Opportunistic Obama
The U.S. President is both politically pragmatic and politically opportunistic.
He knows he can't win in 2012 on the Economy because of his abysmal, dismal performance on JOBS. That is a campaign promise he made but did not keep. Instead he prioritized Healthcare. If you don't have a job can you pay for healthcare?
So today, Obama's trying to capture the anti-war, anti-GREED, peace and unity vote that has coalesced at OWS -- Occupy Wall Street.
Whatever.
I feel relieved the USCIA is supposedly planning to get out of Iraq.
USCIA -- Get out of South Asia too.
Enough already.
Get out already.
---------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html
by Mark Lander
=================================================================================
Showing posts with label USCIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USCIA. Show all posts
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Rockets' Red Glare -- from Pak Against the US!
The Rockets' Red Glare -- from Pak Against the US!
The USCIA manipulated Pakistan's military and govt for 60+ years, since the early 50's, the US got Pakistan to fight its US-invented Cold War, trained terrorists on Pakistan and Afghan sovereign soil.
Both Pakistan and Afghanistan's internally weak post-colonial governments took the US bait but also engaged in war profiteering and terror against their own people.
These US-initiated marriages were headed, from the word go, for Divorce Court, way way before the PAKISI and its proxy, the Haqqani,started firing the rockets on US posts (read occupation), mentioned in your article.
You sow what you reap, US.
Ditto Pak and Afghanistan.
In India, we did not allow one US soldier to set foot on Indian soil. We stayed out of your fabricated Cold War. We maintained cordial relations with both the US and the Soviets, and signed a strategic "treaty of friendship and cooperation" with the Soviets while building a vibrant democracy based on our own Gandhi-led liberation struggle.
See the resulting difference?
Learn from this, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The USCIA will not.
------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/world/asia/cross-border-fire-frustrates-american-troops-in-afghanistan.html
The USCIA manipulated Pakistan's military and govt for 60+ years, since the early 50's, the US got Pakistan to fight its US-invented Cold War, trained terrorists on Pakistan and Afghan sovereign soil.
Both Pakistan and Afghanistan's internally weak post-colonial governments took the US bait but also engaged in war profiteering and terror against their own people.
These US-initiated marriages were headed, from the word go, for Divorce Court, way way before the PAKISI and its proxy, the Haqqani,started firing the rockets on US posts (read occupation), mentioned in your article.
You sow what you reap, US.
Ditto Pak and Afghanistan.
In India, we did not allow one US soldier to set foot on Indian soil. We stayed out of your fabricated Cold War. We maintained cordial relations with both the US and the Soviets, and signed a strategic "treaty of friendship and cooperation" with the Soviets while building a vibrant democracy based on our own Gandhi-led liberation struggle.
See the resulting difference?
Learn from this, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The USCIA will not.
------------------------------------
New York Times copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/world/asia/cross-border-fire-frustrates-american-troops-in-afghanistan.html
Friday, October 7, 2011
US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/united-states-aims-to-encourage-change-in-myanmar.html#preview
US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar
The New York Times headline is misleading or at best overly sanguine about US motives.
The Myanmarese PEOPLE, yes PEOPLE, can effect their own Change.
They have already proved they can. They know how to choose their own leaders.
For the US this is an opportunity to appear they are promoting democracy, but in fact trying to gain strategic depth in South Asia, and yes to supposedly contain China.
Let South Asia and South East Asia, neighbors with common borders, negotiate their own creative, sustainable, sovereign nation-state geopolitical solutions.
US, stay out.
The argument I am making is NOT to ask the US govt. to return to an earlier unproductive policy of "isolationism."
However, a policy ff "interventionism" which is what the US has done pretty much across the world for the past 55 years is unwarranted and counterproductive.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=======================================
NYTimes article follows, their copyright
Detecting a Thaw in Myanmar, U.S. Aims to Encourage Change
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOMAS FULLER
Published: October 6, 2011
WASHINGTON — The United States is considering a significant shift in its long-strained relationship with the autocratic government of Myanmar, including relaxing restrictions on financial assistance and taking other steps to encourage what senior American officials describe as startling political changes in the country.
Enlarge This Image
Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency
Myanmar's new government has met with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, center.
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
The American special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, met with government and opposition leaders in Yangon last month.
The thawing, while in its early stages, follows a political transition in Myanmar after deeply flawed elections last year that nonetheless appears to have raised the possibility that the new government will ease its restrictions on basic freedoms and cooperate with the repressed opposition movement led by the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The new president, U Thein Sein, a former general who was part of the military junta that ruled the country for two decades, has in six months in office signaled a sharp break from the highly centralized and erratic policies of the past. Mr. Thein Sein’s government is now rewriting laws on taxes and property ownership, loosening restrictions on the media and even discussing the release of political prisoners.
The apparent shift offers the United States the chance to improve ties with a resource-rich Southeast Asian nation that after many years of semi-isolation counts neighboring China as its main ally. Last week, Myanmar’s new leadership unexpectedly halted work on a $3.6 billion dam strongly backed by China, prompting angry criticism from the Chinese government and the state-owned Chinese company that was building it.
The Obama administration, though skeptical, has responded to this new openness with a series of small diplomatic steps of its own, hoping that a democratic transition in Myanmar could bring stability and greater economic opportunities to the region at a time of increasing American competition with China over influence in Asia.
“We’re going to meet their action with action,” the administration’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, said in an interview. “If they take steps, we will take steps to demonstrate that we are supportive of the path to reform.” Mr. Mitchell spent five days last month in Myanmar, meeting with senior leaders in the government and opposition. That visit was followed by two meetings in New York and Washington last week between senior State Department officials and Myanmar’s new foreign minister, U Wunna Maung Lwin.
Mr. Wunna Maung Lwin, whose travel in the United States is normally sharply restricted, was the first foreign minister from Myanmar invited to the State Department since the military junta took power.
The motivation for the changes has baffled American officials and others, but Myanmar appears eager to end its diplomatic isolation and rebuild a dysfunctional economy that has trapped the country’s population of 55 million people in poverty, which the government acknowledged for the first time in Mr. Thein Sein’s inaugural address in March.
Members of Mr. Thein Sein’s government have since met several times with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from years of house arrest last November and whose name was so demonized by the previous junta that it was typically whispered in public. She, too, has expressed cautious support for what appears to be a political opening.
The government has also for the first time discussed with her and American officials the possibility of releasing hundreds of political prisoners, after years of denying there were any at all. The government has even assembled a list of those it is considering releasing. About 600 people are on it, though opposition leaders and diplomats say that there are nearly 2,000 political prisoners listed in a database compiled by an organization in Thailand. “We told the government we cannot accept their list,” said U Win Tin, a founding member of the National League for Democracy, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. “We gave that message to the government, but we don’t know yet whether they will change their list.”
Even so, the senior administration official said that the mere acknowledgment that Myanmar held political prisoners reflected a significant shift in the new government’s attitude. Signals like that, even if tentative, have begun to win over skeptics who have seen false dawns before in Myanmar.
“It’s very exciting,” said Priscilla A. Clapp, who was the chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Myanmar from 1999 to 2002. “They are moving into a more pluralistic form of government. I wouldn’t call it totally democratic. But things are changing very rapidly.”
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
p 2
(Page 2 of 2)
Ms. Clapp and others warned that the changes, which are exceeding expectations inside Myanmar and abroad, remained a work in progress. “Any transition this dramatic is a recipe for instability,” she said. “Anything can happen. There could be a coup, a counterrevolution.”
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who led the junta for nearly two decades and stepped down in March, remains an uncertain factor in the tumultuous transition. It was under General Than Shwe’s leadership that the government carried out a deadly crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007 and restricted foreign aid in the aftermath of a cyclone that killed more than 100,000 people.
The reasons that General Than Shwe ceded power to the current government have not been fully explained beyond the notion that he was ready for retirement. In leading the drive for reforms, Mr. Thein Sein appears to be siding with a younger generation of military officers who believe that maintaining the junta’s oppressive policies and hermetic attitudes toward the outside world would be a dead-end path for the country.
The decision by Mr. Thein Sein last week to suspend work on the giant hydroelectric dam on the Irrawaddy River was interpreted by many as a sign that the president was moving out from under the shadow of General Than Shwe.
Obama administration officials are now debating additional steps to support the nascent changes and encourage more, including the creation of a truly democratic political system and an end to violence against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. The outreach is being closely coordinated with Congress, with other countries, including members of the European Union, and with Myanmar’s opposition.
“We’re not looking to move I think any faster than anyone else here,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I think we’re all looking to move step by step. We are going to test. There is no single point where we are absolutely certain that reform is going to be sustained and irreversible.”
Myanmar faces American sanctions first imposed in 1997 and expanded as recently as 2008. One hundred senior officials or businesses remain on the Department of the Treasury’s list banning any commercial trade. Lifting those sanctions would require new legislation in Congress. That is unlikely to happen unless Myanmar convinces its critics that its transformation is fundamental.
In the meantime, though, the administration is considering waiving some restrictions on trade and financial assistance and lifting prohibitions on assistance by global financial institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An I.M.F. team is scheduled to visit this month for consultations on modernizing the country’s exchange rate system and lifting restrictions on international transactions.
Assistance like that is needed to overhaul what for years was a Soviet-style planned economy, where the military ran factories producing soap and bicycles. Ancient-looking cars still ride on potholed roads, and some buildings look as if their last coat of paint was applied during the days when Myanmar was a British colony, known as Burma.
Many in Myanmar remain unconvinced that genuine democracy has arrived.
“All these Western countries are hearing about some changes and they are very happy and keen,” said Mr. Win Tin of the opposition party. “I think that’s wrong. They should listen very carefully and wait to see whether what this government calls change is real and genuine.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed that caution. She recently noted what she called “welcome gestures” but raised a series of issues. “We have serious questions and concerns across a wide range of issues — from Burma’s treatment of ethnic minorities and more than 2,000 prisoners to its relations with North Korea,” she said, using Myanmar’s colonial name, which is official American policy.
She added that the day before she spoke, a 21-year-old journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Myanmar.
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
===================================================================================
US/CIA -- Stay out of Myanmar
The New York Times headline is misleading or at best overly sanguine about US motives.
The Myanmarese PEOPLE, yes PEOPLE, can effect their own Change.
They have already proved they can. They know how to choose their own leaders.
For the US this is an opportunity to appear they are promoting democracy, but in fact trying to gain strategic depth in South Asia, and yes to supposedly contain China.
Let South Asia and South East Asia, neighbors with common borders, negotiate their own creative, sustainable, sovereign nation-state geopolitical solutions.
US, stay out.
The argument I am making is NOT to ask the US govt. to return to an earlier unproductive policy of "isolationism."
However, a policy ff "interventionism" which is what the US has done pretty much across the world for the past 55 years is unwarranted and counterproductive.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=======================================
NYTimes article follows, their copyright
Detecting a Thaw in Myanmar, U.S. Aims to Encourage Change
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOMAS FULLER
Published: October 6, 2011
WASHINGTON — The United States is considering a significant shift in its long-strained relationship with the autocratic government of Myanmar, including relaxing restrictions on financial assistance and taking other steps to encourage what senior American officials describe as startling political changes in the country.
Enlarge This Image
Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency
Myanmar's new government has met with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, center.
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
The American special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, met with government and opposition leaders in Yangon last month.
The thawing, while in its early stages, follows a political transition in Myanmar after deeply flawed elections last year that nonetheless appears to have raised the possibility that the new government will ease its restrictions on basic freedoms and cooperate with the repressed opposition movement led by the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The new president, U Thein Sein, a former general who was part of the military junta that ruled the country for two decades, has in six months in office signaled a sharp break from the highly centralized and erratic policies of the past. Mr. Thein Sein’s government is now rewriting laws on taxes and property ownership, loosening restrictions on the media and even discussing the release of political prisoners.
The apparent shift offers the United States the chance to improve ties with a resource-rich Southeast Asian nation that after many years of semi-isolation counts neighboring China as its main ally. Last week, Myanmar’s new leadership unexpectedly halted work on a $3.6 billion dam strongly backed by China, prompting angry criticism from the Chinese government and the state-owned Chinese company that was building it.
The Obama administration, though skeptical, has responded to this new openness with a series of small diplomatic steps of its own, hoping that a democratic transition in Myanmar could bring stability and greater economic opportunities to the region at a time of increasing American competition with China over influence in Asia.
“We’re going to meet their action with action,” the administration’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, said in an interview. “If they take steps, we will take steps to demonstrate that we are supportive of the path to reform.” Mr. Mitchell spent five days last month in Myanmar, meeting with senior leaders in the government and opposition. That visit was followed by two meetings in New York and Washington last week between senior State Department officials and Myanmar’s new foreign minister, U Wunna Maung Lwin.
Mr. Wunna Maung Lwin, whose travel in the United States is normally sharply restricted, was the first foreign minister from Myanmar invited to the State Department since the military junta took power.
The motivation for the changes has baffled American officials and others, but Myanmar appears eager to end its diplomatic isolation and rebuild a dysfunctional economy that has trapped the country’s population of 55 million people in poverty, which the government acknowledged for the first time in Mr. Thein Sein’s inaugural address in March.
Members of Mr. Thein Sein’s government have since met several times with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released from years of house arrest last November and whose name was so demonized by the previous junta that it was typically whispered in public. She, too, has expressed cautious support for what appears to be a political opening.
The government has also for the first time discussed with her and American officials the possibility of releasing hundreds of political prisoners, after years of denying there were any at all. The government has even assembled a list of those it is considering releasing. About 600 people are on it, though opposition leaders and diplomats say that there are nearly 2,000 political prisoners listed in a database compiled by an organization in Thailand. “We told the government we cannot accept their list,” said U Win Tin, a founding member of the National League for Democracy, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. “We gave that message to the government, but we don’t know yet whether they will change their list.”
Even so, the senior administration official said that the mere acknowledgment that Myanmar held political prisoners reflected a significant shift in the new government’s attitude. Signals like that, even if tentative, have begun to win over skeptics who have seen false dawns before in Myanmar.
“It’s very exciting,” said Priscilla A. Clapp, who was the chief of mission at the United States Embassy in Myanmar from 1999 to 2002. “They are moving into a more pluralistic form of government. I wouldn’t call it totally democratic. But things are changing very rapidly.”
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
p 2
(Page 2 of 2)
Ms. Clapp and others warned that the changes, which are exceeding expectations inside Myanmar and abroad, remained a work in progress. “Any transition this dramatic is a recipe for instability,” she said. “Anything can happen. There could be a coup, a counterrevolution.”
Related
Burmese Wary of ‘Democracy,’ After Decades of Oppression (August 26, 2011)
Times Topic: Myanmar
Senior Gen. Than Shwe, who led the junta for nearly two decades and stepped down in March, remains an uncertain factor in the tumultuous transition. It was under General Than Shwe’s leadership that the government carried out a deadly crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007 and restricted foreign aid in the aftermath of a cyclone that killed more than 100,000 people.
The reasons that General Than Shwe ceded power to the current government have not been fully explained beyond the notion that he was ready for retirement. In leading the drive for reforms, Mr. Thein Sein appears to be siding with a younger generation of military officers who believe that maintaining the junta’s oppressive policies and hermetic attitudes toward the outside world would be a dead-end path for the country.
The decision by Mr. Thein Sein last week to suspend work on the giant hydroelectric dam on the Irrawaddy River was interpreted by many as a sign that the president was moving out from under the shadow of General Than Shwe.
Obama administration officials are now debating additional steps to support the nascent changes and encourage more, including the creation of a truly democratic political system and an end to violence against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. The outreach is being closely coordinated with Congress, with other countries, including members of the European Union, and with Myanmar’s opposition.
“We’re not looking to move I think any faster than anyone else here,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I think we’re all looking to move step by step. We are going to test. There is no single point where we are absolutely certain that reform is going to be sustained and irreversible.”
Myanmar faces American sanctions first imposed in 1997 and expanded as recently as 2008. One hundred senior officials or businesses remain on the Department of the Treasury’s list banning any commercial trade. Lifting those sanctions would require new legislation in Congress. That is unlikely to happen unless Myanmar convinces its critics that its transformation is fundamental.
In the meantime, though, the administration is considering waiving some restrictions on trade and financial assistance and lifting prohibitions on assistance by global financial institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An I.M.F. team is scheduled to visit this month for consultations on modernizing the country’s exchange rate system and lifting restrictions on international transactions.
Assistance like that is needed to overhaul what for years was a Soviet-style planned economy, where the military ran factories producing soap and bicycles. Ancient-looking cars still ride on potholed roads, and some buildings look as if their last coat of paint was applied during the days when Myanmar was a British colony, known as Burma.
Many in Myanmar remain unconvinced that genuine democracy has arrived.
“All these Western countries are hearing about some changes and they are very happy and keen,” said Mr. Win Tin of the opposition party. “I think that’s wrong. They should listen very carefully and wait to see whether what this government calls change is real and genuine.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed that caution. She recently noted what she called “welcome gestures” but raised a series of issues. “We have serious questions and concerns across a wide range of issues — from Burma’s treatment of ethnic minorities and more than 2,000 prisoners to its relations with North Korea,” she said, using Myanmar’s colonial name, which is official American policy.
She added that the day before she spoke, a 21-year-old journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Myanmar.
Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Thomas Fuller from Bangkok.
===================================================================================
Monday, October 3, 2011
Haqqanis, USCIA, PakISI in Kashmir
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/asia/americans-raid-haqqani-byways-of-afghanistan.html
Haqqanis, USCIA PAKISI in Kashmir
It is important to put 2 news story streams together:
1. 2500+ unmarked graves recently discovered along the India-Pak border in divided Kashmir.
2. the attacks on US forces by the Haqqanis along the Af-Pak border.
If we don't put these stories together the daily terror narratives emanating from the Pentagon, Kabul and Pakistan might appear baffling and discrete or at the very least, confusing.
Even though India never has, and never would permit the US to put its bloody boots on the ground anywhere in India, the Indian state of Jammu Kashmir Ladakh (JKL), particularly the Kashmir Valley has long being targeted by the PakISI who hire the Haqqanis and their rivals, to supply suicide bombers whenever and wherever needed -- from Mumbai to Kashmir
Q. But how can Pak afford a decades-long terror infiltration in which cash flow and weapons must be sustained over 55 years? Enter the USA.
The US, even before the Cold War, over 55 years has armed, paid and trained the Haqqanis and many of the Haqqanis' rivals, through the PakISI. It is called the US aid package to Pakistan.
PakISI has, not surprisingly, used the cash and weapons provided by the US, to further their own objectives, the focus of which is the destabilization of Indian Kashmir.
The 2500+ unmarked graves along the LoC (the UN-monitored Line of Control)are mainly of the desperate young men who were paid indirectly through the 'aid package\" by the USA -- and armed, trained and deployed by the PakISI.
I have heard these stories, unsolicited, for 5 years, narrated directly to me in the Kashmir Valley.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/asia/americans-raid-haqqani-byways-of-afghanistan.html
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: October 2, 2011
CHARBARAN, Afghanistan — The first helicopter landed in the bluish gray gloom before dawn. More than 20 members of an American reconnaissance platoon and Afghan troops accompanying them jogged out through the swirling dust, moving into a forest smelling of sage and pine.
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Americans Move Against Haqqani Network in Afghanistan
Related
Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan (September 25, 2011)
Times Topic: Haqqani Network
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Three more helicopters followed, and soon roughly 100 troops were on the floor of this high-elevation valley in Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan. They were beginning their portion of a brigade-size operation to disrupt the Haqqani network, the insurgent group that collaborates with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and that has become a primary focus of American counterterrorism efforts since Osama bin Laden was killed.
The group, based in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier, flows fighters into Afghanistan and has orchestrated a long campaign of guerrilla and terrorist attacks against the Afghan government and its American sponsors.
Its close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, and Pakistan’s unwillingness to act against the Haqqani headquarters in Miram Shah, a city not far from the Afghan border, have drawn condemnation from Washington and escalated tensions between two nations that officially have been counterterrorism partners.
Against this backdrop, the helicopter assault into Charbaran this past week highlighted both the false starts and the latest set of urgent goals guiding the American military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon plans to have withdrawn most of its forces from the country by 2014. Talk among many officers has shifted sharply from discussions of establishing Afghan democracy or a robust government to a more pragmatic and realistic military ambition: doing what can be done in the little time left.
In the tactical sense, this translates to straightforward tasks for units in the security buffer along the border. While they still have their peak troop presence, American commanders are trying to bloody the strongest of the armed antigovernment groups and to put thousands more Afghan police officers and soldiers into contested areas.
The long-term ambition is that Afghan forces will have the skills and resolve to stand up to the insurgency as the Americans pull back.
And yet, even while looking beyond 2014, American units must fight a day-to-day war.
One element lies in trying to prevent more of the carefully planned attacks that have shaken Kabul, the Afghan capital, several times this year. The attacks — striking prominent targets, like the capital’s premier hotel and the American Embassy — have often been organized by the Haqqanis, and have highlighted the Afghan government’s vulnerability and the insurgents’ resiliency.
Lt. Col. John V. Meyer, who commands the Second Battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment, which used two companies to cordon off the Charbaran Valley and another to sweep the villages, called the operation “a spoiling attack to prevent a spectacular attack in the Kabul area.” It was also intended, he said, to gather intelligence.
The Charbaran Valley has become one of the main routes for Haqqani fighters to enter Afghanistan. They generally come in on foot, American officers say, and then, after staying overnight in safe houses and tent camps, they work their way toward Kabul or other areas where they have been sent to fight.
Mid-level Haqqani leaders also meet in the valley’s villages, American officers said, including near an abandoned school and the ruins of a government center that the United States built earlier in the war but that local fighters had destroyed by 2008.
It was 2010 when the last conventional unit entered the valley. An infantry company, it landed by helicopter and was caught in a two-hour gunfight as it left.
When the American and Afghan troops fanned out this time, their mission faced a familiar law of guerrilla war: when conventional forces arrive in force, guerrillas often disperse, setting aside weapons to watch the soldiers pass by.
---
Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan
Published: October 2, 2011
(Page 2 of 2)
The operation was also probably no surprise to the Haqqani fighters in the valley, American officers said, because during the days of preparation some of the Afghan troops probably leaked that the assault was coming.
Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan (September 25, 2011)
Times Topic: Haqqani Network
As the soldiers climbed the hills — laden with body armor and backpacks heavy with water and ammunition — they almost immediately found signs of the fighters’ presence.
In the first house they entered, not far from the landing zone, only two women and several children were home. The men had all left.
Inside, the Afghan troops uncovered a case of ammunition fired by both PK machine guns and Dragunov sniper rifles. They also found two bandoleers of .303-caliber ammunition for the dated Lee-Enfield rifles that remain a common insurgent arm.
Capt. Nicholas C. Sinclair, the company commander, ordered the Afghan troops to confiscate the ammunition. The younger woman protested loudly.
“There have been many American soldiers here, and they always left it,” she said.
This, the Americans said, was most likely a lie. An Afghan police officer packed away the ammunition. The company walked off.
Later, at the now-abandoned school, which the Haqqani and Taliban fighters had forced to close, the soldiers were greeted by a taunting note written in white chalk above the main entrance.
“Taliban is good,” it read, in English.
The school, the soldiers said, was evidence of an earlier setback. According to those who advanced the counterinsurgency doctrine that swept through the American military several years ago, building schools was supposed to help turn valleys like this one around.
Instead, it was shut down by the same fighters who overran the government center and chased the police away. It stands empty — a marker of good intentions gone awry, and of time and resources lost before this latest battalion inherited duties in the province.
More signs of the fighters soon emerged. At the edge of the Charbaran bazaar, where the Haqqani and Taliban fighters were said to gather, Second Lt. Mark P. Adams, a fire support officer, glanced into a woodpile he was using for cover and saw a makeshift bomb.
The weapon — fashioned from 120-millimeter and 82-millimeter mortar rounds attached to roughly 10 pounds of homemade explosives — was powerful but not armed. It apparently had been hidden there but was meant to have been moved to a road frequented by the Afghan and American troops.
Staff Sgt. Robert Blanco, an explosive-ordnance disposal specialist, put a small explosive charge against it and detonated the bomb in place.
Soon the soldiers climbed a mountain, joining the rest of the battalion, to sleep in the relative safety of a higher ridge.
The next morning, as the sweep resumed, one elder, Ghul Mohammad, sat with First Lt. Tony E. Nicosia, an American platoon leader, as Afghan and American soldiers searched the shops a second time.
There was a ritual familiarity to their exchange, a product of a war entering its second decade.
“When you come here, that’s a big problem for us,” the elder said. “Because after you leave the Taliban comes and asks us about you, and they take our food and are not paying for it.”
Whether this was true could not be determined from this conversation alone; many villagers, the Afghan and American soldiers said, support Taliban and Haqqani fighters.
The soldiers also said that at least some of the men gathered around them were probably fighters, at least part time, who had set down their weapons for the brief period that the Americans had a large presence in the valley.
“We understand your concerns and, hopefully, we can push some security in here,” Lieutenant Nicosia said politely.
Ghul Mohammad nodded. “I cannot do anything about it,” he said. “I want my God to bring security here.”
The Americans shouldered their equipment and began the walk to the next buildings, on the opposite side of the valley.
Throughout the operation, hidden fighters were occasionally heard over the two-way radios that Afghan interpreters were monitoring for intelligence. The guerrillas had threatened to ambush the reconnaissance company.
After the American and Afghan soldiers reached the opposite slope, the guerrillas managed their only attack: they fired four mortar rounds from outside the cordon.
The rounds exploded well behind the soldiers, near the abandoned school, causing no harm but making clear that Charbaran, which had fallen almost silent as the company moved through, remained out of government hands.
===================================================================================
Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan
Haqqanis, USCIA PAKISI in Kashmir
It is important to put 2 news story streams together:
1. 2500+ unmarked graves recently discovered along the India-Pak border in divided Kashmir.
2. the attacks on US forces by the Haqqanis along the Af-Pak border.
If we don't put these stories together the daily terror narratives emanating from the Pentagon, Kabul and Pakistan might appear baffling and discrete or at the very least, confusing.
Even though India never has, and never would permit the US to put its bloody boots on the ground anywhere in India, the Indian state of Jammu Kashmir Ladakh (JKL), particularly the Kashmir Valley has long being targeted by the PakISI who hire the Haqqanis and their rivals, to supply suicide bombers whenever and wherever needed -- from Mumbai to Kashmir
Q. But how can Pak afford a decades-long terror infiltration in which cash flow and weapons must be sustained over 55 years? Enter the USA.
The US, even before the Cold War, over 55 years has armed, paid and trained the Haqqanis and many of the Haqqanis' rivals, through the PakISI. It is called the US aid package to Pakistan.
PakISI has, not surprisingly, used the cash and weapons provided by the US, to further their own objectives, the focus of which is the destabilization of Indian Kashmir.
The 2500+ unmarked graves along the LoC (the UN-monitored Line of Control)are mainly of the desperate young men who were paid indirectly through the 'aid package\" by the USA -- and armed, trained and deployed by the PakISI.
I have heard these stories, unsolicited, for 5 years, narrated directly to me in the Kashmir Valley.
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/asia/americans-raid-haqqani-byways-of-afghanistan.html
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: October 2, 2011
CHARBARAN, Afghanistan — The first helicopter landed in the bluish gray gloom before dawn. More than 20 members of an American reconnaissance platoon and Afghan troops accompanying them jogged out through the swirling dust, moving into a forest smelling of sage and pine.
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Americans Move Against Haqqani Network in Afghanistan
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Three more helicopters followed, and soon roughly 100 troops were on the floor of this high-elevation valley in Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan. They were beginning their portion of a brigade-size operation to disrupt the Haqqani network, the insurgent group that collaborates with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and that has become a primary focus of American counterterrorism efforts since Osama bin Laden was killed.
The group, based in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier, flows fighters into Afghanistan and has orchestrated a long campaign of guerrilla and terrorist attacks against the Afghan government and its American sponsors.
Its close ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, and Pakistan’s unwillingness to act against the Haqqani headquarters in Miram Shah, a city not far from the Afghan border, have drawn condemnation from Washington and escalated tensions between two nations that officially have been counterterrorism partners.
Against this backdrop, the helicopter assault into Charbaran this past week highlighted both the false starts and the latest set of urgent goals guiding the American military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon plans to have withdrawn most of its forces from the country by 2014. Talk among many officers has shifted sharply from discussions of establishing Afghan democracy or a robust government to a more pragmatic and realistic military ambition: doing what can be done in the little time left.
In the tactical sense, this translates to straightforward tasks for units in the security buffer along the border. While they still have their peak troop presence, American commanders are trying to bloody the strongest of the armed antigovernment groups and to put thousands more Afghan police officers and soldiers into contested areas.
The long-term ambition is that Afghan forces will have the skills and resolve to stand up to the insurgency as the Americans pull back.
And yet, even while looking beyond 2014, American units must fight a day-to-day war.
One element lies in trying to prevent more of the carefully planned attacks that have shaken Kabul, the Afghan capital, several times this year. The attacks — striking prominent targets, like the capital’s premier hotel and the American Embassy — have often been organized by the Haqqanis, and have highlighted the Afghan government’s vulnerability and the insurgents’ resiliency.
Lt. Col. John V. Meyer, who commands the Second Battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment, which used two companies to cordon off the Charbaran Valley and another to sweep the villages, called the operation “a spoiling attack to prevent a spectacular attack in the Kabul area.” It was also intended, he said, to gather intelligence.
The Charbaran Valley has become one of the main routes for Haqqani fighters to enter Afghanistan. They generally come in on foot, American officers say, and then, after staying overnight in safe houses and tent camps, they work their way toward Kabul or other areas where they have been sent to fight.
Mid-level Haqqani leaders also meet in the valley’s villages, American officers said, including near an abandoned school and the ruins of a government center that the United States built earlier in the war but that local fighters had destroyed by 2008.
It was 2010 when the last conventional unit entered the valley. An infantry company, it landed by helicopter and was caught in a two-hour gunfight as it left.
When the American and Afghan troops fanned out this time, their mission faced a familiar law of guerrilla war: when conventional forces arrive in force, guerrillas often disperse, setting aside weapons to watch the soldiers pass by.
---
Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan
Published: October 2, 2011
(Page 2 of 2)
The operation was also probably no surprise to the Haqqani fighters in the valley, American officers said, because during the days of preparation some of the Afghan troops probably leaked that the assault was coming.
Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan (September 25, 2011)
Times Topic: Haqqani Network
As the soldiers climbed the hills — laden with body armor and backpacks heavy with water and ammunition — they almost immediately found signs of the fighters’ presence.
In the first house they entered, not far from the landing zone, only two women and several children were home. The men had all left.
Inside, the Afghan troops uncovered a case of ammunition fired by both PK machine guns and Dragunov sniper rifles. They also found two bandoleers of .303-caliber ammunition for the dated Lee-Enfield rifles that remain a common insurgent arm.
Capt. Nicholas C. Sinclair, the company commander, ordered the Afghan troops to confiscate the ammunition. The younger woman protested loudly.
“There have been many American soldiers here, and they always left it,” she said.
This, the Americans said, was most likely a lie. An Afghan police officer packed away the ammunition. The company walked off.
Later, at the now-abandoned school, which the Haqqani and Taliban fighters had forced to close, the soldiers were greeted by a taunting note written in white chalk above the main entrance.
“Taliban is good,” it read, in English.
The school, the soldiers said, was evidence of an earlier setback. According to those who advanced the counterinsurgency doctrine that swept through the American military several years ago, building schools was supposed to help turn valleys like this one around.
Instead, it was shut down by the same fighters who overran the government center and chased the police away. It stands empty — a marker of good intentions gone awry, and of time and resources lost before this latest battalion inherited duties in the province.
More signs of the fighters soon emerged. At the edge of the Charbaran bazaar, where the Haqqani and Taliban fighters were said to gather, Second Lt. Mark P. Adams, a fire support officer, glanced into a woodpile he was using for cover and saw a makeshift bomb.
The weapon — fashioned from 120-millimeter and 82-millimeter mortar rounds attached to roughly 10 pounds of homemade explosives — was powerful but not armed. It apparently had been hidden there but was meant to have been moved to a road frequented by the Afghan and American troops.
Staff Sgt. Robert Blanco, an explosive-ordnance disposal specialist, put a small explosive charge against it and detonated the bomb in place.
Soon the soldiers climbed a mountain, joining the rest of the battalion, to sleep in the relative safety of a higher ridge.
The next morning, as the sweep resumed, one elder, Ghul Mohammad, sat with First Lt. Tony E. Nicosia, an American platoon leader, as Afghan and American soldiers searched the shops a second time.
There was a ritual familiarity to their exchange, a product of a war entering its second decade.
“When you come here, that’s a big problem for us,” the elder said. “Because after you leave the Taliban comes and asks us about you, and they take our food and are not paying for it.”
Whether this was true could not be determined from this conversation alone; many villagers, the Afghan and American soldiers said, support Taliban and Haqqani fighters.
The soldiers also said that at least some of the men gathered around them were probably fighters, at least part time, who had set down their weapons for the brief period that the Americans had a large presence in the valley.
“We understand your concerns and, hopefully, we can push some security in here,” Lieutenant Nicosia said politely.
Ghul Mohammad nodded. “I cannot do anything about it,” he said. “I want my God to bring security here.”
The Americans shouldered their equipment and began the walk to the next buildings, on the opposite side of the valley.
Throughout the operation, hidden fighters were occasionally heard over the two-way radios that Afghan interpreters were monitoring for intelligence. The guerrillas had threatened to ambush the reconnaissance company.
After the American and Afghan soldiers reached the opposite slope, the guerrillas managed their only attack: they fired four mortar rounds from outside the cordon.
The rounds exploded well behind the soldiers, near the abandoned school, causing no harm but making clear that Charbaran, which had fallen almost silent as the company moved through, remained out of government hands.
===================================================================================
Americans Raid Byways of Haqqani Insurgents in Afghanistan
Monday, April 25, 2011
Frayed Fabric of South Asia-US Geopolitics
Frayed Fabric of South Asia-US Geopolitics
Both India and Pakistan governments have respectively dismissed as "false" "unfounded and totally baseless" The Times (London) April 23, 2011 report of "back channel" diplomacy.
The following news story appears to have been faked all the way up and down. Or not.
Because the story was allegedly faked, the question is Why? Actually the more productive line of inquiry would be, why did all the India and Pakistan media run with the news story, before checking whether it was fact?
Look, this is not about building a conspiracy theory. Instead, the story gained weight and credibility because it's really all about the drone-weary, terror-wary PEOPLE, the Aam Janata in India and Pakistan, hoping for some stability, some positive momentum, some hope to keep the positive feelings going, after the heady India double victory against a sporting Sri Lanka side and a fumbling Pakistan team in an unprecedented ALL South Asia 2011 World Cup Cricket Final.
The allegedly fake news report, excerpted from The Times of London states:
"Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy"
"De facto control"? Really? Not so much.
The US controls Pak's foreign policy, which is shaped by the CIA acting in its own interest against various factions of the ISI.
The LeT is therefore funded both directly and indirectly by the USCIA.
The CIA dictates US Govt's Foreign policy, not the other way around.
[Most recent example, CIA operatives are and have long been in Libya]
That is the rocky, murky terrain of South Asia-US geopolitics that Manmohan Singh, born in Pakistan (!) has to negotiate. The tragedy of Partition becomes more real every day.
Further, the Times article states Manmohan sent "an unofficial envoy" to talk to Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
I lived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and saw the raped and pregnant Bengali Hindu women, broken but still survivors, enter the streets as brutalized refugees from Dacca (now Dhaka).
Kayani (b. 1952, same year as ISI head honcho Shuja Pasha) was commissioned, age 19, a highly impressionable age, in the year (1971) that the Pakistan Army was driven out of East Bengal under the leadership of Libertador Sheikh Mujb-ur-Rahman (BangaBandhu) and East Bengal became the sovereign nation-state of Bangladesh.
Q.Will Kayani or Pasha, ever forget that humiliating defeat and lost territory?
If we rely on the hard evidence of political psychology,
India will have to wait for bitter but pragmatic Kayani's and bitter but pragmatic Pasha's successors, successors born in a later generation, to see significant progress and change.
This defeat is why Pakistan will keep clamoring for Kashmir because of the psychological and political scars of a forever lost East Bengal. It's understandable but not tenable.
Pakistan now shrinks by the minute, its territory overrun by USCIA/NATO and its people droned from the air by the USCIA. The Raymond Davies CIA agent, who was set free by the PakISI, is only the latest predictable twiststory in PakISI/USCIA geopolitics.
See how complex and challenging our shared history with Pakistan is?
So long as the territory of Pakistan, not just the Af-Pak border, is owned and operated by the USCIA, India will continue to need to take ***baby steps*** towards dialogue, always watching our backs and looking over our shoulders.
No problem, India can keep doing that, we have become adept at watching the US operating in our region against both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
USCIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan go back to the early US-invented Cold War 1950's, just about the time Kayani and Pasha were born!
Pity and empathy for the people of Pakistan, our blood sisters and brothers, who are suffering, in propagandist/hate Hindu denial for the crimes committed against them by:
1) Pak/ISI,
2) in collusion with the USCIA
South Asia-US Geopolitics: Collective Memory Vs. Militarist Memory
To deepen the gravitas of South Asia-US geopolitics in 2011, let us note that Kayani and Pasha, both newly commissioned at age 19 in 1971, would even now, in 2011, gratefully remember 1)the US Seventh Fleet and 2)the CIA. How would they remember that?
The US Seventh Fleet, (specifically the TF 74, which included the nuclear-powered Enterprise and Gumard, destroyers and missile escorts ) was there when Pakistan needed them most, in 1971.
The USCIA was there again, after 9/11, when the US airlifted key CIA-directed ISI/Taliban operatives out of Kabul and Kandahar, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.
It can be gratifying (not to mention profitable) to be a dependent-client state. Kayani and Pasha can understandably appreciate that.
In 1971, at the height of Bangladesh’s war of Liberation, the United States Seventh Fleet conducted an incursion into the Bay of Bengal, to advance its own interest vis a vis Pakistan, its dependent-state client.
This is the same US Seventh Fleet that supported combat intelligence that divided the Koreas (1945) in the context of the US- invented Cold War against the Soviets. This is the same Seventh Fleet that provided the balltle support that napalmed little girls in VietNam (1972). Se how that Vietnam atrocity in 1972 is neatly juxtaposed with the Bay of Bengal incursion in 1971?
See how our current geopolitics is driven by collective memory of powerful militarists in a client dependent-state ?
To perform Development Journalism, Kayani and Pasha’s anti-people, geopolitical militarist memory needs to be outweighed and outmaneuvered by Aam Log Collective Social Justice memory, based on evidence, proof and personal experience of dislocation and dispossession from Swat to Sylhet.
South Asian Aam Log Collective Memory can prevail against Militarist Memory, so long as We the People, our activists, our media (even some of our governments and some of our armies some of the time), take effective ethical steps on that collective path, in the name of All South Asians for the sake of a Greater Collective Good (GCG). That’s pragmatic idealism with a calm, steely eye fixed on the geopolitics of the dependent-client state(s) in our region.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
[blog funded by CUNY]
www.facebook.com/chithra.karunakaran
www.disqus.com/EthicalDemocracy
@EthicalDemocracy
http://Southasianidea.com
posts on "A People's General."
-----------------------
Rising Kashmir newspaper copyright
Manmohan in secret talks with Kayani: THE TIMES
London, April 23: India's Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh opened secret talks with Pakistan Army chief ten months ago to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the two countries, a media report said today.
“Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy," The Times reported. It said the talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
Earlier also, there were reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to open channels of communication with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Kayani as well as ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
"We have given the green signal.
As a new season of Indo-Pak engagement bursts upon the sub-continent, there is a realization that India's efforts to talk is incomplete because there is no communication with the Pakistani army — effectively the real power centre. The diplomatic outreach to General Kayani is under the rubric of engaging all stakeholders so as not to attract extra attention, but it's a special effort by India,” sources in Indian government had said.
The visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the semi-final match between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup last month has sparked hope of a diplomatic thaw between the two neighbouring countries.
Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to build contacts with Taliban groups. The army chief was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
-----
-------------
The Times (London) copyright
The Times (London) April 23, 2011
Restart of cricket relations leads to secret India-Pakistan diplomatic drive
Francis Elliott and Tom Coghlan
• The Times
• Published: 23 April 2011
• Asia
[Full text obtained through LexisNexis]
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 42
LENGTH: 440 words
The Prime Minister of India has opened secret talks with the head of Pakistan's military to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the rivals.
appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy, about ten months ago, The Times has learnt.
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged London and Washington to believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
General Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by President Karzai, to build contacts with Taleban groups. General Kayani was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Delhi, which in the past would have condemned the visit as Pakistani "meddling", remained silent - providing the latest evidence of rapprochement being driven by the US, after the Cricket World Cup semi-final between the two nations.
Cricketing ties, severed in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, have been restored and a series of three one-day games will take place to coincide with a visit to Islamabad by Mr Singh.
The settling of a disputed border at Sir Creek in the south, and the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier in the north, are also being used to create an impression of diplomatic momentum.
Genuine progress, however, requires the co-operation of Pakistan's military, which India has long accused of fostering militant groups to fight a proxy war in Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan accuses India of promoting separatists in the province of Baluchistan and seeking undue influence in Afghanistan as a counterbalance to its neighbour. It questions the need for India to maintain four consulates in Afghanistan, two of them close to its borders in Kandahar and Jalalabad.
Pakistan insists that it must insure against a possible collapse of Afghanistan into civil war, by retaining proxies within the country. It is pressing the US to open talks with figures from the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, as it seeks to influence the future Afghan government.
Despite US pressure and Mr Singh's commitment there remain other substantial obstacles to a lasting thaw. Access for Indian investigators to the suspected conspirators behind the Mumbai attacks, who are detained in Pakistan, remains a sticking point.
Although it will allow the investigators to travel, Islamabad said that they may interview only the interrogators, not the suspects.
-------------------------------------------
Rising Kashmir copyright
News report 2 days later:
‘Kayani did not contact Singh’
Islamabad, April 25: Pakistan Army Monday dismissed as unfounded and totally baseless a media report that its powerful chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani held talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh through a "secret envoy and back channel".
A spokesperson of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate (ISPR) denied the news item which appeared in The Times of London on April 23 and called it "unfounded and totally baseless".
The paper had reported that Singh had appointed an "unofficial envoy" to make contact with Kayani, "who exercises de facto control over Pakistan's foreign policy".
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process, the media report had said.
The prime minister's office in New Delhi had yesterday termed as 'false' the report that Singh had contacted Kayani before the Mohali meeting between prime ministers of the two countries.
------------------------------------
Both India and Pakistan governments have respectively dismissed as "false" "unfounded and totally baseless" The Times (London) April 23, 2011 report of "back channel" diplomacy.
The following news story appears to have been faked all the way up and down. Or not.
Because the story was allegedly faked, the question is Why? Actually the more productive line of inquiry would be, why did all the India and Pakistan media run with the news story, before checking whether it was fact?
Look, this is not about building a conspiracy theory. Instead, the story gained weight and credibility because it's really all about the drone-weary, terror-wary PEOPLE, the Aam Janata in India and Pakistan, hoping for some stability, some positive momentum, some hope to keep the positive feelings going, after the heady India double victory against a sporting Sri Lanka side and a fumbling Pakistan team in an unprecedented ALL South Asia 2011 World Cup Cricket Final.
The allegedly fake news report, excerpted from The Times of London states:
"Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy"
"De facto control"? Really? Not so much.
The US controls Pak's foreign policy, which is shaped by the CIA acting in its own interest against various factions of the ISI.
The LeT is therefore funded both directly and indirectly by the USCIA.
The CIA dictates US Govt's Foreign policy, not the other way around.
[Most recent example, CIA operatives are and have long been in Libya]
That is the rocky, murky terrain of South Asia-US geopolitics that Manmohan Singh, born in Pakistan (!) has to negotiate. The tragedy of Partition becomes more real every day.
Further, the Times article states Manmohan sent "an unofficial envoy" to talk to Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
I lived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and saw the raped and pregnant Bengali Hindu women, broken but still survivors, enter the streets as brutalized refugees from Dacca (now Dhaka).
Kayani (b. 1952, same year as ISI head honcho Shuja Pasha) was commissioned, age 19, a highly impressionable age, in the year (1971) that the Pakistan Army was driven out of East Bengal under the leadership of Libertador Sheikh Mujb-ur-Rahman (BangaBandhu) and East Bengal became the sovereign nation-state of Bangladesh.
Q.Will Kayani or Pasha, ever forget that humiliating defeat and lost territory?
If we rely on the hard evidence of political psychology,
India will have to wait for bitter but pragmatic Kayani's and bitter but pragmatic Pasha's successors, successors born in a later generation, to see significant progress and change.
This defeat is why Pakistan will keep clamoring for Kashmir because of the psychological and political scars of a forever lost East Bengal. It's understandable but not tenable.
Pakistan now shrinks by the minute, its territory overrun by USCIA/NATO and its people droned from the air by the USCIA. The Raymond Davies CIA agent, who was set free by the PakISI, is only the latest predictable twiststory in PakISI/USCIA geopolitics.
See how complex and challenging our shared history with Pakistan is?
So long as the territory of Pakistan, not just the Af-Pak border, is owned and operated by the USCIA, India will continue to need to take ***baby steps*** towards dialogue, always watching our backs and looking over our shoulders.
No problem, India can keep doing that, we have become adept at watching the US operating in our region against both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
USCIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan go back to the early US-invented Cold War 1950's, just about the time Kayani and Pasha were born!
Pity and empathy for the people of Pakistan, our blood sisters and brothers, who are suffering, in propagandist/hate Hindu denial for the crimes committed against them by:
1) Pak/ISI,
2) in collusion with the USCIA
South Asia-US Geopolitics: Collective Memory Vs. Militarist Memory
To deepen the gravitas of South Asia-US geopolitics in 2011, let us note that Kayani and Pasha, both newly commissioned at age 19 in 1971, would even now, in 2011, gratefully remember 1)the US Seventh Fleet and 2)the CIA. How would they remember that?
The US Seventh Fleet, (specifically the TF 74, which included the nuclear-powered Enterprise and Gumard, destroyers and missile escorts ) was there when Pakistan needed them most, in 1971.
The USCIA was there again, after 9/11, when the US airlifted key CIA-directed ISI/Taliban operatives out of Kabul and Kandahar, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.
It can be gratifying (not to mention profitable) to be a dependent-client state. Kayani and Pasha can understandably appreciate that.
In 1971, at the height of Bangladesh’s war of Liberation, the United States Seventh Fleet conducted an incursion into the Bay of Bengal, to advance its own interest vis a vis Pakistan, its dependent-state client.
This is the same US Seventh Fleet that supported combat intelligence that divided the Koreas (1945) in the context of the US- invented Cold War against the Soviets. This is the same Seventh Fleet that provided the balltle support that napalmed little girls in VietNam (1972). Se how that Vietnam atrocity in 1972 is neatly juxtaposed with the Bay of Bengal incursion in 1971?
See how our current geopolitics is driven by collective memory of powerful militarists in a client dependent-state ?
To perform Development Journalism, Kayani and Pasha’s anti-people, geopolitical militarist memory needs to be outweighed and outmaneuvered by Aam Log Collective Social Justice memory, based on evidence, proof and personal experience of dislocation and dispossession from Swat to Sylhet.
South Asian Aam Log Collective Memory can prevail against Militarist Memory, so long as We the People, our activists, our media (even some of our governments and some of our armies some of the time), take effective ethical steps on that collective path, in the name of All South Asians for the sake of a Greater Collective Good (GCG). That’s pragmatic idealism with a calm, steely eye fixed on the geopolitics of the dependent-client state(s) in our region.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
[blog funded by CUNY]
www.facebook.com/chithra.karunakaran
www.disqus.com/EthicalDemocracy
@EthicalDemocracy
http://Southasianidea.com
posts on "A People's General."
-----------------------
Rising Kashmir newspaper copyright
Manmohan in secret talks with Kayani: THE TIMES
London, April 23: India's Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh opened secret talks with Pakistan Army chief ten months ago to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the two countries, a media report said today.
“Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy," The Times reported. It said the talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
Earlier also, there were reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to open channels of communication with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Kayani as well as ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
"We have given the green signal.
As a new season of Indo-Pak engagement bursts upon the sub-continent, there is a realization that India's efforts to talk is incomplete because there is no communication with the Pakistani army — effectively the real power centre. The diplomatic outreach to General Kayani is under the rubric of engaging all stakeholders so as not to attract extra attention, but it's a special effort by India,” sources in Indian government had said.
The visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the semi-final match between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup last month has sparked hope of a diplomatic thaw between the two neighbouring countries.
Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to build contacts with Taliban groups. The army chief was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
-----
-------------
The Times (London) copyright
The Times (London) April 23, 2011
Restart of cricket relations leads to secret India-Pakistan diplomatic drive
Francis Elliott and Tom Coghlan
• The Times
• Published: 23 April 2011
• Asia
[Full text obtained through LexisNexis]
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 42
LENGTH: 440 words
The Prime Minister of India has opened secret talks with the head of Pakistan's military to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the rivals.
appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy, about ten months ago, The Times has learnt.
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged London and Washington to believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
General Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by President Karzai, to build contacts with Taleban groups. General Kayani was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Delhi, which in the past would have condemned the visit as Pakistani "meddling", remained silent - providing the latest evidence of rapprochement being driven by the US, after the Cricket World Cup semi-final between the two nations.
Cricketing ties, severed in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, have been restored and a series of three one-day games will take place to coincide with a visit to Islamabad by Mr Singh.
The settling of a disputed border at Sir Creek in the south, and the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier in the north, are also being used to create an impression of diplomatic momentum.
Genuine progress, however, requires the co-operation of Pakistan's military, which India has long accused of fostering militant groups to fight a proxy war in Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan accuses India of promoting separatists in the province of Baluchistan and seeking undue influence in Afghanistan as a counterbalance to its neighbour. It questions the need for India to maintain four consulates in Afghanistan, two of them close to its borders in Kandahar and Jalalabad.
Pakistan insists that it must insure against a possible collapse of Afghanistan into civil war, by retaining proxies within the country. It is pressing the US to open talks with figures from the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, as it seeks to influence the future Afghan government.
Despite US pressure and Mr Singh's commitment there remain other substantial obstacles to a lasting thaw. Access for Indian investigators to the suspected conspirators behind the Mumbai attacks, who are detained in Pakistan, remains a sticking point.
Although it will allow the investigators to travel, Islamabad said that they may interview only the interrogators, not the suspects.
-------------------------------------------
Rising Kashmir copyright
News report 2 days later:
‘Kayani did not contact Singh’
Islamabad, April 25: Pakistan Army Monday dismissed as unfounded and totally baseless a media report that its powerful chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani held talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh through a "secret envoy and back channel".
A spokesperson of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate (ISPR) denied the news item which appeared in The Times of London on April 23 and called it "unfounded and totally baseless".
The paper had reported that Singh had appointed an "unofficial envoy" to make contact with Kayani, "who exercises de facto control over Pakistan's foreign policy".
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process, the media report had said.
The prime minister's office in New Delhi had yesterday termed as 'false' the report that Singh had contacted Kayani before the Mohali meeting between prime ministers of the two countries.
------------------------------------
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Why Neither India nor Pak can Trust the US: The Headley Instance
Q. Why was the India Gov so wretchedly uninformed?
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
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