Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (IS) is a kind of shadow government over the country’s democracy, setting policy in Afghanistan and establishing red lines beyond which elected officials cannot cross. So when Prime Ministers Imran Khan altered the procedure for selecting a successor to ISI chief Faiz Hameed, last month, he set off a political crisis in...
Category: Asia
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India’s Supreme Court to Investigate Allegations of Pegasus Spyware Abuse
The Pegasus Project, first published in July by a global media consortium that included The Washington Post, revealed that hundreds of numbers from India appeared on the global list of more than 50,000 phone numbers, which included some associated with heads of state. Phone numbers belonging to journalists, activists and political figures in India were found...
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Washington Post Calls for an Investigation of COVID’s Origins
Last August, the Office of Director of National National Intelligence published an unclassified paper on the origins of COVID-19 saying the U.S. intelligence community broadly agreed the virus was not a biological weapons but was more divided on the question of whether the virus was genetically engineered. Given those rather equivocal findings, the editors of...
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Pakistan’s ISI Has a Message for the Taliban: You Owe Us
From Jonathan Broder at the reliable SpyTalk. You can’t understand Afghanistan without understanding the role of the Pakistani spy agency known as Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI. Islamabad publicly distanced itself from the Taliban, proclaiming Pakistan a loyal ally in the U.S. war on terror. But the ISI covertly continued its support for the group, giving...
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Pakistani Intelligence Chief Visits Taliban
First CIA director WIlliam Burns met with the Taliban. Now, Faiz Hamid, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence is visiting Kabul. Intelligence chiefs now do the job that foreign ministers used to do.