The CIA Station Chief

The CIA station chief in Islamabad has been recalled after being named in a Pakistani civil lawsuit as the cause of civilian casualties in a recent Drone bombing in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The agent was apparently known to the Pakistani government and a lot of other people in the country.

First, one could say that this is somewhat bizarre since CIA agents are supposed to be clandestine, or at least very discreet. And, he was an agent marked for greater things in the CIA’s clandestine service, and that would seem to be in jeopardy now as well.

In any event, the entire world, with the exception of the US government which rarely admits any such activity, knows that the American CIA is making Drone forays from Afghanistan into Pakistan’s border area to try to eliminate Al-Qaida and Taliban militia operating there.

Pakistani newspapers had published a week ago the name of the agent as a possible target in a lawsuit to be brought by relatives of civilians killed in such Drone attacks. Later, an attorney for the families asked the Pakistani police to prevent the CIA agent from leaving the country until the lawsuit was filed. Despite this logical reason for his evacuation, the United States says it pulled the agent out of Pakistan because of serious death threats against him.

But, the plot thickens. The Washington Post has published an article suggesting that the naming of the US CIA agent may be in retaliation for a lawsuit filed last autumn in New York, naming the Pakistani who is head of the Inter-Service Intelligence, the equivalent of the US CIA, in relation to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year. The ISI has in the past been accused by the US of helping militants close to the Taliban in the northern provinces as a way to protect their interests in case of American failure to eliminate them.

Have we entered an era where CIA and other spies are no longer secret, but instead normal members of their respective government’s presence in foreign countries? If so, why bother to call them spies? Maybe the military’s term, consular military attaché, would be more honest. But, if that is so, where are our spies? Do we need them? Probably, if we want to have the best intelligence available in sensitive areas of the world. And, every country would undoubtedly agree vis-à-vis its spies.

However, in the Pakistan case, perhaps we have just one more example of the United States being in a country that is not really an ally. That does not want our presence. That would prefer to make its own peace with the groups attacking it, even if that would mean co-existence with them and at least partial loss of sovereignty. Pakistan mistakenly thinks it can live with the Taliban, but it ought to ask Afghanistan citizens about the truth of Taliban rule. It would also mean the loss of US financial aid, not that it is going to those who need it every time.

And, it would also mean that the Pakistani nuclear capacity would be at the disposal of Al-Qaida and the Taliban. That is the real reason we are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nation-building is the cover, but a cover not much more effective than the cover of the CIA agent who was just sued in Pakistan and then hustled out of the country before worse arrived.