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
Saturday, June 18, 2011
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.
Rana trial, ISI, Headly Pune bakery bombing connection
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/isi-handler-major-iqbal-is-chaudhery-khan-headley-108188
Pune Mirror :
Handwriting analysis experts have concluded that arrested terror suspect David Coleman Headley had indeed visited Pune before the German Bakery bomb blast. The handwriting analysis claimed that Headley’s signatures matched with various documents where he had signed.Headley has been arrested by US intelligence agencies and a trial at a court in Chicago is underway.
Headley had visited Pune in March 2009 and had stayed in Hotel Surya Villa in Koregaon Park. He had booked room number 202 on March 19. He wrote his name and signed on the hotel register and at the same time had submitted photocopies of his passport which bore his signature.
The Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) team had seized the hotel register and the photocopies of Headley’s passport. Both documents were then sent to the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to have the handwriting analysed.
The CID has a separate wing of for handwriting analysis. A special team of handwriting experts were deputed to analysis Headley’s documents.
The team worked on the documents for over three months, and submitted a detailed report to the ATS. A senior CID officer confirmed that a ‘positive report of the handwriting analysis’ was sent to the ATS. This means that the handwriting sample obtained from the Headley’s passport matched with the signature and handwriting of the hotel register.
However, ATS officials refused to comment on the issue. The state CID’s handwriting wing has specialised equipment and staff to study the hand writing of the suspects involved in fraud and other serious offences.
It studies the slant (graphology), pressure applied on the paper and other technical aspects. The process is repeated atleast thrice to confirm or match the handwriting samples. A set of three different staff members analyse the documents to match the handwriting and only after these tests are done, it is declared ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ i e matching or not.
Headley, a suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, is a US national. After checking into the hotel, he visited the Osho International Meditation Resort in Koregaon Park on same day. He checked out the next day at 8.15 pm after paying a bill of Rs 1,240. It is suspected that he had visited many places in Koregaon Park.
It was also suspected that Headley had visited Pune earlier in 2008 and 2009 on a Business Visa. After Headley’s survey of the area, a bomb ripped through the German Bakery on February 13, 2010, in which 17 persons were killed and several others were left injured.
Pune Mirror :
Handwriting analysis experts have concluded that arrested terror suspect David Coleman Headley had indeed visited Pune before the German Bakery bomb blast. The handwriting analysis claimed that Headley’s signatures matched with various documents where he had signed.Headley has been arrested by US intelligence agencies and a trial at a court in Chicago is underway.
Headley had visited Pune in March 2009 and had stayed in Hotel Surya Villa in Koregaon Park. He had booked room number 202 on March 19. He wrote his name and signed on the hotel register and at the same time had submitted photocopies of his passport which bore his signature.
The Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) team had seized the hotel register and the photocopies of Headley’s passport. Both documents were then sent to the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to have the handwriting analysed.
The CID has a separate wing of for handwriting analysis. A special team of handwriting experts were deputed to analysis Headley’s documents.
The team worked on the documents for over three months, and submitted a detailed report to the ATS. A senior CID officer confirmed that a ‘positive report of the handwriting analysis’ was sent to the ATS. This means that the handwriting sample obtained from the Headley’s passport matched with the signature and handwriting of the hotel register.
However, ATS officials refused to comment on the issue. The state CID’s handwriting wing has specialised equipment and staff to study the hand writing of the suspects involved in fraud and other serious offences.
It studies the slant (graphology), pressure applied on the paper and other technical aspects. The process is repeated atleast thrice to confirm or match the handwriting samples. A set of three different staff members analyse the documents to match the handwriting and only after these tests are done, it is declared ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ i e matching or not.
Headley, a suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, is a US national. After checking into the hotel, he visited the Osho International Meditation Resort in Koregaon Park on same day. He checked out the next day at 8.15 pm after paying a bill of Rs 1,240. It is suspected that he had visited many places in Koregaon Park.
It was also suspected that Headley had visited Pune earlier in 2008 and 2009 on a Business Visa. After Headley’s survey of the area, a bomb ripped through the German Bakery on February 13, 2010, in which 17 persons were killed and several others were left injured.
ProPublica on the Rana trial
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-do-we-know-pakistan-terror-witness-is-telling-the-truth
Headlines
Mirror.co.uk - James Lyons
BRITAIN is pressing the UN to lift sanctions against ex-Taliban commanders to help persuade Islamist rebels to stand down. The UK and US both want to scrap some of the restrictions put in place after the 9/11 ...
Mirror.co.uk - James Lyons
BRITAIN is pressing the UN to lift sanctions against ex-Taliban commanders to help persuade Islamist rebels to stand down. The UK and US both want to scrap some of the restrictions put in place after the 9/11 ...
With friends like these, who needs the Taliban?
Global Post. Jean MacKenzie
Afghanistan's Council of Religious Scholars calls for a harsh crackdown on independent media on grounds of “immorality.” ...
UN may lift ex-Taliban sanctions
BBC News
It has asked for 18 people to be removed from the sanctions list. Sanctions include a travel ban and the freezing of assets. The request is seen as part of broader efforts to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan and to explore the possibility of peace ...
Two Visions Of Talking To The Taliban
RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty - Zarif Nazar, Jan Alekozai
By RFE/RL There are few things more divisive in Afghanistan today than the question of talking to the Taliban. The issue has become a national hot-button since President Hamid Karzai created a High Peace Council in September to reach out to the Taliban ...
Britain and US in drive to lift sanctions on former Taliban
Telegraph.co.uk - Alex Spillius - Jun 2, 2011
The United Nations is set to rule on appeals by Afghanistan to remove sanctions on former members of the Taliban, as part of a growing effort by Britain and the United States to promote reconciliation with remaining insurgents. ...
Green force
BBC News - Jun 2, 2011
By Tahir Qadiry BBC Persian TV
Green is the colour of choice for many young and educated Afghans who are agitating for change. It is the colour adopted by a new grassroots political movement inspired by the popular revolts sweeping across the Arab world ...
Talking to the Taliban: Less than meets the eye
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Our report today that Britain and America are pressing for UN sanctions against 18 former senior members of the Taliban to be lifted is encouraging news. In opposing the troop surge in Afghanistan, we have argued that this long war will only come to an ...
Taliban zealot who banned TV points to his set. 'We've changed,' he insists
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Mohammed Qalamuddin's religious police beat women who wore high heels and makeup. Now UN sanctions against him may be lifted – with the backing of the US and Britain Haqqani Taliban fighters in their mountain camp in eastern Afghanistan. ...
Making peace with the Taliban? UN pressed to lift Afghan sanctions
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Haqqani Taliban fighters in Khost, east Afghanistan. Their representaives visited Kabul for talks. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the Guardian Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban ...
BRITAIN is pressing the UN to lift sanctions against ex-Taliban commanders to help persuade Islamist rebels to stand down. The UK and US both want to scrap some of the restrictions put in place after the 9/11 ...
Mirror.co.uk - James Lyons
BRITAIN is pressing the UN to lift sanctions against ex-Taliban commanders to help persuade Islamist rebels to stand down. The UK and US both want to scrap some of the restrictions put in place after the 9/11 ...
With friends like these, who needs the Taliban?
Global Post. Jean MacKenzie
Afghanistan's Council of Religious Scholars calls for a harsh crackdown on independent media on grounds of “immorality.” ...
UN may lift ex-Taliban sanctions
BBC News
It has asked for 18 people to be removed from the sanctions list. Sanctions include a travel ban and the freezing of assets. The request is seen as part of broader efforts to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan and to explore the possibility of peace ...
Two Visions Of Talking To The Taliban
RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty - Zarif Nazar, Jan Alekozai
By RFE/RL There are few things more divisive in Afghanistan today than the question of talking to the Taliban. The issue has become a national hot-button since President Hamid Karzai created a High Peace Council in September to reach out to the Taliban ...
Britain and US in drive to lift sanctions on former Taliban
Telegraph.co.uk - Alex Spillius - Jun 2, 2011
The United Nations is set to rule on appeals by Afghanistan to remove sanctions on former members of the Taliban, as part of a growing effort by Britain and the United States to promote reconciliation with remaining insurgents. ...
Green force
BBC News - Jun 2, 2011
By Tahir Qadiry BBC Persian TV
Green is the colour of choice for many young and educated Afghans who are agitating for change. It is the colour adopted by a new grassroots political movement inspired by the popular revolts sweeping across the Arab world ...
Talking to the Taliban: Less than meets the eye
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Our report today that Britain and America are pressing for UN sanctions against 18 former senior members of the Taliban to be lifted is encouraging news. In opposing the troop surge in Afghanistan, we have argued that this long war will only come to an ...
Taliban zealot who banned TV points to his set. 'We've changed,' he insists
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Mohammed Qalamuddin's religious police beat women who wore high heels and makeup. Now UN sanctions against him may be lifted – with the backing of the US and Britain Haqqani Taliban fighters in their mountain camp in eastern Afghanistan. ...
Making peace with the Taliban? UN pressed to lift Afghan sanctions
The Guardian - Jun 2, 2011
Haqqani Taliban fighters in Khost, east Afghanistan. Their representaives visited Kabul for talks. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the Guardian Britain and the United States are pressing for United Nations sanctions against 18 former senior Taliban ...
Friday, June 17, 2011
Anatol Lieven on Pakistan
Five Myths about Pakistan
by Anatol Lieven
The Washington Post
June 06, 2011
Late last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials had known that Osama bin Laden lived undetected blocks from the country’s equivalent to West Point. But after the al-Qaeda leader was killed in Abbottabad on May 1, others were skeptical.
“How could they not know?” said Sen. John Kerry (D. - Mass.). “Did nobody have some questions about who the hell was living behind those walls?”
In the war on terrorism, where does Pakistan’s loyalty lie? If this nation is our ally, why can’t we trust it? To answer these questions, let’s first tackle some widespread misconceptions about a troubled country torn between the Taliban and the West.
1. Pakistan is a US ally in the war on terrorism.
Pakistan pursues only its national interests - or whatever its military high command decides is in the county’s national interests. The security establishment likes to work with the United States when possible and certainly likes receiving US aid, but its perception of Pakistan’s interests always comes first.
During the Cold War, Washington considered Pakistan an ally against the Soviet Union. Under President Ayub Khan in the 1960s and President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, the United States gave Pakistan substantial aid - $3.2 billion in a five-year package in the early ‘80s, or about $8 billion in 2011
Yet, Pakistan followed its own path. When Ayub went to war with India in 1965 and Pakistan launched its savage crackdown in East Bengal in 1971, Washington wasn’t consulted.
Since Sept 11, 2001, Pakistan has sometimes helped the United States, and sometimes not. Though some US legislators believe that its intelligence community sheltered bin Laden, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency arrested al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh and helped foil terrorist plots by Pakistanis living in Britain.
Though they don’t want to promote anti-western terrorism, Pakistan’s generals do want to cultivate the Afghan Taliban for an expected civil war with anti-Pakistani Tajiks backed by India.
Our enemies might turn out to be their friends.
2. Pakistan is an ally of the Taliban.
Just as Pakistan isn’t an unconditional ally in the West’s war on terrorism, it isn’t always in the Taliban’s corner, either. Pakistan’s military gives the Afghan Taliban shelter, but it does not provide the fighters with sophisticated weapons such as antitank rockets or antiaircraft missiles.
If Pakistan were fully on the Taliban’s side, the Taliban would be much more militarily effective. The Taliban doesn’t trust the Pakistanis. “Pakistan is so famous for treachery that it is said that they can get milk from a bull,” wrote Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was the ambassador to Pakistan for Afghanistan’s Taliban government until 2001.
“They have two tongues in one mouth and two faces on one head, so that they can speak everybody’s language. They use everybody, deceive everybody.”
And this suspicion runs both ways. Pakistan’s military remembers that the Afghan Taliban spurned its advice before 9/11, refusing to moderate its radical ideology and expel al-Qaeda. Pakistani generals disapprove of Islamist revolution - whether in Afghanistan or their own country - but most back the Afghan Taliban because they think they have no choice, given the bitter anti-Pakistan sentiment of powerful forces within Hamid Karzai’s government and India’s links to those forces.
3. Islamist revolution is coming to Pakistan.
In a 2010 Pew Research Center poll, less than a fifth of Pakistanis viewed the Taliban favorably. The masses do not want Islamist revolution and the wealthy clans that dominate Pakistani politics are a strong anti-revolutionary force. And, no matter what people think, Pakistan’s military has proved - by launching counteroffensives that cleared the Taliban from the Swat valley and other areas - that it can defeat Islamist insurgency.
The Taliban could gain a meaningful political foothold in Pakistan only after a large-scale military mutiny.
If the United States launched sustained ground raids into Pakistan and generals ordered their soldiers not to resist, Pakistani army regulars would feel that their honor was compromised and might flock to the Taliban. The unilateral US raid to kill bin Laden did embarrass the military and garnered some criticism from the Pakistani public. But while Islamist extremists have penetrated the Pakistani military, only US missteps could bring soldiers to rebel and plunge Pakistan into revolution.
4. Massive US aid lets Washington dictate Pakistani policy.
The United States has given $1 billion per year to Pakistan’s military since 2001, but civilian aid is limited.
Even if the $7.5 billion promised over five years by the recent Kerry-Lugar bill were disbursed - unlikely, given conditions attached requiring that Pakistan fight extremist groups and remain at peace with India- the aid would probably be outweighed by economic losses from terrorism and insurgency. Pakistan’s government estimates that these losses were more than $18 billion in 2010 alone.
Islamabad also has an invaluable bargaining chip: Supply routes for US and Nato forces in Afghanistan run through Pakistan. Without Pakistan’s support, the United States would have to send supplies across Central Asia, doing deals with nasty, unstable governments such as Uzbekistan’s and making major concessions to Russia. In addition, Pakistan is one of China’s few allies-and Pakistani officials believe that this economic powerhouse could offer financial assistance that matches America’s if asked. The United States is in no position to issue diktats.
5.Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the front in the war on terrorism.
Given: Bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan. Given: With almost 200 million people, Pakistan has about six times the population of Afghanistan and contains numerous anti-western extremist groups. Given: Some of these groups have battled India at Pakistan’s behest, including Lashkar-i-Taiba, sponsor of 2008’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. And given: The large Pakistani diaspora in Britain and Canada has provided a base for terrorist attacks in the West.
But none of this means that the United States should pursue more aggressive policies against Pakistan to win the war on terrorism. Pakistan’s enormous population, nuclear weapons and 500,000-strong military limit American options. Any US action that endangered the stability of the Pakistani government would be insane. Nukes could fall into the hands of terrorists, along with huge quantities of conventional arms. Still embroiled in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, President Obama has no choice but to work with Pakistan and its military, deeply uncomfortable though this relationship is.
If we made this nation the front of a new war, it’s a war we would lose.
Anatol Lieven is a professor of war studies at King’s College London and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
by Anatol Lieven
The Washington Post
June 06, 2011
Late last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials had known that Osama bin Laden lived undetected blocks from the country’s equivalent to West Point. But after the al-Qaeda leader was killed in Abbottabad on May 1, others were skeptical.
“How could they not know?” said Sen. John Kerry (D. - Mass.). “Did nobody have some questions about who the hell was living behind those walls?”
In the war on terrorism, where does Pakistan’s loyalty lie? If this nation is our ally, why can’t we trust it? To answer these questions, let’s first tackle some widespread misconceptions about a troubled country torn between the Taliban and the West.
1. Pakistan is a US ally in the war on terrorism.
Pakistan pursues only its national interests - or whatever its military high command decides is in the county’s national interests. The security establishment likes to work with the United States when possible and certainly likes receiving US aid, but its perception of Pakistan’s interests always comes first.
During the Cold War, Washington considered Pakistan an ally against the Soviet Union. Under President Ayub Khan in the 1960s and President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, the United States gave Pakistan substantial aid - $3.2 billion in a five-year package in the early ‘80s, or about $8 billion in 2011
Yet, Pakistan followed its own path. When Ayub went to war with India in 1965 and Pakistan launched its savage crackdown in East Bengal in 1971, Washington wasn’t consulted.
Since Sept 11, 2001, Pakistan has sometimes helped the United States, and sometimes not. Though some US legislators believe that its intelligence community sheltered bin Laden, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency arrested al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh and helped foil terrorist plots by Pakistanis living in Britain.
Though they don’t want to promote anti-western terrorism, Pakistan’s generals do want to cultivate the Afghan Taliban for an expected civil war with anti-Pakistani Tajiks backed by India.
Our enemies might turn out to be their friends.
2. Pakistan is an ally of the Taliban.
Just as Pakistan isn’t an unconditional ally in the West’s war on terrorism, it isn’t always in the Taliban’s corner, either. Pakistan’s military gives the Afghan Taliban shelter, but it does not provide the fighters with sophisticated weapons such as antitank rockets or antiaircraft missiles.
If Pakistan were fully on the Taliban’s side, the Taliban would be much more militarily effective. The Taliban doesn’t trust the Pakistanis. “Pakistan is so famous for treachery that it is said that they can get milk from a bull,” wrote Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was the ambassador to Pakistan for Afghanistan’s Taliban government until 2001.
“They have two tongues in one mouth and two faces on one head, so that they can speak everybody’s language. They use everybody, deceive everybody.”
And this suspicion runs both ways. Pakistan’s military remembers that the Afghan Taliban spurned its advice before 9/11, refusing to moderate its radical ideology and expel al-Qaeda. Pakistani generals disapprove of Islamist revolution - whether in Afghanistan or their own country - but most back the Afghan Taliban because they think they have no choice, given the bitter anti-Pakistan sentiment of powerful forces within Hamid Karzai’s government and India’s links to those forces.
3. Islamist revolution is coming to Pakistan.
In a 2010 Pew Research Center poll, less than a fifth of Pakistanis viewed the Taliban favorably. The masses do not want Islamist revolution and the wealthy clans that dominate Pakistani politics are a strong anti-revolutionary force. And, no matter what people think, Pakistan’s military has proved - by launching counteroffensives that cleared the Taliban from the Swat valley and other areas - that it can defeat Islamist insurgency.
The Taliban could gain a meaningful political foothold in Pakistan only after a large-scale military mutiny.
If the United States launched sustained ground raids into Pakistan and generals ordered their soldiers not to resist, Pakistani army regulars would feel that their honor was compromised and might flock to the Taliban. The unilateral US raid to kill bin Laden did embarrass the military and garnered some criticism from the Pakistani public. But while Islamist extremists have penetrated the Pakistani military, only US missteps could bring soldiers to rebel and plunge Pakistan into revolution.
4. Massive US aid lets Washington dictate Pakistani policy.
The United States has given $1 billion per year to Pakistan’s military since 2001, but civilian aid is limited.
Even if the $7.5 billion promised over five years by the recent Kerry-Lugar bill were disbursed - unlikely, given conditions attached requiring that Pakistan fight extremist groups and remain at peace with India- the aid would probably be outweighed by economic losses from terrorism and insurgency. Pakistan’s government estimates that these losses were more than $18 billion in 2010 alone.
Islamabad also has an invaluable bargaining chip: Supply routes for US and Nato forces in Afghanistan run through Pakistan. Without Pakistan’s support, the United States would have to send supplies across Central Asia, doing deals with nasty, unstable governments such as Uzbekistan’s and making major concessions to Russia. In addition, Pakistan is one of China’s few allies-and Pakistani officials believe that this economic powerhouse could offer financial assistance that matches America’s if asked. The United States is in no position to issue diktats.
5.Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the front in the war on terrorism.
Given: Bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan. Given: With almost 200 million people, Pakistan has about six times the population of Afghanistan and contains numerous anti-western extremist groups. Given: Some of these groups have battled India at Pakistan’s behest, including Lashkar-i-Taiba, sponsor of 2008’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. And given: The large Pakistani diaspora in Britain and Canada has provided a base for terrorist attacks in the West.
But none of this means that the United States should pursue more aggressive policies against Pakistan to win the war on terrorism. Pakistan’s enormous population, nuclear weapons and 500,000-strong military limit American options. Any US action that endangered the stability of the Pakistani government would be insane. Nukes could fall into the hands of terrorists, along with huge quantities of conventional arms. Still embroiled in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, President Obama has no choice but to work with Pakistan and its military, deeply uncomfortable though this relationship is.
If we made this nation the front of a new war, it’s a war we would lose.
Anatol Lieven is a professor of war studies at King’s College London and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Oh, stop boasting Mr Zaeef
"Pakistan is so famous for treachery that it is said that they can get milk from a bull," wrote Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was the ambassador to Pakistan for Afghanistan's Taliban government until 2001. "They have two tongues in one mouth and two faces on one head, so that they can speak everybody's language. They use everybody, deceive everybody."
"Don't count on a peace deal with Taliban"
"Don't count on a peace deal with Taliban"
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
May 26, 2011 6:14 a.m. EDT
[CNN] Editor's Note: Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation. His latest book is "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda." This article is based on testimony that Bergen gave Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
> Peter Bergen says hopes of a peace deal with Taliban are unlikely to be realized
> He cites nine obstacles standing in the way of a negotiated settlement
> He says Taliban's Mullah Omar has taken extreme stands, resists reasonable compromises
> Bergen says engaging Taliban in peace talks makes sense even if chances of a deal are remote
Washington (CNN) -- Recently, both The Washington Post and the German magazine Der Spiegel have reported on meetings between U.S. officials and representatives of the Taliban that have taken place in Germany to discuss some form of peace negotiations.
Talking to the Taliban makes sense, but there are major impediments standing in the way of a deal.
First, who exactly is there to negotiate with in the Taliban? It's been a decade since their fall from power, and the "moderate" Taliban who wanted to reconcile with the Afghan government have already done so. They are the same group of Taliban who are constantly trotted out in any discussion of a putative Taliban deal: Mullah Zaeef, their former ambassador to Pakistan; Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, their foreign minister; and Abdul Hakim Mujahid, who was the Taliban representative in the United States before 9/11. This group was generally opposed to Osama bin Laden well before he attacked the United States.
Bin Laden told intimates that his biggest enemies in the world were the United States and the Taliban Foreign Ministry, which was trying to put the kibosh on his anti-Western antics in Afghanistan. And today the "moderate" already-reconciled Taliban don't represent the Taliban on the battlefield, because they haven't been part of the movement for the past decade.
The key Taliban figure is still their leader, Mullah Omar, aka "The Commander of the Faithful." The title indicates that Mullah Omar is not just the leader of the Taliban, but also of all Muslims. This suggests that Mullah Omar is not only a religious fanatic, but also a fanatic with significant delusions of grandeur. Negotiations with religious fanatics who have delusions of grandeur generally do not go well.
Almost every country in the world -- including the Taliban leader's quasi-patron, Pakistan -- pleaded with Mullah Omar in the spring of 2001 not to blow up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan's greatest cultural patrimony. But he did so anyway. After 9/11, Mullah Omar was prepared to lose his entire regime on the point of principle that he would not give up bin Laden to the United States following the attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon. And he did.
(Senior U.S. military officials tell me that it is their view that Mullah Omar is living at least some of the time in the southern Pakistani megacity of Karachi. President Obama has indicated he would be willing to launch another operation, along the lines of the one that killed bin Laden, if another major target such as Mullah Omar were located.)
Since his regime fell, Mullah Omar has also shown no appetite for negotiation or compromise. He is joined in this attitude by some senior members of his movement, such as Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a Taliban leader in eastern Afghanistan, who said in January, "Neither has there been any peace talk nor has any of the Islamic Emirate (the Taliban) shown any inclination towards it."
Second, the Taliban have had ten years to reject bin Laden and all his works, and they haven't done so. For this reason, Saudi Arabia, which has hosted "talks about talks" in Mecca between Afghan government officials and some Taliban representatives, has soured on the process.
Third, "the Taliban" are really many Talibans, and so a deal with one insurgent group doesn't mean the end of the insurgency writ large. It's not clear that even Mullah Omar can deliver all of the Taliban that he nominally controls in southern Afghanistan, because they are often fissured into purely local groups, many of whom are a long way from Taliban HQ across the border in Quetta, Pakistan. As Amb. Richard Holbrooke commented three months before he died, "There's no Ho Chi Minh. There's no Slobodan Milosevic. There's no Palestinian Authority." Instead, there are several leaders of the various wings of the insurgency, from the Quetta Shura in southern Afghanistan, to the Haqqani Network in the east, as well as smaller insurgent groups, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami in the northeast.
Fourth, the history of "peace" deals with the Taliban in Pakistan shows that the groups can't be trusted. Deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Waziristan in 2005 and 2006 and in Swat in 2009 were merely preludes to the Taliban establishing their brutal "emirates," regrouping and then moving into adjoining areas to seize more territory.
Fifth, the arrest in Pakistan last year of Mullah Baradar, the Taliban No. 2 who had been negotiating directly with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, shows that the Pakistani military and government want to retain a veto over any significant negotiations going forward. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as certainly Pakistan's legitimate interests in the post-American Afghanistan must be recognized, but it also demonstrates that negotiations with the Taliban will not be as straightforward as just having the Afghan government and the insurgents at the negotiating table.
Sixth, other key players in any negotiations with the Taliban are the former leaders of the largely Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance, who fought a bitter several-years war with the Taliban and who now occupy prominent positions in Afghanistan -- for instance, the minister of the interior, Bismullah Khan, and Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main rival for the presidency in 2009, who is -- at least for now -- the most likely candidate to succeed Karzai in the 2014 presidential elections. These leaders are not going to allow all they fought for to be reversed by a deal with the Taliban that gives them significant concessions on territory or principle.
Seventh, the several meetings over the past three years between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in Mecca and in the Maldives to discuss "reconciliation" have so far produced a big zero. A senior U.S. military officer dismissed these talks as "reconciliation tourism," while an Afghan official joked with me that in landlocked Afghanistan, "Everybody wanted to go to the Maldives for a meeting."
Eighth, the debacle involving Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour last year shows how much of a fog surrounds the whole reconciliation process. Mullah Mansour was portrayed as one of the most senior of the Taliban leaders, who was in direct negotiations with the Karzai government in the fall of 2010. Except it then turned out he wasn't Mullah Mansour at all, but a Quetta shopkeeper who had spun a good yarn about his Taliban credentials so he could pick up what a British government report characterizes as "significant sums."
Finally, and most importantly: What do the Taliban really want? It's relatively easy to discern what they don't want: international forces in Afghanistan. But other than their blanket demand for the rule of Sharia law, the Taliban have not articulated their vision for the future of Afghanistan. Do they envision a democratic state with elections? Do they see a role for women outside the home? What about education for girls? What about ethnic minorities?
While these obstacles show that reaching an accommodation with the Taliban is going to be quite difficult, that doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying. Even if peace talks are not successful they can have other helpful effects, such as splitting the facade of Taliban unity.
Even simple discussions about the future shape of negotiations can help sow dissension in the Taliban ranks, while if such discussions do move forward in even incremental steps, more intelligence can be garnered about what exactly is going on inside the shadowy Taliban movement. Also, getting the Taliban to enter into any negotiations means that they will no longer get to occupy the moral high ground of fighting a supposed holy war, but will instead be getting their hands dirty in more conventional political back-room deals.
Audrey Cronin of the National Defense University has systematically examined how and why terrorist/insurgent groups come to some kind of peace deal and has laid out some general principles about what that usually takes, which are worth considering in the context of Afghanistan.
First, there must be recognition on both sides that a military stalemate has been reached. (In the early 1980s the American academic William Zartman coined the term a "mutually hurting stalemate" to describe the moment when combatants will start considering a peace settlement.)
That precondition may now exist to some degree, given that over the past six months or so the Taliban have taken heavy losses in their heartlands of Kandahar, while the U.S. public has increasingly turned against what is already America's longest war. In December, 60% of Americans said the war was "not worth fighting," according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll -- up from 41% in 2007.
An important shift in the Obama administration's stance on Taliban negotiations was recently signaled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While giving the Richard Holbrooke memorial lecture at the Asia Society in New York on February 18, Clinton said that previous American conditions for talks with the Taliban -- that they lay down their arms, reject al Qaeda, and embrace the Afghan Constitution -- were no longer conditions that the Taliban had to meet before negotiations could begin, but were "necessary outcomes" of the final peace process.
Judging by the lack of media attention in the United States to this shift, this subtle but important distinction was probably also not well grasped by the Taliban, but it does represent a somewhat more flexible American position.
Similarly the Afghan government has now adopted "reconciliation" as its official policy, setting up a "High Peace Council" in the fall to help facilitate those negotiations, a body that is made up, in part, of a number of leaders from the former Northern Alliance, who are less likely to act as spoilers of a peace process if they feel they are a part of it.
Successful negotiations often require a capable and trusted third party sponsor. This condition seems also to be lacking right now: The Saudis are, at best, lukewarm about facilitating talks with the Taliban; the Pakistanis are not really trusted by any of the parties in the conflict, even by much of the Taliban; and while the United Nations may have some role to play in negotiations, Taliban attacks on U.N. personnel in Afghanistan last year don't suggest this avenue has much immediate promise. (Murmurings about a role for Turkey in facilitating a deal may have some potential, given that Turkey has an Islamist government and is also a key member of NATO.)
A peace deal also generally requires strong leadership on both the government and insurgent sides to force a settlement. Neither Hamid Karzai nor Mullah Omar fits this particular bill. Finally, Cronin explains that the overall political context must be favorable to negotiations for a deal to succeed. Here there is some real hope: While fewer then one in ten Afghans have a favorable view of the Taliban, a large majority is in favor of negotiating with them. Nationally, around three-quarters of Afghans favor talks, while in Kandahar the number goes up to a stratospheric 94%.
All that said, the bottom line on the Taliban reconciliation process is that nothing of any real note is currently happening. According to a Western official familiar with the record of discussions with the Taliban, the chances of a deal with the Taliban similar to the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkans war in the mid-1990s, or the Good Friday Agreement that ended the IRA campaign against the British government, are "negligible" for the foreseeable future. The official says that Mullah Omar needs his council of ulema (religious scholars) to sign off on a peace deal and there is "no sign of this right now."
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Peter Bergen.
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
May 26, 2011 6:14 a.m. EDT
[CNN] Editor's Note: Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, is the director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation. His latest book is "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda." This article is based on testimony that Bergen gave Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
> Peter Bergen says hopes of a peace deal with Taliban are unlikely to be realized
> He cites nine obstacles standing in the way of a negotiated settlement
> He says Taliban's Mullah Omar has taken extreme stands, resists reasonable compromises
> Bergen says engaging Taliban in peace talks makes sense even if chances of a deal are remote
Washington (CNN) -- Recently, both The Washington Post and the German magazine Der Spiegel have reported on meetings between U.S. officials and representatives of the Taliban that have taken place in Germany to discuss some form of peace negotiations.
Talking to the Taliban makes sense, but there are major impediments standing in the way of a deal.
First, who exactly is there to negotiate with in the Taliban? It's been a decade since their fall from power, and the "moderate" Taliban who wanted to reconcile with the Afghan government have already done so. They are the same group of Taliban who are constantly trotted out in any discussion of a putative Taliban deal: Mullah Zaeef, their former ambassador to Pakistan; Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, their foreign minister; and Abdul Hakim Mujahid, who was the Taliban representative in the United States before 9/11. This group was generally opposed to Osama bin Laden well before he attacked the United States.
Bin Laden told intimates that his biggest enemies in the world were the United States and the Taliban Foreign Ministry, which was trying to put the kibosh on his anti-Western antics in Afghanistan. And today the "moderate" already-reconciled Taliban don't represent the Taliban on the battlefield, because they haven't been part of the movement for the past decade.
The key Taliban figure is still their leader, Mullah Omar, aka "The Commander of the Faithful." The title indicates that Mullah Omar is not just the leader of the Taliban, but also of all Muslims. This suggests that Mullah Omar is not only a religious fanatic, but also a fanatic with significant delusions of grandeur. Negotiations with religious fanatics who have delusions of grandeur generally do not go well.
Almost every country in the world -- including the Taliban leader's quasi-patron, Pakistan -- pleaded with Mullah Omar in the spring of 2001 not to blow up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan's greatest cultural patrimony. But he did so anyway. After 9/11, Mullah Omar was prepared to lose his entire regime on the point of principle that he would not give up bin Laden to the United States following the attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon. And he did.
(Senior U.S. military officials tell me that it is their view that Mullah Omar is living at least some of the time in the southern Pakistani megacity of Karachi. President Obama has indicated he would be willing to launch another operation, along the lines of the one that killed bin Laden, if another major target such as Mullah Omar were located.)
Since his regime fell, Mullah Omar has also shown no appetite for negotiation or compromise. He is joined in this attitude by some senior members of his movement, such as Maulavi Abdul Kabir, a Taliban leader in eastern Afghanistan, who said in January, "Neither has there been any peace talk nor has any of the Islamic Emirate (the Taliban) shown any inclination towards it."
Second, the Taliban have had ten years to reject bin Laden and all his works, and they haven't done so. For this reason, Saudi Arabia, which has hosted "talks about talks" in Mecca between Afghan government officials and some Taliban representatives, has soured on the process.
Third, "the Taliban" are really many Talibans, and so a deal with one insurgent group doesn't mean the end of the insurgency writ large. It's not clear that even Mullah Omar can deliver all of the Taliban that he nominally controls in southern Afghanistan, because they are often fissured into purely local groups, many of whom are a long way from Taliban HQ across the border in Quetta, Pakistan. As Amb. Richard Holbrooke commented three months before he died, "There's no Ho Chi Minh. There's no Slobodan Milosevic. There's no Palestinian Authority." Instead, there are several leaders of the various wings of the insurgency, from the Quetta Shura in southern Afghanistan, to the Haqqani Network in the east, as well as smaller insurgent groups, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami in the northeast.
Fourth, the history of "peace" deals with the Taliban in Pakistan shows that the groups can't be trusted. Deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Waziristan in 2005 and 2006 and in Swat in 2009 were merely preludes to the Taliban establishing their brutal "emirates," regrouping and then moving into adjoining areas to seize more territory.
Fifth, the arrest in Pakistan last year of Mullah Baradar, the Taliban No. 2 who had been negotiating directly with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, shows that the Pakistani military and government want to retain a veto over any significant negotiations going forward. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as certainly Pakistan's legitimate interests in the post-American Afghanistan must be recognized, but it also demonstrates that negotiations with the Taliban will not be as straightforward as just having the Afghan government and the insurgents at the negotiating table.
Sixth, other key players in any negotiations with the Taliban are the former leaders of the largely Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance, who fought a bitter several-years war with the Taliban and who now occupy prominent positions in Afghanistan -- for instance, the minister of the interior, Bismullah Khan, and Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main rival for the presidency in 2009, who is -- at least for now -- the most likely candidate to succeed Karzai in the 2014 presidential elections. These leaders are not going to allow all they fought for to be reversed by a deal with the Taliban that gives them significant concessions on territory or principle.
Seventh, the several meetings over the past three years between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in Mecca and in the Maldives to discuss "reconciliation" have so far produced a big zero. A senior U.S. military officer dismissed these talks as "reconciliation tourism," while an Afghan official joked with me that in landlocked Afghanistan, "Everybody wanted to go to the Maldives for a meeting."
Eighth, the debacle involving Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour last year shows how much of a fog surrounds the whole reconciliation process. Mullah Mansour was portrayed as one of the most senior of the Taliban leaders, who was in direct negotiations with the Karzai government in the fall of 2010. Except it then turned out he wasn't Mullah Mansour at all, but a Quetta shopkeeper who had spun a good yarn about his Taliban credentials so he could pick up what a British government report characterizes as "significant sums."
Finally, and most importantly: What do the Taliban really want? It's relatively easy to discern what they don't want: international forces in Afghanistan. But other than their blanket demand for the rule of Sharia law, the Taliban have not articulated their vision for the future of Afghanistan. Do they envision a democratic state with elections? Do they see a role for women outside the home? What about education for girls? What about ethnic minorities?
While these obstacles show that reaching an accommodation with the Taliban is going to be quite difficult, that doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying. Even if peace talks are not successful they can have other helpful effects, such as splitting the facade of Taliban unity.
Even simple discussions about the future shape of negotiations can help sow dissension in the Taliban ranks, while if such discussions do move forward in even incremental steps, more intelligence can be garnered about what exactly is going on inside the shadowy Taliban movement. Also, getting the Taliban to enter into any negotiations means that they will no longer get to occupy the moral high ground of fighting a supposed holy war, but will instead be getting their hands dirty in more conventional political back-room deals.
Audrey Cronin of the National Defense University has systematically examined how and why terrorist/insurgent groups come to some kind of peace deal and has laid out some general principles about what that usually takes, which are worth considering in the context of Afghanistan.
First, there must be recognition on both sides that a military stalemate has been reached. (In the early 1980s the American academic William Zartman coined the term a "mutually hurting stalemate" to describe the moment when combatants will start considering a peace settlement.)
That precondition may now exist to some degree, given that over the past six months or so the Taliban have taken heavy losses in their heartlands of Kandahar, while the U.S. public has increasingly turned against what is already America's longest war. In December, 60% of Americans said the war was "not worth fighting," according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll -- up from 41% in 2007.
An important shift in the Obama administration's stance on Taliban negotiations was recently signaled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While giving the Richard Holbrooke memorial lecture at the Asia Society in New York on February 18, Clinton said that previous American conditions for talks with the Taliban -- that they lay down their arms, reject al Qaeda, and embrace the Afghan Constitution -- were no longer conditions that the Taliban had to meet before negotiations could begin, but were "necessary outcomes" of the final peace process.
Judging by the lack of media attention in the United States to this shift, this subtle but important distinction was probably also not well grasped by the Taliban, but it does represent a somewhat more flexible American position.
Similarly the Afghan government has now adopted "reconciliation" as its official policy, setting up a "High Peace Council" in the fall to help facilitate those negotiations, a body that is made up, in part, of a number of leaders from the former Northern Alliance, who are less likely to act as spoilers of a peace process if they feel they are a part of it.
Successful negotiations often require a capable and trusted third party sponsor. This condition seems also to be lacking right now: The Saudis are, at best, lukewarm about facilitating talks with the Taliban; the Pakistanis are not really trusted by any of the parties in the conflict, even by much of the Taliban; and while the United Nations may have some role to play in negotiations, Taliban attacks on U.N. personnel in Afghanistan last year don't suggest this avenue has much immediate promise. (Murmurings about a role for Turkey in facilitating a deal may have some potential, given that Turkey has an Islamist government and is also a key member of NATO.)
A peace deal also generally requires strong leadership on both the government and insurgent sides to force a settlement. Neither Hamid Karzai nor Mullah Omar fits this particular bill. Finally, Cronin explains that the overall political context must be favorable to negotiations for a deal to succeed. Here there is some real hope: While fewer then one in ten Afghans have a favorable view of the Taliban, a large majority is in favor of negotiating with them. Nationally, around three-quarters of Afghans favor talks, while in Kandahar the number goes up to a stratospheric 94%.
All that said, the bottom line on the Taliban reconciliation process is that nothing of any real note is currently happening. According to a Western official familiar with the record of discussions with the Taliban, the chances of a deal with the Taliban similar to the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkans war in the mid-1990s, or the Good Friday Agreement that ended the IRA campaign against the British government, are "negligible" for the foreseeable future. The official says that Mullah Omar needs his council of ulema (religious scholars) to sign off on a peace deal and there is "no sign of this right now."
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Peter Bergen.
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