Category Archives: Pakistan

Haqqani network will outlast the U.S. in Afghanistan

The New York Times reports:

They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.

They safeguard their mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.

Today, American intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged a daylong assault on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack, although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.

But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops.

American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.

“Whoever is in power in Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Pakistani officials warned Friday that they could jettison the United States as an ally if American officials continued to accuse Islamabad’s intelligence agency of assisting a leading Afghan Taliban group in recent attacks in Afghanistan.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar cautioned the U.S. against airing allegations such as the blunt charge of collusion between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as ISI, and the militant Haqqani network made Thursday by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan; you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people,” Khar said in New York, speaking to a Pakistani television channel. She was in the U.S. for the U.N. General Assembly session.

Pakistani army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani in a statement called Mullen’s remarks “very unfortunate and not based on facts.”

Pakistani officials continued to tersely reject the allegations and challenged the U.S. to furnish evidence of ties between the country’s intelligence community and the Haqqani group.

Mullen called the Haqqani network “a veritable arm” of the ISI and said the intelligence agency helped Haqqani militants during attacks Sept. 13 on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul as well as a truck bomb blast in Wardak province three days earlier that injured 77 American troops.

Facebooktwittermail

Rights groups rally to oppose U.S. aid to Uzbekistan

The Washington Post reports:

Human rights groups are lining up to pressure Congress not to authorize the provision of U.S. military aid to the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan, even though such assistance could prove crucial to getting supplies into and out of Afghanistan.

With the Obama administration weighing whether to request a waiver that would allow military aid to Uzbekistan for the first time since 2005, the groups recently sent a letter to members of the Senate pleading with them to oppose any such move, saying, “Uzbekistan’s status as a strategic partner to the United States should not be allowed to eclipse concerns about its appalling human rights record.”

The issue of military aid to Uzbekistan is a complicated one, but goes to the heart of the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan has been prohibited from receiving military aid since government security forces there massacred demonstrators six years ago, and the authoritarian state has carried out a host of human rights abuses since that time.

For Washington, however, the government of Islam Karimov matters more now than perhaps at any other time in the history of their relationship.

U.S. military officials remain leery that Pakistan, a sometimes fickle ally, could cut off its supply routes to American troops in Afghanistan — as it has done for limited stretches in the past. And if that happens, Uzbekistan becomes the best transhipment point into the war zone.

Facebooktwittermail

Saleem Shahzad’s murder, al Qaeda, and the ISI

Dexter Filkins writes:

I met Saleem Shahzad nine days before he disappeared, and he seemed to know that his time was running out. It was May 20th, and Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories about the Abbottabad raid: bin Laden was still alive; Kiyani and Pasha had secretly helped the Americans with the raid. Mostly, the public radiated anger and shame.

I had called Shahzad to discuss a pair of stories he’d written about bin Laden. In March, five weeks before the raid in Abbottabad, Shahzad claimed that bin Laden had suddenly come across the radar screens of several intelligence agencies: he was on the move. The story also reported that bin Laden had held a strategy meeting with an old friend, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen whom the State Department considers a “global terrorist.” Then, just after the Abbottabad raid, Shahzad published a report claiming that the Pakistani leadership had known that the Americans were planning a raid of some sort, and had even helped. What the Pakistanis didn’t know, Shahzad wrote, was that the person the Americans were looking for was bin Laden. Both stories struck me as possibly dubious, but it was clear that Shahzad had numerous sources inside Pakistani intelligence and other intelligence agencies in the region.

Shahzad and I agreed to meet at a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop, not far from his home. For years, Islamabad was a sleepy town of bureaucrats; however dangerous the rest of Pakistan was, the capital was usually quiet. This was no longer true. In 2008, the Marriott Hotel, only a few miles from Gloria Jean’s, was destroyed by a suicide bomber, who killed or wounded more than three hundred people. Lately, the Kohsar Market—the collection of expensive boutiques where the Gloria Jean’s is situated—had been declared off limits for American Embassy personnel on weekends, out of fear that it would be attacked.

Shahzad and I took our coffees upstairs. He pointed to a table in an alcove by a window. “Welcome to my private office,” he said, with a smile. “No one will be able to hear us here.”

We talked for a few minutes about the Abbottabad raid and the stories he’d written. Shahzad was tall and self-possessed; he had thick black hair and a round face offset by a trim beard. He was warm and expressive, the sort of reporter whom people talked to because he seemed genuinely nice. No wonder he got all those scoops, I thought. He was wearing Western clothes and spoke flawless English. He told me that he knew some of my colleagues, and offered to help me out in any way that he could.

And then Shahzad changed the subject. What he really wanted to talk about was his own safety. “Look, I’m in danger,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of Pakistan.” He added that he had a wife and three kids, and they weren’t safe, either. He’d been to London recently, and someone there had promised to help him move to England.

The trouble, he said, had begun on March 25th, the day that he published the story about bin Laden’s being on the move. The next morning, he got a phone call from an officer at the I.S.I., summoning him to the agency’s headquarters, in Aabpara, a neighborhood in eastern Islamabad. When Shahzad showed up, he was met by three I.S.I. officers. The lead man, he said, was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, who serves as the head of the I.S.I.’s media division.

“They were very polite,” Shahzad told me. He glanced over his shoulder. “They don’t shout, they don’t threaten you. This is the way they operate. But they were very angry with me.” The I.S.I. officers asked him to write a second story, retracting the first. He refused.

And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought about it every day since.

“We want the world to believe that Osama is dead,” Nazir said.

Bin Laden was still alive, his whereabouts presumably unknown, when that conversation occurred. I pressed Shahzad. What did they mean by that?

He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder again. They were obviously trying to protect bin Laden, he said.

“Do you think the I.S.I. was hiding bin Laden?” I asked him.

Shahzad shrugged again and said yes. But he hadn’t been able to prove it. (The I.S.I. calls this claim an “unsubstantiated accusation of a very serious nature.”)

Shahzad said that he’d left I.S.I. headquarters that day thinking that he needed to be careful. Now, two months later, there was another reason to worry: a book that he’d written, “Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” was being released in three days, in both Pakistan and the West. The book, written in English, explored even more deeply the taboo subject of the I.S.I.’s relationship with Islamist militants.

“They’re going to be really mad,” Shahzad said.

Facebooktwittermail

The CIA, lies and intelligence

After a recent speech, John Brennan, a longtime former CIA officer and currently President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, took a question from John Hopkins professor of strategic studies, Elliot Cohen, on the US policy of so-called targeted killing. Brennan responded by highlighting the “surgical” precision that Obama has insisted upon when the US chooses its targets.

If there are terrorists who are in an area where there are women and children or others, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger. In fact I can say that the types of operations that the US has been involved in — in the counter-terrorism realm — that nearly for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities that we have been able to develop.

Brennan might have been repeating what he had been told by the CIA and their reports may have stated that in each drone attack over the said period no civilians were knowingly killed. But ignorance is no defense.

Indeed, the CIA’s lack of interest in the truth is evident in the fact that they have been eager to refute the findings on the latest research on civilian casualties from drone attacks on the tribal areas of Pakistan before such findings had even been published.

  • One in seven of all US strikes appear to have resulted in child fatalities.
  • Between 2,292 and 2,863 people have died in the attacks.
  • Since Obama took office, those attacks have occurred on average once every four days.
  • Among those killed only 126 militants have been named.
  • Credible news reports indicate that between 385-775 civilians have been killed, including 164 children.

The New York Times reports:

On May 6, a Central Intelligence Agency drone fired a volley of missiles at a pickup truck carrying nine militants and bomb materials through a desolate stretch of Pakistan near the Afghan border. It killed all the militants — a clean strike with no civilian casualties, extending what is now a yearlong perfect record of avoiding collateral deaths.

Or so goes the United States government’s version of the attack, from an American official briefed on the classified C.I.A. program. Here is another version, from a new report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists: The missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, killing 18 people — 12 militants, but also 6 civilians, known locally as Samad, Jamshed, Daraz, Iqbal, Noor Nawaz and Yousaf.

The report, “Drone War Exposed – the complete picture of CIA strikes in Pakistan,” comes from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

CIA drone strikes have led to far more deaths in Pakistan than previously understood, according to extensive new research published by the Bureau. More than 160 children are among at least 2,292 people reported killed in US attacks since 2004. There are credible reports of at least 385 civilians among the dead.

In a surprise move, a counter-terrorism official has also released US government estimates of the numbers killed. These state that an estimated 2,050 people have been killed in drone strikes – of whom all but an estimated 50 are combatants.

The Bureau’s fundamental reassessment of the covert US campaign involved a complete re-examination of all that is known about each US drone strike.

The study is based on close analysis of credible materials: some 2,000 media reports; witness testimonies; field reports of NGOs and lawyers; secret US government cables; leaked intelligence documents, and relevant accounts by journalists, politicians and former intelligence officers.

The Bureau’s findings are published in a 22,000-word database which covers each individual strike in Pakistan in detail. A powerful search engine, an extensive timeline and searchable maps accompany the data.

The result is the clearest public understanding so far of the CIA’s covert drone war against the militants. Yet US intelligence officials are understood to be briefing against the Bureau’s work, claiming ‘significant problems with its numbers and methodologies.’

Iain Overton, the Bureau’s editor said: ‘It comes as no surprise that the US intelligence services would attack our findings in this way. But to claim our methodology is problematic before we had even published reveals how they really operate. A revelation that is reinforced by the fact that they cannot bring themselves to refer to non-combatants as what they really are: civilians and, all too often, children’.

The Bureau’s data reveals many more CIA attacks on alleged militant targets than previously reported. At least 291 US drone strikes are now known to have taken place since 2004.

The intended targets – militants in the tribal areas – appear to make up the majority of those killed. There are 126 named militants among the dead since 2004, though hundreds are unknown, low-ranking fighters. But as many as 168 children have also been reported killed among at least 385 civilians.

More than 1,100 people are also revealed to have been injured in the US drone attacks – the first time this number has been collated.

In the wake of the Bureau’s findings Amnesty International has called for more CIA transparency.

But transparency is not what intelligence agencies trade in — “transparency” is for them nothing more than another name for public relations.

Facebooktwittermail

Fighting back against the CIA drone war

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes:

They call it “bug splat”, the splotch of blood, bones, and viscera that marks the site of a successful drone strike. To those manning the consoles in Nevada, it signifies “suspected militants” who have just been “neutralised”; to those on the ground, in most cases, it represents a family that has been shattered, a home destroyed.

Since June 18, 2004, when the CIA began its policy of extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, it has left nearly 250 such stains on Pakistani soil, daubed with the remains of more than 2,500 individuals, mostly civilians. More recently, it has taken to decorating other parts of the world.

Since the Pakistani government and its shadowy intelligence agencies have been complicit in the killings, the CIA has been able to do all this with complete impunity. Major human rights organisations in thrall to the Obama Administration have given it a pass. So have the media, who uncritically accept officials’ claims about the accuracy of their lethal toys.

Two recent developments might change all this.

On July 18, 2011, three Pakistani tribesmen, Kareem Khan, Sadaullah, and Maezol Khan, filed a formal complaint against John A Rizzo, the CIA’s former acting General Counsel, at a police station in Islamabad. Until his retirement on June 25, 2009, Rizzo served as legal counsel to the program whose victims have included Kareem Khan’s son and brother, Maezol Khan’s seven-year-old son, and three family members of Sadaullah (who also lost both legs and an eye in the attack).

In an interview with Newsweek’s Tara McKelvey, Rizzo bragged that he was responsible for signing off on the “hit list” for “lethal operations”. The targets were “blown to bits” in “businesslike” operations, he said. By his own admission, he is implicated in “murder”. Indeed, he boasted: “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” And that is not the full extent of Rizzo’s derring-do: he claims he was also “up to my eyeballs” in Bush’s program of torture in black sites in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Facebooktwittermail

US-Pakistan relations worsen with arrest of two alleged spies

The Guardian reports:

Relations between Washington and Islamabad deteriorated further when the US justice department charged two men alleged to have been in the pay of the Pakistan intelligence service.

One was involved with the Kashmiri American Council, through which it is alleged that Pakistan channelled millions of dollars to influence members of the US Congress. The US said there are also Kashmiri centres in London and Brussels that the FBI alleged are run by elements of the Pakistani government. FBI special agent Sarah Webb Linden, in an affidavit unsealed on Tuesday, named the one in London as the Justice Foundation/Kashmir Centre run by Nazir Ahmad Shawl.

The FBI arrested the executive director of the Kashmiri American Council, Ghulam-Nabi Fai, aged 62, at his home in Fairfax, Virginia, later. The other, Zaheer Ahmad, 63, is believed to be in Pakistan. Both are US citizens and face a prison sentence of five years if convicted.

Facebooktwittermail

Campaigners seek arrest of former CIA legal chief over Pakistan drone attacks

The Guardian reports:

Campaigners against US drone strikes in Pakistan are calling for the CIA’s former legal chief to be arrested and charged with murder for approving attacks that killed hundreds of people.

Amid growing concern around the world over the use of drones, lawyers and relatives of some of those killed are seeking an international arrest warrant for John Rizzo, until recently acting general counsel for the American intelligence agency.

Opponents of drones say the unmanned aircraft are responsible for the deaths of up to 2,500 Pakistanis in 260 attacks since 2004. US officials say the vast majority of those killed are “militants”. Earlier this week 48 people were killed in two strikes on tribal regions of Pakistan. The American definition of “militant” has been disputed by relatives and campaigners.

The attempt to seek an international arrest warrant for Rizzo is being led by the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith of the campaign group Reprieve, and lawyers in Pakistan. The lawyers are also building cases against other individuals, including drone operators interviewed or photographed during organised press facilities.

Facebooktwittermail

Black ops and blood money

Matthew Teague writes:

Hearing the American’s name whispered in his ear, the chief of police in Lahore, Pakistan, turns from his desk and nods toward a nondescript side door in his office. His desk sits surrounded by concentric rings of chairs, occupied by visitors hoping for a moment of Chief Aslam Tareen’s time. Lahore is a city of 10 million people, and justice demands constant attention. But before he’ll discuss the American — perhaps the most notorious American in Pakistan’s history — Tareen needs privacy. He leaves his desk and slips through the side door into a smaller, more secluded office. A bed is in the corner, along with a television, and an attendant brings a pair of slippers and sets them before the chief’s leather recliner. In Pakistan the truth is like a woman; it stays veiled in public, only fully revealing itself behind closed doors. And this particular subject is a treacherous one.

“Raymond Davis,” Tareen says, settling into his chair. “Spy.”

Davis operated in the darkest shadows of the war against terrorism. He worked for the CIA as an independent contractor, gathering information on the jihadist group behind some of the most cruel and spectacular attacks in recent years. The intelligence operation collapsed violently in January when two Pakistani men accosted Davis on a crowded street and he shot them both dead with a skill rarely seen outside spy novels. A botched attempt to rescue him in the -aftermath left a third man dead and Davis under arrest.

Facebooktwittermail

David Headley saves his own life in a Chicago courtroom

Liz Mermin writes:

The United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois is an enormous glass cube of a building that occupies an entire block in downtown Chicago. When I arrive there on a cold and wet afternoon in the middle of May, the lobby is scattered with bomb-sniffing dogs and dozens of US Marshals. A sign outside the building noting “heightened security levels” suggests this is no ordinary state of affairs, even though America seems these days to be in a perpetual state of heightened security. But in this case a little paranoia could be forgiven: the trial getting underway is one of the most significant terrorism cases to have taken place in the US.

The defendant, a 50-year-old Pakistani-Canadian businessman and Chicago resident named Tahawwur Hussein Rana, is accused of the uniquely American crime of “providing material support to terrorism” in three instances: to the 26 November 2008 attack on Mumbai; to a plot against Jyllands-Posten, the Copenhagen newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in 2005; and to the Pakistani terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). He is being tried in America, rather than India or Denmark, in part because of the six Americans killed in the Mumbai attacks.

But the trial—which promises to linger in great detail on the workings of LeT and its relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as well as the involvement of al Qaeda in the Danish plot—doesn’t seem to be attracting much local attention. Judging from the headlines, Chicagoans are far more interested in the corruption trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the taping of Oprah Winfrey’s final talk show, and the predictions of an octogenarian Christian evangelical that the world will end on 21 May.

Even among the few reporters who have been closely following the case, no one really cares much about Rana. The star attraction will be David Coleman Headley—formerly Daood Gilani—who is expected to take the stand as a key witness against Rana, his oldest and best friend. A handful of Headley-obsessed journalists are converging on the courthouse for a chance to hear the man whose bizarre life they have been investigating for more than a year.

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. is deferring millions in Pakistani military aid

The New York Times reports:

The Obama administration is suspending and, in some cases, canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the Pakistani military, in a move to chasten Pakistan for expelling American military trainers and to press its army to fight militants more effectively.

Coupled with a statement from the top American military officer last week linking Pakistan’s military spy agency to the recent murder of a Pakistani journalist, the halting or withdrawal of military equipment and other aid to Pakistan illustrates the depth of the debate inside the Obama administration over how to change the behavior of one of its key counterterrorism partners.

Altogether, about $800 million in military aid and equipment, or over one-third of the more than $2 billion in annual American security assistance to Pakistan, could be affected, three senior United States officials said.

This aid includes about $300 million to reimburse Pakistan for some of the costs of deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border to combat terrorism, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware, according to half a dozen Congressional, Pentagon and other administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss the politically delicate matter.

Some of the curtailed aid is equipment that the United States wants to send but Pakistan now refuses to accept, like rifles, ammunition, body armor and bomb-disposal gear that were withdrawn or held up after Pakistan ordered more than 100 Army Special Forces trainers to leave the country in recent weeks.

Some is equipment, such as radios, night-vision goggles and helicopter spare parts, which cannot be set up, certified or used for training because Pakistan has denied visas to the American personnel needed to operate the equipment, two senior Pentagon officials said.

And some is assistance like the reimbursements for troop costs, which is being reviewed in light of questions about Pakistan’s commitment to carry out counterterrorism operations. For example, the United States recently provided Pakistan with information about suspected bomb-making factories, only to have the insurgents vanish before Pakistani security forces arrived a few days later.

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistan hits back at US commander over journalist’s murder claim

The Guardian reports:

Pakistan has lashed out at America’s top-ranking military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, on Friday, saying that its relations with the US have been further damaged by his remarks blaming the Islamabad government for the killing, torture and murder of a Pakistani journalist.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff shocked Islamabad by saying publicly what US officials had confirmed only in private: that the Pakistani government had “sanctioned” the killing of Syed Saleem Shahzad, the investigative reporter for Asia Times Online whose mutilated body was found on 30 May in a canal 40 miles from the capital. He had been writing about jihadist infiltration of the Pakistani military.

Pakistan’s information minister, Firdous Ashiq Awan, told a news conference Mullen had made an “extremely irresponsible and unfortunate statement”.

“This statement will create problems and difficulties for the bilateral relations between Pakistan and America. It will definitely deal a blow to our common efforts with regard to the war on terror,” she said, without going into details.

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistani generals ‘helped sell nuclear secrets’

The Guardian reports:

The story of the world’s worst case of nuclear smuggling took a new twist on Thursday when documents surfaced appearing to implicate two former Pakistani generals in the sale of uranium enrichment technology to North Korea in return for millions of dollars in cash and jewels handed over in a canvas bag and cardboard boxes of fruit.

The source of the documents is AQ Khan, who confessed in 2004 to selling parts and instructions for the use of high-speed centrifuges in enriching uranium to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Extracts were published by the Washington Post, including a letter in English purportedly from a senior North Korean official to Khan in 1998 detailing payment of $3m to Pakistan’s former army chief, General Jehangir Karamat, and another half-million to Lieutenant General Zulfiqar Khan, who was involved in Pakistan’s nuclear bomb tests.

Both generals denied the allegations. “What can I say. [These are] bits of old info packaged together. [There is] not an iota of truth in the allegations against me. [There is] no reason on earth for anyone to pay me for something I could not deliver,” Karamat wrote in an email to the Guardian. Lt Gen Khan told the Washington Post that the documents were “a fabrication”.

The issue is seen as critically important by western governments. Seven years after Khan, the godfather of the Pakistani nuclear programme, made his public confession on Pakistani television, there is still uncertainty over the extent to which he was a rogue operator or just a salesman acting on behalf of the Pakistani state and its army. Western officials are also unsure whether the covert nuclear sales are continuing.

Facebooktwittermail

US officials say ISI murdered Pakistani journalist

The New York Times reports:

Obama administration officials believe that Pakistan’s powerful spy agency ordered the killing of a Pakistani journalist who had written scathing reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military, according to American officials.

New classified intelligence obtained before the May 29 disappearance of the journalist, Saleem Shahzad, 40, from the capital, Islamabad, and after the discovery of his mortally wounded body, showed that senior officials of the spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, directed the attack on him in an effort to silence criticism, two senior administration officials said.

The intelligence, which several administration officials said they believed was reliable and conclusive, showed that the actions of the ISI, as it is known, were “barbaric and unacceptable,” one of the officials said. They would not disclose further details about the intelligence.

But the disclosure of the information in itself could further aggravate the badly fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan, which worsened significantly with the American commando raid two months ago that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistan safehouse and deeply embarrassed the Pakistani government, military and intelligence hierarchy. Obama administration officials will deliberate in the coming days how to present the information about Mr. Shahzad to the Pakistani government, an administration official said.

The disclosure of the intelligence was made in answer to questions about the possibility of its existence, and was reluctantly confirmed by the two officials. “There is a lot of high-level concern about the murder; no one is too busy not to look at this,” said one.

A third senior American official said there was enough other intelligence and indicators immediately after Mr. Shahzad’s death for the Americans to conclude that the ISI had ordered him killed.

“Every indication is that this was a deliberate, targeted killing that was most likely meant to send shock waves through Pakistan’s journalist community and civil society,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the information.

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistani military still cultivates militant groups, a former fighter says

The New York Times reports:

The Pakistani military continues to nurture a broad range of militant groups as part of a three-decade strategy of using proxies against its neighbors and American forces in Afghanistan, but now some of the fighters it trained are questioning that strategy, a prominent former militant commander says.

The former commander said that he was supported by the Pakistani military for 15 years as a fighter, leader and trainer of insurgents until he quit a few years ago. Well known in militant circles but accustomed to a covert existence, he gave an interview to The New York Times on the condition that his name, location and other personal details not be revealed.

Militant groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen and Hizbul Mujahedeen, are run by religious leaders, with the Pakistani military providing training, strategic planning and protection. That system was still functioning, he said.

The former commander’s account belies years of assurances by Pakistan to American officials since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that it has ceased supporting militant groups in its territory. The United States has given Pakistan more than $20 billion in aid over the past decade for its help with counterterrorism operations. Still, the former commander said, Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has not abandoned its policy of supporting the militant groups as tools in Pakistan’s dispute with India over the border territory of Kashmir and in Afghanistan to drive out American and NATO forces.

“There are two bodies running these affairs: mullahs and retired generals,” he said. He named a number of former military officials involved in the program, including former chiefs of the intelligence service and other former generals. “These people have a very big role still,” he said.

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistan: the hard reality

At Open Democracy, Anatol Lieven writes:

If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan, it is “Janus-faced”. So apt do I find it, and so often did I use it in the draft of my book Pakistan: A Hard Country (Penguin/Public Affairs, 2011), that the editor went through the manuscript excising it.

Where politics are concerned, the notion suggests that many of the features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic and political development.

This is most obviously true of the Pakistan army. The institution is essential to keeping the country together, but through its proportionally huge budget drains money that might otherwise have gone to development; and through its repeated interventions in government acts as a brake on what might otherwise have been greater progress towards democracy.

The operative word here, however, is “might”. For even leaving aside the military, there are colossal obstacles in Pakistan both to the creation a truly representative democracy and to economic and social progress. These obstacles are bound up both with the deep conservatism of most of the population, and with the entrenched power of local kinship groups and the landowning and urban bosses who lead them.

Facebooktwittermail

Partial troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

CBS News reports:

President Obama on Wednesday night informed the nation of his plans to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by fall of next year, marking the beginning of the end of an increasingly unpopular war.

“The tide of war is receding,” Mr. Obama said from the White House, promising that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will both come to a “responsible end.”

Ten thousand troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, the president announced, with another 23,000 leaving no later than September 2012. That would leave roughly 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan to continue the decade-long war.

The New York Times reports:

[T]here are two reasons American planners hope to negotiate with the government of President Hamid Karzai an agreement to keep upward of 25,000 American forces in Afghanistan, even after the 30,000 “surge” troops are withdrawn over the next 14 months, and tens of thousands of more by the end of 2014.

Their first is to assure that Afghanistan never again becomes a base for attacks on the United States. But the more urgent reason is Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama invited Pakistan to expand its peaceful cooperation in the region, but he also noted that Pakistan must live up to its commitments and that “the U.S. will never tolerate a safe haven for those who would destroy us.”

Pakistan has already made it clear, however, that it will never allow American forces to be based there. As relations have turned more hostile with the United States in recent months, it has refused to issue visas to large numbers of C.I.A. officers and seems to be moving quickly to close the American drone base in Shamsi, Pakistan.

For their part, administration officials make it clearer than ever that they view Pakistan’s harboring of terrorist groups as the more urgent problem. “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said Wednesday in briefing reporters before the president’s speech. Later he added, “The threat has come from Pakistan.”

Facebooktwittermail

Guardian journalist badly beaten for the second time in Pakistan

The Guardian reports:

Five days after he published an account of abduction and torture by suspected Pakistani intelligence agents, a journalist working for the Guardian has been badly beaten by uniformed men who said they wished to “make an example” of him.

The assault revived concerns about media freedom in Pakistan, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. Three weeks ago, another reporter, Saleem Shahzad, was beaten to death after disappearing from the capital.

Men wearing police uniforms stopped Waqar Kiani, a 32-year-old local journalist who has worked for the Guardian, as he drove through Islamabad on Saturday night, and ordered him to get out of his car. As he stepped out, four men landed a flurry of blows with fists, wooden batons and a rubber whip. Two others watched from inside the jeep. “They said ‘You want to be a hero? We’ll make you a hero’,” said Kiani, who was recovering from his injuries . “Then they said: ‘We’re going to make an example of you’.”

It was the second time Kiani had been targeted. Last Monday the Guardian revealed he had been abducted from central Islamabad in July 2008, blindfolded and taken to a safe house where interrogators beat him viciously and burned him with cigarettes.

The ordeal ended 15 hours later when his abductors dumped him 120 miles from Islamabad, warning they would rape his wife “and post the video on YouTube” if he told anyone.

Kiani had been working on a story about the illegal detention and torture of Islamist militants by Pakistani intelligence in collaboration with MI5. His research led him to an office of the Intelligence Bureau, the main civilian spy agency.

Although his abductors did not identify themselves they displayed detailed knowledge of Kiani’s bank account, movements and contacts with Guardian journalists, leading him to conclude they worked for the government.The Guardian withheld Kiani’s story for three years until last Monday. Kiani later gave a detailed interview about his experience to a local television channel. He believes the coverage triggered Saturday’s vicious assault, which occurred after he went out to buy milk. “There is zero tolerance among our government and military establishment,” he said. “They don’t want us to speak the truth.”

Facebooktwittermail