You wouldn't know from the title of this Bloomberg report that it contains interesting data on the thefts from NATO supply convoys, the openly-tolerated theft from the trucks and the resale racket of the stolen goods in Pakistan.
Pakistan Shuts Karachi-Kabul Route After Boom
By Shahan Mufti
Dec 15, 2011 2:00 PM ET
[...]
The Afridi family is one of hundreds that have enjoyed the boom from American military supplies through Pakistan after 2001. The gold rush started with the troop surge in Afghanistan that began soon after Obama won the election in 2008. When he took office there were just over 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By January 2010, the number had more than doubled to nearly 70,000. In May of this year, troop levels peaked at nearly 100,000.
More troops meant more supplies. Figures issued by the Pakistan Federal Tax Ombudsman show the spike in traffic at Karachi’s port. U.S. military equipment received at the port rose from nearly 16,000 shipping containers in 2005 to more than 54,000 in 2009. Halfway through 2010 the U.S. military had already shipped nearly 30,000 containers to Karachi.
In Pakistan the demand for trucks skyrocketed. “Everyone who had nothing to lose took out a loan and bought a truck,” Muntazir says. He invited many of his extended relatives from the tribal areas to come to Karachi and start driving.
The local “third party vendor” transport companies, to whom the international shipping lines subcontracted, were so desperate for drivers that Muntazir says they began lending money to people they had just met, so they would buy a truck and get supplies moving. “There was just no way the companies would be able to deal with truckers,” Muntazir says. “They couldn’t keep track of a thing.” Entire truckloads started going missing.
This is where Shakir, the elder brother, began to do work he describes as “brokering,” placing himself between truck owners and the local transport companies. He takes responsibility for the cargo and ensures it gets to U.S. and other ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Acting as a guarantor, Afridi receives a cut from the logistics companies when the cargo is picked up and again when it’s dropped off. The work has proved so profitable that Afridi has sold his entire fleet.
Increased Attacks
In November 2008, Hakimullah Mehsud, a commander of the newly formed Taliban Movement of Pakistan, invited the news media to Orakzai, a tribal agency in Pakistan, for his first press conference. Mehsud arrived riding in a brand new armored U.S. military Humvee. He told reporters he had captured a few American vehicles after attacking and looting a military convoy traveling through Pakistan. He boasted he would increase these attacks.
Such attacks started at the same time as the U.S. troop surge in late 2008. Fuel tankers began getting torched regularly and shipping containers were ripped open, looted, and left empty along highways. In the local press, Pakistani military officials told of groups in the tribal areas stealing helicopter parts. Militants who couldn’t get to the trucks took to bombing bridges and roads along the route, at times shutting the supply route for days.
The supply line was not just vulnerable to militants. In the past several years, the Pakistani and American visions for Afghanistan’s future have diverged so far that the relationship has turned hostile. Pakistan first cut off NATO’s supplies in September 2008, in response to the first-ever reported incursion of U.S. troops into Pakistan. Two months later, after a drone aircraft targeted Pakistan’s settled nontribal lands for the first and only time, 160 NATO trucks were burned in a nightlong rampage in Peshawar.
Vanishing Cargo
Many believed the event was staged by the Pakistani military and meant to send a clear signal. Vice Admiral Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a 2009 speech that 12 percent of the freight bound for Bagram in December 2008 had disappeared.
The supply line has been under consistent fire ever since. In 2009 there were 25 attacks on NATO supply lines in Pakistan, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, an online database tracking terror incidents in the region. In 2011, before the supply line was closed in November, there had already been a total of 111 reported incidents, destroying hundreds of supply vehicles. Even in times of calm, the Pakistani military has had its hand on the valve, as it alone decides how many trucks carrying U.S. military equipment to let through on any given day.
Driver’s Role
The spike in attacks is partly because of drivers and truck owners. Drivers, discouraged by the high risks involved, have taken to selling their loads of fuel on the black market, then setting fire to the tankers and collecting insurance money. Though the scam is a pain for the brokers, Muntazir says he feels for the truckers. “These guys risk their lives, and they get what? Thirty thousand, maybe forty thousand rupees for a trip?” That’s about four hundred dollars.
In June 2010, after an unsourced news report on Pakistani television said nearly 11,000 Afghanistan-bound shipping containers that had arrived in Karachi had gone missing, the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked another agency, the Federal Tax Ombudsman’s office, to investigate. The case went to Shoaib Suddle, a career police officer and Karachi’s police chief at the height of a war between several ethnic groups in the mid- 1990s. He has a doctorate in white-collar criminology from the University of Wales and has also served as the chief of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau.
Detailed Records
Suddle found that private container terminals in Karachi were keeping detailed records of the exact time containers would depart and return. Some trucks would never check back in. But thousands of mostly empty trucks were coming back too soon, sometimes a few hours after departing for Afghanistan.
“We found the mother of all scams,” Suddle said. In a report published by his office earlier this year, he described complex transnational networks bribing local customs agents and using crooked bureaucrats in Pakistan to forge documents and create fake companies. The intent of that corruption was to get goods labeled as Afghanistan-bound into the country, and then divert them for resale on the black market.
Suddle estimated that at least 7,992 shipping containers had never reached Afghanistan. The report called this “the tip of the iceberg.” A follow-up investigation, also ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, revealed that close to 29,000 cargo loads have gone missing in the country. There is no way of knowing precisely what disappeared.
Military Cargo
While many of these containers were loaded with commercial cargo destined for Afghanistan, military equipment for coalition forces accounts for nearly 40 percent of all trade to Afghanistan through Pakistan. Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue estimates that 3,300 shipping containers full of military equipment were among those missing.
According to an agreement between the Pakistani and British ministries of defense signed in June 2002, Pakistan allows ISAF military equipment to arrive in Pakistan without inspection. The U.S. military is not required to file a customs declaration form describing contents inside shipping containers.
In the Khyber Agency, not far from Peshawar, the hemorrhaging U.S. supply line stocks a long bazaar the locals call Karkhano Market. Among the corrugated-iron storefronts, middle-aged women are shopping for “USA” branded oil and soap bars with the American flag printed on them. Fighters drop in from Afghanistan to sample the latest in the military technology available on roadside tables.
Military Manuals
Alongside old British rifles and Soviet AK-47s, American military gear like Kevlar vests, boots, camouflage suits, night- vision goggles, and knives hang from hooks. Tall stacks of large boxes carrying ammunition and weapons parts will not be opened without a good reference. In the bargain bins, thrown in with used fleece socks and shrink-wrapped copies of The Book of Mormon, are U.S. military operation manuals that restrict distribution to “DoD and DoD contractors only,” and carry instructions to destroy “by any method that must prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of documents.”
A sign for a shop on the second floor reads, “Haji M. Ikhlas USA traders,” with crude paintings of a U.S. military helmet and army boots. In 2009 a U.S. military laptop that the U.S. Army’s 864th Engineer Combat Battalion used for diagnostics and maintenance of military weapons systems and vehicles was found in this same market.
Shopkeepers say that much of their stock comes from Afghanistan or is brought in from elsewhere in Pakistan.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
With closing of Pak border crossings, NDN becomes even more important
Afghanistan: The Pressure Is Now on Central Asian Supply RouteBy Deirdre Tynan
EurasiaNet.org [H/T IPS News]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Dec 8, 2011 (IPS/EurasiaNet) - The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org.
"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said.
The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins.
U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source.
The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defence to be a safer re-supply option than trucking goods and fuel through Pakistan. The Pakistani route has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years to Taliban attacks.
The NDN comprises of a rail link starting in Latvia going through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; a road route via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for goods initially delivered to the Manas Transit Centre near Bishkek; and a Caucasus pathway that ferrys cargo from the United States and Europe by sea to the Turkish port of Metin, as well as to Poti in Georgia, for onward delivery across the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan.
Pakistan has closed its re-supply route on two previous occasions to protest U.S. or NATO military activities - for almost two weeks in 2010 and again for three days in April 2011. This time, officials in Islamabad insist that the closure is permanent.
Policy-makers in Washington have long planned for such a contingency. Since 2005, many U.S. government contracts have specified that fuel should be sourced from countries north of Afghanistan. By 2010, northern sources were a requirement in tenders that cited potential "mission failure" due to disruptions in Pakistan.
"If you look at the trajectory, it's clear which way the relationship is going. It will be difficult to overcome yet another serious problem. The policy implication is that we need to diversify (transit routes) as much as we can and as quickly as we can. That's what the U.S. government has been all about recently," said a U.S. government official.
"But the real question is whether the NDN can fully compensate for what's happened in Pakistan. We have a good NDN, but we also have Central Asian roads that are not the best," he added. The NDN's rail component is expected to pick up most of the extra freight volume.
Editor's note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs
EurasiaNet.org [H/T IPS News]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Dec 8, 2011 (IPS/EurasiaNet) - The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org.
"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said.
The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins.
U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source.
The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defence to be a safer re-supply option than trucking goods and fuel through Pakistan. The Pakistani route has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years to Taliban attacks.
The NDN comprises of a rail link starting in Latvia going through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; a road route via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for goods initially delivered to the Manas Transit Centre near Bishkek; and a Caucasus pathway that ferrys cargo from the United States and Europe by sea to the Turkish port of Metin, as well as to Poti in Georgia, for onward delivery across the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan.
Pakistan has closed its re-supply route on two previous occasions to protest U.S. or NATO military activities - for almost two weeks in 2010 and again for three days in April 2011. This time, officials in Islamabad insist that the closure is permanent.
Policy-makers in Washington have long planned for such a contingency. Since 2005, many U.S. government contracts have specified that fuel should be sourced from countries north of Afghanistan. By 2010, northern sources were a requirement in tenders that cited potential "mission failure" due to disruptions in Pakistan.
"If you look at the trajectory, it's clear which way the relationship is going. It will be difficult to overcome yet another serious problem. The policy implication is that we need to diversify (transit routes) as much as we can and as quickly as we can. That's what the U.S. government has been all about recently," said a U.S. government official.
"But the real question is whether the NDN can fully compensate for what's happened in Pakistan. We have a good NDN, but we also have Central Asian roads that are not the best," he added. The NDN's rail component is expected to pick up most of the extra freight volume.
Editor's note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs
Monday, December 5, 2011
US clandestine ops in Pakistan
The U.S.-Pakistani relations may be on the rocks, but the CIA’s secret friends in the country fight on in units, prisons, and bases the United States has been building up since 9/11 to counter the pro-Taliban side of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. Eli Lake reports exclusively.
America's Shadow State in Pakistan
By Eli Lake
December 5, 2011
The Daily Beast
Officially, America’s relations Pakistan’s military and intelligence services were in a tailspin in August. Furious at having been kept in the dark ahead of the Americans’ May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, Pakistan’s military had kept U.S. investigators out of the place until it was scrubbed for evidence and had refused them access to bin Laden’s wives for some time. And the Pakistanis had outed the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, back in America, fears were rising over possible al Qaeda attacks on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.
But in the shadows, far from the public rancor, Pakistani-U.S. cooperation quietly continued. In Quetta, the Taliban’s capital in exile, U.S. intelligence was monitoring the cellphone of the presumed planner of any Qaeda anniversary attacks, Younis al-Mauritani, the group’s newly named external operations chief. The Americans’ tracking data—signals intelligence, or sigint, as it’s known in the profession—was being shared in real time with the local branch of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps. When his exact location was discovered, the Pakistanis smashed through the doors of his safe house and grabbed him along with two deputies.
Soon he was hundreds of miles away, at a special detention center in Punjab province, under intensive interrogation by a pro-U.S. faction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The Americans began getting regular reports on potential threats connected to the anniversary. CIA officials were even given an “unofficial” visit to question Mauritani directly.
Many in the U.S. government regarded the capture as a crowning achievement of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to build a secret network of Pakistani security forces, intelligence operatives, counterterrorism fighters, and detention centers. Its objective had been to create a friendlier, more trustworthy alternative to Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Now, however, just three months after Mauritani’s capture, the partnership is facing its most dire challenge. Relations between the two countries have been rocked by back-to-back incidents. First came what the media are calling “memogate,” in which President Asif Ali Zardari’s administration is accused of plotting with the U.S. to replace the leadership of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. And then, on Thanksgiving weekend, a NATO helicopter reported being fired upon by a Pakistani military outpost near the Afghanistan border. The chopper returned fire, killing two dozen Pakistani soldiers.
The reaction inside Pakistan has been white hot, and current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast they worry the CIA’s alternate security network will be the ultimate casualty. If that happens, America could be left blind to future threats emanating from Pakistan, and the task of rounding up or killing high-value Qaeda remnants could become more difficult, if not impossible.
“We’ve been trying desperately for the last 10 years to build elements of Pakistani society and its national security bureaucracy to support U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former manager at the National Counterterrorism Center. “This latest incident is a major test of that strategy.”
Former CIA director Mike Hayden says he has feared such an outcome for years as he watched U.S.-Pakistani relations drifting apart. “The space where American perceptions of strategic interests and Pakistani perceptions of strategic interests overlap has been diminishing,” he says.
In recent years, the relationship was kept afloat largely by the efforts of one man: Adm. Mike Mullen. Before his retirement as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman this September, he maintained a personal friendship with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At tense moments for the two countries, such as the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two armed men in Lahore this past January, Mullen would be sent to smooth things over with Pakistan’s Army chief. One U.S. intelligence officer who works on Pakistan refers to Mullen as “the Kayani whisperer”: a man with a special knack for quietly and discreetly influencing Kayani at crucial points.
But the friendship soured in Mullen’s final days. The four-star admiral accused the ISI of supporting direct attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Haqqani network, a deadly faction and support network for the Afghan Taliban, according to most accounts. The accusation left a shocked Kayani insisting to the Pakistani media that his old friend was simply misinformed. But things had been unraveling ever since the Davis shooting. The CIA contractor was one of numerous U.S. operatives who worked with elements of the U.S.-aligned shadow forces in Pakistan to target and apprehend terrorists—Pakistan, after all, was the country where bin Laden had been living unmolested for years. Before the shooting, current and recently retired U.S. intelligence officials say, the pro-American shadow network in Pakistan was capturing on average one Qaeda suspect a month. Still, those captures were seldom cleared through the chain of command of the ISI or the Pakistani military, and since the Davis incident the job has gotten much harder and riskier, U.S. officials say.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, America got valuable assistance from the military under Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. (It was Musharraf who handpicked Kayani as his replacement as Army chief shortly before stepping down from the presidency in August 2008.) Musharraf’s support enabled the Americans to bring a number of major Qaeda fugitives to justice, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Pakistan’s cooperation gradually petered out as Qaeda-instigated insurgencies erupted around the country, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the wild mountain region along the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers were killed before Musharraf finally caved in and signed peace deals with FATA warlords in 2006 and 2007, effectively creating a sanctuary where al Qaeda’s leadership could regroup.
America’s current partnership with the Frontier Corps dates back to the summer of 2008, when U.S. special forces began frequent cross-border raids into the FATA. (Before 2008 such raids were rare.) Since then the corps has helped target senior Taliban and Qaeda leaders for drone strikes, in addition to helping capture senior Qaeda operatives such as Mauritani and providing security for the Shamsi drone base, the headquarters of the CIA’s Pakistan drone operations. This is risky work as well. On Sept. 8, two suicide bombers killed 23 people at the home of Farrukh Shahzad, the deputy commander of the Baluchistan Frontier Corps that captured Mauritani.
Within the ISI, America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.
Over the past 10 years, Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in public U.S. funding for military and economic assistance. Washington’s secret subsidy of Pakistan’s intelligence and military could be much higher. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called attention to the CIA’s extensive secret funding during a recent Republican debate. “The money that we are spending right now is primarily intelligence money to Pakistan,” she declared. “It is helping the United States. Whatever our action is, it must ultimately be about helping the United States and our sovereignty, our safety, and our security.”
That’s not as easy as it may sound. It’s been necessary to pick and choose which elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus America should engage with, says Mark Lowenthal, a former House Intelligence Committee staff director and former CIA assistant director for analysis. “We do this because of the nature of the Pakistani state,” he says. “If it was a coherent government, then when we made a deal with the president or the prime minister, you would know as the orders come down the line they would be obeyed.” Nevertheless, he says, “That is not the nature of Pakistan. You have all these competing power centers. We are not doing this because we are trying to be too clever by half, we are doing this because this is the nature of the state we are dealing with.”
The death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers has made that challenge tougher than ever. “As bad as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is now, it’s only likely to get worse,” says Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA official and one of the co-authors of President Obama’s initial Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. So far, however, no one on either side knows what else to do but keep on.
America's Shadow State in Pakistan
By Eli Lake
December 5, 2011
The Daily Beast
Officially, America’s relations Pakistan’s military and intelligence services were in a tailspin in August. Furious at having been kept in the dark ahead of the Americans’ May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, Pakistan’s military had kept U.S. investigators out of the place until it was scrubbed for evidence and had refused them access to bin Laden’s wives for some time. And the Pakistanis had outed the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, putting his life at risk. Meanwhile, back in America, fears were rising over possible al Qaeda attacks on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.
But in the shadows, far from the public rancor, Pakistani-U.S. cooperation quietly continued. In Quetta, the Taliban’s capital in exile, U.S. intelligence was monitoring the cellphone of the presumed planner of any Qaeda anniversary attacks, Younis al-Mauritani, the group’s newly named external operations chief. The Americans’ tracking data—signals intelligence, or sigint, as it’s known in the profession—was being shared in real time with the local branch of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps. When his exact location was discovered, the Pakistanis smashed through the doors of his safe house and grabbed him along with two deputies.
Soon he was hundreds of miles away, at a special detention center in Punjab province, under intensive interrogation by a pro-U.S. faction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The Americans began getting regular reports on potential threats connected to the anniversary. CIA officials were even given an “unofficial” visit to question Mauritani directly.
Many in the U.S. government regarded the capture as a crowning achievement of a decade-long, multibillion-dollar effort to build a secret network of Pakistani security forces, intelligence operatives, counterterrorism fighters, and detention centers. Its objective had been to create a friendlier, more trustworthy alternative to Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
Now, however, just three months after Mauritani’s capture, the partnership is facing its most dire challenge. Relations between the two countries have been rocked by back-to-back incidents. First came what the media are calling “memogate,” in which President Asif Ali Zardari’s administration is accused of plotting with the U.S. to replace the leadership of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. And then, on Thanksgiving weekend, a NATO helicopter reported being fired upon by a Pakistani military outpost near the Afghanistan border. The chopper returned fire, killing two dozen Pakistani soldiers.
The reaction inside Pakistan has been white hot, and current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast they worry the CIA’s alternate security network will be the ultimate casualty. If that happens, America could be left blind to future threats emanating from Pakistan, and the task of rounding up or killing high-value Qaeda remnants could become more difficult, if not impossible.
“We’ve been trying desperately for the last 10 years to build elements of Pakistani society and its national security bureaucracy to support U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region,” says Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former manager at the National Counterterrorism Center. “This latest incident is a major test of that strategy.”
Former CIA director Mike Hayden says he has feared such an outcome for years as he watched U.S.-Pakistani relations drifting apart. “The space where American perceptions of strategic interests and Pakistani perceptions of strategic interests overlap has been diminishing,” he says.
In recent years, the relationship was kept afloat largely by the efforts of one man: Adm. Mike Mullen. Before his retirement as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman this September, he maintained a personal friendship with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. At tense moments for the two countries, such as the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two armed men in Lahore this past January, Mullen would be sent to smooth things over with Pakistan’s Army chief. One U.S. intelligence officer who works on Pakistan refers to Mullen as “the Kayani whisperer”: a man with a special knack for quietly and discreetly influencing Kayani at crucial points.
But the friendship soured in Mullen’s final days. The four-star admiral accused the ISI of supporting direct attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan by the Haqqani network, a deadly faction and support network for the Afghan Taliban, according to most accounts. The accusation left a shocked Kayani insisting to the Pakistani media that his old friend was simply misinformed. But things had been unraveling ever since the Davis shooting. The CIA contractor was one of numerous U.S. operatives who worked with elements of the U.S.-aligned shadow forces in Pakistan to target and apprehend terrorists—Pakistan, after all, was the country where bin Laden had been living unmolested for years. Before the shooting, current and recently retired U.S. intelligence officials say, the pro-American shadow network in Pakistan was capturing on average one Qaeda suspect a month. Still, those captures were seldom cleared through the chain of command of the ISI or the Pakistani military, and since the Davis incident the job has gotten much harder and riskier, U.S. officials say.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, America got valuable assistance from the military under Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. (It was Musharraf who handpicked Kayani as his replacement as Army chief shortly before stepping down from the presidency in August 2008.) Musharraf’s support enabled the Americans to bring a number of major Qaeda fugitives to justice, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Pakistan’s cooperation gradually petered out as Qaeda-instigated insurgencies erupted around the country, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the wild mountain region along the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers were killed before Musharraf finally caved in and signed peace deals with FATA warlords in 2006 and 2007, effectively creating a sanctuary where al Qaeda’s leadership could regroup.
America’s current partnership with the Frontier Corps dates back to the summer of 2008, when U.S. special forces began frequent cross-border raids into the FATA. (Before 2008 such raids were rare.) Since then the corps has helped target senior Taliban and Qaeda leaders for drone strikes, in addition to helping capture senior Qaeda operatives such as Mauritani and providing security for the Shamsi drone base, the headquarters of the CIA’s Pakistan drone operations. This is risky work as well. On Sept. 8, two suicide bombers killed 23 people at the home of Farrukh Shahzad, the deputy commander of the Baluchistan Frontier Corps that captured Mauritani.
Within the ISI, America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.
Over the past 10 years, Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in public U.S. funding for military and economic assistance. Washington’s secret subsidy of Pakistan’s intelligence and military could be much higher. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called attention to the CIA’s extensive secret funding during a recent Republican debate. “The money that we are spending right now is primarily intelligence money to Pakistan,” she declared. “It is helping the United States. Whatever our action is, it must ultimately be about helping the United States and our sovereignty, our safety, and our security.”
That’s not as easy as it may sound. It’s been necessary to pick and choose which elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus America should engage with, says Mark Lowenthal, a former House Intelligence Committee staff director and former CIA assistant director for analysis. “We do this because of the nature of the Pakistani state,” he says. “If it was a coherent government, then when we made a deal with the president or the prime minister, you would know as the orders come down the line they would be obeyed.” Nevertheless, he says, “That is not the nature of Pakistan. You have all these competing power centers. We are not doing this because we are trying to be too clever by half, we are doing this because this is the nature of the state we are dealing with.”
The death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers has made that challenge tougher than ever. “As bad as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is now, it’s only likely to get worse,” says Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA official and one of the co-authors of President Obama’s initial Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. So far, however, no one on either side knows what else to do but keep on.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Kabul tries to disarm independent militias in Kunduz
Complex problem given that the militias can be the only line of defense against Taliban. From this article they seem to be operating as a de facto police force, although of course that means they 'tax' for their services.
Afghanistan Seeks to Disband Some Armed Militias
By Ray Rivera
August 2, 2011
The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — Government officials seeking to break up hundreds of small independent militias in the volatile northern province of Kunduz have ordered more than 4,000 members to surrender their weapons within 20 days or face a military crackdown, threatening more violence in a region where security has steadily eroded over the last two years.
The militias in many cases piggybacked on an officially sanctioned American-financed program to recruit local men for police patrols to fight off the Taliban, an effort that has been tried in other parts of the country with varying degrees of success.
In Kunduz, where the government has armed and equipped about 1,500 militiamen, thousands of others have joined the proliferating independent groups, or arbakai. Some have only a dozen men, while others number in the hundreds. But officials say they are little more than gangs that wreak havoc, frequently clashing with one another and collecting illegal taxes from local residents.
The new order is focused on Khan Abad district in the southeast of Kunduz, where officials say the concentration of the independent militias is highest. The decision came after a gathering there on Saturday of tribal elders, army and police officials and some militia leaders.
Military officials say they will begin going house to house to collect the weapons if the militia members do not comply by the deadline.
“The existence of these illegally armed groups has created serious problems in bringing peace,” said Mohammad Zaman Waziri, First Brigade commander of the Afghan National Army’s 209th Corps. “These people take money from people in the name of religious tax, disturb locals, and they have also fought among each other many times.”
But the province has only grown more dangerous in recent years, and militia leaders say turning over their weapons — which include rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and mortars — would leave them vulnerable to the Taliban they claim to be fighting.
“There are still many Taliban in our areas,” said Hussain, an arbakai commander who goes by one name. “If our weapons are taken from us, the Taliban will kill us.”
Others say that instead of being rewarded with local police jobs for their efforts to push out the Taliban, they are being punished.
“I am ready to surrender my weapons to the government,” said another commander, Mohammad Omar. “But the condition is that I should get hired in the local police.”
Many of the officially recognized militiamen in Kunduz are to be absorbed into the Afghan Local Police through the American-financed program, which aims to convert insurgents and other residents of remote areas into village defense forces until the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police can be built up enough to protect the entire country.
But Kunduz has only 1,200 local police slots available, and the process of screening and training has been slow. To date, only 105 militiamen have become officers. Khan Abad district has only 550 slots available, said Col. Abdul Rahman Aqtash, deputy police chief of Kunduz.
The problems in Kunduz reflect growing concern over the local police program. Begun a year ago, it had trained about 6,200 officers in 41 districts by mid-June with the goal of recruiting 30,000 in 100 districts by the end of the year. But aid workers and United Nations officials warn that the program risks empowering local strongmen who have little regard for human rights and legal procedure.
Other areas of concern include weak vetting of recruits and oversight, and issues of command and control over the forces, which are supposed to fall under the local police chief but which often remain loyal to their former bosses. A recent study by Oxfam and three other nongovernment groups concluded that that the program had failed to provide effective policing and instead produced forces that are “feared by the communities they are supposed to protect.”
The controversy in Kunduz began during the spring harvest as new arbakai began demanding what they deemed an Islamic tax from the farmers, amounting to 10 percent of their harvest. Payments were also demanded from others. In June, two arbakai commanders with 30 armed men stormed a girls school in Kunduz city and beat the headmaster and assistant headmaster after they refused to pay, leaving both men in comas.
At least 50 families in Khan Abad say that groups have taken their homes to use as military compounds, and clashes between groups in the last few months have left at least six people dead and several more wounded, Mr. Aqtash said.
“We get reports and complaints about arbakai forces almost every day,” he said.
The Taliban, meanwhile, have remained active in the province. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, insurgents attacked a guesthouse in Kunduz city frequented by foreign aid workers and private security contractors, leaving four people dead.
The attack began when a suicide bomber rammed a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives into the front entrance of the guesthouse compound, killing the four guards at the gate. Two other attackers armed with light weapons and wearing explosive-laced vests ran into the compound before police arrived, leading to a three-hour firefight before one of the attackers was shot and killed and the other detonated his vest, killing himself as the police closed in, Mr. Aqtash said.
Nine civilians and a police officer were wounded, he said.
An Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kunduz Province.
Afghanistan Seeks to Disband Some Armed Militias
By Ray Rivera
August 2, 2011
The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — Government officials seeking to break up hundreds of small independent militias in the volatile northern province of Kunduz have ordered more than 4,000 members to surrender their weapons within 20 days or face a military crackdown, threatening more violence in a region where security has steadily eroded over the last two years.
The militias in many cases piggybacked on an officially sanctioned American-financed program to recruit local men for police patrols to fight off the Taliban, an effort that has been tried in other parts of the country with varying degrees of success.
In Kunduz, where the government has armed and equipped about 1,500 militiamen, thousands of others have joined the proliferating independent groups, or arbakai. Some have only a dozen men, while others number in the hundreds. But officials say they are little more than gangs that wreak havoc, frequently clashing with one another and collecting illegal taxes from local residents.
The new order is focused on Khan Abad district in the southeast of Kunduz, where officials say the concentration of the independent militias is highest. The decision came after a gathering there on Saturday of tribal elders, army and police officials and some militia leaders.
Military officials say they will begin going house to house to collect the weapons if the militia members do not comply by the deadline.
“The existence of these illegally armed groups has created serious problems in bringing peace,” said Mohammad Zaman Waziri, First Brigade commander of the Afghan National Army’s 209th Corps. “These people take money from people in the name of religious tax, disturb locals, and they have also fought among each other many times.”
But the province has only grown more dangerous in recent years, and militia leaders say turning over their weapons — which include rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and mortars — would leave them vulnerable to the Taliban they claim to be fighting.
“There are still many Taliban in our areas,” said Hussain, an arbakai commander who goes by one name. “If our weapons are taken from us, the Taliban will kill us.”
Others say that instead of being rewarded with local police jobs for their efforts to push out the Taliban, they are being punished.
“I am ready to surrender my weapons to the government,” said another commander, Mohammad Omar. “But the condition is that I should get hired in the local police.”
Many of the officially recognized militiamen in Kunduz are to be absorbed into the Afghan Local Police through the American-financed program, which aims to convert insurgents and other residents of remote areas into village defense forces until the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police can be built up enough to protect the entire country.
But Kunduz has only 1,200 local police slots available, and the process of screening and training has been slow. To date, only 105 militiamen have become officers. Khan Abad district has only 550 slots available, said Col. Abdul Rahman Aqtash, deputy police chief of Kunduz.
The problems in Kunduz reflect growing concern over the local police program. Begun a year ago, it had trained about 6,200 officers in 41 districts by mid-June with the goal of recruiting 30,000 in 100 districts by the end of the year. But aid workers and United Nations officials warn that the program risks empowering local strongmen who have little regard for human rights and legal procedure.
Other areas of concern include weak vetting of recruits and oversight, and issues of command and control over the forces, which are supposed to fall under the local police chief but which often remain loyal to their former bosses. A recent study by Oxfam and three other nongovernment groups concluded that that the program had failed to provide effective policing and instead produced forces that are “feared by the communities they are supposed to protect.”
The controversy in Kunduz began during the spring harvest as new arbakai began demanding what they deemed an Islamic tax from the farmers, amounting to 10 percent of their harvest. Payments were also demanded from others. In June, two arbakai commanders with 30 armed men stormed a girls school in Kunduz city and beat the headmaster and assistant headmaster after they refused to pay, leaving both men in comas.
At least 50 families in Khan Abad say that groups have taken their homes to use as military compounds, and clashes between groups in the last few months have left at least six people dead and several more wounded, Mr. Aqtash said.
“We get reports and complaints about arbakai forces almost every day,” he said.
The Taliban, meanwhile, have remained active in the province. At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, insurgents attacked a guesthouse in Kunduz city frequented by foreign aid workers and private security contractors, leaving four people dead.
The attack began when a suicide bomber rammed a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives into the front entrance of the guesthouse compound, killing the four guards at the gate. Two other attackers armed with light weapons and wearing explosive-laced vests ran into the compound before police arrived, leading to a three-hour firefight before one of the attackers was shot and killed and the other detonated his vest, killing himself as the police closed in, Mr. Aqtash said.
Nine civilians and a police officer were wounded, he said.
An Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kunduz Province.
Monday, July 18, 2011
US drone strikes in Waziristan doing more harm than good. File under "Only an Idiot Could Fail to See"
From Foreign Policy magazine's AFPAK Channel daily roundup:
The Guardian has a must-read story [July 17, 2011] about Noor Behram, a resident of Pakistan's tribal regions who has made an effort to document the aftermath suspected U.S. drone strikesin the area (Guardian). Behram claims that civilian casualties from the strikes are far higher than reported, and that, "The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater." And Pakistani lawyers and a British human rights advocate plan to seek an international arrest warrant against former CIA general counsel John Rizzo for approving drone attacks (Express Tribune)
Saturday, June 18, 2011
"Pentagon opposes limiting aid to Pakistan"
June 17, 2011
Pakistan Observer
Washington— Enthusiasm for aid to Pakistan has waned considerably on Capitol Hill and among presidential hopefuls following the news Tuesday that Pakistan had arrested the CIA informants who helped the United States find Osama bin Laden.
But Pentagon officials and some senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are cautioning that hasty moves to withdraw aid from the insurgency-plagued country that borders Afghanistan could have a negative impact on the US military’s war efforts, Christian Science Monitor newspaper said in a report on Thursday.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, cautioned that “changes to these relationships in either aid or assistance ought to be considered only with an abundance of caution and a thorough appreciation for the long view, rather than the flush of public passion and the urgency to save a dollar.”
Yet these two powerful catalysts are already having an impact on lawmakers sensitive to constituent concerns. After finding Al Qaeda’s leader bin Laden in a leafy suburb full of Pakistani military officers, “it is almost impossible for an American politician to continue to help Pakistan,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, acknowledged Wednesday.—INP
Pakistan Observer
Washington— Enthusiasm for aid to Pakistan has waned considerably on Capitol Hill and among presidential hopefuls following the news Tuesday that Pakistan had arrested the CIA informants who helped the United States find Osama bin Laden.
But Pentagon officials and some senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are cautioning that hasty moves to withdraw aid from the insurgency-plagued country that borders Afghanistan could have a negative impact on the US military’s war efforts, Christian Science Monitor newspaper said in a report on Thursday.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Wednesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, cautioned that “changes to these relationships in either aid or assistance ought to be considered only with an abundance of caution and a thorough appreciation for the long view, rather than the flush of public passion and the urgency to save a dollar.”
Yet these two powerful catalysts are already having an impact on lawmakers sensitive to constituent concerns. After finding Al Qaeda’s leader bin Laden in a leafy suburb full of Pakistani military officers, “it is almost impossible for an American politician to continue to help Pakistan,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, acknowledged Wednesday.—INP
STRATFOR Nov 2010 report: "Pakistan and the Naxalite Movement in India"
Pakistan and the Naxalite Movement in India
By Ben West
November 18, 2010
STRATFOR
Indian Maoist militants, known as Naxalites, have been meeting with members of the outlawed Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), according to the director-general of police for India’s Chhattisgarh state. Based on information from a police source, state police chief Vishwa Ranjan said Nov. 11 that two LeT operatives attended a Naxalite meeting in April or May. While their presence at the meeting still needs to be corroborated, the chief said, it appears very likely that the Naxalites held the meeting to adopt a new policy and plans for increasing “armed resistance” in order to seize political power in India.
Indian authorities are using the alleged meeting between LeT operatives and Naxalites as evidence that Pakistan is trying to forge relationships with the Naxalites, which India has long suspected. India blamed the LeT for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2001 parliament attack. For the Indian public, LeT also has become synonymous with Pakistani intelligence operations. The group that Indian officials refer to as “LeT,” however, is no longer an ally of Pakistan and has changed so much in recent years that we have started to refer to it and similar groups as “neo-LeT”.
Before this latest accusation, Indian officials implicated at least six other militant groups in Naxalite activities (with varying degrees of Pakistani support). Linking the estimated 10,000-strong Naxalites to militant groups backed by Pakistan, India’s main geopolitical rival and primary source of external security threats, creates a “nightmare” scenario for India. Indeed, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has labeled the Naxalites “the biggest internal security challenge” to India. Taken at face value, reports of such an alliance lead to visions of well-trained, well-disciplined Naxal militants expanding their near-daily attacks on low-level rural targets in eastern India (known as the “Red Corridor”) to political and high-tech targets in Calcutta, Hyderabad or even New Delhi. But such visions are alarmist and do not reflect the true nature of the very limited Pakistani-Naxalite relationship.
STRATFOR has watched Indian officials link Pakistan to the Naxalites before, but we have yet to see significant changes on the ground that would give any credence to the scenario outlined above. Many Indian officials are equally insistent that no connections exist between Naxalites and Pakistan. Although the Naxalites have provided rhetorical support for Kashmiri (and other anti-Indian groups’) opposition to New Delhi over the past year, there has been little action to back up the rhetoric. The Indians have long feared that outside powers would manipulate grassroots groups in India and further destabilize an already regionalized country. When the Naxalite movement began in the 1960s, New Delhi feared Beijing was trying to get a foothold in India, and for the past 50 years India has demonized Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) for allegedly supporting militant operations in India.
To better understand the allegation that Pakistan is supporting the Naxalites, we have decided to investigate the sources of Naxalite weapons and training to get an idea of how much outside help the Naxalites rely on in the first place, since this is one way to measure the level of outside assistance. The study below focuses on what types of arms Naxalites have access to, how they got them and who they got them from. While we did find evidence of some Pakistani involvement in supplying the weapons through third parties, the Naxalites appear to remain a very self-reliant group that has not established a strong partnership with Pakistan when it comes to weapons and training.
Weapons
Local Indian media sources report that Naxalite forces have an arsenal of approximately 20,000 weapons — an average of two weapons per soldier. The Naxalites have obtained this arsenal from four different sources:
1.From Indian security forces, either by Naxalite raids on their outposts in Naxalite-controlled areas or bribing or coercing members of the security forces to sell or give them firearms and ammunition, along with ballistic vests and tactical gear, including night-vision optics. This is the source of most Naxalite weapons, which include Indian-made assault rifles, light machine guns and carbines that fire 5.62mm NATO ammunition; variants of the AK-47 that fire 7.62mm rounds; and locally made shotguns of various gauges. Israeli-made sniper rifles have also been found in Naxalite caches on a few occasions, likely the Galil 7.62mm rifles that India acquired from Israel in efforts to target Naxalite leaders in the first place.
2.Theft from businesses operating in the Naxalite-controlled areas, including fertilizer distributors and mining companies that maintain stocks of explosives, blasting caps and detonators.
3.Local arms factories run directly by Naxalites or other criminal groups. These operations demonstrate a wide range of craftsmanship, from assembling makeshift weapons from discarded parts to more advanced forging processes. These factories also produce homemade mortar rounds and components for improvised explosive devices.
4.Procuring foreign weapons, ammunition and explosives from external militant and criminal groups operating within and outside of India. Details on the types of weapons procured this way are available from seizures of weapons shipments into India that have included rifles in the .315- to .30-06-caliber range. Such shipments are traded for smuggling services or purchased with funds from banditry, extortion or revolutionary taxes. Purchasing weapons from the outside is very expensive. According to a 2009 India Daily News article, Naxalite expenditure reports seized by police showed that, over a six-month period, one zone command spent more than three-quarters of the unit’s budget on weapons ($70,214), with the rest ($20,604) spent on supplies. Such evidence suggests that Naxalite weapon procurements from the outside have their limitations; obtaining them locally is far cheaper and can be done by virtually any Naxalite fighter.
The Naxalite arsenal is vast and diverse, consisting of weapons manufactured in China, Russia, the United States, Pakistan and India. Photographs of Naxalite units in training or on patrols show fighters wielding a variety of rifles in different calibers and conditions, indicating a lack of weapons uniformity across Naxalite units. While this does suggest a certain level of resourcefulness among the Naxalites, it also means that parts and ammunition are not interchangeable, which is an important tactical limitation. If one rifle breaks, its parts cannot be easily replaced. If one militant runs out of ammunition, he cannot turn to his neighbor for more rounds. Standardized weapons are a key advantage for organized militias (the Taliban, for example, virtually all use a variant of the AK-47), an advantage the Naxalites appear to be lacking. The lack of weapons uniformity among Naxalite groups indicates that they do not have a benefactor that has bestowed on them a reliable, standardized arsenal and have had to build up their own from scratch.
Outside Suppliers
There are numerous reports in open-source media in India and elsewhere that link Naxalites to a number of militant and criminal groups throughout South Asia. These groups interact with Maoists from Nepal, secessionists in India’s restive northeast, ISI-backed Islamists from Bangladesh, criminals from Myanmar and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. Weapons flow among these groups in a region that has historically been a rich environment for secessionist movements.
The British originally encouraged strong regional identities throughout the Indian subcontinent to prevent the various ethnic groups from uniting in opposition to British colonial rule. The Pakistanis continued that strategy in order to maintain leverage over India, supporting anti-Indian groups primarily in the contested Kashmir region and later in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), which they used as bases for extending their activities into India. India also supported anti-Pakistani groups in Bangladesh in an attempt to offset this Pakistani pressure. The Naxalites have benefited from this arrangement, directly from foreign powers like Pakistan and, for the most part, through indirect relationships with other regional secessionist movements that also oppose New Delhi.
STRATFOR sources in India claim that Pakistani intelligence has established business relationships with Naxalites to sell arms and ammunition and lately has tried to use Naxal bases for anti-Indian activities. There is evidence that the ISI is providing weapons and ammunition to the Naxalites in exchange for money or services, mostly through third parties like the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) or the ostensible Bangladeshi militant leader Shailen Sarkar (both are described in more detail below). Naxalite leaders in India deny cooperating with Pakistan but have very publicly pledged their support for separatist movements in India. STRATFOR sources in the Indian army say they are investigating but still lack the evidence to prove a direct link between the Naxalites and the ISI, since the Pakistanis continue to play a peripheral role.
The groups below are reported to have had contact with the Naxalites and to have provided various levels of support. Some of these groups have established links to the ISI, which makes them possible conduits of contact and support between Pakistan and the Naxalites.
ULFA, one of the largest, most violent secessionist movements in India’s northeast, is accused of working with ISI Islamist assets along the Indian-Bangladeshi border, where it controls smuggling routes through the Siliguri corridor. The Indian government accuses the Naxalites of working with ULFA to smuggle drugs and counterfeit money through Siliguri on behalf of the ISI in exchange for weapons and explosives.
The People’s Liberation Army of Manipur (PLAM) is a secessionist group in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. According to Indian security officials, the respective political wings of the PLAM and the Naxalites signed a document in October 2010 pledging to “overthrow the … Indian reactionary and oppressive regime.” However, there are no documented instances of PLAM providing material support to the Naxalites. Indian intelligence agencies report that a militant from Manipur who was arrested in 2007 revealed that the PLAM leadership was in frequent contact with the LeT leadership in 2006 as directed by the ISI.
The National Social Council of Nagaland-Issac Muviah branch (NSCN-IM) is a secessionist movement in the northeast Indian state of Nagaland. Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said in June that the leader of NSCN-IM helped members of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) smuggle weapons through Myanmar and Bangladesh. Indian officials in the state of Tripura accused the NSCN-IM of working jointly with the ISI in assisting militant cadres.
The People’s War Group (PWG) was a militant faction of the Communist Party of India-Marxist/Leninist until 2004, when it left and helped form the CPI-M, which is the political arm of the Naxalite movement. In 2004, the PWG received bomb-making materials and training from groups like ULFA and NSCN-IM in Bangladesh in exchange for smuggling drugs into India, an effort organized by the ISI between 2000 and 2004, when the PWG was not under the Naxalite umbrella.
LTTE is an ethnic secessionist movement in northern Sri Lanka that was defeated by Sri Lanka’s military in 2009 after 26 years of fighting. According to a surrendering Naxalite commander, LTTE militants taught Naxalites how to handle mines and grenades at a camp in Bastar, Chhattisgarh state. LTTE fighters have fled Sri Lanka since their 2009 defeat, and Indian authorities suspect that Tamil fighters are providing training for Naxalites in exchange for safe haven.
Nepalese Maoists comprise the militant wing of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal. They have exchanged training and weapons with Indian Naxalites, and there are also reports of Nepalese Maoists receiving medical care at Naxalite camps in India.
Shailen Sarkar is a member of the Communist Party of Bangladesh. The Indian Home Ministry accuses Sarkar’s group of training Naxalites at ISI-funded camps in Bangladesh. The ministry also claims that Sarkar has met with Naxal leaders in India.
Evidence of direct links between the ISI and the Naxalites is hard to come by. The connections above show only links between Naxalites and Pakistan via third parties, which makes it hard to measure the influence that Pakistan has over Naxalite militants. Pakistan likely wants to keep its activities in India covert so as not to exacerbate an already tense diplomatic situation. Murky, circuitous relationships are most likely preferred in this kind of environment.
Indeed, Pakistan does not necessarily need much more than murky, circuitous relationships in order to keep pressure on New Delhi. The Naxalites are a low-maintenance, self-sustaining movement that will continue to undermine Indian rule in the country’s east — Pakistan does not need to expend more resources to sustain this, and the Naxalites are likely wary of undermining their own local legitimacy by accepting too much assistance from an outside government. While something like a standardized arsenal compliments of the ISI would benefit the Naxalites operationally, such a move would be a high-risk, low-reward effort for Islamabad, which seeks to operate very subtly in India for the time being while tensions over the 2008 Mumbai attacks continue to cool off.
The lack of evidence of an institutional relationship between Naxalites and Pakistan does not mean that personal relationships between ISI assets and Naxalite cadres could not develop through the limited interaction now taking place. A combination of more aggressive people from both sides could certainly lead to a more concerted attacks in India, reminiscent of the 2008 serial bombings in cities throughout India.
Such attacks, however, would likely be more of a one-off exception. For the time being, reports of Pakistani-Naxalite cooperation will continue to surface, though this cooperation will probably involve third-party groups that give both Pakistan and the Naxalites plausible deniability. Until we see indications from either the Naxalites or Pakistan that they are willing to establish more robust connections and become more aggressive toward India, a coordinated militant campaign remains unlikely.
Pakistan and the Naxalite Movement in India is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
By Ben West
November 18, 2010
STRATFOR
Indian Maoist militants, known as Naxalites, have been meeting with members of the outlawed Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), according to the director-general of police for India’s Chhattisgarh state. Based on information from a police source, state police chief Vishwa Ranjan said Nov. 11 that two LeT operatives attended a Naxalite meeting in April or May. While their presence at the meeting still needs to be corroborated, the chief said, it appears very likely that the Naxalites held the meeting to adopt a new policy and plans for increasing “armed resistance” in order to seize political power in India.
Indian authorities are using the alleged meeting between LeT operatives and Naxalites as evidence that Pakistan is trying to forge relationships with the Naxalites, which India has long suspected. India blamed the LeT for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2001 parliament attack. For the Indian public, LeT also has become synonymous with Pakistani intelligence operations. The group that Indian officials refer to as “LeT,” however, is no longer an ally of Pakistan and has changed so much in recent years that we have started to refer to it and similar groups as “neo-LeT”.
Before this latest accusation, Indian officials implicated at least six other militant groups in Naxalite activities (with varying degrees of Pakistani support). Linking the estimated 10,000-strong Naxalites to militant groups backed by Pakistan, India’s main geopolitical rival and primary source of external security threats, creates a “nightmare” scenario for India. Indeed, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has labeled the Naxalites “the biggest internal security challenge” to India. Taken at face value, reports of such an alliance lead to visions of well-trained, well-disciplined Naxal militants expanding their near-daily attacks on low-level rural targets in eastern India (known as the “Red Corridor”) to political and high-tech targets in Calcutta, Hyderabad or even New Delhi. But such visions are alarmist and do not reflect the true nature of the very limited Pakistani-Naxalite relationship.
STRATFOR has watched Indian officials link Pakistan to the Naxalites before, but we have yet to see significant changes on the ground that would give any credence to the scenario outlined above. Many Indian officials are equally insistent that no connections exist between Naxalites and Pakistan. Although the Naxalites have provided rhetorical support for Kashmiri (and other anti-Indian groups’) opposition to New Delhi over the past year, there has been little action to back up the rhetoric. The Indians have long feared that outside powers would manipulate grassroots groups in India and further destabilize an already regionalized country. When the Naxalite movement began in the 1960s, New Delhi feared Beijing was trying to get a foothold in India, and for the past 50 years India has demonized Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) for allegedly supporting militant operations in India.
To better understand the allegation that Pakistan is supporting the Naxalites, we have decided to investigate the sources of Naxalite weapons and training to get an idea of how much outside help the Naxalites rely on in the first place, since this is one way to measure the level of outside assistance. The study below focuses on what types of arms Naxalites have access to, how they got them and who they got them from. While we did find evidence of some Pakistani involvement in supplying the weapons through third parties, the Naxalites appear to remain a very self-reliant group that has not established a strong partnership with Pakistan when it comes to weapons and training.
Weapons
Local Indian media sources report that Naxalite forces have an arsenal of approximately 20,000 weapons — an average of two weapons per soldier. The Naxalites have obtained this arsenal from four different sources:
1.From Indian security forces, either by Naxalite raids on their outposts in Naxalite-controlled areas or bribing or coercing members of the security forces to sell or give them firearms and ammunition, along with ballistic vests and tactical gear, including night-vision optics. This is the source of most Naxalite weapons, which include Indian-made assault rifles, light machine guns and carbines that fire 5.62mm NATO ammunition; variants of the AK-47 that fire 7.62mm rounds; and locally made shotguns of various gauges. Israeli-made sniper rifles have also been found in Naxalite caches on a few occasions, likely the Galil 7.62mm rifles that India acquired from Israel in efforts to target Naxalite leaders in the first place.
2.Theft from businesses operating in the Naxalite-controlled areas, including fertilizer distributors and mining companies that maintain stocks of explosives, blasting caps and detonators.
3.Local arms factories run directly by Naxalites or other criminal groups. These operations demonstrate a wide range of craftsmanship, from assembling makeshift weapons from discarded parts to more advanced forging processes. These factories also produce homemade mortar rounds and components for improvised explosive devices.
4.Procuring foreign weapons, ammunition and explosives from external militant and criminal groups operating within and outside of India. Details on the types of weapons procured this way are available from seizures of weapons shipments into India that have included rifles in the .315- to .30-06-caliber range. Such shipments are traded for smuggling services or purchased with funds from banditry, extortion or revolutionary taxes. Purchasing weapons from the outside is very expensive. According to a 2009 India Daily News article, Naxalite expenditure reports seized by police showed that, over a six-month period, one zone command spent more than three-quarters of the unit’s budget on weapons ($70,214), with the rest ($20,604) spent on supplies. Such evidence suggests that Naxalite weapon procurements from the outside have their limitations; obtaining them locally is far cheaper and can be done by virtually any Naxalite fighter.
The Naxalite arsenal is vast and diverse, consisting of weapons manufactured in China, Russia, the United States, Pakistan and India. Photographs of Naxalite units in training or on patrols show fighters wielding a variety of rifles in different calibers and conditions, indicating a lack of weapons uniformity across Naxalite units. While this does suggest a certain level of resourcefulness among the Naxalites, it also means that parts and ammunition are not interchangeable, which is an important tactical limitation. If one rifle breaks, its parts cannot be easily replaced. If one militant runs out of ammunition, he cannot turn to his neighbor for more rounds. Standardized weapons are a key advantage for organized militias (the Taliban, for example, virtually all use a variant of the AK-47), an advantage the Naxalites appear to be lacking. The lack of weapons uniformity among Naxalite groups indicates that they do not have a benefactor that has bestowed on them a reliable, standardized arsenal and have had to build up their own from scratch.
Outside Suppliers
There are numerous reports in open-source media in India and elsewhere that link Naxalites to a number of militant and criminal groups throughout South Asia. These groups interact with Maoists from Nepal, secessionists in India’s restive northeast, ISI-backed Islamists from Bangladesh, criminals from Myanmar and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. Weapons flow among these groups in a region that has historically been a rich environment for secessionist movements.
The British originally encouraged strong regional identities throughout the Indian subcontinent to prevent the various ethnic groups from uniting in opposition to British colonial rule. The Pakistanis continued that strategy in order to maintain leverage over India, supporting anti-Indian groups primarily in the contested Kashmir region and later in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), which they used as bases for extending their activities into India. India also supported anti-Pakistani groups in Bangladesh in an attempt to offset this Pakistani pressure. The Naxalites have benefited from this arrangement, directly from foreign powers like Pakistan and, for the most part, through indirect relationships with other regional secessionist movements that also oppose New Delhi.
STRATFOR sources in India claim that Pakistani intelligence has established business relationships with Naxalites to sell arms and ammunition and lately has tried to use Naxal bases for anti-Indian activities. There is evidence that the ISI is providing weapons and ammunition to the Naxalites in exchange for money or services, mostly through third parties like the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) or the ostensible Bangladeshi militant leader Shailen Sarkar (both are described in more detail below). Naxalite leaders in India deny cooperating with Pakistan but have very publicly pledged their support for separatist movements in India. STRATFOR sources in the Indian army say they are investigating but still lack the evidence to prove a direct link between the Naxalites and the ISI, since the Pakistanis continue to play a peripheral role.
The groups below are reported to have had contact with the Naxalites and to have provided various levels of support. Some of these groups have established links to the ISI, which makes them possible conduits of contact and support between Pakistan and the Naxalites.
ULFA, one of the largest, most violent secessionist movements in India’s northeast, is accused of working with ISI Islamist assets along the Indian-Bangladeshi border, where it controls smuggling routes through the Siliguri corridor. The Indian government accuses the Naxalites of working with ULFA to smuggle drugs and counterfeit money through Siliguri on behalf of the ISI in exchange for weapons and explosives.
The People’s Liberation Army of Manipur (PLAM) is a secessionist group in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. According to Indian security officials, the respective political wings of the PLAM and the Naxalites signed a document in October 2010 pledging to “overthrow the … Indian reactionary and oppressive regime.” However, there are no documented instances of PLAM providing material support to the Naxalites. Indian intelligence agencies report that a militant from Manipur who was arrested in 2007 revealed that the PLAM leadership was in frequent contact with the LeT leadership in 2006 as directed by the ISI.
The National Social Council of Nagaland-Issac Muviah branch (NSCN-IM) is a secessionist movement in the northeast Indian state of Nagaland. Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said in June that the leader of NSCN-IM helped members of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) smuggle weapons through Myanmar and Bangladesh. Indian officials in the state of Tripura accused the NSCN-IM of working jointly with the ISI in assisting militant cadres.
The People’s War Group (PWG) was a militant faction of the Communist Party of India-Marxist/Leninist until 2004, when it left and helped form the CPI-M, which is the political arm of the Naxalite movement. In 2004, the PWG received bomb-making materials and training from groups like ULFA and NSCN-IM in Bangladesh in exchange for smuggling drugs into India, an effort organized by the ISI between 2000 and 2004, when the PWG was not under the Naxalite umbrella.
LTTE is an ethnic secessionist movement in northern Sri Lanka that was defeated by Sri Lanka’s military in 2009 after 26 years of fighting. According to a surrendering Naxalite commander, LTTE militants taught Naxalites how to handle mines and grenades at a camp in Bastar, Chhattisgarh state. LTTE fighters have fled Sri Lanka since their 2009 defeat, and Indian authorities suspect that Tamil fighters are providing training for Naxalites in exchange for safe haven.
Nepalese Maoists comprise the militant wing of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal. They have exchanged training and weapons with Indian Naxalites, and there are also reports of Nepalese Maoists receiving medical care at Naxalite camps in India.
Shailen Sarkar is a member of the Communist Party of Bangladesh. The Indian Home Ministry accuses Sarkar’s group of training Naxalites at ISI-funded camps in Bangladesh. The ministry also claims that Sarkar has met with Naxal leaders in India.
Evidence of direct links between the ISI and the Naxalites is hard to come by. The connections above show only links between Naxalites and Pakistan via third parties, which makes it hard to measure the influence that Pakistan has over Naxalite militants. Pakistan likely wants to keep its activities in India covert so as not to exacerbate an already tense diplomatic situation. Murky, circuitous relationships are most likely preferred in this kind of environment.
Indeed, Pakistan does not necessarily need much more than murky, circuitous relationships in order to keep pressure on New Delhi. The Naxalites are a low-maintenance, self-sustaining movement that will continue to undermine Indian rule in the country’s east — Pakistan does not need to expend more resources to sustain this, and the Naxalites are likely wary of undermining their own local legitimacy by accepting too much assistance from an outside government. While something like a standardized arsenal compliments of the ISI would benefit the Naxalites operationally, such a move would be a high-risk, low-reward effort for Islamabad, which seeks to operate very subtly in India for the time being while tensions over the 2008 Mumbai attacks continue to cool off.
The lack of evidence of an institutional relationship between Naxalites and Pakistan does not mean that personal relationships between ISI assets and Naxalite cadres could not develop through the limited interaction now taking place. A combination of more aggressive people from both sides could certainly lead to a more concerted attacks in India, reminiscent of the 2008 serial bombings in cities throughout India.
Such attacks, however, would likely be more of a one-off exception. For the time being, reports of Pakistani-Naxalite cooperation will continue to surface, though this cooperation will probably involve third-party groups that give both Pakistan and the Naxalites plausible deniability. Until we see indications from either the Naxalites or Pakistan that they are willing to establish more robust connections and become more aggressive toward India, a coordinated militant campaign remains unlikely.
Pakistan and the Naxalite Movement in India is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
Matt Kaminski on what it really takes to win the Afghan War
From John Batchelor's blog on his radio interview with Kaminski:
Borderland 2011
By John Batchelor
December 22, 2010 2:02 AM
Spoke Matt Kaminski re his recent visit to ISAF and David Petraeus wrote the COIN book at Kansas, and it worked in Iraq because there was an infrastructure to protect and to use for restoration. There is nothing comparable in the bronze age AfPak borderland.
Kaminski remarks that VPOTUS Biden's remark that the US will be "outta there" by 2014 is folly and smoke-blowing.
Kaminski passes on Petraeus's opinion that Afghanistan is the frontlines against the jihadist deviltry in Pakistan, in Baluchistan, in Iran.
Will we cross the AfPak border in 2011? No clear answer. The command and control for the Haqqani Taliban is in the frontier. The CnC for the Quetta Shura is in Baluchistan. The devils find their financing in Peshawar and Karachi.
Until the US probes the borderland of Swat, Khyber, Orakzai, Mohmand, Tribal Areas, North and South Waziristan, with ground troops, with Special Operations back up by tactical air, with the forces required to take prisoners, then the enemy will continue to probe and kills us at will.
My measure of Kaminski's remarks is that Petraeus pointed toward Special Operations in the borderland. Watching.
Does the Obama administration have the heart for the long fight? No. Then again, there is no will to make the case to leave. POTUS will drift along, with the GOP (particularly John Bolton) preparing to campaign in favor of a winning plan to take the battle to the enemy in Pakistan and Iran.
Borderland 2011
By John Batchelor
December 22, 2010 2:02 AM
Spoke Matt Kaminski re his recent visit to ISAF and David Petraeus wrote the COIN book at Kansas, and it worked in Iraq because there was an infrastructure to protect and to use for restoration. There is nothing comparable in the bronze age AfPak borderland.
Kaminski remarks that VPOTUS Biden's remark that the US will be "outta there" by 2014 is folly and smoke-blowing.
Kaminski passes on Petraeus's opinion that Afghanistan is the frontlines against the jihadist deviltry in Pakistan, in Baluchistan, in Iran.
Will we cross the AfPak border in 2011? No clear answer. The command and control for the Haqqani Taliban is in the frontier. The CnC for the Quetta Shura is in Baluchistan. The devils find their financing in Peshawar and Karachi.
Until the US probes the borderland of Swat, Khyber, Orakzai, Mohmand, Tribal Areas, North and South Waziristan, with ground troops, with Special Operations back up by tactical air, with the forces required to take prisoners, then the enemy will continue to probe and kills us at will.
My measure of Kaminski's remarks is that Petraeus pointed toward Special Operations in the borderland. Watching.
Does the Obama administration have the heart for the long fight? No. Then again, there is no will to make the case to leave. POTUS will drift along, with the GOP (particularly John Bolton) preparing to campaign in favor of a winning plan to take the battle to the enemy in Pakistan and Iran.
"Setbacks Plague U.S. Aid to Pakistan"
Even though the following article is six months old it's still important. It also contains a helpful graph (above) and chart. See the report at the Wall Street Journal site for the chart, which shows top recipients of USAID economic assistance.
Setbacks Plague U.S. Aid to Pakistan
By Tom Wright
January 21, 2011
Wall Street Journal
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan— A massive U.S. aid program that has made Pakistan the world's second-largest recipient of American economic and development assistance is facing serious challenges, people involved in the effort say.
The ambitious civilian-aid program is intended in part to bolster support for the U.S. in the volatile and strategically vital nation. But a host of problems on the ground are hampering the initiative.
• A push to give more money directly to local organizations and the Pakistani government has been slowed by concerns about the capacity of local groups to properly handle the funds.
• Some international groups have balked at new requirements, such as prominently displaying U.S. government logos on food shipments, and have pulled out of U.S. government programs.
• Anti-American sentiment in the nation continues to flourish despite the uptick in spending, in part because of American drone attacks on tribal regions. A poll of Pakistanis in July by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed that two-thirds of respondents considered the U.S. an enemy.
"Drone strikes cannot be justified because civilians are also killed in them, which further aggravates a tense situation," said Bacha Khan, a refugee from Bajaur, a tribal region along the Afghan border where the Pakistani army is fighting Taliban militants.
Due to various problems, in the year ended Sept. 30, the U.S. spent only about two-thirds of the roughly $1.2 billion appropriated by Congress.
U.S. officials acknowledge difficulties distributing so much money, but say the shift in direction is needed. "Our goal here is to help the [Pakistani] government improve its capacity to deliver key public services," says senior State Department official Robin Raphel, U.S. Coordinator for Economic and Development Assistance in Pakistan. "The object of the program is quality, not to push money out of the door."
The U.S. is eager to win support from ordinary Pakistanis to boost its prospects in the war in neighboring Afghanistan and to counter the rise of Islamic extremism in Pakistan itself, a trend that officials say directly threatens America.
In 2009, Congress agreed to spend even more in Pakistan: $1.5 billion annually for civilian aid, over five years. The first tranche of that money is being spent in the current fiscal year.
The ramped-up aid program took shape at a time of instability for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the aid arm of the U.S. government. It lacked an administrator for about a year after Barack Obama took office. Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, named a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan by Mr. Obama, died in December after ordering major changes to the way aid is distributed in Pakistan. U.S. officials say his policy changes will continue.
When Mr. Holbrooke took the job in early 2009, he was frustrated that all of the money the U.S. was pouring into Pakistan hadn't improved America's image. In March 2009, he called a meeting in India of all aid officials involved in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Central Asian republics to outline how things would change.
"He thought everything we were doing was a failure," recalls one participant in the meeting.
Mr. Holbrooke decided to shift focus—to give more aid directly to local organizations and the Pakistani government, and less to foreign nongovernmental organizations that handled the bulk in the past. He also decided to publicize projects more aggressively to show ordinary Pakistanis that they are benefitting from U.S. funds.
He started curtailing existing programs handled by foreign contractors that he viewed as wasting money. Many of them involved less visible and harder-to-measure programs such as initiatives to improve the justice system or local bureaucracies. He directed the aid instead to visible infrastructure projects like roads, bridges and dams, especially in the volatile tribal regions that border Afghanistan.
In all, USAID-funded projects involving foreign organizations worth almost $200 million have been scrapped due to the new strategy. Other projects were denied new money. In June 2009, for example, Mr. Holbrooke refused requests for an increase in funding from Maryland-based Development Alternatives Inc., a contractor that was running a $46 million, three-year project to help train government workers in the tribal region. U.S. officials say it is difficult for foreigners to monitor projects in the tribal areas because of the security risk of going there.
U.S. officials contend that the previous reliance on foreign contractors bred ill will among Pakistanis, who saw them spending lavishly on houses and cars. The new approach, they say, involves the Pakistani government more in how the money is spent, a move intended to improve often testy relations between Washington and Islamabad.
Some nongovernmental organizations have objected to the new direction. Last month, Care International, an American charity, pulled out of a U.S.-funded project to train Pakistani workers, citing "safety concerns," after the U.S. asked it to focus on the dangerous border region with Afghanistan. Oxfam International, also late last year, declined U.S. funding for its Pakistan flood-relief program after Washington demanded that it prominently display U.S. government logos on its food. Some aid organizations worry that such logos could provoke attacks by militants.
The Pakistani government is slated to receive at least half of all funding under the new plan, up from about 10% before. Corruption problems raise the prospect that significant amounts will be diverted. Sen. John Kerry, a key architect of the civilian-aid package, warned in a letter to Mr. Holbrooke last year that so much money going through untested Pakistani institutions could fuel corruption and hurt the U.S.'s image.
Mr. Holbrooke responded that the U.S. was working to prevent that from happening. The U.S., for example, signed an agreement in September with Transparency International, a Berlin-based corruption watchdog, to set up a hot line in Pakistan to report evidence of corruption. That plan already has run into problems. In November, the chairwoman of Transparency International, Huguette Labelle, wrote to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari to complain about death threats and "possible state intimidation" against Transparency's local head in the wake of its USAID pact.
It is unclear whether Pakistan's nongovernmental organizations are prepared to handle a massive influx of funds. "I think $1.5 billion is too much money for this country," says Shandana Khan, head of a nationwide network of rural-development organizations that recently won a $20 million grant from USAID. "This country doesn't have many organizations that can absorb this kind of money."
Some senior USAID staffers have complained that the change in policy has happened too quickly for the agency to find suitable new programs. "Large amounts of new funds are coming online, and it will take considerable time and effort to design new activities that will make wise use of that money," Stuart Callison, a senior USAID development economist, said in an email to agency officials in October 2009. A USAID spokesman declined to comment on the email, and Mr. Callison didn't respond to requests for comment.
In the year ended Sept. 30, USAID spent only $770 million of the roughly $1.2 billion appropriated by Congress for the period. With a backlog of assistance to disburse, the U.S. now must try to find ways to almost double spending by Sept. 30. That amounts to roughly $10 for each Pakistani.
Many Pakistanis see the U.S. history of economic assistance as inconsistent, and resent that U.S. aid often has propped up military dictatorships.
After World War II, the U.S. embraced Pakistan as an ally in the Cold War. During the first half of the 1960s, the U.S. accounted for more than half of all foreign aid to Pakistan.
Aid was cut off in the late 1970s to punish Pakistan for seeking to develop nuclear weapons. But billions of assistance dollars flowed in during the 1980s to reward Pakistan for organizing the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
Aid was cut again in 1990 after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. USAID shut its Pakistan office in the mid-1990s, only to reopen it in 2002 after the country became an ally in fighting the Taliban.
Since 2003, civilian aid has risen steadily. The U.S. also has been a major supplier of military aid, giving $11 billion since 2001.
But the torrent of dollars doesn't seem to have done much to improve the U.S. image. USAID contractors are regularly portrayed in the Pakistani press as being from Blackwater Worldwide, the security firm now called Xe Services LLC, whose actions while guarding U.S. government installations and personnel in Iraq have been highly controversial.
"The popular perception that the public has seen little benefit from the billions of U.S. funding has encouraged a number of conspiracy theories about the ultimate and malignant objectives of the U.S. government as exercised through its assistance programs," Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at Georgetown University, told Congress in 2009.
Andrew Wilder, a former head of Save The Children in Pakistan and director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank, adds: "The idea that by giving them money we can buy their hearts and minds is a rather simplistic analysis of what's driving anti-American sentiment in Pakistan."
Public sentiment has been hurt by the Central Intelligence Agency's ongoing campaign to use missiles fired from pilotless drones to kill al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Pakistan's tribal regions. Civilians also have been killed in such attacks.
U.S. officials do not acknowledge the drone strikes and won't comment on how they might affect public opinion. "It is in both countries' and the region's interest to have security and stability on both sides of the Afghan/Pak border—an elusive but attainable goal," said Alberto Rodriguez, a U.S. embassy spokesman in Islamabad, in an email.
Mr. Khan, the Bajaur refugee who is critical of the drone attacks, recently received USAID-branded food from a United Nation's distribution post in Charsadda, a town northeast of Peshawar. Even though the Taliban has been targeting food-distribution centers, he laid blame for the escalating violence on the U.S. On Christmas Day, the Taliban claimed responsibility for an attack by a female suicide bomber who killed 46 in Bajaur.
Shaukat Khan, another refugee who has received food from USAID, faults the U.S. for his predicament. "In Bajaur, we had a lot of land planted with crops, but these were destroyed by America," he said recently, speaking in a squalid room near Charsadda, where he is living with his wife and five children, the youngest only days old. "It's because of America being in Afghanistan that Bajaur is not at peace."
A road project in South Waziristan, a tribal region that has been a base for Taliban militants and a focus of the CIA's drone campaign, shows how difficult it is to use aid to change public sentiment.
A year ago, the U.S. signed an agreement to pump $55 million through a local government body into roads, water and electricity in South Waziristan, where anti-Americanism is rampant. Six months ago, to improve access to markets, schools and health facilities, workers began transforming a winding, potholed mountain road between the towns of Tank and Makin into a wide, paved road. Because of militant attacks, the Pakistani army's public-works division is leading construction.
Habibullah Khan, a senior government official in the region, said the move to fund bigger infrastructure projects in South Waziristan has gained local support. But he said it's too dangerous for now to put any USAID logos on the road because of possible reprisals against workers. He said the government plans to do so once the road is finished.
Haji Mursalin, a tribal elder from the region, says locals support the road but don't like America any more as a result. "The construction of roads won't work because our whole social structure has been destroyed," Mr. Mursalin said. "Most of the common people are against drone strikes because most of the time there are civilian casualties and collateral damage."
Last summer's devastating floods in Pakistan, which killed almost 2,000 and affected 20 million others, gave the U.S. a chance to showcase its assistance. When Mr. Holbrooke visited the flood zone in September, he stressed that the U.S. was the biggest donor to flood relief. USAID paid for emergency food, shelter and seeds for the winter's wheat-planting season.
Haq Nawaz, a 38-year-old farmer from Nowshera Kalan, a village near Peshawar, lost his house and crops. He received seeds for wheat, peas and radishes from a local organization helping farmers on behalf of USAID. But his view of the U.S. hasn't changed.
"I like America's money, but I don't like their bullets," he said. "It is fair enough that they are fighting the Taliban, but they kill too many innocent civilians."
—Rehmat Mehsud contributed to this article.
Reuters Chronology of U.S.-Pakistan relations up to 1985
Not complete by any means; e.g., U.S. assistance to Pakistan began in 1947 not 1954. But still a handy reference.
Reuters
WASHINGTON
October 10, 2010
1954 - U.S. and Pakistan negotiate a mutual defense assistance agreement to address Washington's fear of Soviet expansionism and Islamabad's concerns about rival India.
1955 - Pakistan joins the South East Asia Treaty Organization and Central Treaty Organization -- two Western regional defense pacts. Between 1953 and 1961, Pakistan receives some $2 billion in U.S. aid, a quarter of that in military assistance.
1960 - Pakistan allows the United States to fly its spy planes from an air base on the outskirts of Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar for reconnaissance of the Soviet Union. A U.S. U-2 spy plane flown from this air base was shot down by the Soviet Union over its air space on May 1, worsening relations between Pakistan and the Soviet Union. Pakistan publicly claimed to have been deceived by the United States about the use of the base.
1962 - Indo-China war prompts U.S. President John F. Kennedy to offer India economic and military aid. Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan expresses displeasure over not having been consulted beforehand, as Kennedy had promised.
1965 - Second Indo-Pakistan war prompts U.S. to suspend military assistance to both sides, leading to a cooling of U.S.-Pakistani ties.
1970 - Pakistan plays a behind-the-scenes role to open communications between its old ally China and the United States. These efforts result in a secret visit of then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to China in 1971 and then by President Richard Nixon the following year, the first U.S. presidential trip to China.
1971 - Civil war between West and East Pakistan leads to the third Indo-Pakistan war. East Pakistan breaks away to form Bangladesh. U.S. again suspends military aid. Many in Pakistan begin to see United States as an unreliable ally.
1974 - India conducts underground nuclear test, prompting Pakistan to begin efforts to respond with its own nuclear arms capability. Islamabad's pursuit of atomic weapons in subsequent years strains ties with Washington.
1975 - U.S. resumes limited military aid to Pakistan.
1977 - Army chief General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq stages a coup, overthrowing the government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
1979 - President Jimmy Carter's administration cuts off military aid to Pakistan again over its covert construction of a uranium enrichment facility.
November 1979 - Enraged Pakistani students burn the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad on rumors that U.S. forces have attacked Islam's holiest city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Two U.S. Marines and two Pakistanis are killed in the incident.
December 1979 - The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. The United States begins to view Pakistan as a front-line state in the effort to stop Soviet expansionism.
September 1981 - President Ronald Reagan's administration negotiates a five-year, $3.2 billion economic and military aid package with Islamabad. Pakistan becomes the main route for arms and supplies for the Afghan resistance.
1985 - Pressler amendment added to the Foreign Assistance Act. It requires the president to certify to Congress that Pakistan does not possess a nuclear device as a condition for receiving aid.
Reuters
WASHINGTON
October 10, 2010
1954 - U.S. and Pakistan negotiate a mutual defense assistance agreement to address Washington's fear of Soviet expansionism and Islamabad's concerns about rival India.
1955 - Pakistan joins the South East Asia Treaty Organization and Central Treaty Organization -- two Western regional defense pacts. Between 1953 and 1961, Pakistan receives some $2 billion in U.S. aid, a quarter of that in military assistance.
1960 - Pakistan allows the United States to fly its spy planes from an air base on the outskirts of Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar for reconnaissance of the Soviet Union. A U.S. U-2 spy plane flown from this air base was shot down by the Soviet Union over its air space on May 1, worsening relations between Pakistan and the Soviet Union. Pakistan publicly claimed to have been deceived by the United States about the use of the base.
1962 - Indo-China war prompts U.S. President John F. Kennedy to offer India economic and military aid. Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan expresses displeasure over not having been consulted beforehand, as Kennedy had promised.
1965 - Second Indo-Pakistan war prompts U.S. to suspend military assistance to both sides, leading to a cooling of U.S.-Pakistani ties.
1970 - Pakistan plays a behind-the-scenes role to open communications between its old ally China and the United States. These efforts result in a secret visit of then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to China in 1971 and then by President Richard Nixon the following year, the first U.S. presidential trip to China.
1971 - Civil war between West and East Pakistan leads to the third Indo-Pakistan war. East Pakistan breaks away to form Bangladesh. U.S. again suspends military aid. Many in Pakistan begin to see United States as an unreliable ally.
1974 - India conducts underground nuclear test, prompting Pakistan to begin efforts to respond with its own nuclear arms capability. Islamabad's pursuit of atomic weapons in subsequent years strains ties with Washington.
1975 - U.S. resumes limited military aid to Pakistan.
1977 - Army chief General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq stages a coup, overthrowing the government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
1979 - President Jimmy Carter's administration cuts off military aid to Pakistan again over its covert construction of a uranium enrichment facility.
November 1979 - Enraged Pakistani students burn the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad on rumors that U.S. forces have attacked Islam's holiest city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Two U.S. Marines and two Pakistanis are killed in the incident.
December 1979 - The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. The United States begins to view Pakistan as a front-line state in the effort to stop Soviet expansionism.
September 1981 - President Ronald Reagan's administration negotiates a five-year, $3.2 billion economic and military aid package with Islamabad. Pakistan becomes the main route for arms and supplies for the Afghan resistance.
1985 - Pressler amendment added to the Foreign Assistance Act. It requires the president to certify to Congress that Pakistan does not possess a nuclear device as a condition for receiving aid.
Two views of India's role in Afghanistan
Fair and balanced reporting from Asia Times Online :-)
Pro-China view:
Peter Lee, Asia Times Online, May 21, 2011
India left standing in Afghan musical chairs
Pro-India view:
Sudha Ramachandran, Asia Times Online, May 21, 2011
Delhi seeks a hands-on role
Pro-China view:
Peter Lee, Asia Times Online, May 21, 2011
India left standing in Afghan musical chairs
Pro-India view:
Sudha Ramachandran, Asia Times Online, May 21, 2011
Delhi seeks a hands-on role
Waste, fraud, no accountability mark US aid to Pakistan
This article gets better as it goes along; data rich
U.S. may terminate military aid to Pakistan
May 21, 2011 6:30 pm ET .
Jim Kouri writing on Public Safety
Examiner
[See link at Examiner website for information on Kouri]
Prior to visiting with Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Monday, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) had said that Pakistan faces significant changes in its relationship with the U.S. In Washington, D.C. several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pondering whether the U.S. should continue financial aid for Pakistan earmarked for counterterrorism operations.
The friction that's occurred as a result of U.S. Navy SEALs' surreptitious entry into Pakistan to terminate the command of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden on May 1 appears to have strained the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. But most national security experts and diplomats understand that Pakistan's reliance on the U.S. is paramount to that Muslim nation's survival.
Pakistan is certainly a key U.S. ally in the effort to combat terrorism and violent extremism. Taliban, al Qaeda, and other terrorists have used parts of Pakistan to plan and launch attacks on Afghan, U.S., and NATO security forces in Afghanistan, as well as on Pakistani citizens and security forces in Pakistan.
"U.S. aid to Pakistan is under review as a result of questions about whether or not elements of the Pakistan military and intelligence services were aware of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Regardless, it is troubling that USAID would let a dollar, much less millions of dollars, go out the door to any organization susceptible to waste and abuse of U.S. funding," said Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
"Perhaps this problem explains why so many IG reports of USAID programs fail to find measurable results. Working with trustworthy partners is the necessary first step to ensure we are not wasting millions in aid on good intentions alone," she said.
Since 2002, the United States has provided over $18 billion in foreign assistance and reimbursements to Pakistan, about two-thirds of which has been security-related. In October 2009, Congress passed the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, which authorizes up to $1.5 billion a year for development, economic, and democratic assistance (referred to as "civilian assistance" by U.S. lawmakers) to Pakistan for fiscal years 2010 through 2014.
In the act, Congress declares that the United States requires a balanced, integrated, countrywide strategy to support Pakistan's efforts that does not disproportionately focus on security-related assistance. The act authorizes civilian assistance for a wide range of activities, including projects to build the capacity of government institutions, promote sustainable economic development, and support investment in people through education and health programs.
The act also encourages, as appropriate, the use of Pakistani organizations to provide this assistance. In several reports and testimonies since 2008, the Government Accountability Office identified the need to improve planning, monitoring, documentation, and oversight of U.S. assistance to Pakistan.
For example, in previous reports analysts noted the need to increase oversight and accountability for Pakistan's reimbursement claims for Coalition Support Funds and to improve planning, performance, and monitoring documentation of U.S. development assistance to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 requires the Department of State (State) to develop several monitoring and strategy reports for U.S. assistance to Pakistan, including the Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report and the Semi-Annual Monitoring Report. The act also directed the Comptroller General to provide a review of -- and comments addressing -- the Department of State's Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report; an assessment of the impact of the civilian assistance on the security and stability of Pakistan; and a detailed description of the expenditures made by Pakistan with Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants.
As of December 31, 2010, the full impact of the fiscal year 2010 civilian assistance could not be determined because most of the funding had not yet been disbursed. According to a State Department document, it will take some time before significant outcomes of the civilian assistance can be measured.
Furthermore, performance indicators, targets, and baselines had not yet been established for all of the civilian assistance. USAID, for example, is in the process of establishing new indicators across all sectors. Since fiscal year 2002, a total of $2.11 billion has been appropriated for FMF grants to Pakistan. Of that amount, Pakistan has used about $1.86 billion to acquire various defense articles, services, or training.
Some of these funds have been used to refurbish or upgrade defense articles that were given to Pakistan under the Excess Defense Articles program, including Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and the frigate U.S.S. McInerney. As of the end of calendar year 2010, Pakistan still had approximately $250 million available to purchase U.S defense articles, services, or training.
According to agency documents, some of these funds will be used to acquire naval surveillance aircraft, communications equipment, upgrades to TOW missile launchers, and additional helicopters. To supplement the Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report so that information reported to Congress complies with all requirements of the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, GAO analysts recommended that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton take two actions: include information on plans for operations research, as defined in the act, in its forthcoming Semi-Annual Monitoring Report; and deliver to Congress a projection of the levels of assistance to be provided to Pakistan under the act, broken down into the 17 Millennium Challenge categories listed in the act.
To enhance the accountability of U.S. civilian assistance to Pakistan, the GAO recommended that the USAID Administrator should ensure that U.S. assistance to Pakistani organizations identified as high- or medium-risk be provided through contracts, grants, or agreements that require these organizations to address weaknesses identified in their pre-award assessment that would improve the accountability of U.S. funds. These measures can include such steps as implementing a conflict of interest policy, recruiting more qualified internal audit and procurement staff, embedding approved CPA staff, and participating in a capacity-building program.
U.S. may terminate military aid to Pakistan
May 21, 2011 6:30 pm ET .
Jim Kouri writing on Public Safety
Examiner
[See link at Examiner website for information on Kouri]
Prior to visiting with Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Monday, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) had said that Pakistan faces significant changes in its relationship with the U.S. In Washington, D.C. several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pondering whether the U.S. should continue financial aid for Pakistan earmarked for counterterrorism operations.
The friction that's occurred as a result of U.S. Navy SEALs' surreptitious entry into Pakistan to terminate the command of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden on May 1 appears to have strained the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. But most national security experts and diplomats understand that Pakistan's reliance on the U.S. is paramount to that Muslim nation's survival.
Pakistan is certainly a key U.S. ally in the effort to combat terrorism and violent extremism. Taliban, al Qaeda, and other terrorists have used parts of Pakistan to plan and launch attacks on Afghan, U.S., and NATO security forces in Afghanistan, as well as on Pakistani citizens and security forces in Pakistan.
"U.S. aid to Pakistan is under review as a result of questions about whether or not elements of the Pakistan military and intelligence services were aware of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Regardless, it is troubling that USAID would let a dollar, much less millions of dollars, go out the door to any organization susceptible to waste and abuse of U.S. funding," said Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
"Perhaps this problem explains why so many IG reports of USAID programs fail to find measurable results. Working with trustworthy partners is the necessary first step to ensure we are not wasting millions in aid on good intentions alone," she said.
Since 2002, the United States has provided over $18 billion in foreign assistance and reimbursements to Pakistan, about two-thirds of which has been security-related. In October 2009, Congress passed the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, which authorizes up to $1.5 billion a year for development, economic, and democratic assistance (referred to as "civilian assistance" by U.S. lawmakers) to Pakistan for fiscal years 2010 through 2014.
In the act, Congress declares that the United States requires a balanced, integrated, countrywide strategy to support Pakistan's efforts that does not disproportionately focus on security-related assistance. The act authorizes civilian assistance for a wide range of activities, including projects to build the capacity of government institutions, promote sustainable economic development, and support investment in people through education and health programs.
The act also encourages, as appropriate, the use of Pakistani organizations to provide this assistance. In several reports and testimonies since 2008, the Government Accountability Office identified the need to improve planning, monitoring, documentation, and oversight of U.S. assistance to Pakistan.
For example, in previous reports analysts noted the need to increase oversight and accountability for Pakistan's reimbursement claims for Coalition Support Funds and to improve planning, performance, and monitoring documentation of U.S. development assistance to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 requires the Department of State (State) to develop several monitoring and strategy reports for U.S. assistance to Pakistan, including the Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report and the Semi-Annual Monitoring Report. The act also directed the Comptroller General to provide a review of -- and comments addressing -- the Department of State's Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report; an assessment of the impact of the civilian assistance on the security and stability of Pakistan; and a detailed description of the expenditures made by Pakistan with Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants.
As of December 31, 2010, the full impact of the fiscal year 2010 civilian assistance could not be determined because most of the funding had not yet been disbursed. According to a State Department document, it will take some time before significant outcomes of the civilian assistance can be measured.
Furthermore, performance indicators, targets, and baselines had not yet been established for all of the civilian assistance. USAID, for example, is in the process of establishing new indicators across all sectors. Since fiscal year 2002, a total of $2.11 billion has been appropriated for FMF grants to Pakistan. Of that amount, Pakistan has used about $1.86 billion to acquire various defense articles, services, or training.
Some of these funds have been used to refurbish or upgrade defense articles that were given to Pakistan under the Excess Defense Articles program, including Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and the frigate U.S.S. McInerney. As of the end of calendar year 2010, Pakistan still had approximately $250 million available to purchase U.S defense articles, services, or training.
According to agency documents, some of these funds will be used to acquire naval surveillance aircraft, communications equipment, upgrades to TOW missile launchers, and additional helicopters. To supplement the Pakistan Assistance Strategy Report so that information reported to Congress complies with all requirements of the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, GAO analysts recommended that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton take two actions: include information on plans for operations research, as defined in the act, in its forthcoming Semi-Annual Monitoring Report; and deliver to Congress a projection of the levels of assistance to be provided to Pakistan under the act, broken down into the 17 Millennium Challenge categories listed in the act.
To enhance the accountability of U.S. civilian assistance to Pakistan, the GAO recommended that the USAID Administrator should ensure that U.S. assistance to Pakistani organizations identified as high- or medium-risk be provided through contracts, grants, or agreements that require these organizations to address weaknesses identified in their pre-award assessment that would improve the accountability of U.S. funds. These measures can include such steps as implementing a conflict of interest policy, recruiting more qualified internal audit and procurement staff, embedding approved CPA staff, and participating in a capacity-building program.
U.S. bases in Afghanistan
US bases in Afghanistan
By A.G. Noorani
May 21, 2011
Dawn [Pakistan] newspaper
It is about time the United States clearly defined its interests in Afghanistan, the objectives it aims to accomplish and stated candidly and publicly the policy it proposes to pursue.
The situation today is radically different from what it was on 9/11. Even then, as a book published a few days ago reveals, deliberations within the US administration “reflected an inchoate approach that would undermine the coming intervention in Afghanistan”. Afghanistan How the West lost its way
Tim Bird and Alex Marshall`s book bears an apt sub-title . In a crucial meeting at Camp David, on Sept 15, “only Al Qaeda and Iraq, not the Taliban, were deemed to be `strategic threats` to the US”. On Oct 7, air operations were begun as a prelude to combat on the ground. The Taliban regime was swept aside. On May 2, the Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed.
What, precisely, then are America`s aims in Afghanistan in mid-2011? One would think no more than the establishment of peace and a stable government based on a consensus; domestic and external. It would seem, however, that it has far wider aims in mind. It seeks to extract from Afghanistan, in its hour of need, a `Permanent Bases Agreement`. The New York Times
In a speech to the Asia Society on Feb 18, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of “a long-term framework for our bilateral cooperation”. The details were reported from Kabul by correspondent Rod Nordland on April 20. Apparently, formal talks on a long-term agreement began in March under Marc Grossman who succeeded Richard Holbrooke, as President Barack Obama`s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The name of the game is a `Strategic Partnership Declaration`. A State Department delegation visited Kabul to fill in the details.
News leaked out. Iran`s interior minister rushed to Kabul followed by the national security advisers of Russia and India. A political adviser at the Russian embassy in Kabul Stefen Anikeen, pointedly asked: “How is transition possible with these bases? A 10- or 20-year agreement can be prolonged at any time. And we have no guarantee they`re not permanent.” As the French shrewdly say, nothing lasts longer than the temporary.
Far sharper was the criticism made by Ataullah Ludin, deputy chairman of the High Peace Council which President Hamid Karzai set up to promote talks with the Taliban. He said: “The Americans have not been honest about this, even among themselves. One says we are not building bases; another says we are building them.” The denials are deceptive. More recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, urged what he called a minimum, permanent `military presence` in the country.
Nato`s heads of state decided last November in Lisbon that foreign forces would withdraw by the end of 2014 and security duties would be transferred to the Afghan National Army. An orderly withdrawal depends on two factors — Pakistan`s assistance and an accord with the Taliban who insist on the withdrawal of foreign forces.
The US attempts will only muddy the waters and make a settlement almost impossible. Who will suffer the most? Pakistan, of course, Michael Krepon, co-founder of the prestigious Stimson Centre in Washington D.C. warned the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on May 5, “We might also reconsider our present course. In my view, our Afghan policies hurt, rather than help Pakistan to find its balance.” With stark realism Krepon proceeded to add, “If authorities in Afghanistan are unable to safeguard our military`s hard-won gains, we are obliged to ask how much more blood and treasure ought to be devoted to this cause. I acknowledge that there are risks in accelerating reductions in the US level of effort in Afghanistan. In my view, greater risks and costs are incurred by remaining on our current glide path.” The New York Times
Krepon`s plea for accelerating efforts “to secure a political settlement”, alongside steeper reductions in the troop levels, would have won Richard Holbrooke`s full support. His widow, Kati Marton, shared with Nicholas D. Kristof of some of his “scattered reflections” now in her hands. “He thought that this could become Obama`s Vietnam. Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that Obama did not want to hear it. …Richard never thought that this war could be won on the battlefield”. He sought a “viable lasting solution”. The only way out of the mess was “a peace deal with the Taliban”. Le Nouvel Observateur
There is a certain irony in the Vietnam analogy. True, the Soviet Union bears a heavy responsibility for its invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. But what went unnoticed is that months earlier president Jimmy Carter had accepted the proposal of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to deliberately provoke a Soviet invasion intended to create Moscow`s “own Vietnam”. Brzezinski spilled the beans in an interview to of Paris (Jan 15, 1998). Carter signed the fateful directive on July 3, 1979 for secret aid to the Mujahideen. “I wrote a note to the president … this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention … We didn`t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly created the probability that they would.” Later, the US brought in some 20,000 Arabs, including Bin Laden, to fight the Soviet troops. It is now faced with another Vietnam of its own making.
In consequence the entire region has suffered grievously. Holbrooke made a sage remark. Pakistan “was centre stage; Afghanistan was a sideshow”. It is all to the good that on April 16, a delegation led by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani visited Kabul. He was accompanied by army chief Gen Kayani, DG ISI Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and the ministers for defence and the interior. By all accounts they agreed on the framework of a strategy for peace. These efforts will be wrecked by America`s lust for bases and the region will be destabilised for a long time to come.
The writer is an author and a lawyer.
By A.G. Noorani
May 21, 2011
Dawn [Pakistan] newspaper
It is about time the United States clearly defined its interests in Afghanistan, the objectives it aims to accomplish and stated candidly and publicly the policy it proposes to pursue.
The situation today is radically different from what it was on 9/11. Even then, as a book published a few days ago reveals, deliberations within the US administration “reflected an inchoate approach that would undermine the coming intervention in Afghanistan”. Afghanistan How the West lost its way
Tim Bird and Alex Marshall`s book bears an apt sub-title . In a crucial meeting at Camp David, on Sept 15, “only Al Qaeda and Iraq, not the Taliban, were deemed to be `strategic threats` to the US”. On Oct 7, air operations were begun as a prelude to combat on the ground. The Taliban regime was swept aside. On May 2, the Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed.
What, precisely, then are America`s aims in Afghanistan in mid-2011? One would think no more than the establishment of peace and a stable government based on a consensus; domestic and external. It would seem, however, that it has far wider aims in mind. It seeks to extract from Afghanistan, in its hour of need, a `Permanent Bases Agreement`. The New York Times
In a speech to the Asia Society on Feb 18, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of “a long-term framework for our bilateral cooperation”. The details were reported from Kabul by correspondent Rod Nordland on April 20. Apparently, formal talks on a long-term agreement began in March under Marc Grossman who succeeded Richard Holbrooke, as President Barack Obama`s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The name of the game is a `Strategic Partnership Declaration`. A State Department delegation visited Kabul to fill in the details.
News leaked out. Iran`s interior minister rushed to Kabul followed by the national security advisers of Russia and India. A political adviser at the Russian embassy in Kabul Stefen Anikeen, pointedly asked: “How is transition possible with these bases? A 10- or 20-year agreement can be prolonged at any time. And we have no guarantee they`re not permanent.” As the French shrewdly say, nothing lasts longer than the temporary.
Far sharper was the criticism made by Ataullah Ludin, deputy chairman of the High Peace Council which President Hamid Karzai set up to promote talks with the Taliban. He said: “The Americans have not been honest about this, even among themselves. One says we are not building bases; another says we are building them.” The denials are deceptive. More recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, urged what he called a minimum, permanent `military presence` in the country.
Nato`s heads of state decided last November in Lisbon that foreign forces would withdraw by the end of 2014 and security duties would be transferred to the Afghan National Army. An orderly withdrawal depends on two factors — Pakistan`s assistance and an accord with the Taliban who insist on the withdrawal of foreign forces.
The US attempts will only muddy the waters and make a settlement almost impossible. Who will suffer the most? Pakistan, of course, Michael Krepon, co-founder of the prestigious Stimson Centre in Washington D.C. warned the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on May 5, “We might also reconsider our present course. In my view, our Afghan policies hurt, rather than help Pakistan to find its balance.” With stark realism Krepon proceeded to add, “If authorities in Afghanistan are unable to safeguard our military`s hard-won gains, we are obliged to ask how much more blood and treasure ought to be devoted to this cause. I acknowledge that there are risks in accelerating reductions in the US level of effort in Afghanistan. In my view, greater risks and costs are incurred by remaining on our current glide path.” The New York Times
Krepon`s plea for accelerating efforts “to secure a political settlement”, alongside steeper reductions in the troop levels, would have won Richard Holbrooke`s full support. His widow, Kati Marton, shared with Nicholas D. Kristof of some of his “scattered reflections” now in her hands. “He thought that this could become Obama`s Vietnam. Some of the conversations in the Situation Room reminded him of conversations in the Johnson White House. When he raised that Obama did not want to hear it. …Richard never thought that this war could be won on the battlefield”. He sought a “viable lasting solution”. The only way out of the mess was “a peace deal with the Taliban”. Le Nouvel Observateur
There is a certain irony in the Vietnam analogy. True, the Soviet Union bears a heavy responsibility for its invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. But what went unnoticed is that months earlier president Jimmy Carter had accepted the proposal of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to deliberately provoke a Soviet invasion intended to create Moscow`s “own Vietnam”. Brzezinski spilled the beans in an interview to of Paris (Jan 15, 1998). Carter signed the fateful directive on July 3, 1979 for secret aid to the Mujahideen. “I wrote a note to the president … this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention … We didn`t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly created the probability that they would.” Later, the US brought in some 20,000 Arabs, including Bin Laden, to fight the Soviet troops. It is now faced with another Vietnam of its own making.
In consequence the entire region has suffered grievously. Holbrooke made a sage remark. Pakistan “was centre stage; Afghanistan was a sideshow”. It is all to the good that on April 16, a delegation led by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani visited Kabul. He was accompanied by army chief Gen Kayani, DG ISI Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and the ministers for defence and the interior. By all accounts they agreed on the framework of a strategy for peace. These efforts will be wrecked by America`s lust for bases and the region will be destabilised for a long time to come.
The writer is an author and a lawyer.
Incoming ISAF commander John Allen promotes USAID, development aspect of COIN
New ISAF commander hearts USAID
By Josh Rogin
The Cable, Foreign Policy magazine
May 9, 2011
Lt. Gen. John Allen is set to take over command of the war in Afghanistan when Gen. David Petraeus becomes CIA director in September. The battle against the Taliban remains the centerpiece in the Afghanistan effort, but the development mission -- the world's largest and most challenging -will also be a focus for Allen.
In a long interview with USAID's Frontline magazine, Allen talked about the development challenges in Afghanistan and recounted his experiences working with development professionals in the Mediterranean in the 1970s, running the task force that led the U.S. government response to the Asian tsunami of 2004-2005, and coordinating development projects in Iraq during the surge from 2006 to 2008. He promised to push for increased cooperation between soldiers and aid workers and fight for USAID's continued support from the military and Congress.
Here are some excerpts:
On the challenges in the military-civilian relationship in a warzone:
"It's largely in the sequencing. Ten years ago, I'd have said it was cultural. Not today. Yes, the development and military cultures are inherently different, but after a decade of war, where our paths in many ways are now inextricably linked, our institutional cultures are largely in harmony and we draw strength from the relationship. This includes development NGOs as well.... When the development and military entities are closely tied together in planning and execution --"within the hearing of the guns" -- we have all the ingredients for success. While there remains room for improvement, we're far more advanced and effective in this relationship than we were just 10 years ago."
On how to achieve better cooperation between the military and development personnel on the ground:
"For the military, working better on the ground with USAID can come specifically from establishing a close working relationship with the USAID elements which will be operating with or alongside the military units. During periods of conflict, this ideally begins at the unit's home station before the deployment and continues without interruption right down to the ground level during the deployment and employment. If we've done this right, USAID or development personnel who'll be in the same area have had the chance to participate in the military unit's training during its preparations and in its mission rehearsal exercises prior to deployment. "
On development's role in preventing conflicts:
"As we start our second decade of counterinsurgency efforts in CENTCOM, it has become clear to us that one of the best ways we can defend our nation is to prevent factors that combine in our region which severely stress social systems ... ultimately creating a critical mass of hopelessness, and frequently leading to insurgency and conflict. Indeed, the social turmoil playing out in our region, the so-called Arab Spring, is a direct result of these societal forces boiling over...."
On why domestic support for development is lower than support for the military:
"I honestly think it is simply a combination of word association and exposure. Through the media, particularly since 9/11, your average American has had far more day-to-day exposure to the military culture than to the development world. Americans are accustomed to and generally understand the broad mission areas of the military in ways they never had prior to 9/11. In contrast, they may not have had any exposure to, or understanding of, the art and science of development.
In many respects, USAID's efforts can do as much -- over the long term -- to prevent conflict as the deterrent effect of a carrier strike group or a marine expeditionary force. There are adversaries in the CENTCOM region who understand and respect American hard power, but they genuinely fear American soft power frequently wielded in the form of USAID projects. While the hard power of the military can create trade, space, time, and a viable security environment, the soft power of USAID and the development community can deliver strategic effects and outcomes for decades, affecting generations."
On the budget fight over funding for USAID:
"The development programs carried out by USAID directly support the president's National Security Strategy and are a sound expenditure of our nation's precious resources. As you note, some do feel that expending funds in support of development projects is a luxury. This argument complements the ever increasing concerns over the economic realities facing our government. The fiscal pie is only so big and the ability to carve out a larger slice -- no matter who you are -- will only continue to become more challenging."
Read the entire interview at www.usaid.gov/frontlines.
By Josh Rogin
The Cable, Foreign Policy magazine
May 9, 2011
Lt. Gen. John Allen is set to take over command of the war in Afghanistan when Gen. David Petraeus becomes CIA director in September. The battle against the Taliban remains the centerpiece in the Afghanistan effort, but the development mission -- the world's largest and most challenging -will also be a focus for Allen.
In a long interview with USAID's Frontline magazine, Allen talked about the development challenges in Afghanistan and recounted his experiences working with development professionals in the Mediterranean in the 1970s, running the task force that led the U.S. government response to the Asian tsunami of 2004-2005, and coordinating development projects in Iraq during the surge from 2006 to 2008. He promised to push for increased cooperation between soldiers and aid workers and fight for USAID's continued support from the military and Congress.
Here are some excerpts:
On the challenges in the military-civilian relationship in a warzone:
"It's largely in the sequencing. Ten years ago, I'd have said it was cultural. Not today. Yes, the development and military cultures are inherently different, but after a decade of war, where our paths in many ways are now inextricably linked, our institutional cultures are largely in harmony and we draw strength from the relationship. This includes development NGOs as well.... When the development and military entities are closely tied together in planning and execution --"within the hearing of the guns" -- we have all the ingredients for success. While there remains room for improvement, we're far more advanced and effective in this relationship than we were just 10 years ago."
On how to achieve better cooperation between the military and development personnel on the ground:
"For the military, working better on the ground with USAID can come specifically from establishing a close working relationship with the USAID elements which will be operating with or alongside the military units. During periods of conflict, this ideally begins at the unit's home station before the deployment and continues without interruption right down to the ground level during the deployment and employment. If we've done this right, USAID or development personnel who'll be in the same area have had the chance to participate in the military unit's training during its preparations and in its mission rehearsal exercises prior to deployment. "
On development's role in preventing conflicts:
"As we start our second decade of counterinsurgency efforts in CENTCOM, it has become clear to us that one of the best ways we can defend our nation is to prevent factors that combine in our region which severely stress social systems ... ultimately creating a critical mass of hopelessness, and frequently leading to insurgency and conflict. Indeed, the social turmoil playing out in our region, the so-called Arab Spring, is a direct result of these societal forces boiling over...."
On why domestic support for development is lower than support for the military:
"I honestly think it is simply a combination of word association and exposure. Through the media, particularly since 9/11, your average American has had far more day-to-day exposure to the military culture than to the development world. Americans are accustomed to and generally understand the broad mission areas of the military in ways they never had prior to 9/11. In contrast, they may not have had any exposure to, or understanding of, the art and science of development.
In many respects, USAID's efforts can do as much -- over the long term -- to prevent conflict as the deterrent effect of a carrier strike group or a marine expeditionary force. There are adversaries in the CENTCOM region who understand and respect American hard power, but they genuinely fear American soft power frequently wielded in the form of USAID projects. While the hard power of the military can create trade, space, time, and a viable security environment, the soft power of USAID and the development community can deliver strategic effects and outcomes for decades, affecting generations."
On the budget fight over funding for USAID:
"The development programs carried out by USAID directly support the president's National Security Strategy and are a sound expenditure of our nation's precious resources. As you note, some do feel that expending funds in support of development projects is a luxury. This argument complements the ever increasing concerns over the economic realities facing our government. The fiscal pie is only so big and the ability to carve out a larger slice -- no matter who you are -- will only continue to become more challenging."
Read the entire interview at www.usaid.gov/frontlines.
"U.S. Aid Plan for Pakistan Is Foundering"
U.S. Aid Plan for Pakistan Is Foundering
By Jane Perlez
May 1, 2011
The New York Times
KHAJURI KACH, Pakistan — A multibillion-dollar aid plan that the Obama administration hoped would win over Pakistanis and buttress the weak civilian government is foundering because Washington’s fears of Pakistani corruption and incompetence has slowed disbursal of the money, undermining a fundamental goal of the United States in Pakistan, officials from both nations say.
The aid program promoted by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, promised Pakistan $7.5 billion over five years, much of it delivered through the civilian government.
But so inadequate is Pakistan’s civilian bureaucracy and so rife are United States fears of corruption in the government that American officials, constricted by layers of their own rules, have struggled to find safe places to actually invest the money available. Instead of polishing the tarnished image of America with a suspicious, even hostile, Pakistani public and government, the plan has resulted in bitterness and a sense of broken promises.
In a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said that only $179.5 million of the first $1.5 billion of the five-year program had been disbursed by last December.
Energy projects that the Obama administration said would improve electricity for households and energy-starved industries have been placed in out-of-the-way areas, and help for the crumbling education system has not materialized.
The United States Agency for International Development’s director for Pakistan, Andrew B. Sisson, defended the pace of spending. “This is a long-term enterprise, and building that takes time, and we’re doing that,” he said. The amount spent on projects from the $1.5 billion, he said, has risen to more than $200 million.
More than $1 billion in American aid was actually spent by U.S.A.I.D. in Pakistan last year from previously unused funds, Mr. Sisson said, including $500 million for flood victims.
During a visit to Pakistan in October 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that much of the American aid money would be devoted to “seven signature projects.”
They included the Gomal Zam Dam here in South Waziristan, where $20 million helped build the spillway to a power plant lighting one of Pakistan’s most neglected corners.
Built during the last eight years by Chinese engineers of the Sinohydro Corporation, the dam will serve the towns of Wana in South Waziristan and Tank in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, far from Pakistan’s biggest population centers.
But the Gomal dam — and the other projects — while helpful, barely qualify as “signature,” and none have been completely finished, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development in Washington.
The overall goals of the aid program were unrealistic, she said. The Obama administration wanted big-impact projects that would win instant love for the civilian government and the United States.
The administration said it would funnel at least 50 percent of the funds through the Pakistani government, rather than using American contractors. The aim was to show America’s commitment to the civilian government and help strengthen its ability to deliver to its citizens, American officials said. Moreover, the large overheads of American contracting companies would be eliminated, they said.
But the Americans have run into problems of corruption and incompetence on the civilian side. After nearly a decade of military rule in Pakistan — the military has run Pakistan for about half of its six decades — the three-year-old civilian government is deeply unpopular, having failed to provide a better life for Pakistanis.
The economy is failing. Education, health care and other services are almost nonexistent, while civilian leaders from the landed and industrialist classes pay hardly any taxes.
Pakistanis see the aid as a crude attempt to buy friendship and an effort to alleviate antipathy toward United States drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas. Last month, the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, said that if America did not stop the drones, Pakistan should turn down the aid package.
Mr. Kerry, co-sponsor of the 2009 aid legislation with Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, acknowledged the disappointment.
“I understand that Pakistanis may be frustrated by the slow pace of projects,” Mr. Kerry said. “Moving this much money transparently through any bureaucracy is always a slow process, but the administration must move faster to implement projects.”
U.S.A.I.D. officials point to a report by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General that highlighted the difficulties of operating effective, corruption-free projects in Pakistan. The first two years of a $750 million development program begun in the tribal areas in 2008 were plagued by allegations of corruption and the limitations of sending Americans to such a dangerous area. Only 53 percent of the planned projects had been carried out, the assessment said.
To keep a close watch on corruption, U.S.A.I.D. expanded its inspector general’s office in Pakistan to nine auditors in 2010, from two in 2009. Already, the office has opened 12 cases so far this year — involving bribery, kickbacks and collusion on bidding — compared with 13 cases in 2010, the office said.
Another big goal for the $1.5 billion was to reconstruct schools in the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani Army fought the Taliban two years ago, leaving a devastated economy and hundreds of schools destroyed.
Of 115 schools that the aid agency promised to rebuild, none have been completed, said Ziauddin Yousafzai, the principal of a private school, who has watched the school program closely.
“At this hour, work has only started on 14 to 20 schools,” Mr. Yousafzai said. One school on the outskirts of Mingora, Swat’s main city, was “like the Taj Mahal, very beautiful,” he said. But it was only half done, he said.
The slow progress was due to a clash between Pakistani politicians at the provincial authority created to speed Swat reconstruction, and two monitoring agencies the United States employed to oversee the contracts, Mr. Yousafzai said.
Undeterred by the pace in Swat, Mr. Sisson, the U.S.A.I.D. official, said he was planning to spend $303 million building hundreds of schools in Punjab and Sindh Provinces in the next three years.
To overcome the letdown over the first $1.5 billion of the Kerry-Lugar funds, the Obama administration is considering offering start-up financing for a major dam project, Basha, in the northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which would help solve Pakistan’s critical water shortages, American and Pakistani officials involved in the discussions said.
Sakib Sherani, a former principal economic adviser to the Finance Ministry, said that the United States would win more friends by offering trade concessions.
“They would have a big payoff for ordinary Pakistanis and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayer — chief of these would be access for Pakistani textiles,” Mr. Sherani said.
By Jane Perlez
May 1, 2011
The New York Times
KHAJURI KACH, Pakistan — A multibillion-dollar aid plan that the Obama administration hoped would win over Pakistanis and buttress the weak civilian government is foundering because Washington’s fears of Pakistani corruption and incompetence has slowed disbursal of the money, undermining a fundamental goal of the United States in Pakistan, officials from both nations say.
The aid program promoted by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, promised Pakistan $7.5 billion over five years, much of it delivered through the civilian government.
But so inadequate is Pakistan’s civilian bureaucracy and so rife are United States fears of corruption in the government that American officials, constricted by layers of their own rules, have struggled to find safe places to actually invest the money available. Instead of polishing the tarnished image of America with a suspicious, even hostile, Pakistani public and government, the plan has resulted in bitterness and a sense of broken promises.
In a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said that only $179.5 million of the first $1.5 billion of the five-year program had been disbursed by last December.
Energy projects that the Obama administration said would improve electricity for households and energy-starved industries have been placed in out-of-the-way areas, and help for the crumbling education system has not materialized.
The United States Agency for International Development’s director for Pakistan, Andrew B. Sisson, defended the pace of spending. “This is a long-term enterprise, and building that takes time, and we’re doing that,” he said. The amount spent on projects from the $1.5 billion, he said, has risen to more than $200 million.
More than $1 billion in American aid was actually spent by U.S.A.I.D. in Pakistan last year from previously unused funds, Mr. Sisson said, including $500 million for flood victims.
During a visit to Pakistan in October 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that much of the American aid money would be devoted to “seven signature projects.”
They included the Gomal Zam Dam here in South Waziristan, where $20 million helped build the spillway to a power plant lighting one of Pakistan’s most neglected corners.
Built during the last eight years by Chinese engineers of the Sinohydro Corporation, the dam will serve the towns of Wana in South Waziristan and Tank in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, far from Pakistan’s biggest population centers.
But the Gomal dam — and the other projects — while helpful, barely qualify as “signature,” and none have been completely finished, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development in Washington.
The overall goals of the aid program were unrealistic, she said. The Obama administration wanted big-impact projects that would win instant love for the civilian government and the United States.
The administration said it would funnel at least 50 percent of the funds through the Pakistani government, rather than using American contractors. The aim was to show America’s commitment to the civilian government and help strengthen its ability to deliver to its citizens, American officials said. Moreover, the large overheads of American contracting companies would be eliminated, they said.
But the Americans have run into problems of corruption and incompetence on the civilian side. After nearly a decade of military rule in Pakistan — the military has run Pakistan for about half of its six decades — the three-year-old civilian government is deeply unpopular, having failed to provide a better life for Pakistanis.
The economy is failing. Education, health care and other services are almost nonexistent, while civilian leaders from the landed and industrialist classes pay hardly any taxes.
Pakistanis see the aid as a crude attempt to buy friendship and an effort to alleviate antipathy toward United States drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas. Last month, the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, said that if America did not stop the drones, Pakistan should turn down the aid package.
Mr. Kerry, co-sponsor of the 2009 aid legislation with Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, acknowledged the disappointment.
“I understand that Pakistanis may be frustrated by the slow pace of projects,” Mr. Kerry said. “Moving this much money transparently through any bureaucracy is always a slow process, but the administration must move faster to implement projects.”
U.S.A.I.D. officials point to a report by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General that highlighted the difficulties of operating effective, corruption-free projects in Pakistan. The first two years of a $750 million development program begun in the tribal areas in 2008 were plagued by allegations of corruption and the limitations of sending Americans to such a dangerous area. Only 53 percent of the planned projects had been carried out, the assessment said.
To keep a close watch on corruption, U.S.A.I.D. expanded its inspector general’s office in Pakistan to nine auditors in 2010, from two in 2009. Already, the office has opened 12 cases so far this year — involving bribery, kickbacks and collusion on bidding — compared with 13 cases in 2010, the office said.
Another big goal for the $1.5 billion was to reconstruct schools in the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani Army fought the Taliban two years ago, leaving a devastated economy and hundreds of schools destroyed.
Of 115 schools that the aid agency promised to rebuild, none have been completed, said Ziauddin Yousafzai, the principal of a private school, who has watched the school program closely.
“At this hour, work has only started on 14 to 20 schools,” Mr. Yousafzai said. One school on the outskirts of Mingora, Swat’s main city, was “like the Taj Mahal, very beautiful,” he said. But it was only half done, he said.
The slow progress was due to a clash between Pakistani politicians at the provincial authority created to speed Swat reconstruction, and two monitoring agencies the United States employed to oversee the contracts, Mr. Yousafzai said.
Undeterred by the pace in Swat, Mr. Sisson, the U.S.A.I.D. official, said he was planning to spend $303 million building hundreds of schools in Punjab and Sindh Provinces in the next three years.
To overcome the letdown over the first $1.5 billion of the Kerry-Lugar funds, the Obama administration is considering offering start-up financing for a major dam project, Basha, in the northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which would help solve Pakistan’s critical water shortages, American and Pakistani officials involved in the discussions said.
Sakib Sherani, a former principal economic adviser to the Finance Ministry, said that the United States would win more friends by offering trade concessions.
“They would have a big payoff for ordinary Pakistanis and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayer — chief of these would be access for Pakistani textiles,” Mr. Sherani said.
"Signs That Bin Laden Weighed Seeking Pakistani Protection"
Signs That Bin Laden Weighed Seeking Pakistani Protection
By Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times
May 27, 2011
WASHINGTON - Documents seized at the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed show that he and his aides discussed making a deal with Pakistan in which Al Qaeda would refrain from attacking the country in exchange for protection inside Pakistan, American officials said Thursday.
The documents, which officials said included messages between Bin Laden and his top operations chief over the past year, provide the first suggestion that Bin Laden considered Pakistan's government amenable to a bargain that would ensure the safety of top Qaeda leaders.
The officials emphasized that they had found no evidence that such a proposal, which one American official said was in the "discussion phase," was ever raised with Pakistani military or intelligence operatives.
But the fact that Bin Laden even considered a truce with Pakistan suggests that he thought the idea might have had some support inside the country's national security establishment. At the same time, Pakistan could argue that the discussions provided evidence that there was no deal already in place allowing Bin Laden to hide in the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, a middle-class town 75 miles by road from the Pakistani capital.
The Central Intelligence Agency is poring over a huge electronic database that Navy Seal commandos seized during the raid that killed Bin Laden this month. The new details about the information came as American officials said that Pakistan had granted permission for the C.I.A. to send a forensics team to search Bin Laden's compound.
Many American officials are skeptical that Bin Laden could have hidden for so long inside Pakistan without at least the tacit approval of some Pakistani officials.
Top American officials said they had yet to see any evidence of official approval from the electronic files. But new information is being discovered about Al Qaeda's structure, particularly about a tier of operatives Bin Laden corresponded with who were in charge of the network's daily operations.
In particular, the documents highlight the central role played by Atiya Abdul Rahman, the operations chief with whom American officials said Bin Laden discussed a possible truce with Pakistan. Mr. Rahman is a Libyan operative who came into the job after a drone strike in 2010 killed his boss, Sheik Saeed al-Masri.
The job of Qaeda operations head is particularly perilous, as C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed a number of people holding that position over the past year. American officials and terrorism experts said the position was dangerous because the operations chief had to communicate with Qaeda operatives outside Pakistan, communications that are often intercepted by American eavesdropping.
Last year, American officials said, Mr. Rahman notified Bin Laden of a request by the leader of Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to install Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric, as the leader of the group in Yemen. That group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, apparently thought Mr. Awlaki's knowledge of the United States and his status as an Internet celebrity might help the group's operations and fund-raising efforts.
But, according to American officials, Bin Laden decided that the group's leadership should remain unchanged.
Pakistan's decision to allow a C.I.A. forensic team to search the compound, first reported on Thursday by The Washington Post, comes after weeks of private talks between uneasy allies.
It may be more important for symbolic than substantive reasons, as the Obama administration does not appear optimistic that the team would uncover secret tunnels or buried clues that could yield fresh information about Qaeda operations.
Still, American and Pakistani officials are, at least publicly, trying to play down tensions in a deeply fractured relationship. In another move aimed at thawing relations, Pakistan last week returned to the Americans the severed tail of a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed at the Abbottabad compound on the night of the raid.
By Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times
May 27, 2011
WASHINGTON - Documents seized at the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed show that he and his aides discussed making a deal with Pakistan in which Al Qaeda would refrain from attacking the country in exchange for protection inside Pakistan, American officials said Thursday.
The documents, which officials said included messages between Bin Laden and his top operations chief over the past year, provide the first suggestion that Bin Laden considered Pakistan's government amenable to a bargain that would ensure the safety of top Qaeda leaders.
The officials emphasized that they had found no evidence that such a proposal, which one American official said was in the "discussion phase," was ever raised with Pakistani military or intelligence operatives.
But the fact that Bin Laden even considered a truce with Pakistan suggests that he thought the idea might have had some support inside the country's national security establishment. At the same time, Pakistan could argue that the discussions provided evidence that there was no deal already in place allowing Bin Laden to hide in the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, a middle-class town 75 miles by road from the Pakistani capital.
The Central Intelligence Agency is poring over a huge electronic database that Navy Seal commandos seized during the raid that killed Bin Laden this month. The new details about the information came as American officials said that Pakistan had granted permission for the C.I.A. to send a forensics team to search Bin Laden's compound.
Many American officials are skeptical that Bin Laden could have hidden for so long inside Pakistan without at least the tacit approval of some Pakistani officials.
Top American officials said they had yet to see any evidence of official approval from the electronic files. But new information is being discovered about Al Qaeda's structure, particularly about a tier of operatives Bin Laden corresponded with who were in charge of the network's daily operations.
In particular, the documents highlight the central role played by Atiya Abdul Rahman, the operations chief with whom American officials said Bin Laden discussed a possible truce with Pakistan. Mr. Rahman is a Libyan operative who came into the job after a drone strike in 2010 killed his boss, Sheik Saeed al-Masri.
The job of Qaeda operations head is particularly perilous, as C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed a number of people holding that position over the past year. American officials and terrorism experts said the position was dangerous because the operations chief had to communicate with Qaeda operatives outside Pakistan, communications that are often intercepted by American eavesdropping.
Last year, American officials said, Mr. Rahman notified Bin Laden of a request by the leader of Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen to install Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric, as the leader of the group in Yemen. That group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, apparently thought Mr. Awlaki's knowledge of the United States and his status as an Internet celebrity might help the group's operations and fund-raising efforts.
But, according to American officials, Bin Laden decided that the group's leadership should remain unchanged.
Pakistan's decision to allow a C.I.A. forensic team to search the compound, first reported on Thursday by The Washington Post, comes after weeks of private talks between uneasy allies.
It may be more important for symbolic than substantive reasons, as the Obama administration does not appear optimistic that the team would uncover secret tunnels or buried clues that could yield fresh information about Qaeda operations.
Still, American and Pakistani officials are, at least publicly, trying to play down tensions in a deeply fractured relationship. In another move aimed at thawing relations, Pakistan last week returned to the Americans the severed tail of a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed at the Abbottabad compound on the night of the raid.
"First, Take Nuristan: The Taliban's New Afghan Plan"
First, Take Nuristan: The Taliban's New Afghan Plan
By Julius Cavendish
June 1, 2011
TIME magazine
Jalalabad - Every morning at 8 a.m., Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group's ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. "People aren't happy, but they pretend to be," says one local trader. "They dislike the Taliban as much as they dislike government."
Zahir's attempt at daily dispute resolution is important in one respect: for the first time in almost a decade the Taliban are administering an Afghan district unmolested. In fact, Waygal has been almost completely abandoned by NATO for the past three years. For the insurgents — and their non-Afghan militant allies from Pakistan and Arabic-speaking countries — it is the most visible step in a longer term strategy to turn Nuristan, itself virtually given up by the alliance since 2009, into a militant hub and a staging post for attacks on strategic targets, including the capital Kabul.
Still, it is hard going for the Taliban. Local commanders don't exactly have the same agendas as the foreign fighters with visions of global jihad. Elsewhere in the province, on occasions when the militants have massed, Afghan government commandos and their U.S. mentors have scrambled from bases lower down the valleys to disperse them. Last Wednesday, as Taliban fighters attempted to storm Du Ab district center in Nuristan's west, U.S. warplanes killed more than 100 in a series of bombing runs, reportedly including civilians and a convoy of Afghan police. After NATO bombs killed several children in southern Helmand province on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai complained loudly. NATO apologized for the civilian casualties. Karzai has yet to comment on the Du Ab strike although his government has been broadly supportive of the Nuristan campaign, with the Interior Ministry promising to reclaim areas lost to the Taliban.
NATO is quick to point out that the sustained fighting in Nuristan is a testament to the toughness of the Afghan police on the front lines. That is undoubtedly true, but it misses the point that the Taliban attacks are part of a rolling effort to drive the government out of Nuristan altogether. The Taliban has three objectives in mind: to take Nuristan; storm Asadabad, capital of neighboring Kunar province; and undermine NATO's plans to hand a third territory, Laghman province, over to the Afghan government.
"The number of attacks has been shooting up," says a Western security analyst. "Bases are getting smashed, there are [illegal] checkpoints on the road every day." On May 1, when the Taliban announced their nearly nationwide spring campaign, Asadabad bore the brunt of the assault: three mortar attacks on a U.S. base in 36 hours and assaults on the prison and police headquarters, in what may well have been a hint of things to come.
Indeed, history is not on NATO's side. The 1978 uprising by landowners and clerics, which led to civil war, the virtual collapse of the government and ultimately the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, began in eastern Nuristan and spread quickly to Kunar. "Trouble here can break the central government," said Qari Ziaur Rahman, a regional commander for the Taliban who is also a leader of the Punjab-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, in a 2008 interview. "Whoever has been defeated in Afghanistan, his defeat began from Kunar." Whether the Taliban and their allies can pull off a successful assault on Asadabad is questionable, but there seems little doubt they'll try. For its part, NATO has redeployed troops to the valley linking Waygal with Asadabad in what looks like an attempt to lock the door.
But the Taliban and their allies have "a very definite plan" to launch attacks in neighboring Laghman province, Western security analysts say. There, NATO is already handing over security of the provincial capital Mehterlam to Afghan forces, and the rest of the province is expected to follow suit next year. If the Taliban can seize Nuristan's western fringes, they'll have a free run from the Pakistani border all the way to Laghman, where provincial officials are already said to be glancing nervously at their unruly neighbor.
There is, it's true, a sense that many local Taliban fighters in Nuristan want nothing more than to remain in splendid isolation. But with "most of the authority and the decisionmaking" in the hands of the foreign fighters operating in the region, according to Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul think tank, there are grander agendas afoot. While the withdrawal of U.S. troops has dampened the insurgency in some respects, it has also given the hodgepodge of global jihadist groups in the region freer rein.
According to one Afghan official, members of the Pakistani Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups alien to Afghanistan are regularly present in Nuristan. Western diplomats say that links between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda are stronger in Nuristan and Kunar than anywhere else in the country — and that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmir Islamist militant group backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, is a growing presence. The group is blamed for the massacre of a party of aid workers in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, next door to Nuristan, in 2010.
Earlier in May, an explosion rocked a house in the Nuristani village of Chatras, killing two Arab fighters thought to belong to al-Qaeda, two retired Pakistani soldiers, three local Talibs — and the 12-year-old boy they were drilling in the craft of suicide bombing. "After the instruction, they fitted the jacket on him," the Afghan official told TIME, "And he said, 'O.K., should I walk like this?' 'Yes, yes.' 'And I should press this button?' And he pressed the button and exploded."
The influx has brought its own problems, with clashes between local Taliban commanders and die-hard outsiders. In a stark illustration of the tension, a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander called Maulawi Ahmad last winter ambushed the shadow governor of Nuristan, Jamil Rahman, who is Zahir's boss. Rahman had publicly upbraided Ahmad for kidnapping engineers working on a road that would improve life for local communities. Ahmad's men reportedly beat Rahman with sticks until they broke his arm. Many foreign militants flowing into Nuristan continue to see such foreign aid projects as legitimate targets.
It remains to be seen whether these interlopers from Pakistan will have better luck taming Nuristan's wild valleys than NATO has. But even if they're unsuccessful, the situation — a weak government under siege by local insurgents and tensions deepening between the region's myriad factions and strongmen — offers a sobering picture of what the rest of Afghanistan could look like when NATO leaves.
By Julius Cavendish
June 1, 2011
TIME magazine
Jalalabad - Every morning at 8 a.m., Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group's ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. "People aren't happy, but they pretend to be," says one local trader. "They dislike the Taliban as much as they dislike government."
Zahir's attempt at daily dispute resolution is important in one respect: for the first time in almost a decade the Taliban are administering an Afghan district unmolested. In fact, Waygal has been almost completely abandoned by NATO for the past three years. For the insurgents — and their non-Afghan militant allies from Pakistan and Arabic-speaking countries — it is the most visible step in a longer term strategy to turn Nuristan, itself virtually given up by the alliance since 2009, into a militant hub and a staging post for attacks on strategic targets, including the capital Kabul.
Still, it is hard going for the Taliban. Local commanders don't exactly have the same agendas as the foreign fighters with visions of global jihad. Elsewhere in the province, on occasions when the militants have massed, Afghan government commandos and their U.S. mentors have scrambled from bases lower down the valleys to disperse them. Last Wednesday, as Taliban fighters attempted to storm Du Ab district center in Nuristan's west, U.S. warplanes killed more than 100 in a series of bombing runs, reportedly including civilians and a convoy of Afghan police. After NATO bombs killed several children in southern Helmand province on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai complained loudly. NATO apologized for the civilian casualties. Karzai has yet to comment on the Du Ab strike although his government has been broadly supportive of the Nuristan campaign, with the Interior Ministry promising to reclaim areas lost to the Taliban.
NATO is quick to point out that the sustained fighting in Nuristan is a testament to the toughness of the Afghan police on the front lines. That is undoubtedly true, but it misses the point that the Taliban attacks are part of a rolling effort to drive the government out of Nuristan altogether. The Taliban has three objectives in mind: to take Nuristan; storm Asadabad, capital of neighboring Kunar province; and undermine NATO's plans to hand a third territory, Laghman province, over to the Afghan government.
"The number of attacks has been shooting up," says a Western security analyst. "Bases are getting smashed, there are [illegal] checkpoints on the road every day." On May 1, when the Taliban announced their nearly nationwide spring campaign, Asadabad bore the brunt of the assault: three mortar attacks on a U.S. base in 36 hours and assaults on the prison and police headquarters, in what may well have been a hint of things to come.
Indeed, history is not on NATO's side. The 1978 uprising by landowners and clerics, which led to civil war, the virtual collapse of the government and ultimately the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, began in eastern Nuristan and spread quickly to Kunar. "Trouble here can break the central government," said Qari Ziaur Rahman, a regional commander for the Taliban who is also a leader of the Punjab-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, in a 2008 interview. "Whoever has been defeated in Afghanistan, his defeat began from Kunar." Whether the Taliban and their allies can pull off a successful assault on Asadabad is questionable, but there seems little doubt they'll try. For its part, NATO has redeployed troops to the valley linking Waygal with Asadabad in what looks like an attempt to lock the door.
But the Taliban and their allies have "a very definite plan" to launch attacks in neighboring Laghman province, Western security analysts say. There, NATO is already handing over security of the provincial capital Mehterlam to Afghan forces, and the rest of the province is expected to follow suit next year. If the Taliban can seize Nuristan's western fringes, they'll have a free run from the Pakistani border all the way to Laghman, where provincial officials are already said to be glancing nervously at their unruly neighbor.
There is, it's true, a sense that many local Taliban fighters in Nuristan want nothing more than to remain in splendid isolation. But with "most of the authority and the decisionmaking" in the hands of the foreign fighters operating in the region, according to Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a Kabul think tank, there are grander agendas afoot. While the withdrawal of U.S. troops has dampened the insurgency in some respects, it has also given the hodgepodge of global jihadist groups in the region freer rein.
According to one Afghan official, members of the Pakistani Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups alien to Afghanistan are regularly present in Nuristan. Western diplomats say that links between the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda are stronger in Nuristan and Kunar than anywhere else in the country — and that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmir Islamist militant group backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, is a growing presence. The group is blamed for the massacre of a party of aid workers in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, next door to Nuristan, in 2010.
Earlier in May, an explosion rocked a house in the Nuristani village of Chatras, killing two Arab fighters thought to belong to al-Qaeda, two retired Pakistani soldiers, three local Talibs — and the 12-year-old boy they were drilling in the craft of suicide bombing. "After the instruction, they fitted the jacket on him," the Afghan official told TIME, "And he said, 'O.K., should I walk like this?' 'Yes, yes.' 'And I should press this button?' And he pressed the button and exploded."
The influx has brought its own problems, with clashes between local Taliban commanders and die-hard outsiders. In a stark illustration of the tension, a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander called Maulawi Ahmad last winter ambushed the shadow governor of Nuristan, Jamil Rahman, who is Zahir's boss. Rahman had publicly upbraided Ahmad for kidnapping engineers working on a road that would improve life for local communities. Ahmad's men reportedly beat Rahman with sticks until they broke his arm. Many foreign militants flowing into Nuristan continue to see such foreign aid projects as legitimate targets.
It remains to be seen whether these interlopers from Pakistan will have better luck taming Nuristan's wild valleys than NATO has. But even if they're unsuccessful, the situation — a weak government under siege by local insurgents and tensions deepening between the region's myriad factions and strongmen — offers a sobering picture of what the rest of Afghanistan could look like when NATO leaves.
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