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Pakistan shuts down ISI's Kashmir wing: Report

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has ordered shutdown of the wing of the military intelligence agency Inter-Service Intelligence that deals exclusively with the armed groups that Pakistan backs in Kashmir, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

In future, Pakistan would limit its backing for the 'Kashmir freedom struggle' to groups with roots in Kashmir, and rely on Kashmiris to conduct military operations, the paper said quoting officials in Islamabad.

Pakistan would continue to back groups with 'roots in Kashmir' like Hizbul Mujahadeen which, it says, are dominated by the Kashmiris, the report said.

As an example of groups that would continue to get government backing, officials cited Hizbul Mujahideen, which, the paper said 'dominated the Kashmir insurgency from its beginnings in 1989 until the mid-1990s, but rapidly lost its primacy as Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed took over'.

The militant groups, the report noted, shifted increasingly to political assassinations, car bombings and attacks on villages that killed large numbers of Kashmiri civilians, mostly Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims accused of 'collaborating' with the Indian authorities.

Groups like Hizbul Mujahedeen, the officials said, would get 'moral and political' support from the government in Islamabad, but not military training and weapons.

They would also be required to purge all non-Kashmiri Muslims, including the Arabs and Chechens.

In the last two years, Indian security forces have captured or killed growing numbers of foreign fighters, mostly Arabs.

Western intelligence reports, the paper said has confirmed that Al Qaeda in Afghanistan trained many of those fighters.

"The decision has been made to cut off support to all non-indigenous groups in Kashmir," the officials told the Times.

They said Musharraf believed that the change in policy would 'cause a scaling-down of the freedom struggle, but will not be its end', and that he felt that 'lowering the level of insurgency is not too high a price to pay for protecting the country' against attack by India.

The decision, the paper said, would be met with scepticism in India, which has accused Pakistan of breaking previous promises to curb terrorism in Kashmir, and which has said since the Parliament attack that it wants more from Musharraf than freezing the bank accounts of Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

India has also implied that it wants all Pakistan-based groups that challenge Indian rule in Kashmir shut down.

India has blamed the attack on two Pakistan-based Islamic militant groups that dominate the militancy in Kashmir, both of which have links to Al Qaeda.

The Pakistani officials said Musharraf's orders would end the armed activities of the two groups accused in the attack on Parliament, as well as of other Islamic militant groups that have used bases in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to mount attacks across the Himalayas.

Although Pakistani officials questioned the evidence India had against the two groups, they acknowledged that the groups were responsible for about 70 per cent of all attacks in Kashmir in the last three years.

India has demanded that all Pakistan-based groups that indulge in terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in the country be shut down.

Western diplomats who have been in contact with Musharraf during the crisis, the paper said, described the decision to end the Islamic militant groups' role in the Kashmir fighting as his boldest step yet to defuse the tensions that have gripped the sub-continent in the aftermath of the Parliament attack.

But the diplomats noted that a succession of Pakistani leaders have found that ordering the military intelligence agency to change course, especially when it involves Islamic militant groups, has not always succeeded.

The diplomats said that the ISI, operating in the shadows, with few controls on its spending, has long been a rogue agency, capable of continuing support for groups that it has formally disavowed, as it did for at least a few weeks after Musharraf ordered an end to support for the Taliban in September.

Since then, Musharraf has appointed a new ISI chief, but even he has acknowledged privately that getting complete control of the agency would take time.

Still, the diplomats said they saw Musharraf's latest action as a turning point in the crisis.

They said the Pakistani president appeared to have settled on the move after telephone calls that US President George Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made last week to him and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee urging both leaders to turn toward a negotiated end to the crisis.

The Times quoted diplomats as saying that the American leaders' message to India had been that Musharraf had started Pakistan on a 'process' of curbing Islamic militancy that would meet India's demand for an end to terrorist attacks by Pakistan-based groups.

But India had also been told, the diplomats said, that the Pakistani leader needed time so as not to be seen to be 'doing India's bidding' under threat of war.

Indian leaders, the diplomats said, had been 'reminded' of the message Musharraf has been spreading in Pakistan for several months.

Although he has been careful not to offer concessions over Kashmir, he has been telling Pakistanis that the country has to rid itself of the scourge of Islamic militancy and its corollary, terrorism.

Meanwhile, a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman said he did not have any information regarding shutting down of a wing of the ISI providing backing for military groups fighting in Kashmir.

"I have no such information," he told reporters in Islamabad.

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