Countries linked to Al Qaeda - Pakistan
tiger.berkeley.edu
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The New York Times, October 29, 2001
Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say
By JAMES RISEN and JUDITH MILLER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American officials.
The intelligence service even used Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train covert operatives for use in a war of terror against India, the Americans say.
The intelligence service, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., also maintained direct links to guerrillas fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir on Pakistan's border with India, the officials said.
American fears over the agency's dealings with Kashmiri militant groups and with the Taliban government of Afghanistan became so great last year that the Secret Service adamantly opposed a planned trip by President Clinton to Pakistan out of concern for his safety, former senior American officials said.
The fear was that Pakistani security forces were so badly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly including Mr. bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, would learn of the president's travel route from sympathizers within the I.S.I. and try to shoot down his plane.
Mr. Clinton overruled the Secret Service and went ahead with the trip, prompting his security detail to take extraordinary precautions. An empty Air Force One was flown into the country, and the president made the trip in a small unmarked plane. Later, his motorcade stopped under an overpass and Mr. Clinton changed cars, the former officials said.
The Kashmiri fighters, labeled a terrorist group by the State Department, are part of Pakistan's continuing efforts to put pressure on India in the Kashmir conflict. The I.S.I.'s reliance on Mr. bin Laden's camps for training came to light in August 1998, when the United States launched a cruise missile attack against Al Qaeda terrorist camps near Khost, Afghanistan, in response to the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa. The casualties included several members of a Kashmiri militant group supported by Pakistan who were believed to be training in the Qaeda camps, American officials said.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, the Pakistani government, led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has turned against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in favor of the United States.
One element in that shift was General Musharraf's decision to oust the chief of the intelligence service, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who may have been reluctant to join an American-led coalition against the Taliban government that his organization helped bring to power.
Still, American officials said the depth of support within elements of the I.S.I. for a war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda remained uncertain, and a former chief of the agency has become one of the most vocal critics of American policy in Pakistan.
The former director general, Hameed Gul, complained in an interview with a Pakistani newspaper that the Bush administration was demanding that the agency be placed at the disposal of the Americans, as if it were a mercenary force.
"The I.S.I. is a national intelligence agency, whose potential and ouput should not be shared or rented out to other countries," Mr. Gul said.
American officials acknowledged that recent American policies toward Pakistan had fueled such attitudes. In the 1990's the Central Intelligence Agency failed to maintain the close ties it had developed with the I.S.I. in the American agency's covert action program to support the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet army of occupation in the 1980's.
The close personal relationships that had developed between C.I.A. and I.S.I. officials - General Gul among them - during the war against the Soviets withered away.
"After the Soviets were forced out of Afghanistan," said Shamshad Ahmad, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations and a former foreign secretary, "you left us in the lurch with all the problems stemming from the war: an influx of refugees, the drug and gun running, a Kalashnikov culture."
In recent years, in fact, American officials said, the United States offered few incentives to the Pakistanis to end their relationship with the Taliban. Washington gave other issues, including continuing concerns about Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and its human rights record, much greater emphasis than the fight against terrorism.
Those priorities were illustrated by the apathetic reaction within the United States government to a secret memorandum by the State Department's chief of counterterrorism in 1999 that called for a new approach to containing Mr. bin Laden.
Written in the the wake of the bombings of two embassies in East Africa in 1998, the memorandum from Michael A. Sheehan, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, urged the Clinton administration to step up efforts to persuade Afghanistan and its neighbors to cut off financing to Mr. bin Laden and end the sanctuary and support being offered to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Sheehan's memo outlined a series of actions the United States could take toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to persuade them to help isolate Al Qaeda.
The document called Pakistan the key, and it suggested that the administration make terrorism the central issue in relations between Washington and Islamabad. The document also urged the administration to find ways to work with the countries to curb terrorist money laundering, and it recommended that the United States go public if any of the governments failed to cooperate.
Mr. Sheehan's plan "landed with a resounding thud," one former official recalled. "He couldn't get anyone interested." As the threat from Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden grew and the United States began to press Pakistan harder to break its ties to the Taliban, the Pakistanis feigned cooperation but did little, current and former American officials say.
One former official said the C.I.A. "fell for" what amounted to a stalling tactic aimed at fending off political pressure. The C.I.A. equipped and financed a special commando unit that Pakistan had offered to create to capture Mr. bin Laden. "But this was going nowhere," the former official said. "The I.S.I. never intended to go after bin Laden. We got completely snookered."
The C.I.A. declined to comment on its relationship with the Pakistani agency, saying it did not discuss its ties with foreign intelligence services. But a former senior Clinton administration official disagreed with the idea that the United States had had unrelaistic expectations about the commando proposal.
"There were some concerns about the penetration of the I.S.I., and a lot of uncertainty about whether it would work," the official said. "But all of us, including the intelligence community, thought it was worth doing. What was there to lose?"
What is most remarkable about the tensions that have grown in recent years between the United States and Pakistan's security service is that it was one of the C.I.A.'s closest allies just over a decade ago.
In the 1980's, when the C.I.A. mounted the largest covert action program in its history to support Afghan rebels against the Soviets, the Pakistani agency served as the critical link between the C.I.A. and the rebels at the front lines.
While the C.I.A. supplied money and weapons, it was the I.S.I. that moved them into Afghanistan. The Americans relied almost entirely on the Pakistani service to allocate the weapons to the rebel leaders, and the senior C.I.A. officials involved developed close relations with their counterparts.
But when the Soviet Army finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the C.I.A. ended its support for the Afghan rebels, the agency's relationship with the Pakistani agency was neglected and Washington began to complain more openly about the Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
By the early 1990's, officials of the Pakistani agency became resentful over the change in American policy. In 1990, just one year after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, Congress imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear program.
Faced with turmoil in post-Soviet Afghanistan - which the United States had no interest in addressing in the early 1990's - Pakistan moved in to support the Pashtun ethnic group in southern Afghanistan as it created the Taliban movement.
With Pakistani support, the Taliban gradually took control of most of the country. By 1996, Mr. bin Laden, who had been in Afghanistan in the 1980's, helping to pay for Arab fighters to battle the Soviets, returned and quickly forged a close alliance with the Taliban.
American officials do not believe that the I.S.I. was ever directly involved with Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda in terrorist activites against the United States. But the Pakistani agency used Afghan terrorist training camps for its Kashmiri operations, and the Pakistani leadership failed to act as it watched the the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban grow ever closer.
The I.S.I. did cooperate with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on several counterterrorism operations in the 1990's. Most notably, the Pakistanis were instrumental in the capture in Islamabad in 1995 of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the arrest in Pakistan in 1997 of Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two C.I.A. employees on a shooting rampage outside C.I.A. headquarters in 1993.
American officials now believe that the Pakistanis were finally starting to become alarmed in the last year or two by the extent to which the Taliban had been co-opted by Mr. bin Laden. Still, the I.S.I. did little to extricate itself from its relationship with the Taliban - until Sept. 11.
"I think the Pakistanis realized as time went on that they had made a bad deal," one State Department official said. "But they couldn't find an easy way out of it."
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in.news.yahoo.com
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Taliban, al Qaeda fled to Pakistan: Report
A Chalomumbai Correspondent
Most of the Taliban and al-Qaeda members have fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, thanks to ISI,
a leading British newspaper reported on Sunday.
The Sunday Telegraph correspondent Christina Lamb, who had been regularly visiting Pakistan for 15 years and lived two years there wrote: "My own experience shows that the intelligence services, particularly the military intelligence ISI, are completely out of control of the federal government."
"It is not surprising. Equipped, trained and funded by the CIA which used them to funnel arms to the Afghan rebels to fight Soviet forces throughout the 1980s, the ISI has got used to running its own show, supporting militant Islamic groups fighting in Kashmir and Chechnya in addition to Afghanistan. It is, therefore, to Pakistan that most of the Taliban and al-Qaeda have fled from Afghanistan. The whereabouts of many Taliban ministers seem to be known in Islamabad, yet no one does anything about them."
"This is also the base for numerous Islamic organisations such as Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba and many others, identified as terrorist groups by the CIA. This is the world that Pearl (Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal) was trying to penetrate," the report said.
Stating that Pakistan is becoming one of the most perilous places in the world to be a reporter, she said over the past decade, partly because of the failure of the state education system, madrassas or religious schools have opened in most towns.
"Like many Western journalists," Lamb said, "I have visited these places, listened to turbaned mullahs and young boys almost frothing at the mouths as they described our homelands as great Satans - yet never imagining that this naked hatred might be targeted at one of our own."
She said in Pakistan, where much of the media is one the payroll of intelligence services, there is no concept of independent reporting. "I lost count long ago of the number of times I have been asked here if I am really a spy - even by educated people I know well - and not just for MI6, but for the Indians and the
Russians too."
As regards Pearl, she said he is known as an extremely thorough investigative reporter, often critical of his own government - producing, for example, a series of front-page articles in 1998 saying that the supposed chemical weapons factory bombed by the US in Sudan was, in fact, a pharmaceuticals plant. Yet he has been accused by his captors of being an American spy.
"For all Pakistan's new eagerness to be a friend of the West, it remains a military regime where there are women in jail because they have been raped and cannot produce the necessary four male witnesses, and where I can walk out of my hotel and buy an AK 47 assault rifle for less than 100 pounds in the pharmacy on Jinnah Road."
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sptimes.com
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Taliban, al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan planning revival
©Associated Press
March 20, 2002
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Protected by sympathetic clerics, up to 1,000 Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are hiding in Pakistan and planning a Taliban comeback in Afghanistan, according to Taliban members and others familiar with the Islamic movement.
Most of the exiles -- including some of the best-known figures in the Islamic militia -- live quietly in Pakistan's lawless frontier region, protected by tribal leaders of their own Pashtun ethnic group in an area where the central government's authority is limited.
Many of the Taliban fugitives remain convinced that interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai's hold on power depends on U.S. support and once the Americans are gone, they will have little trouble dealing with Afghans who are now allied with Washington.
"I am waiting for the big war," said Mullah Towha, former chief of security for the Taliban governor of Afghanistan's Nangharhar province. "America and Britain will have to leave one day, and then we will have a jihad against those Afghans who fought with them against other Muslims."
The mullah, who has trimmed his beard and abandoned his distinctive Taliban turban for a white skullcap, spoke to the Associated Press in a car as it weaved through the Khyber Pass in the middle of Pakistan's tribal belt. He lives in an Islamic shrine protected by a "pir," or holy man.
Pakistan has repeatedly denied knowingly harboring al-Qaida and Taliban renegades, and has insisted that intelligence service links to extremists were severed after President Pervez Musharraf threw his support to the U.S.-led war on terrorism last year.
"There is absolutely no truth in these reports," chief government spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Quereshi told AP on Tuesday. He called the idea that Pakistani intelligence was still supporting Taliban fugitives "nonsense" and "part of a malicious campaign against Pakistan."
Nonetheless, the Taliban fugitives reportedly living in Pakistan include some of the most high-profile and influential members of the hard-line Islamic movement. All once worked closely with Pakistan's powerful intelligence service and have close ties to influential figures in the Pakistani military and government establishment.
According to Taliban and other sources, they include former Defense Minister Mullah Obeidullah, former Interior Minister Abdul Razzak, former Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Hasan Akhund and Amir Khan Muttaqi, spokesman for the Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
It is unclear why the Pakistani government has made no move to round them up. Local chiefs in the border area wield considerable power and tracking them down would take time and resources and doubtless meet local resistance.
Also, before Sept. 11, top fugitives were close to powerful figures in Pakistan, who may be protecting them.
The list also includes Jalaluddin Haqqani, who several Afghans say was the mastermind of al-Qaida and Taliban efforts to regroup in his stronghold of Paktia province -- target of the just-concluded U.S.-led Operation Anaconda.
The police chief of Paktia's provincial capital Gardez, Haji Mohammed Ishaq, said Haqqani lives in Pakistan's South Waziristan region along the Afghan border, supported by former leaders of Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI.
Since most of the Taliban were ethnic Pashtuns, they have little trouble blending in with the mostly Pashtun population of the Pakistani border areas.
For al-Qaida fugitives, the situation here is more complicated. Pakistanis who joined al-Qaida-affiliated movements such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, or Movement of Holy Warriors, returned freely to their own country.
A Muslim leader in Karachi, Hasan Turabi, said many of those Pakistani al-Qaida fighters have since turned to acts of violence in Pakistan, directing their anger at Musharraf for abandoning the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
However, Arabs, who formed the core of the al-Qaida terror network's leadership and are easily identified as outsiders, must rely on the protection of Pakistanis who fought with them in Afghanistan. The Arabs also have the support of Pakistan's hard-line clerics and tribal leaders who supported the Taliban.
Several key al-Qaida figures reportedly have slipped into Pakistan last year and may still be here.
They include Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian who contacts here say is the key figure trying to reorganize and revive al-Qaida after the collapse of Taliban rule.
Zubaydah, a key lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, has close ties to Azhar Mahmood, the imprisoned leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Army of Mohammed. Because of those ties, he can rely on the movement's extensive network inside Pakistan.
Zubaydah reportedly is trying to revive al-Qaida's financial network to support operations both in Afghanistan and abroad.
In Washington, CIA chief George Tenet said Tuesday that many pockets of insurgents remain in the Afghan-Pakistan border area, and wiping them out could pose a military challenge because they are in smaller groups of 10 men or so.
"As spring emerges, we'll see, maybe, more activity on their part," Tenet said.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that al-Qaida has stepped up its financial activity and communications in recent weeks, suggesting some leaders are reasserting control.
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