UstaadKhan Blogs

By Farhat Taj:

In terms of the drone attacks, the US must not make any distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban. They both have internalised a global ideology that is anti-civilisation and anti-human

There is news coming up in the media that al Qaeda in Waziristan may run away to Yemen in the face of growing drone attacks. The people of Waziristan have expressed deep concern at this news. They do not want al Qaeda to run away from Waziristan. They want al Qaeda along with the Taliban burnt to ashes on the soil of Waziristan through relentless drone attacks. The drone attacks, they believe, are the one and only ‘cure’ for these anti-civilisation creatures and the US must robustly administer them the ‘cure’ until their existence is annihilated from the world. The people of Waziristan, including tribal leaders, women and religious people, asked me to convey in categorical terms to the US the following in my column.

One, your new drone attack strategy is brilliant, i.e. one attack closely followed by another. After the first attack the terrorists cordon off the area and none but the terrorists are allowed on the spot. Another attack at that point kills so many of them. Excellent! Keep it up!

Your drone technology has the full capacity to encircle and eliminate al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan. If you fail to do so and al Qaeda manages to run away to Yemen or any other place, it could only happen in two cases: either you are highly incompetent people or you have ulterior motives.

The people who have established one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and have taken science and technology to a new zenith cannot be highly incompetent. Now the only possibility is that you have ulterior motives, which could facilitate al Qaeda’s escape from Waziristan. (more…)

Barack Obama

In the early days of this heroic now-nearly eight year-old vigil, patriotic motorists, often on their way to the local Tsuri Indian Casino to swill at the Firewater Lounge, would hurl invectives and sometimes loaded beer cans at the women. But as the war settled into a daily grind and the U.S. body count climbed incrementally towards 5000, the insults and the beer cans diminished and a few locals now even honk their horns in support.

In the seven years that Trinidad Women In Black have held their ground by the off-ramp, the participants, never spring chickens to begin with, have grown older and one now suffers from dementia. Now when the women stand, she turns to Janine and often asks if the war is over yet?

Barack Obama’s nationally televised December 1st declaration of renewed jihad against Al Qaeda’s estimated 100 Afghan warriors that will elevate 

U.S. troop deployment to nearly a quarter of a million in Afghanistan and Iraq (plus another quarter million mercenary contractors) will keep Trinidad Women In Black in business for at least another decade.

The President’s goal of “disrupting, dismantling, and destroying” the Taliban-Qaeda Axis of Evil is calculated to tickle America’s terrorist nerve. As his grip on the wheel of state grows slack, Obama’s presidency increasingly depends on harpooning “America’s white whale” as Robert Wright recently dubbed Bin Laden in a New York Times op-ed piece. Al Qaeda’s spiritual leader, a Frankenstein fabricated by Reagan’s CIA, probably died years ago dragging his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass.

Robert Fisk notes that Obama-man’s West Point kowtow to the generals parallels a similar Soviet troop build-up way back in 1980 that was designed to train Afghan security forces to confront the CIA-financed Muhajadeen. We all know how successfully that plan backfired.

With Blackwater loading up the drones in Pakistan, it’s only a matter of months before General McCrystal marches into Pakistan to wipe out the Taliban’s safe havens and the Commander-in-Chief puts another 50,000 boots on the ground to secure that nuclear-empowered nation against “international terrorism.” (more…)

Among the 19 hijackers that struck targets in New York and Washington on 9/11, none was an Afghani or Pakistani. They were Arab Muslims, mostly from Saudi Arabia, based in Europe and trained in USA, in all probability by Jews.

Yet all hell broke on Afghanistan and now Pakistan is being punished for its uncommitted crimes and US blunders. It may be recalled that when the US and its allies decided to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 on a flimsy excuse of getting hold of Osama bin Laden and disrupting and dismantling Al-Qaeda to avenge terrorist attacks allegedly masterminded by Osama, in that timeframe Al-Qaeda was an unknown entity. If nabbing or killing blue-eyed boy of CIA Osama and his 2-3000 ill-organised and ill-equipped henchmen from different countries was the real purpose, there was absolutely no reason for carrying out grand mobilisation and invading Afghanistan where he was based.

Either dialogue together with coercive diplomacy should have been carried out for another month or so, or some proof of his involvement furnished to Mullah Omar as asked by him to justify handing over his guest, or his rational suggestion of putting Osama on trial in a neutral country heeded to. In case these efforts failed, the US should have then carried out a combined covert cum commando operation backed up with well-coordinated intelligence backup support to round them up. Drones or cruise missiles could have been used to for the purpose.

However, the US tried to kill a fly with a huge hammer, which still managed to fly away. The real purpose of invasion was not Osama but to topple Taliban regime that had disagreed with unjust terms and conditions of US oil and gas tycoons wanting to pipe down energy resources from Central Asia to European and US markets via Afghanistan and Pakistan. Eager to give practical shape to its New World Order, the US wanted to convert Afghanistan into a permanent military base wherefrom it could monitor regional countries of its interest. (more…)

The heavy focus on al Qaeda in the new AfPak strategy could complicate America’s broader strategy of strategic public engagement with the Muslim world. The politics of the focus make perfect domestic sense, as Obama — quite effectively, in a disappointingly Bush-like way — tried to recapture the mantle of the “good war” and to focus American public attention on 9/11. And to the extent that this represents a limiting of American objectives, then I’m all for it. But the heavy focus on al Qaeda risks rescuing it from the position of marginality in Arab and Muslim politics to which it has largely been relegated over the last year — and could end up strengthening the strategic threat of violent extremism even if it weakens al Qaeda Central.

I am not talking here about the much-discussed point that al Qaeda does not seem to actually be present in any significant way in Afghanistan. The argument here rests on claims that the goal is to prevent al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan and that al Qaeda is so deeply interwoven with the various Talibans as to make the distinction meaningless. Both arguments are problematic -– but since both have been discussed elsewhere at some length, I won’t dwell on them. (more…)

Dr Aafia Siddiqui as a student in a photo provided by her family. Photograph

A Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three is to stand trial in New York for attempted murder. But shadowy questions about her life remain – including her links to al-Qaida and her five ‘lost’ years.

On a hot summer morning 18 months ago a team of four Americans – two FBI agents and two army officers – rolled into Ghazni, a dusty town 50 miles south of Kabul. They had come to interview two unusual prisoners: a woman in a burka and her 11-year-old son, arrested the day before.

Afghan police accused the mysterious pair of being suicide bombers. What interested the Americans, though, was what they were carrying: notes about a “mass casualty attack” in the US on targets including the Statue of Liberty and a collection of jars and bottles containing “chemical and gel substances”.

At the town police station the Americans were directed into a room where, unknown to them, the woman was waiting behind a long yellow curtain. One soldier sat down, laying his M-4 rifle by his foot, next to the curtain. Moments later it twitched back.

The woman was standing there, pointing the officer’s gun at his head. A translator lunged at her, but too late. She fired twice, shouting “Get the fuck out of here!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Nobody was hit. As the translator wrestled with the woman, the second soldier drew his pistol and fired, hitting her in the abdomen. She went down, still kicking and shouting that she wanted “to kill Americans”. Then she passed out.

Whether this extraordinary scene is fiction or reality will soon be decided thousands of miles from Ghazni in a Manhattan courtroom. The woman is Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three. The description of the shooting, in July 2008, comes from the prosecution case, which Siddiqui disputes. What isn’t in doubt is that there was an incident, and that she was shot, after which she was helicoptered to Bagram air field where medics cut her open from breastplate to bellybutton, searching for bullets. Medical records show she barely survived. Seventeen days later, still recovering, she was bundled on to an FBI jet and flown to New York where she now faces seven counts of assault and attempted murder. If convicted, the maximum sentence is life in prison.

The prosecution is but the latest twist in one of the most intriguing episodes of America’s “war on terror”. At its heart is the MIT-educated Siddiqui, once declared the world’s most wanted woman. In 2003 she mysteriously vanished for five years, during which time she was variously dubbed the “Mata Hari of al-Qaida” or the “Grey Lady of Bagram”, an iconic victim of American brutality.  

Yet only the narrow circumstances of her capture – did she open fire on the US soldier? – are at issue in the New York court case. Fragile-looking, and often clad in a dark robe and white headscarf, Siddiqui initially pleaded not guilty, insisting she never touched the soldier’s gun. Her lawyers say the prosecution’s dramatic version of the shooting is untrue. Now, after months of pre-trial hearings, she appears bent on scuppering the entire process. (more…)

One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan – a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as ”strategic assets” to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

“Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left,” writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend’s attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters. (more…)

Senator John F. Kerry made clear today that, while he is weighing the wisdom of adding additional troops to Afghanistan, he does not believe that withdrawal is an option.

“I don’t see that as on the table,” he said. “I don’t think that there is anyone up here who is talking about that.”

Kerry spoke at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing — the third in a series he has called on Afghanistan — that probed what the impact of additional troops would be on stability in Pakistan, a fragile, nuclear-armed neighbor.

Maleeha Lodhi, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, said an increase in US combat troops in Afghanistan could lead to an increase in suicide attacks, militant groups, and support for extremism in Pakistan.

“A further military escalation in Afghanistan is unlikely to succeed,” she said.

Lodhi, Milt Bearden, who served as the CIA station chief in Pakistan during the 1980s, and Steve Coll of the New America Foundation, said the Obama administration should put the emphasis on brokering a political solution to the fighting.

“I think we are going to have to start understanding who they are and deal with them,” Bearden said. “There will always be enough Pashtuns to meet our troops in the field.”

Kerry’s opening statement is below. (more…)

Afghan refugees Fawad, 10, left, and Jawed, 12. They have been living rough on the streets of Calais since the destruction of their refugee camp.

The UN’s refugee agency warned today that children as young as three are among the migrants attempting to reach Britain and that the number of unaccompanied refugee children is on the increase.

There is evidence that ever younger children are attempting dangerous journeys around the world, said William Spindler, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

“There have always been minors, but in the last 18 months or so, we have seen younger children, and more families with small children. Recently we encountered a child of three with its mother,” he said.

The warning came three days after the French government destroyed a makeshift refugee camp known as the “jungle” near Calais, detaining 278 migrants, including 132 children. The Guardian spoke to three Afghan cousins aged 10, 12 and 13 who are now sleeping rough on the streets of Calais. (more…)

Officials questioned Mr Zazi for three days prior to his arrest

Three men have been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to launch an attack in the United States, the US Justice Department says.

 

Two Afghan-born men, a father and son, were arrested in Denver, Colorado.

A third man, also from Afghanistan, was later detained in New York, the department said.

The men are accused of making false statements related to “a matter involving international and domestic terrorism”, the statement said.

The FBI was investigating several people “in the United States, Pakistan and elsewhere, relating to a plot to detonate improvised explosive devices in the United States”, the Justice Department said in court documents related to the arrests.

US media have reported that the investigation was focusing on a possible plan to attack a public area in New York.

David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said the arrests were part of “an ongoing and fast-paced investigation”. (more…)

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen gestures during a news conference at the Pentagon.

The threat of a US failure in Afghanistan is becoming all too real with recent reports of a fraudulent election and a controversial German air strike. At the heart of the problem, however, are disputes within the US defense establishment about waging the war. A recent article published in Joint Force Quarterly by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent shock waves through the media and the defense establishment. Mullen argued that US policy was failing in Afghanistan because the US was not getting its message across and lacked credibility. He was seen as “blasting” the US military – a military of which he himself is in charge.

So why did he go to the press with his complaints when he could change the “strategic communication” policy he derides? It turns out that his failure to implement the policy he recommends is but the tip of the iceberg of the contradictory condemnation of US policy.

Mullen stressed that “there is no doubt that Abu Ghraib was a stain on our national character, and it reminded us yet again of the power of our actions. The incidents there likely inspired many young men and women to fight against us.” He apparently forgot, like many have, that the main inspiration for Islamism and al-Qaida is not Iraq, that the Iraq war came after 9/11 and that al-Qaida’s extremism cannot always be traced to US actions. Any inspiration for young men to fight against the US emanating from Abu Ghraib was only on top of a wellspring that had provided young men to “fight against us” for years. (more…)