Why the ISI has played a silent spectator to the CIA/Black Water operations?

By Yousuf Nazar

I have suspected for long that the United States has been conducting false flag operations in Pakistan through covert operatives. I wrote on my blog on January 10, 2008, Could CIA be conducting Operation Gladio in Pakistan?

False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and can be used in peace-time. Operation Gladio was a covert operations project conducted by the UK and UK intelligence during the 1960s in Europe and involved massacres and bombing conducted by the covert operatives of these agencies with the objective of blaming them on the communist Soviet Union and discrediting it.

On December 11, 2009, the Guardian published a story, “Blackwater operating at CIA Pakistan base”, which said:

“the US contractor Blackwater was operating in Pakistan at a secret CIA airfield used for launching drone attacks, according to a former US official, despite repeated government denials that the company is in the country.The official, who had direct knowledge of the operation, said that employees with Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, patrol the area round the Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan province.He also confirmed that Blackwater employees help to load laser-guided Hellfire missiles on to CIA-operated drones,”

On September 16, 2010, noted investigative journalist Wayne Madsen published an article in the Online Journal titled, ” Blackwater/Xe cells conducting false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan.” The author of the Wasden Report (who formerly worked for the US Navy and the State Department) claimed that he has learned from a deep background source that Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, has been conducting false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan that are later blamed on “Pakistani Taliban” and noted that only recently did the US State Department designate the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as terrorist organization.

On March 17, 2011, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an uncharacteristically candid and realistic article, “Perfidious America” declaring that the [Raymond] Davis case has knocked Washington off the moral high ground in Pakistan. It is probably for the first time that a pro-establishment American paper such as the WSJ acknowledged that ‘suspicions of Pakistanis about the US operations in Pakistan have a basis in reality’ noting that in his book “Obama’s Wars,” Bob Woodward revealed the existence of a secret 3,000-strong army of paramilitary Afghan fighters created by the CIA to target Taliban and al Qaeda commanders inside Pakistan through “false flag attacks.” Recall that the Wikileaks had revealed that President Zardari had told Richard Halbrooke that he suspected that the US was destabilizing Pakistan through the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Former Indian Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar in an article published by the AsiaTimes (February 15, 2011) pointed out that “the heart of the matter is that Pakistan has been wondering for a long time who it is who could be instigating the so-called “Pakistani Taliban” to inflict such bloody wounds on the Pakistani military and weaken and incrementally destabilize the Pakistani state” and concluded that Davis can most certainly provide the proverbial “missing link” to Pakistan to connect several dots on an intriguing chessboard. Ambassador Bhadrakumar had also noted that that Davis’ detention sent alarm bells ringing all the way to the White House and the US was apprehensive that the Davis case had the potential to shake up the very foundations of its alliance with Pakistan.

So the most important question to come out of the Raymond Davis, as I wrote in the Express Tribune on February 28, 2011, is not whether he killed in self-defense or not, whether the ISI manipulated the media or not, whether he was an accredited diplomat or not, whether he enjoyed diplomatic or consular immunity or not, or whether he was spy or a CIA contractor.

The most critical question is what hundreds of CIA agents (according to scores of reports including those carried by top US papers recently) are doing in Pakistan, and why they were provided cover by an embassy whose facilities are being upgraded by a massive spending program exceeding one billion dollars, according to official US documents, as either the ISI looked the other way or was sleeping.

Going further, given the dirty and murky CIA-ISI deal that resulted in the release of Raymond Davis, the most important question seems to be why the civilian and military leaders of Pakistan have kept silent, at the least, and therefore have been complicit in the false flag operations against the state and the people of Pakistan despite the fact that the head of the state had expressed his suspicions that the CIA was behind some the terrorist attacks. The nation and the super-patriots that our TV anchors are ought to tell General Kayani that issuing press statement condemning drone attacks can no longer fool the people. The masses may be silent and may feel helpless for now but the time will come when they will ask loudly, why did you co-operate with the Americans when you knew they were upto no good?