See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/328832348

Hein G. Kiessling. 2016. Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of

Pakistan

Article · December 2018

DOI: 10.1177/2347797018799891

CITATIONS READS
0 7,803

1 author:

Dr Ejaz Hussain
Iqra University
81 PUBLICATIONS   79 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

India-Pakistan Relations: Is Peace Possible? View project

Civil-military relations in Pakistan View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Dr Ejaz Hussain on 29 November 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Book Reviews 331

Wang, Z. (2007). Constructing soft power for socialism harmonious society. Beijing:
Renming Publisher.

Feng Renjie
Ph.D. Candidate
Center for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
E-mail: fengrenjie0801@gmail.com

Hein G. Kiessling. 2016. Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan.

London: Hurst. 307 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84904-517-9

DOI: 10.1177/2347797018799891

There is plenty of literature available on Pakistani politics, history and civil–

military relations. However, there have been comparatively fewer detailed studies
on Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI). Essentially, the literature on the ISI falls into two basic camps. The first
seeks to demonize the agency in some form. Notable examples include Krishna
Dhar’s Fulcrum of Evil: ISI–CIA–Al Qaeda Nexus, S. K. Ghosh’s Pakistan’s ISI:
Network of Terror in India, Bhure Lal’s The Monstrous Face of ISI and B. Raman’s
Intelligence: Past, Present and Future, which all take an Indian nationalist view
of ISI’s role in Kashmir, Northeast India and Afghanistan. Moreover, these
accounts lack in-depth analysis of the internal organizational structure, financial
mechanism and institutional capacity of the ISI. In contrast, the second camp typi-
cally approaches the ISI in a more neutral or, at least, professional way. For exam-
ple, Sean P. Winchell’s ‘Pakistan’s ISI: The Invisible Government’ and Owen L.
Sirrs’s Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate expose the internal intri-
cacies of this otherwise formidable force which has been, for decades, at the cen-
tre of policymaking in Pakistan.
Kiessling’s recent book, Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan, falls into
the second category, at least in the sense that it clearly does not consider the ISI
inherently evil. Importantly, the present manuscript is seemingly an improved
version of his 2011 book on India’s (foreign intelligence) Research and Analysis
Wing and ISI. Based on Kiessling’s 13-year (1989–2002) lived experience in
Pakistan, the book is divided into small but easy-to-understand chapters (21 in
number) besides introduction, postscript and appendices. Two of the appendices
are provided to the author by the ISI demonstrating that it is able to communicate
its perspective, especially on counter terrorism.
Kiessling begins his analysis with ISI’s origins, identifying that it was estab-
lished as a small-scale organization in 1948 by Australian-born British General
and spymaster Walter Joseph Cawthorne (pp. 14–15). Cawthorne, who was hired
by the Pakistani Army, had already conceived Soviet Russia as a strategic threat
to the British interests in South Asia and the Middle East. Thus, his desire was to
332 Book Reviews

establish an intelligence apparatus that could be utilized as an effective instrument

to counter Russian, if not the Indian, moves in the region. Soon, however, the
Pakistani Army and the ISI were indigenized organizationally and ideologically.
From July 1948 onwards, a Pakistani Army officer led the ISI. Moreover, ISI’s
primary focus shifted from trans-regional geopolitics to national politics and
security policy. As a result, Iskander Mirza, a general-cum-bureaucrat, and
General Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief, spied upon both Prime Minister
Noon and the Opposition during the 1950s (p. 21). Once the ISI was directed
towards internal surveillance of the political class, rather than just suspected
enemies of the state, its more infamous role in shaping Pakistan’s political scene
was only a short step forward.
As regards the country’s security policy, the agency’s capacity and role was
quite limited during the 1960s. Although the ISI was involved in supporting
numerous anti-India insurgencies, Generals Ayub and Yahya Khan relied more on
non-ISI intelligence apparatuses such as Military Intelligence and the (civilian)
Intelligence Bureau (IB). This probably explains the agency’s inability to gather
enemy intelligence during the 1965 India–Pakistan War (p. 23). Although during
the 1971 crisis in East Pakistan, the ISI proved to be efficient in terms of forward-
ing copies of General Manekshaw’s operational instructions on the forthcoming
Indian invasion of Pakistani troops, the country’s military and civil leadership
failed to prevent the disintegration of Pakistan.
In the post-breakup period, Zulfiqar Bhutto attempted to rejuvenate the morale
of the armed forces including the ISI. To counter the Soviet–Afghan elements, the
Bhutto government empowered and trusted the ISI to train and utilize around
5,000 strong Afghan guerrilla troops. Colonel Syed Raza Ali played a major role
in this respect. Ironically, however, Bhutto was deposed unceremoniously in July
1977. This may have been due to Bhutto’s efforts to tamper the internal power of
the ISI by creating two parallel organizations, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)
and Federal Security Force (FSF), to oversee the ISI. Bhutto himself certainly
thought so, insinuating that ‘a possible conspiracy had been hatched against him
among the military leadership and the intelligence agencies’ (p. 39).
The role, size and influence of the ISI grew immensely under its Director
General (DG), Akhtar Abdul Rehman, during General Zia’s regime (1977–88).
The ISI conceived, established and operationalized its Afghanistan Bureau, which
trained 80,000 mujahideen, paid them millions of US dollars in cash and distrib-
uted tons of sophisticated weapons to various Afghan militias (p. 54). Of course,
the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collaborated with its counterpart
in these efforts. With the Soviets withdrawal from Afghanistan starting in 1987,
the USA re-ranked its strategic priorities in terms of the Geneva Accords (1988),
effectively turning its back on the region, believing its mission complete. The ISI
under DG Hamid Gul thought differently towards Afghanistan and India—the
‘Disaster in Jalalabad’, as discussed in the book, is a case in point (p. 67). Owing
to his fundamentalist obsession with pan-Islamism and anti-People’s Party stance,
Gul was replaced by retired General Shamsur Rehman Kallue (May 1989–Aug
1990). Through this appointment, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto attempted to
‘domesticate’ the prime agency but in vain (p. 81). Consequently, she lost her
Book Reviews 333

government at the hands of pro-military President Ghulam Ishaq Khan who, in the
following years, dismissed the Sharif government on similarly dubious charges.
Kiessling has highlighted, with primary data, the complexities of civil–military
relations in the 1990s quite candidly. Moreover, his description of ISI’s engage-
ment with the Taliban (1994–2001) is based on his personal contact with members
of the agency. However, what is not clear is the role of the ISI with respect to
handing over Osama bin Laden to the USA. DG of the ISI, Lt Gen. Ehsan ul Haq
(Oct 2001–04) was instrumental in Pakistan’s Afghan policy and the bilateral
relations with the USA, Saudi Arabia and China. Although the agency cooperated
with the American CIA under Musharraf, the ISI guarded the national interests by
registering concerns over the excessive use of drones in Pakistan’s tribal areas
(p. 186). The US–Pakistan relations deteriorated in the post-Musharraf period
(2008–13), when the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led government urged the
USA to prevent coup d’état in the wake of bin Laden’s killing by the US Navy
SEALs in May 2011. The Raymond Davis Affair and the Salala incident, in the
same year, halted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supply via
Pakistan to Afghanistan. Besides, the Gilani (Zardari) government attempted to
control the ISI along with signalling friendly gestures to India. This strained civil–
military relations to the extent that PM Gilani was fired by the pro-military
judiciary.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government (2013–2018)
continued PPP’s policy of attempting to normalize relations with India, interfer-
ing in the military and ISI’s internal matters, controlling the foreign policy vis-
à-vis Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, China and the USA. The Sharif government
also attempted to curtail the ISI by empowering the IB institutionally. The Army
and the ISI, keen to stay relevant in contemporary Pakistan, responded with its
own institutional manoeuvres. The most notable result was ISI’s role in encour-
aging the Judiciary to disqualify Nawaz Sharif after the recent Panama Papers
scandal.
In Kiessling’s view, Pakistan’s premier agency is still a powerful force in the
region. It views India as a chronic enemy in illegal control of Kashmir, whereas
Afghanistan is seen as an unfriendly country under Indian patronage which is instru-
mental in causing terrorism in Pakistan, especially Balochistan. The latter has
assumed a highly significant position within the Army’s strategic calculus and the
ISI is working as the Army’s trusted tool to ward off internal and external threats.
However, the strength of Kiessling’s book lies in its attempt to bridge the gap
in the literature with respect to the internal structure, functions and intra-agency
power relations. This objective is partly achieved as there remain questions on the
role and position of the ISI within the contemporary intelligence apparatuses,
politics and security/foreign policy of Pakistan. For example, the book is silent on
what happened between ISI and CIA over the Raymond Davis issue and whether
the ISI knows of the US Navy SEALs operation?
Another potential detraction for some readers is the author’s journalistic
approach to the topic. Hence, those looking for a more rigorous academic study of
the ISI and its history and current role will not find it here. Moreover, minor errors
such as typos detract from its quality with even the title containing a grammatical
 334 Book Reviews

error (‘inter-service’ is put instead of ‘inter-services’). Nonetheless, Faith, Unity,

Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan is reader-friendly, very educational investigation
on the subject, and thus recommended for specialists and laymen readers alike.

Ejaz Hussain
Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Iqra University, Islamabad, Pakistan
E-mail: ejaz.hussain@iqraisb.edu.pk

T. V. Paul (Ed.). 2016. Accommodating Rising Powers: Past, Present,

and Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, x + 326 pp. ISBN:
13-9781107592230

DOI: 10.1177/2347797018799894

The contemporary international system is passing through a period of transition

because the power is not only shifting from the established to the rising powers
but also diffusing from state to non-state actors. This redistribution of power has
generated uncertainty about the future of the international order. Amidst the
uncertainty, Amitav Acharya (2014) speculates the coming international order as
a ‘multiplex theatre’, where different movies run at the same time and same place,
while Charles Kupchan (2012) conceives it as ‘no one’s world’, a world where not
one superpower will dominate the system. Despite divergence, there is an agree-
ment among scholars that the future of the international order, to a large extent,
will depend on how the established powers react to the emergence of rising pow-
ers and how the rising powers respond to the established power’s reaction. T. V.
Paul’s Accommodating Rising Powers investigates ‘whether, and when, peaceful
accommodation of rising powers works against the conditions that generate
intense rivalry and conflict’ (p. 4) and the range of strategies do the established,
and rising powers have available. It argues that ‘though structural conditions can
lead to conflict, proper synchronisation of strategies for peaceful change by estab-
lished and rising powers can mitigate the possibilities of violent conflicts’ (p. 4).
The first section containing five chapters provides a conceptual and theoretical
overview. Whilst defining accommodation, Paul argues that it is a mutual process
that involves adaptation of rising powers by the established powers, status accept-
ance by both the rising and established powers as well as a substantial reduction
of hostility between them. Accommodation, to him, implies that ‘the emerging
power is given the status and perks associated with the rank of great power in the
international system, which includes … recognition of its sphere of influence, or
the decision not to challenge it militarily’ (p. 5). To investigate the possible nature
of transition, whether it will be peaceful or conflictual, the contributors have
deployed different theories. In the second chapter, Steven Lobell has noticed that
the realists see the prospects of a peaceful power transition grim. Instead of
change, realists believe that established powers try to maintain their domination.
To prevent rising powers from accumulating power, the established powers use
three strategies: balance (of power), containment and deterrence.

View publication stats