The ISI -- Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency -- was one of those entities with strong ties to US intelligence (Mossad was another) many suspected of having been involved in 9/11. I don't think we can discount the theory. It was rampant after 9/11, then dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Still, the suspicion that the attacks may have been anticipated? encouraged? assisted? by rogue elements on our own soil hasn't died dead yet and is fed by the secrecy, the autocratic behaviors, and the coverups of the Bush administration. Even without a direct connection to 9/11, the relationships among these intelligence agencies and their ties to Islamic militants need clarification. The ISI -- and Pakistan -- are allegedly helping us deal with Afghan militants at the Pakistan border.
"The ISI has for decades maintained contacts with various militant groups in the tribal areas and elsewhere, both for gathering intelligence and as proxies to exert influence on neighboring India and Afghanistan. It is unclear whether the C.I.A. officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s spy service and military, or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus."
What is clear in Michael Mazzetti's report in today's New York Times, is that the CIA -- the US -- has decided to take a stand on its "open marriage" with Pakistan. That marriage of convenience (we need Pakistan's assistance and intelligence) has always been full of infidelities. The awkward truth right now is the open secret that top officials in Pakistan are aiding the very enemy they're supposedly helping us fight.
"A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.
"The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.
"The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants..."
"...That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous reports in The New York Times. But the C.I.A. and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism."
Up until now, the US has been willing to go along with these "infidelities." I'm willing to bet that there has been a shift now within the CIA matching the shift within the Bush administration, putting some distance between the president and the angry cynicism of people like John Bolton. I'm talking about the kind of angry cynicism (often personified "at highest levels of the administration" by the vice president) which makes it easy for the rest of us to imagine that the Bush administration's self-styled "war council" may have also been responsible not just for the responses to 9/11 but for 9/11 itself.
This week's confrontation of the Pakistani government by the US may just be for show. Or it may be for real. Or somewhere in between. Meanwhile, it's interesting to look back at some earlier reactions to the US-Pakistan relationship.
November 2004. Kerry had just lost the election. A month or so earlier, Bush suppressed a CIA assessment of failures related to 9/11. That report could well have been helpful in electing Kerry but -- just as important -- it could have given us some clues as to the state of the CIA under the Bush administration and its willingness to deal with Al Qaeda. It turned out that the state of the CIA was bad and its ability/willingness to deal with Al Qaeda worse. In fact, the CIA's Al Qaeda team was worse off than before 9/11. Bush wasn't interested in Al Qaeda. Michael Scheuer wrote in the Atlantic:
"September 2004: In the CIA's core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September ... The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda—and have done so for years, not weeks or months—but have been ignored ..."
So what was the Bush administration focusing on if not terrorism? Or what were they covering up?
Also in 2004, a few months earlier, Michael Meacher, a British MP was up in arms about the Daniel Pearl murder. The wrong man was to be hanged for it, he said, and it comes back to questions about the ISI.
"It has been rumoured that Pearl was especially interested in any role played by the US in training or backing the ISI. Daniel Ellsberg, the former US defence department whistleblower who has accompanied [FBI whistleblower Sibel] Edmonds in court, has stated: 'It seems to me quite plausible that Pakistan was quite involved in this ... To say Pakistan is, to me, to say CIA because ... it's hard to say that the ISI knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of.' ..."
And on it goes. Each time there's a little break in the bubble protecting the US-Pakistan relationship, we get a whiff of just how far our leaders -- and theirs -- may have gone to protect their interests, whether those interests be oil pipelines or political power at home or any number of schemes we haven't even dreamed of yet.