US PRESIDENT BARACK HUSAIN OBAMA'S MUMBAI VISIT IGNORES 4 MILLION CITY MUSLIMS
By Ghulam Muhammed
Obama's visit to Mumbai has left out any contacts with a 20 percent strong Muslim presence in the city, that projects an All India mix of relocated Muslims from practically every state in the Republic. That makes a very broad but very vibrant consensus of Muslims, especially when it comes to any reference to the USA.
Compared to 2006 Bush visit to India, when Mumbai Muslims staged a very strong protest rally against Bush visit over his illegal invasion of Muslim countries, this time around, even though privately Muslims feel Obama has belied all hopes of the promised change, he is still recognized as defusing the crisis centers of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and recently Kashmir.
The city Muslim is calm and observant as to what Obama has to offer to Mumbai's heady mix of Hindu-Muslim cosmopolitinism that can forestall tragedies like the post-Babri communal riots, the Shiv Sena carnage and holding the city to ransom after the infamous Bombay Blasts, the train bombings and lastly the 26/11 tragedy.
It is evident that as local issues started taking back seat, when the international scenarios seem to dominate the danger of inflammations. Death of Karkare, the Anti Terrorist Squad Chief that exposed Saffron Terror and instantly became target of death threats from the Hindutva extremists, seems to be uncannily inserted in the 26/11 terror scenario; giving strong doubts of common authorship of the two distinct and disparate streams of terror, intermingling to achieve some common agenda.
It is uncertain, if Obama will touch on the deep malaise that exposes the city to such meticulously planned terror events. His focus is only cursorily on 26/11 carnage and possibly more on economic agenda that will take more of his time interacting with India's top business and industry leaders gathered in the Commercial Capital of India.
His cultural forays in this city of most vibrant and thriving cultural diversities, has pointedly ignored Mumbai Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom have remained peaceful, even after their gross and wanton victimization by communal elements, especially in Security establishments and political opportunists circles. In a total city population of over 20 million, Muslims are about 4 million. That is as big a population as possibly half the population of Muslim in the US. The diversity of regional origins of the relocated Muslims in Mumbai only gets superseded when a common threat on their Muslim identity is organised by political elements. The Muslim reaction to such victimization has potential for great disruption in national and international peace atmosphere. If Obama had been rightly advised by the Mumbai’s American Consul General, a visit to a nearby 100-year old educational institution, Anjuman Islam, with student strength of over 100,000 Muslim boys and girls, right next to CST Railways Terminus, where Obama is scheduled to visit to pay homage to the innocent, would have symbolized as America’s big endorsement of moderate and secular Muslim’s one institution that is relentlessly struggling to offer modern and professional education to the masses as the bulwark against any uncivil activities that could threaten national or international peace.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
A blast and a conspiracy By Smita Nair --- The Indian Express - Mumbai -INDIA
http://www.indianexpress.com/
Tue, 26 Oct 2010
By Smita Nair
The Rajasthan anti-terrorist squad’s 806- page chargesheet against six accused in the 2007 blast at Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti’s Dargah in Ajmer throws up some interesting facts, and alleges a well-thought out conspiracy to “avenge the attacks on Hindus”.
The first lead in the investigation was a live bomb inside an unclaimed bag found at the gate of the Ajmer Dargah — the investigation would later reveal that the second bomb was timed to explode a minute later from the first when the crowd would try to escape. The probe started with two SIM cards— one in the live bomb and the other in the exploded bomb — and the two mobile handsets used to trigger the explosion. The scope of the probe changed after the investigators matched similarities with another attack — two similar handsets and SIM cards were used as timers in the Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad on May 18, 2007. The first step was to locate the current locations of the people who purchased the cards and the handsets. The forensic report pointed that the screen saver on the unexploded handset at Ajmer had the words ‘Vande Mataram’ written on it.
The number of the exploded SIM card was tracked down to Airtel’s Bihar-Jharkhand range and was activated on June 2, 2006. The purchase details were tracked to a name called Babulal Yadav from Mihijam and the card was shown to be sold from a shop, Mobile Care in Jharkhand. The SIM of the unexploded bomb was purchased from the West Bengal network of Hutch/Vodafone. The owner of this SIM was Babulal Yadav’s son Manohar Yadav, who belonged to Asansol. He produced a driving licence (WB 28 289892) at Sargam Audio in Chitranjan, West Bengal, to buy the SIM.
These two identities eventually led investigators to a yoga columnist named Taraknath Pramanik, whose identity the blast accused used to procure forged driving licences to buy 11 SIM cards and eight handsets to carry out explosions. The probe found that 11 SIM cards were procured with the same details — voter identity card and the same driving licence — from areas around Jamtara, Mihijam, and Asansol between May 24, 2006 and November 26, 2006. It came to light that two SIM cards used in the Mecca Masjid blast were from this same set of 11 cards. Ajmer blast accused Devendra Gupta was Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Zilla Pracharak during this period and all three places came under him.
While four mobile phones were used in the Ajmer and Mecca Masjid blasts — four other phones, that had at some point used one or many of the 11 SIM cards, were found to be in the possession of Madhya Pradesh residents Chandrashekar Leve, Ravindra Patidar and Santosh Patidar. When the team reached one Vishnu Patidar, a relative of the Patidars, it was found that Chandrashekar had told him to put the blame on one Pankaj Patidar, who had died.
Chandrashekar later confessed three handsets were given to him by another blast accused Sandeep Dange, who is also wanted for the 2008 Malegaon blast. It has now been found that when the Maharashtra ATS began their search for Dange in 2008, he was believed to have given the remaining four mobile sets (of the entire bunch of eight used for the blast operations — with four already used in Ajmer and Mecca Masjid) in a suitcase to RSS functionary Govardhan Singh, a resident of Shajapur, with instructions to hand them to Chandrashekar Leve, before Dange went underground. Chandrashekar Leve then, along with another RSS functionary Bhanu Thakur, left to meet Govardhan Singh.
Chandrashekar gifted three mobiles to his relative Vishnu Patidar and started using one for himself, which investigators say was his first mistake as it helped them track them down. One of the these three phones was eventually destroyed by Vishnu Patidar after it failed to work. With these forensic leads and confession of Chandrashekar (arrested on May 1, 2010), the investigating team made their first arrest, Devendra Gupta (April 29, 2010), followed by the others.
During interrogation, Malegaon 2008 blast accused Col Shrikanth Purohit allegedly admitted before the Jaipur police that, among other things, he was acquainted with Swami Aseemanand, a resident of Dangs, Gujarat. Aseemanand had then informed Purohit that Malegaon 2008 blast accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh and Sunil Joshi had formed the ‘Jai Vande Mataram’ outfit and it should merge with Purohit’s ‘Abhinav Bharat’ as it would prove “beneficial to their cause”. Pragya and Joshi’s outfit’s name first appeared as the screen saver on the unexploded handset at the Ajmer blast site.
Purohit informed the cops that on the night of December 29, 2007, Aseemanand called to say that one of their “kaas admi” (important person) was murdered in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. He is then alleged to have said that “Sunil Joshi is the person behind the Ajmer blast and it thus becomes important for us to probe who murdered him”.
Joshi’s phonebook and daily expenses diary had revealed much about his history, workplace, movements and other sources. The material revealed that Joshi was a “radical Hindu extremist” and that he had, a year prior to his death, assumed a different identity, Manoj, living in Dewas Bypass in a rented house. Four others — with assumed names of Raj, Mehul, Ghanshyam and Ustad — had lived with him for a year and a half before his killing, and had disappeared soon after his death, never to be located thereafter.
Agencies are still trying to ascertain the identities and the role of these four people — it was Joshi who had given them assumed names and they always tracked his movements.
The probe into Joshi’s death brought out some interesting relationships. Ajmer blast accused and Ajmer native Devendra Gupta was first introduced to Joshi when the latter was Zilla Pracharak of RSS in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. Gupta, who was a low-level functionary with the RSS, slowly rose in the cadre through his association with Joshi and was eventually given a respectable posting in RSS sister body ‘Seva Bharati’ in 1999. In 2001, he slowly rose to the post of RSS Tehsil Pracharak.
Under Joshi’s guidance, he continued to work as an RSS functionary in Indore and Mhow region between 1998 and 2003. The association bloomed into a very “thick friendship” and the both met over a period, with Gupta shifting to Jharkhand and taking over the post of Zilla Pracharak till September 2008. Nine years of association saw the two meeting each other in the company of common friends at various places in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Jharkhand — this bond was later to become the framework for flow of ideas over secret meetings with extremists ideas.
Malegaon blast accused Sandeep Dange, who is now shown wanted in this probe too, was Zilla Pracharak in Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh. Another Ajmer blast accused Chandrashekar Leve worked very closely with him in the same region and their association goes back to 10 years.
RSS senior functionary and blast accused Devendra Gupta has confessed that the Ajmer blast was a conspiracy planned and executed by Sunil Joshi along with Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma. He confessed to making driving licences specifically for this operation for himself (WB38178780) and Sunil Joshi’s new identity Manoj (WB 38178781) on September 30, 2005 so that these forged documents could be used to buy SIM cards and mobile phones that will be eventually used in the blasts. So organised was their plot that Gupta exchanged the driving licence with Joshi at a railway station in Kolkata.
Gupta showed the Jamtara RSS office at Mihijam — the Bhupat Maheswari Sadan — when Gupta was a Zilla Pracharak between 2003 and 2008 and where “secret conspiracy meetings for exploding bombs in Ajmer and many other places were discussed”. This office was where many secret meetings were held since May 2005 after the decision to carry out blasts was taken in Ujjain during the Kumbh of 2004. Though this office is in Jamtara, Jharkhand, it is just 50 metres from the West Bengal border. The entire operation was run from Mihijam — right from the forged documents to the conspiracy.
First to be arrested, Gupta spilled the beans on Indore resident and RSS functionary Lokesh Sharma who was part of the conspiracy and who, along with Sunil Joshi, was responsible in procuring explosives for the blast. He and Joshi had procured the explosives from a certain Krishnadutt Pandey’s goshala in Depalpur.
The detonators were first procured by Sandeep Dange and later shifted to Ramji’s house along with pipes for making the bomb. While further probe is in progress, it is based on this confession that Sharma was arrested on May 15, 2010. He later confessed that the “secret meetings” continued at Malegaon blast accused Ramji Kalsangra’s Shantivihar Colony flat in Indore where the group eventually met to make the bombs used in the blast.
The explosives first exchanged hands at Dewas bypass in Indore where eventually Sunil Joshi would be murdered some day. Sharma also showed the shop in Faridabad where the handsets (the exploded handset in Ajmer and an unexploded one in Mecca Masjid) were purchased. Based on these links, Sharma and Gupta were arrested for their role in the Hyderabad blast by the CBI.
The chargesheet looks at the role of Swami Aseemanand, who emerged as a key figure in the planning and execution of the plot after he first led a group comprising Pragya Singh, Sunil Joshi, Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, Devendra Gupta, Samandar and Shivam Dhakad during a secret meet, on the sidelines of the Kumbh in Ujjain in April-May 2004. This meeting, the confessions have disclosed, had discussed “the attacks by Muslim terrorists across 2001 and 2002 on places such as Amarnath yatra, Akshardham Mandir, Ahmedabad and Raghunath Mandir, Jammu,” says the chargesheet. “Critical of the government and police’s inability to handle the situation, this meeting vowed to avenge the attacks with the same vengeance.”
“Not only was Aseemanand found to be leading this group, but he had also offered his support and sanctuary to those like Sunil Joshi after the Ajmer blasts,” the chargesheet reads. Aseemanand was active with the work of Hindu Dharm Jagran at tribal-majority Ahawa in Dang districts in Gujarat in 1995 to stop Hindu conversions and to take on Christian missionaries. It also emerged that Aseemanand was known to have “close links” with Malegaon blasts co-accused Pragya, Purohit, Dayanand Pandey and Sameer Kulkarni, besides being responsible for bringing together Jai Vande Mataram and Abhinav Bharat, both of which had played an active role in the Malegaon blasts.
Joshi and six others — Lokesh Sharma, Ramji Kalsangra, Shivam Dhakad, Samandar, Sandeep Dange and Pragya Singh Thakur — reached Jaipur on October 31, 2005 and stayed at the C-Scheme Gujarati Samaj Room No 26 under assumed identities. It was here that a secret meeting was allegedly addressed by RSS leader Indresh Kumar in which he advised Joshi to align with some religious grouping while working to facilitate travel through cities under the pretext of some religious duties to avoid raising suspicion, the chargesheet says.
The main plot was shaped in Jaipur and responsibilities delegated. Targets and their recce and explosive procurement and making the bombs was Sharma and Kalsangra’s responsibility. Gupta was made in charge of procuring forged documents to get SIM and mobile handsets, Pragya was given the role of media relations while the funding was entirely the responsibility of RSS Zilla Pracharaks Sandeep Dange and Sunil Joshi. Further probe is still in progress on the Jaipur secret meetings. It is from here that the Rajasthan ATS chooses to identify these people collectively as a “terrorist group” under the guidance of Swami Aseemand.
Another interesting aspect is that all these people were co-organisers at the Shabrikumbh organised in February 2006 by Aseemanand at Shabridham, Dang, where many people with extreme Hindu fundamental views participated. Another secret meeting took place here — the reference agenda was the Varanasi Sankat Mochan temple blast and how Hindus had been tolerant. Locations for targeting Muslims were discussed, which included Jama Masjid, New Delhi, Dargah Sharif, Ajmer, Mecca Masjid Hyderabad, Malegaon’s Muslim population and the Samjhauta Express. These locations were then to be vetoed and accepted by Swami Aseemanand. The group then left for Indore, after taking instructions from Aseemanand.
Joshi, Dange, Sharma, and Kalsangra then conducted another secret meeting at Kalsangra’s home in Indore in March 2006. While these remained the main players, they also were joined by Pragya in specific meetings in various locations. Bomb-making was primarily under the supervision of Dange and Kalsangra as they both were tech-savvy and Kalsangra was a qualified electrician, the chargesheet says.
Interestingly, after the Ajmer blast, Joshi called an associate of Aseemanand, Bharat Rateshwar, asking him to switch on the television and watch the Ajmer blast coverage and to inform Aseemanand that the blast was a success. Dang turned to be a safe haven for the accused after the two blasts of Ajmer and Mecca Masjid. After “successfully carrying out the blasts”, Sadhvi Pragya, Joshi, Dange, Kalsangra, Gupta, Sharma, Dhakad and Samandar visited Ujjain and performed last rite ceremonies of blast victims killed in attacks by “Muslim terrorists”.
Tue, 26 Oct 2010
A blast and a conspiracy
By Smita Nair
The Rajasthan anti-terrorist squad’s 806- page chargesheet against six accused in the 2007 blast at Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti’s Dargah in Ajmer throws up some interesting facts, and alleges a well-thought out conspiracy to “avenge the attacks on Hindus”.
An unexploded bomb and a long trail
The first lead in the investigation was a live bomb inside an unclaimed bag found at the gate of the Ajmer Dargah — the investigation would later reveal that the second bomb was timed to explode a minute later from the first when the crowd would try to escape. The probe started with two SIM cards— one in the live bomb and the other in the exploded bomb — and the two mobile handsets used to trigger the explosion. The scope of the probe changed after the investigators matched similarities with another attack — two similar handsets and SIM cards were used as timers in the Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad on May 18, 2007. The first step was to locate the current locations of the people who purchased the cards and the handsets. The forensic report pointed that the screen saver on the unexploded handset at Ajmer had the words ‘Vande Mataram’ written on it.
The number of the exploded SIM card was tracked down to Airtel’s Bihar-Jharkhand range and was activated on June 2, 2006. The purchase details were tracked to a name called Babulal Yadav from Mihijam and the card was shown to be sold from a shop, Mobile Care in Jharkhand. The SIM of the unexploded bomb was purchased from the West Bengal network of Hutch/Vodafone. The owner of this SIM was Babulal Yadav’s son Manohar Yadav, who belonged to Asansol. He produced a driving licence (WB 28 289892) at Sargam Audio in Chitranjan, West Bengal, to buy the SIM.
These two identities eventually led investigators to a yoga columnist named Taraknath Pramanik, whose identity the blast accused used to procure forged driving licences to buy 11 SIM cards and eight handsets to carry out explosions. The probe found that 11 SIM cards were procured with the same details — voter identity card and the same driving licence — from areas around Jamtara, Mihijam, and Asansol between May 24, 2006 and November 26, 2006. It came to light that two SIM cards used in the Mecca Masjid blast were from this same set of 11 cards. Ajmer blast accused Devendra Gupta was Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Zilla Pracharak during this period and all three places came under him.
While four mobile phones were used in the Ajmer and Mecca Masjid blasts — four other phones, that had at some point used one or many of the 11 SIM cards, were found to be in the possession of Madhya Pradesh residents Chandrashekar Leve, Ravindra Patidar and Santosh Patidar. When the team reached one Vishnu Patidar, a relative of the Patidars, it was found that Chandrashekar had told him to put the blame on one Pankaj Patidar, who had died.
Chandrashekar later confessed three handsets were given to him by another blast accused Sandeep Dange, who is also wanted for the 2008 Malegaon blast. It has now been found that when the Maharashtra ATS began their search for Dange in 2008, he was believed to have given the remaining four mobile sets (of the entire bunch of eight used for the blast operations — with four already used in Ajmer and Mecca Masjid) in a suitcase to RSS functionary Govardhan Singh, a resident of Shajapur, with instructions to hand them to Chandrashekar Leve, before Dange went underground. Chandrashekar Leve then, along with another RSS functionary Bhanu Thakur, left to meet Govardhan Singh.
Chandrashekar gifted three mobiles to his relative Vishnu Patidar and started using one for himself, which investigators say was his first mistake as it helped them track them down. One of the these three phones was eventually destroyed by Vishnu Patidar after it failed to work. With these forensic leads and confession of Chandrashekar (arrested on May 1, 2010), the investigating team made their first arrest, Devendra Gupta (April 29, 2010), followed by the others.
RSS links, 3 blasts and an ‘organised terror group’
.During interrogation, Malegaon 2008 blast accused Col Shrikanth Purohit allegedly admitted before the Jaipur police that, among other things, he was acquainted with Swami Aseemanand, a resident of Dangs, Gujarat. Aseemanand had then informed Purohit that Malegaon 2008 blast accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh and Sunil Joshi had formed the ‘Jai Vande Mataram’ outfit and it should merge with Purohit’s ‘Abhinav Bharat’ as it would prove “beneficial to their cause”. Pragya and Joshi’s outfit’s name first appeared as the screen saver on the unexploded handset at the Ajmer blast site.
Purohit informed the cops that on the night of December 29, 2007, Aseemanand called to say that one of their “kaas admi” (important person) was murdered in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. He is then alleged to have said that “Sunil Joshi is the person behind the Ajmer blast and it thus becomes important for us to probe who murdered him”.
Joshi’s phonebook and daily expenses diary had revealed much about his history, workplace, movements and other sources. The material revealed that Joshi was a “radical Hindu extremist” and that he had, a year prior to his death, assumed a different identity, Manoj, living in Dewas Bypass in a rented house. Four others — with assumed names of Raj, Mehul, Ghanshyam and Ustad — had lived with him for a year and a half before his killing, and had disappeared soon after his death, never to be located thereafter.
Agencies are still trying to ascertain the identities and the role of these four people — it was Joshi who had given them assumed names and they always tracked his movements.
The probe into Joshi’s death brought out some interesting relationships. Ajmer blast accused and Ajmer native Devendra Gupta was first introduced to Joshi when the latter was Zilla Pracharak of RSS in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. Gupta, who was a low-level functionary with the RSS, slowly rose in the cadre through his association with Joshi and was eventually given a respectable posting in RSS sister body ‘Seva Bharati’ in 1999. In 2001, he slowly rose to the post of RSS Tehsil Pracharak.
Under Joshi’s guidance, he continued to work as an RSS functionary in Indore and Mhow region between 1998 and 2003. The association bloomed into a very “thick friendship” and the both met over a period, with Gupta shifting to Jharkhand and taking over the post of Zilla Pracharak till September 2008. Nine years of association saw the two meeting each other in the company of common friends at various places in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Jharkhand — this bond was later to become the framework for flow of ideas over secret meetings with extremists ideas.
Malegaon blast accused Sandeep Dange, who is now shown wanted in this probe too, was Zilla Pracharak in Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh. Another Ajmer blast accused Chandrashekar Leve worked very closely with him in the same region and their association goes back to 10 years.
RSS senior functionary and blast accused Devendra Gupta has confessed that the Ajmer blast was a conspiracy planned and executed by Sunil Joshi along with Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma. He confessed to making driving licences specifically for this operation for himself (WB38178780) and Sunil Joshi’s new identity Manoj (WB 38178781) on September 30, 2005 so that these forged documents could be used to buy SIM cards and mobile phones that will be eventually used in the blasts. So organised was their plot that Gupta exchanged the driving licence with Joshi at a railway station in Kolkata.
Gupta showed the Jamtara RSS office at Mihijam — the Bhupat Maheswari Sadan — when Gupta was a Zilla Pracharak between 2003 and 2008 and where “secret conspiracy meetings for exploding bombs in Ajmer and many other places were discussed”. This office was where many secret meetings were held since May 2005 after the decision to carry out blasts was taken in Ujjain during the Kumbh of 2004. Though this office is in Jamtara, Jharkhand, it is just 50 metres from the West Bengal border. The entire operation was run from Mihijam — right from the forged documents to the conspiracy.
First to be arrested, Gupta spilled the beans on Indore resident and RSS functionary Lokesh Sharma who was part of the conspiracy and who, along with Sunil Joshi, was responsible in procuring explosives for the blast. He and Joshi had procured the explosives from a certain Krishnadutt Pandey’s goshala in Depalpur.
The detonators were first procured by Sandeep Dange and later shifted to Ramji’s house along with pipes for making the bomb. While further probe is in progress, it is based on this confession that Sharma was arrested on May 15, 2010. He later confessed that the “secret meetings” continued at Malegaon blast accused Ramji Kalsangra’s Shantivihar Colony flat in Indore where the group eventually met to make the bombs used in the blast.
The explosives first exchanged hands at Dewas bypass in Indore where eventually Sunil Joshi would be murdered some day. Sharma also showed the shop in Faridabad where the handsets (the exploded handset in Ajmer and an unexploded one in Mecca Masjid) were purchased. Based on these links, Sharma and Gupta were arrested for their role in the Hyderabad blast by the CBI.
The chargesheet looks at the role of Swami Aseemanand, who emerged as a key figure in the planning and execution of the plot after he first led a group comprising Pragya Singh, Sunil Joshi, Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, Devendra Gupta, Samandar and Shivam Dhakad during a secret meet, on the sidelines of the Kumbh in Ujjain in April-May 2004. This meeting, the confessions have disclosed, had discussed “the attacks by Muslim terrorists across 2001 and 2002 on places such as Amarnath yatra, Akshardham Mandir, Ahmedabad and Raghunath Mandir, Jammu,” says the chargesheet. “Critical of the government and police’s inability to handle the situation, this meeting vowed to avenge the attacks with the same vengeance.”
“Not only was Aseemanand found to be leading this group, but he had also offered his support and sanctuary to those like Sunil Joshi after the Ajmer blasts,” the chargesheet reads. Aseemanand was active with the work of Hindu Dharm Jagran at tribal-majority Ahawa in Dang districts in Gujarat in 1995 to stop Hindu conversions and to take on Christian missionaries. It also emerged that Aseemanand was known to have “close links” with Malegaon blasts co-accused Pragya, Purohit, Dayanand Pandey and Sameer Kulkarni, besides being responsible for bringing together Jai Vande Mataram and Abhinav Bharat, both of which had played an active role in the Malegaon blasts.
Joshi and six others — Lokesh Sharma, Ramji Kalsangra, Shivam Dhakad, Samandar, Sandeep Dange and Pragya Singh Thakur — reached Jaipur on October 31, 2005 and stayed at the C-Scheme Gujarati Samaj Room No 26 under assumed identities. It was here that a secret meeting was allegedly addressed by RSS leader Indresh Kumar in which he advised Joshi to align with some religious grouping while working to facilitate travel through cities under the pretext of some religious duties to avoid raising suspicion, the chargesheet says.
The action begins
The main plot was shaped in Jaipur and responsibilities delegated. Targets and their recce and explosive procurement and making the bombs was Sharma and Kalsangra’s responsibility. Gupta was made in charge of procuring forged documents to get SIM and mobile handsets, Pragya was given the role of media relations while the funding was entirely the responsibility of RSS Zilla Pracharaks Sandeep Dange and Sunil Joshi. Further probe is still in progress on the Jaipur secret meetings. It is from here that the Rajasthan ATS chooses to identify these people collectively as a “terrorist group” under the guidance of Swami Aseemand.
Another interesting aspect is that all these people were co-organisers at the Shabrikumbh organised in February 2006 by Aseemanand at Shabridham, Dang, where many people with extreme Hindu fundamental views participated. Another secret meeting took place here — the reference agenda was the Varanasi Sankat Mochan temple blast and how Hindus had been tolerant. Locations for targeting Muslims were discussed, which included Jama Masjid, New Delhi, Dargah Sharif, Ajmer, Mecca Masjid Hyderabad, Malegaon’s Muslim population and the Samjhauta Express. These locations were then to be vetoed and accepted by Swami Aseemanand. The group then left for Indore, after taking instructions from Aseemanand.
Joshi, Dange, Sharma, and Kalsangra then conducted another secret meeting at Kalsangra’s home in Indore in March 2006. While these remained the main players, they also were joined by Pragya in specific meetings in various locations. Bomb-making was primarily under the supervision of Dange and Kalsangra as they both were tech-savvy and Kalsangra was a qualified electrician, the chargesheet says.
Interestingly, after the Ajmer blast, Joshi called an associate of Aseemanand, Bharat Rateshwar, asking him to switch on the television and watch the Ajmer blast coverage and to inform Aseemanand that the blast was a success. Dang turned to be a safe haven for the accused after the two blasts of Ajmer and Mecca Masjid. After “successfully carrying out the blasts”, Sadhvi Pragya, Joshi, Dange, Kalsangra, Gupta, Sharma, Dhakad and Samandar visited Ujjain and performed last rite ceremonies of blast victims killed in attacks by “Muslim terrorists”.
Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear - By Bob Smietana • THE TENNESSEAN •
Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear
By Bob Smietana • THE TENNESSEAN • October 24, 2010First of Two Parts
Steven Emerson has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims.That's how many dollars Emerson's for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they're in imminent danger from Muslims.
Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.
Leaders of the so-called "anti-jihad" movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they've found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.
But beyond the rhetoric, Emerson's organization's tax-exempt status is facing questions at the same time he's accusing Muslim groups of tax improprieties.
"Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit," said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group. "It's wrong. This is off the charts."
But a spokesman for Emerson's company said the actions were legal and designed to protect workers there from death threats.
"It's all done for security reasons," said Ray Locker, a spokesman for SAE Productions.
Emerson made his name in the mid-1990s with his documentary film Jihad in America, which aired on PBS. Produced after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the film uncovered terrorists raising money in the United States.
He followed up with the books Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S. and American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.
He claims that extremists control 80 percent of mosques in the United States. In August, he claimed to have uncovered 13 hours of audiotapes proving that Feisal Rauf, the imam behind the proposed mosque near ground zero, is a radical extremist.
"I don't think he'll survive the disclosure of these tapes," he told talk show host Bill Bennett.
Rauf is still in place as a project leader, even though tape excerpts have been online for weeks.
Emerson formed a Middle Tennessee connection last summer, when his organization uncovered pictures on a Murfreesboro mosque board member's MySpace page. His company said the pictures proved connections to Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization, but mosque leaders said they checked with the Department of Homeland Security and found the concerns were groundless.
Special Agent Keith Moses, who heads the FBI's Nashville office, told The Tennessean last month that the bureau doesn't discuss specific allegations.
"In a post-9/11 era, the FBI is taking every step to prevent further terrorist attacks," he said. "We also want to protect civil rights and the freedom of religion."
Others cash in
While large organizations like Emerson's aren't the norm, other local and national entrepreneurs cash in on spreading hate and fear about Islam.Former Tennessee State University physics professor Bill French runs the Nashville-based, for-profit Center for the Study of Political Islam. He spoke recently to a group of opponents of the Murfreesboro mosque gathered at a house in Murfreesboro.
With an American flag as a backdrop, French paced back and forth like the Church of Christ ministers he heard growing up. His message: how creeping Shariah law is undermining the very fabric of American life.
"This offends Allah," said French, pointing to the flag on the wall. "You offend Allah."
French, who has no formal education in religion, believes Islam is not a religion. Instead, he sees Islam and its doctrine and rules — known as Shariah law — as a totalitarian ideology.
In his 45-minute speech, he outlined a kind of 10 commandments of evil — no music, no art, no rights for women — taken from his book Sharia Law for Non-Muslims. The speech was free, but his books, penned under the name "Bill Warner," were for sale in the back and ranged from about $9 to $20.
When he was done, the 80 or so mosque opponents gave him a standing ovation and then began buying French's books to hand out to their friends.
Frank Gaffney, head of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Security Policy, earned a $288,300 salary from his charity in 2008. Gaffney was a key witness in recent hearings in the Rutherford County lawsuit filed by mosque opponents. He said he paid his own way.
On the stand, the Reagan-era deputy assistant defense secretary accused local mosque leaders of having ties to terrorism, using ties to Middle Eastern universities and politics as evidence. His main source of information was his own report on Shariah law as a threat to America, one he wrote with other self-proclaimed experts.
But, under oath, he admitted he is not an expert in Shariah law.
The list of people on the anti-Islam circuit goes on. IRS filings from 2008 show that Robert Spencer, who runs the Jihadwatch.org blog, earned $132,537 from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative nonprofit.
Brigitte Tudor, who runs the anti-Islam groups ACT! For America and the American Congress for Truth, earned $152,810, while her colleague Guy Rogers collected $154,900.
Unusual arrangement
Emerson's older, most established organization collects several times that in an average year.Emerson incorporated his for-profit company, SAE Productions, in Delaware in 1995. He launched the nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation in Washington, D.C., in 2006.
But he doesn't make that distinction on his website, www.investigativeproject. org, which describes the Investigative Project on Terrorism as "a non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995." And today, the two groups share the same Washington street address, which is published on Emerson's personal website.
In 2002 and 2003, despite lacking nonprofit status, Emerson received a total of $600,000 in grants from the Smith Richardson Foundation, a conservative public-policy shaper based in Connecticut. The foundation declined to comment on the grants but said it gives money only to tax-exempt charitable groups.
"It almost never happens," he said.
Locker, a former USA TODAY national security editor now working for SAE Productions, said his organization does not discuss funding.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation's 1023 application for tax-exempt status stated that all of the money raised by the Washington, D.C.-based charity would go to a nonprofit subcontractor with no ties to Emerson or any board members. The application also said the charity would buy no services from board members. Emerson ended up being the only board member.
In a letter dated Dec. 8, 2006, the IRS asked if there would be any ties between the subcontractor and the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation. On Dec. 29, 2006, Emerson wrote back: "There are and will be no financial/business transactions between officers, board members or relatives of the aforementioned and applicant organization."
In 2008, however, the charity paid $3,390,000 to SAE Productions for "management services." Emerson is SAE's sole officer.
Because of its unusual arrangement with Emerson's company, the Investigative Project's tax returns show no details, such as salaries of staff.
Locker said the approach was vetted by the group's lawyers and is legal. He said that Emerson takes no profits from SAE Productions and therefore the Investigative Project is a nonprofit.
That doesn't fly, said Charity Navigator's Berger. Berger said tax-exempt nonprofits must be transparent and disclose how they spend money and how much they pay their staff. Emerson's group appears to be trying to skirt these rules, he said.
"It really undermines the trust in nonprofits," he said. "This is really off the grid."
The Frist Foundation's Bird said the discrepancy between the Investigative Project's application to the IRS and its practices is troubling.
"It looks like they told the government one thing and did another," he said.
But Rebecca Bynum, editor of the New English Review, a Nashville-based online magazine that's critical of Islam, said she has no problem with Emerson's big take. Her nonprofit took in $30,000 in 2008 and has no paid employees.
"I know that (Emerson) does great work," Bynum said. "They investigate very thoroughly. You can always count on what they say."
Inaccurate information
The message anti-Islam authors and groups disseminate isn't always accurate.Brannon Wheeler, history professor and director of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the United States Naval Academy, said critics of Islam mistakenly assume that Shariah law is a set of fixed principles that apply to every Muslim, everywhere.
That's not the case, he said, making clear that he speaks as an expert and not for the Navy or the Naval Academy.
While French, for example, has put together his Sharia Law for Non-Muslims, no similar book exists for Muslims.
"There's no text that is entitled The Shariah," Wheeler said. "It's not a code of law. It's not like you could go to the library and get the 12 volumes of Shariah law."
Instead, Shariah is flexible, and applies differently in different contexts. It comes from clerics' and scholars' interpretations of the Quran and other holy books.
Wheeler also had harsh words for Gaffney's report, which claims Shariah is an imminent threat to America.
"He makes the Shariah look absurd and insidious by trolling through and finding outrageous rulings and then making them universal for all time," Wheeler said. "It's ridiculous."
Wheeler also responded to another criticism of Islam — that it allows Muslims to lie to non-Muslims. Critics of the local mosque often say that's why Muslims can't be trusted when they say they're peaceful.
Wheeler said the term applies only to Shia Muslims, the smaller of the two majors sects of Islam, during times of persecution.
"It's an escape clause," he said. "You are not required to tell the truth about your religion if someone is going to kill you. It's not to be understood as lying."
Middle Tennessee's Muslims are Sunnis, the larger sect. They find the constant barrage of mistruths about their faith baffling.
"What does Shariah law have to do with America? Why are they talking about it?" asked Abdiaziz Barre, who immigrated to Nashville from Somalia 17 years ago. He said he has heard claims that Muslims endorse slavery and terrorism.
That's nonsense, said Barre, who rejects both. But he's not going to lose sleep over the misinformation of critics.
"If people don't want to be a good neighbor or friend, so what," he said. "I have plenty of neighbors and friends."
Message gains traction
Despite what critics call inaccuracies, the anti-Islam message has found traction in Middle Tennessee, with some casually citing it.Sally Snow hosted French's speech along with her husband, former Rutherford County Republican Party Chairman Howard Wall. She has been a regular at hearings in a lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.
One day this month, Snow arrived wearing sunglasses and joked that she was trying to cover up marks on her face.
"Howard's turned into a Muslim," she said. "He's started beating me."
French's crowd contained politicians and preachers, businesspeople and others — brought together by their fear of Shariah and their belief that Islam is incompatible with American life. Some oppose Islam on theological grounds, seeing it as a threat to their Bible Belt culture or, for Christian Zionists, to the state of Israel.
According to that belief, American Christians have a religious duty to protect the state of Israel. When Israel expands, they believe, Muslims in Iran and Iraq will be forced out of their homes to make way. Then the second coming of Jesus can begin.
"The reason America exists is to partner with Israel, to protect Israel," said the Rev. Darrel Whaley, pastor of Kingdom Ministries Worship Center and head of a Protestant ministers group opposed to the mosque in Murfreesboro.
Laurie Cardoza-Moore, who led opposition to a failed mosque in Brentwood, also is Christian Zionist. Her nonprofit, the Franklin-based Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, exists to drum up support of Israel among Christians.
With those stances out there, it's unlikely broad-based, interfaith cooperation is possible, said Rabbi Rami Shapiro, an adjunct religion professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
At an interfaith event at the university this month, he downplayed fears that Muslims would try to impose their religious laws on the United States.
"Muslims are not going to 'Shariah-ize' America," Shapiro said. "What's going to happen is that America is going to Americanize Muslims."
Still, he said, building trust between Muslims and some right-wing Christians will be difficult.
"According to their beliefs, Muslims are in the way of God's plan," he said. "You can't argue with that."
Contact Bob Smietana
at 615-259-8228 or bsmietana@tennessean.com.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
PrePaid taxi service of Delhi Police - By Amitabh Thakur - Arkitectindia@yahoogroups.com
From: Amitabh Thakur <amitabhth@yahoo.com>
Sender: arkitectindia@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:39:12 -0700 (PDT)
To: Amitabh Thakur<amitabhthakurlko@gmail.
ReplyTo: arkitectindia@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Arkitect India] PrePaid taxi service of Delhi Police
Friends,
Yesterday, when I and my wife had gone to Delhi for a one-day workshop on governance, when we stepped out of the Airport, I was asked by a person whether I needed a cab. When I said yes, he immediately guided me to a vehicle standing in front of the Domestic Airport. I hardly go out of Lucknow and have not much experience of travelling hence I sat there and asked for the fare to Gurgaon. The man started with Rs. 720 saying that I would also have to pay Rs. 80 extra for the toll tax at the Delhi Haryana border. I said it was too much and the person immediately said that I might pay only Rs. 600, a drop of Rs. 120 in one go. I was going to agree when wife Nutan asked me why I don’t get the fare verified. I was slightly reluctant but fearing that she might get irritated I came out of the vehicle. When I looked around, I saw a Helping booth which I later found belonged to the Delhi Police and provided service for Pre-paid taxi. I went there and found a very-well mannered police officer sitting there. I asked for fare for Sector 44, Gurgaon . He asked for the number of luggage and then told me the fare to be Rs. 360. I immediately paid and got a receipt. We sat in the prepaid taxi.
On my way, I could not resist asking the taxi driver how these unauthorized persons were there right in front of the Airport. His reply was rather curt-“We all know how these vehicles are there. The cop standing next to that vehicle also knows the fact that they shall not be there as they are touts. Yet, no action is being taken against them because the policemen there are their friends.” After this he started blaming the police organization in the usual manner saying that justice was nothing but a dependent on a person’s financial and social position.
I was really impressed by this Pre-paid service being provided by Delhi Police and asked the driver of it was also being provided anywhere else. He said that it was only being provided at the two Airports and Ajmeri gate Railway station. I said that when this was such a beautiful system that was so helpful and safe for the passengers and was a great public service, why was it not extended? He again laughed at me and said that the reason is again the same. The taxi drivers oppose such a move because it will affect their business adversely and the policemen also go by their words because this way they are able to make some extra money.
Without going into the charges made by the taxi driver against the police, which people are so prone to make, I think the following few suggestions might be useful-
1. This arrangement of prepaid taxis might be extended in all big cities, if it is not presently being implemented
2. Again in such cities, it might be implemented at least at all Airport and railway stations.
It is a wonderful system, though it hardly needs any great technical skills. But this system is so much helpful for common people because-
1. The people get taxis at fare rate and cheating stops to great extent
2. The interference of police boosts much of public confidence
3. When the police notes down the vehicle number and the passenger’s name, it generates a very useful record for future reference and for safety
What are your views on this?
Amitabh Thakur
IPS,
Currently at IIM Lucknow
# 94155-34526
Friday, October 22, 2010
A Deal with the Taliban? - Ahmed Rashid reviews Abdul Salam Zaeef's book : My Life with the Taliban
http://www.nybooks.com:80/
A Deal with the Taliban?
Ahmed Rashid reviews Abdul Salam Zaeef's book My Life with the Taliban
The Taliban leadership should be provided with a neutral venue such as Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, where it can hold talks with the Afghan government and NATO. The US should release the remaining Afghan prisoners held at Guantánamo and allow them to go to either Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia.
Unless such publicly announced policies are carried out, the Taliban may well conclude that it is better and safer to sit out the next eighteen months, wait for the Americans to start leaving, and then, when they judge Afghanistan to be vulnerable, go for the kill in Kabul—although that would only lead to a renewed civil war.
6.
Just as Afghanistan faces a crucial choice, we have a book that for the first time places readers at the heart of the Taliban’s way of thinking—My Life with the Taliban, by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban minister and ambassador to Pakistan, who spent over four years in Guantánamo prison. Originally published in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, the book has been beautifully translated and extensively edited for easier understanding by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, two researchers who live in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.
Zaeef was born in 1968 and grew up in a small dusty village in Kandahar province. Like many Taliban, he came from a family of mullahs and grew up an orphan, having lost his parents at an early age. Economic development never penetrated such Afghan villages as his and daily life was centered on learning at the madrasa, farming, and sustaining the Pashtun tribal code of honor and revenge. His extended clan fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, but at the age of fifteen he secretly returned home to fight the Soviets. In the 1980s he served under several commanders, including Mullah Omar.
Zaeef dramatically brings to life the extremely harsh conditions under which the Afghans fought—without food, medical aid, or enough ammunition, and under constant Soviet bombardment:
When I first joined the jihad I was fifteen years old. I did not know how to fire a Kalashnikov or how to lead men. I knew nothing of war. But the Russian front lines were a tough proving ground and…I eventually commanded several mujahedeen groups.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan, Zaeef became a mullah in a small village near Kandahar. He describes how the situation deteriorated in the south as warlords and criminals extracted tolls from trucks on the road, kidnapped and raped women, and held young boys captive to become their forced lovers. Zaeef was one of the original Taliban; in the winter of 1994 he joined with like-minded young men to work out a strategy for dealing with the warlords.
He was and remains intensely loyal to Mullah Omar, who would, he writes,
listen to everybody with focus and respect for as long as they needed to talk, and would never seek to cut them off. After he had listened, he then would answer with ordered, coherent thoughts.
When Zaeef attended the founding meeting of the Taliban, each man took an oath of loyalty to Omar. That oath is still in effect, which is why no senior Taliban commander has ever betrayed the whereabouts of Omar. As the Taliban started to conquer Afghanistan, Zaeef was promoted from one job to the next.
After the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996, Zaeef was moved to the defense ministry where, he writes, the weekly budget for the various Taliban militias fighting the Northern Alliance was $300,000 a week, or just $14 million a year. By 1999, when the Taliban controlled 80 percent of the country, their entire annual budget was just $80 million—from the Islamic taxes the Taliban imposed as well as donations from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, after 1996, Osama bin Laden (although Zaeef does not mention his contribution). He describes a chaotic and uncoordinated government:
The budget didn’t even come close to what was needed in order to start any serious development; it was like a drop of water that falls on a hot stone, evaporating without leaving any trace.
Early in his book Zaeef describes his intense hatred for the ISI, which deepened in 2000 when he was appointed Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He claims he resisted being recruited by the ISI. “In my dealings with them I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” He describes how “the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer puts down roots in the human body,” and how “every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it.” Zaeef set up his own clandestine network of Pakistani officials who provided him information about what the ISI was planning regarding the Taliban.
What Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI’s financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban’s repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban’s harsh punishments, including public stonings.
By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban’s international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with USand Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar’s mind, Zaeef writes, “there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely.”
In January 2002 he was turned over to the Americans by the ISI—sold, according to him—and ended up in Guantánamo. He now lives in Kabul under government protection and his final plea is for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. He says he does not believe in al-Qaeda, but speaks as an Afghan patriot with strong Islamist leanings toward the Taliban. Afghanistan, he writes, is “a family home in which we all have the right to live…without discrimination and while keeping our values. No one has the right to take this away from us.” Can Afghanistan ever be a peaceful home for all Afghans? They certainly deserve it.
*See Noah Shachtman, “‘Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely’: Top U.S. Intel Officer,” Wired.com, January 8, 2010. General Flynn’s briefing, called ” State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives,” was presented on December 23, 2009. Also see “NATO Official: US Spy Work Lacking in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, January 5, 2010.
Ahmed Rashid reviews Abdul Salam Zaeef's book My Life with the Taliban
1.
For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.
One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad—the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.
By then the Soviets were in a state of panic. They ironically shared the CIA’s analysis that Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah would last only a few weeks after the Soviet troops had departed. The CIA got it wrong—Najibullah was to last three more years, until the eruption of civil war forced him to take refuge in the UN compound in April 1992. The ISI refused to oblige Shevardnadze. It wanted to get Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven disparate Mujahideen leaders and its principal protégé, into power in Kabul. The CIA had also urged the ISI to stand firm against the Soviets. It wanted to avenge the US humiliation in Vietnam and celebrate a total Communist debacle in Kabul—no matter how many Afghan lives it would cost. A political compromise was not in the plans of the ISI and the CIA.
I was summoned to meet Shevardnadze late at night and remember a frustrated but visibly angry man, outraged by the shortsightedness of Pakistan and the US and the clear desire of both governments to humiliate Moscow. He went on to evoke an apocalyptic vision of the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region. His predictions of the violence to come turned out to be dead right.
At that pivotal moment, if Shevardnadze’s compromise had been accepted, the world might well have avoided the decade-long Afghan civil war, the destruction of Kabul, the rise of the Taliban, and the sanctuary they provided al-Qaeda. Perhaps we could have avoided September 11 itself—and much that has followed since, including the latest attempt by a Nigerian extremist to blow up a transatlantic airliner, the killing of seven CIA officers at an Afghan base, and the continuing heavy casualties among NATO troops and Afghan civilians in Afghanistan.
With Obama’s controversial and risk-laden plan to first build up and then, in eighteen months, start drawing down US troops in Afghanistan, every nation and political leader in the region now faces another pivotal moment. At stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Afghan Taliban, because there is no military victory in sight and no other way to end a war that has been going on for thirty years.
When that moment comes—as it must—will the US and NATO be ready to talk with the Taliban or will they be internally divided, as they are now? Will President Hamid Karzai have the credibility to take part in such talks and deliver on an agreement that might be reached? Will the ISI demand that their own Taliban protégés return to power? Will the Taliban hard-liners, now scenting victory, even agree to talks and, as a consequence, be prepared to dump al-Qaeda? Or will they sit out the next eighteen months waiting for the Americans to begin to leave?
2.
The Afghan Taliban are now a country-wide movement. During the last year they expanded to the previously quiet west and north of Afghanistan. Their leadership has safe havens in Pakistan. Casualties on all sides have risen dramatically. According to the UN, in 2009 there were an average of 1,200 attacks a month by Taliban or other insurgent groups—a 65 percent increase from the previous year. Over the twelve-month period, 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed, an increase of 14 percent; of those, two thirds were killed by the Taliban, a 40 percent increase. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 percent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.
Adding to the challenges facing the Afghan government, over the years it has been difficult to recruit Pashtuns for the Afghan army and police from the southern Pashtun provinces that are largely controlled by the Taliban, although recently Pashtun recruitment has increased following a pay rise for security forces. Even so, the Taliban have infiltrated parts of the Afghan army and police—the key components of the US plan to start the handover of power to local forces by July 2011. In large parts of Afghanistan, development programs have come to a halt and nearly half of the UN staff assigned to Afghanistan have been relocated to Dubai and Central Asia because of security concerns.
According to Major General Michael Flynn, the NATO military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now have shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces—they serve to organize the movement at a provincial level and disrupt government initiatives in their area—and the movement “can sustain itself indefinitely.” Flynn has described US intelligence in Afghanistan as “clueless” and “ignorant.”*
Taliban commanders have stepped up their vicious campaign to intimidate or kill any Afghan civilians working for the Karzai government, aid agencies, women’s groups, and even the UN. On January 18, militants launched a double suicide attack just yards from the presidential palace in central Kabul, provoking a gun battle in which three soldiers and two civilians were killed and more than seventy wounded. “We are now at a critical juncture…. The situation cannot continue as is if we are to succeed in Afghanistan,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council earlier in the month. “There is a risk that the deteriorating overall situation will become irreversible,” he added.
The prevailing view in Washington is that many Taliban fighters in the field can eventually be won over, but that the present US troop surge has to roll them back first, reversing Taliban successes and gaining control over the population centers and major roads. According to the current American strategy, the US military has to weaken the Taliban before negotiating with them. The commander of US and NATOforces, General Stanley McChrystal, has both a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives and other forms of support to Taliban who put down their arms, and a group of British and American officers who are drawing up plans to win over Taliban commanders and fighters as the troop surge tilts the battlefield back in favor of the US. General McChrystal told me in Islamabad in early January that he is confident that many Taliban will be won over in the field. This US reconciliation effort would be led by Karzai, who for several years has called for talks with Taliban leaders.
There is another way of looking at the present crisis. Despite their successes, the Taliban are probably now near the height of their power. They do not control major population centers—nor can they, given NATO’s military strength and air power. There are no countrywide, populist insurrections against NATO forces as there were against the coalition forces in Iraq. The vast majority of Afghans do not want the return of a Taliban regime despite their anger at the Karzai government and the general international failure to deliver economic progress. Many Afghans believe that as long as Western troops remain, there is still the hope that security can return and their lives change for the better.
Thus the next few months could offer a critical opportunity to persuade the Taliban that this is the best time to negotiate a settlement, because they are at their strongest.
3.
Both Generals McChrystal and David Petraeus, the head of the US military’s Central Command, have said that they cannot shoot their way to victory. Obama is clear about defeating al-Qaeda, but he is more inclined toward negotiations with the Taliban. In his West Point speech in December, Obama said he supported Kabul’s efforts to “open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.”
The present US military strategy aims to peel away Taliban commanders and fighters and resettle them without making any major political concessions or changes to the Afghan constitution. But Washington remains deeply divided about talking to the Taliban leaders. The State and Defense Departments, the White House, and the CIA all have different views about it, and there are also divisions between the US and its allies.
General McChrystal told me that many mid-level Taliban commanders and their men are waiting for Karzai to announce a reconciliation strategy before offering to change sides. “The reintegration of former Taliban into society offers a good chance to reduce the insurgency in Afghanistan…while al-Qaeda needs to be hunted and destroyed.” Whether the US and its allies should hold talks with the Taliban leadership, he said, is a political decision to be made by Washington. In December Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that in his estimation some 70 percent of the Taliban fight for local reasons or money rather than because of ideological commitment to the movement, and they can be won over.
Meanwhile the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, as suggested in a ten-page statement issued in November 2009 for the religious festival of Eid. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while urging his fighters to continue the jihad against “the arrogant [US] enemy,” also pledged that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and noninterference from outside forces, and would pose no threat to neighboring countries—implying that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan along with the Taliban. Sounding more like a diplomat than an extremist, Omar said, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.”
A week later, the Taliban’s response to Obama’s West Point speech again suggested a changed attitude. There was not a single mention of jihad or imposing Islamic law. Instead the Taliban spoke of a nationalist and patriotic struggle for Afghanistan’s independence and said they were “ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” In a New Year’s message the Taliban, while condemning the US surge, even seemed to empathize with Obama, observing that the American president faces “a great many problems and opposition” at home.
The Taliban’s new tone can be traced to secret talks in the spring of 2009. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia at Karzai’s request, the talks included former (or now retired) Taliban, former Arab members of al-Qaeda, and Karzai’s representatives. No breakthrough took place, but the talks led to a series of visits to Saudi Arabia by important Taliban leaders during the rest of 2009. The US, British, and Saudi officials who were indirectly in contact with the Taliban there quickly encouraged them to renounce al-Qaeda and lay out their negotiating demands. In turn, the Taliban said that distancing themselves from al-Qaeda would require the other side to meet a principal demand of their own: that all foreign forces must announce a timetable to leave Afghanistan.
Istakhbarat, the Saudi intelligence service, is not set up to produce political results, but it has given the Taliban a safe venue to meet and it has acted as an interlocutor with Afghan government and Western officials. Significantly the ISI, which has demanded a key part in the negotiations from its erstwhile Saudi allies, has so far been left out at the request of both the Taliban and the Afghan government—neither of whom trust it. That now may be about to change. The key to more formal negotiations with Taliban leaders lies with Pakistan and theISI.
4.
Tensions between the US and Pakistan have escalated in recent months as Washington demands that the Pakistani military “capture or kill” Afghan Taliban leaders as well as top militants in Pakistan. These include the Afghan Taliban leadership living in Quetta and Karachi, as well as their allies such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who live in North Waziristan in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan. Pakistan says it is too busy dealing with its own acute problems with the Pakistani Taliban and a growing number of terrorist attacks by various insurgent groups. Its forces are overstretched, it has little money, and it will oblige the Americans only when it is ready to do so. In fact Pakistan would never launch a military offensive against the Afghan Taliban leaders since it has viewed them as potential allies in a post-American Afghanistan, when the US will probably ditch Pakistan as well.
Pakistan’s military is deeply fearful of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan; the result could be civil war and mayhem in its backyard once again. “We want the American surge to succeed in Afghanistan, because if they don’t we will pay the price,” a senior Pakistani military officer told me. The army is also convinced that the US will eventually align itself with India and that it has allowed India to strengthen its influence in Kabul at Pakistan’s expense. Despite all the sacrifices it has made for the Afghans over thirty years, supporting them against the Soviets, Pakistanis are now friendless in Afghanistan—except for the Afghan Taliban, who are more wary than friendly toward the ISI.
To regain influence in Afghanistan and drive the Indians out once the Americans leave, the Pakistan military could, as an alternative, back the Taliban in a plan to retake Kabul and set up a government that would do Pakistan’s bidding. However, that possibility is now too risky; the international community would never tolerate it, and such a regime would also provide a base from which the Pakistani Taliban could launch further attacks in Pakistan.
In a major policy shift, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. “We want the talks to start now, not in eighteen months when they are leaving; but the Americans have to trust and depend on us,” a senior military officer told me. There is a deep lack of trust between the CIA and the ISI, and other countries may also balk at Pakistan’s insistence that all negotiations should be channeled through the ISI. Pakistani officials suggest that if the ISI helps arrange talks, then independent contacts between Taliban leaders and the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) would have to stop. In return, Pakistani officials say only that they want to be sure “that Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan are looked after”—interests that have yet to be clearly spelled out to the Americans and Afghans.
This is an important change in the official position of Pakistan. For the past nine years—despite the well-known connections between theISI and the Afghan Taliban—Pakistan has denied that it has influence over the Taliban leaders, and openly playing host to them was considered out of the question. Pakistan will have to make serious efforts to gain the confidence of the US and the Afghans if it is to sponsor negotiations with the Taliban; but their differences could be worked out through arrangements made between the various intelligence agencies and governments involved. Senior US officials say that Pakistan is showing itself to be “more flexible” on Afghan policy than before.
How will the Taliban leaders respond? Many of them are fed up with years of ISI manipulation and strategizing on their behalf and would prefer to keep the ISI out of such talks. Some members of the Taliban have built up a rapport with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency of the Kabul government. The NDS and the ISI loathe and mistrust each other, and the NDSwould be extremely reluctant to allow the ISI a central part in negotiations. Moreover, the crucial acceptance of reconciliation with the Taliban has to come from the non-Pashtun population in the north who are extremely hostile to the Taliban and the ISI. If the northern ethnic groups who make up just over 50 percent of the population do not accept the reconciliation plan, there could be a renewed civil war as in the 1990s.
But the ISI has power and influence over the Taliban. Not only are the Taliban able to resupply their fighters from Pakistan, and seek medical treatment and other facilities, but the families of most Taliban leaders live in Pakistan where they own homes and run businesses and shops. Taliban leaders travel to Saudi Arabia on Pakistani passports. All this makes them vulnerable to ISI pressure. Even before the USmilitary can consider coopting mid-level Taliban commanders, both sides would have to ascertain how this would play with the ISI.
The Pakistani army’s desperate desire to have some control over future events in Afghanistan is partly due to its strategic aim of avoiding encirclement by India; but it is also a result of the setbacks it has received since 2001. The military is still smarting from former President Bush’s decisions to allow the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance to take Kabul in 2001, to ignore Islamabad’s later requests for consultations on US strategy in Afghanistan, and to treat all Afghan Pashtuns as potential Taliban. This helped radicalize Pakistan’s own Pashtun population, which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan’s. (There are 12 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 27 million in Pakistan.)
5.
Talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes to Taliban commanders to change sides—as it did with the Northern Alliance in 2001. There is an urgent need for a publicly promoted strategy involving concrete efforts to build political institutions and provide humanitarian aid in ways that do not require intrusive Western control—a strategy that could attract many members of the Taliban, reduce violence, and placate Afghans who are opposed to all such compromises. Obama officials have talked up the need for such a public strategy but accomplished little during his first year in office. Yet such goals are of paramount importance.
Here are some suggestions of steps that should be taken in advance of talking to the Taliban. Almost all these points have theoretically been accepted by the US and NATO but none have been acted upon:
Convince Afghanistan’s neighbors and other countries in the region to sign on to a reconciliation strategy with the Taliban, to be led by the Afghan government. Creating a regional strategy and consensus on Afghanistan was one of the primary aims of the Obama administration; but little has been achieved. From Iran to India, regional tensions are worse now than a year ago.
For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.
One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad—the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.
By then the Soviets were in a state of panic. They ironically shared the CIA’s analysis that Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah would last only a few weeks after the Soviet troops had departed. The CIA got it wrong—Najibullah was to last three more years, until the eruption of civil war forced him to take refuge in the UN compound in April 1992. The ISI refused to oblige Shevardnadze. It wanted to get Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven disparate Mujahideen leaders and its principal protégé, into power in Kabul. The CIA had also urged the ISI to stand firm against the Soviets. It wanted to avenge the US humiliation in Vietnam and celebrate a total Communist debacle in Kabul—no matter how many Afghan lives it would cost. A political compromise was not in the plans of the ISI and the CIA.
I was summoned to meet Shevardnadze late at night and remember a frustrated but visibly angry man, outraged by the shortsightedness of Pakistan and the US and the clear desire of both governments to humiliate Moscow. He went on to evoke an apocalyptic vision of the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region. His predictions of the violence to come turned out to be dead right.
At that pivotal moment, if Shevardnadze’s compromise had been accepted, the world might well have avoided the decade-long Afghan civil war, the destruction of Kabul, the rise of the Taliban, and the sanctuary they provided al-Qaeda. Perhaps we could have avoided September 11 itself—and much that has followed since, including the latest attempt by a Nigerian extremist to blow up a transatlantic airliner, the killing of seven CIA officers at an Afghan base, and the continuing heavy casualties among NATO troops and Afghan civilians in Afghanistan.
With Obama’s controversial and risk-laden plan to first build up and then, in eighteen months, start drawing down US troops in Afghanistan, every nation and political leader in the region now faces another pivotal moment. At stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Afghan Taliban, because there is no military victory in sight and no other way to end a war that has been going on for thirty years.
When that moment comes—as it must—will the US and NATO be ready to talk with the Taliban or will they be internally divided, as they are now? Will President Hamid Karzai have the credibility to take part in such talks and deliver on an agreement that might be reached? Will the ISI demand that their own Taliban protégés return to power? Will the Taliban hard-liners, now scenting victory, even agree to talks and, as a consequence, be prepared to dump al-Qaeda? Or will they sit out the next eighteen months waiting for the Americans to begin to leave?
2.
The Afghan Taliban are now a country-wide movement. During the last year they expanded to the previously quiet west and north of Afghanistan. Their leadership has safe havens in Pakistan. Casualties on all sides have risen dramatically. According to the UN, in 2009 there were an average of 1,200 attacks a month by Taliban or other insurgent groups—a 65 percent increase from the previous year. Over the twelve-month period, 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed, an increase of 14 percent; of those, two thirds were killed by the Taliban, a 40 percent increase. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 percent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.
Adding to the challenges facing the Afghan government, over the years it has been difficult to recruit Pashtuns for the Afghan army and police from the southern Pashtun provinces that are largely controlled by the Taliban, although recently Pashtun recruitment has increased following a pay rise for security forces. Even so, the Taliban have infiltrated parts of the Afghan army and police—the key components of the US plan to start the handover of power to local forces by July 2011. In large parts of Afghanistan, development programs have come to a halt and nearly half of the UN staff assigned to Afghanistan have been relocated to Dubai and Central Asia because of security concerns.
According to Major General Michael Flynn, the NATO military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now have shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces—they serve to organize the movement at a provincial level and disrupt government initiatives in their area—and the movement “can sustain itself indefinitely.” Flynn has described US intelligence in Afghanistan as “clueless” and “ignorant.”*
Taliban commanders have stepped up their vicious campaign to intimidate or kill any Afghan civilians working for the Karzai government, aid agencies, women’s groups, and even the UN. On January 18, militants launched a double suicide attack just yards from the presidential palace in central Kabul, provoking a gun battle in which three soldiers and two civilians were killed and more than seventy wounded. “We are now at a critical juncture…. The situation cannot continue as is if we are to succeed in Afghanistan,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council earlier in the month. “There is a risk that the deteriorating overall situation will become irreversible,” he added.
The prevailing view in Washington is that many Taliban fighters in the field can eventually be won over, but that the present US troop surge has to roll them back first, reversing Taliban successes and gaining control over the population centers and major roads. According to the current American strategy, the US military has to weaken the Taliban before negotiating with them. The commander of US and NATOforces, General Stanley McChrystal, has both a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives and other forms of support to Taliban who put down their arms, and a group of British and American officers who are drawing up plans to win over Taliban commanders and fighters as the troop surge tilts the battlefield back in favor of the US. General McChrystal told me in Islamabad in early January that he is confident that many Taliban will be won over in the field. This US reconciliation effort would be led by Karzai, who for several years has called for talks with Taliban leaders.
There is another way of looking at the present crisis. Despite their successes, the Taliban are probably now near the height of their power. They do not control major population centers—nor can they, given NATO’s military strength and air power. There are no countrywide, populist insurrections against NATO forces as there were against the coalition forces in Iraq. The vast majority of Afghans do not want the return of a Taliban regime despite their anger at the Karzai government and the general international failure to deliver economic progress. Many Afghans believe that as long as Western troops remain, there is still the hope that security can return and their lives change for the better.
Thus the next few months could offer a critical opportunity to persuade the Taliban that this is the best time to negotiate a settlement, because they are at their strongest.
3.
Both Generals McChrystal and David Petraeus, the head of the US military’s Central Command, have said that they cannot shoot their way to victory. Obama is clear about defeating al-Qaeda, but he is more inclined toward negotiations with the Taliban. In his West Point speech in December, Obama said he supported Kabul’s efforts to “open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.”
The present US military strategy aims to peel away Taliban commanders and fighters and resettle them without making any major political concessions or changes to the Afghan constitution. But Washington remains deeply divided about talking to the Taliban leaders. The State and Defense Departments, the White House, and the CIA all have different views about it, and there are also divisions between the US and its allies.
General McChrystal told me that many mid-level Taliban commanders and their men are waiting for Karzai to announce a reconciliation strategy before offering to change sides. “The reintegration of former Taliban into society offers a good chance to reduce the insurgency in Afghanistan…while al-Qaeda needs to be hunted and destroyed.” Whether the US and its allies should hold talks with the Taliban leadership, he said, is a political decision to be made by Washington. In December Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that in his estimation some 70 percent of the Taliban fight for local reasons or money rather than because of ideological commitment to the movement, and they can be won over.
Meanwhile the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, as suggested in a ten-page statement issued in November 2009 for the religious festival of Eid. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while urging his fighters to continue the jihad against “the arrogant [US] enemy,” also pledged that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and noninterference from outside forces, and would pose no threat to neighboring countries—implying that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan along with the Taliban. Sounding more like a diplomat than an extremist, Omar said, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.”
A week later, the Taliban’s response to Obama’s West Point speech again suggested a changed attitude. There was not a single mention of jihad or imposing Islamic law. Instead the Taliban spoke of a nationalist and patriotic struggle for Afghanistan’s independence and said they were “ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” In a New Year’s message the Taliban, while condemning the US surge, even seemed to empathize with Obama, observing that the American president faces “a great many problems and opposition” at home.
The Taliban’s new tone can be traced to secret talks in the spring of 2009. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia at Karzai’s request, the talks included former (or now retired) Taliban, former Arab members of al-Qaeda, and Karzai’s representatives. No breakthrough took place, but the talks led to a series of visits to Saudi Arabia by important Taliban leaders during the rest of 2009. The US, British, and Saudi officials who were indirectly in contact with the Taliban there quickly encouraged them to renounce al-Qaeda and lay out their negotiating demands. In turn, the Taliban said that distancing themselves from al-Qaeda would require the other side to meet a principal demand of their own: that all foreign forces must announce a timetable to leave Afghanistan.
Istakhbarat, the Saudi intelligence service, is not set up to produce political results, but it has given the Taliban a safe venue to meet and it has acted as an interlocutor with Afghan government and Western officials. Significantly the ISI, which has demanded a key part in the negotiations from its erstwhile Saudi allies, has so far been left out at the request of both the Taliban and the Afghan government—neither of whom trust it. That now may be about to change. The key to more formal negotiations with Taliban leaders lies with Pakistan and theISI.
4.
Tensions between the US and Pakistan have escalated in recent months as Washington demands that the Pakistani military “capture or kill” Afghan Taliban leaders as well as top militants in Pakistan. These include the Afghan Taliban leadership living in Quetta and Karachi, as well as their allies such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who live in North Waziristan in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan. Pakistan says it is too busy dealing with its own acute problems with the Pakistani Taliban and a growing number of terrorist attacks by various insurgent groups. Its forces are overstretched, it has little money, and it will oblige the Americans only when it is ready to do so. In fact Pakistan would never launch a military offensive against the Afghan Taliban leaders since it has viewed them as potential allies in a post-American Afghanistan, when the US will probably ditch Pakistan as well.
Pakistan’s military is deeply fearful of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan; the result could be civil war and mayhem in its backyard once again. “We want the American surge to succeed in Afghanistan, because if they don’t we will pay the price,” a senior Pakistani military officer told me. The army is also convinced that the US will eventually align itself with India and that it has allowed India to strengthen its influence in Kabul at Pakistan’s expense. Despite all the sacrifices it has made for the Afghans over thirty years, supporting them against the Soviets, Pakistanis are now friendless in Afghanistan—except for the Afghan Taliban, who are more wary than friendly toward the ISI.
To regain influence in Afghanistan and drive the Indians out once the Americans leave, the Pakistan military could, as an alternative, back the Taliban in a plan to retake Kabul and set up a government that would do Pakistan’s bidding. However, that possibility is now too risky; the international community would never tolerate it, and such a regime would also provide a base from which the Pakistani Taliban could launch further attacks in Pakistan.
In a major policy shift, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. “We want the talks to start now, not in eighteen months when they are leaving; but the Americans have to trust and depend on us,” a senior military officer told me. There is a deep lack of trust between the CIA and the ISI, and other countries may also balk at Pakistan’s insistence that all negotiations should be channeled through the ISI. Pakistani officials suggest that if the ISI helps arrange talks, then independent contacts between Taliban leaders and the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) would have to stop. In return, Pakistani officials say only that they want to be sure “that Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan are looked after”—interests that have yet to be clearly spelled out to the Americans and Afghans.
This is an important change in the official position of Pakistan. For the past nine years—despite the well-known connections between theISI and the Afghan Taliban—Pakistan has denied that it has influence over the Taliban leaders, and openly playing host to them was considered out of the question. Pakistan will have to make serious efforts to gain the confidence of the US and the Afghans if it is to sponsor negotiations with the Taliban; but their differences could be worked out through arrangements made between the various intelligence agencies and governments involved. Senior US officials say that Pakistan is showing itself to be “more flexible” on Afghan policy than before.
How will the Taliban leaders respond? Many of them are fed up with years of ISI manipulation and strategizing on their behalf and would prefer to keep the ISI out of such talks. Some members of the Taliban have built up a rapport with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency of the Kabul government. The NDS and the ISI loathe and mistrust each other, and the NDSwould be extremely reluctant to allow the ISI a central part in negotiations. Moreover, the crucial acceptance of reconciliation with the Taliban has to come from the non-Pashtun population in the north who are extremely hostile to the Taliban and the ISI. If the northern ethnic groups who make up just over 50 percent of the population do not accept the reconciliation plan, there could be a renewed civil war as in the 1990s.
But the ISI has power and influence over the Taliban. Not only are the Taliban able to resupply their fighters from Pakistan, and seek medical treatment and other facilities, but the families of most Taliban leaders live in Pakistan where they own homes and run businesses and shops. Taliban leaders travel to Saudi Arabia on Pakistani passports. All this makes them vulnerable to ISI pressure. Even before the USmilitary can consider coopting mid-level Taliban commanders, both sides would have to ascertain how this would play with the ISI.
The Pakistani army’s desperate desire to have some control over future events in Afghanistan is partly due to its strategic aim of avoiding encirclement by India; but it is also a result of the setbacks it has received since 2001. The military is still smarting from former President Bush’s decisions to allow the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance to take Kabul in 2001, to ignore Islamabad’s later requests for consultations on US strategy in Afghanistan, and to treat all Afghan Pashtuns as potential Taliban. This helped radicalize Pakistan’s own Pashtun population, which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan’s. (There are 12 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 27 million in Pakistan.)
5.
Talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes to Taliban commanders to change sides—as it did with the Northern Alliance in 2001. There is an urgent need for a publicly promoted strategy involving concrete efforts to build political institutions and provide humanitarian aid in ways that do not require intrusive Western control—a strategy that could attract many members of the Taliban, reduce violence, and placate Afghans who are opposed to all such compromises. Obama officials have talked up the need for such a public strategy but accomplished little during his first year in office. Yet such goals are of paramount importance.
Here are some suggestions of steps that should be taken in advance of talking to the Taliban. Almost all these points have theoretically been accepted by the US and NATO but none have been acted upon:
Convince Afghanistan’s neighbors and other countries in the region to sign on to a reconciliation strategy with the Taliban, to be led by the Afghan government. Creating a regional strategy and consensus on Afghanistan was one of the primary aims of the Obama administration; but little has been achieved. From Iran to India, regional tensions are worse now than a year ago.
Allow Afghanistan to submit to the UN Security Council a request that the names of Taliban leaders be removed from a list of terrorists drawn up in 2001—so long as those leaders renounce violence and ties to al-Qaeda. Russia has so far refused to entertain such a request; but Obama has not tried hard enough to extract this concession from Russian leaders.
Pass a UN Security Council resolution giving the Afghan government a formal mandate to negotiate with the Taliban, and allow the US,NATO, and the UN to encourage that process. This would mean persuading reluctant countries like Russia and India to support such a resolution. (On January 27, a UN Security Council committee announced, with Russian agreement, that it has lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials who are said to support the Karzai government.)
Have NATO and Afghan forces take responsibility for the security of Taliban and their families who return to Afghanistan, enlisting the help of international agencies such as the UN High Commission for Refugees or the International Committee of the Red Cross to work with the Afghan government to assist these returning Taliban members, arranging for compensation, housing, job training, and other needs they may have in facing resettlement.
Provide adequate funds, training, and staff for a reconciliation body, led by the Afghan government, that will work with Western forces and humanitarian agencies to provide a comprehensive and clearly spelled-out program for the security of the returning Taliban and for facilities to receive them.
Encourage the Pakistani military to assist NATO and Afghan forces in providing security to returning Taliban and their families and allow necessary cross-border support from international humanitarian agencies. Encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help the Taliban set up a legal political party, as other Afghan militants—such as former members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami party—have done. This would be a tremendous blow to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban and it would give concrete form to Obama’s repeated pledge that he is ready to reach out to foes in the Muslim world.The Taliban leadership should be provided with a neutral venue such as Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, where it can hold talks with the Afghan government and NATO. The US should release the remaining Afghan prisoners held at Guantánamo and allow them to go to either Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia.
Unless such publicly announced policies are carried out, the Taliban may well conclude that it is better and safer to sit out the next eighteen months, wait for the Americans to start leaving, and then, when they judge Afghanistan to be vulnerable, go for the kill in Kabul—although that would only lead to a renewed civil war.
6.
Just as Afghanistan faces a crucial choice, we have a book that for the first time places readers at the heart of the Taliban’s way of thinking—My Life with the Taliban, by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban minister and ambassador to Pakistan, who spent over four years in Guantánamo prison. Originally published in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, the book has been beautifully translated and extensively edited for easier understanding by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, two researchers who live in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.
Zaeef was born in 1968 and grew up in a small dusty village in Kandahar province. Like many Taliban, he came from a family of mullahs and grew up an orphan, having lost his parents at an early age. Economic development never penetrated such Afghan villages as his and daily life was centered on learning at the madrasa, farming, and sustaining the Pashtun tribal code of honor and revenge. His extended clan fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, but at the age of fifteen he secretly returned home to fight the Soviets. In the 1980s he served under several commanders, including Mullah Omar.
Zaeef dramatically brings to life the extremely harsh conditions under which the Afghans fought—without food, medical aid, or enough ammunition, and under constant Soviet bombardment:
When I first joined the jihad I was fifteen years old. I did not know how to fire a Kalashnikov or how to lead men. I knew nothing of war. But the Russian front lines were a tough proving ground and…I eventually commanded several mujahedeen groups.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan, Zaeef became a mullah in a small village near Kandahar. He describes how the situation deteriorated in the south as warlords and criminals extracted tolls from trucks on the road, kidnapped and raped women, and held young boys captive to become their forced lovers. Zaeef was one of the original Taliban; in the winter of 1994 he joined with like-minded young men to work out a strategy for dealing with the warlords.
He was and remains intensely loyal to Mullah Omar, who would, he writes,
listen to everybody with focus and respect for as long as they needed to talk, and would never seek to cut them off. After he had listened, he then would answer with ordered, coherent thoughts.
When Zaeef attended the founding meeting of the Taliban, each man took an oath of loyalty to Omar. That oath is still in effect, which is why no senior Taliban commander has ever betrayed the whereabouts of Omar. As the Taliban started to conquer Afghanistan, Zaeef was promoted from one job to the next.
After the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996, Zaeef was moved to the defense ministry where, he writes, the weekly budget for the various Taliban militias fighting the Northern Alliance was $300,000 a week, or just $14 million a year. By 1999, when the Taliban controlled 80 percent of the country, their entire annual budget was just $80 million—from the Islamic taxes the Taliban imposed as well as donations from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, after 1996, Osama bin Laden (although Zaeef does not mention his contribution). He describes a chaotic and uncoordinated government:
The budget didn’t even come close to what was needed in order to start any serious development; it was like a drop of water that falls on a hot stone, evaporating without leaving any trace.
Early in his book Zaeef describes his intense hatred for the ISI, which deepened in 2000 when he was appointed Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He claims he resisted being recruited by the ISI. “In my dealings with them I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” He describes how “the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer puts down roots in the human body,” and how “every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it.” Zaeef set up his own clandestine network of Pakistani officials who provided him information about what the ISI was planning regarding the Taliban.
What Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI’s financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban’s repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban’s harsh punishments, including public stonings.
By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban’s international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with USand Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar’s mind, Zaeef writes, “there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely.”
In January 2002 he was turned over to the Americans by the ISI—sold, according to him—and ended up in Guantánamo. He now lives in Kabul under government protection and his final plea is for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. He says he does not believe in al-Qaeda, but speaks as an Afghan patriot with strong Islamist leanings toward the Taliban. Afghanistan, he writes, is “a family home in which we all have the right to live…without discrimination and while keeping our values. No one has the right to take this away from us.” Can Afghanistan ever be a peaceful home for all Afghans? They certainly deserve it.
*See Noah Shachtman, “‘Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely’: Top U.S. Intel Officer,” Wired.com, January 8, 2010. General Flynn’s briefing, called ” State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives,” was presented on December 23, 2009. Also see “NATO Official: US Spy Work Lacking in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, January 5, 2010.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Are They Giving an Oscar to an Anti-Semite? By Benjamin Ivry - Forward.com
http://www.forward.com/articles/132013/
Are They Giving an Oscar to an Anti-Semite?
‘Strange Thing Hollywood,’ Where the Dishonorable are Honored
By Benjamin Ivry
Published October 08, 2010.
The Opinions of an Artist: Jean-Luc Godard, pictured here, has made many regrettable comments during his career.
Admired for avant-garde films like “Breathless” (1960); “My Life to Live” (1962) and “Contempt” (1963), Godard is one of the last survivors of French cinema’s New Wave movement, after the death in January of director Éric Rohmer and the premature 1984 demise of Godard’s colleague and ex-friend, François Truffaut. The friendship between Godard and Truffaut dissolved by the end of the 1960s because of the former’s anti-Semitism, according to two new biographies: “Godard” by film historian Antoine de Baecque, published in Paris in March, and “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” (2008) by Richard Brody.
Both biographers recount a series of incidents expressing Godard’s unhealthy obsession with Jews, which noted French historian and journalist Pierre Assouline, on his Le Monde blog, termed “anti-Semitic.” In 1968, Godard, in the presence of Truffaut, called producer Pierre Braunberger, an early supporter of New Wave filmmakers, “sale juif” (“filthy Jew”), after which Truffaut immediately broke from Godard.
Godard’s attitude toward Jews has also come under the microscope because of his contempt for the State of Israel, which he has often called “a cancer on the map of the Middle East” —including in a famous 1991 interview with the newspaper Libération. His 1976 documentary “Ici et Ailleurs” (“Here and Elsewhere”) contrasts the lives of a French and Palestinian family and features alternatingly flickering images of Golda Meir and Adolf Hitler, proposing them as comparable tyrants. As de Baecque underlines, in “Ici et Ailleurs” Godard also defends the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, suggesting that “before every Olympics finale, an image of Palestinian [refugee] camps should be broadcast.”
When I interviewed Godard in 1991 at his home in the Swiss city of Rolle, I asked him to explain the cancer metaphor. Keeping one eye on a muted television showing tennis, Godard languidly described hospital X-rays of malignant tumors in what he clearly saw as an exact analogy to the Middle East. He discussed the subject more recently, in a 2007 documentary, “Morceaux de Conversations,” (“Fragments of Conversations With Jean-Luc Godard”) made by film historian Jean Narboni, an editor of the influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Godard tells Narboni that Israelis currently occupy a territory that belongs to “their eternal fiction, from biblical times onward.” When Narboni states that the term “fiction” is offensive, Godard flippantly replies that Israelis live on “reality TV,” whereas Palestinians exist “in a film by Frederick Wiseman,” the starkly tragic, albeit American Jewish, documentarian.
Reality itself becomes a relative term when Godard, as de Baecque observes, justifies every act of Arab resistance, including terrorism, by saying that “Israel is a paradoxical form of Nazism’s historical resurgence.” In a 1970 short documentary filmed for German TV, Godard brandished a tract with the slogan “NazIsrael” emblazoned on it and told the cameraman, “Write us a check from German television, which is financed by Zionists and that idiotic Social Democrat, Willy Brandt, and that will let us buy weapons for the Palestinians to attack Zionists,” as de Baecque further recounted.
Godard’s fictional films also contain disquieting anti-Semitic utterances, sometimes in the guise of pseudo-humor. In 1964’s “A Married Woman” (“Une Femme Mariée”), a character states: “Today, in Germany, I said to someone, ‘How about if tomorrow, we kill all the Jews and the hairdressers?’ He replied, ‘Why the hairdressers?’” In 1967’s “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” (“Deux ou Trois Choses Que je Sais D’elle”), the director brags that ParisMatch magazine “always affixes a star to my films, as it does to Jews.” The allusion to the Nazi law forcing Jews to wear yellow stars in Occupied France is symptomatic of a sensibility, usually found among Europe’s ultra-right-wing politicians, that produces crushingly unfunny jokes about such historical tragedy. Godard’s 2010 film, “Film Socialisme” (“Socialism Film”), which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, features a typical pseudo-aphorism of this ilk: “Strange thing Hollywood — Jews invented it.”
While Hollywood historians know that the early studio heads were for the most part Jewish, to conclude that this explains the industry’s “strangeness” is racist, to say the least. Godard is entitled to criticize filmmaking, and he has poured scorn on much of Hollywood’s output — especially on Steven Spielberg — but his comments are clearly not confined to that arena. Even Godard’s friends and collaborators, like the French-Jewish filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, can find themselves insulted. In 1973, Gorin contacted Godard to be paid for his collaborative work on 1972’s “Tout Va Bien” (“Everything’s Fine”), to which Godard responded, “Ah, it’s always the same: Jews call you when they hear a cash register opening.”
In a 2009 article in Le Monde, “Godard and the Jewish Question” by Jean-Luc Douin, Godard is quoted as making an off-camera comment during the filming of a 2006 documentary: “Palestinians’ suicide bombings in order to bring a Palestinian State into existence ultimately resemble what the Jews did by allowing themselves to be led like sheep to be slaughtered in gas chambers, sacrificing themselves to bring into existence the State of Israel.” Godard apparently believes that Jews committed mass suicide during the Holocaust in order for Israel to be created. The same article quotes him along these lines: “Basically, there were six million kamikazes” and “Hollywood was invented by Jewish gangsters.” At least Godard cannot accuse the American film industry of being ungrateful gangsters.
When the Forward submitted some of Godard’s anti-Semitic utterances to the academy, the following written response was issued: “The Academy is aware that Jean-Luc Godard has made statements in the past that some have construed as anti-Semitic. We are also aware of detailed rebuttals to that charge. Anti-Semitism is of course deplorable, but the Academy has not found the accusations against M. Godard persuasive.”
As “detailed rebuttals,” an Academy spokesperson cited a single 2009 article in the English-language Canadian magazine Cinemascope by Bill Krohn, a Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du Cinema, to which Godard and many of the early New Wave directors contributed. Krohn accused Brody of ideological simplification, biographical reductivism, guilt by association, misinterpretation, having felt snubbed by Godard and, overall, perpetrating “a hatchet job disguised as a celebration of Godard’s genius.” Krohn’s critique is diffuse and short on specifics, but in one concrete instance he suggests that Godard’s exclamation of “filthy Jew,” taken by Braunberger as a deadly insult, was misunderstood. Krohn unpersuasively interprets it as affectionate banter between old friends and, even more absurdly, as an allusion to Jean Renoir’s classic 1937 film “La Grande Illusion.”
Assouline expressed astonishment that after Brody’s biography appeared, revealing “with precision Godard’s anti-Semitism,” Godard was rumored to be preparing an adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” tracing the fate of six Holocaust victims. Perhaps film producers make the distinction between an artist of undeniable talent and an individual of extremely dubious opinions. Responding to reporters from the London Sunday Times, Jean-Luc Gaillard, a longtime neighbor of Godard, noted, “He [Godard] is on a different level from the rest of us, somewhere between genius and completely round the bend.”
In proudly Anglo-dominated Los Angeles, it seems that artists whose odious statements are made in languages other than English can get a free pass and, on occasion, even a hat tip. Because Godard’s statements have been in French, there has been barely any American opposition to the Academy’s nomination. When approached to comment for this story, even staunch opponents of anti-Semitism — such as Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and multiple Academy Award winner; noted University of California, Los Angeles, film historian Howard Suber, and writer-producer Lionel Chetwynd — said that they had no personal knowledge of Godard’s reputed anti-Semitism.
Elsewhere — and especially in France, where Godard has worked for several decades — others may agree with Braunberger, who wrote to Truffaut in 1968: “I will never forgive Godard for his anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism brings joy to no one… I realize that from now on, you can only despise Godard on a human level. ‘Filthy Jew’ is the only insult which I cannot take… If you know what these words evoke within me, what they revive of a past which is still agonizing, you would come over to embrace me. (signed) Your Jewish friend who owes so much of his Jewish happiness to you.”
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
Tom Tugend, who provided additional reporting, is a contributing editor at the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
U.S. Had Warnings About Plotter of Mumbai Attack - THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/asia/17headley.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack.
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives, Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.
Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and are raising the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.
More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities, or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by strained relations with their husband.
Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I. investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the American drug agency lasted much longer.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American former wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told the authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar.
On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.”
Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Interviews with United States and allied intelligence and security officials illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headlely testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009. ¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.
Besides Mr. Headley’s guilty plea in a United States court, seven Pakistani suspects have been charged there. American investigators say a critical figure who has not been charged is Sajid Mir, a Lashkar operative who became close to Mr. Headley as the plans for the Mumbai operation unfolded. The investigators fear he is still working on other plots.
Mr. Headley was known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States. In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.
Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.
And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.
“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me to get lost.”
Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas.
He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old, his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.
Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores.
But at the same time he was involved in a life of crime. Each time he was arrested on drug trafficking charges, he used his roots in the United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law enforcement as he was to the traffickers — one with the looks and passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate secretive organizations.
He was married at least three times. For one period he was married to all three wives — Ms. Outalha, who is a medical student half his age; a New York makeup artist; and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the same time.
Those relationships, however, caused him trouble. In 2005, his American wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. She went back a month later with more information. A senior administration official acknowledged that Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms. Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.
“The texture of the meeting was that her husband was involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”
Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said. More than that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to the American authorities looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.
Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking a plaza in Morocco, Ms. Outalha said that in hindsight, she is convinced that he is both men. She claims to be puzzled that American officials did not heed her warning.
“I told them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”
U.S. Had Warnings About Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008. By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
Related
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack.
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives, Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.
Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and are raising the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.
More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities, or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by strained relations with their husband.
Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I. investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the American drug agency lasted much longer.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American former wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told the authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar.
On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.”
Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Interviews with United States and allied intelligence and security officials illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headlely testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009. ¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.
Besides Mr. Headley’s guilty plea in a United States court, seven Pakistani suspects have been charged there. American investigators say a critical figure who has not been charged is Sajid Mir, a Lashkar operative who became close to Mr. Headley as the plans for the Mumbai operation unfolded. The investigators fear he is still working on other plots.
Mr. Headley was known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States. In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.
Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.
And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.
“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me to get lost.”
Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas.
He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old, his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.
Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores.
But at the same time he was involved in a life of crime. Each time he was arrested on drug trafficking charges, he used his roots in the United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law enforcement as he was to the traffickers — one with the looks and passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate secretive organizations.
He was married at least three times. For one period he was married to all three wives — Ms. Outalha, who is a medical student half his age; a New York makeup artist; and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the same time.
Those relationships, however, caused him trouble. In 2005, his American wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. She went back a month later with more information. A senior administration official acknowledged that Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms. Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.
“The texture of the meeting was that her husband was involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”
Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said. More than that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to the American authorities looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.
Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking a plaza in Morocco, Ms. Outalha said that in hindsight, she is convinced that he is both men. She claims to be puzzled that American officials did not heed her warning.
“I told them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)