Asia Times: Pearl a victim of Pakistan's grim legacy


	February 26, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Pearl a victim of Pakistan's grim legacy
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The latest pledge by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to crack down further on militant groups after the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl comes soon after a major revamp of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), for long blamed as the root cause of militancy in the country.

The Pakistani military regime has decided to restructure the ISI in such a manner that no one individual or group of individuals will be able to implement independent operations, as has been the case in the past. The ISI has been attributed with, among other things, facilitating the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and in stoking militancy in Kashmir.

Last month, Musharraf pledged in a keynote speech that his country would fight terrorism in all its forms. Since then, his government has banned several Islamic groups and has announced the arrests of about 2,000 militants.

The reorganization of the ISI has not been announced officially, but sources say that as many as a quarter of its entire staff, estimated to comprise more than 10,000 people drawn mostly from the military, will be transferred or reassigned. In future, all ISI functions will be operated with an internal and an external wing at every level. Previously, the ISI's external and internal wings only coordinated at sector command (provincial) level.

Further, the ISI's Afghan desk has been closed down completely and the functions of the Kashmir cell have been reduced in that it will only report on political affairs in Indian-held Kashmir.

The internal wing has now been given supreme position among all other intelligence agencies in the country and it has been empowered to coordinate with Musharraf to run the political affairs of the country.

The restructuring comes at an important time for Pakistan. After the slaying of Pearl, the Musharraf administration will be under increasing pressure from the United States in particular to do something about militancy in the country.

On Monday, a Pakistani judge in Karachi ordered 14 more days' police detention for the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. A government spokesman said that the order had been issued during a brief appearance before an anti-terrorism court in Karachi by British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and two other men linked to the kidnapping.

The two other men were Sheikh Abil and Salman Saquib, accused of sending e-mails linked to the kidnapping. Sheikh Omar, 28, arrested on February 12, was in custody when authorities received a videotape last Thursday showing Pearl's throat being cut on camera.

Pearl, the South Asian bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, disappeared on January 23 in Karachi while working on a story about Islamic radicals in Pakistan and their links with Osama bin Laden.

The group claiming to have held Pearl calls itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty and accuses Pearl of being a spy, first for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then for Israeli intelligence. It said the kidnap was to protest against US treatment of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners from the Afghan war.

The ISI has helped make and break many governments in Pakistan, and it has provided even the military regime of Musharraf, who came to power in a 1999 coup, with some headaches, as well as his interior minister, Moinuddin Haider.

The old structure of the ISI was conceived during the Afghan war. Working closely with the CIA, the ISI established close ties with Islamic militants in Afghanistan during the 1980s at the time of the US-backed effort to support the mujahideen forces fighting to oust the Soviet occupation force.

And to launch operations in Afghanistan, the concerned ISI officials were given free hands. They were given independence to generate funds through any means because official funds were insufficient to finance a major guerrilla war in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, the most effective ways to raise money were through arms and drug dealing, which flooded into the country. And contrary to general practice, teams of army and civilian officials were posted to the ISI for several years at a time for deep-rooted operations. These teams established close ties with mafia and militant groups, the army and politicians. As a result, the teams were able to manipulate events even after they retired.

After September 11, the then director general of the ISI, Lieutenant-General (now retired) Mehmood, asked Musharraf to allow limited public demonstrations, which could then be used as a bargaining tool in negotiating the "price" of Pakistan giving its support to the US war on terror.

Musharraf agreed half-heartedly and religious zealots soon whipped up popular support for the the Taliban and against US operations in Afghanistan. By the time the US started bombing Afghanistan, several demonstrators had been killed in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi in clashes with the police. Strikes and protests were the order of the day and the law-and-order situation was rapidly spiraling out of control.

Mehmood was sacked and the ISI handed over to Lieutenant-General Ehsan ul-Haq, a loyal friend of Musharraf and a moderate, and all interior operations were under the eye of Haider, who was given powers to curb the demonstrations. He took harsh steps by first detaining all top religious leaders and then by issuing strict warnings, and the situation was brought under control.

The Daniel Pearl case, however, which has seen the arrest of some ISI officials and others associated with it in connection with the journalist's kidnapping, shows that it will take some doing fully to wipe out the diverse extremist elements to which the ISI gave birth and shelter for so many years.

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