The spy who sold his cause

The sentencing of the flamboyant Kashmiri-American lobbyist, Ghulam Nabi Fai, by a district court in Virginia, US, to two years of imprisonment and three additional years of monitored release, is a victory for India. It is also a slap in the face for those who had been propagating a “third way” of independence, as opposed to remaining in India or joining Pakistan, for the Muslims of Kashmir. Fai’s fall from the status of a high-flying Washington broker, who mobilised many American lawmakers and Kashmiri Muslim diaspora members to support “self-determination” in Kashmir, to a convicted criminal as an unregistered agent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is a big blow to the azaadi brigade.

For two decades, since the uprising and insurgency against India commenced in the Kashmir Valley, Fai was a hyperactive Washington figure who conducted innumerable seminars, conferences and forums where “freedom” for Kashmiri Muslims from “Hindu India” was projected as a cause on par with the Palestinian cause. That he was an ISI implant meant to be the psychological counterpart of the “mujahideen” terrorists waging a war against India in Jammu and Kashmir was obvious to perceptive observers. But Fai kept up the charade of azaadi to legitimise himself as a spokesman for the will of the majority of Kashmiri Muslims, and not of the Pakistani state.
This distinction between being an ISI mole in America and a representative voice of Kashmiri Muslims was important for Islamabad to strategically deny any involvement in cross-border terrorism and armed insurgency in India. Fai was the proverbial duck decoy. The anti-India stances taken by the Bill Clinton administration on Kashmir in the early 1990s were partly the result of Fai’s indefatigable efforts to bribe and persuade lawmakers and the executive side in Washington. The outspoken Fai would boast in those days that he knew everyone who mattered in American policymaking towards South Asia and that he was an independent, non-military crusader against Indian “occupation” of Kashmir. In reality, he was instrumental in mobilising Kashmiri Muslim professionals in the West to embrace the violent jihad in the Valley as a “freedom struggle”.
Under investigation by the US justice system, Fai confessed that his cover organisation, an alleged “think tank” called Kashmiri American Council (KAC), was being bankrolled directly by brigadiers and generals of the ISI in charge of training, funding and sheltering jihadi groups. Initially, though, the KAC depended on funds from the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora (especially wealthy doctors in the US) who considered azaadi to be their life mission. Some of them held lower level offices in the KAC, but the “third way” identity of Kashmiri nationalism got sidelined as Pakistan tightened its grip on all shades of separatism related to Kashmir.
The degeneration of the KAC into a “psy ops” (psychological operations) tool of the ISI mirrored the weakening of indigenous Kashmiri jihadi outfits like Hizbul Mujahideen on the ground in the Valley. Self-determination was nothing but a fabrication being propagated by shysters like Fai in the international media through paid news stories about human rights abuses in the Valley. KAC’s annual budget statements, as revealed by investigators after Fai’s arrest, included hefty sums not only for “contributions to lawmakers” but also “for opinion pieces to be distributed to newspapers” for swaying public sentiment in the US against Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan’s jihadi complex was unleashing terror in the Valley through remote-controlled organisations like the Jaish-e-Muhammad and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, while Fai’s KAC was one of the external components of this “Pakistanisation” of the azaadi bandwagon.
During the trial in the US, Fai admitted that his actions had inflicted tremendous “damage” to the Kashmir cause, but more shocking details also emerged about the compromised nature of the entire azaadi camp in the Valley. According to the American prosecutor of Fai, the so-called “moderate” chairman of the apex separatist Hurriyat Conference in the Kashmir Valley, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, is “supported and controlled” by the ISI. This blows the cover of semantics about divisions in the Hurriyat, between the Islamist hardliners of the “Geelani faction” and the liberals of the “Mirwaiz faction”. All of them are basically appendages of the ISI and not true representatives of Muslims in the Valley, a majority of whom are indeed in favour of the “third way” of independence from both India and Pakistan.
Another critical issue raised by the shameful end to Fai’s career is the unabated power of the “state within the state” of Pakistan, i.e. the ISI. Why did the ISI need to finance Fai as an undercover agent in the US when the government of Pakistan had hired separate, registered and legal lobbying firms to operate openly in the influence-buying capital of the world, Washington, D.C.?
As a parallel authority which is above the Pakistani civilian and military structures, the ISI has never believed in sharing its existential Kashmir jihad with any sister institution within the state apparatus. Fai is one instance of how this rogue intelligence agency has conducted its own foreign policy and domestic politics (the recent case in the Pakistani Supreme Court about ISI financing the Army’s preferred political parties in elections is the tip of the iceberg).
The Fai affair is one more demonstration of the root cause of the unending hostility in South Asia, viz. a Pakistani state which is completely manipulated by security agencies and where civilian rule is a hoax. Fai was exposed a whopping 21 years after he set up shop in the United States as a Kashmiri “freedom fighter” precisely because of worsening relations between the US and the Pakistani military following the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Despite reams of evidence being passed on about his nefarious connections by India for years, the Americans finally arrested Fai only when they saw through the deep skullduggery of the ISI and the Pakistani Army after Abbottabad.
The “take home” lesson from Fai’s infamy is that the international community must re-focus on Pakistan’s military-industrial complex as the main obstacle to peacefully resolving the Kashmir and Afghan problems. Assuming that the threats to peace come from non-state “spoilers” like the Taliban and Al Qaeda is flawed diagnosis that feeds a vicious cycle of violence. Knowing the enemy is the basic maxim of strategy in war. The enemy is not really Fai, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed or the Taliban. It is their master handlers — a spy agency and an Army which informally rule over a “democratic” state of 175 million people.

The writer is vice-dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs and the author of International Organisations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones