Cell phone links bin Laden courier with militant Pakistani group that has close ties with ISI and Pak military

"Heeeere lizard lizard lizard"

"It is as if the Pakistani powers that be have had, ever since Al Qaeda's retreat from Afghanistan and their withdrawal into Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, a precise idea of where the chiefs of Al Qaeda could be found. It is as if Pakistan's formidable intelligence service, the ISI, had not only localized but kept these public enemies of the U.S. -- and theoretically of Pakistan -- under observation, handy for periodic culling.

It is as if these people were bargaining chips, with the Pakistanis drawing from their reserves of terrorists and cashing them in one by one, depending on the needs of their relationship with the great American 'friend.'

Optimists will be delighted to learn that there is a country where people know a little about the hiding places of Osama bin Laden's lieutenants, as well as about Bin Laden himself, perhaps." -- Bernard-Henri Lévy, 2005

“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in Bin Laden’s hide-out now hangs like a dark cloud over the entire relationship” between Pakistan and the United States." -- Bruce Riedel, 2011

Seized Phone Offers Clues to Bin Laden’s Pakistani Links

By Carlotta Gall, Pir Zubair Shah and Eric Schmitt
June 23, 2011 - 11:00 PM EDT
The New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.

The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.

In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. One said they had met. The officials added that the contacts were not necessarily about Bin Laden and his protection and that there was no “smoking gun” showing that Pakistan’s spy agency had protected Bin Laden.

But the cellphone numbers provide one of the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for the answer to an urgent and vexing question for Washington: How was it that Bin Laden was able to live comfortably for years in Abbottabad, a town dominated by the Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive from Islamabad, the capital?

“It’s a serious lead,” said one American official, who has been briefed in broad terms on the cellphone analysis. “It’s an avenue we’re investigating.”
[...]
Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.”

“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in Bin Laden’s hide-out now hangs like a dark cloud over the entire relationship” between Pakistan and the United States, Mr. Riedel added.

Indeed, suspicions abound that the ISI or parts of it sought to hide Bin Laden, perhaps to keep him as an eventual bargaining chip, or to ensure that billions of dollars in American military aid would flow to Pakistan as long as Bin Laden was alive.

Both the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, said this month that they believed that some members of the ISI or the Pakistani Army, either retired or on active duty, were involved in harboring Bin Laden.

Bin Laden himself had a long history with the ISI, dating to the mujahedeen insurgency that the Americans and Pakistanis supported against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Two former militant commanders and one senior fighter who have received support from the ISI for years said they were convinced that the ISI played a part in sheltering Bin Laden. Because of their covert existence, they spoke on the condition that their names not be used.

One of the commanders belonged to Harakat. The other said he had fought as a guerrilla and trained others for 15 years while on the payroll of the Pakistani military, until he quit a few years ago. He said that he had met Bin Laden twice.
[...]
He and the other commander, who spent 10 years with Harakat, offered no proof of their belief that Bin Laden was under Pakistani military protection. But their views were informed by their years of work with the ISI and their knowledge of how the spy agency routinely handled militant leaders it considered assets — placing them under protective custody in cities, often close to military installations.

The treatment amounts to a kind of house arrest, to ensure both the security of the asset and his low profile to avoid embarrassment to his protectors.
[...]

Yes. That is how Pakistan's military was able to magically locate members of al Qaeda when they found it expedient.

There is much more to the Times report than I've quoted here, so I hope you'll read the entire piece at the Times site.

Memo to Afghans: Who're ya gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes?

Ah. I see from this Wall Street Journal report that Afghans are worried Obama's drawdown speech means the United States is going to leave them at the mercy of the ISI again. Now would we do a thing like that?

For heaven's sake; we've already put them at the mercy of the ISI again. Or haven't Afghans noticed? It's just a matter of degree: once you're hanging from one thumb why complain about the prospect of hanging from two?

Wary Afghans Worry U.S. is Repeating History
By DION NISSENBAUM
June 23, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

KABUL—President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw one-third of U.S. forces in Afghanistan over the next 14 months conjured up uneasy memories for Afghans concerned that their American allies could leave the country before the job is done.

[...] Across the political spectrum, Afghan leaders expressed reservations about American intentions, saying they don't want to see U.S. policy makers repeat the patterns of the past by cutting off support for Afghanistan without making sure it had a stable government. They recalled the U.S. decision to dramatically scale back support for Afghanistan after Soviet forces were forced to withdraw in 1989. Afghanistan observers say withdrawal of American support for Afghan anti-Soviet fighters allowed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency to secure its place as a central player in Afghanistan's political stability.

"Twenty years ago, they left Afghanistan after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan and Afghanistan was controlled by the ISI," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar city. "We don't want to go back 20 years when they were making the decisions about Afghanistan."
[...]

President Obama's Speech on drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan: Long War Journal has the best analysis

The discussion at Long War Journal is a model of clarity, written by people who actually know what they're talking about -- a rare phenomenon in the world of Afghan War analysis:

Obama announces rapid drawdown of surge forces from Afghanistan
By Bill Roggio and Chris Radin
June 23, 2011
Long War Journal

President Barack Obama announced a swift drawdown of US forces from Afghanistan in a nationally televised speech [White House transcript] from the [White House East Room] last night. The announcement reflects an abandonment of a counterinsurgency-heavy strategy advocated by US military commanders and a shift to less manpower-intensive counterterrorism operations advocated by members of the Obama administration.

President Obama's drawdown plan calls for a reduction by 10,000 of the more than 100,000 US troops currently in country by the end of this year. Roughly a brigade of troops, estimated at 5,000, will be withdrawn beginning next month. A second brigade of 5,000 troops will be pulled out of Afghanistan by the beginning of 2012.

An additional 23,000 US soldiers will be withdrawn by the end of the summer of 2012. This will lower the number of troops in Afghanistan to 67,000, which is the same quantity present before the "surge" was deployed in accord with President Obama's announcement of a new strategy in a December 2009 speech. A steady reduction of US forces will continue though 2013 and 2014, until only a small residual force is left by the end of 2014.

A high-risk strategy

President Obama's plan indicates that the US and NATO transfer of control to Afghan security forces will be accelerated, forcing them to divert energy from building and training forces to actively assuming security responsibilities. This high-risk plan relies on the nascent Afghan security apparatus to battle the Taliban in areas outside of government control while negotiating a political settlement with the top levels of the Taliban movement. President Obama also indicated that he will continue to attempt to work with Pakistan to deal with terrorist sanctuaries there.

The US will likely remove the first batch of troops from the southern region, where the bulk of the 33,000 surge forces were deployed. Security in the south has improved since the surge began, and the US believes there are sufficient Afghan forces available to start taking over. The remaining US forces, while smaller in number, will be required to complete the remaining combat operations while transitioning a portion of their numbers to mentoring the Afghan security forces.

The quick drawdown means that the US and NATO will not have enough forces to address the problems that still exist in the east and the north, where the situation has either remained the same or, in some cases, worsened. President Obama's announcement means that troops freed from the south will not be redeployed to the east. They are being withdrawn altogether while the remain troops in the south will be kept busy completing the mission there before the final pullout in 2013-2014.

This means that the burden of securing the east and the north will fall on the Afghan security forces, without the support of surge forces. The Afghans will have a fight on their hands, one at least as tough as the conflict in the South. In order to prevail, Afghan security force will have to improve quickly and significantly, which is a capacity that has not been demonstrated thus far.

Under these conditions, it is not reasonable to expect Afghan security forces to be able to beat back the insurgency, specifically in the east, where the enemy is effective and the terrain is difficult. The east will continue to be a violent, unstable place for some time to come and the insurgency, with access to sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan, will continue to threaten the stability of Afghanistan as a whole.

"It's the last place we will be fighting," a senior US military official told The Washington Post last week. "And the Afghans will be fighting there in perpetuity. It's a bad neighborhood."
[...]

The authors then present a summary of the achievements and failures of the troop surge that President Obama authorized in December 2009. They end with an assessment of the negative aspects of the shift to counterterrorism tactics and how the Taliban will use President Obama's speech.

Barring glitch in Allen's confirmation Petraeus out of Afghanistan in July

June 22, 2011

Officials: Petraeus to hand off Afghan command sooner than expected
By Kevin Baron
Stars and Stripes
Published: June 22, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon wants Gen. David Petraeus out of Afghanistan by mid-July, much sooner than the original September target date for his change of command, giving the general time for a break before he takes over as CIA director.

Defense Department and military officials confirm there are plans for Petraeus to leave immediately after his deputy and operational commander Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez ends his term in country. Rodriguez’s last day is expected to be July 11, with Petraeus tentatively scheduled to leave July 18.

Petraeus’ exit, however, depends on the Senate confirming his replacement, Central Command deputy Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

“[Allen] needs to be confirmed to take the job, and NATO also has an approval process that must be met,” said Capt. John Kirby, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Pentagon leaders want Petraeus to get a break in between jobs.

[...]

Rodriguez’s replacement, Lt. Gen. Mike Scaparrotti, is scheduled to arrive Afghanistan by the end of the month before assuming command of the International Security Assistance Force’s joint operations, a key position as daily battlefield manager and right-hand man to the commanding general. The two also met this month at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state to prepare for the transition.
[...]

Bringing up baby Pakistan

Dear, he just needs a little tough love:

June 14 (Dawn): A US defence bill approved on Tuesday proposes withholding 75 percent of the $1.1 billion aid to Pakistan for the next fiscal year until the Obama administration reports to Congress on how it would spend the money.

The House Appropriations Committee also gave additional power to Congress to review US assistance to Pakistan. This would ensure that Islamabad cooperates with the Americans in the war against terror, as stipulated in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill.

The committee unanimously approved an amendment to create an independent panel of experts to examine the Afghanistan-Pakistan situation.[ ...]

Nonsense, dear, he just needs more understanding:

June 16 (RTT News) - EU To Increase Aid To Pakistan In Return For Reforms

European Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs and German Development Minister Dirk Niebel arrived in Islamabad on Thursday for a joint visit to Pakistan.

Piebalgs will reaffirm the European Commission's plan to increase its development assistance to Pakistan by 50% - to 75 million euros ($106 million) a year -- for 2011-2013, the Commission said in a press release.

The aid programs will continue to focus on rural development, support for education and stronger governance.
[...]
Piebalgs said he will encourage the authorities to speed up the political and economic reform process, as it is the "only way Pakistan can move towards sustainable economic growth and stability."

He vowed that knowing that Pakistan faces multiple challenges today on the road to the eradication of poverty, the EU will continue to provide support to address the country's needs. The EU and Pakistan will also discuss the next steps towards an EU-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, including important economic aspects such as development and market access, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, but also human rights, and peace-building issues.

John Batchelor featured the above still from the 1938 screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby, in the course of chortling about the return of screwball comic Keith Olbermann to television. But there, in one picture, is the story of the outside world's relationship with Pakistan, which learned over decades at the World Bank-IMF to play other governments like a fiddle.

So if not for all the victims of Pakistani terrorism the current NATO relationship with Pakistan would also qualify as screwball comedy.

Springtime for al Qaeda

June 22, 2011:

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Security officials say 57 militants, mostly from al-Qaeda, have escaped from a prison in southern Yemen.

They say the 57 were among 62 inmates from the Mukalla jail in the Hadarmout province who escaped Wednesday through an underground tunnel.

Bands of gunmen attacked the prison simultaneously, opening fire on the guards from outside to divert their attention away from the escape.

One guard was killed and another wounded in the attack, said the security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Wednesday's escape was the latest sign that Yemen's months-long upheaval has emboldened al-Qaeda militants to challenge authorities in the country's nearly lawless south.

The escapees included militants convicted on terror charges or held in protective custody pending trial, according to officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media,
[...]
Yemen's political crisis began when demonstrators inspired by successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia took to the streets in early February. The largely peaceful movement gave way to heavy street fighting when tribal militias took up arms in late May.
[...]

The Republic, for laughs

June 18:

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner may be at odds over taxes, the debt ceiling and the conflict in Libya, but for today at least, they put aside their differences for a round of golf. Obama and Boehner took on Vice President Biden and Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich in a game at Joint Base Andrews' golf course in Maryland.
[...]
"The foursome had great time and really enjoyed playing golf at Joint Base Andrews today," a statement from the White House said.[...]

WABC radio's John Batchelor is not amused.

Golfing Backwards for Laughs
By John Batchelor

The strange detail is that four government men make a peacock display of the game of golf in order to show common purpose with regard the fragile state of the US economy and the overbearing Federal debt load that threatens the nationals ecurity.
[...]
What do we learn from the theatrical exercise? These four government men are not in the same economy as the rest of us working fellows: they take the Treasury's check, and we pay the Treasury's bills.

Stats show there are 30 million American males working full time between the ages of 15 and 45. There are 15 million American men working full time between the ages of 46 and 65. The younger, larger group is frustrated and stuck.

Spoke with Mike Dorning, Bloomberg, to learn that one million fewer men and women are changing jobs each month now than before the Great Recession; that is a reflection of fear, caution, lack of choice, frustration, drift, underemployment.

In addition there are nearly 14 million unemployed; in addition hourly wages year over year (2010-2011) have retreated 1.6%.

In sum, the youngest workers are going backward in the same job.

All this adds up to tens of millions of men and women who do not have the leisure, cash, temperament or desire to play golf on a Saturday in June.
[...]
So what to conclude from the golf summit? These four government men have too much down time and not enough anecdotal information to realize that the US is in existential trouble.

What happened in the Great Recession of 2007, 2008 and 2009 is that the US government took money from taxpayers and gave it to the bankers and sharpies who crashed the economy with gambling dens and fraudulent markets.

TARP was theft from a generation of working men and women. The US government (Bush approved and signed: Obama and Biden and Boehner voted Yes; Kasich was out of office) colluded to take $1 trillion of TARP for the bankers and whatever else struck their fancy and whined loudly. TARP was theft from a generation.

Now the TARP thieves can golf together to demonstrate purpose? A golf ball on grass is meaningful? This is the Republic for laughs?

The podcast for John's ten-minute discussion with Mike Dorning is here (second interview).

The following chart backs up Dorning's observations. Yet what is doesn't show is how many of the employed males work in civilian government and in the military. Nor does it show how many of the males work as hamburger flippers in fast food franchises or in other menial jobs. Remove all three sets of workers from the tally and the true measure of how far and fast America is pedaling backward would come into sharper focus.

U.S. government still making excuses for Pakistan military's support for terrorists who kill NATO troops

Aren't such excuses supposed to be called treason? Or is that interpretation a childish reading of facts?

AP sources: Pakistanis tip off militants again
By KIMBERLY DOZIER, AP Intelligence Writer – 12 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials say Pakistan has apparently tipped off militants at two more bomb-building factories in its tribal areas, giving the terror suspects time to flee, after U.S. intelligence shared the locations with the Pakistani government.

Those officials believe Pakistan's insistence on seeking local tribal elders' permission before raiding the areas may have most directly contributed to the militants' flight. U.S. officials have pushed for Pakistan to keep the location of such targets secret prior to the operations, but the Pakistanis say their troops cannot enter the lawless regions without giving the locals notice.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

The latest incidents bring to a total of four bomb-making sites that the U.S. has shared with Pakistan only to have the terrorist suspects flee before the Pakistani military arrived much later. The report does not bode well for attempts by both sides to mend relations and rebuild trust after the U.S. raid on May 2 that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, a Pakistani army town only 35 miles (56.32 kilometers) from the capital Islamabad.
[...]

U.S. government thinks new Qaeda chief continues to hide in Pakistan

June 17:

US believes Zawahiri in Pakistan
by Amir Mir
The News [Pakistan]

LAHORE: With the elevation of Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri as the new al-Qaeda chief, Pakistan is likely to come under renewed American pressure for intelligence sharing about his possible whereabouts because the American intelligence community strongly believes he may be hiding somewhere in an urban locality of Pakistan, most likely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as had been the case with Osama bin Laden.
[...]
General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, told John King on CNN on May 3, 2011, a day after bin Laden was killed in Pakistan that Zawahiri was “somewhere along the Pak-Afghan border.”

Then, the US House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said on May 15, 2011 that Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri was most likely hiding in Pakistan. In an interview to an American television channel, Congressman Rogers said that the US has known for years that the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are living inside Pakistan. Rogers said he knows that the Pakistanis have disclosed US operations and held back information, but believes the killing of bin Laden may lead to more cooperation. “I hope they see this as an opportunity to be more cooperative, to be more open, to help us with other targets that we have in Pakistan that we are very interested in having apprehended and brought to justice. Zawahiri is a great example and I believe he is in Pakistan,” the US House Intelligence Committee chairman added.

According to well-informed diplomatic sources in Islamabad, the computer files and documents recovered during the bloody raid that culminated in the death of Osama revealed that he was vigorously pursuing his anti-US agenda from his Abbottabad hideout where he used to see key al-Qaeda leaders to plan and direct terrorist attacks across the globe. The scanning of the seized material further revealed that bin Laden was in regular touch with his top aides, especially Dr Zawahiri. The documents, which included a handwritten notebook of February 2010, indicated that Osama and Zawahiri were planning yet another major terrorist attack on the American soil on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, falling on September 11, 2011. He has served as the public face of al-Qaeda over the past decade, appearing in numerous propaganda tapes and even hosting an online question and answer session.

Therefore, the CIA has already marked Zawahiri as its next target and is vigorously pursuing its Pakistani counterparts to share intelligence that could help them hunt him down. A trusted aide of Osama for almost 20 years till his demise, Zawahiri is also believed to be hiding in an urban locality of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. US intelligence sleuths believe Zawahiri had shifted from his hideout in Fata to some urban locality after having escaped a US drone strike on January 13, 2006 targeting Damadola village of Bajaur Agency in Fata that killed 18 people.

The drone attack was carried out on the basis of human intelligence provided by some former Pakistani intelligence sleuths, believed to be part of the Spider Group, which is being run by the CIA in Fata, primarily to gather intelligence information about the fugitive al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders as well as their activities. But Zawahiri was lucky enough to have survived the strike as he had already left the targeted building much before it was hit.

In an audio message released later, Zawahiri confirmed his presence in Bajaur Agency at the time of the missile strike: “US planes launched the assault under the pretext of wanting to kill my frail self and four of my companions. However, all of us have survived the attack by the grace of Allah Almighty.”

However, believable indications of his presence in Pakistan came in the aftermath of the bloody Operation Silence, carried out by the Special Services Group of the Pakistan Army in July 2007 in Islamabad against the clerics of Lal Masjid. As Pakistani security forces took control of the Red Mosque after a fierce gunbattle, they were astonished to discover letters written by Dr Zawahiri to Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Maulana Abdul Aziz, the cleric brothers who ran the mosque and adjacent madrassa, directing them to conduct an armed revolt. Zawahiri’s Lal Masjid connection was confirmed on July 11, almost a week after the military operation was conducted, when he issued a videotape, asking Pakistanis to join jehad in revenge for the Lal Masjid “bloodshed”.

Zawahri’s four-minute address was titled “The aggression against Lal Masjid”. The video was released by al-Qaeda’s media wing, as-Sahab and subtitled in English. On August 1, 2008, CBS News reported that it had obtained a copy of an intercepted letter dated July 29, 2008, which urgently requested a doctor to treat Zawahiri. The letter indicated that Zawahiri was injured in a US missile strike at Azam Warsak village in South Waziristan on July 28.
[...]
In his latest video appearance on June 8, 2011, Zawahiri vowed to avenge the death of Osama “blood for blood”. The 28-minute video was the first statement from him to acknowledge the death of bin Laden. Looking aged, and at times angry, Zawahiri used a chopping motion with his hands and urged his followers to remember the 9/11 attacks against Americans and made a point to recall the deaths of US military personnel at the Pentagon.

He urged the youth of Pakistan to follow the lead of the youth of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria and seek to overthrow the government. The statement also said the group will not shift its policy and pledged its support to, among others, the Afghan Taliban chief Mulla Mohammad Omar.

With the death of bin Laden, who was also one of the original 22 people on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists released in October 2001, Zawahiri is now the world’s most-wanted living terrorist. Zawahiri was wanted by the US even before the 2001 attacks targeting New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. He was indicted in absentia in 1999 for the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 224 people, and was also considered the mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 sailors. Zawahiri went into hiding after the US-led allied forces overthrew the Taliban regime in October 2001, in the remote region along the Pak-Afghan border [...]

Americans, who are you?

At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 310 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest both by land area and population. (Wikipedia)

The following is from a discussion I wrote for the comment section at Zenpundit blog, which had linked to my post "Hollowed out” Mexico and hollowed-out USA.

Visit the comment section at the Zenpundit post for background on my discussion, which was to reply to blogger Joseph Fouche's critical views on how Americans act toward others and to elaborate on what I had meant by "hollowed-out America."

I'll add here that in a response to my discussion another blogger, Madhu, made the telling observation that Americans don’t understand Europe very well so they turn to 'experts' for guidance when talking about themselves. (Zenpundit is a 'blogger's blog.' I'd say many if not most of the best bloggers in the American diplo-defense part of the blogosphere read Zenpundit.)

I agree with Madhu; outside Washington and the international trade/finance sectors many Americans don't know much about European politics and know virtually nothing about European Union policies. So they don't recognize the profound impact that EU policies are having on Washington's policies -- a point I made in my recent post about "Euism," and which I've made many times over the years on this blog.

*******************

[B]y ‘hollowing out’ of American society I was referring to what we’ve done to ourselves rather than how we’ve ’operated’ on those outside our shores. But there is one aspect of Washington’s interactions with peoples who are unfamiliar with American history that can’t be emphasized enough: Yes, Washington thinks "they’re just like us" EXCEPT when it comes to assuming they’re human.

Thus, Americans in Afghanistan can go on at great length to a Pashtun tribal leader about the need for rout out corruption in government but they can’t describe the Battle of Trenton or the Battle of Valley Forge. Yet they’re dealing with people whose lives are circumscribed by battles to maintain their independence — battles going back thousands of years and which they can describe in great detail.

And Americans can talk endlessly about the importance of democracy, but they never thought to explain to the chiefs why they came back to Afghanistan. They arrived with suitcases full of cash to buy help – but they never told the chiefs that they were there because the way al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11 meant that many Americans couldn’t find so much as a fingernail of their massacred relatives to bury because the bodies were ground to dust.

Not to be able to bury one’s dead or even a piece of one’s dead — knowing THAT would have meant a great deal to the chiefs and those in their tribes. But the Americans never explained, never even cried, never showed emotion. THEY NEVER ACTED HUMAN; they never interacted with the Afghans in ways that are the same for all — not only all humans but all mammalian creatures. In other words, they displayed not a whit of common sense.

What do you talk about when you first sit down with a man whose life has been circumscribed by war and who knows nothing about you and your tribe? The answer is you tell me of your battles, I’ll tell you of mine and in this way we establish a commonality of experience.

You transform the rug or patch of sand you’re sitting on into the terrain of the battle, and you use sticks and stones or teacups as place markers for the troops to show how the battle was fought. In this way, you demonstrate that the battle is truly in your heart, that it means enough to you that you can bring it alive for another.

If you don’t show what’s in your heart, then you haven’t established a basis for developing a mutual understanding, so then there is no way to move off the dime. Only when you’ve demonstrated by your stories of war that your tribe also shed much blood for independence, can you move on to explaining stuff about government. You can explain that you were losing too many of your sons in battle so you devised a type of government that would help defend your freedoms and with less bloodshed. And so on.

But the history of America is one that shows a great willingness to do battle if there seemed no other option to defend Americans’ freedom. So actually Americans do have much in common with the Afghans – and it’s a key commonality. Yet it’s one we never revealed to them.

Well, I see I’ve gone on at some length and not yet gotten to the part about hollowing out. So in brief: All of Europe can fit 2-1/2 times into the continental United States. Yet one wouldn’t know that from listening to American foreign policy experts, who view the USA as if it’s a Mittel European country than can be traversed by car in an hour. Heck, one can’t even drive across Texas in a day.

America is a giant dreaming it’s a midget — and here I’m speaking of land mass and population size, not ‘civilization.’ Of course Americans owe a great deal to European civilization, but two world wars and Nato, along with a huge influx of Europeans to American universities and Washington after WW1, meant that U.S. defense/foreign policy began to reflect the strategies and tactics of the middle child in a large family — which is how small European nations have had to survive each other.

The upshot is that we have not created a distinctly American defense/foreign policy. For a generation we had a Natoist policy, but once the European Union rose up, we became a minority of one (the Canadians had the Commonwealth) at Nato despite our superior military power and wealth. So then the thinking of U.S. policymakers came to reflect the views of the European Union, which is where we are today.

I made a pass at discussing what I term ‘Euism’ [as in "EU"] in a recent post but the point is that when Americans talk of "we" in relation to the rest of the world — how can we do that, when we don’t know who we are?

Who we are has been hollowed out — not by the Europeans or any other external factor but by our own thinking, by our refusal to see ourselves as we actually are. This, despite all our talk of American exceptionalism.

The best explanation of American exceptionalism I ever heard came from a Japanese. He asked for a leave of absence from work after he was picked to manage a plant in the USA. He’d been raised on American movies but had never been to America; he wanted to see for himself what the country was like so he could better interact with his American employees. So he rented a car and drove the length and breadth of the continental USA.

He returned to Japan in a state of shock. All he could say for days was, "America is so big. It’s so big."

Yeah. But don’t tell that to Fareed Zakaria, who ended a segment on his recent CNN show about how to stimulate innovation in America by saying, 'In the next part we’ll see how America measures up to other countries in terms of innovation.'

It’s unfair to other countries to measure America against them. That’s because we’re so big. Even on our knees, we’re such a giant that if we sneeze the rest of the world catches a cold.

We’re a giant not only in terms of land mass but also population size. Americans are one of the very few peoples in the world who could maintain a good standard of living if we only traded with each other. That’s a little secret that Brussels and Whitehall would rather the American bumpkins didn’t know. That’s because it works to their advantage to have a giant dreaming it’s a midget at their beck and call.

But the "you gotta have a gang" mentality that led to Washington creating the United Nations and other multilateral institutions that came back to bite us was never necessary for the United States. That’s because we’re so big we’re a gang unto ourselves.

And it’s from that exceptional fact of our lives that we should conduct our foreign relations and build our defense policy. And we should lead the world by example, not by forming gangs of nations. [The more polite if somewhat dated term is 'multilateral approaches' which has morphed into the 'consensus of the international community.']

At the end of WW2 the vast majority of peoples in the world saw Americans in the role of The Perfect Son, not the role of The Boss [or Leader of the Pack]. Since then we’ve done everything to spurn the role we were given — a role, I might add, that is the highest honor that can be bestowed by men; it’s saying, ‘I am so proud of you, I see you as my son.’

Yet wisdom in foreign relations, as in one’s personal life, is knowing one’s role and playing it to the hilt.

Conservation, infrastructure, economic planning -- and the awful sinking feeling that what used to be simple germs are getting the better of humanity

This evening I took refuge from the Afghan War by fleeing to Dave Schuler's Glittering Eye blog, and there found a bevy of essays I enjoyed reading, and three I found not only thought-provoking but also important for Americans to ponder:

More on Turning Japanese, which discusses whether and to what extent the American economy will repeat the worst mistakes of Japan's economic planners and includes a few of Dave's thoughts on how tax dollars are best spent:

[...] Two observations here. First, helping the economy reach full employment and reallocating assets away from finance and housing construction in the near term are, unfortunately, in conflict. The economic dislocation will, in the short term, result in more unemployment rather than less. That’s why the administration and the Federal Reserve have been so active in propping up the failing sectors rather than supporting sectors in which there are some prospects for future growth. Wishing for the status quo ante is an inherent quality of political institutions, not an accidental one.

Second, IMO we should be very careful about just what technology and infrastructure we invest in and how we do it. I believe that we’re enormously over-invested in biotechnololgy, for example. That may pay off enormously. Or it may be an utter waste.

If you define infrastructure as roads and bridges, do we have enough or far too much? I think the latter (building bridges to nowhere, anyone?) and that rather than diluting our resources by trying not only to maintain everything but even to expand it we should concentrate on what’s most important and most productive. Does that argue for the federal government doing these things? I’m not so sure.

Here in the Chicagoland area we have plenty of roads. Our problems are that many of our roads don’t go the right way and we have peak load problems. The reason for the former is political and I don’t think the solution to the latter is more roads.

Then there is a very unsettling discussion on The Post-Antibiotic Age but which unfortunately every country, not just the USA, needs to grapple with now, not a decade from now.

To round out the trio, there is Re-Thinking Conservation Strategies, which I consider a 'must read' in the wake of natural disasters that have hit the USA very hard just in this year -- and we're only half-way through the year.

Since 2009 there have been so many very expensive natural disasters in the USA, or disasters arising from accidents (e.g., the Gulf Oil spill) or disasters created by attempts to avert bigger disasters (e.g., opening floodgates in the Morganza Spillway) that they tend to make a mockery of economic planning and ideas that have come to stand for conservation strategy, such as carbon trading.

Well, I invite you to read Dave's essay and add your thoughts to the debate. My two cents' worth is that the defense budget shouldn't be cut back; the part slated to be chopped should be reoriented to treat natural disasters as national security threats -- at least until more Americans adopt sound forest management, sound water and wetlands management, and return to baseline intelligent actions such as never building houses in America's Tornado Alley that don't have tornado cellars.

For six years Amrullah Saleh was in the best position to understand the Taliban. It's time NATO began listening to his advice about dealing with them.

This is an example of U.S. sending mixed signals to Pakistan

Many Afghans believe that to get to a negotiated settlement, the Taliban leaders involved in talks should be relocated to Afghanistan from their current locations in Pakistan, where they are protected by Pakistan’s intelligence service.
-- Amrullah Saleh

Today Bloomberg news service has published an op-ed by Amrullah Saleh, which I republish in full below. But before turning over the floor to Saleh, I want to dispute a part of his advice that pertains to dealing with Pakistan. I think Pakistan's military and civilian leaders read the "carrot and stick" approach he advocates as deliberately mixed signals, which convey acceptance for their continued prosecution of what is in effect a proxy war in Afghanistan; this on the theory that the USA finds Pakistan so valuable as a client state/strategic asset it will tolerate its aggression toward Afghanistan and even NATO troops.

In other words, what NATO leaders consider inducements (carrots) the Pakistanis read as tacit acceptance of their course of action no matter how much NATO says it dislikes the course. This situation is mirrored in the way substance abusers read continued material support from family members as sympathy for their predicament, no matter how much the family members yell and scream at them to give up dope, and no matter how many times they threaten to throw the addict out of the house or turn him into the police.

Western psychologists have a term for that kind of family member: enabler; i.e., someone who enables a person who can't on his own continue a self-destructive course of action.

Psychologists know that often the greatest obstacle to an addict confronting his dire predicament is the enabler in his life, which can be a lover or friend or even employer in addition to family members. No matter the type of relationship, the enabler always provides just enough support -- material and/or emotional -- to allow the addict to continue his self-destructive behavior with the sense that he's able to manage the addiction.

I read the very same situation in the NATO-Pakistan relationship, and in particular the British and U.S. government's relations with Pakistan's government. This is an old story that goes back to Pakistan's inception and it's created a very sick, very toxic relationship that Western psychology terms co-dependent; i.e., a need developed on both sides for a relationship that's destructive to both parties, and often those nearest them as well.

However, the difference between a co-dependent relationship between individuals and between governments is that the latter can lead to the most horrific situations involving many thousands or even millions of people. And thus, the way the Afghan War has been prosecuted by ISAF since Operation Airlift of Evil, which set the course for the rest of the war and led to a situation whereby NATO and in particular the USA is in effect paying Pakistan's military to help murder NATO troops.

But when called out on this atrocity, U.S./NATO government officials engage in rationalizations that are textbook examples of the kind of excuses that enablers deploy to rationalize their continued support for a substance abuser! Textbook. Here are the top four excuses with the U.S. variation in parentheses:

If I stop helping him:

> He'll die (Pakistan will collapse)
> He'll kill himself (Pakistan will be overrun by extremists)
> He'll turn to crime (Pakistan will start a nuclear war)
> It will break up the family (Pakistan won't give any help to NATO)

Indeed, the rationalizations voiced by NATO officials are so similar to those used by enablers that I've often wondered if the war could have been successfully concluded years ago, if psychologists who specialize in helping families stop being enablers had been brought in by CENTCOM to analyze the relationships between officials in major NATO governments and their counterparts in Pakistan's government.

Well, I've discussed this angle several times over the years on this blog, and once I went to some trouble to detail how it's possible to stop the enabling without breaking off the relationship. (See Stay out of the bazaar.) So I'll end here, with a final observation that I like Saleh's method of dealing with the Taliban because it helps distinguish those Talibs who are genuine insurgents from ones being used as proxies by Pakistan's military.

June 16, 2011, Bloomberg:

Afghan Role for Taliban, if They Play by Rules
By Amrullah Saleh

As the U.S. prepares to reduce its troop presence in Afghanistan next month, Afghans are seriously considering what will come next for our country. As Hamid Karzai’s government steers reconciliation talks with the Taliban aimed at creating enough quiet for the Americans and the rest of NATO to justify departing, Afghans like me increasingly worry that we will wind up in a situation worse than the civil war of past years.

This is avoidable. The opposition to Karzai isn’t just a rejection of the current government, as the media have emphasized. We provide an alternative vision to Karzai’s way out of the status quo. It entails a complete disarming of the Taliban, an end to Pakistan’s practice of giving sanctuary to Taliban militants and a truth-and-reconciliation process for Afghanistan.

As things are going, the future looks grim.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization expects that a negotiated settlement, eventually, will end the fighting between Afghan government forces, on one side, and the Taliban and its allies on the other. Before extending an olive branch to the Taliban leadership, however, NATO is pursuing a military strategy to weaken the enemy. This involves brilliant special operations inside Afghanistan that have killed perhaps many hundreds of Taliban mid-level commanders. The idea is to break the leadership of the Taliban in order to get the group’s second and third tier to come in from the cold. Whether this plan works will depend on whether NATO succeeds in pressuring Pakistan, which supports the Taliban, to go along. Insurgencies don’t end when they are given sanctuary in a neighboring country.

Taliban Wants Arms

But the Pakistan-Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance wants a deal that would allow the Taliban to remain armed and mobilized so that it could again have the capacity to dominate Afghanistan, as both a political and military force.

In such a scenario, real political competition in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strongest, would be either difficult or impossible. The Taliban would gain access to major funds through illegal taxation, narcotics trafficking, extortion, the sale of natural resources and the black market. These funds would enable them to sustain their organization and provide some services to their constituents. Pakistan would feel safe having its proxy control the border areas, limiting or blocking India’s access, and would use its influence with the Taliban to gain maximum concessions from the government in Kabul.

Abuse of Power

That government, today, is a conglomerate of small and big interest groups surviving through manipulation, abuse of power and criminal commerce. Its overt outreach wing for the reconciliation talks is the so-called High Peace Council. The council is largely a platform to keep the big names within the Karzai government under one tent and to give the outreach an artificial multi-ethnic face.

The council’s chief spokesman is Karzai, who has caused deep division within Afghan society by his constant, unconditional offer of alliance to the Taliban. For those who have fought for a vision of a pluralistic Afghanistan, a Karzai-Taliban alliance is a recipe for disaster. The Taliban’s return to positions of authority would raise the horrific specter of their previous time in power.

It is for fear of that outcome that voices for justice and permanent peace have been raised in Afghanistan. Many Afghans believe that to get to a negotiated settlement, the Taliban leaders involved in talks should be relocated to Afghanistan from their current locations in Pakistan, where they are protected by Pakistan’s intelligence service.

Monopoly of Force

In any agreement, the Taliban must be disarmed, demobilized and reintegrated into society. The Taliban should be allowed to become a political force and be given every chance to play according to the script of democracy. But the Afghan state alone must have a monopoly on force. It isn’t permissible to allow the Taliban to become a Hezbollah-type entity within Afghanistan -- an armed state within a state. If they agree to just a cease-fire with Karzai or his replacement, it will only bring a deceptive stability that will prove short-lived.

Many years of war have wounded the psyche of the Afghan nation. Burying the facts will not help us heal those wounds. An internationally funded truth-finding commission should investigate human-rights violations, massacres and major crimes of the past 20 years. Knowing the facts would help the Afghan people reconcile with themselves. A full report may take years to compile, but the process would create hope.

In this scenario, Pakistan must stop its support of the Taliban. The U.S., which supplied Pakistan with $4.5 billion in economic and security aid last fiscal year, would need to offer carrots and sticks to ensure that country’s compliance. Pakistan and Afghanistan would sign an agreement guaranteeing the cessation of interference in each other’s affairs, both directly and indirectly.

This is the way out for Afghanistan, the Taliban, Pakistan, as well as U.S. and other NATO forces. A settlement that falls short of these minimums will only prolong Afghanistan’s agony.

(Amrullah Saleh was the head of the National Directorate of Security in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Pak military cuts off food and water to Americans at drone base; U.S. companies still selling war equipment to Pakistan

June 15, The New York Times:

The Pakistanis have already blocked the supply of food and water to the base used for the drones, a senior American official said, adding that they were gradually "strangling the alliance" by making things difficult for the Americans in Pakistan.

June 15, The Washington Post:

[T]he U.S. military still supplies the Pakistani military with new, sophisticated intelligence collection and communications equipment.

The Army Communications and Electronics Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground recently put out a notice signaling that it may need contractors to train members of the Pakistani military on how to use a new "Ground Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (GISR) system."

Developed by DRS Technologies, a high-tech military contractor based in New Jersey, the system intercepts and locates the sources of enemy communications and then permits continued monitoring of them. It also allows users to quickly analyze the collected data, including visual material, "to provide mission-critical intelligence to the warfighter."

Anatomy of a debacle: ISI arrest of Pakistani CIA informants in Abbottabad raid causes Pakistan and USA further loss of face (UPDATED 2X)

UPDATE 6:05 AM EDT
Oh boy. Here we go. According to Pakistan's The News, Inter Services Public Relations is denying that anyone was arrested:

RAWALPINDI: The Pakistan Army has rejected claims in the US media that the country's top intelligence agency ISI arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. A statement released by the ISPR read that no arrests were made and no major was being investigated in reference to the Abbottabad raid.

That does it for me; I'm not going to play this game. This is the last update.
UPDATE 5:25 AM EDT
A spokesman for Pakistan's army has denied the New York Times report that an army major was arrested in the sweep. “I can say with authority that all arrests were non-military.” Well, that pits the spokesman against the unnamed American officials who were sources for the NYT report. The sources are surely high-level. So for now I'm going to leave the rest of this post as I wrote it; even if Pakistan's version of the story turns out to be right, that wouldn't overturn my points.
**************
See my 1:05 AM EDT post for background. The brave and patriotic Pakistani Army major who secretly helped the CIA gather information about doings at the mysterious Abbottabad compound has been arrested by the ISI, and probably on treason charges.

That's surely the case for the brave Pakistani civilians who also helped the U.S. government gather information on the compound.

Given the grave threat that al Qaeda poses to the Pakistani people and in particular the country's military installations the Pakistani informants deserve a medal, not arrest. However, that would be impossible given the incredibly stupid decisions made on both the U.S. and Pakistani sides in the wake of the Abbottabad raid. The die was cast with a phone call from President Obama to his Pakistani counterpart:

Analysis: The Silence of the States
by Myra MacDonald in London
May 24, 2011
Reuters

When President Barack Obama telephoned Pakistan's president to tell him U.S. forces had found and killed Osama bin Laden, he offered him a choice.

Pakistan could say it had helped find bin Laden or that it knew nothing. President Asif Ali Zardari chose the former.

The exchange, recounted by a senior Western official briefed on the May 2 raid in the town of Abbottabad, illustrates the sometimes deliberate confusion over how far Pakistan is co-operating with the United States in fighting Islamist militants.

Unwilling to be seen as working too closely with a country which is deeply unpopular at home, Pakistan veers uncomfortably between trying to claim credit overseas while reassuring domestic critics it has not sold out to the United States.

Those two irreconcilable public positions, combined with a real and deep underlying distrust between Pakistan and the United States, mean that three weeks after bin Laden was killed, almost nobody knows for sure exactly what happened and why.

They may also be creating such strains within Pakistan that it is becoming harder to contain militants [terrorists, Myra!] who on Sunday [May 22] were able to overrun its naval aviation base [PNS Mehran] in the city of Karachi.

After telephoning Zardari, Obama announced bin Laden's death in a televised address and added that "it's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding."

A Pakistani official, asked about the exchange between Obama and Zardari, said Pakistan's military leadership had also been on board initially in saying they had helped find bin Laden -- a position reflected in early public and private statements.

But with emotions running high in both the United States and Pakistan, that early emphasis on cooperation disintegrated.

In Washington, CIA director Leon Panetta insisted the United States had acted alone because it did not trust Pakistan.

And in Pakistan, the second official said, the military leadership backed off its initial position after feedback from garrisons highlighted deep anger in the ranks about the breach of sovereignty involved in the U.S. helicopter raid.

Worried about a backlash from Islamist militants if it were seen to have helped the United States find and kill bin Laden, and insulted by Panetta's comments, Pakistan hit back.

Its political and military leadership, which official sources say initially welcomed bin Laden's death, began instead to criticize the United States.

Pakistan's parliament condemned the violation of sovereignty and called for an end to strikes by U.S. Predator drones in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
[...]

The choice Obama gave Zardari put Pakistan's military and Pakistan's civilian government behind the eight ball; it was surely (and correctly) read as an attempt at extortion because no matter which choice they took, if they didn't cooperate enough in the future with the USA an unnamed US official could always leak the information that they'd been given the offer -- which came to pass!

So the intelligent approach would have been for Obama to explain to Zardari that his initial announcement about the raid would not address whether Pakistan's military had been involved and then say to Zardari, 'After conferring, let me know you want us to handle this.'

Obama should also have instructed everyone in the Cabinet to say nothing to the press about the raid until the message could be coordinated.

But the Pakistani side acted in no more intelligent fashion than the American one. There was no way "the garrisons" could have registered anger at the violation of Pakistani sovereignty if they didn't know the sovereignty had been violated. So, somebody in the information chain on the Pakistani side had loose lips. This might not have happened if Obama had done something brilliant and told Admiral Mike Mullen to phone Kayani and in confidence break the news to him first. But even without that move, the Pakistani military and civilian leadership would have been in a position to swear to the sky that they'd been involved all along in planning for the raid, and that they'd given the U.S. top-secret permission to enter Pakistan's air space.

Of course Kayani couldn't see around corners, so he didn't know the attack on PNS Mehran was imminent and that it was most probably orchestrated by al Qaeda. And he couldn't know then that the PML-N, Pakistan's most powerful opposition political party, would suddenly do a 180-degree turn and announce it was fully supporting a war on terrorism in Pakistan, which it did just a few days ago.

What does the latter turn of events mean? Depending on how you want to look at it, it means former Pakistani PM and PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif kicked the struts out from under Rawalpindi's pet excuse that it couldn't wage an all-out war on terrorism because so many Pakistanis were against it -- or that Gen. Kayani finally managed to twist some arms in the PML-N leadership. See the report at the end of this post.

But as soon as Kayani and the civilian leaders learned of the Abbottabad raid, they would have known that by saying they'd cooperated with the U.S. government, they could have fully shared in the triumph of catching the world's Number One terrorist. They should have stuck to that line come hell or high water. That would have given them a priceless public relations victory with the world's major governments and more importantly the world's major international banks, which by then were looking at Pakistan as Terrorism, Inc.

And once they tracked down the CIA informants who helped the USA nail bin Laden, they could have paraded that Army major as a great hero of the people and a sterling example of how dedicated Pakistan's military is to combating terrorism.

Too late now for the smart move. But at least the PML-N is wising up, at least for the time being:

PML-N for full-scale war on terror, at last

By Muhammad Akram
June 13, 2011
(Pakistan) Daily Times

LAHORE: With the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) now seeking a full-fledged war against the menace of terrorism and the eradication of terrorists from the country, the murky political atmosphere on this all-important issue is getting clearer.

It took one full year to bring about this change in the mind of the PML-N as Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, who last year on the occasion of first death anniversary of Dr Sarfraz Naeemi, who was killed in a Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan-claimed suicide blast in 2009, urged Taliban to spare Punjab province since the government here shared their perception about America.

However, on the second death anniversary of Dr Naeemi on Sunday, the Punjab chief minister sought to eradicate the menace of terrorism in the country, only a day after his one-on-one meeting with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani on the sidelines of a reception hosted by the prime minister in honour of visiting Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

Among other important events that took place from June 2010-2011 besides dozens of terrorist attacks across Pakistan include the successful hunt down of world’s most wanted man Osama bin Laden, who was killed by the US SEALs in a covert operation on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad and a terrorist attack on PNS Mehran allegedly carried out with inside support.

The PML-N has been the major centre-of-the-right-party in the country that has been shying away from demanding a war against terrorism alongside the religious parties like Jamaat-i-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). However, the JUI started seeking a U-turn on its policy vis-à-vis TTP and other militant offsprings when its chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman was attacked twice couple of months back forcing him to confine his political activities indoor and make an unusual statement that ‘even the bearded are not safe from terrorists in Pakistan.’

PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif who had been riding high on the popularity graph among the followers of constitutionalism in the country following his principled demand on the constitution of an independent probe commission on the events of May 2 covert US operation in Abbottabad and terrorists attack on PNS Mehran in Karachi, had been avoiding till recently a direct tirade on the forces responsible for terrorism in Pakistan.

Nawaz Sharif during his address to a reference in memory of slain journalist Saleem Shahzad the other day though called a spade a spade on questions pertaining to decade-old issue of civil-military relations yet he was conscious and crafty enough to take position as far as the question of war against terrorism.

The welcoming words of his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif that defines well the PML-N position on war against terrorism only after less than 24 hour of his meeting with the army chief is enough to speculate that the murkier atmosphere is perhaps getting clearer on all the fronts.

Keeping in view the words of PML-N Nawaz Sharif that he and his party are on the same page on the issue of defining once for all the civil-military relations as envisaged in the constitution, it would be safe to infer that the Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and his party would be on the same page also on his declaring war on terrorism in the country.

The PML-N’s taking a clear position on war against terrorism and the forces of darkness would be a great morale booster not only for the PPP-led coalition government which had been waging this war for the last four years that has killed over 35,000 innocent citizens and more than 3000 soldiers. A defined PML-N position on war against terrorism would also be of great help for the armed forces who may have been rendered confused by a conservative section of society with the notion that the war on terrorism is a war of America and not of Pakistan.

With the PML-N getting on a just path on the issue that poses existential threat to the country, the political forces that are left on the other side of the divide would definitely get weaker, particularly the political landscape of the Punjab province.

The likes of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Tehrik-e-Insaf of Imran Khan who are not ready to accept the war on terrorism as a war of survival of the country would get weaker with the PML-N getting out of the phase of not stating thing clearly and keeping the issue on the backburner.

The JI, in fact, has got more clearer on the issue keeping in view the private discussions its leader made that of course are contradictory to the public stance of TI which appeared to be seeking religio-political inspiration from the former.

The political pundits predict a marked improvement in the working relationships between the PML-N and the PPP and subsequently the federal and the Punjab governments following Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s public statement on war against at terrorism at an all-important venue of Jamia Naeemia where Dr Sarfraz Naeemi was targeted two years ago on sectarian grounds. The political observers view as result-oriented and productive the meeting between Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Army Chief Gen Kayani after a break of over a month as the two last met on May 2, when the US SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden in a covert operation.

The political observers are of the view that though the PML-N though has belatedly taken a clear position on war against terrorism yet it is important that it has come out of a mirage it has created for itself as being a representatives of conservative sections of Punjab province.

The political observers are confident that the PML-N would pursue its policy on war against terrorism as vigorously as it has been pursuing the principled stand on civil-military relations. And since the two are intertwined the success on one front would yield result on the other too, said the observer.

Pakistan's ISI arrests Pakistani informants who helped CIA gather intell for US raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad (UPDATED 3X)

UPDATE 6:05 AM EDT
According to Pakistan's The News, Inter Services Public Relations is denying that anyone was arrested:

RAWALPINDI: The Pakistan Army has rejected claims in the US media that the country's top intelligence agency ISI arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. A statement released by the ISPR read that no arrests were made and no major was being investigated in reference to the Abbottabad raid.

I am not going to sit here for the rest of the morning and add more updates on denials and corrections to denials, so this is the last update.

UPDATE 5:00 AM EDT
The number of those arrested has gone up from the number cited in the NYT report, which broke the story (see below):

Pakistan Arrests 30 Civilians in Probe of U.S. Raid That Killed Bin Laden
By Haris Anwar - Jun 15, 2011 4:14 AM EDT

Pakistan arrested 30 to 40 civilians as it investigates the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden last month, an army spokesman said, denying a report that an army major was among those detained.

Some of those arrested have already been released, Brigadier Azmat Ali, director of public relations at the army’s media arm in Rawalpindi, said in a phone interview.

A report in the New York Times that an army officer is being held is “totally wrong,” Ali said. “I can say with authority that all arrests were non-military.”

Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested five Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that killed bin Laden on May 2, the Times reported today, citing American officials it didn’t name.

Those arrested include a Pakistani army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, the report said.

UPDATE 1:54 AM EDT
From Reuters about 50 minutes ago: "Asked about the Times report [see below], a CIA spokeswoman neither confirmed nor denied it and said she had no further comment."
*********

Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid

By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: June 14, 2011 [published online at approx. 11 PM EDT]
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s top military spy agency [ISI] has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.

Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan.
[...]
The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
[...]

The rest of the Times report doesn't throw more light on the situation so here I'll switch to the Associated Press, which unearthed another factoid connected with the situation:

AP sources: Pakistan nabs CIA informants

By KATHY GANNON [reporting from Islamabad]
[Published approx. midnight EDT]
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pakistan's intelligence service has arrested the owner of a safe house rented to the CIA to observe Osama bin Laden's compound before the U.S. raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, as well as a "handful" of other Pakistanis, a U.S. official said late Tuesday.

In Pakistan, a Western official confirmed a New York Times report [see above] that five of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the CIA before the May 2 raid were arrested by Pakistan's top military spy agency.

The officials spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.[...]

"Hollowed out" Mexico and hollowed-out USA

The Republic of International Community as seen from satellite

CNN and FNC -- America's two national cable TV all-news channels -- have been too busy during the past week reporting on the murder trial of Casey Anthony and the antics of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to squeeze in reporting on Mexico (actually they're always too busy to do more than glance at Mexico) so in the manner of a public service I present links to the following recent reports on Mexico. All the reports are important but I think the Reuters one is the 'must read' and biggest shocker.

June 1 - Reuters, Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.

June 2 - The Los Angeles Times, How many have died in Mexico's drug war?

June 5 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexico peace tour: How the drug war changed once-calm Cuernavaca

June 7 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexican drug traffickers' latest weapon: 'monster' narco-tanks

June 8 - Wall Street Journal, Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

A companion read is Zenpundit Mark Safranski's April 5 review of Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries, a series of monographs edited by Dr. Robert J. Bunker. Before I quote Mark's summary of the book, in which he mentions the need for better U.S. policy on Mexico, an aside:

I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn't know this because he doesn't watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC - Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.

I myself speak of the "country" of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.

As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.

(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner's texting problem not because he's a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton's closest aide and they didn't want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)

So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let's examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.

One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn't indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I'd be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.

Later this week or the next I'll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I'll just say that I think Mexico's type of racism is the true "virus" that Dr Bunker talks about.

Now to Mark's summary (see the article at Zenpundit for links to topics and sources):

[...] Narcos Over the Border. ... is one of the more disturbing academic works recently published in the national security field, not excluding even those monographs dealing with Islamist terrorism and Pakistan. If the authors of this granular examination of Mexico’s immense problems with warring narco-cartels, mercenary assassins, systemic corruption, 3rd generation gangs and emerging “Narcocultas”of Santa Muerte are correct - and I suspect they are - Mexico’s creeping path toward state failure reprsents a threat to American national security of the first order.
[...]
Some impressions I gained from reading Narcos Over the Border include:

> The Narco-Cartels and the Zetas, which fight each other as well as Mexico’s military (Mexican police generally are infiltrated, intimidated, outgunned and seriously outclassed by the Cartel gunmen, Zetas and Guatemalan Kaibiles) are better armed and better trained than are the Taliban. The deadly and efficient Zetas and Kaibiles are superior to regular Mexican military forces and have established safe haven training camps in Central America.

> Narco-cartels are properly speaking, no longer narco-cartels but transnational criminal syndicates involved in a wider array of revenue generating activities, but with professional intelligence and military capabilities, and increasingly, political, social and religious agendas that are functionally reminiscient of Hezbollah and HAMAS.

> The Mexican state is severely hampered in its response to the threat presented by the cartels by its own strategic use of corruption as a cost-saving measure and a tool for sustaining elite control of Mexican politics, as well as a method of personal enrichment by members of Mexico’s ruling class.

> The eschewing of the extreme violence by the cartels North of the border appears to be more of a sign of a strategic policy by cartel and Zeta bosses than a lack of capacity or evidence of a lack of infiltration into American society. To the contrary, Mexican cartel links to acutely dangerous American prison and street gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and MS-13 are significant and well documented.

> The cartels are global, not regional or local operators.

> The culture of the Narco-cartels, which draws on some romantic Mexican social and religious underground traditions, particularly the hybrid cartel La Familia, is morphing into a very dangerous “Narcocultas”, a neo-pagan, folk religion featuring ritualistic violence, beheadings and torture-murders carried out for reasons other than economic competition.

[See also Zenpundit's summary , Skulls and Human Sacrifice: Bunker and Sullivan on Societal Warfare at Small Wars Journal]

> Mexico has departed the realm of having a serious law enforcement problem and has graduated to a significant counterinsurgency war against the cartels in which the Mexican state is treading water or making progress against some cartels (possibly displacing their activities to weaker states in Central America).

The authors do not assume the worst-case scenario for Mexico; i.e., state collapse, but rather an insidious “hollowing out” of the state by the cartels and a mutation of Mexico’s native culture to host a 4GW nightmare. As Robert Bunker writes:

What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a “rotting corpse” but potentially something far worse - akin to a body infected by a malicious virus.

Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few bariers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new infection. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

... conceivably derived from norms based on slaveholding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification and the desecration of the dead.

While meticulous, Narcos Over the Border is not all-encompassing in scope. A fundamentally Mexico-centric collection of scholarly articles, it does not deal extensively with American policymakers involved in Mexico’s narco-insurgency, the intricacies of cartel financial operations or undertake case studies of narco activities in Mexican-American communities, though the authors do track narco-cartel and gang presence in cyberspace.

Narcos Over the Border represents a starting point for deeper investigation of narco-insurgency and for a national security community that has thus far treated Mexico as a third-tier problem, a policy call to arms. Strongly recommended.

LOL -- Bad Pundita! Don't laugh it's not funny! ROFL I'll give you a cookie if you stop laughing hahahaha stop it!

Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani “capture” of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in [US] Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad.

From Christopher Hitchens's slam on Pakistan for the July issue of Vanity Fair. I haven't even gotten halfway through the piece I'm laughing so hard snort don't snort Pundita it's not ladylike.

Oh gosh [wiping tears of laughter] this is what they mean by trench humor, or maybe it's called going insane after almost ten years of closely following the war on terror.

How U.S. can win the Afghan War, in eight steps

1. Set aside all talk of an 'insurgency' in Afghanistan. Proceed on the forest-thinning principle; i.e., first clear out all the Taliban fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan on behalf of Pakistan's military, then see how much of a genuine insurgency is left to deal with.

2. Recognize that the greatest obstacle to winning the war isn't the Taliban or even Pakistan's regime; the obstacle is that Washington has reasoned itself into a false dilemma regarding Pakistan's sheltering of Taliban that wreak murder and mayhem in Afghanistan.

3. State the dilemma in plain English to see how silly it is: EITHER start a war with Pakistan OR continue to put up with the protection its military affords Taliban groups it finds useful.

4. Reflect on how the Taliban came into being, and how certain among them became useful to Pakistan's military, to understand that Washington has made a mountain out of a molehill and called this a dilemma.

5. Admit the dilemma is an illusion after considering this simple example:

Say I provide much of your material support, then I see you engaging in behavior I consider not only destructive but also an attack on me. I repeatedly warn you to stop the behavior but each time I do so, I give you $1,000.

How, then, how would you read my words? As a warning to stop the behavior? Or as encouragement to continue the behavior -- encouragement that for some reason I don't wish to clearly articulate?

6. So much for the dilemma. As to why official Washington ignores the obvious, I think there's more than one reason. But Washington continues to find support for its refusal to confront the obvious by taking refuge in the pronouncements of opinion experts it consults on Pakistan. This is an old story, by the way, not limited to Pakistan and the Afghan War.

The same old story is that Washington decides that people in X country are from another planet and thus, it will take experts with very specialized knowledge to explain how the aliens think; e.g., Christine "I can translate Urdu into English" Fair.

From listening to these experts, who have no moorings whatsoever in common sense, Washington gets so confused that the next thing the world knows Americans are once again wrestling with a huge dilemma. Recognize that this approach to problem-solving has created chaos in Afghanistan.

7. To wrest order from chaos recall that human nature is the same for all, including Pakistanis; ergo, Washington should try something new and act human in its relations with Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Do this first, then see how much of threat remains from Pakistan.

Acting human includes not repeatedly sending mixed signals and not grandstanding for the press; conveying seriousness to Pakistan's leaders is best done behind closed doors.

I should add that always sending mixed signals greatly angers not only humans but every kind of mammalian creature that must endure the mixed signals; that's because mixed signals are perceived as a ploy to establish complete control by sowing constant confusion.

8. The catch is that even after Pakistan's military sets to work rolling up the Taliban, it's waited so long to do so that a veritable army of Frankensteins has spawned in Pakistan and many of these aren't Taliban.

However, there is a workaround. The military can explain to Pakistan's media that it's now their job to explain to the Pakistani public that it's a new day, which means among other things that the military is inviting the USA to work under their direction in helping them clean up Dodge City.

If you tell me it can't be that simple -- only if Pakistanis are from another planet is it not that simple. But I didn't say it was easy because Washington finds it very hard to be consistent for more than 15 minutes in a row. Consistency is what's needed to convey to Pakistan's military that the USA is deadly serious about no longer supporting a government that supports the killing of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

But then if it is that simple, things would resolve themselves so quickly in Afghanistan that NATO would have little excuse to remain there in force for decades on end. This means NATO couldn't continue to use Afghans as experimental subjects for every development idea that legions of contractors and subcontractors can think up and bill for.

From that point of view some might argue it's better for Washington to go on seeing Pakistanis -- and Afghans, for that matter -- as aliens. That tack certainly keeps legions of opinion experts gainfully employed, but a better tack for the United States is to pull off a decisive victory in Afghanistan.

Amazing but true there are times I like MI6. This is one of those times.

From Gates of Vienna News Feed for Friday, June 3:

In other news, MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, successfully hacked an Al Qaeda website and substituted a cupcake recipe for what were supposed to be downloadable instructions for building bombs from household materials.

See this link at GOV for more on the story of MI6 being naughty.

Police find body of Syed Saleem Shahzad; say he was tortured, killed

See this May 31 TIME report, published while there was still hope Shahzad was alive, for extensive background; report was updated at 10:00 AM EDT to reflect reports of his death.

June 1, Asia Times Online:

[HONG KONG] Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief for Asia Times Online who went missing on Sunday evening, has been killed, according to police. ...

Police reported that his body was found in a canal in Mandi Bahauddin in Punjab province about 150 kilometers southeast of Islamabad and about 10 kilometers from where his car was found. They said that his body bore marks of torture.

He leaves a wife, two sons aged 14 and seven, and a daughter aged 12. ...

Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani expressed his "deep grief and sorrow" over Shahzad's death and ordered an immediate inquiry into his kidnapping and murder, according to Associated Press of Pakistan. ...

Shahzad, who has been writing for Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online for nearly 10 years, failed to show up for a scheduled appearance on a television talk show in the capital Islamabad.

Earlier, the International Federation of Journalists released a statement saying it "urgently appeals to the Government of Pakistan to order its security and police agencies to respond immediately to find a senior journalist who disappeared in Islamabad on May 29".

Shahzad, 40, had on several occasions been warned by officials of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) over articles they deemed to be detrimental to Pakistan's national interests or image.

Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dayan Hasan earlier said he suspected ISI officials abducted Shahzad, possibly because of a recent story he wrote on al-Qaeda infiltration in the Pakistani navy. Authorities haven't commented. (Al-Qaeda had warned of Pakistan strike.)

Tony Allison, the Editor of Asia Times Online, expressed his deep concern for one of the most fearless journalists with whom he had ever worked. "We will bring the utmost pressure to bear on the authorities over this case. We at Asia Times Online express our deepest sympathies for Saleem's family."