Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, has claimed that the much-dreaded Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI-D) is now being "cleansed and restructured". Such a statement should be welcomed in India but with substantial doses of caution. Circumspection is in order because the transformation that is being contemplated would require a dramatic reordering of civil-military relations within Pakistan.

The ISI-D, after all, is a handmaiden of the behemoth Pakistani military establishment. The latter, as is well known, has long guarded its extraordinary privileges at the cost of civilian and democratic regimes in Pakistan. It will not easily allow civilian authority to reorder its interests and prerogatives merely because there is growing anger in New Delhi and...