Ramanisblog

Tag: haqqani

  • Pakistan SC orders enquiry into ‘MemoGate’ -To what end?

    It is not new for Pakistani Rulers(civilian and military) to seek the help of foreign powers to bail out either for the country or for themselves.

    To protect them from the Military, the Civilian Presidents/PMs call for help, especially from the US or Saudi Arabia overtly.

    If a former President/PM is involved,either they seek help for themselves or ensure that their political opponent is offered sanctuary abroad as in the case of Nawaz Sharief and Pervez Musharaff.

    People are also aware what Ayub Khan,Yahya Khan,Benazir were up to.

    It is the accepted practice in Pakistan.

    What if the Commission finds that the memogate is true?

    The SC shall dismiss the Government?

    Waste of time?

    ISLAMABAD, Dec 1: President Asif Ali Zardari was dealt a second supreme blow in less than a week.

    Within days of having rejected the government’s review petition against the NRO judgment, the Supreme Court moved on Thursday decisively and rapidly against the government on a petition filed by PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif.

    It ordered an inquiry to be completed into the ‘memogate’ scandal within 15 days, barred former ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani from leaving the country and issued notices to the president, the army chief and others concerned with the case.

    A nine-judge larger bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry took up nine petitions moved by PML-N leaders from four provinces, AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan and
    two individuals.

    Mr Sharif himself presented his case by reading out the entire petition in the tightly packed court.

    The chief justice passed the order at the end of the four-hour proceedings without much deliberation or hesitation.

    The immediate ‘affectee’ of the order is obviously Mr Haqqani who has been directed not to leave the country without prior permission and to cooperate with the commission set up by the court.

    The commission will be headed by former secretary of the Anti-Narcotics Force Tariq Khosa, who will be free to conduct the inquiry on his own or to associate any expert to collect forensic evidence.

    Mr Khosa, who has also served as inspector general of Balochistan police and director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, is a brother of Justice Asif Saeed Khosa and Punjab Chief Secretary Nasir Khosa.

    http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/02/one-man-commission-named-ppps-angry-reaction-president-coas-isi-chief-to-explain-position-sc-orders-memogate-inquiry-tells-haqqani-not-to-go-abroad.html

     

    Related: Memogate History.

    HUSAIN Haqqani will not be enjoying Christmas festivities in Washington DC. The former journalist and spin-doctor was simply outmanoeuvred by his opponents in the field he thought he had mastery of.

    He did not lose his job for contributing to the drafting of the alleged memo. He was not punished for courting Americans to influence Pakistan’s political and security set-up. He was booted out for committing perjury. Perjury, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “is the voluntary violation of an oath or vow either by swearing to what is untrue or by omission to do what has been promised under oath”. Husain Haqqani vowed that he has not been a party in the correspondence with Mansoor Ijaz that ultimately led to the memo delivered to Mike Mullen.

    In the media trial, he is charged with the crime of peddling to the Americans, thus compromising the sovereignty of Pakistan.

    He is reprimanded for bringing a bad name to the Pakistan armed forces and to one of the country’s intelligence agencies. His detractors are not content with him losing the coveted ambassadorial spot. They want to dig deep and see who else in the political hierarchy — implying none other than President Asif Zardari — might have been part of washing Pakistan’s dirty political laundry in the American laundromat.

    Armed with the sabre of sovereignty, anchors of independent electronic media have joined ranks to cut the likes of Haqqani down to size. Letting Pakistani sovereignty be violated by the Americans, if one believes the talk shows, appears to be the present government’s invention. Nothing can be farther from the truth. In theory, Haqqani is accused of trying to rope the Americans into what should be the exclusive domain of Pakistan’s national politics. If he is to be reprimanded for doing this, then the pioneer of this trend was none other than Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister.

    Liaquat Ali Khan did not write or instruct the then ambassador to send any secret memorandum to the Americans. He was pretty open about it. During his first trip to the United States in 1950, he met the press at the National Press Club in the American capital. A reporter asked how large a standing army Pakistan wanted. Liaquat Ali Khan’s reply was quite simple to the inquisitive American reporter and here is a direct quote from the prime minister’s answer: “If your country will guarantee our territorial integrity, I will not keep any army at all.”

    So if Pakistan now has an all-powerful army, it is partly thanks to the American hesitation in extending the guarantee Pakistan’s first prime minister was seeking.

    It is ironic, bordering on being comical, the way commentators de-contextualise the issues at hand. What Mr Haqqani has purportedly done is part and parcel of the Pakistani ruling elite’s historical trait. In 1953, Ghulam Mohammad, then governor general, dismissed Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin and promptly appointed Mohammad Ali Bogra as the new prime minister.

    Mohammad Ali Bogra at that time was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington. Nazimuddin’s ouster was planned by the establishment of the time and Bogra’s greatest political asset was his pro-American stance. One can infer that the Pakistani establishment of the 1950s, mainly comprising the civil and military bureaucracies, had no qualms in having Americans on board when it came to Pakistan’s national affairs.

    In 1958 Iskander Mirza, according to the US embassy in Karachi’s reports, was thinking of imposing dictatorship. The State Department instructed the American ambassador to caution Mirza about taking such a step and he deferred it for a while. The less one says about taking vital decisions without heeding the Americans’ advice the better.

    But in October of the same year when Mirza and Ayub Khan, the then army commander, decided to impose martial law, the American ambassador was told a week in advance of the impending decision. This should tell the reader that Pakistani leaders have a long tradition of consulting and soliciting American approval in their national affairs. More importantly, the Pakistani leadership has seldom shared the details of the nature of their ties with the Pakistani public.

    Ayub Khan allowed the Americans to use Pakistani territory to fly U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union. Pakistanis came to know about these covert operations when the Soviets downed an American plane and captured its pilot and put him on television screens for the world to see. Pakistanis, all along, were told that the Americans were using the base outside Peshawar for weather-monitoring purposes.

    http://www.dawn.com/2011/11/27/memogate-and-history.html

  • Pakistan Admits Haqqani Links,refuses US Advice.

    The Pakistani Establishment, through , Major General Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, acknowledged the service had contacts with the Haqqanis.

    In the same breath he had stated that the Government has to maintain Links with Terrorist Groups ‘for some positive out come’!

    Astonishing!

    By the same logic does will Pakistan admit that it had links with Osama,Taliban?

    Will it go the extra mile to state that to contain Terrorism, the Government has o help the Terrorists occasionally?

    AdmiraMike Mullen,Joint Chief Of Staff, has castigated Pakistan  thus.

    ‘

    Admiral Mullen accused Pakistan of “exporting” violent extremism to Afghanistan by allowing militants to act as an “arm” of the intelligence service.

    “In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan – and most especially the Pakistani Army and ISI – jeopardises not only the prospect of our strategic partnership, but also Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence,” he told US senators. “By exporting violence, they have eroded their internal security and their position in the region.”.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8783139/Mike-Mullen-Pakistan-is-exporting-terror.html

    In reply Pakistan threatened US that 

    “You will lose an ally,” Khar told Geo TV.

    “You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan, you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people. If you are choosing to do so and if they are choosing to do so it will be at their own cost,” Khar added, according to Reuters. “Anything which is said about an ally, about a partner publicly to recriminate it, to humiliate it is not acceptable.”

    In this tit for tat, Pakistan has failed to address the Real problem of Pakistan,

    That this Policy is hurting Pakistan in that it faces Terrorist Attacksin Pakistan.

    Economic survival of Pakistan depends on External Assistance.

    Pakistan, Pause ,before shooting off.

    Better to be Wise than foolhardy.

     

     

     

     

     

  • How CIA Was Fatally Duped by Jordanian Double Agent

    The doctor-turned-bomber who was recruited by Americans to hunt down Bin Laden’s right-hand man was in fact working for al-Qa’ida.
    The Central Intelligence Agency was bracing yesterday for a fresh barrage of questions about its competence following reports that the man who blew himself up at its main operating base in Afghanistan on 30 December, killing seven of its employees, had been recruited by the US but had, in fact, been a double agent for al-Qa’ida all along.

    It was the deadliest attack suffered by the CIA against its own for more than 25 years. The suicide bomber, at first thought to have been a disgruntled Afghan soldier, has now been identified as Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a 32-year-old doctor from Jordan.

    Also killed by the blast at the CIA’s Forward Operation Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan, was his Jordanian handler, Ali bin Zaid, a senior intelligence officer of Jordan and a cousin of King Abdullah. The CIA has not identified the victims from its ranks, some of whom were agents while others may have been contractors.

    Nor was the CIA making any on-the-record comment about the attack, details of which were still surfacing last night. But one top US intelligence official told The Washington Post anonymously that it would not go unanswered. “The agency is determined to continue pursuing aggressive counter-terrorism operations,” the official said. “Last week’s attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day.”

    Family members yesterday said that al-Balawi had been working as a doctor in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan near Zarqa, which happens also to be the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida leader who was killed in Iraq in 2006. They said he had told friends months ago that he was going away to study in Turkey.

    But family and friends, it seems, were not the only people that al-Balawi duped. First arrested over a year ago by Jordan as a suspected al-Qa’ida sympathizer and operative, al-Balawi subsequently convinced the Jordanian intelligence agency that he was ready to switch sides and infiltrate the terror group. In time, the Americans were apparently also convinced that he had been successfully turned.

    To cement the deception, al-Balawi reportedly supplied the Jordanians and the CIA with what officials have called “actionable intelligence” on al-Qa’ida on more than one occasion.

    That he continued to pen pro-jihad messages on websites associated with al-Qa’ida, and to speak publicly of his support for armed jihad, seemingly did not give Western agents pause, perhaps because they assumed he was doing so to build up his own cover as a double agent. Al-Balawi’s specific mission was to help the Americans track down down al-Qa’ida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Minimal precautions were apparently taken when al-Balawi, accompanied by Jordan’s Bin Zaid, travelled to the CIA facility in Khost province last week, apparently after indicating that he had important information to share.

    It was as he approached one of the main buildings at the complex that al-Balawi detonated a powerful bomb concealed in his vest. Among the immediate concerns being raised are why he had not been thoroughly searched on entering the compound, and why there were so many CIA people with him at the moment he set off the explosives he carried. American intelligence officials are working to identify the masterminds of the attack.

    According to at least one report, US military officials believe it may have been orchestrated by the Haqqani network, an al-Qa’ida-linked militant group that operates out of north-west Pakistan and has launched many attacks in Khost in the past. Ironically, the network’s ageing leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was formerly a close US ally in the covert Afghan war against the Soviets. He visited the Reagan White House and was described by Texas politician Charlie Wilson as “goodness personified”.

    Meanwhile, the bombing has highlighted both the shortcomings of both Jordanian and US intelligence operations, and the increasing sophistication and reach of their enemies.

    “Double-agent operations are really complex. The fact that they can pull this off shows that they [al-Qa’ida] are not really on the run,” one former CIA official commented. “They have the ability to kick back and to think about these things.”

    The evidence that al-Balawi may have been fatally mishandled comes even as a top American military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Major-General Michael Flynn, suggested in an article published by a Washington think-tank that the US intelligence community is only “marginally relevant” to the West’s efforts to confront the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.

    The debacle may also add strains to the relationship between the US and Jordanian intelligence agencies, which have hitherto been very close.

    Bin Zaid, whose body was met by the king when it was returned to Jordan, seems to have been the first to be convinced that al-Balawi had genuinely changed sides.

    Yet al-Balawi’s jihadist writings had the ring of conviction. He reportedly told one magazine he had had a “predisposition for love of jihad and martyrdom ever since I was little.”
    http://www.alternet.org/story/144976/how_cia_was_fatally_duped_by_jordanian_double_agent?page=entire