Sirajuddin Haqqani—Pakistan’s Secret Weapon, The Taliban Unifier

Afghanistan faces tough battle as Haqqanis unify the Taliban

 

FILE- In this Aug. 22, 1998 file photo, Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the militant group the Haqqani network, speaks during an interview in Miram Shah, Pakistan. A shadowy, Pakistan-based militant faction is on the rise within the Taliban, moving to unify the insurgency and further poison already frayed relations between Afghanistan and its neighbor, according to analysts. An audio recording of a recent meeting of the top Taliban leadership shows the Haqqani network _ a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that was linked to a Kabul bombing last month that killed 64 people _ is on the ascendancy, raising fears that Afghanistan faces another summer of fierce fighting. (AP Photo/Mohammed Riaz, File) (The Associated Press)

ISLAMABAD –  A shadowy, Pakistan-based militant faction is on the rise within the Taliban after its leader was appointed deputy and played a key role in unifying the fractured insurgency.

The ascendency of the Haqqani network, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, could significantly strengthen the Taliban and herald another summer of fierce fighting in Afghanistan. The firepower it brings to the Taliban was shown by a Kabul bombing last month that killed 64 people, the deadliest in the Afghan capital in years, which experts say was too sophisticated for the insurgents to have carried out without the Haqqanis.

The network’s role could also further poison already tainted relations between Islamabad and Kabul. Afghanistan is pressing Pakistan to crack down on the Haqqanis, accusing it of tolerating the group, a charge the Pakistanis deny.

An audio recording of a recent meeting of the top Taliban leadership, obtained by The Associated Press, offers a glimpse into the influence the Haqqani network now holds within the movement. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the network’s leader and newly elevated deputy head of the Taliban, tells the gathering that they must end differences and focus on fighting. “It is time to work. The mujahedeen (Islamic holy warriors) are happily going to the battlefield,” he is heard saying. The voice is recognizable as Haqqani’s.

Haqqani’s rise to the deputy post is the highest, most direct role that the network is known to have taken in the Taliban leadership. The network pledged allegiance to the Taliban years ago but has traditionally operated independently.

The network was founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a one-time ally of the United States who achieved fame fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and who developed close ties to the slain al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. After his death, his son Sirajuddin Haqqani took over.

The elder Haqqani aligned his group with the Taliban after the insurgents were driven from power in the U.S.-led invasion that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. He was a formidable militant financier, traveling to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to raise money. The network maintained close ties to al-Qaida and is believed to have large numbers of Arab and other foreign fighters.

The network is believed to command thousands of fighters on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Over the years, the Haqqanis emerged as the Taliban’s strongest asset because of their battle-hardened fighters and traditional links to Pakistan’s security agencies. Both U.S and Afghan intelligence agencies say Pakistan’s intelligence network, known as ISI, has allowed the Haqqanis to live freely for decades in Pakistan’s tribal regions, a claim Islamabad denies.

“There’s no one sole source of the Haqqani network’s strength, though three places you can point to are its personnel, its links to Pakistan, and its ties to the Gulf region,” said Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

The Taliban leadership meeting, held early last month at an undisclosed location, focused on strategies and battles ahead, the audio recording shows. During the meeting, Sirajuddin Haqqani called on the Taliban to close ranks, reminding them their enemy is the “foreign infidel” and not each other.

“Our objectives should be service to religion and we should end our differences and complaints,” he says in Pashtu, the language of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns, the ethnic group that makes up the backbone of the Taliban movement.

Since last summer, Sirajuddin Haqqani has been instrumental in reconciling differences among Taliban commanders, who balked at recognizing Mullah Akhtar Mansoor as the supreme Taliban chief following the announcement that the insurgency’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was dead.

As soon as Mansoor became leader, he announced that he had named Haqqani as his deputy.

Haqqani quickly set about uniting the fractured Taliban, first by bringing Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Yaqoob, and his brother, Mullah Abdul Manan Omari, into the fold, according to a Taliban official who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to talk to the press.

Haqqani then coaxed Zakir Qayyum, a Taliban strongman in the battleground southern Afghan province of Helmand and the former head of the Taliban military committee under Mullah Omar, to swear allegiance to Mansour, healing some of the biggest divisions within the Taliban, the Taliban official said. Fahd Humayun, program and research manager at the Jinnah Institute, a think-tank in the Pakistani capital, who closely follows Taliban developments, also said Haqqani was key to healing the divisions.

The rise of the Haqqanis comes at a critical juncture in relations between Kabul and Islamabad.

In the off-and-on effort for negotiations over the years, Pakistan has hosted past meetings between the Kabul government and the Taliban, whose leaders are widely believed to be based in the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan.

A four-nation group that included Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and the United States launched efforts earlier this year to try to bring Afghanistan’s protracted war to a negotiated end but the push fell apart amid recent Taliban battlefield gains.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani now says he is no longer interested in having Pakistan bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. Instead, he demands Islamabad stop harboring the Taliban and take up the fight against the Haqqanis.

The U.S. State Department has also repeated its demand that Pakistan take action.

“We have consistently expressed our concerns at the highest level of the government of Pakistan about their continued tolerance for Afghan Taliban groups, such as the Haqqani network, operating from Pakistani soil,” U.S. State Department spokesman Elizabeth Trudeau said at a press briefing following the Kabul attack.

Islamabad claims it decimated the Haqqani network’s infrastructure in a military operation launched two years ago in North Waziristan, where the Haqqanis are headquartered. It points to its own grievances with the Haqqanis, who also maintain links with the Pakistan Taliban, a separate group that has killed hundreds of Pakistani soldiers in recent years.

Islamabad has also aided the United States in its drone strikes against the Taliban and other militants by providing ground intelligence for the Americans, said Humayun of the Jinnah Institute, though officially Pakistan condemns the strikes because of civilian deaths.

While Pakistan pledged to dismantle militant networks on its territory, Pakistan’s special adviser on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, earlier this week told reporters in Islamabad that the only solution to the Afghan war was through peace talks.

Should the Haqqanis be pushed out of Pakistan and back into Afghanistan, Ghani’s government and Afghan forces would likely be overwhelmed, say analysts.

“I can’t imagine the Afghans would be able to take on the Haqqanis themselves,” Kugelman said. “I’m not sure they’d be able to take them on even with assistance from foreign combat forces.”

Pentagon Prepares For Real War Next Time, NOT More Organized Mass Slaughter

U.S. Army Is Getting Ready for Great Power War (Think Russia or China)

Kris Osborn

The Army is developing its weapons, technologies and platforms with a greater emphasis on being ready for great-power, mechanized force-on-force war in order maintain cross-the-board readiness and deter near-peer adversaries from unwanted aggression.

While the service aims to be prepared for any conceivable contingency, to include counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and hybrid-type conflicts, the Army has been shifting its focus from 15-years of counterinsurgency war and pivoting its weapons development toward major-power war.

“We are excellent at counterinsurgency,” Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson, Military Deputy, Assistant Secretary of the Army – Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, told Scout Warrior in an exclusive interview last month. “We’re developing systems to be prepared for the full range of potential conflict.”

As a high-level leader for the Army’s weapons, vehicle and platform developmental efforts, Williamson explained that some technologies are specifically being engineered with a mind toward positioning the service for the prospect of massive great-power conflict; this would include combat with mechanized forces, armored vehicles, long-range precision weapons, helicopter air support and what’s called a Combined Arms Maneuver approach.

Combined Arms Maneuver tactics use a variety of combat assets, such as artillery, infantry and armored vehicles such as tanks, in a synchronized, integrated fashion to overwhelm, confuse and destroy enemies.

(This piece first appeared in Scout Warrior here)

While the Army naturally does not expect or seek a particular conflict with near-peer nations like Russia and China, the service is indeed acutely aware of the rapid pace of their military modernization and aggressive activities.

As a result of its experience and skill with counterinsurgency fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army’s training, doctrine and weapons development is sharpening its focus on armored vehicles, long-range precision weapons and networking technologies to connect a force dispersed over a wide area of terrain.

Another key aspect of the Army’s future strategy is called Wide Area Security, an approached grounded in the recognition that large-scale mechanized forces will likely need to operate and maneuver across much wider swaths of terrain as has been the case in recent years. Having a dispersed force, fortified with long range sensors, armor protection, precision weapons and networking technologies, will strengthen the Army’s offensive approach and make its forces a more difficult, less aggregated target for enemies.

New High-Tech Army Platforms – JLTV & AMPV:

While the Army remains focused on being needed for counterinsurgency possibilities across the globe and hybrid-type wars involving groups of terrorists armed with conventional weapons and precision-guided missiles — the service is identifying, refining and integrated technologies with a specific mind to attacking enemies and protecting Soldiers in major-power war, Williamson explained.

Major, great-power war would likely present the need for massive air-ground coordination between drones, helicopters and ground vehicles, infantry and armored vehicle maneuver formations and long-range weapons and sensors. The idea is to be ready for enemies equipped with high-end, high-tech weapons such as long-range rocket, missile and air attack capabilities.

As evidence of this approach, Williamson pointed to some of the attributes of the Army’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, and Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle as platforms well-engineered for large-scale mechanized warfare.

The JLTV, for instance, is engineered with additional armor, speed, suspension, blast-protection and ground-clearance in order to withstand enemy fire, mines, IEDs and roadside bombs. These same protection technologies would also enable the vehicle to better withstand longer-range attacks from enemy armies far more capable than those encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vehicle is being built to, among other things, replace a large portion of the Army’s Humvee fleet.

The JLTV represents the next-generation of automotive technology in a number of key respects, such as the ability to design a light tactical, mobile vehicle with substantial protective ability to defend against a wide range of enemy attacks.

The vehicle is designed from the ground up to be mobile and operate with a level of underbody protection equivalent to the original MRAP-ATV (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected — All Terrain Vehicle) vehicle standards. Also, the vehicle is being designed with modular armor, so that when the armor is not needed we can take it off and bring the weight of the vehicle down to drive down the operating costs, Army officials have explained.

The modular armor approach gives the vehicle an A-kit and B-kit option, allowing the vehicle to integrate heavier armor should the war-threat require that.

With a curb weight of roughly 14,000 pounds, the JLTV will provide protection comparable to the 25,000-pound M-ATV, thus combining the mobility and transportability of a light vehicle with MRAP-level protection. The vehicle can reach speeds greater than 70-MPH.

The vehicle, made by Oshkosh Defense, is also built with a system called TAK-4i independent suspension designed to increase off-road mobility in rigorous terrain – a scenario quite likely should there be a major war. The JLTV is equipped with next-generation sensors and communications technologies to better enhance Soldiers’ knowledge of a surrounding, fast-moving dynamic combat situation.

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NATO Pushes To Upset the Status Quo In Georgia and Central Europe, Moving Major Assets To EU Frontline

[NATO Allies Preparing to Put Four Battalions at Eastern Border With Russia]

Noble Partner Equipment Offload–May 6, 2016

“The arrival and offload of U.S. Army Europe M1A2 main battle tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and other support vehicles and equipment at the Port of Poti, Georgia, in support of Exercise Noble Partner.”

Train full of Tanks in Houston Tx–May 3, 2016

“Second train this week”

6 May 201620:32

Comment by the Information and Press Department on US-Georgia military exercises

We paid attention to the large-scale preparations for Noble Partner 2016 US-Georgia military exercises that are to take place on May 11-26. Their declared goal is to train the Georgian Army for participation in the NATO Response Force and enhance Georgia’s territorial self-defence capability. The drills will include deployment of NATO member-states’ combat equipment in Georgia. Last year, infantry combat vehicles were deployed and now Abrams tanks have also been delivered by ferry from Bulgaria.

We regard this ongoing “exploration” of Georgia’s territory by NATO forces as a provocative step aimed at escalating the military and political situation in the South Caucasus. To a large extent, this is encouraged by Washington’s and its allies’ open connivance at Tbilisi’s revanchist ambitions.

The latest evidence of this was the recent public remarks by David Usupashvili, the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, who said that “while part of the country’s territory is occupied, the mission of the Georgian armed forces remains unfulfilled.” The Speaker believes that the key to fulfilling the mission is not only “the heroism of Georgian soldiers and officers” but also assistance from its partners, NATO member-states.

We would like to understand the meaning of these statements. Incidentally, they were made on May 4, the very day when US tanks were unloaded at the Poti sea port.

*****

04 May 2016

The Speaker, David Usupashvili participated in the event dedicated to the 25th anniversary of establishment of the Armed Forces of Georgia

“Let me congratulate you on behalf of the Parliament, all the political parties, majority, minority and the opposition, inasmuch as it is the day when the All Georgia is united and we all celebrate this wonderful day”.

As the Speaker stated, during 25 years, history of the country teemed with victories and success, though there were failures, tragedies and pains as well. The politicians, soldiers and the citizens still have to serve their solemn duty to the country. “These 25 years in our history was full of victories and success but unfortunately, we had failures, tragedies and pains as well. So, it is hard to be absolutely happy celebrating 25 years of the Armed Forces when the part of our country is still occupied. Our state is not united yet but this mission will further strengthen us all, filling us with inspiration and courage because our duty to our country is still to be paid by the politicians, soldiers and citizens. It is the greatest duty – defending our country, unification of our country and provision of peace in our country. 25 years are enough for Georgian state to proudly state that yes, we do have Armed Forces capable to implement its mission”.

“I would like to express particular gratitude to our friends and partners from various countries, NATO member states, without support of which we would not achieve the standards Georgian Armed Forces enjoy now. I believe cooperation with our partners will allow us solution of the tasks of the Armed Forces in Georgia and first of all the tasks that are protection of the country and own territories and peace in the world as we are the member of the community striving for peace”.

“Armed Forces played the crucial role in creation and enhancement of Georgian state and still continues to play this role. We celebrate this day with price as we see success of our soldiers and officers and at the same time note the problems still unsolved in Georgia – occupation of the part of our territories. And thus, the mission of Georgian Armed Forces and Georgian state is still to be accomplished but it will be accomplished for sure. We are hopeful due to heroism of our soldiers and officers, enhancement of our state and our partners, representatives of NATO member states. Together with this community, we will solve all the tasks in and out of the country. Once again, let me congratulate you with this day. I congratulate all the soldiers, their family members, veterans and every citizen”.