Truth is out...
From the NYTimes
A Shooting in Pakistan Reveals Fraying Alliance
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON Inside a dark jail cell on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, a brawny 36-year-old American from the mountains of southwest Virginia has sat for weeks as Pakistan began proceedings against him on murder charges and his own government made frantic attempts to secure his release.
Late in January, Raymond A. Davis a covert security officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and onetime Green Beret unloaded a Glock pistol into two armed Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore, according to a Pakistani police report. His case was to move forward in court as early as this week.The shooting complicated American attempts to portray Mr. Davis as a paper-shuffling diplomat who stamped visas as a day job; generated an extraordinary swirl of recriminations and for many Pakistanis confirmed suspicions that America has deployed a secret army of spies and contractors inside the country.
It has also called unwelcome attention to a bigger, more dangerous game in which Mr. Davis appears to have played just a supporting role.
The C.I.A. team Mr. Davis worked with, according to American officials, had among its assignments the task of secretly gathering intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant Army of the Pure. Pakistans security establishment has nurtured Lashkar for years as a proxy force to attack targets and enemies in India and in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. These and other American officials, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity, are now convinced that Lashkar is no longer satisfied being the shadowy foot soldiers in Pakistans simmering border conflict with India. It goals have broadened, these officials say, and Lashkar is committed to a campaign of jihad against the United States and Europe, and against American troops in Afghanistan.
During a visit to Islamabad last July, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Lashkar a global threat, a statement that no doubt rankled his Pakistani hosts.
And so a group that Pakistan has seen for years as an essential component of its own national security, and that American counterterrorism officials could once dismiss as a regional problem, has emerged as a threat that Washington feels it can no longer ignore.
Given such a fundamental collision of interests, it was perhaps inevitable that Lashkar would one day provoke tensions between Pakistani and American security officials, and the collision itself would come into full public view. Rather than being a cause of the problem, Mr. Davis was merely an all-too-visible symptom.
As Mr. Davis discovered, the regularly accepted rules of the spy game dont apply here. There was little chance of quickly brokering a quiet deal, allowing Mr. Davis to be spirited out of Pakistan without anyone making a fuss. Because Lashkar has long been nurtured by Pakistans spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, American espionage operations against the group are freighted with grave risks, and are not viewed kindly by Pakistani spies.
C. Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert and Georgetown University professor who closely studies Lashkars operations, said that the group was founded by Pakistans government in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war that that ISI fought in close alliance with the C.I.A. As that war wound down, Professor Fair said, then President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan began redeploying Lashkar fighters to Kashmir because he feared that Kashmiri independence groups might create a separate state in the mountainous region now controlled by India, rather than weld it to Pakistan. The ISI continued to nurture Lashkar, along with others, as a counterweight to the separatist groups.
Officially, Lashkar was banned by President Pervez Musharrafs government in 2002, and declared a terrorist organization three years later by the United Nations. But it hardly operates like a group in hiding.
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Lashkars charismatic leader, gives regular sermons in Lahore on Fridays, denouncing what he calls the imperialism of the United States, Israel and India while flanked by guards. A stocky man with a wild beard, Mr. Saeed has been placed under house arrest at various times in the past 10 years, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all charges against him and set him free.
That same court has now been assigned to determine Mr. Daviss fate.
Lashkars sprawling headquarters in Muridke, a Lahore suburb situated along the famed Grand Trunk Road, contains not only a radical madrassa and housing for the schools faculty members, but also a market, a hospital and a fish farm.
Terrorism experts said that the compound was built with donations from benefactors in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world. Lashkar also runs successful fund-raising campaigns inside Pakistan through its allied political organization, Jamat-ud-Dawah, a group that also operates schools, medical clinics and blood banks throughout the country.
Lashkar has long employed the language of global jihad in its propaganda, denouncing the United States and Israel, and vowing that the group would plant a flag in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Despite such global goals, Lashkar for most of its history has limited its attacks to India and Kashmir the targets that would serve the interests of its ISI benefactors.
Professor Fair, the Georgetown expert on Lashkar, said the group has set up sophisticated networks throughout Asia to train dozens of sleeper operatives for attacks in India.
In Thailand, for instance, Muslim recruits arriving from India are handed fake Pakistani passports for travel to Pakistan, where they go for several weeks of training, according to Professor Fair. After the training, the operatives go back to Thailand, reclaim their Indian passports and return to India.
But experts on Lashkar say that in recent years the group has expanded the focus of its operations, perhaps because it has felt restricted by the ISI, or perhaps a sign that it was splitting into factions with competing agendas.
Whatever the reason, American intelligence officials believe that hundreds of Lashkar operatives now operate inside Afghanistan, and have teamed with other militant groups to attack American troops. In February 2010, a Lashkar assault on a cluster of guesthouses in Kabul killed 18 people, including a number of Indian doctors and other foreigners.
Lashkar has also bolstered fund-raising networks throughout Europe, especially in Germany and Britain, and European counterterrorism officials believe Lashkar is considering attacks in Western capitals similar to the devastating raids by the group in Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who until last month worked on Afghanistan and Pakistan issues for United States Special Operations Command, compared the expansion of Lashkars operations with the broadening ambitions of the Pakistani Taliban, a group that had focused exclusively on attacks inside Pakistan until it dispatched Faisal Shazad in a failed mission last May to set off a van full of explosives in Times Square.
Mr. Jones said a Lashkar attack on the West could have more far-reaching consequences than one by the Taliban because Washington would no doubt lay blame for the attack on the ISIs doorstep.
There is a recognition that because of Lashkars associations, an attack on the United States could wind up causing the Pakistani government extreme pain, said Mr. Jones, implying the possibility of using military force deep within Pakistan.
For years, the ISI has quietly assented to the C.I.A.s campaign to batter Pakistans tribal areas with drone strikes, because the strikes have largely focused on operatives from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban groups that Islamabad also considers to be mortal enemies.
But an American intelligence review late last year found that it was becoming harder to compartmentalize the distinct militant groups in Pakistan, because their membership and operations were blending into a murky stew; that was making it increasingly difficult to determine whether Pakistani support for groups like Lashkar might also be aiding Al Qaeda.
In addition, the Obama administrations signals that it would like to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible have led Pakistans military and intelligence officers to believe they should keep groups like Lashkar and the Haqqani network under their wing for future operations in Afghanistan and India.
In Washington, there seems to be little enthusiasm for sending yet another delegation to Islamabad to press Pakistani officials to cut their ties to militants. It hasnt worked so far, and Obama administration officials know that Pakistan believes too much is at stake to walk away from the groups it might need once the Americans leave Afghanistan.
But even with such seemingly irreconcilable differences, and even as both American and Pakistani officials muse in private about how long the beleaguered alliance can survive, both appear to realize that for now it simply must.
As much as senior Pakistani officials resent the billions of dollars in aid they accept from Washington, they believe that they cant turn away the money and hope to keep pace with their rival, India. And Wendy Chamberlin, the former American ambassador in Islamabad, said that Americas relationship with Pakistan remains essential for security in the region, even if some lawmakers in Washington might see cutting aid to the country as a way to distance the United States from the headaches of the relationship.
There are many reasons for continuing the relationship with such a large and strategically important country, she said. At the very least, Ms. Chamberlin said, the appetite of the Afghan war makes ending the relationship impossible, because there are no better routes over which to transport all the military supplies that currently are shipped through Pakistan.
Like it or not, she said, Pakistan is our lifeline.
