Friday, April 16, 2010

Pakistan army sure it has upper hand in tribal areas

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
From his office less than 100m from where that melancholy grafittist left his mark, the man who leads the 50,000-strong Frontier Corps on the front lines of Pakistan's war on terror believes that time is near.

Major General Tariq Khan says the Frontier Corps is just two months away from flushing Islamic militants from all but one of the country's tribal agencies - North Waziristan - and once again bringing the country's western border with Afghanistan under government control.

It is a bold security assessment of a 1200km land strip that has become a redoubt for some of the world's most dangerous Islamic extremists. Even more so given Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, admits that one of Afghanistan's most feared militants, the Taliban-allied Afghan fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani, continues to spend up to 15 days each month in North Waziristan."There are no roads not open to us, no villages not accessible to us," General Khan boasts. "It makes me very happy to say that out of seven agencies, four of them we have total writ over. We're just waiting for the major operations - like Orakzai and Khyber - to finish in a couple of months to spare us the troops to start changing our methodology."

When that happens, the Frontier Corps - traditional defenders of the western border for more than 150 years - will conduct operations across the Federally Administered Tribal Area, going house to house in search of weapons caches and the remnants of the Pakistani Taliban leadership.

If it is true that Pakistan has finally turned the hose on the Islamic militants who have in the past found safety and even state support in FATA - and there is still scepticism it has - it could prove decisive for NATO and US forces fighting a Taliban insurgency across the border in Afghanistan.

The US has consistently accused Pakistan of playing a double game in the war on terror, co-operating with Western powers to rout Taliban forces while covertly supporting Afghan extremists in FATA to maintain leverage after the US pull-out.

Militant commanders such as Haqqani have long been regarded as a "Pakistani asset" (although the military is preparing to launch an operation in North Waziristan.) But US rhetoric has changed markedly in recent months as the Pakistani military has made material gains in FATA and Swat and arrested several high-profile Afghan Taliban leaders, even as the ISI has reportedly let others go.

"You have to give them a lot of credit for what they have done," one senior US official said of the Pakistani military this week. "They definitely are shrinking the safe havens inside Pakistan."

Yet in recent days General Khan has publicly criticised NATO and the US for failing to act on recent Pakistani intelligence that militants are escaping over the border into Afghanistan.

"At a tactical level, we have a very close relationship (with NATO and the US) but we're all governed by our own rules of engagement and in Afghanistan the rules of engagement are not allowing those people to operate the way they were operating," the straight-talking general says.

"I don't blame them (NATO troops). They're as frustrated as we are."

Civilian deaths in Afghanistan have forced NATO into accepting new rules that forbid troops from firing on an unarmed person, which means militants only have to drop their weapons and they may move away unhindered.

With the Pakistan military in the ascendant in its own backyard, General Khan believes his troops have succeeded where the better-equipped NATO and the US have so far failed.

"When I took command in August 2008, the Khyber Road was threatened, Peshawar and the surrounding areas had 50 kidnappings for ransom a day, Buner was occupied, the motorway (into Islamabad) was threatened," he says.

"Swat had its own constitution, Bajaur was days away from declaring allegiance to Afghanistan, Mohmand was a no-go area and Waziristan" was the acknowledged headquarters for Taliban insurgents.

"What's the situation now? The road to Kabul is open. Bajaur is secure. In all agencies bar one, we have the writ of the government."

In recent weeks, the Frontier Corps has spruiked its victories by flying journalists out to Damadola, in Bajaur Agency, to tour a complex of 156 caves developed by militants over seven years, within clear view of eastern Afghanistan. The area was the headquarters of al-Qa'ida and the Taliban and the home of al-Qa'ida No 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri until a failed drone attack in 2006 forced him to flee the area.

The Frontier Corps's victories have not come without US help, however. More than $US100 million in US aid has been spent in the past five years to help convert the corps from an under-resourced law enforcement agency struggling with mass desertions into a disciplined counter-insurgency force. Annual salaries have increased more than fourfold, and weapons, military infrastructure and living conditions have all improved significantly.

US Special Operations trainers, several of whom were seen by The Weekend Australian at Bala Hisar, now work with the corps to set up infrastructure in liberated areas, including tube wells, medical camps and FM radio stations with a dial-up network that villagers can use like a 000 or 911 emergency system.

Khadim Hussain from the independent Pakistani think tank Ariana Institute says many Pakistanis remain sceptical of military victory declarations they have heard many times before.

"Pakistanis generally are not yet clear as to what the military establishment is up to with respect to dealing with non-state actors and militant Islamic forces," he said. "The Taliban network, and its leadership, is still intact and still capable of launching strikes across Pakistan."

General Khan agrees the key to long-term stability in FATA is ensuring the support of the people there. Across most of the tribal areas he insists his troops - who are recruited from within the tribal agency itself - are greeted as liberators from the misery of life under Taliban rule.

But that is not universally the case. The military has faced heavy criticism for causing civilian deaths during operations and this week the army was forced into a rare admission over one of the most serious incidences yet in the Tyrah Valley in the Khyber Agency. About 57 people were killed in an aerial attack that was thought to be targeting a militant hideout but in fact hit the home of a tribal elder sympathetic to the government.

General Khan concedes such incidents do not help Pakistan win over the famed and feared FATA tribes, and appears to hold similar views on the US unmanned drones, used to devastating effect over the past 18 months to target militants, including the late Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

"We have to take the people with us. There's no other way."

General Khan says $1 billion is needed to rehabilitate the tribal areas, to ensure Taliban forces do not return to fill the vacuum.

If that occurs, then the FATA will no longer pose a threat to the country's stability, regardless of what happens over the border.

Pakistan blaming the US for letting the Taliban slip away

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
The young, immaculately turned out Pakistani soldiers responsible for guarding the world's most inhospitable terrain were finding it hard to conceal their frustration. For the past 18 months, they had been fighting to drive thousands of Taliban militants from their strongholds in the remote tribal regions that straddle Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
The campaign reached its climax last month, when Pakistani forces finally dislodged the Taliban from heavily fortified positions in Bajaur, just a few miles from the forbidding mountain passes that lead to Afghanistan.
This week, when I became one of the first Western journalists to reach Bajaur following the Taliban's defeat, the detritus of battle lay everywhere. Along the roads to the border villages stood semi-demolished houses riddled with bullet holes, where Taliban fighters had made their last, desperate stands. Occasionally, frightened children would peer from dilapidated alleyways and wave nervously at our passing convoy of military lorries.

At the border village of Damadola, where the insurgents lost their final battle, all that remained from their reign of terror was the network of caves they had carved into the surrounding mountains, which were filled with the dusty sleeping bags and clothes abandoned in their haste to escape the military's advance.

But even though Pakistani forces have inflicted a crushing defeat on the Taliban in the semi-autonomous tribal region of northern Pakistan, their senior officers are furious that hundreds of fighters escaped across the border into Afghanistan, where they are being housed and protected in camps set up by Afghan supporters.

Pakistani commanders insist that they informed their American opposite numbers that large numbers of Taliban were fleeing into territory that is supposed to be under US control, but they failed to intervene. Now the Pakistanis fear the Taliban will regroup in Afghanistan and launch a fresh offensive to re-establish its presence in northern Pakistan.

"We have done everything the West asked us to do," Col Nauman Saeed told me when we met at the headquarters of the Bajaur Scouts, who spearheaded the campaign against the Taliban. "We feel badly let down."

Previously, Nato commanders had accused the Pakistani authorities of not taking effective action against Taliban bases on their soil, which have been used to plan terrorist attacks against Western targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now the Pakistanis are turning the tables on Nato. The irony of these claims will not be lost on the Americans, who faced similar accusations in late 2001, after they led the coalition that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan. On that occasion, US forces failed to prevent the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies from escaping across the border to Pakistan, undermining attempts to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader.

Since then, the insurgents have exploited the goodwill of Pashtun leaders in Pakistan's remote tribal areas to build a new administrative structure. They used this to terrorise the population through the strict application of sharia law, and also provided a haven for al-Qaeda terrorists. Pakistani intelligence sources believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden's key lieutenants, was given shelter in Bajaur itself.

The Pakistani military was finally forced to intervene after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, and the Taliban moved south and seized control of the Swat Valley, close to the capital of Islamabad.

But the fact that, nine years after Western forces first deployed to the region, there appears to be no proper co-ordination between Nato commanders in Afghanistan and their Pakistani counterparts does not bode well for the future success of this campaign.

After all, the whole point of the new strategy devised by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces, is that it involves those on both sides of the border working together to defeat their common enemy.

What I found particularly disconcerting during my visit this week to the war zone in Pakistan was that the complaints I heard from Pakistani officers were not dissimilar to those I heard from their British counterparts when I visited Helmand this year. While both sides have made significant military gains against the Taliban, they are critical of the lack of support they are receiving from their allies.

The British and Americans accuse the Pakistanis of not doing enough to stop Taliban fighters fleeing across the border, while the Pakistanis complain about the ease with which the Taliban can move in the opposite direction.

It is clearly in the interests of everyone that this impasse is resolved quickly, as the glaring disconnect between Nato and Pakistan threatens to undermine the entire international effort to prevent this region from being a haven for Islamist terrorists. And with President Obama sticking to his pledge to start withdrawing American troops from the region in July next year, time is of the essence.

Pakistan blaming the US for letting the Taliban slip away

The young, immaculately turned out Pakistani soldiers responsible for guarding the world's most inhospitable terrain were finding it hard to conceal their frustration. For the past 18 months, they had been fighting to drive thousands of Taliban militants from their strongholds in the remote tribal regions that straddle Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
The campaign reached its climax last month, when Pakistani forces finally dislodged the Taliban from heavily fortified positions in Bajaur, just a few miles from the forbidding mountain passes that lead to Afghanistan.
This week, when I became one of the first Western journalists to reach Bajaur following the Taliban's defeat, the detritus of battle lay everywhere. Along the roads to the border villages stood semi-demolished houses riddled with bullet holes, where Taliban fighters had made their last, desperate stands. Occasionally, frightened children would peer from dilapidated alleyways and wave nervously at our passing convoy of military lorries.

At the border village of Damadola, where the insurgents lost their final battle, all that remained from their reign of terror was the network of caves they had carved into the surrounding mountains, which were filled with the dusty sleeping bags and clothes abandoned in their haste to escape the military's advance.

But even though Pakistani forces have inflicted a crushing defeat on the Taliban in the semi-autonomous tribal region of northern Pakistan, their senior officers are furious that hundreds of fighters escaped across the border into Afghanistan, where they are being housed and protected in camps set up by Afghan supporters.

Pakistani commanders insist that they informed their American opposite numbers that large numbers of Taliban were fleeing into territory that is supposed to be under US control, but they failed to intervene. Now the Pakistanis fear the Taliban will regroup in Afghanistan and launch a fresh offensive to re-establish its presence in northern Pakistan.

"We have done everything the West asked us to do," Col Nauman Saeed told me when we met at the headquarters of the Bajaur Scouts, who spearheaded the campaign against the Taliban. "We feel badly let down."

Previously, Nato commanders had accused the Pakistani authorities of not taking effective action against Taliban bases on their soil, which have been used to plan terrorist attacks against Western targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now the Pakistanis are turning the tables on Nato. The irony of these claims will not be lost on the Americans, who faced similar accusations in late 2001, after they led the coalition that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan. On that occasion, US forces failed to prevent the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies from escaping across the border to Pakistan, undermining attempts to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader.

Since then, the insurgents have exploited the goodwill of Pashtun leaders in Pakistan's remote tribal areas to build a new administrative structure. They used this to terrorise the population through the strict application of sharia law, and also provided a haven for al-Qaeda terrorists. Pakistani intelligence sources believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of bin Laden's key lieutenants, was given shelter in Bajaur itself.

The Pakistani military was finally forced to intervene after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, and the Taliban moved south and seized control of the Swat Valley, close to the capital of Islamabad.

But the fact that, nine years after Western forces first deployed to the region, there appears to be no proper co-ordination between Nato commanders in Afghanistan and their Pakistani counterparts does not bode well for the future success of this campaign.

After all, the whole point of the new strategy devised by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces, is that it involves those on both sides of the border working together to defeat their common enemy.

What I found particularly disconcerting during my visit this week to the war zone in Pakistan was that the complaints I heard from Pakistani officers were not dissimilar to those I heard from their British counterparts when I visited Helmand this year. While both sides have made significant military gains against the Taliban, they are critical of the lack of support they are receiving from their allies.

The British and Americans accuse the Pakistanis of not doing enough to stop Taliban fighters fleeing across the border, while the Pakistanis complain about the ease with which the Taliban can move in the opposite direction.

It is clearly in the interests of everyone that this impasse is resolved quickly, as the glaring disconnect between Nato and Pakistan threatens to undermine the entire international effort to prevent this region from being a haven for Islamist terrorists. And with President Obama sticking to his pledge to start withdrawing American troops from the region in July next year, time is of the essence.

U.N. Report Finds Faults in Pakistani Bhutto Inquiry

New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A United Nations investigation into the assassination of the former opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has concluded that the failure of Pakistani authorities to effectively investigate the killing was “deliberate” and had been “severely hampered” by the country’s powerful intelligence agencies.
The 65-page report, issued in New York on Thursday, did not answer the question of who killed Ms. Bhutto, or even give the precise cause of death. It was concerned instead with looking into the facts and circumstances surrounding her death in a suicide bombing and gun attack at a political rally in December 2007.
Its findings underscore the impunity with which political crimes are committed in Pakistan, a country whose short and turbulent history is punctuated by unexplained killings of prominent leaders.
The response in Pakistan to the UN report was muted on Friday, with television commentators sticking mostly to general points about security lapses, instead of delving into the most pointed criticism of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agencies.
Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said that Pakistan’s government had already opened an investigation into Ms. Bhutto’s death last year, but that the UN report would be “a shot in the arm,” for that probe. The report cataloged a litany of failings on the part of the authorities before and after the attack that killed Ms. Bhutto, leaving an impression of purposeful obstruction and raising questions of whether the country’s military and intelligence establishment had something to hide.
It was particularly scathing of the role of Saud Aziz, the police chief in Rawalpindi, the city where the assassination took place, who made a series of decisions that denied investigators valuable evidence.These included orders to hose down the crime scene less than two hours after the attack. Hosting long lunches and serving tea, he then delayed investigators for two full days from reaching the site, where they finally spent seven hours wading through a drainage sewer to retrieve a single bullet casing.Investigators managed to collect just 23 pieces of evidence in a case that would typically have yielded thousands, the report said.The decision to hose down the site was made after Mr. Aziz received a call from army headquarters, possibly involving Maj. Gen. Nadeem Ijaz Ahmad, then director general of military intelligence, the report said, citing anonymous sources. It called a later Pakistani inquiry into the decision “a whitewash.”“Hosing down the crime scene so soon after the blast goes beyond mere incompetence,” the report said. “It is up to the relevant authorities to determine whether this amounts to criminal responsibility.”The report also criticized Mr. Aziz for deliberately preventing an autopsy, repeatedly denying doctors permission to conduct it, and effectively eliminating another central piece of evidence.It says he then tried to “cover up” his failure by putting Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in the position of requesting one as he was presented with his wife’s body in a coffin on an air base outside Rawalpindi, a full seven hours after her death. A request then, the report says, would have been “patently unrealistic.”The report in large part dismisses allegations that Mr. Zardari, who is now president, had any hand in Ms. Bhutto’s death.
Conspiracy theories involving Mr. Zardari “simply had no basis, no evidence to be treated as credible hypotheses,” said Heraldo Muñoz Valenzuela, a Chilean diplomat who was part of the three-member team that conducted the investigation. He spoke at a news conference at the United Nations that was broadcast live on the Internet.Instead, the report criticized what it called the pervasive influence of the country’s military and intelligence authorities. The country’s main intelligence agency, know by its initials, the I.S.I., conducted its own parallel investigation even though it does not have a legal mandate to conduct criminal investigations, and selectively withheld information from the police, it said.“The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials,” the reports said, “which impeded an unfettered search for the truth.”
Agents from the I.S.I. were present at crucial points of the police investigation, including during the gathering of evidence at the crime scene and the forensic examination of Ms. Bhutto’s vehicle, “playing a role that the police were reluctant to reveal to the commission,” the report said, referring to the United Nations panel.
An I.S.I. officer was also present at the hospital throughout the evening.
The relationship with the military was a fraught one for Ms. Bhutto, who had raised concerns about Pakistanis she believed were a threat to her security to Pervez Musharraf, a military general who was then the president. They included a former I.S.I. director, Hamid Gul, and a former military intelligence officer, Brigadier Ejaz Shah.Particularly disturbing, the report said, was Mr. Musharraf’s failure to provide Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister, with the same security that was extended to two other former prime ministers on Oct. 22, 2007, who were his political allies.“This discriminatory treatment is profoundly troubling given the devastating attempt on her life only three days earlier and the specific threats against her which were being tracked by the I.S.I.,” the report said.It also noted sharply that it was Mr. Musharraf who made the decision to call a news conference the day after the assassination. In it, the government presented evidence of a telephone intercept collected by the I.S.I. linking the attack to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.“It is not clear how or when the intercept from the I.S.I. was recorded,” the report said. “Such a hasty announcement of the perpetrator prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun,” it added.
The report made no definitive judgement as to who was behind the plot to kill Ms. Bhutto, nor did it resolve the precise cause of her death, which occurred after a 15-year-old suicide bomber detonated his payload.
But it concluded, “No one believes that this boy acted alone.”