U.S. Finds Itself Relying On Information From Former Taliban Allies

by Michael Zielenziger and Juan O. Tamayo
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
November 3, 2001

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan _ Until last week, anyone who dialed 225-4718 on his telephone here could have had a unique peek into the workings of a spy agency whose intimate knowledge of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and Osama bin Laden could prove a decisive asset _ or liability _ for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

The local call would have been answered 600 miles away, in the western Afghan city of Herat, by "Colonel Imam," an officer in Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and a friend of supreme Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

But "Imam" was forced to return home last week, the result of a sudden policy reversal by his boss, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. After seven years of supporting the Taliban, Musharraf and his powerful ISI have pledged full support to Washington in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

"Imam," who friends say grew a 6-inch beard while on assignment to demonstrate his commitment to fundamentalist Islam, wasn't the only one sent packing. All ISI officers in Afghanistan, attached to the Pakistani embassy in Kabul and consulates in other cities, are now reported to be home _ safe from the Taliban's ire. But their departure makes them far less useful as spies and underlines the risks facing the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Without agents of its own, the United States remains dependent on intelligence gathered by former Taliban allies, some still smarting from the sanctions Washington slapped on Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program.

"It is a foolish commander who depends on someone else's intelligence, especially when that someone doesn't like him and was once friendly with the enemy," said retired army general and former ISI director general Hamid Gul.

Washington has repeatedly expressed confidence in the ISI, especially after Musharraf, an army general, replaced its chief last month with Gen. Ehsanul Haq, a key player in the 1999 military coup that brought Musharraf to power.

Yet anti-Taliban Afghans, foreign diplomats and Pakistani government security officials say that pro-Taliban officers remain deeply embedded within ISI and might still be helping America's enemies inside Afghanistan.

"There are lots of (ISI) officers who are fully committed to the way of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden," Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the anti-Taliban United Front, told reporters Thursday in northern Afghanistan.

U.S. military and CIA officials have depended on the ISI to collect intelligence on the Taliban and bin Laden and to native Pashtun tribes to encourage defect from the Taliban, U.S. officials say.

An agency with an estimated at 25,000 employees, most of them with military backgrounds, the ISI has been carrying out Pakistan's Afghan policies since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

As distribution agents for CIA and Saudi Arabian aid, the ISI channeled billions of dollars to the Afghan rebels until the Russians withdrew in 1989. Then, trying to retain its influence over a neighboring state, it backed the Taliban in its ferocious civil war against parties backed by Iran and Central Asian republics. By 1998, the Taliban, a group of Islamic fundamentalists, controlled 90 percent of the country.

So deeply were the ISI embedded in the fabric of Taliban operations, that ISI officers later took over several of bin Laden's terrorist camps to train Pakistani Muslims fighting Indian control of disputed Kashmir, according to two recent books on international terrorism.

The cozy relationship between the ISI and the Taliban changed after Sept. 11, when Musharraf chose to back the U.S. war against terrorism rather than support the forces of holy war his own military had helped create. Yet despite the directive from above, many in Pakistan still doubt whether ISI officers are obeying their commander or continuing to aid their one-time allies.

"No matter how much Musharraf insists that he's made a 180 degree turn . . . this institution (ISI) is something like a battleship. You can't turn it around so quickly," said one skeptical Asian diplomat in Pakistan.

Proud of the military traditions learned from Pakistan's British colonial rulers, former ISI chiefs say the agency is tightly disciplined and on the whole will not stray from Musharraf's new path.

"ISI has no (independent) international agenda," Communications Minister Javid Ashraf Qazi, who headed the agency in the mid-1990s, told Pakistan's Daily Jang newspaper in an interview published Wednesday.

Hamid Gul, the former ISI director, agreed _ up to a point. "Its people will gripe and grumble but at the end of the day will carry out orders," he said. "But don't expect operators to risk their lives, especially when the orders come as a shock."

Indeed, some evidence suggests the ISI is helping the covert side of the U.S. campaign to topple the Taliban and capture or kill bin Laden.

ISI agents have detained or deported some 60 "Arab Afghans" _ non-Afghan veterans of the war against Moscow suspected of being members of or supporting bin Laden's al Qaida terror network, Afghan exiles said.

They have provided security and logistical support for several meetings of Afghan tribal and religious leaders in Pakistan designed to forge a broad-based government that would replace the Taliban, the exiles added.

And they have been working, with no apparent success so far, to woo senior Taliban officials such as Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil and military commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Pakistani security official said.

Yet some of their other missions have failed.

When Musharraf sent top Pakistani Muslim leaders to Afghanistan last month to urge the Taliban to surrender bin Laden, then-ISI chief Lt. Gen. Mahmmood Ahmed went along to make sure they stayed "on message," the security official said.

Instead, Ahmed did nothing as the visitors poured praise on Omar and failed to raise the issue of bin Laden.

Afghan exiles have raised the possibility that ISI officers betrayed of Abdul Haq and Hamid Karzai, two former anti-Soviet commanders who ran into Taliban ambushes after infiltrating Afghanistan to round up support for a post-Taliban government. Haq was captured and executed, and Karzai was last reported to be dodging the Taliban.

Musharraf insists that he has the ISI on a short leash. "It is a misperception that ISI is operating on its own," he told reporters Friday.

But his actions have betrayed a deeper concern.

On Oct. 7, the day the Pentagon started bombing Afghanistan, he dismissed Ahmed and replaced him with Gen. Haq, who in turn removed several ISI department chiefs considered too friendly to the Taliban.

Most of the new section chiefs were Muhajir, like Musharraf the sons of Muslim immigrants who fled from India to Pakistan after the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947, according to the top security official.

ISI ranks now appear to be split between a waning but still powerful pro-Taliban faction, an anti-Taliban faction and a third group interested in being on the winning side, the official said.

"You never really know what is going on there," added the official, who asked for anonymity because he works with ISI. "As to who will come out on top, it's very difficult to say."

Compounding the doubts over ISI, some of its agents are said to still be bitter over the U.S. abandonment of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the late 1980s after the Soviets withdrew, and Washington's sanctions against Pakistan for its development of a nuclear arsenal and the 1999 break with democracy.

"Pakistan was abandoned and beaten with a stick after the end of the Afghan-Soviet war, and army people felt betrayed," said Gul, now a strong critic of Musharraf and the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

Whatever the current loyalties of the ISI, it is clear that Musharraf's sudden about-face on the Taliban already has severely hurt his spies' ability to collect fresh intelligence on the Taliban and bin Laden.

"The severance of communications in fact dries up intelligence, and naturally with the shift in Pakistan policies the Afghans are now very suspicious of us," said Hamid Gul.

Col. Imam's recall to Islamabad, for example, left ISI with no "eyes" in Herat, where U.S. and Pakistani officials hope that the predominantly Shia Muslim population will rebel against Taliban, mostly Sunni Muslim.

Imam, a code name for Amir Sultan Tarar, a Shia army colonel assigned to ISI, also was described by friends as one of Mullah Omar's closest advisors, a man who once would have had easy access to the Taliban leader.

The Islamabad engineer who now answers calls to "Col. Imam's" old telephone number said he got the new line installed just three days ago, and has since received since several calls intended for the mystery man.

"Who is this man?" he asked when contacted by Knight Ridder. "All kind of people calling for him. Americans, Afghans, everyone. I just tell them he is no more."

(c) 2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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