Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats

[Anwaar]

Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats

A missive to Mr. Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs

By Anwaar Hussain

Mr. Boucher,

Judging by your call to ‘reform the ISI’, you, sir, seem to be in dire need of some advice.

We understand that you are stung by your abject failure in Iraq and the looming near total disaster in Afghanistan, what with the empire now teetering at its outer most edge and your imperial carpetbaggers out in a frenzied search for a scapegoat. It is perhaps on their urging that you now think in ISI you have a scapegoat and in Pakistan an escapegoat. You, sir, are as far from reality as the Mars from planet Earth. Neither will prove to be a goat of any kind for you.

There are reasons that I say this.

First, with a 3-million strong tribal population, with every Pathan armed to the gills and caring not a fig for even his own life and an honor code as primitive and rigid as the Hindukush, and a million strong nuclear armed Pakistan army at their back, you want to tread very softly in this region. The dispute with these Pathans is an internal one and the Pakistanis know how to deal with each other. While between them this dispute may take years to resolve, resolve it will in the end. However, your entering into the fray will instantly evaporate any ill will that the warring parties have for each other, uniting them in an unreserved hate for your country. Despite the well established facts of your limitless ruthlessness as was witnessed against the Iraqis and your ability to lay waste to the entire region, they will go for your collective throat with a ferocity that will make you forget what you have seen thus far. Please be careful in taking Pakistan for an escapegoat or the FATA for an escape route.

Next, your memory cannot be that short Mr. Boucher. Let me refresh it for you, however. It was only last year that the CIA was forced to release hundreds of documents, long known within the agency as “the family jewels”, after struggling to keep the dirty secrets under wraps for upward of three decades.

Those documents, Mr. Boucher, proved to be an elaborate record of some of the most outrageous intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans including student anti-war activists, Black Power group leaders, Castro sympathizers and Soviet dissidents. The documents revealed that CIA operatives worked closely with local police to gather intelligence against groups planning protests at the presidential conventions in 1972 and that anti-war activists were followed.

So embarrassing were those revelations that the CIA’s own serving director Michael Hayden is on record for having called them as “reminders of some things the CIA should not have done”. He was being mild, of course.

Many of the ventures detailed in those 693 pages, like the intricate attempts by the CIA to enlist Mafia operatives to poison a head of state, should make even you blush Mr. Boucher. Even decades before 9/11, that blank check watershed in whose name now every thing is moral and legal, the documents described secret CIA holding cells, plans to eavesdrop on international phone calls of U.S. residents and shady efforts to root out leaks of classified information to reporters.

Perhaps the most extraordinary operation detailed was a plot to enlist known organized-crime figures to assassinate Castro in the early 1960s. The CIA realized it was dealing with Giancana, an underworld Mafia Don, only after seeing his photo in a most-wanted listing in Parade magazine. Talk of ineptitude Mr. Boucher.

That much is now a widely known fact. What is not known to many is the fact that so hideous were some of the other secrets that the released records had dozens of pages blacked out by CIA censors. One memo that listed the most hurtful secrets contained in “the family jewels” was missing the first paragraph. A separate memo that was supposed to sum up the “unusual activities” of the CIA’s domestic branch included just three intact paragraphs followed by 17 blank pages. Talk of ‘the need for reform’ Mr. Boucher.

We do understand that perhaps the ISI does need a reform but not for the reasons that you think. Perhaps it is more for the reason that the ISI miserably failed in predicting for Pakistan the deadly consequences of an alliance with your country during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It also failed to predict the rise of fundamentalism as a direct result of that policy. It failed to tell us that one day Pakistan would be caught between the hammer and the anvil of an unethical American military might from the skies and a bloody radical insurgency on the ground. The ISI should have raised a Mamba alarm when Pakistan was going to bed with your country. What is more, the ISI actually helped you create, nurture and sustain the very monsters who are slaughtering Pakistanis at will and who everyone is now finding impossible to exterminate. For those reasons, yes, the ISI does need a reform.

But what YOU need to understand, sir, is that it is for Pakistan to decide the when, how and how-much of this reform. And further, it is not the ISI that needs such an urgent reform, its shadowy activities more rumored than factual, but the CIA whose dark past is an out and indisputable fact.

And now with the CIA’s torture trails firmly established across the globe, the techniques of killing and tormenting further refined, you don’t even suggest a confessional ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ for CIA and for the ISI you recommend a ‘reform’? Where have you learned your sense of balance and standards of fairness Mr. Boucher? That the ISI helped you in the same is another reason it needs to be reformed.

What say Mr. Boucher?

Anwaar Hussain