In November 2008, a new form of terrorism filled our television screens as a 10-man cell dispatched by Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba wreaked murder and mayhem across Mumbai. Choosing prominent targets filled with foreigners and Indians, the terrorists opened fire on anyone they came across, butchering 266 before dying fighting the authorities.
In so doing, they took over global headlines for days as well as bringing one of Asia’s super-cities to a standstill. Terrorist groups around the world celebrated this horror and began to discuss how they might try to emulate this success. Seven years later in Paris, the playbook has been copied.
This has been the longstanding fear of Western security agencies. Aware of the perceived success of the Mumbai attack, police and intelligence services across Europe have been ramping up their preparedness and training. Most recently, in June, the UK’s emergency and intelligence agencies did a dry run for a marauding shooter attack in London. And there have been scares. In 2010, a network of European cells that seemed to indicate al-Qaeda was attempting a Mumbai-style assault, with training camps in Pakistan’s badlands, was apparently disrupted.
Then earlier this year, Paris was racked by the Charlie Hebdo murders. But whereas those attacks, initially at least, were selective in their targets, Friday’s were utterly indiscriminate. The bombers at the stadium must have known the French President was in the environs, though they blew themselves up outside, killing whoever happened to be nearby. The other cell liberally targeted Parisians on a Friday night out. This is a markedly different form of horror and one that requires deep indoctrination, preparation and training. It is also a step up in terms of atrocity from what we had seen before in Europe. Mumbai-style terrorism has reached European shores.
At least one of the attackers has been uncovered as having some French background. While unsurprising given the threat picture that we have seen, this is particularly disturbing within the context of the sort of attack they undertook. To brutally shoot and execute fellow nationals pleading for their lives is something which would have required intense commitment. This training may have occurred in Syria, but in many ways this no longer matters. Islamic State (Isis) has shown an interest in stirring chaos and misery around the world with little apparent concern for its strategic impact.
Unlike the Madrid bombings, which had the effect of prying apart the coalition in Iraq, the attacks that Isis has inspired, instigated or directed, have been aimed at killing as many as possible in “enemy” countries and stirring tensions in societies. France in particular has been at the epicentre of this threat. In May 2014, Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche opened fire at a Jewish Museum in Brussels killing three. He was later reported to have fought alongside Isis. In August this year, another young man with links to France, Ayoub el Khazzani, was barely prevented from shooting at passengers on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris.
His background remains unclear, but he was linked to a network in Turkey that was linked to Isis and connected to Sid Ahmed Ghlam, a 24-year-old Algerian French resident who was reportedly plotting to attack churches in Paris. He was detained after he called an ambulance to his home having shot himself accidentally in the leg. He was already of concern to French security services.
And none of this is to talk about the numerous plots that French authorities have faced where individuals have launched attacks in advance of jihadist ideologies with no clear evidence of any sort of network. Around Christmas last year there was a spate of random attacks using knives or cars, and in June, Yassin Salhi decapitated his boss and tried to drive a car bomb into a chemical factory in Lyon. He strung up his boss’s head on a fence, took pictures of it with an Islamist flag and sent them to a fighter he knew in Syria.
This, sadly, is the nature of the current threat. And while obtaining the high-powered rifles required to cause such mass slaughter is much harder in the UK, it could strike here. Each wave of terrorism has to cause greater mayhem to have the same impact over time, and consequently for Isis to distinguish itself from al-Qaeda, it must create greater impact and misery.
Timeline of Paris attacks
While the UK can draw comfort from the fact weapons are harder to get here, British people abroad have fallen foul of these plots. The massacre in Sousse particularly affected British nationals, and at least one Briton was caught up in Friday’s Paris attacks. Terrorism has to continually evolve and cause greater brutality to maintain impact and attract attention. And while France is currently the epicentre, the ideology and groups are ones that are keen to equally target the UK.
Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute
Pakistan’s powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif during his U.S. visit this week will hold talks with top defence officials and discuss key issues like the Afghanistan situation, facilitating peace parleys with the Taliban and Indo—Pak ties, officials said on Sunday.
General Raheel, during his visit from November 15—20, will meet top American defence officials amid indications that the U.S. wants Pakistan to revive reconciliation talks with the Afghan Taliban, considered close to the spy agency ISI.
Significantly, Gen. Raheel is visiting the U.S. on his own as there was no official invitation either from his American counterpart or the Pentagon.
A Pakistani official said Pakistan is ready to play its role in the reconciliation process but the statements by Afghan government blaming the country for the recent deadly attacks by the Taliban have vitiated the atmosphere.
“The issue of peace in Afghanistan will be part of talks in Washington and Pakistan will like to have assurance of action against militants involved in attacks in return for pushing Taliban for talks,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan has been demanding action against militants like chief of Pakistani Taliban Mullah Fazlullah, who is allegedly hiding in Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said last month that his government was trying to arrange talks with the Taliban but nothing concrete has come out so far.
Earlier, the first open round of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban were held in Murree near Islamabad in July and another round scheduled later was cancelled when the news of Taliban supremo Mullah Omar’s death surfaced.
Gen. Raheel will also brief the U.S. officials about security relations with India after deadly border clashes in recent months raised fears that the conflict might spiral out of control, officials said.
Gen. Raheel would meet Vice President Joe Biden. Other meetings that he would have during his stay in Washington include with Secretary of State John Kerry, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Joseph Dunford, Army Chief of Staff Gen Mark Milley and Director CIA John Brennan.
KANDAHAR, Nov 8: Fierce clashes have erupted between two rival Taliban groups in southern Afghanistan, officials said Sunday, reportedly leaving dozens dead in the first internecine fighting since a breakaway faction of the Islamist movement appointed its own leader.
The skirmish was taking place in southern Zabul province between fighters loyal to the widely-recognised Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor and followers of Mansoor Dadullah, a deputy of splinter-group leader Mohamed Rasool who announced his own faction Tuesday.
“The fighting started from early Saturday morning in Khak-i-Afghan and Arghandab districts of Zabul province. About 60 fighters of Mullah Dadullah and 20 of Akhtar Mansoor have been killed,” Ghulam Jilani Farahi the deputy police chief for the province told AFP, adding 30 others were injured.
The two districts are under Taliban control, and it was unclear how Farahi arrived at his figures.
“The fighters killed are mostly from Mansour Dadullah’s group, including foreign fighters from Uzbekistan,” he said.
Islam Gul Seyal, the provincial governor’s spokesman, confirmed the battle and said fighting was still going on.
Mansoor Dadullah was appointed as second deputy for Rasool, who was named the leader of the splinter group in a mass gathering of dissident fighters on October 3, in the remote southwestern province of Farah, according to an AFP reporter who attended the meeting.
It was unclear whether the new group could rally wide support but its emergence poses a fresh hurdle to potential peace talks with the government.
It also exposes simmering rifts within the movement since the announcement in July of the death of longtime leader Mullah Omar.
Also on Sunday, the bodies of seven minority Shia Hazaras who were kidnapped in October from neighbouring Ghazni province by gunmen were found dead in Zabul.
“The seven Hazara bodies – three women and four men – all have been beheaded and were brought by tribal elders to a hospital in Shah Joy district,” Jawad Waziri district governor for Shah Joy said.
There has been a rise in sectarian killings in Afghanistan this year, blamed by observers on the growing influence of foreign Sunni fighters and the Islamic State group in the country.
A spokesman for a breakaway Afghan Taliban faction says they have elected their leader, further deepening the split within the insurgency group.
Manan Niazi, a spokesman for the dissidents, says that Mullah Mohammad Rasool has been voted in as the Taliban’s “supreme leader.”
It’s unclear how many followers the splinter group has but Thursday’s statement is a reflection of deep divisions among the Taliban, who have been waging war on the Kabul government for 14 years.
The differences among various Taliban leaders have been festering since July, when Afghanistan’s intelligence service announced the death of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the group’s founder and leader.
The July announcement said Mullah Omar had been dead for more than two years. The leadership soon afterward chose his deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, as new leader.
Washington, Oct 23: The US has “categorically ruled out” any kind of negotiations with Pakistan on India-type civil nuclear deal, terming the reports in American media “completely false”.
“Let me state categorically, we have not entered into negotiations on 123 Agreement with Pakistan nor are we seeking an exception for Pakistan within the nuclear supplier group in order to facilitate civil nuclear exports,” a senior Administration official said after US President Barack Obama met Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif here on Thursday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was responding to questions on reports appearing in the American media that US was considering a civil nuclear deal with Pakistan.
“There is no such thing as a nuclear deal which has been reported in the media is some short of a civilian nuclear package alleged to be something like that the US concluded with India 10 years ago.
“Let me just assure you categorically that the press allegations of a 123 agreement with Pakistan are completely false,” the official added.
Pakistan has made it clear its interest in civilian nuclear cooperation and it is called socio-economic imperative because of energy shortfalls, the official noted.
Leaders of the two countries, however, did discuss on Pakistan’s nuclear safety and security which is an ongoing discussion.
The 123 Agreement signed between the US and India is known as Indo-US nuclear deal. The framework for this agreement was done in 2005.
“We have a long standing dialogue with Pakistan about its nuclear program, and various developments in this program. We are particularly concerned and have expressed these concerns to Pakistan that there is requirement of all countries possessing nuclear weapon to ensure the safety, security of these weapons and do everything it can to promote strategic stability. So we will continue to engage in dialogues like this with Pakistan,” the official said.
It is the understanding of the US that Pakistan is very well aware of the full range of potential threat to nuclear arsenal including from terrorist groups that operate on its soil. Other Pakistani military facilities have been attacked.
“So they are very well aware of the terrorist threats including to all aspects of their military installations and its our understanding that they have a dedicated security apparatus that understands the importance of nuclear security,” the official said.
In a readout of the Obama-Sharif meeting, the White House said the President stressed the importance of avoiding any developments that might invite increased risk to nuclear safety, security, or strategic stability.
“The leaders pledged to continue their strong cooperation on nuclear security, including at the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit,” the readout said.
According to a joint statement, Obama and Sharif discussed the continuing threat of nuclear terrorism. Obama welcomed Pakistan’s constructive engagement with the Nuclear Security Summit process and its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international forums, it said.
The leaders noted Pakistan’s efforts to improve its strategic trade controls and enhance its engagement with multilateral export control regimes, the joint statement said.
“Recognising the importance of bilateral engagement in the Security, Strategic Stability and Non-Proliferation Working Group, the two leaders noted that both sides will continue to stay engaged to further build on the ongoing discussions in the working group,” the statement added.
“More generally, the US urges all Nuclear Weapons states including Pakistan to exercise restraint in nuclear weapon and missile and capabilities.”
“In particular, we have discussed measures to strengthen safety and security for Pakistan and continue to hold regular discussions on Pakistan on these issues,” the senior administration official added.
US announcement on Afghanistan (Credit: thewrap.com)
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 — The United States will halt its military withdrawal from Afghanistan and instead keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of his term in 2017, President Obama announced on Thursday, prolonging the American role in a war that has now stretched on for 14 years.
In a brief statement from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Mr. Obama said he did not support the idea of “endless war” but was convinced that a prolonged American presence in Afghanistan was vital to that country’s future and to the national security of the United States.
“While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,” said Mr. Obama, flanked by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his top military leaders. “I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.”
The current American force in Afghanistan of 9,800 troops will remain in place through most of 2016 under the administration’s revised plans, before dropping to about 5,500 at the end of next year or in early 2017, Mr. Obama said. He called it a “modest but meaningful expansion of our presence” in that country.
The president, who has long sought to end America’s two wars before he leaves office, said he was not disappointed by the decision. He said the administration had always understood the potential for adjustments in troop levels even as the military sought to withdraw troops from battle.
But the announcement underscores the difficulty Mr. Obama has had in achieving one of the central promises of his presidency in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Obama conceded that despite more than a decade of fighting and training, Afghan forces are not fully up to the task of protecting their country.
Mr. Obama noted the dangers, saying, “In key areas of the country, the security situation is still very fragile, and in some areas, there is risk of deterioration.” After 2017, he said, American forces will remain in several bases in the country to “give us the presence and the reach our forces require to achieve their mission.”
He did not specifically mention Iraq, where a full troop withdrawal has been followed by a surge in violence from the Islamic State. But he said the mission in Afghanistan had the benefit of a clear objective, a supportive government and legal agreements that protect American forces — three factors not present in Iraq.
“Every single day, Afghan forces are out there fighting and dying to protect their country. They’re not looking for us to do it for them,” Mr. Obama said. He added, “If they were to fail, it would endanger the security of us all.”
After the president’s remarks, White House officials reiterated to reporters that the missions of American soldiers in Afghanistan would not change. Some of the troops will continue to train and advise Afghan forces, while others will carry on the search for Qaeda fighters, militants from the Islamic State and other groups that have found a haven in Afghanistan.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said politics played “absolutely no role” in the president’s decision to extend the American military presence in Afghanistan.
But Mr. Earnest acknowledged the 2016 presidential election, saying that the next president — Democrat or Republican — will inherit a situation in the country that is a “dramatically improved one when compared to the situation that President Obama inherited.”
Some critics of the administration, who have long urged the president to leave more troops in Afghanistan, said Mr. Obama’s actions did not go far enough to confront Al Qaeda and other threats there.
“While this new plan avoids a disaster, it is certainly not a plan for success,” Representative Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
House Speaker John A. Boehner said in a separate statement that he was “glad the administration finally admits President Obama’s arbitrary political deadlines are ‘self-defeating.’ ” He added: “The president’s half-measures and failed leadership have emboldened our enemies and allowed for ISIL’s rise. It’s time for a change.”
Even before Kunduz fell to the Taliban, the administration had been under growing pressure from the military and others in Washington, including Congress, to abandon plans that would have cut by about half the number of troops in Afghanistan next year, and then drop the American force to about 1,000 troops based only at the embassy in Kabul by the start of 2017.
Obama’s Evolving Stance on Afghanistan
Important speeches illustrate President Obama’s shifting stance on keeping troops in Afghanistan, beginning with his days as a senator.
Now, instead of falling back to the American Embassy — a heavily fortified compound in the center of Kabul — Mr. Obama said that the military would be able to maintain its operations at Bagram Air Field to the north of Kabul, the main American hub in Afghanistan, and at bases outside Kandahar in the country’s south and Jalalabad in the east.
All three bases are crucial for counterterrorism operations and for flying drones that are used by the military and the C.I.A., which had also argued for keeping troops in Afghanistan to help protect its own assets.
There was no set date for the military to decrease the number of troops in Afghanistan to 5,500. The pace of that troop reduction would be determined largely by commanders on the ground, and the timing would also most likely provide flexibility to whoever succeeds Mr. Obama.
President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan had also pressed for Mr. Obama to keep more troops, and many in Washington who have worked closely with the Afghans over the past several years were loath for the United States to pull back just when it had an Afghan leader who has proved to be a willing partner, unlike his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Ghani is acutely aware of his country’s need for help from the United States and its NATO allies. The American military has repeatedly stepped in this year to aid Afghan forces battling the Taliban, launching airstrikes and at times sending Special Operations troops to join the fight, despite Mr. Obama’s declaration that the American war in Afghanistan had ended.
But the recent fighting in Kunduz also exposed the limits of foreign forces now in Afghanistan, which total 17,000, including American and NATO troops. It took only a few hundred Taliban members to chase thousands of Afghan soldiers and police officers from Kunduz, and the Afghans struggled to take back the city even with help from American airstrikes and Special Operations forces.
Mr. Obama apologized for the attack, which may have violated guidelines laid down by the administration for the use of force by the military after the American combat mission ended last year. Under the rules, airstrikes are authorized to kill terrorists, protect American troops and help Afghans who request support in battles — like those in Kunduz, recently taken over by the Taliban — that can change the military landscape.
The idea behind the guidelines was to give troops leeway and to keep Americans out of daily, open-ended combat. But how much latitude Mr. Obama would allow the military moving forward was unclear.
It is not the first time the administration has revised the withdrawal plans. During Mr. Ghani’s visit in March, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through 2015, instead of cutting the force in half, as had been originally planned. At the time, the White House still maintained that almost all the troops would be pulled out by 2017.
But with the situation in Afghanistan continuing to deteriorate, the military presented the administration with new options this summer. The plan that has been decided on for 2017 and beyond hewed closely to a proposal made by Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Obama said that 5,500 troops, along with contributions from NATO allies, which have yet to be agreed upon, would provide enough power to protect the force and continue the advisory and counterterrorism missions.
His announcement will allow the military to continue carrying out secret operations against suspected militant leaders focused primarily in eastern Afghanistan. In recent years, the United States shifted away from counterinsurgency operations that involved tens of thousands of troops patrolling the countryside and toward a so-called “lighter footprint” model of targeted strikes.
New details about such operations were disclosed on Thursday in classified documents published by The Intercept, a national security news website. The documents – part of a larger group of military files providing details about the Pentagon’s drone war from 2011 to early 2013 – included a set of briefing slides assessing Operation Haymaker, an effort to hunt down Taliban and Qaeda militants in Afghanistan from January 2012 to February 2013.
During that period, there were 56 airstrikes that killed 35 suspected militants who the military had been tracking. Those strikes also killed 219 other people who do not appear to have been specifically targeted but were labeled “enemy killed in action,” the documents showed.
WASHINGTON, Oct 15: US President Barack Obama on Thursday, in an address to his nation from the White House, said he would meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 22 to discuss his plan for peace in the Pak-Afghan region.
Obama also announced a plan to keep 5,500 American troops in Afghanistan into 2017, cancelling his earlier plan to bring home most of the troops before he leaves office.
The US president said he held extensive consultations with his commanders in Afghanistan, the US national security team, international partners and Afghan leaders before making the announcement.
Obama also spoke with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday to discuss this plan and also discussed with him the Afghan-led reconciliation process.
The US troops will operate from three bases in Bagram, Jalalabad and Qandahar and will be able to operate quickly when needed.
He also slowed the pace of the reduction of American forces and plans to maintain the current US force of 9,800 through most of 2016.
Obama called the new war plan a “modest but meaningful” extension of the US military mission in Afghanistan, which he originally planned to end next year.
The US president acknowledged his country’s weariness of the lengthy conflict but said he was “firmly convinced we should make this extra effort.”
Military leaders have argued for months that the Afghans needed additional assistance and support from the US to beat back a resurgent Taliban and hold onto gains made over the past 14 years of American bloodshed and billions of dollars in aid.
It will be up to Obama’s successor — the third US commander in chief to oversee the war — to decide how to proceed from there.
“I suspect that we will continue to evaluate this going forward, as will the next president,” Obama said, standing alongside Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford as he announced the plan.
Robin Raphael (Credit: abcnews.com)WASHINGTON, Oct 10 — Last fall, federal agents raided the home and office of Robin L. Raphel in search of proof that she, a seasoned member of America’s diplomatic corps, was spying for Pakistan. But officials now say the spying investigation has all but fizzled, leaving the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute Ms. Raphel for the far less serious charge of keeping classified information in her home.
The fallout from the investigation has in the meantime seriously damaged Ms. Raphel’s reputation, built over decades in some of the world’s most volatile countries.
If the Justice Department declines to file spying charges, as several officials said they expected, it will be the latest example of American law enforcement agencies bringing an espionage investigation into the public eye, only to see it dissipate under further scrutiny. Last month, the Justice Department dropped charges against a Temple University physicist who had been accused of sharing sensitive information with China. In May, prosecutors dropped all charges against a government hydrologist who had been under investigation for espionage.
Ms. Raphel, in negotiations with the government, has rejected plea deals and has been adamant that she face no charges, according to current and former government officials, particularly because the Justice Department has been criticized in recent years for handing out inconsistent punishments to American officials who mishandle classified information.
Both the Justice Department and a lawyer for Ms. Raphel, Amy Jeffress, declined to comment.
The Raphel case has also been caught in the crosswinds of America’s tempestuous relationship with Pakistan, a strong Cold War alliance that has frayed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks amid recriminations between Washington and Islamabad. Ms. Raphel has for decades been at the center of shaping American policy toward Pakistan, and she has maintained close ties to Pakistani officials even as many of her colleagues became disenchanted with what they saw as Islamabad’s duplicity in the fight against terrorism.
Against that backdrop, the federal investigation has delved into the murky world of international statecraft, where diplomats exert influence through a careful dance of trading, sharing and eliciting information. Some American investigators viewed Ms. Raphel’s relationships with deep suspicion.
Those suspicions became a federal investigation last year when American officials, while eavesdropping on a Pakistani government official, intercepted a conversation that seemed to suggest that Ms. Raphel, an adviser at the State Department, was passing American secrets to Pakistan. The reason for the eavesdropping is unclear, but the government routinely listens to the phone calls and reads the emails of foreign officials.
After months of secret surveillance, the investigation into Ms. Raphel spilled into the public when agents searched her home and her State Department office last October. She was quickly stripped of her security clearances and left in the dark about the precise origins of the federal investigation. Her friends said that the investigation had taken a deep emotional toll.
“Sometimes the whiff of scandal can be worse than any actual scandal,” said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistan ambassador to Washington who has known Ms. Raphel for years. “More people hear that you were investigated than care to know you were cleared or never actually charged.”
American officials will not discuss what classified information the investigators found in Ms. Raphel’s home. The current and former American officials who discussed the case did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it publicly.
Over the years, the stories of American officials mishandling classified information have at times seemed as peculiar as they were serious. John P. O’Neill, a counterterrorism specialist for the F.B.I., once lost a briefcase full of government secrets in a Florida hotel. Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, stole classified documents from the National Archives and hid them under a construction trailer. As attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales took material about the nation’s warrantless wiretapping program home with him.
One C.I.A. director, John M. Deutch, stored classified information on his home computer. Another C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, shared his highly classified journals with his mistress, then lied to the F.B.I. about it. Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private email system when she was secretary of state that investigators say contained classified information, although Mrs. Clinton and the State Department say the information was not marked as classified.
The punishment for mishandling classified information has varied wildly. Mrs. Clinton has not been charged with wrongdoing. Mr. Berger pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Mr. Deutch received a pardon from Mr. Clinton and was never charged. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. O’Neill were not charged. In the most recent case, the Justice Department allowed Mr. Petraeus to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, despite strong objections from investigators. That deal was so contentious that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, personally appealed to the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and said that Mr. Petraeus’s crimes warranted felony charges, according to two government officials involved in the case. F.B.I. agents are still angry about that decision and say it set a standard that will make it harder to bring cases in the future.
In discussions with prosecutors, according to several government officials, Ms. Raphel and her lawyer have cited the Petraeus case as the vital precedent. If passing secrets — including notes on war strategy and the names of covert officers, which Mr. Petraeus shared — and lying about it amount to a misdemeanor, then, Ms. Raphel says, she should not face any charges.
Some American investigators remain suspicious of Ms. Raphel and are loath to abandon the case entirely. Even if the government cannot mount a case for outright spying, they are pushing for a felony charge related to the classified information in her home. Several officials acknowledged, however, that the case would be difficult to prosecute because it would require intelligence agencies to declassify information and would probably reveal secrets about American surveillance of foreign officials.
Felony charges for improperly taking and storing classified information, while not espionage in the common sense of the word, would be filed under the Espionage Act and could expose Ms. Raphel to years in prison — a far stiffer penalty than Mr. Petraeus and others received.
The news of the investigation has shaken policy circles in Washington, where Ms. Raphel has been a fixture as a diplomat, a South Asia expert in the private sector, and a lobbyist. She began her career as a C.I.A. analyst but moved quickly to the State Department, which sent her to Islamabad in the mid-1970s. It was during this posting that she met and married Arnold L. Raphel, another foreign service officer. In 1988, while he was America’s ambassador to Pakistan and after he and Ms. Raphel had divorced, Mr. Raphel was killed in a plane crash with the Pakistani president, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq.
During the Clinton administration, Ms. Raphel served as the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, and then ambassador to Tunisia. In the George W. Bush administration, she was the State Department’s coordinator for reconstruction in Iraq, where she tried to guide the war-torn country toward a stable government and economy. After retiring from the government in 2005, she joined Cassidy & Associates, a Washington lobbying firm that represents the Pakistani government, among other clients.
At the start of the Obama administration, Richard C. Holbrooke, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reached out to Ms. Raphel to work with him. She quit her lobbying job and was sent as a State Department contractor to the American Embassy in Islamabad, where she helped disburse American aid to Pakistan. Until the F.B.I. investigation, she continued to work on contract as an adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan.
During her long career working on Pakistan issues, Ms. Raphel has seen the country go from being one of America’s most steadfast Cold War allies — and a partner in the 1980s effort to train Afghan fighters to expel Soviet troops from Afghanistan — to being something of a pariah to Washington. Although Pakistan pledged support for the campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks, senior members of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations became convinced that Pakistani soldiers and spies were aiding the Taliban and other militant groups by attacking American troops in Afghanistan.
For their part, Pakistani officials stoked fury in the country about the C.I.A.’s campaign of drone strikes and what they came to see as the agency’s expansion operations in Pakistan.
As relations between the two countries deteriorated, Ms. Raphel was considered one of Pakistan’s few remaining supporters in the top echelon of American government. This earned her enemies among government officials in India, Pakistan’s archrival, but also among colleagues who considered her too sympathetic toward an unreliable ally.
“I don’t think it was very fashionable to say, ‘I think the Pakistanis have a point,’ but Robin did that,” said Cameron Munter, the former American ambassador to Pakistan who oversaw Ms. Raphel’s work in Islamabad
The Russian intervention in Syria begins a new and even more dangerous phase in the continuing nightmare of the Syrian civil war. Obama administration critics often portray the incident as a test in comparative presidential masculinity. As The New York Post would have it, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to “humiliate” President Obama or, as Senator John McCain informed us, Mr. Putin has exploited Mr. Obama’s “weakness.”
Clearly, this sort of policy by machismo is good politics in both the United States and in Russia. American presidents like to look tough, and the Russian president has demonstrated that riding around bare-chested on horses and tagging tigers on camera can improve one’s domestic approval rating.
But foreign policy rarely favors the bold, even if headline writers do. The Russian move into Syria is indeed daring, but it will not end the Syrian civil war or counter the threat of terrorism and extremism. The various militias on the ground in Syria and their supporters abroad don’t care how Mr. Putin looks on a horse. They will plot a response and kill Russians.
Over all, the Russian efforts will worsen the violence, inflame terrorism and risk dragging the Russians into a quagmire. The consequences are likely to be bad for Russia, for the United States and, worst of all, for Syria and its neighbors.
It would be the height of folly for the United States to respond to Russia’s foray into Syria with a similarly bold but unwise countermove. The many proposals coming from the presidential candidates, from imposing no-fly zones to sending in United States forces to fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad directly, all have the virtue of appearing strong and responsive to the Russian challenge. But they all lack an even vaguely plausible theory of how they would actually improve the situation on the ground in Syria. The basic concept is to do something bold and decisive, and then peace and democracy will simply follow. Unfortunately, the George W. Bush administration already tested that idea in Iraq.
Instead, Western policy makers should pause, exercise some unpopular caution, and reflect on what fuels the violence in Syria and why the Russians felt the need to engage in such a potentially costly escalation. Both the Assad regime and the various factions of the opposition have survived this long in the civil war because of substantial external assistance. When one faction suffers setbacks, its external supporters reliably rush in to prop it back up. This is a familiar pattern from the bad old days of the Cold War, when proxy civil wars in such diverse locations as Angola, Guatemala and Vietnam thrived for decades on United States-Soviet escalation and counterescalation.
Even without a Cold War, the pattern of proxy wars holds. The Assad regime, in fact, has suffered several setbacks in recent months, including the Islamic State’s advance through central Syria and opposition victories in Idlib Province. These setbacks resulted in part from increased and improved foreign assistance from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and even to some extent the United States.
Russia noticed, and escalated in Syria so that it could, in the classic formulation, negotiate with the United States and its allies from “a position of strength.” This means shoring up the shaky Assad regime.
This strategy is a mirror image of the equally flawed American plan for Syria. American policy similarly holds that ending the Syrian civil war requires changing the balance of power sufficiently to convince Mr. Assad’s external supporters that his regime has no future and to enter into a negotiation on opposition terms.
And so external supporters on both sides have simply doubled down in an attempt to create their own facts on the ground. But the result is a seesaw effect in which no side will ever keep its position of strength for long or produce its desired negotiation. To the contrary, the likely consequence of Russia’s escalation is that supporters of the Syrian opposition — not just the United States, but even more Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey — are more likely to counterescalate.
Both the United States and the Syrian people would be better off if we simply skipped the next step in Syria and instead looked for a way to break out of the destructive cycle.
The necessary compromise to ending the cycle is not that far from the one stated in the Geneva Communiqué that the United States and Russia signed in 2012. It would involve real concessions, particularly from the United States and its partners, on Mr. Assad, in which they would support a political transition that contained no guarantee that Mr. Assad would leave power, while the regime and its supporters agreed to share power in Damascus.
The recent Russian escalation and American posturing have made that compromise even more difficult to achieve. The regional powers, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia, seem even further away from compromise than the United States and Russia. At the moment, the regional powers still hope for victory and would prefer to fight the war to the last Syrian.
In the meantime, American efforts should focus on the vast suffering that is overflowing into neighboring countries and into Europe. The refugee crisis, as many have noted, is a symptom of the disease that is the Syrian civil war.
The United States, and the international community as a whole, have often seemed so focused on curing an incurable disease that they have given the symptoms — which in this case are refugees — short shrift.
We can provide greater assistance to the refugees, and we can make greater efforts to integrate them into the neighboring countries. That’s not a solution to the civil war, but sometimes the boldest thing to do is recognize the limits of your power.
Jeremy Shapiro is a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution
KABUL, Afghanistan — If ever there was a Taliban bureaucrat who seemed set on a less than stellar career path, it was Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
In the 1990s, he was the Taliban government’s chief of aviation while Afghanistan had few planes in the air. He also oversaw the tourism department for what was one of the world’s most sealed-off countries at the time.
In short, there was little hint back then that he would someday emerge as the Taliban’s supreme commander, and the successor to the group’s legendary founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar.
But in the years since the Taliban leadership was driven into exile in Pakistan in 2001, Mullah Mansour became central to the group’s reincarnation as a powerful insurgency that survived NATO offensives to pose a grave threat now to the Western-backed Afghan government.
Details of his rise, filled in through interviews with current and former Taliban commanders, Western and Afghan officials, paint a portrait of an insurgent leader with a distinct flair for intrigue.
As acting leader of the Taliban over the past few years, he closely kept the secret that Mullah Omar had been dead since 2013. And he wielded that edge powerfully, issuing orders in Mullah Omar’s name, moving against rival Taliban commanders and steadily consolidating power, according to Afghan and Taliban officials.
He has also benefited from a powerful alliance with the Pakistani military spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, the original sponsor of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. That relationship, along with a hefty dose of cash payouts to fellow commanders, was a crucial factor in his ability to manage the succession crisis this summer after news of Mullah Omar’s death finally got out, Taliban and Afghan officials said.
Pakistan’s role in Mullah Mansour’s rise and rule has offered a bit of hope to Afghan and Western officials that Pakistani officials might be persuaded to force the Taliban to accept a peace deal.
But it has also sometimes been a political liability for Mullah Mansour, embittering some Taliban figures who resent Pakistan’s influence on the leadership and who are not likely to forgive his deception about Mullah Omar’s death. Some alienated commanders have sought a new direction with the Islamic State offshoot that is growing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mullah Mansour’s biggest mystery to Western and Afghan officials is wrapped up in the question of how he will try to shape Afghanistan’s future now that he has consolidated power: Will he attempt to return the Taliban to power as conquerors, or will he try to turn military victories into a strong hand in peace talks?
Riches in Exile
Mullah Mansour, a stout man believed to be just under 50, does not, unlike his famously reclusive predecessor, live in hiding. His circumstances are not those of a jihadist leader living a fugitive existence, fearing drone strokes and avoiding cellphones in case they are tracked — in fact, one person who knows him says the Taliban leader owns a cellphone company.
Some of the time, he lives in a southern neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan, known as Satellite Town, in an enclave where he and some other Taliban leaders from the same Pashtun tribe, the Ishaqzai, have built homes, according to interviews with a range of people who know him, including high-ranking Taliban leaders. As with many of the people interviewed about Mullah Mansour, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending or prompting revenge.
But Quetta is not his only option. Although he is on the United Nations no-fly list, Mullah Mansour has repeatedly taken flights in and out of Pakistan, according to a senior Afghan intelligence official. Often, his destination has been Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where he has a house and several investments under different names, the official said.
That freedom alone would support widespread claims that he enjoys special status from the Pakistani authorities. Also telling is the large detachment of plainclothes security officers in his part of Satellite Town that notably grew around the time he was announced as the Taliban’s leader, neighborhood residents say.
Although he has benefited from his Pakistani contacts, they come with strings. Intelligence officials say that Mullah Mansour is wealthy by any standard, partly because of his ties to Ishaqzai narcotics traffickers. But some of that wealth has occasionally been frozen by Pakistani officials, the Afghan intelligence official said. One such time came this year when Pakistan was seeking to broker a round of talks between the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government and wanted Mullah Mansour to go along with it, the official said.
Such details present, for the Taliban, an uncomfortable contrast to the austere lives their leaders supposedly lived when they governed the country. A biography of Mullah Mansour recently issued by the Taliban seemed intent on rebutting that impression.
“He likes and wears loose, neat and clean clothes,” the biography reads. “He dislikes and avoids extravagance and prodigality in dressing, eating and all other needs of everyday life.”
Mullah Mansour is one of the last senior members of Mullah Omar’s original government still with the insurgency. Of those still alive, some have reconciled with the Afghan government and now live in Kabul. To them, it is surprising that Mullah Mansour is what he is today.
Mullah Salaam Alizai, who was close to Mullah Omar during the Taliban government in the 1990s and later spent years as an insurgent commander, described Mullah Mansour as unpredictable and an opportunist. “The kind of person who doesn’t have his own ideology, the kind of person who doesn’t care about how much destruction occurs,” he said in a phone interview.
“If he is told to destroy one road, he will destroy 10, if he is told to kill one person, he will kill 100,” added Mullah Alizai, who reconciled with the government about eight years ago.
Maulawi Qalamuddin, who ran the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice in the Taliban government, remembered Mullah Mansour as a hard-working administrator.
“Mullah Mansour was not a notorious figure and he was not fundamentalist, either,” said Maulawi Qalamuddin, who is now on the Afghan government’s peace commission. “People didn’t grumble or complain about him.”
A Violent Operator
Those seeking evidence that Mullah Mansour’s priority is to wage war rather than pursue peace talks will have no difficulty finding it. He was one of the early organizers of the insurgency after the United States toppled the Taliban government in 2001, becoming a major battlefield commander.
Leaked United States military intelligence logs present a snapshot of him sowing violence across southern Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. They show that he attended strategy sessions where suicide bombings were planned, back when that was still a relatively new tactic for the Taliban.
If the boundaries between the Taliban and opium and heroin traffickers in Afghanistan are now blurred, that is in no small part because of Mullah Mansour. He was among the first major Taliban officials to be linked to the drug trade, according to a 2008 United Nations report, and later became the Taliban’s main tax collector for the narcotics trade — creating immense profits for the Taliban as opium and heroin exports soared.
The Taliban biography of Mullah Mansour on its English website relishes in tracing how the ferocity of the Taliban’s war against American and coalition forces seems to track each of Mullah Mansour’s promotions up the group’s ranks.
Despite his rising profile within the Taliban, he remained something of an unknown to his enemies. Of that there is no better measure than a bizarre episode in 2010, when an impostor claiming to be Mullah Mansour sought to engage in secret peace talks.
The Afghan government and the American-led military coalition were hopeful, especially when they heard the man’s modest demands for an end to the war: amnesty for Taliban leaders and jobs for Taliban soldiers. The military showered the man with money, flew him to Kabul for meetings, and struggled to keep expectations in check.
Then he simply disappeared, and both Kabul and Washington concluded they had been duped. And the real Mullah Mansour’s star continued to rise.
In 2010, Pakistani officials arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Omar’s top deputy. Afghan and Western officials later said he was detained because he had been negotiating with Afghan officials without Pakistan’s involvement.
Two commanders rose to more prominence in the wake of Mullah Baradar’s arrest: One was Mullah Mansour, the other was Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a young former detainee at the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who had a reputation as a tough commander in southern Afghanistan.
For a while, the two coexisted uncomfortably as co-deputies. But Mullah Mansour clearly gained the upper hand, becoming the acting leader of the Taliban, said Rahmatullah Nabil, the head of the Afghan intelligence agency, in an interview last year.
Afghan and Western officials said he had become the sole supposed conduit to Mullah Omar, in whose name annual announcements were made, but whom even senior Taliban commanders had not seen in years — to their growing anger and skepticism.
But Mullah Mansour was confident enough to begin placing his loyalists in important spots, and to move against those who doubted him.
In spring last year, Mullah Mansour served notice to Mullah Zakir that he was being fired because Mullah Omar was dissatisfied with the commander’s military strategy. But Mullah Zakir called his bluff, demanding proof that Mullah Omar was both alive and did in fact want him gone, three Afghan and Western officials said. Mullah Mansour showed a letter attributed to Mullah Omar, but could not produce compelling evidence. The gamble had failed, and the issue festered, giving wider circulation to rumors that Mullah Omar was dead and Mullah Mansour was deceiving his comrades.
A Power Struggle
Those rumors dogged Mullah Mansour through the first half of the year, when Pakistan began pushing the Taliban leadership to officially meet for the first time an Afghan government delegation, as a prelude to peace talks.
Until that meeting, in early July near Islamabad, the Taliban had long refused to meet with the Afghan government. But diplomats in attendance at the Pakistani-brokered talks were told that Mullah Mansour himself had authorized the meeting, one of the Afghan delegates, Hekmat Karzai, later said.
The senior Afghan official said that Mullah Mansour had, in fact, acquiesced to sending a delegation to the meeting, under heavy pressure from Pakistani officials. But as the talks were being prepared, he suddenly shifted tack, instructing several possible Taliban emissaries that they should refuse to attend. Then Mullah Mansour disappeared for a while.
“Mansour’s phones were turned off, he went missing,” one senior Afghan official said.
Why Mullah Mansour tried to sink the talks is unclear, but the Afghan intelligence official and a Western diplomat who had read intelligence reports on the issue said Mullah Mansour was probably worried he would lose the loyalty of Taliban commanders.
“It is not that Mansour is not obedient to Pakistan — it’s just that he is afraid of the movement falling apart,” the senior Afghan official said.
Pakistan was left scrambling to find Taliban figures who were willing to participate, leading to a smaller and less impressive delegation than the Afghan government had hoped for at the July 7 meetings. Still, the talks were hailed as the historic beginning of a long-sought peace process.
But Mullah Mansour’s apparent concerns were coming true. Within the Taliban, the talks — and Mullah Mansour’s perceived acquiescence to them — had cleaved the senior ranks. Senior Taliban figures began discussing the need for guidance from Mullah Omar, which in turn provoked renewed questions about whether he was even alive, two Afghan officials and a Western envoy said.
Deception Discovered
In July, word that Mullah Omar had long been dead suddenly began to circulate among commanders, according to Afghan officials. Precisely how the news broke was unclear, but one theory is that with peace talks looming, Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, began to confide to other senior Taliban leaders, according to an Afghan and a Western official.
On July 29, the Afghan government made it public, proclaiming that Mullah Omar had in fact died two years earlier in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan.
Mullah Mansour immediately tried to get ahead of a potential succession struggle. In a few days of masterful constituency building — with the help of cash payouts and Pakistani influence, according to Afghan and Western officials — he secured the loyalty of possible rivals. In a series of shuras — consultative councils that his detractors claimed had been packed with his friends and tribesmen — he manufactured consent.
But others rallied behind Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Yaqoub. Those supporters included Mullah Zakir and, reportedly, the leadership of the Haqqani network, an influential wing of the Taliban known for its brutal terrorist tactics and fund-raising mastery, according to members of the Taliban leadership council.
Then, Mullah Mansour let the world know that he had cut the heart out of his opposition.
The Taliban announced on July 31 that not only had Mullah Mansour been officially declared the new supreme leader, but that both of his deputies had also been chosen from the Haqqani network’s leadership, some of Mullah Yaqoub’s supposed backers. Two weeks later, the Taliban released a statement that Mullah Yaqoub and his family members had agreed to pledge their loyalty to Mullah Mansour’s leadership.
Mullah Zakir, however, would not go easily.
Officials with the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, said they had intercepted a message in which Mullah Mansour offered more than $14 million to Mullah Zakir through an intermediary in Helmand Province. The senior Afghan intelligence official claimed that after a payoff was made, of an unknown sum, Mullah Zakir demanded that he lead the Taliban military commission and that Mullah Mansour pledge not to engage in peace talks. However, those claims could not be confirmed in interviews with Taliban officials.
In any case, after he was anointed as Mullah Omar’s successor, Mullah Mansour had some consolidating to do. He disowned the July 7 peace meeting with the Afghan government, telling his supporters that they should dismiss talk of a peace process as propaganda — “the words of the enemies,” according to a recording the Taliban released.
Yet even then his speech was met with some degree of hope in Kabul, where diplomats noted that he had not explicitly ruled out future negotiations with the Afghan government.
“The doors of indirect meetings with the enemy in regards to independence of Afghanistan and the end of occupation were and still are open,” the Taliban said in another statement on their website.
Uncertainty Ahead
The deftness with which Mullah Mansour emerged as the new leader speaks to his political talents. But some Taliban leaders see it more as evidence of Pakistan’s support.
One of the insurgency’s most senior officials, Tayyeb Agha, resigned in August, saying he was dismayed that Mullah Mansour’s selection occurred outside Afghanistan.
In a lengthy statement, Mr. Agha, who was the Taliban’s chief foreign emissary, said choosing a leader in Pakistan was “a great historical mistake” and that Taliban leaders should relocate to Afghanistan from their exile in Pakistan to “preserve their independence.”
Within the insurgency, an aversion to peace talks and Mullah Mansour’s close ties with Pakistan remain potent issues for those who have not yet accepted his leadership.
But in recent days, Mullah Mansour has swept aside attention from internal tensions by presiding over the Taliban’s most consequential military victory since their government was ousted in 2001. After two years of steady infiltration into the north, and a patient encirclement campaign in Kunduz Province, Taliban fighters planted the white Taliban flag in the heart of Kunduz on Sept. 28.
The changes on the Afghan battlefield have for now made peace talks almost an afterthought. Afghan and Western officials hope that will not always be the case. But even those who have examined Mullah Mansour’s statements and career closely for clues are hard pressed to say what his long-term intentions might be.
“I’ll tell you who he isn’t,” Barnett Rubin, a scholar of Afghanistan who has worked in the United States government on Afghanistan policy, said in an interview. “He is not a moderate or extremist Talib, because his life is not lived according to our categories. People are trying to pigeonhole him into something they understand.”
Mujib Mashal, Ahmad Shakib and an employee of The New York Times contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
