7
INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE HQ, ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
NADEEM Ashan walked down the broad hallway with a sense of dread. After twenty-nine years of working for Pakistani intelligence, one would think Ashan would be used to these bumps in the road, but this particular bump concerned him for reasons that he was extremely reluctant to share with anyone else in the building. Ashan was an expert navigator when it came to the turbulent waters of the ISI, and that historical knowledge only added to his growing concern. The place was not some monolithic bureaucracy where like-minded men shaped the intelligence-gathering and covert activities of Pakistan. The ISI was a deeply divided, sectarian institution composed of intelligence professionals and military personnel who had vastly different ideas about what was best for their country.
The main fault line lay between the secularists and the religious fanatics, with various groups within each camp. The secularists typically pushed for modernity and stability. They had warned for years that the intelligence agency's support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, India, would eventually bite them in their proverbial behind. The religious fanatics saw the Taliban as an ally that could be used to keep neighboring Afghanistan weak, and the fiercely nationalistic element of the group refused to waver in their support for the terrorists in Kashmir. Their hatred for India ran so deep that they blindly supported the savages who intentionally killed civilians in an effort to make Kashmir a free state.
The hard-liners were exposed as reckless fools in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 195 dead and the world-famous Taj Hotel a smoldering ruin. The international outcry was deafening. As the deputy general for Analysis and Foreign Relations, Ashan heard it the loudest. Even before the attacks on New York and Washington, Ashan had had a very close relationship with the CIA and MI-5. After those attacks, Ashan began to see just how dangerous it was to support the mongrel dogs of jihad. Even President Musharraf began to see the light, and when he moved to support the United States in the War on Terror, those dogs turned on him and tried unsuccessfully to take his life seven times during his tenure as Pakistan's head of state. Only five of those incidents had been reported. Ashan and his colleagues at ISI helped cover up the other two due to the conspirators' ties to certain intelligence officials.
All of these incidents were embarrassing for the ISI, but none of them compared to what was uncovered when the Americans sent in one of their elite commando units to kill the world's most notorious terrorist. Bin Laden, it turned out, had been hiding in Pakistan for years. Ashan instantly knew that factions within the ISI had been harboring him. Money would have changed hands, to be sure, but the primary motivation was undoubtedly ideological symmetry. No matter how Pakistan tried to deny it, there were a significant number of men in the Pakistani military and ISI who supported and applauded the actions of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Ashan was on his way to see just such an individual. Lieutenant General Akhtar Durrani was the deputy general of the ISI's External Wing. Durrani and Ashan ran two of the ISI's three main groups. Their influence was vast, and they both reported directly to the ISI's director general. Ashan managed to move back and forth between the secularists and the hard-liners depending on the situation, while Durrani was firmly in the camp of the hard-liners. Ashan's pragmatism was driven by an obvious fact - Pakistan was overwhelmingly a Muslim country.
Ashan moved past the handpicked military bodyguards and his colleague's male personal assistant with nothing more than a nod. ISI Headquarters was a sprawling compound and the Foreign Relations Wing was a healthy distance from the offices of the External Wing, but even so, the two deputy generals were very close. Almost every day Ashan made the lengthy walk from his office to Durrani's. Unlike most of the Pakistani men his age, Ashan was very focused on his health. Neither of his parents had made it to sixty. His father died of a heart attack brought on by years of smoking cigarettes, and his mother died of lung cancer brought on by years of smoking. Ashan abhorred smoking and made every effort to eat right and walk every day. He was intent on living well into his eighties.
The heavy door to Durrani's office was closed. Ashan glanced over his shoulder at