Pakistan's Ideology and Identity crisis

Pakistan 'key' to UK terror plots

A US report investigating links between Britain and Pakistan says that "a physical and ideological terrorism pipeline" exists between the countries.

The report, published by centre-right think tank The Heritage Foundation, argues that "Pakistan is central" to terrorist plots in Britain.

More than a quarter of those convicted of terrorism in the UK trained or tried to train in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

It also warned that British "homegrown" terrorism constitutes a major threat.

The Heritage Foundation, examined data from "major Islamist terrorist plots" in Britain between 11 September 2001 and early August 2009.

Homegrown threat

The authors, Ted Bromund and Morgan Roach, said the data they analysed showed that 19 out of the 87 individuals convicted of terrorism offences in Britain had family ties to Pakistan.

At least one was a Pakistani citizen, they say, and 61 were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

They also warn of British homegrown terrorism citing the 18 individuals linked to major plots over the past eight years who were trained in Britain - more than in any other country except Pakistan.

The report also noted that North Africa posed a threat, with at least 13 individuals having ties to the region, six of whom were Algerians.

Participation from the Middle East, the report says, was "comparatively insignificant".

The threat, it concludes, came from individuals affiliated with al-Qaeda, making "Islamist terrorism in Britain another front in the war that al-Qaeda is waging now in Pakistan and Afghanistan".

Border control

Mr Bromund and Mr Roach say that Britain and America "need to break the Pakistan-UK terrorism pipeline."

"Breaking that pipeline is just as important as, but far more difficult than, ending the flow of trained men from Pakistan into Britain."

They believe that the current war in Afghanistan is key to breaking the "pipeline", saying that "a premature US and British military retreat from Afghanistan would allow that country to serve again as an international terrorist haven and would embolden Al Qaeda and its affiliates to export their ambitions regionally and globally.

In line with the Heritage Foundation's Eurosceptic credentials, the authors also recommend that Britain take action to control its borders, adding that further European integration would imperil Britain's ability to control its ports of entry.

The data, the authors say, shows that out of the 87 individuals convicted of terrorism in Britain, 21 had entered Britain illegally or under false pretences.
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Pakistan 'key' to UK terror plots

worth reading full:
Understanding the ‘Jihad Print Media’ in Pakistan and its Impact

Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) conducted a national seminar on Understanding the ‘Jihad Print Media’ in Pakistan and its impact on 20 October in Islamabad. The seminar brought together a large number of media representatives, scholars and academics to discuss and comment on PIPS’ recently produced report on the subject.

Watch Episode-2 part-1. Their ex air chief clearly states that Pakistan was the aggressor in all wars and need not fear India.

India would get into their unholy mess if we attacked them. Something we all know. They have nothing that would attract us to them!

well first thanks vinod for the videos. a good one.

i have always felt that PAF then and even now are very pragmatic. they disagree with with PA'a designs. i wish the other two wings learn from them.

asghar khan refers to the mess pakistan is in today and goes on to say the situation if india invaded. in any case why will india invade? india just wants peace in its own and the region's interest.

Pak generals trying to dislodge Zardari: US

Fearing that Obama Administration wants Pakistan Army to be brought under effective civilian control, the military generals are conspiring to dislodge President Asif Ali Zardari through democratic means and political channels.

The fear, among the generals, who have ruled Pakistan for majority of years after independence is also that Zardari with his enhanced powers of presidency might appoint generals of his choice, when the Army's present top hierarchy comes up for retirement in October next year, according to a leading US intelligence think tank.

The Pakistan military, the think tank Stratfor said sees the alignment of the Obama Administration with Zardari as further undermining its position at a time when its power within the country already has weakened because of the rise of civilian forces and a raging Taliban insurgency.

Noting that both this domestic situation and pressure from Washington have placed considerable limits on the ability of the military to dislodge civilian government, Stratfor said the military was now using its influence to help align forces against the president, to force him out of office with a veneer of legality.

"The goal is thus not to unseat the current

government, but to get rid of Zardari in such a way that looks like the byproduct of a constitutional process rather than of a coup -- a return to the times when the military dismissed four different governments between 1985 and 1999," Stratfor said.

Riling up the opposition against the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) is thus a means of forcing Zardari into a corner, it said. Stratfor said the Obama administration feels that unless the army is brought under civilian control, Washington cannot deal with the region's Taliban problem.

This is because the Pakistani security establishment draws a distinction between "good" Taliban that fight in Afghanistan and "bad" Taliban that wage war in Pakistan, it argued.

Also what has antagonised the Army is the aid package for Pakistan recently signed into law recently, which calls for civilian supremacy over the military in Pakistan, and represents a bid by Washington to work with the Zardari government to rein in the Pakistani military. Stratfor said the Pakistani military as an institution has remained deeply opposed to Zardari, though it has continued to work with him.

"This is due to the fact that the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate feel no good alternative to Zardari exists capable of leading Pakistan. PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif is seen as unreliable given his past struggles with the army and his recent moves to emerge as the torchbearer for democracy," it said.

Noting that one key power of the enhanced presidency is the ability to appoint high-level army officials, the think-tank said this power will come into play when current army chief General Ashfaq Kayani retires in October 2010.

Pakistan's other four-star general, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen Tariq Majid, is due to retire at the same time, and current ISI chief Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha could retire as early as March 2010.

"The Zardari government would like to use this opportunity to appoint generals of its own choice to these top military and intelligence posts, something the armed forces deem extremely unacceptable.

The military thus would like to see Zardari's departure from office before that can happen," Stratfor said.

Famed French judge Bruguiere tells of a troubled Pakistan

In a new book, former investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere says Pakistan has lost control of rogue military and intelligence officers, who are aiding militants.

Reporting from Washington - The Pakistani government has lost control of rogue military and intelligence officers who aid Al Qaeda and its allies and play a double game with the West, a renowned French judge asserts in an upcoming book.

For three decades, Jean-Louis Bruguiere was an investigative magistrate, a powerful role that combines the duties of prosecutor and judge and allowed him to cultivate high-level contacts from Algiers to Moscow. He stepped down from that post in 2007, and now serves as the European Union's envoy to Washington on issues related to the financing of terrorism.

His 481-page book, "What I Could Not Say," is to be published Monday in France.

An advance copy obtained by The Times bolsters the 66-year-old official's swashbuckling reputation with previously undisclosed witness testimony and intelligence documents from a trove of case files.

Pakistan's government has long faced criticism that elements of its security services have protected militant groups. The government says it is trying to purge them, and it has launched offensives this year against militants in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, where its forces are currently battling entrenched Taliban fighters.

The book details French investigations of extremist activity in Pakistan, including a case in which officials went as far as hiding militants from CIA inspection teams at a training camp run by the Pakistani military. Military handlers then sent the trainees on terrorist missions to the West, Bruguiere asserts.

The United States made strategic errors in dealing with Pakistan, he says, adding that it might be too late to clear the security forces of those who sympathize with the extremists.

Islamic radicals seemed to benefit from "a certain sympathy, to say the least" within Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, he writes, citing one of his cases. "We did not have the impression that our interlocutors considered [Al Qaeda militants] to be terrorists."

Published as interviews with Jean-Marie Pontaut, an editor at L'Express magazine, the book is a portrait of one of Europe's best-known crime fighters. The stocky, square-jawed, restless Bruguiere comes from a line of judges dating back to Napoleonic times. He tells of interrogating fanatics and eating crocodile meat during a harrowing investigative trip to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. But he also writes about growing up among Surrealist painters, who were friends of his father, an art aficionado. And he participated in Paris' leftist student protests of May 1968.

Tracing a history of modern-day terrorism, the book describes the nine-year investigation of the 1989 bombing of a flight from Chad to Paris that killed 170 people. The global hunt culminated in the convictions, in absentia, of top Libyan officials. The judge also recounts the fight against far-left and Palestinian groups supported by the Soviet Union.

After terrorist attacks on France in the 1990s, Bruguiere became an expert on Al Qaeda and an early warning voice. Today, he says, errors by Washington contributed to the crisis in Pakistan.

"The situation in Pakistan is among the most worrisome," he writes. "The central government has lost control of certain elements of the army and the ISI, an intelligence service that no longer has the trust of its foreign partners."

The judge cites his investigation of Willie Brigitte, a Frenchman who was convicted of terrorism charges in 2007.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Al Qaeda militants helped Brigitte go to Pakistan to train with hundreds of Arabs and Westerners and several thousand Pakistanis and Afghans at a mountain complex in Punjab. Affiliated with Al Qaeda, the camp was run jointly by the Lashkar-e-Taiba extremist group and Pakistani security forces, which supplied arms and instructors, the book says.

CIA officers accompanied by Pakistani officials made four inspections of the camp, part of an agreement in which Pakistan had promised to prevent foreign militants from training with Lashkar, Bruguiere writes.

"But, since most of the officers of Lashkar belonged to the army, these inspections were doomed to draw a blank," the book says. "The foreign recruits were alerted on the eve of the arrival of the inspection teams by their instructors, military men informed by their hierarchy.

"The trainees then had to . . . erase any traces of their presence and head to an elevation of more than 13,000 feet while the inspection lasted."

The book says Brigitte testified that his handler was a Pakistani military officer, identified as Sajid, who sent the Frenchman to Australia to join a cell plotting bomb attacks on targets that included a nuclear plant. Alerted by French investigators on Brigitte's trail, Australian police arrested the group in 2003.

Sajid also dispatched militants for missions in Britain and in Virginia, where authorities later convicted Americans who were part of a group known as the "paintball jihadis" and who were fellow trainees of Brigitte, the book says. A French court convicted Brigitte on terrorism charges and sentenced him to nine years in prison.

In 2006, Bruguiere went to the Pakistani port city of Karachi to investigate a suicide bombing that had killed 11 French naval contractors three years earlier. Pakistani security officials were uncooperative and hostile, he asserts.

"French officials in Pakistan were the target of threats and physical intimidation: a way of dissuading us from returning," he writes.

The George W. Bush administration underestimated the threat in Pakistan largely because it was distracted by the war in Iraq, Bruguiere says. He says U.S.-French tensions over Iraq did not harm anti-terrorism cooperation, and he writes about his many friends and allies in U.S. law enforcement.

But Bruguiere says he warned U.S. officials that the war would worsen Islamic extremism. He dismisses former Vice President **** Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as "men who did not understand the Arab world" and "felt invested with a quasi-divine sense of mission."

At the same time, Bruguiere shares with U.S. conservatives a deep suspicion of Iran. Attacks by Iranian operatives in France and elsewhere show that Tehran's security apparatus is the "real heart of power," the book says.

Iran has used systematic deception to manipulate Western diplomats in talks about its nuclear program, while preparing a global terrorist infrastructure that could be used in a confrontation with the West, Bruguiere charges.

Iran also could strike in unexpected ways in remote places such as West Africa or Latin America, where Tehran's longtime ally Hezbollah has an entrenched presence, Bruguiere warns.

"These networks . . . are able to create circumstantial alliances with drug cartels operating in Colombia and Mexico," the book says, referring to the convergence of extremists and traffickers as "a complex configuration of threats directed at the United States."

Famed French judge Bruguiere tells of a troubled Pakistan -- latimes.com

No differences between president, army chief: Malik

Malik has spoken ergo something's up.

Must see!

You are right. It is indeed comforting.

The worry is still that these voices may prove too little and too late. The institutions of power can still get away without heeding to the saner voices.:dfi-1:

the solace is atleast in people accepting the fact that how PA has nurtured and fathered the outfits like JEM, LET etc..

you are right. all these people kept quiet when they should have spoken. but still i feel it acts as some sort of psychological leash on PA to mend ways. but we will have to wait for generations for the effect of it if PA finally admits and mends.

you are spot on. PA has always ruled pakistan according to their whims and have never been answerable. if something has to change it is PA. only then we will see some positive outcome.

I only get the feeling of ostrich sticking its head in the sand.Too many conspiracy theories to put the blame on some body else.