Pakistani Role in Global Terrorism
Posted: 25 May 2007 03:56
Old Thread in Trash Can Archive.
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
https://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/
Spanish court convicts three Pak al-Qaeda financiers
MADRID: Spain’s high court on Tuesday convicted three Pakistanis for sending money to al-Qaeda operators in Pakistan but cleared them and eight others of preparing terrorist attacks in Barcelona.
The suspects had faced up to 32 years in jail for alleged involvement with al-Qaeda, drugs trafficking and preparing attacks on a shopping centre and other targets in the city, where they lived and were picked up in autumn 2004.
Following a three-month trial, the Madrid-based tribunal on Tuesday acquitted them all of charges of terrorist plotting for lack of evidence. The three sent down for sending money to al-Qaeda operators received jail terms of five-and-a-half years for terrorist collaboration. Two others received six months each for falsifying documents and the six remaining suspects were acquitted. All of them were Pakistani nationals.
One of the three found guilty of collaboration, Mohammad Afzaal, received an additional four years for drug dealing.
The other two, Shahzad Ali Gujar and Choudhry Mohammad, were found guilty of transferring more than 800,000 euros cash to radical Islamists based in Pakistan, including at least one activist believed involved in the kidnap and murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
SPIEGEL: To what extent does President Pervez Musharraf steer foreign policy?
Rashid: He gives strategic direction to the policy, but I don't think he would get personally involved in the day to day. What I mean by strategic direction is that the Taliban are a pro-Pakistani force, they will oppose the Indian presence in Afghanistan. The thinking is that they should be supported just in case the Karzai government falls, the Americans pull out or NATO is defeated.
But I think, unfortunately, that the ISI has taken great liberties in interpreting its original mission. If the message to the ISI has been to turn a blind eye as the Taliban regroup and reorganize, then the tendency of the ISI has been to say, 'We don't just turn a blind eye, we actually go and help them'. And the governments of Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province are supporting the Taliban. These two provinces are ruled by an alliance of religious parties. So, for example, the Taliban has been importing weapons and ammunition from the Gulf. But they have been able to import them officially through Karachi as part of the imports of the Balochistan government.
SPIEGEL: President Musharraf himself seems to be a prisoner of domestic politics. How is he supposed to be able to operate against his own security apparatus?
Rashid: The army has always relied upon the fundamentalists to be the front line of their foreign policy, whether in Kashmir, whether in Afghanistan or in Central Asia. The extremist groups have always provided the manpower, the cannon fodder. You have to remember that Musharraf won an election in 2002 that was rigged, in which the army allied itself with the MMA, the alliance of religious parties. If Musharraf were to move tomorrow against the Taliban in Pakistan he would also have to move against his political allies -- the fundamentalists. Can he afford to do this in an election year like this?
SPIEGEL: What steps would you take in order to strengthen the moderates, who represent the majority of Pakistanis. And how can the fundamentalists be isolated and weakened?
Rashid: A discreet but clear ultimatum to Pakistan with the threat that the West could end cooperation, aid -- all those kinds of things. The military has to be made aware that this support to the Taliban is not acceptable and the lives of European soldiers are more important to Europe than anything else. And the Western forces in the south of Afghanistan must have a common strategy to get the balance right between aggressive action and reconstruction and development. NATO last year hung on by the skin of its teeth, literally, in the south. The only reason it hung on was through the use of air power. We now know, according to some estimates, that air strikes may have killed up to 1,000 civilians.
Posted: 5/31/2007
Billions in Aid, With No Accountability
Pakistan receives the most post-9/11 U.S. military funding, yet has failed to ferret out al Qaeda, Taliban leaders
By Sarah Fort
WASHINGTON — The runaway winner of the post-9/11 race for new U.S. military aid dollars is Pakistan, but where did the money go?
Human rights activists, critics of the Pakistani government and members of Congress all want to know, but most of the money — totaling in the billions — came through a Defense Department program subject to virtually no congressional oversight.
That is a major finding of more than a year of investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). U.S. military aid to Pakistan since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks includes almost $5 billion in Coalition Support Funds, a program controlled by the Defense Department to reimburse key allies in the global war on terror. Pentagon reports that ICIJ obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that Pakistan is the No. 1 recipient of these funds — receiving more than 10 times the amount that went to the No. 2 recipient, Poland — and that there is scant documentation of how the money was used.
Pakistan also benefited from other funding mechanisms set up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. In the three years after the attacks, Pakistan was the third-largest recipient of the Pentagon's new Regional Defense Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, designed to train foreign forces in counterterrorism techniques. More than $23 million was earmarked for Pakistan in fiscal 2006 for "Improving Counter Terrorism Strike Capabilities" under another new Pentagon program referred to colloquially as Section 1206 training, which allows the Pentagon to use a portion of its annual funding from Congress to train and equip foreign militaries. Pakistan finished first in the race for this new Pentagon-controlled training.
ICIJ's data show that when all U.S. programs are combined, Pakistan's increase in U.S. military aid in the three years after 9/11 is a stunning 45,000 percent, growing from just $9 million in the three years before the attacks to more than $4 billion in the three years after. In the process, Pakistan has become the No. 3 recipient of U.S. military training and assistance, trailing only longtime leaders Israel and Egypt.
This tsunami of new funding reflects Pakistan's key role in the U.S. global war on terror. Shortly after 9/11, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, made a commitment to align his regime with the United States as it went after Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces that were being protected by the Islamist Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan.
Since Musharraf closed ranks with the U.S., Pakistan's financial rewards have been bountiful — and he has been the target of several assassination attempts and plots. On a visit to the U.S. in 2006, Musharraf told television interviewers that he made the commitment to join the war on terror after threats from the U.S., which Bush administration officials have denied. More recently, the administration has accused Musharraf of turning a blind eye to Taliban and al Qaeda operations in his own country, and critics in the U.S. and abroad have assailed U.S. support for Musharraf.
Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, and, after Indonesia, the second largest Muslim-majority country. Violence and political instability have characterized the country throughout its history. Pakistan is teeming with intrigue; it is home to some of the world's most vocal anti-American clerics and to religious schools that have served as recruiting grounds for the Taliban and other Islamist extremist groups. In tribal areas near the Afghanistan border, some leaders support the Taliban, and its largest province, Balochistan, has long been unstable and barely controlled by the central government in Islamabad.
The U.S. State Department rates Pakistan's human rights record as poor and reports a long litany of abuses. That nourishes critics' claims that U.S. largesse has been put to abusive purposes, including to buy weapons that have been turned against Pakistani civilians and to offer bounties on suspects the U.S. is seeking.
A key ally
Shortly after 9/11, Pakistan offered bases to the U.S. for its use in counterterrorism operations, banned numerous militant groups, began sharing intelligence and deployed tens of thousands of troops to tense regions, including the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan where al Qaeda leaders and Taliban remnants from Afghanistan were rumored to be hiding out.
According to Sen. Sana Baloch, an opposition lawmaker who fled the country out of safety concerns, the U.S. has several military bases inside Pakistan including some in the senator's home province of Balochistan. "Most of the U.S. bases are based in Balochistan," Baloch told ICIJ in an interview. "One or two of them are in Kharan, my own home district. The U.S. is using the bases in this area for the war on terror. We are very supportive of the U.S. in this role."
In return for Pakistan's assistance, in March 2005 the U.S. announced that it would resume sales of American F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan after a 16-year ban that had served to punish Pakistan for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Pakistan also got debt write-offs, the reestablishment of U.S. military training programs and support for Musharraf's administration despite concerns about his anti-democratic policies (Musharraf came to power through a military coup).
Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr., assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs from 2001 to 2005, told ICIJ that U.S. policy is to pull Pakistan in closer. "Logistically," he said, "we can't overstate what we've been able to accomplish with Pakistan's help."
Others aren't so sure. In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 1, 2007, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., raised concerns about an increase in attacks on coalition forces along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and about al Qaeda training camps reportedly given sanctuary inside Pakistan after the Pakistani central government made peace with local tribal leaders in the lawless region.
Concerns about oversight
The majority of new U.S. funding to Pakistan has come in the form of billions of dollars of Coalition Support Funds (CSF), a post-9/11 funding mechanism created to reimburse key countries for expenses incurred in supporting American counterterrorism operations. According to K. Alan Kronstadt, an expert on South Asia at the Congressional Research Service, by August 2006, CSF accounted for roughly $4.75 billion of the military aid Pakistan received from the U.S. since the terrorist attacks. Pentagon documents obtained by ICIJ say the money that went to Pakistan was largely for "military operations on the Afghanistan border."
Coalition Support Funds are considered a reimbursement by some and a blank check by others. Craig Cohen, co-author of a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies study on U.S. aid to Pakistan, asked rhetorically whether CSF money is "intended to yield some sort of specific action on the part of the government," adding, "If so, there's clearly no oversight."
Olga Oliker, an expert on U.S. defense policy and co-author of a recent RAND think tank report on the human rights performance of internal security forces in South Asia, said she's concerned that U.S.-made weapons that go to Pakistani security forces and U.S. training that the forces receive are being used against civilian populations. "In implementing assistance," she told ICIJ, "the U.S. has paid relatively little attention to human rights abuses and oversight. People weren't paying attention."
Baloch said that even as a senator, he did not have access to that information.
A former U.S. official previously based in Pakistan, who has intimate knowledge of Pakistan's CSF receipts, told ICIJ that, "Right from the beginning it was very difficult to pin down what the costs were and how they were computed. Initially there were very round numbers reported. Now figures are coming out with more specificity. Whether or not they are inflated, it's difficult to get a handle on that."
Increased oversight
The new Democratic-controlled Congress has taken a greater interest in CSF payments to Pakistan. Under the previous GOP majority, there was virtually no oversight of CSF payments to any country. In January 2007, the House of Representatives acted to impose conditions on military aid to Pakistan by adopting the Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007.
Section 1442 of the bill relates to Pakistan. It identifies areas of concern for U.S. policy, including the need for Pakistan to curb the proliferation of nuclear technology, to address the presence of the Taliban and other extremist forces and to secure its borders to prevent movement of terrorists.
The bill would impose limits on foreign assistance to Pakistan, declaring that U.S. assistance may not be approved until "the President determines and certifies to the appropriate congressional committees that the Government of Pakistan is making all possible efforts to prevent the Taliban from operating in areas under its sovereign control." In addition, Pakistan would be required to demonstrate that it is making significant steps toward "free and fair parliamentary elections in 2007." The bill also requires that the president submit a report describing the long-term strategy of U.S. engagement with Pakistan.
The full Senate has yet to take up the legislation, and the White House has opposed the proposed restrictions on Pakistani assistance, saying that any conditions placed on Pakistan would be "counterproductive to the important goal … of fostering a closer relationship."
Regional context
From 1953 to 1961, during Cold War concerns about Soviet expansionism, Pakistan received nearly $2 billion (current dollars) from the U.S., one-quarter of which was military aid. Later, in the 1970s, concerns about Pakistan's efforts to seek nuclear weapons led to a suspension of U.S. aid.
Meanwhile, as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, millions of Afghan refugees began to move across the border into Pakistan. Despite efforts to return them to their home country following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, roughly 2½ million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan, many afraid of what they might have to face upon their return.
The current difficult relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is due in part to the number of Afghan refugees in Pakistani territory; the disputed border separating the two states; Pakistan's nuclear capability; and finally, the collaboration between sections of Pakistan's powerful and controversial Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) with the Taliban.
Fears regarding Pakistan's nuclear program have again forced discussions about whether the U.S. should continue sending massive amounts of military assistance to Pakistan. That debate came into sharp focus with the 2004 confession by Abdul Qadeer Khan, also known as A.Q. Khan and considered the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, that he had operated an illicit nuclear smuggling network to countries including North Korea, Iran and Libya. So far, the only punishment Khan has received from Pakistan is to have been placed under house arrest in Islamabad in what has been described as comfortable conditions.
Kronstadt of CRS said of Khan, "The [A.Q. Khan] tentacles haven't all been uncovered. At some level, the chain may still be in operation. The U.S. and IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] haven't had access to him to this day."
Whose war?
Hundreds of people were detained in Pakistan after 9/11, and some of them ended up in the U.S. naval prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Amnesty International's 2006 Annual Report, Pakistan's security agencies continue to arbitrarily detain and arrest terrorist suspects.
The tribal region of Balochistan is known for documented cases of human rights abuses. According to press reports, at least three Pakistani politicians from Balochistan are being held for reasons of political dissent. A former politician, Abdur Rauf Mengal, who resigned in protest after Baloch political leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in August 2006, has been held in solitary confinement.
"The American-supplied military arsenal has been used against Baloch nationalists," Sen. Baloch told ICIJ. "Sophisticated helicopters bought to control the drug trade have been misused against the Baloch people." He said he and others have gone to the State Department, "and the State Department says [the U.S. has] given military hardware with no conditions."
A former U.S. official previously based in Pakistan acknowledged to ICIJ that in Balochistan, "The [Pakistani] army stepped in with a pretty heavy hand last year."
Christine Fair, co-author of the RAND report and a South Asia expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace, said that the U.S. is nearsighted in its support for Musharraf. "I don't think he'll ever deliver what he says he will. The U.S. government is 'all Musharraf all the time.' And [the U.S. goal is] to keep him in place, to keep the army happy."
Says T. Kumar, advocacy director for Asia and Pacific at Amnesty International USA: "Pakistan is a solid dictatorship. The U.S. is being taken for a big ride. Musharraf is not the right person for the war. Powerful sections of the ISI [remain] involved with the Taliban. They're waiting for time, biding their time."
Assistant Database Editor Ben Welsh contributed this report.
LINK
And another article confirming the Pakistani antecedents of Abdel Nur :JFK Terror Suspects Face Extradition
….. The fourth suspect, fugitive Abdel Nur, 57, is originally from Pakistan but is a citizen of Guyana. ………
Officials: JFK terror plot foiled
………… Also charged are Kareem Ibrahim, Abdul Kadir and Abdel Nur. Ibrahim, a Trinidadian, and Kadir are being detained in Trinidad, and U.S. officials are seeking their extradition to New York. Kadir is a former member of the Guyanese Parliament and a former mayor of Linden, Guyana. Nur, a Guyanese national of Pakistani descent, is still at large. ……….
just how nervous European authorities are becoming about burgeoning Pakistani populations in places—such as Italy, Spain and France—where there were few or none at all just a few years ago. Now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, many of these Pakistanis have sneaked onto the Continent via Iran, Turkey and the Balkans. They've also begun taking a circuitous route across Africa and then by ship to Spain's Canary Islands or the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. Almost overnight, Pakistani neighborhoods have sprung up in Barcelona and Bologna.
Yet Roland Jacquard, a leading French security expert, says that current government assessments rank Pakistani networks second only to Al Qaeda's branches in North Africa as a terrorist threat. He says that there's particular concern about itinerant Pakistani imams who preach a radical line. Because they often work in homes rather than mosques, they're also harder to watch.
It is the Tabligi Jamaat. They will not know what hit them.Laks wrote:
Yet Roland Jacquard, a leading French security expert, says that current government assessments rank Pakistani networks second only to Al Qaeda's branches in North Africa as a terrorist threat. He says that there's particular concern about itinerant Pakistani imams who preach a radical line. Because they often work in homes rather than mosques, they're also harder to watch.
The defendants formed a cell led by Dhiren Barot (bottom right)
Seven men have been jailed for up to 26 years over an al-Qaeda-linked plot to kill thousands in the UK and US. Woolwich Crown Court heard they were in a "sleeper cell" led by Dhiren Barot, who is already serving a life sentence.
Barot planned attacks including an explosives-packed limousine, a dirty radiation bomb and blowing apart a London Underground tunnel.
Six admitted conspiracy to cause explosions and a seventh was found guilty of conspiracy to murder.
Counter-surveillance
In the plot, countered by police in Operation Rhyme, the men played supporting roles to Barot whom prosecutors say had devised multiple bombing operations. These resembled professional business plans in their complexity and detail.
He also researched blowing apart a London Underground tunnel beneath the River Thames to drown hundreds of commuters.
Prosecutors said that Barot presented his meticulous plans to al-Qaeda figures hiding in Pakistan. He submitted detailed funding requirements and explained how the campaign would benefit their cause.
Back in the UK, the seven men were vital for Barot to push ahead with the plots in the summer of 2004, playing roles as couriers, drivers and taking counter-surveillance measures in an attempt to throw the security services off the scent.
Barot sub-contracted key parts of his plotting to other members of his team, utilising their skills in devising false identities, as minders and researchers, prosecutors said.
The men who pleaded guilty admitted roles mostly confined to plotting against UK targets.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command, said that although the seven did not instigate the planned attacks, Barot needed their help and expertise.
He added: "Dhiren Barot and his gang were determined terrorists who planned bombings on both sides of the Atlantic.
"The plans for a series of co-ordinated attacks in the United Kingdom included packing three limousines with gas cylinders and explosives before setting them off in underground car parks. This could have caused huge loss of life.
"The plans to set off a dirty bomb in this country would have caused fear, panic and widespread disruption."
Mr Clarke said the men were skilled in anti-surveillance techniques, with Feroze and Jalil having travelled hundreds of miles to use an internet cafe.
'Terrorist planning'
Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, 27, of Harrow in north London, was jailed for 20 years; Junade Feroze, 31, of Blackburn, received 22 years and Zia Ul Haq, 28, of Wembley in north London, got 18 years.
Abdul Aziz Jalil, 24, of Luton, was jailed for 26 years; Omar Abdur Rehman, 23 of Bushey in Hertfordshire, was jailed for 15 years and Nadeem Tarmohamed, 29 also of Wembley, received 20 years. Qaisar Shaffi, 28, of Willesden, north-west London, was sentenced to 15 years.
Sentencing the seven, Mr Justice Butterfield said anyone who participates in such a plan "will receive little sympathy from the courts"
He added: "Barot was the instigator of this terrorist planning, he was by some considerable distance the principal participant in the conspiracy.
"Each one of you was recruited by Barot and assisted him at his request."
The judge told the men the pain caused to their families as a result of their imprisonment "is but a tiny fraction of the suffering that would have been experienced had your plans been translated into reality".
Woolwich Crown Court was told that Bhatti used his first-class degree in engineering to research how the bombs could work. Feroze acted as a driver and led counter-surveillance checks - but also researched bomb parts in catalogues.
Ul Haq had a degree in architecture and acted as a "consultant" on the best way to bring down buildings. Jalil rented a safe-house for the men and researched radioactivity.
Rehman is said to have studied how to disable electronic security and fire control systems.
Shaffi was the only man to plead not guilty. He joined Barot on his US reconnaissance trip, although he was replaced by Tarmohamed in the States after falling ill.
Home Secretary John Reid said: "The outcome of this trial once again shows the extent of the very real and serious threat the UK faces from terrorism."
...many analysts believe that though the case remains open, the full story behind the kidnapping plot probably will never be known.
"We're never going to get the whole picture," said Christine Fair, a senior research associate in South Asia and terrorism at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.
The most persistently nebulous element of the case, analysts say, is how much Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew about the events surrounding Pearl's capture and execution. Pakistani military intelligence has a history of entanglement with the Islamic militants it is charged with policing.
"There are officials within the security services who are not entirely interested in seeing this [investigation] go forward," said John Harrison, a senior researcher for the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. "Not that they were involved in the murder itself, but there are definitely embarrassing connections between the ISI and many of the perpetrators."
U.S. and Pakistani investigators say that there is a continuing overlap between homegrown Pakistani militant groups and broader-based international organizations such as Al Qaeda, and that Karachi has been used as a sanctuary and staging ground.
...in April, a Pakistani man who owned the property where Pearl was held and had dropped out of sight soon after the kidnapping, finally surfaced — but emaciated and on the brink of death. The family of Saud Memon said he was dumped outside his home and died weeks later in a hospital.
The family said through lawyers that it believed Memon had been in the custody of Pakistani intelligence at some point, and that it was trying to determine whether he also had been held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lisa Curtis, a senior South Asia research fellow at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington and a former CIA analyst, believes there are larger long-term lessons to be learned from the case.
"The Pearl kidnap and murder was a sophisticated operation, involving both Al Qaeda and local Pakistani groups," she said. "To me, it demonstrates the pitfall of Pakistan not cracking down on all violent extremist groups, of seeking an accommodation with some — that was a futile policy."
June 20, 2007 - The international media barely noticed when Pakistani authorities recently picked up three foreign jihadis, including two German passport holders, in the remote town of Taftan near the Iranian border. But the arrests are being taken seriously by Western intelligence agencies.
Several of the best-publicized terrorist plots that U.S. and European authorities claim to have disrupted since 9/11 have connections to Pakistan or its border regions.
My strongest reservation in "A Mighty Heart" is the absurd political correctness that permeates the film; its writers, producers, and directors do not even mention fanatical Islam to avoid offering offense.
...
Pakistan is an exporter of terrorism. The government of that country is another Muslim enterprise pretending to be a Western ally, just like Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and many others. That is why Pearl went there and why he was kidnapped and murdered.
A British government source told ABC News that the authorities here in the middle of investigating significant anti-terror activities right now, with a number of investigations under way at once, including ones with links to Pakistan and al Qaeda.
singhaji,Singha wrote:Bomb found and defused in central london
Blazing car crashes into airport
A car on fire has been driven at the main terminal building at Glasgow Airport.
...
One eyewitness at Glasgow Airport said: "I heard the sound of a car's wheels spinning and smoke coming out.
"I saw a Jeep Cherokee apparently as if it was trying to get right through the doors into the terminal building.
"There were flames coming out from underneath then some men appeared from in amongst the flames.
"The police ran over and the people started fighting with the police. I then heard what sounded like an explosion."
Molotov cocktails
Eye-witness Richard Gray told BBC News 24: "A green Jeep was in the middle of the doorway burning.
"There was an Asian guy who was pulled out of the car by two police officers, who he was trying to fight off. They've got him on the ground.
"The car didn't actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the petrol."
Stephen Clarkson said he helped police restrain one of the men.
"I managed to knock the fellow to the ground," he said.
"By this time there were four policemen who got on top of him and restrained him.
"His clothes had partially burned from his body. His hair was on fire.
"His whole body was on fire."
Thomas Conroy, a maintenance worker at the airport believes the men deliberately tried to set the car on fire.
"It looked like they had Molotov cocktails with them," he said.
"They sort of burst them round about the flames to make sure the car would go up big style.
"Within minutes it was up and the terminal caught as well."
...
Taxi driver Ian Crosby said: "This was no accident. This was a deliberate attack on Glasgow Airport."
The reaction of members of the public was not to help the men in the car, but to restrain them, he told the BBC.
Mr Crosby, who said he served in Northern Ireland, told how he shepherded people away from the scene in case of a secondary explosion or a nail-bomb.
Two men, one of whom was reported to be badly burned, were seen being led away in handcuffs.