The nation awaits a HISTORIC verdict soon..for over 5 hours all of the so called free media in Pakistan is chanting sologans of FREEDOM and FREE JUDICIARY..the judiciary that fails to put the most corrupt man in country on trial..he is still the President of the Land of pure and his so called opposition is still busy in protecting credit card thieves and police bashers in public with the consent of the SHARIFs..whats in the name some one said ...nothing indeed..one can be a sharif and yet be a scounderal ..and yet be really really wealthy .. the world is indeed coming to an end it seems ..
lets closely analyse the potential outcome from the very case in point ..that according to our media is going to be a trendsetter and a feather in the cap of the free judiciary thats ironically associated with only one man ..the veyr person who had to make amends to his thought process and make deals with the gatekeepers of the power corridors ..
The decision may :
1) Nullify the 3rd Nov decision ..
[ who cares ..will that resolve the power crisis , free us from corruption, my provide riddance from poverty ...oh guess what ..none of these ]
2) Null and void the reinstatment of 3rd Nov Judiciary
who cares again ..what are these powerful judges doing for the nation, have they taken any substantial notice to the nation's woes in any way possible?
3) Take notice of NRO
Lets be fair guys ..Iftikhar Chaudhry would never do that ..for once he has to pay back to his bosses in real ..he cant afford another outster..that would tame his shiny sun glasses and his power politics for good.
what ever may be the final decision of the court ..According to CJ himself .."we will not make any decision that may disrupt the system in place" ....come again Mr. CJ system or LACK OF SYSTEM ?.. i think you have got in wrong once again..you will keep your self busy in taking notices of rape cases , illegal constructions , power scandal of Chak Shehzad and basant for instance :)
so for those who day dream about this case leading to the rescue of the land of Pure ..should ponder once again ...are we fooling ourselves ..these goons are no good ..and will do nothing to make our lives better ...only we can make our lives better ..that is if we realize this ..or else ..all will be the same in this vicious cycle ...
May Allah Bless Pakistan
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
India’s Arihant — upping the psychological ante
By : Dr.Shireen Mazari [ Defence Analyst , PTI Spokesperson]
Coming back to the Indian nuclear powered submarine – it should be pointed out that we do not yet know how it will perform once its reactor goes critical. Will it actually have the speed and capability – given that it has been built with Soviet/Russian technology and the fate of many Soviet/Russian subs lies at the bottom of the seas – taking a heavy toll of human life and reflecting the limitations of Soviet weapon systems?
While Pakistan’s decision makers squabble over whether to go ahead and implement the 2008 decision of buying German submarines or alter course and seek more French subs instead, India has put its prototype nuclear powered submarine, INS Arihant, into the waters. Incidentally, those in Pakistan who have been ranting for years over the use of Islamic warrior names for our missiles seem absurdly mute in commenting on India’s aggressive usage of Hindu mythology warrior names not only for its missiles but now also for its nuclear-powered submarine. Of course, the reality is that the nuclear reactor of this submarine will not go critical till 2012, so at the moment Arihant is more of a symbolic reflection of where India is headed in terms of its nuclear arsenal. Nevertheless, the development has signalled the nuclearisation of the Indian Ocean by a littoral state – since nuclear weapons have been present in this Ocean through the military presence of the external nuclear powers, especially the US.
That is one major reason why the US, France and UK always opposed the UN General Assembly’s efforts to make the Indian Ocean a weapon-free “zone of peace” – as reflected in the first UN GA Resolution of 16 December 1971(2832:XXVI). Ironically, along with the Soviet Union, India was a major force behind this Non-Aligned Movement-supported UN resolution. But then this has been the hallmark of Indian security policy: seeking time through multilateral diplomatic moves while it builds its military capability. In contrast to the Indian position on the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace resolution, the US, France and the UK always voted against this idea and in 1989 they chose to withdraw from the 44 member UN committee on this issue that had been set up in 1972. The US in fact demanded that the committee be eliminated so as to reduce UN spending and we know how this whole issue simply died for lack of visible progress. Now that India has also moved towards nuclear militarisation of the Indian Ocean, it will be difficult to see any revival of the zone of peace proposal for this region in the future. With the launching of the Arihant, India has moved still further away from being a proponent of nuclear disarmament to being a projector of nuclear force. Strategic rationality makes it incumbent on Pakistan to seek to restore the nuclear balance for the future.
However, this should not be a major issue for us even in financial terms, as long as the lure of commissions does not distort or destroy our strategic interests. We already have conventional submarines including the Agosta-type which are not only capable of carrying nuclear warheads, but can be upgraded to being fitted with air-independent propulsion technology (AIP) specifically designed to allow conventional subs to remain submerged for longer periods. That is the main advantage of nuclear-powered submarines, along with the speed element – they do not need to surface like conventional subs that need to surface after short periods of being submerged and therefore become vulnerable. AIP technology is specifically designed for conventional subs and the Germans have been in the forefront of this technological development, although the Agostas can also be upgraded.
It is unfortunate that Pakistan’s purchase of subs has been delayed apparently over the commissions lure, because now the international community will make it harder for this country to acquire these subs. Have we learnt no lessons from what happened to Pakistan in 1974 after the Indian nuclear test? India tested and Pakistan was penalised! The Canadians withdrew from KANUPP despite IAEA safeguards and a legal agreement. There is nothing to suggest that things will be different this time round – given how Hillary Clinton practically blessed Indian militarisation with a new defence pact. Besides Pakistan’s pathetic record of asserting legal agreements with its allies makes us easy victims of foreign pressure and diktat – remember the replacement of F-16s with wheat and soya beans? Not only did we lose our money, but before the US finally retracted on the deal, we were made to pay parking charges for these F-16s also! But we always forget US abuse and present ourselves for more of the same whenever the occasion arises!
Coming back to the Indian nuclear powered submarine – it should be pointed out that we do not yet know how it will perform once its reactor goes critical. Will it actually have the speed and capability – given that it has been built with Soviet/Russian technology and the fate of many Soviet/Russian subs lies at the bottom of the seas – taking a heavy toll of human life and reflecting the limitations of Soviet weapon systems? A major disadvantage of nuclear-powered subs is that they are noisier because they have to keep the reactor powered on all the time so if conventional subs can acquire longer submergeable capability through AIP technology – although it will still not be the same as a nuclear-driven sub – the imbalance can be offset to some extent.
Sea-launched nuclear missiles are central to second strike capability which acts as a stabiliser in the context of nuclear strategy since it reduces the imperatives for first strike. In this context, although Pakistan has not officially made any declarations regarding the development of this capability, it is now fairly well-established that we are already on the way to ensuring this second strike capability. It is also now recognised that we have had more success with missile development than India – probably because we have kept our missile ranges and types limited and focused more on developing solid fuelled delivery systems (which, again, are more stable) and reducing circular error probabilities. India, on the other hand, chose to have a wide-ranging missile programme including seeking the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). While we have stabilised our cruise missile as well as moved towards the beginnings of sea-launched ballistic missiles, from all accounts, India has not been too successful in both these fields – especially with the Sagarika (which is to be its sea-launched missile) in surface tests. So if India is to gain any advantage from its nuclear-powered submarine, assuming it will perform as expected once its reactor goes critical, it will have to work more on its delivery systems.
For Pakistan while there is no need to go into panic mode, we will have to stop sacrificing good deals simply because of the greed over commissions. The fact that a French inquiry has hinted at commissions lying at the root of the death of the French engineers in Karachi should be a sobering moment for any leadership. But the brazenness with which our successive decision-makers have been proceeding, with scant regard for propriety and wastage of limited national resources, shows that no lessons have been learnt – nor is there any desire to learn from even recent history.
Worse still, our rulers are full of bombast but are unwilling to take proactive concrete actions. Take the case of Balochistan. Political leaders of all shades have been repeating ad nauseum the need for political healing and economic investment in that province but why have the first steps in that direction not been taken beyond publication of reports and statements? Why is the leadership so hesitant to declare a general amnesty for all Baloch political figures and the release of all political prisoners? When we can talk to militants (and we should if they are our own people prepared to accept the writ of the state) and be allied to the Americans who continue to kill our people through drone attacks, why are we so unwilling to begin the healing process with the Baloch people and their leaders? Why are we allowing our detractors to provide support for the dissidents instead of taking the punch out of their dissidence by granting them a one-time amnesty if they accept the writ of the state? How can we rise to external military challenges posed by countries like India and the US when we are unable to deal with our own people? Our weakness lies within ourselves reflecting a psychological confidence deficit which makes the rulers aggressive and non-accommodative with the nation and timorous before external players.
The Indians and Americans are exploiting this well which is why the Indian’s are making grandiose statements about a submarine that has yet to show how it performs!
The writer is a defence analyst. Email: callstr@hotmail.com
Note : Also watch this Times of India video clip on India's JUNK weapons system
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videoshow/4835093.cms
Coming back to the Indian nuclear powered submarine – it should be pointed out that we do not yet know how it will perform once its reactor goes critical. Will it actually have the speed and capability – given that it has been built with Soviet/Russian technology and the fate of many Soviet/Russian subs lies at the bottom of the seas – taking a heavy toll of human life and reflecting the limitations of Soviet weapon systems?
While Pakistan’s decision makers squabble over whether to go ahead and implement the 2008 decision of buying German submarines or alter course and seek more French subs instead, India has put its prototype nuclear powered submarine, INS Arihant, into the waters. Incidentally, those in Pakistan who have been ranting for years over the use of Islamic warrior names for our missiles seem absurdly mute in commenting on India’s aggressive usage of Hindu mythology warrior names not only for its missiles but now also for its nuclear-powered submarine. Of course, the reality is that the nuclear reactor of this submarine will not go critical till 2012, so at the moment Arihant is more of a symbolic reflection of where India is headed in terms of its nuclear arsenal. Nevertheless, the development has signalled the nuclearisation of the Indian Ocean by a littoral state – since nuclear weapons have been present in this Ocean through the military presence of the external nuclear powers, especially the US.
That is one major reason why the US, France and UK always opposed the UN General Assembly’s efforts to make the Indian Ocean a weapon-free “zone of peace” – as reflected in the first UN GA Resolution of 16 December 1971(2832:XXVI). Ironically, along with the Soviet Union, India was a major force behind this Non-Aligned Movement-supported UN resolution. But then this has been the hallmark of Indian security policy: seeking time through multilateral diplomatic moves while it builds its military capability. In contrast to the Indian position on the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace resolution, the US, France and the UK always voted against this idea and in 1989 they chose to withdraw from the 44 member UN committee on this issue that had been set up in 1972. The US in fact demanded that the committee be eliminated so as to reduce UN spending and we know how this whole issue simply died for lack of visible progress. Now that India has also moved towards nuclear militarisation of the Indian Ocean, it will be difficult to see any revival of the zone of peace proposal for this region in the future. With the launching of the Arihant, India has moved still further away from being a proponent of nuclear disarmament to being a projector of nuclear force. Strategic rationality makes it incumbent on Pakistan to seek to restore the nuclear balance for the future.
However, this should not be a major issue for us even in financial terms, as long as the lure of commissions does not distort or destroy our strategic interests. We already have conventional submarines including the Agosta-type which are not only capable of carrying nuclear warheads, but can be upgraded to being fitted with air-independent propulsion technology (AIP) specifically designed to allow conventional subs to remain submerged for longer periods. That is the main advantage of nuclear-powered submarines, along with the speed element – they do not need to surface like conventional subs that need to surface after short periods of being submerged and therefore become vulnerable. AIP technology is specifically designed for conventional subs and the Germans have been in the forefront of this technological development, although the Agostas can also be upgraded.
It is unfortunate that Pakistan’s purchase of subs has been delayed apparently over the commissions lure, because now the international community will make it harder for this country to acquire these subs. Have we learnt no lessons from what happened to Pakistan in 1974 after the Indian nuclear test? India tested and Pakistan was penalised! The Canadians withdrew from KANUPP despite IAEA safeguards and a legal agreement. There is nothing to suggest that things will be different this time round – given how Hillary Clinton practically blessed Indian militarisation with a new defence pact. Besides Pakistan’s pathetic record of asserting legal agreements with its allies makes us easy victims of foreign pressure and diktat – remember the replacement of F-16s with wheat and soya beans? Not only did we lose our money, but before the US finally retracted on the deal, we were made to pay parking charges for these F-16s also! But we always forget US abuse and present ourselves for more of the same whenever the occasion arises!
Coming back to the Indian nuclear powered submarine – it should be pointed out that we do not yet know how it will perform once its reactor goes critical. Will it actually have the speed and capability – given that it has been built with Soviet/Russian technology and the fate of many Soviet/Russian subs lies at the bottom of the seas – taking a heavy toll of human life and reflecting the limitations of Soviet weapon systems? A major disadvantage of nuclear-powered subs is that they are noisier because they have to keep the reactor powered on all the time so if conventional subs can acquire longer submergeable capability through AIP technology – although it will still not be the same as a nuclear-driven sub – the imbalance can be offset to some extent.
Sea-launched nuclear missiles are central to second strike capability which acts as a stabiliser in the context of nuclear strategy since it reduces the imperatives for first strike. In this context, although Pakistan has not officially made any declarations regarding the development of this capability, it is now fairly well-established that we are already on the way to ensuring this second strike capability. It is also now recognised that we have had more success with missile development than India – probably because we have kept our missile ranges and types limited and focused more on developing solid fuelled delivery systems (which, again, are more stable) and reducing circular error probabilities. India, on the other hand, chose to have a wide-ranging missile programme including seeking the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). While we have stabilised our cruise missile as well as moved towards the beginnings of sea-launched ballistic missiles, from all accounts, India has not been too successful in both these fields – especially with the Sagarika (which is to be its sea-launched missile) in surface tests. So if India is to gain any advantage from its nuclear-powered submarine, assuming it will perform as expected once its reactor goes critical, it will have to work more on its delivery systems.
For Pakistan while there is no need to go into panic mode, we will have to stop sacrificing good deals simply because of the greed over commissions. The fact that a French inquiry has hinted at commissions lying at the root of the death of the French engineers in Karachi should be a sobering moment for any leadership. But the brazenness with which our successive decision-makers have been proceeding, with scant regard for propriety and wastage of limited national resources, shows that no lessons have been learnt – nor is there any desire to learn from even recent history.
Worse still, our rulers are full of bombast but are unwilling to take proactive concrete actions. Take the case of Balochistan. Political leaders of all shades have been repeating ad nauseum the need for political healing and economic investment in that province but why have the first steps in that direction not been taken beyond publication of reports and statements? Why is the leadership so hesitant to declare a general amnesty for all Baloch political figures and the release of all political prisoners? When we can talk to militants (and we should if they are our own people prepared to accept the writ of the state) and be allied to the Americans who continue to kill our people through drone attacks, why are we so unwilling to begin the healing process with the Baloch people and their leaders? Why are we allowing our detractors to provide support for the dissidents instead of taking the punch out of their dissidence by granting them a one-time amnesty if they accept the writ of the state? How can we rise to external military challenges posed by countries like India and the US when we are unable to deal with our own people? Our weakness lies within ourselves reflecting a psychological confidence deficit which makes the rulers aggressive and non-accommodative with the nation and timorous before external players.
The Indians and Americans are exploiting this well which is why the Indian’s are making grandiose statements about a submarine that has yet to show how it performs!
The writer is a defence analyst. Email: callstr@hotmail.com
Note : Also watch this Times of India video clip on India's JUNK weapons system
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videoshow/4835093.cms
Monday, July 27, 2009
Indian Army Major-General Runs Terrorist Camps Inside Afghanistan
By Ahmed Quraishi Sunday, 26 July 2009.
KABUL, Afghanistan—As the United States military occupation of Afghanistan falters, regional powers move in for the kill. Afghanistan has many neighbors. India is not one of them. It does not share any borders with Afghanistan. But after CIA, India’s two intelligence services – the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – are among the most active in the occupied country.
The Indians have excellent contacts within Karzai’s security setup. Most of them are former communist leaders who escaped to India in the 1970s and ‘80s and returned to power along with the Northern Alliance in 2001, backed by both US and India.
The Indians have also sold the Americans, or at least some key people within the American intelligence and strategic communities, on the dubious Indian ‘expertise’ on Afghanistan. This is how India was assigned an expanded role inside Afghanistan. The role takes the form of development work on the surface. But in reality, the Indians are neck deep in Afghanistan, and now it turns out they are neck deep inside western Pakistan as well.
The Indians have a separate, extensive intelligence and espionage setup focused on Pakistan’s tribal Pashtun belt. This is where the Indians and Karzai’s people are running a joint venture of pumping saboteurs into Pakistan disguised as the so-called ‘Pakistani Taliban’, who are also known as the Fake Taliban to differentiate them from the Afghan Taliban who are fighting the foreign armies in Afghanistan and are not fighting Pakistan.
This report focuses on India’s espionage work in southern Afghanistan targeting Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
Apart from the Indian Embassy in Kabul, there are nine consulates strategically located in the US-occupied country.
India has two consulates in the south near Pakistan’s three key areas: the provinces of Balochistan and NWFP and the tribal belt. One Indian consulate is located in Kandahar. The other one is located close to the airport in Lashkar Gah, capital of the Helmand province. This Indian ‘consulate’ has a training facility where training is imparted to would-be terrorists. Here they are equipped and sent to Pakistan. Most of these terrorists are young men recruited from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Indian ‘diplomats’ from the two southern consulates have been sighted collecting large quantities of Pakistani rupees from the open market on several occasions.
Interestingly, Helmand is the same province where the United States and the United Kingdom have mobilized their military and intelligence resources to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban and push them toward Pakistan.
From Pakistan’s point of view, this US-NATO operation is bogus. After all, the Afghan Taliban are registering success in Afghan provinces that are nowhere near the Pakistani border, including northern Afghanistan. There is no evidence that the Afghan Taliban managed to do this because of help from Pakistani soil. And yet US-NATO forces forget Taliban everywhere else and decide to focus on Helmand which borders Pakistani Balochistan, a province that is being destabilized from the Afghan soil.
Knowing that this operation could be used by intelligence operatives [Indian, Afghan and possibly even American] to push undercover agents and saboteurs inside Pakistan, Pakistani authorities formally objected to Washington over the military action noting very clearly that pushing terrorists inside Pakistan is not a solution.
On top of the nine Indian consulates, six more ‘diplomatic’ outposts have been established by both RAW and a Karzai spy outfit called NDS.
The six new ‘consulates’ are part of a network headed by a retired major-general from the Indian army. His CV shows that he used to head RAW’s counterintelligence wing based in New Delhi.
His job description is simple.
In intelligence parlance, he is responsible for identifying strategic opportunities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and use them to India’s advantage. He is expected to cultivate, recruit, train, arm and finance espionage and sabotage inside Pakistan in a calculated manner resulting in supporting India’s wider political and strategic objectives in the region.
In simple everyday language, the Indian officer is supposed to open enough fronts for Pakistan from the west in order to distract Pakistan’s grip and attention over Kashmir, the Indian occupied region to the east.
The Indian major-general has led an operation where young men from Pakistan and Afghanistan have been recruited in the name of waging jihad against America. Once in, the young men are brainwashed. They are shown violent speeches by supposed religious clerics. They are introduced to ‘mujahedeen leaders’ who enjoy vast knowledge in Islamic and Quranic teachings. Most of these ‘mujahedeen leaders’ are either Indian or Karzai’s intelligence people.
The brainwashing sessions include virulent sermons against Pakistan and its role in betraying Islam. The indoctrination ends with the mission that Pakistan needs to be the first target in the jihad against America. Whoever sides with Pakistan in this battle is a supporter of America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
These young men with ‘messed up minds’ are then sent to Pakistan to carry out bombings, suicide attacks, targeted killings, and slaughter innocent people.
Most of them are introduced as Islamic militants or Taliban. But a large number of them are also sent in to pretend they are Pakistanis fighting for the separation of Balochistan from the motherland.
As soon as these terrorists finish blowing up pipelines or killing university professors in Balochistan’s provincial capital Quetta, Indian consulates in Afghanistan arrange for their Urdu writers to pen down neatly written statements in Urdu which are then dispatched to Pakistani news organizations. Some analysts who have had a chance to look at these statements are impressed by the high quality of the Urdu language used in these written press statements. [Non-Pakistani readers may not understand the significance of this point. A small minority in northeast India, a region that has been the seat of Muslim nobility and empire for most of the past ten centuries, continue to be well acquainted with Urdu, the language of the old Muslim nobility in the region. The terrorists spreading havoc in Pakistani Balochistan do not enjoy even a moderately acceptable command over this classical language. The only other people outside Pakistan who can show off a few experts in this language are Indians from the northwestern part of their country.]
Exploiting a barren, rough terrain, the Indians and Karzai’s security people have identified routes along three regions in southwest Pakistan – Dalbandin, Noshki and Chaman – as transportation routes for weapons and bombs smuggled into the province.
Pakistani security forces have consistently been confiscating US and Israeli manufactured weapons from terrorists in various parts of southwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
Intelligence agencies from eight different countries are suspected to be active in the wave of terror inside Pakistan. These spy outfits belong to the United States, India, Afghanistan, Iran, UAE, Israel, Britain and Russia.
Pakistani authorities have been slow in discovering the role of a 9th country in this mix: Oman.
Oman is situated right across the Arabian Sea, facing the coastal line of Balochistan. Thanks to cross migrations between Oman and Pakistan over the past two centuries, a substantial portion of the Omani population is of Pakistani Baloch descent. They have traditionally worked for the security service and the army of successive Omani kings, including the incumbent, Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed.
At least two countries, the US and Britain, have intelligence ‘listening and monitoring outposts’ in Oman. There have been reports that Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed had also granted Israel the right to use his territory for discreet information gathering operations targeting neighboring countries, especially Iran and the region surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. This area includes Pakistani Balochistan.
Apart from the Indians, Washington is known to be very interested in Balochistan. The Pakistani province offers the shortest land route to Afghanistan should Islamabad decide to cease support to NATO and US supply lines through the rest of Pakistan. The Americans are also suspicious that a hard-to-defeat Afghan Taliban are based in Balochistan.
The suspicion is that at some level Oman is helping US access Pakistani Balochistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani government.
The nine foreign intelligence agencies are in Afghanistan for various purposes. The American and the Omani roles have been explained. Karzai’s intelligence is simply ready to join any effort that harms Pakistan. The Indians want to punish Pakistan for supporting the struggle of the Kashmiri people against Indian occupation. India also wants to destabilize Balochistan enough so that China abandons the huge development projects inside the Pakistani province, an objective that the Americans would welcome without hesitation.
Iran is more concerned about the CIA-backed Jundullah terrorist group that is working on setting the Sunni Balochi population inside Iran against the Shiite majority. The Dubai emirate of the UAE has been told by the Indians that Pakistan’s Gwadar port in Balochistan is being developed as competition. There is also suspicion that some lobbies within the UAE are aligned with the American agenda on Iran, especially considering that Iran occupies three UAE islands. Pakistani Balochistan figures prominently in this agenda. I am referring to ‘lobbies inside the UAE’ because while Dubai is suspicious about Gwadar it is not interested in joining any anti-Iran effort. But Abu Dhabi, the other influential emirate in the UAE, is more susceptible to go along the Americans on Iran, including the idea of using Balochistan for this purpose.
The Brits are also closely aligned with the Americans. The case of the Israelis, however, is more interesting. Israel is the only country with the longest experience in dealing with Islamic groups. Israel has gone as far as establishing Islamic religious schools inside Israel that serve intelligence purposes, such as understanding how fighters are indoctrinated and also how to develop undercover agents who can go and join Islamic groups disguised as Muslim extremists.
Washington sought Israeli assistance in this regard after 9/11. The Indians were smarter. They approached Israel in the 1990s to counter Islamic groups backed by Pakistan. These groups were at the forefront of the Kashmiri people’s fight against the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Israeli has demonstrated it can help India in Kashmir in May-June 1999 when a defeated Indian army unit there was provided Israeli military assistance on the ground to repel advancing Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters. [The timely and effective Israeli assistance helped turn a tactical Pakistani military victory into defeat, providing India enough time to mobilize a diplomatic offensive to invite international intervention in Kashmir. This is according to a rare disclosure by Mark Sofer, Israel’s ambassador to India, in a Feb. 2008 interview with an Indian news magazine.]
There is a strong probability that Israel’s help is once again at play in India’s anti-Pakistan activities on the Afghan soil. The Israelis are also focused on Iran. This leaves out the Russians who are most probably fishing in troubled waters and are there to reclaim the influence they lost in the area with the end of the Soviet Union 18 years ago.
But it is the Indians who walk away with the prize. They have played their cards well and convinced likeminded lobbies in Washington to let them use the Afghan soil against Pakistan for a good seven years now. But as the situation deteriorates for the Americans inside Afghanistan, a desperate Obama administration is listening to Pakistani complaints for the first time and possibly taking some action to reign in their wayward Indian friends.
© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists
KABUL, Afghanistan—As the United States military occupation of Afghanistan falters, regional powers move in for the kill. Afghanistan has many neighbors. India is not one of them. It does not share any borders with Afghanistan. But after CIA, India’s two intelligence services – the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – are among the most active in the occupied country.
The Indians have excellent contacts within Karzai’s security setup. Most of them are former communist leaders who escaped to India in the 1970s and ‘80s and returned to power along with the Northern Alliance in 2001, backed by both US and India.
The Indians have also sold the Americans, or at least some key people within the American intelligence and strategic communities, on the dubious Indian ‘expertise’ on Afghanistan. This is how India was assigned an expanded role inside Afghanistan. The role takes the form of development work on the surface. But in reality, the Indians are neck deep in Afghanistan, and now it turns out they are neck deep inside western Pakistan as well.
The Indians have a separate, extensive intelligence and espionage setup focused on Pakistan’s tribal Pashtun belt. This is where the Indians and Karzai’s people are running a joint venture of pumping saboteurs into Pakistan disguised as the so-called ‘Pakistani Taliban’, who are also known as the Fake Taliban to differentiate them from the Afghan Taliban who are fighting the foreign armies in Afghanistan and are not fighting Pakistan.
This report focuses on India’s espionage work in southern Afghanistan targeting Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
Apart from the Indian Embassy in Kabul, there are nine consulates strategically located in the US-occupied country.
India has two consulates in the south near Pakistan’s three key areas: the provinces of Balochistan and NWFP and the tribal belt. One Indian consulate is located in Kandahar. The other one is located close to the airport in Lashkar Gah, capital of the Helmand province. This Indian ‘consulate’ has a training facility where training is imparted to would-be terrorists. Here they are equipped and sent to Pakistan. Most of these terrorists are young men recruited from both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Indian ‘diplomats’ from the two southern consulates have been sighted collecting large quantities of Pakistani rupees from the open market on several occasions.
Interestingly, Helmand is the same province where the United States and the United Kingdom have mobilized their military and intelligence resources to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban and push them toward Pakistan.
From Pakistan’s point of view, this US-NATO operation is bogus. After all, the Afghan Taliban are registering success in Afghan provinces that are nowhere near the Pakistani border, including northern Afghanistan. There is no evidence that the Afghan Taliban managed to do this because of help from Pakistani soil. And yet US-NATO forces forget Taliban everywhere else and decide to focus on Helmand which borders Pakistani Balochistan, a province that is being destabilized from the Afghan soil.
Knowing that this operation could be used by intelligence operatives [Indian, Afghan and possibly even American] to push undercover agents and saboteurs inside Pakistan, Pakistani authorities formally objected to Washington over the military action noting very clearly that pushing terrorists inside Pakistan is not a solution.
On top of the nine Indian consulates, six more ‘diplomatic’ outposts have been established by both RAW and a Karzai spy outfit called NDS.
The six new ‘consulates’ are part of a network headed by a retired major-general from the Indian army. His CV shows that he used to head RAW’s counterintelligence wing based in New Delhi.
His job description is simple.
In intelligence parlance, he is responsible for identifying strategic opportunities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and use them to India’s advantage. He is expected to cultivate, recruit, train, arm and finance espionage and sabotage inside Pakistan in a calculated manner resulting in supporting India’s wider political and strategic objectives in the region.
In simple everyday language, the Indian officer is supposed to open enough fronts for Pakistan from the west in order to distract Pakistan’s grip and attention over Kashmir, the Indian occupied region to the east.
The Indian major-general has led an operation where young men from Pakistan and Afghanistan have been recruited in the name of waging jihad against America. Once in, the young men are brainwashed. They are shown violent speeches by supposed religious clerics. They are introduced to ‘mujahedeen leaders’ who enjoy vast knowledge in Islamic and Quranic teachings. Most of these ‘mujahedeen leaders’ are either Indian or Karzai’s intelligence people.
The brainwashing sessions include virulent sermons against Pakistan and its role in betraying Islam. The indoctrination ends with the mission that Pakistan needs to be the first target in the jihad against America. Whoever sides with Pakistan in this battle is a supporter of America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
These young men with ‘messed up minds’ are then sent to Pakistan to carry out bombings, suicide attacks, targeted killings, and slaughter innocent people.
Most of them are introduced as Islamic militants or Taliban. But a large number of them are also sent in to pretend they are Pakistanis fighting for the separation of Balochistan from the motherland.
As soon as these terrorists finish blowing up pipelines or killing university professors in Balochistan’s provincial capital Quetta, Indian consulates in Afghanistan arrange for their Urdu writers to pen down neatly written statements in Urdu which are then dispatched to Pakistani news organizations. Some analysts who have had a chance to look at these statements are impressed by the high quality of the Urdu language used in these written press statements. [Non-Pakistani readers may not understand the significance of this point. A small minority in northeast India, a region that has been the seat of Muslim nobility and empire for most of the past ten centuries, continue to be well acquainted with Urdu, the language of the old Muslim nobility in the region. The terrorists spreading havoc in Pakistani Balochistan do not enjoy even a moderately acceptable command over this classical language. The only other people outside Pakistan who can show off a few experts in this language are Indians from the northwestern part of their country.]
Exploiting a barren, rough terrain, the Indians and Karzai’s security people have identified routes along three regions in southwest Pakistan – Dalbandin, Noshki and Chaman – as transportation routes for weapons and bombs smuggled into the province.
Pakistani security forces have consistently been confiscating US and Israeli manufactured weapons from terrorists in various parts of southwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
Intelligence agencies from eight different countries are suspected to be active in the wave of terror inside Pakistan. These spy outfits belong to the United States, India, Afghanistan, Iran, UAE, Israel, Britain and Russia.
Pakistani authorities have been slow in discovering the role of a 9th country in this mix: Oman.
Oman is situated right across the Arabian Sea, facing the coastal line of Balochistan. Thanks to cross migrations between Oman and Pakistan over the past two centuries, a substantial portion of the Omani population is of Pakistani Baloch descent. They have traditionally worked for the security service and the army of successive Omani kings, including the incumbent, Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed.
At least two countries, the US and Britain, have intelligence ‘listening and monitoring outposts’ in Oman. There have been reports that Sultan Qaboos bin Saeed had also granted Israel the right to use his territory for discreet information gathering operations targeting neighboring countries, especially Iran and the region surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. This area includes Pakistani Balochistan.
Apart from the Indians, Washington is known to be very interested in Balochistan. The Pakistani province offers the shortest land route to Afghanistan should Islamabad decide to cease support to NATO and US supply lines through the rest of Pakistan. The Americans are also suspicious that a hard-to-defeat Afghan Taliban are based in Balochistan.
The suspicion is that at some level Oman is helping US access Pakistani Balochistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani government.
The nine foreign intelligence agencies are in Afghanistan for various purposes. The American and the Omani roles have been explained. Karzai’s intelligence is simply ready to join any effort that harms Pakistan. The Indians want to punish Pakistan for supporting the struggle of the Kashmiri people against Indian occupation. India also wants to destabilize Balochistan enough so that China abandons the huge development projects inside the Pakistani province, an objective that the Americans would welcome without hesitation.
Iran is more concerned about the CIA-backed Jundullah terrorist group that is working on setting the Sunni Balochi population inside Iran against the Shiite majority. The Dubai emirate of the UAE has been told by the Indians that Pakistan’s Gwadar port in Balochistan is being developed as competition. There is also suspicion that some lobbies within the UAE are aligned with the American agenda on Iran, especially considering that Iran occupies three UAE islands. Pakistani Balochistan figures prominently in this agenda. I am referring to ‘lobbies inside the UAE’ because while Dubai is suspicious about Gwadar it is not interested in joining any anti-Iran effort. But Abu Dhabi, the other influential emirate in the UAE, is more susceptible to go along the Americans on Iran, including the idea of using Balochistan for this purpose.
The Brits are also closely aligned with the Americans. The case of the Israelis, however, is more interesting. Israel is the only country with the longest experience in dealing with Islamic groups. Israel has gone as far as establishing Islamic religious schools inside Israel that serve intelligence purposes, such as understanding how fighters are indoctrinated and also how to develop undercover agents who can go and join Islamic groups disguised as Muslim extremists.
Washington sought Israeli assistance in this regard after 9/11. The Indians were smarter. They approached Israel in the 1990s to counter Islamic groups backed by Pakistan. These groups were at the forefront of the Kashmiri people’s fight against the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Israeli has demonstrated it can help India in Kashmir in May-June 1999 when a defeated Indian army unit there was provided Israeli military assistance on the ground to repel advancing Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters. [The timely and effective Israeli assistance helped turn a tactical Pakistani military victory into defeat, providing India enough time to mobilize a diplomatic offensive to invite international intervention in Kashmir. This is according to a rare disclosure by Mark Sofer, Israel’s ambassador to India, in a Feb. 2008 interview with an Indian news magazine.]
There is a strong probability that Israel’s help is once again at play in India’s anti-Pakistan activities on the Afghan soil. The Israelis are also focused on Iran. This leaves out the Russians who are most probably fishing in troubled waters and are there to reclaim the influence they lost in the area with the end of the Soviet Union 18 years ago.
But it is the Indians who walk away with the prize. They have played their cards well and convinced likeminded lobbies in Washington to let them use the Afghan soil against Pakistan for a good seven years now. But as the situation deteriorates for the Americans inside Afghanistan, a desperate Obama administration is listening to Pakistani complaints for the first time and possibly taking some action to reign in their wayward Indian friends.
© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
URGENT: India Pays Baitullah Mehsud To Attack Pakistan’s Nuclear Sites, Plan Deployed
Author : Ahmed Quraishi
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—India has paid terrorist leader Baitullah Mehsud and his well armed and trained terrorist army around U.S. $ 25 million to mount a spectacular attack on a major Pakistani nuclear site. A special force of around 500 recruits has been assembled and trained to mount the operation that is supposed to shock the world. The purpose is to create an event that will create a global media scare and convince the world of the need for military intervention in Pakistan. Another objective is to neutralize voices of reason within the U.S. government that believe Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure.
The bulk of the terrorists in the special 500-strong force put together by Mehsud have been trained inside Afghanistan by trainers suspected of having links to the Indian intelligence. Although most of the recruits are expected to be Pakistanis from Mehsud’s tribe, an unknown number of Afghan and Indian elements with special operations training have been inserted in the Mehsud group in order to ensure the success of this high profile operation.
It is not clear when this plan was conceived and whether the 500-strong force divided into crack teams to carry out the attack(s) is ready. But Pakistani officials are taking no chances. The nation’s security setup is on high alert. As for the nuclear installations, the managers of Pakistan’s strategic arsenal maintain unrestricted universal operability to fulfill the arsenal’s role as a deterrent. For them, no day is a normal day.
But this latest disclosure of a plan to attack the nuclear sites has raised alarm bells, to say the least.
A rough sketch of the plan and how the attack(s) are expected to unfold goes as follows:
1. A team or several teams of terrorists attack one or more Pakistani nuclear sites and attempt to enter the facilities.
2. Within each crack team only a small core is supposed to be equipped with modern communications equipment, special operations gear, and modern weapons; highly trained to exact maximum damage.
3. Where possible, the terrorists plan to break in and hold the fort, a la Mumbai attacks, in order to generate maximum media coverage and embarrassment for the Pakistanis.
4. The international media, and especially the main American and British news outlets, turn this into a global crisis, comparable to the Bay of Pigs in 1962.
5. The event generates enough pressure to justify an ‘international demand’ to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and force Pakistanis to accept ‘international’ supervision.
6. Depending on the aftermath, and after a few days or weeks, a small nuclear weapon is used somewhere, maybe against the US military or NATO bases in Afghanistan since it would be difficult to do it anywhere else, in order to confirm that the Afghan Taliban or generally the ‘Islamic extremists’ managed to steal a weapon from the earlier attack(s) on Pakistani sites.
This last point is critical. According to the available information, the mysterious disappearance of a senior Indian nuclear scientist and his subsequent death in May is linked to at least some parts of this plan. The scientist, Mr. Lokanathan Mahalingam, 47, had access to Indian’s sensitive nuclear information and worked at the prestigious Kaiga Atomic Power Station in the southern Indian state Karnataka, close to Project Seabird, a major Indian military base. His disappearance received limited coverage in the Indian media and there was almost a blackout on the circumstances surrounding how his dead body was found in a lake. The media in the U.S. and Britain also ignored the story. It is believed that Mr. Mahalingam was either involved in or had some knowledge about the planning for securing a small nuclear weapon that would leave no fingerprints, to put it this way, in order to execute the idea in paragraph 6 above.
The Indians have been working on this scenario for some time now.
On 16 May, the Israeli security website Debka under a story titled, ‘Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost,’ reported the following:
“India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are "already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
The Times of India, reporting the story, complained about “Washington's misplaced confidence in, and [careless] approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets,” and grumbled that “Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.”
The Indian interest is obvious. But so is the Israeli interest. It is quite revealing that the story was broken by a news outlet known in international circles for its links to the Israeli government.
Official circles in Washington, including the White House, the State Department, Pentagon and CIA are cognizant of a history of cooperation between India and Israel in security issues. India’s security establishment is largely focused on Pakistan and on controlling Kashmir where the population is fighting the Indian military. At least in one incident, during the limited Pakistan-India war in 1999, the Israelis directly intervened to help the battered Indian army overturn a tactical victory by Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters.
As recently as two days ago, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and an Obama adviser known for his strong anti-Pakistan views, wrote an article published at the Brookings Institute website that demonstrates how far the anti-Pakistan lobby is willing to go to prove that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not safe.
In Mr. Riedel’s case, he went as far as lying.
He used a recent terrorist attack on a bus carrying employees of KRL, a Pakistani nuclear facility, to say that Pakistani nuclear sites are already under attack. What he conveniently ignored is that the said bus was in fact traveling through a densely populated part of the city and not anywhere near any nuclear site. The bus most probably became a target of opportunity because it carried a plate indicating it was a government vehicle.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement quoted by an Israeli source which was widely reported and never denied by the Indians, the Israelis or the Americans, was not the first to promote the alarmist and the unreal scenario of Pakistani nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands. Mr. Singh came on record during an interview with CNN in 2005 to say this:
“I am worried about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets should President Pervez Musharraf be replaced, since there is always the danger of Islamic militants seizing power and taking control of the country’s nuclear assets.”
There is little question that influential parts of the Indian government are involved in exporting terrorism into Pakistan from bases inside Afghanistan. Attempts to incite ethnic unrest in Pakistan’s southwest were traced by investigators to Indians in Afghanistan. Pakistani investigators reached the same conclusion with some of the evidence found in northwest Pakistan where terrorists are killing Pakistanis. And now there are reports of an impending attack on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities using Baitullah Mehsud.
The Indians and those who are supporting them should be under no illusions. Any attack on Pakistani nuclear facilities in the coming days will be construed as a declaration of war by India against Pakistan. Knowing of Mehsud’s previous contacts with Indians and with Karzai’s people, any miscalculated attempt by his terrorists will not be seen as anything less than a direct Indian attack. In this case, Pakistan will consider itself in a state of war, and retaliate accordingly. There should not be any confusion on this.
The bulk of the terrorists in the special 500-strong force put together by Mehsud have been trained inside Afghanistan by trainers suspected of having links to the Indian intelligence. Although most of the recruits are expected to be Pakistanis from Mehsud’s tribe, an unknown number of Afghan and Indian elements with special operations training have been inserted in the Mehsud group in order to ensure the success of this high profile operation.
It is not clear when this plan was conceived and whether the 500-strong force divided into crack teams to carry out the attack(s) is ready. But Pakistani officials are taking no chances. The nation’s security setup is on high alert. As for the nuclear installations, the managers of Pakistan’s strategic arsenal maintain unrestricted universal operability to fulfill the arsenal’s role as a deterrent. For them, no day is a normal day.
But this latest disclosure of a plan to attack the nuclear sites has raised alarm bells, to say the least.
A rough sketch of the plan and how the attack(s) are expected to unfold goes as follows:
1. A team or several teams of terrorists attack one or more Pakistani nuclear sites and attempt to enter the facilities.
2. Within each crack team only a small core is supposed to be equipped with modern communications equipment, special operations gear, and modern weapons; highly trained to exact maximum damage.
3. Where possible, the terrorists plan to break in and hold the fort, a la Mumbai attacks, in order to generate maximum media coverage and embarrassment for the Pakistanis.
4. The international media, and especially the main American and British news outlets, turn this into a global crisis, comparable to the Bay of Pigs in 1962.
5. The event generates enough pressure to justify an ‘international demand’ to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and force Pakistanis to accept ‘international’ supervision.
6. Depending on the aftermath, and after a few days or weeks, a small nuclear weapon is used somewhere, maybe against the US military or NATO bases in Afghanistan since it would be difficult to do it anywhere else, in order to confirm that the Afghan Taliban or generally the ‘Islamic extremists’ managed to steal a weapon from the earlier attack(s) on Pakistani sites.
This last point is critical. According to the available information, the mysterious disappearance of a senior Indian nuclear scientist and his subsequent death in May is linked to at least some parts of this plan. The scientist, Mr. Lokanathan Mahalingam, 47, had access to Indian’s sensitive nuclear information and worked at the prestigious Kaiga Atomic Power Station in the southern Indian state Karnataka, close to Project Seabird, a major Indian military base. His disappearance received limited coverage in the Indian media and there was almost a blackout on the circumstances surrounding how his dead body was found in a lake. The media in the U.S. and Britain also ignored the story. It is believed that Mr. Mahalingam was either involved in or had some knowledge about the planning for securing a small nuclear weapon that would leave no fingerprints, to put it this way, in order to execute the idea in paragraph 6 above.
The Indians have been working on this scenario for some time now.
On 16 May, the Israeli security website Debka under a story titled, ‘Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost,’ reported the following:
“India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are "already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
The Times of India, reporting the story, complained about “Washington's misplaced confidence in, and [careless] approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets,” and grumbled that “Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.”
The Indian interest is obvious. But so is the Israeli interest. It is quite revealing that the story was broken by a news outlet known in international circles for its links to the Israeli government.
Official circles in Washington, including the White House, the State Department, Pentagon and CIA are cognizant of a history of cooperation between India and Israel in security issues. India’s security establishment is largely focused on Pakistan and on controlling Kashmir where the population is fighting the Indian military. At least in one incident, during the limited Pakistan-India war in 1999, the Israelis directly intervened to help the battered Indian army overturn a tactical victory by Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters.
As recently as two days ago, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and an Obama adviser known for his strong anti-Pakistan views, wrote an article published at the Brookings Institute website that demonstrates how far the anti-Pakistan lobby is willing to go to prove that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not safe.
In Mr. Riedel’s case, he went as far as lying.
He used a recent terrorist attack on a bus carrying employees of KRL, a Pakistani nuclear facility, to say that Pakistani nuclear sites are already under attack. What he conveniently ignored is that the said bus was in fact traveling through a densely populated part of the city and not anywhere near any nuclear site. The bus most probably became a target of opportunity because it carried a plate indicating it was a government vehicle.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement quoted by an Israeli source which was widely reported and never denied by the Indians, the Israelis or the Americans, was not the first to promote the alarmist and the unreal scenario of Pakistani nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands. Mr. Singh came on record during an interview with CNN in 2005 to say this:
“I am worried about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets should President Pervez Musharraf be replaced, since there is always the danger of Islamic militants seizing power and taking control of the country’s nuclear assets.”
There is little question that influential parts of the Indian government are involved in exporting terrorism into Pakistan from bases inside Afghanistan. Attempts to incite ethnic unrest in Pakistan’s southwest were traced by investigators to Indians in Afghanistan. Pakistani investigators reached the same conclusion with some of the evidence found in northwest Pakistan where terrorists are killing Pakistanis. And now there are reports of an impending attack on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities using Baitullah Mehsud.
The Indians and those who are supporting them should be under no illusions. Any attack on Pakistani nuclear facilities in the coming days will be construed as a declaration of war by India against Pakistan. Knowing of Mehsud’s previous contacts with Indians and with Karzai’s people, any miscalculated attempt by his terrorists will not be seen as anything less than a direct Indian attack. In this case, Pakistan will consider itself in a state of war, and retaliate accordingly. There should not be any confusion on this.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
When Spies Don’t Play Well With Their Allies
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: July 20, 2008.
The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — As they complete their training at “The Farm,” the Central Intelligence Agency’s base in the Virginia tidewater, young agency recruits are taught a lesson they are expected never to forget during assignments overseas: there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.
Anjum Naveed/Associated Press
MASTER SPY Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, (with Pervez Musharraf, left) used to run the I.S.I.
Foreign spy services, even those of America’s closest allies, will try to manipulate you. So you had better learn how to manipulate them back.
But most C.I.A. veterans agree that no relationship between the spy agency and a foreign intelligence service is quite as byzantine, or as maddening, as that between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.
It is like a bad marriage in which both spouses have long stopped trusting each other, but would never think of breaking up because they have become so mutually dependent.
Without the I.S.I.’s help, American spies in Pakistan would be incapable of carrying out their primary mission in the country: hunting Islamic militants, including top members of Al Qaeda. Without the millions of covert American dollars sent annually to Pakistan, the I.S.I. would have trouble competing with the spy service of its archrival, India.
But the relationship is complicated by a web of competing interests. First off, the top American goal in the region is to shore up Afghanistan’s government and security services to better fight the I.S.I.’s traditional proxies, the Taliban, there.
Inside Pakistan, America’s primary interest is to dismantle a Taliban and Qaeda safe haven in the mountainous tribal lands. Throughout the 1990s, Pakistan, and especially the I.S.I., used the Taliban and militants from those areas to exert power in Afghanistan and block India from gaining influence there. The I.S.I. has also supported other militant groups that launched operations against Indian troops in Kashmir, something that complicates Washington’s efforts to stabilize the region.
Of course, there are few examples in history of spy services really trusting one another. After all, people who earn their salaries by lying and assuming false identities probably don’t make the most reliable business partners. Moreover, spies know that the best way to steal secrets is to penetrate the ranks of another spy service.
But circumstances have for years forced successful, if ephemeral, partnerships among spies. The Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s predecessor, worked with the K.G.B.’s predecessors to hunt Nazis during World War II, even as the United States and the Soviet Union were quickly becoming adversaries.
These days, the relationship between Moscow and Washington is turning frosty again, over a number of issues. But, quietly, American and Russian spies continue to collaborate to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, and to secure nuclear arsenals.
The relationship between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. was far less complicated when the United States and Pakistan were intently focused on one common goal: kicking the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. For years in the 1980s, the C.I.A. used the I.S.I. as the conduit to funnel arms and money to Afghan rebels fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
But even in those good old days, the two spy services were far from trusting of each other — in particular over Pakistan’s quest for nuclear weapons. In his book “Ghost Wars,” the journalist Steve Coll recounts how the I.S.I. chief in the early 1980s, Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, banned all social contact between his I.S.I. officers and C.I.A. operatives in Pakistan. He was also convinced that the C.I.A. had set up an elaborate bugging network, so he had his officers speak in code on the telephone.
When the general and his aides were invited by the C.I.A. to visit agency training sites in the United States, the Pakistanis were forced to wear blindfolds on the flights into the facilities.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, C.I.A. officers have arrived in Islamabad knowing they will probably depend on the I.S.I. at least as much as they have depended on any liaison spy service in the past. Unlike spying in the capitals of Europe, where agency operatives can blend in to develop a network of informants, only a tiny fraction of C.I.A. officers can walk the streets of Peshawar unnoticed.
And an even smaller fraction could move freely through the tribal areas to scoop up useful information about militant networks there.
Even the powerful I.S.I., which is dominated by Punjabis, Pakistan’s largest ethnic group, has difficulties collecting information in the tribal lands, the home of fiercely independent Pashtun tribes. For this reason, the I.S.I. has long been forced to rely on Pashtun tribal leaders — and in some cases Pashtun militants — as key informants.
Given the natural disadvantages, C.I.A. officers try to get any edge they can through technology, the one advantage they have over the local spies. [Editor’s note: The writer makes the classical error in judgment, acquired from Indian analysts, that ISI is ‘dominated’ by officers from Punjab. That is not necessarily true or accurate. At various times, officers from different provinces serve the agency. Officers from the NWFP make a substantial portion of both the ISI and the Pakistani military. American writers on Pakistan should stop taking their cue from Indians.]
For example, the Pakistani government has long restricted where the C.I.A. can fly Predator surveillance drones inside Pakistan, limiting flight paths to approved “boxes” on a grid map.
The C.I.A.’s answer to that restriction? It deliberately flies Predators beyond the approved areas, just to test Pakistani radars. According to one former agency officer, the Pakistanis usually notice.
As American and allied casualty rates in Afghanistan have grown in the last two years, the I.S.I. has become a subject of fierce debate within the C.I.A. Many in the spy agency — particularly those stationed in Afghanistan — accuse their agency colleagues at the Islamabad station of actually being too cozy with their I.S.I. counterparts.
There have been bitter fights between the C.I.A. station chiefs in Kabul and Islamabad, particularly about the significance of the militant threat in the tribal areas. At times, the view from Kabul has been not only that the I.S.I. is actively aiding the militants, but that C.I.A. officers in Pakistan refuse to confront the I.S.I. over the issue.
Veterans of the C.I.A. station in Islamabad point to the capture of a number of senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan in recent years as proof that the Pakistani intelligence service has often shown a serious commitment to roll up terror networks. It was the I.S.I., they say, that did much of the legwork leading to the capture of operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
And, they point out, the I.S.I. has just as much reason to distrust the Americans as the C.I.A. has to distrust the I.S.I. The C.I.A. largely pulled up stakes in the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, rather than staying to resist the chaos and bloody civil war that led ultimately to the Taliban ascendance in the 1990s.
After the withdrawal, the American tools to understand the complexity of relationships in Central and South Asia became rusty. The I.S.I. operates in a neighborhood of constantly shifting alliances, where double dealing is an accepted rule of the game, and the phenomenon is one that many in Washington still have problems accepting.
Until late last year, when he was elevated to the command of the entire army, the Pakistani spymaster who had been running the I.S.I. was Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. American officials describe this smart and urbane general as at once engaging and inscrutable, an avid golfer with occasionally odd affectations. During meetings, he will often spend several minutes carefully hand-rolling a cigarette. Then, after taking one puff, he stubs it out.
The grumbling at the C.I.A. about dealing with Pakistan’s I.S.I. comes with a certain grudging reverence for the spy service’s Machiavellian qualities. Some former spies even talk about the Pakistani agency with a mix of awe and professional jealousy.
One senior C.I.A. official, recently retired, said that of all the foreign spymasters the C.I.A. had dealt with, General Kayani was the most formidable and may have earned the most respect at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. The soft-spoken general, he said, is a master manipulator.
“We admire those traits,” he said.
Mark Mazzetti is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered national security from the newspaper's Washington bureau since April 2006. Mr. Mazzetti was the recipient of the 2006 Gerald R Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. In 2008, Mr. Mazzetti won the Livingston Award in the category of national reporting for his series "C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations," confirming videotape evidence of severe interrogation techniques against al Qaeda operatives had been destroyed within the C.I.A.
Published: July 20, 2008.
The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — As they complete their training at “The Farm,” the Central Intelligence Agency’s base in the Virginia tidewater, young agency recruits are taught a lesson they are expected never to forget during assignments overseas: there is no such thing as a friendly intelligence service.
Anjum Naveed/Associated Press
MASTER SPY Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, (with Pervez Musharraf, left) used to run the I.S.I.
Foreign spy services, even those of America’s closest allies, will try to manipulate you. So you had better learn how to manipulate them back.
But most C.I.A. veterans agree that no relationship between the spy agency and a foreign intelligence service is quite as byzantine, or as maddening, as that between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.
It is like a bad marriage in which both spouses have long stopped trusting each other, but would never think of breaking up because they have become so mutually dependent.
Without the I.S.I.’s help, American spies in Pakistan would be incapable of carrying out their primary mission in the country: hunting Islamic militants, including top members of Al Qaeda. Without the millions of covert American dollars sent annually to Pakistan, the I.S.I. would have trouble competing with the spy service of its archrival, India.
But the relationship is complicated by a web of competing interests. First off, the top American goal in the region is to shore up Afghanistan’s government and security services to better fight the I.S.I.’s traditional proxies, the Taliban, there.
Inside Pakistan, America’s primary interest is to dismantle a Taliban and Qaeda safe haven in the mountainous tribal lands. Throughout the 1990s, Pakistan, and especially the I.S.I., used the Taliban and militants from those areas to exert power in Afghanistan and block India from gaining influence there. The I.S.I. has also supported other militant groups that launched operations against Indian troops in Kashmir, something that complicates Washington’s efforts to stabilize the region.
Of course, there are few examples in history of spy services really trusting one another. After all, people who earn their salaries by lying and assuming false identities probably don’t make the most reliable business partners. Moreover, spies know that the best way to steal secrets is to penetrate the ranks of another spy service.
But circumstances have for years forced successful, if ephemeral, partnerships among spies. The Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s predecessor, worked with the K.G.B.’s predecessors to hunt Nazis during World War II, even as the United States and the Soviet Union were quickly becoming adversaries.
These days, the relationship between Moscow and Washington is turning frosty again, over a number of issues. But, quietly, American and Russian spies continue to collaborate to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, and to secure nuclear arsenals.
The relationship between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. was far less complicated when the United States and Pakistan were intently focused on one common goal: kicking the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. For years in the 1980s, the C.I.A. used the I.S.I. as the conduit to funnel arms and money to Afghan rebels fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
But even in those good old days, the two spy services were far from trusting of each other — in particular over Pakistan’s quest for nuclear weapons. In his book “Ghost Wars,” the journalist Steve Coll recounts how the I.S.I. chief in the early 1980s, Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, banned all social contact between his I.S.I. officers and C.I.A. operatives in Pakistan. He was also convinced that the C.I.A. had set up an elaborate bugging network, so he had his officers speak in code on the telephone.
When the general and his aides were invited by the C.I.A. to visit agency training sites in the United States, the Pakistanis were forced to wear blindfolds on the flights into the facilities.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, C.I.A. officers have arrived in Islamabad knowing they will probably depend on the I.S.I. at least as much as they have depended on any liaison spy service in the past. Unlike spying in the capitals of Europe, where agency operatives can blend in to develop a network of informants, only a tiny fraction of C.I.A. officers can walk the streets of Peshawar unnoticed.
And an even smaller fraction could move freely through the tribal areas to scoop up useful information about militant networks there.
Even the powerful I.S.I., which is dominated by Punjabis, Pakistan’s largest ethnic group, has difficulties collecting information in the tribal lands, the home of fiercely independent Pashtun tribes. For this reason, the I.S.I. has long been forced to rely on Pashtun tribal leaders — and in some cases Pashtun militants — as key informants.
Given the natural disadvantages, C.I.A. officers try to get any edge they can through technology, the one advantage they have over the local spies. [Editor’s note: The writer makes the classical error in judgment, acquired from Indian analysts, that ISI is ‘dominated’ by officers from Punjab. That is not necessarily true or accurate. At various times, officers from different provinces serve the agency. Officers from the NWFP make a substantial portion of both the ISI and the Pakistani military. American writers on Pakistan should stop taking their cue from Indians.]
For example, the Pakistani government has long restricted where the C.I.A. can fly Predator surveillance drones inside Pakistan, limiting flight paths to approved “boxes” on a grid map.
The C.I.A.’s answer to that restriction? It deliberately flies Predators beyond the approved areas, just to test Pakistani radars. According to one former agency officer, the Pakistanis usually notice.
As American and allied casualty rates in Afghanistan have grown in the last two years, the I.S.I. has become a subject of fierce debate within the C.I.A. Many in the spy agency — particularly those stationed in Afghanistan — accuse their agency colleagues at the Islamabad station of actually being too cozy with their I.S.I. counterparts.
There have been bitter fights between the C.I.A. station chiefs in Kabul and Islamabad, particularly about the significance of the militant threat in the tribal areas. At times, the view from Kabul has been not only that the I.S.I. is actively aiding the militants, but that C.I.A. officers in Pakistan refuse to confront the I.S.I. over the issue.
Veterans of the C.I.A. station in Islamabad point to the capture of a number of senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan in recent years as proof that the Pakistani intelligence service has often shown a serious commitment to roll up terror networks. It was the I.S.I., they say, that did much of the legwork leading to the capture of operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
And, they point out, the I.S.I. has just as much reason to distrust the Americans as the C.I.A. has to distrust the I.S.I. The C.I.A. largely pulled up stakes in the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, rather than staying to resist the chaos and bloody civil war that led ultimately to the Taliban ascendance in the 1990s.
After the withdrawal, the American tools to understand the complexity of relationships in Central and South Asia became rusty. The I.S.I. operates in a neighborhood of constantly shifting alliances, where double dealing is an accepted rule of the game, and the phenomenon is one that many in Washington still have problems accepting.
Until late last year, when he was elevated to the command of the entire army, the Pakistani spymaster who had been running the I.S.I. was Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. American officials describe this smart and urbane general as at once engaging and inscrutable, an avid golfer with occasionally odd affectations. During meetings, he will often spend several minutes carefully hand-rolling a cigarette. Then, after taking one puff, he stubs it out.
The grumbling at the C.I.A. about dealing with Pakistan’s I.S.I. comes with a certain grudging reverence for the spy service’s Machiavellian qualities. Some former spies even talk about the Pakistani agency with a mix of awe and professional jealousy.
One senior C.I.A. official, recently retired, said that of all the foreign spymasters the C.I.A. had dealt with, General Kayani was the most formidable and may have earned the most respect at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. The soft-spoken general, he said, is a master manipulator.
“We admire those traits,” he said.
Mark Mazzetti is a correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered national security from the newspaper's Washington bureau since April 2006. Mr. Mazzetti was the recipient of the 2006 Gerald R Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. In 2008, Mr. Mazzetti won the Livingston Award in the category of national reporting for his series "C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations," confirming videotape evidence of severe interrogation techniques against al Qaeda operatives had been destroyed within the C.I.A.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Time Has Come For Pakistan To Decide
By Peter Chamberlin
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The trusted watch-keepers of the world have turned their hearts to midnight plunder, while they carried-out their duty standing guard over mankind, who blissfully, unaware, continued to sleep. Morning rapidly approaches and the householders are sure to demand an accounting.
The exploding world economy and the expanding war are but symptoms of the great mental sickness that afflicts society, waves of warning of the tsunamis that lie directly ahead. The dominant
ideas and ideology that drive our world are all collapsing around us, falling from the weight of their own corruption and immoral baggage.
In the ongoing warfare of ideas, the selfish immorality of the old order is proving to be its downfall, as it meets the impenetrable resistance of the higher ideals of selflessness and human compassion. When the heart of the people is exposed to the emotionally crippling images of the children of war, then and thereafter, their only concern becomes the ending of the scourge of war.
Human nature is naturally compassionate, no matter how much the person has changed from the innocence of their youth. Even evil men must feel the heart’s emotional tugging at their consciences, no matter how deeply they have buried it, at the sight of such a suffering little one. Knowing that you and your government did this to these children and thousands more just like them, just like your own children that you so dearly love. We are the authors of what you see.
For God so loved the world that he sent us all sons and daughters, to melt our cold hearts and to expose our buried consciences. Human suffering is probably the most powerful motivation for good on this earth. It moves men to take-up arms to avenge it. It motivates others to offer their own lives that others might suffer less.
Humankind has the means to save itself from itself, just as surely as it has the means to cause its own extinction, all that separates the two is the gulf of choice and human freewill. Those of us who believe in a higher power, The One who created all things both great and small, know for certain that mankind will one day rise to the challenge before him. We know that the promise of eventual world peace is a solid truth, just waiting for enough people to understand and choose to reach out with us. Peace is truly just a handshake away, all that is lacking is the will to effect change and the desire to leave this world a better place.
The only question is how long before we as a people begin to care about our fellow man? This is the one factor that determines how much the suffering will intensify before we arrive at our predetermined solution. Efforts spent shoring-up the old collapsing political/economic structure only add to the suffering by adding to the length of the suffering and wasting limited resources in futile attempts to repair the rotten, immoral order that compelled mankind’s sprint to self-destruction.
Military adventures, intended to deflect the coming collapse merely increase our national guilt for having failed in our voluntary task of standing watch at the ramparts of freedom, guarding the rights of God’s creation with one arm, while we killed and indiscriminately erased both people and human rights with the other strong arm. Our military became our means of plundering our brothers’ resources and rights, because we were trusted it to defend our friends against foreign aggressors.
We reach-out our hand to both friend and foe, expecting commerce, while preparing to wage covert war upon them. We buy our friends in the world, the rest we simply intimidate or secretly undermine. From behind the shield of nearly omnipotent military power we have bribed and browbeat the world into submission to our ideas, our ideology, our economic schemes. Our cutthroat system of buying, selling and extorting our friends based solely on profit instead of need, therefore it is designed to weed-out everyone (regardless of their needs) who don’t have the cash to meet they need. The “haves and have-nots” exclusionary economic system is about to be crushed under the impending weight of the hungry misery it spreads far and wide.
The immorality of the current system will bring forth a new moral economic system from the violence of the old one dying. Each war or epidemic of violence that wracks the nations is a cry for help, as a segment of society explodes as a result of the local contradictions.
The war on Pakistan is a case in point. Here we have compelled our most faithful ally to engage in full-scale civil war as the means to salvage our failing economic order, by way of seizing the Caspian oil and gas reserves. We have forced Pakistan onto a path towards its own destruction as a feeble-minded calculated gamble to avert our own deserved dissolution. It seems only logical that a nation which feeds its own insatiable appetite for more of everything by depriving the poorest of the poor nations of the little that they have to call their own, would seek to avert its own profit loss by spreading death and suffering amongst the very people who have time and again proven to be among its best friends.
History has proven that some of America’s most trusted friends and allies have been the recipients of her most insidious and deadly intrigues. Pakistani leaders are delusional if they think that their friendship with the United States is stronger than that of Italy, or Germany.
The CIA turned Pakistan into the “epicenter of terrorism” for a reason. That reason went way beyond the mission against the Soviets, or else the training camps would have been shut-down and some attempt would have been made to clean-up the mess they had made when the Russians left Afghanistan. The CIA kept the camps and the madrassas running, turning-out thousands of good jihadis. By relying on the factor of “deniability,” they put the training camps in Pakistani hands. This should have been understood by Pakistan’s leaders for what it was, a euphemistic way to express the reality that the Army and the ISI were always intended to be America’s scapegoat. That time has come.
America has turned the tables on Pakistan. Just as Pakistan has used their proxy army, the local Taliban to stage running battles (some were for real), in order to fool the United States about Pakistani intentions in the war on terror, the new administration is using their own creation, the “Pakistani Taliban” (TTP), to call the Army’s bluff about its latest war in its tribal region. The generals can no longer get away with merely chasing the local Taliban from one agency into another, or anything less than waging total war in all of FATA and the NWFP. Pakistan’s “double-game” is over, while America’s double-games have barely begun.
Gen. Kayani has been trying to follow in Musharraf’s footsteps, running a limited pretend all-out war production, even following the same order of the previous war on Waziristan, tribal jirgas, lashkars, economic siege, etc. The General’s neatly dressed, never dirty, determined-looking soldiers faithfully posed for countless publicity shots, putting on a great show for the international circus media. Army spokesmen claim to have killed 1,500 terrorists in Malakand and elsewhere, always taking place beyond the range of the camera’s lens. There are no “embedded reporters” in Pakistan. The only news coming out of the region is approved after passing through several layers of filtering by the controlling governments there, especially by the one all-controlling super government. If Pakistan is really out to get Mehsud, as Kayani boasted, then it is because that is what Obama wants Pakistan to do.
The Predator strikes are the Pakistani strategy, intended to ease their citizenry into a renewed fight in S. Waziristan. (SEE: Paramilitary Pretense, Who Controls the Predators?) The last two attempts to carry the operation into the militant home base were met by fierce resistance on the ground, as well as in Pakistan’s streets. The people became so enraged that this path of slowly boiling Pakistan’s “frogs” became the only feasible alternative. This theory means that Mehsud is either an asset of the ISI or their CIA bosses. And the regular terror attacks upon Shiites and their shrines, even attacks on outposts of the Frontier Corp are likely the work of the ISI, just as the militants have been claiming in various interviews. As unlikely as this all seems, no other theory explains the curious behavior of Pakistan’s government and military and mountains of circumstantial evidence linking the ISI to the militants.
“So while Pakistan’s dysfunction is entirely Pakistan’s fault, American naivete cannot get a pass because Pakistan is a basket case. In the Age of Obama, America has to do better. Anyone that was really interested in debilitating the Punjabi-dominated, Hindu-hating, right-leaning, military-dominated Pakistani establishment would have to be recklessly foolish if it went and helped rebrand the Pakistan army in the wake of eight years of Musharraf and a devastating and humiliating defeat at the hands of the country’s lawyers. Yet that’s exactly what President Zardari has done since the May 8 offensive was launched into Swat. The Swat offensive has helped rehabilitate the image of the military.”
If Pakistan was really pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” in its negotiations with Mullah Nazir, seeking to separate the powerful warlord from Baitullah Mehsud before launching a new war in S. Waziristan against him, then the Army would not have allowed the continuing Predator attacks on Nazir to take place, or go unanswered. None of this happened. If they were serious about overtures made to the Wana warlord then they most certainly would not have shelled his offices.
Obama is driving the former enemies together. This is Langley’s intention. Mullah Nazir has not been the sole target of drone attacks for the past year to thwart Pakistan’s peace initiatives with the militants (since Washington controls everything Islamabad does), the reason is much more sinister than that.
If the United States government was truly at odds with the Army over American attacks upon Pakistani citizens, carried-out in order to sabotage Pakistan’s war plans, then there would be swift reprisals, because such an affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty would be far worse than merely “counter-productive.” Everything is going according to the Imperial game plan–American drones attack all pro-Pakistani militant leaders, ignoring everyone who is killing Pakistanis. The targeted leaders coalesce into a powerful, motivated union.
The generous benefactors of Maulana Fazlullah and his TNSM forces were sponsors of state terrorism, directed mostly at girls’ schools and CD shops in the North West Region. Their murderous rampage and deceptive Shariah pacts forced Army intervention. Predator attacks upon Mullah Nazir intensify, until he begins to fight back, forcing the Army to scrap plans to divide the Taliban as a means to avoid a massive tribal war, focusing only on Mehsud. Meanwhile, some unknown outfit bombs Shia mosques and shopping areas (Nazir blames the attacks upon the Army), stoking the war in Kurram. Bahadur honors his pact with Nazir and Mehsud; he fights back, forcing the Army to broaden their planned offensive to include N. Waziristan against their better judgment.
Never once, do the generals complain, or offer resistance to American violations of sovereignty. Instead, they follow the orders of their American masters, while the President of Pakistan continues to represent the President of the United States, instead of his own people, who are being killed by the dozens and the hundreds by the good old USA!
Hard as they may try to set their own course, Pakistan’s generals have surrendered their souls to the devil when they plotted with American generals to deceive their countrymen into passively, even enthusiastically accepting the new war. The war in Waziristan (both North and South) will be fought on Obama’s terms.
According to Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas:
“It was thus obvious that the confrontation between the militants and the military in North Waziristan would escalate because the US is unlikely to give up its policy of using drones to target militants positions.”
In other words, for the first time, one of the silent generals dared to explain the Army’s position. ISI concerns about “shaping the battlefield” and confining the war in Wana to Mehsud didn’t amount to a hill of beans to Petraeus and Mullen, Obama insists that Pakistan go against the generals’ better judgment and incite a “tribal uprising.”
The attacks in N. Waziristan by Gul Bahadur and the artillery strikes upon Nazir’s headquarters, both a bi-product of the Predator prevarications, as well as the recent assassination of Pakistan’s other “ace in the hole, Qari Zainuddin, have destroyed Pakistan’s last chance to restore the writ of the state without resorting to all-out civil war. Either Gen. Kayani submits entirely to Obama’s will, including the planned submission to Indian domination afterwards, or he stands-up to the United States, meaning he stops the drone attacks and reveals the entire ugly scenario that the CIA cannot allow anyone to reveal. “Al Qaida” is fake. The war on terror is a fraud. The fraud is a plan for world war. And we all know that neither Gen. Kayani, nor any other Pakistani official will ever reveal the “great game” or the plot to destroy the Islamic Republic.
The United States corporacracy is a monstrous devouring beast and “Islamist terror” is her illegitimate offspring.
Mr. Chamberlin is an American journalist who runs ThereAreNoSunglasses Weblog, Building An American Resistance Movement. This column is reproduced by permission. He can be reached at peterchamberlin@naharnet.com
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The trusted watch-keepers of the world have turned their hearts to midnight plunder, while they carried-out their duty standing guard over mankind, who blissfully, unaware, continued to sleep. Morning rapidly approaches and the householders are sure to demand an accounting.
The exploding world economy and the expanding war are but symptoms of the great mental sickness that afflicts society, waves of warning of the tsunamis that lie directly ahead. The dominant
ideas and ideology that drive our world are all collapsing around us, falling from the weight of their own corruption and immoral baggage.
In the ongoing warfare of ideas, the selfish immorality of the old order is proving to be its downfall, as it meets the impenetrable resistance of the higher ideals of selflessness and human compassion. When the heart of the people is exposed to the emotionally crippling images of the children of war, then and thereafter, their only concern becomes the ending of the scourge of war.
Human nature is naturally compassionate, no matter how much the person has changed from the innocence of their youth. Even evil men must feel the heart’s emotional tugging at their consciences, no matter how deeply they have buried it, at the sight of such a suffering little one. Knowing that you and your government did this to these children and thousands more just like them, just like your own children that you so dearly love. We are the authors of what you see.
For God so loved the world that he sent us all sons and daughters, to melt our cold hearts and to expose our buried consciences. Human suffering is probably the most powerful motivation for good on this earth. It moves men to take-up arms to avenge it. It motivates others to offer their own lives that others might suffer less.
Humankind has the means to save itself from itself, just as surely as it has the means to cause its own extinction, all that separates the two is the gulf of choice and human freewill. Those of us who believe in a higher power, The One who created all things both great and small, know for certain that mankind will one day rise to the challenge before him. We know that the promise of eventual world peace is a solid truth, just waiting for enough people to understand and choose to reach out with us. Peace is truly just a handshake away, all that is lacking is the will to effect change and the desire to leave this world a better place.
The only question is how long before we as a people begin to care about our fellow man? This is the one factor that determines how much the suffering will intensify before we arrive at our predetermined solution. Efforts spent shoring-up the old collapsing political/economic structure only add to the suffering by adding to the length of the suffering and wasting limited resources in futile attempts to repair the rotten, immoral order that compelled mankind’s sprint to self-destruction.
Military adventures, intended to deflect the coming collapse merely increase our national guilt for having failed in our voluntary task of standing watch at the ramparts of freedom, guarding the rights of God’s creation with one arm, while we killed and indiscriminately erased both people and human rights with the other strong arm. Our military became our means of plundering our brothers’ resources and rights, because we were trusted it to defend our friends against foreign aggressors.
We reach-out our hand to both friend and foe, expecting commerce, while preparing to wage covert war upon them. We buy our friends in the world, the rest we simply intimidate or secretly undermine. From behind the shield of nearly omnipotent military power we have bribed and browbeat the world into submission to our ideas, our ideology, our economic schemes. Our cutthroat system of buying, selling and extorting our friends based solely on profit instead of need, therefore it is designed to weed-out everyone (regardless of their needs) who don’t have the cash to meet they need. The “haves and have-nots” exclusionary economic system is about to be crushed under the impending weight of the hungry misery it spreads far and wide.
The immorality of the current system will bring forth a new moral economic system from the violence of the old one dying. Each war or epidemic of violence that wracks the nations is a cry for help, as a segment of society explodes as a result of the local contradictions.
The war on Pakistan is a case in point. Here we have compelled our most faithful ally to engage in full-scale civil war as the means to salvage our failing economic order, by way of seizing the Caspian oil and gas reserves. We have forced Pakistan onto a path towards its own destruction as a feeble-minded calculated gamble to avert our own deserved dissolution. It seems only logical that a nation which feeds its own insatiable appetite for more of everything by depriving the poorest of the poor nations of the little that they have to call their own, would seek to avert its own profit loss by spreading death and suffering amongst the very people who have time and again proven to be among its best friends.
History has proven that some of America’s most trusted friends and allies have been the recipients of her most insidious and deadly intrigues. Pakistani leaders are delusional if they think that their friendship with the United States is stronger than that of Italy, or Germany.
The CIA turned Pakistan into the “epicenter of terrorism” for a reason. That reason went way beyond the mission against the Soviets, or else the training camps would have been shut-down and some attempt would have been made to clean-up the mess they had made when the Russians left Afghanistan. The CIA kept the camps and the madrassas running, turning-out thousands of good jihadis. By relying on the factor of “deniability,” they put the training camps in Pakistani hands. This should have been understood by Pakistan’s leaders for what it was, a euphemistic way to express the reality that the Army and the ISI were always intended to be America’s scapegoat. That time has come.
America has turned the tables on Pakistan. Just as Pakistan has used their proxy army, the local Taliban to stage running battles (some were for real), in order to fool the United States about Pakistani intentions in the war on terror, the new administration is using their own creation, the “Pakistani Taliban” (TTP), to call the Army’s bluff about its latest war in its tribal region. The generals can no longer get away with merely chasing the local Taliban from one agency into another, or anything less than waging total war in all of FATA and the NWFP. Pakistan’s “double-game” is over, while America’s double-games have barely begun.
Gen. Kayani has been trying to follow in Musharraf’s footsteps, running a limited pretend all-out war production, even following the same order of the previous war on Waziristan, tribal jirgas, lashkars, economic siege, etc. The General’s neatly dressed, never dirty, determined-looking soldiers faithfully posed for countless publicity shots, putting on a great show for the international circus media. Army spokesmen claim to have killed 1,500 terrorists in Malakand and elsewhere, always taking place beyond the range of the camera’s lens. There are no “embedded reporters” in Pakistan. The only news coming out of the region is approved after passing through several layers of filtering by the controlling governments there, especially by the one all-controlling super government. If Pakistan is really out to get Mehsud, as Kayani boasted, then it is because that is what Obama wants Pakistan to do.
The Predator strikes are the Pakistani strategy, intended to ease their citizenry into a renewed fight in S. Waziristan. (SEE: Paramilitary Pretense, Who Controls the Predators?) The last two attempts to carry the operation into the militant home base were met by fierce resistance on the ground, as well as in Pakistan’s streets. The people became so enraged that this path of slowly boiling Pakistan’s “frogs” became the only feasible alternative. This theory means that Mehsud is either an asset of the ISI or their CIA bosses. And the regular terror attacks upon Shiites and their shrines, even attacks on outposts of the Frontier Corp are likely the work of the ISI, just as the militants have been claiming in various interviews. As unlikely as this all seems, no other theory explains the curious behavior of Pakistan’s government and military and mountains of circumstantial evidence linking the ISI to the militants.
“So while Pakistan’s dysfunction is entirely Pakistan’s fault, American naivete cannot get a pass because Pakistan is a basket case. In the Age of Obama, America has to do better. Anyone that was really interested in debilitating the Punjabi-dominated, Hindu-hating, right-leaning, military-dominated Pakistani establishment would have to be recklessly foolish if it went and helped rebrand the Pakistan army in the wake of eight years of Musharraf and a devastating and humiliating defeat at the hands of the country’s lawyers. Yet that’s exactly what President Zardari has done since the May 8 offensive was launched into Swat. The Swat offensive has helped rehabilitate the image of the military.”
If Pakistan was really pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” in its negotiations with Mullah Nazir, seeking to separate the powerful warlord from Baitullah Mehsud before launching a new war in S. Waziristan against him, then the Army would not have allowed the continuing Predator attacks on Nazir to take place, or go unanswered. None of this happened. If they were serious about overtures made to the Wana warlord then they most certainly would not have shelled his offices.
Obama is driving the former enemies together. This is Langley’s intention. Mullah Nazir has not been the sole target of drone attacks for the past year to thwart Pakistan’s peace initiatives with the militants (since Washington controls everything Islamabad does), the reason is much more sinister than that.
If the United States government was truly at odds with the Army over American attacks upon Pakistani citizens, carried-out in order to sabotage Pakistan’s war plans, then there would be swift reprisals, because such an affront to Pakistan’s sovereignty would be far worse than merely “counter-productive.” Everything is going according to the Imperial game plan–American drones attack all pro-Pakistani militant leaders, ignoring everyone who is killing Pakistanis. The targeted leaders coalesce into a powerful, motivated union.
The generous benefactors of Maulana Fazlullah and his TNSM forces were sponsors of state terrorism, directed mostly at girls’ schools and CD shops in the North West Region. Their murderous rampage and deceptive Shariah pacts forced Army intervention. Predator attacks upon Mullah Nazir intensify, until he begins to fight back, forcing the Army to scrap plans to divide the Taliban as a means to avoid a massive tribal war, focusing only on Mehsud. Meanwhile, some unknown outfit bombs Shia mosques and shopping areas (Nazir blames the attacks upon the Army), stoking the war in Kurram. Bahadur honors his pact with Nazir and Mehsud; he fights back, forcing the Army to broaden their planned offensive to include N. Waziristan against their better judgment.
Never once, do the generals complain, or offer resistance to American violations of sovereignty. Instead, they follow the orders of their American masters, while the President of Pakistan continues to represent the President of the United States, instead of his own people, who are being killed by the dozens and the hundreds by the good old USA!
Hard as they may try to set their own course, Pakistan’s generals have surrendered their souls to the devil when they plotted with American generals to deceive their countrymen into passively, even enthusiastically accepting the new war. The war in Waziristan (both North and South) will be fought on Obama’s terms.
According to Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas:
“It was thus obvious that the confrontation between the militants and the military in North Waziristan would escalate because the US is unlikely to give up its policy of using drones to target militants positions.”
In other words, for the first time, one of the silent generals dared to explain the Army’s position. ISI concerns about “shaping the battlefield” and confining the war in Wana to Mehsud didn’t amount to a hill of beans to Petraeus and Mullen, Obama insists that Pakistan go against the generals’ better judgment and incite a “tribal uprising.”
The attacks in N. Waziristan by Gul Bahadur and the artillery strikes upon Nazir’s headquarters, both a bi-product of the Predator prevarications, as well as the recent assassination of Pakistan’s other “ace in the hole, Qari Zainuddin, have destroyed Pakistan’s last chance to restore the writ of the state without resorting to all-out civil war. Either Gen. Kayani submits entirely to Obama’s will, including the planned submission to Indian domination afterwards, or he stands-up to the United States, meaning he stops the drone attacks and reveals the entire ugly scenario that the CIA cannot allow anyone to reveal. “Al Qaida” is fake. The war on terror is a fraud. The fraud is a plan for world war. And we all know that neither Gen. Kayani, nor any other Pakistani official will ever reveal the “great game” or the plot to destroy the Islamic Republic.
The United States corporacracy is a monstrous devouring beast and “Islamist terror” is her illegitimate offspring.
Mr. Chamberlin is an American journalist who runs ThereAreNoSunglasses Weblog, Building An American Resistance Movement. This column is reproduced by permission. He can be reached at peterchamberlin@naharnet.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
