CIA, ISI intensify joint operations in Pakistan
Obama administration’s pressure on Pakistan military leadership is yielding some result, says a reliable source in Washington DC, as ISI and CIA are teaming-up to intensify operations in Baluchistan
A senior Pakistani official told us today that ISI and CIA have conducted over fifty joint operations recently. “These are very complex engagements. CIA and ISI depend on each other for not only success of these operations but to watch each other’s back,” official said stressing under the apparent tension – there is solid cooperation between two intelligence agencies.
Other Pakistani government officials complain that their army is overstretched and under- appreciated for handling vicious terrorists in Swat, South Waziristan and Orakzai.
Obama administration has sent several senior officials to Islamabad in past two weeks urging Pakistan to tackle North Waziristan and allow drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.
“We feel joint targeted operations are more successful in Balochistan. Drone attacks will be counterproductive,” said Pakistani official. He acknowledges that Obama administration is becoming more ‘demanding’ and has warned General Kayani that “you do it, or we will”.
A senior civilian adviser to America’s special forces commander in Afghanistan, Seth Jones in his New York Times article, Take the war to Pakistan, has argued that the Afghan war is “run and organized out of Balochistan” by the Quetta shura, a 15-man war council led by the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. “Virtually all significant meetings of the Taliban take place in that province, and many of the group’s senior leaders and military commanders are based there,” he said.
Pakistan army’s ‘secretive’ relations with American counterpart are no surprise.
During Musharaf’s tenure, according to a report in Guardian today, American Special Forces had conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas. A former NATO officer told Guardian that the incursions occurred between 2003 and 2008, and involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night.
“While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American “boots on the ground” is greeted with virulent condemnation,” Guardian claims.
This dynamics has changed. Pakistan Army does not want to allow drone attacks in Baluchistan and would rather conduct joint operations.
CIA-ISI relationship is extremely complex: on one hand we learn about how these two agencies are working together but through consistent leaks we are often told a different story – devoid of any semblance of trust.
US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida
Former Nato officer reveals secret night operations in border region which America kept quiet
American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.
A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.
"The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations.
Such operations are a matter of sensitivity in Pakistan. While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American "boots on the ground" is greeted with virulent condemnation.
After the only publicly acknowledged special forces raid in September 2008, Pakistan's foreign office condemned it as "a grave provocation" while the military threatened retaliatory action.
The military source said that was the fourth raid of previous years. Two of the others targeted Taliban and al-Qaida "high-value targets" near the border, while the third was to rescue a crashed Predator drone. He said that one of the capture raids succeeded, the other failed and the US sent elite soldiers to the downed Predator because they did not trust Pakistani forces. "People were afraid they would take the parts and reverse- engineer its components," he said.
The secretive nature of the raids underscores the suspicious nature of the relationship between the two allies as they argue about Washington's latest demands.
Disrupting the Taliban safe haven inside Pakistan is the unspoken part of Barack Obama's "surge" announced this month. Although 30,000 troops will be deployed to Afghanistan by next summer, the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership is believed to be sheltering on the Pakistani side of the 1,600-mile border.
In recent weeks Washington has sent a stream of senior officials to Islamabad seeking Pakistani action on at least two fronts: attacks on Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord with strong al-Qaida ties based in North Waziristan, and an expansion of the CIA-led drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.
"This is crunch time," said a senior Pakistani official. "The tone of the Obama administration is growing more ominous. The message is 'you do it, or we will'."
In a recent New York Times article titled Take the war to Pakistan, Seth Jones, a senior civilian adviser to America's special forces commander in Afghanistan, said the Afghan war was "run and organised out of Balochistan" by the Quetta shura, a 15-man war council led by the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. "Virtually all significant meetings of the Taliban take place in that province, and many of the group's senior leaders and military commanders are based there," he said.
The US demands have drawn an angry reaction from Pakistan's military. A senior official with the ISI, Pakistan's premier spy agency, said it was hunting the Taliban in Balochistan, citing 60 joint operations between the CIA and ISI in the province over the past year. "They are going in for kills, they are apprehending people. CIA and ISI operatives depend on each other for their lives in these operations," he said. The official, who spoke anonymously but with official sanction, said Pakistan's military were overstretched. "We can't fight everywhere at once," he said. Since October the army has been at war in South Waziristan, stronghold of the "Pakistani Taliban" whose suicide bombers have killed more than 500 people in cities over the past two months.
US generals say the army is playing a "double game", turning a blind eye to "Afghan Taliban" sheltering in Balochistan because it considers them strategic assets as part of a wider gambit to check Indian influence in Afghanistan.
The ISI official denied such links and accused the US of "scapegoating" Pakistan for its own failures. "During the past year there has been zilch actionable intelligence about the Quetta shura or Haqqani," he said. "If they are so sure Mullah Omar is in Quetta or Karachi, why don't they tell us where he is?"
The CIA declined to comment. "We don't as a rule comment on the agency's relationship with foreign partners or on reports of our operational activities," it said.
The aggressive American approach to Balochistan contrasts with the low-key British tone, despite the fact Balochistan lies across the border from Helmand, where 9,000 British troops are fighting the Taliban.
A British official said the government was reluctant to publicly criticise Pakistan for fear of endangering the relationship between MI6 and ISI in tracking suspected extremists moving between Britain and Pakistan. "That's our priority. It's a matter of national security," he said.
But SAS soldiers have been active in the province. The former Nato officer said SAS units were active in Balochistan in 2002, 2003 and possibly beyond, attacking drug traffickers. "It was of strategic concern to the UK at the time," he said. Until now the US has heeded Pakistani objections to drone strikes in Balochistan. But that could change, if troop casualties mount, a former senior US official warned. "We could get tired and say 'you know what, we are sending in Predators to take out Mullah Omar and his gang in Quetta'. And then we'll see what happens."
Why Does Pakistan Hate the United States?
Because it is dependent on us.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 21, 2009, at 11:43 AM ET
Vice President Joe BidenGive credit to the vice president: He really does enjoy politics and "can't see a room without working it," as a colleague of mine half-admiringly remarked last Wednesday morning. We were waiting to enter the studio and comment after Biden had finished his interview with the Scarborough/Brzezinski team, in which the main topic was Afghanistan. Exiting, he chose to stop and talk to each of us. Not wanting to waste a chance to be a bore on the subject, I asked him why he had mentioned India only once in the course of his remarks. Right away Biden managed the trick—several good politicians have mastered this—of reacting as if the question had been his own idea. Of course, he said, it was vexing that Pakistan preferred to keep its best troops on the border with India (our friend) rather than redeploying them to FATA—the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas—where they could be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida (our enemy). My flesh was pressed, and it was on to the next. The newspapers that morning revealed that Pakistani authorities showed no interest in apprehending a Taliban leader in Afghanistan whom they considered an important asset. The newspapers the following morning reported that Pakistan was refusing to extend the visas to U.S. Embassy and other American personnel, resulting in a gradual paralysis of everything from intelligence-gathering to the maintenance of helicopters.
Several questions arise from this. The first: Who is in charge of policy in the area? When some hard words had to be spoken to President Hamid Karzai about the dire and ramshackle nature of his regime, it was the vice president who drew the job of delivering them. For the rest of the time, the Af-Pak dimension is supposedly overseen by Richard Holbrooke, who seems lately to show some outward signs of discontent. Yet on one day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may appear on the tarmac at Kabul or Islamabad. On another it will be Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or the CIA or any number of a series of generals. If this is really a "team of rivals," it doesn't seem to have had the effect of clarifying policy differences by debate. It looks more like one damn thing after another.
The next question is a version of an older one. Why do the Pakistanis hate us? We need not ask this in a plaintive tone of "after all we've done for them," but it is an apparent conundrum nonetheless. The United States made Pakistan a top-priority Cold War ally. It overlooked the regular interventions of its military into politics. It paid a lot of bills and didn't ask too many questions. It generally favored Pakistan over India, which was regarded as dangerously "neutralist" in those days, and during the Bangladesh war it closed its eyes to a genocide against the Muslim population of East Bengal. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington fed the Pakistani military and intelligence services from an overflowing teat and allowed them to acquire nuclear weapons on the side.
This, then, is why the Pakistani elite hates the United States. It hates it because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli right-wingers, as well.) By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy. Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbor.
This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased. It's not possible to found a working, trusting, fighting alliance on such a basis. Under communism, the factory workers of Eastern Europe had a joke: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." In this instance, the Pakistanis don't even pretend that their main military thrust is directed against the common foe, but we do continue to pay them. If we only knew it, the true humiliation and indignity is ours, not theirs.
This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don't have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn't based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world's largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.
One reason the Pakistani army coddles the Taliban in Afghanistan is because it has recently been told that the United States will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer. Who can blame them for basing their future plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for? Meanwhile, though, it is the Afghans who get the lectures about how they need to shape up. "Lots of luck in your senior year" was the breezy way in which the vice president phrased his message to Kabul as I watched. (I wonder how that translates into Pushtun.) Speed the day when the Pakistanis are publicly addressed in the same tones and told that the support they so much despise is finally being withdrawn.
