Me always thought they protested too much

From a recent Wall Street Journal report:

Pakistan's leaders have publicly denounced U.S. missile strikes as an attack on the country's sovereignty, but privately Pakistani military and intelligence officers are aiding these attacks and have given significant support to recent U.S. missions, say officials from both countries.
American unmanned Predator aircraft have killed scores of Islamic militants in Pakistan in more than 30 missile strikes since August, provoking outrage in the South Asian nation.

As the report points out in no uncertain terms:

Yet, with the Taliban pushing deeper into the country, Pakistan's civilian and military leaders, while publicly condemning the attacks, have come to see the strikes as effective and are passing on intelligence that has helped recent missions, say officials from both countries.

The Pakistani military is apparently still trying to maintain its policy of plausible deniability:

Maj. Gen Akhtar Abbas, a spokesman for the military, said Pakistan and the U.S. "have a long history of military cooperation and intelligence sharing." But he said it doesn't include the missiles strikes. "We have made our opposition clear," he said. "The strikes are counterproductive."

But as the WSJ report goes on:

[

Other Pakistani] officials say President Asif Ali Zardari and top military leaders decided in recent months to aid the American effort in the hopes it will help them regain control over the tribal areas. The Taliban and al Qaeda have flourished in those areas bordering Afghanistan since 2001. The cooperation also could prove as a counterbalance to U.S. displeasure over a peace deal announced Monday with a Taliban faction in Swat Valley.
The protests are "really for the sake of public opinion," said one Pakistani official. "These operations are helping both sides. We are partners on this."
A former U.S. intelligence official said cooperation has always been strong between the two countries' intelligence services. "There's always been a double game," the former official said. "There's the game they'll play out in public [but] there has always been good cooperation."
Further evidence of the close working relationship between the two countries came last week, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Predators are flown out of a base in Pakistan, not U.S. bases in Afghanistan, as many counterterrorism analysts had believed.

...Pakistan has since denied Ms. Feinstein's account, but former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that it was accurate, lamenting the fact she stated it publicly. "It was a big mistake on her part," said one.

The Treasure Hunt in Pakistan Begins; Your First Clue

Win up to $27 million if you find this guy.

Your first clue via Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, two geographers at UCLA. In a recent study published by MIT International Review and reported by UCLA Newsroom:

...the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.

But you better hurry as:

They warn that if bin Laden indeed remains to this day in the tiny city of Parachinar, or even elsewhere in the relatively thinly populated tribal area of Kurram, he may move to the city of Peshawar (population 1.4 million) in the neighboring tribal area of North-West Frontier Province if Peshawar falls to the Taliban. News reports have warned of that possibility since last summer.

The geographers used distance-decay theory (of course!) and island biogeographic theory (duh!) to come up with their conclusion. "Island biology theory predicts that he would find his way to the largest but least isolated city of that area," said Gillespie. "If you get stuck on an island, you would want it to be Hawaii rather than one with a single palm tree. It's a matter of resources."

"The Pakistani side of the border is much better for hiding because of its ambiguous political status within the country and the formal absence of U.S. or NATO troops," Agnew said.

Faced with the prospect of picking from more than 1,000 structures clearly portrayed in the satellite imagery of Parachinar, the team decided to come up with a short list of the criteria that bin Laden would need for housing, based on well-known information about him, including his height (between 6'4" and 6'6", depending on the source), his medical condition (apparently in need of regular dialysis and, therefore, electricity to run the machine) and several basic assumptions, such as a need for security, protection, privacy and overhead cover to shield him from being spotted by planes, helicopters and satellites...

Only three structures fit the criteria. The buildings also appeared to be the best fortified and among the largest in Parachinar. Two are clearly residences, the study states. The third may be a prison. But whatever the third structure is, it has "one of the best maintained gardens in all of Parachinar," the study says.

While the three structures meet all six of the criteria that the researchers believe would be required for lodging bin Laden, an additional 16 structures in Parachinar appear to meet five of the six criteria. If bin Laden is not in the first three structures, the U.S. military should investigate these other buildings, the study urges.

So there you go.

Blame it on the office

The Associated Press report on Friday:

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

The report continues:

After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.

"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

As the AP duly noted:

It's not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.

Who the Taliban sees as the enemy

Scary, right?

All of the above photos courtesy of UNAMA.

Swat peace: Not a done deal

Sherin Zada, Associated Press

Today the Washington Post reports that the peace accord announced yesteday between the Pakistani government and the Taliban who in Swat valley appears to have stalled .

As the Post report reports:

[The] proposed pact marks an unprecedented and risky attempt to disarm about 2,000 Taliban fighters, who have invaded and terrorized the once-bucolic area of 1.5 million people in northwestern Pakistan, by offering to install a str ict system of Islamic law in the surrounding district....The Taliban has ravaged the once-pristine, affluent area for months, burning schools, killing police and ordering women to remain home. More than half the populace is believed to have fled their homes.

Many Pakistanis greeted news of the accord with alarm.

Retired Pakistani brigadier and former intelligence chief in the area, Asid Munir, wrote in the News newspaper

All segments of society and the general public need to be educated that Talibanization is a real and serious threat to the country, and that if nothing is done to stop its advance, then the anarchy will spread.

Rifaat Hussain, a professor of defense and security studies at Quaid-i Azam University in Islamabad, was quoted in the Post as saying:

It legitimizes the existence of violent and armed groups and allows them to draw the wrong lesson: that if you are powerful enough to challenge the writ of the state, it will cave in and appease you.

A U.S. official reportedly told the Post "It's a surrender disguised as a truce."

But local residents who have had to live with the Taliban these last months seemed to have a different take. Many took to the streets, as the Post writes, to show their support for the accord "in a jubilant peace march."

Gul Bad Shah, a local shopkeeper in Swat, told reporters: "We want peace at any cost....We are very happy to see the hustle and bustle in the markets after a long time."

A local college student said he was hopeful that "once the law is implemented in letter and spirit" the Taliban will vanish.

Public spirits were reportedly dampened by the end of the day, however, when news was received about Musa Khan Khel, a Pakistani TV journalist who was covering the march.

"He was with us all day on the march, and then suddenly we heard he had been kidnapped and killed and his body dumped on the road," a Dawn newspaper reporter told the Post.

Maybe its the office not the man

As the NYT reported yesterday:

In a little noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

Moreover,

The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team's arguments that a lawsuit by former CIA detainees should be shut down based on the "state secrets" doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.

And nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta, as the Times report went on to say, "opened a loophole in Mr. Obama's interrogation restrictions [restricting CIA interrogators to Army Field Manual techniques]."

At his hearing, Mr. Panetta said that if the approved techniques were "not sufficient" to get a detainee to divulge details he was suspected of knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for "additional authority."....Mr. Panetta also said the CIA might continue its 'extraordinary rendition' program, under which agents seize terrorism suspects and take them to other countries without extradition proceedings....

Margaret Satterthwaite, faculty director of NYU's human rights center, described some of the new administration's arguments as "Bush redux - exactly the same legal arguments that we saw the Bush administration present to court." And ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said there were worrisome indications that Mr. Obama is going to continue "some of the most problematic policies of the Bush presidency."

Go figure.

NATO members refuse to impede the flow of funds to the Taliban

That's right. Some NATO states are excusing themselves from having to eradicate opium even though they acknowledge reports that suggest that this is where the Taliban is now getting funding in the range of $100 million to $500 million per year.

As the New York Times reports: "Each [NATO] country is allowed to state its reservations and opt out of missions that are viewed as too risky, either politically or militarily."

American commanders say that such provisions are preventing the coalition of troops from carrying out what has been agreed upon is a critical mission. Some NATO members have expressed fear that their soldiers can be prosecuted under domestic laws. Others are said to live in fear of public opinion at home.

Why not then encourage or allow (whatever the case is) Kabul to legalize opium production?

Why should the Taliban and the criminals reap all or in fact any of the benefits? It would seem to me that working on ways to reduce demand would be far easier (not to mention cheaper) than focusing on reducing the supply side of this equation.

Pakistan cedes Swat to Taliban

Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

Jane Perlez at the NYTimes reports on Islamabad's latest deal with the Taliban. In exchange for a ceasefire, Islamabad will agree to accept a system of Islamic law in Swat valley. As the NYT reports:

[the deal was] criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.

As the Times continues, the U.S. isn't thrilled by this agreement either. Pakistani authorities were advised by the Americans to keep fighting the Taliban.

Pakistan may have made this deal to restore some calm as former and current ministers suggested to the Times. Or it could be that there is another angle here.

As the Times notes, "the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants [in North and South Waziristan." While Islamabad previous deals allowed, as the Times writes, "a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants" to form, peace has yet to prevail in Waziristan.

The Pakistani military pulled out, it seems to me, only to let the American military - or rather its unmanned drones - step in. In fact, since the earlier peace accords, the U.S. drone attacks in Waziristan have been so unrelenting that some analysts believe they are the cause that the Taliban is now in Swat. Swat has been in the cross-hairs of the Taliban since long before the U.S. military began its campaign there so I don't think so myself.What I think is that Islamabad's move was to stop embarrassing itself and let the Americans get the blood on their hands.

And I doubt the drones are going to agree on the peace deal that Islamabad just did. To give you an idea why, consider what we know about the Taliban's concept of Islamic law:

Taliban leaders have proscribed what they call un-Islamic activities by residents, including watching television, dancing and shaving beards, and they have sometimes beheaded offenders. The penalties are regularly, and terrifyingly, announced over radio stations under the militants’ control.

Pakistan's information minister, according to another Times report, wants to play this as though it is no big change, saying, "We are only providing for an increase in the number of judges and setting a time frame for the disposal of cases." But I think he's kidding himself.

What does he think the Taliban think "disposal" means?

The Long Arm of the Taliban

 

If you think people who hail from the tribal areas of Pakistan - now effectively ceded to the Taliban by Islamabad- can escape to, say, New York, think again.

Kirk Semple reports for the NYTimes about a New York resident who returned for the first time in three years to the Swat Valley which until the Taliban moved in, was considered a mountain paradise:

...several heavily armed Taliban fighters wearing masks appeared at the door of their house [while he and his family were celebrating his homecoming and] accused Mr. Khan of being an American spy and kidnapped him.

During two weeks of captivity in a nearby mountain range, Mr. Khan says, he was interrogated repeatedly about his wealth, property and “mission” in the United States. He was released in exchange for an $8,000 ransom. His family, threatened with death if they did not leave the region, is now hiding elsewhere in Pakistan.

Another man, the owner of a limo company in NY, told the NYT that he received an anonymous phone call in which he was told that if he didn't bring $1 million with him on his next trip to Pakistan, "you know what will happen....we know your family."  Soon after his elderly father received a demand letter asking him for $200,000 in order to avoid being kidnapped.  In the letter the writer referred to his son in America.

"My 97-year-old father is [now] on the run," the limo-company owner told the NYTimes.

Another NY-resident Swati's brother was held hostage by the Talibanfor 75 days last year.  They made it clear he was being held because he had relatives in America  who they indicated could come up with the money to buy his release.

The sense of helplessness is no doubt compounded by the fact that there is little these Swatis can do from America. 

“To go to their rescue would actually make the situation worse,” said Mr. Khan....“We are the only source of income for these people. If we leave the United States, they’ll have no one supporting them.”