The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate is Pakistan's military equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to some, it has in the past functioned as a shadow government, one that has used its ties to drug dealers and Islamic extremists to stir up trouble not only in Pakistan but in Afghanistan and the Kashmir region of India as well. The agency helped bring the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in the 1990's, and many American officials suspect that those ties still are at work. It has also worked closely with groups that have conducted terror attacks in India, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
The relationship between the service and American intelligence agencies has been tangled and ever-changing. As Pakistan's own Taliban movement began to pose a threat to the government's existence in 2009, the ISI began to increase its cooperation with Amerian intelligence officials, working together on raids and bombings, even as each side moved warily toward conflicting long-range goals.
But it also scuttled talks between Afghanistan and the Taliban's number two leader, to maintain its leverage in shaping the politics of Pakistan's troubled neighbor. Relations with the United States sunk so low that in December 2010, American officials said the suspected that the ISI played a role when the C.I.A.'s station chief in Pakistan had his identity revealed, forcing him to leave the country.
The ISI, an institution feared by most Pakistanis, is used to getting its way, sometimes by meddling in domestic politics.
The spy service was formed in the early days of Pakistan's independence, but took on greater importance as the rivalry with India and tensions over Kashmir rose in the 1960s. Its role increased sharply after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, when the United States pressed Pakistan to support the guerrilla war that eventually led to a Soviet withdrawal. In the civil wars that followed, the ISI backed the Taliban, which came from the Pashtun-speaking region on Pakistan's border.
In the three decades since the C.I.A. and the ISI first teamed up, the two spy services have soldiered through a co-dependent yet suspicious relationship. C.I.A. officers in Islamabad rely on the Pakistani spy service for its network of informants. But they are wary of the ISI's longstanding ties to militants like the Taliban, which Pakistani spies have seen as a necessary ally to blunt archrival India's influence in Afghanistan.
In the years that followed the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, American frustration built as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda members established sanctuaries within Pakistan. The low point in the relationship came in the summer of 2008, when the C.I.A.'s deputy director traveled to Pakistan to confront ISI officials with communications intercepts indicating that the ISI was complicit in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
In July 2010, thousands of classified American military documents were released that suggested that the Pakistani spy service had guided the Taliban with a hidden hand, including meeting directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.
Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is believed to be coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of ISI. merican officials have described Pakistan's spy service as a rigidly hierarchical organization that has little tolerance for "rogue" activity. But Pakistani military officials give the spy service's "S Wing" — which runs external operations against the Afghan government and India — broad autonomy, a buffer that allows top military officials deniability.
American officials said that the S Wing provided direct support to three major groups carrying out attacks in Afghanistan: the Taliban based in Quetta, Pakistan, commanded by Mullah Muhammad Omar; the militant network run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and a different group run by the guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.
More recently, the two spy agencies have built a certain amount of trust in part through age-old tactics of espionage: killing or capturing each other's enemies. A turning point came in August 2009, when a C.I.A. missile killed the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud as he lay on the roof of his compound in South Waziristan, his wife beside him massaging his back.
Mr. Mehsud for more than a year had been responsible for a wave of terror attacks in Pakistani cities, and many inside the ISI were puzzled as to why the United States had not sought to kill him. Some even suspected he was an American, or Indian, agent.
The drone attack on Mr. Mehsud is part of a joint war against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, where C.I.A. drones pound militants from the air as Pakistani troops fight them on the ground.
And yet for two spy agencies with a long history of mistrust, the accommodation extends only so far. For instance, when it comes to the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan hopes to play a significant role as a power broker, interviews with Pakistani and American intelligence officials in Islamabad and Washington reveal that the interests of the two sides remain far apart.
Even as the ISI breaks up a number of Taliban cells, officials in Islamabad, Washington and Kabul hint that the ISI's goal seems to be to weaken the Taliban just enough to bring them to the negotiating table, but leaving them strong enough to represent Pakistani interests in a future Afghan government.
This contrasts sharply with the American goal of battering the Taliban and strengthening Kabul's central government and security forces, even if American officials also recognize that political reconciliation with elements of the Taliban is likely to be part of any ultimate settlement.
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