The Pakistani government issued visas to more than 400 Americans without army security clearances starting in early 2010, possibly enabling the CIA to boost its presence, in a move that angered the military. Details of the visa decision emerged after US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad on May 2, straining already uneasy ties between strategic allies Islamabad and Washington.
The grant of visas has also fuelled tension between the military and the nuclear-armed country’s civilian leaders, whose relations are uneasy at the best of times. Pakistani cooperation is crucial for US efforts to combat militants and bring stability to Afghanistan.
However, the US has had doubts about Islamabad’s commitment and, given the contacts that Pakistan’s spy agency has had with militants in the past, almost certainly uses its own operatives to collect intelligence in the country.
Pakistani diplomatic missions in Washington, the United Arab Emirates and London issued the visas after the government came under intense pressure from the United States, officials said. “At the end of 2009, a special presidential order was issued to give 7,000 visas and the same order was passed through the prime minister’s office to Haqqani,” a senior Pakistani security official told Reuters, referring to Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani.
“On the basis of these orders, the visas which were valid for three to six months were issued without the scrutiny or routine security clearance by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).” About 450 of those visas were issued to the CIA, the security official said. A spokeswoman for President Asif Ali Zardari declined to comment on details of the visa decision, saying only that security clearance was not always needed from the army.
The army did not respond to a request for information on the visas, but a senior security official said “We lost control of CIA operatives in Pakistan”. Army generals, who have ruled Pakistan for more than half of its history, largely direct security and foreign policy even when civilian administrations are in power, as is the case now, and they do not like to be challenged on those agendas.
Ties between the United States and Pakistan reached a low point this year after Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor and former US Special Forces member, shot dead two Pakistanis in the city of Lahore in January.
Ayesha Siddiqa, author of “Military Inc”, a book on the military’s economic might, said it was clear why army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani and the head of the ISI were “hopping mad” over the Davis case. “Because somebody in the Pakistani political government had allowed X number of CIA operatives to come into Pakistan and set up parallel operations to sneak into what was going on,” she told Reuters.
A second security official said the military was angered by the move and as a result the number of Americans in the country that had received the visas has been reduced by 50 percent. But those who remained were cause for concern.