Pakistan's ISI Still Playing Double Game, Say US Officials

By Steve Hynd

Color me entirely unsurprised by this report from the WaPo:

The recent capture of the Afghan Taliban's second in command seemed to signal a turning point in Pakistan, an indication that its intelligence agency had gone from helping to cracking down on the militant Islamist group.

But U.S. officials now believe that even as Pakistan's security forces worked with their American counterparts to detain Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and other insurgents, the country's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, quietly freed at least two senior Afghan Taliban figures it had captured on its own.

...The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity and declined to identify the Taliban figures who were released, citing the secrecy surrounding U.S. monitoring of the ISI. But officials said the freed captives were high-ranking Taliban members and would have been recognizable as insurgents the United States would want in custody.

The capture of Baradar was "positive, any way you slice it," said a U.S. counterterrorism official. "But it doesn't mean they've cut ties at every level to each and every group."

Not only that but one of the high-ranking Taliban Pakistan claimed to have captured just after Baradur, Maulvi Abdul Kabir, wasn't in their custody at all according to U.S. officials. Pakistan simply lied about him.

The WaPo reports that the official line on all this, following the Mullen/Petraeus led belief that general Kayani and the senior Pakistani leadership are fully on board with their American allies, is that "The Pakistanis did a sharp change of policy after 9/11, and it's not certain everybody got the memo -- or read it if they did." In other words, rogue elements within the ISI are to blame rather than it being a conscious effort to play both ends by Pakistan's military and intelligence leadership. But Mullen and Petraeus, two people apparently very much convinced of their own intellectual superiority over common mortals if puff-piece profiles of both are to be believed, seem have been utterly snowed by General Kayani - the man in charge of the ISI at the time of the Mumbai 2006 attacks and who appointed the ISI chief at the time of the atrocities in Mumbai in 2008, planning for both of which led back to Pakistan's intelligence agency. Either that or they know Kayani is pulling a snow job and for reasons of their own - namely happy-talk of "progress" to make the American people feel better about the decade long war in Afghanistan - they're publicly going along with the gag.

Here are the simple truths Mullen et al either don't want to believe or don't want the American public to believe: Pakistan is not now and never will be a natural ally of the United States. It is already a satellite state of China's, with deep economic and military ties that bind it to its larger neighbour as well as a mutual enemy in India. Pakistan has clearly stated that it wishes "strategic depth" in Afghanistan - which translated means a place to retreat to if a conflict with India starts. An American military presence in Afghanistan would hardly allow that so whatever they say publicly the Pakistani military do not want a long-term American military presence across their Western border. These simple truths means that anything Pakistan may offer the U.S. will be short-lived and probably more about style than substance.

Pakistan's primary objective in Afghanistan is to create a regime or a set of circumstances which excludes India, giving Pakistan's military the space for a strategic retreat should there ever be a major war between the two. It's secondary objective is to aid its primary economic and military ally - China, not America - in preventing Indian influence upon and economic expansion in the region. To both those ends, it needs a Quetta Shura that will do as it is told, not go off negotiating on its own. And it needs to keep reminding Afghanistan's Karzai that the Quetta Shura isn't the only proxy weapon it has available so that he does what he's told too. Those can be seen as final positions. If China and Pakistan can get the West to bleed itself a little more on the Afghan thornbush before withdrawing, so much the better.

Expecting Pakistan to do anything more than play a double game, as it has done since the Bush administration threatened to "bomb it back to the stone age" if it didn't co-operate over basing and supply lines, is expecting too much. It'd be nice if the mainstream of national security journalism didn't carry quite so much stenographic water for the Pentagon and White House in claiming the opposite.