The Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence

Stop helping.

That should get me added to a couple more lists. Still AI.

It resembles nothing so much as a tweedy little private university; a campus of one and two-story well-maintained buildings surrounded by neatly-manicured lawns, and dotted here and there by exquisite fountains, burbling happily.

While you could be forgiven for thinking you were on the grounds of a faintly exotic Ivy-League college, this is — depending on which metric you use — the hub of the #1 financier/facilitator of State-sponsored terrorism in the world.

And it isn’t in Tehran, it’s in Islamabad. Welcome to the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence. It is one of, if not the largest Intelligence agencies in the world, with — at best guess — about 10,000 active operatives. It is also absolutely ate-up with Islamist Fundie bellends, has an impressive budget, suffers zip divided by squat oversight from the Pakistani government, and somehow has better PR than the Iranian equivalent.

Personally, I’m not a big fan.

The year is 1948, and Pakistan is licking the wounds handed to it by India. An Australian Army officer, attached to the Pakistani military by the British Army¹ , decides that maybe Pakistan would at least have a somewhat better showing in the future if it had a military intelligence branch².

Unfortunately for Major-General Sir Walter Joseph Cawthorn his fledgling Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence tended to be about as amateur as you could wish for. ISI’s Really Good Ideas for the 1965 war with India blew up in their faces; and they badly mishandled the 1971 Bangladesh situation which ended up losing Pakistan a good chunk of territory.

However, ISI fortunes took a major turn for the better when a bunch of scum-sucking Siberian snow pimps rolled into neighboring Afghanistan in 1979. Suddenly Pakistan — and it’s junior varsity military intelligence outfit — Were Relevant.

The United States, at the height of the Cold War enthusiasm, went at the Soviet Union full hammer and tongs, using Pakistan and the ISI as cut-outs. The American money spigot was turned full-on. American — and Western — training in all sorts of fun activities was frequent and thorough. Training camps for the Afghan insurgency were set-up on the Pakistan border. Weapons and funds for Afghan insurgents were funnelled through Pakistan. And the woefully under-paid and under-trained Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence got a decade of the best training that Western Intelligence services could provide.

80,000 mujahedeen fighters were trained by the ISI during the Afghan-Soviet conflict. ISI ran the weapons pipeline that went from Western and Middle-Eastern³ nations through Pakistan and into Afghanistan. And — unfortunately — when the volunteer fighters⁴ from Middle Eastern nations went through the ISI training camps, they left something insidious behind — Islamic fundamentalism, particularly of the Wahhabist flavour.

Along comes 1989, and the USSR has had enough and unasses Afghanistan. With the retreat of the Russian bear, the US decides they’ve won this round of the Cold War and abandons Pakistan. Sigh.

So, in Afghanistan the Soviets left a power vacuum that led to several different factions of mujahedeen indulging in a civil war for the country and the ISI — suddenly being irrelevant and bored — meddles about, keeping the whole thing at a simmer.

Coincidentally, at the same time that the Paki Goon Squad was stirring the pot, they were also hosting a whole bunch of Pushtun kids⁵ at madrassas⁶ run by the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam⁷ throughout Pakistan. This would be one of the major symptoms of that insidious little religious fundamentalism I mentioned above.

Come about 1994, and one of these graduates got a severe case of the ass at the rampant sexual excesses of the Afghan warlords, got three or four dozen of his madrassa buddies together, and hung one of said warlords from the barrel of a tank gun.

This graduate — name of Muhammad Umar — quickly got himself a vision, announced that he — personally — was going to end bacha bazi⁸, and started thumping paedophiles left, right, and centre⁹.

This got the attention of more madrassa graduates (and the Paki ISI), and before you could turn around twice, Young Umar was in the lead of about 12,000 frothing-at-the-mouth religious students (and a hundred or so ISI agents. For communication and training, of course), and the non-fanatic locals — finally seeing someone bringing the warlords to heel — starting using Umar and his student as neutral arbiters in all sorts of disputes.

Next thing you know (and to the absolute delight of the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence) the tired, fed-up locals were looking at these neutral monkish students¹⁰ and handing the reins of power over to them.

Anyhoo, Umar and his group of students kept getting more and more power, and more and more "aid" and "guidance" from the Goon Squad at ISI; and finally wound up taking over Afghanistan in 1996. At which point those charming religious students turned into the Islamic version of Nazi Puritans From Hell¹¹.

And we all know how much of a pain in the ass the Taliban have become.

That’s one, albeit minor, country. At the same time, Pakistan and ISI were, and have been, an on-going safe harbour for such bugsnipes as Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and ISIS-K, amongst others, as well as financial and moral support for countless other terror groups. Pakistan — and the ISI — had a place of distinction on the United States Department of State’s List of State Sponsors of Terrorism until 2001 when they played their GWOT cards with canniness and cunning.

If you’re an Islamist honyock, odds are that you’ve gotten some training from one of two major States sponsoring terror in the 21st century¹².

Speaking of, remember Lashkar-e-Taiba I mentioned above? It was founded in 1985 in Pakistan for the express purpose of taking the Indian part of Kashmir away from India and giving it to Pakistan. A second — minor, really — stated purpose is once that is accomplished, to use the region as a springboard to bring all of the Indian sub-continent under Muslim rule. You can guess how the Indians feel about that.

Lashkar-e-Taiba — started by, trained by, funded by, and supported by Paki ISI — is also the group responsible for the atrocity du jour that has the Indo-Pak region all up in the current ruckus, and launched these two posts of mine.

Ian

1. Remembering that Pakistan was still a Commonwealth nation at this time.

2. Yes, that is my eye twitching.

3. Saudi Arabia.

4. Like Osama bin Laden.

5. We'll briefly note that the Pushtun word for 'students' is 'taliban', a loan-word from Arabic, with a connotation of 'those whose seek'.

6. Religious schools.

7. We'll also note that the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam at the time was becoming fairly heavily influenced and funded by the fundamentalist Wahhabis -- with the attendant shift to hard-line religious fundamentalism.

8. The practice of sodomizing young boys.

9. I have to say — he wasn’t all bad.

10. As an odd little aside, Austere Islamic Religious Scholar Muhammad Umar never made the hajj to Mecca. Weird, that.

11. Better known as the Taliban.

12. If you’re a Major National Power in the 21st century, with an unexpected outbreak of “Separatist Militia Syndrome”, snag one of the little bugsnipes. If he has the faint acrid whiff of Shi’a, with over-tones of spicy, it’s Iran. The crisp, mouldy essence of Sunni, with base-notes of arrogant, is Pakistan.