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Attorney among six killed in Afghan suicide blast: governor
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) - A suicide bomber disguised as a beggar blew himself up inside a government building in Afghanistan Saturday, killing a state prosecutor and five other people, a provincial governor said.
Afghan provincial governor dies in car crash
Sat Sep 6, 2:03 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - The newly appointed governor of Afghanistan's rugged mountain province of Nuristan was killed when the car he was travelling in plunged into a river en route to Kabul, his deputy said Saturday.
Casualties feared as quake rattles Afghanistan
Sat Sep 6, 2:58 AM ET
KABUL (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 5.6 struck Afghanistan's Hindu Kush region on Saturday and officials said they expected casualties.
AP IMPACT: Afghans fed up with government, US
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 5, 7:10 PM ET
GHANI KHIEL, Afghanistan - The bearded, turbaned men gather beneath a large, leafy tree in rural eastern Nangarhar province. When Malik Mohammed speaks on their behalf, his voice is soft but his words are harsh.
US commander sees a 'slow win' in Afghanistan
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer Fri Sep 5, 3:52 PM ET
WASHINGTON - U.S.-led forces are achieving a "slow win" in Afghanistan, but the less-than-decisive approach must be accelerated soon, a key American commander there said Friday.
U.S. needs more troops in Afghanistan, commander says
But with Petraeus set to recommend slowing the drawdown in Iraq, more forces are unlikely to be available soon to deal with rising bloodshed.
By Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes Los Angeles Times Staff Writers September 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — A top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said Friday that he needed thousands of additional troops to combat violence along the border with Pakistan, a requirement that appears
China to equip major hospital in Afghan capital
September 06, 2008 People's Daily
The People's Republic of China after rebuilding one of the major hospitals in the Afghanistan capital Kabul has agreed to equip it with modern facilities, Afghan public Health Ministry said on Saturday.
Poll: U.S. confidence in Afghanistan low
Sept. 5, 2008
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Americans are becoming less optimistic about the situation in Afghanistan, a Harris poll indicated.
Pak stops overland oil supplies to US-led troops in Afghan
REZAUL H LASKAR ISLAMABAD, (PTI) Outlook India - Sep 06 1:06 AM
To mark its protest against the continuing cross-border raids by the US-led forces from Afghan soil, Pakistan today said it was suspending overland oil supplies to the coalition troops in the war-ravaged country.
Challenges that Pakistan's new president will face
The Associated Press Saturday, September 6, 2008
The following are some of the major challenges facing Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of slain ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was elected Pakistan's president by lawmakers Saturday.
Obama says Pakistan used U.S. aid to prepare for war against India
by: Myra MacDonald September 6th, 2008 Reuters UK
Senator Barack Obama has accused Pakistan of misusing U.S. military aid meant to help it fight al Qaeda and the Taliban to prepare for war against India. In an interview with Fox News he also says the United States
'Aid workers not killed because they were Canadian'
Newly appointed ambassador talks about Canada's role in Afghanistan
Scott Deveau , Canwest News Service Friday, September 05, 2008
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan - Canada's newly appointed ambassador to Afghanistan says he doesn't believe that two aid workers gunned down outside Kabul last month were targeted
Right at the Edge
New York Times, United States By DEXTER FILKINS September 5, 2008
I: The Border Incident
Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right
Asif Ali Zardari and the battle to hold Pakistan together
Daily Telegraph. By Ahmed Rashid 06/09/2008
It is a sign of the times in Pakistan that Asif Ali Zardari, the man most likely to be elected president today, had to move from his heavily fortified house in Islamabad to the even more heavily fortified prime minister's
Paralympics team off to Beijing
KABUL (PAN): A five member Afghan Paralympics delegation left Kabul for China on Sunday to participate in the Beijing Paralympics games which is set to be held from September 6 to September 15.
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Attorney among six killed in Afghan suicide blast: governor
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) - A suicide bomber disguised as a beggar blew himself up inside a government building in Afghanistan Saturday, killing a state prosecutor and five other people, a provincial governor said.
The bomber, who had explosives strapped to his body, had tried several offices in the building in the town of Zaranj on the southwestern border with Iran before entering that of the attorney, Nimroz province governor told AFP.
Once inside, he blew himself up, bringing down the whole single-storey building, Governor Ghulam Dastgir Azad said.
"We have recoverd so far six bodies," he said. The dead were provincial attorney Anwar Shah Khan, who had worked on intelligence matters, his 20-year-old son, and his deputy and three civilians, Azad said.
"The whole building has collapsed. There might be more casualties," the governor said.
The bomber had been able to get past an outer security gate because guards had taken shelter from a sandstorm in the desert province, Azad said.
People were searching under the rubble for more victims, police said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
There has been a wave of suicide blasts in Afghanistan in the past three years, most of them claimed by Taliban extremists who are waging an insurgency against the US-backed government in Kabul.
The Taliban were in government between 1996 and 2001 when they were ousted in an invasion led by the United States and supported by Afghan anti-Taliban factions.
They have regrouped to put up an insurgency that is said to have support from other extremist factions, including Al-Qaeda, and radical elements based across the border in Pakistan.
The Afghan government is supported by about 54,000 soldiers in a NATO-led force and a few thousand more in a separate US-led force as it fights to rebuild its security forces and fight back the extremists.
A top US commander working in Afghanistan, Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, said Friday he needs more troops to counter growing insurgent violence amid signs the rebels were preparing for a winter campaign for the first time.
"I do believe that the level of significant activities, maybe violence, will be higher than any previous winter since 2002," Schloesser said in a video teleconference to Washington from his base in eastern Afghanistan.
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Afghan provincial governor dies in car crash
Sat Sep 6, 2:03 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - The newly appointed governor of Afghanistan's rugged mountain province of Nuristan was killed when the car he was travelling in plunged into a river en route to Kabul, his deputy said Saturday.
Hazrat Din Noor, 55, was killed Friday along with his driver and a bodyguard in the Sarobi area roughly 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the capital, deputy governor Halim Nuristani told AFP.
A former commander in the anti-Soviet resistance, Noor had replaced Tamim Nuristani who was sacked days after speaking out against July 4 US-led air strikes said to have killed 17 civilians.
The reasons for his dismissal were not made clear and it was not certain if it was related to his comments on the casualties.
Nuristan, one of 34 provinces in Afghanistan, is in the Hindu Kush mountains on the border with Pakistan.
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Casualties feared as quake rattles Afghanistan
Sat Sep 6, 2:58 AM ET
KABUL (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 5.6 struck Afghanistan's Hindu Kush region on Saturday and officials said they expected casualties.
The quake, centered 275 km (170 miles) northeast of Kabul, was also felt across parts of northern Pakistan and India, including the respective capitals Islamabad and New Delhi, reporters said.
"The quake was very strong and lasted for 10 seconds. We are expecting casualties because the earthquake was very strong but at the moment we don't have any reports," Munshi Abdul Majid, the governor of the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, where the epicenter was located, told Reuters.
The U.S. Geological Survey said on its website the quake's magnitude was 5.6 and the epicenter was at a depth of 177 km (110 miles) and 65 km (40 miles) south of the city of Faizabad.
"All my colleagues ran out of office," a Reuters reporter in northeastern Kunar province said.
About 73,000 people were killed in northern Pakistan by a powerful earthquake in October 2005.
(Reporting by Tahir Qadiry; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by David Fogarty)
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AP IMPACT: Afghans fed up with government, US
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer Fri Sep 5, 7:10 PM ET
GHANI KHIEL, Afghanistan - The bearded, turbaned men gather beneath a large, leafy tree in rural eastern Nangarhar province. When Malik Mohammed speaks on their behalf, his voice is soft but his words are harsh. Mohammed makes it clear that the tribal chiefs have lost all faith in both their own government and the foreign soldiers in their country.
Such disillusionment is widespread in Afghanistan, feeding an insurgency that has killed 195 foreign soldiers so far this year, 105 of them Americans.
"This is our land. We are afraid to send our sons out the door for fear the American troops will pick them up," says Mohammed, who was chosen by the others to represent them. "Daily we have headaches from the troops. We are fed up. Our government is weak and corrupt and the American soldiers have learned nothing."
A strong sense of frustration echoed through dozens of interviews by The Associated Press with Afghan villagers, police, government officials, tribal elders and Taliban who left and rejoined the religious movement. The interviews ranged from the capital, Kabul, to the rural regions near the border with Pakistan.
The overwhelming result: Ordinary Afghans are deeply bitter about American and NATO forces because of errant bombs, heavy-handed searches and seizures and a sense that the foreigners do not understand their culture. They are equally fed up with what they see as seven years of corruption and incompetence in a U.S.-backed government that has largely failed to deliver on development.
Even with more foreign troops, Afghanistan is now less secure.
"It certainly is a mess. Security is the worst that it has been for years. Corruption is out of control. It impacts every single Afghan," says Doug Wankel, a burly 62-year-old American who coordinated Washington's anti-drug policy in Afghanistan from 2004 until 2007 and is now back as a security consultant. "What people have to understand is that what ordinary Afghans think really does matter."
The fear and fury is evident among the neighbors at Akhtar Mohammed's walled home deep within Nangarhar province, reached by a dirt road along a dirty brown canal. A dozen men lie on traditional rope beds beneath a thatched roof. Some wear the full-bodied beard of the devout, with a clean-shaven upper lip. Others have dyed their gray beards a flaming orange with henna to show that they have made the pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca.
They live barely an hour's drive from an errant bombing last month that hit a wedding party and killed about 50 people. Khiel Shah says his home was raided two months earlier, and troops killed his nephew, a high school student.
An old man sits by moaning, "No, no, they weren't Taliban. They were going to the bathroom. They weren't even carrying guns."
Villagers want to know why people who give false information are not arrested, and they say American soldiers still can't sift the good intelligence from the bad.
"But now this is seven years. I am hopeless. They haven't learned until now," says Akhtar Mohammed.
NATO's top Gen. David D. McKiernan blames civilian deaths on insurgents who hide among the population. But the problem could also be one of strategy, says Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador and National Security Council staff member.
"There is a contradiction between wanting to minimize Afghan civilian casualties and minimizing U.S. military casualties," he says. "For the former, we should go on the ground. For the latter, go in from the air."
An air strike in Herat province about two weeks ago killed dozens of people. A U.S. investigation concluded that most were Taliban, but the Afghan government and the United Nations say up to 90 civilians died, including children.
Villagers say the U.S. does not understand how complex alliances, violence and even drugs play out in their culture. The eyes of elderly Malik Bakhtiar well with tears as he recalls his brother's arrest by U.S. troops for apparently running a drug laboratory in his home. In certain regions of Afghanistan, people grow opium for their livelihood.
"They don't understand us," Bakhtiar says. "Every house has a gun. Every house has opium."
Inside the walled compound of the Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul, workers are knee-deep in statistics that measure the dissatisfaction of Afghans. An army of workers crisscrossed 33 of the country's 34 provinces and took the opinions of 15,200 people, mostly in rural areas. The survey has not been released, but Ahmad Nader Nadery, the commissioner, gave The AP a preview.
The survey, done annually for the past three years, shows a steady deterioration in the social and economic stability of Afghans, Nadery says. Average debt last year was $1,000 and is now 20 percent higher. And up to 73 percent of Afghans say they cannot go to the government for help unless they have money or power.
"Elders say when they go to government officials, they face humiliation," Nadery says in his cramped ground floor office.
Najib, a policeman who asks not to be identified beyond his first name for fear of losing his job, reflects the general anger.
Since he joined Afghanistan's police force in 2001, he has been mistakenly bombed by a U.S. airplane that killed seven of his colleagues. He has paid bribes to government officials, he says, and taken bribes to balance his books. He recalls watching a friend buy a police job for $2,000, and notes that posts with better opportunities for bribery are available for upward of $10,000.
Corruption has made it easier for the Taliban to infiltrate police ranks and carry out lethal attacks, according to Najib.
"The president is crying, but nothing has changed," says Najib, who still walks with a limp from the U.S. bombing. "People are unhappy, and more and more it will become difficult for the Americans and good for the Taliban. These people (U.S. troops) are not making one mistake, but they are making one thousand mistakes and they are killing many people."
In an exclusive interview with the AP, President Hamid Karzai said the mistakes of troops are seriously undermining his government. But he also spoke candidly about what he described as his failure and gave a frank assessment of his track record, as he prepares to run for re-election next year. He said he had achieved some but not all of his goals for Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan does not have a properly functioning government yet," he said. "With regard to corruption, it's a deeper problem, it's an Afghan problem. It's the problem of an inefficient government machinery. ... It's a problem of so much money coming into Afghanistan, it's a problem of the international presence."
It is now so dangerous outside the capital that Afghans are afraid to travel hundreds of miles of newly-paved roads, and most international aid groups have forbidden their staff to do so altogether. Truck drivers who have no choice often say thieves and thieving police are a bigger worry than the Taliban.
"An Afghan trucker put it succinctly: 'Forget the Taliban, our biggest problems are with the police,'" says Seth Jones, an analyst with the U.S.-based RAND Corporation and author of a report on the rise of Afghanistan's insurgency.
Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashery puts the corruption level at barely 20 percent of the force, and says efforts are being made to tackle it. But many Afghans think otherwise.
Kidnappings in Kabul are in the double digits this year, according to the attorney general's office, and Afghans suspect police involvement. Most are for ransom rather than because of politics.
In the meantime, the Taliban is advancing.
Moiabullah, a black-bearded Taliban from the troubled province of Ghazni, fled to Iran after the Taliban collapsed in 2001 but returned several months ago.
"People are fed up with this government," he says. "No one is working honestly. If you provide a good life, factory or jobs, of course no one will follow Mullah Omar (the Taliban leader)."
Out at the heavily fortified, sprawling U.S. military base at Bagram, north of Kabul, Brig. Gen. Mark Milley says the Taliban and al-Qaida are enemy number one, and corruption is enemy number two. But he claims the troops are inching forward in bringing security to the country.
"The western forces, international forces, Americans in particular are the most disciplined in our use of deadly force," says Milley, the deputy commanding general of operations. "We think we are succeeding."
Back at the tribal council, or shura, in Nangarhar, the eldest of the elders disagrees.
"It is a shame for them," says Abdul Samad, a tall, lanky man in his seventies with a silver beard on his gaunt face. "It was a good opportunity after the Taliban. But it is gone."
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US commander sees a 'slow win' in Afghanistan
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer Fri Sep 5, 3:52 PM ET
WASHINGTON - U.S.-led forces are achieving a "slow win" in Afghanistan, but the less-than-decisive approach must be accelerated soon, a key American commander there said Friday.
Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, in a video conference with reporters at the Pentagon, said he remains hopeful that the Bush administration will send him more combat troops and other resources by winter.
He mentioned that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is by necessity an "economy of force" mission, meaning it is under-resourced because the war in Iraq is considered a higher and more urgent national security priority.
"We need to get away from that, over time," to make a stronger push in Afghanistan, Schloesser said.
The current approach, he said, is making headway, but not at a rate that he considers satisfactory.
"It's not the way that I think ... the Afghans, the international community and the American people would like to see us conduct this war," Schloesser said. "It will take longer the way we are doing it right now, as far as the level of resources that we have. I'd like to speed that up. So it's a slow win. I'd want to make it into a solid, strong win" by committing more resources.
There are now about 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, compared with about 146,000 in Iraq.
Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, leads a contingent of international forces responsible for an eastern sector of Afghanistan, which includes a volatile area bordering Pakistan.
He predicted that insurgent activity would not fall off as much as usual this winter, when snow usually limits the fighting season.
"I do believe that the level of significant activities, maybe violence, will be higher than any previous winter since 2002," he said. The war began in October 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks launched by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, which at the time used Afghanistan as a haven.
Schloesser declined to say exactly how many additional U.S. combat troops and support forces he thinks are needed in his sector, but said he was optimistic that they would be provided in the next several months.
"The numbers are going to be a couple thousand — some series of thousands," he said.
In addition to combat troops there is a need for more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance units of the type that currently are being used on missions in Iraq, he added.
In some areas of eastern Afghanistan there simply are too few U.S. or coalition troops to decisively defeat the Taliban, he said.
"I can come in and I can clobber the enemy but then I can't hold it and stay with the people," he said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Mullen on Wednesday recommended to President Bush that a partial shift of resources from Iraq to Afghanistan be undertaken early in 2009, but it's not clear whether that will provide the help Schloesser says is needed to deal with enemy forces this winter.
"If we don't do anything over the winter the enemy will more and more try to seek safe haven in Afghanistan rather than going back to Pakistan," Schloesser said.
On the other hand, he said, getting additional forces is not a make-or-break issue.
"We're not losing this war, and we won't lose (it) if those troops don't show up in the next several months," he said.
U.S. and NATO officials say militants cross into Afghanistan from Pakistan, where they rest, recruit, train and resupply in tribal areas along the frontier where the Pakistani government has little sway.
Schloesser said he is counting on executing a two-track strategy this winter for further eroding the insurgents' fighting prospects.
The first is an aggressive effort to hunt them down.
"We will pursue them wherever they run," he said. "We will intercept them, and we're going to destroy their resources. My intent is to eliminate the support areas within our sector to diminish the enemies' ability to operate next year."
The second is what Schloesser called a "development surge." That would be a variety of projects, such as construction and road maintenance, designed to keep military-aged males employed who otherwise could be recruited to join the insurgency.
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U.S. needs more troops in Afghanistan, commander says
But with Petraeus set to recommend slowing the drawdown in Iraq, more forces are unlikely to be available soon to deal with rising bloodshed.
By Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes Los Angeles Times Staff Writers September 5, 2008
WASHINGTON — A top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said Friday that he needed thousands of additional troops to combat violence along the border with Pakistan, a requirement that appears to be at odds with recommendations from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus on future troop levels in Iraq.
Because of strains on the military, plans to boost the number of troops in Afghanistan depend on reducing the force in Iraq. Petraeus' plan, which President Bush is expected to approve Tuesday in an appearance at the National Defense University, would slow the reduction of combat troops in Iraq, freeing up only one full Army combat brigade for redeployment to Afghanistan. That move would not happen until early next year.
In addition to the combat brigade of about 3,500 to 4,000 troops, U.S. officials also plan to withdraw about 2,000 non-combat support personnel from Iraq and transfer about 1,300 Marines from Iraq's Anbar province to western Afghanistan.
Some in the Pentagon had been pushing for a faster and larger reduction of combat forces from Iraq and a more aggressive troop buildup in Afghanistan. They preferred withdrawing as many as three combat brigades so that additional forces could be sent to Afghanistan before the end of the year.
Pressure from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan for more troops has become the central point in a public debate among senior U.S. military officers and a source of tension among Pentagon planners, who are at odds over how quickly to shift forces from an increasingly stable Iraq to an increasingly violent Afghanistan.
Army Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, who took command of American-controlled eastern Afghanistan in April, said that coalition forces were at no risk of losing in Afghanistan without additional brigades. But he said that continuing with the current level of about 34,000 U.S. troops for an extended period would result in a "slow win."
"It's not the way that I think the Afghans, the international community and the American people would like to see us conduct this war," Schloesser said in a video conference with reporters at the Pentagon. "It will take longer, the way we are doing it right now. . . . I'd like to speed that up."
Petraeus, reluctant to risk hard-won security gains in Iraq, had wanted to maintain troop levels there at 15 brigades through next June, according to a Pentagon official who described the internal deliberations on condition of anonymity.
But under a compromise with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first brigade to redeploy from Iraq to Afghanistan -- the 3rd Brigade of the Army's 10th Mountain Division -- will deploy in February.
U.S. officials say that insurgents and extremist groups use Pakistan's tribal areas as a base from which to attack foreign forces across the border in eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. targets Islamic militants in the tribal areas with airstrikes by unmanned Predator drones, and this week U.S. commandos conducted a raid into Pakistan, angering the government.
Schloesser said that recent Pakistani military action in the lawless tribal regions has begun to stem some of the bloodshed associated with cross-border attacks.
Still, violence overall in eastern Afghanistan is up 20% to 30% in the first eight months of the year compared with last year, he said.
In July, nine Americans were killed in a coordinated insurgent assault on an isolated outpost in northeastern Afghanistan.
"I think they're going to decrease the level of activities just because of the tough winter weather that we normally have here in this part of Afghanistan," Schloesser said.
"But I do believe that the level of significant activities, maybe violence, will be higher than any previous winter since 2002."
Schloesser said he intended to launch a "winter offensive" in the coming months to prevent extremist groups from regrouping when fighting resumes next spring. But an offensive could be difficult without additional forces, he said.
U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan have "very low numbers of troops," Schloesser said. They are able to attack enemy positions, but not hold captured territory and begin the rebuilding necessary to win in a counterinsurgency effort.
"We're not losing this war, and we won't lose if those troops don't show up in the next several months," he said. "If we're going to try to do this in a more timely way and be as effective as I want to be . . . then we're going to need them, you know, within the winter time-frame."
A senior military official close to the process said that the Army combat brigade, Marine units and support personnel represent a withdrawal of 7,000 to 8,000 troops from Iraq by February.
"Eight thousand is a pretty significant cut," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the recommendations have not been made public.
But whether those withdrawals will provide adequate help in eastern and southern Afghanistan, the two most troubled regions of the country, remains in question.
The 1,300 Marines -- a battalion and helicopter unit -- would be the only combat troops to shift from Iraq this year. However, a senior military official said the Marines were likely to be sent to western Afghanistan in November, not the more turbulent east or south.
They would replace the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, based in Twenty-Nine Palms. Officials are not planning to replace another Marine contingent in the country's most troubled area, Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.
In sum, the Marine shifts actually represent an overall decline of about 2,000 U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan. The arrival there in February of the brigade from the Army's 10th Mountain Division would then amount to a net increase in combat troops.
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said his top priority for Afghanistan would be military trainers for Afghan security forces, suggesting a portion of those troops may be assigned to noncombat missions.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said Bush had received the military's recommendation on troop levels during a meeting Wednesday evening with Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who presented Petraeus' plan.
"The question on the president's mind has been: How do we make sure that we cement those gains [in Iraq] and not jeopardize those gains, and be able to continue the process of return on success?" she said.
peter.spiegel@latimes.com
julian.barnes@latimes.com
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China to equip major hospital in Afghan capital
September 06, 2008 People's Daily
The People's Republic of China after rebuilding one of the major hospitals in the Afghanistan capital Kabul has agreed to equip it with modern facilities, Afghan public Health Ministry said on Saturday.
"Provision of medical equipment to the Jumhuriat Hospital or Republican Hospital by China with a value of 2.5 million U.S. dollars is another important step in the strengthening of health system in Afghanistan," the ministry said in a statement.
Afghan Minister for Public Health Syed Mohammad Amin Fatimi and Chinese ambassador to Afghanistan Yang Houlan inked the agreement Thursday on behalf of their respective governments.
The Republican Hospital which has been reconstructed in new style with 10-story building and 20 million U.S. dollars financial support of China would be inaugurated in near future to provide service.
"Equipping and activating of Republican Hospital will benefit not only the residents of Kabul but also patients from provinces with complicated health problems," it added.
"We are thankful to the government and the people of China and would like the continuation of such assistances from them in the future," the statement quoted Minister for Public Health Fatimi assaying.
China has contributed around 180 million U.S. dollars towards reconstruction of the post-Taliban Afghanistan since 2002.
Source: Xinhua
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Poll: U.S. confidence in Afghanistan low
Sept. 5, 2008
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (UPI) -- Americans are becoming less optimistic about the situation in Afghanistan, a Harris poll indicated.
The poll of 2,710 U.S. adults, released Friday, found just 11 percent of those surveyed online between Aug. 11 and Aug. 17 said they believed the situation in Afghanistan was improving. Thirty-seven percent said the situation was getting worse and 35 percent said they believed there had been no change, Harris said.
Fifty-four percent said they are not confident that U.S. efforts in Afghanistan will be successful while 17 percent said they are confident and 26 percent said they are unsure.
Sixty-two percent said President George W. Bush is doing a fair to poor job on Afghanistan and 25 percent described his job performance on the issue as excellent or very good.
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Pak stops overland oil supplies to US-led troops in Afghan
REZAUL H LASKAR ISLAMABAD, (PTI) Outlook India - Sep 06 1:06 AM
To mark its protest against the continuing cross-border raids by the US-led forces from Afghan soil, Pakistan today said it was suspending overland oil supplies to the coalition troops in the war-ravaged country.
Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said the decision to stop the supplies had been made because the attacks by the US-led forces from Afghanistan had continued despite protests by Pakistan.
"We've already taken action today. We've stopped the supply of oil and this would tell how serious we are to the International Security Assistance Force," Mukhtar told reporters outside parliament.
He said the coalition forces could not carry on with such attacks. "We told the (visiting) German Defence Minister yesterday that this is not acceptable, the way you people are handling the situation in the border areas."
Asked how long the oil supplies would be stopped, he replied: "As long as they don't come up with some proper answer. We will wait for a reply from them."
Pakistan's action came after a series of attacks by coalition forces in North and South Waziristan tribal regions, portrayed by the US and the Afghan governments as a "safe haven" for Taliban and al-Qaida militants.
Pakistan has reacted in anger to the attacks, describing them as a violation of its sovereignty. It has also said only Pakistani troops have the right to operate on its soil.
Gen Tariq Majid, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, yesterday even went to the extent of saying that the Pakistan reserves the right to retaliate against cross-border strikes by the coalition forces.
The Torkham highway, which passes through Pakistan's Khyber Agency and links Peshawar with Kabul and northern parts of Afghanistan, are major transit routes for supplies to the US-led coalition forces, which are ferryed overland from the port of Karachi.
Islamabad has recently claimed that nearly 40 people, including many women and children, have been killed in cross-border strikes in North and South Waziristan since the beginning of this week.
Authorities also claimed that twenty people were killed on Wednesday in a cross border raid on Angoor Adda in Southern Wazirisatan by commandos ferried on aboard helicopters and backed by gunships.
The attack marked the first time that US-led ground forces from Afghanistan had intruded into Pakistan.
Yesterday, a drone believed to be operated by the US-led forces in Afghanistan fired three missiles into North Waziristan Agency, killing four children and three women and injuring several others.
Pakistan's parliament has condemned the attack in South Waziristan, saying such violations of the country's territory were "not acceptable". It also said such raids could affect cooperation in the war against terror.
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Challenges that Pakistan's new president will face
The Associated Press Saturday, September 6, 2008
The following are some of the major challenges facing Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of slain ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was elected Pakistan's president by lawmakers Saturday.
MILITANTS
The government must respond to Western pressure to clamp down on Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas attacking targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan without provoking a tribal uprising or alienating a public already skeptical of the Pakistani role in Washington's war on terror.
ECONOMIC PROBLEMS
Pakistan needs donors to top up its foreign currency reserves and prevent a run on the rupee. The government has slashed subsidies to fight a widening budget deficit and is under pressure to do more to soften the blow of inflation running at over 20 percent. Investment and economic growth are slowing.
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
As president, Zardari will chair the joint military-civilian committee that controls Pakistan's nuclear weapons. He also will likely face calls for the release of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist blamed for passing nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, and questions about whether Khan knows more about secret atom bomb projects in other countries.
DEMOCRACY
The election completes Pakistan's return to civilian rule nine years after Pervez Musharraf's military coup, but the country could be more democratic. Zardari will be under pressure to resign as leader of his political party and return powers that Musharraf took away from Parliament. Doubts remain about the independence of the judiciary purged by Musharraf.
INDIA
A peace process with India begun by Musharraf has stalled without solving the core dispute over Kashmir. Recent mass protests in Kashmir have reawakened Pakistani hopes that it might one day gain control of the Himalayan territory over which the countries have twice gone to war. India accuses Pakistani spies of helping bomb its embassy in Kabul.
STAYING ALIVE
Zardari has already moved into the prime minister's residence because of concern for his safety, and his wife, Bhutto, was assassinated in December. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilan's limousine was fired on earlier this week. Musharraf survived several assassination attempts, including suicide bombings blamed on al-Qaida.
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Obama says Pakistan used U.S. aid to prepare for war against India
by: Myra MacDonald September 6th, 2008 Reuters UK
Senator Barack Obama has accused Pakistan of misusing U.S. military aid meant to help it fight al Qaeda and the Taliban to prepare for war against India. In an interview with Fox News he also says the United States must put more pressure on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants, hold it accountable for increased military support, and be prepared to act aggressively against al Qaeda; “if we have bin Laden in our sights, we target him and we knock him out,” he says. However he adds that “nobody talked about some full-blown invasion of Pakistan.”
The latter part of his comments is not that new, nor indeed that different from the policies of the current U.S. administration. But it is his comment about India that has been seized upon by the media in South Asia. ”We are providing them military aid without having enough strings attached. So they’re using the military aid that we use, to Pakistan, they’re preparing for war against India,” he says.
You can see the stories in The Times of India and Dawn here and here.
It will be interesting to see if Obama expands on those comments next week, either in the Fox News interview (so far only the early part has been released) or elsewhere. The main question is how the United States would try to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its full force against al Qaeda and the Taliban on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, while easing up on its traditional preoccupation of defending its border with India. Holding Pakistan accountable for U.S. military aid is one thing; changing the psychology of the Pakistan Army is quite another.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Obama has said the U.S. war in Afghanistan would be made easier if the United States worked to improve trust between India and Pakistan. “A lot of what drives, it appears, motivations on the Pakistan side of the border, still has to do with their concerns and suspicions about India,” he told a news conference in Amman back in July.
So pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on al Qaeda and the Taliban is likely to be accompanied by U.S. pressure on India to make peace with its much smaller neighbour. But India deeply resents any outside interference in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral issue.
The United States desperately needs Pakistan’s help to avoid a humiliating failure in Afghanistan. But it is also anxiously courting India (as highlighted by the U.S.-India nuclear deal) as it realigns its alliances in Asia to deal with an increasingly powerful China.
So what gives?
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'Aid workers not killed because they were Canadian'
Newly appointed ambassador talks about Canada's role in Afghanistan
Scott Deveau , Canwest News Service Friday, September 05, 2008
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan - Canada's newly appointed ambassador to Afghanistan says he doesn't believe that two aid workers gunned down outside Kabul last month were targeted because they were Canadian, but rather because of their efforts to improve the country.
"There is an investigation going on into what happened with our two aid workers and, while I can't state now what actually happened on the ground, we don't believe this was a targeting of Canadians," said Ron Hoffmann, shortly after being appointed ambassador to the war-torn country earlier this week.
In mid-August, Jacqueline Kirk, 40, of Outremont, Que., and Shirley Case, 30, from Williams Lake, B.C., were killed by insurgents in a daylight attack that also claimed the lives of an American colleague and their Afghan driver.
The women had been working in Afghanistan with the New York-based aid agency, International Rescue Committee.
In the days after the attack, the Taliban issued a dire warning to Canadians, including those working in the aid community, to leave Afghanistan or risk further attacks.
"The Taliban statement about targeting Canadians was a very opportunistic piece of propaganda that we are not taking seriously," Hoffmann said.
"We do not believe it was a targeted attack against Canadians, it was clearly an attack aimed to harm the aid workers."
He said he has been heartened, however, by the continued efforts by the more than 200 non-governmental agencies operating in the country after the attack.
"They are making changes to deal with the changing security situation, just like we all are," he said. "But the resolve of the NGO community as a whole is one of continuing to work with this country in an effort to improve people's lives."
The attack last month does, however, highlight the difficulties faced by those in Afghanistan trying to build up the country and its government, while insurgents look to undercut those efforts.
"One reason government services and development have not progressed at the rate that everyone would have liked to see is, indeed, because the security situation continues to be a serious one," Hoffman said, adding that the increased violence is overshadowing "significant, concrete progress" being made in Afghanistan.
He said there has been a marked improvement in the efforts by Canada and its NATO allies to build up the Afghan National Army and, to a lesser extent, the Afghan National Police and other security institutions that will help Afghanistan defend itself in the future.
"While we have had a lot of attention focused on a security situation that has become worse in the last year-and-a-half, and is a serious one," he said, "I think what is getting less attention, and what is less visible in many ways is the continued deepening of institutional capacity and the strengthening of Afghan leadership."
One of the major tasks Hoffmann will face over the next year in his new role will be to keep an eye on the presidential election here, which is slated for the latter half of 2009.
But he said he also wants to renew efforts to weed out corruption, improve civilian policing, and to focus on delivering Afghan aid to the Afghan people in such important sectors as agriculture and energy.
Hoffmann, like his predecessor, Arif Lalani, believes that Afghanistan will be able to secure itself by the deadline set by Canada to end its combat role here in 2011.
"We think it will be strong enough to stand on its own two feet."
"The future always has some uncertainties," he said, adding that the security situation will be a "key determinant" in what will be possible in the coming years.
"But, notwithstanding the security situation, the Afghan institutions and government are continuing to develop. Alongside increased violence, we are seeing increased progress."
Hoffmann, from Winnipeg, joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1989. He has been in Afghanistan since last summer when he was appointed deputy head of the mission here.
He has previously served in The Hague, Johannesburg, Beijing and London, and has filled various roles in both provincial and federal governments.
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Right at the Edge
New York Times, United States By DEXTER FILKINS September 5, 2008
I: The Border Incident
Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.
The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.
The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.
“When the Americans started bombing the Taliban, the Frontier Corps started shooting at the Americans,” we were told by one of Suran Dara’s villagers, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being persecuted or killed by the Pakistani government or the Taliban. “They were trying to help the Taliban. And then the American planes bombed the Pakistani post.”
For years, the villagers said, Suran Dara served as a safe haven for jihadist fighters — whether from Afghanistan or Pakistan or other countries — giving them aid and shelter and a place to stash their weapons. With the firefight under way, one of Suran Dara’s villagers dashed across the border into Afghanistan carrying a field radio with a long antenna (the villager called it “a Motorola”) to deliver to the Taliban fighters. He never made it. The man with the Motorola was hit by an American bomb. After the fight, wounded Taliban members were carried into Suran Dara for treatment. “Everyone supports the Taliban on both sides of the border,” one of the villagers we spoke with said.
Later, an American analyst briefed by officials in Washington confirmed the villagers’ account. “There have been dozens of incidents where there have been exchanges of fire,” he said.
That American and Pakistani soldiers are fighting one another along what was meant to be a border between allies highlights the extraordinarily chaotic situation unfolding inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban, along with Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, enjoy freedom from American attacks.
But the incident also raises one of the more fundamental questions of the long war against Islamic militancy, and one that looms larger as the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates: Whose side is Pakistan really on?
PAKISTAN’S WILD, LARGELY ungoverned tribal areas have become an untouchable base for Islamic militants to attack Americans and Afghans across the border. Inside the tribal areas, Taliban warlords have taken near-total control, pushing aside the Pakistani government and imposing their draconian form of Islam. And for more than a year now, they have been sending suicide bombers against government and military targets in Pakistan, killing hundreds of people. American and Pakistani investigators say they believe it was Baitullah Mehsud, the strongest of FATA’s Taliban leaders, who dispatched assassins last December to kill Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister. With much of the North-West Frontier Province, which borders the tribal areas, also now under their control, the Taliban are increasingly in a position to threaten the integrity of the Pakistani state.
Then there is Al Qaeda. According to American officials and counterterrorism experts, the organization has rebuilt itself and is using its sanctuaries inside the tribal areas to plan attacks against the United States and Europe. Since 2004, six major terrorist plots against Europe or the United States — including the successful suicide attacks in London that killed 52 people in July 2005 — have been traced back to Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Hoffman says he fears that Al Qaeda could be preparing a major attack before the American presidential election. “I’m convinced they are planning something,” he told me.
At the center of all this stands the question of whether Pakistan really wants to control the Talibs and their Qaeda allies ensconced in the tribal areas — and whether it really can.
This was not supposed to be a major worry. After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf threw his lot in with the United States. Pakistan has helped track down Al Qaeda suspects, launched a series of attacks against militants inside the tribal areas — a new offensive got under way just weeks ago — and given many assurances of devotion to the antiterrorist cause. For such efforts, Musharraf and the Pakistani government have been paid handsomely, receiving more than $10 billion in American money since 2001.
But as the incident on the Afghan border suggests, little in Pakistan is what it appears. For years, the survival of Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders has depended on a double game: assuring the United States that they were vigorously repressing Islamic militants — and in some cases actually doing so — while simultaneously tolerating and assisting the same militants. From the anti-Soviet fighters of the 1980s and the Taliban of the 1990s to the homegrown militants of today, Pakistan’s leaders have been both public enemies and private friends.
When the game works, it reaps great rewards: billions in aid to boost the Pakistani economy and military and Islamist proxies to extend the government’s reach into Afghanistan and India.
Pakistan’s double game has rested on two premises: that the country’s leaders could keep the militants under control and that they could keep the United States sufficiently placated to keep the money and weapons flowing. But what happens when the game spins out of control? What happens when the militants you have been encouraging grow too strong and set their sights on Pakistan itself? What happens when the bluff no longer works?
II. Being a Warlord
Late in June, to great fanfare, the Pakistani military began what it described as a decisive offensive to rout the Taliban from Khyber agency, one of seven tribal areas that make up the FATA. “Forces Move In on Militants,” declared a headline in Dawn, one of Pakistan’s most influential newspapers. Reporters were kept away, but footage on Pakistani television showed troops advancing behind trucks and troop carriers. The Americans were pleased. “We think that’s a positive development and certainly hope and expect that this government will continue,” Tom Casey, the deputy spokesman at the State Department, said.
The situation was serious indeed: Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province and just east of Khyber agency, was almost entirely surrounded by Taliban militias, which had begun making forays into the city. The encirclement of Peshawar was the culmination of the Taliban’s advance: first they conquered the tribal areas, then much of the North-West Frontier Province, and now they were aiming for the province’s capital itself. The Talibs were cutting their well-known medieval path: shutting girls’ schools, banishing women from the streets, blowing up CD kiosks and beating barbers for shaving beards.
A few days into the military operation, the photographer Lynsey Addario and I, dressed in traditional clothes and with a posse of gunmen protecting us, rode into Khyber agency ourselves. “Entry by Foreigners Prohibited Beyond This Point,” the sign said on the way in. As we drove past the dun-colored buildings and corrugated-tin shops, every trace of government authority vanished. No policemen, no checkpoints, no guards. Nothing to keep us from our appointment with the Taliban.
It was a Friday afternoon, and our guides suggested we pull off the main road until prayers were over; local Taliban enforcers, they said, would not take kindly to anyone skipping prayers. For a couple of hours we waited inside the home of an uncle of one of our guides, listening to the muezzin call the locals to battle.
“What is the need of the day?” a man implored in Pashto over a loudspeaker. “Holy war — holy war is the need of the day!”
After a couple of hours, we resumed our journey, traveling down a mostly empty road. And that is when it struck me: there was no evidence, anywhere, of the military operation that had made the news. There were no Pakistani soldiers, no trucks, no tanks. Nothing.
After a couple of miles, we turned off the road and headed down a sandy path toward a high-walled compound guarded by young men with guns. I had come to my destination: Takya, the home village of Haji Namdar, a Taliban commander who had taken control of a large swath of Khyber agency.
Pulling into Namdar’s compound, I felt transported back in time to the Kabul of the 1990s, when the Taliban were at their zenith. A group of men and boys — jittery, clutching rifles and rocket-propelled grenades — sat in the bed of a Toyota Hi-Lux, the same model of truck the Taliban used to ride to victory in Afghanistan. A flag nearly identical to that of the Afghan movement — a pair of swords crossed against a white background — fluttered in the heavy air. Even the name of Namdar’s group, the Vice and Virtue brigade, came straight from the Taliban playbook: in the 1990s, bands of young men under the same name terrorized Afghanistan, flogging men for shaving their beards, caning women for walking alone and thrashing children for flying kites.
The young fighters were chattering excitedly about a missile that had recently destroyed one of their ammunition dumps. An American missile, the kids said. “It was a plane without a pilot,” one of the boys explained through an interpreter. His eyes darted back and forth among his fellows. “We saw a flash. And then the building exploded.”
His description matched that of a Predator, an airborne drone that America uses to hunt militants in the tribal areas. Publicly, at least, the Predator is the only American presence the Pakistani government has so far allowed inside its borders.
We walked into the compound’s main building. In a corner, Namdar sat on the floor, wearing a traditional salwar kameez, but also a vest that looked as if it had been plucked from a three-piece suit. He stood to shake my hand, and he gave a small bow. To break the ice, I handed him a map of Pakistan and asked him to show me where we were. Namdar peered at the chart for several seconds, his eyes registering nothing. He handed it to one of his deputies. He resumed his stare.
Trying again, I asked about the Pakistani military operation — the one that was supposed to be unfolding right now, chasing the Taliban from Khyber.
Why, I asked Namdar, aren’t the Pakistani forces coming after you?
“The government cannot do anything to us, because we are fighting the holy war,” he said. “We are fighting the foreigners — it is our obligation. They are killing innocent people.” Namdar’s aides, one of whom spoke fluent English, looked at him and shook their heads to make him speak more cautiously. Namdar carried on.
“When the Americans kill innocent people, we must take revenge,” he said.
Tell me about that, I asked Namdar, and his aides again shook their heads. Finally Namdar changed his line. “Well, we can’t stop anyone from going across” into Afghanistan, he said. “I’m not saying we send them ourselves.” And with that, Namdar raised his hand, declining to offer any more details.
By many accounts — on the streets, among Western analysts, even according to his own deputies — Namdar was regularly training and dispatching young men to fight and blow themselves up in Afghanistan. An aide, Munsif Khan, told me that his group had sent “hundreds of people” to fight the Americans. At one point, he described for me how the Vice and Virtue brigade had recently set a minimum-age requirement for suicide bombers. “We are opposed to children carrying out suicide bombings,” Khan said. “We get so many young people coming to us — 15, 16 years old — wanting to go on martyrdom operations. This is not the age to be a suicide bomber. Any man who wants to be a suicide bomber should be at least 20 or 25.”
Khan himself, a former magazine reporter in Peshawar, had been gravely wounded in a car-bomb attack last year. His feet were mangled, and he could walk only with crutches. A bloody struggle for power rages among the many Taliban warlords of the FATA; Khan said his assailants had likely been dispatched by Baitullah Mehsud, the powerful warlord in South Waziristan, because Namdar had refused to submit to Mehsud’s authority.
Another of Namdar’s aides had spoken enthusiastically of his commander’s prowess in battle. “He is a great fighter!” the aide told me. “He goes to Afghanistan every month to fight the Americans.”
So here was Namdar — Taliban chieftain, enforcer of Islamic law, usurper of the Pakistani government and trainer and facilitator of suicide bombers in Afghanistan — sitting at home, not three miles from Peshawar, untouched by the Pakistani military operation that was supposedly unfolding around us.
What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?
“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”
Entertain whom? I asked.
“America,” he said.
III. Playing the Game
The idea that Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies could simultaneously be aiding the Taliban and like-minded militants while taking money from the United States is not as far-fetched as it may seem.
The relationship dates to the 1980s, when, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became the conduit for billions of dollars of American and Saudi money for the Afghan rebels. Pakistan’s leader, the fundamentalist Gen. Zia ul-Haq, funneled the bulk of the cash to the most religiously extreme guerrilla leaders. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, Pakistani military and intelligence services kept on supporting Islamist militants, notably in the Muslim-majority Indian state of Kashmir, where they threw their support behind a local uprising. Through time, with the Pakistanis closely involved, the Kashmiri movement was taken over by Islamist extremists and foreign fighters who moved easily between Pakistan and Kashmir.
Then, in 1994, Pakistani leaders made their most fateful move. Alarmed by the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan following the Soviet retreat, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her government intervened on behalf of a small group of former anti-Soviet fighters known for their religious fanaticism. They called themselves “the students”: the Taliban.
With Pakistan providing support and the United States looking the other way, the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996. “We created the Taliban,” Nasrullah Babar, the interior minister under Benazir Bhutto, told me in an interview at his home in Peshawar in 1999. “Mrs. Bhutto had a vision: that through a peaceful Afghanistan, Pakistan could extend its influence into the resource-rich territories of Central Asia.” That never happened — the Taliban, even with Pakistani support, never completed the conquest of Afghanistan. But the training camps they ran, sometimes with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers, were beacons to Islamic militants from around the world.
By all accounts, Pakistan’s spymasters were never terribly discriminating about who showed up in their training camps. In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes against camps in Afghanistan following Al Qaeda’s bombings of American embassies in East Africa, several trainers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, were killed. Osama bin Laden was supposed to be there when the missiles struck but apparently had already left.
After 9/11, President George W. Bush and other senior American officials declared in the strongest terms that Pakistani leaders had to end their support for the Taliban and other Islamic militants. Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, promised to do so.
Yet the game did not end; it merely changed. In the years after 9/11, Musharraf often made great shows of going after militants inside Pakistan, while at the same time supporting and protecting them.
In 2002, for instance, Musharraf ordered the arrest of some 2,000 suspected militants, many of whom had trained in Pakistani-sponsored camps. And then, quietly, he released nearly all of them. Another revealing moment came in 2005, when Fazlur Rehman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, one of the most radical Islamist parties, denounced Musharraf for denying the existence of jihadi groups. Everyone knows, Rehman said in a speech before Pakistan’s National Assembly, that the government supports the holy warriors. “We will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jihadis or crack down on them,” Rehman declared. “We cannot afford to be hypocritical any more.”
In 2006, a senior ISI official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told a New York Times reporter that he regarded Serajuddin Haqqani as one of the ISI’s intelligence assets. “We are not apologetic about this,” the ISI official said. For a presumed ally of the United States, that was a stunning admission: Haqqani, an Afghan, is currently one of the Taliban’s most senior commanders battling the Americans in eastern Afghanistan. His father, Jalaluddin, is a longtime associate of bin Laden’s. The Haqqanis are believed to be overseeing operations from a hiding place in the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan.
But such evidence, however intriguing, fails to answer the critical questions: Exactly who in the Pakistani government is helping the militants and why?
THE MOST COMMON THEORY offered to explain Pakistan’s continued contact with Islamic militants is the country’s obsession with India. Pakistan has fought three major wars with India, from which it split violently upon independence from Britain in 1947. To the east, the Pakistani military and intelligence services have long tolerated and sometimes directed militants moving into Indian Kashmir. To the west, Afghanistan has long been seen as a potentially critical arena of competition with India. After the U.S.-led invasion in the fall of 2001, for example, India lost no time in setting up consulates throughout Afghanistan and beginning an extensive aid program. According to Pakistani and Western officials, Pakistan’s officer corps remains obsessed by the prospect of Indian domination of Afghanistan should the Americans leave. The Taliban are seen as a counterweight to Indian influence. “We are saving the Taliban for a rainy day,” one former Pakistani official put it to me.
Another explanation is growing popular hatred of the United States. Pakistan’s leaders — whether Musharraf or the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, or the country’s leading civilian politicians — are finding it more and more difficult to mobilize their own army and intelligence services to act against the Taliban and other militants inside the country. And while the Pakistan Army used to be a predominantly secular institution, increasingly it is being led by Islamist-minded officers.
The pro-Islamist and anti-American sentiments pervading the armed forces might help explain why a group of ill-trained, underpaid Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers would open fire on American troops fighting the Taliban. Those same sentiments buttress the notion, offered by some American and Pakistani officials, that rogue officers inside the army and ISI are supporting the militants against the wishes of their superiors.
Finally, there is the problem of the Pakistan Army’s competence. For all the myths that officers like Musharraf have spread about the institution, the simple fact is that it isn’t very good. The Pakistan Army has lost every war it has ever fought. And it isn’t trained to battle an insurgency. Each of the half-dozen offensives the army has launched into the tribal areas since 2004 has left it bloodied and humbled.
For all these reasons, when it comes to the militants in their midst, it’s easier for Pakistan to do as little as possible.
“There is a growing Islamist feeling in the military, and it’s inseparable from anti-Americanism,” I was told by a Western military officer with several years’ experience in the region. “The vast majority of Pakistani officers feel they are fighting our war. There is a lot of sympathy for the Taliban. The result is that the Pakistanis do as little as they possibly can to combat the militants.”
These are reasonable explanations, offered by reasonable people. But are such explanations enough? The more Pakistanis I talked to, the more I came to believe that the most reasonable explanations were not necessarily the most plausible ones.
ONE SWELTERING AFTERNOON in July, I ventured into the elegant home of a former Pakistani official who recently retired after several years of serving in senior government posts. We sat in his book-lined study. A servant brought us tea and biscuits.
Was it the obsession with India that led the Pakistani military to support the Taliban? I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
Or is it the anti-Americanism and pro-Islamic feelings in the army?
“Yes,” he said, that too.
And then the retired Pakistani official offered another explanation — one that he said could never be discussed in public. The reason the Pakistani security services support the Taliban, he said, is for money: after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani military concluded that keeping the Taliban alive was the surest way to win billions of dollars in aid that Pakistan needed to survive. The military’s complicated relationship with the Taliban is part of what the official called the Pakistani military’s “strategic games.” Like other Pakistanis, this former senior official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of what he was telling me.
“Pakistan is dependent on the American money that these games with the Taliban generate,” the official told me. “The Pakistani economy would collapse without it. This is how the game works.”
As an example, he cited the Pakistan Army’s first invasion of the tribal areas — of South Waziristan in 2004. Called Operation Shakai, the offensive was ostensibly aimed at ridding the area of Taliban militants. From an American perspective, the operation was a total failure. The army invaded, fought and then made a deal with one of the militant commanders, Nek Mohammed. The agreement was capped by a dramatic meeting between Mohammed and Safdar Hussein, one of the most senior officers in the Pakistan Army.
“The corps commander was flown in on a helicopter,” the former official said. “They had this big ceremony, and they embraced. They called each other mujahids. ”
“Mujahid” is the Arabic word for “holy warrior.” The ceremony, in fact, was captured on videotape, and the tape has been widely distributed.
“The army agreed to compensate the locals for collateral damage,” the official said. “Where do you think that money went? It went to the Taliban. Who do you think paid the bill? The Americans. This is the way the game works. The Taliban is attacked, but it is never destroyed.
“It’s a game,” the official said, wrapping up our conversation. “The U.S. is being taken for a ride.”
IV. A New Government, A New Tack
In February, nationwide elections lifted to power Pakistan’s first full-fledged civilian government in nine years. The elections followed the tumultuous events of Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile and her assassination.
If there was any reason to hope that the government’s games with the Taliban would end, this was it: Pakistan’s new leaders declared they had a popular mandate to steer the country in a new direction. That meant, implicitly, reining in the military and the spy agencies. At the same time, the country’s new civilian leaders, led by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, made it clear that they would not be taking orders from officials in the Bush administration, whom they resented for having supported Musharraf for so long. (Musharraf, facing impeachment, finally resigned from the presidency last month.) Instead of launching military operations into the tribal areas, Pakistan’s new leaders promised to embark on negotiations to neutralize the militants.
The leader of this new civilian effort in the tribal areas is Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the North-West Frontier Province. Since February, Ghani is said to have embarked on a series of negotiations in tribal areas.
I went to see Ghani earlier this summer at the governor’s mansion in Peshawar, inside a lovely compound built by the British at the height of their imperial power. Ghani seemed as if he might have stepped from the Raj himself: he gave off an air of faint amusement, a British affectation common in the upper tiers of Pakistani society. On his wall hung a British-made Enfield rifle, preserved from colonial days. Outside, peacocks strolled across the manicured lawn.
“You know the joke about the Pathans,” Ghani began, using the old British name for the Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates the tribal areas and the Taliban. “A Pathan’s heart hammers harder when he has a gun than a woman!”
Suddenly turning serious, Ghani spelled out a state-of-the-art counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the militants in control of the FATA. He emphasized that the purely military approach to the tribal areas had failed — not merely because the army has been unable to succeed militarily but also because it no longer could count on popular support. “No government can afford to make war on its own people for very long,” Ghani said.
The new approach, Ghani said, would entail negotiations and economic development. Under the plan, the government would pour billions into the region over the next five years to build schools, roads and health clinics. (The United States has agreed to pitch in $750 million.) The political negotiations, Ghani said, would be conducted by civilian members of the government and the region’s tribal leaders, not, as in the past, by military officers and Taliban militants. Ghani called this new strategy “Jang and Jirga” — the Pashto words for “war” and “tribal council.” Carrot and stick.
“The idea is to drive a wedge between the militants and the people,” Ghani said. “There will be no negotiations with the militants themselves.”
Ghani’s previous post had been as governor of Baluchistan Province, to the south, where he had weakened an ethnically based insurgency that had churned on for decades. He said he was confident he could do the same here. “Don’t underestimate the Pakistani desire to confront the militants,” he insisted. “Ninety percent of the country is behind us.”
It was sundown when Ghani and I finished talking. As I strolled across the grounds of the governor’s compound, a group of soldiers had just begun lowering the Pakistani flag. Another man blew into a bugle, playing “A Hundred Pipers,” a Scottish air.
FOR GHANI AND PAKISTAN’S civilian government, the crucial players in achieving peace are traditional tribal leaders whose power is independent of the Taliban or other militants. This method of governing the tribal areas — indirect rule through local chiefs — dates back to the British imperial period. The British put tribal leaders — known as maliks — on the payroll to stand in for the central government, which imposed no taxes or customs duties and, in turn, did very little. At the same time, imperial administrators reserved for themselves extraordinary powers of arrest and punishment that extended to collective reprisals against entire tribes. The purpose of the malik system was to keep the tribal areas quiet and at least nominally under the thumb of the imperial government. This preserved a feudal political structure, and feudal levels of economic development, into the 20th century.
The British system, with a little tinkering, has survived to this day: the FATA stands apart from the rest of Pakistan, with little or no government presence and little or no development. Not 1 person in 5 can read or write. Pakistani political parties are banned. Universal suffrage wasn’t allowed until 1997. Until recently, tribesmen could claim no protection by Pakistan’s Constitution or its courts. Inside the FATA, the locals do not even change the time on their clocks, as other Pakistanis do, when daylight savings begins. “English time,” it is called.
A few days after my talk with Ghani, I met an elder of one of the two main tribes of South Waziristan. He refused to give his name and insisted that I refer to him as Jan. South Waziristan is believed to contain the largest number of militant Arabs and other foreign fighters, possibly even bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. To be more specific about Jan — to use his name, to identify the tribe he leads, to name the town where he lives — would almost certainly, he said, result in his death at the hands of the militants and Taliban fighters who control South Waziristan.
“There are many Arab fighters living in South Waziristan,” Jan told me. “Sometimes you see them in the town; you hear them speaking Arabic.
“But the important Arabs are not in the city,” he continued. “They are in the mountains.”
Important Arabs? I asked.
“They ride horses, Arabian horses; we don’t have horses like this in Waziristan,” Jan said. “The people from the town take food to the Arabs’ horses in the mountains. They have seen the horses. They have seen the Arabs. These horses eat better than the common people in the town.”
How do you know?
“I am a leader of my tribe. People come to me — everyone comes to me. They tell me everything.”
What about Osama? I asked. Is he in South Waziristan?
“Osama?” Jan said. “I don’t know. But they” — the Arabs in the mountains — “are important.”
The labor it took to persuade Jan to speak to me is a measure of what has become of the area over which his family still officially presides. Since it was not possible for me to go to South Waziristan — “Baitullah Mehsud would cut off your head,” the Taliban leader, Namdar, told me — I had to persuade Jan to come to Peshawar. For several days, military checkpoints and roadblocks made it impossible for Jan to travel. Finally, after two weeks, Jan left his home at midnight in a taxi so no one would notice either him or his car.
Jan had reason to worry. Seven members of his family — his father, two brothers, two uncles and two cousins — have been murdered by militants who inhabit the area. Jan said he believed his father was killed by Uzbek and Tajik gunmen who fled to South Waziristan after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. His father had opposed them. Jan’s cousins, he said, were killed by men working for Baitullah Mehsud. Jan’s father was a malik, and thousands of Waziri tribesmen came to his funeral: “the largest funeral in the history of Waziristan,” Jan said.
The rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda has come at the expense of the maliks, who have been systematically murdered and marginalized in a campaign to destroy the old order. In South Waziristan, where Mehsud presides, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have killed more than 150 maliks since 2005, all but destroying the tribal system. And there are continual reminders of what happens to the survivors who do not understand this — who, for example, attempt to talk with Pakistan’s civilian government and assert their authority. In June, Mehsud’s men gunned down 28 tribal leaders who had formed a “peace committee” in South Waziristan. Their bodies were dumped on the side of a road. “This shows what happens when the tribal elders try to challenge Baitullah Mehsud,” Jan said.
Like Taliban militias in other parts of Pakistan, Mehsud’s men have been strong-arming families into turning over their young sons to join. “They have taken my own son to be a suicide bomber,” Jan said. “He is gone.” The Talibs, he said, now control the disbursement of all government money that comes into the area.
The Taliban have not achieved this by violence alone. They have capitalized on the resentment many Pakistanis feel toward the hereditary maliks and the government they represent. Taliban leaders and their foot soldiers come mostly from the lower classes. Mehsud, the Taliban chieftain, was an unemployed man who spent his time lifting weights before he picked up a gun. Manghal Bagh, the warlord in Khyber agency whom the Pakistan military went after in June, swept public buses. “They are illiterate people, and now they have power,” Jan said.
EVERYWHERE I TRAVELED during my stay in the tribal areas and in Peshawar, I met impoverished Pakistanis who told me Robin Hood-like stories about how the Taliban had challenged the wealthy and powerful people on behalf of the little guys. Hamidullah, for instance, was an illiterate wheat farmer living in Khyber agency when, in 2002, a wealthy landowner seized his home and six acres of fields. Hamidullah and his family were forced to eke out a living from a nearby shanty. Neither the local malik nor the government agent, Hamidullah told me, would intervene on his behalf. Then came Namdar, the Taliban commander. He hauled the rich man before a Vice and Virtue council and ordered him to give back Hamidullah’s home and farm.
Now Hamidullah is one of Namdar’s loyal militiamen.
“There are so many guys like me,” he said, cradling a Kalashnikov.
The social revolution that has swept the tribal areas does not bode well for the plans, laid out by Governor Ghani, to oust the Taliban by boosting the tribal elders. Nor does it hold out much promise for the Americans, who have expressed hope that they could do in the FATA what they were able to do with the Sunni tribes in Iraq. There, local tribesmen rose up against, and have substantially weakened, Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.
Indeed, in some cases the distinction between tribe and Taliban has vanished altogether. Baitullah Mehsud, for instance, comes from the Mehsud tribe, one of the two largest clans of South Waziristan. (“The Taliban is the Mehsud tribe,” Jan said. “They are one and the same now.” )
Mehsud is the most powerful of dozens of Taliban chieftains who control the tribal areas. Some of them answer to Mehsud; some do not. The others are no less brutal: in July, for instance, in Bajaur tribal agency, the Taliban leader Faqir Mohammed staged a public execution of two men “convicted” of spying for the United States. One was shot; the other beheaded. A photograph of the men’s last moments was displayed on the front page of The News, a Pakistani newspaper.
The chieftains’ rivalries are intense, too. Six weeks after I met Namdar, he was gunned down by one of his bodyguards, in the very house where I met him. It isn’t entirely clear who ordered the killing of Namdar, but many of his followers suspect it was Mehsud.
V. The Game Changes
While most of the Taliban chieftains do share a basic ideology, they appear to be divided into two distinct groups: those who send fighters into Afghanistan to fight the Americans and those who do not. And that is an important distinction for the Pakistanis, as well as for the Americans.
After the rout of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, many militants fled across the border, and the Taliban inside Pakistan grew. At first, they largely confined their activities to the tribal areas themselves, from where they could send fighters into Afghanistan. That started to change last year. Militants began moving out of the FATA and into the rest of Pakistan, taking control of the towns and villages in the neighboring North-West Frontier Province. Militants began attacking Pakistani police and soldiers. Inside the FATA, Mehsud was forming Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella party of some 40 Taliban groups that claimed as its goal the domination of Pakistan. Suddenly, the Taliban was not merely a group of militants who were useful in extending Pakistan’s influence into Afghanistan. They were a threat to Pakistan itself.
The turning point came in July last year, when the government laid siege to a mosque in Islamabad called Lal Masjid, where dozens of militants had taken shelter. The presence of the militants inside Islamabad itself, Pakistan’s stately, secular-minded capital, was shock enough to the country’s ruling class. Then, after eight days, on orders from Musharraf, security forces stormed the mosque, sparking a battle that left 87 dead. The massacre at Lal Masjid became a rallying cry for Islamic militants across the country. Mehsud and other Islamists declared war on the government and launched a campaign of suicide bombings; there were 60 in 2007 alone. In an act of astonishing humiliation, Mehsud’s men captured 300 Pakistan Army soldiers that came into South Waziristan; Mehsud eventually let them go. And then, in December, a suicide bomber, possibly dispatched by Mehsud, killed Bhutto.
The bloody siege of Lal Masjid, Western and Pakistani officials say, finally convinced senior Pakistani military and ISI leaders that the Taliban fighters they had been nurturing for so many years had grown too strong. “Now, the militants are autonomous,” one retired Pakistani official told me. “No one can control them anymore.”
IN JANUARY OF THIS YEAR, Pakistan opened an offensive into South Waziristan that was far fiercer than any that had come before. It inflicted hundreds of casualties on Mehsud’s forces and caused at least 15,000 families to flee. Then, after just three weeks, the operation ended. As they had before, Pakistani commanders and Mehsud struck a deal. But this time, remarkably, the deal seemed to stick. The army dismantled its checkpoints and pulled back its troops, and the suicide bombings all but stopped.
What happened? A draft of the peace agreement struck between the army and Mehsud may help explain. The agreement itself, which has not been officially released, provides a look into the Pakistani government’s new strategy toward the militants. According to the agreement, members of the Mehsud tribe agreed to refrain from attacking the Pakistani state and from setting up a parallel government. They agreed to accept the rule of law.
But sending fighters into Afghanistan? About that, the agreement says nothing at all.
And that appears to be the essence of the new Pakistani game. As long as the militants refrain from attacking the state, they are free to do what they want inside the tribal areas — and across the border in Afghanistan. While peace has largely prevailed between the government and the militants inside Pakistan since earlier this year, the infiltration of Taliban fighters from the tribal areas into Afghanistan has risen sharply. Even the current Pakistani offensive, according to Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, the top American commander in eastern Afghanistan, has failed to slow the influx.
In short, the chaos has been redirected.
This must have been why Namdar told me with such confidence that “fighting the jihad” insulated him from the Pakistani government. The real purpose of the government’s Khyber operation became clear: to tame Manghal Bagh, the warlord who does not send men into Afghanistan and who was encroaching on Peshawar. Indeed, after more than a week of enduring the brunt of the army’s assault, Bagh agreed to respect the Pakistani state. Namdar had been left alone by government troops all the while.
If channeling the Taliban into Afghanistan and against NATO and the Americans is indeed the new Pakistani game, then one more thing is also clear: the leaders of the Pakistan Army and the ISI must still be confident they can manage the militants. And it is certainly the military and ISI officers who are doing the managing — not the country’s elected leaders. When I asked Jan, the tribal elder, about the negotiations that Ghani had described for me — talks between the country’s new civilian leaders and FATA’s tribal elders — Jan laughed. “The only negotiations are between the army and the Taliban, between the army and Baitullah Mehsud,” he said. “There are no government officials taking part in any negotiations. There are no tribal elders taking part. I’m a tribal elder. I think I would know.”
Western officials agreed that the influence of Pakistan’s new civilian leaders over strategy in the tribal areas was close to nil. “Until the civilians get their act together, the military will play the dominant role,” a Western analyst in Pakistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. The parliamentary coalition cobbled together earlier this year is already falling apart.
“It’s a very close relationship,” Jan said, describing the meetings between the Pakistan Army and the Taliban. “The army and the Taliban are friends. Whenever a Taliban fighter is killed, army officers go to his funeral. They bring money to the family.”
Indeed, American officials said in July that the ISI helped Jalaluddin Haqqani’s fighters bomb the Indian Embassy in Kabul. The attack killed 54, including an Indian defense attaché. American officials said the evidence of the ISI’s involvement was overwhelming. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment,” one of them said.
VI. The Path of Jihad
After I met Namdar, the Taliban commander, he ordered some of his young fighters to take me to the Afghan border. The mountains that ran along the border shimmered in the monsoon rains, and a new stream was running down from the peaks. It was this range, called the White Mountains, through which Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. The Afghan frontier, the fighters told me, was a day’s walk over the hills.
It was along a similar route, two years ago, that an 18-year-old Pakistani named Mudasar trekked into Afghanistan to blow himself up. His family, who live in the town of Shakhas in Khyber agency, told me they learned of his fate in a telephone call. “Your son has carried out a suicide operation inside of Afghanistan,” a man said without identifying himself. There was no corpse to send home to Pakistan, so Mudasar’s family and the rest of the villagers of Shakhas gathered for a ghaibana, a funeral without a body.
“It is very respectable to die this way,” Abu Omar, Mudasar’s brother, told me one day at a cafe in Peshawar. Mudasar and Abu Omar were both part of the tide of young Pakistani men that has been surging across the Afghan border to fight the Americans. Abu Omar described his brother as intensely religious, without hobbies — unlike Abu Omar himself, whose passion was playing fullback on the soccer field. “Mudasar would lie awake at night crying for the martyred people in Afghanistan,” Abu Omar said.
What finally drove Mudasar to want to kill Americans was a single spectacular event. In January 2006, the Americans maneuvered a Predator drone across the border into Pakistan and fired a missile at a building they thought contained Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader. The missile reportedly missed Zawahiri by a couple of hours, but it killed his son-in-law and several other senior Al Qaeda members. A number of civilians died as well, including women and children. Television footage from the scene, showing corpses lying amid the rubble, sparked protests across Pakistan.
“My brother saw that and resolved to become a martyr,” Abu Omar told me.
Confiding in only his mother and brother, Mudasar enrolled in a local camp for suicide bombers. Abu Omar declined to tell me who ran the camp or where it was, saying such things were military secrets. “There are many such camps,” he said and shrugged.
It was during our second meeting, in Peshawar’s main shopping area, that Abu Omar agreed to talk about his own mission across the border. We sat in a shabby second-floor office in the Saddar bazaar. Last October, following the death of his brother, Abu Omar enrolled in one of the Taliban training camps inside Khyber agency operated by Mehsud’s organization. The camp, Abu Omar said, was split into three sections: one for bomb making, one for reconnaissance and ambushes and one for firing large weapons. Abu Omar’s section was given a heavy machine gun.
“Big enough to shoot down helicopters,” he said.
Abu Omar spoke listlessly but in great detail. The militant camp sat within a few miles of the Afghan border, he said, and only a few miles from a Pakistan military base. Most of the volunteers were Pakistani, he said, although foreigners trained, too, including a Muslim convert from Great Britain.
“He had blond hair, but a very long beard,” Abu Omar said, breaking into his only smile of the afternoon. “A good Muslim.”
When the time finally came, Abu Omar said, he and about 20 of his comrades moved at night to a safe house near the Afghan frontier, in Mohmand tribal agency. They were just across the border from Kunar, one of the most violent of Afghanistan’s provinces. There, he said, he and his comrades waited for two days until the way was clear. Then, when the signal came, they moved across. None of the men, Abu Omar said, were particularly worried about what would happen if they were spotted by Pakistani troops. “They are Muslims,” he told me. “They support what we are doing.”
Fighting in Afghanistan, Abu Omar said, was a hit-and-miss, sometimes tedious affair: once across the border, he and the other fighters sat inside another safe house for two days, waiting for word to launch their attack. Finally, Abu Omar’s commander told them that there were too many American and Afghan soldiers about and that they would have to return to Pakistan.
The second time, the mission worked. Crossing into Kunar once more, Abu Omar and the other fighters attacked a line of Afghan army check posts just inside the border. Omar put his heavy machine gun to good use, he said, and four of the posts were overrun. “We killed seven Afghan soldiers,” he claimed. “Unfortunately, there were no Americans.”
Their attack successful, Abu Omar and his comrades trekked back across the Pakistani border. The sun was just rising. The fighters saw a Pakistani checkpoint and headed straight for it.
“They gave us some water,” he said of the Pakistani border guards. “And then we continued on our way.”
VII. The Rose Garden
From the Rose Garden of the White House, you could just make out the profile of the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, sitting across from President Bush inside the Oval Office. It was Gilani’s first official visit and, by all accounts, not a typical one. That same day, July 28, as Gilani’s plane neared the United States, a Predator drone had fired a missile into a compound in South Waziristan, killing Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Al Qaeda poison and bombing expert. The hit was a significant one, and Al Qaeda posted a eulogy to al-Masri on the Internet a couple of days later. Gilani, according to the American analyst who was briefed by officials, knew nothing of the incident when he arrived in Washington. “They just did it,” the analyst said. The Americans pressed Gilani, telling him that his military and security services were out of his control and that they posed a threat to Pakistan and to American forces in Afghanistan.
At the Rose Garden, though, appearances were kept up in grand style. Bush and Gilani strode from the Oval Office side by side. Gilani laughed as the two leaders stopped to face the assembled reporters. Over to the side, to the right of the reporters, the senior members of Bush’s foreign-policy team had gathered, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, John Negroponte.
“Pakistan is a strong ally and a vibrant democracy,” Bush said. “We talked about the common threat we face: extremists who are very dangerous people. We talked about the need for us to make sure that the Afghan border is secure as best as possible: Pakistan has made a very strong commitment to that.”
“Thank you,” Gilani said, hesitating, looking at Bush. “Now?”
“Please, yes, absolutely,” the president said.
Gilani played his part. “We are committed to fight against those extremists and terrorists who are destroying and making the world not safe,” Gilani said. “There are few militants — they are hand-picked people, militants, who are disturbing this peace,” he concluded. “And I assured Mr. President we’ll work together for democracy and for the prosperity and peace of the world.”
And then the two men walked together back into the White House, with Rice and Negroponte trailing after them.
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Asif Ali Zardari and the battle to hold Pakistan together
Daily Telegraph. By Ahmed Rashid 06/09/2008
It is a sign of the times in Pakistan that Asif Ali Zardari, the man most likely to be elected president today, had to move from his heavily fortified house in Islamabad to the even more heavily fortified prime minister's residence. And not a moment too soon. There was an assassination attempt on prime minister Yousuf Raza Gailani on Wednesday.
Zardari, the controversial widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who spent nine years in jail facing charges of corruption, is now the principal target for al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.
His past and the fact that he has never held political office are the main concerns of most Pakistanis, but his presidency could determine nothing less than the future of his nuclear-armed state and the West's war on terror.
Pakistan has, since the September 11 attacks, become home to al-Qaeda's leadership and a gathering point for the Taliban, who continue to challenge Nato in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The new president's resolve will not only be tested by how he tackles these threats but also by the growing problem of Pakistan's own Islamic fundamentalists.
These groups, which often have links to the Taliban, are fostering an atmosphere in the country's religious schools, or madrassas, which British intelligence officials believe could help indoctrinate youths into committing acts of terror on Britain's streets.
The greatest fear for many is that if Pakistan's civilian government becomes weaker and more discredited in the eyes of the public, it could be toppled by Islamists. This holds out the prospect of fundamentalists winning control of a nuclear-armed state for the first time.
For Nato - and particularly British soldiers - fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, what happens in the next few weeks in Islamabad could mean life or death.
If Zardari succeeds in tackling even some of Pakistan's problems his chequered past may be forgiven, but if he does not, his opponents in the army may bring down the curtain on civilian rule.
Zardari has had many reincarnations. Born in 1955, he grew up in Karachi where he earned a reputation as a playboy, with a disco in his basement. In the 1980s, as the husband of prime minister Benazir Bhutto, he was dubbed Mr Ten Per Cent as stories circulated about alleged commissions earned from business deals.
None of the charges ever stuck - the one conviction he received was overturned - and when he left jail in December 2003 he was hailed a hero by many in his wife's Pakistan People's Party for enduring incarceration by President Pervez Musharraf and still being able to joke about it.
When Mrs Bhutto returned to Pakistan last year she left him behind in Dubai to look after their three children. Nobody expected him to enter frontline politics. But since his wife's murder last December he has had to again reinvent himself - this time as a ruthless, street-smart politician wielding power behind the scenes to hold the PPP together, easing out Musharraf, rebuilding relations with the army and trying to keep his main rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, at bay.
Pakistan is a parliamentary democracy but as a result of Musharraf's coup in 1999 the president is all powerful, able to appoint top officials and the army chief as well as dismiss the government. While the prospect of this massive accumulation of power in Zardari's hands worries many Pakistanis, he sees it as an opportunity to end political bickering so that the government can get on with tackling the two major issues of the economy and terrorism.
Much depends on how he uses his power. His biggest advantage is that the PPP is the only party in the country commanding support in all four provinces.
However, the PPP has had bitter relations with the army for 40 years - partly because it stands for civilian dominance over the military, seeks better relations with the army's traditional foe India and has opposed Islamic extremists whom the army has supported in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
An attempt by Zardari in July to curb the powers of the army's Interservices Intelligence (ISI), which interferes in local politics and directs policy on the extremists, failed miserably.
Washington is betting on both horses, supporting Zardari's election but also keeping close ties with the army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani. So far, Kiyani has refused to intervene in politics but the army, rather than the government, controls the on-off war against the Pakistani Taliban.
Zardari has to now wean the army and the ISI away from its past policies, rather than confront it. To do so he has to forge a strong working relationship with Kiyani. There are already signs that Kiyani is undertaking a reshuffle in the army's top ranks, which may also see changes in the ISI.
That may be helpful to the West and Zardari as we approach the seventh anniversary of September 11 with Osama bin Laden still at large. Al-Qaeda and its allies may be defeated in Iraq but they are stronger than ever in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The Pakistani army and intelligence services fostered the Taliban to keep Afghanistan destabilised in the 1990s. Much to the fury of the US, the army still allows the Afghan Taliban to use Pakistani soil for recruitment and rearming. It maintains they are wholly different to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban which they are trying, with little success, to turn out of the lawless regions.
Zardari's greatest challenge is to convince the army and ISI that such distinctions are now meaningless, as all three groups fight together to carve out a new Islamic state in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands.
If Zardari acts responsibly, keeps his cronies at a distance and wise men close, he could gain the army's trust and help it create a new strategic policy towards all extremists. The future of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the West's war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban depend on it.
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Paralympics team off to Beijing
KABUL (PAN): A five member Afghan Paralympics delegation left Kabul for China on Sunday to participate in the Beijing Paralympics games which is set to be held from September 6 to September 15.
A press please issued to Pajhwok Afghan News said as the official sponsor of the Afghan Paralympics delegation, the Alokozay Foundation wishes the team great success and is confident that it will represent the values of the people of Afghanistan at their best.
This commitment to the promotion of special sports is an aspect of the Alokozay Foundations efforts to support such bold initiatives in Afghanistan.
As part of its corporate social responsibility, the Alokozay International Lt., has established the Alokozay Foundation which provides aid and emergency relief along with financial resources for initiatives that support community development and improve quality of life. The Alokozay Foundation strongly believes in playing a key role in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Afghanistan.
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