Mullen Takes on the ISI

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Snapshot

How the Haqqani Network is Expanding From Waziristan

Michael Semple

The network of militants operating in Pakistan's tribal areas are playing an increasingly destabilizing role in NATO's possible negotiations with the Taliban.

The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who led the High Peace Council, illustrates all too well the tremendous obstacles to a meaningful reconciliation among Afghanistan's various factions. Before his death on September 20 at the hands of a man who claimed to be an emissary of the Quetta Shura, Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, had been in charge of reconciliation efforts with Taliban insurgents. His appointment had apparently been meant as a way to pull the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance into the peace process. The jury is still out on exactly who ordered the killing -- the Taliban first claimed and then denied involvement -- but its implications are clear. Rabbani's assassination, the latest in a systematic campaign of targeted killings of high-profile anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, has increased the chance that tensions among the Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and other Islamist Pashtun groups could devolve into all-out war.

The beneficiary of this uncertainty is the region's primary spoiler: the Pakistani military. Although its generals have received billions of dollars in U.S. aid since 9/11 to combat terrorism, they have consistently done everything in their power to bolster it. They selectively cooperate with the United States, apprehending al Qaeda militants and fighting the Pakistani Taliban insurgents -- which also threaten the Pakistani military -- while sheltering and supporting other radical extremists, such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which spearhead the deadly cross-border insurgency in Afghanistan.

The United States has had hard evidence of the Inter-Service Intelligence's double game for some time. For example, the George W. Bush administration reportedly intercepted communications between the ISI and Haqqani operatives who perpetrated the 2006 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. But in this and several other cases, the United States chose to look the other way, because it needed ISI cooperation in the fight against al Qaeda. In addition, the United States continues to rely on Pakistan's land routes to supply its troops in Afghanistan.

It took a direct terrorist hit on the U.S. mission in Kabul for Washington to read the riot act to Pakistan's generals. In the most direct and daring official U.S. indictment of the Pakistani military to date, Admiral Michael Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States had "credible evidence" that the September 10 truck bombing of a U.S. military base in Wardak province and the September 13 terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul were carried out by the Haqqani network with the ISI's active collusion.

If Mullen is right, the ISI is extending its Afghan proxy war against India to target the United States. The reckless escalation is likely intended to demonstrate to Washington that nothing is off-limits to Pakistan's Afghan surrogates, and it may even be designed to push Washington to rethink its involvement in helping India expand its presence in Kabul. Pakistan's military believes, somewhat plausibly, that India has used U.S. military cover to increase its intelligence assets on Pakistan's western border, which would allow New Delhi to foment insurgency in Pakistan's resource-rich province of Baluchistan. The generals are also alarmed by New Delhi's deployment into Afghanistan of its mountain-trained Indo-Tibetan police force, mainly to protect the personnel of the semi-military Border Roads Organization (BRO), which has a role in  developing Afghanistan's infrastructure. One project is a strategic highway linking Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar, which will reduce the landlocked country's dependence on Pakistani land routes.

The ISI-led attack also conveys the agency's intent and capacity to use insurgents to spoil any peace process that excludes Pakistan. The country no doubt has a legitimate stake in a peaceful and stable Afghanistan to its west, and it, along with other regional states, should be part of any reconciliation process. But its military covets a seat at the head table in any peace negotiation so that it can veto any outcome that threatens its expansive national security interests in the region. Ideally, the military would like Afghanistan to become a relatively stable satellite dominated by Islamist Pashtuns, which are much less likely than more secular Pashtuns to make irredentist claims on Pakistan's own Pashtun regions, or bow to Indian influence. The military's worst-case scenario would be an Afghanistan controlled or dominated by groups with ties to India, such as the Northern Alliance, which it fears would permit New Delhi to continue activities that are hostile to Pakistan even after the United States leaves the region.