India blames Pakistan’s ISI for Kabul embassy blast

Last week National Security Advisor MK Narayanan said the Indian government has good evidence linking Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI to the 7 July embassy bomb in Kabul that killed 56 people. Narayanan refused to elaborate on the nature of the evidence but said “the ISI needs to be destroyed”. Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani earlier denied his country's intelligence service had any involvement in the bombing. 'Why should Pakistan destabilize Afghanistan?” he said. “It is in our interest to have a stable Afghanistan.”

But whether or not the ISI was directly involved in the Kabul bombing, there is little doubt they have played an active role in Afghan affairs. ISI stands for the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. Very little happens in Pakistan or its proxy state Afghanistan without the knowledge of this powerful but shadowy group. The ISI has been crucial in maintaining order and sustaining military rule in an otherwise semi-anarchic state.

Critics now say the ISI is out of control answering to neither the president nor the Prime Minister. Mariane Pearl, writing about the murder of her husband Danny, described the ISI as a “kingdom within a state”. Many in the organisation are ideologically sympathetic to jihadi organisations. The Pearls were both journalists working in Karachi in 2002 when one Jihadi group kidnapped Danny and executed him. Mariane’s account of the incident reached a wider audience with Michael Winterbottom's film version of A Mighty Heart (starring Angelina Jolie). The Pearls had gotten an inkling of official Pakistani views when they interviewed Hamid Gul who accused the “Jews and Mossad” of carrying out the 9/11 attacks.

Hamid Gul was no ordinary conspiracy theorist. He was the director of the ISI from 1987 to 1989 and was considered the architect of the Afghan jihad. Gul masterminded the mujahideen war against the Soviets, financed by the CIA. In the nineties Gul was called “the Godfather of the Taliban”. Gul fell out of power but remains an important background voice. After the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, he told Robert Fisk he was not a Muslim extremist "but I support the implementation of Shari'a and we must be governed by the rules of Allah."

After the Afghan mujahideen war, Pakistan terrorists turned their attention to the “liberation” of Kashmir. By 1995, the ISI engaged the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeM) to raise a Taliban-type force of young Pakistani students to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. But now the Jihadi monster it created has gotten out of control. In 2003, JeM suicide bombers attempted to assassinate President Musharraf. A year earlier Pearl was killed by Sheikh Omar Saeed, a double agent of the ISI and JeM.

The ISI did not like journalists getting too close to their operations. As well as Pearl, they persecuted two Pakistani journalists who dared write about their activities. Ghulam Hasnain, whose work was syndicated to Time and CNN, was investigating Indian fugitive and smuggler Dawood Ebrahim when was arrested by the ISI a day before Pearl disappeared. He was so traumatised when released 36 hours later, he has refused to speak of it to anyone since. They also physically threatened Shaheen Sehbai, the editor of Islamabad’s The News, in a vain attempt to stop him from linking Pearl’s assassin, Sheik Omar Saeed, with the ISI.

Other leading Pakistani journalists such as Kamran Khan have struck a Faustian pact with the ISI in order to continually report freely. In order to maintain a relationship with them he writes as much to please them as about them. Khan freely admits the ISI have funded madrassas which have harboured Al Qaeda operatives. But he said that some of the Islamists are actually double-agents. He explained how it works to PBS Frontline: “the bottom line here is that, ‘Look. Whatever you are doing, whatever you do, we understand. But mind you, we cannot afford to harbour Arabs here. We cannot afford to harbour non-Pakistanis here. So please, please cooperate with us on that count.’ There is a very deep connection between the religious madrassas, and the key religious scholars, and the establishment.”

Given their power, Mariane Pearl could never understand why the ISI took an active interest in her husband’s disappearance. While the investigating police told Pearl that the ISI had been to her house on the day after the kidnap, she was unaware of their presence except the two occasions they sent a sullen, unhelpful and unsympathetic man who gave his name and rank, in possible homage to Catch-22, as “Major Major”. But if Major played dumb, others in the ISI definitely knew more about the killing than they were letting on.

When the Pakistani police finally tracked down Omar, they found he had already turned himself in to the custody of the home secretary of the Punjab state. Brigadier Ejaz Shah gave Omar sanctuary and kept his detention secret a week. Shah was a powerful figure behind the scenes. In the 1990s, he worked for the ISI and was the official “handler” for Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Musharraf appointed him to the Punjab role on taking power in 1999. It is likely the ISI interrogated Omar during that week.

The Pakistanis weren’t the only people interested in Omar. In 2001, the FBI were tracing a link between Omar and 9/11 leader Mohammad Atta. Omar wired $100,000 to Atta in the month before the US attacks and the FBI wanted to know who authorised him to make the money transfer. It seemed the order had come from Omar’s boss: ISI head Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed. But while this might have shocked the FBI, it would have been no surprise to another well-known American agency. Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, told the South Asia Tribune in 2004 it has long been established, “the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA”. Yet this unpalatable truth remains hidden in a patchwork of Byzantine alliances. And as the Indian embassy bombing showed, it remains out of control.

A mighty heart: The story of Daniel and Mariane Pearl

Mariane Pearl has dropped a lawsuit seeking damages from a Pakistani bank and Al Qaeda for the 2002 murder of her husband Daniel Pearl. Her lawyers said Habib Bank Limited and other defendants had not answered the suit filed in a US court in July. The lawyers have so far not elaborated on the reasons for the withdrawal but it is safe to assume the defendents woould never have appeared in an American court.

The victim Daniel Pearl was a Wall St Journal correspondent who was abducted and later executed in Karachi in the aftermath of 9/11. Pearl’s kidnapping and his wife'a search for his captors are the subject of a movie currently in general release in Australian cinemas. “A Mighty Heart” was directed by prolific British auteur Michael Winterbottom and stars Angelina Jolie in the central role of Mariane Pearl. Jolie puts in a mesmerising performance of a woman desperate to seek her husband’s safe return while negotiating a minefield of police, media and governmental interests.

Pearl was the Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief. Mariane, his French wife, was also a journalist. She was five months pregnant and the couple were due to return to the US to have the baby. Although based in Mumbai, the couple were in Karachi to check out Pakistani links to Richard Reid, the UK born Muslim convert who gained infamy as the "shoe bomber".

Daniel Pearl was born to a Jewish family on 10 October 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated from Stamford University in 1985 with a degree in communications. He worked for several small newspapers before joining the Wall St Journal in 1990. He met Mariane in 1998 and moved to Paris where they married. Pearl was appointed Mumbai bureau chief two years later. There he began to cover the growing “war on terror” with occasional trips to Pakistan.

His investigations were taking him into murkier territory with possible links between radical elements and the Pakistan security agency the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). He was also looking at how the US trained the ISI during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. Many people including Pearl’s biographer Bernard-Henri Lévy have implicated the ISI in his death despite the indignant denials of Musharraf’s regime.

On 23 January 2002, Pearl arranged to meet Sheik Ali Shah Gilani, a respected spiritual leader. Pearl had found out that Richard Reid met Gilani in Karachi prior to Reid’s unsuccessful attempt to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with a bomb hidden in the lining of his shoes. On his way to meet Gilani, Pearl was kidnapped by a group calling itself The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The group claimed variously that Pearl was a CIA or Mossad agent and demanded the US release prisoners from Guantanamo in exchange for his release. Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded. His body was cut up into ten pieces and dumped in a shallow grave near Karachi. His captors released a video of Pearl’s death.

In March this year, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told a U.S. military tribunal he personally beheaded Pearl. According to the Pentagon transcript, Mohammed admitted he was responsible for a string of high-profile attacks including Pearl’s death. "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," he apparently held the tribunal. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

Winterbottom’s film about Pearl’s death was careful to take a non-political line. It did not preach and tried to tell the story from the view of the protagonist without taking sides. Winterbottom has made two other films about the Muslim world, “In This World” (about refugees) and “The Road to Guantanamo” (about political prisoners) where he has been more explicit about his ideals. “A Mighty Heart” was different. Winterbottom said he didn’t want to build opinions into the film. "We were making a film about a journalist and felt we should try to reflect that," he said. “Why try to dramatise it? Tell it as truthfully as you can."