Word: musharraf
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...quite pleased with the cooperation we've got from them," says a U.S. official in Washington. A Western diplomat in Islamabad says, "There's grudging compliance. They're saluting Musharraf and obeying...
...Hunting down al-Qaeda agents is just one of Musharraf's challenges. ISI has also backed Muslim rebels in Kashmir, a disputed territory that both India and Pakistan claim as their own. Five months ago, violence by the guerrillas escalated tensions between India and Pakistan and nearly led to full-scale warfare. The President must also rely on the agency to crack down on sectarian extremists who operate within Pakistan proper - zealots have killed more than 70 people this year, including two Americans and three others in an Islamabad church in March - even though the ISI is believed to have...
...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...
...sympathy for the Taliban. When the President 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...