The secret lives of Fai

In arresting Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Kashmiri American Council (KAC) and the Washington D.C.-based Kashmir Centre, the FBI has inadvertently triggered controversy in India. Mr Fai has been accused of being an agent for the ISI and, as such, a secret operative for the Pakistani government. He ran the KAC as an interest group in the United States and organised seminars and conferences that sought to explore the Kashmir tangle, but invariably titled towards a “solution” that favoured Pakistan.

Over the years, Mr Fai had invited numerous Indian intellectuals to the US for his conferences. Many of these people now claim they had no idea he was an ISI affiliate and that if they had known they would not have gone. Others have defended the right to speak at Mr Fai’s conferences on the grounds of free speech.
While superficially persuasive, there is an element of hypocrisy to these arguments. First, it has been fairly clear for some time that Mr Fai and his organisation were being funded by Islamabad. The KAC was not a plain civil rights body but motivated by a political agenda. Its Indian guests must have known as much.
Second, free speech cannot exist outside of a free platform. The KAC platform was not a free platform. It comprised carefully-chosen speakers. They rarely, if ever, deviated strongly from Mr Fai’s preferred positions. Third, in at least some cases, KAC seminar speakers made statements in the US that they had (and have) never done publicly in India. This insults the idea of Indian democracy, imperfect but worth cherishing nevertheless.
The “outing” of the Fai network is a tactical advance for India. It brings under a cloud the other Kashmir Centres in London and Brussels. In these cities, Mr Fai’s peers have had access to British and European Union parliamentarians. This access remains the source of occasional bother for South Block.
By itself, however, the Fai case signals no great breakthrough for India on the Kashmir issue. There are both positive and negative reasons for this.
For a start, while fringe opinion in Brussels or London or even Washington D.C. may hold a different view, the political mainstream in the West has long lost the stomach for a radical and innovative answer to the Kashmir conundrum.
Since the Kargil War of 1999, the American administration has been consistent; it wants no redrawing of borders in South Asia. Since 9/11, few politicians in North America and Europe can seriously put forward a case for an autonomous Muslim-dominated territory, bordering Pakistan and susceptible to being overrun by Islamist militia. In that sense, India has won the larger international battle.
There remains, of course, the even more important domestic battle. New Delhi has a history of being dishonest in its dealings with the Kashmir Valley. It has to remedy this and find a compromise that Kashmiris, including Kashmiri Pandit refugees, the people of Jammu and Ladakh and the rest of the country can all live with. This may call for a grand bargain within the ambit of the Indian Constitution — maybe even amendments to the Indian Constitution, as was done, for example, when the Mizoram Accord was signed in 1986.
The debunking of Mr Fai and his KAC makes no difference to this process. New Delhi has to persevere, and persevere with integrity.
Yet, it has to be admitted that India is a sideshow in the FBI-Fai drama. Everybody and his mother knew what the KAC was all about. If it had links with Pakistani intelligence agencies, these would have been no secret to the authorities in Washington D.C. Granted, the intricacies of the financial relationship and information about specific banking transactions between Mr Fai and the ISI may have been hidden, but the big picture was clear.
So why has the FBI acted now? Is it a tit for tat game, as some have suggested, with Washington D.C. and Islamabad compromising each other’s intelligence assets as part of a testy exchange in the weeks following Osama bin Laden’s assassination? Will this shadow boxing inevitably cease sooner or later?
While that may be true, there is another factor to consider. Was Mr Fai working with the ISI only on the Kashmir project or was he a dual-use asset, with an insider knowledge of Pakistani intelligence operations directed at the West? This question would be exercising the Americans.
Political mobilisation is often carried out through grassroots organisations. Mr Fai’s Kashmir Centres were what are sometimes called “astroturf organisations”. Astroturf resembles grass but is not natural grass. An example of an astroturf organisation would be a group that opposes smoking bans because it says this is an infringement upon personal freedom. In reality, this group has been put together and paid by a tobacco company to put pressure on governments and build suitable civil society opinion.
The ISI and the Pakistani foreign office are masters at sponsoring and spinning off astroturf organisations. In their 2007 book, The Man from Pakistan (originally published as The Nuclear Jihadist), American writers Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins detailed how the Pakistani government, including individual diplomats and embassies, enabled the import of components for Dr A.Q. Khan’s nuclear weapons programme. They did so by setting up a series of front companies and spurious scientific research institutions that placed orders for dual-use devices in the US, Germany and so on.
As long as Islamabad was a strategic ally and as long as the Pakistani quest for the bomb targeted only India, the Americans looked the other way. It was when they realised that the A.Q. Khan network was supplying nuclear know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea and directly threatening the West that US officials took action.
It is likely the same story is being repeated with Mr Fai’s KAC and the other ISI-made astroturf organisations in Europe and America. As long as they demonised India, it was fine. What if, however, the ISI was also using them to provide logistical support to would-be jihadist cells in the West and within the frontiers of the US?

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com