US vows Kabul attacks won't halt Afghan mission
AFP
Americans will not be cowed and will continue to work in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday after Taliban gunmen attacked the US embassy in Kabul.
Taliban Target US Embassy, NATO in Kabul Attack
VOA News September 13, 2011
Taliban insurgents armed with suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades have attacked targets in central Kabul, including NATO's headquarters, the U.S. Embassy and the Afghan intelligence agency.
Pentagon to drastically cut spending on Afghan forces
Under pressure from the White House for steep reductions, the Pentagon agrees to a no-frills approach for Afghanistan' s army and police. Expenditures will be cut by more than half by 2014.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud September 12, 2011
Washington - The Pentagon is planning to slash U.S. assistance to Afghanistan' s army and police by more than half over the next three years, settling for a no-frills Afghan security force to battle the Taliban-led insurgency after American forces pull out.
Afghan forces kill 21 insurgents, detain 9 in Badakhshan province
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces eliminated 21 Taliban insurgents and captured nine others during an operation in Badakhshan province, 315 km northeast of capital city Kabul, an official said Tuesday.
Pakistan deploys troops along Afghan border
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan has deployed regular army along its borders with Afghanistan following a series of attacks recently launched by militants from Afghan territory, said a military spokesman on Tuesday.
Afghan Troops to be Provided with Armoured Personnel Carriers
TOLOnews.com Monday, 12 September 2011
Afghan army would by the end of this year be provided with armoured personnel carriers that no other countries have except the United States, deputy commander of the Nato training mission in the country said on Monday.
4 Dead in School Bus Shooting in Pakistan
VOA News September 13, 2011
Pakistani officials say gunmen have attacked a school bus in northwest Pakistan, killing four children and the driver.
Major shifts in Afghanistan' s media landscape
ABC News.com By Mark Colvin Monday, September 12, 2011
MARK COLVIN: Ten years ago in Afghanistan television was banned and the country's one radio channel was dominated by religious chanting. Now there are over 75 television channels and almost 200 radio stations in a media industry that's growing by 20 per cent every year.
Meet Our Minister: He's Incompetent and Corrupt
The Huffington Post By Virginia M. Moncrieff 12/09/2011
The Afghanistan Embassy in Norway apparently gave a frank character assessment of the Minister for Counter Narcotics when it posted the following biography:
Afghan Children Being Sold Into Forced Labor
September 12, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- Endemic poverty in parts of Afghanistan is forcing many poor families to sell their children in order to survive, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
The Journalist and the Spies
The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistan’s secrets.
by Dexter Filkins September 19, 2011 The New Yorker
On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.
_____
Back to Top
US vows Kabul attacks won't halt Afghan mission
AFP
Americans will not be cowed and will continue to work in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday after Taliban gunmen attacked the US embassy in Kabul.
Officials at the Pentagon and key lawmakers meanwhile insisted the US mission would not be deterred by the assault, and said it would have no impact on US plans for a gradual drawdown of its forces by 2014.
"The civilians who serve are dedicated, brave men and women, committed to advancing our mission. They will not be intimidated by this kind of cowardly attack," Clinton said, adding there were no casualties among US personnel at the embassy.
"We will take all necessary steps not only to ensure the safety of our people but to secure the area and to ensure that those who perpetrated this attack are dealt with."
Taliban gunmen armed with suicide bombs and heavy weaponry launched coordinated attacks in Kabul, targeting NATO's headquarters, the US embassy and the Afghan intelligence agency.
Around three hours after the attack began, gunbattles were still ongoing.
Six people were killed -- four police officers and two civilians -- and 15 others most of them civilians were wounded, the interior ministry told AFP. Six insurgents were also killed.
Two suicide attacks also struck police in what is usually the most heavily protected part of the capital, with a Taliban insurgency at its deadliest since US-led troops ousted the Islamists' regime after the 9/11 attacks 10 years ago.
New CIA chief David Petraeus, the former US commander in Afghanistan, told lawmakers a "handful of individuals" -- possibly wearing suicide vests -- were able "to move into a building a few hundred meters from the embassy."
"All embassy members have been accounted for," the retired four-star general said, adding "four Afghan citizens were injured" from rocket-propelled grenade fire as they had lined up waiting for US visas.
Pentagon press secretary George Little played down the attack as have had little effect.
"This was far from a spectacular attack," said Little, adding that the walls of the US embassy had not been "breached."
The insurgents "will not prevail. Our resolve is unwavering," he told reporters. "Our commitment remains strong and the enemy will fail."
Little said the attack would not alter US and NATO plans to gradually hand over control to Afghan security forces, which he said were increasingly capable.
"There's absolutely no change in our commitment to transition," Little said.
Key US senators said the attack showed worrisome sophistication, but also said it should not lead to changes in the US war-fighting strategy.
"I don't think one attack is going to affect the strategic position, which is basically working. You can't let one attack do that or else the attackers succeed," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat.
"It certainly has proved that we've got a lot more to do," noted Senator John McCain, the top Republican on Levin's committee and a critic of President Barack Obama's plan to pull US forces out of the strife-torn country by 2014.
"They believe that the best way to erode American support for our effort there is these kinds of spectacular, headline-grabbing attacks," said McCain.
Despite the attack, Little said recent months have exposed "a less effective insurgency" that "can't effect more widespread offensives" while US-led forces have maintained control of areas that were once dominated by the Taliban.
But last month was the deadliest yet for US forces in the ten-year old war, with 71 American troops killed, according to a Pentagon tally.
The attacks underscored plummeting security in Kabul, where insurgents have staged increasingly brazen commando-style raids on Western targets in recent years, most recently on the British Council last month.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Taliban Target US Embassy, NATO in Kabul Attack
VOA News September 13, 2011
Taliban insurgents armed with suicide vests and rocket-propelled grenades have attacked targets in central Kabul, including NATO's headquarters, the U.S. Embassy and the Afghan intelligence agency.
Gunfire and bomb blasts could be still heard in the Afghan capital Tuesday, as security forces worked to repel the assault near the city's diplomatic district. Officials say a police officer and two insurgents have been killed.
Afghan police say up to five attackers took over a multi-story building under construction in Kabul's Abdul Haq square and begin firing at key targets.
NATO said a small group of insurgents attacked the vicinity of the U.S. embassy and coalition headquarters, firing from from outside the compound. Both Afghan and NATO forces responded to the attack, with coalition forces also providing air support.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul also confirmed Tuesday's attack near its heavily guarded compound, but said there were no casualties among embassy personnel. Embassy spokeswoman Kerri Hannan said that staff had been ordered to take cover.
A Taliban spokesman told news agencies that the insurgents' primary targets were the Afghan intelligence agency, a ministry, the U.S. embassy, and NATO.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters that he was confident that Afghan forces could deal with the situation in Kabul. He also said that the transfer of security from NATO to Afghan forces would not be derailed by such attacks. The NATO chief said transition is on track and will continue.
The attack comes just days after insurgents carried out an attack on a NATO base in central Afghanistan on Saturday, killing four Afghan civilians and wounding more than 100 others, include 77 U.S. troops.
The Taliban claimed responsibility the attack outside the main gate of the Combat Outpost Sayed Abad in Wardak province. But Pentagon spokesman George Little said Monday there is a very strong likelihood that the Pakistan-based Haqqani leadership supported and was aware of the attack.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Pentagon to drastically cut spending on Afghan forces
Under pressure from the White House for steep reductions, the Pentagon agrees to a no-frills approach for Afghanistan' s army and police. Expenditures will be cut by more than half by 2014.
Los Angeles Times By David S. Cloud September 12, 2011
Washington - The Pentagon is planning to slash U.S. assistance to Afghanistan' s army and police by more than half over the next three years, settling for a no-frills Afghan security force to battle the Taliban-led insurgency after American forces pull out.
Training and equipping Afghans to take over security has been key to the Obama administration strategy to withdraw all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2014. But the White House increasingly views high spending on the beleaguered Afghan military as unsustainable and has pressured the Pentagon for steeper cuts than previously planned.
The new approach, including reduced spending on such equipment as air conditioning and car radios, would provide for a "good enough" Afghan force to combat an entrenched insurgency that has survived nearly a decade of U.S.-led firepower, White House officials privately say.
"We realized we were starting to build an army based on Western army standards, and we realized they don't need that capability," said Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, the deputy commander of the U.S.-led command in the capital that is assisting in recruiting, training and equipping Afghan forces.
The cutbacks, along with already planned reductions, would shrink annual U.S. expenditures on Afghan security forces from nearly $13 billion to well below $6 billion in 2014, the officials said. The Pentagon has spent more than $39 billion to build up the fledgling forces over the last six years.
The U.S. pays almost all the costs for Afghanistan' s military and police and probably will continue to do so in the near future because the government in Kabul takes in only about $2 billion a year from taxes and other domestic revenue.
The Obama administration requested $12.8 billion from Congress this year after U.S. and Afghan officials decided to increase the national security force to 352,000 troops, up from 305,000. Internal Pentagon projections had called for spending levels to drop after 2014, as trucks, helicopters and other equipment now being purchased go into use. Finding billions in spending cuts will be difficult without scaling back plans to increase the size of the force, several officials said.
The push to cut expenses is the latest point of tension between the White House and some in the military over Afghan policy. The split emerged this year when President Obama ordered the withdrawal of 100,000 troops at a faster rate than commanders had recommended.
By all accounts, Obama appears more comfortable with a military strategy that relies heavily on drone aircraft strikes in neighboring Pakistan and nightly raids by special operations forces against Afghan militants, while trimming the American military presence and budget to politically acceptable levels.
Some in the military see the Afghanistan conflict, which began weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a test of U.S. resolve, while some in the administration view it as a military stalemate and are seeking a way to cut further losses. But even Defense Department officials who oppose deep spending cuts or troop withdrawals acknowledge that Congress is unlikely to indefinitely support current funding levels for Afghan troops.
"Everyone knows that funding levels have to come down, but if you go too far, you put at risk the entire strategy, which really rests on making [Afghan forces] competent enough that they can assume the lead as we draw down," said a U.S. military official, who discussed the deliberations on condition of anonymity.
Douglas Ollivant, a former National Security Council aide under Obama and President George W. Bush, said the administration has recognized that "they've got to get to budget reality and that Afghanistan is unlikely to collapse before the 2012 election" even if spending is cut.
David Sedney, a top Pentagon official on Afghanistan, is in Kabul this week for talks on future funding of the army and police, officials said. How deep the cuts will go is still being discussed by U.S. and Afghan officials, but in internal deliberations administration aides have considered reducing aid below $4 billion a year, one official familiar with the discussions said.
Marine Gen. John R. Allen, who recently took over as top commander in Afghanistan, has embraced the effort to cut the training and equipment budget, and is urging North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in the war to step up their contributions, officials said. Those allies have pledged about $1.5 billion a year to the Afghan security forces, but only a fraction of those funds have been made available, U.S. officials said.
Cost-saving measures being considered include trimming the number of vehicles provided to Afghan police and giving them low-cost radios, Fuller said. And the Afghan army does not need mobile kitchens to feed soldiers in the field nor as many trucks with trailers, he added.
Replacing air conditioners with ceiling fans in barracks and other facilities the U.S. is building for the Afghan army would save about $150 million, officials said.
The Pentagon currently pays more than $5 billion a year to clothe, equip and pay the Afghan forces. The rest of the funds go toward heavy equipment, construction of new facilities, vehicles and training.
Despite intensive training efforts, the Afghan army — and, to a greater extent, the national police force — remains beset by drug use, illiteracy and high desertion rates. The Taliban and other insurgent groups have repeatedly infiltrated both forces, and "turncoat" attacks by Afghans in uniform have killed and injured dozens of Western troops over the last two years.
The overall cost of the war in Afghanistan and overseas military operations in Iraq and elsewhere is about $160 billion this year.
The transition of security responsibilities, which began this summer when Afghan forces took control of seven cities or provinces, is a key element of the U.S. military exit strategy. The Taliban and other groups specifically targeted some of the "hand-over" zones in recent months, however, seeking to sow public fears about the ability of the police and army to provide protection.
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch released a report Monday strongly criticizing the U.S.-backed Afghan Local Police, detailing instances of recruits — who are not always carefully vetted — engaging in theft from villagers' homes, illegal detentions and beating of suspects. A spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, German Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, said the report would be "carefully evaluated."
david.cloud@ latimes.com
Times staff writer Laura King in Kabul contributed to this report.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Afghan forces kill 21 insurgents, detain 9 in Badakhshan province
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Afghan forces eliminated 21 Taliban insurgents and captured nine others during an operation in Badakhshan province, 315 km northeast of capital city Kabul, an official said Tuesday.
"The operation was launched against Taliban militants in Kasham district on Monday and so far 21 rebels have been killed and nine others including two group commanders namely Mullah Abadullah and Mullah Shir Mohammad have been captured," spokesman of the provincial administration Abdul Marouf Rasikh told Xinhua.
It was a joint operation of Afghan and NATO-led troops, kicked off against Taliban fighters in Khambak area of Kasham district at 10:00 p.m. local time, the official said, adding the operation will go ahead until lasting peace is ensured there.
Badakhshan has been regarded as one of the relatively peaceful provinces in the militancy-ridden Afghanistan and Taliban activities have been reported there over the past one year.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Pakistan deploys troops along Afghan border
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan has deployed regular army along its borders with Afghanistan following a series of attacks recently launched by militants from Afghan territory, said a military spokesman on Tuesday.
Pakistan's army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas told the media that regular troops have been deployed along Afghan border in Chitral, Lower Dir and Upper Dir districts.
He said the deployment is aimed at "preventing terrorists" attacks from Afghan soil".
The regular troops have taken positions on the forward bases which had been manned by paramilitary troops and border police, said the spokesman.
A source in Chitral told Xinhua on phone he saw nearly 70 buses and trucks full with troops arrived in the area for duties.
He also said that the troops have deployed heavy weapons now along its border with Afghanistan.
In the most recent attack on August 27, some 300 militants attacked seven check posts in the Pakistani border district of Chitral and killed nearly 30 security personnel.
There had been several more attacks by militants from Afghan soil in other Pakistani border regions, causing casualties on Pakistani forces and also civilians.
Pakistan's army says that the attacks had been carried out by Pakistani Taliban militants who have established bases in Afghanistan' s eastern Kunar and Nuristan provinces. They had fled major military operations and have now regrouped in Afghanistan border regions.
Pakistan Taliban kidnapped about 30 Pakistani boys from Bajaur tribal region in late August when they had been celebrating Muslim Eid festival. The abducted Pakistani boys are now held somewhere in Kunar province and a Pakistani Taliban leader Dadullah last week showed some of the boys to a group of Afghan reporters.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Afghan Troops to be Provided with Armoured Personnel Carriers
TOLOnews.com Monday, 12 September 2011
Afghan army would by the end of this year be provided with armoured personnel carriers that no other countries have except the United States, deputy commander of the Nato training mission in the country said on Monday.
Major General Michael Day, Deputy Commander of the Nato training mission, said Nato is on track to build a 195,000 Afghan national army before the full withdrawal of foreign combat forces by the end of 2014.
While desertion was an issue, it would not affect the plan to build a modern, well-equipped army capable of fighting the Taliban insurgency.
"It does not affect our ability to get to the number we want. We have been told to build a national army of 195,000 by the end of 2014. We are right on line," General Day told reporters at a joint press conference with Isaf spokesman in Kabul.
Pointing out to speedy recruiting process, he said that thousands of young Afghans lined up each month at recruitment centres across the country to enlist.
"It is a great challenge to train an army that can't read, that can't count," General Day said
Some 3,000 Afghan instructors have been hired to build up literacy level of army recruits.
Isaf Spokesman Gen. Carsten Jacobson said Taliban attack on an Isaf base in Wardak province was a sign of insurgents increasingly growing weak since foreign troops received no serious damage and casualty.
"Saturday's vehicle borne Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Wardak province was again an example of a failed insurgent complex attack," Gen. Carsten Jacobson said.
"The attempt was to kill Isaf personnel and to degrade the operational capability of our combat outpost. Two Afghan civilians were killed and about 25 wounded. Seventy-seven Isaf personnel were injured with non-life threatening injuries," Gen. Jacobson added.
Afghan security forces have taken over security responsibilities in some relatively peaceful regions with the next tranche of security transition expected to be started next month.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
4 Dead in School Bus Shooting in Pakistan
VOA News September 13, 2011
Pakistani officials say gunmen have attacked a school bus in northwest Pakistan, killing four children and the driver.
At least five other children were wounded in the attack near Peshawar. Police say militants first aimed a rocket at the school bus and missed, then opened fire.
The bus was taking children home from school Tuesday.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which took place near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
The area is a known as a stronghold of al-Qaida and Taliban-linked militants who have targeted civilians in the past.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Major shifts in Afghanistan' s media landscape
ABC News.com By Mark Colvin Monday, September 12, 2011
MARK COLVIN: Ten years ago in Afghanistan television was banned and the country's one radio channel was dominated by religious chanting. Now there are over 75 television channels and almost 200 radio stations in a media industry that's growing by 20 per cent every year.
The most influential media figure in Afghanistan has an Australian accent. His name is Saad Mohseni and before moving back to Afghanistan in 2002 he'd spent most of his life in Australia.
He's been labelled un-Islamic for putting men and women together on TV and he's put president Hamid Karzai offside by publicly criticising the government for its corruption.
From outside it might look like a good time to be a media mogul in Afghanistan. But Afghans say the situation inside the country is fragile.
I asked Saad Mohseni whether he felt his industry was secure.
SAAD MOHSENI: Well I think that no-one is secure. The situation is still very fragile and we're all still very vulnerable. And you know I think we've seen obviously some very positive changes since 2001. Can these positive changes be sustained? That's a question we don't have an answer to just yet.
MARK COLVIN: What are the benefits just in the field that you work in?
SAAD MOHSENI: Well I think the media has played a very positive role in the sense the Afghanistan obviously has to play catch-up. You know 10 years of fighting against the Russians, almost 20 years of fighting itself, a civil war that literally destroyed its major cities. There's a lot to catch up with.
And I think we've played an important role in fast-tracking social change in this country and of course technology's played a positive role. In 2001 there were literally 8,000 phone lines in a country of 30 million people. Fast forward to 2011 something like 16 million people have access to mobile phones.
MARK COLVIN: Does that have an economic effect? Does that mean that they can conduct small businesses and things more easily?
SAAD MOHSENI: Absolutely. I mean I think they have access to information. They can communicate. They can do business. I mean they can even transfer money. I mean you obviously they're technologies that allow people to use their card credit and make payments. And the new technology that allows the banks to flourish, media to go all over the place.
And you know media in itself, there was obviously no television in 2001 and today you know half the population, impoverished and still lacking electricity, access to electricity, watch television, listen to the radio and you know to a large extent we are the window to the rest of the world.
And so people change very, very quickly. And you know you have to remember that Afghanistan is a very, very young country. Sixty per cent of the population is under the age of 20 with a median age of 17.
MARK COLVIN: So you have a huge stake don't you? If the Taliban came back there'd be no more television presumably.
SAAD MOHSENI: Presumably. I mean they're saying, obviously they're not saying that now but one can't take their word for it obviously.
But obviously the people of Afghanistan will suffer like they did in the 90s. I don't think there's going to be much difference because their ideology is still the same.
MARK COLVIN: Now I know that you read a story, the same story that I read in the Wall Street Journal, about the hospitals that are treating Afghan soldiers where Afghan soldiers are dying sometimes with maggots in their wounds, sometimes they're dying of malnutrition because the system is so corrupted. The doctors and nurses won't treat them without being paid bribes.
Is that a symptom of what's going on in Afghanistan on the government level?
SAAD MOHSENI: Yeah I mean when you have a government that's inept and this corrupt obviously there's no accountability. You know, we keep on talking about governance. I mean without good governance this government will have no credibility. And that's why I think the efforts of the international community, they could not be sustained with these people in charge.
MARK COLVIN: Is there any prospect of getting a less corrupt government?
SAAD MOHSENI: Of course, of course. The conundrum for the international community is that their mere presence allows these people to prosper because they fund the police, they fund the military, they fund major institutions. But at the same time they're not using the leverage that they have at their disposal in terms of forcing the government to do more in terms of tackling corruption and holding these individuals accountable.
I mean no major official has been indicted on charges of corruption. No major drug trafficker has been indicted on trafficking in drugs. If anything we had a story two days ago that the president has been pardoning major criminals - not individuals with questionable charges but people who were actually caught with tonnes of opium or heroin.
MARK COLVIN: But we've seen incidents in the past when even quite light pressure has been put on president Karzai and he jacks up and essentially says, well I can go and talk to the Taliban.
SAAD MOHSENI: Well I mean, you know, I think everyone knows, including the president, that he will not do that. He could not do that. The acting government is in dire need of help. They need the international community. It is psychological warfare.
But you know they have to figure out a way that they can, in a united way, deal with the Afghan government not so much as an enemy but as a strategic ally.
MARK COLVIN: There's this deadline of 2014, what do you think's actually going to happen in the next couple of years?
SAAD MOHSENI: The Afghan war is not an election issue in the US. It may be unpopular but it's not going to make or break the government.
But the flip side is that if things start to really go wrong, which we believe they will, it could impact people's prospects of staying in office. So I think that they've got to be very careful, very mindful of not doing that.
And of course, I mean, how could you explain another 9/11 if you were to withdraw from Afghanistan in a very hasty manner?
So I believe that they will take out the bulk of the troops. They will have some special forces. They will have four or five bases. They will probably need to fund the Afghan government in the years ahead. How much we're not exactly sure. But to a large extent the international community will need to remain engaged.
MARK COLVIN: Saad Mohseni, the Australian Afghan who is now Afghanistan' s most powerful media mogul, speaking to me from Dubai.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Meet Our Minister: He's Incompetent and Corrupt
The Huffington Post By Virginia M. Moncrieff 12/09/2011
The Afghanistan Embassy in Norway apparently gave a frank character assessment of the Minister for Counter Narcotics when it posted the following biography:
Zarar Ahmad Moqbel was born in 1966 in Parwan central province. He studied at the Habibia High School before doing graduation from the Pedagogy Institute in his native province. It is not proofed that he is a graduate from Kabul Polytechnic University.
He joined the Jihad against the USSR in 1988 and was in charge of construction of Shura-i-Nazar in northern Takhar province. From 1992 to 2003, Moqbel worked as Kabul police chief and secretary at Afghanistan' s Embassy in Tehran.
Moqbel served as deputy interior minister under President Karzai from 2004 to 2006 and then briefly served as interior minister. He worked earlier in the police department of Parwan province, was Governor of Parwan and an ambassador.
Engineer Zarar Ahmad Moqbel briefly served as the Interior Minister under President Karzai. During his tenure the ministry became infamous for selling senior police positions. Provincial police chiefs would then make a return on their investments by extorting bribes from civilians and protecting narcotics and kidnap gangs. Moqbel was sacked and replaced with Mohammad Hanif Atmar.
President Karzai tried to appoint Moqbel instead as the Minister of Refugees after a cabinet shuffle on October 11, 2008. Moqbel did not show up to his confirmation by the Parliament.
He is seen by many outsider oberservers and Afghans as an incompetent and corrupt civil servant. He has the backing of Vicepresident Fahim.
A former Shura-ye Nazar commander, Moqbel has turned into a Karzai loyalist. But he is still close to Vice President Muhammad Qasem Fahim.
Moqbel was confirmed as Minister Counternarcotics by Wolsesi Jirga in January 2010 (161 for, 56 against, 4 blank, 1 invalid).
He can speak Dari, Pashto and English.
The article posting went viral on twitter and facebook - and then was suddenly removed from the embassy's website. Hackers? Funsters? Or truth in advertising? You decide .... but the bad spelling and many typos may give you a clue.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
Afghan Children Being Sold Into Forced Labor
September 12, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- Endemic poverty in parts of Afghanistan is forcing many poor families to sell their children in order to survive, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
Human rights officials say dire economic conditions have forced many families in the northern Jawzjan Province -- one of the most undeveloped regions in Afghanistan -- to sell their kids.
The International Save the Children Alliance, an NGO dedicated to eradicating child labor worldwide, said in a 2010 report that some 28 percent of all children between the ages of 5-15 in Jawzjan have been sold by their parents or guardians.
Farid, a 4-year-old boy in Jawzjan, was sold to a relative eight months ago following the death of his father. His mother, who remarried, received 12,000 afghanis ($280) for her son with the expectation that he would work for the relative.
Farid currently lies on a bed in the children's hospital in Jawzjan with severe burns to his arms and feet. Covered in bandages, he cries in pain.
"When he was brought to the hospital a week ago, the burns on his body were badly infected and swollen," Dr. Khalil Hidari, the head of the hospital, told RFE/RL. "He was suffering from malnutrition and was in very poor health."
Farid's grandmother told RFE/RL the family was not responsible for his poor health or current condition, maintaining that the boy sustained his injuries when he accidentally set a plastic bag alight.
But doctors at the hospital are skeptical of that explanation, with some believing someone may have tried to kill Farid because he was not useful or they could no longer afford to feed and care for him.
"Unfortunately, many Afghans do not know their own rights or those for children and women," says Maghferat Samimi, head of the provincial office in Jawzjan for Afghanistan' s Independent Human Rights Commission. "The resulting levels of violence that accompany this are very concerning to us all."
Despite being a signatory of the UN Convention on Children's Rights, child labor in Afghanistan is rampant, with impoverished families selling their children into forced labor, sexual exploitation, and early marriage. Many of the children -- who can be as young as 3 -- are overworked and are subject to malnutrition and disease.
The Afghan government, which is obliged to stop the selling and trading of children under the convention, is ill-equipped to curb the increasing trend of children being sold into child labor.
Back to Top
_____
Back to Top
The Journalist and the Spies
The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistan’s secrets.
by Dexter Filkins September 19, 2011 The New Yorker
On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.
Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.
It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.
Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function.
Amid this tumult, Shahzad wrote a sensational story for Asia Times Online, the Web site that employed him, saying that the attack on the Mehran base had been carried out by Al Qaeda—not by the Pakistani Taliban, which had claimed responsibility. He said that the Mehran assault had been intended to punish the military for having conducted “massive internal crackdowns on Al Qaeda affiliates within the Navy.” A number of sailors had been detained for plotting to kill Americans, and one “was believed to have received direct instructions from Hakeemullah Mehsud”—the chief of the Pakistani Taliban. It was not the first time that Shahzad had exposed links between Islamist militants and the armed forces—a connection that Pakistan’s generals have denied for years. But the Mehran article was his biggest provocation yet.
Shahzad, whose parents migrated from India after Partition, making him a muhajir—Urdu for “immigrant”—was an affable outsider within Pakistan’s journalistic circles. Asia Times Online is not connected to any of the country’s established newspapers; its editorial operations are based in Thailand. Shahzad had no local editor to guide him or restrain him. Only a few other journalists had written as aggressively about Islamist extremism in the military, and not all of them had survived.
A hallmark of Shahzad’s reporting was that it frequently featured interviews with Islamist militants, including Al Qaeda fighters. His work was sometimes inaccurate, but it held up often enough so that other journalists followed his leads. Perhaps because he had cultivated so many militants as sources, he occasionally seemed to glorify the men who were carrying out suicide bombings and assassinations. In 2009, he published a breathless account of a meeting with Ilyas Kashmiri, a top Al Qaeda leader. Shahzad noted that the terrorist “cut a striking figure,” was “strongly built,” and had a powerful handshake, adding, “Ilyas, with his unmatched guerrilla expertise, turns the strategic vision into reality, provides the resources and gets targets achieved, but he chooses to remain in the background and very low key.” At other times, like many Pakistani journalists, he seemed to spare the intelligence services from the most damning details in his notebooks. But on several important occasions—as in the case of the Mehran attack—he wrote what appeared to be undiluted truth about the Pakistani state’s deepest dilemmas.
An autopsy report showed that Shahzad had died slowly and painfully, his rib cage smashed on both sides, his lungs and liver ruptured. Someone, apparently, had intended to send a message by killing him.
The media in Pakistan immediately suggested a culprit. According to the newspaper Dawn, it was believed that Shahzad “had been picked up by the I.S.I. because of his recent story on the P.N.S.-Mehran base attack.”
Two days after Shahzad’s body was found, an I.S.I. official made a statement denying that its agents had played any role in the killing. Shahzad’s death, he said, was “unfortunate and tragic,” adding, “Baseless accusations against the country’s sensitive agencies for their alleged involvement in Shahzad’s murder are totally unfounded.” Forty-six journalists have been killed in Pakistan since 2001, and the I.S.I. had never before issued such a stark denial. The statement hardly quieted suspicion; in fact, it heightened it. “Everybody knows who did it,” Muhammad Faizan, a colleague of Shahzad’s at Asia Times Online and a friend, told me. “But no one can say.”
I met Saleem Shahzad nine days before he disappeared, and he seemed to know that his time was running out. It was May 20th, and Islamabad was full of conspiracy theories about the Abbottabad raid: bin Laden was still alive; Kiyani and Pasha had secretly helped the Americans with the raid. Mostly, the public radiated anger and shame.
I had called Shahzad to discuss a pair of stories he’d written about bin Laden. In March, five weeks before the raid in Abbottabad, Shahzad claimed that bin Laden had suddenly come across the radar screens of several intelligence agencies: he was on the move. The story also reported that bin Laden had held a strategy meeting with an old friend, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen whom the State Department considers a “global terrorist.” Then, just after the Abbottabad raid, Shahzad published a report claiming that the Pakistani leadership had known that the Americans were planning a raid of some sort, and had even helped. What the Pakistanis didn’t know, Shahzad wrote, was that the person the Americans were looking for was bin Laden. Both stories struck me as possibly dubious, but it was clear that Shahzad had numerous sources inside Pakistani intelligence and other intelligence agencies in the region.
Shahzad and I agreed to meet at a Gloria Jean’s coffee shop, not far from his home. For years, Islamabad was a sleepy town of bureaucrats; however dangerous the rest of Pakistan was, the capital was usually quiet. This was no longer true. In 2008, the Marriott Hotel, only a few miles from Gloria Jean’s, was destroyed by a suicide bomber, who killed or wounded more than three hundred people. Lately, the Kohsar Market—the collection of expensive boutiques where the Gloria Jean’s is situated—had been declared off limits for American Embassy personnel on weekends, out of fear that it would be attacked.
Shahzad and I took our coffees upstairs. He pointed to a table in an alcove by a window. “Welcome to my private office,” he said, with a smile. “No one will be able to hear us here.”
We talked for a few minutes about the Abbottabad raid and the stories he’d written. Shahzad was tall and self-possessed; he had thick black hair and a round face offset by a trim beard. He was warm and expressive, the sort of reporter whom people talked to because he seemed genuinely nice. No wonder he got all those scoops, I thought. He was wearing Western clothes and spoke flawless English. He told me that he knew some of my colleagues, and offered to help me out in any way that he could.
And then Shahzad changed the subject. What he really wanted to talk about was his own safety. “Look, I’m in danger,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of Pakistan.” He added that he had a wife and three kids, and they weren’t safe, either. He’d been to London recently, and someone there had promised to help him move to England.
The trouble, he said, had begun on March 25th, the day that he published the story about bin Laden’s being on the move. The next morning, he got a phone call from an officer at the I.S.I., summoning him to the agency’s headquarters, in Aabpara, a neighborhood in eastern Islamabad. When Shahzad showed up, he was met by three I.S.I. officers. The lead man, he said, was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, who serves as the head of the I.S.I.’s media division.
“They were very polite,” Shahzad told me. He glanced over his shoulder. “They don’t shout, they don’t threaten you. This is the way they operate. But they were very angry with me.” The I.S.I. officers asked him to write a second story, retracting the first. He refused.
And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought about it every day since.
“We want the world to believe that Osama is dead,” Nazir said.
Bin Laden was still alive, his whereabouts presumably unknown, when that conversation occurred. I pressed Shahzad. What did they mean by that?
He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder again. They were obviously trying to protect bin Laden, he said.
“Do you think the I.S.I. was hiding bin Laden?” I asked him.
Shahzad shrugged again and said yes. But he hadn’t been able to prove it. (The I.S.I. calls this claim an “unsubstantiated accusation of a very serious nature.”)
Shahzad said that he’d left I.S.I. headquarters that day thinking that he needed to be careful. Now, two months later, there was another reason to worry: a book that he’d written, “Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” was being released in three days, in both Pakistan and the West. The book, written in English, explored even more deeply the taboo subject of the I.S.I.’s relationship with Islamist militants.
“They’re going to be really mad,” Shahzad said.
Since the founding of Pakistan, in 1947, one of the country’s central myths has been the indispensability of the Army. Along with its appendage the I.S.I., it has intervened regularly in domestic politics, rigging votes and overthrowing elected governments. Civilians have been viewed by the Army as a collective nuisance, easily undermined or ignored.
In the spring of 1999, when General Pervez Musharraf, then the chief of the Army staff, sent Pakistani soldiers into the Kargil region of India—setting off a war between the two countries—he didn’t even bother telling the Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. (Musharraf denies this.) Sharif tried to fire him, but Musharraf threw Sharif in jail and took control of the government. Musharraf ruled for nine years, bullying the Supreme Court and fixing elections, and exhausting the public’s patience for military rule. Since Musharraf left office, in 2008, the military has continued to pay the country’s civilian leaders little respect. In October, 2009, after an attack by Islamist militants on the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, was prohibited from entering the compound. The country’s current President, Asif Zardari, is seen as serving merely at the military’s pleasure.
Pakistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it has the eighth-largest army, which takes up nearly a quarter of the country’s federal budget. The Army’s oligarchs have appropriated a remarkable amount of the country’s wealth; they have substantial investments in the oil-and-gas industry and own shopping centers, farms, banks, and factories. Members of the Army are believed to traffic in narcotics, guns, and mercenaries. Officers live behind high walls, in manicured compounds of a luxury unimaginable to the average Pakistani. Army officers send their children to special schools and avail themselves of special hospitals. “The Pakistani Army is like a mafia,” Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent author who has written extensively about the Pakistani military, said. “The Army has its own interests, and it will eliminate any opposition to those interests, including civilian governments.”
But the most pernicious of the Army’s activities has been its long alliance with Islamist militants. Since the late seventies, the military and the I.S.I. have trained and directed thousands of militants to fight in Indian Kashmir—an area that Pakistan has claimed since independence—and in Afghanistan. For years, the I.S.I. has offered sanctuary to Taliban leaders, who have used Pakistan as a base for planning operations.
In an article published in October, 2010, Shahzad reported that I.S.I. officials knew where top Taliban leaders were hiding in Karachi, yet had done nothing to pick them up. Some Western officials believe that the I.S.I.’s protection extends to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar. In May, a retired senior Pakistani military officer told me that Mullah Omar was living in Pakistan, with the knowledge of the country’s security agencies. “Our people have his address,” he said. The I.S.I. also provides support to the Haqqani network, a Taliban-related guerrilla group. Publicly, Pakistan’s generals claim that they cannot find Taliban and Haqqani leaders. Although many American officials consider this a lie, Pakistan continues to receive as much as three billion dollars a year from the U.S.—most of it for the military.
In recent years, as Pakistan has edged toward anarchy, the I.S.I. has grown bolder and more violent. This spring, a witness testified in federal court in Chicago that I.S.I. agents were deeply involved in the planning of the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008, which killed a hundred and sixty-three people. The witness, a Pakistani-American named David Headley, said that he had received espionage training from I.S.I. operatives, and that he had provided hours of video surveillance of the Mumbai target to the I.S.I. and a terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba. Headley testified that he understood Lashkar to be operating “under the umbrella of the I.S.I.” Shortly after the Mumbai attack, Shahzad published an article alleging that the operation was based on an I.S.I. scheme for an attack on another Indian target. At the time, the I.S.I. was under the direction of General Kiyani.
Since the late nineties, the I.S.I.’s links to bin Laden and Al Qaeda have been strong enough to expose some embarrassing entanglements. In 1998, the Clinton Administration fired cruise missiles at a jihadi training camp in Afghanistan, in the hope of killing bin Laden. The missiles missed him, but they killed several Islamist militants—and the team of I.S.I. agents who were training them.
The agency’s links to bin Laden continued after the 9/11 attacks. This May, I travelled to Afghanistan to meet an I.S.I. agent named Fida Muhammad, who had been arrested by Afghan intelligence agents. He was being held in Pul-i-Charki prison, outside Kabul. When I arrived, the Afghan guards brought Muhammad to a small room and left him alone with me and my translator. Muhammad told me that he’d been a prisoner since 2007. He was from Sada, a village in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. He described himself as a civilian employee of the I.S.I. For much of the past decade, he said, he had escorted Haqqani fighters from their sanctuaries in Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they fought against the Americans. He had been hired for his knowledge of the trails that wind through the mountainous border. “I can pass right under the noses of the Americans and the Afghans, and they will never see me,” he said. He’d been arrested while spying on Indian agents inside Afghanistan.
Muhammad told me that his most memorable job came in December, 2001, when he was part of a large I.S.I. operation intended to help jihadi fighters escape from Tora Bora—the mountainous region where bin Laden was trapped for several weeks, until he mysteriously slipped away. Muhammad said that when the American bombing of Tora Bora began, in late November, he and other I.S.I. operatives had gone there, and into other parts of eastern Afghanistan, to evacuate training camps whose occupants included Al Qaeda fighters.
“We told them, ‘Shave your beards, change your clothes, and follow us,’ ” Muhammad said. “We led them to the border with Pakistan and told them they were on their own. And then we went back for more.”
Muhammad was part of a four-man team, and there were dozens of such teams. He estimated that the I.S.I. teams evacuated as many as fifteen hundred militants from Tora Bora and other camps: “Not only Arabs but Pakistanis, Uzbeks, and Chechens. I didn’t see bin Laden. But there were so many Arabs.” The operation had been sanctioned at the highest levels of the I.S.I. “There are people in the I.S.I. who believe the militants are valuable assets,” he said. (The I.S.I. denied Muhammad’s account.)
Amrullah Saleh directed the Afghan intelligence service from 2004 to 2010. He recently told me that in 2005 his men arrested an I.S.I. operative, Syed Akbar Sabir, who had escorted bin Laden from the Pakistani region of Chitral to Peshawar, passing through Kunar Province, in Afghanistan, along the way. “We believed that he was part of the I.S.I. operation to care for bin Laden,” Saleh said. In 2006, Sabir was convicted in an Afghan court of aiding the insurgency, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. I spoke to him at Pul-i-Charki in May. He told me that he was a trained physician and a member of a militia financed by the Pakistani Army, but he denied that he was an I.S.I. operative.
Since the raid in Abbottabad, U.S. officials have openly suggested that the Pakistani Army or the I.S.I. helped to hide bin Laden, but hard evidence has yet to be found. Perhaps the most suggestive hint of official involvement comes in the shadowy figure of Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, who was the director of the I.S.I. in 2007 and 2008. He was very close to Musharraf—they are reportedly related by marriage. Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer, says that Taj was deeply involved with Pakistani militants, particularly those fighting against India. Riedel, who oversaw President Barack Obama’s initial review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said, “Taj was very close to the militant networks. And his fingerprints were on everything.” In 2008, American officials successfully pressured Musharraf to remove Taj, suspecting that he had been involved in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, earlier that year.
Before taking over the I.S.I., Taj was the commandant of the Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. That is, he was the senior military official in Abbottabad at the time that American officials believe bin Laden began living there. Taj retired from the Pakistani Army in April, just days before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in Pakistan were unsuccessful.
Riedel said, “Taj is the right person at the right time. If the I.S.I. was helping to hide bin Laden, then it would make sense to park him somewhere permanently. Who better to be the park policeman than Musharraf’s favorite general?”
Shahzad was not the only Pakistani journalist whose reporting made him a target of the state. Umar Cheema, a reporter for the News, an important Pakistani daily, has published numerous articles on the military’s failures. At three in the morning on September 4, 2010, Cheema was driving home from a tea shop in Islamabad, where he’d met some friends, when he was forced off the road by two unmarked Toyotas. Two men in police uniforms approached his car. They told him that he was suspected of running over and killing a pedestrian.
The policemen directed Cheema into the back seat of a black Land Cruiser, where two other men handcuffed him and covered his face with a shawl. After two hours, the car came to a stop. He was led up a stairwell, and a heavy door closed behind him. Cheema asked, “What police station have we come to?” One of the men responded, “Shut up.” “That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” Cheema told me. During the next half hour, he was stripped, beaten with rods and a leather strap, and sexually humiliated. “I was crying out to God,” Cheema recalled. Then the shawl covering his face was removed: standing around him were five masked men. They shaved his head and eyebrows and took degrading photographs of him. “We’re going to make an example of you,” one of the men said.
Cheema, who is thirty-four, described his ordeal over tea at my hotel in Islamabad. He spoke without hesitation, and seemed remarkably fit, given all that he’d been through.
The torturers, Cheema said, put the shawl back over his face and drove him to a village a hundred miles from Islamabad. One of the men removed the cuffs and told him to walk into the street. “You’ll find your car right over there,” the man said. “Don’t look back.” They’d taken Cheema’s glasses, wallet, and cell phone, and given him a hundred rupees—the equivalent of a dollar and twenty cents. “That was for the toll on the way home,” he said.
Cheema’s captors made it clear that they were working for the government. “You are being punished for your reporting,” one of them said during the interrogation. Cheema had no doubt that he had been detained by the I.S.I.; ten times over the previous six months, he told me, the agency had warned associates of his that it was unhappy about his reporting. (The I.S.I. denied that it had anything to do with the assault.)
Pakistani journalists say that it is not easy to predict when the security agencies will detain, torture, or kill a reporter. Pakistan is a peculiar state: it is unjust and autocratic, but it is also partly open and partly democratic. The media there is loud, lively, and varied, and there are good newspapers, magazines, and television networks that investigate official misconduct. And although reporters in Pakistan are routinely threatened and sometimes brutalized, a small cohort seems able to write more freely about sensitive subjects.
The journalist best known outside Pakistan is Ahmed Rashid, the author of several books on Pakistan and Afghanistan; his book “Taliban” was a best-seller in the U.S. He has published dozens of revelatory reports on the military and intelligence services. Rashid says that he has been threatened repeatedly by the I.S.I. over the years, and was once warned personally by Musharraf. Rashid’s colleagues believe that his prominence in the West has protected him; he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and the Financial Times.
These days, Rashid says, he has had to be more careful. After a recent threat, he stayed out of Pakistan for a couple of months before returning to his home, in Lahore. “There is a red line in Pakistan—there has always been a red line,” Rashid said. “But, after Saleem Shahzad, no one knows where the red line is anymore.” He went on, “It’s debilitating. You can’t really go out and report. Sometimes you just sit and think about what is going to happen.”
Saleem Shahzad wasn’t well known outside the country. Asia Times Online, which he joined in 2000, had only a small presence in Pakistan, and was struggling to attract international readers. Shahzad seemed to enjoy the freedom that the Web site offered, even if it meant that he had to surrender some influence. In the preface to “Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” he wrote, “Independent reporting for the alternative media best suits my temperament as it encourages me to seek the truth beyond ‘conventional wisdom.’ As a result, I study people and situations from a relatively uncompromised position.”
In the decade after 9/11, Shahzad’s reporting increasingly attracted notice within Pakistani media circles. Many of his articles for Asia Times Online were reprinted in the Pakistani press. What stood out was his legwork: he often travelled to the tribal areas near the Afghan border to meet with members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Zafar Sheikh, Shahzad’s best friend and a local correspondent for the Saudi state television network, told me, “Saleem would say, ‘Let’s have a joyride!,’ and then we would go off to somewhere crazy to meet the militants.” Shahzad took to the rugged life. During the government’s offensive against militants in the Swat Valley, in 2009, rebels were impressed by his ability to sleep, untroubled, for hours in the open air.
Sheikh warned Shahzad that the stories he was writing could get him in trouble with the authorities. “I told him so many times, ‘Saleem, you’re going to be killed, what you’re doing is too dangerous,’ but he was reckless.”
In September, 2009, Pakistani officials announced that Ilyas Kashmiri, the Al Qaeda operative, had been killed in a drone strike. On October 15th, Shahzad published a memorable rebuttal—his account of meeting Kashmiri, with a dateline from North Waziristan. “We planned this battle to bring the Great Satan and its allies into this swamp,” Kashmiri told him. Shahzad got the story right: Kashmiri was still alive. The article’s tone bordered on gloating. Shahzad wrote that Kashmiri’s arrival in the border areas would send “a chill down spines in Washington as they realized that with his vast experience, he could turn unsophisticated battle patterns in Afghanistan into audacious modern guerrilla warfare.”
Tony Allison, a South African who works in the Thailand offices of Asia Times Online, was Shahzad’s editor. “Sometimes, Saleem would disappear for three or four days, and I wouldn’t know where he’d gone, and then he would emerge with a great story,” he told me. “I knew he could get the story and I trusted him.”
Shahzad was not universally respected by his peers. No doubt there was some resentment over his scoops. But sometimes he seemed to be regurgitating the stories his sources told him without checking whether they were true. Sometimes he got things seriously wrong. His story claiming that Pakistan’s leaders assisted the Americans’ raid in Abbottabad, for instance, is not supported by any available evidence.
“I liked Saleem, but I didn’t always know what was right and what was wrong,” Cyril Almeida, the chief political columnist for Dawn, told me. “It was difficult to know where he was getting this stuff.”
In Shahzad’s book, there are many vivid anecdotes; for instance, he details an incident in which an Al Qaeda militant and former Army officer, Major Haroon Ashik, smuggled a shipment of night-vision goggles through Islamabad International Airport, assisted by an aide to President Musharraf. The story seems solid, as it is based on an interview with Ashik. But the book’s analysis is shallow: Shahzad depicts Al Qaeda not as an embattled and fragmented entity, as most of the available evidence suggests it is, but, rather, as an Islamist version of SPECTRE, from the James Bond films—a monolithic, secretive power whose influence stretches across the globe. Similarly, instead of portraying the group as a far-flung franchise operation, as it is widely seen in the West, he claims that Al Qaeda has been intimately involved in directing other militant groups in the region, including the Taliban.
Shahzad’s book, even more than his daily journalism, leaves the impression that he harbored sympathy for the killers he writes about. Not only does he describe with enthusiasm the exploits of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters like Ilyas Kashmiri; he refers several times to “Khurasan”—an outdated term for Central Asia that Al Qaeda followers often use to denote the region. At the end of the book, Shahzad writes, in an oddly prophetic register, “The promised messiah, the Mahdi, will then rise in the Middle East and Al Qaeda will mobilize its forces from Ancient Khurasan for the liberation of Palestine, where a final victory will guarantee the revival of a Global Muslim Caliphate.”
When Shahzad was in college, he was a member of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party that has fed thousands of recruits into militant groups. Some of his classmates received training as guerrilla fighters, and Shahzad told other journalists that these young men became key sources for his reporting in the field. In recent years, friends and colleagues say, Shahzad stopped supporting Jamaat-e-Islami, finding its ideology too radical.
Although Shahzad didn’t support the militants’ aims, his feelings for them ran deep. “I think Saleem had great sympathy for the militants, not because he believed in the caliphate but because he understood their side of the story,” Allison, his editor at Asia Times Online, said. “He understood and empathized with them. He had empathy for the Western soldiers in Afghanistan, too. This is why he was trusted by the militants. He did not share their vision, but he understood their vision.”
Shahzad was socially conservative: he didn’t drink, and friends and colleagues describe him as pious. But they say that he didn’t support Islamist violence. “Saleem felt that there was a kind of endgame unfolding between the militants and the Americans, because the Americans had been so stupid in Afghanistan,” Hameed Haroon, the publisher of Dawn, told me. “This permeated his writing. But he was against the terror.”
Because Shahzad had relationships with a number of I.S.I. agents, he was one of a small class of reporters more likely to become targets of the intelligence agencies. Talking to the I.S.I. allowed him to get privileged information, and to verify information that he had picked up on his own. But maintaining a relationship with the I.S.I. may have created expectations of loyalty. Almeida, the Dawn columnist, told me that he refuses to talk to the I.S.I.: “Once you start talking to these people, that creates a relationship, and then they think you owe them. Then, if you do something they don’t like, they feel betrayed.”
Ayesha Siddiqa, the independent author who has written scathingly of the military, said that, two years ago, she turned down an offer to meet General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief. “Once you go into the headquarters, they have you,” she told me. “They can photograph you there, they can put out the word that you were visiting, they can blackmail you.” Siddiqa, too, has been threatened repeatedly by associates of the military and the I.S.I. Since Shahzad’s death, she has felt more pressure than ever before. “It wears on me,” she said. “Some days, you can’t work. I know that they could come for me anytime.”
Siddiqa spoke to Shahzad only hours before he disappeared. At about 4 P.M. on May 29th, he called her on her cell phone. She was driving, she said, so the conversation was brief. Shahzad seemed interested in some aspect of official Pakistani duplicity. She recalls him saying, “Pakistan should stop lying to the U.S.—even if we don’t want to do what they want us to do, we should stop lying about it.” They agreed to speak later that day.
According to Shahzad’s friends and colleagues, he had been warned by the I.S.I. at least three times before he finally disappeared. Shahzad documented one of those encounters in remarkable detail.
On October 16, 2010, Shahzad published an article about Abdul Ghani Baradar, then the deputy commander of the Taliban. The next day, he was summoned to the I.S.I.’s headquarters. The Baradar story touched on the I.S.I.’s relationship with Taliban leaders—an extremely sensitive subject. Earlier that year, American and Pakistani intelligence agents had arrested Baradar during a raid in Karachi. At the time, both the Americans and the Pakistanis hailed Baradar’s arrest as a breakthrough in their difficult relationship. But I.S.I. agents later told a different story: they had orchestrated Baradar’s arrest, after discovering that he was holding secret peace talks with Afghanistan’s leaders, without informing his I.S.I. handlers. The I.S.I. agents had set up the raid in Karachi in order to cut off the peace talks. Shahzad, in his October article, wrote that the I.S.I. had quietly released Baradar.
After a tense meeting with two I.S.I. officers about the article, Shahzad called Ali Dayan Hasan, the director of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan. Hasan suggested that Shahzad make notes of the meeting. Shahzad did so, and sent a copy of them to Hasan. Shahzad wrote that he was met at headquarters by two I.S.I. officials—Commodore Khalid Pervaiz and Rear Admiral Nazir, the same officer who gave him the warning in March.
Nazir and Pervaiz were courteous as they asked him to reveal his sources for the Baradar story. Shahzad refused. They asked him to publicly retract the story, and Shahzad refused to do that, too. The I.S.I. officers did not push him, he wrote.
But at the very end of the conversation Nazir made an ominous remark. He said, “We recently arrested a terrorist and recovered a lot of data—diaries and other material—during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him.” He then added, “If I find your name on the list, I will certainly let you know.”
Seven months later, on May 22nd, the naval base at Mehran came under attack. The siege lasted fifteen hours and was covered, live, on Pakistani television. Footage shot by cameramen just outside the base showed plumes of fire from the ruined jets spiralling into the night sky.
Five days after the incident, Shahzad published his report saying that the attack was a reprisal for the Navy’s arrest of sailors who were Al Qaeda sympathizers. High-level naval officers, Shahzad wrote, had been secretly negotiating with Al Qaeda over the fate of the detained sailors. To move the discussions along, militants had already carried out three attacks on naval targets in Karachi.
Shahzad quoted naval officers as saying that the arrest of the Islamist sailors had set off a chain reaction. “That was the beginning of huge trouble,” one officer told Shahzad. According to the article, top officers in the Navy believed that the ease with which the militants had attacked the naval base indicated there was a “sizable Al Qaeda infiltration within the Navy’s ranks.” Indeed, Shahzad wrote, the Mehran attack had been carried out by a group of fighters led by Ilyas Kashmiri—the Al Qaeda fighter whom he had praised for his “unmatched guerrilla expertise.”
Three days after the attack, the naval base at Mehran got a new commander: Commodore Pervaiz, one of the two I.S.I. officers who, in October, had warned Shahzad to tone down his reporting. The embarrassing Asia Times Online report was published on Pervaiz’s second day in command. Two days later, Shahzad disappeared.
Commodore Zafar Iqbal, an I.S.I. spokesman, told me that Pervaiz would not be available for an interview. “Out of the question,” he said.
The Islamization of the Pakistani military causes deep worry among policymakers in the United States and Europe. Pakistan, which is believed to possess about a hundred nuclear warheads, has the fastest-growing atomic arsenal in the world. The fear is that rogue members of the military could help a terrorist group like Al Qaeda acquire a warhead, or that a group of Islamist military officers could overthrow the government. “The Pakistanis are worried to death about the security of their nuclear weapons,” a senior American military officer told me. “They would never tell us that, but we are sure of it.”
Even before the attack on Mehran, there had been signs of violent radicalism inside the Pakistani military. Two assassination attempts against President Musharraf in 2003, both of which nearly succeeded, were carried out by Al Qaeda fighters who were assisted by Air Force officers. And in October, 2009, came the attack on the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, killing twenty-three people. The attackers wore Army uniforms and seemed to know the layout of the headquarters. One of the lead attackers was a former medic in the Pakistani Army.
Shahzad argues in his book that it was around the time of the attempts on Musharraf’s life that Al Qaeda made its first substantial inroads into the Army. “From 2003 onwards Al Qaeda succeeded in sowing the seeds of dissent within Pakistan’s armed forces,” Shahzad writes. “Pakistan’s tribal youths and formerly pro-establishment jihadi cadres moved away from Pakistan’s ruling establishment and promised allegiance to Al Qaeda.”
In the weeks after the Abbottabad raid, Islamist groups tried to capitalize on the outpouring of anti-American anger inside the Pakistani military. The most active group appears to have been Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global movement that advocates a peaceful restoration of the caliphate, the theocratic state that once ruled the Islamic world from Spain to the Arabian Sea. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Pakistan, but it is allowed to operate in many countries, including the United Kingdom.
After the attack on the Mehran base, people working on behalf of Hizb ut-Tahrir distributed leaflets at military bases and in cantonments in Karachi, with the aim of stirring up a revolt. One leaflet said, “O true officers of the Pakistan Army! Your leaders broke their promises again. . . . These traitorous leaders are spilling your blood and the blood of Muslims in Afghanistan and the tribal areas, and they are doing this for America. . . . This is a request for you to prepare a plan to give power to Hizb ut-Tahrir.” The incidents, which took place on May 3rd, May 7th, and June 23rd, were confirmed by Commodore Iqbal.
Pakistan’s military leaders have become acutely nervous about Hizb ut-Tahrir, and about the Islamist threat more generally. In June, they announced the arrest of Brigadier Ali Khan, who worked at Army headquarters, because of alleged associations with Hizb ut-Tahrir. According to Pakistani press accounts, Brigadier Khan had denounced Kiyani and Pasha in language similar to that used in the leaflets.
Iqbal told me that Khan’s arrest was approved at the highest levels. “You don’t just arrest a brigadier,” he said. “It’s a very big deal.” Some American officials believe that the arrest of Khan, who was only months from retirement, was designed to send a message to lower-ranking officers that Islamist sentiment—and insubordination—would not be tolerated. “Khan was a fall guy,” the senior American military officer told me. Khan’s arrest may have been ordered to reassure the U.S. as well. American officials say that Kiyani and Pasha, for all their faults, are the best allies the U.S. is likely to get.
The attack on the Mehran base was especially troubling, because it could be seen as a test run for an assault on one of Pakistan’s nuclear bases. “You have to appreciate how impressive the attack in Karachi was,” the senior American military officer said. “They practiced it. They knew the layout of the base. They probably built a mock-up of the place. And no one knew a thing.”
Commodore Iqbal did not rule out the possibility that the attackers were helped by Al Qaeda sympathizers inside the base, but said that there was “no proof” yet. At least three Pakistani sailors have been court-martialled.
The presence of Islamists in the Navy, and at Mehran, was not a secret among Pakistanis. But Shahzad’s article was particularly incendiary. Not only did he report that sailors at the base had helped the attackers; he wrote that the Navy’s leadership was bargaining directly with Al Qaeda. “Consider the time when Saleem’s piece came out,” a high-level American official told me. “The military felt humiliated. It felt backed into a corner.” The official added, “When you’re backed into a corner like that, you strike back.”
The first order to harm Shahzad was issued shortly after his article on the Mehran attack appeared. The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up, possibly in the same way that Cheema had been dealt with. But a senior American official confirms that, at some point before Shahzad was taken away, the directive was changed. He was to be murdered.
Five weeks after the killing, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly that it had been “sanctioned by the government” of Pakistan. In fact, according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on General Kiyani’s staff. The officer made it clear that he was speaking on behalf of Kiyani himself. (General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army, called this allegation “preposterous.”)
After the discovery of Shahzad’s body, some of his friends and family members told me they believed that the I.S.I. agents had meant only to beat him, and that things got out of hand. They had reason to think so. A year earlier, during an altercation with a guard outside a social club in Islamabad, Shahzad had been shot. Shahzad’s brother-in-law, Hamza Ameer, told me that the guard had become angry after Shahzad complained about being denied entry, because he had forgotten his membership card. The bullet had penetrated his liver, and it remained lodged near his spine. (According to Ameer, Shahzad eventually pardoned the guard in a Pakistani court, as is allowed under the law, so the guard went free.) Shahzad’s autopsy report says that a ruptured liver is one of the things that killed him.
But Dr. Mohammed Farrukh Kamal, one of the physicians who performed the autopsy, told me that Shahzad had been beaten with a heavy instrument, like a metal rod, and he dismissed the notion that Shahzad had been killed by mistake. “You don’t hit a person that hard by accident,” he told me. “They meant to kill him.”
Shahzad’s journalism may not have been the sole reason that he was targeted. I.S.I. officials may have become convinced that Shahzad was working for a foreign intelligence agency. This could have elevated him in the eyes of the military from a troublesome reporter who deserved a beating to a foreign agent who needed to be killed.
In fact, Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several foreign intelligence officials. He told me that a Saudi intelligence official was among those who had told him that bin Laden had met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen now considered a terrorist. Shahzad himself, under questioning from the I.S.I., had admitted that another source for that story was General Bismillah Khan—then the Interior Minister of Afghanistan, and a loathed figure in the Pakistani military.
More crucially, it appears that, in the months before Shahzad was killed, some foreign intelligence agencies tried to recruit him. Roger van Zwanenberg, the publisher of Pluto Press, the London imprint that released Shahzad’s book, told me that members of British intelligence had asked Shahzad for help during a short visit that he made to London in March. The intelligence officers wanted Shahzad to help them get in touch with Taliban leaders. “Saleem declined,” van Zwanenberg said. He added that, when Shahzad attended a conference in New Delhi this spring, officers from an Indian intelligence agency offered to put him on a retainer. Several of Shahzad’s colleagues confirmed this.
There is no evidence that Shahzad was working for any foreign intelligence agency, but mere suspicion on this front could have imperilled him. “What is the final thing that earns Shahzad a red card—the final thing that tips him over from being a nuisance to an enemy?” a Western researcher in Islamabad said to me. “If someone concluded that he was a foreign agent, and that the stories he was putting out were part of a deliberate effort to defame the I.S.I. and undermine the I.S.I.’s carefully crafted information strategy—if anyone in the I.S.I. concluded that, then Saleem would be in grave danger.”
On June 3rd, four days after Shahzad was found in the Upper Jhelum Canal, a C.I.A. officer, operating a pilotless drone, fired a missile at a group of men who had gathered in an orchard outside the village of Ghwa Khwa, in South Waziristan. Locals who ran to the scene saw many bodies, but a group of militants who had survived told them to stay back. “Kashmiri Khan! Kashmiri Khan!” one of them yelled. Among the dead was Ilyas Kashmiri—the terrorist whom Shahzad had once proved to be still alive, and who he said was responsible for the attack on the Mehran base.
Three days later, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, announced that, this time, Kashmiri was definitely dead.
Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.
If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. In 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative held by the Egyptian government, made statements, under torture, suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden; this information was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.
Kashmiri, who was forty-seven, was a guerrilla fighter who received training from both the Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. According to American officials, he fought in the guerrilla war inside Indian Kashmir, working closely with the I.S.I. According to one frequently heard story, Kashmiri, returning from an operation in India, presented Musharraf—then the chief of the Army staff—with the head of an Indian soldier.
But, as Musharraf began to curtail the activities of militant groups operating in India, Kashmiri moved to the tribal areas and started waging war against the Pakistani state. He brought together the 313 Brigade, an amalgam of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other fighters. Kashmiri was accused of playing a key role in one of the two unsuccessful plots to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, and he is believed to have helped orchestrate the 2009 attack on the Army’s headquarters. Earlier this year, David Headley, the Pakistani-American who testified in Chicago about the Mumbai attack, named Kashmiri as a key terrorist planner.
On May 27th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and she presented to Pakistani leaders a list of high-value targets. According to ABC News, Kashmiri was on the list. That morning, Shahzad had published the article naming Kashmiri as the perpetrator of the attack on the Mehran base—broadcasting, once again, his connection to the militant leader.
Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said, “After the Abbottabad raid, the Pakistanis were under enormous pressure to show that they were serious about Al Qaeda.”
Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several Taliban and Al Qaeda militants. It’s obvious from his book that Kashmiri was one of them. Muhammad Faizan, Shahzad’s colleague, said, “The militants used to call him, not the other way around.”
After Shahzad’s murder, the Pakistani government appointed a commission, led by a justice of the Supreme Court, to investigate. In late July, the justice, Mian Saqib Nisar, summoned a group of Pakistani reporters and editors and briefed them on his progress. Bani Amin Khan, the inspector general of the Islamabad police, also appeared at the meeting, with some of his investigators. According to reporters who attended the briefing, one of the investigators said that he had seen something unusual in Shahzad’s cell-phone records: more than two hundred and fifty-eight calls to and from a single number during a one-month period.
Imtiaz Alam, the secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association, told me that after the briefing he approached Khan and pressed him for details. Khan’s answer, according to Alam: “The calls were with Ilyas Kashmiri.” When I asked Khan about Shahzad’s case, he threw me out of his office.
The evidence is fragmentary, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Pakistani intelligence agents gave the C.I.A. at least some of the information that pinpointed Kashmiri. Likewise, it seems possible that at least some of that information may have come from Shahzad, either during his lethal interrogation or from data taken from his cell phone. In the past, the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. have coöperated extensively on the U.S. drone program.
This relationship has been strained since the bin Laden killing. For the moment, much of the drone program, once based in Pakistan, appears to be frozen. According to the senior American military officer, the drones are no longer flying out of Shamsi Air Base, in Pakistan, but from Afghanistan, and the intelligence used to target militants is now being collected almost entirely by American networks. Most of the drone strikes are being carried out without prior Pakistani knowledge.
“We want the Pakistanis’ coöperation, but we are prepared to go without it,” the military officer told me. The Americans’ unilateral approach to drone strikes is causing intense tension with Pakistani leaders, and not just because of their claims that the strikes kill many civilians. The drone strikes sometimes reveal that the Americans and the I.S.I. are working against each other.
On March 17th, four missiles fired from a drone hit a group of men who had gathered at a market in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan. As many as forty-four people died. The Pakistani government denounced the strike, claiming that it had killed a number of tribal elders, and demanded an apology.
As with nearly all drone strikes, the precise number and nature of the casualties were impossible to verify. The high-level American official told me that the “tribal elders” were actually insurgent leaders. But he offered another reason that the Pakistani officials were so inflamed: “It turns out there were some I.S.I. guys who were there with the insurgent leaders. We killed them, too.” (The I.S.I. denied that its agents were present.)
What were I.S.I. agents doing at a meeting of insurgent commanders? The American official said that he did not know.
A senior counterterrorism official said that the Kashmiri strike was not connected to Shahzad’s death. At the same time, the official acknowledged that in the past the U.S. had received intelligence from the Pakistanis on Kashmiri, and confirmed that the Pakistanis continue to share information on targets.
Commodore Iqbal, the I.S.I. spokesman, reiterated the agency’s insistence that it had no involvement in Shahzad’s death. But he said that the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. were still coöperating. “We are giving the Americans a lot of intelligence,” Iqbal told me. “We don’t feel like we are getting much in return.” When I asked him if the I.S.I. had coöperated on the strike that killed Kashmiri, he said, “I can’t answer that.”
These days, the high-level American official told me, most drone attacks in Pakistan are “signature strikes,” which are carried out when a group of people match a certain profile—they are operating a training camp, for instance, or consorting with known militants. Such strikes are not directed at specific individuals—like, say, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s new leader. Usually, the agency doesn’t know the identities of the people it is firing at. “Most of the high-value targets have been killed this way,” the American official told me.
In the case of Kashmiri, the American official initially told me that he had been killed in a signature strike. “We did the strike, and we found out later that it was him,” the official said. When I pressed him, though, he said, “We sort of thought he would be there.” He declined to elaborate.
No comments:
Post a Comment