The CIA, Pakistan & Tangled Webs

By Conn Hallinan

Dispatches From The Edge

February 27, 2011

Was American CIA agent Raymond Davis secretly working
with the Taliban and al-Qaeda to destabilize Pakistan
and lay the groundwork for a U.S. seizure of that
country's nuclear weapons? Was he photographing
sensitive military installations and marking them with
a global positioning device? Did he gun down two men in
cold blood to prevent them from revealing what he was
up to? These are just a few of the rumors ricocheting
around Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar in the aftermath
of Davis's arrest Jan. 27, and sorting through them is
a little like stepping through Alice's looking glass.

But one thing is certain: the U.S. has hundreds of
intelligence agents working in Pakistan, most of them
private contractors, and many of them so deep in the
shadows that Pakistan's intelligence agency, the
Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
doesn't know who they are or what they are up to. "How
many more Raymond Davises are out there?" one ISI
official asked Associated Press.

Lots, it would appear. Five months ago, the Pakistani
government directed its embassies in the U.S. to issue
visas without letting the ISI or Pakistan's Interior
Ministry vet them. According to the Associated Press,
this opened a "floodgate" that saw 3,555 visas for
diplomats, military officials and employees issued in
2010.

Many of those visas were for non-governmental
organizations and the staff for the huge, $1 billion
fortress embassy Washington is building in Islamabad,
but thousands of others covered consular agents and
workers in Lahore (where Davis was arrested), Karachi
and other cities. Some of those with visas work for Xe
Services (formally Blackwater), others for low-profile
agencies like Blackbird Technologies, Glevum
Associates, and K2 Solutions. Many of the "employees"
of these groups are former U.S. military
personnel-Davis was in the Special Forces for 10
years-and former CIA agents. And the fact that these
are private companies allows them to fly under the
radar of congressional oversight, as frail a reed as
that may be.

How one views the incident that touched off the current
diplomatic crisis is an example of how deep the
differences between Pakistan and the U.S. have become.

The Americans claim Davis was carrying out surveillance
on radical insurgent groups, and was simply defending
himself from two armed robbers.  But Davis's story has
problems. It does appear that the two men on the
motorbike were armed, but neither fired their weapon
and, according to the police report, one did not even
have a shell in his pistol's firing chamber. Davis
apparently fired through the window of his armored SUV,
then stepped out of the car and shot the two men in the
back, one while attempting to flee. He then calmly took
photos, called for backup, climbed into his car, and
drove off. He was arrested shortly afterwards at an
intersection.

The Pakistanis have a different view of the incident.
According to Pakistani press reports, the two men were
working for the ISI and were trailing Davis because the
intelligence agency suspected that the CIA agent was in
contact with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, a Pakistani group
based in North Waziristan that is currently warring
with Islamabad. As an illustration of how bizarre
things are these days in Pakistan, one widespread rumor
is that the U.S. is behind the Tehtik-e-Taliban
bombings as part of a strategy to destabilize Pakistan
and lay the groundwork for an American seizure of
Islamabad's nuclear arsenal.

The ISI maintains close ties with the Afghan Taliban
based in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, as well as
its allies, the Hizb-e-Islami and the Haqqani Group.
All three groups are careful to keep a distance from
Pakistan's Taliban

Yet another rumor claims that Davis was spying on
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group with close ties to the ISI
that is accused of organizing the 2008 massacre in
Mumbai, India. The Americans claim the organization is
working with al-Qaeda, a charge the Pakistanis reject.

When Davis's car was searched, police turned up not
only the Glock semi-automatic he used to shoot the men,
but four loaded clips, a GPS device, and a camera. The
latter, according to the police report, had photos of
"sensitive" border sites. "This is not the work of a
diplomat," Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah told the
Guardian (UK), "he was doing espionage and surveillance
activities."

The shooting also had the feel of an execution. One of
the men was shot twice in the back and his body was
more than 30 feet from the motorbike, an indication he
was attempting to flee. "It went way beyond what we
define as self-defense, " a senior police official told
the Guardian (UK), "It was not commensurate with the
threat." The Lahore Chief of Police called it a "cold-
blooded murder."

The U.S. claims that Davis is protected by diplomatic
immunity, but the matter might not be as open and shut
as the U.S. is making it. According to the Pakistani
Express Tribune, Davis's name was not on a list of
diplomats submitted to Pakistan's Foreign Ministry on
Jan. 25. The day after the shooting the embassy
submitted a revised list that listed Davis as a
diplomat.

Washington clearly considered Davis to be important.
When he asked for backup on the day of the shooting,
another SUV was dispatched to support him, apparently
manned by agents living at the same safe house as
Davis. The rescue mission went wrong when it ran over a
motorcyclist while going the wrong direction down a
one-way street. When the Pakistani authorities wanted
to question the agents, they found that both had been
whisked out of the country.

Almost immediately the Obama administration sent Sen.
John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, to Islamabad to apologize and pressure
Pakistan to release Davis. But the incident has stirred
up a hornet's nest in Pakistan, where the CIA's drone
war has deeply alienated most Pakistanis. Opposition
parties are demanding that the CIA agent be tried for
murder. A hearing on the issue of whether Davis has
diplomatic immunity will be heard Mar. 14.

In the meantime, Davis is being held under rather
extraordinary security because of rumors that the
Americans will try to spring him, or even poison him.
Davis is being shielded from any direct contact with
U.S. officials, and a box of chocolates sent to Davis
by the Embassy was confiscated.

The backdrop for the crisis is a growing estrangement
between the two countries over their respective
strategies in Afghanistan.

The U.S. has stepped up its attacks on the Afghan
insurgents, launched a drone war in Pakistan, and is
demanding that Islamabad take a much more aggressive
stance toward the Taliban's allies based in the Afghan
border region. While Washington still talks about a
"diplomatic resolution" to the Afghan war, it is busy
blowing up the very people it will eventually need to
negotiate with.

This approach makes no sense to Pakistan. From
Islamabad's point of view, increasing attacks on the
Taliban and their allies will only further destabilize
Pakistan, and substitutes military victory for a
diplomatic settlement. Since virtually every single
independent observer think the former is impossible,
the current U.S. strategy is, as terror expert Anatol
Lieven puts it, "lunatic reasoning."

Pakistan wants to insure that any Afghan government
that emerges from the war is not a close ally of India,
a country with which it has already fought three wars.
A pro-Indian government in Kabul would essentially
surround Pakistan with hostile forces. Yet the
Americans have pointedly refused to address the issue
of Indian-Pakistan tension over Kashmir, in large part
because Washington very much wants an alliance with
India.

In short, the U.S. and Pakistan don't see eye to eye on
Afghanistan, and Islamabad is suspicious that Americans
like Davis are undermining Pakistan's interests in what
Islamabad views as an area central to its national
security. "They [the U.S.] needs to come clean and tell
us who they [agents] are, what they are doing," one ISI
official told the Guardian (UK). "They need to stop
doing things behind our back."

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the
matter. Was the ISI onto Davis, and was he really in
contact with groups the Pakistani army didn't want him
talking to? What did Washington know about Davis'
mission, and when did it know it? Did Davis think he
was being held up, or was it a cold-blooded execution
of two troublesome tails?

Rumor has it that the CIA and the ISI are in direct
negotiations to find an acceptable solution, but there
are constraints on all sides. The Pakistani public is
enraged with the U.S. and resents that it has been
pulled into the Afghan quagmire. On the other hand,
there are many in Washington-particularly in
Congress-who are openly talking about cutting off the
$1.5 billion of yearly U.S. aid to Pakistan.

What the incident has served to illuminate is the fact
that U.S. intelligence operations are increasingly
being contracted out to private companies with little
apparent oversight from Congress. At last count, the
U.S. Defense Department had almost 225,000 private
contractors working for them.

The privatization of intelligence adds yet another
layer of opacity to an endeavor that is already well
hidden by a blanket of "national security," and funded
by black budgets most Americans never see. The result
of all this is a major diplomatic crisis in what is
unarguably the most dangerous piece of ground on the
planet.

___________________________________________

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