Bharat Rakshak

"Increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India," wrote U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, who is in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in a leaked assessment of the war last September.

The implication of McChrystal's view, said expert Lisa Curtis, was that India's approach was not viewed as helpful and Pakistan's strategic interests were more in play.

shukla wrote: If his views are a true reflection of the policy that the American's are going to employ in Afghanistan then it infuriating... This is no balancing act, this is a clear preference to the paki's.. I hope our babus stop turning a nelsons eye to these reports..

AnimeshP wrote:Apologies if posted earlier ...
Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

Venkarl wrote:

AnimeshP wrote:Apologies if posted earlier ...
Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

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AnimeshP wrote:Apologies if posted earlier ...
Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

secrets-from-inside-the-obama-war-room
Newsweek
May 24, 2010
Secrets From Inside The Obama War Room ( This is an excerpt from the book)
By Jonathan Alter
The first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings came on Sept. 13, when the president gathered 16 advisers in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. This was to be the most methodical national-security decision in a generation. Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.
The Obama administration was determined to change that. “For the past eight years, whatever the military asked for, they got,” Obama explained later. “My job was to slow things down.” The president had something precious in modern crisis management: time. “I had to put up with the ‘dithering’ arguments from Dick Cheney or others,” Obama said. “But as long as I wasn’t shaken by the political chatter, I had the time to work through all these issues and ask a bunch of tough questions and force people to sharpen their pencils until we arrived at the best possible solution.”
Obama’s approach in the meetings was the same as always. He was, according to one participant, “clear-eyed, hardheaded, and demanding.” More than once the president felt obliged to remind those briefing him that it wasn’t 2001 anymore. The United States had been in Afghanistan for eight years, and doing more of the same wasn’t going to cut it. The war in Afghanistan was destined soon to pass Vietnam (11 years) as the longest war in American history........

If the president sided with Biden, the commanding general couldn’t support it? This was insubordination, and the White House was livid. Was McChrystal out of control or just naive? (The consensus was naive.) Obama and his senior staff believed this had Mullen’s and Petraeus’s fingerprints all over it. They were using McChrystal to jam the president, box him in, manipulate him, game him–use whatever verb you like. The president had not yet decided on a policy and didn’t appreciate the military sounding in public as if he had.
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On the day after the London speech, McChrystal was summoned to Copenhagen to meet with Obama, who was trying–and failing–to lure the Olympics to Chicago. They talked alone for 25 minutes while Air Force One sat on the tarmac. It was only the second time the two had met since McChrystal took over in June. The president wasn’t happy, but he held his temper in check, as usual. By this time the White House had concluded that McChrystal was simply in over his head in the media world, a pawn in Mullen and Petraeus’s game.
Obama found that he liked McChrystal personally and thought he had the right approach for completing the mission. Of course he wanted more troops, Obama figured. All battlefield generals do. But Obama was perfectly aware of the box he was now in. He could defer entirely to his generals, as President Bush had done, which he considered an abdication of responsibility. Or he could overrule them, which would weaken their effectiveness, with negative consequences for soldiers in the field, relations with allies, and the president’s own political position. There had to be a third way, he figured.
In the meantime it was important to remind the brass who was in charge. Inside the National Security Council, advisers considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century. In the first week of October, Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was “exceedingly unhappy” with the Pentagon’s conduct. He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were “disrespectful of the process” and “damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.” In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know “here and now” if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.
“This was a cold and bracing meeting,” said an official in the room. Lyndon Johnson had never talked to Gen. William Westmoreland that way, or George H.W. Bush to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton had all been played by the Pentagon at various points but hadn’t fought back as directly. Now Obama was sending an unmistakable message: don’t toy with me. Just because he was young, new, a Democrat, and had never been in uniform didn’t mean he was going to get backed into a corner.
Mullen described himself as “chagrined” after the meeting..........

Petraeus replied that the Afghanistan surge was not modeled on Iraq. “Well, your presentation earlier was on Iraq,” Obama reminded him.
The general always threw in the caveat that Iraq and Afghanistan were very different countries. Afghanistan would need new runways, ammo storage, billets, and other military infrastructure before many more U.S. troops could arrive. But the whole thrust of his analysis, the basis of his prestige, was that what he had learned in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan and other nations. They had talked about this for hours in previous meetings and now the president was calling Petraeus’s bluff, as one note taker at the meeting put it. “The only way we’ll consider this is if we get the troops in and out in a shorter time frame,” Obama said.
Obama was moving out of his probing mode and toward conclusions and eventually presidential orders. This would not be a five- to seven-year nation-building commitment, much less an open-ended one. The time frame the military was offering for both getting in and getting out must shrink dramatically, he said. There would be no nationwide counterinsurgency strategy; the Pentagon was to present a “targeted” plan for protecting population centers, training Afghan security forces, and beginning a real–not a token–withdrawal within 18 months of the escalation.
On Sunday, Nov. 29, having made his decision, the president decided to hold a final Oval Office meeting with the Pentagon brass and commanders in the region who would carry out his orders. He wanted to put it directly to the military: Gates, Mullen, Cartwright, Petraeus, and national-security adviser Jim Jones, without any of the others. Obama asked Biden to come back early from Thanksgiving in Nantucket to join him for the meeting.
As they walked along the portico toward the Oval Office, Biden asked if the new policy of beginning a significant withdrawal in 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn’t be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes. The president didn’t need the reminder. Obama had already learned something about leaving no room for ambiguity with the military. He would often summarize his own meetings in a purposeful, clear style by saying, “Let me tell you where I am,” before enumerating points (“One, two, three”) and finishing with, “And that’s my order.”
Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, “David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?”
“Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,” Petraeus replied.
“Good. No problem,” the president said. “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”
“Yes, sir, in agreement,” Petraeus said.
“Yes, sir,” Mullen said.
The president was crisp but informal. “Bob, you have any problems?” he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it.
The president then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda, and build the Afghan Army. “I’m not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don’t agree with me that we can execute this, say so now,” he said. No one said anything.
“Tell me now,” Obama repeated.
“Fully support, sir,” Mullen said.
“Ditto,” Petraeus said.
Obama was trying to turn the tables on the military, to box them in after they had spent most of the year boxing him in. If, after 18 months, the situation in Afghanistan had stabilized as he expected, then troops could begin to come home. If conditions didn’t stabilize enough to begin an orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces (or if they deteriorated further), that would undermine the Pentagon’s belief in the effectiveness of more troops. The commanders couldn’t say they didn’t have enough time to make the escalation work because they had specifically said, under explicit questioning, that they did.
It wasn’t a secret that someone in the military would likely have been fired had Biden been president. But the vice president admitted to other advisers that it was better that Obama was in charge and showing more mercy toward the Pentagon. The generals thought they were working him over, Biden said privately, but the president had the upper hand. He was a step ahead of them, and as much as some of them thought they had obliterated the July 2011 deadline for beginning a withdrawal, they were mistaken.
When he spoke to McChrystal by teleconference, Obama couldn’t have been clearer in his instructions. “Do not occupy what you cannot transfer,” the president ordered. In a later call he said it again: “Do not occupy what you cannot transfer.” He didn’t want the United States moving into a section of the country unless it was to prepare for transferring security responsibilities to the Afghans. The troops should dig wells and pass out seeds and all the other development ideas they had talked about for months, but if he learned that U.S. soldiers had been camped in a town without any timetable for transfer of authority he wasn’t going to be happy.
At the conclusion of an interview in his West Wing office, Biden was adamant. “In July of 2011 you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it,” Biden said as he wheeled to leave the room, late for lunch with the president. He turned at the door and said once more, “Bet. On. It.”

From The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter. To be published on May 18 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

One of the panelists near the end of the session very vigorously argued that most of these problems were “a problem of implementation.” From what I gather, this means that we already know what we’re supposed to do; we just aren’t doing it right. That’s an interesting assumption. If we were trying to build a house, and that house kept falling apart, we could plausibly conclude that our house-building effort suffered from a problem implementation–shoddy workmanship, inadequate resources, and things like that. However, without evidence to the contrary, we could just as plausibly conclude that we had sloppy blueprints. If you draw up a wildly unrealistic blueprint, it doesn’t matter how competent your builders are or how high the quality of your materials is. The house still won’t stand. ’m leaning towards that sloppy-blueprints explanation of how the Afghan conflict is going right now. One of the panelists provided me with an excellent example of why. This is an honest-to-goodness quote: “The process requires some kind of mechanism that provides that mechanism.” In all fairness this speaker, who was talking about ensuring accountability, might have just been tongue-tied at that moment. The rest of the speech, however, seemed reasonably articulate, and when that gem of shoddy-blueprintism was voiced, other panelists and audience members alike nodded their heads knowingly. What in the world is a mechanism? When I think of the word, I think about something mechanical–when a gear turns it moves a part of the machine because the machine is built in a way that the gear can’t do anything but move the part. How do you provide a “good governance” mechanism? What would that even look like?
The speaker said (rightly, in my opinion) that none of these topics really reflected the whole picture of what is happening in Afghanistan. This speaker’s solution, however, was to advocate dividing our understanding of Afghanistan’s population along every demographic line possible. If we could just understand all of the religious, age, regional, occupational, gender, and political divisions, then we could focus on those and solve the problem.

Miles Amoore, Kabul
RECOMMEND? (8)
THE Taliban commander waited at the ramshackle border crossing while Pakistani police wielding assault rifles stopped and searched the line of cars and trucks travelling into Afghanistan.

Some of the trucks carried smuggled goods — DVD players, car stereos, television sets, generators, children’s toys. But the load smuggled by Taliban fighter Qari Rasoul, a thickset Pashtun from Afghanistan’s Wardak province, was altogether more sinister.

Rasoul’s boot was full of remote-control triggers used to detonate the home-made bombs responsible for the vast majority of Nato casualties in Afghanistan. The three passengers sitting in his white Toyota estate were suicide bombers.

The policemen flagged down Rasoul’s car and began to search it. They soon found the triggers, hidden beneath a bundle of clothes in the back of the estate. They asked him who he was and who the triggers belonged to. “I’m a Taliban commander. They belong to me,” he told them.

Instead of arresting him, the elder policeman rubbed his thumb and index finger together and, smiling, said: “Try to understand.”

Rasoul phoned a Pakistani friend. Two hours later he was released, having paid the policemen 5,000 Pakistani rupees, the equivalent of about £40, each.

“That was the only time I ever faced problems crossing the border with Pakistan,” said Rasoul, who is responsible for delivering suicide bombers trained in Pakistani camps to targets in Afghanistan.

Pakistani support for the Taliban in Afghanistan runs far deeper than a few corrupt police officers, however. The Sunday Times can reveal that it is officially sanctioned at the highest levels of Pakistan’s government.

Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), is said to be represented on the Taliban’s war council — the Quetta shura. Up to seven of the 15-man shura are believed to be ISI agents.

The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, Amrullah Saleh, who resigned last week, said: “The ISI is part of the landscape of destruction in this country, no doubt, so it will be a waste of time to provide evidence of ISI involvement. They are a part of it.”

Testimony by western and Afghan security officials, Taliban commanders, former Taliban ministers and a senior Taliban emissary show the extent to which the ISI manipulates the Taliban’s strategy in Afghanistan.

Pakistani support for the Taliban is prolonging a conflict that has cost the West billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Last week 32 Nato soldiers were killed.

According to a report published today by the London School of Economics, which backs up months of research by this newspaper, “Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude” in Afghanistan.

The report’s author, Matt Waldman, a Harvard analyst, argues that previous studies significantly underestimated the influence that Pakistan’s ISI exerts over the Taliban. Far from being the work of rogue elements, interviews suggest this “support is official ISI policy”, he says.

The LSE report, based on dozens of interviews and corroborated by two senior western security officials, states: “As the provider of sanctuary and substantial financial, military and logistical support to the insurgency, the ISI appears to have strong strategic and operational influence — reinforced by coercion. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign.”

The report also alleges that Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, recently met captured Taliban leaders to assure them that the Taliban had his government’s full support. This was vigorously denied by Zardari’s spokesman. Pakistani troops have launched offensives against militants in North and South Waziristan.

However, a senior Taliban source in regular contact with members of the Quetta shura told The Sunday Times that in early April, Zardari and a senior ISI official met 50 high-ranking Taliban members at a prison in Pakistan.

According to a Taliban leader in the jail at the time, five days before the meeting prison officials were told to prepare for the impending presidential call. Prison guards wearing dark glasses served the Taliban captives traditional Afghan meals three times a day.

“They wanted to make the prisoners feel like they were important and respected,” the source said.

Hours before Zardari’s visit, the head warder told the Taliban inmates to impress upon the president how well they had been looked after during their time in captivity.

Zardari spoke to them for half an hour. He allegedly explained that he had arrested them because his government was under increasing American pressure to end the sanctuary enjoyed by the Taliban in Pakistan and to round up their ringleaders.

“You are our people, we are friends, and after your release we will of course support you to do your operations,” he said, according to the source.

He vowed to release the less well-known commanders in the near future and said that the “famous” Taliban leaders would be freed at a later date.

Five days after Zardari’s visit, a handful of Taliban prisoners, including The Sunday Times’s source, were driven into Quetta and set free, in line with the president’s pledge.

“This report is consistent with Pakistan’s political history in which civilian leaders actively backed jihadi groups that operate in Afghanistan and Kashmir,” Waldman said.

According to the source, during his visit to the prison Zardari also met Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s former second in command, who was arrested by the ISI earlier this year with seven other Taliban leaders.

Baradar, who is from the same tribe as Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, had allegedly approached the Afghan government to discuss the prospect of a peace settlement between the two sides.

Baradar’s arrest is seen in both diplomatic and Taliban circles as an ISI plot to manipulate the Taliban’s political hierarchy and also to block negotiations between the Kabul government and the Taliban leadership.

Shortly after Baradar’s arrest the ISI arrested two other Taliban members — Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir and his close associate and friend Mullah Abdul Rauf. Both men were released after just two nights in custody.

Following his release, Zakir, who spent years in custody in Guantanamo Bay, assumed command of the Taliban’s military wing, replacing Baradar. Rauf, also a former Guantanamo inmate, was immediately appointed chairman of the Quetta shura.

“To say the least, this is compelling evidence of significant ISI influence over the movement and it is highly likely that the release was on ISI terms or at least on the basis of a mutual understanding,” the LSE report states.

The promotions of Zakir and Rauf will give Pakistan greater leverage over future peace talks, Taliban and western officials said.

To ensure that the Pakistani government retains its influence over the Taliban’s leadership, the ISI has placed its own representatives on the Quetta shura, according to these officials.

Up to seven of the Afghan Taliban leaders who sit on the 15-man shura are believed to be ISI agents. However, some sources maintain that every member of the shura has ISI links.

“It is impossible to be a member of the Quetta shura without membership of the ISI,” said a senior Taliban intermediary who liaises with the Afghan government and Taliban leaders.

The LSE report states: “Interviews strongly suggest that the ISI has representatives on the shura, either as participants or observers, and the agency is thus involved at the highest levels of the movement.”

The two shura members who receive the strongest support from the ISI are Taib Agha, former spokesman for Mullah Omar, the Taliban supreme leader, and Mullah Hasan Rahmani, the former Taliban governor of Kandahar, according to the Taliban intermediary and western officials.

Strategies that the ISI encourages, according to Taliban commanders, include: cutting Nato’s supply lines by bombing bridges and roads; attacking key infrastructure projects; assassinating progovernment tribal elders; murdering doctors and teachers; closing schools and attacking schoolgirls.

ISI agents hand chits to Taliban commanders who use them to buy weapons at arms dumps in North Waziristan.

The Taliban’s “plastic bombs” — the low metal content improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill the majority of British soldiers who die in Afghanistan — were introduced to the Taliban by Pakistani officials, according to Taliban commanders, the Taliban intermediary and western officials. The materials allow Taliban sappers to plant bombs that can evade Nato mine detectors.

Rasoul, the Taliban commander from Wardak province, also alleged that the ISI pays 200,000 Pakistani rupees (£1,600) in compensation to the families of suicide bombers who launch attacks on targets in Afghanistan.

“They need vehicles, fuel and food. They need ammunition. They need money and guns. They need clinics and medicine. So who is providing these things to the Taliban if it’s not Pakistan?” a former Kabul police chief said.

In the eastern province of Khost, one commander described how Pakistani military trucks picked his men up from training camps in Pakistan and ferried them to the Afghan border at night.

Once at the border, Pakistanis dressed in military uniform gave the commander a list of targets inside Afghanistan. Taliban fighters then ferried the weapons and ammunition into Afghanistan using cars, donkeys, horses and camels.

“We post our men along our supply routes to protect the convoys once they are on Afghan turf,” said the Khost commander. “The [US] drones sometimes bomb our convoys and many times they have bombed our ammo stores.”

Camps within Pakistan train Taliban fighters in three different sets of skills: suicide bombing, bomb-making and infantry tactics. Each camp focuses on a different skill.

Pakistan’s support for the Taliban has sparked friction between the home-grown Taliban groups and those who are bankrolled to a greater extent by the ISI.

Many lower-level commanders in Afghanistan are angered by the degree to which the ISI dictates their operations.

“The ISI-backed Taliban are destroying the country. Their suicide bombings are the ones that kill innocent civilians. They are undoing the infrastructure with their attacks,” said a Taliban commander from Kandahar province.

Most commanders said they resented their comrades who received the largest slice of ISI support. They also said they knew about the ISI’s influence over their senior leadership. “There is already mistrust among the low-level fighters and commanders,” the Taliban intermediary said. “But they don’t really know the extent of it. They don’t believe that our leaders are ISI spies.”

Major-General Athar Abbas, Pakistan’s senior military spokesman, called the claim that the ISI has representatives on the Quetta shura “ridiculous”. He said: “The allegations are absolutely baseless.”

Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for the Pakistani president, said: “There’s no such thing as President Zardari meeting Taliban leaders. This never happened.”

To see the full London School of Economics report, go to thesundaytimes.co.uk/world

The key player

Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) became enmeshed in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. The CIA used it to channel covert funds and weapons to Afghan mujaheddin groups fighting the Soviet army during the 10-year conflict.

A decisive factor in the Soviet defeat was the CIA’s decision to provide surface- to-air Stinger missiles.

Saudi Arabia, which, from the mid-1980s matched American funding for the insurgency dollar for dollar, also used the ISI to channel funds to the mujaheddin.

The American effort was promoted and supported by the late Texas congressman Charles Wilson, who fought to raise awareness and cash for the Afghan cause in the United States. His role was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.

The ISI continued to support groups of Afghan fighters long after the Russian withdrawal in 1989, often providing backing for brutal warlords in an attempt to install a pro-Pakistani government in Kabul.

The ISI backed the Taliban during their rise to power between 1994 and 1996. Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, Benazir Bhutto, believed the Taliban could stabilise Afghanistan.

The report's author, Matt Waldman, a Harvard analyst, argued that previous studies significantly "underestimated" the influence that Pakistan's ISI exerts over the Taliban.

(Reuters) - Pakistani military intelligence not only funds and trains Taliban fighters in Afghanistan but is officially represented on the movement's leadership council, giving in significant influence over operations, a report said.

The report, published by the London School of Economics, a leading British institution, on Sunday, said research strongly suggested support for the Taliban was the "official policy" of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Although links between the ISI and Islamist militants have been widely suspected for a long time, the report's findings, which it said were corroborated by two senior Western security officials, could raise more concerns in the West over Pakistan's commitment to help end the war in Afghanistan.

The report also said Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was reported to have visited senior Taliban prisoners in Pakistan earlier this year, where he is believed to have promised their release and help for militant operations, suggesting support for the Taliban "is approved at the highest level of Pakistan's civilian government."

A Pakistani diplomatic source described that report as "naive," and also said any talks with the Taliban were up to the Afghan government.

"Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude," said the report, based on interviews with Taliban commanders and former senior Taliban ministers as well as Western and Afghan security officials.

"DUPLICITY"

In March 2009, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said they had indications elements in the ISI supported the Taliban and al Qaeda and said the agency must end such activities.

Nevertheless, senior Western officials have been reluctant to talk publicly on the subject for fear of damaging possible cooperation from Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state Washington has propped up with billions of dollars in military and economic aid.

"The Pakistan government's apparent duplicity -- and awareness of it among the American public and political establishment -- could have enormous geo-political implications," said the report's author, Matt Waldman, a fellow at Harvard University.

"Without a change in Pakistani behavior it will be difficult if not impossible for international forces and the Afghan government to make progress against the insurgency," Waldman said in the report.

The report comes at the end of one of the bloodiest weeks for foreign troops in Afghanistan -- more than 21 have been killed this week -- and at a time when the insurgency is at its most violent.

More than 1,800 foreign troops, including some 1,100 Americans, have died in Afghanistan since U.S.-backed Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban in late 2001. The war has already cost the United States around $300 billion and now costs more than $70 billion a year, the report said, citing 2009 U.S. Congressional research figures.

VIOLENT REGIONS

The report said interviews with Taliban commanders in some of the most violent regions in Afghanistan "suggest that Pakistan continues to give extensive support to the insurgency in terms of funding, munitions and supplies."

"These accounts were corroborated by former Taliban ministers, a Western analyst and a senior U.N. official based in Kabul, who said the Taliban largely depend on funding from the ISI and groups in Gulf countries," the report said.

Almost all of the Taliban commanders interviewed in the report also believed the ISI was represented on the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's supreme leadership council based in Pakistan.

"Interviews strongly suggest that the ISI has representatives on the (Quetta) Shura, either as participants or observers, and the agency is thus involved at the highest level of the movement," the report said.

The report also stated that Pakistani President Zardari, along with a senior ISI official, allegedly visited some 50 senior Taliban prisoners at a secret location in Pakistan where he told them they had been arrested only because he was under pressure from the United States.

"(This) suggests that the policy is approved at the highest level of Pakistan's civilian government," the report said.

Afghanistan has also been highly critical of Pakistan's ISI involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan. Last week, the former director of Afghanistan's intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, resigned saying he had become an obstacle to President Hamid Karzai's plans to negotiate with the insurgents.

In an exclusive interview with Reuters at his home a day after he resigned, Saleh said the ISI was "part of the landscape of destruction in this country."

"It will be a waste of time to provide evidence of ISI involvement. They are a part of it. The Pakistani army of which ISI is a part, they know where the Taliban leaders are -- in their safe houses," he told Reuters.

"Without a change in Pakistani behaviour it will be difficult if not impossible for international forces and the Afghan government to make progress against the insurgency," the report concludes.

shyamd wrote:The Afghan War nears end with Pakistan-aided Taliban victory

The allies owe their reverses to five factors: Postponement of the Kandahar offensive, Taliban's acquisition of anti-air missiles and ability to strike anywhere in Kabul, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency's extensive support for the Taliban, and a UN proposal to "de-list" some key Taliban and al Qaeda figures designated as terrorists. debkafile elaborates on these factors:

2. Another deadly turning-point in the conflict was marked last week with the discovery that Taliban had acquired the missiles for downing Western helicopters and low-flying aircraft.
The British Prime Minister David Cameron had to cancel his helicopter flight to the main British base of Camp Bastion on June 12 after receiving intelligence that the Taliban was preparing to shoot it down.
Three days earlier, on June 9, an American Chinook crashed near Sangin in the Helmand Province killing all four US servicemen aboard. It was then that US and NATO commanders first realized that an unknown party had given the Taliban those anti-air missiles and instructed them in their use.
This means that US helicopters can no longer provide ground forces with close air support and must fly at higher altitudes out of missile range.

5. On Sunday, June 13, The Sunday Times of London ran a long article under the heading: Pakistan puppet masters guide the Taliban killers. It was based on a new report by the London School of Economics according to which Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency is providing extensive funding, training and sanctuary to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The report cites concrete evidence suggesting that support for the Taliban is the "official policy" of the ISI, which not only trains and funds the Afghan insurgents, but is officially represented on the their leadership council.

Washington was shocked by this evidence so soon after President Asif Ali Zardar assured President Obama when they met in Washington last month that he could count on the commitment of the Pakistani government and intelligence resources to fight Taliban and al Qaeda, as a solid prop of US strategy for the Afghan war.
But all the time, it transpired, behind their false face to US military and intelligence chiefs, the ISI has been collaborating with Taliban commanders in their operational planning and selection of targets, supplying them with weapons, explosives and roadside bombs and making grants to the bereaved families of suicide killers who murdered American and British troops.

According to the LSE report, half at least of the 15 members of the Taliban's Quetta Shura (the council which runs the war from its seat in Quetta, the capital of Pakistani Baluchistan) are active officers of Pakistani military intelligence.
"It is impossible to be a member of the Quetta Shura without membership of the ISI," said a high-ranking Taliban fighter.
Given the depth of the ISI's integration in the Afghanistan Taliban's war effort against NATO, the US military might as well drop their efforts to cut the Afghan Taliban's weapons supply route from Pakistan.
The revelations of the LSE are not new, debkafile reports, except for the fact that a prominent Western publication was willing to print them.
They were covered fairly exhaustively in previous issues of DEBKA-Net-Weekly in the past two years.
Most recently, on February 28, 2010, DNW 434 exposed a shady Pakistan intrigue behind the handover to the Americans of Abdul Ghani Baradar, whom they represented as Mullah Omar's first lieutenant the lost of whom would seriously impair Taliban's fighting ability - so they claimed
It was in fact an ISI trick. Baradar was no longer important to the Taliban and his handover no great loss because he had turned coat and was looking for an opening for peace talks with the Americans. The ISI needed to get rid of him before he succeeded to keep the Afghan War on the boil, because as long as it lasts, both the Taliban and the Americans will be dependent on Islamabad and the Pakistanis will carry on pulling wires and playing one side against the other.

The longer the Obama administration clings to the assumption that cooperation with Pakistan and its intelligence agency is the only course for beating the Taliban and al Qaeda, the more elusive an Afghanistan triumph will be for the US and its allies.

ramana wrote:MMS has his own game going wrt Kashmir and nuke reconciliation with the plethora of four letter treaties. Thats his unfinished business. so dont expect him o make any noises while TSP gets its depth. Don't know how deep it will be?

Pakistan's India blockade and an international sanctions regime in Iran may put a spanner in Indian companies' drive to exploit the mineral bonanza in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's geological wealth is not new. But Indian companies extracting minerals face a unique problem: taking the stuff out of the country. Pakistan refuses to let Indian goods travel through its territory. The other way out is Iran, but Indian multinational companies are wary of getting in there and incurring the wrath of the US.

Only a few companies like L N Mittal's Arcelor or Anil Agarwal's Vedanta, with their Central Asian interests, have a fighting chance of being able to utilize this wealth. They will have a chance when the Afghan government once again opens up the Hajigak iron ore mines for bids next week. While India enjoys enormous goodwill in Afghanistan, which has increased substantially in the past decade as India has invested heavily in Afghanistan's civilian sectors, translating this into economic equity is more difficult for India than, say, China, which is making a huge push into tapping Afghan mineral resources, as part of its global push.

The Karzai government clearly wants to be more even-handed. The Afghan government postponed bidding on these mines earlier this year, after many international companies, including Indian, pulled out, leaving only one Chinese company in the fray. China could end up as the biggest beneficiary of Afghanistan's mineral finds. Nevertheless, for Afghanistan and the world to benefit, the war has to end. But despite western commentaries that this may be "crunch time" in Afghanistan, the less-than-optimal results of the US-led war effort tells a very different story.

As a direct outcome of the attack, President Karzai's long-trusted intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, a former aide of the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, and Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar were forced to resign. This is seen as a setback both for the US and the Indians. Saleh is a long-time ISI-hater who considers the Pakistani intelligence agency as Afghanistan's enemy number one. Obviously, Karzai, himself a Pakhtun, no longer considers them loyal.

Despite Karzai's fence-mending sojourn to the White House last month, a deep schism persists between Washington and Kabul. The US by questioning the transparency of the presidential elections held in autumn last year robbed Karzai of his legitimacy as a leader. The so-called drawdown plan of US and NATO troops by July 2011 does not sit well with the Afghan leader.

So far as Washington is concerned, it views President Karzai's contacts with the Taliban as highly suspect. The US is not happy about the secret meetings Karzai's half brother and trusted lieutenant Ahmed Wali Karzai had with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the former deputy commander of the Taliban. Neither was the ISI happy about these contacts. Hence, Baradar was arrested early this year by the very ISI which was housing him in Karachi.

Some analysts contend that Karzai has lost faith in the ability of the American and NATO forces to prevail in Afghanistan. Having serious doubts that the Americans and NATO forces can ever defeat the insurgents, he is trying to strike a secret deal with the Taliban and Pakistan. According to a US official quoted in the New York Times, "there are deep fissures among Afghan leaders how to deal with the Taliban and with their patrons in Pakistan."

In an interview Karzai's discredited intelligence chief has claimed that the Afghan president was strongly involved in a more conciliatory line towards Pakistan. According to him, Afghanistan will be forced to accept "an undignified deal" with Pakistan. He has also claimed that he was removed on Islamabad's insistence.

In this backdrop the timing of the LSE report based on a discussion paper appropriately titled as "The Sun in the Sky: the Relationship between Pakistan's ISI and Afghan Insurgents," is ominous. The author, Matt Waldman of Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is quintessential establishment. He has been an Oxfam official in Kabul as well as a defence advisor to the UK and European parliaments. With little or no knowledge of Dari or Farsi, it is a miracle that he had a meaningful conversation with so may unnamed Taliban sources.

The paper concludes that Pakistan's "involvement in a double game of this scale," could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke US counter-measures. However, the report concedes that the powerful role of the ISI, and parts of the Pakistani military requires their support. It suggests the only way to secure such co-operation is to address the, "fundamental causes of Pakistan's insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India. This requires American backing for moves towards a resolution of the Kashmir dispute."

It is obvious that commissioning of such reports and selective leaks in the Western media are meant to tighten the noose around Islamabad's neck to change its historic India-centric strategic paradigm. Implicating the Pakistani civilian government as being an active backer of the Taliban has further upped the ante.

So far as the ISI is concerned, its fine distinctions between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the Punjabi Taliban, the Kashmir- and India-specific Taliban and, last but not least, the good and the bad Taliban, are losing their relevance as fast as the West is losing patience in Afghanistan. In the final analysis, it is only one Taliban which is the nemesis of the West, eating into the very entrails of the state. More so for Pakistan!

The demand for the Pakistani army to start an attack against Taliban sanctuaries in North Waziristan will gain further impetus though such damning reports alleging a real or perceived nexus between the ISI and the Taliban. The ISI wants to be part of any future negotiations with the Taliban. President Karzai, opening his own channels not entirely approved by Washington, is a window of opportunity for the ISI. It puts Islamabad in a relatively advantageous position to safeguard its interests in a post US and NATO forces withdrawal from Afghanistan.

President Karzai's removal of some key anti-Pakistan officials from his cabinet has cleared the decks for some kind of role for Islamabad. Nevertheless, the ISI cannot win a popularity contest in Afghanistan where it is viewed as overbearing and interfering, but at the same time a necessity by the Pakhtuns.

The writer is a former newspaper editor. Email: [email protected]

President Karzai is weaker than ever and any notion that he would be able to hold his own in negotiations with the Pakistani military does not stand up to scrutiny. According to today’s Washington Post article (and other sources), the Pakistani military is offering to mediate a solution by bringing the deadly Jalaluddin Haqqani network into the negotiations. (Reminder: Jalaluddin Haqqani’s forces in coordination with Pakistan’s intelligence serve (ISI) bombed the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008, killing two senior Indian officials and over 50 Afghan civilians).
Moreover, Pakistan’s “offer” to bring Haqqani into the negotiations comes at a time when the U.S. is pressing Pakistan to take on Haqqani’s forces in North Waziristan through military operations. General David Petraeus in Congressional testimony this week told U.S. lawmakers that Pakistan’s military Chief General Kayani was recently informed by U.S. officials that Haqqani fighters were involved in a raid on the U.S. Bagram Airbase in mid-May.Obama administration policies are partially to blame for the Pakistani hubris of pushing for a political settlement in Afghanistan that favors their proxy and our enemy, Haqqani. The Obama administration’s lack of a clear policy on reconciliation also is contributing to Karzai’s flailing about on the issue. Karzai recently fired respected Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh over differences on the Taliban reconciliation issue. Saleh said negotiations with the Taliban would “disgrace” Afghanistan.