A FEW days ago, this newspaper carried a report from its Islamabad bureau to the effect that the Chief Executive was now relying on information from the ISI to decide senior civil service promotion cases.

Apparently, a number of officers on the panel have been superseded because the intelligence agency found them to be corrupt. Now I have no way of knowing whether the charge is accurate or not, but this method of assessing the suitability of officers to further promotion raises a number of disquieting questions. Firstly, the officers concerned have no way of defending themselves. Just because a low-level intelligence official files a report saying that X, Y or Z is living in a big house or driving an expensive car is not necessarily proof of corruption: he could have private means, or be married to a rich woman.

Without holding any brief for crooks, the point I am making is that this recourse to intelligence agencies in such cases flies in the face of natural justice as an assumption of guilt is made without either informing the individual of the charge, or allowing him to offer an explanation in his defence. And if the Chief Executive is indeed convinced that this group of officers is corrupt, then surely they should be sacked. Merely being overlooked for promotion is not enough.

But what is more worrying than the careers of a few civil servants is the involvement of the Inter Service Intelligence in such mundane, purely domestic matters. Surely its agents have better things to do than calculate how much our civil servants are spending. Given the situation in Afghanistan and Kashmir, one would imagine that the ISI has its plate full. And surely the threat perceived by our leaders from across our eastern border should be the proper focus of military intelligence. As it is, there are more than enough civilian outfits who go around snooping in areas of little interest to most of us.

In a very interesting article written by Benazir Bhutto in The Nation recently, the ex-Prime Minister has dilated on the rise of intelligence agencies in Pakistan. While she has glossed over her own (as well as her father's) role in supporting this massive expansion, Ms Bhutto has given details of how officers who have served in the ISI have been rewarded with diplomatic assignments, and how the resources of military and civilian intelligence agencies have been expanded so that they are now operating down to the tehsil level.

While the ISI was headed by a Brigadier until the seventies, the post was upgraded and the agency was headed by Lt-General Jilani under Bhutto. It was he who advised the prime minister to appoint Ziaul Haq as COAS, and according to reports, it was General Jilani who warned Zia that he was about to be sacked, thus triggering the coup of July, 1977. After the United States, China and other countries started sending billions of dollars in cash and equipment to the Afghan freedom fighters through the ISI, the intelligence outfit was expanded considerably, and it acquired a major role in policy-making in Afghanistan.

During Mr Bhutto's term, a political cell was created in the ISI to monitor opposition activities. This was the first time this agency was given a domestic role, and under Zia, this capacity was steadily increased. Both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif relied heavily on ISI reports to keep tabs on their rivals. But it was not until General Aslam Beg admitted in the course of a Supreme Court hearing that the ISI had received Rs 140 million from Mehran Bank to rig the 1990 election that we learned the extent and nature of the agency's involvement in national politics. Apparently, the ISI had cobbled together the Pakistan National Alliance to prevent the PPP from returning to power after it had been turfed out by the president. Needless to add, the politicians who benefited from Mehran Bank's largesse and the ISI's patronage are still masquerading as democrats.

Today the country is awash in spooks of every description. Apart from the ISI, there is Military Intelligence, the Intelligence Bureau and the FIA. In addition, the provincial police forces have any number of plainclothes cops, and all the armed forces have their separate intelligence agencies. Phones are routinely tapped without any legal authority and letters opened without let or hindrance. Most of these agencies have huge budgets that are not subjected to scrutiny or audit. They are answerable to nobody but their own immediate superiors.

In the last decade, there have been four elected governments, and neither of the two prime ministers who headed them have been able to reduce the size or role of the intelligence agencies in domestic politics. On the contrary, they relied on them to hang on, knowing all too well that the spooks could destabilize their governments when they chose to. The infamous "Midnight Jackal" operation was mounted in 1989 by retired Brigadier Iqbal and Major Aamir - both Nawaz Sharif's hatchet men - to topple Benazir Bhutto.

Ever since the present military government took over last October, the newly created National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has recruited on a considerable scale, mostly from among retired army officers. These gentlemen have taken to spending their time in government corporations and departments, trying to get details of past scams. But since their grasp of accounting and contracts is uncertain, they want serving civil servants to explain the finer points of purchase procedures to them. So far, this brigade of retired officers has failed to do much except bring decision-making in these organizations to a virtual halt.

The problem in having an army of spooks is that apart from the enormous costs involved, they have to find things to do to justify their salaries. And what they do is spy on citizens who pose no threat to national security. This will inevitably result in a serious erosion of our civil rights as half-baked reports from intelligence sources come to shape our future.

Indeed, the whole business of having intelligence agents monitoring the administration and the political system is against the spirit of democracy and the open society it seeks to promote. If any future civilian government has the political will to reduce their numbers and powers, they will turn against it and destabilize it. Here then is another job for the Chief Executive: bring the spooks to heel.