David Ignatius (Photo: Aude)
David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post and an authority on Pakistan’s spy agency, ISI, tells anchor Lisa Mullins the US and Pakistan intelligence agencies are locked in a tangled, inter-dependent relationship.
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Lisa Mullins: The Pakistani Intelligence Agency, the ISI, says it’s extremely embarrassed that it didn’t know about Bin Laden’s hideout. Pakistan is under growing pressure to explain why it was apparently unaware that Bin Laden was living in a compound just about a half mile from a big army facility near Islamabad. Today, that growing pressure in Pakistan came from the Senate Intelligence Committee. Members of the committee are threatening cuts in the more than $1 billion in annual U.S. aid to Pakistan. Washington Post columnist, Dave Ignatius, has spent considerable time in Islamabad with officials of the ISI. He says that whatever the Pakistani’s game was before Sunday’s raid, they’ve pretty much played ball with the U.S. since.
Dave Ignatius: The Pakistanis after they were told about the operation said President Obama must announce this right away, we don’t want Pakistanis to wake up wondering whether this was an American raid on Pakistanis. So, that’s one reason for the President’s unusual announcement near midnight of the operation. Second, at the U.S.’ request, the Pakistanis said that they would try to mitigate public anger in Pakistan over the raid, and they did issue a statement on Monday that was pretty supportive, that talked about the common fight against terrorism and identified Osama Bin Laden as a terrorist adversary. In that sense I think you can say that they were trying to be responsible rather than whip up public indignation against the U.S., they do seem to have tried to calm it.
Mullins: Interesting that it sounds by what you’re saying is that there is at least a compliant relationship, if not a tight relationship, between Pakistani government, the ISI, the intelligence service there, and U.S. intelligence.
Ignatius: This is one of the most complicated intelligence relationships that I’ve seen in 30 years of writing about this subject. Essentially, these are two countries that can’t live without each other and can’t live with each other either. If it was a marriage you’d say well, they ought to go into counseling; maybe they need a divorce, but it would be bad for the children. The Pakistanis are locked in a battle against domestic terrorists. Talk to senior ISI officials, they know that the people who are killing members of the Pakistani military, in particular members of the ISI, are the Pakistani Taliban. At the same time I think they’re caught in the rhetoric that they spin about American dominance, American interference with Pakistani sovereignty…a good example is the predator drone attacks. The Pakistanis in secret have agreed to let these predators operate within a fairly tightly defined zone. They take off from an airbase in Pakistan, they’re not coming from outside, and they take off with the aqueous of the Pakistani government. But in public Pakistani officials express indignation about this violation of their sovereignty, so that they whip up this public anger that then catches them. They’re caught in a backlash they helped create. And I think they’ve begun to understand that this situation isn’t tolerable. Somehow, and I think the U.S. is realizing this too, somehow we have to help the Pakistani government seem more independent of U.S. pressure, and that may mean pulling back a little bit, changing the rules of the intelligence game between the two countries.
Mullins: Why would the U.S. want to play into that kind of duplicity when it needs Pakistan to come clean in so many regions of the country and track down the remaining cells of al Qaeda and the Taliban as you say?
Ignatius: I think we’d like nothing more than for the Pakistanis to come clean and to admit strongly that they work with the United States, they need the United States, we’re in a joint fight. They say that occasionally, it’s just that periodically those tensions become unmanageable, that they just spin out of control.
Mullins: Since 2002 Washington has given Pakistan in foreign aid more than $5 billion. How much actual assistance has it received Pakistan in tracking down extremists from the Taliban to al Qaeda?
Ignatius: Limited help, I’ve written that the CI was recently allowed to open a station in Quetta, in Balochistan, which is near the Pakistan-Afghan border. It’s a very valuable place to be able to operate from. That was done with a wink from the Pakistani government. So, the Pakistanis allow us to do some operations. I think that the U.S.-Pakistan relationship needs to be rethought top to bottom because it isn’t working for either country. We have to get our act together. We talk about giving Pakistan assistance that needs, for example, we’ve talked about giving them helicopters so they could operate more effectively in the tribal areas. Those have been promised. They’ve been in the pipeline. They just don’t arrive. When I ask where are they, why haven’t they been delivered? You know, you just get uh, it’s a bureaucratic problem. We’ve had legislation pending for goodness, four years, to create opportunity zones in the tribal areas so people could setup factories, and export things to the U.S. cheaply, and provide some alternative employment there so they don’t go off and join the Taliban. It’s a no-brainer. And yet that legislation doesn’t get passed. Why? Because of the pettiest political differences between republicans and democrats, and it just sits there stalled. I don’t get it.
Mullins: David Ignatius is a columnist for the Washington Post. His latest novel, Blood Money, is going to be published later this month.
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