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

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At Least 50 Killed in Pakistan’s Weekend of Bombings

Saturday Blast Killed 41 Refugees From Orakzai Offensive

by Jason Ditz, April 18, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/18/at-least-50-killed-in-pakistans-weekend-of-bombings/


With Pakistan still reeling from last weekend’s air strike, in which military jets killed at least 71 civilians in Pakistan’s tribal area, the nation saw another deadly flurry of bombings, this time by the militants, which left upwards of 50 civilians killed and an unknown number of others wounded.

The bulk of the casualties came on Saturday, when a pair a burqa-clad suicide bombers struck a refugee camp in Kohat, killing at least 41 people lined up at a registration table. The bulk of the casualties were people fleeing the military’s offensive in Orakzai Agency.

The bombing led the United Nations to announce that it was suspending its aid operations in Kohat until proper security could be guaranteed, a guarantee that can scarcely be said to exist anywhere in the nation, and a blow to the 200,000+ civilians displaced in and around Kohat.

Today, a second attack hit Kohat, when a vehicle packed with explosives slammed into a tractor near a police station. Several police were among the dozens injured, but again it appears all the slain were just civilian bystanders.

A Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) member confirmed today’s attack and extended their “regret” for the civilian deaths, insisting the police were the real target. The refrain will likely be all-too-familiar for the civilians of the area, who are constantly hearing the exact same claim from the Pakistani Army.

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Monday, April 19, 2010
17:45 Mecca time, 14:45 GMT   
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201041914959513554.html

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 


 
Bomb blast hits Pakistan protest 
 
 
At least 20 people, including a number of police officers, have been killed after a bomb blast during a protest in northwest Pakistan.

Another 30 people were hurt in the attack in an area of the old city of Peshawar, known as the Storytellers' Bazaar.

A local government official said that the explosion was believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said: "There was a large demonstration against the frequent power cut across Pakistan.

"A large crowd was heading toward the bazaar when the explosion hit. A senior police officer of the city was killed in the explosion.

"The rally was organised by Jamaat-Islamiya an extreme right-wing religious group, and some of its workers may have been killed during the attack," he said

 
 
 

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Monday, April 19, 2010
20:58 Mecca time, 17:58 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201041914959513554.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Bomb blast hits Pakistan protest 
 

 The explosion took place as protesters gathered
to demonstrate over power cuts [AFP]
 
At least 25 people, including a number of police officers, have been killed after a bomb blast during a protest in northwest Pakistan.

Another 30 people were hurt in the attack in an area of the old city of Peshawar, known as the Storytellers' Bazaar.

A local government official said that the explosion was believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said: "There was a large demonstration against the frequent power cut across Pakistan.

"A large crowd was heading toward the bazaar when the explosion hit. A senior police officer of the city was killed in the explosion.

"The rally was organised by Jamaat-e-Islamiya an extreme right-wing religious group, and some of its workers may have been killed during the attack," he said.

A number of the protesters were believed to be among the dead.

"We were burning tyres after the protest. We had set one tyre on fire when a deafening blast rocked the whole area," Saifullah, a party worker, told the AFP news agency.

Taliban blamed

Shafqat Malik, the chief of the bomb disposal squad, told reporters that the blast was caused by a bomber wearing a suicide vest packed with steel pellets, ball-bearings and six to eight kilogrammes of explosives.

"We have recovered the head and legs of the attacker," he said.

"There are many groups and agencies involved in the acts of terrorism but this is the failure of government who are responsible for the protection of citizens" Siraj ul-Haq, deputy head of Jamat-e-Islamiya
 
Police and government officials blamed the Taliban for the bombing.

"The terrorists are beasts, Their aim is just to shed blood," Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, said.

But Siraj ul-Haq, the deputy head of Jamat-e-Islamiya, instead declined to accuse Taliban fighters of staging the attack.

"There are many groups and agencies involved in the acts of terrorism but this is the failure of government who are responsible for the protection of citizens," he said.

The government declared three days of mourning in the province after the blast.

The attack came hours after an eight-year-old boy was killed and at least 10 other people were wounded in a bombing outside a high school in Peshawar, which struck as students were wrapping up the school day.

"It was an improvised explosive device planted near a shop. It was a timed device. School children were the target," Mohammad Karim Khan, a senior police official told AFP news agency.

Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have been blamed for scores of suicide and bomb blast in northwest Pakistan that have killed hundreds of people over the past year.

Peshawar, which lies close to the border with Afghanistan, has been one of the hardest-hit cities.
 
 

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South Asia
Apr 23, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD23Df01.html 
 
 Pakistan, US undeterred by Afghan setback

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - The recent American withdrawal from the strategic Korangal Valley in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar was largely seen among the old-guard mujahideen as a replay of the Soviet withdrawal from that area in 1986.

After the Red Army left the valley, the mujahideen, operating from their bases in the Pakistani tribal areas of Bajaur and Mohmand directly across the border, had a free hand. They subsequently opened up a path all the way to the Taghab Valley in Kapisa province that eventually led to the mujahideen attacking the capital, Kabul. Within three years, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan.

The withdrawal of American forces from Korangal Valley is a direct result of the failure of the Pakistani armed forces to tame militants in Mohmand and Bajaur, where as in the 1980s, they have vital bases in support of the struggle across the border.

In August 2008, Pakistan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launched a joint military campaign, "Operation Lion Heart", with the Pakistanis concentrating on Bajaur and Mohmand and NATO targeting Nuristan and Kunar in Afghanistan.

After eight months the operation was declared a success, but it soon became apparent that the militants had simply dispersed into the Hindu Kush mountains and after a few months they came back with renewed vigor and by November 2009 had forced NATO to withdraw from three of its four main bases in Nuristan.

Pakistan launched another operation in that month and claimed that all of the Taliban's top commanders had been killed. This was not the case and the militants fought on, culminating in the American pullout from the Korangal Valley.

"The reason for the failure of Pakistani troops in the tribal region is their naivety," a senior United States official told Asia Times Online in Islamabad. "There is no doubt that the Pakistan army is fighting against the militants with maximum conviction. Their earlier mindset has very much changed, before they thought of the militants as their boys who could be tamed at any time.

"Former president [General Pervez] Musharraf's unpopularity was very heavy baggage for the military and after his departure [August 2008], by which time the militants had expanded their presence up to Swat and Buner, the Pakistan army had become such a joke that the military leadership decided to restore its image at all costs, and so they went very hard against the militants. For us [the US] this was a big change. Now they consider the militants as a bigger threat than we do," the official said.

"Now the problem is not a lack of conviction but a lack of professionalism. For example, we are blamed for drone attacks and for the collateral damage they cause. Drone attacks might be killing a few additional people, but when the Pakistan army conducts operations in the tribal areas they unnecessarily turn whole areas into rubble.

"Undoubtedly they routed the militants, but in the process there is no place for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people to come back. That is one example of their non-professionalism. Now they are asking us to provide the money for rehabilitation work and delays are allowing the militants to come back," the official said.

Despite this view, relations between the Pakistan military and the US are at an all-time high, with unprecedented levels of coordination.

The US official also had his views on the arrest in February of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's supreme commander in Afghanistan. He was appended in the Pakistani port city of Karachi during a raid by Pakistani and US intelligence officials.

"The Pakistan army's mental block about the Afghan Taliban is still there. They still believe them as their connection in Afghanistan. Mullah Baradar's arrest was not deliberate, it was a mistake," the official said.

"At the time of Baradar's arrest, all the [Pakistani] bosses [chief of army staff and director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence] were in Brussels. We got a hint that somebody very important was lurking in Karachi. We informed them [Pakistanis] and jointly we went there. At the time of the arrest neither we nor the Pakistanis were aware that they had rounded up Baradar," he said.

"It is quite possible that he will be disconnected from the Taliban, but he has not been useless. We knew that Baradar had treasures of information so we used our rapport with Pakistan and now we are getting access to Baradar and are getting precious information from him," the official said.

After being joined in an often stormy marriage of convenience in the "war on terror" for nearly a decade, Washington and Islamabad are now beginning to trust one another. Pakistan is ready to give up its concerns and fully facilitate the American war in Afghanistan and the Americans have overcome their worries that Pakistan will use US military aid against India.

On Tuesday, Pakistan and United States signed a US$65 million contract in Washington for the transfer of the USS McInerney. The contract for the "hot transfer" of the Perry-class guided-missile frigate was signed by senior officials of the two countries. Under the agreement, the Pakistan navy will take over the vessel on August 31.

The sale of the frigate, which will be inducted into the Pakistan navy as PNS Alamgir at a ceremony in the US, was approved by the United States Congress in September 2008.

Commissioned in 1979, the frigate will be handed over after a refurbishment that includes anti-submarine capability that has been paid for with the foreign military aid provided by the United States to friendly countries.

The successful conclusion of this contract will pave the way for the acquisition of more vessels of the same class. Pakistan is designated a major non-NATO ally and is able to receive older unneeded US military equipment. The US is also expected to transfer some technology related to unmanned drones.

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

 
 
 

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Pakistani Military Holding Thousands of Detainees

Claims Civilian Courts Can't Be Trusted

by Jason Ditz, April 21, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/21/pakistani-military-holding-thousands-of-detainees/

Pakistani officials and human rights advocates are expressing concern today about the large number of “suspects” being held in extralegal detention by Pakistan’s military in the tribal areas.

According to reports, most of the thousands of detainees have been held for nearly a year and been given no access to lawyers or family. They have not been charged with anything but are being held indefinitely on the belief that they might be members of one militant faction or another.

Pakistani Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas confirmed the detentions, which have no legal basis under Pakistani law, but insisted that the military was concerned the civilian government would release them if they were ever given access to the legal system.

Pakistan’s civilian court systems, particularly in the tribal areas, are a model of inefficiency, which is in no small part why the various Taliban factions are so successful in the area: in many cases they offer an alternative dispute resolution system under sharia law.

Still, given the Pakistani military’s recent history of shrugging off civilians as “suspects” the disappearance of thousands of people into what looks to be a legal black hole as the nearly endless wars continue to unfold seems far from a long term solution, and just underscores the Pakistani civilian government’s own lack of oversight on military activities.

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On the run, Pakistan militants find new haven

Fleeing Pakistani militants find new sanctuary, raising questions about Pakistan strategy

CHRIS BRUMMITT
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/04/21/on-the-run-pakistan-militants-find-new-haven-2/

Apr 21, 2010 16:49 EDT

They were never routed, no matter what Pakistan claimed. Instead, the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters have merely relocated. They're still near the Afghan border.

Months after Pakistani troops chased them from South Waziristan, these militants have established a new base farther north under the protection of an insurgent leader who has cut past deals with the Pakistani army, according to residents, militants and reports from Associated Press correspondents who visited recently.

The fighters — including Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks — roam through markets, frequent restaurants and watch jihadi movies or surf the Web at Internet cafes, their weapons propped up against the table. Pakistani troops wave them through checkpoints even though they're armed with assault rifles and rocket launchers.

These are the new VIPs in Pakistan's most dangerous region, North Waziristan.

The influx of these militants in North Waziristan in recent months adds to pressure on the army to launch an offensive there, and raises questions over its policy of making agreements with Gul Bahadur and other insurgent commanders who threaten U.S. forces in Afghanistan but do not attack targets in Pakistan.

Bahadur agreed not to help his fellow militants during last year's offensive in South Waziristan as part of an understanding reached with the army. In exchange, the army would not attack his territory to the north. Now it appears that this pact has backfired on the army, enabling militants whom Pakistan considers a threat to its security to regroup on Bahadur's lands.

The military says it is not moving into North Waziristan because it does not have enough troops to do so effectively. Critics say the force is holding back because it does not want to sever alliances with militant factions fighting just across the border in Afghanistan, believing they will one day serve Pakistan's interests there.

That makes North Waziristan an enticing destination for extremists, even with U.S. missiles regularly pounding the region. All but two of the 27 missile strikes fired from unmanned drones since January have hit targets in the north, according to a count by the AP.

Newly arrived Pakistani Taliban, Arab and Uzbek militants from South Waziristan are now commonly seen in the north's major towns, Mir Ali and Miran Shah, which are under the control of Bahadur, according to residents there and two AP reporters in the region.

The Pakistani Taliban has set up a command and control center in Mir Ali's bazaar, where it communicates by radio with other groups in the tribal belt, witnesses say.

All those interviewed declined to give their names, citing fear of retribution by either the Taliban or Pakistani security forces. The AP reporters also asked to remain anonymous for the same reason.

"Under tribal customs and traditions, we are bound to host brothers from South Waziristan. We are like brothers and we support each other," said a close aide to Bahadur. "We have no concern that our attitude toward the Pakistani Taliban in our area will invite an army offensive. Why should it? Neither we nor the Pakistani Taliban men have caused any problems for the army in North Waziristan."

Before launching the offensive in South Waziristan, the Pakistani army acknowledged striking the deal with Bahadur.

On Wednesday, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas denied the force had any ongoing deal with Bahadur not to attack his territory, saying the local administration may have an arrangement with tribal leaders in the area to ensure peace there.

But security analysts and residents disputed this, saying there was clearly a truce of some sort in the region.

Abbas insisted the army had not ceded the north to militants, saying the army had about 25,000 troops stationed there that carry out small-scale, targeted operations against insurgents. Any such operations are rarely reported.

Despite the remarks by Bahadur's aide, there are signs the new arrivals may be straining relations with their hosts.

The Pakistani Taliban circulated a leaflet two months ago calling on their fighters to avoid any "criminal activity" and interference in the internal affairs of the region.

The army began its operations in South Waziristan in October against the Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella grouping of militants that has claimed responsibility for many of the hundreds of suicide bombs to hit the country over the last two years.

It retook the area in about two months, but most of the insurgents fled rather than fight and none of the top commanders were captured or killed.

In Washington, a senior military official confirmed that fighters scattered from South Waziristan, including some to the north and others into Afghanistan. They included foreign fighters, he said on condition of anonymity because it involves intelligence.

The army has since launched air and ground operations in the Orakzai tribal area, where it says many of those who fled South Waziristan have ended up. But several analysts said they believed North Waziristan was home to most of the insurgents, including their leaders.

"The Taliban are receiving undeclared protection and shelter there in North Waziristan. The issue is now for how long this can be sustained, said Imtiaz Gul, director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "If you look at the growing convergence between the Pakistan and the U.S. military, it will be difficult for Gul Bahadur to keep these people and not be disturbed."

Bahadur, whose forces do not carry out attacks within Pakistan, is regarded as "good Taliban" by Pakistani security agencies. But he and other allied insurgents leaders in the north, among them Jalaluddin Haqqani, regularly dispatch men to fight U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have praised Pakistan's actions against the Taliban in the northwest over the last 18 months, a change from two years ago when their refrain was a near constant "Pakistan must do more." They have also said they understood Pakistan's reasons for not going into North Waziristan immediately.

But an uptick in bombings in recent weeks in Pakistani cities after three month of relative calm will add to calls for action in the north.

"The strikes over the last couple of days mean the Taliban have reorganized," said Mahmood Shah, a former security chief for Pakistan's tribal regions. "I understand the complexities of launching an operation in North Waziristan, but I think it will become a compulsion."

Some residents said they saw signs that a military offensive might come — from soldiers repairing checkpoints on previously abandoned roads, to Pakistani Taliban fighters using the north as a base.

"After the military operation in South Waziristan we have seen Arabs, Uzbeks and Pakistani Taliban in Miran Shah market," said a school teacher in that town near the Afghan border. "I am happy with the agreement between Gul Bahadur and Pakistan, but I fear another military operation in our area when I see these people having free movement."

The owner of a pharmacy in the same town had similar fears.

"I am not hopeful about the future of the Gul Bahadur agreement when I see what's happening on the ground," he said.

___

Associated Press correspondent Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: AP News

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From The Times April 21, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7103260.ece

Pakistan military fails to woo tribal allies under grip of Taleban


by Richard Beeston

The region has been described by the US President as the most dangerous place in the world. No one who lives here would disagree.

Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas are now in the fourth year of a fierce struggle that shows little sign of ebbing and every indication that the daily toll in lives will continue to grow.

The past few days provide a telling snapshot. More than 70 people were killed in a bungled Pakistani air raid against suspected militants; 45 Shia Muslims were killed by Sunni suicide bombers in burkas; a police station was hit by a suicide car bomber, killing 7; and 25 died in another suicide attack on a market in Peshawar, the regional capital.

During this period US military drones continued their daily strikes in North Waziristan, while Pakistani forces engaged in fierce battles with Taleban fighters over their strongholds in Orakzai. The impact is starting to show on the deeply conservative Pashtun population that straddles the mountainous frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Which way they turn could decide the future of the American campaign and ultimately the fate of this country.

In the village of Ghazni Khel, the arrival of three Western visitors this week came as a huge surprise to locals. Young children have never met anyone from London. Their parents say that the last time anyone bothered to visit was four years ago — that includes politicians from the capital only a few hours’ drive away.

In particular, local residents were horrified when not a single representative of the central Government came to the funeral of 100 young people killed on New Year’s Day by a Taleban suicide bomber during a volleyball game at the village of Shah Hasan Khel.

“We feel we have been forgotten,” said Salim Saifullah Khan, the local tribal leader, who represents the area in the Pakistani senate. He has been trying to lobby for development projects — such as a new hydroelectric dam — and demonstrating to visitors that the real victims of the present war are civilians.

Their world changed dramatically four years ago when the Taleban began to assert their authority. Militant checkpoints appeared on the major roads. Music was banned and hi-fi systems ripped out of cars. Some changes were welcome, such as Taleban courts that administered justice in a matter of hours where the local authorities could take months. In some areas they also redistributed land, giving peasants areas previously owned by landlords. But Taleban rule also meant brutal summary justice. Money was extorted in the name of jihad against America. Kidnapping became commonplace and the local authorities found themselves under siege.

Doctors and other professionals have been hit particularly hard. They are frequently abducted and pressed into work before being ransomed.

Last year a GP, Dr Inshaullah, was intercepted by gunmen on his way home with his 13-year-old son. The two spent 70 days in North Waziristan, where their abductors demanded a ransom of £150,000. He eventually managed to escape but some of his colleagues are still missing.

The military insists that it has gone a long way to reassert control over the area at considerable cost. Certainly Taleban strongholds such as Bajaur, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan are now largely under government control. But the campaign of intimidation continues through skilful propaganda. Those who stand up to the militants receive threatening phone calls and are accused of being CIA spies. In Dr Inshaullah’s case the police made it clear that they were not interested in pursuing his abductors even though he can identify them and knows where they live.

“People are very intimidated,” Khalid Munir, a former army officer, said. “They have been terrorised by the Taleban. They are scared to go out at night. They are scared to speak. The war is not over.

“The Taleban may not be as visible as they were before but they are still there.”

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Pakistani air strike kills more than 70 civilians


By W.A. Sunil

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m65311&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, April 22, 2010

In a bid to quell public anger, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was forced to issue a public apology last Saturday over the killing of more than 70 civilians in a recent air strike on a village near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The air strike was part of the proxy war being fought by Pakistan on behalf of Washington to suppress Islamist militants fighting against the US-led occupation inside neighbouring Afghanistan.

The attack took place on April 10 at Sravela village in the remote Tirah Valley of the Khyber Agency, which is part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The dead and injured included women, children and elderly people of the Kukikhel tribe. It was the worst incident involving the Pakistani military since it began operations into the border areas in 2003.

The army initially insisted that the air strike had killed 42 Taliban fighters and claimed that the Tirah valley was a "stronghold" of the Islamist group Lashkar-e-Islam and a "hub" for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Local residents, however, insisted that the bombing had killed civilians and that the village did not support the Taliban.

"All of those killed were civilians, 100 percent innocent," Ikramullah Jan Kukikhel, a local tribal leader, told the media. "The Kukikhel are with the government. We have never joined the Taliban or any other fundamentalist group. We are normal people who just want peace for the country."

According to the New York Times, the local Khyber administration expressed condolences and paid compensation to the families of the victims. Those being treated at the Hayatabad Medical Complex in Peshawar said that a plane had dropped a bomb on a house, then as villagers scrambled to retrieve the dead and wounded, a plane dropped another bomb. "It was the second bomb that caused the most devastation," Kashmalu Khan Afridi said. He lost 11 relatives in the attack.

The Kyber Agency has a population of more than half a million. Like other FATA areas, it has largely been neglected by successive Pakistani governments. It lacks basic physical and social infrastructure, including roads, health care and education. The literacy rate is just 6.7 percent among males and less than 1 percent for females.

General Kayani made his apology for the airstrike—the first of its kind—amid rising criticism from tribal leaders and sections of the Pakistani media who warned that the military would further lose support among tribespeople in the FATA region. The army chief said the "unfortunate incident" had "resulted in loss of precious and innocent civilian lives" and promised "measures to avoid a reoccurrence of such incidents in future".

More civilian deaths are inevitable, however, as the Pakistani military continues its offensives that have left a swathe of destruction in their wake. Under pressure from the Obama administration, the army launched a major operation last April into the Swat Valley that displaced an estimated two million people.

Naseem Akhtar, a senior civilian administrator in the Swat region, told Agence France Presse this week that "reconstruction" was "a Herculean task". According to the UN, 175 of the 1,576 schools in the valley were destroyed during the offensive and another 226 damaged. Akhtar warned of a new "class war" if the huge disparity between wealthy landowners and poor farmers—which the Taliban had exploited—was not addressed.

Operations in the Swat Valley were followed in October by an offensive in the FATA agency of South Waziristan that destroyed scores of villages and towns and left at least 400,000 people homeless. Last month General Kayani claimed that the military had achieved all its major objectives in the agency, but residents are reluctant to return. The army holds the main towns, yet insurgents still control large mountainous areas and continue to harass the military.

According to a Pak Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS) report, 6,329 people were killed and 3,181 injured during the military’s "operational attacks" in 2009. The report also gave overall figures, including retaliatory suicide bombings by Islamist militants and cross-border attacks by US and NATO forces, as 12,632 dead and 12,815 injured—up from 907 dead and 1,543 injured in 2006. Undoubtedly, a majority of casualties were civilians.

The UN warned last week that aid groups were running out of funds to assist an estimated 1.3 million people still displaced by the military’s operations. A further 200,000 people were driven out of their homes after the Pakistani army launched an offensive into the Orakzai agency last month.

The Pakistani government and military are again under pressure from Washington to launch a new operation into North Waziristan in the northern spring and summer. To date the army has resisted US demands, pointing out that it is already overstretched in holding onto territory occupied in last year’s offensives. With almost a third of its half million strong-army engaged in fighting Islamist insurgents, it does not want to pull more troops from the border with its regional rival India.

However, the Obama administration has boosted US troop numbers in Afghanistan and the US military is preparing a major offensive to establish firm control of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. As these US operations begin, the Pakistani military will come under renewed pressure to extend its control in the FATA areas.

President Asif Ali Zardari’s government is heavily dependent on US political, financial and military support. Facing a severe balance of payments crisis last year, it was compelled to take out a $US11.3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The US also agreed to provide $7.5 billion in economic assistance over the next five years to Pakistan but the money is conditional on its support for the so-called Afpak war.

Last month, Islamabad and Washington held a "strategic dialogue" to put Pakistan’s relationship with US "on a new footing". In a statement issued after the talks, the two countries declared they would "redouble their efforts to deal effectively with terrorism" and would work together for "peace and stability in Afghanistan." Although Foreign Minster Shah Mehmood Qureshi officially led the Pakistani delegation, General Kayani played a major role in the talks.

Kayani’s apology last Saturday is just one symptom of the deep political and social divisions that Pakistan’s support for the US "war on terrorism" has opened up. Zardari and his government are regarded by broad layers of people as little more than US puppets. That anger is being fuelled by Pakistani military’s operations, as well as by US attacks using unmanned drones inside the FATA areas.

According to the PIPS report, 78 "border clashes" involving US and NATO forces, which included drone bombings, took place in 2009, killing 700 people and injuring another 363. The figures are likely to underestimate the actual casualties, many of whom were civilians, as PIPS is clearly partisan in its support for the "war on terrorism". Just days after the airstrike in the Tirah Valley, a US drone attack took place in North Waziristan that allegedly killed "four militants".





 

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South Asia
Apr 24, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD24Df04.html 
 
AN ATOL EXCLUSIVE

Confessions of a Pakistani spy

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja, a former Inter-Services Intelligence official and a close friend of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden during the resistance in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, has explained in videos sent to Asia Times Online how he was on a mission to broker a deal between militants and the army when he was captured by militants, and how he played a double game by deceiving a radical cleric into being arrested.

Khawaja was dismissed from the air force in the late 1980s and subsequently earned a reputation of having close ties to some militant groups. Khawaja has played an important behind-the-scenes role in both regional and national politics. Before the US attack on Afghanistan in late 2001, he was a part of the back-room diplomacy between the US and the Taliban, which failed miserably.

The revelations appear in five video clips sent to Asia Times Online by an al-Qaeda-linked group of militants from the Pakistani North Waziristan tribal area. The clips appear to have been heavily edited, with some of Khawaja's sentences - he is speaking in Urdu - cut off. At times it appears that a frail Khawaja, in his early 60s, is under duress.

 
The following are five video clips sent to Asia Times Online featuring Khalid Khawaja, who is speaking in Urdu. Video files are approximately 2.5Mb each in MOV format.
Please click here to download the clips: 1 2 3 4 5
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD24Df04.html

On March 25, Khawaja traveled to North Waziristan to interview commanders Sirajuddin Haqqani and Waliur Rahman Mehsud. He was accompanied by a British citizen, Asad Qureshi, a reporter with Channel 4, and Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, also a former long-time ISI official and once Pakistan's consul-general in Herat in Afghanistan.

Tarrar was nicknamed "Colonel Imam" by the mujahideen as he was instrumental in helping raise the Taliban militia and he trained present Taliban leader Mullah Omar and other top Afghan leaders, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the slain Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. "Colonel Imam" is widely referred to as the "Father of the Taliban."

The three men have not been heard from since March 25.

Soon after their disappearance, Punjabi militants calling themselves the "Asian Tigers" sent a video to the media in which they demanded a ransom of US$10 million for the release of Asad Qureshi and the freedom of Taliban leaders Mullah Baradar and Mansoor Dadullah in exchange for Khawaja and Colonel Imam.

The Afghan Taliban have distanced themselves from the kidnappings and their spokesman Zabiullah Muhajahid said they were working for the release of the two.

In the video footage, Khawaja confesses to a scheme to bring down the radical movement that had become centered around Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the capital, Islamabad. By mid-2007, the movement had become increasingly aggressive. Students from nearby educational faculties had taken to the streets to persuade video shops not to sell "vulgar" movies. The campaign took a turn for the worse when the students seized a suspected brothel owner in the Aapara area, where both the Taliban-supporting Lal Masjid and the ISI were situated.

Khawaja says he hatched a plan with Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the chief of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (the largest Islamic party in the country), the Gand Mufti of Pakistan, Mufti Rafi Usmani, and other scholars to eliminate the Lal Masjid movement from Islamabad.

Khawaja says he trapped Maulana Abdul Aziz, the prayer leader of the mosque and the brother of Ghazi Abdul Rasheed, with whom Aziz ran Lal Masjid.

Khawaja says he telephoned Aziz and lured him into being arrested. Rasheed was killed in the military raid on the mosque in which scores of militants also died.

"I am known among the media and masses as a thoroughbred gentleman, but in fact I was an ISI and CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency] mole ... I am remembering the burnt bodies of the innocent boys and girls of Lal Masjid ... I called Maulana Abdul Aziz and forced him to come out of the mosque wearing a woman's veil and gown, and that's how I got him arrested," Khawaja says in one of the video clips.

The Lal Masjid incident proved a defining moment in Pakistan's recent history: it culminated in the decline of president Pervez Musharraf, who stepped down in August 2008, and provoked a fierce reaction among militants against the Pakistani state.

Khawaja says that top jihadi commanders were the ISI's proxies and were given a free hand to collect funds. The leaders included Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil (who laid the foundations of the International Islamic Front with bin Laden in 1998), Maulana Masood Azhar (chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad), Abdullah Shah Mazhar (a former supreme commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammad.)

"I brought here a list of 14 commanders and was aiming to malign them among militant circles ... Abdullah Shah Mazhar, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, Masood Azhar and jihadi organizations like Laskhar-e-Taiba, al-Badr, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Harkatul Mujahideen, Jamiatul Mujahideen etc operate with the financial cooperation of the Pakistani secret services and they are allowed collect their funds inside Pakistan," Khawaja says in the video.

Khawaja was arrested immediately after the Lal Masjid operation and spent several months in jail. He had been involved in talks with the government to prevent the military from moving into the mosque and he had assured the government that he would resolve the matter without force. However, the government intercepted some of his messages in which he apparently urged those inside the mosque not to surrender and he was arrested as a collaborator with the Lal Masjid.

He was a known critic of the role of the Pakistani Intelligence agencies after September 11, 2001, when Pakistan sided with the US in the "war on terror".

He was one of the few prominent people to openly provide assistance to Arab-Afghan families whose male members had been arrested or killed during the US invasion on Afghanistan in 2001.

At the time of his disappearance, Khawaja was working for the cause of missing people - mostly militants. But because of his past links to the air force and the ISI, he has always been viewed with some suspicion by al-Qaeda.

Khawaja was retired from the air force in the late 1980s after he wrote a letter to the then-president, General Zia ul-Haq, in which he called him a hypocrite for not enforcing Islam in Pakistan. He then went to Afghanistan and fought alongside bin Laden. He was a recruiter and trainer of Pakistani fighters for the resistance against the Soviets.

Khawaja's name hit the headlines again in February 2002 in connection with the kidnapping, torture and murder by militants of American reporter Daniel Pearl. It was alleged that he was involved in the abduction at the behest of the ISI.

Khawaja gave several interviews to Asia Times Online in which he revealed how he had set up a meeting in Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s between bin Laden and then leader of the opposition, Nawaz Sharif, to dislodge Benazir Bhutto's government. Her government fell in 1990 and Sharif became premier. Khawaja also revealed that in the late 1980s he passed on funds from bin Laden to a former Pakistani minister, Sheikh Rasheed, for the operation of training camps for Kashmiri separatists.

It is unclear why Khawaja took Colonel Imam with him to North Waziristan. In the video footage, Khawaja says, "I was sent by the Pakistan army in North Waziristan because the army was badly caught in the middle of a conflict and was unable come out. I was sent to get reconciliation between the army and the militants so that the militants would give safe passage to the military to leave the area."

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

 
 
 

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Pakistan army says militant ambush kills 8 troops

Pakistan army says militants kill 8 soldiers in an ambush on their convoy near Afghan border

MUNIR AHMED
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/04/23/pakistan-army-says-militant-ambush-kills-8-troops/

Apr 23, 2010 10:48 EDT

Militants ambushed a Pakistani army convoy traveling in a tribal region that is mostly home to insurgent groups focused on the war in neighboring Afghanistan, killing eight soldiers, the military said Friday.

The attack could raise pressure on Islamabad to wage an offensive in North Waziristan, which has largely escaped Pakistani army action in recent years despite U.S. pressure for a crackdown. Militant attacks on troops in the region have also been rare.

The army statement said the attack Thursday occurred in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan, and that the convoy was "carrying out a routine movement" to the area from the town of Miran Shah. Sixteen soldiers were wounded in the ambush, one of the worst known to have occurred against the army in the border region in several months.

The statement did not give many details. However, two intelligence officials in the northwest said tribesmen joined local Taliban fighters to stage the ambush after a 15-year-old boy in the area was allegedly shot to death by an earlier group of traveling soldiers.

The boy was killed when troops opened fire after a roadside bomb exploded near the convoy, the officials said on condition on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media on the record.

Pakistan has carried out several army operations in its semiautonomous tribal belt, where al-Qaida and various Taliban factions have long thrived. The offensives have mainly been aimed at militant groups targeting Pakistani institutions.

North Waziristan has largely escaped the operations because most of the militant networks there — unlike groups such as the Pakistani Taliban — are focused on the war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. wants Pakistan to take on the North Waziristan networks, but Islamabad says it does not have the resources to open another front. Critics suspect Pakistan doesn't want to anger militants it may need to influence affairs in Afghanistan once the U.S. leaves.

The area struck Thursday is controlled by Sadiq Noor, one of the few Pakistani Taliban commanders known to operate in the region, said two other intelligence officials, also asking that their names not be used.

It's unclear whether the attack will have any impact on the Pakistan's army future designs in North Waziristan.

However, large numbers of Pakistani Taliban fighters are believed to have set up base in North Waziristan after the army began an offensive last year against their prior main stronghold, South Waziristan.

Like most of the information given by the government or military out of the tribal regions, independent verification of the deaths is nearly impossible because access to the zone is severely restricted.

Also in North Waziristan on Friday, the mutilated bodies of four men alleged to have been U.S. spies were found in Mir Ali town.

Area residents and an Associated Press reporter saw the bodies Friday morning. One was beheaded, while the other three had slit throats and severed hands.

Dozens of men have been killed in a similar fashion in North Waziristan in recent years. Like previous cases, notes attached to the bodies warned others to learn from the fate of the so-called spies.

___

Associated Press Writer Rasool Dawar in Mir Ali and Ishtiaq Mahsud contributed to this report.

Source: AP News

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Pakistan Struggles to Lure Tribesmen Back to South Waziristan

With Militants Still at Large, Elders Won't Return

by Jason Ditz, April 23, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/23/pakistan-struggles-to-lure-tribesmen-back-to-south-waziristan/

Having declared a victory in the South Waziristan Agency months ago, the Pakistani government is looking to convince everyone else that the offensive accomplished something by encouraging the tribesmen to return to the region. So far this is easier said than done.

For the dominant Mehsud tribe, the region doesn’t appear remotely safe to return to. One elder asked “how can we go back unless the area is cleared? This is not our land any more. It’s a battleground.”

Pakistan’s military insists the area has been cleared, but they claimed the same thing about the Swat Valley, and twice about the Bajaur Agency. In all cases the offensive drove the militants out, but few of the leaders were ever accounted for, and as soon as the military lures the civilians back, the militants return as well.

For the Mehsud tribe in particular, trust in the government is difficult to come by. Officials were ordering mass arrests of Mehsud tribesmen across the nation in October, claiming that they were “suspected militants.” When the militants return to South Waziristan, as they inevitably will, the tribe is setting itself up to be blamed once again for not stopping the militants themselves.

The tribesmen are thus holding out for security guarantees, which the Pakistani military cannot possibly make in good faith, as they lack the resources to remain in the long term to provide security. This means the refugee status of much of the Mehsud tribe is going to remain unchanged, at least for now.

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Suspected militants kill four ‘US spies’ in Pakistan

Last Updated: April 23. 2010 5:08PM UAE
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100423/FOREIGN/704239887/1103

Suspected Taliban militants in northwest Pakistan killed four men today after accusing them of spying for the United States, residents said.

The mutilated bodies were dumped in an open area in Mir Ali, a major town in the North Waziristan tribal region.

Dozens of men have been killed in a similar fashion in North Waziristan in recent years, especially as the US has pushed for Pakistan’s army to take on insurgents based there who plan attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan.



Ikram Ullah, a resident in the area, and a reporter saw the bodies this morning. One was beheaded, while the other three had slit throats and severed hands.

Notes attached to the bodies warned others to learn from the fate of the so-called spies.

Meanwhile, security forces in a gun battle killed 18 suspected militants in the Orakzai tribal region, government official Jahanzeb Khan said.

One soldier was also wounded in today’s shoot-out, he said.



Pakistan has stepped up army operations in Orakzai since mid-March when authorities dispatched ground forces there to flush out insurgents who fled an offensive in the South Waziristan tribal area last year.



* AP

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Passions run high over Pakistan name change

By Riffatullah Orakzai
BBC Urdu, Abbottabad

The name change has proved to be a deeply contentious issue

"I have not come here alone to protest - I have brought my children with me," says Qazi Ghulam Kabeer.

He is demonstrating against the recent change in name of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa.

The name change is part of constitutional amendments recently passed by the country's parliament which transfer power from the president to the popularly elected prime minister and parliament.

Among other changes is the concession of more power and rights to the provinces.

Top of the list was the long-standing demand by the NWFP's ruling Awami National Party (ANP) to change the name of NWFP.

This has now been accomplished - but not to everybody's satisfaction.

Sense of exclusion

Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa means "land of the Khyber side of the Pakhtoons", or Pashtuns.


“ We will not rest till Hazara becomes a separate province ” Sardar Haider Zaman Khan

The trouble is that this description does not encompass all the ethno-linguisitic groups in the province.

The sense of exclusion is most keenly felt by people like Qazi Kabeer, in the north-eastern Hazara region of the province.

These are the Hazarawals, a people identified as indigenous primarily because of their linguistic origins.

The Hazarawals speak the Hindko dialect, which is completely distinct from the Pashto language.

However, there is no such clear view on their ethnic origins. Some say they are part of the greater Punjabi region, while others claim they are of Kashmiri origin.

Whatever the case, the Hazarawals regard themselves as ethnically and linguistically distinct from the rest of northern Pakistan.

"We will not back down till they give us our province - even if we have to sacrifice our children," an emotional Qazi Kabeer said.

Looting

This has become a rallying cry across the Hazara region - made up of the districts of Abbottabad, Kohistan, Haripur, Batagram and Mansehra.


The Hazara region broke out into spontaneous protest

Following the initial ratification of NWFP's name change, the region burst into spontaneous protest.

On 13 April, a day after the act of parliament, incensed Hazarawal demonstrators clashed with police in the main city of Abbottabad.

At least seven people died and dozens were injured in the ensuing violence which soon engulfed the region.

The protests eventually disintegrated into a rioting and looting free-for-all that led to paramilitary troops being called in.

When I drove into the region during the protests, the discontent was still simmering.

Small groups of demonstrators could be seen on the road into Abbottabad - armed with sticks and stones.

Every passing car was a target, with vehicles being pelted and chased and sometimes emptied of occupants and set on fire.

When I was eventually able to talk to some of the demonstrators, their first words were to demand that "Hazara must become a province".

This is not the first time that Hazarawals have demanded a separate identity. In 1958, a local lawyer formed a political front to promote the rights of people of the region.

But the start of a consistent campaign for a separate province can be traced to 1992, when the Hazara National Front (HNF) was formed by another local barrister.

The HNF was at the height of its power in 1997, when the issue of Pakhtoonkhwa was first raised in the NWFP assembly.

Separate status call

Violence broke out throughout the region after the assembly passed a bill agreeing to the name change.


The Hazarawals are angry over their 'exclusion'

The situation was eventually brought under control as the assembly decision was not ratified by parliament.

But strong feelings have simmered since then.

The recent amendments have now brought them to the fore once again.

This time however, the main leadership comes from another organisation called the Hazara Action Committee.

This is led by senior local politician Sardar Haider Zaman Khan, known affectionately as Baba (old man) Haider Zaman.

A sprightly 75-year-old, Baba Haider Zaman has been active in politics since 1962.

He has stood in dozens of local and national parliamentary elections.

"We will not rest till Hazara becomes a separate province," he thunders.

'Can of worms'

For the moment, the dust has begun to settle in the region.

However, feelings are still strong and the issue is likely to be the main rallying point in this pivotal region in the next general elections.

That, however, is not the only fallout of the Hazara episode in Pakistan.

Analysts believe that the 18th amendments bill has opened a can of worms for the central government.

"Ethnic groups across Pakistan have been galvanised by the granting of more provincial autonomy," said a senior opposition figure who asked not to be named.

"Everybody, from southern Punjab to Karachi is now hankering for recognition. At the moment the central government is unlikely to bow down to any pressure.

"But if the movements gather steam, they could be the most significant change in Pakistan since the fall of Dhaka."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8636863.stm

Published: 2010/04/23 23:33:26 GMT

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Bombs, missiles, bullets leave 29 dead in Pakistan

Bombs, missiles and bullets leave 29 dead in Pakistan as Taliban, army clash

ASIF SHAHZAD
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/04/24/bombs-missiles-bullets-leave-29-dead-in-pakistan/

Apr 24, 2010 14:19 EDT

A suicide car bomber attacked a prison van while gunmen torched six NATO oil tankers in separate strikes Saturday that killed four Pakistani police officers and wounded 10 others, authorities said.

The army, meanwhile, kept up its pressure on the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal belt, killing 20 suspected fighters, while apparent U.S. missiles killed five alleged insurgents in a nearby northwest region, officials said.

The oil tankers were hit in Chakwal district — a rare, possibly unprecedented such assault in Punjab province. Militants and ordinary criminals frequently attack trucks that travel along supply routes used by NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but usually in the northwest Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa or southwest Baluchistan provinces.

Suspected militants in two pick-up trucks rode up to the gas station where the tankers were parked and opened fire before setting the vehicles aflame, police officer Aslam Tareen told The Associated Press. Four police officers who responded to the scene were killed, he said.

The drivers of the oil tankers said they were headed for NATO troops in Afghanistan, Tareen said. The militants managed to flee. Chakwal is not far from the Punjab border with the northwest province.

On Saturday morning, a suicide car bomber targeted a prison van as it arrived at a jail in Timergarah to pick up prisoners to take to the nearby Swat Valley, senior police official Shakeel Khan said.

No prisoners were in the van at the time, but 10 police officials were wounded.

Timergarah is in Lower Dir district, which is near the Afghan border. It was a militant stronghold until spring 2009 when a military offensive there and in Swat largely reclaimed the areas from insurgents.

Pakistan followed that offensive with one in South Waziristan tribal region, the key haven for the Pakistani Taliban.

Many militants there have since fled to other areas such as Orakzai, another part of the lawless tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, leading the army to open new fronts.

Troops on Saturday raided a militant ammunition depot in Sangra village of Orakzai, killing 10 alleged insurgents, local administrator Jehanzeb Khan said. One soldier was wounded.

Airstrikes later destroyed three more hide-outs, killing another 10 suspects, Khan said.

The information is nearly impossible to verify independently — access to the tribal belt and regions such as Dir is difficult to obtain due to the dangerous, remote nature of the terrain and legal restrictions.

The U.S. has relied heavily on its covert campaign of missile strikes to take out targets in the tribal areas.

A suspected U.S. missile strike in the Machi Khel area of North Waziristan tribal region killed five alleged insurgents at a compound, said two intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

North Waziristan is dominated by militant factions whose primary focus is battling American and NATO forces across the border. Washington wants Islamabad to take action against these groups, but Islamabad has resisted, saying it has its hands full with offensives against the Pakistani Taliban, a network that has focused on overthrowing the Pakistani state.

____

Associated Press Writers Hussain Afzal in Parachinar, Rasool Dawar in Mir Ali and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

Source: AP News

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Kucinich: Obama policy of drone strikes helping stoke 'fanatacism,' 'radicalism'

By Bridget Johnson - 04/24/10 12:20 PM ET


Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) told an India-based news agency that President Barack Obama's policy of unmanned drone strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan is leading the U.S. "into an area of unaccountability that leads to blowback, where we actually lose friends, where we help inspire anti-American sentiments and fanaticism and radicalism."

Kucinich, speaking to Asian News International, stressed his opposition to the strikes, which began under the Bush administration, and branded them as counterproductive.


"Just as an occupation fuels an insurgency, these drones build feelings and resistance against the United States and help gain support for those elements who wish to do America harm," Kucinich said, adding that Obama needs to "be careful not to inadvertently create the circumstances that push Pakistan into becoming a failed state."


In 2008, Kucinich denounced the Bush policy -- which has continued unabated under Obama -- as "playing with fire" and "violating international law by invading yet another nation which has not attacked the United States."


Pakistan has protested the drone strikes, saying that it supports the fight against terrorists but wants control over the U.S. drone technology.


Source:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/94127-kucinich-obama-policy-of-drone-strikes-helping-inspire-fanatacism-and-radicalism

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US drone kills seven in NW Pakistan: security officials

by Hasbanullah Khan Hasbanullah Khan
Sat Apr 24, 5:38 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100424/wl_sthasia_afp/pakistanunrestusmissile

A map locating North Waziristan in Pakistan. A US drone fired three missiles into a militant compound in Pakistan's tribal area near the Afghan border on Saturday, killing seven militants, security officials said.…(AFP/Graphic

 
MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (AFP) – A US drone fired three missiles into a militant compound in Pakistan's tribal area near the Afghan border on Saturday, killing seven militants, security officials said.

The strike took place at 9:00 pm (1600 GMT) in Marsikhel area, 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, which is known as a hub for Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked militants.

The nationalities of the seven dead were not immediately clear, a senior Pakistani security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Another security official confirmed the strike and the death toll and said: "We don't know yet if any high-value target was present in the area at the time of attack."

The strike came a day after seven Pakistani soldiers were killed and 16 wounded when militants armed with guns and rocket launchers ambushed their convoy, which was on a routine mission from Miranshah to Dattakhel town.

US forces have been waging a covert drone war against Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked commanders in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, where militants have carved out havens in mountainous areas outside direct government control.

US officials say drone strikes are a vital weapon in the war to defeat Al-Qaeda and reverse the Taliban insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan, where Washington is leading a major troop surge.

Critics say the hi-tech strikes risk radicalising local populations, particularly if civilians are killed.

More than 870 people have been killed in nearly 100 drone strikes in Pakistan since August 2008.

North Waziristan's prominence in the covert drone war has grown since a Jordanian Al-Qaeda double agent blew himself up killing seven CIA employees in a neighbouring Afghan province in December.

Islamist militants in Pakistan's tribal belt are believed to be supporting the nearly nine-year insurgency in Afghanistan.

North Waziristan is a fortress of Al-Qaeda, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, and the affiliated Haqqani network, set up by Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and now effectively run by his ambitious son Sirajuddin.

Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked groups have been blamed for a wave of suicide and bomb attacks that have killed nearly 3,300 people across Pakistan since 2007.

Pakistan claims to have made big gains against home grown Taliban over the past year following campaigns in the northwestern district of Swat and South Waziristan, but has yet to launch a major campaign in North Waziristan.

Pakistan launched a punishing assault against Taliban militants in Orakzai, another tribal district, last month amid increased US pressure for more operations against rebels.

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Four policemen killed, 12 tankers torched at Tila Gang

  Updated at: 2045 PST, Saturday, April 24, 2010 
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/updates.asp?id=103574

     
   TILA GANG: Twelve oil tankers transporting fuel for Nato were set on fire by miscreants also killing four policemen in Tila Gang area, RPO Aslam Tarin told Geo News Saturday.

He said unknown miscreants opened indiscriminate firing on tankers parked at a petrol pump at Mianwali Road in Tila Gang that triggered fire in the tankers and the pump.

Police patrol reached the scene and also came under fire attack. This killed a sub inspector and three constables. However, the miscreants escaped when police retaliated with fire.

The RPO said the area has been cordoned off. 

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'Ten police injured' in Pakistan suicide strike

AFP South Asian Edition
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/04/24/ten-police-injured-in-pakistan-suicide-strike-4/

Apr 24, 2010 06:48 EDT

A suicide attack targeting a prison van wounded at least 10 policemen in Pakistan's restive northwest on Saturday, officials said.

"The bomber blew up his explosives-packed car near the van, wounding 10 policemen, two of them seriously," senior police official Shakil Ahmad told AFP.

Nobody was in the van at the time of the attack, in the town of Timergara in Lower Dir district.

"We have found the engine of the car used in the attack and some body parts of the bomber including his sliced head from the site," Ahmad said.

Another senior police official, Qazi Jamil, confirmed the incident, saying: "It was a suicide attack targeting the police van."

Northwest Pakistan suffers from chronic insecurity largely connected to the neighbouring semi-autonomous tribal belt, which Washington calls the most dangerous place on Earth and a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.

A campaign of suicide and bomb attacks has killed nearly 3,300 people in less than three years across the nuclear-armed country of 167 million, blamed on Al-Qaeda, Taliban and other extremist Islamist groups.

The conservative northwest witnessed a major internal displacement of people as a result of Taliban violence and a series of military offensives concentrated on flushing out the armed Islamists from parts of the northwest and tribal belt.

Under US pressure, Pakistan has in the past year significantly increased operations against militants in its tribal belt.

The rugged tribal terrain became a stronghold for hundreds of extremists who fled neighbouring Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in late 2001.

Meanwhile, 10 people were injured in an explosion in southwestern Sibbi town, 160 kilometres (99 miles) southeast of Quetta, the capital of oil and gas rich Baluchistan province bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

"An improvised explosive device went off in a bakery in Sibbi on Saturday, wounding 10 people including the owner, employees and a few customers," district police chief Mujahid Akbar told AFP.

He added that nobody had so far claimed responsibility of the incident.

Baluchistan is rife with Islamist militancy, sectarian violence between majority Sunnis and minority Shiite Muslims and a regional insurgency.

Baluch rebels rose up in 2004 demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region's wealth of natural resources, including oil and gas. Hundreds of people have died since then.

Source: AFP South Asian Edition

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Indo-Pakistan proxy war heats up in Afghanistan

India faces Pakistan in sometimes-bloody shadow war in Afghanistan

TIM SULLIVAN
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/04/25/indo-pakistan-proxy-war-heats-up-in-afghanistan/

Apr 25, 2010 12:00 EDT

Across Afghanistan, behind the obvious battles fought for this country's soul, a shadow war is being quietly waged. It's being fought with spies and proxies, with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money and ominous diplomatic threats.

The fight pits nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan against one another in a battle for influence that will almost certainly gain traction as the clock ticks down toward America's military withdrawal, which President Barack Obama has announced will begin next year.

The clash has already sparked bloody militant attacks, and American officials fear the region could become further destabilized. With Pakistani intelligence maintaining ties to Afghanistan's Taliban militants, India has threatened to draw Iran, Russia and other nations into the competition if an anti-Indian government comes to power in Kabul.

"This is a delicate game going on here," said Daoud Muradian, a senior adviser to the Afghan Foreign Ministry. He spoke wearily about how Afghanistan, a mountainous crossroads linking South Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia, has for centuries often been little more than a stage for other countries' power struggles. "We don't want to be forced to choose between India and Pakistan."

For both India and Pakistan, Afghanistan is an exceedingly valuable prize.

To India, ties with Kabul mean new trade routes, access to Central Asia's vast energy reserves and a way to stave off the rise of Islamic militancy. It means the chance for New Delhi to undermine Islamabad as it nurtures its superpower aspirations by expanding its regional influence.

While Pakistan is also desperate for new energy supplies, its Afghan policy has been largely shaped by the view that Afghanistan is its natural ally. The two countries share a long border, overwhelmingly Muslim populations and deep ethnic links.

Then there is fear. Pakistan and India have already fought three wars over the past seven decades, and Pakistani military leaders are terrified of someday being trapped militarily between India on one border and a pro-India Afghanistan on the other.

"We can't afford an unfriendly government in Afghanistan," said Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan.

The shadow war began in earnest in the wake of the 2001 U.S. invasion, when the Taliban government was forced from power and New Delhi began courting Afghanistan's new leaders. It was a move into a country that Islamabad, a fierce supporter of the Taliban government, had seen as its diplomatic territory for two decades. But New Delhi quickly became a close ally of President Hamid Karzai, who will travel to India early next week for talks aimed at strengthening ties between the two countries.

On the surface, both India and Pakistan are bringing help to a country that desperately needs it.

New Delhi has built highways in the western deserts and brought electricity to Kabul. It is constructing a new Parliament building and offers free medical care in clinics across Afghanistan. Despite its immense spending needs — India has widespread poverty and staggering infrastructure problems despite its rapidly growing economy — it has given more than $1.3 billion in development aid.

That, in turn, has sparked Pakistani efforts, with Islamabad spending about $350 million on everything from school textbooks to buses.

But this is far from pure humanitarianism.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, laid out the situation bluntly: "While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures," he warned in a report late last year.

Heightened tensions are the last thing the U.S. wants. The Afghan war has killed more than 1,800 coalition soldiers — more than 1,100 of them Americans. More than 2,400 Afghan civilians were killed just last year.

If the competition over Afghanistan is rooted in a cocktail of issues, much of it revolves around the Taliban.

New Delhi's perceptions of modern Afghanistan have been molded by its memories of the 1996-2001 Taliban government, the fundamentalist Muslim regime which rose to power with Pakistan's help.

It was a time when New Delhi was openly despised in Kabul, when anti-India insurgents trained in Afghan camps and the hijackers of an Indian airliner were welcomed here as heroes. Even after the Taliban government fell, Pakistan's powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, retained links to the Taliban insurgency now battling the American-led forces and the Karzai government, in case the Taliban ever return to power.

But if there's one thing New Delhi does not want, it's another militant Islamic government in Kabul.

"We want the stabilization of Afghanistan because it is directly related to our security. Plain and simple," said Jayant Prasad, the Indian ambassador to Afghanistan, speaking inside his heavily guarded Kabul residence.

India has paid heavily for its Afghan involvement. The Indian Embassy was bombed in 2008 and again last year, leaving 75 people dead. Six Indians were killed by militants during the construction of an India-funded highway.

Two Kabul guest houses popular among Indians have been attacked. The last attack, in February, left at least six Indians dead and forced New Delhi to temporarily close its medical and teaching missions in Kabul. India blamed that attack on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the same group believed to be behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

India and the United States have both said the embassy attacks were carried out by militants allied to Pakistan's ISI.

The Pakistanis "are bringing the proxy war to Afghanistan and we are the targets," said Prasad.

It's an accusation that Pakistan angrily denies.

"India has always used Afghanistan against us," said Sadiq, the Pakistani ambassador.

Karzai has made little secret of his preference for India. The president, who was educated in India, has loudly welcomed New Delhi's assistance while rarely mentioning Pakistan's aid.

Other Afghan officials barely disguise their distrust of Pakistan.

Pakistan wants "a puppet state in Kabul, a subservient state," said Muradian, the foreign ministry adviser. "India wants a stable, pluralistic Afghanistan."

Certainly, India has shown it is willing to play diplomatic hardball.

Even India's allies say New Delhi has a large presence in Afghanistan from its foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW. At least one victim of the February guest house attack was an undercover RAW agent, a senior Afghan official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

According to Islamabad, many of those agents are providing support to separatist militants in Pakistan's Baluchistan province — an accusation New Delhi denies.

The reality remains murky. Pakistan keeps Baluchistan largely sealed off to outsiders. Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, say Indian intelligence is believed to be in contact with the Baluchi separatists, though it's unclear if they provide any support.

India also is keeping in reserve its longtime links to Afghan warlords, in case Afghanistan is again divided by violence.

For years, New Delhi supplied the leaders of the Northern Alliance, the collection of ethnic militias that battled the Taliban (and often one another), with food, intelligence and medical care. Later, after the Alliance helped the U.S. oust the Taliban in 2001, the warlords scattered into government and business — and sometimes into crime or exile.

But India remains in close contact with a range of the former militia leaders, according to people with close ties to New Delhi's foreign policy elite, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

New Delhi's biggest worry is that U.S. forces will withdraw from Afghanistan before Karzai's government is in full control of the country. An early withdrawal, India fears, could allow Islamabad and the Taliban militants to gain more power in Afghanistan and potentially even usher in another government hostile to New Delhi.

While a full American pullout appears unlikely anytime soon, U.S. military officials have angered New Delhi by talking about the possibility of allowing some Taliban to join the Afghan government.

India warns it could form a coalition with Iran — an alliance that would infuriate Washington — if the Taliban appear poised to return to power. The "self-interested coalition" could include Russia and several Central Asian states that would also fear a Taliban return, according to an Indian with knowledge of the diplomatic maneuvering.

For now, though, India's program to win Afghan hearts and minds is clearly working.

Take the three Indian doctors working in the dusty northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, dispensing prescriptions and performing surgeries in a faded colonial-era hospital that somehow survived the years of fighting.

Every morning, clusters of women in blue burqas gather in the narrow hallway outside the clinic, while men wait in the parking lot. They are the poorest people in one of the world's poorest countries: widows, the unemployed, the elderly. They measure the distance to the clinic by the cost of getting there — and a 10-cent bus ride is a painful investment.

About 150 arrive every day for free care and medicine.

An old man named Myagul — he has only one name, and didn't know his age — had been coughing badly, he said, and growing dizzy when he stood up. The doctors prescribed blood pressure medicine and cough syrup. He'd already been to a handful of doctors, but they had all asked for fees he couldn't afford.

But on a warm Afghan morning, the old man with the greasy beard and the torn blazer left the clinic clutching a handful of medicines, weary but pleased.

"Finally it was these Indians who helped."

Source: AP News

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Hundreds Killed as US Escalates Pakistan Strikes

Few Notable Militants Reported Killed

by Jason Ditz, April 25, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/25/hundreds-killed-as-us-escalates-pakistan-strikes/

After killing a record 700 civilians last year in at least 44 distinct drone strikes against Pakistan in 2009, the Obama Administration looks to be escalating the rate even further in 2010, to the point that drone strikes have become a decidedly ordinary occurrence.

Less than four months into the new year, the US has already launched 40 attacks and killed at least 268 people. The most recent strike yesteray in North Waziristan killed at least nine people.

The identities of the victims are never particularly easy to ascertain, but the number of named militants killed so far this year is trivial, as it was last year, when most of the “suspects” turned out to have no discernible relation to any militant faction.

Since taking office, President Obama has repeatedly escalated the drone strikes against the tribal areas, to the point where multiple attacks a week are a matter of course. With the normal winter lull seeing such a large number of strikes, a new record for killings seems all but assured again in 2010.

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Taliban Ousted, Pakistan's Swat Valley Still Longs for Islamic Justice

By RANIA ABOUZEID / MINGORA Rania Abouzeid / Mingora
Sun Apr 25, 6:50 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100425/wl_time/08599198406700
 
The U.S. and many of its allies, as well as a large number of Pakistanis, professed alarm in February 2009 when Pakistan's government ceded control of the judiciary in a strategic border region to the Taliban. But the locals appeared to be very happy. Television footage showed grinning men distributing sweets to celebrate the implementation of Nizam-e-Adl, the legal system based on Islamic Shari'a law. It had been a local demand that predated the Taliban's ascendency in the breathtakingly beautiful Swat Valley and its surrounding villages in the North-West Frontier Province. But the mood in the tribal territory once known as the "Switzerland of Pakistan" soon soured.


That's because Taliban justice often meant merciless public floggings for seemingly innocuous "transgressions," brutal beheadings, and corpses hanging for days in the main public squares of Swat's capital, Mingora, 80 miles north of Islamabad. That's not what the people of Swat believe is proper Shari'a practice at all. "The Taliban had their Nizam-e-Adl, and then there is the real Nizam-e-Adl," says Siraj Khan, a tribal elder from the former Taliban stronghold of Bara Bandai, some six miles from Mingora. "None of them were religious scholars, they weren't even educated. The real Islam is a good religion." (See the U.N. probe into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.)


The Pakistani military then expelled the Taliban in a fierce military offensive last summer. That meant the restoration of the writ of the central government, including its judicial system. But many locals and lawyers, while happy to see the back of the Taliban, still want to reinstate proper Nizam-e-Adl. Says Siraj Khan: "We want the quick justice given by Nizam-e-Adl." (See pictures from Pakistan's northwest.)


Quick is the operative word. It's not that what has been reinstated is un-Islamic: the country's constitution requires that all laws be consistent with Islam; and the Penal Code includes a number of Shari'a principles. But the central government's legal system, a mishmash of century-old British procedural law and Islamic principles, is slow-moving, expensive and corrupt. As one local puts it, even a small legal matter can drag through the courts for years: "You would die and your son would have to follow it up," he says.


Islamic justice has long been a demand of the people of the region, nostalgic for a time when judicial decisions supposedly came down fast. Before Swat became part of Pakistan in 1969, the area was a princely state ruled by a wali and governed by quick, inexpensive customary law, or rivaj, which was more or less like Shari'a. The introduction of the Pakistani common law was an unwelcome development, leading to popular discontent. In 1994, the Islamist militant Sufi Mohammad, sensing the growing anti-establishment sentiment in Swat, called for the imposition of Shari'a, a rallying cry widely backed in the district. Various governments in Islamabad promised but never truly delivered on the carving out of a Shari'a law enclave in Swat.


But why must Swat's judicial system be different from that used in the rest of Pakistan? Abdul Ghafoor, president of the Swat District Bar Association, says an exception has to be made in Swat for the sake of security. "At the moment the people are waiting for this Nizam-e-Adl," he says. "If this result is not satisfactory, then there is a possibility that those people, the Taliban, will come again. This is for sure." Justice Javed Nawaz Gandapur, a former judge in the Peshawar High Court, says that in the same way that the various U.S. states have their own laws, the people of Swat should be allowed their own system. "It's a matter of convenience," he says. "Swat traditionally had its own judicial system. It wasn't very complicated and it was easy for people to get their disputes settled. Our procedural system is absolutely rotten with its long delays."


The concern is that the longer it takes for the wheels of justice to turn, the more likely it is that the people of Swat will look for alternatives, delivered by either the Taliban or the anti-Taliban neighborhood militias known as lashkars. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said in its annual report released last month that lashkars in Swat and other areas in the northwest were engaging in extra-judicial killings, sometimes at the behest of the military, and that dozens of bodies have been dumped in mass graves across the Malakand area that encompasses Swat. Other corpses, it said, were hung upside down "with notes attached to the bodies warning that anyone supporting the Taliban will meet the same fate."

Half a dozen lashkar leaders from across Malakand were interviewed by TIME and all vigorously denied the allegations, claiming that any insurgent deaths occurred in self-defense. The military has also denied the claims. "Why should I carry out extra-judicial killings?" says Lieutenant Colonel Akhtar Abbas, military spokesman in Swat. "Yes, the people of Swat desired it, they wanted to see these people hang, but there is a judiciary doing its job."

The problem is, it's not moving fast enough for many, especially the families of suspected militants. Thousands are being held in indefinite detention, according to military and legal officials as well as Pakistani press reports. There are between "two to three thousand defendants," according to Ghafoor of the Swat bar association. It's a factor that can play in the Taliban's favor. Commissioner Fazal Karim Khattak, the administrative head of the provincial government in Swat and seven other nearby districts, acknowledges that the current judicial system is "not really appealing to the people" and that the promise of speedy Shari'a justice had been "the most attractive slogan for the people of Swat and [advocating it] helped the initiation of the [Taliban] movement."


The discontent stirred by the untried alleged militants may be a potential time bomb, but Lieut. Col. Abbas defends the delays in prosecuting them. "It is a matter of life and death," he says, "so it has to be slow." The government points out that it has appointed 16 new judges for the district, opened new courts and in less than a year, reduced the backlog of cases from 18,000 to about 5,000. It wants new criminal cases processed within four months and civil ones in six. It has also pledged to create a circuit bench of the High Court in Mingora so that petitioners no longer need to travel to Peshawar, some 200 miles away by road.


But all that may not be enough for many who simply don't want Pakistani common law in the district. The Swat District Bar Association has threatened to launch a protest campaign until the government fully honors its commitment to impose Nizam-e-Adl. "They should fulfill this promise now," says Ghafoor.


See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/time/wl_time/storytext/08599198406700/35938349/SIG=11v66se51/*http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1653255,00.html

See pictures of suicide bombs in Islamabad.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/time/wl_time/storytext/08599198406700/35938349/SIG=11vgqk4k2/*http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1931173,00.html

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Amid outrage over civilian deaths in Pakistan, CIA turns to smaller missiles

By Joby Warrick and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, April 26, 2010; A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/25/AR2010042503114_pf.html


The CIA is using new, smaller missiles and advanced surveillance techniques to minimize civilian casualties in its targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Pakistan's tribal areas, according to current and former officials in the United States and Pakistan.

The technological improvements have resulted in more accurate operations that have provoked relatively little public outrage, the officials said. Pakistan's government has tolerated the airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of suspected insurgents since early 2009, but that support has always been fragile and could quickly evaporate, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

The CIA declines to publicly discuss its clandestine operations in Pakistan, and a spokesman would not comment on the kinds of weapons the agency is using. But two counterterrorism officials said in interviews that evolving technology and tactics have kept the number of civilian deaths extremely low. The officials, along with other U.S. and Pakistani officials interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the drone campaign is both classified and controversial.

Last month, a small CIA missile, probably no bigger than a violin case and weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miram Shah, a town in the tribal province of South Waziristan. The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists.

The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighboring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports.

Urban strikes

The agency, using 100-pound Hellfire missiles fired from remotely controlled Predator aircraft, once targeted militants largely in rural settings, but lighter weapons and miniature spy drones have made killings in urban areas more feasible, officials said.

According to an internal CIA accounting described to The Washington Post, just over 20 civilians are known to have died in missile strikes since January 2009, in a 15-month period that witnessed more than 70 drone attacks that killed 400 suspected terrorists and insurgents. Agency officials said the CIA's figures are based on close surveillance of targeted sites both before and after the missiles hit.

Unofficial tallies based on local news reports are much higher. The New America Foundation puts the civilian death toll at 181 and reports a far higher number of alleged terrorists and insurgents killed -- more than 690.

The drone strikes have been controversial in Pakistan, where many view them as an infringement on national sovereignty. In the past the strikes have spawned protests, as well as angry denunciations in newspaper editorials and in speeches by opposition politicians.

The clamor over the strikes has died down considerably over the past year, however, and Pakistani officials acknowledge that improved accuracy is one of the reasons. Pakistani security officials say that better targeting technology, a deeper pool of spies in the tribal areas, and greater cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services have all led to strikes that cause fewer civilian deaths.

Still, the drone strikes are often cited by Pakistanis as a prime reason for their displeasure with U.S. policy in the region. Pakistan has repeatedly asked for its own armed drones so that it can carry out the strikes -- a move that could help the government with the perception that it has ceded authority to the United States. The United States has agreed to provide Pakistan with surveillance drones but has declined to arm them.

Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said the agency's accounting of the effects of the drone campaign can neither be confirmed nor refuted without greater access to the tribal areas for outsiders or independent scrutiny of CIA video of the strikes.

Driving perceptions

Officials say CIA targeteers are increasingly driven to avoid civilian deaths, in part to tamp down any political blowback from Pakistan and from U.S. and international human rights groups. Current and former officials point to the relative absence of complaints from local and regional leaders as evidence of the success of their efforts.

"Where are the photos of atrocities? Where are the protests?" asked one U.S. official who closely monitors the program. "After civilian deaths in Afghanistan, there are always press reports. Why don't you ever see that in Pakistan?"

Peter Warren Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, noted that while Americans use words such as "efficient" and "costless" to describe the campaign, some Pakistanis view it as war without honor.

"The civilian-casualties narrative is a misnomer; it's not a driver of perceptions," said Singer, the author of "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century." He said that in the tribal areas, the technology itself can be seen as evil because it is so alien.

The fear of collateral damage has led to what officials describe as a rigorous process for confirming the identity of terrorism suspects -- a process that includes what one U.S. official described as "advance visual observation" by operatives or surveillance drones. But new tools and weapons are equally important, the officials said.

"We're talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the CIA program is highly classified.

Today, several small missiles are available to the agency, including the 21-inch Small Smart Weapon, created by Lockheed Martin. Weighing 35 pounds and having roughly the diameter of a coffee cup, the Scorpion, as it is now called, was designed to be launched from the Predator. It causes far less destruction than a Hellfire, and it can be fitted with four different guidance systems that allow it to home in on targets as small as a single person, in complete darkness, according to U.S. officials familiar with the missile.

A Lockheed spokesman declined to say whether the CIA is currently using the Scorpion, which, according to a Lockheed brochure, is intended for "precision attack using a small, lethal warhead against targets in areas requiring low collateral damage." The agency is also using a variety of warheads for the Hellfire, one former senior intelligence official said. Among them is a small thermobaric warhead, which detonates a cocktail of explosive powders on impact to create a pressure wave that kills humans but leaves structures relatively intact. The wave reaches around corners and can penetrate the inner recesses of bunkers and caves, according to weapons experts.

The CIA's expanded arsenal also includes surveillance drones that carry no weapons, two former intelligence officials said. These "micro-UAVs" -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- can be roughly the size of a pizza platter and are capable of monitoring potential targets at close range, for hours or days at a stretch. At night, they can be nearly impossible to detect, said one former official who has worked with such aircraft.

"It can be outside your window and you won't hear a whisper," the official said.



Correspondent Griff Witte and staff writer Karen DeYoung in Islamabad and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

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South Asia
Apr 28, 2010 
 
Showdown looms in North Waziristan


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area on Tuesday issued a statement claiming that skirmishes had broken out early in the morning when the military tried to enter Miranshah, the tribal headquarters. There was no official confirmation.

The United States has placed Islamabad under intense pressure to launch an operation in North Waziristan, which it views as the command and control center of al-Qaeda and from where the powerful network of Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani is based for its operations in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has over the past year marched into several other tribal areas to take on militants, including Swat and South Waziristan, but at present a peace agreement is in place between Taliban-led militants in North Waziristan and the military.

However, al-Qaeda linked militants have informed Asia Times Online that a battle in North Waziristan is inevitable to avenge atrocities that the militants claim the military has inflicted on children in the tribal area. The incident took place last week in a brief clash between the army and militants.

The al-Qaeda linked militants are spoiling for a fight even though the chief of the Taliban in North Waziristan, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, has said that last week's contact would not affect the ceasefire.

The militants also want to head off any attempt by the government to create a split in their ranks. In one effort, Islamabad has put in motion an operation that includes a former Iraqi intelligence official who now works for the Saudis, former officials of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and a former Taliban commander who was once a member of parliament.

"It is not an issue of whether the Pakistan army wants a military operation or not. The issue is related to their capacity," Muhammad Umar, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan, told Asia Times Online in a telephone interview. Muhammad Umar is an alias for a non-Pashtun from Punjab province.

"They [the army] are already under siege in North Waziristan. Troops are sitting at checkpoints and cannot even fetch water for themselves from a nearby stream if the militants, positioned all around the mountains, open fire on them."

The situation in North Waziristan is clearly highly volatile as the militants are not united. Many, especially those allied with the predominately Pashtun Haqqani network, want to concentrate all of their efforts on Afghanistan, hence the peace accord with the army. Al-Qaeda-linked militants, including Punjabis, see the state as their enemy, in addition to the foreign forces across the border.
The recent abduction of influential powerbrokers highlights the problem.

On March 25, retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI official, traveled to North Waziristan to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani and Waliur Rahman Mehsud. He was accompanied by Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, also a former long-time ISI official and once Pakistan's consul-general in Herat in Afghanistan. Tarrar is nicknamed "Colonel Imam" by the mujahideen as he was instrumental in helping raise the Taliban militia.

The men have not been seen since and Punjabi militants calling themselves the "Asian Tigers" said they had seized the men. Subsequently, Asia Times Online received several video clips of Khawaja speaking. (See Confessions of a Pakistani spy Asia Times Online, April 24, 2010.)

The militants believe Khawaja was a part of a joint international operation trying to isolate the al-Qaeda-linked militants.

Asia Times Online has leaned that Khawaja and Colonel Imam wanted to hammer out a formula of peaceful coexistence between militants and the military in North Waziristan, and in the broader context to seek a way for the US to withdraw from the region in such a manner that the Taliban would have a role to play in Afghanistan and Pakistan would have a friendly government in Kabul.

The initiative was stopped in its tracks with the abduction of the peacebrokers and in the video clips Khawaja, most likely under duress, spoke out against Pakistan's military establishment.

The message between the lines from the militants is that the role of the Pakistan army in Afghan affairs through any Islamist or non-Islamist cadre is over; that is, the war is exclusively between the West and Muslim militants, and no "referee" is required.

Two sides of the story
Khawaja was retired from the air force in the late 1980s after he wrote a letter to the then-president, General Zia ul-Haq, in which he called him a hypocrite for not enforcing Islam in Pakistan. He then went to Afghanistan and fought alongside Osama bin Laden. He was a recruiter and trainer of Pakistani fighters for the resistance against the Soviets.

After his forced retirement, Khawaja was active in politics, from trying to stitch together an Islamic election alliance in 1988 against the Pakistan People's Party's government to the so-called Operation Khilafat, an alleged plot of some military officers and jihadis to stage an Islamic revolution in Pakistan in the mid-1990s.
Khawaja and former US Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey worked unsuccessfully after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US to prevent the invasion of Afghanistan.

Khawaja tricked a radical cleric into being arrested during the crackdown on the Taliban-sympathetic Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in the capital, Islamabad, in mid-2007. Yet he has been active in providing support to the families of members of al-Qaeda who have been arrested or killed. Earlier this year he filed a case that prevented captured Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar from being handed over to the Americans or the Afghan government.

Depending on the issue, Khawaja is clearly not afraid to act in the establishment's interests, or against them, and he is equally comfortable speaking to Americans or with the ISI.

Along with an American friend, Mansoor Ejaz, who was close to right-wing Republicans, Khawaja worked on a project for peace in South Asia. In this regard he gave a detailed interview to Asia Times Online to promote his theme that the international proxy war in the region should be stopped. (See The pawns who pay as powers play June 22, 2005.)

Before his ill-fated trip to North Waziristan, Khawaja spoke to Asia Times Online, saying that a few veterans of the Afghan jihad (against the Soviets) were now coming together.

"It would be premature to tell you the details, but I will soon give you a breaking story about a mechanism under which these suicide attacks in Pakistan will be stopped completely," Khawaja said. He also pointed to the involvement of a renowned Arab, Mehmud al-Samarai, earlier wanted by the Americans for financing militants in Iraq but now known to be helping Saudi Arabia's peace efforts in Afghanistan.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Umar gave his version of Khawaja's trip to North Waziristan.

"Khalid Khawaja, Colonel Imam and a [former] Iraqi intelligence agent [Mehmud al-Samarai] and Shah Abdul Aziz [a commander during the Taliban regime and a former member of parliament] visited North Waziristan about a month and a half ago. They were all old mujahids who fought against the Russians, therefore they were all treated with respect. However, everybody noticed their suspicious activities," Muhammad Umar told ATol.

"They met the chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan [Pakistani Taliban] Hakeemullah Mehsud, Mufti Waliur Rahman Mehsud [chief of the Taliban in South Waziristan] and the Khalifa Sahib [Sirajuddin Haqqani]. Khawaja brought with him a list of 14 commanders and he tried to convince Hakeemullah Mehsud and Waliur Rahman Mehsud that all those commanders, including Qari Zafar [a leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi] and others are Indian plants among the mujahideen and the Taliban should get rid of them. Both Hakeemullah and Waliur Rahman were tolerant of those allegations against their own commanders and they were silent. However, these people did some other things which made them suspicious," Umar said.

"They tried to convince Hakeemullah Mehsud and Waliur Rahman Mehsud to stop attacking the Pakistan army and discussed a mechanism to target NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] supply lines only. They offered to help Hakeemullah set up pockets in different parts of the country from where they could attack NATO supplies going to Afghanistan.

"Shah Abdul Aziz was then spotted asking people the names of the militants who [last December] attacked the Parade Lane Mosque in Rawalpindi [several army officers were massacred along with 17 of their children]. At the same time, the visiting group met with Khalifa Sahib and urged him to keep his connection with the army. They asked him what kind of weapons he required and they would arrange it for him," Umar said.

Umar said that during Khawaja's first visit, he used Mufti Mehsud's four-wheel drive vehicle. A few days after Khawaja and the others returned to Islamabad, the same vehicle was hit by a drone.

"You know that the Pakistan army aims to keep the Taliban divided as good and bad Taliban. The Afghan Taliban are good for them and the Pakistani Taliban are bad. We don't have such distinctions. If we get proof that a person has a connection with the ISI, whether he is bad or good, he is an enemy. As far as Khawaja is concerned, he confessed that he was sent by an ISI officer. We have reports that he frequently meets with the CIA and arranges meetings of other people with the CIA in return for money," Umar said.

"Khawaja and the others left North Waziristan with assurances that he would soon come back with a British journalist. We all compared notes and concluded that he had come with an agenda and he would come back again. As was expected, he came back and we caught him immediately. The journalist he brought with him also worked for the ISPR [Inter-Services Public Relations) for documentary-making projects. Therefore, they were all the Pakistan army's assets and our enemies and they will be dealt with according to their crimes. It has been decided," Umar said.

The Pakistan army, the Americans and the militants each have their own plans, and they are all at a critical juncture.

Pakistan's military anticipated that the US would be defeated in Afghanistan and therefore there was no need to wage all-out war in the Pakistani tribal areas. Rather, they wanted to keep operations at a level where hostilities would remain minimal and once the Americans left, Pakistan and the militants would restore their traditional strategic relations.

"That illusion went away under General Kiani's command," a senior US official told Asia Times Online in reference to Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani.

"The militants showed so much hostility that the military had to wage an all-out war against them. However, the situation in North Waziristan terrifies them [the army]. Sirajuddin Haqqani has a strong 4,000 armed militia [besides Hafiz Gul Bahadur's men, al-Qaeda, Uzbeks, Chechens and other militias]. The army thinks that if they launch an operation in North Waziristan, the militants will occupy South Waziristan again and the military will be unable to fight them," the official said.

However, the Americans aim to provide full support through their unmanned drones, which target militant leaders, as they have been doing for some while. The aim is to eliminate the major Taliban networks and support bases and then make preparations for a US withdrawal from the region.

However, as illustrated by the Khawaja case, sections of the militants are in no mood to talk, other than through the barrels of their guns.

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

 
 
 

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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
08:53 Mecca time, 05:53 GMT
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/04/201042833438404437.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Suicide blast hits Pakistan police  
 
 

 
A suicide bomber has attacked a security checkpoint in the northwest of Pakistan, killing at least four policemen and wounding another 12 people.

A religious leader and a woman were among those injured in Wednesday's attack.

The assailant drove a car into the checkpoint on the edge of the northwestern city of Peshawar, police said.

"The policemen were on their routine duty when the bomber driving the car from the tribal area detonated explosives near the checkpost," Najmul Hasan, a police official, told the Reuters news agency.

Liaquat Ali, a Peshawar city police chief, said that two of the wounded people were in a critical condiditon.

"The small building at the police checkpoint was destroyed. A nearby house and a mosque were also damaged," he said.

The northwestern region is at the forefront of Pakistan's battle against Taliban, al-Qaeda and other opposition groups who launch attacks from the tribal mountainous area both within Pakistan and bordering Afghanistan.

US drones - unmanned aircraft - also carry out missions against these fighters in the region.

The Pakistani military have increased attempts to gain control of the northwest over the last year, launching major offensives and killing hundreds of opposition fighters.

But opposition groups have continued to function, carrying out about 50 bomb attacks in the last year, killing about 500 people.
 
 

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April 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/world/asia/28contractor.html?hp

U.S. Begins Inquiry on Spy Network in Pakistan



By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has opened an inquiry into whether a top Defense Department official violated Pentagon rules by setting up a network of private contractors to gather intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that Mr. Gates was also demanding greater oversight over the millions of dollars the Defense Department spent annually to carry out “information operations,” to ensure that such missions did not “stray off course” into secret intelligence collection.

At the center of the Pentagon inquiry is Michael D. Furlong, a civilian official working for the Air Force who last year used a web of private contractors to clandestinely gather intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to current and former government officials, some of that information was turned over to Special Operations troops to help fight militants.

Some American officials think that Mr. Furlong may have financed the secret network by improperly diverting money from an overt program to gather information about the tribal structures and political dynamics in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon’s inspector general is already conducting a criminal investigation into the matter. One focus of that investigation is whether Mr. Furlong engaged in contract fraud by channeling contracts to International Media Ventures, a media technology firm that American officials say Mr. Furlong used in the intelligence-gathering effort.

But even if no laws were broken, officials said, the inquiry announced on Tuesday will more clearly define the Pentagon’s boundaries in intelligence operations, and determine whether Mr. Furlong’s outsourcing of intelligence collection violated Pentagon rules.

The inquiry will be led by Mr. Gates’s senior aide in charge of intelligence oversight.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that a Pentagon team set up to do a quick study of Defense Department information operations — the area of warfare where information is used to achieve military ends — had found that the programs were well managed and had unearthed no evidence of operations similar to the one set up by Mr. Furlong.

“There do not seem to be any other alleged rogue information operations under way,” he said.

Since The New York Times last month revealed details about his contractor network, Mr. Furlong has given only one interview, telling a newspaper in San Antonio that all of his actions had been approved by senior military officials. He did not provide the names of these officials.

One of the contractors Mr. Furlong hired, officials said, was Duane Clarridge, a former C.I.A. officer whose history includes an indictment and subsequent presidential pardon for his role in the Iran-contra scandal.

Mr. Morrell said that despite the investigations into the Furlong case, Mr. Gates thought that information operations remained an essential tool for the military to carry out its strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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What have Pakistan offensives achieved?



A year ago Pakistan launched the first of a series of major military assaults against the Taliban in the country's north-west. The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan looks back at the anti-militant operations and how successful they have been.

On 26 April 2009, Pakistan army commandos stormed into Buner district in the North West Frontier Province.

The Pakistani authorities had been under growing pressure to take action after the Taliban took control of the district.

Under their leader, Maulana Fazlullah, the local Taliban had been expanding their power from Swat Valley, once a popular tourist area, to other parts of the region since 2007.

After the move into Buner, Pakistan's army declared all-out war.

Black Thunderstorm - as the Buner operation was called - was soon expanded into a fully-fledged military offensive.



Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told the nation the militants had two choices - surrender or die.

Over the next two months the operation widened out from Buner to nearby Swat and other parts of Malakand division.

More than two million people fled the fighting in Swat.

By August they were told it was safe to come back and the operation was declared a success.

But Maulana Fazlullah was never captured and the militants, despite being on the back foot, continued to maintain their strongholds in the tribal areas in other parts of north-west Pakistan.

For the reinvigorated military, these were the next targets - especially South Waziristan, the heartland of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Humanitarian cost

Operation Path to Salvation was finally launched in South Waziristan on 17 October 2009. The army deployed 35,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and aircraft.


FORCES IN WAZIRISTAN

Pakistan army: Two divisions totalling 28,000 soldiers
Frontier Corp: Paramilitary forces from tribal areas likely to support army
Taliban militants: Estimated between 10,000 and 20,000
Uzbek fighters supporting militants: several hundred

Before the operation began the militants suffered a big blow - their top leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US missile attack in August 2009.

Even without him, the Taliban initially made it very tough going for the army, but superior troop numbers and firepower took their toll.

On 12 December, the military claimed victory over the Taliban in South Waziristan and said the militants were now neutralised as a viable threat in Pakistan.

The militants' power had been amply demonstrated in a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks around the country which left hundreds dead in a matter of weeks. Attacks have continued in 2010 but not at the same rate.

There was also a huge humanitiarian cost to the fighting in the north-west.

As well as the millions of people displaced, thousands of homes, businesses, schools and offices were also destroyed.

Civilian authority and infrastructure were ruined. On the ground there is little evidence the billions of dollars in aid received by the government have been put to good use.

There have been allegations of official corruption, although no firm proof. But certainly money has been mismanaged.

Schools in Swat are one example. According to official figures, 700 were destroyed and have yet to be rebuilt.


Many people displaced by the fighting returned - only to find rubble where their homes and businesses once existed.

"The people can never forsake the region," says a local journalist in Swat, now based in Islamabad. "While many have returned, thousands are still unsure about home."

But fear of the Taliban is also keeping people away.

"The army has enforced peace here through the barrels of their guns," says a local from Mingora. "But we know they will eventually leave and then the Taliban may come back."

Militants 'down but not out'

At the moment, the militants remain a real but distant fear in Swat - but not elsewhere.

"The army's operations have dented the militants' ability to carry out attacks within Pakistan. But the Taliban leadership and most of the local militants have simply relocated," one observer says.


New Taliban strongholds have emerged in North Waziristan, which is now the focus of a sustained bombing campaign by US drones.

Pakistan's army has resisted US pressure to extend its assault into North Waziristan, largely due to a deal with local Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.

His group is not part of the Tehrik-e-Taliban organisation which has carried out attacks across Pakistan. Instead, its fighters are said to carry out strikes against Nato forces over the border in Afghanistan.

In Bajaur, another tribal region, the army's stop-start operation against the militants has continued. Troops have claimed victory several times, but the militants have returned. Fighting has also been fierce recently in Orakzai.

The army remains in control of the Mehsud tribal heartland in South Waziristan, but few locals have dared to return. The Taliban continue to exact terrible vengeance on anyone who dares side with the government.

Beheaded bodies regularly turn up in North and South Waziristan, with notes identifying them as "ISI" or "CIA" spies.

More ominously, though, the killings are now slowly spreading to places like Peshawar and Swat. The military are also accused of extra-judicial killings.

"The Taliban may be down, but they are far from out," says the Islamabad-based Swat journalist. "The fact that the army has said 'no' to any new operations has come as a shot in their arm.

"All they have to do is lie low for the next six months".

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8647210.stm

Published: 2010/04/27 15:51:12 GMT

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Pakistani officials: Taliban's Mehsud alive despite death reports

By Reza Sayah, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

-Hakimullah Mehsud spotted in North Waziristan, senior military official says
-Report contradicts recent reports Pakistani Taliban leader was killed in drone strike
-North Waziristan is one of seven districts in Pakistan's tribal region along Afghan border

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is alive and was recently seen in Pakistan's tribal region, officials said Thursday contradicting recent reports he was killed in a drone strike.

A Pakistan intelligence official and a senior military official told CNN that Mehsud survived the aerial strike in January.

He has been spotted in North Waziristan, one of seven districts in Pakistan's tribal region along the Afghan border, the military official said.

In February, a U.S. intelligence official and three Taliban sources told CNN that Mehsud had been killed in the January drone strike. But the spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Azam Tariq, had always denied reports of Mehsud's death.

The officials asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

Taliban leaders have denied leaders' deaths in the past. Tariq always maintained that Mehsud was alive, but never provided any proof. When former Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a U.S. drone strike last year, cell phone video of his body was aired on Pakistani TV.

However, the militants never changed their stance that Hakimullah Mehsud had survived, though they would not let reporters interview him. TheTaliban never named his successor, fueling rumors that he was still alive.

Hakimullah Mehsud got Washington's attention when he appeared in a video with Humam Al Balawi, the Jordanian doctor turned suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents in eastern Afghanistan in December last year.

Journalist Nasir Dawar contributed to this report.
 

 
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/04/29/pakistan.mehsud/index.html?hpt=T2 
 

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South Asia
Apr 30, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LD30Df01.html 
 
AN ATOL EXCLUSIVE

How Iran and al-Qaeda made a deal


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - On March 30, Heshmatollah Attarzadeh, the commercial attache at the Iranian consulate in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, was "recovered from outside Iran and returned to Iran" after being abducted by militants on November 13, 2008.

In a terse statement, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry announced that Attarzadeh had been freed after a "complicated intelligence operation" by Iranian intelligence forces, without giving further details, apart from a dig at Pakistan: "Following the failure of the Pakistani government to secure the release of Attarzadeh, my ministry took the initiative and managed to rescue the diplomat," Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi said.

Attarzadeh, 59, was more outspoken. In an interview with the Iranian state-owned Press TV, he said Israel's Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, under orders from the US, were behind his abduction.

Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, after a meeting with Attarzadeh, did not comment on these claims, instead taking time for a little back-patting. "The freedom of the diplomat shows the all-out might of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its all-around dominance in the realm of intelligence," Rahimi was quoted by the semi-official Fars News Agency as saying.

Investigations by Asia Times Online show that while the Iranians did indeed secure Attarzadeh's release, it came at a price: a deal with al-Qaeda that resulted in the release of high-profile prisoners from Iranian custody. And in the negotiating process, Iran supplied weapons to a top Taliban commander allied with al-Qaeda.

The mean streets of Peshawar

At about 7.30 on the morning of November 13, 2008, Attarzadeh was in the Hayatabad neighborhood on his way to the Iranian consulate in Peshawar, where he had worked for the previous three years. Peshawar is the freewheeling capital of North-West Frontier Province, which was recently renamed Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa to reflect its dominant ethnic Pashtun population.

Attarzadeh's car was intercepted by two other cars and in a hail of gunfire forced to stop. Attarzadeh was seized by at least two armed men, bundled into one of the vehicles and taken to the South Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, home of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP- Pakistani Taliban). Attarzadeh's bodyguard, a Pakistani police officer, was shot dead in the initial exchange of gunfire.

The incident made international headlines and Iran's Foreign Ministry called it an "act of terrorism". A day before Attarzadeh's abduction an American aid worker had been shot and killed outside the Iranian consulate in Peshawar.

Typically in such abductions, a ransom demand quickly follows. In this case there was only silence.

An Iranian diplomat in the Pakistani southern port city of Karachi told Asia Times Online in early 2009 that the Iranian government was prepared to pay any amount of ransom or listen to any demands, but there had not been a word from the captors.

Alarm bells began to ring. Attarzadeh had been clearly targeted in a well-planned abduction; something bigger than ransom was at stake.

Tehran set about trying to get back its man, starting with official Pakistani channels, including appeals to the Foreign Office and the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence. Nothing happened. The Iranians then turned to Afghan contacts in Zabul province, who in turn used their tribal connections to make contact with top Taliban commander Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of veteran mujahid Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Sirajuddin is headquartered in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area and his network spreads through the Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Ghazni and Wardak, in addition to the capital, Kabul. The Haqqani network has strong ties with al-Qaeda commanders as well as with Punjabi fighters. It is considered the strongest and the most effective resistance network against foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Taliban and al-Qaeda become involved

Iran requested Sirajuddin to use his influence to secure the release of Attarzadeh. According to people familiar with the Haqqani network who spoke to Asia Times Online, this happened in mid-2009. Sirajuddin said he would look into the case, and in return some of his men visited Iran.

Sirajuddin wasted no time and made contact with members of the al-Qaeda-linked TTP who were holding Attarzadeh. The captors arranged for the diplomat to talk by telephone with his family in Iran. Ostensibly, the call was to inform Attarzadeh that an in-law of his had died, possibly his mother-in-law.

This was the beginning of a better relationship between Tehran and the militants, who, in Iran's eyes, were tarred with the same brush as al-Qaeda. Shi'ite-majority Iran had been deeply upset by al-Qaeda's Jordanian militant, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who until his death in 2006 had conducted a vicious campaign against Shi'ites and the shrines of revered descendants of the Prophet Mohammad in Iraq.

Al-Qaeda now stepped directly into the picture. It requested that in return for Attarzadeh being allowed to speak with his family, al-Qaeda should be allowed to speak to some of its members who had been apprehended in Iran in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

A senior al-Qaeda-linked militant told Asia Times Online on the telephone, "Iran had not put them in jail. Instead, the al-Qaeda members and their families were placed in different houses. Later, they were brought together in a compound with comfortable private housing. Sirajuddin Haqqani's men visited them and reported back to al-Qaeda that they were in good condition."

Some of these "captives" in Iran were then given access to telephones to speak with al-Qaeda's shura (council) members in North Waziristan, the militant said. "This relationship developed very patiently. Video footage of the Iranian diplomat was sent to his family to show that he was in good condition."

The atmosphere continued to improve, and by the end of 2009 it was time to get down to the real business.

Al-Qaeda opened with a demand for the release of all of its members being held in Iran in return for Attarzadeh. Tehran would not agree with this. Negotiations along this line went back and forth.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, meanwhile, had seen an opportunity.

Deals emerge

Sirajuddin assured the Iranians that the Taliban bore no grudge against Iran or Shi'ites - their only aim was to defeat the Western coalition in Afghanistan. He wrote a detailed letter to Tehran in which he spelled out that neither his father (Jalaluddin) nor himself had ever been involved in anti-Iran activities. He said that they only worked for the resistance against anti-Islam forces, whether it be those of the Soviet Union or the US.

Iran has historic reasons to be wary of the Taliban. The Hazara, a predominately Shi'ite, Persian-speaking ethnic minority in Afghanistan, suffered extensive persecution under Taliban rule in the late 1990s. Taliban forces also killed at least eight Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan in the same period.

Sirajuddin's overtures worked. "The result of this communication was the delivery of several dozen sophisticated anti-aircraft guns, which shocked the Americans," the al-Qaeda-linked militant told Asia Times Online.

This was the prize Sirajuddin was after, the weapons to fight the curse of the militants in the tribal areas - drones, the US's unmanned aerial vehicles that rain missiles onto suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. Scores of top leaders have been killed in such raids over the past year.

On January 24, near Hamzoni village in North Waziristan, a drone went down. Pakistani and US intelligence confirmed the incident but would not say whether the drone had crashed or been shot down.

The militants had no doubt, claiming that their new Iranian-supplied weapons were responsible. There were other reports of drones going down in North Waziristan. The US temporarily suspended drone attacks, without saying why.

Militant sources say that the US Central Intelligence Agency then sprung into action and after a week-long probe traced the anti-aircraft guns to Dand-e-Darpa Khel in North Waziristan. Their positions were pinpointed, and in February a string of drone attacks destroyed them all. Mohammad Haqqani, a brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, was killed in one of the attacks.

The militant source claims that Sirajuddin recently received a fresh batch of weapons from Iran. The weapons, though, were something of a sideshow that developed out of Attarzadeh's abduction.

By this time Iran and al-Qaeda had finally come to an agreement: Attarzadeh would be exchanged for some al-Qaeda members, as well as one of Osama bin Laden's daughters.

"Al-Qaeda and Iran agreed to swap Osama bin Laden's daughter Iman, and some other prisoners were also released," the militant said. He refused to give details of the "other" prisoners.

On March 22, Iman bin Laden, 18, was allowed to travel to Syria after spending 112 days living in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran after escaping house arrest in a family compound. She joined her mother, Najwa bin Laden, in Syria.

Dozens of bin Laden's family members have been held in Iran since fleeing from Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in 2001. They were held for entering the country illegally and for not having proper travel documents.

While the militant would not give details of which al-Qaeda members were exchanged, a former director of a European intelligence agency who now works for an American strategic think-tank told Asia Times Online that one of them was most likely the high profile al-Qaeda leader, Saiful Adil, who has been involved in a number of al-Qaeda terror plots.

"Iranians posing as a security agency initially conducted an operation in the Pakistani tribal areas and in Afghanistan to secure the release of their diplomat, but it was a long haul," the former intelligence official said.

"During the process [of negotiation], the sides developed a rapport and Iman bin Laden was released as a gesture of goodwill and then prisoners were swapped. It still needs to be verified [officially] that the Iran diplomat was released by al-Qaeda and that Saiful Adil was released by the Iranian government," the official said.

New forces

While Iran, al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network have all benefited from the Attarzadeh saga, their cooperation has alarmed others.

"Saudi Arabia was the first country to show its concern over the growth of this new relationship," a senior Pakistani counter-terrorism official told Asia Times Online. "The second one was Egypt. Both countries separately approached Pakistan and there have been several interactions between Saudi intelligence agencies and Pakistani intelligence agencies to trace the roots and dimension of these relations."

“The Saudis and Egyptians have their eyes on the nexus in the Pakistani tribal areas as well as on the situation in Yemen, from where there could be a direct spillover into Saudi Arabia and then onto Egypt," the official said.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) regrouped in January 2009 through a merger between two regional offshoots of al-Qaeda in neighboring countries Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Led by a former aide to bin Laden, AQAP has vowed to attack oil facilities, foreigners and security forces in an effort to topple the Saudi monarchy and Yemeni government, and establish an Islamic caliphate.

Iran has proxies in Yemen among the minority Shi'ite population and if the two factors - the Shi'ites and AQAP - develop ties, it would be a big blow for Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, the Pakistani official said.

"If Saiful Adil has been exchanged, Pakistan is not aware of this, it would be bad news for the Western world as it would mean a revival in al-Qaeda's international operations," the official said. He explained that Saiful Adil could possibly coordinate activities with Iran, as captured al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida did in the past with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The deals made to have Attarzadeh released after his abduction in Peshawar may prove to be more far-reaching than ever imagined.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He is writing an exclusive account of al-Qaeda's strategy and ideology in an upcoming book 9/11 and beyond: The One Thousand and One Night Tales of al-Qaeda. He can be reached atsaleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
 
 
 

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US Again Fails to Kill Pakistani Taliban Leader

Hakimullah 'Basically OK' Reports ISI

by Jason Ditz, April 28, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/28/report-hakimullah-mehsud-still-basically-ok/


For most people, one time being killed by the United States is plenty. Even the most hardened insurgent can rarely claim to have been killed more than a couple of times before it takes on an air of permanence. But Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has them all beat with the apparent confirmation of his latest survival, his seventh overall


 
Hakimullah Mehsud

According to a senior member of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency Hakimullah, who was “confirmed” killed in January and then assumed to be gravely wounded, and who was “confirmed” the have died of his injuries in February, is alive and “basically ok.”

Hakimullah has not been seen publicly since a late February video was released, though with the Pakistani military attacking the TTP in several agencies across the tribal areas and with so many threats against his life it is perhaps unsurprising that he is keeping a low profile.

Hakimullah took power of the TTP in August after the US successfully assassinated his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, in an air strike. Baitullah’s death was initially thought to be a serious blow to the group but the aggressive and charismatic Hakimullah has made the group arguably far more dangerous, launching several major attacks and orchestrating the bombing of a CIA base in neighboring Afghanistan.

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Pentagon sees Pakistan shift, downplays Afghan impact

WASHINGTON
Thu Apr 29, 2010 12:26am BST
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE63R6ES20100428

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pakistan has shifted 100,000 of its troops from its Indian frontier to spearhead an unprecedented crackdown on militants along the Afghan border, but the offensives are unlikely to have an immediate impact on the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.

In a report to Congress released on Wednesday, the Pentagon estimated that about 140,000 Pakistani troops were taking part in offensives against militants in the semi-autonomous tribal regions, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, and the Northwest Frontier Province, near Afghanistan.

The Pentagon, which had long pressed the Pakistanis to take on Taliban and al Qaeda leaders on their territory, said the recent military deployments were the biggest in the country's history on the western border.

To carry it out, Pakistan has shifted more than 100,000 troops from the eastern border with India, according to the report. "This unprecedented deployment and thinning of the lines against India indicates that Islamabad has acknowledged its domestic insurgent threat," the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon issued the report one day before the prime ministers of India and Pakistan are due to hold their first meeting in nine months. Washington has sought to improve frayed ties between the South Asian rivals, who have fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947.

In the report, the Pentagon said Pakistani military operations in the FATA and the Waziristans have had an impact across the border, placing a "high degree of pressure on enemy forces and reduced insurgent safe haven" in eastern Afghanistan.

Recent arrests by Pakistan of Afghan Taliban leaders, including the group's No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, have "increased insurgent leaders' concern over the security of their safe havens" and created "financial and logistical" problems, it said.

A senior U.S. defence official said the arrests in Pakistan had produced "a lot of concerned chatter" among Taliban sympathizers in Afghanistan, but added, "I've not seen anything to indicate ... that there is a leadership crisis in the Taliban."

The Pentagon said Islamabad's crackdown had thus far "focussed almost exclusively on internal threats."

"While this evolving approach is unlikely to have significant impact on the Afghan insurgency in the short term, it offers opportunities in coming months to have a greater impact on the conflict in Afghanistan depending on how PAKMIL (Pakistani military) operations evolve," the report said.

(Reporting by Adam Entous and Phil Stewart; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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U.S., Pakistan bolster joint efforts, treading delicately

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 29, 2010; A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/28/AR2010042805580_pf.html


The scheduled arrival of 50 additional U.S. military personnel to Pakistan in June, accompanying four new F-16 fighter jets, will increase the official number of American boots on the ground there by 25 percent. It is enough to make the Pakistani government shudder with trepidation.

Exaggerated tales of U.S. soldiers and spies flooding the country are regular front-page fare in Pakistan, and cause for strident political criticism of Western intervention that sometimes erupts into violence. Pakistan's military and intelligence services remain highly suspicious about the motives and methods of their U.S. counterparts, a wariness mirrored in American attitudes toward Pakistan.

But a strategic decision by both sides to improve counterterrorism cooperation, along with the personnel requirements of increased U.S. aid, have led in recent months to a small but significant expansion in the U.S. presence in Pakistan.

There are currently about 200 U.S. military involved in security assistance in Pakistan, including a Special Operations training and advisory contingent, initially set at 80 troops, that has twice been enlarged since last year and now totals up to 140 troops in two Pakistani locations, according to senior U.S. military officials. The Pakistani government prohibits U.S. combat forces.

The CIA has sent additional intelligence-gathering operatives and technicians in recent months. Plans are underway to establish a joint military intelligence processing center. After an initial period of tension, Pakistani officers are using cross-border intelligence compiled at two joint coordination centers on the Afghan side of the frontier.

Although news media and the public continue to criticize the CIA's drone-fired missile attacks targeting insurgent figures in western Pakistan, intelligence cooperation in directing the missiles has improved, according to Pakistani officials who say U.S. operatives have gotten better on coordinating such activities to prevent conflicts with Pakistan's own air operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, along the Afghan border.

Under agreements connected to Pakistan's purchase of 18 F-16s scheduled for staggered delivery this year, a U.S. military team must be on hand to ensure that sophisticated, top-of-the-line avionics, weapons and data systems aboard the aircraft remain secure. The planes, which for the first time will allow Pakistan to conduct nighttime air operations, are far more advanced than the 30-year-old U.S. aircraft that are the current air force mainstay.

They will be housed at Shahbaz air base in south-central Pakistan, one of three bases where Pakistan allowed limited U.S. use for several years after the 2001 beginning of the war in Afghanistan. Far from advertising the arrival of a new contingent of Americans at Shahbaz, the Pakistani military is building a cloistered facility to house them amid some 5,000 of its own troops that will occupy the newly expanded base. Pakistani and U.S. military and intelligence officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so on the record.

"Certainly, this is a delicate area," a Pakistani military official said of the American presence. Both Pakistani and U.S. officials expressed concern about how the previously unpublished news of the team's deployment would be played in the Pakistani press, and emphasized that the U.S. personnel would have no operational role.

"For someone against the United States, it is not all that easy to make him like the U.S. overnight," Nawabzada Malik Ahmad Khan, Pakistan's minister of state for foreign affairs, said in an interview.

Progress in bilateral relations culminated with last month's meeting between senior Pakistani cabinet and military officials in Washington. Although it did not eliminate problems and mistrust, it does appear to have achieved a new degree of mutual candor and tolerance.

During a recent PowerPoint briefing in Islamabad, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, ISI, provided a comprehensive list of U.S. complaints about them.

The Obama administration, a senior ISI official said, remains "suspicious of ISI linkages with the Afghan Taliban," thinks that the ISI is indifferent to the threat posed by al-Qaeda and that it promotes anti-American diatribes in the Pakistani media. The United States, the official said, sees Pakistan as incapable of guaranteeing the security of its nuclear arsenal, irrationally obsessed with the threat from India and generally not serious about either democracy or fighting terrorists, he said.

The Pakistanis plead guilty as charged to some of the U.S. concerns. Al-Qaeda -- whose presence in its territory is officially disputed by Pakistan -- is not seen as a domestic threat. Links with the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are long-standing and considered a strategic necessity to protect Pakistan's western flank. Should the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan or allow Afghan President Hamid Karzai to reconcile with insurgent leaders without input from Islamabad, Pakistan believes it would need allies among the Pashtun tribes there to maintain its influence and protect its western flank from Indian inroads.

"They don't believe we don't know what Karzai is doing," a State Department official involved in Pakistan policy said. "They're afraid that we're going to cut a peace deal without them. We've told them that as soon as we know, they'll know."

A separate ISI PowerPoint slide listed Pakistan's complaints with the United States: unfounded nuclear concerns, not enough assistance, unrealistic accounting and audit demands on aid funding, and "insisting on actions that Pakistan views as inconsistent with its own concerns."

The Obama administration has additional complaints. The slow issuance of visas for additional U.S. personnel remains a sore point, along with harassment of U.S. military and civilian officials at military and police checkpoints.

But it has quieted its public criticism of Pakistan, hailing military successes against the Pakistani Taliban and easing up on pressure to do more. "We can be taken to task for giving too much advice" in the past, a senior U.S. military official said.

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April 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30pstan.html?hp


Pakistan, in Shift, Weighs Attack on Militant Lair

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, CARLOTTA GALL and ISMAIL KHAN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistani military, long reluctant to heed American urging that it attack Pakistani militant groups in their main base in North Waziristan, is coming around to the idea that it must do so, in its own interests.

Western officials have long believed that North Waziristan is the single most important haven for militants with Al Qaeda and the Taliban fighting American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan has nurtured militant groups in the area for years in order to exert influence beyond its borders.

The developing shift in thinking — described in recent interviews with Western diplomats and Pakistani security officials — represents a significant change for Pakistan’s military, which has moved against Taliban militants who attack the Pakistani state, but largely left those fighting in Afghanistan alone.

That distinction is becoming harder to maintain, Pakistani and Western officials say, as the area becomes an alphabet soup of dangerous militant groups that have joined forces to extend their reach deeper inside Pakistan.

“This is a scary phenomenon,” one Western diplomat said. “All these groups are beginning to morph together.”

The consensus is gathering against a background of improved United States-Pakistan relations. The Obama administration’s efforts with Pakistan are beginning to bear fruit, officials said, while the countries’ armies have begun working together more closely, particularly since Pakistan stepped up its military efforts, according to a Pentagon report to Congress released this week.

Even so, any operation in North Waziristan by Pakistan’s badly stretched military would still be months away, Pakistani and Western officials said. And even if it is undertaken, the offensive may not completely sever Pakistan’s relationship with the militants, like Sirajuddin Haqqani, who serve its interests in Afghanistan.

The area has long been a sanctuary for Mr. Haqqani, a longtime asset of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services who is also one of the most dangerous figures in the insurgency against American forces.

In recent months, however, it has also become home to Hakimullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy No. 1, who is now believed to have survived an American drone strike in January, according to the Western diplomat and Pakistani intelligence officials.

He and his supporters fled a Pakistani military operation in South Waziristan that began last October. Though Pakistan’s military said the operation was completed last month, its soldiers are still dying there in rising numbers, as Mr. Mehsud and his forces strike at them from their new base. In recent weeks, at least 19 soldiers have been killed in areas where the military had all but claimed victory.

To make matters worse, families who left during the operation are reluctant to return to their homes, saying they are afraid of vengeful leaders still at large.

“They know a lot of these guys have fled to North Waziristan,” said a Western diplomat in Islamabad. “That’s patently obvious. And sooner or later,” the diplomat continued, “they’re going to have to go in there.”

In a separate interview, a senior Pakistani official concurred. “The source of the problem is in North Waziristan, and it will have to be addressed,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because he was not allowed to speak publicly.

The growing consensus on North Waziristan comes after a year in which the Pakistani military has opened several fronts against the Taliban in Pakistan, beginning with a campaign in the Swat Valley last spring.

The fighting has cost Pakistan about 2,700 soldiers since 2001, nearly triple the total number of Americans killed in Afghanistan in the same period.

Militants struck back, hitting the military’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, a mosque where military families prayed, and the offices of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in three cities. The number of Pakistani civilians killed last year in Taliban attacks exceeded civilian deaths even in Afghanistan, helping shift public opinion against the militants.

“I think it has become very dramatic that these people are out after them,” the diplomat said.

The fighting — coupled with intense American drone strikes in the western tribal region — has splintered the militant groups, which are now a poisonous mix of Pashtun tribesmen, Arabs, Uzbeks and ethnic Punjabis, known for their brutality against Shiites and their close links to Al Qaeda.

The fracturing is so profound that one Pakistani government official in the tribal region said that the Pakistani Taliban now consisted of several parts operating independently, and that the groups “do not necessarily take orders from Hakimullah Mehsud.” But the widening military campaign has also given them common cause. Operations by the militants have become more fluid. “All these groups are helping each other out and selling their services to the highest bidder,” the diplomat said.

Pakistani officials recognize that the evolving nature of the militants has made them more dangerous — and made the necessity of going after them in North Waziristan increasingly unavoidable. “Their nexus with the Punjabi Taliban have given them greater reach,” a Pakistani law enforcement official said.

But even as there is a growing consensus that North Waziristan is now the source of the problem, there is a continuing debate in the military over when and how to tackle it. Publicly the Pakistani military is saying that it is already fighting on several fronts, and that it does not have the resources to push into North Waziristan for at least several months. Western officials say they believe that the Pakistani military is doing as much as it can under the circumstances.

There is also an understanding that opening a new front in North Waziristan — with its tangle of tribes, Qaeda militants, antistate groups and Haqqani supporters, thought to be in the thousands — will be a formidable task. “To go after Haqqani, it takes a very sizable military operation,” the diplomat said.

But some officials say an operation could come sooner, not least because officers on the ground are calling for it. More frequent attacks emanating from North Waziristan “are likely to lead to a reaction sooner rather than later as field commanders feel the pressure to protect their troops,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia program at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Others argue that Pakistan should wait and see how the American-led military offensive in southern Afghanistan plays out this summer. One senior military officer who favors Pakistani military action sooner derisively called that option “sitzkrieg,” Mr. Nawaz said.

Whatever the case, the military would most likely avoid a frontal invasion, some officials suggested, and instead bolster the forces it already maintains in the area, about 10,000 soldiers. Pakistani forces in North Waziristan, which include the paramilitary Frontier Corps, are mostly confined to their barracks.

Despite the prospect of a shift on North Waziristan, there is no apparent change in Pakistan’s attitude toward the leadership council of the Afghan Taliban, which manages the insurgency from in and around the city of Quetta, in southwest Pakistan, several diplomats said.

The Afghan Taliban, under Mullah Muhammad Omar, remains Pakistan’s main tool for leverage in Afghanistan. The arrest of the Taliban’s top operational commander, Abdul Ghani Baradar, in January has not led to a broader crackdown against the Afghan insurgents. “Does it indicate a shift in policy?” the Western diplomat said, referring to the arrest of Mr. Baradar. “No. But it’s still a good thing.”


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

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State Department Flies Mercenary Air Force Over Pakistan

By Nathan Hodge  April 30, 2010 
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/state-department-flies-mercenary-air-force-over-pakistan/

The airspace along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is pretty crowded these days: Along with U.S., Afghan and Pakistani military missions, the CIA is running its own covert drone ops. Less well known, but perhaps equally controversial, is the State Department’s counter-narcotics air force, staffed by mercenaries.

A recently released State Department Inspector General report, however, gave an unusually detailed look at the size and scope of these operations. The report fills in more details about America’s growing and undeclared war in Pakistan.

The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (known by the abbreviation INL) operates an air wing of around 14 aircraft in Afghanistan and another 17 in Pakistan. The aircraft help monitor the border, fly crop-eradication and interdiction missions, and move equipment and personnel around the region.

These kinds of missions aren’t new: The State Department has similar Air Wing programs in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru. Perhaps more importantly, the State Department has outsourced much of this mission. The INL’s air wing in Afghanistan and Pakistan is operated by private military company DynCorp, and the presence of U.S. contractors in Pakistan has proven extremely controversial (the released IG report, not surprisingly, was originally marked “sensitive but unclassified”).

For instance, when it was disclosed earlier this month that the U.S. government was seeking land for an aircraft maintenance base DynCorp, the Pakistani press had a field day. Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik had repeatedly denied the presence of U.S. private security contractors on Pakistani soil, but here was the U.S. government, asking for a maintenance base for its contracted air wing. “This is worth recalling here that Interior Minister Rehman Malik had told the National Assembly in February this year, ‘Neither Blackwater nor any other security agency with such name is operating in Pakistan,’” Pakistan’s The Nation newspaper snarkily noted.


In fairness, the State Department hasn’t really been too secretive about this: INL’s winter newsletter featured a news announcement about the delivery to Pakistan of more Huey II helicopters, similar to the rotorcraft pictured here. More interesting is what the recent Inspector General report hints at the extent to which the Pakistani government relies on this air wing for domestic policing and security operations. “In Pakistan, the Air Wing program, funded at $32 million to date, has been generally effective in providing critical air support for activities along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, including a variety of missions for the Pakistan Government,” the report states.

Inevitably, the report also notes some shortcomings. DynCorp, the IG found, “had problems meeting some of the contract terms, particularly flying hour goals. The inability to meet the required aircraft readiness rate is directly related to low levels of maintenance personnel and, according to INL/A, is also affected by issues with staff from Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior.”

In addition, the IG also found the Pakistani government was less than forthcoming about how it was using State’s aircraft. The government of Pakistan, the report said, “continues its reticence in providing information on flights.”

Incidentally, the inspector general also alluded to another contracted air force, called “Kabul 40.” That air wing provides passenger and cargo movement for diplomatic staff in Afghanistan.

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/state-department-flies-mercenary-air-force-over-pakistan/#ixzz0mmP3n9S3

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The Legal Case for Robot War Gets Complicated

By Nathan Hodge  April 29, 2010 
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/the-legal-case-for-robot-war-gets-complicated/



The legal debate over America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan is getting sharper: In a congressional hearing yesterday, a prominent law professor suggested that drone operators could, in, theory, be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes.”

It’s just one of the many sticky legal issues raised by observers of the CIA’s (and the military’s) lethal drone operations. “This is not an academic debate,” Shane Harris of National Journal noted earlier this year. “Quietly, and with little apparent notice from the Obama administration, a broad range of important international actors are raising fundamental questions about the legality of drone strikes, particularly in countries where the United States does not have a military presence.”

Kenneth Anderson, one of the law professors involved in the discussion, stated in his testimony (.pdf) that the one of the main challenges to drone campaign comes from the “international law community” – an influential group of players that includes UN investigators, human-rights activists and other critics.

In in our comments section, Anderson elaborated a bit more on this point. “I regard the participation of the CIA in this activity as well as covert action under orders from the President and as an exercise in legitimate ’self-defense’ in international law as both legal and, from a political and policy standpoint, a very good thing,” he said. “The questions I raised were not from a belief that it was illegal or a bad idea, but that underlying many of the objections — whether from academics, activists, UN officials, and others — is a fundamental objection to the idea of a covert civilian service that in under certain circumstances uses force. I think that covert civilian service is lawful and a good idea - but underlying many people’s objections is an unstated premise that it is not.”

In an e-mail, Danger Room pal Peter Singer — who testified in the first hearing on this subject — amplified another point: The drone war has blurred the traditional lines between contractors, uniformed military and intelligence personnel. “Again, the problem isn’t so much bad people in these roles or malicious intent, but that we are really flouting the original vision of dividing out roles in realms of policy and war, such as how Title 10 [the military] and 50 [intelligence agencies] were to be something different, and that difference used to be very important both politically and legally,” he said. “Whether its doublehatting the NSA and military cyber command, the CIA recreating the 21st century equivalent of the force of B-26s it not so ‘covertly’ used in the Bay of Pigs, or the rise of ‘government owned-contractor operated’ weapons platforms, there is a lot of strange morphing of uniformed military, civilian intelligence, and private business roles going on.”


Under the Obama administration, the drone war in Pakistan has steadily escalated; CIA Director Leon Panetta has described the Predator strikes as  “the only game in town” in terms of trying to disrupt al Qaeda operations and decapitate its leadership. But the tangle of legal and bureaucratic issues created by the campaign promises to have very real political consequences.

As Mike Innes of Current Intelligence writes Danger Room: “Intelligence and SF/SOF [special operations] targeting in general is a surprisingly ordinary, bureaucratic process. Can’t imagine there’s all that much that’s fundamentally different about the drones approach. If I had to guess, there’s a long chain of individuals who take small decisions that add up to one big one. Everyone’s responsible, so no one’s responsible … which doesn’t mean someone somewhere won’t be covered in sh*t once it hits the fan over all this.”

[PHOTO: Noah Shachtman]



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/the-legal-case-for-robot-war-gets-complicated/#ixzz0mmPzZ38v

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Friday, April 30, 2010
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/30/wanted-accurate-information-that-a-terrorist-is-de/


Wanted: Accurate intel on 'dead' terrorists


by Ashish Kumar Sen



Taliban leader Qari Hussain? Killed in January 2008 ... until he appeared at a news conference a few months later in Waziristan.

Al Qaeda official Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri? Annihilated in a drone attack in September ... but still able to give an exclusive interview in October.

Taliban honcho Hakimullah Mehsud? Wiped out in a missile attack in January ... or was he?

Reports on Thursday that Mehsud was only wounded in that U.S. drone attack have prompted questions about the quality of intelligence emerging from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran currently with the Brookings Institution, described the latest reports as "a useful reminder that claims of the drones' successes need to be judged with caution."

"Intelligence is not a science experiment," Mr. Riedel said. "It is a difficult task of resolving conflicting data over time."

According to an Associated Press dispatch, four intelligence officers said Pakistan's main spy agency now thinks Mehsud is alive, citing electronic surveillance and reports from sources in the field, including from inside the Taliban.

U.S. officials privately have expressed frustration with the level of cooperation from Pakistani officials in the fight against militant groups.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency helped create the Taliban in the 1990s. Despite pressure from the U.S. to sever links with the militants in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. officials and analysts say some elements in the Pakistani establishment remain sympathetic to terrorist groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Our close relationship with the Pakistanis is based on common interests, particularly our shared commitment to fight terror," said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. "They have people dying almost every day, after all. But there are some groups that at least some parts of the Pakistani state see differently than we do."

The official said that when it comes to fighting al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, "there's really no daylight" between the Washington and Islamabad.

Still, the premature announcement of the death or capture of a terrorist is far from uncommon.

In January, Pakistani authorities announced that they had arrested Adam Gadahn, an American al Qaeda spokesman wanted in the U.S. on a charge of treason, in Karachi. Days later, they announced they hadn't arrested him after all.

While Pakistan's military has acted against al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, both of which have carried out several attacks in Pakistan and are viewed as direct threats to the state, it has been less eager to take on the Afghan Taliban.

"To speak to the Taliban, you have to go through the Pakistani army and the ISI," Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told a meeting this week, confirming links among the Pakistani army, the ISI and the Taliban.

"Pakistan is both playing with the radicals and trying to have a relationship with the Americans," he said. "It is too late to ask the Pakistani army to reverse its policy of supporting the Taliban."

On Feb. 10, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik confirmed reports of Mehsud's death, which the Taliban promptly dismissed as a lie and then insisted Mehsud was alive.

The CIA also never confirmed Mehsud's death.

However, a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mehsud had not been seen or heard from since the drone strike.

"If Hakimullah really is alive, let him prove it. He never had a problem going before the cameras. But, for the past few months, he's nowhere to be seen," the official said. "His group isn't one that traditionally led from the cave in silence."

The Taliban said it would not offer any evidence, such as a video recording, because doing so could help security forces hunt down Mehsud, the AP reported.

A Pakistani Embassy spokesman in Washington said he could not confirm reports that Mehsud was alive.

"His absence is the Taliban's problem, not ours. It's already been shown that he can be hit," the U.S. counterterrorism official said. "As Baitullah Mehsud learned to his peril, if you're a terrorist figure in that part of the world, you have to be smart ... and lucky," the official added, referring to the former leader of the Pakistani Taliban who was killed in a U.S. strike in August.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said he had seen "no evidence" that Mehsud "is operational today or is executing or exerting authority over the Pakistan Taliban, as he once did."

"So I don't know if that reflects him being alive or dead, but he clearly is not running the Pakistani Taliban anymore," Mr. Morrell told reporters.

The Taliban waited three weeks to confirm Baitullah Mehsud's death. That incident spawned reports that two likely successors - Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman - had engaged in a gunfight in which one or both militants had been killed.

That report also proved to be inaccurate, and Hakimullah Mehsud later met with reporters to prove that he was in fact alive.

In January, he appeared in a video with a Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan in December.

Ayesha Siddiqa, a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said he was not surprised that Mehsud could have survived the drone attack.

"It doesn't take rocket science to discover that if, as it was indicated in the news, he had died in Multan then somebody ought to have seen his dead body. None of that happened," Ms. Siddiqa said.

"His death and rebirth are part of the larger psy-ops. At this point, it is tough to determine truth from lies, which makes fighting very difficult," she said.

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Assassination spike threatens new Pakistan flashpoint

By Maaz Khan (AFP) –


Pakistani security officials are seen at a bomb blast site in Quetta


QUETTA, Pakistan — Targeted killings happen so often in Pakistan's city of Quetta, they have become almost routine. Assassins drive up, fire a hail of bullets and melt into shadows as their victims bleed to death.

Heading to and from work, or nipping to the shops, fear grips professional men and women in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, where a sharp increase in assassinations is being blamed on separatist rebels.

An upsurge in killings threatens to ignite the southwestern tinder box, with possible consequences for neighbouring Iran and Afghanistan, and heavyweight allies China and the United States.

Last week Nazima Talib became the most high-profile female victim, shot dead at point blank range as she got into a rickshaw to go home after another long day teaching mass communication at Balochistan University.

A mother of one, she was the third member of staff killed in the past two years. Now others wonder whether they will return home at the end of a day's work.

"Gunmen are roaming around killing teachers.... They have left us at the mercy of terrorists. I won't go to the university under these circumstances," said Farkhanda Aurangzaib, a professor in the English department.

Police say sectarian and ethnic targeted killings in Baluchistan have claimed 87 lives and injured 303 people in 168 incidents so far this year.

The killings embarrass the police, who concede that none of the assassins has been arrested, have forced some teachers to flee and fanned insecurity.

Hundreds of people have died since Baluch rebels rose up in 2004 demanding independence and control of profits from natural resources in their region.

Baluchistan, which makes up 40 percent of the country's landmass, is rich in oil and gas -- both desperately needed in energy-starved Pakistan.

For decades, its people have felt excluded or marginalised by the central government and the province has long been a fertile breeding ground for Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants as well as separatist rebels.

The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a banned group fighting for an independent Baluchistan, claimed responsibility for Talib's death, threatened more killings and accused Pakistani security forces of mistreating Baluch women.

The group says its assassinations of Punjabis avenge the deaths of Baluch rebels and civilians at the hands of the military, whose ranks and top brass are dominated by Pakistan's richest and most populous province, Punjab.

Although Pakistan's weak civilian government has sponsored a reconciliation process with Baluch nationalists, it has limited control over the powerful military, blamed for the disappearance of hundreds of Baluch activists.

The surge in violence threatens to torpedo the prospects of political reconciliation, warns Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch.

Targeted killings and disappearances underscore "political breakdown" in Baluchistan with assassinations an "instrument of political warfare," he said.

"It is placing large sections of the non-Baluch population in a state of anxiety and fear and will lead to greater instability and violence in the province," he told AFP.

"It is a rebellion against the Pakistani state but it has regional and international strategic and security implications, and there are many countries that stand to be affected or benefit from development in Baluchistan."

The Chinese have economic investments in the province. Baluchistan shares an extensive border with Iran, which is in turn keen that Pakistan does not become a staging ground for unrest among Iranian Baluch.

Militants crossing to and from Afghanistan also give Kabul and the United States a stake as they wage a nine-year war against the Afghan Taliban.

The militia's one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, is reported to have carved out a haven in Quetta and its leadership council has been dubbed the Quetta Shura.

The Pakistani military fears that intensifying US-led operations against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan this summer will see militants flee across the border into Baluchistan, posing further problems to law and order.

For those at risk, there is little reprieve. "By living your everyday life you can simply be shot dead and it doesn't matter if you've been in Baluchistan 10, 20 years, half a century or longer," said Hasan.

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South Asia
May 4, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LE04Df01.html 
 
Militants write their answer in blood


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - When villagers of Karamkot near the town of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area on Friday came across a bullet-riddled body they thought at first it was just another little-known person killed by militants on suspicion of being a traitor, as often happens in the area.

The tag attached to the body told another story: it was retired squadron leader Khalid Khawaja, a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) official and a close friend of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden during the resistance in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s.

He had been on a mission to mend ties between the Islamic forces of the country and the military establishment in an attempt to stave off a grand regional AfPak battle, the highlight of which would be the upcoming offensive in North Waziristan.

Pakistan's showdown with militants and al-Qaeda now seems inevitable.

On March 25, Khawaja traveled to North Waziristan to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani and Waliur Rahman Mehsud, leading militants. He was accompanied by journalist Asad Qureshi and Colonel Ameer Sultan Tarrar, also a former long-time ISI official and once Pakistan's consul-general in Herat in Afghanistan. Tarrar is nicknamed "Colonel Imam" by the mujahideen as he was instrumental in helping raise the Taliban militia.

Punjabi militants calling themselves the "Asian Tigers" claimed responsibility for the abductions. This month, Asia Times Online received several video clips of Khawaja speaking. (See Confessions of a Pakistani spy Asia Times Online, April 24, 2010.)

Pakistan's toothless administration in North Waziristan sent a tribal jirga (council) with white flags to Karamkot to recover Khalid's body and took it to the capital, Islamabad, where he was buried on Sunday. He was in his early 60s.

Pakistan has already moved 100,000 troops from the eastern border (near India) to the western borders in the tribal areas near Afghanistan and is reported to be waiting for the transmission of US$600 million in support funds from coalition countries fighting in Afghanistan.

On Sunday, the chief of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, arrived in Islamabad to meet with Pakistan's top brass to discuss plans for the operation in North Waziristan, home of the biggest Taliban-led group, the Haqqani network, as well as a headquarters of al-Qaeda. The operation is seen to be directly linked with the fate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) upcoming battle in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar. NATO is particularly concerned that its vital supply lines through Pakistan are protected.

For their part, the militants aim to spread the military as thin as possible, and terror operations have been revived in Peshawar and the Swat Valley. There was also a low-intensity bomb attack in Lahore on Saturday night. The Indian capital, New Delhi, has been placed on high security alert on fears of an attack.

Failed peace efforts

In January 2009, a lobby approached Baitullah Mehsud, the then-leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban - TTP), and urged him to write a letter to army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani and seek a peace deal. The letter was to be delivered by a former parliamentarian, Shah Abdul Aziz, but before anything could happen Aziz was arrested and Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike.

Another initiative began in March, as explained by Pakistan's former chief of army staff, General Aslam Beg, at Khawaja's funeral service.

"Khalid Khawaja approached me in the first week of March before he went to North Waziristan. When he came back from North Waziristan he brought good information about the ground situation. He assured me that all top leaders of the militants agreed on peace with Pakistan and he told me that now the ball was in Pakistan's court. However, nobody from the state machinery would meet with Khalid Khawaja. However, he was optimistic that his efforts would bear fruit and peace would prevail, but unfortunately he was killed when he visited the area a second time," Beg said.

Khawaja's murder would indicate that al-Qaeda is pulling the strings in North Waziristan. Other key groups had tried to get the so-called Asian Tigers to release Khawaja, Colonel Imam and Qureshi.

The Afghan Taliban, including those led by Mullah Omar from southwestern Afghanistan, Sirajuddin Haqqani (an Afghan Taliban based in North Waziristan) and the chief of the Taliban in North Waziristan, Hafiz Gul Bahadur (a Pakistan), all called for the release of the men.

However, the captors, militants who moved from South Waziristan after military operations there, would not budge. They have taken control of the town of Mir Ali and are closely allied with al-Qaeda and do not listen to the Afghan Taliban. The Afghan Taliban never believed Colonel Imam or Khawaja worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but the al-Qaeda-linked militants believed so.

"Ahmad Shah Massoud [leader of the Northern Alliance assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2001] was also a practicing Muslim. He was also an old mujahid, but when he joined hands with the CIA, his murder was justified," Usman Punjabi, a militant spokesman from North Waziristan, told Asia Times Online by telephone the day before Khawaja's murder.

Many media outlets have accused Pakistani Ilyas Kashmiri's 313 Brigade of being behind the murder. The brigade is an operational arm of al-Qaeda. However, Usman worked with Kashmiri a long time ago before he formed his own group.

Mullah Omar sent a delegation to North Waziristan to seek the unconditional release of Colonel Imam, known as the father of the Taliban as he trained many top leaders of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, including Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and even Mullah Omar. Usman had told Asia Times Online that he would let Colonel Imam go anyway as he was not involved in anything. The fate of Qureshi is in the balance.

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

 
 
 

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Hakimullah: Not Dead, for the Seventh Time


Hakimullah Confirms Survival as New Video Emerges

TTP Leader Appears Alive and Well in Early April Video

by Jason Ditz, May 03, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/03/hakimullah-confirms-survival-as-new-video-emerges/

Appearing today in a video dated to early April, Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud confirmed what Pakistani intelligence has been telling us for awhile, that his “confirmed” killing in February was greatly exaggerated and that he is alive and “basically ok.”

Hakimullah’s video warned of plans to attack the United States mainland, a potential nod to the TTP claims that they were responsible for this weekend’s failed Times Square plot.

Taking the reigns of the TTP after the US assassinated previous leader Baitullah Mehsud in August, Hakimullah quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with, a fearsome reputation made all the more sensational given the large number of “confirmed” assassinations he has survived, seven in all.

Under Hakimullah the TTP has gotten increasingly bold and willing to operate across the border, finding themselves at the center of the Khost attack which was the deadliest against the CIA in decades.

Though Hakimullah had been targeted before that, the US dramatically escalated the attempts on his life after Khost, and it was the latest of those attempts that was the most recent believed to have killed him.

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Pakistan drone strategy originated with Bush, official says

From Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon correspondent

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

-Plan is now to attack broader terrorist targets beyond al Qaeda leaders

-Wider target set approved by Bush White House, stepped up by Obama

-It is seen as key strategy to protect U.S. forces in Afghanistan

-Administration sensitive to claims of civilian deaths

Drones are just one tool in a larger counterterrorism strategy, one expert says

Washington (CNN) -- When the latest apparent U.S. drone strike was conducted this week against militants in Pakistan, the obvious question appeared to be: Did the United States get a "big fish" in the Taliban or al Qaeda organizations?

But a U.S. counterterrorism official says that's now the wrong question to ask, and chances are those hit were not major players. He wouldn't discuss the specifics of the latest strike, but with the official backing of his bosses, he sought to explain how U.S. strategy has changed in the crucial effort to attack targets inside Pakistan with missiles fired from drones.

The plan now is to attack a broader set of terrorist targets far beyond the original effort to strike and kill top al Qaeda leaders, the official said.

The strategy originated not with President Obama but with the previous administration, he said.

Although the United States is the only country in the region known to have the ability to launch missiles from drones, which are controlled remotely, U.S. officials normally do not comment on suspected drone strikes.

The more expansive target set was approved in the final months of the Bush administration in late 2008 but has been stepped up under the Obama White House, the official said. It is seen as a key strategy to help protect the growing number of U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan from insurgents operating in Pakistan's border region.

Drone-launched missiles are now hitting lower-level al Qaeda and Taliban personnel, camps, training areas, bomb makers, buildings and other targets in the remote region.

"You've had an expanded target set for time now, and given the danger these groups pose and their relative inaccessibility, these kinds of strikes -- precise and effective -- have become almost like the cannon fire of this war. They're no longer extraordinary or even unusual," the official said.

"The enemy, to be sure, has lost commanders, operational planners, weapons specialists, facilitators and more. But they've also lost fighters and trainers, the kinds of people who have killed American and allied forces in Afghanistan," he said. "Just because they're not big names doesn't mean they don't kill. They do. Their facilities -- where they prepare, rest and ready weapons -- are legitimate targets, too."

Success in using the drones depends on larger intelligence efforts, said Frances Fragos Townsend, a former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush and now a CNN intelligence analyst. Drones are just one tool in larger strategy, she said.

It requires other tools -- intelligence, military and diplomatic -- to support it, she said.

The administration has been sensitive to accusations that a large number of civilians have been killed since the stepped-up raids began. Statistics kept by the New America Foundation indicate that 30 percent of those who died in drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 were not militants.

The U.S. counterterrorism official disputed that, saying, "We believe the number of non-combatant casualties since this campaign intensified is under 30 -- those being people who were near terrorist targets, often by choice -- while the total for militants taken off the battlefield exceeds 500."

The official said those figures are based not only on intelligence but also on visual observations before and after strikes.

"The terrorists, who have a real incentive to spread stories of atrocities from the air, haven't done so because they can't do so," the official said. "They'd have to produce names, dates, photos and witnesses, the kinds of things you see almost instantly if the coalition makes a mistake in Afghanistan. But you just don't see that sort of thing coming out of the tribal areas. Instead, even press accounts from the area speak of militants cordoning off places that have been struck and of local and foreign fighters being hit."
 

 
 
 
 

 
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/04/pakistan.drone.attacks/index.html?hpt=T3 

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In wake of bomb scare, U.S. may lean on Pakistan to hit harder against militants

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 5, 2010; A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050405173_pf.html


ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- The arrest of a Pakistani American in connection with the failed Times Square bombing again put a spotlight on Pakistan as a global terrorist training hub, raising the prospect of intensified U.S. pressure to break up militant networks.

In court documents, U.S. authorities said Tuesday that Faisal Shahzad, 30, admitted to having undergone bomb-making training in Waziristan, a remote tribal region that hugs Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. If this proves true, Shahzad would join a growing list of extremists who have trained with militants in Pakistan before attempting attacks in the West, including the plotters of deadly subway bombings in London in 2005 and a similar plan that fizzled in New York.

That pattern, now punctuated by the close call in Times Square, is likely to prompt U.S. officials to lean on Pakistan to deepen its fight against Islamist extremists, particularly in the militant hotbed of North Waziristan. But this is a particularly sensitive period in bilateral relations with Pakistan, a U.S. ally that the Obama administration considers key to success in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has chafed at past American exhortations to hit harder against militants on its soil, saying that it has paid a heavy price for its efforts against extremist groups -- in terms of lives and money. U.S. officials, seeking to improve relations, have more recently lavished praise on Pakistan for its military offensives in the tribal areas and arrests of top Afghan Taliban leaders.

Over the past year, Pakistan's military has challenged its homegrown militants with unprecedented force, and it has boosted its image by pushing the Taliban out of the Swat Valley and South Waziristan. But its boasts of having crippled the insurgency have been contradicted by intermittent attacks and, more recently, by the reemergence of a Taliban chief thought to be dead.

Still, Pakistan has resisted U.S. pressure to take on insurgents in North Waziristan or in Punjab province, an area that is at the heart of Pakistan but is also the base of militant groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, suspected in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

Shahzad told investigators that he trained in Waziristan, court documents show.

They did not indicate whether he meant South Waziristan, the Pakistani Taliban's former hub, or North Waziristan, where the group's leaders are thought to be currently based, along with Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

On Tuesday, intelligence officials in Pakistan said they had arrested at least two people in connection with the Times Square case in the southern metropolis of Karachi, where Shahzad had family ties and where militant organizations are known to raise funds and hide. Pakistani government officials said they would cooperate with the U.S. investigation.

News of the bombing suspect's ties to Pakistan was met with questions about whether the country was being unfairly maligned and fears that Pakistanis would face discrimination in the United States, additional screening at airports and global media scorn.

"Somehow or another, there is always a Pakistani connection," an intelligence official said.

Shahzad's arrest followed the release of new videos featuring Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

U.S. and Pakistani officials had thought that Mehsud was killed in a drone strike in January. In videos circulated online this week, Mehsud is shown pledging that his organization would strike in U.S. cities.

U.S. investigators are examining whether Shahzad had links to the Pakistani Taliban, a group that has sustained a campaign of suicide blasts and assassinations against Pakistani government targets.