The outing of Ghulam Nabi Fai

One of the biggest complaints about Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is that it has failed in the public relations war. Instead of the issue being viewed as the outcome of the legitimate aspirations to self-determination of a people suppressed by the Indian army, it is, thanks to our military’s flawed policy, associated with terrorism and militancy.

Along comes Ghulam Nabi Fai, a US citizen of Kashmiri descent, who pleaded guilty to taking money from the ISI to lobby for the cause of Kashmiri independence. As an American citizen, Fai is legally obliged to disclose his sources of foreign funding and, in failing to do so, he is now going to serve jail time. It is easy to work up moral outrage about secretly trying to influence the US political process, but the fact is that what Fai and the ISI did is practiced by every country of the world. The biggest mistake Fai and his handlers made was that they got caught. As the premier spy agency in the country, it is appropriate that the ISI was responsible for paying and guiding Fai. The problem arises in the fact that the ISI is a part of the military. When such schemes are cooked by the CIA, for example, they end up reporting to the president, not the Pentagon or the US military chief. Putting our Kashmir policy under military control has not achieved much tangibly.

The outing of Fai as being in the pay of the ISI should provide our elected representatives and parliament with the opportunity to now rightfully assume control of a policy they should have been directing from the very start. Our lobbying efforts, both legal and extralegal, should be devised and coordinated by the elected government, not an unaccountable military. The ISI should merely be the vessel for carrying out government policy; it should not be formulating the policy itself.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2011.