US threatens airstrikes in Pakistan by Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb is a British journalist who is currently Foreign Correspondent for The Sunday Times. Profile - http://www.christinalamb.net/pages/aboutme.html

US threatens airstrikes in Pakistan From The Sunday Times September 27, 2009

The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan.

The threat comes amid growing divisions in Washington about whether to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan by sending more troops or by reducing them and targeting the terrorists.

This weekend the US military was expected to send a request to Robert Gates, the defence secretary, for more troops, as urged by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander there.

In a leaked strategic assessment of the war, McChrystal warned that he needed extra reinforcements within a year to avert the risk of failure. Although no figure was given, he is believed to be seeking up to 40,000 troops to add to the 68,000 who will be in Afghanistan by the end of this year.

However, with President Barack Obama under pressure from fellow Democrats not to intensify the war, the administration has let it be known that it is rethinking strategy. Vice-President Joe Biden has suggested reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan and focusing on the Taliban and AlQaeda in Pakistan.

Last week McChrystal denied any rift with the administration, saying “a policy debate is warranted”.

According to The New York Times, he flew from Kabul to Ramstein airbase in Germany on Friday for a secret meeting with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the request for more troops.

So sensitive is the subject that when Obama addressed the United Nations summit in New York, he barely mentioned Afghanistan. The unspoken problem is that if the priority is to destroy Al-Qaeda and reduce the global terrorist threat, western troops might be fighting on the wrong side of the border.

The Biden camp argues that attacks by unmanned drones on Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al-Qaeda’s leaders are hiding, have been successful. Sending more troops to Afghanistan has only inflamed tensions. “Pakistan is the nuclear elephant in the room,” said a western diplomat.

It is a view echoed by Richard Barrett, head of the UN Commission on Monitoring Taliban and Al-Qaeda, who believes the presence of foreign troops has increased militant activity and made it easier for the Taliban to recruit.

“If Obama sends more troops it had better be clear what they are to do,” he said.

“A few thousand more boots on the ground may not make much difference except push the fight into areas which are currently quiet because no one is there to challenge the Taliban. I cannot see any number of troops eliminating the Taliban. Obama has a really difficult decision to make.”

The debate has been intensified by the debacle of the Afghan election, which has left many European leaders struggling to justify sending soldiers to support a government that has been fraudulently elected.

According to preliminary results, President Hamid Karzai won 54.6% of the vote, compared with 27.8% for Abdullah Abdullah, his main challenger. But there have been complaints that fraudulent ballots may account for up to 20% of the 5.5m votes cast.

The Electoral Complaints Commission, overseen by a UN watchdog, has begun to recount about 10% of the disputed votes. Final results are not expected for two weeks. If Karzai is left without the 50% needed for outright victory, there must be a second round unless he agrees to form a unity government.

In the meantime, the country is in limbo and the Taliban is taking advantage, opening up new fronts in the north and west.

Al-Qaeda is also trying to capitalise on the uncertainty. Osama Bin Laden issued a call to European nations to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and threatened reprisals with an allusion to the bombings in Madrid and London. The recording, released on Friday, seemed to be directed at Germany in the run-up to parliamentary elections today.

The Afghan election has strengthened the position of those in Washington who advocate eliminating Taliban leaders in Pakistan.

Senior Pakistani officials in New York revealed that the US had asked to extend the drone attacks into Quetta and the province of Baluchistan.

“It wasn’t so much a threat as an understanding that if you don’t do anything, we’ll take matters into our own hands,” said one.

The problem is that while the government of President Asif Zardari is committed to wiping out terrorism, Pakistan’s powerful military does not entirely share this view.

Earlier this year there was optimism that Pakistan had turned a corner after it confronted a Taliban group that had taken over the Swat valley and moved to within 70 miles of Islamabad.

There has been tacit co-operation over the use of drones. Some are even stationed inside Pakistan, although publicly the government denounces their use.

Suspicions remain among US officials that parts of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI, are supporting the Taliban and protecting Mullah Omar and other leaders in Quetta.

It was to shore up Zardari’s domestic standing that Obama attended a Friends of Pakistan summit in New York on Thursday. On the same day, the US Senate tripled non-military aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year.

The Obama administration hopes such moves will reduce anti-American feeling in Pakistan. A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre found that almost two-thirds regarded the US as an enemy.

Drone attacks on Quetta would intensify this sentiment, causing some British officials to argue that such missions would be “unthinkable”.

The Pakistani government is reluctant to take its own action, however. “We need real-time intelligence,” said Rehman Malik, the interior minister. “The Americans have never told us any location.”

Western intelligence officers say Pakistan has been moving Taliban leaders to the volatile city of Karachi, where it would be impossible to strike. US officials have even discussed sending commandos to Quetta to capture or kill the Taliban chiefs before they are moved.

URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6850838.ece

‘Stop the Taliban now – or we will’ by Christina Lamb

‘Stop the Taliban now – or we will’

The US got tough with Pakistan as terrorists moved to with in 60 miles of the capital Christina Lamb in Washington and Daud Khattak in Buner From The Sunday Times April 26, 2009

Christina Lamb is a British journalist who is currently Foreign Correspondent for The Sunday Times. [Courtesy: Wikipedia/NATO]

AMERICA made clear last week that it would attack Taliban forces in their Swat valley stronghold unless the Pakistan government stopped the militants’ advance towards Islamabad.

A senior Pakistani official said the Obama administration intervened after Taliban forces expanded from Swat into the adjacent district of Buner, 60 miles from the capital.

The Pakistani Taliban’s inroads raised international concern, particularly in Washington, where officials feared that the nuclear-armed country, which is pivotal to the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda, was rapidly succumbing to Islamist extremists.

“The implicit threat - if you don’t do it, we may have to - was always there,” said the Pakistani official. He said that under American pressure, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency told the Taliban to withdraw from Buner on Friday.

However, reports yesterday indicated that the Taliban withdrawal was less than total. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people in the district were still at the mercy of armed militants and their restrictive interpretation of Islamic law.

American military and intelligence forces already run limited ground and air operations on Pakistani soil along the border with Afghanistan. But an overt military operation such as that threatened in Swat, away from the border, would mark a major escalation.

The official said last week’s outspoken remarks by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, were “calculated to ramp up the pressure on Pakistan” to take action. Clinton warned that the terrorists’ advance had created a “mortal threat” to world security.

She was one of several American political and military leaders to use unusually strong language about Pakistan’s failure to curb the Taliban. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who visited Pakistan, said he was “extremely concerned” about the developments and that the situation was “definitely worse” than two weeks ago.

General David Petraeus, of US Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan - to which America is about to commit 17,000 more troops - said Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Pakistan posed an “ever more serious threat to Pakistan’s very existence”.

These remarks have stung Pakistan. Husain Haqqani, the ambassador to Washington, accused the Obama administration of making it harder for his country to fight the Taliban.

“The US needs to relate its comments to the ground realities in Pakistan instead of the mood in Washington,” he said. “Most Pakistanis are not supportive of the Taliban way of life, but at the same time widespread anti-Americanism confuses many Pakistanis into having a conflicting view.

“We want to turn that view around but the US and its leaders must help us to do that.”

The latest crisis stems from a controversial ceasefire the government signed in February to end months of vicious fighting between the Taliban and the army in Swat that caused significant loss of life and an exodus from what had once been a tourist centre. Some 500,000 now live outside Swat, a third of them in camps that used to shelter refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan.

In return for the imposition of sharia [Islamic law] in Swat, the Taliban agreed to disengage, disarm and stop menacing people. But it was from Swat last week that their fighters overran Buner with about 500 well-armed men under a hardline commander, Maulvi Khalil.

As in Swat, once his forces had established themselves, Khalil began to impose the movement’s repressive rules on what had once been a peaceful valley. He ordered girls over seven to wear veils and directed men to keep their women inside and to grow beards. He banned music. In several villages the Taliban were snatching mobile phones on the pretext that they had musical ring tones or photos of women on them.

The Taliban stole livestock, took vehicles belonging to government officials and ransacked the offices of some local nongovernment organisations. In a phone call, Khalil denied the Taliban were terrorists. He said: “We’ve raised the arms to spread the message of Allah. This is the responsibility of each and every Muslim.” But residents fear it is just a matter of time before their daughters are forced to marry Taliban commanders, a process that has begun already in Swat, along with public floggings.

On Friday, in a much publicised agreement with the government, Khalil agreed to withdraw. Local residents said the withdrawal was incomplete. He had left men behind to supplement local armed Taliban groups and newly recruited sympathisers.

“There is a collective holding of breath,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia director, from Islamabad. “The Taliban edicts are still in force and the dismantling of the civilian infrastructure is still very much in effect, so a lot of doctors, midwives, civil servants have left and people are hunkering down because they fear an army operation.”

The government sent a few hundred paramilitaries to Buner last week but they kepta low profile. It has not sent any troops. The Americans want the government to shift troops from the India-Pakistan border to meet the Taliban threat, but frightened residents of Buner fear an army operation would cause civilian casualties.

URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6168940.ece