The DG ISI’s offer

The offer by the head of the ISI during a closed-door briefing to members of Parliament on May 13 to resign, if Parliament orders him to, perhaps amounted to throwing the ball back into the latter’s court over the Abbottabad issue. The ISI chief is reported to have admitted that the agency had failed in its duty but is also reported to have said that this was “unintentional” and did not amount to negligence. Without getting into the semantics of the whole situation, it is perhaps worth saying at the outset that had such a security lapse happened in a truly democratic country, the heads of the institutions responsible for the lapse usually resign on their own, without offering caveats and/or qualifiers. If failure is being admitted to, then it is unclear why the nation’s forgiveness is being sought because the issue of protecting the frontiers of the country from external threat is related to the preparedness of our defence forces, and, in this particular case, our intelligence and radar systems.

If the head of the country’s premier intelligence agency is admitting before Parliament that his institution failed in tracking the world’s most-wanted terrorist then perhaps the sensible thing would be to resign. In any case, the offer by the head of the ISI does not, and should not, take away from the fact that an independent inquiry into the failure of intelligence and the radars should be carried out, which means that it should be conducted by civilian organs of state. There is another, perhaps even more important, issue that will have to be touched upon very soon by both the legislature as well as the executive. And that has to do with the fact that what has happened is perhaps an outcome of our security and strategic doctrines as well as chunks of our foreign policy relating to our neighbours, in which, by and large, elected civilian governments have had little or no role or say. Questions such as whether Osama bin Laden was in fact sheltered by elements sympathetic to his cause and ideology, or why we don’t hunt down terrorists hiding in veritable sanctuaries on our own soil, also need immediate answers.



Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2011.