Eideard

Pakistani police guarding the bin Laden compound
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The doctor who is suspected of helping the CIA target Osama bin Laden will be charged with treason…

“A case of conspiracy against the state of Pakistan and high treason is made” against Dr. Shakeel Afridi, the information ministry said, summarizing a commission’s investigation into the death of the al Qaeda leader.

Afridi is accused of helping the CIA use a vaccination campaign to try to collect DNA samples from people who lived in bin Laden’s compound.

The United States “has repeatedly asked” for the release of the Pakistani doctor, a U.S. official said Thursday. The official declined to comment further on the treason charges…

“This was one very small piece of a very large intelligence effort to determine that bin Laden was located at the compound,” a senior U.S. official told CNN over the summer.”People need to put this into some perspective,” the official added. “The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else. If the United States hadn’t shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn’t used all the tools at its disposal to find bin Laden.”

Pakistan demonstrates once again what passes for priorities and standards in that nation.

While the Obama administration trots out the usual diplomatic smoke-and-mirrors to maintain some sort of relationship with a corrupt government the fact remains that they can be trusted as far as I can throw the Aiwan-e-Sadr uphill into a heavy wind left-handed.

Taking fingerprints of one of the dead attackers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The top U.S. military officer accused Pakistani intelligence on Thursday of backing violence against U.S. targets including the American Embassy in Afghanistan…

Admiral Mike Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) played a role in the September 13 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, supporting militants known as the Haqqani network. That network, he said, is a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

The embassy attack was the latest in a series of violent episodes that were a blow to U.S. efforts to bring the Afghan war to a peaceful close.

Pakistan’s interior minister rejected the U.S. accusations of Islamabad’s links to the Haqqanis, one of the most feared insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan. The minister, Rehman Malik, also warned against a unilateral U.S. ground attack on the Haqqanis, who are based in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal territories…

A complete break between the United States and Pakistan — sometimes friends, often adversaries — seems unlikely, if only because the United States depends on Pakistan as a route to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and as a base for unmanned U.S. drones…

But support in the U.S. Congress for curbing assistance or making conditions on aid more stringent is rising rapidly. And Mullen, CIA Director David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have all met their Pakistani counterparts in recent days to demand Islamabad rein in militants.

Bruce Riedel, a former top CIA analyst with close ties to the Obama White House, which he once advised, told Reuters administration officials have told him that militants who attacked the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on September 13 phoned individuals connected with the ISI before and during the attack.

Following the attacks, Riedel said, U.S. security forces collected cell phones the attackers had used. These are expected to provide further evidence linking militants to ISI.

RTFA for beaucoup details.

Yes, I know all the history and have my own opinion about how things got this way. But, between no legal structure encompassing tribal bandits and apparently little or no inclination to divest backwards elements inside portions of the military and ISI, Pakistan will remain a well-armed and therefore more dangerous variation on the gangster turf which lies between Afghanistan and India. That adds nothing to the future of the people of Pakistan.

Pakistani intelligence officials have reportedly arrested alleged informants who gave information to the Central Intelligence Agency before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the former al-Qaeda leader.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that five people had been detained, including an army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting bin Laden’s compound in the city of Abbottabad, weeks before the US operation…

Neither the army nor Pakistan’s intelligence agency would confirm or deny the overall report about the detentions…

The fate of those arrested is unclear, but US officials said that Leon Panetta, the CIA director, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officials.

US-Pakistani relations have been strained over the raid by Navy SEALs on Pakistani territory, which was seen as a blow to the prestige of the country’s military.

Officials said the arrests of the alleged informants was just the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the two nations.

The New York Times also said that at a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael Morell, the deputy CIA director, to rate Pakistan’s co-operation with the US on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of one to 10.

“Three,” Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange, the newspaper said.

That’s encouraging. I’d have rated it lower – and less productive – than that.

Allegations that Pakistan’s intelligence service was involved in the Mumbai terror attacks will be scrutinised in an American court case starting on Monday when the man who helped plan the 2008 strikes testifies against his alleged accomplice.

David Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman who has confessed to his involvement in the attacks, will be the star witness in the trial of Tahawwur Rana, his childhood friend, in Chicago.

Rana is charged with providing material support for terrorism in the assaults, which killed 166 people, as well as a plot in Denmark that was never carried out. Opening arguments in the case, based on the deaths of six Americans in Mumbai, will begin on Monday.

The case has drawn international attention because Headley’s testimony is expected to reinforce allegations that Pakistan plays a double game in the fight against terrorism. Its success will depend largely on how the jury views Headley, 50, who is said to have juggled relationships with multiple wives, terrorist groups and intelligence agencies.

Headley is a former informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He pleaded guilty last year to conducting reconnaissance for the Mumbai attacks and for the Danish plot. His confessions painted a devastating portrait of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) – he says ISI officers helped the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group plot the commando-style attacks on Mumbai…

Prosecutors recently raised the political stakes by indicting a suspected ISI officer for the murders in Mumbai. The officer, identified only as Major Iqbal, allegedly oversaw Headley’s scouting in India.

The decision to indict Iqbal was made at high levels in Washington, sending a signal from Barack Obama’s administration, which had expressed frustration about Pakistan’s reliability even before Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Abbottabad.

RTFA. Beaucoup detail. Involved, intricate, opportunist – and offering all the corruption you would expect in global politics.

The ISI is about as useful to processes dedicated to peace and security as the average teabagger is to stem cell research.

A founding patron of the Taliban in Afghanistan died in the hands of a younger generation of militants in the tribal badlands of Pakistan in the last few days, a victim of the vicious forces he helped create, Pakistani officials said Monday.

Brig. Sultan Amir, known by his nom de guerre, Colonel Imam, was captured by the Pakistani Taliban in northern Waziristan last March. Whether he was killed by his captors, or died of a heart attack as reported by the Taliban, remained unclear.

The demise of Colonel Imam comes 10 days after another veteran figure in the emergence of the Afghan Taliban, Gen. Naseerullah Babar, 82, died after a long illness at his home in Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan.

The death of the two men signified the end of an era of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan that began in the 1970s, stretched into the American-backed mujahedeen resistance against the Soviet occupation and was followed by the coercive Taliban rule of Afghanistan in the 1990s…

Colonel Imam formed a close bond with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader who welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan…

A weathered figure with a long white beard and white turban who looked to be in his 70s, Colonel Imam was initially trained by the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1974, and completed a master parachutist course with the 82nd Airborne Division…

A senior Pakistani government official in the tribal areas, Tariq Hayat, said Monday that he had been informed by a Pakistani official in North Waziristan that Colonel Imam was dead. The militants were demanding a ransom for the return of the body, he said. Only after the body has been reclaimed would the cause of death be known, Mr. Hayat said.

Chickens coming home to roost land in the Pentagon about as frequently as any other center for the training of imperial flunkies.

RTFA for the details. If you have watched American policy in South Asia for a spell you ain’t about to be surprised.

The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations’ 25 experts-strong, 71-page task force report on the [Afghan] crisis, says, given “the complex political currents of Pakistan and its border regions … it is not clear U.S. interests warrant” the costly war, “nor is it clear that the effort will succeed…”

The same week CFR published its gloomy assessment of the Afghan war, one of Pakistan’s most influential journalists, the editor of a major newspaper, made the “off the record” — which now means go ahead and use it but keep my name out of it — rounds in Washington to deliver a stunning indictment of all the players.

Samples:

– All four wars between India and Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999) were provoked by Pakistan.

– There is no Indian threat to Pakistan, except for what is manufactured by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency…

– Pakistan has a big stake in Afghanistan. And America’s own exit strategy is entirely dependent on Pakistan. Our army has a chokehold on your supply lines through Pakistan. And Pakistan wants to be the U.S. proxy in Afghanistan. ISI wants to make sure Pakistan doesn’t become a liability in Afghanistan…

– There is no chance whatsoever for the United States and its NATO and other allies to prevail in Afghanistan. No big military successes are possible. All U.S. targets are unrealistic. You cannot prevail on the ground. ISI won’t abandon Taliban. And if Taliban doesn’t have a major stake in negotiations with the United States, these will be sabotaged by Pakistan…

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