Breaking open CIA’s embrace

By Momin Iftikhar | Published: June 25, 2011

“CIA recruits agents and mercenaries, it bribes and blackmails foreign officials to carry out its most unsavoury tasks. It does whatever is required to achieve its goals without any consideration of the ethics involved or the moral consequences of its actions.”
– Excerpt from The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti
The exposure of Raymond Davis as a CIA agent, who killed two Pakistanis in cold blood, followed by Operation Geronimo that yielded the prized catch of Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Abbottabad on May 2, has left no doubt in public perception about the extent to which the CIA has penetrated into Pakistan’s troubled landscape. The realisation that the agency has sunk its tentacles deep inside the county, to a degree, whereby it has become capable of circumventing the agencies who own the turf, has generated shockwaves that are reverberating the public opinion in Pakistan.
To make matters worse, the brouhaha raised in Washington over the detention of five Pakistani collaborators of the CIA by local agencies has further exacerbated the feeling that that the American agency is not only running amok in Pakistan, but has also the arrogance (or naiveté) to assume that its stepping on our toes will continue to go unchallenged. The US media fusillade, launched in the wake of CIA Director Leon E. Panetta’s unsuccessful visit, undertaken to secure the release of five CIA collaborators, who provided the ground information that facilitated the Navy SEALs raid on Osama’s compound in Abbottabad is quite instructive to understand USA’s policy framework in which the agency clandestinely operates in foreign countries.
It is evident that the CIA enjoys a full and multidimensional support of the US establishment. To build up pressure on Pakistan and to make it relent in the case of the detention of its collaborators, the US legislators provided ample ammunition to its media organs to launch broadsides at Pakistan with telling effect. The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, after expressing the standard Washington fare of claiming that ‘elements’ from the Pakistani military and the ISI provided some level of assistance to OBL before he was killed, subsequently laid out what was expected of Pakistan in the context of detention of the informers. “They [Pakistan] could have said ‘we are going to redouble our efforts with the US, we are going to fight extremism, we are going to fight terrorism, we are going to join with you as partners to try to remove the extremists and dangerous elements in Pakistan that we know have targeted the US in the past,” he said. Rogers, in his fit of oratory, had made it sound like as if detention of the CIA’s Pakistani informers had washed out the country’s entire effort of bagging the maximum number of Al-Qaeda big fish, as a partner of the US. His lament; when the American sailors, who ditched Osama’s body in sea and returned to a heroic welcome in the US; the five Pakistanis, who had collaborated with the CIA had been left out in the cold to undergo interrogation about their role in the operation. Emotional outbursts aside, the exposure of CIA’s asset in Pakistan has implications that are substantive enough to have triggered such an impassioned outcry from the intelligence and political establishment in Washington.

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