UPDATE: Pakistan’s drift toward extremist control has accelerated in recent days, raising anxiety among its neighbours, and drawing words of alarm from Washington. The government in Islamabad is “basically abdicating to the Taliban,” Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, said during an appearance before a congressional committee. Clinton was referring to a series of events in the country suggesting the Islamist radicals are operating with impunity through ever greater tracts of Pakistan’s northern territories. Of particular concern is an agreement authorized by President Asif Ali Zardari last week allowing the Taliban to impose sharia law in the Swat Valley, located just 140 km west of the capital. The parties reached the deal after the Pakistani military tried and failed to root Taliban fighters out of the area.
The situation in the Swat Valley underlines the gravity of the situation—for the region and the rest of the international community. In the eight months since its former military dictator Pervez Musharraf gave way to a democratically elected government, Pakistan has gone from grudging partner to the NATO mission in Afghanistan to potential victim of the Islamist radicals in its own right. Its weakness was made plain this week when Taliban forces occupied a district located 100 km from the capital, before withdrawing voluntarily. The stakes behind these developments could not be higher: the Taliban now represent what Clinton called an “existential threat” to a government that—she hardly needed to mention—possesses nuclear capability. Atomic weapons in the hands of the Taliban is a worst-case scenario for India, and by extension, its western allies. This week, it seems dangerously close to coming true.
Few things are more disturbing than a spy giving you the once over. It’s that look in his eyes that makes you feel slightly less than human—more like a locked box he’s carefully assessing with the intent of cracking open—and the cold, cruel precision of it all. This particular spy, the one who enters a house in a nondescript part of central Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Taliban-plagued North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, really looks nothing like a spy. But that’s the thing about spooks: a good one never fits the bill, which is why James Bond would make such a terrible spy in the real world. “The trick is to disappear,” says the portly middle-aged man (for simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Farouk), a mid-level agent in Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency. “Whether you’re walking around in a market, or undercover inside a militant group, you have to look like everyone else. Otherwise you’re a dead man.”
In Pakistan, spies take their jobs very seriously, but that’s the nature of the espionage business in these unruly parts. It is a game of life and death, much like it was in the old days of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. That era is long gone, but another cold war, between archrivals India and Pakistan, rages on, with potentially dangerous consequences to the world that have been largely ignored. Like the U.S. and the Soviets, both India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed nations; one is secular and the other religious, an echo of the capitalist-Communist divide that was at the heart of the Cold War. But while the U.S. and the Soviets never went to war, Pakistan and India have fought three, and very nearly a fourth.
Shortly after that standoff in 1999, Pakistan’s dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf admitted that he would not hesitate to use the nuclear arsenal at his disposal if Pakistan’s defeat was imminent. Since then, the potential for chaos has grown as parts of Pakistan have steadily devolved into anarchy, while the country’s economy has been reduced to a beggar’s state. India, meanwhile, has rocketed to near developed-world status. “Pakistan defines itself in opposition to India,” says John Pike, founder of globalsecurity.org, a leading online source for security and intelligence information and a long-time observer of the Pakistani and Indian intelligence communities, “and over time India’s advantages just keep getting greater, so Pakistan is playing a losing hand.”
Against that backdrop, Pakistani intelligence agents are convinced that Indian spies are hard at work to destabilize their country. “There are tens of thousands of RAW agents in Pakistan,” claims Farouk, referring to the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s spy service. “But you’ll never see them. The guys that get caught are two or three steps removed from the agency men. They don’t even know who the agency men are. That’s the way things are done.”
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Pakistani officials take a somewhat more measured and diplomatic approach—but still maintain that the threat is real. “We do see foreign hands at work in Pakistan,” says Abdul Basit, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, using the accepted euphemism for Indian intelligence. “We have been raising the issue with our friends in Washington. We do have information regarding these activities, but such things are not shared publicly. Whatever is shared is shared through the proper channels.” Basit concedes that a “cold war mentality” is doing damage to Indo-Pakistani relations, but predictably deflects the blame onto India, saying that it’s the Indians who want to “ratchet up” the tensions on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to take attention away from Kashmir.
That issue, of course, lies at the heart of Indo-Pakistani animosity. Since Barack Obama took over the U.S. presidency on Jan. 20, Pakistan has been hoping that the Kashmir question would get the attention it feels it deserves. Indeed, in the early days of the Obama administration, word was that the U.S. would aggressively seek a resolution to the six-decades-long quarrel over the disputed territory. In recent weeks, however, under pressure from New Delhi, U.S. administration officials have back-pedalled. During an April 8 meeting with Indian officials, Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to the region, said that the Americans would not involve themselves in any Indo-Pakistani disputes.
The change of heart only fuels speculation in Pakistan that India has some pull in shaping U.S. policy in Pakistan and also Afghanistan, where New Delhi is friendly with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. “Why is the U.S. listening to India more in Afghanistan?” says Maj.-Gen. Athar Abbas, director general of Inter-Services Public Relations, the media wing of the Pakistani army. “Frequent events do suggest a rise in foreign activities inside both [Pakistan and Afghanistan]. The ISI is working to counter these activities, but the U.S. can do more to remove those irritants by listening more to us.” Abbas, like others in Pakistani political and military circles, is worried by Washington’s growing ties with India and the visits over the past two months to New Delhi by officials from the CIA and FBI, among others, to discuss Afghan and Pakistani policy.
Ultimately, according to Farouk and others, India’s endgame is nothing less than the breakup of Pakistan. And the RAW is no novice in that area. In the 1960s, it was actively involved in supporting separatists in Bangladesh, at the time East Pakistan. The eventual victory of Bangladeshi nationalism in 1971 was in large part credited to the support the RAW gave the secessionists. Pakistanis haven’t forgotten that traumatic loss of territory. Similarly, the Tamil Tiger separatists in Sri Lanka, now on the verge of defeat after a bloody and controversial all-out offensive by the Sri Lankan army, were ostensibly supported by Indian intelligence in the 1970s. (When the group overstepped its bounds and began spreading its agenda to the Tamil-majority south of India, the RAW withdrew its support.)
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