In this episode of Eurasian Connectivity, Dr. Kamran Bokhari and Ejaz Haider, a prominent Pakistani broadcast journalist and analyst, discuss the recent arrest of Pakistan’s former ISI head, the country’s challenging civil-military relations, and the external pressures Pakistan faces.
Kamran Bokhari:
Hello, everyone. This is Kamran Bokhari once again with another episode of Eurasian Connectivity here at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. Today, I have a very special guest. His name is Ejaz Haider. And in my opinion, he’s probably the best English writing analyst in the country. I’ve known him for quite some time. He has had an illustrious career in the Pakistani media. He’s hosted several talk shows on several channels, both in Urdu and English. And he writes on issues of national security and foreign policy and has a keen eye on issues that are beyond Pakistan. But today, we are going to discuss about Pakistan’s intelligence community.
There’s been a development recently, something unprecedented. We’ve had the arrest and initiation of court-martial proceedings of a recently retired former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, General Faiz Hameed, and that has created a firestorm in the country. There’s a lot that has been said about it, so we’re not going to necessarily focus on the actual details of the arrest and the entire controversy. But what does it really mean for Pakistan, what does it really mean for Pakistan’s intelligence community and the broader national security establishment? Welcome to the show, Ejaz.
Ejaz Haider:
Thank you, KB. Great to be with you. And thank you for a very generous introduction.
Kamran Bokhari:
No, my pleasure. Thank you for doing this. So listen, let’s just get started. And give a sense to our listeners what the arrest of General Faiz Hameed means for Pakistan, and in the context of all the various sundry crises that are plaguing the country.
Ejaz Haider:
So this is a first, most certainly in the sense that never before has a former DG ISI, who also served as DG Internal Wing of the ISI when he was a major general, has been arrested and, as you have noted, will be put through the Field General Court Martial. Now, there have been occasional incidents before in which a major general, for instance, was court-martialed and jailed for a mutinous plot. A couple of years ago, a former three-star was court-martialed and jailed for spying for the United States. Allegedly, his sentence has been commuted since. But never a top intelligence officer, an officer who’s actually headed the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. Now, he is being tried under Article 40 of the Army Act, which deals with fraudulent offense in respect of property, and Article 31, which deals with mutiny and insubordination. If you recall the somewhat terse statement that was put out by the Inter-Services Public Relations, it said that the arrest was pursuant to the order of the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a real estate case.
Now, that’s where Article 40 of the Army Act comes in. But the statement also then referred to certain other activities, and it was fairly ambiguous, but talked about these activities in violation of the Army Act. And the general sense is that those activities were political, presumably in favor of a certain political party that is now out of favor. And the army thought that the former general was acting in ways that were prejudicial to good order and military discipline, as the phrase goes. There’s a lot of irony in this because Hameed as DGC, when he was heading the Internal Wing, and then as DGI was primarily doing political manipulation, a lot of which can also be traced back to former Army Chief General Bajwa.
So his actions by most evidence were greenlit by the brass and the former army chief. In a way, one can say his actions had institutional sanction. So with Bajwa gone and Khan in jail, the institution’s priorities with respect to political actors seemed to have changed. And that seems to be what has led to Hameed’s arrest. But the interesting thing is that it also sets a precedent. Will former top officers be arrested by serving command when the political dispensation changes and they’re found to favor the dispensation that may be out of favor? In a manner of speaking, if Hameed’s arrest leads to breaking a taboo, then this could become more frequent. And that’s also going to be a first.
Kamran Bokhari:
So thank you for that introduction and bringing our listeners up to speed. So listen, everybody knows that, for the longest time, the Pakistani Army intelligence establishment as a cohesive force has been capable of, for a lack of better term, hitting the reset button whenever they needed to intervene directly or indirectly. And we have a decades-long history on this. But it seems now as though there are serious internal differences within the general staff and the intelligence service in order for Faiz to be able to do what he was doing without sanction from top leadership. What do you make of that?
Ejaz Haider:
That’s a very interesting but also a very complex question. A question broadly speaking that has spawned a number of theories in the civil-military relations literature, starting with Samuel Huntington as a soldier in the state. And frankly, no one has a real answer, which is fine because social sciences and human and political interactions are not mathematical. You can’t say, here’s the problem, end it with a QED. Now as far as the Pakistan Army is concerned, it has traditionally been both a cohesive and a disruptive force. Cohesive because it is a national old volunteer army and draws its offices and men from all parts of Pakistan and also Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. It is also a highly disciplined and professional force, and displays managerial excellence. It has also displayed organizational unity and integrity despite ebbs and flows. But it’s also disruptive because it has traditionally conflated national security with organizational interests.
Now, I’m not saying that this is something which is conscious. At some point, you just get into… The culture evolves in a certain way and takes you along a certain pathway. And we have organizational theories that tell us how organizational interest and pathways develop. The problem is that its disruptions come in the name of national cohesion, and so it believes that the normal noisy course of politics in a diverse country is a problem. So as a force that believes in managerial excellence and having everything very neatly packaged, it shows impatience with the rough and tumble of politics. Now, ironically, when it does get into politics, whether directly or indirectly, it gets soiled too and results through the same imaginations, which is it ostensibly aborts. Now in the present case, to simplify things, it continues to build Imran Khan as an alternative to corrupt leadership of traditional parties.
I’m sure you follow Pakistan closely. And if you take October 2011 as a cut off date or year or month, you would see that after that particular political rally, Khan was slowly building up and went into the 2013 elections. And then of course, we come to the 2018 elections. Now during this entire period, Khan certainly caught the imagination of younger cohorts and also large numbers of military officers, mostly veterans. But then as always happens, when he became the prime minister, he decided to assert his constitutional position. And that’s what got the army to facilitate and engineer his ouster. But they thought Khan would count out. Instead, he has doubled down. And that was the time the army actually thought his statements might disrupt the army’s cohesion. You might recall a number of statements in which he talked about the fact that only animals are neutral and the army has to stand with haqq, as in truth, instead of batil, as in falsehood.
And so there was a general sense and there were a number of analyses being put out at that time. And I personally wrote about the fact that some of these statements are inciting and they could actually disrupt the inner cohesiveness of the army. So there was a real fear, and I think the army itself also feared that that’s a possibility. And then we have May 9th, which gave the army the pretext to crack down on Khan’s party. Now since that action, its cohesion has held, but its image has taken a lot of battering, even among former officers. So the situation as its stance remains fraught. The army is, as we use that term in war termination theories, is the army is gambling for resurrection. And Khan for his part remains defiant. So it’s not a stable situation. Add to that the problem of terrorism and economic wars, and then you have a political dispensation that is seen at the front for the General Headquarters and frankly will remain on a slippery slope.
Kamran Bokhari:
So in your recent writings… And I want to point out to our listeners that if you want to catch the excellent analysis of Ejaz, you should go to The Friday Times website. He also publishes occasionally for Dawn Magazine, and you should check those out as well. But coming back to your recent writings and recent podcast interviews on YouTube, you seem to be talking about a deeper malaise within the ISI, the premier intelligence service of the country, and that General Faiz Hameed is just sort of the tip of the iceberg. I’d love for you to elaborate a bit upon that. And I understand that there may be areas that you may not want to delve into, and that’s just fine, but give a sense to our listeners, what does that really mean?
Ejaz Haider:
Well, KB, you yourself are an expert when it comes to how intelligence works and how intelligence agencies work. But my point is somewhat simple. Frankly, when you refer to the podcast that I did with Raza, for instance, and some of my recent writings, so my argument is that without a culture of impunity and lack of checks, Hameed could not have played as he did. Even if he could override his subordinates, someone at some point would’ve put his foot down. Now, we are talking about two tenures. One, when he was a major general and he was Director General of the Internal Wing. And next, when he became the Director General of the ISI as a left-wing general. Now let’s assume that, as DGI, he had greater space, but what about when he was DGC? He was a major general. If the organization had not evolved in the way that it has, someone would’ve said, hold on, this is not the way to do things.
Now, recently, among other stuff that has been fed to the media, we also know… And it’s actually something that came out in December last year, when one of Pakistan’s senior lawyers, Akram Sheikh, came on a Pakistani TV channel. And he said, “Look, there was an armed robbery in my house. My family and I were held at gunpoint for several hours, and the robbers took away valuables.” And three days after this incident, then Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa invited Mr. Sheikh to the army house, dined him, and offered a mea culpa confessing that the people who had raided his house were actually our people. Now this is the time when Hameed is the DGI. Now this is the army chief saying that this is… Acknowledging that this has happened, but not taking any action against the DGI. So either there was a nexus between the army chief and the DGI about what happened. And if we accept that to be the case, then obviously we’re talking about a certain kind of culture, a certain kind of impunity.
And then we can say, okay, maybe Hameed was predisposed to doing certain things. But unless his disposition was in line with the ethos of the organization, he could not have continued to do what he was doing. Now when he became DGI, before becoming DGI and just a brief sort of gap when he was in the General Headquarters, he was heading the C Wing. And C is not for counterintelligence, it deals with internal politics, so. And the entire focus is political wheeling, dealing. So an intelligence agency where a wing is dedicated to something like this will naturally develop a culture and approaches that aren’t strictly in line with the laws and the constitution. And frankly, I am being euphemistic.
Kamran Bokhari:
So Ejaz, for the benefit of our listeners, could you briefly sort of map out the Pakistani intelligence community? More focus in the West is on the ISI because of its prominence, but it’s a much broader space. And if you could briefly give a sense of what that looks like.
Ejaz Haider:
Okay. So Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is the ISI, is the primary agency that performs the dual functions of external strategic intelligence gathering as well as counterintelligence. I can’t think of any other agency that combines in itself these two functions. Then there’s the Internal Wing that we’ve talked about, and that’s yet another dimension of it. It draws its cards from the three services, but also has a large pool of civilians who are directly recruited.
Kamran Bokhari:
Sorry, what’s the breakdown between this, the ratio between civilians and the uniformed officers?
Ejaz Haider:
I am not sure, but I think it’s 60/40. So it’s about 60% civilians and 40% officers. And most of the officers, not all of the officers are serving officers. There are lots of offices who previously worked in the ISI, or in the military intelligence, or in certain other branches of the military, but brought into the ISI on short-term contracts. So that’s another pool from where they draw their human resource. But most of these officers ever since they raised the core of military intelligence, these are officers who have at the minimum done the officer’s basic intelligence course and the intelligence staff course and have had some strengths in some of the intelligence outlets. So they have the intelligence background. Then you have The Military Intelligence. It’s kind of like the Russian GRU, though it doesn’t have its own special forces. Air Force and Navy have their own intelligence agencies. Rangers, which is a paramilitary force, has its own intelligence units, and they’re mostly field intelligence units.
The army also held intelligence battalions and field security sections. Then during Zia’s time, another intelligence outfit was raised to essentially get information on sentiments within the army. And until the raising of CMI, the officers who had done intelligence courses and spent some time in intelligence outfits and that returned to their respective arms and services. The premier civilian intelligence agency is The Intelligence Bureau. Its primary task is counterintelligence. Then police has special branches and also a counterterrorism department, CTD, which since the War on Terror has become very active, gathered its own intel, also has some pool of SWAT teams. Then customs has Customs Intelligence, they have their own task. And then there’s the Federal Investigation Agency, what’s called the FIA. FIA has a very broad mandate and multiple specialized units. But interestingly, there have been half-baked efforts to consolidate input from at least the primary agencies, something like the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. But that hasn’t really worked out.
Kamran Bokhari:
So thank you for elaborating on that. And that analogy with DNI is fascinating. I saw something in years past about those efforts to consolidate and give ISI sort of like a leading role. Do I recall that correctly? Is that what it was about?
Ejaz Haider:
Yes. Actually, what happened was that with this NACTA, the idea was that NACTA would be the umbrella.
Kamran Bokhari:
You’re referring to the National Counter Terrorism Authority?
Ejaz Haider:
Yes, yes. So it was supposed to be the umbrella organization and will have two primary functions. One is to actually study, research, conceptualize, find solutions to the various peculiar aspects of terrorism in Pakistan. And the other was that it would collate and analyze information, the intelligence inputs coming in from various intelligence agencies. But then large-scale bureaucratic organizations, turf battles, and the ISI didn’t want to lose its primacy. And so NACTA, which was supposed to be within the Prime Minister’s Office, was attached to the interior ministry. And then you’re right in pointing out that then there was this effort to get the ISI to be the lead agency and for all other agencies to basically give input to the ISI, but the other intelligence agencies were very reluctant to do that.
Nothing peculiar. That happens everywhere. But that was the broader sea map. Basic point being that lots of these agencies work in silos, which again has been that this was a problem that the 9/11 Commission Report identified in terms of the failure of the US intelligence agencies to detect the incoming attack. Something akin to that has also happened here, and there’s still no umbrella organization which can get input from all intelligence agencies and then to… Even for formulating policies on the basis of that input after it’s been collated and analyzed and discussed.
Kamran Bokhari:
Well, thank you for mapping that out. We’re running out of time, but I want to get to the point where… We’ve already discussed the problems in considerable detail, but given your decades-long work on national security matters, where do we go from here in terms of, let’s just call it a roadmap towards improvement, towards reforms? How does the Pakistani state fix its problems that are having to do with intelligence gathering and the role of intelligence agencies in politics?
Ejaz Haider:
Well, you preceded this question by saying we are running out of time, and then you put so much on the table.
Kamran Bokhari:
Sorry.
Ejaz Haider:
If I can sort of be brief about it. So ideally, if you look at most expressions of democratic theory and practice, the military should be subservient to the civilian principles. In reality, as political scientist Peter Feaver noted, there’s a paradox. The very institution created to protect the polity is given sufficient power to become a threat to the polity. And he wasn’t obviously the first one to talk about this. Like Samuel Finer, who wrote The Man on Horseback, was aware of the problem. In fact, he argued that civilian control of the military is not possible. He said, “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we should ask why they ever do otherwise.” So even in stable democracies, there’s a legal normative standard against intervention.
The militaries, like all large-scale bureaucracies, they find workarounds, they create alliances within the system, learn how to game the system for budget allocations, et cetera, et cetera. In Pakistan, as in many other countries also, unfortunately, the military has got a praetorian bug. And as you know, it began in the 50s. So it has directly intervened at least three times, but even when it is not directly in power, it has managed to capture, even as I speak with you on this, to capture strategic nodes within the system to influence policymaking and to retain its primacy. There are times when it has been predominant. There have been times when it hasn’t. And now once again, it’s predominant. And that is not going to go away.
And the military also exploits differences among political actors. For years, I’ve used Mao’s principle contradiction framework to argue that the civilians have to figure out where the principle contradiction is. If it’s between them or among them, then the military will keep exploiting the civilians and play one against the other. And that’s a scenario that has been played and replayed and replayed multiple times in Pakistan. But if it’s between the civilians and the military, then the civilians have to come up with a joint front and establish certain rules of the game. I don’t think we are anywhere near that. So basically what I’m saying is, that unless something changes, we’ll be seeing more of the same.
Kamran Bokhari:
So you’ve actually preceded my next question, which is about… Look, at the end of the day, the intelligence problem is deeply rooted in a broader issue, which is the chronic imbalance in civil-military relations in the country. And considering the scale to which this imbalance has been exacerbated because of the experiment known as Imran Khan has gone awry, how do you see the future of democratization, or let’s just call it civilianization of the Pakistani polity?
Ejaz Haider:
So, we already talked a lot about the problem, but let me try and put in another way. The paradox is that states need strong militaries, well, especially one situated where Pakistan is. So while we need a military that is subservient to the civilians, that being the ideal, we can’t do it by weakening the military. So how does one have a strong military, but a military that only does what the civilians ask it to do? And frankly, there’s no clear answer anywhere in the corpus of literature on CMR. Now, ditto for intelligence agencies. I’ve said so many things about the ISI, but how does one control them?
And that, again, points to a paradox because intelligence is crucial for a number of reasons, and certainly for military planning. So we also need intelligence agencies that are super great. Now, you’ve done, as I’ve said earlier, done so much work on intelligence and… The Old Testament tells us, and then the Quran tells us in Surah Al-Ma’idah the importance of intelligence as being dictated to the believers by God himself when he asked Moses, Hazrat Mūsā, to select 12 among the tribes to go and scout the land of Canaan and gather intelligence.
We also know that despite theological exhortation about speaking the truth, we know that deception, what is described as prudence to use a euphemism, is an essential part of intelligence work. So there’s a lot of cloak and dagger stuff involved in this. In Pakistan, much of the army’s praetorian work is done by the Internal Wing of the ISI. And ironically, it’s the case against Hameed that has brought it to the fore, not that it was ever a secret. But as I’ve said earlier, I do not see this nexus fixed anytime soon. Given the standoff between Khan and Khan’s party in the army, the situation is unlikely to improve unless something changes.
Kamran Bokhari:
Listen, we can keep talking about this. This is so fascinating. I don’t want this conversation to end, but unfortunately all good things do come to an end. So a final question. I had actually two of them, so I’m going to wrap both of them together and I’m going to let you take a shot at it. So we know that this crisis that we’ve been discussing comes in a broader context. You talked about terrorism and the threat of that. We currently have two armed insurrections, one from the Taliban, the other from the Baloch rebels, and we have all the challenges that come with the economic and financial crisis. Pakistan’s strategic environment isn’t exactly ideal, for lack of a better term.
You have the Taliban Emirate in Afghanistan. You have uncertainty in Iran and Iranian-Pakistani relations. You have a right-wing government in India, and then you have Pakistan caught between the U.S. and Chinese competition. In this broader context, do you think that the national security establishment can walk and chew gum at the same time, meaning deal with their internal problems and continue to do what they need in order to secure Pakistan’s national security interests?
Ejaz Haider:
KB, this is actually the most important question and also the most important reason going by what we’ve discussed earlier for why the civilians and the army are to find some way out of the current impasse. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating that you’ve done a lot of work on NADSEC intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism. You know all this. We have the example of some of the best militaries in the world failing at quine and even CT. Militaries are sledgehammers or the lion’s paw, if you will. And going by that Aesop’s Fable, the gnat can exhaust the lion, but a spider can trap a gnat. The point is that CT and quine require a scalpel, and they also require a public buy-in. You need high-grade intelligent, disciplined forces and the population standing behind the quine or CT forces. So the current political instability and economic uncertainty do not augur well, and they certainly go against the fundamentals of fighting low-intensity conflict.
So that is as far as dealing with this situation is concerned because you begin to lose the nuances. There’s the Baloch, there’s the TTP. The Baloch want to secede, the TTP wants to ideologically conquer Pakistan. They’re using same methods, but the policies of how to deal with them have to be different on the basis of what the adversaries objectives are. So that’s as far as the internal thing is concerned. As far as the geopolitical environment and the sort of habitat where we are, if we do not begin to course correct, we will steadily lose the ability to counter external and internal challenges. So the best-case scenario would be that we’ll trundle along and keep internal violence at manageable levels while occasionally facing more daring attacks. Externally, India has already cut Pakistan loose. India believes it’s playing in the global big league while Pakistan continues to slide.
Frankly, roughly constituted as I am, if I were an Indian analyst, I would think the same. I would say I don’t need to engage with them unless something changes, unless they come to us and then we can get our pound of flesh. Otherwise, let them stew in their own juices. As I said earlier, the Taliban wants to ideologically conquer Pakistan. Whether it can, that’s a separate debate. But the TTP has got the havens. It will continue to hurt Pakistan. The relations with Iran, all other things being equal, will stay as they are. Expressions of friendship, but not much more. A lot of that, frankly, also has to do with U.S. sanctions against Iran, which indirectly hurt the potential of Pakistan-Iran trade.
The US-China competition, if it gets worse, will force Pakistan. And Pakistan is not the only country. It would for many other countries also to choose a camp, if not very overtly but covertly. And I’m not saying it’s going to be a linear process, it won’t be. But as I was listening to Mr. Mishra Ibrahimov just a couple of days ago, and he said in an interview that we live in radically uncertain times. There are a number of other factors that add to that uncertainty. But broadly, given that Pakistan is unlikely to settle its internal problems, its external reach will also remain limited, and my fear is that it could increasingly shrink.
Kamran Bokhari:
Well, on that not so positive note, we’re going to have to conclude our conversation, but I hope to pick this up at some point in the future and continue. This is an important discussion that we should be having, and not just you and me, others as well, given what’s at stake over here. So folks, that was Ejaz Haider, my guest for today. We were discussing the Pakistan intelligence community in the broader context of civil-military relations in the country and in the broader strategic geopolitical context of Southwest Asia. This is Kamran Bokhari signing off for now. See you in another episode soon. Cheers.
Ejaz Haider:
Thanks, KB.
