AMONG the many things Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised upon returning to power for a third time, one of the more interesting, and important, was a pledge to restructure the Intelligence Bureau to make it more effective and less politicised.

The idea was to finally put the IB in its rightful place as the pre-eminent civilian intelligence organisation.

As reported in this newspaper yesterday and sourced by an IB insider, the federal government has partially delivered on its promise by providing more money, equipment and manpower to an organisation that suffered very real neglect during the near-decade-long military rule of Pervez Musharraf.

Most immediate has been the change seen in Karachi, with the IB playing a significant role alongside the law-enforcement agencies in the operation there.

However, much as the IB may want to pat itself on the back, there are enormous challenges that still remain to be addressed for the intelligence community as a whole.

The list of problems is long, both the generic and the specific. In the case of the ISI, there is little to no clarity on the scope of its mandate, its drift from intelligence-gathering to operational activities or even its legal origins. Surely, having grown to the size and influence the ISI has by now, a mandate that is legislated and parliamentary oversight are two basic, and still missing, requirements.

But there are wider problems, not least of which is politicisation. The IB itself has recently been drawn into a semi-controversy over its alleged spying on politicians and journalists.

Beyond the vaguely worded accusations and the equally murky denials, there is little clarity on the matter, leaving many to wonder whether professionalisation of the IB still means politicisation to some degree.

Then, there is the elephant in the room: the civ-mil imbalance. The National Internal Security Policy drawn up by the interior ministry has a section that deals with intelligence coordination between civilian and military spy agencies, and the creation of a ‘National Intelligence Directorate’ appears, at least on paper, to be a reasonable step.

But the real issue is whether the government has the capacity or the will to change the habits and thinking of entrenched and powerful intel organisations and their institutional backers.

It is in the very nature of the intelligence business to be suspicious of other organisations within even the same state structure, to drift into areas where they have no business or legal mandate to do so and to all the time raise the spectre of threats real and imagined to justify their ever-expanding presence. To be sure, Pakistan needs both an internally and externally strong intelligence set-up.

But what is needed and what is actually produced can hardly be assumed to be the same thing. The intelligence community needs serious attention and detoxification.