Elvis wrote:8bitagent wrote:I remember the days when saying Pakistan was in bed with the Taliban and al qaeda was conspiracy truther stuff, now all the sudden its headline news used as propaganda to propegate future conflicts.
The New Yorker (hardly a truther rag) has covered that to a fair extent going back to 1998 or so. If you go to
newyorker.com and use their search function you'll find
some of the pertinent stuff.
The first New Yorker article concerning Pakistan and the Taliban etc. that came to my mind today was one from not long after 9/11, about Hamid Gul, among other things, that featured a big photo of him (he told the writer the Jews did it). So I searched it on their site today but it didn't come up. Curious, I thought. (Now I'll have to dig through my past print issues to find it; a nightmare---random piles of them are stashed everywhere around my place).
Anyway, my "New Yorker"+"Hamid Gul" Google search did yield still-active links to old New Yorker articles containing "Hamid Gul"---links that do not come up in The New Yorker's own internal search engine (even more curious?)---on
historycommons.org, namely in the 9/11 Timeline. So try History Commons for links to articles about Pakistan and the Taliban, Hamid Gul etc.
(I could have overlooked it but still didn't find the article I set out to find. If I find the hard copy I'll scan & post it. It's always interesting to go back to these things in the light of new developments and the accompanying spin.)
In a more recent New Yorker article about US-Pakistani relations, a Pakistani official said that if there was a popularity poll in Pakistan today, the US would score lower than
India---the gist being they
rilly resent US bullying.
(PS I'd get some links for y'all myself but am burned out on that search for today...plus I *should* be working)
And this is a surprise?
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Afghanistan: Who's the Enemy Here?
Jul. 13, 2003
History keeps repeating itself in Afghanistan. In December 2001, when the allies encircled al-Qaeda's craggy mountain retreat of Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden and his cronies slipped away, leaving foot soldiers as decoys for the bunker busters and special-ops bullets. Last month another opportunity to round up al-Qaeda terrorists was botched — this time by fighting among U.S. allies. Afghan fighters and some 2,000 Pakistani troops deployed to help hunt down al-Qaeda holdovers not far from Tora Bora instead turned their weapons on one another. By the time things calmed down, two weeks later, any terrorists there had slipped away.
The U.S. had pushed Pakistan for months to launch this operation. Military intelligence suggested that a dozen terrorists — possibly including bin Laden — might be holed up in the feisty Mohmand tribe's mountain stronghold, which straddles the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The plan was to have the Pakistanis sweep into the tribal area while U.S. troops sealed off the Afghan side, trapping the terrorists. Things went awry when Mohmand tribesmen and Afghan fighters supporting the U.S. forces attacked the Pakistani soldiers. The Pakistanis, unsurprisingly, shot back. All together a dozen were killed or injured, and the U.S. was left to referee a nasty diplomatic donnybrook between key allies.
The two nations' animosity runs deep. Historical grievances about Pakistan's former sponsorship of the Taliban, and more recent ones over what Kabul claims are Pakistani incursions into its territory, played into the hostilities. A mob of Afghans furious about the alleged incursions trashed the Pakistani embassy in Kabul last week. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is vexed by the refuge Taliban leaders have found in Pakistan's northwestern provinces. "The Afghans are convinced that the Pakistanis know where these Taliban leaders are — but they won't catch them," a diplomat explains. It was only after Karzai and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf spoke on the telephone last Thursday — prompted by U.S. pressure, say diplomats — that the border crisis was defused. According to sources in Kabul and Islamabad, military operations against suspected al-Qaeda hideouts have resumed.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030721-464465,00.html------
Officials deny bin Laden
escaped November captureby J.S. Newton, Fayetteville Observer, 2 August 2002
A Special Forces soldier says that troops had Osama bin Laden pinpointed in Afghanistan in November, but leaders took too long to decide to go after him and he slipped away.
Military officials have discounted the story.
The soldier, who said he was on the ground at Tora Bora when bin Laden was located, agreed to talk about the incident on condition that his name not be used.
The Observer has been unable to find other soldiers who can corroborate his account, and official military spokesmen say they have no knowledge of it.
Reporters are rarely permitted to accompany special operations troops into battle, so verification of battlefield accounts can be difficult.
But the story is consistent with previous reports from other sources that bin Laden was seen in the Tora Bora cave complex. American and Afghan troops spent weeks attacking and searching the caves late last year in the hunt for bin Laden and al-Qaida terrorists.
"We had `the man' and lost him," said the Special Forces soldier. "We knew the exact cave he was in and had the coordinates. It was 30 minutes away from our position. But we couldn't get orders quickly enough."
Following the operation, military leaders were criticized in the press and in Congress for allowing hundreds of al-Qaida members to escape into Pakistan.
On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the region, acknowledged that many al-Qaida members had escaped the assault on Tora Bora. Franks was testifying before a Senate Armed Service Committee examining the hunt for the terrorists.
Exact location
According to the soldier who believes bin Laden could have been captured, teams from the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Ky. -- working alongside members of the Central Intelligence Agency -- believe they had the location of the terrorist leader on Nov. 28.
Intelligence reports placed bin Laden in an elaborate cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The soldier said bin Laden's captured cook had told American military officials bin Laden's exact location.
But a Special Forces team captain on the ground would not give approval to go after bin Laden because there was no specific mission order to do so, the soldier said.
While the Army was deciding what to do, Special Forces soldiers saw two Russian-made helicopters fly into the area where bin Laden was believed to be, load up passengers and fly toward Pakistan.
"I said, `There he goes,'" the soldier said.According to a story published Dec. 5 in Newsday, bin Laden had reportedly been spotted in the Tora Bora area in late November.
The story quoted an Afghan official, Hazrat Ali, chief of security forces in the area. But the story did not say that bin Laden's location was pinpointed, and no other published reports have confirmed the soldier's story.
Central Command
The U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, which oversees Special Forces units, referred all questions about the soldier's account to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla. The Central Command is running the war in Afghanistan.
Officials at Central Command said that had they confirmed bin Laden's location, they would certainly have acted.
"That's the first I ever heard of it," said Air Force Lt. Col. Martin Compton, a Central Command spokesman. "We have never acknowledged anything like that."
Compton said he doubts the report.
"The bottom line is we have never acknowledged we have had that kind of accuracy to where he is," he said.
U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican who serves on the House Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism, said House investigators are looking into the time it takes U.S. forces to react to credible intelligence reports.
He said it can be frustrating, and potentially life-threatening, when the military takes too long to make critical decisions.
And he said he would be disappointed if the military missed bin Laden because key decision-makers failed to act in time.
"I would say anything is possible," he said. "I would certainly hope there was more to it to see than the soldier was able to see from his vantage point."
Hayes said he would investigate the issue.
"It certainly is not something that needs to be kept under wraps," he said. "It needs to be investigated. ... It's very troubling. I think we need to follow up at it."
But Rep. Mike McIntyre's spokesman, Dean Mitchell, who is also on the House terrorism panel, said the soldier's account does not match any reports he has heard.
"We've not heard of this situation with Osama," Mitchell said.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has also said that American troops have never had good enough intelligence about bin Laden's location to go after him.
In an Associated Press story in April, Rumsfeld said there had been speculation about where bin Laden was, but the pieces of information "haven't been actionable, they haven't been provable, they haven't resulted in our ability to track something down and actually do something about it."
On Wednesday, Rumsfeld was criticized at the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing by Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat from Georgia, for not doing a better job of tracking down bin Laden.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. campaign has been successful so far in devastating the al-Qaida terrorist network's ability to carry out further attacks.
"You can be frustrated if you want, I'm not," Rumsfeld said.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/OdbLeNc.html
