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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Gates Sees Fallout From Troubled Ties With Pakistan


Nobody else in the Obama administration has been mired in Pakistan for as long as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. So on a trip here this past week to try to soothe the country’s growing rancor toward the United States, he served as a punching bag tested over a quarter-century. “Are you with us or against us?” a senior military officer demanded of Mr. Gates at Pakistan’s National Defense University, according to a Pentagon official who recounted the remark made during a closed-door session after Mr. Gates gave a speech at the school on Friday. Mr. Gates, who could hardly miss that the officer was mimicking former President George W. Bush’s warning to nations harboring militants, simply replied, “Of course we’re with you.” That was the essence of Mr. Gates’s message over two days to the Pakistanis, who are angry about the Central Intelligence Agency’s surge in missile strikes from drone aircraft on militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, among other grievances, and showed no signs of feeling any love. The trip, Mr. Gates’s first to Pakistan in three years, proved that dysfunctional relationships span multiple administrations and that the history of American foreign policy is full of unintended consequences. As the No. 2 official at the C.I.A. in the 1980s, Mr. Gates helped channel Reagan-era covert aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the American allies at the time: Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Many of those fundamentalists regrouped as the Taliban, who gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and now threaten Pakistan. In meetings on Thursday, Pakistani leaders repeatedly asked Mr. Gates to give them their own armed drones to go after the militants, not just a dozen smaller, unarmed ones that Mr. Gates announced as gifts meant to placate Pakistan and induce its cooperation. Pakistani journalists asked Mr. Gates if the United States had plans to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (Mr. Gates said no) and whether the United States would expand the drone strikes farther south into Baluchistan, as is under discussion. Mr. Gates did not answer. At the same time, the Pakistani Army’s chief spokesman told American reporters at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Thursday that the military had no immediate plans to launch an offensive against extremists in the tribal region of North Waziristan, as American officials have repeatedly urged. And the spokesman, Maj. Gen Athar Abbas, rejected Mr. Gates’s assertion that Al Qaeda had links to militant groups on Pakistan’s border. Asked why the United States would have such a view, the spokesman, General Abbas, curtly replied, “Ask the United States.” General Abbas’s comments, made only hours after Mr. Gates arrived in Islamabad, were an affront to an American ally that gave Pakistan $3 billion in military aid last year. But American officials, trying to put a positive face on the general’s remarks and laying out what they described as military reality, said that the Pakistani Army was stretched thin from offensives against militants in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan and probably did not have the troops. “They don’t have the ability to go into North Waziristan at the moment,” an American military official in Pakistan told reporters. “Now, they may be able to generate the ability. They could certainly accept risk in certain places and relocate some of their forces, but obviously that then creates a potential hole elsewhere that could suffer from Taliban re-encroachment.” Mr. Gates’s advisers cast him as a good cop on a mission to encourage the Pakistanis rather than berate them. And he was characteristically low-key during most his visit here, including during a session with Pakistani journalists on Friday morning at the home of the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson. But Mr. Gates perked up when he was brought some coffee, and he soon began to push back against General Abbas. American officials say that the real reason Pakistanis distinguish between the groups is that they are reluctant to go after those that they see as a future proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan when the Americans leave. India is Pakistan’s archrival in the region. “Dividing these individual extremist groups into individual pockets if you will is in my view a mistaken way to look at the challenge we all face,” Mr. Gates said, then ticked off the collection on the border. “Al Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Tariki Taliban in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani network — this is a syndicate of terrorists that work together,” he said. “And when one succeeds they all benefit, and they share ideas, they share planning. They don’t operationally coordinate their activities, as best I can tell. But they are in very close contact. They take inspiration from one another, they take ideas from one another.”
Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s “trust deficit” with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better. His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching “Seven Days in May,” the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.

Bin Laden claims plane bombing bid



Osama Bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the failed attack on a US airliner on December 25 in a new audio tape. In the tape obtained by Al Jazeera, the world's most wanted man warns Barack Obama, the US president, that there will be more attacks unless he finds a solution to the Palestinian crisis. The audio tape is believed to have been recorded last month. "The message I want to convey to you through the plane of the hero Omar Farouk [Abdulmutallab], reaffirms a previous message that the heroes of 9/11 conveyed to you." "America will never dream of living in peace unless we live it in Palestine. It is unfair that you enjoy a safe life while our brothers in Gaza suffer greatly. "Therefore, with God's will, our attacks on you will continue as long as you continue to support Israel," bin Laden said. Abdulmutallab, who is now in US police custody, allegedly attempted to ignite explosives sewn into his underpants as Northwest Airlines Flight 253 made its final descent to Detroit on Christmas Day. Obama has criticised his own intelligence agencies for failing to piece together information about the suspect which should have stopped him boarding the flight.

Haiti survivor pulled out of rubble



Rescue teams have pulled a 22-year-old man out of the rubble of a flattened building in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, eleven days after a 7.0 earthquake devastated the Caribbean republic. Wismond Jean-Pierre was rescued late on Saturday night after spending a week and a half under a collapsed hotel, just hours after the Haitian government declared search and rescue operations over. Jean-Pierre's survival was dubbed as "more than a miracle" by the French and Greek search and rescue teams who found him. Carmen Michalska, a rescuer with the Greek team, said: "He just said 'thank you' when we pulled him out." Speaking from his hospital bed, Jean-Pierre agreed he felt he had received "revelation I would survive".

Parliamentary elections postponed to September



Afghanistan's election authorities said Sunday they had to postpone parliamentary elections from May to September because of a funding shortage and lack of security in the troubled country. "The Independent Election Commission, due to lack of budget, security and uncertainty and logistical challenges... has decided to conduct the Wolosi Jirga election on September 18, 2010," Fazil Ahmad Manawi, a senior commissioner told reporters in Kabul. Wolosi Jirga is the official name for Afghanistan's lower house of the parliament. The ballot was originally planned for May 22.

Osama is alive, claims al-Qaeda leader



Al-Qaeda leader Sheikh Rashad Mohammed Saeed Ismael alias Abu al-Fida has ruled out the news about death of Osama Bin Laden, saying that he is alive and kicking. He said that Osama married for fifth time few months before 9/11 and his Yemeni wife went to meet him in Afghanistan via Pakistan. During an interview, Osama’s close aide Abu al-Fida said that when Osama decided to marry for the fifth time, he turned to him to find him a Yemeni bride. After initial preparations, Fida escorted a girl namely Amal al-Sadah from Sana’a to Kandahar via Karachi where Osama would was waiting for his future bride. The expenditures of the marriage were borne by al-Qaeda’s financial chief Sheikh Saeed al-Masri. He added that Osama left Afghanistan before 9/11, however his wife stayed behind. After 9/11, he was arrested in Yemen and detained for two years. His brother Sadeq, 25, was seized in Pakistan and sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. A brother-in-law and a cousin remain there to this day. Fida blames a recent resurgence of the group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the Yemeni government’s failure to help former fighters returning from Afghanistan. “Some of these men got frustrated and disillusioned and decided to head back to the mountains and regroup,” he said. He confirmed that the group had organised the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had studied in London, to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into his underpants after training in Yemen. Fida now acts as an adviser to the Yemeni government, pressing it to provide money and jobs for rehabilitated radicals, and has offered to mediate between officials and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Probe sought into Nigeria killings



A US-based rights group has urged Nigeria's vice-president to order an immediate criminal investigation into "a massacre of at least 150 Muslim residents" of a town in central Nigeria. In a statement, Corinne Dufka, Human Rights Watch's (HRW) senior West Africa researcher, said the killings in Kuru Karama, 30km south of the city of Jos, required "the authorities to act now". "Something extremely serious has happened in the town ... act now both to bring those behind these heinous crimes to justice and to protect both the survivors and those at risk of renewed violence," Dufka said. "Vice-president [Goodluck] Jonathan's statement that the perpetrators will be prosecuted is a start. But now he needs to make sure the police conduct an immediate and impartial investigation." The three main mosques of the town were burned and destroyed as well, according to HRW. And one witness told HRW that at least one police officer participated in the attack, while another said the police abandoned their post shortly before the violence began, adding that the killings took place throughout the day, without police intervention to stop the violence, despite repeated calls to the police.

Indian hijack plot caused new UK terror alert



FEARS that Islamist terrorists plan to hijack an Indian passenger jet and crash it into a British city helped to prompt this weekend’s heightened terror alert. MI5 was told by the Indian authorities early last week about a suspected plot by militants linked to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan to hijack an Air India or Indian Airlines flight from Mumbai or Delhi. The warning, which came after the capture of a suspected Islamic leader, was contained in a detailed “threat assessment” sent to MI5 by the Indian Intelligence Bureau. It did not state that Britain was a specific target. But police security sources said it had raised fears in London that a British city might be attacked. The warning revived long-running concerns following an Al-Qaeda plot in 2003 in which a hijacked aircraft was to be flown into Heathrow airport. That incident led Tony Blair, then prime minister, to make the largely symbolic move of dispatching armoured vehicles to guard the airport perimeter. The Indian government has increased passenger screening and frisking at all main airports. It is deploying additional armed sky marshals to deal with the threat. Alan Johnson, the home secretary, revealed on Friday that the threat level to Britain was being raised from “substantial” to “severe”. That is the second-highest level and means that an attack is “highly likely”. The official terror threat was at the severe level for four years after the July 7 bombings in London in 2005. It was downgraded last July. The latest move comes exactly four weeks after the Christmas Day attempted suicide attack on an airliner over Detroit. The FBI has charged a former British student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underpants bomber, with the failed attack. The authorities yesterday maintained their stance of being deliberately vague about the precise reasons why the threat level had been raised. A senior Whitehall official said only that the Detroit attack proved that Al-Qaeda had both the “capability and the intent” to attack western aircraft.