The next day, talking to the BBC, an unnamed senior official contradicted Qureshi saying the wing hadn’t been disbanded but was made “inactive”. According to this official, the staff had not been given new assignments.

Wonderful! But let’s take a pause and see what this political wing is all about.

Talk of a “dirty-tricks” brigade within the ISI has been around for a while. But it re-emerged when a former director-general, Lt-Gen Hameed Gul (retd), decided to recast himself as a democrat and as part of his mea culpa to the nation confessed that the ISI has a dedicated political wing which is used to make and break governments.

I recently asked another former DG, Lt-Gen Asad Durrani (retd.) about the wing. Durrani denied there was any dedicated set-up but admitted that the ISI played a political role when asked by a government to do so — and didn’t need a dedicated wing for the job.

Where does the truth lie?

Conversations with various officers reveal that there may be no “dedicated” political wing but the agency not only has the capacity in its internal wing to meddle in political affairs but has been doing this both off its own bat as well as at the behest of successive governments.

Keeping tabs on politicians within and outside the government is something most intelligence agencies do. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover became notorious for such activities. Recent books on R&AW show the agency performs this task almost as a routine affair.

Objectionable though such interventions in peoples’ privacy may be, the situation becomes worse when an agency is routinely utilised to put down political opponents. The PPP says it has been stung the most by the ISI. But the irony is that its founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was the man who put the ISI and the Federal Security Force — his own creation — to most use when it came to hounding and putting down political opponents.

So, how does one wean the ISI from something it has been expected to do for a long time and for which the agency seems to have developed a taste? Definitely not by announcing casually at the Multan airport that the political wing of the ISI has been disbanded; nor, as was earlier done abortively, placing it under the interior ministry.

At the minimum two things are required. Conceptualising an effective reform process which must be debated thoroughly before it is implemented; and creating, as part of that exercise, an effective monitoring mechanism which can keep a check on the agency without interfering with its necessary work and compromising its requirements for secrecy.

This is not an easy task; neither is it a function of casual statements that can be contradicted the very next day or of orders that are then rescinded with obscene haste.

Dealing with the ISI is a serious issue requiring a degree of gravitas, something that seems to be missing from most actions by the current government. When the CIA was thought to have become too big for its boots, the then-US president Jimmy Carter decided to reform it by purging its Directorate of Operations in what is now famously referred to as the Halloween Massacre.

Whether the ISI needs such a purge can only be decided through a proper review process which, as noted earlier, must result in reforming both the agency and its interaction with any government. As things stand, without such a process and an intrusive mechanism to verify that the agency is not overstepping its brief, the agency retains its capacity to make mischief and any government possesses the inclination to use it for internal mischief.

Do we need the ISI’s internal wing in the presence of the Intelligence Bureau? Currently, it performs both tasks, counter-intelligence and external intelligence. Is there need to have an agency, apart from Military Intelligence, that is officered at the top by the military? Should the ISI only concern itself with external intelligence and leave counter-intelligence to the IB or some other organisation?

These and other questions need to be addressed. But, and this is crucial — no matter what organisation is created — and how many purges are done, until a country retains a culture of political oppression, intelligence agencies, with their cloak-and-dagger outlook, will always come in handy.

So, in addition to any re-organisation, what is most needed are measures that can prevent a government from utilising an agency to further its political ends. And these measures must be part of a transparent process of checks and balances.

The writer is Op-Ed Editor Daily Times and Consulting Editor The Friday Times, Lahore; the views expressed are his own

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