Why Aren’t Pakistani Soldiers Killed By Hakeemullah As Important As Those Killed By Americans?

More equal than others in death

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance communications consultant. She tweets at @tazeen and blogs at http://tazeen-tazeen.blogspot.com/

In the wake of the cross-border Nato attack in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in Salala, the whole country was up in arms against the aggression of the allied forces. From the political parties to lawyers associations, from banned militant outfits to student organisations, from the head of the armed forces to the aunties in drawing room; everyone thought it fitting to lambast the US — especially since most people cannot really distinguish between the US and Nato — for attacking Pakistan’s sovereignty, its land and its people.

A few weeks later, 15 Frontier Constabulary personnel who were captured in Tank on December 23 were taken to Waziristan by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and killed after some time. Unlike the deaths in Salala, no one is mourning the loss of lives of these 15 men because we do not cry at the atrocities committed by our so-called ‘strategic assets’, who not only claim these deaths with impunity, but justify it as an act of revenge. We only lament, or maybe we are pushed into lamenting for those who are killed by foreigners, be it individuals (victims of Raymond Davis) or troops (victims of the Salala raid in November) to get maximum political and material leverage out of it. It’s a slur on our national integrity if soldiers die in cross-border skirmishes, but if our strategic assets — or more likely strategic liabilities — murder a group of soldiers in cold blood, it only merits a brief press release with no mention of the names of those who died.

The victims of Waziristan will also not be grieved because there were no officers and gentlemen amongst them. They were ordinary soldiers, and we do not mourn the deaths of mere soldiers who are killed in the line of duty by their compatriots.

Did any political party call for a protest against this act of barbarism? No.

Has footage of the flag-covered coffins been shown on television channels to invoke public anger and resentment against the TTP? No.

Have our religious parties offered funeral prayers for the soldiers who were kidnapped and killed by the TTP? No.

Did people hold rallies vowing to avenge the deaths of these soldiers at the hand of the Taliban? No.

Did our lawyers boycott their activities and call for action against the TTP? No. In fact, for them, it was business as usual.

Were distressed family members, wailing mothers and fathers with slumped shoulders interviewed to fan public outrage against this barbaric act? No.

Did anyone ask the TTP to pay qisas to the families of the 15 victims? No.

Were there any TV anchors frothing at the mouth, dishing out sermons dripping with moral outrage calling people to stand up against the effrontery of the TTP? No. The debate on television was about memogate and the several contempt of court notices issued by the superior judiciary to members of the PPP leadership.

Why bother, when there is no financial compensation to be had, where no effigy-burning rallies can be organised, and no foreign nation is to be blame. It is known that some animals are more equal than others in the animal farm called Pakistan, but what is now being learned is that some animals are more equal in death as well.

Published in The Express Tribune

Mossad And India Spy Agency Team Up, Target Pakistan–(5-19-2002)

Mossad And India Spy Agency Team Up, Target Pakistan

By Tariq Saeedi
Globe-Intel
5-19-2002

“It is essential that we…strike and crush Pakistanis, enemies of Jews and Zionism, by all disguised and secret plans.” — David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister. Janes information group, the world’s foremost source on intelligence information, reported in July 2001 that “The Indian spy agency RAW and the Israeli spy agency Mossad have created four new agencies to infiltrate Pakistan to target important religious and military personalities, journalists, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats. In addition, bombs would be exploded in trains, railway stations, bridges, bus stations, cinemas, hotels and mosques of rival Islamic sects to incite sectarianism.” Pakistani intelligence agencies also said that RAW had constituted a plan to lure Pakistani men between 20 and 30 years of age to visit India so that they could be entrapped “in cases of fake currency and subversion and then be coerced to spy for India.” This was the high point of cementing an unholy alliance which began much earlier and which continues to tighten its noose around the neck of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. It appears that RAW and Mossad — either singly or jointly, either covertly or overtly — have been making efforts to penetrate sensitive circles of top echelon in Pakistan. It cannot be said with certainty but there are some reasons to assume that Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, wittingly or unwittingly, played in the hands of RAW-Mossad masterminds. She appointed Rehman Malik as chief of the Federal Investigation Agency which then launched a secret war against the Islamists; amounting to a direct attack on the ISI. War against religious extremists could have been a laudable goal but it seemed to target only those elements which could have brought a semblance of moderation to the religious swatch cutting across Pakistan society. Thus, leaving the field wide open for extremists. It seems that the Pakistani military was equally dismayed by reports of FIA contacts with the Israeli secret service, the MOSSAD, to investigate Islamist terrorists. One of the first acts of President Leghari after dismissing Benazir Bhutto on November 5, 1996 was to imprison the Ghulam Asghar, head of FIA, suspended on non-specified corruption charges. Rehman Malik, Addl. Director General FIA, was also arrested. Whether these actions were triggered as a consequence of plotting by RAW-Mossad planners or whether it was an entirely internal matter, it is difficult to say. Bhutto s visit to India last year at a time when Pakistan was going through one of the worst crises in its history, and her statements there which aimed to undermine the whole foundation of Pakistan, generate more than a flicker of doubt in analytic minds. The basic question arises: Who is Benazir Bhutto? Leaving BB to her own fate, let’s return to RAW-Mossad connection. What is clear right now is that Indian RAW and Israeli Mossad are collaborating extensively to curb the freedom movement of Kashmir and destabilize Pakistan. The Indian newspaper The Pioneer wrote on March 3, 2001: Fencing of the Indo-Pak border is not enough. To check Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism, top security experts of Israel have suggested that hi-tech gadgets ranging from an electronic barrier system of radars to thermal imaging devices should be immediately installed on India’s sensitive international border in J[ammu] & K[ashmir] and Punjab sectors. The team of experts, including officials of the Mossad, the Israeli Army and the Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), also found shocking loopholes in the security arrangements relating to the much-talked about Samjhauta Express. They advised that instead of Lahore, the train should terminate on the Attari border. Sources in the Ministry of Home Affairs said the Israeli experts surveyed the 198 km international border in Jammu and Punjab and reviewed the route of the Samjhauta Express with top officials of the Border Security Force. Subsequently, former DG of the Border Security Force, E.N. Ram Mohan was appointed as the consultant on border management. Mr. Ram Mohan has recommended that besides radars, aerostate balloons and FLIR equipment be used. India is keen to purchase surveillance aircraft (UAVs) from Israel to gain intelligence teeth. The UAVs could also help the state police in keeping an eye in naxalite-affected areas of Andhra Pradesh. For several years, Mossad and Israel’s internal intelligence agency, Shinbhet, have utilised unmanned air vehicles to patrol the hypersensitive Gaza border. Qutbuddin Aziz, former minister in Pakistan embassy in London, wrote an excellent article, titled ‘Dangerous Nexus between Israel & India.’ It was published by a prominent Pakistani newspaper on April 1, 2001. Aziz writes: “Top secret details of Indian Home Minister LK Advani’s visit to Israel in June 2000, show that the deals he has struck with the Israelis would make India and Israel partners in threatening the Muslim world with diabolic conspiracies to fragment and cripple it as a political force in the world. The details of his meetings with Israel’s rulers, particularly the heads of the Israeli Home Ministry and its intelligence agencies, Mossad and Sabak, reveal that the arrangements he has made for joint Indo-Israel espionage operations in key areas of the Muslim world would make the Indian embassies in these Muslim countries the eyes and ears of the worldwide cloak-and-dagger Israeli spy network. ”Under the euphemism of ‘counter-terrorism,’ India is allowing Israel to establish a huge spy establishment in India which will, inter alia, unearth and monitor ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ individuals and groups for elimination by extra judicial process or by cold-blooded murder and kidnapping. ”The most important meeting Indian Home Minister Advani had during his three-day Israeli tour on June 13-16 was with the top brass of Israel’s intelligence agencies in Tel Aviv. Heading the Israeli team was the powerful chief of Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, with the heads of the Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad and Sabak, and military officials dealing with Israel’s punitive and espionage operations against Arabs in Israel, Palestine and neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. Senior officials from the Israeli Foreign Office and the defence and home ministries attended this meeting. Israeli experts in bomb detection were also present. ”Mr. Advani’s large team included India’s highest-level spymasters such as the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Mr. Shayamal Dutta, the Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, Mr. R. K. Raghvan, the head of the Indian Border Security Force, Mr. E. M. Ram Mohan, Indian Home Ministry’s powerful Secretary K. Pande who oversees the work of the infamous Indian spy agency, RAW, and liaises with the Indian Foreign Office in respect of undercover RAW agents working in Indian embassies abroad, and a senior officer of India’s military intelligence agency (equivalent of Pakistan’s ISI). ”In this top-level meeting in Tel Aviv on June 14, Advani reportedly thanked the Israeli government for its immense help to India in security matters and spoke of the dangers India and Israel face from their common enemies, i.e., Muslim neighbours. ”Advani, it is reported, highly praised the help provided by Mossad and army commando personnel to the Indian army in the war on ‘Muslim militants’ in Kashmir and against ‘Muslim terrorists’ such as the ‘Memon brothers’ of Mumbai in Dubai. Advani said he had, throughout his political career, advocated India’s recognition and friendship with Israel and that his party had played a key role in forcing Congress government to have full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992. ”He lauded the Indo-Israeli cooperation in the military, economic and other fields. Advani recalled that India had voted in favour of a US-sponsored motion in the UN for rescinding a UN resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Mr. Advani explained at length India’s security problems in which the danger from Pakistan and Indian Muslims getting Arab money loomed large. Advani gave a long list of the special services in spying and the anti-insurgency devices and spy equipment India urgently needs from Israel to combat ‘Muslim terrorism.’ ”In the June 14 Tel Aviv meeting, the Israeli Police Chief, Yehuda Wilk, profusely praised India for its friendship with Israel and pledged help to the Indian government in combating ‘Muslim terrorism’ that poses new threats to Israel and India. The heads of India’s intelligence agencies then briefed the Israeli side in the meeting on the ground situation in India in respect of ‘Muslim terrorists,’ especially in Jammu and Kashmir, and the new dangers coming up for India and Israel because of the Pakistani bomb and the fear that Pakistan may give its nuclear weapons to the anti-Israel Arabs. ”The Indian side showed a keen interest in learning from Israeli security experts how they had run the slice of Lebanon which Israel ruled for 18 years and gave up recently. Some information about the Israeli torture and investigation methods was gathered by the Indian side from the Israelis with regard to dealing with Arab dissidents within Israel and in the Palestinian Authority region. ”The Indians gave the Israelis a long shopping list of spying, torture and surveillance equipment such as electronic fencing of sensitive sites, laser systems, short-range rockets, eagle-eyed long distance snipers, observation blimps, giant shields, night vision device, unmanned aircraft of the MALAT wing of the Israeli Aircraft Industries Limited, special protective dress and gear for security personnel, cross border snopping devices and gadgets, training and deployment of spies and the special gear for them, use of computers and Internet for espionage and disinformation, code-breaking, tailing of enemy agents and their elimination, nuclear espionage, purloining state secrets of hostile countries and pooling them for the good of India and Israel and their mutual friends. ”The Israelis were interested in having access to the secret reports of Indian undercover RAW diplomats from certain Muslim countries of special interest to Israel (especially Pakistan, Libya and Iran). India is apparently willing to grant access to Israeli agents to the Indian Home Ministry’s Central Intelligence Processing Unit (CIPU) in New Delhi. This was recently set up under Advani’s direction with Israeli and US help. A handpicked RAW officer, trusted by Advani, heads this unit. Israel wants full access to its information data. The Indian government has already allowed access to it by American intelligence agencies now working with the Indian government on so-called anti-terrorist assignments. Federation of American Scientists website comments on RAW in these words: “RAW has engaged in disinformation campaigns, espionage and sabotage against Pakistan and other neighboring countries. RAW has enjoyed the backing of successive Indian governments in these efforts. Working directly under the Prime Minister, the structure, rank, pay and perks of the Research & Analysis Wing are kept secret from Parliament.” Tarek Fatah, a Turkish scholar settled in Canada, wrote: “Britain’s authoritative and respected defense publication, Jane’s Terrorism & Security Monitor, reports that Israel and India have formed a military relationship and that Israeli intelligence is active in Occupied Kashmir.  ”It says: Israeli intelligence agencies have been intensifying their relations with India’s security apparatus and are now understood to be heavily involved in helping New Delhi combat Islamic militants in the disputed province of Kashmir… Ed Blanche writes in Janes’ Security on 14 August 2001: “Israeli intelligence agencies have been intensifying their relations with India’s security apparatus and are now understood to be heavily involved in helping New Delhi combat Islamic militants in the disputed province of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state which lies at the core of the conflict with neighbouring Pakistan. ”Israel has several teams now in Kashmir training Indian counter-insurgency forces to fight the dozen separatist guerrilla groups operating in the Indian-controlled sector of the disputed state. ”The exact extent of the involvement in Kashmir by Israel s intelligence agencies is far from clear, but it fits into Israel’s increasing focus on events in Central Asia, and as far afield as Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, to counteract Islamic fundamentalism, which it perceives as a major threat. ”Shimon Peres, currently Israel’s foreign minister, said during a visit to New Delhi in January 2001 (shortly before he took his current post in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s coalition government) that Israel was prepared to co-operate with India to fight terrorism. Weeks earlier, an Israeli counterterrorism team, including military intelligence specialists and senior police commanders, paid a visit to Indian-administered Kashmir and other regions of the country that are grappling with anti-government militants to assess India’s security needs.  If there is still any doubt as to the real intentions of Israel, then please see this statement issued by David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister. His words, as printed in the Jewish Chronicle, 9 August 1967, leave nothing to imagination: ”The world Zionist movement should not be neglectful of the dangers of Pakistan to it. And Pakistan now should be its first target, for this ideological State is a threat to our existence. And Pakistan, the whole of it, hates the Jews and loves the Arabs. ”This lover of the Arabs is more dangerous to us than the Arabs themselves. For that matter, it is most essential for the world Zionism that it should now take immediate steps against Pakistan. ”Whereas the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula are Hindus whose hearts have been full of hatred towards Muslims, therefore, India is the most important base for us to work therefrom against Pakistan. ”It is essential that we exploit this base and strike and crush Pakistanis, enemies of Jews and Zionism, by all disguised and secret plans. ____ We are grateful to Tariq Saeedi for permission to reprint excerpts from his special report that appeared first in The Balochistan Post, http://www.balochistanpost.com . For archived Globe-Intel issues, click on http://www.topica.com/lists/gordonthomas/read

Zionist Poodle Musharraf Wants Pakistan To Embrace the Mossad

[The shitty little state of Isra-hell and the Mossad have been out to destroy Pakistan since both states were formed in the same year (SEE:  Mossad And India Spy Agency Team Up, Target Pakistan).]

statement issued by David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister. His words, as printed in the Jewish Chronicle, 9 August 1967, leave nothing to imagination: ”The world Zionist movement should not be neglectful of the dangers of Pakistan to it. And Pakistan now should be its first target, for this ideological State is a threat to our existence. And Pakistan, the whole of it, hates the Jews and loves the Arabs. ”This lover of the Arabs is more dangerous to us than the Arabs themselves. For that matter, it is most essential for the world Zionism that it should now take immediate steps against Pakistan. ”Whereas the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula are Hindus whose hearts have been full of hatred towards Muslims, therefore, India is the most important base for us to work therefrom against Pakistan. ”It is essential that we exploit this base and strike and crush Pakistanis, enemies of Jews and Zionism, by all disguised and secret plans. ____ We are grateful to Tariq Saeedi for permission to reprint excerpts from his special report that appeared first in The Balochistan Post, www.balochistanpost.com .

Musharraf supports better relations with Israel

Talking to an Israeli newspaper, former president says policies should be changed when environment changes. PHOTO: AFP/ FILE

Former President Pervaiz Musharraf has expressed his support for the betterment of ties between Pakistan and Israel, in a recent interview to an Israeli newspaper.

Talking to Haaretz, Musharraf said that Israel is a reality and a positive relationship with it can prove to be helpful for Pakistan. He said: “Pakistan also needs to keep readjusting its diplomatic stand toward Israel based on the mere fact that it exists and is not going away.”

He said that since the time Israel came into existence, Pakistan has always been “pro-Palestine”, but he believes “in realism and in assessing ground realities” and thinks it is “necessary to understand the changing environment, analyze it – and respond.”

He said that in his era, he tested the relationships by sending the then Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri to meet former Israeli foreign minister in September 2005. “I took the initiative of having our foreign minister meet your foreign minister – they met openly in Turkey and that was also received positively,” he told the newspaper.

When asked about the anti-Semitic attitude in Pakistan, the former president clearly denied its existence, while saying that a “dislike of Israel” may be present but not anti-Semitism.

“Pakistan adjusting its stance toward Israel has the advantage of possibly breaking those anti-Pakistan activities,” said Musharraf.

Turkey’s ex-army chief arrested on terror charges

Turkey’s ex-army chief arrested on terror charges

Hurriyet.com.tr

A civilian court has arrested a former chief of staff for the first time in Turkey’s history as suspect Gen İlker Başbuğ rejects accusations that he sought to overthrow the government through propaganda. President Abdullah Gül calls for an even-tempered contemplation of the matter, noting that ‘everyone is equal in front of the law’

Gen İlker Başbuğ leaves a courthouse after an order for his arrest. AA photoGen İlker Başbuğ leaves a courthouse after an order for his arrest. AA photo

Former Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ was arrested late last night on charges of heading a terrorist organization and attempting to overthrow the government.

Başbuğ had arrived yesterday at an Istanbul prosecutor’s office to testify in an ongoing case into an alleged propaganda campaign against the current government by the Turkish Armed Forces.

After seven hours of questioning, prosecutor Cihan Kansız directed Başbuğ to a court requesting his arrest on charges of “heading a terrorist organization,” and “attempting to overthrow the government through use of force.”

Former chief of staff arrested on terror charges

The court ordered Başbuğ’s arrest at around half past midnight and sent him to Silivri prison. It is the first time in Turkey’s history that a former chief of staff has been arrested by a civilian court of law.

President Abdullah Gül commented on Başbuğ’s arrest today, saying, “Everyone is equal in front of the law; the matter should be contemplated with an even-temper.”

‘Judgment rests with the Turkish people’

Başbuğ made a statement after the court ordered his arrest, saying, “The 26th chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Republic has been arrested on charges of forming and leading a terrorist organization. The judgment rests with the Turkish people.”

Başbuğ denied all accusations in his defense and said it was “tragicomic” that the chief of one of the world’s most powerful armies had been accused of leading a terrorist organization.

‘Heaviest punishment’

The leveling of such a claim was already the heaviest punishment that he could have received, Başbuğ said, adding that any subsequent penalty would not hurt as much as the initial accusation.

“I was not asked a serious question during my time with the prosecutor. I do not know how they reached this conclusion [that I headed a terrorist organization],” he said.

Başbuğ said he had always carried out his duty as mandated by the laws and the Constitution. He said it was painful for him to be accused of attempting to overthrow the government by forming several websites and making several press statements. “If I had such malicious intentions, I could have found other ways of achieving them given that I commanded a force of 700,000 people.”

Decision political, CHP head says

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu commented on the arrest, saying the decision was made by political authorities and then confirmed by the court.

Kılıçdaroğlu also said he had “no faith that specially authorized courts” would achieve justice.

Pakistan’s TTP “Miscreants” Prove Once Again That They Are Really Monsters

TTP claims killing of 15 abducted FC troops

TTP spokesman says they have taken their revenge, officials say bodies not recovered yet. PHOTO: AFP/ FILE

PESHAWAR: Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Thursday claimed to have killed 15 Frontier Constabulary (FC) personnel who were kidnapped earlier.

“We’ve taken our revenge,” said TTP Spokesperson Ihsanullah Ihsan.

District Officer FC Ali Sher Mehsud said that the bodies have been recovered and they are being kept at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) in Tal.

Fifteen FC personnel were abducted by the TTP on December 23 when several militants attacked their fort in Mullazai.

The militant outfit’s spokesperson claimed to have killed all of them.

Ihsan, speaking from an unknown location, said that the FC personnel were killed “as a consequence of an operation by security forces in Khyber Agency.”

Qari Kamran, a top TTP commander, was reportedly killed along with 12 other militants, while some women and children were also taken into custody by the security forces during the operation in the Karmana area of Landi Kotal.

Ihsan said that the bodies of the security personnel were near Shawa area in North Waziristan, while local sources said that there were reports of 13 bodies.

Security officials, though confirming the information of the dead bodies, did not comment further on the identities or the number of people killed.

In a written statement, the TTP said: “It was against Pashtoontradition and culture that the women and children had been taken into custody.”

Spy-vs-Spy–CIA’s Terrorists Bomb ISI’s Terrorists

[Baloch Liberation Army is a product of CIA and RAW (SEE:  The Stunning Investigative Story on the Birth of Balochistan Liberation Army).  Musallah Defa Tanzeem is ISI's solution to Baloch Liberation Army.   The fact that the BLA attackers link today's assault to the future IPI Iran/Pakistan/India pipeline, as well as Chinese engineers, is like signing the attack "MADE IN AMERICA."]

Blast at Shafiq Mengal’s house kills 13, BLA claims responsibility

Balochwarna

Occupied Balochistan - At least 13 people were killed and more than 30 injured, some of them seriously, in a massive bomb blast outside the house of Shafiq Mengal, the head of infamous anti Baloch armed groups, Musallah Defa Tanzeem, here on Friday.

Unidentified men had fitted explosives in a vehicle and parked it outside the house of Balochistan’s ISI agent Shafiq Mengal at Al-Mashriq Lane, Arbab Karam Khan Road, Quetta, which went off with a huge bang. As a result, 13 people were killed and over 30 others injured some of them in critical condition.The blast was so powerful that it completely pulled down some parts of the residence of the Shafiq Mengal besides badly damaging nearby houses and shops. Seven vehicles which were parked in the parking lot of the residence were also badly damaged.

The bodyguards of Shafiq Mengal opened indiscriminate firing at passers-by, media persons and the rescue workers that started to pour there to help the injured after the blast. Independent sources reported that most of the wounded people were victims of the wanton firing by the bodyguards of Mr Mengal. The body guards of Shafiq Mengal also barred the media persons from covering the incident and tortured a photographer of local newspaper and broke a camera of private TV channel.

The electricity cables in the area were also disconnected as a result of the blast and fire broke out in the house due to damage to gas pipeline. Fire fighters were called to the site of blast site that after one hour succeeded in extinguishing the fire. According to Bomb Disposal Squad officials about 40kg explosives were used in the blast which were planted with a car, adding, that two time bombs of 8kg were also recovered from the blast site.

‘About 13 people have been killed and over 30 sustained injuries in the blast’, Deputy Inspector General, Operations Quetta Nazir Kurd told media persons, adding, that most of the injured and dead were the guards of Shafiq Mengal. He said that the main target of the bomb attack was Shafiq Mengal, however, he and his family members remained unhurt in the blast.

Baloch patriots say that Shafiq Mengal, a son of Naseer Mengal, of running the anti-Baloch armed group, the Baloch Musla Defai Tanzeem, with the help of the Pakistani intelligence agencies. The shadowy group has accepted responsibility for the targeted killing of dozens of Baloch nationalist leaders, activists, journalists and people from other walks of life. While the junior Mengal has not publicly owned the anti-nationalist group, he, however, passionately criticizes the Baloch nationalist movement by billing it as the brainchild of “anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan elements” in his frequent statements published in Quetta-based Urdu newspapers.”

According to BBC Urdu service, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has accepted responsibility for the blast and claimed that it was a case of suicide bombing, the first of its nature the armed resistance organization has ever perpetrated. The BLA and other Baloch resistance organisations are fighting for the Independence Balochistan.

He said the suicide blast was carried out by Darwesh Baloch, who was a member of Shaheed Majeed Brigade. He said the blast killed the members of Shafiq Mengal’s group who were holding a meeting at his residence at the time of the attack. Meerak Baloch said that Shafiq Mengal was a Baloch national traitor and BLA would continue targeting traitors in future also. He requested the general public to stay away from such National traitors because they are on the target of Baloch fighters and they can be attacked anywhere at any time.

He warned that if IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline project was not dropped, such attacks would also be carried out on Chinese engineers. He said “BLA warns all multinational companies to abandon Pakistan’s exploitative projects in occupied Balochistan.”

The IPI pipeline passes through Balochistan, Pakistan and Iran are adamant to go ahead with their plan without the consent of Baloch people. Patriot/pro-liberation parties believe that since Balochistan is an occupied country the International Multinational companies must avoid investing on so called development projects initiated by Pakistan unless the long standing issue of occupied Balochistan is resolved.

Courtesy: BBC Urdu, The Nation and The Balochhal

Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman Fight May Reignite

[Blast from the past (it's a real shame that it wasn't true)]– 

Pakistani news agencies, including the state-run TV channel, PTV, reported that Hakimullah Mehsud had been shot by Wali-ur-Rehman, or one of his supporters, following disagreements regarding the leadership succession”

Top Pakistan Taliban commanders ‘at each other’s throats’

Any division within the TTP could hinder the Afghan Taliban, al Qaeda’s struggle in Afghanistan against the US. PHOTO: AFP/FILE

ISLAMABAD: Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani militants have held a series of meetings aimed at containing what could soon be open warfare between the two most powerful Pakistani Taliban leaders, militant sources have said.

Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the Tehreek-i-Taliban (TTP), and his deputy, Waliur Rehman, were at each other’s throats, the sources said.

“You will soon hear that one of them has eliminated the other, though hectic efforts are going on by other commanders and common friends to resolve differences between the two,” one TTP commander said.

Any division within the TTP could hinder the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda’s struggle in Afghanistan against the United States and its allies, making it more difficult to recruit young fighters and disrupting safe havens in Pakistan used by the Afghan militants.

Despite multiple reports of the Rehman-Mehsud split, Rehman told Reuters on Tuesday there was no problem between the two.

“There are no differences between us,” Rehman said.

The TTP, formed in 2007, is an umbrella group of various Pakistani militant factions operating in Pakistan’s unruly northwestern tribal areas along the porous border with Afghanistan.

It has long struggled with its choice of targets. Some factions are at war with the Pakistani state while others concentrate on the fight against the United States and its allies in Afghanistan.

There has been a noticeable decrease in militant attacks in Pakistan, but there continue to be random acts of violence across the country.

Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban commanders are asking the TTP to provide more men for the fight in Afghanistan and are looking to smooth over the dispute between Mehsud and Rehman.

Long-standing feuds

Taliban sources said Rehman had ordered his fighters to kill Mehsud because of his increasing closeness with al Qaeda and its Arab contingent.

Mehsud’s former deputy has also alleged the TTP chief received money from Pakistan’s arch-rival, India, to kill a former Pakistan spy agency official acting as a mediator between the Pakistani Taliban, Afghan insurgents and the Pakistani government.

Pakistani Taliban Killing “Col. Imam”, posted with vodpod

The reported enmity between Mehsud and Rehman is not the only conflict within the TTP ranks.

Mehsud has a long-standing feud with militant commanders Maulvi Nazeer in South Waziristan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan, both of whom have non-aggression agreements with the Pakistani military.

Mehsud’s men have also fought with the militia under the control of Fazal Saeed Haqqani, the former TTP head in the Kurram tribal region. He has accused Mehsud of killing his commanders and innocent people and kidnapping for ransom.

Haqqani, who is close to the militant Afghan Haqqani network, broke away from the TTP last year.

A pamphlet distributed by militants in North Waziristan this week announced the formation of a council to try to resolve the conflicts.

“All jihadi forces have jointly, on the recommendation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, formed a five-member commission which will be known as the Shura Muraqba,” the pamphlet said, using the term by which the Afghan Taliban describe themselves.

“The Shura Muraqba will be working to resolve differences and problems between mujahideen.”

It said that any “mujahideen” found to have committed an “unlawful” killing or kidnapping would be punished under Islamic law. It is likely any attack on a fellow “mujahideen” commander would be considered “unlawful”.

“All mujahideen should respect the decisions of the council that has been set up,” a senior commander of the Haqqani faction in Kurram said.

“If people continue to do as they like, the situation will not improve. Things will instead get much worse.”

 

 

You Cannot Believe Pakistani Reports About the Alleged “Pakistani Taliban”

[The Pakistani Taliban have no connection to the Afghan Taliban, no allegiance to Mullah Omar.  Proof of this is Hakeemullah's execution of Col. Imam, against the pleas of Omar.  The Pakistani press keeps feeding the rumors that the two groups are one (SEE:  Taliban Groups Unite Against Us).  Hakeemullah Mehsud and the gang that works for him are criminals, murderers and assorted thugs, all of whom should be put down like mad dogs.]

No halt to fight against Pakistani forces: TTP

PESHAWAR: The Hakimullah Mehsud-led Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Monday confirmed that militant organisations had agreed to avoid killing innocent people and kidnapping for ransom in Pakistan, but at the same time vowed to continue carrying out suicide attacks and fighting against Pakistan’s security forces.

“Yes, we signed an accord with three other major Taliban groups of Maulvi Nazeer, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and an Afghan Taliban faction to avoid killing of innocent people and kidnapping for ransom, but we did not agree with them to stop suicide attacks and our fight against Pakistani security forces,” TTP spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan told this correspondent from somewhere in the tribal areas on the phone.

The TTP, he said, had not announced any ceasefire and had no plans to do so in the near future. He warned that their fighters would continue their operations in Pakistan. He said the TTP would extend cooperation to the five-member Taliban Shura, having members from the militant groups such as Maulvi Nazeer, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and the Haqqani network.

Ihsanullah Ihsan argued that the joint Taliban Shura or council had, in fact, been formed for tackling two major issues to put an end to the frequent incidents of kidnapping for ransom and killing of innocent people, especially those picked up by unknown people in the tribal areas and executed on charges of spying for the US forces.

About reports attributed to the Afghan Taliban supreme leader, Mulla Mohammad Omar, urging Pakistani Taliban to stop their fight in Pakistan and instead support them in liberating Afghanistan from the “occupation forces”, he declined to offer comment and only said that they would operate both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Look, for us Pakistan is as important as Afghanistan, and, therefore, we cannot stop our activities here,” he insisted.

The TTP spokesman also denied differences between the TTP leadership, saying Hakimullah Mahsud was still leader of the Pakistani Taliban and Maulana Waliur Rahman was his deputy.

 

Under Umbrella of “Drug Control” US Is Preparing Death Squads for Azerbaijan and Central Asia

GOOGLE TRANS.

George Borodin: guests from Colombia, El Salvador, and Kosovo: The U.S. is prepared in Azerbaijan and Central Asia “death squads”

REGNUM

Deputy Secretary of State and Head of the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the U.S. Department of State William Brownfield (right) pledged robust support CARICC.  Together with the Director Lt. Gen. CARICC Beksultanov Sarsekovym.  Source: CARICC.

Deputy Secretary of State and Head of the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the U.S. Department of State William Brownfield (right) pledged robust support CARICC. Together with the Director Lt. Gen. CARICC Beksultanov Sarsekovym. Source: CARICC.

Undersecretary of State William Brownfield said that "the Central Asian Initiative on Drugs," the U.S. will be higher than the struggle for influence between Washington and Moscow.  Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Richard Solash.

Undersecretary of State William Brownfield said that “the Central Asian Initiative on Drugs,” the U.S. will be higher than the struggle for influence between Washington and Moscow. Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Richard Solash.

Director CARICC B. Sarsekov (left) with the Director of the Office for law enforcement issues and drug control in Europe and Asia, the U.S. State Department ID Kostelanchikom.  Source: CARICC.

Director CARICC B. Sarsekov (left) with the Director of the Office for law enforcement issues and drug control in Europe and Asia, the U.S. State Department ID Kostelanchikom.Source: CARICC.

Today, under the burden of “fighting drugs” the United States are trying to create a loyal group of law enforcement agencies and special purpose units in the Central Asian states. One of the mechanisms of this process is CARICC – Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Centre on fight against drugs. All that the U.S. did in Central America in the 1970-1990′s: there training counternarcotics police later turned into a murderous death squads and civil wars for decades. Drug production in the meantime increased in proportion to American intervention. Today, the process of “Afghanization” Central Asia is gaining momentum and to the point of no return, there is very little time.

In foreign practice, the Obama administration’s entrenched certain tactical approach: hands of other states to act and conduct their own initiative as a multilateral mechanism of international organizations. Thus, the war was waged against Libya by France and the United States provided only “support” functions. The “New Silk Road” will initiate Turkey and the United States in its “neutral, but an enthusiastic companion” (1). League of Arab States, one after the other issues calls for the overthrow of the legitimate, but disliked the leaders of the United States. UN Security Council resolution against Syria in October 2011 put forward France, Britain, Germany and Portugal and the United States it is only “support” – in the company of Colombia, Nigeria, Gabon and Bosnia. It’s really more intelligent and sophisticated tactics, compared with a cowboy fell swoop the previous U.S. administration: the costs and accrue a negative response to others; the more so in the budget deficit, “the transfer of the burden of defense spending allies – the only sensible way” (2-3 .)

United Nations, the main international mechanism, the U.S. is trying to turn into a multilateral extension of the State Department to give international legitimacy to its sole initiatives. Washington is also trying to use a separate structure in its UN, U.S., destination: The IAEA has recently used to put pressure on Iran, the Office on Drugs and Crime United Nations (UNODC) – tool penetration into Central Asia.

Another favorite American maneuver – the creation of “regional” institutions thousands of miles from their borders, in which the United States are members or observers. Directing the activities of these structures, the curators of Washington repeated local leadership, “it’s your idea, your structure, do everything yourself, we will only help” – and thus get a (semi) compliant mechanism that serves as their outpost in the remote region.

As a pretext for the creation of such mechanisms, the United States are using the theme of “cooperation in areas of common interest.” The most plausible and persuasive cover serves as a “joint fight against drugs,” and this card is played out most actively against Russia and Central Asia. In recent months, Washington has coined especially mocking argument: his “war on drugs” they activate in response to concern about the implications of Russia “withdrawal” of troops from Afghanistan (in fact, no “O”, of course – a reduction of troops).

If the United States so concerned about drugs, why do they flatly refuse to fight drug production and drug trafficking in Afghanistan (4), and instead seek to “assist” Russia and Central Asian states in their territories? Intercept drugs at the source is much easier, especially when the territory is occupied 140,000th military contingent as part-time drug dealers are CIA agents, and precursors and drugs are transported under the control of the same warlords who “provide security” of U.S. and NATO convoys ( 5). Center was created by means of NATO member states: the United States (3.2 million), Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, France, Czech Republic, as well as Finland and Luxembourg – a total of 15,400,000 USD (9). These same states plus Afghanistan and Pakistan have observer status at CARICC – while China and Iran on the list are not registered. Observer States had access to the entire volume of information collected and analyzed by the Center. Director Sarsekov says CARICC “ready to cooperate with western countries” and proposes to expand the mandate of the Centre for all types of cross-border crime, not limiting it to the fight against drug trafficking – as evidenced by Wikileaks dispatches disclosed the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent (10). Indeed, CARICC takes a lot of international visitors: foreign delegations arrive in the center of one another. Training CARICC conduct “international experts with extensive law enforcement and managerial experience” (11).

U.S. sees CARICC as “very important and effective tool”, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally oversaw the development of the Centre (12). As an “observer” The United States takes an active part in its work. Hardware and software for CARICC put U.S. Central Command (13). In the “technical support / service” CARICC also involved the Office of Military Cooperation U.S. Department of Defense (Office of Military Cooperation, OMC), as reported in a telegram to the U.S. Embassy in Astana, disclosed in the latest WikiLeaks documents servings September 1, 2011 (14) . The United States insisted that multilateral efforts to combat the drug passed through CARICC and NATO-Russia Council, and not through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (15).Washington also hoped to link the activities CARICC the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which now trains police officers and other professionals involved in the protection of the law, but because of objections by Russian officials to the United States had to abandon those plans (16). In an attempt to hide the involvement of the Armed Forces of the United States in CARICC, though rather clumsy. Russian version of the site CARICC reports that “from May 16, 2011 in CARICC held a two-week training course for high ranking law enforcement agencies and special services of the parties, organized with the support of UNODC and donors.” Coverage of the same event in the English language is different: training courses have been organized “with the support of UNODC and the U.S. Central Command” (emphasis added) (17).

For all its benefits for the U.S. CARICC – only one of the stages of penetration into the power structure of the Central Asian states. In June 2011 Deputy Secretary of State and Head of the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the U.S. State Department (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, INL) William Brownfield (William Brownfield), which will be discussed separately, has announced some ” Central Asian Initiative on Drugs “(Central Asian Counternarcotics Initiative, CACI) (18). In this project, the legal and practical aspects of which develops over the UNODC, we are talking directly to the creation of anti-drug “Special Forces” in the five Central Asian states, which would be linked to their counterparts in Afghanistan and Russia, and would coordinate through the UNODC and CARICC. As the model results in Brownfield “remarkably effective and proven specially selected units” created within the anti-narcotics police of Afghanistan by the Agency on U.S. Drug Enforcement (DEA). Washington will provide funding for training, purchase equipment and supplies for these special groups: $ 4.2 million to the initiative of the State Department has already allocated (19). Brownfield also noted that the implementation of the initiative does not require a massive military presence, neither the U.S. nor the Russian Federation. In summer and autumn of this year, he and his staff circulated by the Central Asian capitals, urging them to guide the need for such a model of special forces in the region.

Undersecretary of State William Brownfield, even among the arrogant power “diplomats” stands calmly and insolence. For this post Brownfield came in January 2011 directly from the chair of U.S. Ambassador to Colombia (2007-2010) (20). Brownfield previously served as ambassador to Venezuela, where it is not for his ambassadorial work twice received from President Hugo Chavez’s warnings of expulsion (21). In 1996-1999, the Brownfield served as deputy head of that Office, struggling with drugs and “strengthening the rule of law”, particularly in Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1993 he graduated from the National Military Institute (National War College). In 1989-1990. When the U.S. invaded Panama, served as political advisor to the commander of U.S. Southern Command in Panama. A Brownfield began his career in Venezuela in 1979 and in El Salvador in 1981-1983. (22) – During the Civil War and the highest activity of the right-wing “death squads”.

David Kostelanchik (David Kostelancik), Director for Europe and Eurasia in the Office of William Brownfield, began his career in Turkey (1989-1991) and Albania (1992-1993) in 1994 was a special assistant to Ambassador T. Pickering in Moscow. In 1998-2001. engaged in military-political issues in NATO’s Central European affairs in the State Department and National Security Council. In 2007 Kostelanchik to advance in the same National War Institute, and then left for Moscow for the post of Minister-Counselor for Political Affairs and head of the inner section (Russian) politics (23). D. Kostelanchika residence in Virginia (24) is located in a convenient 4-mile distance from Langley – much closer than to State Department.

Some might believe that U.S. officials with the track record of cooperation aim to rescue the Russian people on heroin? As for the main anti-drug department of the USA – the Agency for U.S. Drug Enforcement (DEA), Ministry of Justice, its mission is to prevent the flow of drugs into the United States. International activities of DEA controlled by the fact that in 2006 it was included in the U.S. intelligence community, now consisting of 16 structures. Perhaps there will be decent in DEA officers, who consider the task of the true fight against narcotic evil. But they do not specify the course of the Agency, and when in their operative work imposed razvedkadrov development, the latter prevail.

However, not only the diplomacy of force and DEA, but Central Command and the U.S. Armed Forces, the giant war machine ravaged their area of ​​responsibility of full-scale wars and conflicts of low intensity, as the “fight against drugs” – and even in Central Asia! However, anti-drug activities in the CENTCOM cover quickly gives way to the formation and training of local military special forces.

Center of U.S. military activity in Central Asia, in addition to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan became. According to a press release, in Tajikistan, Central Command conducts 50 to 60 programs and activities in the field of security, and in 2011 – 70 (25). In particular, the completed construction of the National Center for training, systems are being interdepartmental communication to the Government of Tajikistan, built a bridge across the Panj River to the border and customs checkpoints on the Tajik-Afghan border – the complex, which “helps to increase the commercial exchange that enhances communication Tajikistan, with its southern neighbor “(26). Institute of Foreign Languages ​​U.S. Department of Defense spent two 16-week courses in English for the Tajiks, the reconstruction of the Police Academy in Tajikistan, provided assistance in training personnel. Built frontier posts in Shurabad and Yahchi, Pune, at the opening of which in June 2011 came to himself Brownfield – it installed “underfloor heating”! (27) Military Partner Tajikistan – National Guard Virginia – is also expanding its military cooperation: conducting training and information exchange in 2011, supplemented by the formation of “peacekeeping unit” training “disaster relief” and the civil-military medical readiness.

Medical services to the civilian population in the host country forces – is a classic technique events “winning hearts and minds” of Field Manual on counterinsurgency (anti-guerrilla) activities, the current version of which was developed under the leadership of Gen. Mattis, now commander of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Petraeus now director of the CIA (28). You can imagine how stun Tajik border guards presented America “underfloor heating”. As well as a new form, brilliant equipment, modern computers – the so-constructed emotional connection with the curator, under the doctrine of psychological warfare.

A special role in American regional structure is given as Kazakhstan’s largest, prosperous and close to the Russian state in Central Asia, without which no valid Eurasian integration. However, the enactment of the Kazakh leadership of Russia, the U.S. and China against each other in the medium term will turn Kazakhstan into an arena of fierce struggle of the three powers – and the position of fighting the landfill altogether unenviable. This process may already have begun: May 17, 2011 in Aktobe saw the first act of terrorism. As described by Michael Park in the article “” Dagestanizatsiya “: extremists have declared total war special forces” on the site of IA REGNUM, to destabilize Kazakhstan is possible an extensive set of subversive acts: acts of terrorism in Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan infiltration of illegal armed formations, mass demonstrations fringe, accompanied by a demonstrative cruelty to certain groups, a series of explosions on pipelines, provoking Kazakhstan disproportionate and unjust military action (29).

And it gets inside the Customs Union of Russia today and in the future – within the Eurasian Union.

When William Brownfield speaks of “specially selected and tested secret units” within the Central Asian Initiative on Drugs, the questions arise: “selected” by whom? ”Trusted” whose intelligence? employees to whom? In fact, under the burden of drug control, the United States in Central Asia are building a loyal force apparatus. For what purpose and objectives?

1. To ensure obedience to the will of the state U.S. legal control is not enough – you need power and control. During stabilization or destabilization of the internal situation of the power unit loyal support the government if it is given to the U.S. line – or help to overthrow him, if it went off course. They suppress the resistance of the masses and eliminate the resistance leaders, and bring people to the desired political position. All these tasks can not be performed by the U.S. military without prejudice to the reputation of the U.S. in addition, local collaborators will perform the dirty work, with particular zeal to settle personal scores (see the experience of the “Galicia” and other national units SS reprisals against Gaddafi.)

2. Unconventional warfare (irregular war) the U.S. will lead the future due to deep partnerships with foreign military, according to the plans of General Mattis the commander of Central Command(30). U.S. Secretary of Defense L. Panetta confirmed that the budget increase of special forcesin the reduction of military expenditure necessary “to fight the rebels, the U.S. did not have to do it”(31). U.S. special forces, in addition to special operations, special forces are training other states – “the industry in the stage of rapid growth,” says the Central Command.

3. Safety and security of transit of military cargo for the U.S. occupation troops in Afghanistan and NATO’s supply lines in the North (Northern Distribution Network, NDN) requires strict order in the transit countries. In the future, as the realization of the American integration project called “New” or “modern” silk road, you will need the security of a huge network of transport and energy lines, and most importantly, pipelines. According to the strategy of the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) ModernSilk Road “will implement a counterinsurgency mission,” U.S.(32).

4. Providing key strategic advantages: Central Asia in conjunction with Afghanistan – the “heart” of the Eurasian region, the last bastion on the way to world domination – provides a base for projecting U.S. threats on three main enemies: Iran, Russia and China. Adoption of the military-political presence in Central Asia to the United States today is as important as the structuring of Western Europe in NATO in the years after World War II.

5. Finally, the political-military U.S. presence in Central Asia undermines any independent from Washington and they are not controlled by a regional integration initiative – CSTO, SCO, and future Eurasian UnionU.S. actions in Central Asia largely duplicate their policy in Central and South America, and it concerns the integration process and the “fight against drugs”, and counter-insurgency war.Thus, in 1993 by the U.S. was founded, “the Central American Integration System” (Central American Integration System, SICA) – the system of economic and political integration. In 2000, Washington launched “Plan Colombia”, which quickly turned from counternarcotics to counterinsurgency and a year later was supplemented by strengthening the capacity of the Colombian army to protect oil pipelines. Colombia is known, became a military foothold in Central America, the United States.

Recognized as a world historian and expert on the role of the CIA in the drug trade, Peter Dale Scott (Peter Dale Scott) as a result of decades of study of anti-drug efforts of the United States came to the conclusion that the increase in drug trafficking is due, not in spite of the efforts of Americans (33). Alfred McCoy (Alfred McCoy), another world-renowned expert on the role of the CIA in the drug trade, states that where the U.S. led “war on drugs,” Drug Production generally increased (34). Drug production increased in proportion to terrorism, loss of life and suffering of a nation whose territory the United States have chosen to “fight against drugs.”

It should be understood: in the fight against drugs Russian and U.S. interests are not “common.” American power apparatus using drugs as a political weapon: the U.S., first create a crisis, then use it to infiltrate the power structures of the target to put them in the service of their interests. The formula is simple: to enter into an alliance with narkotorguyuschimi groups – to declare war on drugs – to establish military and political presence in the region where the drugs are sent.

CARICC for the U.S. – it’s intelligence and coordinating resources in the region and a platform for training of law enforcement agencies, the price of 3.2 million dollars – a paltry price to pay for, to know all that he knows Russia and other states. In the case of U.S. CARICC invites States to play in someone else’s game with marked cards. In this game impossible to win.

It is unlikely that Russian foreign policy establishment in the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry understands the American idea: in their actions that understanding can not be traced.

And in Central Asia, those who participate in the American game, should know they face the same fate as the Central America – the role of “cannon fodder” in the service of American interests and decades of bloody civil wars, dropping in the development of an indefinite amount of time. Understand whether the leaders of Central Asian states, in which game they are drawn? Do they want for themselves and their states of such a future, which has been present in Afghanistan, when the nation was torn at the same time radical extremism and foreign occupation? The process of “Afghanization” Central Asia is gaining momentum and to the point of no return, there is very little time. A position of the leaders of Central Asian states are unlikely be called stable: the drug mafia and overthrew the more stable leadership. The coup d’etat by the trafficking networks in contact with the U.S. secret services, a general massacre and endless foreign occupation – it is most likely future for them all..

1. Andrew Kuchins, Thomas Sanderson, David Gordon. The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road – Planning for Afghanistan’s Future // Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). December 2009. P.3.

2. Joseph M. Parent, Paul K. MacDonald The Wisdom of Retrenchment – America Must Cut Back to Move Forward // Foreign Affairs. November/December 2011.

3. При всём том вое, который поднял Пентагон по поводу сокращения расходов, военный бюджет уменьшается всего лишь на 7-8% на ближайшие 10 лет, и к 2017 г. будет составлять 522,5 миллиардов долл. (без учёта расходов на войны, которые идут отдельной статьей). Военный бюджет России в 2010 г. составил 52,6 млрд.долл., Китая – 114 млрд.долл. Источник: Wikipedia, List of countries by military expenditures.

4. За исключением тех 5-6% наркопроизводства, которое питает движение Талибан.

5. Александр Чайковский Терроризм и наркота: в Москву едет командующий США и НАТО в Европе // ИА Regnum. 4 октября 2011. http://www.regnum.ru/news/1452401.html.

6. Сайт Регионального представительства УНП ООН в Центральной Азии (UNODC ROCA) – http://www.unodc.org/centralasia/.

7. Россия присоединилась к ЦАРИКЦ одной из последних 4 сентября 2009 г. (Казахстан – 16 сентября 2011 г.), решение было ратифицировано в марте 2011 г.

8. US Embassy Tashkent cable ID 08TASHKENT485. Caricc Ready To Move Forward As Pilot Phase Nears Completion. Date: 24 Apr 2008. Paragraph3. Wikileaks ID 151157, First published on 26 Aug 2011. http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=08TASHKENT485&q=caricc

9. Mid-term evaluation of project TD/RER/H22 Establishment of the Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Centre – CARICC. Peter Allan, Consultant.

10. US Embassy Tashkent cable ID 08TASHKENT485. Caricc Ready To Move Forward As Pilot Phase Nears Completion. Date: 24 Apr 2008. Summary. Wikileaks ID 151157, First published on 26 Aug 2011. http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=08TASHKENT485&q=caricc

11. Завершение очередных курсов обучения руководящего состава компетентных органов. Сайт ЦАРИКЦ: http://www.caricc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=251&Itemid=1&lang=russian.

12. Представитель Госдепартамента США в ЦАРИКЦ. ЦАРИКЦ: http://www.caricc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=247&Itemid=1

13. Avaz Yuldohev Only five member nations ratify CARICC establishment agreement by Feb 1 // Asia-Plus. February 5, 2010. http://news.tj/en/news/only-five-member-nations-ratify-caricc-establishment-agreement-feb-1.

14. US Embassy Astana Cable, reference ID 10ASTANA225. Kazakhstan: Scenesetter For Srap Holbrooke. Date 18 Feb 2010. Source: Wikileaks ID #249282. First published 1 Sep 2011. http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10ASTANA225.

15. US Embassy Moscow cable ID 10MOSCOW226. Scenesetter For February 4 US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Drug Trafficking Working Group Meeting. Date: 29 Jan 2010. Paragraph 7. Source: Wikileaks ID 246266. First published 24 Aug 2011. http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10MOSCOW226.html#.

16. US Embassy Dushanbe cable ID 09DUSHANBE702. New Russian Ambassador Proposes Closer Cooperation. Date: 5 Jun 2009. Paragraph 6. Wikileaks ID 210433. First published 1 Sep 2011. http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09DUSHANBE702&q=caricc.

17. Executive-level law enforcement training course conducted at CARICC. CARICC website: http://www.caricc.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1&limit=5&limitstart=15&lang=english.

18. Richard Solash US Promotes New Plan to Battle Drug Trade In Afghanistan, Central Asia, Russia // Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. July 19, 2011.

19. US issues $4.2mln for Central Asia Counternarcotics Initiative. The American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce. 10 October 2011. http://www.aucconline.com/news.php?news_id=259.

20. William Brownfield Biography, State Department http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/154184.htm.

21. William Brownfield Biography, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Brownfield.

22. William Brownfield Biography, http://www.allgov.com/Official/Brownfield_William.

23. David J. Kostelancik visits Nizhny Novgorod American Center. 13.03.2009. http://amcorners.ru/news/news796/ac147/

24. Property valuation of Bridle Path Lane, Fairfax, VA. http://www.city-data.com/fairfax-county/B/Bridle-Path-Lane-2.html.

25. CENTCOM, Tajikistan expand security partnership. US Central Command press-release. June 29, 2010. http://www.centcom.mil/press-releases/centcom-tajikistan-expand-security-partnership.

26. Idem.

27. Tajikistan: US Government rebuilds border guard facilities in Shurobod // Fergana News Information Agency. June 30, 2011. http://enews.fergananews.com/news.php?id=2108. См. также видео: Американские дипломаты на таджикско-афганской границе, 29 июня 2011 г. http://nm.tj/politics/381-amerikanskie-diplomaty-na-tadzhiksko-afganskoy-granice-video.html; оригинал видео на английском: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB5X4GU7-C8&feature=player_embedded#!

28. Counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting. Publication no. 3-33.5 Washington, DC: Department of the Army and Department of the Navy, December 2006.

29. Михаил Пак. “Дагестанизация”: экстремисты объявили спецслужбам тотальную войну: Казахстан за неделю // ИА Regnum. 16.11.2011. http://www.regnum.ru/news/1467798.html

30. Greg Grant Grunts to Rebuild Like SOF, Move Away From Bases: Mattis // DoD Buzz – Online Defense and Acquisition Journal. February 19th, 2009. http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/02/19/grunts-sof-fob-based-coin-must-end-mattis/

31. См. важный материал Thom Shanker, Elisabeth Bumiller Weighing Pentagon Cuts, Panetta Faces Deep Pressures // The New York Times. November 6, 2011.

32. Andrew Kuchins, Thomas Sanderson, David Gordon. The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road – Planning for Afghanistan’s Future // Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). December 2009. P.22.

33. Peter Dale Scott Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003. P. 75

34. Alfred W. McCoy The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Lawrence Hill Books, Second revised edition. 2003. P. 449.

Георгий Бородин – эксперт Института внешнеполитических исследований и инициатив (ИНВИССИН, Москва)

REGNUM

Smashing Greater Central Asia – (Part IV)–Smashing Systematically

Smashing Greater Central Asia – Part IV

Smashing Systematically

Peter Chamberlin

The pipeline wars are real wars, in that two or more nations are ordering their civilian and military foot soldiers, on a daily basis, into life or death contests to the finish.  For the United States, it is a contest which must be won, if we are to survive, according to most of our national leaders.  But is that really true?  According to both civilian and military authorities, if we lose this war, then we lose “our way of life.”  That may be true, but it does not mean the end of us as a free Republic.  America will go on, even after the impending military defeat.  We cannot win…We cannot be allowed to win, if victory means world conquest.

The next phase of action in the battle to smash greater Central Asia will probably be the most dangerous phase of the war (other than the final global conflagration, if there is to be one).  The unfolding grand production will involve the usual mixture of open and covert measures, following a carefully choreographed ballet of geopolitical and geostrategic forces.

The real danger will arise out of the uncertainty factor that is inherent in all conspiratorial plans.  The great danger will arise when the plan for total control double-crosses dictators who think they have been part of that plan. The uncertainty of their future reactions to threats to their survival is the sand in the wheels of the military machine.  In nearly all cases, normal people can be counted upon to make the choices that seem to guarantee their survival, even if they contradict lucrative backroom deals that have been made with powerful individuals.  Unhinged dictators may choose to bring the grand production down with them.

In the coming conflagration, no one (not even the genius planners who have designed this powerful international soap opera) can know for certain just what will happen next.  No matter how many computer simulations they have run, no matter how many ways they have war-gamed the human psyche, using their complex logarithms for predicting human behavior in a crisis, no one can predict the future.  This is especially true when trying to predict the reactions of dictators, who find themselves alone and cornered.  Cocksure generals and intelligence analysts are convinced that they can predict the course of a limited warfare scenario.  Preventing a planned limited warfare engagement between nuclear-armed adversaries from escalating into total thermonuclear war is the key to our survival.  Asshole generals and admirals do not have that degree of control of our world, no matter what they think.

Students of human nature understand that, in this world of rapidly-building social tensions, the coming conflagration will take the form of a mass human uprising.  There will be no reapplication of the “Libya solution,” over and over, until the world is swept clean.  If the West dares to pull that trick again, this time upon either Syria or Iran, the outcome will be completely different.  Neither Russia nor China is prepared to allow NATO to get away with this again.  There are some actual “red lines” in this brave new world that no power dares to cross.  There are “red lines” in the desert sands and in the blue waters of the Middle East.  Russia has also scattered red lines all over the former Soviet Union.

Given time, every dictator will be unseated, even the secret ones, those faceless men who reveal their faces to the world, while they are manipulating commerce for their own profit.  The day of retribution is at hand for the world-planners, and most of them understand this.  That fact is what elevates the threat from the burgeoning global social revolution, making it even more dangerous to dictators than any military power.  Taking into account this universal fear of all dictators, we can see that the only part that any of us play in this great human drama is in either impeding or accelerating that coming day of freedom.  For the day when the last secret dictator falls will be the day that mankind’s full potential is set free from the cages within our minds, which bind us all.

The problem with predicting the decisions to be made by panicking dictators, is that they are not normal human beings, most of them fitting easily  into the mold of psychopaths, if only because of the methods that they used in pushing themselves into their seats of power.  During the last days of the Soviet Union, not one analyst in the West could have imagined in their best-case/worst-case scenarios the decision that Mikhail Gorbachev had already made, to pull the plug on the Soviet Union and simply allow it to die.  This unpredictability is one of the things which make dictators so dangerous.  It certainly is a major factor in discouraging most people from even trying to understand them.  But I am not most people.  Efforts like mine, to understand the minds of the dictators, who have all been targeted for political “termination,” may be the best path for anticipating what Obama has planned for us next.

I have always tended to believe the worst about our leaders’ intentions, up until now, that one day their actions would make nuclear war inevitable.  After learning of some of their hidden capabilities, especially their ability to manipulate human behavior, I have had to fine-tune my beliefs.  Western behavioral control specialists have devised an elementary mind-control science, which gives them the capability to “manage conflict,” to prevent conflicts from escalating into total global war.

If only our leaders were capable of compromise, making them willing to renounce their great plans for world domination, then they could use their power over man for the benefit of all mankind.  As it is, our leaders are all American supremacists, who believe that American domination of the world would be for the betterment of all mankind.  These types see our wars of “humanitarian intervention” (such as the recent NATO slaughter in Libya) as acts of benevolence.  The rest of the world looks at our wars and the havoc that we have wrought from Afghanistan to North Africa and sees them as the acts of “state terrorism” which they really are.

All the world really is “a stage” in America’s “war on terrorism,” which is actually the greatest psychological warfare operation ever conceived by the minds of men.  The trick for understanding this synthetic world we live in, is learning to think of every event that is reported by national news media as a deception, because it probably is.  Learning to look behind the publicized events which shape popular opinion, is the key to understanding our manufactured reality.  Any report which makes it into the “legitimate press” is either there to help dull our senses, or to mislead us, diverting us from real news stories which might awaken us from our slumber.

In the “global war on terror” everything is based on deception.  American media and Western media in particular, have worked hand-in-glove with the US government to mold American popular opinion, as well as world opinion, around a false narrative.  Together, government and its subservient media have dispensed a synthetic reality of a “heroic” American military intervention, that is serving as a “force for good” around the world.  Not once, have any of the “legitimate news” sources questioned the destruction that has been left in our wake, or the millions of lives that have been sacrificed so far, on the altar of projected American magnanimity.

The global terror war operates around an unknown number of separate psychological warfare operations, with each major production leading its targeted audiences to accept a simple central narrative—“America’s  terror war is one of good –vs—evil.”

There are several central disinformation operations, around which the global narrative revolves—

War between Iran and the US is inevitable.

American forces are at war against militant Islamists.

The United States is a protector of human rights.

The US/NATO will one day end its war and leave Afghanistan.

The American goal is to bring prosperity to the world.

None of these statements are true; in fact, they are all calculated to produce the exact opposite outcomes in the new manufactured reality.  Iranian, American and British intelligence agencies all work together, to create the false impression of an inevitable global conflagration.  Militant Islamists are manipulated by the CIA and by military controllers, to provide America with an excuse to unleash its military power upon a targeted country.  The US is moving us all away from a state of worldwide freedom, where full human rights are the norm, instead of the exception, towards a global police state under American domination.  The US cannot consider leaving Afghanistan, without first giving-up on its plans for “Silk Roads” and “pipelinestan.”  American leaders plan to avoid the effects of the economic collapse (which their greed has caused), by taking control over the global economy, where they will oversee the diminution of personal wealth for most of us.

Obama’s America operates under a different set of rules than those which have governed his predecessors.  He doesn’t even bother hiding the two faces of American foreign policy—one of benevolence and one of menace.

Obama and Hillary are a perfect pair for deploying this strategy—she dispenses the warm smiles, while she uses her feminine wiles to push “humanitarian intervention,” while he often sports the determined grimace of a mafia “Don,” making backroom threats and offers which dictators dare not refuse.

The drive to win the pipeline wars for Central Asian blue gas and black gold makes use of every national and international asset to clear the pipeline corridor, connecting the Caspian to the Arabian Seas, eventually reaching the Pakistani port built by the Chinese at Gwadar.  The US plan has been to network its way into this New World Order.  NATO took a big first-step toward this new world when it created the “Virtual Silk Road,” a computer network which services eight of the CIS governments of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia,  Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan).  NATO provides this network to Eastern governments as a service, creating for them a virtual domain over everything in their real domains.  This Western service operates from a central hub at Deutsches Elektronen-SYnchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany (at the home of one of Europe’s largest particle accelerators).  The Soros Foundation is one of the Silk Project’s backers.

It may be that the German angle is the key to unraveling this whole knot.  Germany seems to be a key-way for “Islamists” to integrate into Europe.  German Industrial giant Siemens has won the Turkmen state contract for electrification of the country, water distribution, Caspian oil exploration.

Germany could be considered to be one of the “nodes” in a greater virtual network, which provides the Empire real power to manipulate the world, using powerful nations (nodes) like Germany as tools to oversee lesser nations, such as those in Central Asia.  Turkey is another node.  Istanbul services the Empire’s need for local personal connections into the Turkmen culture, which stretches deep into Central Asia, all the way to Russia.  Turkey provides unique services, in addition to manufacturing and construction projects, Turkey helps by producing fake “al-Qaeda,” Hizb-ut Tahrir and even Chechen militants, who have been either recruited or arrested inside Turkey.  This militant recruitment circuit is used for funneling militant players into local Turkmen-based psyops.  Turkey also provides the ground troops of Fethullah Gülen’s “moderate Islamists,” who build Islamist-based schools in former Soviet territory, or work from homes to clandestinely spread the teachings of the “Nurcular” movement, which has been banned in Russia as extremist literature.  This provides perfect fertile ground for spreading the seeds of Islamist teachings and the widespread Islamaphobic reactions, which always follow.

It is the so-called “moderate Islamists” of Fethullah Gulen and Hizbut-Tahrir (both of which impart the teachings of Said Nursi) which represent the greatest danger of quietly radicalizing the young men of Russia and Central Asia.  Their manmade versions of Islam are intended to bend innocent, hungry minds, imparting a false set of ideological beliefs, full of triggering injunctions, that give believers a false sense of moral superiority and a hatred of all of those weaker souls (infidels) who dare to believe differently.

The following definition of that psychological danger is a judgment from the Moscow district court, which describes this psychological mechanism, taught in Nursi’s writings, called “Risale-i Nur”–

[Risale-i Nur] “attempts to influence the psyche of the reader subconsciously using mechanisms of religious belief, i.e. the formation of conscious values and convictions with an irrational basis…,the destruction of religious equality, expressed in the formation of a negative, aggressive attitude among its target audience towards adherents of other confessional groups…,propagandises hatred between Muslims and non-believers.”

This process utilizes the same triggering mechanism of religious guilt that has been used for many years by the Wahhabi and radical Deobandi leaders, to brainwash young suicide bombers all over Asia, and the Middle East.  The followers of Nursi follow a gentler approach, but they still motivate young minds with the same mission to defend their false beliefs, which have been methodically drummed into them, filling them with ideas of moral superiority and hatred for everyone who is different.  Once their conditioning is complete, they are given the triggering verses (which have been lifted out of context from the real Quran), confronting them with a moral choice, which they cannot escape—will they defend God, or will they surrender to their own sinful natures?   

Excessive concerns about the dangers from the spread of these forms of pseudo-Islam may be premature, when there are real Islamic scholars, like Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda (SEE:  Tajik Mufti Who Sees Through Anti-Islamist Western Subversion, Targeted By Tajik Court) in Tajikistan, who very boldly speaks-out against these false belief systems. Turajonzoda is second-in-command of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan.

“He has called Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organization, a threat to Tajikistan’s stability.[4] He claimed HT is Western-sponsored and that it wants to “remak[e] Central Asia… A more detailed analysis of HT’s programmatic and ideological views and concrete examples of its activities suggests that it was created by anti-Islamic forces. One proof of this is the comfortable existence this organization enjoys in a number of Western countries, where it has large centers and offices that develop its concept of an Islamic caliphate.”

Hizbut-Tahrir is a British creation, a weaponized form of Islam, which has been passed on to the American Empire-builders.  The spread of this viral form of pseudo-religious mass-hypnosis coincides with a rapidly increasing Western-motivated wave of social unrest in the Muslim world and the rise of militant Islamists in the former Soviet space.

Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE serve as other nodes, which provide the destabilizing forces with unseen access in Sunni-dominant regions of South and Central Asia, such as Pakistan, where the Saudis spread dollars among the radical madrassas like “manna” from on high.  The UAE controls Shamsi air base in Jacobabad, Pakistan.  Saudi penetration into CA is understood to be primarily through the building of Sunni mosques and similar religious institutions (many of them allegedly Gulen schools), throughout CA, particularly in the Fergana Valley.  Saudi service to the Empire goes far deeper than these more obvious efforts, since the Saudis are the financial benefactors of most “Islamist” movements (except for the Shia ones), especially the ones which are active in Chechnya and the Caucasus.    Bahrain provides another kind of service in other areas, where there is contention or commerce between Sunnis and Shias, or in those countries bordering Iran, such as Turkmenistan.

The psywar for borderline states like Turkmenistan must plan around the special circumstances which are deemed to be matters of survival.  The current President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, as well as his predecessor, have maintained a strict neutrality for the country, even though Imperial wars raged all around them.  Any effort by CIA planners to bend the will of the “Hero of Turkmenistan” must not violate that neutrality, or it must at least maintain the appearance of neutrality.  That public appearance of Turkmen “neutrality” must be maintained, even after the presidential mind has been successfully twisted and he has secretly accepted Imperial domination.

According to the following article from the alternative Turkmen website, Gundogar, (SEE: Predetermined range of Turkmenistan), that goal has already been reached.  According to Turkmen author, Ruslan Babanov, Berdimuhamedov’s decisions may all be slanted, as he tries to accommodate his belief that a US/Israeli airstrike against Iran is inevitable.  Babanov contends that he is flying blind, trying to navigate the treacherous currents that are ebbing and flowing around and through his country, moving back and forth between two bitter “frenemies,” Russia and the US/NATO.

He therefore feels compelled to follow American dictates and to accommodate Israeli interests in his country.  This belief apparently causes him to accept Western plans for harvesting Turkmen gas, as the first stage in dominating all Central Asian gas and oil.  He wants to see his gas flowing towards Europe, if only because that is the Imperial demand being made on him. The author of that piece apparently agrees with my contention that the Turkmen President, like all the Central Asian dictators, will eventually turn to Russia, if the Arab Spring revolutions rise-up in their own neighborhood.  At that point in the game, they will fear being overthrown by the very real masses of protesters, more than they will fear a hypothetical American/Israeli strike upon neighboring Iran.

If the tables are turned upon the Imperial planners in that manner, and the political climate in Central Asia begins to resemble that which was recently witnessed in Kazakhistan, then Putin might see his Eurasian Union become a reality.

Until those tables are turned, Berdimuhamedov will have to maintain normal commerce with his heavily persecuted Shia neighbor.  The government in Iran is known to protest vociferously whenever this Turkmen tilt towards the West becomes apparent.   Once more quoting Babanov, the Chief of Staff or the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Seyed Hassan Firuzabadi frames the Turkmen dilemma this way–

”We are taking all measures to limit the influence of the Zionists in the neighboring state of Iran, in particular, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.”

If Berdy really was the “hero of Turkmenistan,” then he would take actions to defend her against all outside aggression, this would mean fighting back against Imperial subversion and destabilization, in the manner of the counter-revolutionary efforts recently made by the Egyptian Army (SEE:  Egyptian Police Fight Back Against State Dept./Soros Subversive NGOs).  Today, the Army cleaned-out the offices of US and other foreign NGOs, whose sole purpose is to undermine the government there, even though they claim to be defenders of “human rights.”

The National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Freedom House are all subversive command centers, whose foot soldiers act like little moles, as they busily burrow their way into local and national service organizations in Turkmenistan and in every country of  Central Asia, or in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.  The compromised local organizations become compromised, turning into larger instruments of subversion.  The biggest problem for subverting the CA countries through human rights NGOs, is that dictators like the Turkmen and Uzbek  presidents are unwilling to tolerate US criticisms of human rights abuses.  The more that the Western groups criticize these governments, the farther apart the two sides become.

Are Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan more afraid of revolution or of a US/Israeli attack upon Iran?  Decrease fears of US strike, increase fears of revolution, especially Islamist revolution, and you move both nations closer to the Russian sphere of influence.  Russians are staunch supporters of Iran supporter and they are thought to be willing to use whatever force is needed to protect the sovereignty of Iran, just as they will do whatever is necessary to quell any insurrection that threatens their own survival.

So far, Uzbekistan has remained a part of CSTO, but its President, Islam Karimov has refused to take part in preparations for a predominantly Russian rapid reaction force.  Uzbekistan’s tilt towards the West has created doubts about its allegiances to any regional grouping that is dominated by Russia.  That may have just changed as Uzbek negotiators participated in recent Moscow meetings to hammer-out details and financing for Collective Operational Reaction Forces (CORF).  This would also include measures to control the Internet during a regional emergency situation.  Recently, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan submitted a resolution to the U.N., petitioning the General Assembly to delegate to individual states the right to control the Internet during emergency situations, such as the recent Kazakh oil worker protests and major rioting.

Such an explosive situation may be in the making in Russia.  The Moscow protests are shaping-up to be a test, a counter-attack set-up by the State Dept. experts in revolutionary democratic subversion, to prove to the rest of the CIS states that Putin’s way of reviving the violent old ways of the Communist Party will not work in this media age.  In the past, Putin has been quoted as saying that unlawful protestors should “expect a baton to the skull.”  If the world is forced to choose between the violence of the West’s war on terror campaign, or the violence of Russia, based upon the suppression of those democratic rights, then the world will choose to side with the known quantity, the Western ways.  However, the CA dictators are not being asked to do the right thing, they are being compelled to do whatever it takes to survive.

The dictators of the world may have been able to fit into the democratic world on an economic basis, but they can never really fit-into this world, until they loosen their grip on the reins of power.  This is a risk that they dare not take.  In trying to force Putin to give-up power, Obama has reminded the rest of the world’s dictators and authoritarians of the very real dangers to them from the forces of unleashed democracy.  Allow people to say anything that they want and red lines will be crossed, lines which can never be uncrossed.  This is the lesson to be learned from Hillary’s Moscow agitation.

How Putin handles the growing test represented by the Moscow protests will determine for the rest of the former Soviet dictators of the wisdom of a Russian led counter-revolutionary rapid deployment force—vs –an American-led force.  If Putin manages to put-down the challenge and afterwards, he is able to placate the protesters’ demands, then he will have demonstrated the practical value of his approach over that of Obama’s.

How Obama counters the challenge coming from a revitalized Putin (a Putin who is thereafter seen as a force for stability) will probably be the deciding factor in whether America suffers a moderately painful repositioning of its resources and a cessation of hostilities against the world, or whether we take a very large portion of the world with us as we strike-out in a fiery last gasp.  America must face the fact that it cannot continue to have its way with the world, on the lame excuse that we are “fighting terror” and “defending freedom.”   The entire world is slowly catching-on, that we have been sowing terror and snuffing-out the last vestiges of individual freedom.

It is presently in US interests to calm the Central Asian dictators’ fears over an Arab Spring virus breaking out in their domains.  If Russia chooses to challenge the West as it makes a grab for its former national resources, then it would be in Russia’s interests to stoke those fears, as a means to build support for a Russian alliance and rapid reaction force in CA, instead of the American version being pushed upon them.

If Obama doesn’t want Putin to be the leading actor in this psychodrama, then he will accentuate the fears which cause sleepless nights for everyone in the CA neighborhood and the entire hemisphere—Islamists.  It would serve American interests to heighten fears of an Islamist uprising, or a spillover from Afghanistan, or heightened fears over those nasty nuclear-armed Islamists in Iran and Pakistan.

If Russian leaders have been paying attention, then they too, will have copied American dexterity in manipulating people into situations that they would choose to avoid if left on their own.  They would move the people of CA in the direction that they want them to go in, but they would do it in a way which improved people’s lives in some major way.  Just like the Virtual Silk Project, which greatly improved inefficient governments, it also brought with it multiple national Internet systems that let thousands of people improve their lives in countless ways.  By working with the officials and professionals who use this network, the Americans and Europeans have networked themselves into the hearts of these countries, making themselves vital cogs in the great machines of the young Central Asian states.  This says nothing of potential, secret ways in which NATO could have gained advantages over their major adversaries by providing this insiders network.

Russia could also gain similar advantages if Putin would invest some of those Gazprom profits into modernizing some of the decrepit national roads, railroads, water and energy transmission systems that the CA nations are trying to survive on.  If Russia wants to advance itself among civilized Nations then its leaders will learn important lessons from America’s fall and begin to act like a great power.  It will start helping its former allies and stop trying to gain economic advantage over them.  This world is rapidly changing and Nations which refuse to change along with it will be swept away by the howling winds of history.

Russia rises or falls in current world opinion, based on its resistance to American Imperial aggression, or lack thereof.  With the NATO powers rising as world aggressors, the world looks to Russia to resist.   Acting in the role of a champion of the targeted nations of the Middle East and Africa, Russia grows in stature in direct proportion to America’s fall.  The tipping point has now been reached, where every new Western aggression moves greater numbers of people to the side of anyone who will resist the aggression.

The moment of decision has now come, when the atmosphere of fear that America and her Western allies have been striving so hard to create starts to dissipate just a little, so that people might see through the smoky haze of the false reality that has been created.  If the entire world suddenly learns that we have all been following lies for the past ten years there will be no allies left to wage the Empire’s wars.  What repercussions will Americans throughout the world suffer if suddenly it became obvious that we were all being blackmailed into waging a war that none of us wanted?

How many governments have been forced into supporting the US campaign out of fear of an American/Israeli strike upon Iran?  How many have joined us out of a fear of being overrun by an wave of Islamists?  In the Bush/Cheney campaign to gain support for their terror war, they forced every government to decide whether they were “with us or against us.”    This was the prototype of the pattern that was to be followed throughout the perpetual war.  Now, instead of threatening to bomb someone “back to the Stone Age,” we have forced countless conscientious people to warn the world at the top of their lungs, that we are about to cause nuclear war in the Middle East.  The new imperative question then becomes—Whose side do you want to be on?

How corrupt, or how far gone, does a government have to be, if the only way it can survive the damage it has caused by its own excesses is to extort half of the world into doing its will and the other half into serving as its “sacrificial sheep” on the altar of prosperity?  If the only way that this Nation can survive is on the backs of others, then does it even deserve to survive?  What has become of the sterling moral fiber which once allegedly made us so worthy of such international respect?

In the final analysis, how much of this threatened violence, which constantly bombards us from US and Western sources, is for real?  As crazy and as borderline berserker as Bush and Cheney and the rest of the neocons crowd appeared to be, would they really have followed through and eliminated the state of Pakistan, if Musharraf hadn’t given in to their demands?  After ten years of depleting the most expensive and hardest to replace weapons in the US and NATO arsenals, as well as wearing-out their delivery systems, are Western forces still capable of sending any moderately-armed nation like Iran or Pakistan back to the Stone Age, without crossing the nuclear threshold in the process?  Have Bush and Obama “shot our wad,” before taking-out the most important primary targets, which stand between us and world conquest?  There will be no Pipelineistan or Silk Road without either Pakistan or Iran at our side.

What have we really accomplished in either Afghanistan or Iraq, other than totally destroying two previously functioning nations, without defeating any of our chosen “enemies,” considering that their guerilla armies still remain intact?  Does “mission accomplished” mean that we have successfully destroyed these countries and forced their armies to adopt an asymmetric warfare strategy?  We have proved ourselves to be very efficient at mass-destruction, but we are no better at defeating guerilla armies than anybody else.  The bloody terrorist strategy that we set loose upon the Soviets in Afghanistan so many years ago has come home to plague us and to deprive us of an elusive victory.  We taught the original Mujahedeen very well.  They have proven to be very proficient at teaching their learned skills to others.  Through our subversive efforts, the entire world has been made aware of the fact that each man can be an army unto himself, if only he has the will to make it so.

Weighing our future military actions upon these many errors of the past, we begin to see just how many of the military threats that have carried this war (especially the part about recruiting recalcitrant allies) were hollow.  Comparing the red-hot rhetoric sweetened with the honey dripping from the tongues of armies of American diplomats, to the reality of our actions, one thing becomes apparent—all or most of our actions have turned-out to be rational, no matter how insane the threats used to get us to that place seemed to be.  That is the standard that we must use, when judging American and Israeli threats against Iran.  If starting a war with Iran would be an insane act, and most American experts admit that this is correct, then bombing Iran would prove to be an irrational act.  This tells us that there is very little chance that America will allow Israel to bomb Iran.

Following the Imperial line of thinking, beyond the possibilities of war with Iran, for a Nation committed to rationality, are there anticipated circumstances before us, when the only foreseeable rational solution would be to do the irrational thing?  Will there come a time, when taking a calculated, insane-seeming risk is the only rational decision that our leaders can make?  Have the devious American and British planners set us up for a great collision with the other great world powers in our immediate future?  Do they have a Final Solution in mind for us all, a decisive nuclear war with either Russia or China?

Does it make sense to the self-elected world planners that a significant portion of humanity be eliminated, for the sake of some perceived “greater good”?  Have the powers that be come to the merciless, immoral conclusion that “the needs of the many really do outweigh the needs of the few”?  If this is the case, then the rest of mankind would be compelled to make the moral decision to resist this planned genocide.  This is pure insanity; where is the logic in killing millions of innocent human beings?  What exactly is the truth about all the bullshit that our government has been spreading around for so many years?

If the American and other Western oligarchs have foreseen their own destruction at the hands of the people (who will soon respond to the powerful motivations which have been unleashed), then their only logical choice for self-preservation would be to prevent that global mob from reaching that critical mass.  This is the logic of the psychopath, the subject at the center of all “conspiracy theories.”  All such “conspiracy theorists” research this common element, the psychopaths who rule over us.  This probably explains why we have all been branded as lunatics ourselves.

In a reverse logic of that dispensed by the psychopathic ruling elite, we must communicate the threat of this probable future, as our own motivational tool.  Just as the elite use the threat of an insane war upon Iran to force others to join their side, we know that we must project the threat of a US/Russia nuclear war to force people to join us in the anti-Empire resistance.  That is my purpose and that of thousands of others just like me, to warn about the psychopaths who rule us, before it is too late.

therearenosunglasses@hotmail.com

Baloch Assembly Asks If Rehman Malik Works for US, India or Israel

Balochistan Assembly Asks if Rehman Malik is a Foreign Agent

The Baloch Hal News

QUETTA: The Balochistan Assembly declared Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik a “dubious man” and also asked if he was a Pakistani minister or a “agent of foreign countries.”

This question was raised by senior Provincial Minister Maulana Abdul Wasay on a point of order in the session of assembly which met after two days break with Deputy Speaker Syed Matiullah Agha in the chair.

JUI-F leader and senior minister Maulana Abdul Wasay strongly criticized Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik for his new announcement about demolishing of those religious seminaries next year that were not registered.

He said that mutilated dead bodies were being recovered from Balochistan.“Whenever Rehman Malik visits Balochistan he talks about use of stick” he said, and adding that the statements of Rehman Malik were tantamount to rub salt on the wounds of people of Balochistan,

He said that people were being killed in Karachi and Khyber Pashtoonkhowa and when we talked people of those areas they held Rehman Malik for those killings.

Declaring Rehman Malik a dubious person he said that it was not clear whether he was interior minister of Pakistan or agent of US, Britain or Israel.

JUI leader said that people like Rehman Malik were highly harmful for the democracy and due to his activities the democracy could not flourish in the country.  “Incidents of kidnapping for ransom, recovery of decomposed bodies and killing of religious scholars are on rise,” he remarked, and adding that JUI-F had always invited nationalists, religious leaders and other political parties for uniting on a single platform to foil conspiracies against themselves.

He also raised suspicions about Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani’s statement about declaring 2012 as the year of Balochistan saying that keeping in view the experiences of it might not prove the deterioration of Balochistan. “Whenever the federal rulers make any announcement about Balochistan the results prove contrary. This can be gauged from the fact that tall claims were made about giving more funds to Balochistan but contrary to it only so far  Rs 7 billion out of Rs 34 billion have been released for federal projects in Balochistan” he added.

The JUI leader told the house that all institutions were in miserable condition in the country and there was no fund available for Balochistan. “We have taken up the issue of roads with National Highway Authority that until Gwadar Ratho Dero highway is completed there will be no benefit of investment of billions of rupees on Gwadar Port” he said, and adding there was no progress on Kalat and Chaman highway because of non release of funds by the federal government.

The JUI-F ministers, including Maulana Abdul Wasay, Molvi Sarwar Musakhel and Molvi Abdul Bari Agha condemned the killing of Hafiz Ahmed Qamar, son of JUI-F central vice president Moulvi Qamarud Din, in Karachi and demanded for immediate arrest of the culprits.

Speaking on a point of order, provincial Minister and leader of JUI-F Molvi Sarwar Musakhel drew the attention of the house towards the murder of Hafiz Ahmed Qamar, saying the culprits brutally killed him in Karachi and they were still at large.

He said that Karachi was becoming centre of murder of religious scholars as previously several other members were killed in Karachi. “Karachi was the center of business and education for the people of Balochistan but now we are receiving dead bodies from there,” he remarked.

Maulvi Sarwar Musakhel moved a condemnation resolution against the killing of Hafiz Ahmed Qamar demanding Federal and Sindh governments for early arrest of culprits.

When the chair put the resolution for vote the house adopted it unanimously.

The lawmakers once against criticized NHA for its poor performance in the province.

However, Provincial Minister for Finance Mir Asim Kurd Gilu told the house that the reservations of Members of Balochistan Assembly had been convoyed to authorities of NHA.

He said that federal minister for communication Arbab Alamghair had promised that the members of Balochistan Assembly would be briefed next year along with all team.

Later, the chair adjourned the assembly proceedings for an indefinite period.

There Can Be No Peace In Balochistan Until the Army Withdraws

‘Peace will not prevail without military withdrawal’

The condit­ions in the provin­ce bear a resemb­lance to those in Bangla­desh, say JI leader­s. PHOTO: NNI

KARACHI: Because it fears that Balochistan is on the brink of no return, the Jamaat-e-Islami has called for “an end to the unannounced military operation and the role of the [intelligence] agencies in the province.”

The party has also asked for military leaders, including former president General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, to be held accountable in a court of law for the human rights violations in Balochistan.

The Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) leader Asadullah Bhutto and its leaders in Balochistan and Sindh, Abdul Mateen Akhunzada and Mohammad Hussain Mehanti, met with veteran Baloch leader, Sardar Ataullah Mengal, at the latter’s residence on Thursday. When asked if the situation in Balochistan was bad, Akhunzada darkly remarked, “It is not just bad, it has gone far beyond that.”

The “makruh and condemnable role” of security agencies operating in Balochistan is not the way to developing an understanding, Akhunzada told the journalists present. JI believes that the number of enforced disappearances and the bullet riddled bodies being found are signs of how Balochistan has become reminiscent of the condition in Bangladesh prior to its independence in 1971.

The party and Mengal also spoke about the targeted killings of Punjabi settlers in the province.

Mengal reiterated that the “protectors of the country” – the Pakistan Army – has become an army for Punjab only.

Mengal is reported to have said that, “If a Punjabi is killed, dozens of Baloch youth are taken away by the agencies illegally. People wait for years to hear about their whereabouts and then receive the bullet-riddled bodies of their loved ones. How can there not be a reaction?” He also questioned why the military does not react in a similar manner when people are killed in Karachi.

Despite JI’s call and Mengal’s warnings about the condition in Balochistan, no one sees a way out until the military withdraws from Balochistan. Mengal told JI that there was not a “single person in Pakistan who could gain the trust of the Baloch”.

The leaders agreed that those responsible for targeted killings must be dealt with – but in a legal manner.

Mehanti also questioned the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, for not fulfilling his promise to withdraw troops from Balochistan. JI leaders also blamed the current Pakistan Peoples Party government for having wasted the last four years instead of trying to reverse the situation that Musharraf left Balochistan in.

The JI leaders said there were “no prospects for progress” in the province and highlighted the injustices, deplorable economic conditions and lack of resources given to Balochistan. JI also asked the Supreme Court of Pakistan to take suo motu notice of the situation in Balochistan, similar to how it acted on the target killings in Karachi earlier this year.

Mehanti said his party appreciated the fact that Sharif had visited Mengal to discuss the matter and that there was a need to unite to prevent a ‘catastrophe like 1971’.

Published in The Express Tribune

News Central Asia Is Back Online (nCa Returns — Starting where we left)

[Happy to report that our good friends in Central Asia have recovered from that devastating hack attack.  nCa is back online, ready to kick some more investigative ass!  I am glad that you are with us, Tariq.]

nCa Returns — Starting where we left

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Tariq Saeedi

We were hacked in late July 2011. It was a thorough job, done by professionals. Now we are back.

Thanks to all the supporters and well wishers.

At the time of hacking we were in the process of starting an investigative-analytic series ‘Smashing Greater Central Asia.’ To provide background information for this series, we posted some of our archive material consisting of investigative reports done by us during the past ten years. It was the archive material that alarmed Uncle Sam and we are happy that our Indian friends got the opportunity to make some money.

Smashing Greater Central Asia actually started soon after hacking. For this I am grateful to my friend Peter Chamberlin, who has already written and published THREE parts of the series at his hugely popular blog http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/

Peter is a complete team in himself: Sharp mind; tremendous analytical skills; ability to grasp the whole picture any time and every time; endless reserves of energy to pursue a point to its logical conclusion; unlimited memory to recall facts and incidents and the rare gift to connect the dots in the right order.

Peter will remain in the pilot seat for Greater Central Asia series. I will contribute whatever I can.

This will be an open-end series because the Evil Empire is writhing like a mortally wounded cobra and things are changing by the day.

Thanks once again to all.

Russia Wins In Central Asia When the Dictators Fear Revolution More Than They Fear A US Attack On Iran

[Berdimuhamedov is flying blind, trying to navigate the treacherous currents, that are ebbing and flowing around and in his country, between two bitter "frenemies," Russia and the US/NATO.  Keeping with the theme recently sounded on the same website, Gundogar, "Predetermined range of Turkmenistan," that Berdimuhamedov operates under the conviction that the US and Israel will soon bomb Iran.   He therefore feels compelled to follow American dictates.  This belief apparently causes him to accept Western plans to harvest Turkmen gas, as the first stage in dominating all Central Asian gas and oil.  The author of that piece apparently agrees with my contention, that the Turkmen President, like all the Central Asian dictators, will turn to Russia, if Arab Spring revolutions rise-up in their neighborhood.  They will fear being overthrown by very real masses of protesters, more than they will fear a hypothetical American/Israeli strike on Iran.  In which case,  if the political climate in Central Asia begins to resemble that seen recently in Kazakhistan, Putin might see his Eurasian Union become a reality.]

Ghost of the “Arab Spring” reached the borders of Turkmenistan

Events in Libya and the color revolutions in the Middle East


Political analyst Andrei Grozin about the background of the unexpected visit of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to Russia …

December 23, visited Moscow, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, where he met with top officials of the Russian state. According to  the site of the Russian President , Dmitry Medvedev and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov discussed current issues of cooperation between Russia and Turkmenistan. In the official records of the negotiations of Heads of State displayed a dry-officially, without any details that point to the theme of the visit Berdimuhamedov signed the agreement.
 
According to the  website of the Russian government , the president of Turkmenistan met earlier with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. ”You have yet to negotiate with President Medvedev, I know, but I am very pleased that you took the time, stopped to talk on the current trade and economic relations – welcome guest, Vladimir Putin. - In this regard, I note that Turkmenistan – our old traditional partner in many areas of cooperation, of course, primarily in the gas sector. And it is pleasant to note that the volume of our trade grows: we have over the past year was a growth of 33%.This is a very good indicator. We are very pleased this positive dynamics, but fully understand and see with you, how difficult is the situation on world markets. I mean, that we have common interests as suppliers. It’s very good that you and I are in constant contact and coordinating our joint efforts in this direction. “

“Let me thank you for inviting me to visit your beautiful country with a working visit, – Putin said Berdymukhamedov. - I think we will have today is a good opportunity to discuss our cooperation in many aspects, that is for the current period that was done in the future, for the future. And this occasion, I would like to congratulate you. You – a candidate for President of Russia. I wish that you won the election. “

On the question of why Moscow was visited by the President of Turkmenistan and the situation in this country, in an interview with the “Russian people’s lines,” said the head of the Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the CIS Countries Institute  Andrei Grozin .

Andrei Grozin

In the media there is almost no information about what they were talking in Moscow the leaders of Russia and Turkmenistan. One gets the feeling that it was just a “friendly trip.” In fact, it is certainly not the case.Berdymukhamedov, of course, younger and more mobile Niyazov, but just try not to go in vain, as opposed to, for example, from the Tajikistan counterparts Emomali Rakhmonov, who goes wherever he can, if only to ask anyone for money. In Berdimuhamedov with the money more or less in order, and the basis for relations between Russia and Turkmenistan, of course, is a gas.
Obviously, during a visit Berdymukhamedov discussed namely “gas issue”. As far as the discussion was conducted “in private”, and hence – the absence of a leak, a variety of interpretations, etc. I believe that the Russian side is not so much worried about the construction of “Nabucco” (which was built in the foreseeable future will not be), but the construction of the Trans-Caspian pipeline as a first step towards the implementation of major projects out of Central Asian hydrocarbons to Russian territory. Turkmenistan, in addition to what has serious resource base (which in itself is interesting for the European and U.S. corporations), is a bridge actor, cycling who can uncork the whole of Central Asia and try to expand trade and energy flows from the north and east to west.
The position of Ashgabat depends very much, and in Moscow understand that. Therefore, in my opinion, Berdymukhamedov tries until recently did not give anyone any solid guarantees. Something he said, and the EU are talking about the notorious 10 billion cubic meters, of which argue for three years, but it is so vague that even European bureaucrats who support the idea of ​​”Nabucco”, few believe in the marketability of these promises. Another thing is that, unlike Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan does not have the physical and geographical features to really turn around and refuse to supply gas to the north. So they have to conduct a more cautious, more balanced policy. The same Berdimuhamedov will do next – do nothing, just promise to further extend the pipe the Chinese.
Berdymukhamedov mass care and other issues, not only the possibility of pressure from Europe to Ashgabat in connection with the “theme of the gas.” In February, there are presidential elections, when the easiest way to organize unconstitutional change of power or polukonstitutsionnuyu in any state. In addition, in Ashgabat, as well as throughout Central Asia, many excited bloated reports of some “Russian winter” and everything connected with it. It is clear that Berdymukhamedov came to personally clarify the situation for people that really depends on the political development of Russia as opposed to counter-elite that is trying to ride a strange vague ferment inside individual heads, and sectors of society of the capital.
Of course, Berdimuhamedov is worried about the results of the elections. Now nobody in no way certain. Probably Berdimuhamedov to Moscow to seek confirmation of the fortress of Russian power.Turkmenistan is located in a information vacuum – not only in relation to it, little is known, but little is seen from there. In Turkmenistan, very seriously concerned about the ongoing in various expert groups, talk about the fact that Russia is not highly interested in any attempt to build an alternative pipeline from Turkmenistan to the West and will resist such attempts. Against the backdrop of Russia 2006-2007, such arguments by some Russian experts could skip past the ears, but after August 8, 2008, all, including the Central Asian regimes, began to treat the Russian rhetoric is much more closely. Therefore Berdimuhamedov needed to hear the Russian position, as well as hints on how Russia will act if Turkmenistan is still dare to join the Trans-Caspian, where it is actively being dragged and because of which, if it is in this matter will be actively resisted, can emerge serious trouble in the February elections.
In Central Asia, are also seriously concerned as the “Arab spring” (and reaction to it in Russia) as well as what is happening and will happen in Afghanistan. Technologies that are used in the Arab world, perfectly fit the Central Asian soil. Of course, there is its own specifics, but as the experience of the year, clean technology to implement this kind of scenario is not difficult, especially when it comes to such vertically oriented political systems of Central Asia, which differ in the degree of Russian weakness. Our “vertical of power” still a hybrid, and, by the territorial and other factors, more adapted to the external challenges. However, any Central vertical weak in the first place, sharpened by one person when there is no alternative centers of decision-making and crisis response, and secondly – the limited capacity of a single leader (especially since two of the four Central Asian authoritarian already over 70 years, and there discussed the question of who will replace them), that does not add strength to these political structures that undermine the same way just as the Mubarak regime, it is much easier than, for example, in Libya.
Therefore, all the Central Asian rulers gradually catching up to Moscow, because they understand that moving away from Russia, they find themselves in a situation depending on the mood of the West, in other words, the Anglo-Saxon elite. Nobody does not want such a relationship, especially against the background of how the fate of even such a pro-American policy, as Hosni Mubarak.
Now they are nothing more than not believe and try to get some form of compensatory mechanisms in support of Russia. If the situation will be shaken in any of the Central, frankly, despotisms, in parallel with the worsening situation in Afghanistan, they will become more and more pro-Russian – will sign documents of a close partnership, to pursue a Eurasian Union, etc.
It should be noted another important point. The following year, Turkmenistan – Chairman of the CIS.Given the special position of Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan is not transferred to the CIS championship following in alphabetical order the applicant, taking it to yourself), it is quite revealing. It is quite possible that next year, the Turkmen foreign policy will be less neutral and more attempts to integrate into obscheevraziysky mechanism.

Kabul May Withdraw from Its Own Rabbani Commission If Islamabad Continues Blocking Efforts

Rabbani murder probe: Kabul may withdraw from joint commission

Iran’s efforts to bring Afghan and Pakistani leaders together at the trilateral summit fail. PHOTO: EPA/FILE

ISLAMABAD: Afghanistan has threatened to withdraw itself from a bilateral joint commission set up earlier this year to evolve a consensus on negotiations with the Taliban. Kabul has  accused Pakistan of non-cooperation in former presidentBurhanuddin Rabbani’s assassination probe, an official told The Express Tribune on Tuesday.

“They (Afghan authorities) are no more interested in any bilateral engagement with us … Kabul wants more cooperation from Islamabad in the Rabbani murder probe,” the official told The Express Tribune.

He added diplomatic channels between Pakistan and Afghanistan had been halted since the killing was blamed on elements within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Even though Pakistan allowed a team of Afghan investigations to visit Islamabad last month, Kabul claimed that the ISI did not cooperate with them.

“It seems as though Rabbani’s murder has cast a long shadow over Pak-Afghan relations … and the situation is worrying Islamabad as the Afghan endgame nears,” said another official, requesting anonymity.

Published in The Express Tribune

CIA should have no role in any new Lockerbie investigation

CIA should have no role in any new Lockerbie investigation

You report that during his visit to Washington Scotland’s Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland agreed with senior US Government officials that US investigators might join Scottish police in seeking further information on the Lockerbie bombing (“Lockerbie detectives will be in Libya early next year, The Herald December 22″).

While I am pleased that Scottish police officers are to pursue answers to the many unanswered questions about the atrocity and the guilt of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and others, I am less sanguine about them being “assisted” by US anti-terrorist agencies.

The main contribution of the CIA and FBI to the original investigation was to offer a huge bribe to jog the memory of the main prosecution witness about his identification of a casual customer in his shop several years earlier, and to magically find a tiny piece of the detonator casing in a Lockerbie field six months after the local police had scoured every inch of the area. We don’t need any more of that kind of co-operation.

In seeking justice for the victims’ families, and to restore the reputation of the Scottish justice system, what would extremely helpful would be the publication in full of the 800-page Report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which found six reasons to indicate that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the original court conviction.

It is an ongoing disappointment to many who are concerned about the Camp Zeist trial that Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill and his officials have consistently found reasons to conceal this report, despite it being clearly in the public interest that it should be published. Now sections of it are to be revealed in Megrahi’s biography early next year and will no doubt appear on the internet for all to see.

There is another possible scenario. Official Libyan Government documents may reveal what many have always suspected, that Libyan involvement was merely as an undercover agent for an Iranian terrorist group backed by Syria, seeking revenge for the unlawful shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner a few months earlier for which the captain and crew of the US warship were decorated and feted as heroes. How would the CIA manage to cover that up? Is that why it wants to be present at a Scottish criminal investigation?

Iain A D Mann,

7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.

AN extraordinarily detailed research paper published last month seems to confirm that US intelligence was well aware that a timer device of the type used by Palestinian terror group the PFLP-GC was used to detonate the bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, because of the flight time, but that even by November 1991, it was still unaware of the Heathrow break-in. The academic paper also reveals the interception of messages of relief from Iran following this switch of suspicion away from her.

During Mr Megrahi’s trial in 2000, the Heathrow break-in remained unknown, blinding the court to an all-too-obvious route by which the bomb may well have been infiltrated.

The Heathrow break-in occurred just after midnight, 16 hours before the Lockerbie disaster. Because of the nature of the device, it could not possibly have been put on board in Malta.

Iran seemed to be the motivating force in the time between the US shooting down of her airbus and the “Autumn leaves” operation by the (West) German BKA.

Mr Megrahi is now near to death in Tripoli, but his guilt or innocence seems to tell us nothing about what the Gaddafi regime and Abu Nidal were up to between October and December 1988.

Scotland’s compassion in allowing Mr Megrahi to go home to die looks like the release of an innocent scapegoat. The performance of her investigating police in failing to reveal the existence of the Heathrow break-in looks, at best, like a serious omission.

When a person is seriously injured, there is said to be a “golden hour” when life-saving treatment can best be given. At Heathrow 16 golden hours were allowed to elapse between the break-in and the Lockerbie bombing, with no appropriate counter action being taken.

Even so many years after the event an apology would still be welcome, along with proof that things really are done better now.

Having released Mr Megrahi in 2008 Scotland has been unable or unwilling to enforce a comprehensive review of the evidence against him, despite the findings of the SCCRC that the trial may indeed have resulted in a miscarriage of justice.

We hear that the Scottish police are to go to Libya soon to investigate whether other evidence can now be found as to whether the Gaddafi regime was itself involved in the Lockerbie bombing.

I wish them luck when they do finally get to Libya: they will need to remember it’s a country where old scores against the Gaddafi regime are certainly still being actively settled.

Should the Scottish police find any such evidence, it is unlikely to connect with the story heard at Zeist, where, in retrospect it seems clear that Megrahi was no more than a convenient scapegoat. That would be a bitter pill for them and the Crown Office to swallow, and they would need great integrity to admit it.

Meanwhile Tehran is immune to accusations over Lockerbie, but the convulsions in Syria may, hopefully lead to new revelations from that direction. Perhaps the failure of the west to indict those two states over Lockerbie added to its boldness in threatening its own people as well as those of other countries.

Dr Jim Swire,

Rowans Corner, Calf Lane, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire.

Russian FM Lavrov Warns Against Dangerous Consequences from America’s Islamists

Russia warns of religious rift after Arab Spring

Russia warns of religious rift after Arab Spring

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei LavrovAP

Reuters

MOSCOW, Dec 23 (Reuters) – Russia is concerned that the Arab Spring revolutions could sow further turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa by provoking a potentially catastrophic rift between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

In written answers to Reuters, Lavrov said the events in the region were still unfolding and cautioned that social, political and religious tensions showed signs of increasing.

“There are serious fears about the possible emergence of new zones of instability in the region that could become potential sources of challenges to international stability and security,” Lavrov said.

Such threats, he said, included the spread of terrorism, contraband weapons, the narcotics business, illegal immigration and especially the use of religion to ratchet up tensions.

“Attempts to bring the religious factor into regional confrontations are especially troubling,” said Lavrov, the longest serving Russian foreign minister since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

“If there were an open rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites – and such a threat is fully realistic – then the consequences could be catastrophic.”

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has warned the West that meddling in rebellions across the Arab world risks bringing radical Islamists to power and undermining long-term stability in the world’s biggest oil-producing region.

Lavrov, 61, is an eloquent face of Putin’s assertive foreign policy which is aimed at restoring Russia’s global clout as the United States, China and the European Union try to expand their influence.

“We understand that not everyone likes a strong, confident Russia,” he said. “But for us external independence is a key question.”

FOCUS ON SYRIA

Critics say Moscow’s reaction to the relatively bloodless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt was sometimes slow, while Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev differed in public over how to react to Western military intervention in Libya.

Russia has now shifted its focus to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has cracked down on protests against his rule. Thousands of people have been killed in the clampdown and in fighting between mutinous troops and security forces.

Moscow offered a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria this month to try to look less recalcitrant, without giving ground on its opposition to sanctions or foreign military interference.

Lavrov urged an end to violence in Syria but said the West should not ignore the danger posed by what he called extremist groups in the country.

“If you close your eyes to this part of the truth, the situation could disintegrate to what we saw in Libya,” Lavrov said. “There, Western countries used the slogan of protecting civilians to overthrow the regime of M. (Muammar) Gaddafi.”

“We categorically cannot agree with the calls of some of our partners to use the ‘Libyan precedent’ to resolve other conflicts,” Lavrov said.

He said the patience and compromise shown by all sides involved in the conflict in Yemen, where a pact has been agreed for a peaceful power transition, was an example to follow.

“If you need a model to follow, it is without doubt the experience of the way the internal political crisis was resolved in Yemen, where all the external players worked extremely patiently and persistently with all the sides, without ultimatums, encouraging them to compromise,” he said.

“That is how to act in Syria’s case.”

RELATIONS WITH UNITED STATES

Putin’s criticism of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for questioning the validity of Russia’s parliamentary election on Dec. 4 has prompted some policy experts to suggest the “reset” in relations with the United States since Barack Obama became president is under threat.

Putin, who faces demonstrations by protesters demanding the election be rerun as he prepares to return to Russia’s presidency next year, also accused Clinton of encouraging “mercenary” Kremlin opponents.

Lavrov said much had been done in the last few years to strengthen relations with the United States and that dialogue had become more “pragmatic” with Moscow’s former Cold War enemy.

But differences remain over a proposed U.S. missile shield in Europe, which Washington says is meant to protect against Iran but Moscow sees as a threat to its security.

“Of course we face a difficult search for acceptable outcomes on sensitive matters, above all on anti-missile defence,” Lavrov said.

“We have not yet managed to have a constructive dialogue, and the creation of a NATO anti-missile system according to the American plan is going full-steam ahead without our legitimate concerns being taken into account.”

Russia, he said, was ready to look objectively at even the most difficult questions and added: “We hope that our American partners will take the same reasonable and responsible approach.”

Washington helped pave the way to Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, which was approved by the global trading body this month.

Lavrov said he hoped WTO entry would help develop economic ties with the United States but added that for this to happen it was vital for the U.S. Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a 1974 provision linking trade to emigration rights for Soviet Jews.

MQM Figurehead Pushing Pakistani Revolution from London

[For those who have trouble remembering what MQM is all about, here is a little reminder, from your friends at Jang (SEE: Eyewitness: Karachi ).] 

Peaceful revolution knocking on Pakistan’s door: Altaf Hussain

Speaking during a rally in Multan, Hussain says “flood” of the people cannot be stopped now.PHOTO: FILE

MULTAN: Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain on Friday said that the support the people of Multan have shown to the party signifies that a “peaceful revolution” is “knocking on Pakistan’s door.”

In a telephonic address, Hussain said that the “flood” of the people cannot be stopped now.

He said that the people who talk about revolution and claim to bring it must know that in the past the MQM has “slapped” politicians and fuedals on the forums of National Assembly and Senate.

Hussain proclaimed that today’s [Friday] rally is the biggest rally in the history of Multan and that it highlights Multan’s citizens’ love for MQM. He added, “Such love was seen in history for Quaid-e-Azam and Liaquat Ali.”

Backing his statement, he said that the Quaid was truthful and so is MQM.

The MQM chief said that Multan, “the city of Saints,” has “hammered another nail in the casket of feudals.”

He said that a negative propaganda was being planned in order to drive away the support that the people of Multan give to the MQM so that the feudals could “enslave” them.

Hussain reiterated the need for a Seraiki province in the region and repeated, “Make provinces, save Pakistan.”

He showed satisfaction over the demarcation of Southern Punjab and said that a “province for the underprivileged” should be made.

Speaking about his rally, the MQM chief also said that “Such peaceful processions could not be witnessed again in any other party’s rally.”

Scores of dead and wounded in two suicide bombings in Damascus

Scores of dead and wounded in two suicide bombings in Damascus

The sound of explosions this morning in the Syrian capital of Damascus, al-Manar correspondent reported that the first explosion targeted a building near the General Intelligence Department Roundabout “Kafar Souseh” while the second bombing targeted a security branches near the Hotel “Carlton” in the capital. Syrian television and declared that “the two terrorist attacks occurred in Damascus, one aimed at the General Intelligence Department and other branches of one security and initial investigations indicate that it acts of al Qaeda.”

The Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Miqdad that more than thirty people were killed and wounded more than a hundred others in the blasts, which targeted the Damascus this morning. Mekdad said to reporters at the site of one of the attacks “has been more than thirty people dead and more than a hundred wounded, and in the explosions in the day.” ”In the first day of the arrival of Arab observers. It is the first gift from terrorism and al Qaeda, but we will facilitate the task to the farthest extent of the Arab League.” He Mekdad that “terrorism wanted to be the first day of the observers in Damascus tragic day, but the Syrian people will face a killing machine supported by the Europeans and the Americans and some Arab parties.”

The Syrian state television announced that “a number of civilian and military martyrs” killed in the bombings, which targeted the Friday morning security headquarters in Damascus. The television said that “a number of military martyrs and civilians were killed in two terrorist attacks carried out by suicide bombers and car bombs targeted the headquarters of General Intelligence Department and one of the security branches” of Syria. The news agency said Syria, “SANA” that “initial investigations indicate the involvement of al-Qaeda to these blasts.”

The “Al-CIA-da” Killing Machine Has Begun Its Work In Syria

More than 30 dead in Damascus bombings

An image grab taken from Syrian state TV shows Syrians ispecting a burnt car at the site of a suicide attack in a security service base in Damascus (AFP PHOTO/SYRIAN TV)

An image grab taken from Syrian state TV shows Syrians ispecting a burnt car at the site of a suicide attack in a security service base in Damascus (AFP PHOTO/SYRIAN TV)

DAMASCUS: More than 30 people were killed in twin suicide bombings against security service buildings in Damascus on Friday, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Meqdad said.

“There are more than 30 dead and more than 100 wounded in today’s two attacks,” Meqdad told reporters at one of the bomb sites.

“On the first day after the arrival of the Arab observers, this is the gift we get from the terrorists and Al-Qaeda,” he added, referring to an Arab League mission intended to oversee a plan to end nine months of bloodshed.

“But we are going to do all we can to facilitate the Arab League mission,” Meqdad added.

“The terrorists wanted the first day of the observer mission in Damascus to be a tragic day but the Syrian people will stand strong in the face of the killing machine supported by the Europeans, the Americans and some Arab countries,” he said alluding to Western support for the opposition.

He was accompanied to the bomb site by League assistant secretary general Samir Seif al-Yazal, head of the observer mission’s advance team which arrived on Thursday.

“We are going to press on with our work,” Yazal told reporters.

“We have started today, and tomorrow (Saturday) we will meet (Foreign Minister) Walid Muallem.”

Yazal offered his condolences to the families of the victims of the bombings. “What has happened is regrettable but the important thing is that everyone stay calm,” he said.

- AFP/ms/cc

Remaking Central Asia

[This article from Asia Times was loaded with trojans and other malware toys, speaking volumes about the relevance of its content.  The more electronic "noise" any article attracts, the more it must be hitting anti-Empire "home runs."   This article's focus on exposing the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement is very important at this point in our research, as it presently relates to the previous story out of Tajikistan on controversial mufti,  Turajonzoda, who also does what he can to expose the HT group as a Western fabrication. 

An important element of the HT ideology are the teachings of Said Nursi, which is also true in the Fethullah Gulen movement.  Like other totalitarian "Islamic" beliefs, such as that of the Wahhabi, or Salafis, the synthetic "Islam" taught by these individuals instills a supremacist belief system in the mind of the believer that compels him to see individuals professing other faiths as "infidels" and unbelievers.  The most extremist believers of this nonsense are convinced by what they are taught that it is their holy duty to kill the enemies of God.  Read a judgment from the Moscow district court, describing this psychological mechanism as taught in Nursi's writings, Risale-i Nur--

[Risale-i Nur] “attempts to influence the psyche of the reader subconsciously using mechanisms of religious belief, i.e. the formation of conscious values and convictions with an irrational basis…,the destruction of religious equality, expressed in the formation of a negative, aggressive attitude among its target audience towards adherents of other confessional groups…,propagandises hatred between Muslims and non-believers.”

Hizbut-Tahrir is a British creation, which has been passed on to the American Empire-builders.  It is a weaponized form of Islam, intended to infect the mind of those who receive it with a sense of superiority and a mission to be God’s executioner.  The spread of this viral form of pseudo-religious mass-hypnosis coincides with increased social unrest and the rise of militant Islamists in the former Soviet space.  This is why it is banned in Russia and eventually in every CIS country that is striving to survive the great wave of American psychological warfare, otherwise known as the “Arab Spring” movement.]

Remaking Central Asia

By Ramtanu Maitra

May 27, 2005

“Britain has two important ingredients to offer to the United States: first, its ability to undo the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and parts of the Indian sub-continent through the use of people living in London’s Aladdin’s cave; and second, its control of world currency movements through the City of London.”

 

Most major media outlets have spelled out with a profusion of details the “exact” events that led to the death of what some claim to have been hundreds of people in the eastern Uzbekistan town of Andijan on May 13. Led by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the world media condemned much-maligned Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov for yet another bloody and ruthless suppression of “public dissent”. Yet, all the details so far provided do not explain who the real players were or their end objectives.

It is certain, however, that the puzzle cannot be solved unless the London factor is understood. The answers lie in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool. The old British colonial establishment, with former intelligence officer Bernard Lewis as its mentor, appears to have set in motion a series of events that will bring endless bloodshed to Central Asia. London’s objective would appear to be to keep both China and Russia under an open-ended threat. At this point, there is no one who can better serve this “Lewis Doctrine” than Muslims nurtured in Britain – the Hizbut-Tehrir (HT).

Ferghana Valley’s importance
The most significant aspect of the violent incident in Andijan is that it occurred in the Ferghana Valley, a confluence of three former Soviet republics – Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Andijan is located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Osh, Kyrgyzstan, where the seed crystal for the March uprising against Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev was planted. Within a span of 48 hours after the uprising began in Osh, Akayev was gone.

Andijan is also about 25 miles east of Namangan, the hotbed of the Saudi-funded Wahhabi form of Islamic extremism. Juma Namangani, now dead, was the leader of the movement that began in Namangan. The Ferghana Valley’s 7 million inhabitants make it the most densely populated region in Central Asia. In other words, Andijan is in the heart of Ferghana Valley, and is the key to controlling it.

For years, Central Asian governments have pointed to the valley as a hotbed of Muslim extremists aiming to set up an Islamic state in the region. Largely ethnically Uzbek, the valley is split between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in a confused patchwork of Soviet-era borders that often leave enclaves of one country surrounded by the territory of another. In general, Uzbekistan holds the valley floor, Tajikistan holds its narrow mouth and Kyrgyzstan holds the high ground around. Though the valley mouth is narrow, the actual valley is vast at 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles), and the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains that rise above it are only dimly visible, but they are the main source of the water that fertilizes the valley.

During the Soviet era, the valley was a major center of cotton and silk production, and the hills above are covered by walnut forests. The valley also has some oil and gas. That scene has not changed much. What has changed significantly since the1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, is its integration with the “free world”, and that process has made Central Asia economically decrepit and turned it into a hotbed of transnational Islamic militants, controlled and funded by outside forces. Recently, the Kyrgyz media reported of personnel of the country’s border control services saying that the illegal entry of foreign nationals and individuals without any citizenship into Kyrgyzstan was on the rise. What is important to note is that these militants were not parachuted out of airplanes: they are coming through Afghanistan and Pakistan. It could very well be a ticking time bomb for India, China and Russia.

Footsoldiers of foreign powers
Apart from various Islamic preachers, two major Islamic groups function in the Ferghana Valley, whose common objective is to change the regimes in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. These are the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the HT. While the IMU openly thrives on violence, the HT is strongly promoted by the United Kingdom, where it is headquartered, as peaceful. But records indicate that that the IMU and the HT work hand-in-hand. Most of the IMU recruits are from the HT, according to Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on world terrorist outfits. Gunaratna claims that Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian of Chechen origin who has remained active in the Iraqi insurgency against the US occupying forces, were both once members of the HT.

The relationship between the Taliban and the IMU pre-dates September 11. In September 1996, after the Taliban had captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev – long-time adversaries of Karimov and considered the founders of the IMU – held a press conference in the city to announce the formation of the IMU. Namangani, who had served as a Soviet paratrooper in Afghanistan in the 1980s, became the group’s leader (or amir) and Yuldashev its military commander. Their aim was to topple Karimov and turn Uzbekistan, and ultimately the whole of Central Asia, into an Islamic state. The Taliban provided them with a place to shelter and train, and to plot against Karimov. It is also said that Yuldashev developed contact with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the two became supportive of each other. Although Karimov is a target of the IMU, in recent months he has identified the HT as the greater threat. Following the Andijan incident, Uzbek authorities again blamed the HT.

Unlike the IMU, which has concentrated its role in Central Asia, with the Ferghana Valley as the focus, the HT is an international Islamic movement. It is headquartered in London, but also has a strong organizational presence in Birmingham, Liverpool and Bradford. The UK group was co-founded by Omar Bakri Mohammed, who went to the UK after being expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1986. The HT’s present leader is an information technology professional from the Indian sub-continent, Jalaluddin Patel.

The HT was established in 1953 in Palestine by a well-known religious figure, the judge of the appellate Sharia court in Jerusalem, Takieddin al-Nabahani al-Falastini (1909-1979). According to available reports, the group’s first UK-based website was hosted by the London Imperial College – but following complaints to the college authorities, the site was closed down until a new host could be found. The group now posts in its own name as Hizbut-Tehrir.

Although portrayed as non-violent by British authorities, Bakri’s links to bin Laden are widely known. Excerpts of a letter to Bakri from bin Laden, sent by fax from Afghanistan in the summer of 1998, were published in the Los Angeles Times. Bakri later released what he called bin Laden’s four specific objectives for a jihad against the US: “Bring down their airliners. Prevent the safe passage of their ships. Occupy their embassies. Force the closure of their companies and banks.” Many of those who follow HT activities are intrigued that the group is not more discreet. For instance, its website in 2003 carried “A Cry of Imam from the Muslims of Uzbekistan.” In that article, the “imam” gave the call “to destroy Karimov” . Similar calls have been issued to oust the Jordanian and Turkish authorities. These are not empty threats. The HT is a huge organization. Some claim it has at least 10,000 footsoldiers in Central Asia. A few thousand more are lurking in Pakistan and Afghanistan. HT also has a strong presence in North Africa.

As one Indian analyst pointed out, Osh and Jalalabad, the cities that spearheaded the regime change in Kyrgyzstan, happen to be HT strongholds. HT is making huge gains in an entire belt stretching from the Ferghana provinces of Namangan, Andijan and Kokand (contiguous to Osh and Jalalabad) to the adjacent Penjekent Valley (Uzbekistan) and Khojent (Tajikistan).

The Lewis Doctrine
Writing for the Jamestown Foundation Journal (Vol 2 Issue 4), Stephen Ulph, in his article “Londonistan”, seemed intrigued by that fact that scores of violent Islamic movements remain anchored in London. He writes:
It [London] is also a center for Islamist politics. You could say that London has become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East. A framework of lenient asylum laws has allowed the development of the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Just ask the French, whose exasperation with the indulgent toleration afforded to Algerian Islamic activists led them to dub the city dismissively as “l’antechambre de l’Afghanistan”. They certainly have a point. Many of bin Laden’s fatwas [religious edicts] were actually first publicized in London. In fact, the United Kingdom in general seems to differ from other European states in the degree to which it became a spiritual and communications hub for the jihad movement …
Ulph does not, however, ask why it is that London remains an “Aladdin’s Cave”, chock-full of Islamic dissidents. Britain is no longer a military or economic power of substance. In order to be an almost-equal partner in the Atlantic alliance, Britain has two important ingredients to offer to the United States: first, its ability to undo the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and parts of the Indian sub-continent through the use of people living in London’s Aladdin’s cave; and second, its control of world currency movements through the City of London.

The West’s policy – in other words, the policy of the Anglo-Americans, as the European Union does not have a policy worth citing – toward the Middle East has long been formulated by Bernard Lewis. The British-born Lewis started his career as an intelligence officer and has remained in bed with British intelligence ever since. Avowedly anti-Russia and pro-Israel, Lewis reaped a rich harvest among US academia and policymakers. He brought president Jimmy Carter’s virulently anti-Russian National Security Council chief, Zbigniew Brzezinski, into his fold in the 1980s, and made the US neo-conservatives, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, dance to his tune on the Middle East in 2001. In between, he penned dozens of books and was taken seriously by people as a historian. But, in fact, Lewis is what he always was: a British intelligence officer.

To understand the “Lewis Doctrine”, one must read the statement he made in Canada recently while discussing his article, “Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005). “During the Second World War, Nazi Germany and the allies had all sorts of odd friends,” Lewis said on that occasion. “When [Prime Minister Winston] Churchill was asked in the House of Commons about Britain’s new ally, Russia, he replied that if Hitler would invade hell, ‘I would find occasion to support the devil’. In this way, there is nothing odd about an alliance between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda.” Or, one might be expected to conclude, between London and the Hizbut-Tehrir.

In 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over power in Iran and the West was in a quandary, Lewis sucked Brzezinski into his notion that “Koranic evangelism” could be a very useful political tool against Russia in the long term. His Time magazine story at the time, “The Crescent of Crisis”, ended with the following telling observation:
In the long run there may even be targets of opportunity for the West created by ferment within the crescent. Islam is undoubtedly compatible with socialism, but it is inimical to atheistic communism. The Soviet Union is already the world’s fifth largest Muslim nation. By the year 2000, the huge Islamic populations in the border republics may outnumber Russia’s now dominant Slavs. From Islamic democracies on Russia’s southern tier, zealous Koranic evangelism might sweep across the border into these politically repressed Soviet states, creating problems for the Kremlin … Whatever the solution, there is a clear need for the US to recapture what [Henry] Kissinger calls the “geopolitical momentum”. That more than anything else will help maintain order in the crescent of crisis.
The recent developments in Uzbekistan have all the hallmarks of the same process. This time the objective is to weaken China, Russia, and possibly India, using the HT to unleash the dogs of war in Central Asia. It is not difficult for those on the ground to see what is happening. The leader of the Islamic Party of Tajikistan, Deputy Prime Minister Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda, has identified HT as a Western-sponsored bogeyman for “remaking Central Asia”. He said: “A more detailed analysis of HT’s programmatic and ideological views and concrete examples of its activities suggests that it was created by anti-Islamic forces. One proof of this is the comfortable existence this organization enjoys in a number of Western countries, where it has large centers and offices that develop its concept of an Islamic caliphate.” It is evident that Turajonzoda has seen through this game. But he has little capability to stop the juggernaut once it has been unleashed.

It is not a lack of understanding on the part of American neo-conservatives associated with the Bush administration, but their keenness to use the “Lewis Doctrine” to achieve what they believe is justified that promises untold danger. How important a brains-trust is Lewis to the neo-conservatives? Just read the words of Richard Perle, a leading neo-conservative who remains a close adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Bernard Lewis has been the single-most important intellectual influence countering the conventional wisdom on managing the conflict between radical Islam and the West.”

Salala Outpost Attack A Secret Indian/Afghan Provocation

[Was this the opening act of Afghan/Indian Security Pact?  This is the Northern Alliance Afghans finally having their way, using the American Air Force to target Pakistan.]

“Investigators are convinced that an Afghan National Army (ANA) officer conspired with India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security in prompting the Nato airstrike.”

RAW collusion suspected: Probe faults Afghan serviceman for NATO air raid, says report

The alleged Pakistan report concluded that US forces were not involved in the attack. PHOTO: REUTERS/ISPR

A Pakistani investigation into the November 26 Nato air raid on a border post appears to have exonerated the United States and faulted an Afghan military commander for the unprovoked attack, the BBC reported.

The airstrike sparked outrage across the country – forcing the government to review its ‘terms of engagement’ with the United States in the war against terrorism.

The probe report – parts of which have been shared with Nato forces in Kabul – states that no US soldier was involved in the airstrike on the Salala check post in the Mohmand Agency that left two dozen border guards dead.

Investigators are convinced that an Afghan National Army (ANA) officer conspired with India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security in prompting the Nato airstrike, an officer privy to the probe told the BBC.

Islamabad has shared the evidence of his involvement with Nato, saying that the evidence warrants action against him.

Islamabad has long suspected that archrival India is using Afghan soil to foment trouble in Pakistan’s border regions.

The investigators interviewed local military commanders and evaluated ground evidence for their report.

According to the report, troops deployed at the Salala border post spotted the suspected men in a seasonal stream which, according to US intelligence, was used by the Taliban insurgents for sneaking into the Malakand division and Swat.

As per standard operating procedure (SOP), the Pakistani military commanders ordered fire. Minutes later, Nato helicopter gunships attacked the Pakistani post. It turns out that Pakistani troops had fired at ANA personnel patrolling the area. Investigators cite two reasons for the fire. First, the area was not within the patrolling jurisdiction of the ANA. And if needed, they were required to inform the Pakistani officials 72 hours before entering the region.

Second, the ANA patrol didn’t use SOP after receiving the fire. Instead, they appealed for a Nato air raid — even though local ANA commanders were aware of the location of the Pakistani border post in the region.

The ANA patrol was deliberately sent to the area under a conspiracy and then ‘Link 16’ which is normally used for huge operations against militants and extremists.

Pakistani investigators also blame Nato for negligence. According to them, the officer on duty in the control room ordered the airstrike, after receiving ‘Link 16’ and did not bother to check the location on the map which clearly shows that the area is in Pakistan and a security post is also located in the region.

The version of events as gleaned by the BBC from the probe report is disputed by the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media arm of the Pakistani military, which even called it ‘inaccurate.’

The ISPR also clarified a related report which gave the impression that border coordination centres were closed and that officers posted there had been recalled. According to the ISPR, few officers were called for consultations only and now they have gone back to the border coordination centres.

This came after a Nato official said in Kabul that Pakistan has restored liaison officers at coordination centres on the Afghanistan border. “We have seen liaison officers, Pakistani officers, return to border coordination centres, General Allen (the top Nato commander in Afghanistan) has spoken to (Pakistani army chief) General Parvez Kayani, so we are moving in the right direction,” Brigadier General Carsten Jacobsen, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force told reporters in Kabul.

with additional reporting from agencies

Published in The Express Tribune

Balochistan Killing Field

Balochistan Killing Field

[Interactive Map HERE]

Belgian, Italian Christmas Massacres; Reprise of Norway, Gladio Rides Again

Belgian, Italian Christmas Massacres; Reprise of Norway, Gladio Rides Again

By Richard Cottrell

Contributing writer for End the Lie

A body suspected to be the gunman who opened fire on a square packed with children and Christmas shoppers in the eastern Belgian city of Liege, lies on the ground on December 13, 2011 (Photo credit: MICHEL KRAKOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

A confused and probably mindless individual has just been accused by the Belgian authorities of killing five people and injuring another 122 at a traditional Christmas street fair in the city of Liege.

The man, purportedly armed with a powerful automatic rifle, first mounted a staging platform that gave him a perfect view of Saint-Lambert square, packed as usual with seasonal gift-buyers.

The police accounts state that he then opened fire and began to throw grenades. Allegedly, splinters from one of these killed him – conveniently – outright. He was not, the authorities gushed, shot by the police. Perish the thought.

There is every sign that he carefully and cold-bloodedly selected his victims, aiming slowly and patiently. In fact, it was exactly like Anders Behring Breivikthe Norwegian recently judged insane and unfit to plead after for killing 69 campers on the holiday camp island Utøya not far from the capital, Oslo, on July 22nd this year.

Breivik was portrayed as a lone gunman possessed by hatred of Islam and other strange thoughts buzzing in an obviously crowded head.

Rinse and repeat.  Belgian officials have named the Liege gunman as Nordine Amrani, a 33-year-old born to a Moroccan family living in the country.

The charge sheet read impressively: convictions for offences involving possession of illegal weapons, drugs and sexual assaults.

In short, the stereotype patsy the police had under surveillance, exactly like Breivik in Norway before the Utøya Island shooting and the supposed car bomb that he placed in the Oslo government district the same day that killed an additional eight people.

Dissatisfied with the impressive roll call of offences, Amrani was then accused posthumously as the lead suspect in the murder of a 45 year old charwoman who cleaned house for one of Armani’s neighbors, on the same day as the attack. She was found shot in the head on the morning of Tuesday, December 13th.

A rape investigation is presumably intended to add to his guilt while producing useful supporting DNA evidence.

Just about everything is wrong with this story.

A man with a string of offences involving guns, drugs and sex attacks, was clearly the kind of suspect that the police would tail on an automatic basis. But no, instead, he somehow manages to get hold of a high powered rifle and more to the point, grenades.

Yet this is a petty criminal, by and large. Where and how and why would he acquire access to grenades? The answer is: military stores.

What were his motives? Presumably some document will soon be found to explain that, like Breivik’s famous rambling testament in which he weds the right way to grow sugar beet (as a professional market gardener) to his repulsion for Islam and admiration for Israel.

Let’s jump back 30 years. The time leap will help us to the probable answer to these mysteries.

In the early 1980s, a group of heavily armed gunmen terrorized supermarkets and other shops in the Brabant region near Brussels.

The gunmen fired at random at bystanders during a series of robberies between 1982 and 1985, killing 28 people and injuring many more.

The victims included unfortunate shoppers who were cut down in cold blood by machine gunners in busy supermarkets and parking lots.

The official Belgian parliamentary inquiry rudely dismissed that notion that criminals were responsible.

The robbery label anyway failed to stick when a sack crammed with stolen cash was found tossed in a stream. Robbers are rarely that generous.

Instead the official parliamentary investigators concluded the perpetrators were Neofascists associated with Belgian secret services.

In 2006, the guns and the ammunition used in the Brabant massacres were finally traced, to the supposedly defunct branch of the NATO Belgian stay-behind army of secret soldiers called “the Special Intervention Squadron” – the one known within the Gladio command structure as the “Diana [from the Hunter] Organization.”

This unit was quietly reformed under a different name in 2008.

As I explain in my forthcoming book on Gladio (see below) the original Diana was a top secret assassination squad and there is no reason to believe that its successor has any different duties.

The purpose of the Brabant attacks (and others in the city of Nouvelle about the same time) was expressly political.

Belgium in the 1980s was in a state of continual political ferment. NATO, whose headquarters are close to Brussels, feared a dramatic lurch to the Left in its own back yard.

The attacks were supposed to dramatize the impression of a civil insurgency. The reasoning went that voters would flock for security to the arms of a safe Right wing government.

In wider terms, this became known throughout Europe as the Strategy of Tension.

So what are the motives today for a repeat Gladio exercise in Liege? They are two-fold.

First, Belgium is on the edge of breaking apart. The country has just acquired a government after a European record of 547 days since the last election to establish a viable coalition.

The causes are essentially linguistic friction between the Flemish speaking and French speaking regions.

No-one can be sure how long this fragile administration will last, but it is probably not very long. There just isn’t enough political glue to do the job.

The country also suffers severe economic problems particularly in the areas of gross public debts that challenge the euro currency rules.

The collapse of Belgium as a political entity would be a huge embarrassment to the European Union, which also has its central home in Brussels.

The European Council’s president is the Belgian political retread Herman von Rompuy. He is busily, not to say obsessively, involved in trying to push through fast-track European currency union on the back of the wholly artificial and contrived euro currency crisis.

Liege lies in the French canton of Belgium. Traditionally the French speakers, or Walloons as they are called, are more sympathetic to the unitary Belgian state.

The atrocity in Saint-Lambert Square is subliminally intended to cement support for the infant government which has just been formed after such a prolonged nativity.

Secondly, the attack concentrates attention once again on the presence of 450,000 immigrants or long term residents of Islamic origin.

They have been the object of plotting the creation of Sharia law within the country, as a first step to full recognition as an independent linguistic and racial force with the federal state.

The fact that the accused terrorist is of Moroccan descent fits the necessity to scapegoat Belgium’s Islamic minority perfectly.

There were huge riots in Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest city renowned as the diamond capital of Europe, on 29th November 2002.

The provocation was the murder of a quiet young Moroccan supposedly by a mentally deficient neighbor. Again, the retarded patsy has his moment of fame.

The media and the authorities seized on the incident to claim that Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist heading the Arab-European League, which is based in Belgium, deliberately incited the subsequent violence.

The man the newspapers called the Malcolm X of Belgium was never charged, kept under house arrest for a few days, and then quietly released to do as he pleased.

We are in the same territory after the atrocity in Liege. Propaganda reaped its rewards.

The following days will see the patient construction of the case against Nordine Amrani, the Belgian Anders Breivik.

By no coincidence at all, a similar attack occurred in Italy on exactly the same day.

The Italian authorities blamed a “far-right militant” for the death of two Senegalese street vendors in a shooting spree in the historic city of Florence.

Witnesses said they saw the purportedly white assailant, 50-year-old called Gianluca Casseri, casually get out of a car and then calmly aim three shots with a pistol  that killed two vendors on the spot and seriously  wounded a third.

Accounts state that he then shot himself, or was shot by the police. Quite probably, the latter.

The sum of similarities between Liege and Florence are too great to be ascribed to the sudden rash acts by disturbed people

As everyone knows, Italy has recently come under the rule of a non-elected civilian technocrat government which is imposing a stiff austerity program.

Resentment of immigrants from Africa particularly is also the source of immense resentment in the country. The linkage is not difficult to make.

We are back to the Gladio-style Strategy of Tension and the need to muster strong support from both Left and Right flanks of the country behind a Right wing authority pressing unpopular reforms.

My advice is to expect more of the same.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is coming in January of 2012 from Progressive Press.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

 

Newt and Other Republican Morons Forget To Register As Agents of Israel

["Neut" is here to remind us exactly what Bush was all about.  Kissing Netanyahu's ass, while appeasing the Rapture Republicans is a neocon speciality.  Gingrich steered Reagan's bankrupt policies through the Congress, while fixating on Monica Lewinski's stained dress.  He locked the Congress up over Clinton's sexual deviancies, while ignoring the mess that Bill and Hillary were making with his Bosnian Islamists that he recruited from the Afghan veterans, otherwise known as "al-Qaeda."  He, more than anyone else, can be said to have "fiddled" while Clinton created the force of international terrorist mercenaries who helped lead us into the perpetual terror war.  It has been American bipartisan policy to unleash Islamist terrorists upon the rest of the world, as seen in the wave of Islamists which we have helped empower in the Middle East.  The zombie Republicans have arisen from the dead to impersonate American statesmen, who all speak with the same voice, uttering the same seductive promises to save America from Obama, knowing full well that every word they speak is a lie.]

Gingrich and company share their Middle East delusions

James Zogby

On Wednesday, six Republican candidates for president appeared before the Republican Jewish Coalition to campaign for Christian votes. There are Jewish Republicans, to be sure, but not enough to make a difference in this primary contest. No, the real prize that drew the candidates to the event were the 40 per cent of GOP primary voters who identify themselves as “born-again” Christians. Many of them fervently believe that Israel can do no wrong and that it is their religious duty to support any and all Israeli policies as a prerequisite to hasten the “Day of Judgment”.

The speeches were mostly filled with hysterical criticism of President Barack Obama’s “appeasement” of Israel’s enemies and hyperbolic praise for Israel (with the exception of John Huntsman, who, after a few pandering platitudes, spoke mostly about the economy and was greeted with stony silence). Because their remarks included such irresponsible charges and promises, I have included significant excerpts to give a flavour of how out of touch today’s Republican Party is with current Middle East realities.

Newt Gingrich has in recent days surged ahead in the polls with statements like this: “As president, on my first day in office, I will issue an executive order directing the US embassy in Israel to be moved to Jerusalem as provided for in the legislation I introduced in Congress in 1995.

“The United States should explicitly reject the concept of a right of return for Palestinian refugees. The so-called right of return is a historically impossible demand that would be a demographic disaster and mean the end of the Jewish state of Israel.

“The United Nations camps system must be replaced by a system of earned income and property rights to restore dignity and hope to every Palestinian.”

The next day, Mr Gingrich followed up these remarks, in essence rejecting any Palestinian claim to a state: “Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.”

Michele Bachmann continued her pattern of lambasting Mr Obama while pandering to the far-right constituency: “It seems as if lately, our president has forgotten the importance of Israel to America and thinks of our relationship only in terms of what we do for Israel. The president is more concerned about Israel building homes on its own land than the threats that Israel and America face in the region.

“Obama improperly calls for Israel to retreat to indefensible 1949 armistice lines with swaps, and to then still face further demands to divide Jerusalem and allow a Palestinian ‘right of return’ to overrun the entire state of Israel. The Obama administration has also unconditionally given the Palestinians unprecedented amounts of US foreign aid, and opposed Congressional efforts to condition aid on the real steps that would bring about peace.

“The so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs who never lived in Israel, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state.

“My administration will fully recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital.”

In that company, Mitt Romney was eager to sing the same tune: “Over the past three years, President Obama has … chastened Israel. He’s publicly proposed that Israel adopt indefensible borders. He’s insulted its prime minister. And he’s been timid and weak in the face of the existential threat of a nuclear Iran.

“These actions have emboldened Palestinian hard-liners who now are poised to form a unity government with terrorist Hamas and feel they can bypass Israel at the bargaining table. President Obama has immeasurably set back the prospect of peace in the Middle East.”

Rick Perry continued the refrain, based on his own version of history: “President Obama has systematically undermined America’s relationship with Israel … I support the goal of a Palestinian state, but it should be the Palestinians who meet certain preconditions.

“Instead, the administration has insisted on previously unheard of preconditions for Israel, such as an immediate stop to all settlement activity. President Obama has suggested the 1967 borders as a basis for negotiations. And he has instituted the practice of ‘indirect talks’, subverting the Oslo Accords.

“Israel does not need our president demanding gratitude for being the best friend Israel has ever had while his secretary of defence rails that Israel has ‘to get back to the damn table’ with the Palestinians, and his secretary of state questions the viability of Israel’s democracy, even as his ambassador to Belgium blames anti-Semitism among Muslims on Israel’s failure to accommodate the Palestinians.”

All of this went beyond the normal platitudes offered up in an election year. It was dangerous, shameful and crass pandering, making it clear how far today’s Republicans have moved from the reality-based foreign policy of the Bush-Baker era. And while it’s hard to imagine the alternate universe inhabited by these candidates for president, it’s frightening to think of where they would take US-Middle East policy should any of them be elected.

James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute

Kabul attack: Did ISI exact revenge on Afghanistan in the aftermath of Mohmand?

Kabul attack: Did ISI exact revenge on Afghanistan in the aftermath of Mohmand?

A number of well coordinated attacks clearly targeting Shia Muslims in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar have killed at least 58 Shias in Afghanistan. A Pakistani anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has accepted the responsibility of the attacks. (Source)

A spokesman for an Pakistani extremist group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al Almi claimed responsibility in a phone call to Radio Mashaal – a Pashto language radio station. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, (LeJ) is a murderous anti-Shia group founded which acts act as surrogate for Taliban and al-Qaida. The Pakistani Taliban has its roots in anti-Shia violence, and LeJ acted as the training ground for its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. LeJ maintained training camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime but has not mounted attacks in Afghanistan in recent years. The group is believed to be supported by Pakistan’s spy agency, ISI. The group also claimed responsibility for the massacre of 29 Shia pilgrims on a bus in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province in September, and an attack on an Ashura procession in Karachi in 2009 which killed 30 people. Earlier this year, the Pakistani courts freed Malik Ishaq, one of LeJ’s founders. Ishaq had faced dozens of murder charges but the courts said there was lack of evidence – his group had allegedly killed numerous witnesses who may have testified against him. (Source)

LeJ is one of several aliases of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) or Ahl-e-Sunnat-Wal-Jamat (ASWJ), a group with known links with Pakistan’s military establishment. Recently, its chief Malik Ishaq, a confessed killer of more than 70 Shia Muslims, was released by Pakistan ISI-backed judiciary. According to a recent statement by Human Rights Watch“Some Sunni extremist groups are known to have links to the Pakistani military and its intelligence agencies.” It is, however,  a fact that LeJ-SSP does not represent majority of moderate Sunni Muslims. In fact, it represents its Saudi-ISI masters.

The attacks on Afghanistan’s Shia Muslims mourning Imam Hussain highlight the terrifying vision of Pakistan’s foreign policy elite who favour a return to Taliban rule in Afghanistan,  as per the recommendations of the USIP-Jinnah Institute report.  Towards this end, the ISI has undermined the elected government by first entrapping Hussain Haqqani and forcing a replacement with the more plaint, Sherry Rehman of the Jinnah Institute.

The undermining of the PPP government by pro-Taliban policians like Imran Khan (PTI) and Nawaz Sharif (PML N) has been facilitated by a politically-biased Judiciary which has also done its best to release Lashkar-e-Jhangvi mass murderers.  These developments are carefully caliberated to ensure that the security establishment’s goal of “Strategic Depth” is revived and those who disagree with the Taliban are removed from the scene.  The recent boycott of the Bonn Conference (widely believed to have been dictated by the security establishment) is also linked to the attacks on Shia muslim mourners in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, contrary to Pakistan pro-establishment media, the mass murder of Shias is NOT a sectarian conflict. The tragic attacks on Shia mourners of Imam Hussain, the Holy Prophet’s grand-son, in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are part of an ideology whose manifesto is very clear as per this letter of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

Operating under different names such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sahaba, Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jundullah, these terrorists share a common ideology as well as logistical patronage and financial support.  Mercenaries move freely from one group to another and this nexus is responsible for not just the mass murder of Shia muslims.  The same groups also target Ahmedi Muslims, Sunni Muslims (both Barelvis and anti-Taliban Deobandis) and Christains.

In the deadliest incident today (Ashura 2011), a suspected suicide bomb struck a shrine packed with Shia mourners of Ashura in the capital, Kabul, killing at least 54 people. Another blast struck near a Shia mosque the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif at about the same time, killing four. A third attack on Shia Muslims was reported in Kandahar in which five persons were injured.

Ashura is the climax of Muharram, the month of mourning for the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. The event is celebrated by Shia and Sunnis with respect and devotion to the family of the Prophet Muhammad. However, Saudi Salafis/ Wahhabis and the Saudi-ISI affected extremist Deobandis in Pakistan and elsewhere consider the Ashura event as un-Islamic.

Though Taliban have in the past massacred Afghan Shias in Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan, there is not much precedence of such attack on Shia Muslims’ Ashura gathering in Afghanistan. Therefore, the current attack has all the hallmarks of similar attacks by ISI-SCP backed LeJ-SSP terrorists on Shia Muslims in Pakistan. Taliban’s Haqqani Network has close links with SSP-LeJ, both groups are currently besieging Toori Shias of Parachinar with the help of Pakistan’s ISI.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke of the unprecedented nature of the attack, saying it was “the first time that, on such an important religious day in Afghanistan, terrorism of that horrible nature is taking place”.

The near-simultaneous explosions happened at about midday (07:30 GMT). In Kabul, the bomb went off near a gathering of hundreds of Shias singing at the Abu Fazal shrine. Fifty-four people were killed in the blast, said health ministry spokesman Norughli Kargar, while 150 were injured. The bomb which exploded near the main mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif was apparently strapped to a bicycle, and went off shortly after the Kabul blast. Balkh province Deputy Police Chief Abdul Raouf Taj said the device exploded as a convoy of Shias, shouting in celebration of Ashura, passed by, AP reported. At least 4 Shias were killed and 20 were injured. Elsewhere, police said at least three people were wounded by a motorcycle bomb in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s heartland.

The attacks come a day after an international conference on Afghanistan’s future was held, in the German city of Bonn. Pakistan boycotted the conference, after a Nato attack killed 24 of its troops at a checkpoint near the Afghan border last month.

Grave of one of the Ashura attack victims in Kabul’s Kart-e-Sakhi

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16046079

http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/world/2011/12/111206_afghan_blast_ar.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/world/asia/suicide-bombers-attack-shiite-worshipers-in-afghanistan.html?_r=2&hp

CIS Secret Agencies Endorse the American Deception of a Central Asian Terrorist Underground

[Individual secret agencies are coming together to declare a common threat in Central Asia from a non-existent terrorist underground.  This is setting the stage for the coming creation of a Central Asian rapid reaction force (to be used primarily for crushing political dissent), without defining the author of that budding force.  Will it be Western-oriented or Russian, in composition, or will there be two competing forces? 

The only links between "al-CIA-da"-linked terrorist groups anywhere in the world is the common denominator of the CIA hand.  If there are roving bands of irregular warfare fighters prowling around select Central Asian countries the real question is.  The CIA has turned mass-murder into an art form, creating a prototype of roving gang which is familiar to all governments by now.   Which government is behind the alleged "Islamists" of Central Asia, American, or copycat competitors?  Every government has learned from watching American covert warfare over the past thirty years, especially for the past ten years.  Did the Kazakh president manufacture his own "Islamists," to justify a wave of political repression, just as Bakiyev allegedly raised the specter of Mullah Abdullah to provide cover for ethnic rioting unleashed in the Osh region in southern Kyrgyzstan?  Did Karimov claim unseen "terrorists" blew that railroad bridge to cover his feud with Tajikistan? 

Everyone has learned that anybody can commit any act of violence and blame it on mysterious, though unseen, "militant Islamists."  The Pandora's Box of "limited warfare" has been opened and no one can slam it shut.]

Secret services say about the presence in Central Asia, domestic extremist underground

Fergana

The special services of CIS countries to recognize the presence of Central Asian domestic extremist underground, passesKirTAG .

“We have to note the existence of an internal underground in the form of extremist organizations operating in Central Asia.Events in the north and south of Kazakhstan , as well as in the Rasht Valley of Tajikistan showed infiltration of extremists from outside and building sustainable communities within the countries of Central Asia “- December 9, said first deputy chairman of the Counterterrorism Center of the CIS countries Moldiyar Orozaliev in the course of the Bishkek expert advice of representatives of the practical units to combat terrorism and extremism, security agencies and special services of CIS countries of Central Asia.

The press office of the CIS ATC, the meeting was attended by experts of the ATC, the committees and the national security services of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan , Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan , as well as representatives of the CIS bodies, as the Coordination Council Service Commanders of Border Troops and the Office for the Coordination of anti- organized crime and other dangerous types of crimes on the territory of the Commonwealth.

According to the participants, the current operational situation in the Central Asian region can be characterized as a stable instability. There is still a wide range of threats specific to this region: the radicalization of populations, including those based on the use of distorted religious slogans, drug trafficking, the trend towards greater international and extremist organizations.

Significant impact on security in the region continue to have the processes taking place in the northern areas borderingAfghanistan .

“Security in the region can not cause us concern. This is due to negative trends as in Kyrgyzstan and abroad because of the proximity to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where the threat of terrorism. Recently, we are concerned and the situation in Kazakhstan. One can not ignore the factor of external forces interested in destabilizing the situation in the country “, – noted, in particular, the first deputy chairman of the National Security Committee of Kyrgyzstan Kolbay Musaev, transfers Knews.kg .

According to him, in Central Asia are experiencing increased religiosity of the population and the politicization of Islam, but on the basis of propaganda on the Internet and radical Islam, there are autonomous terrorist cells. Many terrorist and extremist organizations provoke ethnic conflict, realizing that this is one of the most vulnerable places.

According to experts ATC, special attention of the security and intelligence services of the CIS should be focused on counter-terrorism and anti-sabotage protection of energy infrastructure, transportation, communication facilities, as well as algorithms Exercises joint action anti-terrorist unit of the Commonwealth, directed, First of all, to prevent terrorist attacks.

The international news agency “Fergana”

The More Civilians That the Taliban Kills the Better It Is for the Pentagon

Does the US military want Afghanistan to get even nastier?

In Afghanistan, insurgents are growing ever more sadistic in their attacks, as the suicide bombing of pilgrims in Kabul showed. But could the US war machine actually want to provoke the Taliban?

  • Jon Boone
  • guardian.co.uk
The aftermath of a suicide bomb at a Shia shrine in Kabul 6 December 2011

A man wails as others try to deal with the aftermath of the suicide bomb that killed 55 at a Shia shrine in Kabul on 6 December 2011. Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP

Even by Afghanistan’s high standards, the massacre of Shia worshippers in Kabul on Tuesday 6 December was an act of stomach-churning brutality. A suicide bomber posing as a pilgrim on Ashura, one of the holiest days of the calendar of Shia Islam, had inveigled his way into the middle of a packed crowd of men, women and children. Witnesses watching from the rooftop of the nearby Abu Fazal shrine said body parts flew up into the air near the epicentre of the blast when the unknown bomber detonated himself.

The clearing smoke revealed a scene strewn with lifeless and often mangled bodies, lying in circles around the blackened area of tarmac where the bomber had stood. A young girl who had somehow miraculously survived was snapped by a photographer wailing into the air. Among the 55 killed there were no police officers or soldiers or anyone who might remotely be considered a “legitimate” target of the Taliban-led war against the Afghan government.

The Taliban itself was quick to condemn the attack in strong terms, while an extremist Pakistan-based movement called Lashkar- e-Jhangvi al Almiv has been fingered. If it really was a unilateral operation launched without the consent of the Taliban’s leadership it is another worrying sign of how the insurgency in Afghanistan is spinning out of control, becoming crueller and ever more willing to inflict horrendous damage on ordinary civilians.

But not everyone thinks such horrors are an entirely bad thing. Indeed, some within the US war machine have long argued the emergence of a nastier insurgency could be really quite useful for Nato’s war aims. So useful, in fact, that foreign forces should try to encourage such behaviour.

One of them was Peter Lavoy, a former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, the body that examines data from across the US government’s intelligence gathering machine and turns it into high-grade analysis that is rarely discussed publicly. At a closed-door meeting with ambassadors at Nato headquarters in Brussels in December 2008, Lavoy spelled out a strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan that has never been uttered publicly: “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009 in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he said, according to a State Department note-taker in the room. “This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”

His words, which we only know courtesy of WikiLeaks, are extraordinary because they have been proven at least partially right. They also differ fundamentally from the publicly stated strategy in Afghanistan. Known as population-centric counterinsurgency, or Coin, the fundamental principle is that foreign forces should try to keep ordinary Afghans safe from insurgents and thereby win their support.

The idea that Nato may actually be trying to make the population less secure appalls observers. “It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military to take more risks in order to protect civilians,” says John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering guerrilla warfare. “I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”

But behind the scenes, powerful voices continue to argue for a harder-edged strategy that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans more miserable, not less. Michael Semple, a regional expert on the Taliban, says it is an outlook he runs across in discussions with Nato officials: “I have heard serious, thinking officers articulate the idea that provoking Taliban fighters into acts of extreme violence against the population could be taken as a sign of Coin progress, prior to the final victory when the people turn against them.”

And evidence has been building up for some time that the Afghan insurgency is indeed becoming a lot nastier. In the view of some analysts, a turning point came in February when a group of gunmen rushed into a bank in the eastern city of Jalalabad. What came next, as the high-definition, full-colour CCTV footage showed, was no ordinary bank job. The raiders did not try to force staff to open the safe or even scoop up the wads of money the cashiers had ready to pay the salaries of the many police officers and soldiers in the bank that day. Instead of stealing anything, the seven men, who were wearing police uniforms in addition to their suicide-bomb vests, methodically walked around the bank and shot customers and bank workers at point-blank range, killing dozens.

One cashier, who was hiding behind his desk, heard an attacker coolly order a man on the floor to stand up and recite a Kalima, a prayer Muslims say as they prepare themselves for death. “Before he finished, he shot him dead,” said Ilyas Yousafzai. “The Taliban claim they are fighting for Islam, but they order people to recite their Kalima and then kill them. That is not Islam.”

Taliban fighters hold their weapons
Intelligence suggests the Taliban is reeling: some fighters refuse promotion or to even step foot in Afghanistan. Photograph: STR/Pakistan/Reuters/Corbis

Such sadistic cruelty is, to say the least, counterproductive for a movement that has a heroic self-image as a force that swept out the warlords who had plagued the country in the 90s. In its own view, the Taliban brought security to a troubled land, a justice to oppressed civilians. It is a treasured reputation it has tried to burnish in the years since its re-emergence, even issuing codes of conduct in the name of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed leader. The rules order fighters not to persecute civilians and generally not to repeat the errors of the mujahideen commanders who became heroes for fighting the Soviet occupation in the 80s but also villains for their corrupt and predatory warlord rule.

But there are plenty of examples of their deeds falling far short of their words. This summer in Gereshk, central Helmand, an eight-year-old boy was kidnapped by the Taliban in an apparent bid to get his father, Noor Mohammad, to hand over his police pickup truck. Unfortunately for the young boy, his father refused. “After two days they hanged my little innocent son, and threw him in the water canal,” Mohammad said. “I never believed the Taliban would ever kill him. I thought they would set him free, but they did the cruellest thing possible. God will never forgive them.”

In Kandahar province this year, four people working on a US-funded road project were kidnapped and had their ears sliced off.

In Paktia province, the researcher Kate Clark reports that the Taliban’s far-from-perfect court system has broken down. Whereas in the past suspected “spies” would get a trial, ultimately sparing some, today an increasingly neurotic local insurgency moves straight to the throat-slitting stage when its suspicions are aroused.

The Taliban has not only grown increasingly fond of suicide bombings, something that was largely unheard of until around 2006, it has also made greater use of children, despite its own strict ban on using underage fighters. On 26 June, for example, in the southern province of Uruzgan, insurgents instructed an eight-year-old girl to carry a bomb to a police pickup truck, which they then remotely detonated, killing the girl but nobody else.

The suicide bombers often completely fail to harm what Taliban press releases call “stooge” foreign forces, or ”puppet” soldiers of the Afghan government. Instead it is civilians that often pay the price. On 7 January, in the southern border town of Spin Boldak, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a public bath house, supposedly in a bid to kill the deputy commander of the border police. However, he was not even present. The explosion ripped through the building, killing 15 and wounding 20.

UN figures show the vast majority of civilian casualties are due to Taliban operations. Whether or not there is a deliberate effort to radicalise the Taliban, it appears to be an unavoidable side effect of trying to crush it militarily. And that is exactly what the US has been trying to do in the last two years.

The US-led decimation of the Taliban’s mid-level leadership begins in top-secret intelligence hubs crammed with analysts scrutinising vast amounts of raw information gleaned from Afghan spies, interrogations and eavesdropping into mobile phone networks. After sifting through the data, a targeting “packet” is created and handed over to special forces teams who are sent out on up to six “kill or capture” missions every single night. Dozing in their traditional mud compounds in distant villages all over rural Afghanistan, the targets have no clue they are in the crosshairs of one of the most advanced intelligence and military machines the world has ever seen until they hear helicopters racing over the horizon.

Nagl says all this amounts to a revolution in the way war is fought. “In the history of counterinsurgency, we have never been this good at taking insurgents off the battlefield,” he says.

And, it is working, say Nato’s data crunchers, who pore over information in a windowless office in Kabul. They claim there are significant signs that the insurgency has weakened in the past year, including the loss of areas in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where the Taliban used to operate unmolested. Radio intercepts and other sources of intelligence suggest the Taliban is reeling: commanders struggle to resupply its men in the field, while some fighters apparently refuse promotions or even to step foot in Afghanistan, preferring the safety of Pakistan. There are also signs that the average age of Taliban commanders has dropped as the movement struggles to replace those who are killed or captured, leading to a new generation of less experienced and less capable insurgents taking the lead.

But despite all this apparently good news, Nato’s generals know they have still not succeeded in their stated strategic goal of protecting the population. In fact, the data currently shows Afghans feeling less secure the more the insurgents are pummelled. As a senior official with Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), charged with supporting the Afghan government, put it recently: “Even though the Taliban are not present in the numbers they used to be, and even though they still don’t enjoy popular support, do the people yet feel more secure? No, not yet.”

This is largely because the Taliban has responded to its pounding by ramping up the number of homemade land mines it plants. Although they are intended to blow up Nato vehicles, more often than not they kill civilians.

Another cause for public discomfort is how Nato’s intensified operations have changed the profile of insurgents in many areas, from disgruntled locals to vicious, hot-headed youth sent in from over the Pakistani border where they are indoctrinated in a network of madrassas.

“If you come into a neighbourhood that you grew up in you are probably going to have a harder time slapping around Grandma than if you are an outsider,” says a senior Nato intelligence officer on the issue of “out of area” fighters. He believes the Taliban experienced this problem particularly acutely in Helmand this summer when, lacking enough local fighters, it “emptied out the madrassas” in Pakistan and sent teams of youngsters over the border. “The [US] marines soon saw these guys infiltrating in, carrying weapons openly,” he says. “Then they started getting reports from locals of increased intimation and beatings.”

Nagl believes all this is an indication that the Taliban is being degraded to the opening stage of Mao Zedong’s famous three “phases” of revolutionary warfare. According to the Chinese revolutionary leader and insurgency theorist, phase one is essentially terrorism, involving attacks on easy targets such as mayors and police chiefs. (When the Taliban re-emerged in 2006, it did indeed specialise in burning schools and intimidating NGOs.) Phase two sees the emergence of larger teams of rebels capable of taking on government military forces to some degree. Phase three is full-blown conventional war.

“The Taliban have been knocked down to phase one and you see what you would expect to see, with the resulting risk of alienating the civilian population,” Nagl says. “If we can get the civilian population on our side in the south, in their heartlands, we can knock them back to phase zero.”

But will the civilian population ever come completely over to the side of the Afghan government and its foreign military backers? The Nato intelligence official, drawing from a thick pile of graphs and bar charts, points to some encouraging signs: 2011 has seen record numbers of tip-offs from locals revealing where caches of weapons and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are hidden. There has also been brisk interest in signing up to the Afghan Local Police scheme, a US special forces-mentored programme that recruits villagers to defend their own communities.

A woman walks past Italian Nato troops in Herat province
A woman walks past Italian Nato troops in Herat province, Afghanistan. Photograph: Jalil Rezayee/EPA

In one interesting case in August, in the Nawa district of Helmand, furious villagers stoned to death a Taliban commander and his bodyguard after the insurgents had killed an old man accused of collaborating with the government. But although the Taliban has long been extremely unpopular, there is precious little sign the public will risk their lives in a big way to defy them.

Sceptics say US strategists are basing their strategic thinking on the “awakening” in the Iraqi province of Anbar in 2006, when the population turned conclusively on the al-Qaida-led insurgency. But bad though the situation in Afghanistan currently is, it is nowhere near the level of violence and destruction that held sway in Iraq.

Optimists call for patience. “We will go through a period of rising violence when we don’t know if success is over the hill,” predicts one former adviser to Nato’s top general in Afghanistan last year. “It’s like the theory of how passengers respond to a plane hijacking, where the first lot of people will get hurt and killed if they try to resist,” he says. “They only have a chance when the whole mob rises up with a ‘let’s roll’.”

But it is a depressing reality that so far it is mostly foreigners who get blamed for the Taliban’s outrages, with many Afghans identifying their misery not with the insurgents, but with the international troops seen as the source of fighting. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s bomb in Kabul, some furious young Shia men at the scene denounced both the Pakistanis and the Americans.

And, as the Nato adviser acknowledges, compared with some other successful counterinsurgencies, people might think twice about rising against the rebels if they don’t think they will get much help from a weak and often corrupt Afghan government.

“For all the implied Coin hope that the nastier Taliban will find it more difficult to survive, in the presence of a failing government, extreme violence may be an effective tool of social control,” says Semple.

Worse still, some analysts fear the new generation of Talibs created by Nato operations will crowd out wiser members of the old regime who are interested in a negotiated, political settlement to the conflict. “The fact that they are a coherent group is a good thing,” says Clark. “It is much better to have a Taliban that actually has a structure you can deal with and implement peace if it so wished, rather than a fragmented, abusive movement more strongly aligned to al-Qaida.”

Killing off potential peacemakers within the insurgency is a real concern, says Nagl, who thinks those insurgents who might be interested in reconciling should be put on a special list that would protect them from Nato’s night-time hit squads. “But it is not at all clear that we are any good at that because people who understand reintegration and reconciliation are Afghans and people who do the targeting are Americans,” he admits.

Others call for a more radical approach to bringing the war to a close that would entail trying to make the Taliban behave better, including confidence-building measures such as ceasefires. That, it is hoped, would then form the basis for peace talks between Afghans. A better-behaved movement would also make the majority of Afghans who never supported them, and are increasingly worried that they might one day return to power, more inclined to some sort of a negotiated compromise.

Semple says he had assumed that a strategy to improve behaviour “was almost orthodox” among US diplomats. But, he notes, the soldiers running the war in Afghanistan are still wedded to military operations they believe will eventually lead to victory, even if it makes life miserable for many Afghans along the way.

“We didn’t intend to make the Taliban nastier,” a Nato military officer in Kabul says. ”But if it helps us, we’re not going to complain.”

Why Does NATO Put Islamists In Power?–Russia To Ask At NATO Meeting

[SEE: America’s “Islamists” Go Where Oilmen Fear to Tread ]

NATO assists assertion of radical political Islam – Rogozin

Brussels, December 7, Interfax – Arbitrary changes of politicians in the ‘third world’ who NATO dislikes means assisting the spread of Sharia and radical Islamist groups, Russian envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said.

“The Russian side would like to understand to what extent NATO is aware of the fact that the assertion of radical political Islam in every region where NATO ‘projected its force’, as they say, is the result of its actions,” Rogozin said Interfax.

The main issue that the Russian side is going to raise at a NATO-Russian Council meeting at the level of foreign ministers on December 8 is the analysis of consequences that the West made in the military and political sphere in 2011, he said.

Are British Interests Worsening the Pakistani/US Confrontation?

[In the following report, taken from the Telegraph, the lead-in to the report makes a false claim, which is not substantiated anywhere in it.  The British press often seems to take the position of trouble-maker, or pot-stirrer in Pakistan/US disagreements.  This position has even been exposed in British military efforts in Afghanistan (SEE:  What exactly were Mervyn Patterson and Michael Semple doing in Helmand? ).  The Afghan story was about a covert effort to create a fake "Taliban," to turn into a counter-force and spy organ, to send into S. Waziristan. 

Have connections within the originally British Pakistani officer corps given London the ability to manipulate events on the ground?  This report, claiming both Pakistani and US confirmation (before the US completes its inquiry), is intended to escalate the situation.  Why would the British Crown wish to see a conflict begin between the two "allies"?  In order to finish my speculation on British trouble-making in Pakistan, I remind readers of the following incident involving known British institutional meddling--(SEE:  Gen. Kayani's trip to speak before the British International Institute for Strategic Studies).  The following excerpts from separate sources speak volumes about the IISS, and what it is all about.  The question must be asked--

"Is Gen. Kayani a member of IISS?"] 

almost shadow UN agency, seeking to affect global diplomatic and military policy. Its current membership boasts 3,000 elite individuals garnered from the worlds of government, business and academia in over 100 countries. The IISS additionally has 200 corporate and business members representing industries such as oil, investment banking, telecommunications, media outlets, aerospace, defense, energy, environment and numerous others, as well as 35 government ministries, 55 different research facilities and military personnel.

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…. “

 

Pakistan friendly fire deaths were due to “errors” by US officers

American officers gave the wrong coordinates to their Pakistani counterparts as they sought clearance for the air strike that killed 24 friendly troops last weekend, admit officials in both countries.

A destroyed border post after cross-border NATO air strike

A destroyed border post after cross-border NATO air strike on the Pakistani border on a mountain in the Mohmand tribal district 

Rob Crilly in Islamabad and Ashfaq Yusufzai in Charsadda

 

Nato and American officials have expressed regret but have refused to apologise until an investigation is completed into the incident near the Afghan border, which has triggered a crisis in relations between the US and Pakistan. Officials have previously offered varying accounts of the event as the two countries try to shift the blame.

But yesterday a senior Pakistani military officer told The Sunday Telegraph that a border co-ordination unit – established to avoid exactly this sort of tragedy – was given incorrect details of a suspected Taliban position.

“The strike had begun before we realised the target was a border post,” he said. “The Americans say we gave them clearance but they gave us the wrong information.” It is understood that American officers have not disputed the Pakistani account of what went wrong.

The American pilots had been confident in their targets as they flew out of the night sky, towards a mountain ridge that marked the border with Pakistan.

Afghan and US commandos hunting Taliban training camps inside the eastern edge of Afghanistan had called in air support as they came under fire from the Pakistani border.

The co-ordinates had been checked with a Pakistani officer to ensure there were no friendly troops in the area, the pilots believed, and the Apache attack helicopters and lone AC-130 gunship had been given the go-ahead to unload their deadly payload on the mountainside.

But as dawn arrived it became clear that a terrible mistake had been made.

Twenty-four Pakistani soldiers lay dead, their border posts were a smoking ruin and a crucial alliance had been poisoned, unleashing a wave of anti-American anger in Pakistan, which has halted co-operation against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

All year their fragile alliance has lurched from crisis to crisis. In January a CIA contractor shot dead two men in Lahore.

Then a secret mission to kill Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil in May provoked an angry response, with American military trainers expelled and US diplomats complaining of harassment.

The latest calamity has provoked an angry reaction among ordinary Pakistanis, who already feel their country’s contribution to the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban is being forgotten.

Daily demonstrations are being held around the country. Protesters in Karachi have burned an effigy of Barack Obama and That leaves a weak, moderate government in Islamabad trying to maintain an awkward balancing act, placating the rabble rousers while keeping the door open to a rapprochement with Washington.

Pakistan’s leaders have closed the country’s borders to Nato supply convoys, announced a boycott of an international conference in Bonn to plot a course for the future of Afghanistan and begun a review of all relations with the US and Nato.

The Pakistani military has also offered a strong response as it tries to rebuild its reputation after a series of blows, not least failing to spot the US helicopters that brought a special forces team deep into its territory to kill the al-Qaeda leader. Last week it circulated revised rules of engagement stating that soldiers can return fire if attacked by Nato forces – although the move is seen as an attempt to assuage public opinion, rather than up the ante along the Afghan border.

Nowhere is the mix of grief and anger more obvious than among the 24 families whose sons were killed by a supposed ally.

In the north-western town of Charsadda, Asfandyar Khan told The Sunday Telegraph how proud his son Najeebullah had been in 2005 to get a soldier’s uniform and to help make his country safe.

He fought against the Pakistan Taliban, clearing them from the Swat Valley in 2009 when militants approached to little more than 60 miles from the capital Islamabad, before being transferred to the Afghan border post where he died.

“He was very happy to fight against the Taliban as he wanted to take on the Pakistan’s enemy”, said Mr Khan, sitting outside his mud brick home set among lush, green fields.

A newly dug grave is decorated with flowers.

Now he must decide whether to ask his other son to leave the army.

But most of all he wants his government to end its close association with the US and its war in Afghanistan.

“Soldiers are losing confidence over the weakness of the government. They are demoralized and only a befitting response to the US can restore the confidence in government,” he said.

Pakistan’s prime minister has said there can be no more “business as usual” with the US.

And most analysts believe the relationship is facing its toughest test since the two countries were thrown together in alliance by 9/11.

Imtiaz Gul, a journalist and author who has written about the border area, said the US had to recognise Pakistan’s sensitivity to American treatment.

“This is not about money or a bigger say in Afghanistan,” he said. “This is about a country that feels underappreciated and hurt, so the way to patch it up is about addressing that emotional need.” But with an investigation not due to report until December 23, there is no sign that this crisis will end soon.