Strategic playbook continues...

Kayani who took over from Musharraf as the Army Chief in November 2007, continued with the policy of shoring up the Taliban through recruitment, training and weapons with the help of ‘strategic assets’ like the Haqqani Network. Kayani, who wrotea thesis on Afghan insurgency, worked hard to ensure that Pakistan maintains a strong leverage in Afghanistan with the helpof the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Kayani’s problem, however, started only when one set of the Taliban took over Swat and other areas, and posed a direct challenge to the army. Although the army managed to wrest the areas from the Taliban after long and fierce fighting, the emergence of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an autonomous umbrella group of various militant groups in the tribal areas, seriously undermined the army’s writ and power. TTP has often avowed allegiance to Mullah Omar and shares a similar ideological goal of establishing an Islamic state in the region.

When the international community had turned to Pakistan, following the 9/11 attacks, one of the first things the army hurriedly did was to reorganise the official structure within the ISI, renaming the existing divisions dealing with militant groups. Almost all the known divisions, departments and sections embedded at Rawalpindi, Quetta and Peshawar, besides Kabul, Kandahar and other centres in Afghanistan were replaced with a covert structure, known in the public domain only as the ‘S wing.’ In official parlance, the ‘S wing’ is known as the Security Wing, located in the ISI HQ in Aabpara, Islamabad. It is headed by a Major General. Those in the know indicate that the new wing was created during Musharraf’s regime. The wing has both servingand retired officials from the ISI and the Pakistan military, especially from the army. Some Pakistani commentators have accused the ‘S wing’ of managing the army’s relationship with terrorist groups like the Haqqani Network, the Taliban and the Hizb-e-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, besides LeT.

To be continued....