US preparing for withdrawal from Afghanistan (Credit: businessinsider.com)WASHINGTON, Sept 13: Pentagon officials are holding talks in Afghanistan on the withdrawal of US military equipment from the country, officials said Friday, as Washington hopes to lower the cost of the massive operation.
American forces are having to fly out large amounts of gear at great expense but defense officials would like to move more vehicles and equipment over cheaper land routes through Pakistan, officials said.
With the US military’s drawdown underway and set to finish by the end of 2014, about 20 percent of the cargo is currently being withdrawn through the overland route across the Pakistan border.
But officials say they would prefer to have 60 percent of all materiel move over land instead of by air.
Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter and other senior officials arrived in Kabul earlier Friday and the equipment withdrawal, or “retrograde,” will feature prominently in their discussions, officials said.
Carter will seek to “assess the continued progress on retrograde efforts,” a defense official said.
The Afghan government shut the border earlier this year in a dispute over what the US military should pay for withdrawing its gear, with Kabul insisting the Americans owed up to $70 million in customs fines.
Washington has maintained the military equipment came into the country legally and refused to pay the fees. Afghan authorities eventually reopened the border.
Asked about the dispute, a senior Pentagon official told reporters: “We think we’ve resolved that.”
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon was pleased with the pace of movement on the Pakistan route since April and hoped that the share of cargo moving on the supply line would expand soon from 20 to 30 percent.
Unlike the American departure from Iraq, the withdrawal of US military equipment from Afghanistan represents a daunting logistical problem in a landlocked nation with unreliable roads and mountainous terrain.
By 2015, the United States must remove about 24,000 vehicles and the equivalent of roughly 20,000 shipping containers.
Other equipment deemed not to be worth taking out is being donated to the Afghan government, passed on to NATO allies willing to cover the transport costs, or destroyed.
The cost of the effort is estimated to range from $5 billion to $7 billion, but how much of the gear is ferried out by land will affect the final price tag, officials said.
Since April, about half of all cargo has been taken out by aircraft to ports in the Middle East, and then shipped back to the United States. And roughly 28 percent of the equipment is flown all the way from Afghanistan to the United States.
Weapons and other sensitive items have to be ferried by air, but the percentage moving over land could increase if “administrative” procedures were cleared up on the Afghan side of the border, officials said.
The United States has 55,000 troops in Afghanistan and plans to withdraw the bulk of combat forces by the end of 2014. US officials are negotiating an agreement with Kabul to keep a smaller force in place beyond 2014.)
GILGIT, Aug 8: Security forces intensified search on Wednesday for militants of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan in the remote northern town of Chilas, headquarters of the Diamer district, after the killing of three high-profile security officials in the area the previous day. The TTP had claimed responsibility for the shooting.
The slain officials — an army colonel, a captain and a senior superintendent of police (SSP) — were investigating the June 23 killing of nine foreign tourists and one of their Pakistani guides in the area.
Victims of the mountain assault included climbers from China, Lithuania, Nepal, Slovakia, Ukraine and one person with joint US-Chinese citizenship. One Chinese climber had escaped the attack.
“We are at present engaged in a search operation against murderers and are very much hopeful of arresting them soon because 14 suspects have already been taken into custody and are being interrogated,” Ali Sher, Deputy Inspector General of Police who is heading the operation in the area, told Dawn.
Police said hideouts of Taliban were being raided.
Law-enforcement agencies, backed by Pakistan Army, have sealed all entry and exit points of the small town which has a population of 40,000. The town is visited by people of the entire district for different purposes.
The police official said that a rally was also held in the area to condemn the murder of the security officials.
People of the area were in a state of shock and an air of gloom and fear enveloped the area because of the rising number of acts of terror which were previously unknown to them.
The DIG said the entire populace of the area should not be linked with terrorism as this would bring nothing but destruction.
Mr Sher pointed towards activists of banned outfits, but did not say which organisation is behind the attack.
“They (militants) have undergone training at various places and are now totally brainwashed,” he said, adding that they could only be stopped if a political solution was found out.
He said that some possible attacks on other police officials were foiled after a tip-off.
“We arrested a man along with weapons who was trying to kill a superintendent of police in Astore and another in Gilgit. Both are now behind bars and they have confessed before courts. Their cases are being heard,” Mr Sher said.
He said hundreds of houses had already been searched to arrest militants wanted by police.
“Do you know I was also a target in some other areas, but Allah Almighty saved me, but the SSP fell victim,” he said.
The DIG spoke kindly about the people of Diamer, saying they had nothing to do with acts of terrorism, but some hidden powers wanted them in the arena.
Kerry meets Sharif (Credit: tribune.com.pk)ISLAMABAD, Aug 1 — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Pakistani counterpart, Sartaj Aziz, said Thursday that the two countries will resume high-level negotiations over security issues.
Kerry also said he had invited Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, to come to Washington to meet with President Barack Obama.
“I’m pleased to announce that today, very quickly, we were able to agree to a resumption of the strategic dialogue in order to foster a deeper, broader and more comprehensive partnership between our countries,” Kerry said at a press conference with Aziz in Islamabad.
He said the talks will cover “all of the key issues between us, from border management to counterterrorism to promoting U.S. private investment and to Pakistan’s own journey to economic revitalization.”
The U.S. and Pakistan launched high-level talks on a wide swath of security and development programs in 2010. But the talks stalled in November 2011 after U.S. airstrikes on a Pakistani post on the Afghan border accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Even before that, the bilateral relationship was severely damaged by a variety of incidents, including a CIA contractor shooting to death two Pakistanis in the eastern city of Lahore and the covert U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistani town of Abbottabad.
The resumption of the strategic dialogue indicates that the relationship between the two countries has improved since that low point. But there is still significant tension and mistrust between the two countries, especially regarding U.S. drone strikes and Pakistan’s alleged ties with Taliban militants using its territory to launch cross-border attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.
“It is also no secret that along this journey in the last few years we’ve experienced a few differences,” Kerry said. “I think we came here today, both the prime minister and myself, with a commitment that we cannot allow events that might divide us in a small way to distract from the common values and the common interests that unite us in big ways.”
Kerry was also asked about progress on a bilateral security agreement with Afghanistan that would keep some U.S. forces in that country after 2014.
“I am personally confident that we will have an agreement, and the agreement will be timely,” he replied. “And I am confident that the president has ample space here within which to make any decisions he wants to make regarding future troop levels.”
While this is Kerry’s first visit to Islamabad as secretary of state, he has a long history of dealing with Pakistan as former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sharif described him as “a wonderful friend,” and Kerry said, “I have had the pleasure of visiting (Sharif’s) home and having a number of meals with him.”
Before heading into a closed-door meeting, Sharif asked Kerry about his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was hospitalized after a seizure last month.
“She’s doing better,” Kerry said.
Sharif came to power in an election that marked the first time in Pakistan that a civilian government completed its full five-year term and transferred power in democratic elections. The country has a history of civilian leaders being overthrown in military coups.
“This is a historic transition that just took place,” Kerry told U.S. Embassy employees. “Nobody should diminish it.”
Senior administration officials traveling with Kerry told reporters that while relations with Pakistan have grown touchy in recent years, there is the prospect of resetting those ties with Sharif’s government and working together on major issues – counterterrorism, energy, regional stability, economic reforms, trade and investment. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss Kerry’s agenda.
The U.S. wants to help strengthen the role of the civilian government in Pakistan, where the military long has been dominant, and wants Sharif to tackle rising extremist attacks inside his country.
The prison break this week that freed hundreds of inmates raises serious questions about Pakistan’s ability to battle an insurgency that has raged for years and killed tens of thousands. Suspected Islamic militants killed at least 160 people during the new government’s first month in office. Sharif’s government has not articulated an alternate strategy.
The U.S. also wants Pakistan to pressure leaders of the Afghan Taliban to negotiate with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government, renounce violence and sever ties with al-Qaida.
Officials in neighboring Afghanistan are demanding that Pakistan dismantle extremists’ havens inside Pakistan and push the Taliban to join the peace process. Both the U.S. and Afghanistan say that if attacks are allowed to continue, the region will never become stable. Pakistani officials say they do not control the Taliban, but Karzai’s government isn’t convinced.
Drone strikes are another point of contention.
Washington says it needs to attack dangerous militants with drones because Pakistan’s government refuses to engage them militarily. Pakistan contends the drone strikes are a fresh violation of its sovereignty, and they have increased widespread anti-American sentiment in the country.
The United States has reduced the number of drone attacks against militants in Pakistan and limited strikes to top targets. These moves appear to have appeased Pakistan’s generals for now, U.S. officials said. But some officials worry about pushback from the new civilian officials, including Sharif, who wants the attacks ended.
There have been 16 drone strikes in Pakistan this year, compared with a peak of 122 in 2010, 73 in 2011 and 48 in 2012, according to the New America Foundation, a U.S.-based think tank.
After Kerry wraps up his meetings in Islamabad, he is scheduled to fly to London. The State Department said he will meet there with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan to discuss Egypt, Syria and Middle East peace.
___
Associated Press writer Sebastian Abbot contributed to this report.
CIA closing bases (nytimes.com)Washington, July 24: The CIA has begun closing clandestine bases in Afghanistan, marking the start of a drawdown from a region that transformed the agency from an intelligence service struggling to emerge from the Cold War to a counter¬terrorism force with its own prisons, paramilitary teams and armed Predator drones.
The pullback represents a turning point for the CIA as it shifts resources to other trouble spots. The closures were described by U.S officials as preliminary steps in a plan to reduce the number of CIA installations in Afghanistan from a dozen to as few as six over the next two years — a consolidation to coincide with the withdrawal of most U.S. military forces from the country by the end of 2014.
Senior U.S. intelligence and administration officials said the reductions are overdue in a region where U.S. espionage efforts are now seen as out of proportion to the threat posed by al-Qaeda’s diminished core leadership in Pakistan.
The CIA faces an array of new challenges beyond al-Qaeda, such as monitoring developments in the Middle East and delivering weapons to rebels in Syria. John O. Brennan, the recently installed CIA director, has also signaled a desire to restore the agency’s focus on traditional espionage.
“When we look at post-2014, how does the threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan measure against the threat in North Africa and Yemen?” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss government deliberations. “Shouldn’t our resources reflect that?”
U.S. officials stressed that the CIA is expected to maintain a significant footprint even after the pullback, with a station in Kabul that will remain among the agency’s largest in the world, as well as a fleet of armed drones that will continue to patrol Pakistan’s tribal belt.
The timing and scope of the CIA’s pullback are still being determined and depend to some extent on how many U.S. troops President Obama decides to keep in the country after 2014. The administration is expected to reduce the number from 63,000 now to about 10,000 after next year but recently signaled that it is also considering a “zero option,” in part because of mounting frustration with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The CIA may be in a unique position to negotiate with Karzai, who has publicly acknowledged accepting bags of money from the agency for years. The CIA also has provided much of the budget and training for the Afghan intelligence service. The agency wants to maintain the strength of those ties.
Even so, a full withdrawal of U.S. troops would probably trigger a deeper retrenchment by the CIA, which has relied on U.S. and allied military installations across the country to serve as bases for agency operatives and cover for their spying operations. The CIA’s armed drones are flown from a heavily fortified airstrip near the Pakistan border in Jalalabad.
The CIA’s presence in the country has already dropped well below the peak levels of several years ago, when more than 1,000 case officers, analysts and other employees had been deployed to support the war effort and hunt al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
The CIA declined to comment on the withdrawal plans.
“Afghanistan fundamentally changed the way the agency conducts business,” said Richard Blee, who served as the CIA’s senior officer in Afghanistan and Pakistan before he retired in 2007. “We went from a purely espionage organization to more of an offensive weapon, a paramilitary organization where classic spying was less important.”
Some of the bases being closed served as important intelligence-gathering nodes during the escalation of the agency’s drone campaign, raising the risk that U.S. counterterrorism capabilities could deteriorate and perhaps allow remnants of al-Qaeda to regenerate.
U.S. officials played down that danger. “There’s an inherent imbalance,” the administration official said. “The effectiveness of our operations has reduced the threat to the point that it’s entirely appropriate that we have a smaller counterterrorism footprint.”
White House officials have been weighing a shift of some of those resources to other regions, including Yemen and North Africa, where al-Qaeda affiliates are now seen as more dangerous than the network’s base. The White House discussions have been part of the overall deliberations over U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan.
The CIA drawdown coincides with Afghanistan-related personnel moves. The agency recently appointed a new station chief in Kabul, a selection that raised eyebrows among some because the veteran officer is known mainly for his tours in Latin America and had not previously served in Afghanistan.
The top military post at CIA headquarters is also changing hands. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Tony Thomas, who was in charge of Special Operations units in Afghanistan, is set to begin serving as associate CIA director for military support in September, replacing an Air Force general with drone expertise.
Current and former U.S. officials familiar with the agency’s plans said they call for pulling most agency personnel back to the CIA’s main station in Kabul, plus a group of large regional bases — known as the “big five” — in Bagram, Kandahar, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad and Herat.
“The footprint being designed involves six bases and some satellite [locations] out of those,” said a former senior CIA officer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. The agency may also rely on “mobile stations” in which a small number of operatives move temporarily into remote locations “where they trust the tribal network,” the former officer said. “Protection issues are going to be critical.”
The base closures involve compounds along the Pakistan border, part of a constellation used by CIA operatives and analysts to identify drone targets in Pakistan. The bases, including locations in the provinces of Zabul, Paktika and Khost, have relied heavily on U.S. military and medical evacuation capabilities and were often near larger military outposts.
Among them is Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, where seven CIA employees were killed by a suicide bomber posing as a potential informant in 2009. It is unclear whether the CIA will pull its personnel out of Chapman, which remained active even after that attack.
Administration deliberations over troop levels could also determine where the agency operates its drones. During the early years of the campaign, the aircraft were flown from Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan, but the agency moved most of its fleet to Jalalabad as public opposition to strikes mounted in Pakistan and relations with the government broke down.
The tempo of the CIA’s drone campaign has already tapered off. The 17 strikes this year in Pakistan are far off the peak pace of 2010, when there were 117 strikes, according to the Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks drone attacks. Over the past decade, the campaign has killed as many as 3,000 militants and dozens if not hundreds of civilians, according to independent estimates.
U.S. officials said that preferred troop-level options would allow U.S. forces to remain at Jalalabad, in part so that the CIA’s flights could continue. But officials said the drones could also be shifted to airstrips at Bagram or Kandahar. The latter has already served as a base for stealth drones used to conduct secret surveillance flights during the bin Laden raid and over Iran.
This year, President Obama approved new counterterrorism guidelines that call for the military to take on a larger role in targeted killing operations, reducing the involvement of the CIA.
But the guidelines included carve-outs that gave the agency wide latitude to continue armed Predator flights across the border and did not ban a controversial practice known as “signature strikes,” in which the agency can launch missiles at targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior without knowing the identities of those who would be killed.
The senior Obama administration official said the United States may propose a shift to military drone flights inside Pakistan as part of the discussions with Afghanistan and Islamabad over U.S. troop levels.
The negotiations are seen as the “one shot you have” to raise the issue, the official said, adding that it was doubtful but “not impossible” that Pakistan would consent. Islamabad has never formally acknowledged its cooperation on the drone program and is seen as unlikely to allow a covert — if not exactly secret — CIA operation to give way to an overt campaign involving U.S. military flights.
Despite the pullout of U.S. troops and CIA operatives, officials said the drone campaign in Pakistan and elsewhere is expected to continue for years. Mike Sheehan, the assistant defense secretary for Special Operations, testified recently that such counterterrorism operations will probably last an additional 10 years or more.
The administration official said others believe the end is closer. The strikes will probably last “some period of years,” the official said. “But I don’t think you can project out five or 10.”
KARACHI, Pakistan — Usman, who limps on a leg bowed by the polio he caught as a child, made sure that his first three children were protected from the disease, but he turned away vaccinators when his youngest was born.
He was furious that the Central Intelligence Agency, in its hunt for Osama bin Laden, had staged a fake vaccination campaign, and infuriated by American drone strikes, one of which, he said, had struck the son of a man he knew, blowing off his head. He had come to see the war on polio, the longest, most expensive disease eradication effort in history, as a Western plot.
In January, his 2-year-old son, Musharaf, became the first child worldwide to be crippled by polio this year.
“I know now I made a mistake,” said Usman, 32, who, like many in his Pashtun tribe, uses only one name. “But you Americans have caused pain in my community. Americans pay for the polio campaign, and that’s good. But you abused a humanitarian mission for a military purpose.”
Anger like his over American foreign policy has led to a disastrous setback for the global effort against polio. In December, nine vaccinators were shot dead here, and two Taliban commanders banned vaccination in their areas, saying the vaccinations could resume only if drone strikes ended. In January, 10 vaccinators were killed in Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north.
Since then, there have been isolated killings — of an activist, a police officer and vaccinators — each of which has temporarily halted the campaign.
The war on polio, which costs $1 billion a year and is expected to take at least five more years, hangs in the balance. When it began 25 years ago, 350,000 people a year, mostly children, were paralyzed. Last year, fewer than 250 were, and only three countries — Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan — have never halted its spread at any point.
While some experts fear the killings will devastate the effort here, Pakistan’s government insists that they will not, and has taken steps to ensure that. Vaccinators’ pay was raised to $5 a day in the most dangerous areas, police and army escorts were increased and control rooms were created to speed crisis responses.
But the real urgency to finish the job began earlier, for a very different reason. Two years ago, India, Pakistan’s rival in everything from nuclear weapons to cricket, eliminated polio.
“Nothing wounded our pride as much as that,” said Dr. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, a vaccine expert at Aga Khan University’s medical school.
Bill Gates, who is the campaign’s largest private donor and calls beating the disease “the big thing I spend the majority of my time on,” said that Pakistan’s desire to not be further humiliated “is our biggest asset.”
After India’s success and hints from the World Health Organization that it might issue travel warnings, Pakistan’s government went on an emergency footing. A cabinet-level “polio cell” was created. Vaccinators’ routine pay doubled to $2.50. More than 1,000 “mobilizers” were hired to visit schools and mosques to counter the ever-swirling rumors that the vaccine contained pork, birth control hormones or H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
Mullahs were courted to endorse vaccination. They issued 24 fatwas, and glossy booklets of their directives were printed for vaccinators to carry.
Perhaps most important, local command was given to deputy commissioners, who have police powers that health officials lack.
Pakistan is closer than ever. Although cases will not peak until after the summer monsoons, there have been only 21 so far this year. A few years ago, 39 substrains of the polio virus circulated; now only two do. About 300,000 children live in areas too dangerous for vaccinators, but almost all the sewage samples from those areas are clear of the virus.
Ultimately, though, success will depend on more than political will and the rivalry with India. In the wake of the recent killings, it will rely most of all on individual acts of courage, like those by prominent imams who pose for pictures as they vaccinate children.
Or by Usman, who appeared with his polio-stricken son, Musharaf, in a fund-raising video asking rich Persian Gulf nations to buy vaccines for poor Muslims elsewhere.
Or by volunteers, like the women of the Bibi family, in Karachi, who formed a vaccination team. Two of them, Madiha, 18, and Fahmida, 46, were gunned down in December. Television news showed female relatives keening over their bodies. Not only are those women still vaccinating, but Madiha’s 15-year-old sister also volunteered for her spot.
“All the children of Pakistan are our children,” said Gulnaz Shirazee, 31, who leads the team. “It’s up to us to eradicate polio. We can’t stop. If we’re too afraid, then who will do it?”
A Moving Target
If there is one spot on earth where polio may make its last stand, it is a cramped slum called Shaheen Muslim Town No. 1 in Peshawar, a hotbed of anti-Western militancy. Since sampling began, its sewers have never tested negative for the virus.
It is a neighborhood of migrant Pashtun families who rent rooms briefly and move on, looking for menial jobs picking fruit or making bricks. On a recent sunny afternoon, its alleys were full of carts drawn by donkeys whose faces were decorated with the red prints of hands dipped in henna. Many women wore the full burqa popular in Afghanistan.
In this part of the world, virtually all those with polio are from the Pashtun tribe, in which resistance to vaccination is highest. It is Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group and the wellspring of the Taliban, but a minority in Pakistan. Pakistani Army sweeps and American drone strikes have driven many Pashtuns from their mountain valleys into crowded cities.
Peshawar worries even Dr. Elias Durry, a normally optimistic polio specialist with the W.H.O. “You can get 90 percent vaccine coverage, and come back a few months later, and it’s 50 percent,” he said. “People just move so quickly.”
Shaheen’s sewers are concrete trenches about a foot deep, into which wastewater, rendered milky white by dish soap, flows from pipes exiting mud-brick houses. A child reaching into one for a stick to play with showed how easily the virus, carried in fecal matter, could spread.
Though the area has clean water from a well, the steel pipe it flows through at times dips inside the sewerage trench. It has dents where trucks have banged it, and it is pierced by connectors, some attached just to rubber hoses.
“Piped water with sewage mixed in is worse than no piped water,” said Dr. Bhutta of Aga Khan. “Sometimes rural populations have it better. They carry water from the river, and they defecate in open fields, so there’s no mixing.”
Pakistani children suffer diarrhea so often that half the country’s young are stunted by it. Polio immunity is low, even in vaccinated children, because other viruses crowd the gut receptors to which the vaccine should attach.
At the clinic in Shaheen, the doctor running the polio drive, an ophthalmologist, complained that he got too little police help.
“I have 28 teams, so I requested 56 constables,” he said. “I was given 12.”
He said the underpaid officers inevitably knocked off at midday because their station house serves a hot meal.
The same problem was echoed in Gadap Town, a Karachi neighborhood where vaccinators were killed in December. As a team worked its way from house to house with a reporter, it had every reason to feel secure: because the visit was arranged by an official, six officers with AK-47s came along.
But another team passing by was guarded only by an aged sergeant with a cudgel.
“Yes, we have a security problem,” Dr. Syed Ali, a local official, said quietly on a side street. “What is a stick in front of a gun?”
The isolation and poverty of the Pashtun tribe underlie its resistance. Many of its imams are from Islam’s fundamentalist Deobandi sect, which emerged in the 19th century as a reaction to the British conquest.
Many Pashtun neighborhoods receive few government services like health clinics, paved streets or garbage pickup, but get shiny new billboards trumpeting the polio fight paid for by Western donors.
“People tell us, ‘We need schools, we need roads, we need housing, and all you bring our children is polio, polio, polio,’ ” said Madiha, a black-veiled Gadap vaccinator.
In the middle of last year, it became known that in 2011, the C.I.A. had paid a local doctor to try to get DNA samples from children inside an Abbottabad compound to prove they were related to Bin Laden.
Even though the doctor, Shakil Afridi, who is now serving a 33-year sentence for treason, was offering a hepatitis vaccine, anger turned against polio drops.
Leaders of the polio eradication effort could not have been more frustrated. They were already fighting new rumors that vaccinators were helping set drone targets because they have practices like marking homes with chalk so that follow-up teams can find them. Now, after years of reassuring nervous families that the teams were not part of a C.I.A. plot, here was proof that one was.
“It was a huge, stupid mistake,” Dr. Bhutta said.
Anger deepened when American lawmakers called Dr. Afridi a hero and threatened to cut off aid if he was not released. The W.H.O. and the Unicef, afraid of offending the United States, did not protest publicly. Unicef’s executive director, Anthony Lake, is a former White House national security adviser, which put the agency in an awkward position, an agency official said on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
But the deans of a dozen top American public health universities wrote a letter of protest to the Obama administration. Mr. Gates said he endorsed it, though he was not asked to sign. He also said he discussed the issue with Tom Donilon, the former national security adviser, though he would not give details of the conversation.
Fistfuls of Rupees
New opposition has forced the adoption of new ground tactics.
Dr. Qazi Jan Muhammad, the former deputy commissioner of Karachi East, called his approach “a mix of carrots and sticks.”
Whole apartment buildings were missed, he discovered, because Pashtun watchmen were shooing away vaccinators.
“I had the police tell them: ‘Either you let them in, or you go behind bars,’ ” he said.
He had traffic circles blocked so teams could approach each car, and he led some teams himself holding fistfuls of rupees, worth about a penny each.
“I saw a girl, about 11, carrying her 2-year-old sister,” he said. “I gave her a 10-rupee note and said, ‘Will you allow me to give drops to your sister? You can get sweets for yourself.’ ”
“She told all the children, ‘A man is giving away 10 rupees,’ and they all came rushing. I vaccinated 400 kids for only 4,000 rupees.”
The sewers of his district, which has several million inhabitants, are now virus-free.
At the Front Lines Again
The country’s new determination has also brought Rotary International back to the front lines.
The club, founded in Chicago in 1905, started the global polio eradication drive in 1988. It has had chapters in what is now Pakistan since 1927, and is now led by Aziz Memon, a hard-driving textile magnate.
Mr. Memon, 70, and other Rotary-affiliated executives have used their money and political connections to keep the pressure on. They compensated the killed vaccinators’ relatives and held news conferences at which the families urged others to continue fighting.
Rotarians also work in places that terrify government officials. In an industrial neighborhood in Karachi, where both gangs and the Taliban hold sway after dark, Abdul Waheed Khan oversaw a Rotary polio clinic in his school, Naunehal Academy. A big, gregarious man, he angered the Taliban by admitting girls to his academy and offering a liberal arts education instead of only Koran study. His only security was local teenagers who ride motorcycles beside his car to keep anyone from pulling up alongside.
In March, he hosted Dr. Robert S. Scott, the 79-year-old Canadian chairman of Rotary’s polio committee, who flew in to vaccinate children to prove that the fight would go on despite the December killings.
“I had a fatwa put on my head,” Mr. Khan said in April as he led a tour of the clinic. “They said I was Jewish. I had a friend issue a counter-fatwa saying I was a good Muslim.”
On May 13, Mr. Khan was killed by gunmen who also wounded his 1-year-old daughter.
His clinic will not close. “No one can replace Waheed, but life has to go on,” Mr. Memon said.
‘This Is Good Work’
Rotary also sponsors a tactic used to reach children from areas too dangerous for home visits: “transit point” vaccinating.
At a tollbooth on the highway into Karachi, Ghulam Jilani’s team takes advantage of an army checkpoint. As soldiers stop each bus to search for guns, Rotary vaccinators hop aboard. On a typical day, they reach 800 children.
Yes, Mr. Jilani said, the soldiers’ presence may intimidate some resistant families into complying. Also, he added brightly: “We scare them a little. We say, ‘You are entering a city with the disease. Don’t you want your children safe?’ ”
About 90 percent comply, he said, sometimes after a public argument between a father who believes the rumors and a mother, outside their home and at times backed by other women on the bus, insisting the children be protected.
Near the Afghan frontier, where thousands of children live in valleys under Taliban control, teams do the same at military roadblocks. At hospitals, which are usually guarded by soldiers, nurses will pack extra doses of the vaccine on ice for families willing to smuggle it to neighbors.
Some frontier clan chiefs have lost their government stipends for opposing vaccination, and officials have threatened to deny national identity cards to their clans. But the chiefs are in a bind; the Taliban have assassinated many for cooperating with the government.
Mr. Memon of Rotary opposes what he called “these coercive gimmicks.”
“We can’t twist arms,” he said. “We want to win them over with love and affection.”
Among hundreds of men wearing turbans and topees at Karachi’s main train station, Muhammad Arshad stood out in his blue baseball cap with Rotary’s bright yellow gearwheel.
Threading his way through the crowd squatting on Platform 1, he picked out children under age 5.
“What a nice boy,” he said to Sohail Ameer, chucking his infant, Abadur Rahann, under the chin. “May I give him drops against polio?”
Mr. Ameer agreed, and it was over in seconds. Abadur looked nervous, but he did not howl and squirm like some.
After the December killings, Mr. Arshad worried briefly, he said. “But then I thought: This is good work, and God will protect me.”
Friendly strangers came up to the Rotary table to suggest he play it safe and quit. He replied that the railroad police would protect him.
His wife tried the hardest.
“But I told her,” he said. “If a man has to die, he can die even at home. I’m going back to work.”
OBL in Abbotabad (Credit: Pakistankakhudahafiz.com)ISLAMABAD: The Abbottabad Commission Report, which is yet to be made public, contains a treasure trove of information on the hunt for the world’s most wanted man – Osama Bin Laden.
Its findings reveal that the arrest of Khalid Bin Attash (an Al Qaeda member who was involved in the pre-9/11 attacks such as on USS Cole and the embassies in Africa) in ‘2002’ from Karachi led to the first major breakthrough – he is the one who identified Abu Ahmed Ali Kuwaiti (the Kuwaiti born Pakistani who was OBL’s right hand man and courier and the man who led the Americans to Bin Laden.
After this information came to light, the Kuwaiti intelligence service was contacted but it could not provide any details about the man.
During the search for this man, CIA provided four phone numbers between “2009 to Nov 2010” to Pakistan but without any details as to who they were searching for, a source privy to the report’s details has told Dawn.
Dawn has learnt that these numbers “most of the time remained off” but while the ISI kept the CIA in the loop it did so “without knowing the context and to whom these numbers belonged”.
Now in retrospect, the commission report confirms Attash’s disclosure – Kuwaiti was OBL’s right hand man.
According to what the commission has discovered, he was with OBL’s family in Karachi when it moved to the port city in Oct/Nov 2001.
In 2002, when the family (including OBL’s wives) moved to Peshawar, Kuwaiti was with them and this is where OBL joined them – in mid-2002.
From here they moved to Swat where OBL was visited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
A month later, KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi, prompting the scared OBL family to move to Haripur.
Kuwaiti and his brother Ibrar (who had joined the fugitives in Swat) were with OBL and they all stayed in Haripur till 2005.
And it is here that the move to Abbottabad was planned and executed by Kuwaiti. He is the one who purchased a plot in Abbottabad by using a fake identity card and also supervised the construction of the house, which says a source was custom built.
It contained three complexes. “One open compound, an annexe where Kuwaiti and his family lived and the main three storey house,” said the source, adding that the two top storeys were used by OBL and his family.
The youngest wife stayed on the second floor while the older wives – Sharifa and Khaira – stayed on the lower floor.
Ibrar and his wife lived on the ground floor.
The source explained that the house was built so that the children of Ibrar could not see OBL.
The commission has been told that OBL never had a phone line, an internet or cable connection either in Swat, Haripur or Abbottabad though a dish was used to watch Al Jazeera in more than one city that the families stayed in.
Dawn has learnt that the commission has pointed out the violations committed by the residents of the Abbottabad House which remained unchecked by the authorities at the local level.
For instance, it has noted that a manual ID card was used to purchase land even though a computerised CNIC had been made mandatory in 2004 by Nadra – “the manual NIC was accepted by the Revenue Department, Cantonment Board and others,” said the source, adding that the identities and the addresses were never verified.
He also said that the third floor was built in violation of the building plan and once again no authority intervened.
In addition, the commission has noted that “the fort type construction remained unnoticed by cantonment board, police, intelligence agencies and the locals. The occupants also remained unchecked for non-payment of property tax since 2005”.
When the compound in Abbottabad was stormed by the Navy Seals in the middle of the night, OBL’s first reaction was to tell his family to stay calm and recite the kalima.
When the Seals reached Laden’s room, he is said to have a weapon in his hand and was searching for a grenade on a shelf — he was shot as he turned around, the source has told Dawn. It was at this point that Amal and OBL’s daughter Summaya rushed at the men to stop them, leading to Amal’s bullet injury. Summaya and Kuwaiti’s wife were asked to identify OBL after which the rest of the inhabitants of the house were told by the Seals that Laden had been killed.
Last but not least, Dawn has learnt that the commission has given recommendations to the government that are aimed at averting another May 2 like operation.
It was not possible to find out whether or not the report has investigated and/or made any recommendations to prevent fugitives such as OBL from hiding in Pakistan. Neither is it clear whether or not the commission has held anyone responsible for the presence of OBL in the country or the May raid by the Americans.
The recommendations that Dawn has learnt about are focused on checking American activity in the country and averting operations by outside forces by suggesting that the role of the post of chairman joint chiefs of staff committee be enhanced for more effective coordination between the armed forces. It has also recommended strengthening the National Security Council so that it can take immediate steps as the commission has noted that certain high government functionary could not be contacted during operation.
The commission has also recommended a probe over the issuance of visas to a large number of US contractors who established a spy network within Pakistan.
WASHINGTON, July 11: Former Pakistan ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani has rejected the Abbottabad Commission’s suggestion that as ambassador he issued visas without authorisation or was responsible for CIA agents coming into Pakistan in large numbers.
Mr Haqqani said in a statement that the US Navy SEALS who found Osama bin Laden did not come with visas and the entire controversy over visas had been manufactured to distract attention from the two vital questions. “The first question is, why Pakistan’s bloated security agencies failed to find OBL for nine years and the second, how were the US SEALS able to come into Pakistan without detection by our security forces,” he said.
The former ambassador said the commission interviewed him on Dec 19, 2011 in Islamabad and he informed it that he did not have access to official records for visas at the time but the commission had not recorded that point in its report. He added that the figures for visas were provided by officials at the embassy and the foreign ministry after he had resigned and to say that these came from him was “an absolute falsehood”.
Mr Haqqani also said that giving a visa to a person does not make him invisible within Pakistan. “Entry of that person is still recorded at the airport and he can be followed like thousands of Pakistanis and foreigners are followed by intelligence agencies,” he said.
IT is our war. It is America’s war. Thousands of Pakistanis have perished in this war. And all we do is take part in this debate. We do nothing to end it.
If one could put it down to a simple lack of will or spine it would have been bad enough. That a fair bit of the discourse on terrorism represents ideologically motivated obfuscation is unforgivable, particularly given how many compatriots have had to sacrifice so much.
The dominant argument is that Pakistan’s support to the US-led war in Afghanistan and the CIA’s drone attacks are the only drivers of terrorism in the country. Ergo, this support to the US is not just blamed for terrorism but also advanced as a justification for the mass murder of our people.
Refusal to accept this view in its entirety is immediately pounced upon as being tantamount to condoning or worse still supporting the drone attacks that mostly kill our civilians, women and children, and occasionally the militant in the tribal areas.
God help you if you happen to have doubts about talks with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP): “Amreeka key agent media mein bethey huey hein jo amn ke khilaf hein” (There are American agents in the media opposed to peace), Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) leader Imran Khan said in his ‘first’ televised interview since his election campaign accident.
His utter contempt for anyone holding a view different to his own is always a bit upsetting but, on this occasion, it was reassuring because it established the PTI leader had been restored to good health and his former self.
Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to hear him say that if the US can facilitate the opening of an Afghan Taliban office in Doha and initiate a dialogue with them why couldn’t Pakistan do the same in case of the TTP.
Let me be open and admit that I have a soft corner for the great Khan. He gave me and countless others one of the finest moments of our lives by leading Pakistan to its only Cricket World Cup triumph. That is why we all forgave him for his “In the twilight of my career…” speech.
That the well-meaning, born-again Muslim then went on to a greater triumph in setting up and successfully running the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital for specialised cancer care in memory of his mother who, like mine, died at the cruel hands of cancer was awe-inspiring.
So yes, I disagree with him but won’t call him Taliban Khan; even if he finds ideological compassion for the TTP and understanding for the atrocities committed by the group against thousands of Pakistanis.
He is free to call me an American agent or by whatever name he wishes because I oppose talks with the TTP. I do so because there is no parallel between that and the US starting a dialogue with the Afghan Taliban.
The US is now keen to get out of Afghanistan, a foreign country it invaded with UN approval and possibly a just cause, after the Taliban administration refused to hand over the mostly Saudi suspected perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on US soil.
It went into the country seeking retribution. This retribution wasn’t possible without regime change. It did what it thought necessary. It may even have attained its main objective of attacking Al Qaeda in its sanctuary and denuding it of its capacity to attack the US on its soil again.
But a democracy it remains and its war-weary voting public is wary of continuing a bloody conflict which, they understand, cannot be won. So, the US has now embarked on its plan to shrink its giant footprint in that foreign country.
However, it also doesn’t wish a return of the pre-invasion situation in Afghanistan where Islamic militants from around the world found a safe haven and training ground to serve as a launching pad for their global jihad.
It wants guarantees that only the Taliban can give. It isn’t clear if, in line with ISI belief, the Taliban can return to their pre-war glory and rule over Kabul as well but it is clear to the US they’ll have large swathes of the country under their control as they do even now; hence, the talks.
If the admittedly imperfect Afghan democracy collapses post-US withdrawal so be it as long as the new power structures can guarantee no sanctuaries for global jihadis. The US doesn’t seem interested in ‘nation building’ any more. It’ll retain its drone programme, and possibly some residual air and special operations capability so nothing’s left to chance. We have our democracy to lose. Unless, that is, we actually believe that once the US has pulled out of Afghanistan or we have pulled out of the ‘US war’ all will be hunky-dory. We’ll need to forget the TTP is committed to their brand of Sharia in the country and beyond.
They find democracy, diversity of opinion and faith against their ideological beliefs. Groups of mass murderers such as the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi are either TTP allies or franchises. The TTP continues to offer sanctuaries to foreign fighters with global ambitions.
Thousands of soldiers have died clearing the bulk of the tribal areas of these militants. The TTP remains ensconced in its remaining stronghold of North Waziristan. That is where the serpent’s head is.
One would have said carry on with your obfuscation, talk about talks, do deals like in the past, if it wasn’t so dangerous. All this wasted time means wasted opportunities. The TTP gets bolder and bolder in its attacks; its ranks appear swollen by zealots; who knows what fear can do to people.
What if one day, battered by TTP’s bombings and filled with despair by the inertia of the state, more people turn to its ideology if only to find some respite, save themselves? What a horrifying thought. I’d rather be labelled an American agent and strive to salvage whatever is left of my Pakistan.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Nanga Parbat base camp (Credit: halaat.com)ISLAMABAD, June 23 — Islamic militants wearing police uniforms shot to death nine foreign tourists and one Pakistani before dawn Sunday as they were visiting one of the world’s highest mountains in a remote area of northern Pakistan, officials said.
The foreigners who were killed included five Ukrainians, three Chinese and one Russian, said Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. One Chinese tourist was wounded in the attack and was rescued, he said.
The local branch of the Taliban took responsibility for the killings, saying it was to avenge the death of a leader killed in a drone strike.
The shooting is likely to damage the country’s struggling tourism industry. Pakistan’s mountainous north — considered until now relatively safe — is one of the main attractions in a country beset with insurgency and other political instability.
The attack took place at the base camp of Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest mountain in the world at 8,126 meters (26,660 feet). Nanga Parbat is notoriously difficult to climb and is known as the “killer mountain” because of numerous mountaineering deaths in the past. It’s unclear if the tourists were planning to climb the mountain or were just visiting the base camp, which is located in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan.
The gunmen were wearing uniforms used by the Gilgit Scouts, a paramilitary police force that patrols the area, said the interior minister. The attackers abducted two local guides to find their way to the remote base camp. One of the guides was killed in the shooting, and the other has been detained and is being questioned, said Khan.
“The government will take all measures to ensure the safety of foreign tourists,” said the interior minister in a speech in the National Assembly, which passed a resolution condemning the incident.
Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan claimed responsibility for the attack, saying their Jundul Hafsa group carried out the shooting as retaliation for the death of the Taliban’s deputy leader, Waliur Rehman, in a U.S. drone attack on May 29.
“By killing foreigners, we wanted to give a message to the world to play their role in bringing an end to the drone attacks,” Ahsan told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The attackers beat up the Pakistanis who were accompanying the tourists, took their money and tied them up, said a senior local government official. They checked the identities of the Pakistanis and shot to death one of them, possibly because he was a minority Shiite Muslim, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Although Gilgit-Baltistan is a relatively peaceful area, it has experienced attacks by radical Sunni Muslims on Shiites in recent years.
The attackers took the money and passports from the foreigners and then gunned them down, said the official. It’s unclear how the Chinese tourist who was rescued managed to avoid being killed.
Local police chief Barkat Ali said they first learned of the attack when one of the local guides called the police station around 1 a.m. on Sunday.
The Pakistani government condemned the shooting in a statement sent to reporters.
“The government of Pakistan expresses its deep sense of shock and grief on this brutal act of terrorism, and extends its sympathy to the families of the victims,” said a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry. “Those who have committed this heinous crime seem to be attempting to disrupt the growing relations of Pakistan with China and other friendly countries.”
Pakistan has very close ties with neighboring China and is very sensitive to an issue that could harm the relationship. Pakistani officials have reached out to representatives from China and Ukraine to convey their sympathies, the Foreign Ministry said.
Many foreign tourists stay away from Pakistan because of the perceived danger of visiting a country that is home to a large number of Islamic militant groups, such as the Taliban and al-Qaida, which mostly reside in the northwest near the Afghan border. But a relatively small number of intrepid foreigners visit Gilgit-Baltistan during the summer to marvel at the peaks of the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, including K2, the second highest mountain in the world.
Syed Mehdi Shah, the chief minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, condemned the attack and expressed fear that it would seriously damage the region’s tourism industry.
“A lot of tourists come to this area in the summer, and our local people work to earn money from these people,” said Shah. “This will not only affect our area, but will adversely affect all of Pakistan.”
Shah said authorities are still trying to get more information about exactly what happened to the tourists. The area where the attack occurred, Bunar Nala, is only accessible by foot or on horseback, and communications can be difficult, said Shah. Bunar Nala is on one of three routes to reach Nanga Parbat, he said.
The area has been cordoned off by police and paramilitary soldiers, and a military helicopter is searching the area, said Shah. The military plans to airlift the bodies of the foreign tourists to Islamabad, he said.
“God willing we will find the perpetrators of this tragic incident,” said Shah.
The government suspended the top police chief in Gilgit-Baltistan following the attack and has ordered an inquiry into the incident, said Khan, the interior minister.
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Associated Press writer Rasool Dawar contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and ROD NORDLAND The New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — In a diplomatic scramble to keep alive the possibility of peace talks with the Taliban, American officials on Wednesday pressed the insurgents to backtrack on their effort to present themselves as essentially an alternative government at the office they opened Tuesday in Qatar, Afghan officials said.
The Afghan government, furious that assurances from the Americans that the Taliban would not use the Doha office for political or fund-raising purposes had been flouted, suspended bilateral security talks with the Americans earlier Wednesday and said they would not send their peace emissaries to Qatar to talk to the Taliban until there was a change.
American officials, worried that painstaking efforts to restart the peace process after 18 months of deadlock were crumbling right at a breakthrough moment, moved quickly to try to resolve the Afghan government’s objections to what increasingly appeared to be a publicity coup by the Taliban.
Afghans of nearly every political stripe expressed outrage and concern at widely broadcast news images of insurgent envoys raising the white Taliban flag from their days in power and speaking as if they had set up an embassy for a government in exile — including raising a sign that described the office as the political office of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the formal name of the old Taliban government. Qatari-based news organizations, including Al Jazeera, later broadcast several interviews with the envoys making their case for international attention.
Hours after President Hamid Karzai canceled talks with the Americans over a post-2014 security agreement, accusing the Americans of saying one thing and doing another, and then boycotting the Qatar peace talks, his spokesman said that he had received assurances from Secretary of State John Kerry that the Taliban office would be curbed.
The State Department spokeswoman, Jennifer R. Psaki, confirmed that, saying that Mr. Kerry had spoken twice with Mr. Karzai, on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday.
Mr. Kerry told him that Qatar’s government had assured that the Taliban’s office in the capital, Doha, had removed the Islamic Emirate sign. “The office must not be treated as or represent itself as an embassy or other office representing the Afghan Taliban as an emirate government or sovereign,” she said.
However there was much to repair from the events of the last two days, and the Afghans said they felt betrayed by their American allies and by the Taliban.
In lashing out, Mr. Karzai again showed his willingness to unilaterally halt American initiatives when his allies displeased him, after reining in American detention operations and Special Operations missions earlier this year. It struck directly at two of the most critical parts of the Obama administration’s long-term vision for Afghanistan: entering peace talks with the Taliban to help dampen the insurgency as Western troops withdraw, and reaching an agreement to allow a lasting American military force past 2014.
At the same time, it became increasingly apparent that the Taliban, at little cost in binding promises or capital, were seizing the peace process as a stage for publicity.
The rapid-fire developments on Wednesday came a day after the American military formally handed over control of security in all of Afghanistan to Afghan forces, a development that was followed hours later with the three sides’ announcement that peace talks would begin in Doha.
The opening was hailed by American officials as a breakthrough after 18 months of stalled peace efforts, though they cautioned that a long road remained ahead.
Meanwhile, the Taliban played to the cameras.
Opening their Doha office with a lavish ceremony that included a ribbon-cutting and the playing of the Taliban anthem, insurgent officials said they intended to use the site to meet with representatives of the international community and the United Nations, interact with the news media, “improve relations with countries around the world” and, almost as an afterthought, meet “Afghans if there is a need.” They did not mention the Afghan government.
Some of the other language the Taliban used closely followed the American framework for peace talks. The insurgents seemed to agree to distance themselves from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, saying the Taliban’s aims were only within Afghanistan and that they did not support the use of Afghan soil to plot international attacks.
In one move, showing a sudden and surprising willingness to open an office after months of resistance, the insurgents could appear to accede to an exhaustive international effort to start peace talks, even while using Qatari territory — and its globally reaching news outlets — in a new bid for acceptance as a political force.
“The way the Taliban office was opened in Qatar and the messages which were sent from it was in absolute contrast with all the guarantees that the United States of America had pledged,” said the statement from President Karzai’s office.
The statement also seemed to lump in Qatar, for its active role in facilitating the Taliban office, with the United States. “Recent developments showed that there are foreign hands behind the opening of the Taliban office in Qatar. Unless the peace process is led by Afghans, the High Peace Council will not participate in the Qatar negotiations,” the statement said, referring to a body Mr. Karzai established in 2010 during earlier peace efforts.
“The Taliban cannot call themselves an Islamic emirate,” said Aminuddin Mozafari, a member of the High Peace Council and a former mujahedeen commander who fought the Russians. “They are just a group of insurgents with no legal status.”
American officials said the Taliban overture was relatively sudden, initially signaled by Qatari officials toward the end of May. The timing, too, offered some surprise. Taliban forces in Afghanistan had been stepping up their attacks as summer neared, bloodying Afghan Army and police forces who have been taking the lead in security operations as American troops stepped back to a support role.
Almost as a reminder that the Taliban, too, could borrow a page from the “fight and talk” American road map for diplomacy in Afghanistan, insurgents struck within hours of the Doha office opening. Insurgents tripped a deadly ambush on an American convoy near the Bagram Air Base north of the Afghan capital, killing four American soldiers, Afghan officials said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington, and Sangar Rahimi, Sharifullah Sahak, and Habib Zahori from Kabul.
