Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
<strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s Unholy Alliance<br />
communist superpower. In Afghanistan, as well as Kashmir, the<br />
agency discovered the effectiveness of covert warfare as a method<br />
of bleeding a stronger adversary, while maintaining the element of<br />
plausible deniability. <strong>The</strong> ISI falls directly within <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s military<br />
chain of command and had also served as an instrument for promoting<br />
the military’s domestic political agenda and the guardian of its selfprofessed<br />
‘ideological frontiers’ of the country. Almost all ISI officers<br />
are regular military personnel, who are rotated in and out for a fixed<br />
tenure. However, there have been some exceptions.<br />
<strong>The</strong> export of jihad sponsored by the ISI had its blowback. It had<br />
allowed the <strong>Islam</strong>ists a huge space for their activities. State patronage,<br />
in the form of an ‘unholy alliance’ between the military and the mullahs,<br />
resulted in an unprecedented rise of radical <strong>Islam</strong>. <strong>The</strong> ISI had helped<br />
to create much of the <strong>Islam</strong>ic militancy and religious extremism that<br />
Musharraf was confronted with. That unholy alliance had been a major<br />
factor in the country’s drift to <strong>Islam</strong>ic fundamentalism.<br />
Founded in 1948 by a British army officer, Major-General R.<br />
Cawthome, then Deputy Chief of Army Staff in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>, the agency<br />
was initially charged with performing all intelligence tasks at home<br />
and abroad. Its scope of operation extended to all areas related to<br />
national security. Until the 1960s, the ISI largely remained an obscure<br />
organization that confined itself to playing its specified role. But in the<br />
mid 1970s its scope was expanded to domestic politics. Ironically, it<br />
was a civilian leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto 1 who created the ISI’s internal<br />
wing which played a critical role in the ousting of his government<br />
a few years later. It was to cast its heavy shadow over the country’s<br />
politics in later years.<br />
A charismatic and populist leader, Bhutto took over a humiliated<br />
military and a brutally truncated <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> in search of a new identity,<br />
following the Indian-supported secession of East <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> (now<br />
Bangladesh), in 1971. <strong>The</strong> country had been dismembered by civil<br />
war and Indian military action. It was no longer the country created by<br />
Mohammed Ali Jinnah. 2 <strong>The</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> that emerged from the ashes of<br />
defeat required a different geopolitical orientation. A revolt by young<br />
Turks in the army in the aftermath of a humiliating defeat in the war had<br />
forced the military ruler, General Yahya Khan, 3 to hand over power to<br />
Bhutto. His legitimacy was rooted in the country’s first democratically<br />
held elections in 1970. Bhutto’s socialist <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> People’s Party had<br />
swept the fateful polls in the western wing of then-united <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>,<br />
trouncing the right-wing <strong>Islam</strong>ic parties.<br />
1