WikiLeaks Revelations

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WikiLeaks Analysis: Dossier points to the war's most dangerous man​

Retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul is a walking anomaly — a former Pakistani spymaster who loves publicity.

A hawk-like man with dark piercing eyes, he is self-confident to the point of condescending arrogance. Well-educated and outspoken, he thrives on Pakistan's infatuation with grand conspiracy theories. And, if the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs are to be believed, he is also behind a secret network helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda strike at U.S. forces.

An architect of Afghanistan's jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he used financial and logistical support from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to mould the mujahedeen into a victorious fighting force.

Now, he is fiercely anti-American, publicly defends al-Qaeda and the Taliban and condemns Washington for waging war on all Muslims.

In his final years in the army, Gen. Gul decorated his desk with a chunk of the Berlin Wall that was presented to him by West Germany's intelligence agency the BND. It had a small plaque that read, "With deepest respects to General Hamid Gul, who helped deliver the first blow — 1989."

Nowadays, the 74-year-old former tank commander is regarded by many as one of the world's most dangerous men.

U.S. military documents released this week by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks portray Gen. Gul as head of a secret Pakistani intelligence network that arms, supports and directs the Taliban while helping co-ordinate insurgent attacks on U.S. and foreign troops in Afghanistan.

One document, dated mid-December 2006, says Gen. Gul met with "senior members of the Taliban leadership in Nowshara, Pakistan," and announced he had dispatched three insurgents with improvised explosive devices to Kabul to carry out attacks during the Muslim celebration of Eid.

"Gul instructed two of the individuals to plant IEDs along the roads frequently utilized by Government of Afghanistan and ISAF vehicles," the report says. "The third individual is to carry out a suicide attack utilizing a suicide vest" against Afghan government and NATO targets.

"Make the snow warm in Kabul," Gen. Gul told the bombers, the report says. "Set Kabul aflame."

Another report, dated Jan. 5, 2009, says Gen. Gul attended a meeting of insurgents in South Waziristan that was held to plot revenge attacks for the death of a Taliban commander killed in a U.S. drone attack.

"Three unidentified older Arab males, who were considered important" also attended. They were probably top al-Qaeda leaders, since they had "approximately 20 Arab bodyguards."

There has been speculation for years that Gen. Gul was working tirelessly in retirement to maintain his intelligence contacts with insurgent networks in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

In the past, India claimed it was Gen. Gul who unleashed the forces of Islamic fundamentalism to wage a proxy terrorist war in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the 1990s.

India also claims Gen. Gul was behind the 2008 Mumbai hotel massacre by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba and say he played a major role in the 2008 bombing of India's embassy in Kabul.

After the Kabul embassy bombing the United States tried to have Gen. Gul listed by the United Nations as a supporter of Islamic terrorism.

A year before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, then U.S. counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke claimed a "former head of Pakistan's ISI," widely believed to be Gen. Gul, had given the Taliban advance warning in 1998 of U.S. attempts to assassinate Osama bin Laden with a barrage of missile strikes, after bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa.

The Pakistani spymaster was rumoured to have warned bin Laden his satellite phone was being used to track him.

Gen. Gul retired from the army in 1991, after being denied a chance to become the head of the armed forces and forced to step down as the country's spy chief by then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Ever since, he has been actively involved with radical Islamist groups and served as a "strategic advisor" to a six-party coalition of religious extremists that now serves as Pakistan's main opposition.

He regularly appears as a pundit on television talk shows and is frequently consulted as a supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In recent years, Gen. Gul has claimed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, were "inside jobs" carried out by Israel's Mossad and elements of the CIA.

He has also fingered the U.S. for carrying out Ms. Bhutto's assassination in 2007.

Always impeccably dressed, Gen. Gul frequently entertains foreign reporters at his home, in a gated compound for retired officers near army headquarters in Rawalpindi. This week, after the WikiLeaks accusations were made public, he took delight in dismissing the claims as "fiction and nothing else."

"If this is the condition of U.S. intelligence, then I am afraid it is no wonder they are losing in Afghanistan," he said.

"I am their favourite whipping boy and it is not the first time that such allegations are made against me. It is almost two decades since I retired from the ISI, but they keep accusing me of everything."

National Post



Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Wi...st+dangerous/3329911/story.html#ixzz0v2QwRNwX

 

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The New Republic: WikiLeaks And Pakistani Loyalties

Pakistan, like most of the Greater Middle East, is a seriously schizoid land, where people passionately believe contradictory ideas, especially about God, man, and America, and leaders pursue policies that often do not redound to their advantage, let alone to the miserable denizens they rule over. But what Mr. Gelb and others are recommending will give Pakistan a much worse personality disorder than anything we've seen so far. No doubt: The Pakistanis are going to have to fight this out among themselves, as did the Iraqi Sunnis, who once pretty broadly embraced Al Qaeda's savagery against the United States and the Iraqi Shia. It's their fight much more than it is ours. But as in Iraq, we need to hold our ground. If we do not, the right people shall lose. Pakistani schizophrenia is deeply distressing and frightening, but an American retreat would make the ISI's former die-hard Islamist boss Hamid Gul, a dangerously captivating man, into a compelling shrink. That's not a good idea.

 

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On WikiLeaks, Pakistan and Afghanistan; the tip of an old iceberg​

...
So while Pakistan might eventually be able to lean on the Taliban to negotiate, and may not be that far apart from Washington on the kind of settlement it wants to see in Afghanistan, it is unlikely to want to give much ground until it has some reassurances about India (that India, in turn, still angry about the 2008 attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, is unwilling to give.)

Is Pakistan the only one entitled to have reassurances? Reassurances on what? That they should be allowed to maintain anti-India jihadi terrorist infrastructure?

 

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I never ordered Indians killed: Former ISI chief
Former head of Pak's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) Gen Hamid Gul has described the 91,000 leaked US military documents, which allege close connections between Pak and Taliban militants, as "fictional". Gul, DG of ISI from 1987 to 1989, said there was "much bashing of the ISI and of the army indirectly in this case, and they feel that I am probably a convenient whipping boy". Instead, Gul has blamed General Ashfaq Kayani, Pak's present army chief.

Gul, who headed ISI when Pakistan and the US were supporting Islamist militants in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, is mentioned a number of times throughout the leaked intelligence reports. In one report, Gul, who has been an outspoken supporter of the Taliban, is alleged to have dispatched three men in Dec 2006 to carry out attacks in Afghanistan's capital.

However, in an interview in Rawalpindi on Tue, Gul said that it was "fictional" and went on to say that "it only depicts the intelligence failure on the part of US and whoever else, but much of it, I think, has been contributed by Afghan intelligence".

Clearly pointing a finger at Pak, the Afghan government had said on Monday that the leaked documents verified Afghanistan's long-held view that the war won't end until terrorist sanctuaries in neighbouring nations are shut down.

But the ISI lashed out against the leaked reports alleging close connections between it and Taliban militants fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan, calling the accusations malicious and unsubstantiated.

The reports, which were released by the online whistle-blower 'Wikileaks', raised new questions about whether the US could succeed in convincing Pak to sever its historical links to the Taliban and deny them sanctuary along the Afghan border - actions that many analysts believe are critical for success in Afghanistan.

Pak helped the Taliban seize power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Although the govt renounced the group in 2001 under US pressure, many analysts believe Pak refuses to sever links with the Taliban because it believes it could be a useful ally in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw.

The reports, which cover a period from Jan 2004 to Dec 2009, suggest Pak allows representatives of its ISI agency to meet directly with the Taliban to organise militant networks that fight US troops in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders, according to The New York Times.

In one report from Mar 2008, the ISI is alleged to have ordered Siraj Haqqani, a prominent militant based in northwestern Pak, to kill workers from archenemy India who were building roads in Afghanistan. In another from Mar 2007, the ISI is alleged to have given Jalaluddin Haqqani, Siraj's father, 1,000 motorcycles to carry out suicide attacks in Afghanistan.

The Haqqanis run a military network based in Pak's North Waziristan tribal area that is believed to have close ties with the ISI. The US has given Pak billions in military aid since 2001 to enlist its cooperation, but it has had little success convincing Pak to target Afghan Taliban militants holed up in the country, especially members of the Haqqani network.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/I-never-ordered-Indians-killed-Former-ISI-chief/articleshow/6231725.cms

 

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Taliban Missiles Likely Supplied by Pakistan, Not USA ​

The media has seized upon this story as yet another government blunder since after all wasn't it the U.S. government who originally supplied the Mujahideen with stinger missiles back in the 80's when they were fighting the Soviets? However, a closer examination of the specs on these stingers leads one to a far different and perhaps more dangerous conclusion; that Pakistan has begun to supply the Taliban with their own surface to air missiles to use against U.S. forces.

The fact remains however that the Taliban are getting fully functioning MANPADS from somewhere, which in all likelihood have been constructed in the last 4-5 years. The most likely candidate is Pakistan which is both the traditional patron of the Taliban and has for the last twenty years been a manufacturer of their very own surface to air missile known as the Anza. The Anza has an effective range of up to 5000 meters and could certainly have been behind the downing of several US helicopters in recent years. In recent years, Pakistan has advertised the Anza series for export,displaying it at the International Defense Exhibition (IDEX) 2007 event in the UAE.

 

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WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday denounced the disclosure this week of 75,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war by the Web site WikiLeaks, asserting that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged the ability of others to trust the United States government to protect their secrets.


Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates portrayed the documents as "a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old" that offered little insight into current policies and events. Still, he said, the disclosures — which include some identifying information about Afghans who have helped the United States — have "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences."

"The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world," he said. "Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries."

Mr. Gates said the documents' disclosure had prompted a rethinking of a trend nearly two decades old, dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991, of trying to make intelligence information more accessible to troops in combat situations so they can respond rapidly to developments.

"We endeavor to push access to sensitive battlefield information down to where it is most useful — on the front lines — where as a practical matter there are fewer restrictions and controls than at rear headquarters," he said. "In the wake of this incident, it will be a real challenge to strike the right balance between security and providing our frontline troops the information they need."

The military has charged an intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, with downloading large amounts of classified information from a computer at a base in Iraq and sending it to WikiLeaks, which operates from servers scattered across multiple countries and solicits "classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance."

Military officials have said that Army investigators also consider Private Manning a "person of interest" in the investigation into the Web site's most recent disclosures. They said Thursday that he was being moved from Kuwait to Quantico, Va., where he would remain in military confinement as he awaits further judicial steps. WikiLeaks shared the documents with publications in Britain, Germany and the United States, including The New York Times, before posting them this week.

Julian Assange, an Australian computer specialist who founded WikiLeaks, has described the project as a form of journalism that seeks to protect whistle-blowers and enhance democracy by making public information that government officials would rather keep secret.

In a series of media appearances and interviews this week, he has defended the latest release as providing an unvarnished portrait of problems with the war in Afghanistan, while saying that his organization had held back about 15,000 documents for safety reasons.

But at Mr. Gates's news conference on Thursday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, portrayed WikiLeaks as recklessly endangering people in order to satisfy its "need to make a point."

"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Admiral Mullen said.

Mr. Gates said the military was taking steps to protect some Afghans identified in the documents, but he declined to specify them. He also declined to comment about the investigation beyond noting that he had enlisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist Army investigators, a move that is seen as a precursor to potentially charging people who are not uniformed service members.

A person familiar with the investigation has said that Justice Department lawyers are exploring whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing, or conspiring in, violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/asia/30wiki.html?_r=1&ref=asia

 

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LONDON: The Taliban in Afghanistan has threatened to behead informers who have been revealed following the explosive disclosure by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks has put out over 90,000 uncensored intelligence documents, causing a security scare. Countries which have their forces fighting in Afghanistan are poring over the documents to see the extent of the damage.

The Taliban Thursday night responded for the first time since the WikiLeaks expose of the names and locations of anti-Taliban informers, Daily Mail reported on Friday.

The terror group said, "We know how to punish them", a reference to beheading that is a punishment for those whom they consider traitors.

The reaction came as officials in Britain said they were worried for those who had helped the British military in Afghanistan. British officials in Kabul on Thursday said the publication was "in the best case compromising informants and in the worst, putting their lives at risk".

"We are still involved in assessment but it will certainly discourage individuals from being prepared to co-operate with us," an official was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the expose "extremely irresponsible and shocking".

He said: "Their (NATO force soldiers) lives will be in danger now. This is a very serious issue."

Colonel Richard Kemp, former head of British forces in Afghanistan, said: "This is potentially damaging to operational security. Publishing this information online increases the enormous dangers our soldiers face.

"There are few things more valuable to the enemy than gaining insight into our plans. The Taliban will be poring over every one of the leaked documents with a fine toothcomb."

 

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What if the leaks were engineered by pentagon itself and the field operatives which are named in docs are actually are ISI operatives.=heheh

 

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With Friends Like These...​

It's time to wake up, Washington. Pakistan's military is running the show in Islamabad, and the WikiLeaks revelations have only confirmed that supporting jihadi terrorist groups aren't the actions of a few, rogue generals -- it's government strategy.

BY SUMIT GANGULY | JULY 29, 2010

Until recently, the relationship between Islamabad and New Delhi seemed to be going relatively well. Tempers had calmed in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, substantive discussions at the bureaucratic level were well under way, and the highest levels of government had given their blessing to joint diplomatic talks held on July 16. But things have turned sour -- as they often do on the subcontinent -- with a remarkable quickness.


Two seemingly unrelated events of the past two weeks have illustrated a fundamental problem with the nature of the Indo-Pakistani relationship. The first was the breakdown of the talks in Islamabad. At their press conference following the closed-door meeting, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi excoriated the Indian home secretary for publicly announcing that David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American charged with involvement in the Mumbai attacks, had worked closely with Pakistani intelligence. The outburst brought an acrimonious end to the carefully planned talks.

The second was the decision of three news organizations to simultaneously publish significant excerpts from a trove of classified documents made available by WikiLeaks, the self-described global whistleblower website. The documents alleged that over the past several years, despite public professions of close cooperation with the United States on the antiterrorism front, Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate had actually abetted and aided the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Beyond these startling revelations, the documents also charged that the ISI had provided information to insurgents about U.S. troop movements, their likely operations, and military capabilities.

Both developments highlight the disturbing dominance of Pakistan's permanent military establishment and their ongoing ties to jihadi groups. Even though a civilian regime assumed office in Pakistan in September 2008, the country's military has experienced little or no change. Gen. Pervez Musharraf's hand-picked successor, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, though nominally subservient to the civilian regime, remains primus inter pares. And the security establishment that he presides over has not lost sight of its two cardinal and related principles: unremitting hostility toward India and the need for a pliable regime in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's military has long cultivated ties with a host of religious militants, but the notion that it might be convinced to abandon its use of asymmetric war strategies in Afghanistan and Indian-controlled Kashmir seems increasingly unlikely. Contrary to popular belief, the security establishment's links with these groups is not of recent vintage. Pakistan has used jihadi proxies to varying effect against India since the first war following partition in 1947. They were also the basis for another assault against India in 1965.

Of course, the use of jihadis reached its peak under the leadership of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the Soviets departed, the ISI played a decisive role in the Afghan civil war that brought the Taliban to power. By installing that regime in Kabul, Pakistan's security establishment realized its long-sought goal of "strategic depth" against India.

Meanwhile, thanks to India's ineptitude in the handling of political demands in its Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, an insurgency there erupted in 1989. Almost immediately, the Pakistani security establishment sent in its militant surrogates, transforming a domestic rebellion into a well-funded, externally supported, and religiously oriented extortion racket.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, General Musharraf was coerced by the United States to cut his ties to the Taliban and a plethora of other jihadi organizations. Musharraf, however, didn't want to lose Pakistan's strategic assets in Afghanistan and Kashmir. So even as he delivered a handful of key al Qaeda leaders including Abu Farraj al-Libi, reputedly the group's third in command, he did little or nothing to curb the activities of other jihadi organizations, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, two of the largest and most active Islamist terrorist organizations in South Asia. Instead, they were allowed to operate with considerable impunity from a number of encampments within Pakistan.

Even in the wake of the Lashkar-organized Mumbai attacks, the Pakistani security establishment chose to coddle its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. Under substantial American and Indian pressure, he was briefly placed under house arrest. Shortly thereafter, though, two Pakistani courts declared that there was insufficient evidence linking him to the Mumbai attacks and he was allowed free to resume peddling venomous anti-Indian and anti-Jewish propaganda.

Just weeks before the WikiLeaks episode, stories had started to surface in the American press about Lashkar attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. Fearful that growing evidence of the group's involvement in Afghanistan could hurt relations with Pakistan, the Pentagon chose to play down the significance of the attacks. But in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks allegations, it is hard to see how these concerns can now be swept under a rug.

The American and the Pakistani political establishments are now scrambling to contain the diplomatic damage from this week's revelations -- stressing that the evidence is dated and that U.S. policy and Pakistani behavior have changed significantly since the Obama administration entered office.

Don't bet on it. In its quest to establish a firm political foothold in Afghanistan after the American military drawdown in July 2011, Pakistan's security establishment will soon insist that Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul make peace with two of its most reliable proxies, the forces loyal to Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban network of Sirajuddin Haqqani. Not only will Pakistan have managed to reinstall a pliant regime in Afghanistan, but will also have dramatically limited what Islamabad sees as a dagger pointed at its heart -- India's growing influence to the northwest.

Simply put, the military establishment simply does not want peace with India. Meaningful progress on contentious bilateral issues would inevitably call into question its extraordinary privileges and its lavish existence. Likewise, it has little or no interest in full-fledged counterterrorism cooperation with the United States. A swift and decisive end to the swarm of jihadis operating within Pakistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border would mean an end to the seemingly unending flow of American largesse. The time has now arrived for the Obama administration to undertake a policy review that explores alternative logistics supply routes into Afghanistan and one that will lower the boom on Pakistan -- unless it shows tangible and immediate progress on the counterterrorism cooperation front. A policy that falls short on these two counts is an invitation for the continued loss of blood and treasure to no viable end.

 

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This Week at War: Pakistan Is Winning the War in Afghanistan​

What the four-stars are reading -- a weekly column from Small Wars Journal.

BY ROBERT HAD**** | JULY 30, 2010

Pakistan's Game

Of all the players in the Afghan game, Pakistan is running up the highest score. For several decades, Pakistan's policy toward Afghanistan has remained largely unchanged, regardless of who was running the country. That policy is to support Afghanistan's Pashtuns in their seemingly genetic resistance to outside control (outside in this case extends to any government located in Kabul). By supporting Pashtun autonomy, Pakistan establishes for itself a security buffer zone on its northwest frontier, which comes with a friendly auxiliary army -- the Afghan Taliban -- as a bonus.


For nearly nine years, U.S. officials have pleaded with Pakistan to suspend support for the Afghan Taliban and allow Afghanistan to unite under a central government. Pakistani officials have provided a variety of verbal responses to these entreaties but have not changed their policies toward the Afghan Taliban, whose military capability inside Afghanistan only seems to grow.

The United States cannot achieve its goals in Afghanistan while the Afghan Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan remain open. The Pakistani government refuses to close or even isolate those sanctuaries. Yet the massive U.S. foreign-assistance pipeline to Pakistan remains open. Why?

U.S. policymakers have seemingly concluded that they have more options and less risk by engaging Pakistan. They tried isolating Pakistan and found that course was neither wise nor sustainable. As a result, the Washington has opted to shower Pakistan with aid and hope that persistent persuasion will eventually result in greater Pakistani action against the Afghan Taliban.

The result has been a spectacular strategic success for Pakistan. Development aid from the United States has never been greater. The United States will deliver long-embargoed F-16 fighters to Pakistan and is providing other upgrades to Pakistan's armed forces. Along with this has come a de facto U.S. security guarantee against the perceived threat from India. Pakistan's diplomatic leverage over the United States has given it a free hand to work with China to upgrade its nuclear complex. Meanwhile, Pakistan's proxy forces in southeast Afghanistan are successfully defending the security buffer zone. Pakistan's dominant position has forced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to virtually sue for peace. This could result in an ethnic partition of Afghanistan that would secure Pakistan's main objective in the conflict.

With its winning position, Pakistan's current task is to arrange a stable end-state that avoids a backlash from the losers. Pakistan and the United States are in a largely zero-sum relationship over Afghanistan. Pakistan's leaders must fashion a settlement (however temporary) that allows the United States to save face, that maintains the U.S. aid pipeline, and that keeps the de facto security guarantee in place. U.S. officials should hope that Pakistan manages the endgame as well as it has managed the rest of the match.

Are overseas bases worth the risk?

As a country with global security responsibilities, the United States depends on an archipelago of overseas military bases to assert its presence and project power. Having benefited for so many decades from the access these bases have provided, U.S. military planners have established design specifications for weapon systems and fashioned military strategies under the assumption that access to these bases is hardly in doubt. But are these assumptions wise? Over the past two decades, political disputes have forced the Pentagon to retreat from many overseas bases, resulting in greater concentration and risk attached to those bases that remain. More closures at critical but politically vulnerable facilities cannot be ruled out. The potential for disruptions to the remaining basing archipelago calls into question the Pentagon's foresight regarding the weapons it plans to buy and its plans to project power without the base access it has become accustomed to.

The Defense Department has a long history of adjusting its overseas basing posture. Changes since the end of the Cold War have been particularly dramatic. Some have been intentional. The vast drawdown of Army and Air Force units in Europe has resulted in the closure of scores of installations. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deliberately shifted or brought home many units to make them usable for global rather than just regional contingencies.

The Pentagon has coped with involuntary ejections from overseas bases with varying degrees of success. U.S. Southern Command adjusted to its removal from Panama and Vieques, Puerto Rico by moving to Florida and building up relationships elsewhere in Central America. More recently, Ecuador tossed out a United States counternarcotic patrol base and the United States responded with an expanded presence in Colombia.

By contrast, the expulsion of the U.S. Air Force and Navy from their large bases in the Philippines has resulted in heightened risk due to greater reliance on the remaining large bases on Okinawa and Guam. And in spite of the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama over his mishandling of the Futenma base dispute, the local population's opposition to U.S. bases on Okinawa continues to boil. Defense planners cannot rule out the possibility that local political pressure will remove U.S. forces from the Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, opening a huge hole in the Pentagon's Pacific defense plans.

Writing at the Stimson Center's Budget Insight blog, Alexander Cooley, an associate professor at Columbia University, discussed some political strategies U.S. diplomats can employ to ward off local political opposition to U.S. overseas bases, especially in frontier developing countries. Cooley recommends extending U.S. diplomatic outreach to include a variety of domestic actors and sectors and not just top central government and military officials. Cooley notes that this is the technique Chinese diplomats are successfully using as they gradually expand their relationships around the globe.

The Pentagon could gain control over its own fate if it reduced its spending on weapons that require vulnerable overseas bases and increased spending on naval power and global long-range strike capabilities. For example, it could cut by half the planned purchase of short-range F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and redirect the $100 billion or more in savings on accelerating and expanding the Air Force's Next Generation Bomber program and the Navy's long-range carrier-based strike drone project. Directing the Marine Corps to refocus on the amphibious assault mission -- a power projection capability less dependent on overseas bases - would in some cases provide a hedge against the potential closure or disruption of overseas Air Force and Army bases.

Do Pentagon planners assume that their bases in the western Pacific, Central Asia and around the Persian Gulf will always be there? They undoubtedly have alternate plans on the shelf. But these workarounds could be less risky if weapons systems and strategies were designed from the beginning to be less dependent on these bases.

 

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Some leaked documents a breath of fresh air​

In all the furor of the leaked documents posted on the leftist anti-war website Wikileaks, there is some information now in the public domain that actually might do some good. Finally, we are able to see documentary evidence that the United States actually knows, or at least believes, that the Pakistanis may not be part of the solution in Afghanistan, but are in reality a major part of the problem, and that the Iranians are supporting the Taliban in their operations against American forces. While many of us have suspected this all along, it is good to see it in real government documents.

Pakistan
America's relationship with Pakistan has had its ups and downs over the years, much of influenced by how much they could do for us in furthering our national interests. That is, after all, what foreign policy is all about. During the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan's intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) was the conduit for virtually all American weapons and money to the Aghfan mujahidin.

Any one who knows Pakistan or the Pakistanis realizes that not all of the money nor weapons reached their intended recipients. The CIA officers responsible for the operation knew that there was going to be a certain amount of corruption, but that it was the price of doing business - there was no viable alternative to dealing with the ISI. The more important mission was getting weapons to the fighters in Afghanistan.

The weapons provided to the mujahidin included, as glamorized in the movie Charlie Wilson's War (see my comments on Charlie and "his" war), the FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-launched heat-seeking air defense missile system, to this day arguably the finest shoulder-fired system in existence.

As feared by many officers at the Pentagon when Representative Wilson basically forced the U.S. Army to provide Stingers to the ISI for the mujahidin, some of the missiles ended up in the hands of people we did not want to have them. In September 1987, while the CIA was still sending Stingers to the ISI, the U.S. Navy found Stingers on board the Iranian mine-laying ship Iran Ajr in the Persian Gulf. The serial numbers indicated that they had been shipped to the ISI for delivery to the mujahidin. A gift to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from our "allies."

After the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan in 1988, our assistance to the mujahidin stopped almost overnight. The mujahidin were disappointed that we did not continue our support, but our operation in Afghanistan were not about them, it was about the Soviets. Once the Soviets left, our foreign policy objective was achieved and we turned to other matters.

No longer needing the cooperation of the Pakistanis, the U.S. Congress began scrutinizing Pakistan's nascent nuclear weapons and missile programs. In 1990, once it was assessed that Pakistan was in fact developing a nuclear weapon, the United States halted delivery of additional F-16 fighter aircraft (that had already been paid for) under the terms of the Pressler Amendment. Relations between Islamabad and Washington chilled.

In the early 1990's, the ISI was involved in the creation of the fundamentalist Taliban - its charter members were drawn from the millions of Afghan refugees in northern Pakistan. When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they were supported by the ISI, and diplomatically recognized by Pakistan. There is more to the relationship between the ISI and Taliban than than Pakistani national interest.

As with many countries in the Middle East and South Asia, ethnic and tribal loyalties trump almost everything else. Many of the ISI are ethnic Pushtuns, as are most of the Taliban. It is the Pushtun tribesmen in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (especially in North and South Waziristan, the semi-autonomous regions along the Afghanistan border) that have extended protection to al-Qa'idah leaders Usmah bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar. There is also a large Pushtun contingent in the Pakistani armed forces.

The thought that the ISI and many in the Pakistani army are going to be fully supportive of the Pakistani government's efforts to move against their fellow tribesman in the Waziristans is wishful thinking. In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case - the ISI, or at least some officers in the ISI, along with some Pakistani army officers are actively supporting the Taliban in their operations against American and coalition forces.

Regardless of what Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs would have you believe - and the documents tend to make him out as less than truthful - the Pakistanis are not serious about helping us eradicate an organization that they created. To think otherwise defies logic.

Iran
The Iranians likewise are much more involved in supporting the Taliban in its operations against American and coalition forces than the administration would have us believe. The Iranians, as they did with the Iraqi Shi'a militias such as the jaysh al-mahdi (JAM) of Muqtada al-Sadr, have been providing weapons and other support to the Taliban. Although the Taliban and the Iranians have many ideological differences, their mutual hatred of the United States supersedes any reluctance to cooperate with each other.

There are also the much-touted Obama outreach efforts to Iran - all of which have been rebuffed by the Iranians and have been a dismal failure. Could a desire to not offend the Ahmadinejad regime have played into the downplaying of Iran's support for the Taliban? I have my suspicions.

Last words
Julian Assange, the self-righteous arrogant co-founder of Wikileaks is joined by Amnesty International in its condemnation of American involvement in Afghanistan and what they believe is a high level of civilian casualties. Why don't they spend as much time condemning the Taliban and its murderous activities? They act like the Taliban is a legitimate entity rather than a bunch of murdering jihadist fanatics.

Finally, if U.S. Army intelligence analyst Specialist Bradley Manning turns out to be the source of the leaked documents, I urge the Secretary of Defense to pursue treason charges and seek the death penalty. Release of these classified documents when American troops are involved in combat operations rises to that level - if he did it, he deserves to die.

 

[Neil]

No Afghan Ally Left Behind

A TALIBAN spokesman announced Thursday that the group is poring over the tens of thousands of classified military documents published by WikiLeaks this week, looking for the names of pro-American Afghans.

As in the past, those identified will likely be added to lists of people to be assassinated, or rounded up once the United States and its allies leave the country. We're already seeing this in Iraq where, as American troops prepare to withdraw, there is a campaign by insurgents to kill members of the Awakening movement and others who have cooperated with the United States.

With the United States' deadlines for leaving Afghanistan only a year away, we need to plan for what will happen to our allies once we're gone. And we must certainly not allow a repetition of what happened in Indochina after the withdrawal in 1975 of our military forces, our diplomatic establishment and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Because the United States made virtually no provision for the security of its friends and collaborators, millions of people accused of being American sympathizers were killed, imprisoned or compelled to flee as the North Vietnamese took power in South Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao in Laos.

In South Vietnam, only a small number of collaborators was evacuated by Marine helicopters to ships off the coast. Just weeks later, as the North Vietnamese seized full control of the South, Le Duan, the hard-line Marxist successor to Ho Chi Minh, instituted a purge of American allies, consigning as many as 400,000 people to prison camps.

More than a million others fled the country by boat over the next 15 years. Some were picked up at sea by the United States and resettled here. But American policymakers never seriously considered the fate of our South Vietnamese allies.

Conditions were even worse in Cambodia. Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of the Khmer Rouge, ordered the immediate execution of Cambodian soldiers and officials who served in the American-supported government of Lon Nol. Over the next four years, the United States stood by while an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died by execution, starvation and maltreatment as Pol Pot set about cleansing the country of "foreign influence."

In Laos, the United States abandoned its most loyal allies, the Hmong hill people, who had been employed by the C.I.A. to battle the Communist-led Pathet Lao and disrupt North Vietnamese military traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which snaked through Laos on its way into South Vietnam. True, from 2000 to 2005 the United States gave asylum to 15,000 of the estimated 100,000 Hmong who had fled to Thailand. But it did nothing when, last December, Thailand deported more than 4,000 of the remaining refugees back to Communist-ruled Laos, where they could face retribution.

There are many parallels between the American experience in Indochina and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the United States prepared to withdraw from Indochina, particularly Vietnam, it undertook a program of, in President Nixon's words, "Vietnamization," in which American forces trained and equipped allied armies to take over the fighting.

That we are doing the same in Afghanistan and Iraq should raise concerns. Vietnamization was predicated on the promise of continued American air support and other military aid. But as Congress became impatient with the ineptitude of the allied leaders and the war's continued costs, that assistance was cut off, leaving our allies practically defenseless.

We can see similar tendencies in Congress today. Criticism of government leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as demands for reductions in military spending and accelerated withdrawal timetables, could be a harbinger of cuts to financial and military aid after we leave.

We must plan now to protect our allies in the future. We should consider leaving behind residual forces to ensure their security. We should refuse to negotiate political settlements with Taliban factions without iron-clad security guarantees for those who cooperated with the United States. We should seek international arrangements, possibly with United Nations support, to assure peaceful and humane political transitions.

And, if need be, we should offer asylum to anyone directly endangered for helping us. Having fought brutal wars in their countries to protect our interests, we owe them nothing less.

Seymour Topping, an emeritus journalism professor at Columbia and a former correspondent for The Times, is the author of "On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent's Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam."


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31topping.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

[ajtr]

WikiLeaks or Wikihype?​

S Rajagopalan

Nations often have confrontations with "The Truth", but invariably end up doing nothing with them. This week America hit such a crossroads.

Who is Julian Assange? Many would have asked until last Sunday, when the soft-spoken Australian made a bold statement that has shaken America's corridors of power. A former computer programmer, a convicted hacker and a sometimes journalist, the 39-year-old put out some 92,000 classified United States military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan on the whistleblower website that he founded four years ago — WikiLeaks.

Airing the material pertaining to the 2004-09 phase of the ongoing war has startled and infuriated the White House and the Pentagon alike. For the record, however, the authorities have downplayed the import of the expose. President Barack Obama was dismissive: "The fact is these documents don't reveal any issues that haven't already informed our public debate on Afghanistan." But he added he was concerned that the disclosures could potentially jeopardise individuals or operations.

Assange does not agree with Obama or other functionaries of his administration about the significance of the leaked material. He for one believes that what he has brought to light is comparable to the Pentagon Papers saga of the 1970s, when contributor Daniel Ellsberg turned over the top-secret analysis of the US's unpopular involvement in the Vietnam War to the New York Times and later to the Washington Post. Assange for his part opted to hand over the Afghan war logs to three different media outlets — NYT, Britain's Guardian and Germany's

Der Spiegel — with instructions not to report on them till July 25, when he would post the 92,000 odd documents on the WikiLeaks website.

Ellsberg himself has a word of praise for Assange, saying the young Australian "is serving our (American) democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country".

Whatever the contention of the US authorities over the worth of the disclosures, the expose has strongly vindicated India's long-held stand on the machinations of Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The war logs have vividly brought out the ISI's covert support to the Taliban, despite Islamabad receiving billions of dollars from the United States to help crush the Taliban-al-Qaeda combine's insurgency. More than 180 intelligence files in the war logs are said to detail accusations that the ISI has been supplying, arming and training the insurgency since at least 2004. Although the ISI's shenanigans have been chronicled in the past, here they are contained in field reports from US troops. Washington just cannot pretend to be looking the other way.

The leaked documents are mostly reports written by soldiers and intelligence officers from the field, describing lethal military actions, intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures and related details. The Pentagon says the disclosure has put the lives of Afghan informants at risk and threatens to undermine intelligence work in the war-torn nation. Afghan President Hamid Karzai too feels the same way. Assange argues that no one has been harmed, yet concedes: "Should anyone come to harm of course that would be a matter of deep regret — our goal is justice to innocents, not to harm them." He says he has delayed the release of about 15,000 reports "as part of a harm minimisation process demanded by our source". He, however, proposes to release them as well after further review, with occasional redactions.

More than the contents themselves, the debate that is currently raging in the US is on whether WikiLeaks should have brought the documents to the public domain and whether NYT should have collaborated with "a stateless organisation" and done the reporting. A war of sorts has also broken out with rivals, who were bypassed by Assange. Washington Post, for one, lost little time to run down the disclosure. In an editorial, titled "Wikihype". It carped: "Though it may represent one of the most voluminous leaks of classified military information in US history, the release by WikiLeaks of 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan hardly merits any hype offered by the website's founder." Anne Applebaum, a Post columnist, followed it by commenting: "They give newspapers a chance to pretend they've got scoops. The documents might even help bring in advertising revenue." Assange retorted: "I assume a Washington Post bias simply because they didn't have access to the great big scoop."

NYT offers its own explanation on its website. "Overall these documents amount to a real-time history of the war reported from one important vantage point — that of the soldiers and officers actually doing the fighting and reconstruction"¦.(NYT) spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today. Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not."

Whatever they may add up to, one thing WikiLeaks looks set to achieve is to sharpen the polarisation among the pro and anti-war groups in America. Though the leaked material largely relates to predecessor George W Bush's White House years, President Obama knows he would have to convince Congress and the people at large that his war strategy remains on track. With the mid-term Congressional elections just three months away, he has to be mindful of any political fallout. Curiously enough, the Republicans, opposed to a hasty pullout from Afghanistan, are more forthright in their criticism of Assange, who remains a strong opponent of wars.

As the Obama administration grapples with what the WikiLeaks maverick has thrust on its lap, Assange himself is savouring his moment in the spotlight. The man who ostensibly does not have a permanent address and is so much on the move that he is "living in airports these days" says that the one place that he should not be going to right now is the US.

-- The writer is Washington correspondent, The Pioneer

 

[ajtr]

A decade of lies and murders​

Wilson John

The biggest ever leak of military documents — will it lead to course correction? Quite a question given the layers of dubious pragmatism at the basis of the US-Pakistan relationship. Besides, how do you wake up somebody pretending to sleep?

What does the 90,000-plus classified documents on Afghan War show? Two things are the most obvious-the Americans have lost the script in the Hindu Kush and that Pakistan has emerged as a full-fledged terrorist State, supporting and sustaining terrorist groups that are capable of carrying out worst kinds of nightmarish attacks in any parts of the world today.

Even a cursory reading of some of the relevant documents can reveal that the US lost the war in Afghanistan when it decided to make Pakistan first its 'strategic ally', then its 'non-Nato ally' to hunt Osama bin Laden and his deputies. President George Bush, blinded by his own vision of being a swashbuckling General of the B-Grade Westerns, found a partner in the roguishly charming Pervez Musharraf, who spoke the right words and did all that could be wrong. Musharraf played to the galleries in Washington and elsewhere in the western world, charmed his way to the treasuries and back home talked peace with terrorists, helped them to find a sanctuary in Waziristan and nearby tribal areas along the Durand Line. The leaked classified documents from the battlefield during Musharraf's tenure (2003-2006) showed how desperate the men and officers of the US military were in keeping up the charade played by their President and his advisors in the White House. When Musharraf and his Generals, including Kayani, were being hosted and feted in the White House, their proxies were raining death on the American soldiers.

An obvious inference that ought to be drawn by the American public is that their government funded the terrorist sponsors who were fighting the sons, brothers and husbands of ordinary American families to keep the flag flying in a distant land. In many ways, the leaked documents showed how criminally dim-witted the leaders in Washington were in courting the enemy's chief sponsor. Perhaps, for the public, the only way to compensate the losses they suffered in the past decade is to try, most of all, President Pervez Musharraf, as a war criminal. He is singularly responsible for creating and sustaining the bigger terrorist sanctuary in the world within his country. He is not only responsible for the death of several hundreds American soldiers but also that of Pakistani soldiers who were pushed into the battlefield unprepared.

The world must act on the damning evidence provided by these documents about Pakistan's terrorist intentions and activities which are clearly detrimental to peace and stability of the world. Documents after documents reveal how Pakistan and its military not only supported the terrorist groups but also guided, armed and provoked them to carry out terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and India. This is not the first time that such revelations have come about but unlike in the past the sheer volume of evidence makes it impossible to deny and affirms Pakistan's role in endangering the world.

The US must declare Pakistan a terrorist State. There have been occasions in the past when the US government came close to making such a declaration but shied away from it due to the powerful lobby groups employed by Pakistan. Such a step is now imperative to protect the US homeland from terrorist attacks originating from Pakistan. Pakistan's terrorist leanings are not only a threat to the US but to the entire world. By supporting terrorist groups like the Taliban and

al-Qaeda and its various allies and proxies, Pakistan has created a global syndicate of terror that is not easy to dismantle or contain. The world will pay for the follies committed by successive US governments.

One of the most alarming bits of information hidden in the leaked documents is the interest shown by the Taliban to acquire a radioactive material to configure bombs. One of the commanders, the document showed, had succeeded in locating a possible seller of uranium in Lahore; the deal fell through on price.

The document dated July 23, 2008, (when General Ashfaq Kayani was the chief), said one "Dr Mohammad" was quite keen on making chemically-enhanced munitions for the Taliban to fight the US forces in Afghanistan. The Taliban also was interested in procuring uranium for this purpose. The document said: "The uranium was allegedly available from an unspecified factory in Lahore, Punjab province, Pakistan, at a cost of approximately 35,000 Pakistani rupees for ten grams. ($538.)" The said 'Dr' had reportedly learnt his nuclear skills from AQ Khan. This group had several members from Pakistan's tribal areas who were aligned with a radical Sunni group, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), which was instrumental in helping the Taliban-al-Qaeda elements to escape and find shelter in Pakistan when the US began bombing their hideouts following the September 11 attack. This single document is enough to show how dangerous a country Pakistan has become under the leadership of Musharraf first and then Kayani.

Another ominous inference that become obvious from the documents is the role played by General Kayani in supporting and sustaining groups inimical to the US-led forces in Afghanistan. The Obama administration's courting of Kayani is therefore littered with perils both known and unknown. The Obama-Kayani relationship is no different from that of Bush-Musharraf nexus in running a disastrous global war on terror. The Obama-Kayani duo's disastrous Af-Pak war has been so effectively exposed by the documents made public of Wikileaks. The references to ISI in hundreds of documents point to the role played by Kayani as the ISI chief. He promoted anti-US forces led by terrorist syndicates run by Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbudin Hekmatyr.

The Haqqani clan is instrumental in killing more American soldiers than any other terrorist group in Afghanitan. The Haqqanis are the protégé of Pakistan Army and are protected by Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha, both of whom managed to wrangle extensions with the help of the Americans from a weak-kneed, divided political leadership in Islamabad. Kayani's refusal to part ways with terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) reveals his mindset and the dangers such policies could pose to region, and more importantly to the US. Kayani wants the Americans to leave Afghanistan for his military to lord over the Afghans, a delusion riven with enormous dangers.

Since the Afghans, even Pashtuns, have no lost for Pakistanis whom they consider as `Punjabis`, Kayani and his men can at best trigger only a bloody civil war to keep not only India but rest of the world from Afghanistan, creating in the process a much bigger terrorist sanctuary or `emirate` than his predecessor, Musharraf, carved out of the tribal areas.

The leaked documents are a foretaste of grave dangers created by a blundering American policy in Afghanistan and its dependence on the terrorist-sponsor State, Pakistan, to bail it out of a lost war.

-- The writer is vice-president, Observer Research Foundation, author and columnist

 

[ajtr]

In Pakistan, Echoes of American Betrayal​

PAKISTAN'S premier intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, has been accused of many bad things in its own country. It has been held responsible for rigging elections, sponsoring violent sectarian groups and running torture chambers for political dissidents. More recently, it has been accused of abducting Pakistanis and handing them over to the United States for cash.

But last week — after thousands of classified United States Army documents were released by WikiLeaks, and American and British officials and pundits accused the ISI of double-dealing in Afghanistan — the Pakistani news media were very vocal in their defense of their spies. On talk show after talk show, the ISI's accusers in the West were criticized for short-sightedness and shifting the blame to Pakistan for their doomed campaign in Afghanistan.

Suddenly, the distinction between the state and the state within the state was blurred. It is our ISI that is being accused, we felt. How, we wondered, can the Americans have fallen for raw intelligence provided by paid informants and, in many cases, Afghan intelligence? And why shouldn't Pakistan, asked the pundits, keep its options open for a post-American Afghanistan?

More generally, the WikiLeaks fallout brought back ugly memories, reminding Pakistanis what happens whenever we get involved with the Americans. In fact, one person at the center of the document dump is our primary object lesson for staying away from America's foreign adventures.

Hamid Gul, now a retired general, led the ISI during the end years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and together with his C.I.A. friends unwittingly in the 1990s spurred the mujahedeen to turn Kabul — the city they had set out to liberate — into rubble. According to the newly released documents, Mr. Gul met with Qaeda operatives in Pakistan in 2006 and told them to "make the snow warm in Kabul ... set Kabul aflame."

This would seem highly sinister except that, today, Hamid Gul is nothing more than a glorified television evangelist and, as the columnist Nadir Hassan noted, "known only for being on half a dozen talk shows simultaneously." He is also, for Pakistanis, a throwback to the lost years of our American-backed military dictatorships, a stark reminder of why we distrust the United States.

The ISI and the C.I.A. have colluded twice in the destruction of Afghanistan. Their complicity has brought war to Pakistan's cities. After every round of cloak-and-dagger games, they behave like a squabbling couple who keep getting back together and telling the world that they are doing it for the children's sake. But whenever these two reunite, a lot of children's lives are wrecked.

In the West, the ISI is often described as ideologically allied to the Taliban. But Pakistan's military-security establishment has only one ideology, and it's not Islamism. It's spelled I-N-D-I-A. It will do anybody's bidding if it's occasionally allowed to show India a bit of muscle.

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, has just been given an unexpected three-year extension in his office, due in large part, it is said, to American pressure on Islamabad. Yet General Kayani headed the ISI during the period that the WikiLeaks documents cover. Since he became the head of the Pakistan Army — and a frequent host to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the number of drone attacks on Pakistani territory have increased substantially. It seems he has found a way to overcome his ISI past.

While he generally keeps a low profile, General Kayani in February gave an off-the-record presentation to Pakistani journalists. His point was clear: Pakistan's military remains India-centric. His explanation was simple: we go by the enemy's capacity, not its immediate intentions. This came in a year when Pakistan lost more civilians and soldiers than it has in any war with India.

Yet it has become very clear that an overwhelming majority of Pakistani people do not share the army's India obsession or its yearning for "strategic depth" — that is, a continuing deadly muddle — in Afghanistan. They want a peaceful settlement with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir and a safer neighborhood. None of the leading parties in Parliament made a big deal about India, Afghanistan or jihad in their election campaigns. They were elected on promises of justice, transparency and reasonably priced electricity.

Lately, Americans seem to have woken up to the fact that there is something called a Parliament and a civil society in Pakistan. But even so, it seems that Americans are courting the same ruling class — the military elite's civilian cousins — that has thrived on American aid and obviously wants an even closer relationship with Washington. A popular TV presenter who interviewed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit later jibed, "What kind of close relationship is this? I don't even get invited to Chelsea's wedding?"

Pakistan's military and civil elite should take a good look around before they pitch another marquee and invite their American friends over for tea and war talk. There are a lot of hungry people looking in, and the strung lights are sucking up electricity that could run a small factory, or illuminate a village. Besides, they're not likely to know what WikiLeaks is — they've been too busy cleaning up after their masters' guests.

Mohammed Hanif, a correspondent for the BBC Urdu Service, is the author of the novel "A Case of Exploding Mangoes."

 

[ajtr]

Now we know why British PM David Cameroon was peeved at pakistan.Its not that he has special love for india but its the helmand province where pakistanis are killing british soldiers.

Helmand despatch: 'Pakistan is the true enemy'​

The shadow of Pakistan hangs over British-led efforts to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, reports Nick Meo in Nad-e-Ali

The district governor of Nad-e-Ali pointed across parched fields towards a line of trees where the Taliban attacks come from.
"That's where our enemy is," said Habibullah Shamalany, 58, standing outside a police fortress, the ground around his feet littered with discarded cartridge cases from recent battles. "Their shadow government begins over there."Behind him a teenage police recruit wearing jeans and an Adidas shirt squinted down the gun sight of his machine-gun at imaginary Taliban where the governor was pointing.
Mr Shamalany is a close ally of the British soldiers who patrol the dangerous roads around Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital 20 miles away. The Taliban sow fear in the villages, he said, but it is Pakistan that is the true enemy of Afghans like him.
"Yes, our Afghan village boys join the Taliban," he conceded. "But only because they are scared by Taliban threats to their families.
"It is Pakistan that trains, funds and leads them. When we capture their fighters they confess that they are trained in Pakistan. The Pakistanis find religious boys, give them weapons, and send them across the border into Afghanistan to kill us, and to kill your British soldiers."
Villagers grunted in agreement. "Pakistan is against Afghanistan, they want to destroy us," said Mullah Yar Gul, 29, to approval.
They had gathered to discuss a new "safer fields" scheme, described by the commander of British forces in the district, Lieutenant-Colonel Lincoln Jopp MC, as Neighbourhood Watch, Helmand-style. "The difference is that instead of reporting possible burglars, farmers are encouraged to keep their land free of bombs and landmines by keeping an eye out for suspicious activity," he said.
The colonel arrived with a detachment of 1st Battalion Scots Guards in armoured vehicles to be embraced as an old friend by the governor.
Only a year ago the area was under Taliban control, and it remains frighteningly violent. Last Sunday three Taliban died in a gunfight with police a mile from the fortress, a mudbrick construction festooned with razor wire and with an Afghan flag fluttering over it.
Days before that, two of Colonel Jopp's soldiers died when they came under fire trying to rescue an injured comrade.
At dawn British and American soldiers had launched operation Tor Shezada to push the Taliban out of one of the few pockets of Nad-e-Ali they still controlled, a few miles to the north of the fortress. Two A-10 ground attack aircraft roared in low on their way to the battle as helicopter gunships circled nearby.
The governor had just broadcast a message on the radio urging families in the area where the British were advancing to stay in their homes where they would be safe.
Villagers said they were glad the Taliban were being pushed back again. They queued up to denounce the Taliban, who they said had stolen food and press-ganged their young men when they still controlled their area - which they did until a year ago.
They believed that many of the gunmen, who they were forbidden from talking to, were Pakistani fighters, speaking Pashtun with unfamiliar foreign accents.
The governor was delighted to hear that David Cameron last week accused Pakistan of promoting the "export of terror", insisting that Helmand was one of the places to which it is exported.
"I agree with your Prime Minister," he said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. "I am glad he said this about Pakistan. Almost every day here we see the bloody consequences of their work."
The Prime Minister's accusation, made on a visit to India, was greeted with fury by Pakistan, coming soon after the Wikileaks reports alleging that Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency orchestrated Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. Afghans have long believed they are victims of the ISI, which is also accused by India of supporting a twenty-year campaign of terrorism on its soil.
Pakistan openly supported the Taliban regime before 2001, and Afghans believe it has secretly done so ever since. Afghan police and intelligence chiefs say captured Taliban fighters often have Pakistani rupees and receipts from Pakistani shops in their pockets, or Pakistani phone cards.
For several years they have accused the ISI of helping organise terrorist attacks on Afghan soil, and insist that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar lives in the major Pakistani city of Quetta, where his fighters allegedly go for rest and recreation between bouts of jihad against Afghan security forces and Nato troops.
They are claims which are privately accepted by many Nato officers, but Pakistan is rarely condemned in public because it is officially an ally of the West in the war against terror.
Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, tried to rally support last week for Nato attacks on Taliban based in Pakistan, asking why they had not attacked guerrilla sanctuaries on Pakistani soil.
Enmity between Kabul and Islamabad over a disputed border goes back decades, and no Afghans hate Pakistan more than Helmandis. Hajji Abdul Wahab, 48, the gnarled police chief in charge of the fortress, said: "The Taliban leader here is a man called Pahlawan, he is from the Pakistani Punjab. He is out there somewhere beyond the trees, probably planning bomb attacks as we speak.
"This is a war of Pakistan against Afghanistan. We are determined to resist them. When we find the Taliban we will kill them."
A major concern for many Afghans is that Pakistani jihadists could impede negotiations which they hope will one day end the war.
"Peace with the Taliban is possible," said Hajji Abdul Ajan, 38, a member of the provincial council in Lashkar Gah. "But the Pakisani Taliban won't accept it. They will never reconcile and they will try to stop the Afghan Taliban from doing so."
British soldiers also believe Pakistanis fight alongside the Taliban, although they stop short of accusing the ISI of helping them.
"We do encounter some evidence of Pakistani involvement in the insurgency in Helmand," said Colonel Jopp.
He believes the counter-insurgency strategy his men are following has dramatically improved security in the flat farmlands around Lashkar Gah. It is slow, dangerous and fantastically expensive: Britain alone is now spending about £6bn ammually on the war.
For the Scots Guards, trained as warriors, the new strategy has meant a profound culture shock.
"Before I came here I didn't think I would be interacting with the locals much," said Sergeant Allan Reid, 29, from Ayrshire. "I thought I would be fighting them."
Sergeant Reid was one of a small detachment based at a small fort built just months ago, living alongside a group of Afghan policemen. The Scots have been given the task of getting to know villagers and protecting them from the Taliban.
He said attacks had dropped drastically since the unit was first set up and they hadn't been shot at since last week. "The locals say they don't like the Taliban, but you can't really be sure. I trust the police we work with though, they are good guys," he said.
One of them was Bismillah Khan, 22, the deputy leader of the Afghan police contingent. Mr Khan said he chose to work for the police because the Taliban was against Afghanistan and killed innocent people.
"Friends from my village joined the Taliban, and there is a lot of trouble now at home. My family has been threatened," he said.
Like other Helmandis, he fears what may happen when the British and other Nato troops finally pull out, a process which is expected to begin next year.
"The Afghan security forces are not strong enough by themselves. There will be civil war again," he said.
It is a prospect which haunts Afghans. A British stabilisation advisor said that with deadlines being discussed for withdrawing troops by 2014, villagers are starting to ask if they can arm themselves for their own protection.
"Our withdrawal is being discussed at village meetings," he said. "Afghans are getting worried."
Ironically, Afghan government in parts of Helmand has never looked in better shape. The Army is confident that its counter-insurgency campaign is bearing fruit as intelligence improves and they insist that the quality of Afghan police – once a notoriously corrupt force of hashish smokers – has improved, to the benefit of security.
The Provincial Reconstruction Team – a mix of Foreign Office civilians and servicemen and women on a heavily fortified base in Lashkar Gah - buzzes with a can-do optimism which is a surprising contrast to the gloomy mood about the war in Britain.
British civil servants praise their Afghan government counterparts, who for the first time now have to sit exams, and proudly describe how the Kabul government has a presence in 10 districts in Helmand, up from four in 2008.
The economy is booming and property prices are rising in Lashkar Gah, and travel between central Helmand's towns is said to be faster than ever on new roads, at least for those willing to risk suicide bombs.
Education projects are a major success, but the armoured cars used by the PRT's civilian contractors have cracked bullet-proof windows from rocks thrown by schoolchildren.
The PRT, the nerve centre of Western efforts to stabilise Helmand, is proud of what it has achieved, but its staff know that they are now in a race against time to strengthen the government and security forces enough for them to survive when Nato troops come home.
Afghans fear what could happen then if they are not ready. "In 2008 when they launched an offensive there were real fears that the Taliban was going to overrun Lashkar Gah, and they found a death list of 3000 names of people who worked with the Afghan government or for the British, on the body of a dead Taliban fighter," said one educated Afghan in the city.
"That really makes us worry about the future."

 

[ajtr]

Even though it was known to the USA establishment, now even mainstream US columnists talks of Pakistani connection to the 9/11.

The Great (Double) Game​

The trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It's actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: "If you are in a poker game and you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you."In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that's us.

Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, we are paying Pakistan's Army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 percent against us. The same could probably be said of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask — or two.

China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the U.S. military makes China's military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce our oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taliban schools and warriors our soldiers are fighting against.

So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Obama just foolish?

It is more complicated. This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And we responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.

So we tried to impact them by indirection. We hoped that building a decent democratizing government in Iraq would influence reform in Saudi Arabia and beyond. And after expelling Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, we stayed on to stabilize the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.

That strategy has not really worked because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are built on ruling bargains that are the source of their pathologies and our fears.

Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India. The Pakistani Army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India — and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani Army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taliban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for "strategic depth" because, if India dominated Afghanistan, Pakistan would be wedged between the two.

Alas, if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools, farms and industry, instead of Afghanistan, it might be able to produce a stable democracy — and we wouldn't care about Pakistan's nukes any more than India's.

Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam — and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.

So Pakistan's nukes are a problem for us because of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia's oil wealth is a problem for us because of the nature of that regime. We have chosen to play a double game with both because we think the alternatives are worse.

So we pay Pakistan to help us in Afghanistan, even though we know some of that money is killing our own soldiers, because we fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan's Islamists controlling its bomb. And we send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though we know that some of it ends up financing the very people we are fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilizing. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)

Is there another a way? Yes. If we can't just walk away, we should at least reduce our bets. We should limit our presence and goals in Afghanistan to the bare minimum required to make sure that turmoil there doesn't spill over into Pakistan or allow Al Qaeda to return. And we should diminish our dependence on oil so we are less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia, so we shrink the funds going to people who hate us and we make economic and political reform a necessity for them, not a hobby.

Alas, we don't have the money, manpower or time required to fully transform the most troubled states of this region. It will only happen when they want it to. We do, though, have the technology, necessity and innovators to protect ourselves from them — and to increase the pressure on them to want to change — by developing alternatives to oil. It is time we started that surge. I am tired of being the sucker in this game.

 

[NewMember]

Pakistan have even betryed the taliban, let alone the others. trust me the taliban hate pakistan.