NEW DELHI: The new chief of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Naveed Mukhtar is the Pakistan Army ‘veteran’ who provided safe hideouts to al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and Taliban’s boss Mullah Omar during his tenure in the counter-terror cell of the snoop agency.
A resident of Nankana Sahib in Pakistan’s Punjab, the new ISI boss has extensive linkages in the Sikh community there and might revive Khalistan movement in India.
Mukhtar had joined the Pakistan Army in 1983 when Islamabad-sponsored Sikh extremism was as its peak in India. While in Army, he was involved in the Sikh insurgency operations. He continues to enjoy good rapport with the fugitive Khalistani extremists, revealed Intelligence sources. Between 2010 and 2014, Mukhtar worked as a brigadier with the counter-terror cell of the ISI. He led the team of the spy agency that deceived the Western agencies and concealed hideouts of the top terrorists, the sources said.
Mukhtar had revealed about Osama’s Abottabad hideout to his then boss DG of ISI Ahmad Shuja Pasha, who in turn passed on the information to the Americans, who later killed Osama.
In 2013, Omar died due to illness in Karachi. However, he had allowed safe hideouts to other Talibani cadres, sources said. When Omar died, other Taliban cadres taking refuge in Karachi became leaderless. Mukhtar, however, started eliminating political rivals of Nawaz Sharif’s party in Sindh and Karachi by branding them as RAW agents. He had also targeted a number of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Balochistan Liberation Army. This is one of the major reasons why has been appointed as the ISI chief, an official said.
As per Intelligence assessments, Mukhtar is said to be deeply influenced by Pak President Zia ul Haq’s doctrine of bleeding India with a thousand cuts. Inputs further suggest Mukhtar could seek to destabilise the pro-India government in Afghanistan and re-establish the Taliban regime there. The new Army chief of Pakistan General Qamar Javed Bajwa is already a favourite of the Haqqani network.
Both Laden and Umar were assets for Mukhtar and now that both are dead, the new ISI boss could seek to shift operations from Dubai to the eastern countries like Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
“Mukhtar had deceived the Americans in the counter-terror operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Now that Pakistan has a significant number of Chinese people, particularly due to the investments in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), there is every possibility that he will deceive them in one manner or the other,” a top Intelligence official said, adding that radical Muslims could be pushed into China through CPEC or Mukhtar’s agents could hit cargo movement in the corridor to seek more Chinese funds.