After the political cell of the ISI was reportedly closed down, we learn that there is a media wing also in the intelligence agency. Before he was brutally murdered last week, Saleem Shahzad said on record that he was called by the ISI media wing DG and deputy DG to be warned discreetly to mend his ways.
This raises several questions. The ISI has supposedly closed down the political cell which blatantly indulged in political engineering, shadowed politicians, bribed some, threatened others and forged political alliances. The wrapping up of the cell was needed because it was a redundant body. Why was the tax payers’ money then wasted on it? As the officers manning the cell could have been spared from that active service for years, does it indicate the military is overstaffed?
What is the purpose of maintaining a media wing headed by high ranking officers and several subordinate staff members? If the idea is to project the military’s point of view in media, the task is already being performed by the ISPR. Is the wing supposed to be doing to the media person what the political cell had been doing to the politicians? Several incidents have in fact been reported of the illegal persecution of media persons by the ISI.
Aamer Ahmed Khan, Editor BBC Urdu related on June 2 what the wing did to him: “Editing one of Pakistan’s leading news analysis magazines in 2001, I ran a controversial story on the ISI-Taliban nexus…Days later, I got a call from someone who introduced himself as Colonel Tariq. ‘I know quite a bit about you. You drive a Honda City, don’t you?’ he said. He knew details of my wife and family and continued: ‘I find myself wondering why people like you think they can be journalists and have a family at the same time.’”
The treatment meted out to Umar Cheema last year and to Amir Mir earlier also points out what the media wing of the ISI might be doing.
Concentrating upon activities of the sort has downgraded the ISI’s performance. This is best explained by the highly embarrassing discovery of OBL from Abbottabad. With ISI tailing the politicians or engaged in media management the ISI has little time or resources left to track the terrorists or foreign agents. The later have launched operations inside GHQ, Navy War College in Lahore, PNS Mehran, and even attacked ISI’s HQs and numerous other facilities in Punjab and other provinces.
It irks the ISI when journalists like Saleem Shahzad point out the flaws in the security agency’s work. The agency was piqued when Shahzad wrote an article which quoted unnamed insiders telling that Mullah Baradar was released so that he could play a part in reconciliation talks in Afghanistan. When Shahzad declined to reveal the source, he was told he could be killed by a terrorist.
Shahzad’s last article in Asia Times Online was about the recent attack by militants on the Mehran naval base in Karachi. He said that Al-Qaeda had infiltrated the naval ranks and that the attack occurred after negotiations between the militants and the military broke down. The article must have been disliked by those who thought he was exposing the security agencies. Shahzad disappeared two days after the publication of the article.
The ISI has called it “regrettable” that some sections of the media are using the incident for targeting and maligning the ISI. The email sent by Shahzad originally to Ali Dayan Hasan of HRW has to be regarded as the statement of a dying man trying to point out the possible killers. More and more people are telling now they had either received the e-mail or heard Shahzad point a finger at the ISI.
Foremost among them is APNS Presdient Hameed Haroon, a highly respected person who cannot be accused of partiality. Replying to the ISI’s claim that the allegation by Dayan Hasan was “baseless,” Haroon says, “I wish to state on the record… that the late journalist confided in me and several others that he had received death threats from various officers of the ISI on at least three occasions in the past five years. Whatever the substance of these allegations, they form an integral part of Mr Shahzad’s last testimony.”
Writing in the London based daily Independent on June 2, the paper’s Asia Correspondent, Andrew Buncombe, reported that Shahzad once let slip that he’d been called in by the ISI last October. He revealed that things had been said to him that could have been taken as a threat. “In the aftermath of what has transpired, of course, the meeting and that message look terribly sinister”, he wrote
If anybody had thought that Shahzad’s death would silence the critics, they had not taken into consideration the bad name the killing would bring to the intelligence agencies of Pakistan.
Inside Pakistan journalists and members of civil society are holding protests for three days. While condemning the killing the HRCP has pointed finger at state actors. The killing has been condemned not only by the journalist bodies and human rights organisations all over the world, it has been criticised by Secretary of State Clinton, Sen Kerry and British Foreign Secretary Hague.
There is a universal demand for an independent enquiry and punishment for those behind the act. The least that needs to be done meanwhile is to close down the media wing of the ISI.
The writer is a former academic and a political analyst.
