SSridhar wrote:Johann wrote:Whomever conducted this hit was very professionally trained. That's a very tight pattern around the driver's side - no spray and pray here. May well have been ex-SSG.
Pakistan's security establishment is at war with itself, but they still want to have their cake and eat it too.
Let's remember the death last year of Maj Gen Feisal Alvi, ex Chief of SSG. He was killed by Major Haroon at the instigation of Ilyas Kashmiri. Ilyas Kashmiri himself was an ex-SSG commando. Maj. Haroon's brother was a Captain in the SSG who left it to join the Punjabi Taliban. Also recall the Tarbela SSG suicide bombing, conducted by an SSG officer.
S Sridhar,
It went much higher than that. The prime movers behind Alavi's assassination was not ex-military members in the tanzims; it was the PA itself.
Please note the similarity between Alavi and Moin-Ud-Din Ahmed's assassinations. The fact that Ahmed was a *serving general officer* at the time of his killing is an escalation in the PA's internal conflict.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 337881.ece
by Carey Schofield
The brother-in-law of VS Naipaul, the British novelist and Nobel laureate, was murdered last month after threatening to expose Pakistani army generals who had made deals with Taliban militants.
Major-General Faisal Alavi, a former head of Pakistan’s special forces, whose sister Nadira is Lady Naipaul, named two generals in a letter to the head of the army. He warned that he would “furnish all relevant proof”.
Aware that he was risking his life, he gave a copy to me and asked me to publish it if he was killed. Soon afterwards he told me that he had received no reply.
“It hasn’t worked,” he said. “They’ll shoot me.”
Four days later, he was driving through Islamabad when his car was halted by another vehicle. At least two gunmen opened fire from either side, shooting him eight times. His driver was also killed.
Alavi believed he had been forced out because he was openly critical of deals that senior generals had done with the Taliban. He disparaged them for their failure to fight the war on terror wholeheartedly and for allowing Taliban forces based in Pakistan to operate with impunity against British and other Nato troops across the border in Afghanistan.Alavi, who had dual British and Pakistani nationality, named the generals he accused.
The reports blamed militants, although the gunmen used 9mm pistols, a standard army issue, and the killings were far more clinical than a normal militant attack.
...Friends and family members were taken aback to be told by serving and retired officers alike that “this was not the militants; this was the army”. A great many people believed the general had been murdered to shut him up.
Some background on Alavi;
I first met Alavi in April 2005 at the Pakistan special forces’ mountain home at Cherat, in the North West Frontier Province, while working on a book about the Pakistani army.
He told me he had been born British in Kenya, and that his older brother had fought against the Mau Mau. His affection for Britain was touching and his patriotism striking.
In August 2005 he was visiting Hereford, the home of the SAS, keen to revive the SSG’s relationship with British special forces and deeply unhappy about the way some elements of Pakistan’s army were behaving.
He told me how one general had done an astonishing deal with Baitullah Mehsud, the 35-year-old Taliban leader, now seen by many analysts as an even greater terrorist threat than Osama Bin Laden.
Mehsud, the main suspect in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto late last year, is also believed to have been behind a plot to bomb transport networks in several European countries including Britain, which came to light earlier this year when 14 alleged conspirators were arrested in Barcelona.
Yet, according to Alavi, a senior Pakistani general came to an arrangement with Mehsud “whereby – in return for a large sum of money – Mehsud’s 3,000 armed fighters would not attack the army”.
The two senior generals named in Alavi’s letter to Kayani were in effect complicit in giving the militants free rein in return for refraining from attacks on the Pakistani army, he said. At Hereford, Alavi was brutally frank about the situation, said the commanding officer of the SAS at that time.
“Alavi was a straight-talking soldier and some pretty robust conversations took place in the mess,” he said. “He wanted kit, skills and training from the UK. But he was asked, pretty bluntly, why the Pakistani army should be given all this help if nothing came of it in terms of getting the Al-Qaeda leadership.”
Alavi’s response was typically candid, the SAS commander said: “He knew that Pakistan was not pulling its weight in the war on terror.”
It seemed to Alavi that, with the SAS on his side, he might win the battle, but he was about to lose everything. His enemies were weaving a Byzantine plot, using an affair with a divorced Pakistani woman to discredit him.
Challenged on the issue, Alavi made a remark considered disrespectful to General Pervez Musharraf, then the president. His enemies playeda recording of it to Musharraf and Alavi was instantly sacked.
What is going on is a civil war within the PA. Western governments have not trusted the Pakistani chain of command for several years now, and have been attempting to work around it, cultivating officers who they believe won't play both sides.
However, these men are now being targeted and killed, just like the tribal maliks in FATA who worked with anti-Taliban forces.
There is *severe* anxiety amongst the Zia's children in the PA and security establishment about Western penetration of the community. That is what the Dyncorps affair is about, and that is what the smear campaign against Alawi was about.
Although the odds are stacked against anyone in the PA who plays only one side (either Taliban or NATO), the pressures to chose a side are only getting worse, and it is destroying the cohesiveness of the security establishment and the PA's officer corps. These tensions will only grow deeper, and more violent.
:
)