Pakistan has been coddling al Qaeda for too long.
The Bush Administration counterterrorism policy in this regard is a dismal failure.
By trusting a miltary dictator and not placing the type of dipplomatic pressure on Musharraf necessary to eradicate al Qaeda from Waziristan, the Bush Administration has allowed al Qaeda to rebuild and become stronger than ever --- now to the extent that they threaten the stability of Pakistan --- a nuclear weapon state.
August 4, 2004
Pakistan Lets Taliban Train, Prisoner Says
NEW YORK TIMES
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...agewanted=print
By CARLOTTA GALL; DAVID ROHDE CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM PAKISTAN FOR THIS ARTICLE.
For months Afghan and American officials have complained that even while Pakistan cooperates in the fight against Al Qaeda, militant Islamic groups there are training fighters and sending them into Afghanistan to attack American and Afghan forces.
Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations, saying they are unaware of any such training camps. Now the Afghan government has produced a young Pakistani, captured fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan three months ago, whose story would seem to back its complaints about Pakistan.
The prisoner, who gave his name as Muhammad Sohail, is a 17-year-old from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, held by the Afghan authorities in Kabul. In an interview in late July, in front of several prison guards, he said Pakistan was allowing militant groups to train and organize insurgents to fight in Afghanistan. Mr. Sohail said he hoped that granting the interview would increase his chances of being freed. Mr. Sohail described his recruitment through his local mosque by a group listed by the United States as having terrorist links, his military training in a camp not far from the capital, Islamabad, and his dispatch with several other Pakistanis to Afghanistan.
He did not give all the details that intelligence officials said they gleaned from him in interrogations, but he talked easily about his party and its leaders, and said they had high-level support from within the establishment. He said he was recruited and trained within the past eight months by Jamiat-ul-Ansar, the new name for the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen party, which was designated a terrorist group by the State Department and banned by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in January 2002. Under its new name it is functioning, if more discreetly, and its leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, moves around freely.
Mr. Khalil has been involved in recruiting and training militants since the 1980's. In 1998, American planes bombed his training camp in Afghanistan when they were targeting Osama bin Laden after the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bombing killed a number of Pakistanis, and Mr. Khalil at the time vowed to take revenge against America for the attack.
It is an open secret in Pakistan that groups supporting separatism in Kashmir have not stopped their activities, despite official declarations, and have continued to train men and infiltrate them into Indian Kashmir. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a visit to the region last month that Pakistan had not dismantled all the camps used to train militants for Kashmir. And while he praised Pakistan for its efforts against Al Qaeda, he urged the country to do more to stop Taliban militants carrying out attacks from Pakistan.
Mr. Sohail is not the first Pakistani to be captured fighting alongside the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan over the past two years. On at least one occasion, Pakistanis who were captured in a joint American-Afghan military operation last year were handed back to Pakistan. But he is the first made available for an interview by the Afghan government. Intelligence officials said they found on him a Jamiat-ul-Ansar membership card and a list of phone numbers of high-level party officials.
A Pakistani official interviewed recently described Mr. Sohail as a ''one-off case,'' and denied that Pakistani militants were showing up in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said he thought Jamiat-ul-Ansar and its network had been dismantled. ''There is no ambiguity in our policy,'' he said. ''The government does not sponsor, nor create, nor is aware of training camps. If they were aware of any, they would go and dismantle them.''
Zalmay M. Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, has stated publicly that Pakistan has not done nearly enough to stop the Taliban and other militants from using Pakistan's border areas as operational and recruiting bases.
In a speech in Washington in April, he warned that if Pakistan did not do the job on its side of the border, American forces would have to do the job themselves.
A Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview last month in Kabul said: ''When you talk about Taliban, it's like fish in a barrel in Pakistan. They train, they rest there. They get support.''
Western diplomats in Kabul and Pakistani political analysts have said that Pakistan has continued to allow the Taliban to operate to retain influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan supported the Taliban in the 1990's as a way to create an area where Pakistani forces could retreat to the west if war erupted with its the country's longtime rival and neighbor to the east, India. Pakistan has also long tried to maintain influence over Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, because of its wariness of its own Pashtun minority in the border areas.
General Musharraf may also fear that a crackdown on the Taliban will provoke protests from an alliance of hard-line Islamist political parties that are now the third largest block in Parliament, the Western diplomat in Kabul said. And Pakistani officials may fear that the United States will abandon the region if Mr. bin Laden is captured.
In interviews along the border over the past two years, Pakistani government officials have made statements that they do not see the Taliban as a threat to Pakistan. They have also, at times, said the Taliban have a legitimate political grievance in Afghanistan.
Mr. Sohail was probably chosen to fight in Afghanistan because he is a Pashtun, the dominant group in the Taliban. Born in Swat, near the Afghan border, he grew up in Karachi, left school at 15 and went to work in a confectionary shop.
''I was going to the mosque every Thursday, and they were saying you should go and do jihad,'' he said. ''In Palestine, Chechnya, Cuba, France and a lot of places all over the world, they are mistreating Muslims. So I decided to do it and got training for one month.''
He traveled with a group of 15 others from his mosque to a training camp near Mansehra, north of Islamabad. It was a remote place, in the mountains with lots of trees, he said. There he received one month of training in explosives and weapons.
An uncle of Mr. Sohail's, reached by telephone in Karachi, said the family recently received a letter via the Red Cross from Mr. Sohail saying he was in an Afghan jail.
After their training in Mansehra, Mr. Sohail and his group went to Islamabad and met Mr. Khalil, the leader of Jamiat-ul-Ansar, at his headquarters.
Three months later, Mr. Khalil went to speak at their mosque and called the group up to fight, Mr. Sohail said. ''He said, 'Go and fight the Americans.'''
They went to the Pakistani border town of Quetta, and then Mr. Sohail set off with four other fighters. They crossed over the main border and drove to the city of Kandahar. They went to a designated hotel and in a room found a bag with weapons. The next day they headed to a mountain base near the town of Panjwai, not far west of Kandahar, where they joined some 50 fighters and rapidly became involved in combat operations themselves.
Mr. Sohail's account becomes vague after that. He said he only fought for one night and returned to Pakistan. Sent back into Afghanistan to gather information about casualties, he approached some Afghan police, thinking they were Taliban. They arrested him.
He is accused of taking part in an attack on the Panjwai District center in April, in which a police officer and two aid workers were killed, security officials said.
Other militants who have been captured are Afghans from the refugee community in Pakistan. They have described receiving training in large, walled residential compounds in and around Quetta, rather than in military camps, according to Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan.
One Afghan prisoner interviewed recently in Kandahar, who spent 10 years in a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan from the age of 14, complained that the arrival of American troops in Afghanistan brought behaviors that were against the Koran, including drinking alcohol and prostitution. ''They are destroying Islam,'' the prisoner said.
Mr. Sohail has received a 20-year sentence from a judge in Kabul. His appeal is in progress.
''I'm very sad,'' he said mournfully. ''The jihad is over for me.'' But he showed flashes of fanaticism, too. ''I wish I was a prisoner of the Americans,'' he said. ''Then I could die a martyr at their hands, or kill myself.''
--------------------
Heavy Fighting Against Taliban
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 (Reuters) -- Afghan forces backed by American attack aircraft engaged in heavy fighting with suspected Taliban guerrillas near the border with Pakistan, the United States military said Tuesday. The military said as many as 50 guerrillas had been killed, but both an Afghan commander and a former Taliban official in the area said only 2 had died.
The military's casualty figure was based on estimates by pilots flying in support of Afghan soldiers in the battle, which started when the Taliban attacked the force on Monday morning. If confirmed, the total would be one of the heaviest losses the insurgents have suffered in a single battle in recent months.
But Abdul Rauf Akhund, the former governor of Khost under the Taliban, said by satellite phone that 2 Taliban fighters had died and 8 had been wounded, and that 10 Afghan soldiers had been killed.
Gen. Khialbaz Sherzai, an Afghan military commander in Khost, said Monday that he only knew of two Afghan soldiers and two Taliban fighters killed.
Correction: August 27, 2004, Friday A front-page article on Aug. 4 about evidence that Islamic groups are training fighters in Pakistan and sending them into Afghanistan misstated the nature of a 1998 American air strike on a militant training camp in Afghanistan. It was carried out with cruise missiles fired from ships in the Arabian Sea, not bombs dropped by American planes.
And little has changed since then...
January 21, 2007
At Border, Signs of Pakistani Role in Taliban Surge
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/world/as...amp;oref=slogin
NEW YORK TIMES
QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?
The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.
Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.
More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.
The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.
At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.
One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.
“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.
The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.
The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.
In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.
“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.
“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.
In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.
Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.
“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.
President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.
At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.
Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.
Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.
He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”
On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.
He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”
NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.
Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”
American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.
For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on Dec. 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.
At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.
President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.
Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.
Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Mr. Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.
NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.
At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.
One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.
Farther on, in the village of Bagarzai, lies the grave of Azizullah, a religious scholar who used only one name and acquired fame as a Taliban commander.
Only 25, he was killed with a group of 15 to 20 men in an airstrike in the Afghan province of Helmand on May 22, said his father, Hajji Abdul Hai. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including senior members of the provincial government, the father said.
Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”
It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.
That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.
“In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things,” said his father, Hajji Noora Gul. “We went to the madrasa in Pashtunabad, but no one was ready to tell us his whereabouts.”
“Even the madrasa people did not know,” he added. “Behind the curtain of the madrasa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.”
Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.
“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’ ”
His eldest son, Allah Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.
“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”
David Rohde contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
January 21, 2007
At Border, Signs of Pakistani Role in Taliban Surge
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/world/as...amp;oref=slogin
NEW YORK TIMES
QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?
The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.
Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.
More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.
The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.
At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.
One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.
“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.
The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.
The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.
In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.
“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.
“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.
In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.
Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.
“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.
President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.
At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.
Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.
Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.
He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”
On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.
He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”
NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.
Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”
American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.
For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on Dec. 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.
At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.
President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.
Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.
Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Mr. Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.
NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.
At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.
One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.
Farther on, in the village of Bagarzai, lies the grave of Azizullah, a religious scholar who used only one name and acquired fame as a Taliban commander.
Only 25, he was killed with a group of 15 to 20 men in an airstrike in the Afghan province of Helmand on May 22, said his father, Hajji Abdul Hai. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including senior members of the provincial government, the father said.
Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”
It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.
That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.
“In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things,” said his father, Hajji Noora Gul. “We went to the madrasa in Pashtunabad, but no one was ready to tell us his whereabouts.”
“Even the madrasa people did not know,” he added. “Behind the curtain of the madrasa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.”
Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.
“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’ ”
His eldest son, Allah Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.
“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”
David Rohde contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
December 30, 2007
Local Militants in Pakistan Add to Qaeda Threat
By CARLOTTA GALL
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/world/as...agewanted=print
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Qaeda network accused by Pakistan’s government of killing the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is increasingly made up not of foreign fighters but of homegrown Pakistani militants bent on destabilizing the country, analysts and security officials here say.
In previous years, Pakistani militants directed their energies against American and NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan and avoided clashes with the Pakistani Army.
But this year they have very clearly expanded their ranks and turned to a direct confrontation with the Pakistani security forces while also aiming at political figures like Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister who died when a suicide bomb exploded as she left a political rally on Thursday.
According to American officials in Washington, an already steady stream of threat reports spiked in recent months. Many concerned possible plots to kill prominent Pakistani leaders, including Ms. Bhutto, President Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, another opposition leader.
“Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters in Washington on Dec. 21.
The expansion of Pakistan’s own militants, with their fortified links to Al Qaeda, presents a deeply troubling development for the Bush administration and its efforts to stabilize this volatile nuclear-armed country.
It is also one that many in Pakistan have been loath to admit, but that Ms. Bhutto had begun to acknowledge in her many public statements about the greatest threat to her country being in religious extremism and terrorism.
Those warnings have now been borne out with her death and in the turmoil that has followed it and shaken Pakistan’s political fault lines. Rioting over the last two days has left at least 38 people dead and 53 injured, and cost millions of dollars of damage to businesses, vehicles and government buildings, according an Interior Ministry spokesman. Protesters have accused the government of failing to protect Ms. Bhutto, or even conspiring to kill her.
On Saturday, Mr. Sharif, now the country’s most prominent opposition figure, ventured to the political stronghold of his assassinated rival to lay a wreath on her grave, but also to make common cause against President Musharraf and the Bush administration’s support of him.
The government has tried to deflect that anger, blaming militants linked to Al Qaeda, specifically Baitullah Mehsud, for having masterminded the attack. But on Saturday, through a spokesman, Mr. Mehsud denied he was responsible and dismissed the allegations, adding fuel to the notion of a government conspiracy.
“Neither Baitullah Mehsud nor any of his associates were involved in the assassination of Benazir, because raising your hand against women is against our tribal values and customs,” the spokesman, Maulavi Omar, said in a telephone call from the tribal region of South Waziristan. “Only those people who stood to gain politically are involved in Benazir’s murder,” he said.
One of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, The Daily Times, noted Saturday that such denials were a common tactic used to obscure the origins of the militants’ attacks, and in particular to extend the myth that the bombings are the work of foreign elements, rather than of Pakistanis.
Al Qaeda in Pakistan now comprises not just foreigners but Pakistani tribesmen from border regions, as well as Punjabis and Urdu speakers and members of banned sectarian and Sunni extremists groups, Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, wrote in a front-page analysis. “Al Qaeda is now as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it is an Arab or foreign element,” he wrote.
Senior American intelligence officials said all credible threat information in recent weeks had been passed to Pakistani authorities, mainly through the United States Embassy in Islamabad. But the officials said they were not aware of any specific reports of an attempt on Ms. Bhutto’s life in Rawalpindi.
A senior American intelligence official said it was clear from his reading of recent threat reports that “the political process was not going to go untouched,” adding that militants almost surely would go to any length “to create political disarray.”
And while Ms. Bhutto had perhaps the longest list of enemies among Pakistan’s most prominent politicians, the official said: “It almost didn’t matter which one was attacked — Musharraf, Bhutto or Sharif. The militants were looking for multiple target sets, whether in the capital area, which would carry more weight, or in Karachi or Peshawar.”
In the face of that danger, American lawmakers pressed for tighter government security around Ms. Bhutto. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who heads the Foreign Relations Committee and who is running for president, released a letter last week that he and two Senate colleagues had written to Mr. Musharraf at Ms. Bhutto’s request, urging him to increase her security.
The letter, written six days after the Oct. 18 bombing attempt on Ms. Bhutto’s life, urged Mr. Musharraf to provide her “the full level of security support afforded to any former prime minister,” including “bomb-proof vehicles and jamming equipment.”
After Ms. Bhutto’s death, Mr. Biden said in a statement, “The failure to protect Ms. Bhutto raises a lot of hard questions for the government and security services that must be answered.” But a Defense Department official said Saturday, “I don’t know how foolproof you can make any security when people are willing to kill themselves.”
The tribes on the border have a long history of fighting invading armies. But since 2001, when Qaeda and Taliban forces fled the American intervention in Afghanistan and took refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Pakistani militants have steadily grown in strength and boldness.
Today they have been bolstered by the foreigners among them. Those include a smaller number of hard-core Arabs, like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, as well as a larger number of Uzbeks, Tartars and Tajiks who have influence them to take on new agendas, Pakistani security officials familiar with the region said.
The Arabs in particular have brought money and fighting and explosives expertise, as well as ideology that includes religious justifications of tactics like suicide bombings and beheadings, which Afghans and Pakistanis had not used before, they said.
More and more, those tribes and foreign networks have overlapping operations and agendas.
“The country is facing the gravest challenge from these terrorists and extremist elements,” Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the director of the National Crisis Management Cell and main spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said Friday as he accused Al Qaeda of Ms. Bhutto’s assassination. “They are systematically targeting our state institutions in order to destabilize the country.”
Mr. Mehsud, he said, was of the “same brand of Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists,” and was “behind most of the recent terrorist attacks that have taken place in Pakistan.”
Some security officials in the North-West Frontier Province have warned, however, that it has become the norm for the government to blame Mr. Mehsud for just about any attack, without providing real evidence.
Mr. Mehsud is in fact one commander in a broader terrorist network who runs just one of an estimated five groups that train and dispatch suicide bombers from Pakistan’s isolated tribal areas, according to officials.
Another man known to be sending out suicide bombers is Qari Zafar, a militant from southern Punjab who was connected to the banned Sunni extremist group Sipa-e-Sahaba and then Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Mr. Zafar escaped capture in Karachi and is now based in South Waziristan, where he trains insurgents on how to rig roadside bombs and vests for suicide bombings, a former security official said.
But it is Mr. Mehsud who has emerged this year as the most visible proponent of Al Qaeda’s ambitions in Pakistan, security officials said. He has claimed to have hundreds of suicide bombers ready to attack government and military targets.
Barely two years ago Mr. Mehsud, 32, was just a Pashtun tribesman who did not register on the radar screen of the intelligence services or government officials. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when he trained and fought with the Taliban, according to one Pakistani intelligence official.
He became a follower of Abdullah Mehsud, the one-legged commander who was captured when fighting with the Taliban in 2001 in Afghanistan and detained by the United States at its military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Abdullah Mehsud was later released and took up the fight against American forces in Afghanistan from his home base in South Waziristan.
Both Abdullah and Baitullah share the name of the Mehsud of South Waziristan, a large warrior Pashtun tribe that is renowned for never being pacified by the British forces.
Abdullah Mehsud was killed in July by Pakistani forces in Zhob, a district south of the tribal areas in the province of Baluchistan. But even before then, Baitullah Mehsud had been promoted over him by the Taliban leadership.
Baitullah Mehsud is now believed to be responsible for some of the most spectacular and damaging attacks inside Pakistan in recent months, including suicide bombings against army and intelligence targets as well as prominent politicians like Ms. Bhutto.
He has also been identified by officials in Afghanistan as one of the main sources of the suicide bombers who carry out attacks there.
But Mr. Mehsud’s master strike came at the end of July when he captured nearly 300 soldiers who were escorting a supply convoy through the Mehsud lands in Waziristan. He beheaded three soldiers and demanded that the government withdraw from his area and cease operations against militants.
It took the government two months of negotiations to win the release of the soldiers. Only on Nov. 3 did it do so. As part of the deal the government handed over 25 of Mr. Mehsud’s men on the same day that President Musharraf imposed emergency rule, saying he needed the extra powers to combat terrorists.
Since then, however, the government, wary of the retaliatory attacks Mr. Mehsud can employ, appears to have done little to rein him in. He now leads Tehrik-i-Taliban, a newly formed coalition of Islamic militants committed to waging holy war against the Pakistani government.
The government has outlawed the group but not moved against it. The army has instead concentrated its efforts in recent weeks on clearing militants from the Swat Valley. That region is some distance from the tribal areas on the border, and the fight there an indication of just how far the militant influence has spread.
Pakistani officials who have worked in the tribal areas say that it is still possible to contain the threat of someone like Mr. Mehsud through tribal pressure, if he can be separated from the foreign elements. “The only problem is these foreigners,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You remove these foreigners and the rest is no problem.”
Yet to remove the foreigners, namely a small number of Arab leaders, who are well protected and well hidden, from among the tribesmen is a task that Pakistan so far has failed to do and according to some may not be capable of. “That can only be done with an operation,” the official said.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Local Militants in Pakistan Add to Qaeda Threat
By CARLOTTA GALL
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/world/as...agewanted=print
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Qaeda network accused by Pakistan’s government of killing the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is increasingly made up not of foreign fighters but of homegrown Pakistani militants bent on destabilizing the country, analysts and security officials here say.
In previous years, Pakistani militants directed their energies against American and NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan and avoided clashes with the Pakistani Army.
But this year they have very clearly expanded their ranks and turned to a direct confrontation with the Pakistani security forces while also aiming at political figures like Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister who died when a suicide bomb exploded as she left a political rally on Thursday.
According to American officials in Washington, an already steady stream of threat reports spiked in recent months. Many concerned possible plots to kill prominent Pakistani leaders, including Ms. Bhutto, President Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, another opposition leader.
“Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters in Washington on Dec. 21.
The expansion of Pakistan’s own militants, with their fortified links to Al Qaeda, presents a deeply troubling development for the Bush administration and its efforts to stabilize this volatile nuclear-armed country.
It is also one that many in Pakistan have been loath to admit, but that Ms. Bhutto had begun to acknowledge in her many public statements about the greatest threat to her country being in religious extremism and terrorism.
Those warnings have now been borne out with her death and in the turmoil that has followed it and shaken Pakistan’s political fault lines. Rioting over the last two days has left at least 38 people dead and 53 injured, and cost millions of dollars of damage to businesses, vehicles and government buildings, according an Interior Ministry spokesman. Protesters have accused the government of failing to protect Ms. Bhutto, or even conspiring to kill her.
On Saturday, Mr. Sharif, now the country’s most prominent opposition figure, ventured to the political stronghold of his assassinated rival to lay a wreath on her grave, but also to make common cause against President Musharraf and the Bush administration’s support of him.
The government has tried to deflect that anger, blaming militants linked to Al Qaeda, specifically Baitullah Mehsud, for having masterminded the attack. But on Saturday, through a spokesman, Mr. Mehsud denied he was responsible and dismissed the allegations, adding fuel to the notion of a government conspiracy.
“Neither Baitullah Mehsud nor any of his associates were involved in the assassination of Benazir, because raising your hand against women is against our tribal values and customs,” the spokesman, Maulavi Omar, said in a telephone call from the tribal region of South Waziristan. “Only those people who stood to gain politically are involved in Benazir’s murder,” he said.
One of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, The Daily Times, noted Saturday that such denials were a common tactic used to obscure the origins of the militants’ attacks, and in particular to extend the myth that the bombings are the work of foreign elements, rather than of Pakistanis.
Al Qaeda in Pakistan now comprises not just foreigners but Pakistani tribesmen from border regions, as well as Punjabis and Urdu speakers and members of banned sectarian and Sunni extremists groups, Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, wrote in a front-page analysis. “Al Qaeda is now as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it is an Arab or foreign element,” he wrote.
Senior American intelligence officials said all credible threat information in recent weeks had been passed to Pakistani authorities, mainly through the United States Embassy in Islamabad. But the officials said they were not aware of any specific reports of an attempt on Ms. Bhutto’s life in Rawalpindi.
A senior American intelligence official said it was clear from his reading of recent threat reports that “the political process was not going to go untouched,” adding that militants almost surely would go to any length “to create political disarray.”
And while Ms. Bhutto had perhaps the longest list of enemies among Pakistan’s most prominent politicians, the official said: “It almost didn’t matter which one was attacked — Musharraf, Bhutto or Sharif. The militants were looking for multiple target sets, whether in the capital area, which would carry more weight, or in Karachi or Peshawar.”
In the face of that danger, American lawmakers pressed for tighter government security around Ms. Bhutto. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who heads the Foreign Relations Committee and who is running for president, released a letter last week that he and two Senate colleagues had written to Mr. Musharraf at Ms. Bhutto’s request, urging him to increase her security.
The letter, written six days after the Oct. 18 bombing attempt on Ms. Bhutto’s life, urged Mr. Musharraf to provide her “the full level of security support afforded to any former prime minister,” including “bomb-proof vehicles and jamming equipment.”
After Ms. Bhutto’s death, Mr. Biden said in a statement, “The failure to protect Ms. Bhutto raises a lot of hard questions for the government and security services that must be answered.” But a Defense Department official said Saturday, “I don’t know how foolproof you can make any security when people are willing to kill themselves.”
The tribes on the border have a long history of fighting invading armies. But since 2001, when Qaeda and Taliban forces fled the American intervention in Afghanistan and took refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Pakistani militants have steadily grown in strength and boldness.
Today they have been bolstered by the foreigners among them. Those include a smaller number of hard-core Arabs, like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, as well as a larger number of Uzbeks, Tartars and Tajiks who have influence them to take on new agendas, Pakistani security officials familiar with the region said.
The Arabs in particular have brought money and fighting and explosives expertise, as well as ideology that includes religious justifications of tactics like suicide bombings and beheadings, which Afghans and Pakistanis had not used before, they said.
More and more, those tribes and foreign networks have overlapping operations and agendas.
“The country is facing the gravest challenge from these terrorists and extremist elements,” Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, the director of the National Crisis Management Cell and main spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said Friday as he accused Al Qaeda of Ms. Bhutto’s assassination. “They are systematically targeting our state institutions in order to destabilize the country.”
Mr. Mehsud, he said, was of the “same brand of Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists,” and was “behind most of the recent terrorist attacks that have taken place in Pakistan.”
Some security officials in the North-West Frontier Province have warned, however, that it has become the norm for the government to blame Mr. Mehsud for just about any attack, without providing real evidence.
Mr. Mehsud is in fact one commander in a broader terrorist network who runs just one of an estimated five groups that train and dispatch suicide bombers from Pakistan’s isolated tribal areas, according to officials.
Another man known to be sending out suicide bombers is Qari Zafar, a militant from southern Punjab who was connected to the banned Sunni extremist group Sipa-e-Sahaba and then Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Mr. Zafar escaped capture in Karachi and is now based in South Waziristan, where he trains insurgents on how to rig roadside bombs and vests for suicide bombings, a former security official said.
But it is Mr. Mehsud who has emerged this year as the most visible proponent of Al Qaeda’s ambitions in Pakistan, security officials said. He has claimed to have hundreds of suicide bombers ready to attack government and military targets.
Barely two years ago Mr. Mehsud, 32, was just a Pashtun tribesman who did not register on the radar screen of the intelligence services or government officials. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when he trained and fought with the Taliban, according to one Pakistani intelligence official.
He became a follower of Abdullah Mehsud, the one-legged commander who was captured when fighting with the Taliban in 2001 in Afghanistan and detained by the United States at its military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Abdullah Mehsud was later released and took up the fight against American forces in Afghanistan from his home base in South Waziristan.
Both Abdullah and Baitullah share the name of the Mehsud of South Waziristan, a large warrior Pashtun tribe that is renowned for never being pacified by the British forces.
Abdullah Mehsud was killed in July by Pakistani forces in Zhob, a district south of the tribal areas in the province of Baluchistan. But even before then, Baitullah Mehsud had been promoted over him by the Taliban leadership.
Baitullah Mehsud is now believed to be responsible for some of the most spectacular and damaging attacks inside Pakistan in recent months, including suicide bombings against army and intelligence targets as well as prominent politicians like Ms. Bhutto.
He has also been identified by officials in Afghanistan as one of the main sources of the suicide bombers who carry out attacks there.
But Mr. Mehsud’s master strike came at the end of July when he captured nearly 300 soldiers who were escorting a supply convoy through the Mehsud lands in Waziristan. He beheaded three soldiers and demanded that the government withdraw from his area and cease operations against militants.
It took the government two months of negotiations to win the release of the soldiers. Only on Nov. 3 did it do so. As part of the deal the government handed over 25 of Mr. Mehsud’s men on the same day that President Musharraf imposed emergency rule, saying he needed the extra powers to combat terrorists.
Since then, however, the government, wary of the retaliatory attacks Mr. Mehsud can employ, appears to have done little to rein him in. He now leads Tehrik-i-Taliban, a newly formed coalition of Islamic militants committed to waging holy war against the Pakistani government.
The government has outlawed the group but not moved against it. The army has instead concentrated its efforts in recent weeks on clearing militants from the Swat Valley. That region is some distance from the tribal areas on the border, and the fight there an indication of just how far the militant influence has spread.
Pakistani officials who have worked in the tribal areas say that it is still possible to contain the threat of someone like Mr. Mehsud through tribal pressure, if he can be separated from the foreign elements. “The only problem is these foreigners,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You remove these foreigners and the rest is no problem.”
Yet to remove the foreigners, namely a small number of Arab leaders, who are well protected and well hidden, from among the tribesmen is a task that Pakistan so far has failed to do and according to some may not be capable of. “That can only be done with an operation,” the official said.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
This was the article that got me to post this thread...
It is a sad look at reality in Pakistan where the Taliban is gaining strength to the extent that moderates who have tried to temper the Taliban's efforts in Pakistan and elsewhere are not targets of the Taliban.
Some might see dissesion between these groups as a benefit to the war on terror, but the outcome could be a Pakistan even more resentful of democracy...
January 6, 2008
Next-Gen Taliban
By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine...agewanted=print
One day last month, I climbed onto a crowded rooftop in Quetta, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and wedged myself among men wearing thick turbans and rangy beards until I could find a seat. We converged on the rooftop that afternoon to attend the opening ceremony for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam’s campaign office in this dusty city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, better known by its abbreviation, J.U.I., is a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban. In the last parliamentary elections here, in 2002, the J.U.I. formed a national coalition with five other Islamist parties and led a campaign that was pro-Taliban, anti-American and spiked with promises to implement Shariah, or Islamic law. The alliance, known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., won more than 10 percent of the popular vote nationwide — the highest share ever for an Islamist bloc in Pakistan. The alliance formed governments in two of the country’s four provinces, including Baluchistan.
A cool breeze blew across the rooftop, and a green kite flew above in the crisp, periwinkle sky. The J.U.I. was gearing up again for national elections, then scheduled for the second week of January, but the message this time was remarkably different from what it was five years ago. One by one, hopefuls for the national and provincial assembly constituencies gave short speeches. Most of them spoke in Pashto, but, knowing Urdu, I could understand enough to realize that they weren’t rehashing the typical J.U.I. rhetoric. No one praised the Taliban. Shariah was mentioned only in passing. Just one person, a first-time candidate in a suede jacket who probably felt obliged to prove his credentials in a party of fundamentalist mullahs, attacked the United States. Afterward, party workers handed out free plates of cookies and cups of tea.
This seemed altogether too gentle. Had the J.U.I. gone soft? Among several firebrands conspicuous by their absence was Maulvi Noor Muhammad, Quetta’s former representative in the National Assembly and an outspoken supporter of the Taliban, so I went to see him at his madrassa. Adolescent students, many wearing the black turbans favored by the Taliban, mingled by the metal entrance gate. Muhammad had told me in the fall of 2006 that the sole reason that the Taliban hadn’t defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan yet was because NATO had B-52’s, and when I reminded him of this, he smiled through a mouthful of missing teeth. “The Taliban have more than made up for that disadvantage now with suicide bombers,” he said.
If the government’s version is correct, radical Islamists pressed their advantage to terrible effect in assassinating Benazir Bhutto during a rally on Dec. 27. Bhutto’s family and her party clearly have no faith in the probity of President Pervez Musharraf’s government, and many - including Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto’s nearest rival in the Pakistani opposition - have accused the government of creating the security situation that led to her murder. Musharraf responded in a nationally televised speech on the evening of Jan. 2 by doubling his insistence that terrorists were responsible: “We need to fight terrorism with full force, and I think that if we don’t succeed in the fight against terrorism, the future of Pakistan will be dark.” Efforts at democratic integration by parties like the J.U.I. have now been overshadowed by the violence of their antidemocratic Islamist colleagues - a network of younger Taliban fighting on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, jihadis pledging loyalty to Al Qaeda and any number of freelancing militants. Disrupting and discrediting democracy may, of course, be the point. The Bhutto assassination could well make moderation impossible, as Islamist radicals savor their disruptive power - and enraged mainstream parties threaten the stability of the government itself. For now, the Bhutto killing has given the opposition a rare unity, and the elections, although delayed to Feb. 18, may well go ahead. The J.U.I. remains determined to continue campaigning. Six weeks, however, could prove to be a very long time in Pakistan’s embattled politics.
In Quetta, Maulvi Noor Muhammad, who is 62, sat on the madrassa’s cold concrete floor wrapped in a wool blanket as he leafed through a newspaper. Speaking in Pashto through an interpreter, he said that Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the J.U.I. chief, had visited three times in the previous few weeks to persuade him to enter the election. Muhammad claimed to have refused each time because he believed the J.U.I. had drifted from its core mission: to lead an aggressive Islamization campaign and provide political support to what he referred to as the mujahedeen, a term for Muslim fighters that can shift in meaning depending on who is speaking. “Participating in this election would amount to treason against the mujahedeen,” he said. I asked about the others in the party who had decided to run for office. Muhammad shook his head in disappointment and explained how, following the government operation against the Red Mosque rebels in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city, in July, President Musharraf put religious leaders under tremendous pressure. “Musharraf threatened to raid several madrassas,” Muhammad said. “The political mullahs got scared.”
Maulana Fazlur Rehman is exactly the sort of “political mullah” whom Muhammad portrayed as running scared. In the past year, the J.U.I. chief has tried to disassociate himself from the new generation of Taliban wreaking havoc not only across the border in Afghanistan, as they have for years, but also increasingly in Pakistan. At the same time, Rehman has been trying to persuade foreign ambassadors and establishment politicians here that he is the only one capable of dealing with those same Taliban. (Rehman told me that he never offered Muhammad a chance to enter the election; he even added that the J.U.I. had already expelled the Taliban guru “on disciplinary grounds.” ) In the process, some Islamists maintain that Rehman has sold them out. Last April, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rehman’s house from the main road before crashing into the veranda of his brother’s home next door. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rehman’s name on it.
“The religious forces are very divided right now,” I was told by Abdul Hakim Akbari, a childhood friend of Rehman’s and lifelong member of the J.U.I. I met Akbari in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown, which is situated in the North-West Frontier Province. According to this past summer’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, approved by all 16 official intelligence agencies, Al Qaeda has regrouped in the Tribal Areas adjoining the province and may be planning an attack on the American homeland. “Everyone is afraid,” Akbari told me. “These mujahedeen don’t respect anyone anymore. They don’t even listen to each other. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is a moderate. He wants dialogue. But the Taliban see him as a hurdle to their ambitions. ”
Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto. As the rocket attack on Rehman’s house illustrates, the militant jihadis have even lashed out against the same Islamist parties who have coddled them in the past.
Western audiences might find news about Islamists fighting among themselves rather appealing. But jihadi wars, at least since the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, have tended to spill over borders, all the more so since Sept. 11, 2001. And within Pakistan, the struggle for supremacy between those Pakistani Islamists who want to gain power democratically and those who want to abolish democracy altogether could well tear the country apart.
The election season got off to a late start, postponed by President Musharraf’s suspension of the constitution and declaration of a state of emergency. In November, when politicians should have been out stumping and rallying support, many were dodging the police. Besides sacking dozens of judges and pulling private television channels off the air, Musharraf arrested thousands of lawyers, students, social activists and political leaders during the 42-day emergency regime, which ended on Dec. 15.
The most damaging result of the emergency, however, may have been the doubt it sowed within the opposition, splitting those advocating participation from others calling for a boycott. The split hit the six-party Islamist M.M.A. alliance hardest of all. While Rehman repeated the J.U.I.’s intention to field candidates, his main partner in the alliance, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, argued that the polls would be rigged and participation would legitimize Musharraf’s regime. Both parties stuck to their positions, and in mid-December, the Islamist alliance fell apart.
Rehman maintained that he could persuade Jamaat-e-Islami supporters to vote for the J.U.I. this time around, but even some of his fellow party members doubted that would work. “In the last election, everything was related to Afghanistan and how innocent Afghans were being killed,” Chaudhry Sharif, a longtime J.U.I. member from Rehman’s district, told me last month. Now Rehman “has to answer his people when they ask him, ‘What happened in our own country?’ ” Despite the M.M.A.’s taking power in the North-West Frontier Province, hundreds of civilians have died in Islamist terrorist attacks. The public’s previous image of mullahs as incorruptible politicians has also been tarnished. Rehman’s chance of attracting swing voters appeared dim.
For now, it is Islamist violence that seems to have the political upper hand rather than the accommodation of Islamist currents within a democratic society. The mainstream parties have addressed Islamic militancy strictly as a security issue. Benazir Bhutto used particularly aggressive rhetoric against militants — her main rival, Nawaz Sharif, has a more religiously conservative base — but all of the main political figures outside the M.M.A. treated jihadi violence within a pro- or anti-Musharraf context, and as an effect of U.S. relations rather than as a problem integral to Pakistan’s political culture. “This election comes down to whether you are pro-Musharraf or anti-Musharraf,” a lawyer at a Pakistan Peoples Party rally told me a few weeks ago. In the North-West Frontier Province, the Awami National Party, a secular, nationalist Pashtun outfit, also stands to gain from the M.M.A.’s decline and will dilute the Islamists’ influence in the provincial assembly.
Jihadis have, of course, increasingly opted to intervene in Pakistan by attacking mainstream politicians and their supporters. Only a week before Bhutto’s assassination, a suicide bomber targeted the former interior minister, leaving more than 50 people dead. It was the second attempt on the minister’s life; the first, in April, killed nearly 30 people. And of course Bhutto’s arrival home in October, after years abroad, was greeted by two suicide bombers who detonated themselves beside her float, killing about 140 people. In the aftermath of her killing, more violence seems inevitable. But the politics of terror and assassination are probably secondary, among jihadis, to the gradual extension of their control over rural and semiurban stretches of western Pakistan — a power base that, at least in the short term, can be disrupted only by the Pakistani military. Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander from South Waziristan who captured about 250 soldiers in August, recently warned a J.U.I. candidate there not to run unless several of his arrested Taliban fighters were released. More ominously, in mid-December, 40 representatives from different Taliban gangs from across the North-West Frontier Province and the Tribal Areas banded together into a single group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban Movement). The movement named Mehsud their leader. He has also been named by Pakistani authorities as a suspect in Bhutto’s murder.
The sound of an explosion punctured an otherwise pleasant evening. I had been sitting under a giant mango tree, drinking Southern Comfort with a group of friends, including a midlevel intelligence officer in the army. It was my first night in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown in the North-West Frontier Province, about 100 miles from the Afghan border. While the blast jerked me upright, no one else seemed too bothered. Locals had grown used to the bangs and booms. The previous night, Pakistani Taliban bombed a music store in the town bazaar. The sound I heard was the explosion from a small grenade targeting the owner of a cable-TV service.
Musharraf’s government says the increasingly frequent bombings are evidence of Talibanization creeping east from the Afghanistan border. The local Taliban militants blast shops selling un-Islamic CDs, cable-TV operators, massage parlors and other sites they consider havens of vice. A newspaper editor in Dera Ismail Khan showed me a letter he received, signed by the Taliban, warning him not to print anything that defamed the mujahedeen. They threatened to blow up his office if he didn’t comply.
Rehman’s critics blame him and his party for facilitating the local Taliban, an allegation he resents. “We are politicians, and we will have to go to our constituencies to get votes in an election,” he told me, as we sat together in the drawing room of his home in Dera Ismail Khan. “If there is a war going on, no one can vote.” Halogen spotlights dotted the ceiling, and soft leather couches lined the walls. Rehman wore a pinstripe waistcoat over a shalwar kameez. The room smelled of strong cologne. He added, in a rare moment of candor, “But even we are now afraid of the young men fighting.”
For many years, few people questioned Rehman’s command over the mujahedeen along the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan. His father, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, ran the J.U.I. for 20 years. Mahmood helped kick-start the Afghanistan jihad by issuing a fatwa against the Soviet-backed communist government in Kabul. A year later, when Mahmood died from a heart attack, Rehman, a 27-year-old madrassa student with scant political experience, inherited the J.U.I. and his father’s jihadi enterprise. Thousands of Islamic seminaries profess political allegiance to the J.U.I., and thousands of Taliban warriors first imbibed radical theology in Rehman’s madrassas.
Over time, Rehman cultivated his pragmatic side and played power politics in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad. He eased his way into the establishment just as the Taliban were taking over Afghanistan. In 1993, Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister, named him chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, a post that “enabled him to have influence on foreign policy for the first time,” writes Ahmed Rashid in his book “Taliban.” Rehman still argues that, particularly in the Taliban’s later period of running Afghanistan, he was having a moderating influence on Mullah Omar. “They should,” he told me, “have been given more time.”
During Pakistan’s 2002 election campaign, Rehman played up his links with the Taliban, and the Islamist coalition did well. In retrospect, that may have been his high point. The divide between the pro-Taliban leaders of yesterday and those of today was fully exposed by the insurrection at the Red Mosque in Islamabad, which began last January under the leadership of Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his brother. As the weeks and months passed, the rebels kidnapped a brothel madam, some police officers and, finally, six Chinese masseuses. They made a bonfire of CDs and DVDs and demanded that Musharraf implement Shariah. Defenders paced the outer walls of the mosque holding guns and sharpened garden tools.
Rehman tried to talk the Ghazi brothers out of their reckless adventure, but his influence inside the mosque was limited. “They are simply beyond me,” he said at one point.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his entourage of Islamic militants finally clashed with state security forces in early July, but the real rebellion actually occurred in the preceding months, when Ghazi and his brother flouted efforts by Rehman and other religious elders to talk them down. Back in April, when I had asked Ghazi how he felt with the entire old guard turning against him, he looked more amused than worried. “Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones because old people do not like change,” he said. “They are rigid.” Before army commandos killed him in July, Ghazi promised that a government assault on the Red Mosque would be a blessing for the mujahedeen. His “martyrdom,” he used to say, would further invigorate the jihadis and expedite an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
Since Ghazi’s death, hundreds of soldiers and policemen have died in suicide blasts or in gunfights against the Taliban. The capture of the soldiers in South Waziristan has perhaps been the worst of it. (In a Taliban-produced DVD circulating around Dera Ismail Khan, a teenager saws the head off a soldier while, in the background, three of his adolescent peers chant “Allahu akbar.”) But the militants have not spared Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), which orchestrated the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. In September, twin suicide blasts went off, and one ripped through a bus carrying I.S.I. employees to work in Rawalpindi, the military’s garrison city near Islamabad, killing at least 25 people. The intelligence officer I met in Dera Ismail Khan, whose area of operations included the Taliban-ruled enclave of South Waziristan, maintains that his contacts with the militants were severed long ago. “We can hardly work there anymore,” he told me. “The Taliban suspect everyone of spying. All of our sources have been slaughtered.”
I asked Rehman, who used to refer to the Taliban as “our boys,” if he still considered the Taliban, even those who might be firing rockets at his house, his boys. “Definitely,” he replied. “But because of America’s policies, they have gone to the extreme. I am trying to bring them back into the mainstream. We don’t disagree with the mujahedeen’s cause, but we differ over priorities. They prefer to fight, but I believe in politics.”
Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of the pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, told me that no one can negotiate the politics of the North-West Frontier Province better than Rehman. “We know that we need a bearded, turbaned guy out there,” Hussain told me. It is perhaps a measure of how inextricable Islamism and politics have become in Pakistan that even the United States would deal with an anti-American like Rehman. In September, he had the first meeting of his 30-year political career with an American ambassador. What did Rehman and Anne Patterson, the American envoy, discuss? “She urged me to form an electoral alliance with Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf,” he told me a few days after the meeting. “I am not against it. But politically, because of the American presence in Afghanistan and rising extremism, it is a bit hard for us to afford.” Plus, the fact that the Americans thought Bhutto could tackle the Taliban had simply baffled him. “She has no strategy in those areas, and nothing to do with those people,” he said.
When asked if Patterson’s meeting signaled a change in American attitudes, an embassy spokeswoman said it “reflects our approach to democratic politics in Pakistan” and was “part of a process of talking to all those who represent political movements in Pakistan, across the spectrum.” The U.S. has given more than $5 billion to Pakistan in the past few years to fight Islamist militants, but recent reports suggest that the aid has not been effective. Late last month, Congress put restrictions on some military aid and called for the restoration of democratic rights.
Even after the Bhutto assassination, Rehman told me he would stay in the election — although, as he put it, “the reality is that this is complete anarchy, and no one can run a campaign.”
Before his death at the end of the Red Mosque standoff in July, Abdul Rashid Ghazi was allies with a young cleric in the Swat Valley, in the North-West Frontier Province. The cleric’s name is Maulana Fazlullah. For a year, Fazlullah trained his militia and amassed a following. Twice a day, he delivered a radio address, broadcast to tens of thousands of people in Swat, over his illegal station. He preached about the virtues of Shariah, the ills of female education and the honor of jihad and the Taliban. In retaliation for the assault on the Red Mosque, Fazlullah’s militiamen and suicide bombers launched attacks on convoys and police stations throughout the Swat Valley.
When, in October, I asked Rehman if he had any control over Fazlullah, he said the negotiating efforts of the J.U.I. leader there, Qari Abdul Bais, were saving Fazlullah and the Pakistani Army from going to war. But when I met Bais, a septuagenarian with a cane, he offered this estimation of Fazlullah: “He is totally out of control.” Fazlullah created a more difficult situation for Musharraf and the generals — and, in a different way, for local religious leaders — because his ambitions exceeded the mere creation of an Islamic emirate in Swat. In November, his men began conquering territory and taking over police stations in neighboring districts, pulling down Pakistani flags and raising their own. By late November, the Pakistani Army had had enough and mounted an immense offensive against Fazlullah and his men, a bloody battle that continued into late December. I was able to visit Fazlullah’s compound (since destroyed) just before the military attacks began and get a sense of what a Taliban-controlled area in Pakistan would be like.
Fazlullah’s base was a sprawling mosque and madrassa compound in the village of Imam Dehri, located across the Swat River from the city of Mingora. The entire Swat Valley is surrounded by mountains blanketed with pine forests. The river pours from the Hindu Kush Mountains and meanders through the valley, nourishing apple and persimmon orchards. During the summer, thousands of Pakistanis flock here for a break from the heat and humidity choking the lowlands. When I visited Swat in June, for example, still weeks before the Red Mosque assault began in Islamabad, I had trouble getting a room at the exclusive Serena Hotel. By the time I returned in October, I was the only guest. Almost immediately after arriving the second time around, I saw why: at the edge of town, Taliban rode around in flatbed trucks, pointing weapons in the air and ordering motorists to remove the tape decks from their cars. Fazlullah, like his Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, deemed music — and anything that plays music — un-Islamic.
The following Friday, I went to Imam Dehri, where I met the commander of Fazlullah’s militia, a man with glacier-blue eyes named Sirajuddin. (Fazlullah appeared briefly, but didn’t stay long; he was observing aitekaaf, a meditation period that lasts 10 days at the end of Ramadan.) To get from Mingora to Imam Dehri, my Pashto interpreter and I boarded a small metal tram attached to a zip-line. Six other people piled in. We got a light push to get moving, and then soared over the river. Sirajuddin waited on the other side, and he led us through a crowd of Fazlullah’s supporters. The P.A. system blasted prerecorded jihadi poems while Taliban walked about with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.
“We are struggling for the enforcement of Shariah,” Sirajuddin told me inside a brick shed that was his office. “Twice, in 1994 and 1999, the government said it was committed to enforcing Shariah in this area, but it never did. The people here want Islam to be a way of life.” He added: “We are Muslims, but our legal system is based on English laws. Our movement wants to replace the English system with an Islamic one.”
Four Taliban sat in the room with us, watching me with dark, intent eyes. I asked one of them, a 32-year-old named Abdul Ghafoor, what he was fighting for. Islam? Revenge? “This is not personal revenge; this is our religious obligation,” he told me, speaking Pashto through an interpreter. Ghafoor crouched on a low stool, a Kalashnikov resting on his lap. He said he was a recent graduate from the University of Peshawar with a master’s degree in Islamic theology, and that he earned his living as a schoolteacher. Every day after school, and on holidays, he grabbed his gun and joined Fazlullah. He wore a long beard, a black turban, an ammunition vest stuffed with extra banana clips and pistols and Reebok high-tops with a Velcro strap. Messages crackled over the walkie-talkie attached to the collar of his vest. The Taliban were coordinating their movements.
Later, Ghafoor took me from Sirajuddin’s office to a platform where some supposed criminals were scheduled to be lashed. About 15,000 men and boys, some sitting on picnic blankets, encircled the wooden platform, which was supported on drum barrels and had been erected by Fazlullah’s group as a place for public punishments. The Taliban paraded three men, accused of aiding kidnappers, before the crowd. Fazlullah’s mujahedeen had caught the kidnappers as they were shuttling two women out of Swat. The Taliban sent the women back home and arrested everyone involved with the crime. Now the youngest of the criminals, who appeared to be still in his teens, scaled the steps to the platform. He looked as if he might collapse, legs wobbling with fear, as hundreds of heavily armed Taliban spread out around him. I stood among them, waiting to see the boy receive 15 lashings — the appropriate Islamic punishment, according to Fazlullah.
The boy lay face-down on the platform. Taliban held his arms and legs so he wouldn’t flop around. Another jihadi, clutching a thick, leather whip, roughly two feet long, wore a camouflage shalwar kameez and a ski mask over his face. Every time the whip crashed on the boy’s back, the crowd called out the corresponding number of lashes, as if counting the final seconds of a basketball game. The teenager’s body convulsed under the crack and thud of each lash; when he finally stood up, he was shaking and drenched in tears.
“This punishment is permitted in Islam,” announced one of Fazlullah’s deputies over a P.A. system fixed to a flatbed truck parked beside the platform. Along with the three accused men, who were lashed in turn, a dozen militants also stood on the platform, holding Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Another lay on his stomach on the roof of a nearby shed, his eyes lined up behind the sights of an automatic machine gun. Everyone knew that Fazlullah’s decision to take the law into his own hands was in blatant defiance of the government’s writ: the militants’ job was to repel any sudden ambush by the Pakistani Army or paramilitary forces; the deputy on the P.A. system, meanwhile, had to persuade the people that the lashings accorded with Islamic law. “Even if there is no central Islamic government, these punishments are permitted in parts of the country if it contributes to maintaining peace,” the deputy explained, speaking in Pashto. “We have no intention to occupy the government or for any political authority. This is only for peace and security.”
After the lashings, thousands of people lined up to ride the tram back across the river. Ghafoor took us to Mingora by another route, through a cluster of villages loyal to Fazlullah. On the way, I asked Ghafoor what he thought about Maulana Fazlur Rehman. “He and his party deceived the public for votes, all in the name of Islam,” Ghafoor said. Ghafoor voted for the M.M.A. in 2002, hoping that they would enforce Shariah as they had promised. “But Maulana Fazlur Rehman didn’t even implement an Islamic system within himself,” Ghafoor said. “He gets photographed with women, which is against the principles of Islam. And he failed to resolve the Jamia Hafsa crisis. He couldn’t protect all the innocent people who died.” Jamia Hafsa was the women’s madrassa adjoining the Red Mosque.
We got into an S.U.V. and rode on a single-lane dirt road, lined with lush fields of cauliflower, apricot orchards and persimmon trees, their ends tipped with the bright orange fruit. We passed through a village made of mud-brick homes, and on one of the walls someone had chalked “Shariat ya Shahadat” (“Shariah or Martyrdom”). “I will never vote for the M.M.A. again,” Ghafoor said, “and we will totally boycott the next election.” Democracy, he added, was un-Islamic.
The Pakistani Army now claims to have killed hundreds of Taliban, and arrested hundreds more, in its Swat Valley operation. The army also says that local people in Swat greeted them with sweets, and that the homes of some top leaders, including Sirajuddin, had been destroyed. Ghafoor’s phone line has been cut for weeks, as have those of others in the group — although Sirajuddin has made occasional calls to the press, as when he accepted responsibility for a suicide attack in late December.
When I met Rehman in Peshawar in the fall we sat outside on plastic lawn furniture in the shade of a large oak tree. He rubbed a strand of chunky, orange prayer beads, and we discussed the changing leadership in the borderlands of Pakistan. In the past five years, more than 150 pro-government maliks, or tribal elders, had been killed by the Taliban. Oftentimes, the Taliban dumped the bodies by the side of the road for passers-by to see, with a note, written in Pashto, pinned to the corpse’s chest, damning the dead man as an American spy. “When the jihad in Afghanistan started,” Rehman told me, “the maliks and the old tribal system in Afghanistan ended; a new leadership arose, based on jihad. Similar is the case here in the Tribal Areas. The old, tribal system is being relegated to the background, and a new leadership, composed of these young militants, has emerged.” He added, “This is something natural.”
Though Rehman describes the emergence of the local Taliban in evolutionary terms, he explains it as a result of a leadership crisis in Pakistan. He respects the secular-minded people who created Pakistan but insists that social and religious changes over the past two decades have made such leaders much less relevant: “We have to adjust to reality, and that demands new leaders with new visions.”
I asked if he considered himself such a new leader with a new vision.
“I don’t consider myself as someone extraordinary,” Rehman said. “I have the same feelings as everyone else in the current age: if the weather is warm, everyone feels warm; if it is cold, everyone feels cold. The difference between me and other people is in our responsibilities.” He took a long breath of the fresh, fall air, continued rubbing his prayer beads and leaned over the chair to spit. “That’s why I am so careful, because my decisions can affect many, many people. I am trying to bring people back from the fire, not push them toward it.” Rehman once seemed ready to introduce Taliban-style rule in Pakistan. Now he is trying to preserve democracy from being destroyed by ruthless militants. If he can’t succeed, can anyone?
Nicholas Schmidle is a Pakistan-based writer and a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. This is his first article for the magazine.
It is a sad look at reality in Pakistan where the Taliban is gaining strength to the extent that moderates who have tried to temper the Taliban's efforts in Pakistan and elsewhere are not targets of the Taliban.
Some might see dissesion between these groups as a benefit to the war on terror, but the outcome could be a Pakistan even more resentful of democracy...
January 6, 2008
Next-Gen Taliban
By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine...agewanted=print
One day last month, I climbed onto a crowded rooftop in Quetta, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and wedged myself among men wearing thick turbans and rangy beards until I could find a seat. We converged on the rooftop that afternoon to attend the opening ceremony for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam’s campaign office in this dusty city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, better known by its abbreviation, J.U.I., is a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban. In the last parliamentary elections here, in 2002, the J.U.I. formed a national coalition with five other Islamist parties and led a campaign that was pro-Taliban, anti-American and spiked with promises to implement Shariah, or Islamic law. The alliance, known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., won more than 10 percent of the popular vote nationwide — the highest share ever for an Islamist bloc in Pakistan. The alliance formed governments in two of the country’s four provinces, including Baluchistan.
A cool breeze blew across the rooftop, and a green kite flew above in the crisp, periwinkle sky. The J.U.I. was gearing up again for national elections, then scheduled for the second week of January, but the message this time was remarkably different from what it was five years ago. One by one, hopefuls for the national and provincial assembly constituencies gave short speeches. Most of them spoke in Pashto, but, knowing Urdu, I could understand enough to realize that they weren’t rehashing the typical J.U.I. rhetoric. No one praised the Taliban. Shariah was mentioned only in passing. Just one person, a first-time candidate in a suede jacket who probably felt obliged to prove his credentials in a party of fundamentalist mullahs, attacked the United States. Afterward, party workers handed out free plates of cookies and cups of tea.
This seemed altogether too gentle. Had the J.U.I. gone soft? Among several firebrands conspicuous by their absence was Maulvi Noor Muhammad, Quetta’s former representative in the National Assembly and an outspoken supporter of the Taliban, so I went to see him at his madrassa. Adolescent students, many wearing the black turbans favored by the Taliban, mingled by the metal entrance gate. Muhammad had told me in the fall of 2006 that the sole reason that the Taliban hadn’t defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan yet was because NATO had B-52’s, and when I reminded him of this, he smiled through a mouthful of missing teeth. “The Taliban have more than made up for that disadvantage now with suicide bombers,” he said.
If the government’s version is correct, radical Islamists pressed their advantage to terrible effect in assassinating Benazir Bhutto during a rally on Dec. 27. Bhutto’s family and her party clearly have no faith in the probity of President Pervez Musharraf’s government, and many - including Nawaz Sharif, Bhutto’s nearest rival in the Pakistani opposition - have accused the government of creating the security situation that led to her murder. Musharraf responded in a nationally televised speech on the evening of Jan. 2 by doubling his insistence that terrorists were responsible: “We need to fight terrorism with full force, and I think that if we don’t succeed in the fight against terrorism, the future of Pakistan will be dark.” Efforts at democratic integration by parties like the J.U.I. have now been overshadowed by the violence of their antidemocratic Islamist colleagues - a network of younger Taliban fighting on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, jihadis pledging loyalty to Al Qaeda and any number of freelancing militants. Disrupting and discrediting democracy may, of course, be the point. The Bhutto assassination could well make moderation impossible, as Islamist radicals savor their disruptive power - and enraged mainstream parties threaten the stability of the government itself. For now, the Bhutto killing has given the opposition a rare unity, and the elections, although delayed to Feb. 18, may well go ahead. The J.U.I. remains determined to continue campaigning. Six weeks, however, could prove to be a very long time in Pakistan’s embattled politics.
In Quetta, Maulvi Noor Muhammad, who is 62, sat on the madrassa’s cold concrete floor wrapped in a wool blanket as he leafed through a newspaper. Speaking in Pashto through an interpreter, he said that Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the J.U.I. chief, had visited three times in the previous few weeks to persuade him to enter the election. Muhammad claimed to have refused each time because he believed the J.U.I. had drifted from its core mission: to lead an aggressive Islamization campaign and provide political support to what he referred to as the mujahedeen, a term for Muslim fighters that can shift in meaning depending on who is speaking. “Participating in this election would amount to treason against the mujahedeen,” he said. I asked about the others in the party who had decided to run for office. Muhammad shook his head in disappointment and explained how, following the government operation against the Red Mosque rebels in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city, in July, President Musharraf put religious leaders under tremendous pressure. “Musharraf threatened to raid several madrassas,” Muhammad said. “The political mullahs got scared.”
Maulana Fazlur Rehman is exactly the sort of “political mullah” whom Muhammad portrayed as running scared. In the past year, the J.U.I. chief has tried to disassociate himself from the new generation of Taliban wreaking havoc not only across the border in Afghanistan, as they have for years, but also increasingly in Pakistan. At the same time, Rehman has been trying to persuade foreign ambassadors and establishment politicians here that he is the only one capable of dealing with those same Taliban. (Rehman told me that he never offered Muhammad a chance to enter the election; he even added that the J.U.I. had already expelled the Taliban guru “on disciplinary grounds.” ) In the process, some Islamists maintain that Rehman has sold them out. Last April, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rehman’s house from the main road before crashing into the veranda of his brother’s home next door. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rehman’s name on it.
“The religious forces are very divided right now,” I was told by Abdul Hakim Akbari, a childhood friend of Rehman’s and lifelong member of the J.U.I. I met Akbari in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown, which is situated in the North-West Frontier Province. According to this past summer’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, approved by all 16 official intelligence agencies, Al Qaeda has regrouped in the Tribal Areas adjoining the province and may be planning an attack on the American homeland. “Everyone is afraid,” Akbari told me. “These mujahedeen don’t respect anyone anymore. They don’t even listen to each other. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is a moderate. He wants dialogue. But the Taliban see him as a hurdle to their ambitions. ”
Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto. As the rocket attack on Rehman’s house illustrates, the militant jihadis have even lashed out against the same Islamist parties who have coddled them in the past.
Western audiences might find news about Islamists fighting among themselves rather appealing. But jihadi wars, at least since the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, have tended to spill over borders, all the more so since Sept. 11, 2001. And within Pakistan, the struggle for supremacy between those Pakistani Islamists who want to gain power democratically and those who want to abolish democracy altogether could well tear the country apart.
The election season got off to a late start, postponed by President Musharraf’s suspension of the constitution and declaration of a state of emergency. In November, when politicians should have been out stumping and rallying support, many were dodging the police. Besides sacking dozens of judges and pulling private television channels off the air, Musharraf arrested thousands of lawyers, students, social activists and political leaders during the 42-day emergency regime, which ended on Dec. 15.
The most damaging result of the emergency, however, may have been the doubt it sowed within the opposition, splitting those advocating participation from others calling for a boycott. The split hit the six-party Islamist M.M.A. alliance hardest of all. While Rehman repeated the J.U.I.’s intention to field candidates, his main partner in the alliance, the Jamaat-e-Islami party, argued that the polls would be rigged and participation would legitimize Musharraf’s regime. Both parties stuck to their positions, and in mid-December, the Islamist alliance fell apart.
Rehman maintained that he could persuade Jamaat-e-Islami supporters to vote for the J.U.I. this time around, but even some of his fellow party members doubted that would work. “In the last election, everything was related to Afghanistan and how innocent Afghans were being killed,” Chaudhry Sharif, a longtime J.U.I. member from Rehman’s district, told me last month. Now Rehman “has to answer his people when they ask him, ‘What happened in our own country?’ ” Despite the M.M.A.’s taking power in the North-West Frontier Province, hundreds of civilians have died in Islamist terrorist attacks. The public’s previous image of mullahs as incorruptible politicians has also been tarnished. Rehman’s chance of attracting swing voters appeared dim.
For now, it is Islamist violence that seems to have the political upper hand rather than the accommodation of Islamist currents within a democratic society. The mainstream parties have addressed Islamic militancy strictly as a security issue. Benazir Bhutto used particularly aggressive rhetoric against militants — her main rival, Nawaz Sharif, has a more religiously conservative base — but all of the main political figures outside the M.M.A. treated jihadi violence within a pro- or anti-Musharraf context, and as an effect of U.S. relations rather than as a problem integral to Pakistan’s political culture. “This election comes down to whether you are pro-Musharraf or anti-Musharraf,” a lawyer at a Pakistan Peoples Party rally told me a few weeks ago. In the North-West Frontier Province, the Awami National Party, a secular, nationalist Pashtun outfit, also stands to gain from the M.M.A.’s decline and will dilute the Islamists’ influence in the provincial assembly.
Jihadis have, of course, increasingly opted to intervene in Pakistan by attacking mainstream politicians and their supporters. Only a week before Bhutto’s assassination, a suicide bomber targeted the former interior minister, leaving more than 50 people dead. It was the second attempt on the minister’s life; the first, in April, killed nearly 30 people. And of course Bhutto’s arrival home in October, after years abroad, was greeted by two suicide bombers who detonated themselves beside her float, killing about 140 people. In the aftermath of her killing, more violence seems inevitable. But the politics of terror and assassination are probably secondary, among jihadis, to the gradual extension of their control over rural and semiurban stretches of western Pakistan — a power base that, at least in the short term, can be disrupted only by the Pakistani military. Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander from South Waziristan who captured about 250 soldiers in August, recently warned a J.U.I. candidate there not to run unless several of his arrested Taliban fighters were released. More ominously, in mid-December, 40 representatives from different Taliban gangs from across the North-West Frontier Province and the Tribal Areas banded together into a single group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban Movement). The movement named Mehsud their leader. He has also been named by Pakistani authorities as a suspect in Bhutto’s murder.
The sound of an explosion punctured an otherwise pleasant evening. I had been sitting under a giant mango tree, drinking Southern Comfort with a group of friends, including a midlevel intelligence officer in the army. It was my first night in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown in the North-West Frontier Province, about 100 miles from the Afghan border. While the blast jerked me upright, no one else seemed too bothered. Locals had grown used to the bangs and booms. The previous night, Pakistani Taliban bombed a music store in the town bazaar. The sound I heard was the explosion from a small grenade targeting the owner of a cable-TV service.
Musharraf’s government says the increasingly frequent bombings are evidence of Talibanization creeping east from the Afghanistan border. The local Taliban militants blast shops selling un-Islamic CDs, cable-TV operators, massage parlors and other sites they consider havens of vice. A newspaper editor in Dera Ismail Khan showed me a letter he received, signed by the Taliban, warning him not to print anything that defamed the mujahedeen. They threatened to blow up his office if he didn’t comply.
Rehman’s critics blame him and his party for facilitating the local Taliban, an allegation he resents. “We are politicians, and we will have to go to our constituencies to get votes in an election,” he told me, as we sat together in the drawing room of his home in Dera Ismail Khan. “If there is a war going on, no one can vote.” Halogen spotlights dotted the ceiling, and soft leather couches lined the walls. Rehman wore a pinstripe waistcoat over a shalwar kameez. The room smelled of strong cologne. He added, in a rare moment of candor, “But even we are now afraid of the young men fighting.”
For many years, few people questioned Rehman’s command over the mujahedeen along the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan. His father, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, ran the J.U.I. for 20 years. Mahmood helped kick-start the Afghanistan jihad by issuing a fatwa against the Soviet-backed communist government in Kabul. A year later, when Mahmood died from a heart attack, Rehman, a 27-year-old madrassa student with scant political experience, inherited the J.U.I. and his father’s jihadi enterprise. Thousands of Islamic seminaries profess political allegiance to the J.U.I., and thousands of Taliban warriors first imbibed radical theology in Rehman’s madrassas.
Over time, Rehman cultivated his pragmatic side and played power politics in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad. He eased his way into the establishment just as the Taliban were taking over Afghanistan. In 1993, Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister, named him chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, a post that “enabled him to have influence on foreign policy for the first time,” writes Ahmed Rashid in his book “Taliban.” Rehman still argues that, particularly in the Taliban’s later period of running Afghanistan, he was having a moderating influence on Mullah Omar. “They should,” he told me, “have been given more time.”
During Pakistan’s 2002 election campaign, Rehman played up his links with the Taliban, and the Islamist coalition did well. In retrospect, that may have been his high point. The divide between the pro-Taliban leaders of yesterday and those of today was fully exposed by the insurrection at the Red Mosque in Islamabad, which began last January under the leadership of Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his brother. As the weeks and months passed, the rebels kidnapped a brothel madam, some police officers and, finally, six Chinese masseuses. They made a bonfire of CDs and DVDs and demanded that Musharraf implement Shariah. Defenders paced the outer walls of the mosque holding guns and sharpened garden tools.
Rehman tried to talk the Ghazi brothers out of their reckless adventure, but his influence inside the mosque was limited. “They are simply beyond me,” he said at one point.
Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his entourage of Islamic militants finally clashed with state security forces in early July, but the real rebellion actually occurred in the preceding months, when Ghazi and his brother flouted efforts by Rehman and other religious elders to talk them down. Back in April, when I had asked Ghazi how he felt with the entire old guard turning against him, he looked more amused than worried. “Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones because old people do not like change,” he said. “They are rigid.” Before army commandos killed him in July, Ghazi promised that a government assault on the Red Mosque would be a blessing for the mujahedeen. His “martyrdom,” he used to say, would further invigorate the jihadis and expedite an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
Since Ghazi’s death, hundreds of soldiers and policemen have died in suicide blasts or in gunfights against the Taliban. The capture of the soldiers in South Waziristan has perhaps been the worst of it. (In a Taliban-produced DVD circulating around Dera Ismail Khan, a teenager saws the head off a soldier while, in the background, three of his adolescent peers chant “Allahu akbar.”) But the militants have not spared Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), which orchestrated the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. In September, twin suicide blasts went off, and one ripped through a bus carrying I.S.I. employees to work in Rawalpindi, the military’s garrison city near Islamabad, killing at least 25 people. The intelligence officer I met in Dera Ismail Khan, whose area of operations included the Taliban-ruled enclave of South Waziristan, maintains that his contacts with the militants were severed long ago. “We can hardly work there anymore,” he told me. “The Taliban suspect everyone of spying. All of our sources have been slaughtered.”
I asked Rehman, who used to refer to the Taliban as “our boys,” if he still considered the Taliban, even those who might be firing rockets at his house, his boys. “Definitely,” he replied. “But because of America’s policies, they have gone to the extreme. I am trying to bring them back into the mainstream. We don’t disagree with the mujahedeen’s cause, but we differ over priorities. They prefer to fight, but I believe in politics.”
Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of the pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, told me that no one can negotiate the politics of the North-West Frontier Province better than Rehman. “We know that we need a bearded, turbaned guy out there,” Hussain told me. It is perhaps a measure of how inextricable Islamism and politics have become in Pakistan that even the United States would deal with an anti-American like Rehman. In September, he had the first meeting of his 30-year political career with an American ambassador. What did Rehman and Anne Patterson, the American envoy, discuss? “She urged me to form an electoral alliance with Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf,” he told me a few days after the meeting. “I am not against it. But politically, because of the American presence in Afghanistan and rising extremism, it is a bit hard for us to afford.” Plus, the fact that the Americans thought Bhutto could tackle the Taliban had simply baffled him. “She has no strategy in those areas, and nothing to do with those people,” he said.
When asked if Patterson’s meeting signaled a change in American attitudes, an embassy spokeswoman said it “reflects our approach to democratic politics in Pakistan” and was “part of a process of talking to all those who represent political movements in Pakistan, across the spectrum.” The U.S. has given more than $5 billion to Pakistan in the past few years to fight Islamist militants, but recent reports suggest that the aid has not been effective. Late last month, Congress put restrictions on some military aid and called for the restoration of democratic rights.
Even after the Bhutto assassination, Rehman told me he would stay in the election — although, as he put it, “the reality is that this is complete anarchy, and no one can run a campaign.”
Before his death at the end of the Red Mosque standoff in July, Abdul Rashid Ghazi was allies with a young cleric in the Swat Valley, in the North-West Frontier Province. The cleric’s name is Maulana Fazlullah. For a year, Fazlullah trained his militia and amassed a following. Twice a day, he delivered a radio address, broadcast to tens of thousands of people in Swat, over his illegal station. He preached about the virtues of Shariah, the ills of female education and the honor of jihad and the Taliban. In retaliation for the assault on the Red Mosque, Fazlullah’s militiamen and suicide bombers launched attacks on convoys and police stations throughout the Swat Valley.
When, in October, I asked Rehman if he had any control over Fazlullah, he said the negotiating efforts of the J.U.I. leader there, Qari Abdul Bais, were saving Fazlullah and the Pakistani Army from going to war. But when I met Bais, a septuagenarian with a cane, he offered this estimation of Fazlullah: “He is totally out of control.” Fazlullah created a more difficult situation for Musharraf and the generals — and, in a different way, for local religious leaders — because his ambitions exceeded the mere creation of an Islamic emirate in Swat. In November, his men began conquering territory and taking over police stations in neighboring districts, pulling down Pakistani flags and raising their own. By late November, the Pakistani Army had had enough and mounted an immense offensive against Fazlullah and his men, a bloody battle that continued into late December. I was able to visit Fazlullah’s compound (since destroyed) just before the military attacks began and get a sense of what a Taliban-controlled area in Pakistan would be like.
Fazlullah’s base was a sprawling mosque and madrassa compound in the village of Imam Dehri, located across the Swat River from the city of Mingora. The entire Swat Valley is surrounded by mountains blanketed with pine forests. The river pours from the Hindu Kush Mountains and meanders through the valley, nourishing apple and persimmon orchards. During the summer, thousands of Pakistanis flock here for a break from the heat and humidity choking the lowlands. When I visited Swat in June, for example, still weeks before the Red Mosque assault began in Islamabad, I had trouble getting a room at the exclusive Serena Hotel. By the time I returned in October, I was the only guest. Almost immediately after arriving the second time around, I saw why: at the edge of town, Taliban rode around in flatbed trucks, pointing weapons in the air and ordering motorists to remove the tape decks from their cars. Fazlullah, like his Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, deemed music — and anything that plays music — un-Islamic.
The following Friday, I went to Imam Dehri, where I met the commander of Fazlullah’s militia, a man with glacier-blue eyes named Sirajuddin. (Fazlullah appeared briefly, but didn’t stay long; he was observing aitekaaf, a meditation period that lasts 10 days at the end of Ramadan.) To get from Mingora to Imam Dehri, my Pashto interpreter and I boarded a small metal tram attached to a zip-line. Six other people piled in. We got a light push to get moving, and then soared over the river. Sirajuddin waited on the other side, and he led us through a crowd of Fazlullah’s supporters. The P.A. system blasted prerecorded jihadi poems while Taliban walked about with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.
“We are struggling for the enforcement of Shariah,” Sirajuddin told me inside a brick shed that was his office. “Twice, in 1994 and 1999, the government said it was committed to enforcing Shariah in this area, but it never did. The people here want Islam to be a way of life.” He added: “We are Muslims, but our legal system is based on English laws. Our movement wants to replace the English system with an Islamic one.”
Four Taliban sat in the room with us, watching me with dark, intent eyes. I asked one of them, a 32-year-old named Abdul Ghafoor, what he was fighting for. Islam? Revenge? “This is not personal revenge; this is our religious obligation,” he told me, speaking Pashto through an interpreter. Ghafoor crouched on a low stool, a Kalashnikov resting on his lap. He said he was a recent graduate from the University of Peshawar with a master’s degree in Islamic theology, and that he earned his living as a schoolteacher. Every day after school, and on holidays, he grabbed his gun and joined Fazlullah. He wore a long beard, a black turban, an ammunition vest stuffed with extra banana clips and pistols and Reebok high-tops with a Velcro strap. Messages crackled over the walkie-talkie attached to the collar of his vest. The Taliban were coordinating their movements.
Later, Ghafoor took me from Sirajuddin’s office to a platform where some supposed criminals were scheduled to be lashed. About 15,000 men and boys, some sitting on picnic blankets, encircled the wooden platform, which was supported on drum barrels and had been erected by Fazlullah’s group as a place for public punishments. The Taliban paraded three men, accused of aiding kidnappers, before the crowd. Fazlullah’s mujahedeen had caught the kidnappers as they were shuttling two women out of Swat. The Taliban sent the women back home and arrested everyone involved with the crime. Now the youngest of the criminals, who appeared to be still in his teens, scaled the steps to the platform. He looked as if he might collapse, legs wobbling with fear, as hundreds of heavily armed Taliban spread out around him. I stood among them, waiting to see the boy receive 15 lashings — the appropriate Islamic punishment, according to Fazlullah.
The boy lay face-down on the platform. Taliban held his arms and legs so he wouldn’t flop around. Another jihadi, clutching a thick, leather whip, roughly two feet long, wore a camouflage shalwar kameez and a ski mask over his face. Every time the whip crashed on the boy’s back, the crowd called out the corresponding number of lashes, as if counting the final seconds of a basketball game. The teenager’s body convulsed under the crack and thud of each lash; when he finally stood up, he was shaking and drenched in tears.
“This punishment is permitted in Islam,” announced one of Fazlullah’s deputies over a P.A. system fixed to a flatbed truck parked beside the platform. Along with the three accused men, who were lashed in turn, a dozen militants also stood on the platform, holding Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Another lay on his stomach on the roof of a nearby shed, his eyes lined up behind the sights of an automatic machine gun. Everyone knew that Fazlullah’s decision to take the law into his own hands was in blatant defiance of the government’s writ: the militants’ job was to repel any sudden ambush by the Pakistani Army or paramilitary forces; the deputy on the P.A. system, meanwhile, had to persuade the people that the lashings accorded with Islamic law. “Even if there is no central Islamic government, these punishments are permitted in parts of the country if it contributes to maintaining peace,” the deputy explained, speaking in Pashto. “We have no intention to occupy the government or for any political authority. This is only for peace and security.”
After the lashings, thousands of people lined up to ride the tram back across the river. Ghafoor took us to Mingora by another route, through a cluster of villages loyal to Fazlullah. On the way, I asked Ghafoor what he thought about Maulana Fazlur Rehman. “He and his party deceived the public for votes, all in the name of Islam,” Ghafoor said. Ghafoor voted for the M.M.A. in 2002, hoping that they would enforce Shariah as they had promised. “But Maulana Fazlur Rehman didn’t even implement an Islamic system within himself,” Ghafoor said. “He gets photographed with women, which is against the principles of Islam. And he failed to resolve the Jamia Hafsa crisis. He couldn’t protect all the innocent people who died.” Jamia Hafsa was the women’s madrassa adjoining the Red Mosque.
We got into an S.U.V. and rode on a single-lane dirt road, lined with lush fields of cauliflower, apricot orchards and persimmon trees, their ends tipped with the bright orange fruit. We passed through a village made of mud-brick homes, and on one of the walls someone had chalked “Shariat ya Shahadat” (“Shariah or Martyrdom”). “I will never vote for the M.M.A. again,” Ghafoor said, “and we will totally boycott the next election.” Democracy, he added, was un-Islamic.
The Pakistani Army now claims to have killed hundreds of Taliban, and arrested hundreds more, in its Swat Valley operation. The army also says that local people in Swat greeted them with sweets, and that the homes of some top leaders, including Sirajuddin, had been destroyed. Ghafoor’s phone line has been cut for weeks, as have those of others in the group — although Sirajuddin has made occasional calls to the press, as when he accepted responsibility for a suicide attack in late December.
When I met Rehman in Peshawar in the fall we sat outside on plastic lawn furniture in the shade of a large oak tree. He rubbed a strand of chunky, orange prayer beads, and we discussed the changing leadership in the borderlands of Pakistan. In the past five years, more than 150 pro-government maliks, or tribal elders, had been killed by the Taliban. Oftentimes, the Taliban dumped the bodies by the side of the road for passers-by to see, with a note, written in Pashto, pinned to the corpse’s chest, damning the dead man as an American spy. “When the jihad in Afghanistan started,” Rehman told me, “the maliks and the old tribal system in Afghanistan ended; a new leadership arose, based on jihad. Similar is the case here in the Tribal Areas. The old, tribal system is being relegated to the background, and a new leadership, composed of these young militants, has emerged.” He added, “This is something natural.”
Though Rehman describes the emergence of the local Taliban in evolutionary terms, he explains it as a result of a leadership crisis in Pakistan. He respects the secular-minded people who created Pakistan but insists that social and religious changes over the past two decades have made such leaders much less relevant: “We have to adjust to reality, and that demands new leaders with new visions.”
I asked if he considered himself such a new leader with a new vision.
“I don’t consider myself as someone extraordinary,” Rehman said. “I have the same feelings as everyone else in the current age: if the weather is warm, everyone feels warm; if it is cold, everyone feels cold. The difference between me and other people is in our responsibilities.” He took a long breath of the fresh, fall air, continued rubbing his prayer beads and leaned over the chair to spit. “That’s why I am so careful, because my decisions can affect many, many people. I am trying to bring people back from the fire, not push them toward it.” Rehman once seemed ready to introduce Taliban-style rule in Pakistan. Now he is trying to preserve democracy from being destroyed by ruthless militants. If he can’t succeed, can anyone?
Nicholas Schmidle is a Pakistan-based writer and a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. This is his first article for the magazine.
Such insight from Krauthammer is certainly welcome.
It is a shame that it took until now for him to write this article...
Where was this article when the Bush Administration was courting Bhutto these many months -- or even years.
Bhutto’s democracy false
Friday, January 04, 2008 - Bangor Daily News
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://bangornews.com/news/t/default.aspx?...int-article.htm
'My mother always said, democracy is the best revenge.' - Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of the late Benazir Bhutto
Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bhutto was suggesting.
For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. Benazir was always avenging the death of her father, the former prime minister hanged two years after a coup. Bilawal is now pledged to do the same for his mother’s martyrdom. The Pakistan People’s Party has always been a wholly owned family subsidiary. Hence the almost unseemly haste with which Bhutto’s husband and son were given immediate control upon Benazir’s death.
Democracy was meant to be the antithesis of feudalism. Popular sovereignty was to supplant divine right; free elections to supplant dynastic succession (a progression Americans have not completely mastered either). It is clear that Bilawal meant to put the best gloss on his mother’s dictum. He, like she, would avenge the political murder of a parent not with violence but through the ballot box. Nonetheless, his unmistakable assumption of aristocratic entitlement clangs against his professed fealty to democratic means.
His mother was the same. In more than one journalistic profile, she was characterized as "a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties." Part of the reason for the precariousness of Pakistan’s democracy is precisely that it remains a largely feudal society practicing democratic forms.
But Pakistan is hardly alone. The very same week Pakistan nearly imploded, a close and disputed election sent Kenya, heretofore one of the more stable democracies in Africa, into a convulsion of tribal violence. These bloody eruptions come against a background of less dramatic but equally important defeats for the democratic idea. Russia acquiesces cravenly as its nascent democracy is systematically dismantled in return for a bit of great-power posturing and a measure of oil-fueled pottage doled out by Czar Vladimir. China even more apathetically continues to concede stewardship of its market economy and modernizing society to a Leninist dictatorship.
This comes after the Palestinians, in their first post-Arafat parliamentary election, give the mandate to a terrorist group. And as Lebanon watches Syrian proxies systematically kill members of parliament to deny the democrats the quorum they need to elect a like-minded president.
These defeats, marking the cresting of the 30-year democratic wave that had swept through Latin America, Eastern Europe, East Asia and even parts of Africa, raise more than theoretical questions. They challenge the core Bush notion that American foreign policy should be predicated on trying to spread democracy. But while spreading democracy may be necessary, can it, in fact, be done?
We know that it can, of course, as demonstrated by our success in turning Germany, Japan and South Korea into important democratic allies. But there we had the rare advantage of the near total control that came with uncontested postwar occupation.
What is required in conditions of far less control? A healthy respect for the enduring power of local political primitivism and a willingness to adapt to it.
In Afghanistan, that means accepting radical decentralization and the power of warlords. In Iraq, that means letting centralized top-down governance give way, at least temporarily, to provincial and tribal autonomy as the best means of producing effective representative institutions.
And in Pakistan, that means accepting both the enduring presence of feudal politics and the pre-eminent role of the military, Pakistan’s one functioning national institution, as a guarantor of the state — even (as in another secular Islamic country, Turkey) at the cost of giving it extra-constitutional authority. It also means accepting the reality that Pervez Musharraf, however dubious his democratic credentials, is not to be abandoned because his fall would unleash the deluge.
These are hard days for democracy. That is not a reason for giving up on it. It is a reason for the prudent acceptance and nurturing of local variants, however imperfect.
The Roman Church learned that spreading the creed required tolerance for the incorporation of certain pre-Christian practices as a way of strengthening the new faith and giving it local roots. For the spread of democracy today, we need to practice our own brand of syncretism and learn not to abandon the field when forced to settle for regional adaptations that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal.
Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. Readers may contact him at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.
It is a shame that it took until now for him to write this article...
Where was this article when the Bush Administration was courting Bhutto these many months -- or even years.
Bhutto’s democracy false
Friday, January 04, 2008 - Bangor Daily News
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://bangornews.com/news/t/default.aspx?...int-article.htm
'My mother always said, democracy is the best revenge.' - Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of the late Benazir Bhutto
Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bhutto was suggesting.
For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. Benazir was always avenging the death of her father, the former prime minister hanged two years after a coup. Bilawal is now pledged to do the same for his mother’s martyrdom. The Pakistan People’s Party has always been a wholly owned family subsidiary. Hence the almost unseemly haste with which Bhutto’s husband and son were given immediate control upon Benazir’s death.
Democracy was meant to be the antithesis of feudalism. Popular sovereignty was to supplant divine right; free elections to supplant dynastic succession (a progression Americans have not completely mastered either). It is clear that Bilawal meant to put the best gloss on his mother’s dictum. He, like she, would avenge the political murder of a parent not with violence but through the ballot box. Nonetheless, his unmistakable assumption of aristocratic entitlement clangs against his professed fealty to democratic means.
His mother was the same. In more than one journalistic profile, she was characterized as "a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties." Part of the reason for the precariousness of Pakistan’s democracy is precisely that it remains a largely feudal society practicing democratic forms.
But Pakistan is hardly alone. The very same week Pakistan nearly imploded, a close and disputed election sent Kenya, heretofore one of the more stable democracies in Africa, into a convulsion of tribal violence. These bloody eruptions come against a background of less dramatic but equally important defeats for the democratic idea. Russia acquiesces cravenly as its nascent democracy is systematically dismantled in return for a bit of great-power posturing and a measure of oil-fueled pottage doled out by Czar Vladimir. China even more apathetically continues to concede stewardship of its market economy and modernizing society to a Leninist dictatorship.
This comes after the Palestinians, in their first post-Arafat parliamentary election, give the mandate to a terrorist group. And as Lebanon watches Syrian proxies systematically kill members of parliament to deny the democrats the quorum they need to elect a like-minded president.
These defeats, marking the cresting of the 30-year democratic wave that had swept through Latin America, Eastern Europe, East Asia and even parts of Africa, raise more than theoretical questions. They challenge the core Bush notion that American foreign policy should be predicated on trying to spread democracy. But while spreading democracy may be necessary, can it, in fact, be done?
We know that it can, of course, as demonstrated by our success in turning Germany, Japan and South Korea into important democratic allies. But there we had the rare advantage of the near total control that came with uncontested postwar occupation.
What is required in conditions of far less control? A healthy respect for the enduring power of local political primitivism and a willingness to adapt to it.
In Afghanistan, that means accepting radical decentralization and the power of warlords. In Iraq, that means letting centralized top-down governance give way, at least temporarily, to provincial and tribal autonomy as the best means of producing effective representative institutions.
And in Pakistan, that means accepting both the enduring presence of feudal politics and the pre-eminent role of the military, Pakistan’s one functioning national institution, as a guarantor of the state — even (as in another secular Islamic country, Turkey) at the cost of giving it extra-constitutional authority. It also means accepting the reality that Pervez Musharraf, however dubious his democratic credentials, is not to be abandoned because his fall would unleash the deluge.
These are hard days for democracy. That is not a reason for giving up on it. It is a reason for the prudent acceptance and nurturing of local variants, however imperfect.
The Roman Church learned that spreading the creed required tolerance for the incorporation of certain pre-Christian practices as a way of strengthening the new faith and giving it local roots. For the spread of democracy today, we need to practice our own brand of syncretism and learn not to abandon the field when forced to settle for regional adaptations that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal.
Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. Readers may contact him at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.
Musharraf: Bhutto Knew Of Risks
Jan. 6, 2008
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/05/...le3678203.shtml
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(CBS) Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, leads a country in crisis ten days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan is the only Islamic country with nuclear bombs, a place where the influence of the Taliban and al Qaeda is growing.
The Bush administration hopes Musharraf can save his country, but he's the man many Pakistanis blame for its crisis. Was he responsible for the assassination, as many Pakistanis believe? Did his government fail to provide adequate protection? Or did Benazir Bhutto take unnecessary risks?
Lara Logan asked these questions of President Musharraf on Saturday in Islamabad, his first interview since the Bhutto assassination.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I knew that she's under threat. She herself knew that. I told her personally," Musharraf says.
"So it was just a matter of time, do you think?" Logan asks.
"It's your luck," Musharraf replies. "There's no real protection against a suicide bomber really."
Benazir Bhutto's luck ran out on December 27th. She was leaving a campaign rally in her bid to become prime minister for the third time. Bhutto was waving and smiling from her vehicle as excited supporters swarmed around her.
Gunshots rang out. Then, moments later, a suicide bomber blew himself up. In less than two hours, the announcement came that Bhutto was dead.
"That came as an utter shock. It came as an utter shock," Musharraf remembers.
Asked what the first thing was that went through his mind when he heard the news, Musharraf tells Logan, "Well, I knew there was going to be a disturbance in the country and I immediately told the army commander and told everyone to alert everyone, and we must take immediate measures to control any kind of agitation, any kind of emotional outburst."
The moment word of Bhutto's death hit the streets, riots broke out; much of the rage was directed at President Musharraf, her main political rival.
"By the time of her assassination, how would you describe the nature of your relationship with her?" Logan asks.
"Up and down. It wasn't constant - I had asked her not to come before the election, and that we will arrange - then she could come after the election, which she agreed. She had agreed. But then she decided to come all of a sudden. Now that changed a little. It upset me a little," Musharraf says.
"Were you feeling that she was not sticking to her agreements with you, that she wasn't keeping her word?" Logan asks.
"Well, to an extent yes. She used to change the goalposts frequently, depending on the ups and downs here in the country," Musharraf replies.
"It sounds like she was annoying you," Logan remarks.
"On many occasions," Musharraf admits. "But on many other occasions she was positive."
"Did you like her?" Logan asks.
"I think in such a situation it's not your personal like and dislikes. It’s more for the nation that I thought one has to interact with her," Musharraf says.
"When I hear words like that, you know, 'One has to interact with her for the sake of the nation,' sounds to me like you didn’t like her very much," Logan remarks.
"No I wouldn't say I didn’t like her - well, I like or dislike, I didn't have any kind of personal friendship with her," Musharraf says.
The president was upset with Bhutto last October, when, in spite of warnings, she went ahead with a rally in Karachi on her return from self-imposed exile in Dubai. Her convoy was attacked, with two blasts killing close to 150 people.
"Now, in Karachi we knew from Sheikh Mohammad of Dubai, I mean, I got information, intelligence from him. We had our own intelligence. He sent intelligence that there are suicide bombers there targeting her. We told her this," Musharraf explains. "And she knew it. We told her. Don’t do it!"
"And 145 people died," Logan remarks.
"We offered. We said that we can give you a helicopter," Musharraf says. "But she decided to go in that procession. That's what happened."
Asked if he thinks that was a mistake, Musharraf tells Logan, "Yes, indeed. Absolutely."
Musharraf also thinks Bhutto made a mistake by going to the area where she was killed, where a former prime minister had previously been assassinated. And it wasn't the first time Bhutto had tried to hold a rally there.
"We again had intelligence that this is a dangerous place and there's a likelihood of a suicide attempt. We asked her not to go," Musharraf says. "She insisted she will go. We stopped her. And we got such a poor - flak - we got flak from all over the world, from media, from Western media."
"From the U.S.?" Logan asks.
"From everywhere," Musharraf explains.
The night of the assassination, Musharraf believes Bhutto broke a basic rule of security in a crowded charged political rally: to be particularly careful when leaving.
"She should have just gone and moved fast, gone and waved, yes. But if you're standing and -- because you are vulnerable. You're vulnerable and people are charging," Musharraf says. "And all the film that you see, people are charging. Now, when people are there by the hundreds swarming around you, this man is one of them. Who can check these people at that stage?"
"And the mistake she made, if I understand you correctly, was stopping?" Logan asks.
"Yes. But then the mistake was not that," Musharraf says. "I mean, God was kind -- she went into the car in spite of the fact that she was waving and all that. She did go into the car. Now is the point. Why did she stand outside the car?"
"Why did she stand up in the hatch?" Logan asks.
"Entirely. Who's to blame?" Musharraf replies.
Asked who is to blame, Musharraf says, "Only she."
"So Benazir Bhutto, in your words, should bear some responsibility for what took place for her own death?" Logan asks.
"For standing up outside the car, I think it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers," Musharraf says.
"Don't you think it will make her supporters crazy to hear you say that?" Logan asks.
"Well, I don't think so. I mean, that's the fact. She shouldn't have stood up," Musharraf says.
"Just so I'm clear, even with the benefit of hindsight, you feel that your government, you and your government, did everything possible to give Benazir Bhutto the security she needed?" Logan asks.
"Yes, absolutely," Musharraf says. "She had the threat. So she was given more security than any other person."
Musharraf conceded that Bhutto's return was a bitter pill to swallow. It was part of a deal engineered by the Bush administration after a year of political unrest and extremist violence in Pakistan.
"There was a year of secret negotiations; the United States administration has made their views very clear. President Bush endorsed Bhutto's return, Condoleezza Rice, they had top State Department officials meeting with her. You yourself went to Dubai and met with her twice," Logan says.
"Well, yes. All this was going - you seem to be well-informed. Very good. Yes it was happening, I agree," Musharraf acknowledges.
"One of the reasons Benazir Bhutto had such popularity amongst top U.S. officials is that she cast herself as the person who would take action against al Qaeda. Who would go into the tribal areas. Who would get Bin Laden. Who would do all the things that she said you were not doing," Logan says.
"No. Now, again, these are misperceptions of American thinking. All American media, some officials who don't know Pakistan," Musharraf responds.
"So what are you doing to find Osama bin Laden? What is Pakistan doing? What end are you actually still today - seven years - under you…," Logan asks.
"We are…fighting terrorism. And we are fighting extremism," Musharraf says.
"But the question is really within that fight against extremism, what are you doing - if you like - to find Osama Bin Laden?" Logan asks. "That's what Americans want to know."
"Okay. We are fighting first of all al Qaeda. Let's take al Qaeda. We have arrested or eliminated about 700 al Qaeda leaders. Only Pakistan has done it. And lately also whoever has been killed or arrested, I challenge -- who else, which other country has done this?" Musharraf asks.
"Well, which other country has Osama bin Laden?" Logan replies.
"No, I challenge-- I don't accept that at all. There is no proof whatsoever that he is here in Pakistan," Musharraf says.
"But are you looking for him?" Logan asks.
"No, again, the same answer," Musharraf says. "We are not particularly looking for him but we are operating against terrorists and al Qaeda and militant Taliban. And in the process, obviously, it is combined, maybe we are looking for him also. Yes. If he's here?"
Musharraf was quick to blame Bhutto's assassination on al Qaeda, particularly a local extremist named Beitullah Mehsud, who operates out of Pakistan's lawless tribal region where both al Qaeda and the Taliban enjoy widespread support.
"Point two percent of our population is in South Waziristan and North Waziristan. Point two percent," Musharraf says.
"Well, that point two percent has be able to cause a lot of trouble," Logan remarks.
"Yes. We must not say that Taliban are in Pakistan. Pakistan, this is a frontier region. Two tribal agencies of Pakistan," Musharraf says.
"It's still inside Pakistan. Any way you look at it," Logan points out.
"But it's a small part the population and it is this population where they hide and they get support," Musharraf says.
"But they regrouped under…," Logan says.
"Yes, indeed," Musharraf says.
"…your watch?" Logan says.
"No, they regrouped because -- not under us. Because of Afghanistan. Okay?" Musharraf says.
"But under your term as president," Logan remarks.
"Yes. Yes, indeed," Musharraf acknowledges.
"They have regrouped and they are stronger than ever," Logan says.
"Well, Taliban. Yes. They may be. They may be getting stronger. I can’t say for sure," Musharraf says.
Asked if the U.S. shares any of the blame in this, Musharraf says, "Yes, of course. I mean everyone, the whole coalition should share the blame for not succeeding."
Of all the issues 60 Minutes discussed with Musharraf, the one that seemed to affect him the most personally, was about accusations that he may somehow have been involved in Bhutto's death.
"There have been suggestions among certain quarters, particularly amongst Benazir Bhutto's supporters, that you may have had a hand in her killing," Logan says.
"This is unfortunately a very baseless allegation. Nobody has a right to blame anyone for killing anyone unless they have the proof. I've lived in a family which believes in values - it believes in certain principles. It stands for character. And I stand for that," Musharraf says. "Why would I be informing her about all these intelligence reports that we have against her, the threat to her? Why would I be doing that? Why would I be concerned about telling her all this? 'Don’t go there, don’t do this, don’t do that.' So these are all indicators. I can't prove it legally, I can't prove my innocence legally. But I can prove it only through what I stand for as a person."
Jan. 6, 2008
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/05/...le3678203.shtml
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CBS) Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, leads a country in crisis ten days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan is the only Islamic country with nuclear bombs, a place where the influence of the Taliban and al Qaeda is growing.
The Bush administration hopes Musharraf can save his country, but he's the man many Pakistanis blame for its crisis. Was he responsible for the assassination, as many Pakistanis believe? Did his government fail to provide adequate protection? Or did Benazir Bhutto take unnecessary risks?
Lara Logan asked these questions of President Musharraf on Saturday in Islamabad, his first interview since the Bhutto assassination.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I knew that she's under threat. She herself knew that. I told her personally," Musharraf says.
"So it was just a matter of time, do you think?" Logan asks.
"It's your luck," Musharraf replies. "There's no real protection against a suicide bomber really."
Benazir Bhutto's luck ran out on December 27th. She was leaving a campaign rally in her bid to become prime minister for the third time. Bhutto was waving and smiling from her vehicle as excited supporters swarmed around her.
Gunshots rang out. Then, moments later, a suicide bomber blew himself up. In less than two hours, the announcement came that Bhutto was dead.
"That came as an utter shock. It came as an utter shock," Musharraf remembers.
Asked what the first thing was that went through his mind when he heard the news, Musharraf tells Logan, "Well, I knew there was going to be a disturbance in the country and I immediately told the army commander and told everyone to alert everyone, and we must take immediate measures to control any kind of agitation, any kind of emotional outburst."
The moment word of Bhutto's death hit the streets, riots broke out; much of the rage was directed at President Musharraf, her main political rival.
"By the time of her assassination, how would you describe the nature of your relationship with her?" Logan asks.
"Up and down. It wasn't constant - I had asked her not to come before the election, and that we will arrange - then she could come after the election, which she agreed. She had agreed. But then she decided to come all of a sudden. Now that changed a little. It upset me a little," Musharraf says.
"Were you feeling that she was not sticking to her agreements with you, that she wasn't keeping her word?" Logan asks.
"Well, to an extent yes. She used to change the goalposts frequently, depending on the ups and downs here in the country," Musharraf replies.
"It sounds like she was annoying you," Logan remarks.
"On many occasions," Musharraf admits. "But on many other occasions she was positive."
"Did you like her?" Logan asks.
"I think in such a situation it's not your personal like and dislikes. It’s more for the nation that I thought one has to interact with her," Musharraf says.
"When I hear words like that, you know, 'One has to interact with her for the sake of the nation,' sounds to me like you didn’t like her very much," Logan remarks.
"No I wouldn't say I didn’t like her - well, I like or dislike, I didn't have any kind of personal friendship with her," Musharraf says.
The president was upset with Bhutto last October, when, in spite of warnings, she went ahead with a rally in Karachi on her return from self-imposed exile in Dubai. Her convoy was attacked, with two blasts killing close to 150 people.
"Now, in Karachi we knew from Sheikh Mohammad of Dubai, I mean, I got information, intelligence from him. We had our own intelligence. He sent intelligence that there are suicide bombers there targeting her. We told her this," Musharraf explains. "And she knew it. We told her. Don’t do it!"
"And 145 people died," Logan remarks.
"We offered. We said that we can give you a helicopter," Musharraf says. "But she decided to go in that procession. That's what happened."
Asked if he thinks that was a mistake, Musharraf tells Logan, "Yes, indeed. Absolutely."
Musharraf also thinks Bhutto made a mistake by going to the area where she was killed, where a former prime minister had previously been assassinated. And it wasn't the first time Bhutto had tried to hold a rally there.
"We again had intelligence that this is a dangerous place and there's a likelihood of a suicide attempt. We asked her not to go," Musharraf says. "She insisted she will go. We stopped her. And we got such a poor - flak - we got flak from all over the world, from media, from Western media."
"From the U.S.?" Logan asks.
"From everywhere," Musharraf explains.
The night of the assassination, Musharraf believes Bhutto broke a basic rule of security in a crowded charged political rally: to be particularly careful when leaving.
"She should have just gone and moved fast, gone and waved, yes. But if you're standing and -- because you are vulnerable. You're vulnerable and people are charging," Musharraf says. "And all the film that you see, people are charging. Now, when people are there by the hundreds swarming around you, this man is one of them. Who can check these people at that stage?"
"And the mistake she made, if I understand you correctly, was stopping?" Logan asks.
"Yes. But then the mistake was not that," Musharraf says. "I mean, God was kind -- she went into the car in spite of the fact that she was waving and all that. She did go into the car. Now is the point. Why did she stand outside the car?"
"Why did she stand up in the hatch?" Logan asks.
"Entirely. Who's to blame?" Musharraf replies.
Asked who is to blame, Musharraf says, "Only she."
"So Benazir Bhutto, in your words, should bear some responsibility for what took place for her own death?" Logan asks.
"For standing up outside the car, I think it was she to blame alone. Nobody else. Responsibility is hers," Musharraf says.
"Don't you think it will make her supporters crazy to hear you say that?" Logan asks.
"Well, I don't think so. I mean, that's the fact. She shouldn't have stood up," Musharraf says.
"Just so I'm clear, even with the benefit of hindsight, you feel that your government, you and your government, did everything possible to give Benazir Bhutto the security she needed?" Logan asks.
"Yes, absolutely," Musharraf says. "She had the threat. So she was given more security than any other person."
Musharraf conceded that Bhutto's return was a bitter pill to swallow. It was part of a deal engineered by the Bush administration after a year of political unrest and extremist violence in Pakistan.
"There was a year of secret negotiations; the United States administration has made their views very clear. President Bush endorsed Bhutto's return, Condoleezza Rice, they had top State Department officials meeting with her. You yourself went to Dubai and met with her twice," Logan says.
"Well, yes. All this was going - you seem to be well-informed. Very good. Yes it was happening, I agree," Musharraf acknowledges.
"One of the reasons Benazir Bhutto had such popularity amongst top U.S. officials is that she cast herself as the person who would take action against al Qaeda. Who would go into the tribal areas. Who would get Bin Laden. Who would do all the things that she said you were not doing," Logan says.
"No. Now, again, these are misperceptions of American thinking. All American media, some officials who don't know Pakistan," Musharraf responds.
"So what are you doing to find Osama bin Laden? What is Pakistan doing? What end are you actually still today - seven years - under you…," Logan asks.
"We are…fighting terrorism. And we are fighting extremism," Musharraf says.
"But the question is really within that fight against extremism, what are you doing - if you like - to find Osama Bin Laden?" Logan asks. "That's what Americans want to know."
"Okay. We are fighting first of all al Qaeda. Let's take al Qaeda. We have arrested or eliminated about 700 al Qaeda leaders. Only Pakistan has done it. And lately also whoever has been killed or arrested, I challenge -- who else, which other country has done this?" Musharraf asks.
"Well, which other country has Osama bin Laden?" Logan replies.
"No, I challenge-- I don't accept that at all. There is no proof whatsoever that he is here in Pakistan," Musharraf says.
"But are you looking for him?" Logan asks.
"No, again, the same answer," Musharraf says. "We are not particularly looking for him but we are operating against terrorists and al Qaeda and militant Taliban. And in the process, obviously, it is combined, maybe we are looking for him also. Yes. If he's here?"
Musharraf was quick to blame Bhutto's assassination on al Qaeda, particularly a local extremist named Beitullah Mehsud, who operates out of Pakistan's lawless tribal region where both al Qaeda and the Taliban enjoy widespread support.
"Point two percent of our population is in South Waziristan and North Waziristan. Point two percent," Musharraf says.
"Well, that point two percent has be able to cause a lot of trouble," Logan remarks.
"Yes. We must not say that Taliban are in Pakistan. Pakistan, this is a frontier region. Two tribal agencies of Pakistan," Musharraf says.
"It's still inside Pakistan. Any way you look at it," Logan points out.
"But it's a small part the population and it is this population where they hide and they get support," Musharraf says.
"But they regrouped under…," Logan says.
"Yes, indeed," Musharraf says.
"…your watch?" Logan says.
"No, they regrouped because -- not under us. Because of Afghanistan. Okay?" Musharraf says.
"But under your term as president," Logan remarks.
"Yes. Yes, indeed," Musharraf acknowledges.
"They have regrouped and they are stronger than ever," Logan says.
"Well, Taliban. Yes. They may be. They may be getting stronger. I can’t say for sure," Musharraf says.
Asked if the U.S. shares any of the blame in this, Musharraf says, "Yes, of course. I mean everyone, the whole coalition should share the blame for not succeeding."
Of all the issues 60 Minutes discussed with Musharraf, the one that seemed to affect him the most personally, was about accusations that he may somehow have been involved in Bhutto's death.
"There have been suggestions among certain quarters, particularly amongst Benazir Bhutto's supporters, that you may have had a hand in her killing," Logan says.
"This is unfortunately a very baseless allegation. Nobody has a right to blame anyone for killing anyone unless they have the proof. I've lived in a family which believes in values - it believes in certain principles. It stands for character. And I stand for that," Musharraf says. "Why would I be informing her about all these intelligence reports that we have against her, the threat to her? Why would I be doing that? Why would I be concerned about telling her all this? 'Don’t go there, don’t do this, don’t do that.' So these are all indicators. I can't prove it legally, I can't prove my innocence legally. But I can prove it only through what I stand for as a person."
OPINION
Benazir Bhutto: In Life and Death, a Blessing to the Jihadists
Written by Alamgir Hussain
Published January 07, 2008
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/01/07/010043.php
I was shocked and saddened as the story of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination suddenly popped up while browsing news at the dead of night on 27 December 2007. She was probably the only one able to put the house in order in Pakistan. Now that she is gone, it could well be the end of salvaging Pakistan from the hands of the Islamists. However, I held hope that this was probably the wake-up call, which Pakistanis might heed and rise up against the death-cult of the Jihadists.
After her death, Ms Bhutto has emerged as an icon of secularism and modernity in the Islamic world, a courageous political leader and a champion democrat, a champion of women’s rights, and a fighter against the Jihadists. Her death has been compared to Gandhi’s and her political struggle to Aung San Suu Kyi’s. She was going to replace the rogue dictatorship of President Musharraf to institute democracy and secularism in Pakistan.
In a thoughtful analysis, however, it turns out that the majority of these epithets bestowed on her career and legacy are not accurate. Her most devastating action, not only for Pakistan but also for the whole world, was her patronization of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and fueling of separatist Jihad in Kashmir.
It is not right to put all the blame on her for the support that the Taliban and Kashmiri militants received during her tenure as Prime Minister (PM), because the Pakistan intelligence services (ISI) and the military are too powerful for the PM to call the shots alone. Yet, she must accept her share of eager complicity.
Let us explore the Jihadi world of Benazir Bhutto. As the Islamist separatist movement was heating up in Kashmir, she walked into the field to fuel the Jihad in Kashmir. In addressing a huge congregation, she said:
“The people of Kashmir do not fear death, because they are Muslim. The Kashmiris have the blood of the Mujahids [Jihadists] and Ghazis [infidel slayers]. The Kashmiris have the blood of Mujahideens, because Kashmiris are the heir of Prophet Muhammad, Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Umar.”
In inciting even the women of Kashmir to Jihad, she said:
“And the brave women of Kashmir ― they know how to fight and also to live. And when they live, they do so with dignity.”
She added:
“From every village [of Kashmir] only one voice will emerge, “Freedom.” From every school, only one voice will merge, “Freedom.” Every child will shout: Freedom, freedom, freedom.”
After becoming PM for the second time, she told William Dalrymple in 1994 about her support of the Jihadists of Kashmir:
"India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir… India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression."
These rabble-rousing statements speak volume of Benazir Bhutto’s eager support for the Kashmiri separatists, clearly inspired by her Jihadi zeal. The Islamic separatist movement in Kashmir started getting backing from Pakistan since 1990, when well-trained Jihadists started crossing border to join the Kashmiri guerrillas. During her second term (1993-1996), both foreign and local Jihadists started pouring into Kashmir in ever greater number. The result was a large-scale pogrom of native Kashmiri Hindus. No less than 60,000 people have died, many more have been handicapped or mutilated, while nearly half a million Kashmiri Hindus have been evicted from their ancestral homes, who languish in refugee-shelters elsewhere in India.
Benazir Bhutto was, therefore, not a brave warrior against extremism and terrorism as commentators have propagandized over the last few days. Undeniably, she had an unstinted support for the Kashmiri Jihad movement. She had a similar support, on the other side of border, for the Taliban militia, who captured power in Afghanistan during her second term as unimpeded assistance flowed to them from Pakistan. It is impossible to discount the role of ISI and the military in Pakistan’s support for the Kashmir and Afghan Islamist militias during her tenure. But, inspired by her religious zeal, she obviously had whole-hearted support for them.
During Bhutto’s stewardship, the Islamist militia power peaked in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, thanks to the unstinted support from Pakistan. The havoc, wrecked by Islamist terrorists today in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is the harvest of what was seeded or nurtured and inspired by her. Her death is basically a fruit of the seed she herself had planted. Unfortunately, thousands of otherwise innocent men, women and children have also been victim of it and many more to follow in coming years and decades. I see more reason to mourn for those thousands of the victims, the innocent Hindus of India in particular, of the Jihad, she nurtured and helped flourish.
A Harvard- and Oxford-educated liberated woman, she became first Prime Minister of a powerful Muslim state in 1988 at the young age of 35. But she did absolutely nothing to alleviate the despicable treatment of women in Pakistani society. She helped the Taliban sweep into power, who became the worst oppressor of women in living memory. Nearly an entire generation of Afghan women lost their rights, freedom, and dignity. She never lodged a strong protest against the mistreatment of Afghan women by her Taliban protégés. So much for a champion of women’s right!
Furthermore, her support for the Kashmiri Jihadist was meant for creating another Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. India, since her birth, has established as a sustainable secular democracy with credible records in the rule of law, freedom and liberty, human rights, and the rights of women and minorities, which definitely rate much better than those of Pakistan. Her support for breaking Kashmir away from India to transform it into something like Pakistan or Afghanistan, does not make a her champion of democracy, secularism or women’s rights either. Instead, her encouragement of the Kashmiris to be peaceful part of India probably could.
William Dalrymple is obviously correct in asserting that she “did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan's becoming the region's principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.”
Among the epithets accorded to her, she probably deserved to be called a brave person. She, defying ominous threat to her life from Islamic terrorists, returned to Pakistan and gave her life at the hands of a death-cult, she had propped up.
Moreover, although her actions, especially her support for the Jihadists in Kashmir and Afghanistan, were meant for the undoing of secularism ― she was, I believe, a truly secular-minded woman. She belonged to a secular family and grew up in the West, where lived the life of freedom and liberty and donned western dresses before her return to Pakistan.
Her support for the Jihadists was probably an outcome of her naivety. She, like many others at the time, probably failed to conceive how the whole thing would transpire in the years and decades to come. I believe, she finally realized the depth of the Jihadist crisis faced by Pakistan; and this time round, she was up for a fight against them. I, however, doubt her ability to do anything worthwhile to contain the Jihadist tide.
It is told that the Islamists have little support among the mainstream Pakistanis. But opinion polls have repeatedly proved that notion false. Since the 9/11, opinion polls have consistently demonstrated 45-51% popular support for Osama bin Laden among the Pakistanis.
It is a fact that the mindset of Pakistanis has become dominantly radicalized. Under such circumstance, it is doubtful that she, being a woman, was going to be accepted as the leader of the country by the mainstream Pakistanis. A photo of her wearing a mini skirt was making rounds in the internet and among Pakistani communities, attracting negative comments. The Islamists were going to expose her on the grounds of her previous un-Islamic life-style. Her being a woman and her previous life-style were going to be useful weapons to the Islamists for further fanaticizing the minds of Pakistanis. They were going to bring her down sooner or later.
Yet, it would have been interesting to see how she was going to fight former Islamist protégés. Now that she has gone, my biggest hope at the first moment was that her death could probably galvanize the half-hearted secularists of Pakistan onto a single platform and wage a united confrontation against the Jihadists. It should be realized that the greatest Jihadist danger the world faces today lies in nuclear-weaponized Pakistan, not Afghanistan or Iraq. The stability of Afghanistan is also intimately related to the situation in Pakistan, and the outcome in Afghanistan will ultimately influence the outcome in Iraq.
The way the Talibanized elements are spreading their hold block by block in Pakistan already extending their tentacles to all major cities ― it only about time before Pakistan falls at the hands of Jihadists. Pakistan can avoid becoming another Afghanistan only if all the highly divisive secular and semi-secular secular and half-secular forces join hands and stand up against the Islamists. Benazir Bhutto’s death was a real opportunity for them to come onto a single platform.
Instead, the Pakistani society has become even more divisive in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Today no prominent leader in Pakistan is more secular than Musharraf despite his tainted past. Neither does anyone else grasp the depth of crisis and the need to firmly deal with it, as does he. There was a strong likelihood that following the election, the parties of Benazir and President Musharraf would join together to form an anti-Jihadist platform. However Pakistanis have almost unequivocally pointed fingers at President Musharraf and his ally America and to Israel and India for Bhutto’s assassination. This has further shaken Musharraf’s already tenuous position.
Muslims are adamant that they will not point fingers at the Islamists, the guardians of the “religion of peace,” who can do nothing wrong. This wrong finger-pointing taints the secular fronts leaving the real culprits, namely the Islamists, clean and emboldened, accelerating their cruise to power.
Ominously for Pakistan, the Islamist politicians have already emerged as the power brokers. Bhutto’s death has only made them stronger. She has been a blessing to the Islamists in her death as she was in life during her time in power.
Benazir Bhutto: In Life and Death, a Blessing to the Jihadists
Written by Alamgir Hussain
Published January 07, 2008
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/01/07/010043.php
I was shocked and saddened as the story of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination suddenly popped up while browsing news at the dead of night on 27 December 2007. She was probably the only one able to put the house in order in Pakistan. Now that she is gone, it could well be the end of salvaging Pakistan from the hands of the Islamists. However, I held hope that this was probably the wake-up call, which Pakistanis might heed and rise up against the death-cult of the Jihadists.
After her death, Ms Bhutto has emerged as an icon of secularism and modernity in the Islamic world, a courageous political leader and a champion democrat, a champion of women’s rights, and a fighter against the Jihadists. Her death has been compared to Gandhi’s and her political struggle to Aung San Suu Kyi’s. She was going to replace the rogue dictatorship of President Musharraf to institute democracy and secularism in Pakistan.
In a thoughtful analysis, however, it turns out that the majority of these epithets bestowed on her career and legacy are not accurate. Her most devastating action, not only for Pakistan but also for the whole world, was her patronization of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and fueling of separatist Jihad in Kashmir.
It is not right to put all the blame on her for the support that the Taliban and Kashmiri militants received during her tenure as Prime Minister (PM), because the Pakistan intelligence services (ISI) and the military are too powerful for the PM to call the shots alone. Yet, she must accept her share of eager complicity.
Let us explore the Jihadi world of Benazir Bhutto. As the Islamist separatist movement was heating up in Kashmir, she walked into the field to fuel the Jihad in Kashmir. In addressing a huge congregation, she said:
“The people of Kashmir do not fear death, because they are Muslim. The Kashmiris have the blood of the Mujahids [Jihadists] and Ghazis [infidel slayers]. The Kashmiris have the blood of Mujahideens, because Kashmiris are the heir of Prophet Muhammad, Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Umar.”
In inciting even the women of Kashmir to Jihad, she said:
“And the brave women of Kashmir ― they know how to fight and also to live. And when they live, they do so with dignity.”
She added:
“From every village [of Kashmir] only one voice will emerge, “Freedom.” From every school, only one voice will merge, “Freedom.” Every child will shout: Freedom, freedom, freedom.”
After becoming PM for the second time, she told William Dalrymple in 1994 about her support of the Jihadists of Kashmir:
"India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir… India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression."
These rabble-rousing statements speak volume of Benazir Bhutto’s eager support for the Kashmiri separatists, clearly inspired by her Jihadi zeal. The Islamic separatist movement in Kashmir started getting backing from Pakistan since 1990, when well-trained Jihadists started crossing border to join the Kashmiri guerrillas. During her second term (1993-1996), both foreign and local Jihadists started pouring into Kashmir in ever greater number. The result was a large-scale pogrom of native Kashmiri Hindus. No less than 60,000 people have died, many more have been handicapped or mutilated, while nearly half a million Kashmiri Hindus have been evicted from their ancestral homes, who languish in refugee-shelters elsewhere in India.
Benazir Bhutto was, therefore, not a brave warrior against extremism and terrorism as commentators have propagandized over the last few days. Undeniably, she had an unstinted support for the Kashmiri Jihad movement. She had a similar support, on the other side of border, for the Taliban militia, who captured power in Afghanistan during her second term as unimpeded assistance flowed to them from Pakistan. It is impossible to discount the role of ISI and the military in Pakistan’s support for the Kashmir and Afghan Islamist militias during her tenure. But, inspired by her religious zeal, she obviously had whole-hearted support for them.
During Bhutto’s stewardship, the Islamist militia power peaked in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, thanks to the unstinted support from Pakistan. The havoc, wrecked by Islamist terrorists today in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is the harvest of what was seeded or nurtured and inspired by her. Her death is basically a fruit of the seed she herself had planted. Unfortunately, thousands of otherwise innocent men, women and children have also been victim of it and many more to follow in coming years and decades. I see more reason to mourn for those thousands of the victims, the innocent Hindus of India in particular, of the Jihad, she nurtured and helped flourish.
A Harvard- and Oxford-educated liberated woman, she became first Prime Minister of a powerful Muslim state in 1988 at the young age of 35. But she did absolutely nothing to alleviate the despicable treatment of women in Pakistani society. She helped the Taliban sweep into power, who became the worst oppressor of women in living memory. Nearly an entire generation of Afghan women lost their rights, freedom, and dignity. She never lodged a strong protest against the mistreatment of Afghan women by her Taliban protégés. So much for a champion of women’s right!
Furthermore, her support for the Kashmiri Jihadist was meant for creating another Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. India, since her birth, has established as a sustainable secular democracy with credible records in the rule of law, freedom and liberty, human rights, and the rights of women and minorities, which definitely rate much better than those of Pakistan. Her support for breaking Kashmir away from India to transform it into something like Pakistan or Afghanistan, does not make a her champion of democracy, secularism or women’s rights either. Instead, her encouragement of the Kashmiris to be peaceful part of India probably could.
William Dalrymple is obviously correct in asserting that she “did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan's becoming the region's principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.”
Among the epithets accorded to her, she probably deserved to be called a brave person. She, defying ominous threat to her life from Islamic terrorists, returned to Pakistan and gave her life at the hands of a death-cult, she had propped up.
Moreover, although her actions, especially her support for the Jihadists in Kashmir and Afghanistan, were meant for the undoing of secularism ― she was, I believe, a truly secular-minded woman. She belonged to a secular family and grew up in the West, where lived the life of freedom and liberty and donned western dresses before her return to Pakistan.
Her support for the Jihadists was probably an outcome of her naivety. She, like many others at the time, probably failed to conceive how the whole thing would transpire in the years and decades to come. I believe, she finally realized the depth of the Jihadist crisis faced by Pakistan; and this time round, she was up for a fight against them. I, however, doubt her ability to do anything worthwhile to contain the Jihadist tide.
It is told that the Islamists have little support among the mainstream Pakistanis. But opinion polls have repeatedly proved that notion false. Since the 9/11, opinion polls have consistently demonstrated 45-51% popular support for Osama bin Laden among the Pakistanis.
It is a fact that the mindset of Pakistanis has become dominantly radicalized. Under such circumstance, it is doubtful that she, being a woman, was going to be accepted as the leader of the country by the mainstream Pakistanis. A photo of her wearing a mini skirt was making rounds in the internet and among Pakistani communities, attracting negative comments. The Islamists were going to expose her on the grounds of her previous un-Islamic life-style. Her being a woman and her previous life-style were going to be useful weapons to the Islamists for further fanaticizing the minds of Pakistanis. They were going to bring her down sooner or later.
Yet, it would have been interesting to see how she was going to fight former Islamist protégés. Now that she has gone, my biggest hope at the first moment was that her death could probably galvanize the half-hearted secularists of Pakistan onto a single platform and wage a united confrontation against the Jihadists. It should be realized that the greatest Jihadist danger the world faces today lies in nuclear-weaponized Pakistan, not Afghanistan or Iraq. The stability of Afghanistan is also intimately related to the situation in Pakistan, and the outcome in Afghanistan will ultimately influence the outcome in Iraq.
The way the Talibanized elements are spreading their hold block by block in Pakistan already extending their tentacles to all major cities ― it only about time before Pakistan falls at the hands of Jihadists. Pakistan can avoid becoming another Afghanistan only if all the highly divisive secular and semi-secular secular and half-secular forces join hands and stand up against the Islamists. Benazir Bhutto’s death was a real opportunity for them to come onto a single platform.
Instead, the Pakistani society has become even more divisive in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Today no prominent leader in Pakistan is more secular than Musharraf despite his tainted past. Neither does anyone else grasp the depth of crisis and the need to firmly deal with it, as does he. There was a strong likelihood that following the election, the parties of Benazir and President Musharraf would join together to form an anti-Jihadist platform. However Pakistanis have almost unequivocally pointed fingers at President Musharraf and his ally America and to Israel and India for Bhutto’s assassination. This has further shaken Musharraf’s already tenuous position.
Muslims are adamant that they will not point fingers at the Islamists, the guardians of the “religion of peace,” who can do nothing wrong. This wrong finger-pointing taints the secular fronts leaving the real culprits, namely the Islamists, clean and emboldened, accelerating their cruise to power.
Ominously for Pakistan, the Islamist politicians have already emerged as the power brokers. Bhutto’s death has only made them stronger. She has been a blessing to the Islamists in her death as she was in life during her time in power.
US Navy prepared to fire on Iran boats after standoff in major oil shipping route
Last updated at 15:29pm on 7th January 2008
The U.S. Navy came close to opening fire on five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats after they radioed a threat to blow up the American sailors.
The U.S claims its boats were harassed and provoked in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route off the Iranian coast.
According to reports the Iranian vessels came within 200 yards of the U.S. ships in international waters in the strait on Saturday, and U.S. sailors almost opened fire.
U.S. military officials said the boats were "attack craft" that they believed were operated by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
"Five Iranian speedboats pretty much swarmed three US warships as they were transiting through international waters," said an official.
The Iranian boats made threatening manoeuvres against the U.S. warships and threatening radio transmissions, the officials said.
The captain of one U.S. vessel was in the process of giving the order to shoot when the Iranian ships began turning away.
A U.S. Navy source told CNN that a radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes.".
After the threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships' guns and were very close to opening fire.
In Tehran, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman had no immediate comment when asked about the report.
The incident occurred on the eve of a visit to the Middle East by U.S. President George W. Bush, who said last week that one of the aims of his trip was to counter Iran's ambitions in the region.
Washington has been engaged in a long standoff with Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.
Oil prices rose about 30 cents to over $98 a barrel after the report, with traders citing increased risk of disruptions to oil shipments along the key shipping route.
It's not the first time Iranian boats have caused havoc for British and American Navy ships.
In May last year, 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were captured by Iranian gunboats in international waters in the northern Gulf.
The 15 British armed services personnel that were held captive by Iran
The 14 men and female sailor Faye Turney were seized during boarding operations near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway which divides Iraq and Iran.
They were lightly armed miles away from their mother ship HMS Cornwall which was unable to help, while the ship's helicopter which had been circling overhead had left the scene - allowing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to pounce in heavily-armed gunboats.
Critics claim the fiasco not only undermined the Navy's reputation but also exposed a lack of appropriate heavily-armed patrol boats, as HMS Cornwall was unable to sail into shallow waters to support the boardings.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770
Last updated at 15:29pm on 7th January 2008
The U.S. Navy came close to opening fire on five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats after they radioed a threat to blow up the American sailors.
The U.S claims its boats were harassed and provoked in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route off the Iranian coast.
According to reports the Iranian vessels came within 200 yards of the U.S. ships in international waters in the strait on Saturday, and U.S. sailors almost opened fire.
U.S. military officials said the boats were "attack craft" that they believed were operated by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
"Five Iranian speedboats pretty much swarmed three US warships as they were transiting through international waters," said an official.
The Iranian boats made threatening manoeuvres against the U.S. warships and threatening radio transmissions, the officials said.
The captain of one U.S. vessel was in the process of giving the order to shoot when the Iranian ships began turning away.
A U.S. Navy source told CNN that a radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes.".
After the threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships' guns and were very close to opening fire.
In Tehran, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman had no immediate comment when asked about the report.
The incident occurred on the eve of a visit to the Middle East by U.S. President George W. Bush, who said last week that one of the aims of his trip was to counter Iran's ambitions in the region.
Washington has been engaged in a long standoff with Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.
Oil prices rose about 30 cents to over $98 a barrel after the report, with traders citing increased risk of disruptions to oil shipments along the key shipping route.
It's not the first time Iranian boats have caused havoc for British and American Navy ships.
In May last year, 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were captured by Iranian gunboats in international waters in the northern Gulf.
The 15 British armed services personnel that were held captive by Iran
The 14 men and female sailor Faye Turney were seized during boarding operations near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway which divides Iraq and Iran.
They were lightly armed miles away from their mother ship HMS Cornwall which was unable to help, while the ship's helicopter which had been circling overhead had left the scene - allowing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to pounce in heavily-armed gunboats.
Critics claim the fiasco not only undermined the Navy's reputation but also exposed a lack of appropriate heavily-armed patrol boats, as HMS Cornwall was unable to sail into shallow waters to support the boardings.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770
QUOTE(Marine @ Jan 7 2008, 10:34 AM) 
US Navy prepared to fire on Iran boats after standoff in major oil shipping route
Last updated at 15:29pm on 7th January 2008
The U.S. Navy came close to opening fire on five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats after they radioed a threat to blow up the American sailors.
The U.S claims its boats were harassed and provoked in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route off the Iranian coast.
According to reports the Iranian vessels came within 200 yards of the U.S. ships in international waters in the strait on Saturday, and U.S. sailors almost opened fire.
U.S. military officials said the boats were "attack craft" that they believed were operated by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
"Five Iranian speedboats pretty much swarmed three US warships as they were transiting through international waters," said an official.
The Iranian boats made threatening manoeuvres against the U.S. warships and threatening radio transmissions, the officials said.
The captain of one U.S. vessel was in the process of giving the order to shoot when the Iranian ships began turning away.
A U.S. Navy source told CNN that a radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes.".
After the threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships' guns and were very close to opening fire.
In Tehran, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman had no immediate comment when asked about the report.
The incident occurred on the eve of a visit to the Middle East by U.S. President George W. Bush, who said last week that one of the aims of his trip was to counter Iran's ambitions in the region.
Washington has been engaged in a long standoff with Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.
Oil prices rose about 30 cents to over $98 a barrel after the report, with traders citing increased risk of disruptions to oil shipments along the key shipping route.
It's not the first time Iranian boats have caused havoc for British and American Navy ships.
In May last year, 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were captured by Iranian gunboats in international waters in the northern Gulf.
The 15 British armed services personnel that were held captive by Iran
The 14 men and female sailor Faye Turney were seized during boarding operations near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway which divides Iraq and Iran.
They were lightly armed miles away from their mother ship HMS Cornwall which was unable to help, while the ship's helicopter which had been circling overhead had left the scene - allowing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to pounce in heavily-armed gunboats.
Critics claim the fiasco not only undermined the Navy's reputation but also exposed a lack of appropriate heavily-armed patrol boats, as HMS Cornwall was unable to sail into shallow waters to support the boardings.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770
Last updated at 15:29pm on 7th January 2008
The U.S. Navy came close to opening fire on five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats after they radioed a threat to blow up the American sailors.
The U.S claims its boats were harassed and provoked in the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route off the Iranian coast.
According to reports the Iranian vessels came within 200 yards of the U.S. ships in international waters in the strait on Saturday, and U.S. sailors almost opened fire.
U.S. military officials said the boats were "attack craft" that they believed were operated by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
"Five Iranian speedboats pretty much swarmed three US warships as they were transiting through international waters," said an official.
The Iranian boats made threatening manoeuvres against the U.S. warships and threatening radio transmissions, the officials said.
The captain of one U.S. vessel was in the process of giving the order to shoot when the Iranian ships began turning away.
A U.S. Navy source told CNN that a radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes.".
After the threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships' guns and were very close to opening fire.
In Tehran, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman had no immediate comment when asked about the report.
The incident occurred on the eve of a visit to the Middle East by U.S. President George W. Bush, who said last week that one of the aims of his trip was to counter Iran's ambitions in the region.
Washington has been engaged in a long standoff with Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.
Oil prices rose about 30 cents to over $98 a barrel after the report, with traders citing increased risk of disruptions to oil shipments along the key shipping route.
It's not the first time Iranian boats have caused havoc for British and American Navy ships.
In May last year, 15 British sailors and Royal Marines were captured by Iranian gunboats in international waters in the northern Gulf.
The 15 British armed services personnel that were held captive by Iran
The 14 men and female sailor Faye Turney were seized during boarding operations near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway which divides Iraq and Iran.
They were lightly armed miles away from their mother ship HMS Cornwall which was unable to help, while the ship's helicopter which had been circling overhead had left the scene - allowing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to pounce in heavily-armed gunboats.
Critics claim the fiasco not only undermined the Navy's reputation but also exposed a lack of appropriate heavily-armed patrol boats, as HMS Cornwall was unable to sail into shallow waters to support the boardings.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...in_page_id=1770
A Gulf of Tonkin sequel?
Or more probably a cat and mouse game reminiscent of the cold war-----striking coup but stopping just short of provoking hostility.
Perhaps it could be a manouver to drive oil prices up further.
Yes, and discussing the Iranian situation is certainly relevant to the actions taking place in Pakistan...
So, the US is ready to strike Iran militarily --- but not yet Pakistan where al Qaeda and the Taliban have grown in strength.
Yes, well it has become clear that the Bush Administration is less interesting in waging an effective war on terror than they are engaging in a tit for tat with oil producing nations.
So, the US is ready to strike Iran militarily --- but not yet Pakistan where al Qaeda and the Taliban have grown in strength.
Yes, well it has become clear that the Bush Administration is less interesting in waging an effective war on terror than they are engaging in a tit for tat with oil producing nations.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jan 7 2008, 11:47 AM)
Yes, and discussing the Iranian situation is certainly relevant to the actions taking place in Pakistan...
As equally relevant as the name of this thread.
Marine..
As relevant as the title of this thread?
Come on Marine. What is this grade school again?
I am certain you win a lot of arguments using this line of reasoning...
The posts above offer a stark example that Bush's approach in Pakistan in waging the war on terror against Al Qaeda and the Taliban is a failure.
The posts are relevant to the title.
The US has been backing one dictator after another for Pakistan.
Al Qaeda according the the NIE last year is as strong as it ever was. Transferring our intelligence assets from Afghanistan to Iraq allowed a resurgence. Iraq's al Qaeda terrorism financing efforts prior to the Iraq invasion were null --- but since the invasion they are massive according to the NIE. Imagine that, we always thought al Qaeda Pakistan was funding al Qaeda Iraq --- and we learn by the NIE that al Qaeda Iraq is actually funding al Qaeda Pakistan...
Why don't you craft an argument or provide some evidence to rebut mine --- or is that beyong your abilities at this stage of the discussion?
As relevant as the title of this thread?
Come on Marine. What is this grade school again?
I am certain you win a lot of arguments using this line of reasoning...
The posts above offer a stark example that Bush's approach in Pakistan in waging the war on terror against Al Qaeda and the Taliban is a failure.
The posts are relevant to the title.
The US has been backing one dictator after another for Pakistan.
Al Qaeda according the the NIE last year is as strong as it ever was. Transferring our intelligence assets from Afghanistan to Iraq allowed a resurgence. Iraq's al Qaeda terrorism financing efforts prior to the Iraq invasion were null --- but since the invasion they are massive according to the NIE. Imagine that, we always thought al Qaeda Pakistan was funding al Qaeda Iraq --- and we learn by the NIE that al Qaeda Iraq is actually funding al Qaeda Pakistan...
Why don't you craft an argument or provide some evidence to rebut mine --- or is that beyong your abilities at this stage of the discussion?
Marine, it seems like you are a lot angrier with folks in Iran than folks in Pakistan. I can understand how you feel that way. But I am not willing to be convinced by your feelings here, not when we are talking about the future of the world that my children have to live in.
Pakistan is a heck of a lot more central to the problem of international terrorism than Iran is. Period.
Your stuff about Iran here, which has some importance (so does the civil war going on in my wife's home country), is not central.
Pakistan is a heck of a lot more central to the problem of international terrorism than Iran is. Period.
Your stuff about Iran here, which has some importance (so does the civil war going on in my wife's home country), is not central.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jan 7 2008, 12:06 PM)
Marine..
As relevant as the title of this thread?
Come on Marine. What is this grade school again?
I am certain you win a lot of arguments using this line of reasoning...
The posts above offer a stark example that Bush's approach in Pakistan in waging the war on terror against Al Qaeda and the Taliban is a failure.
The posts are relevant to the title.
The US has been backing one dictator after another for Pakistan.
Al Qaeda according the the NIE last year is as strong as it ever was. Transferring our intelligence assets from Afghanistan to Iraq allowed a resurgence. Iraq's al Qaeda terrorism financing efforts prior to the Iraq invasion were null --- but since the invasion they are massive according to the NIE. Imagine that, we always thought al Qaeda Pakistan was funding al Qaeda Iraq --- and we learn by the NIE that al Qaeda Iraq is actually funding al Qaeda Pakistan...
Why don't you craft an argument or provide some evidence to rebut mine --- or is that beyong your abilities at this stage of the discussion?
As relevant as the title of this thread?
Come on Marine. What is this grade school again?
I am certain you win a lot of arguments using this line of reasoning...
The posts above offer a stark example that Bush's approach in Pakistan in waging the war on terror against Al Qaeda and the Taliban is a failure.
The posts are relevant to the title.
The US has been backing one dictator after another for Pakistan.
Al Qaeda according the the NIE last year is as strong as it ever was. Transferring our intelligence assets from Afghanistan to Iraq allowed a resurgence. Iraq's al Qaeda terrorism financing efforts prior to the Iraq invasion were null --- but since the invasion they are massive according to the NIE. Imagine that, we always thought al Qaeda Pakistan was funding al Qaeda Iraq --- and we learn by the NIE that al Qaeda Iraq is actually funding al Qaeda Pakistan...
Why don't you craft an argument or provide some evidence to rebut mine --- or is that beyong your abilities at this stage of the discussion?
Taz, you can play your games all you want. When you try to link problems in Pakistan as created by George Bush it is inane nonsense. It would be the same as blaming Ford or General Motors for someone ramming their car into a tree and killing themselves.
You have no solutions to the problems in Pakistan. You only want to blame somebody and as your history clearly indicates I'm surprised you haven't blamed George Bush for kicking Mrs. O'Leary's cow and starting the Chicago fire. That happened 76 years before Bush was even born but you've never let facts stand in your way before, eh?
When your arguments are framed in a manner which makes no sense, I'll decline to argue with you. My Grand Dad told us many times to never argue with a fool, because people watching won't be able to tell you part.
Marine, I am baffled.
At this point I would only be mildly surprised if in response to someone stating that Bush gave Musharraff too much support for too long that you might respond with something like George Bush knew Vincente Fox, the past President of Mexico, when he was running for President, proving that he was not so ignorant of foreign affairs as the Democrats said he was.
Your arguments are getting that disconnected.
At this point I would only be mildly surprised if in response to someone stating that Bush gave Musharraff too much support for too long that you might respond with something like George Bush knew Vincente Fox, the past President of Mexico, when he was running for President, proving that he was not so ignorant of foreign affairs as the Democrats said he was.
Your arguments are getting that disconnected.
Marine:
I will grant you that I have not spelled out solutions in detail yet to the problems in Pakistan.
However, the premise of the thread is to identify where Bush foreign policy has so far failed to achieve the results it was supposed to achieve with regard to the war on terror.
Certainly these articles taken some separately, and most definitely together spell out a failure in Bush foreign policy in terms of rooting out al Qaeda.
I have already mentioned the distraction into Iraq and its impact. Part of why a significant withdrawal of troops from Iraq is so important is so they can engage in the real war on terror and not the one created by the Bush invasion.
The security of Afghanistan is vital to the war on terrorism and the resurgence of the Taliban is disrupting this effort.
I would also suggest that more pressure needs to be brought to bear on Musharraf to allow the US forces into Pakistan to engage al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Bush was late to come to the decision to actually pursue al Qaeda in Pakistan after Barack Obama said it. Another Democratic idea stolen by the Bush Administration.
Finally, the greatest need to help fight the war on terror is a more stable Pakistan. It remains to be seen if Musharraf can provide that stability. There need to be elections. And there need to be credible candidates which can oppose Musharraf.
Isn't it interesting to you that al Qaeda was successful twice in attacking Benazir Bhutto as a friend of the US, when it is Musharraf who has supposedly been our friend since 9/11. I guess al Qaeda seems to feel more secure with Musharraf in power than with someone else. This should bother you.
I will grant you that I have not spelled out solutions in detail yet to the problems in Pakistan.
However, the premise of the thread is to identify where Bush foreign policy has so far failed to achieve the results it was supposed to achieve with regard to the war on terror.
Certainly these articles taken some separately, and most definitely together spell out a failure in Bush foreign policy in terms of rooting out al Qaeda.
I have already mentioned the distraction into Iraq and its impact. Part of why a significant withdrawal of troops from Iraq is so important is so they can engage in the real war on terror and not the one created by the Bush invasion.
The security of Afghanistan is vital to the war on terrorism and the resurgence of the Taliban is disrupting this effort.
I would also suggest that more pressure needs to be brought to bear on Musharraf to allow the US forces into Pakistan to engage al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Bush was late to come to the decision to actually pursue al Qaeda in Pakistan after Barack Obama said it. Another Democratic idea stolen by the Bush Administration.
Finally, the greatest need to help fight the war on terror is a more stable Pakistan. It remains to be seen if Musharraf can provide that stability. There need to be elections. And there need to be credible candidates which can oppose Musharraf.
Isn't it interesting to you that al Qaeda was successful twice in attacking Benazir Bhutto as a friend of the US, when it is Musharraf who has supposedly been our friend since 9/11. I guess al Qaeda seems to feel more secure with Musharraf in power than with someone else. This should bother you.
And Marine --- prove my "facts" wrong.
You post links --- I read the links. You post a response. I read it and respond.
What have I posted here that is not true?
Bush allying himself with Musharraf has proven a disaster. He only pressured Musharraf to adopt a more democratic regime once the NIE came out that the Taliban and al Qaeda were as strong as ever.
Afghanistan is yet to be stable.
So it is clear that Bush has so far failed regarding the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Once we reach common ground on this point, we can move on to
You post links --- I read the links. You post a response. I read it and respond.
What have I posted here that is not true?
Bush allying himself with Musharraf has proven a disaster. He only pressured Musharraf to adopt a more democratic regime once the NIE came out that the Taliban and al Qaeda were as strong as ever.
Afghanistan is yet to be stable.
So it is clear that Bush has so far failed regarding the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Once we reach common ground on this point, we can move on to