ISI chief makes it to 2011 Time 100 list

ISI Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha included among 100 most influential people of 2011.

Intelligence Chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s name appeared on aTime Magazine list released on Thursday on this year’s 100 most influential people.

The head of the Inter-Services Intelligence is the only Pakistani to have made it to the 2011 TIME 100.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden has written about Pasha in the magazine and said that the Lt General is a “Pakistani Patriot” and an American partner.

Within weeks of Lieut. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s becoming head of Pakistan’s top intelligence agency, ISI, in 2008, terrorist attacks in Mumbai seriously roiled already stressed US-Pakistani relations. Pasha, 59, has grown progressively more suspicious of US motives and staying power. The arrest of a US government contractor in Lahore has led to acrimony. And larger changes in Pakistan — the growth of fundamentalism, nationalism and anti-Americanism — have squeezed the space in which any ISI chief can cooperate with the US, Hayden wrote.

The first name on the magazine’s website is of Wael Ghonim. Ghonim, the Egyptian-born Google marketing executive first played a role in organising the opposition against former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak through Facebook.

By emphasising that the regime would listen only when citizens exercised their right of peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience, Ghonim, helped initiate a call for a peaceful revolution, the magazine said.

Leader of Burma’s democracy movement and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi’s name appeared right after intelligence chief Pasha’s.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 22^nd, 2011.