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

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Pakistan: Killed Americans were part of 100-strong commando unit

By Amir Mir

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62932&hd=&size=1&l=e

February 04, 2010

LAHORE: The three US soldiers who lost their lives on Wednesday in a school bombing incident in Dir Lower were members of the Army Special Forces, which has been training the Frontier Corps to improve its intelligence and combat tactics to effectively fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgents in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt.

It is for the first time since the American occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 that any US soldier has been killed in Pakistan, that too in a terrorist act. According to well informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad, the slain US soldiers were part of a 100-member strong special American military training unit which was dispatched to Pakistan in 2008 to raise a 1,000-member strong well-trained paramilitary commando unit which could conduct guerrilla operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban militants active in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt and involved in cross-border ambushes against the US-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan.

The military training programme was never officially announced by Pakistan to avoid a possible backlash by the opposition parties, which are opposed to the American military presence on the Pakistani territory. The US-funded training course for the largely under-equipped and under-trained Frontier Corps included both classroom and field sessions.

In the beginning, the American military trainers confined themselves to training compounds due to security concerns in Pakistan. However, they had now started accompanying Pakistani troops on special guerrilla operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, eventually leading to the Wednesday incident in Dir Lower which shares a border with Afghanistan and with the restive Swat district, where the Army had to carry out a massive military operation last year. The three slain US soldiers were travelling in a convoy with troops, journalists and officials to the opening of Koto Girls’ High School when the roadside bomb exploded.

The school was blown up in January 2009 and rebuilt with the help of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Dozens of girls’ school were set ablaze in Lower Dir area in 2008-2009 by the private army of Maulana Fazlullah, the fugitive chief of the Swat chapter of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Though a Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq has claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying the dead Americans belonged to the US security company Blackwater Worldwide - now known as Xe, military spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas has said that the American soldiers were in Pakistan to train the Frontier Corps. Informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad say the American soldiers were part of a $100 million Pentagon-funded training programme which is meant to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armour, vehicles, and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more during the next year. As per the programme, the Pentagon intended to spend around $400 million more in the next few years to train and equip the Frontier Corps. Sources say, besides dispatching American marines to train the Frontier Corps personnel, the Pentagon had also sent a special team of its Special Forces military advisers, communication experts, technical specialists and combat medics to help establish coordination centres on Pak-Afghan border so that the American and Pakistani officials could share intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taliban elements in and around the tribal areas.




 

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The Expanding US War in Pakistan


By Jeremy Scahill

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62940&hd=&size=1&l=e

February 4, 2010

Three US special forces soldiers were killed in northwest Pakistan this week, confirming that the US military is more deeply engaged on the ground in Pakistan than previously acknowledged by the White House and Pentagon (see " The Secret US War in Pakistan," November 23, 2009). The soldiers died Wednesday in Lower Dir when their convoy was hit by a car bomber in what appeared to be a targeted strike against the Americans. According to CENTCOM, the US soldiers were in the country on a mission to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force run by Pakistan's Interior Ministry that patrols the country's volatile border with Afghanistan. A Pakistani journalist who witnessed the attack said that some of the US soldiers were dressed in civilian clothes and had been identified by their Pakistani handlers as journalists. The New York Times estimates that there are sixty to a hundred such US special forces "trainers" in Pakistan. Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command said there are about 200 US military personnel in Pakistan.

While the deaths of the soldiers has sparked impassioned discussion in Pakistan about the extent of the US military presence, the Pentagon has emphasized that the US soldiers were in Pakistan on a training mission at the invitation of the Pakistani government, saying they were not engaged in direct combat.
But the geography of Wednesday's attack--in the northwest of the country in an area where the US has no on-the-ground aid presence and where Pakistani forces have struggled against the Taliban and other insurgents--reveals just how close to the epicenter of the action in Pakistan the US military is. According to CENTCOM, the soldiers were not members of Delta Force or the Green Berets, instead classifying them as "civil affairs" trainers. Officially, CENTCOM describes this mission as part of an expanding "partnership with the Pakistani military and Frontier Corps," providing "increased US military assistance for helicopters to provide air mobility, night vision equipment, and training and equipment--specifically for Pakistani Special Operations Forces and their Frontier Corps to make them a more effective counter-insurgency force."

In military parlance, these above-board US "training" forces operating under an unclassified mandate are "white" forces, while operatives working for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) would be classified as working on "black" operations, sometimes referred to as Special Mission Units. Since 2006, JSOC teams have operated in Pakistan in pursuit of "high-value" targets.

"What we're seeing is the expansion of 'white' Special Operations Forces into Pakistan," says a former member of CENTCOM and US Special Forces with extensive experience in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. "As Vietnam, Somalia and the Balkans taught us, that is almost always a precursor to expanded military operations." The former CENTCOM employee spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Pakistan operations. He characterized the US military's role with the Pakistani Frontier Corps as "training in offensive operations," but rejected the idea that at this stage these US trainers would cross the line to engage in direct combat against Taliban forces. That does not mean, he says, that US military forces are not fighting in Pakistan. "Any firefights in Pakistan would be between JSOC forces versus whoever they were chasing," he said. "I would bet my life on that."

What has gone largely unmentioned in the media coverage of the deaths of the three US soldiers in Pakistan is the role private contractors are playing. While the New York Times reported that "The Americans' involvement in training Frontier Corps recruits in development assistance was little known until Wednesday's attack," The Nation first reported on that program--and the US involvement in training the Frontier Corps--last December. A former Blackwater executive told The Nation that Blackwater was training and advising the Frontier Corps, working on a subcontract with Kestral Logistics, a Pakistani firm. The presence of the Blackwater personnel in Pakistan was shrouded from the public, the former executive said, because they worked on a subcontract with Kestral for the Pakistani government. At times, he said, Blackwater forces cross the line from trainers or advisers and actually participated in raids. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it,' " said the former executive. "But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work." After the US soldiers were killed on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility and said the dead men worked for Blackwater. "We know the movement of US Marines and Blackwater guys," said Taliban spokesperson Azim Tariq. "And we have prepared suicide bombers to go after them." The United States dismissed the claim about Blackwater as "propaganda and disinformation."

While the former CENTCOM employee said the US military's training mission in Pakistan (he is against using contractors for such missions) is in the "US interest," he cautioned that there is growing concern within the military about what is perceived as the disproportionate and growing influence of JSOC's lethal "direct action" mentality on the broader Special Forces operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As The Nation reported in November, JSOC operates a parallel drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, carrying out targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action. JSOC, a military intelligence source told The Nation, also operates several secret bases inside Pakistan. These actions are deeply classified and not subjected to any form of comprehensive oversight by Congress.

With General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded JSOC from 2003-2008, running the war, forces--and commanders--accustomed to operating in an unaccountable atmosphere now have unprecedented influence on overall US military operations, opening the door for an expansion of secretive, black operations done with little to no oversight. "The main thing to take away here is a recognition and acceptance of the paradigm shift that has occurred," says the former CENTCOM employee. "Everything is one echelon removed from before: where CIA was the darkest of the dark, now it is JSOC. Therefore, military forces have more leeway to do anything in support of future military objectives. The CIA used to have the ultimate freedom--now that freedom is in JSOC's hands, and the other elements of the military have been ordered to adapt."

The former CENTCOM member said that what is unfolding in Pakistan is part of the Bush-era philosophy, continued by the Obama administration, of "preparing the battlefield." He sketches out a pattern wherein "black" operations are followed by "white" operations and then conventional US forces. That "preparing the battlefield" justification was often used by the Bush administration to circumvent Congressional oversight of clandestine military operations, particularly when McChrystal was running JSOC. The CIA is legally required to brief the Intelligence committees on covert operations, while JSOC has traditionally operated outside the purview of Congressional oversight. "This allows the JSOC/Special Mission Units more freedom to expand or absorb traditionally CIA missions," he says. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Stephen Cambone "embraced this model--so have Obama and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates--and it persists to this day." He added that "there is a deep, deep resentment" of the influence of JSOC within "the Special Forces community" under Admiral Eric Olson, commander of the Special Operations Command and Vice Admiral William McRaven, the current head of JSOC.

What is clear from Wednesday's attack on US soldiers in Pakistan is that the US military is becoming increasingly entrenched in the country. In late January in Washington DC, US and Pakistani military officials gathered under the umbrella of the "U.S.-Pakistan Land Forces Military Consultative Committee." According to notes from the meeting, they discussed CENTCOM's operations in Pakistan aiming to "enhance both U.S. and Pakistan Army COIN [counterinsurgency] capabilities" and "potential US COIN Center/Pakistan Army interactions." Among the participants were representatives of the Special Operations Command, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs--Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell, the Office of Defense Representative--Pakistan and a Pakistan delegation led by Brigadier General Muhammad Azam Agha, Pakistan's Director of Military Training.

The United States does not publicly acknowledge US military operations in Pakistan. On CENTCOM's website, they are described in vague terms. "We will of course continue to target, disrupt, and pursue the leadership, bases,and support networks of Al Qaeda and other transnational extremist groups operating in the region," declares CENTCOM's Pakistan page. "We will do this aggressively and relentlessly."

Since President Obama's inauguration, the administration has downplayed the role of US military forces in Pakistan. In July, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said bluntly, "People think that the US has troops in Pakistan, well, we don't." On Wednesday, after the US soldiers' deaths, his tune changed dramatically: "There's nothing secret about their presence," he said. One thing is certain: as the situation in Pakistan becomes more volatile and the US military presence in the country expands, it will become increasingly difficult for the Obama administration to downplay or deny the reality that a US war in Pakistan is already underway.



 

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by Lewis Grossberger

Feb. 4 2010 - 4:43 pm
http://trueslant.com/lewisgrossberger/2010/02/04/shh-were-trying-to-keep-the-war-in-pakistan-a-secret/

Shh! We’re trying to keep the war in Pakistan a secret

Image by KirrilyRobert via Flickr

You might think that keeping a war secret would be impossible. For one thing, they’re really noisy. And then there are all those bodies lying around.

But if anyone can do it, it’s us. When it comes to finding new and exciting ways to conduct warfare, who gives battle more innovatively (or frequently) than the U.S.?

So I wasn’t too surprised at recent news reports intimating that we’re having a secret war in Pakistan. Not with Pakistan, of course. We don’t fight countries much anymore. It’s those damn terrorists. Wherever you go, there they are.

It’s gotten to the point where we can invade pretty much any country at random and bingo! A bunch of terrorists is there waiting to fight us.

In places like Pakistan, you have to fight the damn terrorists on the QT, because, as I understand it, if the Pakistanis ever find out they’ll get so mad they’ll overthrow their government, the one we’re propping up, and then the terrorists will become the government and the war will get bigger, noisier, bloodier, more expensive and worst of all, incredibly non-secret. They’re very touchy, those Pakistanis.

Fortunately, we’ve developed stealthy weapons such as the Predator Drone, which lurks around the skies, ducking behind clouds a lot. When in the open, it whistles, looks casual and pretends to be a tourist. Should it spot an enemy, it drops a rather subtle and unassuming guided missile on him.

This way, we avoid having a few hundred thousand noisy, sweaty troops clomping around the countryside, which is always a dead giveaway that there’s a war on.

So the thing is, whatever you do, don’t tell the Pakistanis. If you know a Pakistani, talk with him about sports, weather, fashion, the new season of Lost, anything but war.

In New York and other large northeastern cities, you’ll mostly have to be careful not to mention the war while riding in taxis unless, of course, the driver is talking on his cell phone, in which case he’ll be too distracted to overhear you.

Personally, I think this is a very small sacrifice to ask of my fellow Americans in support of our secret war effort. In general, if you must talk about the war, just keep your voice down and avoid excited gesticulation.

We all know how successful the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy has been at handling the gays-in-the-military issue. Well, now we’re just applying it to an entire war.

By the way, I hate to bring this up but it’s possible we’re fighting other wars, too, wars so secret that even The New York Times doesn’t know about them.

If we are and you’re in on it, please don’t tell me. I’m having enough trouble keeping the Pakistan war secret. I almost mentioned it to my gossipy neighbor Frieda the other day.

If she finds out, forget it; it’ll be all over the neighborhood.

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Pakistan: Bomber may have hit US vehicle with help

Authorities investigate whether attack on US soldiers in Pakistan was an inside job

by NAHAL TOOSI
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/02/04/pakistan-bomber-may-have-hit-us-vehicle-with-help/
Feb 04, 2010 11:55 EST

Suspicion intensified Thursday that a suicide car bomber who killed three U.S. soldiers training Pakistani troops along the Afghan border had inside information on their movements.

If confirmed that Wednesday's suicide attack was aimed at the Americans, it would indicate an increased sophistication in militant tactics, as well as potential infiltration of extremists in Pakistani security forces.

Thousands of Pakistanis in at least four cities, meanwhile, protested a New York jury's conviction of a U.S.-educated Pakistani woman for shooting at American security officials in Afghanistan — shouting anti-U.S. slogans and burning the Stars and Stripes.

The attack on U.S.forces occurred in Lower Dir, a northwest district believed to be a crossroads for al-Qaida and the Taliban. The blast also killed three schoolgirls and a Pakistani paramilitary soldier. Two more U.S. soldiers were among dozens wounded.

Police official Naeem Khan said Thursday that authorities were investigating whether the suicide bomber knew the soldiers would be passing through Shahi Koto town and which vehicle to target in the five-car convoy, which also included Pakistani troops.

Such convoys usually include green military vehicles carrying armed troops who are clearly visible. The Pakistani forces could also have been the target as they have frequently been over the past several years.

"We launched a massive search in the area yesterday, and now about 35 suspects are in our custody, and we are questioning them in an effort to trace those who orchestrated the suicide attack," Khan said. "God willing, we will capture those responsible for this carnage."

Local resident Gohar Khan said he saw a small car attack the convoy.

"As soon as the convoy appeared it rushed to that place and exploded," he told The Associated Press.

The soldiers killed were part of a small group of American troops training members of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps.

Training local forces is considered an important way to reduce the threat of militants using Pakistani soil as a staging ground for attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan, especially since Pakistan does not allow U.S. combat troops on its territory.

The soldiers' deaths were the first known U.S. military fatalities in nearly three years in Pakistan's Afghan border region.

The latest attack drew rare attention to the training program, which officials rarely discuss because of anti-American feelings here.

That sentiment flared Thursday as demonstrators protested a New York jury's conviction of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman accused of shooting at American security personnel who came to interrogate her after her arrest in Afghanistan's central Ghazni province.

Many Pakistanis believe the U.S. has fabricated the charges. Some suspect the Americans had held the thin neuroscience specialist in a secret prison — allegations the U.S. denies. Siddiqui had been missing for five years before being picked up in Afghanistan in 2008.

A Manhattan federal jury convicted Siddiqui on Wednesday on two counts of attempted murder, though it found the act was not premeditated. Siddiqui was also convicted of armed assault, using and carrying a firearm, and assault of U.S. officers and employees.

Pakistanis denounced the verdict against Siddiqui, a devout Muslim who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University before returning to Pakistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"We hate America," "We hate U.S. judiciary," and "Down with the US," read some of the signs carried by burqa-clad women protesting in the southern city of Karachi, the hometown of Siddiqui's family.

Another reason Pakistanis are upset with the U.S. is its use of missile strikes to target militants in the northwest.

A senior intelligence official said Wednesday that U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is dead following one such strike last month. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

The statement came after days of posturing by Pakistani Taliban officials, who first said they would prove their leader was alive and well, then reversed course and said they saw no need to prove it.

___

Associated Press writers Ashraf Khan in Karachi and Zarar Khan in Shahi Koto contributed to this report.

Source: AP News

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Pakistan bomb in Karachi kills 11 people: hospital

Published: Friday February 5, 2010

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Pakistan_bomb_in_Karachi_kills_11_p_02052010.html

A bomb attack targeting a bus in Pakistan's financial capital Karachi on Friday killed 11 people, including women and children, and wounded dozens, a hospital official said.

"Eleven people have been martyred and 40 injured. There are children and women among the killed and wounded," Doctor Seemi Jamal, the chief of Jinnah Hospital in Karachi, told AFP.

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Friday, February 05, 2010
20:24 Mecca time, 17:24 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/201025111132590730.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Karachi bomb blasts leave many dead  
 

The wounded from the first attack were being treated at the scene of the second blast [AFP]

Two bomb blasts in the Pakistani city of Karachi, apparently targeting Shia Muslims marking a religious ceremony, have killed at least 22 people.

A bomb-laden motorcycle first exploded on a main road in the city as a bus carrying Shia worshippers passed on Friday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 40 others.

The second blast went off outside the hospital where the wounded were being taken, reportedly killing another 10 people, witnesses said.

"An explosion occurred at the Jinnah hospital near the emergency ward, where the bodies and injured were being taken," Dr Mushtaq Ahmad said.

"I heard a large blast. People are running all over the place."

Police later said they had defused a third explosive device in the premises of the hospital.

"The bomb was planted in a television set and we successfully defused it," Ghulam Nabi Memon, a senior police officer, said.

Shia ceremony

Shias in Pakistan are marking Arbaeen - the end of a 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed in a seventh century battle in Karbala.

The violence in Karachi echoed similar attacks in Iraqagainst Shia Muslims gathered in Karbala to mark the occasion.

It was not clear if either attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.

"A bomb was planted on the motorcyle and it hit the bus," Waseem Ahmad, the city police chief, said.

"We cannot determine in one and a half hours whether it was a suicide blast or not. We are examining the site. We are collecting the evidence. We are taking witness statements and then we will say something concrete."

'Destabilising' Karachi

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said that it was unclear who had carried out the two attacks on Friday, but he noted that the city had previously seen ethnic, sectarian and political violence.


 
The first explosion hit a bus carrying Shia Muslim worshippers [AFP]

"It would appear that whoever is conducting these acts of terror in Karachi wants to destabilise Karachi," he said.

"There has been a lot of talk that Karachi is a strategic city, it is a port city, but whoever wants to hit Karachi primarily wants to do so because it is the financial heart of the country.

"Karachi has also seen an unrelenting wave of firing incidents, snipers shooting at ordinary people across the city."

The Pakistani Taliban have claimed past attacks against Shia Muslims in Pakistan.

Two attacks in Karachi last Decemberclaimed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan left at least 60 people dead and unleashed a wave of angeron the city's streets.

Pakistan had tightened security in the city to protect mass processions of worshippers during Ashura- deploying tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces.
 
 

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Shia pilgrims target of bombings in Pakistan

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:29:30 GMT
http://presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=117937&sectionid=351020401

 
 
Thirteen people have reportedly been killed in a bomb attack on a Pakistan-based hospital which was receiving the Shia casualties from an earlier explosion.

The bomb ripped through the Jinnah hospital in the Pakistan's largest city, Karachi on Friday, injuring scores of people. "This happened in front of the emergency ward of," spokesman for the provincial government Jameel Soomro was quoted by the AFP as saying.

The blast occurred as the hospital was receiving the wounded from an earlier attack in which a bomber had targeted a bus packed with Shia mourners.

Twelve people died and dozens other were injured among the group of pilgrims marking the 40th day after the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein (PBUH).

The hospital attack was followed by a second attack which was unsuccessful, Reuters reported.

Senior police officer Ghulam Nabi Memon said that law enforcement agents "successfully defused" a bomb in the premises of the hospital.

In December 2009, a deadly attack on an Ashura procession claimed the lives of nearly 50 people.

Over the past two years, some 3,000 people have died in bomb attacks and other militant operations throughout Pakistan.

HN/RE

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Saturday, February 06, 2010
11:16 Mecca time, 08:16 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/20102651755191605.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Karachi mourns bomb attack victims  

 
A blast struck outside the hospital in Karachi where victims were being taken after the first attack [AFP]
 
Thousands of people have gathered in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, for a mass funeral after 25 people were killed and more than 150 were wounded in bomb attacks on Friday.

Two bombs planted on two buses carrying Shia worshippers were detonated simultaneously on Friday killing 12 people and wounding more than 40 others, police said.

A second blast went off outside a hospital entrance where the wounded were being taken, reportedly killing another 13 people, witnesses said.

A third bomb was defused in the hospital car park, police said.

Major Aurang Zeb, a paramilitary spokesman in Karachi, said on Saturday that security forces were on maximum alert ahead of the funeral in the Malir area of the southern port city.

"It looks like there's no government in Pakistan," Syed Shabbir Hussain, who lost a cousin in the first blast, said.

"They always say that there are militants here, and that they will attack. And then they attack, but the police and the government do nothing."

Shia Muslims in Pakistan are marking Arbaeen - the end of a 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed in a seventh century battle in Karbala.

City shut down

Most of shops in Karachi, a city of 18 million people, were closed and public transport reduced as several thousand mourners gathered at funerals of some of the victims of the attacks.


in depth

  Deadly ethnic violence hits Karachi
  Blast hits Pakistan school opening
  Blog: Pakistan: Another bloody year?
  Focus: Pakistan, another bloody year?
  Riz Khan: Is Pakistan heading towards civil war?
  Focus: Obama's Pakistan dilemma

 

Hasan Abdullah, a correspondent with Pakistan's Dawn News television, told Al Jazeera: "The police say that a bomb was planted on the first and second bus and they were detonated remotely."

Initial investigations had suspected a bomb-laden motorcycle was driven into one of the buses.

"As far as the general strike is concerned, all the markets have been closed down and also the city government's schools have been closed," Abdullah said.

"At least 20 suspects have been rounded up, and police say these suspects belong to banned sectarian organisations."

Raja Umer Khattab, a senior police investigator, said the Jundullah [Army of God] group was behind the attacks.

"This is the same group that carried out the Ashura attack," he said, referring to a bomb attack at a Shia procession in late December that killed 43 people.

Strategic city

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "Right now the people of Karachi are in mourning. Once they have buired their dead, there will be more anger that the security have not been able to protect them.

"Karachi has seen violence in the past. It would appear that whoever is conducting these acts of terror in Karachi wants to destabilise Karachi," he said.

"There has been a lot of talk that Karachi is a strategic city, it is a port city, but whoever wants to hit Karachi primarily wants to do so because it is the financial heart of the country.

The Pakistani Taliban have claimed past attacks against Shia Muslims in Pakistan.

Two attacks in Karachi last December claimed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan left at least 60 people dead and unleashed a wave of angeron the city's streets.

Pakistan had tightened security in the city to protect mass processions of worshippers during Ashoura, deploying tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces.
 
 

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No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle

by Chris Floyd

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62969&hd=&size=1&l=e

February 5, 2010

Here's the way the game works. First you get the outright lie, then later, in dribs and drabs, you get a few, grudging crumbs of the truth.

For example, first you get: "No, there are no Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. None. That's just a conspiracy theory, terrorist propaganda. These kinds of lies just make it harder for us to do good in the region." Then later: "Well, yes, we do have Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. But, uh, we don't actually cut their checks directly in the Pentagon."

Or what about this more recent example? First: "The United States has no troops in Pakistan. None. We are not going to send troops to Pakistan. That's just wild talk, a conspiracy theory. And it makes it harder for us to do good in the region."

Then later: "Well, yes, we do have a few troops in Pakistan. All right, a couple hundred. But that's it. We promise. And they're just training their counterparts in Pakistan's military. Oh yeah, and also working alongside paramilitary militias in the frontier regions. And maybe, you know, following up on some of our drone strikes. That is, our alleged drone strikes, because we are not, as you know, officially admitting that we are carrying out an ever-accelerating campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, although if we were, these strikes would be very surgical, and the hundreds of people who might have been killed in just the past few months by these strikes, if they happened, would have all been vicious savage murdering 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! terrorists. But other than these 200 troops we have in Pakistan now, we have no troops in Pakistan. Never have. Except, of course, for the 12 American troops who have been killed in, well, battle, in, er, Pakistan since 2001. But that's it. Look me in the eye; would I lie to you?" 

Yes, yet another aspect of what must be the most unsecret secret war in history has been rumbled. American troops are on the ground in Pakistan – and getting killed there. As the world now knows, three American soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing (which also killed six Pakistanis, as if anyone cares) in a remote frontier province in Pakistan this week. The bombing took place in an area that had supposedly been cleared in the savage, swoopstake "counterinsurgency" operations launched by Pakistan at America's insistence. (Operations which, we were told at the time, had no American involvement whatsoever.)

Yet as the Pakistani paper The News points out, this massive "clearing" operation – which cleared more than a million people from their homes as they fled the fighting – could not stop the insurgents from placing a huge 70kg bomb "in an area that had reportedly been 'cleared' and moreover plant it on such a high-profile target that should have been guarded as closely as possible given that 'foreign visitors' were on their way. Nobody noticed a 70kg bomb being buried in the road?"

All this might suggest to a cynic that our much-ballyhooed "counterinsurgency doctrines" (and they are indeed treated as holy writ, handed down by St. David Petraeus) are not, perhaps, as entirely effective as they might be – especially considering the vast cost in innocent life they exact, and the hatred and extremism they engender.

Noel Shachtman at Wired has a couple of useful roundups (here and here) on the latest revelations of our sure-enough war in Pakistan. But equally revealing are some of the remarks he passes along from readers, and his own response: exchanges which demonstrate that, sadly, it is not only our elites who are marinated in "a sense of imperial entitlement and dominance" (as we noted here the other day).

Shachtman notes how the new revelations give the glaring lie to the solemn promises made by Obama's "special envoy" to the region, Richard Holbrooke. Speaking in Brussels last May, Holbrooke declared:



"The heart of the problem for the West is in western Pakistan. But there are not going to be US or NATO troops on the ground in Pakistan. There is a red line for the government of Pakistan and one which we must respect," he said.


(Parenthetically, isn't it rather strange that the "heart of the problem" for our militarist mandarins always seems to lie outside the borders of the country they are ravaging? So the "real problem" in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan. And, as we were told repeatedly for years, the "real problem" in Iraq was actually Iran, whose nuke-mad mullahs kept stirring up our lazy, docile darkies in Iraq. Tony Blair stuck to this line, well, religiously in his recent canard-o-rama at the Iraq inquiry in London. It was Iran who caused all our problems in Iraq, he said over and over; in fact, he mentioned Iran 58 times in the course of his testimony, much of which was aimed at fomenting new war fever against Tehran.)

Shachtman also notes the fact that the Americans killed in Pakistan this week were not, by the Pentagon's own admission, super-duper secret agents, but part of a straightforward "counterinsurgency" program: "a widening war," as he says, rightly.

Then comes a pushback from various warbloggers. First, the pseudonymous Islamophobe armchair warrior "Rusty Shackleford" (I guess cowardice in the service of virtue is no vice, eh, Rusty?) weighs in:



"Admitting that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles would — literally — lead to a civil war in Pakistan. .. It is a catch-22, ironic, and duplicitous: but calling this a war is the same thing as losing it. Me, I’m willing to be called two-faced for sake of winning a war. Those that prefer consistency over victory are misguided."


This is wilful ignorance with a vengeance. Obviously, Pseudo-Warrior believes that Pakistanis are too stupid to notice foreign troops fighting on their own soil. So as long as we don't admit "that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles," then those dumb Pakis will never know! Man, that's some crafty, subtile strategy there.

Shachtman then gives us the views of "Uncle Jimbo" at Blackfive:



It is fair to point out that the ops in Pakistan are more tightly tied to a shooting war than many others, but does that mean we should take them and shine a bunch of bright lights on them? … There is plenty of oversight operating where it belongs in classified briefings… The political environment in Pakistan is delicate as Hell so we properly tread lightly. A bunch of breathless stories about the mere possibility that we are cooperating more w/ Pakistan or that heaven forbid the evil Blackwater mercenaries are helping load drones doesn’t make doing any good there easier… It is smart and a proper use of Special Forces. Now let’s stop making their jobs harder by acting like something nefarious is going on.


Shachtman replies, reasonably, that, as noted, the Pakistanis already know what's going on in their own country, and that "secrecy is only fueling the paranoia and conspiracy theories — not to mention depriving Americans of their right to know how their blood and treasure is being spent." Shachtman also, perhaps out of courtesy, refrains from commenting on Jimbo's touching naiveté that our always wise and competent leaders will provide all the necessary "oversight" in their secret briefings.

But despite this display of common sense, Shachtman feels compelled to establish his own "tough realist" credentials. In response to Jimbo's claim that telling the truth about the U.S. war in Pakistan "doesn’t make doing any good there easier," Shachtman hastens to reply:



I hear that. And if this were some other, relatively small-scale SF operation (cough Yemen cough), I’d agree 100%.


And there you have it: the quintessential, unconscious response of the fully marinated modern American. Shachtman is not at all opposed to imperial agents carrying out deadly attacks in foreign lands at peace with the United States. The principle of unlimited violence -- the right of America to kill people anytime, anywhere in the world -- is never questioned. The only argument that "serious" people can have concerns the application of this principle; i.e., is it in our best interest to kill these people now, or wait until later, or maybe kill some other people instead, or build a few more schools while we're killing people or -- and this is as radical as our "serious" discourse allows -- should we even maybe hold off on killing people for just a little while, to let the lesser breeds cool down a bit, and rebuild our busted finances?

As we noted here the other day:



Our elites and their courtiers [and their commentators] literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.


And so these debates between chest-beating militarists and more thoughtful "moderates" over the proper application of imperial violence in foreign lands will go on. Because until the empire is dismantled -- until we bring America home -- there will be no end to these wars and op and "interventions," secret, open, two-faced or otherwise. And no end to the blowback of violence and retrogression they produce.




 

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Malik describes attacks as ‘sectarian violence’

LAHORE: Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik has described Friday’s attacks as incidents of “sectarian violence”, according to a private TV channel. Malik said the federal government had formed a joint team of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Intelligence Bureau and the Federal Investigation Agency to investigate the Karachi bombings. Malik said the team would report to him the within the next 48 hours. He said the twin blasts were similar to what happened on December 28. However, he said the latest attacks could not be suicide bombings. Police officials and eye-witness accounts also corroborate Malik’s claim.

daily times monitor
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\02\06\story_6-2-2010_pg1_2

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Friday, Feb. 05, 2010
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1960415,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

U.S. Military Deaths in Pakistan Fuel the Fires of Suspicion

By Omar Waraich / Islamabad

A man carries an injured boy away from the site of a bombing, which hit near a school and killed three U.S. soldiers in the town of Timergara in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province


By killing three U.S. soldiers in a bomb attack in a remote corner of northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Taliban scored a political jackpot. With anti-American sentiment cresting in Pakistani public opinion, the presence of the three American trainers in a convoy passing through Koto village when it was struck by a roadside bomb has set off a flurry of questions and even wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. presence in the country. The news left Islamabad in a difficult position, deepened suspicion of the U.S. and further strained an already troubled relationship. (Watch a video about bomb threats at Pakistan schools.)

The trainers' presence had been Pakistan's worst-kept secret. They're here at the invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, "There is nothing secret about their presence there."

On Wednesday, a group of these trainers was traveling in a convoy with Pakistani security forces and local journalists to a school freshly renovated at U.S. expense. They had been invited to attend its opening ceremony, a symbolically significant event in a former Taliban stronghold where girls' schools were routinely bombed. As they rolled through Koto, a roadside bomb exploded near a girls' school along the way. (See pictures of a police academy in Pakistan.)

Three of the Americans were killed, two others injured. Also among the dead were two teenage schoolgirls and a Pakistani paramilitary. More than 100 people were injured, most of them schoolgirls, according to Médecins Sans Frontières doctors at a local hospital. Television images showed grim but now depressingly familiar scenes of the charred remains of nearby cars, broken masonry from the school building, scattered books and bags, and rescue workers scrambling through the debris in search of survivors.

While Taliban attacks on girls' schools have been common and helped rally Pakistani public opinion behind a military campaign to drive the movement out of areas it had taken over, there are few doubts that the U.S. personnel were the targets. (Watch a video about bomb threats at Pakistan schools.)

In recent months, wild but potent conspiracy theories have been keenly promoted by sectors of the Pakistani media and political opposition. Figuring most prominently among them has been the allegation that the U.S. security contractor Xe Services, previously known as Blackwater, has been operating with impunity throughout the country. Exploiting such sentiment, the Taliban described Wednesday's attack as "revenge for the blasts carried out by Blackwater in Pakistan." (See pictures of suicide bombings in Islamabad.)

The attack, in an area believed to have been cleared of militants, comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Washington-Islamabad relations. In recent weeks, the CIA has dramatically escalated its covert drone-launched missile strikes on suspected militants in the tribal wilds of North Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan. Pakistani military officials are still trying to confirm whether a Jan. 17 attack fatally wounded Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

While the Taliban deny that Hakimullah was killed, they had initially issued similarly fierce denials when his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed by a drone strike last August. There are strong signs that a change of leadership may be under way in the ranks of the Pakistani Taliban. According to local reports, Hakimullah was taken to Mamozai village in Orakzai tribal agency, where he had first emerged as a Taliban commander and where his second wife lives. A doctor was summoned from nearby Hangu to treat his injuries. But well-placed sources believe Hakimullah died from his injuries and was buried in the village last week. (See a video about Pakistan schools and reactions to bombings.)

If confirmed, Hakimullah's death would represent a major victory for both Washington and Islamabad. Pakistan's most wanted man had claimed responsibility for the Dec. 30 suicide bombing by a Jordanian triple agent who killed half a dozen CIA personnel on a base in Afghanistan's Khost province. He had also claimed credit for a series of high-profile terrorist attacks in Pakistan and the ongoing wave of violence across the country that has killed more than 600 people since October.

But the now almost daily drone strikes remain unpopular in Pakistan, whose government publicly denounces the attacks but has privately nodded its assent and offered the use of bases on its soil. Even Taliban militants recently acknowledged the effectiveness of the drone war. "Westerners have some regard for civilians, and they do distinguish between Taliban fighters and civilians, but the Pakistani army doesn't," says a pamphlet distributed recently in North Waziristan by the pro-Taliban Council of United Holy Warriors. "Instead of the Taliban, it is bombing ordinary people's homes and their bazaars and killing innocent people." (See pictures of Pakistan beneath the surface.)

Anti-American sentiment was further stoked Wednesday just hours after news broke of the three U.S. personnel killed in Koto, when a New York City court convicted Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist, of the attempted killing of U.S. personnel after she had been captured in Afghanistan. The verdict triggered an outpouring of rage across the Pakistani media and political class, which has long championed Siddiqui as a victim of alleged American brutality.

The p.r. setbacks come as Washington struggles to persuade Pakistan to turn up the heat on Taliban and related militants who use its territory to mount operations against NATO troops in Afghanistan. Last month, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates was visiting, the Pakistan military's chief spokesman said there were no plans to launch fresh offensives for at least six months, if not a year. That was a pretty blunt "No" to the Americans. Now, with suspicions deepening over the nature and extent of the U.S. presence in Pakistan, winning its cooperation and shifting public attitudes has become an even more trying task.

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Grave concerns over presence of Blackwater in Pakistan

By Asif Haroon Raja

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62998&hd=&size=1&l=e

February 6, 2010

A private and secretive outfit named Blackwater under Erik Prince propped up in North Carolina in mid 1990s with its HQ spread over 7000 acres of land.

It trains tens of thousands of law enforcement officials a year from the US and other nations. It has grown into a private army and has become so powerful that it can topple a government. It has over 2300 soldiers deployed in nine countries. It maintains a data base of 21000 Special Forces troops and retired police for its use.

Jeremy Scahill revealed in his book "Rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army", that Pentagon has made private contractors an integral part of operations. Infamous private security firm Blackwater had been put to use in Iraq as hired killers. Largest ever private contractors totalling 100,000 were employed having a ratio of 1:1 to American soldiers. Paul Bremer initially used security guards of this private firm for his personal protection and subsequently expanded its role to avoid US casualties. Rs one lac was paid to a security guard per day. It changed its name to Xe Worldwide or Xe Services after earning bad name in Iraq where it was extensively employed by US military.

This role is now being performed in Afghanistan particularly after US war casualties started to rise in 2009. Most of clandestine work in Afghanistan is being done by Blackwater. Reportedly, Blackwater/Xe in Afghanistan is training and equipping Afghan troops who then fire on US soldiers during joint operations. Two such incidents took place in 2009 and this practice is aimed at justifying troop surge.

Gordon Duff, a senior editor of Veterans Today has disclosed that the CIA has outsourced its most secret projects to Blackwater, a mercenary group with worst reputation of any firm the US has ever done business with. It plans and executes terrorist acts against civilian targets, military installations, intelligence agencies and resorts to target killings. It maintains contacts with terrorist leaders and organizes revolutionary groups. Disregarding US laws, CIA has expanded the role of private contractors including Blackwater like raids, operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia and now in Yemen. This was disclosed by four former US military and intelligence officers to ABL News.

There is mounting evidence that Pentagon and CIA are engaged in a war against Pakistan population involving death squads, disappearances and torture. These infamous practices were employed in Vietnam and Al Salvador. One of the chief executives of Blackwater Robert Richer was head of CIA’s Near East and South Asia from1999 to 2004 and ran clandestine operations throughout Middle East and South Asia. Gen Petraeus in August 2009 announced plans to launch an intelligence training centre in coordination with others to train military officers, covert agents and analysts who agree to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to a decade. In the same month, it was announced that Pentagon was reassigning its 3rd Special Forces Group presently deployed in Africa and Caribbean to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The CIA also uses credentialed journalists to engage in counter-intelligence. Individuals working as subcontractors to CIA have links to Blackwater CIA-approved operations in targeted countries of the region. Blackwater comes in the guise of contractors, investors, business partners and economic advisers. According to Tim Shorrock, Washington obtained $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.5 in 2000. It implies 70% intelligence budget going to private companies. Private contractors have been involved in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram and Abu Garib prisons. Blackwater not only serves CIA but also private interests for money. Blackwater elements used extensively by CIA and US military to minimize hazards of combat to US troops have come under intense censure and scrutiny in Iraq and Pakistan due to which their liberty of action has curtailed.

Controversial Blackwater firm which is an extension of US military and CIA is associated with Christian rights and is anti-Islam. Its head Eric Prince is right wing Christian. He has been engaged in uniting conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common Theo-conservative holy war to eliminate Muslims and Islam globally. Blackwater acts as the armed wing of the movement. Blackwater is reportedly running a covert recruitment drive through its website in Pakistan; www.blackwaterUSA.com. It can only be accessed through four company executives’ references. It seeks candidates who can speak Punjabi and Urdu. $ one billion has been allocated for Blackwater which is above law and accountability. Not even home country law is applicable to this outfit. Not a single private contractor involved in gruesome murders has been prosecuted.

Presence of elements of notorious Black water in Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta and now in Karachi has created ripples in Pakistan and has become a cause of serious concern for all Pakistanis. In Peshawar, they are operating from office of CA11 on Chinar Road, University Town. In-charge of this set up Craig Davis was caught red handed in Peshawar indulging in objectionable activities and having links with Afghanistan. He was identified as an operative of Creative Associates International Inc; a Washington based US firm, one of the wings of Blackwater. Craig was arrested and deported to USA. He and several other deported persons were returned to Pakistan after receiving visas from Pak Embassy in Washington and security cleared by interior ministry and Craig resumed his official activities. Ambassador Hussain Haqqani issued 360 visas to American nationals in one month without consulting Islamabad. This dangerous practice would have continued had the ISI not put its foot down. Consequent to this setback, this suspicious company changed its name and shifted to Karachi.

Several incidents of Americans carrying prohibited bore weapons and grenades roaming the streets of Islamabad during ungodly hours took place. Two incidents happened in Lahore and five Americans were caught under suspicious conditions from Sargodha. Glen Greinwad disclosed that there is ample evidence that the US pays a number of groups within Iran to commit acts of terrorism. If so, there is likelihood that CIA must be indulging in such like activities in Pakistan as well. Blackwater has been actively involved in assassinating pro-government Maliks, clerics and notables in FATA, religious scholars in NWFP, political figures, and target killings in Quetta and in Karachi and in drone attacks. It had a role in organised terrorist attacks against military and police targets in Lahore and Rawalpindi. It provides surveillance and support to terrorist groups such as BLA and BRA in Balochistan and Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan in FATA and Swat.

Reportedly, the US has purchased 16 acres land from CDA in Islamabad. Over $ 1 billion has been earmarked for the expansion of US Embassy in Islamabad, part of which would stretch up to PM Secretariat and Presidency. Offices of Marines, Blackwater security consultants along with residences will be constructed. The new Embassy would be designed to make it bomb proof and to be able to eavesdrop all our high powered secret meetings taking place in parliament, Presidency and PM Secretariat. Rumors are afloat that 1000 to 7000 US Marines together with APCs are planned to be stationed within the confines of new embassy in Islamabad with licence to move about anywhere in Pakistan. 400 houses have been hired in Islamabad by US Embassy.

The intended expanded US Embassy in Islamabad will be the largest in the world. $ 115 million have been earmarked for it and made part of Kerry-Lugar Bill (KLB) package for Pakistan. It includes $5 million for Marines quarters, $53.5 million for housing infrastructure; $18 million for general services and office area; $36 million for temporary duty quarters and community staff facilities. All told $4 billion will be required for the ambitious project. $800 million had been allocated for the protection of enlarged and fortified Embassy through private security contractor DynCorp.

Some say it is being made into a military base while others say a cantonment is being built. Expansion of US Embassy in Islamabad is being justified under the plea that greater number of officials would be required to disburse promised $1.5 billion aid per annum from USA and Friends of Pakistan. If this is the criteria, India with which USA has strategic cooperation in defence and economic fields which is twenty times more in volume, USA should need half of New Delhi to accommodate coordinating and disbursement staff. US Ambassador has sought sanction for 800 vehicles which will be in addition to existing fleet of 1100 private cars in use by Embassy staff in Islamabad. It is said that the fortified US Embassy close to PM secretariat will counter balance Rawalpindi based 111 Brigade. Under the garb of KLB, which is a step towards neo-colonisation of Pakistan, it is intended to enhance presence of US military contractors, immune from prosecution.

The US has purchased a large chunk of land in Sihala and has seemingly established a secret military training camp adjacent to police academy just a few km away from Islamabad and from Kahuta. It is being used to recruit retired army personnel preferably ex SSG at handsome salaries to work for US military. Monthly salaries range from $200 to $1200. Commandant of the Academy or any other person belonging to law enforcing agency could not enter the prohibited area. Sensitive instruments were implanted to monitor KRL and to gain intelligence on nuclear assets. It has now come to light that this unchecked facility was given to USA in 2003 under an unwritten agreement by Gen Musharraf to train the police.

A security firm has a warehouse in Islamabad which was involved in illegal arm trade. The warehouse, Kestral Logistics, worked as a sub contractor of Xe World. It imported heavy arms and ammunition for US Company for its illicit operation in Pakistan. The US rejected news on warehouse for storing arms. US Ambassador Anne Patterson and Richard Holbrooke too denied presence of Blackwater.

In 2006, Pakistan had signed an agreement with the US authorising Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden. At that time Gen McChrystal was head of JSOC. It was learnt in 2008 that the US had acquired huge chunk of land near Tarbela with a view to build a military base. Some reports say that 300 US military advisers are lodged in Tarbela and drones are also controlled from there. US Special Forces have been conducting joint exercises with our commandoes apart from imparting advanced training.

US military trainers favour tactics adopted by JSOC and are imparting training to Frontier Corps in Fort Balhissar Peshawar and in Warsak. On 23 February 2009, Pentagon revealed that over 70 American military advisers had been secretly working in Pakistan since long. It has now transpired that 100-member strong Special Forces unit is stationed in NWFP since 2008 to train FC in counter terrorism. Three US trainers died in a suicide attack in Lower Dir on 3 February 2010. TTP claimed responsibility and claimed that the killed foreigners belonged to Xe Worldwide.

Reportedly, US opened a JSOC in Balochistan where Marines are coming in via Islamabad. Marines as well as heavy contingent of Blackwater elements to the tune of 11000 have also been spotted in Balochistan, who in collaboration with BLA and BRA are mostly carrying out target killings. Four air bases in Balochistan had been leased to US military in September 2001 and these bases at Jacobabad, Pasni, Dalbaldin and Shamsi are still in their use. It is now an open secret that Shamsi airbase is under use by US drones where Blackwater was hired for loading hellfire missiles and 500 lbs laser guided bombs on Predators. Similar job is being performed at Jalalabad air base to strike targets in Pakistan. In the wake of intense pressure from people of Pakistan, CIA terminated the contract of terrorist group Blackwater Worldwide employed at Shamsi Base but is still using it in Balochistan under the name of Xe Services.

Blackwater has now spread its tentacles to Karachi under a different name. It has hired seven private houses in defence area and acquired hundreds of acres of land near Pataro in Sindh to launch agricultural research institute. There were reports of secret construction of operational facilities in Gharo in Sindh to serve as a base for 200 Marines and that sizeable numbers of American armoured carriers had arrived at Port Qasim, with 3000 Hummvies awaiting dispatch.

Jeremy Scahill has revealed about a covert forward operation base run by JSOC in Karachi in which Blackwater is actively involved in planning and executing target assassination of suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The outfit also helps in gathering intelligence and in drone attacks. Reportedly the militant wing of MQM has joined hands with Blackwater and former is making full use of it to serve its political ends.

Seymour M. Hersh suggested that it is easier and safer to remove separately stored arming system of nuclear systems from the soil of Pakistan. US intelligence agencies in various guises like Xe worldwide are reportedly developing techniques to disable arming system. Blackwater has begun to make diagrammatical drawings and video films of nuclear installations as well as available routes to help execute US plan to hijack nukes in one go.

While every second Pakistani is expressing its grave concern over presence of Blackwater, and even Robert Gates admitted its presence, ironically the Interior Minister is adamant that there is none and wants documentary proof. It is generally believed that while Musharraf regime allowed setting up of DynCorp in Islamabad, Hussain Haqqani and Rehman Malik are instrumental in facilitating entry of Blackwater in Pakistan.

- Asian Tribune -

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America’s Silent War In Pakistan Unmasked

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63017&hd=&size=1&l=e


Countercurrents.org , February 6, 2010


Three US Marines were killed and another two injured in a suicide attack in Dir, northern Pakistan on Wednesday. The Americans, disguised in traditional Pakistani dress, were traveling with Pakistani military officers in a five-car convoy to attend the inauguration of a girl school, which had been renovated with the U.S. humanitarian assistance. Four schoolgirls and a paramilitary soldier were also killed in the attack while more than 120 school girls were injured.

To many Pakistanis the most shocking aspect of the latest Taliban suicide bombing the question was: What was a team of American soldiers doing in a volatile corner of North West Frontier province?

According to Pakistan’s leading newspaper, The News, the three US soldiers were apparently in the area to train the paramilitary Frontier Corp personnel engaged in the military operations against the Taliban in the area.

The suicide bombing on Wednesday was the first against the US soldiers in Pakistan. And it was the first time that so many American soldiers were killed and injured in Pakistan. A US Embassy statement said they were the US military personnel in Pakistan to conduct training at the invitation of the Frontier Corps.

The News reported that the slain US soldiers were part of a 100-member strong special American military training unit which was dispatched to Pakistan in 2008 to raise a 1,000-member strong well-trained paramilitary commando unit which could conduct guerrilla operations against the Taliban militants active in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt.

The military training program was never officially announced by Pakistan to avoid a possible backlash by the masses which are opposed to the American military presence on the Pakistani territory. Interestingly, the US-funded training course for the largely under-equipped and under-trained Frontier Corps included both classroom and field sessions.

The News said that besides dispatching American marines to train the Frontier Corps personnel, the Pentagon had also sent a special team of its Special Forces military advisers, communication experts, technical specialists and combat medics to help establish coordination centers on Pak-Afghan border so that the American and Pakistani officials could share intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taliban elements in and around the tribal areas.

In the beginning, the American military trainers confined themselves to training compounds due to security concerns in Pakistan. However, they had now started accompanying Pakistani troops on special guerrilla operations against the Taliban, eventually leading to the Wednesday incident in Dir Lower which shares a border with Afghanistan and with the restive Swat district, where the Army had carried out a massive military operation last year.

Pakistani press reports indicated that the American soldiers were part of a $100 million Pentagon-funded training program which is meant to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more during the next year. As per the program, the Pentagon intended to spend around $400 million more in the next few years to train and equip the Frontier Corps. This is in addition to a 7.5 billion dollars US assistance for the next five years announced last year under controversial the Kerry-Lugar Act. But behind the scenes the US is engaged in other ways. Over the past decade it has given over $12bn in cash directly to the ­military to subsidize the costs of fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida. Ominously, part of the money doled out to Pakistan’s mercenary army by the Pentagon is for what United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) calls Foreign Internal Defense (FID) a key pillar of Special Forces' Unconventional Warfare doctrine.

El Salvador Option:

Unconventional or irregular warfare is conducted "by, with, or through surrogates." According to Unconventional Warfare doctrine: Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Unconventional Warfare, Defense Department, September 2008, p. 1-3)

Significantly, as in El Salvador, Colombia and a score of other global "hot spots" tagged for resource extraction or geopolitical control by America's corporatist masters, the USSOC manual calls for the direct training of paramilitary forces.

United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) touts the "success" of their "mission" in El Salvador as an applicable model for countering insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For 12 years, beginning in 1979, the United States assisted the El Salvador military in becoming a more professional and effective fighting force against the Communist-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). A U.S. military group assisted the El Salvadoran army by establishing a facility for basic and advanced military training. SF advisors, primarily from the 7th Special Forces Group, served with El Salvadoran units to support small-unit training and logistics. The advisors helped the El Salvadoran military become more professional and better organized, while advising in the conduct of pacification and counter guerrilla operations. Advisors were also present at the brigade levels assisting in operations and intelligence activities. From 1985 to 1992, just over 140 SF officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) served as advisors to a 40-battalion army. From a poorly staffed and led force of 8,000 soldiers in 1980, SF trainers created a hard-hitting (counter insurgency force) COIN force of 54,000 by 1986. U.S. forces supported U.S. interests by creating an effective COIN force that fought the guerrillas to a standstill and established the groundwork for a negotiated settlement by 1991. (Foreign Internal Defense (FID) document p A-6)

Translation: between 1980-1991 Special Operations Forces "assistance" to the brutal Salvadoran military produced 75,000 civilian deaths, by and large the result of Army massacres carried out in tandem with far-right narco-trafficking death squads who ruled the roost with an iron fist.

The "hard-hitting COIN force," while shying away from battles with tough FMLN guerrillas, kidnapped and "disappeared" peasants, labor organizers, students, Catholic priests and nuns, or just plain folks caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, often subjecting them to hideous torture before lining the roads with their brutalized corpses.

Today, Pentagon planners and their cheerleaders in the corporate media are touting these tactics as a "fresh approach" to beat back the Taliban. In Afghanistan and Pakistan today, to ensure that effective measures of "populace and resource control" (PRC) are brought to bear to stem the insurgent tide, FID theorists recommend widespread political repression and panoptic methods of surveilling the "target" population.

The authors' aver: Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme.

PRC measures can also include the following:

* Curfews or blackouts.
* Travel restrictions.
* Restricted residential areas, such as protected villages or resettlement areas.
* Registration and pass systems.
* Control of sensitive items (resources control) of critical supplies, such as weapons, food, and fuel.
* Checkpoints, searches, and roadblocks.
* Surveillance, censorship, and press control.
* Restriction of activity that applies to selected groups (labor unions, political groups, and so on). (FID, op. cit. p. A-12)

We see implementation of these measures in the current Pakistan army military operations in South Waziristan as well as in Swat which is occupied by the army in the aftermath of last year’s military operation that displaced more than three million people, killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed neighborhoods and economic centers. At least 400,000 people have been displaced in the current operation in South Waziristan while millions of so-called Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on return find their homes, shops and neighborhoods damaged by the indiscriminate air strikes and shelling by the army.

If the army atrocities in May-July 2009 operation against the militants in Swat are any indication then we may find extra-judicial killings and mass graves in South Waziristan as uncovered in Swat. Returning residents of Swat displaced by the army operation often found unclaimed bodies dumped in agricultural fields, by the roadside or on the banks of Swat River. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) sent a fact-finding mission to Swat which documented accounts of not only extrajudicial killings but also the discovery of mass graves.

While the Swat displaced people are still clamoring for rehabilitation, the South Waziristan operation has created another humanitarian problem. More than three months after the Pakistani military launched the US-financed offensive, humanitarian aid organizations are only now gaining access to the people who have fled the fighting in the region.

Not surprisingly, according to the Defense of Human Rights of Pakistan, between 8,000 to 10,000 people disappeared in Pakistan since General Parvez Musharraf government joined the US "global war on terror."

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claims responsibility

A Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bombing, saying the dead Americans belonged to the Iraq-ill famed US mercenary army Blackwater - now known as Xe. "We claim responsibility for the blast," Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Azam Tariq said in a call from an unspecified place. "The Americans killed were members of the Blackwater group. We know they are responsible for bomb blasts in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities," he said.

Pakistan's government could now face further anti-American feeling as the deaths disclosed the extent of the unpopular US military involvement. Tensions over American Predator drone missile strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants on Pakistani soil have already led to widespread anti-American protests. In the most intense barrage yet an estimated eight drones fired at least 17 missiles at different compounds and vehicles in North Waziristan on Tuesday which killed at least 31 people.

The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, according to Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. "The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks," Professor Hussain said.

If the American soldiers were the targets, the attack raised the question of whether the Taliban had received intelligence or cooperation from within the Frontier Corps. Pakistani analysts said Wednesday's bombing underscored the strength of militant networks in the area despite the military presence and last year's bloody offensive. "The attack shows maybe they had some advance information that the convoy had some foreigners... and that the militants' intelligence is still active, and this is a matter of concern," said retired intelligence officer Saad Khan. "The situation in the area is still not normal and it is not going to be over soon."

According to Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat and Dir, it was odd that American soldiers would go to such a volatile area where Taliban militants were known to be prevalent even though the Pakistani army insisted that they had been flushed out.

The killing of the three US soldiers was a deep embarrassment to the US client Pakistani government of President Asaf Ali Zardari. The Pakistani public has been increasingly upset about the alleged activities of the US military and Blackwater (Xe) in their country. There is a general impression among Pakistanis that the wave of bombings besetting their country, blamed by the mainstream on the Taliban, is secretly carried out by American agents, in order to destabilize Pakistan and justify a US imperial presence.

A survey last August for international broadcaster al Jazeera by Gallup Pakistan found that 59 percent of Pakistanis felt the greatest threat to the country was the United States. A separate survey in August by the Pew Research Center, recorded that 64 percent of the Pakistani public regards the U.S. "as an enemy" and only 9 percent believe it to be a partner.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine
American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com
Email: asghazali@gmail.com





 

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Bilour admits presence of foreign operatives

By Haleem Asad


Sunday, 07 Feb, 2010 | 03:18 AM PST | 
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/03-bilour-admits-blackwater-presence-in-nwfp-ss-05
 
 
 Since the law and order situation is poor and security arrangements are not satisfactory, foreign companies have started hiring foreign guards: Bashir Ahmad Bilour.—File photo


TIMERGARA: NWFP’s Senior Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour has said that foreign operatives are present in the country for providing security to the US embassy, consulates and diplomats.

The ANP has been in the frontline against militancy and for that reason it was being targeted by militants, the minister said at a press conference in Balambat on Saturday.

He said the ANP government in the NWFP had been bravely fighting militants who had been playing into the hands of foreign foes.

Mr Bilour claimed that they had restored the government’s writ in the entire province and that the ANP would never step back from its stance to flush out militants from the region.

He said since the law and order situation in the country was poor and security arrangements were not satisfactory, foreign companies had started hiring foreign guards.

About the setting up of Darul Quza (appellate courts), the minister said it was a responsibility of the central government and the apex court to decide about them.

The NWFP government had not received a single penny out of the Rs17 billion reconstruction package announced for the province by the federal government, Mr Bilour said.

He said that heirs of the deceased in the Koto bomb blast would get Rs300,000 in compensation and each injured would be provided with Rs100,000.

Three US soldiers and three schoolgirls were killed in a suicide attack in Koto, Lower Dir, on Wednesday.

He condemned targeted killings in Karachi and called for an end to bloodshed in the city.

Earlier, the minister visited the Timergara DHQ hospital, where he gave gifts to schoolgirls and other people injured in the Koto blast.

Mr Bilour ruled out any negotiations with hardcore militants.
 

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/03-bilour-admits-blackwater-presence-in-nwfp-ss-05

 

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From The Sunday Times
February 7, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article7017929.ece

School bombing exposes Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan


Victims trapped in the rubble after a suicide bombing at the opening of a school for girls in the northwestern Pakistani town of Dir last week


by Christina Lamb

THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We're quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

For the past month drones have pounded the tribal region of North Waziristan in apparent retaliation for the murder of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan by a Jordanian suicide bomber working with the Pakistani Taliban.

Last week America launched its first multiple drone attack, according to Pakistani security officials. Eighteen missiles were fired from eight unmanned aircraft in Dattakhel village, killing 16 people.

The discovery of the dead US soldiers revealed that America’s shadowy war in Pakistan not only involves drones but also small cadres of special operations soldiers.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, insisted that US troops were in Pakistan only to provide counter-insurgency training for the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force operating in the tribal areas.

Other sources said there were about 200 US military inside the country. “I’m not sure you could just call it training,” one official said. “They are hardly behind the wire if they are on trips to schools in Dir.”

The three US soldiers, who have been described variously as special operations forces and civil affairs troops, were killed when their convoy was bombed as it travelled to the re-opening of the school. It had been rebuilt with US aid after being bombed by the Taliban last year.

Three schoolgirls, two villagers and a Pakistani soldier were also killed in the attack, for which the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. More than 100 were wounded, mostly schoolgirls.

It was officially reported that the device was a remote-controlled bomb. It has now emerged that a suicide bomber rammed into the vehicle carrying the Americans. This suggests the bomber had inside information. “This attack was too perfect: they lay in wait for the convoy to pass and knew exactly which vehicle to hit,” a US military officer told the Long War Journal.

One of those killed was Sergeant Matthew Sluss-Tiller, 35, the father of a three-year-old daughter. His mother, Jane Blankenship, said her son had been in Pakistan on a civil affairs mission and had grown a beard for it.

One official suggested the “trainers” may be used to pick up intelligence on drone targets, particularly because the CIA did not trust its counterparts from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service that has close links to the Taliban.

The Americans insist the drone attacks have been a success, picking off the second and third tier of Al-Qaeda’s leadership. In August they killed Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban. They recently claimed to have killed his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, but Pakistan’s foreign minister said this had not been confirmed.

To the irritation of Washington, Islamabad has kept up a pretence that drone attacks are carried out without its approval, even though the aircraft are based in Pakistan.

Among the Pakistani public, there has been outcry at the attacks. Surveys constantly show that Pakistanis consider the US a greater threat than the Taliban, despite 3,021 Pakistani deaths in terrorist attacks last year.

If the drones are controversial, the presence of US soldiers on Pakistani soil is far more so. Despite a $1.5 billion (£959m) aid programme, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, had to fly into Pakistan two weeks ago to reassure its military leadership. “Let me say definitively the US does not covet a single inch of Pakistani soil,” he told Pakistan’s National Defence University.

Additional reporting: Daud Khattak

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Forces retake Damadola after six years
 
Sunday, February 07, 2010
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=27111



Pak flag hoisted in militants’ stronghold in Bajaur


 PESHAWAR: Security forces have cleared Damadola, a stronghold of terrorists in Bajaur Agency, which was being used as a base to carry out terrorist activities. The forces on Saturday hoisted the Pakistani flag in the area, ending a six-year occupation by the militants.

A Frontier Corps (FC) spokesman said here on Saturday that security forces faced no resistance upon entering the Damadola area and the local tribesmen warmly welcomed the troops at various points.

Since the start of this operation, 60 terrorists have been killed while seven soldiers embraced Shahadat, said the FC spokesman.

Our Khar correspondent adds: Sources said elders in Damadola raised a Lashkar and assured to fight alongside security forces against the militants.

The sources said the elders and members of the Lashkar accorded a warm welcome to security forces on the occasion. They chanted slogans in support of the government, security forces and Pakistan.

It may be added that Damadola, the erstwhile stronghold of militants, was attacked by US drones four times.

Official sources said security forces continued targeting suspected hideouts of militants with artillery and mortar guns in Damadola, Badalai, Sewai, Jani Shah and adjoining areas in Mamond Tehsil.

Seven more militants were killed and five others sustained injuries when security forces hit their hideouts in the Sewai area in Mamond subdivision, official sources said. They said several hideouts of militants were also destroyed in these areas.

The sources said security forces had started patrolling the area after strengthening their positions in Damadola, Dabar, Badan and adjoining areas.

News Desk adds: The Central Intelligence Agency drones fired missiles into the village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal area on January 13, 2006, killing at least 18 people. Originally, the political administration of Bajaur claimed that four foreign members of al-Qaeda were among the dead.

US and Pakistani officials later admitted that no al-Qaeda leaders were killed in the strike and that only local villagers were killed. Damadola is about seven kilometres from the Afghan border. The attack was carried out by four Predator drones which launched four missiles at a mud-walled compound, destroying three houses.

The official number of dead was 18, including eight men, five women and five children, but other reports said that 25 people were killed. Fourteen of the dead were said to be from the same family. The attack targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was thought to be in the village.
 

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Dozen injured in blast in Pakistan's Quetta

Islamabad, Feb 6 (PTI):
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/51225/dozen-injured-blast-pakistans-quetta.html

At least a dozen people, including two paramilitary Frontier Corps personnel, were injured today when a bomb went off at a key thoroughfare in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta. 

 

Police said a bomb planted in a motorcycle exploded outside a hotel on Jinnah Road in Quetta.

Two paramilitary personnel and 10 passers-by were injured. Two of the injured are in a critical condition, hospital officials said.

Police and law enforcement personnel cordoned off the area immediately after the blast and launched a search for those responsible for the attack.
Officials of the bomb disposal squad said the blast was caused by an explosive device fitted with a timer.

The hotel's management alerted police about the suspicious motorcycle but the device went off before the bomb disposal squad reached the spot.

No group claimed responsibility for the blast.
Such attacks in southwestern Balochistan province are usually blamed on national groups waging a campaign for greater autonomy. 

 

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Could U.S. Air Strikes Push Pakistan into Khmer Rouge Type Genocide?

As in the 1960s in Cambodia, U.S. air strikes are having a devastating effect in Pakistan, not just on the targeted communities, but on public consciousness throughout the region.

By Pratap Chatterjee and Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 7, 2010, Printed on February 8, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145576/

Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA’s “secret” battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- that is, pilot-less drones -- shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in:  a certain number of al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders or suspected Arab or Uzbek or Afghan “militants” have died.  The numbers are often remarkably precise.  Sometimes they are attributed to U.S. sources, sometimes to the Pakistanis; sometimes, it’s hard to tell where the information comes from.  In the Pakistani press, on the other hand, the numbers that come back are usually of civilian dead.  They, too, tend to be precise.

Don’t let that precision fool you.  Here’s the reality:  There are no reporters on the ground and none of these figures can be taken as accurate.  Let’s just consider the CIA side of things.  Any information that comes from American sources (i.e. the CIA) has to be looked at with great wariness.  As a start, the CIA’s history is one of deception.  There’s no reason to take anything its sources say at face value.  They will report just what they think it’s in their interest to report -- and the ongoing “success” of their drone strikes is distinctly in their interest.

Then, there’s history.  In the present drone wars, as in the CIA’s bloody Phoenix Program in the Vietnam era, the Agency’s operatives, working in distinctly alien terrain, must rely on local sources (or possibly official Pakistani ones) for targeting intelligence.  In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Agency’s Phoenix Program -- reportedly responsible for the assassination of 20,000 Vietnamese -- became, according to historian Marilyn Young, “an extortionist’s paradise, with payoffs as available for denunciation as for protection.”  Once again, the CIA is reportedly passing out bags of moneyand anyone on the ground with a grudge, or the desire to eliminate an enemy, or simply the desire to make some of that money can undoubtedly feed information into the system, watch the drones do their damnedest, and then report back that more “terrorists” are dead.  Just assume that at least some of those “militants” dying in Pakistan, and possibly many of them, aren’t who the CIA hopes they are.

Think of it as a foolproof situation, with an emphasis on the “fool.”  And then keep in mind that, in December, the CIA’s local brain trust, undoubtedly the same people who were leaking precise news of “successes” in Pakistan, mistook a jihadist double agent from Jordan for an agent of theirs, gathered at an Agency base in Khost, Afghanistan, and let him wipe them out with a suicide bomb.  Seven CIA operatives died, including the base chief. This should give us a grim clue as to the accuracy of the CIA’s insights into what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan, or into the real effects of their 24/7 robotic assassination program.

But there’s a deeper, more dangerous level of deception in Washington’s widening war in the region: self-deception.  The CIA drone program, which the Agency’s Director Leon Panetta has called “the only game in town” when it comes to dismantling al-Qaeda, is just symptomatic of such self-deception.  While the CIA and the U.S. military have been expending enormous effort studying the Afghan and Pakistani situations and consulting experts, and while the White House has conducted an extensive series of seminars-cum-policy-debates on both countries, you can count on one thing: none of them have spent significant time studying or thinking about us.

As a result, the seeming cleanliness and effectiveness of the drone-war solution undoubtedly only reinforces a sense in Washington that the world’s last great military power can still control this war -- that it can organize, order, prod, wheedle, and bribe both the Afghans and Pakistanis into doing what’s best, and if that doesn’t work, simply continue raining down the missiles and bombs.  Beware Washington’s deep-seated belief that it controls events; that it is, however precariously, in the saddle; that, as Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal recently put it, there is a “corner” to “turn” out there, even if we haven’t quite turned it yet.

In fact, Washington is not in the saddle and that corner, if there, if turned, will have its own unpleasant surprises.  Washington is, in this sense, as oblivious as those CIA operatives were as they waited for “their” Jordanian agent to give them supposedly vital information on the al-Qaeda leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas.  Like their drones, the Americans in charge of this war are desperately far from the ground, and they don’t even seem to know it.  It’s this that makes the analogy drawn by TomDispatch regular and author of Halliburton’s Army, Pratap Chatterjee, so unnerving.  It’s time for Washington to examine not what we know about them, but what we don’t know about ourselves.  Tom Engelhardt

Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?
By Pratap Chatterjee

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war.  No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office.  They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting daily.

In remote villages where no reporters dared to go, far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."

The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast," and, while it may sound like the CIA’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact.  The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids.  Later ones were named "Lunch," "Snack," and "Supper," and they went under the collective label "Menu." They were authorized by President Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon," a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.

Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Return to the Killing Fields

In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative -- and perhaps more ominous -- analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent.  To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries.”

Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way.  In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group, little-known communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge.  (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who have settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.)  They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk -- until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began.  As these intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a U.S.-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.

You know the grim end of that old story.

Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snuol, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after they took power in 1975.

Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living by himself in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.

All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of U.S. troops the following year. "We thought the Americans had come to help us," said Choenung Klou. "But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women."

He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. "They would stay at people's houses, take our hammocks and food. We didn't like them and we were afraid of them."

Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.

"If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion," Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. "If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor."

Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.

Unraveling Pakistan

Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large in my mind.  Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.

In the Afghan capital, Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L'Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene's "quiet American," these "consultants" describe a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.

At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilot-less drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan.  They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.

In 2009, on the orders of President Obama, the U.S. unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than President Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in number and intensity.  By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if, this time around, no one is using the code phrase, "the ball game is over," Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be somewhere just over the horizon.

As in the 1960s in Cambodia, these strikes are, in actuality, having a devastating, destabilizing effect in Pakistan, not just on the targeted communities, but on public consciousness throughout the region. An article in the January 23rd New York Times indicated that the fury over these attacks has even spread into Pakistan's military establishment which, in a manner similar to Sihanouk in the 1960s, knows its limits in its tribal borderlands and is publicly uneasy about U.S. air strikes which undermine the country’s sovereignty. "Are you with us or against us?" the newspaper quoted a senior Pakistani military officer demanding of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he spoke last month at Pakistan's National Defense University.

Even pro-American Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has spoken out publicly against drone strikes.  Of one such attack, he recently told reporters, "We strongly condemn this attack and the government will raise this issue at [the] diplomatic level."

Despite the public displays of outrage, however, the American strikes have undoubtedly been tacitly approved at the highest levels of the Pakistani government because of that country’s inability to control militants in its tribal borderlands.  Similarly, Sihanouk finally looked the other way after the U.S. provided secret papers, code-named Vesuvius, as proof that the Vietnamese were operating from his country.

While most Democratic and Republican hawks have praised the growing drone war in the skies over Pakistan, some experts in the U.S. are starting to express worries about them (even if they don’t have the Cambodian analogy in mind). For example, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, says that an expansion of the drone strikes "might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan."

Indeed, even General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27, 2009: "Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan… especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties." Quoting local polls, he wrote: "35 percent [of Pakistanis] say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time."

The Pakistani Army has, in fact, launched several significant operations against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and in South Waziristan, just as Sihanouk initially ordered the Cambodian military to attack the Khmer Rouge and suppress peasant rebellions in Battambang Province. Again like Sihanouk in the late 1960s, however, the Pakistanis have balked at more comprehensive assaults on the Taliban, and especially on the Afghan Taliban using the border areas as “sanctuaries.”

The New Jihadists

What happens next is the $64 million question. Most Pakistani experts dismiss any suggestion that the Taliban has widespread support in their country, but it must be remembered that the Khmer Rouge was a fringe group with no more than 4,000 fighters at the time that Operation Breakfast began.

And if Cambodia's history is any guide to the future, the drone strikes do not have to create a groundswell for revolution. They only have to begin to destabilize Pakistan as would, for instance, the threatened spread of such strikes into the already unsettled province of Baluchistan, or any future American ground incursions into the country. A few charismatic intellectuals like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot always have the possibility of taking it from there, rallying angry and unemployed youth to create an infrastructure for disruptive change.

Despite often repeated claims by both the Bush and Obama administrations that the drone raids are smashing al-Qaeda's intellectual leadership, more and more educated and disenchanted young men from around the world seem to be rallying to the fundamentalist cause.

Some have struck directly at American targets like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian double agent and suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives at a military base in Khost, southern Afghanistan, five days later.

Some have even been U.S.-born, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the 38-year-old Islamic preacher from New Mexico who has moved to Yemen; Adam Pearlman, a 32-year-old Southern Californian and al-Qaeda spokesman now known as "Azzam the American,"who reportedly lives somewhere in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions; and Omar Hammami, the 25-year-old Syrian-American from Alabama believed to be an al-Shabaab leader in Somalia.

Like the Khmer Rouge before them, these new jihadists display no remorse for killing innocent civilians. "One of the sad truths I have come to see is that for this kind of mass violence, you don't need monsters," says Craig Etcheson, author of After the Killing Fields and founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Ordinary people will do just fine. This thing lives in all of us."

Even King Sihanouk, who had once ordered raids against the Khmer Rouge, eventually agreed to support them after he had been overthrown in a coup and was living in exile in China. Could the same thing happen to Pakistani politicians if they fall from grace and U.S. backing?

What threw Sihanouk's fragile government into serious disarray -- other than his own eccentricity and self-absorption -- was the devastating spillover of Nixon's war in Vietnam into Cambodia’s border regions. It finally brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

Pakistan 2010, with its enormous modern military and industrialized base, is hardly impoverished Cambodia 1969.  Nonetheless, in that now ancient history lies both a potential analogy and a cautionary tale.  Beware secret air wars that promise success and yet wreak havoc in lands that are not even enemy nations.

When his war plans were questioned, Nixon pressed ahead, despite a growing public distaste for his war. A similar dynamic seems to be underway today.  In 1970, after Operation Breakfast was revealed by the New York Times, Nixon told his top military and national security aides: "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp."

Had he refrained first from launching Operation Breakfast and then from supping on the whole “menu,” some historians like Etcheson believe a genocide would have been averted. It would be a sad day if the drone strikes, along with the endless war that the Obama administration has inherited and that is now spilling over ever more devastatingly into Pakistan, were to create a new class of fundamentalists who actually had the capacity to seize power.




Copyright 2010 Pratap Chatterjee

 


Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War (Nation Books, 2009).

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

© 2010 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145576/

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9,000 Blackwater personnel in Islamabad: Fazl

http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%5C02%5C08%5Cstory_8-2-2010_pg7_22

LAHORE: Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Fazlur Rehman alleged on Sunday that as many as 9,000 personnel of the US-based security firm Blackwater are present in Islamabad, a private TV channel reported on Sunday. According to the channel, Fazl alleged that Blackwater was responsible for carrying out Taliban-like terrorist activities in Pakistan. He said there were more Blackwater personnel present in the federal capital than policemen, where the Capital City Police only had 7,000 policemen on its payroll. Earlier, JI deputy chief Sirajul Haq and NWFP Senior Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour also pointed towards the presence of the security firm’s personnel in Pakistan. In a statement made before the National Assembly Standing Committee on Interior on November 21 2009, Interior Minister Rehman Malik had claimed that he would resign if it was proven that the Blackwater was operating in Pakistan.

daily times monitor

[PEOA]

your post is a lifeline to the what is going on.....keep filling in the gaps......

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 Feb 9th 2010
 
 
 Pakistan's military sets Afghan terms

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - With the United States striving hard to establish dialogue with the Taliban, Asia Times Online sources privy to the Pakistan military establishment reveal that the army has clearly spelled out that Washington must make sure any Indian involvement does not go beyond development work in Afghanistan and that Delhi plays no part in any overall strategy concerning Afghanistan.

The United States has said that it wants to reach out to second- and third-tier Taliban and, in doing so, exert pressure on the top Taliban leaders to seek reconciliation. Instead, Pakistan has emphasized that it is necessary to talk to Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his appointed representatives.

At the same time, Pakistan has rejected US proposals for the


   

balkanization of Afghanistan, by which it was proposed to appoint an autonomous controlling authority for southeastern and southwestern Afghanistan - the Pashtun-majority areas.

The Pakistani military has also given assurances that US officials will be granted visas, but, unlike previously, they will not be allowed visas on arrival. Further, for the first time, Pakistan has clearly refused to mount operations against the Sirajuddin Haqqani network, as well as that of his ally, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, as they are not hostile towards Pakistan.

At this important juncture of the American-led war in Afghanistan, Washington desperately needs Pakistan's support, as it did after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US to stage the invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan's demands were relayed in recent encounters with US officials by, among others, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, General Tariq Majid; the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani; and the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha. The US officials included visiting Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. Majid also set out Pakistan's position at a recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting in Brussels.

A straight-forward encounter
In the years following the invasion on Afghanistan in October 2001, Pakistan was frequently accused of duplicity in the US-led "war on terror", even though it provided extensive logistical support. This included bases for the US Air Force to carry out strikes in landlocked Afghanistan, transit routes for NATO supplies (now flowing freely again), collaboration with US intelligence agencies to arrest top al-Qaeda members, and military operations in the Pakistani tribal areas against pro-Taliban militants.

Yet the Americans still believed that Pakistan's support was half-hearted and that it tacitly supported the Taliban. One reason for this belief was Pakistan's opposition in principle from the beginning to the war on the Taliban. Former president Pervez Musharraf consistently urged the Americans to engage the Taliban in a political process.

In the early days of the conflict, the Americans were not interested in any form of reconciliation with the Taliban as the regime had been toppled in a matter of months and its leaders were holed up in the mountains straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan: Washington had no reason to talk to such losers.

Nine years on, the situation has changed dramatically. The American war machine is under siege and huge swathes of Afghanistan are either under direct Taliban control or heavily influenced by the militants.

The US and its allies are still game for a fight, though. In a matter of days, thousands of coalition and Afghan troops are expected to try to take back Marjah in Helmand province in one of the biggest offensives of the war. It will be the first major operation since US President Barack Obama announced last year that 30,000 additional troops would be sent to Afghanistan. (Pakistan has made its opposition to this surge clear to the US.)

However, it is widely acknowledged that the big push is aimed primarily at softening up the Taliban, rather than defeating them in the field, and that talks remain the only viable path to peace.

Just as the US has over the years changed its thinking on Afghanistan, given the realities on the ground, it has revised its opinion on Pakistan.

About two years ago, the administration of George W Bush became convinced that a coalition government comprising secular and liberal political parties would handle the "war on terror" more effectively than Pakistan's security apparatus, such as that ruled over by Musharraf, a general.

However, although such a secular government emerged after Musharraf stepped down in August 2008, it has not lived up to expectations. It has not won credibility among the masses due to economic mismanagement, the mishandling of a judicial crisis and the failure to adopt a straightforward policy against militancy.

By the end of 2009, the coalition government of President Asif Ali Zardari was riven with political in-fighting and there were large ethnic riots in the port city of Karachi, mainly between two pro-American political parties.

It was evident that political players were in no position to handle the sensitive issues relating to fighting the "war on terror", and in a short time all decision-making concerning security issues passed on to the military. Although militants have not been conclusively defeated in Pakistan, the military has waged several big operations in the tribal areas.

From the US perspective, more important is the rapport that has been established between US and Pakistan military leaders; even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated on a visit to Pakistan that the White House favored dealing directly with the military establishment on issues concerning the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Kiani has explained to the US that while the Pakistani army - and Kiani himself - are essentially strategically India-centric, they will work in partnership with the Americans to help the US win the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan sees the next phase of this as the eradication of terrorism and militancy from the region and the incorporation of the majority Pashtun population of Afghanistan, which supports Taliban, fully into the political process.

A friendship of two armies
Kiani is scheduled to retire in November, while ISI chief Pasha is due to leave office in March. Zardari's government is preparing to promote officers with whom it could work, that is, who would listen the government.

The president of the National Defense University, Lieutenant General Muhammad Yousuf, and the Corps Commander Gujranwala, Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, are the most-discussed candidates in President House for the position of chief of army staff.

Zardari has also indicated his intention to revive the position of national security advisor to be filled by a retired four-star general to control the ISI.

The government is making all efforts to take Washington into its trust, but according to insiders it is having little success. On the other hand, the military establishment is heavily engaged in day-to-day business with the Americans to tackle the military and political issues involved in finding a solution to the Afghan insurgency. If Pakistan's political government tries to bypass the military, it might face serious embarrassment.

Washington apparently supports the idea of extending Pasha's term for another year - Kiani would take that decision, whether or not Zardari approved. As for Kiani, he has been heard to say that his position "is not an issue at the moment".

Pakistan has once again emerged as vitally important to the US in dealing with Afghanistan, from securing NATO's supply lines to cutting off the supplies of the Taliban and getting them to the negotiating table. Washington is apparently ready to sacrifice its political allies in Pakistan and work directly with the military to achieve these goals.

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

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and 
 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB09Df03.html

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South Asia
Feb 9, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB09Df04.html 
 
India-Pakistan thaw key to Afghan peace


By Siddharth Srivastava

NEW DELHI - India has proposed the first high-level bilateral talks with Pakistan since their peace process broke down following the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008.

New Delhi and Islamabad are still working on an agenda for meetings expected in late February, but they are likely to address long-stalled issues such as the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir, joint anti-terror efforts and shared water resources.

The offer of talks comes despite Islamabad not meeting New Delhi's demands after the Mumbai attack that Pakistan convict those behind the November 26, 2008, atrocity, which left up to


   

173 dead, and crack down on any terrorism cells and infrastructure in Pakistan aimed against India.

Delhi had repeatedly warned Islamabad that another major militant strike in India would provoke a strong reaction, since the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group responsible for the Mumbai attack planned it on Pakistan soil.

The talks were proposed last Friday following a meeting between Pakistan's High Commissioner to India, Shahid Malik, and Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao. Pakistan has called for a broader "composite dialogue", which also means inclusion of Kashmir as one of the main topics of discussion.

Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna has said the first step towards engaging with Pakistan will be a high-profile visit by Home Minister P Chidambaram, the first by an Indian minister since the November '08 attack, to Islamabad later this month.

"Chidambaram will get a chance to have very useful exchanges with his counterparts and other leaders in Pakistan,'' Krishna said. In a sign of India's intentions to bring about a thaw in relations, he added that "India should be quite satisfied with Pakistan taking a few steps to investigate the Mumbai attack".

Chidambaram was appointed home minister in the wake of the strikes, and he has since headed internal efforts to put in place a better intelligence and security structure.

America has responded positively to the Indian proposal. "This is a welcome move,'' said Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs PJ Crowley. "We are supportive of dialogue among India, Pakistan and Afghanistan as a key component of moving ahead and achieving a stable region."

Washington's focus has shifted to the western frontiers of Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are thought to have their biggest base, and the US is keen for simmering India-Pakistan relations to cool.

This would enable a redeployment of the massive Pakistani troop presence on its eastern borders with India to the Afghan front, possibly paving the way for a reduced American military presence in Afghanistan. However, it is unclear if the proposed India-Pakistan talks have come at the prodding of Washington.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said in a recent interview that the peace process should be resumed and not be held hostage to fallout from the Mumbai attack. Islamabad has indicated that is it amenable to using Indian evidence against the plotters of the attack, and has accepted that the small boats used were launched from Karachi.

There are larger geopolitical factors in play, particularly America's involvement in Afghanistan.

India's offer of talks can be seen in the context of global powers endorsing in London last month a US-backed Afghan plan to seek reconciliation with the Taliban. Pakistan is expected to play a big role in this, especially in persuading the fundamentalist group to come to the negotiating table.

Pakistan will continue to remain a crucial cog in America's "war on terror'' and be a continued recipient of increased military aid. For now, Islamabad has also managed to keep out the influence of India in brokering any deal with the Taliban.

Delhi wants to have a say in Afghanistan, a role that Pakistan has kept for itself until now, with the backing of some Muslim majority nations.

While direct military involvement in Afghanistan remains unfeasible (for now at least) due to domestic concerns, India's civilian involvement is only expected to grow.

Indian involvement in Afghanistan opens trade opportunities with nations in the Middle East that are rich in natural resources. India imports the bulk of its gas from Qatar and has been looking at sourcing energy resources from Iran, though attempts via the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline have been stalled by American tensions with Tehran over its nuclear program.

India has also been looking at the prospects of an undersea pipeline from Qatar, which could loop through Iran at some future date. Indian firms have also mapped out big plans to invest in Iran's gas rich South Pars fields.

Given the security and transit issues that India has with Pakistan, particularly through volatile Balochistan province, Afghanistan could prove to be a transit point for India's energy sources as well as somewhere it can limit the influence of Islamabad.

Siddharth Srivastava is a journalist based in New Delhi. He can be reached at sidsri@yahoo.com.
 
 
 

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More Blackwater Contractors Than Cops In Pakistan's Capital

United Press International

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63097&hd=&size=1&l=e

February 9, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- There are more private security contractors from Xe, formerly Blackwater, operating in Islamabad than capital police, a religious leader said.

Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi political party in Pakistan, said there were as many as 9,000 Xe contractors working in Islamabad, compared with just 7,000 capital police, Pakistan's News International reports.

The Pakistani Taliban last week said attacks in the Lower Dir District of Pakistan's North-West Frontier province killed U.S. personnel, claiming the attack was an act of revenge against Xe contractors operating in the region.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, confirmed the deaths were U.S. military personnel but described the Taliban claims as propaganda.

Their deaths are the first known U.S. military fatalities in Pakistan.

Fazal blamed foreign contractors for instability in the country, saying they undermined an already weak democratic government. He equated Xe contractors with the insurgent Taliban.

Washington linked stability in Pakistan to the success of its counterinsurgency battle in neighboring Afghanistan, encouraging Islamabad to step up domestic security measures. Pakistan in October launched its own offensive in the volatile tribal regions near the Afghan border.

Fazal during a weekend meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said an immediate halt to military activity in the tribal areas would bring normalcy to the region.





 

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Published on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by GRITtv

Lifting the Veil on US Troops in Pakistan

by Laura Flanders

“The deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan.”  So began a Feb 4th piece by Jane Perlez in the New York Times [1].

But even all these days on, it’s been a very discreet unveiling.

Lest we forget, US servicepeople are not supposed to be dying in Pakistan.  It’s not Iraq, it’s not Afghanistan. There’s no agreement for combat troops to operate.  Until recently, U.S. officials have repeatedly officially denied having any combat troops  in place. This month’s killing exposed that lie  — so what were the US troops doing there?

What we’ve learned so far is the soldiers were part of what federal officials say is a small contingent of American soldiers who’ve been training Pakistan’s army for 18 months now.

As the Times puts it, “the trainings has been acknowledged only gingerly by both the Americans and the Pakistanis…..so as not to trespass onto Pakistani sensitivities about sovereignty and not to further inflame high anti-American sentiment.”

For a taste of that gingerly-acknowledging, read the Times story. In more than 1, 000 words Perlez quotes roughly a dozen sources, all but two of them US officials, or Pakistanis working implicitly or explicitly with the US embassy.  Of two non-official sources, one makes the obvious point:

The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,” Professor Hussain said.

It’s an obvious point because the Pakistani press and local activists have been making it loudly, n the press and in street protests for months now.  In the same week that Perlez’s piece appeared, the country’s English daily, The News [2], ran a long editorial on the rapid increase in US drone attacks, making the point that roughly 41 civilians have been killed for every alleged Al Qaeda or Taliban target.

The Taliban’s rewarding its fighters [3] with new cars when they bring down US drones — “The shooting down of the drone has lifted the morale of our fighters. It’s a huge success for the poorly armed Taliban against a powerful enemy,” remarked a senior Taliban commander, at the car-award ceremony.

Among the Pakistani public, surveys constantly show that Pakistanis consider the US a greater threat than the Taliban, despite 3,021 Pakistani deaths in terrorist attacks last year. If the drones are controversial, the presence of US soldiers on Pakistani soil is far more so.

If the US war is quietly shifting, it’s not quiet inside Pakistan. People are kicking up a stink. Yet Perlez’s piece, which is bylined Islamabad, reads more like an Embassy hand-out than a Pulitzer Prize-winner’s research. Times readers get only the barest whiff of local reaction, and that may be the most dangerous strike yet.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org [4] and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv [5] or GRITlaura [6] on Twitter.com.


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

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/09-2

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South Asia
Feb 10, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB10Df05.html 
 
India papers over cracks with Pakistan

By Chietigj Bajpaee

Last week's offer of renewed talks between India and Pakistan remains mere rhetoric in the absence of any real progress on the core issues plaguing the bilateral relationship and with the reluctance of either side to seek a new approach to address areas of contention.

The offer of dialogue notably followed the United States government's decision to issue a fresh travel alert for India on January 30, warning of possible terrorist attacks similar to the coordinated attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. It also comes amid a period of renewed militant infiltration across the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Indian and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. These developments reaffirm the region's precarious security environment and the possibility of renewed conflict despite the recent wave of optimism generated by the offer of dialogue.

Negative rhetoric fuels tense reality
A lack of progress on the "composite dialogue" peace process between India and Pakistan has created a prolonged period of mistrust between both states. Despite several high-profile meetings between the Indian and Pakistani leadership over the last year, there has been a lack of substantive progress aside from a few symbolic confidence-building measures.

The much-touted meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in July, which was preceded by a meeting between Manmohan and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, has created further bitterness amid allegations of appeasement on both sides rather than reviving bilateral relations.

While Pakistan has filed charges against seven people in connection with the Mumbai attacks, perceptions persist in India that Pakistan has pursued a half-hearted effort in pursuing the perpetrators of the attacks. Several militants including Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, leader of Jammut ud-Dawa, a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group that was held responsible for the attack, remain at large.

This climate of mistrust has been exasperated by both countries' fundamentally divergent positions on Afghanistan, with Pakistan favoring rapprochement with the Taliban, India opposing such an initiative, while the international community is increasingly leaning toward Pakistan's position in the aftermath of the London conference last month.

Added to this are several recent symbolic actions and statements that have fueled a growing sense of acrimony between both states. A speech by Indian army chief Deepak Kapoor at a training command seminar in December about preparing the military for fighting a two-front war with China and Pakistan has renewed perceptions in Islamabad about India's belligerent intentions.

United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' statement in January during a visit to India that "Indian patience would be limited were there to be further attacks" suggested that the US would be unable to restrain India in the event of another Mumbai-style terrorist attack. More likely, this was an attempt by the US to renew pressure on both states to restart their process of reconciliation.

Beyond the political and military level, relations have also deteriorated at the people-to-people level. This was evidenced most recently when no Pakistani players were picked during the Indian Premier League (IPL) auction for the Twenty20 cricket tournament in March. While the teams claim that visa and security concerns deterred them from bidding for the Pakistani players, it has been interpreted as an insult by some in Pakistan.

Deficiencies remain in security infrastructure
Added to the fragile state of bilateral relations is the precarious security environment on both sides of the border. Despite the absence of a major terrorist attack in India in over a year since the Mumbai attacks and reports that several high-profile plots have been foiled, the growing sophistication of militant tactics, their growing transnational capabilities, combined with continued deficiencies in India's security infrastructure make another terrorist attack on India over the next year a likely possibility.

A sense of alert fatigue has developed in India amid the surge in travel alerts and security advisories in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Credible threats, such as the alleged plot to hijack an Indian airliner in December, which prompted stepped-up security across airports in the region, have been accompanied by more implausible threats such as reports that militants are attempting to acquire gliders to fly across the border.
The Mumbai police have noted that they have received almost 600 alerts in the year since the November 2008 attacks, demonstrating the extent to which the civilian population and security and civilian leaderships remain on edge. The growing transnational capabilities of Pakistan-based terrorist groups such as the LeT has increased this sense of vulnerability (and paranoia) in India. This was most visibly demonstrated with the arrest of David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Rana in the United States and Canada, respectively in October and their alleged links to LeT and the Mumbai attacks.

The government claims that it has averted at least a dozen major terrorist attacks since the Mumbai one. A national counter-terrorism center and national-intelligence database are to be established this year following the establishment of the National Investigation Agency last year in order to improve intelligence coordination and collection. However, these initiatives are likely to be slow-moving in overcoming well-entrenched levels of inter-agency rivalry among India's intelligence agencies.

Kashmir: Return to square one?
At the same time, Jammu and Kashmir, which has been the traditional focal point of bilateral tensions, faces a renewed deterioration in its security climate. Despite a significant reduction in terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir in recent years, continued grievances by the local population combined with growing levels of militant infiltration across the LoC set the stage for renewed hostilities in the disputed territory.

A surge in militant infiltration has led to speculation that militants are returning to their traditional sanctuaries in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PAK) amid ongoing pressure from Pakistani and US military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Although there has been a decline in the number of militant attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK) in recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of militant infiltration attempts with 110 people crossing the LoC in the first 11 months of 2009, up from 57 in 2008.

According to Indian army chief Kapoor, some 700 militants are waiting to infiltrate across the LoC into IAK. Notably, the attack by two militants in the Lal Chowk district of Srinagar in January, which was attributed to Pakistan-based terrorist outfits, marked the first major attack in the state capital in two years.

Aside from a surge in militant infiltration across the LoC into IAK, there has also been a surge in terrorist attacks in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PAK), which has traditionally avoided instabilities despite being a sanctuary for militant groups. PAK has suffered four suicide bomb attacks since June, the latest being outside a Pakistani army barracks in Tarakhal in January, which followed several attacks in the state capital Muzaffarabad. The region has also experienced a surge in sectarian violence with attacks on the Shi'ite Muslim community, leading to concerns over the growth of Islamic extremist ideology in the region.

The Indian government for its part has attempted to relax its heavy-handed security presence in the region. In December, Defense Minister A K Antony announced the withdrawal of two army divisions comprising 30,000 Indian troops from the state.

Nonetheless, local grievances continue to act as a catalyst for instabilities; in 2008 a dispute over the use of land for an annual Hindu pilgrimage (Amaranth Yatra) sparked widespread unrest. In 2009, the alleged rape and murder of two women in the town of Shopian in May sparked violent demonstrations, which were revived in December when India's Central Bureau of Investigation ruled that they had drowned rather than been murdered. More recently, a curfew was imposed in Srinagar in February after two teenagers were killed by security forces, which set off protests in the city.

The state government alleges that the Indian military continues to occupy 50,000 hectares of land in the state while the continued enforcement of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in the state is a source of grievance to the local population.

Political motives drive and deter reconciliation
The silver lining in the current climate may be a narrow window of opportunity created by a relatively stable government in India, which may accelerate momentum for renewed dialogue. Indian policymakers have little appetite for renewed conflict with Pakistan.

With the Indian National Congress (Congress)-led United Progressive Alliance government holding a strengthened mandate and facing a weakened opposition following its re-election last May, there is little political pressure on the government to appease allegations of being "soft on security". However, this window of stability is unlikely to last as assembly elections in several high-profile states in 2011-12 could shift the balance of power and revive the opposition.

At the same time, there is a growing recognition within India's policymaking elite that instability within Pakistan and conflict with Pakistan is detrimental to India's security. This was evidenced following the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai when speculation of India taking retaliatory action against Pakistan prompted the late former leader of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan - TTP), Baitullah Mehsud, to pledge to put aside differences with the Pakistani government in order to fight against India.

There is recognition in India that conflict with Pakistan, which would be accompanied by travel advisories and the evacuation of foreigners from India, is also not conducive to the Indian government's goals of reviving the economy in the aftermath of the global economic downturn. The country is still reeling from the fallout of having several high-profile events, such as the Indian Premier League and Twenty20 relocated (in the case of the former) and delayed (in the case of the latter). With the country holding several high-profile events in 2010, notably the World Cup hockey tournament in February and Commonwealth Games in October, the government will be deterred from taking any belligerent action against Pakistan.

However, a fluid political environment in Pakistan and reluctance by elements of the Pakistani security forces to target militant sanctuaries within the country and seek a rapprochement with India will act as a continued deterrent to reconciliation. In contrast to the strengthened mandate of the Congress-led government in India, Pakistan faces the opposite scenario with Zardari facing eroding legitimacy.

With the National Reconciliation Order having lapsed last December, the stage is now set for corruption charges to be reopened against Zardari and several members of his Pakistan People's Party-led government. This has deterred progress in improving bilateral relations with the weak civilian leadership in Pakistan conscious that any progress made in improving relations with India could be interpreted as appeasement or stepping on the toes of the military, which has traditionally dominated foreign and security policies. Renewing tensions with India may in fact offer a means for the government to revive flagging support.

At the same time, the terms of several key security officials are due to end this year, including the director general of the Inter-Service Intelligence, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha (in March), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Tariq Majeed (in October) and army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani (in November). Conflict with India could offer a means for these officials to extend their terms and allow the military to re-exert its influence over the policymaking arena if the civilian government is seen to be taking actions that are detrimental to its interests.

Finally, the Pakistani military faces growing international pressure to step up operations in the other tribal agencies of the FATA in the aftermath of its offensive in South Waziristan in October. The authorities remain reluctant to do so, given an unwillingness to target "pro-Pakistani" militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, Hezb-i-Islami (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) and Gul Bahadur and Mullah Nazir factions of the TTP. This contrasts with its relative willingness to target "anti-Pakistani" militant groups such as the Hakimullah Mehsud faction of the TTP based in South Waziristan.

Adding to this are concerns that the surge in the US military presence in Afghanistan could result in an increase in cross-border military operations into Pakistan, notably in southern Balochistan province, which is believed to be the sanctuary of the Afghan Taliban leadership. Renewed hostilities with India would offer a means to delay or deter any expansion of military operations against militant sanctuaries in Pakistan.

The fact that the Pakistani military continues to maintain the majority of its resources on its eastern border with India rather than against militant sanctuaries along the western border with Afghanistan is evidence of its continued preoccupation with India rather than the threat of Islamic extremism.

Chietigj Bajpaee is a South Asia analyst at Control Risks, a London-based political and security consultancy. He has previously worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and IHS Global Insight. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at cbajpaee@hotmail.com.

 
 
 

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South Asia
Feb 10, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB10Df02.html 
 
Islamabad can't give an inch

By Zahid U Kramet

LAHORE - They have ruffled feathers, but they have since regained some lost ground in their mission to bring stability to South Asia. The United States' special envoy to the Af-Pak region, Richard Holbrooke, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have nudged arch-rivals Pakistan and India back to the negotiating table after the November 11, 2008, Mumbai attacks had seen them on the verge of war.

Holbrooke had earlier caused a stir. After discussions with Indian External Minister S K Krishna in India he was quoted by attendant journalists as having announced, "India is a tremendously important participant in the search for peace, not only in South Asia, but throughout the vast region that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pacific."

This was followed by Krishna saying, "Indians feel worried that the argument is gaining ground in Washington at all levels that New Delhi needs to be more flexible ... towards Pakistan ... on its eastern borders." The Holbrooke brief was seen in Pakistan not as bending India towards peace, but as an acknowledgement of its military muscle.

The waters having been muddied, it took concerted efforts on the part of Gates and Holbrooke to reassure Pakistan that this had not been the aim. It was not until Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell announced that the US had drawn the line at India training Afghan forces that Pakistan was somewhat appeased.

Suspicions, however, remained, compelling the White House to table an enhanced US$3.1 billion budget proposal for Pakistan to calm the waters, with $1.9 billion of this marked as civilian aid and $1.2 billion marked as military assistance. To bring Pakistan deeper into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) embrace, the US offered to train Pakistani military officers in its schools.

Just days earlier, at a NATO commanders' meeting in Brussels on the eve of the London conference, both Pakistan's chief of army staff Ashfaq Parvez Kiani and pertinently Russia's chief of staff Nicolai Markov had endorsed NATO's new war plans to defeat the Taliban. Both reportedly said, "We have a greater interest than you that you succeed."

Russia's concurrence particularly would have made an impression on India as they have long stood as "non-aligned" allies. It therefore came as little surprise to see India bend towards "talking with the Taliban", though it said the Taliban were functioning as Pakistan proxies to launch terrorist acts on India.

Following the London conference, however, India's external minister took the first opportunity to announce to the press, "The international community has come out with the proposition to bring into the political mainstream those [Taliban] willing to function within the Afghan system ... We are willing to give it a try." But discomfort was visible.

"We consider them to be terrorists who have close links with al-Qaeda ... We are next door and our experiences make it difficult for us to differentiate between good or bad Taliban," Krishna said, clearly pointing to Pakistan in adding that Afghanistan's stability was dependent on its neighbors' "support, sustenance and sanctuaries" for terrorists.

Meanwhile, it had dawned on Washington that Pakistan's charges of Indian complicity in Af-Pak affairs were not all ill-founded - that they must not be summarily dismissed. At congressional hearings both Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General David Petraeus, head of Central Command, advised Washington to accommodate Pakistan's perspectives on Afghanistan.

General Stanley McChrystal, who heads the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, went further. In his report to the White House he said that "Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan" and with the present government in Afghanistan perceived in Islamabad as being pro-Indian, this would "exacerbate regional tensions".

Pakistan's normally media-shy commanding general then clearly spelt out Pakistan's position to the press in his country. "We want strategic depth ... A peaceful and friendly Afghanistan can provide Pakistan strategic depth ... If we get more involved with the ANA [Afghan National Army] there's more interaction and better understanding."

Kiani reaffirmed that 140,000 Pakistani troops were fighting the militancy in Pakistan's tribal areas, where 2,273 officers and men of Pakistan's armed forces have been killed. He denied Pakistan's reluctance to fight the Taliban in North Waziristan (seen as Pakistan's allies), bearing instead on the "hold-and-build" paradigm before opening another front.

Washington appeared to have understood Pakistan's predicament and taken it on itself and its NATO allies to up the ante against the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Together they are set to launch the biggest-ever offensive in Afghanistan with a strike force of 15,000. The media are projecting the assault as the US's largest since the Vietnam war.

The Taliban were presented with an option. NATO helicopters dropped leaflets warning villagers of the impending assault. Droves of people began to evacuate the area. But the 2,000 plus Taliban are deeply embedded and steeled to resist. Reports filed quote locals as saying, "The Taliban will not leave ... They are bringing in people and weapons."

McChrystal responded, "If they want to fight, then obviously that will have to have an outcome. But if they don't want to fight [and elect to integrate into the government] that's fine too." The hope is that the Taliban will chose to integrate rather than fight. However, should the battle ensue, its result will have a direct bearing on the Pakistan-India talks.

Pakistan's stated position is that India must delink the talks from terrorism as Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi reiterated the view that Pakistan's strategic policies would remain India-centric as long as Kashmir and a water dispute remained unresolved. India has adopted a polar position.

Pakistan stands to lose all popular support if it concedes to Indian perspectives without gaining any concessions. Its greatest fear is that if the militants fall to the Pakistan army's assault in North Waziristan, they will infiltrate larger cities and play the type of havoc witnessed recently with the bombings in the southern port city of Karachi - or a repeat of the Mumbai attack in India.

If the Pakistan-India talks are to arrive at even an interim understanding, it stands to reason that both the terrorist and the Kashmir issues must be simultaneously addressed. The two are inter-related. But if hardened positions persist, the talks will be another exercise in futility - with al-Qaeda (read anti-state elements) gaining on both fronts.

Zahid U Kramet, a Lahore-based political analyst specializing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, is the founder of the research and analysis website the Asia Despatch.

 
 
 

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South Asia
Feb 10, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB10Df03.html 
 
Operation Breakfast redux

By Pratap Chatterjee

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids.

The computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy's central headquarters, whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting.

Far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, and no reporters dared to go, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky over remote villages had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."

The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast", and while it may sound like the Central Intelligence Agency's present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn't. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named "Lunch", "Snack" and "Supper" and they went under the collective label "Menu". They were authorized by president Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon", a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.

Like President Barack Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington's bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity. "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices," Nixon said.

Return to the Killing Fields
In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to "the Vietnam analogy", comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that US military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative - and perhaps more ominous - analogy today might be between the CIA's escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Nixon's secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a "neutralist" king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found "sanctuaries".

Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way. In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group of communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk - until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As the raids intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a US-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.

The grim end of that old story is well known.

Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snoul, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after seizing power in 1975.

Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living alone in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.

All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of US troops the following year. "We thought the Americans had come to help us," said Choenung Klou. "But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women."

He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. "They would stay at people's houses, take our hammocks and food," he said. "We didn't like them and we were afraid of them."

Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.

"If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion," Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. "If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor."

Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the US Embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.

Unraveling Pakistan
Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large. Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.

In the Afghan capital Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L'Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene's quiet American, these "consultants" described a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.

At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilotless drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan. They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.

In 2009, on the orders of Obama, the US unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than president George W Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in intensity. By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if this time around no one is using the code phrase "the ball game is over", Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be just over the horizon.
 
As in the 1960s in Cambodia, these strikes are having a devastating, destabilizing effect, not just on the targeted communities in Pakistan, but on public consciousness throughout the region. An article in the January 23 New York Times indicated that the fury over these attacks has even spread into Pakistan's military establishment which, in a manner similar to Sihanouk in the 1960s, knows its limits in its tribal borderlands and is publicly uneasy about US air strikes which undermine the country's sovereignty. "Are you with us or against us?" the newspaper quoted a senior Pakistani military officer demanding of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he spoke last month at Pakistan's National Defense University.

Even pro-American Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has spoken publicly against drone strikes. Of one such attack, he recently told reporters, "We strongly condemn this attack and the government will raise this issue at [the] diplomatic level."

Despite the displays of outrage, however, the American strikes have undoubtedly been tacitly approved at the highest levels of the Pakistani government that is unable to control militants in its tribal borderlands. Similarly, Sihanouk finally looked the other way after the US provided secret papers, code-named Vesuvius, as proof that the Vietnamese were operating from his country.

While most Democratic and Republican hawks have praised the growing drone war in the skies over Pakistan, some US experts are starting to express worries (even if they don't have Cambodian history in mind). John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, says that an expansion of the drone strikes "might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan".

Indeed, even General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27, 2009: "Anti-US sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan ... especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties." Quoting local polls, he wrote: "35% [of Pakistanis] say they do not support US strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan military ahead of time."

The Pakistani army has launched several significant operations against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and in South Waziristan, just as Sihanouk initially ordered the Cambodian military to attack the Khmer Rouge and suppress peasant rebellions in Battambang province. Again, like Sihanouk in the late 1960s, the Pakistanis have balked at more comprehensive assaults on the Taliban, and especially on the Afghan Taliban using the border areas as "sanctuaries".

The new jihadis
What happens next is the $64 million question. While most Pakistani experts dismiss any suggestion that the Taliban have widespread support in their country, it is wise to remember that the Khmer Rouge was a fringe group with no more than 4,000 fighters at the time that Operation Breakfast began.

And if Cambodia's history is any guide, the drone strikes do not have to create a groundswell for revolution. They only have to begin to destabilize Pakistan. The threatened spread of such strikes into the already unsettled province of Balochistan, or any future American ground incursions into the country may have that effect. A few charismatic intellectuals like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot always have the possibility of taking it from there, rallying angry and unemployed youth to create an infrastructure for disruptive change.

Despite often repeated claims by both the Bush and Obama administrations that the drone raids are smashing al-Qaeda's intellectual leadership, more and more educated and disenchanted young men from around the world seem to be rallying to the fundamentalist cause.

Some have struck directly at American targets, like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and Dr Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian double agent and suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives at a military base in Khost, southern Afghanistan, five days later.

Some have even been US-born: like Anwar al-Awlaki, the 38-year-old Islamic preacher from New Mexico who moved to Yemen; Adam Pearlman, a 32-year-old southern Californian and al-Qaeda spokesman known as "Azzam the American" who reportedly lives in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions; and Omar Hammami, the 25-year-old Syrian-American from Alabama believed to be an al-Shabaab leader in Somalia.

Like the Khmer Rouge before them, these new jihadis display no remorse for killing innocent civilians. "One of the sad truths I have come to see is that for this kind of mass violence, you don't need monsters," says Craig Etcheson, author of After the Killing Fields and founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Ordinary people will do just fine. This thing lives in all of us."

Even King Sihanouk, who had once ordered raids against the Khmer Rouge, eventually agreed to support them after he had been overthrown in a coup and was living in exile in China. Could the same thing happen to Pakistani politicians if they fall from grace and US backing?

What threw Sihanouk's fragile government into serious disarray - other than his own eccentricity and self-absorption - was the devastating spillover of Nixon's war in Vietnam into Cambodia's border regions. It finally brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

Pakistan 2010, with its enormous modern military and industrialized base, is hardly impoverished Cambodia 1969. Nonetheless, in that now ancient history lies both a potential analogy and a cautionary tale. Beware secret air raids that promise success and yet wreak havoc in lands that are not even enemy nations.

When his war plans were questioned, Nixon pressed ahead, despite a growing public distaste for his war. A similar dynamic seems to be underway today. In 1970, after Operation Breakfast was revealed by the New York Times, Nixon told his top military and national security aides: "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp."

Had he refrained first from launching Operation Breakfast and then from supping on the whole menu, some historians like Etcheson believe genocide would have been averted. It would be a sad day if the drone strikes, along with the endless war that the Obama administration has inherited and is now spilling over ever more devastatingly into Pakistan, were to create a new class of fundamentalists who actually had the capacity to seize power.

Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has written two books about the war on terror, Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009). For more information on Nixon's secret campaign, he recommends Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross. (Simon and Schuster, 1979)

(Copyright 2010 Pratap Chatterjee.)

 
 

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Suicide Bomb Attack on Pakistan Police Kills 13: Officials
 
 
11/02/2010 08:29:54 AM GMT   
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Suicide-Bomb-Attack-on-Pakistan-Police-Kills-13-O.html

 
A suicide bomber attacked police in Pakistan's tribal belt on the Afghan border Wednesday, killing 13 people, including seven policemen, officials said.

"The death toll has risen to 13. Seven are khasadar (tribal policemen) and we are trying to ascertain the identity of six others," Shafeerullah Wazir, the administration chief of Khyber, told AFP.

Wazirdand is a small town near Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar and on the edge of the tribal belt, which lies outside direct government control.

The suicide bomber struck hours after a Pakistani military helicopter crashed in Khyber while operating against militants, officials said.
 
The fate of the two people on board was not immediately clear. "It was a Cobra helicopter. It crashed during an operation against suspected militant hideouts in the area," Wazir told AFP by telephone.
 
"We are trying to get details about the cause of the accident and fate of the pilots," military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said.
¬
Source: AJP
 

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FBI officials accused of directing Pakistan 'torture'

By Syed Shoaib Hasan, BBC News

February 10, 2010
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m63147&hd=&size=1&l=e

Five US citizens held in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting attacks have alleged that US officials directed their torture to extract confessions.

The US embassy in Islamabad has dismissed the claims as "baseless".

The men, who are being held in the city of Sargodha, earlier stated in court that they had been tortured by the Pakistani authorities.

They deny claims they were plotting attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and had sought links with extremists.

The men, aged between 18 and 25, were arrested in Sargodha in November on suspicion of trying to contact al-Qaeda linked groups and plotting attacks against Pakistan and its allies.

Officials say the men were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. The men have denied having links to al-Qaeda and insist that they wanted to go to Afghanistan for charity work.

They face life imprisonment if put on trial and found guilty. A Pakistani court has barred their deportation to the US.

US 'pressure'

"The boys told me that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents were present and were directing their interrogations," Khalid Khawaja, a human rights activist handling the case told the BBC.

 
"I have a written statement which says the Americans were asking them to which militant organisation they belonged.

"Pakistanis were beating them up and Americans kept asking them questions.

"The agents demanded they confess that they had come here (to Sargodha) to attack the nearby nuclear plant."

Mr Khawaja said that the men had also made accusations of torture in the court where their case is being heard.

He said it was only because of US pressure that the men had been arrested.

"There is no real evidence against them," he said.

"I intend to file a petition in the next few days asking the court to dismiss all charges against them."



 

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Official: U.S. Military to Set Up New Training Centers Inside Pakistan

AP
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/11/official-military-set-new-training-centers-inside-pakistan/

Senior defense official says the U.S. military is planning to set up new training centers inside Pakistan.

   
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military is planning to set up new training centers inside Pakistan where American special operations trainers would work with Pakistani forces close to the Afghan border battle zone, a senior defense official said.

The new centers would supplement two already operating in Pakistan, and they would be used to accelerate and expand the training of Pakistani forces considered key to rooting out Al Qaeda leaders hiding along the mountainous border, the official said.

The plan would give U.S. forces closer access to Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents operating there.

Staffing the new centers will require an increase in the more than 100 U.S. special operations forces in Pakistan for the training effort, but Pentagon officials do not yet know how much of a boost will be needed, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about internal discussions.

U.S. officials see their effort to train Pakistan's forces, which includes the country's paramilitary Frontier Corps, its Special Service Group commandos and its Army, as a growing success.

Welcomed by Islamabad, the training has helped repair America's fragile relationship with the Pakistanis, while also giving elite U.S. special operations forces better access to the rugged border region dominated by Al Qaeda and its militant allies.

At the same time, the small but growing numbers of American troops inside Pakistan have also become targets. Last week, three U.S. special operations soldiers participating in that low-profile program were killed and two others wounded by a roadside bomb. They were the first known U.S. military fatalities in nearly three years in Pakistan's Afghan border region.

Al Qaeda's senior leaders are believed to operate from the mountainous border, and Taliban insurgents also in that area have been directing operations against the U.S. and its allies.

Military aid to Pakistan, which could grow to $1.2 billion under the Obama administration's 2011 budget plan, is considered key to winning the Afghan war and the ongoing fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The planned expansion comes as the Pentagon also prepares to approve millions of dollars in new aid to its coalition partners battling in Afghanistan.

After more than a year of applying pressure on Islamabad, U.S. officials are expressing increased satisfaction with Pakistan's expanded operations against militants along the border, the defense official said.

As the Pakistani forces have expanded their combat operations toward the border, it has made it more difficult for their troops to trek to existing training centers -- one in the Northwest Frontier Province and a new one in Baluchistan.

The plan now is to build a number of smaller training centers in the Northwest Frontier Province, closer to the Pakistani forces.

The official said the creation of new centers will depend on when and where they can be constructed in the difficult mountain region. Combat operations are expected to escalate as the weather improves.

The Pakistan military has more than doubled its presence along the border, the official said, so trying to pull units off the front lines for the training would mean fewer forces on the watch.

U.S. officials have said they hope to train more than 9,000 members of the Frontier Corps and slash their previous four-year training time by half.

The plan to add more trainers may also depend on whether the U.S. can get visas from the Pakistani government -- a diplomatic problem in recent months. Pakistan has held up visas for U.S. diplomats, military service members and others, apparently because of hostility within the country toward the expansion of U.S. operations there.

Anti-American sentiment has been fueled by the escalating drone missile strikes against Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, largely through a CIA program that is believed to have tacit approval from the Pakistani government. U.S. officials decline to discuss the program, which has also sparked complaints that the strikes have killed innocent civilians.

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Taliban Blow Up Boys School in Northwest Pakistan
 
 
13/02/2010 08:31:54 PM GMT   
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Taliban-Blow-Up-Boys-School-in-Northwest-Pakistan.html

 
Taliban militants blew up a boys high school in a tribal district of northwest Pakistan along the Afghan border on Saturday, an official said.
 
There were no casualties as the school in the village of Qamardin at Safi area of the Mohmand tribal district, 92 kilometers (57 miles) in northwest of Peshawar, was closed.
 
"The school was almost completely destroyed. Taliban planted explosives at five places and blew up most of the rooms," Maqsood Khan, a senior administrative official in the area told AFP by telephone.
 
"This was an act of the Taliban," Khan added. "This is a reaction to the operation we have launched in the area."
¬
Source: AJP
 

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Sunday, February 14, 2010
12:58 Mecca time, 09:58 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/201021474951328248.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Blast clouds 'India-Pakistan talks' 

 
The Indian interior minister said he had little clue who was behind the Pune attack [AFP]
 
A deadly explosion in the Indian city of Pune, that killed nine people and wounded 57 others, is threatening to jeopardise resumption of peace talks between India and Pakistan.

A day after the blast ripped through a cafe popular with foreigners and sent shock waves through India, Hindu nationalist leaders have demanded that bilateral talks, scheduled for February 25, be called off.

The leaders on Sunday blamed Pakistan for involvement in the deadly blast, though no group has yet claimed responsibility and there is no evidence to suggest Pakistani links.

Arun Jaitley, a leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, said "India's initiative to hold peace talks with Pakistan is misconceived and adventurous".

Prerna Suri, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the Indian capital, New Delhi, said "if there is a Pakistani link established to this attack, it will definitely have an impact on these very crucial talks".

'Destabilising talks'

M J Akbar, editor of the Indian Sunday Guardian weekly told Al Jazeera that "the government of India has never in principle objected to talks, but it wants credible proof that the government of Pakistan is actually taking action against the terrorists."

"One obvious pattern is that when hopes over an Indo-Pak dialogue rises or is aroused by the two government, then malevolent factors simultaneously get into play in order to destabilise these talks."

Senior officials from India and Pakistan plan to meet in New Delhi on February 25 to resume talks suspended in the wake of the co-ordinatated attacks in 2008 on India's financial capital, Mumbai, which was blamed on Pakistani-based fighters.

P Chidambaram, the Indian interior minister, admitted on Sunday that the authorities at the moment had no clue about who could have been behind the blast in Pune's famous German Bakery.

"Nothing is ruled out, nothing is ruled in. The investigation is in progress," he said.

"This particular area has been on the radar for quite some time. But this was not an overt attack by a gunman, but an insidious attack with a bomb planted in a soft target.

Foreigners among dead

Saturday's bomb attack was the country's first big assault since the Mumbai attack that left 166 people dead.

Dilip Band, a police official, said "the explosive was in a bag kept in the bakery" and that four foreign women were among the dead but their nationalities were not immediately known.

Chidambaram said police had been alerted to the possibility of attacks on Pune's Osho ashram and Chabad House, a Jewish cultural and religious centre whose members were targeted in the Mumbai attacks, but there had been no intelligence input on the German Bakery.

Al Jazeera's correspondent said the home minister mentioned the possible role of David Headley, arrested in the US last year and charged with scouting targets for the Mumbai rampage, in the attack.

The attack also appeared similar to a wave of bombs that hit Indian cities in the years before the Mumbai attacks, killing more than 100 people.

Police blamed most of those attacks on home-grown Muslim fighters, and a little-known group called the "Indian Mujahideen" claimed responsibility for some attacks. But Hindu hardliners were also accused of masterminding some blasts.
 
 

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Al-Qaeda chief delivers a warning

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LB13Df03.html

ISLAMABAD - Asia Times Online has received a message from top guerrilla commander Ilyas Kashmiri, whose 313 Brigade is an operational arm of al-Qaeda. The message arrived on Monday morning, shortly after the deadly weekend bombing of the German Bakery in the western Indian city of Pune. The message does not specifically claim responsibility for the bombing, but implies the Brigade's involvement.

The text of the emailed message reads, in rough translation:

“We warned the international community to play their role in getting the Kashmiris their right of self-determination and preventing India from committing brutalities in Kashmir, especially in Badipuar, raping the women and behaving inhumanly with Muslim prisoners.

“We warn the international community not to send their people to the 2010 Hockey World Cup, IPL [Indian Premier League - a cricket competition involving international players] and Commonwealth Games [to be held in Delhi later this year]. Nor should their people visit India - if they do, they will be responsible for the consequences.

"We, the mujahideen of 313 Brigade, vow to continue attacks all across India until the Indian Army leaves Kashmir and gives the Kashmiris their right of self-determination. We assure the Muslims of the subcontinent that we will never forget the massacre of the Muslims in Gujarat and the demolition of Babri Masjid [a Muslim mosque destroyed by Hindu militants in 1992]. The entire Muslim community is one body and we will take revenge for all injustices and tyranny. We again warn the Indian government to compensate for all its injustices, otherwise they will see our next action.

"From 313 Brigade"

The bombing and Kashmiri's warning come as Washington tries to bring India and Pakistan together to work as allies in fighting the "war on terror". The intention seems to be to reignite conflict between the two countries, diverting Pakistan’s attention from Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas and preventing India playing a strategic role.

The Pune bombing killed nine people, including two foreigners, and injured 57. It came a day after India and Pakistan agreed to foreign-secretary-level talks in New Delhi on February 25.

Typically, 313 Brigade does not claim responsibilty for its actions, which are said to include attacks on foreigners in India and Afghanistan and the Mumbai carnage of last November. The Brigade has also been linked to the so-called "Chicago Conspiracy" to massacre Indian military officers, attack the Indian nuclear arsenal, and attack the cartoonists whose anti-Muslim illustrations were published by a Danish newspaper.

It is unprecedented that 313 Brigade should send a message to a news outlet. However, Asia Times Online has previously been in contact with Kashmiri, and interviewed him last October. The interview, conducted in the Pakistani tribal agency of South Waziristan, was arranged by Kashmiri, primarily to discount rumors that he had been killed in a US drone attack. (See Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy.)  http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html

The Indian government said on Monday that there would be no knee-jerk reaction to the Pune bombing and that the talks with Pakistan would go ahead. If more attacks are carried out in India, however, the tension between the countries would soar, and the US-led "war on terror" would be an early casualty.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief.

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US Drones Kill at Least Seven in North Waziristan

Identities of Slain Unclear


by Jason Ditz, February 14, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/02/14/us-drones-kill-at-least-seven-in-north-waziristan/

At least seven people were killed today and several others were wounded in the North Waziristan town of Mir Ali, 25 kilometers east of Miramshah, when US drones fired a pair of missiles at a building.

Officials said the identities of the slain were unclear, but that four of them may well have been ethnic Uzbeks. Security sources still labeled the slain as “suspected militants,” however.

The CIA has launched an increasing number of strikes since a late December attack on their Khost headquarters in neighboring Afghanistan. Over 150 people have been killed so far this year, only a handful of which were confirmed to be militant leaders.

Officials have yet to determine the identities of most of those slain so far this year, but the vast, vast majority of those slain in 2009 had no apparent militant ties at all, and were likely innocent civilians who happen to live in the tribal area.

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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
13:26 Mecca time, 10:26 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/201021642737235803.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban deputy 'seized' in Pakistan  
 

US officials say Mullah Brader's capture could  lead them to Taliban leader Mullah Omar [pictured]

 
Mullah Abdul Ghani Brader, a senior Taliban military commander, has been captured in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, a US newspaper has reported.

According to The New York Times, Mullah Brader, the Taliban's number two, was captured in a secret raid by US and Pakistani intelligence forces several days ago.

Citing US government officials, the paper said Mullah Brader had been in Pakistani custody for several days and was being interrogated by US and Pakistani intelligence.

The paper described him as the most significant Taliban figure captured since the start of the Afghanistan war.

Taliban denial

But a Taliban spokesman denied the report of his capture, saying he was still in Afghanistan actively organising the group's military and political activities.   


MullaH Brader
  Born in Dehrawood district of Uruzgan province, in 1968
  Number two to Taliban founder Mullah Omar
  In charge of Taliban's military operations and financial affairs
  Former defence minister for the Taliban regime
  Newsweek: profile
  Newsweek: interview

Al Jazeera is not responsible for the content of external websites
"He has not been captured. They want to spread this rumour just to divert the attention of people from their defeats in Marjah and confuse the public," Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters, referring to a US-led Nato offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

Mullah Brader has been in day-to-day command of the Afghan Taliban ever since the group's founder and leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, disappeared from view almost three years ago.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from the capital Kabul, said Mullah Brader's capture, if true, is "significant".

"But Mullah Brader would be a very good source, concerning information about the Taliban leadership, simply because as far as we know, he has a very good relationship with Mullah Omar, and their relationship goes back to the days when the Taliban were really in power," she said.

"Mullah Brader was a man in charge of military operations who was given the opportunity to make decisions. The ultimate decisions were made by Mullah Omar, but Mullah Brader really played an important role."

Our correspondent, however, indicated that Mullah Brader may have had a fallout with the leadership.

"Mullah Brader has become a liability because sources say he was taking part in negotiations with the Afghan government between Taliban leaders, and the UN special representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide. Of course the Taliban deny that any such meetings took place.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), said Mullah Brader's capture may not deal a body blow to the Taliban.

"The Taliban is not a monolithic organisation ... I don't think his capture is going to affect the ability of the Taliban to resist the onslaught that the Americans want to launch," he said.

'Joint raid'

The New York Times report said it was not clear if he was talking, but quoted the officials as saying his capture could lead to other senior Taliban leaders.


in depth
 
  Your Views: Is it time to cut a deal with the Taliban?
  Timeline: Afghanistan in crisis
  The Taliban's influence in Pakistan
  Operation Moshtarak at a glance
  Talking to the Taliban
  Pakistan's war
 
The officials voiced hope Mullah Brader would provide the location of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.

The New York Times cited officials as saying the operation to capture Mullah Brader was conducted by ISItogether with CIA operatives.

The newspaper said it learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it after a request by White House officials who said disclosing it would end a very successful intelligence drive.

The New York Times said it was now publishing the report because White House officials acknowledged that news of the capture was becoming broadly known in the region.

The arrest came as US-led forces across the border in Afghanistan undertake one of Nato's biggest offensives against the Taliban.

The assault, one of the biggest in the eight-year war, is the first test of US President Barack Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where the Taliban has made a steady comeback since a US-led invasion ousted it in 2001.
 
 

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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
13:26 Mecca time, 10:26 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/201021642737235803.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban deputy 'seized' in Pakistan  
 

US officials say Mullah Brader's capture could  lead them to Taliban leader Mullah Omar [pictured]

 
Mullah Abdul Ghani Brader, a senior Taliban military commander, has been captured in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, a US newspaper has reported.

According to The New York Times, Mullah Brader, the Taliban's number two, was captured in a secret raid by US and Pakistani intelligence forces several days ago.

Citing US government officials, the paper said Mullah Brader had been in Pakistani custody for several days and was being interrogated by US and Pakistani intelligence.

The paper described him as the most significant Taliban figure captured since the start of the Afghanistan war.

Taliban denial

But a Taliban spokesman denied the report of his capture, saying he was still in Afghanistan actively organising the group's military and political activities.   


MullaH Brader
  Born in Dehrawood district of Uruzgan province, in 1968
  Number two to Taliban founder Mullah Omar
  In charge of Taliban's military operations and financial affairs
  Former defence minister for the Taliban regime
  Newsweek: profile
  Newsweek: interview

Al Jazeera is not responsible for the content of external websites
"He has not been captured. They want to spread this rumour just to divert the attention of people from their defeats in Marjah and confuse the public," Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters, referring to a US-led Nato offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province.

Mullah Brader has been in day-to-day command of the Afghan Taliban ever since the group's founder and leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, disappeared from view almost three years ago.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from the capital Kabul, said Mullah Brader's capture, if true, is "significant".

"But Mullah Brader would be a very good source, concerning information about the Taliban leadership, simply because as far as we know, he has a very good relationship with Mullah Omar, and their relationship goes back to the days when the Taliban were really in power," she said.

"Mullah Brader was a man in charge of military operations who was given the opportunity to make decisions. The ultimate decisions were made by Mullah Omar, but Mullah Brader really played an important role."

Our correspondent, however, indicated that Mullah Brader may have had a fallout with the leadership.

"Mullah Brader has become a liability because sources say he was taking part in negotiations with the Afghan government between Taliban leaders, and the UN special representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide. Of course the Taliban deny that any such meetings took place.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), said Mullah Brader's capture may not deal a body blow to the Taliban.

"The Taliban is not a monolithic organisation ... I don't think his capture is going to affect the ability of the Taliban to resist the onslaught that the Americans want to launch," he said.

'Joint raid'

The New York Times report said it was not clear if he was talking, but quoted the officials as saying his capture could lead to other senior Taliban leaders.


in depth
 
  Your Views: Is it time to cut a deal with the Taliban?
  Timeline: Afghanistan in crisis
  The Taliban's influence in Pakistan
  Operation Moshtarak at a glance
  Talking to the Taliban
  Pakistan's war
 
The officials voiced hope Mullah Brader would provide the location of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.

The New York Times cited officials as saying the operation to capture Mullah Brader was conducted by ISItogether with CIA operatives.

The newspaper said it learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it after a request by White House officials who said disclosing it would end a very successful intelligence drive.

The New York Times said it was now publishing the report because White House officials acknowledged that news of the capture was becoming broadly known in the region.

The arrest came as US-led forces across the border in Afghanistan undertake one of Nato's biggest offensives against the Taliban.

The assault, one of the biggest in the eight-year war, is the first test of US President Barack Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where the Taliban has made a steady comeback since a US-led invasion ousted it in 2001.
 
 

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Taliban rejects US report on top commander

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:00:52 GMT
http://presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=118723&sectionid=351020403

   
 

File photo

Afghan Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has rejected a US report claiming that a Taliban commander has been arrested in Pakistan.

Mujahid told Reuters that Mullah Baradar is still in Afghanistan and actively organizing military and political activities of the terrorist network.

"He has not been captured. They want to spread this rumor just to divert the attention of people from their defeats in Marjah and confuse the public."

Zabihullah was referring to Operation Moshtarak in which thousands of US-led troops are working to capture Taliban strongholds in areas around Marjah and Nad Ali.

Earlier US officials said the military commander had been captured in a secret US-Pakistani raid in Karachi. They said Baradar was the most significant militant figure detained since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

According to US media reports, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was arrested in a secret operation several days ago, but the release of information of Baradar's arrest was delayed at the request of the White House for fear it would prevent other Taliban officers from cutting off communication with their leader.

Baradar heads the Taliban's military council and was elevated in the body after the 2006 death of military chief Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Usmani. Baradar is known to coordinate the movement's military operations throughout the South and Southwest of Afghanistan. His area of direct responsibility covers Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces.

MP/TG/DT

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Mullah Baradar arrest reports propaganda: Rehman Malik

Tuesday, 16 Feb, 2010
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/12-us+pakistan+capture+taliban+top+commander--bi-04 


     Pakistan's government is a close US ally in the war on Al-Qaeda and the eight-year conflict against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan —File photo Front Page


ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rehman Malik on Tuesday branded as “propaganda” reports that the top Taliban military commander had been arrested in a joint Pakistani-US spy operation.

Speaking to reporters outside parliament in Islamabad, the cabinet minister stopped short of either confirming or denying the media reports.

The New York Times and other US media cited US government officials as saying that US and Pakistani intelligence services arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi “several days ago”.

“We are verifying all those we have arrested. If there is any big target, I will show the nation,” Malik said.

“If the New York Times gives information, it is not a divine truth, it can be wrong. We have joint intelligence sharing and no joint investigation, nor joint raids,” Malik added.

“We are a sovereign state and hence will not allow anybody to come and do any operation. And we will not allow that. So this (report) is propaganda,” he added.

Pakistan's government is a close US ally in the war on Al-Qaeda and the eight-year conflict against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan, but the relationship is controversial in an increasingly anti-American country.

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Three killed in drone missile strike in N. Waziristan

Wednesday, 17 Feb, 2010       
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/12-three+killed+in+drone+missile+strike+in+pakistan--bi-06


The drone targeted a militant compound in the village of Tapi, near Miranshah.—Photo by AP

MIRANSHAH: A US drone aircraft fired a missile into Pakistan's North Waziristan region on the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing at least three militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The drone targeted a militant compound in the village of Tapi, about 15 km (9 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town in the region, which is a hotbed of Taliban and al Qaeda militants. It was the second attack on the village this week.—Reuters

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US drone strike kills 4 in Pakistan 
 
 
17/02/2010 06:21:00 PM GMT   
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/US-drone-strike-kills-4-in-Pakistan-.html

 
At least four people have been killed in another US drone strike at a home in northwestern Pakistan, close to the Afghan border.

The residents said the Wednesday attack targeted a house in Tapi Tolkhel village, just five kilometers from the border with the Afghan province of Khost.

AFP quoted an unnamed security official as claiming that the attack killed four and injured two militants. "According to initial reports four militants were killed and two wounded."

The attack was the third since Sunday in North Waziristan district.

The United States says the drone attacks are targeting militants, but local media reports say civilians are the main victims of the strikes.

Although Pakistan publicly opposes the US drone attacks, there have been reports that the unmanned aircraft take off from military bases within the Pakistani territories.

Hundreds of people, many of them civilians, have been killed since 2006 in CIA-operated drone strikes in Pakistan, according to local media.

The attacks were initiated under the former US President George W. Bush and have escalated under Nobel Peace Prize winner President Barack Obama.

There have been nationwide rallies in Pakistan against high civilian casualties inflicted by the US operations.

Pakistan Islami Jamiat-e Talaba staged an anti-American rally in mid-January to show strong resentment at US drone attacks in the country.

Demonstrators demanded that the government take a strong stand against the US presence in the country.


Source: Press TV