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

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South Asia
May 1, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE01Df01.html 
 
THE ROVING EYE

The myth of Talibanistan

By Pepe Escobar

Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.

Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.

What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.

It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.

Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.

What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.

The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.

During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.

In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.

For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.

Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.

And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.

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.
 
 
 

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latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-drone-targets-20100506,0,57614.story

CIA drones have broader list of targets

The agency since 2008 has been secretly allowed to kill unnamed suspects in Pakistan.


The drones in Afghanistan, including the Predator shown here, are operated by the U.S. military. The CIA runs the program in Pakistan. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press)



By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times

8:37 PM PDT, May 5, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.

The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as "pattern of life" analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.

The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known, the officials said. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list.

The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said.

Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA-operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

As a matter of policy, CIA officials refuse to comment on the covert drone program. Those who are willing to discuss it on condition of anonymity refuse to describe in detail the standards of evidence they use for drone strikes, saying only that strict procedures are in place to ensure that militants are being targeted. But officials say their surveillance yields so much detail that they can watch for the routine arrival of particular vehicles or the characteristics of individual people.

"The enemy has lost not just operational leaders and facilitators — people whose names we know — but formations of fighters and other terrorists," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We might not always have their names, but ... these are people whose actions over time have made it obvious that they are a threat."

In some cases, drones conduct surveillance for days to establish the evidence that justifies firing a missile, the officials said.‬ Even then, a strike can be delayed or canceled if the chance of civilian casualties is too great, they said.

But some analysts said that permitting the CIA to kill individuals whose names are unknown creates a serious risk of killing innocent people. Civilian deaths caused by Western arms is a source of deep anger in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"There are a lot of ethical questions here about whether we know who the targets are," said Loch Johnson, an intelligence scholar at the University of Georgia and a former congressional aide. "The danger is that it could spawn new terrorists and increase resentment among the Pakistani public, in particular where these strikes are taking place."

U.S. officials say the strikes have caused fewer than 30 civilian casualties since the drone program was expanded in Pakistan, a claim that is impossible to verify since the remote and lawless tribal belt is usually off-limits to Western reporters. Some estimates of civilian casualties by outside analysts are in the hundreds.

Of more than 500 people who U.S. officials say have been killed since the pace of strikes intensified, the vast majority have been individuals whose names were unknown, or about whom the agency had only fragmentary information. In some cases, the CIA discovered only after an attack that the casualties included a suspected terrorist whom it had been seeking.‬

The CIA was directed by the Bush administration to begin using armed drones to track Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda figures, as well as Taliban leaders who fled to Pakistan's tribal areas after the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush secretly decided in his last year in office to expand the program. Obama has continued and even streamlined the process, so that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta can sign off on many attacks without notifying the White House beforehand, an official said.

Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush's last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site's figures

The 2010 attacks have killed from 143 to 247 people, according to estimates collected by the site, but only seven militants have been publicly identified. Among them are Al Qaeda explosives expert Ghazwan Yemeni, Taliban commander Mohammad Qari Zafar, Egyptian Canadian Al Qaeda leader Sheikh Mansoor, and Jordanian Taliban commander Mahmud Mahdi Zeidan.

Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud, the architect of a series of suicide bombings and raids on markets, mosques and security installations in the latter half of 2009, was targeted in multiple strikes last year after evidence emerged that he was involved in attacks against the Pakistani government and Americans.

He was initially believed to have been killed in a January drone strike, but apparently survived. This week he appeared in a video, vowing additional attacks against the U.S.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that there is increasing evidence that Mahsud's group, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, had helped train the Pakistani American who allegedly attempted to carry out a car bombing in New York's Times Square.

The attempt may have been a response to the escalating U.S. drone campaign, one official said.

The number of Predator and Reaper drones in the region is classified, but one former official estimated that the size of the fleet has at least doubled in the last year. The increased numbers improve the CIA's ability to conduct continual surveillance against multiple targets in North Waziristan and other militant strongholds, the officials said.

The CIA maintains a list of senior members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militants, identified by name, whom the agency still tracks and seeks to kill. The decision to widen the program was made because counter-terrorism officials saw militant threats growing, but were unable to use lethal force unless they were able to track a targeted individual.

"In the last year of the Bush administration, the intelligence people had overwhelming evidence that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the tribal areas, and was plotting actively against this country," said the counter-terrorism official.

"You can't hear an alarm like that and then do nothing," the official said, adding that the actions taken by the Bush administration have "intensified since."

The CIA program is operated independently of the U.S. military, which flies its own unmanned aircraft primarily over Afghanistan and follows different targeting procedures.

The border region is a stew of interlocking and shadowy militant groups, some of which seek to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan or mount larger attacks against U.S. interests, while others are more focused on overthrowing the Pakistani government.

Some outside analysts caution that it could be difficult to determine whether a suspect about whom little is known represents a threat to U.S. interests.

But former officials who were involved in the program said that many of the groups were found to be working together, and thus were considered legitimate targets. One former official directly involved in the program said many locations were watched so closely that the CIA could predict daily routines.

"Is the white van there yet?" the official said, giving an example of the degree of scrutiny. "Is he walking with a limp?"

Officials say some decisions are straightforward — for example, if drones observe bomb-making or fighters training for possible operations in Afghanistan. In one case cited by officials, a missile was fired at a compound where unknown individuals were seen assembling a car bomb.

People who are determined to be raising money for Al Qaeda or who only facilitate its operations are not targeted, according to a senior administration official. Such support "is not enough as a matter of administration practice and policy to make you a target for lethal operations," the official said.

In addition to more drones, U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the program have increased the number of analysts working on tracking targets and have made other technical upgrades that have improved their ability to track and kill militants.

The Pakistani government occasionally complains publicly about the U.S drone strikes, but also has helped expand the program by providing information about possible targets and by clearing airspace, so the drones can operate without risk of collision with other planes, officials said.

david.cloud@latimes.com

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Pakistan FM: Times Square Attack Retaliation for Drones

Pakistan's Military Rejects Suggestion of TTP Involvement

by Jason Ditz, May 05, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/05/pakistan-fm-times-square-attack-retaliation-for-drones/

Pakistan’s military today rejected the suggestion that the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were responsible for the failed Times Square bombing attack, saying that they don’t have the capacity to hit the US maintland.

At the same time attention has focused on one of several Pakistani groups. If not the TTP, than either the Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM) of the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) are being presented as possibly behind it.

Whatever the case, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi is openly describing the attempt as “blowback,” saying that it was a predictable retaliation for the countless US drone attacks against the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The timing is particularly awkward for US-Pakistani relations, which had just finally seemed to come to a level where the US was satisfied with the number of wars Pakistan’s military was fighting. In the wake of Times Square, it is widely expected that the US will press Pakistan to launch even more offensives, and will probably escalate its own drone strikes yet again.

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Punjabi Provincial Govt Shelters Militant Groups

Times Square Brings Renewed Focus to Punjab Militants

by Jason Ditz, May 05, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/05/punjabi-provincial-govt-shelters-militant-groups/

Despite repeated efforts by the Pakistani national government to get them to do something about it, the Punjabi Provincial government, led by Shahbaz Sharif, has openly refused to take on major banned militant groups based in its territory.

On the one hand, the provincial government has made efforts to move against the TTP and other Taliban-styled groups, but it has left the Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM) and the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) essentially alone, a piece of political expediency which is becoming a major embarrassment.

Both the JeM and the LeT have been mentioned as possible organizers of the Times Square attack, both are banned as terrorist groups, but for many Punjab residents the groups are popular, heroic freedom fighters that are working to liberate Kashmir from India.

The government, which depends largely on conservative Sunni voters, can ill afford to move against these groups. It has largely gotten around this problem by drawing a line between the groups fighting in the tribal north and the Kashmiri separatist factions.

Increasingly, however, the Kashmiri separatist groups are expanding their business, and if it turns out one of these groups is responsible for the Times Square attack, it will leave the Sharif government scrambling for political cover.

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Failed Times Square attack comes at delicate time for US-Pak ties
 
Thursday, May 06, 2010
http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=237806

Amid reports that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad may have travelled to Pakistan’s North Waziristan, the US and Pakistani governments are still working out details on a new agreement that would expand intelligence and military operations in that very region.

The basic tenets of the agreement, according to diplomatic sources, were hashed out during the inaugural session of the US-Pakistani strategic dialogue in March. Neither side has completely signed off and our sources caution that implementation is another matter, but the provisional agreement shows the growing cooperation between the two countries in the military and intelligence spheres as well as growing coordination on the way forward in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The Times Square bombing attempt comes at a very bad time for US-Pakistan relations, said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Centre at The Atlantic Council. “The US and Pakistan have been doing very well at increasing their cooperation and joint efforts in combating terrorism in that area recently,” he said, referring to North Waziristan. “This is the kind of incident that can kind of derail some of those efforts, I hope it doesn’t.”

Nearly two years after the unhappy exit of Pervez Musharraf, the former Army chief and president, US-Pakistani relationship is still very much a military- and intelligence-based interaction, with the key figures on the US side being Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and CIA Director Leon Panetta. On the Pakistani side, all roads go through Musharraf’s successor as Army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was given red-carpet treatment when he came to Washington for the March talks.

Kayani is increasingly seen as both an interlocutor for US officials as well as a constructive link between the Pakistani military structure and the civilian government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, who has been steadily losing power to Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Meanwhile, the day-to-day relationship is still managed in Washington by Ambassador Husain Haqqani, who despite being a Zardari ally, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. And the relationship is getting very close attention from senior Obama administration officials, with a flurry of high-level visits there in recent weeks. On the sidelines of the strategic dialogue, there was a private session that involved Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and Mullen. From the Pakistani side, only Kayani, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, and Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar attended.

That’s where the new agreement on military and intelligence cooperation was discussed. Here is a readout that Sourabh Gupta, a researcher with Samuels International Associates (SIA), published in the Nelson Report, a daily Washington insider’s newsletter. Our sources say this readout is “almost exactly right.”

Key Pakistani political demands: Non-negotiable requirement for friendly successor regime in Kabul; significant downgrading of Indian presence and influence in Afghanistan, including New Delhi’s training of Afghan military; preference for extended-term American presence in Afghanistan/strategic neighbourhood, notwithstanding drawdown of forces next year.

Secondary set of political-military demands: faster delivery of upgraded weapons package; expedited payment for outstanding dues related to AfPak support operations and assistance with civil infrastructure rebuilding in frontier territories; US to lay-off from Islamabad’s nuclear program (given latter’s need to ramp-up fissile material production in absence of bestowal of India-equivalent civil nuclear deal); US to intensify diplomatic effort to facilitate productive Islamabad-New Delhi dialogue on ‘core’ issues -- Kashmir and water (upper riparian/lower riparian) issues.

Key US demands: Islamabad to re-direct primary counter-insurgency energies against key Islamist groups based/operating out of North Waziristan (Al-Qaeda, Afghan Taliban Haqqani network, local Talibanized tribal warlords); unfettered drone strikes in N Waziristan/other tribal territories to continue; expanded CIA intel. operations/listening posts in Pakistani cities -- Islamabad to subsequently allow access to Taliban leaders arrested by way of real-time communication intercepts; Islamabad to rein-in larger infrastructure of Jihad that it has casually tolerated, even supported.

Gupta goes on to say that Islamabad is also arguing for a seat at the table for any discussions about a successor regime in Kabul and that if the current US ground offensive in Afghanistan doesn’t produce results, the momentum will shift back to the Pakistani Army and intelligence services.
 

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US to expand Pakistan drone strikes

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/05/201056104348785170.html

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted approval by the US government to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions in a move to step up military operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, officials have said.

Federal lawyers backed the measures on grounds of self-defence to counter threats the fighters pose to US troops in neighbouring Afghanistan and the United States as a whole, according to authorities.

The US announced on Wednesday that targets will now include low-level combatants, even if their identities are not known.

Barack Obama, the US president, had previously said drone strikes were necessary to "take out high-level terrorist targets".

Conflicting figures

"Targets are chosen with extreme care, factoring in concepts like necessity, proportionality, and an absolute obligation to minimise loss of innocent life and property damage," a US counterterrorism official said.

But the numbers show that more than 90 per cent of the 500 people killed by drones since mid-2008 are lower-level fighters, raising questions about how much the CIA knows about the targets, experts said.

Only 14 of those killed are considered by experts to have been high ranking members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other groups.

"Just because they are not big names it does not mean they do not kill. They do," the counterterrorism official said.

The US tally of combatant and non-combatant casualties is sharply lower than some Pakistani press accounts, which have estimated civilian deaths alone at more than 600.

Analysts have said that accurately estimating the number of civilian deaths was difficult, if not impossible.

"It is unclear how you define who is a militant and who is a militant leader," Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said.

Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "It is impossible to assess the accuracy of government figures, unattributed to a named official, without information about what kind of information they are based on, how the government defines 'militants' and how it distinguishes them from civilians."

US message

Former intelligence officials acknowledged that in many, if not most cases, the CIA had little information about those killed in the strikes.

Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University, said the CIA's goal in targeting  was to "demoralise the rank and file".

"The message is: 'If you go to these camps, you're going to be killed,'" he added.

Critics say the expanded US strikes raise legal as well as security concerns amid signs that Faisal Shahzad, the suspect behind the attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square on Saturday, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

CIA-operated drones have frequently targeted the group over the past year in Pakistan, and its members have vowed to avenge strikes that have killed several of their leaders and commanders.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, told CBS television channel that the US should not be surprised if anti-government fighters try to carry out more attacks.

"They're not going to sort of sit and welcome you [to] sort of eliminate them. They're going to fight back," Qureshi said.

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US to expand Pakistan drone strikes

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/05/201056104348785170.html

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been granted approval by the US government to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions in a move to step up military operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, officials have said.

Federal lawyers backed the measures on grounds of self-defence to counter threats the fighters pose to US troops in neighbouring Afghanistan and the United States as a whole, according to authorities.

The US announced on Wednesday that targets will now include low-level combatants, even if their identities are not known.

Barack Obama, the US president, had previously said drone strikes were necessary to "take out high-level terrorist targets".

Conflicting figures

"Targets are chosen with extreme care, factoring in concepts like necessity, proportionality, and an absolute obligation to minimise loss of innocent life and property damage," a US counterterrorism official said.

But the numbers show that more than 90 per cent of the 500 people killed by drones since mid-2008 are lower-level fighters, raising questions about how much the CIA knows about the targets, experts said.

Only 14 of those killed are considered by experts to have been high ranking members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other groups.

"Just because they are not big names it does not mean they do not kill. They do," the counterterrorism official said.

The US tally of combatant and non-combatant casualties is sharply lower than some Pakistani press accounts, which have estimated civilian deaths alone at more than 600.

Analysts have said that accurately estimating the number of civilian deaths was difficult, if not impossible.

"It is unclear how you define who is a militant and who is a militant leader," Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said.

Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "It is impossible to assess the accuracy of government figures, unattributed to a named official, without information about what kind of information they are based on, how the government defines 'militants' and how it distinguishes them from civilians."

US message

Former intelligence officials acknowledged that in many, if not most cases, the CIA had little information about those killed in the strikes.

Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University, said the CIA's goal in targeting  was to "demoralise the rank and file".

"The message is: 'If you go to these camps, you're going to be killed,'" he added.

Critics say the expanded US strikes raise legal as well as security concerns amid signs that Faisal Shahzad, the suspect behind the attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square on Saturday, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

CIA-operated drones have frequently targeted the group over the past year in Pakistan, and its members have vowed to avenge strikes that have killed several of their leaders and commanders.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, told CBS television channel that the US should not be surprised if anti-government fighters try to carry out more attacks.

"They're not going to sort of sit and welcome you [to] sort of eliminate them. They're going to fight back," Qureshi said.

"... We've shot an amazing number of people
and killed a number and, to my knowledge,
none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
- General Stanley McCrystal


Gen. McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number Of People' Who Were Not  Threats
Justin Elliott | April 2, 2010, 3:09PM
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/gen_mcchrystal_weve_shot_an_amazing_number_of_peop.php?ref=fpblg

In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the "escalation of force" problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which "we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it."

In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.

Every two weeks, McChrystal participates in a virtual town hall in which soldiers in Afghanistan submit questions by chat that he answers over streaming audio.

TPMmuckraker has obtained a fuller transcript of the comments, which were first reported by the New York Times last week. The Times' Richard Oppel noted that since last summer U.S. and NATO troops killed 30 and wounded 80 Afghans in convoy and checkpoint shootings.

In response to a question about reducing such incidents, McChrystal told troops listening to the town hall:

"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

He continued: "That doesn't mean I'm criticizing the people who are executing. I'm just giving you perspective. We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

(Continued)

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South Asia
May 8, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE08Df01.html 
 
US takes the war into Pakistan

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - The approval given to the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by the administration of President Barack Obama to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions is on face value a declaration of war by the US inside Pakistan. The move comes at a time when Pakistan is trying to win some breathing space to delay an all-out operation in North Waziristan, home to powerful militant groups and an al-Qaeda headquarters.

The CIA was given authority on Wednesday to expand strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against low-level combatants, even if their identities are not known. Obama had previously said drone strikes were necessary to "take out high-level terrorist targets".

However, official figures show that more than 90% of the 500 people killed by drones since mid-2008 were lower-level fighters; in effect, the new approval simply legitimizes the current situation.
Federal lawyers backed the drone measure on the grounds of self-defense to counter threats militants pose to US troops in Afghanistan and the United States as a whole, according to authorities.

Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani has developed close ties to the US military, and there is no doubting Pakistan's conviction in fighting militancy. Islamabad has opened theaters in all of the tribal regions except North Waziristan, as it fears a militant backlash across the country would be unmanageable.

The head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, visited Pakistan recently for talks with senior military officials to put the finishing touches to the operation in North Waziristan. But the Pakistanis pointed out that given the rising number of casualties in South Waziristan, the army did not want to open another front for at least another few months.

This in part could explain the US's decision to expand drone operations, while North Waziristan has also been attracting world attention.

Focus on North Waziristan
The sequence of events began with the dramatic abduction in late March in North Waziristan of former Inter-Services Intelligence officials Khalid Khawaja and Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, also known as "Colonel Imam". They were on a mission to broker a peace deal between the military and the militants.

Then this month the chief of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban - TTP), Hakimullah Mehsud, resurfaced after having been reported killed in a drone attack in January. A few days after this, the bullet-riddled body of Khawaja was found in North Waziristan.

Then this week, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, Faisal Shahzad, was arrested in New York in connection with a failed attempt to set off a car bomb in Times Square. He is reported to have said that he received training in North Waziristan. The TTP claimed responsibility for the incident and vowed attacks on US cities.

On Thursday morning, Colonel Imam, credited as being the founding father of the Taliban, was handed over by the so-called Asian Tigers to Afghan Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, again in North Waziristan. Also freed by the Punjabi militants was a journalist, Asad Qureshi, who had been on the peace mission.

The men were apparently freed after the intervention of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, whose delegation demanded that everyone needed to clarify where their allegiances lay.

In an attempt to speed up operations in North Waziristan, the US on Wednesday expedited a payment of US$468 million for Pakistan from the Coalition Support Fund, which has been set up in recognition of Pakistan's contribution in the "war on terror". Pakistan has been paid approximately $7.2 billion since 2001.

However, Islamabad went into overdrive to deflect attention from North Waziristan. The ambassador to the US, Professor Husain Haqqani, called Shahzad a disturbed man. He said it was premature to speculate on whether he had trained with any radical groups in Pakistan and that an investigation into his links to the country was ongoing.

The military chipped in too. Spokesman Major General Athar Abbas denied that any group was linked to the bombing and he refused to accept that Shahzad had ever visited North Waziristan. He also said an unspecified number of people had been questioned, but no one had been arrested or detained in Pakistan - contrary to media reports of several arrests. On Thursday, Shahzad's father, retired Air Vice-Marshal Baharul Haq, was taken into protective custody.

The plain fact cannot be missed: North Waziristan is the nerve center of the Afghan resistance and as long as Pakistan delays, the US will take matters into its own hands.

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

 
 
 

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May 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/asia/07diplo.html?ref=world

Debate on Expanded Presence in Pakistan

By MARK MAZZETTI and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The evidence of ties between the man accused of being the Times Square bomber and Pakistani militants has intensified debate inside the Obama administration about expanding America’s military presence in Pakistan, with some officials making the case to increase the number of Special Operations troops working with Pakistani forces in the country’s western mountains.

The American military presence in Pakistan has already grown substantially over the past year, and now totals more than two hundred troops, part of a program to share intelligence with Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops and train them to battle militant groups.

But the failed bombing in Times Square, and evidence that the accused man, Faisal Shahzad, received training in a camp run by the Pakistani Taliban, has given support to those who want to expand the mission.

In particular, some inside the administration believe that the C.I.A. program of killing militants from the air is insufficient for preventing attacks on the West, and that an expanded training mission might raise confidence in Pakistan’s military enough to launch an offensive in the militant sanctuary of North Waziristan, in the tribal areas.

“There is a growing sense that there will need to be more of a boots on the ground strategy,” said one Obama administration official.

Officials, who requested anonymity to discuss strategy surrounding a program that is technically secret, emphasized that any new troops in Pakistan would serve as advisers and trainers, not as combat forces.

But the presence of any American troops on Pakistani soil is extremely sensitive. It is thought to be widely opposed by Pakistanis, and the Pentagon has worked hard to keep a low profile. American troops there are careful about how much time they spend away from enclosed garrisons.

Officials said there was now discussion about presenting Pakistan’s government with a formal request to dispatch more Special Operations troops to the country. American officials believe they have improved relations with Islamabad in recent months, and that this might be a particularly opportune time to press the case.

But one senior Pakistani official cautioned that Washington should not overreach.

“The Americans have to be careful not to make demands that are disproportionate to the good will they have built up,” he said.

It is also unclear how much leverage the United States would have, given that the attack was amateurish and unsuccessful.

In the meantime, American officials said that Pakistan’s government had been helpful during the initial phase of the investigation. Investigators have passed along leads from Mr. Shahzad’s interrogation to officials at the American Embassy in Islamabad, who have passed the leads on to Pakistani authorities.

So far, administration officials said, Pakistani authorities have been cooperating with requests for details about Mr. Shahzad and his family. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, spoke on Thursday with Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and the foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

Administration officials said their top priority was to nail down Mr. Shahzad’s links to militant groups, and then to press Pakistan to act against the groups. While the evidence continues to point to the Pakistani Taliban as the primary link, a senior official said Mr. Shahzad “appears to be at the intersection of a whole lot of strands.”

“There’s a bit of a false distinction being made between these groups,” said another official. “The Pakistani Taliban is connected to Al Qaeda, which is connected to the Haqqani network. I don’t think you can put team jerseys on them.”

Pakistani officials have blown hot and cold on the issue of American troops in the country. Months ago, when sentiment was running more strongly against additional troops, Pakistan held up issuing visas for advisers and trainers. After visits by senior officials, including Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pakistan began issuing them again.

The near-miss in Times Square on Saturday evening is likely to make some Pakistani officials less reluctant to accept additional American trainers, said officials with knowledge of the Pakistani government. There is a sense in Islamabad, these officials said, that if the car bomb had exploded, it would have severely strained relations between the United States and Pakistan.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of United States Central Command, has been very supportive of the American training mission in Pakistan. But military officials said General Petraeus was cautious about making a formal request to Pakistan now, as he is concerned about the impact such a move would have on relations with Pakistan’s military and on inflaming anti-American sentiment in the country.

For the Obama administration, the terrorist plot comes at a sensitive time in its effort to cultivate Pakistan. In March, it held a high-level strategic dialogue with Pakistan’s government, which officials said went a long way toward building up trust between the two sides.

Pakistan, for its part, said it would crack down on any group making the United States a target. “We do not, and we will not, make distinctions between any terrorist groups,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. “Pakistan has proven over the last few years that it is fighting extremists for its own sake. We will continue to do that.”


Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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Possible role of Kashmir-focused groups may hinder Times Square terrorism probe

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 7, 2010; A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/06/AR2010050606029_pf.html


KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- Faisal Shahzad's path from suburban Connecticut to bombmaking training in Pakistan's mountains may have wound through a mosque on a ragged corner of this metropolis, Pakistani officials say. The suggestion highlights the nation's complex militant web -- but could also form an obstacle to a terrorism investigation spanning two continents.

A man who guided Shahzad from Karachi to the country's northwest, Pakistani officials say, was arrested this week at the mosque, which is affiliated with Jaish-i-Muhammad. The al-Qaeda-linked group is one in a mosaic of domestic jihadist organizations that were created or cultivated by Pakistan's intelligence services to antagonize Indian troops in the disputed region of Kashmir but have gone increasingly rogue.

U.S. officials say they are worried about these militant groups based in Punjab province, many of which are banned but still operate freely. The most prominent among them is Lashkar-i-Taiba, suspected in a deadly 2008 siege in Mumbai. The group has changed its legal name, but its leaders remain free.

Some elements in Pakistan's security establishment continue to view such groups as assets against India, and Punjabi politicians court them for political support. It is uncertain whether Pakistan would take aggressive action against the organizations, even if they are found to be definitively connected to the Times Square bombing attempt.

"There's never been any clampdown on any of these groups that were fighting in Kashmir. That's not just Lashkar, it's everyone," said Ahmed Rashid, who has written extensively on militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "That's a problem."

Pakistani authorities are looking into whether the groups are connected to the New York case, although developments in the investigation remain murky. On Thursday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said he did not think Shahzad acted alone, as some Pakistani officials have suggested.

In addition to the arrest this week of Mohammed Rehan -- described variously by officials as a prominent Jaish-i-Muhammad leader and Shahzad's suspected "motivator" -- one Karachi intelligence official said as many as 30 people were detained Thursday for questioning by Pakistani and U.S. authorities. All were associated with Jaish-i-Muhammad, Lashkar-i-Taiba and another banned sectarian group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, the official said.

A second intelligence official said that at least 16 people affiliated with those militant organizations have been detained in recent days in Karachi and in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Pakistani officials say publicly that they have established no concrete links between Shahzad and any militant organization. U.S. officials say evidence points to the involvement of the Pakistani Taliban, a predominantly Pashtun group based in the Afghan border region whose anti-state agenda traditionally did not overlap with that of Kashmir-focused organizations. It initially asserted responsibility for the bombing attempt, but a spokesman later denied involvement.

Militant groups converge

As state support for anti-India militant groups has waned, the aims of the Pakistani Taliban and the Kashmir-oriented groups have increasingly converged. Militant groups of various stripes have intermingled, and Punjabi fighters have become valuable bridges between Pakistan's mainland and the rugged, restricted border where guerrilla training takes place.

Five Northern Virginia men arrested late last year and charged with terrorism in Pakistan came in contact with Jaish-i-Muhammad while on a journey they had hoped would take them to North Waziristan, a haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Pakistani authorities say.

Jaish-i-Muhammad has been implicated in several prominent terrorist acts in South Asia, including an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl. It was banned in Pakistan in 2002.

That caused the group to splinter, said terrorism analyst Muhammad Amir Rana, though its main infrastructure remained intact in a form common to banned militant organizations in Pakistan: as a religious charity operating schools and hospitals and, along the way, indoctrinating fighters. Some of those recruits have joined up with the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas.

"There are people who are the Punjabi Taliban operating in North Waziristan and South Waziristan and other tribal agencies," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. "People do tend to support each other."

A mosque in Karachi

In the Karachi suburb of North Nazimabad on Thursday, the principal of the madrassa, or religious school, at the sand-colored Bat'ha mosque declined to answer questions about Rehan or Shahzad. Across the street, several shopkeepers said that they knew nothing about either man but that they had heard about recent arrests at the mosque.

It was common knowledge, they said, that the mosque was a hotbed for Jaish-i-Muhammad. The shopkeepers said its members, a mix of Pashtuns and southern Punjabis, frequently collect donations for the group.

"Every banned organization changes their name and continues on working," said Asad Raza Khan, sitting behind a counter selling spice packets and gum.

One former resident of North Nazimabad said he attended prayers at the mosque and frequently saw weapons inside. He said that after the ban, officials at the mosque washed away the jihadist slogans painted on the outside walls, but nothing else changed.

Mohammed Imran, the neighborhood's former political boss from the ruling party in Karachi, said intelligence officials monitor the mosque. But they only watch the front door, he said -- and Jaish-i-Muhammad activists use the back one.

Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad and a special correspondent in Karachi contributed to this report.

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Pakistan test-fires ballistic missiles
 
 
08/05/2010 11:19:26 AM GMT     
 
 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Pakistan-test-fires-ballistic-missiles.html

 
Pakistan has successfully test-fired two short-range and medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the country's military has announced.

An official statement issued by the Pakistani military on Saturday said the short-range ballistic Shaheen-1 missile and the medium-range ballistic Ghaznavi missile both "successfully hit the target areas."

During Saturday's missile test, Pakistani systems Ghaznavi and Shaheen were also test-fired.

"Both missiles can carry conventional and nuclear warheads to a range of 290 kilometers and 650 kilometers respectively," the statement added.

The missile launch marked the conclusion of the annual field training exercise of Army Strategic Force Command, seeking to showcase Pakistan's military capabilities.

Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff Committee General Tariq Majid, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Noman Bashir, Director General of Strategic Plans Division Lieutenant General Khalid Ahmed Kidwai and other senior military figures were present at the test fire.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gilani called on the international community to recognize Pakistan as a nuclear power, saying "It is time for the world to recognize Pakistan as a de jure nuclear power with equal rights and responsibilities."

The Pakistani prime minister lauded the country's nuclear deterrence capability while adding that Islamabad should be given a Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) waiver.

"Energy is a vital economic security need of Pakistan and nuclear energy is a clean way forward," he stressed.

The 45-member NSG controls the export and sale of nuclear technology worldwide.

South Asian rivals India and Pakistan have routinely carried out missile tests since both countries demonstrated their nuclear weapon capabilities in 1998.

HA/CS/MB
Source: Press TV
 

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Obama widens drone attacks in Pakistan

By Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65753&hd=&size=1&l=e


WSWS, May 7, 2010


The Obama administration has granted secret permission to the CIA to carry out more indiscriminate drone missile strikes in Pakistan, even as protests over civilian casualties caused by the attacks continue to grow.

Officials revealed this week that the US intelligence agency is operating under rules that allow it to target suspected "militants" in Pakistan based upon "pattern of life" analyses, without even ascertaining their identity. For the most part, they acknowledge, the names of those assassinated with Hellfire missiles fired from Predator and the larger Reaper drones are never known.

This description of the drone program flies in the face of official propaganda, which has presented the missile attacks as part of a carefully prepared exercise in "targeted killings" aimed against high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But according to the Los Angeles Times, which cited current and former intelligence officials, "The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region."

The newspaper reported that the initial permission to broaden the drone campaign came during the last year of the Bush administration, but has been continued and even widened under the presidency of Barack Obama.

"Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan," the LA Times notes.

There have been 34 missile strikes so far this year, at least two every week, according to figures compiled by the New America Foundation. This compares to 53 for all of last year and 30 during the last year of the Bush administration.

Intelligence officials report that the size of the drone fleet being deployed over Pakistan has doubled since Obama took office in January 2009.

The LA Times report states that "some analysts said that permitting the CIA to kill individuals whose names are unknown creates a serious risk of killing innocent people. Civilian deaths caused by Western arms are a source of deep anger in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Indeed, while claiming that only a handful of civilians have been slain in the missile attacks, US officials acknowledge that the CIA does not know the names of the more than 500 people it admits to having killed.

According to the New America Foundation, of the up to 247 people reported killed in attacks carried out so far in 2010 only seven have been publicly identified as "militants."

Pakistani officials have charged that the overwhelming majority of the victims of the CIA missile attacks are civilians, most of them women and children. They have placed the number of civilians killed at over 700 last year alone.

Given this scale of carnage, the deaths of civilians cannot be viewed as a matter of unfortunate accidents, but rather constitute a deliberate reign of terror that is being imposed upon what Washington views as a hostile population inhabiting the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

These assassinations by remote-controlled pilotless aircraft have provoked mounting anger throughout Pakistan itself. Investigators have reported that Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in last weekend’s abortive Times Square car bombing attempt in New York City, has stated that he decided to attempt the terrorist attack after a return to his native country, where he saw the bloodshed caused by the missile strikes.

The public statements signaling a further widening of the drone campaign and a loosening of the restrictions on who may be targeted come just a week after legal experts testified before Congress, warning that both those who order these attacks and those who actually execute them could be prosecuted for war crimes.

"Only a combatant—a lawful combatant—may carry out the use of killing with combat drones," Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor from the University of Notre Dame law school, testified at the April 28 hearing held by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"The CIA and civilian contractors have no right to do so," she continued. "They do not wear uniforms, and they are not in the chain of command. And most importantly, they are not trained in the law of armed conflict."

David Glazier, a professor from Loyola law school in Los Angeles, California, concurred with this opinion, stating that CIA personnel are "clearly not lawful combatants, [and] if you are not a privileged combatant, you simply don’t have immunity from domestic law for participating in hostilities."

He went on to warn that "any CIA personnel who participate in this armed conflict run the risk of being prosecuted under the national laws of the places where [the combat actions] take place." CIA operatives involved in the drone program, he said, could be found guilty of war crimes.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter to President Obama in conjunction with the congressional hearing, noting recent reports that this administration had targeted a US citizen living in Yemen—the American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki—for assassination by means of a drone attack.

The letter expressed "profound concern about recent reports indicating that you have authorized a program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists—including US citizens—located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it affects US citizens, it is also unconstitutional."




 

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Associated Press
 - May 08, 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/08/pakistan-successfully-test-fires-ballistic-missiles/

Pakistan Successfully Test-Fires Two Ballistic Missiles

The Shaheen-1 missile has range of about 400 miles, while the second Ghaznavi missile could hit target at a distance of 180 miles.


May 8: In this handout photo released by Pakistan's Inter Services Public Relations, a Ghaznavi missile is launched from an undisclosed location in Pakistan.


ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan successfully test-fired two ballistic missiles Saturday capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the military said, as the Islamic nation's leader urged the world to recognize it as a legitimate nuclear power.

The Shaheen-1 missile has a range of about 400 miles, while the second Ghaznavi missile could hit targets at a distance of 180 miles, an army statement said. Both can carry conventional and nuclear warheads.

Pakistan's missiles are mostly intended for any confrontation with archrival India, and the range of the Shaheen-1 would include the Indian capital of New Delhi. Saturday's tests -- which featured the rare launch of two missiles -- are unlikely to aggravate tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors, since they both routinely conduct missile tests.

The latest Pakistani missile test came more than a week after the leaders of two sides met in Bhutan on the sidelines of a regional conference, hoping to improve relations that have been strained since the deadly 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other senior army and civil officials witnessed the launches at an undisclosed location, and the missiles "successfully hit the target areas," the statement said.

Gilani also urged world powers "to recognize Pakistan as a dejure nuclear power with equal rights and responsibilities," the army statement said. The prime minister called for cooperation on civilian nuclear power, which would help relieve Pakistan's chronic energy shortages.

Pakistan has refused to sign nonproliferation accords and faces a nuclear trade ban.

"Energy is a vital economic security need of Pakistan and nuclear energy is a clean way forward," the statement said.

Pakistan became a declared nuclear power in 1998 by conducting nuclear tests in response to those carried out by India. Islamabad test-fired its first missile that same year.

The safety of its nuclear arsenals has been a matter of concern since 2004 when the architect of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, confessed to spreading sensitive technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Pakistan has since set up strict controls to prevent any such repeat and the retired Khan is living under virtual house arrest.

But a recent report, commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and released by Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, found that Pakistan faces formidable risks in safeguarding its nuclear warheads. Danger persists from "nuclear insiders with extremist sympathies, Al Qaeda or Taliban outsider attacks, and a weak state."

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Pakistani militant groups out in the open



Though banned, groups like Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is suspected of having a link to Times Square suspect Faisal Shahzad, are out in the open, with their leaders delivering sermons and holding rallies.

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times

May 8, 2010
http://freedomsyndicate.com/fair0000/latimes00188.html
Reporting from Karachi, Pakistan

The leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad, one of Pakistan's most feared militant groups, recently drew hundreds of worshipers to the Batha Mosque, where the theme of speeches and sermons often covers the same topic: holy war against the West.

Young men streamed into the beige building in north Karachi chanting "God is great!" on the day Maulana Masood Azhar spoke. Though Jaish-e-Muhammad has been banned in Pakistan since 2002, local police officers joined mosque guards in cordoning off the garbage-strewn dirt lanes surrounding the mosque and providing security for the rally.

"They had metal detectors checking people going in," said Ali Khan, 27, who works at a barber shop about 50 yards from the mosque's white iron gate. "The people in this mosque, their main focus is jihad."

Jaish-e-Muhammad is being scrutinized by U.S. and Pakistani investigators for a possible connection to Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb last week in New York City's Times Square.

Pakistani authorities arrested at least four suspected Jaish-e-Muhammad members in Karachi this week, including Mohammed Rehan, who in July allegedly drove Shahzad to the northwestern city of Peshawar, the gateway to the country's Taliban-filled tribal areas.

In light of the Shahzad case, the U.S. probably will push Pakistan to clamp down on groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad that harbor bitter hatred for the United States and have begun to establish links with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan's record in enforcing its ban on militant groups has been poor, Pakistani analysts said.

In Karachi, banned militant groups routinely dispatch workers to mosques where they have strong followings to pass out jihad pamphlets and compact discs, said Raza Hassan, a Karachi-based crime reporter for Dawn, a Pakistani English-language newspaper.

"Authorities have not come down hard on Jaish-e-Muhammad or any of these banned outfits," Hassan said. "They seem to lack a policy."

If there has been a policy, it has been one that publicly condemns certain militant groups while discreetly allowing them to function under the radar. To facilitate their operations, some extremist organizations have created humanitarian front groups with different names that raise funds for building schools and healthcare clinics. What's not known is how much of that money gets channeled to militant activities.

"Usually when the government bans these militant groups, they suddenly start welfare work," said Yusuf Khan, a Karachi-based analyst. "During the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, Jaish-e-Muhammad began helping people and rebuilding. That's their technique: to become philanthropic and get sympathy."

One reason groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad are allowed to operate is because historically they have set their primary target as India, Pakistan's nuclear-armed rival, experts said.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group alleged to have engineered the 2008 attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people, is banned in Pakistan but continues to operate under the banner of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which runs hospitals and schools throughout the country. Though the West regards Lashkar-e-Taiba as a terrorist organization, the group's founder, Hafiz Saeed, moves freely through Pakistan and periodically delivers sermons at a mosque in Lahore.

U.S. officials and others in the West worry that Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba may be operating training compounds in Pakistan's volatile tribal belt along the Afghan border. Experts doubt that the Shahzad case will prod Pakistani authorities to crack down on those groups.

"I'm afraid it will be life as normal," said Yusuf Khan. "There is a lot of sympathy among many in law enforcement for these people. You cannot wipe this out."

It is widely believed that Pakistan's intelligence community helped form Jaish-e-Muhammad in the mid-1990s to battle Indian forces in the Indian-administered section of Kashmir. Later, however, the group widened its mission, training thousands of recruits to fight U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Jaish-e-Muhammad is also linked to the 2002 kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.

Jaish-e-Muhammad's leader, Azhar, lives in Bahawalpur, a southern Punjab city and the militant group's home base. When he comes to Karachi, he usually heads to the North Nazimabad neighborhood, where he makes periodic appearances at the Batha Mosque, Ali Khan and other residents said.

Shopkeepers and neighbors near the mosque's 10-foot perimeter wall said they tolerate a nervous co-existence with the mosque.

"We're always fearful that something's going to happen there," says Shahzad Ali, a 35-year-old grocery shop owner, "and that in the process, we'll become victims."

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South Asia
May 11, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE11Df01.html 
 
Militants in no mood to talk

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan stands at a crossroad in its battle against militancy.

On the one hand, its Washington ally wants to turn their strategic partnership into a closer military alliance in which the United States would help the Pakistani military significantly ramp up the war against militancy - meaning opening a new battlefield, as the Americans did in Laos during the Vietnam war.

Alternatively, Pakistan is tempted to set aside American interests and apply its own mechanism to defeat militancy - which means striking deals with the "good" Taliban and defeating the "bad" Taliban without care for the consequences on the war in Afghanistan or the future of al-Qaeda and its allied Punjabi groups operating in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Pakistan took a step towards the second option at the weekend when it air-dropped leaflets in the North Waziristan tribal area warning pro-Taliban tribes "to back out of their support of the militants [al-Qaeda and its associate Punjabi militants] or face the consequences, like the people of Swat and Bajaur -tribal agencies] faced and lost their properties and assets".

For hawkish decision-makers in Washington and "bad" militants in North Waziristan, there is another option: remove Pakistani links in the war and deal directly with one another on Pakistani soil.

Last week, the Barack Obama administration authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to step up drone attacks on militants in the tribal areas to include missile strikes against unknown targets. Previously, a suspect had to be identified. The CIA wasted no time. In a series of attacks over the weekend, at least 10 militants were reported killed in North Waziristan.

The hardcore militants also flexed their muscles by blocking efforts led by the Afghan Taliban, who are not hostile towards Pakistan, for a truce and for the release of a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) hostage.

Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, nicknamed "Colonel Imam" by the mujahideen as he was instrumental in helping to raise the Taliban militia, was abducted by a Punjabi group, the Asian Tigers, on March 25, along with journalist Asad Qureshi. The bullet-riddled body of Khalid Khawaja, another former ISI official who was abducted at the same time, was recently found in North Waziristan.

The Tigers ignored instructions from Taliban leader Mullah Omar that the men should be freed, instead issuing a list of high-profile men in Pakistani jails to be released in 15 days. Otherwise, they said, Tarrar would meet the same fate as Khawaja. For the release of Qureshi, there is a separate demand of US$10 million in ransom. See Qureshi's video below sent to ATol at the weekend.

http://atimes.net/media/p1-b.wmv

The New York Times reported on Friday that evidence of ties between the man accused of trying to car bomb Times Square in New York - Faisal Shahzad - and Pakistani militants had intensified debate inside the Barack Obama administration about expanding America's military presence in Pakistan. Some officials are said to want to increase the number of special operations forces working with Pakistani troops in the western mountains.

In a dispatch from Washington, the newspaper said the American military presence in Pakistan had already grown substantially over the past year, and now totaled more than 200 troops, part of a largely secret program to share intelligence with the Pakistani army and paramilitary troops and train them to battle militant groups.

This would play into the hands of the militants, who aim to lure the Americans into what they see as a trap in the rugged mountainous terrain on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

Militants make demands
Among the 150 prisoners the militants want released are those involved in an attack on military headquarters in Rawalpindi, the killing of a retired general, abductions for ransom, and those allegedly connected to the attack on Mumbai in India in November 2008. Interior Minister Rahman Malik, who is traveling in Britain, was unable to respond to questions from Asia Times Online.

The militants had initially said they would release both captives.

A militant spokesman, Usman Punjabi, told ATol on April 29 on the telephone that Khawaja would be executed (which happened the next day) but that Colonel Imam would be released as he was not a part of Khawaja's plan to negotiate peace between the militants and the military,

Other sources told ATol that Colonel Imam was to be released because of pressure from the Afghan Taliban and that he would be handed into the custody of Afghan Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani's group led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the chief of the Taliban in North Waziristan. This was also widely reported in the Pakistani media.

However, everything changed with the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in New York and the ramping up of the drone program. Al-Qaeda forcibly put its foot down and managed to undermine the authority of Mullah Omar.

"It was completely wrong news that we agree to the release of Colonel Imam and Asad Qureshi," Usman Punjabi told ATol on the telephone on Sunday. "We did not receive any direct instruction from Mullah Omar. We did not see any direct emissary of Mullah Omar's. What we heard regarding the instructions [from Mullah Omar] was just talk by some ISI-backed Taliban groups in North Waziristan that they had been asked by Mullah Omar to release Colonel Imam.

"So we have asked them to provide evidence - any audio or video recording of Mullah Omar in which he ordered the release of Colonel Imam. We cannot believe the words of just any person in that regard," said Usman Punjabi.

"For us Colonel Imam was not a mujahid. If he was assumed in the past as the father of the Taliban, he did that as a government employee - being an army officer. He still receives a pension from the Pakistan army. To us he is their man," said Usman Punjabi. This is in direct contradiction to what he earlier told ATol, that Colonel Imam would be released.

It is becoming apparent that al-Qaeda is calling the shots in North Waziristan and creating a situation under which the good and bad Taliban will not have any choice but to operate under al-Qaeda's flagship while trying to entice the US into a fight.

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

 
 
 

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CIA allowed to kill terrorist suspects without identification

By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times



CIA drones have broader list of targets

The agency since 2008 has been secretly allowed to kill unnamed suspects in Pakistan.


May 5, 2010
http://uruknet.com/?p=m65805&hd=&size=1&l=e

Reporting from Washington

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.

The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as "pattern of life" analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.

The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known, the officials said. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list.

The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said.

Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA-operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

As a matter of policy, CIA officials refuse to comment on the covert drone program. Those who are willing to discuss it on condition of anonymity refuse to describe in detail the standards of evidence they use for drone strikes, saying only that strict procedures are in place to ensure that militants are being targeted. But officials say their surveillance yields so much detail that they can watch for the routine arrival of particular vehicles or the characteristics of individual people.

"The enemy has lost not just operational leaders and facilitators — people whose names we know — but formations of fighters and other terrorists," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We might not always have their names, but ... these are people whose actions over time have made it obvious that they are a threat."

In some cases, drones conduct surveillance for days to establish the evidence that justifies firing a missile, the officials said.‬ Even then, a strike can be delayed or canceled if the chance of civilian casualties is too great, they said.

But some analysts said that permitting the CIA to kill individuals whose names are unknown creates a serious risk of killing innocent people. Civilian deaths caused by Western arms is a source of deep anger in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"There are a lot of ethical questions here about whether we know who the targets are," said Loch Johnson, an intelligence scholar at the University of Georgia and a former congressional aide. "The danger is that it could spawn new terrorists and increase resentment among the Pakistani public, in particular where these strikes are taking place."

U.S. officials say the strikes have caused fewer than 30 civilian casualties since the drone program was expanded in Pakistan, a claim that is impossible to verify since the remote and lawless tribal belt is usually off-limits to Western reporters. Some estimates of civilian casualties by outside analysts are in the hundreds.

Of more than 500 people who U.S. officials say have been killed since the pace of strikes intensified, the vast majority have been individuals whose names were unknown, or about whom the agency had only fragmentary information. In some cases, the CIA discovered only after an attack that the casualties included a suspected terrorist whom it had been seeking.‬

The CIA was directed by the Bush administration to begin using armed drones to track Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda figures, as well as Taliban leaders who fled to Pakistan's tribal areas after the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush secretly decided in his last year in office to expand the program. Obama has continued and even streamlined the process, so that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta can sign off on many attacks without notifying the White House beforehand, an official said.

Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush's last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site's figures

The 2010 attacks have killed from 143 to 247 people, according to estimates collected by the site, but only seven militants have been publicly identified. Among them are Al Qaeda explosives expert Ghazwan Yemeni, Taliban commander Mohammad Qari Zafar, Egyptian Canadian Al Qaeda leader Sheikh Mansoor, and Jordanian Taliban commander Mahmud Mahdi Zeidan.

Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud, the architect of a series of suicide bombings and raids on markets, mosques and security installations in the latter half of 2009, was targeted in multiple strikes last year after evidence emerged that he was involved in attacks against the Pakistani government and Americans.

He was initially believed to have been killed in a January drone strike, but apparently survived. This week he appeared in a video, vowing additional attacks against the U.S.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that there is increasing evidence that Mahsud's group, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, had helped train the Pakistani American who allegedly attempted to carry out a car bombing in New York's Times Square.

The attempt may have been a response to the escalating U.S. drone campaign, one official said.

The number of Predator and Reaper drones in the region is classified, but one former official estimated that the size of the fleet has at least doubled in the last year. The increased numbers improve the CIA's ability to conduct continual surveillance against multiple targets in North Waziristan and other militant strongholds, the officials said.

The CIA maintains a list of senior members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militants, identified by name, whom the agency still tracks and seeks to kill. The decision to widen the program was made because counter-terrorism officials saw militant threats growing, but were unable to use lethal force unless they were able to track a targeted individual.

"In the last year of the Bush administration, the intelligence people had overwhelming evidence that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the tribal areas, and was plotting actively against this country," said the counter-terrorism official.

"You can't hear an alarm like that and then do nothing," the official said, adding that the actions taken by the Bush administration have "intensified since."

The CIA program is operated independently of the U.S. military, which flies its own unmanned aircraft primarily over Afghanistan and follows different targeting procedures.

The border region is a stew of interlocking and shadowy militant groups, some of which seek to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan or mount larger attacks against U.S. interests, while others are more focused on overthrowing the Pakistani government.

Some outside analysts caution that it could be difficult to determine whether a suspect about whom little is known represents a threat to U.S. interests.

But former officials who were involved in the program said that many of the groups were found to be working together, and thus were considered legitimate targets. One former official directly involved in the program said many locations were watched so closely that the CIA could predict daily routines.

"Is the white van there yet?" the official said, giving an example of the degree of scrutiny. "Is he walking with a limp?"

Officials say some decisions are straightforward — for example, if drones observe bomb-making or fighters training for possible operations in Afghanistan. In one case cited by officials, a missile was fired at a compound where unknown individuals were seen assembling a car bomb.

People who are determined to be raising money for Al Qaeda or who only facilitate its operations are not targeted, according to a senior administration official. Such support "is not enough as a matter of administration practice and policy to make you a target for lethal operations," the official said.

In addition to more drones, U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the program have increased the number of analysts working on tracking targets and have made other technical upgrades that have improved their ability to track and kill militants.

The Pakistani government occasionally complains publicly about the U.S drone strikes, but also has helped expand the program by providing information about possible targets and by clearing airspace, so the drones can operate without risk of collision with other planes, officials said.

- david.cloud@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times




 

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25 killed in U.S. drone attack in Pakistan

The Hindu

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65833&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 9, 2010

Peshawar: Twenty-five people, including 21 militants, were killed in Pakistan's northwest where a U.S. drone targeted insurgent hideouts and the military stepped up ground attacks on militants in the region today.

Ten people, including six militants, were killed and several others injured in a U.S. drone strike in the restive North Waziristan tribal region in northwest Pakistan.

Unmanned spy planes fired at least two missiles at a suspected militant hideout in Inzarkas village, located 50 km west of Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan Agency.

"Local residents pulled 10 bodies from the rubble and some more people are said to be injured," a source said. Sources said six of those killed were militants, while the rest were civilians.

At least two drones were seen flying over the area for several minutes after the strike, witnesses said.

The strike occurred in the vicinity of Datta Khel, considered a haven for Taliban and Al Qaida elements.

Datta Khel, located near the border with Afghanistan, is the hometown of militant commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur. — PTI





 

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US missiles kill 14 in NW Pakistan

Tue, 11 May 2010 08:19:24 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=126122&sectionid=351020401   

 
Pakistan has publicly objected to attacks by CIA pilotless aircraft saying they are a violation of its sovereignty.

A US drone attack in Pakistan's tribal North Waziristan region has killed 14 people at what the Pakistani security officials describe as a militant compound.

The drone reportedly fired a barrage of 18 missiles on Tuesday at a vehicle and the compound in a village in the Lawara Mandi area, near the Afghan border .

The bombing took place in Dattakhel village, about 30 km west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

"The militants have cordoned off the area; so far they've retrieved 11 bodies from the debris," an unidentified security official in the region said. "The death toll may rise because the militants are still searching for bodies."

Pakistani government has publicly condemned the drone attacks, saying they violate the country's sovereignty, although there is a wide belief that US uses its Pakistani air bases to launch drone attacks against alleged militant strongholds.

On Sunday, the Pakistani defense minister claimed that US troops stationed in neighboring Afghanistan will not expand their drone attacks on the country's troubled tribal areas.

Ahmed Mukhtar said the reports about the expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan are mere speculation on the part of the western media.

His remarks come after recent reports in prominent US media quoted unnamed Obama Administration officials as saying that the CIA had received authorization to expand drone attacks against alleged militant targets in Pakistan following US allegations that tied the recent New York City attempted bombing to a Pakistani militant group.

The US has increased the number of drone attacks in Pakistan in recent years. Since August 2008, such strikes have killed nearly a thousand people, including many civilians.

MVZ/TG/MB

[bigron]

Tuesday, May 11, 2010
13:22 Mecca time, 10:22 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/201051181854906102.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
'US drones' kill Pakistan fighters 

 
The suspect in a failed New York bombing has claimed to have visited a Taliban camp in Waziristan [AFP]
 
At least 14 people have been killed in an attack by suspected US drone aircraft in Pakistan's North Waziristan region.

Up to 18 missiles were fired at targets in Dattakhel village, close to the border with Afghanistan, security officials said on Tuesday morning.

It was the third drone attack since US officials said Taliban from the region were behind a failed bombing in New York's Times Square on May 1.

"Three missiles hit a vehicle and three militants sitting in it were killed," an intelligence official in the region said.

The drones then attacked a nearby compound used by fighters, firing about 12 missiles into it.

"The militants have cordoned off the area. So far they've retrieved 11 bodies from the debris," a second security official said.

"The death toll may rise because the militants are still searching for bodies."

Identities unclear

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the capital, Islamabad, said the attack lasted for up 20-25 minutes.

"According to reports from the area, up to 18 missiles were fired against targets on the ground. These were encampments and vehicles."

in depth

 - Inside Story: Pakistan - A new wave of attacks?
 - Video: US panel debates drone legality
 
There was no word on the identity of any of the fighters killed but the attack was in an area where members of an Afghan Taliban faction led by a commander known as Gul Bahadur operate.

Foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda are said to be in the area as well as Pakistani Taliban fighters fleeing an army offensive in South Waziristan.

Drone attacks have stirred anger in Pakistan as they often result in civilian casualties.

According to statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, more than 90 per cent of the 708 people killed in attacks targeting the tribal areas in 2009 were civilians.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a journalist in Islamabad, said the killings of innocent people were feeding into "the radicalisation agenda and narrative that many people in Pakistan are subject to."

"If the only metric of success is to kill members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then certainly [drone attacks] have been successful," he told Al Jazeera.

"But if the objective is to win the global war on terror and to defeat the radicalisation agenda in this part of the world, and ensure that we're not creating new terrorists and new recruits for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then ... I think there are a lot of questions."

Attacks to expand

Last week, officials said that the US intelligence agency had been granted approval by the government to expand drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions in a move to step up military operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Targets would now include low-level combatants, even if their identities were not known.

Last month, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban who was previously thought killed by a missile from a drone, appeared in internet videos threatening suicide attacks in the US.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said Washington expects more co-operation from Pakistan in fighting terrorism and warned of "severe consequences" if an attack on US soil were traced back to the country.

Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square bombingattempt, has reportedly claimed to have visited a Taliban camp in the Waziristan region.

CIA-operated drones have frequently targeted the group over the past year, and its members have vowed to avenge strikes that have killed several of their commanders.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan's foreign minister, told CBS television channel last week that the US should not be surprised if fighters try to carry out more attacks.

"They're not going to sort of sit and welcome you [to] sort of eliminate them. They're going to fight back," Qureshi said.
 
 

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U.S. military tries to reassure Pakistan amid Times Square probe

By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

-U.S. secretary of state had warned about Pakistan links to Times Square plot

-U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman discussed matter with chief of Pakistani army

-Senior U.S. military official says U.S. "not trying to pressure him as a result of this case"

-U.S. intelligence indicates suspect in failed bombing had ties to Pakistani Taliban


Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with the chief of the Pakistani army Sunday.

Washington (CNN) -- The top U.S. military officer is reassuring his Pakistani counterpart that the U.S. military is not pressuring the Pakistani army to increase its operations against the Taliban there, a senior U.S. military official said.

The message comes as the United States has turned up independent evidence that ties the suspect in the attempted bombing in New York's Times Square to the insurgent group. It stands in sharp contrast to tough talk from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who warned of "consequences" if the Times Square plot is linked to elements in Pakistan.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, chief of the Pakistani army, to discuss the matter Sunday.

Mullen called to "reassure Kayani we are not trying to pressure him as a result of this case," a senior U.S. military official said. "Mullen didn't call to say, 'You gotta do more because this Pakistani-American was trained on your territory.' "

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, met with Kayani as well, and his spokesman denied McChrystal made any effort to pressure the Pakistani official.

Clinton publicly took a tougher line, saying on the CBS program "60 Minutes": "We've made it very clear that if -- heaven forbid -- an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences."

The senior U.S. military official was adamant in saying the U.S. military is not trying to make the Pakistanis accelerate their timetable to move against Taliban strongholds in North Waziristan, a border region long believed to be sheltering al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

Kayani has repeatedly said his troops would not expand their operations into North Waziristan until they have finished operations in other areas.

"We are very comfortable with the work they have been doing and where they are at the moment," the senior official said.

Other senior military officials offer the same assessment.

The military official said the current view has been reached even as intelligence increasingly indicates the Times Square bombing plot suspect, Faisal Shahzad, had "strong links" to the Pakistani Taliban.

"We believe right now the Pakistanis are doing everything they can," the U.S. military official said. He declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation.

The United States now has independent intelligence to indicate Shahzad had ties to the Pakistani Taliban, according to a U.S. official. The official could not be identified because he is not authorized to speak publicly. The independent confirmation is important because it gives the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community a better understanding of Shahzad's activities without just following leads based on his interrogation.

The official said the United States is still trying to figure out "how deep" Shahzad's links are to the Pakistani Taliban and "how high up" his connections go into the organization. But he emphasized that public statements by top U.S. officials about Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban are "not just based on what Shahzad is saying."

He would not discuss additional details about the other intelligence streams of information.

"People are looking into other streams of intelligence that point in a serious way to links to the [Pakistani Taliban]," the official said.

President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, said Sunday, "It looks like he was working on behalf of the Tariki Taliban Pakistan, the TTP, that's the Pakistan Taliban. This is a group that is closely allied with al Qaeda."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, went further, saying that the plot was directed by the Pakistani Taliban.

"We know that they helped facilitate it; we know that they helped direct it," Holder said. "And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot."

The U.S. official also said the United States is trying to get a better understanding of the TTP's own source of financing. While acknowledging the risk posed by a single Taliban operative, he also said there are indications the TTP lacks extensive financial resources and it's not clear it could set up an extensive operation in the United States.

If U.S. intelligence can determine and isolate a target precisely tied to Shahzad, such as the training areas where he might have been sheltered, the most likely scenario is that the U.S. government would call in drone strikes to ensure any lethal action is as precise as possible and potential civilian casualties are minimized, several officials have told CNN.

In other news from the region, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan says the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan is as strong as it's ever been.

At a White House news conference Monday, Karl Eikenberry acknowledged that there have been "ups and downs" in the relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

But Eikenberry said he expected the two countries "to be able to work our way through difficulties and come back together and still find ourselves well-aligned" as a result of Karzai's visit to Washington this week to meet with Obama.

Also at the news conference, McChrystal said there will be increased violence in Afghanistan "as our combined security forces expand into Taliban-controlled areas" in the south.
 

 
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/05/10/us.pakistan.times.square/index.html 

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Georgetown Professor: 'Drones Are Not Killing Innocent Civilians' in Pakistan

by Jeremy Scahill

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65851&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 10, 2010

I'm not sure how many of you caught the segment last Friday on the Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC featuring Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a 25 year army veteran and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Task Force STRATUS IVY and Georgetown University professor Christine Fair of the Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS). The two were discussing the alleged failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and potential connections to the Taliban in Pakistan. In the discussion, Lt. Col. Shaffer raised the issue of US drone strikes against Pakistan, which Shahzad reportedly has said were part of his motivation for the attempted bombing. "The Taliban are more motivated than ever to come at us," said Shaffer, saying that "the Predator program is having the same effect in Afghanistan two years ago in killing innocents" that it is now having in Pakistan.

Professor Fair, who has also worked for the RAND Corporation and as a political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, acted dumbfounded at the idea that the US drone strikes kill any civilians. "I take extreme exception top the way my colleague characterized the drones," Fair said. "Actually the drones are not killing innocent civilians. Many of those reports are coming from deeply unreliable and dubious Pakistani press reports, which no one takes credibly on any other issue except for some reason on this issue. There've actually been a number of surveys on the ground, in FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. The residents of FATA generally welcome the drone strikes because they know actually who's being killed. They're very much aware and who's being killed and who's not."



Here is video of the segment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnmoHc9hhRc&feature=player_embedded#!

Some estimates, most of which are indeed Pakistani sources, suggest that the vast majority of Pakistanis killed are civilians. In an Op-Ed for The New York Times last year, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, called for a moratorium on the strikes, saying they had "killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent." They relied on "Pakistani sources," which are apparently offensive to Professor Fair. But Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation recently did a meticulous review of the strikes, citing the following methodology:
**
"Our analysis of the drone campaign is based only on accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan. We restricted our analysis to reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, accounts by major news services and networks--the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC--and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan--The Daily Times, Dawn, and The News--as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network."
**
Bergen and Tiedemann concluded that "the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent." They concluded that under President Obama Under President Obama, who has used the drones with much greater frequency than Bush, "about a quarter [of drone-inflicted deaths] appear to have been civilians."

I expect that Professor Fair, if confronted on this, will have to retract her definitive statement "the drones are not killing innocent civilians." It just simply is false.



 

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Afghanistan, Iraq And Next Pakistan?

By Gulam A. Mitha

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65855&hd=&size=1&l=e

10 May, 2010 - Countercurrents.org

Does it have to be that an entire country and it’s innocent civilians have to be punished after the failed New York Times Square bomb attempt by one person? It seems to be that way. Maybe another false flag operation was planned to issue stern warnings to Pakistan that should there be a successful attack next, there might even be a "boots-on-the ground" US presence on Pakistan as reported by the New York Times, a Zionist mouthpiece, on Saturday May 9, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/asia/09pstan.html). After the unsuccessful bomb attack by US citizen Faisal Shehzad who was captured by US authorities on board a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, the US administration has started issuing threats to Pakistan.

The first threat came on May 5, 2010 from Fareed Zakaria, author and host of CNN’s "Fareed Zakaria GPS" in which he reported that "Pakistan is the epicentre of Islamic terrorism" and that "..it's worth noting that even the terrorism that's often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan..". Zakaria was a favored student of Dr. Huntington the celebrated author of "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order". Zakaria has also been noted to be involved with George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz in pushing for the war on Iraq.

Why would Zakaria use the words "Islamic Terrorism" rather than Muslim terrorism? In my article, The Winds of Change, published by Countercurrents on May 4, 2010 I’d written that since the war cannot be waged on Islam, the next best is to wage it on its adherents to weaken them. The strategy is working. The affluent group of Muslims are being weakened as they pursue materialistic objectives whereas the poorer Muslims are being intimidated through wars waged on them. One group fears the loss of wealth and the other fears loss of lives, not their own maybe but of their families.

On May 7, 2010, US military commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal met with Pakistan’s military commander General Ashfaq Kiyani in Islamabad to clearly issue a stern warning that Pakistan must immediately begin a military offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in North Waziristan. US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson also met with Pakistani president Asif Zardari and used "forceful" language to convey the American point that the Pakistanis had to move more assertively against the militants threaded through the society. As if that is not enough, pressure mounted from Hillary Clinton on May 7, 2010 that it faced "very severe consequences" if a terror plot like Times Square bombing were traced to Pakistan. US officials have even admitted that if there is a successful attack, the US will have to act. Maybe there is a successful attack being planned by the US either on its soil or on some European, Indian or Israeli soils. If the unsuccessful bomb attack is so politically successful, one would wonder how successful will be a successful bomb attack.

The answers to the question why US has urged Pakistan to launch a military offensive in the northern areas is very clear. It is to create more fear and terrorism, more suicide bombings, ensure more terrorists are bred, continue and further increase drone attacks and, demoralize and weaken the military through exhausting the hardware in its arsenal such that if a joint US-Indian-NATO attack is launched on Pakistan in the near future, it’ll not be able to sustain the war. Nuclear deterrence against an enemy already on its soil is pointless.

The one thing that most Muslim leaders severely lack is diplomacy and negotiation skills, more so a nuclear state like Pakistan than any of the others who’ve no strong and viable defences. Pakistan could easily retaliate to threats from US or India but being an indebted nation whose leaders are corrupt to the nth degree and who have families overseas, they’re unable to demonstrate diplomacy or use language that would remove threats so they submit to threats. Zardari is a known state criminal and the US has all the scoops on him to blackmail him should he not relent to US demands.

It is now obvious that the US has military intentions towards Pakistan. India and Israel but more so the latter would like to see Pakistan denuclearised. Pakistan is also of significant geo-political importance as it would serve as a corridor for land-locked Afghanistan and the former Soviet satellites . 9/11 led to the occupation of Afghanistan, WMDs led to the occupation of Iraq and its becoming obvious that the relentless pressure of terrorism might lead to Pakistan’s occupation and subsequent denuclearisation. The Zionists have mastered the art of fabrication without being challenged. They’ve not only fabricated 9/11, WMDs and other false flag operations but they’ve also fabricated an economic culture leading to rewards for the obedient servants and slavery for the masses throughout the world.

Much as the US, France, Germany and UK would like to bomb Iran to the rubble because of its oil and gas, Russia and China have not been supportive of actions against Iran in the United Nations. The next best target is therefore Pakistan as the US needs not secure UN, Russian or Chinese support for actions against it. The excuse of containing the epicentre of "Islamic terrorism" is sufficient. Pakistan is in the pressure cooker with the lid on and the stove flame on high.

Gulam Asgar Mitha

180 Citadel Crest Cir. NW

Calgary, AB, CANADA T3G 4G4

http://mithagam.shawwebspace.ca/blog/



 

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Clinton: Pakistan Officials ‘Harboring’ Bin Laden

Claims Govt 'Holding Back' on al-Qaeda Leader

by Jason Ditz, May 10, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/10/clinton-pakistan-officials-harboring-bin-laden/

In perhaps the clearest signal yet that tensions between the US and Pakistan are on the rise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused unnamed parties in Pakistan’s government of harboring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“I’m not saying that they’re at the highest levels, but I believe that somewhere in this government are people who know where Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11,” Clinton warned.

US officials have regularly made pointed comments about Pakistan’s status on bin Laden whenever tensions are on the rise, but had held off on those claims in recent months.

Now, it seems, the Obama Administration has returned to the “hard line” position adopted previously, largely as political fallout from the Times Square bombing attempt earlier this month.

Secretary of State Clinton has threatened “very serious consequences” against Pakistan in retaliation for this failed attack, and the sudden (but by no means novel) claims regarding bin Laden are probably just one facet of that retaliation.

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US drone attacks kill 24 in Pakistan

Tue, 11 May 2010 18:16:46 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=126184&sectionid=351020401

   
 
A second US drone attack in less than a day has killed at least 10 people and wounded several others in northwest Pakistan.

Officials say an American unmanned plane fired two missiles at a house in North Waziristan.

Earlier, another unmanned aircraft fired over a dozen missiles into a village killing 14 people.

The issue of civilian casualties has strained relations between Islamabad and Washington. Pakistan has repeatedly objected to the attacks, saying they violate its sovereignty.

Since August 2008, such strikes have killed nearly a thousand people, many of them civilians.

JR/AKM

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Wednesday, May 12, 2010
13:07 Mecca time, 10:07 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201051271757128641.html
   
FOCUS 
 
Ominous signs for US-Pakistan ties 
 
 By Robert Grenier

 
Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised Pakistan-born US citizen, has been charged with planting a bomb in New York's Times Square [EPA]

This is going to turn out badly.

I have watched with some surprise, and with growing concern, the reactions of Americans to the string of revelations concerning the Pakistani links of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged would-be car bomber of Times Square.

It appears that Shahzad was progressively radicalised during the course of several trips to the land of his birth.

He is considered by many to be a case of home-grown terrorism: A US resident - indeed, a citizen - who was motivated to strike innocent civilians in his adopted country, apparently out of concern for attacks against Muslims abroad.

In this, he joins a growing list of such actual or aspirational terrorists in the US, among whom Major Hassan Nidal, the army officer who killed 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, and Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-born permanent resident alien who recently pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb the New York subway, are but the most recent and worrisome examples.

Time to reconsider


Shahzad apparently claims to have had support from the Pakistani Taliban [EPA]

However, Shahzad also apparently claims to have had encouragement and support, including bomb training, from the so-called Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan - the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP.

To most Americans, this is a new and unwelcome twist. Attacks by al-Qaeda they fear, but understand.

The fact that we are at war in Afghanistan with the Taliban is well-known. But to find now that the US is apparently under some form of attack from a rag-tag group of Pakistani extremists of whom most Americans had not heard two weeks ago is even more unsettling.

The fact that even well-informed Americans, including many in government, wonder why we should be targeted by the TTP is, to me, a source of wonder. What did they think?

Beitullah Mehsud, the 2007 founder of the TTP, was killed in an apparent US missile strike in 2009.

His successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was apparently also the victim of two missile strikes this year, the second of which was thought to have killed him - until he recently popped back up.

Beitullah distinguished himself by making appeals not as a local militant with strictly parochial concerns, but as a member of a regional and global movement of which he considered himself and his organisation to be an integral part.

To those in the US who knew of Beitullah's threat to strike the White House, or to hit targets in the UK, such boasts were largely ridiculed. But in a technically wired world in which people, things and ideas move so freely, the ridiculers should stop to reconsider.

The TTP, until now, has been considered primarily a threat to the government of Pakistan.

Pakistani opposition to the TTP, in turn, has been unequivocal for nearly a year. 

Indeed, the Pakistan army's invasion of South Waziristan late last year was aimed at the Mehsuds and the core of the TTP, to which the TTP has responded with a horrific string of mass-casualty attacks, largely against civilians.

Given that history, the clear commitment of the Pakistanis to counter the TTP (if not other groups), and the scale of Pakistani suffering at TTP hands, one might have expected this possibly TTP-abetted attempt on the US to reinforce the sense of solidarity between the two partner countries.

That was hardly the case.

Heightened suspicions

IN depth
More from Robert Grenier:
 
-  Why Karzai cannot choose his family
-  Remembering Operation Eagle Claw
-  US leadership in non-proliferation
-  Follow the chain of command
-  Talking to the enemy
-  Striking at Afghanistan corruption
-  Pakistan needs friendly Afghanistan
-  Political umbrage in Washington?
-  Iraq 'condemned' to democracy
-  Israel's cost-benefit calculation
-  Making room for the Taliban
-  Interview on America's battles abroad
 
Instead, the Shahzad affair has heightened US suspicion of both Pakistani motives and Pakistani resolve in resisting extremism and militancy.

Pakistani policy toward militant groups of various stripes is far too complicated, far too ambiguous, and far too finely calibrated to ever gain clear US support.

Pakistani willingness to tolerate on its territory Afghan insurgent groups through whom it might hope to exert influence in that country has gained a certain measure of grudging, sullen tolerance from US officials, but will never find real US acceptance.

Pakistan's reluctance to move too aggressively against its many current and potential enemies at once - particularly in North Waziristan - while at times understandable to official American eyes, will always generate the nagging suspicion that at any given moment, Pakistan can, and should do more.

The US attitude was most bluntly expressed by the secretary of state herself.

Speaking this past weekend on the 60 Minutes television show, Hillary Clinton praised Pakistani progress in fighting extremism, but added this, referring to the Times Square incident: "If, heaven forbid, an attack like this, that we can trace back to Pakistan, were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences."

Asked to elaborate - and given the chance to moderate her statement - she declined.

Breeding resentment


The Shahzad affair has heightened distrust of Pakistan's resolve to tackle terrorism [EPA]

The US administration's attitude could not be clearer: Whatever the current degree of US engagement with Pakistan, no matter the level of US financial support, regardless of US proclamations that it wants a long-term strategic partnership with Pakistan, US-Pakistani relations cannot withstand a significant terrorist attack on the US homeland if it should emanate from Pakistani soil.

It should be recognised and acknowledged, however, that it is not a matter of whether, but of when there will be another significant terrorist attack in the US

And if, God forbid, it involves some link to Pakistan, as well it might, there will be hell to pay.

The open question is: Just what would the US do?

The Times Square incident has already begun to generate the usual pressures for expanded drone attacks in Pakistan, and even for consideration of a direct US military presence.

But it is not like drone attacks, if they are targeted and discriminating, as they must be, can simply be dialed up a few notches at will.

And even the most willfully aggressive US military and government officials will understand, on even a moment's informed reflection, that a cross-border US combat military presence in Pakistan would be disastrously counter-productive.

Given Pakistan's growing reliance on US financial support, both direct and indirect through international institutions, though, it seems likely that the US would react to a terrorist attack with crude threats of a financial cut-off, reverting to the coercive tactics of the past and abandoning its stated attempt to get beyond the "transactional" dynamic of its past relations with Pakistan.

Such attempts at gaining "leverage" are more likely to generate resentment than renewed commitment on the part of Pakistan.

Ticking clock

Meanwhile the US-Nato coalition project in Afghanistan is not going well.

In the end, whatever the efforts of the coalition and the Afghan government, "victory" will ultimately depend on the willingness of Afghans in the Pushtun areas to resist voluntarily both the blandishments and the threats of the Taliban.

They are unlikely to do so consistently. And the Afghan government, for its part, will not develop the capacity to enforce its writ unilaterally in the Pushtun areas on any timeline politically acceptable in the US - and most likely never will, despite high levels of US support.

Moreover, so long as the US maintains a substantial military presence in Afghanistan, the number of its enemies - the number of "accidental guerillas," as David Kilcullen would say - across the Durand Line in Pakistan will continue to increase, irrespective of broad popular support for resistance to militants who directly threaten Pakistan. 

The motivation of those hunted by the US to strike back at their tormentors is also likely to grow commensurately.

All the while, the clock continues to tick down on the next US terror attack.

When one puts it all together, it is hard to see how this can turn out well.

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

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

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Pakistan: 28 die in NWA drone attack

By Malik Mumtaz & Mushtaq Yusufzai

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65902&hd=&size=1&l=e

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

MIRAMSHAH/PESHAWAR: The US spy planes on Tuesday launched the biggest missile attack in North Waziristan tribal region and killed 28 suspected militants and villagers in the wake of heightening tension in the Pak-US relations over Faisal Shahzad’s alleged involvement in the botched New York car bombing.

Official sources in Miramshah, the principal town of North Waziristan, said the unmanned US spy planes fired the biggest number of missiles at a time against a single target.

"It’s terrible. They intend to intensify the drone attacks as the number of planes hovering over the area has gone up dramatically," remarked an official in Miramshah, who declined to be named.

The official and tribal sources said 13 people, including villagers and militants, were killed in the first round of missile strikes in the Doga area in Dattakhel subdivision while 15 others, believed to be militants, were killed in the second hit on a house in the Gorweek area.

According to sources, nine drones took part in the coordinated missile strikes in the mountainous Doga area in Dattakhel subdivision, located near the border with the Urgoon area of Afghanistan’s Paktika province.

The area, which is about 65-70 kilometres west of Miramshah, is the hometown of MNA from North Waziristan Kamran Khan. Pakistan has deployed one Army brigade in this area. According to sources, the drones first started firing missiles at a speedy car travelling towards Doga from the border area of Afghanistan. Three people, suspected to be the militants, were killed and two others injured in the strike .

Later, the drones started targeting suspected hideouts of the militants affiliated with North Waziristan Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur and his deputy Maulvi Sadiq Noor. Security officials said some of the missiles hit tented hideouts of the militants which they had temporarily established in mountains.

Besides local militants, officials said, foreign fighters were also killed in the series of missile strikes. Tribesmen said they saw nine bodies of the local militants being shifted to their native villages near Miramshah for burial. The sources close to the Taliban said there was no prominent figure among the victims.

An official of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) on condition of anonymity said death toll might rise as some of the missiles struck houses of local tribesmen in the village. He said five tribesmen injured in the attack in Doga were brought to the Agency Headquarters Hospital in Miramshah and three others were rushed to Peshawar.

Later, the drones fired three more missiles and struck the hideout of Maulvi Sadiq Noor in the Gorweek area of Dattakhel tehsil. The official sources said 15 militants were killed and four others injured, while militants claimed only 10 of their men had been killed in the attack.

The government officials said it was the 31st missile attack by the US spy planes in North Waziristan since the beginning of this year and 13th on Dattakhel, stronghold of Hafiz Gul Bahadur-led militants.

They said over 500 people, including militants and local tribesmen, had lost their lives in these missile strikes and several others were maimed for life. Meanwhile, tension prevailed in the militancy-stricken North Waziristan with tribesmen fearing a likely military operation after a strong-worded threat to Pakistan by the US following the arrest of Faisal Shahzad.

The peace committee, headed by prominent cleric Maulana Gul Ramazan, has been trying to bring together the government and the Hafiz Gul Bahadur-led Taliban. But the committee members have not been able to overcome the differences between the government and the Taliban after the May 11 attack on a military convoy near Khattay Killay in which nine soldiers were killed and 16 others were injured.

Since then the military authorities have been facing problems in taking troops form one area to another for security reasons. The militants had threatened to attack the troops if they came out of their camps in Miramshah, Mir Ali and Dattakhel. The militants said that they had imposed their own curfew of their own and would not allow the troops to move in the area during the curfew hours.





 

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Pakistani official: No, we didn't capture Mullah Omar

by Josh Rogin

http://uruknet.com/?p=m65908&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 11, 2010

Despite what you might have read, the Pakistani government did not arrest Taliban leader Mullah Omar, a senior Pakistani government official confirms to The Cable.

"Neither the U.S. government nor the Pakistani government are saying this is true and it is not true," the official said, adding that he was never captured by the Pakistani military or intelligence services and is not in Pakistani custody.

"It just doesnt make sense that we would arrest a man and keep it a secret," the official went on, saying the reports by online sites including Big Government and The Jawa Report are totally off the mark.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn't believe that Omar is captured, but she did say recently that she thinks the Pakistanis have some information on his whereabouts that they aren't sharing with the U.S.

"I believe that somewhere in this government are people who know where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11," she said Sunday on CBS 60 minutes.

The White House declined to comment on the reports of Omar's capture.



 

[bigron]

May 12, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp05122010.html

"They Know Where Osama bin Laden Is"

Threatening Pakistan



By GARY LEUPP

"We’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” declared Attorney General Eric Holder last Sunday, referring to the May 1 attempted car bombing of Times Square in New York City. “We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it, and that [Faizal Shabad] was working at their direction.” Days earlier General David Petraeus had told reporters Shabad was probably “a lone wolf” and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that the abortive bombing was nothing “other than a one-off.”

Meanwhile White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told “Fox News Sunday” that Shahzad was “operating on behalf of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the TPP,” adding, “It’s a group that is closely allied with al Qaeda. They train together, they plan together, they plot together. They are almost indistinguishable.”

Actually, they are distinguishable, even if they reportedly share money and resources in common efforts to assist the Afghan Taliban and to resist the U.S./NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as the Pakistani Army. The Pakistani Taliban emerged in solidarity with the original Afghan Taliban, fellow Pashtuns wanting to implement Sharia law. Neither they nor the Afghan originals is concerned with a global jihad against the U.S. so much as with being left alone. The Tehrik-e-Taliban was only formed in 2007, in response to the Pakistani Army’s attacks, at U.S. demand, on South Waziristan.

It’s may be true true that Hakimullah Mehsud, who took over leadership of the TTP last August, stated in a videotape released May 2, after the Manure Bomber incident, stated that “We Tehreek-e-Taliban with all the Pride and Bravery, take full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA.” And in a second tape released the same day, but dated April 14, he states, “Inshaallah (God willing) very soon in some days or a month’s time, the Muslim ummah (world) will see the fruits of most successful attacks of our fedayeen in USA.”

But according to Asia Times Online: “The TTP itself, via a spokesman, Azam Tariq, dismissed the whole thing, although it had initially claimed responsibility. Tariq was quoted as saying, “This is a noble job and we pray that all the Muslim youths should follow Faisal Shahzad. But he is not part of our network.” Instead, what the TTP says it sees is “a plot hatched by the US and its allies to trap Muslim and Pukhtun [Pashtun] youth in terrorist activities.” Meanwhile the Pakistani Army and Interior Ministry have expressed skepticism that TTP is behind the bombing attempt.

The McClatchy Newspapers reported Tuesday that “six US officials” have actually stated that “no credible evidence has been found” that Shahzad “received any serious terrorist training from the Pakistani Taliban or another radical Islamic group.” Yet the Obama administration is asserting that the Pakistani Taliban, or one of the several factions (they sometimes quarrel among themselves), is now even more dangerous, constituting a threat to the Homeland comparable to that posed by al-Qaeda. Hence the Pakistani government’s failure to suppress it is all the more unacceptable.

Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online notes that “Earlier in 2010, the Central Intelligence Agency warned al-Qaeda might try an attack inside the US  ‘within the next six months.’ It did happen - like clockwork - with the added bonus that the alleged perpetrators are even more convenient than al-Qaeda.” In other words, in the absence of any more compelling evidence for Taliban plans to attack the U.S. this incident of the smoking SUV allows the CIA to say, “We predicted this,” even though evidence is in fact rather murky. It is politically useful to posit an intimate connection between Shahzad, TTP and al-Qaeda to further demonize the Talibs and thus defend the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Recall how right after the 9-11 attacks George W. Bush announced that the U.S. “will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them” and later elaborated: “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
This boast about making “no distinction” was a declaration to the world that the U.S. would eschew careful rational thinking in order to multiply targets for attack. It was practically an announcement that the U.S. administration had gone berserk, and was in a trance-like fury. Hence the entire world should fear it more than ever. This is illogic itself used (very consciously) as a weapon.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was asked at a European security conference in February 2002 what Bush meant by the “axis of evil,” conflating as it did the highly dissimilar regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He responded, with insidious vagueness: “Countries must make a choice.” (In other words, don’t ask me to explain that ridiculous phrase logically, as a normal representative of a normal country might do. Fear and obey!) The Europeans were stunned.

Journalist Ron Suskind wrote in the New York Times in 2004 about a Bush aide who’d mocked him for being “in what we call the reality-based community,” or people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” (The “we” here is undoubtedly the neocons, whose Straussian political philosophy justifies the “noble lie.”) But when Suskind observed that reasonable people had been studying empirical reality since the Enlightenment, the aide cut him off contemptuously and said, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality --- judiciously, as you will --- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This assault on reason,  this arrogant insistence that the U.S. government and military can create their own reality out of whole cloth (such as a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or the existence of Iraqi WMDs) didn’t die with the Bush administration. The Obama administration has insisted from its inception that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. In his very first press conference after the election, when asked his response to the Iranian president’s letter of congratulation, he changed the subject. “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable,” he declared. “And we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.” It was a clear indication that he was on board the disinformation campaign just as much as Dick Cheney and the neocons.

That Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, or even wants to, is not proven; indeed the U.S. intelligence community has said for several years that there is no evidence of such a program and that any efforts were abandoned in 2003. Obama’s engaging in another  exercise in “creating our own reality” (otherwise known as disinformation)to deceive the people so that they’ll be more apt to accept the need to “act again” with vicious military force.

Of course it is in fact (in the real world) important to make distinctions, and to see things as they really are. The fact that Bush did not distinguish between the Taliban and al-Qaeda has had horrible consequences, beginning with the bombing of Afghanistan, the re-empowerment of the warlords, the death of over 13,000 civilians, the massive revival of opium poppy cultivation, and the revival of the Taliban as the preferred alternative to the corrupt Karzai regime and its boy-raping police.

In June 2002 Bush told West Point cadets, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead — a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” (This by the way was the year the Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise Minority Report was released. In it police, rather than waiting for crimes to occur, premptively apprehend people based upon the foreknowledge provided by special psychics or “precogs” that they plan to commit crimes. That was fiction. In the real world, the president of the U.S. was surrounded by precogs.)

This “preemption” strategy was of course used to justify the invasion of Iraq, based on the false claim that Saddam had accumulated weapons of mass destruction. It has also been used, first by Bush, then by Obama, to justify drone strikes on Pakistani territory.

Australian David Kilcullen, a former counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, told the Financial Times in March 2009, “They [the strikes] have an undeniable benefit, because we have disrupted AQ [Al Qaeda] operations and damaged AQ cells in Pakistan. But they have a negative strategic effect in that they incite Punjabi militancy, which is the biggest problem in Pakistani right now.” He said the U.S. had killed 14 mid-level or lower level al-Qaeda leaders since 2006 but the strikes had killed 700 civilians, adding “That’s a hit rate of two per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It’s not moral.”

“They incite Punjabi militancy.” (Well, duh.)And they anger the people of Pakistan in general. The parliament and top officials indignantly protest the repeated violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty. U.S. officials comment blandly that the Pakistani leadership is secretly on board the program but can’t say so “for domestic political reasons.” In other words, they can’t say they’re cooperating in attacks on their country because their people would view them as traitors and try to drive them from power.
 
Pakistani-American Shahbad, reportedly enraged at the drone attacks on Waziristan, may have as alleged sought out members of one or more Pakistani Taliban groups while visiting the country of his birth. They may have given him some training, at his request. Similarly  the Nigerian Farouk Abdulmutallab, likely enraged at U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, may have gone to his mother’s homeland of Yemen for training before attempting to blow up an airplane last Christmas. It’s called blowback.

Bush’s declarations produce a vicious circle. Preemptive attacks (inevitably) killing civilians produce rage. Enraged people seek revenge. They turn to terrorism. When terrorists attack, or try to attack, the U.S., the U.S. responds by more attacks, producing more civilian casualties. It demands cooperation from governments where “terrorists” operate, threatening to target them if they don’t. (Remember that Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Pakistani President Musharraf right after 9-11, “Be prepared to be bombed [if you don’t cooperate with the U.S.]. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.”) Thus the war spreads. Refugees from the Afghan bombing flee into Pakistan, spreading pro-Taliban sentiment, producing local Taliban, who have to be bombed there too. 

Now Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is threatening Pakistan with “severe consequences” if there is a successful attack on the U.S. planned in that country. What might those consequences be? The U.S. has been relentlessly pressuring the Pakistani government to conduct more operations against the proliferating Taliban in the “Af-Pak” border area. When the overstretched Pakistani Army hesitates or balks, the U.S. complains that Pakistan isn’t “doing enough.” Granted, they are cooperating, but they need to “do more.”

Clinton told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Monday:  “I’m not saying that they’re at the highest levels, but I believe that somewhere in [the Pakistani] government are people who know where Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is, where Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is, and we expect more cooperation to help us bring to justice, capture or kill those who attacked us on 9/11.” FOX News predictably spun it this way: “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused members of the Pakistani government over the weekend of practically harboring Usama bin Laden…”

FOX is reminding us of Bush’s words: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. This remains U.S. doctrine, and the justification of all manner of imperialist aggression. Thus governments in nations like Yemen and Pakistan, fearing the accusation that they might be willingly harboring America’s enemies, can be intimidated into forms of cooperation with the U.S. that they know are unpopular and politically risky. But they can only do so much, and the demands of the U.S. hyperpower seem endless.

Let’s say the Pakistanis can’t or don’t comply to Clinton and Obama’s satisfaction. After a successful bombing in the U.S., by someone trained in Pakistan, the U.S. massively bombs the border area, with or without the permission of the regime. How would the Pakistani people react? A Pew Research Center public opinion poll taken last summer indicated that 64% of Pakistanis regard the U.S. as an enemy and only 9% consider it a “partner.” Presumably Clinton knows this. Is she hell-bent on further alienating Pakistanis, even as anti-U.S. sentiment mounts in Afghanistan? (According to an ABC News poll, 68% of Afghans supported the presence of U.S. troops in 2005. That number’s now down to 38%.)

What are the possible scenarios? (More) political upheaval? (Another) military coup? An ultimatum to the Pakistani military to move as directed by Washington, or accept direct U.S. military intervention with ground troops? How does Clinton suppose a proud Muslim nation armed with nukes might react to any “severe consequences” inflicted on it by the U.S.?

It might respond with severe consequences of its own. Practically every single U.S. measure or policy in the region from the Mediterranean to the Indus in recent history, from the unconditional support for Israel as it continues to occupy Arab land, to the imposition of the Shah’s vicious regime on Iran, to the criminal invasions of Iraq, the imposition of U.S. military bases on Saudi Arabia (from 1990 to 2003), the drone strikes on Yemen and Pakistan, have produced negative consequences for the U.S. government as well as the people of this country.

Those consequences include a rise in hatred for the U.S., which although actually quite rarely expressed in violence has produced such pathetic attempts as that of the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, and the Times Square Bomber. When you kill 700 civilians in Pakistan, 13,000 in Afghanistan, 100,000 in Iraq in a part of the world that believes in “an eye for an eye” you have to expect the occasional violent reaction, including actions in the U.S.  To expect otherwise would be to retreat into the “create own own reality” mode, which is---rather like the mind of the schizophrenic, driven by delusions, withdrawn from the real world---profoundly demented.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu 

 

[bigron]

The U.S. Is Shipping Tons of Deadly Weaponry to Pakistan

U.S. drones bomb Pakistan regularly. Now, Washington is about to deliver 20 F-16s and surveillance planes to Islamabad along with a thousand 500 lb bombs.

By Jeremy Scahill, TheNation.com
Posted on May 12, 2010, Printed on May 13, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146842/

Obama administration, that expanded the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. Citing current and former counterterrorism officials, the paper reported that the CIA had received "secret permission to attack a wider range of targets" allowing the Agency to rely on "pattern of life" analysis.

"The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known," according to the report. "Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list. The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said."

There is no doubt that the Obama administration has dramatically expanded the use of drones in Pakistan and that the drone attacks are unpopular. It is far from a radical position to assert that the bombings are creating fresh enemies, inspiring militants and empowering the Taliban. On Monday, I reported on the comments of Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer and Georgetown Professor Christine Fair on the issue. Shaffer said he was against the drone attacks because they create a reality where the "Taliban are more motivated than ever to come at us... the Predator program is having the same effect [it had] in Afghanistan two years ago in killing innocents" that it is now having in Pakistan. Shaffer is no anti-war activist -- on the same show he advocated deploying U.S. "boots on the ground" in Pakistan. Fair, a respected former UN advisor in Afghanistan, made the ridiculous claim that "the drones are not killing innocent civilians," adding that the "residents of FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas] generally welcome the drone strikes because they know actually who's being killed."

It is indisputable that, across Pakistan, the drone strikes are passionately opposed. According to a poll conducted by Gallup last year, only 9% of Pakistanis support the strikes.

Presumably, Professor Fair was basing her assertion regarding support for drone bombings in FATA on polls such as the one conducted by the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy last year in FATA. It found that more than half of respondents (52%) believed the drone strikes were accurate and 60% believed the strikes were damaging "militant organizations." That is a far cry from "welcoming" U.S. drone strikes.

Pakistani journalist Mosharraf Zaidi raises an interesting point about this, writing, "Anyone that suggests that drone attacks are popular is presenting an amputated and distorted fact." Zaidi writes:

The only enthusiasm that exists for drone attacks is within the context of having to choose between different poisons. If given a choice between drone attacks, and Pakistani artillery and aerial bombardment campaigns, many tribal people will choose the drone attacks because no matter how many civilians they kill, it is less than the blunt force of the Pakistani military. So in a room with only two very ugly options, the drone attacks are the less ugly. That is not the same thing as being popular.
This aspect of the war in Pakistan -- the Pakistani military's own air war -- is seldom discussed in the U.S. media, despite the fact that the U.S. is playing an expanding role in it. Since 2005, when the ban on most U.S. military sales to Pakistan was lifted, Islamabad has been building up its air capabilities, swiftly ordering $5 billion worth of Lockheed Martin-manufactured F-16s. After the 2008 "scorched earth" attacks on Bajaur, the Pakistani air force has been purchasing a steady stream of weapons, training and upgrades from the U.S. Before the Swat offensive in April-May 2009, the U.S. provided Pakistan with laser-guidance systems for bombs fired from F-16s, which were used extensively.

In April, a Pakistani military strike reportedly killed upwards of 70 civilians. That same month, the U.S. announced the delivery of the fresh, new F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. "The first four of the 18 planes purchased are scheduled for delivery June 26 to Shahbaz air base in south-central Pakistan," according to the U.S. Air Force. "The rest will be delivered on a staggered schedule throughout this year. In addition, Pakistan's existing F-16 fleet will undergo a mid-life update in 2011 designed to upgrade cockpits and avionics to match the F-16C/D."

 

"The F-16 sale is a sign of this burgeoning relationship between us and increased defense cooperation between our two countries," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, adding that U.S. personnel were deploying to Pakistan "to assist the Pakistanis so that they can operate these sophisticated warplanes." The U.S. is reportedly sending 50 personnel to Pakistan in June to accompany the war planes and provide instruction to the Pakistanis. That amounts to an approximately 25 percent increase in the acknowledged U.S. military presence in Pakistan.

The U.S. and Pakistan are wasting no time in training the pilots. Eight Pakistani air force pilots recently became the first from their nation since 1983 to train in the United States. The Pakistani pilots received training over the past month from the Arizona National Guard at Tucson International Airport. On May 5, they were honored at a graduation ceremony and are now off to Lockheed Martin to receive additional instruction. "For Pakistan, our air force is gaining capabilities that it has needed for the last decade -- capabilities that are critical to ongoing operations in Pakistan's war on terror," said Wing Commander Ghazanfar Latif, a 12-year F-16A pilot with the Pakistani air force. "This is going to make a big difference because we do not have the capability to make precision engagements at night... Everybody understands that collateral damage is a big factor, and the [new technology on the planes] will help us carry out precision engagement and close-air support."  Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said the war planes would help Pakistan fight "radical elements" on the border with Afghanistan.

In February, the U.S. delivered 1,000 MK-82 500 lb bombs to Pakistan, followed by "an initial batch" of 700 GBU-12 and 300 GBU-10 Paveway laser-guided bomb kits built by Lockheed and Raytheon Co, sophisticated technology that will allow better targeting of the weapons.

But it is not just fighter jets and bombs the U.S. is selling Pakistan or training its pilots to use. The day the Pakistani pilots graduated in Arizona, the U.S. Air Force announced a solicitation for U.S. companies to bid on a training program for Pakistani pilots flying surveillance planes, revealing that the "Pakistan Government purchased two specially modified King Air 350 aircraft." Depending on its modifications, the King Air 350 can be used for signals intelligence, command and control, communications support and surveillance (The Iraqi government recently purchased them as well).

The point here is that there is every indication that the air war is going to intensify in Pakistan on two fronts. The U.S. drone campaign appears to be escalating and the Pakistani military is building up, modernizing and elevating the lethality of its air force thanks to U.S. training and the approval of military hardware sales.


Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

© 2010 TheNation.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146842/

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Revenger's tragedy: The forgotten conflict in Pakistan

The arrest of Faisal Shahzad for planting the Times Square car bomb has forced America to confront the bloody conflict in Pakistan that inspired his actions. The West has ignored this war for too long, writes Patrick Cockburn


Monday, 10 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/revengers-tragedy-the-forgotten-conflict-in-pakistan-1969893.html


Blowback: US marines test an unmanned drone, their preferred weapon in Pakistan's tribal areas

It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan.


In reality, this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the US response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciated by the outside world.

Western governments and media for long looked at the fighting in the tribal areas along Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan as a sideshow to the Afghan war. Washington congratulated itself on using pilotless drones to kill Taliban leaders, a tactic which meant that there were no American casualties and apparently no political fall out in the United States.

 
This has now all changed, since Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a bomb in Times Square in New York last week. Within days the US press and television was camped outside the locked gate of his family's compound in Peshawar, the effective capital of the north-west frontier region, and were trying to interview his relatives in the streets of his ancestral village of Mohib Banda, outside the city.

The Pakistan Taliban had been saying that they would seek revenge for the drone attacks by striking directly at the US, but nobody took them seriously. Their first claim that they were behind the Times Square bomb was disbelieved as being beyond their capabilities. It is difficult to see why the idea of their involvement should have been treated with derision, since suicide bombers from the Pakistan Taliban are blowing themselves up every few days along the north-west frontier.

Mr Shahzad told his interrogators that he received training in Waziristan, further south – though it cannot have been very serious given the amateurism of his later efforts. But a high degree of technical expertise is not necessary since even the most botched and ineffective bomb attack has a powerful political impact so long as it happens in the US, as was demonstrated by the Nigerian student who tried and failed to blow up a plane over Detroit at Christmas by detonating explosives in his underpants.

One outcome of the abortive Times Square attack is that it has drawn the attention of the world to the seriousness of the fighting in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, which stretch along the Afghan border. Last year the violence there and in other parts of North-West Frontier Province was enough to send 3.1 million refugees running for their lives. Many of these, particularly from the Swat valley, in the northern part of the province, have now gone home, but hundreds of thousands of others are now taking flight because of army assaults on Pakistan Taliban strongholds in FATA. These mass movements of people in obscure places like Orakzai or Kurram are hardly noticed – even within Pakistan, where they are reported without much detail on the inside pages of the newspapers.

The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Qureshi, believes that what happened in New York was "blowback" for the US drone strikes in Pakistan, which he says killed 700 Pakistani civilians last year. This may be true, but it is also hypocritical since the drones are launched from inside Pakistan and senior Pakistani security officials confirm that the information on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders, enabling the drones to target them, comes from Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) agents on the ground. Without the ISI involvement the drones would be ineffective.

The attacks of the Predator drones are highly publicised and Mr Shahzad told his interrogators that they were one reason why he made his abortive attack on Times Square. But the drones only cause a limited number of casualties and most of the destruction in what until recently was called the North-West Frontier Province are the result of heavy fighting between the Pakistan army and the local Taliban. Villages are destroyed and whole districts emptied of their inhabitants as the army imposes government authority in the seven "agencies" (sub-divisions) of FATA where the Taliban had its strongholds. The army is winning, but the Taliban is not retreating without a fight. Suicide bombings have become as frequent and as devastating as in Kandahar or Baghdad.

I recently visited Bajaur, a well-watered and heavily populated hilly agency on the Afghan border north of Peshawar from which the army has driven the Taliban over the last two years. Col Nauman Saeed, the commander of the Bajaur Scouts, a 3,500-strong force made up of tribal levies, says that the Taliban have been defeated and driven out of Bajaur and into Afghanistan and will never be able to return. But the area looks as if it is wholly under military occupation, with checkpoints every few hundred yards, little traffic on the roads, and many shops closed in the villages. Col Saeed says that 12 villages have been completely destroyed.

It is the same story south of Peshawar. I drove down the main road running to Lakki Marwat, just east of Waziristan, where there continues to be frequent suicide bombings. One had demolished part of a village police station just a few hours before we passed through, killing seven people. People are wary, and there is an atmosphere of subdued menace. I was glad to be riding in a well-armoured civilian vehicle with bullet-proof glass, protected by the bodyguards of a powerful tribal leader, businessman and senator. "I tell people that this vehicle will only stop pistol bullets," explained a former army colonel who is head of this leader's security. "In this area, if you tell them that your vehicle can stop an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] round then they will fire something even heavier at you."

The Taliban had gone but nobody believes they had gone very far. "People don't want to co-operate with the army, because they think the Taliban will find out and take revenge," said one man from a nearby village. Probably they will never come back in full force, but they show on a daily basis that they are still a force to be to be feared. When one village, called Shah Hassan, asked the local Taliban to leave, they retaliated by sending a suicide bomber into a crowd of young men playing volley ball. He detonated his explosives and killed 100 people.

Civilians are being squeezed between two implacable forces. The army's tactic is to order the civilian population out of whatever district it is trying to clear of Taliban, and then freely use its artillery and air power on the assumption that all who remain are Taliban supporters.

It is a policy heavy on destruction that would be widely reported by the media if it occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan. In Pakistan it does not attract much criticism because places like Waziristan are almost impossible for Pakistani or foreign journalists to reach as they are too dangerous except under the protection of the army. But travellers who do go there are aghast at the extent of the devastation. "What I saw was the stuff nightmares are made of," writes Ayzaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador who travelled on a bus through South Waziristan. "Houses, shops, madrassahs and even official buildings on the roadside stood in ruins or demolished. There was no sign of any human or animal life, except for a few cows wondering about in the deserted villages."

As the army marched in, some quarter of a million refugees have come flooding out of South Waziristan, according to the United Nations. The army is keen for them to return home, but most are refusing to do so because they say it is not safe – and they are almost certainly right. "The army has control only of the roads, and we are present in the forests," one Pakistan Taliban commander was quoted as saying. A further reason is that the Pakistani army may be expert at blowing things up, but the civilian government is not good at rebuilding them. Wherever I went along the frontier, people complained of the absence of any help from officials sent by the central government. They complain that no representative of the government dared attend the funeral of the 100 young men playing volleyball killed by a bomber at Shah Hassan village.

The Pakistani army defends itself by saying it has the legitimacy and popular support to use maximum force against the Pakistan Taliban. Officers point to the movement's cruelty and bigotry, with girls' schools being blown up and Taliban fighters at checkpoints ripping out CD players from cars if they hear music being played. In the Swat Valley, film of the Taliban flogging a girl turned opinion against them across Pakistan. It is also true that in the long run the government in Islamabad could not tolerate the Taliban running a state within a state.

The army is successful militarily but civilian rule has not returned to FATA. Local people suspect that if the soldiers relaxed their grip the Taliban would return. They also fear that the crisis facing them is about to get worse as the US demands that the army invade North Waziristan, a district that is a stronghold of the Afghan Taliban. Officials say this is going to happen, and construction companies are hard at work widening and improving the main military supply route leading to Waziristan.

The US has long believed that closing down the Afghan Taliban's safe enclaves in Pakistan might be the trump card in winning the war there. No doubt the loss of the enclaves would be a blow to the insurgency, but the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is 2,600 kilometres long and officials repeatedly stress it cannot be sealed.

Senior officers also give the impression that moving against the Afghan Taliban is something they would only do with reluctance. They refer to the Pakistan Taliban as "miscreants" who lack the legitimacy and popular support of the Taliban in Afghanistan – whom they see as a resistance movement defending the Pashtun community.

The US will almost certainly succeed in persuading the Pakistan military to invade North Waziristan, and this pressure can only grow since Mr Shahzad claims to have been trained there. But invasion and military occupation will not end the conflict in north-west Pakistan, which will continue to fester, with America being blamed by Pakistanis for both the drones and the actions of the Pakistani army. This will probably be enough to motivate young men like Mr Shahzad to give up their careers and go on their doomed missions of revenge.

[bigron]

Pakistan's Two Air Wars

BY Jeremy Scahill | May 12, 2010


Last week the Los Angeles Times reported [1] on a 2008 authorization by the Bush administration, continued by the Obama administration, that expanded the US drone attacks in Pakistan. Citing current and former counterterrorism officials, the paper reported that the CIA had received "secret permission to attack a wider range of targets" allowing the Agency to rely on "pattern of life" analysis.

"The information then is used to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known," according to the report. "Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list. The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said."

There is no doubt that the Obama administration has dramatically expanded the use of drones in Pakistan and that the drone attacks are unpopular. It is far from a radical position to assert that the bombings are creating fresh enemies, inspiring militants and empowering the Taliban. On Monday, I reported [2] on the comments of Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer [3] and Georgetown Professor Christine Fair [4] on the issue. Shaffer said he was against the drone attacks because they create a reality where the "Taliban are more motivated than ever to come at us... the Predator program is having the same effect [it had] in Afghanistan two years ago in killing innocents" that it is now having in Pakistan. Shaffer is no anti-war activist--on the same show he advocated deploying US "boots on the ground" in Pakistan. Fair, a respected former UN advisor in Afghanistan, made the ridiculous claim that "the drones are not killing innocent civilians," adding that the "residents of FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas] generally welcome the drone strikes because they know actually who's being killed."

It is indisputable that, across Pakistan, the drone strikes are passionately opposed. According to a poll [5] conducted by Gallup last year, only 9% of Pakistanis support the strikes.

Presumably, Professor Fair was basing her assertion regarding support for drone bombings in FATA on polls such as the one conducted [6] by the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy [7] last year in FATA. It found that more than half of respondents (52%) believed the drone strikes were accurate and 60% believed the strikes were damaging "militant organizations." That is a far cry from "welcoming" US drone strikes.

Pakistani journalist Mosharraf Zaidi raises an interesting point about this, writing [8], "Anyone that suggests that drone attacks are popular is presenting an amputated and distorted fact." Zaidi writes:

"The only enthusiasm that exists for drone attacks is within the context of having to choose between different poisons. If given a choice between drone attacks, and Pakistani artillery and aerial bombardment campaigns, many tribal people will choose the drone attacks because no matter how many civilians they kill, it is less than the blunt force of the Pakistani military. So in a room with only two very ugly options, the drone attacks are the less ugly. That is not the same thing as being popular."

This aspect of the war in Pakistan--the Pakistani military's own air war--is seldom discussed in the US media, despite the fact that the US is playing an expanding role in it. Since 2005, when the ban on most US military sales to Pakistan was lifted, Islamabad has been building up its air capabilities, swiftly ordering [9] $5 billion worth of Lockheed Martin-manufactured F-16s [10]. After the 2008 "scorched earth [11]" attacks on Bajaur, the Pakistani air force has been purchasing a steady stream of weapons, training and upgrades from the US. Before the Swat offensive in April-May 2009, the US provided Pakistan with laser-guidance systems for bombs fired from F-16s, which were used extensively.

In April [12], a Pakistani military strike reportedly [13] killed upwards of 70 civilians. That same month, the US announced the delivery of the fresh, new F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. "The first four of the 18 planes purchased are scheduled for delivery June 26 to Shahbaz air base in south-central Pakistan," according [14] to the US Air Force. "The rest will be delivered on a staggered schedule throughout this year. In addition, Pakistan's existing F-16 fleet will undergo a mid-life update in 2011 designed to upgrade cockpits and avionics to match the F-16C/D."

"The F-16 sale is a sign of this burgeoning relationship between us and increased defense cooperation between our two countries," said [15] Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, adding that US personnel were deploying to Pakistan "to assist the Pakistanis so that they can operate these sophisticated warplanes." The US is reportedly [16] sending 50 personnel to Pakistan in June to accompany the war planes and provide instruction to the Pakistanis. That amounts to an approximately 25% increase in the acknowledged US military presence [17] in Pakistan.

The US and Pakistan are wasting no time in training the pilots. Eight Pakistani air force pilots recently became the first from their nation since 1983 to train in the United States. The Pakistani pilots received training over the past month from the Arizona National Guard at Tucson International Airport. On May 5, they were honored at a graduation ceremony and are now off to Lockheed Martin to receive additional instruction. "For Pakistan, our air force is gaining capabilities that it has needed for the last decade -- capabilities that are critical to ongoing operations in Pakistan's war on terror," said [14] Wing Commander Ghazanfar Latif, a 12-year F-16A pilot with the Pakistani air force. "This is going to make a big difference because we do not have the capability to make precision engagements at night... Everybody understands that collateral damage is a big factor, and the [new technology on the planes] will help us carry out precision engagement and close-air support."  Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said [18] the war planes would help Pakistan fight "radical elements" on the border with Afghanistan.

In February, the US delivered [18] 1,000 MK-82 500 lb bombs to Pakistan, followed by "an initial batch" of 700 GBU-12 and 300 GBU-10 Paveway laser-guided bomb kits built by Lockheed and Raytheon Co, sophisticated technology that will allow better targeting of the weapons.

But it is not just fighter jets and bombs the US is selling Pakistan or training its pilots to use. The day the Pakistani pilots graduated in Arizona, the US Air Force announced [19] a solicitation for US companies to bid on a training program for Pakistani pilots flying surveillance planes, revealing that the "Pakistan Government purchased two specially modified King Air 350 aircraft." Depending on its modifications, the King Air 350 can be used for signals intelligence [20], command and control [21], communications support and surveillance [22] (The Iraqi government recently purchased them as well).

The point here is that there is every indication that the air war is going to intensify in Pakistan on two fronts. The US drone campaign appears to be escalating and the Pakistani military is building up, modernizing and elevating the lethality of its air force thanks to US training and the approval of military hardware sales.




Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/pakistans-two-air-wars



Links:
[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-drone-targets-20100506,0,57614.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: latimes/news/nationworld/world (L.A. Times - World News)
[2] http://www.thenation.com/blog/georgetown-professor-drones-are-not-killing-innocent-civilians-pakistan
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Shaffer_(intelligence_officer)
[4] http://home.comcast.net/~christine_fair/index.html
[5] http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/2009888238994769.html
[6] http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=165781
[7] http://www.airra.org/home/
[8] http://www.mosharrafzaidi.com/2010/05/11/the-consensus-about-drones-part-i/
[9] http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1111-02.htm
[10] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/f-16.htm
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?_r=3
[12] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/International/pakistan-airstrike-kill-70-civilians/story?id=10364774
[13] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8617843.stm
[14] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=59026
[15] http://www.rttnews.com/Content/Policy.aspx?Id=1287813&SM=1
[16] http://www.deccanherald.com/content/66779/f-16-600-mn-route.html
[17] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/us-says-200-troops-on-the-ground-in-pakistan/
[18] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0217277420100302?type=marketsNews
[19] https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=b0babdb7ea6178cafb99c4a4833d4cb5&tab=core&_cview=0
[20] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/king-air.htm
[21] http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/beach_king_air350/
[22] http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Standing-Up-the-IqAF-King-Air-350s-05101/

[bigron]

'All Pakistanis are terrorists' - Part 2

By Imran Khan in  Asia  on May 12th, 2010
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2010/05/12/all-pakistanis-are-terrorists-part-2


 Photo by AFP


If Pakistan is to become a stable, secure country, it is key to understand the reasons why "terror" has become popular in the country.

Last week I wrote a blog post about how Pakistanis were being singled out because they, and men of Pakistani descent, seemed to be involved in an inordinate number of so called terrorist attacks and plots.

The blog drew a number of comments and I read each one with interest. If you wrote in, I thank you. Free speech is important (even though some of you disagreed with my assertion that I am British).

As I am currently in the newsroom in Doha, I have had a chance to reflect on why so many Pakistanis have turned to so-called terror tactics to make their point. Over the years I have read a great number of books and articles on the subject (I highly recommend "Descent into chaos" by Ahmed Rashid; accessible, well-written, and a great explainer) and spoken to experts, academics, friends and family.

It's key to try to understand the reasons why violent attacks have become popular if Pakistan is to become a stable, secure country.

Why?

Pakistan lives in a dangerous neighbourhood. Afghanistan and Iran are on one side, China and India on the other. It's a relatively new country, just over 60 years old. Its institutions - to be polite - are developing.

The only way Pakistan has survived is its strong military, which protects and defines the character of the country. That's not to say all Pakistanis are standing at attention, dressed in khaki, with an AK47 in hand; but you get my point.

According to the writer Ayesha Siddiqa, whose book Military Inc explores the subject in depth, the military dominates the landscape; it is involved in everything from construction to foreign investment.

The seeds of the military's influence were sown when the first civilian government asked the military to step in to save the country from instability. The military took over and, for many historians, it would seem that the generals enjoyed the power and influence that came with government.

Fast forward to today, and Pakistan has flip-flopped between civilian and military governments. It has broadly aligned itself with the US. It has seen Afghanistan rage with war for the last three decades; came to blows with India three times; watched as China invaded Indian land; and looked worryingly at Iran and Iraq as they fought a bloody war.

Revolutions, nuclear weapons and political meddling have punctuated all of these events. The world watched the developments with interest, keen to see how each one would play out. For Pakistan one thing was clear: It needed to be tough enough to stand any battle it might face.

So from the very beginning of Pakistan a strong military was seen as important, but with that came a price. The country needed more than just a conventional army. It was then, according to South Asian historians, that the army began to use deniable proxy forces to help them secure their goals.

Enter the mujahideen

A rag-tag bunch of fighters, these hardened men from the northwest proved to be some of the toughest men on the planet. Pakistan has used them since its earliest days. Famously the founder of Pakistan Mohammed Ali Jinnah sent Pashtun fighters into Kashmir iust after partition to counterbalance the Indian influence there. He denied it, but Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India was sure the fighters were under Jinnahs control.

Decades later the US also saw potential in them and Pakistan jumped to arm them in their fight for Afghan independence from Soviet occupation, using American and Saudi cash. It worked. Pakistan publicly proclaimed the Afghan mujahideen as heroes. The Soviets, tired of fighting a losing battle, limped out of Afghanistan. The Afghans had won.

And then the US lost interest - and the rest, as they say, is history. But Pakistan still needed those fighters: Pakistan needed them to influence events in Kashmir, in India and in Afghanistan. According to the Book, "My life with The Taliban" the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Zaeef had dealings with Pakistan's shadowy intelligence service the ISI.

Pakistan's mistake was thinking it could get the jihadist groups to act on Pakistan's behalf. Not so. Men like Osama bin Laden came along, men who did not have Pakistan's interests at heart; they were fighting instead for an Islam they believed would make the world a better place.

Then along came 9/11. The US invaded and occupied Afghanistan under a thin international coalition.

That war has spilled over into Pakistan. The attacks of 9/11 showed clearly the consequences of leaving a country like Afghanistan behind. The international community forgot about Afghanistan. The jihadists did not.

Almost every day, silent pilotless aircraft armed with deadly weaponry fly above the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, around 18 missiles rained down on one compound in North Waziristan. As far as we know, no high value target was killed. Bin Laden, it seems lives to fight another day. Fourteen people did die that day. Collateral damage, to use that most callous of terms.



Northwest Pakistan is under attack. Those mujahideen who were so useful to Pakistan and the US in their battle with the Soviets are now the same tribes under attack from, you guessed it, the US and Pakistan.

That's why Pakistan has bred violence. It is at war - a war that the US is, arguably responsible for.

Little choice

To be fair to the US, it feels it has little choice; and the Pakistanis believe they have even less. You fight fire with fire. But that strategy seems to have failed. The world is not a safer place today. Instead, anger rises.

Time after time the tribes of the area complain that this is not their fight, they did not ask to be bombed. Time after time missiles rain down in the name of American security.

At its most basic level this is why Times Square came under attack, why potential shoe bombers have changed the way we fly, why a truck laden with explosives smashed into the gates of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad.

The US says its strikes are surgical and are key to victory in Afghanistan, and that the porous, ungovernable border hides men who are the biggest threat to the US and its allies. Yet hundreds of innocents have died as a result of the strikes.

That comes with a price. The Pakistani Taliban have aligned themselves against America. The Pakistani government is in a prolonged battle with them. In Mumbai in November 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba - a group allegedly considered by some in Pakistan's intelligence community as an ally, albeit an unhinged and dangerous ally - broke ranks and nearly brought the two countries to war once again.

Pakistan - with, it would seem, the backing of the US - has created a monster, a monster that now threatens innocent civilians on the streets of London, New York, Karachi, Islamabad and New Delhi.

This war has seen millions of dollars in military technology, hundreds of dead Pakistani and coalition soldiers, thousands of dead civilians. Yet, as we saw in Times Square, one lone man with a little training sets off a fizzle that was heard around the world.

All Pakistanis are not terrorists. All terrorists are not Pakistani. But Pakistan faces a tough challenge - one that many ordinary Pakistanis fear could upset the balance of the country. It's clear you have to deal with the threat of violence, but after nearly nine years of failed military attempts to bring the problem under control, it's clear something else needs to be done.

I can live with the racism that comes along with being of Pakistani descent. I have little choice. Visa delays, security checks, the casual comments of the ignorant are now a fact of everyday life. But that's about all I face. I'll live.

Others won't put up with it, not when families, children, fellow citizens are dying at the hands of bungled drone strikes, when the Pakistani army is fighting Pakistani citizens, when India's influence in Afghanistan is rising.

That is why Pakistan is exporting violence - it is involved in a war. And you have to wonder whether the US and Pakistani governments really understand how to get themselves out of it.

[bigron]

Published on Thursday, May 13, 2010 by Al-Jazeera-English

Drone Attacks Rise in Pakistan


Drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas have intensified [1]in recent days.

The raids come after it was revealed that the US government had granted approval to the CIA to expand drone attacks [2]to lower-level members of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

But the attacks have caused growing anger in Pakistan, as civilians continue to be killed and homes and villages are destroyed.

Jamshed Ayaz Khan, a Pakistan-based defence analyst, told Al Jazeera that a "hundred per cent [of Pakistanis] are against the drone attacks".

"I have not seen anybody who is in favour of drone attacks," he said.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder reports from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.

WATCH:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7staAN-sskw&feature=player_embedded


© 2010 Al-Jazeera-English

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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/05/13-0

[bigron]

Blowback: Why They Try to Bomb Us

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blowback_why_they_try_to_bomb_us_20100513/

Posted on May 14, 2010
By David Sirota

Imagine, if you can, an alternate universe.

Imagine that in this alternate universe, a foreign military power begins flying remote-controlled warplanes over your town, using onboard missiles to kill hundreds of your innocent neighbors.

Now imagine that when you read the newspaper about this ongoing bloodbath, you learn that the foreign nation’s top general is nonchalantly telling reporters that his troops are also killing “an amazing number” of your cultural brethren in an adjacent country. Imagine further learning that this foreign power is expanding the drone attacks on your community despite the attacks’ well-known record of killing innocents. And finally, imagine that when you turn on your television, you see the perpetrator nation’s tuxedo-clad leader cracking stand-up comedy jokes about drone strikes—jokes that prompt guffaws from an audience of that nation’s elite.

Ask yourself: How would you and your fellow citizens respond? Would you call homegrown militias mounting a defense “patriots” or would you call them “terrorists”? Would you agree with your leaders when they angrily tell reporters that violent defiance should be expected?

Fortunately, most Americans don’t have to worry about these queries in their own lives. But how we answer them in a hypothetical thought experiment provides us insight into how Pakistanis are likely to be feeling right now. Why? Because thanks to our continued drone assaults on their country, Pakistanis now confront these issues every day. And if they answer these questions as many of us undoubtedly would in a similar situation—well, that should trouble every American in this age of asymmetrical warfare.

Though we don’t like to call it mass murder, the U.S. government’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan is devolving into just that. As noted by a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and a former Army officer in Afghanistan, the operation has become a haphazard massacre.

“Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders,” David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum wrote in 2009. “But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed.”

Making matters worse, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has, indeed, told journalists that in Afghanistan, U.S. troops have “shot an amazing number of people” and “none has proven to have been a real threat.” Meanwhile, President Barack Obama used his internationally televised speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner to jest about drone warfare—and the assembled Washington glitterati did, in fact, reward him with approving laughs.

By eerie coincidence, that latter display of monstrous insouciance occurred on the same night as the failed effort to raze Times Square. Though America reacted to that despicable terrorism attempt with its routine spasms of cartoonish shock (why do they hate us?!), the assailant’s motive was anything but baffling. As law enforcement officials soon reported, the accused bomber was probably trained and inspired by Pakistani groups seeking revenge for U.S. drone strikes.

“This is a blowback,” said Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. “This is a reaction. And you could expect that ... let’s not be naive.”

Obviously, regardless of rationale, a “reaction” that involves trying to incinerate civilians in Manhattan is abhorrent and unacceptable. But so is Obama’s move to intensify drone assaults that we know are regularly incinerating innocent civilians in Pakistan. And while Qureshi’s statement about “expecting” blowback seems radical, he’s merely echoing the CIA’s reminder that “possibilities of blowback” arise when we conduct martial operations abroad.

We might remember that somehow-forgotten warning come the next terrorist assault. No matter how surprised we may feel after that inevitable (and inevitably deplorable) attack, the fact remains that until we halt our own indiscriminately violent actions, we ought to expect equally indiscriminate and equally violent reactions.

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

[bigron]

Friday, May 14, 2010
19:29 Mecca time, 16:29 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/05/2010514145838312504.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Pakistan Taliban in overthrow call  

 
Faisal Shahzad is suspected of carrying out the attempted Times Square bombing [AFP]
 
The Pakistani Taliban has in a new video called for Pakistan's rulers to be overthrown for following "America's agenda", warning that the US will soon "burn".

The group, which is allied with the Afghan Taliban, is accused of numerous suicide bombings killing hundreds of people across Pakistan.

But in the new video, Azam Tariq, a spokesperson for the Pakistani Taliban, denied responsibility for bombings in public places, saying authorities wanted to malign his fighters for such attacks.

He spoke of fighting in various places in Pakistan saying his men were holding their own and the security forces, which he said were being paid with US aid money, were suffering significant losses.

'Jihad will continue'

Sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a rock face and speaking in Urdu, Tariq said the Pakistani people were being sacrificed for the sake of the US by their own government, which he called un-Islamic.

"Now is a time to remove them from power as soon as possible. All their policies are anti-Islam, anti-people," he said.

"Jihad will continue as long as the ruling coterie and the unholy army continue to follow the American agenda."

Washington claims the group, allied with al-Qaeda and operating out of Pakistan's northwestern border regions, was behind an attempted car-bomb attack in New York's Times Square on May 1.

Pakistan has been co-operating with US investigators trying to determine what links Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American man suspected of carrying out the attempted Times Square bombing, may have had with groups in Pakistan.

However, Tariq, stopped short in the video from claiming or denying responsibility for the failed attempt.

'US will burn'

He did not refer specifically to any attacks abroad, but said mujahideen "wherever they were, in any part of the world" were supporting each other.

"America has not imagined that it could face a car bomb on its territory," he said.

"The car did not explode. But, one day such a car will explode in America. On that day, America will not be the only target.

"All the countries allying with the US will be targeted. America will burn along with its allies."

The Washington Post reported that authorities in Pakistan had arrested a man linked to the Pakistani Taliban who said he helped Shahzad travel to northwest Pakistan for bomb-making training.

It was not clear if the newspaper was referring to a man officials said earlier was detained in the southern city of Karachi on May 4.

The Pakistani government has denied that any arrests have been made in connection with the case but security officials said the man held in Karachi, Mohammad Rehan, was suspected of having taken Shahzad to northwest Pakistan to link up with the Taliban.

In Washington, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said despite Pakistan's recent improved efforts to tackle the Taliban, it must do more.

"We think that there is more that has to be done and we do fear the consequences of a successful attack that can be traced back to Pakistan," she said.
 
 

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Saturday, May 15, 2010
13:41 Mecca time, 10:41 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201051261426209589.html
   
Focus 
 
US warns Pakistan to 'do more'  
 
 By Gregg Carlstrom

 
The Pakistani army is already fighting in most of the tribal agencies, including South Waziristan [EPA]




Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, appeared on national television a week after the failed car bombing in Times Square with a stern warning for Pakistan's security establishment.

"We've made it very clear that, if, heaven forbid, an attack like this, if we can trace back to Pakistan, were to have been successful, there would be very serious consequences," Clinton said on CBS News' 60 Minutes programmelast week.  http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6470182n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

Clinton's harsh language was probably meant for a domestic audience. Nevertheless, the US has already accelerated the pace of drone strikes in Pakistan: Three suspected drone attacks have killed more than two dozen people in North Waziristan since May 1.

And behind the scenes, the US is also reportedly pressuring Pakistan to launch a fresh military offensive in North Waziristan.

But will a more aggressive counterterrorism strategy in Pakistan be effective?

Many analysts say that recent history is not encouraging: Drone strikes and several major Pakistani army offensives have succeeded in inflaming public opinion, but they have failed to dislodge the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Another FATA offensive

Suspected drone attacks have occurred 35 times this year, compared to 53 in all of 2009

North Waziristan, one of Pakistan's seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas, is a base for several regional militant groups.

The Haqqani network - considered the most serious threat to US and Nato forces in Afghanistan - operates from Miranshah, the largest town in North Waziristan. So does Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the leader of a faction of Pakistan's Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP).

General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, reportedly urged General Ashfaq Kayani, his Pakistani counterpart,to launch a military campaign in North Waziristan aimed at clearing out those various Taliban factions. McChrystal has since deniedthose reports.

A story in the New York Times last week highlighted the growing debatewithin the Obama administration about sending more US troops to Pakistan - to train the Pakistani army for such a campaign.

But analysts in Islamabad question whether a US training mission would convince the army to overcome its long-standing reluctance to launch a campaign in North Waziristan.

"There's concern about becoming overstretched. And that's a plausible argument. They're already conducting operations in five of the seven tribal agencies, in the Swat Valley, and in Malakand [a district in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province]," said Cyril Almeida, a security analyst and columnist for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper.

Pakistan is still struggling to deal with the aftermath of previous offensives in the northwest. The United Nations has registered more than 1.2 million internally displaced personsin Pakistan; more than 85,000 people fled the tribal agencies in April alone.

The Swat Valley offensive last year displaced more than two million people from their homes. Most have returned, according to the Pakistani government - but many of the returnees say the government is not providing basic services, notably security and housing.

Widespread insecurity has also allowed the Taliban to return to previously-cleared areasin the Swat Valley.

Even if Pakistan launches an offensive there is no guarantee it will be able to hold and consolidate its gains - particularly if eastern Afghanistan, just across the border from North Waziristan, remains insecure.

"The Pakistanis acknowledge that they haven't been able to do [counterinsurgency]. But the Nato failure on the other side of the border is just as obvious," said Hassan Abbas, a professor at Columbia University and a former Pakistani government official.

A public backlash

The US, meanwhile, has already accelerated its aerial bombing campaign in the tribal regions: Suspected drone strikes have already occurred 35 times this year, compared with 53 attacks in all of 2009, according to the Washington-based New America Foundation, which maintains a comprehensive databaseof the strikes.

"That seems to be the alternative plan: In case the Pakistani army refuses to go into North Waziristan, the US will intensify its drone strikes," said Abdul Basit, a researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies in Islamabad.

But the drone strikes have not decapitated the TTP; the group continues to terrorise Pakistan, and some US officials acknowledge that the drone strikes have made the Taliban more determined to strike targets in the US.

What is more, the drone strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan - an Al Jazeera-Gallup poll conducted in August 2009found that just 9 per cent of the Pakistani public supported them - and there is growing debate in Washingtonabout whether the attacks create more militants than they kill.

Faisal Shahzad, the man charged with attempting to plant a bomb in New York's Times Square, may himself have been influenced by the drone programme.

It is too early to tell what caused his radicalisation, but there are reports that he was motivated - at least in part - by anger over US drone strikes.

A larger US military presence in Pakistan could have a similarly negative effect on public opinion.

"I don't see what more boots on the ground will do ... in terms of bolstering the military's capacity to fight the TTP," said Sameer Lalwani, a research fellow at the New America Foundation.

"It's a question of marginal returns: Whether the benefits outweigh the inevitable public backlash ... it's not costless."
 
 

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Gunmen 'kidnap over a dozen travellers in Pakistan'

Published: Saturday May 15, 2010
 
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Gunmen_kidnap_over_a_dozen_travelle_05152010.html



Gunmen Saturday kidnapped over a dozen people in northwest Pakistan, a region beset by militant and sectarian violence, a senior government official said.

The hostages were travelling from Peshawar city to Parachinar, the main town in the tribal region of Kurram, when their vehicle was intercepted by around 40 armed militants, local administration chief Khalid Omarzai, said.

He said "13 people including two employees from the state-run power supply company have been abducted."

Abdul Rashid, a police official in the nearby town of Hangu, said he had received information that "the number of hostages was 50 plus."

"They stopped their vehicles and whisked away the passengers," Rashid said.

Omarzai said the incident took place as authorities were trying to hammer out a peace accord between Sunni and Shiite communities in the area.

"It is an attempt to sabotage the peace efforts," he said.

The area is a sectarian flashpoint, where Sunni and Shiite militants have clashed in the past. They have also kidnapped rival sect members for payment of ransom and have sometimes killed the hostages.

Local MP Mufti Janan told AFP the kidnappers appeared to be from Kurram, where Pakistani Taliban militants are active.

"They have contacted me to convey that some travellers were in their custody," he said, without saying how many hostages were being held.

"I am in touch with them and hope they will be released shortly," he added.

Shiites account for about 20 percent of Pakistan's Sunni-dominated population. The two communities usually coexist peacefully, but more than 4,000 people have died in outbreaks of sectarian violence since the late 1980s.

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Pressured from All Sides in Pakistan’s Swat Valley

Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier, May 15, 2010
http://original.antiwar.com/kelly/2010/05/14/pressured-from-all-sides-in-pakistans-swat-valley/


In May of 2009, under tremendous pressure from the United States, the Pakistani military began a large-scale military operation in the Swat District of Pakistan to confront militants in the region. The UNHCR said the operation led to one of the largest and fastest displacements it had ever seen.  Within ten days, more than two million people fled their homes.


Now, a year later, our small delegation visited the Swat District. After a breathtaking ride through the Hindu Kush mountains, traveling in a pick-up truck from Shah Mansour in the Swabi district, we arrived in Swat’s capital, Saidu Sharif.     


Saidu Sharif is a small town, ringed by mountains.  The Swat River, a few hundred yards in width, runs through it.  It’s easy to imagine a former time when tourists would flock to visit this scenic treasure. While we were there, the town seemed tranquil. Stores were open and the streets were bustling. Merchants, children, shoppers, bicyclists, goats, cars, donkey carts, rickshaws, and tractors jostled for space in the narrow roadways.  But, we also saw dozens of uniformed men, carrying weapons, suggesting that tensions still prevail in Swat.


We arrived at sunset, shortly before the evening call to prayer. On top of a hill, we approached a modest home, a courtyard surrounded by rooms which housed several families.  Our host in Saidu Sharif operates three small shops. He had purchased the house with money earned while he worked as a shopkeeper in Saudi Arabia. Joining him was his close friend who had spent ten years working in Saudi Arabia, also as a shopkeeper.  Now, he has an antique/specialties shop in Mingora.  Both men hope that tourism will be revived, soon, in the Swat Valley.  They are finding it difficult to make ends meet.


Our host family extended the warmest of hospitality.  They served us seasoned rice, yogurt, chicken, parata bread and, for desert, pudding with the word "Welcome" spelled out in bits of coconut. We discussed life and conditions in Swat until late evening.  We learned that the brother of one of our hosts had recently lost his spouse in an attack that had also destroyed his home, an aerial attack by the Pakistani military that was supposed to be targeting Taliban militants.  Our host offered to take us in the morning to speak with her brother, the other survivors of the attack and others in the area who had been affected by the fighting.  But the visit was never to occur. 


The next morning, May 9th, tragic news arrived that her brother had just died.  He had started his morning prayers, finished them, walked into the washroom and took his last breath.   


Despite such a horrendous loss, and although falling headfirst into the sudden whirlpool of urgent funeral preparations, the family continued to look after us graciously. They managed to arrange for us to meet with a distant relative later that day in Swat.   


We expressed our earnest condolences with our goodbyes and in the afternoon removed ourselves from the circle of their bustle and grief.   A quick drive through town followed, and we were on the next stage of our journey.

The relative they arranged for us to meet, Jamshaid Ali, is a "Nazim" or "mayor" of his town’s governing council. He is a man of considerable local power and prestige, yet he had his own story of violent loss to share with us.  While one side of the family had recently faced the careless injustice of the Pakistani military, this very wealthy Nazim and his brothers had barely survived successive assaults by well-armed militants in the area.           


The account of the assaults, according to Jamshaid, went like this:


In December of 2007, militants in the Malakand province warned Jamshaid to resign from his public post, or else.  He’d worked for years as a contractor, managing large construction projects that added to his already considerable inherited wealth. He says that while he served, for ten years, as an elected official, he obtained funding from the government for projects that would benefit his district, and he added his own money into these projects.   


The militants, however, had put him and all his brothers on a hit list, targeted for assassination.  On December 28, 2007, Jamshaid Ali survived a remote control bomb attack that killed eight others. Starting the next day, fighters used heavy weapons and mortars to attack his home and the homes of his relatives in Barkala Bishbarn. The attacks lasted for two days.   


A year passed.  Jamshaid Ali had spent this time in constant, wary vigilance.  He and his family found housing outside of the Swat District.


On the 7th and 8th of October of 2008, attackers ransacked and blew up the homes belonging to Jamshaid Ali and his brothers.  One brother told us that he and his wife had tried to fight off the attackers, his wife helping to load the machine gun he was using.  He told us about this in the room where it happened.  But when militants had launched a grenade into the house, they had realized they were defeated and managed to survive  only by hiding.  The militants killed one of the household servants (named Saeed Karim Bakhat Wazir), the next day.


Jamshaid showed us a newspaper with his photo: one of about a dozen men shown out of eighty six that the Taliban had ordered to appear before a Taliban Shura Council which would hold them accountable for their wrongdoing.  The council was held in the meeting house of a Taliban-run section of Swat. He had refused to attend. 


He said that the militants destroyed forests, fruit gardens and trees belonging to him and his brothers.  Four pipelines for water were destroyed, ruining crucial infrastructure for the mosque in the village, the government primary school and the home of one villager.  They also blew up the girls’ primary school.


Jamshaid and his brothers have applied to the Pakistani government for hundreds of thousands of rupees, each, in compensation for their losses.  As wealthy land owners, they’re lucky; they have the resources, chief among them security, with which to document their losses.  Most Pakistanis living in Swat, suffering through grief for loved ones or the sudden homelessness of displacement, are not able to document their circumstances. Nor have all those who have been displaced been able to return home.   


Jamshaid was able to produce a booklet presenting tables, photographs, medical reports, news clippings, and detailed accounting of the losses sustained by him and his family members.  In all, sixteen houses were destroyed.  The "before" photos show picturesque villas nestled in the mountainside.  The Pakistani government has not given one rupee of compensation, at this point, to Jamshaid Ali and his family members. We imagine how hard it must be for Swatis who aren’t prosperous to petition their government for compensation. 


Rumors are still flying, in the Swat District, as to who attacked Jamshaid and his family, and why.  Some believe that that the militant activity which destroyed Jamshaid’s home was more the result of a family rivalry than "Taliban" activity.  In an area with very striking economic inequality, there are still feuds between wealthy landowners for dominance of the region.   


With the external pressure put on the Pakistani government to violently confront militant groups in Swat and other districts in Pakistan, there have been reports of families attempting to use the government forces to knock off their rivals. There are also instances of similar tactics being employed in Waziristan, where locals will feed the U.S. false intelligence, hoping the CIA will use a drone strike to eliminate a rival.               


Whatever the truth is about these specific incidents concerning Jamshaid, we left the Swat district with strong  impressions of inequality and insecurity afflicting residents throughout the area. Numerous people accused of being militants have been imprisoned.  Several women in Jamshaid Ali’s family acknowledged that torture was regularly used to extract confessions from the accused prisoners.  One of them insisted that electric shock and beatings were necessary, "otherwise no one would be so honest as to confess what he has done."


According to the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, militant groups conscript youngsters, telling a family that they must either pay a large sum to support Taliban projects, or send one of their sons to join as a new militant. This is a horrible reality, reminiscent of the conscription of child soldiers in Uganda. In fact, many of these forcibly enlisted children are the ones who are often attacked or imprisoned in the Pakistani government’s efforts to sweep the area and rid it of Taliban and other militants. In the face of such tactics, the Pakistani military and Frontier Corps militias have hardly distinguished themselves from non-state actors like the Taliban.


Mr. I.A. Rehman, head of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, told us that he is very worried about the way the military carried out operations in Swat. There have been credible reports of civilian losses, mass graves, extra-judicial executions and mysterious disappearances. He said that the government is holding over one thousand people incommunicado, while refusing to take any of them to trial.  It’s likely that many of these prisoners were taken from Swat and Malakand, during past seasons of military offensives here.


People living in Swat have borne the brunt of military offensives, forced evacuations, militant attacks, reprisals, destruction of homes and livelihoods, economic decline, and ongoing insecurity.

The government offensives, the militants, the landowners and the United States insistence on crushing the Taliban have all made life unbearably difficult for the people of Swat. A hospital administrator in the region, Syed Muhammad Ilyas, said it will be ten years before Swat will return to normalcy. Yet we are inspired by the hospitality, resilience, and courage of Swati residents who carry on in their daily lives through such turbulent times. As we continue our delegation, we’ll try to relay more about people who have suffered acutely from war, displacement, and neglect in a land of incredible beauty.

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CIA wants Baradar sent to Afghanistan

By Anwar Iqbal

Sunday, 21 Feb, 2010       



CIA Director Leon E. Panetta and other officials have proposed moving Mullah Baradar to the US-run prison at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, said a US media report. -AP File Photo World


WASHINGTON: The CIA wants Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar transferred to an American prison near Kabul for interrogation, US officials said.

The Taliban military chief, who was captured in Karachi earlier this month, is in Pakistan’s custody and is being interrogated mainly by ISI officials, but CIA representatives also have participated in some of these sessions.

Senior US officials, who spoke to various media outlets on the condition that they are not identified, said the Americans were not satisfied with the interrogation and wanted to take charge.

“CIA Director Leon E. Panetta and other officials have proposed moving Mullah Baradar to the US-run prison at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul,” said a US media report.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Friday that once Pakistani agencies completed their investigation, Mullah Baradar could be handed over to his country of origin, which is Afghanistan, but not to the US.

And US officials indicated in Washington that the plan could be acceptable to them because they did not want to bring him over to the United States. Instead, they would prefer to interrogate him at the Bagram base where senior Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects were often kept.

“Mullah Baradar is an Afghan, so it’s only logical that his home country might be considered as an ultimate destination,” said a US official.

The US media claimed that Washington’s proposal to bring Mullah Baradar to Bagram reflected America’s frustration with the Pakistani investigation process.

Although Mullah Baradar had been with the Pakistanis for several weeks, they had not been able to extract any useful information from him, the reports said.

As the main architect of the Taliban’s insurgent campaign, Mullah Baradar is believed to have extensive knowledge of the militant networks’ operations and finances.

The US media also claimed that the CIA was denied direct access to Mullah Baradar for about two weeks after his arrest, and had since worked alongside Pakistani interrogators who continued to control the questioning.

Some US media outlets have alleged that Mullah Baradar also had longstanding ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service and that’s why Pakistan may be reluctant to turn over a prisoner who could reveal details about that relationship.

The media also noted that Mullah Baradar’s capture was portrayed as a breakthrough in US efforts to get Pakistan to pursue Taliban leaders in the country.

“But emerging details about the arrest challenge that conclusion,” said one report.According to these reports, Pakistani and CIA operatives did not know they had captured Mullah Baradar until after they began sorting through a group of suspects arrested in a raid on the outskirts of Karachi on Jan 26.

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Survey: Drone attacks in Pak fuel anger
 
 
16/05/2010 10:19:17 AM GMT   
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Survey-Drone-attacks-in-Pak-fuel-anger.html

 
The majority of people in Pakistan's Swat Valley believe that the US drone attacks in tribal areas have contributed to the spread of militancy, a new survey says.

According to the survey released on Sunday, 67 percent of those asked in Pakistan's Swat Valley said that the strikes by US' unmanned planes provoked the people, who lost their relatives in missile attacks.

A total of 384 people, 85 percent male and 15 percent female, were interviewed during the survey carried out by the Regional Institute of Policy Research and Training.

At least 298 out of the 384 persons asked said that Pakistan's support for the US rallied support for the militants, while 227 said that the US invasion of Afghanistan had also raised support for the militants.

Meanwhile scores of Pakistanis in the volatile city of Peshawar flooded the streets on Sunday to protest the recent wave of US drone attacks.

The protests come as unmanned Predator aircraft, claimed the lives of at least 13 people and left several others wounded in the Khyber region of northwest Pakistan on Saturday.

According to a recent study released by the New America Foundation in February, more than 1,210 civilians have been killed by drones since 2004. The number of deaths surged in 2009 after President Barack Obama zeroed in on Pakistan in the US-led war on al-Qaeda terrorists.

MVZ/TG/MMA
Source: Press TV