SPY EYES

The downing of a surveillance drone in Iran and missile attacks in Pakistan confirm suspicions that CIA is using Afghan soil to wage wars against neighbors. Russia and China are also exposed to US espionage from Afghanistan.

CIA is not only violating international borders but it has invited other spy agencies to do the same. Intelligence operatives from India, Jordan, and other US allies are encouraged by CIA to violate the law and enter Pakistan without permission. On 31 December 2009, a suicide attacker at a secret CIA outpost on the Pakistani border killed American and Jordanian spies. The embarrassment exposed how CIA and other spy agencies were jointly violating Pakistani sovereignty.

This is a key reason behind CIA and US military’s reluctance to leave Afghanistan. CIA has established intelligence outposts that target Iran, Pakistan and China, all immediate neighbors of Afghanistan.

The United States is quietly increasing Indian military and intelligence footprint in Afghanistan, which doesn’t even neighbor India.

Although American people have no appetite for more wars, CIA planners believe it would be a mistake to let go of a piece of land like Afghanistan that allows US spies to hide in the backyards of major powers in the region like Russia and China.

This secretive war by the CIA has not been sanctioned by US Congress and is illegal under international law. CIA officers who served in the region are open to murder charges because actions beyond Afghan borders violate the UN mandate for Afghanistan post-9/11. Rights activists in Pakistan are using this legal hole to pursue American gents in Pakistani courts.

For the same reason, legal experts working for the federal government in Islamabad have finalized recommendations for criminalizing CIA under UN and international law. Pakistan is contemplating internationalizing CIA violations in the next few weeks.

Suing CIA and US government for extrajudicial killings can open the door for copycat lawsuits covering a decade of CIA excesses and human rights violations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal belt. In fact, the situation is so bad in the Pakistani tribal region that there are reports about fatwas to target any CIA agent in Afghanistan and Pakistan in retaliation for killing thousands of innocent Pakistanis and Afghans as ‘collateral damage’.

Pakistanis evicted CIA from a small airbase last week that was suspected of being used against both Pakistan and Iran.

Afghan insurgents have long talked about seeing US-run training camps inside Afghanistan where terrorists and saboteurs train to infiltrate Muslim regions of western China.

CIA and allied spy services have established terror training camps to send saboteurs to Iran. Terrorists in Pakistan’s Balochistan province are fully backed by US government and intelligence. At least one if not more of those terrorists were shifted to Switzerland earlier this year after Pakistan exposed their safe havens in Kabul.

These and other actions by CIA are evidence to the double game that the United States has been playing in Afghanistan since 2002 which has alienated an ally like Pakistan.

A huge debate ensues inside Pakistan’s policy making circles about how the nation blundered in helping the Americans entrench themselves in the region with Pakistani help. Today the US is the single biggest cause of instability and war in the region. American scaremongering about Al-Qaeda presence and strength in the region is widely believed to be a smokescreen to avoid leaving Afghanistan.

Pakistan Nationalists