Multiple officials, including foreign diplomats said that the dossier was full of comical errors and looked more like a project report by a college student than a professionally compiled dossier by a well-funded spy agency.
New Delhi:
Pakistani spy agency ISI, earlier last week, released a “dossier” purporting to detail the “anti-Pakistan” activities that were being carried out by India. The dossier, prepared with the assistance of the Pakistan Army’s consistent backer in the UNSC, China, has done more harm to its, and the country’s, image than bolster its charges. The “facts” listed in the dossier have found virtually no takers, nor has the dossier gained traction in the intelligence community in India or abroad. Of course, such exemplars of unbiased reportage as Global Times would disagree.
Multiple officials (including foreign diplomats) who spoke to The Sunday Guardian said that the dossier was full of comical errors and looked more like a project report by a college student than a professionally compiled dossier by a well-funded spy agency.
According to one diplomat belonging to an Asia-Pacific country, they were expecting a dossier that would produce hard documentary and electronic evidence since the details of the dossier were made public jointly by Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Major General Babar Iftikhar.
“The GHQ dossier is full of claims, with no proof to support them. It is clearly the result of some very shoddy work. We have seen some parts of it; there are so many errors there, both factual and spelling. If it would have come to us anonymously, we would have discarded it after reading the first few pages”, said the diplomat, requesting anonymity.
Official sources said that the dossier was prepared and released to coincide with the regime change in Washington. The Sino-Pakistan lobby has several sympathisers active in the Biden-Harris camp and they were informed in advance about the document. The dossier was the brainchild of US educated Moeed W. Yusuf, who is the Special Assistant to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on national security. “The dossiers will be distributed to the new Biden team by Pakistan supporting lobbyists in Washington so that anti-India sentiments can be generated from the start of the new administration”, an official said. The effort is to ensure a return to the Clinton days, when the White House sought to force India to surrender Kashmir to Pakistan and facilitated the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. President Bill Clinton’s policy on Afghanistan has been adopted by President Donald Trump for reasons that are not clear.
However, the dossier has, in all probability, backfired and is likely to increase calls for Yusuf to lose his job in the coming months. Even the Pakistan moles in the Biden-Harris camp are unhappy that the lack of hard evidence will set back their effort to distance Washington from New Delhi and get President Biden to walk away from the Indo-Pacific in favour of the long-standing Atlanticist strategy favoured by Hillary Clinton, a powerful voice in the Democratic Party who ensured that the party’s best candidate, Biden, stepped back in the 2016 Presidential contest. Had Biden run, Trump may have been defeated, with significant consequences for the US. Feedback from Washington is that much more believable accounts need to be created and that the dossier (which was shown in advance to the PLA) is insufficient to force a return to Clinton-era policies favouring Pakistan and its proxies.
“It claims that India is managing 87 terror camps across India and Afghanistan. We for a fact know that there is not even an iota of truth in such claims. Such things (running such a large number of camps) cannot be hidden in these times. So when a country makes such outlandish claims, it automatically dents the credibility of the country. Pakistan has done damage to its credibility by making such false statements. In future it will become very hard for even a neutral country to believe Pakistan’s claim”, said another diplomat who is part of the G-7 grouping.
Of course, the all-weather friend and ally, China, will stand with Pakistan against India owing to its own compulsions of opposing New Delhi because of Delhi’s increasing alignment with Washington, a warming of relations GHQ and the PLA seek to reverse.
Following are some of the ridiculous claims made in the Pakistani dossier.
* CLAIM: India is trying to establish a consortium of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) with proscribed dissident organisations from Balochistan—BLA, BLF and BRA—which are already united under the banner of BRAS (Baloch Raaji Aajoie Sangar) constituted in 2018.
REALITY: It is the Pakistan Army, which is collaborating with the Haqqani network to arrive at a peace deal with the TTP, a fact that has also been recorded by US agencies. The Sunday Guardian too had carried a detailed report on how the Pakistan Army was bending over backwards to seek a ceasefire with the TTP.
* CLAIM: An Indian intelligence officer named Col Rajesh (employed at the Indian embassy in Afghanistan) is supervising terror attacks.
REALITY: No officer of such name is posted in Afghanistan.
* CLAIM: Recently, 30 Indian Daesh militants were relocated from India to various camps along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border by two Indian intelligence operatives. These militants were handed over to Daesh commander Shiekh Abdul Rahim alias Abdul Rehman Muslim Dost.
REALITY: This charge too is complete fiction. All the arrested ISIS sympathizers are in NIA custody and most of them have been convicted by court. Their family members and lawyers meet them regularly.
* CLAIM: RAW made two transactions to promote terrorism in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Both transactions have been made through Indian banks: $28,000 was transferred by Punjab Bank India; the second transaction of $55,851 was made by Mr Manmeet (an Indian national) from Indian Bank, New Delhi, which was received by Afghanistan International Bank.
REALITY: No intelligence agency, worth its salt, will use normal banking channels to finance its operations in another country.
* CLAIM: To sabotage the CPEC, India raised a militia of 700 persons to undertake terrorism in Balochistan. A commission comprising 24 members was created, which included 10 RAW operatives. $60 million were dedicated for this force.
REALITY: Another fiction. They might as well have claimed a 7,000-person strong milita.
* CLAIM: RAW was paying them handsome amounts (suicide attacks—PKR 10 Mn; VBIED—PKR 10 Mn; IED—PKR 1 Mn; and target killing—PKR 1 Mn) for undertaking terrorist activities.
REALITY: According to intelligence officials of a third country with whom The Sunday Guardian spoke to, contract killings in Pakistan can be done for as meagre an amount as PKR 10,000.
* CLAIM: Indian intelligence agencies are managing 87 terrorist camps, out of which 66 are located in Afghanistan, while 21 are located in India. India had established four training camps for militants at Dehradun, Haryana, in North and Northeast India.
REALITY: Such “terror camps” have never been reported or identified by any other country or reported by the Indian media.
* CLAIM: Since January 2019, Indian intelligence handlers delivered Alinco “walkie-talkie” sets that are sold by Space Telecom New Delhi on “Indiamart”.
REALITY: Alinco is a Japanese brand that sells its products even in Pakistan.
* CLAIM: A video tutorial for detonating IED was delivered by operatives from Indian intelligence agency.
REALITY: Thousands of videos are available online on how to detonate an IED. It escapes logic why any Indian agency would deliver such things.