WikiLeaks Revelations

DaRk WaVe

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There's a patter like this there in almost all articles implicating ISI

"[F]or all their eye-popping details," writes the Guardian's Declan Walsh, "the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity."
 

DaRk WaVe

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Afghanistan war logs: How the IED became Taliban's weapon of choice
It begins with a relative trickle in the east of Afghanistan in 2004. Five years later it is the Taliban's favoured weapon across the country and the biggest killer of coalition soldiers by a large margin.

But the IED – improvised explosive device – not only strikes foreign troops on ground patrols and in road convoys, it is also an indiscriminate terror weapon killing and injuring thousands of civilians.

The unprecedented mass of data in the leaked war logs presents the most comprehensive picture yet of successful violence by the Taliban. The soaring number of attacks by these increasingly powerful homemade bombs can clearly be seen to be focused in the southern and eastern provinces.

In 2004, according to the logs, there were 308 makeshift bombs; last year there were 7,155. Taliban fighters in total planted more than 16,000 IEDs in those five years.

On 22 June last year, in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, the US military log says: "A little boy picked up the IED and it exploded in his hands killing him. The IED blast caused people to gather around the little boy, then a motorcycle drive up and detonated his suicide IED motorcycle." The end result was reported to be nine civilians killed and 42 wounded.

On 7 October 2009, six locals were going to Sarobi in eastern Afghanistan to buy cattle "when they struck an IED, instantly killing three of the occupants. A 70-year-old male suffered a gaping head, a 40-year-old suffered an eye injury and [a] 20-year-old had his ear drums blown out".

The logs suggest that Taliban insurgents have killed or injured at least 7,000 Afghan civilians in IED attacks between 2004 and 2009. The number has increased tenfold over that time. Civilian casualties rose even after Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader, ordered insurgents to avoid killing bystanders.

In May last year, he said suicide bombers should only attack "high and important targets". "A brave son of Islam should not be used for lower and useless targets. The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties." He called on his fighters to win over the Afghan people.

Yet in August, 429 civilians were killed or wounded by IEDs, the highest recorded in the logs. Investigators working for the UN said in January that the Taliban were responsible for more civilian deaths than the US-led military coalition. They criticise the Taliban for "indiscriminately" killing civilians by detonating IEDs in crowded markets or on busy roads.

Taliban fighters appear to have been prepared to blow up large numbers of people in order to assassinate a single target, such as a high-ranking government official or police chief.

For example, in February 2008, a suicide bomber caused havoc at a dog-fighting meet near Kandahar, killing or injuring more than 100 civilians, in a successful quest to assassinate one tribal leader. Another attack in September 2007 claimed around 70 civilian casualties near markets in Helmand province.

"It appears to be a suicide attack intended to target a police chief, Aram Attulah. The explosion killed this police chief and 10 of his security detail," reads the log.

IED attacks this year will be higher than ever, according to the latest Pentagon figures. The numbers are rising even though the US military has spent $17bn struggling to neutralise IEDs in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Since 2006 the Taliban can be seen to have changed tactics. The insurgents began to rely more on IEDs than confrontational gun battles. Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the director of the Pentagon agency in charge of countering IEDs, admitted in March: "I don't think you can defeat the IED as a weapon system. It is too easy to use."

The IEDs are built in a variety of ways with the aim of inducing permanent anxiety among troops and the populace. Some are detonated remotely by a transmitter such as a mobile phone or hand-held radio, while others are ignited by thin wires attached to switches such as washing machine timers. Others are "victim-operated" – they go off when the unsuspecting soldier or civilian steps on a trip wire or a pressure plate.

The insurgents load bombs into lorries and crash them into targets. The logs are replete with accounts of suicide-bombers ("PBIEDs", or person-borne IEDs, according to the US army jargon) who strap bombs to their bodies. A typical example occurred on 7 May 2009 in the town of Gereshk in Helmand when a "PBIED "¦crashed his motorcycle into a patrol, as he got to his feet he detonated himself".

Horse-drawn carts have been also used to explode the bombs next to patrolling soldiers.

The highest number of IED attacks occurred on three consecutive days – 18-20 August last year – when the country voted for a new president. The Taliban had vowed to disrupt the election and planted between 33 and 37 IEDs on each of the three days, killing or wounding at least 100 in the coalition and among their Afghan allies. Several attacks were made on polling stations and staff.

According to the logs, the Americans have located and disabled more bombs than have exploded, yet they have so far been unable to halt the attacks.

The logs record that 8,582 of the Taliban's IEDs were found and cleared, but 7,553 successfully exploded


Afghanistan war logs: How the IED became Taliban's weapon of choice | World news | The Guardian
 

DaRk WaVe

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Afghan war logs: inquiry launched into source of leaks
The US military has launched an inquiry to find the source of tens of thousands of classified American documents on the war in Afghanistan that were leaked to the media.



The documents - detailing military operations between 2004 and 2009 - disclosing how Nato forces have killed scores of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan.

More than 90,000 documents were leaked to the Wikileaks website and shown to several newspapers around the world.

The release of the huge file of classified papers is described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

The White House condemned the publication of the data which it said threatened the safety of coalition forces.

A spokesman said: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security."

The documents also include references to incidents involving British troops.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions.

"Reducing the risk to local civilians has always formed an essential part of planning for all military operations carried out by UK forces and we always do our utmost to ensure that we shield the civilian population from violence during the course of any military activity.

The leaked documents reveal how:

* A secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

* The US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired heat-seaking surface-to-air missiles.

* The coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

* The Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

Although many of the claims have been aired previously, the leak is highly embarrassing.

The documents claim that 195 civilians have been improperly killed and 174 wounded. Many are innocent motorcylists or drivers shot after being suspected of being suicide bombers.

The growing evidence that Iran and Pakistan in supporting and fuelling the insurgency is also detailed in the documents.

Pakistan's ambassador to the United States insisted his country was fully committed to fighting Islamic insurgents.

Ambassador Husain Haqqani called the release of the file "irresponsible", saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.

The founder of Wikileaks said the angry reaction showed that the whistleblower website is succeeding in its mission.

Julian Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer programmer, told the Guardian: "If journalism is good it is controversial by its nature.

"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction."

Until the Afghan dossier, Wikileaks' most prominent scoop was a video posted in April this year showing a US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007.

The not-for-profit website organisation has also been responsible for publishing a Guantanamo Bay training manual, BNP membership lists and details of Sarah Palin's private emails.

The source of the leak to the website is so far unknown.

The last person suspected of providing classified material to the outlet is American soldier Bradley Manning who has been charged with two counts of misconduct for allegedly providing video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in 2007 in which around a dozen people were gunned down in broad daylight.

Afghan war logs: inquiry launched into source of leaks - Telegraph
 

SHASH2K2

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Afghan war logs: inquiry launched into source of leaks
The US military has launched an inquiry to find the source of tens of thousands of classified American documents on the war in Afghanistan that were leaked to the media.



The documents - detailing military operations between 2004 and 2009 - disclosing how Nato forces have killed scores of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan.

More than 90,000 documents were leaked to the Wikileaks website and shown to several newspapers around the world.

The release of the huge file of classified papers is described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

The White House condemned the publication of the data which it said threatened the safety of coalition forces.

A spokesman said: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security."

The documents also include references to incidents involving British troops.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions.

"Reducing the risk to local civilians has always formed an essential part of planning for all military operations carried out by UK forces and we always do our utmost to ensure that we shield the civilian population from violence during the course of any military activity.

The leaked documents reveal how:

* A secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

* The US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired heat-seaking surface-to-air missiles.

* The coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

* The Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

Although many of the claims have been aired previously, the leak is highly embarrassing.

The documents claim that 195 civilians have been improperly killed and 174 wounded. Many are innocent motorcylists or drivers shot after being suspected of being suicide bombers.

The growing evidence that Iran and Pakistan in supporting and fuelling the insurgency is also detailed in the documents.

Pakistan's ambassador to the United States insisted his country was fully committed to fighting Islamic insurgents.

Ambassador Husain Haqqani called the release of the file "irresponsible", saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.

The founder of Wikileaks said the angry reaction showed that the whistleblower website is succeeding in its mission.

Julian Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer programmer, told the Guardian: "If journalism is good it is controversial by its nature.

"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction."

Until the Afghan dossier, Wikileaks' most prominent scoop was a video posted in April this year showing a US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007.

The not-for-profit website organisation has also been responsible for publishing a Guantanamo Bay training manual, BNP membership lists and details of Sarah Palin's private emails.

The source of the leak to the website is so far unknown.

The last person suspected of providing classified material to the outlet is American soldier Bradley Manning who has been charged with two counts of misconduct for allegedly providing video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in 2007 in which around a dozen people were gunned down in broad daylight.

Afghan war logs: inquiry launched into source of leaks - Telegraph
Now cat is already among the pigeons. Though entire world already knows truth about pakistan double games now they have a valid source as well . This inquiry is not going to help pakistan. Its just an eyewash.
 

SHASH2K2

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Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert
By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: July 25, 2010


Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
Readers' Comments and Reaction

Share your thoughts about the classified documents on the At War blog, which is following the reaction to the War Logs report.


The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.

But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency's collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.

Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan's militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult.

The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan's unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATO supplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan.

This month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in one of the frequent visits by American officials to Islamabad, announced $500 million in assistance and called the United States and Pakistan "partners joined in common cause."

The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top American commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.

Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the United States to capture or kill Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Still, he said that the "status quo is not acceptable," and that the havens for militants in Pakistan "pose an intolerable threat" that Pakistan must do more to address.

"The Pakistani government — and Pakistan's military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders," he said. American military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.

Several Congressional officials said that despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and C.I.A.

Nonetheless, senior lawmakers say they have no doubt that Pakistan is aiding insurgent groups. "The burden of proof is on the government of Pakistan and the ISI to show they don't have ongoing contacts," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who visited Pakistan this month and said he and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee chairman, confronted Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, yet again over the allegations.

Such accusations are usually met with angry denials, particularly by the Pakistani military, which insists that the ISI severed its remaining ties to the groups years ago. An ISI spokesman in Islamabad said Sunday that the agency would have no comment until it saw the documents. Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities."

The man the United States has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, the head of the army, Gen. Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn. American officials have frequently praised General Kayani for what they say are his efforts to purge the military of officers with ties to militants.

American officials have described Pakistan's spy service as a rigidly hierarchical organization that has little tolerance for "rogue" activity. But Pakistani military officials give the spy service's "S Wing" — which runs external operations against the Afghan government and India — broad autonomy, a buffer that allows top military officials deniability.

American officials have rarely uncovered definitive evidence of direct ISI involvement in a major attack. But in July 2008, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, confronted Pakistani officials with evidence that the ISI helped plan the deadly suicide bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul.

From the current trove, one report shows that Polish intelligence warned of a complex attack against the Indian Embassy a week before that bombing, though the attackers and their methods differed. The ISI was not named in the report warning of the attack.

Another, dated August 2008, identifies a colonel in the ISI plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate President Hamid Karzai. The report says there was no information about how or when this would be carried out. The account could not be verified.

General Linked to Militants

Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the C.I.A. joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedeen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.

And more than two decades later, it appears that General Gul is still at work. The documents indicate that he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jaluluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.

General Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan's current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities.

For example, one intelligence report describes him meeting with a group of militants in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, in January 2009. There, he met with three senior Afghan insurgent commanders and three "older" Arab men, presumably representatives of Al Qaeda, who the report suggests were important "because they had a large security contingent with them."

The gathering was designed to hatch a plan to avenge the death of "Zamarai," the nom de guerre of Osama al-Kini, who had been killed days earlier by a C.I.A. drone attack. Mr. Kini had directed Qaeda operations in Pakistan and had spearheaded some of the group's most devastating attacks.

The plot hatched in Wana that day, according to the report, involved driving a dark blue Mazda truck rigged with explosives from South Waziristan to Afghanistan's Paktika Province, a route well known to be used by the insurgents to move weapons, suicide bombers and fighters from Pakistan.

In a show of strength, the Taliban leaders approved a plan to send 50 Arab and 50 Waziri fighters to Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, the report said.

General Gul urged the Taliban commanders to focus their operations inside Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan turning "a blind eye" to their presence in Pakistan's tribal areas. It was unclear whether the attack was ever executed.

The United States has pushed the United Nations to put General Gul on a list of international terrorists, and top American officials said they believed he was an important link between active-duty Pakistani officers and militant groups.

General Gul, who says he is retired and lives on his pension, dismissed the allegations as "absolute nonsense," speaking by telephone from his home in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters. "I have had no hand in it." He added, "American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes."

Senior Pakistani officials consistently deny that General Gul still works at the ISI's behest, though several years ago, after mounting American complaints, Pakistan's president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, was forced publicly to acknowledge the possibility that former ISI officials were assisting the Afghan insurgency. Despite his denials, General Gul keeps close ties to his former employers. When a reporter visited General Gul this spring for an interview at his home, the former spy master canceled the appointment. According to his son, he had to attend meetings at army headquarters.

Suicide Bomber Network

The reports also chronicle efforts by ISI officers to run the networks of suicide bombers that emerged as a sudden, terrible force in Afghanistan in 2006.

The detailed reports indicate that American officials had a relatively clear understanding of how the suicide networks presumably functioned, even if some of the threats did not materialize. It is impossible to know why the attacks never came off — either they were thwarted, the attackers shifted targets, or the reports were deliberately planted as Taliban disinformation.

One report, from Dec. 18, 2006, describes a cyclical process to develop the suicide bombers. First, the suicide attacker is recruited and trained in Pakistan. Then, reconnaissance and operational planning gets under way, including scouting to find a place for "hosting" the suicide bomber near the target before carrying out the attack. The network, it says, receives help from the Afghan police and the Ministry of Interior.

In many cases, the reports are complete with names and ages of bombers, as well as license plate numbers, but the Americans gathering the intelligence struggle to accurately portray many other details, introducing sometimes comical renderings of places and Taliban commanders.

In one case, a report rated by the American military as credible states that a gray Toyota Corolla had been loaded with explosives between the Afghan border and Landik Hotel, in Pakistan, apparently a mangled reference to Landi Kotal, in Pakistan's tribal areas. The target of the plot, however, is a real hotel in downtown Kabul, the Ariana.

"It is likely that ISI may be involved as supporter of this attack," reads a comment in the report.

Several of the reports describe current and former ISI operatives, including General Gul, visiting madrasas near the city of Peshawar, a gateway to the tribal areas, to recruit new fodder for suicide bombings.

One report, labeled a "real threat warning" because of its detail and the reliability of its source, described how commanders of Mr. Hekmatyar's insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, ordered the delivery of a suicide bomber from the Hashimiye madrasa, run by Afghans.

The boy was to be used in an attack on American or NATO vehicles in Kabul during the Muslim Festival of Sacrifices that opened Dec. 31, 2006. According to the report, the boy was taken to the Afghan city of Jalalabad to buy a car for the bombing, and was later brought to Kabul. It was unclear whether the attack took place.

The documents indicate that these types of activities continued throughout last year. From July to October 2009, nine threat reports detailed movements by suicide bombers from Pakistan into populated areas of Afghanistan, including Kandahar, Kunduz and Kabul.

Some of the bombers were sent to disrupt Afghanistan's presidential elections, held last August. In other instances, American intelligence learned that the Haqqani network sent bombers at the ISI's behest to strike Indian officials, development workers and engineers in Afghanistan. Other plots were aimed at the Afghan government.

Sometimes the intelligence documents twin seemingly credible detail with plots that seem fantastical or utterly implausible assertions. For instance, one report describes an ISI plan to use a remote-controlled bomb disguised as a golden Koran to assassinate Afghan government officials. Another report documents an alleged plot by the ISI and Taliban to ship poisoned alcoholic beverages to Afghanistan to kill American troops.

But the reports also charge that the ISI directly helped organize Taliban offensives at key junctures of the war. On June 19, 2006, ISI operatives allegedly met with the Taliban leaders in Quetta, the city in southern Pakistan where American and other Western officials have long believed top Taliban leaders have been given refuge by the Pakistani authorities. At the meeting, according to the report, they pressed the Taliban to mount attacks on Maruf, a district of Kandahar that lies along the Pakistani border.

The planned offensive would be carried out primarily by Arabs and Pakistanis, the report said, and a Taliban commander, "Akhtar Mansoor," warned that the men should be prepared for heavy losses. "The foreigners agreed to this operation and have assembled 20 4x4 trucks to carry the fighters into areas in question," it said.

While the specifics about the foreign fighters and the ISI are difficult to verify, the Taliban did indeed mount an offensive to seize control in Maruf in 2006.

Afghan government officials and Taliban fighters have widely acknowledged that the offensive was led by the Taliban commander Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who was then the Taliban shadow governor of Kandahar.

Mullah Mansour tried to claw out a base for himself inside Afghanistan, but just as the report quotes him predicting, the Taliban suffered heavy losses and eventually pulled back.

Another report goes on to describe detailed plans for a large-scale assault, timed for September 2007, aimed at the American forward operating base in Managi, in Kunar Province.

"It will be a five-pronged attack consisting of 83-millimeter artillery, rockets, foot soldiers, and multiple suicide bombers," it says.

It is not clear that the attack ever came off, but its planning foreshadowed another, seminal attack that came months later, in July 2008. At that time, about 200 Taliban insurgents nearly overran an American base in Wanat, in Nuristan, killing nine American soldiers. For the Americans, it was one of the highest single-day tolls of the war.

Tensions With Pakistan

The flood of reports of Pakistani complicity in the insurgency has at times led to barely disguised tensions between American and Pakistani officers on the ground.

Meetings at border outposts set up to develop common strategies to seal the frontier and disrupt Taliban movements reveal deep distrust among the Americans of their Pakistani counterparts.

On Feb. 7, 2007, American officers met with Pakistani troops on a dry riverbed to discuss the borderlands surrounding Afghanistan's Khost Province.

According to notes from the meeting, the Pakistanis portrayed their soldiers as conducting around-the-clock patrols. Asked if he expected a violent spring, a man identified in the report as Lt. Col. Bilal, the Pakistani officer in charge, said no. His troops were in firm control.

The Americans were incredulous. Their record noted that there had been a 300 percent increase in militant activity in Khost before the meeting.

"This comment alone shows how disconnected this particular group of leadership is from what is going on in reality," the notes said.

The Pakistanis told the Americans to contact them if they spotted insurgent activity along the border. "I doubt this would do any good," the American author of the report wrote, "because PAKMIL/ISI is likely involved with the border crossings." "PAKMIL" refers to the Pakistani military.

A year earlier, the Americans became so frustrated at the increase in roadside bombs in Afghanistan that they hand-delivered folders with names, locations, aerial photographs and map coordinates to help the Pakistani military hunt down the militants the Americans believed were responsible.

Nothing happened, wrote Col. Barry Shapiro, an American military liaison officer with experience in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, after an Oct. 13, 2006, meeting. "Despite the number of reports and information detailing the concerns," Colonel Shapiro wrote, "we continue to see no change in the cross-border activity and continue to see little to no initiative along the PAK border" by Pakistan troops. The Pakistani Army "will only react when asked to do so by U.S. forces," he concluded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html?_r=1&hp
 

ajtr

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Now its time for everybody getting shell shocked and issuing denials :)

Afghan says it's 'shocked' by leaked U.S. documents


(CNN) -- The Afghan government said Monday it was "shocked" as it sifted through tens of thousands of leaked U.S. military and diplomatic reports on the war in Afghanistan that a whistleblower website posted a day earlier.
"The Afghan government is shocked with the report that has opened the reality of the Afghan war," said Siamak Herawi, a government spokesman.
WikiLeaks.org -- a whistleblower website -- published on Sunday what it says are more than 90,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.
The first-hand accounts are the military's own raw data on the war, including numbers killed, casualties, threat reports and the like, according to Julian Assange, the founder of the website.
"It is the total history of the Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with some important exceptions -- U.S. Special Forces, CIA activity, and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups," Assange said.
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents. The Department of Defense will not comment on them until the Pentagon has had a chance to look at them, a Defense official told CNN.
"What you have here is you have a variety of reports of different types," said New York Times reporter Chris Chivers. "Many of them are simple incident reports. The military describing ... on the ground what happened. Incident by incident."
The New York Times reported Sunday that military field documents included in the release suggest that Pakistan, an ally of the United States in the war against terror, has been running something of a "double game," allowing "representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders."
Herawi charged that Washington needed to deal with Pakistani intelligence, known as the ISI.
"There should be serious action taken against the ISI, who has a direct connection with the terrorists," he said. "These reports show that the U.S. was already aware of the ISI connection with the al Qaeda terrorist network. The United States is overdue on the ISI issue and now the United States should answer."
But Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's intelligence service and who is mentioned numerous times in the Wikileaks reports, called the accusations lies.
"These reports are absolutely and utterly false," Gul said Monday. "I think they [United States] are failing and they're looking for scapegoats."
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, issued a statement Sunday saying the reports "do not reflect the current onground realities."
Rather, they "reflect nothing more than single source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination," Haqqani's statement said.
"Pakistan's government under the democratically elected leadership of President [Asif Ali] Zardari and Prime Minister [Yousuf Raza] Gilani is following a clearly laid out strategy of fighting and marginalizing terrorists and our military and intelligence services are effectively executing that policy," the statement said.
National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones issued a statement Sunday calling the documents' release "irresponsible."
"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," the statement said.
"These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people," the statement said.
Assange declined to tell CNN where he got the documents. Jones' statement said the website made "no effort" to contact the Obama administration about the documents.
"The United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted," Jones' statement said.
Assange claims the documents reveal the "squalor" of war, uncovering how many relatively small incidents have added up to huge numbers of dead civilians.
The significance lies in "all of these people being killed in the small events that we haven't heard about that numerically eclipse the big casualty events. It's the boy killed by a shell that missed a target," he told CNN.
"What we haven't seen previously is all those individual deaths," he said. "We've seen just the number and, like Stalin said, 'One man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.' So, we've seen the statistic."
WikiLeaks publishes anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them, it says. It claims never to have fallen for a forgery.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said in a statement Sunday that the documents -- regardless of how they came to light -- "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Wikileaks has previously made headlines for posting controversial videos of combat in Iraq.
The site gained international attention in April when it posted a 2007 video said to show a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq killing a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists.
At the time, Maj. Shawn Turner, a U.S. military spokesman, said that "all evidence available supported the conclusion by those forces that they were engaging armed insurgents and not civilians."
Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, suspected of leaking a classified 2007 video, has been charged by the U.S. military with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military earlier this month.
Attempts to reach Manning's military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, were unsuccessful Sunday. However, U.S. Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins has said Bouchard would not speak to the media about the charges.
Assange says WikiLeaks has attempted to put together a legal team to defend Manning, something it will do for any "alleged" whistleblower that runs into legal trouble because of WikiLeaks.
Assange -- a former teen hacker who launched the site in 2007 -- denies that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger.
"There certainly have been people who have lost elections as a result of material being on WikiLeaks," he said.
"There have been prosecutions because of material being on WikiLeaks. There have been legislative reforms because of material being on WikiLeaks," he said. "What has not happened is anyone being physically harmed as a result."
The website held back about 15,000 documents from Afghanistan to protect individuals who informed on the Taliban, he said.
But he said he hoped his website would be "very dangerous" to "people who want to conduct wars in an abusive way."
"This material doesn't just reveal occasional abuse by the U.S. military," he said. "Of course it has U.S. military reporting on all sort of abuses by the Taliban. ... So it does describe the abuses by both sides in this war and that's how people can understand what's really going on and if they choose to support it or not."
Assange said the organization gets material from whistle-blowers in a variety of ways -- including via postal mail -- vets it, releases it to the public and then defends itself against "the regular political or legal attack."
He said the organization rarely knows the identity of the source of the leak. "If we find out at some stage, we destroy that information as soon as possible," he said.
 
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ajtr

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Intel had warned of attack on Indian embassy in Kabul: WikiLeaks


Quote:
Press Trust Of India
New York, July 26, 2010


Polish intelligence had, a week before the 2008 Indian embassy bombing, warned of a possible Taliban attack on Indian interests in the Afghan capital with the "main goal" to show its ability to attack on every object in Kabul, according to a document leaked by whistle-blower site


The document on possible attack on the Indian Embassy is part of a massive leak of 92,000 intelligence reports that suggested that the war in Afghanistan is going badly for the US and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is fuelling the insurgency in the war-torn country.

Advance copies of the leak were made available to three publications - The New York Times, British daily newspaper Guardian, and German weekly Der Spiegel, which made some excerpts available.

The document dealing with the Indian Embassy is titled 'Threat Report..Threat to Indian Embassy.'

The date of information is June 30, 2008, while the date of report is July 1, 2008. The organisation involved is "Taliban Center" and the Report number is 75010708.

"Taliban are planning to carry out an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. TB (Taliban) designated an engineer to take this action," the document reads.

"He intends to use stolen ANA/ANP (Afghan National Army/ Afghan National Police) car, and wears stolen uniform. He speaks Dari with distinct Iranian accent. Allegedly, he is the owner of a company," it added.

A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into the heavily fortified Indian embassy's gates in Kabul on July 7, 2008, killing 58 people and wounding more than 140.

Defence Attache Brigadier RD Mehta and Counsellor Venkateswara Rao were killed when the suicide bomber targeted the embassy during the morning rush hour.

"INS (Insurgents) are planning to divide into two groups: First will attack Indian embassy building, whilst the second group will engage security posts in front of MOI (Ministry of Interior), IOT (In Order to) give possibility to escape attackers from the first group," the report said.

"Budget for this action is about $ 1,20,000. The main goal of this operation is to show TB's (Taliban) abilities to carry out attack on every object in Kabul."

Other documents strongly indicate that Pakistan's ISI is supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan, as well as plotting with Taliban leaders to assassinate Afghan leaders.

The New York Times pointed out that it has been difficult for the US to pin Pakistan's spy agency directly to an attack orchestrated by the Taliban.

But the assault on the Indian embassy led the CIA's then deputy director Stephen R Kappes to immediately go to Islamabad to confront the ISI with evidence that it had helped organise the attack.

Another leaked document, dated August 2008, identifies a Colonel in the ISI plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

However, there were no accompanying details and the report could not be verified.

Meanwhile, US National Security Advisor James Jones, in a statement, condemned the leaks as "irresponsible" and said that WikiLeaks had not contacted the US government before going public.

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," Jones said.

"WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organisations that these documents would be posted," he added.
 

Oracle

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Every couple of months comes a statement accusing ISI of aiding terrorists and then unleashing them at India and Afghanistan. We do not need documents from wikileaks.org to come to the conclusion that Pakistan is the epi-center of terrorism. Everybody knows it, but nobody is doing jack about it. Pakistan's double standards vis-s-vis WOT and US' hypocrisy will cost South-East Asia and in general to this world more harm than Pakistan and US can afford. But wait, Pakistan can afford it - it already is a failed state, what about the United States of America? With a dwindling economy, should not the US stress more on accountability of where the aid money is going?. US should fix Pakistan first, if it wishes to end this WOT and move out of Afghanistan. It should not repeat its tried and failed foreign policy and for once shed it's skin of double standards.

This exposure calls for a more serious thought from the GoI, who have been failing miserably in dealing with Pakistan. Even though we have a bigger stick, we have been inventing ways not to use it. I agree we have to stress on our economy more and also on the infrastructure front, but what is the use of those billions of dollars spent on acquiring defense equipments? Stop all means of communication with Pakistan, block every single lane which connects with Pakistan. Let intellectuals cry hoarse, but if we do not want to use arms against Pakistan and believe in resolving disputes through Ahimsa(read talks), then let us also believe in the other principle of the same person who in the first place gave us Ahimsa - Non Co-operation.
 
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ajtr

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White House memo to the public on the leak, on issues addressed in the documents.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-war-logs/?ref=asia]

The President has commented on safe"haven in Pakistan and connection to Afghanistan

3/27/09: President Obama said: "After years of mixed results, we will not, and cannot, provide a blank
check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists
within its borders." "Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning
attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan"¦.The future of Afghanistan is
inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan. In the nearly eight years since 9/11, al Qaeda
and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier. This
almost certainly includes al Qaeda's leadership: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al"Zawahiri. They have
used this mountainous terrain as a safe haven to hide, to train terrorists, to communicate with
followers, to plot attacks, and to send fighters to support the insurgency in Afghanistan. For the
American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world."

"The terrorists within Pakistan's borders are not simply enemies of America or Afghanistan "" they are a
grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan. Al Qaeda and other violent extremists have killed
several thousand Pakistanis since 9/11. They've killed many Pakistani soldiers and police. They
assassinated Benazir Bhutto. They've blown up buildings, derailed foreign investment, and threatened
the stability of the state. So make no mistake: al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks
killing Pakistan from within. It's important for the American people to understand that Pakistan needs
our help in going after al Qaeda. This is no simple task. The tribal regions are vast, they are rugged, and
they are often ungoverned. And that's why we must focus our military assistance on the tools, training
and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists. And after years of mixed results, we will not,
and cannot, provide a blank check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda
and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken "" one way or
another "" when we have intelligence about high"level terrorist targets." {Remarks of the President,
Marcy 27, 2009}

12/1/09: President Obama said: "We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading
through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan.
That's why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border." "But while we've achieved
hard"earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. After escaping across the
border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, al Qaeda's leadership established a safe haven there"¦.We're in
Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer
has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That's why we need a strategy that works on both
sides of the border"¦. In the past, there have been those in Pakistan who've argued that the struggle
against extremism is not their fight, and that Pakistan is better off doing little or seeking accommodation
with those who use violence. But in recent years, as innocents have been killed from Karachi to
Islamabad, it has become clear that it is the Pakistani people who are the most endangered by
extremism. Public opinion has turned. The Pakistani army has waged an offensive in Swat and South
Waziristan. And there is no doubt that the United States and Pakistan share a common enemy.
{Remarks of the President, 12/1/09}

U.S. Officials Have Discussed Links Between ISI and Extremist Groups

6/29/10: Gen. Petraeus Said It Was Difficult to Determine If ISI's Contacts With the Taliban and Other
Extremists Were to Support Those Groups or to Recruit Sources – "There Are No Questions About the
Longstanding Lenghts. Let's Remember that We Funded the ISI to Build These Organizations When
They Were the Mujahideen and Helping to Expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. And so Certainly
1

Residual Links Would Not Be a Surprise. The Question Is What the Character of Those Links Is and
What the Activities Are Behind Them." "Well, again, what we have to always figure out with Pakistan
center is, are they working with the Taliban to support the Taliban or to recruit sources in the Taliban?
And that's the difficulty, frankly, in trying to assess what the ISI is doing in some of their activities in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas, in contacts with the Haqqani network, or the "" the Afghan Taliban.
There are no questions about the longstanding lengths. Let's remember that we funded the ISI to build
these organizations when they were the Mujahideen and helping to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.
And so certainly residual links would not be a surprise. The question is what the character of those links
is and what the activities are behind them." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 6/29/10]

6/29/10: Gen. Petraeus Thought that Pakistan Had Recently Decided that Internal Extremists Posed a
Pressing Threat But That They Could Not Deal With All of Them Simultaneously, Noted that Many of
these Groups Were Founded With U.S. Money Through the ISI "With respect to the Pakistanis, I think
there is some reassessment that has gone on with respect to Afghanistan. I think as important has been
the reassessment of the situation within their own borders. It took place about 12 to 18 months or so
ago when the Pakistani people, the leadership, and the clerics all came to recognize that the most
pressing existential threat to their country was that posed by internal extremists who had threatened
the writ of governance for "" again, in Swat Valley and the rest of what is now called Khyber
Pukhtoonkhwa, and then in a number of areas of the "" of the tribal areas. The fact is, I think they came
to recognize that the "" the concept that had been in practice, was in practice, and still may be in some
areas, that concept that you can allow poisonous snakes to have a nest in your backyard as long as they
only bite the neighbor's kids inevitably turns around and "" and ends up biting you in the backside. And I
think they have come to see the challenges of this. Now, to be fair to them, let's remember that many of
these groups were formed in the beginning with our money through the ISI when we were trying to help
get rid of the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the Mujahideen were our heroes at that time, while those
very groups put down roots and in some cases turned into transnational extremist elements, in others,
extremist elements that have threatened the idea of Pakistan being able to move forward and actually
want to turn the clock back several centuries. And I think that they have come to recognize the threat
that these groups pose to their country, but have also realized that they cannot deal with all of them
simultaneously and that their means, particularly when it comes to the holding, building, and transition
phases, is particularly "" or somewhat limited." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 6/29/10]

2/8/10: Gates Said Al Qaeda, The Taliban And Other Extremist Networks Are Working Together In
Pakistan. Gates said, "You know, just to go back to an earlier point, one of the things that I talked about
when I was in Pakistan is that al Qaeda, the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan are all
working together. And the al Qaeda "" al Qaeda is helping the Pakistani Taliban try to destabilize the
Pakistani government there. There is evidence that al Qaeda is helping them plan these attacks, the
targeting, the training on capabilities, and so on. These threats are all mixed together. It's a syndicate.
And trying to help the Pakistanis understand that each "" if any of the three of these, or others such as
the Haqqani network, are successful, it redounds to the benefit of the others. And so we've got to attack
this problem as a whole, rather than piecemeal. [FOX News, 2/8/10]

3/12/10: Admiral Mullen Said that ISI "Have Been Very Attached to Many of these Extremist
Organizations." "He certainly is aware of the concerns that I have with respect to his intelligence
agency, ISI. And in fact, that they have "" they were literally created by the government of Pakistan. They
have "" they have been very attached to many of these extremist organizations. And it`s my belief that in
the long run, they have got to completely cut ties with those in order to really move in the right
direction, and that ISI fundamentally has to change its strategic approach, which has been clear to focus
2

on India as well as Afghanistan. And I don`t believe they can make a lot of progress until that actually
occurs. Now, General Kiyani has taken one of his best guys and appointed him as the new director of ISI,
General Pasha. I`m encouraged "" I`ve met with General Pasha many times, but recently since he`s been
appointed, and I`m encouraged with his views and I`m encouraged with how he sees the problem. It`s
going to take some time to get at it inside ISI." [Charlie Rose, 3/12/09]

12/10/08: Mullen " "There's A Rich History Of ISI Fomenting Challenges." "There's a rich history here of
ISI fomenting challenges, particularly in Kashmir, and everybody is aware of that. We're aware of
that. The Indians are aware of that. The Pakistanis are aware of that, as is the international community
writ large. And it's literally that piece of the previous strategy in Pakistan which I believe's got to shift for
the future, and without getting into the specifics of what was causal, certainly in a classified way, or
what happened here. [Transcript, DOD News Briefing, 12/10/08]

4/5/09: Admiral Mullen Said, "Do I Think the ISI Has to Change?... Absolutely. Do I Think There Are
Elements of ISI Connected to Those Militant Organizations? Absolutely. Gen. Kayani and I Talk About
This. Gen. Pasha and I Talk About this, More Than Once, But It Isn't Going to Happen Overnight."
"Another key U.S. concern: Will the ISI cut off its support for militant groups like the Afghan Taliban,
which it uses to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan? Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar
operates out of Pakistan's Baluchistan region. Or will the ISI end ties with Pakistani terrorists such as the
group that recently conducted an outrageous attack in Mumbai, India? The ISI trained such groups in the
past to attack Indian targets in Kashmir. 'Do I think the ISI has to change?' Mullen asks rhetorically.
'Absolutely. Do I think there are elements of ISI connected to those militant organizations? Absolutely.
Gen. Kayani and I talk about this. Gen. Pasha and I talk about this, more than once, but it isn't going to
happen overnight.' Mullen says he has 'complete confidence that the military and civilian leadership in
Pakistan recognize the seriousness of their problem with the insurgents.' He says that Pasha was
'handpicked' by Kayani to change the ISI, and that Kayani has 'put some of his best people in key
positions in the ISI.' But can Kayani and Pasha change the ISI's culture? 'I've led big organizations all my
life,' says Mullen, 'and it takes a fairly significant time to change an organization.'" [Philadelphia
Inquirer, Rubin Column, 4/5/09]

3/31/09: Gates " "The ISI's Contacts With [Extremist Groups] Are A Real Concern To Us., And We Have
Made These Concerns Known Directly To The Pakistanis." "The ISI's contacts with some of these
extremist groups "" with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Haqqani network, Commander Nazir (sp) and others
"" are a real concern to us, and we have made these concerns known directly to the Pakistanis. And we
hope that they will take action to put an end to it." [Transcript, Interview with Afghan TV, 3/31/09]

3/29/09: Gates " "We Certainly Have Concerns About The Contacts [Between ISI] And Some OF These
[Extremist] Groups In The Past." "Well, the way I would answer is to say that we certainly have
concerns about the contacts of – between the Pakistani intelligence service and the – and some of these
groups in the past. But the reality is the Pakistanis have had contacts with these groups since they were
fighting the Soviets 20 or 25 years ago when I first was dealing with the Pakistanis on this. And, I must
say, also helping make sure that some of those same groups got weapons from our safe haven in
Pakistan. But with people like Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and the Hakani network, the Pakistanis have had
contacts with these people for a long time, I think partly as a hedge against what might happen in
Afghanistan if we were to walk away or whatever. What we need to do is try and help the Pakistanis
understand these groups are now an existential threat to them, and that we will be there as a steadfast
ally for Pakistan, that they can count on us, and that they don't need that hedge. [Transcript, Interview
on FOX News, 3/29/09]
3


3/27/09: Mullen Said There Were Indication that There Were Still Elements Within ISI That Were
Supporting the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda.
BLITZER: How much can you, the U.S. military, the U.S. government, trust the Pakistanis?

MULLEN: The "" the agency you're really talking about, Wolf, is their "" is their intelligence
agency, the ISI.

And I have believed for a significant period of time now, fundamentally, the strategic approach
with the ISI must change. And their support for militants, their support for militants actually on
both borders, has to fundamentally shift in order for...

BLITZER: Are there still elements in the Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, who are sympathetic or,
even worse, actually supporting the Taliban and/or al Qaeda?

MULLEN: There are certainly indications that that's the case. And fundamentally that's one of
the things that has to change. [CNN Situation Room, 3/27/09]

3/27/09: Mullen " "I Have Believed For A Significant Period Of Time Now Fundamentally [That] The
Strategic Approach With The ISI Must Change"¦And Their Support For Militants – Actually On Both
Borders – Has To Fundamentally Shift." "Also regarding Pakistan, Mullen stressed the need for a
fundamental shift in the role of the country's intelligence agency, known as the ISI. Mullen
acknowledged indications that confirm news reports claiming the ISI supports insurgent elements in
Afghanistan and Pakistan with money, supplies and guidance. The United States has raised the issue
with Pakistani civilian and military leadership, he added. "I have believed for a significant period of time
now fundamentally [that] the strategic approach with the ISI must change," he said. "And their support
for militants "" actually on both borders "" has to fundamentally shift. [Armed Forces Press, 3/27/09]

4/1/09: Gen. Petraeus Said It Was Difficult to Tell The Nature of an Intelligence Contact in Pakistan
and that There Were Troubling Examples of Contacts Warning The Enemy of Impending Operations –
Said He Had Discussed the Issue With the Head of Pakistani Intelligence."How we do that has to be
done very carefully, and we will have to go through a process, I think, where we literally do build some
of the trust because there are both troubling events in the past and there are troubling accusations out
there. Some of these, frankly, when you dig into them are a bit more ambiguous than they seem to be
on the surface, although some are not. There are "" it is difficult in some cases to sort out what is an
intelligence agency contact that is trying to develop a source or, on the other hand, what is an
intelligence agency contact that is warning them of an impending operation. There have been examples
of the latter. Those are troubling. We have discussed those with the head of Pakistani intelligence, of the
ISI, Lieutenant General Pasha. I have done that, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, others. Ambassador
Holbrooke and I had a session with him together. The Pakistani military "" again, we've had these same
conversations with them." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 4/1/09]

U.S. Officials Have Discussed Pakistan as a Safe Haven for Extremists and Urged Greater Effort and
Cooperation Against Extremists in the Tribal Region From Pakistan

7/23/10: Holbrooke Said The Level Of Cooperation Between Pakistan And Allies Is "Not Yet Where We
Hope It Will Be." "It's a very complicated relationship, but it is an indispensable one for Great Britain
and the United States and very much at the top of the U.S."U.K. agenda is how to work together with
4

Pakistan to make Pakistan part of the solution to the problems of the region — because without
Pakistan's participation, this war could go on indefinitely," Holbrooke said. The envoy said ties between
Pakistan and the West had greatly improved in recent months, bringing "much more co"operation at
every level" in dealing with the Afghan conflict. "I don't want to mislead you," Holbrooke said. Levels of
co"operation are "not yet where we hope it will be." [AP, 7/23/10]

7/19/10: Secretary Clinton Called for Greater Cooperation Between the U.S. and Pakistan in Targeting
Bin Laden and Al"Qaida Who Have Used Pakistan as a Safe Haven. "But we're not saying go do it alone;
we're saying we're doing it with you. We're doing more and you're doing more. So there are, I'm sure,
additional steps that each of us can and should take. The problem is that we don't have any clear idea
about how best to get at the people we consider to be our primary enemies. Al"Qaida, Usama bin Ladin,
those are the people who attacked us and those are the people who are at the top of our list. Now, they
are somewhere, we believe, based on our best information. Where, we don't know. We would like to
work more closely together to go after them and to either capture or kill them, because we believe that
at the center of this syndicate of terror that is terrorizing people in Pakistan, al"Qaida exists." [Sec.
Clinton Roundtable with Pakistani Journalists, 7/19/10]

7/14/10: Holbrooke " "We Do Not Have Enough Action Yet On The Pakistani Side Of The Border."
"We do not have enough action yet on the Pakistani side of the border. And here is a perfect example
of why the two countries cannot be disaggregated for purposes of policy. We got what we wanted on
one side of the border, but we haven't gotten it on the other yet. And Americans are being killed and
wounded because of this. And I can assure you that we will take this up again when I go to Pakistan in
a few days and other senior officials go as well." [Transcript, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Transcript, 7/14/10]

10/30/09: Sec. Clinton Said Al"Qaida Had a Safe Haven in Pakistan Since 2002 and She Found It "Hard
to Believe that Nobody in Your Government Knows Where They Are and Couldn't Get Them If They
Really Wanted to" – Urged More Cooperation in Tracking Down Al"Qaida. "But let me ask you
something. Al"Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. I find it hard to believe that nobody in
your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to. And maybe
that's the case. Maybe they're not getable. I don't know. But that's something that in respect for your
sovereignty, al"Qaida has run attacks against Indonesia, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, other
countries, the Philippines, et cetera, through either direct or indirect approaches. So the world has an
interest in seeing the capture and killing of the people who are the masterminds of this terrorist
syndicate, but so far as we know, they're in Pakistan. So I think I am more than willing to hear every
complaint about the United States. I am more than willing to do my best both to answer but also to
change where we can so that we do have better communication and we have better understanding. But
this is a two"way street. If we're going to have a mature partnership where we work together on
matters that really are in the best interest of both of our countries, then there are issues that not just
the United States but others have with your government and your military security establishment. So I
think that that's what I'm looking for. I don't believe in dancing around difficult issues, because I don't
think that benefits anybody. And I think part of the problem that we're facing in terms of the deficit of
trust that has been talked about is that we haven't taken seriously a lot of the concerns. I'm here to take
them seriously. But I ask in the pursuit of mutual respect that you take seriously our concerns so that it's
not just a one"sided argument. And I believe that if we do that, we may still not agree or there may still
be answers like, well, I don't know what is happening in this province of your country or I don't know
what the reasons are that al"Qaida has a safe haven in your country, but let's explore it and let's try to
5

be honest about it and figure out what we can do." [Sec. Clinton Roundtable with Senior Pakistani
Editors, 10/30/09]

2/3/10: DNI Blair Said the Safe Haven That Afghan Insurgents Had In Pakistan Was the Group's "Most
Important Outside Support," and that Disrupting that Safe Haven Was Necessary to Succeed in Our
Overall Effort in Afghanistan. "The safe haven that the Afghan insurgents have in Pakistan is the group's
most important outside support. And disrupting that safe haven won't be sufficient by itself to defeat
the insurgency in Afghanistan. But disrupting that presence in Pakistan is necessary " it's a necessary
condition for making overall program in Afghanistan." [House Intelligence Committee Hearing, 2/3/10]

6/29/10: Gen. Petraeus Said Al"Qaida Had Established New Sanctuaries in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan
Following the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. "It was, of course, in response to those attacks that
a U.S."led coalition entered Afghanistan in late 2001 and defeated Al Qaida and the Taliban elements
that allowed Al Qaida to establish its headquarters in training camps in Afghanistan. In the subsequent
years, however, the extremists were able to recruit, with Al Qaida establishing new sanctuaries in the
tribal areas of Pakistan and the Taliban and its affiliates reentering Afghanistan in an effort to reestablish
the control they once had in much of the country. In light of those developments, our task in
Afghanistan is clear. Indeed, President Obama has explained America's vital national interests there. We
will not, he has stated, tolerate a safe haven for terrorists, who want to destroy Afghan security from
within and launch attacks against innocent men, women and children in our country and around the
world." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 6/29/10]

6/29/10: Gen. Petraeus Said There Were Still Extremist Elements That Had Sanctuary in the Pakistan
Tribal Areas that Were Carrying Out Operations in Afghanistan and Others That Were Transnational,
Like Al" Qaida. "They have sustained significant losses, as is well known, in the tribal areas. Their
freedom of action has been reduced by Pakistani "" or operations by the Pakistani army and Frontier
Corps in the former Northwest Frontier Province, Pakhtunkhwa, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and in several of
the agencies of the tribal areas "" certainly not all of them. And certainly, there are still, without
question, extremist elements there that have sanctuary there and are carrying out operations inside
Afghanistan, and others that are transnational, as is the case of Al Qaida and some other elements in
Pakistan, as well." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 6/29/10]

1/20/10: Gates Said The "Afghan"Pakistan Border Is [Al"Qaeda's] Primary Home And Safe Haven."
Gates said, "What we have in the area of the Afghan"Pakistan border is first of all, al"Qaida. It's its
primary home and safe haven. You also have the Taliban who are active in Afghanistan. You also have
the Tehrik"e" Taliban Pakistan that are focused on Pakistan. You also have Lashkar" e"Taiba, LET, that is
focused on Pakistan but also on India. And what we see is that the success of any one of these groups
leads to new capabilities and new reputation for all. A victory for one is a victory for all. What I see
happening is these groups operating under the umbrella of al"Qaida in the Northwest Frontier Province,
probably in North Waziristan, is orchestrating attacks using one element in Afghanistan, using another
element of the Taliban in Pakistan to attack targets in Pakistan to try to destabilize Pakistan, and again,
working with al" Qaida, Lashkar"e"Taiba, planning attacks in India. I believe this operation under the
umbrella of al"Qaida, working with all of these different groups, is intended to destabilize not just
Afghanistan or not just Pakistan, but potentially the whole region by provoking a conflict perhaps
between India and Pakistan through some provocative act or terrorist act, or provoking instability in
Pakistan itself through terrorist attacks in Pakistan. So I think it's a very complicated situation. I think it's
very dangerous for the region as a whole. I also think it's dangerous to single out any one of these
groups and say if we could beat that group that will solve the problem. Because they are, in effect, a
6

syndicate of terrorist operators intending to destabilize this entire region. That's why it is so important
for all of us to be engaged, to understand the magnitude of this threat and to be engaged in trying to
reduce the threat, and wherever possible eliminate it. And it does require a high level of cooperation
among us all." [CQ Transcript, Press Conference in India, 1/20/10]

12/8/09: Gates Said Pakistan Should "Focus On What Has Become, In My View, A Real Existential
Threat To Pakistan Which Is These Different Terrorist Groups Operating Within It's Territory." "What
we [and the Indian government] talked about at some length was the syndicate of different terrorist
groups that I talked about at the outset and how they put all of the countries here in the region "
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India " at risk because of their activities. And as we've talked about, clearly one of
the subjects of discussion for my next visit is how to allay their concerns so that they can focus on what
has become, in my view, a real existential threat to Pakistan which is these different terrorist groups
operating within its territory." [American Forces Press Service, 12/8/09]

12/2/09: Sec. Clinton Said It Was Difficult to Parse Out the Different Groups Operating in Pakistan, All
of Whom We Thought Were Connected to Al Qaida and Partition Some Off and Go After Others, Said
Adm. Mullen Had Been Key in Making the Case to the Pakistanis That They Needed to Do More
Against the Insurgents. "It is difficult to parse out the different groups that are operating within
Pakistan all of whom we think are connected in one way or another with al"Qaida and partition some off
and go after the others. So it will be our continuing effort. And Admiral Mullen has been instrumental in
working on this with his counterparts to make the case that the Pakistanis have to do more against all of
the insurgent terrorist groups that are threatening them, that are threatening us in Afghanistan and the
Afghan people, are threatening other neighbors in the region. And we hope that we'll be able to make
that case successfully." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 12/2/09]

12/2/09: Sec. Clinton Said We Were Asking for More Help from the Pakistanis to Go After Al"Qaida
and the Leadership of the Afghan Taliban Inside Their Own Territory. "But that we also are asking for
more help from the Pakistanis to go after al"Qaida and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban inside their
own territory." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 12/2/09]

9/15/09: Adm. Mullen Said It Was Clear that Al"Qaida Was Diminished While It Was Living in Pakistan
But That They Were By No Means Dead and Was a Very Serious Threat. "It's very clear that, in fact, Al
Qaida is diminished while it's living in Pakistan. And this is a Pakistan" Afghanistan issue. They are by no
means dead. It's a very serious threat. And that if we allow the Taliban to "" to take control and run
Afghanistan again, I think the likelihood that they would return to that safe haven would be high."
[Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 9/15/09]

4/1/09: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Flournoy Said that the U.S. Strategy Required
Eliminating Al"Qaida's Safe Haven in Pakistan and Ensuring they Did Not Return to Afghanistan – Said
Pakistan's Ability to Dismantle the Safe Havens in its Terrority Was Critical to Its Stability and Security.
"As the president stated last Friday, I think very eloquently, we have a very clear goal. This strategy went
"" really went back to first principles about our interests and our objectives, and we clarified our goal in
this region as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating Al Qaida and its extremist allies, and to do so, we
must eliminate their safe haven in Pakistan and ensure that such a safe haven does not return to
Afghanistan"¦ Pakistan's ability to dismantle the safe havens on its territory and defeat the terror and
insurgent networks within its borders are absolutely critical to the security and stability of that nuclear"
armed state." [Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, 4/1/09]

7

3/27/09: Admiral Mullen Said that Al Qaida's Safe Haven in Pakistan Was in the FATA and He
Assumed that's Where Bin Laden and Zawahiri Were Hiding Out.
I have been in Pakistan on multiple trips to meet with their leadership. And, in fact, in the last
year, the Pakistan army and the Frontier Corps, who are the "" the local troops on the border...

FOREMAN: And they're "" they're based where...

(CROSSTALK)

MULLEN: They're actually based here in the FATA. And when we talk about...

FOREMAN: Right here.

MULLEN: ... a safe haven for al Qaeda and the president's focus on al Qaeda, this is where they
live.

BLITZER: And that's where you assume Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al"Zawahri are hiding out,
on the "" on the Pakistan side of this border?

MULLEN: Absolutely, and "" and they hide very well. [CNN's Situation Room, 3/27/09]

3/27/09: Interagency Report " "The Core Goal of the U.S. Must Be to Disrupt, Dismantle, and Defeat al
Qaeda and its Safe Havens in Pakistan, and to Prevent Their Return to Pakistan or Afghanistan."
"Therefore, the core goal of the U.S. must be to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe
havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan. The ability of extremists in
Pakistan to undermine Afghanistan is proven, while insurgency in Afghanistan feeds instability in
Pakistan." [White Paper on the Interagency Policy Group's Report on U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan and
Pakistan, 3/27/09]
 

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Asia Times claims there has been a cover up of the malign role the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in fomenting terrorism in Afghanistan including by India. The foregoing is apparently because the international community "is terrified of facing a failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous one". OTOH, in India's case this is apparently because the Congress led UPA Government would rather have the Islamic Republic of Pakistan covertly fomenting terrorism and have an excuse for not directly confronting the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. India accordingly is reluctant to have the US act tough with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan


Murder on the Khyber Pass express

By Spengler

The 92,000 American classified military documents released by WikiLeaks add to the evidence that Pakistan's intelligence service backs the Taliban, to the point of helping the Taliban plan assassinations of American and Afghan officials.

This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president **** Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran. They are all terrified of facing a failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous one.

The released papers - described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history - detail military operations between 2004 and 2009. Some of the documents published on July 25 disclose how North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have killed scores of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan. The documents claim that 195 civilians have been improperly killed and 174 wounded. Many are motorcylists or drivers shot after being suspected of being suicide bombers.

The White House has condemned the publication, saying it threatened the safety of coalition forces, while Pakistan's ambassador to the United States said his country was committed to fighting insurgents. Husain Haqqani called the release "irresponsible", saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.

The "everybody" involved in this case seems to exclude whomever actually leaked the documents, presumably some element of the US military, which has to absorb the effect of Pakistan's double game in the region in the form of body bags for enlisted men and shattered reputations for commanders. Like the Rolling Stone magazine interviews that led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, the America commander in Afghanistan, the WikiLeaks documents suggest a degree of disaffection of the American military with civilian leaders deeper than anything in living memory.

To exit the Afghan quagmire in a less than humiliating fashion, the United States requires Pakistani help to persuade the Taliban not to take immediate advantage of the American departure and evoke Vietnam-era scenes of helicopters on the American Embassy roof. The politicians in Washington know they have lost and have conceded to the Taliban a role in a post-American Afghanistan. They can only hope that once the country plunges into chaos, the public will have moved onto other themes, much as it did after the Bill Clinton administration put Kosovo into the hands of a gang of dubious Albanians in 1998.

India does not want America to call Pakistan to account. In the worst case, Pakistan might choose to support the Taliban and other terrorist organizations - including Kashmiri irredentists - openly rather than covertly. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of whom the Economist on July 25 wrote "the strength of his coalition depends largely on how weak he is as Prime Minister", does not want to confront Pakistan. If Pakistan's support for anti-Indian terrorism became undeniable, India would have to act, and action is the last thing the Congress party-led coalition in New Delhi wants to consider.

China has no interest in destabilization in Pakistan; on the contrary, Beijing lives in fear that radical Islamists in Pakistan might infect its own restive Uyghurs. And Iran, which shares the fractious Balochis with Pakistan on their common border, lives in terror that a destabilized Pakistan would free the Balochis to make trouble.

Balochis comprise little over 2% of Iran's population, but they have demonstrated their talent at bomb-making on several recent occasions, including the bombing this month of a Shi'ite mosque in southeastern Iran in which 28 people were killed and hundreds wounded. Iran has accused Pakistan of sponsoring Balochi terror attacks, but intelligence community sources in Washington insist that the Pakistanis would never be so reckless as to put bombs into Balochi hands.

With 170 million people - more than Russia - and a nuclear arsenal, Pakistan is too big to fail, that is, too big to fail without traumatic consequences for its neighbors. Whether it can be kept from failure is questionable. Half its people live on less than a dollar day, and half are illiterate. It is riven by religious differences - a seventh of Pakistanis are Shi'ite - as well as ethnic ones.

The government's desultory campaign against pro-Taliban elements on the Afghan border comes down to Punjabis killing Pashtuns. To drive the Taliban in earnest out of the Pashto-speaking frontier in the Waziristan tribal areas would risk tearing the country apart. It is also the case that Pakistan wants the Taliban as a bulwark against India. But it is misleading to separate Islamabad's foreign policy objectives from the requirements of domestic cohesion, since irredentist agitation against India is part of the glue that holds together a fractious and fanatical collection of tribes.

Pakistan's claim on the support and forbearance of its neighbors, and its foreign sponsors, the United States and China, is its propensity to fail. American policy still wants to maintain a balance of power between India and Pakistan. That is an act of extreme folly. The longer the regional powers delay a reckoning with Pakistan, the more damaging the outcome. As I wrote in my year-end review last December 29:
There is one great parallel, but also one great difference, between the Balkans on the eve of World War I and the witch's cauldron comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and contiguous territory. The failure of the region's most populous state - in that case the Ottoman Empire, in this case Pakistan - makes shambles out of the power balance, leaving the initiative in the hands of irredentist radicals who threaten to tug their sponsors among the great powers along behind them. But in 1914, both France and Germany thought it more advantageous to fight sooner rather than later. No matter how great the provocation, both India and China want to postpone any major conflict. The problem is that they may promote minor ones. [1]
Given the overwhelming evidence that Pakistan is taking American aid while helping the Taliban kill American soldiers, perhaps by providing its Afghani friends with shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles, the Obama administration has done the only thing it can: deny that the 92,000 documents contain any new information, while insisting that its November 2009 "review" of Afghan war strategy is an appropriate response to the problems detailed in the documents. The Obama administration has a story, and it is sticking to it. The White House stated after the documents were published on July 25:
Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our important bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al-Qaeda's leadership. The Pakistani military has gone on the offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the Pakistani military and people. The United States and Pakistan have also commenced a Strategic Dialogue, which has expanded cooperation on issues ranging from security to economic development ... yet the Pakistani government - and Pakistan's military and intelligence services - must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively against al-Qaeda and its extremist allies. US support for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent extremist groups, while supporting the aspirations of the Pakistani people.
That this is nonsense, Obama knows, along with the whole world. At some point the charade must come to an end, and it would be a novelty in world affairs if the reluctance of American commanders to feed the charade with American blood were the proximate cause of its termination. The United States would be better advised to stop the game now and seek an open alliance with India, the world's largest democracy and America's natural partner in Central Asia.
 

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US paying Pakistan to kill American troops?


WASHINGTON: A treasure trove of US documents implicating Pakistan in its support for terrorism exploded in the public domain on Sunday, sending officials in both countries scurrying to defend a dubious alliance and straining a phony partnership based on a misreading of the ground sentiment and situation.

WikiLeaks, a whistleblower organization that publishes sensitive government leaks from anonymous sources, put a staggering 91,000 documents, mainly ground reports from US military personnel, in public domain on Sunday. Many of the documents exposed Pakistan's double-faced policy of fuelling terrorism in Afghanistan while claiming to be fighting it as an US ally.

In effect, the chronicles suggested that Washington was blindly paying Pakistan massive amounts of money for access to Afghanistan even as Islamabad uses its spy agency, ISI, to plot the death of American and Nato troops, allied Indian personnel, and undermines US policy. The most devastating leaks showed that Pakistan allows representatives of its spy service, ISI, to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize attacks against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders, including President Hamid Karzai.

WikiLeaks worked with three media organizations--The New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel and The Guardian--to make sense of the massive cache of documents, while not disclosing how it got hold of it. Stunned Washington experts compared it to the leaking of the Pentagon papers during the Vietnam War. What the cache highlighted most was the continuing Pakistani perfidy, and American credulity in accepting Islamabad as an ally and funnelling billions of dollars in aid even as it helped plot US downfall in the region and killed American soldiers.

"Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harboured strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants," the New York Times said in its assessment of the report. "The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan's unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety," it continued.

"The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Islamabad as an ally by American officials looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaida havens," it added.

That policy of ambivalence and appeasement continued even into the hours after the WikiLeaks expose, as US and Pakistani officials rushed to control the damage. US national security advisor James Jones condemned the "disclosure of classified documents by individuals and organizations", which, he said, "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security", when, in effect, the documents suggest it is Washington's appeasement of Pakistan which is doing that.

US officials also argued that the documents posted by WikiLeaks covered a period from January 2004 to December 2009 and pre-dated President Barack Obama's new strategy announced on December 1, 2009, when they suggested there began a turnaround "with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on Al Qaida and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years".

"I don't think anyone who follows this issue will find it surprising that there are concerns about the ISI and safe havens in Pakistan. In fact, we've said as much repeatedly and on the record," one official explained. "The period of time covered in these documents (January 2004-December 2009) is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three-month policy review and a change in strategy."

But the official also cast aspersions on WikiLeaks and its motive, saying, "It's worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes the US policy in Afghanistan."

Pakistan, as usual, reacted with fury to the disclosures, calling the leaks "malicious and unsubstantiated". An unnamed official in Islamabad was quoted as saying, "They were from raw intelligence reports that had not been verified and were meant to impugn the reputation of the spy agency."

A more restrained reaction came from Pakistan's ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani (whose book chronicles the Pakistani military's jihadi connections and outlook). "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities," Haqqani said, plying the current Washington-Islamabad line that whatever happened was in the past.
 

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Brezinski is trying to distinguish between pak army and the ISI and essentially implicating India for all the mess in Afghanistan.

MSNBC video today of Zbigniew "Brzezinski. He is asked by the Hostess, "if Pakistan is our enemy".
And immediately this Zbigniew launches into a defense of Pakisatan:

If we think the Pakistan as our enemy, we are shooting ourselves not in the foot, but in the head.

And then there is India (snarls), which is fighting Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan. And in this fight, Indian are together with Iran (more snarl).....
 
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Leaks show up undeclared war by Pak on India


WASHINGTON: Pakistan's war by terrorism against India in Afghanistan is highlighted in the WikiLeaks cache, including a July 1, 2008, threat report issued by Polish intelligence in Kabul that warns of an attack on the Indian embassy, which was carried out a week later.

The report relating to the attack on the Indian Embassy reads: INS [insurgents] are planning to divide into two groups: first will attack Indian embassy building, whilst the second group will engage security posts in front of MOI [the Afghan ministry of interior], IOT [in order to] give possibility to escape attackers from the first group.

The main goal of this operation is to show TB's [Taliban's] ability to carry out attack on every object in Kabul."

The attack claimed more than 50 lives, including that of a young Indian diplomat from the foreign service and a senior Indian military attache.

In fact, so strong was the ISI fingerprint in the attack that the then-US President George Bush and CIA deputy director Stephen Kappes are said to have confronted Islamabad with evidence that ISI elements aided militants in the attack.

While the WikiLeaks cache of documents is replete with instances of Pakistani support and sponsorship of terrorism in Afghanistan, the most charitable explanation being trotted out by Pakistani apologists in Washington is that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing in Pakistan. Another way of looking at it is Pakistan deliberately insulates a section of the ISI (called the S division) that controls and practices terrorism, to maintain what is called plausible deniability.

The expose also suggests that Pakistan uses its retired and former generals in pursuit of its policy of state-run terrorism. Among its proxies is Lt-Gen Hamid Gul, a favourite of television anchors even in India whose pro-Taliban stance and conspiracy theories are said to provide an alternative narrative in the war on terror. But according to the documents accessed by WikiLeaks, Gul, a former ISI chief and one of Pakistan's top generals, is an active terrorist. In the documents, Gul is depicted as an adviser and an important source of aid to the Taliban. One report even calls him "a leader" of the insurgents.

One threat report from January 14, 2008 claims that Gul coordinated the planned kidnapping of United Nations employees on Highway 1 between Kabul and Jalalabad. The memos also state that Gul ordered suicide attacks, describing the former intelligence chief as one of the most important suppliers of weaponry to the Taliban.

A threat report issued in Kabul on December 23, 2006, reveals monthly visits by Gen Gul to a madrassa in Khyber Pakhutnwa Province, in Pakistan, cited as a major provider of young boys for suicide missions in Afghanistan. The report includes a comment from the CIA Counterterrorism Center: "95% of the suicide attackers are trained in the 'Madrassa of Hashimiye' which is located in Peshawar district of Pakistan. Monthly, the former chief of ISI General Hamid Gul is visiting this madrassa."

Another threat report issued in Kabul on December 30, 2006, suggests Gen Gul, in a meeting earlier that month, directed three attackers to carry out IED attacks along the roads of the Afghan capital during the Eid ul-Fitr. The report reads: "Gul instructed two of the individuals to plant IEDs along the roads frequently utilized by government of Afghanistan (GOA) and ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] vehicles. The third individual is to carry out a suicide attack utilizing a suicide vest against GOA or ISAF entities. Reportedly, Gul's final comment to the three individuals was 'make the snow warm in Kabul', basically telling them to set Kabul aflame.
 

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The Suppurating Mess That is Pakistan

Jul 26, 2010
David P. Goldman
If Pakistan's intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning's Asia Times Online, is everybody.

This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president **** Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran. They are all terrified of facing a failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous one.

As of 9:00 a.m., there was nary a mention of one of the year's biggest news stories on either National Review or the Commentary magazine website. Perhaps that is because the new documents put as much egg on the face of the previous Republican administration as on the present Democratic one. "What elephant in the parlor?," sadly, is not a full-credit answer.

It is hard to dismiss the documents as a fabrication: Who has time to forge 92,000 documents in a credible style imitation of American military-speak? And if the documents are genuine, it is hard to dismiss them as unimportant. Even for those of us with an extremely dour view of the Afghan War (and I took such a view in my May 2010 First Things essay, "The Morality of Self-Interest"), the contents are eye-popping. Certainly they reinforce my view that the nation-building strategy of the past Republican administration was a delusion. Social engineering doesn't work, whether attempted by the right or the left.

Everyone has a good reason to ignore the suppurating mess that is Pakistan:

To exit the Afghan quagmire in a less than humiliating fashion, the United States requires Pakistani help to persuade the Taliban not to take immediate advantage of the American departure and evoke Vietnam-era scenes of helicopters on the American Embassy roof. The politicians in Washington know they have lost and have conceded to the Taliban a role in a post-American Afghanistan. They can only hope that once the country plunges into chaos, the public will have moved onto other themes, much as it did after the Bill Clinton administration put Kosovo into the hands of a gang of dubious Albanians in 1998.

India does not want America to call Pakistan to account. In the worst case, Pakistan might choose to support the Taliban and other terrorist organizations—including Kashmiri irredentists—openly rather than covertly. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of whom the Economist on July 25 wrote "the strength of his coalition depends largely on how weak he is as Prime Minister", does not want to confront Pakistan. If Pakistan's support for anti-Indian terrorism became undeniable, India would have to act, and action is the last thing the Congress party-led coalition in New Delhi wants to consider.

China has no interest in destabilization in Pakistan; on the contrary, Beijing lives in fear that radical Islamists in Pakistan might infect its own restive Uyghurs. And Iran, which shares the fractious Balochis with Pakistan on their common border, lives in terror that a destabilized Pakistan would free the Balochis to make trouble.

Balochis comprise little over 2% of Iran's population, but they have demonstrated their talent at bomb-making on several recent occasions, including the bombing this month of a Shi'ite mosque in southeastern Iran in which 28 people were killed and hundreds wounded. Iran has accused Pakistan of sponsoring Balochi terror attacks, but intelligence community sources in Washington insist that the Pakistanis would never be so reckless as to put bombs into Balochi hands.

With 170 million people—more than Russia—and a nuclear arsenal, Pakistan is too big to fail, that is, too big to fail without traumatic consequences for its neighbors. Whether it can be kept from failure is questionable. Half its people live on less than a dollar day, and half are illiterate. It is riven by religious differences—a seventh of Pakistanis are Shi'ite—as well as ethnic ones.

No one will accuse me of dovishness. But to continue to sacrifice American lives in Afghanistan under the circumstances seems stupid and immoral. It may be true that Afghanistan will be a breeding ground for terrorism when American troops leave, but Pakistan already is a breeding ground for terrorism. But there are other, cheaper ways to deal with the problem. Here's an idea: freeze travel between Pakistan and the United States (or subject prospective travelers to extreme scrutiny) until Pakistan roots out and punishes the elements of its military who help the Taliban kill Americans and their allies.

As for the threat that Pakistan may become a failed state: Pakistan already is a failed state. America's natural ally in the region is India.
 

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The adage " A picture is worth a thousand words" was never more true than after the wikileaks. In this case 92K documents!
 

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Afghanistan war logs: whose side is Pakistan on?

Wikileaks reports have galvanised opinions of some Americans who view the Pakistani military with suspicion

The storm of controversy raised by the accounts of alleged collusion between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban in the war logs has resurrected one of the most vexed questions of the nine-year Afghan war: whose side is Pakistan on?

The reports have galvanised the opinions of some Americans who view the Pakistani military, which runs the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, as a double-dealing entity that accepts $1bn a year in US funding while quietly helping Afghan insurgents.

Although the quality of evidence against the ISI in the logs is low – and the spy agency has rejected it as "malicious and unsubstantiated" – experts say there is strong evidence to suggest collusion elsewhere.

The main focus is along the lawless 1,600-mile frontier with Afghanistan, where insurgent commanders can recruit, re-supply and seek finance with little interference.

The main node is in the south-west province of Balochistan, across the border from the conflict-racked provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Here, Taliban foot soldiers shelter deep in the countryside in old Afghan refugee camps, such as Girdi Jungle, while the leadership clusters around Quetta.

Despite behind-the-scenes pressure from the British and US governments, the ISI has taken little action to break up this safe haven.

Hardly any Taliban leaders have been arrested, in contrast with the dozens of al-Qaida fugitives rounded up elsewhere. And the whereabouts of the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar remain a mystery. But the picture is complex and evolving. Militancy experts say many Taliban leaders have abandoned Quetta for the sprawling city of Karachi, where last February the ISI arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's number two, in a move trumpeted as heralding a new policy.

But it may have been a mistake. One US official said Baradar was arrested by the ISI section that co-operates with the CIA, but that had not been coordinated with the section that runs covert Afghan operations, known as directorate S. The ISI chief, General Shuja Pasha, was out of Pakistan at the time, he noted.

Even at senior levels of the US administration, the official said, the nature of the ISI's relationship with the Taliban was unclear. "Is it command and control? We don't know. It's one thing to provide a group territory and let them raise funds, recruit and give tactical advice. It's another to be able to tell them to do something – or to shut them down at will."

The other main staging area for Taliban operations lies further north along the border, in the tribal belt, where one of the war's most notorious commanders, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has a foothold. Some 377 reports in the war logs refer to the role of Haqqani fighters in the insurgency – their distribution of threatening "night letters", training of suicide bombers, ammunition smuggling across the border, and plots to attack luxury hotels in Kabul. While reports of ISI links in the papers are unconfirmed they echo a growing chorus of accusations from the CIA, largely made in private, in recent years. Based on intercepted phone calls US agents have accused the ISI of sponsoring suicide attacks by Haqqani fighters on the Indian embassy in Kabul.

The third warlord with a base in Pakistan is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 63, who has deep ties to the ISI, and operates close to Peshawar. His name features in 69 war log reports.

Much of the war logs controversy swirls around General Hamid Gul, a former ISI head and fundamentalist sympathiser who is described in at least eight intelligence files as an active Taliban organiser.

But the fuss around Gul, a notorious publicity hound, obscures the role of a much more significant figure in the conflict, Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani. This commander led the fight against the Pakistani Taliban last year and has overseen a sharp rise in CIA drone attacks in the tribal belt, which has had the blessing of the ISI. Last week he won an unprecedented three-year extension to his term of office.

But many forget that Kayani was also head of the ISI from 2003-2007, when the level of ISI-related reporting in the war logs started to soar. Paradoxically, or perhaps because of this, he is now leading Pakistan efforts to help broker a peace deal with the Taliban.

Kayani recently worked to soften the army's hostile relationship with Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, and push towards negotiations.

Analysts say it is clear that ISI policy towards the Taliban, much like Kayani himself, is an enigma, and in reality has multiple strands, opportunistically supporting some groups when it suits strategy and perceived interests, and fighting against groups on others. The ISI, they say, is on its own side.

Then there is the issue of capacity. One former US military officer said he doubted the ISI had the ability to crack down on every militant group inside its borders even if it wanted to.
 

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Leaked files lay bare war in Afghanistan



The documents detail multiple reports of cooperation between retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who ran ISI in the late 1980s, and Afghan insurgents battling U.S. forces in the mountainous eastern region of the country. In the latter years of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Gul worked closely with several major mujaheddin fighters who currently are battling U.S. troops and trying to topple the Afghan government. The documents also include reports that Gul was trying to reestablish contacts with insurgent leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose fighters have been responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks on U.S. forces.

Over the past decade, U.S. intelligence has collected evidence of direct contacts between ISI and Jalaluddin Haqqani, Hekmatyar and Taliban leader Mohammed Omar. That evidence includes both human intelligence and intercepted communications, officials said.

As the new Afghan war strategy was being formulated late last year, Obama stepped up private pressure on the Pakistanis to sever ties with the Taliban, suggesting that if there wasn't improvement, the United States would begin to take matters into its own hands.

"The key thing to bear in mind is that the administration is not naive about Pakistan," an Obama administration official said. "The problem with the Pakistanis is that the more you threaten them, the more they become entrenched and don't see a path forward with you."

Most of the voluminous store of classified reports reflects the daily grind of life in Afghanistan as covered in news reports for the past several years. In them, junior officers complain about poorly equipped Afghan forces, corrupt Afghan government officials and a U.S. war effort that at times seemed to be seriously wanting for resources.

In one document, a team of civil affairs soldiers reports donating money for an orphanage that is supposed to help about 100 fatherless children and finding later that only about 30 boys and girls were being helped. Also missing were the stores of rice, grain and cooking oil that the troops had provided. "We found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA [humanitarian assistance] we had given them," the report states.

Other reports give accounts of police chiefs skimming the pay of their patrol officers or placing nonexistent "ghost" troops on their rolls so that they could pocket the additional salaries.

Another report that chronicles a massive Taliban attack on Combat Outpost Keating in eastern Afghanistan quotes frantic radio calls from an overwhelmed U.S. lieutenant seeking air support to hold off the much larger Taliban force. The attack on the base was chronicled in a Washington Post report this year, based on interviews with the officer and his troops.



At times the U.S. troops show a lack of knowledge about Afghanistan, botching the names of cities and the relationships between senior Afghan officials.

The reports highlight how civilian casualties resulting from mistakes on the battlefield have alienated Afghans. Over the past year, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have dropped significantly. But many of the problems referred to in the memo -- a resilient Taliban, porous borders with Pakistani safe havens and largely ineffectual Afghan government -- remain.
 

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WikiLeaks Drops 90,000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally


Turns out "Collateral Murder" was just a warmup. WikiLeaks just published a trove of 77,000 mostly-classified U.S. military documents — out of over 90,000 it obtained — that details a strengthening Afghan insurgency with deep ties to Pakistani intelligence.

WikiLeaks' release of a 2007 Apache gunship video sparked worldwide outrage, but little change in U.S. policy. This massive storehouse taken, it would appear, from U.S. Central Command's CIDNE data warehouse — has the potential to be strategically significant, raising questions about how and why America and her allies are conducting the war.

Not only does it recount 144 incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians over six years. But it shows just how deeply elements within the United States' supposed ally, Pakistan, have nurtured the Afghan insurgency. In its granular, behind-the-scene details about the war, this has the potential to be Afghanistan's answer to the Pentagon Papers. Except in 2010, it comes as a database you can open in Excel, brought to you by the now-reopened-for-business WikiLeaks.

Now, obviously, it's not news that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligences has ties to the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami. That's something that pretty much every observer of the Afghanistan war and the Pakistani intelligence apparatus has known for the better part of a decade.

But as the early-viewing New York Times reports, WikiLeaks presents a new depth of detail about how the U.S. military has seen, for six years, the depths of ISI facilitation of the Afghan insurgency. For instance: a three-star Pakistani general active during the '80s-era U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi sponsorship of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Hamid Gul, allegedly met with insurgent leaders in South Waziristan in January 2009 to plot vengeance for the drone-inflicted death of an al-Qaeda operative. (Gul called it "absolute nonsense" to the Times reporters.)

Other reports, stretching back to 2004, offer chilling, granular detail about the Taliban's return to potency after the U.S. and Afghan militias routed the religious-based movement in 2001. Some of them, as the Times notes, cast serious doubt on official U.S. and NATO accounts of how insurgents prosecute the war. Apparently, the insurgents have used "heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft," eerily reminiscent of the famous Stinger missiles that the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan provided to the mujahedeen to down Soviet helicopters. One such missile downed a Chinook over Helmand in May 2007.


Typically, NATO accounts of copter downings are vague — and I've never seen one that cited the Taliban's use of a guided missile. This clearly isn't just Koran, Kalashnikov and laptop anymore. And someone is selling the insurgents these missiles, after all. That someone just might be slated to receive $7.5 billion of U.S. aid over the next five years.



That said, it's worth pointing out that the documents released so far are U.S. military documents, not ISI documents, so they don't quite rise to smoking-gun level.

Not that that's so necessary. The ISI's quasi-sponsorship of the Afghan insurgency is pretty much an open secret. Most Washington analysts take it for granted that at least some aspects of the Pakistani security apparatus retain ties to the Taliban and affiliated extremist groups as an insurance policy for controlling events inside Afghanistan. That's why some thought it was a positive sign in February when the Pakistanis captured Mullah Baradar, a senior Afghan Taliban leader — including (cough) too-credulous journalists.

WikiLeaks has freaked out the White House, though, by clearly raising questions about whether Pakistani aid to the Afghan insurgency is far deeper than typically acknowledged — something that would raise additional questions about whether the Obama administration's strategy of hugging Pakistan into severing those ties is viable. Retired Marine General Jim Jones, President Obama's national security adviser, e-mailed reporters a long statement denouncing the leaks and pledging continued support for Pakistan.

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," Jones said in a statement. "Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents — the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people." So much for a shift in course.

Is there a silver lining to Pakistan's relationship with the insurgents? On the one hand, it's possible that the extent of those ties might amount to leverage over the insurgents to cut a deal with Hamid Karzai's government to end the war. But there was a lot of talk about that when Baradar was captured, and none of it has panned out. And in the meantime, the first batch of expanded U.S. aid to Pakistan — $500 million worth — arrived on July 18. Who knows how much of that money will end up in the Afghan insurgents' pockets.

We'll have additional reports on this as we go through the trove, as will our sister blog, Threat Level. There's stuff in here about the use of drones, the deadly Kunduz airstrike last year and much, much more. In the meantime, tell us what you find in the WikiLeaks trove, either by leaving a note in the comments, or by dropping us a line. Either way, include the document number so we can keep track of it all.



Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/201...ers-pakistan-as-insurgent-ally/#ixzz0uqfnb400
 

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