Rawalpindi: Lt-General (r) Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director General Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s premier spy agency, has retired from his post on Sunday (today).
General Shuja Pasha was appointed DG ISI in October 2008 and due to reach the age of superannuation on 18 March 2010, but his tenure was extended by a year, until 18 March 2012. He will be replaced by Lieutenant General Zaheerul Islam.
Lt-Gen Pasha was recently named as one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine.
Pasha as an ISI chief saw major events including GHQ coming under attack from militants, the Mumbai bombings, the May 2 Abbottabad operation and the Memogate affair.
His tenure was surrounded by controversies arising out of these incidents and other matters such as the extension he got in his service along with the one given to Chief of Army Staff Gen Parvez Kayani. There are also allegations against him of supporting Imran Khan (which Khan strenuously denies) and creating the Pakistan Defence Council; and there have been constant outcries against alleged atrocities being committed in Balochistan and elsewhere – the Adiala 11 came to symbolise part of a problem our security agencies have been embroiled in for decades but whose intensity has increased manifold of late in the wake of the complexities arising out of Pakistan’s role in the war on terror on one hand and the Balochistan insurgency on the other.
Pasha’s successor, 56-year-old Zaheerul Islam, who has been appointed by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as head of the country powerful spy agency,  the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is considered a close aide of Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
Islam comes from a military family of Punjab province, and had served as Deputy ISI Director from 2008 to 2010.
Islam, as Corps Commander Karachi, played a key role in operations by security forces to control widespread ethnic and political violence in the commercial hub of the nuclear nation Karachi last year.
During his earlier stint in the ISI, he reportedly headed a section that dealt with domestic and counter-intelligence matters.
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