Author: James Risen and Judith
Miller
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 29, 2001
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The intelligence
service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has
had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a
blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban, according to American officials.
The intelligence service even used
Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train covert operatives for use in a war
of terror against India, the Americans say.
The intelligence service, known
as Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., also maintained direct links
to guerrillas fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir on Pakistan's
border with India, the officials said.
American fears over the agency's
dealings with Kashmiri militant groups and with the Taliban government
of Afghanistan became so great last year that the Secret Service adamantly
opposed a planned trip by President Clinton to Pakistan out of concern
for his safety, former senior American officials said.
The fear was that Pakistani security
forces were so badly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly
including Mr. bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, would learn of the president's
travel route from sympathizers within the I.S.I. and try to shoot down
his plane.
Mr. Clinton overruled the Secret
Service and went ahead with the trip, prompting his security detail to
take extraordinary precautions. An empty Air Force One was flown into the
country, and the president made the trip in a small unmarked plane. Later,
his motorcade stopped under an overpass and Mr. Clinton changed cars, the
former officials said.
The Kashmiri fighters, labeled a
terrorist group by the State Department, are part of Pakistan's continuing
efforts to put pressure on India in the Kashmir conflict. The I.S.I.'s
reliance on Mr. bin Laden's camps for training came to light in August
1998, when the United States launched a cruise missile attack against Al
Qaeda terrorist camps near Khost, Afghanistan, in response to the bombings
of two American Embassies in East Africa. The casualties included several
members of a Kashmiri militant group supported by Pakistan who were believed
to be training in the Qaeda camps, American officials said.
Since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, the Pakistani government, led by Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, has turned against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in favor
of the United States.
One element in that shift was General
Musharraf's decision to oust the chief of the intelligence service, Lt.
Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who may have been reluctant to join an American-led
coalition against the Taliban government that his organization helped bring
to power.
Still, American officials said the
depth of support within elements of the I.S.I. for a war on the Taliban
and Al Qaeda remained uncertain, and a former chief of the agency has become
one of the most vocal critics of American policy in Pakistan.
The former director general, Hameed
Gul, complained in an interview with a Pakistani newspaper that the Bush
administration was demanding that the agency be placed at the disposal
of the Americans, as if it were a mercenary force.
"The I.S.I. is a national intelligence
agency, whose potential and ouput should not be shared or rented out to
other countries," Mr. Gul said.
American officials acknowledged
that recent American policies toward Pakistan had fueled such attitudes.
In the 1990's the Central Intelligence Agency failed to maintain the close
ties it had developed with the I.S.I. in the American agency's covert action
program to support the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet army of occupation
in the 1980's.
The close personal relationships
that had developed between C.I.A. and I.S.I. officials - General Gul among
them - during the war against the Soviets withered away.
"After the Soviets were forced out
of Afghanistan," said Shamshad Ahmad, Pakistan's ambassador to the United
Nations and a former foreign secretary, "you left us in the lurch with
all the problems stemming from the war: an influx of refugees, the drug
and gun running, a Kalashnikov culture."
In recent years, in fact, American
officials said, the United States offered few incentives to the Pakistanis
to end their relationship with the Taliban. Washington gave other issues,
including continuing concerns about Pakistan's nuclear weapons program
and its human rights record, much greater emphasis than the fight against
terrorism.
Those priorities were illustrated
by the apathetic reaction within the United States government to a secret
memorandum by the State Department's chief of counterterrorism in 1999
that called for a new approach to containing Mr. bin Laden.
Written in the the wake of the bombings
of two embassies in East Africa in 1998, the memorandum from Michael A.
Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, urged the
Clinton administration to step up efforts to persuade Afghanistan and its
neighbors to cut off financing to Mr. bin Laden and end the sanctuary and
support being offered to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Sheehan's memo outlined a series
of actions the United States could take toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to persuade them to help isolate
Al Qaeda.
The document called Pakistan the
key, and it suggested that the administration make terrorism the central
issue in relations between Washington and Islamabad. The document also
urged the administration to find ways to work with the countries to curb
terrorist money laundering, and it recommended that the United States go
public if any of the governments failed to cooperate.
Mr. Sheehan's plan "landed with
a resounding thud," one former official recalled. "He couldn't get anyone
interested." As the threat from Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden grew and the
United States began to press Pakistan harder to break its ties to the Taliban,
the Pakistanis feigned cooperation but did little, current and former American
officials say.
One former official said the C.I.A.
"fell for" what amounted to a stalling tactic aimed at fending off political
pressure. The C.I.A. equipped and financed a special commando unit that
Pakistan had offered to create to capture Mr. bin Laden. "But this was
going nowhere," the former official said. "The I.S.I. never intended to
go after bin Laden. We got completely snookered."
The C.I.A. declined to comment on
its relationship with the Pakistani agency, saying it did not discuss its
ties with foreign intelligence services. But a former senior Clinton administration
official disagreed with the idea that the United States had had unrelaistic
expectations about the commando proposal.
"There were some concerns about
the penetration of the I.S.I., and a lot of uncertainty about whether it
would work," the official said. "But all of us, including the intelligence
community, thought it was worth doing. What was there to lose?"
What is most remarkable about the
tensions that have grown in recent years between the United States and
Pakistan's security service is that it was one of the C.I.A.'s closest
allies just over a decade ago.
In the 1980's, when the C.I.A. mounted
the largest covert action program in its history to support Afghan rebels
against the Soviets, the Pakistani agency served as the critical link between
the C.I.A. and the rebels at the front lines.
While the C.I.A. supplied money
and weapons, it was the I.S.I. that moved them into Afghanistan. The Americans
relied almost entirely on the Pakistani service to allocate the weapons
to the rebel leaders, and the senior C.I.A. officials involved developed
close relations with their counterparts.
But when the Soviet Army finally
pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the C.I.A. ended its support for the
Afghan rebels, the agency's relationship with the Pakistani agency was
neglected and Washington began to complain more openly about the Pakistan's
nuclear weapons program.
By the early 1990's, officials of
the Pakistani agency became resentful over the change in American policy.
In 1990, just one year after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, Congress
imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear program.
Faced with turmoil in post-Soviet
Afghanistan - which the United States had no interest in addressing in
the early 1990's - Pakistan moved in to support the Pashtun ethnic group
in southern Afghanistan as it created the Taliban movement.
With Pakistani support, the Taliban
gradually took control of most of the country. By 1996, Mr. bin Laden,
who had been in Afghanistan in the 1980's, helping to pay for Arab fighters
to battle the Soviets, returned and quickly forged a close alliance with
the Taliban.
American officials do not believe
that the I.S.I. was ever directly involved with Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda
in terrorist activites against the United States. But the Pakistani agency
used Afghan terrorist training camps for its Kashmiri operations, and the
Pakistani leadership failed to act as it watched the the relationship between
Al Qaeda and the Taliban grow ever closer.
The I.S.I. did cooperate with the
C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on several counterterrorism operations in the 1990's.
Most notably, the Pakistanis were instrumental in the capture in Islamabad
in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center
bombing in 1993, and the arrest in Pakistan in 1997 of Mir Aimal Kansi,
who killed two C.I.A. employees on a shooting rampage outside C.I.A. headquarters
in 1993.
American officials now believe that
the Pakistanis were finally starting to become alarmed in the last year
or two by the extent to which the Taliban had been co-opted by Mr. bin
Laden. Still, the I.S.I. did little to extricate itself from its relationship
with the Taliban - until Sept. 11.
"I think the Pakistanis realized
as time went on that they had made a bad deal," one State Department official
said. "But they couldn't find an easy way out of it."
