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

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New Setback for US-Pakistan Ties

Panetta Accuses Pakistan of 'Collusion' With Militants


by Jason Ditz, June 10, 2011

The Pakistani government’s official position is that most of the tribal areas are now under control. The US, however, sees the threats as growing, and is also growing in their accusations that elements of the Zardari government are secretly in league with militants

MORE

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/06/10/new-setback-for-us-pakistan-ties/

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'Foreigners intensify Pakistan instability'


Sun Jun 12, 2011 12:59PM
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/184346.html



Foreign leaders and elements are the reason why Pakistan's long raging civil war between the militants and security forces escalates, a political analyst says.


Liaquat Ali Khan, author and professor of Law at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, told Press TV that the presence of foreign leaders, such as CIA chief Leon Panetta, is the reason behind the escalation of the country's civil war.

He explained that the war which has been “raging” for the past several years is between the militants and the security forces who lack the required resources and intelligence to fight the imposed danger.

Militants disapprove Pakistan's foreign policy, the US occupation of Afghanistan and the drone attacks, Ali Khan said.

This is just a part of a pattern of several civil wars taking place in other Muslim countries, designed by foreign elements in order to cause political chaos and economic stagnation.

Many cities along with tribal areas are already targeted on a regular basis by terrorist groups and US-led NATO forces, Ali Khan added.

Meanwhile, in northwest Pakistan, two massive explosions in a crowded supermarket complex in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province claimed the lives of at least 34 people while injuring 80 others.

The explosions destroyed over 20 shops near the blast site. A two-storey hotel also collapsed following the huge bomb attacks, burying many people under the debris.

While the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility shortly after the incident, police have arrested three suspects during the search operation following the blasts.

REZ/PKH/MMN

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/184346.html

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Sun Jun 12, 2011 10:15AM
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/184329.html

Arrest warrant issued for Musharraf



Pakistan's former President Pervez Musharraf

A Pakistani court has issued an arrest warrant for former President Pervez Musharraf over his alleged involvement in the assassination of the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.


On the request of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), an anti-terrorism court's judge, Rana Nisar Ahmed, asked the authorities to immediately put Musharraf on trial, a Press TV correspondent reported.

In April, the court urged Islamabad to issue the arrest warrant through Interpol. Musharraf's arrest warrant could still not be served by the government.

In a February report, FIA said Musharraf was behind Bhutto's assassination in Rawalpindi in 2007.

According to the report, Musharraf had appointed the two senior policemen who are suspected of not giving adequate protection to Bhutto at the time of her murder.

Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in an attack as she was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi. A gunman reportedly shot her in the neck and set off a bomb. At least 20 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.

The FIA report said the officers failed to provide adequate security to Bhutto, denied her a post-mortem and were also responsible for hosing down the scene of the killing immediately after the crime.

Musharraf is accused of giving the pair their orders.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who won the presidency after Bhutto's death, has pointed the finger of blame at the then government of Musharraf and threatened to take action against the former military ruler.

MSH/AKM


http://www.presstv.ir/detail/184329.html

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Pakistan: Beginning of The Endgame? –


Analysis

Written by: IDSA

June 18, 2011
http://www.eurasiareview.com/pakistan-beginning-of-the-endgame-analysis-18062011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29


By P. K. Upadhyay

The study on Pakistan brought out by the ‘Pakistan Project’ team of the IDSA in mid-2010 (‘Whither Pakistan? The Growing Instability and Implications for India’) had argued that Pakistan’s vexed ethnic, regional and economic fault-lines had gotten deeper and that, in addition, the rising tide of Deobandi sectarian zeal was tearing apart the national fabric. The militant Deobandi zealots, raised encouraged and nurtured by the Pakistani establishment (i.e. the Army and the ISI), were almost out of control in pursuit of their agenda of setting-up a Deobandi Islamic order in the country by supplanting the existing social and political edifice. The one chance that Pakistan had in averting this scenario was for the Army to succeed in quelling the Deobandi Islamists, as it was the last surviving national institution with the capability to overturn the rising tide of religious radicalism. There were, however, question marks over the Army’s desire and motivation to take on the Islamists.


Pakistan
Events in the past few weeks suggest that there could now be serious doubts about the Army’s will and commitment to confront the Islamists due to the penetration of its own rank and file by the latter. Ironically this demon of radicalism springs out of the Pakistan Army’s continued espousal of the Zia-era doctrine of ‘total Jihadist wars’ that treated militant groups like Al Qaeda as its allies in the continuing and inevitable conflict between Dar-ul Islam and Dar-ul Harb. Osama-bin Laden and the Taliban leaders were part of Dar-ul Islam and even though the Pakistan Army had to be tactically aligned with the forces of Dar-ul Harb (i.e. USA and other western powers) for the present, links with OBL and his allies were being maintained in the hope that one day the jihad would eventually triumph. Therefore, hiding Osama and other Taliban leaders in safe sanctuaries and havens within Pakistani territory, even while operating with USA against them, was an acceptable and understandable contradiction. However, what has clearly been beyond comprehension for many in Pakistan’s civil and military establishments was the tacit help extended to the Americans in liquidating OBL.

Many in the Pakistan Army appear to view this as a sell-out by senior Commanders and that they have to pay for it. There are indications that such sentiments are very high and many middle level officers of the ranks of Colonel and others are openly confronting their superiors with these questions. The situation is serious enough to have forced General Kayani and other senior Corps Commanders to visit various units and try and assuage ruffled Islamic sentiments of the rank and file by declaring that they shared the latter’s sense of humiliation over the Abbottabad raid by US commandos, though now was no time to jettison ties with the US. Kayani is reported to have told senior officers last week (139th Corps Commanders’ Conference, Islamabad, June 9, 2011) that the Army was “drastically cutting” the number of US troops stationed in Pakistan and that US military aid to Pakistan should be diverted to civilian use as it was no longer essential for the Army. He also declared that US drone strikes in FATA were “not acceptable under any circumstances”.

The tone and tenor of the Army leadership’s statements and the wide media publicity they have been given is indicative of not just the extent of the feeling of hurt and betrayal that pervades Pakistan’s civil and military structures but also the alarm it seems to have set-off among the top-brass. Coming in the aftermath of attack on Mehran Naval Aviation Base in Karachi, the military’s statement is a tacit admission of the significant extent to which radical sentiments seem to have penetrated inside the Pakistani military establishment and the preparedness of these elements to openly challenge the military hierarchy and structures. One could be pardoned if one hears echoes of Anwar Sadat’s assassination in Egypt in recent (past few weeks) armed attacks on Pakistani military establishments from within its own ranks. It may be recalled that Sadat’s assassination showed that just a handful of religiously fired military men were enough to nearly bring down an established regime. In Pakistan this phenomenon had been there for past many years and, if any thing, elements that attacked Musharraf, the Karachi Corps Commander and Musharraf’s Prime Minister designate Shaukat Aziz, have only become stronger and bolder.

If these incidents and developments suggest a weakening of the Pakistani military structure, it could be the beginning of the endgame in Pakistan’s troubled polity. If the Army withers away then a fragmentation of Pakistan into a ‘Lebanonized’ state would become inevitable. The next two to three years are very crucial for Pakistan.

Is India prepared to deal with this scenario? India should read the writing on the wall and be prepared for the inevitable. The Government must try and build up a broad national consensus on how to deal with the fast evolving situation in the north-west of the sub-continent. Any uncertainty and indecision in this regard could have grave security and other implications for India. It is, perhaps, time for India to engage with Pakistan’s diverse communities and ethnic groups so that their actions do not come as a surprise.

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/PakistanBeginningoftheEndgame_pkupadhyay_170611

http://www.eurasiareview.com/pakistan-beginning-of-the-endgame-analysis-18062011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

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Pakistan Leads In Human Rights Violations – OpEd

Written by: Tanveer Jafri

June 18, 2011

http://www.eurasiareview.com/pakistan-leads-in-human-rights-violations-oped-18062011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29


Formed in 1947, with intent to establish an Islamic state, Pakistan can today be seen crushing every single Islamic teaching and ideal. The Holy Quran clearly prohibits any kind of ill-treatment of any innocent. It equates killing of an innocent with the killing of entire humanity. Dozens of innocent people are getting killed in Pakistan on a daily basis- sometimes in the hands of the Taliban and suicide bombers and sometimes by the security forces themselves. Many mysterious deaths are even said to be the handiwork of the ISI and the Army.

Recently, a 40-year old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad was killed just because he was doing his job honestly. On May 31, Shahzad had to lay his life for exposing the unholy nexus between the Pakistani Navy and Al Qaeda. “Islamic” rulers of an “Islamic” country couldn’t tolerate the truth being brought to the fore by a true Muslim journalist. In this flagrant case of Human Rights violation, not only an innocent has been killed but also an attempt has been made to suppress the freedom of the Press. Reportedly, the ISI is said to be behind the assassination of Saleem Shahzad.

Within a week of this ghastly incident, another gruesome act of Human Rights violation took place in Karachi on June 8. Sarfaraz Shah (19) was dragged out of a park by a man in plain clothes. He was pushed towards a group of Sindh Rangers, a paramilitary force, who were in uniform and armed. The unarmed young man pleaded for his life as one of the Rangers pointed a gun at his neck. The Ranger then shot him twice at close range, hitting him in the thigh. The young man was writhing on the ground, bleeding heavily and crying for help. Shortly after, he died from his injuries.

A journalist made an amateur video of this horrendous act. This disturbing video has been watched widely across the world. Pak Rangers didn’t like their inhuman act being exposed. Now, they have threatened the journalist, who made that video, of dire consequences. But killing of innocent Sarfaraz didn’t go down well the Pak judiciary. Taking suo motu cognizance of this gruesome act, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry not only ordered the removal of the Pak Rangers Director, Major General Ejaz Chaudhry and Police Commissioner Fayyaz Leghari but also directed the Accountant General to withhold their salaries if its orders were not carried out. On this heart-rending act of Human Rights violation, the Chief Justice observed, “Rangers were indulging in target killing instead of stopping it.” In their defence, Pak Rangers are alleging that Sarfaraz was involved in a robbery, whereas his relatives are saying that Sarfaraz was just walking in the park. The Supreme Court has also ordered the verification of Sarfaraz’s past crime record, if any.

Many sincere and responsible people in Pakistan have expressed concern over this incident. The worries of the Pakistani people are accentuated by the fact that Pak Rangers are an indispensable component of Pakistan’s internal security and work directly under the Interior Ministry. Therefore, such an act of daylight killing of an innocent puts a big question mark on the working of the internal security system of Pakistan. Though Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik has order an enquiry into it, Prime Minister Gilani is not fine with the criticism of Pak Rangers. Defending the Rangers on the floor of the National Assembly, he said “state institutions cannot be blamed for the actions of some individuals.”

If evidences of each and every incident are collected, Pakistan will certainly top the list of countries witnessing Human Rights violations. In a similar incident on 17 May this year, five unarmed Chechens (3 men and 2 women) were killed by the Pakistani security forces in Kharotabad near Quetta. Among the deceased women, one was 7 months pregnant whom the ‘brave’ troops shot 12 bullets. When faced with criticism, Pak Army contended that three of them were suspected suicide bombers; even though no arm or weapon is recovered from their possession. But the charge on troops is that they tried to molest a Chechen girl. When she and her colleagues resisted, the soldiers shot them dead in cold-blood.

When everyone in Pakistan ranging from suicide bombers, terrorists, extremists, tribal councils and clerics is in the business of denying and crushing the fundamental Human Rights of the common people, replication of such cruel and inhuman acts by the Pak security and intelligence agencies will lead Pakistan nowhere but only make the country a ‘leader’ in Human Rights violation.

About the author:
Tanveer Jafri

Tanveer Jafri is a columnist based in India. He has written hundreds of articles for popular daily news papers/portals in India and abroad. Jafri writes in the field of communal harmony, world peace, anti communalism, anti terrorism, national integration, national & international politics etc. He is a devoted social activist for world peace, unity, integrity & global brotherhood. He is also a receipent of many awards in the field of Communal Harmony & other social activities. (Email : tanveerjafriamb@gmail.com )


http://www.eurasiareview.com/pakistan-leads-in-human-rights-violations-oped-18062011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

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CIA instigating mutiny in the Pakistani army


by M K Bhadrakumar

Rediff.com, June 19, 2011
http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2011/06/16/cia-instigating-mutiny-in-the-pakistani-army/


The unthinkable is happening. The United States is confronting the Pakistani military leadership of General Parvez Kayani. An extremely dangerous course to destabilise Pakistan is commencing. Can the outcome be any different than in Iran in 1979? But then, the Americans are like Bourbons; they never learn from their mistakes.

The NYT report today is unprecedented. The report quotes US officials not less than 7 times, which is extraordinary, including "an American military official involved with Pakistan for many years"; "a senior American official", etc. The dispatch is cleverly drafted to convey the impression that a number of Pakistanis have been spoken to, but reading between the lines, conceivably, these could also probably have been indirect attribution by the American sources. A careful reading, in fact, suggests that the dispatch is almost entirely based on deep briefing by some top US intelligence official with great access to records relating to the most highly sensitive US interactions with the Pak army leadership and who was briefing on the basis of instructions from the highest level of the US intelligence apparatus.

The report no doubt underscores that the US intelligence penetration of the Pak defence forces goes very deep. It is no joke to get a Pakistani officer taking part in an exclusive briefing by Kayani at the National Defence University to share his notes with the US interlocutors - unless he is their "mole". This is like a morality play for we Indians, too, where the US intelligence penetration is ever broadening and deepening. Quite obviously, the birds are coming to roost. Pakistani military is paying the price for the big access it provided to the US to interact with its officer corps within the framework of their so-called "strategic partnership". The Americans are now literally holding the Pakistani army by its jugular veins. This should serve as a big warning for all militaries of developing countries like India (which is also developing intensive "mil-to-mil" ties with the US). In our country at least, it is even terribly unfashionable to speak anymore of CIA activities. The NYT story flags in no uncertain terms that although Cold War is over, history has not ended.

What are the objectives behind the NYT story? In sum, any whichever way we look at it, they all are highly diabolic. One, US is rubbishing army chief Parvez Kayani and ISI head Shuja Pasha who at one time were its own blue-eyed boys and whose successful careers and post-retirement extensions in service the Americans carefully choreographed fostered with a pliant civilian leadership in Islamabad, but now when the crunch time comes, the folks are not "delivering". In American culture, as they say, there is nothing like free lunch. The Americans are livid that their hefty "investment" has turned out to be a waste in every sense. And. it was a very painstakingly arranged investment, too. In short, the Americans finally realise that they might have made a miscalculation about Kayani when they promoted his career.

Two, US intelligence estimation is that things can only go from bad to worse in US-Pakistan relations from now onward. All that is possible to slavage the relationship has been attempted. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen - the so-called "friends of Pakistan" in the Barack Obama administration - have all come to Islamabad and turned on the charm offensive. But nothing worked. Then came CIA boss Leon Panetta with a deal that like Marlon Brando said in the movie Godfather, Americans thought the Pakistanis cannot afford to say 'No’ to, but to their utter dismay, Kayani showed him the door.

The Americans realise that Kayani is fighting for his own survival - and so is Pasha - and that makes him jettison his "pro-American" mindset and harmonise quickly with the overwhelming opinion within the army, which is that the Americans pose a danger to Pakistan’s national security and it is about time that the military leadership draws a red line. Put simply, Pakistan fears that the Americans are out to grab their nuclear stockpile. Pakistani people and the military expect Kayani to disengage from the US-led Afghan war and instead pursue an independent course in terms of the country’s perceived legitimate interests.

Three, there is a US attempt to exploit the growing indiscipline within the Pak army and, if possible, to trigger a mutiny, which will bog down the army leadership in a serious "domestic" crisis that leaves no time for them for the foreseeable future to play any forceful role in Afghanistan. In turn, it leaves the Americans a free hand to pursue their own agenda. Time is of the essence of the matter and the US desperately wants direct access to the Taliban leadership so as to strike a deal with them without the ISI or Hamid Karzai coming in between.

The prime US objective is that Taliban should somehow come to a compromise with them on the single most crucial issue of permanent US military bases in Afghanistan. The negotiations over the strategic partnership agreement with Karzai’s government are at a critical point. The Taliban leadership of Mullah Omar robustly opposes the US proposal to set up American and NATO bases on their country. The Americans are willing to take the Taliban off the UN’s sanctions list and allow them to be part of mainstream Afghan political life, including in the top echelons of leadership, provided Mullah Omar and the Quetta Shura agree to play ball.

The US tried its damnest to get Kayani to bring the Taliban to the reconciliation path. When these attempts failed, they tried to establish direct contact with the Taliban leadership. But ISI has been constantly frustrating the US intelligence activities in this direction and reminding the US to stick to earlier pledges that Pakistan would have a key role in the negotiations with the Taliban. The CIA and Pentagon have concluded that so long as the Pakistani military leadership remains stubborn, they cannot advance their agenda in Afghanistan.

Now, how do you get Kayani and the ISI to back off? The US knows the style of functioning of the Pakistani military. The army chief essentially works within a collegium of the 9 corps commanders. Thus, US has concluded that it also has to tackle the collegium. The only way is to set the army’s house on fire so that the generals get distracted by the fire-dousing and the massive repair work and housecleaning that they will be called upon to undertake as top priority for months if not years to come. To rebuild a national institution like the armed forces takes years and decades.

Four, the US won’t mind if Kayani is forced to step aside from his position and the Pakistani military leadership breaks up in disarray, as it opens up windows of opportunities to have Kayani and Pasha replaced by more "dependable" people - Uncle Sam’s own men. There is every possibility that the US has been grooming its favourites within the Pak army corps for all contingencies. Pakistan is too important as a "key non-NATO ally". The CIA is greatly experienced in masterminding coup d-etat, including "in-house" coup d’etat. Almost all the best and the brightest Pak army officers have passed through the US military academies at one time or another. Given the sub-continent’s middle class mindset and post-modern cultural ethos, elites in civil or military life take it for granted that US backing is a useful asset for furthering career. The officers easily succumb to US intelligence entrapment. Many such "sleepers" should be existing there within the Pak army officer corps.

The big question remains: has someone in Washington thought through the game plan to tame the Pakistani military? The heart of the matter is that there is virulent "anti-Americanism" within the Pak armed forces. Very often it overlaps with Islamist sympathies. Old-style left wing "anti-Americanism" is almost non-existent in the Pakistani armed forces - as in Ayaz Amir’s time. These tendencies in the military are almost completely in sync with the overwhelming public opinion in the country as well.

Over the past 3 decades at least, Pakistani army officers have come to be recruited almost entirely from the lower middle class - as in our country - and not from the landed aristocracy as in the earlier decades up to the 1970s. These social strata are quintessentially right wing in their ideology, nationalistic, and steeped in religiosity that often becomes indistinguishable from militant religious faith.

Given the overall economic crisis in Pakistan and the utterly discredited Pakistani political class (as a whole) and countless other social inequities and tensions building up in an overall climate of cascading violence and great uncertainties about the future gnawing the mind of the average Pakistani today, a lurch toward extreme right wing Islamist path is quite possible. The ingredients in Pakistan are almost nearing those prevailing in Iran in the Shah’s era.

The major difference so far has been that Pakistan has an armed forces "rooted in the soil" as a national institution, which the public respected to the point of revering it, which on its part, sincerely or not, also claimed to be the Praetorian Guards of the Pakistani state. Now, in life, destroying comes very easy. Unless the Americans have some very bright ideas about how to go about nation-building in Pakistan, going by their track record in neighbouring Afghanistan, their present course to discredit the military and incite its disintegration or weakening at the present crisis point, is fraught with immense dangers.

The instability in the region may suit the US’ geo-strategy for consolidating its (and NATO’s) military presence in the region but it will be a highly self-centred, almost cynical, perspective to take on the problem, which has dangerous, almost explosive, potential for regional security. Also, who it is that is in charge of the Pakistan policy in Washington today, we do not know. To my mind, Obama administration doesn’t have a clue since Richard Holbrooke passed away as to how to handle Pakistan. The disturbing news in recent weeks has been that all the old "Pakistan hands" in the USG have left the Obama administration. It seems there has been a steady exodus of officials who knew and understood how Pakistan works, and the depletion is almost one hundred percent. That leaves an open field for the CIA to set the policies.

The CIA boss Leon Panetta (who is tipped as defence secretary) is an experienced and ambitious politico who knows how to pull the wires in the Washington jungle - and, to boot it, he has an Italian name. He is unlikely to forgive and forget the humiliation he suffered in Rawalpindi last Friday. The NYT story suggests that it is not in his blood if he doesn’t settle scores with the Rawalpindi crowd. If Marlon Brando were around, he would agree.

http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2011/06/16/cia-instigating-mutiny-in-the-pakistani-army/

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The Real War –vs– The Illusions


BY Peter Chamberlin

June 21, 2011
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m78854&hd=&size=1&l=e


In the complicated calculus of the men who would plan our destinies for us, if we would only let them, it is often hard to fathom which line of reasoning represents their dominant thinking on any strategic subject.  In Afghanistan and in Pakistan, it is getting harder to distinguish between the minimum acceptable goals for the Empire and less-desirable, though ultimately acceptable conditions for ending the war.  In particular, thinking of the "pipeline wars" (which American corporations seem to be losing, badly), if America is projected to fail miserably in its plans for Central and South Asia, then what secondary objectives is the Empire preparing for the region?

Could it be possible that the rationale for the US terror war is falling apart so quickly since the big production in Abbottabad, that the secondary objective of playing spoiler for the winners in the energy war is replacing the primary mission of Central Asian energy-looting as America’s military solution for economic salvation?  The war itself is unsustainable, absent the collective will of the American people to wage this war without a valid reason, or foreseeable end, the 911 attacks having been replaced long ago with whatever excuse Obama wanted to use as justification.  On top of this, the bin Laden psyop is having the unintended consequence of undermining support for continuing the war and increasing the public uproar to find an end to this war that now has no adversary, in the absence of a terrorist mastermind.  It is slowly winding-down to total defeat for the United States, absent another earth-shattering unifying, "Pearl Harbor-like event" in the near future.  What will the American administration do to sustain this unpopular war?  How far will they go to keep the Afghan/Pakistan war going?

The NATO side is currently still pursuing a policy of faking negotiations with old acquaintances of Mullah Omar, like Tayyab Aga, allegedly discussing reconciliation efforts for harmless "Taliban" (those who are not veteran Taliban fighters).  These fighters are expected to turn-in their weapons for cash, even though the actual Taliban spokesmen for Mullah Omar insist that there will be no negotiations as long as occupation forces remain in Afghanistan.  The US has staked-out the position that those who fought against the coalition government cannot be "reconciled," meaning that all those who have fought against the American occupation have no other choices but to keep fighting until they die in combat, or turn themselves in for arrest.  The Taliban still insist that there is nothing to talk about as long as the occupation continues.  Mullah Omar has issued hand-written warning notes to local mosques stating that those who negotiate with the Americans are marked for death. There is no room for compromise there for either side.  So what good will it do for US/British negotiators to talk to second or third level Taliban who have no sway with high command?  It is more than likely that all of this reconciliation talk is merely for public entertainment purposes, maintaining popular support for the war and Obama, by pretending that Obama is getting it right and peace may be just around the corner.

It is becoming clear to those who care to look for the truth about the war, that the US never intended to leave Afghanistan, it has always planned to use Afghanistan and Pakistan as a military beachhead into Central Asia (SEE: Neutral Afghanistan serves regional stability).  Every American spokesperson who has publicly denied these now obvious facts, has been consciously lying to the world, in order to advance this mass deception as far as possible before the American people wake-up.  Researchers and analysts are breaking through the carefully constructed wall of American deception to understand just how cynically American leaders have manipulated Pakistan and India, playing them off against one another in a dangerous game of brinkmanship designed to serve only Imperial ends.

Indian and Pakistani writers have to dig deeper to understand the psyops that are still playing-out along the Durand Line.  They must ask:  How deep does the American deception go, or is everything about this war a deception?  Only then can it become apparent the defensive actions that each nation must take, perhaps in a united action against the Imperial designs.

Indian writer M K Bhadrakumar reports on American attempts to sideline both Afghan and Pakistani governments from any negotiations with the Afghan Taliban (SEE:  CIA instigating mutiny in the Pakistani army), in order to buy time to force an American compromise.  His article offers the following novel explanation of why American leaders would intentionally engineer a risky potential "colonel’s coup" to unseat Gen. Kayani:

"The only way is to set the army’s house on fire so that the generals get distracted by the fire-dousing and the massive repair work and housecleaning that they will be called upon to undertake as top priority for months if not years to come."

In the opinion of this former Indian diplomat, Washington was actively destabilizing Islamabad, and it was endangering the entire region in order to do it.  A destabilized nuclear sub-continent has always been the implied result of these American machinations.  It is only logical to ask whether this has always been the plan, and for what conceivable reasons?  Did they really believe that they could force both Afghans and Pakistanis to follow orders that would harm their own countrymen, or that their plans would succeed even if they got everything that they wanted from them?  What could American leaders hope to get out of this planned conflagration that they probably could have achieved by less violent, more honorable means?  There is nothing "honorable" about this ongoing thirty-year war.  Our "upstanding" national leaders have always planned to use American military muscle to protect their great redistribution of wealth (the exact opposite of the Marxist concept, the rich get everything), as they looted, raped and plundered the entire world, even our allies.  It is only now, in the end game, when these things are being made clear to all who care to see.

The plan has always been to use American military muscle to create for themselves the power to dictate a political/military solution to the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by sidelining all the valid neighborhood players, even the Afghan "straw man" government itself, much as it has already done for itself in Iraq.  They have even applied the same time-tested formula for destabilization which was used in Iraq, but without the same results.  The US is no more in position to dictate terms to Afghanistan today than it was ten years ago.  Unlike Iraq, where the "Anbar solution" of tribal militias was field-tested, there are no major differences between Afghans to exploit.  Iraq is nothing like Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Different solutions were required, even though Pentagon and CIA geniuses only knew the one song of divide and conquer.  That is why they have failed so miserably in the Far Eastern war theater.

Since they had only one song and dance routine, the CIA and their ISI counterparts have kept playing on the same theme, in their little war games, intended to hold the attention of  patriotic Americans and Pakistanis.  In Afghanistan, Western powers have manipulated the tribal and national differences by developing the Northern Alliance coalition of Hamid Karzai, which is mostly comprised of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara Shia, as a counterfoil to mostly Pashtun Taliban forces.  The anti-Taliban coalition efforts of a massive nationwide propaganda effort, supplemented with an equally massive program of enormous pay-offs, backed-up by NATO firepower have failed to buy or intimidate loyalty from local warlords or join their forces to the Karzai/Northern Alliance government.

Since Karzai’s reelection, the Western media, politicians and generals have been steadily undermining the support Karzai did have, undercutting his efforts to create a High Peace Council, probably well on their way to grooming his replacement, someone like former Afghan spymaster, Amrullah Saleh, who is already a long-term CIA asset, besides being Karzai’s exact opposite.  Saleh is one of those selected individuals, unfortunate enough to be native to a CIA-targeted country, who was sent to America before 2001, for specialized training by the CIA.  As a top junior aid to legendary Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, he was there in Takhar Province, serving as the CIA liason, when the "Lion of Panjshir" was assassinated on September 9, 2001.  He has been a favorite of the spooks since then, especially after the FBI forced him on Karzai as his new spy chief in Feb. 2004, coincidentally, just one month before Pakistani Taliban founder Abdullah Mehsud was released from two and one-half years at Guantanamo "brainwashing academy" into his custody as Afghan intelligence chief.  The story of the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan that he helped to inspire is a tale of grief and double-crossing.  They are the "poison" that was introduced into the Pakistani soil, which Saleh so colorfully described.

The Americans are hedging their bets in Afghanistan, like always, fronting two streams of the Afghan political spectrum at once.  The Karzai/Rabbani alliance is backing the reconciliation talks with the Taliban that could lead to the partitioning of Afghanistan, split between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in control of the south, in order to facilitate pipeline and development plans for the north.  This is the State Dept. best solution.  This position is allegedly unacceptable to Northern Alliance candidate Saleh, who advocates carpet-bombing Pakistan and night-time Special Forces decapitation raids all the way from Balochistan to Bajaur.  His position is that there can never be victory in the war against the Taliban until their support lines to the Pak Army are cut.  He represents the most radical factions of the CIA, who advocate total war with Pakistan.

In order to dissuade the Pak Army from continuing to support the Afghan Taliban, the CIA master-plotters have created their own versions of "lashkars," such as the fake Pakistani Taliban, to battle and terrorize the Army and the people of Pakistan.  Since 2003, Musharraf’s generals have been helping him and his successor Gen. Kayani, to revive the defeated Taliban movement as a substitute for concerted, decisive military action against the remnants of "al-Qaeda" and the Afghan Taliban leadership, who had been all been allowed to regroup in Waziristan and Balochistan by both the ISI and the CIA.  They originally relocated there from northern Afghanistan in the infamous "Kunduz airlift," where they were spared from certain annihilation at the hands of Uzbek Gen. Dostum and the Northern Alliance forces.  Once they were flown there, they began to reoccupy the old CIA/ISI training camps there which had formerly been vacated after they were used to drive-out the Soviets.  The IMU terrorists of Tahir Yuldeshev, who were brought across the border with Abdullah Mehsud in his instant army of fake Taliban (composed of Northern Alliance fighters), ran the camps and shared their military expertise with the new Taliban recruits being readied to keep the Afghan conflict going.

Abdullah brought his Uzbek and Chechen fighters to Wana, where they joined-up with Nek Mohammed.  This was long before the Pakistani Taliban began their waves of Pakistani terrorism, when they still had the trust of the real Afghan Taliban.  Because of his trust for new militant leader Baitullah Mehsud, as well as his initial distrust of Abdullah Mehsud, because of the Guantanamo years, Mullah Omar sent his hand-picked emissary, celebrated veteran commander Mullah Dadullah, to bless the Pakistani Taliban union and name Baitullah as its head.  Dadullah oversaw the effort in S. Waziristan, where he had been working closely with Nek Mohammed and his successors, Abdullah and Baitullah Mehsud to develop a formidable new Taliban army of 20,000 fighters or more, including a suicide-bomber academy.  After Dadullah shepherded the Waziri Accord peace treaty between the Pakistani Taliban and the Army on orders from Mullah Omar himself, Dadullah was also targeted for drone assassination, just like Nek before him (even though British Special Forces claim the kill).

Under the command of Baitullah, the Pakistani Taliban (now called Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan, TTP) unleashed a wave of terror upon tribal leaders, government forces and the mosques of the unbelievers.  At first, this terror was blamed upon the IMU terrorists who had been given shelter by the Mehsud leadership, providing an opening for the Pak Army to introduce a counter-insurgency, in the form of aggressive tribal lashkars of their own.

Local Ahmadzai Wazir militant leader Maulvi Nazir created a lashkar army of 900 heavily armed men, who proceeded to run the IMU terrorists out of his territory around Wana, S. Waziristan.  The Army then began to replicate the lashkar-building process in other towns, hoping to enlist the tribals in a massive show of force to evict the "bad Taliban" and those labeled as "al-Qaeda" from Pakistan.  Nothing much came from the effort, except for a bunch of dead lashkar militiamen.

Needing a concrete strategy to counter US destabilization plans and demands for total war in the Tribal Regions, Pakistan has continued to sell the "good/bad Taliban" theme as a path to eventual "reconciliation," putting distance between the two groups, so that heavy force could then be used to eliminate the criminal Taliban in successive operations.  But each time that Pakistan made a little headway, lashkar leaders would be eliminated in car-bomb attacks, or by the occasional Predator drone.

Beginning with the massive drone assault in Bajaur, on October 30, 2006, which killed 80 religious students, drone attacks have become the favorite weapon for radicalizing locals and driving them into the eager arms of the Taliban.  This is one of the reasons for believing that American leaders have always secretly supported the formation of militant armies, in order to have someone to fight and to provide valid-seeming reasons for prolonging the war.  Everything they do creates more resistance.

The complex CIA schemes have forced Pakistan to develop its own ISI counter-schemes as a matter of self-defense against American demands to wreck the country and force the Pakistani people into open rebellion against their elected government.  The ten-year deception in Pakistan has gone through many stages, fronted by many separate players, all of them having some stake in the Empire winning the contest. Today in Afghanistan we have an ongoing war, fueled by a series of major deceptions.  The more obvious it becomes that the war is being lost, the more the deceptions will fall apart.  At some point, the lies will fall apart faster than they can be reconstructed in a new form.

In Pakistan, we see at least ten times the number of major deceptions which we can see unwinding across the border.  I guess that this is what they mean by an "intelligence driven war."  Every interested great power has a game at play now in Pakistan; every interested great power is double-gaming someone else, partners are being made to be cashed-in later, when it will bring the greatest advantage.  Pakistan’s military, the "Establishment" and every one of the many "mafias" (land mafia, gas mafia, etc.) have their own separate games going on, all of them game off each other.  Seeing daylight through this morass of webs of intrigue is almost an impossibility.  It is not surprising that the game-players are having such a difficult time controlling the eventual outcome of this soon to be exploding psychological warfare experiment.

American mind-benders have playing their usual games and inventing a few new ones in their careful efforts to destabilize Pakistan without really upsetting the apple cart, losing control of the situation.  It suits CIA and American military purposes to give the ISI enough rope to hang itself.  This explains why they seem to go along with Pakistan’s generals, even when they are obviously lying or playing games to avoid causing a rupture in relations.  In their international media campaign to embarrass the Pak Army and government, the media-masters are careful to go just so far in slandering them, but not far enough to force negative international reactions.  US leaders understand the close relationship between the ISI and certain militant groups, but, until recently never charged the Army with supporting militants in public.  Since open psychological war broke-out between the two sides in 2008 (SEE:  US/Pakistan Showdown/Throwdown July12), they have maintained a love/hate relationship, creating difficult circumstances for fulfilling contracts and such.  As far as the United States is concerned, Pakistan has a contractual obligation to help eliminate the "al-Qaeda" militants that the US and Pakistan have created together.

For these reasons, the CIA lets the ISI have its Lashkars and its "strategic depth" militants, preferring to seize the opportunity to use the controlled media to weave stories about the Wana battles into tales of "al-Qaeda," the mythical international terrorist network. Beginning with the story about Mullah Nazir and his battle against the IMU terrorists of Abdullah and Baitullah Mehsud, CIA-sponsored Pakistani and Western reporters have invented stories of "good Taliban" turning against "al-Qaeda."  (The most reliable of these al-Qaeda story creators was Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shazad, the author of the Al-Qaeda/Taliban split story.  Syed worked tirelessly, over several years to weave a tapestry out of whole cloth about the "al-Qaeda" monolith that stood astride the Durand Line, threatening the entire world with "Islamist terrorism.").

Since its inception, the concept of "good Taliban vs bad Taliban has been fully implemented by both sides, although neither side could agree on whether the "bad Taliban" were those who attacked only Pakistan, or those who attacked only Afghan coalition targets.  It seems that most of the time, there has been no Taliban who attacked both sides, except when the Pak Army gave in to American demands and turned its guns upon its friends.  By cultivating peace treaties and non-aggression agreements with individual tribal groups, Pakistan had developed an equilibrium with the militants, and for short intervals, terror attacks seemed to have almost come to an end—until the Predator assassination campaign began, ultimately destroying any trust, driving tribal fighters by the thousands into the arms of the Taliban.

American drones have consistently targeted those militant leaders and outfits that the Pak Army has chosen to protect under the wing of its "strategic depth" concept.  Both militant and lashkar leaders have fallen prey to drone missiles—the majority of them friends of the Army.  The CIA has intensified the drone attacks as the administration upped the ante, demanding more and more that Pakistan dare not give, since national suicide is out of the question.

The big question then becomes then:  Is Obama willing to accept a partial non-Haqqani offensive against the TTP, the mad dog killers of Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja, in N. Waziristan, in place of an anti-Haqqani offensive?  Of all the militant groups, the criminal gangs who have attached themselves to the psychopathic killer Hakeemullah Mehsud, heir to all that Baitullah stood for, are by far the most dangerous.  The only explanation for such a grouping of monsters who have never attacked American or NATO troops, is that they consider them to be allies, or at least employers.  If the US would support the elimination of these killers first, as a favor to our struggling ally, then perhaps Pakistan’s influence upon such "Taliban" as Haqqani can help bring the Afghan war to a resolution, if that is what Obama really wants.

If events follow the time-tested patterns of previous Pakistani offensives, then an operation in N. Waziristan would mean another flushing of refugees onto the roadways  and trails of neighboring provinces (overwhelming limited social services wherever they come to rest, Pakistan already has more refugees than any other country).  This will once again demonstrate Pakistan’s basic inability to carry-out the total war actions that the US is demanding from them.  Pakistan doesn’t have either the manpower or the equipment needed to meet national disasters (just like most other nations), nor the capabilities required to eliminate an entrenched heavily armed insurgency.  Will Obama accept this excuse for doing half of what he has demanded, just as Bush eventually did in the past?

The basis of the new great Show seems to be the "Waziristan Accords," agreements between the Army and the Ahmadzai Wazirs of Mullah Nazir of the South and Uthmanzai Waziris in the North, led by Gul Bahadur.  The agreement allegedly binds the tribes to police their own areas against Mehsuds or foreign terrorists.  The antecedent to this Wazir option is the creation of multiple lashkars amongst the other tribes, even among the Mehsuds, if that is possible, considering the fate of the previous anti-Mehsud Mehsud leader, Qari Zainuddin Mehsud, that might prove to be impossible.

Pak plans to rope in tribals to take on al-Qaeda, according to the Indian press.  If the plan really is to rebrand the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan as the new "al-Qaeda," as the IMU Uzbeks once were, then this might put Pakistan’s generals and American generals on the same page.  Once the offensive actually gets underway it will become obvious exactly who is on what page.  Until then, we will have to get by on the delicious clues given us in Pakistan news leaks, or the latest militant attacks, to try to understand the mindset of the generals on both sides, who continue to run the show.

In light of recent events in S. Waziristan that are described below, it is possible to project the shape of the upcoming offensive: The Army goes after Hakeemullah Mehsud and the foreign terrorists under his protection, demanding from Haqqani lieutenant and local Wazir tribal leader Gul Bahadar that he fulfill his treaty commitments under the Waziristan Accords and actively suppress foreign terrorists, as well as the criminal Mehsuds, if they violate his territory, thus limiting the operating range of fleeing TTP militants (SEE:  Pakistan Using Wazir Tribe of Mullah Nazir to Set-Up Next Psyop):

"The alleged 2007 agreement referred to in [that] report, between Nazir and the govt., allows the Army to wash its hands of the Wana region, making the tribes responsible for keeping-out Uzbeks, Mehsuds, Al-Qaeda and other foreign militants, an impossible task for the outgunned tribes."

But this plan too, is being undermined by the government leaks that "telegraph" their next moves to the militants, raising lashkars for what is coming next, giving their friends there plenty of time to either prepare or relocate.  It might be that the Army telegraphing its next moves gives Hakeemullah the same opportunity to flee the area before the battle, that it gives to Haqqani.  It is here where the Army will rely upon the new Kurram Treaty to bring Haqqani into action against Hakeemullah in Kurram and perhaps in Hangu, Hakeemullah’s home turf, as well.  We are already seeing an impending confrontation between the two groups over continued TTP attacks upon Shia, in spite of having signed the truce, thus endangering the fragile peace (SEE:  Kurram Agency: Haqqani warns Hakimullah not to 'sabotage’ peace deal):

"Things have now reached a very awkward point … Haqqani has said some very strong words to Hakimullah: 'Stop it yourself or my men will make you stop it’."

It may be that Haqqani also has a personal grudge to settle with Mehsud, over the murder of Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja, who was highly respected by his father Jalaluddin and by all Afghan Taliban, since Mehsud refused to spare the old jihadi teacher’s life.  If that is the case, then he may be more than willing to help-out the ISI clean-up the mess.

The timing of the events around Col. Tarar’s kidnapping and murder nearly one year later, help to confirm the "rogue" out of control status of Hakeemullah Mehsud, when compared to the Haqqanis.  Ignoring all Haqqani, ISI, or Afghan Taliban pleas, Hakeemullah Mehsud gave the order to kill Col. Imam, which can be seen on YouTube.

(SEE:  Taliban release video of killing of Col Imam).

 
Taliban release video of killing of Col Imam, posted with vodpod

His body was then dumped in the Danday Darpakhel area of Miramshah on January 23, 2011.  This was clearly intended to serve as a challenge to Haqqani’s authority.  On Jan. 27, CIA agent Raymond Davis shot two ISI agents dead in Lahore.  The Haqqani-backed Kurram peace deal between the Turi tribe and Shia was struck ten days later, on February 3.  Four days after that, on Feb.7, 2010, top Taliban leaders were placed under protective custody (or arrest) in Pakistan, beginning with Taliban number two, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.  As far as can be ascertained, the Mullahs were arrested to stop the previous attempt to initiatate secret American/Taliban negotiations—that time they were with Mullah Omar’s actual second in command.

On 2/26/2010, Khalid Khwaja petitioned the Lahore High Court to block US efforts to have the arrested Taliban extradited to Afghanistan and into US custody.

One month later, 03/25/2010, former ISI agent Khwaja was abducted, along with Col. Imam and the British journalist Asad Qureshi, in North Waziristan.  They were allegedly in Waziristan at the insistence of retired generals Beg and Gul, trying to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani and Wali-ur Rahman Mehsud.

"The Asian Tiger organization… offered to release them in exchange for three important Afghan Taliban figures — Mulla Abdul Ghani Biradar, Mulla Abdul Kabir and Mansoor Dadullah — presently 'in the custody of the Pakistan government’. The group didn’t even know that Kabir wasn’t, in fact, in detention in Pakistan."

Khalid  Khwaja was found dead in Miranshah on April 30, 2010.  Qureshi was ransomed.

The Murder of Col Imam was a turning point for several parties, in many areas of their relationships. The fact that Hakeemullah ignored pleas from fellow Islamist Sirahuddin Haqqani, as well as the ISI, confirms the split between the Pakistani Taliban group and the ISI-supported Afghan Taliban.  Hakeemullah Mehsud and his TTP followers, especially the IMU Uzbeks and the just as radical Punjabi recruits of the Lashkar e-Jhangvi are a criminal/terrorist menace and must be eliminated from Pakistan.  The US military has no intention of helping the Pak Army with this formidable task, such as focusing drone attacks first upon this criminal network, even though it would be a simple task, even considered as an obligation to help an ally and old friend.  The American military is only interested in those fighters in Pakistan who wage war on NATO, not those who choose to fight against Pakistan.  Reciprocity might be the better choice over issuing demands and making ultimatums to Pakistan’s generals.

Col Imam was a bitter critic of the United States which, he said, had left the Afghan mujahideen in the lurch after the defeat of the Soviet forces in the late 1980s.  The CIA hated Imam and the Pakistani Taliban hated him.  When he went to N. Waziristan he was carrying a list of 14 Taliban leaders who worked for India and probably the US.  That list ended-up in Hakeemullah’s hands.  His name was alleged at the top of the list.  Perhaps that was why he had to die.

From the Pakistani press comes the claim that Col. Imam and Khalid Khawaja may have been killed by Ilyas Kashmiri, as revenge for his being tortured by the Army in 2003 for trying to kill Musharraf.  Other elements of the national press claim that the pair were killed for calling the Afghan Taliban mujahedeen and the Pakistani Taliban criminals.  little known militant group called Asian Tigers,

If that was the case then it would justify Pakistan setting Kashmiri up for a drone kill in Wana on June 3.  Unlike the surreptitious drone whacking of Baitullah Mehsud (where ISI allegedly tricked the CIA into striking Baitullah), it appears that a potential joint effort to get Kashmiri may have been conceivable, considering Headley’s testimony about Kashmiri’s connections to the Mumbai attack, made Ilyas Kashmiri an embarrassment for both sides.  Like always, in this tortuously slow dance between Pakistani and American leaders, that has been grinding-on for decades now, at times it is impossible to tell whether the two sides are in almost perfect step with each other, whether they are hopelessly out of sync, or even at times, whether they are moving at all.  Judging by today’s deadly drone strike on Haqqani forces in Kurram, it seems like they might be at odds with each others plans.  Recent reports have revealed that the US is attempting to draw Ibrahim Haqqani into negotiations, even though US drones continue to strike Haqqani targets in Kurram Agency.

Can the Obama team accept Pakistan’s revised game plan and spin it in an effective manner, so that it will fool the yokels back home, even after all the yelling that they have done over North Waziristan?  Or is the great game suddenly no longer about maintaining the illusion?  Has the American/NATO position deteriorated so far down that they must force a "game-changer" upon us all?  Have run up against so many walls that we have given-up entirely upon the American vision for Afghanistan and Pakistan as the new international strategic corridor, the new "Silk Road" to Central Asia?  Is the new intent to simply so destabilize the region that no one else can reap the economic rewards?

There are many good questions here that no one wants to touch, or to see answered.  The questions will answer themselves in short order, whenever it becomes apparent whether Obama opts for Pakistan’s pacification or for its destabilization.  Will he maintain and escalate the state of confrontation until it leads to widespread violence between two old allies, or will he choose to calm things down in Pakistan, even as he risks revealing the American hand and long-term plans for moving into Central Asia?

Perhaps the most important part of this whole new (recycled) psyop is that the Tehreek e-Taliban Pakistan will now play the role of "Al-Qaeda" (SEE:  The CIA/ISI Soap Opera In South Waziristan) for the remainder of this drama.

chamberlinpeter@hotmail.com

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South Asia
Jun 24, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MF24Df03.html 
 
Islamists break Pakistan's military ranks



By Amir Mir



ISLAMABAD - The arrest of Brigadier Ali Khan, a senior officer of the Pakistan army, for his alleged ties to Hizbul Tehrir (HuT), a banned Islamic militant group believed to be working in tandem with al-Qaeda under the garb of pan-Islamism, has brought into the open conflicting Islamists and reformists ideologies that have split the military's rank and file for a decade.

Pakistani armed forces spokesman Major General Athar Abbas confirmed Khan has been arrested due to his links to the HuT and was being interrogated by the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Intelligence. The brigadier, who had been posted at the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the army in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, was taken into custody on May 6, hardly three days after the May 2 killing of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in a US military raid in Abbottabad.

The military spokesman was quick to dispel any impression that Khan, who was in charge of drafting army regulations, was linked with the investigations into the Abbottabad episode. "The detention shows that the Pakistan army is determined to weed out bad actors,'' Major General Athar Abbas said. ''We follow zero tolerance policy of such activities in the military and that's why prompt action was taken on detection. We don't allow any other cult in the military other than the military cult. We have zero-tolerance policy for any extremist ideology in the army."

The arrest of the brigadier over a suspected militant connection has surprised his colleagues since he comes from a family with three generations in military service, besides having a brilliant service record. His father was a junior commissioned officer, while his younger brother is a colonel in a Pakistani intelligence agency. His son and son-in-law are both army captains.

Khan's wife, Anjum, rejected the allegations. "Every general knows Brigadier Ali Khan. Even army chief General [Ashfaq Pervez] Kiani knows him," she told a foreign news agency on June 22. "We can never think of betraying the army or our country. He is an intellectual, honest, patriotic and ideological person. It has become a fashion in Pakistan that whosoever offers prayers and practices religion is dubbed as Taliban and militant."

She said her husband went missing on May 5, and she has been searching for information about his whereabouts since. Authorities had assured her that he would soon return, she said. "Our three generations have served the army and none of our family members have had any links with the militants," she insisted.

Military circles said clearance for Khan's arrest came after Kiani was shown convincing evidence of the brigadier's apparent militant links. The army chief was disturbed to learn of infiltration by HuT at such a senior level. Khan, who had received training in the United States and was set to retire soon, had previously been denied promotion because of his extremist leanings. A defense source claimed that a lieutenant-colonel who worked under Khan had also been detained.

Before his GHQ posting, the brigadier served as a commander in the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir. The source added that efforts were being made to arrest other members of the group who were in contact with him.

News of brigadier's arrest was made public almost a week after a June 15 report in The New York Times that Pakistan's top military spy agency had arrested five Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) informants, including a major who fed information to the American spy agency before the Abbottabad raid in which Bin Laden was killed.

Major General Athar Abbas confirmed that the army had made several detentions in connection with the US raid and other unspecified incidents under ''a purge'', but denied holding any military officer. "These arrests are part of ongoing cleansing process and are not related to any single incident," the military spokesman said, without clarifying what he meant by "cleansing process" and whether it was about a covert CIA network in the country.

It soon transpired that a doctor in the Pakistan army's medical corps, Major Amir Aziz, had been picked up by the agencies from his Abbottabad house, just a couple of hundred meters from the compound where the Americans killed Bin Laden. However, it is not yet clear if the arrests of Khan and Aziz were part of a larger "cleansing process" in the military or an isolated event. Pakistan's armed forces have come under scathing international criticism for a seemingly lax approach to elements who sympathize with militant organizations.

Brigadier Khan was not the first high-ranking officer of the Pakistan army to be arrested for alleged links with HuT, which represents a new breed of Islamic fundamentalists who study at top British and American educational institutions yet abhor Western values and advocate the removal of the pro-US Pakistan government and the formation of a pan-Islamic state.

Military intelligence apprehended Colonel Shahid Bashir, then commanding officer of the Shamsi air force base in Balochistan province, on May 4, 2009, for keeping links with HuT. The colonel was arrested along with a retired fighter pilot-turned lawyer, Squadron Leader Nadeem Ahmad Shah, and Awais Ali Khan, a US-educated mechanical engineer who held a Green Card giving him the right to live in the United States.

On May 13, 2009, Federal Minister for Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Babar Awan informed parliament that the army had detained a serving colonel along with a Rawalpindi-based lawyer on espionage charges.

Colonel Bashir was subsequently accused of leaking secrets pertaining to the Shamsi air force base, which the CIA was using to launch drone attacks on al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. He was eventually court-martialed on charges of spying and provoking armed forces personnel to get involved in terrorist acts.

The court martial was conducted by a military court, headed by a brigadier under Section 31(d) of the Army Act. Under the act, the accused could be sentenced to death if proven guilty. The accused had pleaded not guilty and challenged the jurisdiction of the military court. Their fate is unknown.

The arrest of Khan over suspected jihadi links only confirms that the tug-of-war between Islamists and reformists in the army has reached a boiling point as the Islamic extremists and their ideological partners in the garrison act in unison to advance their anti-US and anti-state agenda.

The development has set alarm bells ringing among the military leadership, which already faces sharp criticism for the May 2 American raid in Abbottabad and subsequent terrorist attacks targeting highly sensitive military installations in various parts of the country - especially the naval base in the port city of Karachi. Investigations have revealed that the May 22 assault on the high-guarded Mehran naval base could not have been possible without inside help.

Investigators believe the naval base attackers achieved their prime aim, the destruction of two PC3 Orion aircraft, worth together over US$70 million, in a clear bid to impair Pakistan's military prowess and demoralize its rank and file. The most worrying aspect of the assault was that the militants appeared to have been privy to classified information about the Mehran base that only an insider could have provided.

In Lahore on May 30, hardly a week after the naval base attack, Pakistani military authorities arrested a former navy commando, Kamran Ahmed, and his younger brother Zaman Ahmed, for aiding the attackers. Kamran, who joined the navy in 1993 and was trained as a Special Services Group commando, was detained on charges of providing the attackers with maps of the base.

He served at the Iqbal Naval base in Karachi until 1997 and was later transferred to the Mehran naval base, where an assault on a senior officer led to a court martial and his discharge from service in 2003. The military court had further declared Kamran unfit for the job because of his extremist views.

Kamran is not the only navy officer to have been arrested over links with jihadis. Another Pakistani marine commando from the Waziristan tribal region, who was posted at Mehran, was arrested in January 201. During interrogation, he disclosed that al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants had plans to target key naval installations, including oil depots and power grid stations.

Interestingly, the arrested commando was a member of the Mehsud tribe from the FATA of Waziristan. It has produced many Taliban leaders, like Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban - TTP) founder commander Baitullah Mehsud, Qari Hussain Mehsud and the incumbent TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud. The banned organization has already claimed responsibility for the naval base attack as vengeance for the death of Bin Laden.

The specter of Islamist infiltration has haunted the armed forces for decades. Creeping conservatism in the armed forces is a legacy of the country's third military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, under whose command state policies were centered on Islam, religious sermons by fanatic mullahs in military units were encouraged, and even members of the Muslim missionary group Tableeghi Jamaat were allowed to preach in garrisons at will.

This drift was first revealed during Benazir Bhutto's second tenure as prime minister in 1995, when a group of senior army officers led by a serving major general was busted while planning to topple the federal government in Islamabad and to eliminate the top military leadership, with the prime aim of enforcing Islamic sharia in the country.

The arrests of dozens of commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the Pakistan army and the air force in connection with the December 2003 twin-assassination attempts targeting General Pervez Musharraf's presidential cavalcade in Rawalpindi did not come as a great surprise to many.

Subsequent investigations revealed that al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants had penetrated army and air force units to preach their brand of jihad and recruit personnel to assassinate none other than their own army chief. The probes took the military investigators to Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and the FATA, to question about 150 suspects including four-dozen commissioned and non-commissioned personnel in both services.
The investigators concluded that the attempts on Musharraf's cavalcade (on December 14 and December 25, 2003) were an exclusive job of over a dozen brainwashed air force technicians who lived nearby in a Pakistan Air Force residential facility. They were directed, motivated and armed by a Pakistani contact person in al-Qaeda.

The investigation showed that Air Intelligence, the air force intelligence wing, had no wind that its personnel - about two dozen at the Chaklala air base - had been attending meetings with religious extremists and making preparations at the base to bomb the presidential motorcade.

The investigation also led to the arrest of civilian religious extremists, including three clerics involved in the indoctrination of the technicians and in the planning of the attacks. A small group of religious extremists who had stored and supplied the C4 plastic explosives to the technicians and suicide bombers was also arrested.

The investigation team, headed by General Kiani, who was a lieutenant-general at that time, was stunned to learn that the air force technicians spent two days making several trips beneath the Lai Bridge to strap large quantities of the C4 explosives to pillars of the bridge, all without drawing the attention of either the police or military intelligence, which were supposed to keep an eye on the presidential route.

Based on these findings, Musharraf ordered the purging of known Islamists from superior ranks of the armed forces. In January 2005, almost a year later, after court martial proceedings, a military court headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Sultan Noor Ali Khan of 96 Medium Air Defense Regiment, sentenced three air force officers to terms ranging from two to nine years for alleged links with the Jaish-e-Mohammad, led by Maulana Masood Azhar. Nauman Khattak, 18, and Saeed Alam, 19, were sentenced to two years in prison, while the third airman, Munir Ahmed, was given a nine-year sentence.

Three months later, in March 2005, the court handed down a death sentence (in absentia) to another servicemen accused in the assassination conspiracy, including Naik Arshad Mahmood of the army's Special Services Group and Havaldar Mohammad Younis of the 98 Air Defense Regiment, who was awarded 10 years hard labor, and Naik Zafar Iqbal Dogar, the special services soldier who abandoned the mission halfway and became a key state witness.

Six months later, on September 18, yet another military trial court sentenced three other officers: Major Adil Qudoos was given 10 years in prison, Colonel Abdul Ghaffar got three years and Colonel Khalid Abbasi six months. Major Attaullah, Major Faraz and Captain Zafar were dismissed from service.

In an unprecedented move clearly intended to send a stark message to the Islamists in uniform, the Pakistan army executed the soldier accused of pressing the remote control button for the device that had targeted Musharraf on December 14, 2003. Abdul Islam Siddiqui was executed on August 20, 2005 after a closed-door Field General Court Martial headed by a major general found him guilty as charged.

Other charges against the 35-year-old Siddiqui included abetting a mutiny against the army chief and attempting to persuade "a person in the military" to rebel against the government. Siddiqui was also charged with receiving terrorism training in Bhimber (Jammu Kashmir) at a training camp run by the Jaish-e-Mohammad. His family members insisted that Siddiqui was actually arrested in South Waziristan after he had refused to fight against local tribes suspected of having links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The South Waziristan military operation had turned out to be the biggest dent in Pakistani army discipline as several units reportedly declined to be posted there and dozens of troops refused to continue the fight against tribes. The development shocked the military high command, which had to recall most of the troops from the front line.

Such discontent clearly indicated that conflicting ideologies caused fissures in the ranks, pitting Islamists against reformists. The split actually sharpened in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US because of Musharraf's attempts under American pressure to give his army a liberal outlook more acceptable to the United States.

Several years later, with Musharraf gone with the wind and Bin Laden having already been killed, there are strong indications to suggest that Islamic extremists are still sprinkled within the lower ranks of the armed forces and have been involved in several deadly attacks on key military installations. This raises the billion-dollar question: Is the jihadi penetration of Pakistani armed forces deeper than feared?

Amir Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist and the author of several books on the subject of militant Islam and terrorism, the latest being Talibanisation of Pakistan: From 9/11 to 26/11.

 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MF24Df03.html 
 
 

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South Asia
Jun 25, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MF25Df02.html 
 

Obama puts the heat on Pakistan


By Karamatullah K Ghori
 

When the head of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) directorate of the Pakistan military makes a clean breast, as he did on June 21, that a serving brigadier of the army at the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi is in detention on charges of having links with an extremist religious organization, one has to believe that something very serious must be wrong in the military.

Another announcement from the ISPR, a day later, added four majors of the army to the brigadier's column. These four, however, are merely being questioned and not detained, at least not yet.

The Pakistan military is an exclusive club that doesn't let out much information about itself unless there's an overwhelming reason for it. And the current period in time is, no doubt, one such phase when a lot has happened that the denizens of this elitist club may never have wished to see.

The series of humiliations kicked off in early May with the embarrassment of Abbottabad and the macabre siege of the naval base Mehran, in Karachi, and shows little sign of abating.

As the sweltering heat in the plains of Pakistan is getting closer to making room for the annual monsoons - with the likelihood of another visitation of floods engulfing the country - dark clouds ominously dot the horizon for the army.

The open season that opposition politicians, led by two-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, have declared on the military's bloated but unwelcome role in governance is enough to test its resilience. And now United States President Barack Obama, too, has waded in to make the challenge even more onerous for the generals at GHQ.

Obama's June 22 speech from the White House - in which he announced the commencement of his promised drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan in July this year and phased over the next three years - contains a list of veiled demands and warnings for Pakistan, particularly its military.

To Obama, the thinning of the American combat presence in Afghanistan doesn't mean any dilution of his firm resolve to keep up the pressure on al-Qaeda and its militant comrades. He complimented Pakistan's efforts that, together with the American punch, have led to more than half of al-Qaeda's top brass being eliminated. However, he left no room for doubt that as long as he was in command, there would be no sanctuary for terrorists, anywhere.

That's where Pakistan and the role of its military take on a pivotal position in Obama's estimation. He was quite categorical that there would be no "safe havens for al-Qaeda". That was a loud and clear message for Pakistan to ensure there are no hide-outs for al-Qaeda and its fellow-travellers in the "no man's land" of Pakistan's tribal belt straddling Afghanistan.

It's an old but persistent demand of the Americans for the Pakistan army to do in its North Waziristan tribal area what it did in South Waziristan. The Pakistan army - for a variety of reasons - has been stalling on that demand. But Obama sounded more insistent and resolute than ever before. Indeed, his confidence has climbed since US special forces killed al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in his hideout not far from a military compound in Abbottabad. So he hardly minced his words in articulating that "we will insist" that Pakistan keeps its commitments.

It's easy for Obama to pile pressure on Pakistan, coupled with barely disguised warnings that if Pakistan didn't, then he would go about it on his own, which in simple words means another Abbottabad-like solo operation.

However, the relentless demands from Obama for the Pakistan army to do still more - with himself holding a gun to its head, is a catch-22 dilemma for the generals. The price Obama could exact from them and the country is enormous.

The latest survey by the Washington-based Pew research in Pakistan in the wake of Bin Laden's demise finds that 67% of Pakistanis questioned, a solid majority, don't think the "war on terror" is Pakistan's war. A fresh incursion by the army into North Waziristan to oblige the Americans could only trigger wider public uproar, which would be hard to stomach for an army leadership already forced onto the back foot.

The Pakistan army's operation in South Waziristan has already brought a massive spike in acts of terrorism that has taken a heavy toll of public life. Another Quixotic venture would inevitably add fuel to a burning fire and push the country to the brink of anarchy.

In a nutshell, Pakistan could slide into civil war, given an already super-charged tension in its political culture, where tolerance of any kind is at a heavy premium.

On top of that, Pakistan is wary of the talks that Washington has been carrying on for some time with the Afghan Taliban behind its back. Keeping Pakistan out of the loop has only one meaning for Islamabad: the Obama administration doesn't trust it enough to make it a party to the parleys, which could have far-reaching consequences for Pakistan, more than any other neighbor of Afghanistan.

Islamabad is also feeling increasingly leery of the traction that the so-called Blackwill formula - to divide Afghanistan along ethnic lines into a Pashtun south and a non-Pashtun north - is apparently receiving in top echelons of the Obama administration.

There's near-consensus in Pakistan's intellectual community, and policymakers, that the author of this prescription, Robert Blackwill, has absorbed a lot of Indian input into his brain wave. Blackwill was George W Bush's ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003.

Pakistan's intellectual community also fears Obama's drawdown of forces, spread over three years, is calibrated to allow the Blackwill plan ample opportunity to take root in Afghanistan.

A divided Afghanistan would not only denude Pakistan of its strategic depth, vis-a-vis India, but may also become a cause for the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line, the poorly marked border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to unite. Such unity could only mean further dismemberment of Pakistan and open up a Pandora's box. Pakistan simply can't countenance such an outcome and will pull no punches to thwart it.

Karamatullah K Ghori is a former career ambassador of Pakistan whose diplomatic assignments took him to the United States, Argentina, Japan, China, The Philippines, Algeria, Kuwait, Iraq, Macedonia and Turkey.

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MF25Df02.html
 

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Pakistan attack kills 22 Afghans



Wed Jun 29, 2011 11:23AM



Pakistani troops patrol in the tribal region of South Waziristan along the Afghan border (file photo)



Pakistan's Armed Forces have reportedly fired rockets on an area in neighboring Afghanistan, killing as many as 22 people and injuring 78 others.

MORE

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/186761.html

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Pakistan tells US military to leave ‘drone’ attack base


AFP
June 29, 2011 (2 days ago)
http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/29/pakistan-tells-us-military-to-leave-drone-attack-base.html

“We have told them (US officials) to leave the air base,” national news agency APP quoted Pakistani Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar as telling a group of journalists in his office on Wednesday. – File Photo by Reuters

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan told the United States to leave a remote desert air base reportedly used as a hub for covert CIA drone attacks, Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar was quoted by state media as saying Wednesday.

His remarks are the latest indication of Pakistan attempting to limit US activities since a clandestine American military raid killed Osama bin Laden on May 2 and plunged ties between the anti-terror allies into chaos.

“We have told them (US officials) to leave the air base,” national news agency APP quoted Mukhtar as telling a group of journalists in his office.

Images said to be of US Predator drones at Shamsi have been published by Google Earth in the past. The air strip is 900 kilometres (560 miles) southwest of the capital Islamabad in Baluchistan province.

A US embassy spokeswoman told AFP there were no US military personnel at the Shamsi base.

American drone attacks on Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s northwestern semi-autonomous tribal belt are hugely unpopular among a general public opposed to the government’s alliance with Washington.

CNN reported in April that US military personnel had left the base, said to be a key hub for American drone operations, in the fallout over public killings by a CIA contractor in Lahore and his subsequent detention.

Reports said operations at the base, which Washington has not publicly acknowledged, were conducted with tacit Pakistani military consent.

Neither does the United States officially confirm Predator drone attacks, but its military and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy the armed, unmanned aircraft in the region.

The bin Laden raid humiliated the Pakistani military and invited allegations of incompetence and complicity, as well as severely damaging trust between Islamabad and Washington.

“This trust deficit could be reduced by sitting together and taking joint actions,” the state-sun Associated Press of Pakistan quoted Mukhtar as saying.

According to US Vice Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the bin Laden raid, the US military believes Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar is in Pakistan and had asked the Pakistani army to find him.

Asked about Omar, Mukhtar said: “If he was in Pakistan, even then, he would have left the country after the Abbottabad incident.” Mukhtar, who belongs to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, said that he supported negotiations with the Taliban to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/29/pakistan-tells-us-military-to-leave-drone-attack-base.html

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US Rejects Demands to Vacate Pakistan Drone Base


By REUTERS

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28448.htm


July 01, 2011 "Dawn" - -The United States is rejecting demands from Pakistani officials that American personnel abandon a military base used by the CIA to stage drone strikes against suspected militants, U.S. officials told Reuters.

U.S. personnel have not left the remote Pakistani military installation known as Shamsi Air Base and there is no plan for them to do so, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive material.

"That base is neither vacated nor being vacated," the official said. The information was confirmed by a second U.S. official.

The U.S. declaration that drone operations in Pakistan will continue unabated is the latest twist in a fraught relationship between security authorities in Washington and Islamabad, which has been under increasing strain for months.

Regarding the Shamsi base in particular, Pakistani officials have frequently suggested it is being shuttered, comments that may be aimed at quieting domestic opposition to U.S. military operations using Pakistani soil.

Earlier this week, Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar told the Financial Times that Pakistan had already stopped U.S. drone operations there.

On Thursday, Mukhtar told Reuters: "When they (U.S. forces) will not operate from there, no drone attacks will be carried out."

He said Islamabad had been pressuring the U.S. to vacate the base even before the May 2 commando raid in which U.S. Navy SEAL commandos killed Osama bin Laden. After the raid, Mukhtar said, "We told them again."

A senior Pakistani military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that when U.S. forces first launched counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan "provided Americans two bases in Jacobabad and Shamsi. Jacobabad base has been vacated for long time ago, but Shamsi is still with them."

"They are vacating it," the official insisted. "Shamsi base was for logistic purpose. They also used it for drones for some time but no drones have been flown from there."

DIFFERENT STORIES

The official said no base in Pakistan was presently used by the Americans for drone operations. But he did not give a precise date for when drones supposedly stopped operating from Shamsi.

The U.S. officials disputed that account. If anything, the Obama administration is moving to a counter-terrorism strategy based more on drone strikes and other covert operations than on deploying large numbers of troops.

On Wednesday, John Brennan, president Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor, promised that in the tribal regions along the Afghan/Pakistan border, the U.S. would continue to "deliver precise and overwhelming force against al Qaeda."

"And when necessary, as the President has said repeatedly, if we have information about the whereabouts of al Qaeda, we will do what is required to protect the United States -- as we did with bin Laden," Brennan said in a speech.

Pakistani officials have faced fierce criticism for tacitly allowing the CIA to conduct drone operations on Pakistani soil. Allegations that civilian bystanders have been killed in drone attacks have only compounded the political problems facing Pakistani authorities.

Brennan rejected suggestions that U.S. drone attacks had caused numerous civilian casualties, claiming that the U.S. had been "exceptionally precise and surgical" in its operations. "Not a single collateral death" had been caused by U.S. counter-terrorism operations over the last year, he said.

U.S. officials have said that since the United States in July 2008 greatly increased the rate of drone-borne missile strikes against suspected militants along the Afghan/Pakistan border, the number of civilian deaths caused by such attacks has totaled under 40. Some Pakistani officials and human rights activists have claimed the death toll is much higher.

(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani and Chris Allbritton; Editing by Warren Strobel and Anthony Boadle)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28448.htm

 
 

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Imperial Eye on Pakistan

Pakistan in Pieces, Part 1

By Andrew Gavin Marshall


 
Global Research, May 28, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25009




Introduction

 

As the purported assassination of Osama bin Laden has placed the focus on Pakistan, it is vital to assess the changing role of Pakistan in broad geostrategic terms, and in particular, of the changing American strategy toward Pakistan. The recently reported assassination was a propaganda ploy aimed at targeting Pakistan. To understand this, it is necessary to examine how America has, in recent years, altered its strategy in Pakistan in the direction of destabilization. In short, Pakistan is an American target. The reason: Pakistan’s growing military and strategic ties to China, America’s primary global strategic rival. In the ‘Great Game’ for global hegemony, any country that impedes America’s world primacy – even one as historically significant to America as Pakistan – may be sacrificed upon the altar of war.

 

Part 1 of ‘Pakistan in Pieces’ examines the changing views of the American strategic community – particularly the military and intelligence circles – towards Pakistan. In particular, there is a general acknowledgement that Pakistan will very likely continue to be destabilized and ultimately collapse. What is not mentioned in these assessments, however, is the role of the military and intelligence communities in making this a reality; a veritable self-fulfilling prophecy. This part also examines the active on the ground changes in American strategy in Pakistan, with increasing military incursions into the country.

 

Imperial Eye on Pakistan
 

In December of 2000, the CIA released a report of global trends to the year 2015, which stated that by 2015, “Pakistan will be more fractious, isolated, and dependent on international financial assistance.”[1] Further, it was predicted, Pakistan:

 

Will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction. Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties. Further domestic decline would benefit Islamic political activists, who may significantly increase their role in national politics and alter the makeup and cohesion of the military – once Pakistan’s most capable institution. In a climate of continuing domestic turmoil, the central government’s control probably will be reduced to the Punjabi heartland and the economic hub of Karachi.[2]

 

The report further analyzed the trends developing in relation to the Pakistan-India standoff in the region:

 

The threat of major conflict between India and Pakistan will overshadow all other regional issues during the next 15 years. Continued turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan will spill over into Kashmir and other areas of the subcontinent, prompting Indian leaders to take more aggressive preemptive and retaliatory actions. India’s conventional military advantage over Pakistan will widen as a result of New Delhi’s superior economic position.[3]

 

In 2005, the Times of India reported on a US National Intelligence Council report, written in conjunction with the CIA, which predicted a “Yugoslavia-like fate” for Pakistan, saying that, “by year 2015 Pakistan would be a failed state, ripe with civil war, bloodshed, inter-provincial rivalries and a struggle for control of its nuclear weapons and complete Talibanisation.”[4]

 

In November of 2008, the US National Intelligence Council released a report, “Global Trends 2025,” in which they outlined major trends in the world by the year 2025. When it came to Pakistan, the report stated that, “Ongoing low-intensity clashes between India and Pakistan continue to raise the specter that such events could escalate to a broader conflict between those nuclear powers.”[5] It stated that Pakistan “will be at risk of state failure.”[6] In examining potential failed states, the report stated that:

 

[Y]outh bulges, deeply rooted conflicts, and limited economic prospects are likely to keep Palestine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and others in the high-risk category.  Spillover from turmoil in these states and potentially others increases the chance that moves elsewhere in the region toward greater prosperity and political stability will be rocky.[7]

 

The report referred to Pakistan as a “wildcard” and stated that if it is “unable to hold together until 2025, a broader coalescence of Pashtun tribes is likely to emerge and act together to erase the Durand Line [separating Pakistan from Afghanistan], maximizing Pashtun space at the expense of Punjabis in Pakistan and Tajiks and others in Afghanistan.”[8]

 

In January of 2009, a Pentagon report analyzing geopolitical trends of significance to the US military over the next 25 years, reported that Pakistan could face a “rapid and sudden” collapse. It stated that, “Some forms of collapse in Pakistan would carry with it the likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger haven for violent extremists, and the question of what would happen to its nuclear weapons,” and as such, “that ‘perfect storm' of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger.”[9]

 

A top adviser to former President George Bush and current President Obama warned in April of 2009, that Pakistan could collapse within months, and that, “We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we're calling the war on terror now.” The adviser and consultant, David Kilcullen, explained that this would be unlike the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which each had a population of over 30 million, whereas “Pakistan has [187] million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control.”[10]

 

Target: Pakistan
 

Going back to the later years of the Bush administration, it is apparent that the US strategy in Pakistan was already changing in seeing it increasingly as a target for military operations as opposed to simply a conduit. In August of 2007, newly uncovered documents revealed that the US military “gave elite units broad authority” in 2004, “to pursue suspected terrorists into Pakistan, with no mention of telling the Pakistanis in advance.”[11]

 

In November of 2007, an op-ed in the New York Times stated categorically that, “the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss,” and that, “we need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.” The authors, Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon are both well-known strategists and scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, two of the most prominent and influential think tanks in the United States. While stating that Pakistan’s leaders are still primarily moderate and friendly to the US, “Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late,” referring to the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They warn:

 

The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.[12]

 

They state that the military solutions are “daunting” as Pakistan is a nation of 187 million people, roughly five times the size of Iraq. They wrote that, “estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size,” which led them to conclude, “Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.” They suggested one plan would be to deploy Special Forces “with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hand.” However, they admit that, “even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate.” Another option, they contend:

 

would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership. This would require a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations.[13]

 

The authors concluded, saying that any state decline in Pakistan would likely be gradual, therefore allowing the US to have time to respond, and placed an emphasis on securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and combating militants. They finished the article with the warning: “Pakistan may be the next big test.”[14]

 

In December of 2007, the Asia Times Online ran a story about the US plan to rid Pakistan of President Musharraf, and that the US and the West, more broadly, had begun a strategy aimed at toppling Pakistan’s military. As part of this, the US launched a media campaign aimed at demonizing Pakistan’s military establishment. At this time, Benazir Bhutto was criticizing the ISI, suggesting they needed a dramatic restructuring, and at the same time, reports were appearing in the US media blaming the ISI for funding and providing assistance to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. While much of this is documented, the fact that it suddenly emerged as talking points with several western officials and in the media does suggest a turn-around against a long-time ally.[15]

 

Both Democratic and Republican politicians were making statements that Pakistan represented a greater threat than Iran, and then-Senator (now Vice President) Joseph Biden suggested that the United States needed to put soldiers on the ground in Pakistan in cooperation with the “international community.” Biden said that, “We should be in there,” and “we should be supplying tens of millions of dollars to build new schools to compete with the madrassas. We should be in there building democratic institutions. We should be in there, and get the rest of the world in there, giving some structure to the emergence of, hopefully, the reemergence of a democratic process.”[16]

 

In American policy-strategy circles, officials openly began discussing the possibility of Pakistan breaking up into smaller states, and increasing discussion that Musharraf was going to be “removed,” which obviously happened. As the Asia Times stated:

 

Another worrying thing is how US officials are publicly signaling to the Pakistanis that Bhutto has their backing as the next leader of the country. Such signals from Washington are not only a kiss of death for any public leader in Pakistan, but the Americans also know that their actions are inviting potential assassins to target Bhutto.

 

If she is killed in this way, there won't be enough time to find the real culprit, but what's certain is that unprecedented international pressure will be placed on Islamabad while everyone will use their local assets to create maximum internal chaos in the country.[17]

 

Of course, this subsequently happened in Pakistan. As the author of the article pointed out with startlingly accurate foresight, “Getting Bhutto killed can generate the kind of pressure that could result in permanently putting the Pakistani military on a back foot, giving Washington enough room to push for installing a new pliant leadership in Islamabad.” He observed that, “the US is very serious this time. They cannot let Pakistan get out of their hands.”[18]

 

Thus, it would appear that the new US strategic aim in Pakistan was focused on removing the Pakistani military from power, implying the need to replace Musharraf, and replace him with a new, compliant civilian leadership. This would have the effect of fracturing the Pakistani elite, threatening the Army’s influence within Pakistani politics, and undertaking more direct control of Pakistan’s government.

 

As if on cue, in late December it was reported that, “US special forces snatch squads are on standby to seize or disable Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in the event of a collapse of government authority or the outbreak of civil war following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.”[19]

 

The New York Times ran an article in early January 2008, which reported that, “President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.” The article stated that the new strategy was purportedly in response to increased reports of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity within Pakistan, which “are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government.” Bush’s National Security team supposedly organized this effort in response to Bhutto’s assassination 10 days previously.[20]

 

Officials involved in the strategy discussions said that some “options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces,” and one official said, “After years of focusing on Afghanistan, we think the extremists now see a chance for the big prize — creating chaos in Pakistan itself.” Of pivotal importance to the strategy, as the Times reported: “Critics said more direct American military action would be ineffective, anger the Pakistani Army and increase support for the militants.”[21] Perhaps this is not simply a “side-effect” of the proposed strategy, but in fact, part of the strategy.

 

As one prominent Pakistani political and military analyst pointed out, raids into Pakistan would expand anger and “prompt a powerful popular backlash” against the Pakistani government, losing popular support.[22] However, as I previously stated, this might be the intention, as this would ultimately make the government more dependent upon the United States, and thus, more subservient.

 

On September 3, 2008, it was reported that a commando raid by US Special Forces was launched in Pakistan, which killed between 15 and 20 people, including women and children. The Special Forces were accompanied by five U.S. helicopters for the duration of the operation.[23]

 

In February of 2009, it was reported that, “More than 70 United States military advisers and technical specialists are secretly working in Pakistan to help its armed forces battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the country’s lawless tribal areas.” So not only are U.S. Special Forces invading Pakistani territory; but now US military advisers are secretly advising the Pakistani Army on its own operations, and the advisers are themselves primary made up of Special Forces soldiers. They provide the Pakistani Army “with intelligence and advising on combat tactics,” and make up a secret command run by US Central Command and Special Operations Command (presumably JSOC – Joint Special Operations Command).[24]

 

In May of 2009, it was reported that, “the U.S. is sending Special Forces teams into one of Pakistan's most violent regions as part of a push to accelerate the training of the Pakistani military and make it a more effective ally in the fight against insurgents there.” The Special Forces were deploying to two training camps in the province of Baluchistan, and “will focus on training Pakistan's Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force responsible for battling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.” Further, the project “is a joint effort with the U.K.,” which helps “fund the training, although it is unclear if British military personnel would take part in the initiative. British officials have been pushing for such an effort for several years.”[25]

 

In December of 2009 it was revealed that, “American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme,” which was revealed by a former NATO officer. He said these incursions had occurred between 2003 and 2008, indicating they go even further back than US military documents stipulate. The source further revealed that, “the Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them.” Further, as the source noted, British “SAS soldiers have been active in the province” of Bolochistan in 2002 and 2003 and “possibly beyond.”[26]

 

The “Balkanization” of Pakistan: Blaming the Pakistanis
 

Selig S. Harrison is a director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, former senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former journalist and correspondent. “His reputation for giving ‘early warning’ of foreign policy crises was well established during his career as a foreign correspondent.  In his study of foreign reporting, Between Two Worlds, John Hohenberg, former secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Board, cited Harrison’s prediction of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war eighteen months before it happened.” Further, “More than a year before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Harrison warned of this possibility in one of his frequent contributions to the influential journal Foreign Policy.”[27]

 

On February 1, 2008, Selig Harrison threw his renowned “predictive” abilities on Pakistan in an op-ed for the New York Times in the run-up to the Pakistani elections. He started by stating that, “Whatever the outcome of the Pakistani elections, now scheduled for Feb. 18, the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is not likely to survive for long unless it is radically restructured.” Harrison then went on to explain that Pakistan would likely break up along ethnic lines; with the Pashtuns, concentrated in the northwestern tribal areas, the Sindhis in the southeast uniting with the Baluch tribesmen in the southwest, with the Punjab “rump state” of Pakistan.[28]

 

The Pashtuns in the north, “would join with their ethnic brethren across the Afghan border (some 40 million of them combined) to form an independent ‘Pashtunistan’,” and the Sindhis “numbering 23 million, would unite with the six million Baluch tribesmen in the southwest to establish a federation along the Arabian Sea from India to Iran,” presumably named Baluchistan; while the rump state of Pakistan would remain Punjabi dominated and in control of the nuclear weapons. Selig Harrison explained that prior to partition from India, which led to the creation of the Pakistani state in 1947, Pashtun, Sindhi and Baluch ethnicities had “resist[ed] Punjabi domination for centuries,” and suddenly:

 

they found themselves subjected to Punjabi-dominated military regimes that have appropriated many of the natural resources in the minority provinces — particularly the natural gas deposits in the Baluch areas — and siphoned off much of the Indus River’s waters as they flow through the Punjab.

 

The resulting Punjabi-Pashtun animosity helps explain why the United States is failing to get effective Pakistani cooperation in fighting terrorists. The Pashtuns living along the Afghan border are happy to give sanctuary from Punjabi forces to the Taliban, which is composed primarily of fellow Pashtuns, and to its Qaeda friends.

 

Pashtun civilian casualties resulting from Pakistani and American air strikes on both sides of the border are breeding a potent underground Pashtun nationalist movement. Its initial objective is to unite all Pashtuns in Pakistan, now divided among political jurisdictions, into a unified province. In time, however, its leaders envisage full nationhood.

 

... The Baluch people, for their part, have been waging intermittent insurgencies since their forced incorporation into Pakistan in 1947. In the current warfare Pakistani forces are widely reported to be deploying American-supplied aircraft and intelligence equipment that was intended for use in Afghan border areas. Their victims are forging military links with Sindhi nationalist groups that have been galvanized into action by the death of Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi hero as was her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.[29]

 

This passage is very revealing of the processes and perceptions surrounding “Balkanization” and “destabilization.” What I mean by this, is that historically and presently, imperial powers would often use ethnic groups against each other in a strategy of divide and conquer, in order “to keep the barbarians from coming together” and dominate the region.

 

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard,” that, “Geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.”[30] Brzezinski then gave a masterful explanation of the American global strategy, which placed it into a firm imperialistic context:

 

To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.[31]

 

While imperial powers manipulate, and historically, even create the ethnic groups within regions and nations, the West portrays conflict in such regions as being the product of these “ethnic” or “tribal” rivalries. This perception of the East (Asia and the Middle East) as well as Africa is referred to as Orientalism or Eurocentrism: meaning it generally portrays the East (and/or Africa) as “the Other”: inherently different and often barbaric. This prejudiced perspective is prevalent in Western academic, media, and policy circles. This perspective serves a major purpose: dehumanizing a people in a region that an imperial power seeks to dominate, which allows the hegemon to manipulate the people and divide them against each other, while framing them as “backwards” and “barbaric,” which in turn, justifies the Western imperial power exerting hegemony and control over the region; to “protect” the people from themselves.

 

Historically and presently, Western empires have divided people against each other, blamed the resulting conflict on the people themselves, and thus justified their control over both the people, and the region they occupy. This was the strategy employed in major recent geopolitical conflicts such as the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. In both cases, Western imperial ambitions were met through exacerbating ethnic rivalries, providing financial, technical, and military aid and training to various factions; thus, spreading violent conflict, war, and genocide. In both cases, Western, and primarily American strategic interests were met through an increased presence militarily, pushing out other major imperial and powerful rivals, as well as increasing Western access to key economics resources.

 

This is the lens through which we must view the unfolding situation in Pakistan. However, the situation in Pakistan presents a far greater potential for conflict and devastation than either Yugoslavia or Rwanda. In short, the potential strategy of “Balkanization” and destabilization of Pakistan could dwarf any major global conflict in the past few decades. It’s sheer population of 187 million people, proximity to two major regional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its strategic location as neighbor to India, China, and Iran with access to the Indian Ocean, and its nuclear arsenal, combine to make Pakistan the potential trigger for a much wider regional and possibly global war. The destabilization of Pakistan has the potential to be the greatest geopolitical catastrophe since World War II.

 

Thus, Selig Harrison’s op-ed in the New York Times in which he describes the “likely” breakup of Pakistan along ethnic lines as a result of “ethnic differences” must be viewed in the wider context of geopolitical ambitions. His article lays the foundation both for the explanation of a potential breakup, and thus the “justification” for Western intervention in the conflict. His “predictive” capacities as a seasoned journalist can be alternatively viewed as pre-emptive imperial propaganda.

 

Fracturing Pakistan

 

The war in Afghanistan is inherently related to the situation in Pakistan. From the days of the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, arms and money were flowing through Pakistan to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. During the civil war that followed, Pakistan armed and financed the Taliban, which eventually took power. When the U.S. and NATO initially attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, this was primarily achieved through cooperation with Pakistan. When the war theatre was re-named “AfPak,” the role of Pakistan, however, was formally altered. While the previous few years had seen the implementation of a strategy of destabilizing Pakistan, once the “AfPak” war theatre was established, Pakistan ceased to be as much of a conduit or proxy state and became a target.

 

In September of 2008, the editor of Indian Defence Review wrote an article explaining that a stable Pakistan is not in India’s interests: “With Pakistan on the brink of collapse due to massive internal as well as international contradictions, it is matter of time before it ceases to exist.” He explained that Pakistan’s collapse would bring “multiple benefits” to India, including preventing China from gaining a major port in the Indian Ocean, which is in the mutual interest of the United States. The author explained that this would be a “severe jolt” to China’s expansionist aims, and further, “India’s access to Central Asian energy routes will open up.”[32]

 

In August of 2009, Foreign Policy Journal published a report of an exclusive interview they held with former Pakistani ISI chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who was Director General of the powerful intelligence services (ISI) between 1987 and 1989, at a time in which it was working closely with the CIA to fund and arm the Mujahideen. Once a close ally of the US, he is now considered extremely controversial and the US even recommended the UN to put him on the international terrorist list. Gul explained that he felt that the American people have not been told the truth about 9/11, and that the 9/11 Commission was a “cover up,” pointing out that, “They [the American government] haven’t even proved the case that 9/11 was done by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.” He said that the real reasons for the war on Afghanistan were that:

 

the U.S. wanted to “reach out to the Central Asian oilfields” and “open the door there”, which “was a requirement of corporate America, because the Taliban had not complied with their desire to allow an oil and gas pipeline to pass through Afghanistan. UNOCAL is a case in point. They wanted to keep the Chinese out. They wanted to give a wider security shield to the state of Israel, and they wanted to include this region into that shield. And that’s why they were talking at that time very hotly about ‘greater Middle East’. They were redrawing the map.”[33]

 

He also stated that part of the reason for going into Afghanistan was “to go for Pakistan’s nuclear capability,” as the U.S. “signed this strategic deal with India, and this was brokered by Israel. So there is a nexus now between Washington, Tel Aviv, and New Delhi.” When he was asked about the Pakistani Taliban, which the Pakistani government was being pressured to fight, and where the financing for that group came from; Gul stated:

 

Yeah, of course they are getting it from across the Durand line, from Afghanistan. And the Mossad is sitting there, RAW is sitting there — the Indian intelligence agency — they have the umbrella of the U.S. And now they have created another organization which is called RAMA. It may be news to you that very soon this intelligence agency — of course, they have decided to keep it covert — but it is Research and Analysis Milli Afghanistan. That’s the name. The Indians have helped create this organization, and its job is mainly to destabilize Pakistan.[34]

 

He explained that the Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army had told him that he had gone to India to offer the Indians five bases in Afghanistan, three of which are along the Pakistani border. Gul was asked a question as to why, if the West was supporting the TTP (Pakistani Taliban), would a CIA drone have killed the leader of the TTP. Gul explained that while Pakistan was fighting directly against the TTP leader, Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani government would provide the Americans where Mehsud was, “three times the Pakistan intelligence tipped off America, but they did not attack him.” So why all of a sudden did they attack?

 

Because there were some secret talks going on between Baitullah Mehsud and the Pakistani military establishment. They wanted to reach a peace agreement, and if you recall there is a long history of our tribal areas, whenever a tribal militant has reached a peace agreement with the government of Pakistan, Americans have without any hesitation struck that target.

 

... there was some kind of a deal which was about to be arrived at — they may have already cut a deal. I don’t know. I don’t have enough information on that. But this is my hunch, that Baitullah was killed because now he was trying to reach an agreement with the Pakistan army. And that’s why there were no suicide attacks inside Pakistan for the past six or seven months.[35]

 

An article in one of Canada’s national magazines, Macleans, reported on an interview with a Pakistani ISI spy, who claimed that India’s intelligence services, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), have “tens of thousands of RAW agents in Pakistan.” Many officials inside Pakistan were convinced that, “India’s endgame is nothing less than the breakup of Pakistan. And the RAW is no novice in that area. In the 1960s, it was actively involved in supporting separatists in Bangladesh, at the time East Pakistan. The eventual victory of Bangladeshi nationalism in 1971 was in large part credited to the support the RAW gave the secessionists.”[36] 

 

Further, there were Indian consulates set up in Kandahar, the area of Afghanistan where Canadian troops are located, and which is strategically located next to the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, which is home to a virulent separatist movement, of which Pakistan claims is being supported by India. Macleans reported on the conclusions by Michel Chossudovsky, economics professor at University of Ottawa, that, “the region’s massive gas and oil reserves are of strategic interest to the U.S. and India. A gas pipeline slated to be built from Iran to India, two countries that already enjoy close ties, would run through Baluchistan. The Baluch separatist movement, which is also active in Iran, offers an ideal proxy for both the U.S. and India to ensure their interests are met.”[37]

 

Even an Afghan government adviser told the media that India was using Afghan territory to destabilize Pakistan.[38] In September of 2009, the Pakistan Daily reported that captured members and leaders of the Pakistani Taliban have admitted to being trained and armed by India through RAW or RAMA in Afghanistan in order to fight the Pakistani Army.[39]

 

Foreign Policy magazine in February of 2009 quoted a former intelligence official as saying, “The Indians are up to their necks in supporting the Taliban against the Pakistani government in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” and that, “the same anti-Pakistani forces in Afghanistan also shooting at American soldiers are getting support from India. India should close its diplomatic establishments in Afghanistan and get the Christ out of there.”[40]

 

The Council on Foreign Relations published a backgrounder report on RAW, India’s intelligence agency, founded in 1968 “primarily to counter China's influence, [however] over time it has shifted its focus to India's other traditional rival, Pakistan.” For over three decades both Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies have been involved in covert operations against one another. One of RAW’s main successes was its covert operations in East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh, which “aimed at fomenting independence sentiment” and ultimately led to the separation of Bangladesh by directly funding, arming and training the Pakistani separatists. Further, as the Council on Foreign Relations noted, “From the early days, RAW had a secret liaison relationship with the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency.”[41]

 

Since RAW was founded in 1968, it had developed close ties with the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD, primarily to do with intelligence sharing on Pakistan. In the 1980s, while Pakistan was funding, arming and training the Afghan Mujahideen with the support of Saudi Arabia and the CIA, India was funding two covert groups which orchestrated terrorist attacks inside Pakistan, which included a “low-grade but steady campaign of bombings in major Pakistani cities, notably Karachi and Lahore.” RAW has also had a close relationship with the CIA, as even six years before RAW was created, in 1962, the CIA created a covert organization made up of Tibetan refugees, which aimed to “execute deep-penetration terror operations in China.” The CIA subsequently played a part in the creation of RAW. In the 1980s, while the CIA was working closely with the ISI in Pakistan, RAW, while wary of their relationship, continued to get counterterrorism training from the CIA.[42]

 

In October of 2009, the New York Times reported that the US strategy “to vastly expand its aid to Pakistan, as well as the footprint of its embassy and private security contractors here, are aggravating an already volatile anti-American mood as Washington pushes for greater action by the government against the Taliban.” The U.S. gave Pakistan an aid deal of $1.5 billion per year for the next five years, under the stipulation of “Pakistan to cease supporting terrorist groups on its soil and to ensure that the military does not interfere with civilian politics.” President Zaradari accepted the proposal, making him even more unpopular in Pakistan, and further angering Pakistan’s powerful military, which sees the deal as interfering in the internal affairs of the country.[43]

 

America is thus expanding its embassy and security presence within the country, as the Embassy “has publicized plans for a vast new building in Islamabad for about 1,000 people, with security for some diplomats provided through a Washington-based private contracting company, DynCorp.” The NYT article referred to how relations were becoming increasingly strained between Pakistan and the US, and tensions were growing within the country exponentially, as “the American presence was fueling a sense of occupation among Pakistani politicians and security officials,” and several Pakistani officials stated that, “the United States was now seen as behaving in Pakistan much as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Futher:

 

In particular, the Pakistani military and the intelligence agencies are concerned that DynCorp is being used by Washington to develop a parallel network of security and intelligence personnel within Pakistan, officials and politicians close to the army said.

 

The concerns are serious enough that last month a local company hired by DynCorp to provide Pakistani men to be trained as security guards for American diplomats was raided by the Islamabad police. The owner of the company, the Inter-Risk Security Company, Capt. Syed Ali Ja Zaidi, was later arrested.

 

The action against Inter-Risk, apparently intended to cripple the DynCorp program, was taken on orders from the senior levels of the Pakistani government, said an official familiar with the raid, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

 

The entire workings of DynCorp within Pakistan are now under review by the Pakistani government.[44]

 

As revealed in the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson wrote in September of 2009 that the U.S. strategy of unilateral strikes inside Pakistan “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan without finally achieving the goal.”[45]

 

In an interview with Press TV, Hamid Gul, former Inter-Services Intelligence chief revealed more of what he sees as the US strategy in Pakistan. He explained that with the massive expansion of the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, and alongside that, the increased security staff, the Chinese are becoming increasingly concerned with the sovereignty and security of Pakistan. He claimed that the money that the US government offered (with heavy conditions) to Pakistan, $1.5 billion every year for five years, will be spent under the direction of the Americans, and that “they are going to set up a large intelligence network inside Pakistan,” and ultimately “they really want to go for Pakistan's nuclear assets.” He further claimed that the Indians are trying to destabilize Pakistan; however, he explained, this does not necessarily mean disintegrate, but rather:

 

they are trying to destabilize Pakistan at the moment so that it feels weak and economically has to go begging on its knees to Americans and ask for succor and help. And in that process they will want to expect certain concessions with regards to nuclear power and also with regards to setting up their facilities here in Pakistan.[46]

 

When he was asked what America’s long-term goal was in regards to Pakistan, Gul responded that the goal:

 

for America is that they want to keep Pakistan destabilized; perhaps create a way for Baluchistan as a separate state and then create problems for Iran so that this new state will talk about greater Baluchistan... So it appears that the long-term objectives are really to fragment all these countries to an extent that they can establish a strip that would be pro-America, pro-India, pro-Israel. So this seems to be their long-term objective apart from denuclearizing Pakistan and blocking Iran's progress in the nuclear field.[47]

 

In Part 2 of ‘Pakistan in Pieces’, I will examine the specific ways in which the American strategy of destabilization is being undertaken in Pakistan, including the waging of a secret war and the expansion of the Afghan war into Pakistani territory. In short, the military and intelligence projections for Pakistan over the next several years (discussed in the beginning of Part 1 above) are a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those very same military and intelligence agencies that predict a destabilized Pakistan and potential collapse are now undertaking strategies aimed at achieving those outcomes.

 


Notes

 

[1]        NIC, Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts. The Central Intelligence Agency: December 2000: page 64

http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2015.html

[2]        Ibid, page 66.

[3]        Ibid.

[4]        PTI, Pak will be failed state by 2015: CIA. The Times of India: February 13, 2005: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Pak-will-be-failed-state-by-2015-CIA/articleshow/1019516.cms

[5]        NIC, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The National Intelligence Council: November 2008: page x

http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html

[6]        Ibid, page 45.

[7]        Ibid, page 65.

[8]        Ibid, page 72.

[9]        Peter Goodspeed, Mexico, Pakistan face 'rapid and sudden' collapse: Pentagon. The National Post: January 15, 2009: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=1181621

[10]      PAUL MCGEOUGH, Warning that Pakistan is in danger of collapse within months. The Sydney Morning Herald: April 13, 2009: http://www.smh.com.au/world/warning-that-pakistan-is-in-danger-of-collapse-within-months-20090412-a40u.html

[11]      Scott Lindlaw, AP: U.S. gave troops OK to enter Pakistan. USA Today: August 23, 2007: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-08-23-pakistan-engagement_N.htm

[12]      Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem. November 18, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18kagan.html

[13]      Ibid.

[14]      Ibid.

[15]      Ahmed Quraishi, The plan to topple Pakistan's military. Asia Times Online: December 6, 2007: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IL06Df03.html

[16]      Ibid.

[17]      Ibid.

[18]      Ibid.

[19]      Ian Bruce, Special forces on standby over nuclear threat. The Sunday Herald: December 31, 2007: http://www.heraldscotland.com/special-forces-on-standby-over-nuclear-threat-1.871766

[20]      Steven Lee Myers, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, U.S. Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan. The New York Times: January 6, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/washington/06terror.html

[21]      Ibid.

[22]      Ibid.

[23]      Farhan Bokhari, Sami Yousafzai, and Tucker Reals, U.S. Special Forces Strike In Pakistan. CBS News: September 3, 2008: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/03/terror/main4409288.shtml

[24]      Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, U.S. Unit Secretly in Pakistan Lends Ally Support. The New York Times: February 22, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/world/asia/23terror.html

[25]      YOCHI J. DREAZEN and SIOBHAN GORMAN, U.S. Special Forces Sent to Train Pakistanis. The Wall Street Journal: May 16, 2009: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124241541672724767.html

[26]      Declan Walsh, US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida. The Guardian: December 21, 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/us-forces-secret-pakistan-raids

[27]      CIP, SELIG S. HARRISON. Center for International Policy: http://www.ciponline.org/asia/Seligbio.html

[28]      Selig S. Harriosn, Drawn and Quartered. The New York Times: February 1, 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/opinion/01harrison.html

[29]      Ibid.

[30]      Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. (New York: Perseus, 1997), page 39

[31]      Ibid, page 40.

[32]      Bharat Verma, Stable Pakistan not in India’s interest. Indian Defence Review: September 11, 2008: http://www.indiandefencereview.com/2008/09/stable-pakistan-not-in-indias-interest.html

[33]      Jeremy R. Hammond, Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan’. Foreign Policy Journal: August 12, 2009: http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/08/12/ex-isi-chief-says-purpose-of-new-afghan-intelligence-agency-rama-is-%E2%80%98to-destabilize-pakistan%E2%80%99/

[34]      Ibid.

[35]      Ibid.

[36]      Adnan R. Khan, New Delhi’s endgame? Macleans: August 23, 2009: http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/04/23/new-delhi%E2%80%99s-endgame/

[37]      Ibid. See also Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 30, 2007

[38]      Imtiaz Indher, Afgan MPs call for early withdrawal of foreign troop. Associated Press of Pakistan: April 1, 2009: http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72423&Itemid=2

[39]      Moin Ansari, Proof: Captured TTP terrorists admit to being Indian RAW agents. Pakistan Daily: September 20, 2009: http://www.daily.pk/proof-captured-ttp-terrorists-admit-to-being-indian-raw-agents-11015/

[40]      Laura Rozen, Can the intel community defuse India-Pakistan tensions? Foreign Policy: February 16, 2009:
 http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/02/16/can_the_intel_community_defuse_india_pakistan_tensions

[41]      Jayshree Bajoria, RAW: India's External Intelligence Agency. The Council on Foreign Relations: November 7, 2008: http://www.cfr.org/publication/17707/

[42]      Ibid.

[43]      Jane Perlez, U.S. Push to Expand in Pakistan Meets Resistance. The New York Times: October 5, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/world/asia/06islamabad.html

[44]      Ibid.

[45]      US embassy cables, Reviewing our Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, The Guardian, 30 November 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/226531

[46]      US military bases 'will destabilize Pakistan'. Press TV: September 13, 2009: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=106106&sectionid=3510302

[47]      Ibid.


 
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25009

[bigron]

Punishing Pakistan and Challenging China

Pakistan in Pieces, Part 2

By Andrew Gavin Marshall


 
Global Research, June 30, 2011

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25440


This is Part 2 of "Pakistan in Pieces."

Part 1: Imperial Eye on Pakistan




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

The AfPak War Theatre: Establishing the New Strategy



As Senator Obama became the President-elect Obama, his foreign policy strategy on Afghanistan was already being formed. In 2007, Obama took on veteran geostrategist and Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as one of his top foreign policy advisers,[1] and he remained his foreign policy adviser throughout 2008.[2] On Obama’s campaign, he announced that as President, he would scale down the war in Iraq, and focus the “War on Terror” on Afghanistan, promising “to send in about 10,000 more troops and to strike next-door Pakistan, if top terrorists are spotted there.”[3]

 

In October of 2008, before the Presidential elections, “senior Bush administration officials gathered in secret with Afghanistan experts from NATO and the United Nations,” to deliver a message to advisers of McCain and Obama to tell them that, “the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse,” and “that the next president needed to have a plan for Afghanistan before he took office,” or else, “it could be too late.”[4] Both McCain and Obama had agreed to a troop increase for Afghanistan, essentially ensuring the “continuity of empire” from one administration to the next.

 

A week after winning the election, Obama invited one of Hillary Clinton’s top supporters and advisers to meet with him. Richard Holbrooke, who had worked in every Democratic administration since John F. Kennedy, “which extended from the Vietnam War, in the sixties, to the Balkan conflicts of the nineties,” was Clinton’s Ambassador to the United Nations for the last year and a half of the Clinton administration. Obama had decided “that Holbrooke should take on the hardest foreign-policy problem that the Administration faced: Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Holbrooke wrote in March of 2008, before Obama won the Presidency, that, “The conflict in Afghanistan will be far more costly and much, much longer than Americans realize,” and it “will eventually become the longest in American history.”[5]

 

The position Holbrooke was to receive in the Obama administration was one created specifically for him. He was to become a “special representative” to the region of Afghanistan and Pakistan:

 

n addition to being an emissary to the region, Holbrooke would run operations on the civilian side of American policy. He would create a rump regional bureau within the State Department, carved out of the Bureau of South and Central Asia, whose Afghanistan and Pakistan desks would report directly to him. He would assemble outside experts and officials from various government agencies to work for him, and he would report to the President through Hillary Clinton. Clinton told Holbrooke that he would be the civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus, the military head of Central Command.[6]

 

Holbrooke was thus placed in charge of “Af-Pak”, a term of his own creation, “to make the point that the two countries could not be dealt with separately,” which was then adopted into official parlance.[7]

 

In November of 2008, the Washington Post reported that while Obama was considering giving the position of Secretary of State (which he then did), he was also discussing giving General James L. Jones the position of National Security Adviser, which he subsequently did. The article stated that, “Obama is considering expanding the scope of the job to give the adviser the kind of authority once wielded by powerful figures such as Henry A. Kissinger.” James Jones was a former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant.[8]

 

Jones as NATO commander was pivotal in assembling troops for the war in Afghanistan, and at the time of his nomination as NSA (National Security Adviser), he headed “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy.”[9] The official statement of purpose for the Institute for 21st Century Energy is:

 

to unify energy policymakers, regulators, business leaders, and the American public behind a common sense strategy that ensures affordable, reliable, and diverse energy supplies, improves environmental stewardship, promotes economic growth, and strengthens national security.[10]

 

Jones earned $900,000 in salary from the Chamber of Commerce, and got $330,000 from serving on the board of Boeing and $290,000 for serving on the board of Chevron upon his resignations of those positions to become National Security Adviser.[11] In October of 2010, Jones was replaced as National Security Advisor by Tom Donilon.

 

On February 8, 2009, within weeks of being installed as NSA, Jones gave a speech at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy, in which he stated:

 

As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. [Henry] Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.[12]

 

He then elaborated on the purpose and restructuring of the National Security Council under the Obama administration. He stated that the NSC “must be strategic” in that, “we won’t effectively advance the priorities if we spend our time reacting to events, instead of shaping them. And that requires strategic thinking.” He further stated that:

 

the NSC today works very closely with President Obama’s National Economic Council, which is led by Mr. Larry Summers, so that our response to the economic crisis is coordinated with our global partners and our national security needs.[13]

 

Shortly after taking office, Obama set up a two-month White House strategic review of Afghanistan and Pakistan, to be headed by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and scholar at the Brookings Institution, and “Riedel will report to Obama and to retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones Jr., the national security advisor,” and was to work very closely with Richard Holbrooke in drafting the policy review.[14]

 

In February of 2009, Henry Kissinger wrote an article for the Washington Post describing the strategy America should undertake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, emphasizing the role of “security” over the aim of “reform” of the Afghan government, stating that, “Reform will require decades; it should occur as a result of, and even side by side with, the attainment of security -- but it cannot be the precondition for it.” Militarily, Kissinger recommended the “control of Kabul and the Pashtun area,” which stretches from Afghanistan to the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan province in Pakistan. When it came to the issue of Pakistan, Kissinger wrote:

 

The conduct of Pakistan will be crucial. Pakistan's leaders must face the fact that continued toleration of the sanctuaries -- or continued impotence with respect to them -- will draw their country ever deeper into an international maelstrom.[15]

 

Following the policy review, on March 27, Obama announced the administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, decidedly to make it a dual strategy: the AfPak strategy. Obama promised “to send lawyers and agricultural experts to Afghanistan to reform its government and economy, and to offer seven and a half billion dollars in new aid for schools, roads, and democracy in Pakistan.”[16]

 

Holbrooke had a staff of 30 in the State Department, and “nine government agencies, including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense and Treasury Departments, and two foreign countries, Britain and Canada, [were] represented in the office.” General David Patraeus, then Commander of U.S. CENTCOM (the Pentagon’s Central Command with authority over the Middle East, Egypt and Central Asia), along with then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, and Richard Holbrooke worked together and “pressured General Ashfaq Kayani, the head of the Pakistani Army, to push back against the Taliban in Swat,” which had the effect of precipitating the internal displacement of more than 2 million people.[17]

 

Changing Strategy, Changing Command
 

In January of 2009, shortly after Obama took office, he announced that his administration “picked Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former top military commander in Afghanistan, to be the next United States ambassador to Kabul,” of which the New York Times said:

 

Tapping a career Army officer who will soon retire from the service to fill one of the country’s most sensitive diplomatic jobs is a highly unusual choice.[18]

 

Further, the General had “repeatedly warned that the United States could not prevail in Afghanistan and defeat global terrorism without addressing the havens that fighters with Al Qaeda had established in neighboring Pakistan,” which is parallel to the new strategy in Afghanistan. His appointment “has the backing of Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”[19]

 

On May 11, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired General David D. McKiernan, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which commands all NATO forces in Afghanistan. Gates stated that, “It's time for new leadership and fresh eyes,” and that it was the Pentagon command which recommended the White House fire McKiernan, including Gates, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mullen and McKiernan’s military boss, General Patraeus, Commander of CENTCOM.[20]

 

There has been much speculation as to the reasons for his firing, and it is a significant question to ask, as the firing of a General in the field is a rarity in the American experience. The general view pushed by the Pentagon was that it was due to a matter of “consistency,” as in changing strategies and changing ambassadors, it was also necessary to change Generals. While McKiernan was focused on military means and tactics, the strategy required counter-insurgency tactics. It was reported that, “McKiernan was overly cautious in creating U.S.-backed local militias, a tactic that Petraeus had employed when he was the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.”[21]

 

One Washington Post article made the claim that the push to fire McKiernan came initially and most forcefully from the Chairman of the JCS Mullen, and that Gates agreed and lobbied Obama to fire him. The reasoning was that McKiernan was “too deferential to NATO” in that he wasn’t able to properly manage the NATO forces in Afghanistan, and lacked the political fortitude to manage both military and political affairs.[22]

 

The official reason for the firing was mostly to facilitate alignment with the new strategy requiring a new military commander, which is likely true. However, it requires an understanding of the new strategy as well as a look at who was sent in to replace McKiernan where you realize the true nature of his being fired. [Note: McChrystal himself was later fired in 2010 after publicly speaking out against top administration officials].

 

McKiernan was replaced with Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, former Commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the highly secretive command of U.S. Special Forces operations. As the Washington Post pointed out, his appointment “marks the continued ascendancy of officers who have pressed for the use of counterinsurgency tactics, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that are markedly different from the Army's traditional doctrine.”[23]

 

The new AfPak strategy, which McChrystal would oversee, “relies on the kind of special forces and counterinsurgency tactics McChrystal knows well, as well as nonmilitary approaches to confronting the Taliban. It would hinge success in the seven-year-old war to political and other conditions across the border in Pakistan.”[24]

 

In March of 2009, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the U.S. military was running an “executive assassination ring” during the Bush years, and that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was running it, and that, “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” and that, “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office... Congress has no oversight of it.” He elaborated:

 

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.[25]

 

Hersh appeared on Amy Goodman’s program, Democracy Now, to further discuss the program, of which he stated:

 

There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.[26]

 

At the time this news story broke, it was reported that the JSOC commander at the time, “ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower are jeopardizing broader goals there.” The halt lasted a total of two weeks, and “came after a series of nighttime raids by Special Operations troops in recent months killed women and children.”[27]

 

All of this is very concerning, considering that the new Commander of NATO operations in Afghanistan, was the former head of the “executive assassination ring.” Having run JSOC between 2003 and 2008, McChrystal “built a sophisticated network of soldiers and intelligence operatives,” which conducted operations and assassinations in Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan.”[28]

 

In June it was reported that McChrystal was “given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy.” He was reported to be assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers “who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years.” The New York Times referred to this strategy as “unknown in the military today outside Special Operations.” The Times further reported that McChrystal:

 

picked the senior intelligence adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, to join him in Kabul as director of intelligence there. In Washington, Brig. Gen. Scott Miller, a longtime Special Operations officer now assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff but who had served previously under General McChrystal, is now organizing a new Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell.[29]

 

In June of 2006, Newsweek referred to McChrystal’s JSOC as being a “part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work the dark side’ after 9/11.” McChrystal also happened to be a Fellow at Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.[30]

 

As it was later revealed, the CIA had been running – from 2002 onwards – a force of roughly 3,000 elite paramilitary Afghans, purportedly to hunt al-Qaeda and the Taliban for the CIA. Used for reconnaissance, surveillance, and actual operations, many in the force have been trained by the CIA in the United States, and their operations and numbers have expanded since the new strategy involving Pakistan was put in place. The paramilitary force – or terrorists, depending upon one’s perspective – are undertaking covert operations inside Pakistan, often working directly with U.S. Special Forces.[31] It must be remembered that during the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s when the CIA was funding, arming and training the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviets – late to become known as ‘al-Qaeda’ – they were, at the time, referred to as “freedom fighters,” just as the terrorist death squads were referred to in Nicaragua. Thus, the nomenclature of “paramilitary force” must be viewed with suspicion as to what the group is actually doing: covert operations, surveillance, assassinations, etc., which by many definitions would make them a terrorist outfit.

 

In May of 2009, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was reported as saying that a US military offensive in southern Afghanistan could have the effect of pushing militants and Taliban into Pakistan, “whose troops are already struggling to combat militants.” Chairman Mike Mullen stated that this means that Pakistan “could face even greater turmoil in the months ahead.” This was based off of a US surge of troops in Afghanistan. Senator Russ Feingold said that, “We may end up further destabilizing Pakistan without providing substantial lasting improvements in Afghanistan,” and that, “Weak civilian governments, an increased number of militants and an expanded U.S. troop presence could be a recipe for disaster for those nations in the region as well as our own nation's security.” Mullen responded to the Senator’s concerns by stating, “Can I... (be) 100 percent certain that won't destabilize Pakistan? I don't know the answer to that.”[32]

 

But of course, the answer is in fact, certain; and it’s an unequivocal “yes”. These remarks were made following the surge of an additional 21,000 US troops to Afghanistan in March. In the beginning of May, Pakistan launched a military offensive against the Taliban in Swat and other areas of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), after a peace deal broke down between them, “forcing more than two million people from their homes.”[33] It was further reported that:

 

Pakistani military chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani has told U.S. officials he's worried not only about Taliban moving across the border, but also the possibility that U.S. forces could prompt an exodus of refugees from southern Afghanistan.[34]

 

In May, Holbrooke and the American military establishment had pressured the Pakistani government to undertake the offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley, which led to the displacement of more than 2 million people. As the New Yorker put it, Holbrooke “was mapping out a new vision for American interests in a volatile region, as his old friend Henry Kissinger had done in Southeast Asia. And he was positioning himself to be a mediator in an international conflict, as he had done in the Balkans.”[35]

 

In September of 2009 a classified report written by General McChrystal was leaked, in which he had concluded, “that a successful counterinsurgency strategy will require 500,000 troops over five years.”[36] It was further reported in September that, “the CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence ‘surge’ that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history,” rivaling its stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. The initiative began “under pressure from Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal,” and the extra personnel are being employed in a number of ways, including teaming up with Special Forces troops in “pursuing high-value targets.” Further:

 

The intelligence expansion goes beyond the CIA to involve every major spy service, officials said, including the National Security Agency, which intercepts calls and e-mails, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which tracks military threats.[37]

 

In October of 2009, it was reported by the Washington Post that although Obama announced a troop surge in Afghanistan of 21,000 additional troops, “in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized -- and the Pentagon is deploying -- at least 13,000 troops beyond that number.” It was reported that these additional forces were primarily made up of “support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police.” Thus, it brings the total 2009 surge in Afghanistan to 34,000 US troops. Thus as of October 2009, there were 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan (more than double the amount of when Bush left office), and 124,000 US troops in Iraq.[38]

 

In early October, Henry Kissinger wrote an article for Newsweek in which he proposed a strategy for the US in Afghanistan, in which he initially made it clear that he supported General McChrystal’s proposal of sending an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. Kissinger proclaimed that calls for an “exit strategy” were a “metaphor for withdrawal,” which is tantamount to “abandonment.” Clearly, Kissinger favours a long-term presence. He stated that even a victory “may not permit troop withdrawals,” citing the case of South Korea. Kissinger further wrote on the options for Afghan strategy, stating:

 

A negotiation with the [Taliban] might isolate Al Qaeda and lead to its defeat, in return for not challenging the Taliban in the governance of Afghanistan. After all, it was the Taliban which provided bases for Al Qaeda in the first place.

 

This theory seems to me to be too clever by half. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are unlikely to be able to be separated so neatly geographically. It would also imply the partition of Afghanistan along functional lines, for it is highly improbable that the civic actions on which our policies are based could be carried out in areas controlled by the Taliban. Even so-called realists—like me—would gag at a tacit U.S. cooperation with the Taliban in the governance of Afghanistan.[39]

 

Kissinger further claimed that a reduction of forces in Afghanistan would “fundamentally affect domestic stability in Pakistan by freeing the Qaeda forces along the Afghan border for even deeper incursions into Pakistan, threatening domestic chaos,” and that, “the prospects of world order will be greatly affected by whether our strategy comes to be perceived as a retreat from the region, or a more effective way to sustain it.”[40]

 

He further explained that any attempts to “endow the central government with overriding authority” could produce resistance, which would “be ironic if, by following the received counterinsurgency playbook too literally, we produced another motive for civil war.” Kissinger thus proposed a strategy not aimed at “control from Kabul,” but rather, “emphasis needs to be given to regional efforts and regional militia.” Kissinger explained the regional importance of Afghanistan, and thus, the “challenge” of American strategy:

 

The special aspect of Afghanistan is that it has powerful neighbors or near neighbors—Pakistan, India, China, Russia, Iran. Each is threatened in one way or another and, in many respects, more than we are by the emergence of a base for international terrorism: Pakistan by Al Qaeda; India by general jihadism and specific terror groups; China by fundamentalist Shiite jihadists in Xinjiang; Russia by unrest in the Muslim south; even Iran by the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban. Each has substantial capacities for defending its interests. Each has chosen, so far, to stand more or less aloof.[41]

 

In November of 2009, Malalai Joya, a former Afghan MP and one of the few female political leaders in Afghanistan, said that:

 

Eight years ago, the U.S. and NATO—under the banner of women's rights, human rights, and democracy—occupied my country and pushed us from the frying pan into the fire . . . Eight years is enough to know better about the corrupt, mafia system of [President] Hamid Karzai . . . My people are crushed between two powerful enemies . . . From the sky, occupation forces bomb and kill civilians…and on the ground, the Taliban and warlords continue their crimes . . . It is better that they leave my country; my people are that fed up . . . Occupation will never bring liberation, and it is impossible to bring democracy by war.[42]

 

In late November, Pakistani Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani warned “that the US's decision to send thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan may destabilize his country,” as it would likely lead to “a spill over of militants inside Pakistan.” In particular, it could force militants and Taliban to migrate into Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan.[43]

 

On December 1, President Obama announced that the U.S. would send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan by summer 2010, and with a “plan” to purportedly withdraw by July 2011. As the Washington Post reported, “adding 30,000 U.S. troops to the roughly 70,000 that are in Afghanistan now amounts to most of what Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces there, requested at the end of August.” Obama stated that the chief objective was to “destroy al-Qaeda,” and a senior administration official said that, “the goal for the Afghan army, for example, is to increase its ranks from 90,000 to 134,000 by the end of 2010.”[44]

 

President Karzai said in early December that, “Afghanistan's security forces will need U.S. support for another 15 to 20 years,” and that, “it would take five years for his forces to assume responsibility for security throughout the country.”[45] This statement supports the conclusions set out in McChrystal’s classified report, which stated that the US would need to remain for at least 5 years.

 

Seth Jones, a civilian adviser to the U.S. military and senior political scientist at RAND Corporation, one of America’s top defense think tanks, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in December titled, “Take the War to Pakistan.” He stated that the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s by not attacking the Taliban “sanctuary” in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. He stated that, “This sanctuary is critical because the Afghan war is organized and run out of Baluchistan.” He then proclaimed that, “the United States and Pakistan must target Taliban leaders in Baluchistan,” which could include conducting raids into Pakistani territory or hit Taliban leaders with drone strikes.[46]

 

As Jeremy Scahill reported in June 2009, “more than 240,000 contractor employees, about 80 percent of them foreign nationals, are working in Iraq and Afghanistan to support operations and projects of the U.S. military, the Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.” Scahill reported on the findings of a Defense Department report on contracting work in the war zones, stating that, “there has been a 23% increase in the number of ‘Private Security Contractors’ working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which ‘correlates to the build up of forces’ in the country.” While contractors outnumbered forces in Afghanistan, in Iraq they were roughly equal to the US forces occupying the country, at 130,000.[47]

 

It was reported that as Obama ordered more troops to Afghanistan in December of 2009, a new surge of contractors would follow suit. As of June 2009, the number of contractors in Afghanistan outweighed the US military presence itself, with 73,968 contractors and 55,107 troops. According to different estimates, “Between 7% and 16% of the total are Blackwater-style private security contractors.” As of December 2009, the number of contractors in Afghanistan was reported to be 104,100.[48]

 

In January of 2010, as Obama’s announced 30,000 extra troops began to be deployed to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials became increasingly fearful that “a stepped-up war just over the border could worsen the increasingly bloody struggle with militancy” within Pakistan itself, ultimately further destabilizing Pakistan’s southwestern border and the “already volatile tribal areas in the northwest.” On top of sending militants into Pakistan, there were fears that it would exacerbate the flow of Afghan refugees into Pakistani territory.[49]

 

Blackwater and the “Secret War” in Pakistan

 

In November of 2009, investigative journalist and best-selling author Jeremy Scahill wrote an exclusive report on the secret war of the United States in Pakistan. The story sheds light on the American strategy in the region aimed at the destabilization and ultimately the implosion of Pakistan. The chief architects and administrators of this policy in Pakistan are none other than the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), previously run as an “executive assassination ring” by General McChrystal, and the infamous mercenary organization, Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. JSOC and Blackwater work together covertly in undertaking a covert war in yet another nation in the region, adding to the list of Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Scahill described the covert operations as “targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives,” as well as “other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Further, “the Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.” The sources for the report are drawn heavily from individuals within the US military intelligence apparatus. One source revealed that the program is so “compartmentalized” that “senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.” This program is also separate from the CIA’s own programs, including both drone attacks and assassinations, of which the CIA assassination program was said to be cancelled in June of 2009.

 

It was in 2006 that JSOC reached an agreement with the Pakistani government to run operations within the country, back when Stanley McChrystal was running it in close cooperation with Vice President Dick Cheney as an “executive assassination ring.” A former Blackwater executive confirmed that Blackwater was operating in Pakistan in cooperation with both the CIA and JSOC, as well as being on a subcontract for the Pakistani government itself, as well as “working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan.”

 

JSOC’s covert program in liaison with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to 2007, and the operations are coordinated out of the US Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and that Blackwater operates at “an ultra-exclusive level above top secret.” The contracts are all kept secret, and therefore “shielded from public oversight.” On top of carrying out operations for JSOC and the CIA inside Pakistan, Blackwater further conducts operations in Uzbekistan.

 

In regards to the drone strikes within Pakistan, while largely reported as being a part of the CIA drone program, many are, in fact, undertaken under a covert parallel JSOC program. One intelligence source told Jeremy Scahill that, “when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes.” Further, Blackwater is involved in the drone strike program with JSOC, “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality.” Blackwater further provides security for many secret US drone bases, as well as JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) camps within Pakistan.

 

With General McChrystal’s rise from JSOC Commander to Commander of the Afghan war theatre (which in military-strategic terms now includes Pakistan under the umbrella of “AfPak”), “there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure.” McChrystal had overseen JSOC during the majority of the Bush years, where he worked very closely and directly with Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As Seymour Hersh had exposed, JSOC operated as an “executive assassination ring” and had caused many problematic diplomatic situations for the United States, as even the State Department wasn’t informed about their operations. One high-level State Department official was quoted as saying:

 

The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home.[50]

 

Blackwater is also involved in providing “security for a US-backed aid project” in a region of Pakistan, which implies that even some aid projects are connected with military and intelligence operations, often using them as a cover for covert operations. Blackwater still operates in Afghanistan working for the US military, the State Department and the CIA. As one military-intelligence official stated:

 

Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous.[51]

 

Mmuch of Scahill’s information has been supported by other mainstream news sources. In August of 2009, the New York Times reported that in 2004, the CIA “hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda.” The CIA had held high-level meetings with Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince. The article also revealed that in 2002, Blackwater had been awarded the contract to handle security for the CIA station in Afghanistan, “and the company maintains other classified contracts with the C.I.A.” Blackwater has hired several former CIA officials, “including Cofer Black, who ran the C.I.A. counterterrorism center immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.”[52]

 

CONTINUES

[bigron]

CONTINUATION OF :

Punishing Pakistan and Challenging China


Pakistan in Pieces, Part 2


By Andrew Gavin Marshall

+++++++


On December 10, 2009, the New York Times reported that in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Blackwater “participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents.” These raids, referred to as “snatch and grab” operations, occurred almost nightly between 2004 and 2006, and that, “involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred.” One former CIA official was quoted as saying, “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.” Further, Blackwater was reported to have provided security not only for the CIA station in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq; and in both countries, Blackwater “personnel accompanied the [CIA] officers even on offensive operations sometimes begun in conjunction with Delta Force or Navy Seals teams.”[53]

 

In late August it was reported that Blackwater had a CIA contract to operate the remotely piloted drones, carried out at “hidden bases” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as provide security at the bases.[54] In December, the New York Times ran a story reporting that the CIA had terminated its contract with Blackwater “that allowed the company to load bombs on C.I.A. drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” However, while the CIA claimed that all Blackwater contracts were under review, a CIA spokesperson said that, “At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any C.I.A. operations other than in a security or support role,”[55] which is still a very wide role, considering how the roles have been blurred between providing “security” and actively taking part in missions.

 

As the Guardian reported in December of 2009, Blackwater had a contract in Pakistan “to manage the construction of a training facility for the paramilitary Frontier Corps, just outside Peshawar,” which is the Pakistani Army’s paramilitary force.[56] Despite a continual official denial of Blackwater involvement in Pakistan, in December, the CIA admitted Blackwater operates in Pakistan under CIA contracts,[57] and in January of 2010, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that both Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) and DynCorp have been operating in Pakistan.[58]

 

However, some reports indicate that Blackwater may be involved in even more nefarious activities inside Pakistan. A former head of Pakistani’s intelligence services, the ISI, stated in an interview that apart from simply taking part in drone attacks, Blackwater “may be involved in actions that destabilize the country.” Elaborating, he said, “My assessment is that they [Blackwater agents] — either themselves or most probably through others, through the locals — do carry out some of the explosions,” and that, “the idea is to carry out such actions, like carrying attacks in the civilian areas to make the others look bad in the eyes of the public.” In other words, according to the former head of the ISI, Blackwater may be involved in committing false flag terrorist attacks inside Pakistan.[59]

 

In November of 2009, Al-Jazeera reported that while many attacks occurring across Pakistan are blamed on the Tehreek e-Taliban, Pakistan’s Taliban, “the group has issued its first video statement denying involvement in targeting civilians and has blamed external forces for at least two recent blasts.” The denial stated that the attacks are being used as an excuse to prepare for military operations in various tribal regions of Pakistan, including South Waziristan. The denial also stated that the Pakistani Taliban “had no role in the bomb blast in a Peshawar market that killed at least 100 people as well as an attack in Charsada, a town located in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.” The spokesperson claimed that the Pakistani Taliban does not target civilians, and that the bombings were “linked to Blackwater activities in the country.” Even when the bombings initially occurred the Taliban denied involvement, and the local media was blaming “Blackwater and other American agencies.”[60]

 

The head of the Pakistani Taliban had previously stated that, “if Taliban can carry out attacks in Islamabad and target Pakistan army's headquarters, then why should they target general public,” and proceeded to blame the bomb blast in Peshawar that killed 108 people on “Blackwater and Pakistani agencies [that] are involved in attacks in public places to blame the militants.” He was further quoted as saying, “Our war is against the government and the security forces and not against the people. We are not involved in blasts.”[61]

 

In January of 2010, it was reported that Blackwater “is in the running for a Pentagon contract potentially worth $1 billion to train Afghanistan's troubled national police force,” as Blackwater already “trains the Afghan border police — an arm of the national police — and drug interdiction units in volatile southern Afghanistan.”[62]

 

As Jeremy Scahill reported in August of 2009 on a legal case against Blackwater, where a former Blackwater mercenary and an ex-US Marine “have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.” Among the claims:

 

The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."[63]

 

Further, both men stated that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq, often on Erik Prince’s private planes. These allegations surfaced in a trial against Blackwater for committing human rights violations and war crimes in Iraq against civilians. One of those who testified further stated that, “On several occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince's employ, Mr. Prince's management has personally threatened me with death and violence.” The testimony continued in explaining that:

 

Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

 

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."[64]

 

In January of 2010, Erik Prince, the controversial founder and CEO of Blackwater gave an interview with Vanity Fair magazine which was intended to not simply discuss the company, but also the man behind the company. It begins by quoting Prince as saying, “I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” and continued, “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” It is worth quoting the article at some length:

 

Publicly, [Erik Prince] has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.[65]

 

Prince’s Afghan security team is the “special-projects” team of Blackwater, and “except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers.” In regards to Prince’s worth with the CIA, he:

 

wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset. Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the C.I.A.’s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest.[66]

 

In Afghanistan, Blackwater “provides security for the US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and his staff, and trains narcotics and Afghan special police units.” There was also a revolving door of sorts between Blackwater and the CIA. Not only was Prince a CIA asset, but many higher-ups in the CIA would also move into Blackwater. A Blackwater-CIA team even hunted down an alleged Al-Qaeda financier in Hamburg, Germany, without even the German government’s awareness of it. Publicly, the Blackwater program with the CIA was canned. Although there was no mention of its covert program with JSOC in Pakistan, so one must assume its relationship is maintained in some capacity. Prince ultimately left his position at Blackwater in the face of bad press, but still controls the majority of the stock.[67]

 

In September of 2009, General Mirza Aslam Beg, Pakistan’s former Army Chief, said that, “Blackwater was directly involved in the assassinations of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.” He told a Saudi Arabian daily that, “former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had given Blackwater the green light to carry out terrorist operations in the cities of Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and Quetta.” It was in an interview with a Pakistani TV network when he stated that Blackwater and “the United States killed Benazir Bhutto.” Beg was chief of Army staff during Benazir Bhutto’s first administration. He claimed that she was killed “in an international conspiracy because she had decided to back out of the deal through which she had returned to the country after nine years in exile.”[68]

 

Is the West Punishing Pakistan to Challenge China?
 

China and Pakistan established diplomatic ties in 1951, and have enjoyed a close relationship since then, with Pakistan being one of the first countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1950. One of the primary reasons behind the close and ever-closer relationship between China and Pakistan is the role of India, as both an adversary and competitor to Pakistan and China. A Pakistani ambassador to the United States said that for Pakistan, “China is a high-value guarantor of security against India.” Further, within India, increased Chinese military support to Pakistan is perceived as “a key aspect of Beijing's perceived policy of 'encirclement' or constraint of India as a means of preventing or delaying New Delhi's ability to challenge Beijing's region-wide influence.” These ties have increased since the 1990s, and especially as the United States became increasingly close to India. As a Council on Foreign Relations background report on China-Pakistan relations explained:

 

The two countries have cooperated on a variety of large-scale infrastructure projects in Pakistan, including highways, gold and copper mines, major electricity complexes and power plants, and numerous nuclear power projects. With roughly ten thousand Chinese workers engaged in 120 projects in Pakistan, total Chinese investment--which includes heavy engineering, power generation, mining, and telecommunications--was valued at $4 billion in 2007 and is expected to rise to $15 billion by 2010.[69]

 

As the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. further explained, “Pakistan thinks that both China and the United States are crucial for it,” however, he went on, “If push comes to shove, it would probably choose China--but for this moment, it doesn't look like there has to be a choice.” The recent U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement has further entrenched a distrust of America within Pakistan and pushed the country closer to China. In 2010, China announced it would be building two nuclear power reactors in Pakistan.[70]

 

In 2007, China and Pakistan inaugurated Gwadar Port in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province along the Arabian Sea, creating the first major point in an “energy corridor” which would eventually bring oil from the Gulf overland through Pakistan into China. China financed the building of the port city for $200 million, with plans to fund billions more worth of railroads, roads, and pipelines which would link Gwadar Port to China. Pakistan is strategically placed in the centre of the new ‘Great Game’, a nomenclature for the great imperial battles over Central Asia in the 19th century. Pakistan is neighbour to Iran, India, China, and Afghanistan, with a coastline on the Arabian Sea. Thus, Pakistan is situated between the oil-rich Middle East and the natural gas-rich Central Asian countries, with two of the fastest growing economies in the world – India and China – as energy-hungry neighbours; with the imperial presence of America in neighbouring Afghanistan, with its eye focused intensely on neighbouring Iran. A ‘Great Game’ ensues, drawing in Russia, China, India and America, and the main focus of the game is pipelines.[71]

 

China has a major pipeline project in the works to bring in natural gas from Central Asia, transporting the gas from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and into China, which is set to be completed by 2013.[72] Iran, OPEC’s second largest oil exporter (after Saudi Arabia), is among the top ten oil exporters to China, and in 2010 it was reported that the Chinese have invested roughly $40 billion in Iran’s oil and gas sectors, including financing for the construction of seven new oil refineries, as well as various oil and gas pipeline projects.[73] In June of 2011, it was reported that China’s oil imports from Iran have increased by 32%, signaling a growing importance in the relationship between the two countries. The largest three oil exporters to China are Saudi Arabia, Angola, and Iran, respectively.[74]

 

The Gwadar Port city built by Chinese investments is destined to be a central hub in the pipeline politics of the ‘Great Game,’ in particular between the competing pipeline projects of the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP or TAPI), involving a pipeline bringing natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into India; and the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI). The major issue here is that the TAPI pipeline cannot be built so long as Afghanistan is plunged into war, thus the project has been incessantly stalled. On the other hand, India has been wavering and moving out of the picture in the IPI pipeline, in no small measure due to its increasingly close relations with the United States, which has sought to dissuade Pakistan from building a pipeline with Iran. However, in 2010, Pakistan and Iran signed the agreement, and are willing to either allow India or China to be the beneficiary of the pipeline. Whether going to India or China, Gwadar Port will be a central hub in this project.[75] Pakistan has now been seeking direct help from China on the Iran-Pakistan pipeline project.[76] The U.S., for its part, warned Pakistan against signing onto a pipeline project with Iran, yet Pakistan proceeded with the project regardless.[77]

 

The southern Pakistani province of Balochistan is home to oil, gas, copper, gold, and coal reserves, not to mention, it is the strategic corridor through which the pipeline projects would run, and is home to the strategically significant port city of Gwadar. For the past fifty years, however, Balochistan has been a major hub of Chinese investment and opportunity, with Chinese companies having poured $15 billion into projects in the province, including the construction of an oil refinery, copper and zinc mines, and of course, Gwadar Port.[78] India is increasingly concerned about China’s presence in the Gulf and Indian Ocean. China is building ports not only in Pakistan, but in Bangladesh and Burma, as well as railroad lines in Nepal.[79]

 

Following the supposed assassination of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. in Pakistani territory, tensions between Pakistan and America increased, and ties between China and Pakistan deepened. The Chinese were subsequently approached by the Pakistanis to take control of the port of Gwadar, and perhaps to even build a Pakistani naval base there, though the Chinese have denied Pakistani claims that any such deal had been reached. China, further, in response to the apparent U.S. assassination of Bin Laden, said that the ‘international community’ (referring to the United States) “must respect” Pakistani sovereignty. Indian news quoted diplomatic sources as saying that China “warned in unequivocal terms that any attack on Pakistan would be construed as an attack on China.”[80]

 

Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani visited China on a state visit shortly after the American raid into Pakistan. Following the meetings, China agreed to immediately provide 50 fighter jets to Pakistan, a clear signal that Pakistan is looking for alternatives to its American dependence, and China is all too happy to provide such an alternative.[81] As the Financial Times reported, “Pakistan has asked China to build a naval base at its south-western port of Gwadar and expects the Chinese navy to maintain a regular presence there.”[82] China has also signaled that it would be interested in setting up foreign military bases, just as the United States has, and specifically is interested in such a base inside Pakistan. The aim “would be to exert pressure on India as well as counter US influence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”[83]

 

Conclusion

 

It would seem, then, that the true cause of chaos, destabilization, and war in Pakistan is not the Orientalist perspective of Pakistanis being the ‘Other’: barbaric, backwards, violent and self-destructive, in need to ‘intervention’ to right their own wrongs. Following along the same lines as the dismantling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the destabilization of Pakistan is aimed at wider strategic objectives for the Western imperial powers: namely, the isolation of China. While Pakistan has long been a staunch U.S. puppet regime, in the wider geopolitical context of a global rivalry between the United States and China for control of the world’s resources and strategic positions, Pakistan may be sacrificed upon the altar of empire. The potential result of this strategy, in a country exceeding 180 million people, armed with nuclear weapons, and in the centre of one of the most tumultuous regions in the world, may be cataclysmic, perhaps even resulting in a war between the ‘great powers.’ The only way to help prevent such a potential scenario would be to analyze the strategy further, and expose it to a much wider audience, thus initiating a wider public discussion on the issue. As long as the public discourse on Pakistan is framed as an issue of “terrorism” and the “War on Terror” alone, this strategic nightmare will continue forward.

 

As the saying goes, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

 

But so too then, can war be the casualty of Truth.

 

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  He is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," available to order at Globalresearch.ca. He is currently working on a forthcoming book on 'Global Government'.




Notes

 

[1]        Russell Berman, Despite Criticism, Obama Stands By Adviser Brzezinski. The New York Sun: September 13, 2007:
http://www.nysun.com/national/despite-criticism-obama-stands-by-adviser/62534/

[2]        Eli Lake, Obama Adviser Leads Delegation to Damascus. The New York Sun: February 12, 2008:
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/obama-adviser-leads-delegation-to-damascus/71123/

[3]        Jonathan Tepperman, How Obama’s Star Could Fall. Newsweek: October 13, 2008:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/162316

[4]        Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, McCain and Obama advisers briefed on deteriorating Afghan war. The New York Times: October 31, 2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world/americas/31iht-31policy.17405861.html

[5]        George Packer, The Last Mission. The New Yorker: September 28, 1009:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_packer

[6]        Ibid.

[7]        Ibid.

[8]        Michael Abramowitz, Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut, Obama Close to Choosing Clinton, Jones for Key Posts. The Washington Post: November 22, 2008:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/21/AR2008112103981.html

[9]        Ibid.

[10]      About Us, Our Mission. Chamber of Commerce: Institute for 21st Century Energy:
http://www.energyxxi.org/pages/about_us.aspx

[11]      JOHN D. MCKINNON and T.W. FARNAM, Hedge Fund Paid Summers $5.2 Million in Past Year. The Wall Street Journal: April 5, 2009:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879462053487927.html

[12]      James L. Jones, Remarks by National Security Adviser Jones at 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy. The Council on Foreign Relations: February 8, 2009:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/18515/remarks_by_national_security_adviser_jones_at_45th_munich_conference_on_security_policy.html

[13]      Ibid.

[14]      Julian E. Barnes, Obama team works on overhaul of Afghanistan, Pakistan policy. Los Angeles Times: February 11, 2009:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/world/fg-us-afghan11

[15]      Henry A. Kissinger, A Strategy for Afghanistan. The Washington Post: February 26, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/25/AR2009022503124.html

[16]      George Packer, The Last Mission. The New Yorker: September 28, 1009:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_packer

[17]      Ibid.

[18]      Eric Schmitt, Obama Taps a General as the Envoy to Kabul. The New York Times: January 29, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/washington/30diplo.html

[19]      Ibid.

[20]      Agencies, US fires top general in Afghanistan as war worsens. China Daily: May 12, 2009:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-05/12/content_7766306.htm

[21]      Ann Scott Tyson, Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Fired. The Washington Post: May 12, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051101864.html

[22]      Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Pentagon Worries Led to Command Change. The Washington Post: August 17, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/16/AR2009081602304_pf.html

[23]      Ann Scott Tyson, Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Fired. The Washington Post: May 12, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051101864.html

[24]      Agencies, US fires top general in Afghanistan as war worsens. China Daily: May 12, 2009:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-05/12/content_7766306.htm

[25]      Muriel Kane, Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney. The Raw Story: March 11, 2009:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Hersh_US_has_been_running_executive_0311.html

[26]      Transcript, Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America. Democracy Now!: March 31, 2009:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31/seymour_hersh_secret_us_forces_carried

[27]      MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT, U.S. Halted Some Raids in Afghanistan. The New York Times: March 9, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/world/asia/10terror.html

[28]      Ann Scott Tyson, Manhunter To Take On a Wider Mission. The Washington Post: May 13, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051203679_pf.html

[29]      THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Is Given More Leeway. The New York Times: June 10, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/world/asia/11command.html

[30]      Michael Hirsh and John Barry, The Hidden General. Newsweek: June 26, 2006:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/52445

[31]      KIMBERLY DOZIER and ADAM GOLDMAN, Counterterrorist Pursuit Team: 3,000 Man CIA Paramilitary Force Hunts Militants In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Huffington Post, 22 September 2010:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/22/counterterrorist-pursuit-_n_734961.html

[32]      Andrew Gray, US Afghan surge could push militants into Pakistan. Reuters: May 21, 2009:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N21412211.htm

[33]      Isambard Wilkinson, Top US official warns that war in Afghanistan strengthens Taliban in Pakistan. The Telegraph: May 22, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/5369740/Top-US-official-warns-that-war-in-Afghanistan-strengthens-Taliban-in-Pakistan.html

[34]      AP, Afghanistan surge tied to Pakistan stability. MSNBC: May 21, 2009:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30871807/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

[35]      George Packer, The Last Mission. The New Yorker: September 28, 2009:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_packer

[36]      Tom Andrews, Classified McChrystal Report: 500,000 Troops Will Be Required Over Five Years in Afghanistan. Huffington Post: September 24, 2009:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

[37]      Greg Miller, CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan. The Los Angeles Times: September 20, 2009:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-intel20-2009sep20,0,1183243.story?page=1

[38]      Ann Scott Tyson, Support Troops Swelling U.S. Force in Afghanistan. The Washington Post: October 13, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/12/AR2009101203142.html?hpid=topnews

[39]      Henry A. Kissinger, Deployments and Diplomacy. Newsweek: October 12, 2009:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216704

[40]      Ibid.

[41]      Ibid.

[42]      Travis Lupick, Suspended Afghan MP Malalai Joya wants NATO's mission to end. The Georgia Straight: November 12, 2009:
http://www.straight.com/article-270310/vancouver/afghan-activist-wants-natos-mission-end

[43]      US surge in Afghanistan 'may destablize Pakistan'. Press TV: November 30, 2009:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=112484&sectionid=351020401

[44]      Scott Wilson, Obama: U.S. security is still at stake. The Washington Post: December 2, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/01/AR2009120101231.html

[45]      Julian E. Barnes and Tony Perry, Afghanistan will need U.S. help for 15 to 20 years, Karzai says. The Los Angeles Times: December 9, 2009:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-afghan-mcchrystal9-2009dec09,0,224382.story

[46]      Seth G. Jones, Take the War to Pakistan. The New York Times: December 3, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/opinion/04jones.html

[47]      Jeremy Scahill, U.S. War Privatization Results in Billions Lost in Fraud, Waste and Abuse—Report. Rebel Reports: June 10, 2009:
http://rebelreports.com/post/121172812/u-s-war-privatization-results-in-billions-lost-in

[48]      Justin Elliott, As Obama Sends More Troops, Giant Shadow Army Of Contractors Set To Grow In Afghanistan. TPMMuckraker: December 1, 2009:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/as_obama_sends_more_troops_giant_shadow_army_of_co.php?ref=fpb

[49]      Karin Brulliard, Pakistan worried U.S. buildup in Afghanistan will send militants across border. The Washington Post: January 5, 2010:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010403335.html

[50]      Jeremy Scahill, The Secret US War in Pakistan. The Nation: November 23, 2009:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/scahill

[51]      Ibid.


[52]      Mark Mazzetti, C.I.A. Sought Blackwater’s Help to Kill Jihadists. The New York Times: August 19, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/us/20intel.html

[53]      James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids. The New York Times: December 10, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/politics/11blackwater.html

[54]      James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones. The New York Times: August 20, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21intel.html

[55]      Mark Mazzetti, Blackwater Loses a Job for the C.I.A. The New York Times: December 11, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/politics/12blackwater.html

[56]      Declan Walsh and Ewen MacAskill, Blackwater operating at CIA Pakistan base, ex-official says. The Guardian: December 11, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/11/blackwater-in-cia-pakistan-base

[57]      CIA admits Blackwater presence in Pakistan. Press TV: December 12, 2009:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=113512&sectionid=351020401

[58]      Gates confirms Blackwater presence in Pakistan. Press TV: January 22, 2010:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116754&sectionid=351020401

[59]      Blackwater behind Pakistan bombings: Ex-intel chief. Press TV: December 12, 2009:
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=113540&sectionid=351020401

[60]      Pakistan Taliban airs video denial. Al-Jazeera: November 16, 2009:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/11/20091116145058336650.html

[61]      Xihua, Taliban in Pakistan blame U.S. Blackwater for deadly blast. China View: October 29, 2009:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12358907.htm

[62]      Richard Lardner, Xe Services aiming for Afghan police training deal. The Guardian: January 9, 2010:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8891058

[63]      Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder. The Nation: August 4, 2009:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill

[64]      Ibid.

[65]      Adam Ciralsky, Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy. Vanity Fair: January 2010:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001

[66]      Ibid.

[67]      Ibid.

[68]      Blackwater involved in Bhutto and Hariri hits: former Pakistani army chief. Tehran Times: September 14, 2009:
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=203224

[69]      Jamal Afridi and Jayshree Bajoria, China-Pakistan Relations, Backgrounder: Council on Foreign Relations, 6 July 2010:
http://www.cfr.org/china/china-pakistan-relations/p10070

[70]      Jamal Afridi and Jayshree Bajoria, China-Pakistan Relations, Backgrounder: Council on Foreign Relations, 6 July 2010:
 http://www.cfr.org/china/china-pakistan-relations/p10070

[71]      David Montero, China, Pakistan team up on energy, Christian Science Monitor, 13 April 2007:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0413/p06s01-wosc.html

[72]      Li Woke, China to enhance natural gas imports via Central Asian pipeline, Global Times, 19 September 2010:
http://business.globaltimes.cn/industries/2010-09/574887.html

[73]      JPost Staff, China invests $40b. in Iran oil and gas, The Jerusalem Post, 31 July 2010:
http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=183200

[74]      China oil imports from Iran up 32 percent, Trend Energy News, 8 June 2011:
http://en.trend.az/capital/energy/1888392.html

[75]      Pepe Escobar, China wages "war" over Asian pipelines, Salon, 12 October 2010:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/10/12/china_oil_gas_pipeline

[76]      Pakistan Seeks China's Help for IP Gas Pipeline, Gulf Oil and Gas, 13 March 2011:
http://www.gulfoilandgas.com/webpro1/MAIN/Mainnews.asp?id=14611

[77]      AP, US opposes Pakistan-Iran pipeline deal, The Jerusalem Post, 21 June 2010:
http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?ID=179002

[78]      Maha Atal, China's Pakistan Corridor, Forbes, 10 May 2010:
http://www.forbes.com/global/2010/0510/companies-pakistan-oil-gas-balochistan-china-pak-corridor.html
[79]      VIKAS BAJAJ, India Worries as China Builds Ports in South Asia, The New York Times, 15 February 2010:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/business/global/16port.html


[80]      China asks US to respect Pak's sovereignty, independence, Economic Times, 20 May 2011:
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-05-20/news/29565072_1_pakistan-s-ambassador-pakistan-china-pakistan-media

[81]      JANE PERLEZ, China Gives Pakistan 50 Fighter Jets, The New York Times, 19 May 2011:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/asia/20pakistan.html?_r=3

[82]      Farhan Bokhari and Kathrin Hille, Pakistan turns to China for naval base, The Financial Times, 22 May 2011:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3914bd36-8467-11e0-afcb-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Ol8EY8QF

[83]      Saibal Dasgupta, China mulls setting up military base in Pakistan, The Times of India, 28 January 2010:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-28/china/28120878_1_karokoram-highway-military-bases-north-west-frontier-province
 
 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25440

[bigron]

Israel lobby prepares America for war with Pakistan


by Maidhc Ó Cathail


June 30, 2011

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79119&hd=&size=1&l=e

No doubt taking their cue from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has said that Pakistan poses the biggest strategic threat to Israel, three of the Israel lobby’s loudest mouthpieces used a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing — convened to advance Senate approval of President Barack Obama’s decision to promote Vice Adm. William McRaven to become commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command — to mentally prepare Americans for what will most likely be dubbed another "war of Muslim liberation."


CNN reports on the lobby’s latest efforts to induce the United States into a totally unnecessary war with Pakistan:

Washington (CNN) — U.S. senators didn’t miss a chance Tuesday to voice frustration with Pakistan over how it takes billions of dollars of American aid while providing safe havens to terrorists to build bombs and launch cross-border attacks on U.S.troops in Afghanistan.

"Well, something’s got to give, something’s got to change," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing. "Because it just can’t continue this way, for them to expect that we’re going to have a normal relationship with them — which we all hope for."

And Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, also was critical of Pakistan; specifically, whether the top Taliban leader and al Qaeda ally Mullah Omar was hiding there.

"Is Mullah Omar in Pakistan?" Graham asked Vice Adm.William McRaven, who supervised the raid on the Osama bin Laden compound In Pakistan that ended with the death of al Qaeda leader.

"Sir, we believe he is," McRaven replied.

The hearing was the next step toward Senate approval of President Barack Obama’s decision to promote McRaven to become commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command.

Graham nudged McRaven along. "Do we believe he is there is with the knowledge of the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate) and the upper echelon of the (Pakistani) army?" asked Graham.

"Sir, I believe the Pakistanis know he is in Pakistan," McRaven said.

"Let me ask you this — If they tried for about a week do you think they could then find him?" said Graham.

"I can’t answer that because i don’t know whether they could or not because i don’t know exactly where Mullah Omar is," answered McRaven, who said he believed the United States. has asked Pakistan to find the Taliban leader.

"Well, I’m asking," said Graham. "I think Sen. Levin and I will both ask together today."

And the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen.John McCain, R-Arizona, praised McRaven and his un-named fellow special operators for their success against bin Laden. "The leader of al Qaida is dead, but a new one has taken his place," McCain said. "Your mission will be to help ensure he meets the same end."

McCain used the hearing to voice again his strong criticism of President Obama’s troop drawdown timetable for Afghanistan.

"I’m very concerned that the president’s decision poses an unnecessary risk to the progress we’ve made thus far, to our mission, and to our men and women in uniform," McCain warned

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Allen — poised to take over from Army Gen. David Petraeus as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — promised McCain and the other senators he would closely monitor the withdrawal plan and give candid advice where he saw fit.

"If confirmed, I will offer my candid assessment to the chain of command on the current state of the conflict, as well as provide options with respect to the president’s goals in accomplishing this strategy," Allen said.

Last week Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said the president had chosen a more aggressive withdrawal timetable than they had expected.

McCain grilled Allen on support for the White House plan.

"Gen. Allen, do you know of any military leader that recommended in 2009 that the president make an announcement in 2011 of drawdown of troops?" McCain asked.

"I do not, senator," Allen replied.

"Do you know of any military leader that recommended the drawdown plan that the president announced last week?" McCain asked.

"I do not, senator," Allen answered.

And the general said planning already was underway on how to implement the president’s plan to withdraw 10,000 troops this year, starting next month, and an additional 23,000 by next summer.

The hearing shed new light on U.S. concerns that al Qaeda and the Taliban are assembling explosives in Pakistan and then planting them in Afghanistan to kill Americans.

McRaven said he was certain IEDs — improvised explosive devices such as roadside bombs — used against Americans and coalition troops are coming out of Pakistan and that information about where the bombs are being assembled has been provided to Pakistani authorities.

"Have they (the Pakistanis) responded effectively?" asked Graham.

"They have not, sir," McRaven replied.

Instead of going to war with a nation of more than 180 million Muslims, over its supposed sheltering of a man who has most likely been dead for 10 years, wouldn’t America be a lot safer if it indicted Senators Levin, Graham and McCain for their treasonous warmongering on behalf of Israel?

WATCH FOLLOWING VIDEOS

Carl Levin on Syria and Iran  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OiDFlpr075A

Senator Lindsey Graham At AIPAC 2010 pt.1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VlVCH1j7Enc

McCain at AIPAC: Drumbeats of War? (1 of 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc0j7JL4gDA&feature=player_embedded

 

[bigron]

Posted on Thu, Jun. 30, 2011

U.S.-led coalition: Pakistan group behind Kabul hotel attack



Hashim Shukoor | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: June 30, 2011 05:18:04 PM

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/30/116814/us-led-coalition-pakistan-group.html

KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S.-led military coalition Thursday blamed a notorious Pakistan-based terrorist group for this week's spectacular assault on a hilltop Kabul hotel and said it had killed one of the group's senior commanders, who was suspected of involvement in the attack.

The International Security Assistance Force didn't say how it had determined that the Haqqani network was responsible for the siege Tuesday night at the Kabul Intercontinental hotel, which left 10 civilians, two policemen and all nine assailants dead.

But it said a senior Haqqani commander, Ismail Khan, was suspected of providing material support for the assault, and that he and several other Haqqani fighters had been killed Wednesday in a "precision airstrike," only hours after Afghan police had retaken control of the hotel.

"The Haqqani network, in conjunction with Taliban operatives, was responsible for the Tuesday night attack on the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel which killed 12 people, including a provincial judge," the ISAF statement said..

Meanwhile, Afghan officials announced Thursday that they'd assume security responsibilities in seven provinces and cities, including Kabul, beginning July 14.

The quick schedule for the transition — previous announcements had suggested it wouldn't begin till later in July — seemed designed to put to rest any suggestion that Tuesday's assault would delay the hand-over.


Dr. Ashraf Ghani, the chairman of the commission that's overseeing the security handover, said the July 14 transition would be largely ceremonial because Afghan forces had been gradually taking control in the seven areas since President Hamid Karzai announced the transition plan in March.

Karzai and President Barack Obama have much at stake in the change in security responsibility. Karzai has argued for months that Afghan forces are strong enough to combat Taliban insurgents, and Obama announced earlier this month an aggressive withdrawal plan that will see 33,000 American troops leave Afghanistan by the end of next year.

Both leaders have said they plan for the international military presence in Afghanistan to end in 2014, a deadline that would be in doubt if the Taliban were to mount a serious challenge to government control in areas where NATO forces are no longer present.

The seven areas are all considered relatively peaceful, though some have seen an uptick in violence since Karzai announced the transition. Three of the areas are cities, Mazar-i-Sharif in the country's north, Mehterlam, the capital of Laghman province in the east, and Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province in the south.

The other four areas are provinces with reputations for relatively little Taliban activity. They include Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, Panjshir, the birthplace of the legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, in the north, and Herat province.

Kabul, the fourth province, has seen three spectacular terrorist operations since April, including Tuesday's hotel assault, that involved breaching heavily secured facilities. One attack was on the Defense Ministry, and another in the country's main military hospital.

It wasn't clear from Ghani's announcement what the transition to be undertaken this month would involve. While he said it was largely ceremonial, he also said it would take about a week. The hand-overs in all seven locations will begin simultaneously, he added.


Ghani's announcement came at the end of a two-day meeting of Afghan security officials that had been set to take place at the Intercontinental. A Taliban spokesman who claimed credit for the assault said that a reception for conference attendees had been the intended target.

The government moved the meeting to a government media center and conducted the gathering as scheduled.

While Ghani said Afghan police were fully prepared to assume responsibility, noting that they had the necessary "equipment, training and numbers," the country's intelligence chief warned that provincial officials should expect violence.

In his remarks, Rahmatullah Nabeel seemed to be pointing a finger at Pakistan as a likely backer of efforts to disrupt the transition.

"Some neighboring countries do not want that Afghans themselves provide their own security and will always try to derail and disrupt this process," he said.

That comment dovetailed with the ISAF announcement of Haqqani network involvement in Tuesday's hotel attack.

The Haqqani network is based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region. U.S. officials have long called it the most resilient of Afghanistan's terrorist groups and say that it's allied with the Taliban and al Qaida. Afghan government officials frequently criticize Pakistan as not doing enough to stop Haqqani-allied fighters from crossing into Afghanistan.

The Haqqani network has been blamed for a wide range of attacks in Kabul, including the bombing of the Indian Embassy in 2008 and a 2009 attack on a well-known shopping mall.

Afghan-led security forces have captured or killed more than 80 Haqqani leaders and facilitators since January, primarily in the Paktika, Paktia and Khost areas.

Initial reports indicate that no civilians were harmed in the airstrike Wednesday, the ISAF statement said.

(Shukoor is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/30/116814/us-led-coalition-pakistan-group.html

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US troops pullback has let Taliban open new bases in Afghanistan: Pak Army


http://www.newkerala.com/news/2011/worldnews-19413.html


Islamabad, July 2 : The Pakistan Army has said that a US pullback of troops from northeast Afghanistan over 20 months has let Islamic guerrillas establish bases in the area and carry out unusually huge attacks inside Pakistan in recent weeks.
 
Military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said that several Pakistani Taliban groups moved fighters into Nuristan and Kunar, and used those Afghan provinces five times in the past month to send hundreds of militants to attack Pakistani border posts or police stations.

“In the past we never had this kind of experience, where 200 to 300 militants attacked us,” Bloomberg quoted Abbas, as saying in an interview at Pakistan’s army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

“It’s a big body in this mountainous terrain” and shows that the militants have established bases in northeastern Afghanistan that can house, feed and transport such groups, he pointed out.

The US government contends that Pakistan has failed to eliminate similar safe havens for guerrillas in its border districts, especially North Waziristan.

The complaints on both sides underscore the need and the difficulty for Pakistan and Afghanistan to maintain control all the way to the isolated, mountainous border between them, Abbas observed.

He said that hundreds of Taliban fighters crossed the border from Kunar on mountain ridges as high as 3,700 meters to attack police stations in Pakistan’s Dir Valley on April 22 and on June 1m and about 300 fighters crossed into Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal district last month and seized two border posts, killing 15 Pakistani security officers.

As the Pakistani army has undertaken offensives since 2007 to re-capture districts taken over by the Taliban, the surviving Taliban forces- including commanders Hakimullah Mehsud from South Waziristan, Faqir Muhammad from Bajaur and Abdul Wali from Mohmand- have moved to Kunar and Nuristan to regroup, he said.

“The best economy of effort is by conducting joint operations” to trap the guerrillas between US and Pakistani forces, Abbas added.

However, Afghanistan’s Defence Ministry spokesman General Zaher Azimi denied that any Pakistani Taliban maintain bases anywhere in Afghanistan, saying in a telephone interview that Pakistan is “trying to blame Afghanistan.”

“ISAF posts were vacated and that created a void,” Abbas said. “Unless we resolve this, it will not allow the whole effort of bringing stability in the region.”


--ANI


http://www.newkerala.com/news/2011/worldnews-19413.html

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Interview: General Hamid Gul, Former DG ISI

"The war on terror is meant to destablise Pakistan"


By Arif Rana





"The Pakistan military and its agencies are in a state where
they cannot recognise their real enemy"
- General Hamid Gul, former DG ISI

July 2, 2011
http://www.uruknet.info/pic.php?f=2hameedgul06-11.jpg

Q: Terrorists are increasingly turning more deadly and hitting targets at will. The PNS Mehran attack speaks of the gravity of the situation. There is an impression that Pakistani forces are incompetent or unwilling to take on the terrorists head-on. What do you think?

A: Pakistan’s armed forces and security agencies are in a deterioration and disorientation phase that can lead to disgruntlement and mistrust in the performance of vital state institutions. The Abbottabad and Mehran attacks are examples of just such a deterioration. Operation Osama and Mehran were meant to fix the Pakistan military and ISI, and set them up for criticism and ridicule — the devisers of this scheme succeeded in their intent. The US has been involved in every attack on Pakistan’s strategic assets, aimed at creating the feeling among Pakistanis that their armed forces and secret agencies are incompetent and cannot protect their country.

Pervez Musharraf is solely responsible for creating this mess in Pakistan by allowing the US to use its bases and other facilities and establish its network through Raymond Davis-like agents to destabilise Pakistan. Musharraf allowed the US to intrigue against Pakistan and push its agenda of de-Islamisation, denuclearisation and de-linking China from Pakistan. The Pakistan military and its agencies are in a state where they cannot recognise their real enemy. A US-India sponsored group is involved in the Mehran attacks and its sole purpose was to hit the Pakistan navy’s navigation surveillance system and deprive Pakistan of its ability to detect any Abbottabad-like operation in its waters. After having succeeded in their mission, I forsee a big 'game’ by anti-Pakistan forces. It may be a naval blockade or another Abbottabad-like operation in Karachi or some other part of Pakistan.

Q: Particularly since it came in the wake of another intelligence failure, i.e. the Osama mission, Mehran seemed to cap the huge embarrassment to our agencies and armed forces. Despite the huge and oft reiterated threat to Pakistan’s strategic assets from assorted terror groups, Pakistans’ security apparatus failed to secure a vitally important facility. How can anyone now feel secure about our nuclear installations?

A: I am convinced the war on terror is meant to destablise Pakistan, destroy it economically and then achieve the objective of giving India the role of regional superpower. Washington successfully managed to instal the rulers of its choice in Islamabad at a stage when Pakistan was at the crossroads. Asif Zardari and company are working for completing the US agenda at Pakistan’s cost. When Asif Zardari pronounces India is not Pakistan’s enemy, he actually furthers the US agenda of changing the Pakistani mindset, because Pakistanis have always believed India is their only enemy and they have never wanted their leaders to accept Indian hegemony.

Q: Some senior officials in Washington are accusing the ISI and the Pakistan military of complicity with 'the world’s most wanted man.’ They contend sections of the military provided Osama and his family shelter in Pakistan. The military maintains that Pakistani security agencies, including the ISI, were ignorant of OBL’s presence in Pakistan until the US forces’ operation. What do you believe?

A: The US has been working on an anti-ISI agenda for a long time. I can recall many times that Washington has employed dirty tactics to malign Pakistan’s spy agency. However, in the past, such tactics failed because they did not get the support of the Pakistani leadership. But today, danger looms more visibly than ever before because Pakistani rulers themselves are a party to conspiracies hatched against the country. Osama’s surfacing in Abbottabad and killing is a part of the same Pakistan-specific US mission. This entire episode is a mystery and perhaps no one will ever know the truth.

Q: The US and ISI installed the mujahideen in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviet Union in the ’80s, and after winning the war, the US abandoned Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is widely believed that the ISI’s policy of controlling Afghanistan through the Taliban brought terrorism and insurgency to Pakistan. What do you say?

A: Our western border has always been a shield for Pakistan and this fact was established by Pakistan’s early decision to demilitarise the Pak-Afghanistan border in 1948. By defeating the Soviets, the ISI protected Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and made our western border safer, but what we miscalculated is the US thinking on Pakistan. Today the US wants Pakistan to shift its military from the eastern border to the western border to provide India relief and allow it to acquire an even greater role in the region. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s rulers are preparing the Pakistani nation so that they accept India’s new role.

Q: You have been a staunch supporter of jihad to protect Pakistan’s interest globally, whereas the world community takes Pakistan’s jihadi culture as a threat. Incidents like 9/11 and the Mumbai attacks are being used to prove Pakistan is a rogue state. Do you still believe jihad can benefit the country?

A: My concept of jihad has always been taken in the wrong sense. By jihad I mean protecting the national interest through fighting if other means are exhausted. We need to advocate jihad in its real spirit. How can one be denied his right to fight for what is lawful? It is a right given to individuals and nations in the United Nations charter. As far as 9/11 is concerned, it was a home-made US plan to unleash a war on innocent Muslims to push America’s agenda across the globe. .

Q: Do you subscribe to the view that in the current situation there is a danger that Pakistan’s nuclear assets could fall into Al-Qaeda or Taliban hands and be used to catastrophic ends, or do you think a consensus is being built around the world on the issue, so that that our nukes can be taken out?

A: The US is after Pakistan’s nuclear assets. It is bent on creating a hell-like situation in Pakistan so that it can, in the final round, deprive the county of its nuclear assets. But let me tell you, the US is not going to achieve its ultimate goal. I am pretty convinced that the custodians of Pakistan’s nuclear assets are fully aware of the US conspiracy and will not let it succeed.

Q: In the in-camera briefing to parliament on OBL’s killing, ISI Chief Shuja Pasha stated that some Islamic countries were funding JUI and other religious parties to carry out their respective agendas. Is there any truth to this and did it happen when you were at the helm of the ISI?

A: Yes we had information that some religious parties were getting dollars from an Islamic country. But having said that, the ISI also had information and evidence that some politicians loudly demanding democracy in Pakistan were also being funded by foreign countries. I have many secrets about popular political leaders, which, if disclosed will stun the nation. But my oath not to disclose state secrets prevents me from doing so.

Q: Do you think Pakistan’s military and political leadership are on the same page vis-à-vis Pak-US, Pak-India and Pak-Afghan relations?

A: I do not think so, but I cannot say anything for sure. I have very little knowledge about what the military leadership is thinking. But one thing I can say for sure: Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador in the US, and many others in Islamabad are directly serving CIA interests.

Q: With the dubious agendas of both agencies – clearly not always in consonance with one another – can the ISI and CIA actually work together even for a limited common cause?

A: The ISI and CIA have no common purpose. The CIA is working against Pakistan and the ISI is trying in every possible way to counter this.

Q: It has been tacitly recognised by successive political governments and the public that the ISI operates as a completely independent body answerable to no one, and Pakistan’s foreign policy has long been held hostage by the agency in pursuit of its own agendas, which are often in conflict with the government’s. Do you concede this?

A: It is Pakistan’s great tragedy that the PPP has always aimed at bringing the ISI under its control. Whether it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto or now Zardari and his party – every one of them has wanted to use the ISI for its own purposes. The PPP actually has always seemed to believe that if the ISI is not directly responsible to it, it will weaken the government. So the current PPP leaders are once again trying to bring the ISI under civilian rule. Basically the PPP wants to weaken the ISI as an institution and in the process, serve others’ aims.

Q: Do you subscribe to Nawaz Sharif’s demand for a judicial probe into the Abbottabad and Mehran Naval Base incidents?

A: I believe in transparency and the rule of law. I think an independent inquiry into the Abbottabad and Mehran incidents will make everything crystal clear. However, I believe justice (Retd) Rana Baghwandas should have headed the commission to make it credible and acceptable to the international community.


http://www.newslinemagazine.com/2011/06/interview-general-hamid-gul-former-dg-isi/
 

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South Asia
Jul 8, 2011 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG08Df01.html 
 

INTERVIEW

'Stooges' time is up in Pakistan'


By Mahan Abedin

Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), or the Liberation Party, was founded in 1953 in Jerusalem. The party advocates the politics of pan-Islam by calling for the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is active in most Muslim countries in addition to Western Europe, North America and Australia. Since the targeted assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by United States special forces in Pakistan in early May, the Pakistani chapter of HuT has come under increasing media and security attention because of its alleged penetration of the higher reaches of the powerful Pakistani military establishment.

To investigate this issue further, Asia Times Online conducted anexclusive interview with Hizb ut-Tahrir's spokesman in Pakistan, Naveed Butt.

Butt grew up in Islamabad and began his degree at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore before transferring to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he completed a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Since 2000, he has been the media spokesman for HuT in Pakistan.

Asia Times Online: How do you explain the explosion in alarmist stories about Hizb ut-Tahrir Pakistan by the Pakistani and international media?

Naveed Butt: Western governments along with their media are well aware of the global impact and reach of Hizb ut-Tahrir, especially in the Muslim world. Both America and Britain know that openly declaring our party as the real opponents will further galvanize support for our call and objectives.

Therefore, they try their level best to ignore us in the media whilst at the same time they use their agent Muslim rulers to hamper our activities through oppression, mass arrests, torture and persecution. The Hizb's influence and activities in the ummah [Muslim community] have now forced the West to address us through their media and so do their agents in Muslims countries.

Ignoring such a high-profile incident [alleged HuT support for militancy and HuT penetration of the Pakistani armed forces] would mean encouraging people within the armed forces to look for alternatives. Therefore, the Western and Pakistani media at the behest of the governments quickly jumped in on it and started concocting lies and causing unnecessary alarm amongst the masses. Having said that, there have been exceptions, and there are many sincere journalists in Pakistan who have come out openly and exposed these lies and supported the Hizb's non-violent political struggle for the khilafah [caliphate].

ATol: What was Brigadier Ali Khan's precise relationship with Hizb ut-Tahrir Pakistan? [1]

NB: The policy of Hizb ut-Tahrir is that we neither confirm nor deny such accusations or allegations.

ATol: To what extent is the Pakistani military sympathetic to the views and goals of Hizb ut-Tahrir?

NB: We call on the people of power to fulfill their Islamic duty and stop the munkar [transgression] by using their authority. We call upon them to eject all those who have revolted against Allah and His Messenger by conniving with the imperialists.

It is well known that seeking nusra [support] from the people of power was a part of the methodology of the Prophet Mohammad (saw) [2] for establishing the Islamic state, and the Hizb follows this method in letter and spirit. Unlike in some other countries. the Pakistani army is not an elitist army. They come from all strata of society.

Hence, whatever exists in the public opinion of the country, more or less the same thoughts and emotions are carried by the military as well. The Hizb has been working in the masses for the last 10 years and hence it is not surprising that like the masses, the idea of khilafah and the unification of the Muslim ummah resonates with officers of the armed forces.

ATol: What has been the reaction inside the Pakistani military to the targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 2?

NB: The Pakistani military is part of society and they share the same Islamic feeling as the masses. Therefore, the thing that disgusted and infuriated the army was the sheer audacity and arrogance of the US and blatant subservience of the [Pakistan] military top brass.

No sane person in Pakistan, let alone an army officer who is more aware of Pakistani security capabilities and standard operating procedures, is willing to buy the absurd explanation that the US came from across the border, conducted an operation for 40 minutes and then safely flew back without the knowledge and consent of the top army and civilian leadership.

This incident alone was enough for the officers of the armed forces to conclude that they are actually led by a bunch of US stooges. This is why [Chief of Army Staff] General [Ashfaq Parvez] Kiani himself visited various military garrisons and gave explanations in town-hall style meetings including at the National Defense University (NDU) and Quetta Staff College in order to pacify the angry officers.

His basic argument was built around fear, ie we are weak and cannot counter the US hence we have to accept this humiliation and violation of Pakistani sovereignty. Obviously, officers of a professional army that possesses nuclear capability are not willing to buy this. This is why the US and their agents, such as General Kiani, feel very vulnerable and have started to harass anybody who has Islamic inclinations.

There are reports that all those officers who are known to be Islamic in orientation are not being promoted to higher ranks even if they deserve to be; or they are given posts which are not sensitive. This in turn produces frustration and disenchantment which, obviously, is not going to help the US in winning hearts and minds within the armed forces.

ATol: In regards to the violation and gradual erosion of Pakistani sovereignty by the United States government, is there a point at which the Pakistani military will snap and react against America?

NB: It is not a matter of if but rather when. The frustration, anger and disgust currently present in the Pakistan army cannot be sustained, especially when more and more people now believe that they should not be fighting America's "war of terror".

Numerous officers have either quietly resigned or they have been court-martialed for refusing to fight their Muslim brothers in FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. This pressure cannot be sustained indefinitely. And evidence points to the fact that it [the breaking point] will occur sooner rather than later. However, a decisive break with America can't happen under the current political and military leadership, it has to be under a new sincere Islamic leadership, ie the khilafah state.

ATol: To what extent are Pakistan's political elites in conflict with the military over America's growing role in the country?

NB: The "politicians" versus "military" paradigm must itself be questioned. Just as there are some sincere people in the armed forces who are ready to challenge American tyranny, there is also a growing band of sincere politicians who are against America. Just as there are collaborators in the military leadership who have sold the country and its people to America for personal gain, there are also similar people in the political leadership.

ATol: As the situation inside Afghanistan becomes increasingly critical to the Western alliance, and in view of Pakistan's and America's divergent views on the desired outcome to the Afghan conflict, do you envisage an armed confrontation between Pakistan and America?

NB: Under the current traitor leadership there is no serious challenge to the American hegemony in the region and its attempts to pillage the huge material resources of Afghanistan that are estimated to be worth around one to three trillion dollars.

They have squandered an opportunity. Merely cutting off the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] supply line permanently and expelling US officials from Pakistan would force America into a hasty retreat. As for the US fighting Pakistan, if America were to make that mistake, I ask the question; if they have not been able to subdue small groups of mujahideen in Afghanistan in a decade of fighting, what chance do they have against the strongest and most battle-experienced Muslim army in the world?

And this is why on March 11, 2009, in his presentation to key [US President Barack] Obama officials including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Interagency Policy Review of Afghanistan-Pakistan for the Obama administration, Bruce O Riedel, said they had looked at the extreme option of invading Pakistan, and, of course, immediately dismissed it. Invading a country that possesses dozens of nuclear weapons would be something beyond madness. Everyone agreed.
ATol: To what extent is the Pakistani Taliban a creature of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)?

NB: Infiltrating a loosely knit organization such as the Taliban is not difficult for any government. There is enough evidence to conclude that the US has been able infiltrate the loosely structured Taliban to cause chaos in Pakistan. This was further confirmed by [Central Intelligence Agency operative] Raymond Davis' links with militant organizations. This is why the "militants" instead of targeting US assets, such as offices of the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], CIA and Blackwater [Xe Services], were targeting mosques, Islamic universities, markets and bus stations. The whole purpose was to start a civil war or fitna [strife] where Muslims would die on both sides.

ATol: How will the ISI react to a popular revolution in Pakistan, aiming to overthrow the entire political establishment and replace it with a more representative system?

NB: Well, this is a question for the ISI to answer and I am only a spokesman of Hizb ut-Tahrir. However, the traitors within the Arab intelligence services did their best to stop the popular revolutions, but they were not successful in spite of deploying all their resources. Therefore, if a popular revolution starts in Pakistan, I advise the military and the political leadership to flee to their master's abode like [former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine] Ben Ali and the Afghan Central Bank governor [Abdul Qadir Fitrat]!
ATol: Do you fear greater Indian meddling in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the light of the growing turmoil in Pakistan?

NB: The recent Pakistan-India dialogue has shown that Pakistan has completely backed off from her traditional stance. The Pakistanis have decoupled Kashmir from trade negotiations and in principle agreed to grant India land access to Afghanistan.

On the other hand, it is well known that China is a regional threat to US interests in South and Far East Asia. America wants to use Pakistan and India as a block against China. For this very purpose, Kashmir and other irritants must be buried, not resolved, since any just solution will not be acceptable to India.

It was for this reason that the US is dictating that Pakistan backs down from her longstanding stance on Kashmir. [Former Pakistan president General Pervez] Musharraf was the first to initiate this divergence; [current President Asif Ali] Zardari is only staying the course. Hence, with agents like Zardari, [current Prime Minister Yousaf Raza] Gilani and Kiani one can only expect capitulation and surrender before India. So, yes, if these agents are not ejected, India's influence in Kashmir and Afghanistan will only increase.

ATol: To what extent have the problems noted above set back the quest to reclaim Kashmir from India?

NB: Reclaiming Kashmir is no longer on the Pakistan government's agenda. Hence, now we don't even hear the slogan "Kashmir banay ga Pakistan" [Kashmir will become Pakistan]. All we hear is about how much economic benefit we can get by trading with India.

Just last year, when Kashmir's streets were full of thousands of protesters, Pakistan observed a deafening silence. This was a clear signal that not only has Pakistan stopped supporting jihadi organizations resisting India's brutality, but she has also halted political support to the freedom struggle. The only way Kashmir can be liberated is through organized jihad under a state that mobilizes the armies. This would only be possible by establishing the khilafah.

ATol: What is your view on the recent conference in Tehran on the global fight against terrorism, which was attended by the heads of state of Pakistan and Afghanistan? Can Iran help redefine terrorism in a manner that suits global Islamic interests?

NB: That conference has actually exposed the real face of the Iranian regime. Everybody knows that Pakistan and Afghanistan are nothing but stooges of America and what they consider as terrorism is according to the definition as laid down by the United States.

In such a circumstance, cooperating with Afghanistan and Pakistan is actually cooperating with America. I don't see how by working with Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iran can benefit Muslims. The real vision for these and all Muslim countries is unification into a single state to represent all Muslims, regardless of their race or school of thought; a state that will stand for their interests with their considerable combined resources to end American terrorism practiced by official US armed forces and private military organizations.

Note
1. Brigadier Ali Khan and four majors were arrested last month for alleged links to the HuT. They are being interrogated in the garrison town of Rawalpindi by the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Intelligence. 2. Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is an expression Muslims use whenever the name of Prophet Mohammad is mentioned or written. The meaning is: "May the blessings and the peace of Allah be upon him [Mohammad].

Mahan Abedin is an analyst of Middle East politics.
 
 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG08Df01.html

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South Asia
Jul 8, 2011 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG08Df04.html 
 
Pakistanis' anger mounts
over growing power chaos

By Syed Fazl-e-Haider


KARACHI - Public anger is growing at the Pakistan government's failure to ensure adequate power supplies for industrial and private use, with two people killed and more than 30 wounded by police this week when a crowd of about 8,000 marched towards Chashma Nuclear Power Plant in Mianwali, Punjab province.

Power cuts were also a factor in protests in the industrial center of Karachi this week that have left at least 35 people dead. Karachi is facing 10 hours of power outages a day, severely damaging industrial output and undermining economic growth. The shortages of electricity and gas have forced hundreds of units to shut down in the textile district of Faisalabad, in Punjab province. The textile industry accounts for 60% of export revenue.

"Almost 800 units of a total of around 2,000 factories in Punjab province have closed down and many more are likely to be shut," Sheikh Abdul Qayyum, former head of the Faisalabad chamber of commerce, said this week, Agence France-Presse reported. "Around 500,000 workers lost their jobs in the province - about 100,000 in Faisalabad alone due to the closure of the factories."

A 40% cut in generation late last month forced the Pakistan Electric Power Company to carry out eight to 10 hours of load-shedding in urban areas and 12 to 14 hours in rural areas.

The government last week acknowledged that power cuts would continue for at least another seven years. Critics point to a lack of political will, bad governance and administrative inabilities on the part of the government as reasons for the deepening crisis.

The government, with no long-term plan to overcome the severe energy shortages, simply manages the shortages by cutting supply for hours at a time to industrial and domestic users. This week's fatal march in Mianwali was called by a local rights group, Tehrik Huqooq Mianwali, to demand the district be exempted from power outages as it needs just 100 (megawatt) MW of power while Chashma's three nuclear power plants produce about 1,000MW, Dawn newspaper reported.

A week earlier, protests were held across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, including the provincial capital Peshawar, against excessive power loadshedding.

The country faced a total shortfall of 7,739 MW of electricity in the peak summer month of June, while the overall shortfall in the gas supply to industry is around 400 million cubic feet per day.

The government, in a bid to partially ameliorate the electricity shortages, plans to divert to power producers gas that would go to stations selling compressed natural gas for trucks and cars.

Among factors for the present shortages is a failure by past governments to anticipate growth in demand while delaying power and dam projects that would have boosted output. The economy grew an average of 7% a year under the 2002-2007 government of prime minister Shaukat Aziz and president Pervez Musharraf.

Growth has since declined to 2.4% in the fiscal year that ended last month, from 3.8% in the 12 months to June 2010. Even so, the energy crisis has worsened over the past three years, due to continuing poor investment, rampant theft as electricity prices rise, and a problem with circular corporate debt that has debilitated the production capacity of power generation companies and refineries.

Power distribution companies estimate that they suffer line losses to theft of up to 30-40%. The government aggravates the problem by forcing state-owned energy companies to pay dividends to fill its budget gaps rather than allowing them to reinvest profits into expanding energy production.

Debts mount due to non-payment by customers (including the government) and non-payment of government subsidies to producers and generators. The resulting outstanding private and public debt is about 3% of gross domestic product. The debt burden in turn prevents producers from purchasing sufficient fuel to operate at full capacity.

Independent power producers (IPPs) have started to take legal and financial steps to force the government to make payments against the electricity it has purchased. The government is committed to make payments less than 10 days after the IPPs present a final notice, or its sovereign guarantees will be encashed by the banks.

The government this year has raised power tariffs to accommodate conditions linked to a 2008 International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout agreement, but they are still about 20% less than the cost of power.

Restructuring the power sector, and reducing subsidies, will be contentious issues when the government tries next month to restart IMF bailout payments, which were suspended last year when Islamabad failed to meet loan conditions and spending targets. The government spent 342 billion rupees (US$4 billion) on subsidies to the power sector in the 12 months to June 30, more than the total federal development spending of 280 billion rupees in the same period.

The country lacks a fully deregulated chain from power generation to transmission and distribution, and in the absence of a suitable regulatory framework where private and public power producers could compete on an equal footing international financial institutions are reluctant to provide loans or support investments.

Completion of a gas pipeline from Iran would help to generate around 5,000 MW of electricity, which is equivalent to the present peak shortage of power in the country. But while an export contract was signed between the two countries last year to supply Pakistan with natural gas from 2014, the United States is opposed to the plan.

Syed Fazl-e-Haider (http://www.syedfazlehaider.com) is a development analyst in Pakistan. He is the author of many books, including The Economic Development of Balochistan (2004). He can be contacted at sfazlehaider05@yahoo.com.

 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG08Df04.html
 

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Taliban commander back on the air in Pakistan

In this photo taken Tuesday, March 2, 2010, a Pakistani soldier holds a rocket launcher while securing the area in the Bajur tribal region on the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of Pakistan's most notorious Taliban radio voices is back on the air after the army raided his stronghold last year and drove him across the border into Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
 
By Sebastian Abbot and Anwarullah Khan
Associated Press / July 7, 2011
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2011/07/07/taliban_commander_back_on_the_air_in_pakistan/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Latest+news


 KHAR, Pakistan—One of Pakistan's most notorious Taliban radio voices is back on the air after the army raided his stronghold last year and drove him across the border into Afghanistan.

The resurgence of Maulvi Faqir Mohammed -- also one of the Pakistani Taliban's top commanders -- illustrates the resilience of militants fighting to topple the U.S.-allied Pakistani government and the growing problem of sanctuaries in eastern Afghanistan that allow fighters to elude the army's grasp.

"We will return and enforce the golden system of Islam," Mohammed said in a recent radio broadcast from his new base in Afghanistan. "All of those who have turned their backs on us -- like we are gone for good -- should seek forgiveness from Allah."

Militants and their supporters in Pakistan have long used illegal FM radio stations to spread their message and incite violence against the government. The tactic is hard to counter because the equipment needed is cheap and easily transportable.

Mohammed was one of the most prominent militant radio personalities before the army invaded his enclave early last year in the Bajur tribal area, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) northwest of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Many of the militants in Bajur, including Mohammed, simply slipped across the border into Kunar province, an area of Afghanistan where the U.S. has largely withdrawn its troops. Kunar has turned into a staging ground for large-scale attacks inside Pakistan, according to the Pakistani army.

The most recent such assault in Bajur occurred Monday when around 60 Pakistani Taliban militants sent by Mohammed stormed a paramilitary checkpoint, killing one soldier and wounding three others, said local officials.

Mohammed claimed responsibility for the attack, as well a similar one by at least 100 militants on several border villages in Bajur in mid-June that killed at least five people.

"Our fighters carried out these two attacks from Afghanistan, and we will launch more such attacks inside Afghanistan and in Pakistan," said Mohammed over the Voice of Sharia radio in his measured, matter-of-fact style.

His on-air reply after the June attack: "Don't dare stand in the way of those who are following the path of God."

Radio is the main connection to the outside world for most tribesmen in Bajur and other areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border because they can't afford satellite television dishes, and the infrastructure needed for cable TV is usually nonexistent.

Mohammed and his associates transmit for two and a half hours every day beginning at 8 p.m., although sometimes the broadcast is overpowered by a station run by the paramilitary Frontier Corps, said Gul Ahmed Jan, the owner of a grocery store near Khar, the main town in Bajur.

Mohammed gives half-hour sermons three times per week in which he encourages locals to participate in jihad, or holy war, and warns them against cooperating with Pakistani authorities.

"This war is between Islam and infidels, and every Muslim is duty-bound to take part," said Mohammed on his show "The Leader Says."

.His brother, Gul Mohammed, who claims to have been tortured by Pakistan's security forces, often rails against alleged mistreatment of tribesmen by the Pakistani army and Frontier Corps. The station also plays songs praising suicide bombers, even though some radical Islamists, including the Afghan Taliban, have denounced music of any kind.

"Look, the lucky guy is on the way to heaven," said one song. "Young man, how great you are."

Militants from the Swat Valley in nearby Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are often invited to participate as guest speakers. Their leader, Mullah Fazlullah, was Pakistan's most active Taliban radio personality before the army invaded Swat in 2009, earning him the nickname "Mullah Radio." He is also believed to be in Kunar, according to the Pakistani army and Bajur residents, but he hasn't resurfaced on the radio.

The Pakistani army has complained that U.S. and Afghan forces have done nothing to address the growing number of militants who have holed up in Kunar after fleeing military operations on the Pakistan side of the border. The U.S. withdrew many of its troops from Kunar in the past year so it could focus on more populated areas that it deems more strategic.

"There is no effort to act against these strongholds or sanctuaries," said Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. "Many terrorist leaders are gathered there, and there is no pressure on them to leave."

The army claims that groups of up to 300 militants have staged at least five cross-border attacks in the last month, killing 55 paramilitary soldiers and tribal police.

A senior Western intelligence official, however, expressed doubt about Pakistan's figures and whether all the attacks came from bases in Afghanistan. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence matters.

Pakistani is also under U.S. pressure to focus offensives on their side of the border, particularly in the North Waziristan area that is home to the Haqqani network. The U.S. military views the Haqqani faction as the most dangerous militant group fighting in Afghanistan.

"As these cross-border raids mount, Pakistan will have less and less inclination, resources and resolve to launch operations against the Haqqani network," said Riffat Hussain, a defense professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

The Afghan government has accused Pakistan of launching over 750 rockets into Kunar since May, killing at least 40 people and increasing tension between the two countries.

The Pakistani army has denied intentionally firing rockets into Afghanistan, but acknowledges that some rounds it fired at militants staging cross-border attacks may have accidentally fallen into the country.

Mohammed, the Taliban commander, doesn't seem fazed by the rocket barrage.

"Just like the Americans were defeated in Afghanistan and are withdrawing, the Pakistani army will soon leave Bajur," said Mohammed over the radio.

------

Abbot reported from Islamabad. Associated Press Writer Habib Khan contributed to this report from Khar.

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Brig Imtiaz says CIA sponsored campaign against Army, ISI

The News International

July 11, 2011

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79461&hd=&size=1&l=e

ISLAMABAD: The CIA sponsored unabated media campaign smacks of maliciousness and absurdity and is meant to target Pakistan’s state organs, particularly the leadership of the military and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), former Chief of Intelligence Bureau Brig (R) Imtiaz Ahmed has said.

In a statement made available to this correspondent he said the Washington Post, New York Times and "WikiLeaks", which he called a CIA ploy, have embarked upon abuse of media Code of Ethics which can gravely undercut already strained Pak-US relations and can gravely impinge upon the peace of South Asia, and international community on the whole.

Imtiaz said that America had since drawn strategic plan for South Asia and Middle East with well defined objectives to contain China, prop up bulwark against Iran, gain access to Arab oil reserves and natural resources of Central Asian states and provide effective foothold to India in Afghanistan. "Recently scenarios in Libya, Egypt and Yemen, are a reflection of US game plan set for the Middle East," the former spy master said, adding that in her strategic pursuits, America sees Pakistan endowed with geo-political formidable strength as a blockade in her "time frame", synchronized with Afghanistan exit plan.

He said that America-India strong nexus thus assumes weakening of Pakistan from within as an imperative for their successful drive in the region. CIA and RAW collaborated media campaign has thus been unleashed to attack Pakistan’s internal stability and fiber of nationhood, he said.

Imtiaz said that state sponsored subversive machinations are being unleashed to alienate the undaunted faith of the people of Pakistan in the national security institutions, articulate political chaos, aggravation of economic stagnation, germination of divisive trends in the nation.

Lately, he said, CIA and RAW have integrated the cultural religious fiber of our society which also was visible in the recent function held in US Embassy in Islamabad for propagation of homosexuality.

"Their eyes are all set to push Pakistan into a pliable status by convincing the international community to believe that nuclear assets of Pakistan are not in safe hands," he said. Imtiaz strongly reiterated that Pakistan’s armed forces and ISI provided an impregnable fortress of defiance against the Indo-US multidimensional offensive aimed at Pakistan, and thus the present leadership of these two institutions has become the prime target of state sponsored media campaign.

"We possess the national resilience to thwart the external offensive but we need to internally show the political will, national maturity and vision to rise above self," he said. He added that particular political leadership obsessed with political motives as well as self conceit and a very small section media infested with perceptual distortions of late have become vulnerable to intangible criticism rather ridicule of state security institutions.

These internal trends, Imtiaz said, are providing cherished space to foreign subversive onslaught. He stated that certainly above 90 percent people of Pakistan stand behind their armed forces and its vibrant media can play precious role to show the light to others.

He said that in the past American media took the defeat of America in Vietnam to their people and consequently the US had to withdraw from Vietnam. Today, America lost war in Afghanistan but it is being shown by her media as victory to their people.

"We must rise above self as a nation in this hour of 'great test’ and the political force in power must show political will to steer the country through the 'storm’ with objectivity, statesmanship and economic prudence. Inertia at official level must be shed off and strong diplomatic rebuff with ground objective measures, are needed in Pakistan’s best interests," Imtiaz recommended.


http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79461&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

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South Asia
Jul 13, 2011  
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df03.html  
 

THE ROVING EYE




Pakistan 'punished' in Pipelineistan


By Pepe Escobar



Before the end of 2011, Pakistan will start working on its stretch of the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline - according to Asim Hussain, Pakistan's federal minister for petroleum and natural resources. The 1,092 kilometers of pipeline on the Iranian side are already in place.

IP, also known as "the peace pipeline", was originally IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India). Although it badly needs gas for its economic expansion, faced with immense pressure by the George W Bush - and then Barack Obama - administrations, India still has not committed to the project, even after a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008.

More than 740 million cubic feet of gas per year will start flowing to Pakistan from Iran's giant South Pars field in the Persian Gulf by 2014. This is an immense development in the Pipelineistan "wars" in Eurasia. IP is a major node in the much-vaunted Asian Energy Security Grid - the progressive energy integration of Southwest, South, Central and East Asia that is the ultimate mantra for Eurasian players as diverse as Iran, China, India and the Central Asian "stans".

Pakistan is an energy-poor, desperate customer of the grid. Becoming an energy transit country is Pakistan's once-in-a-lifetime chance to transition from a near-failed state into an "energy corridor" to Asia and, why not, global markets.

And as pipelines function as an umbilical cord, the heart of the matter is that IP, and maybe IPI in the future, will do more than any form of US "aid" (or outright interference) to stabilize the Pakistan half of Obama's AfPak theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India obsession.

Another 'axis of evil'?
 
This Pipelineistan development may go a long way to explain why the White House announced this past Sunday it was postponing US$800 million in military aid to Islamabad - more than a third of the annual such largess Pakistan receives from the US.

The burgeoning Pakistan-bashing industry in Washington may spin this as punishment related to the never-ending saga of Osama bin Laden being sheltered so close to Rawalpindi/Islamabad. But the measure may smack of desperation - and on top it do absolutely nothing to convince the Pakistani army to follow Washington's agenda uncritically.

On Monday, the US State Department stressed once again that Washington expected Islamabad to do more in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency - otherwise it would not get its "aid" back. The usual diplomatic doublespeak of "constructive, collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship" remains on show - but that cannot mask the growing mistrust on both sides. The Pakistani military confirmed on the record it had not been warned of the "suspension".

No less than $300 million of this blocked $800 million is for "American trainers" - that is, the Pentagon's counter-insurgency brigade. Moreover, Islamabad had already asked Washington not to send these people anymore; the fact is their methods are useless to fight the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked jihadis based in the tribal areas. Not to mention the preferred US method is the killer drone anyway.

The wall of mistrust is bound to reach Himalaya/Karakoram/Pamir proportions. Washington only sees Pakistan in "war on terror", counter-terrorism terms. Since the coupling of the AfPak combo by the Obama administration, clearly Washington's top war is in Pakistan - not in Afghanistan, which harbors just a handful of al-Qaeda jihadis.

Most "high-value al-Qaeda targets" are in the tribal areas in Pakistan - and they are, in a curious parallel to the Americans, essentially trainers. As for Afghanistan, it is most of all a neo-colonial North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) war against a Pashtun-majority "national liberation" movement - as Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself defined it.

Asia Times Online's Saleem Shahzad - murdered in May - argued in his book Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban (full review coming later this week) that al-Qaeda's master coup over the past few years was to fully relocate to the tribal areas, strengthen the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban), and in a nutshell coordinate a massive Pashtun guerrilla war against the Pakistani army and the Americans - as a diversionist tactic. Al-Qaeda's agenda - to export its caliphate-bound ideology to other parts of South and Central Asia - has nothing to do with the Mullah Omar-led Afghan Taliban, who fight to go back to power in Afghanistan.

Washington for its part wants a "stable" Afghanistan led by a convenient puppet, Hamid Karzai-style - so the holy grail (since the mid-1990s) can be achieved; the construction of IP's rival, the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline, bypassing "evil" Iran.

And as far as Pakistan is concerned, Washington wants it to smash the Pashtun guerrillas inside their territory; otherwise the tribal areas will keep being droned to death - literally, with no regard whatsoever to territorial integrity.

No wonder the wall of mistrust will keep rising, because Islamabad's agenda is not bound to change anytime soon. Pakistan's Afghan policy implies Afghanistan as a vassal state - with a very weak military (what the US calls the Afghan National Force) and especially always unstable, and thus incapable of attacking the real heart of the matter: the Pashtunistan issue.

For Islamabad, Pashtun nationalism is an existential threat. So the Pakistani army may fight the Tehrik-e-Taliban-style Pashtun guerrillas, but with extreme care; otherwise Pashtuns on both side of the border may unite en masse and make a push to destabilize Islamabad for good.

On the other had, what Islamabad wants for Afghanistan is the Taliban back in power - just like the good old days of 1996-2001. That's the opposite of what Washington wants; a long-range occupation, preferably via NATO, so the alliance may protect the TAPI pipeline, if it ever gets built. Moreover, for Washington "losing" Afghanistan and its key network of military bases so close to both China and Russia is simply unthinkable - according to the Pentagon's full-spectrum dominance doctrine.

What's going on at the moment is a complex war of positioning. Pakistan's Afghan policy - which also implies containing Indian influence in Afghanistan - won't change. The Afghan Taliban will keep being encouraged as potential long-term allies - in the name of the unalterable "strategic depth" doctrine - and India will keep being regarded as the top strategic priority.

What IP will do is to embolden Islamabad even more - with Pakistan finally becoming a key transit corridor for Iranian gas, apart from using gas for its own needs. If India finally decides against IPI, China is ready to step on board - and build an extension from IP, parallel to the Karakoram highway, towards Xinjiang.

Either way, Pakistan wins - especially with increasing Chinese investment. Or with further Chinese military "aid". That's why the Pakistani army's "suspension" by Washington is not bound to rattle too many nerves in Islamabad.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com
 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df03.html

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South Asia
Jul 13, 2011 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df02.html 
 
Islamabad takes a shot at US drones

By Amir Mir



ISLAMABAD - Pakistan-United States military ties have touched their lowest ebb since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the US, mainly because of the endless American drone campaign in the tribal areas of Pakistan that has killed 2,587 people, including 58 high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban targets, in 256 strikes between June 2004 and June 2011.

This standoff is set to affect the battle against Islamic militancy in the region in a big way.

The spat sank to a new level on Sunday when White House chief of staff William Daley confirmed that the Barack Obama administration had held back on a payment of US$800 million - part of $2 billion in annual security aid to Pakistan - over Islamabad's decision to cut back in US military trainers and to restrict visas for US personnel.

A Pakistan military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, responded on Monday that "we can conduct our operations without external support. The tribal operations won't be affected."

Tensions were already running high following comments by the top military commander in the US, Admiral Mike Mullen, that Pakistan "sanctioned" the killing of Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistani bureau chief of Asia Times Online whose tortured body was found on May 31. A Pakistan government spokesman dismissed the accusation as "extremely irresponsible".

In the aftermath of the covert Abbottabad operation on May 2 by American SEALs that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Pakistani military authorities, who earlier had been hand-in-glove with their American counterparts on the issue of drone attacks, asked the US military leadership to immediately stop the deadly campaign - "the core irritant" between the countries.

The Americans simply rejected the Pakistani demand, saying the drone attacks were an integral part of the "war against terror" that seeks to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants hiding in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan border in the northwest of Pakistan.

In an indication of the changed mood, Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kiani, recently rejected US claims that there existed some private agreements between the two countries on drone hits and American intelligence activities in Pakistan.

Pakistan's military leaders and intelligence establishment were buffeted and embarrassed by being kept in the dark for months as the US closed in on Bin Laden's bolt hole, and they came in for some stinging criticism.

While the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) supposedly had no idea that the world's most wanted terrorist was living in a house next to Pakistan's best-guarded military academy, the army and air force were equally clueless about American stealth helicopters having already intruded into Abbottabad to conduct the 45-minute long "Operation Geronimo" to get Bin Laden.

Pakistan's military leaders, who hold the real power over matters of national security, subsequently decided to stop sharing any further intelligence information with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a protest against the unilateral Abbottabad raid.

They demanded firm assurances by the US that it would not undertake any further unilateral military action on Pakistani soil, and they presented a list of conditions to their US counterparts with the message that their acceptance was a prerequisite for the continuation of anti-terrorism cooperation between Pakistan and the United States. One such condition was that the US must observe strict limits on the use of drone strikes and the number of American military and intelligence personnel in the country.

In a recent meeting with the CIA's deputy director, Michael Morrell, ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha is reported to have warned the US that Pakistan would be forced to respond if the US did not come up with a strategy to stop the drone strikes and reduce the number of American spies operating in Pakistan.

These demands were taken as a reaction to US military and intelligence programs that had gone well beyond what the Pakistani authorities had agreed to with the Americans in the past. But the Americans made it clear that they would not stop the drone campaign in the tribal areas.

In fact, the US intensified raids, carrying out 12 strikes in the tribal areas in June alone - the highest monthly total of the year. Between January 1 and June 30, the CIA-run predators carried out 42 attacks in the tribal areas, killing 358 people. The strikes were as follows: nine in January, three in February, seven in March, two in April, seven in May and 12 in June. The previous four months, from September to December 2010, averaged almost 16 strikes per month (21 in September, 16 in October, 14 in November and 12 strikes in December 2011).

In the latest episode in the quarrel over the drone campaign, the decision-makers in general headquarters in Rawalpindi and at the Pentagon have locked horns over the use of an air base, Shamsi, in the province of Balochistan, which has been used in the past by the CIA to launch drone attacks in the tribal areas.

Pakistan's Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar announced on June 29 that his government had asked the US to stop using Shamsi for the attacks and vacate the facility. Mukhtar told Reuters, "We have been talking to them [Americans] on the issue for some time. But after May 2, we told them again. When the American forces do not operate from the Shamsi base, no drone attacks will be carried out."

The Americans were quick to rebuff the Pakistani demand. In less than 24 hours, a senior US official in Washington told Reuters that no US personnel had left Shamsi and there were no plans for them to do so. "The United States plans to keep using the Shamsi airstrip for non-lethal drone flights against militants near the Afghanistan border. The facility remains fully operational and supports American counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan," Reuters quoted the official as having said on July 6.

The drone attacks are carried out by the CIA's Special Activities Division, which has made a series of attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan. These strikes have increased substantially under President Barack Obama, with the drones targeting top al-Qaeda leaders, its external operations network, and Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders and fighters hiding in the FATA areas. The Americans ramped up the number of drone strikes in July 2008, and have continued to regularly hit at targets inside Pakistan since then.

In his book In the Line of Fire, published in September 2006, Pakistan's former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, who was ruling the roost at that time, wrote:
How could we allow the US blanket over-flight and landing rights without jeopardizing our strategic assets? I offered only a narrow flight corridor that was far from any sensitive Pakistani areas. Neither could we give the United States use of Pakistan's naval ports, air bases, and strategic locations on borders. We refused to give any naval ports or fighter aircraft bases to the United States. We allowed the US only two bases - Shamsi in Balochistan and Jacobabad in Sindh - and that too only for logistics and aircraft recovery. No attack could be launched from there. We gave no blanket permission [to the US] for anything.
However, three years later, in an interview on December 4, 2010, Musharraf admitted that he had actually allowed the US to carry out drone surveillance inside Pakistan's territory.

Musharraf said in the interview in London:
We wanted intelligence; we wanted the US to locate targets. It was only a general kind of carpet agreement with the United States, and surveillance was allowed on a case-to-case basis. Once we located the targets, we would decide on the method of striking, either by helicopter gunship or some other way. But that was a decision which was left to us.
Musharraf's critics say his attempt to minimize the blame by saying that his permission was restricted to "surveillance" and that too for the benefit of Pakistan forces sounds feeble given the fact that he did nothing when the drones started violating this "carpet agreement".

Following Musharraf's departure as army chief in November 2007 (he stepped down from the presidency in August 2008) he was succeeded by Kiani. A cable sent by the then-US ambassador, Anne Patterson, on February 11, 2008, and made public by the Pakistani English newspaper Dawn, provided confirmation that the US drone strikes program within Pakistan had more than just tacit acceptance of the country's top military brass, despite public posturing to the contrary.

During a meeting with US Central Command chief Admiral William J Fallon (on January 22, 2008), Kiani requested the Americans to provide "continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area in South Waziristan" where the army was conducting operations against militants.

The American account of Kiani's request for "Predator coverage" does not make clear if mere air surveillance was being requested or missile-armed drones were being sought. Reaction to the request suggests the latter. According to the report of the meeting sent to Washington by Patterson, Fallon "regretted that he did not have the assets to support this request" but offered trained US Marines (known as joint terminal attack controllers - JTACs) to coordinate air strikes for Pakistan's infantry forces on ground. But Kiani "demurred" on the offer, pointing out that having American soldiers on the ground "would not be politically acceptable".

In another meeting with Admiral Mullen on March 4, 2008, Kiani was reportedly asked for his help "in approving a third restricted operating zone for US aircraft over the FATA". The American request - detailed in a cable sent from the US Embassy in Islamabad on March 24, 2008 - clearly indicates that two "corridors" for US drones had already been approved.

In yet another secret cable sent on October 9, 2009, and published recently by WikiLeaks, Patterson reports that the US military support to the Pakistan army's 11th Corps operations in South Waziristan would "be at the division level and would include a live downlink of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) full motion video".

In a cable dated February 19, 2009, Patterson sends talking points to Washington ahead of a week-long visit to the US by Kiani. Referring to drone strikes, she writes, "Kiani knows full well that the strikes have been precise (creating few civilian casualties) and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the Waziristan region."

But Kiani had the audacity to claim on May 21, 2011, while addressing the National Defense University, that there existed no agreement between Pakistan and the United States regarding drone attacks, and that they should be stopped immediately.

Such contradictions surrounding drone attacks are not surprising as many in Pakistan are aware of the state's complicity in such strikes. WikiLeaks cables have already revealed how some Pakistani politicians told senior US officials that they would publicly make a noise about the drone attacks while in practice turning a blind eye.

While the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments are afraid of a right-wing backlash by admitting to their complicity in the drone strikes, right-wing religious parties are continuing their protests against the strikes.

On the other hand, the Americans are determined to go ahead with their drone campaign, saying over 2,000 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants are still present in the Pakistan tribal belt alone, from where they launch cross-border ambushes in Afghanistan. Therefore, the Obama administration seems justified in its drone campaign that has wiped out over four dozen high value al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan.

The utility of drones in eliminating some of the most wanted terrorists was admitted recently by the officer in charge of Pakistani troops in North Waziristan, General Officer Commanding of 7-Division, Major General Ghayur Mehmood. Addressing a news conference in the Mirali area of North Waziristan on March 9, the two-star major general said:
Myths and rumors about American predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it's a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners. Yes, there are a few civilian casualties in precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked terrorists, including foreign elements. Between 2007 and 2011, 164 predator strikes had been carried out, killing over 964 terrorists. Of those killed, 793 were locals and 171 foreigners.
It remains a fact that top Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders like Nek Mohammad, Baitullah Mehsud, Qari Mohammad Zafar, Qari Hussain Mehsud, Mustafa Abu Yazid and several others have been killed US drones as the Pakistan army couldn't eliminate them despite carrying out operations in their mountainous strongholds.

Amir Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist and the author of several books on the subject of militant Islam and terrorism, the latest being The Bhutto murder trail: From Waziristan to GHQ
 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df02.html



 

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South Asia
Jul 13, 2011 
 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df01.html
 

An $800 million teaser

By Jim Lobe


WASHINGTON - By suspending US$800 million in United States military aid to Pakistan, the administration of President Barack Obama appears to be taking a calculated gamble that Islamabad - and especially its powerful army - has no interest in substantially escalating the growing crisis in bilateral relations.

While it is still too early to say whether the gamble was sound, Pakistan has thus far protested the decision only verbally, insisting, as its army spokesman, General Athar Abbas, did on Monday, that "the provision of aid with conditions is not acceptable". He noted that the government had not yet been informed of the aid halt.

Analysts in Washington are particularly worried that Islamabad may express its displeasure by cutting US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supply lines to Afghanistan, as the Pakistani parliament threatened to do last month in retaliation for the US raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

Despite Washington's efforts over the past 18 months to sharply reduce its dependence on Islamabad as a supply route, notably by forging new agreements with Central Asian states, more than half of the supplies and equipment used by the nearly 150,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan travel through Pakistan.

"The test is to see if they cut the supply routes," Zia Mian, the director of the Project Peace and Security in South Asia at Princeton University, told Inter Press Service (IPS). "My own sense is that they haven't decided what they're going to do yet."

The suspension, which was confirmed by White House chief of staff William Daley on Sunday, marked the latest in a series of moves and statements by Washington to convey its deepening frustration and anger with what it sees as Islamabad's failure to cooperate with US efforts to defeat the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda and its local Pakistani affiliates.

The latest downward spiral in relations began after the May 1-2 raid against Bin Laden, about which Islamabad was informed only after the fact.

Anti-US opinion, however, was already running at record highs at the time due to popular outrage over the sharply increased number of US drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan and the extended controversy over the fate of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor who shot to death two men who he claimed had tried to rob him outside of Lahore in January.

After protracted negotiations and a reported agreement to pay compensation to the families, Davis was permitted to leave Pakistan in mid-March. But the subsequent six weeks of high-level meetings designed to patch up relations between the two countries collapsed with the Bin Laden raid.

In recent weeks, US officials have accused the Pakistani military of tipping off militants at four bomb-making sites in the tribal areas along the Afghan border before the army or the Frontier Corps could raid them. They have also repeatedly complained of the continued support by at least some elements of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) unit for radical Islamist groups tied to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

And last Thursday, the outgoing chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, told reporters that he had "not seen anything to disabuse" a New York Times report, quoting unnamed US officials, that the ISI had directed the late-May abduction and murder of Pakistani investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online's bureau chief, who had long detailed the close connections between ISI and Islamist extremists.

"His [death[ isn't the first. For whatever reason, it has been used as a method historically," Mullen, who did not explicitly blame the ISI, added, in comments deemed "extremely irresponsible" by the Pakistani Information Ministry. The ISI has vehemently denied any involvement in Shahzad's death.

"Admiral Mullen's statement has been the clearest indication of how very frustrated the administration has become because Mullen, more than anyone else in the administration, really invested a lot of personal capital in improving the relationship and moving it to one of strategic partnership," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Contributing to that frustration since the Bin Laden assassination has been Pakistan's announcement last month that Shamsi airbase in Balochistan, from which the CIA launched drone strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, will no longer be available to US personnel and equipment.

Since the Davis case, Islamabad has also sought to enforce other curbs on CIA activity on its territory, although it recently reportedly lifted a freeze on visa approvals for CIA officers, dozens of whom are reported to have recently entered the country.

Earlier in June, Islamabad, however, expelled some 120 US special forces personnel - as well as a dozen British officers - who had been training and equipping Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps, the security force based in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) along the Afghan frontier.

It was those actions - as well as Pakistan's repeated refusal to launch an offensive against the so-called Haqqani faction of the Taliban in North Waziristan - that reportedly prompted the administration to make the decision to suspend $800 million of the roughly $2 billion that the Pakistani military was due to receive this year.

"When it comes to our military assistance, we're not prepared to continue providing that at the pace that we were providing it unless and until we see certain steps taken," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Monday.

Of the total, about $300 million was to reimburse Pakistan some of the costs incurred in its military operations in FATA and along the Afghan border, while the rest was related to equipment and training costs for the Frontier Corps.

The Pentagon stressed that the aid could still go forward provided certain conditions were met. Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday that the aid withheld by Washington was "directly tied to those decisions by the Pakistani military to curtail training and to not grant visas for some of the US personnel that we need to get in. If those things change, then this aid will change as well."

For his part, Abbas stressed that the suspended assistance would not affect the army's current operations in FATA. "We have always claimed that we are conducting these operations without any external support whatsoever," he said. "So we will continue with that because we feel very strongly that this is a common enemy, a common threat."

"The aid clearly was not motivating the Pakistani military to move even on the most important issues, like Bin Laden and going after the Haqqani network," Felbab-Brown told IPS. "The big question is whether it will make them better behaved or make them more intransigent.

"I think they're extremely sensitive about this suspension, not necessarily because of the diminution of the aid itself, but, more importantly, the symbolism at a time when the military institution itself feels very vulnerable domestically," she added. "I think it may encourage them to take a more defensive crouch."

Daniel Markey, a South Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), echoed that concern, predicting in a note posted on the CFR website, "Alone, cutting US military assistance will not force Pakistan to reassess its strategic posture."

On the other hand, he said, "If Washington's harder line is being taken within the context of a more comprehensive strategy that includes other points of US influence, then this deeper slide in military-to-military relations might be worth suffering."

Such a strategy would include lobbying Islamabad's allies in China and Saudi Arabia and press Pakistan for greater cooperation, he wrote.

Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

(Inter Press Service) 
   
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG13Df01.html
 

 

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US drone strikes kill 50 in Pakistan

Tue Jul 12, 2011 1:29PM




A series of non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks have killed at least 50 people and wounded many others in Pakistan's tribal belt near the border with Afghanistan.

MORE

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/188707.html

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Pakistan is fast slipping out of hands of USA



By Asif Haroon Rajan


July 12, 2011

http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2011/07/11/pakistan-fast-slipping-out-hands-usa

The US having failed to achieve any of the stated political and military objectives in Afghanistan is now desperate to pullout safely but cannot do so due to number of reasons. The US trained and enlarged ANA as well as police are unable to confront Taliban threat at their own.

The US installed regime has not shown any sign of improvement and being highly unpopular, it is not likely to survive for long after the departure of ISAF. The country will possibly get engulfed in another bout of internecine war as it happened when the US abandoned Afghanistan in 1989.

Despite using excessive force and resorting to torture and intrigues for a decade, the US couldn’t disable Taliban power. Rather, they have become more powerful and resilient and are enjoying a military edge over the collection of most powerful armies of the world and are unprepared to negotiate with USA on its terms. With the killing of OBL, America is left with no excuse to prolong its stay, particularly when it claims that al-Qaida’s back has been broken. In fact it had barged into Afghanistan with the main objective of punishing al-Qaeda for its alleged role in 9/11. Ten years intense oppression and massacre of tens of thousands of Afghans and al-Qaeda operatives and death of most wanted top leader are enough to avenge deaths of about 3000 Americans, mostly Asian origin.

Former CIA Director and now Secretary Defence Leon Panetta who has always taken a harsh stance against Pakistan has stated that the new al-Qaeda chief Zawahiri is living in Pakistan’s tribal areas and has asked Pakistan to target him. He made this wild claim without furnishing any proof and didn’t consider it desirable to use words like 'possibly’ or 'could be’. This is the beginning of a new drama after OBL which in my reckoning is a prelude towards another sting operation to 'Get Zawahiri’. Very soon the US spin doctors would start accusing the Army and ISI for sheltering him.

Likewise, American telescope will also see Mullah Omar residing in the safe house of ISI. To put direct pressure on Army, promised $800 million has been withheld.

This unfriendly step has been taken at a time when the Army has performed another feat in Mohmand Agency and is currently engaged in a tough battle in Kurram Agency which will have a bearing on militants in adjacent North Waziristan.

This is the price the two institutions are paying to defend Pakistan’s sovereignty and national interests. The US is exposing its hidden motives through such tomfoolery to intimidate Pakistan. It doesn’t want Pak Army to win battles and defeat terrorism but to lose.

Taking a cue from US military’s claim that al-Qaeda has been emasculated beyond redemption, and not more than 50-60 Qaeda operatives are active in Afghanistan; if this be true, how come Panetta is so disturbed over Qaeda’s miniscule strength and prophesying that its strategic defeat was within US military’s grasping reach if 10-20 leaders of this outfit located in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa are disposed off. It indicates confusion and nervousness of US military leaders.

The US must not forget that Pakistan played a key role in weakening al-Qaeda in Af-Pak region since over 100 al-Qaeda operatives including several dozens top guns and hundreds of affiliates were nabbed by ISI and handed over to USA. Ever since the main bunch of al-Qaeda was flushed out of Ahmadzai Wazir’s South Waziristan (SW) in 2004, and later from Mehsud belt in SW in 2005 and the back of its chief patron TTP broken in 2009, this outfit has been in disarray and on the move. Remnants are scattered and hiding in North Waziristan, Orakzai, Tirah, Mohmand and Kurram Agencies. Death of OBL further jolted the runaways. Pak Army’s highly successful operations in Orakzai, Mohmand and now in Kurram Agency have virtually choked the space for Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

The US main battle in Afghanistan is with Taliban and not the disarrayed al-Qaeda whose combat strength is negligible. The misused word 'strategic’ would have sounded more plausible if the sole super power with strongest armed forces and technological means was in clash with China or Russia and not with rag-tag al-Qaeda and Taliban. Even if last fighter of al-Qaeda based in Af-Pak region is eliminated, this outfit will not die since its main strength resides in Arab Peninsula.

It has also made deep inroads in western countries and USA. Anwar al-Awlaki is American citizen based in Yemen while Zawahiri is Egyptian. A good commander should be logically at a place where main battle is raging and not at the site of auxiliary effort where al-Qaeda has little interest left. The Arab world which is in turmoil is an ideal place for al-Qaeda to operate and increase its influence among the agitating youth seeking big change.

Obama’s popularity which had slightly improved after OBL’s death is again sliding down since he has been unable to put right melting economy, solve problem of unemployment and control high expenditure on defence. Excessively high defence budget is responsible for widening fiscal deficit. Expenditure incurred on US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, for training of ANA and police, for development works, for security contractors and for covert operations is a huge drain on US exchequer.

This amount spent in the name of insane war which has given nothing except pain and ignominy to USA is a big waste which can be profitably utilized for welfare of home public. It is ironic to see the sole super power mired in heavy debt and getting more and more dependent upon its archrival China for its sustenance.

These compulsions have compelled Obama to pullout or at least thin out bulk of troops from two theatres of war.

Caught up in a quagmire and Pakistan not ready to play the game entirely to US benefit, hawks in USA are continuing with their efforts to sabotage troop drawdown plan. Karzai regime, India and Israel too are affected parties and are sending emergent signals to Washington urging Obama to reconsider his decision. Seeing that Obama is not budging, Pentagon has come out with alternative plans to provide backup support to ANA after 2014. These include dividing Afghanistan on ethnic lines and retaining US presence in northern and central Afghanistan; keeping 50,000 US-UK troops in five military bases of Kandahar, Kabul, Bagram, Herat and Shindad; holding on to only two military bases of Kandahar and Bagram with about 10,000 troops. Stay back force will prolong its own agony as well as of Afghans.

Having got itself completely knotted up in Afghanistan and not knowing how to untie the knots, the US has unwisely started to cross swords with Pakistan.

Pakistan is keen to free USA and has been fighting its battle devotedly, but its spirits have dampened ever since the US hit it below the belt. The climb down in relations started with the arrest of Raymond Davis and climaxed after sting operation in Abbottabad. On both occasions the snooty US officials adopted a tough posture as if Pakistan was its satellite, thus adding insult to injury. They desire slapping Pakistan at will and expect the recipient to offer its other cheek without a whimper.

Show of defiance by Army and ISI has sent them into fits of rage. Their behavior has become so degrading that it is ruffling feathers of even those in Pakistan who have been singing their praises. Anti-Americanism has surged to new heights never seen before and pro-American lobby has got reduced to miniscule minority. Every second person is seeking refurbishment of our US centric policy and it seems Pakistan is fast slipping out of the hands of USA.

- Asian Tribune -


http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2011/07/11/pakistan-fast-slipping-out-hands-usa


 

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Drone strikes are police work, not an act of war?

Jul 5, 2011 02:26 EDT
http://blogs.reuters.com/afghanistan/2011/07/05/drone-strikes-as-police-work-not-an-act-of-war/

Launching an air strike in another nation would normally be considered an act of aggression. But advocates of America’s rapidly expanding unmanned drone programme don’t see it that way.

They are arguing, as Tom Ricks writes on his blog The Best Defense over at Foreign Policy, that the campaign to kill militants with missile strikes from these unmanned aircraft, is more like police action in a tough neighbourhood than a military conflict.

These raids conducted by sinister-looking Predator or Reaper aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – and since last month in Somalia - should not be seen as a challenge to states and their authority. Instead they are meant to supplement the power of governments that are either unable to or unwilling to fight the militants operating from their territories.

They are precise, limited, strikes aimed at taking down specific individuals, and in that sense are more like the police going after criminals, rather than a full-on military assault. Ricks writes:

“Police work involves small arms used precisely. Drones aren’t pistols, but firing one Hellfire at a Land Rover is more like a police action than it is like a large-scale military offensive with artillery barrages, armored columns, and infantry assaults.”

It is a bit of a stretch, though, to compare a police action in a rough part of town with the kind of devastation that the laser-guided Hellfire missile can rain down when fired from unmanned aircraft as scores of Pakistani civilians in the troubled northwest region  discovered in the initial days of the programme launched by the Bush administration.

Civilian casualties have dropped off since then as ground intelligence improves and drone controllers, whether they are sitting in the CIA headquarters in Langley or out in air-conditioned trailers in Nevada, acquire more experience in this type of warfare which outgoing CIA director Leon Panetta once said was the “only game in town”with regard to disrupting and destroying al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Under the Obama administration there has not only been a surge in strikes since it came to office in January 2009 but there has also been a diversification of the targets of the missile attacks as reported out of Pakistan.

Under President George W. Bush, the drone attacks were largely directed against al Qaeda and its associates, including the Afghan Taliban. Under Obama, they have also been targeting the Pakistani Taliban and its associates — particularly after their involvement in the killing of CIA officers in a suicide bombing in Khost area of Afghanistan in December, 2009. The pace of strikes against the Pakistani Taliban picked up further after it was found to have given training to Faisal Shahzad, a US citizen of Pakistani origin, to carry out a strike in New York’s Times Square last May. The car bomb failed, and Shahzad is serving a life sentence.

The idea that the United States can arrogate to itself the right of life and death of people around the world can set off a dangerous precedent.  What happens if India decides to do a bit of police action of its own in next door Pakistan. Unlike the CIA, India has actually built up a legal case against the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafeez Sayeed, for involvement in the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. Given the lack of action by Pakistani authorities, should India take the law into its hands and target Sayeed and his associates for the assault ?

Or as Greg Scoblete says in the Real World Compass blog, what if Iran develops the capability to fly drones of its own and blows up the suburban Virginia home of a CIA official that is suspects is  instigating violence in Iran, how will America react ?

Surely it is not going to say this is police action, but an act of war, or at the very least a terrorist strike on the homeland.

The U.S. leads the world in the use of unmanned aircraft for warfare by a distance, but it can’t be very long before other nations scale up their capabilities in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as they are also  known.

The drone technology may be sophisticated, but it can be reverse-engineered and replicated (the Chinese are reportedly already doing it). Forty countries already have UAVs in their arsenals, as do reportedly non-state actors such as Hezbollah. Today the U.S.  is able to fly its drones over Waziristan and Yemen, but it is not inconceivable that in the future others too might be able to fly their drones over New York and Washington.

Indeed, Pakistan – which has taken the highest number of drone strikes in recent years – is itself asking for these aircraft both for surveillance and to carry out covert warfare.  America has so far refused.

http://blogs.reuters.com/afghanistan/2011/07/05/drone-strikes-as-police-work-not-an-act-of-war/

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South Asia
Jul 14, 2011 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG14Df01.html 
 

Pakistan bristles at failed label


By Dinesh Sharma


Pakistan may be taking a deleterious turn, especially as the United States plans to pull out of Afghanistan by 2012 and threatens to withdraw military aid from the country, but its media has reacted indignantly to claims that put it on the same scale as the poorest African countries.

Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace declared Pakistan a near failed state (translated in Urdu "nakam riyasat"). In a June 21 ranking, Pakistan was placed 12th after many African underdeveloped nations (eg, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast and Guinea), disaster-prone Haiti, and the war-torn countries of Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a whole host of measures - demographic pressures, flow of refugees, ethnic group conflict, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, de-legitimization of the state, lack of public service, human rights, security, external intervention and factionalized elites - things are going from bad to worse in Pakistan. But the local media has reacted defiantly to the country being lumped together with some of the poorest, tribal African nations carved out by the West at the end of colonialism. Pakistan nakam riyasat nahin (Pakistan is not a failed state), declared a popular Urdu-language blogger.

According to Policy Matters on the Urdu language Awaz-TV, Pakistan is a "functioning state", notwithstanding all of the mounting global challenges. "Pakistan is a melting pot of global fault lines," claimed Sartaj Aziz, vice chancellor of Beaconhouse National University. The negative undercurrents of the "war on terror" conspired to produce security threats both within and across the AfPak border, obstructing the daily functioning of the state, Aziz said..

Likewise, news on July 10 that US will suspend US$800 million of military aid to Pakistan was received with indifference and defiant resolve in the Pakistani media. Major General Athar Abbas, the chief spokesman of the Pakistan military, reportedly received no formal notification of any cuts. He further noted that army chief General Ashfaq Kiani had already made it clear that the reimbursements in cash from the US, known as Coalition Support Funds, must be directed to the civilian government where the need is greater.

"We have conducted our [anti-extremist] military operations without external support or assistance," the Pakistani military authorities said on hearing the news. Pakistani authorities also believe that the reports coming out of the US are intended to undermine Pakistan's military organizations. Pakistan may have suddenly felt orphaned by the US, but only momentarily, before lapsing into a defiant stance.

A recent report from the New York-based Asia Society, Pakistan 2020: A Vision for Building the Future, suggested that the cutting of foreign aid might be the best course of action for creating more transparency within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the military. Headed by Hassan Abbas of Columbia University, the report documents how most of the aid has rarely reached local populations who need it the most.

India immediately accepted the news with praise that America was tightening the foreign aid noose around Pakistan. "It is not desirable that this region had to be heavily armed by the US, which will upset the equilibrium in the region itself ... To that extent, India welcomes this step," said India's External Affairs Minister S M Krishna.

The Pakistani military may now turn to China, its long-term partner and neighbor in military strategy. According to a report in the International Business Times on July 11, this is indeed the case: "While China's relationship is very different from that of the US - it is the single-largest arms supplier to Pakistan - having another powerful ally may only benefit Pakistan from a geopolitical point of view ... As the relationship now deteriorates and suspicions are increasing, China can help support Pakistan and at the same time as it enlarges its sphere of influence in the Asian Pacific region."

The increasingly tense relationship between the US and Pakistan became even more contentious as US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen disclosed in a Pentagon briefing on July 7 that the ISI and the military had a hand in the killing of the Asia Times Online journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.

A few days later, the Pakistani government issued a strong rebuke, calling it an "extremely irresponsible and unfortunate statement". Clearly, the level of cooperation between the two countries seems to have hit a roadblock as both countries are trying to figure out their private and public postures in the post-Osama bin Laden world.

The news seemed to take an Orwellian turn as Pakistan asked the US to share intelligence on the whereabouts of new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri after US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he believed Zawahiri was hiding in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Then we learned that the Central Intelligence Agency ran a vaccination program in Abbottabad as a covert means to prepare for the raid that hunted Bin Laden, with the hopes of capturing genetic material to confirm his identity.

Which direction will Pakistan take as the US assumes a less active role in the AfPak region? Will it go the way of Somalia, as a Pakistani-American friend suggested to me recently? Somalia ranks at the top of the failed state index. Or will it try to emulate Bangladesh, a people's republic with a vibrant Muslim population and a civil society?

When I discussed these future scenarios with Dr Arturo Munoz at RAND, he suggested that civil society in Pakistan was still not strong enough to take head-on either the military establishment or the clerical mullahs. The confluence of these two forces - religious and militaristic - within the ISI may define the rogue elements of the Pakistani intelligence community.

According to Munoz, Pakistan will not become another Somalia. The West will hold Pakistan back from sliding down that treacherous path. Pakistan, after all, is a nuclear state, something the government has used as a bargaining chip to elicit more support and aid over the years.

Furthermore, the history of Pakistan has shown that the military intervenes at the eleventh hour to take the law into its own hands. Perhaps, this is the most likely scenario if the situation deteriorates. The military will step in and put in place a curfew or institute a shoot-on-sight order, as it did in the city of Karachi last week when violence broke out between political factions. On July 10, the Rangers, a type of paramilitary force, took control of several colonies within the city.

As former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has said, the three As that run Pakistan are: Allah, America and the Army. Allah is far away. America is far away too, and often ignorant. Thus, the Army must hold the country together for the foreseeable future.

Pakistan will most likely become a client state of China to meet its security and infrastructure needs. The power vacuum left by the US and foreign forces in Afghanistan will be filled by regional powers vying for greater leverage in the AfPak region. It's an open question whether China can match the financial and technological aid provided by the US.

According to Arif Jamal, the author of Shadow War, if Americans completely withdraw support, which is highly unlikely, the West will follow suit.

"Pakistan has many avenues for growth through China, Russia, India and Iran," said Shaikh Rasheed, a Pakistani politician. The Iran-Pakistan pipeline is the latest example of this development, as recently described by Pepe Escobar in Asia Times Online. (See Pakistan 'punished' in Pipelineistan July 13.

For almost 40 years, China has transferred to Pakistan a whole set of nuclear technologies as it has now begun to transfer green technologies, according to David Sanger, the author of The Inheritance.

"Pakistan is already exporting technology to many parts of Africa. How can we be declared a failed state next to them?" asked Shaikh Rasheed, who takes the patriotic view of the state or watan, overlooking many internal problems.

As Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution suggested in January, Pakistan is crucial to the continuing stability and growth of the Asian hemisphere for several reasons: threats of nuclear proliferation, state sponsored jihadi groups, identity disputes with India, a stagnating economy and poor demographic indicators.

Jamal agrees that due to these lagging social and economic indicators, Pakistan is on its way to becoming a failing state, where the economic future looks bleak. Most Pakistani politicians and academics may not publicly admit this as they are in a state of denial and defiance, said Jamal.

The world cannot afford to have two contiguous, near failed states, Pakistan and Afghanistan, turning into defiant orphan states and becoming safe havens for terrorism again.

"Before writing Pakistan off as the hopelessly failed state that its critics believe it to be, Washington may have one last opportunity to ensure that this troubled state will not become America's biggest foreign policy problem ..." warned Cohen. As Washington is beginning to lose its patience, that window of opportunity may be closing.

Dinesh Sharma is the author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: the Making of a Global President (ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2011).
 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MG14Df01.html
 

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Pakistan: US drone attacks kill 61 in 24 hours


by Malik Mumtaz & Irfan Burki


Deadly drone attacks kill 61 in 24 hours Foreign, Punjabi militants among dead

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=7377&Cat=13&dt=7/13/2011

MIRAMSHAH/WANA: Twenty-four more people, including local and foreign militants, were killed and nine others injured in three separate drone attacks in South Waziristan and North Waziristan on Tuesday. Some news agencies and private television channels reported that the death toll in the drone strikes during the last 24 hours had reached 61.

Tribal sources in South and North Waziristan, where the government in the past signed peace accords with local Taliban leaders and tribes, reported an unprecedented rise in flights by the US spy planes. Official and tribal sources said in the first attack, a drone fired seven missiles at suspected hideouts of militants in the Malik Shahi village in Birmal Tehsil of South Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan’s Paktika province.

Eight people, mostly local and foreign militants, were killed in the attack. Tribal sources said the drone pounded a house where a group of Punjabi Taliban and tribal fighters were residing. There were also reports that some foreign fighters were among the dead and wounded. Tribal sources said some Arab nationals were present in the house during the attack. There was no immediate information about the nationality of the foreign militants.

Another 16 people, some of them stated to be tribal militants, were killed and nine others injured in two different missile attacks by the CIA-operated US drones in North Waziristan. Tribal sources said a drone fired six missiles, hitting a house in Dre Nishtar area in the mountainous Shawal valley in North Waziristan. There were reports that a group of tribal militants was staying in the house.

A house and two double-cabin pickup trucks were reportedly destroyed while another house located near the suspected compound of the militants was partially damaged in the attack. Tribesmen claimed that local villagers were killed and injured in the attack in Shawal valley.

In another attack, a drone fired two missiles, hitting a car in the Neway Adda village of Dattakhel area near the Afghan border. Both official and tribal sources said a local villager driving his personal car came under drone attack. Villagers said only body parts of the tribesman were collected from the spot of the attack.

This was the fourth attack during the past 24 hours by US spy planes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Earlier, US drones on Monday night fired 12 missiles at two houses and killed 25 militants in the Gorweek area of North Waziristan near the Afghan border. Pakistani security officials and Taliban sources said the drones had fired 12 missiles at a large compound and two pickup trucks, reportedly used by the Afghan Taliban and their foreign guest fighters.


Source

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=7377&Cat=13&dt=7/13/2011


 

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Pakistan - Chemical being used in drone attacks: Ajmal Khan

Associated Press of Pakistan

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79535&hd=&size=1&l=e

ISLAMABAD, July 13, 2011 (APP): Senior Vice President of Pakistan Muslim League(Q) Ajmal Khan Wazir on Wednesday said that lethal chemicals were being used in drone attacks resulting in outbreak of different diseases in Waziristan and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).Addressing a press conference at National Press Club, flanked by local leadership of PML-Q from Waziristan, he said it was sheer violation of human rights as well as international laws and conventions, adding that the drone attacks also undermining country’s sovereignty.

He called upon the Pakistan government, USA, United Nations and international community to play their due role in bringing an end to the drone attacks inside Pakistan.

Ajmal Wazir said that during the last 24 hours more than four drone attacks were reported from North and South Waziristan and other areas of FATA but neither the government nor the political parties said a word to condemn these attacks.

He informed that skin and eyes infections are common diseases in drone attacked areas, the new born babies were having pimples on their skins while a non curable infection had developed in the wounds of the injured persons.

Wazir called for media and human rights organizations’ access to North and South Waziristan and FATA areas so that the facts could be revealed to the people.

He said the government and the political parties should have to raise their voice against this violation of country’s sovereignty as well as human rights.

To a question, he acknowledged that the drone attacks were permitted during Musharraf government, but said that it was dictatorship at that time.

He said PML-Q was not doing politics on the issue of drone attacks rather it has a firm stance that these are counterproductive and violation of country’s sovereignty.

He said resignation is not a solution of any issue, the PML-Q would continue its fighting and protest against the drone attacks at every forum.


http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79535&hd=&size=1&l=e


 

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Gunboats and Gurkhas in the American Imperium


A complicit government in Pakistan, enabled by US interlocutors, continues to support US drone strikes.


By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

July 14, 2011 "Al Jazeera" - -  Meet Resham Khan. The 52-year-old shepherd was brought on a stretcher to a psychiatric hospital in Islamabad in January, traumatized and unable to speak. The father of six witnessed 15 members of his extended family perish last June when a US drone attacked a funeral procession in his native North Waziristan. The atrocity has left him mute and emotionally paralyzed, his vacant eyes staring into the distance. He gave up on food and drink in the months following the attack; shortly afterward, the pious Muslim gave up on prayer too. His condition also prevented him from looking after his ailing mother who died soon thereafter. And his surviving children have suffered. When the Reuters journalist finally got him to talk, one of the few things he said was 'Stop the drone attacks.'

Kareem Khan, too, has suffered. On December 31, 2009, his son Zaenullah Khan and his brother Asif Iqbal were among the three people killed in a US drone attack which destroyed their home in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. Kareem's absence spared him the sight of his mutilated family; and unlike the helpless shepherd, he had the wherewithal to demand justice. In November 2010, his lawyer, Barrister Shahzad Akbar served legal notices to the CIA station chief Jonathan Banks, former Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and former Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta for $500 million in damages.  Banks, who was in Pakistan on a business visa, took fright and soon fled the scene, and the US government was so terrified of the legal challenge that last month it denied a visa to Barrister Akbar to travel to the US. More survivors have since come forward demanding justice.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani state hasn't just forsaken the people of FATA, it has actively aided the slaughter and abetted the cover-up. After each drone strike, the Pakistani military rushes out an official who 'on the condition of anonymity' announces that all the dead were 'militants'. The press dutifully reports the numbers without asking why the claim should be trusted when the state has made no effort to confirm the identity of the dead. The numbers are subsequently laundered by Washington-based think-tanks and recycled back to the media. The media then report the stats with attribution to a 'foundation' or an 'institute', giving them a pseudo-academic pedigree.

In addition, the human rights industry is either AWOL or has actively abetted the programme. In a recent appearance on Democracy Now!, the head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth justified the attacks while waxing idealistic about the rule of law. Most have taken their cue from Harold Koh -- Obama's own John Yoo -- who has declared the extrajudicial murder of the indigent thousands of miles from home 'legitimate self defence'. The terrorized population now finds itself silenced, adrift between the Scylla of a mercenary state complicit in their oppression and the Charybdis of comprador hacks erasing their suffering.

The establishment

In William Faulkner's modernist masterpiece The Sound and the Fury, the tradition-bound Southerner Quentin Compson is so shamed by his sister's promiscuity that he decides it would be less dishonourable to falsely confess to incest than to let the world know of her shame. In a similar vein on June 18, 2004, when a US Predator drone killed the Wazir chieftain Nek Muhammad, the Pakistani government claimed responsibility for the attack rather than admit that its sovereignty had been breached by a foreign power. For the next few years the same policy persisted where Pakistan would claim responsibility for attacks carried out by the US, some of which killed a large number of civilians.

In Faulkner's story Compson's troubled conscience eventually leads him to suicide; but in Pakistan, the troubled frontier has yielded the suicide bomber whose targets are often civilians with no role in the betrayal. In a short-sighted attempt to retain legitimacy, the state has endangered its citizens twice over, first by sanctioning their murder by US drones and then by exposing soldiers and civilians to the predictable blowback.

The drone attacks in Pakistan which started while Pervez Musharraf was president intensified immediately on his departure. There were a total of 17 drone strikes during his presidency which ended on August 18, 2008. Since then, there have been 236. In a 2009 interview with Seymour Hersh, Musharraf confessed to being 'troubled' by this development. But his reservations had less to do with the human cost of the attacks than with the resulting perception of the Pakistani state's increasing impotence. After his request for the transfer of the drones to Pakistani control was turned down, Musharraf said he had to beg the US officials to 'just say publicly that you're giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.'

If Musharraf had the capacity to be troubled, his successor has proved immune to such sentiment. Indeed, Asif Ali Zardari – 'Mr. Ten Percent' to Pakistanis, 'widower Bhutto' to everyone else – is an unabashed proponent of collective punishment. In May 2009, after over two million people had been driven from their homes by the Pakistani Army's major counter-insurgency operation in Swat, Zardari pronounced himself untroubled by the fact that the refugees were languishing in the squalor of teeming camps in the sweltering heat of the plains. Seymour Hersh reported that Zardari 'insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson.'

It was thus unsurprising when a US embassy cable surfaced showing Zardari encouraging the US to continue its drone strikes. 'Collateral damage worries you Americans,' he said. 'It does not worry me.' His Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was equally sanguine. 'I don't care if they do it as long as they get the right people,' he said. 'We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.'

Meanwhile, discontent has been seeping from the files into the ranks of the Pakistani military. Few relish the idea of serving as Gurkhas for the American empire or of dying fighting their own people. But the brass has remained by and large impervious, sometimes engaging in embarrassing attempts to deflect criticism from their complicity. In a media briefing on March 8, Major Gen Ghayur Mehmud tried to justify the US drone policy by claiming that the majority of those killed were militants. Other than furnishing hawks in Islamabad and Washington with a factoid, the briefing achieved little beyond further tarnishing the army's image. The army quickly rushed out its spokesman Major General Athar Abbas to claim that the general had been quoted out of context.

The military's embarrassment was compounded when days later, on March 17, a drone massacred 45 tribesmen, including children, gathered for a jirga (tribal council) to resolve a local dispute in Dattakhel, North Waziristan. The incident happened only a day after the ISI had facilitated the release of Raymond Davis, a US mercenary who had murdered two young men widely believed to be ISI assets. The attack finally compelled Pakistan's military chief General Ashfaq Kayani to condemn the US for 'carelessly and callously' targeting civilians, in 'complete violation of human rights'. Kayani should know about violations of human rights since in an interview with Brian Cloughley he had himself recounted an incident in 2005 when a drone slaughtered a group of tribesmen gathered in a village to watch a performing monkey.

As with Zardari and Gilani, however, Kayani's words were geared mainly for public consumption. Since the incident, no attempt has been made to pressure the US by cutting off NATO's main supply arteries which run through Pakistan. The drone attacks have continued unabated, killing many more, including women and children. The rest of Pakistan's political establishment has been equally hypocritical, keeping a large gap between word and deed. Though all major parties in the parliament pronounce themselves opposed to the drones, none has taken any tangible action (except for an inconsequential resolution passed in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly).

The intelligentsia

WATCH VIDEO :


US to stop using Pakistani airbase for drone attacks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JARvd1_Ebg&feature=player_embedded
 
A small section of the Pakistani intelligentsia, mainly writing for the English language press, approves of the drone attacks. These are the only voices that the western media generally picks up. Their support is predicated on the drones' supposed accuracy and popularity. All these claims, without exception, rely on a single source: the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a letter head organization of dubious provenance. Its public face, Farhat Taj, is a zany middle-aged graduate student with a reputation for preposterous claims based on unnamed – many suspect invented – interlocutors. But neither the source's credibility nor common sense has proved a barrier to Pakistan's liberal hawks invoking its authority to support their calls for greater violence.

Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn, makes a case for 'more drone attacks, not less.'  Husain (who once served on the advisory board of an Israel lobby astroturf operation campaigning for the normalization of relations between Pakistan and Israel) bases his claim on the pronouncements of 'Dr Farhat Taj'. (The curious elevation of Taj's status to 'Dr' suggests that Husain is aware he is skating on thin ice.) He quotes her as saying that the 'ordinary people in FATA are delighted' by and 'feel comfortable with the drone attacks'. 'They would welcome anyone,' she adds, 'Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil to rid them of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.' To Husain, this 'makes perfect sense'. And sceptics -- such as the media, Imran Khan, or two-thirds of the Pakistani public -- are on the other hand merely 'acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists.'

Farrukh Saleem, a ruling party courtier who, in keeping with the 'war on terror' zeitgeist, has reinvented himself as a defence analyst, references a poll – which does not mention drones – to conclude that the strikes can't be an issue for 92 percent of Pakistanis because they listed inflation, terrorism and unemployment as the biggest challenges facing them. As with all drone apologia, Saleem then turns to the Aryana Institute, albeit with a novel attribution. Though the Aryana 'study' was published in the very paper Saleem is writing for, he curiously prefaces its claims with 'according to the BBC,' presumably to give it the gravitas it would otherwise lack. The drones, he argues, are considered accurate by 'around 80 percent of people' in FATA -- a fact further confirmed by general Ghayyur Mehmood of the 7th Infantry Division, a unit so illustrious that among its 'notable commanders are General Yahya Khan'. Yahya Khan is of course notable among other things for overseeing the mass slaughter of civilians during Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971.

More circumspect, yet equally firm in his support of the drones is Pervez Hoodbhoy, a onetime anti-nuclear activist who more recently has been hosting what the BBC described as the 'ideas' arm of the 'war on terror', a British Foreign Office-funded propaganda operation featuring the controversial Quilliam Foundation. Hoodhboy has argued that 'most tribals actually welcome the drone attacks'. The claim is inevitably referenced to Farhat Taj, whom Hoodbhoy also quotes as saying: 'In Waziristan people get really upset when there are no drone attacks.' After registering some doubt as to whether this statement can be 'fully believed,' he proceeds to affirm it because many of his FATA students 'want the beasts killed' (In another place he also made a reference to the 'militant fanaticism of Pathan tribals'). Having earlier acknowledged the human cost of the attacks, evidently no price is too high for Hoodbhoy's beasticide.

Hoodbhoy claims that he has to base his argument on evidence whose credibility he himself cannot vouch for because a 'scientific survey of attitudes in FATA in today's dangerous circumstances is impossible'. This bespeaks laziness or dishonesty because a scientific survey of attitudes had indeed been conducted and widely reported. Pakistan's liberal hawks chose to ignore it because its findings did not accord with the worldview they had been projecting on the citizens of FATA. The poll conducted by the New America Foundation (itself a booster of the drone war) and Terror Free Tomorrow found 76 percent of the respondents opposed to drone attacks (only 16 percent deemed them accurate), 87 percent opposed to US military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and that 59 percent consider suicide bombings against the US military justified. 

So does that make them 'cheerleaders for these terrorists' as the hawks would have it? Not quite. The same poll also found 77 percent opposed to the presence of Al Qaeda in the region, 69 percent opposed to the Pakistani Taliban, and 61 percent to the Afghan Taliban. However, at the same time four times as many identified the US as most responsible for the violence compared to the Pakistani Taliban. It also found 83 percent opposition to suicide bombings against the Pakistani military and police.

But perhaps most disturbingly for the liberal hawks, the poll also revealed that the most popular political party in the region was the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the one party that has taken the most uncompromising line against the drone attacks. Its leader, the former cricketing legend Imran Khan, is a hate figure among Pakistani liberal hawks and was declared 'one of the forces of darkness' by their tribune Fahat Taj. Darkness has evidently claimed wider territory since, according to a June 2011 Pew survey, at 68 percent the antiwar Khan has the highest approval rating of any public figure in Pakistan.

Squirters and Bugsplat

The drone war has developed its own slang. The scared humans on the ground running for cover are labelled 'squirters.' Successful attacks are called 'bugsplats'. The likeness with extermination of insects is evidently not lost on the drone warriors. Many drone operators have commented on its 'antiseptic' nature and the emotional detachment it engenders. "It's like a video game," said one to Peter Singer, author of Wired for War, "It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's f**king cool."

The few journalists who have bothered to investigate what it is like to be on the receiving end of these death machines –Graeme Smith of Globe and Mail, for example – have discovered traumatized villagers spending their meagre resources on psychiatric medicine. Sedatives by night, anti-depressants by day – and of whatever remains, most is expended on frequent visits to Peshawar for psychiatric treatment. The price of some anti-depressants has risen six-fold according to Smith, and the consumption of sedatives has increased by 30 to 40 percent. The anxiety siezes all, and most find the constant fear of death worse than dying. Even animals sense the terror. 'The buffalo get skittish,' one FATA resident told Smith, 'they look at the sky and make noises like they're weeping.'

It is now common practice for drones to attack funerals, even rescuers. People, as a result, are too scared to rescue survivors lest they fall prey to a secondary attack, as so many have. At times the drones deliberately terrorize villages by flying very low, often in packs. A recent survey by the NGO Horizon found that caught between the violence above and below, up to 80 percent of Waziristan residents suffer from mental illness, especially children. (Not everyone is hostile to these strategies however. It was an unnamed Pakistani official who, according to an embassy cable, first encouraged the US to launch secondary strikes to target rescuers. It is also cheered by the ever-reliable Taj, who exclaimed that the 'new drone attack strategy is brilliant'.)

But these are uncomfortable truths which conflict with the image of an antiseptic war promoted by hawks both in Islamabad and Washington. It is so much easier to believe in the insane fancies of Farhat Taj. Who doesn't like a bloodless war? (It is also worth noting that in the listing for all the incidents noted above the New America Foundation database does not record a single civilian death!)

Those who had been relying on the US, economically weakened and chastened by recent military setbacks, to adopt a less interventionist policy would be disappointed. As Andrew Bacevich, the ablest chronicler of US military strategy, observed in his prophetic American Empire, since the mid-1990s the US has tried to bypass constraints on interventionism by adopting a policy of 'gunboats and gurkhas' – the use of airpower and mercenaries in place of resource-intensive military deployment. A decade later, the costs have been reduced further by replacing piloted aircraft with unmanned drones and American mercenaries with foreign gurkhas. Since 2002, the US has given Pakistan $13 billion in military aid, nearly the same amount it spends on military operations in Afghanistan in a single month – a bargain, no doubt. The US leadership can also be confident that unlike a dead American GI, the 2,795 Pakistani soldiers killed and the 8,671 wounded fighting its war will never come to haunt it in an election. Gunboats and gurkhas may yet extend the American empire's lease on life.
 
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a Glasgow-based sociologist and the co-editor of Pulsemedia.org. He can be reached at idrees@pulsemedia.org. You can follow him on Twitter: @im_pulse.
   
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28581.htm

 
 

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Pakistan : Imran Khan- led PTI calls for military action against drone attacks


ANI

Islamabad, July 14, 2011(ANI): The Pakistan Tehrik-e- Insaf (PTI) has said the United States-led drone attacks in the tribal areas were unacceptable and tantamount to state terrorism against Pakistani citizens and added that it was time for the government to order military action against such strikes. TI Vice-President for Policy Planning, National Security and Foreign Affairs Dr. Shireen Mazari regretted that during the past 24 hours, over 60 people had been killed in these drone attacks.

She welcomed the Pakistan military's decision to combat terrorism using national resources.

However, she pointed out that terrorism could be successfully combated with the help of a comprehensive national counter-terrorism policy embracing political, economic and military aspects of the problem.

"Unfortunately, there has been no effort to have a cohesive and coordinated counter-terrorism policy to date since the rulers have been busy fulfilling the US agenda and toeing the US unsuccessful and misnamed 'war on terror'. It is time to move beyond cheap rhetoric and prove one's resolve by deeds," the News quoted her, as saying.


Source

http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/230315


"That the Pakistani state is continuing to be a party to the killing of its own people despite the direct political, diplomatic and military assault now launched on Pakistan itself by the US, is a shameful reflection of the inability of the Pakistani rulers to extricate themselves from the US web of destruction, which is rapidly targeting Pakistan on all fronts," she added.

"It is time Pakistan stopped giving a blank cheque to America to kill Pakistanis at will and destroy the country," she concluded. (ANI)





 

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Obama’s Bush-League World

Is the Obama National Security Team a Pilotless Drone?


BY Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch, July 13, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175416/

George W. who?  I mean, the guy is so over.  He turned the big six-five the other day and it was barely a footnote in the news.  And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick.  Condoleezza Rice?  She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it's as if she's been wiped from history, too?  As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February and it hit the bestseller lists, but a few months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised?  They were wrong about Afghanistan.  They were wrong about Iraq.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.  They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing.  The country imploded economically while they were at the helm.  Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff.  In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies.  (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.)  Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you'll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t.  It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word "homeland," both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever; or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie; or Guantanamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close; or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating; or the National Security Agency’s surveillance and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing.  No, it's scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over.  Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.

Yes, Obama’s national security officials threw that term to the dogs back in 2009, and now pursue a no-name global strategy that’s meant not to remind you of the Bush era.  Recently, the White House released an unclassified summary of its 2011 "National Strategy for Counterterrorism," a 19-page document in prose only a giant bureaucracy with a desire to be impenetrable could produce.  (Don’t bother to read it.  I read it for you.)  If it makes a feeble attempt to put a little rhetorical space between Obama-style counterterrorism and what the Bush administration was doing, it still manages to send one overwhelming message: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., are still striding amongst us, carrying big sticks and with that same crazed look in their eyes.

The Global War on Terror (or GWOT in acronym-crazed Washington) was the bastard spawn of the disorientation and soaring hubris of the days after the 9/11 attacks, which set afire the delusional geopolitical dreams of Bush, Cheney, their top national security officials, and their neocon supporters.  And here’s the saddest thing: the Bush administration’s most extreme ideas when it comes to GWOT are now the humdrum norm of Obama administration policies -- and hardly anyone thinks it’s worth a comment.

A History Lesson from Hell

It’s easy to forget just how quickly GWOT was upon us or how strange it really was.  On the night of September 11, 2001, addressing the nation, President Bush first spoke of winning "the war against terrorism."  Nine days later, in an address to a joint session of Congress, the phrase "war on terror" was already being expanded.  "Our war on terror," Bush said, "begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.  It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

In those early days, there were already clues aplenty as to which way the wind was gusting in Washington.  Top administration officials immediately made it plain that a single yardstick was to measure planetary behavior from then on: Were you "with us or against us"?  From the Gulf of Guinea to Central Asia, that question would reveal everything worth knowing, and terror would be its measure.   

As the New York Times reported on September 14th, Bush’s top officials had "cast aside diplomatic niceties" and were giving Arab countries and "the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism or face the certain prospect of death and destruction."  According to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage took that message directly to his country’s intelligence director: either ally with Washington in the fight against al-Qaeda, or prepare to be bombed "back to the Stone Age," as Armitage reportedly put it.

Global War on Terror?  They weren’t exaggerating.  These were people shocked by what had happened to iconic buildings in "the homeland" and overawed by what they imagined to be the all-conquering power of the U.S. military.  In their fever dreams, they thought that this was their moment and the apocalyptic winds of history were at their backs.  And they weren’t hiding where they wanted it to blow them either.  That was why they tried to come up with names to replace GWOT -- World War IV (the third was the Cold War) and the Long War being two of them -- that would be even blunter about their desire to plunge us into a situation from which none of us would emerge in our lifetimes.  But to the extent anything stuck, GWOT did.

And if everything is in a name, then the significance of that one wasn’t hard to grasp.  Bush’s national security folks focused on an area that they termed "the arc of instability."  It stretched from North Africa to the Chinese border, conveniently sweeping through the major oil lands of the planet.  They would later dub it "The Greater Middle East."  In that vast region, they were ready to declare hunting season open and they would be the ones to hand out the hunting licenses.

Within weeks of 9/11, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were speaking of this vast region as a global "swamp," an earthly miasma that they were going to "drain" of terrorists.  As the U.S. military had declared whole areas of enemy-controled rural Vietnam "free fire zones" in the 1960s, so they were going to turn much of the planet into such a zone, a region where no national boundary, no claim of sovereignty would stop them from taking out whomever (or whatever government) they cared to.

Within days of 9/11, administration officials let it be known that, in their war, they were preparing to target terrorist groups in at least 60 countries.  And if they were that blunt in public, in private they were exuberantly extreme.  Top officials spoke with gusto about "taking off the gloves" or "the shackles" (the ones, as they saw it, that Congress had placed on the executive branch and the intelligence community in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair).

As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, in a "Presidential Finding" on September 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally.  By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the "Worldwide Attack Matrix."  According to Suskind, it already "detailed operations [to come] against terrorists in 80 countries."

In other words, with less than 200 countries on the planet, the president had declared open season on nearly half of them.  Of course, the Pentagon wasn’t about to be left out while the CIA was given the run of the globe.  Soon enough, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld began building up an enormous CIA-style secret army of elite special operations forces within the military.  By the end of the Bush years, these had reportedly been deployed in -- don’t be surprised -- 60 countries. In the Obama era, that number expanded to 75 -- mighty close to the 80 in the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

And one more thing, there was a new weapon in the world, the perfect weapon to make mincemeat of all boundaries and a mockery of national sovereignty and international law (with little obvious danger to us): the pilotless drone.  Surveillance drones already in existence were quickly armed with missiles and bombs and, in November 2002, one of these was sent out on the first CIA robot assassination mission -- to Yemen, where six al-Qaeda suspects in a vehicle were obliterated without a by-your-leave to anyone.

CT to the Horizon

That CIA strike launched the drone wars, which are now a perfectly humdrum part of our American world of war.  Only recently, the Obama administration leaked news that it was intensifying its military-run war against al-Qaeda in Yemen by bringing the CIA into the action.  The Agency is now to build a base for its drone air wing somewhere in the Middle East to hunt Yemeni terrorists (and assumedly those elsewhere in the region as well).  Yemen functionally has no government to cooperate with, but in pure Bushian fashion, who cares?

Similarly, as June ended, unnamed American officials leaked the news that, for the first time, a U.S. military drone had conducted a strike against al-Shabab militants in Somalia, with the implication that this was a "war" that would also be intensifying.  At about the same time, curious reports emerged from Pakistan, where the CIA has been conducting an escalating drone war since 2004 (strikes viewed "negatively" by 97% of Pakistanis, according to a recent Pew poll).  Top Pakistani officials were threatening to shut down the Agency’s drone operations at Shamsi air base in Baluchistan.  Shamsi is the biggest of the three borrowed Pakistani bases from which the CIA secretly launches its drones.  The Obama administration responded bluntly.  White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan insisted that, whatever happened, the U.S. would continue to "deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida" in the Pakistani tribal areas.

As Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog summed things up, "The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help." In other words, permission from a beleaguered local ally might be nice, but it isn’t a conceptual necessity.  (And in any case, CIA flights from Shamsi still evidently continue uninterrupted.)

In other words, if Bush’s crew is long gone, the world they willed us is alive and well.  After all, there are reasonable odds that, on the day you read this piece, somewhere in the free-fire zone of the Greater Middle East, a drone "piloted" from an air base in the western United States or perhaps a secret "suburban facility" near Langley, Virginia, will act as judge, jury, and executioner somewhere in the "arc of instability."  It will take out a terrorist suspect or suspects, or a set of civilians mistaken for terrorists, or a "target" someone in Washington didn’t like, or that one of our allies-cum-intelligence-assets had it in for, or perhaps a mix of all of the above.  We can't be sure how many countries American drones, military or CIA, are patrolling, but in at least six of them -- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq -- they have launched strikes in recent years that have killed more "suspects" than ever died in the 9/11 attacks.

And there is more -- possibly much more -- to come.  In late June, the Obama administration posted that unclassified summary of its 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism at the White House website.  It's a document that carefully avoids using the the term "war on terror," even though counterterrorism advisor Brennan did admit that the document "tracked closely with the goals" of the Bush administration.

The document tries to argue that, when it comes to counterterrorism (or CT), the Obama administration has actually pulled back somewhat from the expansiveness of Bush-era GWOT thinking.  We are now, it insists, only going after "al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents," not every "terror group" on the planet.   But here’s the curious thing: when you check out its "areas of focus," other than "the Homeland" (always capitalized as if our country were the United States of Homeland), what you find is an expanded version of the Bush global target zone, including the Maghreb and Sahel (northern Africa), East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, South Asia, Central Asia, and -- thrown in for good measure -- Southeast Asia.  In most of those areas, Bush-style hunting season is evidently still open.

If you consider deeds, not words, when it comes to drones the arc of instability is expanding; and based on the new counterterrorism document, the next place for our robotic assassins to cross borders in search of targets could be the Maghreb and Sahel.  There, we’re told, al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with roots in Algeria, but operatives in northern Mali, among other places, potentially threatens "U.S. citizens and interests in the region."

Here’s how the document puts the matter in its classically bureaucratese version of English:

"[W]e must therefore pursue near-term efforts and at times more targeted approaches that directly counter AQIM and its enabling elements.  We must work actively to contain, disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQIM as logical steps on the path to defeating the group.  As appropriate, the United States will use its CT tools, weighing the costs and benefits of its approach in the context of regional dynamics and perceptions and the actions and capabilities of its partners in the region..."

That may not sound so ominous, but best guess: the Global War on Terror is soon likely to be on the march across North Africa, heading south.  And recent Obama national security appointments only emphasize how much the drone wars are on Washington’s future agenda.  After all, Leon Panetta, the man who, since 2009, ran the CIA’s drone wars, has moved over to the Pentagon as secretary of defense; while Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus, the war commander who loosed American air power (including drone power) in a massive way in Afghanistan, is moving on to the CIA.

On his first visit to South Asia as secretary of defense, Panetta made the claim that Washington was "within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda."  Perhaps it won’t surprise you that such news signals not a winding down, but a ratcheting up, of the Global War on Terror.  Panetta, as Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported, "hinted of more to come, saying he would redouble efforts by the military and the spy agency to work together on counterterrorism missions outside the traditional war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq."

More to come, as two men switching their "civilian" and military roles partner up.  Count on drone-factory assembly lines to rev up as well, and the military’s special operations forces to be in expansion mode.  And note that by the penultimate page of that CT strategy summary, the administration has left al-Qaeda behind and is muttering in bureau-speak about Hizballah and Hamas, Iran and Syria ("active sponsors of terrorism"), and even the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

On the Bush administration's watch, the U.S. blew a gasket, American power went into decline, and the everyday security of everyday Americans took a major hit.  Still, give them credit.  They were successful on at least one count: they made sure that we’d never stop fighting their war on terror.  In this sense, Obama and his top officials are a drone national security team, carrying out the dreams and fantasies of their predecessors, while Bush and his men (and woman) give lucrative speeches and write books, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175416/

 

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Published on Friday, July 15, 2011 by The Guardian/UK


Campaigners Seek Arrest of Former CIA Legal Chief over Pakistan Drone Attacks


UK human rights lawyer leads bid to have John Rizzo arrested over claims he approved attacks that killed hundreds of people


by Peter Beaumont


http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/15-6

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

Rizzo, who was by his own admission "up to my eyeballs" in approving CIA use of "enhanced interrogation techniques", said in the interview that the CIA operated "a hit list". (Photo: Danita Delimont/Getty Images/Gallo Images)

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

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

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

A first information report, the first step in seeking a prosecution of Rizzo in Pakistan, will be formally lodged early next week at a police station in the capital, Islamabad, on behalf of relatives of two people killed in drone strikes in 2009. The report will also allege Rizzo should be charged with conspiracy to murder a large number of Pakistani citizens.

Now retired, Rizzo, 63, is being pursued after admitting in an interview with the magazine Newsweek that since 2004 he had approved one drone attack order a month on targets in Pakistan, even though the US is not at war with the country.

Rizzo, who was by his own admission "up to my eyeballs" in approving CIA use of "enhanced interrogation techniques", said in the interview that the CIA operated "a hit list". He also asked: "How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?"

Rizzo has also admitted being present while civilian operators conducted drone strikes from their terminals at the CIA headquarters in Virginia.

Although US government lawyers have tried to argue that drone strikes are conducted on a "solid legal basis", some believe the civilians who operate the drones could be classified as "unlawful combatants".

US drone strikes were first launched on Pakistan by George Bush and have been accelerated by Barack Obama.

Much of the intelligence for the attacks is supplied either by the Pakistani military or the ISI, the country's controversial intelligence agency.

Both have blocked journalists and human rights investigators from visiting the tribal areas targeted, preventing independent verification of the numbers killed and their status.

While Stafford Smith of Reprieve estimates around 2,500 civilian deaths, others say the number is closer to 1,000. US sources deny large numbers of civilian deaths and say only a few dozen "non-combatants" have been killed.

While killing civilians in military operations is not illegal under international law unless it is proved to be deliberate, disproportionate or reckless, Stafford Smith believes the nature of the US drone campaign puts it on a different legal footing.

"The US has to follow the laws of war," he said. "The issue here is that this is not a war. There is zero chance, given the current political situation in Pakistan, that we will not get a warrant for Rizzo. The question is what happens next. We can try for extradition and the US will refuse.

"Interpol, I believe, will have to issue a warrant because there is no question that it is a legitimate complaint."

The warrant will be sought on the basis of two test cases. The first centres on an incident on 7 September 2009 when a drone strike hit a compound during Ramadan, brought by a man named Sadaullah who lost both his legs and three relatives in the attack.

The second complaint was brought by Kareem Khan over a strike on 31 December 2009 in the village of Machi Khel in North Waziristan which killed his son and brother.

Both men allege Rizzo was involved in authorising the attack. The CIA refused to comment on the allegations.

The pursuit of Rizzo will further damage US-Pakistani relations, which are already under severe strain following years of drone attacks and the killing of Osama bin Laden in May. Last week the US suspended $800m (£495m) in military aid to Pakistan.

The US launch its first drone strike against a target in Pakistan in 2004, the only one for that year. Last year there were 118 attacks after Obama expanded their use in 2009, while 2011 has so far seen 42.

The use of drones has been sharply criticised both by Pakistani officials as well as international investigators including the UN's special rapporteur Philip Alston who demanded in late 2009 that the US demonstrate that it was not simply running a programme with no accountability that is killing innocent people.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/15-6

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The Needle and the Damage Done: Toxic Fallout From the CIA's Human Shield Operation


by Chris Floyd


July 15, 2011
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2149-the-needle-and-the-damage-done-toxic-fallout-from-the-cias-human-shield-operation.html


When I first saw the stories about the CIA’s super-cunning covert op – setting up a fake vaccination scheme to try to get DNA from Osama bin Laden's children in Abbottabad – I immediately thought: How many innocent people are going to die or suffer needlessly from this unconscionable tainting of medical programmes by Terror War subterfuge? How many people will now turn away from ostensibly genuine humanitarian efforts, wary of being used by foreign spies infiltrating their country? How many more genuine medical relief and health care workers will now be targeted as agents of militarist agendas in troubled lands already rightly suspicious of the murderous spy games being played in their midst?

Now Médecins Sans Frontières has voiced the same concerns, in public blast on Thursday which called the CIA's toying with the lives and health of vulnerable children "grave manipulation of the medical act."

Of course, the story has already been forgotten in the American media echo chamber, now solely obsessed with the epic battle between Obama and the Republicans to see who can degrade the largest number of American lives and usher in oligarchic rule the fastest. So we'll let the Guardian re-set the scene:

The CIA recruited a Pakistani doctor and health visitors before the operation in May that killed Bin Laden in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan, to try to ascertain whether the al-Qaida leader was living in the compound. The doctor, Shakil Afridi, set up a vaccination drive for Hepatitis B in the town in order to try to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound and obtain DNA samples from those living there. ..

However, on the ground in Abbottabad the Guardian discovered that while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on, in April this year, to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived.

These vaccines are not effective unless the full course of doses is administered. The CIA thus suborned genuine medical professionals, without their knowledge, and then left the children being used as -- dare we say it? -- human shields for the spy agency still at grave risk of contracting Hepatitis B. Having established their front in the poorest part of town, luring in the most vulnerable, they simply "moved on." What of the children of Nawa Sher? Who cares? They're expendable.

The Guardian story spells out the larger implications:

"The risk is that vulnerable communities – anywhere – needing access to essential health services will understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid," said Unni Karunakara, MSF's international president. "The potential consequence is that even basic healthcare, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most."

"It is challenging enough for health agencies and humanitarian aid workers to gain access to, and the trust of, communities, especially populations already sceptical of the motives of any outside assistance," said MSF. "Deceptive use of medical care also endangers those who provide legitimate and essential health services."

The impact of the fake vaccination drive may be keenly felt in Pakistan, where the public already sees an American conspiracy everywhere. Polio campaigns could be at particular risk, as Pakistan has the biggest polio problem in the world.

But again, none of that matters. These are non-people, unpersons, Untermenschen. The only thing that matters is that American elites are made to look tough, willing to do "whatever it takes." The Guardian quotes the usual anonymous Obama Administration official defending the use of innocent children as human shields for black ops:

The US official said: "The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world's top terrorist, and nothing else. If the United States hadn't shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn't used all tools at its disposal to find Bin Laden."

Yes, inquiring minds want to know: why didn't the United States abuse and exploit and endanger even more innocent children to find bin Laden? (Aside from the thousands of children killed in the post-9/11 Terror Wars, of course.) Thank god the Peace Laureate and his people have more "creativity" than his cloddish predecessors!

Oh, and what was the upshot of this "creativity"? I mean, sure, they put the poorest children in Abbotabad at grave risk of suffering, and yeah, they endangered vaccination and health programs and medical workers all over the world -- but hey, the fake vaccine thing worked, didn't it? It helped them get bin Laden, didn't it?

Er, no. Like so much else in the Terror War -- indeed, like the Terror War in its entirety -- the CIA human shield operation in Abbotabad was a busted flush. The whole thing was designed to suck blood from bin Laden's children to get the DNA that would confirm his presence in the house -- but it didn't even do that. As the New York Times reports:

The American official said that the doctor managed to temporarily gain access to the compound, but that he never saw Bin Laden and was not successful in getting DNA samples from any Bin Laden family members.

Endangering children, increasing mistrust and instability around the world, militarizing medicine, polluting every notion of a greater common good or human fellow-feeling -- and all for absolutely nothing (aside from the perpetuation of the pointless dominance of a witless, brutal, all-devouring elite): that pretty much sums up the foreign policy of our rotting, blundering, bankrupt empire.



Source
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2149-the-needle-and-the-damage-done-toxic-fallout-from-the-cias-human-shield-operation.html






 

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'U.S. Military Aid Came With Spies Attached'


By Zofeen Ebrahim

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79735&hd=&size=1&l=e

KARACHI, Jul 19, 2011 (IPS) - Defence analysts in Pakistan believe that foregoing 800 million US dollars worth of aid may be a fair bargain for ridding this country of over a hundred 'military trainers’ who were suspected of being spies.

Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has said that his military can do without the suspended U.S. military aid worth 800 million dollars, but suggested that the funds be diverted to improving the country’s economy.

The suspended funds amount to roughly one-third of yearly U.S. security assistance to Pakistan.

Relations between the allies in the war on terror in neighbouring Afghanistan soured after U.S. Navy Seals crossed over the border in helicopters and swooped down on Abbotabad to kill al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in his hideout in the Pakistani cantonment town.

The U.S., which relied on its own intelligence network within Pakistan for the May 2 raid, also stepped up public denunciation of Pakistan’s army, accusing it of incompetence in tracking down bin Laden or, worse, complicity.

Coming under pressure from the U.S. military on the one hand and facing domestic anger at the Abbottabad raid on the other, the Pakistani army reacted by sending home more than a hundred U.S. military trainers.

"They were not all trainers and the army knew it," says Ikram Sehgal, a well-known defence analyst. "Of every three or four trainers, one would be an undercover intelligence person trying to subvert the loyalties of our soldiers."

Signs that the U.S. maintained a spy network within Pakistan became apparent after Raymond Davis, a U.S. official, shot dead two Pakistani men in Lahore on Jan. 27. Davis, who said the Pakistanis were trying to rob him at gunpoint, turned out to be an intelligence operative.

"It’s a good thing they were sent packing," Sehgal said. "We were previously giving in to Washington’s every whim. Now we are finally speaking as equals and that is how any relationship should be based – on mutual respect," he added.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a senior journalist and an expert on Afghan war, said the U.S. trainers were infiltrating the armed forces and trying to establish their own intelligence network in Pakistan.

According to Yusufzai, the trainers were part of a package which included light arms and gadgets like night vision goggles which the army was "coerced and tempted" to accept.

"They are often private contractors, outsourced by the U.S. army," said Sehgal, adding that the U.S. has more to lose by taking a high-handed stance as "major intelligence sharing may be stopped" by Pakistan.

Another reason why Washington is unhappy with its frontline ally is that its "do more" programme failed to enthuse the Pakistani military into launching an offensive against the powerful Afghan militant group led by Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, known as the 'Haqqani network’.

Frustrated by the lack of cooperation, the U.S. military has resorted to intensified drone attacks in North Waziristan in Pakistan, where the Haqqani network is based, causing indiscriminate death and destruction.

"Going after the Haqqani network is like putting your hand in an anthill," said Sehgal, explaining the Pakistan army’s reluctance to launch an offensive. "These terrorist attacks taking place [in Pakistan] today will seem like a Sunday picnic."

Sehgal offers three reasons for Pakistani inaction: "The Haqqani network has never carried out attacks on or in Pakistan; the army does not have resources needed to carry out an all out operation against the group and they must be well aware of the consequences of such an offensive."

The army is also keen to win back the respect of Pakistan’s people. There is a growing feeling among its ranks that rising domestic criticism is a concerted campaign to vilify and weaken the army.

Along with domestic criticism, the U.S. is adding "to the barrage of propaganda" to build pressure from outside, says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based defence analyst. "Public denunciation of Pakistan has damaged the U.S. - Pakistan relations more than any other issue."

How important is U.S. aid to Pakistan? "Pakistan can live without aid even now if there is no internal conflict and terrorism in Pakistan," says Rizvi.

In the 1990s when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan, cutting all economic and military ties, the democratic governments of that time showed remarkable resilience in weathering the crisis.

As for normal bilateral relations between the U.S. and its frontline ally some observers believe that the elastic limit may soon be reached. "Unless some kind of a miracle happens, I think we shall reach the point of no return," commented Pervez Hoodbhoy, an academic and a peace activist.

Hoodbhoy says Pakistan has brought the present situation upon itself and is now paying the price for it.

"I wish the facts were in our favour, but they are not," Hoodbhoy said. "Bin Laden was in Pakistan, jehadi groups operate in full public view, and the Taliban are sheltered in Quetta.

"It is time we started worrying about how Pakistan violates the sovereignty of other countries rather than just see the violation of our own. We can lie to ourselves as much as we like, but the world can see for itself."

(END)


http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m79735&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

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Drone Attacks Are Wrong And Cowardly, Regardless


By Ethan Casey

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28628.htm

July 19, 2011 "Dawn" -- Drone attacks are wrong. I’m sure to be called an appeaser of terrorists for saying that, particularly in light of the latest events in Mumbai. But I think it’s important for Pakistanis, who are on the receiving end of the humiliation and much worse that drone attacks inflict, to hear an American say it. Hopefully some Americans will read this, too. First and foremost, whatever the official pablum or even the truth about “suspected militants” or “alleged al Qaeda leaders,” innocent civilians are being killed.
Sometimes it’s important to start from first principles, and I think one of those is that it’s wrong to terrorise women and children with unmanned aircraft piloted remotely from the other side of the planet. In the dark calculations of a flawed political world, even something that’s clearly wrong can be justified, if not truly justifiable, if it has good results. The philosophical school that makes such arguments is called utilitarianism, and its adherents – such as, I suppose, the Obama administration – could say drone attacks are necessary because they somehow protect Americans. That argument is marketable to the US public, precisely because it’s vague and plays on people’s fears and ignorance. And, from a Machiavellian point of view, it has the merit of being unfalsifiable: If terrorist attacks don’t happen in America, the US administration can say that’s because of drone attacks in Pakistan.

But meanwhile, actual, non-hypothetical life in Waziristan and beyond is being severely disrupted. When we hear about drone attacks at all in the American media – which we often don’t – it’s usually either asserted or simply assumed that they’re necessary and having the right results. The experts assured us that we were winning in Vietnam, too. I wish we would stop taking their word for it. One US military officer in Vietnam said something that became infamous as a symbol for that entire doomed war effort: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Is that what America is doing all over again in Waziristan?

I don’t know, because I haven’t been there. But when I traveled in Pakistan in 2009 for my book Overtaken By Events, I made a point of seeking out people who had lived there or in Dera Ismail Khan, a city that has become all too frequent a dateline.

My Pakistani-American friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan urged me to try to go there, but acknowledged that it might not be safe for goras to visit. “It’s a small, sleepy town,” she told me. “People were minding their own business, [didn’t] want to get in any trouble, to the point of being lazy, frankly. Since all this happened, a lot of people have migrated into Dera Ismail Khan. … [The] cantonment is right next to the river, and people used to go out and walk by the river. And now they have bunkers, and it’s very difficult for people from the city to go there. My mother lives there and now, we have friends, and it’s really hard for them even to visit her.” All the displaced people fleeing the drone attacks were disrupting life in Dera, Shahnaz told me. “They don’t have any permanent places to live, and they have a different language, different culture,” she said.

An urbane young businessman I met in Islamabad, Faiysal Ali Khan, echoed Shahnaz. Refugees from the drone attacks, he told me, “have had a huge, huge impact on our culture, our society, our people. All these things got disturbed. They brought in the guns, the narcotics, all the illicit trade. Not that I’m saying that they’re bad or anything. They’re refugees; what are they supposed to do?” I asked him about the loyalties of the general public in Waziristan. “On one side, the drone strikes are happening,” he said. “On the other side, Pakistan Army is also bombing you. Americans also bombing you. International community in Nato, ISAF; they’re also bombing you. Everyone is bombing. They’re bombing, bombing, killing innocent people, everything. Why should we have any feeling towards any of these?”

In Karachi, I met a 15-year-old Waziri refugee. “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people,” he told me through a translator. “They ask our government to tell the people that all of the people who are killed are foreigners. But that is not the case. Most of them are innocent people. Every person has now become a victim of the US, from these drone attacks. What the US is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these US attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”

That was more than two years ago. Have things gotten better since then?

I don’t believe there’s any big conspiracy in the US to disregard voices such as these; it’s just that no one here wants to hear what they’re saying. A few of us are trying to get others to listen. I’m doing what I can, through my writing and public speaking, not only for the sake of suffering Waziris and other Pakistanis, but for the good of my own country. America is damaging not only its soul, but also its already badly compromised national economy. And – notwithstanding any circumstances or excuses – attacking people from afar, at no immediate risk to oneself, is cowardly.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com

   
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28628.htm
 

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The US Love Affair With Drones

A war strategy built around drone attacks is not only unethical, but will hurt US interests in the long run.

By Ted Rall

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28629.htm


July 19, 2011 "Al Jazeera" - - One of the pleasures of traveling through the developing world is that things develop. They change. There's always something new.

Afghanistan is, depending on one's point of view, developing, deteriorating, or doing both at once.

Example: Last August found me and two fellow Americans in a hired taxi zooming past bombed-out fuel trucks through Taliban-held Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan near the Tajik border. The sense of menace was palpable, but our driver seemed calm.

Then his face darkened. We were passing into the flatlands east of Mazar-i-Sharif. We saw nothing but dirt, dust and rocks, all the way to the horizon. Yet our driver was nervous. He scanned this bleak landscape. "Motorcycles," he said. "I am looking for the motorcycles."

The adaptable neo-Taliban increasingly rely on the classic tactics of guerilla warfare. Rather than hold territory, these postmodern Islamists-cum-gangsters rely on hit-and-run strikes using something I hadn't seen in 2001: motorcycles. Like a scene from the Kazakh film epic about Genghis Khan updated by Quentin Tarantino, squadrons of bearded bikers are terrorizing Afghanistan's newly- and cheaply-paved highways.

I call them the Talibikers.

One of the more intriguing revelations in last year's WikiLeaks data dump was that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency has been supplying the Taliban with thousands of Pamir dirtbikes, including a 2007 shipment of 1,000 to the Waziristan-based network led by Mawlawi Jalaludin Haqqani. Talibs ride the Pamirs and their preferred brand, the Honda 125 and its Chinese knock-offs, to assassinations. They launch attacks on highways from bases in villages 10 to 15 kilometers away.

The Talibikers speed across the desert in great clouds of dust, "Mad Max" style, to ambush and bomb fuel trucks. There they set up checkpoints where they shake down travelers for cash. Sometimes they kidnap motorists and demand ransom payments from their families. By the time the hapless Afghan national police shows up, the resistance fighters are long gone.

An early report on the Talibikers appeared in the Telegraph in 2003. "The motorcycles have played a key role in Taliban hit-and-run operations in the south of the country where the campaign against international troops and aid workers has intensified," the British newspaper reported in November of that year. "In the latest incident, a Frenchwoman working for the United Nations was shot dead this month by the pillion passenger on a motorcycle in the south-eastern town of Ghazni. The Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack.

In another recent attack, a group of motorcyclists opened fire on an aid convoy near Kandahar, killing four Afghans. In August, two motorcyclists threw a grenade into the Kandahar compound of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, damaging the building but causing no injuries."

ISI-funded motorbikes continue to play a vital role in the Taliban's war to drive US and NATO occupation troops out of Afghanistan. "Day and night, Taliban assassins on motorbikes hunt their victims, often taunting them over the telephone before gunning them down in the city’s streets," Paul Watson wrote in The Star, a Canadian newspaper, in February 2011.

"They are working their way through lists, meticulously killing off people fingered as collaborators with the Afghan government or its foreign backers … The build-up of Afghan police and soldiers, and foreign troops, in and around Kandahar city over recent months has improved security, but agile and coldly efficient motorbike death squads remain active."

Mass attacks continue as well. "About 100 Taliban fighters on motorcycles attacked a northern Afghan village that was working to join the government-sponsored local police program against the insurgency, killing one villager, police said Wednesday. An ensuing battle also left 17 militants dead," the Associated Press reported in May 2011.

There are fewer than 10,000 Talibikers in Afghanistan. They could be eliminated - if the US and NATO stopped focusing on assassination-by-drone and instead used the same technology to increase security.

Drones, drones everywhere

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) date to the maiden flight of the now-familiar Predator drones in 1994. After 9/11 the United States became addicted to the Predator and its successor, the Reaper.

Today the Air Force and CIA have at least 7,000 UAVs in service around the world, representing the biggest and most visible presence of the US military in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. This trend is likely to accelerate. As of March 2011 the US Air Force was training more remote drone "pilots" than those for conventional planes. Next year the Pentagon wants $5 billion just for drones.

Drones are getting smaller and more numerous. "One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill," according to The New York Times. "There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost." More on this later.

 US unveils new 'micro-drone'
 
It's easy to see why generals and politicians are so enthusiastic. The pilotless planes, guided by operators manning a joystick at military and pseudomilitary agencies such as CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and armed by Xe, the private contractor formerly called Blackwater, are relatively cheap. A Predator costs $4.5 million; an F-22 Raptor fighter jet runs $150 million a unit.

Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, cites the "three Ds". Drones are "dull" because they can patrol empty stretches of barren land 24 hours a day. They're "dirty" because they can fly in and out of toxic clouds, including radiation.

Most appealingly, they are "dangerous" because the absence of a pilot eliminates the risk that a pilot - they cost millions to train - will be killed or captured by enemy forces. UAVs exploit the element of surprise: though relatively unobtrusive, they fire supersonic armor-piercing Hellfire missiles capable of striking a target as far as five miles away.

"People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying," The New Yorker magazine reported in 2009.

"'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.) [Bleeding] human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'"

Charming.

According to the Pentagon, drones hit their targets with 95 percent accuracy. The problematic question is: who are their targets?

Thousands of people have been rubbed out by drones since 9/11.

(Press accounts document between 1,400 and 2,300 extrajudicial killings by allied forces, mostly in the Tribal Areas adjacent to Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. According to media reports cited by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, at least 957 Pakistanis were murdered by American drones in 134 airstrikes during the year 2010 alone. Since the media only learns about a fraction of these "secret" killings, the real number must be many times higher.)

Drone attacks illegal, unethical

Since the Pakistani government does not officially acknowledge, much less authorize, such attacks, they are illegal acts of war.

Political philosopher Michael Walzer asked in 2009: "Under what code does the CIA operate? I don't know. There should be a limited, finite group of people who are targets, and that list should be publicly defensible and available. Instead, it's not being publicly defended. People are being killed, and we generally require some public justification when we go about killing people."

One would think.

Legal or not, Christine Fair of Georgetown University says the US doesn't use drone planes indiscriminately: "You have lawyers, you have targeteers, you have intelligence operatives, you actually have pilots who are manning the drones. These are not 14-year-old kids right out of basic training, playing around with a joystick," she told National Public Radio.

In the real world, it's often hard to tell the difference. There's no doubt that drone operators make mistakes. In April 2011, for example, two American marines were killed by a Predator in Afghanistan.

Of course, the majority of victims are local civilians. In Afghanistan and Pakistan drone strikes have killed countless children and wiped out so many wedding parties that it's become a sick joke. Estimates of the civilian casualty rate range from a third (by the New America Foundation) to 98 percent (terrorism expert Amir Mir). There is no evidence that a single "terrorist" has ever been killed by a drone - only the say-so of US and NATO spokesmen.

Errors are inherent due to the principal feature of the technology: remoteness. Manned aerial warfare is notoriously inaccurate; pilots zooming close to the speed of sound tens of thousands of feet above the ground have little idea who or what they're shooting at. Drone operators have even less information than old-school pilots. Like a submariner peering out of a periscope, they are supposed to decide whether people live or die based on fuzzy images through layers of glass. They call it the "soda straw."

Nowadays, staffing is a troubling challenge: it takes 19 analysts to study images and other data from one drone. In the future, a war could eliminate unemployment entirely: it will take approximately 2,00 men and women to process information from one drone equipped with "Gorgon stare" optics capable of scanning an entire city at once.

There's also a huge gap in education, experience and culture. Virtual warriors require simple rules that don't apply when trying to kill jihadis. At the beginning of the US war against Afghanistan in 2001, for example, it was an article of faith within the Pentagon that men wearing black long-tailed turbans were Talibs.

Dozens, possibly hundreds, of noncombatants were killed because of this incorrect assumption. In February 2002 a drone operator blew up a man because he was tall - as was Osama bin Laden. In fact, he and two other men killed were poor villagers gathering scrap metal. Again, this doesn't address the broader issue of whether it's okay to murder people simply because they are members of the Taliban.

At least as interesting as the choice of target is whom the U.S. does not try to kill: the Talibikers.

Unlike the wedding parties, houses and tribal councils that have been mistakenly incinerated by the aptly-named Hellfire missiles, Taliban bike gangs are easy to identify from the air. One or two hundred dirtbikes speeding across the desert toward a truck on an Afghan highway are unmistakable. Most Afghans, even those who oppose the US occupation, fear the Talibikers and resent being robbed at impromptu checkpoints. There have been a few scattershot drone strikes, nothing more. Why don't the CIA whiz kids make these easily-identified fighters a primary target?

Afghans a low priority for US

I posed the question to Afghan government officials. They told me that the same US military that blows $1 billion a week on the war won't lift a finger to save Afghan lives by providing basic security. "Afghan lives are worth nothing to the Americans," a provincial governor told me.

Last week the United Nations announced that civilian casualties were up 15 percent during the first six months of 2011. If the same rate continues, this will be the worst year of the ten-year-long American occupation.

A well-placed US military source confirms that Afghan security "isn't a priority, it isn't even much of a passing thought". Contrary to President Obama's claim that US is in Afghanistan in order to prevent the country from becoming a base for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups and to combat opium cultivation, he says that Afghanistan isn't about Afghanistan at all. "Afghanistan is a staging area for drone and other aerial strikes in western Pakistan," he says. "Nothing more, nothing less. Afghanistan is Bagram [airbase]."

Under Obama the death toll has risen, worsening relations between the White House and its puppet president, Hamid Karzai. Beyond the horror of the deaths themselves, it would be impossible to overstate the contempt that ordinary people in nations like Afghanistan and Pakistan feel for the drone program. "Americans are cowards" was one refrain I heard last year. Real soldiers risk their lives. They do not send buzzing machines to kill people half a world away…people they know nothing about.

Back in 2002, former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith worried about blowback. "If [Taliban leaders and soldiers are] dead, they're not talking to you, and you create more martyrs," he noted. Ongoing drone attacks "suggest that it's acceptable behavior to assassinate people…Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas."

These days, the media gives little to no time or space to such concerns. Americans have moved into postmorality. Right or wrong? Who cares?

Recently international law professor Mary Ellen O'Connell of Notre Dame University said that the new reliance on drones could prompt an already militaristic superpower to fight even more wars of choice. "I think this idea that somehow this technology is allowing us to kill in more places and ... aim at more targets is for me the fundamental ethical and legal problem."

Meanwhile, adds Mary Dudziak of the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law: "Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on…endless war." No casualties? No problem.

Meanwhile, at a "microaviary" inside an air force base north of Dayton, Ohio, "military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds", approvingly reports The New York Times.

Ted Rall is an American political cartoonist, columnist and author. His most recent book is The Anti-American Manifesto. His website is http://tedrall.com/

   
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28629.htm