Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conspiracy. Show all posts
Less than a week after Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, returned home from a trip to Washington, an American drone killed Hakimullah Mehsud, a man who had terrorized all Pakistan as the leader of the country’s most dangerous militant group, the Pakistani Taliban.
With any other two countries, such a sequence of events might have been followed by an official nod to the cooperation involved — or at the very least, meaningful silence. But with the United States and Pakistan it’s always more complicated. Hours after the drone strike, Pakistan’s interior minister accused the United States of the “murder of peace efforts.” He later berated “enemies dressed as friends.”
It’s an old script. Regardless of whatever cooperation is involved, both countries always find it more useful to paint the other as the villain. The Pakistani government, which in reality is playing a central role in the war on terror, gets to paint itself as the victim of a bullying superpower.
Meanwhile, American officials keep pointing to Pakistan’s “double game” for most of their failures in Afghanistan, while downplaying the fact that, without Pakistan, this war would have been impossible to wage in the first place.
The real root of the dysfunction is not so much deceit between allies as the lies both governments have told their own people. Pakistani and American leaders have systematically and purposefully misled their own publics about the nature and details of their partnership. Each country has used the other as a strategic and convenient punching bag.
As an American born to Pakistani parents, fluent in the languages of both countries, I have spent the past 12 years regularly shuttling between the two countries and I’ve seen and heard the duplicitous official narratives steadily take root on each side.
Just days after 9/11, Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler of Pakistan, addressed his country in Urdu, telling them that America had asked Pakistan for cooperation in intelligence sharing, the use of Pakistani airspace and logistical support. Mr. Musharraf made it clear that he’d decided to cooperate.
But that’s where the openness ended. In 2005, for example, when the Pakistani government announced that a senior Al Qaeda operative had died in an accidental bomb-making explosion in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Hayatullah Khan, a Pakistani investigative journalist travelled to the scene of the blast and found fragments of an American Hellfire missile. Mr. Khan was kidnapped and soon turned up dead. Presenting evidence that America could operate in Pakistani airspace turned out to be deadly.
Seven years later, the American public still doesn’t know much about what their country does in Pakistan. For years, Washington didn’t even recognize the use of drones there. Only recently, after leaks from inside the Obama administration forced officials to begin speaking about the details of the program, have Americans been able to piece together a basic outline.
The same is true of supply lines into landlocked Afghanistan. Within months of the 2001 invasion, Mr. Musharraf signed a deal allowing the transport of American and NATO military equipment through Pakistan. But the agreement was kept secret from the Pakistani people until 2010. The American government was no more candid with its own people. Americans never truly appreciated, for example, that since President George W. Bush was denied permission to dock U.S. Navy vessels in Pakistani ports, America was forced to outsource nearly the entire American military supply chain into the hands of private contractors close to the Pakistani military.
The decision to hide and obscure such details was born of a desire to control the precarious narrative of the war at home. Insecure Pakistani leaders always feared that details of the cooperation would destabilize their already shaky regimes. Likewise, Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama likely thought that publicly acknowledging the compromises they’d made to win Pakistan’s support, might make them appear weak. Keeping their citizens in the dark, leaders in both nations seemed to think, would keep the cooperation simple.
The result has been quite the opposite. The stark disconnect between reality and rhetoric now makes both governments’ pronouncements sound absurd. There have been more than 300 American drone strikes in a remote corner of Pakistan. And while Islamabad continues to denounce these strikes, Pakistani citizens see thousands of trucks carrying huge shipping containers on the highways every day, bringing supplies to the American military in Afghanistan. Likewise, Americans have learned that billions of dollars in aid is still flowing to Pakistan, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden was living a mile away from Pakistan’s main military academy for years.
The resulting confusion is making Americans and Pakistanis hate each other. A Pew Research Center poll in July found that America is more disliked in Pakistan than anywhere else. A Gallup poll a few months earlier found that the countries most disliked by Americans are Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.
The lies that were meant to hold Pakistan and America together in a time of war, are now imperiling the alliance they were meant to protect.
The two countries have been geopolitical allies since Pakistan appeared on the map in 1947. In the interest of preserving this long-term relationship, which will remain vital to both countries long after the American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the details of the agreements between Pakistan and America must be made public. In the end, Americans and Pakistanis want the same thing — the truth, for once, from their leaders.
Shahan Mufti is the author of “The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War.”
INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES
KABUL, Afghanistan — A bungled attempt by the Afghan government to cultivate a shadowy alliance with Islamist militants escalated into the latest flash point in the troubled relationship between Afghanistan and the United States, according to new accounts by officials from both countries.
The disrupted plan involved Afghan intelligence trying to work with the Pakistan Taliban, allies of Al Qaeda, in order to find a trump card in a baroque regional power game that is likely to intensify after the American withdrawal next year, the officials said. And what started the hard feelings was that the Americans caught them red-handed.
Tipped off to the plan, United States Special Forces raided an Afghan convoy that was ushering a senior Pakistan Taliban militant, Latif Mehsud, to Kabul for secret talks last month, and now have Mr. Mehsud in custody.
Publicly, the Afghan government has described Mr. Mehsud as an insurgent peace emissary. But according to Afghan officials, the ultimate plan was to take revenge on the Pakistani military.
In the murk of intrigue and paranoia that dominates the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistanis have long had the upper hand. A favorite complaint of Afghan officials is how Pakistani military intelligence has sheltered and nurtured the Taliban and supported their insurgency against the Afghan government.
Now, not content to be merely the target of a proxy war, the Afghan government decided to recruit proxies of its own by seeking to aid the Pakistan Taliban in their fight against Pakistan’s security forces, according to Afghan officials. And they were beginning to make progress over the past year, they say, before the American raid exposed them.
Although Afghan anger over the raid has been an open issue since it was revealed in news reports this month, it is only now that the full purpose of the Afghan operation that prompted the raid has been detailed by American and Afghan officials. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss secret intelligence matters.
The thinking, Afghan officials said, was that the Afghans could later gain an advantage in negotiations with the Pakistani government by offering to back off their support for the militants.
Aiding the Pakistan Taliban was an “opportunity to bring peace on our terms,” one senior Afghan security official said.
From the American standpoint, though, it has exposed a new level of futility in the war effort here. Not only has Washington failed to persuade Pakistan to stop using militants to destabilize its neighbors — a major American foreign policy goal in recent years — but its failure also appears to have persuaded Afghanistan to try the same thing.
Worse still, for American officials, was the Afghans’ choice of militant allies. Though the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban are operationally distinct, they are loosely aligned; the Pakistani insurgents, for instance, pledge allegiance to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Afghan Taliban. In the estimation of American officials, support for one invariably bleeds into assistance for the other.
At the same time, the Pakistan Taliban shares its base in the tribal areas of Pakistan with a number of Islamist groups that have tried to mount attacks in the West, including the remnants of Al Qaeda’s original leadership. The Pakistan Taliban have also showed a willingness to strike beyond the region, unlike the Afghan Taliban. Mr. Mehsud, for instance, is suspected of having a role in the foiled plot to detonate a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, American officials said.
American officials said they were also worried that the Afghan actions would give credibility to Pakistani complaints that enemies based in Afghanistan presented them with a threat equivalent to the Afghan insurgency. No one in the Western intelligence community believes the comparison to be anywhere close, given that the Afghan Taliban insurgency, with help from its Pakistani allies, has killed tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan in the past 12 years, including more than 2,000 Americans.
“What were they thinking?” said one American official of his Afghan counterparts.
Both Afghan and American officials said the Afghan plan to aid the Pakistan Taliban was in its preliminary stages when Mr. Mehsud was seized by American forces. But they agree on little else.
American officials interviewed about the raid say they saved Afghanistan from folly. Pakistan’s use of militants has left that country torn by violence with group after group spinning out of the government’s control — the Pakistan Taliban being Exhibit A. The Americans also said it was not clear how much help the Afghans could actually provide the Pakistan Taliban.
In the Afghan telling, the theft of their prized intelligence asset is an egregious example of American bullying, and President Hamid Karzai remains furious about it. Afghan officials assert that Mr. Mehsud’s continued detention could still derail a pact to keep American troops here beyond next year, despite the progress toward reaching a deal made during talks this month between Mr. Karzai and Secretary of State John Kerry.
Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said that Mr. Mehsud had been in contact with officials from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, for “a long period of time.”
The Pakistan Taliban leader “was part of an N.D.S. project like every other intelligence agency is doing,” Mr. Faizi said in an apparent reference to the support provided to the Afghan Taliban by Pakistan intelligence. “He was cooperating. He was engaged with the N.D.S. — this I can confirm.”
Mr. Faizi did not elaborate on the nature of the cooperation. But two other Afghan officials, when asked why they were willing to discuss such a potentially provocative plot, said Mr. Mehsud’s detention by the United States had already been exposed — it was firstreported by The Washington Post — ruining his value as an intelligence asset and sinking their plan.
As a consolation, the Afghan officials said they now wanted Pakistan to know that Afghanistan could play dirty as well. One said they would try again if given the opportunity.
Afghan officials dismissed American admonishments about the dangers of working with militants as the kind of condescension they have come to expect. No one in Mr. Karzai’s government was naïve enough to believe they could turn the Pakistan Taliban into a reliable proxy, said a former Afghan official familiar with the matter.
“I would describe what we wanted to do was foster a mutually beneficial relationship,” the former official said. “We’ve all seen that these people are nobodies — proxies.”
Another Afghan official said the logic of the region dictated the need for unseemly alliances. The United States, in fact, has relied on some of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords to fight the insurgency here, the official tartly noted.
“Everyone has an angle,” the official said. “That’s the way we’re thinking. Some people said we needed our own.”
Afghan officials said those people included American military officers and C.I.A. operatives. Frustrated by their limited ability to hit Taliban havens in Pakistan, some Americans suggested that the Afghans find a way to do it, they claimed.
So Afghanistan’s intelligence agency believed it had a green light from the United States when it was approached by Mr. Mehsud sometime in the past year.
After months of negotiations with Mr. Mehsud, the intelligence agency struck an initial deal, two Afghan officials said: Afghanistan would not harass Pakistan Taliban fighters sheltering in mountains along the border if the insurgents did not attack Afghan forces.
Still, the Afghans decided to keep their relationship with Mr. Mehsud a secret and did not tell American officials.
An American official briefed on Mr. Mehsud’s case said there was “absolutely no way” any American would encourage the Afghans to work with the Pakistan Taliban or do anything that could result in attacks on Pakistani forces or civilians, the official said.
“If they thought we’d approve,” the American official added, “why did they keep it a secret?”
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.
Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.
The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according tothe U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.
But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts.
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."
Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.
The CIA and the White House were both asked for comment on this story. By the time this story went to press, they had not responded. The Israeli intelligence services -- the Mossad -- were also contacted, in writing and by telephone, but failed to respond. As a policy, Israel does not confirm or deny its involvement in intelligence operations.
There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing campaign aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear program, though no evidence has emerged connecting recent acts of sabotage and killings inside Iran to Jundallah. Many reports have cited Israel as the architect of this covert campaign, which claimed its latest victim on Jan. 11 when a motorcyclist in Tehran slipped a magnetic explosive device under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a young Iranian nuclear scientist. The explosion killed Roshan, making him the fourth scientist assassinated in the past two years. The United States adamantly denies it is behind these killings.
According to one retired CIA officer, information about the false-flag operation was reported up the U.S. intelligence chain of command. It reached CIA Director of Operations Stephen Kappes, his deputy Michael Sulick, and the head of the Counterintelligence Center. All three of these officials are now retired. The Counterintelligence Center, according to its website, is tasked with investigating "threats posed by foreign intelligence services."
The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents.
"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told me. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."
Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.
"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry," a former intelligence officer said. "After all, it's hard to engage with a foreign government if they're convinced you're killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same."
A senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing -- a result that the officer attributed to "political and bureaucratic inertia."
"In the end," the officer noted, "it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat." Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush's national security team, pitting those who wondered "just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on" against those who argued that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.
The decision was controversial inside the CIA, where officials were forced to shut down "some key intelligence-gathering operations," a recently retired CIA officer confirmed. This action was followed in November 2010 by the State Department's addition of Jundallah to its list of foreign terrorist organizations -- a decision that one former CIA officer called "an absolute no-brainer."
Since Obama's initial order, U.S. intelligence services have received clearance to cooperate with Israel on a number of classified intelligence-gathering operations focused on Iran's nuclear program, according to a currently serving officer. These operations are highly technical in nature and do not involve covert actions targeting Iran's infrastructure or political or military leadership.
"We don't do bang and boom," a recently retired intelligence officer said. "And we don't do political assassinations."
Israel regularly proposes conducting covert operations targeting Iranians, but is just as regularly shut down, according to retired and current intelligence officers. "They come into the room and spread out their plans, and we just shake our heads," one highly placed intelligence source said, "and we say to them -- 'Don't even go there. The answer is no.'"
Unlike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the controversial exiled Iranian terrorist group that seeks the overthrow of the Tehran regime and is supported by former leading U.S. policymakers, Jundallah is relatively unknown -- but just as violent. In May 2009, a Jundallah suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, during a Shiite religious festival. The bombing killed 25 Iranians and wounded scores of others.
The attack enraged Tehran, which traced the perpetrators to a cell operating in Pakistan. The Iranian government notified the Pakistanis of the Jundallah threat and urged them to break up the movement's bases along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The Pakistanis reacted sluggishly in the border areas, feeding Tehran's suspicions that Jundallah was protected by Pakistan's intelligence services.
The 2009 attack was just one in a long line of terrorist attacks attributed to the organization. In August 2007, Jundallah kidnapped 21 Iranian truck drivers. In December 2008, it captured and executed 16 Iranian border guards -- the gruesome killings were filmed, in a stark echo of the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq at the hands of al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In July 2010, Jundallah conducted a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan outside a mosque, killing dozens of people, including members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The State Department aggressively denies that the U.S. government had or has any ties to Jundallah. "We have repeatedly stated, and reiterate again that the United States has not provided support to Jundallah," a spokesman wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal, following Jundallah's designation as a terrorist organization. "The United States does not sponsor any form of terrorism. We will continue to work with the international community to curtail support for terrorist organizations and prevent violence against innocent civilians. We have also encouraged other governments to take comparable actions against Jundallah."
A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article, suggested that the United States was offering covert support to Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are endangering American lives.
"This certainly isn't the first time this has happened, though it's the worst case I've heard of," former Centcom chief and retired Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation upon being informed of it. "But while false-flag operations are hardly new, they're extremely dangerous. You're basically using your friendship with an ally for your own purposes. Israel is playing with fire. It gets us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not."
The Israeli operation left a number of recently retired CIA officers sputtering in frustration. "It's going to be pretty hard for the U.S. to distance itself from an Israeli attack on Iran with this kind of thing going on," one of them told me.
Jundallah head Abdolmalek Rigi was captured by Iran in February 2010. Although initial reports claimed that he was captured by the Iranians after taking a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan, a retired intelligence officer with knowledge of the incident told me that Rigi was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers in Pakistan. The officer said that Rigi was turned over to the Iranians after the Pakistani government informed the United States that it planned to do so. The United States, this officer said, did not raise objections to the Pakistani decision.
Iran, meanwhile, has consistently claimed that Rigi was snatched from under the eyes of the CIA, which it alleges supported him. "It doesn't matter," the former intelligence officer said of Iran's charges. "It doesn't matter what they say. They know the truth."
Rigi was interrogated, tried, and convicted by the Iranians and hanged on June 20, 2010. Prior to his execution, Rigi claimed in an interview with Iranian media -- which has to be assumed was under duress -- that he had doubts about U.S. sponsorship of Jundallah. He recounted an alleged meeting with "NATO officials" in Morocco in 2007 that raised his suspicions. "When we thought about it we came to the conclusion that they are either Americans acting under NATO cover or Israelis," he said.
While many of the details of Israel's involvement with Jundallah are now known, many others still remain a mystery -- and are likely to remain so. The CIA memos of the incident have been "blue bordered," meaning that they were circulated to senior levels of the broader U.S. intelligence community as well as senior State Department officials.
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."
Courtesy: Foreign Policy
Libya has retreated from a claim that Moammar Gadhafi was killed by cross fire and says it will prosecute those guilty of killing him after his capture.The interim government changed its position after a week of sustained criticism of the ousted leader's captors, who used camera phones to record his final minutes.
Videos -- including images of a wounded Gadhafi apparently being sodomized with a stick or a knife or some other spike-shaped weapon -- caused widespread revulsion outside the country and strong denunciations by the transitional government's international backers.
National Transitional Council Vice Chairman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, a human-rights lawyer, said Libya would try to bring to justice anyone proven to have fired the shots that killed Gadhafi.
"Whoever is responsible for [Gaddafi's killing] will be judged and given a fair trial," he told the Saudi-owned Arabic-language al-Arabiya satellite news channel Thursday, explaining Libya's new government has "a code of ethics" for handling prisoners of war.
The killing was likely "an individual act and not an act of revolutionaries or the national army," Ghoga said.
A rebel fighter who identified himself as Senad el-Sadik el-Ureybi claimed in a leaked video a couple of days after Gadhafi's capture that he shot and killed the former ruler.
"We grabbed him. I hit him in the face," the fighter said in Arabic. "Some fighters wanted to take him away and that's when I shot him twice, in the head and in the chest."
He said he didn't like the idea of Gadhafi being caught alive. He also said if took a half hour for Gadhafi to die after being shot.
His account was not independently confirmed.
Whoever killed Gadhafi is widely known in Misurata, Libya, as is the Katiba Ghoran unit he belonged to, Britain's Guardian reported Friday.
Misuratan forces played important roles in the fall of Tripoli Aug. 21, and in and the south coastal city of Sirte, Libya, Oct. 20, where Gadhafi was captured, bloodied but alive, in a wastewater drain.
Gadhafi had tried to flee Sirte, as fighters battling the vestiges of his fallen regime wrested control of his hometown.
The ousted dictator died of bullet wounds to his head and chest on the way to a hospital, a post-mortem indicated.
Until now, the official account from Libya's fledgling government said Gadhafi was killed in cross fire in fighting with loyalists after his capture.
NTC Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil said Monday he ordered an inquiry to determine how Gadhafi was killed, suggesting the fatal bullets might have come from Gadhafi supporters who feared he would implicate them in atrocities if he survived and was put on trial.
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to lift the no-fly zone over Libya and cancel its authorization for military action Monday, despite an NTC request for NATO to stay until the end of the year to stop Gadhafi loyalists from fleeing to neighboring countries.
After the vote, NATO, which led the air campaign against the loyalists, confirmed it would cease operations by 11:59 p.m. Libyan time Monday, when it would hand control of Libyan air space back to local authorities.
Separately, Gadhafi son and previous heir-apparent Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, 39, was reported in Niger Friday.
The Guardian cited officials in Niger as saying Gadhafi planned to join his brother Saadi Gadhafi and former Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi in exile.
But it also cited LIbyan officials as saying the London-educated Saif al-Islam Gadhafi hoped to fly to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, for trial to avoid a fate like his father.
The court, which has no death penalty, issued an arrest warrant for him and Senussi for alleged crimes against humanity -- charges both men deny.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the SPY EYES Analysis and or its affiliates. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). SPY EYES Analysis and or its affiliates will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements and or information contained in this article.
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a congressional panel on Thursday that any Afghan-led peace process would have to include the Quetta Shura and its leader Mulla Omar.
Her statement before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs also emphasised several other key points reflecting a major change in US approach towards seeking a peaceful end to the Afghan conflict. “There is no solution in the region without Pakistan and no stable future in the region without a partnership.”
The US needs to negotiate with the Haqqani network while continuing to work with Pakistan to destroy the safe havens it has inside Fata.
The US aid to Pakistan should not be conditioned to disbanding Lashkar-i-Taiba. And the “real game-changer in the region” would be a stronger relationship between Pakistan and India.
Her statement indicated that the new US approach had evolved further after Secretary Clinton’s visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan last week where she discussed this strategy with the leaders of those two countries as well.
After the visit, she told the US media that the United States and Pakistan had reached 90-95 per cent agreement on the issues that at one stage appeared close to breaking up their relationship.
The lawmakers, who still seem upset with Pakistan over its alleged links to the militants, created several opportunities for the secretary to browbeat Pakistan but she refrained from doing so.
Congressman Steve Chabot, a Republican, asked Secretary Clinton if the US was prepared to negotiate with Mulla Omar. “And if so, under what circumstances and what would our conditions be?” he asked.
“Well, Congressman, the negotiations that would be part of any Afghan-led peace process would have to include the Quetta Shura and would have to include some recognition by the Quetta Shura which, based on everything we know, is still led by Mulla Omar, that they wish to participate in such a process,” she responded. “We are pursuing every thread of any kind of interest expressed.”
Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the panel’s chairperson, questioned the wisdom of engaging the Haqqani network while it continued to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan. “What’s the US strategy, crackdown or negotiate with the Haqqani network or a little bit of both,” she asked.
“It’s both,” said Secretary Clinton.
Later, while responding to Congressman Chabot, she said the US agreed to meet the Haqqani network because that the ISI had asked them to do so.
“This was done in part because I think the Pakistanis hope to be able to move the Haqqani network towards some kind of peace negotiation and the answer was an attack on our embassy” in Kabul.
The US still wanted to stay engaged with the Haqqani network to test whether these organisations had any willingness to negotiate in good faith, she told Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen.
“There is evidence going both ways, to be clear. Sometimes we hear that they will, that there are elements within each that wish to pursue that, and then other times that it’s off the table.” she added.
Secretary Clinton noted that only last week the US had launched a major military operation in Afghanistan that rounded up and eliminated more than 100 Haqqani network operatives. “And we are taking action to target the Haqqani leadership on both sides of the border,” she said. “We are already working with the Pakistanis to target those who are behind a lot of the attacks against Afghans and Americans.”
Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen asked Secretary Clinton to comment on a recent statement by Afghan President Hamid Karzai that if there was war between Pakistan and America, he would side with Pakistan.
Secretary Clinton said that as soon as she heard this statement, she asked the US ambassador in Kabul to figure out what Mr Karzai meant and the ambassador reported back that Mr Karzai was talking about the long history of cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular the refuge that Pakistan provided to millions of Afghans during the Soviet occupation.
“This was not at all about a war that anybody was predicting,” she said. Responding to a question about recent remarks by US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and former military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, who blamed Pakistan for continuing to support the militants, Secretary Clinton said that neither Mr Panetta nor Admiral Mullen ever questioned the need to stay engaged with Pakistan.
She said that everyone in the US administration believed that the Haqqanis had safe havens inside Pakistan and used these hideouts for attacking US and Afghan soldiers.
“And we also agree, however, … that there is no solution in the region without Pakistan and no stable future in the region without a partnership.”
Congressman Ed Royce, another Republican, reminded her that another congressional panel had asked the Obama administration to condition US assistance to Pakistan to shutting down the LeT and asked her if she was willing to do so.
“We have had intensive discussions with our Indian counterparts” on the LeT and on the attacks it allegedly carried out in India. But “I do not want to commit at this time to taking such a path because I think it’s important that there be further consideration of all of the implications,” Secretary Clinton said.
“Certainly, every time we meet with the Pakistanis, we press them on the LeT about the continuing failure, in our view, to fulfil all of the requirements necessary for prosecution related to the Mumbai attacks and we will continue to do so,” she said.
Secretary Clinton said that like the congressman, she too worried about the possibility that LeT attacks inside India could trigger yet another war between India and Pakistan. “And we discuss it in great depth with our Indian counterparts, because it is, first and foremost, a concern of theirs. It is obviously also concerning to us.”
Congressman Joe Wilson, also a Republican, noted that Pakistan was developing a most-favoured nation trade status with India and asked what the US could do to promote a level of trade and positive contact between India and Pakistan.
“Well, Congressman, I agree with you that the real game-changer in the region is not so much our bilateral relationship as the relationship between Pakistan and India. And the more that there can be progress, the more likely there can be even more progress,” the secretary said.
“So we have in Pakistan today a leadership, both civilian and military, that wants to see progress with India, and we have the same on the Indian side.”
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the SPY EYES Analysis and or its affiliates. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). SPY EYES Analysis and or its affiliates will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements and or information contained in this article.
Source - Original Link of this article is from www.dawn.com
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