Fair pushback, but I would argue the ISI isn’t even doing its primary job. No one expects the ISI to compensate for the broader state failure afflicting Pakistan. That’s given. But it lacks in its primary role of intelligence collections and analysis.
For example, Pakistan spent the entire Afghanistan war clandestinely aiding the Taliban. It got sanctioned and isolated for it. As soon as the Americans and NATO left, their supposed proxy turned rogue and initiated an active project of dismantling the Pakistani state.
The ongoing operations by Pakistan inside Afghanistan reflects this basic failure. The ISI didn’t know what it was getting into by supporting the Taliban. Today the Taliban are closer to India than Pakistan. That reflects an intelligence failure of epic proportions. Not to mention the ISI’s failure in locating senior BLA and TTP leadership in Afghanistan. Mossad with substantially less experience in Iran is able to eliminate to the entire cadre of Iranian leadership. RAW is executing operations in Canada and the US.
The ISI’s only known overseas operations in recent years was murdering a Pakistani journalist in cold blood in Kenya.
Ps
One of the most wanted people in Pakistan is a former ISI agent who went rogue and has engineered some of the biggest attacks in Pakistan. So the ISI can’t even handle its own agents.
You are still making two flawed assumptions. First, you are talking about ISI as if it has the resources, reach, institutional freedom, and operational insulation to act like an all seeing state within the state, when even agencies like the CIA or NSA cannot deliver that kind of omniscience or control.
Intelligence services work under budget limits, political interference, poor interagency coordination, bad source validation, and imperfect local partners. So when you list every downstream failure of Afghan policy, militancy, border insecurity, and proxy blowback and then collapse all of it into “ISI failed,” you are effectively expecting one institution to perform as god.
Second, you’re comparing ISI to RAW or Mossad in a completely lopsided way. You’re looking at the small percentage of visible successes from those agencies and treating that as the whole picture, while looking at Pakistan through the lens of every visible failure and treating that as the whole picture too. That’s just sampling bias. You don’t see the failed ops, bad reads, missed targets, political restrictions, internal screwups, and strategic blunders on the other side with the same level of visibility, so naturally the comparison ends up distorted.
On Afghanistan specifically, it is also too convenient to treat long term Taliban blowback as if it proves a uniquely ISI specific analytical collapse. States repeatedly back actors they believe are useful in one phase and dangerous in another; that is not rare in intelligence history, it is almost the norm. The Americans did this repeatedly, the Soviets did it, the Iranians do it, and regional services across the Middle East have done the same. That does not excuse bad judgment, but it does mean the issue is larger than “they didn’t know what they were getting into.” Often they know the risks and still proceed because policymakers prioritize short term gains over long term stability.
And this is where your argument still stretches too far because you’re bundling together strategic miscalculation, policy failure, weak border control, lack of governance, inability to eliminate every hostile leader across the border, and even rogue former operatives, then dumping all of it into one basket called “ISI is ineffective.”
An intel service can be flawed, overstretched, and operating in a declining system without being useless. What you’re really showing is that you expect "near perfect" outcomes from an institution that doesn’t have "near perfect" tools, while giving foreign agencies credit based mostly on the curated highlights people hear about online.
location: YOO-KAY
