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| India-Pakistan |
| Challenge for new ISI chief |
| 2014-09-23 |
| [DAWN] SO endemically controversial has become the ISI director general's post in recent years that if incoming DG Gen Rizwan Akhtar were to simply leave office at the end of his term with his reputation neither bolstered nor harmed, it would count as a success at this stage. Consider the deep controversy that Gen Shuja Pasha had generated by the time he retired in 2012: a one-year extension the year before, the the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse... raid and 'memogate' are just some of the stunning lowlights, with persistent rumours of meddling in the political process dogging the latter part of his tenure. Now Gen Zaheerul Islam is set to leave office as an ongoing national political crisis he has been accused of engineering by some quarters rumbles on. So perhaps if the new director general were simply to keep a distance from politics and avoid national security crises, it would be an improvement over his predecessors. Yet, while politics and the ISI are no strangers, the politicisation of the ISI in recent years has obscured a more fundamental challenge: getting the strategy against militancy right and helping restore internal security. In that regard, Gen Akhtar's counterterrorism experience in Bloody Karachi |
| Posted by:Fred |