A fatwa vs. suicide bombings
Mar 12, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
There has never been a shortage of fatwas. These legal rulings or opinions made by religious authorities address a wide array of issues concerning politics and social norms, and have both justified and widely condemned the use of violence. In 1998, Al Qaeda ideologues Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a fatwa “to kill the Americans and their allies.”
However, since then, a number of imams and scholars have issued fatwas against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In November 2008, for example, more than 6,000 Muslim clerics in India signed a fatwa against terrorism, following a similar edict issued earlier in the year by India’s top Islamic institution Darul Uloom Deoband.
Most recently, Dr. Tahir ul-Qadri, a Pakistani Barelvi Muslim scholar, issued a 600-page global ruling against terrorism and suicide bombing, which provides a point-by-point theological rebuttal “of every argument used by Al-Qaeda inspired recruiters.” Although many scholars have released similar fatwas in the past, Dr. Qadri, the founder of Minhaj al-Quran International, “argued that his massive document goes much further by omitting ‘ifs and buts’ added by other thinkers,” noted the BBC.
According to the 80-page summary of the edict:
Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri goes that crucial step forward and announces categorically that suicide bombings and attacks against civilian targets are not only condemned by Islam, but render the perpetrators totally out of the fold of Islam, in other words, to be unbelievers.
The fatwa has garnered much press attention among western news outlets, such as Fox News, CNN, and the Washington Post. But while many have celebrated the release of a religious decree grounded in Islamic jurisprudence and history, others remain doubtful of its actual impact on potential young suicide bombers. While Minhaj al-Quran International is active in 70 countries and has 5,000 members in the UK, Qadri is considered to be relatively liberal and tolerant. Therefore, the people that would follow and accept his fatwa are unlikely to be the same as those susceptible to being recruited by Islamist militant groups.
Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC, further emphasised, “The Sunni religious authority, as distinct from the Shi’a religious authority, is fragmented. So there’s not one figure who can issue a fatwa that every Sunni will listen to.” While Ahmed noted that any fatwa of this kind is important, the problem we are facing with suicide bombers “is that they are not from the same class [as moderate scholars like Qadri]. These young recruits respond much more to their own imams and preachers.”
No one questions the airtight credibility of Qadri’s text. But the issue we should raise is not whether the fatwa will have an impact, but how to ensure that it does. Fatwas or edicts of this kind can be influential if they are implemented in a culturally nuanced way, using language that can be understood by the intended target audience. In other words, if militant recruiters are using drone strikes to vilify the United States or the Pakistani government, countering this ideology requires messaging that takes similar realities into consideration. Although Qadri’s fatwa is based in exhaustive academic research, most young jihadists won’t take the time to sift through 600 pages in their decision-making.
Qadri may not be a universally accepted figure, but his text can be used as the focal point for a strategic communications campaign geared towards countering militancy and terrorism. This fatwa will only have the intended effect if local imams and religious leaders from various sects endorse and adapt it for their nuanced communities – applying Qadri’s language and framing it within the ground realities.
Madrassa leaders more open to reform can incorporate the fatwa’s text into their curriculum. Imams of local mosques can use the fatwa’s framing of terrorists as today’s Khawārij in their sermons, subsequently making it digestible for the public. Rather than simply shutting down jihadist chat rooms, intelligence agencies can create pop-up ads using language from the fatwa to vilify and undermine militant ideology. Pamphlets, billboard ads, and radio spots can be other potential mediums.
We are well-aware that Islam is a religion of peace, that it has been hijacked by militant and terrorist organisations to justify violence and intolerance against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The question, therefore, is how do we use that knowledge to make a tangible difference?
Ultimately, Qadri’s 600-page fatwa has its limitations, and could very likely end up on the metaphorical shelf, gathering dust. But this airtight research could instead be used to enforce a more localised and nuanced campaign that could have a more strategic impact.
Tags: Fatwa, suicide bombings, Swat, taliban, war on terror
U.S – NATO Offensive Unravels in Afghanistan: The Longest Foreign War in U.S. History
Mar 11, 2010 afghan war
Global Research, March 8, 2010
The Pentagon offensive against the Afghan city of Marjah was public-relations media hype from the very first day. The sole purpose of the offensive in Marjah was to convince the U.S. population and increasingly tepid NATO allies that this imperialist war is winnable.
U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now the longest foreign war in U.S. history, on both the air and the ground. The Pentagon described the Marjah offensive as the biggest military operation in more than eight years of occupation, but now calls it a prelude to a larger assault on the city of Kandahar.
In U.S. counterinsurgency warfare, such an offensive means dropping heavily armed troops in an area seeking to draw enemy fire. The troops then call in air support, long-range artillery fire, machine-gun fire, rockets, white phosphorous bombs and anti-personnel bombs. The latter cover the ground with bomblets that emit thousands of razor-sharp fragments.
Tens of thousands of civilians were driven from the villages of Helmand Province, and the town of Marjah was partially evacuated. But thousands of Afghans were unwilling to leave their homes and animals in the cold of winter for the hunger, instability and flimsy shelter of refugee camps. Many are too poor to leave. They ended up as targets of Pentagon weapons.
The Marjah offensive’s stated goal was to introduce a ready-made, U.S.-created local regime, staffed by an Afghan puppet administration totally dependent on U.S. power. With cynical and racist arrogance, NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “We got a government in a box ready to roll in.” (New York Times, Feb. 12)
Afghan casualties unrecorded
Throughout this war, the Pentagon and corporate media have never counted and scarcely mentioned Afghan civilian deaths, injuries and trauma from bombings, fires and destruction. Tens of thousands more die of starvation, cold and infections in crowded refugees camps, swollen cities and isolated villages.
During the U.S. offensive in Marjah, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached the milestone of 1,000. This total confirms that youth are paying the price of the lack of education and job opportunities in the U.S. In addition, suicides among returning soldiers now exceed combat deaths and injuries are about four times the deaths.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point warned of sharp increases in U.S. troop casualties in the months ahead. “What I want to do is signal that this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect.” (Army Times, Jan. 7)
As the two-week offensive officially ended in Marjah, bombs exploded in one of the most secure areas of Kabul. Some reporters described it as a sophisticated and well-coordinated operation in the heavily guarded capital. A car bomb targeted housing of employees from countries connected to the occupation, apparently with the aim of undermining international support for the Afghan war.
During the offensive came the announcement on Feb. 21 that the Netherlands coalition government had fallen apart, due to heated opposition of a coalition party to keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. This sealed the planned withdrawal of 2,000 Dutch troops from NATO forces in Afghanistan, as of next August.
The Netherlands was the first NATO member to announce that it is quitting. The announcement was a big setback for the U.S. and NATO, and has prompted wide media speculation of other possible NATO withdrawals from the deeply unpopular war.
A Los Angeles Times editorial on Feb. 24 stated that the Dutch “withdrawal is likely to raise concerns about a fracturing of the international commitment to Afghanistan, and about the Afghan government’s ability to provide security in the long term . … The Dutch decision should serve as a warning to the Obama administration.”
The majority of the people in almost all the NATO countries opposes the war and wants their troops out. This has become a major issue in domestic politics and elections in many countries. Canada has announced the withdrawal of its forces by the summer of 2011.
Anti-war mood undermines NATO militarism
Following the Dutch announcement, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech at the National Defense University told NATO officers and officials that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader goals. “The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment. … Right now the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.” (New York Times, Feb. 24)
Gates also reminded NATO officials that, not counting U.S. forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were scheduled to increase to 50,000 this year — from 30,000 last year.
The total 43-country International Security Assistance Force, including U.S. soldiers, is presently at 140,000 troops in Afghanistan.
As journalist Rick Rozoff summed up a year ago: “The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the 60 years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and 12 other European and Caucasus nations linked to NATO. …
“The 12 European NATO partners who have sent troops in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent’s five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The European NATO and partnership deployments count among their number troops from six former Soviet Republics — with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic states … including airbases and troop and naval deployments in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean (where the Japanese navy has been assisting).” (rickrozoff.wordpress.com, March 25, 2009)
Military units from Australia, New Zealand, Jordan, Colombia and South Korea are also stationed in Afghanistan.
Afghans have a right to resist
Despite all these occupation forces, Afghanistan has become an imperialist quagmire with no stability, no security and no end in sight.
The resistance in Afghanistan has gained ground and broad support as it becomes clear to the whole population that U.S./NATO forces have brought only racist arrogance, corruption, repression and greater poverty. While occupation forces label all resistance as terrorism and Taliban-inspired, increasingly Afghans see resistance as a right and a patriotic or religious duty. It is essential in the period ahead that the anti-war movement supports the right of the Afghan people to resist this criminal occupation and increases the effort to bring all troops home now.
Tags: afghan war, afghanistan, cia, Marjah, U.S. History, war, war on terror
American Al Qaeda terrorist Adam Gadahn arrested, Pakistan claims
Mar 8, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
Pakistani officials claimed Sunday they nabbed Adam Gadahn, the treasonous Californian Al Qaeda leader who has long been on Washington’s most wanted list.
But high-level U.S. officials said they could not verify the report – and there were growing indications it could be a mixup.
President Obama did not mention what would be a welcome blow against terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden when he made a statement to reporters about the Iraqi election yesterday. He ignored a shouted question about Gadahn.
“We are checking with Pakistani authorities to confirm one way or the other,” said FBI spokesman William Carter.
A Pakistani official told Agence France-Presse that “we thought it could have beena big catch, but it appeared it’s not Gadahn.”
The confusing swirl of reports began in Karachi, where The Associated Press and several news outlets quoted Pakistani officials announcing the arrest of Bin Laden’s American mouthpiece.
An English-language paper ran a photo of a man said to be Gadahn being taken away with a bag on his head. Later reports suggested the arrested man might not be Gadahn but a Taliban commander with a similar name.
Gadahn, 31, is the first American to be charged with treason since World War II. If convicted, he would face the death penalty.
Stories about Gadahn’s arrest came just hours after he appeared in a new Internet video urging American Muslims to go on shooting sprees like Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s at Fort Hood, Tex., last year.
Gadahn’s arrest would be the latest in a series of successes in the new partnership between Pakistan’s once-balky intelligence services and the CIA.
Known in Al Qaeda videos as “Azzam the American” or Azzam al-Amereeki, Gadahn was born in Oregon to a Jewish family.
His hippie father converted to Christianity before his son was born, changing the family name from Pearlman to Gadahn, after an Old Testament warrior.
Adam Gadhan was home-schooled in Southern California on a goat farm without running water. Once an avid fan of Death Metal music, he converted to Islam at 17 and moved to Pakistan in 1998 at 20.
Intelligence officials say he joined up with Al Qaeda after 9/11 and attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
By 2004, he was a senior Al Qaeda operative and became Bin Laden’s top propagandist, appearing in numerous Internet videos calling for the destruction of America. In a 2008 video he tore up his U.S. passport on camera and urged Americans to launch domestic terrorist attacks.
He is believed to report directly to Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Gadahn was branded a traitor in 2006 by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, Calif. He would be tried in a federal court, like California native John Walker Lindh and ex-Chicago gang member Jose Padilla.
With James Gordon Meek in Washington
Tags: Adam Gadahn, afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Gadahn arrested, Pakistan, Qaeda terrorist Adam Gadahn, terrorist, war on terror
A U.S.-Trained Pakistani Is Said to Support the Taliban
Mar 4, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: March 4, 2010
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.
A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.
In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Despite Pakistan’s recent arrest of several high-level Taliban commanders, men like Colonel Imam sit at the center of the questions that linger around what Pakistan’s actual intentions are toward the Taliban.
American and NATO officials suspect that retired officers like Colonel Imam have served as a quasi-official bridge to Taliban leaders and their rank and file as well as other militant groups.
Now retired, Colonel Imam (his real name is Brig. Sultan Amir) lives in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, just yards from the Pakistani Army headquarters.
In the interviews, Colonel Imam denied any continued link to the Taliban. But he admitted that some “freelancers” — meaning former Pakistani military or intelligence officials — might still be assisting the insurgents.
If Colonel Imam personifies the double edge of Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban, he also embodies the deep connection Pakistan has to the Afghan insurgents, and possibly the key to controlling them.
Once a promising protégé for the United States, he underwent Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1974, learning in particular the use of explosives, and he went on to do a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division.
On his return to Pakistan, he taught insurgent tactics to the first Afghan students who fled the country’s Communist revolution in 1978, among them future resistance leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Masood. He then worked closely with the C.I.A. to train and support thousands of guerrilla fighters for the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Army throughout the 1980s.
Once the Soviets were pushed out, the Taliban emerged and Colonel Imam, then serving as a Pakistani consular official in Afghanistan, provided critical support to their bid to rule the country, Western officials said.
By his own account, he was so close to the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, that he visited him in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and left only when the American bombing campaign began later in 2001. He says he has not returned since. His parting advice to Mullah Omar, he said, was to fight on, but stick to guerrilla tactics.
Today, Colonel Imam speaks highly of the Americans he worked with. But he predicts failure for the United States in Afghanistan. While his views are clearly colored by his ardor for the Taliban cause, they also carry the weight of someone who knows his subject well.
The Taliban cannot be defeated, he said, and they will not be weakened by the recent capture of senior commanders, including the No.2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The Taliban movement is so devolved, he said, that commanders on the ground make most of their own decisions and can raise money and arrange for weapons supplies themselves.
“The Taliban cannot be forced out, you cannot subjugate them,” he said. “But they can tire the Americans. In another three to four years, the Americans will be tired.”
He criticized President Obama’s decision last year to send more American troops into Afghanistan. “They are doing what you should never do in military strategy, reinforcing the error,” he said.
“They will have more convoys, more planes, more supply convoys, and the insurgents will have a bigger target,” he added. “The insurgents are very happy.”
The plan by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, to win over the Afghan people while pressing the Taliban militarily could have worked in 2003 or 2004, when the Taliban were weak and had less support, but now the Taliban had a presence in virtually every province, he said.
He also said the idea of paying members of the Taliban to change sides would not work and only bogus figures would come forward. “It is shameful for a superpower to bribe,” he said.
Meanwhile, he has nothing but praise for Mullah Omar, who is suspected of hiding in Pakistan today. Of all the thousands of men he trained, he said, religious students like Mullah Omar were the most “formidable” opponents because of their commitment.
The Taliban had been tainted in recent years by bad characters joining the movement and committing crimes, and Mullah Omar was now cracking down on them, he said.
He pointedly criticized the Pakistani Taliban who turned to fight the Pakistani Army in Swat last year and unleashed a wave of bombings in Pakistan’s cities. They were “troublemakers” that should be “neutralized,” he said.
Yet for Afghanistan, the solution was to negotiate with the Taliban leadership, he said. Mullah Omar wants peace and is capable of compromise, he said.
He was also the only leader who could keep Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan or in abeyance, including Osama bin Laden, he said. Mullah Omar’s popular support was such that Mr. bin Laden would have to listen, he said.
Mullah Omar had refused to hand over Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, in 2001 because he calculated that if he did, it would be only the first of many demands placed on him, he said.
Tags: afghanistan, taliban, war, war on terror
Pakistan Has Caught More Taliban Than You Think
Feb 25, 2010 Pakistan, pakistan politics
FP
Since Oct. 7, 2001, when the first U.S. B-52 bombers began bombarding Taliban installations around Kabul, the United States and its allies have been waiting for Pakistan to demonstrate its sincerity in the war being fought on Afghan soil. The arrest of nine Taliban militants in the Pakistani city of Karachi, including the Afghan Taliban’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, may indicate a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s relations with the NATO states fighting in Afghanistan.
Despite former President Pervez Musharraf’s repeated public commitment to the war on terror, the U.S. intelligence community has remained wary of its Pakistani interlocutors — the military and the mighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s main spy agency — because of their longstanding complicity with Afghanistan’s Taliban factions. Its suspicions kept falling on the ISI for allegedly protecting Afghan Taliban leaders such as Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the eldest son of veteran jihadist leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.
The arrest of Baradar, known as the Taliban’s master strategist, might put an end to these rumors. This success was followed by a deluge of arrests of other Taliban and jihadi leaders, likely on evidence provided by Baradar. These include Ameer Muawiya, an associate of Osama bin Laden responsible for foreign al Qaeda militants in Pakistan’s border areas, and Akhunzada Popalzai, also known as Mohammad Younis, a former Taliban shadow governor in Afghanistan’s southern Zabul province and ex-police chief of Kabul. Earlier this week, the Pakistani police also picked up Maulvi Kabir, a former governor of Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, from a town about 20 kilometers east of Peshawar.
Pakistan also captured a number of other significant figures in the raid that netted it Baradar. Others captured in Karachi include Hamza, a former Afghan army commander in Helmand province during Taliban rule; Abu Riyad al-Zarqawi, a liaison with Chechen and Tajik militants in Pakistan’s border area; and Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mohammad, former shadow governors for Kunduz province and Baghlan province, respectively.
The arrest of over a dozen key Taliban commanders amounts to a serious blow to the insurgency in Afghanistan. Intriguingly, while Pakistani officials claim Baradar was captured in Karachi, some sources insist the arrest took place several days earlier in Baluchistan, the Pakistani southwestern province along the border with Afghanistan. But regardless of where Baradar was picked up, the utility of the intelligence gained from his capture and the motives of Pakistan in going after the Afghan Taliban, this development is significant in many ways.
First, Baradar has become the latest in a long string of Taliban stalwarts captured by Pakistani and U.S. authorities. The ISI, possibly working in conjunction with the CIA, was responsible for the killing of key Taliban commanders Mullah Dadullah and Akhtar Mohammad Osmani in 2006. The 2007 arrest of Mullah Obaidullah, the former Taliban defense minister and Baradar’s predecessor, was also apparently the result of a joint operation — not so different from the arrest, in 2003, of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. The expanding list of Pakistani successes underscores the ever-increasing army-to-army cooperation and intelligence sharing between the two countries.
Intelligence officials in Islamabad also point to the Feb. 17 drone strike in North Waziristan as further evidence of growing intelligence cooperation between the United States and Pakistan. The attack killed Muhammad Haqqani, the 30-year-old son of Jalaluddin Haqqani and the younger brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is leading the Haqqani network in the area. U.S. officials have long accused Pakistan of protecting the Haqqanis, and this strike could be proof that the two allies are increasingly on the same page on this issue.
Perhaps the most important reason for the improved ties between these two allies is the personal rapport that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen and Centcom chief Gen. David Petraeus have cultivated with Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani and the head of the ISI, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
Since assuming his position as Army Chief from Musharraf in November 2007, Kayani has quietly endeavored to distance himself from his predecessor, relieving Musharraf’s allies of sensitive duties and charting a new course in the Army’s relationship with the United States. He has increasingly provided U.S. military commanders with operational details and critical information concerning regional developments.
Tags: Af Pak, afghanistan, cia, Kiyani, Mullah Obaidullah, obama, Pak Army, Pakistan, taliban, war on terror
Holbrooke Says al-Qaeda to Attack Central Asia
Feb 22, 2010 News & Events, war on terror
Roman Kozhevnikov
Reuters
February 21, 2010
Al Qaeda aims to infiltrate Central Asia to train militants and turn the ex-Soviet region into a zone of unrest, a U.S. envoy said on Saturday.
The West is worried about risks to stability in the vast Muslim region, dominated by authoritarian but secular governments. Analysts believe Islamist militancy could spread into the heart of Central Asia from nearby Afghanistan.
U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke is on a blitz tour of the five “stans” of Central Asia.
“I think the real threat in this region is less from the Taliban but from al Qaeda, which trains international terrorists,” he said on a visit to Tajikistan.
Tags: Al-Qaeda, Central Asia, Holbrooke, war on terror
Three Huge Ways Pakistan Still Isn’t Cooperating
Feb 20, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
FP | BY DAVID KENNER | FEBRUARY 18, 2010
The capture of Mullah Baradar doesn’t change the fact that, on many important security issues, the United States and Pakistan still don’t see eye to eye.
The dramatic news of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s capture has revived a long-dormant spirit of optimism regarding the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan. Eager for a clear-cut victory after the country’s slow-motion collapse during the past five years, many hoped that the arrest of Baradar, Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s top deputy, would not only be a turning point for the NATO war effort in Afghanistan, but would also usher in a new era of cooperation with Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
In the New York Times‘ article on Baradar’s capture, the paper referred to unnamed Americans who think Pakistani officials, most notably Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, “have gradually come around to the view that they can no longer support the Taliban in Afghanistan … without endangering themselves.” Baradar’s arrest was evidence of a “sea change in Pakistani behavior,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official, told the Times.
Not so fast. The circumstances surrounding Baradar’s capture are still murky, making it difficult to extract any meaning from the Pakistani decision to arrest the Taliban leader. And even if U.S. and Pakistani interests overlapped in the case of Baradar, there are still a slew of outstanding issues between the two countries that appear no closer to resolution.
“The basic problem is that there are things we don’t know about this operation, and that we will probably never know,” says Teresita Schaffer, director of the South Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The most optimistic explanation is that the ISI thinks the Afghan Taliban has become a threat to its interests in Pakistan, and has decided to move against the group. But Schaffer also floated another, less cheerful, possibility: Baradar, as suggested by this Newsweek profile, is more open to negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government than some of the Taliban hierarchy’s hard-line members. The ISI could have arrested him in a bid to thwart negotiations meant to assimilate the Afghan Taliban back into Afghanistan’s political fold, which would likely cost Pakistan its influence as the group’s patron. In other words, given the information available to the public, the Pakistanis could have arrested Baradar with the hopes of halting Taliban attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan — or they could have arrested him in an attempt to continue those attacks.
Even assuming that Baradar’s arrest is a step in the right direction, there remains a long list of issues on which the United States and the Pakistani military do not see eye to eye. The most obvious is the Haqqani network, which operates out of North Waziristan and has become one of the most lethal threats to NATO forces in Afghanistan. Although General Kayani has shown a willingness to go after Taliban operatives in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. requests to take on Haqqani operatives to the north. For years, U.S. officials have accused the ISI of maintaining links to tribal patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani. In one particularly blunt message delivered in 2008, CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes traveled to Islamabad to tell the Pakistanis, “[W]e know there’s a connection … and we think you could do more and we want you to do more about it,” as summarized by a senior American official to the New York Times. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also stated publicly that Pakistan’s ties to the Haqqani network, as well as other extremist groups in the tribal areas, “are a real concern to us.” The ISI is thought to maintain its ties to Haqqani because it perceives his organization as a valuable asset in countering Indian influence in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s fixation with India has also led the country to sponsor Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a paramilitary group focused on forcing India out of Kashmir. The United States designated LeT as a terrorist organization in December 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks; under Western pressure, then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf also banned the group in 2002. Nevertheless, LeT reconstituted itself as Jamaat-ud-Dawa and continued to plan and carry out attacks against Indian interests, culminating in the spectacular November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. The Mumbai massacre raised to a fever pitch Western and Indian calls for Pakistan to crack down on the organization. “Pakistan has restricted the aboveground organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, but not to a significant degree,” notes Stephen Tankel, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the forthcoming Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba. “They can operate under different names, and they continue to raise funds.”
Tags: Af Pak, DAVID KENNER, FP, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Mullah Baradar, Pakistan, war on terror
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
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Captured in Pakistan
Feb 17, 2010 News & Events
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 16, 2010
During a discussion on Fox News about “mirandizing” Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab after the Christmas non-bombing, the corporate media appointed leader of the Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck, said POWs captured in Afghanistan should be shot in the head. See the video:
Beck was, needless to say, a little confused. He said the U.S. had captured the second most important member of al-Qaeda today. In fact, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, second within the Afghanistan Taliban only to the group’s leader Mullah Omar, was captured near Karachi about ten days ago. Of course, there is a big difference between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not that we should expect Beck — or for that matter the corporate media — to notice the difference. Beck said Baradar should be tortured and then shot in the head. Isn’t this what the Nazis did to POWs and the resistance in countries they invaded and occupied? “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely,” states the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. But then neocons like Beck have nothing but contempt for the Geneva Convention. Translated, the French term hors de combat means a soldier who is incapable of performing a military function. Baradar was arrested in a slum in the Pakistani city of Karachi. He was not on the battlefield and not engaged in a military function at the time of his capture. Many are speculating that Baradar was not captured but rather surrendered (see video below). Of course, for Beck and the neocons — and Beck is indeed a neocon, not a constitutionalist or patriot — the facts surrounding Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar are irrelevant. He should be tortured and then promptly shot in the head.
The second in command of the Taliban was captured or turned himself in to agents working for Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA, two intelligence organizations that collaborated to create the Taliban. According to Newsweek, Baradar was far less militant than his comrades. “Baradar is consistently described as more open, more consultative, more consensus-oriented, and more patient than Omar. Taliban operatives say he’s less mercurial and more willing to hear different views rather than act on hearsay, emotion, or strict ideology,” Ron Moreau wrote on July 29, 2009. “His influence among the insurgents — and with Mullah Omar — is unmatched, and he’s not as close-minded as many of the leaders in Quetta are.”
Does not matter. Beck would have him tortured and then shot in the head.
Baradar is essentially a creation of the ISI-CIA collaboration in Afghanistan. He studied in the same madrassa as Omar — a religious school organized by the ISI and CIA (the latter provided militant Islamic textbooks and more) and lavishly funded by the Saudis — and they fought together against the Soviets in Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski’s brutal covert war back in the 1980s.
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Brzezinski infamously responded when asked about his war crime. Brzezinski’s vendetta against the Soviet Union ultimately resulted in around 400,000 dead Afghans, not counting those killed more recently by the Pentagon.
Glenn Beck is a neocon and a brutal warmonger who hates Muslims opposed to the illegal invasion and occupation of their countries (note the expression on his face when he says Baradar should be shot in the head — pure anger and hatred).
The neocon link to Trotskyism is well documented. Beck makes a big deal out of a scattering of Marxists in the Obama administration (while ignoring the strong presence of Wall Street banksters) and warns that the “progressives” will take us down the same road as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, i.e., gulags and mass extermination, and yet Beck ignores the murderous totalitarian strain in the neocon movement. This psychopathic proclivity has thus far resulted in well over a million dead Iraqis and an undetermined number of dead Afghans and Pakistanis. If the neocons and their neolib collaborators have their way, the death toll will escalate considerably after they attack Iran in the coming months.
Beck and his ideological soul-mate, Tea Party Sarah Palin, are all for killing Iranians. “Blowing up Iran. I say we nuke the bastards,” said the popular television and radio talk show host on May 11, 2006.
Said just like a rabid neocon.
Addendum
The media in Pakistan has reported that Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik believes the news of Baradar’s arrest (or surrender) is propaganda.
“We are a sovereign state and hence will not allow anybody to come and do any operation. And we will not allow that. So this (report) is propaganda,” Malik told Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely-read English-language newspaper.
Malik criticized the New York Times for announcing the capture as a fait accompli and victory against the Taliban. “If the New York Times gives information, it is not a divine truth, it can be wrong. We have joint intelligence sharing and no joint investigation, nor joint raids,” said Malik outside parliament in Islamabad.
Tags: AlQaida, cia, ISI, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Omar, Pakistan, taliban, war on terror
A new understanding for the U.S. and Pakistan?
Feb 11, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
By Imtiaz Gul, FP
During a briefing at his office in the garrison town of Rawalpindi earlier this month, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani staunchly defended Pakistan’s efforts to combat the militant groups operating on its territory, while pointing toward the still-prominent perceived threat from India as a reason for not taking the operations further.
“During our counterterror campaign we have lost 2,273 army and paramilitary soldiers including three generals, five brigadiers, as many as 73 senior intelligence operatives, and also faced the blowback from Islamist militants,” Kayani told us, citing internal instability, a violent spate of suicide bombings — 87 in 2009 alone — and an adverse impact on Pakistan’s economy.
The Pakistani Army has been conducting counterinsurgency campaigns in 11 tribal areas plus Swat since 2007, including some 209 major military operations, and has committed almost 150,000 of its 550,000-troop army to this effort in the northwestern border regions, the general told us. Kayani noted that Pakistan remains concerned about India’s Pakistan-specific military capability, as six of India’s 13 strike corps are currently deployed along the border, and India’s involvement in Afghanistan is ongoing.
Kayani also pointed to the “Cold Start doctrine” propounded by archrival India and the talk of “limited war” under a “nuclear overhang,” suggested by the outgoing Indian army chief in November, saying that this policy and rhetoric do alarm Pakistan’s security apparatus. “You plan on an adversary’s capability and not intentions,” Kayani explained. While the capability takes years to build, intentions may change overnight and Pakistan simply cannot depend on other’s intentions, he reasoned.
“I explained to NATO leaders in Brussels [during a recent security conference there] that understanding Pakistan’s strategic framework would help them understand the situation in a much better way,” Kayani said. Before his late January presentation in Brussels, Kayani had made a similar forceful case before the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi. “If you care about India getting upset, care about us as well. You have to balance the concern for India with concern for our interests,” was the blunt message he described.
Kayani reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to a “peaceful, stable, and friendly Afghanistan.” As he said earlier this month, “We cannot wish for Afghanistan anything that we don’t wish for Pakistan.” In this context he brushed aside the allegations of Pakistan pursuing “a strategic depth policy” in Afghanistan. “This does not imply controlling Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is peaceful, stable, and friendly we have our strategic depth because our western border is secure… You’re not looking both ways — as simple as that.”
Kayani again insisted that Pakistan must “consolidate our gains and fully stabilize the areas secured, lest they fall back to terrorists,” in response to the oft-repeated demand from the U.S. that Pakistan move against militants based in North Waziristan. “Constraints of our capability to absorb and operate, limited cutting edge counterintelligence and counterterrorism capability, and limited budgetary space should be factored in,” he said, referring to last fall’s Pakistani military operations in South Waziristan, which had served as a of terrorism for Pakistani, Arab, and Uzbek Islamist militants. Kayani explained that the Army had managed to hamper militant logistics and restrict operating space in North Waziristan.
From that, it’s straightforward to discern that Kayani’s army would far prefer to choose the scale and timing of any military operations into North Waziristan, rather than be dictated to by the United States. The Army says that any “military adventures into the tribal regions require extreme caution and consideration for the future.” International troops will not be in Afghanistan forever, the Pakistani argument runs, so in several years Pakistan will be on its own to co-exist with the very tribes that would be hurt when or if the Pakistani Army moves against the militants nestled among them. Thus, Kayani has been explaining to the U.S. and NATO that Pakistan must balance the West’s comparatively short-term interests in containing and eliminating the insurgencies with its own long-term objectives, namely securing its western border without offending the tribes that live in that region.
And when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in December that he “couldn’t give the Pakistani Army anything but an ‘A’ for how they’ve conducted their battle so far,” it was after Mullen had spent several hours flying over the mountains and gorges of Pakistan’s Swat Valley with Kayani. Mullen was apparently so impressed that he asked Kayani to take the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal on a similar tour so he could “get a sense of how and what you need to fight in such a difficult terrain,” according to the general.
McChrystal flew over from Kabul shortly thereafter for the detailed aerial view of Swat’s hilly and forested topography that had served as a natural sanctuary for the terrorists of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and left with an appreciation for Pakistan’s counterinsurgency campaign, according to Kayani. For Kayani, who took charge of Pakistan’s army in November 2007, this was hard-earned praise.
And recently, President Obama asked Congress for an additional $500 million to support Pakistan. If approved, the ‘Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund’ would jump to $1.2 billion in the fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2010, and the money under the fund would be used to train and equip the Pakistan military to fight militants more effectively along the Afghan border.
Several Pakistani generals, including Kayani, believe the praise by Mullen and the subsequent request by Obama for additional counterinsurgency funding for their anti-militant reflects a new understanding among the coalition of Pakistani concerns and constraints. The language and vocabulary emanating from Washington and London toward Islamabad has changed in recent months, a prerequisite for creating greater trust among the coalition partners, according to Pakistani generals. Let us see what wonders the changed vocabulary can work in the coming months.
Tags: cia, Gen Kiyani, obama, Pak Army, Pakistan, US, war, war on terror
