President Obama plans to announce Wednesday evening that he will order the withdrawal of 10,000 American troops from Afghanistan this year, and another 20,000 troops, the remainder of the 2009 “surge,” by the end of next summer, according to administration officials and diplomats briefed on the decision. These troop reductions are both deeper and faster than the recommendations made by Mr. Obama’s military commanders, and they reflect mounting political and economic pressures at home, as the president faces relentless budget pressures and an increasingly restive Congress and American public.
The president is scheduled to speak about the Afghanistan war from the White House at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
Mr. Obama’s decision is a victory for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has long argued for curtailing the American military engagement in Afghanistan. But it is a setback for his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped write the Army’s field book on counterinsurgency policy, and who is returning to Washington to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
Two administration officials said General Petraeus did not endorse the decision, though both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is retiring, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reluctantly accepted it. General Petraeus had recommended limiting initial withdrawals and leaving in place as many combat forces for as long as possible, to hold on to fragile gains made in recent combat.
Peace activists won a major victory on Monday, June 20, when the US Conference of Mayors voted to adopt two resolutions that call for a drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abolition of nuclear weapons. Both resolutions also demand the reprioritization of defense spending, including the $126 billion spent each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, toward the needs of municipalities.
The group, which represents mayors of municipalities with 30,000 or more residents, has not passed such a resolution in 40 years.
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow Karen Dolan directs IPS’s Cities For Peace project, which organizes elected officials and activists to take action against war on a local level. In a statement to Truthout, Dolan said that the mayors, “are responsive to the needs of the people in a way in which Congress and the president have not been. Unless money is better spent at the state and local level, we will not see an economic recovery.” According to IPS, hundreds of municipalities around the United States have called for the end to the wars in the Middle East.
It was one of history’s greatest prison escapes in terms of the ingenuity and perseverance of those involved. It happened at 10pm on 25 April this year in southern Afghanistan. After five months of tunnelling, Taliban diggers finally broke through the concrete floor of a cell in the centre of Sarposa prison on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar. Behind them snaked a tunnel 3ft high and almost 1,200ft long, which led under the prison walls to a house on the far side of a main road. During the next five hours, 541 prisoners, one of them with a broken leg, crawled to freedom. Only when the guards tried to hold their regular roll call in the prison yard later in the morning did they discover the empty cells from which had vanished some of the most dangerous prisoners in the world.
The story of the escape is not only exciting in itself; it shows Taliban members – usually portrayed as brainwashed fanatics – as imaginative, disciplined and resourceful. This is what makes them such formidable adversaries of the American, British and Afghan armies, despite their inferiority in numbers, training and weapons. The Kandahar prison break illustrates an ability to foresee difficulties and find intelligent ways of overcoming them.
The escape is also one of the few complicated operations carried out by the Taliban where a full account is available from their side and can be largely confirmed by American and Afghan government sources. Some of these details emerged immediately after the escape, as Taliban spokesmen crowed about their success and Afghan government and American officials produced their own embarrassed explanations about what had gone wrong. But the whole story of the escape from the Kandahar prison only emerged several months later when the Taliban allowed the details of the escape to be published in its Arabic-language magazine Al-Somood. Two articles were printed, one of which appears to be the Taliban’s lengthy official account of the escape, supplemented by a second shorter piece, published under the name of “Muhammad Idris”, a young Taliban fighter who was in Sarposa prison awaiting trial and was one of the first people into the tunnel. The two articles were translated and put online by the prestigious Afghanistan Analysts website. They are circumspect about a few episodes, such as the possible complicity of the prison guards. But their account is otherwise convincing.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce this week that 30,000 U.S. “surge” forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, an administration official has told CNN.
Obama will deliver his highly anticipated speech on the troop drawdown on Wednesday.
The time-frame would give U.S. commanders another two “fighting” seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed for additional time to roll back Taliban gains in the country before starting any significant withdrawal — a position at odds with a majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys.
Republicans are facing a widening fissure over the U.S. role on the world stage as party leaders decide whether to confront President Obama this week over his policy toward Libya.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional Republican leaders have said that U.S. involvement in NATO’s bombing campaign, which hit the 90-day mark Sunday, violates the War Powers Act. The House could seek to cut off money for the war as it takes up the annual Pentagon spending bill this week.
Several of the party’s potential presidential candidates have called for the U.S. to quit the fight in Libya and questioned the depth of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Other Republicans have begun pushing back, criticizing what they see as a growing isolationist agenda within the party. The result is that Republicans, once relatively unified on foreign policy issues, now have a division that parallels the long-standing split in Democratic ranks.
Since the United States handed control of the air war in Libya to NATO in early April, American warplanes have struck at Libyan air defenses about 60 times, and remotely operated drones have fired missiles at Libyan forces about 30 times, according to military officials.
The most recent strike from a piloted United States aircraft was on Saturday, and the most recent strike from an American drone was on Wednesday, the officials said.
While the Obama administration has regularly acknowledged that American forces have continued to take part in some of the strike sorties, few details about their scope and frequency have been made public.
The unclassified portion of material about Libya that the White House sent to Congress last week, for example, said “American strikes are limited to the suppression of enemy air defense and occasional strikes by unmanned Predator” drones, but included no numbers for such strikes.
Reports that a guard at the hotel housing foreign journalists here had been fatally shot sent a tremor of anxiety through the Qaddafi government’s media operation on Monday.
While Qaddafi loyalists said the guard accidentally shot himself with his own weapon while eating a late dinner at the end of the hotel two days earlier, at least two people working for the government said on the condition of anonymity that he was killed by rebel snipers.
The guard had been assigned to protect a prominent state television commentator known for his outspoken criticism of the rebels. The commentator, Yousef Shakeer, had taken refuge with his family inside the safety of the hotel because of rebel death threats against him.
In a brief interview, Mr. Shakeer said the government had identified his would-be assassin as a past member of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group, a jihadist group that dates back years, and he affirmed the government’s account that the guard accidentally shot himself on Saturday night.
While the details of the shooting could not be confirmed, it came amid growing reports of episodes of violence between local rebels challenging the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his security forces. Some Tripoli residents said Monday that the sense of danger from the ground was compounding the effect of the escalation of NATO strikes from above.
When I was a child, I read the Guinness Book of Records, and marvelled at the stories of the people who, in ancient times, removed themselves from everyday reality, like Saint Simeon Stylites, a Christian ascetic who lived on a tiny platform on top of a pillar in Aleppo, Syria for 37 years in the 5th century AD.
As I grew up, I continued to hear about people who had similarly removed themselves from the everyday world, and had come to be be regarded as prophets or as saints, appealing to those bound by the norms of everyday life — or in some cases vilified by them. However, they were always in countries that were not part of the so-called “first world,” where dissent is tolerated only so long as it is toothless, and the authorities have no patience for anyone who would occupy a public place in pursuit of a higher purpose.
Nevertheless, on June 2, 2001, Brian Haw, born in Barking, Essex, who was married with seven children, and, at the time, was 52 years old, took up residence opposite the Houses of Parliament, initially protesting about the British government’s involvement in the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, which, he maintained, were responsible for the deaths of 200 Iraqi children per day.
After a long battle with lung cancer, Brian Haw died on Saturday June 18, but for ten years he maintained his protest, along the way becoming a hero for anyone not convinced that Britain, the US and other countries in the West should be engaged in perpetual war, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have died.
One of the highlights of the Netroots convention that ended yesterday was a panel on getting out of Afghanistan that included the threat by two House Democrats to work with antiwar Republicans to undermine the Obama war program in coming weeks.
Below I’m going to provide some of the back-and-forth from that panel to convey the intensity and eloquence of that leftwing criticism, at a time when the Congressmen said that the White House is reexamining its Afghan commitment. And if you don’t read everything in this dialogue– well, be sure to read General Paul Eaton’s Arlington Cemetery story 1/2 way down.
REP. JIM McGOVERN of Massachusetts: “We’re being called by the administration and being told about all these successes in Afghanistan. ‘We secured this village, this [other] one’… The question is, is any of this sustainable without a prolonged military presence? Everything we do requires us to be there forever… And I wouldn’t trust the government of Afghanistan to tell me the correct time, based on their record of corruption.”
STEVE CLEMONS of the New America Foundation, and leader of an Afghan Study Group, pointed out that we are spending nearly $120 billion a year in a country that has a GDP of $14 billion. Couldn’t that money be better spent than on military actions? Clemons named Republicans who are making hay by questioning Afghanistan, including Michelle Bachmann, Michael Steele, Ann Coulter, Bing West (a former Reagan Defense official), Grover Norquist, and likely presidential candidate John Huntsman Jr.
The White House figured that when leftwingers abandoned them on Afghanistan, they still had the right wing. But Clemons arranged for a poll of conservatives. “Once they knew of the costs, support collapsed.”
An overwhelming number of voters believe the United States is involved in too many foreign conflicts and should pull back its troops, according to a new poll conducted for The Hill.
Seventy-two percent of those polled said the United States is fighting in too many places, with only 16 percent saying the current level of engagement represented an appropriate level. Twelve percent said they weren’t sure.
Voters also do not think having U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the country safer, according to the poll.
Thirty-seven percent said the continued presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan makes no impact on national security, while another 17 percent said it makes the United States less safe. By contrast, 36 percent said the United States is safer because forces are in Afghanistan.
As the Obama administration nears a crucial decision on how rapidly to withdraw combat forces from Afghanistan, high-ranking officials say that Al Qaeda’s original network in the region has been crippled, providing a rationale for an accelerated reduction of troops.
The officials said the intense campaign of drone strikes and other covert operations in Pakistan — most dramatically the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — had left Al Qaeda paralyzed, with its leaders either dead or pinned down in the frontier area near Afghanistan. Of 30 prominent members of the terrorist organization in the region identified by intelligence agencies as targets, 20 have been killed in the last year and a half, they said, reducing the threat they pose.
Their confidence, these officials said, was buttressed by information found in Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. They said the trove revealed disarray within Al Qaeda’s leadership, with a frustrated Bin Laden indicating that he could no longer direct terrorist attacks by lieutenants who feared for their own lives.
The American success in the counterterrorism campaign would seem to bolster arguments for a swift withdrawal from Afghanistan — an issue the administration is currently examining. The officials emphasized that Mr. Obama had not yet made a determination on that question.
Fighting Al Qaeda, they noted, was the main reason Mr. Obama agreed to deploy 30,000 more troops last year, even as he adopted a broader, more troop-intensive and time-consuming strategy of making key towns in Afghanistan safe from the Taliban and helping the Afghans to build up security forces and a better-functioning government.
The focus on progress against Al Qaeda was also a counter to arguments made by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other military officials in recent days that the initial reduction of troops should be modest, and that American combat pressure should be maintained as long as possible so that the gains from the surge in troops are not sacrificed.
The president of Afghanistan has said his government and the US are negotiating with Taliban fighters to bring peace to the country.
While officials at the US embassy in Kabul could not be immediately reached for comment, Hamid Karzai’s remarks were the first official confirmation of US involvement in the negotiations.
“Peace talks have started with [the Taliban] already and it is going well,” Karzai said on Saturday in Kabul.
“Foreign militaries, especially the United States of America, are going ahead with these negotiations.”
Diplomats have already said there have been months of preliminary talks between the two sides, and Karzai, who is a strong advocate of peace talks, has long said Afghans are in contact with anti-government groups.
Karzai’s disclosure came a day after the UN Security Council split the UN sanctions list for Taliban and al-Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help induce the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.
American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.
Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014 – the agreed date for all 130,000 combat troops to leave — despite continuing public debate in Washington and among other members of the 49-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan about the speed of the withdrawal.
American officials admit that although Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, recently said Washington did not want any “permanent” bases in Afghanistan, her phrasing allows a variety of possible arrangements.
“There are US troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently,” a US official told the Guardian.
As he mulls how many U.S. troops to pull out of Afghanistan starting next month, President Barack Obama is coming under increasing pressure from Democratic lawmakers and a growing number of Republicans to re-examine his war strategy following Osama bin Laden’s death.
Obama’s nominee to be the new U.S. ambassador to Kabul, veteran diplomat Ryan Crocker, felt the heat on Wednesday. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members of both parties used Crocker’s confirmation hearing to vent frustration with record violence in Afghanistan nearly a decade after the U.S. invasion, and to question the size of the U.S. military contingent and what nearly $19 billion in U.S. aid since 2001 has accomplished.
Before the hearing, the panel’s majority Democrats released a two-year study highly critical of U.S. aid programs. It found that the $320 million now spent each month lacks oversight, has limited impact, is fueling corruption and diverting skilled Afghans into U.S.-funded projects, depriving their government of their talents.
“While the United States has genuine national security interests in Afghanistan, our current commitment in troops and in dollars is neither proportional to our interest nor sustainable,” said the committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, who until recently was a key backer of the administration’s policy.
“What we’re doing . . . is not sustainable,” agreed Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.
The complexities of an exit strategy are compounded because relations with Pakistan and Iran are severely strained. These countries do not have the option of withdrawing from the neighborhood. If their interests in Afghanistan are not related to ours to some extent, Afghanistan will exist under permanent threat. Without a sustainable agreement defining Afghanistan’s regional security role, each major neighbor will support rival factions across ancient ethnic and sectarian lines — and be obliged to respond to inevitable crises under the pressure of events. That is a prescription for wider conflict. Afghanistan could then play the role of the Balkans prior to World War I.
Such an outcome would threaten the security of Afghanistan’s neighbors more than America’s. A partly regional, partly global diplomatic effort is needed to accompany direct negotiation with the Taliban. So long as America bears the primary burden, Afghanistan’s neighbors avoid difficult decisions. To the extent that U.S. postwar withdrawal is made explicit and inexorable, they will be obliged to take another look. The formal deadline established by NATO, the implicit Obama administration deadline and the public mood make it impossible to persist in an open-ended civil war. An immediate withdrawal largely for symbolic reasons would risk falling between all shoals. A multilateral diplomacy that defines a common international security interest proscribing terrorist training centers and terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan should be undertaken urgently. To encourage this process, a deadline should be established for reaching a residual force — say, in 18 months to two years, with the major reductions coming at the end of the process. Should a reliable international enforcement mechanism emerge, the U.S. residual force can be merged into it. A regional conference is the only way a bilateral negotiation with the Taliban can be enforced. If the process proves intractable, Afghanistan’s neighbors will eventually have to face the consequences of their abdication alone.
After America’s withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and the constraint to our strategic reach produced by the revolution in Egypt, a new definition of American leadership and America’s national interest is inescapable. A sustainable regional settlement in Afghanistan would be a worthy start.
Signs are increasing that the American people are growing tired enough over fighting two and a half (or whatever the right number is, depending on how you count what’s going on in Libya) wars for their fatigue to affect policy, especially through the actions of their elected representatives in Congress. The war in Afghanistan, now the largest and most expensive in terms of ongoing operations, and now in its tenth year of U.S. involvement, has been the subject of several expressions of impatience. Less than two weeks ago a resolution in the House of Representatives calling on the administration to accelerate a withdrawal from Afghanistan came very close to passing (the vote was 204 to 215). Now Norm Dicks (D-WA), an influential Democrat on national security matters who is the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee on defense, has become an outspoken critic of the war. “I just think that there’s a war fatigue setting in up here,” says Dicks, “and I think the president is going to have to take that into account.” Skepticism about the war is increasingly being voiced by Republicans as well. Even Sarah Palin is expressing unease.
On Libya—on which Congressional dissent is fueled in part by the administration’s blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution—two resolutions of protest were put to a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday. One that was introduced by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and called directly for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Libyan conflict was defeated but attracted 148 votes, including 87 Republicans. The other, which was proposed by Speaker John Boehner as an alternative to the Kucinich resolution and passed, called on the administration to provide a more detailed explanation of the costs and objectives of the U.S. involvement in the war.
Then, of course, there is the Iraq War. It is still by far the most expensive of the expeditions in terms of cumulative costs, with the bill now exceeding $800 billion in direct costs and with all the eventual indirect costs making it more like a three trillion dollar war. But simply adhering to existing policy and agreements will mean that an end to this nightmare is just seven months away. There is no need for new action by Congress.
In general, bowing to popular fatigue is not necessarily a very careful and effective way of formulating national security policy. And throwing into the same hopper three wars that have been fought for different reasons (whether looking at the original rationales or at objectives that later emerged, which in each case were different from the original rationales) doesn’t necessarily represent careful policy-making either. But when drawing down or terminating each of these expeditions is in the national interest—which it is—then the national war fatigue is a force for good. It can and should be harnessed to effect a change of course in Afghanistan and Libya and to resist any diversion from the course toward the exit in Iraq.
President Obama’s national security team is contemplating troop reductions in Afghanistan that would be steeper than those discussed even a few weeks ago, with some officials arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden, which they called new “strategic considerations.”
These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field. They want gradual cuts that would keep American forces at a much higher combat strength well into next year, senior administration officials said.
The cost of the war and Mr. Karzai’s uneven progress in getting his forces prepared have been latent issues since Mr. Obama took office. But in recent weeks they have gained greater political potency as Mr. Obama’s newly refashioned national security team takes up the crucial decision of the size and the pace of American troop cuts, administration and military officials said. Mr. Obama is expected to address these decisions in a speech to the nation this month, they said.
Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former ambassador of the Taliban to Pakistan, and Hekmat Karzai, the Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS) in Kabul, write:
In December 2009, President Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops to confront growing violence in Afghanistan. Though the impact of the US military and diplomatic surge remains uncertain, we can nevertheless conclude that 2010 was easily the most violent year in the decade-old conflict.
The Taliban’s response, however, to this renewed attention by the international community was a surge of their own, which they launched through bold attacks and targeted assassinations of senior Afghan government officials. Their efforts have clearly made an impact on the ground.
The past three decades in Afghan history are filled with nothing but violence: cities turned into rubble; atrocities committed by countless different factions and – most importantly – generations lost to the violence.
Indeed, Afghans are now tired and just want to live in peace in a country where their children can go to school and live a normal life.
The process of reconciliation has become an important demand of Afghans and most are convinced, and will tell you, that the only way to end this bloody conflict is through a political settlement with the Taliban. Of course, there are a few voices that claim this blood bath should continue until the Taliban is “defeated”, but their arguments are divorced from the reality on the ground.
When Dennis Kucinich earlier this month introduced a bill to compel the withdrawal of all American troops from Libya within 15 days, the leadership of both parties and the political class treated it the way they do most of Kucinich’s challenges to establishment political orthodoxy: they ignored it except to mock its unSeriousness. But a funny thing happened: numerous liberal House Democrats were joined by dozens of conservative GOP members to express support for his bill, and the White House and GOP House leadership became jointly alarmed that the bill could actually pass; that’s why GOP House Speaker John Boehner introduced a Resolution purporting to rebuke Obama for failing to comply with the War Powers Resolution, but which, in fact, was designed to be an utterly inconsequential act. Its purpose was to protect Obama’s war by ensuring that Kucinich’s bill failed; the point of Boehner’s alternative was to provide a symbolic though meaningless outlet for those House members angry over Obama’s failure to get Congressional support.
Still, Kucinich’s bill attracted an extraordinary amount of support given that it would have forced the President to withdraw all troops from an ongoing war in a little over 2 weeks. A total of 148 House members voted for it; even more notable was how bipartisan the support was: 61 Democrats and 87 Republicans. Included among those voting for mandatory withdrawal from Libya were some of the House’s most liberal members (Grijalva, Holt, Woolsey, Barney Frank) and its most conservative members identified with the Tea Party (McClintock, Chaffetz, Bachmann). Boehner’s amendment — demanding that Obama more fully brief Congress — ultimately passed, also with substantial bipartisan support, but most media reports ultimately recognized it for what it was: a joint effort by the leadership of both parties and the White House to sabotage the anti-war efforts of its most liberal and most conservative members.
The president promised that he would act consistent with the War Powers Resolution, which requires congressional approval to continue military action beyond 60 days after it commences, and to consult closely with Congress. These commitments have gone unfulfilled. The administration even barred Defense Department officials from testifying at a public hearing and canceled a private briefing for senators by a Marine general. This disdain for Congress and constitutional principles led to Friday’s nonbinding House resolution.
Belatedly, the president and his allies are trying to establish congressional endorsement for the war through a nonbinding Senate resolution approving “the limited use of military force by the United States in Libya.” But this illustration of the president’s go-it-alone attitude would set a dangerous precedent.
These “sense of the Senate” resolutions are most often used to commemorate non-controversial events such as last month’s resolution celebrating National Train Day — not to authorize a war. The resolution would have no force of law and would not have to be passed by the House. Nonetheless, it would be touted by the administration as evidence of congressional approval for the war.
Passing this resolution would be a profound mistake that would lower the standard for congressional authorization for the use of military force and would forfeit the Senate’s own constitutional role. By setting this precedent in the interests of expediency, Congress would make it far more likely that future presidents will deem a nonbinding vote in one house as sufficient to initiate or continue a war, or marginalize Congress’s involvement in far more consequential war-making decisions than we face now in Libya.
A prominent Pakistani journalist who investigated links between the military and al-Qaida has been found dead, triggering angry accusations against the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan correspondent for a news service based in Hong Kong, disappeared on his way to a television interview in Islamabad on Sunday evening. On Tuesday, police said they found his body on a canal bank in Mandi Bahauddin, 80 miles south-east of the capital.
Shahzad’s abandoned car was found 25 miles away. Television images of his body showed heavy bruising to his face. Media reports said he had a serious trauma wound to the stomach.
Human Rights Watch had already raised the alarm over the disappearance of the 40-year-old father of three, citing a “reliable interlocutor” who said he had been abducted by ISI.
“This killing bears all the hallmarks of previous killings perpetrated by Pakistani intelligence agencies,” said a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in south Asia, Ali Dayan Hasan. He called for a “transparent investigation and court proceedings”.
Other journalists reacted angrily, directly accusing ISI of responsibility on television and social media. “Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies?” tweeted Mohammed Hanif, a bestselling author.
Al-Qaeda carried out the brazen attack on PNS Mehran naval air station in Karachi on May 22 after talks failed between the navy and al-Qaeda over the release of naval officials arrested on suspicion of al-Qaeda links, an Asia Times Online investigation reveals.
Pakistani security forces battled for 15 hours to clear the naval base after it had been stormed by a handful of well-armed militants.
At least 10 people were killed and two United States-made P3-C Orion surveillance and anti-submarine aircraft worth US$36 million each were destroyed before some of the attackers escaped through a cordon of thousands of armed forces.
An official statement placed the number of militants at six, with four killed and two escaping. Unofficial sources, though, claim there were 10 militants with six getting free. Asia Times Online contacts confirm that the attackers were from Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade, the operational arm of al-Qaeda.
Three attacks on navy buses in which at least nine people were killed last month were warning shots for navy officials to accept al-Qaeda’s demands over the detained suspects.
The May 2 killing in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden spurred al-Qaeda groups into developing a consensus for the attack in Karachi, in part as revenge for the death of their leader and also to deal a blow to Pakistan’s surveillance capacity against the Indian navy.
The deeper underlying motive, though, was a reaction to massive internal crackdowns on al-Qaeda affiliates within the navy.
Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside several navy bases in Karachi, the country’s largest city and key port.
“Islamic sentiments are common in the armed forces,” a senior navy official told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.
“We never felt threatened by that. All armed forces around the world, whether American, British or Indian, take some inspiration from religion to motivate their cadre against the enemy. Pakistan came into existence on the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations and therefore no one can separate Islam and Islamic sentiment from the armed forces of Pakistan,” the official said.
“Nonetheless, we observed an uneasy grouping on different naval bases in Karachi. While nobody can obstruct armed forces personnel for rendering religious rituals or studying Islam, the grouping [we observed] was against the discipline of the armed forces. That was the beginning of an intelligence operation in the navy to check for unscrupulous activities.”
The official explained the grouping was against the leadership of the armed forces and opposed to its nexus with the United States against Islamic militancy. When some messages were intercepted hinting at attacks on visiting American officials, intelligence had good reason to take action and after careful evaluation at least 10 people – mostly from the lower cadre – were arrested in a series of operations.
“That was the beginning of huge trouble,” the official said. [Continue reading…]
In the aftermath of 9/11 we worked in tandem; he was in Karachi, I was in Islamabad/Peshawar. After the US ”victory” in Afghanistan I went to visit him at home. He plunged me into Karachi’s wild side – in this and other visits. During a night walk on the beach he confessed his dream; he wanted to be Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times, which he regarded as the K2 of journalism. He got it.
And then, years before ”AfPak” was invented, he found his perfect beat – the intersection between the ISI, the myriad Taliban factions on both sides of AfPak, and all sorts of jihadi eruptions. That was his sterling beat; and no one could bring more hardcore news from the heart of hardcore than Saleem.
I had met some of his sources in Islamabad and Karachi – but over the years he kept excavating deeper and deeper into the shadows. Sometimes we seriously debated over e-mails – I feared some dodgy/devious ISI strands were playing him while he always vouched for his sources.
Cornered by the law of the jungle, no wonder most of my Pakistani friends, during the 2000s, became exiles in the United States or Canada. Saleem stayed – threats and all, the only concession relocating from Karachi to Islamabad.
Now they finally got him. Not an al-Qaeda or jihadi connection. Not a tribal or Taliban connection, be it Mullah Omar or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. It had to be the ISI – as he knew, and told us, all along.
In an interview on the Real News Network recorded a few days before his murder, Shahzad described the transformation of al Qaeda over the last decade and that while the group itself has shrunk, its ideology has spread horizontally by incorporation inside and beyond the new Taliban.
First you have to understand this fact, that there are 17 Arab-Afghan groups which are operating inside Pakistani tribal areas and in Afghanistan, and most of these groups and most of the groups are aligned with al Qaeda but they are not part of al Qaeda — number one. And the strength of those 17 Arab-Afghan groups is over 1,000 approximately.
Second, those who are the members of al Qaeda are hardly 100, not more than 100.
The third thing is — and this is the most important thing — and that is the phenomenon of new Taliban — the new generation of those Afghan fighters, of the Pakistani fighters, or the fighters coming from the Pakistani tribal areas who previously pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but now they — in the last ten years — they completely absorbed al Qaeda’s ideology inside-out, and they are more loyal to al Qaeda than to Mullah Omar or to the al Qaeda leaders, or to their jihadi commanders.
So this is the new group, this is al Qaeda horizontally, not only in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the tribal areas, but all across the globe, like in Yemen, in Somalia and other parts, even in Europe, even in America. So this is the new generation on which al Qaeda is heavily banking on. And not only those, but it also includes the new converts, white Caucasians which are living in North Waziristan and in South Waziristan. And many of them were sent back to their countries of origin in Europe, Canada and America, and different countries. So, this was a completely new phenomenon. Al Qaeda grew horizontally in different directions.
Watch Shahzad’s last interview (in two parts) with the Real News Network:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai called Tuesday for an immediate halt to coalition air strikes on civilian homes and threatened to take unilateral action to block such attacks if international forces don’t take him seriously.
Three days after an errant U.S. air strike killed as many as 12 Afghan women and children in southern Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai called a press conference to criticize the international alliance.
“The Afghan people can no longer tolerate these attacks on their homes,” Mr. Karzai said during the televised news conference. “Nobody has the right to take the life of an Afghan child.”
While Mr. Karzai has no significant authority to block the air strikes, his threats could inflame passions across Afghanistan and undermine the fragile working relationship with Western leaders as the U.S. military prepares to begin withdrawing thousands of troops this summer.
Western officials in Kabul said that relations between Mr. Karzai and the U.S.-led coalition have been deteriorating and the Afghan president took repeated jabs at military leaders during his hour-long press conference.
“We must clearly demonstrate our understanding that Afghanistan is an ally, not an occupied country,” Mr. Karzai told reporters. “And our treatment with NATO is from the point of view of an ally. If it turns to the other, to the behavior of an occupation, then of course the Afghan people know how to deal with that.”
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