By ZAID HAMID
Monday, 1 June 2009.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—While Pakistan is busy in battling a foreign-funded local proxy Taliban in Swat, Malakand and other areas, the Americans and the Indians are exploiting a distracted Pakistani state to recruit influential Pakistanis as spies.

The American embassy in Islamabad is acting as facilitator in hiring influential Pakistani government officials. U.S. diplomats in Islamabad are facilitating meetings between Pakistani officials and Indian intelligence officials representing RAW.

A few days back one such recruitment attempt came to the fore when the American envoy, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson, arranged a function at the residence of a senior American diplomat – 152 Margala Road, Islamabad – wherein top Pakistani officials were invited from Capital Development Authority, DA, Prime Minister Secretariat, Police department, federal cultural agencies and a professor from the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

Among those honored with an invitation by the U.S. envoy is the Chairman of CDA Tariq Mehmood, Joint Secretary Prime Minister Secretariat Amna Imran, Superintendent Police Mir Waiz Niaz, Director of the Pakistan National Council of Arts Naeem Tahir, Director Lok VersaKhalid Javed, and Professor Amir Bhatti of Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad.



The more shocking aspect of this entire episode is the fact that the only non-U.S. foreign diplomat invited to this party was non-other than Mr. Rajinder Kumar Sherma who is an undercover RAW operatives acting as visa councilor at the Indian High Commission Islamabad.

The Pakistani nation has the right to ask the above mentioned Pakistani officials under what capacity did they attended that function and under which authority they were introduced to a RAW operative? What is the purpose of their introduction to the Indian intelligence agency and why U.S. is so eager to play a role of facilitator in this campaign for consolidating Indian intelligence assets in Pakistan?

The U.S. and Indians have already started spending huge amounts of money to buy Pakistani opinion makers. The main concern of the Americans and the Indians at this stage is to carry out propaganda against Pakistan and especially against its armed forces. This is a new tactic that has been introduced to get influential Pakistani civilian officials onboard to supplement CIA and RAW psy-ops and disinformation campaign. This is very disturbing.

Due to the prevailing security situation in Pakistan, foreign diplomats and especially the Americans and the British ones, have virtually confined themselves to the security of the Diplomatic Enclave and have limited their social activity to well guarded cocktail parties. In such a situation they resort to arrange such receptions to get inside information and influence those at top positions in civil departments.

Though such functions are not seen as anything strange provided the function is open for officials from different countries but when the attempt is purely made for facilitating the introduction of top Pakistani civilian officials suspected local representatives of Indian intelligence then indeed the Pakistani security institutions should take notice of such activities.

We are already facing grave security problems due to militants’ activities. In such a scenario, we cannot afford to ignor such attempts by the U.S. and India because of their potential to the harm security of the country.

Apart from being vigilant to such anti-Pakistan activities by these countries, Pakistan needs to introduce rules and regulations that banning officials from attending such diplomatic meetings.