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.

Did Cheney Have Benazir Bhutto Assassinated?

I guess it's a combination of having been there a couple times and the feeling it's the most dangerous place on earth-- not for tourists, for the existential survival of the planet-- but I keep writing about Pakistan. No one ever seems in the slightest bit interested. Last week we looked at all the billions and billions of our tax dollars that have been shoved into the most corrupt system in the world-- around $12 billion worth, most of it basically untraceable military support. Yesterday's NY Times reported on a confidential congressional briefing that warned about how that money is being used: expanding the country's nuclear capacity-- even now as the Taliban insurrection is slowly taking control of more and more of the country. (They already have as many as 100 nuclear weapons, scattered around the country.)

Inside the Obama administration, some officials say, Pakistan’s drive to spend heavily on new nuclear arms has been a source of growing concern, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when Washington is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of an arsenal of 80 to 100 weapons so that they will never fall into the hands of Islamic insurgents.

Obama administration officials said that they had communicated to Congress that their intent was to assure that military aid to Pakistan was directed toward counterterrorism and not diverted. But Admiral Mullen’s public confirmation that the arsenal is increasing-- a view widely held in both classified and unclassified analyses-- seems certain to aggravate Congress’s discomfort.

So what we have is a Pakistan descending into chaos with the Taliban making tremendous headway in winning over the hearts and minds of the impoverished masses, while a weak national government gropes for internal support. Yes, the Taliban looks almost attractive compared to a government that makes pre-Revolutionary France seem like the shining city on the hill in retrospect. And the U.S. taxpayer is being asked, surreptitiously, to subsidize billions of dollars more in money that goes for a nuclear program that can only mean serious trouble and international instability-- or worse.

The dimensions of the Pakistani buildup are not fully understood. “We see them scaling up their centrifuge facilities,” said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which has been monitoring Pakistan’s continued efforts to buy materials on the black market, and analyzing satellite photographs of two new plutonium reactors less than 100 miles from where Pakistani forces are currently fighting the Taliban.

“The Bush administration turned a blind eye to how this is being ramped up,” he said. “And of course, with enough pressure, all this could be preventable.”

As a matter of diplomacy, however, the buildup presents Mr. Obama with a potential conflict between two national security priorities, some aides concede. One is to win passage of a global agreement to stop the production of fissile material-- the uranium or plutonium used to produce weapons. Pakistan has never agreed to any limits and is one of three countries, along with India and Israel, that never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Yet the other imperative is a huge infusion of financial assistance into Afghanistan and Pakistan, money considered crucial to helping stabilize governments with tenuous holds on power in the face of terrorist and insurgent violence.

Senior members of Congress were already pressing for assurances from Pakistan that the American military assistance would be used to fight the insurgency, and not be siphoned off for more conventional military programs to counter Pakistan’s historic adversary, India. Official confirmation that Pakistan has accelerated expansion of its nuclear program only added to the consternation of those in Congress who were already voicing serious concern about the security of those warheads.

Meanwhile newspapers in Asia today are reporting on a claim from Sy Hersh that Cheney had Benazir Bhutto assassinated. The original source seems to be a major Pakistani paper, The Nation, which was quickly taken off-line-- though not before the report started spreading-- and then came back online. The Indian is also carrying the story. Here's the version from The Nation, datelined New York:

Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.

The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.

Hersh said former US vice-president Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he clear the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit.

Seymour also said that Rafiq Al Hariri and the Lebanese army chief were murdered for not safeguarding the US interests and refusing US setting up military bases in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot.

A number of websites around the world are suspecting the same unit for killing of Benazir Bhutto because in an interview with Al-Jazeera TV on November 2, 2007, she had mentioned the assassination of Usama Bin Laden, Seymour said. According to BB, Umar Saeed Sheikh murdered Usama, but her words were washed out from the David Frosts report, he said.

The US journalist opined that it might have been done on purpose because the US leadership did not like to declare Usama dead for in the case the justification of the presence of US army in Afghanistan could no more be there, hence no reason for operation against Taliban.

On the other hand, the diplomatic analysts believe that BB murder is still a fable and it is for the reason Asif Zardari and other govt authorities are stressing UN probe in the murder case, also paying huge sums for it.

Another website has disclosed that Benazir was put to death in order to roll back Pakistan nuclear programme and the take over its nukes and India, Israel and the US, were making hectic efforts to deprive Pakistan of its atomic capability so as to bring to under their control.

You probably know we don't hold Cheney in high regard here at DWT. And no one will ever persuade me that the CIA hasn't been the most evil force in America nor that they didn't kill JFK. But I am very dubious about this particular report. It doesn't ring true and sounds like a way to smear McChrystal.




UPDATE: Cheney Didn't Have Bhutto Murdered

As I suspected, Hersh denied the whole thing. From Steve in comments:

LAHORE: US journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday contradicted news reports being published in South Asia that quote him as saying a “special death squad” made by former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto. The award-winning journalist described as “complete madness” the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief. “Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto,” Hersh said. “I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say anything remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet.” He said Gen McChrystal had run a special forces unit that engaged in “high value target activity”, but “while I have been critical of some of that unit’s activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.” He regretted that none of the publications had contacted him before carrying the report. “This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their job – and that is to verify such rumours.”

In the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, maybe only one thing is clear: The mess in Pakistan has gotten messier

Buses burn in Hyderabad, in former Prime Minister Benazir

Bhutto's home province of Sindh, following her assassination

It's still unclear exactly how two-time Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was murdered today following a campaign rally stop in Rawalpindi. It appears that she was shot and her car was the target of a suicide bomber--after the car had pulled away

It's even less clear who is behind the assassination. If we set aside the possibility that President Pervez Musharraf--who is at once the U.S.'s best friend in Pakistan and no friend at all--was involved, and it's not at all clear that this possibility can be set aside, it seems likelier that the movers were supporters rather than opponents of the president. (U.S. policymakers have been trying to ram a Musharraf-Bhutto alliance down the throats of the Pakistanis.)

I've seen it suggested that Bhutto as a martyr may serve the democratic cause in Pakistan more than she ever did in her manipulative and corrupt political life. It's hard to see in the short term, though, where a meaningful pro-democracy movement might come from in Pakistan.

A few things seem relatively clear:

(1) The country was already both a human disaster zone and a powder keg--a nuclear powder keg at that.

(2) The mess is even worse today. The country was already in a state of emergency, and President Musharraf now has the perfect excuse clamp down even further. The scheduled election seems an all-but-certain casualty.

(3) It would be hard to imagine anyone less competent to have a positive influence on the situation than the babbling criminal psychopaths in charge of our foreign policy, who have done more to promote the cause of anti-American terrorism than Osama bin-Laden could ever have dreamed of. (Howie was just writing about the mess that the Bush regime has made of our policy toward Pakistan--dumping $5 billion in without achieving any result, unless you count deepening and hardening anti-Americanism.