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| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistan helped Afghan al-Qaeda |
| 2003-09-15 |
| Hat tip LGF PAKISTAN helped al-Qaeda members launch their operations in Afghanistan in the 1990s and even secretly ran a major training camp used by Osama bin Laden’s terror network, according to US intelligence documents made public in the US. The documents, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 and declassified in a censored version this past week, also indicate that legendary Afghan guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Masood may have been killed two days before the September 11 attacks because he had learned something about bin Laden’s plan and "began to warn the West." In its secret dispatches, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization here, the DIA warns that the documents represent only raw intelligence. They nonetheless paint a complex picture of factional rivalry, in which Pakistan had tried to use the Taliban and al-Qaeda to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan - only to eventually lose control over both of them. I have my doubts over just how ’out of control’ they really got. Also, even when the Taliban were providing a base to dozens of sectarian terrorists responsible for the murder of hundreds of Pakistani Shias, the ISI used to put pressure on the Police and civilian government of the day not to make to many arrests, because it would demoralise "our boys"; by 9/11, the Army begun to see the Taliban as a fellow traveller, rather than just a proxy. "Taliban acceptance and approval of fundamentalist non-Afghans as part of their fighting force were merely an extension of Pakistani policy during the Soviet-Afghan war," said one of the DIA dispatches among US government agencies after the September 11 attacks but before US troops began their operation to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan. It said Pakistani agents "encouraged, facilitated and often escorted Arabs from the Middle East into Afghanistan." To make them a more viable fighting force, Pakistan even built a training camp located outside the Afghan village of Zahawa, near the border between the two countries. According to the DIA, the camp, target of a US missile strike, was built by Pakistani contractors funded by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), and protected by a local and influential Jadran tribal leader called Jalalludin. "However, the real host of the facility was the Pakistani ISI," said one of the documents, which added that this arrangement raised "serious questions" about early ties between bin Laden and Pakistani intelligence. The report doesn’t seem to mention that there have been over a hundred ’maksars’ or training camps operating within Pakistan for going on 2 decades, from which tens of thousands of Pak Jihadis have been trained. The US military fired a volley of cruise missiles into the camp in August 1998 in retaliation to the terrorist bombings earlier that year of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 257 people dead. The DIA said efforts by Islamabad to advance its interests through proxies had "seriously backfired" because it eventually lost control of the Taliban and bin Laden whose extremism was allowed "to grow unmolested." In an interview published Saturday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf denied that Islamic extremists had contacts within his country’s army. Musharraf told The News newspaper that only three army officers were currently under investigation for "abetting al-Qaeda elements." The US Central Intelligence Agency, in a recent brief, praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror. The agency also warned that "it should be assumed" that at least some of the hundreds of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft Stinger missiles shipped by the CIA to Afghanistan during Soviet occupation "are in al-Qaeda hands." Javid Nasir, the former Director-General of the ISI, bragged that he helped channel many stingers to Bosnia during the civil war there, that was one of the reasons the Americans had him forced to retire. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #1 Shouldn't we have a special "No Shit, Sherlock" section for items like this? |
| Posted by: mojo 2003-9-15 1:19:03 PM |