Archive for War Against Terror

Afghan War Has Lasted Longer Than WWII

December 20, 2009 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Corruption, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , ,

Why is the largest military machine on this planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan, in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ?

Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world today. It has one of the shortest life expectancy rates, highest infant mortality rates and the lowest rates of literacy.

The total U.S. military budget has more than doubled from the beginning of this war in 2001 to the $680 billion budget signed by President Obama Oct. 28. The U.S. military budget today is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined.

The U.S. arsenal has the most advanced high-tech weapons. The funds and troop commitment to Afghanistan have grown with every year of occupation. 

More than three times as many forces are currently in Afghanistan when NATO forces and military contractors are counted. Eight years ago, after an initial massive air bombardment and a quick, brutal invasion, every voice in the media was effusive with assurances that Afghanistan would be quickly transformed and modernized, and the women of Afghanistan liberated. There were assurances of schools, roads, potable water, health care, thriving industry and Western-style democracy. A new Marshall Plan was in store. Was it only due to racist and callous disregard that none of this happened?

In Iraq , how could conditions be worse than during the 13 years of starvation sanctions the U.S. imposed after the 1991 war?

Today more than a third of the population has died, is disabled, internally displaced and/or refugees. Fear, violence against women and sectarian divisions have shredded the fabric of society.

Previously a broad current in Pakistan looked to the West for development funds and modernization. Now they are embittered and outraged at U.S. arrogance after whole provinces were forcibly evacuated and bombarded in the hunt for Al Qaeda. U.S. occupation forces are actually incapable of carrying out a modernization program. They are capable only of massive destruction, daily insults and atrocities. That is why the U.S. is unable to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan or Iraq . That is what fuels the resistance. Today every effort meant to demonstrate the power and strength of U.S. imperialism instead confirms its growing weakness and its systemic inability to be a force for human progress on any level.

COLLABORATORS AND WARLORDS

Part of U.S. imperialism’s problem is that its occupation forces are required to rely on the most corrupt, venal and discredited warlords. The only interest these competing military thugs have is in pocketing funds for reconstruction and development. Entire government ministries, their payrolls and their projects have been found to be total fiction.

Billions allocated for schools, water and road construction have gone directly into the warlords’ pockets. Hundreds of news articles, congressional inquiries and U.N. reports have exposed just how all-pervasive corruption is.

In Iraq the U.S. occupation depends on the same type of corrupt collaborators. For example, a BBC investigation reported that $23 billion had been lost, stolen or not properly accounted for in Iraq .

A U.S. gag order prevented discussion of the allegations. (June 10, 2008)

Part of the BBC search for the missing billions focused on Hazem al-Shalaan, who lived in London until he was appointed minister of defense in 2004. He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the Iraqi defense ministry. But the deeper and more intractable problem is not the local corrupt collaborators. It is the very structure of the Pentagon and the U.S. government. It is a problem that Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general in Afghanistan , or President Obama cannot change or solve. It is the problem of an imperialist military built solely to serve the profit system.

CONTRACTOR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

All U.S. aid, both military and what is labeled civilian, is funneled through thousands and thousands of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors.

None of these U.S. corporate middlemen are even slightly interested in the development of Afghanistan or Iraq . Their only immediate aim is to turn a hefty superprofit as quickly as possible, with as much skim and double billing as possible. For a fee they will provide everything from hired guns, such as Blackwater mercenaries, to food service workers, mechanics, maintenance workers and long-distance truck drivers.

These hired hands also do jobs not connected to servicing the occupation. All reconstruction and infrastructure projects of water purification, sewage treatment, electrical generation, health clinics and road clearance are parceled out piecemeal. Whether these projects ever open or function properly is of little interest or concern. Billing is all that counts.

In past wars, most of these jobs were carried out by the U.S. military. The ratio of contractors to active-duty troops is now more than 1-to-1 in both Iraq and Afghanistan .

During the Vietnam War it was 1-to-6. In 2007 the Associated Press put the number in Iraq alone at 180,000: The United States has assembled an imposing industrial army in Iraq that is larger than its uniformed fighting force and is responsible for such a broad swath of responsibilities that the military might not be able to operate without its private-sector partners. (Sept. 20, 2007) The total was 190,000 by August 2008. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 18, 2008)

Some corporations have become synonymous with war profiteering, such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater in Iraq , and Louis Berger Group, BearingPoint and DynCorp International in Afghanistan .

Every part of the U.S. occupation has been contracted out at the highest rate of profit, with no coordination, no oversight, almost no public bids. Few of the desperately needed supplies reach the dislocated population There are now so many pigs at the trough that U.S. forces are no longer able to carry out the broader policy objectives of the U.S. ruling class. The U.S military has even lost count, by tens of thousands, of the numbers of contractors, where they are or what they are doing except being paid.

LOSING COUNT OF MERCENARIES

The danger of an empire becoming dependent on mercenary forces to fight unpopular wars has been understood since the days of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. A bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting was created last year to examine government contracting for reconstruction, logistics and security operations and to recommend reforms. However, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission, explained at a Nov. 2 hearing that there is no single source for a clear, complete and accurate picture of contractor numbers, locations, contracts and cost. (AFP, Nov. 2) [Thibault said] the Pentagon in April counted about 160,000 contractors mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, but Central Command recorded more than 242,000 contractors a month earlier. The stunning difference of 82,000 contractors was based on very different counts in Afghanistan . The difference alone is far greater than the 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Thibault continued: How can contractors be properly managed if we are not sure how many there are, where they are and what are they doing? The lack of an accurate count invites waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money and undermines the achievement of U.S. mission objectives. The Nov. 2 Federal Times reported that Tibault also asked: How can we assure taxpayers that they are not paying for ghost employees? This has become an unsolvable contradiction in imperialist wars for profit, markets and imperialist domination.

Bourgeois academics, think tanks and policy analysts are becoming increasingly concerned. Thomas Friedman, syndicated columnist and multimillionaire who is deeply committed to the long-term interests of U.S. imperialism, describes the dangers of a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. (New York Times, Nov. 3)

OUTSOURCING WAR

Friedman hastens to explain that he is not against outsourcing. His concern is the pattern of outsourcing key tasks, with money and instructions changing hands multiple times in a foreign country. That only invites abuse and corruption.

Friedman quoted Allison Stanger, author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, who told him:

Contractors provide security for key personnel and sites, including our embassies; feed, clothe and house our troops; train army and police units; and even oversee other contractors. Without a multinational contractor force to fill the gap, we would need a draft to execute these twin interventions. That is the real reason for the contracted military forces. The Pentagon does not have enough soldiers, and they don’t have enough collaborators or allies to fight their wars.

According to the Congressional Research Service, contractors in 2009 account for 48 percent of the Department of Defense workforce in Iraq and 57 percent in Afghanistan . Thousands of other contractors work for corporate-funded charities and numerous government agencies. The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development make even more extensive use of them; 80 percent of the State Department budget is for contractors and grants. Contractors are supposedly not combat troops, although almost 1,800 U.S. contractors have been killed since 9/11. (U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 30) Of course there are no records on the thousands of Afghans and Iraqis killed working for U.S. corporate contractors, or the many thousands of peoples from other oppressed nations who are shipped in to handle the most dangerous jobs. Contracting is a way of hiding not only the casualties, but also the actual size of the U.S. occupation force. Fearful of domestic opposition, the government intentionally lists the figures for the total number of forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as far less than the real numbers.

A SYSTEM RUN ON COST OVERRUNS

Cost overruns and war profiteering are hardly limited to Iraq , Afghanistan or active theaters of war. They are the very fabric of the U.S. war machine and the underpinning of the U.S. economy. When President Obama signed the largest military budget in history Oct. 28 he stated: The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year, and found cost overruns that totaled $296 billion. This was on a total 2009 military budget of $651 billion. So almost half of the billions of dollars handed over to military corporations are cost overruns! This is at a time when millions of workers face long-term systemic unemployment and massive foreclosures.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have now cost more than $1 trillion. The feeble health care reform bill that squeaked through the House, and might not survive Senate revisions next year, is scheduled to cost $1.1 trillion over a 10-year period.

The bloated, increasingly dysfunctional, for-profit U.S. military machine is unable to solve the problems or rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan or Iraq , and it is unable to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure in the U.S. It is unable to meet the needs of people anywhere. It is absorbing the greatest share of the planet’s resources and a majority of the U.S. national budget. This unsustainable combination will sooner or later give rise to new resistance here and around the world.

Sara Flounders is a national co-director of the anti-war group International

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Imperial Forces ve Changed Taliban into Nationalistic Movement

December 20, 2009 at 11:51 am · Filed under Afghanistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , ,

On Newsnight (Aug 20, 2009 ), the US general incharge of the Afghan war, David Petraeus, said that the war was “not a war of choice”. Afghanistan has not been an important planning area for any attacks on western countries and the Taliban have shown no inclination to conduct war against NATO countries outside Afghanistan (so far, but we seem to be doing our best to change their practices). They are freedom-fighters who want us out of their country. Would we be killing them if there were no oil and gas around the Caspian sea?

General Petraeus said that the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 were planned in Afghanistan. This remark is disingenuous. Osama bin Laden may have been in Afghanistan at the time of the attacks, but had he been in Washington, New York, London, Paris or Hamburg, his whereabouts would have made no difference to the outcome. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks resided in Germany, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and were trained (in part) in flying schools set up (some allege, for this very purpose) by the CIA in Florida, US.

Gordon Brown statement that 75 per cent of the terrorist attacks planned against Britain so far have been planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan is a dishonest one.

Mr Brown has no idea what terrorist attacks on Britain have been planned so he cannot know what percentage were planned in Afghanistan or Pakistan. The most he can ever claim to know is what percent of the terrorist attacks planned, and known to our intelligence services, originated from one of those two countries. How many such plans does he know about? Is it 75 per cent of one, two, three, or four plans? We are not told and we don’t ask. 

And what about the convenient disjunction in the claims of our officials — that the terrorist plots were planned in Afghanistan or in Pakistan? Well, which country was it?

For the existence of any such plans to afford us grounds for killing thousands of Afghans in their own country, it would have to be shown (minimally) that such plots could never be hatched elsewhere. Clearly that cannot be shown. So, even if such plans might have exited, or might occur in future, their existence, or possible existence, offer no grounds for our belligerent presence in Afghanistan; any more than their known past occurrence in Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and America would justify the mass killing of the nationals of those countries by anyone’s armed forces.

Would the Taliban be justified in bombing London just because our politicians are aggressive, dishonest, opportunists?

Two British journalists have at last mentioned that during the eight years of our presence in Afghanistan, there has been no improvement whatever in the appalling conditions under which most Afghans live. Perhaps that was news to them, but it is not news to any Afghan, nor to anyone who knows the region well.

Despite the billions of dollars that have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 (which has promptly poured straight out again), no help has been given to the poor there. Actually the condition of the poor has got much worse since 2001, which is why, contrary to yet more dishonest statements by our officials, a great many Afghans support the Taliban. The only reliable experience Afghans have had of most NATO powers is that they break their promises (under Mullah Omar, the Taliban did not break their promises). So why should the NATO powers ever be trusted?

And the plight of poor Afghan women (outside of the privileged families located mainly in Kabul) has also got worse since the Taliban were overthrown (hard as this may be for us liberals to believe). But did we not invade to liberate them?

Had the money spent on the Afghan war been spent on the poor, there would be no war there.

At last we see a glimmer of truth in the self-serving, meticulously disseminated, ‘fog’ of war. The fog exists in Europe and America, not in Afghanistan. The Afghans have a perfectly clear, close-up, view of what we are up to: and what they see is not pretty. They must think foreigners are all fools or liars.

When challenged on the failure of the NATO powers to do anything to help ordinary Afghans, the usual response from officials in the NATO countries is that the Taliban always prevent developmental projects from being implemented. They call it ‘the security situation’. But the claim is another lie.

There are huge areas of Afghanistan suffering the agonies, deformities, diseases and deaths caused by poverty, but those areas are untroubled by the Taliban. Nevertheless, they have not seen a dime since 2001. These areas are free from the troublesome Taliban, so anyone could visit them safely and confirm the truth of what I have just said, and so prove that what British and American officials are saying is false; but few do.

Western officials talk little of the fact that when the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001 opium production in Helmand was eliminated completely. Newspapers allege, repeatedly, that the Taliban are financing themselves with sales of heroin. The western media’s favourite estimate of the profit made by the Taliban from heroin sales is $100 million a year.

First question: how do they know?

Second question: which Taliban make this money? The so-called Taliban no longer have a unified command (we saw to that). There are at least fourteen different groups being called ‘Taliban’. Is the dope trade run like a welfare state, with fair shares for all? NATO officials are probably the source of most claims about the drug trade in Afghanistan. Can they be trusted? I don’t think so.

Simultaneously with claims that the drug trade is run by the ‘Taliban’, we are told that it is run by Karzai’s ‘war lords’. But Karzai is America’s man. So could it be that the drug trade is financing America’s men (as it did during the Vietnam war and during the illegal, American-run, Contra war against the elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua)? In any case, can these commentators have it both ways? Is the drug trade financing both sides? Maybe, maybe not.

The writer has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He divides his time between the UK and Pakistan. Email: charlesferndale@ yahoo.co.uk

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Plea to Obama Not to Send Troops to Afghanistan

December 7, 2009 at 11:49 am · Filed under War Against Terror ·Tagged , ,

November 30th, 2009
An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the “Garden State” (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev’s number though. It’s + 41 22 789 1662. I’m sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you’re about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.” Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line — and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can’t take it anymore. We can’t take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of “landslide victory” don’t you understand?

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

President Obama, it’s time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, “No, we don’t need health care, we don’t need jobs, we don’t need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, ’cause we don’t need them, either.”

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that’s what they’d do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam “might” be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish — the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON’T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother’s son.

We’re counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/open-letter-president-obama-michael-moore

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India Jittery About the Americans Leaving Afghanistan

December 7, 2009 at 10:43 am · Filed under Afghanistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , , ,

The road to success for President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy runs through India. That’s because reversing the Taliban’s momentum requires getting rid of the movement’s sanctuary in Pakistan, where the insurgent leadership is known to be based in and around the city of Quetta. 

But while Pakistan is aggressively tackling its domestic Taliban, it has consistently declined to act against Afghan Taliban groups based on its soil — because it sees the Afghan Taliban as a useful counterweight to what it believes is the dominant influence in today’s Afghanistan of Pakistan’s arch-enemy, India. Unless India can be persuaded to take steps to ease tensions with Pakistan, some suggest, Pakistan will not be willing to shut down the Afghan Taliban. 

Indian influence has expanded after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban — it had been a longtime supporter of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition that dominated the Karzai government, and it poured hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into supporting the new regime. 

That’s left many in Pakistan raising the specter of Indian encirclement — a concern noted by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal in September, when he said that “increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions.” 

Some U.S. pundits have even called for India to scale back its operations in order to appease the Pakistanis. 

Indian officials have little time for such reasoning. Events northwest of the Khyber Pass have had a central place in the strategic calculations of generations of rulers in Delhi, dating back to the imperial Mughals and the colonial British. India’s ties with Kabul had lapsed during the bloody civil war that saw the Pakistani-backed Taliban rise to power in 1996, turning Afghanistan into a hotbed of extremism, some of it directed against India. 

In 1999, an Indian passenger airliner was hijacked by Pakistani nationals and flown to Afghanistan — negotiating for the release of the hostages, India was forced to free three Islamist militants, one of whom was later implicated in the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. 

The Taliban also forged links with fundamentalist groups waging war on India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. “The consequences of that vacuum where Pakistan stepped in and meddled were horrendous for India,” says Harsh Pant, professor of defence studies at King’s College London. “It’s a lesson no one in India is in the mood to learn again.” 

That’s why India has pumped over $1.2 billion in development aid to the Karzai government, funding infrastructure projects ranging from highways to hydroelectric dams to a 5,000-ton cold storage facility for fruit merchants in Kandahar. India is building schools and hospitals, as well as flying hundreds of Afghan medical students to train in Indian colleges, because its own experience of the last period of Taliban rule has given it a vested interest in preventing a recurrence. 

The popularity of Bollywood music and Indian soap operas also hints at India’s significant cultural influence in Afghanistan, which is buttressed by lasting bonds with Afghanistan’s political elite. 

Afghan President Karzai went to university in India, while his electoral opponent, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, belongs to the old Indian-backed Northern Alliance. Kabul and New Delhi also share a common distrust of Islamabad, seeing the 1996 Taliban takeover as having been enabled by Pakistan’s military intelligence wing. 

But in the India-Pakistan relationship, each side often thinks itself the victim of the other’s machinations, and Pakistan’s generals view India’s growing influence in Afghanistan as motivated by an intent to destabilize Pakistan. 

Islamabad claims that India’s consulates in the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad have been orchestrating terrorist activity in Pakistan, particularly in the vast, restive province of Baluchistan. India vehemently rejects such claims, for which no evidence has been offered in public. During her trip to Pakistan last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also dismissed the notion that India was trying to foment trouble in Pakistan. “The Pakistani fears are completely imaginary,” says Bahukutumbi Raman, a former top-ranking Indian intelligence official and prominent strategic analyst. 

The problem for Washington, at least according to Raman and other Indian analysts, is that regardless of their validity, Pakistan’s fears translate into inaction when it comes to tackling the Afghan Taliban on its soil. “The Afghan Taliban are important to the Pakistanis. They give them a strategic depth,” says Raman. The Pakistani military is still struggling to accept a strategic universe in which India is no longer its most dangerous enemy. You get the sense that if India does not loom large as a threat, then the Pakistani military loses much of its raison d’etre as an institution. 

Indian analysts fear tensions could be exacerbated by President Obama’s declaration that the U.S. will begin to draw down 18 months after surging some 30,000 more American troops into Afghanistan. 

The prospect that the U.S. will soon depart Afghanistan makes it even less likely that Pakistan will want to crack down on a group that could still be a strategic asset in an uncertain situation. 

India, for its part, is unlikely to change its own strategy in Afghanistan. It is developing a port at Chabahar in Iran, which could become a key point of entry for Indian goods and materiel into Afghanistan because Pakistan refuses India land transit rights to the Afghan border. 

India also runs an air base at Farkhor in Tajikistan on Afghanistan’s northeastern border — a facility it secured with Russian support. Neither Moscow nor Tehran want to see the Taliban return to power, and a growing consensus between Russia, Iran and India — all traditional backers of the Northern Alliance — could work to prevent that in the months and years to come. 

“India may have to hedge its bets with these regional partners,” says Harsh Pant. “When America leaves Afghanistan, they may be the ones left to deal with the mess.”

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Blackwater in Pakistan

November 26, 2009 at 8:10 pm · Filed under Pak-US Relations, Terrorism in Pakistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , , ,

Blackwater’s program in Pakistan is classified. It is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence. 

The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. 

Company Non Grata in Pakistan

It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved–almost from the beginning of the “war on terror”–with clandestine US operations. 

Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. 

The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater’s presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, “Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan.” 

In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater’s rumored Pakistani operations. 

Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan. 

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater “provides security for a US-backed aid project” in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. “We have no contracts in Pakistan,” Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. “We’ve been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there.” 

Reports of Blackwater’s alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. “The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar,” he said. “That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities.” Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are “wildly incorrect,” saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has “found refuge from potential U.S. attacks” in Karachi “with the assistance of Pakistan’s intelligence service.” 

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi’s Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, “The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in.” 

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it’s the contractors’ fault, not the government’s. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. “We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,” said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. “In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it’s almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.” Addicott added, “If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That’s one of the reasons we’re not members of the International Criminal Court.” 

In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. 

Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. 

Blackwater denies the company is operating in Pakistan

 “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.” 

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. 

He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the NWFP and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. 

“It wouldn’t surprise me because we’ve outsourced nearly everything,” said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater’s role in Pakistan. 

Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater’s involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. “Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don’t have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it’s that simple. It would not surprise me.” 

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007. 

The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. 

Blackwater’s presence in Pakistan is “not really visible, and that’s why nobody has cracked down on it. 

Blackwater’s operations in Pakistan are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. It’s Blackwater via JSOC, and it’s a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis. The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. It’s a rudimentary operation. It is comparable to the CIA outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. 

Blackwater’s work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan. 

While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince. 

The name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA’s counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a “media-scouring/open-source network. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services. They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two names have such a stain on them. 

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater’s classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, “The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you’re doing is really one military guy to another.” 

Blackwater’s first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. 

Its personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), these personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified “black” operations. With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above ’secret’–even though you have no business doing so. It allows Blackwater personnel that do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust. It as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That’s exactly what it is: a circle of love. Blackwater, therefore, has access to “all source” reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. That’s how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors. The contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don’t unless they ask. 

Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have “conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up,” he said, adding, “They have a sizable force in Pakistan–not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way–but to support a legitimate contract that’s classified for JSOC.” 

Blackwater’s Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight. 

It is unclear as to when the arrangement with JSOC began, but a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it. Some of the Blackwater personnel work undercover as aid workers. Nobody even gives them a second thought. 

Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as “Qatar cubed,” in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. 

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. 

Pakistan’s Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets. 

It’s not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people. 

Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. 

The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls “Blackwater Vanilla,” and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. 

The operatives are not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They’re very good at what they do. 

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, “that’s not entirely accurate.” While he concurred with the military intelligence source’s description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad.

According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral’s main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries. 

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues “regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States.” 

Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues. 

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. “Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship,” he said. “They’ve met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another.” Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan. 

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the NWFP, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as “frontier scouts”). 

The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater “is providing the actual guidance on how to do counterterrorism operations and Kestral’s folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they’re executing the job,” he said. “You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.” He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. 

Blackwater is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, ‘Hey, no, we don’t have any Westerners doing this. It’s all local and our people are doing it.’ But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for counterterrorism-related work.” 

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, “There’s no real oversight. It’s not really on people’s radar screen.”

In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by “a private American security contractor.” The statement said, “Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments.” 

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney’s Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal’s elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war–which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan–there is a concomitant rise in JSOC’s power and influence within the military structure. 

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater’s 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. 

JSOC controls the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators–which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater’s alleged contracts with JSOC. 

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. 

The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they’ve been around 20 to 30 years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don’t. They’re known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they’ve got the experience. They’re very valuable. 

They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia. They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they’re talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It’s a ridiculous revolving door. 

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. “What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,” said Colonel Wilkerson. 

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. 

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. “When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn’t tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, ‘Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?’ So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him–we rendered him home.” 

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using “reprogrammed” funds “without explicit congressional authority or appropriation,” according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA’s authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end “near total dependence on CIA.” Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may “conduct clandestine HUMINT operations…before publication” of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations. 

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the “darkest acts” in part to keep them concealed from Congress. “Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress,” said the source. “They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: ‘Preparing the Battlefield.’” 

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC’s operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA’s is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress,” she said. “If they are not, that is a violation of the law.”

In December 2009, a former CIA official confirmed that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan at a secret CIA airfield used for launching drone attacks, despite repeated government denials that the company is in the country.

The official, who had direct knowledge of the operation, said that
employees with Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, patrol the area
round the Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan province.

He also confirmed that Blackwater employees help to load laser-guided
Hellfire missiles on to CIA-operated drones that target al-Qaida
members suspected of hiding in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
regions.

The secretive base at Shamsi is a key element in the CIA co-ordinated missile strikes that have hit more than 40 targets in the past year.

The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/politics/11blackwater.html?hp”
title=”New York Times] reported that links between Blackwater and the CIA in Iraq and Afghanistan have been closer than has yet been disclosed, with Blackwater staff participating in clandestine CIA raids against suspected insurgents.

The US and Pakistan governments, as well as Xe, deny the company operates in Pakistan.

Blackwater is a particularly emotive issue in Pakistan, where the
company’s name, along with the drone strikes, have become lightning
rods for anti-American sentiment. Television stations have run images
of alleged “Blackwater houses” in Islamabad, while some newspapers
regularly run stories accusing US officials and respected journalists
of being Blackwater operatives.

US diplomats say the stories are mostly incorrect, and the Pakistani
media has confused American contractors from other companies and aid
workers with Blackwater employees. Pakistan’s interior minister offered to resign if Blackwater was proved to be in Pakistan.

But there is growing evidence to suggest that Blackwater is working in
Pakistan. A serving US official said that Blackwater had a contract to
manage the construction of a training facility for the paramilitary
Frontier Corps, just outside Peshawar, in 2009. But most of the work
on the project, the official said, was done by Pakistani sub-contractors.

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Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

November 26, 2009 at 7:56 pm · Filed under Pak-US Relations, War Against Terror ·Tagged , ,

Since President Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. 

Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. 

The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as 60 people attending a Taliban funeral. 

In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft.” 

In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. 

The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan. 

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. “Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it’s JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes.” The Pentagon has stated bluntly, “There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.” 

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC’s drone bombings as well. It’s Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC. When civilians are killed, “people go, ‘Oh, it’s the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.’ Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that’s JSOC [hitting] somebody they’ve identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they’ve culled the intelligence themselves or it’s been shared with them and they take that person out and that’s how it works.” 

The CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that. Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress, so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s 34 people in the building, 35 people are going to die. That’s the mentality. They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that. It’s an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC? 

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

 

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Strange War: Americans Fund Taliban to Get Clearance for their Convoys

November 26, 2009 at 4:47 pm · Filed under Afghanistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , , ,

How the U.S. Funds the Taliban

By Aram Roston, The Nation
Posted on November 13, 2009

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. 

The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. 

Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. It’s a big part of their income. 

In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. 

The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” 

Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here,” one American trucking executive told me. “We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.” 

The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls “the Battlespace”–that is, the entire country. 

Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. 

The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.

Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. 

Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas–some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force–to move your trucks through.”

Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: “We’re basically being extorted. Where you don’t pay, you’re going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to.” Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. 

“Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It’s based on the number of trucks and what you’re carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they’re not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more.”

Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”

Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. 

Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai’s cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker’s son, sources say. And so on.

In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. 

One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official’s plea agreement in US court in August. 

AIT is a well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief.

But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.

One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. “They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs,” a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. “They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that’s just a joke. I carry an AK–and that’s just to shoot myself if I have to!”

The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, “An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade–you are going to lose!” That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. 

It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. 

FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I’ve been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI’s convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, “What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat.” He’s an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he’s not happy about what’s being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.

“Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He’s a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. “Two Taliban is enough,” she told me. “One in the front and one in the back.” She shrugged. “You cannot work otherwise.”

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war–to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan’s company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel “are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process.” Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan’s secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.

It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition–a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.

So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4×4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah “charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers.”

It’s hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly–security, extortion or a form of “insurance.” Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That’s impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, “He works both sides… whatever is most profitable. He’s the main commander. He’s got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows.”

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan’s and Ruhullah’s convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan’s services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.

Hamed Wardak wouldn’t return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn’t speak with me either. There’s nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.

It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. “Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?” That’s what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. “That’s a questionable business practice,” he said. “They shouldn’t give it to him. How come that’s not questioned?”

I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed’s father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair “Gucci commander” Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. “I’ve tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life,” the defense minister said. “This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful.”

Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. “I was against it from the beginning, and that’s why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit.”

When I told Wardak that his son’s company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. “This is impossible,” he said. “I do not believe this.”

I believed the general when he said he really didn’t know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.

Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I’m told are “very detailed” reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.

The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? “The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ‘Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intelligence guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics.”

In a statement about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring.” He added that, despite oversight, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent.”

In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that–as with so much in Afghanistan–the United States doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.

Aram Roston is an Emmy Award-winning investigative producer at NBC News and the author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (Nation Books), from which this article is adapted.

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An Exit Strategy for US from Afghanistan

November 20, 2009 at 1:23 pm · Filed under Afghanistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged , , ,

By Dr. Ved Pratap Vaidik

 Can America get out of the quagmire of Afghanistan? (Or to use a reference from Mahabharat, the famous Indian Epic, how can the American Abhimanyu can get out of the Afghanistan Chakravyuh (maze) that he is trapped in?)

In reply to this cardinal question I have devised a five-point strategy.

Point One: President Obama should not send a single new American soldier to Afghanistan and he must announce a definite date for the withdrawal of the American army from Afghanistan. Not a single American soldier should continue to stay in Afghanistan after that date.

In my opinion this deadline should be December 31, 2010.Of course, this withdrawal would include all foreign soldiers belonging to ISAF.

This announcement will make a magic impact on the public opinion of the US.

It will, then, be Obama’s second victory in one year. All the Democrats and even Republicans will rally around him. In far away Afghanistan there will rise a high tide of joy and relief because the people of Afghanistan have an age-long hatred for the presence of the foreign soldiers on their motherland. During the last 150 years they have taught a bitter lesson to the British Army thrice and to the Soviet Army in the recent past. Initially, the people of Afghanistan had welcomed the Western Armies but now they feel that the resurgence of Taliban has taken place basically due to the presence of foreign armies (ISAF).

Point Two: If all the foreign armies leave Afghanistan within a year the question comes up that, ‘would the Hamid Karzai Government survive’? Will anarchy not spread in Afghanistan? There is no doubt about it. So what are the options? 

At least a National Army of half a million Afghan soldiers and a Police Force should be raised immediately.

When Zahir Shah was over thrown 36 years ago, the Army and Police consisted of about  200,000 soldiers. Now the population has grown two-fold and since the last 30 years Afghanistan is passing through a war-like situation. If an Army of half a million soldiers becomes a reality then you won’t find any unemployed youth on the streets of Kandahar or Kabul. It is mostly the unemployed youth that is being trapped by the Taliban, smugglers and the mafia. If they find a place in the Army, the human source of the Taliban and smugglers will totally dry up. No youth will be left to be drafted by the Al-Qaeda and Taliban.

The expenses incurred on inducting five million youth to the Army will be less than the expenses of maintaining just five thousand soldiers of any Western Army in Afghanistan. If the US and other NATO countries take up the maintenance of the Afghan National Army for the next five years, they will still save billions of dollars and hundreds of precious lives. If the ISAF armies leave Afghanistan, the Taliban will automatically lose their rationale to operate.

India can take up the responsibility of training the soldiers and officers in Afghanistan. If we need to immediately step up the fighting strength of the present army set up, instead of sending new soldiers from the western countries, the friendly Asian and African countries can be approached to do the needful.

Point Three: What makes the Taliban and Al-Qaeda thrive is the ill-gotten wealth of opium. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium. You will be shocked to know if I recount the name of the people who are involved in the growing and smuggling of opium. The funds generated from opium far exceed the national budget. The opium money is the mother of corruption in Afghanistan. A total ban may be imposed on the cultivation of opium or it can be put under stringent laws as it is in India. If they clamp down on illegal wealth obtained through opium, the Karzai Government can not only break the back of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda but can also get rid of many rogue politicians.

Point Four:  There is no central control or accountability of the billions of dollars that pour into Afghanistan. President Karzai himself had shared with me this fact a few months ago that in Kabul his government has control on only four percent of the total foreign aid that comes into his country. The balance, 96% is allotted to provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT). There teams operate on their own. They have very little say of the Central Afghans Government in their functioning. This gives rise not only to corruption and malpractices but also deals a blow to the image of the Central Government. The people of Afghanistan respect the government which is strong and assertive. Not only the foreign aid but also the overall control over foreign troops and their operations should be in the hands of the Central Government of Afghanistan.

Point Five: The Karzai Government has to put up a determined fight against the violent terrorists but at the same time it should not hesitate to enter into a dialogue with the Taliban.

After all they are also the sons of Mother Afghanistan ( Maadare-Watan). If their ideas are totally absurd why so many young men are out to sacrifice their lives ? I had been talking to Taliban and Al-Queda leaders.

About ten to twelve years ago in Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Islamabad, London, Washington, DC and New York. They are abusive and acrimonious at times but they do also believe in the value of argumentation. They are open to the contrary view. I found them flexible, and helpful too. If it is not so, how the high jacked Indian airplane was released from Kandahar in 1999. The dialogue with the Taliban should be conducted by the Afghans and not the Americans. Assistance of some other knowledgeable persons may be sought.

If this Five-Point strategy is put together and implemented, the US can rescue itself from the quagmire of Afghanistan.

While putting this strategy into action, the policy makers may face several new questions.

While implementing this exit strategy, if the image of the Afghan Government is not built as all-powerful and sovereign body, chances of success would appear to be bleak. To bolster the image of Karzai Government it is absolutely imperative that President Karzai take a drastic and exemplary action against corruption. If need be, he might have to sideline some of his close friends and relatives even if it is meant to placate the public opinion.

                                                         Similarly, the deadlock between the President and the Parliament must be broken at its earliest. The Constitution of Afghanistan cannot be replaced now at this juncture, there is a plausible remedy in my view. Why can’t the political leaders be encouraged to set up viable political parties, which can become a bridge between the President and Parliament and also the Government and the ordinary people. How can you imagine a healthy democracy without the political parties?

Dr. V.P. Vaidik, A-19 Press Enclave New Delhi 110 017, (Phone) (0091-11) 2686 7700, 2651 7295 Mob. : (0091)98-9171-1947, e-mail : dr.vaidik@gmail.com

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Why Pak Army is Not Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan?

November 20, 2009 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Afghanistan, War Against Terror ·Tagged ,

The success of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan will depend heavily on Pakistan acting to stop its territory being used to attack Western forces next door.

And that’s bad news, because the demands of its own domestic counterinsurgency campaign, doubts about the duration of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan and looming political instability in Islamabad have left Pakistan in no hurry to help out.

Obama’s National Security Adviser General James Jones in November 2009 visited Islamabad carrying a message from his boss to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari. 

Obama in the letter urged Zardari to rally his nation behind a joint campaign against militants who fight the Pakistani government and those who fight U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. Obama was also reported to have demanded more decisive action against al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In return, he reportedly offered a range of fresh incentives, “including enhanced intelligence sharing and military cooperation.”

The problem, of course, is that Obama’s letter may have gone to the wrong address. As a weak and unpopular President scarcely seen in public and now the object of growing vilification at home, Zardari is in no position to lead a popular movement against militancy, much less to redirect his army’s focus.

As ever, it is the all-powerful military establishment that will make the key decisions in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s military has certainly moved decisively against those militants that pose a direct challenge to its authority on home soil.

Buoyed by its successes in last May’s campaign to drive the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, it has for the past month deployed some 30,000 troops to confront the militants in their main stronghold of South Waziristan, along the Afghan border. The army has steadily cleared territory eastward, seizing some of the Pakistani Taliban’s most prized bases, but also sparking a vicious wave of terrorist attacks that continues to claim innocent lives on a near daily basis.

The South Waziristan offensive, however, may be the limit of what the Pakistani military is willing to take on right now. It’s priority after clearing the area of Taliban elements will be to hold it — and there are signs that the militants have merely scattered to areas beyond the scope of the current offensive, waiting to stage a return. “We have not been defeated,” Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq told reporters at a secret location on Nov 18, dismissing the army’s claims. “We have voluntarily withdrawn into the mountains under a strategy that will trap the Pakistan army in the area.”

With a long fight ahead of it, the Pakistan army won’t welcome demands that it expand its range of operations. They will view this letter with some displeasure. Pakistan army is not going to go to North Waziristan before it completes its operation in South Waziristan.

Two of the militant groups that Washington would like to see Islamabad target are based in North Waziristan: the Haqqani network and the one led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, both of whom mount cross-border attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan.

I don’t think that the Pakistan army will target Haqqani. The reason being that they don’t want to open a front with every militant group. The army has long insisted that it does not have the resources to counter the full range of militants based in the tribal areas. Already, military officials argue, heavy numbers are committed all along the tribal areas and in the Swat Valley. It is also forced to commit forces to guard against upsurges of militancy in other parts of Pakistan.

And, of course, the army’s priority remains guarding the eastern border with India. Indeed, the fact that India continues to be viewed as the principal security challenge by the Pakistani military establishment also dictates a policy toward Afghanistan that does little to help the U.S. there.

Pakistan’s generals are concerned by what they perceive as growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, through the Karzai government and massive development projects. They also accuse India of using Afghanistan as a base from which to wage a proxy war on Pakistan. Its priorities make the Pakistan army unlikely to turn its fire on the Haqqani and Hafiz Gul Bahadur networks, as Obama is demanding.

Instead, the army has revived a nonaggression pact with Bahadur and with Maulvi Nazir — both of which use Pakistani soil as a base from which to wage war on NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s priority is simply to get them to agree to stay neutral or join in the fight between the army and the Pakistan Taliban. Nazir, who was freed from Pakistani custody to fight al-Qaeda-linked Uzbek militants, controls the areas of South Waziristan where the Pakistan army has positioned troops to seal off a line of retreat for the Pakistan Taliban. The danger for the U.S. is that such deals involve a nod and a wink for continued cross-border attacks, making the militants an even more potent threat.

The Haqqani network is believed to have long-standing links with the ISI, while senior Western diplomats allege that Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban continues to operate out of Quetta.

Many suspect that the reason that the Afghan Taliban manages to operate unmolested on Pakistani soil is Pakistan’s need to maintain leverage in Afghanistan, where the U.S. presence is viewed as temporary. Indeed, some Pakistani observers suggest that even if a U.S. surge is successful, it will at best lead to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, in which Pakistan would play broker.

You need an increased U.S. troop strength to countervail the Taliban in the south and the east, so that you can bring them to the negotiating table. The Pakistani military also thinks that if they succeed in Afghanistan, the Taliban will be less powerful in Pakistan. The Americans should see Pakistan as an interlocutor for trying to handle these groups politically.

The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan is unlikely to work unless the Taliban and their allies are denied the sanctuary they enjoy across the border in Pakistan. That’s why two top U.S. military commanders, General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Islamabad in Dec 2009 to press their Pakistani counterparts for action on Afghan Taliban networks based in Pakistani North Waziristan and around the city of Quetta. But even as the Pakistani military fights a full-scale counterinsurgency war against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban), it remains reluctant to extend its targets to include the groups that most concern the U.S.

The argument most often used by Pakistani officials to rebuff Washington’s demands for action against the Afghan Taliban–allied Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, as well as the Afghan Taliban leadership core in Quetta, is about resources and priorities.

Pakistan has committed 30,000 troops to its offensive against the TTP in Swat and South Waziristan, and officials say they simply don’t have the resources to open a second front against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan (which is also where al-Qaeda’s leaders are believed to be hiding). General Ashfaq Kayani reportedly told Petraeus that Pakistan’s priority, given its limited resources, was the TTP insurgency, which directly challenges the Pakistani state.

If Pakistan is overstretched, then even the current operation against the Afghan Taliban will be directly affected. Pakistani officials advancing this argument often imply that once the domestic insurgency has been suppressed, the army can move on to tackling the groups that most concern the U.S. But many analysts believe that Pakistan’s reluctance to go after Haqqani, Hekmatyar and the Afghan Taliban leadership in Quetta is based not only on resources and priorities, but also on the Pakistani military’s assessment of its long-term interests in Afghanistan after the US leaves.

The fearsome North Waziristan–based network, led by ailing former Afghan mujahedin commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and run by his son Sirajuddin, controls three key Afghan provinces that border Pakistan — Khost, Paktia and Paktika. The network has a long-standing relationship with the ISI and is viewed by many in the Pakistani military as an important strategic asset in the regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan. (Some reports suggest that this has become a matter of debate within the Pakistani military.) Those who share this view believe that the group can be separated from al-Qaeda and could form part of a compromise political solution in Afghanistan, which Pakistan hopes to play a key role in brokering. A similar logic is probably at work with respect to Hekmatyar and even the Afghan Taliban leadership. It’s a view based on seeing the Afghan Taliban as a Pashtun nationalist movement challenging the new Tajik-dominated political order in Kabul — which is deemed by many in Pakistan to be a proxy for India. There’s also concern that mounting an offensive against Taliban groups that confine their attacks to Afghanistan will rouse Pashtun fury on both sides of the border, imperiling Pakistan’s domestic counterinsurgency effort.

To eliminate al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, it must be separated and isolated from the Taliban ’sea’ in which it is currently hiding. But the U.S. troop surge will be mainly directed against the Taliban insurgency. It will push al-Qaeda and the insurgents closer together, making it more difficult to isolate and target al-Qaeda. Pakistan’s going after the Afghan Taliban, which is seen as America’s enemy, would weaken Pakistan’s national consensus supporting the offensive against the TTP, many Pakistanis like Munir Akram believe.

The immediate focus of discussion between the U.S. and Pakistan is North Waziristan. While the Pakistan army has cleared swaths of territory once controlled by the TTP in South Waziristan and claims to have killed more than 600 militants, it has not managed to kill or capture any of the leadership, who have largely fled north, along with many fighters. That certainly gives Pakistan’s army a pretext for pushing into North Waziristan — as the U.S. is urging — although any such operation would probably be a limited one, focused on TTP groups and concentrated in areas where they would avoid clashing with Haqqani fighters.

If the Pakistani military declines to go after the Afghan Taliban, the U.S. faces limited options for turning up the heat. Unable, politically, to commit ground forces to Pakistani territory, it would be forced to rely on the remote-controlled drone strikes that have been effective in killing al-Qaeda leaders in the area. Conflicting reports in the U.S. media suggest that President Obama either plans to expand those operations precisely to target the Afghan insurgent groupings that remain largely unmolested in Pakistan or is reluctant to authorize strikes that go beyond the targets agreed by Pakistan, for fear of jeopardizing cooperation and triggering a political crisis. But if the goal is to reverse the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, the U.S. may feel it has no choice. And that’s certainly the message it wants Pakistan — and the Taliban — to take from the current conversation.

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What Osama’s 4th Son out of 20 Thinks of His Father

October 28, 2009 at 12:28 pm · Filed under War Against Terror ·Tagged ,

Osama 4th sonFor Omar Bin Laden, the fourth eldest of Osama bin Laden’s 20 known children, the awful realization that his own father was a terrorist mastermind plotting a global conspiracy that would destroy the lives of thousands of innocent people and even his own family came gradually.

Of course, there were warning signs: Omar’s childhood was marked by regular beatings and survivalist training; there was the growing army of ruffians and retainers who called his father “Prince”; and then there was that Afghan mullah who had given his father an entire mountain in Tora Bora.

But as he recounts in a book co-written with his mother, Omar — now 28 years old — found it hard to give up hope that a man who had killed so many people might one day turn his back on violence and become a normal father.

The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the United States; but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks. “That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”

born 1957, 17th of 57 childrenAs the first book written about Osama bin Laden with help from anyone in the bin Laden family, Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World (St. Martin’s Press) is a valuable — if limited — glimpse into the personal life of the world’s most wanted man. In recollections from Omar and his mother, Najwa bin Laden (the first of Osama’s five known wives), and with the assistance of American author Jean Sasson, the book paints a picture of Osama as a towering figure whose noble demeanor inspired fierce loyalty, but also an absolute authoritarian who wanted as many wives and children as possible in order to have foot soldiers for Islamic jihad. “My sons, your limbs must react to my thinking as though my brain was in your head,” he told his children when they complained about their life in al-Qaeda camps.

However, Osama the father remains almost as elusive to his son (and the reader) as he is to the FBI — too consumed by jihad to care much for his children, too distant to seem like a full person. But Omar’s memoir itself — which forms the core of the book — presents a strange and fascinating coming-of-age-story about a young boy groomed by his father to take over a worldwide terrorist enterprise who chooses instead to get a job, start a family, and play with animals. If the book suffers somewhat from the limitations of translation and overly formal prose, the thrill of being a fly on the wall of the bin Laden family drama quickly takes over.

Omar’s early childhood is both charmed and abusive. Though the family inhabited a mansion in the Saudi city of Jeddah and owned horse ranches in the desert, their father refused to let them have toys, take modern medicine, or use almost any modern conveniences except for light bulbs, automobiles and firearms. Though Osama would punish his boys for laughing or smiling and send them on forced marches in the desert without water, Omar and his brothers could at least console themselves with the honor of being sons of the man who helped defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a hero in both the Muslim world and the West. “When I was a young boy I worshipped my father, whom I believed to be not only the most brilliant but also the tallest man in the world,” Omar writes. “I would have to go to Afghanistan to meet a man taller than my father. In truth, I would have to go to Afghanistan to truly come to know my father.”

The nightmare began in earnest after the Saudi government banished Osama from the Kingdom for railing against Riyadh’s decision to allow American soldiers on Saudi soil to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. From the new family home in Sudan, while Osama plotted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and the American government, Omar noticed some dangerous new arrivals in their Khartoum neighborhood, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of an Egyptian Islamist movement who becomes al-Qaeda’s second in command. When members of another extremist group raped one of Omar’s male friends, al-Zawahiri took justice into his own hands — by executing the victim.

On Christmas eve 2009, one of  Osama’s daughter, Eman, 17, took refuge in the Saudi Embassy in Tehran after eluding guards who have held her and five siblings under house arrest for eight years.

It has long been believed that Iran has held in custody a number of Osama’s children since they fled Afghanistan following the US-led invasion of that country in 2001 — most notably Saad and Hamza bin Laden, who are thought to have held positions in Al Qaeda.

Sister Eman told relatives in a call from the embassy that 29-year-old Saad and four other brothers were still being held in Iran.

Britain’s the Times reported that one of Osama’s wives and their 11 grandchildren were also living in Iran.

Osama’s another son, Abdullah, who lives in Saudi Arabia, told the Al Jazeera TV that Eman telephoned him after she eluded guards who were taking her on a shopping trip in Tehran.

Osama reportedly has 19 children by several wives. He took at least one of his wives and their children with him to Afghanistan in the late 1990s after he was thrown out of his previous refuge, Sudan. They fled when the US-led war erupted.

Omar said the family had not known for certain the fate of the siblings that fled through Iran until Eman’s escape. ‘Until four weeks ago, we did not know where they were,’ said the 28-year-old Omar, who is married to a British woman and has lived in Egypt and the Gulf. He said eight of Osama’s children lived in Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Most of Osama’s children, like Omar, live as legitimate businessmen. The extended Bin Laden family, one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, disowned Osama in 1994 when Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship because of his militant activities.

Osama’s billionaire father Mohammed, who died in 1967, had more than 50 children and founded the Bin Laden Group, a construction conglomerate that gets many major building contracts in the kingdom.

Omar said he spoke by telephone in recent weeks to his 25-year-old brother Othman, who is among the six siblings being held in Iran. Othman told them that Iranian authorities detained the group after they crossed the border from Afghanistan in 2001, and since have been holding them under guard in a housing complex in Tehran, Omar told Asharq Al Awsat.

Omar identified siblings in Iran as Saad, Hamza, Othman, Bakr, Fatima and Eman.

The Times quoted Omar as saying that his brothers and sisters told him how they had fled Afghanistan and walked to the Iranian border. They were taken to a walled compound outside Tehran where guards said they were not allowed to leave ‘for their own safety’.

Omar said his relatives lived as normal a life as possible, cooking meals, watching television and reading. They were allowed out only rarely for shopping trips.

As a number of families are being held in the compound some of the older siblings have been able to marry and have their own children.

‘The Iranian government did not know what to do with this large group of people that nobody else wanted, so they just kept them safe. For that we owe them much gratitude, and thank Iran from the depth of our heart,’ he said.

Omar hopes that the family will be given permission to leave Iran and join his mother, brother and two sisters in Syria, or himself and his wife in Qatar

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