The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

In the name of protecting the honour of Islam or its prophet, children and mentally ill people have been lynched; neighbourhoods put to the torch; and prisoners murdered by their guards. Once, I was trapped in the lobby of Islamabad’s Serena Hotel as a blasphemy protest raged in the street outside. The trigger was a crude video clip, posted to the internet by an obscure group of American Christian fundamentalists, that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. Now, thousands of miles from America, young Pakistanis were battling the riot police. For what, exactly? Yet such passions did have a certain logic. Sometimes, blasphemy was purposefully whipped up by powerful interests – clerics, media personalities, even intelligence agencies – to serve their interests. For some rioters, it was a thinly veiled class struggle – a frustrated howl at a horribly unequal society where the super-rich shamelessly flaunted their privilege and treated the poor with unvarnished contempt.

If the parallels suggested that such inflamed killings were a speciality of the subcontinent, Taseer’s death raised a specific question that went to the heart of Pakistan’s age-old ideological war. Who was the good Muslim: Taseer the reformer or Qadri the killer?

The spy agency’s fortunes were transformed, in the 1980s, by the Afghan jihad. Alongside the CIA, it ran the vast covert war machine that supplied money, men and missiles to the guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation. Over the course of a decade, the ISI smuggled one million Kalashnikovs to the mujahideen – not to mention crates of American-supplied Stinger missiles that knocked the Red Army’s helicopter gunships from the sky. By the time the last Soviets stumbled from Afghanistan in 1989, bloodied and humiliated, the ISI had become a powerful, well-resourced organisation and a centre of power in its own right.

But the most profound effect of that era was on the Pakistan military’s thinking. Intoxicated by victory, the ISI sought to replicate its success in Afghanistan by employing the same tactics elsewhere. Through the 1990s, it established its own jihadi groups and deployed them to attack Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and it funnelled cash to foreign Islamist guerrillas as far afield as the Philippines. At home, the emboldened spy agency meddled aggressively in politics, mostly in an effort to oust Benazir Bhutto. ISI officers rigged elections, bought politicians and strong-armed troublesome judges. Critics began to speak of a ‘state within a state’.

In fact, Colonel Imam himself had become radicalised – one of several ISI officers who had drunk the jihadist Kool-Aid, imbibing the ideology they used to motivate the Afghan guerrillas. Now he, too, was a true believer.

I heard versions of that speech from other Pakistani officers, who, it seemed, purposefully distorted Pashtun culture for their own purposes. Imam, for his part, didn’t even speak Pashto properly, and the way he talked was reminiscent of the old colonial writers, like Olaf Caroe, with their romanticised versions of the ‘noble savage’. But there was also no doubt that he considered jihad to be a sacred calling – as a soldier, a Pakistani and a Muslim. I think he viewed himself as a kind of Pakistani T. E. Lawrence: the army officer who turned unruly tribesmen into disciplined warriors, and now, through the toil of battle, had joined their ranks. But orientalism, even of an Islamist variety, can cloud one’s vision, and the world that Imam helped create was shifting rapidly beneath his feet. Around the time of our first meeting, in the mid-2000s, the powerful forces unleashed by the Afghan jihad of the 1980s were mutating in wild and unpredictable ways inside Pakistan. Nowhere were those changes more starkly evident than in the tribal belt, where it had all started.

For decades, Pakistanis had treated the tribal belt as a kind of lawless colony, famed for smuggling, hostage-taking and hashish production. The government exerted its authority through political agents like Khan and the maliks – handpicked elders whose loyalty was purchased with cash payments and sinecures. In the movies, villains escaped the law by fleeing into the tribal areas, where they vanished into a world of high-walled compounds and biddable tribesmen.

Within a few years of my 2005 trip, Waziristan had spun completely out of control. Aspiring jihadis flooded in from across the globe to sign up with al Qaeda. In Miram Shah, where I had taken tea with Tariq Khan, the restaurants and internet cafés burbled with foreign accents. ‘This bazaar is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from EU countries and of course our Arab brothers,’

David Coleman Headley, an American-born jihadi, marvelled in an email in 2009. ‘Any Waziri or Mehsud I spoke to seemed grateful to God for the privilege of being able to host the “Foreign Mujahideen”.’ Headley had participated in the terrorist assault on Mumbai a year earlier, in which 163 people were killed, and was plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Other foreigners planned mayhem in Madrid, London, Amsterdam and New York. Waziristan had become the cockpit of global jihad. ‘It’s like an Elvis fan coming to Graceland,’ a British diplomat in Islamabad told me of the influx. ‘It confirms you.’ The Americans, alarmed at Pakistan’s loss of control, took matters into their own hands. The CIA dramatically ramped up its campaign of drone strikes in the tribal belt, hitting at least fifty-four targets in 2009, and then 118 in 2010. For President Barack Obama and Washington lawmakers, the drone strikes had an antiseptic appeal, decimating the top al Qaeda ranks while posing little danger to American life. But they also killed hundreds of innocent civilians – the exact numbers were hard to know – and fed into a groundswell of anti-American sentiment across Pakistan.

The military’s solution to this conundrum was to play a complex double game. In places like Balochistan, at the western end of the Durand Line, the ISI covertly assisted fighters who directed their fire on Afghanistan – the ‘good Taliban’. But in Waziristan, the agency was at war with militants who threatened the Pakistani state – the ‘bad Taliban’.

Whatever the truth, Imam and Gul belonged to a generation of Pakistani military officers who nursed a great bitterness towards the United States over a perceived betrayal. In 1990, a year after the Soviets were routed from Afghanistan, Washington imposed heavy sanctions on Islamabad over its nuclear programme and cut off military ties. The about-turn deeply stung old jihadi warriors, like Imam and Gul, who had worked closely with the Americans, as Milt Bearden, an American spy who ran the CIA station in Islamabad in the late 1980s, told me.

‘Muslim ummah, Muslim ummah – there is no fucking such thing as a Muslim ummah,’ he said, using the term for the global community of Islam. ‘They hate each other. They are at each other’s throats. What Muslim ummah? Zia should be taken out of his grave, whatever is left of him, and hanged. He has ruined the psyche of this country.’

Imam sat dejectedly on the ground, eyes downcast. Hakimullah turned to the camera, and delivered a speech in the firm, undulating manner of a court prosecutor. Imam and other men like him in the Pakistani military had betrayed the mujahideen, he charged. They took money from Osama bin Laden in the 1980s but reneged on their promise to turn Pakistan into a true Islamic state. After 2001, they committed the greatest sin of all: selling out to the Americans. Hakimullah’s voice rose, swelling with righteous indigation. He jerked a thumb at Imam. ‘He cheated the people,’ he said. ‘He cheated the people who gave him honour, respect and blood. He is a traitor.’ It was an unsophisticated speech that offered a searing repudiation of Pakistani policy. Once, men like Colonel Imam had been welcomed to the tribal belt by fighters sought to repel unwanted foreigners. But the new generation, indoctrinated and tutored by al Qaeda, had bigger goals. They dreamed of overthrowing the Pakistani state and establishing a global caliphate.

That attitude angered Aslam. At any time, about one-third of Karachi’s 30,000 police officers were on ‘VIP duty’ – sitting

in police pick-ups that trailed the luxury vehicles of political or business bigwigs. Every rich person had a police ‘uncle’ to turn to in a moment of need – a son arrested with a bottle of liquor in his car, a business dispute that required resolution, or even a family member facing manslaughter for knocking over and killing a poor man with their Porsche. Then, the rich were all polite smiles and unctuous solicitation. ‘Please, uncle, we’re counting on you.’ But once the problem had been solved, the police were quietly escorted out, via the back door, like tradesmen who had served their purpose. Aslam flicked his cigarette, his tired eyes following the glowing stub as it tumbled into the blackness. It wasn’t just the super-rich. Muscle was a prerequisite to survival in Karachi, and everyone used the police to their own ends: the politicians, the army generals, even the criminals. A good cop knew how to play the system – when to swim with the tide of fortune and when to change course; when to take money and when to give it; when to break the law and when to enforce it. The cops were the grease of the city, the element that lubricated its cogs and kept the whole messy, corrupt, infernal machine turning.

If Pakistani cities were caricatures, most would be easy to draw. Lahore is corpulent and languid, stretched out in a shalwar kameez, twirling its moustache over a greasy breakfast. Islamabad cuts a more clipped figure, holding court in a gilded drawing room, proffering Scotch and political whispers. Peshawar wears a turban or a burka, scuttling among the stalls of an ancient bazaar. But Karachi is harder to sketch. It has too many faces: the shiny-shod businessman, rushing to the gym; the hardscrabble labourer who sends his wages to a distant village; the slinky young socialite, kicking off her heels as she bends over a line of cocaine. You can feel the difference as soon as you step off the plane. A breeze slings in off the Arabian Sea, tangy with a lick of salt. There is a palpable zing, a sense of scale and motion. People dress differently, jeans rather than shalwar kameez. The buildings are unlovely glass and concrete, no Mughal splendour here. Unruly buses lumber through seething streets filled with opportunity and peril. A newcomer to Karachi might make a million, or have his wallet stolen at gunpoint in traffic. ‘Lahore may be the heart of Pakistan,’ wrote the columnist Mosharraf Zaidi. ‘But Karachi is its wallet, its BlackBerry, its cologne. Karachi is its mojo.’

A century ago, Karachi was a sleepy backwater, a Raj-era port of stout bungalows, art deco cinemas and neat streets that were hosed clean every morning. The city fathers were midshipmen of empire: Hindu gold merchants, British bureaucrats, Parsi shipping magnates and a handful of Jews. In 1919, Abraham Reuben was elected to the Karachi City Council; still today a Star of David adorns the Merewether Clock Tower, named after a British officer who fought in Abyssinia. Partition changed everything. Hindus fled by train to India; Jews boarded steamships for Palestine, where Israel would be founded a year later; and Muslims flooded in from northern India – United Provinces, Bihar and New Delhi, mostly – all drawn by Jinnah’s splendid promises. Language changed. Previously people spoke Sindhi, Gujarati and English, but the newly arrived migrants from India, known as mohajirs, spoke Urdu. In the space of a few frantic months, the population doubled to one million people. That was just the start. In the decades that followed, successive waves of migrants crashed on Karachi’s shores: refugees from China’s civil war in the 1940s; Bengalis seeking economic opportunity in the 1960s; Iranians after the fall of the Shah in 1979; Afghans throughout the 1980s. Mostly, though, they hailed from small-town Pakistan, hopeful newcomers laden with cheap suitcases and modest dreams. Still today they come at a rate of 350,000 a year, propelling Karachi into the ranks of global megacities such as L...

for 40 per cent of the city’s population; his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, was an electoral juggernaut which had swept every election in the city for two decades. Yet Hussain himself was in England, where he had been living for over twenty-five years, running his party – and, by extension, Pakistan’s largest city – from an anonymous office block in a rundown corner of north London. He kept up with events in Karachi via satellite TV and communicated with the party faithful from London via ‘phone rallies’ – giant street meetings that he addressed by telephone or videoconference. It was not unusual to turn a corner in Karachi and see tens of thousands of people, sitting raptly before a stage that was empty save for Hussain’s portrait, listening to his disembodied voice as it boomed over the loudspeakers. Hussain’s political appeal was not immediately evident. A barrel-shaped man with a caterpillar moustache, he wore unfashionable, amber-tinted glasses and spoke in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. He addressed his followers in the hectoring style of a 1930s fascist – now smirking, now scowling, or jabbing a finger in the air – and was prone to absurdist turns. Mid-spee...

to him; others, apparently believing he possessed mystical powers, implored him to bless their babies with a kiss. At Nine Zero, the MQM headquarters named after the last two digits of Hussain’s phone number, party officials stayed up late into the night to await his instructions, in a room where the clocks were set to Greenwich Mean Time. They handed me hagiographical books about their great leader, or collections of essays that lauded his wisdom. In 2014 Hussain published a book, The Philosophy of Love, that featured his beatific portrait on the cover. But it was on the streets of Karachi that Hussain’s grip was most evident. At a couple of hours’ notice, he could bring the entire city to a grinding halt by calling a hartAal, or general strike. Shopkeepers would whip down their shutters and office workers would scurry to their cars and rush home with anxious haste. Electoral politics only partly explained this formidable show of strength. The MQM was a beacon of middle-class ambition – a party filled with articulate, well-educated officials, women as well as men, who espoused progressive ideas and presented themselves as an antidote to the tired political dynasties like the Bh...

carried out gun attacks on police officers, journalists and members of rival political parties, mostly ethnic Pashtuns who were themselves armed. In 2009, American diplomats estimated the MQM had 10,000 men under arms, with another 25,000 in reserve. ‘A frightening military organization cohabiting within a political party,’ judged the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But Hussain, oddly unbothered by the British authorities, seemed untouchable. Nine Zero, which was located inside a maze of streets patrolled by armed gunmen, had the air of a neighbourhood militia base. At a nearby traffic junction, a monument depicted a giant fist smashing through a granite plinth. DISTANCE DOES NOT MATTER, read the inscription. Karachi’s volatile politics contributed to its unenviable international reputation. The American journalist Daniel Pearl died here in 2002, executed in a garden shed by the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad; in the years that followed, the fugitive leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, was often reported (probably erron...

Karachiites seemed to be making a virtue of necessity, glossing over the realities of their chaotic, cruel city where it seemed that nobody was in charge, not even the police.

Aslam became a cop in 1986, a year of jolting change in Karachi. One day a speeding bus driven by a Pashtun knocked over and killed a female student named Bushra Zaidi, who happened to be a mohajir. The accident triggered days of rioting between mohajirs and Pashtuns in which over forty people were killed. A fuse had been lit. The mohajirs, who thrived in the early decades of Pakistan, felt marginalised by the wave of incoming migrants. Now they rallied behind a charismatic young leader, a student pharmacist named Altaf Hussain, who urged them to arm themselves with newly available guns, most of which had fallen off the CIA’s secret pipeline that smuggled arms to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. ‘Sell your TVs and buy a Kalashnikov!’ Hussain famously cried at one rally. Karachi descended into anarchy. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the MQM battled for supremacy with other ethnic and

political factions – at first Sindhis, then Pashtuns, and finally the government. Parts of the city became battlegrounds that were compared to war-torn Beirut. Schools were frequently forced to shut down. Atrocities were common, on all sides.

Suddle quickly concluded that he needed to dispense with the usual tools of law enforcement, such as arrest and trial, in favour of a more robust, hard-shooting

approach. He began searching for officers to carry out that vision.

By the time I met Aslam, fifteen years later, following the Taliban attack on his home, his hard-charging, law-breaking approach to law enforcement was not universally appreciated. Instead of fighting the gangs of Karachi, critics claimed, the police had become one of them. Officers who racked up ‘encounters’ were promoted, not punished. Corruption was rife. The cops were taking a cut from the brothels on Napier Road; from the backstreet gambling dens where gamblers played mang patta, a local version of craps; and even from the gun-toting thugs who snatched purses and mobile phones while officers at nearby stations did nothing. Corruption was even endemic inside the police force. To get a decent posting, an officer had to bribe his superiors, often to the tune of thousands of dollars. Then he used low-level officers, known as ‘beaters’, to collect his money from smugglers or pimps. A percentage was reserved for officers at the top. It was classic Karachi: the poor robbed the rich, the rich robbed the government, and the cops – well, they had to get their cut, too.

Although he was famed for his ability with a Glock, the secret of his success was in fact his citywide network of informants – street children, traders, prostitutes, criminals. It cost up to $10,000 to nab a major criminal. Where else would he get the money for that?

Karachi’s wealthier residents enjoyed little more than to wax lyrical about the glorious sixties and seventies – a halcyon era of nightclubs, racecourses and casinos, when Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie played the cabarets, the Beatles were swamped by screaming schoolgirls and Che Guevara was photographed on the beach. Long-haired Western hippies passed through, on the trail between Iran and India, arriving in Volkswagen buses emblazoned with slogans about love and peace. Some paused to smoke dope with the Sufi fakirs at the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine. The city boasted hundreds of cinemas, including one, the Bambino, run by the family of a brash young playboy named Asif Ali Zardari. Guns were rare: the greatest trouble came from gangs of macho young men who roamed the streets armed with knuckledusters.

That era drew to a close after 1977, with the ban on alcohol and the start of General Zia’s Islamising drive, which injected Karachi’s middle classes with a cloying piety. Among the witnesses to this change was a twenty-year-old American college student named Barack Obama, who visited the city with a college friend in 1981. In any case, fond memories of Karachi’s glamorous past are tinted in rose: even in its heyday, the good life was accessible only to a minority of Pakistanis, and it ignored the ethnic and social tensions that would explode with such destructive force decades later. Like resilience, nostalgia was a psychological crutch for Karachiites struggling with the present. Even so, Karachi remains a cosmopolitan ideal for many Pakistanis. Professionals and women thrive here in a manner that is difficult, or impossible, in other parts of the country. Gay couples discreetly cohabit. A working woman can rent an apartment on her own without, as happens in other cities, being accused of prostitution by a suspicious landlord. At weddings, women wear belly-baring saris, a form of dress shunned in other parts of Pakistan for its associations with the culture of Hindu-dominated India.

Now the enemy was dysfunction. Giant diesel-powered generators squatted in their gardens, to combat power shortages, and armed guards stood at their gates.

Perhaps that explained the pervasive sense of decay and rot. Unlike stately Lahore or modern Islamabad, Karachi resembled the set of a dystopian thriller. In the city centre, the stately Raj-era buildings cowered behind tangles of power lines and garish neon signs. Rubbish was piled outside elegant mansions in upmarket Clifton. In the summer, when power cuts were frequent, slum dwellers slept on the rooftops, and clouds of flies swarmed around people as they walked to work. Every day, 400 million gallons of untreated sewage poured from the city into the Arabian Sea. Karachi’s conservationists were a suicidal lot. ‘Loving Karachi is like loving an unfaithful mistress who has not hesitated to discard her earlier charms and replace them with the tear-streaked makeup of an unhappy harlot,’ noted one.

The Pakistani Taliban had been arriving quietly since about 2008, hiding amid a flood of Pashtun civilians fleeing the military’s anti-Taliban operations in Swat, Waziristan, and other corners of the tribal belt. After a spate of bank robberies, police investigators reviewing surveillance footage noticed that the robbers often wore shalwar trousers that were hitched above the ankle, and handled their guns with practised ease. Then the militants became more brazen, kidnapping businessmen for ransom, extorting money from Pashtun haulage companies, and – in a sure sign they had arrived – becoming players in the property rackets. In Sohrab Goth, a labyrinthine Pashtun shanty town on the outskirts of Karachi, Taliban clerics established informal sharia courts to settle disputes; the Awami National Party, a secular party that had traditionally represented Pashtuns in Karachi, was drummed out of town.

Quetta was the hardest place to work in Pakistan, a city of shadows and secrets that yielded easily to nobody. Militants skulked in its streets, plotting their next atrocity. Drug kingpins lorded it up in glitzy mansions while heroin addicts squatted in a storm drain that snaked through the city centre. A heavy military presence overlaid everything. Foreigners were discouraged from visiting Quetta, and those who made it were generally presumed to be spies.

The most overtly ruthless attacks are perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni supremacist jihadi outfit dedicated to wiping out minority Shias. Lashkar is particularly strong in Quetta, where the Shias are ethnic Hazaras, easily distinguished by their Central Asian features. In recent decades, sectarian militants have sprayed gunfire on Shia religious processions; flung bombs into crowded markets and snooker halls; and dragged Shia pilgrims off buses headed to holy sites in Iran to be executed on the roadside.

In the West, though, Quetta is better known as the home of the Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban ruling council that found sanctuary here, with ISI support, after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. As Western pressure on Pakistan over their presence in Quetta grew, those fighters vanished from the streets. But on my first trip to the city, in 2004, they circulated openly. At the Talib Cassette Centre, a store in the main bazaar that sold audiotapes of anti-Western sermons and posters of Osama bin Laden, I bumped into a pair of cheery young men in black turbans. They were back from a stint fighting American soldiers in Uruzgan, they told me, and had come to Quetta for a little R&R. The Taliban fighters took me for a stroll in a nearby park, where they offered tea and a lecture on the virtues of jihad.

The Baloch insurgency had been rumbling on for about six years by then, little noticed by the outside world. The fighting was led by a patchwork of small, obscure rebel groups that

targeted remote army checkposts, trains and energy infrastructure. Their cause attracted little publicity, or sympathy, in Pakistan’s national press. But I had heard that the war was far more serious, and dirtier, than was widely known – which was why I had come.

‘A poem,’ he announced, about Buddhism. He started to read. How can it be that Brahm Would make a world and keep it miserable

Since, if all-powerful, he leaves it so, He is not good, and if not powerful He is not God?

The sardars of Balochistan have always guarded their power jealously. During the British Raj, in the nineteenth century, they banded together in a loose confederacy to strike a bargain: in return for allowing the British to build a railway through Balochistan, carrying troops to Afghanistan, the sardars could run their affairs as they pleased. In recent times, though, they have acquired a notorious reputation as the custodians of a cruel feudal order. Like the Pashtuns, they preside over informal village courts that dispense approximate justice. But while Pashtun society is underpinned by an egalitarian ethos that prizes consensus, the Baloch system is an autocracy that vests immense power in one man. As ever, women suffer most. In 2009, Pakistan’s Parliament erupted over reports that three Baloch women had been buried alive,

Not for the first time, the army was trying to hold Pakistan together by force, crushing its critics instead of talking to them. And not for the first time, in squeezing too hard, it seemed to be pulling the country even further apart.

The smear campaign was no accident. It soon became clear that my expulsion was a harbinger of a much wider crackdown targeting the Pakistani news media. Over the preceding years, Pakistan’s generals had endured serial humiliations – the Taliban uprising, the fall of Musharraf, the American raid that took out bin Laden under their noses. They urgently needed to re-establish their authority. But how? The traditional solution – a military coup – was no longer so easy, and being in charge would mean direct responsibility for the mess. So they set about quietening their critics. Foreign reporters like me were a minor concern; the priority was to silence Pakistani journalists.

Even as the military was busy trying to tear down the institutions and most recognisable faces of the Pakistani media, it began experimenting with building up its own one. Around the time that Hamid Mir came under fire, a brash new television station announced itself on Pakistan’s crowded electronic-media landscape. The station, Bol (Urdu for ‘speak’), was fronted by a showy Karachi businessman with military ties named Shoaib Shaikh, who tried to lure the top staff at the main networks, including Hamid Mir, with promises of

extravagant salaries, limousines and mansions. Bol presented itself as a patriotic TV network, promising to present a ‘positive image’ of Pakistan. That, along with its murky finances, led many Pakistani journalists to suspect it was being backed by the army.

The Defence Services Intelligence Academy was Pakistan’s version of The Farm, the CIA’s covert training facility on a

9,000-acre compound in rural Virginia. It was located on the edge of Rawalpindi, where the city bleeds into the suburbs of Islamabad, at a discreet compound where recruits had to surrender their mobile phones and computers. Next door was an ISI storage depot known as Ojhri Camp, which briefly hit the news in 1988 when a huge stockpile of rockets and other munitions, destined for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, exploded. A hail of flaming munitions fell across a wide area, killing dozens of civilians; despite a wealth of conspiracy theories about sabotage and infiltration, the cause of the disaster was never fully explained. Ashraf’s class was filled with small-town boys like him, from across Pakistan. Over six months, they learned rudimentary tradecraft – lock-picking, phone-tapping and surveillance; interrogation and infiltration; surreptitious entry, clandestine photography. How to divert the attention of an adversary if caught in the act. ‘If you caught me covering a target in here,’ Ashraf said, gesturing around the Pizza Hut, ‘I might pretend that I was stealing a pizza, to divert you from my true purpose.’ The trainee spies practised their skills on the streets of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Deploying in small groups to shopping malls and university campuses, often in disguise, they surveilled unsuspecting citizens and practised ‘dead drops’ – an espionage technique for secretly passing on messages in public. Other times, the instructors drove the students to towns mile...

without money or papers, and ordered them to make their way back to the Academy using their wits. Sometimes, real life intruded. Once Ashraf and his classmates, in the guise of street vendors, were arrested by police officers who hauled them off to jail for refusing to pay a bribe. The police slapped and threatened the students, who were under strict orders not to break cover. Eventually, a weary ISI instructor turned up to bail them out. After his graduation, Ashraf was posted to Quetta. He was initially assigned menial duties – running bureaucratic errands for bosses, or depositing payment for sources at the bank – but that afforded a view of the ISI’s extensive operations in Quetta. Offices dotted around the city were known by their code names: Section 944 for Operations; Section 9341 for Counter-Intelligence; and, most sensitive of all, Section 21 for the ‘Afghan Cell’, which liaised with the Afghan Taliban. Like any intelligence organisation, the ISI was supposed to be strictly compartmentalised. But Quetta’s compact size, and the loose discipline of its officers, allowed Ashraf to grasp the agency’s activities beyond his office. In Meezan Chowk, a bustling downtown interse...

their work – swapping notes about their findings, showing off personal photos taken from phones or email accounts and chortling about anything strange or compromising. The Counter-Intelligence detachment, Section 9341, was charged with surveilling foreigners. Quetta was a city of secrets, and their job was to ensure that snooping visitors didn’t expose them. At the Serena, Ashraf explained, ISI officers posed as waiters, hovering near tables in the lobby, or listened through the walls of adjoining bedrooms at night. United Nations officials, Western diplomats, aid workers and foreign correspondents were the typical targets; hotel management, with little choice but to cooperate, pleaded with the spies for discretion. In 2006 those pleas were ignored, when the journa...

The ISI also tailed its nominal allies. The CIA funded much of the ISI’s fancy counterterrorism wing, known as Directorate C, and the two agencies collaborated closely on the hunt for members of al Qaeda. But out in the field, a chasm of mistrust lay between the two agencies, and the gloves came off. A CIA officer who went by the name George, and who came to Quetta to cooperate on counterterrorism, was the subject of an intensive surveillance operation, Ashraf told me. The American’s phone was tapped, his car was tailed and his meetings were monitored at the ISI safe house where he was staying. (CIA officials in Pakistan, for their part, had begun to apply ‘Moscow Rules’, a highly defensive form of spycraft in a hostile country.) Of likely greatest interest to the Americans was Section 21. Also known as the Afghan cell, Section 21 was part of what American intelligence called Directorate S – the most sensitive, action-oriented branch of the ISI, roughly akin to the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division, which had been at the heart of the agency’s blackest operations for decades. Colonel Imam had been deputy chief of Section 21 for a period during the 1980s, directing guerilla strikes against the Red Army inside Afghanistan. A sister unit, known as the

Kashmir Cell, ran jihadi operations in Indian-occupied Kashmir. In recent decades, officers at Section 21 liaised with the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s exiled leadership council. Even inside the ISI, its work was considered secretive. Most of its officers in Quetta were army officers, Ashraf said, and they tended to work through “cutouts” – paid tribal strongmen who lived in the ethnic Pashtun villages around Quetta, where Taliban fighters sheltered.