ISI playing double game in war against terrorism: Congressman

From Lalit K Jha
Washington, Jun 4 (PTI) Slamming ISI for its "double
game" in the war against terrorism, a top US lawmaker has said
that while the Pakistani spy agency was cooperating with
America on some high-value targets, it was "protecting"
militants active in Kashmir.
"ISI continues to be a troubling issue for the
American people and the Congress, in the sense that they
always play this double game or they like to play both sides
of the fence: while, on one hand, cooperating with us on some
high-value targets; and on the other hand, protecting
extremists when it's in their best interests, like for
instance in the Kashmir area," Republican Congressman Michael
McCaul said.
But "this double game" really came to a head "when we
saw the killing of (Osama) bin Laden and we saw where he was
living for quite a few years," McCaul, who chaired the
Congressional hearing on terror threats from Pakistan, said
Friday.
"It's very troubling to me, because if you look at...
there's a diagram up there about the compound, the location,
it's less than a mile away, which is half the distance between
here and the Washington Monument, to what's the equivalent of
Pakistan's West Point Academy," he said.
McCaul noted that the community surrounding bin
Laden's Abbottabad compound included retired military officers
and ISI agents.
"This is not a normal house. It was a large compound,
very heavily fortified, very suspicious-looking, and in a very
sort of military area. It leads me to the question of our
relationship with Pakistan," he said.
"Where do we go from here, because in my judgment,
it's hard for anybody to believe that they didn't know he (bin
Laden) was there. The question is, at what level did the
Pakistan government know about this? I believe that either
they're complicit or they're incompetent.
"Either they're complicit with providing material
support to the most wanted terrorist by providing him a safe
haven, or they're totally incompetent to not know he was
there," he said.
The Congressman also called on the Obama
administration to use its influence over Pakistan to prevent
the ISI's double game with the US in the war against
terrorism.
Responding to the lawmaker's questions, Steve Coll,
President and CEO of New America Foundation, a Washington-
based eminent think tank, said the circumstantial evidence
about the house in Abbottabad raises very disturbing questions
about the knowledge that almost certainly must have been
present in at least some sections of the Pakistani government
about this unusual compound.
"I hope that over time we will discover more about how
far up the chain of command in Pakistan such knowledge might
have gone," he said.