Center for a New American Security

Kip's out of pocket and asked Charlie to post the newest chapter in our ongoing tale of ISI woe:

A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.

The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said. [...]

The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. [...]

With Pakistan’s new civilian government struggling to assert control over the country’s spy service, there are concerns in Washington that the ISI may become even more powerful than when President Pervez Musharraf controlled the military and the government. Last weekend, Pakistani military and intelligence officials thwarted an attempt by the government in Islamabad to put the ISI more directly under civilian control.

That the ISI maintains relationships with some rather unsavory folks in the tribal areas is old news. What does seem to be new is the intensity of American pressure and an implied suggestion that ISI elements may have been involved in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier this month. To Charlie's mind, it seems rather implausible that ISI actions are fully sanctioned by the new Pakistani government and more likely that it's going off the reservation.

Unfortunately that probably further reduces US options, which weren't looking so hot to begin with. Increased pressure on the civilian government to rein in the ISI risks a backlash or coup. CIA-ISI relations are notoriously bad. But at the end of the day, the ISI has the intel and we don't. (Also, the whole "India is our strategic partner in the region" routine probably isn't doing much to undermine the ISI's position in Islamabad.)

This state of affairs--to include the Taliban/AQ sanctuary in FATA--has to be a major planning assumption in any strategy for Afghanistan as we go forward. And suggests that all right thinking people should adjust their mental file folders to read "Afg-Pak strategy." As if Afghanistan wasn't complicated enough on its own.