US & Pakistan Dispute and Tensions over Haqqani group

[khanz4996]

wow i congratulate all muslims and pakistanis all over the world as according to the article pakistan is recognized as a power which can cofront the devil

 

[regular]

wow i congratulate all muslims and pakistanis all over the world as according to the article pakistan is recognized as a power which can cofront the devil

Hopefully we will confront the Devil and its all Satanic powers successfully...InshaAllah.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

An excellent rebuttal to Reidel's article, putting the trash posing as analysis in its place:

Let’s get angry in the right way​

Zafar Hilaly
Thursday, October 20, 2011


The New York Times carried an article by Bruce Reidel, on October 14 titled ‘Containment - a new policy for dealing with Pakistan’ and followed it up only three days later with yet another front page report captioned ‘Suspicions of Pakistan grow with attacks’.

Bruce Reidel, once a key Obama adviser on South Asia, now works for Brookings, one of the numerous ‘think tanks’ that abound in Washington DC and vie for influence on policy making. These institutions promote their brand of politics and many of them who work in those elite outfits are not really scholars but publicists. Reidel, a former CIA sleuth, is one of those so-called scholars, while the New York Times often doubles up as an apologist of Israeli foreign policy.

Both Bruce Reidel and the New York Times seem to have launched on a twin crusade to get the Obama administration worked up sufficiently to teach Pakistan a lesson for blocking the United States from making an honourable exit from Afghanistan if not for denying an outright military victory.

Reidel’s article is the work of a publicist. Had it been the work of a scholar, it would have been less jagged, more rounded and much better informed. Nor is it a serious re-examination of the present US policy. Reidel’s basic contention is that the only recourse left to America is ‘containment of the Pakistan Army’s ambition until real civilian rule returns’ to Pakistan.

For a start, this is puzzling because Pakistan cannot really ‘return’ to ‘real civilian rule’ since it has never existed before. A scholar would have known, for instance, that the Constituent Assembly, elected prior to partition, was supposed to draft a constitution and although it subsequently acted as a legislature, it failed on both counts and was dissolved.

Subsequent attempts by Major General Iskander Mirza and Field Marshal Ayub Khan to give Pakistan a durable constitution also failed. The latter’s bespoke constitution fitted him but not the country. The ‘civilian’ interlude which followed under ZA Bhutto was an aberration since Bhutto assumed power as a martial law administrator, being the only civilian in the world to have enjoyed that dubious distinction.

Admittedly Bhutto did give Pakistan a constitution in April 1973 but the very next day he suspended provisions of the constitution that granted citizens the right to approach the courts. Not a democrat by instinct, Bhutto finally fell victim to his own vanity. Thereafter the military has seated and unseated governments much as it has wished. Hence, for Washington to wait out the military ‘until real civilian rule returns’ would be like mistaking a mirage for an oasis in the desert.

Reidel’s second piece of advice for Obama is equally impractical. He suggests a policy of ‘containment’ towards the Pakistani establishment which is not aimed at ‘hurting Pakistan’s people but at holding its army and intelligence branches accountable’.

Implicit is such advice is the belief that the Pakistani public is averse to the army’s involvement in politics. That might have been true for a while but not after the mess created by the Zardari-Gilani duo. They have mired the country in governance issues, corruption has soared to unprecedented heights under their watch and the country is assailed on all sides by terrorists, while their political opponents and a disgruntled public are now hollering for their removal. Once again, sadly, many are looking to the army to act as the proverbial deus ex machina. Ironically if the current dispensation is still in power it is because of the army’s restraining influence.

Furthermore, even a cursory reading of Pakistan’s history will show that it is the military that has had a soft spot for the US albeit, as many believe, for selfish and ill-advised reasons. The people have never been able to work up a similar enthusiasm for the US or its policies.

Thus, it was the military that pushed for Pakistan’s membership of Cento and Seato in the 1950s when the foreign office advised caution; and it again prodded the government of the day in 1956 to support the western intervention in Egypt, during the Suez crisis which infuriated the public.

Moreover, two recent parliamentary resolutions calling for a military response to the US drone and ground attacks, which the military has repeatedly ignored, shows that left to parliament, the US-Pakistan relations would have been a lot worse by now. So much for Riedel’s notion that with the ‘return’ of real civilian rule, all would be hunky dory between Washington and Islamabad.

However, Riedel is spot on when he says the strategic interests of the US and Pakistan ‘are in conflict and not (in) harmony’. Indeed the two countries stand on opposite sides of the fence. Our enemies are different; our thoughts and plans for what is best for the region are poles apart; the roles we envisage for each other are in stark contrast; our respective positions on controversial matters of international law as much as on current world issues such as Palestine, Kashmir, Iran, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, nuclear and disarmament, etc, are very different if not completely at odds. How can a return to ‘real’ civilian rule make a difference when there is so much divergence?

Riedel is right to ask why Pakistan seems so obstreperous and why it has not yet buckled under. But his answer (that ‘they seem to think they are invulnerable because they control Nato’s supply line from Kabul to Karachi and have nuclear weapons’) is far too simplistic and irresponsible, not being based on facts and hard analysis.

Admittedly, the nuclear shield does help Pakistan to deter India and hence generates a sense of confidence within the country. It ended Pakistan’s perennial need for allies, like America, to offset India’s conventional military superiority. In that sense American goodwill for Pakistan though important is no longer essential. But that is by no means the only reason why the Pakistani worm finally turned.

Poor American diplomacy made worse by some crass insensitivity towards Pakistan has played a bigger role. Obama callously bypassed Pakistan during his visit to India; the US-India civil nuclear power deal is estimated to vastly augment India’s ability to multiply its stockpile of nuclear warheads; the opening of America’s armories to India; the failure to push harder on Kashmir after initial promises to do more; the Raymond Davis matter and Obama’s personal assurance that that the violence prone murderous CIA thug was a diplomat and scores of niggly incidents that remain unreported but take place almost daily in dealings between their respective officials. All these have accelerated the decline of the US-Pak relations.

Other developments have also done further damage, sometimes dramatically, like over the Bin Laden raid and Mullen’s diatribe in the Congress against the ISI and that, too, just after he had a constructive session of talks with Kayani. The latest bone of contention is, of course, the safe haven granted by the US-Afghan forces to the murderous Fazlullah gang whose attacks into Pakistan from across the border have resulted in the death of nearly a hundred Pakistani soldiers.

No wonder then many Pakistanis too are willing to throw caution to the wind and risk ending a relationship that is still, in some important respects, clearly in the interests of both countries.

Currently the US really has very little to offer given the mood prevailing in the Congress and the dire warnings and threats that have been pouring out of Washington. These are identical in many respects to Riedel’s own advice to consider sanctions, hot pursuit, targeted killing of ISI officials and who knows perhaps also an invasion eventually.

Far from reducing the army’s role in the country’s political life these ill-conceived threats will make it more intrusive even as politicians clamber over each other, for their own reasons, to come to the defence of the armed forces, thereby postponing even further the inception (not the return) to real civilian rule in Pakistan.

Aristotle’s words seem to apply aptly to the current US-Pakistan imbroglio: If you have to get angry ‘let’s get angry at the right things and with the right people and in the right way and at the right time and for the right length of time’.

The writer is a former ambassador. Email: charles123it@hotmail.com

Let

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

Hi, Hello:

The solution to the Afghan conflict is not in Afghanistan or Pakistan--it's in the Persian Gulf, which is the big prize the US 'has' and intends to keep under its thumb. Don't forget that al-Qaida started because OBL didn't want US/Western presence in the Persian Gulf. Some could argue that as long as the US stays in the Middle East and in ''Muslim lands'' (while providing blind support to israel), these types of conflict could go on. Pakistan is stuck with this problem because its society is more open and its people have more freedoms. We have areas in our country that are connected only by one roadway; rugged border areas that are difficult to patrol. That's why al-Qaida/taleban type operatives are able to flock in and flock out from Pakistan.


Under the leadership of Ron Paul, many Americans have begun to realize that global military hegemony is killing America. Resources are being spent on wars when the people are hungry for jobs and economic development...

 

[Omar1984]

Hillary Clinton: US held meeting with Haqqani network


The US has held a meeting with representatives of the Haqqani militant network, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has revealed.

She did not give any details about who was involved or where they met.

But one senior US official said the meeting took place over the summer, before several major attacks against US interests in Afghanistan.

Mrs Clinton has been in talks in Islamabad where she has urged Pakistan to clamp down on the Haqqanis.

She said the US held one preliminary meeting with the Haqqani network "to see if they would show up".

"In fact, the Pakistani government officials helped to facilitate such a meeting," Mrs Clinton told Pakistani journalists.

She added: "We have reached out to the Taliban, we have reached out to the Haqqani network to test their willingness and their sincerity, and we are now working among us - Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States - to try to put together a process that would sequence us toward an actual negotiation."

Reports about such a meeting circulated over the summer but the US refused to confirm them at the time.

Mrs Clinton said the US had reached out to the Taliban and to the Haqqani network to test their sincerity and willingness to engage in a peace process.

The BBC's Kim Ghattas, in Islamabad, says a political settlement is key to ending the war in Afghanistan.

A senior US official also said the meeting took place over the summer at the request of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, who asked the US to give it a chance.

The meeting took place before two major attacks against US troops in Afghanistan and the US embassy in Kabul.

The attacks were blamed on the Haqqani network.

In September, outgoing US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm Mike Mullen called the Haqqanis a "veritable arm" of the Pakistani intelligence agency, accusing the ISI of directly supporting the militants.

Pakistan has denied supporting militants. Last month, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that his country "will not bow to US pressure" on fighting militancy.

Earlier, Mrs Clinton held talks with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, who said more could be achieved with better international co-operation.

"Do safe havens exist? Yes, they do exist [on] both sides," Ms Khar said. "Do we need to co-operate? Yes. We can co-operate more and achieve better results."

Relations between the US and Pakistan are at their lowest point for a decade.

After months of tension Mrs Clinton is heading a high-powered delegation that includes CIA chief David Petraeus and the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Martin Dempsey.

Speaking in the Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday, Mrs Clinton called for a new partnership between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight militants, whom she urged to pursue peace. She said Pakistan "must be part of the solution" to the Afghan conflict.



BBC News - Hillary Clinton: US held meeting with Haqqani network

 

[iPhone]

An excellent rebuttal to Reidel's article, putting the trash posing as analysis in its place:

Let’s get angry in the right way​

Zafar Hilaly
Thursday, October 20, 2011
the Raymond Davis matter and Obama’s personal assurance that that the violence prone murderous CIA thug was a diplomat and scores of niggly incidents that remain unreported but take place almost daily in dealings between their respective officials. All these have accelerated the decline of the US-Pak relations.


The writer is a former ambassador. Email: charles123it@hotmail.com

Let

very disappointed by the royal treatment of hillary and the clan recieved under PPP gov't despite their continious berating rants against Pakistan. She should not have been allowed to open her mouth like that in Afgh. prior to coming to Pak and then continuing her rehtoric in Pakistan as well.

She should have been put in front of a 'real Pakistani civil society' to face and answer real Pakistani questions and concerns regarding this relationship and not a hand picked and cowardly group by the PPP govt at the requests of clan hilary which was more eager to highlight domestic problems and begging for an outsider for help

Hillary could have been shut up easily by the mention of one name, Raymond Davis. But no one choose to bring it up. She would have turned three different colors had some one asked and inquired about the US embassy vehicle which crushed and killed a Pakistani man by travling and speeding the wrong way on the street. The people of the vehicle fled, the vehicle disappeared, and you madam are talking about mutual respect and fairness.

You talk about not tolerating nor protecting anyone be it Pakistani, Afghani, American or anyone who targets and kills civilians. Yet your actions show otherwise. You lie to cover for hired spies, you help flee and protect thugs and killers. Does that rule only apply to American civilians and soldeirs? the killers of whom must be punished. And not to Pakistani civilians and soldiers who can be killed and crushed on Pakistani streets by Americans and you turn a cruel blind eye to it.

Heat could have been turned up further by the mention of multiple occassions this year when from East Afgh. hundereds of militants attacked Pakistani check posts in Dir. And this is not a small group of 10-20 militants easily able to slip through US radar, the number here is of over 200 militants grouping up and launching attacks into Pakistan. How do you explain that?

By the way happy to read about news that Pakistan army is setting up mulitiple posts in that area to counter the Afghn. threat.

You madam talk about militants crossing the durand line, but do you know that Afghan side doesn't recognize the durand line and considers trible areas of Pak part of Afghanistan.

Sadly, we have a gutless Pak govt in place which is too cautious to give a lip back to the US - Their reasons, financial, enomical, their own corruption, whatever those maybe, are a big stain on nation's integrity. Ask the US what national integrity is. No one's asking for a war with the US. But a retrospective is required on the foreign policy with the US. One where one nation isn't treated like a negro slave in his white master's hands. That comes at a cost of puny American aid then it should be embraced.

Sadly, once again, this amount of evaluation on the foreign policy is asking a lot from this current lot of the PPP govt but rather the next elected one. These lessons shuld be learned and knowledge implemented.

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

The changing face of the Taliban | Magazines | DAWN.COM

In June 2001, a couple of months before the infamous attack on New York which changed the world, I had traveled with a couple of colleagues from Kandahar to Kabul to do a series of reports on life under the Taliban for a foreign television channel.

It was there that, for the first time, I truly understood the tragedy that was Afghanistan and the circumstances that gave rise to the group whose name has now become shorthand for all that is myopic, literalist and extremist for most on the one hand, and for a brave indigenous resistance to a foreign occupation to some on the other. No amount of prior reading had the same revelatory effect on my understanding of the nuances of the Taliban movement as that trip.

When Nato attacked Afghanistan in October that year as a response to ‘9/11’, one of the things that completely bewildered them was how the supposedly fierce and resilient Taliban seemed to have disappeared into thin air. For most outsiders it seemed to prove the dictum — parroted by the Northern Alliance and ‘security’ pundits in India — that the Taliban were some sort of foreigner force propped up entirely by Pakistan’s ISI which had returned en masse to the foreign land it had come from.

The ISI certainly provided support and military know-how to the Taliban after Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1994 saw them as a solution to internecine warfare and warlordism among the former anti-Soviet ‘mujahideen’. But having interacted with most levels of the Taliban bureaucracy — except for the reclusive ‘Emir’ Mullah Omar — it was clear to me even then that they were very much an Afghan force.

While the leadership might have fled to Pakistan or elsewhere or while some commanders had opportunistically switched sides in the age-old tradition of the land, most Taliban fighters — which included the former ‘mujahideen’ — had simply melted away to their homes, indistinguishable from ordinary rural Pakhtun Afghans. Bizarrely, it seems it took Nato almost a further decade to understand this.

One of the people I got to know well on that trip was a senior member of the Taliban information ministry. He was only 24 then — youthful like most Taliban I met (even Mullah Omar’s right-hand man, Mullah Hasan Rehmani, the governor of Kandahar, was only in his early forties). A former law student at Kabul University, he had chosen to join the Taliban out of the necessity of choosing sides and in the naïve belief that they were actually a force for good compared to the warlordism he had seen growing up.


Now mortified by some of the Taliban’s extremes, he chose to confide his secret dissent to me, and his own remarkable story as the unsung protector of Afghanistan’s film heritage still remains to be told. When he fled Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul (more out of notions of honour than necessity since two of his brothers who were also Taliban commanders had simply switched sides), he landed up in Pakistan for a few months and I had the chance to interview him in a less guarded environment for the BBC Urdu Service.

One of the questions I asked him was how it was that I had never seen any of the Arabs linked to Al Qaeda — who the West considered the real string pullers of the Taliban — in any government ministry during my time in Kandahar or Kabul. In fact, I don’t think I saw a single Arab the entire time I was there. He replied that, while there were some Arabs in Afghanistan and they may have had access to Mullah Omar (he himself had met Osama bin Laden once on the Kabul frontlines), they never interfered in the day to day running of government nor exerted any direct influence on the Taliban rank and file.

Most analysts with a far greater knowledge of Afghanistan than mine corroborated his words which pointed to the essential difference between the Al Qaeda Arabs and the Afghan Taliban: one had a global vision and “an agenda that stretches beyond borders”, the other mainly localised interests.

It’s pertinent to remember that despite the fact that Al Qaeda had found refuge in Afghanistan, no act of international terrorism has ever involved an Afghan. In the heady days after driving the Taliban from power, Nato and its allies chose to ignore this distinction.

Syed Saleem Shahzad’s book, at its most persuasive, is essentially an explanation of how that crucial mistake and its resultant hubris allowed Al Qaeda to make “blood brothers” of those lumped with them and weave itself into the fabric of the Taliban far more than it ever had before 9/11.

Shahzad’s contention is that the West’s initial myopia in Afghanistan has become a self-fulfilling prophecy which has made it now impossible to separate Al Qaeda from the Taliban insurgency and which will thus lead to the West’s eventual defeat in that arena.

THIS review has been the most difficult one, by far, that I have ever had to write. And it is only very partially because of the denseness of the book under consideration. The author frequently uses the metaphor of the Arabic mythological epic, Alf Laila Wa Laila (A Thousand and One Nights), to give a sense of the multifarious interconnected stories of Al Qaeda, but the metaphor could as easily be used for this book itself. It is a series of stories about people who fought and died and were replaced, obscure histories and recent events that have ostensibly shaped the beast that is Al Qaeda.

In fact, the book would have benefited tremendously from some charts and diagrams to help readers keep track of the numerous jihadist characters and their often complicated and fluid relationships with various organisations without having to continuously flip backwards and retrace their steps.

But there are two far more primary reasons this has been a difficult book to review. The first has to do with the content. Most of the book is written without source citations and more often than not, assertions are made that are impossible to verify.

Obviously, one must take the author at his word if he asserts that Militant X or Al Qaeda Planner Y told him something in an exclusive interview; there is no way for a reader to corroborate or refute such information, especially if X and Y are now dead.

But as often, startling claims are made without reference to any information in the public domain that would substantiate them.

To give just a few examples of numerous such assertions, the book claims that after the 2003 military operation in South Waziristan, Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zwahiri were separately holed up in various valleys in the far-flung area of Shawal which falls at the juncture of South and North Waziristan and Afghanistan (if true, Shahzad was far more knowledgeable about their whereabouts than any of the various intelligence agencies hunting for them); that the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas was engineered by Al Qaeda in order to prevent an imminent recognition of the Taliban by China which, had it occurred, would have reduced the Taliban government’s international isolation and thus have worked against Al Qaeda’s “broader interests” to make the Taliban dependent on it; and that “Unlike [President] Musharraf, [General] Kayani was unconcerned about inflicting collateral damage” and was also unconcerned by the plight of millions of civilians made refugees in 2008 and 2009 in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Mohmand and Swat.

These are not small assertions for a journalist to make as throwaway “factoids”. Yet the book is littered with such claims. What makes such assertions particularly problematic is that they are presented along with other verifiable facts about well known events, quite possibly lulling the ordinary reader, with little independent knowledge of the region’s politics, into accepting them as the truth rather than highly contested ‘facts’.

The second reason making this a difficult review are the circumstances in which the book was published. It was launched in London only a few days before the author, Syed Saleem Shahzad, a fellow journalist who worked with the same media house as myself at one time, was kidnapped and found brutally murdered with the finger of blame pointing squarely towards the state’s intelligence outfits. The immediate assumption was that his senseless murder was connected in some way to his writings on the murky world of jihadist outfits and possibly to this very book.

This obviously attached a halo to his investigative pieces that he possibly never enjoyed in his lifetime. It is never easy to write critically of the work of a colleague (albeit a colleague I never met), but especially when that colleague has met such a horrific and thoroughly undeserved fate.

The Commission of Inquiry into Shahzad’s murder has yet to make its findings known. But irrespective of the results of that inquiry, and indeed it remains a fervent hope that Shahzad’s killers are identified and punished, the book must be judged on its content, which I have endeavoured to do with the caveats detailed above.

I have already pointed out one of the major issues with the content of the book being a lack of citations for rather startling claims. However, there also numerous assertions in the text which can actually be called out for their own internal contradictions and even misstatement of known facts.

As examples of the latter, Shahzad claims at one point that Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan (Afghanistan under the Taliban) “is recognised by a majority of Muslim scholars as an Islamic state”, which is just simply wrong. At another point he claims that General Tariq Majeed was General Musharraf’s choice to succeed him as chief of army staff in 2007 but that Musharraf was forced to accept General Kayani since the latter was the US choice. This is contradicted by the recent WikiLeaks disclosures of secret US documents that show that General Musharraf played his cards close to his chest and that US diplomats were left to speculate on who Musharraf’s successor might be.

As an example of the former, Shahzad claims at one point in the book that Al Qaeda’s leadership had become quite upset with its man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for his brutality and his policy of targeting Shias in Iraq since it felt this was alienating even moderate Sunnis from Al Qaeda. In fact, the author claims Al Qaeda was getting ready to quickly distance itself from Zarqawi before he was killed by US forces. Yet, at another point the author notes that Dr Ayman al-Zwahiri, who he calls the real founder of Al Qaeda, “awarded” Zarqawi the “Al Qaeda franchise for Iraq to stir up sectarian strife so that Iraq’s theater of war would be more complicit” and to make Iraq ungovernable.

His claims about Al Qaeda’s alleged concern about Zarqawi’s sectarianism are also belied by his own telling of Al Qaeda’s intellectual lineage from the medieval ideologue Ibne Taymiyyah who declared Shias heretics, and how the virulently anti-Shia outfit, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, was welcomed into Al Qaeda with open arms and allowed to carry on its targeting of the Shia in Pakistan.

But perhaps the book’s greatest problem lies in Shahzad’s interpretation of Al Qaeda itself. Contrary to every other scholarly dissection of Al Qaeda as a loose-knit group of radical jihadis worldwide bound by a common ideology, Shahzad paints an organisation that seems not only to micromanage all affairs but which has a Nostradamus-like prophetic far-sightedness.

According to Shahzad, Al Qaeda not only “fashioned” the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2007-8 by spotting and nurturing young radicals such as Baitullah Mehsud, Qari Ziaur Rehman and Swat’s Ibne Ameen (who was later notorious for his throat-slitting brutality) early on, it did so because it had foreseen that Pakistan’s tribal areas would become the real battleground against the Americans.

Shahzad also claims that the Lal Masjid episode of 2007 was precipitated by Al Qaeda on whose advice Maulana Abdul Aziz, the mosque’s infamous khateeb, had in 2004 issued a fatwa forbidding Muslim funerals for army personnel killed in the South Waziristan operation. Before the actual military operation against Lal Masjid, “The Al Qaeda shura (council) met in North Waziristan and, after prolonged discussion and debate, agreed that the high point of their struggle in Pakistan would come when the foreseeable military operation against Lal Masjid began,” writes Shahzad. “Open war against the US-Pakistan designs was now unavoidable.”

Al Qaeda also knew in 2006 (!) that Barrack Obama would be elected president of the US, according to Shahzad, and therefore the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was timed to unsettle US plans for Pakistan during a transition phase from a Republican to a Democrat administration. And its 9/11 attacks were orchestrated knowing that the US would then attack Afghanistan, thereby “sucking the US into their trap” and leading to a Muslim backlash which would precipitate a confrontation between the West and the Muslim world. This supposedly fulfilled a Hadith about the beginning of “End of Times” battles in ancient Khurasaan comprising the current areas of Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan and India. The belief in this Hadith is explained as the motivator for bin Laden’s decision to return to Afghanistan in 1996, even though the actual circumstances of bin Laden’s flight of necessity from Sudan are well known.

It is one thing to disabuse some silly liberals of their notions of the jihadists as unthinking automatons. It is quite another to do what Shahzad seems to have done: delineate Al Qaeda as some sort of all-seeing, all-knowing entity that is able to plan far ahead of mere mortals. In fact, his far more credible focus on Al Qaeda’s “uncanny ability to exploit unfolding events” is undercut by this constant awe at the ‘prophetic’ nature of the group’s leadership. In all probability, many of these stories were probably revisionist takes on past events by jihadists Shahzad had access to, such as the notorious Ilyas Kashmiri (killed in a drone strike a few days after Shahzad’s own murder). But for the author to take these at face value betrays a strange gullibility for a seasoned journalist.

The book is at its best where Shahzad clearly cites his sources of information, usually mid-tier and lesser known figures of this shadowy world that he personally met, and which then provide a fresh insight into the workings of terror outfits. Characters like the former army commandos turned jihadis, Captain Khurram Ashiq, Major Abdul Rehman and Khurram’s brother, Major Haroon Ashiq are among the most fascinating to emerge from these stories.

Major Haroon, who the author claims personally killed the former SSG commander Major General (retired) Faisal Alavi in Islamabad in retaliation for the 2003 special forces operations in Angoor Adda, in particular, is singled out as one of the real architects of Al Qaeda’s new military strategy. This included, among other things, the November 26, 2008 attack on Mumbai (Shahzad claims it was planned by Haroon who “cunningly manipulated” a “forward section” of the ISI and the Lashkar-i-Taiba and was designed to take pressure off militants on the Afghan border by causing an India-Pakistan conflagration), the focus on cutting off Nato supply lines and the kidnapping-civilians-for-ransom strategy (including of the Karachi-based filmmaker, Satish Anand) to raise funds.

He also claims that the attack on the touring Sri Lankan cricket team in March 2009 was actually aimed to hold the team hostage to negotiate the springing from prison of Haroon, who had been arrested during a bungled kidnapping in Rawalpindi.

Incidentally, it should be noted that Carey Schofield in her recently published book Inside the Pakistan Army hints strongly that Alavi’s murder may have been motivated by the personal animosity of two senior generals who Alavi felt had reason to hold a grudge against him, who poisoned his longtime supporter General Musharraf against him and against whom he had filed a formal complaint for misrepresenting facts that led to his dismissal from service. She also repeats Alavi’s family’s claims (which she could not verify) that Major Haroon, who was charged with Alavi’s murder, was acquitted and walked out of prison in the summer of 2011.

Shahzad is also good where, through recounting his own experiences of navigating the difficult terrain of the Pak-Afghan border, he is able to convey how militants are able to manoeuvre militarily undetected by both Nato and Pakistani forces.

And because of his wealth of information on mid-level jihadists, he is also able to provide a snapshot of the increasingly fluid membership structure of militant outfits. With the book citing an estimated figure of 600,000 militants trained between 1980 and 2000, it paints a grim picture for analysts who believe they can turn a blind eye to some groups while targeting others.

Most importantly, the book also details the nuances of the extremely murky fight against militancy and terrorism in which nobody has any roadmaps and there is a constant push-and-pull over whether to employ force or divide-and-conquer tactics.

Shahzad points out, for example, that Nato initially mis-assessed Sirajuddin Haqqani’s loyalty to Mullah Omar, hoping to use him to displace Omar from the leadership of the Taliban (according to the book, the US also attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up the Jaishul Muslim, as a rival outfit to the Taliban). They did not realise, Shahzad says, that unlike his father Jalaluddin Haqqani, Siraj had become very close to Al Qaeda and, in fact, Al Qaeda’s man in the Taliban shura, and would never betray Omar because this would jeopardise Al Qaeda’s own interests. In fact, he had also assisted the TTP against the Pakistan army, which might explain recent rumours that the Pakistanis were willing to help the US track him down in exchange for the Americans not touching the elder Haqqani.

Similarly, he also puts down the failed treaties between the Pakistan army and militants, such as those of Shakai (April 2004), Srarogha (February 2005) and with the Utmanzai Wazirs (September 2006, which also resulted in money being transferred to militants as ‘compensation’ and other arrested militants being freed) not so much as Pakistan playing double games with the US, as desperate tactical strategies to contain militarily untenable situations.

In 2007, for example, the Pakistan army also supported the TTP South Waziristan commander Mullah Nazir, with success, in order to wipe out the Al Qaeda-related Uzbek fighters, who Shahzad claims were the ones who introduced brutal tactics, such as the cutting of throats, to Pakistani militants.

The author also mocks those who allege any nexus between the ISI and Al Qaeda in the Mumbai attacks laying the blame unequivocally on Major Haroon, Major Abdul Rehman and their Al Qaeda cohorts. If anything, Shahzad accuses the army of creating more jihadis through the “unnecessary persecution” of militants and through torture tactics, neither of which seems to fit into the current discourse of US allegations of double-dealing against Pakistan. If indeed state intelligence agents were responsible for Shahzad’s murder, the irony is that they have silenced a voice that could have bolstered their arguments against the American accusations.

IN early 2000, a few months after General Musharraf took power in a coup, he participated in a question and answer session with a large audience in Karachi. He was asked a question about the army’s concept of “strategic depth” and whether it realised that its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan was encouraging similar literalist interpretations of religion and militancy in Pakistan. At that point, reports had just begun to filter in of bands of Pakistani militants imposing Taliban-like strictures, such as banning television, music and girls’ education, in parts of the tribal areas.

His answer surprised many of those present. Musharraf spoke about how four years earlier, when his army officers used to visit the Taliban, they were forced to eat sitting on the ground, usually from one large communal plate. Now, he said, when they visit, they sit at tables and chairs with the Talibs and have separate plates and even cutlery.

Although his answer sounded absurd then, particularly in relation to the question that was asked, I suppose what he meant was that the Taliban were also ‘evolving’.

If Syed Saleem Shahzad’s hypothesis about Al Qaeda is correct, the Taliban have certainly changed, though not in the way General Musharraf envisioned. And the repercussions of their ideological influence can be felt all over Pakistan. While it is questionable whether Al Qaeda actually foresaw and pre-planned the so-called “******” theatre of war or not, and the US may have taken too long to decide that a common strategy was called for, Pakistan’s establishment it seems has yet to understand this fully. Whatever the merits of tactically supporting the Taliban as a hedge against a potentially hostile Afghanistan after Nato withdraws, the long-term strategic consequences for Pakistan’s own social fabric are disastrous.

Even more ironically, while the Pakistan military may have officially abandoned their ideas of “strategic depth”, Al Qaeda and the Taliban it seems are the ones who have managed truly to achieve “strategic depth.”