The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.

The warning to the Taliban originated at a four-day meeting of senior Americans, Russians, Iranians and Pakistanis at a hotel in Berlin in mid-July. The conference, the third in a series dubbed “brainstorming on Afghanistan”, was part of a classic diplomatic device known as “track two”.

It was designed to offer a free and open-ended forum for governments to pass messages and sound out each other’s thinking. Participants were experts with long diplomatic experience of the region who were no longer government officials but had close links with their governments.

“The Americans indicated to us that in case the Taliban does not behave and in case Pakistan also doesn’t help us to influence the Taliban, then the United States would be left with no option but to take an overt action against Afghanistan,” said Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, who was at the meeting.

“I told the Pakistani government, who informed the Taliban via our foreign office and the Taliban ambassador here.”

The three Americans at the Berlin meeting were Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Karl “Rick” Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state for south Asian affairs, and Lee Coldren, who headed the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the state department until 1997.

According to Mr Naik, the Americans raised the issue of an attack on Afghanistan at one of the full sessions of the conference, convened by Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat who serves as the UN secretary general’s special representative on Afghanistan. In the break afterwards, Mr Naik told the Guardian yesterday, he asked Mr Simons why the attack should be more successful than Bill Clinton’s missile strikes on Afghanistan in 1998, which caused 20 deaths but missed Bin Laden.

“He said this time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan. The Russians were listening to the conversation but not participating.”

Asked whether he could be sure that the Americans were passing ideas from the Bush administration rather than their own views, Mr Naik said yesterday: “What the Americans indicated to us was perhaps based on official instructions. They were very senior people. Even in ‘track two’ people are very careful about what they say and don’t say.”

In the room at the time were not only the Americans, Russians and Pakistanis but also a team from Iran headed by Saeed Rajai Khorassani, a former Iranian envoy to the UN. Three Pakistani generals, one still on active service, attended the conference. Giving further evidence of the fact that the Berlin meeting was designed to influence governments, the UN invited official representatives of both the Taliban government in Kabul and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance’s foreign minister, attended. The Taliban declined to send a representative.

The Pakistani government took the US talk of possible strikes seriously enough to pass it on to the Taliban. Pakistan is one of only three governments to recognise the Taliban.

Mr Coldren confirmed the broad outline of the American position at the Berlin meeting yesterday. “I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.” The three former US diplomats “based our discussion on hearsay from US officials”, he said. It was not an agenda item at the meeting “but was mentioned just in passing”.

Nikolai Kozyrev, Moscow’s former special envoy on Afghanistan and one of the Russians in Berlin, would not confirm the contents of the US conversations, but said: “Maybe they had some discussions in the corridor. I don’t exclude such a possibility.”

Mr Naik’s recollection is that “we had the impression Russians were trying to tell the Americans that the threat of the use of force is sometimes more effective than force itself”.

The Berlin conference was the third convened since November last year by Mr Vendrell. As a UN meeting, its official agenda was confined to trying to find a negotiated solution to the civil war in Afghanistan, ending terrorism and heroin trafficking, and discussing humanitarian aid.

Mr Simons denied having said anything about detailed operations. “I’ve known Niaz Naik and considered him a friend for years. He’s an honourable diplomat. I didn’t say anything like that and didn’t hear anyone else say anything like that. We were clear that feeling in Washington was strong, and that military action was one of the options down the road. But details, I don’t know where they came from.”

The US was reassessing its Afghan policy under the new Bush administration at the time of the July meeting, according to Mr Simons. “It was clear that the trend of US government policy was widening. People should worry, Taliban, Bin Laden ought to worry – but the drift of US policy was to get away from single issue, from concentrating on Bin Laden as under Clinton, and get broader.”

Mr Inderfurth said: “There was no suggestion for military force to be used. What we discussed was the need for a comprehensive political settlement to bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, that has been going on for two decades, and has been doing so much damage.”

The Foreign Office confirmed the significance of the Berlin discussions. “The meeting was a bringing together of Afghan factions and some interested states and we received reports from several participants, including the UN,” it said.

Asked if he was surprised that the American participants were denying the details they mentioned in Berlin, Mr Naik said last night: “I’m a little surprised but maybe they feel they shouldn’t have told us anything in advance now we have had these tragic events”.

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin said in an interview released yesterday that he had warned the Clinton administration about the dangers posed by Bin Laden. “Washington’s reaction at the time really amazed me. They shrugged their shoulders and said matter-of-factly: ‘We can’t do anything because the Taliban does not want to turn him over’.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/22/afghanistan.september113

Pieczenik then stated that the video tape of a fat Bin Laden look alike “taking responsibility” for 9/11 that was released in December 2001 was “such a hoax” designed to “manipulate” people in the emotional aftermath of 9/11.
The subsequent war in Afghanistan that followed 9/11 was orchestrated “With the agreement of the bin Laden family, knowing fully well that he would die,” said Pieczenik. “And I think that Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, spilled the beans by accident three months ago when he said that bin Laden was dead because his kidney dialysis machines were destroyed in East Afghanistan.”
In addition to Pieczenik, as we reported in August 2002, Alex Jones was separately told by a high level Republican source that Bin Laden was dead and that his body was being kept “on ice” until Osama’s death could be announced at the most “politically expedient” time.
When Jones asked the source if his claim was mere speculation or whether it was actually true, the source re-iterated the fact that he was being deadly serious and that Bin Laden’s corpse was “physically on ice” waiting to be rolled out for public consumption at the most opportune moment.
Many expected that moment to be right before the 2004 election, but after Democrats began speculating about the possibility, Republicans settled instead for a fake Osama video tape that was released on the eve of the election and, according to both George W. Bush and John Kerry, was the deciding factor in a closely-fought contest. Veteran news reader Walter Cronkite labeled the entire farce a Karl Rove-orchestrated “set-up”.
In addition to these sources, a deluge of other heads of state as well as intelligence agency professionals have gone on record over the past nine years to state their belief that Bin Laden was likely dead, after it became clear that the Al-Qaeda leader’s health was in severe decline as a result of kidney disease at the end of 2001. These include;
- Former CIA officer and hugely respected intelligence & foreign policy expert Robert Baer, who in 2008 when asked about Bin Laden by a radio host responded, “Of course he is dead.”
- On December 26, 2001, Fox News, citing a Pakistan Observer story, reported that the Afghan Taliban had pronounced Bin Laden dead and buried him in an unmarked grave.
- On January 18, 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf announced: “I think now, frankly, he is dead.”
- On July 17, 2002, the then-head of counterterrorism at the FBI, Dale Watson, told a conference of law enforcement officials that “I personally think he [Bin Laden] is probably not with us anymore.”
- In October 2002, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told CNN that “I would come to believe that [Bin Laden] probably is dead.
- In 2003, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Fox News Channel analyst Morton Kondracke she suspected Bush knew the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and was waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture.
- In November 2005, Senator Harry Reid revealed that he was told Osama may have died in the Pakistani earthquake of October that year.
- In February 2007, Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s Religious Studies program, stated that the purported video and audio tapes that were being released of Bin Laden were fake and that he was probably dead.
- On November 2, 2007, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told Al-Jazeera’s David Frost that Omar Sheikh had killed Osama Bin Laden. Shortly after she exposed Bin Laden’s 2001 death, she was assassinated.
- In March 2009, former US foreign intelligence officer and professor of international relations at Boston University Angelo Codevilla stated: “All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.”
- In May 2009, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari confirmed that his “counterparts in the American intelligence agencies” hadn’t heard anything from Bin Laden in seven years and confirmed “I don’t think he’s alive.”
In a way, the establishment had their hand forced in having to announce the death of someone whose shadowy existence had proven very useful to them in maintaining fear and uncertainty amongst the population of America and the world.
The fact that the myth behind Al-Qaeda has been completely demolished and that the group, through a myriad of revelations, including Anwar Al-Alawki’s post-9/11 visit to the Pentagon, is now widely known to be a US intelligence front, perhaps now means that Al-Qaeda will be swept under the rug and a new enemy will be invented in order to legitimize the continued US military-complex domination of the globe. (The EU Times)

http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/04-May-2011/Bin-Ladens-corpse-has-been-on-ice-for-nearly-a-decade-EU-Times

t’s the end of the Second World War, and the United States is deciding what to do about two immense, poor, densely populated countries in Asia. America chooses one of the countries, becoming its benefactor. Over the decades, it pours billions of dollars into that country’s economy, training and equipping its military and its intelligence services. The stated goal is to create a reliable ally with strong institutions and a modern, vigorous democracy. The other country, meanwhile, is spurned because it forges alliances with America’s enemies.

The country not chosen was India, which “tilted” toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Pakistan became America’s protégé, firmly supporting its fight to contain Communism. The benefits that Pakistan accrued from this relationship were quickly apparent: in the nineteen-sixties, its economy was an exemplar. India, by contrast, was a byword for basket case. Fifty years then went by. What was the result of this social experiment?

India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America’s worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years—in strikingly comfortable circumstances—before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd.

American aid is hardly the only factor that led these two countries to such disparate outcomes. But, at this pivotal moment, it would be a mistake not to examine the degree to which U.S. dollars have undermined our strategic relationship with Pakistan—and created monstrous contradictions within Pakistan itself.

American money began flowing into Pakistan in 1954, when a mutual defense agreement was signed. During the next decade, nearly two and a half billion dollars in economic assistance, and seven hundred million in military aid, went to Pakistan. After the 1965 Pakistan-India war began, the U.S. essentially withdrew aid to both countries. Gradually, U.S. economic aid was restored, but the Pakistani military was kept on probation.

Those civilian-aid programs were largely successful. Christine Fair, a specialist on South Asia at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, at Georgetown University, notes that the original model for economic assistance was “demand driven”—local groups or governments proposed projects and applied for grants. Aid usually came in the form of matching funds, so that grantees had a stake in the projects. Moreover, American specialists presided over the disbursement of these funds and served as managers. “That was effective,” Fair says. “But we haven’t done it for decades.”

Then, in 1979, U.S. intelligence discovered that Pakistan was secretly building a uranium-enrichment facility in response to India’s nuclear-weapons program. That April, the military dictator of Pakistan, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, hanged the civilian President he had expelled from office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; he then cancelled elections. U.S. aid came to a halt. At the same time, Zia began giving support to an Islamist organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, the forerunner of many more radical groups to come. In November, a mob of Jamaat followers, inflamed by a rumor that the U.S. and Israel were behind an attack on the Grand Mosque, in Mecca, burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad to the ground, killing two Americans and two Pakistani employees. The American romance with Pakistan was over, but the marriage was just about to begin.

The very next month, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter, in a panic, offered Zia four hundred million dollars in economic and military aid. Zia rejected the offer, calling it “peanuts”—the term often arises in Pakistani critiques of American aid, but it must have rankled the peanut farmer in the White House. Zia was smart to hold out. Under Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, U.S. aid nearly quintupled: about three billion dollars in economic assistance and two billion in military aid. The Reagan Administration also provided three billion dollars to Afghan jihadis. These funds went through the sticky hands of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, the spy branch of the Pakistani Army. Starting in 1987, the I.S.I. was headed by General Hamid Gul, a cunning and bitterly anti-American figure. The I.S.I. became so glutted with power and money that it formed a “state within a state,” in the words of Benazir Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s Prime Minister in 1988. She eventually fired Gul, fearing that he was engineering a coup.

Milton Bearden, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan, once described Gul to me as having a “rococo” personality. In 2004, I visited Gul—a short man with a rigid, military posture and raptor-like features—at his villa in Rawalpindi. He proudly asked his servant to bring me an orange from his private grove. I asked Gul why, during the Afghan jihad, he had favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven warlords who had been designated to receive American assistance in the fight against the Soviets. Hekmatyar was the most brutal member of the group, but, crucially, he was a Pashtun, like Gul. As I ate the orange, Gul offered a more principled rationale for his choice: “I went to each of the seven, you see, and I asked them, ‘I know you are the strongest, but who is No. 2?’ ” He formed a tight, smug smile. “They all said Hekmatyar.”

Later, Gul helped oversee the creation of the Taliban, reportedly using mainly Saudi money. The I.S.I. openly supported the Taliban until September 11, 2001. Since then, the Pakistani government has disavowed the group, but it is widely believed that it still provides Taliban leaders with safe harbor in Quetta, where they stage jihad against Western forces in Afghanistan.
n 1990, President George H. W. Bush cut off military aid to Pakistan. Ostensibly, this was in response to Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, but it’s also true that, after the Soviets were pushed out of Afghanistan, in the late eighties, the U.S. lost interest in Pakistan. U.S. assistance, directed almost entirely toward food and counter-narcotics efforts, fell to forty-five million dollars a year, and declined further after 1998, when Pakistan began testing nuclear weapons.

After the September 11th attacks, Pakistan abruptly became America’s key ally in the “war on terror.” Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. gave billions of dollars to Pakistan, most of it in unrestricted funds, to combat terrorism. Pervez Musharraf, who served as President between 1999 and 2008, now admits that during his tenure he diverted many of those billions to arm Pakistan against its hobgoblin enemy, India. “Whoever wishes to be angry, let them be angry—why should we bother?” Musharraf said in an interview on the Pakistani television channel Express News. “We have to maintain our security.” Since Musharraf left office, there has been little indication that U.S. aid—$4.5 billion in 2010, one of the largest amounts ever given to a foreign country—is being more properly spent.

The main beneficiary of U.S. money, the Pakistani military, has never won a war, but, according to “Military Inc.,” by Ayesha Siddiqa, it has done very well in its investments: hotels, real estate, shopping malls. Such entrepreneurship, however corrupt, fills a gap, as Pakistan’s economy is now almost entirely dependent on American taxpayers. In a country of a hundred and eighty million people, fewer than two million citizens pay taxes, and Pakistan’s leaders are doing little to change the situation. In Karachi, the financial capital, the government recently inaugurated a program to appoint eunuchs as tax collectors. Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.

In 2008, Pakistan’s government made the dramatic announcement that it was placing the I.S.I. under the control of its Interior Ministry—a restructuring that was revoked within hours by inflamed military leaders, who effectively vetoed the government. That November, Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization that has reportedly received backing from the I.S.I. to wage jihad in Kashmir, carried out attacks on tourists in Mumbai. According to American indictments, an I.S.I. officer directed the surveillance of suitable targets. Those sites included the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the train station, the Leopold Café, and the Chabad House, a Lubavitch outpost run by an American rabbi and his pregnant wife. According to Sebastian Rotella, who has written extensively for ProPublica about the attack, “They were going out of their way to kill Americans.” At the hotels, the attackers sorted through passports, looking for American and British citizens. In the end, a hundred and sixty-six people were killed, but only six were Americans. The Pakistani government denied any involvement, although it eventually conceded that the attacks had been planned in Pakistan.
Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent who interrogated many of the Al Qaeda members captured in Pakistan, told me that “the majority of them said that Lashkar-e-Taiba had given them shelter.” After the battle of Tora Bora, he added, the Al Qaeda members who fled to Pakistan—including top leaders—were greeted by Lashkar operatives and taken to safe houses. Some Pakistanis worry that Lashkar may become the new Al Qaeda.

In 2009, Senators Richard Lugar and John Kerry, recognizing that American military aid had given the Army and the I.S.I. disproportionate power in Pakistan, helped pass legislation in Congress sanctioning seven and a half billion dollars in civilian assistance, to be disbursed over a period of five years. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, apparently at the direction of the military, flew to Washington, and insisted that his country would not be micromanaged. So far, less than a hundred and eighty million dollars of that money has been spent, because the civilian projects require oversight and checks on corruption. The Pakistani military, meanwhile, submits expense claims every month to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad; according to a report in the Guardian, receipts are not provided—or requested.

One day in March, 2004, when I was in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan, a firefight broke out in the tribal areas nearby. The newspapers said the Army was fighting Al Qaeda, and had surrounded Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy. Zawahiri escaped, but the troops captured a number of Al Qaeda fighters, including Zawahiri’s son Ahmed. The next day, a newspaper bore the headline “AHMED’S TALKING!” Yet Zawahiri doesn’t have a son named Ahmed. After that day, nothing more was said about Ahmed, but I kept puzzling over that tricked-up episode. I began to wonder, What would happen if the Pakistani military actually captured or killed Al Qaeda’s top leaders? The great flow of dollars would stop, just as it had in Afghanistan after the Soviets limped away. I realized that, despite all the suffering the war on terror had brought to Pakistan, the military was addicted to the money it generated. The Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. were in the looking-for-bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.

A number of investigative reports have suggested that the I.S.I. diverted American money designated for fighting terrorism to the Taliban. According to a 2007 document released by WikiLeaks, U.S. military interrogators at Guantánamo implicitly acknowledged this problem when they placed the I.S.I. on an internal list of “terrorist and terrorist-support entities.”
In October, 2009, I went to Washington to attend a daylong conference on “Al Qaeda and Its Allies.” (The event was sponsored by the New America Foundation and by the Center on Law and Security, at N.Y.U.’s law school, where I am a fellow.) The final panel discussion was devoted to Pakistan. Major General Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., spoke of the importance of having America and Pakistan united in their military strategy, especially in South Waziristan, which he called “the epicenter of militancy.” The halfhearted efforts of the Pakistani Army to oppose its radical protégés there had created a ferocious backlash. The Taliban attacked I.S.I. offices and began taking over parts of Pakistani territory, including the Swat Valley, which is less than a hundred miles from Islamabad. Just two weeks before the conference, a group of Taliban fighters attacked the military headquarters in Rawalpindi, a mile from where General Durrani lives. The I.S.I. had lost control of its creation.

Durrani made a plea for the U.S. to continue its partnership with Pakistan. “Trust us, developing Pakistan’s capacity to fight terrorism will pay rich dividends,” he said. “I do not want to sound ungrateful, but what had been supplied over the last five years, in terms of hardware, is almost peanuts.” When I had the opportunity to ask a question, I pointed out that, since 9/11, the U.S. had given eleven billion dollars to Pakistan, the bulk of it in military aid, much of which was misappropriated to buy weapons to defend against India. If Pakistan didn’t have the equipment to fight insurgents and terrorists in the tribal areas, was that really America’s fault? And if American aid to Pakistan—especially military assistance—had done more harm than good, shouldn’t it be drastically reduced?

Another retired general on the podium, Talat Masood, responded that the losses Pakistan had suffered in the “so-called war on terror” amounted to more than forty billion dollars. “So please don’t harp on the eleven billion,” he said.

Pakistan has indeed suffered for its official alliance with the U.S. In 2006, there were six suicide bombings in the country; the next year there were fifty-six, with six hundred and forty people killed. Last year, twelve hundred people were murdered by suicide bombers. More than three thousand Pakistani soldiers and officers have been killed in the war, including eighty-five members of the I.S.I. Yet many of these wounds have been self-inflicted, for the military and the I.S.I. created and nurtured the very groups—such as the Taliban—that have turned against the Pakistani state. And the money used to fund these radical organizations came largely from American taxpayers.

Many foreign-policy experts maintain that America cannot, at this juncture, cut off military aid to Pakistan—even if elements of the I.S.I. turn out to have harbored bin Laden. There are two prongs to this argument. One is that America needs Pakistan’s support in order to defeat the Taliban. If the U.S. withdraws aid, it is argued, Pakistan might insist that we can no longer fly drones over tribal areas. But Pakistan has covertly supported the drone program for years, in return for the U.S.’s targeting of Taliban forces that it cannot vanquish on its own. Without U.S. aid, the Pakistani military will need drone assistance more than ever.
The more pressing concern is that radical Islamists will somehow get their hands on a nuclear bomb, either through covert means or by actually coming to power. “The military is playing on this fear,” a Pakistani reporter, Pir Zubair Shah, told me.

As much as half of the money the U.S. gave to the I.S.I. to fight the Soviets was diverted to build nuclear weapons. The father of Pakistan’s bomb, A. Q. Khan, later sold plans and nuclear equipment to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. A month before 9/11, Pakistani nuclear scientists even opened a secret dialogue with Al Qaeda. The government of Pakistan has denied knowledge of what Khan and his associates were doing.

In February, 2009, the Pakistani government announced that it had “dismantled the nuclear black market network.” There is no way of knowing if this is true. Neither the U.S. nor the International Atomic Energy Agency has been allowed to interview Khan. According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, the “current status of Pakistan’s nuclear export network is unclear.” Meanwhile, American policymakers have been paralyzed by Pakistan’s nuclear capability. They have repeatedly expressed the worry that, if Pakistan is alienated, its nuclear secrets and materials might get into the wrong hands. But that has already happened.

Not only has American military aid been wasted, misused, and turned against us; it may well have undermined the Pakistani military, which has feasted on huge donations but is far weaker than its nemesis, the Indian military. If the measure of our aid is the gratitude of the Pakistani people and the loyalty of their government, then it has clearly been a failure. Last year, a Pew Research Center survey found that half of Pakistanis believe that the U.S. gives little or no assistance at all. Even the Finance Minister, Hafiz Shaikh, said last month that it was “largely a myth” that the U.S. had given tens of billions of dollars to Pakistan. And if the measure of our aid is Pakistan’s internal security, the program has fallen short in that respect as well. Pakistan is endangered not by India, as the government believes, but by the very radical movements that the military helped create to act as terrorist proxies.
Eliminating, or sharply reducing, military aid to Pakistan would have consequences, but they may not be the ones we fear. Diminishing the power of the military class would open up more room for civilian rule. Many Pakistanis are in favor of less U.S. aid; their slogan is “trade not aid.” In particular, Pakistani businessmen have long sought U.S. tax breaks for their textiles, which American manufacturers have resisted. Such a move would empower the civilian middle class. India would no doubt welcome a reduction in military aid to Pakistan, and the U.S. could use this as leverage to pressure India to allow the Kashmiris to vote on their future, which would very likely be a vote for independence. These two actions might do far more to enhance Pakistan’s stability, and to insure its friendship, than the billions of dollars that America now pays like a ransom.

Within the I.S.I., there is a secret organization known as the S Wing, which is largely composed of supposedly retired military and I.S.I. officers. “It doesn’t exist on paper,” a source close to the I.S.I. told me. The S Wing handles relations with radical elements. “If something happens, then they have deniability,” the source explained. If any group within the Pakistani military helped hide bin Laden, it was likely S Wing.

Eight days before Osama bin Laden was killed, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani Army, went to the Kakul military academy in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the villa where bin Laden was living. “General Kayani told the cadets, ‘We have broken the backbone of the militants,’ ” Pir Zubair Shah, the reporter, told me. “But the backbone was right there.” Perhaps with a touch of theatre, Hamid Gul, the former I.S.I. chief, publicly expressed wonder that bin Laden was living in a city with three army regiments, less than a mile from an élite military academy, in a house that appeared to have been built expressly to protect him. Aside from the military, Gul told the Associated Press, “there is the local police, the Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence, the I.S.I. They all had a presence there.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_wright

“All praise is for the Almighty who bestowed sovereignty upon the army, then made the people subservient to the army and the army subservient to its own interests” — Justice M R Kayani

Here we are today, at the lowest point in our recent history. Found not in a cave of Tora Bora or in the ragged mountains of Waziristan but in the serenity of Abbottabad, living within a mile of the famous parade ground of PMA Kakul, next door neighbour to an Army Major and in the city that hosts three regimental centres, Osama Bin Laden, in our very own country. Many had feared that this day would come, but never imagined he would be living in such a suspiciously well protected manner.

By this time, I can assume with a high confidence that opinions and columns in the hundreds, if not thousands, have been written on what was Pakistan’s role in the raid, how Pakistan could have missed the most wanted man on Earth, what it means for Pakistan and how to move on. But, in the midst of all, we are losing a battle that we, the ‘bloody civilians’, have been eager to fight for too long.

Imagine this. The hurriedly called morning meeting at the roundtable in GHQ on May 2. Major and Lieutenant Generals tense and nervous, not knowing what to say. The General, K, possibly broke the ice by asking everyone about their last evening’s score on the 9-holes at the state subsidised Rawalpindi Golf Club. It was a birdie on the difficult 6th, he said. Oh, and he allegedly met the Chief Minister of Punjab too for some unknown reason.

What goes on in the corridors of military power is a mystery to us. What guides their actions remains a complex web of calculations, strategic they say, often immoral, disgusting, irrational and suicidal in our eyes. They value their assets, they hedge their bets and they play both sides of the game and try to bluff the single most powerful country in the world, to which they have played as a near mercenary force for a fair time (“Our Army can be Your Army” said Field Marshal Ayub Khan, the darling of the khaki apologists).

What we know today is that this is possibly the biggest embarrassment the military has faced in a long, long time. Forget 1971, it was far more morally disastrous but it had its jingoistic and racist supporters, but even in the eyes of the khaki-apologist, today the military is naked and deserving of criticism. The khaki apologist who becomes a constitutionalist when it comes to the failings of the army (the politicians are the constitutional power holders, they guided the actions, they “sold the country”, not the Army – is the usual defence) and are cognizant of the military’s powers only when it is on the good side of things, is angry today too. There are too many questions.

Did we protect him? Did we give him refuge? Why would we do that? If not, did we ignore his presence? Are we this incompetent? Did the Field Intelligence Unit (FIU) never ask a question about a mysterious seven kanal house with a three-story building, built by settlers known from being Waziristan? Is the holy mother of all agencies so inept and useless that in the sweeps done around areas visited regularly by the Army Chief and the upper hierarchy, they never got suspicious of the house and its residents? How did bin Laden come to Abbottabad in the first place? Did he take a Rs. 70, 13-seater Hiace ride from Mansehra and stop off at the Baloch Regimental Center?

If not, then why did they allow a foreign power to come in and hunt him down? Did our forces coordinate and collaborate with the US on the raid? Why are they not speaking? It is not as if they would not want to take credit for it. The logic of avoiding the local terrorists’ wrath is just too pathetic, they already target us. Mullah Omar’s, Hekmatyar’s and Haqqani’s anger be damned, this is their protector we are talking about. It is stupid, nay unimaginable, that our forces collaborated extensively and do not want to take credit for it. They would not risk inviting the wrath of the international media that they have called upon themselves today.

And then there is the ultimate nightmare. If they did not know about the operation, then really, like the Foreign Office in its poorly worded, shamefully funny press statement says, we failed to respond in time to nothing less than an invasion? At cruise speed, terrain hugging and avoiding radars, a UH-60 “Blackhawk” (or even the secretive stealth helicopter that are rumoured to have been used, although non-stealth Chinooks are alleged to have provided support too) would have easily spent more than 30 minutes inside Pakistani territory before the soldiers roped down into the compound. A 40-minute operation and then the return ride. In all, the US team spent at least an hour-and-a-half inside Pakistan and we failed to respond? Were our radars jammed completely? Did we even fail to respond to visual sighting of a bunch of helicopters? Is our response time so slow? With three regimental centres in a highly militarised town, no one was able to answer to a 40-minute ground operation by foreign forces? Are our defenses so inept and weak? Did we scramble jets? When did we, if, realise that it was a friendly country conducting an anti-terrorism raid and not “the enemy”? What is the purpose of keeping the armed forces if they consume such a large chunk of our budget and fail to respond to nothing less than an invasion that lasted for 90 full minutes?

I am, for not a single moment, arguing we should have shot down the Americans. I for one believe they did the right thing. For all we know, it was the nightmare we have, that some sympathetic group in our very forces protected the most wanted man on Earth. The questions I pose are the multitude that people from various facets of life and inclinations ask. They ask what would happen if India were to carry out the “surgical strike” that their jingoists threaten of? They ask, yes India is not the United States, but how could our air defense systems be so easily jammed and fooled and tricked? They ask, what is the response time to an invasion? What is the purpose of an Army that let’s others not just operate in its territory, but come in, operate and go back?

So, today, we are at a point where the Army’s defenses are weak. It is being criticised by the international community and ever so slightly, by locals too. But the criticism is weak and non-existent in comparison to what it should be. This is the time when the Army is rightfully exposed to the most criticism. If you ever held any views on civil-military balance that did not hold civilians in contempt, right now is the time to shout and be heard.

If there’s anything that can be guaranteed, it is that the military will remain the most dominant player in the echelons of power for the times to come. And because that will happen, we will continue to fight for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, we will continue to hold India as the mortal enemy, we will continue to amass even more nuclear weapons, procure even more fighter jets and buy another air refueler and what not. We will remain an impoverished, militarised, third world country. And as long as we remain militarised, and existing only to fight against the mythical enemy, the schools will remain dysfunctional, the hospitals non-existent and the people, poor, hungry and malnutritioned.

Barely 40 hours before the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or SEAL Team Six, fast roped down into the compound of Osama bin Laden, our Army Chief told a ceremony at the annual ‘Youm-e-Shuhuda’ (Day of the Martyrs) that prosperity must not come at the cost of honour and dignity. Where was the honour and dignity when, like the Foreign Office says, soldiers from another country basically invaded ours, operated and went back, without even so much as a bird being swatted in response?

The political process is an evolutionary one. Slowly, and slowly, we are moving towards a functional democracy. A Public Accounts Committee functions well today, maybe another institution of accountability and justice and public service will improve tomorrow. The politics of urbanisation is here. But amongst all this evolutionary change, unless the fish with the small legs comes out of the water, the process of evolution will face the ultimate barrier – the military.

I do not aim to demonise the military here. Our soldiers have laid down immense sacrifices for the protection of our boundaries. They have protected us from threats, both internal and external. Even today, make no mistake, we are at a state of war for such a large active deployment of soldiers is nothing short of a full-fledged war, and they are the constant targets of the forces of evil and enemies of humanity. But it is the higher direction of war that is misguided and irrational. We wanted to liberate Kashmir in 1965 and we failed. It only resulted in a large loss of life, loss of sympathy for the Kashmir cause and a permanent setback to the economy. We sent soldiers to die on the peaks of Kargil, fooling a Prime Minister and a nation and thinking that the world would accept that those were “non-state actors” and not our own soldiers. We abandoned our own uniformed men to die on the peaks when we could not even supply them with the basic food supplies for our war was adventurous and the shenanigans of a would-be autocrat. We have lost too many soldiers to the misguided policies of our higher brass. The soldier is just a pawn in the games of the powerful, for his life is a small price in the game of chess they play.

For all their failings, the politicians we have are ones we elected. Incompetent, greedy and often despicable as they are (supporting rapists and honour killers), they represent the collective will of the people in a system marred by inefficiencies and problems. Today is the time for them to come into action. It is not the time to be busy installing gas pipes in UC-84 of Muzaffargarh or to be making sure that their brothers and cousins got the 10 kilometre road construction contract. Today is the time to hold the military accountable for their failures and their actions and bring some direction to the state of affairs.

If there was a time for all facets of society to collectively bargain for change and demand action, this is the time. Come what may, a loosely tied group of non-elected, unelectable, “civil society activists” cannot bring change. Change has to come from the political class. Only they have the tools and the platform to do it. It is directly affected by the media and the perceived voice of the public. The fire breathing demagogues of television ape each other. Kharbooza kharboozey ko dekh kar rang pakarta hai. One of them rips apart a poetic self-righteous line on sovereignty and others feel the need to do so. Imagine that if we can collectively raise hue and cry, how the politicians cannot become sensible and secure enough to take action and hold the military accountable. While it would be commendable if they could resign for their failures, but they get extensions, it is upto the public to demand accountability. Intelligence failures in 1965 were never addressed, the concerned officer was promoted(!). In 1999, the adventurer toppled the government. Isn’t it time we demanded accountability of the powerful and unaccountable?

The Kargil Review Committee Report, commonly called the Subrahmanyam Report, was just a small step in the evolution of India’s civil-military balance. The politicians held their military accountable for the failures of Kargil. We never did that. Today is the most opportune time to do that. Constitute a Parliamentary Commission, for we do not have a Subrahmanyam, nor should we rely on ex-bureaucrats to do that. Select a few hawks, a Tehmina Daultana and a Khawaja Asif. Select a few mild, calculated and efficient politicians, a Raza Rabbani and SherryRehman. Do not put dubiously pro-military politicians like Chaudhry Nisar or ex-generals like Jehangir Ashraf Qazi on it. Summon the DG ISI, DG MI, DG IB. Summon the Army Chief. Summon the bureaucrats. Summon the experts. Summon everybody. Make them testify. Ask them the tough questions. Make the report, if not the proceedings, public.

What should they ask them? I cannot imagine that anybody would even want to ask the unimaginable (did we protect him?). It can only be an intelligence failure inquiry. The good that can come out of this exercise is enormous. A much needed and necessary reform in the intelligence community, a reform in the civil-military balance and a reform in the culture that defines the rules of Islamabad. For once, we could even bring the ISI under civilian control and make it focus on intelligence and counter-terrorism not chasing journalists on CD-70s. For once, we could, just maybe, begin to redress the civilian-military [im]balance in the favour of the civilians. Define the policy, make the policy and own it. Do not let the Generals do it for you anymore. We can, for the first time ever, dream of a national security and foreign policy dictated not by Rawalpindi and Aabpara, but one where civilians make competent decisions, impose their supervision and enable the military to competently implement it.

The op-ed writers, the TV anchors and the pundits are busy answering the questions that either the west has or the old, aged line around the smokescreen of sovereignty. They are missing the point. There is good that holds for us in this.

In the wake of 1971, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto passed gagging orders to prevent the media from criticising the military. The soldiers who returned later were protected by the state and no one was allowed to criticise their actions. Their honour was literally restored by Bhutto. And they sent him to the gallows.

We must not put a shroud on the failures of the military anymore. We have embarrassed our country a lot already. Today is the time for reform, redress and for us to start a new beginning.The military must face music for its actions and failures. Civilian power must be recognised. Strike while the iron is hot.

 SOURCE: http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/05/grab-the-reins-of-power.html

There, the agents determined that the courier would make contact with one of the world’s most wanted men, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who had succeeded September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammad as al Qaeda operations chief a few months earlier.

Agents from Pakistan’s powerful and mysterious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI, raided a house but failed to find al-Libbi, a senior Pakistani intelligence official told Reuters this week.

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf later wrote in his memoirs that an interrogation of the courier revealed that al-Libbi used three houses in Abbottabad, which sits some 50 km (30 miles) northeast of Islamabad. The intelligence official said that one of those houses may have been in the same compound where on May 1 U.S. special forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

It’s a good story. But is it true? Pakistan’s foreign ministry this week used the earlier operation as evidence of Pakistan’s commitment to the fight against terrorism. You see, Islamabad seemed to be pointing out, we were nabbing bad guys seven years ago in the very neighborhood where you got bin Laden.

But U.S. Department of Defense satellite photos show that in 2004 the site where bin Laden was found this week was nothing but an empty field. A U.S. official briefed on the bin Laden operation told Reuters he had heard nothing to indicate there had been an earlier Pakistani raid.

There are other reasons to puzzle. Pakistan’s foreign ministry says that Abbottabad, home to several military installations, has been under surveillance since 2003. If that’s true, then why didn’t the ISI uncover bin Laden, who U.S. officials say has been living with his family and entourage in a well-guarded compound for years?

The answer to that question goes to the heart of the troubled relationship between Pakistan and the United States. Washington has long believed that Islamabad, and especially the ISI, play a double game on terrorism, saying one thing but doing another.

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

Since 9/11 the United States has relied on Pakistan’s military to fight al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountainous badlands along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. President George W. Bush forged a close personal relationship with military leader Musharraf.

But U.S. officials have also grown frustrated with Pakistan. While Islamabad has been instrumental in catching second-tier and lower ranked al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and several operatives identified as al Qaeda “number threes” have either been captured or killed, the topmost leaders – bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy Ayman al Zawahiri — have consistently eluded capture.

The ISI, which backed the Taliban when the group came to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, seemed to turn a blind eye — or perhaps even helped — as Taliban and al-Qaeda members fled into Pakistan during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, according to U.S. officials.

Washington also believes the agency protected Abdul Qadeer Khan, lionized as the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb, who was arrested in 2004 for selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

And when Kashmiri militants attacked the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people, New Delhi accused the ISI of controlling and coordinating the strikes. A key militant suspect captured by the Americans later told investigators that ISI officers had helped plan and finance the attack. Pakistan denies any active ISI connection to the Mumbai attacks and often points to the hundreds of troops killed in action against militants as proof of its commitment to fighting terrorism.

But over the past few years Washington has grown increasingly suspicious-and ready to criticize Pakistan. The U.S. military used association with the spy agency as one of the issues they would question Guantanamo Bay prisoners about to see if they had links to militants, according to WikiLeaks documents made available last month to the New York Times.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last July that she believed that Pakistani officials knew where bin Laden was holed up. On a visit to Pakistan just days before the Abbottabad raid, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused the ISI of maintaining links with the Taliban.

As the CIA gathered enough evidence to make the case that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, U.S. intel chiefs decided that Pakistan should be kept in the dark. When U.S. Navy Seals roped down from helicopters into the compound where bin Laden was hiding, U.S. officials insist, Pakistan’s military and intel bosses were blissfully unaware of what was happening in the middle of their country.

Some suspect Pakistan knew more than it’s letting on. But the Pakistani intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous so that he could speak candidly, told Reuters that the Americans had acted alone and without any Pakistani assistance or permission.

The reality is Washington long ago learned to play its own double game. It works with Islamabad when it can and uses Pakistani assets when it’s useful but is ever more careful about revealing what it’s up to.

“On the one hand, you can’t not deal with the ISI… There definitely is the cooperation between the two agencies in terms of personnel working on joint projects and the day-to-day intelligence sharing,” says Kamran Bokhari, Middle East and South Asia director for global intelligence firm STRATFOR. But “there is this perception on the part of the American officials working with their counterparts in the ISI, there is the likelihood that some of these people might be working with the other side. Or somehow the information we’re sharing could leak out… It’s the issue of perception and suspicion.”

The killing of bin Laden exposes just how dysfunctional the relationship has become. The fact that bin Laden seems to have lived for years in a town an hour’s drive from Islamabad has U.S. congressmen demanding to know why Washington is paying $1 billion a year in aid to Pakistan. Many of the hardest questions are directed at the ISI. Did it know bin Laden was there? Was it helping him? Is it rotten to the core or is it just a few sympathizers?

What’s clear is that the spy agency America must work within one of the world’s most volatile and dangerous regions remains an enigma to outsiders.

GENERAL PASHA

ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha visited Washington on April 11, just weeks before bin Laden was killed. Pasha, 59, became ISI chief in September 2008, two months before the Mumbai attacks. Before his promotion, he was in charge of military operations against Islamic militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. He is considered close to Pakistan military chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, himself a long-time ISI chief.

A slight man who wastes neither words nor movements, Pasha speaks softly and is able to project bland anonymity even as he sizes up his companions and surroundings. In an off-the-record interview with Reuters last year, he spoke deliberately and quietly but seemed to enjoy verbal sparring. There was none of the bombast many Pakistani officials put on.

Pasha, seen by U.S. officials as something of a right-wing nationalist, and CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was in the final stages of planning the raid on Osama’s compound, had plenty to talk about in Washington. Joint intelligence operations have been plagued by disputes, most notably the case of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore in January. Davis was released from jail earlier this year after the victims’ families were paid “blood money” by the United States, a custom sanctioned under Islam and common in Pakistan.

Then there are the Mumbai attacks. Pasha and other alleged ISI officers were named as defendants in a U.S. lawsuit filed late last year by families of Americans killed in the attacks. The lawsuit contends that the ISI men were involved with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an anti-India militant group, in planning and orchestrating the attacks.

An Indian government report seen by Reuters states that David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant who was allied with Lashkar-e-Taiba and who was arrested in the United States last year, told Indian interrogators while under FBI supervision that ISI officers had been involved in plotting the attack and paid him $25,000 to help fund it.

Pakistan’s government said it will “strongly contest” the case and shortly after the lawsuit was filed Pakistani media named the undercover head of the CIA’s Islamabad station, forcing him to leave the country.

TECHNIQUE OF WAR

The ISI’s ties to Islamist militancy are very much by design.

The Pakistan Army’s humiliating surrender to India in Dhaka in 1971 led to the carving up of the country into two parts, one West Pakistan and the other Bangladesh. The defeat had two major effects: it convinced the Pakistan military that it could not beat its larger neighbor through conventional means alone, a realization that gave birth to its use of Islamist militant groups as proxies to try to bleed India; and it forced successive Pakistani governments to turn to Islam as a means of uniting the territory it had left.

These shifts, well underway when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, suited the United States at first. Working with its Saudi Arabian ally, Washington plowed money and weapons into the jihad against the Soviets and turned a blind eye to the excesses of Pakistan’s military ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, who had seized power in 1977 and hanged former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.

Many Pakistanis blame the current problems in Pakistan in part on Washington’s penchant for supporting military rulers. It did the same in 2001 when it threw it its lot with Musharraf following the attacks on New York and Washington. By then, the rebellion in Indian Kashmir had been going since 1989, and U.S. officials back in 2001 made little secret that they knew the army was training, arming and funding militants to fight there.

That attitude changed after India and Pakistan nearly went to war following the December 2001 attack on India’s parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militant groups — a charge Islamabad denied. Musharraf began to rein in the Kashmiri militant groups, restricting their activity across the Line of Control which divides the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir. But he was juggling the two challenges which continue to defy his successor as head of the army, General Ashfaq Kayani — reining in the militant groups enough to prevent an international backlash on Pakistan, while giving them enough space to operate to avoid domestic fall-out at home.

The ISI has never really tried to hide the fact that it sees terrorism as part of its arsenal. When Guantanamo interrogation documents appearing to label the Pakistani security agency as an entity supporting terrorism were published recently, a former ISI head, Lt. General Asad Durrani, wrote that terrorism “is a technique of war, and therefore an instrument of policy.”

Critics believe that elements of the ISI — perhaps an old guard that learned the Islamization lessons of General Zia ul-Haq a little too well — maintain an influence within the organization. “It is no secret that Pakistan’s army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants – both local and foreign, from the early 1980s until at least the events of September 11, 2001 – as instruments of foreign policy,” STRATFOR wrote in an analysis posted on its website this week.

LIST OF GRIEVANCES

That legacy is at the heart of Washington’s growing mistrust of the ISI.

Take the agency’s ties to the powerful Afghan militant group headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which has inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. forces in the region.

“We sometimes say: You are controlling — you, Pasha — you’re controlling Haqqani,” one U.S. official said, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“Well, Pasha will come back and say … ‘No, we are in contact with them.’ Well, what does that really mean?”

“I don’t know but I’d like our experts to sit down and work out: Is this something where he is trying (to), as he would put it, know more about what a terrorist group in his country is doing. Or as we would put it, to manipulate these people as the forward soldiers of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.”

When U.S. Joint Chiefs head Admiral Mike Mullen visited Islamabad last month he was just as blunt.

“Haqqani is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners. And I have a sacred obligation to do all I can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Mullen told a Pakistani newspaper.

“So that’s at the core — it’s not the only thing — but that’s at the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship.”

Just across the border in Afghanistan, Major General John Campbell reaches into a bag and pulls out a thick stack of cards with the names and photos of coalition forces killed in the nearly year-long period since he’s been on the job. Many of the men in the photos were killed by Haqqani fighters.

“I carry these around so I never forget their sacrifice,” Campbell said, speaking to a small group of reporters at U.S. Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province.

“There are guys in Pakistan that have sanctuary that are coming across the border and killing Americans… we gotta engage the Pakistanis to do something about that,” he said.

Campbell calls the Haqqani network the most lethal threat to Afghanistan, where U.S. forces are entrenched in a near decade-old war.

“The Haqqani piece, it’s sort of like a Mafia-syndicate. And I don’t know at what level they’re tied into the ISI — I don’t. But there’s places … that you just see that there’s collusion up and down the border,” he said.

DRONE WARS

Another contentious subject discussed on Pasha’s trip to Washington was the use of missile-firing drones to attack suspected militant camps on Pakistani territory.

Once Obama moved into the White House, the drone program begun by the Bush Administration not only continued, but according to several officials, increased. Sometimes drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan took place several times in a single week.

U.S. officials, as well as counter-terrorism officials from European countries with a history of Islamic militant activity, said that they had no doubt that the drone campaign was seriously damaging the ability of al Qaeda’s central operation, as well as affiliated groups like the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, to continue to use Pakistan as a safe haven.

But the increasingly obvious use of drones made it far more difficult for either the CIA or its erstwhile Pakistani partners, ISI, to pretend that the operation was secret and that Pakistani officials were unaware of it. Since last October, the tacit cooperation between the CIA and ISI which had helped protect and even nurture the CIA’s drone program, began to fray, and came close to breaking point.

Before Pasha visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, last month, Pakistani intelligence sources leaked ferocious complaints about the CIA in general and the drone program in particular, suggesting that the agency, its operatives and its operations inside Pakistan were out of control and that if necessary, Pakistan would take forcible steps to curb them — including stopping drone attacks and limiting the presence of CIA operatives in Pakistan.

When Pasha arrived at CIA HQ, U.S. officials said, the demands leaked by the Pakistanis to the media were much scaled down, with Pasha asking Panetta that the US give Pakistan more notice about drone operations, supply Pakistan with its own fleet of drones (a proposal which the United States had agreed to but which had subsequently stalled) and that the agency would curb the numbers of its personnel in Pakistan.

U.S. officials said that the Obama administration agreed to at least some measure of greater notification to the Pakistani authorities about CIA activities, though insisted any concessions were quite limited.

Just weeks later, Obama failed to notify Pakistan in advance about the biggest U.S. counter-terrorist operation in living memory, conducted on Pakistani soil.

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

It was different the first time U.S. forces went after bin Laden.

Washington’s first attempt to kill the al Qaeda leader came in August 1998. President Bill Clinton launched 66 cruise missiles from the Arabian Sea at camps in Khost in eastern Afghanistan to kill the group’s top brass in retaliation for the suicide bombings on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The CIA had received word that al Qaeda’s leadership was due to meet. But Bin Laden canceled the meeting and several U.S. officials said at the time they believed the ISI had tipped him off. The U.S. military informed their Pakistani counterparts about 90 minutes before the missiles entered Pakistan’s airspace, just in case they mistook them for an Indian attack.

Then U.S. Secretary of State William Cohen came to suspect bin Laden escaped because he was tipped off. Four days before the operation, the State Department issued a public warning about a “very serious threat” and ordered hundreds of nonessential U.S. personnel and dependents out of Pakistan. Some U.S. officials said the Taliban could have passed the word to bin Laden on an ISI tip.

Other former officials have disputed the notion of a security breach, saying bin Laden had plenty of notice that the United States intended to retaliate following the bombings in Africa.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Now that the U.S. has finally killed bin Laden, what will change?

The Pakistani intelligence official acknowledged that bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan will cause more problems with the United States. “It looks bad,” he said. “It’s pretty embarrassing.” But he denied that Pakistan had been hiding bin Laden, and noted that the CIA had struggled to find bin Laden for years as well.

Perhaps. But the last few days are unlikely to convince the CIA and other U.S. agencies to trust their Pakistani counterparts with any kind of secrets or partnership.

Recent personnel changes at the top of the Obama Administration also do not bode well for salvaging the relationship.

Panetta, a former Congressman and senior White House official, is a political operator who officials say at least got on cordially, if not well, with ISI chief Pasha. But Panetta is being reassigned to take over from Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. His replacement at the CIA will be General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. military operations in neighboring Afghanistan.

The biggest issue on Petraeus’s agenda will be dealing with Pakistan’s ISI. The U.S. general’s relationship with Pakistani Army chief of Staff Kayani, Pasha’s immediate superior, is publicly perceived to be so unfriendly that it has become a topic of discussion on Pakistani TV talk shows.

“I think it is going to be a very strained and difficult relationship,” said Bruce Riedel, a former adviser to Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He characterized the attitude on both sides as “mutual distrust.”

After a decade of American involvement in Afghanistan, experts say that Petraeus and Pakistani intelligence officials know each other well enough not to like each other.

 source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-pakistan-isi-idUSTRE74408220110505?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

 The Pakistani brass was caught red-handed and was not given an option to say no to the operation. But the Pakistani deep state still does not get it, for its ideological sympathies are elsewhere

Doveryai, no proveryai! This Russian proverb, meaning ‘trust, but verify’, popularised by Vladimir Lenin and later by Ronald Reagan, has not rung truer than in the events surrounding the assassination of Osama bin Laden (OBL) earlier this week. And we may see it applied much more intensely in the months to come.

Phone calls from friends in Abbottabad about an ongoing military action there, were enough to suggest that something big was happening in what the locals had always believed to be an ISI-run facility, but the e-mail news alert from The Wall Street Journal announcing OBL’s death was still a major surprise. Against the norms of punditry, this time one hoped that we were wrong and this was not happening in Pakistan. But it was, and yes, we now stand vindicated: all of us who had been saying and writing for years that the US’s most wanted man was not under the protection of any major Pashtun tribe but was guarded by the clan that has anointed itself as the guardians of Pakistan’s ‘ideological’ and geographical frontiers. It is this same clan that had actually codified in its curriculum that “you are the selected lords; you are the cream of the nation”. Where else could this syllabus have been taught but at the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul — less than a mile from OBL’s last lair?

There is no polite way of saying it but these masters of Pakistan’s fortunes got egg on their face and that too with the whole world watching. A Peshawarite calling in on a television show said it most aptly: “Koilay ki dallali mein haath to kalay hotay hein per moonh bhi kala hota hai” (Those, whose business is foul, not only get their hands dirty but a blackened face too). But they still have the nerve to say with a straight face that a million-dollar fortress under their nose had been “off their radar”!

Not only that but they also have the gall to mobilise the right-wing media to create the smokescreen of sovereignty yet again while simultaneously playing up their ‘role’ in support of the US action in Abbottabad. The world, however, is not buying that in a cantonment city, the army — which keeps track of every inch of land around its facilities — did not know what was going on in the high-walled compound next to its primary training academy. The paid spin masters will have to do better than this. No matter what President Asif Zardari or his ghostwriter is made to say in op-ed articles in US papers, it is the top brass that is under scrutiny. Using the civilian political leadership as the human shield is not going to work, as the calculus has changed dramatically.

Barack Obama’s token acknowledgment of Pakistan’s non-specific cooperation is being construed by the Pakistani establishment and its minions to imply that the US can be taken for a ride again. It is too early for the specifics to surface but conversations with several sources in Washington and Pakistan point only to the deep mistrust that the US has had vis-à-vis Pakistan. There was no deal initiated by General Shuja Pasha to ‘trade in’ OBL for a bigger Pakistani role in Afghanistan. On the contrary, in response to the chest thumping by the Pakistani security establishment and its ultra right-wing political acolytes, they were confronted with damning evidence about the Haqqani network and possibly the Quetta Shura, while the OBL lead was not shared. The no-fly zone over Pakistan was created through phone calls, minutes after the OBL operation got underway. While the Pakistani brass is clutching at straws like blaming the ‘two Pashtun guards’ for protecting OBL’s compound, it was caught red-handed and was not given an option to say no to the operation. But the Pakistani deep state still does not get it, for its ideological sympathies are elsewhere.

Hillary Clinton’s nuanced diplomatic statements notwithstanding, the mood of the US leadership is almost reflective of the immediate post-9/11 days and was conveyed well by Senator Carl Levin in his remark: “(Pakistan has) a lot of explaining to do … I think the army and the intelligence of Pakistan have plenty of questions that they should be answering.” In a complete paradigm shift, any leverage that the Pakistani junta was hoping to gain from the bravado that started with the Raymond Davis affair has been lost completely. What will follow is a steady demand within the US to hold Pakistan’s feet to the fire. While maintaining a semblance of a working relationship, a very tough line will be adopted in private. The question bound to come up is not just why Pakistan was hanging on to OBL but also if there was any connection of its operatives to the 9/11 tragedy.

From a tactical standpoint, the OBL operation is likely to serve as a template for future action against the jihadist leadership hiding in Pakistan, especially with General David Petraeus assuming his new role in the near future. To get closer to the strategic objective of a certain level of stability within Afghanistan and potentially a political reconciliation there, it is imperative for the US to neutralise the next two key hurdles, i.e. the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network. Both these entities have so far been able to evade the US’s reach, thanks to the Pakistani security establishment’s patronage.

Members of the Haqqani clan have been roaming freely in the vicinity of Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. Khalil Haqqani has conducted several meetings in the previous few months to broker the ‘peace deal’ for the Kurram Agency. It is inconceivable that he could act without the knowledge of the Pakistani security agencies. Similarly, Quetta is home to the Pakistan Army’s XII Corps, ISI regional headquarters, the Balochistan Frontier Corps, an army recruitment centre, the Pakistan Air Force base Samungli and the Pakistan Army’s prestigious Command and Staff College. One wonders if the Pakistani brass would still be able to say that they do not know the whereabouts of Mullah Omar.

A window of opportunity perhaps still exists for Pakistan to make a clean break with the past but its incoherent blame-game and constantly changing story says otherwise. The Pakistani establishment has given the world very little reason to trust it without verifying — unless, of course, another hornet is to be missed hiding near a major nest.

source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011%5C05%5C05%5Cstory_5-5-2011_pg3_2

By Raqib Shah

We need to look at the facts, use common sense and everything becomes crystal clear.

What we all know

August 2010: Pakistan shares with US some details about the compound in Abbottabad. US gathers intelligence that the compound is occupied by Osama’s children.
Jan 27: Raymond Davis, the CIA Station Chief in Pakistan gets an audio file and some pictures of Pak military installations at Tarbela from an informer in Lahore. On the way back he is pursued by two ISI contractors. He realizes that he is being followed and shots both followers in the back. He is arrested by Pakistani police.
March 16: Raymond Davis is released and he shares the information he had gathered with the CIA.
March 17: General Kayani starts criticizing drone attacks in public statements
First Week of April: News started circling that General Petraeus is being transferred to CIA.
April 5: Obama Administration submits a report to the Congress that Pakistan government has no clear strategy to triumph over militants. This is followed by a concerted international media campaign which puts enormous pressure on Pakistani Military and ISI.
April 7: Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and White House advisor writes a report arguing that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not only a deterrent to India but also to USA.
April 8: General Kayani meets with Centcom Chief Gen James Mattis.
April 18: On Pakistan’s Geo TV, Adm. Michael Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence “has a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani Network. That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI, but it’s there.”
April 20: Adm. Mike Mullen meets with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wynne and General Kayani.
April 22: News appears that Pakistan has taken back Shamsi Airbase back from CIA, US forces.
April 26: Washington critically attacks Pakistan Army’s counter-terrorism efforts.
April 26: General Petraeus met with General Kayani.
April 26: Meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) is held at Rawalpindi, one week ahead of schedule at the Joint Staff Headquarters
April 27: Wall Street Journal reports that Pakistan is trying to wean Afghanistan away from the United States and draw it into China’s orbit.
April 28: Obama signs General Petraeus’ transfer to CIA.
April 29: Obama signs the orders to attack the Abbottabad compounds.
April 30: General Kayani gave a veiled threat in his Youm-e-Shuhada address: “Pakistan is a peace-loving country and wants friendly relations with other countries and our every step should move towards prosperity of the people. But we will not compromise our dignity and honour for it”.
May 1: Four US choppers flew from Afghaistan. Reaching Abbottabad they attacked a secure compound which housed some important Al Qaeda members. A gun battle soon ensued. Within minutes a Pakistani military helicopters flew from Tarbela, reaching the compound in Abbottabad few minutes later. In the meanwhile US forces had torched one of their own choppers. The four choppers (three US and one Pak) took off from the compound and flew to Afghanistan. Incidentally, this time none of them followed a low altitude flight. They were quite visible on Pakistani radars.

What we all should know

In August 2010 after Pakistani authorities shared intelligence with US about the compound in Abbottabad. US after its own intelligence gathering ascertains that the compound is occupied by Osama’s children. Compound surveillance continues through the next year in anticipation of capturing Osama bin Laden. In January 2011 the young CIA contractor who is give the charge of Pakistan Station Chief works “extra hard” to gather clandestine information related to ISI and Al Qaeda relationship. The contractor, now infamous as Raymond Davis the “American Rambo” receives a call from one of his assets, early morning on January 27 about a high value target. But the asset refuses to lay out details on phone or to leave the Lahore city, where he had gone underground. Raymond Davis hires a rent a car and drives to Lahore, while his security detail follows him in a bullet proof Land Cruiser. Raymond Davis is able to loose his Islamabad’s ISI “detail” by leaving in unmarked rent a car. The ISI agents falling for his trap follow the embassy’s Land Cruiser. Raymond Davis arrives at Lahore one hour earlier than his detail and meets with the asset. The asset gives him some pictures of an intelligence building at Tarbela and recording of a phone call. Listening the phone call Raymond Davis realizes the gold mine he had struck and immediately calls his security detail which had also reached Lahore, knowing if ISI reaches him first, he would not leave Lahore alive.

Next hour when the security car catches up with Raymond Davis, the ISI bosses realizes that Raymond Davis had give them a slip earlier in the morning and in the couple of hours he had in Lahore, he might have got some important information. Resultantly, they put two contractors on his tail. Raymond Davis seeing a tail fears the worse and shoots them both in the back, at a traffic stop, without logically realizing that there was no way ISI could have know what he was holding. His security detail which was close behind rushed to his “rescue” however, by the police had chased and arrested him, while the security Land Cruiser running over pedestrians escapes towards US embassy compound in Islamabad. ISI officers quickly reach the scene and confiscating the memory sticks realize Raymond Davis has unearthed a deep secret which even their immediate bosses didn’t know about. The sensitivity of information rattles the entire echelons of the ISI and even its own officers are sent under house arrest while the relevant cell steps forward. At that time even some of the top intelligence officers of the secretive ISI outside the relevant cell did not know that Osama bin Laden had died and his body was kept frozen at Tarbela. Young Raymond Davis had unearthed the biggest secret of the century, somehow. But now the Pandora’s Box had been opened. Pak top brass knew it had only a few days or weeks at best to capitalize Raymond Davis’ arrest before US get the intel. In the next six weeks Pakistan plugs all leaks related to Osama’s death and makes sure that maximum gains are made for Raymond’s release. However, when Raymod Davis is released on March 16, his debriefing results in a tsunami of US policy, personal agendas and fuelling of political rivalries. Everyone in the US chain of command now wanted to use the information to further personal goals from General Petreaus to President Obama. On March 17, knowing that Pakistan had lost its trunk card General Pervaiz Kayani releases a press statement in which he critically criticize drone attacks, first from him. From then on Pak Military raised its stance against drone attacks, fearing that US now might target its nuclear assets. While in USA politics was at its full swing. General Petreaus wanted to get the buckle for Osama bin Laden’s death on his belt for his future political ambitions, while President Obama wanted the credit to help is sliding popularity. While the tussle continued, the other issue still pending was how to confirm Osama’s death. In the next one month, nearly every week a top US official visited Pakistan, everyone meeting with General Kayani trying to convince him to hand over Osama’s body. While the stance from Pakistan remained, “Osama, Who?” It was a first in the history that so many US top officials had visited and met with a military chief of a foreign country in such a short time. Seeing nothing getting through the top military brass of Pakistan, US started a political and media campaign on the sides to put extra pressure on Pak Military.

Politics within Obama Administration was also at its full swing. Petraeus was pulling all the strings to take the credit, while trying to lay out a plan to get Osama bin Laden’s body out of Pakistan. President Obama on the other hand in one smooth move decided to “promote” Petraeus to the head of the CIA. The news got out in the first week of April that Petraeus was being transferred to the CIA. While at the main front, Obama continued to pressurize General Kayani and General Pasha and one April 5, Obama Administration submitted a report to the Congress that Pakistan government had no clear strategy to triumph over militants. Alongside the report the media campaign against Pak Military and the ISI continued.

The second week of April began with a bang for top Pak Military brass. On April 7, Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and White House advisor wrote a report arguing that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not only a deterrent to India but also to USA. The obvious had now become clear that Obama Administration has indirectly sent a clear threat to Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The timing of the report was perfect with Centcom Chief Gen James Mattis meeting with General Kayani next day. In the meeting General Mattis asked about Pakistan’s cooperation in capturing Osama bin Laden. This was ironically one of typical Hollywood thriller scene. Pakistan knew that US knew that Pakistan knows that US knows that Osama is dead. But Pakistan continued the naive game of “Osama Who?” while US continued to play the game that “Osama must be captured”. General Mattis leaves with veiled threats and stresses that Pakistan must do more to against the Al Qaeda and Taliban, or indirectly saying that Osama bin Laden must be handed over.

For the ten days US waits and sees how Pakistan responds to the threats, but Pakistan acts by burying its head in the sand – see no evil, hear no evil. Obama Administratio ups the ante and on April 18 on Pakistan’s Geo TV, Adm. Michael Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence “has a longstanding relationship with the Haqqani Network. That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI, but it’s there.” Again, international media had its field day against Pakistan’s ISI and its links with Taliban and the ISI. After putting pressure on General Kayani, Adm. Mike Mullen meets with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wynne and General Kayani on April 20. Admiral Mullen again demands indirectly that Pakistan needs to help USA in locating Osama bin Laden. Pakistan’s response was again, “Osama, Who?” Admiral Mullen however, left with another threat that if they came to know about Osama bin Laden’s location they would go ahead and take unilateral action. This is the same message which President Obama repeated in his announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death, when he said, “We will take actions in Pakistan, if we knew where he was.”

In response to continued threats from USA Pakistan starts taking back its air bases from US in an attempt to avoid launching of any operation from its own soil. As a result on April 22 the news appears that Pakistan had taken back Shamsi Airbase back from CIA, US forces. While Obama Administration was pilling pressure on Pakistan, General Petraeus visited Pakistan on April 26 and met with General Kayani openly asking him to hand over Osama bin Laden, otherwise get ready to face the consequences. Same day Washington also critically attacked Pakistan Army’s counter-terrorism efforts. General Petraeus left with a clear message that unless Pakistan hands over Osama, US forces would be forces to take action over Pakistani soil. Pakistani Military knowing that US knew that Osama bin Laden was dead couldn’t understand Obama Administration’s continued stance on capturing Osama bin Laden. General Petraeus left with the ultimatum that either Pakistan handed over Osama or US would get him.

Same day meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) is held at Rawalpindi, one week ahead of schedule at the Joint Staff Headquarters. The top brass discusses the Osama issue and decision is reached to work out the Obama’s strategy leading to continuous threats for capturing Osama bin Laden alive, even after knowing that he was dead. While in Pakistan intelligence community starts using all of its sources to reach to the bottom of US’ demand of capturing Osama bin Laden. On April 28 President Obama signs General Petraeus’ transfer to CIA and next day signs the orders to attack the Abbottabad compounds. Thus Osama bin Laden’s credit is assured to President Obama.

On 29 April after President Obama signed the orders to “bring back” Osama bin Laden, Pakistani security agencies get a report that another order had been signed which had authorized US forces to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear assets, if needed. The report was nothing short of seeing a death angel for the top Pak Military brass.

Seeing the imminent threat, General Kayani tried his last shot when on 30 April 2011 he clearly stated in his Youm-e-Shuhada address: “Pakistan is a peace-loving country and wants friendly relations with other countries and our every step should move towards prosperity of the people. But we will not compromise our dignity and honour for it”. However, it didn’t stop what was about to come 24 hours later.

As night fell on Sunday, 1 May four choppers from a US Afghan base at a low altitude towards its destination in Abbottabad, to the same compound where Osama’s children were in the hiding. Without any detection courtesy of their latest stealth technology and Pakistan’s outdated technology the choppers continued over the Pakistani territory. Ironically, ten years ago a Pak Air force air commodore had raised concern about the outdated radar technology citing that US or worse India could fly helicopters into the country and take out nuclear installations and in reply he was shown the boot while no upgrades to the systems were made.

Anyway, the four choppers made it to the compound in Abbottabad. It is then that Pak Army was notified that they have a choice. Either face an entire barrage of US choppers attacking Pak nuclear assets or hand over Osama’s body. In the meanwhile the small gun battle at the Abbottabad compound continued and to give the drama some authenticity the US forces torched one of their own choppers.  Pressed for time a Pakistani helicopter flew from Tarbela carrying dead body of Osama bin Laden which was stored in a cold storage there. While at Abbottabad Pak Army soldiers encircle the entire area around the compound within five minutes of the start of fire fight. The fire fight continued for 35 more minutes, waiting for the Pakistani helicopter. Once the Pakistani helicopter reached the compound the three US choppers and the Pakistani helicopter flew towards the Afghan border, this time without the need to fly below the radar detection altitude.

Next day, the world woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead and President Obama had delivered wheat President Bush and Dick Cheney couldn’t. But the Pak Military brass did not wake up, because they never slept the night before. Last night they had woken to the realization that US could fly under the radar and take out Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The problem here is that US has the complete inventory of Pakistan’s nuclear assets along with exact locations. It would be a matter of minutes in a country wide operation to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear assets.

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Will be updated soon…

Orginal Source: http://raqibshah.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/why-we-will-never-see-dead-osama-bin-laden-what-really-happened/

No doubt Raymond Davis is somebody very important CIA operatives in Pakistan, because of all the people, the President of United States, himself intervened, demanding that the Pakistan government must release him immediately because, Davis enjoyed diplomatic immunity and the Pakistani courts of justice could not try him for the cold-blooded murder of two Pakistanis. Obama lied, knowing fully well that Davis was no diplomat and enjoyed no immunity. Now the US government is threatening Pakistan of dire consequences, if Davis was not released.

On the basis of evidence collected from Davis, very revealing information has been obtained about his contacts and his anti-Pakistan activities, as the Chief Coordinator, for other US sponsored agencies, working in Pakistan, such as: The Black Water, agency has been operating in Pakistan since 2004, under different names and since has remained engaged in all kinds of anti-state activities. This agency also worked in Iraq and its gruesome activities have been testified by many writers and human rights activists.

The Special Investigation Centre (SIC) was established in 2005, with its controlling headquarters in Model Town, Lahore, which was blown-up some year and a half back. It’s really a Gestapo organization and employs over six hundred operatives, spread all over Pakistan and is tasked to carry out all the ‘dirty work,’ which Pakistani intelligence agencies would not be willing to take-on. It is this agency which kidnapped hundreds of Pakistanis and handed them over to the CIA, killed and tortured many and carried out number of ‘terror attacks’ to foment trouble and discredit the government by creating despondency amongst the people. The very painful aspect of this organization is that majority of the operatives are Pakistanis, engaged in such heinous acts. Raymond Davis exercised direct control over this agency, maintaining close contact with Blackwater and the agency working along the North Western borders, without a name but controlled by the CIA.

The North West Border Agency was set-up in 2004, when the Americans complained to the government of Pakistan, about the cross-border involvement of Pakistanis and support to the Taliban movement inside Afghanistan. The government came under pressure and the CIA, along with the marines and FBI were allowed to set-up their vigilance net-work along the entire border from Balochistan to Khyber Pakhtun-khawah province. Thus, more than seven hundred personnel were deployed to monitor the Pak-Afghan border. It was during this period, that the ‘Indian Spy Network’ was established in Afghanistan, under the RAW, about which I had sent my report few years back to our national dailies, under the heading “Global Conspiracies Against Pakistan”. Thus CIA and RAW joined hands to infest our border with their agents, and destabilized the entire region and succeeded in turning the war on Pakistan. Thus the Pakistan Army, since 2005, is engaged in dealing with this threat, identified as Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariah (TNS) in Swat and Dir. It is in our common knowledge that prior to 2005, none of our tribals in the border region, fired even a single shot, in anger, in our direction. Thus the CIA and RAW have been able to create the serious insurgency problem for Pakistan. There are a number of NGOs working in Pakistan, who provide operational support to CIA. The FATA Development Agency (FDA) in particular, is very active in support of CIA and COTE operations by the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The arrest of David has caused strains in our relations with the United States, who has been threatening Pakistan of dire consequences, if Davis was not released. Therefore President Zardari found it necessary to tell them, ‘not to cross the red-line’, in blaming Pakistan, because it were the courts of law of the country who would decide the matter and our intelligence agencies, particularly the ISI will probe into the matter of violation of trust for intelligence sharing, and engaging in activities considered detrimental to the security of Pakistan. In this connection some arrests have also been made and more are expected, including some important personalities of Pakistan, operating at the behest of Davis. Thus the working relationship between ISI and CIA also is not the same any more.

Who is Davis? whose arrest has caused strained relations between the two governments and the two secret agencies, working hand-in-glove for the last several decades? Davis’s true identity has been revealed by an American, named Robert Anderson, a CIA agent of the past. His story is very revealing. He says:

“I had Davis’s job in Laos, 30 years ago. As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA. Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore. Davis is the American being held as a spy working under cover out of our embassy in Islamabad. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the ‘Great Satan’.” “In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as Pakistan does to Afghanistan today. As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA. We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive. We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. In Laos, the program, I was affected to carry-out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to US goals. It was called the ‘Phoenix Programmes’ and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina. We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country and still lost the war.”

“But I see from the Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true. When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks? How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programmes? Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head any more. I say “most” everyone knows, because our own public, the ones supposed to be in control of the military and CIA has constantly lied. It is so sad to see President Obama repeating the big lie.” – Counterpunch.

How many Pakistanis have been assassinated, eliminated, kidnapped and dumped in the torture cells in USA, no one will ever know, unless, some years later, Davis’s sense of guilt compels him to speak-out the truth, as Anderson has done. Truth will prevail, but it is time now for USA to wind-up this dirty net-work in Pakistan, for the sake of better relations and mutual understanding between the two countries.

 source: http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=80781

Pakistan’s ‘ghairat’ came calling once again on the afternoon of March 16, 2011. The chartered aeroplane carrying Raymond Davis had grossly violated the ‘honour space’ of Pakistan. Public sentiments were invoked to avenge the fractured ‘national honour’. Few were willing to admit that our state, inundated with loans and lackeys, happily discovered the shortest ‘sharai’ path that links Kot Lakhpat with Lahore airport. A dynastic ruling elite with a penchant for lawlessness and a total lack of concern for its citizens could not possibly have chosen any other course. It may be interesting to examine five other apparently isolated events that happened around the same time and which can explain why Raymonds will continue to happen in Pakistan.

While Raymond was on board a flight out of Pakistan, so was the chief minister of Punjab, making a brotherly get-well visit to London. The head of the PML-N had opted to have a stent inserted into his artery at the elite Central London Hospital. Instead of improving local hospitals, the ruling elite prefer to fly out to exotic locations, often utilising funds siphoned from the taxpayers’ account. Can the interests of poverty-stricken Pakistanis be defended by a ruling elite that has its vital interests deeply embedded in foreign lands? Till this situation is reversed, Raymonds will continue to happen in Pakistan.

Another event that took place around the same time as Raymond’s departure was the shocking revelation by the National Database and Registration Authority that out of the 80.2 million votes that chose our ‘honourable’ parliamentarians in 2008, 36 million were bogus. That means that approximately 45 per cent of the members sitting in parliament have entered through questionable corridors. Add to this another 57 confirmed by the Higher Education Commission as fraudulent degree-holders and 298 who refuse to submit their degrees for verification and you have an exceptional composition of delinquents who would be happy to partake in every conceivable crime.

Why should a foreign country respect a Pakistani court, when the Pakistani government itself refrains from doing so? Only four days before Raymond’s expeditious release, the ruling party called for a province-wide strike to protest against the Supreme Court verdict of annulling the appointment of the NAB chairman. A lawless state machinery, at war not just with its people but also with its own institutions, is hardly expected to produce results any different from what it did in the Davis case. Around the same time as Davis was sipping coffee on his flight out of Pakistan, the prime minister was signing documents to extend the services of the top man in the ISI. It is irrational for us to recycle the same dynastic politicians, bureaucrats, judges and generals and then also feel stunned at getting the same disappointing results. A cartel of fossilised ruling elite dedicated to extending its own life cycle cannot be expected to defend the interests of its people. Raymonds will continue to happen as long as we continue to tolerate a ruling class that lives beyond its means as well as its warranty period. The fifth and perhaps the most important event was an act of omission, hugely  underplayed and least protested. Davis was projected as if he was the only foul fish that we had in the country. What about the 500 or so other CIA security contractors who are engaged in similar dirty tricks? Why did we not demand a collective exodus of these criminals?

While we brood over the fast track dispensation given to a foreigner, we do not seem perturbed about the quality of justice delivered to our own citizens. We have a judicial system that can conduct a trial and release a multiple killer in two hours but do nothing about the 8,000 prisoners still languishing in jails for having been sentenced to death over the past 20 years. We are upset at the indecent haste shown for Raymond, but we have no programme to improve our dilapidated judicial processes. Raymonds will continue to happen in Pakistan for as long as we do not address the causes that create them. Neither the state nor the society seem ready to take on this challenge.

 source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/135966/why-raymonds-will-continue-to-happen/

The US government is being accused of pumping millions of dollars into unregulated training schemes for local police officers and other law enforcers that give a distorted, dangerous and inflammatory picture of the Muslim faith.

Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based progressive thinktank, spent nine months investigating the burgeoning industry of counter-terrorism training. It concluded that in seminars and conferences across America, police, transit and other law-enforcement officers were being given an ideologically skewed impression of Islam that impugned the entire religion, presenting it as inherently violent and sympathetic to terrorism.

One training conference, which PRA investigators attended, was held last October by the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, a body formed by New York police officers in the wake of 9/11. The conference was addressed by Walid Shoebat, a speaker used by several of the private training outfits.

Shoebat is a convert to Christianity, having formerly been a Muslim with links to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In his presentation, called The Jihad Mindset and How to Defeat It: Why We Want to Kill You, he accused Muslim men of raping women, children and young boys. “They are paedophiles!” he shouted.

According to the report, Shoebat went on: “The Muslim beheads with a smile. You can see it on YouTube, on TV; the Afghan child trained to execute Christians. You say that Islam is a peaceful religion? Why? It hates the west.”

He also said: “Islam is a revolution and is intent to destroy all other systems. They want to expand, like Nazism.”

Another training firm that is highlighted is Security Solutions International, a Miami-based company that has worked with some 1,000 law enforcement agencies since 2004. It gives seminars with titles such as “The Islamic Jihadist Threat”, “Jihad 2.0″ and “Allah in America”.

At one seminar, SSI’s trainer showed footage of the 2002 beheading of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, by his al-Qaida kidnappers.

The report is published as the Homeland Security Committee in the House of Representatives is poised to open controversial hearings into the radicalisation of the American-Muslim community. Peter King, who chairs the committee, has been accused of launching a witch-hunt.

A third training outfit, the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, based in Alexandria, Virginia, uses experienced FBI, CIA and other former federal agents to conduct its training of about 8,000 national security employees a year. PRA investigators were not allowed to attend the centre’s seminars, but based on its website and the writings of some of its key trainers, the report concludes that its course, Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine, uses the framework of the cold war to portray Islam as an existential threat equivalent to communism.

Walid Phares, who trains on behalf of the centre, argues in his writings that jihadists are infiltrating western organisations posing as civil rights advocates: “The most important mission is to further recruit and grow their numbers until the ‘holy moment’ comes.”

Thomas Cincotta, the author of the PRA report, called on Congress and the Homeland Security department to begin an inquiry into the use of public money to provide training that he called dangerous and unhelpful. “Police officers and law enforcers who attend these causes will walk away with the impression that law-abiding citizens should be suspicious of the broader Muslim community. I’m deeply troubled by that – it impinges on fundamental freedoms to practise religion, and it jeopardises our safety and national security by potentially alienating Muslims at a time when we need to work together.”

The report says that in the wake of 9/11 a huge sum of taxpayers’ money had been invested in counter-terrorism training for law enforcers. Two federal grant programmes alone, led by Homeland Security, paid out $1.7bn to states across the country in 2010.

Some of the training schemes are closely monitored by the Homeland Security department, but much of the money, the report says, is filtered through a host of largely unregulated training schemes, some of which are conducted by private security bodies.

SSI’s president, Henry Morgenstern, defended his company’s track record. “We have a very good reputation training law enforcers. We are not a kooky organisation.” He said of the report’s authors: “These people are out to weaken the anti-terrorism effort and it’s clearly politically motivated.”

He added: “You cannot whitewash radical Islam – they really do cut people’s heads off, they do carry out honour killings, so we are trying to show law enforcers that this is what they are up against. We are not saying that all Muslims chop people’s heads off.”

The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies declined to comment.

The involvement of anti-Muslim groups in federal and state training has caused consternation in the past. Last August Reverend Jesse Jackson protested to the FBI after it was discovered that Robert Spencer had been used as an official trainer on counter-terrorism for police offers.

Spencer is a founding member of Stop the Islamisation of America, a group that virulently opposed the building of a Muslim community centre near Ground Zero in New York and that has links with the far-right English Defence League.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/09/us-counter-terrorism-training-islam