Operation Breakfast redux: Destabilizing of Pakistan
Feb 18, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By Pratap Chatterjee
Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the “enemy” to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids.
The computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters, whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting.
Far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, and no reporters dared to go, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky over remote villages had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: “The ball game is over.”
The campaign was called “Operation Breakfast”, and while it may sound like the Central Intelligence Agency’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named “Lunch”, “Snack” and “Supper” and they went under the collective label “Menu”. They were authorized by president Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) “Bamboo Pentagon”, a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.
Like President Barack Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity. “We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices,” Nixon said.
Return to the Killing Fields
In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy”, comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that US military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.
A more provocative – and perhaps more ominous – analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries”.
Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way. In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group of communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk – until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As the raids intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a US-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.
The grim end of that old story is well known.
Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snoul, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after seizing power in 1975.
Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living alone in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.
All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of US troops the following year. “We thought the Americans had come to help us,” said Choenung Klou. “But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women.”
He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. “They would stay at people’s houses, take our hammocks and food,” he said. “We didn’t like them and we were afraid of them.”
Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.
“If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion,” Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. “If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor.”
Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the US Embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.
The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.
Unraveling Pakistan
Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large. Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.
In the Afghan capital Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L’Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene’s quiet American, these “consultants” described a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.
At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilotless drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan. They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.
In 2009, on the orders of Obama, the US unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than president George W Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in intensity. By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if this time around no one is using the code phrase “the ball game is over”, Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be just over the horizon.
Tags: afghanistan, cia, Destabilizing of Pakistan, drone attacks, moosad, Operation Breakfast, Pakistan, Raw, US, USA, war on terror
The Dollar Bubble
Jan 26, 2010 Videos
The Dollar Bubble starring Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Jim Rogers, and others. Prepare now for the U.S. dollar collapse.
Tags: $, Dollar, dollar bubble, US economy, USA
Dr Mahathir Mohamad panned over statement
Jan 23, 2010 News & Events
The Star
PETALING JAYA: The statement by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad that the Sept 11 attack was “staged” could not come at a worse time when the nation is facing its own issues, says the Merdeka Centre.
Its director Ibrahim Suffian said Dr Mahathir’s statement did not help with the country’s image at a time of religious tension.
He said Dr Mahathir should know the difference between the fiction of Avatar and the reality of the attack that happened nine years ago.
“Conspiracy theories aside, people actually died in that suicide attack. Dr Mahathir’s statement is disrespectful to the victims for it to be described that way, with reference to a Hollywood movie,” he said yesterday.
Ibrahim said that as the founder of the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, Dr Mahathir should know the root causes of terrorism and point out what led him to draw such conclusions.
DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang in a statement said that Dr Mahathir would have created “an international incident” between Malaysia and the United States if he was still the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, Malaysian Assembly of Mosque Youth (Pemuda Masjid) de facto leader Dr Mohd Nawar Ariffin said more discussions should take place on the allegations made.
“Dr Mahathir is a prominent figure who contributed a lot to the country. Although the statement incites controversy, perhaps it should be taken positively as an encouragement for people to dig out the truth. He is known as an evidence-based person when making statements,” he said.
The statement also sparked a chain of reactions on the Internet with many blogging and tweeting on the issue.
On Wednesday, Dr Mahathir said there was strong evidence that the Sept 11 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 could have been “staged” as an excuse to mount attacks on the Muslim world.
“If they can make Avatar, they can make anything,” Dr Mahathir was quoted as saying.
The United States Embassy declined to comment on the matter.
Tags: cia, Dr Mahathir, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia, USA, war on terror
Shopping in Kabul: Life goes on in war zone capital
Jan 15, 2010 News & Events
KABUL: The security check at the entrance to a French restaurant in Kabul can be both cursory and confusing.
“Anybody got a weapon?” the guard asks as a small group crowds into a holding chamber — called a “cage” — before being admitted into the restaurant complex.
“Yes, I’ve got a gun,” says one man.
“OK,” says the guard, and waves everybody through.
A diner in the upmarket Heetal Plaza Hotel, meanwhile, might find a thickset man chomping a hamburger at the next table, with a large pistol in a holster on his hip.
But while Kabul is the capital of a country at war, it doesn’t always feel that way as the sun glints off distant snow-capped peaks and street life reflects a vibrancy uncowed by three decades of conflict.
Guns, guards and soldiers are everywhere.
But so are markets and shoppers, who risk their lives crossing chaotic roads crammed with everything from trotting donkey carts to smart four-wheel drives and menacing military vehicles.
In the labyrinth of dusty streets and back alleys, deep potholes determine the side of the road drivers choose to use, leading to skilful weaving of traffic which would do credit to an Afghan carpet-maker.
Walk through Chicken Street — of hippy-trail fame before the Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day 1979 — and it is possible to forget there is a war on.
Shops offering jewellery, furs, Afghan scarves and hats vie for attention alongside butchers and money changers plying their trades at stalls in the street itself.
Heavily bearded men in flowing, baggy clothes — wrapped in scarves and turbans against the nose-numbing cold — chat and make deals. But women are scarce.
Of the few who venture out, some wear the all-enveloping blue burqas derided in the West as symbols of the extreme subjugation of women under the former Taliban regime.
But many of them carry babies and beg, suggesting the face-concealing burqa may sometimes play a bigger role in hiding shame than in conforming to Taliban dress codes years after the Islamists were ousted by the US-led invasion in 2001.
Despite the threat of kidnap, whether by Taliban or criminal gangs, a brief stroll down Chicken Street by a Westerner is likely to be disturbed by little more than the enthusiastic attention of street urchins.
But the sudden roar of a fleet of military helicopters overhead is a reminder that Afghanistan has had little relief from conflict in the past 30 years.
Despite that, like urbanites around the world, many love their city.
“I’ve lived all my time in Kabul,” says Mohammad Siddique, 48, a driver for an international company who describes himself as “a living history” of the years of conflict.
“I saw a lot of war, but I never moved from Kabul, and I like my city.”
Doug Wankel, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration chief of operations, who lived in Kabul for two years before the Soviet invasion of 1979, returned in 2004 and has lived here ever since.
“I like the Afghan people, they are very strong, proud and independent. They make good friends and you can rely on them,” says Wankel, now managing partner of security firm Spectre Group International.
Windows in his home were blown out by the most recent suicide attack in Kabul, opposite the Heetal Plaza Hotel on December 15, which killed eight people and wounded 40 others.
“It’s a cost of doing business in Afghanistan — but it’s still worth it,” he told AFP.
Despite the devil-may-care attitude of Kabul’s citizens, they face a rapidly escalating war.
The number of civilians killed in the conflict jumped last year to 2,412, making 2009 the deadliest year for ordinary Afghans since the US-led invasion, the United Nations said.
Last year was also the deadliest for foreign forces fighting the Taliban, with 520 troop deaths, up from 295 for the year before, as the insurgency has escalated and spread.
But carnage is nothing new for Afghanistan and Kabul.
In the courtyard of the Gandamack Lodge, named after a battle in 1842, an ancient cannon stands as a reminder of Britain’s disastrous and bloody invasion of Afghanistan more than 150 years ago.
source dawn
Tags: Afghan, afghanistan, Kabul, Shopping in Afghanistan, Talibans, USA, war on terror
Yemen’s Most Wanted
Jan 11, 2010 Uncategorized
Rap sheet: As leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Wuhayshi has proven to be both a skilled politician and an innovative, often brutal, adversary. Once Osama bin Laden’s secretary, Wuhayshi is a member of the younger and more radical generation of Yemen’s al Qaeda cadres. In 2006, he broke out of a maximum-security prison, along with 22 other militants, in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa. In January 2009, he spearheaded the unification of al Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches under his control.
Rap sheet: Awlaki is ethnically Yemeni, but actually hails from New Mexico. As an imam, he preached in mosques throughout the United States, including in San Diego; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Washington, D.C. (While in San Diego, he was also arrested for soliciting prostitutes.) Technologically savvy, he also has a reputation as an “e-imam,” having created a popular website where he doled out advice and posted “sermons” to spread his radical views.
Rap sheet: Shehri, a Saudi, was captured in December 2001 in Pakistan, where he claimed to be providing humanitarian relief for Muslim refugees. He was subsequently transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, where the U.S. charges against him included “participat[ing] in military operations against the United States and its coalition partners,” as well as plotting to assassinate an unnamed writer.
Rap sheet: Raymi has been associated with al Qaeda in Yemen since well before the creation of AQAP, previously serving as deputy to Wuhayshi for its predecessor group al Qaeda in Yemen. In February 2006, he escaped prison as part of the same jailbreak that freed Wuhayshi. On June 21, 2007, Raymi released the audio statement that announced the formal re-establishment of al Qaeda in Yemen with Wuhayshi at its head. He has successfully evaded authorities ever since, most recently escaping a raid designed to capture him in the southern Abyan province last December.
Rap sheet: The Sanaa-born Mujali hails from a family of al Qaeda members: His younger brothers Arif and Yahya are also active in terrorist circles. Hizam Mujali was stopped at a checkpoint in 2003 and, while resisting arrest, shot and killed a Yemeni police officer. He was also part of the infamous 2006 prison break. However, he eventually turned himself back in to the Yemeni government, striking a deal that would allow him to keep his freedom on the condition that he did not rejoin al Qaeda. That condition appears to have recently been broken: The government targeted him in a raid it launched in Arhab Province this past December. Although they captured his brother Arif, Hizam managed to escape.
Tags: afghanistan, Al qaida, Black Water, cia, iran, Pakistan, terrorist, USA, war on terror, yemen
Secret US raids into Pakistan disclosed
Dec 22, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan
PRESSTV
Tue, 22 Dec 2009
A former NATO officer reveals clandestine US incursions into Pakistan as part of a secret war in the northwestern tribal region regularly hit by CIA drone attacks.
American special forces conducted multiple illegal raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas, which were never declared to the Pakistani government, the unnamed officer told the Guardian.
The incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involving helicopter-borne elite soldiers crossing the border in the night.
“The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn’t confirm officially with them,” he said.
The revelation comes amid growing anger in Pakistan against the CIA-led drone program that, according to local media, has killed many civilians in the lawless tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan, due to see an additional infiltration of 30,000 American soldiers shortly.
The US publicly acknowledged only one of the raids by its special forces in September 2008, prompting strong condemnation from Pakistan’s foreign office, which described it as “a grave provocation.” The military also threatened retaliatory action.
But the ex-NATO officer said that was the fourth raid of previous years, adding one of them was to rescue a crashed Predator drone because they did not trust Pakistani forces.
Washington has recently sent several senior officials to Islamabad to ask Pakistani officials for action against alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants in North Waziristan, and an expansion of CIA drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.
But Pakistan’s intelligence officials reject such requests and accuse the US of “scapegoating” Pakistan for its own failures in Afghanistan.
Tags: afghanistan, Balochistan, Black Water, cia, drone attacks, drone strike, Pakistan, Peshawar, US, USA, war on terror, Waziristan, XE
Will There Always Be a Pakistan?
Dec 16, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan, pakistan politics
BY SETH CROPSEY
Foreign Policy
As another 30,000 U.S. troops get set to deploy to war, most everyone in the White House and the Pentagon knows that the success of their mission won’t only be determined in Afghanistan. The most important battle is in fact next door in Pakistan, a country that, even more than Afghanistan, risks not just failure but utter collapse. The nuclear neighbor has become a haven for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, and its powerful military has been reluctant to take them on. Even when it has, its clumsy, heavy-handed tactics have displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. All the while, the elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari has only grown weaker.
But here’s the really bad news. Pakistan’s military — the lynchpin keeping the chaotic whole together — isn’t getting stronger. It’s threatening to fracture from within. And today’s fractures may well turn into tomorrow’s chaos.
Back in the mid-19th century, the British set out to create a secular, professional Indian army that would neutralize warring ethnic groups and tribes. Pakistan was part of India then, and its army remained secular after the partition in 1947. Officer clubs served liquor. Religion and ethnicity were not proper subjects of discussion. Muslim society was something that existed outside the military. Pakistan’s generals looked to standardized testing and merit-based promotion, drawing on modernity, not Islam, as a model for their professional army.
When Gen. Muhammed Zia ul-Haq overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, he had other ideas. Zia assumed the presidency in 1978 while still chief of staff of the Army — a position from which he encouraged greater religiosity in Pakistan’s armed forces as part of his broader Islamization of the state. Suddenly, military leaders were keeping tabs on which sects of Islam their soldiers belonged to. Members of radical Deoband and Wahhabi sects infused the military education system. Drinking at military clubs was forbidden, with a predictably chilling effect on camaraderie. Prayers once thought optional were strongly encouraged.
The author has wrongly translated the phrases used in the last paragraph of the article.
The authors translation “Pakistan na khappay”, or “Pakistan no longer exists.” and “Pakistan khappay” — “Pakistan does exist.” are wrong
the right translations are as under:
Pakistan na khappay – Pakistan not needed or we don’t need Pakistan
Pakistan khappay in English is Pakistan is needed or we do need Pakistan.
These slogans seem probably led the author to make a such title to this article but author has used wrong translations…..
Some of this was merely a product of the times; Zia’s opposition to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, for instance, was largely predicated on the religious fervor of the Afghan resistance. But Zia’s Islamizing policies within the Army were more deliberate. Whether motivated by piety or political calculation, he reopened the fissures within the contemporary Pakistani military that British colonial policy had never wholly succeeded in papering over. Indeed, when Zia died in a 1988 plane crash, the Islamization of the military and its most powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), continued. By the time Pervez Musharraf tried to return the military to its more secular roots as Army chief of staff, the trend was already too strong to reverse.
In 1999, Musharraf removed from power Nawaz Sharif, who had been re-elected to a second term as prime minister. His coup reinforced Pakistan’s history as a military-run state, and 10 years later, the risk of a coup still looms. Meanwhile, the wave of officers who were recruited during Zia’s Islamizing years is moving into the leadership ranks. The youngest of them are now field-grade officers. Signs are emerging that this is far from a unified military, with widening splits between secular and religious officers as well as problems among different Islamic sects. With official encouragement, for example, some Sunni officers have decided to grow out their beards, while Shiite officers are markedly absent from Sunni-led prayers.
In Pakistan, all this means more than just a troubled fighting force. The Army is rightly seen as the country’s strongest institution — the glue that holds the state together. Though not officially in power, the military has a strong hold over the civilian government and retains de facto veto power over much that gets done. If infighting weakens or shatters the military’s cohesion, the implications for the future of the state itself are dire.
First, such events would be great news to Islamists looking to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nukes are even more likely to see action if a military officer seized power and invaded Indian-held Kashmir, the territory that both Islamabad and New Delhi claim as their own. Such aggression might lead to a nuclear exchange with India, the country’s long-time rival and fellow nuclear state. The fallout, both literal and political, would be felt deep into Central Asia; indeed much of the region would be destabilized. India’s economic progress would be set back significantly, perhaps by decades, and the nuclear threshold will have been crossed.
A less apocalyptic (though still very bad) outcome would be for Pakistan’s paranoia about India to reach fever pitch. Islamabad has long suspected that the rise of the Northern Alliance, the mostly Tajik and Uzbek coalition that helped eject the Taliban from Kabul, or another anti-Islamabad political group in Afghanistan could be a boost to New Delhi. (India is playing a nasty game of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ the Pakistani leadership reckons.) Pakistan is already backing a host of violent groups in Afghanistan, and further meddling could destabilize the surrounding Central Asian states.
Or, there is the prospect of ethnic, sectarian, and geographic implosion. Pakistan’s sense of nationhood is tenuous at best. In the military, Punjabis predominate in the enlisted ranks while Pashtuns and Mujahirs fill most officer posts. The few Sindhis and Baluchis who are national leaders (such as President Zardari, a Sindhi) are the exception rather than the rule. The North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the regions along the border with Afghanistan, resemble the worst drug-infested, gang-ridden parts of American cities — except that the Pakistani authorities have largely abandoned any pretense at control. It’s a nebulous group of ungoverned spaces held together by a center that itself is now fragmenting. When that gives way, it could launch the kind of tribal bloodletting and ethnic or religious strife that strategic forecasts and white papers around the world routinely posit.
Meanwhile, the Army itself is under attack. Punjab-based jihadi groups, often referred to as the Punjabi Taliban, recently claimed responsibility for attacking the Army’s general headquarters in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s equivalent of the Pentagon. Jihadi groups operating out of Punjab have traditionally focused on Kashmir and sectarian issues, so their willingness to target the center of Pakistan’s political gravity — as well as its most important source of military leadership — is unsettling.
In their coldest light, these attacks show the intensification and turning-inward of the struggle for the very character of the Pakistani state. The divisions pulling Pakistan apart at the seams are the same ones reflected in the military — and neither set shows promising signs of resolution.
Pakistanis understand these dangers. When Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, was assassinated in Rawalpindi two years ago, rioters in Sindh chanted Pakistan na khappay, or “Pakistan no longer exists.” Zardari, her husband, tried to quiet the crowd, telling them Pakistan khappay – “Pakistan does exist.” He was right. For the moment.
PAKISTAN KHAPPE
Tags: afghanistan, cia, ISI, obama, Pakistan, Pakistan Khappe, USA, war, war on terror
US to expand drone attacks into Pakistani cities
Dec 15, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan, pakistan politics
PressTv
15, December, 2009
After confirmation that the CIA has been operating drone strikes in Pakistani territory, a new report says the US is seeking to expand the attacks into the country’s cities.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that top US officials were pushing to expand the air strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into the major city of Quetta to allegedly target the Taliban.
Although the US and Pakistan have long been denying that the drones were taking off from Pakistani soil, the CIA confirmed on Saturday that US security contractor Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, has been helping the agency to launch the attacks from within Pakistan.
CIA spokesman George Little quoted spy agency Director Leon Panetta as saying that US has been launching the attacks from secret airfields in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The new revelations also contradicted earlier US assertions that the notorious private security company does not operate in Pakistan.
Beside that, the Islamabad government and Blackwater itself had denied that the company was operating in the country.
The US claims that main Taliban leaders including Mullah Mohammed Omar fled to Pakistan’s Quetta after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Last month, a Pakistani military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas rejected the presence of the Taliban leadership in Quetta, saying that US officials are making such claims just to cover their failures in Afghanistan.
The administration of President Barack Obama who has intensified the attacks in Pakistan says the raids are to target militants but local Pakistani media say that civilians are the main victims.
New US aircraft strikes in Quetta city with population of 850,000 under the pretext of targeting the Taliban could sharply increase civilian fatalities.
If drone attacks, now confined to small villages, were to be mounted in a sizable city, the death rate of innocent bystanders would probably increase, the report concluded.
Tags: Barack Obama, Blackwater, cia, drone, drone attacks, FBI, obama, Pakistan, Peshwar bombings, Quetta, Talibans, USA, war, war on terror
America behind Blasts in Pakistan!
Dec 15, 2009 Uncategorized
Time to Wake up!
Tags: nuke, Pakistan, taliban, USA, war on terror
Who’s to blame for attacks in Pakistan?
Nov 25, 2009 News & Events, Pakistan
In a surprising move, the Pakistani Taliban has denied responsibility for the recent attacks in Pakistan. Instead, they blame Xe Services as well as the country’s own security forces. Author and investigative journalist Webster Tarpley gives his take on the situation.
Tags: attacks, Blackwater, blame, cia, moosad, Pakistan, Raw, taliban, USA, war on terror, Webster Tarpley, XE
