[R-G] Frontier Insurgency Spills Into a Pakistani City

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Compared to what will happen in Pakistan, Iran's Islamic revolution
will seem like a model social revolution, and Khomeini an exemplary
nationalist leader, in hindsight. -- Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/world/asia/18peshawar.html>
January 18, 2008
Frontier Insurgency Spills Into a Pakistani City
By JANE PERLEZ

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — For centuries, fighting and lawlessness have been
part of the fabric of this frontier city. But in the past year,
Pakistan's war with Islamic militants has spilled right into its
alleys and bazaars, its forts and armories, killing policemen and
soldiers and scaring its famously tough citizens.

There is a sense of siege here, as the Islamic insurgency pours out of
the adjacent tribal region into this city, one of Pakistan's largest,
and its surrounding districts.

The Taliban and their militant sympathizers now hold strategic pockets
on the city's outskirts, the police say, from where they strike at the
military and the police, order schoolgirls to wear the burqa and blow
up stores selling DVDs, among other acts of violence.

Suicide bombings, bomb explosions and missile attacks occurred an
average of once a week here in 2007, according to a tally by the
city's police department. In 2006, while there were occasional grenade
attacks and explosions, the authorities did not record a single
suicide bombing or rocket attack inside the city.

The proximity of Peshawar to the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al
Qaeda have regrouped in the past two years makes the city a feasible
prize for the militants in Pakistan's quickly escalating internal
strife that pits the Islamic extremists against the American-backed
government of President Pervez Musharraf.

Though few here believe that the Taliban will rule anytime soon, the
police and residents say that by the standards of counterinsurgency
warfare the extremists are doing well. They have undermined public
faith in the government, sown distrust and made the police fearful for
their lives. "People feel the insecurity is so high, no one can fix
it," said Humair Bilour, the sister-in-law of Malik Saad, a popular
Peshawar police chief who was killed in a suicide bomb attack last
year. "How can the government do anything when the government itself
is involved in it?"

She said she and her friends were now afraid to go out. "People go to
the bazaar and make jokes: 'Is this going to be my last trip?' " she
said.

The extremists have selected the police and the army, two important
pillars of the Pakistani state, as particular targets.

Last week, rockets were fired at an army barracks in Warsak on the
city's perimeter, a warning of the power of the militants to strike
from Mohmand, a district in the tribal areas adjacent to Peshawar, an
area that a few months ago was considered free of the Taliban.

The army headquarters in the center of the city were struck last month
by a bomber who was hiding explosives under her burqa that were set
off by remote control. The assassination a year ago of the police
chief, Mr. Saad, who was killed while on duty trying to control a
religious procession in one of the bazaars, shook the city.

"It's asymmetrical warfare against an established state," said
Muhammad Sulaman Khan, chief of operations for the Peshawar police and
a close friend of Mr. Saad. "The terrorists only don't have to lose
it, we need to win it."

At the core of the troubles here, many say, lie demands by the United
States that the Pakistani military, generously financed by Washington,
join in its campaign against terrorism, which means killing fellow
Pakistanis in the tribal areas. Even if those Pakistanis are
extremists, the people here say, they do not like a policy of killing
fellow tribesmen, and fellow countrymen, particularly on behalf of the
United States.

The Bush administration is convinced that Al Qaeda and the Taliban
have gained new strength in the past two years, particularly in the
tribal regions of North and South Waziristan and Bajaur. It has said
it is considering sending American forces to help the Pakistani
soldiers in those areas. Mr. Musharraf has scoffed at the idea.

Any direct intervention by American forces would only strengthen the
backlash now under way against soldiers and the police in Peshawar,
said Farook Adam Khan, a lawyer here. That reaction spread last week
to Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, where a suicide bomber
killed almost two dozen policemen at a lawyers' rally, he said.

"Pakistani soldiers never used to be targets," Mr. Khan said. "Now we
have the radicals antagonized by Musharraf and his politics of cozying
up to the United States. The actions taken by the army in Waziristan
and Bajaur and Swat are causing the problems here." Swat is an area
100 miles north of Peshawar, where the Pakistani Army is currently
battling a Pakistani Taliban insurgent group with mixed results.

The standing of the Pakistani military is being further harmed by an
increasing awareness here that it is for the first time suffering
significant numbers of defections, mostly among soldiers reluctant to
fight in the tribal areas. The defections gain only scant mention in
the press, but people talk about them.

There are rumors of courts-martial, although the information is
tightly held by the army, former officers said. Morale among the
police in Peshawar has plummeted amid a series of police killings,
making the city far from the glamorous posting it once was, when the
police were fighting smugglers and other outlaws.

Terrorist activities around Peshawar began to increase, Mr. Khan said,
after a major attack on a madrasa in Bajaur in October 2006, in which
82 people, including 12 teenagers, were killed. The Pakistani Army
said intelligence had shown that the madrasa was used as a training
base by Al Qaeda. Local residents said the killings were the work of
an American remotely piloted drone, a charge that Washington denied.

A few months later, government schools for girls around Peshawar began
to receive threats that they would be blown up if the students did not
wear burqas.

At one such school, in Shah Dhand Baba, a town on the northern fringes
of Peshawar, the principal, Gul Bahar Begum, said she received a
handwritten letter in the mail last February demanding that the
students cover up or the school would be blown up.

Ms. Begum, who wears lipstick and lightly covers her hair with a
scarf, and whose office is filled with sports trophies won by her
students, said that about 70 percent of the girls now wore burqas when
they stepped outside the school.

"It is the Islamic way to cover," she said of her instructions to the
girls to cover up. "So the militants were right, but the way they
imposed their decision was not."

The students, dressed in loose white pants and long shirts, suggested
that they accepted the demands because they had to, not because they
believed it was a religious necessity.

Maryam Sultan, 16, who wore a denim jacket over her uniform, said she
and her friends came to school in burqas "for security." Ms. Sultan,
who was more interested in talking about her desire to become a
doctor, said there was little choice but to cover up.

The outward bravura at the school masked a deeper problem: the
inability of the police or any other authorities to deter the
militants. At another school where a threatening letter was received,
the principal protested.

She made contact with the militants, saying that burqas were too
expensive for some of the girls. The militants replied, saying, "If
the girls can afford makeup, they can afford burqas," according to
officials in the district. Days later, the girls were in burqas.

Himayat Mayar, the local mayor, blamed the government for the threats
against the girls.

He said that during the five years that Mr. Musharraf and his allies
in a coalition of Islamic parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, had
governed the North-West Frontier Province, they had allowed madrasas
for young Islamic jihadists to flourish.

"There are so many madrasas run by mullahs that train jihadis and get
funds from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait," Mr. Mayar said. "These jihadists
know only jihad. They should be brought into the mainstream." If it
wanted to, he added, the government could easily provide teachers and
computers to the madrasas, and register them.

Peshawar's booming business in illicit Western and Indian DVDs has
been another target of the militants. Many of the city's myriad retail
outlets have closed after being bombed, or threatened with violence.

At the Bilal DVD Parlor, the owners, Bilal Javed and Akhtar Ali, said
their sales — ranging from "Pride and Prejudice" to "Die Hard 4.0," to
the latest Bollywood films and old Bruce Lee movies — had fallen by 90
percent. Their decade-old wholesale business in the tribal region was
finished, they said.

On a recent day, their modern retail store, fitted with polished
chrome, was packed floor to ceiling with DVDs. There were no
customers. They said people had been afraid to shop there since a bomb
hidden in a water cooler exploded at a DVD store across the street
last year, killing five people, including a 7-year-old boy who wanted
to buy a computer mouse.

"The police chief said, 'We can't secure ourselves, how can we secure
you?' " Mr. Javed said.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/asia/17pakistan_web.html>
January 17, 2008
Pakistan Fort Overrun by Militants
By ISMAIL KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a
paramilitary fort in Sararogha, in the restive South Waziristan tribal
region in north-west Pakistan on Tuesday, killing 22 soldiers and
taking several others hostage in a nearly six-hour battle, government
intelligence agency officials and local officials said Wednesday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were
not authorized to discuss the attack, said that 600 to 700 militants
had attacked the Sararogha fort, firing rockets and mortars in a
region where local and foreign militants have battled the Pakistani
military.

Fifteen soldiers belonging to the South Waziristan Scouts, an official
paramilitary militia, died in the battle, one intelligence official
said.

Another local official said that the militants later beheaded at least
seven other soldiers.

A spokesman for Tehreek-i-Taliban, an Islamic group that is
sympathetic to the Taliban, said that it had carried out the attack
and that it had killed 16 soldiers and captured 24, and that only two
militants had been killed.

Militant groups operating in the tribal region formed
Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan ­ the Taliban Movement of Pakistan ­ last
month, to coordinate their activities and wage a joint struggle
against Pakistani forces.

A spokesman for the militant group, Maulvi Umar, was quoted by Dawn,
an English-language newspaper here, as saying by telephone that the
militants who attacked the fort were led by Baitullah Mehsud, whom the
Pakistani government has accused of responsibility for the
assassination last month of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader and
former prime minister.

A last distress radio message was sent to another fort nearby,
requesting artillery support as the militants blew up part of the
Sararogha fort, broke through the defenses and poured inside, the
officials said.

At the time of the attack, 38 soldiers and six civilians, including
cooks, barbers and orderlies, were in the fort, which was built in the
British colonial era, the officials said.

The remaining soldiers are presumed to have been taken hostage by the
militants, although several were reported to have escaped.

In an official statement, Pakistan's military said that seven soldiers
had died in the attack, which it said had been carried out by 200
militants, and that 40 militants had been killed.

The security official said that seven soldiers who had escaped had
said that six militants had been killed, and that four of them were
said to be Uzbeks.

The militants abandoned the fort after seizing arms and ammunition,
the intelligence officials said. "Nobody is there now." an official
said.

Witnesses reached by telephone said that the militants had captured
several soldiers and slaughtered many of them.

"The forts were well stocked, and soldiers had been told to fight till
the last man, last bullet," a local administration official said. "The
soldiers did put up a good fight in a seemingly hopeless situation."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/world/asia/15isi.html>
January 15, 2008
Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say
By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's premier military intelligence agency
has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has
nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of
that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other
officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on
their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other
extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and
helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last
year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as
well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express
support for Al Qaeda's global jihad, presents a grave threat to
Pakistan's security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban
in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust
covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas
because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable
to do so.

The unusual disclosures regarding Pakistan's leading military
intelligence agency — Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI —
emerged in interviews last month with former senior Pakistani
intelligence officials. The disclosures confirm some of the worst
fears, and suspicions, of American and Western military officials and
diplomats.

The interviews, a rare glimpse inside a notoriously secretive and
opaque agency, offered a string of other troubling insights likely to
refocus attention on the ISI's role as Pakistan moves toward elections
on Feb. 18 and a battle for control of the government looms:

¶One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other
people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort
to manipulate Pakistan's last national election in 2002, and offered
to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President
Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Mr. Musharraf had now ordered the
agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and
denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the
acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of
new meddling.

¶The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that
after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied
Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the
militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert
pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed
hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop
the ideology from spreading.

¶Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI
officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause
and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had
taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI
directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.

None of the former intelligence officials who spoke to The New York
Times agreed to be identified when talking about the ISI, an agency
that has gained a fearsome reputation for interfering in almost every
aspect of Pakistani life. But two former American intelligence
officials agreed with much of what they said about the agency's
relationship with the militants.

So did other sources close to the ISI, who admitted that the agency
had supported militants in Afghanistan and Kashmir, although they said
they had been ordered to do so by political leaders.

The former intelligence officials appeared to feel freer to speak as
Mr. Musharraf's eight years of military rule weakened, and as a power
struggle for control over the government looms between Mr. Musharraf
and opposition political parties.

The officials were interviewed before the assassination of Ms. Bhutto,
the opposition leader, on Dec. 27. Since then, the government has said
that Pakistani militants linked to Al Qaeda are the foremost suspects
in her killing. Her supporters have accused the government of a hidden
hand in the attack.

While the author of Ms. Bhutto's death remains a mystery, the
interviews with the former intelligence officials made clear that the
agency remained unable to control the militants it had fostered.

The threat from the militants, the former intelligence officials
warned, is one that Pakistan is unable to contain. "We could not
control them," said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke
on condition of anonymity. "We indoctrinated them and told them, 'You
will go to heaven.' You cannot turn it around so suddenly."

The Context

After 9/11, the Bush administration pressed Mr. Musharraf to choose a
side in fighting Islamist extremism and to abandon Pakistan's longtime
support for the Taliban and other Islamist militants.

In the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to
contest Indian-controlled Kashmir, the border territory that India and
Pakistan both claim, and to gain a controlling influence in
neighboring Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States supported
militants, too, funneling billions of dollars to Islamic fighters
battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan through the ISI, vastly
increasing the agency's size and power.

Publicly, Mr. Musharraf agreed to reverse course in 2001, and he has
received $10 billion in aid for Pakistan since then in return. In an
interview in November, he vehemently defended the conduct of the ISI,
an agency that, according to American officials, was under his firm
control for the last eight years while he served as both president and
army chief.

Mr. Musharraf dismissed criticism of the ISI's relationship with the
militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police
officers in battles with the militants in recent years — as well as
several assassination attempts against himself — as proof of the
seriousness of Pakistan's counterterrorism effort.

"It is quite illogical if you think those people who have suffered
1,000 people dead, and I who have been attacked thrice or four or five
times, that I would be supportive towards Taliban, towards Al Qaeda,"
Mr. Musharraf said. "These are ridiculous things that discourages and
demoralizes."

But some former American intelligence officials have argued that Mr.
Musharraf and the ISI never fully jettisoned their militant protégés,
and instead carried on a "double-game." They say Mr. Musharraf
cooperated with American intelligence agencies to track down foreign
Qaeda members while holding Taliban commanders and Kashmiri militants
in reserve.

In order to undercut major opposition parties, he wooed religious
conservatives, according to analysts. And instead of carrying out a
crackdown, Mr. Musharraf took half-measures.

"I think he would make a decision when a situation arises," said Hasan
Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani military analyst, referring to
militants openly confronting the government. "But before that he would
not alienate any side."

There is little dispute that Pakistan's crackdown on the militants has
been at best uneven, but key sources interviewed by The Times
disagreed on why.

Most Western officials in Pakistan say they believe, as Pakistani
officials, including President Musharraf, insist, that the agency is
well disciplined, like the army, and is in no sense a rogue or
out-of-control organization acting contrary to the policies of the
leadership.

A senior Western military official in Pakistan said that if the ISI
was covertly aiding the Taliban, the decision would come from the top
of the government, not the agency. "That's not an ISI decision," the
official said. "That's a government-of-Pakistan decision."

But former Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that Mr.
Musharraf had ordered a crackdown on all militants. It was never fully
carried out, however, because of opposition within his government and
within ISI, they said.

One former senior intelligence official said that some officials in
the government and the ISI thought the militants should be held in
reserve, as insurance against the day when American and NATO forces
abandoned the region and Pakistan might again need them as a lever
against India.

"We had a school of thought that favored retention of this
capability," the former senior intelligence official said.

Some senior ministers and officials in Mr. Musharraf's government
sympathized with the militants and protected them, former intelligence
officials said. Still others advised a go-slow approach, fearing a
backlash against the government from the militants.

When arrests were ordered, the police refused to carry them out in
some cases until they received written orders, believing the militants
were still protected by the ISI, as they had been for years.

Inside the ISI, there was division as well. One part of the ISI hunted
down militants, the officials said, while another continued to work
with them. The result was confusion.

In interviews in 2002, Kashmiri militants in Pakistan said they had
been told by the government to maintain a low profile and wait. But as
Pakistani military operations in the tribal areas intensified, along
with airstrikes by C.I.A.-operated drones, militant groups there
issued highly charged and sometimes exaggerated accounts of women and
children being killed.

The first suicide bombing attack on a military target outside the
tribal areas came days after an airstrike on a madrasa in the tribal
area of Bajaur in October 2006 killed scores of people.

Another turning point came last July when Pakistani forces stormed the
Red Mosque in Islamabad, where militants had armed themselves in a
compound less than a mile from ISI headquarters and demanded the
imposition of Islamic law. Government officials said that more than
100 people died. The militants have insisted that thousands did.

Several weeks later, militants carried out the first direct attacks on
ISI employees. Suicide bombers twice attacked buses ferrying agency
employees, killing 18 on Sept. 4 and 15 more on Nov. 24. According to
Pakistani analysts, the attacks signaled that enraged militants had
turned on their longtime patrons.

The Militant

One militant leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, typifies how extremists
once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency's control,
turned against the government and joined with other militants to
create powerful new networks.

In 2000, Mr. Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded
Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Army of Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group
fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who
served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad
from 1999 to 2002. The ISI intermittently provided training and
operational coordination to such groups, he said, but struggled to
fully control them.

Mr. Musharraf banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and detained Mr. Azhar after
militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in
December 2001. Indian officials accused Jaish-e-Muhammad and another
Pakistani militant group of masterminding the attack. After India
massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Pakistan's border, Mr.
Musharraf vowed in a nationally televised speech that January to crack
down on all militants in Pakistan.

"We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in
terrorism inside the country or abroad," he said. Two weeks later, a
British-born member of Mr. Azhar's group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped
Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded
by his captors. Mr. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had
supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the
kidnapping.

After Mr. Pearl's killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than
2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Mr. Azhar and most of
the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed. "I never
believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably
cut," said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk
consulting firm.

At the same time, Pakistan seemingly went "through the motions" when
it came to hunting Taliban leaders who fled into Pakistan after the
2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, he said.

Encouraged by the United States, the Pakistanis focused their
resources on arresting senior Qaeda members, he said, which they
successfully did from 2002 to 2005. Since then, arrests have slowed as
Al Qaeda and other militant groups have become more entrenched in the
tribal areas.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani government did not move against the
leading Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin,
who are based in the tribal areas and have long had links with Al
Qaeda, one senior ISI official said it was because Pakistan needed to
retain some assets of its own.

That policy haunts Mr. Musharraf and the United States, according to
American and Pakistani analysts. Today Pakistan's tribal areas are
host to a lethal stew of foreign Qaeda members, Uzbek militants,
Taliban, ISI-trained Pakistani extremists, disgruntled tribesmen and
new recruits.

The groups carried out a record number of suicide bombings in Pakistan
and Afghanistan last year and have been tied to three major terrorist
plots in Britain and Germany since 2005.

Mr. Azhar, who once served his ISI mentors in Kashmir, is thought to
be hiding in the tribal area of Bajaur, or nearby Dir, and fighting
Pakistani security forces, according to one former intelligence
official. Militants who took part in the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad
in July were closely affiliated with Mr. Azhar's group. This fall, his
group fielded fighters in the Swat Valley, the famous tourist spot,
where the militants presented a challenge of new proportions to the
government, seizing several districts and mounting battles against
Pakistani forces that left scores dead.

One militant from a banned sectarian group who joined Mr. Azhar's
group, Qari Zafar, now trains insurgents in South Waziristan on how to
rig roadside bombs and vests for suicide bombings, according to the
former intelligence official.

Cooperation against the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan has improved
since 2006, and three senior Taliban figures have been caught,
according to Western officials and sources close to the ISI. Yet
doubts remain about the Pakistani government's intentions.

Senior provincial ISI officials continue to meet with high-level
members of the Taliban in the border provinces, according to one
Western diplomat. "It is not illogical to surmise that cooperation is
on the agenda, and not just debriefing," the diplomat said.

"There are groups they know they have lost control of," the Western
diplomat added. But the government moved only against those groups
that have attacked the Pakistani state, the diplomat said, adding, "It
seems very difficult for them to write them off."

The Agency Now

Western officials say that before Mr. Musharraf resigned as army chief
in December, he appointed a loyalist to run the ISI and appears
determined to retain power over the agency even as a civilian
president.

"For as long as he can, Musharraf will keep trying to control these
organizations," a Western diplomat said. "I don't think we should
expect this man to become an elder statesman as we know it."

That puts Mr. Musharraf's successor as army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez
Kayani, who headed the ISI from 2004 to 2007, in a potentially pivotal
position. General Kayani, a pro-American moderate, is loyal to Mr.
Musharraf to a point, according to retired officers. But he will
abandon him if he thinks Mr. Musharraf's actions are significantly
undermining the standing of the Pakistani army.

Mr. Musharraf will maintain control over the agency as long as his
interests coincide with General Kayani's, they said, while the new
civilian prime minister who emerges from February's elections is
likely to have far less authority over the agency. Opposition
political parties already accuse the agency of meddling in next
month's election. The Western diplomat called the ISI "the army's
dirty bag of tricks."

Since Ms. Bhutto's assassination, members of her party have accused
government officials, including former ISI agents, of having a hidden
hand in the attack or of knowing about a plot and failing to inform
Ms. Bhutto.

American experts played down the chances of a government conspiracy
against Ms. Bhutto. They also said it was unlikely that low-level or
retired officers working alone or with militants carried out the
attack.

But nearly half of Pakistanis said in a recent poll that they
suspected that government agencies or pro-government politicians had
assassinated Ms. Bhutto. Such suspicion stems from decades of
interference in elections and politics by the ISI, according to
analysts, as well as a high level of domestic surveillance,
intimidation and threats to journalists, academics and human rights
activists, which former intelligence officials also acknowledged.

Pakistani and American experts say that distrust speaks to the urgent
need to reform a hugely powerful intelligence agency that Pakistan's
military rulers have used for decades to suppress political opponents,
manipulate elections and support militant groups.

"Pakistan would certainly be better off if the ISI were never used for
domestic political purposes," said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A.
Islamabad station chief. "That goes without saying."

Pakistani analysts and Western diplomats argue that the country will
remain unstable as long as the ISI remains so powerful and so
unaccountable. The ISI has grown more powerful in each period of
military rule, they said.

Civilian leaders, including Mrs. Bhutto, could not resist using it to
secure their political aims, but neither could they control it. And
the army continues to rely on the ISI for its own foreign policy aims,
particularly battling India in Kashmir and seeking influence in
Afghanistan.

"The question is, how do you change that?" asked one Western diplomat.
"Their tentacles are everywhere."

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>