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January 9, 2008

Pakistan: The Looming Threat Of Islamist Terror

This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission.

Pakistan: The Looming Threat Of Islamist Terror

No Consensus On Bhutto's Manner Of Death

On Tuesday, January 8, Pakistan would have held national elections. These would have chosen members of the National Assembly and also the prime minister of the nation. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27 caused widespread chaos on the streets of many cities, and led to numerous conspiracy theories concerning the circumstances of Ms Bhutto's death. Initially the interim government maintained that Bhutto had died from striking her head on the lever of her vehicle's sunroof, contradicting eyewitness accounts that she had been shot. On Sunday, January 6, President Pervez Musharraf conceded that Bhutto may have been shot.

With conspiracy theories proliferating, President Pervez Musharraf invited a team of British police from Scotland Yard to investigate the matter. Though their investigations are not complete, the UK team appear to believe that the head of the PPP party was shot before a bomb went off at the scene in Rawalpindi. The team discovered that an Assistant Superintendent of Police should have been escorting Bhutto from the rally she had attended. This official was not present. On Monday the investigators took statements at the hospital where Ms Bhutto's death was announced. The PPP is still pushing for a UN investigation.

The general election will now take place on February 18, but two of the main parties have expressed concern about the election's legitimacy. Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted as prime minister in 1999, heads the PML-N party. He himself is barred from standing for office due to a terrorism conviction, but he has been warning that the elections could be rigged. The PPP party is claiming that the interim government, with help from Musharraf's PML-Q party, is intending to postpone the elections. Despite these unsubstantiated claims, the PPP has announced its intention to restart election campaigning.

Washington's Funding of Pakistan

Since 2001, the United States has donated $10 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan. Of these funds, $1.9 billion has been spent on security assistance since 2002. Coalition Support Funds have provided $5,3 billion to reimburse Pakistan for expenses incurred while fighting the War on Terror.

On Sunday January 6, the Washington Post reported that in 2006 the US allocated $22 million to Pakistan, for the purposes of strengthening democracy programs. Out of that year's spending on Pakistan of $1.6 billion, the figure is small. The Washington Post claims that none of that money has been used by Musharraf to the ends for which it was originally designed.

Though "democracy" funding for Pakistan in 2007 will be $41 million, it appears that the US administration was wary of spending too much on building a strong democracy in the nation, for fear of offending Musharraf. SInce 2004, almost $24 million was given to Pakistan for strengthening democracy, but $19 million of that sum was allocated to assisting Pakistan's Election Commission to update its poorly maintained voter registers.

Three days before Ms Bhutto was assassinated, the New York Times revealed that officials in the US military and the Bush administration were admitting that there had been few checks and controls on Coalition Support Funds to Pakistan. Money which should have gone to fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda was found to have been spent by Pakistan on bolstering its defenses against India - a clear misappropriation of funds. Reimbursement claims from the Pakistani military for the expenses incurred in fighting the War on Terror appear to have been highly exaggerated.

In November, the NYT claimed that the Bush administration had "complained that the cooperation of the Pakistani military has been sporadic and often ineffective." Musharraf denied then that funds to fight terrorism had been diverted to round up citizens during the State of Emergency, which he imposed from November 3 to December 16. Musharraf also complained that of 20 Cobra helicopters donated by the US to the Pakistan military, only one was in service. He suggested he needed more American funds.

US military officials had said that in the six months prior to November 2007, $8 million of parts for the Vietnam-era Cobra helicopters had been dispatched to Pakistan, with a further $4 million to $6 million to be sent this year. Though for eight months in 2007 the US had donated $55 million for maintaining and operating helicopters, the Pakistan government had sent only $25 million of helicopter fleet assistance to the military in the whole year.

On September 5, 2006, the Pakistani government signed a peace deal with seven leaders of the Pakistani Taliban who were based in the agencies of North and South Waziristan, North-West Frontier Province, adjoining the Afghanistan border. This deal, known as the "Waziristan Accord" was doomed to failure. Signed at a soccer ground in Miranshah during a jirga or tribal council, the accord placed responsibility on monitoring the activities of the Taliban onto the Taliban themselves. The accord included a clause prohibiting "targeted killings" but within days of the deal being signed, shot and decapitated bodies of individuals accused of being "American spies" were left in public places.

According to the NYT, even though the accord had caused Pakistani troops to stop fighting (and to withdraw from key Taliban strongholds), US military officials were later angered when the Pakistani army continued to submit receipts for reimbursement. Their displeasure eventually led in 2007 to disclosure of the previously secret statistics of how much money had been allocated to Pakistan from the Coalition Support Fund.

As well as the Pakistani army demanding inflated reimbursements for its outlay costs, other questions must be asked. When the Waziristan Accord was signed, Ali Muhammad Jan Orakzai, the Musharraf-appointed governor of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), paid out money to the 45 local Taliban leaders who had signed the treaty. Each Taliban leader was given 100,000 rupees ($1,658) for brokering the accord. Even if this money was paid from Pakistani coffers, one must wonder if - directly or indirectly - it included sums gathered from American taxpayers.

Another clause in the Waziristan Accord maintained that the Pakistani government had promised to pay the Taliban 10 million rupees ($165,838) if it did not return to them vehicles and weaponry it had seized during military operations. Such a deal - where Taliban fighters were offered their seized weapons or reimbursement - clearly contravened the original intentions of the War on Terror. The Waziristan Accord was initiated by the coalition of Islamists known as the MMA, who dominated NWFP's Regional Assembly, and who are staunchly anti-American and anti-Musharraf. When the accord was signed, the NWFP governor said: "I can see that the future of tribal areas is bright, progressive and prosperous."

In March 2007, another accord with the Taliban was signed in Bajaur, another tribal agency of NWFP. These accords failed spectacularly, and have certainly hindered progress in the War on Terror. The tribal areas have since been dominated by the activities of foreign and local Taliban and Al Qaeda refugees.

In the three months leading up to the Waziristan accord, the contingent of 70,000 Pakistani troops in the tribal areas was scaled back dramatically, leading Afghanistan to claim in July 2006 that Pakistan was not doing enough to prevent cross-border movement of Taliban terrorists. Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of State, echoed the sentiment.

The Pakistan Taliban's New Front

Many parts of NWFP have become Taliban strongholds. Since 2001, 10,000 people have been killed on both the government and Islamist sides in the region. In December, the Pakistan Taliban united under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud. Calling itself the Tehrik-e-Taliban, this group claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a mosque in Charsadda, NWFP, on December 21, killing at least 56 people. Arrests carried out after the blast suggest that Afghan Taliban operatives were involved. Tehrik-e-Taliban has been blamed for causing the attack on Benazir Bhutto, even though Mehsud has denied this.

A fortnight before Ms Bhutto was killed, Baitullah Mehsud threatened that unless seven of his henchmen were released from jail, he would disrupt the activities of candidates in the upcoming election. His threats caused at least one candidate in South Waziristan to withdraw.

35-year old Baitullah Mehsud is vehemently opposed to the West. He has said: "Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God's orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world. We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jizyah [a tax in Islam for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state].... The mujahideen will carry out even more severe attacks. If they [the West] have air power we have fidayeen [suicide bombers]... They will leave dishonored."

Baitullah Mehsud has been notoriously fickle in his dealings with the Pakistani army and government. In January 2005 he had been offered an amnnesty, an offer which was later withdrawn after his one-legged brother Abdullah had slaughtered a kidnapped Chinese engineer. In August 2005 Baitullah agreed a ceasefire with the army. WIthin a couple of months, this ceasefire was broken.

Abdullah Mehsud had spent 25 months in Guantanamo following his arrest in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, in December 2001. He was released in March 2004, and returned to Pakistan. He finally killed himself by blowing himself up to avoid arrest on July 24, 2007 in the town of Zhob, Baluchistan province. His remains were found in the house of a local leader of the JUI-F, the Islamist party with which Benazir Bhutto had shared power from 1993 to 1996.

On March 2, 2007, Baitullah Mehsud had signed a peace deal with the Pakistani government, but later that month, he was involved in serious fighting in Tank DIstrict in NWFP which caused the deaths of two dozen people and the destruction of banks. In October 2007, after Baitullah Mehsud warned that three soldiers would be killed each day until the army stopped resisting his militants in Tank, the bodies of three soldiers were found with heads and limbs hacked off.

On Monday January 7 this week, nine "peace-brokers" were killed in two separate attacks carried out in Wana and Shakai in South Waziristan, where Baitullah Mehsud's tribe live. The nine people who were killed were aides of a local Taliban commander, Maulvi Nazir, who is pro-government. The attacks are said to have happened because Nazir refused to join Mehsud while he gave shelter to Uzbek militants.

These Uzbeks are affiliated to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). In April 2007, after weeks of serious fighting between Taliban and Uzbeks in South Waziristan, Nazir had claimed that the region would not be a "safe sanctuary for foreign miscreants". Despite his claimed support for assisting the government in creating peace in Waziristan, he said his followers would "fight the US and the infidel forces if they attack our territory." He also said he would offer bin Laden sanctuary if asked. He said he would allow "peaceful foreigners" into the region.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) was founded in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1998, with the intention of forming an Islamist state in Uzbekistan. Now it seeks to subsume other Central Asian states. It is led by Tahir Yuldashev (Yuldosh), who gained permission in May 1999 from Afghanistan's Taliban to establish a base in the north of that country, where he was thought to reside until recently. In September 2006, Pakistani intelligence believed Yuldashev was hiding in the tribal areas between Afghanistan and NWFP. Yuldashev is known in Waziristan as Tahir Jan.

The IMU is listed as a terror organization by the US State Department. It was involved in attacks upon Afghanistan's western-affiliated Northern Alliance, and most of the Uzbeks who have been trying to gain influence in Pakistan's tribal regions appear to have arrived since the end of 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan. The Uzbeks have been involved in fighting in the Swat valley in NWFP. Army and police surrenders to Islamists in Swat were partially blamed for the implementation of the State of Emergency.

In Waziristan, the Uzbeks have been opposed by Waziri tribespeople. The Uzbeks are said to have operated private jails in the region where Waziris were held, creating tribal resentment. Baitullah Mehsud is not from the Wazir tribes, who speak Wazirwola. He is a Pashtun, and speaks Pashto, the lingua franca of parts of NWFP and most of Afghanistan.

On Saturday January 4 2008, Ali Muhammad Jan Orakzai (Aurakazi) resigned from his position as the governor of NWFP. He cited personal reasons for his resignation, but the London Times suggests that he was angered by the interim Pakistan government's decision to launch an assault against Baitullah Mehsud. This plan had been on hold for at least a week, awaiting approval from the government. On Monday, caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz officially announced the strategy to arrest Baitullah Mehsud alive, if possible. The minister affirmed that no foreign forces would be involved.

The reason that Hamid Nawaz was at pains to stress that no foreign forces would assist in the hunt for Baitullah Mehsud stems in part from a desire to appease sentiments of anti-Americanism, which are at a high point following Bhutto's death. Her assassination is blamed by her party on Musharraf, America's ally in the War on Terror. In part, Nawaz was also reacting to an article published by the New York Times.

Will The US Act Independently Against Extremists?

On Sunday January 6, the New York Times reported that on January 4, senior US officials gathered at the White House to reassess its strategy in relation to Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto had promised to allow US troops to pursue Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from southern Afghanistan into their refuges in Pakistan if she gained the premiership. With her chances of leadership gone, her party in disarray and with Musharraf under considerable political pressure, a radical rethink of US policy was considered.

The NYT quoted one official who attended the meeting who said: "After years of focusing on Afghanistan, we think the extremists now see a chance for the big prize - creating chaos in Pakistan itself." It certainly seems that the assassination of Bhutto was a deliberate act by Islamists. Her return to Pakistan had been encouraged by the State Department, and her expected election as premier was seen as the best chance of national stability.

Details of the White House meeting are highly sensitive, but apparently options including the expansion of CIA and US military powers to act independently within Pakistan were discussed. Such moves would still rely upon consultation with Pakistani intelligence, and would represent an expansion of existing mandates.

In late November, President Musharraf officially resigned as head of the army. For nine years, he had been head of the army and President. He had been re-elected as president on October 6. It was thought by some that the Chief Justice, Iftikar Mohammed Chaudhry, may have invalidated this election result in response to a legal challenge by Wajihuddin Ahmed, a rival candidate. Chaudhry and Musharraf had been in conflict since March 9 2007, when Musharraf had deposed him. Chaudhry had been reinstated, but during the State of Emergency Musharraf again deposed Chaudhry, replacing the Chief Justice with his political ally, Abdul Hameed Dogar.

Musharraf's replacement as head of the army is Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a former head of the Inter-Service Intelligence directorate (ISI). General Kayani is widely seen as a moderate and potential ally by American administration, someone who will be more sympathetic to effective implementation of the war against Islamist extremists. Morale in the Pakistani army has been low over the past months, and one of Kayani's first actions was to declare 2008 as the "year of the soldier".

The NYT account was reported in the Pakistani national press, and have been met with official assertions of Pakistan's independence. On Sunday, speaking on CBS TV, Musharraf spoke on the War on Terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. He said: "We are not particularly looking for him, but we are operating against terrorists and Al Qaeda and militant Taliban. And in the process, obviously, combined, maybe we are looking for him also."

He claimed his country was fighting extremism and terrorism, adding: "We are fighting first of all Al-Qaeda. Let's take Al-Qaeda. We have arrested or eliminated about 700 Al-Qaeda leaders... which other country has done this?" He refused to acknowledge claims that bin Laden is hiding in the borderlands of Pakistan, saying: "There is no proof whatsoever that he is here in Pakistan."

His comments led Mahmoud Ali Durrani, the ambassador to the United States, to qualify the statements by asserting that the president had meant "that we are totally focused on destroying Al-Qaeda and the Taliban network and not just one person."

During the State of Emergency, Musharraf was criticized by the European Union, but on Sunday the EU confirmed that it will continue to cooperate with him. It is too early to rule out Musharraf's political influence on Pakistan's future. Now he is head of state and no longer army chief, he may yet succeed in his presidential role. The role of the army may become more functional under Kayani's leadership, no longer seen by the populace as governed by someone who is widely viewed as an American "puppet".

Postscript: Did Shady Deals Help Terrorists?

This weekend, the Sunday Times quoted a former Turkish language translator for the FBI, who made some astonishing claims. 37-year old Sibel Edmonds had approached the newspaper to give her story. Nine days after 9/11, Turkish-American Edmonds, who speaks Turkish, Farsi (Persian) and Azeri, had been recruited by the FBI to translate recorded conversations. During her period of FBI employment, she had reported that her supervisor and others had made errors of judgment and policy, and she was subsequently fired in March 2002. She has since testified before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 and other inquiries.

Ms Edmonds contacted the newspaper after reading its report from November 25, 2007, concerning convicted Syrian terrorist Louai al-Sakka, who is in jail in Turkey. Sakka admits involvement in the "trial" and decapitation of British engineer Ken Bigley in 2004. Additionally, he claims that he had a terror training camp in the Yalova mountains of Turkey. Terrorists would come to Turkey, claiming to be on holiday, and he would give them false documents, allowing them to "disappear" abroad. In 1999, he had trained four Saudis in Turkey who would later be among the 19 individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Sakka claimed that he had prepared visas for these men to fly to Pakistan.

Ms Edmonds claims that when she had been employed translating, she had heard that a senior official in the US State Department had been paid by American-based Turkish agents, who sold information on the black market, including to Pakistan. She claims that there were Turkish and Israeli "moles" in various American institutions which handled nuclear material. She says that much of this material was sent back to Pakistan, and that Turkey often acted as an intermediary for Pakistan's ISI. At that time, the head of the ISI was General Mahmoud Ahmad (Mahmood Ahmed). He was based in Washington at one stage and was said to be in constant contact with the Turkish embassy in Washington. The information was apparently passed on to Abul Qadeer Khan, who illegally developed Pakistan's nuclear bomb program. Khan, who sold nuclear secrets and technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran, was officially pardoned by Musharraf in February 2004.

Khan used Sri Lankan Buhary Syed Abu Tahir in his nuclear trafficking, but according to a Malaysian police report, individuals from Germany, Turkey, Britain and Switzerland also acted as middlemen. Transnational attempts to acquire nuclear technology have involved several countries, including Iran, Pakistan, India, Israel, Syria and Egypt. In 2003 a report by British intelligence agency MI5 revealed that 360 private companies had acted as "front groups" for attempts to acquire nuclear technology.

A. Q. Khan's staff had links with both Al Qaeda and also General Ahmed of the ISI. A former CIA official said last week: "We were aware of contact between A Q Khan's people and Al Qaeda. There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end." According to Sibel Edmonds, one of her fellow translators at the FBI was related to an official at the Pakistani embassy who had links to General Ahmed.

Ms Edmonds has named former US defence department analyst Lawrence Franklin (jailed for 12 years in 2006 for spying) as one of the individuals involved in selling information to the network, and has also named a former "big fish" within the US State Department as being complicit in such deals on nuclear technology. This latter individual has denied Ms Edmonds' claims.

I wrote in April that Musharraf claimed in his autobiography that he had been threatened in 2001 by then-US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to join the War on Terror or be "bombed back into the Stone Age". The curious nature and timing of his claim needed to be explained. However, it soon transpired that the purported "threat" had been conveyed to Musharraf by one Lt Gen Mahmood Ahmed, who at that time was head of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency. Ahmed was removed from the ISI on October 8, 2001. Ahmed opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. He has since joined the Islamist group Tablighi Jamaat, which has links with the Taliban and which tried to stage a coup in Pakistan in 1995. Mahmood Ahmed has since been accused by Indian intelligence agents of involvement with the funding of Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 terrorists.

General Ahmed had been replaced as head of the ISI after FBI intelligence linked him to Omar Sheikh. Apparently the general had authorized Sheikh to transfer $100,000 into Mohammed Atta's bank account. Omar Sheikh had been educated at a private school in Snaresbrook, Britain. In January 2007, I wrote: "Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who became a student at the London School of Economics in 1992, went to Bosnia in 1993 and the following year became involved in Kashmiri terrorist groups, including Jaish-e-Mohammed. He was arrested in 1994 after a police shoot-out following the kidnapping of three British backpackers. He escaped from jail in 1999, and was captured by Pakistani police on February 12, 2002. Omar Sheikh was captured for his involvement in the kidnapping and beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl, and given a death sentence on July 15, 2002.

Bizarrely, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan states in his recent book "In The Line Of Fire" that Omar Sheikh had been originally recruited by Britain's international intelligence agency, MI6. Omar Sheikh admits to meeting Osama bin Laden twice, but claims his allegiance is more to Mullah Omar of the Taliban."

The claims made by Sibel Edmonds, if validated, are shocking. Turkey's apparent involvement in illegal nuclear transactions is a source of concern, considering it is already a NATO ally and intends to become part of the European Union. The Sunday Times stated that it had contacted US sources for verification of Ms Edmonds' claims: "One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. 'We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,' the source said."

Sibel Edmonds was issued with a silencing order by John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, in 2004. The order was made retrospectively, even though many of the issues raised have already been widely discussed on the internet.

The Sunday Times has not disclosed the name of the senior figure in the US State Department described by Ms Edmonds, though it has published his denial of Ms Edmonds' claims. One name of a former senior official has been repeatedly mentioned in the comments section, though it would be inappropriate to mention it here.

The claims made by Ms Edmonds could become deeply damaging to America's international reputation. Not to discuss and examine them comprehensively will only feed the conspiracy theorists and the enemies of the United States.

Adrian Morgan

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Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at January 9, 2008 7:46 AM

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