Gosh, if we'd only known about Mullah Omar, we could've at least sent a card or something

We could have had, like, a little memorial service? Or maybe sent a nice floral arrangement? (A local florist would have known what's in season over there.)

Milt Bearden, a former CIA operative in Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that “it is beyond puzzling” that Omar’s death could go unconfirmed for so long, especially given the intelligence and surveillance capabilities of the United States.

But “it’s another case of why intelligence collection in that part of the world is so difficult,” Bearden said. “The truth is layered, and there are multiple agendas, none of which we ever really understand.”

-- from "Taliban leader Omar's tale reflects clashing
agendas," by the Washington Post's Greg Miller

by Ken

It's a relief to find that a certified secret-intelligence pro is "beyond puzzled" by that two-year gap in getting out news of the death of Mullah Omar. At the same time, you wouldn't think that "alive" or "dead" would be a truth subject to such extensive layering.

Meanwhile, I'll bet there are Taliban fighers all over Greater Talibania frantically searching their memories now trying to figure out just how long ago it was they got that inspiring yet terrifying order: "Please to dispatch 20 infidels by sundown also clean out your cave it's disgusting. Kind regards Mullah O." Because as we know now, if the message came less than two years ago, it appears most unlikely that it was from the One-Eyed One after all, and it's now a much less interesting story to tell strangers passing through, not to mention the grandkids. ("You know, Mullah Omar and I were so close that . . . .")

After all, it was just a couple of weeks ago that there was buzz about the sudden appearance of a message from Mullah Omar. Daily Outlook Afghanistan reported "Mullah Omar's Dramatic Emergence; An Impetus to Talks."

Oops!

As breaking-newsbreaks go, it has to be that some luster is taken off the news of Mullah Omar's death by the fact that the event apparently happened two years ago. I wonder what would happen if I tried telling my landlord or mobile-phone service provider that that payment they're so hot to have is on its way when I what I really mean is "at some point in the next two years . . ."

It may also take some of the top off memorial services for Mullah O, the fact that the man hasn't been with us for, you know, two years now. You know that sparkling grape juice you were planning to serve? (It surely wouldn't do to celebrate the passing of a fundamentalist Muslim fighter with sparkling wine. I guess in view of the nature of this particular celebration, you'd want to open the bottles so the fizz goes flat.

One thing I don't think we have to worry about is the late Mullah O feeling slighted by the delay in recognition of his passing. I'm guessing he'd be pleased as punch to have put another one over on the Western infidels. At the same time, if he felt slighted in life by all the attention focused on that upstart interloper in his country Osama bin-Laden, he might smart at public disclosure that his whereabouts and elimination were subjects of vastly less interest to the Western infidel security apparatus -- that basically we infidels didn't give all that big a whoop whether Omar was alive or dead.

As to reasons why the news may be so late in coming, near the end of Greg Miller's Washington Post report we learn: "A former Pakistani official said parts of the government may have sought to keep Omar's death secret out of fear that Taliban factions would splinter without him and damage Islamabad’s ability to influence peace talks with Afghanistan."

The Western infidel security people certainly had inklings. Here's the start of Greg Miller's report:

In early 2011, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta confronted the president of Pakistan with a disturbing piece of intelligence. The spy agency had learned that ­Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader who had become one of the world’s most wanted fugitives after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was being treated at a hospital in southern Pakistan.

The American spy chief even identified the facility — the Aga Khan University Hospital in Karachi — and said the CIA had “some raw intelligence on this” that would soon be shared with its Pakistani counterpart, according to diplomatic files that summarize the exchange.
U.S. intelligence officials now think that Omar probably died two years later, in 2013, and Afghan officials said this week that he succumbed while being treated for a serious illness in a Karachi hospital, just as those earlier intelligence reports had indicated.

Which suggests that if perhaps you were undergoing a medical procedure that you hoped might be kept under wraps -- a little cosmetic work, say -- that Karachi is a destination worth considering. As scary a place as we're often told it is, especially for Westerners, it does appear that the hospitals there know a thing or two about patient confidentiality.

But I digress.

The belated disclosure this week of Omar’s death has added to the legend of the ghostlike Taliban chief, a figure so elusive that it appears to have taken U.S. spy agencies two years to determine that one of their top targets after 9/11 was no longer alive.

But the emerging details of Omar’s death may also help explain the extent to which his ability to remain both influential and invisible was a reflection of the competing and often hidden agendas in the counterterrorism partnership between the United States and Pakistan.

Current and former U.S. ­officials said that despite intermittent intelligence on Omar’s whereabouts, there was never a concerted push to find him that remotely approached the scale of the manhunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

At the same time, the one-eyed Taliban leader’s apparent ability to get medical treatment in the port city of Karachi has bolstered long-standing suspicions that Omar was being sheltered by Pakistan.

The Pakistanis, of course, don't want to hear this.

A Pakistani official described claims that Omar died in Pakistan or that the government was even aware of his presence in the country as “unfounded speculation.”

A Pakistani official described claims that Omar died in Pakistan or that the government was even aware of his presence in the country as “unfounded speculation.”

Then again, for any number of reasons, including all those drones we keep sending their way, Pakistani intelligence officials haven't been exactly Chatty Cathies with us in recent years. Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and former CIA counterterrorism chief tells Greg Miller of the relationship with Pakistan's much-feared intelligence directorate, the ISI:

Pretty quickly you could see a pattern. Where the ISI was very effective working with us in tracking down ­al-Qaeda, anytime we had a lead on a senior member of the Taliban, the Pakistanis weren’t successful in following up.

But then, Grenier also notes, "We were overwhelmingly focused on al-Qaeda." When U.S. forces stumbled across Taliban leaders, it seems to have been a surprise both to us and to the Pakistanis.

And Pakistani officials aren't necessarily all that high on the ISI's "need to know" list. A source described as "a former Pakistani official" -- the same former Pakistani official we heard earlier speculating that the Pakistani government may have deliberately tried to keep Mullah Omar's death secret for fear of post-Omar factionalizing of the Tabliban -- says "the ISI told Pakistani leaders in March this year 'that Mullah Omar is seriously ill and his condition is deteriorating.' "

It seems he could only have wished to be "seriously ill" and "deteriorating" this past March. So it goes.

#

How Many More Billions In Taxpayer Dollars Will The Military Industrial Complex Waste On Pakistan's Corrupt Oligarchy?

Unless you read your NY Times in Pakistan, where the story was disappeared, you probably read about how the Pakistanis knew exactly where Osama bin-Laden was while they took billions of dollars in American aid and pretended to be looking for him. This wasn't really a secret, just another manifestation of the expensive dysfunction that the U.S. spy agencies have always been. Right from the beginning. Failure, failure, failure-- and billions and billions and unknowable billions of dollars wasted. The spy agencies aren't worth shit-- except for unconstitutional spying on American citizens.

Carlotta Gall, a Times correspondent who spent 12 years in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attack, excerpted parts of her upcoming book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 for her Times Magazine piece on March 19, "What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden." She knew all along-- as anyone remotely aware of history knew-- that the authors of Afghanistan's misery were located in Afghanistan, very much under the control of Pakistan's notorious local version of the CIA, the ISI, and the extremist "religious" schools or madrassas. Furthermore, bolstering all the circumstantial evidence, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told her that he thought Musharraf had arranged to hide Bin Laden in Abbottabad.

“The madrasas are a cover, a camouflage,” a Pashtun legislator from the area told me. Behind the curtain, hidden in the shadows, lurked the ISI.

The Pakistani government, under President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was maintaining and protecting the Taliban, both to control the many groups of militants now lodged in the country and to use them as a proxy force to gain leverage over and eventually dominate Afghanistan. The dynamic has played out in ways that can be hard to grasp from the outside, but the strategy that has evolved in Pakistan has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants. The linchpin in this two-pronged and at times apparently oppositional strategy is the ISI. It’s through that agency that Pakistan’s true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned-- a fact that the United States was slow to appreciate, and later refused to face directly, for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation.

…The story they didn’t want out in the open was the government’s covert support for the militant groups that were propagating terrorism in Afghanistan and beyond… After years of nurturing jihadists to fight its proxy wars, Pakistan was now experiencing the repercussions. “We could not control them,” a former senior intelligence official told a colleague and me six months after the Red Mosque siege.

…Yet even as the militants were turning against their masters, Pakistan’s generals still sought to use them for their own purpose, most notoriously targeting Pakistan’s first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was preparing to fly home from nearly a decade in exile in the fall of 2007. Bhutto had forged a deal with Musharraf that would allow him to resign as army chief but run for another term as president, while clearing the way for her to serve as prime minister. Elections were scheduled for early 2008.

Bhutto had spoken out more than any other Pakistani politician about the dangers of militant extremism. She blamed foreign militants for annexing part of Pakistan’s territory and called for military operations into Waziristan. She declared suicide bombing un-Islamic and seemed to be challenging those who might target her. “I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women, and Muslims know that if they attack a woman, they will burn in hell,” she said on the eve of her return.

She also promised greater cooperation with Afghanistan and the United States in combating terrorism and even suggested in an interview that she would give Western officials access to the man behind Pakistan’s program of nuclear proliferation, A. Q. Khan.

President Karzai of Afghanistan warned Bhutto that his intelligence service had learned of threats against her life. Informers had told the Afghans of a meeting of army commanders-- Musharraf and his 10 most-powerful generals-- in which they discussed a militant plot to have Bhutto killed.

On Oct. 18, 2007, Bhutto flew into Karachi. I was one of a crowd of journalists traveling with her. She wore religious amulets and offered prayers as she stepped onto Pakistani soil. Hours later, as she rode in an open-top bus through streets of chanting supporters, two huge bombs exploded, tearing police vans, bodyguards and party followers into shreds. Bhutto survived the blast, but some 150 people died, and 400 were injured.

Bhutto claimed that Musharraf had threatened her directly, and Karzai again urged her to take more precautions, asking his intelligence service to arrange an armored vehicle for her equipped with jammers to block the signals of cellphones, which are often used to detonate bombs. In the meantime, Bhutto pressed on with her campaign, insisting on greeting crowds of supporters from the open top of her vehicle.

In late December, a group of militants, including two teenage boys trained and primed to commit suicide bombings, arrived at the Haqqania madrasa in the northwestern town of Akora Khattak. The madrasa is a notorious establishment, housing 3,000 students in large, whitewashed residence blocks. Ninety-five percent of the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan have passed through its classrooms, a spokesman for the madrasa proudly told me. Its most famous graduate is Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran Afghan mujahedeen commander whose network has become the main instrument for ISI-directed attacks in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

The two young visitors who stopped for a night at the madrasa were escorted the next day to Rawalpindi, where Bhutto would be speaking at a rally on Dec. 27. As her motorcade left the rally, it slowed so she could greet supporters in the street. One of the two teenagers fired a pistol at her and then detonated his vest of explosives. Bhutto was standing in the roof opening of an armored S.U.V. She ducked into the vehicle at the sound of the gunfire, but the explosion threw the S.U.V. forward, slamming the edge of the roof hatch into the back of her head with lethal force. Bhutto slumped down into the vehicle, mortally wounded, and fell into the lap of her confidante and constant chaperone, Naheed Khan.

As Bhutto had long warned, a conglomeration of opponents wanted her dead and were all linked in some way. They were the same forces behind the insurgency in Afghanistan: Taliban and Pakistani militant groups and Al Qaeda, as well as the Pakistani military establishment, which included the top generals, Musharraf and Kayani. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry into the circumstances of Bhutto’s death found that each group had a motive and merited investigation.

Pakistani prosecutors later indicted Musharraf on charges of being part of a wider conspiracy to remove Bhutto from the political scene. There was “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that he did not provide her with adequate security because he wanted to ensure her death in an inevitable assassination attempt, the chief state prosecutor in her murder trial, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, told me. (Musharraf denied the accusations.) A hard-working, hard-charging man, Ali succeeded in having Musharraf arrested and was pushing to speed up the trial when he was shot to death on his way to work in May 2013.

Ali had no doubts that the mastermind of the plot to kill Bhutto was Al Qaeda. “It was because she was pro-American, because she was a strong leader and a nationalist,” he told me. A Pakistani security official who interviewed some of the suspects in the Bhutto case and other militants detained in Pakistan’s prisons came to the same conclusion. The decision to assassinate Bhutto was made at a meeting of the top council of Al Qaeda, the official said.

It took more than three years before the depth of Pakistan’s relationship with Al Qaeda was thrust into the open and the world learned where Bin Laden had been hiding, just a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy. In May 2011, I drove with a Pakistani colleague down a road in Abbottabad until we were stopped by the Pakistani military. We left our car and walked down a side street, past several walled houses and then along a dirt path until there it was: Osama bin Laden’s house, a three-story concrete building, mostly concealed behind concrete walls as high as 18 feet, topped with rusting strands of barbed wire. This was where Bin Laden hid for nearly six years, and where, 30 hours earlier, Navy SEAL commandos shot him dead in a top-floor bedroom.

…Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say.

…America’s failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism is one of the primary reasons President Karzai has become so disillusioned with the United States. As American and NATO troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of this year, the Pakistani military and its Taliban proxy forces lie in wait, as much a threat as any that existed in 2001… Pakistani security officials, political analysts, journalists and legislators warned of the same thing. The Pakistani military was still set on dominating Afghanistan and was still determined to use the Taliban to exert influence now that the United States was pulling out.

No Reason For The GOP Clown Car To Mention Husain Haqqani In Their Debate

If you watched the repulsive Republican "presidential" debate on foreign affairs and national security Tuesday night, you might have been surprised how profoundly superficial the "debate" was. Even given the opportunity to refocus to something serious, none of these clowns ever mentioned the Euro-zone or even talked about China-- beyond Rick Perry's startling and insane prediction that China is on the fast track to the trash heap of history. (But then he also advocated implementing a no-fly zone over Syria, a de facto declaration of war against several countries.) Mitt Romney's foreign policy, apparently, is centered about visiting Israel immediately after being elected or inaugurated. As for Pakistan, we heard nothing but a jumble of political posturing without any discussion of substance. And yet, while Romney and the 7 dwarves were onstage bickering, there was momentous news being made with potentially gigantic consequences to U.S.-Pakistani relations, news that Americans ought to understand.

FYI- Pakistan is the 6th biggest country in the world by population and the second biggest Muslim country, after Indonesia. There are 178 million Pakistanis. In comparison, Russian's population is 143 million, Japan's is 128 million, Mexico's is 112 million, Germany's is 82 million and France, the U.K. and Italy are between 60 and 65 million each. Pakistan also has between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons, including some designed to be carried on missiles.

Tuesday, the extremely pro-American Pakistani ambassador, Husain Haqqani, "resigned" and a new ambassador, Sherry Rehman, was appointed. He was ordered home to Pakistan to face an inquiry about an explosive memo he either wrote or was in being framed for writing. The memo asked Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assist Pakistan's fatally weak civilian government to stave off a coup by the ISI (the out-of-control Pakistani CIA) and the military. The ouster of Haqqani is a huge victory by the ISI and the military over Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari. Haqqani’s ouster, even before any investigation to prove wrongdoing, was a concession by civilian leaders to quell the military’s fury over the scandal. Although none of the poseurs at the GOP debate thought to bring it up, “The real question is, does this end with Haqqani’s resignation or is this the beginning of a larger effort to oust” the elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari, said Lisa Curtis, who has worked on Pakistan policy at the State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the CIA.

The departure of Haqqani, who was close to Zardari, will weaken what Curtis described as an embattled government. There is already “a great deal of effort to provoke an early election” to unseat Zardari and his allies, she said.

Wendy Chamberlin, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, praised Haqqani as “an active, articulate and first-rate ambassador,” and said the scandal is an example of how political rivals in Islamabad exploit close ties with or antipathy toward the United States in internal power struggles.

...A Pakistani-American businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, has alleged he helped Haqqani deliver a message from Zardari to the then- chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. The memo, which Mullen’s spokesman last week said the chairman ignored because he gave it no credence, sought American pressure to prevent Pakistan’s army from seizing power after the U.S. conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden without informing Pakistan, humiliating the security establishment.

Ijaz wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times last month alleging that the memo offered that the civilian government would replace Pakistani military and intelligence officials with officers compliant with U.S. demands to sever the military’s ties with the Taliban and other Islamic militant groups.

Pakistan’s government yesterday denied media reports that it is holding peace talks with the country’s Taliban militants, even as an unidentified commander of the movement was cited as saying a truce has been declared. Interior Minister Rehman Malik and the army yesterday issued statements denying reports in recent days of secret talks between officials and the Tehreek-e- Taliban Pakistan, the main Islamic guerrilla movement fighting the government.

Haqqani has denied Ijaz’s story and defenders such as presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar pointed to Ijaz’s involvement in previous controversies in which U.S. and Pakistani officials denied his claims.

Ijaz, who grew up in Virginia, has helped lead various New York-based companies, including Crescent Hydropolis Resorts Plc, which in 2008 called itself “the world’s leading developer of ultra-luxury underwater resort hotels.”

Haqqani “has been such an important ally to President Zardari that his exit” will weaken him, said Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

The winner in this controversy, which the Pakistani press dubbed “memogate,” is “the purported injured party, the military,” she said.

Before he was named ambassador to Washington in 2008, Haqqani was a professor at Boston University. He wrote a 2005 book recounting the military’s interventions in Pakistani politics and saying that the military had encouraged the growth of violent Islamic militancy in the country.

In part because of the book, the army “has always been opposed to Haqqani,” Pakistani military analyst Hasan-Askari Rizvi, said in an interview from Lahore, Pakistan.

Pakistan’s military has ruled the country for half of the nation’s 64-year history. It remains the country’s most powerful institution, retaining control over national security matters more than three years after transferring power to an elected government.

How Involved Was Pakistan In The Mumbai Assault For Real?

It seems to me that you pretty much get as close as can be to the root of all evil anywhere between Herat and Dacca when you zero in on Pakistan's very own CIA-- which has been very much in cahoots with the CIA much of the time-- the ISI. They have nurtured virtually all of the worst players in the subcontinent from their clients and Frankenstein monster the Taliban to al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and al-Badr. This morning's NY Times asserts what all Indians suspected, that Pakistan's venal Inter-Services Intelligence was indeed involved with the savage assault on Mumbai. ISI is a rogue terrorist organization that isn't under the control of the Pakistani government anymore than nuclear black marketeer A.Q. Khan was. And you can take that as you'd like.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan’s main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.

American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks.

...“People are having to go back and relook at all the connections,” said one American counterterrorism official, who was among several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still progressing.

Meanwhile Britain's Guardian has tracked down the home and family of the lobe surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab... in Pakistan. The villagers in the town tried misleading outsiders, claiming to have never heard of the terrorist. But they were all lying.

Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: "You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television."

Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.
"Ajmal used to go to Lahore for work, as a labourer," continued the villager who feared being named. "He's been away for maybe four years. When he came back once a year, he would say things like, 'We are going to free Kashmir.'"

Wresting the whole of Kashmir from Indian rule is Lashkar-e-Taiba's aim. Ajmal had little education, according to locals. But it is still unclear whether he was radicalised in the village or once he had left to work elsewhere.

...But the villager who turned whistleblower said that local religious clerics were brainwashing youths in the area and that Lashkar-e-Taiba's founder, Hafiz Sayeed, had visited nearby Depalpur, where there were "hundreds" of supporters. There was a Lashkar-e-Taiba office in Depalpur, but that had been hurriedly closed in the past few days. The Lashkar-e-Taiba newspaper is distributed in Depalpur and Faridkot. Depalpur lies in the south of Punjab province, an economically backward area long known for producing jihadists.

Shown a picture of Ajmal, the villager confirmed that he was the former Faridkot resident, who had last visited the village a couple of months ago at the last festival of Eid.

Some locals have claimed that this Faridkot, and another poor village nearby called Tara Singh, are a recruitment hotbed for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group accused of carrying out the Mumbai attack. On the side of a building, just outside Faridkot, is graffiti that says: "Go for jihad. Go for jihad. Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad." MDI is the parent organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Depalpur, a banner on the side of the main street asks people to devote goatskins to Jamaat ud Dawa, another MDI offshoot.

Caught red-handed, Pakistan is making a big show of cracking down. It's just a show. It always is. They're virtually a CIA client state but until the ISI is disbanded and it's leaders turned over to face justice, it's all meaningless. A friend of mine pointed out today that if the Indians and Pakistanis really go at it big time, they can knock the earth off its axis. And that, my friends, really is evil.


UPDATE: TRAINING CAMP RAIDED

The Pakistani military raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp in Kashmir and arrested a dozen activists, including Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the operations chief who India claims was the mastermind behind the Mumbai attack. It's unlikely that they'll certain they won't allow Indian officials to question him-- and it remains to be seen what they actually do with him themselves.

"We've seen before how Pakistan will arrest some militants, keep them for a couple of months and then release them when the world's not paying attention," said B. Raman, a former head of the Pakistan desk at the Research and Analysis Wing (India's MI6).

"It must not be allowed to do that this time. They have to prosecute these people and dismantle the whole terrorist infrastructure," he told the Times.

Yes, good luck with that. Coddled Pakistani terrorist groups, who have a great deal of sympathy among a population which has been brainwashed to revere and idolize them, are already denouncing the arrests. One prominent Pakistani terrorist leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, brazenly condemned the raid, knowing full well that there is no will in his country to really put a stop to the activities if these psychotic religious extremists.

"The operation against jihadi organisations in Pakistani Kashmir is unwarranted and we strongly condemn it," he said. "The Government has shown signs of weakness by targeting Kashmiri organisations... India wants to crush the independence movement of Kashmir using the Mumbai attacks as a pretext."

Arrests and the appearance of a crackdown have continued.

Rumblings In Pakistan Don't Sound Sweet

Will Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani be flying one of the upgraded F-16's?

1969: I had just spent a long time in Afghanistan and I was on my way to India. There's really only one way to go-- thru the Khyber Pass. It may sound romantic and hearken back to childhood stories of Gunga Din but, let me tell you, once you leave Jalalabad, it's pretty hairy right up until you get to Peshawar. And, I promise you, those are two of the scariest cities you are unlikely to ever visit. But between them is basically Pashtunistan, a tribal no man's land that recognizes no international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this week, Bush joined right in in not recognizing the international border either and, with or without the tacit support of the Pakistani government, the U.S. conducted a missile strike into South Waziristan, a bit south of the parts of Pakistan I had to drive through to get to India (almost 40 years before Bush launched his missiles).

Did you know we attacked another country with missiles and killed at least a dozen people? I didn't until a few days ago when I heard on the radio that Bush was urging Congress to allow him to use funds Congress had granted Pakistan to fight terrorists for upgrading advanced fighter jets. It made me suspicious. I knew the Indians would freak out and the Afghans would get up tight. So I figured Bush must have been trading the jet upgrades for the right to attack al Qaeda targets in western Pakistan, in what's called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, districts along the Afghan border with around 3 million people only nominally under the control of the Pakistani government and, more realistically, under the control of the Taliban.

Apparently they were aiming for a senior al Qaeda official, Abu Khabab Masri, and supposedly killed him.

The Pakistani military, as is its custom, denied knowledge of the missile strike and whether it had been carried out by the United States. American attacks inside Pakistan are highly sensitive politically.

One U.S. official familiar with the incident said the Pentagon was not involved and that "it was an agency-run op all the way," a reference to the CIA. The agency had no comment.

A U.S. counter-terrorism official in Washington said that Masri, whose given name is Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, was believed dead. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

"There is indeed a sense that he's gone," said the counter-terrorism official. "This guy not only had knowledge that was dangerous but did dangerous things with it," added the official, who described Masri as a longtime Al Qaeda specialist in poisons and explosives.

The attack came on the day that Pakistani Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani was meeting President Bush [and Barack Obama] in Washington. In the past, Pakistani authorities have sometimes aided in or carried out the reported capture or killing of a senior Islamic militant at around the time of such meetings.

But another, senior American official said that, in this case, the strike was a "strictly unilateral" one by the U.S. without any assistance from Pakistan. It was merely coincidental that it overlapped with Gillani's visit, the official said.

Many members of Congress are as pissed off as the Indians are about the U.S. shifting nearly a quarter billion dollars in counterterrorism funds to upgrading F-16 attack jets that have nothing to do with fighting terrorists and everything to do with India-Pakistan hostilities. Some members of Congress, unaware that Bush was planning an attack on militants inside Pakistan, assumed the money was to ease tensions over the 11 members of the Pakistani paramilitary forces killed in an American airstrike in the area last month. Cheekily, Bush is claiming that the F-16's will be used to fight terrorists. They never have been before. It's just another on the long list of actions Nancy Pelosi will make sure he isn't impeached for. Patrick Leahy and Congresswoman Nita Lowey are going through the motions of demanding an explanation.

This morning's NY Times is reporting that the CIA is wigging out over continued ties between Pashtun militants (that's the Taliban) and the ISI (which is the Pakistani CIA). The deputy director of the CIA went to Islamabad to confront the new government with proof that the ISI is actively supporting the militants.

The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.

The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants.

The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS, Prime Minister Gilani said there are no links between the ISI and the Pashtun militants. He said "We would not allow that.” Congress hasn't agreed to those planes yet; I wonder if Bush is just going ahead with it anyway. No one can access how much power Gilani has over the ISI, although it isn't likely to be very much.

Over the weekend, the government announced a major change in the chain of command for Pakistan's most powerful spy agency-- but then reversed the directive 24 hours later.

The government issued a statement late Saturday, as Gillani was en route to Washington, saying that Inter-Services Intelligence, which is commanded by a senior military officer, would begin reporting directly to the civilian Interior Ministry.

But after what Pakistani press reports described as furious protests the following day from senior military and intelligence officials, the order was canceled.

The ISI, sometimes described as a state within a state, helped arm and organize the Taliban in the 1990s.