Pak uses threats to keep tabs on US diaspora

26 July, 2011 05:10:00 editor

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Poreg View: This New York Times despatch on ISI campaign to gag the voices of Pakistanis in the United States is disturbing. The blame for this should squarely rest at the door-step of American administration.

Washington should have easily checkmated the sinister ISI plan to keep tabs on the diaspora and its not so veiled threats to them against bad mouthing the army.

As a part of the trinity that is widely credited with great influence on who is who in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the United States had the opportunity and the turf space for ticking off the Pasha gang before the ties nose dived after the Raymond Davis happened.

It did not do what is expected of a super power which has styled itself as the global cop in the hot pursuit of terrorists holed up in the Af-Pak region.

Mollycoddling Pakistan has been the hallmark of America’s Islamabad fixation right from the days of long forgotten SENTO and CENTO; pampering it with weapons has been a natural corollary with no attention on the end use of these costly gifts.

The Fai episode stands as a testimony to the institutional and political failure of America as it pursues short term strategic interests camouflaged as long term goals in Pakistan.

The FBI wanted to arrest Ghulam Nabi Fai several times earlier this year after it became amply clear that he is ISI front for lobbying on the Capitol Hill but did not do so following directions from the State Department and the CIA as they feared the arrest could further strain ties with Pakistan.

When Fai was finally arrested on July 19, and a lengthy affidavit was filed against him and the Kashmiri American Council he has been running for two decades, the move came primarily to give a shock treatment to the ISI. It was designed as retaliation for ISI’s refusal to release a Pakistani doctor jailed in Islamabad on the charge of helping the CIA in Operation Geronimo and in running a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad.

It is an established practice the world over for intelligence agencies to function beyond the media glare. ISI is an exception. Its penchant, rather brazen style, keeps it in the eye of a media storm at home and aboard. Like the gag order on Pakistani diaspora which alerted the FBI agents and made them hunt for Mohammed Tasleem, the ISI operative posted as an attaché at the Pakistan mission in New York.

Russia and China are known to run huge spy networks overseas even in countries friendly to them. Their operatives in America mostly focus on stealing hi-tech and business secrets. Their operations are sophisticated and are carried out in several layers of secrecy.

Compared to them, ISI campaigns whether it is lobbying for plebiscite in Kashmir or working to put tabs on Pakistani immigrants, who have distinguished themselves as doctors and engineers, is less sophisticated. Many times it is outright crude, going by the reports in the ethnic press.

As the New York Times reports, Tasleem gave himself literally away by posing as an FBI agent to extract information from Pakistanis living in the US and by issuing threats to keep them from speaking openly about Pakistan’s army. His activities were part of what US government officials and Washington based Pakistani journalists and scholars say is a systematic ISI campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the US.

ISI sleuths are invariably present at seminars and conferences involving the diaspora, introduce themselves and ask probing questions. And put the fear of god in their ‘victims’. This is not a post-9/11 development. Nor was it a result of hammering the army and intelligence community are receiving at home these past few days. In a manner of speaking the army in an act of bravado allowed the Raymond Davis episode into a full blown campaign against America and the events that followed made it come under public scrutiny as never before.

The FBI brought Tasleem’s activities to Leon E Panetta, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and last April, Panetta had a tense conversation with ISI chief, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha. What followed was a quite departure of Tasleem from the US.

In recent years, the US Justice Department has brought several cases against defendants charged with supporting terror groups like the LeT that are nurtured by the ISI. In one case relating to the LeT mayhem in Mumbai’s 26/11, Lt Gen Pasha himself was named last year as an accused and an arrest warrant was issued holding out the prospect of an arrest should he set his foot on the American soil.

Back channel diplomacy averted that possibility. And the US has lost an opportunity in arresting the downslide in its relations with Pakistan.

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