From: PakNationalists Group <paknationalists@gmail.com>
To: PakNationalists <PakNationalists@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, April 14, 2011 8:13:22 PM
Subject: PakNationalists - Where Is Pakistani Charge Sheet Against CIA?
Where Is The Pakistani Charge Sheet Against CIA?
Pakistan has a strong case against CIA but is inexplicably quiet, possibly to avert a collapse in relations that is already here.
AHMED QURAISHI | Friday | 15 April 2011
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—If there ever was a diplomatic equivalent of a kick-in-the-ass, this was it: a drone attack inside Pakistan hours after ISI chief visited Washington to ask his CIA counterpart to cease such attacks.
Before this there was the diplomatic equivalent of a slap in the face three weeks earlier, when a drone attack followed the release of CIA mercenary Raymond Davis.
Despite the kick and the slap, Pakistani responses continue to be cautious and measured. Pakistani officials providing background briefings to US reporters stationed in Islamabad continue to play safe, refusing to say if Pakistan decisively wants an end to CIA-run drone attacks. On Tuesday, a Pakistani foreign office spokesperson sought to soften the impact of a Pakistani protest to the US ambassador on the latest drone attack. Now the foreign office is saying that the US ambassador was not summoned to the foreign office to receive a demarche but was in the building for other business when the matter came up.
This doesn't mean that Pakistani military officials are not capable of bold action. To his credit, army chief Gen. Kayani publicly contradicted American claims on targeting 'militants' in the drone attack on 17 March. He sympathized 'with the people of Waziristan,' insisting in an official statement that the 'security of the people of Pakistan, in any case, stands above all.'
Also, the ISI chief did not hesitate to cut short his Washington visit, dropping an expected meeting with US defense secretary Robert Gates, after he was apparently told that CIA drones and some of the covert activities in Pakistan will continue.
But suspicions are growing that these reactions are for public consumption without any change in Pakistan's role in America's Afghan war. And chances are that President Zardari's government will not fully support such a move.
SILENCE ON CIA'S TERROR RECORD
What Pakistan refuses to do until now is to bell the cat. There is a long list of evidences that point to rogue CIA operations in Afghanistan and links to exporting terrorism to Pakistan.
The CIA contingent in Afghanistan helped groom and support insurgencies and terrorism in Pakistan. It was one way of nudging the Pakistani army into full cooperation in America's war. The idea was to create Islamic groups that attack and kill enough Pakistanis to build domestic pressure to act against all groups, including the Pakistan-friendly Afghan Taliban and the pro-Kashmir groups.
The CIA also punished Pakistan by providing a safe haven in Afghanistan to terrorists claiming to fight in the name of Balochistan, the strategic southwestern province. The official American role in protecting terrorist leader Brahamdagh Bugti is known to Pakistani officials, backed by evidence.
The CIA brought the Indian intelligence service to Afghanistan to help deal with Pakistan.
The Pakistani Taliban, responsible for killing thousands of ordinary Pakistanis in public bombings, was launched by a Pakistani tribesman recruited by CIA and the Indian spy service while in US custody for two years. He was an unknown foot soldier for the Afghan Taliban and was arrested in 2001. But after spending two years with the Americans, he returned to Pakistan as the commander of a new group called Pakistani Taliban, with enough money and weapons to raise a small army. He was released from American custody but was not handed over to Pakistan. His first act of jihad after crossing into Pakistan and forming the so-called Pakistani Taliban was to kidnap and kill Chinese engineers. The Pakistani Taliban's supplies continue to come from Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban deny any link to this group.
The idea behind Pakistani Taliban was simple: If Pakistan can use religious proxies in Afghanistan and Kashmir, so can others. Trained killers in the Pakistani Taliban introduced suicide bombings into Pakistan sometime in 2006, mostly targeting Pakistani cities. Young Pakistani boys were recruited and told they were being prepared for suicide attacks against American soldiers but were sent to kill Pakistani civilians in public places.
In July 2008, in a meeting in Rawalpindi during a secret visit by Admiral Mike Mullen and CIA deputy director Stephen Kappes, senior Pakistani military officers accused CIA of protecting terrorist leaders of the Pakistani Taliban.
Again, in November 2009, the incumbent ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha confronted his CIA counterpart Leon E. Panetta with several pieces of evidence that showed links between CIA and anti-Pakistan terrorists. A detailed report published by a Pakistani newspaper provided a glimpse into that meeting. Here is an excerpt:
"It was in this background that after putting up with so much for so long, the prime intelligence agency of the country ultimately confronted the CIA Director Leon E. Panetta with some highly classified and irrefutable evidence. Panetta was startled when Director-General ISI, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, a no-nonsense General, placed the facts before him in Islamabad on November 20, 2009."
As recently as yesterday, retired Vice Admiral Taj Khattak has accused the US military of turning an Afghan province into a base for Pakistani Taliban terrorists to plan and launch attacks inside Pakistan.
[For more reports on CIA's involvement in terrorism in Pakistan, click here, here, here, here, here, here and here.]
One more evidence of CIA's breach of Pakistani interests came on the last day of 2009, when a Jordanian agent working for CIA blew himself up inside a spy office in Khost across the border from Pakistan. Despite wide media coverage of the incident, a key point that many missed was how CIA had dragged spy services from several countries to join its illegal operations inside Pakistan. Thanks to CIA, Afghanistan today is an intelligence blackhole, used by spy services from several countries for multiple strategic purposes.
Pakistan has a solid case against CIA but it continues to prefer to lose the perceptions war in the hope of averting a collapse in relations that is here anyway.
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