Major General Athar Abbas, the Pakistan Army’s chief spokesman, repeatedly criticised the Times’ reporting and said it was part of a calculated plan by ‘unnamed officials’ to ‘weaken the state’. “This is a direct attack on our security organisation and intelligence agencies,” he told Reuters in a rare on-the-record in-person interview. “We consider ISI as a strategic intelligence organization, the first line of our defence.”
Athar Abbas repeatedly criticised the Times’ reporting and said it was part of a calculated plan by the United States to ‘weaken the state’. Abbas was responding specifically to a July 8 editorial that said there was evidence of complicity by the ISI intelligence agency in sheltering bin Laden, of ties to the 2008 Mumbai attacks and of involvement in the abduction and murder of Asia Times Online journalist Saleem Shahzad.
“This whole reporting through media, quoting unnamed officials, anonymous sources, is part of a design to undermine the authority and the power of the organisation in order to weaken the state,” Abbas said.
He declined to specify exactly who the unnamed officials were, although the New York Times specified they were American officials.
Abbas said there had been unease because of the bin Laden raid. “We have taken certain measures, which we consider, are in the best national interest.”
“We have also ordered a number of US military personnel to be reduced, to go back, because we consider these as non-essential personnel in certain areas, and they’ve been asked to leave,” he said.
The ISI and CIA, he said, which have worked together for decades, should ‘formalise’ their relationship. He said Pasha had “asked them that the relationship between the two intelligence agencies should be formalised. It should be documented. It should not be open-ended. It should not be left to the other side to interpret the way they want to.”
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