Word: isi
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...course, the ISI helped create that extremist danger. Since becoming a nation in 1947, Pakistan has tried with war and guile to pry away the part of Kashmir, a former princely state with a Muslim majority, that is in India's hands. Borrowing a page from the cia's proxy war against the Soviets, which used the mujahedin in Afghanistan, the ISI in 1989 began encouraging Islamic-militant outfits inside Pakistan to cross over the mountains and snipe at Indian troops in Kashmir. As a guerrilla tactic, it was brilliant. On any given day, more than 300,000 Indian troops...
...Musharraf needs the ISI's loyalty for his own survival. Popular anger against America runs high in Pakistan because of civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and Washington's stalwart support of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, who, like most Pakistanis, are mainly Muslims. With Musharraf firmly allied with Washington, the fury extends to him as well. Western diplomats say the threat of assassination is ever present for Musharraf. He packs a silver-plated derringer in his chest pocket and always leaves his presidential office in an armor-plated Mercedes, using two others as decoys...
...first move Musharraf made to tame the ISI was dumping its chief, Ahmed. He and the President were close friends and fellow plotters in the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power. But the intelligence chief proved too radical for Musharraf's purposes. Former comrades of Ahmed's say he experienced a battlefield epiphany in the Himalayan peaks during a 1999 summer offensive against India and began to pursue his own Islamic-extremist agenda. At a Cabinet meeting, he once yelled at an official, "What do you know? You don't even go to prayers...
...sent him to Kandahar six days after Sept. 11 to persuade Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over bin Laden, the spymaster instead secretly told Omar to resist, an ex-Taliban official told TIME. Word of this double cross reached Musharraf, who on Oct. 7 replaced Ahmed as ISI boss. He put in Lieut. General Ehsan ul-Haq, a trusted head of military intelligence who shares Musharraf's more Westernized outlook. His orders from the President were to weed out "the beards," as Islamic extremists are called in the ISI, and make the group more obedient to the President...
...provided al-Qaeda agents a network of safe houses in Pakistan to facilitate their transit in and out of Afghanistan. They also vetted new recruits for al-Qaeda and laundered terrorist funds through a global network of illegal money changers. It was no surprise to foreign spooks that the ISI let the Egyptian-Canadian Khadr escape from Peshawar. He knew too much, they say, about the ISI's alleged ties with al-Qaeda...