Of Spooks And Insurrection

By Unmesh Kher With Reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Ghulam Hasnain/Muzaffarabad and Douglas Waller/Washington

It's hard to find decent work in a war zone. Just ask Ilyas, 28, a Kashmiri, father of five and a guide by profession. Ilyas works for Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. His job is to smuggle jihadis and their munitions into India's portion of Kashmir. If he survives the bullets, land mines and mortars that greet him in the freezing no-man's-land between the two countries, the ISI pays him $334 per trip. If not, his family gets his last paycheck. "Every time I leave home," says Ilyas, "my wife and I say goodbye as if we're seeing each other for the last time."

Ilyas' infiltration industry was thrust into the international limelight last week as India and Pakistan seemed to be approaching the brink of war. India holds Pakistan responsible for the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament because Pakistan supports these infiltrations. Beyond that, India maintains that the ISI actually orchestrates terrorist attacks. According to a U.S. State Department official, however, American intelligence doubts that the ISI is as directly involved in terrorism--including the attack last month--as the Indian government claims.

Still, there is no doubt that Pakistan is deeply engaged in fomenting the Kashmir insurgency, working in large part through the ISI. The agency is staffed by as many as 100,000 operatives and "assets," and its operations are regulated by no law. The ISI has long manipulated Pakistan's internal politics and profoundly influenced its policies on Afghanistan and Kashmir. In the 1980s the agency offered considerable assistance--including the dispersal of aid from other countries, notably the U.S.--to the Islamic militants in Afghanistan who eventually expelled the occupying Soviet army.

The success of that venture inspired Pakistan's military leaders to start helping insurgents fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, in hopes of equally spectacular dividends. The ISI even has a wing devoted to supporting the Kashmir insurgency. The Pakistani military initially trained indigenous Kashmiri militants, but in 1992--after a brutal Indian crackdown almost snuffed the separatist movement--it began funneling foreign jihadis to Kashmir, expecting their zeal would revive the conflict.

It did. And every year of the past decade, hundreds of young militants who have undergone intensive commando training and countless hours of indoctrination by jihadi groups have been picked up in unmarked vehicles from towns around Pakistan-administered Kashmir and ferried to the border. There, after they have had a day or two of rest, military officers have briefed them, handed them rifles, explosives and wads of Indian currency, and introduced them to guides like Ilyas, who lead them to probable death.

Yet all is not well on the jihadi front. The terrorism espoused by several militant groups has effectively dirtied a cause even moderate Pakistanis consider sacred. Indigenous Kashmiri militants, for their part, complain privately that Pakistan has hijacked their movement by throwing into the mix extremists alien to their moderate culture. Indeed, the two groups India accuses of masterminding the bombing of its Parliament are dominated by non-Kashmiri zealots, many of them veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war.

But change is in the air. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has already replaced ISI chief Lieut. General Mahmood Ahmad, a Taliban sympathizer, with a progressive moderate, Lieut. General Ehsan ul-Haq, and sidelined another general who helped shape Pakistan's recent Kashmir policy. Last week, under mounting pressure from the U.S., Pakistan's government promised to shut down the activities of foreign extremists in Kashmir. Ilyas, it seems, may soon have to find some other way to feed his family.

--By Unmesh Kher, with reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Ghulam Hasnain/Muzaffarabad and Douglas Waller/Washington