The Pakistan Update

A United Nations report blaming a record loss of Afghan civilian lives last year on insurgents and the Taliban was dismissed as “untrue” by a Taliban spokesman Saturday.

Meanwhile, a commander of the International Security Assistance Force was encouraged by the report’s findings that coalition forces were not to blame for the increased casualties, but agreed that civilian deaths must drop. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said 3,021 civilians were killed last year, up from 2,790 the prior year.

In an e-mail sent to CNN, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid “strongly” disputed the U.N. mission’s report as “untrue.”

“It has been 10 years since UNAMA has started blaming our Mujahideen with such numbers and untrue figures while the invading forces are using tons of explosives every day in our country, conducting raids on civilian houses and they are killing our innocent people,” Mujahid said in the e-mail.

“Unfortunately I should say that UNAMA, which is operating under the umbrella of the U.N. as a propaganda tool for the invading forces, is trying to blame Mujahideen for the majority of the killings happening in Afghanistan,” Mujahid wrote.

“It is unfortunate that UNAMA is supporting oppressor Americans and other invading forces and is undermining its international reputation,” Mujahid stated.

A total of 11,864 civilians have been killed in the Afghanistan conflict since 2007, the U.N. mission said.

“Afghan children, women and men continue to be killed in this war in ever-increasing numbers,” Jan Kubis, the U.N. special representative for the secretary-general, said in a statement. “For much too long Afghan civilians have paid the highest price of war. Parties to the conflict must greatly increase their efforts to protect civilians to prevent yet another increase in civilian deaths and injuries in 2012.”

General John R. Allen, ISAF commander, said the report showed a reduction in coalition-related civilian casualties.

“Every citizen of Afghanistan must know ISAF will continue to do all we can to reduce casualties that affect the Afghan civilian population. This data is promising but there is more work to be done,” Allen said in a statement.

“The most striking — and obvious — component of the report is the increasing number of civilian casualties attributed to insurgents,” said Allen. “IEDs are now responsible for roughly one out of three civilian casualties according to UNAMA. The death toll from insurgent attacks is much too high and deserves Mullah Omar’s direct attention and action.”

The U.N. report said last year’s deaths are 8% more than in 2010, and double the number in 2007.

The vast majority of 2011 civilian casualties — 77%, according to the U.N. report — were caused by anti-government forces. The number of deaths attributable to the Afghan army and international forces declined year-over-year by 4%, to 410.

The report concludes that the higher number of casualties was due to changing tactics on the part of insurgents, including greater use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), deadlier suicide attacks and more targeted assassinations.

IEDs alone killed 967 Afghan men, women and children in 2011. Many of the 495 victims of targeted killings were provincial and district governors, peace council members and tribal elders.

Among the most disturbing statistics: in the second half of 2011, the number of women and children killed grew by 29 and 51% respectively, compared to 2010. That is in part due to the growing use of the pressure-plate IEDs, which are indiscriminate — such that a van carrying civilians is just as likely to set off the explosive as a Humvee.

“A piece of shrapnel had gone through his head. My son is dead, and his loss is killing me and my wife. He was the only son I had,” said a man in Mazar-e Sharif, who was quoted in the report.

“My daughter is nine years old, and every day before I leave for work, she cries: ‘Mama, don’t go to work, I don’t need to eat,’ “a police officer in Herat was quoted as saying.

The U.N. report says several statements from Taliban leaders in 2011 pledging greater efforts to avoid civilian casualties “neither resulted in improved protection of civilians nor minimized civilian casualties.”

While NATO can take comfort from the fact that its forces — and its allies in the Afghan National Army — caused fewer civilian casualties last year, it is clear that overall security for civilians has not improved. This is despite the deployment of well over 100,000 international troops across Afghanistan in 2011.

In addition to casualties, the number of Afghan civilians displaced by conflict soared last year. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, conflict and insecurity displaced some 185,000 people in Afghanistan, a jump of 41% compared to 2010.

The U.N. report suggests that there has been a significant geographic shift in casualties. As NATO and Afghan Army units focused on the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, the number of civilian casualties fell sharply in the second half of 2011.

But elsewhere — in southeastern, eastern and northern Afghanistan — incidents rose. The number of civilians killed in Kabul province, including in the capital itself, more than tripled largely because of several devastating suicide bombings.

The figures show that the number of casualties caused by NATO and allied night operations dropped sharply, despite the much greater intensity and frequency of such operations. That suggests better intelligence and tactics among pro-government forces. But the number of civilian killed in NATO airstrikes — a source of friction with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai — rose 9%.

Increasingly, as the transition to Afghan leadership gets underway, local security duties are being assigned to a relatively new force: the Afghan Local Police. The U.N. says it has received “mixed reports” about this entity’s overall performance. While most suggested that it had improved security, there were also accounts of human rights abuses and corruption.

Altogether, the U.N. Assistance Mission concludes that “the unremitting toll of civilian casualties coupled with pervasive intimidation affected many civilians directly, and many more indirectly, by fueling uncertainty, tension and fear.”

The report’s authors welcome “ideas that could contribute toward peace negotiations,” adding their value will be measured by reduced civilian casualties and improved security

Originally appeared on cnn.

Tags: Afghan Taliban, Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, NATO, United Nations, zabiullah mujahid

Posted in Afghanistan, Around, News | No Comments »

Afghanistan and Pakistan plan to open a second front in negotiations with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia as US-brokered talks get under way in Qatar, officials said Sunday.

The Taliban, ousted from power by a US-led invasion in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, announced this month that they planned to set up a political office in Qatar ahead of talks with Washington.

And Taliban negotiators have begun holding preliminary talks with US officials on plans for negotiations aimed at ending the decade-long Afghan war, a former Taliban official said Sunday.

But Afghan and Taliban officials indicated in response to a BBC report about plans for talks in Saudi Arabia that both Kabul and Islamabad – usually at loggerheads on the issue – were looking for their own talks with the Taliban.

Asked for his response to the BBC report, Afghan foreign ministry spokesperson Janan Mosazai said: “Of course, we support any steps toward the Afghan peace process.” He refused to comment further.

But a senior Afghan government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP the BBC report was accurate, saying: “We will always pursue all roads toward peace in Afghanistan, including contacts with the Taliban that are not limited to the Qatar office.”

A member of the Taliban’s leadership council, the Pakistan-based Quetta Shura, also backed the report of talks in Saudi Arabia.

“The idea that the Taliban should have a point of contact in Saudi is pushed by the Pakistan and Afghan governments,” he said on condition of anonymity.

“This is because they think they have been sidelined. They want some control over peace talks.”

Supporting this theory, Kabul announced Sunday that Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar would visit Kabul on Wednesday, marking what Mosazai called a “new phase” in co-operation between the two countries.

Khar would meet President Hamid Karzai to “discuss the fight against terrorism and Pakistan’s essential support to the peace process in Afghanistan,” he said.

Khar’s visit comes after the always-touchy relations between the two countries broke down following the assassination of Kabul’s chief peace envoy, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in September.

Karzai accused Pakistan of responsibility for the murder and said Islamabad was sabotaging all attempts at negotiations with the Taliban.

The president was wary over being sidelined in the Qatar talks, leading Washington to dispatch special envoy Marc Grossman to Kabul last week to assure him of a central role for his government in any major negotiations.

And in another effort to soothe Karzai’s doubts, a delegation from the Qatar government is expected to visit Kabul to explain its role in the talks.

Preliminary negotiations between the US and the Taliban are already under way in the Gulf state, a former Taliban official who is now a member of the Afghan government appointed High Peace Council said Sunday.

“The actual peace talks have not yet begun – they are in the process of trust-building and obviously this will take some time,” Mawlavi Qalamuddin, who once led the Taliban’s feared religious police when the hardline Islamists were in power, told AFP.

One of the trust-building measures demanded by the Taliban is the release of five of its members from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, while Washington wants the insurgents to renounce violence.

Originally appeared in the montreal gazette

Tags: 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan, burhanuddin rabbani, Guantánamo, Hamid Karzai, hina rabbani khar, islamists, Kabul, malvi qalamuddin, Saudi Arabia, Taliban, US

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By Mahir Ali

A few days before Barack Obama`s much-anticipated announcement about reversing the troop surge in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai issued one of his sporadic declarations of relative independence from the forces that have sustained him in office for nine years.

“They are here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they are using our soil for that,” he said in reference to the American and Nato military presence. Karzai also spoke of “chemical materials” in the western weaponry — presumably a reference to the use of uranium or other radioactive materials — which he said meant that “our people get killed, but also our environment is damaged.”

The first American response was a rebuke from retired general Karl Eikenberry, the outgoing US ambassador in Kabul (who, incidentally, advised Obama against a surge two years ago). “America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world,” he declared. “We are a good people.”

Quite a few nations that have borne the brunt of American imperialism would beg to differ. Yet his statement that “when we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse … our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on” is open to interpretation as a partial explanation for the withdrawals whereby American troop strength in Afghanistan will be reduced by 33,000 before the end of next year.

But that will still leave twice as many boots on the ground as there were at the start of Obama`s tenure. The US president`s explanation for his drawdown — in the face of opposition from the military hierarchy and administration hawks — did not pursue the Eikenberry line of thought. Nor did he make the mistake of declaring `mission accomplished`, despite the suggestion that the withdrawal was justified because its goals had been achieved.

There is plenty of evidence, however, that domestic political considerations are the primary driving force behind the slashing of resources expended on military adventures overseas. Nearly 10 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, opinion polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose the military presence in Afghanistan. And the urge to conclude American participation in this open-ended conflict is by no means restricted to Democrats: a substantial proportion of prospective Republican candidates for next year`s presidential contest appear to be keen on a more rapid withdrawal of forces.

None of them are willing to admit, of course, that the American response to 9/11 was essentially misdirected. At the time, a commando operation against Al Qaeda would have made considerably more sense than an all-out invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime — officially recognised only by its sponsors in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — was indeed appalling in any number of ways, but it did not pose a threat to the US.

The sanctuary it afforded to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts was incidental. The 9/11 attacks were not contingent on a base in Afghanistan. The conspirators held consultations in Hamburg and trained in the US. The location of their mentors was only marginally relevant. It did not suffice as justification for all-out war. Yet hardly anyone in the US opposed that war when it was launched. The thirst for retribution is not hard to fathom; the nation described in the second half of the 20th century by one of its outstanding personalities, Martin Luther King Jr, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” wasn`t accustomed to being attacked on its own soil. But the effort to quench that thirst was misdirected from the outset. It exhibited a bloodlust that more than matched that of its foes — who had, let`s not forget, been its allies until a few years before.

It is now being argued that the incipient pullout from Afghanistan is somehow related to the successful targeting of bin Laden and the degradation of Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was tracked down to a not-very-safe house in Pakistan, far away from the drone zone where American forces have long operated with impunity from unassailable heights. Al Qaeda`s remaining adherents in the region — believed to number in the dozens — as well as the Taliban leadership are believed to mostly be in Pakistan.

That makes it hard to explain why combat operations are being conducted in Afghanistan — amid, mind you, contacts that could lead to negotiations with the Taliban.

American security relations with Pakistan, meanwhile, have hit a new low in the wake of the bin Laden raid. It does not require particularly deep insight to fathom why the CIA decided against sharing its plans for that raid with Pakistani authorities. Although no substantial evidence has emerged of high-level Pakistani involvement in providing a sanctuary to bin Laden, the manner in which Harkat-ul-Mujahideen — a banned militant group with suspected links to military intelligence — and Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) reacted almost simultaneously with vehement denials of American insinuations of contacts between Harkat and Al Qaeda is certainly intriguing.

ISPR has also been keen to reject American press reports about a brewing revolt within the Pakistani armed forces against the military hierarchy on account of its relations with the US. Doth it protest too much?

Perhaps. It has long been obvious, though, that the struggle against violent religious extremists in Pakistan is something of a lost cause unless it can be portrayed as a Pakistani war. The drone attacks regularly launched from the Shamsi air base in Balochistan have not been particularly helpful in this regard, especially when they entail civilian casualties. The idea that the Americans will maintain forces numbering 25,000 or so even after a `complete` withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years hence, in order to retain the capacity for military interventions in Pakistan, is not particularly reassuring.

The notion that Pakistan is host to terrorists with an international reach is hardly a fantasy. But the notion that US military adventures and expeditions abroad — be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen or Pakistan — are somehow going to diminish the likelihood of attacks on American soil remains a dangerous illusion.

This article originally appeared in Dawn.

Tags: 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai, Iraq, karl eikenberry, martin luther king, NATO, Pakistan, somalia, Taliban, us military, yemen

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by Sen. Carl Levin and Senator Diane Feinstein

The revelation that Osama bin Laden was comfortably hiding out for years in a city popular with Pakistan’s military elite raises disturbing questions that Islamabad needs to answer.

Pakistan will hopefully hold a high-level, civilian investigation — by respected and qualified people — to discover whether any Pakistani officials knew this and to share those answers with the Pakistani people and the international community.

Some basic questions: How was the land bought? How were permits acquired? How could a conspicuous structure be built without Pakistani officials being aware or investigating?

But even before the bin Laden discovery, Pakistan’s actions over the past few years convinced us that an honest look at the relationship between Washington and Islamabad — including our financial aid to Pakistan — is warranted. We need to examine our mutual strategic interests to determine how they align.

The record has been mixed.

Pakistan’s contributions to countering international terrorism need a clear-eyed review. Islamabad has arrested key senior terrorist leaders, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It has suffered greatly at the hands of terrorists — tens of thousands of Pakistani citizens have been killed in terrorist attacks over the past decade. Yet bin Laden’s hiding in plain sight for years suggests either complicity or incompetence on the part of Pakistani officials.

Most disturbing, though, are Pakistan’s continuing ties to extremist militant groups — particularly the Haqqani group in North Waziristan and the Afghan Taliban shura in and around Quetta. Pakistan provides safe harbor to the Haqqani insurgent group responsible for attacks against U.S. and coalition forces across the border in Afghanistan. Regardless of what Pakistan knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts, the Haqqani sanctuaries are well-known.

Similarly, Pakistan continues to provide safe haven for the Afghan Taliban leadership. It is an open secret that the area around Quetta is home to senior Afghan Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar. This is unacceptable.

Pakistan is also alleged to support the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, known as LT. This organization devised the 2008 Mumbai, India, attack — which killed six Americans. India has requested extradition of the LT leaders, but Pakistan has refused.

U.S.-Pakistan intelligence cooperation has become badly frayed in the past six months. Pakistani media, with the likely assistance of security forces, have twice published names of alleged CIA chiefs of station in Islamabad, posing a safety threat to U.S. citizens in the country.

We also need to review Pakistan’s conduct on nonproliferation. It continues building a significant nuclear arsenal. The Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan provided nuclear technology to the world’s most anti-U.S. regimes — including Iran, North Korea and Libya.

In addition, we need to revisit Pakistan’s role in regional stability. Given its population, economy and democratic institutions, Pakistan is inevitably a key player. Yet recent reports that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, urging him to weaken ties with Washington and instead strengthen relations with China are disconcerting. During an address to parliament on Monday, Gilani called China “Pakistan’s all-weather friend.”

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is at a pivotal moment. The return of the tail of the downed helicopter from the bin Laden raid could serve as a useful first step in repairing our ties. But it is essential that Pakistan cut its relations with the Haqqani group and the Afghan Taliban and prevent them from using Pakistan as a safe haven from which to launch attacks in Afghanistan.

Many Pakistanis, including those in the military, believe Washington undervalues the losses they have suffered from terrorist attacks. We understand that feeling — and we believe that should unite us in the fight against those who use Pakistani territory as a base for attacks against the U.S. and its allies. Pakistan should end the impunity, if not tacit approval, that those terrorists receive from Pakistan. As long as that situation exists, it will be difficult to maintain political support in the U.S. for our partnership.

There is still an opportunity to put our countries back on the path of partnership and defeat the terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children — including innocent Pakistanis. But that is likely to require not only answers to the legitimate questions about bin Laden’s presence but strong follow-through on Pakistan’s commitment to act against terrorists openly operating there against us and our allies in Afghanistan.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) is chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Tags: 9/11, A.Q. Khan, Afghan Taliban, Afghanistan, carl levin, china, CIA, diane feinstein, Featured, Hamid Karzai, haqqani network, Iran, khalid sheikh mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, libya, Mullah Omar, non-proliferation, north korea, North Waziristan, nuclear weapons, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pakistan Media, pakistan nuclear weapons, US Pak relations, Yousaf Raza Gilani

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog, News | 1,578 Comments »

by Aram Roston

On a Friday night in June 2009, New York Times reporter David Rohde and his translator made a dramatic escape from captivity in Pakistan, climbing over a wall while their Afghan Taliban guards slept. Rohde wore sandals and a traditional salwar kameez, and he had a long beard, grown during his seven-month imprisonment. The two men walked in the darkness of the city, a Taliban ministate, past mud-brick huts, and found their way to a Pakistani military base just minutes away.

Rohde had been a prisoner shared by two competing groups of Taliban fighters, both of which appear to have held him not as a political or military tool in their operations against the US and Afghan governments but for his monetary value as a hostage.

Rohde’s escape was an unexpectedly joyous ending to a harrowing episode for him, his wife, his colleagues and friends. But it was by no means the end of the story.

An Afghan who is well acquainted with several of the participants in the kidnapping has provided The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute with new details about the perpetrators, as well as new information about what happened after Rohde’s escape. This source’s account reveals how Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) serves as an arbiter for the various Taliban groups that compete with one another for influence, loot and profits. According to the source, the ISI, acting on behalf of one Taliban faction, took two of Rohde’s guards into custody to interrogate them about how he escaped. Then, despite its knowledge of the men’s role in the kidnapping, the ISI simply set them free.

Though this new information merely lends more substance to already strong suspicions about the ISI’s close relationship with the Taliban, it’s still an explosive allegation: rather than cooperating with US authorities, Pakistan’s intelligence agency essentially became an accessory after the fact to Rohde’s kidnapping.

The saga began on November 10, 2008, when Rohde, researching a book about Afghanistan, was driven to Logar province to meet a Taliban commander with the nom de guerre Abu Tayyeb. Rohde was seized on a stretch of road by gunmen in a well-practiced maneuver and taken into the custody of a heavyset Taliban leader who introduced himself as Mullah Atiqullah, as Rohde details in his soon-to-be-released book, A Rope and a Prayer, which he wrote with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill.

In the months to come, Rohde would learn that Mullah Atiqullah and Abu Tayyeb, whom he had intended to interview, were the same person.

The real name of Rohde’s kidnapper, not reported until now, was Haji Najibullah (Haji, of course, is the honorific for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca). Najibullah was an ambitious Taliban commander in his 30s, with a swelling reputation. He had made his bones as an aide to the legendary one-legged Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah Lang. Though Dadullah is not a household name in the United States, he certainly is in Afghanistan. One US Army general called him the Taliban’s “functional leader,” and noted Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid has called him “the most ruthless Taliban commander after 9/11.” Dadullah was killed in a US attack in 2007. Najibullah would be remembered in Taliban circles as one of his minor protégés.

After capturing Rohde, Najibullah quickly saw dollar signs. Realizing that he might have to hold on to Rohde for a long time to shake loose real money in ransom, Najibullah brought him to Pakistan, where the American reporter, his translator and his driver were placed in the custody of the Haqqani network. Rohde, in his forthcoming book, explains how he had made a mistake his second night in captivity: desperate to stay alive, he told Najibullah that he could be traded for “prisoners and millions of dollars.”

The Haqqanis, a mujahedeen clan from Khost province, may be some of the most effective commanders battling US forces. They deploy terrorist tactics—waves of well-trained attackers wearing explosive vests deployed in operations such as the assault on the Kabul guesthouses, the assassination attempt against Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a series of large-scale actions against US combat outposts on the border near Pakistan.

The Haqqanis were even more effective against the Soviets in the 1980s, when they worked closely with the CIA. The late former Congressman Charles Wilson famously referred to Jalaluddin Haqqani back then as “goodness personified.” A former agency official who used to know Jalaluddin said, “I really regret the fact that we are tangling with him, because he is not a guy to fuck around with.”

When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the Haqqanis sided with the Taliban, not Karzai. By 2002 the Haqqanis were almost on the ropes. Jalaluddin was injured in a US bombing raid. So the younger generation took over. Jalaluddin’s son Siraj, trained like his father in the twin arts of paramilitary warfare and charismatic religious leadership, was now in charge.

The Haqqanis are also known to live well. “They do business,” The Nation’s source said. “They’ve done business for years. They are involved in war, but if they find some business opportunity, they do it. They like buying houses and selling them and stuff like that. Now they have trucks and trucking equipment in Peshawar.”

Rohde’s kidnapping was in essence a business opportunity. Najibullah, the young commander who first captured Rohde, was not a subordinate of the Haqqanis; but by bringing Rohde to them, he would build up his reputation with the clan, giving him a safe base from which to conduct negotiations. Najibullah and his men brought Rohde across Afghanistan’s border to the Haqqanis to make it easier to hold him for an extended period, according to the source familiar with the kidnapping. In Pakistan, they figured, they were safe from American rescue efforts, since they understood that the Haqqanis had the protection of the ISI.

Many experts say that the Haqqanis are supported by the ISI today, just as they have been for decades. The network has “been on the payroll of Pakistan’s ISI since the 1970s, and the ISI still allows them to operate freely,” in the words of Ahmed Rashid.

The ISI denies this. “That is not true,” a senior ISI official told The Nation. He spoke on behalf of the agency but insisted on anonymity. “We have attacked Haqqani a number of times. Right now we are not conducting operations against him because primarily we are busy with the TPP [Pakistani Taliban, as opposed to the Afghan Taliban] in South Waziristan, and we do not have the wherewithal to conduct operations against both of them.”

Still, even the US government is skeptical of Pakistan’s denials. Indeed, this past summer Gen. David Petraeus underlined the difficulty in “trying to assess what the ISI is doing…in contacts with the Haqqani network or the Afghan Taliban.”

* * *

The initial ransom requests issued by Rohde’s kidnappers were wildly aggressive. For Rohde’s release, the Haqqanis wanted $25 million, and they wanted prisoners released from Guantánamo. Then it was $15 million and prisoners released from Pul-i-Charkhi prison near Kabul. Then $8 million.

The Nation’s Afghan source said that guarding Rohde was a task shared by Najibullah and the Haqqanis, who provided the logistical support, housing and a secure environment in which to operate near Afghanistan. With so much money at stake, each faction was mistrustful of the other. Of Rohde’s three chief guards, one was a Haqqani loyalist and two were Najibullah’s men. So important was this operation to Najibullah that he had his brother Timor Shah act as a full-time guard for Rohde. (These details are corroborated in Rohde’s book.)

Not only were the Haqqanis and Najibullah eager to use Rohde for profit but the main Taliban Shura—the head council that oversees the Afghan Taliban—hoped to get involved as well, according to The Nation’s source. Afghanistan expert Michael Semple said that has become common in kidnappings. “It is standard practice of Taliban High Command to seek control of kidnapping situations,” he told me.

The Taliban often insisted to Rohde that they had noble motives—that he was being held for the cause, not for money. “They told me repeatedly that they were doing this for the jihad,” Rohde told me in an interview. “They kept telling me that it wasn’t about them getting rich themselves. But given the size of the ransom they were demanding, I find that hard to believe.”

Throughout his captivity, Rohde was well aware of the likely connections between the ISI and the Haqqanis who held him, though he said no ISI agents made themselves known during his captivity. “I didn’t witness any direct contact between the ISI and the Haqqanis.” That said, he was living proof, in a sense, that Pakistani authorities gave the Haqqanis full freedom to do as they liked. “What I did see,” he emphasized, “was that Pakistan forces never came off their bases, and the Haqqanis were allowed to operate their own Taliban ministate in North Waziristan.”

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government stuck to the fiction, until late in Rohde’s captivity on its soil, that it believed he wasn’t being held in Pakistan. Rohde said his wife was repeatedly told by Pakistani officials that he was being held in Afghanistan.

The FBI, the CIA and the New York Times worked quietly behind the scenes to secure Rohde’s release, believing that news of his kidnapping could derail their efforts if it became public. But there was much confusion about the circumstances of the kidnapping, both in the United States and in the Taliban camps, before and after his escape.

During the kidnapping, one of the “security consultants” on the case was Duane “Dewey” Clarridge. Clarridge, 78, has a stormy past. Indicted for perjury in the Iran/Contra case in 1991, he was pardoned a year later by the first President Bush. Then Clarridge became an eager supporter of the discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi.

Clarridge boasted to a small group of people that he had a network of sources with rock-solid information about the kidnapping. While Rohde was in captivity, Clarridge circulated information that some of Rohde’s guards were Chechens, that Rohde had been separated from his driver and translator, and that he was held in a specific border village. Many of those claims turn out to have been erroneous, contradicted not just by The Nation’s source but also by Rohde in his book.

Later, there were news reports that Rohde’s escape had been engineered somehow by the people Clarridge claimed to be working with. ABC News reported that a security firm bribed Taliban guards, and that the Times “used a controversial former CIA official, Duane ‘Dewey’ Claridge [sic], to help plot the escape of Rohde.” That theory, though, is contradicted by Rohde, who believes no guards were bribed, as well as by The Nation’s source. (The claims that his escape was engineered are highly implausible anyway, since it was Rohde’s decision, and his translator’s, to escape that night, and they had no help or contacts.)

Clarridge declined to comment for this article.

In Pakistan, Rohde’s escape was devastating for the Taliban. Not only had they lost their prize prisoner but the loss caused the Haqqanis and Najibullah to turn on each other. They were both convinced, in a case of mirror imaging, that the other one must have released Rohde as part of a secret arrangement in which they kept the ransom money for themselves. Instead of suspecting incompetence on the part of the guards, they believed someone was cheating and getting rich.

“There was a big problem between Siraj [Haqqani] and Najibullah,” the source familiar with the kidnappers told me. “A huge issue. Siraj was blaming Najibullah, that he’s the one who took money from the Americans and let the guy go. And [Najibullah] was blaming him, that he did it, because it was his compound.”

Even the Taliban Shura in Quetta got involved, the source said. They “thought that Siraj kept the money.”

Semple, the Afghanistan expert, also heard about the crisis that hit the Taliban after Rohde’s escape. “There was a witch hunt,” he said, “to see who might have taken the money.”

To arbitrate the dispute about the kidnapping, the Haqqanis turned to the Pakistan government’s intelligence service, according to The Nation’s source. Siraj, the source said, turned over the two guards affiliated with Najibullah to the ISI for questioning. “One of them,” the source said, “was Najib’s brother Timor Shah.”

The guards were allegedly interrogated fiercely and tortured by the ISI. The interrogators demanded to know exactly how Rohde had escaped. Who had let him go, and why? Were the men paid a ransom they had not shared? In other words, the ISI was making sure that the relations between the Taliban factions weren’t destroyed by anyone’s betrayal.

Once the ISI was convinced that there had been no bribes and no ransom, Rohde’s guards were set free. Despite their role in the kidnapping, they were not charged in court or handed over to the Americans. After more than a month in custody, they were let go.

I asked Rohde for his reaction to this information. “It’s very disturbing that the Pakistani authorities would not keep in custody people that were involved in my kidnapping,” he said. “If they had two of my guards in their custody and then released them, that seems to fit a broader pattern of the ISI sheltering the Taliban.”

The senior ISI official who spoke with The Nation would neither confirm nor deny the report. “I don’t know about it. I haven’t heard about it,” he said.

As this case shows, the corruption and profiteering that characterize the Karzai government, propped up by the United States, are often mirrored in the financial dealings of America’s fractious enemies, who are propped up by Pakistan.

As Semple pointed out, “We need to think of Waziristan as this tribal criminal enterprise masking as jihad.”

The Nation’s source put it this way: “There is a lot of money. You have no idea how fragile things are within the Taliban. This is not a small war they are fighting. They are fighting over power. The money goes to whoever has the power.”

This article originally appeared in The Nation

Tags: Abu Tayyeb, Afghanistan, Ahmed Rashid, CIA, Congressman Charlie Wilson, david rohde, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, FBI, Gen. David Petraeus, Guantánamo, Haji Najibullah, Hamid Karzai, haqqani network, ISI, Jalaluddin Haqqani, khost province, Michael Semple, Mullah Atiqullah, Mullah Dadullah Lang, New York Times, North Waziristan, Pakistan, Quetta, Siraj Jalaluddin, Taliban, Timor Shah, TTP

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog, News | 543 Comments »

By Nancy A. Youssef

The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.

What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.

The shift already has begun privately and came in part because U.S. officials realized that conditions in Afghanistan were unlikely to allow a speedy withdrawal.

“During our assessments, we looked at if we continue to move forward at this pace, how long before we can fully transition to the Afghans? And we found that we cannot fully transition to the Afghans by July 2011,” said one senior administration official. “So we felt we couldn’t focus on July 2011 but the period it will take to make the full transition.”

Another official said the administration also realized in contacts with Pakistani officials that the Pakistanis had concluded wrongly that July 2011 would mark the beginning of the end of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

That perception, one Pentagon adviser said, has convinced Pakistan’s military — which is key to preventing Taliban sympathizers from infiltrating Afghanistan — to continue to press for a political settlement instead of military action.

“This administration now understands that it cannot shift Pakistani approaches to safeguarding its interests in Afghanistan with this date being perceived as a walk-away date,” the adviser said.

Last week’s midterm elections also have eased pressure on the Obama administration to begin an early withdrawal. Earlier this year, some Democrats in Congress pressed to cut off funding for Afghanistan operations. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives beginning in January, however, there’ll be less push for a drawdown. The incoming House Armed Services chairman, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., told Reuters last week that he opposed setting the date.

The White House vehemently denies that there is any change in policy. “The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011. There is absolutely no change to that policy,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

On Tuesday, a White House official who spoke with reporters in a conference call arranged to discuss the December review, said the administration might withdraw some troops next July and may hand some communities over to Afghan authorities. But he said a withdrawal from Afghanistan could take “years,” depending on the capability of the Afghan national security forces.

He also said the December review would measure progress in eight areas, though he declined to specify what those are. Congress will get a report by early next year, but Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan, will not testify.

“This is designed to be an inside the administration perspective,” he said, adding it will “set the policymaking calendar” for the Obama administration’s first six months of next year.

De-emphasizing deadlines also allows the administration greater flexibility in responding to conditions in Afghanistan, officials said.

While the Taliban are facing increasing coalition airstrikes, they have no driving incentive to negotiate with an unpopular government. Officials here quietly worry that while they, too, are seeing some drops in violence and the Taliban’s hold in pockets of Afghanistan, those limited improvements aren’t leading to better governance.

A U.N. report issued in August showed that civilian casualties rose 31 percent during the first half of the year compared with the previous year, 76 percent were caused by the Taliban, it said. So far, more than 400 U.S. troops have been killed this year.

Many officials here privately worry that talk of a withdrawal without results will cost the military credibility, with Americans and Afghans alike.

“What we ultimately need in Afghanistan is good governance,” said one senior military officer. “Right now there is a gap” between security gains and governance.

Christopher Preble, the director for foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, said he’s not surprised that the scope of the December review has narrowed and that Obama administration officials are no longer highlighting the July 2011 date.

“The very players who were arguing so strenuously for a deepening of our involvement in Afghanistan a year ago are unlikely to now declare that their earlier recommendations were faulty,” he said.

Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay contributed to this article, which originally appeared in the McClatchy Newspapers

Tags: Afghanistan, afghanistan withdrawal, deadline, general Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, house armed services committee, NATO, Obama, Pakistan, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, Taliban, u.s. central command

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog, News | 719 Comments »

by Steve Steve Luxenberg

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page “terms sheet” that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in “Obama’s Wars,” to be released on Monday.

According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. “Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”

Obama rejected the military’s request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. “I’m not doing 10 years,” he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. “I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.”

Woodward’s book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

But most of the book centers on the strategy review, and the dissension, distrust and infighting that consumed Obama’s national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction, goals, timetable, troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.

Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.

Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama’s political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.” Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president’s senior adviser David Axelrod to be “a complete spin doctor.”

During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was “[expletive] with the wrong guy.” Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.

Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, “How could you trust Hillary?”

“Obama’s Wars” marks the 16th book by Woodward, 67, a Washington Post associate editor. Woodward’s reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book “All the President’s Men.”

Among the book’s other disclosures:

– Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn’t think about the Afghan war in the “classic” terms of the United States winning or losing. “I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?” he said.

– The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

– Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA’s worldwide covert operations.

– A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. “They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally,” then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.

– A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here “a potential game changer.” He said: “When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one where you can’t afford any mistakes.”

– Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. “He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,” Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.

Obama kept asking for “an exit plan” to go along with any further troop commitment, and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session, the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the military’s open-ended approach.

In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise between the military command’s request for 40,000 and Biden’s relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20,000 as part of a “hybrid option” that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room, one by one, asking each participant whether he or she had any objections – to “say so now,” Woodward reports.

The document – a copy of which is reprinted in the book – took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy’s objectives, what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail, according to Woodward, to make sure that the military wouldn’t attempt to expand the mission.

After Obama informed the military of his decision, Woodward writes, the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision, peppering the White House with new questions. Obama, in exasperation, reacted by asking, “Why do we keep having these meetings?”

Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, they kept pushing for their 40,000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.

The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: “In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, ‘We’re doing fine, Mr. President, but we’d be better if we just do more.’ We’re not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we’re talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.”

Petraeus took Obama’s decision as a personal repudiation, Woodward writes. Petraeus continued to believe that a “protect-the-Afghan-people” counterinsurgency was the best plan. When the president tapped Petraeus this year to replace McChrystal as the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus found himself in charge of making Obama’s more limited strategy a success.

Woodward quotes Petraeus as saying, “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

This story originally appeared in The Washington Post

Tags: Afghanistan, bob woodward, david axelrod, Hamid Karzai, Hillary Clinton, james jones, Mike Mullen, NATO, Obama, petrea, Robert Gates, thomas donilon

Posted in Around, Blog, News | 1,743 Comments »

by Justin Elliott

Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward’s new book is coming out on Monday and both the New York Times and the Washington Post have written preview pieces.

So what will we likely be hearing about for the next month? Gen. David Petraeus once referred to top Obama advisor David Axelrod as “a complete spin doctor,” according to the book, titled “Obama’s Wars.” Joe Biden once called Afghanistan guru Richard Holbrooke “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” And national security advisor James Jones once called Obama’s political aides “water bugs.”

But what should we be talking about from the book?

The undeclared, undebated secret war in Pakistan is bigger than we knew, and it’s being conducted in part by CIA-trained Afghans:

The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.

The Obama administration seems to be enamored with a drone-based foreign policy:

Mr. Woodward reveals the code name for the C.I.A.’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, Sylvan Magnolia, and writes that the White House was so enamored of the program that Mr. Emanuel would regularly call the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?”

This is how President Obama defines victory in Afghanistan:

Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn’t think about the Afghan war in the “classic” terms of the United States winning or losing. “I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?” he said.

And this is the man who the United States is relying on over there:

The book also reports that the United States has intelligence showing that manic-depression has been diagnosed in President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and that he was on medication, but adds no details.

Woodward’s book presents an opportunity to explore and debate issues that haven’t gotten much airing — the war in Pakistan, the drone strikes, Obama’s continuation of various Bush-era policies. Unfortunately, it comes wrapped up with another opportunity: to obsess over sketchily sourced stories of interpersonal sniping within the administration.

This story originally appeared in Salon.com

Tags: Afghanistan, bob woodward, CIA, drones, general Petraeus, Hamid Karzai, james jones, Joe Biden, leon panetta, Obama, Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, sylvan magnolia

Posted in Afghanistan, Around, Blog, News | 1,770 Comments »

by Ahmed Rashid

THERE IS perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan. If it did not have such dire consequences for 170 million Pakistanis and nearly 2 billion people living in South Asia, this magical thinking would be amusing.

This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.

Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, or “deep state” as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge. Pakistan’s civilians, politicians and intellectuals are helpless; they cannot make the deep state see sense as long as the West continues its duplicitous policies of propping up the military-intelligence establishment in opposition to popular society while demanding that the Pakistani civilian government wrest back control of the country.

Now there is a serious and deadly overlap—Pakistan’s extremists are determined to topple the political system and the deep state. The army is not oblivious to this reality, but it seems unwilling or unable to tackle the real issues at hand. “This is nothing but a creeping coup d’état by the forces of darkness, a coup that will spare no one,” wrote analyst Kamran Shafi in the Dawn newspaper this summer. “It is them against everyone else—an Islamic Emirate of Pakistan is the goal,” he added.

The deep state is failing its own people, who are in turn becoming more traumatized by the incessant violence, the lack of justice or security, and the perennial economic crisis. This only leads the civilian government to be even more inept, inconsequential and incapable of improving governance.

THE MOTHER of all insurgencies is taking place in the seven tribal agencies of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, and North and South Waziristan in the northwest-frontier region where the Pakistani Pashtun tribes—under the nomenclature of the Pakistani Taliban—are at war with the state. Amnesty International recently said that 4 million Pakistanis in this and adjoining regions are living under Taliban rule. Every time the army claims to have cleared one agency, the Taliban rebound in another with a vengeance.

Also operating from these northern bases are a dozen groups from Kashmir, Karachi and Punjab which were once trained by the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to fight in Indian Kashmir. They have now turned against their former handlers. The Pashtun Taliban have joined with their more sophisticated, better educated urban comrades to plan horrific acts of terrorism in Pakistani cities. Together they want to overthrow the state and establish an extremist Islamic system.

The Pakistani Taliban do not just kill police and soldiers in their barracks or even innocent civilians in mosques. On June 8 they launched a brazen attack on a convoy of trucks carrying NATO war materials for troops in Afghanistan in heavily populated northern Punjab—torching 50 vehicles. There is now talk of the Taliban shutting down Karachi port, where 80 percent of NATO supplies arrive. The public fear is that the army is losing control of the country as the extremists become ever stronger, ever more daring and ever more capable.

If local tribesmen even attempt collaboration with the state, deadly reprisals ensue. In the supposedly “Taliban-free” Mohmand Agency, people received U.S.-donated foodstuffs on July 8. The next day, while tribal elders gathered to discuss helping the army combat the Taliban, two suicide bombings killed over 100 people and wounded another 115.

Since 2004, the area has been hemorrhaging people. Out of a total population of 3.5 million, more than 1 million have fled the tribal agencies while another half a million left during the recent fighting only to become internally displaced refugees in nearby towns.

Amid the Pakistani Taliban, vicious Sunni sectarian groups prosper, galvanizing hatred of all minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The Ahmadi sect follows the teachings of a nineteenth-century religious reformer, promoting a peaceful variant of Islam. And yet in the 1970s, the Pakistani government declared the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority and many Pakistanis today view them as heretics to Islam. On May 28 in Lahore, upwards of nine gunmen and suicide bombers blasted their way into two mosques and killed 90 Ahmadis, wounding another 110. The other minority groups, whether they be Shia, Christian, Hindu or Sikh, have lived in even greater fear since.

The Christian community, which makes up less than 2 percent of the population, is already a target. In July 2009, eight Christians were burned alive in the small Punjab town of Gojra, and in riots that followed an entire Christian neighborhood was scorched. The 17 militants arrested for these crimes were not brought to trial, and the police, facing local pressure, later let them go. A year later, riots erupted again in Faisalabad, Punjab, after two Christians were killed while being held in police custody. Since then, any Christians who can have been seeking political asylum abroad in droves.

An even-worse fate has befallen Shia Muslims. Prominent Shia technocrats—politicians, doctors, architects, bureaucrats and judges—have been singled out for assassination in all major cities, while in December 2009, 43 Shias were massacred by Sunni extremists in Karachi.

Thus the Pakistani Taliban have a two-pronged offensive: the first is to politically undermine the state and its organs through terror; the second is to commit sectarian violence against all those they believe are not true Muslims. This intolerance has developed deep roots in Pakistan over the past three decades, and it has now been boosted by the jihadist policies of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The government’s inability to deal with sectarian threats has led to some Muslim groups arming themselves and taking the law into their own hands. This only leads to further loss of control by the state.

AS ISLAMIC extremist violence spreads, the very fabric of the country is falling apart. Mapping how widespread and varied the violence is gives but a hint of the disaster facing Pakistani society. Growing poverty, inflation and unemployment have led to an unprecedented increase in suicides—sometimes of entire families. One hundred ninety-one people killed themselves in the first six months of this year; at more than one death a day, it is one of the highest rates in the world. And when 113 of those happen in the country’s richest province (Punjab), it is obvious not a single Pakistani is surviving this unscathed—no matter how seemingly privileged. Violence against women is also on the rise; 8,500 violent incidents took place last year. One thousand four hundred of those were murders. Another 680 were suicides.

Freedom of information is quickly coming to a halt. Journalists receive regular threats if they do not report the statements of extremist groups, while extremist literature, newspapers and pamphlets continue to flood the market with no attempts by the state to stop them. And now leading electronics markets in major cities have been repeatedly bombed and shop owners warned to stop selling computers and TVs. Rather than combat the threat, the government has succumbed, closing down Facebook for three weeks starting in May and announcing that major web sites like Google and Yahoo will be censored for “anti-Islamic material.” This is shuttering a vibrant society and slowly turning a country that long strived for democratic openness into a closed state held hostage by radical Islam.

Meanwhile, the lack of services is creating its own anarchy. In Karachi, with a population of 18 million, violence is so endemic and its perpetrators so diverse that it is difficult to summarize. What we do know is that beyond Islamic extremism, the city is in the grip of heavily armed mafias and criminal gangs, who kill over control of water supplies, public transport, land deals and the drug trade. Car theft is rampant. The most lucrative business is kidnapping for ransom. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that there were 260 targeted killings in Karachi in the first six months of this year, compared to 156 last year. Eight hundred eighty-nine murders were reported in the same period. Because the city is the melting pot of the country, much of the violence is between ethnic groups who live in virtual ghettoes and compete for the scarce resources of the city.

Ethnic violence is translated into interparty political assassinations. The Muhajir-dominated Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) which rules Karachi is made up of Urdu-speaking migrants from India. They are in a bloody war with an MQM offshoot and in intense rivalry with the largest Pashtun secular political group (the Awami National Party) as well as with the majority Sindhi population. The Muhajirs blame the Pashtuns for introducing the Taliban to Karachi, and ethnic killings are multiplying; party workers of all groups are being targeted.

There is another civil war going on in Baluchistan Province between Baluch separatists and the army. A province long deprived of development, political freedom and revenue, this is the fifth insurgency by the Baluch tribes against the army since Pakistan’s founding. The ISI maintains that Indian agents based in Afghanistan and the Arabian Gulf states are arming and funding the Baluch. The insurgents launch ambushes and assassinations, and lay land mines every day. They have begun killing prominent non-Baluch who long ago settled in the province. School teachers, university professors and officials have proven the easiest targets—and this in a province that professes a literacy rate of only 37 percent (20 percent for women) compared to the national average of 54 percent. This summer Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that four separatist Baluch “armies” funded by India had forced 100,000 people to migrate from the province. Baluch militants killed 252 non-Baluch settlers from January to June of this year, also assassinating 13 army officers. The army in turn has brutalized Baluch society and several thousand young Baluch are said to be missing, presumed in prison and being tortured. The army’s insistence that the entire Baluch problem is caused by India and that the Baluch have no grievances of their own simply leads to further escalation of violence and further alienation of the population. The province erupted in days of riots and strikes after prominent Baluch nationalist leader Habib Jalib was gunned down in Quetta in mid-July.

The local justice system in Pakistan is in dire straits. Policemen, judges and lawyers are frequently intimidated by terrorist groups. Evidence is rarely collected against the arrested perpetrators of attacks, and either the police or judges release the suspects. If not, the terrorists are quite capable of freeing their own by force from jails, courthouses and hospitals. After the Ahmadi killings, terrorists attacked a hospital where one of their arrested comrades was being treated under heavy police guard. In June, terrorists attacked a Karachi courthouse, freeing four members of their group undergoing trial for the earlier massacre of 43 Shias in the city.

It is now a cliché to describe how a worsening economy and the lack of education and job opportunities have helped spawn Islamic extremism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Yet it is a trope worth repeating.

PAKISTAN’S GEOPOLITICAL assertiveness in the midst of all this chaos is a result of the military’s overwhelming power. It may be losing its hold on vast amounts of territory to the extremists, but it is taking control of Pakistan’s national security and foreign policy away from the government. As the country is now led by weak and widely considered to be incompetent and corrupt civilian rule with President Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of slain leader Benazir Bhutto, at the helm, the armed forces have found it relatively easy to carry out their own programs.

Following its election, the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) sought to reform the policies of the Musharraf era. This included improving relations with India, Iran and Afghanistan and ending Pakistan’s regional isolation. They failed.

Zardari’s overtures regarding India were rebuffed, not only by New Delhi, but also by the Pakistan army—such civilian initiatives are considered an encroachment on military territory. And the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai by Pakistani extremists paralyzed engagement with India for nearly two years. India accuses the ISI of having a direct role in the massacre, which Pakistan denies. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the massacre, has not been curbed.

The situation in Afghanistan isn’t much better. Although Zardari improved personal relations with President Hamid Karzai, it had little impact on the army’s posture—an anti-Karzai, anti-ruling-government strategy. Only recently has the army decided that with a U.S. troop withdrawal starting next year, Karzai and the Afghan Taliban need to be brought together. The Afghan Taliban leadership has had sanctuary and support from the military since its retreat into Pakistan in 2001. Though former-President George W. Bush never attempted to tackle this conundrum, President Barack Obama has privately acknowledged what must be done, trying hard to bring Kabul and Islamabad together. Certainly, any recent success can’t be chalked up to the civilian leadership in Pakistan. The army says it wants to see a stable and peaceful Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal, and to that end it is trying to promote talks between Karzai and the various factions of the Taliban. However, many Afghans remain suspicious of an army that wants an Afghanistan free of Indian influence.

Zardari and the PPP no longer make any moves that oppose the army’s foreign-policy aims. And over the past two years, a strident judiciary, at times backed by the military, has whittled away at the president’s power, trying repeatedly to undermine Zardari or force him to resign by resurrecting old corruption charges against him and by asserting its influence over the constitution—which is in fact Parliament’s prerogative. This judicial collision with parts of the government has further stymied the country’s reputation and put off aid donors and investors. It is destroying Pakistan’s democratic character. Making matters worse, the all-powerful General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has just received a three-year extension to his term as army chief. It was a move that stunned the country. Many Pakistanis concluded that this further reduced the power of civilian authority.

Political instability is precisely what Pakistan does not need. The country requires a sustained period of democracy under civilian governance—even if it is a bad, poorly functioning democracy. If Zardari is unpopular or ineffective, then he should be removed in the next election, not through a judicial or military coup.

FOR DECADES, a cyclical pattern of military rule followed by its collapse and replacement by elected but weak civilian governments has occurred. In time, they too fall—often with a prod from the ISI—and the military returns. Repeated military rule has resulted in the decline of political parties, the exile or execution of civilian leaders, their lack of experience or knowledge when they do come to power, and the unwillingness of young professionals to get involved in politics. The political class has seen no new blood for a generation.

The PPP suffers from all these problems and more. However, it remains the only national party in Pakistan, for it has support in all the provinces—Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the former North-West Frontier (now called Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa). Every other party, including the Pakistan Muslim League–N (the main opposition group), has degenerated. They are now nothing more than regional organizations representing local ethnicities or territories. Only the political alliance the PPP has forged in Parliament can claim to forward a national agenda; it includes regional parties belonging to all ethnic groups. If the government had the total support of the military and the judiciary, there would be a chance of greater stability and better policy options.

Despite the severe problems it faces, the PPP has accrued some political successes in which lie hope for the future. After much delay and procrastination, Parliament passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution in April 2010 that incorporates over 100 changes to the 1973 version of the document, virtually restoring it to its original form and doing away with authoritarian amendments made by successive military dictators.

From having a de facto presidential form of government under military rule, Pakistan has now reverted back to having a parliamentary form of government with the elected PPP Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as the chief executive. The amendment also introduces a new judicial commission to choose judges for the higher courts (justified surely, but it has unsurprisingly angered the judiciary and further prolonged the conflict between it and the PPP).

The amendment also grants an unprecedented degree of autonomy to the four provinces, increases decentralization, and brings many social subjects such as health care and education under provincial control for the first time. This has long been the demand of the three smaller provinces which have felt deprived by the concentration of wealth and power in Punjab. Now the government is giving an additional 10 percent of the federal tax take to the provinces under a new National Finance Commission Award. And Punjab made a rare sacrifice by giving part of its share to the poorer provinces. Over 70 percent of federal taxes now revert back to Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa. For the first time there is relative peace between the center and the periphery.

In an effort to continue these steps toward stability, the PPP has moved to give greater autonomy to the northern areas abutting China. This is especially remarkable because they are part of the territory involved in the Kashmir dispute between Islamabad and New Delhi. Because of the areas’ proximity to India, Pakistan has exercised control over the region, which has never had self-government. That is now changing.

What is still missing is a plan to bring the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—the seven tribal agencies—into the mainstream of governance. Currently this territory has considerable autonomy from Islamabad; the government of the former North-West Frontier Province has no jurisdiction over FATA. Instead, the area is ruled by the president and laws drafted by the British during the Raj. This has led to a power vacuum that has produced a terrorist safe haven. Even though the army claims to have a counterterrorism strategy for the area, it is a plan that cannot work until the army is willing to accept a political agenda that brings FATA under the central government’s control.

DESPITE THE incompetence of the government, the groundwork is now being laid for a genuine democratic dispensation through provincial autonomy, decentralization and the rebuilding of democratic institutions—theoretically making it more difficult for the army to seize power again.

If these steps are matched with equivalent advances in restoring economic stability, reviving local and foreign investment, combating terrorism and Islamic extremism on a nationwide basis, and modernizing the judicial and police systems, Pakistan has a far brighter future than is currently portrayed.

For now, a staggering foreign debt of $54 billion is crippling the country. An estimated growth rate of 4.1 percent for 2009–10 (a negligible improvement from last year’s 1.3 percent) means Pakistan is likely stuck in this financial quagmire. An energy crisis that leads to 14 hours a day of electricity cuts has crippled industry, farming and exports.

The irresponsible handling of the economy is only deepening the crisis. This year’s $38 billion budget has seen a 30 percent increase in military expenditures from last year. This clearly leaves little money for health and education. With 28 percent of the funds reserved for servicing foreign debt, nearly 60 percent of the budget is taken up by that and defense. The entire development pool of $9.2 billion is provided by foreign donors.

Pakistan needs financial aid desperately. Europe is extremely hostile to further bailouts of the country because it is well aware that the military is still spending more money arming itself against India than it is spending to fight the Taliban. On a recent trip to the European Union in Brussels, Prime Minister Gilani was sharply taken to task for his failure to provide good governance and greater transparency on how aid dollars are being utilized.

It is to the credit of the current U.S. administration that it sees and understands that progress is being made, and is providing both financial aid and political support to deepen these changes. For the first time, under the Kerry-Lugar bill, there is U.S. aid that is specifically earmarked for civilian rebuilding rather than military spending.

However, no real change is possible without a change taking place in the army’s obsessive mind-set regarding India, its determination to define and control national security, and its pursuit of an aggressive forward policy in the region rather than first fixing things at home.

It is insufficient for the army to merely acknowledge that its past pursuit of foreign-policy goals through extremist proxies has proven so destructive; it is also necessary for the army to agree to a civilian-led peace process with India. Civilians must have a greater say in what constitutes national security. Until that happens, the army’s focus on the threat from New Delhi prevents it from truly acknowledging the problems it faces from extremism at home.

The army’s track record shows that it cannot offer political or economic solutions for Pakistan. Indeed, the history of military regimes here shows that they only deepen economic and political problems, widen the social, ethnic and class divide, and alienate the country from international investment and aid.

Today there is much greater awareness among the Pakistani people that extremism poses a severe threat to the country and their livelihoods. There is also a much greater acceptance that ultimately civilian rule is better than military or mullah dictatorship. What is still lacking in the war against extremism, however, is a consistent and powerful message from both the government and the army that they will combat all terrorists—not just those who threaten their security. Pakistan’s selective approach to extremism has to end before it can defeat the problem and move on to become what its founders originally intended it to be.

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This article originally appeared in The National Interest

Tags: Afghanistan, Ahmadis, asif ali zardari, Bajaur, baluchistan, civil society, FATA, gilani, habib jalib, Hamid Karzai, ISI, Islam, Khyber, Kurram, Lashkar e Taiba, Mohmand, mqm, NATO, North Waziristan, NWFP, Orakzai, Pak army, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, PML (N), PPP, punjab, South Asia, south waziristan, Taliban, Terrorism

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The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s secret service, originally helped to build up and deploy the Taliban after Afghanistan descended into a bitter and fratricidal civil war between the mujahedeen who had prevailed over the Soviets and forced their withdrawal. Despite all of the reassurances from Pakistani politicians that the old ties are cut, the country is still pursuing an ambiguous policy in the region — at once serving as both an ally to the US and as a helper to its enemy.

There is plenty of new evidence to support this thesis. The documents clearly show that the Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan. The war against the Afghan security forces, the Americans and their ISAF allies is still being conducted from Pakistan.

The country is an important safe haven for enemy forces — and serves as a base for issuing their deployment. New recruits to the Taliban stream across the Pakistan-Afghan border, including feared foreign fighters — among them Arabs, Chechnyans, Uzbekis, Uighurs and even European Islamists.

According to the war logs, the ISI envoys are present when insurgent commanders hold war councils — and even give specific orders to carry out murders. These include orders to try to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai. For example, a threat report dated August 21, 2008 warned: “Colonel Mohammad Yusuf from the ISI had directed Taliban official Maulawi Izzatullah to see that Karzai was assassinated.”

Former Pakistan intelligence chief General Hamid Gul plays a prominent role in the ISI documents. After he left office, Gul came across in the Western media as a kind of propagandist for the Taliban. In the documents, Gul is depicted as an important source of aid to the Taliban and even, in one report, as “a leader” of the insurgents. One threat report from Jan. 14, 2008 claims that he coordinated the planned kidnapping of United Nations employees on Highway 1 between Kabul and Jalalabad.

The memos state that Gul ordered suicide attacks, and they also describe the former intelligence chief as one of the most important suppliers of weaponry to the Taliban. One report mentions a convoy of 65 trucks carrying munitions that Gul allegedly organized for the Taliban. Another claims the ISI delivered 1,000 motorcycles to the Haqqanis, a warlord family led by Sirajuddin Haqqani who — together with the Taliban and Hekmatyar — are among the three greatest opponents of Western forces in Afghanistan. Another mentions 7,000 weapons that were sent to the border province of Kunar, including Kalashnikovs, mortars and Strella rockets.

Still, even those who drew up the reports are uncertain of their veracity. This kind of uncertainty creeps up often in the documents. They reveal the great weakness of the US communications strategy.

Addressing the facets about Pakistan, White House official Rhodes responded: “The status quo is not acceptable, which is precisely why the United States had focused so much on this challenge. Pakistan is moving in the right direction, but more must be done. The safe havens for violent extremist groups within Pakistan continue to pose an intolerable threat to the United States, to Afghanistan and to the Pakistani people who have suffered greatly from terrorism. The Pakistani government — and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders and stay on the offensive against them.”

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This summary of the WikiLeaks document release originally appeared in Der Spiegel.

Tags: Afghanistan, Featured, hamid gul, Hamid Karzai, ISI, Maulawi Izzatullah, Mohammad Yusuf, Pakistan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Taliban

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