No Honor in Dying: Pakistan Disowns Its Dead ISI Agent in Delhi

Few intelligence failures are as embarrassing as confessing to an operation you never carried out, on your own official website. That is effectively what the Pakistan Army did when its "Shuhada" (martyrs) corner listed Naik Zulfiqar Ahmed, army number 1726016, as an ISI operative who died on November 16, 2007, while on a "suicide attack" operation — in New Delhi.

The entry, spotted in December 2010, gave unusual specifics: the operative died of kidney failure and acute respiratory infection at New Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. When the IANS news agency checked, hospital sources confirmed that a Pakistani patient named Zulfiqar Ahmed had indeed been admitted in November 2007 and had died of renal failure. What the army website did not explain was where the supposed suicide operation was meant to take place: no such attack occurred in Delhi or its surroundings in that period.

The listing sat in the same martyrs' section that had earlier published Pakistan's list of its dead from the 1999 Kargil conflict — itself once a denied operation. Whether the entry was a data-entry error, as some Pakistani commentators suggested, or an inadvertent slip of an official record, the effect was the same: a public, army-hosted document placing an ISI man in the Indian capital.

Pakistan has never officially acknowledged running such operations inside India, and the entry was the kind of thing intelligence services are supposed to take to the grave. Instead, it lived on a public webpage for anyone to find. For an agency whose stock-in-trade is deniability, there is no honor in that kind of dying — and no dignity in the disowning that followed.