Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

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