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Book claims drone attacks began after ISI-Taliban coordination confirmed

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Pervez Musharraf was playing 'double game' with US


Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Editor

Washington sent Special Forces into Pakistan last summer after intercepting a call by the Pakistani army chief referring to a notorious Taleban leader as a “strategic asset,” a new book has claimed.

The intercept was ordered to confirm suspicions that the Pakistani military were still actively supporting the Taleban whilst taking millions of dollars in US military aid to fight them, according to the “The Inheritance,” by the New York Times correspondent David Sanger.

In a transcript passed to Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence in May 2008, General Ashfaq Kayani, the military chief who replaced Pervez Musharraf, was overheard referring to Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani as “a strategic asset”. The remark was the first real evidence of the double game that Washington had long suspected President Musharraf was playing as he continued receiving US military aid while aiding the Taleban.

Mr Haqqani, a veteran of the anti-Soviet mujahidin wars of the nineties, commands a hardline Taleban group based in Waziristan and is credited with introducing suicide bombing into themilitants’ arsenal.
Washington later intercepted calls from Pakistani military units to Mr Haqqani, warning him of an impending military operation d esigned to prove to the US that Islamabad was tackling the militant threat.

“They must have dialled 1-800-HAQQANI” a source told Mr Sanger. “It was something like, ‘Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram’.”

The intercept was the clue that led the CIA to uncover evidence of collusion between the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and Mr Haqqani in a plot to carry out a spectacular bombing in Afghanistan. Two weeks later, India’s Embassy in Kabul was bombed, killing fifty-four people and prompting a CIA mission to Islamabad to challenge the government with their evidence.

The first cross-border strike took place in early September without Islamabad’s knowledge after Washington concluded that no one could be trusted with the information.

General Kayani, a former ISI chief, became army chief when Mr Musharraf relinquished that post in 2007, a year before he was forced to quit as president. Worryingly for Washington, General Kayani remains Pakistan’s army chief.

Mr Musharraf reacted angrily to the book’s allegations of double-dealing, which appeared in the Pakistani press for the first time yesterday. “Get your facts correct, I have never double-dealt,” Mr Musharraf told Pakistani television stations.

“There is a big conspiracy being hatched against Pakistan, to weaken the Pakistan army and the ISI to weaken Pakistan.”

Mr Sanger’s book, detailing the foreign policy challenges inherited by the Obama Administration, was published in the US last month. In it, US intelligence officials also speak of their fears that Islamist militants might launch a spectacular attack on Indian soil in the hope of ramping up tensions on the subcontinent, leading Pakistan to deploy its nuclear weapons.
 
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Personally, I find the confluence of Feinstein's comments with Sanger's revelations to be the salient matters.

My conclusion from all this is that President Obama is well aware of the conclusions drawn by the Bush administration and the supporting intelligence. He may have access to new information but everything we read lately suggest that the Quetta shura, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar all remain "beyond reach".

Sanger's information is a damning indictment of your government's duplicity. I can think of only one mitigating factor- your transportation routes. Were it not for that need I don't know how my government could view your nation's actions as anything but war.

Not that war would be the immediate reaction but I rather doubt ROZs and aid bills, etc. would be high on the agenda either. It would be, sadly, a waste of money under the present circumstances.

Obama's delay until April of our policy commitment suggests big changes may be forthcoming. Maybe we already know why.

Yes i agree with you in thses circumstances the aid would be like compleetely waste of money .
But still i ask you does US have a choice to creat another front with Pakistan by blocking its aid ?
I asume you are very well aware of the global facts.
 
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If US blames us of double dealing with them then wat abt the strategik deals made with India. What abt the milletary deals to masively upgrade our arch rival's milletary .
Hasnt the US double dealing with Pakistan by strenthening our bitter enemy and at the same time providing us aid in the form of Polio drops.
I gues the US position in the world has greatly been deteriated due to the events like

1. North Korea joining the nuke group
2. Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear power
3. Iran launching stallite in space
5. US facing heavy resistance both in Iraq and Afganistan
4. Closure of the Kirgystan airbase
5. Release of th AQ khan
6. Imposing sharia law in malakand and sawat .
7. North Korea working on ICBM launch

Looks like the show has entered in the climax scene. I guess there will be plenty more .
So sit back and enjoy . ;) :cheers: :pop:
 
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By Sandra Johnson in Washington DC
Christina Palmer in New Delhi
Jamal Afghani in Kabul
Makhdoom Babar in Islamabad

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Coffee and aspirin, aspirin and coffee. This is what the Chief of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt. General Ehsan-ul-Haque was repeating after he went through the news on the website of a U.S. newspaper in which a news report filed by a U.S. news agency claimed quoting “U.S. intelligence sources” that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf survived the bomb attack on his motorcade because the President’s limousine was equipped with state-of-the-art jamming devices.

The news appeared on Dec. 18, 2003, shortly after former President Musharraf’s motorcade was attacked through a remote controlled device connected to a cell phone on a bridge in Rawalpindi.

“What the hell is this, we discussed this jamming device thing with them just a day before and they have leaked it to the media straight away? What are they up to? Are they helping us or al-Qaeda by telling them that President’s car cannot be bombed through a remote device? Are they trying to guide these killers so that they go for a suicide attack next time?” Gen. Ehsan asked his aides, sitting there to discuss the issue.

And true to his prediction, after a gap some 15 to 20 days, Musharraf’s motorcade was subjected to a high profile suicide attack on the same road a just a few yards away from the previous incident. However the Pakistani President survived again.

This has been the biggest dilemma of Pakistan’s ISI ever since Islamabad decided to be an ally in America’s global war on terror. Right from day one, Pakistan’s Foreign Office and the ISI sleuths have been complaining about the constant leaking in the U.S. media by ‘U.S. intelligence sources’ of intelligence reports and highly classified. The former President of the Islamic Republic, Pervez Musharraf, who was also the head of the country’s army, conveyed these reservations about intelligence leakages many times to U.S. officials and made it very clear to the former U.S. President George W. Bush that Pakistan and particularly the ISI were not comfortable at all with such a state of affairs. The U.S. was told in clear terms that this menace of constant leakages of classified material to the U.S. media had become a very big hardship for the continuation of anti-terror operations.

Terrorism in nothing new to Pakistan, neither is its top security agency, the ISI, an alien to the operations of foreign intelligence services against Pakistan. Starting from 1960s, when neighboring India’s counterpart of ISI, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), commonly know as RAW, started small- scale sabotage activities in border towns like Sialkot, Shakar Garh and parts of Balochistan, the ISI and other security agencies of Pakistan have been through a lot of encounters to prevent and counter anti-Pakistan sabotage activities by India’s R&AW, former Soviet Union’s KGB, former communist Afghanistan’s Khaad, Iran’s former Savak, Israel’s Mosaad and even the Libyan MIF that carried out some sabotage operations after the hanging of the former Prime Minister of the country, Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, who was a very special friend of Libya’s Gaddafi.

In sharp contrast, the ISI or the country’s other security agencies never had a problem with the American CIA and in fact developed an amazing level of understanding and professional collaboration during the USSR’s invasion of neighboring Afghanistan. It appears that suddenly, after the demise of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and with the growing influence of India’s R&AW in Afghanistan, the CIA preferred to become hand in glove with R&AW in Afghanistan. Both R&AW and CIA are banking on the three trillion U.S. Dollars worth of drug money every year that is generated through heroin production and its subsequent sale across the world.

According to The Daily Mail’s investigations, certain wings of both the R&AW and CIA generate millions of dollars by providing or arranging safe passages for drug traffickers of Afghanistan and India at many points across the world. They generate these funds to carry out certain unapproved operations. It was the Pakistani Army and ISI that unfolded some proofs of the same in this direction after which the CIA got extremely annoyed and finally opted to launch motivated campaigns against Pakistan’s ISI and Pakistani Army with the generous collaboration of India’s R&AW.

A former official of the UN office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) says that despite the fact that the cultivation of poppy crop across Afghanistan has risen dramatically after the Taliban era and dozens of heroin production factories have been established across the country, the CIA never showed any interest in recommending to the U.S. government to launch a crackdown on heroin factories across Afghanistan that feed and finance militants and warlords. The annoyance of CIA with Pakistani ISI and Army, according to some reports, peaked when an Indian defense official posted at the Indian Embassy in Kabul, who was a lynchpin between the Indian and Afghan drug operations, was killed in a suicide attack last year. The said Indian official was killed in an attack carried out, according to our investigations, by Afghan President’s brother and the world’s biggest heroin producer Izzat Ullah Wasifi after he developed doubts that the Indian officer was betraying him to America’s DEA (Drugs Enforcement Agency). And despite leads in this direction, R&AW convinced the CIA that the Indian officer was killed by attackers sent by ISI.

The recent blitzkrieg on Pakistan Army and the ISI are clear gifts of CIA. In the first attack, the Chairperson of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Intelligence Diane Feinstein came up with a very ridiculous and rather childish ‘disclosure’ that U.S. Drones, named Predators, were flying from certain ISI air bases within Pakistan and that the USAF or U.S. Army had nothing to do with this activity. “Even a child knows that these Predators fly from the U.S. base in Bagram in Afghanistan and there are no air bases owned by the ISI as ISI is an intelligence agency that relies on Pakistan Air Force and its bases for any air space or avionic support. Coming out with such a ridiculous statement and that too, publicly, by the head of the U.S. Senate Intelligence committee is very surprising”, commented a senior defense analyst when contacted by The Daily Mail. He said this was nothing but a bid to generate feelings of hatred among Pakistanis against their own premier intelligence service, when the ISI is busy protecting the interests of the Pakistanis people.

In a second example, an ordinary U.S. journalist, working for the CIA-blessed U.S. daily The New York Times; named David E. Sanger, has come out with a book that can be described as nothing but a perfect piece of trash and a very mediocre work on intelligence. In the book, titled The Inheritance, Sanger claims, attributing to some highly classified files of the CIA and NSA that former Pakistani President Musharraf was playing a double game and making a double deal, on one side with America and on other side with the Taliban. This is not the start of the great Sanger-CIA trash but he claims a little down the road that the CIA had been bugging or tapping the telephones of top Pakistani Army Generals including the Chief of the Army Staff and head of the top spy agency, the ISI, and that during these tapped calls, it was revealed to the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) that top Generals of Pakistan were protecting the [Afghan] Taliban.



“This Sanger trash is nothing but a double bullshit with a cherry on top. First of all in the Pakistan Army establishment, the Generals and Commanders do not use the ordinary telephone lines or the cellular or satellite phones. The Armed forces have their own, secured and dedicated phone lines and most of the time, dedicated for person to person conversation and no one from the outside can, through any means, tape or bug these highly secured and sophisticated phone lines.
Secondly, I must tell you that conversations of such a highly sensitive nature are never made on telephone lines anywhere in the world, a fact that makes this Sanger stuff a complete piece of trash and bullshit,” said a former Chief of ISI, adding that in no intelligence set up across the world, such advanced warnings are issued to any ally, the way Sanger has narrated in his book while mentioning an advance warning by some ISI officials to Taliban before launching an attack on a school in tribal areas of the country, where Pakistani Army and the ISI are battling militants.


According to certain Western intelligence observers and media commentators, if for a minute it is assumed that Sanger’s book was based on facts, this would raise alarming questions about the state of security and secrecy within CIA and NSA where a journalist like Sanger can lay his hands on information that supposedly cost the two organizations millions of dollars to attain and secure.


“In that case, the ISI’s complaints and Islamabad’s protests over the constant leakages of classified information to the media by U.S. intelligence authorities are one hundred percent accurate,” says David Smith, a senior journalist at a Washington-based news organization. Diplomatic analysts and intelligence observers say that it was surprising to see how that whenever it has something against Pakistan, the first thing the CIA does is to reach out straight away to the journalists of New York Times, Washington Post or CNN. How come the reporters of these media organizations get easy access to highly classified CIA reports in no time?

Taking exceptional note of the Sanger trash, former President Pervez Musharraf, for the first time after he left the Presidency, appeared before the media and brushed aside all the accusations made in the Sanger-CIA trash. He clearly stated that if the Pakistan Army and the ISI were not sincere in the global anti terror war, then it was a big intelligence lapse on part the U.S. spymasters who could not detect this alleged duplicity earlier. He also snubbed Sanger for his baseless accusations but said he would not press charges against the American journalist because the said journalist was that important and such mischief is not unusual. But Musharraf was clear about one thing: That there is a motivated campaign against Pakistan Army and ISI by U.S. quarters. He said the military and the ISI are custodians of Pakistan’s security and solidarity. He urged the Pakistani media to expose the hands behind this anti-ISI and anti-Pak Army campaign.
 
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the journalist knows how to make money by publicizing this
or why would anyone else buy his book?
 
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i dont think musharraf was double dealing ,he might have been appeasing the taliban at some point which is not the same as double dealing.and whats wrong with this retarded media of our nation ,they think Musharraf is the only bad guy in this country ..we have a dacoit as president and nobody ever says anything bad about him
 
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what kind of report it is???? based on CIA, NSA the organisations which yet to find Osama Bin laden, could not intercept the conversations between Osama, Al-AM nuszawari, and other Al-Qida leaders, but did manage to catch Pakistan and ISI conversations, surely ISI is using better equipment then Al-qaida, unless US or Inida providing them with some state of the art gadgets.

CIA, NSA who claimed that there are weapons of Mass distruction in Iraq, not to be, which yet to be found after the deaths of so many innocent people, and putting country in turmoil by the same so called inteliigence organisation.

Organisations still tracing out Hassan-Nasuralah.

IF CIA, NSA was that good 9/11 would not have happened.

its a matter of trust between both coutaries if the war has to carry on, double standerd by my goverment has to stop regarding drones- and Indians should stay out of it.
 
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Personally, I find the confluence of Feinstein's comments with Sanger's revelations to be the salient matters.

My conclusion from all this is that President Obama is well aware of the conclusions drawn by the Bush administration and the supporting intelligence. He may have access to new information but everything we read lately suggest that the Quetta shura, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar all remain "beyond reach".

Sanger's information is a damning indictment of your government's duplicity. I can think of only one mitigating factor- your transportation routes. Were it not for that need I don't know how my government could view your nation's actions as anything but war.

Not that war would be the immediate reaction but I rather doubt ROZs and aid bills, etc. would be high on the agenda either. It would be, sadly, a waste of money under the present circumstances.

Obama's delay until April of our policy commitment suggests big changes may be forthcoming. Maybe we already know why.

Almost your whole nation lives in denial, you go attacking country after country, destroying their infrastructure which pushes them back decades, you demand that other nations support your barbaric and inhumane actions around the world, you use the UN as you lapdog yet you haven't won any war in the last 50 years and you still don't know why the whole world hates you? You force my country to aid you in this illegal and immoral war, demand unfair actions from my military and yet you have the audacity to call a hint of resistance by an ignorable minority an act of war? You have no idea what war really is dude......The day you attack Iran or the day Pakistan gets a general that loves Pakistan more then his uniform you will learn the bitter truth! The day we get lucky and elect a patriot instead of the scums that have been imposed on us since our creation, the day we decide that we shall rather die then live in this disgrace you will find no shelter in Afghanistan and you will find no friend in Pakistan!
 
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009. Daily The News.

News Desk

RAWALPINDI: The views expressed by Gen (Retd) Pervez Musharraf are tantamount to rubbing salt into the wounds of the nation because it is dictatorship that pushed Pakistan towards a political and constitutional anarchy..............................He said although the Army is performing its duty but it is unhappy with it. He said that basically Musharraf is a fraudster and no bigger cheat than him could be found in the world.

I would, as a highly educated person who has traveled the world and speaks from experience, rather believe the words of a former commando who had served the country risking his life in 3 wars then a politician who is a proven traitor any day!
 
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baseless propoganda.....

Lt. Gen Pasha of the ISI is known for his vociferous anti-taleban views. So is Gen. Kiyani.


no doubt, there is some local support for taleban, but on a macro level -- Army is serious about not letting them de-stabilize Pakistan. They have targetted FIA building and Jawan.

drone attacks are merely an agreement between CIA and this sadr saab bhutto-zardari. Apart from some succeses, most of the drone attacks have only fuelled anger --within civilian and military circles.

and the Americans know that they need Pakistan on their side if they dont want to see more of their troops come home in body bags.




but the deep-down truth is that this isnt about taleban. This is just another american vs. russia battle taking place in Afghanistan --which has now spread to Pakistan. No doubt in my mind.
 
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