Civil War is being Incited in Pakistan - a new murderous phase begins

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13:28 Mecca time, 10:28 GMT
3/16/10

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/201031692724310542.html   

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
US drone attack kills Pakistanis  

 
The US refuses to confirm that it carries out drone attacks inside Pakistani territory [File: Reuters]


 
A suspected US drone attack in the restive northwest Pakistan has killed at least 11 people and wounded two others.

The unmanned aircraft fired four missiles at compounds apparently used by pro-Taliban fighters in North Waziristan, destroying two of the hideouts, sources said on Tuesday.

Pakistani security officials confirmed the strikes near the village of Datta Khel west of Miranshah, in the mountainous tribal region.

"US drones fired three missiles on a militant compound," a Pakistani security official said.

"The toll is likely to rise."

The identity of the suspected opposition fighters was not immediately known.

in depth :

  Your Views: Is Islamabad fighting a civil war?
  Hamid Gul: Taliban is the future
  Riz Khan: Heading to civil war?
  Videos:
  Peace eludes Pakistan's Swat valley
  Pakistan 'takes over' Taliban base
  Taliban arrest motives questioned
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/201031692724310542.html
 
North Waziristan is a stronghold for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

At least 15 people were killed by two suspected US missile strikes near the Afghan border in Pakistani North Waziristan last week.

The US refuses to publicly discuss its drone programme in Pakistan but drone attacks routinely target Taliban commanders in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt, which Washington calls the global headquarters of al-Qaeda.

A suspected US drone strike in Miranshah in February killed Mohammed Haqqani, a brother of al-Qaeda-linked Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose network is fighting against US and local forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The drone war against Taliban leaders has focused increasingly on North Waziristan, a bastion of multiple armed groups.

Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked groups are blamed for a wave of suicide and bomb attacks across Pakistan that have killed more than 3,000 people since 2007.
 
 

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ACLU Seeks Govt Disclosures on Drone Attacks

Wants to Know Legal Basis for Killing People

by Jason Ditz, March 16, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/16/aclu-seeks-govt-disclosures-on-drone-attacks/

The ACLU today announced that it was filing a lawsuit aimed at enforcing a previous FOIA request about information pertaining to the massive US drone program, including how many civilians have been killed in the attacks and what the legal basis is for the government killing people with unmanned attack vehicles.

The lawsuit stems from FOIA requests filed in January, and according to the ACLU the Defense Department, the State Department and the Justice Department have all ignored the request. The CIA acknowledged the request but declined to send any information, claiming they couldn’t even confirm or deny if such data existed at all.

The US has been using drones for such attacks for years, but the rate and severity of the attacks have escalated enormously since President Obama took office last year. The attacks have killed a massive number of civilians in recent months.

The ACLU says that in addition to the policy and moral questions, there are serious legal questions with the attacks. The Justice and Defense departments have declined to comment about the specifics of the case.

Adding to the legal questions were comments by National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair last month. Blair told the House of Representatives that the Obama Administration has the legal authority to assassinate American citizens overseas. The details of exactly where the administration acquired this enormous power is unclear, and one of the things the ACLU is seeking to find out in the lawsuit.

[citizenx]

Destabilizing and subverting a nuclear state is the dumbest thing in the world unless you actually want to start WWIII.

Hmmmm...

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Imran Khan: Why I believe America created the Pakistan Taliban


by Liz Hoggard
17.03.10
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23816086-imran-khan-why-i-believe-america-created-the-pakistan-taliban.do

Hero: Imran Khan is treated as a rock star

I don't have to do this,” Imran Khan tells me earnestly. “I could have a very easy existence. I could go on TV and make so much money, live like a king.” Instead the retired international cricketer, and former husband of Jemima Khan, has dedicated his life to politics back home in Pakistan. Jemima, the daughter of the late financier, Sir James Goldsmith, may just have bought a £15 million stately pile in Oxfordshire, but Imran lives hand-to-mouth on a farm outside Islamabad. He grows his own vegetables and tends cows on his land in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Since he founded his party, Tehreek-e-Insaf (the Movement for Justice), in 1996 on an anti-corruption platform, he has campaigned against the elite hogging all the resources. He personally sold all his cricketing memorabilia to fund a cancer hospital in memory of his mother, who died of the disease, and he has opened a vocational college in a poverty-stricken area of Pakistan.

Imran, 57, took nothing from Jemima's fortune when they divorced, so when he runs out of money he does a brief stint as a TV pundit. But he is completely unmaterialistic. “You achieve inner peace when you give away what you have,” he says.

This week he is in London to talk about the crisis in Pakistan, but he has never liked city life. His parents used to take him up in the hills each summer as a boy, and now he takes his sons Sulaiman, 13, and Kasim, 10, hiking and shooting partridge when they visit his farm. He has built them a mini-cricket ground. “They are quite good,” he laughs.

Gone is the handsome playboy who spent his nights in Annabel's and squired gorgeous women, including Susannah Constantine and painter Emma Sergeant, around town. He still has those patrician looks but these days Imran would rather stay up all night talking politics than nightclubbing.

Last week I watched him give a talk to students in London. Mostly bright, politicised young Pakistani-Muslims, they treated him like a rock star. His sense of urgency was palpable, as is his fear that Pakistan might implode at any minute.

Already, it is routinely described as a “failed state”. From day one he opposed the War on Terror and “the American puppet politicians in Pakistan”. The decision to send the army into the tribal areas of the North West Frontier, to flush out al Qaeda terrorists, simply fuelled extremism. “It's civil war in the making,” he says shaking his head. “They were like a bull in a china shop, fighting one or two guerrillas with aerial bombing of villages. That turned people against the army and a new phenomenon was created: the Pakistan Taliban.” It's made him believe even more passionately in socio-economic justice. “You will have no problem with extremists in Pakistan if you have democracy with a welfare state,” he tells the audience.

By the end of the evening he looked shattered. Half his life is spent in transit and his close friend tells me he is wearing jeans instead of the usual suit because he forgot to pack a belt.
When I meet him two days later at Ormeley Lodge, near Richmond Park, he is still fielding calls about a wave of bombings in Pakistan, and trying to have high tea with his sons. The Georgian childhood home of his former wife is where Imran stays whenever he is in London, as a guest of her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith. The wing where we meet is modest: with a pool table and well-worn sofas.

He speaks cordially — if carefully —about his ex-wife. “It's a very tricky thing, divorce, and toughest on the children. But as divorces go, ours has been the most amicable. The anger and bitterness comes when there is infidelity. But there was no infidelity,” he says firmly. “I realised her unhappiness in Pakistan and she, after trying her best, found she just couldn't live there. So that's why it ended, it was just a geographical problem, and we couldn't sustain a marriage like that. If you care for someone you don't want to see them unhappy. My connection with the Goldsmith household is just as it's always been. They [Jemima's siblings, Zac and Ben] are like my younger brothers. And Annabel is as close to me.”

His marriage suffered because of his political zeal — he didn't stand in the 2007 election, arguing that there could be no democracy while the judges were still controlled by the ruling party. But now politics is a mission for him, not a career. “If someone offered me a political career, I would shoot myself. Having to get votes through making compromises, no thank you.
“The classic example in England is Tony Blair.

How did the people go wrong with him lying all the way? He sold the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction. If there had been conscientious politicians in your assembly who weren't worried about their political careers, he would never have got away with it.”
Many people think his involvement in politics is a way to keep alight the adulation he craved as a cricketer, but after leaving Aitchison College in Lahore (the equivalent of Eton), he studied politics at Keble College, Oxford. Former cricketing colleagues — Imran played for Worcestershire and Sussex — recall an intense young man who hated pubs (as a Muslim he doesn't drink) and public speaking. He returned to cricket once more at the World Cup in 1992, aged 39 when he captained Pakistan to victory.

But his spiritual awakening had come in his early thirties after witnessing his mother's agonising death from cancer, without access to proper treatment and painkilling drugs. “She was in such agony that after she passed away I had to consciously discipline myself to shut out the memory of her pain.”

He consulted a mystic who “made me realise I had a responsibility to society because I was given so much. It created selflessness”. Imran approached Pakistan's richest men — many had been schoolfriends — for help in raising
£25 million to build a cancer hospital, but quickly learned that wealth and generosity don't always go hand in hand. Instead, he took to an open jeep and toured 29 cities in six weeks, asking ordinary people for help. “In those six weeks I changed. I realised the generosity of tea boys, taxi drivers, the poorest people bringing 10 rupee notes — and also their faith. I collected £14 million in those six weeks.” Today the hospital treats 70 per cent of patients for free.

Although the dictatorial president, Pervez Musharraf, resigned in 2008, Imran has no faith in the current “democratic” government, now headed by Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. Imran talks passionately about how the rich in Pakistan travel by jet and have tax-evading bank accounts in Switzerland.

He may insist that support for his Movement for Justice party is growing, but the truth is he is still perceived as a maverick outsider. And his romantic past hasn't helped. Conservative voters bring up the love child with Sita White (Imran has never publicly acknowledged Tyrian, now 17, as his daughter; but since her mother died in 2004, he has been involved in her upbringing). And of course there's his marriage to Jemima, a half-Jewish, half Catholic heiress.

Despite converting to Islam and learning Urdu, Jemima — 20 years Imran's junior and still at university when they met — was accused (falsely) of trying to smuggle antique tiles out of Pakistan. The final straw, says Imran, was in 2002 when she was accused of studying under “the blasphemer Salman Rushdie” because his book, The Satanic Verses, had appeared on her university reading list. Protesters torched posters of Jemima. “She was really shaken up by that and moved to England, so that was a big crisis for me.”

Two years later the marriage ended. Jemima has continued to impress as Unicef special representative — and a passionate advocate for democracy in Pakistan. “Frankly I never understood the media image of her as a socialite,” Imran tells me. “I never thought she would fit into that role because she's very bright, she's very political.”

But then Imran is a mass of contradictions himself. In the past, he has argued that the pressure on women to work has contributed to the breakdown of society in the West: “My mother was the biggest influence on my life, a proper mother.” Yet he believes that “a woman should be able to reach her full potential”, and he set up his university in a remote, conservative part of Pakistan precisely so local women could get an education for the first time in the region's history. And he reminds me his three sisters are high-powered career women with children.

Pakistan is Imran's passion and he feels little nostalgia for London — except as the place where his sons live: “Fatherhood has given me the greatest pleasure in my life. And hence it was very painful, the divorce, because that [being separated from them] was the main aspect. But I am basically a goal-orientated person, it's never been about making money or a job. My passion is there so I only come to England to see my children.”

Imran has a core group of friends he has known for 40 years here. Setting up this interview, I came across a devoted group of Londoners — from lecturers to hairdressers — who give up time and money to support his party. “They know I do not have to do this, that it's a big personal sacrifice,” he says.

He finds it desperately sad that he has to defend being a Muslim. “The most important thing to understand is what's happening in Pakistan, and this war on terror is not a religious issue, it's a political issue.” No religion allows terrorism, Imran insists, but “people pushed into desperate situations will do desperate acts”.

It doesn't make him popular. He's been dubbed a Taliban supporter by the same enemies who once called him a Zionist sympathiser. Critics say his politics are idealistic and unworkable in a country bailed out of chaos periodically by military regimes, but Imran insists democracy can be a street movement: “Yes there's a fear, will Pakistan survive? But in a way it's very encouraging because you can see the politicisation of the youth. That's how it starts, in the campuses. Sixty-five per cent of Pakistanis are below the age of 25.”

This probably explains why four days ago, with the help of Jemima, Imran set up his own Twitter page. Back home, he says current affairs programmes get higher ratings than Big Brother.

“Our Paxmans are the most watched in Pakistan today.” Is he handing over the baton? He smiles wearily. “Basically I want the young to come in and upset the whole equation.”

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Key al-Qaeda man 'died in strike'

A key al-Qaeda figure wanted for a deadly attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan has been killed in a US drone strike, US officials believe.

The US does not regularly comment on drone attacks

Hussein al-Yemeni, a top al-Qaeda planner, died in the strike in the city of Miranshah in Pakistan, they said.

He was believed to have helped plan an attack on a base in Khost in December in which a suicide bomber killed seven CIA agents and a Jordanian officer.

The CIA's director has said al-Qaeda is now in disarray in Pakistan.

'On the run'

A US counter-terrorism official told Agence France-Presse news agency that the drone strike in Miranshah, in North Waziristan, was "a clean, precise action that shows these killers cannot hide even in relatively built-up places".


Yemeni was said to be in his late 20s or early 30s and specialised in "bombs and suicide operations", the official said.

"He was a conduit in Pakistan for funds, messages and recruits," he said.

Yemeni had contacts with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups, US officials believe.

The attack on the CIA on 30 December was the worst against US intelligence officials since the American embassy in Beirut was bombed in 1983.

The dead included the head of the CIA's base in Khost Province.

The Taliban said one of their members wearing an explosive vest and an army uniform had carried out the attack.

A US official said at the time that the bomber was being courted as an informant and was not frisked as he entered Forward Operating Base Chapman.


Leon Panetta says that al-Qaeda is now "scrambling"

In an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said attacks against al-Qaeda had left it unable to plan sophisticated operations.

"It's pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run," Mr Panetta said.

He said that the attacks had been so effective that an al-Qaeda lieutenant had pleaded in an intercepted message to Osama Bin Laden that the al-Qaeda leader needed to come to provide some leadership.

Hundreds of people, including a number of militants, have been killed in scores of drone strikes since August 2008.

Pakistan has publicly criticised the drone attacks, saying they fuel support for militants.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/8573652.stm

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NWA Taliban pledge adherence to accord
 
 
 
Thursday, March 18, 2010
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=229661

By Malik Mumtaz Khan

MIRAMSHAH: After weeks of tense calm in volatile North Waziristan Agency (NWA), the Taliban on Wednesday announced to honour their peace accord with the government.

The Taliban, led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, issued a leaflet in Urdu language, pledging to abide by the peace accord. “We will keep our peace accord intact for the sake of our people and all the Muslims,” the Taliban explained in the leaflet.

They denied any role in the recent strong-worded leaflets issued by some elements in North Waziristan against the government and the military authorities, accusing them of working for the interest of the US in the region. They also distanced themselves from remote-controlled bomb attacks on security forces in tribal region and termed them an act of the enemies of the North Waziristan residents.

The Taliban said they had nothing to do with the people who circulated leaflets in the area a few days ago, and challenged the perpetrators to disclose their names. They said they did not issue any leaflet without approval of their Shura or council.

Some unknown people had circulated the leaflets, accusing the military authorities of selling innocent Pakistanis like Dr Aafia Siddiqui to the US for dollars. It had alleged that security agencies were involved in the killing of innocent Pakistanis for dollars and were creating hurdles in the way of implementing Shariah in the country.
 

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March 18, 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-into-the-terrifying-world-of-pakistans-disappeared-1923153.html


Robert Fisk: Into the terrifying world of Pakistan's 'disappeared'


In the first of a series of reports from Pakistan, our correspondent meets the wife of one of 8,000 citizens who have gone 'missing' at the hands of the state


A painting by Amina Janjua about missing people in Pakistan

If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi - a room that somehow accentuates her loneliness - scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country's cruel oppression. Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan's "disappeared".

It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not where Masood Janjua has gone - Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the President - for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of Pakistan's missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 "torture houses" just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from the basements could be heard by residents - who complained only that the buildings might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than compassion.

Masood Janjua was 44 when he was "disappeared" on 30 July 2005. He ran an IT college and a travel agency, the father of two boys - Mohamed and Ali, and a girl, Aisha. He just never came home. Nobody saw what happened. Amina, who was 40 at the time, glows when she speaks of him. "We were so extremely close, so happy, our world was so heavenly - we were always visiting friends, having parties at home. He was so caring and kind to our children, so affectionate. That he should be taken from me! I think it was a very big mistake that they did. But when they do it - like this - they never say they were wrong."

"They". Everyone I talk to here talks about "they". Many refuse to talk in case it provokes "them" to undertake a quick execution. "They" is the Inter-Services Intelligence. "They" is military intelligence. "They" are the Americans, some of them present - according to the few "disappeared" who have been released - during torture sessions. The Defence of Human Rights Pakistan (DHRP), the movement which Amina founded with 25 other bereft families, has gathered evidence of English-speaking interrogators who calmly ask victims questions during their torment. Ironically, Amina lives in a military district of Rawalpindi, beside an old British barracks, where US soldiers are observed in Pakistani uniforms - sometimes female American soldiers dressed, so she says, in the uniforms of Pakistani military paramedics.

Even more ironic was the first word she had of her husband after he disappeared. "When I went to the Supreme Court to demand his return, witnesses came forward to say they saw Masood inside an army barracks here in Rawalpindi, very close to his family. Just think - it was within walking distance from our home! He was inside a cell at 111 Brigade barracks. It was so sad for me - it was as if they were being cynical, to keep him so close to his family."

Amina Janjua found that one of the court witnesses lived in Peshawar and she travelled to the North West Frontier Province to speak to him five months after her husband disappeared. "He had been in the army facility in Rawalpindi. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only when they were taken to the lavatory did they come close to other prisoners. They were forced to wear big hoods - hoods that went right down and covered their shoulders - and the detainees would get no chance to talk to another human being. This man said my husband was there - he even heard the guard call him 'Janjua'."

There is evidence that Pakistan's "disappeared" are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours - fostered, some say, by the security authorities - that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture before the bodies are found. But Amina Janjua believes most of them are alive. You might say she has to believe that.

"After 9/11, everyone was worried. People were ruthlessly disappeared after the New York attacks. No one knew why their loved ones were taken. The first few months were like hell for me. Then I regained my consciousness and said I could not accept all this. I said I would fight. I said I would get my husband back." Brave words. Brave lady.

So she turned to the only brave institution still fighting in Pakistan: the lawyers and the judges and the courts. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around 200 detainees out of the maw of the country's security apparatus - those, that is, who were still in Pakistan. Many are known to have been freighted off to the tender mercies of the Americans at Bagram in Afghanistan, where Arab detainees have long ago testified to being beaten and sodomised with broom sticks. There have been prisoner murders, too, in Bagram, the jail that President Barack Obama refuses to close.

"At the beginning, I went to the International Red Cross about Masood," Amina Janjua says. "I saw them over several months. There was no progress. My father-in-law went to many people, he even went to President Musharraf - he trained in the military with Musharraf and they knew each other very well - and Musharraf said, 'I will do something for you'- but he never did. After that, when we called the President's house, they would start avoiding us. We wrote to all the Pakistan intelligence agencies. All said my husband could not be found."

Many families have been given false hopes. "In some villages way out in the country," Amina recalls, "families were told by the authorities that their sons were coming home. These were poor people but they were so happy, so delighted. They would hold a party and give out sweets and slaughter valuable animals to show their happiness. But then the sons didn't come home. Can you imagine treating people like this?"

Amina Janjua's fraudulent hope came in a phone call in 2006, a year after Masood's disappearance. "We had our first breakthrough when the military secretary of the President called Masood's father to say that his son was alive and that they had heard about him, though he had been ill - in a fever. That was our first sign of relief.

"Then he started avoiding us again. There was no message after that. Then we were told 'No, he is not with us, but we are making every effort because the President has made this request to help you.' I went on asking senior people in the army what had happened to my husband, and they - I put it like this - they started shivering. They would shudder. They could not disclose any information."

Teaching herself law and fighting her own case, Amina Janjua returned to the Supreme Court. "When I did this, I started hearing of many other cases and things that are happening. And that's when I realised. It's not about 'missing' people - this is about abduction. I started organising files on these abducted people and eventually I had 788 families on my list and I started conducting research. And we got about 200 prisoners released. The courts ordered this. They were all still in Pakistan. Others, we know, had been taken to Bagram, three or four to Guantanamo Bay where at least we knew they were alive."

But Amina's research could prove terrifying. She discovered not only that abducted men were alive. They were also dead. "I suspected some of them had died," she said. "I know of three prisoners who are dead. One was Mohamed Shafiq; he was a coach driver and they released his death certificate - it said he died of 'some illness'. He was in his 40s. One of the prisoners, a businessman called Said Menon, died shortly after he was released.

"All of the 200 we got released had been tortured. Initially, it was very ruthless - they were not allowed to sleep; there were beatings and thrashings; they were hanged upside down. There was loud music. There were actual torture rooms where the things were done to them. The prisoners told us they didn't think their torturers were human beings at all. The faces of the torturers, they said, were horrifying. It was no longer a real world for them. The torturers seemed so powerful, like monsters, so big."

The questions they were asked were repetitive, according to Amina Janjua. Where are the guns? Where are the weapons? Where is Mullah Omar? Two prisoners described to Amina's committee how they were made to wear orange jumpsuits, shaven till they were bald and taken for questioning to Islamabad. "They were interrogated by foreigners - they could see them. They were English-speaking. They didn't know if they were Americans or British."

The DHRP now holds public protests in all the cities of Pakistan where the prisoners have their homes - in Lahore, Sagoda, Quetta, Faisalabad, Karachi, Peshawar - but the families focus on Islamabad where they demonstrate their fury and their anguish outside the Supreme Court and the offices of President Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The DHRP files show that there are 1,700 missing from Baluchistan alone. At least 4,000 appear to be in the hands of the Pakistani interior ministry, while 2,000 have been handed over to what the DHRP describes as "foreign agencies" - usually, the Americans. Perhaps 750 of the missing Pakistanis are believed to have been taken by the Americans - illegally, of course - to Bagram, the Policharki prison outside Kabul, or to Herat in western Afghanistan.

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Five security men killed in check-post attack
 
http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=27841
 

Thursday, March 18, 2010

By Javed Aziz Khan

PESHAWAR: Three Frontier Constabulary soldiers and two policemen were killed in a brazen attack by militants on a security check-post in Speen Qabar village on the boundary between the provincial metropolis and the Khyber Agency in the wee hours of Wednesday.

A police official told The News that several heavily armed miscreants first fired a rocket at the Speen Qabar security post in the jurisdiction of Badaber police station and then opened indiscriminate fire at around 2:30 am.

Two policemen, Mumtaz Ali, son of Kabal Khan, and Fayyaz Hussain, son of Ghulam Hussain, and three soldiers of the Frontier Constabulary, identified as Hawaldar Rahman Ali, Ghilaf Khan and Ali Ayaz, were killed in the attack.

Another Frontier Constabulary soldier, Hussain Bacha, sustained bullet wounds in the assault.Subsequently, the attackers reportedly set the post on fire before escaping. It was not clear which group of militants was involved in the attack.

The Speen Qabar security post is located close to the volatile Khyber Agency. Most of the pickets on the boundary between tribal and settled areas are neither properly manned nor equipped. This mostly results in tragic incidents like the one early on Wednesday.

Security posts in this area have come under attack on a number of occasions, resulting in the killing of a number of policemen and Frontier Constabulary soldiers. “The latest attack seems to be a reaction to the ongoing military operation against the miscreants. These operations will continue and we won’t bow down as a result of these terrorist attacks,” senior NWFP Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour told reporters after the funeral prayers for the slain policemen at the Malik Saad Shaheed Police Lines in Peshawar.

Besides Bashir Bilour, the collective funeral was attended by NWFP Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani, Additional IGP Abdul Lateef Gandapur, Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary Safwat Ghayyur and a large number of Frontier Constabulary and police officers.

 

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Americans have direct access to Taliban No. 2


By Adam Entous Adam Entous
Wed Mar 17, 5:13 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100317/ts_nm/us_afghanistan_baradar_usa
 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. investigators have recently been given more regular direct access to Pakistani-led interrogations of the Afghan Taliban's No. 2 leader, U.S. officials said on Wednesday, one month after his arrest was announced.

Pakistani limitations on U.S. access to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar have been a source of tension since he was captured in the port city of Karachi. The joint operation that nabbed the Taliban's top military commander has been so shrouded in secrecy that U.S. and Pakistani officials could not even say with certainty what day it took place.

It was unclear whether the direct U.S. access, disclosed by U.S. officials who requested anonymity, was yielding useful intelligence.

But the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, held out Baradar's arrest as a potential game-changer, telling reporters separately that it "seems to have shaken the confidence of some of the Afghan Taliban leadership." McChrystal did not discuss the interrogation issue.

Previously undisclosed details about the joint U.S.-Pakistani raid, believed to have taken place in late January, shed new light on what has been described in Washington as a major intelligence and propaganda coup that could open divisions within Taliban ranks and weaken a deadly insurgency after eight years of war.

But many questions remain unanswered, such as whether Pakistan's powerful intelligence service was turning against its long-time Taliban allies, or took action against Baradar to ensure its interests would be represented in any future reconciliation process.

"We see indications that they are trying to figure out what way ahead that they should plot," McChrystal told reporters in a conference call from Afghanistan, referring to the tentative response of Taliban leaders to Baradar's arrest.

Mark Sedwill, a British diplomat serving as the senior NATO civilian official in Afghanistan, said: "In a sense I think they (Afghan Taliban leaders) are recalibrating because they don't yet know where they stand. That's a good thing -- we want them to be uncertain about their future."

"This is going to be a real poker game with these guys over the next few months," Sedwill added, referring to the possibility that some Taliban leaders might opt to reach out for a deal.

VALUE INTELLIGENCE?

Pakistan has balked at handing over Baradar either to the United States or to Afghanistan for interrogation, and some U.S. officials have complained privately about a lack of direct access to the secret interrogation sessions.

FBI director Robert Mueller was in Islamabad late last month to discuss the issue and to press for more access for U.S. investigators.

"There is direct access to him," a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

He described the level of direct access of late as "definitely more than minimal."

"More information is coming out of these discussions," the official added, though he declined to say whether any of the information was useful to the U.S. government or military.

Initially, U.S. officials characterized the intelligence value as minimal. But a military official said on Wednesday that a "good" amount of information was flowing to commanders and "the hope is this is a precursor of things to come."

DUMB LUCK?

New information from U.S. officials about the Karachi operation cast doubt on what some observers termed the "dumb luck theory" of how Baradar was captured -- that he was swept up in a raid targeting others.

"This wasn't a case of simple happenstance," said a U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the operation.

"There was intelligence that came together and made this a Baradar-related operation. There were strong indications in advance that the capture would involve, if not him, at least some of his associates," the official added.

The arrest was not disclosed because "it took a while to identify Baradar" conclusively, the counterterrorism official said.

U.S. officials and analysts are still debating Pakistan's motives. The arrest followed Afghan President Hamid Karzai's announcement of a high profile effort aimed at reconciling with Taliban leaders.

There have been conflicting reports that Baradar, the former top Taliban military commander, might have been talking to Kabul, and that may have led to his arrest.

(Additional reporting by Sue Pleming; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Pakistan Charges 5 Americans With Terrorism

One of the Charges Carries a Mandatory Sentence of Life in Prison

By NICK SCHIFRIN
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan March 17, 2010—
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/pakistan-charged-americans-terrorism/story?id=10128293


Pakistani police officers with detained American Muslims leave a police station to send them into prison in Sargodha, Pakistan, Jan. 4, 201. A Pakistani court charged the five young Americans on Wednesday March 17, 2010, with planning terrorist attacks in the South Asian country and conspiring to wage war against nations allied with Pakistan, their defense lawyer said.

Five young Americans were charged with terrorism in Pakistan today, almost four months after police say they tried to join terrorist groups and travel into Afghanistan to attack American troops.

A Pakistani court charged the Virginia natives with five counts, including conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks in Pakistan, planning to commit acts of degradation against the United States and Afghanistan, and directing each other to commit terrorist acts. The charge of intent to commit terrorist acts carries mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

They pleaded not guilty to all the counts.

They are the highest profile overseas case of more than a dozen recently arrested terrorists or would-be terrorists who have American citizenship, a trend that U.S. officials admit reflects a new threat of Islamic extremism created within the United States.

The five men traveled from the Washington, D.C. area to Pakistan last fall after Pakistani police say they were contacted by a terrorist recruiter in Karachi on YouTube. Once they arrived, they failed to join multiple terrorist groups in Hyderabad and Lahore, Pakistan, before being arrested in the small town of Sargodha, where the hearing was held today.

The Americans' defense lawyers say they were planning to travel to Afghanistan to help Muslims affected by the war and had no intent to commit terrorism.

Hassan Dastagir Katchela, who defended the men in court today, accused police of fabricating evidence, citing one piece of communication between the men and a man named Saifullah, who police say recruited them via YouTube and then traded notes in a drafts e-mail folder inside a Yahoo account.

One message between Saifullah and the men "was written two days after the arrest," Katchela told ABC News.

He also accused police of "pressuring" the five men, who range in age from 19 to 25. He repeated an accusation that police had tortured the men, but said their treatment has dramatically improved.

He said the oldest suspect, Umar Farooq, has accused the jail superintendent of choking him. After that accusation, Katchela said, the treatment improved.


Americans' Terror Trial Set to Begin March 31
Police could not be reached on Wednesday night to respond to Katchela's accusations. He plans to bring witnesses from the United States to help try the case.

All five men were reported missing by their families in November, before they traveled to Pakistan. One of the suspects, according to statements made by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, left behind a 11-minute video showing scenes of war and saying Muslims around the world must be defended.

The men have been identified as Ramy Zamzam of Egyptian descent, Waqar Khan and Umar Farooq of Pakistani descent, and Aman Hassan Yemer and Ahmed Minni of Ethiopian descent.

Their trial is scheduled begin on March 31. Because of security fears, it will take place inside the jail where the men are being held.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Ariel Howard, said an American consular official attended to hearing. She declined to comment further.

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Thursday, March 18, 2010
12:58 Mecca time, 09:58 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/20103186023139341.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Court to rule on missing Pakistanis 


 
Chaudhry had ordered the country's security services to produce the missing in court [EPA]
 
 
Pakistan's Supreme Court is set to rule in a case against the government on charges that the state used the so-called "war on terror" to secretly arrest and detain thousands of its citizens.

The court began its final hearing on Thursday into charges that Pakistan's government was complicit in the disappearances of people accused of links to "terrorism".

In evidence presented to the court last week, the country's attorney-general said up to 1,600 people had disappeared between 2001 and 2008.

But a rights group formed by relatives of the missing have said that figure is closer to 8,000.

'Long battle'

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from outside the Supreme Court in the capital, Islamabad, said the attorney-general recommended the court set up a judicial council to look into the issue during the hearing on Thursday.

"That of course will mean that the government is finally agreeing to look deeper into the case," he said.

In depth :

  Focus: Why Pakistan cares about Chaudhry
  Video: Thousands missing in 'war on terror'
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/20103186023139341.html


"There is a possibility that the intelligence agency officers may be asked by the court to come up with a satisfactory answer.

"While the people are pinning their hopes [on this case], it appears that it's going to be another long battle, at least for the families that have been waiting for so long."

Among those believed missing is Masood Janjua, a businessman and father of three from the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, and Faisal Faraz, an engineer from Lahore who disappeared in 2005 while travelling on a bus. Their whereabouts are still unknown.

Rights groups have accused the government of violating its citizens' rights by holding them in secret and failing to charge them with a crime or put them on trial.

Underground prisons

Robert Fisk, a journalist with the UK-based The Independent newspaper who has been following the case closely, said some of the missing are believed to be being held in secret prisons in Pakistan.

"We know there are 120 underground prisons in Lahore alone," he told Al Jazeera.

"Others were clearly taken illegally under international law to the US base at Bagram [in Afghanistan], perhaps 750 of them.

"The Supreme Court has ordered - on the record - the closure of police torture centres, so we know that the judges in Islamabad are aware that these centres exist.

"The real issue is how many people are there, when are they going to be released and why are they being held?"

Role of lawyers

Fisk said the government has not shown enough interest in the case, but he said the country's judiciary and lawyers have championed the cause instead.

"One of the great hopeful signs in this country is the judiciary," he said.

"Lawyers have become in a sense the political opposition. Lawyers are pushing very hard on the issue of missing people."

Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, took up the cases of several of the missing before he was deposed by the country's former president, General Pervez Musharraf, in 2007.

Chaudhry had ordered the country's security services to produce several of the missing in court.

His supporters accused the government of dismissing him in part because of his interest in the case.

However, the campaign for his reinstatement became a popular cause in Pakistan until he was reinstated under the government of Asif Ali Zardari, the current Pakistani president, in 2009.
 
 

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South Asia
Mar 24, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC24Df03.html 
 
 
'Strategic depth' at heart of Taliban arrests

By Shibil Siddiqi

Pakistan has recently arrested a number of top Taliban leaders, including the second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and many of the Quetta shura. It also killed in a drone attack Mohammad Haqqani, a leader of the powerful Haqqani network that Pakistan had been loath to target. Many commentators, including influential think-tanks such as the Carnegie Endowment, have struggled to explain Pakistan's motivations behind the arrests and have hoped they embody a volte-face in its policies towards Afghanistan.

In actuality the arrests are far from representing a paradigm shift in Pakistani thinking. Pakistan's approach to Afghanistan can be boiled down to two words: "strategic depth", the holy grail of the nation 's strategic policy for more than two decades. Strategic depth remains the central pillar in Pakistan's relations with Afghanistan. However, the concept itself is being reinterpreted by Pakistan's security establishment as a consequence of the sliding balance of opportunities and threats, both foreign and domestic.

Strategic depth
The military concept of strategic depth refers to the distance between actual or potential frontlines and key centers of population, logistics and industrial and military production. Having such depth allows a country to withstand initial offensives and enables it to regroup to mount a counter-offensive.

Pakistan's geographic narrowness and the presence of key heartlands and communications networks near its borders with its mortal enemy India means that lack of strategic depth has long haunted its military planners. It was identified as a grave concern by General Arthur F Smith, the chief of general staff in India, as early as 1946 when an independent Pakistan existed only on the Imperial drawing board. The possibility of a friendly - or better yet, a pliant - Afghanistan providing this much vaunted depth in relation to India has long been a mantra for the unimaginative Pakistani generals that have long controlled the country's defense and foreign policy direction.

However, Pakistan's early years, marked by nearly constant internal crises, international isolation, foreign policy disarray and military weakness, meant that this remained a pipe-dream. The language of a "common defense posture" cropped up in the late 1950s and 1960s, couched in both strategic and ideological, ethno-religious terms. But Afghanistan remained both strongly allied to India and within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.

The opportunity to furnish a friendly government in Kabul remained elusive until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the seemingly imminent mujahideen victory in the late 1980s. It was then that strategic depth through a client government in Kabul was adopted as official military doctrine. This fueled the vicious Afghan civil war in the 1990s and drove Pakistan to help install the Taliban in power in 1996.

The Taliban victory was seen in Islamabad as a strategic coup. Pakistan had managed to install a friendly government while excising nearly all remnants of Indian and Russian influence from most of the country. Afghanistan also became an important center for Pakistan's proxy war against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. At last, Pakistan had seemingly attained the conception of strategic depth that had animated its Afghanistan policy for nearly two decades.

The attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American occupation of Afghanistan resulted in the loss of Pakistan's primary influence. It brought many changes to Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan. However, giving up on the idea of pliable Afghanistan dominated by Islamist Pashtun (read Taliban) was not one of them. While reprising its role as a frontline American ally, Pakistan maintained some important links to the Taliban, banking on them emerging as the eventual victors when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces withdrew.

But change has been brewing. For weeks now the Pakistani Foreign Office has talked about the need for a "pluralistic" government in Kabul, the first time that Pakistan has discussed the political order in Afghanistan in such terms. But the decisive shift from the real players - the army's general headquarters - came only recently.

In a rare press briefing on February 1, Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani hinted at the contours of an updated policy. "We want strategic depth in Afghanistan but do not want to control it," said the general, "A peaceful and friendly Afghanistan can provide Pakistan strategic depth."

Talking against wanting a Talibanized Afghanistan, he added, "We can't wish anything for Afghanistan that we don't wish for ourselves." The statements are unprecedented for a Pakistani leader, no less the chief of its hawkish army. The general also reiterated that he was ready to mediate between the Americans and the Taliban, an offer he had also made earlier on his visit to NATO headquarters in January.

Shifting reality
At least two related factors have caused the shift in the way Pakistan views strategic depth. The first is the belated realization that even though the Taliban would almost certainly be able to outlast NATO, it is no longer possible for them to win an outright military victory and rule the country like they did from 1996 to 2001.

There are numerous reasons for this, the most salient being that the Taliban are no longer a unified fighting force, nor are they the unknown and idealized quantity of their original incarnation. Further, many former mujahideen commanders have substantial investments of various shades to protect and therefore, have a vested interest in the status quo, as do Afghanistan's non-Pashtun minorities that are now far better organized and entrenched both politically and militarily.

And the Taliban have hardly ingratiated themselves to the West or Afghanistan's neighbors. Any Taliban attempt to extend control beyond the Pashtun belts to the non-Pashtun central and northern areas of the country are likely to result in a grinding stalemate - one that would continue to destabilize Pakistan while bleeding it economically.

Another overlooked factor in Pakistan's evolving strategy in Afghanistan is that a victory for the Taliban is no longer a desired outcome for Pakistan's security establishment. The economic, political and diplomatic cost of bringing and sustaining the Taliban in power would be far too high. Nor can Pakistan afford to leave the Taliban unchecked in Afghanistan when it is struggling with its own Islamist insurgency with barely checked shades of Pashtun nationalism lurking below the surface.

"It makes no strategic sense for Pakistan to support radical Islamists in Afghanistan when it faces a full-blown Islamist insurgency at home," Kamran Bokhari, the Middle East and South Asia director for Stratfor, said in an interview with Asia Times Online. "By watching the melon, even the cantaloupe catches color," Bokhari said, using a popular Urdu aphorism to refer to the material and ideological support that the Taliban would engender for anti-state groups in Pakistan.

The Taliban are still the main vehicle for Pakistan to exert influence in Afghanistan. But, according to Bokhari, "It doesn't want them running the show." Accordingly, for the first time Pakistan has opened channels to non-Pashtun groups in Afghanistan. It is also making an increasingly successful bid via Washington to become more involved in training the Tajik-dominated Afghan National Army (ANA). Combined with the fact that the Pashtun Taliban are the largest political and military force in the country, Pakistan would be in a commanding position in Afghanistan even if it did not attain the posture it sought in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal.

Reassessing Pakistan's arrests
Enter the recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan. The arrested leaders - Mullah Baradar in particular - are suspected of pursuing their own agenda independent of Pakistan. It is believed they participated in dialogue with the US, the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the United Nations by using back channels that bypassed Pakistan.

The Pakistani arrests have abruptly shut these channels down. They have also given Pakistan physical control of high-level leaders who potentially can represent the Taliban in future talks - or even scuttle them if need be. The arrests are meant to be a clear signal to the US, the Afghan government and the Taliban that Pakistan will not go along with any negotiations in which it doesn't have a place at the table.

In Kiani's words, "[Pakistan's] strategic paradigm needs to be fully realized." Both the Americans and Karzai are persisting in their efforts to minimize Pakistani influence. But given the breadth and depth of its involvement and its indispensability to NATO's occupation and plans for withdrawal, they are unlikely to succeed.
The arrests also signal to the Taliban that they do not have carte blanche in running their insurgency in Afghanistan. They need to accommodate Pakistani interests or risk being completely isolated. By forcing them to negotiate, Pakistan is sapping the Taliban's greatest asset - time. As with any guerrilla force, the Taliban exhibit a preference for long-term attrition over short-term victories. This is why most successful insurgents consistently lose battles and win the war.

By forcefully imposing itself as a mediator between the Taliban and the US, Pakistan is attempting to shape the outcome of negotiations in a way that will preserve the imperative of strategic depth. Accommodation with other ethnic groups in Afghanistan will also keep the Taliban off-balanced enough to prevent their encroachment on Pakistan through ties with the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist Islamist organizations. This will serve to isolate the Pakistani Taliban from their comrades in Afghanistan. Pakistan's insurgency will become less cross-border than it has been, allowing it to force similar settlements on some insurgents while critically weakening and eliminating others.

Too much, too late?
Pakistan's retreat from a maximalist position is a welcome one. But there are lots of moving parts in the strategic machinery that it is setting into motion. Distrust between Afghanistan's ethnic groups today is matched only by their distrust of Pakistan. Its recent moves can only further isolate Pakistan from the Taliban and the Pashtun in general, while non-Pashtuns have long looked askance.

These elements may crystallize into enough opposition on the ground to ultimately limit Pakistani influence. It is also worth remembering that in the 1980s Pakistan overplayed its hand by refusing to negotiate over a future Afghan government. Pakistan had hoped to prolong the Red Army's agony as well as Western support to extract the best possible terms, but failed to anticipate the speed of both the Soviet withdrawal and the West's loss of interest. It may now make the same mistake vis-a-vis the American occupation.

Iran's, India's and Russia's distrust of Pakistan and the Taliban has grown after the two met with a view to a common platform on Afghanistan. But the US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey axis may be able to browbeat an agreement that allows an American withdrawal from Afghanistan with some pretence of having left a stabilized country behind.

Ultimately, Afghanistan's stability and Pakistan's elusive strategic depth will continue to rest on the knife's edge of continuing accommodation and understanding between Afghanistan's various ethnic groups on the one hand, and its unruly neighbors on the other. It is a tall order.

Shibil Siddiqi is a Fellow with the Center for the Study of Global Power and Politics at Trent University and a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives and ZNet. He can be reached at shibil.siddiqi@gmail.com.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) 
   
 
 

 
 

 

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Rights Group: Pakistan Using Tribal Militias for Extralegal Killings

Report Details Hundreds of Mutilated Bodies in Malakand

by Jason Ditz, March 22, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/22/rights-group-pakistan-using-tribal-militias-for-extralegal-killings/


The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) today issued their annual report, condemning the Pakistani government for its policy of setting up tribal militias as “proxies” in its assorted wars against the insurgents.

As the violence across Pakistan has grown, the government has increasingly pressed tribes in the effected areas to form “lashkars,” or tribal militias, and given them arms and orders to go after the Taliban. In many cases the tribes are coerced with threats of being added to the list of Pashtun groups called “Taliban” across the country.

The commission detailed in particular the violence in Malakand, one of the major military offensives last year. While the military invaded and drove civilians out of the Swat Valley and surrounding areas, they also pressed the lashkars into service. The result was around 300 mutilated bodies found throughout the area, dumped along roadsides and hanging in trees.

The HRCP complained that the government was using the lashkars for extralegal killings of suspects, giving them plausible deniability over responsibility for those deaths. Pakistan’s government has constantly maintained that they don’t give any specific orders to the lashkars, but private indications suggest this is not the case.

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Gates says reviewing contractors' role in intel gathering

Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON
Mon Mar 22, 2010 2:28pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62L47620100322



Secretary of Defense Robert Gates outside the Pentagon, March 22, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jim Young


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Monday he was reviewing the role of contractors in intelligence gathering, after accusations some helped track and kill militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Barack Obama

The Pentagon announced last week it was investigating "serious allegations" about a Defense Department employee who may have secretly channeled money to an off-the-books spy operation aimed at hunting militants.

Gates did not comment on those allegations specifically. But asked more broadly about allowing contractors to collect intelligence on the battlefield, Gates said: "Quite frankly, in principle, I would have concerns about that."

"But I don't know enough to know whether it took place, and, if so, whether there was value added," he told reporters.

The accusations, first detailed in a New York Times report, centered on Michael D. Furlong, who the newspaper said hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces operatives.

Although his program was meant to provide U.S. commanders with details of Afghanistan's social and tribal landscape, the contractors gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, the Times reported.

That material was sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, unnamed officials told the paper.

"In terms of the role of contractors -- this is something I need to know more about, but we do have reviews and investigations going on to find out what the story is here, find out what the facts are," Gates said.

"And if it's necessary to make some changes, I'll do that."

Gates, a former director of the CIA, rejected any notion the Pentagon was stepping on the CIA's toes in its intelligence gathering efforts.

"About 85 percent of the national intelligence budget is in the Pentagon budget and is for Pentagon agencies. So we are in the intelligence business," he said.

"It's critical to our success and to protecting the lives of our men and women in uniform."

Furlong said in an interview last week with a newspaper, the San Antonio Express News, that his now-suspended program was fully authorized by the U.S. military.

The military has acknowledged Furlong was a civilian employee at the U.S. Strategic Command's Texas-based Joint Information Operations Warfare Center.

According to its website, the center "uses information as a tool to change attitudes or perception."

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010
13:05 Mecca time, 10:05 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/03/201032482757481979.html
 
FOCUS: OPINION 
 
Pakistan needs friendly Afghanistan 
 
 By Robert Grenier

 
Yousuf Raza Gilani, right, the Pakistani prime minister, met Robert Gates, the US secretary of defence, in Islamabad for strategic talks in January 2009 [AFP]

As in all primitive societies, the social structure in Washington is made up of many tribes. Among the tribe of foreign policy specialists, there are many clans and sub-groupings, who in turn are divided along geographic and substantive lines.

One finds among their ranks a motley assortment of retired government officials, greying military officers, scholars, think-tankers, NGOers, and others who nurse the memories of influence lost or who indulge their fantasies as political "wannabes" by acting as informal briefers and advisers to those with real, current power and influence.

It was at one such gathering in recent days, where a group of reputed experts on Pakistan were dispensing their wisdom to a senior government official, that I heard one of them say something quite profound: "Beware the word 'must'," he said.

Indeed, that is a word one hears constantly with reference to Pakistan: Pakistan "must" deal with the religiously-based militancy permeating its society and "must" get over its decades-long obsession with the security threat from India.

It "must" eradicate the dangerous extremist groups in its midst, "must" move aggressively to route militants from the Tribal Areas, and perhaps most importantly of all, "must" break all ties with the Afghan insurgents, arrest their leaders, and unambiguously aid the Kabul government in its quest to defeat the Afghan Taliban.

I do not disagree with any of that. The problem is that discussions as to how Pakistan is to be induced to do what it "must" usually come down to sterile, two-dimensional formulations regarding the use of "pressure" and "leverage" to induce the Pakistanis to do what they would not otherwise do on their own.

The fact of the matter, however, is that no country will reliably do what it believes to be against its national interests.

That is as true of Pakistan as it is of any other country.

Friendly neighbour needed

With regard to the Afghan Taliban, and their insurgent allies in the so-called Haqqani group and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami (HIG), Pakistan's ambivalence – if that is not too mild a word – in the face of demands from Washington and Kabul derives from its perception of its strategic national interests.

Long concerned about its lack of "strategic depth" in confronting its huge nemesis to the east, Pakistan is understandably concerned about having a friendly regime to its west.

A Kabul government dominated, as it is, by Pakistan's old Northern-Alliance antagonists hardly qualifies, particularly given the eagerness with which it solicits and supports a strong Indian presence.

And lest we dismiss Pakistan's fears of military confrontation with India as some sort of irrational preoccupation, we need only remember the heated war-advocacy of some political elements in India as recently as November 2008, in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.

IN depth
More from Robert Grenier:
 
  Iraq 'condemned' to democracy
  Israel's cost-benefit calculation
  Making room for the Taliban
  Interview on America's battles abroad  


A strong government in New Delhi was able to resist such calls, but who is to say what might happen in the face of another perhaps worse terrorist outrage emanating from uncontrolled – and largely uncontrollable – militants based in Pakistan?

Given Pakistan's inability to stop such attacks even on its own soil, how could any Pakistani strategist or military planner dismiss the possibility of another Indo-Pakistani crisis like the one we witnessed in May 2002, when a previous attack on the Indian Parliament brought the fully-mobilised armies of the two powers to the very brink of war?

To say that Pakistan is largely at fault for this state of affairs is not to dispel the danger.

Doubts about Washington's willingness to stay the course in Afghanistan have been exacerbated by Barack Obama, the US president, himself, given his talk of a US draw-down beginning as early as summer 2011.

As Pakistan contemplates the possibility of a near-term US withdrawal, is it any wonder that they are unwilling to unilaterally and, in their minds, gratuitously sacrifice links with the only elements through whom they could hope to exert influence in a country of such strategic importance to them?

I have been heartened by indications that civilian officials, at least, in the Obama administration understand that the key to changing Pakistani policy on Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgency is to change the strategic environment in which such Pakistani decisions are made.

But while the concept might be right, actually changing the strategic environment – which most likely would require a combination of substantial changes in Afghan government policy toward India and very significant, sustained progress against the Taliban on the ground – will be very difficult.

Changing the strategic environment

No doubt, the urgency surrounding these questions was stepped up several notches this week during US discussions with Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who is visiting the US to participate in the Pakistan-US Strategic Dialogue.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more opportune time for such discussions in light of Pakistan's recent arrest of the Taliban's second most senior official, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and the reported arrival in Kabul of a senior delegation of the HIG.

It is true that there are persistent rumours in Washington which indicate that the arrest of Baradar was something of a "happy accident", and that his detention, along with those of several other Afghan Taliban officials, do not yet indicate a strategic shift in Pakistani policy.


Pakistani newspapers reported the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar [AFP]

Meanwhile, others suggest that Pakistan's arrest of Baradar was motivated by concerns that his rumoured involvement in political talks aimed at intra-Afghan reconciliation could leave the Pakistanis out of the loop.

Leaving all of this aside, now is clearly the time for the US and Pakistan to engage in serious talks about both the conditions and prospects for genuine political reconciliation in Afghanistan.

It seems to me that any sort of rational calculus would suggest that the legitimate interests of the US, the Afghan government, and Pakistan do not greatly diverge.

The current Taliban demand for US withdrawal as a precondition for talks is not only a practical non-starter; it would surely lead to renewed Afghan civil war, which cannot be in Pakistan’s interest.

A full break

On the other hand, anything less than the full break with al-Qaeda demanded by the US of Afghan insurgents would be likely only to condemn the region to re-live the past, recreating the conditions which led to the US intervention in Afghanistan in the first place.

Only a peaceful reconciliation which subjects the Taliban to some sort of democratic accountability can assure both continued unity and stability in the country, while ensuring the Pashtun influence on Afghan national policy which Pakistan sees as a safeguard of its own interests.

Make no mistake: I cannot see the current senior Taliban leadership accepting such a future, or such a role for itself.

However, the point of a realistic and constructive dialogue on these issues between the US and Pakistan would be to bring the two countries to the point of actual operational cooperation on the political front.

With eventual three-way agreement on the aims and principles of a political reconciliation process, Pakistan - rather than blindly tolerating a violent and recalcitrant Taliban leadership as its only viable fall-back option for the future - might instead be motivated to break with the irreconcilables in favour of more accommodating leaders. 

Pakistan cannot be allowed to, dictate the future of Afghanistan. Without its active and willing co-operation, however, no lasting Afghan peace will ever be won.

To those engaged with Pakistani leaders this week, I would repeat: Beware the word 'must'.

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of CIA's counter-terrorism centre.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
 
 

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Published on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by Al Jazeera English


Legality of US Drones Questioned

by John Terrett

Missiles fired from US drones killed at least six people on Tuesday in a Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan, according to security officials.   

It's the latest in a wave of attacks that have been used to target alleged enemy combatants but which frequently kill innocent civilians.   

The latest strike came as a congressional committee in Washington DC heard evidence that legal issues surrounding the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have not been fully worked out.   A lone protester was told by the chairman: "You're going to have an opportunity to sit down or be asked to leave - it's your choice."

There have been multiple civilian deaths as a result of the use of such drones and the committee heard there are concerns inside and outside the US government that drone attacks violate human rights standards and may constitute extra judicial execution.  (AFP/HO/US AIR FORCE/File)

She sat down but soon left the room, allowing the door to slam behind her.   The committee went on to hear that while the US has more than 7,000 UAVs and more on order, there is still no legal framework for the operation of this new technology.   It's widely suspected the CIA operates a fleet of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan which they use for targeting Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.

There have been multiple civilian deaths as a result of the use of such drones and the committee heard there are concerns inside and outside the US government that drone attacks violate human rights standards and may constitute extra judicial execution.

Professor Kenneth Anderson from the Washington College of Law at American University told the hearing:

The long-term effect of that, given that there are not necessarily statutes of limitations, could be the problem of CIA officers or for that matter military officers or their lawyers, being called up in front of international tribunals or courts in Spain or some place that say you've engaged in extra judicial execution or simple murder and we're going to investigate and indict.

The problem, says Professor Anderson, is that administration lawyers haven't justified publically the use of drones, because the administration itself is reluctant to admit drone attacks in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Although nobody in the world doubts what's going on in Pakistan, it's kind of hard for the lawyer to step up and say 'by the way what we're doing is legal and here's why' and give a whole series of reasons and say, 'by the way, we're not admitting that we're actually doing any of this stuff'. It's very hard for the lawyer to get out in front of the client when the client itself has not actually formally stood up and said 'this is what we're doing'.

He says what makes it more difficult is that though the CIA has taken on drone attacks on the Afghan/Pakistan border, it's not doing it as a genuinely covert operation but as an operation that is denied by the administration.

Tuesday's gathering was the opening session of congress's investigation into the use of UAVs.

There will be other meetings like this on Capitol Hill and at them the debate into the use of such drones is likely to continue.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/24

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Published on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by Huffington Post

Drone Wars, Without Any Rules

by Dan Froomkin

The CIA's extensive use of unmanned drones to kill alleged terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere is arguably against international law and raises the possibility that top U.S. officials will someday be tried at the Hague for war crimes, a law professor told a congressional oversight panel [1] on Tuesday.

Despite the rapidly increasing use of drones in warfare and anti-terrorism -- and the legal and ethical issues their use raises -- the U.S. government has never publicly advanced a legal justification for sending its drones on targeted killing runs overseas; up until Tuesday, Congress hadn't even held a single hearing into the question.

Kenneth Anderson [2], an American University law professor, told the panel he believes there is legal justification for the U.S.'s use of drones, not just by the military but by the CIA, under the doctrine of self-defense.

But, he said, government lawyers "have not settled on what the rationales are, and I believe that at some point that ill serves an administration which is embracing this. Now, maybe the answer is: This is really terrible and illegal and anybody that does it should go off to the Hague. But if that's the case, then we should not be having the president saying that this is the greatest thing since whatever. That seems like a bad idea."

As HuffPost reported last week [3], the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit [4] demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused. The initial response [5] from the government was that some public legal justification was, indeed, forthcoming.

But many questions about drones aren't just unresolved, they've never even been asked. Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), chairman of the House oversight committee's national security subcommittee, mentioned some of them in his opening statement:

f the United States uses unmanned weapons systems, does that require an official declaration of war or an authorization for the use of force?
Do the Geneva Conventions -- written in 1949 -- govern the prosecution of an unmanned war?

Who is considered a lawful combatant in unmanned war -- the Air Force pilot flying a Predator from thousands of miles away in Nevada, or the civilian contractor servicing it in on an airstrip in Afghanistan?

Then there are questions about the civilian casualty rate; about how the U.S. maintains superiority in drone warfare; what happens when the bad guys get hold of them; and how do you defend against them.

Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) raised the concern that drones might make some of the Pentagon's big-ticket purchases look less wise.

"What I'm worried about is, we're at some point going to be asked to defend Taiwan, you know, with a set of aircraft carriers, and all of sudden, 10,000 Chinese-manufactured mass-produced drones will be coming at us," Foster said. "And it'll be game over. "

And just wait until they start thinking for themselves.

"If trends in computer science and robotics engineering continue, it is conceivable that autonomous systems could soon be developed that are capable of making life and death decisions without direct human intervention," said John Edward Jackson [6], professor of unmanned systems at the U.S. Naval War College.

"Would a self-conscious and willful machine choose its own ends, and even be considered a person with rights?" asked Edward Barrett [7], director of research for the Stockdale Center, the U.S. Naval Academy's ethics and military policy think tank.

The troubling questions and scenarios were coming from a panel that was, nevertheless, largely pro-drone -- to the consternation of a handful of protesters in the audience.

The panel's head cheerleader was Michael S. Fagan [8], who chairs the Advocacy Committee for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Fagan said there is "much more" that drones can do to protect the nation. He urged the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drone-makers access to more airspace and spoke of "other useful applications of unmanned technology" such as "civil unrest".

Peter W. Singer [9], director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, noted the the U.S. government isn't the only one using drones. American border vigilantes have used them, as did Hezbollah during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and, most recently, a gang of thieves in Taiwan.

Barrett, the ethicist, worried that drones make war too easy. "Favorable alterations to pre-war proportionality calculations," he said, could "reduce the rigor with which non-violent alternatives are pursued, and thus encourage unnecessary -- and therefore unjust -- wars," he said.

He also said the homeland could be at risk if, on the battlefield, there's "no one for the enemy to shoot at." He explained: "You don't want to go just to unmanned, or they're coming here."

Several clear distinctions emerged between the military's use of drones and the CIA's. One of those distinctions is that we know almost nothing about what the CIA is really doing, and how. "We do know about the military's use of these systems, and they've shown... exceptional respect for the laws of war," said Singer. "My concern is with the CIA strikes."

Instead of trained military strategists, it's intelligence analysts planning air-war campaigns, and CIA lawyers deciding on when to launch;. Or maybe it's not even the CIA itself, but its contractors. Who knows?

Are there any limits? How many civilian casualties have there been? Does what they're doing even make sense?

"We may be sucking ourselves into a game of whack-a-mole," Singer said. "Are we unwittingly aiding their recruiting?"

© 2010 Huffington Post
Dan Froomkin is Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. Previously, he wrote the White House Watch [10] column for the Washington Post’s website.


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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/24-5

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US lining up billions more to reward Pak

Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN, Mar 24, 2010, 12.53am IST

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/US-lining-up-billions-more-to-reward-Pak/articleshow/5717402.cms

WASHINGTON: The Obama administration will expedite more than $500 million in military support reimbursements to Pakistan and facilitate an even greater unspecified amount in concessional aid and trade to reward Islamabad for selectively ditching the Taliban and helping the US in the conflict in Afghanistan.

Broad contours of an expansive US program to ramp up aid disbursal, trade concessions, and military support to Pakistan began to emerge this week amid continuing doubts about Islamabad's bonafides, including its reluctance to train its guns away from India.

Expanded American support is expected to include significant aid to help Pakistan address its energy and water crisis, but no outright commitment to conclude a civilian nuclear deal on the lines of the United States-India agreement, although Washington has agreed to discuss the Pakistani request.

"We are going to be announcing a range of actions, some big some small, that move the process forward on issues from energy to water to education, to security issues. The Congress will be involved", Richard Holbrooke, the administration's Af-Pak envoy said on Monday.

Holbrooke's comment came after his meeting with Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who demanded that Washington "walk the talk" and reward Pakistan for its commitment against terror, ahead of the March 24 talks at the State Department.

Underlying that exchange is apprehensions expressed in some Pakistani quarters that the ministerial level strategic dialogue will end up with just American exhortations to "do more" and already announced aid dressed up in new numbers amounting to billions.

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South Asia
Mar 27, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC27Df01.html 
 
US dangles Pakistan a carrot

By Syed Fazl-e-Haider

KARACHI - In 2008, after several years of negotiations, nuclear-armed India and the United States signed a civilian nuclear deal that in essence allowed India access to civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other countries even though it is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Pakistan, which like its neighbor India has a nuclear arsenal and is not a signatory to the NPT, has long been rankled by India's deal, wanting one of its own with the US. This topic featured high on the agenda of a top-level Pakistani delegation that held talks in Washington this week with senior US officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Washington, with some reservations, has been receptive to Pakistan's wishes, especially as Islamabad has emerged as a key strategic partner in the efforts to bring the war in Afghanistan to a conclusion, and in dealing with al-Qaeda and militancy in general in the region.

There will be a price: the US, according to analysts who spoke to Asia Times Online, wants Pakistan to walk away from the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project.

Last year, Islamabad and Tehran finalized a US$7.5 billion deal to transfer gas 2,775 kilometers from fields in Iran to terminals in Pakistan, and this month they signed an operational agreement on the project, despite US opposition.

The US, as it seeks to isolate Iran and impose sanctions on it over Tehran's nuclear program, is a vocal critic of the pipeline project, which was initially to have included a third leg going to India. India dropped its participation in the project, ostensibly over pricing disagreements; there is widespread belief that it did so to secure the nuclear deal with the US.

This, according to analysts familiar with the project, is the dilemma that Pakistan now faces. In recent months, there has been talk of the pipeline being extended to China; that would be a non-starter should Pakistan pull out.

The two days of talks in Washington concluded on Thursday. All that Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said was that his delegation had had "very satisfactory" talks with US on civilian nuclear cooperation.

"I am quite satisfied with the discussions we had," Reuters quoted Qureshi as saying. "We have to modernize and tap on indigenous resources like hydro[electric power], coal. We have to bring in renewables - solar, wind - and we also have the capability of producing nuclear energy and we are doing it."

Clinton was quoted as saying, "We are certainly looking at it [nuclear deal] as how to help Pakistan with its long-term energy needs."

Washington's reservations over a nuclear pact center on lingering concerns over security in Pakistan. The founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, several years ago confessed to playing a role in nuclear proliferation. In 2008, Khan, who remains under house arrest, recanted these confessions. The US is also aware that any deal with Pakistan would upset India.

Pakistan faces daily blackouts, and a power shortfall estimated at 5,000 megawatts (MW) weighs heavily on the economy. Ahead of this week's talks, Islamabad drew up a 56-page report in which it sought US support in developing a civilian nuclear program. The US earlier agreed to provide $125 million for energy development and assistance in establishing three thermal power plants.

Analysts see a major role for the US in rehabilitating the energy sector, as the US could engage international financial institutions, including the US Trade and Development Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, together with the US's private sector.

If the US and Pakistan do go ahead with a nuclear deal, it would still require consensus approval from the 46-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and also from the US Congress - this turned out to be a lengthy process for the Indians.

China this week reacted cautiously to reports that the US was open to help Pakistan tap nuclear energy. "We believe that sovereign countries have the right to peacefully use nuclear energy with adequate safeguards," Pakistan Press International reported a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, as saying in Beijing.

China has assisted Pakistan in developing facilities for nuclear power generation since 1986, when the countries signed a comprehensive agreement for nuclear cooperation that envisaged the supply of power plants and cooperation in the research and development of commercial and research reactors. Under an agreement signed in 1990, China helped Pakistan in the construction of a 300 MW reactor in Chashma, Punjab province, which went into operation in 1998. The Chashma-1 plant has delivered full power of 300 MW to the national grid since September 2000.

In December 2006, a much-awaited agreement on Chinese assistance to build more nuclear reactors in Pakistan was not signed during President Hu Jintao's visit to Islamabad. Though Beijing had agreed to provide two more nuclear power plants, worth about $1.2 billion, China apparently succumbed to pressure from either the West or the NSG. Beijing shelved the project without comment.

At present, China-Pakistan nuclear energy cooperation is mainly focused on the Chashma Nuclear Power Plant-2 in Punjab. The 325-MW capacity facility is being built in collaboration with China National Nuclear Corporation and is likely to be completed by the end of this year.

Syed Fazl-e-Haider ( www.syedfazlehaider.com ) is a development analyst in Pakistan. He is the author of many books, including The Economic Development of Balochistan, published in May 2004. E-mail, sfazlehaider05@yahoo.com

 
 
 

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‘Suspected Militants’


By Craig Considine

 http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64567&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 26, 2010

Why does it seem these days that every bomb dropped and every missile strike kills ’suspected militants’? It is either a great coincidence that the targets are real militants or governments, like the US and Pakistan, are applying the label to try to cover up killing innocent civilians.

Along the Afghan border today in Parachinar, Pakistan, the Pakistani military killed 61 ’suspected militants’, including dozens at a seminary where Taliban commanders were believed to be meeting. The seminary is in the Mamuzai tribal area of Orakzai

Two intelligence officials said the seminary was a main center for Tableeghi Jamaat, a non-violent, pacifist Islamic missionary group. Unfortunately, its members had to pay the maximum price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And yet Pakistani officials claim that all 61 people were ’suspected militants’?

There is no such thing as 'accurate’ death toll counts in the tribal areas because access there is restricted. People reading news releases and official statements are thus more or less forced to trust the word of the Pakistani government. The words 'trust’ and 'government’ do not seem compatible, at least in my opinion.

Locals in the area later conceded that a great many of those killed were actually innocent civilians. Not unbelievable considering the target was a place of worship for a non-violent, pacifist missionary group.

Pakistan is pulling the same tricks as the US in attempting to cover up killing innocent civilians. Drop the ’suspected militants’ bomb and everything is A-OK.

'Suspected’ is the most ambiguous of terms, is it not? It is quite easy to drop this label on the dead, considering there is no chance their guilt or innocence will ever be proven or dismissed in a court of law.

The truth is the US and Pakistani governments have no consideration for the potential loss of civilian life when targeting the 'bad guys’. Both have selfishly been willing to kill a handful of civilians to kill one ’suspected militant’ or a group of them.

Both governments are also destructively involved in a vicious cycle of taking out enemies but creating dozens more in doing so.




 

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Monday, April 05, 2010
13:50 Mecca time, 10:50 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/2010458464129649.html   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Explosions rock northwest Pakistan 
 

 Pakistan is often hit by attacks targeting political and security forces targets [EPA]


 
A series of explosions across Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) have killed more than 30 people and wounded 100 others, police have said.

A bombing at a political rally in the town of Timargarah in Lower Dir district on Monday was quickly followed by at least three explosions near the US consulate in Peshawar, the main city of North West Frontier Province.

"We can confirm there has been an attack at the US consulate Peshawar facilities," Ariel Howard, the spokeswoman for the US embassy in Islamabad, said.

Pakistani television said three people died in the attack.

Sattar Khan, a police official, said those killed included a soldier, a private security guard and a civilian.

There have been no reported US casualties from the attack.

Sensitive locations

The location of the Peshawar explosions was also close to a number of sensitive military installations and police stations, witnesses and a security official said.

"It is a sensitive area. Most of the gun fire was probably from the security forces in the area," Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said.

"The three powerful blasts sent off more secondary explosions. The military is sealing off the area."

"I heard three big explosions. We are investigating what the target was. If there were three explosions, ultimately there will be casualties," a military official told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity.

Pakistani television showed security forces firing their weapons and clouds of smoke rising over the garrison area of the city, close the Peshawar headquarters of Pakistan's intelligence agency, which was bombed last November.

While there have been no claims of responsibility for either attack, Zafar Jaspal, a security analyst in Islamabad, told Al Jazeera that the Pakistani Taliban were the likely perpetrators of the Peshawar attacks.

"The American consulate is one of the most well guarded places in Peshawar. It [the attack] was well planned and they very confidently hit their target," he said.

"Tehrik-e-Taliban and their associates were responsible. The government has been intervening in places like South Waziristan, but it's an ongoing war. They have routed them [the Taliban] from their bases, but they are spreading into settled areas."

Bashir Ahmed Bilour, a government minister, said "They came in two vehicles. The militants were well-equipped. It was a well organised attack.

"The militants were trying to enter the American consulate, but they did not succeed," he said.

Rally targeted

Zahid Khan, a spokesman for the Awami National Party, said his party was celebrating the recent decision to change the name of North West Frontier Province when a suspected suicide bomber struck in Timargarah

The NWFP, the name of which dates back to British colonial rule, will now officially be known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in a nod to its Pashtun-majority population.

"We have received 38 dead bodies," Doctor Wakeel Ahmed, thehead of the main hospital in Timargarah, told AFP.

"There are more than 100 injured. Most of them are in a serious condition. I'm still sending out my ambulance."

Residents in Timargarah reportedly said the bomb exploded close to the stage at the political gathering and police later confirmed it was a suicide attack.

"The man came on foot and detonated himself," Mumtaz Zareen, the Timargarah police chief, said.

Hyder said there have been a series of attacks against the party, which is in government in the province.

"This is an ongoing thing, although this is a clear warning. Recently the Taliban said there would be more attacks there. So some kind of escalation was expected," he said.

More than 3,150 people have been killed in bomb attacks over the last three years, with much of the violence concentrated in the northwest of the country.
 
 

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April 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/asia/06pstan.html?emc=na


Militants Take Aim at U.S. Consulate in Pakistan

By ISMAIL KHAN and SABRINA TAVERNISE

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Militants mounted an assault against the United States Consulate in this northern Pakistani city on Monday, using a powerful bomb and rocket launchers in a multi-pronged attack, said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer.

There were no casualties inside the consulate, the officer said, several guards outside were killed. Pakistani media reported that another eight were injured. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Islamabad, the capital, confirmed the attack.

Pakistani television networks showed footage of a giant cloud of dust and debris rising from the Saddar area where the consulate is located shortly after 1 p.m. Local media reported that there had been three blasts. Authorities cordoned off the area and gunfire was heard long after the explosions, which seemed to indicate a siege-like situation.

The blast was a chilling reminder of just how close the militants are still able get to their targets in Pakistan, where months of operations by the Pakistani military in Taliban-controlled northern areas have dramatically reduced violence.

On March 31, a militant who identified himself as Qari Hussein, the head of the suicide bomber training for the Taliban, spoke to a Pakistani reporter for Dawn, an English language daily, saying that the Taliban would soon launch attacks on important and sensitive targets in order “to refresh memories of the attack on the Khost base.” That attack, on an American military base in Afghanistan, killed eight Americans , seven of them Central Intelligence Agency officers.

A short time before the blasts in Peshawar, a bomb exploded in Dir Province, killing more than 40 people, according to the provincial information minister, Iftikhar Hussein, and media reports.

No one has claimed responsibility for Monday’s blasts. But the spate of attacks — the first in several months — seemed to indicate that the militants still had the power to strike, and were not ready to call it quits, security analysts said.

“The terrorists have sent a strong signal that they are trying to hunt down the Americans and those who are supporting their mission,” said Imtiaz Gul, a security analyst and author in Islamabad, on Pakistani television.

The senior Pakistani intelligence officer said that the consulate attack had been well-coordinated. It involved several militants, all with suicide vests and some firing rocket launchers, as well as a large bomb. It was unclear whether the bomb had been placed in a car or was carried by one of the attackers.

Media reports quoted witnesses as saying the attackers were wearing uniforms of the Pakistani security services but officials did not immediately this.

Militants managed to damage barracks that formed part of the outer layer of security for the heavily fortified consulate area, but did not manage to penetrate inside, the officer said.

The ceremony in Dir was to celebrate the renaming of North-West Frontier Province, was held by a Pashtun political party, the Awami National Party. Fifty people were injured.

“They want to give us a message not to hold activities like this,” Mr. Hussein said.

The bombing took place in the same area where several American military personnel were killed earlier this year, in a bomb attack at the opening of a girls’ school.


Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Sabrina Tavernise from Islamabad. Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Islamabad

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At least 30 killed, several injured in Dir blast


Monday, 05 Apr, 2010
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-four-killed-several-injured-in-dir-blast-ss-02



Injured men are helped away from the site of a suicide bomb attack in Timergarah, situated in Lower Dir. – Reuters World


Pakistani group behind Kabul attacks, says Afghan official Pakistani group behind Kabul attacks, says Afghan official PESHAWAR: A bomb attack killed 30 people at a celebration organised by a political party in northwest Pakistan on Monday, with fears the death toll could rise further, police said.

 

The suspected suicide bomber attacked the open-air gathering in Timargarah, the main town in the district of Lower Dir, where Pakistan waged a major offensive against local Taliban insurgents last year.

 

“Twenty-five people were killed,” Qazi Jamil, police chief for the northwestern region of Malakand, told AFP. However, DawnNews reported that at least 30 people were killed in the blast.

 

“Evidence collected so far indicates it was a suicide attack. We are investigating.”

 

“We are investigating whether it was a suicide attack or a bomb planted in the area. Residents said the blast occurred near the stage,” he added.

 

The Awami National Party (ANP), the secular political party that dominates government in North West Frontier Province organised the meeting to celebrate plans to re-name the province Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

 

The new name honours the Pashtun-majority population in the province and is set to replace a name that dates back to British colonial rule.

 

“Our party had arranged a thanksgiving day to celebrate the changing of the name after 200 years of colonial legacy,” an ANP spokesman told Geo television.

 

“People are saying it was a suicide attack. Many people have been martyred, many more have been wounded,” he added, speaking from the main northwestern city of Peshawar.

 


Rescue workers were searching the site of the blast as people were feared to be trapped under the rubble. The dead and the injured have been shifted to GHQ hospital.

 

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TTP claims responsibility for Peshawar blasts

Monday, 05 Apr, 2010       
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/metropolitan/03-blast-in-saddar-area-of-peshawar-ss-03


Pakistani soldiers take positions following a huge bomb blast in Peshawar on April 5, 2010. – AFP Provinces


 PESHAWAR: Six people, including four attackers, were killed when heavily armed militants in two vehicles tried to storm the US consulate in Peshawar on Monday, a Pakistani minister said.

 

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attacks.

 

“We accept the attacks on the American consulate. This is revenge for drone attacks,” Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Azam Tariq told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.

 

“We have already told you that we have 2,800 to 3,000 fedayeen (suicide bombers). We will carry out more such attacks. We will target any place where there are Americans,” he said.

 

“They came in two vehicles. The militants were well-equipped. It was a well-organised attack,” Bashir Ahmed Bilour, senior minister in the North West Frontier Province government headquartered in the city, told reporters.

 

“The situation is now under control,” he said, adding that six people were killed in the attempted attack and subsequent gun battle with Pakistani security services, including four militants and a policeman.

 

“They (security forces) have killed four militants. Four dead bodies are lying on the spot. The whole area is encircled by the army. The militants were trying to enter the American consulate, but they did not succeed,” he said.

 


Television footage showed a heavy mushroom cloud and smoke rising into the air over the garrison part of the city, close to the US consulate and the Peshawar headquarters of Pakistan's top spy agency in the Saddar area, bombed last November.

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Seventy civilians among 136 killed in Pakistan airstrikes

DPA

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64999&hd=&size=1&l=e

April 11, 2010

Islamabad - Seventy civilians were reportedly among 136 people killed in airstrikes over the weekend in Pakistan's tribal region near Afghan border, officials and locals said on Sunday.

The strikes were carried out in the Orakzai district, where government forces are conducting an offensive to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban hideouts, and in the neighbouring district of Khyber.

A spokesman of the paramilitary Frontier Corps force, Major Fazalur Rehman said 12 militants died and six were injured Sunday in a clash with troops in the Orakzai villages of Kangra and Saam.

'Following the fighting, army helicopters targeted the terrorists' three hideouts. Casualties are not known,' Rehman added.

The fighting came a day after intense clashes in the Baizot area of Orakzai that left 54 militants dead.

'Around 100 terrorists who had come from the nearby district of Khyber tried to capture an important checkpoint but our troops repulsed the raid,' said a local official, Riaz Masood.

Hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have fled to the neighbouring Khyber district following the offensive in Orakzai that started in late March and has killed more than 350 rebels, according to official data.

Most of the retreating militants are taking shelter in Khyber district's remote Tirah valley where jet planes pounded a residential area on Saturday afternoon when a meeting of the tribal elders from the Koki Khel tribe was taking place.

The Koki Khel tribe is believed to have allied itself with pro- Taliban cleric Mangal Bagh, whose men have carried out suicide bombings and raids on security forces over the last two years.

Intelligence agents and officials of the local civilian government said that more than 70 people died and around 50 were injured in the air strike in Sra Vila village in Tira valley. Most were civilians.

'The jet fighters first bombarded a cluster of six houses and when the people gathered to pull the dead and injured from the rubble the plans targeted the place once more,' said a local government official, who asked not to be named.

'It must have been a bad intelligence and the security forces must have thought that the militants were holding a meeting, which was not the case,' said the official.

Pakistan's English-language Dawn newspaper quoted health officials as saying that women and children were among the injured taken to hospitals in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.

The newspaper also cited tribal elders from Koki Khel as condemning the bombing. They claimed most of the dead were non- combatant tribesmen.

The operations have put Taliban an al-Qaeda militants under pressure and reduced the number of their bases from where they once freely carried out cross-border-raids on international forces in Afghanistan.




 

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Clashes force 200,000 Pakistanis to flee
 
 
12/04/2010 04:19:26 PM GMT     
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Clashes-force-200000-Pakistanis-to-flee.html

 
Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis have fled a recent army offensive against militants in the northwest, shortly after fresh clashes killed 43 people.

The United Nations said in a Monday statement that over 200,000 people have fled Orakzai tribal region since the fighting flared up last year.

Nearly 50,000 have fled in the last month alone. The Pakistani military has stepped up operations in the region over the last few weeks with near-constant airstrikes.

Some 1.3 million Pakistanis have already been displaced as a result of the army's last year crackdown on militants in South Waziristan.

The UN also warned of fund deficit that the organization faces in delivering aid supply to the growing population of displaced Pakistanis.

Officials say more than 300 suspected militants have been killed since last March. However, claim many civilians have also lost heir lives in the process.

RZS/MMN
Source: Press TV
 

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U.S. military playing expanded role in Pakistan

by Adam Entous, Reuters

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65024&hd=&size=1&l=e

Mon Apr 12, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Special Operations Forces on a training mission in Pakistan are playing an expanded but largely unseen role in the country's counterinsurgency campaign, working with paramilitary units to "hold and build" tribal areas as militants are cleared out.

U.S. defense and administration officials say the elite trainers, who currently number more than 100, have not and are not authorized to take part in Pakistani military offensives in the semi-autonomous tribal regions, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, along the Afghan border.

Pakistan has balked at U.S. offers of joint military operations there, officials said on condition of anonymity.

But Special Ops trainers play a bigger role than has been widely disclosed in helping Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps, such as surveying and coordinating projects aimed at winning "hearts and minds" and preventing Taliban fighters from returning to areas once they have been pushed out.

A Pentagon proposal would deepen that role by creating a special $10 million pool of funds the trainers could spend more quickly on civil affairs and humanitarian projects in the FATA in coordination with their Pakistani counterparts.

U.S. defense and administration officials spoke about the training program and the new proposal on condition of anonymity because, as one said, the relatively small American military presence is such a "radioactive" issue in Pakistan.

U.S. and Pakistani officials worry that detailed disclosures about the role of Special Ops could compromise operational security, spark a backlash among Pakistanis against their government and fuel already high anti-American sentiment.

There are 200 U.S. military personnel in Pakistan, including troops who guard the sprawling American Embassy compound in Islamabad. The number of Special Operations trainers fluctuates from as little as 60 to about 120.

A February bombing that killed three Special Operations "civil affairs" specialists in northwest Pakistan partly exposed how small U.S. teams sometimes venture out beyond the confines of heavily guarded military bases.

'WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS'

Washington is in talks to increase the number of Special Ops trainers and authorize sending them to sectors deeper in the tribal regions, but details have yet to be worked out.

"This is in the line of essentially training," a senior U.S. defense official said of the Special Operations Forces. "This is a part of winning hearts and minds -- endearing the public to the military and to the government."

"We're in full support, essentially behind the scenes with a Pak-Mil (Pakistani military) face on it, to be able to have them legitimize the government of Pakistan and the military as the people that have brought security to the area and now are providing the initial tools to be able to help and build."

The $10 million in funds, which has yet to be approved by the Pentagon leadership, would be modeled after the Commanders' Emergency Response Program, or CERP, which has become a linchpin of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and has been credited with helping turn the tide in Iraq.

CERP-funded projects are intended to gain the confidence of local residents and leaders and discourage them from cooperating with insurgents. The program has been authorized for war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not Pakistan.

"It does give me some different authorities to be able to assist the government of Pakistan, the Pak-Mil, a little bit quicker, with the right accountability," the senior U.S. defense official said. "We have controls in place," he added when asked about congressional concerns about oversight.

At $10 million, the CERP-like funding would represent a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars in U.S. aid promised to Pakistan, although the amount could be expanded later.

As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the senior defense official said a CERP-like program in Pakistan "might be useful, particularly after a conflict-affected area, to immediately, rapidly go in, do quick impact projects that the Pak-Mil have come to us to seek help with, whether it be electricity, whether it be water, whether it be road."

Alongside large increases in funding to train and equip Pakistani forces for counterinsurgency operations, U.S. President Barack Obama has authorized the CIA to sharply expand a counterterrorism campaign of aerial drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban targets near the Afghan border.

Under the proposal, the $10 million would come out of State Department economic assistance funding for Pakistan, officials briefed on the matter said.

Critics say the move risked stoking concerns in Pakistan about U.S. meddling and could open the door to a further escalation down the road.

Advocates say an expanded Special Operations role in development is needed because U.S. government projects normally take months or longer to get approved, and because the security environment is too unstable in large parts of the FATA for nonmilitary organizations to lead the effort.

The senior defense official said the goal was to "seed the environment to then allow the security to calm down, people to return and for the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) to follow in after."

(Reporting by Adam Entous; Editing by Patricia Wilson and Peter Cooney)





 

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Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by Associated Press

Pakistan Airstrike Kills 71 Civilians: Official

by Riaz Khan and Zarar Khan

Pakistani tribal elders gathered on Monday, April 12, 2010 in Khyber, Pakistan to discuss the situation raised after Pakistan army jets's air strikes on alleged suspected insurgents in Pakistani tribal area along Afghanistan border. More than 200,000 people have fled Pakistan's latest offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest, the United Nations said Monday, as fresh clashes in the remote region killed 41 insurgents and two soldiers. (AP Photo/Qazi Rauf)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Up to 71 civilians were killed in a weekend strike by Pakistani jets near the Afghan border, survivors and a government official said Tuesday — a rare confirmation of civilian casualties that risks undercutting public support for the fight against militants.

Pakistani tribal elders gathered on Monday, April 12, 2010 in Khyber, Pakistan to discuss the situation raised after Pakistan army jets's air strikes on alleged suspected insurgents in Pakistani tribal area along Afghanistan border. More than 200,000 people have fled Pakistan's latest offensive against Taliban militants in the northwest, the United Nations said Monday, as fresh clashes in the remote region killed 41 insurgents and two soldiers. (AP Photo/Qazi Rauf)
The government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said authorities had already handed out the equivalent of $125,000 in compensation to families of the victims in a remote village in the Khyber tribal area.

Also Tuesday, a village elder claimed 13 civilians had been killed in U.S. missile strike on Monday night elsewhere in the northwest, contesting accounts by Pakistani security officials that four militants were killed.

Pakistan's tribal regions are largely out of bounds for reporters and dangerous to visit because of the likelihood of being abducted by militants, who still control much of the area, making it very difficult to verify casualty figures.

Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas on Monday denied that any of the dead in the Pakistani air force attack were civilians, saying the army had intelligence that militants were gathering at the site of the strike. The victims were initially reported to be suspected militants. The military regularly reports killing scores of militants in airstrikes in the northwest, but rarely says it is responsible for civilian deaths.

The Pakistani army, under heavy pressure from the United States, has moved forcefully against Taliban and al-Qaida militants in the northwest over the last 18 months. The insurgents have been blamed for attacks on international troops across the border in Afghanistan as well as scores of attacks within Pakistan.

Pakistani politicians have either supported the operations or avoiding criticizing them, something of a change from several years ago when many backed negotiations with the insurgents. But civilian casualties threaten to undermine support for the offensives, both in the northwest and in the rest of Pakistan, where many people do not like the idea of the army being deployed against fellow Muslims.

The offensives have displaced more than 1 million people, and one newspaper said Tuesday that the deaths of innocents would strengthen support for the Taliban.

Two survivors interviewed Tuesday in a hospital in the main northwestern city of Peshawar gave the first detailed account of the attack, which took place Saturday morning.

They said most of the victims were killed when they were trying to rescue people trapped by an earlier strike on the house of a village elder.

"This house was bombed on absolutely wrong information," said Khanan Gul Khan, a resident of the village who was visiting a relative in the hospital. "This area has nothing to do with militants."

Khan said many of the families in the village, Sara Walla, had sons serving in the security forces and that it had a history of cooperating with the army. He said the owner of the house that was bombed initially, Hamid Khan, had two sons serving in the paramilitary Frontier Corps.

He said 68 people were killed and many more wounded. The political official said Monday that the families of 71 victims had been compensated, but did not identify them.

Dilla Baz Khan suffered a fractured arm in the second attack, which he said came around two hours after the first one.

"We were about to pull out a lady from the rubble when another jet came and bombed us," he said from the orthopedic ward of the Hayatabad medical complex in Peshawar. "Then I lost consciousness."

He said an official from the Khyber political administration visited him Monday and gave him $220 for the loss of four relatives, including his brother. "He said we are sorry for this, and we pray for your early recovery," he said.

Brief reports of significant civilian casualties in the strike Saturday have appeared in the local media in recent days, but have not attracted much attention or criticism. The army, while nominally under civilian control, is the most powerful institution in the country.

An editorial Tuesday in Dawn, a respected English-language daily, said it was clear that the dead had no links to the militants and that the incident "strengthens the hands of the Taliban." It said around 60 people were killed.

The United States also regularly attacks al-Qaida and Taliban targets in northwest Pakistan with missiles fired from unmanned drones. American officials do not acknowledge being behind the attacks, which are credited with killing scores of insurgents. Critics say those attacks also regularly claim civilian lives.

Pakistan intelligence officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said a missile attack late Monday close to the town of Miran Shah in North Waziristan killed four suspected militants. Noor Gul, a resident in the village, disputed that, saying 13 civilians, including two children, were killed.

Zarar Khan reported from Islamabad. Associated Press Writers Chris Brummitt in Islamabad contributed to this report.

© 2010 Associated Press

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South Asia
 Apr 15, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD15Df04.html 
 
The suicide mission that went all wrong


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - The attack on the United States consulate in Pershawar, North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), on April 5 was a combined operation of several militant groups with support from renegade elements of the lower cadre of the security apparatus, Asia Times Online's investigations reveal.

The attack, in which five people were killed, as well as the six attackers, could have been a bigger blow to the US Central Intelligence Agency than the operation in Khost in Afghanistan in December 2009 had it not been for two unforeseen incidents. (In the suicide attack on the CIA's forward operating base of Chapman in Khost seven agents were killed, including the station chief, with six people injured.)

The carefully planned operation in Peshawar, the capital of NWFP, involved several militant groups, including from Peshawar, the Pakistani tribal regions and southern Punjab. They were apparently in contact with cadre of the Frontier Constabulary (FC), a federal paramilitary force comprised mostly of people from the tribal areas, Asia Times Online has learned.

The security personnel passed on critical information on the presence of CIA officials inside the consulate, including maps of the consulate building and its approaches. They also arranged for the militants to receive a safe passage to enter the most-secured "red zone" area of the consulate.

The consulate is officially instrumental in dispersing millions of dollars in US aid into the tribal areas as a part of Washington's aim of eliminating support for the Taliban.

On Monday, April 5, six militants set off in a mini-van (known as "Suzuki carry") for the consulate, which is situated in a very secure zone. The first security cordon was in Hospital Road, comprising an armored personnel carrier (APC) blocking the road.
The second cordon was at Delta Barrier, about 50 meters from the APC cordon. The Pakistani Military Intelligence NWFP office is close to Delta Barrier, as is the military's Live Battle School barrack.

As the militants approached the first barrier, one of them got out of the vehicle and let off a suicide bomb. The blast cleared the way and the militants headed for the second barrier. This time they launched salvoes of rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and gun fire.

The plan now was to use a large ramp they were carrying with them to drive over the barrier and head for the office of the CIA's technical team, which they had pinpointed. They were to take them hostage, use them as bargaining chips to secure the release of other militants and then kill the Americans.

But things had already started to go wrong.

The suicide attack had destroyed the APC as planned, but a big chunk of the engine had been sent flying all the way to Delta Barrier, where it lodged in the security barrier. The suicide bomb also instantly killed two people on a passing motorcycle, which careened into the militants' vehicle. This caused them to lose value minutes before they set off for Delta Barrier.

Once they reached this second security check point and had cleared the guards with their assorted weapons fire, they were further delayed as they struggled to clear the heavy and hot engine chunk from their path.

By this time the internal security of the consulate was rushing to the scene. The militants began to confront them, but in the heat of the moment one of them detonated his suicide vest, killing all of the militants.

The goal of penetrating one of the most important CIA bases in the region was dramatically and abruptly brought to a bloody end.

Pakistani and American intelligence agencies are now trying to find out just how much inside help the militants received. Intercepts of communication point to lower cadre of possibly the FC and several arrests have already been made.

Initial inquiries show the militants took at least a month to plan the operation, which was overseen and financed by al-Qaeda. The foot soldiers were militants from southern Punjab and the tribal areas.

The abortive attack follows one on the Police Intelligence Department in Lahore; more are expected.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He is writing an exclusive account of al-Qaeda's strategy and ideology in an upcoming book 9/11 and beyond: The One Thousand and One Night Tales of Al-Qaeda. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

 
 
 

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Drone strikes: a violation of law

by Aaleem Gardezi

Posted By haroon On April 13, 2010 @ 10:10 am



In light of the ongoing drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan near the Pak-Afghan border, the people across the length and breadth of the country are venting their anger and outrage. The Government of Pakistan has condemned such acts by questioning their legality and expressing its concern over the infringement of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For more than four years, the United States has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s), also known as “drones” to bomb various Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets, within the territory of Pakistan. The US President Barack Obama has not only continued with the policies of George Bush, but rather the intensity of these attacks has considerably increased.

The drones have become a weapon of choice for the US in its fight against terrorism and Al-Qaeda raising significant issues under international law. A study called The Year of the Drone published in February 2010 by the New American Foundation found that in a total of 114 drone strikes in Pakistan carried out between 2004 and early 2010, approximately 834 to 1,216 persons had been killed, about two-thirds of whom were militants and one-third civilians. In a similar study, the Brookings Institution (one of the most prominent think tanks in the US), highlighted the “horrendously indiscriminate nature of drone attacks in Pakistan.” It concluded that more than 600 civilians had died due to the attacks in Pakistan. Thus, as a result every militant is killed at the cost of 10 civilians.

The drone attacks by the US violate both the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which prohibit wilful killing. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Without any explicit evidence to suggest that the Pakistani government has requested the US to assist them in fighting militancy in the region, the use of UAV’s amounts to a clear violation of Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

Furthermore, the Geneva Convention of 1949 and their Additional Protocols I and II of 1977 form bedrock of International Humanitarian Law. Provisions of these conventions have attained the status of Customary International Law (meaning that irrespective of the ratification of the said law they must be followed) and they aim to resolve matters of humanitarian concern arising directly from armed conflicts whether of international or non-international nature.

The purpose of the Additional Protocol I was to cater to issues raised by the changing trends of armed conflicts that is now far more asymmetric in nature. The US in one of its indiscriminate drone attacks in January 2006 launched 10 missiles into the Damdola Village located in the Bajaur tribal area of Pakistan. The target of the attack was Ayman-al-Zawahiri (a top Al-Qaeda operative), who was allegedly attending a dinner being held in celebration of the Eid-ul-Azha. Resultantly, three houses were totally demolished and the death toll was as high as 22.

This attack clearly violates several articles of the Additional Protocol I. Firstly, Article 51(2) prohibits the civilian population from being the object of the attacks under any circumstances. Further, Article 51(5) talks about the principle of discrimination and regards an attack to be indiscriminate when bombarded by any means or methods which may lead to an incidental loss of civilian life.

Moreover, a house hosting a religious dinner is not of military character and could not qualify as a military objective unless it was clear that the house itself was by its location and use is making an effective contribution to the military action, in accordance with Article 52(2).
It is also imperative to note that the US seems to be in clear violation of their minimal precautionary obligations under Article 57 of the Additional Protocol I. According to Article 57(2)(a)(i), the planners of the attack must take utmost precautionary measures to verify that the objects of the attack are not civilians and under Article 57(4) reasonable precautions must be taken to avoid losses of civilian lives and civilian objects. The similar incident was repeated in May 2008 when missiles were fired into Damdola area, killing more than 12 people and injuring several others.

In addition to International Humanitarian Laws, further liability can be imputed on the US under the concept of extrajudicial assassinations which are prohibited under human rights. Extrajudicial executions constitute the illegal assassinations of individuals whether by the state, government or by the state authorities, like the armed forces.

Extrajudicial executions are prohibited in accordance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICC-PR), which the US has ratified. According to Article 6(1) of IC-CPR, “every individual has the inherent right to life and no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” Furthermore, Article 6(2) stipulates that the penalty of death can only be rendered by a competent court of law.

This is further ensured under Articles 10 and 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 10 ensures that everyone is entitled to a fair public hearing and Article 11(1) states that anyone charged with a penal offence is presumed innocent until proven guilty in accordance with law. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Philip Alston has also criticised the drone strikes in Pakistan on the basis that they violate the laws described in the article.

The US persists in its policy of drone strikes in Pakistan. The concept of ‘precision bombing’ has its own merits as disseminated by the US that unfortunately cannot cover its actions under the said notion because of clear reports of indiscriminate deaths of countless civilians, including women and children. Encroaching upon another state’s territorial sovereignty to target militants and killing innumerable civilians would certainly not amount to low collateral damage.

The writer is an advocate and a research associate at the Research Society of International Law, Pakistan.

Email: aaleengardezi@rsilpak.org

The Nation columns [1]

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Article printed from PKColumns: http://www.pkcolumns.com

URL to article: http://www.pkcolumns.com/2010/04/13/drone-strikes-a-violation-of-law-by-aaleem-gardezi/

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US Troops See ‘Expanded Role’ in Pakistan

Pentagon Pushes for $10 Million 'Pool' for Funding

by Jason Ditz, April 13, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/13/us-troops-sees-expanded-role-in-pakistan/

Despite an official prohibition at taking any part in Pakistan’s assorted military offensives, the US Special Forces in the nation have continued to expand the definition of “training operations” until now they are overseeing the combat in several areas.

The training mission was originally supposed to be so limited that they weren’t supposed to even train troops directly, they were supposed to train Pakistani trainers who would pass the information along to the paramilitary forces in FATA. Even this was controversial at the time.

But now, the US troops are taking part in “hold and build” operations in FATA, coordinating the operations of the various Pakistani military and civilian authorities in the region.

The Pentagon is now said to be seeking the creation of a $10 million pool for the “trainers” in the nation, to be used for discretionary “hearts and minds” spending, likely mostly on humanitarian aid projects.

But US troops are already showing up in some odd places considering their extremely limited mission. In February three US soldiers were killed in a bombing in the Swat Valley, when the troops were attending a school opening in the area. These photo-op visits are likely to become more and more common as the US presence in the nation grows.

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Published on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 by Nuvo (Indiana)

Indiana Connections to Drone Warfare Technology

by Fran Quigley

The no-frills YouTube video looks like it could be the chronicling of an ambitious science fair project. Inside a spare Indiana warehouse, a young man launches a thin two and a half foot black cylinder into the air, where its propeller blades keep it hovering vertically. Then it moves slowly across the warehouse, past the Purdue University and ROTC signs, before easing its way back into the waiting hands of the same young man who launched it.

A drone prototype. Pilotless drones equipped with cameras have been used by the U.S. for military surveillance since the Vietnam War. Drones with names like the Global Hawk and the Predator conducted reconnaissance over Bosnia, Serbia and Yemen, and now regularly fly over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shortly after the turn of the century, drones expanded beyond mere surveillance when the Predator was outfitted with Hellfire missiles.

But this is no schoolboy experiment, and the small flying cylinder is no model airplane. It is the Voyeur UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, also known as a "drone." According to the website of its manufacturer, West Lafayette-based Lite Machines, Inc., the Voyeur is designed to allow military and law enforcement to conduct surveillance and "human or non-human target acquisition." The Voyeur can travel as far as 50 miles in the air and can hover over and/or touch its target.

Lite Machines is based in the Purdue Research Park, which promotes the fact that the company has received a $10.5 million contract from the U.S. Navy. The multi-million dollar military investment for a small company in Tippecanoe County represents part of a $4 billion annual Department of Defense budget for UAV technology, a highly secretive world of warcraft, which is being eagerly embraced by U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Last year, for the first time, the U.S. Air Force trained more pilots to operate unmanned vehicles than it did pilots for traditional fighter planes.

But the U.S. drone program is also being sharply criticized for its role in targeted killing in Pakistan and beyond, which has caused significant civilian deaths and which legal experts and peace activists label as both illegal and counter-productive. The Voyeur is one of several Indiana connections to robotic technology that is revolutionizing warfare — for good or for ill.

Other Hoosier sites of drone support include:

•Terre Haute-based Indiana Air National Guard's 181st Intelligence Wing, which analyzes data collected from drones hovering over Afghanistan and Pakistan and sends back the results to troops in the field.
•The Indianapolis plant of Rolls Royce, one of the largest U.S. military contractors, which manufactures the engine for the drone Global Hawk.
•Southwest Indiana's Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center, which has received millions of dollars in military contracts to expand the combat capability of drones.
These developments have been touted in elected officials' press releases applauding the money flowing to Indiana. But some Hoosiers are concerned. "Our state needs jobs, but I hate the fact that people of good conscience may be sucked into the military industrial complex process of creating machines that contribute to the deaths of innocent civilians," says Lori Perdue, an Air Force veteran and local coordinator for the peace activist group CODEPINK. "If we could create green jobs instead of war jobs, I bet the guy working the line making jet turbines would rather be building a wind turbine."

The rise of robot killers

Pilotless drones equipped with cameras have been used by the U.S. for military surveillance since the Vietnam War. Drones with names like the Global Hawk and the Predator conducted reconnaissance over Bosnia, Serbia and Yemen, and now regularly fly over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shortly after the turn of the century, drones expanded beyond mere surveillance when the Predator was outfitted with Hellfire missiles.

The drones are operated remotely by computer and video display, often by Air Force personnel in Nevada or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staff in Virginia, even when the drone is flying several thousand miles away. The lack of an onboard pilot eliminates direct risk to U.S. personnel, and is part of a movement toward robot-izing military missions chronicled in Brookings Institution senior fellow P.W. Singer's widely acclaimed book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

As Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told Singer regarding machines like the drones, "They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

The extent of the current U.S. use of drones for attack purposes is not completely clear. The U.S. military and the CIA have resisted requests by Phillip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, for an explanation of the program, and a Freedom of Information Act request for similar information filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has not yet yielded a response. But it is known that the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command maintain a list of individuals to kill or capture, many of them located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and drone-launched missiles are a preferred method for conducting the assassinations. The New America Foundation recently conducted an extensive study of drone attacks and concluded that the U.S. launched 51 drone missile strikes in Pakistan alone in 2009, with anywhere from 372 to 632 people killed, about a third of whom were civilians.

The election of Barack Obama ushered in an era of significant reliance on drone warfare. Jane Mayer recently reported in The New Yorker that, within three days of Obama taking office, a U.S. Predator airstrike in Pakistan hit the wrong target, killing an entire family including a five-year-old child. Despite that inauspicious beginning, the Obama administration has conducted drone attacks at a rate that far exceeds that seen during the George W. Bush administration. The current CIA director Leon Panetta has said of drone attacks, "Very frankly, it is the only game in town in terms of confronting and disrupting the al Qaeda leadership."

At one strategic level, the attraction is understandable: drone attacks do not put any U.S. soldiers or pilots at immediate risk, and the strikes are potentially more precise than traditional aerial bombing. Recent drone-launched missiles reportedly killed the two top leaders of the Pakistani Taliban. Lack of media access to the rugged areas of Pakistan where drone attacks occur limit the U.S. public's exposure to the unintended effects of such attacks, including the children and civilians killed by Hellfire missiles.

But there is also substantial evidence that drone attacks carry with them significant long-term negative impacts for the U.S. David Kilcullen, who served as a chief counterinsurgency strategist for the U.S. State Department and who helped design the U.S. military surge in Iraq, has estimated that drone attacks kill 50 non-targeted persons for each intended target. Kilcullen told Congress last year that robot-launched missiles lead to a groundswell of anger against the U.S. and spikes of extremism worldwide. New York Times reporter David Rohde recently emerged from seven months as a Taliban hostage to report that his captors' hatred for the U.S. was fueled in part by civilians being killed by drones. "To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law," Rohde wrote.

Cycles of violence and international law

In recent months, an object lesson in drones' role in perpetuating a cycle of violence played itself out in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Multiple drone attacks last summer directed toward Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud reportedly killed over 80 people — many attending funeral services for previous drone strike victims — without claiming Mehsud. The CIA finally got its man in a well-publicized August 2009 missile strike that also killed Mehsud's wife, physician and in-laws. Then, on December 30th, a CIA informant conducted a suicide mission at a U.S. base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA agents. The informant, Hamam al-Balawi, left behind a video stating he intended to avenge Mehsud's death. In response, the U.S. stepped up its drone attacks in Pakistan in early 2010, killing hundreds, including the alleged planner of the al-Balawi suicide bombing.

It seems inevitable that the cycle of drone violence will soon include robot attacks on U.S. targets as well — over 40 countries are reportedly developing UAV technology, including Iran, Russia and China, and Hezbollah has already deployed UAV's during its 2006 war with Israel. In P.W. Singer's March 23rd testimony to the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, he compared the current state of robotics in war to the early 20th century use of the automobile or the state of computers around 1980. "The point here is that every so often in history, the emergence of a new technology changes our world," Singer told Congress. "Like gunpowder, the printing press, or even the atomic bomb, such 'revolutionary' technologies are game-changers not merely because of their capabilities, but rather because the ripple effects that they have outwards onto everything from our wars to our politics."

University of Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O'Connell, who has conducted a case study of the use of combat drones in Pakistan, says these ripple effects have already led to multiple aspects of U.S. drone warfare directly violating international law. Among the illegal acts O'Connell cites are the CIA's involvement in aerial killing, the targeting of individuals in Pakistan — where the U.S. is not at war and does not have explicit permission from civilian authorities to conduct attacks, and the refusal to provide information to the U.N. regarding the program's criteria for selecting human targets.

She also stresses that the large civilian impact of drone attacks violates centuries-old agreements on the rules of war, which limit military strikes to proportional responses that do not unnecessarily risk the lives of non-combatants. "The questions of legality and effectiveness are bound up in each other," says O'Connell, who advocates for a law enforcement-oriented approach of capture and trial of alleged terrorists. "Most of the rules of international law, especially the law on deadly force, are good for us. Not killing people in a way that foments revenge is a rule that goes back to St. Augustine."

Yet the U.S. drone program is clearly gaining momentum. Seven thousand drones are operated by the U.S. currently, the military budget for drones has more than doubled in just the past four years, and the New America Foundation reports that as many as 211 people have been killed by U.S. drone missiles in just the first three months of 2010. The Star Wars-like technology and the remote locations of drone missile strikes do not seem to suggest an affiliation with Midwest settings, but it turns out that there are several Hoosier connections to this trend in warfare. An ongoing investigation by NUVO, including multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to military agencies, has revealed Indiana-based activity in drone manufacture, research and operations.

Indiana's connections to drone warfare

Department of Defense records indicate that West Lafayette-based Lite Machines received nearly $2.5 million in U.S. military contracts for fiscal year 2008 alone, including a $1.5 million contract from U.S. Special Operations Command for research and development. Lite Machines did not return several messages requesting an interview for this article, but the company's website touts the Voyeur's applications for military and law enforcement, including its ability to locate and detonate improvised explosive devices.

Lite Machines promotes the Voyeur's ability to fly in swarms, and many military observers say that such mini-drones can carry weapons as well as surveillance equipment. "Mini-drones can be used for the same purposes as larger ones," Notre Dame's O'Connell says. "They can be used like a flying missile with explosives that can be dropped by the drone or the drone itself can be triggered to explode. The sky is the limit here."

The Indiana Air National Guard's 181st Intelligence Wing, based at Terre Haute's International Airport-Hulman Field, embodies the military's transition to robot warfare. In 2008, the base switched from a focus on F-16 fighter jets to processing information gathered by drones. First Lt. Randi Brown, the 181st's executive staff officer, said that the Guardsmen in Terre Haute are reviewing information obtained by Predator drones and relaying their analysis back to troops and aircraft around the world.

"We receive near-real time video feeds from UAV's, and intelligence airmen analyze that information and send it back out," Brown said. "It is like a customer service job, in that we respond to the requests of the folks in the field, whether it be for humanitarian or combat purposes." Although Brown could not confirm whether the 181st has been involved in the planning of controversial bombings in Pakistan or elsewhere, it has been widely reported that such video analysis provides information used to plan and conduct drone missile strikes.

The Indianapolis plant of Rolls Royce, according to Department of Defense reports, received over $473 million in government contracts in fiscal year 2008 alone, in part to pay for the manufacture of the AE 3007H turbofan engine for the drone Global Hawk. While the Global Hawk does not carry or fire missiles like the Predator does, it is known for its ability to cover tens of thousands of square miles in surveillance while staying in the air for up to 35 hours, gathering data that is used for the planning of drone and other military attacks.

Finally, southwest Indiana's Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center received $3 million in 2005 to expand the capability of drones in "electronic warfare," according to a statement by Senator Evan Bayh. Requests for an explanation of Crane drone activity for this article were not replied to, but Freedom of Information Act requests remain pending.

Drone technology's impact seems destined to expand beyond the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan toward more domestic uses. Lite Machines, for example, advertises the Voyeur's law enforcement capacity in addition to its military uses, and mini-drones are known for their ability to perch and observe via tiny video cameras in places where humans cannot go. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection is already flying drones as part of its border security, and the Miami-Dade Police Department has sought and obtained authorization to create a program of drone surveillance in urban law enforcement.

To Notre Dame's O'Connell, the CIA's drone use in Pakistan is already replacing a difficult but achievable law enforcement challenge—arresting and putting to trial suspected terrorists in a country where we are not at war—with summary executions accompanied by civilian casualties Thus, a slippery slope is already being descended.

"We quickly moved from using drones just for data collection to weaponizing them, and we quickly moved from battlefield use of drones to killing people beyond the lines of any battlefields," O'Connell says. "So what will keep us from using them with other crimes and in other locations, including the U.S.? In the civilian context, that is something we should definitely be concerned about."

The overall Indiana picture is of a state with substantial and varied ties to a robotics revolution that is already transforming war and may soon do the same for law enforcement and domestic surveillance. While elected officials like Senator Bayh and institutions like Purdue University celebrate Indiana's drone connections as an economic victory in a competition to bring some of the billions of dollars in robotic combat spending to local communities, activists like CODEPINK's Perdue see no reason to celebrate. "It breaks my heart to see what we are doing in Indiana to sustain a form of warfare that both causes civilian deaths and creates problems for the U.S. in terms of our global image," she says.

With reporting assistance by Jeff Cox

© 2010 Nuvo

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South Asia
Apr 16, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD16Df04.html 
 
All change in Pakistan

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - The move to change the name of restive North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa - meaning "Khyber side of the land of the Pakhtuns" - to reflect the majority ethnic Pashtun population of the province has stirred a violent backlash that adds another layer to the myriad problems Pakistan faces.

More than a dozen people have been killed in the past week in clashes between the security forces and non-Pashtun protesters in NWFP.

After a two-day debate, the senate on Thursday passed the 18th amendment to the 1973 constitution that instituted the name change. Other amendments that are still awaiting approval would result in the president being stripped of sweeping powers, including a transfer of powers from the Office of the President to the prime minister, taking away, including other things, the president's power to dismiss an elected government and appoint military chiefs. The National Assembly last week passed the amendment.

The amendments will undo the presidential powers instituted by former military dictators General Zia ul-Haq and General Pervez Musharraf and significantly empower parliament; marking one of the most important pieces of legislation in Pakistan's recent history.

The sub-nationalist Pashtun Awami National Party (ANP), which leads the coalition government in NWFP, in return for its support of the presidential changes insisted that NWFP's name be changed at the same time.

This has been a long-standing demand of the party as well as its predecessor, the banned National Awami Party, which was the initial flagbearer of a greater Pakhtoonistan - the name given to the region inhabited by Pashtuns since ancient time that straddles modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The area was designated as a future sovereign state by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as Frontier Gandhi and the grandfather of Asfandyar Wali Khan, the current leader of the ANP) in the late 1940s when British India was in the process of being partitioned. Instead, much of it was incorporated into Pakistan when the new country was established in 1947.

Pashtun nationalists say the historic homeland was first divided in 1893 by the Durand Line, a disputed and what they call an imaginary border between British India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan. The line still serves as the de facto border.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ANP changed its political position and even made alliances with its historical rival, the Pakistan Muslim League. It also publicly recognized the creation of Pakistan and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, previously a political opponent, as its spiritual leader and the father of nation. Jinnah served as Pakistan's first governor general.

The ANP completely distanced itself from its traditional anti-American policies that were born during its closeness to the Soviet camp during the Cold War. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the ANP emerged as an important US ally and its support of the "war on terror" made it a prime target of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

After prolonged and heated debate inside and outside parliament, all the major stakeholders, including the ruling Pakistan People's Party and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, agreed that NWFP's name change to Pakhtoonkhwa would not revive the old controversy of Pakhtoonistan.

The issue has however stirred passions among the frontier province's minority non-Pashtuns in the population of about 21 million. Violence has reached such levels that entire non-Pashtun majority regions are paralyzed. The ANP-led government has responded with force, with unconfirmed reports of about a dozen deaths.

Two other communities, those speaking the Hinko and Siraiki languages, have rejected the name change. In the past few days, thousands of people have taken to the streets of Abbotabad and Mansehra in protest. In the latest twist, people of the region of Hazara have demanded a separate province for the non-Pashtun population.

Protesters have ransacked ANP offices and targeted office bearers. Portraits of the party's founders have been smashed and its red flags, red shirts and red caps set on fire. The former ruling pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-Azam) joined the protests and declared the ANP's leaders traitors. Before partition, the ANP's early leaders had been a part of the Indian National Congress that opposed the creation of Pakistan.

"Nobody expected such a reaction in this renaming drama. Now a crisis looms large," Dr Meraj ul-Huda, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a premier Islamic party, told Asia Times Online.

"The political leadership should have realized the fact that Pakhtoonkhwa would not be acceptable in several areas and that it would only create further complications - which seem inevitable now," Meraj said.

"Already, the Hazara region has put in a demand for a new province. This will not be acceptable to the Pashtun population or the Awami National Party. But the Hazara region now appears to be rigid in its demand," Meraj said, adding that even worse was a fresh demand from the tribal areas situated between Pakistan and Afghanistan for a separate province, Kabailistan (Land of Tribes).

"The most dangerous aspect of this controversy is that the ANP aims to implement its demand of Pakhtoonkhwa by keeping the whole province as one entity by any means possible, using brute force instead of political dialogue," Meraj said.

Splittist sentiment is spreading fast.

There are now calls for a separate Siraiki province to be carved out of Punjab. This is likely to be turned into a movement in the coming weeks. In the southern port city of Karachi, the Mohajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM - Mohajir National Movement) has raised the possibility of splitting from Sindh province and turning Karachi and Hyderabad into a separate province.

These splits are not likely to happen any time soon. But what is worrying for the military establishment is that the flagbearers for these separate entities have traditionally been accused of being Indophile and have generally sat lightly in the American camp. The heat being raised by Pakhtoonkhwa provides them with an opportunity to stir the rabble.

Security contacts tell Asia Times Online that should such mass protests eventuate, the military is considering reviving right-wing Islamic parties as a counter force.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

 
 
 

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Friday, April 16, 2010
14:14 Mecca time, 11:14 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/2010416681216329.html

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths in Pakistan hospital blast 
 

The bomber struck outside a hospital emergency ward
in Quetta in the middle of a media briefing [AFP]
 
At least eight people have been killed and another 35 wounded after a suicide bomber attacked a hospital in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

A television cameraman and a police officer were among those killed on Friday when the attacker detonated his explosives outside the gate of the Civic Hospital's emergency ward.

The chief of police in Quetta told Al Jazeera that a full investigation into Friday's attack was under way.

Family members of a bank manager, who had been shot dead in the early hours of the morning, had gathered outside the hospital before the blast occurred.

The emergency room was full of his friends and relatives when the bomber struck at the gate, Mohammad Sabir, a police official, said.

Zahir Shah Kazmi, a senior police officer who was briefing reporters at the hospital about the attack on the bank executive, was killed in the bombing.

The dead cameraman worked for Samaa TV, a Pakistani television station. Several journalists also present at the scene were wounded.

The bank manager came from a prominent Shia family. An armed man shot him as he stepped out of his car outside the bank on a major city road, officials said.

Sectarian violence

Pakistan, and Quetta in particular, has a history of sectarian violence between extremist groups from the minority Shia and majority Sunni Muslims.

Several of Pakistan's Sunni extremist groups also are allied with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who view Shia Muslims as infidels.

 
In a separate incident on Friday, a suspected US missile attack killed four suspected fighters in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, officials said.

The alleged missile attack took place in the Torkhel area in North Waziristan, a tribal region filled with al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters focused on attacking US and Nato soldiers across the border in Afghanistan.

At least four suspected fighters were killed, Noor Ahmad, a Pakistan government official, said.

The exact identities of the dead were not immediately known.

The US has frequently targeted North Waziristan in its campaign to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders using missiles.
 
 

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April 16, 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-secret-war-ndash-and-the-hidden-lair-of-the-taliban-1946387.html

The secret war - and the hidden lair of the Taliban


Soldiers sort through a tunnel built and used by the Pakistani Taliban in the Bajaur area

Patrick Cockburn investigates the insurgents' mountain hideaway - and a little-known conflict that has killed thousands

The Pakistani army has fought successfully to control mountainous frontier areas once ruled by the Pakistani Taliban, but it remains reluctant to attack the cross-border safe havens of the Afghan Taliban despite American pressure.

Pakistani soldiers in Bajaur district on the Afghan frontier are eager to demonstrate what they have already achieved, showing off captured tunnels dug into the hillside by the local Taliban to protect their fighters against air and artillery attack. On display are some rockets and shells and a broken sign put up outside a building serving as a court house in the last days of Taliban rule reading: "Don't bring any more cases."

In Bajaur, a heavily populated area of mountains and well-watered terraces and valleys, the Pakistani army is once more very much in charge. Col Nauman Saeed, commander of the 3,500-strong Bajaur Scouts, said: "I want to end the misconception that our frontier areas are the most ungovernable in the world."

Even so the Pakistani army is taking no chances. I travelled by helicopter from Islamabad to Khar, the small town which is the district capital, to avoid a 10-hour road trip through at least three mountain ranges. As we drove half a dozen miles along the dusty road from Col Saeed's headquarters, with its neat lawns and beds of roses, to the tunnels and caves where the local Taliban formerly had their headquarters, there was a soldier on guard every few hundred yards. The soldiers did not look as if they expected to be shot at, and the fields around Khar are green with young crops, but there is little traffic on the road and half the shops look closed.

Bajaur may be pacified, but at least a third of Pakistan's half-million strong army is now deployed in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of which it is part. Urged on by the US, the Pakistani military have taken back areas once held by the Pakistani Taliban all along the border, but it is reluctant to enter those like North Waziristan which the Americans see as a crucial base of the Afghan Taliban.

The Pakistani army's campaign in FATA has been largely successful so far. The price has been high in terms of refugees, ruined villages and casualties. In Bajaur the army lost 150 dead and 637 wounded, while several thousand insurgents are claimed dead.

There was little sign of battle damage on Khar, but Col Saeed said that 12 villages totally destroyed in fighting over the last two years have not been rebuilt. Some 70,000 people out of a population of 1.2 million in Bajaur are still refugees, along with a million others from the rest of Pakistan's North West Frontier province.

Many people have died and are still dying in this vicious and little-reported war where it is difficult to get details even when there are many dead. For instance last Saturday some 75 villagers were killed in an air strike by Pakistani jets in the Khyber district of FATA. The army at first said they were Islamic militants, but later admitted that there had been a blunder and victims were being compensated.

Two days after this attack Pakistani officials said that four people had been killed by an American drone hitting a vehicle in North Waziristan. A local resident claimed that in reality 13 civilians, including two children, had died in the explosion.

It may be that local inhabitants are glad to see the back of the Taliban. Officers point out a dry river bed near Khar where people were assembled to watch public executions. But at the same time the area remains very much under military occupation, with frequent checkpoints and fortified outposts. The Bajaur Scouts are recruited from local tribes, but there is also an army brigade in the district.

It is hazardous to draw too many conclusions from an official tour such as the one I was on in Bajaur. There is so much one does not see. But it is impossible for foreign journalists to visit the area without official permission and protection.

Just how necessary this protection is was demonstrated a few hours after I had left Khar when gunmen burst into the house of a local journalist called Imran and shot and badly wounded him and his sister. A press report recalled that Imran's father had been murdered when covering insurgent activities in an earlier incident.

Officially Pakistan decries the use of the American drones, but a senior security official confirmed that the drones rely on information supplied by local agents of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. Without such intelligence the US officers directing the drones, which are launched from inside Pakistan, would not know who or what to target. Some 73 ISI agents have been killed setting up these intelligence networks. Several of them have been seen on video being ritually beheaded by the Taliban.

The Pakistan army's public denunciation of and private collaboration with the drone attacks is one example of its ambivalent relationship with the US. In American eyes it is reluctant to act against Afghan Taliban safe havens along the border in the same way as it did against their Pakistani equivalents. To many Pakistani soldiers this would be a very different type of war.

Col Saeed says he calls the local Islamic militants "miscreants" who have no aim other than to win power and do not deserve the name of Taliban. He has a much higher opinion of the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and has his own explanation as to why the US forces in Kunar, the Afghan province across the border from Bajaur, have so little success. "They don't have the legitimacy we do," he says.

He believes that the Afghan Taliban become insurgents and are motivated because they are members of the Pashtun community which has been marginalised. His analysis is confirmed by many American officials on the ground. The strength of the Pakistan Taliban was probably always exaggerated in the West. They were never more than a powerful irritant rather than a real threat to the Pakistani state even when they took over the Swat Valley. Their open bloodthirstiness, demonstrated on videos of the public lashing of women, isolated them politically.

Peace has not returned to FATA. Local papers carry stories down-column of suspected Islamic militants' houses being burned, refugees in flight or returning, a girls' school destroyed by insurgents and many killed by American drone attacks. The army is in control, but it is not clear what would happen if it left. It may find it more difficult to get out of FATA than it was to get in.

Frontier area in numbers

70,000 people Out of population of 1.2 million in Bajaur are refugees.

150 pakistan soldiers killed by insurgents in Bajaur.

75 civilians killed in Pakistan air strike in Khyber last Saturday.

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US Pullout From Afghan Outpost Leaves Pakistani Army Fuming

Bajaur Invasion Drove Hundreds of Militants Across Afghan Border


by Jason Ditz, April 15, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/15/us-pullout-from-afghan-outpost-leaves-pakistani-army-fuming/

The 5,500+ kilometer border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has been a bone of contention between Pakistan’s military and the international occupation forces in Afghanistan largely since the Afghan War began. Complaints over Pakistan’s inability to secure the border have been a constant strain on ties with the nation, despite the enormity and inhospitableness of the border regions.

But as US pressure has forced Pakistan to invade a number of its own loosely controlled border regions, the tables have turned. Now, it is the Pakistani military complaining about the US inability to control the Afghan border.

The latest dispute comes as the Pakistani military struggles to secure its “victory” over the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the tiny Bajaur Agency. Though the military chased the militants largely out of the region in a battle that killed some 150 security forces, they note with growing resentment that most of the TTP simply relocated to Kunar, on the Afghan side of the border.

In fact the portion of Kunar that borders Bajaur, the Korengal Valley, had only one US outpost, and that was abandoned earlier this week as too dangerous and of questionable value.

For the US the enormous number of wars they have convinced Pakistan to start along the border has been no small achievement. Yet as the US struggles to sell the Afghan War as a growing success the reality is that NATO’s virtually non-existant presence along the border means Pakistan’s offensives are accomplishing very little, except for getting large number of Pakistanis killed.

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Civilian deaths hurt Pakistan Army’s anti-Taliban campaign

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\04\16\story_16-4-2010_pg1_6

* Airstrike on suspected Taliban, which killed civilians in a village, could alienate those the army needs most in its struggle to stabilise country — pro-govt tribesmen

ISLAMABAD: An airstrike on suspected Taliban, which killed civilians in a village could alienate those the army needs most in its struggle to stabilise the country - pro-government tribesmen.

Before the attack on Saturday, remote Saravilla was one of the few villages in northwest Pakistan where the Taliban were too scared to go, residents say. After details of the operation became clear this week, analysts wondered whether the assault may turn some of the few Pakistanis brave enough to resist the Taliban against the army.

Villagers and local government officials said 63 civilians were killed. The military initially denied civilian deaths in strike but later admitted the strikes killed 30 terrorists and then another assault killed up to 20 civilians who had gathered afterwards at the site and were mistaken for Taliban fighters.

“Saravilla is a place where the Taliban cannot dare enter. The government well knows where the hideouts of the terrorists are,” Ameer Baz, a villager whose relative was injured in the attack, told Reuters.

“If the army kills civilians then people will not support operations against terrorists.”

Pakistan cannot afford to anger civilians in the ethnic Pashtun tribal northwest, where it needs more intelligence and cooperation on the ground to fight the Taliban. Terrorists operate from sanctuaries in the areas where the government traditionally has little authority. Pakistani security forces have stepped up anti-Taliban assaults in the northwest over the past year, largely clearing terrorists from the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, and the South Waziristan and Bajaur regions on the Afghan border. It has expanded operations into the Orakzai, Khyber and Kurram regions where officials say the Taliban fled from earlier operations.

Large numbers of civilian casualties could be a blow to the government’s efforts to win over the tribal population from the Taliban, an effort the government says has been largely successful. reuters

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20 killed in Pakistan twin blasts
 
 
17/04/2010 09:20:12 AM GMT   
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/20-killed-in-Pakistan-twin-blasts.html

 
Twin blasts hit a camp for displaced people in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 20 people while lining up to receive aid handouts, a local official says.

"There were two blasts. The first took place when relief items were being distributed among the displaced people," said Kohat police chief Dilawar Khan Bangash.

He added that there was another blast while the casualties were being taken away.

Other officials also confirmed two blasts.

"We are investigating the cause of the first blast, but the second was definitely planted. It's aim was to cause maximum casualties after the first blast," Khalid Omarzai, a local chief of administration, told Geo television.

A police official said 300 people were gathered in the office. He said the death toll was likely to rise as at least 50 others were wounded.

On Friday, a bomber blew himself inside a hospital in Pakistan's southwest Balochistan province, killing at least eleven people and injuring dozens of others.

Over 3,500 people have been killed in bombings and other attacks by militants throughout Pakistan since July 2007.

MVZ/DT


Source: Press TV
 

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Saturday, April 17, 2010
13:03 Mecca time, 10:03 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201041781041654854.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths reported in Pakistan blasts
 
 
The blast came a day after an attack at a hospital in the Pakistani city of Quetta [AFP]
 

 
At least 30 people have been reported killed following two explosions at a camp for displaced people in northwest Pakistan.

Police said scores of others were wounded when the blasts detonated minutes apart on Saturday at a camp in the Kacha Pukka area of Kohat, a tribally administered region close to the Afghan border.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the capital, Islamabad, said the two powerful explosions rocked a food-distribution point in the camp.

"This was a point where registration was under way and food distribution was under way," he said.

"Most of the victims were the displaced people from the Orakzai agency where the military has launched an offensive recently, displacing a large number of people.

"The attack is said to have involved a suicide bomber and perhaps a remote-controlled device planted near that particular area."

But he said there is no clear indication as to who is responsible for the attack.

"The first explosion prompted people to come to the assistance of the victims, at which point the second explosion took place, which shows that this was well planned [and] meticulous."

Military offensive

The Pakistani military stepped up an offensive against Taliban-allied fighters in Orakzai late last month.

in depth :

 
-  Your Views: Is Islamabad fighting a civil war?
-  Hamid Gul: Taliban is the future
-  Riz Khan: Heading to civil war?
-  Peace eludes Pakistan's Swat valley
-  Pakistan 'takes over' Taliban base
-  Taliban arrest motives questioned
 
-  Pakistan: Heading to civil war?
-  Pakistan needs friendly Afghanistan
-  Obama's Pakistan dilemma
-  Pakistan, another bloody year?
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201041781041654854.html
 
The UN said earlier this month that the deteriorating security situation in Orakzai and neighbouring Kurram district has forced 200,000 civilians to flee since November last year.

Over the past year, Pakistan has significantly increased operations against fighters in its northwest and tribal belt which the US has branded an al-Qaeda "headquarters".

The area became a stronghold for hundreds of fighters who fled neighbouring Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in late 2001.

Much of the violence in Pakistan has been concentrated in the northwest of the country.

On Friday, at least eight people were killed and another 35 wounded in a suicide bomb attack at a hospital in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan.

A television cameraman and a police officer were among those killed when the attacker detonated his explosives outside the gate of the Civic Hospital's emergency ward.

Family members of a bank manager, who had been shot dead in the early hours of the morning, had gathered outside the hospital before the blast occurred.

The emergency room was full of his friends and relatives when the bomber struck at the gate, Mohammad Sabir, a police official, said.
 
 

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Kucinich: Obama’s drone attacks in Pakistan ‘inspire radicalism’

By Sahil Kapur
Monday, April 19th, 2010 -- 10:16 am
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0419/kucinich-obamas-drone-attacks-pakistan-inspiring-radicalism/

WASHINGTON – Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) forcefully criticized President Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan as inspiring the anti-American sentiments they seek to quell, touching upon a consequence of the policy rarely discussed in the media but well-recognized in the region.

"I do not support the drone attacks," Kucinich told Raw Story, arguing that they are pushing the United States "into an area of unaccountability that would lead to blowback, where we actually lose friends, where we help inspire anti-American sentiments and fanaticism and radicalism."

The missile strikes, carried out by aircraft drones piloted remotely, have wiped out many Islamic militants, including high-level Al-Qaeda operatives, according to Pentagon officials.

But they have also killed civilians, sparking anger in the Islamic nation and fueling dissatisfaction with the United States and Pakistan’s pro-American government alike. Kucinich argued that the strikes are, as a result, counterproductive.

"Just as an occupation fuels an insurgency, these drones build feelings and resistance against the United States and help gain support for those elements who wish to do America harm," he said, alleging that Pakistan’s support and cooperation is vital to nuclear nonproliferation and counterterrorism efforts.


President George W. Bush initiated the policy in 2005 with the intention of wiping out spillover militant activity from the Afghanistan war into western Pakistan. The attacks have been used with greater frequency under his successor, according to The Associated Press.

The policy's unintended consequence of fueling anti-American sentiments is seldom debated, but Pakistani leaders and citizens are acutely aware of the brewing backlash.

"The Pakistan Government and anti-US elements are condemning the US drone attacks as violation of their sovereignty and innocent tribal people being killed," remarked D. Suba Chandran, deputy director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, in a recent op-ed. "They argue that these attacks result in increasing anti-American feelings and the Taliban gaining local support."

The Ohio congressman called for a careful re-evaluation of US strategy in the region, urging Obama to "be careful not to inadvertently create the circumstances that push Pakistan into becoming a failed state." He didn't, however, oppose the five-year $7.5 billion aid package or new weapons the administration recently gave Islamabad to help subdue brewing terrorist activity.

The Obama administration publicly defended the strikes for the first time on March 25 as both legal and necessary for self-defense, but didn't address the issue of pushback in Pakistan.

State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh declared that the drone strikes "comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war," in a speech to the American Society of International Law. "A state that is engaged in armed conflict – or in legitimate self-defense – is not required to provide targets or legal process before the state may use lethal force."

Although anti-war activists have criticized the unilateral use of missile attacks in the region, the policy enjoys comfortable – if tacit – support from in Congress.