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Pakistan leaks may hinder bin Laden hunt
Despite recent arrests by Pakistan's intelligence agency, US officials say it is still a friend to Al Qaeda.
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies are hard at work trying to change their image as unfaithful friends of the US.
The capture of 442 Al Qaeda terror suspects - including the March 1 arrest of top Al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed - has given Pakistan's secretive Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) a lot to crow about. And the US has been quick with its public praise.
"The cooperation is good, and we have no indication that the Pakistanis are holding back in hunting Al Qaeda," says a Western diplomat based in Islamabad.
Yet US military officials in neighboring Afghanistan privately grumble that Pakistan remains a haven for Al Qaeda. And some Pakistani law-enforcement agents here say that numerous raids on Al Qaeda hideouts in the past year have been compromised by police or intelligence agents tipping off Al Qaeda to flee in advance - the type of leaks that could ultimately hinder the capture of Osama bin Laden.
This ambivalence is a sign that Pakistan will have to do a lot more before it can erase a long history of supporting extremist groups and prove itself a trustworthy ally in the US war on terror.
"I have no doubt that there may be individuals in ISI who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda, who are helping these extremists, giving them safe haven," says one former ISI agent, speaking on condition of anonymity. "These movements have mushroomed in Pakistan, and we need to do a thorough house-cleaning to get rid of these rascals."
To be sure, upon taking office in a 1999 coup, President Pervez Musharraf fired several high-ranking ISI officials.
But the continued level of interaction between the ISI and extremists has become clear through the police investigation of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The man arrested and convicted of being the mastermind of Mr. Pearl's kidnapping last January, Omar Sheikh Sayeed, was a member of Jaish-e Muhammed, an extremist group that trained in Afghanistan, fought in Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Kashmir, and was blamed for the attack on India's Parliament building on Dec. 2001, which left 13 dead. Police investigators say they have attempted to continue with the Pearl case, but have been obstructed by ISI.
For example, Pakistani prosecutors say Mr. Sayeed was arrested on May 12, 2002, when he handed himself over to police in Lahore. But Sayeed's uncle, a sitting Pakistani court justice, testified at Sayeed's trial that he had escorted his nephew to top police officials in Lahore a week before that, on May 5. Some Pakistani police investigators say Sayeed was in ISI custody during that week, giving time to other extremists to flee.
"You get hold of these extremists, and the bottom line comes to ISI," one police investigator in Karachi told the Monitor, privately. "They all have links to ISI."
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