Anujan wrote:Rudradev wrote:In turn the Khans have staged this dog and pony show of a Congressional hearing on LeT. My guess is that it has to do with giving MMS' pro-US faction some breathing space, by showing us SDREs that gora Saab is indeed attentive to our terrorism concerns. Meanwhile on the ground, the US is placating the ISI over India's role in Afghanistan and arming the TSPA against India.
Rudradev-ji
You might be correct, but there are two things to consider.
1. Mumbai could have happened anywhere. And contrary to mango SDREs who get up, dust their dhotis and move on with their lives, the political hysteria and repercussions in places like US will be quite a force to manage. So it is not in the west's interest to rely on the
intent of the Jihadis not to attack them, but to destroy their
capabilities to attack them.
2. Shady figures like Headley could have revealed information which makes Unkil brown his jeans. The pious are being attacked in A'stan and Iraq. How many of them will be placated with Unkil's shiny toys to Pak army? How many of them are itching to use their 26/11 capabilities against western targets? Especially if there is an iota of truth of what Pakis have been trying to convince the world (The terrorists have gone rogue and are no longer under our control). One of the crimes headley has been arrested for, is planning attack on danish newspaper. Why couldnt that very well be some unkil target next time around?
Anujan-ji
Sorry for the delayed response, had not seen this earlier.
To point 1: Quite honestly, Unkil has very few options when it comes to destroying the
capabilities of LeT to attack him, as long as Unkil is committed to supporting the TSPA and enlisting some degree of cooperation from the ISI. In fact, given what we know about the LeT-TSPA-ISI connection, no options at all.
How has Unkil successfully destroyed (or damaged) the capabilities of terrorist groups in the past? One method has been drone strikes. That is not likely to happen in Punjab unless Unkil decides that all-out war against Pakistan is in his interest.
The other option that has worked for Unkil has been to back rival militias, as we saw in Iraq (Sunni Awakening vs. the Zarqawi AQAM). This again is far from practical in a situation like Pakistan, which unlike Iraq has a functioning leadership that is relatively independent of Unkil, and very deeply connected to not only LeT but all the other potential candidates for an "Awakening" type militia.
I don't know if Unkil is behind any of the violence that sporadically erupts between Deobandi and Salafi/Ahl-e-Hadees militias in Pakistan, but I don't know that it would make any sense for Unkil to back a JeM or HuJI against LeT either. If anything the Deobandi groups have been far more active against Unkil's troops in Afghanistan than the LeT has. The LeT, from Unkil's point of view, at least seems to be mostly under the control of the ISI and TSPA around whom Unkil has pivoted his AfPak strategy.
So the only way Unkil could destroy LeT's capabilities would be to go to war against Pakistan with a view to regime change, as in Iraq or Afghanistan; so that as the principal power broker he would have unfettered capacity to either undertake drone-type operations against LeT, or set up other militias against LeT.
That has never been on the cards for Unkil, and it is less so than ever today, when Holbrooke seems to have brokered an "exit strategy" deal that depends heavily on (and caters generously to) TSPA and ISI interests.
That is why I am skeptical about the LeT hearings in Congress; a lot of words were spoken but Unkil's actions speak louder, and Unkil's actions invest far too much in Pakistani state institutions which created and continue to protect the LeT as a valuable strategic asset.
To Point 2:
The longer this Headley drama goes on, the more I have to wonder why he was really arrested. Is the US doing to India with Headley, something like the ISI is doing to the US with Mullah Baradar? Have they locked him up to keep him out of our reach, because of what he could tell us about the Americans' own connections via the CIA and ISI to LeT?
Here's the thing. Despite these sporadic panels of Washington "experts" coming up with bhashans about LeT in public, nothing they say is any great revelation to the American national security apparatus. The CIA has known exactly what LeT is, what they do and whom they do it to for a very long time.
The LeT is intimately familiar to the national security apparatus of the United States; Unkil has been in AfPak for too long a duration, and the CIA has too many connections with the ISI not to know exactly what is going on with LeT.
It was Vikram Sood, IIRC, who related in an article how the CIA regularly inspects LeT camps in Pakistan and PoK to make sure that no "foreigners" (I guess meaning white guys) are being trained there. Unkil has clearly drawn redlines with respect to the LeT and doesn't care what LeT gets up to outside those redlines.
Unkil's counter-LeT actions, in fact, have been restricted specifically to situations where Americans or Europeans were seen to be involved with LeT. Alexandria, Virginia; Willie Brigitte; and of course, David Coleman Headley (who can apparently pass for white).
The US national security apparatus knew Headley very well. They were running him themselves for many years, ostensibly as a DEA informant, but possibly as far more than that. He could very well have been the CIA's liaison with LeT, or CIA's mole within LeT, or something in between (a double agent). He could have been one of many such CIA operatives embedded within LeT.
Unkil has been "playing dumb" with regard to Headley's actual role in the scheme of things. They say he was just a DEA informant who went astray and got co-opted into LeT jihad, and they never realized it until they stumbled upon his Jyllands Posten plans. I don't believe that for a minute. Unkil has been playing dumb for too many decades about too many things, and its way past time we stopped extending our gullibility to swallow his denials on everything regarding Pakistan.
The Americans were admittedly running Headley as an agent; were they so daft that they let him get indoctrinated and play his own game year after year without watching him at all? IMO
total rubbish.
What I believe: At the very least Headley was a deliberate CIA plant in the LeT... maybe even one of the "white guys" sent to LeT training camps to make sure they weren't training any other Americans. Meanwhile, to maintain his cover within the LeT (and probably to satisfy his own personal jihadi tendencies) Headley was allowed to become involved with LeT ops against India. Since those kinds of ops did not cross Unkil's redlines, Unkil had no problem with them, upto and including 26/11.
Given that Headley was even allowed to visit Mumbai after the 26/11 attacks, I don't think even the deaths of Americans in that incident, or the massacre at the Chabad House crossed Unkil's redlines.
After all, a few Americans dead in an attack against SDREs is tragic, but as you say, SDREs will dust off their Dhotis and move on. It was far more important for the CIA to keep Headley in place in the LeT, so as to detect and pre-empt any LeT attack on
Western interests. Headley's involvement in the Mumbai attack was far from sufficient reason for the CIA to withdraw such an important mole.
So that brings up the question of why Unkil finally arrested him.
The official version is that they stumbled upon his plot to blow up Jyllands Posten, and that until this point they had no idea that he was anything but a hard-working DEA informant.
Again, IMO rubbish.
Headley may well have been involved in a plot to blow up the Jyllands Posten, as part of his cover within the LeT. His role in the Jyllands Posten plot may even have been that of a CIA mole trying to unearth other Jihadis based in the US who were willing to target Western interests (remember Osama Eldawoody and the NY Subway plot?) But I don't think that was the
reason he was arrested at all.
It simply doesn't fit together with how Unkil has kept him shielded from India since his arrest, to claim that he was a straightforward American Jihadi of the Jose Padilla variety who got caught out planning an attack on a Western interest. It doesn't fit together with the rest of the story (DEA informant for many years) either.
The only reason I can think of for the Americans to arrest Headley, which makes sense given (a) the available information about him and (b) the extremely tight shield under which the Americans have concealed him from us, is that Indian intelligence was on to him. That the next time he made a trip to India, he would have been busted, and then the entire truth of the CIA's extent of accommodation and understanding with the LeT would have come out.
See for yourself how tightly Headley has been concealed. An IB team from India which went to Chicago to interrogate him, had to return home empty handed. For month after month, even as the patsy Tawwahur Rana's mugshot was plastered everywhere in the media, no one was even allowed to get a look at Headley's face. Until he was already on trial in a US court, at which point it was too late to hide his face any further, not one photograph of Headley was made available to any media whatsoever.
What were the Americans so concerned about? Who did they fear might recognize him?
Headley was about to leave for India on another LeT related mission when he was arrested. This is attested by his emails which include plans to "say hi to Rahul". Did the US grab him just in time to prevent him flying to India and landing in RAW/IB hands?
Some have speculated that the Americans were doing this to conceal the identity of high-level Pak army officers involved with Headley. This may be partially true; but the Americans have not been shy to reveal that in fact serving TSPA officers were involved with Headley... or to accept that serving TSPA officers had a hand in the 26/11 attacks. However, they have studiously avoided naming the specific TSPA officers involved, and they have made very sure that we will never get that information out of Headley himself.
To me, this suggests that it is the *identity* of the specific TSPA officers that Unkil wants to conceal... not the mere fact of TSPA officers' involvement in 26/11.
So it is not TSPA whom Unkil is protecting from embarrassment by denying us access to Headley... it is Unkil himself.
This would make sense if the specific TSPA officers concerned were in fact CIA-employed "minders" of Headley, and possibly responsible for other CIA plants in the LeT besides Headley. If that were the case, the CIA would definitely consider the identities of these specific TSPA officers worth protecting... even if they were personally in charge of planning and executing the 26/11 attacks.
If Headley fell into Indian hands and these links emerged, what would happen? It would become clear that the CIA knew 26/11 was coming, knew who was planning it at the TSPA/ISI and LeT levels, knew what it would entail... and yet did nothing to stop it or warn us about it, so that their mole machine within LeT would not be compromised.
Talk about allies in a common war against terrorism, eh!
Do I have any proof for the above? Of course not.
Is it a product of speculation by rectal extraction? Oh yes.
But even this stuff that has come out of my rectum, seems to me a far more reasonable explanation for what is going on than
Aww shee-ucks, we thought he was just an honist hard workin' ex-junkie with the DEA till we found out he was about to kilt them Day-nish Cartoonists
?
