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Archive for category Pakistan-US Relations

Was Raymond Davis Spying on Pakistan’s Babur Missile?

 

Was Raymond Davis Spying on Pakistan’s Babur Missile?

6:16 am in Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Pakistan by Jim White

As the diplomatic tussle between the United States and Pakistan over US demands for the release of Raymond Davis continues, it is interesting to note that their are varying reports of what Davis had in his possession (photos here) at the time he was arrested after shooting dead two Pakistanis on the streets of Lahore on January 27. Varying reports mention a GPS tracker, a GPS navigation system or a phone tracker, along with a telescope and digital cameras said to have photos of “sensitive” locations. In a very interesting development, we learn from multiple sources that on Thursday Pakistansuccessfully test-fired its Hatf VII cruise missile, which it also calls “Babur”. When the Express Tribune first reported that Davis’victims were from the intelligence community (which ISI has sincedenied and threatened the paper with legal action), the Washington Post followed up by mentioning that Davis was trailed and confronted because he had “crossed a red line“. Was gathering information on the impending test firing of the Babur missile that red line?

Unknown-10Pakistan has a history of developing missiles intended to be used with their nuclear weapons. This report (caution, it is old and dates from 1999 and quotes material from the Rumsfeld Commision) is interesting for where it states that M-11 missiles from China were seen:

The Rumsfeld Commission confirmed that complete M-11 missiles were sent to Pakistan from China. Pakistan has reportedly received more than 30 M-11s, which have been observed in boxes at Pakistan’s Sargodha Air Force Base west of Lahore. Intelligence officials believe Chinese M11s have probably been in Pakistan since November 1992, when China was “reconsidering” its stance on missile exports after the sale of U.S. F-16 aircraft to Taiwan. Since then, Pakistan has been constructing maintenance facilities, launchers and storage sheds for the missiles, all with Chinese help. China and Pakistan deny these reports.

Pakistan calls the M-11 the Hatf-III. The missile has a range of more than 300 km and a payload of 500 kg. It is a two-stage, solid-propelled missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The missile was reportedly test-fired in July 1997.

Of importance is the fact that the missiles were said to be at an air base west of Lahore. Now for the description of the sensitive photos Davis took:

“During the course of investigation, police retrieved photographs of some sensitive areas and defence installations from Davis’ camera,” a source told The Express Tribune requesting anonymity. “Photos of the strategic Balahisar Fort, the headquarters of the paramilitary Frontier Corps in Peshawar and of Pakistan Army’s bunkers on the Eastern border with India were found in the camera,” the source added.

So, just a few weeks after Davis may have provoked Pakistan intelligence into a confrontation with him, perhaps over sensitive photos he may have been observed taking in the Lahore area, Pakistan test-fires a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead:

Pakistan Thursday successfully tested a nuclear-capable cruise missile with a range of up to 600 km, a military official said.

The Hatf-VII missile, also called Babur after the 16th-century Muslim ruler who founded the Mughal Empire, was fired from an undisclosed location, said Major General Athar Abbas, a military spokesman.

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How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States

 

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States

Photo illustration from photographs by Arif Ali/AFP, via Newscom (left) and Douglas County sheriff’s office (right).
By 
April 9, 2013 163 Comments
Tariq Saeed/Reuters

Raymond Davis, who was employed by the C.I.A. as a contractor, was escorted out of court after facing a judge in Lahore, January 28, 2011.

Pakistani rage at the United States — in particular at the drone attacks in the tribal areas — found focus with the Raymond Davis affair.Ilyas J. Dean/PAK/Newscom

 

K.M. Chaudary/Associated Press

An armored car carrying Raymond Davis leaves a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan.

 

The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.

“America, you from America?”

“Yes.”

“You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”

“Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked.

“Yes.”

“As a . . . ?”

“I, I just work as a consultant there.”

“Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?”

“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.

“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”

“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.

“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.

Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”

Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?”

Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a safe house in the city.

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back.

He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power.

Davis was taken to Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with a reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He was separated from the rest of the prisoners and held in a section of the decaying facility where the guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American officials managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States Consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting Davis’s food, checking that it had not been laced with poison.

For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell represented solid proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of the covert American war in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors — many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world.

The third child of a bricklayer and a cook, Davis grew up in a small clapboard house outside Big Stone Gap, a town of nearly 6,000 people in Virginia coal country. He became a football and wrestling star at the local high school, and after graduating in 1993, Davis enlisted in the Army and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, he re-enlisted, this time in the Army’s Third Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by the private security firm Blackwater and soon found himself in Iraq working security for the C.I.A.

Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006, Davis had left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the C.I.A. as a private contractor, what the agency calls a “Green Badge,” for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to enter C.I.A. headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out the C.I.A.’s Global Response Staff — bodyguards who traveled to war zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting spots, even make initial contact with sources to ensure that case officers wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. Officers from the C.I.A.’s security branch came under withering fire on the roof of the agency’s base in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so stretched the C.I.A.’s own cadre of security officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private contractors to do the security jobs. When Davis first deployed with the C.I.A. to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the agency’s base in Peshawar, earning upward of $200,000 a year.

By mid-February 2011, with Davis still sitting in prison, anti-American passions were fully inflamed, and daily street protests and newspaper editorials demanded that the government not cave to Washington’s demands for Davis’s release but instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated that the men Davis killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: the third man killed by the unmarked American S.U.V. fleeing the scene. Making matters even worse for Davis was the fact that he was imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The former leader of the country made no secret about his intentions to once again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, a four-hour drive away. As the American Embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardari’s government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in the city of the president’s bitter rival.

But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistan’s government what the Pakistanis already suspected, and what Raymond Davis’s marksmanship made clear: He wasn’t just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was much darker, and it involved probing an exposed nerve in the already-hypersensitive relationship between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.

Ever since the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) dispatched teams of assassins to lay siege to luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, killing and wounding more than 500 people over four days of mayhem, C.I.A. analysts had been warning that the group was seeking to raise its global profile by carrying out spectacular attacks beyond South Asia. This spurred the agency to assign more of its expanding army of operatives in Pakistan toward gathering intelligence about Lashkar’s operations — a decision that put the interests of the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. in direct conflict. It was one thing for American spies to be lurking around the tribal areas, hunting for Al Qaeda figures; it was quite another to go into Pakistani cities on espionage missions against a group that the I.S.I. considered a valuable proxy force in its continuing battle with India.

The I.S.I. had nurtured the group for years as a useful asset against India, and Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters outside Lahore housed a radical madrassa, a market, a hospital, even a fish farm. The group’s charismatic leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, had been put under house arrest at various times, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all terrorism charges against him and set him free. A stocky man with a wild beard, Saeed preached out in the open on many Fridays, flanked by bodyguards and delivering sermons to throngs of his followers about the imperialism of the United States, India and Israel. Even after the U.S. offered a $10 million reward for evidence linking Saeed to the Mumbai attacks, he continued to move freely in public, burnishing his legend as a Pakistani version of Robin Hood.

By the time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of other C.I.A. officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the agency’s officers in Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of Lashkar. To get more of its spies into Pakistan, the C.I.A. had exploited the arcane rules in place for approving visas for Americans. The State Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all had separate channels to request visas for their personnel, and all of them led to the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American ambassador in WashingtonHaqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign-aid money. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and false identities that even the U.S. Embassy didn’t have accurate records of their identities and whereabouts.

The American Embassy in Islamabad is essentially a fortress within a fortress, a pile of buildings enclosed by walls topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras and then encircled by an outer ring of walls that separates a leafy area, called the Diplomatic Enclave, from the rest of the city. Inside the embassy, the work of diplomats and spies is kept largely separate, with the C.I.A. station occupying a warren of offices in its own wing, accessed only through doors with coded locks.

After Davis was picked up by the Lahore police, the embassy became a house divided by more than mere geography. Just days before the shootings, the C.I.A. sent a new station chief to Islamabad. Old-school and stubborn, the new chief did not come to Pakistan to be friendly with the I.S.I. Instead, he wanted to recruit more Pakistani agents to work for the C.I.A. under the I.S.I.’s nose, expand electronic surveillance of I.S.I. offices and share little information with Pakistani intelligence officers.

That hard-nosed attitude inevitably put him at odds with the American ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter. A bookish career diplomat with a Ph.D. in history, Munter had ascended the ranks of the State Department’s bureaucracy and accepted several postings in Iraq before ultimately taking over the American mission in Islamabad, in late 2010. The job was considered one of the State Department’s most important and difficult assignments, and Munter had the burden of following Anne W. Patterson, an aggressive diplomat who, in the three years before Munter arrived, cultivated close ties to officials in the Bush and Obama administrations and won praise from the C.I.A. for her unflinching support for drone strikes in the tribal areas.

Munter saw some value to the drone program but was skeptical about the long-term benefits. Arriving in Islamabad at a time when relations between the United States and Pakistan were quickly deteriorating, Munter wondered whether the pace of the drone war might be undercutting relations with an important ally for the quick fix of killing midlevel terrorists. He would learn soon enough that his views about the drone program ultimately mattered little. In the Obama administration, when it came to questions about war and peace in Pakistan, it waswhat the C.I.A. believed that really counted.

With Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued that it was essential to go immediately to the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to cut a deal. The U.S. would admit that Davis was working for the C.I.A., and Davis would quietly be spirited out of the country, never to return again. But the C.I.A. objected. Davis had been spying on a militant group with extensive ties to the I.S.I., and the C.I.A. didn’t want to own up to it. Top C.I.A. officials worried that appealing for mercy from the I.S.I. might doom Davis. He could be killed in prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to release him on the grounds that he was a foreign diplomat with immunity from local laws — even those prohibiting murder. On the day of Davis’s arrest, the C.I.A. station chief told Munter that a decision had been made to stonewall the Pakistanis. Don’t cut a deal, he warned, adding, Pakistan is the enemy.

The strategy meant that American officials, from top to bottom, had to dissemble both in public and in private about what exactly Davis had been doing in the country. On Feb. 15, more than two weeks after the shootings, President Obama offered his first comments about the Davis affair. The matter was simple, Obama said in a news conference: Davis, “our diplomat in Pakistan,” should be immediately released under the “very simple principle” of diplomatic immunity. “If our diplomats are in another country,” said the president, “then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”

Calling Davis a “diplomat” was, technically, accurate. He had been admitted into Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. But there was a dispute about whether his work in the Lahore Consulate, as opposed to the American Embassy in Islamabad, gave him full diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. And after the shootings in Lahore, the Pakistanis were not exactly receptive to debating the finer points of international law. As they saw it, Davis was an American spy who had not been declared to the I.S.I. and whom C.I.A. officials still would not admit they controlled. General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, spoke privately by phone and in person with Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., to get more information about the matter. He suspected that Davis was a C.I.A. employee and suggested to Panetta that the two spy agencies handle the matter quietly. Meeting with Panetta, he posed a direct question.

Was Davis working for the C.I.A.? Pasha asked. No, he’s not one of ours, Panetta replied. Panetta went on to say that the matter was out of his hands, and that the issue was being handled inside State Department channels. Pasha was furious, and he decided to leave Davis’s fate in the hands of the judges in Lahore. The United States had just lost its chance, he told others, to quickly end the dispute.

That the C.I.A. director would be overseeing a large clandestine network of American spies in Pakistan and then lie to the I.S.I. director about the extent of America’s secret war in the country showed just how much the relationship had unraveled since the days in 2002, when the I.S.I. teamed with the C.I.A. in Peshawar to hunt for Osama bin Laden in western Pakistan. Where had it gone so wrong?

While the spy agencies had had a fraught relationship since the beginning of the Afghan war, the first major breach came in July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to tell him that President Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy in the drone wars. No longer would the C.I.A. give Pakistan advance warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the C.I.A.’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

The decision had been made in Washington after months of wrenching debate about the growth of militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas; a highly classified C.I.A. internal memo, dated May 1, 2007, concluded that Al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base of operations that militants had established in the tribal areas. That assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department warned that expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing. Since the first C.I.A. drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of militants on the C.I.A.’s list of “high-value targets” had been killed by drone strikes, and other potential strikes were scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled.

So, in July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a hard sell to a frustrated president. That began the relentless, years-long drone assault on the tribal areas that President Obama continued when he took office. And as the C.I.A.’s relationship with the I.S.I. soured, Langley sent station chiefs out to Islamabad who spent far less time and energy building up good will with Pakistani spies than their predecessors had. From 2008 on, the agency cycled a succession of seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan more embittered than the last. One of them had to leave the country in haste when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The C.I.A. suspected the leak came from the I.S.I.

Even many of the operations that at first seemed likely to signal a new era of cooperation between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. ended in recriminations and finger-pointing. In January 2010, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers and American special-operations troops working in Karachi traced a cellphone to a house in Baldia Town, a slum in the western part of the sprawling city. The C.I.A. did not conduct unilateral operations inside large Pakistani cities, so the Americans notified the I.S.I. about the intelligence. Pakistani troops and policemen launched a surprise raid on the house.

Although the C.I.A. didn’t know in advance, hiding inside the house was Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a man considered to be the Afghan Taliban’s military commander and the second in command to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Only after suspects in the house were arrested and questioned did the C.I.A. learn that Baradar was among the detainees. The I.S.I. took him to a detention facility in an industrial section of Islamabad and refused the C.I.A. access to him. “At that point, things got really complicated,” one former C.I.A. officer said.

Was the entire episode a setup? Rumors had circulated inside Pakistan that Baradar wanted to cut a deal with the Americans and bring the Taliban to the negotiating table in Afghanistan. Had the I.S.I. somehow engineered the entire arrest, feeding intelligence to the C.I.A. so that Baradar could be taken off the street and the nascent peace talks spoiled? Had the I.S.I. played the C.I.A.? Months later, senior C.I.A. officials at Langley still couldn’t answer those questions. Today, more than three years later, Mullah Baradar remains in Pakistani custody.

As Davis languished in the jail cell in Lahore, the C.I.A. was pursuing its most promising lead about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since 2001, when he escaped from Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, and fled across the border into Pakistan. A small group of officers inside the agency’s Counterterrorism Center had become convinced that Bin Laden was hiding in a large compound in Abbottabad, a quiet hamlet north of Islamabad. For months, Panetta had been pushing clandestine officers to find a shred of hard proof that Bin Laden was hiding in the compound. The intelligence-gathering operating in Abbottabad had become the highest priority for the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

It was therefore more than a bit inconvenient that one of its undercover officers was sitting in a jail in Lahore facing a double murder charge. Pakistan’s Islamist parties organized street protests and threatened violent riots if Raymond Davis was not tried and hanged for his crimes. American diplomats in Lahore regularly visited Davis, but the Obama administration continued to stonewall Pakistan’s government about the nature of Davis’s work in the country.

And then the episode claimed another victim. On Feb. 6, the grieving widow of one of Davis’s victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison and was rushed to the hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her stomach. The woman, Shumaila Faheem, was certain that the United States and Pakistan would quietly broker a deal to release her husband’s killer from prison, a view she expressed to her doctors from her hospital bed. “They are already treating my husband’s murderer like a V.I.P. in police custody, and I am sure they will let him go because of international pressure,” she said. She died shortly afterward and instantly became a martyr for anti-American groups inside Pakistan.

The furor over the Davis incident was quickly escalating, threatening to shut down most C.I.A. operations in the country and derail the intelligence-gathering operation in Abbottabad. But the C.I.A. stood firm and sent top officials to Islamabad, who told Ambassador Munter to stick to the strategy.

By then, though, Munter had decided that the C.I.A.’s strategy wasn’t working, and eventually even high-level officials in the agency began to realize that stonewalling the Pakistanis was only causing the I.S.I. to dig in. After discussions among White House, State Department and C.I.A. officials in Washington, Munter approached General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, and came clean. Davis was with the C.I.A., he said, and the United States needed to get him out of the country as quickly as possible. Pasha was fuming that Leon Panetta had lied to him, and he was going to make the Americans squirm by letting Davis sit in jail while he considered — on his own timetable — the best way to resolve the situation.

Back in Washington, Ambassador Haqqani was summoned to C.I.A. headquarters on Feb. 21 and taken into Panetta’s spacious office overlooking the agency’s campus in Langley, Va. Sitting around a large conference table, Panetta asked Haqqani for his help securing Davis’s release.

“If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne character to Pakistan, he should have the skills of a Jason Bourne to get away,” Haqqani shot back, according to one person who attended the meeting.

More than a week later, General Pasha came back to Ambassador Munter to discuss a new strategy. It was a solution based on an ancient tradition that would allow the matter to be settled outside the unpredictable court system. The issue had already been discussed among a number of Pakistani and American officials, including Ambassador Haqqani in Washington. The reckoning for Davis’s actions would come in the form of “blood money,” or diyat, a custom under Shariah law that compensates the families of victims for their dead relatives. The matter would be handled quietly, and Davis would be released from jail.

Pasha ordered I.S.I. operatives in Lahore to meet the families of the three men killed during the January episode and negotiate a settlement. Some of the relatives initially resisted, but the I.S.I. negotiators were not about to let the talks collapse. After weeks of discussions, the parties agreed on a total of 200 million Pakistani rupees, approximately $2.34 million, to offer “forgiveness” to the jailed C.I.A. officer.

Only a small group of Obama administration officials knew of the talks, and as they dragged on, Lahore’s high court was preparing to rule on whether Davis would be granted diplomatic immunity, a decision the C.I.A. expected to go against the United States and worried might set a precedent for future cases in Pakistan.

Davis remained in the dark about all of this. When he arrived for his court appearance on March 16, he was fully expecting to hear that the trial would proceed and that the judge would issue a new court date. He was escorted into the courtroom, his wrists cuffed in front of him, and locked inside an iron cage near the judge’s bench. According to one person’s account, General Pasha sat in the back of the courtroom, his cellphone out. He began sending out a stream of nervous text messages to Ambassador Munter, updating him about the court proceedings. Pasha was one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, and yet the I.S.I. had little control over the mercurial courts in Lahore, and he wasn’t entirely sure that things would proceed according to plan.

The first part of the hearing went as everyone expected. The judge, saying that the case would go ahead, noted that his ruling on diplomatic immunity would come in a matter of days. Pakistani reporters frantically began filing their stories about how this seemed a blow to the American case, and that it appeared that Davis would not be released from jail anytime soon. But then the judge ordered the courtroom cleared, and General Pasha’s secret plan unfolded.

Through a side entrance, 18 relatives of the victims walked into the room, and the judge announced that the civil court had switched to a Shariah court. Each of the family members approached Davis, some of them with tears in their eyes or sobbing outright, and announced that he or she forgave him. Pasha sent another text message to Munter: The matter was settled. Davis was a free man. In a Lahore courtroom, the laws of God had trumped the laws of man.

The drama played out entirely in Urdu, and throughout the proceeding, a baffled Davis sat silently inside the cage. He was even more stunned when I.S.I. operatives whisked him out of the courthouse through a back entrance and pushed him into a waiting car that sped to the Lahore airport.

The move had been choreographed to get Davis out of the country as quickly as possible. American officials, including Munter, were waiting for Davis at the airport, and some began to worry. Davis had, after all, already shot dead two men he believed were threatening him. If he thought he was being taken away to be killed, he might try to make an escape, even try to kill the I.S.I. operatives inside the car. When the car arrived at the airport and pulled up to the plane ready to take Davis out of Pakistan, the C.I.A. operative was in a daze. It appeared to the Americans waiting for him that Davis realized only then that he was safe.

The Davis affair led Langley to order dozens of covert officers out of Pakistan in the hope of lowering the temperature in the C.I.A. – I.S.I. relationship. Ambassador Munter issued a public statement shortly after the bizarre court proceeding, saying he was “grateful for the generosity” of the families and expressing regret for the entire incident and the “suffering it caused.”

But the secret deal only fueled the anger in Pakistan, and anti-American protests flared in major cities, including Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Demonstrators set tires ablaze, clashed with Pakistani riot police and brandished placards with slogans like “I Am Raymond Davis, Give Me a Break, I Am Just a C.I.A. Hit Man.”

The entire episode — and bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad later that spring — extinguished any lingering productive relations between the United States and Pakistan. Leon Panetta’s relationship with General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, was poisoned, and the already small number of Obama officials pushing for better relations between Washington and Islamabad dwindled even further. Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign and about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on American relations with Pakistan’s government.

The C.I.A. had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when the agency’s targeters weren’t certain about exactly whom they were killing. Under the rules of so-called “signature strikes,” decisions about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious. For instance, if a group of young “military-age males” were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets. American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, adolescent boys are often among militant fighters. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials at one point to claim that the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians for a year. It was something of a trick of logic: in an area of known militant activity, all military-age males could be considered enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.

The perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, the day after Davis was released from prison and spirited out of the country. C.I.A. drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and some at the Pentagon thought the timing of the strike was disastrous, and some American officials suspected that the massive strike was the C.I.A. venting its anger about the Davis episode. More important, however, many American officials believed that the strike was botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.

Other American officials came to the C.I.A.’s defense, saying that the tribal gathering was in fact a meeting of senior militants and therefore a legitimate target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response in Pakistan, and street protests in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar forced the temporary closure of American consulates in those cities.

Munter said he believed that the C.I.A. was being reckless and that his position as ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their disagreements over the handling of the Davis case, deteriorated even further when Munter demanded that the C.I.A. give him the chance to call off specific missile strikes. During one screaming match between the two men, Munter tried to make sure the station chief knew who was in charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power in Pakistan.

“You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted.

“You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the station chief replied.

This turf battle spread to Washington, and a month after Bin Laden was killed, President Obama’s top advisers were arguing in a National Security Council meeting over who really was in charge in Pakistan. At the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated via secure video link, began making his case that he should have veto power over specific drone strikes.

Panetta cut Munter off, telling him that the C.I.A. had the authority to do what it wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s approval for anything.

“I don’t work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people at the meeting.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Munter’s defense. She turned to Panetta and told him that he was wrong to assume he could steamroll the ambassador and launch strikes against his approval.

“No, Hillary,” Panetta said, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”

There was a stunned silence, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon tried to regain control of the meeting. In the weeks that followed, Donilon brokered a compromise of sorts: Munter would be allowed to object to specific drone strikes, but the C.I.A. could still press its case to the White House and get approval for strikes even over the ambassador’s objections. Obama’s C.I.A. had, in essence, won yet again.

As for Raymond Davis, he tried to settle back into his life in the United States after being flown out of Pakistan. He found work as a firearms instructor, but in the end he couldn’t stay out of trouble. On Oct. 1, 2011, just seven months after his abrupt departure from Pakistan, Davis was eyeing a parking spot in front of a bagel shop in Highlands Ranch, Colo., a suburb of Denver. So was Jeffrey Maes, a 50-year-old minister who was driving with his wife and two young daughters. When Maes beat Davis to the spot, Davis shouted profanities through his open window. Then he jumped out of his car and confronted Maes, telling the minister that he had been waiting for the parking spot.

According to an affidavit given by Maes, he told Davis to “relax and quit being stupid.”

Davis struck Maes in the face, knocking him to the pavement. Maes said in court that when he stood up from the fall, Davis continued to hit him. The minister’s wife, later recalling the episode, said she had never in her life seen a man so full of rage. Just last month, after protracted legal proceedings, Davis pleaded guilty to a charge of third-degree misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to two years of probation. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and attend anger-management classes.

On the streets and in the markets of Pakistan, Raymond Davis remains the boogeyman, an American killer lurking in the subconscious of a deeply insecure nation. On a steamy summer night last summer, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed — the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the reason Davis and his team were sent to Lahore in the first place — stood on the back of a flatbed truck and spoke to thousands of cheering supporters less than a mile from Pakistan’s Parliament building in Islamabad. A $10 million American bounty still hung over Saeed’s head, part of a broader squeeze on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finances. But there he was, out in the open and whipping the crowd into a fury with a pledge to “rid Pakistan of American slavery.” The rally was the culmination of a march from Lahore to Islamabad that Saeed ordered to protest American involvement in the country. The night before the march reached the capital, six Pakistani troops were killed by gunmen riding motorcycles not far from where the marchers were spending the night, leading to speculation that Saeed had ordered the attack.

But Saeed insisted that night that he was not to blame for the deaths. The killers were foreigners, he told the crowd, a group of assassins with a secret agenda to destabilize Pakistan and steal its nuclear arsenal. With a dramatic flourish, he said he knew exactly who had killed the men.

“It was the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals. “It was Blackwater!” The cheers grew even louder. He saved the biggest applause line for last: “It was another Raymond Davis!”

 

This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” published by the Penguin Press.

Mark Mazzetti is a national-security correspondent for The Times. He shared a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Editor: Joel Lovell

Reference

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Voices of Pakistan: Why do Pakistanis Have Such Mixed Opinions About America? – by Sobia Ali

Voices of Pakistan: Why do Pakistanis Have Such Mixed Opinions About America? – by Sobia Ali

 

I belong to the minority of people who actually know the correct pronunciation of “Abbottabad,” unlike President Obama, or Jon Stewart because I grew up there. While I have always taken interest in socio-political issues in Pakistan, this time it was a little surreal.

Walk into an average household in Pakistan in the late afternoon and its not unusual to find middle aged men gathered over tea and biscuits discussing politics with a healthy dose of lambasting America. Its also not uncommon to find them charmed by the likes of Angelina Jolie or the prospects of sending their children for higher education to America.

Why do Pakistanis have such mixed opinions about America? On the one hand, they love American pop culture, jeans, and Hollywood. On the other, the percentage of people that view the United States as favorable is lower in Pakistan than in Egypt, Lebanon, or in the Palestinian territories.

So it’s no wonder that the Western world struggles to understand Pakistanis. I sometimes wonder if we Pakistanis even understand ourselves. In this section, we will use the powerful combination of citizen journalism and social media to explore these questions, and others.

As a member of the HuffPost Tech Team, I approached the editorial side after the event in Abbottabad. I felt there was a strong need to explore the diversity of viewpoints among Pakistanis to make sense of the complex and vulnerable relationship between Americans and Pakistanis. I felt that an honest and open social dialogue was crucial.

We have been gathering opinions from Pakistanis on a range of issues via Skype, email, and personal interviews on the streets. This series, Voices of Pakistan, will pull together their responses to our questions, as well as commentaries from a diverse group of writers and bloggers.

The first thing to know about Pakistanis is that they are not a monolithic group, and questions like, “What do Pakistanis think?” will never have a single right answer.

Like any country with hundreds of millions of people, Pakistan is heterogeneous, varied, and complex, comprising multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures. While the Islamic religion unites the majority of Pakistanis, it also divides them at the sectarian level, often violently.

There are too many people suffering in Pakistan because of extremism, illiteracy, and poverty. I worry about the country I grew up in. I would like to see a shift in the focus of the media from the stereotypes to the more positive aspects of Pakistanis that can be tapped and utilized as a tool to drive social change. We have developed this forum as a place where Pakistanis can be heard speaking for themselves. Resolution will come, but not without a diagnosis.

Below are some of the preliminary responses we have gathered to our questions:

The first question we asked Pakistanis was “What would you like America and the rest of the world to know about Pakistan that you feel they don’t right now?”

Azhar Ali, 65, retired professor believes that the US should have attempted to understand the dynamics of the Pakistani nation and its people instead of focusing on the Pakistan military.

“Ignoring the aspirations of throbbing nation of 180 million people for so long has wounded the Pakistani nation psyche irreparably and the military is no more all powerful due to self inflicted serious wounds.“

Arsalan believes that its the paradoxical nature of the nation that makes it hard to understand.

“Not all of us want to kill you or rob you but a few of us might. We’re a land of paradoxes in so many ways that its almost farcical, a land of rebels and conformists, philanthropists and con artists, murderers and poets.“

Unknown-8Many others who responded were concerned by Western media’s portrayal of Pakistan.

“I think Americans think that we are all stereotypes,” said Syed Harris Hassan, 22, a university student in Islamabad. “They think that all the people in Pakistan are extremists, intolerant, unaccepting and support terrorism.“

Hassan, like others, said that the majority of Pakistanis aren’t extremists and “we hate terrorists just like everyone else does.”

And some wanted the world to know that Pakistan has bigger problems than terrorists

“The people of Pakistan suffer hugely from illiteracy corruption violence and poverty. Most people do back breaking work all day just to put food on the table for their families.“ said Rabia Sultan, a 30-year-old cardiologist from Karachi who currently lives in New York.

We also heard responses like “Americans have done enough” and “Stay out of our country.”

“What Americans don’t understand about Pakistan is getting their way always through powerful Pakistan military is not the best approach. Whenever they were in a spot the military helped them in working out a quick fix while the nation looked on disinterestedly. Ignoring the aspirations of throbbing nation of 180 million people for so long has wounded the Pakistani nation psyche irreparably and the military is no more all powerful due to self inflicted serious wounds. The strategy would have worked well for the Americans, had it been an insignificant state geopolitical in the deep of Africa. But underrating a vibrant nation of sixty percent youth had been a capital sin. Now the Americans are running between the threatening pillar of Pakistani nation and threatened Pakistan Military post to get their nuts out of the fire. Result is not difficult to imagine.”

Azhar Ali, 65, lives in Islamabad and is a retired professor.

“Not all of us want to kill you or rob you but a few of us might. We’re a land of paradoxes in so many ways that its almost farcical, a land of rebels and conformists, philanthropists and con artists, murderers and poets. Pakistan is the best and worst of humanity existing side by side ripping apart everything in the middle Most of us live in remote and disconnected villages and wouldn’t know Osama Bin Laden from Justin Bieber and are too hungry to care.

Time is not money in Pakistan its time, we have plenty of time but no money We all live in a state of permanent confusion, anarchy and fear, terrible things happen around us every day. Yet strangely enough we seem to bundle along and miraculously and almost stubbornly manage to retain some hope.”

Arsalan Khan, 24, lives in Karachi and is a University Student.

“I think Americans think that we are all stereotypes. They think that all the people in Pakistan are extremists, intolerant, unaccepting and support terrorism. I want to let them know that the general people in Pakistan live their lives as do people in United States. We love peace, we like freedom, we are terrified when there is a suicide blast, and we hate terrorists just like everyone else does. There is a particular group which believes in extremism and is intolerant towards other religions and cultures, but they are not in the majority.”

Syed Harris Hassan, 22, lives in Islamabad and is a University Student.

“The people of Pakistan suffer hugely from illiteracy corruption violence and poverty. Most people do back breaking work all day just to put food on the table for their families. They often live incredibly sad lives with great dignity. In spite of this religious fanaticism and mass violence in Pakistan did not find roots till the soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

I’d also like to remind people that a country that can barely feed its own people is the 5th largest army in the whole world . This is because for most of its existence Pakistan has been America’s military ally run by military dictators. If there hadn’t been this huge military collaboration then perhaps Pakistan would probably have a smaller military and better education and human rights today.”

Rabia Sultan, 30, was born in Karachi currently living in New York City, where she is a cardiologist in Brooklyn.

“Pakistanis have never voted for religious parties’ en masse at the most their vote bank is 4-6%, BUT 4-6% of 180 million are still a lot of people and when fraction of that segment turn up in streets to burn American flag, although it makes for good t.v, but it doesn’t really make the whole country nuts.

It’s a misnomer that Pakistan is an extremist country. It’s a country which has had the rule of one institution and one intuition only for the past 52 years. It has had facade of democratic governments but at NO POINT civilians made defense policy OR foreign policy or even economic policy. Whenever civilians have tried to take the reins, they have either been hanged, forced to exile or shot dead in broad-daylight.

Americans should also know that Pakistan doesn’t need to be an inherent beggar. It has enough agricultural growth, industrial infrastructure, natural resources and the human-material to stand on its own feet. Our tax to GDP ratio is at a meager 7%. Like the rest of the civilized world if its around 17-19%, it wont solve all our problems, but it will be a start. We currently don’t tax our biggest industry which is agriculture, if we start taxing just big farmers who are literally millionaires in American sense, PLUS we start taxing real estate (anything bigger than 1500 sq. yards), And bring the stock exchange earnings under tax bracket, we wont need IMF anymore. There is a corruption of at least a billion dollars every month at the top/governmental level. A big problem is economy and inflation which fans extremism. When people don’t have a job, no light at the end of the tunnel, brothers/sisters/parents blowing up in pieces either through a drone or by military gunship helicopter OR by a suicide bomber, world is a living hell, THEN paradise and 72 virgins sounds mighty fine. The rush is not to arrive in paradise; the rush is to check out from the hell that we have collectively created for them.

But here is the silver lining. For the first time in the history of Pakistan, majority of
Pakistanis (read punjabis) have come to this conclusion that there is no way forward for
Pakistan but civilian supremacy/democracy.”

Ahmer, 36, grew up in Karachi is now living in Pennsylvania and works as a Tech Consultant.

 

Source: HuffPost World

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BIN LADINS CAPTURE: What really happened?

What  really happened?  

 

By Raqib  Shah


 
  

 

In August  2010 after Pakistani authorities shared intelligence with US about the  compound in Abbottabad, US  after its own intelligence gathering ascertains that the compound is  occupied by Osama’s children. Compound surveillance continues through the  next year in anticipation of capturing Osama bin  Laden. 

In  January 2011 the young CIA contractor who is given the charge of  Pakistan Station Chief works “extra hard” to gather clandestine  information related to ISI and Al Qaeda relationship.

The  contractor, now  infamous as Raymond Davis the “American Rambo” receives a call from one of  his assets, early morning on January 27 about a high value target. But the  asset refuses to lay out details on phone or to leave the Lahore city,  where he had gone underground.Raymond Davis hires a rent a car and drives  to Lahore, while his embassy’s security detail follows him in a  bullet proof Land Cruiser.

Raymond  Davis is able to loose his Islamabad’s ISI “detail”  by leaving in an unmarked  rented car.  The ISI agents falling for his trap follows the  embassy’s Land Cruiser. Raymond Davis arrives at Lahore one hour earlier  than his detail and meets with the asset. The asset gives him some  pictures of an intelligence building at Tarbela and recording of a phone  call. Listening to the phone  call, Raymond  Davis realizes the gold mine he had struck, and  immediately calls his security detail which had also reached Lahore,  knowing if ISI reaches him first, he would not leave Lahore  alive.

Next hour  when the security car catches up with Raymond Davis, the ISI bosses  realize that Raymond Davis had given them  a slip earlier in the morning and in couple of hours he may have done  in Lahore, he might have got some important information.  Resultantly, they put  two contractors on his tail. Raymond Davis seeing a tail fears the  worst and  shoots them both in the back, at a traffic stop, without logically  realizing that there was no way ISI could have known what  he was holding.

His  security detail which was close behind rushed to his  “rescue”. However, by this time police had chased and  arrested Raymond Davis, while the security Land Cruiser running over  pedestrians escapes towards US consulate compound  in Lahore. ISI officers quickly reach the scene and confiscating the  memory sticks realize Raymond Davis has unearthed a deep secret which even  their immediate bosses didn’t know about.

The  sensitivity of information rattles the entire echelons of the ISI and even  its own officers are sent under house arrest while the relevant cell steps  forward. At that time even some of the top intelligence officers of the  secretive ISI outside the relevant cell did not know that Osama bin Laden had died and  his body was kept frozen at Tarbela. Young Raymond Davis had  unearthed the biggest secret of the century, somehow. But now the  Pandora’s Box had been opened. Pak top brass knew it had only a few days  or weeks at best to capitalize Raymond Davis’ arrest before US get the  intel.

In the  next six weeks Pakistan plugs all leaks related to Osama’s death and makes  sure that maximum gains are made for Raymond’s release. However,when  Raymond Davis is released on March 16, his debriefing results in a tsunami  of US policy, personal agendas and fueling of political rivalries.  Everyone in the US chain of command now wanted to use the information to  further personal goals from General
Petreaus  to President Obama. On March 17, knowing that Pakistan had lost its trump  card General Pervaiz Kayani releases a press statement in which he  critically criticize drone attacks, first from him. From then on Pak  Military raised its stance against drone attacks, fearing that US now  might target its nuclear assets. 

 
 
While in  USA, politics was at its full swing. General Petreaus wanted to get  the buckle for Osama bin Laden’s death on his belt for his future  political ambitions, while President Obama wanted the credit to  help his  sliding popularity. While the tussle continued, the other issue still  pending was how to confirm Osama’s death.

In the  next one month, nearly every week a top US official visited Pakistan,  everyone meeting with General Kayani trying to convince him to hand over  Osama’s body. While the stance from Pakistan remained, “Osama, Who?” It  was a first in the history that so many US top officials had visited and  met with a military chief of a foreign country in such a short time.  Seeing nothing getting through the top military brass of Pakistan, US  started a political and media campaign on the sides to put extra pressure  on Pak Military.

Politics  within Obama Administration was also at its full swing. Petraeus was  pulling all the strings to take the credit, while trying to lay out a plan  to get Osama bin Laden’s body out of Pakistan. President Obama on the  other hand in one smooth move decided to “promote” Petraeus to the head of  the CIA. The news got out in the first week of April that Petraeus was  being transferred to the CIA. While at the main front, Obama continued to  pressurize General Kayani and General Pasha and on April 5, Obama  Administration submitted a report to the Congress that Pakistan government  had no clear strategy to triumph over militants. Alongside the report the  media campaign against Pak Military and the ISI continued.

The  second week of April began with a bang for top Pak Military brass. On  April 7, Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and White House advisor wrote a  report arguing that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not only a deterrent to  India but also to USA. The obvious had now become clear that Obama  Administration has indirectly sent a clear threat to Pakistan’s nuclear  assets. The timing of the report was perfect with Centcom Chief Gen James  Mattis meeting with General Kayani next day. In the meeting General Mattis  asked about Pakistan’s cooperation in capturing Osama bin  Laden.

This was  ironically one of typical Hollywood thriller scene. Pakistan knew that US knew that Pakistan knows  that US knows that Osama is dead.But Pakistan continued the naive  game of “Osama Who?” while US continued to play the game that “Osama must  be captured”. General Mattis leaves with veiled threats and stresses that  Pakistan must do more to against the Al Qaeda and Taliban, or indirectly  saying that Osama bin Laden must be handed over.

For the  next ten days US waits and sees how Pakistan responds to the threats, but  Pakistan acts by burying its head in the sand – see no evil, hear no evil.  Obama Administration ups the ante and on April 18 on Pakistan’s Geo TV,  Adm. Mike Mullen said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence “has a  longstanding relationship with the Haqqani Network.That doesn’t mean  everybody in the ISI, but it’s there.” Again, international media had its  field day against Pakistan’s ISI and its links with  Taliban.

After  putting pressure on General Kayani, Adm. Mike Mullen meets with Chairman  of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shameem Wyne and  General Kayani on April 20. Admiral  Mullen again demands indirectly that Pakistan needs to help USA in  locating Osama bin Laden. Pakistan’s response was again, “Osama, Who?”  Admiral Mullen however, left with another threat that if they came to know  about Osama bin Laden’s location they would go ahead and take unilateral  action. This is the same message which President Obama repeated in his  announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death, when he said, “We will take  actions in Pakistan, if we knew where he was.” 

In  response to continued threats from USA, Pakistan  starts taking back its air bases from US in an attempt to avoid launching  of any operation from its own soil. As a result on April 22 the news  appears that Pakistan had taken back Shamsi Airbase from CIA/US  forces. While Obama Administration was piling pressure on Pakistan,  General Petraeus visited Pakistan on April 26 and met with General Kayani  openly asking him to hand over Osama bin Laden, otherwise get ready to  face the consequences. Same day Washington also critically attacked  Pakistan Army’s counter-terrorism efforts. General Petraeus left with a  clear message that unless Pakistan hands over Osama, US forces would be  forced to  take action over Pakistani soil. Pakistani Military knowing that US knew  that Osama bin Laden was dead couldn’t understand Obama Administration’s  continued stance on capturing Osama bin Laden. General Petraeus left with  the ultimatum that either Pakistan handed over Osama or US would get  him.

Same day  meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) is held at  Rawalpindi, one week  ahead of schedule at the Joint Staff Headquarters. The top brass  discussed the  Osama issue and decision is reached to work out the Obama’s strategy  leading to continuous threats for capturing Osama bin Laden alive, even  after knowing that he was dead. While in Pakistan intelligence community  starts using all of its sources to reach to the bottom of US’ demand of  capturing Osama bin Laden. On April 28 President Obama signs General  Petraeus’ transfer to CIA and next day signs the orders to attack the  Abbottabad compounds. Thus Osama bin Laden’s credit is assured to  President Obama.

On 29  April after President Obama signed the orders to “bring back” Osama bin  Laden,Pakistani security agencies get a report that another order had been  signed which had authorized US forces to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear  assets, if needed. The report was nothing short of seeing a death angel  for the top Pak Military brass. Seeing  the imminent threat, General Kayani tried his last shot when on 30 April  2011 he clearly stated in his Youm-e-Shuhada address: “Pakistan is a  peace-loving country and wants friendly relations with other countries and  our every step should move towards prosperity of the people. But we will  not compromise our dignity and honour for it”. However,  it didn’t stop what was about to come 24 hours later.

As night  fell on Sunday, 1st  May  four choppers from a US Afghan base at a low altitude towards its  destination in Abbottabad, to the same compound where Osama’s children  were in the hiding. Without any detection courtesy of their latest stealth  technology and Pakistan’s outdated technology the choppers continued over  the Pakistani territory. Ironically,  ten years ago a Pak Air force air commodore had raised concern about the  outdated radar technology citing that US or worse India could fly  helicopters into the country and take out nuclear installations and in  reply he was shown the boot while no upgrades to the systems were  made.

Anyway,  the four choppers made it to the compound in Abbottabad. It is then  that PakArmy was notified that they have a choice. Either face an  entire barrage of US choppers attacking Pak nuclear assets or hand over  Osama’s body. In the meanwhile the small gun  battle at the Abbottabad compound continued and to give the drama some  authenticity the US forces torched one of their own choppers.   Pressed for time a Pakistani helicopter flew from Tarbela carrying dead  body of Osama bin Laden which was stored in a cold storage there. While at  Abbottabad Pak Army soldiers encircle the entire area around the compound  within five minutes of the start of fire fight. The firefight continued  for 35 more minutes, waiting for the Pakistani helicopter. Once the  Pakistani helicopter reached the compound the three US choppers and the  Pakistani helicopter flew towards the Afghan border, this time without the  need to fly below the radar detection altitude.

Next day,  the world woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead and President  Obama had delivered what President Bush and Dick Cheney couldn’t. But the  Pak Military brass did not wake up, because they never slept the night  before. Last night they had woken to the realization that US could fly under the radar  and take out Pakistan’s nuclear assets at any  time.

  



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Iqbal Baig, Partner of Terrorists Taliban & Pakistan’s Biggest Heroin Smuggler to US, Building a Shopping Arcade on Hall Road, Lahore.

 Aamir Latif and Kate Willson, ICIJ : Iqbal Baig, Partner of Terrorists Taliban, PML(N) & Pakistan’s Biggest Heroin Smuggler to US & Britain Building a Shopping Arcade on Hall Road Lahore

 

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950403&slug=2113791

 

 

Iqbal Baig, the biggest heroin smuggler to US is building a Shopping Arcade on Hall Road in Lahore. He has torn down historic and architecturally unique flats built in 1920s and 30s, which were part of Pre-Partition Lakhshmi Mansion. Therefore, another, beautiful landmark of Lahore has been victim of corruption and malfeasance of the Sharif brothers dynasty.

 

How did Iqbal Baig manage to get approval for destruction of a historic landmark? Simply, by bribing the Punjab Government, whereby he was able to get a permit to destroy these historical buildings. This is another example of Punjab Government’s expedient cooperation with crooked builders like Malik Riaz and Iqbal Baig.

 

Hall Road shopkeepers have watched helplessly as this drug lord rolls over their property rights and create clouds of dust and debris in one of the biggest electronics market in Asia.  The Punjab Government is in cahoots with this drug smuggler, who finances his activities by money laundering and uses mules to smuggle drugs to the West.

 

Why is the West silent on the rapid growth of the Empire of Drug Baron, Iqbal Baig in Lahore, Pakistan? What is the nature of relationship, between Shahbaz Sharif & the Sharif Family with this known drug kingpin? These are the questions, which have caused considerable distress in the minds of Hall roads business community. But, these concerns may be short lived, as Iqbal Baig can use strong-arm tactics and considerable financial clout to silence his most vocal critics.

 

Many businessmen on Hall Road are appalled at the blatant criminal activities of a known heroin smuggler. It seems the US DEA has all but forgotten about Iqbal Baig’s narcotic empire and his partnership with Al Qaeda and Taliban? However, this criminal is more dangerous than ever, because now he is acquiring a cover of legitimacy. Although, convicted in a US court, this criminal will try to beat the system through use of couriers, instead of getting himself involved in heroin smuggling. Nowadays, due to a weak and corrupt government, Pakistan is awash with narcotics. Iqbal Baig will continue to indulge in his drug smuggling activities, and finance them with money earned through of legitimate business enterprise, like the Hall Road Project. This also provides a conduit to launder drug money and stash it in Middle Eastern Banks. In the process people like Iqbal Baig destroy not only young peoples lives in the West, but also in Pakistan.  They buy greedy politicians like the Nawaz Sharif by “donating,” to their electioneering. It is a creative form of indirect bribery, where the “obligated” politician looks the other way at the illegal activities of their benefactors.

 

It is imperative that US Ambassador pressure the Punjab Government to crack down on such criminals turned legitimate entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they will come to bite back by destroying the lives of people in East and West in the garb of their worst terrorist nightmares. Heroin smuggling, legitimate business, and terrorism are an explosive mix, which the global community should help Pakistan, nip in the bud. However, Pakistani politicians are always drooling for illegal gratifications in the form of bank deposits in Dubai, Cayman Islands, and Isle of Wight made by the likes of Iqbal Baig, Tapi, and Malik Riaz.

 

Iqbal Baig is well known to most of Lahorites, who often wonder, why US, which has waged a War on Terror, does not protest to the Punjab government, about the money laundering, property acquisition, and funneling of drug money into legitimate businesses. In Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Mexico, US has used its DEA agents to stop drug kingpins from infiltrating legitimate commercial enterprises.  But, in Pakistan, heroin smugglers and money launderers are roaming around scott- free. Almost every person in Lahore knows about this drug kingpin and are surprised that the US Embassy or the Lahore Consulate or DEA have not raised Malik Iqbal’s burgeoning empires issue with the Pakistan or at least the Punjab Government.  It is non-productive for DEA to chase small time drug mules, and leaving the barracudas among heroin.  Smugglers untouched. It also earns the ill will of a nation, where US is spending considerable amount of money to build its image.  US government should proactively, coaxing the Punjab Government to cut off money laundering activities of the Iqbal Baig Empire.  This will go a long way in improving the image of US in Lahore, a city, which is the political capital of Pakistan. At the same time it will also earn the considerable goodwill from the people of Lahore, where the image of US suffered during the Raymond Davis Affair. And it will also go a long way in restoring good relations with the people of Pakistan. Otherwise, the question, as to why people of Pakistan, will remain unanswered.  

 

 

 

 

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=896&dat=19950403&id=1y8OAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kH0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5678,274928

 

 

The Taliban and tobacco

By Aamir Latif and Kate Willson June 29, 2009, 10:15 am

 

http://www.icij.org/project/tobacco-underground/taliban-and-tobacco

 

 

Tumman Khan is a poor, aging farmer who tills another man’s land in the restive northern tribal belt of Pakistan. For him and others in the Khyber Agency region, Sahib Ayub Afridi is considered an angel. The illiterate 70-year-old tribal leader finances construction of water pumps, streets and lighting, builds mosques and madrasahs, and supports the penniless and widowed.

But there’s another side to Afridi.

A one-time notorious drug kingpin who in the 1980s armed the Afghan Mujahidin at the CIA’s behest, Afridi churns out millions of counterfeit cigarettes to smuggle across central Asia, China, and Africa, and splits the proceeds with the pro-Taliban militants who control the swath of mountainous borderland, according to Pakistani intelligence and customs officials. The leaders of some of these militant groups are on the U.S. most-wanted list in the region — among them, Baitullah Mehsud, who has claimed responsibility for bloody attacks in Pakistan and has sworn to strike Washington, D.C. U.S. officials have responded by putting a $5 million price on Mehsud’s head.

A tax for terrorism

As government sanctions restrict traditional sources of terrorist financing, Pakistani militant groups increasingly rely on proceeds from counterfeit cigarette production and smuggling, intelligence sources say. Although income figures are rough estimates at best, profits from the illicit cigarette trade account for as much as 20 percent of funding for these militant groups, second only to heroin production, according to terrorism experts in Pakistan. “Taliban and other militant groups do not have to do much,” says Ikram Sehgal, a senior defense and security analyst who heads SMS Security, Pakistan’s leading private security company. “They simply receive taxes on a regular basis from owners of illegal and legal cigarette factories and later for the safe passage they provide to the convoys.”

 

Sahib Ayub Afridi: top cigarette counterfeiter in Pakistan.

The Afridi case is part of a broader trend of terrorism groups relying on contraband to finance their activities, experts say. Even if efforts to cut the region’s booming heroin production are successful — an unlikely prospect — the lucrative tobacco trade suggests how hard it will be to stanch funding to terrorists and insurgents in areas far from government control. The world’s longest-running civil wars are fueled by contraband according to a 2002 study by Stanford University’s James Fearon. Cocaine smuggling has largely propelled FARC’s 40-year insurgency in Colombia. Diamonds have funded civil wars in Sierra Leone and Angola. Opium has led to drawn-out conflicts in Afghanistan and Burma.

In the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the challenges are particularly daunting. U.S. President Barack Obama recently deemed the region “the most dangerous place in the world” for Americans. The growing power of the Taliban and other militant groups, combined with new waves of terrorism, has put Pakistan’s weak government on the defensive. The risks are indeed high: as much as two-thirds of the nuclear-armed country is ruled not by a central government but by insurgents, militants, tribal leaders, or warlords.

Overlooked in the Pakistani Taliban’s growing power is the role of tobacco smuggling.

As U.S. and NATO forces attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan, the predominantly Pashtun fighters increasingly sought sanctuary along the ungoverned border of Pakistan. The Khyber Agency — a border province boasting the most-traveled trade route between the two countries — is also the hotbed of cigarette counterfeiting in Pakistan. And its renegade factories have become the region’s largest employer, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

Fateh Mohammed, a senior Pakistani tax official, said counterfeit cigarette production is on the rise, costing the government an estimated $88 million annually in lost taxes. He said the excise department does what it can, but the factories are “out of reach.”

“It’s hard for us to curb the sale and production of counterfeit cigarettes as we neither have the manpower and other resources to do that,” Mohammed said. “Nor do we have any reach to the tribal belt where this business is flourishing.”

Illicit cigarette production in the strife-torn tribal belt, a semiautonomous region of Pashtun tribes bordering Afghanistan, accounts for an estimated 22 percent of all consumption in Pakistan, a country with cigarette taxes among the highest in the world — accounting for 87 percent of the cost per pack. Mohammad Khosa, who heads the anti-counterfeiting efforts for British American Tobacco in the region, estimated that the region’s factories pump out some 15 billion cigarettes a year, a large portion of which end up smuggled to neighboring Afghanistan.

 

Click to enlarge

“Smuggling has long existed because of physical proximity to land routes going into Central Asia and beyond,” said Sumit Ganguly, professor and Pakistan expert at Indiana University. “On top of that, there are very poor people. The two dovetail very neatly.”

Trade routes between Afghanistan and Pakistan developed over thousands of years with no governmental controls. It wasn’t until the British drew a 1600-mile border between the two countries, in 1893, that a culture of illicit trade flourished. Today, Pashtuns pay little attention to the poorly marked borders that separate the rugged terrain between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Following the October 2001, U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, smuggling contraband goods across to Pakistan provided the Taliban with a major source of financing. In his final story published in The Wall Street Journal before his January 2002 abduction, Daniel Pearl reported on how the group “taxed” goods being smuggled across the border. The militants skimmed between $35 million and $75 million off exports of Marlboro cigarettes, Sony TVs, and Gillette shaving cream, Pearl wrote.

Today, no figure is more deeply mired in the region’s contraband trade than Haji Ayub Afridi, a tribal leader of the region-ruling Afridi clan, which has long controlled trade routes into Afghanistan and whose name is synonymous with trade and transport throughout Pakistan.

Who’s Who of militants

Afridi’s sweeping luxury estate near the Afghan border is enclosed by 20-foot high walls topped with concertina wire, guarded by a private army and protected by an anti-aircraft battery. Authorities point to a pair of lucrative, yet nameless, cigarette factories that Afridi owns, known locally as “One More Cigarette,” and to a number of cigarette-filled warehouses he is said to own near Peshawar — the region’s largest city, 25 miles east of his home. Because most of his business is in the names of associates, the full extent of Afridi’s assets is unknown, but officials believe he operates as many as six factories.

Afridi churns out copies of an array of Western brands — Marlboros, Camels, Benson & Hedges, and 555s, among them, officials say. The Marlboros and Camels are smuggled into Afghanistan and the central Asian countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Benson & Hedges is favored for shipment to South Africa, while counterfeit 555s are moved through the Khunjarab pass into China. Afridi also produces low-quality local brands One-Touch and Datchi, which are popular in Afghanistan.

 

Tobacco counterfeiter Afridi lives in a heavily guarded compound near the Afghan border.

Afridi pays protection money to a Who’s Who of the region’s militant leaders, according to Pakistani intelligence. In exchange for operating his factories in the Khyber Agency, sources say, Afridi pays $36,000 a month — the average combined annual income of 47 Pakistanis — to Mangal Bagh, leader of the area’s ruling pro-Taliban militia.

A former bus token taker and fellow member of the Afridi clan, warlord Bagh commands thousands of heavily-armed Islamist militants through his group Lashkar-i-Islam (Army of Islam). In addition to collecting taxes from the likes of Afridi, the pro-Taliban group specializes in kidnapping for ransom. Early in his smuggling racket, Afridi refused to cut Bagh a percentage of his proceeds, instead paying protection taxes to a rival Taliban group, officials say. The two groups clashed in 2008, leaving 19 dead. Following the battle, Afridi agreed to pay Bagh.

Bagh may be the most moderate militant leader on Afridi’s payoff list. Afridi also pays a pair of rival Taliban factions in the neighboring tribal region of Waziristan, along the Afghan border to the south, who are actively fighting U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. One of the men, Mullah Nazir, opposes fighting against Pakistan security forces. But his rival, Baitullah Mehsud — leader of Pakistan’s Taliban movement — has advocated attacks against the Pakistani government and is blamed by Islamabad for ordering the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Mehsud’s troops also provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda forces fighting in Afghanistan, and his militancy has made him a prime target for the Americans. But that has not deterred the Taliban leader; he recently joined forces with Nazir and a third warlord who, together, now control much of the region. The rival groups agreed to “fight the U.S. together, because we are concerned over the surge in American troops in Afghanistan,” Nazir told local tribal chiefs, according to the Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in the region.

Afridi isn’t the only counterfeit cigarette producer in the tribal belt. Smugglers also transport cigarettes from illegal factories in neighboring provinces of Kohat and Bannu into Afghanistan through the border town of Miramshah. The area is in the grip of an al-Qaeda militia of ethnic Uzbeks loyal to Mehsud. Pakistani intelligence sources say cigarette smugglers pay the militant groups up to 20 percent commission for each convoy. American and Japanese model trucks leave the sprawling, high-walls cigarette factories almost daily, while bigger convoys of five to seven trucks leave twice a week, local residents say.

On the lam

Afridi is no stranger to the black market. During the 1960s he drove truckloads of smuggled gold through the Khyber Pass. His partner was a slightly older gold smuggler named Iqbal Baig. The two prominent tribal members would remain close business partners as they expanded into currency, hashish, and heroin smuggling.

 

The Torkham Crossing, a heavily traveled trade route between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, Afridi is credited with orchestrating the heroin trade between eastern Afghanistan, through the Khyber Pass, to the Afridi clan in Pakistan. Pakistani and Belgian authorities first sought his arrest in 1983, after tying the smuggler to 17 tons of hashish in a southwest Pakistan warehouse and another 6.5 tons in Antwerp, Belgium. But when 50 Pakistani police sought to arrest Afridi in 1990, they were met by an armed militia and quickly retreated, according to U.S. court records.

Despite his record as a narcotics trafficker, the CIA had its own uses for Afridi. In the 1980s, he was one of many Pashtun tribal leaders tapped by the agency to help finance and arm the Mujahidin struggle against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, according to The New Dimension of International Terrorism by former Harvard University fellow and U.S. Army Colonel Stefan M. Aubrey. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, Afridi turned his attention homeward. He was elected to Parliament in 1990 — reportedly after paying up to $600 per vote to represent the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Through it all, Afridi never stopped dealing drugs, according to U.S. court records. He ordered subordinates to truck hashish to Karachi in Bedford trucks and old tanker trucks. Meanwhile, he and his partners made millions smuggling tons of heroin and hashish across the globe — through India to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, packed amid frozen fish into the Netherlands, through Singapore and Hong Kong, and across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada.

Afridi, through his longstanding contacts in the drug world, became the key supplier to the biggest narcotics ring in Pakistan, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA branded Afridi’s syndicate “the single most prolific heroin and hashish drug trafficking organization in Pakistan.” The amounts were indeed impressive: 57 tons of hashish into the Netherlands in a single shipment; 30 tons of hashish to California; and massive amounts of heroin around the world.

At the center of the operation was the notorious Iqbal Baig–a respected, well-known businessman whose assets included cinemas, textile factories, commercial property, and a pizzeria. And at Baig’s side was Tarik Butt, his brother-in-law. Butt took over a battery manufacturing plant in 1986 after its owner — smuggling heroin into Vienna on Butt’s behalf — died from a drug-filled balloon exploding in his stomach. The factory became “a social club of misfits, thugs, murderers and dope dealers,” said a New Delhi-based agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the 1990s, however, Afridi’s criminal past was catching up with him. With authorities threatening prosecution, he went into hiding and was soon splitting his time between Pakistani tribal areas, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates.

It was a trio of hash shipments — 58 tons in all — that finally led to Afridi’s undoing.

 

Children line up with lunch buckets at a refugee camp near Swabi, Pakistan, during spring 2009 fighting in the Swat valley.

Hidden amid fish, tires and sacks of rice, the drugs were sent to Long Island, New York, and Newport News, Virginia, and led to the arrest of one Stewart Newton, Afridi’s U.S. connection. Arrested in 1988, Newton was sentenced to 47 years in prison, but served only eight after agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors in the case against the Pakistani smugglers. Also indicted were Butt and Baig, whom Pakistan extradited to the United States in 1995.

Afridi stayed out of reach, hiding in the tribal zone. But fearful of arrest by Pakistani officials and concerned his now-arrested co-conspirators would turn against him, he negotiated with the DEA for a year before finally turning himself in.

Now-retired DEA agent Gregory D. Lee recalls fielding odd questions from Afridi’s go-between during that time.

“He would ask crazy questions like, ‘how many times a day will I be beaten by the Marshals?’ and ‘will I be able to stay at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan,” Lee said during a recent phone interview. If he wasn’t permitted to serve out his sentence at the four-star hotel, Afridi wanted to know if he could employ a personal cook at the prison. “He had no idea what to expect.”

In 1997, Afridi pleaded guilty to smuggling hashish and was sentenced to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. But the Pakistani godfather served only two years in U.S. jail, paid just $425, and in 1999 he was deported to Pakistan, where officials promptly arrested him for an earlier smuggling case.

Although sentenced in Pakistan to seven years in prison, Afridi was released without explanation shortly after 9/11. Soon after his release, he traveled to Afghanistan to unite anti-Taliban warlords, according to senior Pakistani intelligence and anti-narcotics officials. His attempts failed, they say, and the aging Afridi returned home.

It is back home, in the Khyber Agency, where Ayub Afridi has refocused his attentions. Gone are the hashish and heroin shipments, officials say. The old smuggler has found an easier racket to ply, with few penalties and easy profits — the untaxed cigarette trade. Reached by telephone, in English and Urdu, an elderly man at Afridi’s home denied he was Afridi and declined to comment further.

Nor will others talk openly about Afridi in his native land. Journalists do not write about the man, and even law enforcement officials speak about him in hushed tones. But the poor of the Khyber Agency are not so reticent. Despite his years in Afghanistan, in jails and throughout his smuggling exploits, Afridi didn’t forget the poor who surrounded him, farmer Tumman Khan told a visiting reporter. Even when Afridi was locked away in an American prison cell, the poor and widowed continued to receive monthly checks on his behalf.

“Haji Sahib is an angel for poor people like us,” Khan said. “We don’t know much about his business, whether legal or illegal. What we know is that he has helped us when no one was there to do that.”

 

 
 

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