Category: 9/11

Last month, militants in North Waziristan, led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, announced a ban of anti-polio campaign until the US put a stop to the drone war.

“On the one hand they are killing innocent women, children and old people in drone attacks and on the other, they are spending millions on vaccination campaign,” said a leaflet distributed in the region’s main town of Miramshah.

Following the ban in North Waziristan, similar pamphlets were distributed by a militant faction in the adjoining South Waziristan a week later, warning health workers to stop their campaigns or face the consequences.

“Polio and other foreign-funded vaccination drives in Wana sub-division would not be allowed until US drone operations in the agency are stopped,” stated the pamphlet issued by Taliban commander Mullah Nazir. This is the third time the Taliban have banned polio vaccinations in areas under their control.

Since the Nato conference in Chicago this May, and when Pakistan decided not to re-open its supply route to Afghanistan, drone strikes have intensified and the brunt of attacks has been felt in both the North and South Waziristan agencies.

If the Taliban mean business there could be “an increase in polio cases, and even disability and death among the children of these areas” according to Dr Janbaz Afridi, deputy director of the Expanded Programme for Immunization (EPI) for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“For us, even one child left out is one too many,” says Mazhar Nisar, the Health Education Advisor at the Prime Minister’s Polio Monitoring Cell, referring to the children missed from being administered the oral polio vaccine (OPV) caused by the ban.

These announcements by Taliban are indeed a blow to eradication of polio in Pakistan. Despite two decades of mass vaccination drives, Pakistan has failed to control the crippling paediatric disease. Today, being among the last three countries (others being Afghanistan and Nigeria) where polio is endemic, it is under excessive international pressure to eradicate it as the presence of the virus means a major set-back to global plans.

The last decade saw Pakistan taking massive strides to reduce the polio incidence. In 2005, the number of cases went down to just 28, but since then there have been signs of the OPV drive losing momentum.

Since 1988, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative – spearheaded by WHO, Rotary International, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and Unicef – has achieved a 99 per cent reduction in polio incidence worldwide.

This was possible through the mass administration of OPV simultaneously to all children below the age of five, to induce ‘herd immunity’ in entire regions and replace the wild polio virus with a cultured, attenuated strain.

Since early this year, there have been 22 confirmed polio cases, compared to 52 in the same period last year. Of these, 11 have been reported from Fata, with nine alone from Khyber agency.

Political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi views the Taliban policy of linking the entry of health workers to stopping drone attacks as show of “confidence and control of the area”.

“That they can implement anything if they become determined and the Pakistani authorities are left with no option but to negotiate with them shows the Taliban disregard for the future of children and this fits in well with their policy of destroying schools. The desire to establish their control and create their domain of authority by whatever means is the objective. They represent an authority alternate to Pakistani authority,” Askari told Dawn.com.

Afridi of the EPI agrees. He says the fear of “torture and kidnapping” from the militant groups is quite palpable and spread across the adjoining agencies as well as parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“There is every effort to assuage these fears and the field teams will be provided complete security by the police, with support from the provincial administration.” So far, he said, there have been no cases of health workers pulling out of the immunisation work due to the threats issued by the local militants.

Meanwhile, Nisar, is quite hopeful that the situation will be resolved. “The federal government is aware of the situation and the government of KPK, the political agents, members of the peace committee and tribal elders are intervening to find a solution,” he told Dawn.com, adding: “After all, they are putting their kids at risk too.”

“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” says Afridi.

Mariam Bibi, who heads Khwendo Kor – a KP-based non-government organisation working for women of the area, too concedes persuasion the only way out. “Nobody wants to endanger the lives of their children, but this message needs to be emphasised.”

However, she warns it should not be limited to getting the militants to agree on administration of the polio vaccine.

“Today it is polio, tomorrow the militants will come up with another issue to arm-twist the government; a more holistic approach is needed where the confidence of the local people has to be won.

“You give them water and I swear half your problem will be resolved,” Bibi said.

She said there were “layers upon layers” of problems that needed to be addressed. “Give them a complete healthcare package, not just polio drops; when you promise education, ensure and negotiate that it is not just for boys but be firm that girls will have to be educated as well.” According to Bibi, the government needed to strategise and build its capacity.

“And they need more women in the field.”

The latest announcement by the militants has once again revived the case of Dr Shakil Afridi, a local doctor convicted by a tribal court to 33 years in prison for assisting American spy agence CIA in finding the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden through a fake hepatitis campaign.

Bibi said after Dr Afridi was found to be spying, there is a growing suspicion among the locals that there could be several others among the health workers spying for the US This suspicion is compounded by the statement made by Bahadur who alluded to the “strong possibility of spying” on mujahideen for the US during the polio vaccination campaign. “In the garb of these vaccination campaigns, the US and its allies are running their spying networks in Fata…” the leaflets distributed in South Waziristan says.

With anti-American sentiment at an all time low, this has further hampered the vaccination driver.

However, Mazhar is quite convinced the Pakhtun people “would never use children” as a ploy. Moreover, the health workers were all local people and “well aware of the situation on the ground” in these security compromised areas.

“Taliban use such tactics like burning girls schools to gain world’s attention,” agreed Ibrash Pasha, working for Khwendo Kor in Dir.

Therefore, there are never any fixed dates set for holding vaccination drives and “opportunistic campaigns” take place whenever the situation becomes favourable. For now, the only other step taken by the polio cell is to immunise anyone entering or leaving these tribal agencies and the province. “Vaccinators are present at all entry and exit points,” said Mazhar.

KARZ, July 16 — In this mud-brick village, the United Nations put up the rock retaining wall along the riverbed to keep the road from washing out in floods. The United States paid to fertilize the wheat fields. Hashmat Karzai, a cousin of the president, paid about $70,000 from his own pocket to string up power lines.

As for the Afghan government, it remains all but invisible, even though Karz is the ancestral home of President Hamid Karzai. “The government itself has not done anything,” said Abdul Ali, a village elder.

The United States and its allies have devoted years of effort and billions of dollars to improve the delivery of basic services in rural Afghanistan. If Afghan leadership were to have taken hold anywhere, it might well have been in Karz, a farming area on the outskirts of Kandahar city still populated by relatives and tribesmen of the man who has ruled Afghanistan through a decade of war.

Instead, what is emerging in ever starker relief is a governance vacuum as U.S. forces begin to draw down. As the Americans leave, taking with them a main source of economic stimulus, U.S. officials and residents say what worries them most is the weakness of the local and provincial governments being left behind, which command virtually no resources and almost no authority.

That lack of government progress is apparent every day in Karz with the line of villagers beating a path to Hashmat Karzai’s door.

Karzai holds no official post; his prominence in the village stems from his status as a prosperous and powerful tribal elder and his relationship with the president. He is the former owner of a private security company, Asia Security Group, which sent men to guard U.S. bases, and he currently rents out land for a hotel near NATO’s Kandahar Airfield.

And yet each day the villagers of Karz file into Karzai’s courtyard with a fresh list of problems they say they can find no audience for in the offices of government. One by one they plead for electricity for their irrigation pumps, a clinic for their sick children, or information on the whereabouts of a relative detained by American troops.

“Where should he go? Which door should he knock?” Hashmat Karzai said as he motioned to one of his supplicants. “This is what’s killing the people of Kandahar. You go try to see the governor, it’s impossible to see him. The police chief? The mayor? It would take a month to see them.”

“There’s a distance between locals and the government. There’s a big gap,” Karzai said. “How are you going to cover that gap? I haven’t figured it out yet.”

‘Not delivering the services’
By September, the number of U.S. troops in Kandahar and other, nearby provinces will drop to 13,500, down from a high in April 2011 of nearly 20,000. The bloody battles with the Taliban of the past few years — in Kandahar city and the nearby Arghandab Valley — have shifted farther west, into the rural minefields of Zhari and Panjwai districts.

While the locus of violence has changed, the overall strength of the insurgency has stayed about the same, according to Maj. Gen. James L. Huggins Jr., the top American commander in Kandahar province. He says he is confident that the Afghan soldiers and police can prevail in a fight with the Taliban.

WASHINGTON, July 3 — Pakistan told the United States that it would reopen NATO’s supply routes into neighboring Afghanistan after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she was sorry for the deaths of two dozen Pakistani soldiers in American airstrikes in November, officials from the two countries said Tuesday.

The agreement ended a bitter seven-month stalemate that threatened to jeopardize counterterrorism cooperation, complicated the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cost the United States more than $1 billion in extra shipping fees as a result of having to use an alternative route through Central Asia.

Mrs. Clinton said that in a telephone call on Tuesday morning to Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, they had agreed that both sides made mistakes that led to the fatal airstrikes.

“We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement that the State Department issued but that officials said had been coordinated with her Pakistani counterpart. “We are committed to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever happening again.”

The accord came together on Monday in Islamabad after weeks of behind-the-scenes phone calls, e-mails and meetings between one of Mrs. Clinton’s deputies, Thomas R. Nides, and a top Pakistani diplomat, American and Pakistani officials said. The agreement reflected a growing realization by Pakistani officials that they had overplayed their hand, misjudging NATO’s resolve, and a recognition on both sides that the impasse risked transforming an often rocky relationship into a permanently toxic one at a critically inopportune time.

Mrs. Clinton and her top aides, working closely with senior White House and Pentagon officials, carefully calibrated what she would say in her phone call to Ms. Khar to avoid an explicit mention of what one top State Department official called “the A-word” — “apology.” Instead, Mrs. Clinton opted for the softer “sorry” to meet Pakistan’s longstanding demand for a more formal apology for the airstrikes.

Still, the deal carries risks for both governments. Critics of Pakistan’s weak civilian leadership assailed the accord as a sellout to the United States, and it offers potential fodder for Republicans who contend that President Obama says “sorry” too readily.

“The apology will lower the temperature on U.S.-Pakistan relations,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a South Asia analyst at the Eurasia Group who served as the director for Pakistan and Afghanistan at the National Security Council. “However, relations are not on the mend. They remain very much broken and will remain so unless the two countries resolve broader policy differences on Afghanistan.”

As part of the agreement, Pakistan dropped its insistence on a higher transit fee for each truck carrying NATO’s nonlethal supplies from Pakistan into Afghanistan, after initially demanding as much as $5,000 for each truck.

In the end, Pakistan agreed to keep the fee at the current rate, $250. In return, the administration will ask Congress to reimburse Pakistan about $1.2 billion for costs incurred by 150,000 Pakistani troops carrying out counterinsurgency operations along the border with Afghanistan, a senior American official said.

The November airstrikes, which hit in Pakistani territory in response to reports of militant activity in the area, killed 24 soldiers. In response, Pakistan closed the supply lines and worsened relations already badly frayed by the shooting death of two Pakistanis by a Central Intelligence Agency security contractor and by the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Soon after the strikes, the White House decided that Mr. Obama would not offer formal condolences to Pakistan, overruling State Department officials who argued for such a show of remorse to help salvage relations. Pentagon officials also balked, saying that the statements of regrets and condolences from other American officials had been sufficient and that an apology would absolve Pakistan’s military of any blame in the accident.

Even those in the administration who advocated apologizing did so almost exclusively for practical reasons, such as getting Pakistan on board with the stalled Afghan peace process, officials familiar with the discussions said.

Pakistan, at times, seemingly undermined its own effort to obtain an expression of contrition. The administration was seriously weighing an apology when Afghan insurgents hit multiple targets in simultaneous attacks on Kabul in April, officials said. American military officials quickly linked the attacks to the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that operates out of Pakistan’s tribal areas on the Afghan border. The apology would wait.

In May, days before a NATO summit meeting in Chicago, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan earned a last-minute invitation to the talks when it looked as if a deal to reopen the supply lines might be at hand. But no deal materialized.

After that failure, Mr. Nides and Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, were designated by their governments to begin negotiating. Mr. Nides, a former executive at Morgan Stanley, and Mr. Shaikh hit it off, and began swapping e-mails and phone calls to work out a political deal.

At the same time, according to officials, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani army chief of staff, was pressing his government to resolve the issue, which had put Pakistan at odds with the more than 40 countries with troops in Afghanistan whose supplies were affected.

Pakistani officials said they had misjudged NATO’s ability to adapt to the closing and use an alternative route through Central Asia. That rerouting carried a high price: Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said it was costing up to an extra $100 million a month.

Last weekend, Mrs. Clinton telephoned her congratulations to Pakistan’s new prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf. But it was Mrs. Clinton’s increasingly cordial relationship with the young Pakistani foreign minister, Ms. Khar, 34, that paid dividends in resolving the dispute, American officials said.

Several weeks ago, Mrs. Clinton began working on drafts of the statement she released on Tuesday, and at one point began discussing the language with Ms. Khar, a person with knowledge about the process said. “This was jointly done,” said the person, who, like half a dozen other officials from both countries, spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic protocols.

Also over the weekend, Mr. Nides arrived in Islamabad, joined by Gen. John R. Allen, the American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and James N. Miller, the Pentagon’s top policy official, for meetings with their Pakistani counterparts. On Monday, they put the finishing touches on the agreement. “The Nides visit this past weekend pushed it over the line,” one senior American official said.

In Pakistan on Tuesday, the decision to reopen the supply routes was met with a general sense of befuddlement and muted criticism that the government had given up a much-trumpeted increase in transit fees for NATO trucks.

But government officials were at pains to claim that the accord had never hinged on higher fees. “I am glad that this breakthrough is not part of any transaction,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. “We are playing our role as responsible global partner in stabilizing the region.”

Still, opposition politicians criticized the move and demanded more of an explanation from the Pakistani government and military.

“Now government should let the people know about the terms and conditions for reopening the NATO supply lines. What were the demands?” said Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a former foreign minister and leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a popular opposition political party led by the former cricket star Imran Khan.

Enver Baig, an opposition politician belonging to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, referring to the Americans, complained: “They did not apologize. They said ‘sorry.’ ”

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul, Afghanistan.

CHICAGO, May 21: Nato leaders agreed Monday to hand Afghan forces the lead for security from mid-2013 as they rush to end the war and ensure Afghanistan can ward off Taliban militants after foreign troops leave.

In a Chicago summit declaration, US President Barack Obama and his 27 military allies confirmed plans to withdraw combat troops by the end of 2014.

But they also ordered military officers to begin planning a post-2014 mission to focus on training, advising and assisting Afghan troops and special forces.

“As Afghans stand up, they will not stand alone,” Obama told the opening of a gathering of more than 50 world leaders, focused on ending the international mission in Afghanistan and helping the war-torn country shape its own destiny.

Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen vowed: “We all remain committed to our goal, a secure and democratic Afghanistan in a stable region.” But while the Western alliance coalesced around an exit strategy, they struggled to convince Pakistan to reopen a vital supply route for their troops in Afghanistan.

The leaders declared that the transition process was “irreversible” and would put Afghan forces “in the lead for security nationwide” by mid-2013, allowing US-led troops to gradually shift their focus from combat to support.

“We are gradually and responsibly drawing down our forces to complete the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) mission by 31 December 2014,”they said in a declaration setting in stone a roadmap agreed in 2010.

With the Taliban still resilient after a decade of war, Nato leaders sought to reassure Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the international community would not abandon his country after 130,000 foreign combat troops are gone.

The 28 allies, who discussed Afghanistan over dinner at the American football Soldier Field late Sunday, were meeting Monday with their 22 partners in the war as well as other world leaders including Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Zardari’s attendance had raised hopes his government was ready to lift a blockade on Nato convoys, but talks on reopening the routes have stumbled over Islamabad’s demand to charge steep fees for trucks crossing the border.

In their declaration, the Nato leaders said it was still working with Pakistan to reopen the border crossing, which was used to bring fuel and other supplies to foreign troops, “as soon as possible.” Islamabad shut its border to Nato supplies in November after a botched US air raid that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead.

To ferry troops, food and equipment into Afghanistan, the US-led force in Afghanistan has relied on cargo flights and a more costly northern route network that passes through Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Obama said after talks with Karzai on Sunday that there were still “hard days ahead” in a conflict that has left that has killed over 3,000 coalition soldiers, maimed thousands more and left tens of thousands of Afghans dead.

In a sign of growing impatience within the alliance, new French President Francois Hollande refused to back down from his decision to pull troops out in 2012, a year earlier than planned.

“I told everyone I spoke with that this was not negotiable because it was a question of French sovereignty and everyone understood,” he said, adding France would continue to train Afghan forces after 2012.

Karzai said his country no longer wanted to be a “burden,” urging the international community to complete a security transition to his Afghan forces.

The Afghan leader came to the summit armed with a demand for $4.1 billion a year from Nato and other nations to fund his forces, giving them the means to prevent a civil war.

Thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in recent days calling for an end to war. Although the rallies have been largely peaceful, scuffles broke out Sunday when some hardcore demonstrators refused police orders to disperse.

Police said 45 people had been arrested and four police officers suffered minor injuries.

 

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make (Vice President Joe) Biden take over the presidency,” the al-Qaida leader explained to his top lieutenant. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour … and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

Administration officials said Friday the Obama-Petraeus plot was never a serious threat.

The scheme was described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces on May 1, 2011, the night he was killed. I was given an exclusive look at some of these remarkable documents by a senior administration official. They have been declassified and will be available soon to the public in their original Arabic texts and translations.

The man who bin Laden hoped would carry out the attacks on Obama and Petraeus was Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri.

“Please ask brother Ilyas to send me the steps he has taken into that work,” bin Laden wrote to his top lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. A month after bin Laden’s death, Kashmiri was killed in a U.S. drone attack.

Bin Laden’s plot to target Obama was probably bluster since al-Qaida apparently lacked the weapons to shoot down U.S. aircraft. But it’s a chilling reminder that even when he was embattled and in hiding, bin Laden still dreamed of pulling off another spectacular terrorist attack against the United States.

The terrorist leader urged in a 48-page directive to Atiyah to focus “every effort that could be spent on attacks in America,” instead of operations within Muslim nations. He told Atiyah to “ask the brothers in all regions if they have a brother … who can operate in the U.S. (He should be able to) live there, or it should be easy for him to travel there.”

U.S. analysts don’t see evidence that these plots have materialized.

“The organization lacks the ability to plan, organize and execute complex, catastrophic attacks, but the threat persists,” said a senior administration analyst who has carefully reviewed the documents.

The bin Laden who emerges from these communications is a terrorist CEO in an isolated compound, brooding that his organization has ruined its reputation by killing too many Muslims in its jihad against America. He writes of the many departed “brothers” who have been lost to U.S. drone attacks. But he’s far from the battlefield himself in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he seems to spend considerable time watching television.

Because of constant harassment and communications difficulties in Pakistan’s tribal areas, bin Laden encouraged al-Qaida leaders to leave North and South Waziristan for more distant and remote locations.

Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaida’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for Atiyah, he argued the organization should find a new name.

The al-Qaida brand had become a problem, bin Laden explained, because Obama administration officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,” and instead promoted a war against al-Qaida.

Bin Laden ruminated about “mistakes” and “miscalculations” by affiliates in Iraq and elsewhere that had killed Muslims, even in mosques. He told Atiyah to warn every emir, or regional leader, to avoid these “unnecessary civilian casualties,” which were hurting the organization.

It would be better to concentrate on attacking the U.S. homeland. This led to sharp disagreements with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who favored easier and more opportunistic attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas.

Bin Laden and his aides hoped for big terrorist operations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. They also had elaborate media plans. Adam Gadahn, a U.S.-born media adviser, even recommended to his boss what would be the best television outlets for a bin Laden anniversary video.

“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” Gadahn wrote. At another point, he said of the networks: “From a professional point of view, they are all on one level — except (Fox News) channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks neutrality, too.”

What an unintended boost for Fox, which can now boast that it is al-Qaida’s least favorite network.