The Pakistanis are worked up about the WikiLeaks disclosures that vividly portray the deep-going operational links between ISI and the Taliban since 2004, and demand that Washington repudiate the veracity of the material. The US is engaged in desperate damage control. The Indian establishment, however, does not appear too impressed with all the hullabaloo.
Top flight official sources here believe not much should be expected to immediately change by way of policy in Islamabad, Kabul, New Delhi, or Washington as a result of the outing of some 90,000 US intelligence documents — the biggest in American history — from the Afghan battlefield that indict the ISI as nothing before could have.
The overall sense that the WikiLeaks cache produces is precisely what the Indians have been telling Washington and the whole world for many years.
The same goes for the Afghans. “No, there cannot be much surprise here or in Kabul,” sources familiar with the situation noted. A source agreed that a parallel could be drawn with September 11, which gave the Western world a first-hand taste of terrorism. Before that Indian protests over Islamabad boosting jihadi fighters as state policy were politely heard and then disregarded. In the same way, the WikiLeaks could now impact public perceptions in the US and other Nato countries about Pakistani duplicity.
The documents reveal that while Islamabad takes billions of dollars from the US to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda, its military intelligence agency collaborates with the Taliban to attack US and other Nato troops in Afghanistan. This could energise elements in the US Senate and Congress to ask questions that might eventually have a bearing on policy, say sources. Knowledgeable sources here are not too surprised by the quality of the WikiLeaks documents either. A lot of the stuff coming out has been known to governments “and what was not known is probably incorrect”, the sources noted.
They said that there was a broad idea that the ISI was aiming to use its assets among the jihadist outfits to strike at the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008, and a general intelligence alert had been put out. Accordingly, the embassy had taken precautionary steps with the help of the Afghan authorities and reinforced security measures. But for this the damage would have been much greater in the July 2008 attack.
Diplomatically speaking, the credibility of the “regional approach” to the Afghan quagmire, pushed by President Barack Obama since March 2009 but never quite spelt out, is likely to be degraded, given the shock caused by the WikiLeaks trove. Pakistan has threatened to “re-examine” its relations with the US if the latter does not denounce the contents of the WikiLeaks exposures.