Editor's note: The following content is copied from The New York Times as it is. Intelligence X does not agree with any of its stated material or fictions story.
The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate is Pakistan's military equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to some, it has in the past functioned almost as a shadow government, one that has used its ties to drug dealers and Islamic extremists to stir up trouble not only in Pakistan but in Afghanistan and the Kashmir region of India as well. The agency helped bring the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in the 1990's, and many American officials suspect that those ties still are at work. It has also worked closely with groups that have conducted terror attacks in India, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
The killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 by American commandos close to the Pakistani capital dealt a devastating blow to the Pakistani military and its intelligence service and set off a fevered round of speculation about how Bin Laden could have been hiding virtually under their noses in a small city that housed military garrisons. Both the Pakistani army and the ISI were embarrassed at home and abroad by the raid, which occurred without their permission.
The basic question that Pakistan faced revolved around whether the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies knew of Bin Laden’s location and protected him, or whether they were incompetent and did not know that he was living in Abbottabad, a city less than a two-hour drive from the national capital.
The agency faced scathing criticism within the country as well. In July, Obama administration officials said they believed that the I.S.I. ordered the killing in late May of a Pakistani journalist who had written harsh reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military.
Relations with the U.S.
The strains that came into sharp focus after the Bin Laden raid date back years. After the Sept. 11 attacks, cooperation on Al Qaeda vastly improved. The two countries shared intelligence that led to the capture of dozens of suspected Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.
Yet there were clear red lines that the ISI refused to cross, like carrying out operations in the tribal areas on the Afghan border where many Qaeda members hid, or arresting Afghan Taliban fighters, who were viewed as friendly proxies.
The two agencies were never fully comfortable with each other, according to a former senior C.I.A. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We never did the full monty with them,” said the former official. “There is always this little dance with them. We don’t trust them fully.”
Two former C.I.A. officials said they doubted the ISI as a whole sheltered Bin Laden, but it was possible current or former members may have helped him. Members of the ISI’s shadowy S wing — which directs operations outside of Pakistan and helped create the Taliban — were seen as particularly close to militants.
The distrust between the C.I.A. and ISI became so deep in the last several years that the C.I.A. created its own network of human intelligence that ran parallel and separate to the ISI, according to the former C.I.A. official. Pakistanis in the C.I.A.’s network were instrumental in tracking down the courier to Bin Laden, who was followed by the agents to the compound where the Qaeda leader was living, they said.
The ability to keep that network and develop it even further as a tool in fighting terrorism was one of many reasons the United States could not afford to abandon Pakistan by drastically cutting assistance, as was done in the 1990s.
Background
The relationship between the service and American intelligence agencies has been tangled and ever-changing. As Pakistan's own Taliban movement began to pose a threat to the government's existence in 2009, the ISI began to increase its cooperation with Amerian intelligence officials, working together on raids and bombings, even as each side moved warily toward conflicting long-range goals.
But it also scuttled talks between Afghanistan and the Taliban's number two leader, to maintain its leverage in shaping the politics of Pakistan's troubled neighbor. Relations with the United States sunk so low that in December 2010, American officials said they suspected that the ISI played a role when the C.I.A.'s station chief in Pakistan had his identity revealed, forcing him to leave the country.
In July 2010, thousands of classified American military documents were released that suggested that the Pakistani spy service had guided the Taliban with a hidden hand, including meeting directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.
In December 2010, Pakistan announced that Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director general of ISI, would not obey a summons requesting his appearance before a federal court in Brooklyn, part of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by relatives of victims of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which left 175 people dead, including 9 of the attackers. The lawsuit alleges that the ISI is complicit because it nurtured Lashkar-e-Taiba, the banned militant group that India and the United States consider responsible for the attacks.
Role in Pakistan
The ISI, an institution feared by most Pakistanis, is used to getting its way, sometimes by meddling in domestic politics.
The spy service was formed in the early days of Pakistan's independence, but took on greater importance as the rivalry with India and tensions over Kashmir rose in the 1960s. Its role increased sharply after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, when the United States pressed Pakistan to support the guerrilla war that eventually led to a Soviet withdrawal. In the civil wars that followed, the ISI backed the Taliban, which came from the Pashtun-speaking region on Pakistan's border.
A turning point came in August 2009, when a C.I.A. missile killed the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud as he lay on the roof of his compound in South Waziristan, his wife beside him massaging his back.
Mr. Mehsud for more than a year had been responsible for a wave of terror attacks in Pakistani cities, and many inside the ISI were puzzled as to why the United States had not sought to kill him. Some even suspected he was an American, or Indian, agent.
The drone attack on Mr. Mehsud is part of a joint war against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, where C.I.A. drones pound militants from the air as Pakistani troops fight them on the ground.
End Game in Afghanistan
For two spy agencies with a long history of mistrust, the accommodation extends only so far. For instance, when it comes to the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan hopes to play a significant role as a power broker, the interests of the two sides remain far apart.
Even as the ISI breaks up a number of Taliban cells, officials in Islamabad, Washington and Kabul hint that the ISI's goal seems to be to weaken the Taliban just enough to bring them to the negotiating table, but leaving them strong enough to represent Pakistani interests in a future Afghan government.
This contrasts sharply with the American goal of battering the Taliban and strengthening Kabul's central government and security forces, even if American officials also recognize that political reconciliation with elements of the Taliban is likely to be part of any ultimate settlement.
Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations with the ISI that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A.has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.
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