Turkmenistan and China will jointly combat the “three evil forces”

September 26 Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov held talks with a member of the State Council, China’s Minister of Public Safety Maine Jianzhu and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of China Cheng Guoping .

As the Chinese agency “Xinhua”, at a meeting with Turkmen President Meng Jianzhu said that the security situation in Central Asia, is tense and invited both parties to strengthen the fight against “three evil forces” (terrorism, separatism and extremism) and deepen bilateral and multilateral security cooperation. In turn, Berdymukhammedov assured the Chinese side that Ashgabat is ready to strengthen cooperation with China in fighting “three evil forces” and work together to protect the security of both countries, as well as peace and stability in the region. Participated in the meeting the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of China in Turkmenistan Xiao Qinghua . During his visit to Turkmenistan Minister of Public Security of China has also held meetings with Minister of Internal Affairs Iskander Mulikovym and Minister of National Security Yaylymom Berdiyev .

Helping Islamists Take Syria

Posted by Ryan Mauro
FrontPage Mag

The U.S. is calling on Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to step down and is increasingly persuaded that the uprising against his rule will be victorious. As the world wonders who will replace the regime, an Islamist-dominated group called the Syrian National Council is being embraced by Turkey and the Obama administration State Department. Genuine secular forces, meanwhile, are being left to the wayside as they struggle to save their country from both Assad and theMuslim Brotherhood.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has stated, “We have a desire to coordinate the position of the opposition.” With support from the Turkish government and a naïve U.S. State Department, it can achieve this objective. On September 15, opposition activists formed the Syrian National Council in Istanbul, the latest in a long list of umbrella groups to be formed since the uprising began.

Ammar Abdulhamid, a secular democratic activist based in the U.S., published a list of some of the members. Of the 71 named, 34 are Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood has not officially joined the alliance, but many members of it have.  The composition of the Syrian National Council is frightening other opposition groups who do not want Syria to become the next Gaza Strip. A leader of the leftist Kurdish Party said, “Turkey supports the Islamists in Syria and puts them out front. These Syrian opposition meetings in Turkey prevent the creation of a democratic, pluralistic Syria in which the rights of the Kurds are constitutionally protected and they are recognized as the second largest ethnicity in the country.”

Shockingly, the U.S. State Department and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Hamas-tied front for the Muslim Brotherhood, are together supporting the Syrian National Council. On September 24, the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR held a townhall event featuring a member of the SNC and Frederic C. Hof from the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for the Middle East. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has supported the Islamist opposition in Syria. Files released by WikiLeaks show that the State Department funded the Movement for Justice and Development. The group split from the Muslim Brotherhood and was described in the files as “liberal, moderate Islamists” who sought to “marginalize” the Brotherhood.

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Dragging-Up the Past to Prosecute Pakistan Today

[The day before, legendary Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah was killed in a British SAS operation in Helmand (SEE:  Mullah Dadullah, Taliban top commander, killed in Helmand) , leading to the next day's series of running battles between Paktia Province in Afghanistan and Kurram Agency in Pakistan. It was a fight launched by the Taliban, intended to bring the two sides to blows (SEE:  Heaviest clash between Pakistan, Afghan forces erupts on border).  The events of that day are heavily disputed by both sides--definitely not a clear-cut story of Pakistani forces attacking Americans, but being revived today to add to the case being made about attacks in Kabul and implicating the Haqqani network, and by extension, the Pak. Army.]

Pakistanis Tied to 2007 Border Ambush on Americans

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — A group of American military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.

An American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.

The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.

The reconstruction of the attack, which several officials suggested was revenge for Afghan or Pakistani deaths at American hands, takes on new relevance given the worsening rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad, which has often been restrained by Pakistan’s strategic importance.

The details of the ambush indicate that Americans were keenly aware of Pakistan’s sometimes duplicitous role long before Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate last week that Pakistan’s intelligence service was undermining efforts in Afghanistan and had supported insurgents who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul this month.

Though both sides kept any deeper investigations of the ambush under wraps, even at the time it was seen as a turning point by officials managing day-to-day relations with Pakistan.

Pakistani officials first attributed the attack to militants, then, when pressed to investigate, to a single rogue soldier from the Frontier Corps, the poorly controlled tribal militia that guards the border region. To this day, none of the governments have publicly clarified what happened, hoping to limit damage to relations. Both the American and Pakistani military investigations remain classified.

“The official line covered over the details in the interests of keeping the relationship with Pakistan intact,” said a former United Nations official who served in eastern Afghanistan and was briefed on the events immediately after they occurred.

“At that time in May 2007, you had a lot of analysis pointing to the role of Pakistan in destabilizing that part of Afghanistan, and here you had a case in point, and for whatever reason it was glossed over,” he said. The official did not want to be named for fear of alienating the Pakistanis, with whom he must still work.

Exactly why the Pakistanis might have chosen Teri Mangal to make a stand, and at what level the decision was made, remain unclear. Requests to the Pakistani military for information and interviews for this article were not answered. One Pakistani official who was present at the meeting indicated that the issue was too sensitive to be discussed with a journalist. Brig. Gen. Martin Schweitzer, the American commander in eastern Afghanistan at the time, whose troops were involved, also declined to be interviewed.

At first, the meeting to resolve the border dispute seemed a success. Despite some tense moments, the delegations ate lunch together, exchanged phone numbers and made plans to meet again. Then, as the Americans and Afghans prepared to leave, the Pakistanis opened fire without warning. The assault involved multiple gunmen, Pakistani intelligence agents and military officers, and an attempt to kidnap or draw away the senior American and Afghan officials.

American officials familiar with Pakistan say that the attack fit a pattern. The Pakistanis often seemed to retaliate for losses they had suffered in an accidental attack by United States forces with a deliberate assault on American troops, most probably to maintain morale among their own troops or to make a point to the Americans that they could not be pushed around, said a former American military officer who served in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Looking back, there were always these attacks that could possibly be attributed to deliberate retaliation,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because his job does not permit him to talk to journalists. Pakistani forces had suffered losses before the May 14 attack, he added.

As with so many problems with Pakistan, the case was left to fester. It has since become an enduring emblem of the distrust that has poisoned relations but that is bared only at critical junctures, like Teri Mangal, or the foray by American commandos into Pakistan in May to kill Osama bin Laden, an operation deliberately kept secret from Pakistani officials.

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Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.

 

Heaviest clash between Pakistan, Afghan forces erupts on border

Kabul/Islamabad – The heaviest clash so far between Afghan and Pakistani forces erupted on Sunday when Pakistani forces attempted to install an outpost in eastern Afghanistan.

There were conflicting reports on the death toll of both countries. The Afghan interior ministry said in a statement that eight Pakistani soldiers were killed and their bodies left on the battlefield while, Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said three Pakistani soldiers were injured in the “unprovoked” attack, while the Afghans took six or seven casualties.

Fighting between the two forces erupted early Sunday when the Pakistani army attempted to position their forces in mountains in Goyee area of Jaji district of the south-eastern Paktia province, General Zahir Azimi, Afghan defence ministry spokesman told a press conference.

Azimi said the advancing troops were forced to retreat and began using heavy artillery against the Afghan troops. Two children were killed while another three were injured along with two policemen, when a rocket hit a school.

He said that two Afghan police were also wounded, however, provincial police chief for Paktia Abdul Rahman Sarjang said that one policeman was killed and three others were wounded.

Azimi said that thousands of local people joined the Afghan forces from the Jaji district while tens of thousands of armed people dressed in white, beating drums and chanting “Allahu Akbar”,(God is great) were making their way to the Goyee area.

The local people fired at Pakistani helicopters which were manoeuvering in the area over Afghan soil, Azimi said, adding, “unconfirmed reports suggest that one of the helicopters which was shot and caught fire, crashed in Pakistani soil.”

However, General Arshad rejected reports that a Pakistani helicopter was shot down and said neither side crossed the border.

Arshad, confirmed that an exchange of fire took place at around 9.00 am Sunday in Pakistan’s Kurram Agency, which borders Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia Province.

“Afghan forces started uncontrolled firing on our forces,” he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The situation calmed following the arrival of US-led Coalition officials in the afternoon to investigate the incident, according to the official.

Afghanistan and Pakistan, both strong allies of US war on terror have been at loggerheads, each accusing the other of not doing enough to check cross-border infiltration.

The leaders of both countries met in Turkey late last month to ease the tension between their governments, but the latest clash indicates that the trouble is far from over.

In another separate clash between Afghan backed international forces and Taliban insurgents, 55 Taliban militants were killed in the neighbouring Paktika province on Saturday, the interior ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

In a clash in Gayan district of Paktika province Afghan police killed 40 militants, the statement said, adding that 10 bodies had been recovered.

Some 15 other militants were killed in clash with police after they attacked a police post in Barmal district of the same province around the time of the clash in Gayan, the statement added.

Turkish War Ships Escort Pire Reis Research Vessel Near Greek Cypriot Zone

Piri Reis

Turkish Ship Close to Cypriot Gas Search Zone

by Naharnet Newsdesk

A Turkish exploration ship is searching for gas and oil “close to” a Cypriot drilling zone off the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus, a senior energy ministry official said Tuesday.

“Our ship is exploring gas close to the Greek Cypriot zone, and under the escort of Turkish naval vessels,” the official told Agence France Presse, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Turkish ship Piri Reis, which embarked on its controversial mission last week, started its research on Monday under military protection in the eastern Mediterranean.

The official declined to say how long the ship would be staying in that zone.

Regional tensions have been rising after the Cyprus government, recognized internationally, but not by Turkey, made a deal with U.S. energy firm Noble, which has already started exploratory drilling for gas off the southern coast of the divided island.

In retaliation, Turkey dispatched its own exploration ship to the region after signing an accord with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a statelet only recognized by Ankara, for gas search in the designated areas off the island.

Source Agence France Presse

Northern Distribution Network Railway and Portage Links

“The Pentagon is increasingly relying on the NDN to keep the Afghan war effort going. By the end of this year, US military planners aim to ship 75 percent all Afghan-bound, non-military cargo along the NDN, thus reducing US reliance on a Pakistani supply route.

With Turkmenistan refusing to get involved with any land transit aspect of NDN — despite a concerted effort to incentivize officials in Ashgabat — Uzbekistan stands to be able to make considerable capital from its strategic position and infrastructure.”–[SEE:  Uzbekistan: US Senate Wants Pentagon to be More Transparent on NDN Contracts]

View Larger Map

http://www.adb.org/Documents/PCRs/UZB/30457-UZB-PCR.pdf

 

Uzbek rail: Red hot wheels to Afghanistan

A senior U.S. defense official said the military wants to keep using Pakistan, which offers the most direct and cheapest routes to Afghanistan. But the Pentagon is also developing the means to bypass the country if necessary. Below is a State Department cable related to the supply line discussion.

id: 234236
date: 2009-11-12 04:48:00
refid: 09TASHKENT1577
origin: Embassy Tashkent
classification: CONFIDENTIAL
destination: 09TOKYO2590
header:
VZCZCXRO6199
RR RUEHBI RUEHCI RUEHDBU RUEHLH RUEHNEH RUEHPW
DE RUEHNT #1577/01 3160515
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
R 120448Z NOV 09
FM AMEMBASSY TASHKENT
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 1513
INFO ALL SOUTH AND CENTRAL ASIA COLLECTIVE
CIS COLLECTIVE
RHMFISS/CDR USTRANSCOM SCOTT AFB IL
RHMFISS/HQ USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL
RUEHHE/AMEMBASSY HELSINKI 0102
RUEHKO/AMEMBASSY TOKYO 0005
——————- header ends ——————-
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 TASHKENT 001577
SIPDIS
DEPT FOR SCA/CEN
AMEMBASSY ASTANA PASS TO USOFFICE ALMATY
AMEMBASSY HELSINKI PASS TO AMCONSUL ST PETERSBURG
AMEMBASSY MOSCOW PASS TO AMCONSUL VLADIVOSTOK
AMEMBASSY MOSCOW PASS TO AMCONSUL YEKATERINBURG
E.O. 12958: DECL: 2019/11/12
TAGS: ECON, EAID, ECIN, ELTN, PREL, AF, UZ
SUBJECT: UZBEK RAIL: RED HOT WHEELS TO AFGHANISTAN
REF: 09 TOKYO 2590
CLASSIFIED BY: Robert McCutcheon, Econ Officer, State, Pol/Econ
Office; REASON: 1.4(B), (D)
1. (C) SUMMARY. XXXXXXXXXXXX told us
that Uzbekistan Railroads is having difficulty operating freight
trains on its new Karshi-Termez line. Obsolete locomotives with
inadequate brakes result in multiple delays and wheels that glow
red hot by the time a train has completed the mountain crossing.
XXXXXXXXXXXX Given the importance of the Karshi-Termez line to the Northern Distribution
Network, Post suggests the Department consider approaching Tokyo to
ensure that electrification of the Karshi-Termez line receives top
priority. END SUMMARY
ELECTRIFICATION OF THE KARSHI-TERMEZ LINE
—————————————–
2. (C) On November 9 we met with XXXXXXXXXXXX. XXXXXXXXXXXX
is heavily involved XXXXXXXXXXXX in the construction and
operation of Uzbek Railroad’s new line through the mountains from
Karshi to Termez. The natural, geographically dictated routing
from Karshi to Termez is via Turkmenistan, but after independence
in 1991, the GOU made the strategic decision to reduce its
dependence on routes through now foreign territory. This new
line, partially funded by XXXXXXXXXXXX, avoids Turkmen territory but has to
contend with steep mountain grades. The first trains rolled down
the new track in early 2009.
3. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX told us that there have been difficulties operating
trains over the Karshi-Termez line. Most locomotives used by Uzbek
Railroads are built to the same design as U.S. lend-lease
locomotives given to the Soviet Union in World War II. Soviet
engineers copied this design and used it to produce locomotives
that came to form a significant portion of Soviet rolling stock.
The problem with Uzbekistan’s legacy Soviet locomotives is that
they were never intended for use in mountainous terrain. They have
inadequate brakes and must be operated at slow speed. On the
descents, the brakes in all wagons are applied continuously, thus
necessitating frequent stops so that the wheels can cool. XXXXXXXXXXXX
told us that by the time trains have descended from the mountains,
the wheels are glowing red hot.
4. (C) The Karshi-Termez line carries Northern Distribution Network
(NDN) rail traffic to supply U.S. forces in Afghanistan. XXXXXXXXXXXX.
5. (SBU) XXXXXXXXXXXX told us that the next phase for the Karshi-Termez
rail line will be electrification. This will be accomplished in
four stages over a five-year period, with the steepest grades being electrified first. The cost is expected to be $550 million USD;
this includes provision for purchase of Chinese manufactured
electric locomotives.
6. (C) Only when the electrification program is complete will the
Karshi-Termez line be able to transport freight at full capacity.
XXXXXXXXXXXX told us he is worried, however, that the electrification
program is competing for priority within XXXXXXXXXXXX with a program to
rebuild power generation stations in Uzbekistan. (NOTE: We
believe XXXXXXXXXXXX is referring to the project to upgrade and reequip
TASHKENT 00001577 002 OF 002
the Tashkent Power Plant, for which XXXXXXXXXXXX is to provide
approximately $410 million USD. End Note.) One program will be
funded to begin in 2010, and the other will be funded to start in
2011. XXXXXXXXXXXX told us his XXXXXXXXXXXX contacts in Tashkent had intimated to
him that a well placed word from the USG could influence the
decision on which program gets the higher priority.
ROLLING ON BRITTLE TRACKS
————————-
7. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX told us he was appalled at how long it takes to
transport anything by rail in Uzbekistan. About 70 percent of rail
traffic is freight, but a typical train carries only half the
freight per wagon as a U.S. wagon — 50 tons instead of 100 tons.
From conversations with Uzbek engineers, XXXXXXXXXXXX said the limitation
appears to be not the trains but the quality of the steel used in
the tracks. He described the tracks as brittle and thus subject to
fracture if higher loads are transported.
AFGHAN RAILROAD
—————
8. (C) On the ADB-funded 70-80 km rail link from Hayraton to
Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan, XXXXXXXXXXXX claimed that Uzbek Railways
had padded the construction cost by more than a factor of two.
Whereas the rule of thumb for railroad construction in the U.S. is $1 million USD per mile, the budget for the new rail line in
Afghanistan is $160 million USD. For a line that will not span any
major rivers or face other geological impediments, the main
challenge will be security, not engineering.
COMMENT
——-
9. (C) XXXXXXXXXXXX’s description of current operations on the
Karshi-Termez rail line is cause for concern. XXXXXXXXXXXX underlined
this by saying he himself refused to travel on the line under
current conditions. His description of wheels that are red hot by
the end of the mountain crossing implies that a train wreck is
possible in the literal sense. Given this and the importance of
the line to NDN, Post believes the Department should consider
approaching authorities in Tokyo so that the Karshi-Termez
electrification project gets top priority. We believe that Japan’s
support for the rail electrification project would contribute to
Afghan reconstruction in a way that is compatible with the new
Japanese Government’s approach (reftel).
NORLAND

Uzbekistan: US Senate Wants Pentagon to be More Transparent on NDN Contracts

Uzbekistan: US Senate Wants Pentagon to be More Transparent on NDN Contracts

by Deirdre Tynan

US legislators are willing to lift restrictions on the Defense Department’s ability to provide military assistance to Uzbekistan, a country with one of theworld’s worst human rights records. But before the floodgates of security assistance are opened for Tashkent, Capitol Hill wants the Pentagon to be more transparent in the way it manages the Northern Distribution Network.

The US Senate in particular has voiced alarm that a lack of oversight over the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) has turned it into a gravy train of graft for Uzbekistan’s ruling elite. Uzbekistan serves as a hub for the NDN, which has emerged as a key supply line for US and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan.

The US Senate Committee on Appropriations approved a waiver September 22 that will for the first time in seven years remove restrictions prohibiting military aid to Tashkent. However, the waiver is conditioned on the Defense Department’s compliance with a requirement to provide reports on how Pentagon cash is spent on NDN contracts in Uzbekistan.

“The committee is concerned with reports of pervasive corruption in Uzbekistan and therefore expects to be informed of public and private entities that receive support, directly or indirectly, from United States Government funds used to pay the costs of Northern Distribution Network supply routes through that country,” a Senate report on foreign aid bill S. 1601 states.

“The Committee requires a report that itemizes those costs to the extent practicable to ensure that no US funds are being diverted in support of corrupt practices,” it adds. The first report will be filed six months after the bill becomes law, and annually thereafter.

The reports are expected to be classified and, therefore, unavailable for public review. The foreign aid bill for Uzbekistan is expected to come up for a vote in congress later this year.

The Pentagon is increasingly relying on the NDN to keep the Afghan war effort going. By the end of this year, US military planners aim to ship 75 percent all Afghan-bound, non-military cargo along the NDN, thus reducing US reliance on a Pakistani supply route.

With Turkmenistan refusing to get involved with any land transit aspect of NDN — despite a concerted effort to incentivize officials in Ashgabat — Uzbekistan stands to be able to make considerable capital from its strategic position and infrastructure.

Uzbekistan’s role in the NDN is pivotal with the majority of goods transiting into Afghanistan at the Termez-Hairaton rail node. Pentagon agencies have struck numerous deals with local trucking and storage subcontractors, as well as the state-owned Uzbekistan Railways. Uzbek authorities, while providing use the Navoi air hub to DoD contracted flights, will not allow onward flights from Navoi to Afghanistan, and insist that freight must be trucked to the border.

A well-placed source in Washington, DC, indicated to EurasiaNet.org that the use of subcontracted local firms on DoD contracts is an area of intense interest within some branches of the US government. Some officials worry that Uzbek political and security elites may be profiting from below-the-radar partnerships with international firms.

Another source familiar with Pentagon contracting practices in Central Asia alleges that Defense Department planners are aware that some US military contractors have cultivated relationships with companies that have been linked to friends and relatives of Uzbek President Islam Karimov.
“Pentagon logistics certainly knew some contractors were using companies controlled by the Karimov family to perform aspects of their contracts in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. But it’s very clear they didn’t view this as a negative, just the opposite,” the source said.

A previous investigation by EurasiaNet.org showed that the DoD is not unaware that doing business in Uzbekistan is fraught with complications. Potential contractors have warned the Pentagon that “informal fees,” an unambiguous euphemism for bribery, along with frequent rule changes can be managed partially by “established good relations” with Uzbek authorities.

According to the US Congressional Research Service, contracts listed in the US Federal Procurement Data System as having Uzbekistan as their place of performance rose in value from $11.7 million in 2007 to $20.2 million in 2010.

Human rights activists contend that policymakers in Washington are allowing Tashkent to dictate the terms and parameters of US-Uzbek relations. A recent Wikileaks dump of diplomatic cables suggests that US diplomats in Tashkent are unwilling to challenge the Uzbek government on egregious rights violations, including the widespread and persistent use of forced child labor in the cotton sector.

“[The Committee on Appropriations] mark-up in Senate may have so far gained little attention, but the terrible message it sends to the democracy activists and the ordinary people of Uzbekistan can hardly be overstated,” said Steve Swerdlow , Uzbekistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“Just days after the State Department labeled Uzbekistan a serial violator of religious freedom in its annual Religious Freedom report, and while President [Islam] Karimov continues his severe crackdown on civil society, the use of widespread torture, and forced child labor, the Congress has provided an enormous windfall to the military of one of the world’s most repressive governments,” Swedlow continued. “Given that Tashkent was already heavily benefiting from the US military presence in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should have played its cards better: insist on human rights improvements first, before lifting aid restrictions, not the other way around.”

Editor’s note:

Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based journalist specializing in central Asian affairs.

Obama Sold Bunker-Busting Bombs To Israel: Report

US Sold Bunker-Busting Bombs To Israel: Report

President Barack Obama released bunker-busting bombs to Israel in 2009, Newsweek reports © AFP/NAVY VISUAL NEWS/File Felix Garza Jr.

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama secretly authorized the sale of 55 powerful bunker-busting bombs to Israel, Newsweek magazine reported Friday.

Israel first asked to buy deep-penetrating GBU-28 bombs in 2005, but were rebuffed by then-president George W. Bush. At the time the Pentagon had frozen joint US-Israeli defense projects, fearful that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China, Newsweek said.

However in 2007 Bush informed then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert that the bombs would be ready for delivery in 2009 or 2010, even though the Israelis wanted them immediately.

Obama released the bombs in 2009, the magazine reports, citing unnamed officials familiar with the still-secret decision.

Newsweek, citing unnamed US and Israeli officials, said in its online edition that Israel has developed its own bunker-buster technology, but that it was cheaper to buy the US weapons.

The 2,000-pound bombs are designed to destroy hardened targets, which could be used to strike Iranian nuclear sites.

The Pentagon declined to confirm or deny the report but press secretary George Little said “the United States remains committed to helping Israel provide for its own security and we remain committed to helping Israel maintain its qualitative military edge.”

Fukushima Getting Worse – Tokyo Becoming Uninhabitable?

By Tom Burnett
The radiation coming out of that hell-hole is still INCREASING.  As I have said for months, there is no way to stop it.  The only solution is to hide it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

As of today, the people who were evacuated from the dead zone can apply for compensation to get a home somewhere else.  The instructions are 160 pages long and the application itself is 60 pages and requires various proofs and documents.  Merely having to leave a zone of deadly radiation is not proof of anything to the Japanese government, even though they ordered the evacuation.

In addition, the instructions are incomprehensible, even to a Japanese lawyer.  A typical farmer or lay person could never complete the application.

Moving right along…the Japanese are gearing up to restart all of the nuclear plants that are now offline.  They have no other sources of energy and winter is approaching – so all the plants that were shut down because they were – and still are – unsafe are going to be put back on line before winter.  I absolutely guarantee you that there will be another Fukushima-type accident in the near future because of these unsafe plants.  Japan will not only kill off it’s own citizens, but everyone else as well.

That’s not rhetoric.  Tokyo is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. As my VERY FIRST POST said back in March, when the cores hit groundwater, it will get very serious.  Now it is happening.  The entire northern half of Japan is effectively uninhabitable, although the Japanese government is simply ignoring the problem.

I am continuing to monitor radiation levels in East Hawaii and I have been invited back on the Rense program (9 PM Pacific, 9-26-11) because every one of my predictions and observations have been proven correct. It now appears that we are going to have an earth-shattering event.  Not just Japan.  The entire world is in danger, right now.

The Story of Your Enslavement

The Story of Your Enslavement, posted with vodpod

Turkey to Start Gas Exploration in Mediterranean Monday

by Naharnet Newsdesk

Turkey will start Monday to explore gas and oil in the eastern Mediterranean following a move by Greek Cypriots to press ahead with offshore gas drilling, the Anatolia news agency reported.

“We expect the ship to arrive at noon to the region where exploration will start. The team will start seismological research in the afternoon, after it reaches the region whose (geographical) position was specified,” said Huseyin Avni Benli, the head of the institute that owns the ship, Anatolia reported.

Benli did not elaborate on the ship’s exact destination.

The ship Piri Reis, which embarked on its controversial mission last week, has so far encountered no problems on the Mediterranean, said Benli of Dokuz Eylul University, in the Aegean province of Izmir.

Benli said there was twice-daily communication with the ship through satellite telephone, Anatolia reported. The ship left Urla port near Izmir on Friday.

Regional tensions have been rising after the Cyprus government, recognized internationally but not by Turkey, made a deal with U.S. energy firm Noble, which has already started exploratory drilling for gas off the southern coast of the divided island.

Turkey’s decision to send the seismic ship comes after it signed an accord with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), a statelet only recognized by Ankara, to explore energy supplies in designated waters off the island.

Source Agence France Presse

TAPI gas pipeline: Turkmenistan says no to a raw deal

By Zafar Bhutta

The deadline had earlier been set to July 31 but was extended when the four countries could not agree. PHOTO: FILE

ISLAMABAD: Turkmenistan has rejected the gas pricing formula proposed by its prospective buyers in the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project, a blow to the US-backed project that Washington had been pushing Islamabad to accept as an alternative to the gas pipeline from Iran.

In a meeting held on May 17 and 18 earlier this year, Kabul and New Delhi had accepted Islamabad’s suggestion that the three buyers collectively propose a gas-pricing formula based on Turkmenistan’s cost of production, rather than being linked to the price of oil, which is the standard global practise.

Pakistan’s formula would restrict Turkmenistan to a fixed profit margin, rather than the variable rate that is usually offered to countries exporting gas. Pakistan has signed an agreement with Iran that would link the gas import price to the international price of oil.

Sources told The Express Tribune that technical teams from the four countries, in a recent meeting of the Technical Working Group held in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat, had set October 15 as the deadline to finalise pricing details and sign the gas sales purchase agreement.

The deadline had earlier been set to July 31 but was extended when the four countries could not agree. Sources said that the buyer countries may make some concessions to Turkmenistan, including perhaps linking it to the global price of crude oil. The price of Iran’s gas exports to Pakistan are 78% based on the global price of oil.

“The four countries are expected to link the gas price with some percentage of the world crude oil,” sources said.

While no agreement appears to have yet been reached, sources familiar with the negotiations remain hopeful that the deadline for an accord will be met.

“The technical teams of all stakeholder countries have to conclude price of gas to import from Turkmenistan under TAPI gas pipeline project within ten days,” sources said adding that “We are hopeful that GSPA will be signed by October 15 to move forward on gas import project.”

In a bid to economically isolate Tehran, Washington has been pushing Islamabad to accept the TAPI project as an alternative to the Iran pipeline, going so far as to threaten sanctions if Pakistan does not comply.

Published in The Express Tribune

Ronald Reagan, Afghan Mujahideen, Talibans & Royal Mess.

[Excellent piece of work, laying-0ut the crooked ugliness that has brought us to this point in a pretty straight line.  This Pakistani author, Aamir Mughal, like so many of the best Indian strategic analysts, is retired from the intelligence services.  Despite my own compulsions to discount every word from former intelligence agents as a lie (especially "former" CIA), I often post exposes written by retired Indian and Pakistani spies, knowing that nobody else could possibly describe these insider events for us. 

It all began with Brzezinski, before becoming the centerpiece of Reagan's foreign policy, where it successfully released its plague upon all mankind, in the form of capitalist sponsored "Islamic" terrorism.]

Chagatai Khan

Toasts of President Reagan and President Mobammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan at the State Dinner December 7, 1982 – In the last few years, in particular, your country has come to the forefront of the struggle to construct a framework for peace in your region, an undertaking which includes your strenuous efforts to bring peaceful resolution to the crisis in Afghanistan—a resolution which will enable the millions of refugees currently seeking shelter in Pakistan to go home in peace and honor. Further, you’ve worked to ensure that progress continues toward improving the relationship between Pakistan and India. And in all these efforts the United States has supported your objectives and will applaud your success. And, Mr. President, unfortunately, a new and menacing turbulence has arisen in our region. More than a fifth of the entire population of Afghanistan has been compelled to seek shelter in Pakistan as a result of the armed intervention in that country by a foreign power. We are bending our effort to resolve this tragic situation through a peaceful political settlement, in accordance with the principles enunciated by the international community. The latest manifestation of this was the Resolution of Afghanistan adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, once again with the overwhelming support of the member states. Spread this America, Mr. President, to areas other than the United States of America. Let America be the torchbearer of peace, peace not only on the American continent but peace in Afghanistan, peace in Vietnam, peace in Somalia, and above all, peace in Palestine. We wish you, sir, all the best in your endeavors. And you will never find Pakistanis faltering. We’ll be there right behind you to give you the helping hand, if we can, at the moment that you wish us to do so. REFERENCE: Toasts of President Reagan and President Mobammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan at the State Dinner December 7, 1982http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=42083

Steve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan — Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001–by quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “What an unlucky country.” Americans might find this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor country. On the evidence contained in Coll’s book Ghost Wars, neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished. It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly confirmed Gates’s assertion. “According to the official version of history,” Brzezinski said, “CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”

Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions,

Brzezinski replied: Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’

Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?”

Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jihadists: Your cause is right!

Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jihadists: Your cause i…, posted with vodpod

Funding the Fundamentalists

The motives of the White House and the CIA were shaped by the Cold War: a determination to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible and the desire to restore some aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility that U.S. leaders feared they had lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency’s representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.” These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called “Maryknoll,” on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anti-Communists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church’s reach and power he could contain Communism’s advance, or reverse it. From Casey’s convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s — support for an international anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamentalism or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the counter-strategy of covert action to thwart Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the U.S. in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as a counter to the Soviet Union’s atheism, and Coll suggests that he sometimes conflated lay Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization, of which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, was a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Coll writes that Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the army of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator from 1977 to 1988.

On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also fomented, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always held that the CIA’s clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North. Over time, Casey’s position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad’s guerrilla leaders. The result, according to Coll, was that “Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.” In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency’s lavish support of the Pakistan-backed Islamist general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that “he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters.” Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar’s successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the State Department’s special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89, wrote that “American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war’s end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan,” CIA officials denounced him and planted stories in the embassy that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic. Meanwhile, Afghanistan descended into one of the most horrific civil wars of the 20th century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998. REFERENCE: Are We to Blame for Afghanistan? By Chalmers Johnson 11-22-04 http://hnn.us/articles/8438.html

When neighbors came to Mullah Mohammed Omar in the spring of 1994, they had a story that was shocking even by the grim standards of Afghanistan’ s 18-year-old civil war. Two teen-age girls from the mullah’s village of Singesar had been abducted by one of the gangs of mujahedeen, or ”holy warriors,” who controlled much of the Afghan countryside. The girls’ heads had been shaved, they had been taken to a checkpoint outside the village and they had been repeatedly raped. At the time, Mullah Omar was an obscure figure, a former guerrilla commander against occupying Soviet forces who had returned home in disgust at the terror mujahedeen groups were inflicting on Afghanistan. He was living as a student, or talib, in a mud-walled religious school that centered on rote learning of the Koran. But the girls’ plight moved him to act. Gathering 30 former guerrilla fighters, who mustered between them 16 Kalashnikov rifles, he led an attack on the checkpoint, freed the girls and tied the checkpoint commander by a noose to the barrel of an old Soviet tank. As those around him shouted ”God is Great!” Mullah Omar ordered the tank barrel raised and left the dead man hanging as a grisly warning. The Singesar episode is now part of Afghan folklore. Barely 30 months after taking up his rifle, Mullah Omar is the supreme ruler of most of Afghanistan. The mullah, a heavyset 38-year old who lost his right eye in the war against the Russians, is known to his followers as Prince of All Believers. He leads an Islamic religious movement, the Taliban, that has conquered 20 of Afghanistan’ s 32 provinces.

Mullah Omar’s call to arms in Singesar is only part of the story of the rise of the Taliban that emerged from weeks of traveling across Afghanistan and from scores of interviews with Afghans, diplomats and others who followed the movement from its earliest days in 1994. It is a story that is still unfolding, with the Taliban struggling to consolidate their hold on Kabul, the capital. The city fell three months ago to a Taliban force of a few thousand fighters, who entered the city with barely a shot fired. But the Taliban, despite their protestations of independence, did not score their successes alone. Pakistani leaders saw domestic political gains in supporting the movement, which draws most of support from the ethnic Pashtun who predominate along the Pakistan-Afghanista n border. Perhaps more important, Pakistan’s leaders, in funneling supplies of ammunition, fuel and food to the Taliban, hoped to advance an old Pakistani dream of linking their country, through Afghanistan, to an economic and political alliance with the Muslim states of Central Asia. At crucial moments during the two years of the Taliban’s rise to power, the United States stood aside. It did little to discourage support for the Afghan mullahs both from Pakistan and from another American ally, Saudi Arabia, which found its own reasons for supporting the Taliban in their conservative brand of Islam. American officials emphatically deny the assertion, widely believed among the Taliban’s opponents in Afghanistan, that the United States offered the movement covert support. American diplomats’ frequent visits to Kandahar, headquarters of the Taliban’s governing body, the officials insist, were mainly exploratory. In fact, American policy on the Taliban has seesawed back and forth. The Taliban have found favor with some American officials, who see in their implacable hostility toward Iran an important counterweight in the region. But other officials remain uncomfortable about the Taliban’s policies on women, which they say have created the most backward-looking and intolerant society anywhere in Islam. And they say that the Taliban, despite promises to the contrary, have done nothing to root out the narcotics traffickers and terrorists who have found a haven in Afghanistan under the mujahedeen.
Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (Part 1/5)

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (P…, posted with vodpod
In its most recent policy statement on Afghanistan, the State Department called on other nations to ”engage” with the Taliban in hopes of moderating their policies. But the statement came as the Taliban were tightening still further their Islamic social code, particularly the taboos that have banned women from working, closed girls’ schools, and required all women beyond puberty to cloak themselves head to toe in garments called burqas that are the traditional garb of Afghan village women. The result, so far, is that not a single one of the member countries of the United Nations has recognized the Taliban government and none have come forward with offers of the reconstruction aid the Taliban say will be needed to rebuild this shattered country. In the words of Mullah Mohammed Hassan, one of Mullah Omar’s partners in the Taliban’s ruling council, ”We are the pariahs of the world.”

On the Rise

Catching the Tide Of Discontent

How the Taliban succeeded in pacifying much of a country that had spent years spiraling into chaos is not, as their progress from Singesar to Kabul attests, primarily a question of military prowess. Much more, it was a matter of a group of Islamic nationalists catching a high tide of discontent that built up when the mujahedeen turned from fighting Russians to plundering, and just as often killing, their own people. By 1994, after five years of mujahedeen terror, the Taliban was a movement whose time had come. One man who has seen more of the Taliban than any other outsider, Rahimullah Yusufzai, a reporter for The News in Pakistan, put it simply: ”The story of the Taliban is not one of outsiders imposing a solution, but of the Afghans themselves seeking deliverance from mujahedeen groups that had become cruel and inhuman.

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (Part 2/5)

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (P…, posted with vodpod

The Afghan people had been waiting a long time for relief from their miseries, and they would have accepted anybody who would have freed them from the tyranny.” In any case, Mullah Omar contends that the decision to act at Singesar was not, at the time, envisaged as a step toward power. Although he is universally known in Afghanistan as mullah, or giver of knowledge, he is a shy man who still calls himself a talib, or seeker after knowledge. He has met only once with a foreign reporter, Mr. Yusufzai. Mullah Omar said at their meeting in Kandahar that the men at Singesar intended originally only to help local villagers. ”We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong,” he said. ”How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women, and the poor?” But appeals were soon coming in from villages all around Kandahar. At about the time the two girls were being abducted in Singesar, which is in the Maiwand district 35 miles to the west, two other mujahedeen commanders had confronted each other with tanks in a bazaar in Kandahar, arguing over possession of a young boy both men wanted as a homosexual partner. In the ensuing battle, dozens of civilians shopping and trading in the bazaar were killed. After the Taliban took control of Kandahar, those commanders, too, ended up hanging from Taliban nooses. With each new action against the mujahedeen, the Taliban’s manpower, and arsenal, grew. Mujahedeen fighters, and sometimes whole units, switched sides, so that the Taliban quickly came to resemble a coalition of many of the country’s fighting groups. The new recruits included many men who had served in crucial military positions as pilots, tank commanders and front-line infantry officers in the Afghan Communist forces that fought under Soviet control in the 1980’s. After a skirmish in September 1994 at Spinbaldak, on the border with Pakistan netted the new movement 800 truckloads of arms and ammunition that had been stored in caves since the Soviet occupation, there was no force to match the Taliban. Moving rapidly east and west of Kandahar in the winter of 1994 and the spring of 1995, they rolled up territory. Sometimes, using money said to have come from Saudi Arabia, Taliban commanders paid mujahedeen commanders to give up. But mostly, it was enough for Taliban units to appear on the horizon with the fluttering white flags symbolizing their Islamic puritanism.
Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (Part 3/5)

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (P…, posted with vodpod
”In most places, the people welcomed the Taliban as a deliverance, so there was no need to fight,” recalled Mr. Yusufzai, the Pakistani reporter, who has spent more time with the Taliban than any other outsider. Another event in September 1994 gave the Taliban their most important external backer. Naseerullah Babar, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, had a vision for extricating his wedge-shaped country from the precarious position in which it was placed when it was created in 1947 by the partition of India from territories running along British India’s frontiers with Afghanistan. Mr. Babar saw a Pakistan linked to the newly independent Muslim republics of what had been Soviet Central Asia, along roads and railways running across Afghanistan. He believed that stability in Afghanistan would mean a potential economic bonanza for Pakistan and a strategic breakthrough for the West. ”It was in the West’s overall interest,” he said in an interview in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. ”Unless the Central Asian states have an opening to the sea, they will never be free from Russia.” With the rise of Taliban power around Kandahar, Mr. Babar spied a chance to prove the vision’s practicability. Using Pakistan Government funds, he arranged a ”peace convoy” of heavily loaded trucks to run rice, clothing and other gifts north from Quetta in Pakistan, through Kandahar, and onward to Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan. But outside the American-built airport at Kandahar, a mujahedeen commander guarding one of the thousands of checkpoints that had made an obstacle course of any Afghan journey seized the convoy, demanding ransom. Once again, the Taliban intervened, freeing the convoy and hanging, again from a tank barrel, the commander who hijacked it. Mr. Babar’s subsequent enthusiasm for the Taliban gave rise to a widespread belief among the the group’s opponents that they were a Pakistani creation, or at least that their growing military power was sustained by cash, arms and ammunition from Pakistan. Because of Pakistan’s close ties with the United States, it was a short step for these Taliban opponents to conclude that Washington was also backing the Taliban.
Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (Part 4/5)

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (P…, posted with vodpod
After Kabul fell in September, Americans venturing into non-Taliban areas north of Kabul faced a common taunt from soldiers of the ousted Government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani. ”The Taliban are American puppets!” they said. But while that was not accurate, there were ties between American officials and the growing movement that were considerably broader than those to any other Western country. From early on, American diplomats in Islamabad had made regular visits to Kandahar to see Taliban leaders. In briefings for reporters, the diplomats cited what they saw as positive aspects of the Taliban, which they listed as a capacity to end the war in Afghanistan and its promises to put an end to the use of Afghanistan as a base for narcotics trafficking and international terrorism. Unmentioned, but probably most important to Washington, was that the Taliban, who are Sunni Muslims, have a deep hostility for Iran, America’s nemesis, where the ruling majority belong to the rival Shiite sect of Islam. Along the way, Washington developed yet another interest in the Taliban as potential backers for a 1,200-mile gas pipeline that an American energy company, Union Oil Company of California, has proposed building from Quetta, in Pakistan, to Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic that sits atop some of the world’s largest gas reserves, but has limited means to export them. The project, which Unocal executives have estimated could cost $5 billion, would be built in conjunction with the Delta Oil Company, a Saudi Arabian concern that also has close links to the Taliban. Among the advisers Unocal has employed to deal with the Taliban is Robert B. Oakley, a former American Ambassador to Pakistan. American officials, however, denied providing any direct assistance, covert or otherwise, to the Taliban. Similar assurances were given to Russia and India, as well as indirectly to Iran, countries that were involved in heavy arms shipments of their own to the Taliban’s main opponents, the armies of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and President Rabbani that control the 12 northern provinces that continue to resist the Taliban. ”We do not have any relationship with the Taliban, and we never have had,” David Cohen, the Central Intelligence Agency official who directs the agency’s clandestine operations, told Indian officials in New Delhi in November.
Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (Part 5/5)

Documentary 2006 – Declassified: The Taliban (P…, posted with vodpod

Mr. Babar offered similar denials, asserting that ”there has been no financial or material aid to the Taliban from Pakistan.” But Western intelligence officials in Pakistan said the denials were a smokescreen for a policy of covert support that Mr. Babar, a retired Pakistani general, had extended to the Taliban after the convoy episode at Kandahar airport. That support, the intelligence officials said, apart from ammunition and fuel, included the deployment at crucial junctures of Pakistani military advisers. The advisers were easy to hide, since they were almost all ethnic Pashtuns, from the same tribe that make up an overwhelming majority of the Taliban. Gaining Support To U.S. Diplomats A Rosy Picture American officials like Robin Raphel, the top State Department official dealing directly with matters involving Afghanistan, have placed heavy emphasis on the hope that contacts with the new rulers in Kabul will encourage them to soften their policies, especially toward women. They also say that the United States sees the Taliban, with its Islamic conservatism, as the best, and perhaps the only, chance that Afghanistan will halt the poppy growing and opium production that have made Afghanistan, with an estimated 2,500 tons of raw opium a year, the world’s biggest single-country source of the narcotic. A similar argument is made on the issue of the network of international terrorists, many of them Arabs, who have set up bases inside Afghanistan. But as the Taliban consolidate their power in Kabul, the signs of cooperation are not strong. In the week before Christmas, as bitterly cold winds from the 20,000-foot Hindu Kush mountains swept down on Kabul, senior Taliban officials seemed to be in a more pugnacious mood than in October, when a counteroffensive by the Rabbani and Dostum forces came within 10 miles of Kabul.

The attacking forces have since been driven back beyond artillery range, allowing the Taliban to concentrate on tightening their grip on Kabul’s restive population of 1.5-million. The sense that those Taliban leaders now give is that they see little reason to accommodate the West. Reports from United Nations officials monitoring drug flows suggest the Taliban have done nothing to impede the trafficking and that in the key provinces of Helmand and Nangarhar — accounting for more than 90 per cent of the opium production — they are in league with the drug producers, taxing them, and storing some of the opium in Taliban-guarded warehouses. Turning Away Elusive Positions On West’s Concerns Confronted with these reports, Taliban leaders have a stock response. ”We intend to stop the drug trafficking, because it is against Islamic laws,” they have said. ”But until we can rebuild our economy, there are no other jobs, so now is not the time.” The Taliban position on those who support international terrorists is still more elusive. According to Western intelligence estimates, as many as 400 trained terrorists are living in areas under Taliban control, some of them with links to the groups that mounted the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 and other major attacks, including the attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in Ethiopia in 1995 and attacks in France by Algerian militants. One of the most-wanted men of all, Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian businessman who has been called one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremists in the world by the State Department, has been spotted within the past month at a heavily guarded home in the Afghan city of Jalalabad, held by the Taliban since early September. But it is on their treatment of women that Western governments’ attitudes seem most likely to hinge, and on that matter the Taliban show no sign of relenting. After a Taliban radio bulletin earlier this month celebrated the fact that 250 Kabul women had been beaten by Taliban in a single day for not observing the dress code, an Australian working as a coordinator for private Western aid agencies in Kabul, Ross Everson, visited one of the city’s top Taliban officials, Mullah Mohammed Mutaqi, to appeal for a turn toward what Mr. Everson called ”the doctrine of moderation that the Islamic faith is famous for.” Mullah Mutaqi stood up and waved his fist in Mr. Everson’s face. ”You are insulting us,” he said, Then, snuggling back into the blanket that Taliban officials wear around their shoulders for warmth in the unheated offices of Kabul, he made his clinching argument. ”I must ask you, are you the Muslim here, or am I?” he said. ”If you Westerners want to help us, you are welcome. Otherwise you are free to leave Afghanistan. You may think we cannot survive without you, but I can tell you, God will provide the Taliban with everything we need.” REFERENCE: “How Afghanistan’ s Stern Rulers Took Power,” New York Times, December 31, 1996 by JOHN F. BURNS and STEVE Levine FOR INDEPTH DETAILS: Major General (Retd) Naseerullah Khan Babar, Scandals & Shenanigans http://chagataikhan.blogspot.com/2009/06/major-general-retd-naseerullah-khan.html

US placed the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1996 – CNN’s Crossfire – 09.11.02

US placed the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1996 – …, posted with vodpod

The Taliban invented

But first stability had to be restored to Afghanistan. During the civil war fighting in 1995 the first substantial numbers of Taliban appeared, “invented” by the Pakistani ISI and perhaps funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia. Unocal and its Saudi partner Delta Oil may have even played a major role in buying off local commanders. Security in Afghanistan was apparently their sole purpose. On 26 September 1996 the Taliban took Kabul. Michael Bearden, a CIA representative in Afghanistan during the war against the USSR and currently the CIA’s unofficial spokesman, recalls how US viewed the situation at the time: the Taliban were not considered the worst: they were young and hot-headed, but that was better than civil war. They controlled all the territory between Pakistan and Turkmenistan’s gas fields, which might be good as it would be possible to build a pipeline across Afghanistan and supply gas and energy to the new market. Everyone was happy (5). Unocal’s vice-president, Chris Taggart, barely bothered to pretend Unocal was not backing the Taliban; he described their advance as a positive development. Claiming that Taliban seizure of power was likely to help the gas pipeline project, he even envisaged US recognition of the Taliban (6). He was wrong, but no matter: this was the honeymoon between the US and the “theology students”. Anything goes where oil and gas are involved. In fact, in November 1997 Unocal invited a Taliban delegation to the US and, in early December, the company opened a training centre at the University of Omaha, Nebraska, to instruct 137 Afghans in pipeline construction technology. The political and military situation showed no improvement, leading some in Washington to consider support for the Taliban and the oil pipeline a political mistake. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott warned in 1997 that the region could become a centre for terrorists, a source of political and religious extremism and a theatre of war (7).

An important new factor was influencing Afghanistan’s internal affairs and external relations: Osama bin Laden had sought refuge in Afghanistan after leaving Saudi Arabia. On 22 February 1998, with the support of the Taliban, he launched al-Qaida, a radical international Islamist movement, from Afghanistan. He also issued a fatwa authorising attacks on US interests and nationals. During a visit to Kabul on 16 April 1998, Bill Richardson, the US representative to the UN, raised the question of Bin Laden with the Taliban. They played down the problem. Tom Simons, ambassador to Pakistan, said that the Taliban assured him that Bin Laden did not have the religious authority to issue a fatwa. But on 8 August 1998 bombs destroyed the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans. The US responded by launching 70 cruise missiles against Afghanistan and strikes on Sudan. Bin Laden became US public enemy number one, although it was more than six months before an international arrest warrant was issued. Having failed to capture Bin Laden, the US hoped to negotiate with the Taliban to have him expelled from Afghanistan. But the attacks did collateral damage: Unocal announced that it was abandoning the Afghan gas pipeline. In 1997 the Six plus Two Group was set up, made up of Afghanistan’s six neighbours (Iran, Pakistan, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) with Russia and the US. The group acts under the auspices of the UN and its special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi , a very experienced Algerian diplomat who took the post in July 1998. After the military and political failure of its earlier missions, the UN has again become crucial in the region. There were several diplomatic initiatives in the region in 1998, then on 12 March 1999, following Iran, the US moved closer to Russia on Afghanistan. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Karl Inderfurth went to Moscow. Very little divided the Russians and the Americans, including the role they envisaged for Teheran. According to Inderfurth, Iran as Afghanistan’s neighbour could help end conflict. Iran could play a positive role and the Six plus Two Group could provide a structure.

Inderfurth saw the irony: Afghanistan was an area where Russians and Americans could work together to end a war in which the Russians were involved, openly supporting the Northern Alliance. A new diplomatic game The first signs of current concerns also appeared in 1998. They included initiatives by factions close to supporters of former King Zahir Shah, who was ousted in 1973 and lives in exile in Rome. In a report to the Security Council, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed “the Loya Jirgah (grand assembly) as an informal, time-honoured method of settling disputes, advocated by leaders of non-warring Afghan factions.” He suggested encouraging “the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan to maintain useful contacts with them” (8). Other initiatives were taken around the UN, including a meeting of 21 countries influential in Afghanistan (9). The new diplomatic game began with the full meeting of the Six plus Two Group on 19 July 1999 in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), the first time representatives of the Taliban and members of the Northern Alliance were to sit at the same table. The Taliban, in control of 90% of Afghan territory, refused to allow the Northern Alliance to be represented. As expected, the meeting was a failure, but from then the Group provided the channel for most diplomatic initiatives. Washington refused to abandon hope that the Taliban would surrender Bin Laden, and continued to maintain contacts and encourage processes directed to a political solution. With US blessing, a meeting to promote the Loya Jirgah was arranged by Zahir Shah and held in Rome, 22-25November 1999. The UN Security Council had adopted a resolution calling upon the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden, and imposing limited sanctions. On 18 January 2000 Spanish diplomat Francesc Vendrell replaced Lakdhar Brahimi, who, dispirited by the lack of progress, had resigned. Two days later, Karl Inderfurth went to Islamabad to meet Pakistan’s new leader, General Pervez Musharraf. He also met two senior Taliban representatives and demanded: “Give us Bin Laden”. In return, he offered to regularise relations between Kabul and the world. Although Washington denied it, the Taliban, internationally condemned for policies towards women, attitudes to human rights and protection of Bin Laden, were still in talks with the US. On 27 November the Taliban deputy minister of foreign affairs, Abdur Rahman Zahid, gave a lecture at the Washington Middle East Institute, calling for political recognition of the Taliban regime and intimating that the Bin Laden affair could then be settled (10). On 30 September 2000, on an Iranian initiative, there were fresh negotiations in Cyprus. Among those present were supporters of the former “butcher of Kabul”, Islamic extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had enjoyed the backing of the US and Saudi Arabia against the USSR, but was now in exile in Iran. The Northern Alliance established contacts with the pro-Zahir Shah Rome delegates.

On 6 April 2001 those contacts resulted in an initial joint meeting between the Rome process, in favour of a Loya Jirgah under the auspices of the former King, and the Cyprus process sponsored by the Iranians. Though disagreeing with the pro-Iranian element, the other factions agreed to further meetings. The discussions continued. On 3 November 2000 Vendrell had announced that the Taliban and the Northern Alliance had jointly considered a draft peace plan under the auspices of the Six plus Two Group (11). That coincided with a hardening of attitude within the Taliban as a result of international sanctions. In the spring, tension erupted in the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas. Meanwhile the Six plus Two Group had begun a new, and final, stage — so the Americans thought. A sub-group was secretly set up, supposed to be more effective, of diplomats or specialists with the most up-to-date experience of the region. The delegates’ foreign ministries secretly managed its work. Meetings were held in Berlin, with only the US, Russia, Iran and Pakistan present. The delegates included Robert Oakley, former US ambassador and Unocal lobbyist; Naiz Naik, former foreign minister of Pakistan; Tom Simons, former US ambassador and the most recent official negotiator with the Taliiban; a former Russian special envoy to Afghanistan, Nikolai Kozyrev, and Saeed Rajai Khorassani, formerly the Iranian representative to the UN. Winning the jackpot At the first meetings in November 2000 and March 2001, to prepare for direct negotiations between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, the participants discussed a political undertaking to give the Taliban a way out. According to Naiz Naik, the group wanted to respond to what the Taliban would say about their international approach, a broad-based government and human rights. Naik said the idea was that “we would then try to covey to them that if they did certain things, then, gradually, they could win the jackpot — get something in return from the international community”.

According to the Pakistanis present at the meeting, if the Taliban agreed to review human rights issues within two or three years and accept a transitional government with the Northern Alliance, they would gain massive (financial and technical) international aid to rebuild the country. According to Naik, the objective was to restore peace and stability, and secure the pipeline. It might, he said, be possible to persuade the Taliban that once a broader-based government was in place and the oil pipeline under way, there would be billions of dollars in commission, and the Taliban would have their own resources — the “jackpot” indeed. The US was still determined to get hold of Bin Laden. According to Tom Simons, if the Taliban surrendered him or entered into serious negotiations, the US would be ready to embark on a major reconstruction project. In Washington, the State Department was resolute. The administration had changed and the oil industry was over-represented within government, starting with President George Bush. The task of negotiating with the Taliban was given to Christina Rocca, the new assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, who knew about Afghanistan, a country she had dealt with between 1982 and 1987, when she worked for the CIA. On 12 February the US ambassador to the UN gave an assurance that, at the request of Vendrell, the US would develop a continuing dialogue on humanitarian bases with the Taliban (12). The US believed so firmly in the future of the negotiations that the State Department blocked the FBI investigation into the possible involvement of Bin Laden and his Taliban accomplices in the attack on the USS Cole, in Aden (Yemen) in October 2000. They had John O’Neill, the FBI’s “Mr Bin Laden”, expelled from Yemen to prevent him investigating further (13).

The third meeting was to take place, again in Berlin, between 17 and 21 July, in the presence of the Taliban representative, foreign minister Mullah Mutawkil, and the representative of the Northern Alliance, foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. In early July, a secret meeting had been held between 21 countries influential in Afghanistan, at Weston Park in the UK. A compromise solution based on the former king was approved, particularly by the Northern Alliance. Naiz Naik explained that it was necessary to tell the Taliban that if they refused to cooperate, the Zahir Shah option would be available. From that point, diplomacy saw Zahir Shah as a possible replacement for the Taliban. Unfortunately, the plan collapsed. The Taliban first rejected it because of the involvement of Vendrell: he represented the UN, responsible for the international sanctions. And an attempt was being made to get them to talk to parties to whom they objected. According to Naik, at this point Tom Simons referred to an open-ended military option against Afghanistan from bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The locations seemed plausible, as these were countries known to have military cooperation agreements with the US. But was a specific threat made? Ambassador Simons dismisses this. He was not there in an official capacity and had no authority to issue threats (but would the Taliban have turned up to meet unofficial delegates with no contact with the State Department?) I He merely stated that the US was looking at evidence relating to the USS Cole, pointing out that if the US established that Bin Laden was behind it, there would be military action. It is worth noting that on 5 July, in the belief that the Taliban were taking part in the negotiations, the US was specifically not looking for evidence in relation to the attack on the USS Cole. The Pakistani delegation reported what had been said to the ministry and the secret services. They, no doubt, informed the Taliban. In late July, Islamabad and Pakistani military circles were buzzing with rumours of war. According to an unofficial source at the French foreign ministry, it is possible that, by exaggerating what Simons had said, the Pakistani secret services were trying to pressure the Taliban to expel Bin Laden.

On one last occasion, on 29 July, Christina Rocca held unsuccessful discussions with the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan. The negotiations were at an end. The FBI began to look for evidence against Bin Laden. A possibility haunts people. What if, convinced the US was going to war, Bin Laden fired the first shot? On 11 September the towers of the World Trade Centre were destroyed by men activated no earlier than mid-August. Three days later, Unocal announced that the suspended proposal for a gas pipeline would remain on ice and it would refuse to negotiate with the Taliban, in the expectation that the Kabul regime would fall. A month later, US bombing began. The Tajiks and Uzbeks “agreed” to provide military facilities to US forces. To combat terrorism, Russia “spontaneously” promised all the assistance necessary to the US, and the anti-Taliban factions finally reached an agreement. All this happened in two months. On 27 November 2001 US energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, and a team from the Energy Department, went to Novosibirsk, in Russia, to facilitate the completion and opening of the oil pipeline of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) — a link costing eight companies, including Chevron, Texaco and Exxonmobil, $2.5bn. It was, according to Abraham, a fresh start for relations between Russia and the US (14) — and a further foothold for the US in exploiting the vast oil resources of the former Soviet Union. Hamid Karzai was appointed head of the Afghan interim government agreed at the Bonn meetings. It then emerged that during the negotiations over the Afghan oil pipeline, Karzai had been a consultant for Unocal. Brzezinski must be very amused. REFERENCE: The US and the Taliban: a done deal By Pierre Abramovici http://chagataikhan.blogspot.com/2008/10/taliban-phenomenon-20.html

THE MASSACRE IN MAZAR-I SHARIF On August 8, 1998, Taliban militia forces captured the city of Mazar-i Sharif in northwest Afghanistan, the only major city controlled by the United Front, the coalition of forces opposed to the Taliban. The fall of Mazar was part of a successful offensive that gave the Taliban control of almost every major city and important significant territory in northern and central Afghanistan. Within the first few hours of seizing control of the city, Taliban troops killed scores of civilians in indiscriminate attacks, shooting noncombatants and suspected combatants alike in residential areas, city street sand markets. Witnesses described it as a “killing frenzy” as the advancing forces shot at “anything that moved.” Retreating opposition forces may also have engaged in indiscriminate shooting as they fled the city. Human Rights Watch believes that at least hundreds of civilians were among those killed as the panicked population of Mazar-i Sharif tried to evade the gunfire or escape the city. REFERENCE: AFGHANISTAN: http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/afghan/

MASSACRES OF HAZARAS IN AFGHANISTAN This report documents two massacres committed by Taliban forces in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in January 2001 and May 2000. In both cases the victims were primarily Hazaras, a Shia Muslim ethnic group that has been the target of previous massacres and other serious human rights violations by Taliban forces. These massacres took place in the context of the six-year war between the Taliban and parties now grouped in the United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (the “United Front”), in which international human rights and humanitarian law have been repeatedly violated by the warring factions. Ethnic and religious minorities, and the Hazaras in particular, have been especially vulnerable in areas of conflict, and Taliban forces have committed large-scale abuses against Hazara civilians with impunity. In this report Human Rights Watch calls upon the United Nations to investigate both massacres and to systematically monitor human rights and humanitarian law violations by all parties to Afghanistan’s civil war. The massacre in Yakaolang district began on January 8, 2001 and continued for four days. In the course of conducting search operations following the recapture of the district from two Hazara-based parties in the United Front, the Taliban detained about 300 civilian adult males, including staff members of local humanitarian organizations. The men were herded to assembly points in the center of the district and several outlying areas, and then shot by firing squad in public view. About 170 men are confirmed to have been killed.

The killings were apparently intended as a collective punishment for local residents whom the Taliban suspected of cooperating with United Front forces, and to deter the local population from doing so in the future. The findings concerning events in Yakaolang are based on the record of interviews with eyewitnesses that were made available to Human Rights Watch and other corroborating evidence. The May 2000 massacre took place near the Robatak pass on the border between Baghlan and Samangan provinces. Thirty-one bodies were found at one site to the northwest of the pass. Twenty-six of the dead were positively identified as civilians from Baghlan province. Of the latter, all were unlawfully detained for four months and some were tortured before they were killed. Human Rights Watch’s findings in this case are based in large part on interviews with a worker who participated in the burials and with a relative of a detainee who was executed at Robatak. These accounts have been further corroborated by other independent sources. With respect to both massacres, all names of sources, witnesses, and survivors have been withheld. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the head of the Taliban movement, has stated that there is no evidence of a civilian massacre in Yakaolang and blocked journalists from visiting the district, until recently accessible only by crossing Taliban-held territory. On the night of February 13-14, 2001, however, United Front forces recaptured Bamiyan city, the provincial capital. The offensive secured an airport and a road link to Yakaolang. On January 19, 2001, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a statement expressing concern about “numerous credible reports” that civilians were deliberately targeted and killed in Yakaolang. The secretary-general called on the Taliban to take “immediate steps to control their forces,” adding that the reports required “prompt investigation” and that those responsible should “be brought to justice.”1

On February 16, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson called for the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into human rights violations in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch is concerned that such a commission would take too long to establish; the need is for a small team of experts that could be deployed immediately. The Taliban’s denial of responsibility for the Yakaolang massacre, and its failure to hold its commanders accountable for these and other abuses against civilians by its forces, make it critical that the U.N. itself investigate both cases. There have been preliminary discussions within the U.N. on the feasibility of investigating the Yakaolang massacre; a similar discussion also took place after the Robatak massacre, although no further action was taken. These discussions should be resumed. In doing so, however, the U.N. should not repeat the missteps that resulted in an inconclusive 1999 field investigation by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, into the 1997 killing of Taliban prisoners by United Front forces in Mazar-i Sharif and the reprisal massacre of Hazara civilians by Taliban forces the following year. To allow an effective investigation into the cases documented in this report, the U.N. should adopt the measures outlined below. REFERENCE: 1 Secretary-General, United Nations, “Secretary-General very concerned about reports of civilians deliberately targeted and killed in Afghanistan,” January 19, 2001, as posted on Relief Web, http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf

(accessed February 16, 2001). Afghanistan: The Massacre in Mazar-I Sharif NOVEMBER 1, 1998 http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/1998/11/01/afghanistan-massacre-mazar-i-sharif November 1998 Vol. 10, No. 7 (C) AFGHANISTAN February 2001 Vol. 13, No 1(C) http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/afghanistan/

Dec. 15, 1997 A Taliban delegation has visited Washington and was received by some State Department officials. The Talib delegation’s meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of State for South Asia Karl Inderforth was arranged by the Unocal, which is eager to build a pipeline to pump gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghan territory. “We made our position clear, namely that the pipeline could be useful for Afghanistan’s rehabilitation, but only if the situation was settled there by political means”, a State Department official said on condition of anonymity. He stated that the Taliban representatives were told that they should form “a broadly-based government together with their rivals before the ambitious project to build an oil and gas pipeline is launched”. According to Taliban assessments, only one pipeline could yield almost $ 300 mm for rehabilitating the war-ravaged Afghanistan. The Taliban delegation included Acting Minister for Mines and Industry Ahmed Jan, Acting Minister for Culture and Information Amir Muttaqi, Acting Minister for Planning Din Muhammad, and recently appointed Taliban Permanent Delegate on the United Nations Mujahid. A State Department official described the talks as “open and useful”. He said that they also touched on the production of opium and open poppy on the Taliban-controlled territory, human rights, treatment of women, and on America’s attitude to the projected pipeline. Asked whether there could be problems for the U.S. government if it backed the commercial investments into a country, which is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, who, according to western standards, are oppressing women, the State Department official said that any real “political settlement” would resolve this problem. In the meantime, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the Talib government only a month ago as something quite disgusting due to its policy of oppressing women. FOR FURTHER READING: Taliban visit Washington Volume 3, issue #6 – 25-02-1998 http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/news/ntn80956.htm

Read this US Government Declassified Documents.http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB97/tal40.pdf UN lifts sanctions on five former Taliban officials Wednesday, 27 Jan, 2010http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/04-un-sanctions-list-taliban-qs-07 Taliban leaders may join Afghan govt: US By Anwar Iqbal Tuesday, 26 Jan, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/13+taliban-leaders-may-join-afghan-govt-us-610-za-08 Mullah Omar open to talks: Colonel Imam Tuesday, 26 Jan, 2010http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-omar-talks-col-imam-qs-05

And while the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi stand officially disbanded, their most militant son and leader, Maulana Azam Tariq, an accused in several cases of sectarian killing, contested elections from jail – albeit as an independent candidate – won his seat, and was released on bail shortly thereafter. Musharraf rewrote election rules to disqualify former Prime Ministers Mohammed Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, and threatened to toss them in jail if they returned from abroad, which badly undermined both Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League and Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Musharraf has plainly given the religious groups more free rein in the campaign than he has allowed the two big parties that were his main rivals. In Jhang city, in Punjab province, Maulana Azam Tariq, leader of an outlawed extremist group called Sipah-e-Sahaba, which has been linked to numerous sectarian killings, is being allowed to run as an independent despite election laws that disqualify any candidate who has criminal charges pending, or even those who did not earn a college degree. “It makes no sense that Benazir can’t run in the election,” says one Islamabad-based diplomat, “and this nasty guy can.” References: And this takes me back to Pervez Musharraf’s first visit to the US after his coup. At a meeting with a group of journalists among whom I was present, my dear and much lamented friend Tahir Mirza, then the Dawn correspondent, asked Musharraf why he was not acting against Lashkar-e Tayba and Jaish-e Muhammad. Musharraf went red in the face and shot back, “They are not doing anything in Pakistan. They are doing jihad outside.” Pakistani neocons and UN sanctions Khalid Hasan This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 6:00 pm.http://www.khalidhasan.net/2008/12/28/pakistani-neocons-and-un-sanctions/ For The ‘General’ Good By Sairah Irshad Khan Monthly Newsline January 2003http://www.newsline.com.pk/newsJan2003/cover1jan2003.htm – General’s Election By TIM MCGIRK / KHANA-KHEL Monday, Oct. 07, 2002http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,361788,00.html

RIGHT UNDER THE NOSE OF GENERAL MUSHARRAF AND GEORGE W BUSH!!!

In interviews, however, American intelligence officials and high-ranking military officers said that Pakistanis were indeed flown to safety, in a series of nighttime airlifts that were approved by the Bush Administration. The Americans also said that what was supposed to be a limited evacuation apparently slipped out of control, and, as an unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exodus. “Dirt got through the screen,” a senior intelligence official told me. Last week, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did not respond to a request for comment. Musharraf won American support for the airlift by warning that the humiliation of losing hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of Pakistani Army men and intelligence operatives would jeopardize his political survival. “Clearly, there is a great willingness to help Musharraf,” an American intelligence official told me. A C.I.A. analyst said that it was his understanding that the decision to permit the airlift was made by the White House and was indeed driven by a desire to protect the Pakistani leader. The airlift “made sense at the time,” the C.I.A. analyst said. “Many of the people they spirited away were the Taliban leadership”—who Pakistan hoped could play a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person, “Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on the table” in future political negotiations. “We were supposed to have access to them,” he said, but “it didn’t happen,” and the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence. According to a former high-level American defense official, the airlift was approved because of representations by the Pakistanis that “there were guys— intelligence agents and underground guys—who needed to get out.” REFERENCE: The Getaway Questions surround a secret Pakistani airlift. by Seymour M. Hersh January 28, 2002http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/28/020128fa_FACT

Ron Paul on Threat to National Sovereignty

Ron Paul on Threat to National Sovereignty , posted with vodpod

Turkey Offers Reasonable Solution To Cyprus Gas Crisis

Turkish Cyprus offers proposal to UN chief over Greek gas row

Eroglu said that the proposal was presented to the UN as a way of solution to the problem regarding Greek Cypriot efforts to explore oil and natural gas in the Mediterranean.

President Dervis Eroglu of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) met the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York on Saturday.

Following the meeting, Eroglu told reporters that they discussed Cyprus talks as well as recent developments regarding oil and natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean which was directly related with the Cyprus talks.

Noting that they presented a new proposal including four topics to Ban within that scope, Eroglu said that the proposal was presented to the UN as a way of solution to the problem regarding Greek Cypriot efforts to explore oil and natural gas in the Mediterranean.

Listing the topics, Eroglu said, “1-Let’s suspend the oil and natural gas exploration simultaneously until a comprehensive solution is found to Cyprus problem, 2-If this is not going to happen, then we shall set up an ad-hoc committee shaped by representatives of both peoples. We shall give some authorities to the committee such as; explorations, agreements and licences depend on written approval of both sides, and we will negotiate the ratio of sharing the richness which will be found, 3-We shall use the income to finance the comprehensive talks, 4-Adoption of the plan shall not harm the positions of both sides.”

Eroglu said that Ban was pleased with the proposal.

Earlier this week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Eroglu signed in New York an agreement on the delineation of the continental shelf between two countries in the East Mediterranean following a Greek Cypriot move to start offshore drilling for natural gas and oil in the southeast of the Eastern Mediterranean island.

In 2010, Greek Cypriot administration and Israel signed an accord demarcating their maritime borders to facilitate a search for mineral deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Greek Cypriot administration has recently begun oil and natural gas exploration and drilling.

The Greek Cypriot side had signed a deal with U.S.-based Noble Energy to start drilling in an 324,000-hectare economic zone.

When asked whether TRNC could give authorization to explore oil and natural gas only for north of the island after signing the agreement on the delineation of continental shelf with Turkey, Eroglu said that Turkish Cypriots had rights on all underwater richness around Cyprus island so that TRNC had the right to give authorization both north and the south of the island.

When asked how this process would affect the intensified Cyprus talks, Eroglu said that TRNC wanted to pursue talks, adding that the talks would continue on Tuesday.

Eroglu then held a bilateral meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

CIA created Haqqani network: Rehman Malik

APP

Our security forces are capable of handling terrorists and countering any challenge: Rehman Malik.—File photo

ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rehman Malik on Sunday said that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States not Pakistan created the Haqqani network and trained its members.

Talking to media representatives at a ceremony here, Malik said that the Haqqani network was present in Afghanistan and those claiming otherwise should provide evidence of its presence in Pakistan.

“We will fight the terrorists as our forces are capable of handling them and countering any challenge,” the minister said.

US-Pakistan ties ‘heading for meltdown’

Ravi Velloor

Ten years after the Pervez Musharraf government abruptly reversed Pakistan’s policy of helping the United States topple the Taleban government in Afghanistan, Islamabad’s ties with Washington are hitting new lows with each passing day.

The chief reason has to do with the Pakistan establishment’s unflinching support for the groups of tribal militants loosely banded as the Quetta Shura.

Angered and frustrated at the repeated attacks on American and Nato forces by Pakistan-backed militants, the US is threatening to ignore Pakistani sensitivities and mount hot pursuits in the barely governed tribal badlands of Pakistan.

There are even murmurs of the unthinkable — Pakistan being branded a state sponsor of terrorism — if ties deteriorate further.

Meanwhile, the US is actively looking to expand alternate supply routes into Afghanistan to cut its dependence on the Pakistani port of Karachi.

Taken together, dark clouds are looming over US ties with Pakistan, once so tight that US pilot Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was brought down over Russia in 1960, had taken off from a Pakistani airfield for his mission. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan two decades later, Pakistan was the staging point for the US-backed Afghan resistance.

Now, their interests are completely misaligned and as American frustration grows, hot words are flying.

Last week, US envoy Cameron Munter went on Pakistan radio to decry Islamabad’s support for the Haqqani militant network, directly accusing it of targeting US and Nato offices in Kabul in a bid to control Afghanistan’s post-2014 future.

On Wednesday, his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave her young Pakistani counterpart, the designer-clothed Hina Rabbani Khar, a dressing down.

And just the day before, Admiral Mike Mullen, the soon-to-retire chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pakistani state was using the Haqqanis as “proxies.”

The US Senate Appropriations Committee also voted to make aid to Pakistan conditional on its cooperation to fight militants. Islamabad yesterday promised to take action against the Haqqanis if Washington provides sufficient intelligence, but denied that they were in Pakistan.

Admiral Mullen said he raised the need for Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to sever ties with the Haqqani network during talks with Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Kayani last Friday.

“The ISI has been… supporting proxies for an extended period of time. I think that strategic approach has to shift in the future,” he said.

The blunt remarks raised eyebrows because Admiral Mullen claims a personal friendship with General Kayani. But for those following the steady decline in US-Pakistani ties, it came as no surprise.

“The US-Pakistani partnership has been steadily marching to a meltdown ever since it was resuscitated, thanks to divergent objectives, poor alternatives and endless illusions,” said respected analyst Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Although the US was aware of Pakistan’s active support for the Taleban resurgence as early as 2003, and for anti-Indian jihadi groups even earlier, they did not receive serious attention as long as Afghanistan remained stable. The real strains emerged when the Pakistani backing of the Quetta Shura began to dangerously undermine US operations in Afghanistan.”

The Quetta Shura — shura means council — is a coalition of anti-US groups comprising the Haqqani brothers, Mullah Omar’s Taleban and others. The Haqqanis were blamed for staging the 17-hour stand-off in Kabul last week when militants attacked the US Embassy and Nato headquarters. The US thinks the ISI directly ordered the assault.

Interestingly, the US has not yet classified the Haqqanis as a foreign terrorist organisation.

“The reason is that doing so would mean it will have to also categorise Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism,” said a Western diplomatic source. “There would be many consequences and Washington has to think through all of them carefully. But this is something not to be ruled out for the future. Pakistan must decide whether it wants to be on the side of the problem or the solution.”

Although some of the Shura’s key leaders have been picked up by Pakistani forces in recent months, the US is convinced that it continues to be backed by the ISI.

A string of Indian consulates set up in Afghanistan — all allowed by the India-friendly Hamid Karzai regime — has exacerbated Pakistani insecurities. And it has not helped that India has excellent ties with Tajikistan, on Afghanistan’s northern border, whose Ayni airbase is India’s only foreign military asset.

Meanwhile, the US is desperately building up alternate supply routes.

This month, it was revealed that President Barack Obama was planning to push Congress to lift a seven-year-old arms embargo on Uzbekistan. The idea is to woo Tashkent into closer cooperation with the overland supply route from Europe to Afghanistan, called the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).

Currently, the dominant supply route is through Karachi, from where the supplies pass overland and through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

But the US move suggests that Washington expects that route to get more and more dangerous. Hence the need to get the Uzbeks’ cooperation, never mind that the NDN is a far more expensive route.

©The Straits Times. Reprinted by arrangement with Asia News network.

“The Karachi Affair”

idiotsinpower

THE French President is fighting to prevent a scandal involving allegations of high-level corruption – and even murder – defining his bid for re-election.

Nicolas Sarkozy is suspected by investigators of involvement in alleged kickbacks to help finance Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential campaign from illicit commissions said to have been paid on the sale of three submarines to Pakistan.

At the time, Mr Sarkozy was a junior minister backing Mr Balladur, the prime minister, against Jacques Chirac, their party leader.

The so-called “Karachi affair” began in 1994 when France sold three submarines to Pakistan. It is alleged Pakistani and French officials took a cut from the contract and that some of that money found its way, a year later, into Mr Balladur’s election war chest.

Mr Sarkozy, who dismissed the affair in June as a “grotesque fable”, is alleged to have been involved in the transfer of the illicit funds. The President cannot be prosecuted while in office, but the shadow of sleaze could dog his re-election campaign.

Yesterday, the left-wing opposition and families of 11 French workers killed by a car bomb in Karachi in 2002 called on Mr Sarkozy to answer questions over the E820 million submarine deal.

Socialist leader Martine Aubry called for absolute transparency. The Communist Party said: “We are facing a corruption scandal at the highest level of the state.”

The controversy is seen as a symptom of the long feud between Mr Chirac and the Balladur-Sarkozy pair, who betrayed him in 1995 by trying to block his path to the presidency.

Mr Chirac was, at the time, the boss of both as leader of the Rassemblement pour la Republique, the Gaullist movement.

The scandal erupted in March last year when a French judge expressed his strong suspicion that the 2002 Karachi bombing, which killed 11 French submarine engineers and local dock staff, had been ordered by Pakistani military officers and not by al-Qa’ida, as Pakistan had claimed.

The judge told the families of victims he believed the attack was retaliation for Mr Chirac’s decision in 1995 to halt payments of E83m in commissions to Pakistan. He suspected the newly elected president had stopped payment to prevent further funds from reaching Mr Balladur’s political campaign.

Suspicions that some of the bribes were kicked back to France intensified in January when the Luxembourg police reported that Mr Sarkozy had set up a company there in 1994, when he was Mr Balladur’s budget minister.

“We are led to believe in the existence of a form of retro-commission to pay for political campaigns in France,” the Luxembourg police told the French judge investigating the matter.

Mr Sarkozy denies the claims. But suspicion increased when it became known Mr Balladur’s 1995 campaign accounts contained E1m in unexplained cash.

In 2002 a suicide bomber killed 14 workers of French marine engineering company DCN in Karachi, 11 of whom were French citizens. These killings are linked to submarine sales by France to Pakistan that go back to the early 1990s.

The Time Line

1993

Edouard Balladur is French prime minister under then President Francois Mitterrand.

The French Naval Construction Executive (DCN) is looking to sell French submarines to Pakistan.

As France is competing with Germany for the contracts, SOFMA, the company responsible for the export of French military hardware, is offered a 6.25 percent commission on any future sales. This commission was perfectly legal at the time.

1994

In September 1994 a contract is signed between Pakistan and France for the purchase of submarines for a total of 5.41 billion francs (826 billion euros).

1995

SOFMA looks to pocket 338 million francs, while two Lebanese businessmen, through off-shore company Mercor Finance, look set to receive a four percent commission (216 million francs) to be shared with Pakistani intermediaries for securing the deal.

The French presidential election campaign pitches Prime Minister Edouard Balladur against Jacques Chirac for the Gaullist RPR party’s nomination. Budget Minister and future French president Nicolas Sarkozy is in charge of Balladur’s campaign.

According to left-leaning French daily Liberation in an April 2010 report, the Lebanese businessmen sold their commission contract to a Spanish bank in June 1995 for an immediate down-payment of 54 million francs, with the rest to be paid once the DCN contract with Pakistan was concluded.

Almost simultaneously, 10 million francs in cash (mostly in 500-franc notes) is paid into Balladur’s campaign fund account (one fifth of the total funds), according to the Liberation report.

1996

Jacques Chirac wins the party nomination and is elected president. On discovering the scale of the sales and commissions to be paid, he orders an immediate inquiry led by Defence Minister Charles Millon.

In November 2010, Millon confirmed that he had concluded in his 1996 investigation that there had been kickbacks from the commission payments.

Jacques Chirac orders that all commission payments to Mercor Finance be halted immediately, although according to Liberation, payments continued well into 2001.

2002

A suicide bomber in Karachi, Pakistan kills 14 people, of whom 11 are French naval engineers working for DCN.

France immediately accuses al Qaeda of instigating the attack – although no one has ever claimed responsibility for it.

2007

Anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, assigned to lead the investigation into the bombing, is replaced by two investigating magistrates, Marc Trevidic and Renaud Van Ruymbeke.

Marc Trevidic opens a new direction in the investigation, namely that the attack was linked to the halting of commission payments.

2008

Weekly French news magazine Le Point reveals that a 2002 report by a former agent of the DST (French homeland defence and intelligence agency) concluded that the attacks were “financially motivated”.

2010 – June

French investigative news website Mediapart claims that, according to the Luxembourg authorities, Sarkozy (as budget minister in 1994) set up off-shore company Heine to handle transactions to Mercor Finance in the submarines deal.

The website says that Luxembourg police believed “some of the funds that passed through the Luxembourg account were channelled back to France to finance the campaigns of French political parties.”

Such allegations had been described as a “grotesque fairytale” by Sarkozy in 2009.

Investigating magistrate Trevidic confirms that there were indeed kickbacks associated with the submarine sales.

2010 – August

The families of the 2002 bombing victims start civil proceedings against Jean-Marie Boivin, former administrator of the Heine offshore fund set up in Luxembourg in 1994, for perjury.

The case is handled by Ruymbeke. But Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin says that allegations of corruption by politicians in the 1990s are too old to be investigated.

2010 – October

Ruymbeke announces that he will, after all, investigate the corruption allegations – in particular, the allegations that kickbacks from the submarine sales were used to fund Balladur’s 1995 election campaign.

Balladur says that his campaign funds were given the all-clear by the French Constitutional Court in 1995 and that there is no case to answer.

On November 10, Bernard Accoyer, speaker for France’s National Assembly, refuses to hand Tredivic the testimony of some 60 people – including Balladur – who gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into the affair, citing France’s constitutional separation of power between parliament and the judiciary.

News website Mediapart says that two of its journalists working on the Karachi file are under constant surveillance by the French security services.

The satirical newspaper Canard Enchaine claims, in the same week and in a separate case, that Sarkozy is supervising the surveillance of journalists personally. The Elysee Palace denounces these claims as “utterly ridiculous”.

On November 17, in an interview with Mediapart, Gerard-Philippe Menayas, former financial director of the DCN, says that the payment of commissions from the submarine sales passed through a Luxembourg company called Cedel, later known as Clearstream.

Clearstream is the subject of another scandal alleging illegal kickbacks from the sale of warships in the early 1990s which was linked to senior politicians including former Prime Minister Dominique De Villepin, Sarkozy’s arch enemy.

On November 18, the families of the French engineers killed in the 2002 bomb attack in Karachi call for Sarkozy to testify in the case.

A lawyer for the families said they had lodged a demand with Ruymbeke that he question Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac and also Dominique de Villepin in the case.

http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/181110/how-karachi-affair-caught-nicolas-sarkozy

When the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari met his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace in August, there was one subject that was most officially not on the agenda. This was the so-called ‘Karachi affair’, a complex story involving murder and allegations of corruption on high and illegal party funding.

The affaire is sparked by a two-year investigation led by Paris-based investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic into a bomb attack in Karachi on May 8th, 2002 which left 15 people dead, including 11 French employees of the defence contractor DCN (Direction des constructions navales). They were working in Karachi on the construction of three Agosta class submarines sold to Pakistan by France in a deal concluded in September, 1994 by the government of France’s then prime minister Edouard Balladur.

The magistrate has definitively ruled out the involvement of Al Qaeda, contrary to what was suggested by officials in both countries at the time. Trévidic is now working on the theory that the Karachi victims were targeted as part of a settling of accounts for the non-payment by France of kickbacks to Pakistani intermediaries involved in establishing the Agosta contract.

Storm brewing? Presidents Sarkozy and Zardari at the Elysee Palace

Like Sarkozy and Balladur in France, President Zardari, who was implicated at the time in several financial affairs, earning him the name ‘Mr 10%’, denies any involvement. “When these events took place [in 2002] I was in prison,” Zardari told French daily Le Monde in an interview published on August 4th this year. “I don’t see how I could have a link to this affair. For us this attack has nothing to do with the submarine contract [...] it was a pure act of terrorism.”

While, at present, there is no material proof of a link between the attack and the submarine contract, investigating judge Trévidic has already gathered an important mass of documents and witnesses that reveal the shady financial and political actions surrounding the conclusion of the Agosta deal. Two key names have emerged from the inquiry.

In France it is Nicolas Sarkozy, who was budget minister between 1993 and 1995 and as such the person who approved the financial arrangements for arms contracts, including the payment of hidden commissions. In Pakistan it is Asif Ali Zardari, a government minister at the time and, importantly, husband of the prime minister of the day, Benazir Bhutto, whom he married in 1987.

‘Bribery went from the street-cleaner to the prime minister’

In 1994, at the time of the Agosta contract negotiations, it was perfectly legal for a company or state to ‘corrupt’ foreign decision makers politicians, officials, military officers to help win an international contract. This practice was outlawed under an agreement among OECD member countries in 1997, which France finally ratified in September, 2000.

So when in 1992 France was lining up a Pakistan submarine deal, the state – the majority shareholder in DCN could thus ‘corrupt’ in all legality. And, in the face of stiff Swedish and German competition at the time, it didn’t hold back.

The bribes were readied, even though Pakistan, which would choose France in 1994, was one of the most unstable countries in the world thanks to the corruption of its ruling classes, extreme nationalism and a slide towards fundamentalism.

Out of the 826 million-euro total of the sale of the Agosta submarines, the DCN reserved an initial amount for commissions that totalled 51.6 million euros (6.25% of the contract value). These were destined for intermediaries who would later distribute the cash to dignitaries of the purchasing country. Their purpose was persuasion. A state body was set up to provide the link between the DCN and the intermediaries, namely the Société française de matériels d’armement (Sofma), whose mission was corruption.

Questioned about this issue on November 23rd, 2009 by judge Trevidic, DCN’s former international director Emmanuel Aris told the magistrate: “To my mind, the 6.25% paid by Sofma covered all the political or military decision-makers. [They] were in my view to be for all those involved, from the street-cleaner, so to speak, to the Pakistani prime minister, passing at every level concerned.” During his evidence, Emmanuel Aris never used the word ‘corrupted’ when talking about the ultimate beneficiaries of the commissions but, more cautiously, said that they were ‘covered’.

But in front a French parliamentary fact-finding inquiry into the Karachi affaire, Emmanuel Aris was a little more specific. He told members of parliament that the bribes allocated by Sofma “were to allow the creation of a favourable environment for the clinching of the contract. [It] allowed everyone to be taken care of, the street-cleaners, low-ranking officers, the head of the naval general staff, the minister of finance as well as Madame Bhutto’s entourage.”

The most active Pakistani agent working on behalf of the DCN and Sofma in relation to the Agosta contract negotiations was Amir Lodhi. Brother of a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Amir Lodhi is a high-flying businessman and financier with a murky past. Threatened by the enormous scandal of the BCCI bank, which was linked during its collapse in 1991 to money laundering relating to terrorism and criminal networks, Lodhi came out of it legally unscathed after agreeing to cooperate with investigators. However, for a country like France seeking to sell submarines in 1994, he was an essential figure. For Amir Lodhi had a major card up his sleeve; he was close to Asif Ali Zardari, the husband [of Bhutto] with control over state contracts.

‘Four percent was for Zardari and Bhutto’

On April 6th, 2010, Henri Guittet, who was director general of Sofma at the time of the Agosta deal, told Judge Trévidic that of the 6.25% of the planned commissions “there was 4% for Zardari-Bhutto through the intermediary of Lodhi, who perhaps was keeping a little for himself.” He also told the magistrate: “I believe that in the case of Zardari they had created a company to receive this money. I don’t remember the name of the company. It was perhaps Swiss or in Panama [...] Out of the remaining amount there was to be 1.5% for Lodhi himself, a little for Ansari [another intermediary] of about 0.25%, and around 1% for Zafar Iqbal [also another intermediary].”

Guittet, who is probably among those best placed to know the goings on of the Agosta deal, gave further details to the magistrate: “As for the 4% destined for Zardari-Bhutto I believe that 1% was due upon the signing of the sales contract, which means at the time when everything could start and especially when the deposit and first instalment were paid, and 1% a year later. The remaining 2% was to be paid pro rata with the customers’ payments.”

But there was more. In the summer of 1994, when France had been chosen by Pakistan and the contract was just waiting to be signed in Islamabad which occurred on September 21st – something quite extraordinary happened. At the last minute, a new round of commissions was to be made available, on the express orders of the Balladur government. Two Lebanese businessmen came on the scene and were to receive 4% in extra commissions, which amounted to around 33 million euros.

Ziad Takieddine

The Agosta submarines under review in Pakistan.

One of these agents was Ziad Takieddine: ‘friends’ in high places, who was close to Balladur’s entourage, including Nicolas Sarkozy whom he liked to introduce as “a friend”. The suspicions today about possible hidden political funding in France through the Agosta contract centre on his role. Takieddine was said have to picked up, via an obscure financial trail that involved Luxembourg and the Isle of Man, a portion of the 33 million euros released at the last minute in the Agosta deal, to be ultimately redistributed to French political decision-makers. The aim, it is alleged, was to finance the 1995 presidential campaign of Edouard Balladur, for whom Nicolas Sarkozy was spokesman then campaign director. This is what is known as a ‘retro-commission’, an accounting procedure which has always been illegal in France.

The second agent “imposed” by the Balladur government the word employed by a former DCN senior official – was called Abdulrahman El-Assir. Also close to the Balladur camp, El-Assir had another advantage. “He was a friend of Azif Ali Zardari, the husband of prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was the key to government contracts in Pakistan,” noted Claude Thévenet, a former French counter-espionage officer hired by the DCN to investigate the Karachi attack, in a report dated September 11th, 2002.

The judge travels to Switzerland

The links between Zardari and El-Assir are far from fanciful. British officials, who had harboured suspicions of corruption by Benazir Bhutto and her husband, disclosed in April 2001 that several Swiss bank accounts of the former ruling couple in Islamabad had been credited on August 22nd, 1995 then on September 1st, 1995 one year after the signing of the Agosta deal with three million dollars transferred from a New York Citybank account. The account belonged to Abdulrahman El-Assir.

At present, it is impossible to affirm that those three million dollars corresponded to the bribes surrounding the Agosta deal but according to British investigators the sums involved do have a connection with the payment of hidden commissions.

As a result of an investigation first launched by the Pakistan government that succeeded Benazir Bhutto in 1997, the Swiss authorities also uncovered movements of money that are allegedly compromising for the Bhutto-Zardari couple. In that affair, Bhutto (who was assassinated in 2007) and her husband were pursued by several judges in Geneva for an alleged major money laundering scam, before a timely legal amnesty in Pakistan forced the Swiss authorities to halt their investigation in 2008 – just before Zardari became president of Pakistan.

It was a short-lived respite. A judgement in December 2009 by the Supreme Court in Islamabad, which considered the amnesty unconstitutional, in theory allows the re-opening of investigations. According to information gathered by Mediapart in Geneva, the name of Abdulrahman El-Assir also appeared in the Zardari dossier on the fringes of a major arms contract signed between France and Pakistan in the middle of the 1990s. According to a local source, this concerned the Agosta submarine deal.

At the end of May this year, Judge Trévidic travelled to Geneva to study the Swiss investigating file. “He wasn’t disappointed by his visit and has asked for the transmission of a number of very specific documents,” said Alix Francotte Conus, the investigating judge in Geneva overseeing French-Swiss judicial cooperation, in an interview with Swiss daily Le Temps.

Meanwhile, suspicions that the French authorities are deliberately blocking Trévidic’s enquiries were reinforced by a witness statement given last month by retired general Philippe Rondot, a former special services officer who worked for many years in French foreign intelligence. Rondot’s illustrious career included a major role in the capture of the notorious Venezuelan terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez, AKA Carlos the Jackal.

Questioned by Trévidic on September 27th, he revealed that he travelled to Karachi to lead a joint mission to involving the French domestic and foreign intelligence services, the DST1 and DGSE, in June 2002, just weeks after the bomb attack against the French engineers. Trévidic had never been informed of the operation, despite his repeated requests to the French defence ministry for access to all classified reports relating to the attack.

Also last month, informed sources have told Mediapart that the president of the French parliament’s defence commission, UMP2 member of parliament Guy Tessier, this summer refused a request from Trévidic for the transcripts of interviews conducted by the commission’s enquiry into the Karachi attack.

1. The DST is now renamed the DCRI. 2. The UMP is President Sarkozy’s ruling conservative Right party.

http://www.mediapart.fr/documentaire/france/karachi-lautre-affaire-qui-affole-lelysee

Media articles on the blast in 2002
Pakistan Bomb Kills 11, Mostly

French Nationals

By Imran Maqbool

5-8-2

KARACHI (Reuters) – A suspected suicide bomber in a car killed nine French and two Pakistani nationals on Wednesday outside a top hotel in Pakistan’s volatile southern city of Karachi, police and hospital officials said.

The bomb exploded at around 8 a.m. (10 p.m. EDT), ripping through a navy bus as it was picking up the French nationals from the Sheraton Hotel, where they were staying while maintaining submarines for the Pakistani government.

Police said more than 20 people were wounded by the blast, which reduced the bus to a blackened skeleton and scattered body parts across the street. Rescue teams carried bloodied survivors away on stretchers.

Officials said members of the touring New Zealand cricket team, who were staying at the Pearl Continental Hotel across the street, were safe. New Zealand cricket authorities in Wellington immediately called off the tour.

“It was apparently a suicide bombing,” city police chief Asad Jehangir told Reuters.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in the city where slain U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped earlier this year while investigating a story linked to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

A doctor at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre put the death toll at 11. “We have received 11 dead bodies so far and 17 injured people,” he said. “Those who are injured are in critical condition.”

The French Foreign Ministry in Paris described the blast as a car bomb and said the French nationals worked for the department of naval construction, which is attached to France’s defense ministry.

WAITING TO BOARD BUS

A foreign diplomat in Pakistan said the bomb exploded in a car driven alongside the bus. Witnesses said some of those killed were waiting to board the bus. Others were already on board.

Police described the car as a 1974 Toyota Corolla. Where it exploded, there was a shallow crater in the road.

Pakistan’s military president, Pervez Musharraf, threw his weight behind the U.S.-led war on terrorism and the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, a decision that angered some Muslim groups in the country.

A grenade attack in March killed five people, including the wife and daughter of an American diplomat, in a church mainly used by foreign nationals in the capital Islamabad.

Karachi, a port city of 14 million people and Pakistan’s business capital, also has a history of religious and ethnic rivalry between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims.

The Pakistan stock market, which is based in Karachi, fell three percent after the blast.

Witnesses said Wednesday’s explosion smashed windows of a restaurant in the Sheraton Hotel, overturning tables and littering starched white tablecloths with debris.
———–
(05-09) 04:00 PST Dubai, United Arab Emirates — 2002-05-09 04:00:00 PST Dubai, United Arab Emirates — A suicide bombing that officials suspect may have been mounted by al Qaeda elements took the lives of 14 people, 11 of them French naval engineers, in the Pakistani port city of Karachi on Wednesday morning.

The bomber, driving a 1974 Toyota Corolla laden with high-powered explosives, pulled alongside a shuttle bus parked outside the Sheraton Hotel and detonated his load. The thunderous explosion also killed the bus’ Pakistani driver and a passer-by, shocking an already skittish nation on the front line in the war on terror.
—————–
Wikipedia
On May 8, 2002, a man driving a car bomb stopped next to a bus in Karachi outside the Sheraton Hotel. He detonated the car, ripping the bus apart, and killing himself, 11 Frenchmen, and 2 Pakistanis. The 11 Frenchmen were engineers working with Pakistan to design an Agosta 90B class submarine for the Pakistani Navy. About 40 others were wounded.

Contrary to official announcements by both the Pakistani and French governments at the time, it is now thought unlikely that those responsible for the attack had links to [[al-Qaeda]. It is more likely that the attack was orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and military officials in retaliation for the failure of the French to pay them $33 million that had been previously agreed upon.[1] On September 18, 2002, a man named Sharib Zubair was arrested and believed to have masterminded the attack. In 2003, two men were sentenced to death for the bombing by a Karachi court. The suspected bombmaker, Mufti Mohammad Sabir, was arrested on September 8, 2005. The two men’s conviction’s have since been overturned. An investigation is currently (November 2010) underway in France in order to establish the extent to which former President Edouard Balladur and current President Nicolas Sarkozy were implicated in the the bribing of Pakistani officials. There is also growing suspicion that some of the cash used to bribe Pakistani officials found its way back into Edouard Balladur’s presidential campaign fund. Should this prove to be the case, the consequences would be extremely serious for President Sarkozy, who was, in 2002, both budget minister and treasurer of President Balladur’s election campaign.
————–
BBC
Karachi bus blast kills 15

The attack took place in the heart of Karachi
Fifteen people have been killed in a suicide attack on a bus in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi.
Ten of the victims were French workers for a construction company and the other two were Pakistani – one is thought to have been the suicide attacker.
I was just standing on the street and the noise was so loud it was frightening

Police officer Munir Sheikh
Pakistan’s President, General Pervez Musharraf, has called an emergency meeting of his top military commanders and senior officials after the attack.

Police say the bus – which belonged to the Pakistani navy – exploded after being hit by a car driven by the attacker outside the Sheraton Hotel in the centre of Karachi.

The bus, which was on its way to the city’s dockyard, was ripped apart by the violent explosion and the windows of the nearby Pearl Continental hotel were shattered.

Loud explosion

More than 20 people, including 12 French nationals, were injured when the powerful bomb shattered the bus, creating a large crater, witnesses said.

“The sound was so loud I think you could have heard it from 10 kilometres (six miles) away,” a police officer at the scene, Munir Sheikh, said.

“I was just standing on the street and the noise was so loud it was frightening.”

Most of those on board were French workers employed by a company constructing submarines for the Pakistani navy.

The French President, Jacques Chirac, has strongly condemned the attack and is sending his defence minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, to Pakistan.

We cannot rule out the involvement of al-Qaeda

Sindh police chief Kamal Shah

In a statement, President Chirac said he “unreservedly condemns this despicable act, which nothing can justify”.

It is not yet clear who is behind this attack.

But police said they would investigate possible links between the bombers and the al-Qaeda network as well as Pakistan’s regional rival, India.

“We cannot rule out the involvement of al-Qaeda, but our suspicions are across the border. I am pointing towards India,” the Reuters news agency quoted Sindh province police chief, Kamal Shah, as saying.

Cricket tour called off

The New Zealand national cricket team, who were staying at the Pearl Continental hotel across the street, were due to begin a five-day test match in Karachi on Wednesday.

Police are looking for possible links to al-Qaeda

But the team’s manager, Jeff Crowe, said they would call off their Pakistan tour and head back home.

Members of the Pakistan national side, which was staying at the same hotel, said they narrowly escaped getting hurt.

“I am lucky that I was not in my room and was having breakfast… my room is totally destroyed,” cricket star Shahid Afridi said.

Karachi has been the scene of many sectarian killings recently but there have only been a few incidents of foreigners being targeted.

The American journalist Daniel Pearl disappeared in Karachi in January while researching a story on Islamic militants and a video of his killing was later handed to the United States consulate.

In March, two Americans were among five killed when attackers threw grenades at a church in the diplomatic enclave of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

President Musharraf has been tackling extremist religious groups and banned five of them in January.

A BBC correspondent in Islamabad says the high-level meeting called by the president is expected to announce new security measures and may even lead to a crackdown against suspected militant groups.

Posted by Wingate

‘Zardari took huge bribe for French submarine deal’

ANI

PARIS: Official Pakistani documents, detailing how President Asif Ali Zardari benefited from massive, secret payments connected to the sale of French submarines to Pakistan, have been seized as evidence by a Paris magistrate investigating a suspected widespread scam surrounding the deal.

The documents, published by Mediapart, show that the payments to Zardari and others took place on the fringes of the sale of three Agosta-class submarines by the French defence contractor, the DCN, to Pakistan in the 1990s. The French sale, which succeeded against rival offers by Swedish and German contractors, and the payment of bribes associated with it are at the core of what has become known as the ‘Karachi affair’ currently the subject of two French judicial investigations’ The Nation reports.

A key allegation in the developing affair is that the cancellation of commissions paid out in the submarine deal triggered a suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May 8, 2002, killing eleven French engineers, who were in Pakistan to help build one of the submarines. Increasing evidence suggests that the cancellation of the commissions, ordered by former French president Jacques Chirac, was decided after it was discovered they were in part re-routed back to France to fund political activities of Chirac”s principal political rival, Edouard Balladur.

The documents, which were found during a French police search in June 2010 of the home of Amir Lodhi — one of the intermediaries involved in securing the Agosta contract and a friend of Zardari — provide the first clear details about the scale of the payments made to Zardari, amounting to several million euros, as well as the channels used, including offshore companies, bank accounts and the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

Zardari was one of the main benefactors of the paid bribes, according to a former SOFMA managing director, Henri Guittet, who evaluated the sum paid to Zardari as being 4% of the total value of the sales contract, which amounts to a value of 33 million euros.

The main document seized by French investigators is a photocopy of an original dated November 9, 1997, concerning a request by Pakistan to Switzerland for cooperation in a judicial investigation.

Kayani calls emergency Corps Commanders meeting

[In the continuing battle to bring American and Pakistani thinking on the terror war into alignment, we must bring to light the hidden things which are tearing us apart.  The ongoing arguments over differences between our CIA and Pakistan's ISI, magnified by military differences, cannot be calmed by accusations and denials, but only through admissions.   Our two "Premier" spy agencies have worked together for many years, in many criminal activities.  Many of these activities have become common knowledge.  Acknowledging the obvious is an important first step, which both sides must be willing to take.  The disagreement now comes from Americans trying to blame Pakistan for all of it.

Both sides must acknowledging their shared responsibility for this criminal activity, instead of blaming it all on the other side.  Our worst mutual crime streak has been centered around our creation of militant/terrorist networks and their continued support.  Today's split comes about because of the necessary shifting of the overall mission from creating terrorists to fighting against them.  Many elements of both spy agencies have refused to support the new mission and they  continue to support their terrorists even after our nations have declared war upon them.  These "rogue elements" are the cause of the ongoing argument between us.  This big problem of trouble-making by rogue elements must be solved.  Failure to approach the problem as a problem with out of control rogues will probably end in some level of war between the two nations.  This has to be avoided at all costs, meaning that the rogues on both sides must be exposed so that they alone will take the blame.

The flurry of high-level meetings, ending with CENTCOM Chief Mattis confronting Kayani and now this emergency meeting of Corps Commanders (to be followed by Gen. Kayani's trip to speak before the British International Institute for Strategic Studies), is stark testimony as to how far the situation has deteriorated today.  It will be interesting to see how the narrative either improves or worsens, after the Royal trouble-making institute puts their spin on the situation.  There is far too much at stake here to allow the Illuminate masterminds to continue to muck it all up.

Everybody has to cut-off all support for their own proxy terrorists and in AfPak, everybody has proxies.] 

AFP

The meeting — chaired by the Army chief and attended by all Corps Commanders and Pricipal Staff officers — was called to discuss key issues of importance and urgency, including matters related to national security and the regional peace. — File Photo

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani on Sunday called a ‘special’ meeting of his top commanders to discuss the security situation, the military said, as the war of words with the United States escalated.

The extraordinary meeting of the corps commanders came against the backdrop of sharp US allegations that Pakistan army’s spy agency supported the Haqqani militant group Washington blames for the recent attack on its embassy and other targets in Kabul.

In a terse two-line statement, the military said the commanders would “review (the) prevailing security situation.”

Kayani, who is departing for London later tonight to address the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal College of Defence Studies, is chairing the meeting.

[This note on the International Institute for Strategic Studies--

From "The Committee of 300" by Dr John Coleman: page 178:

The IISS is the vehicle for MI6-Tavistock black propaganda, and wet jobs (an intelligence over name denoting an operation where bloodshed is required), adverse nuclear incidents and terrorism, which goes to the world's press for dissemination, as well as to governments and military establishments. 

Membership in the IISS includes representatives of 87 major wire services and press associations, as well as 138 senior editors and columnists.... 

The IISS is nothing more than a higher echelon opinion maker, as defined by Lippmann and Bernays. In the writing of books, and in newspapers, IISS was formed to be a coordinating centre for not only creating opinions, but to get those opinions and scenarios out much faster and to a far greater audience than could be reached by a book for example.... "

Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power in our country...... We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...."--end of quote, editor]

“The meeting reflects the gravity of crisis,” retired general, turned security analyst, Talat Masood said.

“They will issue a statement to express solidarity (within the military) and to show that they all are on one page.”

The corps commanders meeting comes a day after Kayani met with US CENTCOM commander General James N. Mattis in Pakistan, but military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said the two meetings were “unrelated.”

Contacts with Haqqanis

In an interview with CNN, Abbas acknowledged that army’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) maintained contacts with the Haqqani network, but said that didn’t mean it supported it.

“Any intelligence agency would like to maintain contact with whatever opposition group, whatever terrorist organisation … for some positive outcome,” he told CNN in a telephone interview.

However, he said there was a huge difference between maintaining those contacts to facilitate peace and supporting it against an ally.

In the most blunt remarks by a US official since Pakistan joined the US-led war on militancy in 2001, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on Thursday testified before the US Senate that the Haqqani militant network is a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

He also for the first time held Islamabad responsible for the Kabul attack, saying Pakistan provided support for that assault.

On Saturday night, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani rejected US allegations as a sign of American “confusion and policy disarray”.

“We strongly reject assertions of complicity with the Haqqanis or of proxy war,” Gilani said, breaking off from a speech to aid agencies and foreign diplomats on the country’s flood disaster.

Although Pakistan officially abandoned support for the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 and allied itself with Washington’s “war on terror”, analysts say elements of the ISI refused to make the doctrinal shift.

Gilani’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told Washington on Friday that it risked losing an ally if it kept accusing Islamabad of playing a double game in the war against militancy, and escalating a crisis in ties triggered by US forces’ killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in an unannounced raid in May.

Security analyst Masood said the sharpened rhetoric between Pakistan and the United States could lead to a “collision”.

One of the options for Pakistan, he said, could be to put pressure on Haqqani fighters to leave Pakistan to avert a confrontation.

“I think both Pakistan and the United States will step back to avoid making things worse.”

India told to stop work on Kishanganga dam

By Syed Irfan Raza

The International Court of Arbitration passed a unanimous order on Pakistan’s application for ‘interim measures’ against the construction of the Kishanganga dam on Saturday. – File Photo

ISLAMABAD: The International Court of Arbitration (ICA) has barred India from any permanent works on the controversial Kishanganga hydro-electricity project (KHEP) on River Neelum at Gurez in occupied Kashmir in response to Pakistan’s appeal for ‘interim measures’ against the dam which may inhibit the restoration of the river flow to its natural channel, the government announced on Saturday.

The arbitration court took the decision on an appeal filed by Pakistan that India was diverting the flow of the river and violating Indus Water Treaty (IWT) between the two countries, said Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari, on Saturday.

The court of arbitration passed a unanimous order on Pakistan’s application for ‘interim measures’ against the construction of the Kishanganga dam.

The court order said: “India shall not proceed with the construction of any permanent works on or above the Kishanganga/Neelum River bed at the Gurez site that may inhibit the restoration of the flow of the river to its natural channel.

Pakistan and India shall arrange for periodic joint inspections of the dam site at Gurez in order to monitor the implementation of the court’s order.”

Islamabad had submitted its version in the World Bank’s arbitration court in July. The major contention was that under the law India cannot divert the route of River Neelum. Pakistan fears that the Kishanganga dam would rob it of 15 per cent water share – a violation of the Indus Water Treaty.

Islamabad accused Delhi of trying to divert the water of Neelum river in order to harm Pakistan’s Neelum-Jhelum hydro-electricity project.

In its application Pakistan had sought: “A stop work order; An order that any steps India has taken or may take in respect of the KHEP are taken at its own risk without prejudice to the possibility that the court may order that the works may not be continued, be modified or dismantled, that India be ordered to inform the court and Pakistan of any imminent and actual developments on the Kishanganga Dam that may adversely affect the restoring of the status quo ante or that may jeopardise Pakistan’s rights and interests under the treaty; Any further relief the court considered necessary.”

The president’s spokesman said the office of the special assistant to the prime minister on water resources and agriculture, the team of legal experts from Pakistan and abroad who prepared a tremendous case, NESPAK and PCIW of the ministry of water and power attended the hearing at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.