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Monday, December 28, 2009

Video: Simulation Renders Entire Known Universe

Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe. The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe.

The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the precise location of every object ever observed in the sky. From quasars to pulsars to black holes to nebulas, it's all there.

The observable universe spans 13.7 billion light years, with the background radiation aftershock of the Big Bang as the oldest, and farthest, signal. At that end of the universe lies the oldest material in creation, which, thanks to billions of years of expansion, has accelerated to almost the speed of light. That layer forms an event horizon past which not even light can travel, ringing our universe in what is essentially an inside out black hole.

But enough of my yammering! Check out the video yourself, but make sure to budget some extra time for sitting in slack-jawed awe.



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Saturday, December 26, 2009

Self-Serving Leaks from the A.Q. Khan Circle

by David Albright, Paul Brannan, and Andrea Scheel Stricker

December 9, 2009

Reading the Pakistani A.Q. Khan's latest "leaks," one would think that China depended on Khan in the early 1980s to solve its problems in making weapon-grade uranium for its growing nuclear weapons arsenal.  Using recently stolen European gas centrifuge technology, Khan reportedly claims he helped China modernize its production of bomb-grade uranium 1

But the facts appear quite different.  China relied on its two gaseous diffusion plants to make its weapon-grade uranium, and its gas centrifuge program never took off.

The most recent source of Khan's recent claims is a fascinating November 13, 2009 Washington Post
article about China's nuclear cooperation with Pakistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The Post drew upon several of Khan's written statements from late 2003 and early 2004 when he was desperately trying to defend himself in Pakistan against a growing list of charges that he proliferated sensitive centrifuge and nuclear weapons technology.  Since the exposure of his transnational trafficking network, Khan has periodically revealed details about the secret world of Pakistani nuclear weapons and illicit nuclear trade.  However, many of his assertions are self-serving and highly dubious.  On balance, Khan's statements should be viewed as non-credible without first rigorously verifying them.  He has proven that he is unable to honestly relate the facts fully as he knows them and has many reasons to deceive, obfuscate or suppress the truth.

In the early 1980s Pakistan was frantically trying to acquire its first nuclear weapon, and Khan's gas centrifuge program was Pakistan's only short-term way to produce nuclear explosive material domestically.  But that program, despite receiving extensive, albeit illicit, foreign assistance, was struggling mightily to meet its deadlines.  As has been well documented over the last two decades, during this period, China provided critical nuclear assistance to Pakistan's nuclear weapons effort.  The Washington Post provides new details about this assistance. Without this aid, Pakistan would have likely suffered several more years of delay in obtaining nuclear weapons.  Yet the benefits to China were mostly strategic, not nuclear.

Khan's case has typically been strongest when he tries to rebut the patently ludicrous claims of the Pakistani government that Khan single-handedly ran a proliferation ring over two decades without the knowledge of any Pakistani officials and without their authorization for at least portions of his proliferation actions.  Whether others are also guilty in the Pakistani government and military establishments is a question that has long deserved careful study.  The Washington Post is doing a service by starting to delve into this difficult issue, although Khan's cooperation with China is not what has gotten him into trouble domestically and internationally.  Khan may be using this story as a dress rehearsal for seeking to absolve his guilt in later proliferation activities, a claim that would be false. Regardless of the culpability of members of the Pakistani establishment, multiple investigations in Pakistan and abroad have placed Khan at the center of a multi-decade trafficking operation outfitting the nuclear programs of Libya, Iran, and North Korea.  Moreover, Khan's Nuremberg-type defense is hardly convincing to the international community, and merely reinforces the belief that there are others who are guilty and justice has not yet been served with regard to Khan or others in Pakistan.

A New Media Offensive

Through members of his immediate family and former journalist and family confidant Simon Henderson, Khan is trying again to create a distorted picture of what he did.  He faces an uphill battle and appears to be seeking sympathetic media to air his story.  Although pardoned by Pakistan's then President Pervez Musharraf in early 2004, Khan failed to convince his own government of his innocence and admitted to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.  Based on the extensive information collected by the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.S. government sanctioned him along with many of his accomplices for their proliferation activities.

At the core of the newest Khan campaign is a set of documents, including Khan's 11-page March 2004 "confession" to the Pakistani government, his handwritten December 10, 2003 letter to his wife, and his 5-page version of his government's nuclear cooperation with China 2.  In this letter, for example, Khan wrote his wife to orchestrate a tough stance if the Pakistani government went after him, telling her that proof of his claims was safely stashed away but could be given to the press and the public.  Khan wrote the letter and his "confession" when he was under intense pressure from his own government about a range of incriminating evidence that the United States, the IAEA, and other governments had collected on his proliferation activities in Iran and Libya. 

The Washington Post obtained these documents from Simon Henderson.  Henderson had already published several cryptic assertions about Khan's letter to his wife in a January 2009 report in the British Sunday Times.  Many of the quotes in Henderson's piece reflected only part of the truth.
 
Needless to say, Khan's writings must be approached with a great deal of skepticism, given his well-known denials of any wrong-doing and frequent selective use of the truth.  Henderson is well aware of Khan's proclivities.  During his journalistic career at the Financial Times, he uncovered several of Khan's shady deals.  In the mid-1980s, he was the first to report that China gave Pakistan 50 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium, an important part of the recent Washington Post article.  But Henderson's objectivity about Khan was called into question in the early 1990s, when he started to soft-pedal Khan's tales.  According to Henderson, he sought Khan's cooperation on a biography that Henderson hoped to write 3,  and frank assessments of Khan's statements would unlikely result in that support.  This led Henderson to submit an uncritical interview with Khan in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in September 1993.  Henderson must have known that this interview contained many falsehoods, such as Khan denying that Pakistan had a nuclear weapons program.  In response to a question that the rest of the world sees Kahuta as being an enrichment plant for nuclear weapons, Khan responded that this was "just propaganda." 

Henderson appears to be over-selling Khan's claims again.  He told the Washington Post that he provided the documents because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan's nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policy making 4.  But one-sided accounts are rarely good for policy making, and they distort the public record.  The best course of action is for Henderson to simply publish the entire set of documents and allow for their scrutiny by informed and objective analysts.  If he did, readers would see that Khan continues his long tradition of subterfuge, attempting to shift blame to others or feigning ignorance of what his network did in Libya or Iran.  Given Khan's loquaciousness, he would inevitably provide important new details.  This is supported by the Washington Post article, which has many new details about Pakistan's cooperation with China.  However, sorting out the truth from Khan's lies is no easy feat.

Doubtful Allegations

That China and Khan's centrifuge program shared enrichment equipment, materials, and technology is well known, as is China's supply to Pakistan of 50 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium and a nuclear weapon design in the early 1980s.  The Post, however, published new information about this cooperation using Khan's statements on the Pakistani government's nuclear cooperation with China. 

The major problems in the Washington Post's (and reportedly Khan's) account center on Khan's claim about the importance of the centrifuge plant he built for China and his claim that Pakistan did not use the weapon-grade uranium it acquired from China in its first nuclear weapon. 

Chinese Centrifuge Plant

Khan claims that China needed his help because of its lagging enrichment program to produce weapon-grade uranium.  According to Khan, he briefed three top Chinese nuclear weapons officials on how the European-designed centrifuges could swiftly aid China's uranium enrichment program 5.  However, such aid was unnecessary.

Khan provides few details about his assistance to the Chinese centrifuge program.  The Post article does not state the size of the Chinese facility or the type of centrifuges provided to this facility.  It quotes from a Khan-written document that Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped "put up a centrifuge plant."  Khan wrote in the 2003 letter to his wife that "we sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges."  If the aid were prior to 1985, as implied in the article, the machines were likely P1 centrifuges, 6  which Khan's experts derived from stolen Dutch centrifuge technology.  These centrifuges never operated well, however.
 
It is very difficult to estimate the size of the facility from the information in the article, but the facility is unlikely to have been very large, even by Pakistani standards.  The "plant" may well have been little more than a small pilot, research and development facility—an expected step for any country after receiving a new type of centrifuge.  Pakistan's centrifuge manufacturing complex was too small to have made a plant with ten thousand or more P1 centrifuges, although such a plant would still be a relatively small plant by Chinese standards 7.  Even providing several thousand centrifuges to such a plant might have threatened Khan's ability to build his own centrifuge plant in the early 1980s.

By the early 1980s, China had constructed two relatively large gaseous diffusion plants. 8  In addition, during the early 1980s, China achieved an enormous breakthrough in the enrichment performance at these plants, reducing further the importance of any centrifuge assistance.  It was these two plants that produced roughly 20 tonnes of weapon-grade uranium. 9  Any contribution from gas centrifuges is believed to be small.

The Chinese centrifuge program was still in the development stage in the early 1990s.  According to a U.S. centrifuge expert eyewitness who visited a Chinese pilot centrifuge plant in 1990 (not at Hanzhong), the Chinese appeared to be still developing centrifuges and had not yet built a large-scale centrifuge plant.

The Chinese centrifuge program never matured into a commercial, large-scale program.  By the early 1990s, the Chinese government decided to buy two large-scale centrifuge plants from Russia to supply low enriched uranium for its nuclear power reactors rather than build a centrifuge plant itself.  Its own centrifuge program was cut back substantially after this decision.  In the late 1990s, the U.S. expert revisted the Chinese pilot plant and it was no longer working on centrifuges but instead it was dedicated to laser enrichment. 

Interestingly, the first two Russian centrifuge plants were built near Hanzhong, where Khan says he sent his centrifuges.  Assuming Khan is telling the truth about sending centrifuges to Hanzhong, did China install the Russian centrifuges near an early facility of China's domestic centrifuge effort?  A positive answer might at least confirm Khan's statement that China indeed did build a centrifuge plant there.

Weapon-grade Uranium

Khan claims that the weapon-grade uranium obtained from China was put in storage for three years because KRL was able on its own to produce the nuclear explosive material for Pakistan's first nuclear weapons.  Khan even claims that Pakistan offered to return the weapon-grade material, but China refused the return of this "gift."10 

This statement is not credible without independent confirmation.  At the time, Pakistan's uranium enrichment program was barely able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb.  That Pakistan, as Khan claims, had no need for the Chinese weapon-grade uranium due to an abundance of its own at the time is highly unlikely.  Given Khan's defensiveness about his legacy, it is not surprising that he would assert this.  His reputation relies fundamentally on his claim that he was responsible for making the weapon-grade uranium for Pakistan's first nuclear weapons.  If it were established that Pakistan's first two nuclear weapons were fueled by China's gift, Khan's reputation would suffer and questions about the success of his centrifuge program would arise.  Surprisingly, the Washington Post offered no substantiation of this claim in the article, other than a general statement earlier in the article that it "corroborated much of the content through interviews in Pakistan and other countries."  Given the documented poor performance of the P1 centrifuges in Iran, which originated from Khan and his network, it is possible that the P1 centrifuges worked poorly in Pakistan too and Khan could not provide enough weapon-grade uranium until later.  This version is more plausible than Khan's. 

Conclusion

As this case shows again, Khan is notorious for shading the truth with the media regarding his own activities and his network's role in the proliferation of nuclear technology.  Khan also frequently exaggerates the capabilities of Pakistan's historical nuclear weapons program and the extent to which the government held an official policy favoring nuclear proliferation. We all need to exercise extreme care in sorting through Khan's extravagant assertions.

The Khan circle's latest media campaign likely centers on his effort to embarrass and paint the Pakistani government as complicit in all of his proliferation activities, and it should be seen as part of his greater effort to shame the government into lifting his freedom of movement restrictions.  He may be seeking to take advantage of weakened political leadership in Pakistan by creating a new storyline that it was the government, and not Khan, that directed all of his proliferation activities.  Whatever information Khan and his surrogates have to offer, it should be taken into welcome consideration but also confirmed and verified, because, based on Khan's previous testimonies, much of it will likely be untrue or incomplete.

 
 

 
 


 

1 R. Jeffrey Smith, "Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Said to Affirm Post Article's Accuracy," The Washington Post, November 19, 2009.
2 R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "A Nuclear Power's Act of Proliferation," The Washington Post, November 13, 2009.
3 Simon Henderson, "We can do it ourselves." (A.Q. Khan as Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist) (includes interview) The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1993.
4 "A Nuclear Power's Act of Proliferation," op. cit.
5 "A Nuclear Power's Act of Proliferation," op. cit.
6 Khan could have also provided designs of the German-origin P2 centrifuge to China.  Since Khan did not start making these machines in large quantities until the late 1980s and 1990s, it is doubtful that he provided them in large quantities to China.
7 Ten thousand P1 centrifuges would result in an enrichment plant that was less than about 10 percent of the total estimated annual enrichment capacity of the two Chinese gaseous diffusion enrichment plants in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  See Albright and Corey Hinderstein, "Chinese Military Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium Inventories," ISIS, June 30, 2005, paper prepared under contract with a U.S. national laboratory and available at http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/chinese_military_inventories.pdf.
8 "Chinese Military Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium Inventories," op. cit.
9 "Chinese Military Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium Inventories," op. cit.
10 "A Nuclear Power's Act of Proliferation," op. cit.

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

The Six Kalimahs of Islam

First Kalima

Also known as the Word of Purity or the kalima-e-tayyabah.

word of purity

There is no god except Allah. Muhammad is His messenger.


Second Kalima

Also known as the word of testimony or the kalima-e-shahaadat

word of testification


I bear witness that there is no god except Allah, Who is Alone and has no partners;
And I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.


Third Kalima

Also known as the word of glorification or the kalima-e-tamjeed

word of glorification

Glory be to Allah. And praise be to Allah.
And there is no god except Allah.
And Allah is the Greatest.
And there is no power and no strength except with Allah, the Most High, Most Great.

Fourth Kalima

Also known as the word of unity or the kalima-e-tawhid

word of Oneness of Allah

There is no god except Allah, Who is Alone and has no partners. For Him is the Dominion and for Him is all praise. He gives life and causes death. And He is Living and will never ever die.
Owner of Majesty and Honor: In His Hands is all goodness. And He has power over all things.


Fifth Kalima

Also known as the word of penitence or the kalima-e-astaghfar

word of repentance

I seek forgiveness of my Lord for every sin that I have sinned- intentionally or accidentally, in secret or in open- and I repent to Him for the sins that I am aware of, and for the sins that I am not aware of. Truly You (Oh Allah!) are the Knower of the Unseen, and the Coverer of Faults, and the Forgiver of Sins. And there is no power and no strength except with Allah, the Most High, Most Great.


Sixth Kalima

Also known as the words of rejecting disbelief or kalima-e-rud-e-kuffer

word of rejection of disbelief

Oh Allah! Truly I seek refuge in You from holding any partners with You knowingly. And I see forgiveness of You for that which I am not aware of. I repent of such deeds and I clear myself from any actions of disbelief and idolatry and lying and backbiting and innovation and slander and lewdness and abomination and every type of sin. And I submit to You and I say:

  • There is no god except Allah; Muhammad is His Messenger.

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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Obama expands war into Pakistan

Barry Grey


 

There is an element of immense recklessness in Washington's aggressive policy toward Pakistan. It is driving the country into civil war, which would rapidly destabilize the entire region and heighten the danger of war between India and Pakistan and between India and China, all three of which are nuclear powers. Russia and Iran would inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom as well.

obama-terrorism-pakistan_0preview.jpg

WSWS, 9 December 2009


 

One week ago, President Obama in a speech at West Point sought to portray his escalation of the war in Afghanistan as the prelude to an early withdrawal of US troops. It has since become increasingly apparent that the speech was nothing more than a calculated exercise in public deception.


 

The speech was crafted to chloroform the public, the better to defy and disorient mass popular opposition to the war.


 

It is now clear that the actual policy Obama has decided to pursue is not only the maintenance of an indefinite military occupation of Afghanistan, but a vast expansion of the war into Pakistan.


 

Within hours of the speech, administration officials were "clarifying" Obama's talk of beginning the withdrawal of US forces by July 2011 to make clear that there is no such deadline and that US troops will remain in Afghanistan long after that date. Now it has emerged that a central component of Obama's war plan is an expansion of US drone missile strikes in Pakistan and the deployment of US Special Operations forces on Pakistani territory to carry out attacks on insurgents in that country.


 

Obama said nothing in his speech about expanding the war into Pakistan. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, quoting an unnamed senior aid to the president, "We concluded early on that whatever you do with Pakistan, you don't want to talk about it much."


 

The Times, which has for months been campaigning for an escalation of the war and its expansion into Pakistan, reported the day after Obama's speech that the White House last month signed off on an expansion of CIA operations in Pakistan.


 

On Tuesday, the newspaper reported that prior to Obama's speech, his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, met with the heads of Pakistan's military and intelligence service and told them that unless Pakistan moved quickly to expand its military offensive against insurgents to Baluchistan and North Waziristan, "the United States was prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone strikes beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume raids by Special Operations forces into the country against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders."


 

In an editorial on Tuesday bristling with imperialist arrogance, the Times demanded that the Pakistanis "stop temporizing and get fully into the fight." On the expansion of US missile strikes in Pakistan, including their extension into Baluchistan, the newspaper wrote: "Such strikes have killed several top extremists, but the program is hugely unpopular in Pakistan and Mr. Obama must be judicious about expanding it. That means three things: extremely careful targeting, no civilian casualties, or as few as possible [i.e., as many as needed], and no publicity."


 

In other words, the American people are to be kept in the dark about targeted assassinations, civilian casualties from missile strikes, and other covert military operations in Pakistan. And the Times will do its part to suppress any information about such actions.


 

The editorial went on to declare that Obama had to persuade the Pakistanis that "the United States is in it for the long haul this time."


 

What this points to is an unprecedented program of US military aggression and subversion and the transformation of both Afghanistan and Pakistan into US protectorates. This is the meaning of the recent statement by National Security Adviser Jones that "We are not leaving the region. We have enormous strategic interests in Afghanistan, east of Afghanistan in Pakistan…"


 

Since Obama's lying speech, a program of US colonial domination of Central and South Asia has been unfurled, and the US media has swung into action to bolster the effort with a new round of pro-war propaganda, including the dispatch of TV news anchors to American bases in Afghanistan.


 

The war in Afghanistan is only part of the global strategy of American imperialism to assert its domination of a region rich in oil and gas and of critical geo-strategic importance for supremacy over the Eurasian continent. The implications of this drive are catastrophic for the peoples of the region, who will pay the price in countless deaths, social devastation and neo-colonial oppression. But they are also disastrous for the people of the United States, whose sons and daughters will be sacrificed and whose living standards will be further slashed to pay for never-ending military adventures.


 

There is an element of immense recklessness in Washington's aggressive policy toward Pakistan. It is driving the country into civil war, which would rapidly destabilize the entire region and heighten the danger of war between India and Pakistan and between India and China, all three of which are nuclear powers. Russia and Iran would inevitably be drawn into the maelstrom as well.


 

Obama's election was promoted by sections of the American ruling elite who believed he could serve as the figurehead for a certain recalibration of US foreign policy after the disasters of the Bush years. It is now clear that Obama is the front man for the military and the most ruthless representatives of the ruling class.


 

It is necessary for workers and youth to draw the requisite conclusions. The fight against the war is a fight against the Obama administration. It is a fight against the Democratic Party and the two-party system. And it is a fight against American imperialism and the capitalist system upon which it is based.

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Sunday, December 6, 2009

For Maryam, on her birthday

It's your birthday, but we got the gift...

a gentle, sweet, beautiful daughter

who is always a pleasure to be with.

You glow with sensitivity and compassion

generated from the depths

of your warm heart and and kind soul.

A loving kid, a peacemaker,

a darling full of the joy of life,

that's you.

Anyone who spends time with you

is privileged to know

such an extraordinary person.

You are a great joy in our lives.

We love you and cherish you and treasure you

and wish that every one of your birthdays

will be the happiest yet.

It's your birthday beautiful child

make a wish


let your dreams run wild!

We thank God, He blessed us with you

a girlie girl in all you do.

Big black eyes and wavy black hair

little things to you are such a big fare.

Fashion and makeup are what you like

you always ask to ride your bike.

You brushed the tooth til it was clean

how happy it made you could surely be seen.

In such a hurry to grow up big

please slow down, child cuz

I'm enjoying this gig!



The day even gold lose its glitter

For it can't be as bright as you

And all flowers fear to bloom

For they can't be as fresh as you.

The day all diamonds lose their worth

For they have no worth in front of you

And even snow just melt

For it can't be as pure as you.

That's the day when

We all say to you

"Happy Birthday to You,

Happy Birthday to You."





A very special someone who came and knocked

Quietly on my heart's door that was locked

And then very swiftly entered in my heart

And used her cute gestures and art


To bring the smile back on my face

And spread joy in that sweet little pace

Is no one but you my little sweet heart

Who certainly knows how in her art


To shine like a sun upon all

And don't let anyone's tear ever fall

And you're that someone who came and knocked

Quietly on my heart's door that was locked


And today you are turning six dear Mium

I wish may your life be bright and sunny

For you came as first sunshine to dawn

Who built people's hopes for the appearing morn


And now I don't have more words to lay

Neither more things or sayings to say

But one more thing that I wish that is true

Is that may Allah's blessings all surround you.



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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan

By Jeremy Scahill

November 23, 2009

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services."

The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.

Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."

"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."


 

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."

Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"


 

Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The Nation.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."

In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."


 

Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.

In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."


 

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."

"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."


 

Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan

For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."

Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."

The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large residential estate originally established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."

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Zardari forces closure of ‘Meray Mutabiq’ in Dubai

Dr Shahid faces life threats; Geo programme to be telecast from another location; bar widely condemned

News Desk

KARACHI: Under immense pressure from President Asif Ali Zardari on the Dubai government, 'Meray Mutabiq', the popular programme of Dr Shahid Masood on Geo TV, was banned from being telecast on Monday night from the Dubai studios of Geo TV.

Dr Masood presented his programme from a different location without the use of his studio and technical facilities and announced that he had been stopped by the local authorities from presenting his programme.

The popular talk show host also disclosed that he had received serious life threats from PPP leaders who had told him to come to Pakistan and conduct his programme from this country and then "we will see you".

In an exact replay of the Musharraf era, the use of influence and pressure on a foreign government by the president of Pakistan is a direct attack on the freedom of the press in Pakistan, the Geo TV management said in a statement on Monday night.

It announced that the programme will still be telecast from a different location, as was done on Monday night.The management of Geo TV condemned the action of the Pakistani authorities to use the influence of a foreign government to deny freedom of expression and the Press.

Monday night's programme of Dr Shahid Masood featured Group Editor of The News Shaheen Sehbai and Editor Investigations of The News Ansar Abbasi, who condemned the action, and with one voice declared that the action would not force Geo TV to succumb to government pressure.

Shaheen Sehbai expressed shock and regret and said the action showed that the PPP leaders had pushed the panic button in desperation otherwise there was no reason why they could not tolerate the voice of any journalist or any TV talk show host.

Sehbai said the action by the PPP rulers was a direct negation of democracy and freedom of speech and would be resisted by all democracy and freedom loving people in Pakistan and round the world. In today's world of instant communications, Internet, U-Tube, SMS, emails, Twitter and private phone-videos, such a ban was nothing but sheer stupidity.

Journalist Ansar Abbasi said the journalists community had fought similar bans throughout their careers, specially under dictators, and they had always won and they will again win this time. But he said the regrettable part was that the curbs had been imposed by a government which called itself democratically elected.

Dr Shahid Masood in his statement revealed that he had been receiving threats to his life and the banning of his show in Dubai was a clear proof of the desperation and panic in the government. He, however, expressed his determination to continue speaking the truth and exposing the corruption and wrongdoings of the government, without fear.

Geo TV has always raised issues of public importance and had been in the vanguard of the movement for the restoration of the judges, against corruption of public money and for democracy and rule of law.

These issues had resulted in a similar ban imposed by the former dictator General Musharraf for three months after the imposition of the Nov 3 emergency but Geo TV and its journalists and TV hosts stood their ground and finally saw the dictator disappear into the dustbin of history.

The government action against Geo TV programme was immediately condemned by a wide spectrum of political leaders, media organisations and human rights bodies. Spokesman of the PML-N Ahsan Iqbal said it was an attack on the democratic freedom guaranteed under the Constitution and his party strongly condemned it. Chairman of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission Iqbal Haider called it a crude attack on all democratic norms and a violation of constitution which will be fought with full force.

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Defending the Arsenal

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?

by Seymour M. Hersh

November 16, 2009

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army's ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country's best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army's main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general's route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military's control over nuclear weapons." Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, "we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state."

Clinton's words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

On April 29th, President Obama was asked at a news conference whether he could reassure the American people that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal could be kept away from terrorists. Obama's answer remains the clearest delineation of the Administration's public posture. He was, he said, "gravely concerned" about the fragility of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. "Their biggest threat right now comes internally," Obama said. "We have huge . . . national-security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state." The United States, he said, could "make sure that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is secure—primarily, initially, because the Pakistan Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons' falling into the wrong hands."

The questioner, Chuck Todd, of NBC, began asking whether the American military could, if necessary, move in and secure Pakistan's bombs. Obama did not let Todd finish. "I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort," he said. "I feel confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands. O.K.?"

Obama did not say so, but current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis. At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities—goals that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistan Army, has long desired. In June, Congress approved a four-hundred-million-dollar request for what the Administration called the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, providing immediate assistance to the Pakistan Army for equipment, training, and "renovation and construction."

The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust. Many Pakistanis believe that America's true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, who view the weapons as symbols of their nation's status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India. (India's first nuclear test took place in 1974, Pakistan's in 1998.)

A senior Pakistani official who has close ties to Zardari exploded with anger during an interview when the subject turned to the American demands for more information about the arsenal. After the September 11th attacks, he said, there had been an understanding between the Bush Administration and then President Pervez Musharraf "over what Pakistan had and did not have." Today, he said, "you'd like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d'état in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India's nuclear weapons?" the official asked. "Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan."

The ongoing consultation on nuclear security between Washington and Islamabad intensified after the announcement in March of President Obama's so-called Af-Pak policy, which called upon the Pakistan Army to take more aggressive action against Taliban enclaves inside Pakistan. I was told that the understandings on nuclear coöperation benefitted from the increasingly close relationship between Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Kayani, his counterpart, although the C.I.A. and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have also been involved. (All three departments declined to comment for this article. The national-security council and the C.I.A. denied that there were any agreements in place.)

In response to a series of questions, Admiral Mullen acknowledged that he and Kayani were, in his spokesman's words, "very close." The spokesman said that Mullen is deeply involved in day-to-day Pakistani developments and "is almost an action officer for all things Pakistan." But he denied that he and Kayani, or their staffs, had reached an understanding about the availability of American forces in case of mutiny or a terrorist threat to a nuclear facility. "To my knowledge, we have no military units, special forces or otherwise, involved in such an assignment," Mullen said through his spokesman. The spokesman added that Mullen had not seen any evidence of growing fundamentalism inside the Pakistani military. In a news conference on May 4th, however, Mullen responded to a query about growing radicalism in Pakistan by saying that "what has clearly happened over the [past] twelve months is the continual decline, gradual decline, in security." The Admiral also spoke openly about the increased coöperation on nuclear security between the United States and Pakistan: "I know what we've done over the last three years, specifically to both invest, assist, and I've watched them improve their security fairly dramatically. . . . I've looked at this, you know, as hard as I can, over a period of time." Seventeen days later, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "We have invested a significant amount of resources through the Department of Energy in the last several years" to help Pakistan improve the controls on its arsenal. "They still have to improve them," he said.

In interviews in Pakistan, I obtained confirmation that there were continuing conversations with the United States on nuclear-security plans—as well as evidence that the Pakistani leadership put much less weight on them than the Americans did. In some cases, Pakistani officials spoke of the talks principally as a means of placating anxious American politicians. "You needed it," a senior Pakistani official, who said that he had been briefed on the nuclear issue, told me. His tone was caustic. "We have twenty thousand people working in the nuclear-weapons industry in Pakistan, and here is this American view that Pakistan is bound to fail." The official added, "The Americans are saying, 'We want to help protect your weapons.' We say, 'Fine. Tell us what you can do for us.' It's part of a quid pro quo. You say, also, 'Come clean on the nuclear program and we'll insure that India doesn't put pressure on it.' So we say, 'O.K.' "

But, the Pakistani official said, "both sides are lying to each other." The information that the Pakistanis handed over was not as complete as the Americans believed. "We haven't told you anything that you don't know," he said. The Americans didn't realize that Pakistan would never cede control of its arsenal: "If you try to take the weapons away, you will fail."

High-level coöperation between Islamabad and Washington on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal began at least eight years ago. Former President Musharraf, when I interviewed him in London recently, acknowledged that his government had held extensive discussions with the Bush Administration after the September 11th attacks, and had given State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures. Musharraf also confirmed that Pakistan had constructed a huge tunnel system for the transport and storage of nuclear weaponry. "The tunnels are so deep that a nuclear attack will not touch them," Musharraf told me, with obvious pride. The tunnels would make it impossible for the American intelligence community—"Big Uncle," as a Pakistani nuclear-weapons expert called it—to monitor the movements of nuclear components by satellite.

Safeguards have been built into the system. Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads (containing an enriched radioactive core) and their triggers (sophisticated devices containing highly explosive lenses, detonators, and krytrons) to be stored separately from each other and from their delivery devices (missiles or aircraft). The goal is to insure that no one can launch a warhead—in the heat of a showdown with India, for example—without pausing to put it together. Final authority to order a nuclear strike requires consensus within Pakistan's ten-member National Command Authority, with the chairman—by statute, President Zardari—casting the deciding vote.

But the safeguards meant to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly could make the arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed the process and concluded that the triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled—at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb. A consultant to the intelligence community said that in one war-gamed scenario disaffected members of the Pakistani military could instigate a terrorist attack inside India, and that the ensuing crisis would give them "a chance to pick up bombs and triggers—in the name of protecting the assets from extremists."

The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focussed on the warheads' cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.

"The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads, some of their locations, and their command-and-control system," the former senior intelligence official told me. "We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans, so we could augment them in case of a breach of security," he said. "We're there to help the Pakistanis, but we're also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile." The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane, the former official said, and where the triggers could be sequestered. Admiral Mullen, asked about increased American insight into the arsenal, said, through his spokesman, "I am not aware of our receipt of any such information." (A senior military officer added that the information, if it had been conveyed, would most likely "have gone to another government agency.")

A spokesman for the Pakistani military said, in an official denial, "Pakistan neither needs any American unit for enhancing the security for its arsenal nor would accept it." The spokesman added that the Pakistani military "has been providing protection to U.S. troops in a situation of crisis"—a reference to Pakistan's role in the war on terror—"and hence is quite capable to deal with any untoward situation."

Early this summer, a consultant to the Department of Defense said, a highly classified military and civil-emergency response team was put on alert after receiving an urgent report from American intelligence officials indicating that a Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray. The team, which operates clandestinely and includes terrorism and nonproliferation experts from the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the F.B.I., and the D.O.E., is under standing orders to deploy from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, within four hours of an alert. When the report turned out to be a false alarm, the mission was aborted, the consultant said. By the time the team got the message, it was already in Dubai.

In an actual crisis, would the Pakistanis give an American team direct access to their arsenal? An adviser to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency said that some analysts suspected that the Pakistani military had taken steps to move elements of the nuclear arsenal "out of the count"—to shift them to a storage facility known only to a very few—as a hedge against mutiny or an American or Indian effort to seize them. "If you thought your American ally was telling your enemy where the weapons were, you'd do the same thing," the adviser said.

"Let me say this about our nuclear deterrent," President Zardari told me, when asked about any recent understandings between Pakistan and the United States. "We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody's integrity. We're all big boys."

Zardari and I met twice, first in his office, in the grand but isolated Presidential compound in Islamabad, and then, a few days later, alone over dinner in his personal quarters. Zardari, who became President after the assassination, in December, 2007, of his charismatic wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, spent nearly eleven years in jail on corruption charges. He is widely known in Pakistan as Mr. Ten Per Cent, a reference to the commissions he allegedly took on government contracts when Bhutto was in power, and is seen by many Pakistanis as little more than a crook who has grown too close to America; his approval ratings are in the teens. He is chatty but guarded, proud but defensive, and, like many Pakistanis, convinced that the United States will always favor India. Over dinner, he spoke of his suspicions regarding his wife's death. He said that, despite rumors to the contrary, he would complete his five-year term.

Zardari spoke with derision about what he depicted as America's obsession with the vulnerability of his nation's nuclear arsenal. "In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us," he said. "The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it's very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They're British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It's a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many."

Zardari offered some advice to Barack Obama: instead of fretting about nuclear security in Pakistan, his Administration should deal with the military disparity between Pakistan and India, which has a much larger army. "You should help us get conventional weapons," he said. "It's a balance-of-power issue."

In May, Zardari, at the urging of the United States, approved a major offensive against the Taliban, sending thirty thousand troops into the Swat Valley, which lies a hundred miles northwest of Islamabad. "The enemy that we were fighting in Swat was made up of twenty per cent thieves and thugs and eighty per cent with the same mind-set as the Taliban," Zardari said. He depicted the operation as a complete success, but added that his government was not "ready" to kill all the Taliban. His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. "Money is the best incentive," he said. "They can be rented."

Zardari's view of the Swat offensive was striking, given that many Pakistanis had been angered by the excessive use of force and the ensuing refugee crisis. The lives of about two million people were torn apart, and, during a summer in which temperatures soared to a hundred and twenty degrees, hundreds of thousands of civilians were crowded into government-run tent cities. Idris Khattak, a former student radical who now works with Amnesty International, said in Peshawar that residents had described nights of heavy, indiscriminate bombing and shelling, followed in the morning by Army sweeps. The villagers, and not the Taliban, had been hit the hardest. "People told us that the bombing the night before was a signal for the Taliban to get out," he said.

Zardari did not dispute that there were difficulties in the refugee camps—the heat, the lack of facilities. But he insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson and would not "let the Taliban back into their cities."

Rahimullah Yusufzai, an eminent Pakistani journalist, who has twice interviewed Osama bin Laden, had a different explanation for the conditions that led to the offensive. "The Taliban were initially trying to win public support in Swat by delivering justice and peace," Yusufzai said. "But when they got into power they went crazy and became brutal. Many are from the lowest ranks of society, and they began killing and terrorizing their opponents. The people were afraid."

The turmoil did not end with the Army's invasion. "Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing," Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. "They told us they hated what they were doing—'We were trained to fight Indians.' " But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. "They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed—just like the Americans with their Predator missiles," Yusufzai said. "What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don't understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family." What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day "good-will visit" to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively.

Last year, the Washington Times ran an article about the Pressler Amendment, a 1985 law cutting off most military aid to Pakistan as long as it continued its nuclear program. The measure didn't stop Pakistan from getting the bomb, or from buying certain weapons, but it did reduce the number of Pakistani officers who were permitted to train with American units. The article quoted Major General John Custer as saying, "The older military leaders love us. They understand American culture and they know we are not the enemy." The General's assessment provoked a barrage of e-mail among American officers with experience in Pakistan, and a former member of a Special Forces unit provided me with copies. "The fact that a two-star would make a statement [like] that . . . is at best naïve and actually pure bullshit," a senior Special Forces officer on duty in Pakistan wrote. He went on:



I have met and interacted with the entire military staff from General Kayani on down and all the general officers on their joint staff and in all the services, and I haven't spoken to one that "loves us"—whatever that means. In fact, I have read most of the TS [top secret] assessments of all their General Officers and I haven't read one that comes close to their "loving" us. They play us for everything they can get, and we trip over ourselves trying to give them everything they ask for, and cannot pay for.

Some military men who know Pakistan well believe that, whatever the officer corps's personal views, the Pakistan Army remains reliable. "They cannot be described as pro-American, but this doesn't mean they don't know which side their bread is buttered on," Brian Cloughley, who served six years as Australia's defense attaché to Pakistan and is now a contributor to Jane's Sentinel, told me. "The chance of mutiny is slim. Were this to happen, there would be the most severe reaction" by special security units in the Pakistani military, Cloughley said. "But worry feeds irrationality, and the international consequences could be dire."

The recollections of Bush Administration officials who dealt with Pakistan in the first round of nuclear consultations after September 11th do not inspire confidence. The Americans' main contact was Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, the agency that is responsible for nuclear strategy and operations and for the physical security of the weapons complex. At first, a former high-level Bush Administration official told me, Kidwai was reassuring; his professionalism increased their faith in the soundness of Pakistan's nuclear doctrine and its fail-safe procedures. The Army was controlled by Punjabis who, the Americans thought, "did not put up with Pashtuns," as the former Bush Administration official put it. (The Taliban are mostly Pashtun.) But by the time the official left, at the beginning of George W. Bush's second term, he had a much darker assessment: "They don't trust us and they will not tell you the truth."

No American, for example, was permitted access to A. Q. Khan, the metallurgist and so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, who traded crucial nuclear-weapons components on the international black market. Musharraf placed him under house arrest in early 2004, claiming to have been shocked to learn of Khan's dealings. At the time, it was widely understood that those activities had been sanctioned by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.). Khan was freed in February, although there are restrictions on his travel. (In an interview last year, Kidwai told David Sanger, for his book "The Inheritance," that "our security systems are foolproof," thanks to technical controls; Sanger noted that Bush Administration officials were "not as confident in private as they sound in public.")

A former State Department official who worked on nuclear issues with Pakistan after September 11th said that he'd come to understand that the Pakistanis "believe that any information we get from them would be shared with others—perhaps even the Indians. To know the command-and-control processes of their nuclear weapons is one thing. To know where the weapons actually are is another thing."

The former State Department official cited the large Pakistan Air Force base outside Sargodha, west of Lahore, where many of Pakistan's nuclear-capable F-16s are thought to be stationed. "Is there a nuke ready to go at Sargodha?" the former official asked. "If there is, and Sargodha is the size of Andrews Air Force Base, would we know where to go? Are the warheads stored in Bunker X?" Ignorance could be dangerous. "If our people don't know where to go and we suddenly show up at a base, there will be a lot of people shooting at them," he said. "And even if the Pakistanis may have told us that the triggers will be at Bunker X, is it true?"

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recently retired after three years as the Department of Energy's director of intelligence and counter-intelligence, preceded by two decades at the C.I.A., wrote vividly about the "lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders" in Pakistan. "Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends," Mowatt-Larssen wrote. "Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan. . . . Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan's nuclear security is an investment" in America's security.

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, "I don't think there's any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don't tell us what we want to hear we'll cut off their goodies." Gelb added, "In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were 'access.' I don't know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn't know what it's talking about."

The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. "If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he's lying," he said. "The Pakistanis wouldn't share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away."

Sultan Amir Tarar, known to many as Colonel Imam, is the archetype of the disillusioned Pakistani officer. Tarar spent eighteen years with the I.S.I. in Afghanistan, most of them as an undercover operative. In the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, in the eighties, he worked closely with C.I.A. agents, and liked the experience. "They were honest and thoughtful and provided the finest equipment," Tarar said during an interview in Rawalpindi. He spoke with pride of shaking hands with Robert Gates in Afghanistan in 1985. Gates, now the Secretary of Defense, was then a senior C.I.A. official. "I've heard all about you," Gates said, according to Tarar. "Good or bad?" "Oh, my. All good," Gates replied. Tarar's view changed after the Russians withdrew and, in his opinion, "the Americans abandoned us." When I asked if he'd seen "Charlie Wilson's War," the movie depicting that abandonment and a Texas congressman's futile efforts to change the policy, Tarar laughed and said, "I've seen Charlie Wilson. I didn't need to see the movie."

Tarar, who retired in 1995 and has a son in the Army, believed—as did many Pakistani military men—that the American campaign to draw Pakistan deeper into the war against the Taliban would backfire. "The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us," he said. If the Obama Administration persists, "there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse. Every Pakistani will then be his own nuclear bomb—a suicide bomber," Tarar said. "The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage. People there will flee to the big cities like Lahore and Islamabad."

Tarar believed that the Obama Administration had to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that meant direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Tarar knew Mullah Omar well. "Omar trained as a young man in my camp in 1985," he told me. "He was physically fit and mission-oriented—a very honest man who was a practicing Muslim. Nothing beyond that. He was a Talib—a student, and not a mullah. But people respected him. Today, among all the Afghan leaders, Omar has the biggest audience, and this is the right time for you to talk to him."

Speaking to Tarar and other officers gave a glimpse of the acrimony at the top of the Pakistani government, which has complicated the nuclear equation. Tarar spoke bitterly about the position that General Kayani found himself in, carrying out the "corrupt" policies of the Americans and of Zardari, while Pakistan's soldiers "were fighting gallantly in Swat against their own people."

A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. Shaheen Sehbai, a senior editor of the newspaper International, said that Zardari's "problem is that he's besieged domestically on all sides, and he thinks only the Americans can save him," and, as a result, "he'll open his pants for them." Sehbai noted that Kayani's term as Army chief ends in the fall of 2010. If Zardari tried to replace him before then, Kayani's colleagues would not accept his choice, and there could be "a generals' coup," Sehbai said. "America should worry more about the structure and organization of the Army—and keep it intact."

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the director general of the I.S.I. in the late eighties and worked with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Gul, who is retired, is a devout Muslim and had been accused by the Bush Administration of having ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda—allegations he has denied. "What would happen if, in a crisis, you tried to get—or did not get—our nuclear triggers? What happens then?" Gul asked when we met. "You will have us as an enemy, with the Chinese and Russians behind us."

If Pakistani officers had given any assurances about the nuclear arsenal, Gul said, "they are cheating you and they would be right to do so. We should not be aiding and abetting Americans."

Persuading the Pakistan Army to concentrate on fighting the Taliban, and not India, is crucial to the Obama Administration's plans for the region. There has been enmity between India and Pakistan since 1947, when Britain's withdrawal led to the partition of the subcontinent. The state of Kashmir, which was three-quarters Muslim but acceded to Hindu-majority India, has been in dispute ever since, and India and Pakistan have twice gone to war over the territory. Through the years, the Pakistan Army and the I.S.I. have relied on Pakistan-based jihadist groups, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, to carry out a guerrilla war against the Indians in Kashmir. Many in the Pakistani military consider the groups to be an important strategic reserve.

A retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who worked with his C.I.A. counterparts to track down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that he was deeply troubled by the prospect of Pakistan ceding any control over its nuclear deterrent. "Suppose the jihadis strike at India again—another attack on the parliament. India will tell the United States to stay out of it, and 'We'll sort it out on our own,' " he said. "Then there would be a ground attack into Pakistan. As we begin to react, the Americans will be interested in protecting our nuclear assets, and urge us not to go nuclear—'Let the Indians attack and do not respond!' They would urge us instead to find those responsible for the attack on India. Our nuclear arsenal was supposed to be our savior, but we would end up protecting it. It doesn't protect us," he said.

"My belief today is that it's better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted," the former officer concluded. "The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so."

Pakistan's fears about the United States coöperating with India are not irrational. Last year, Congress approved a controversial agreement that enabled India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States without joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making India the only non-signatory to the N.P.T. permitted to do so. Concern about the Pakistani arsenal has since led to greater coöperation between the United States and India in missile defense; the training of the Indian Air Force to use bunker-busting bombs; and "the collection of intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal," according to the consultant to the intelligence community. (The Pentagon declined to comment.)

I flew to New Delhi after my stay in Pakistan and met with two senior officials from the Research and Analysis Wing, India's national intelligence agency. (Of course, as in Pakistan, no allegation about the other side should be taken at face value.) "Our worries are about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan," one of the officials said. "Not because we are worried about the mullahs taking over the country; we're worried about those senior officers in the Pakistan Army who are Caliphates"—believers in a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state. "We know some of them and we have names," he said. "We've been watching colonels who are now brigadiers. These are the guys who could blackmail the whole world"—that is, by seizing a nuclear weapon.

The Indian intelligence official went on, "Do we know if the Americans have that intelligence? This is not in the scheme of the way you Americans look at things—'Kayani is a great guy! Let's have a drink and smoke a cigar with him and his buddies.' Some of the men we are watching have notions of leading an Islamic army."

In an interview the next afternoon, an Indian official who has dealt diplomatically with Pakistan for years said, "Pakistan is in trouble, and it's worrisome to us because an unstable Pakistan is the worst thing we can have." But he wasn't sure what America could do. "They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans," he said. "I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you."

India and Pakistan, he added, have had back-channel talks for years in an effort to resolve the dispute over Kashmir, but "Pakistan wants talks for the sake of talks, and it does not carry out the agreements already reached." (In late October, Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, publicly renewed an offer of talks, but tied it to a request that Pakistan crack down on terrorism; Pakistan's official response was to welcome the overture.)

The Indian official, like his counterparts in Pakistan, believed that Americans did not appreciate what his government had done for them. "Why did the Pakistanis remove two divisions from the border with us?" He was referring to the shifting of Pakistani forces, at the request of the United States, to better engage the Taliban. "It means they have confidence that we will not take advantage of the situation. We deserve a pat on the back for this." Instead, the official said, with a shrug, "you are too concerned with your relationship with Pakistan."

Pervez Musharraf lives in unpretentious exile with his wife in an apartment in London, near Hyde Park. Officials who had dealt with him cautioned that, along with his many faults, he had a disarmingly open manner. At the beginning of our talk, I asked him why, on a visit to Washington in late January, he had not met with any senior Obama Administration officials. "I did not ask for a meeting because I was afraid of being told no," he said. At another point, Musharraf, dressed casually in slacks and a sports shirt, said that he had been troubled by the American-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. "I said to the Americans, 'Give us the Predators.' It was refused. I told the Americans, 'Then just say publicly that you're giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.' That, too, was denied."

Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. "Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud," Musharraf told me. "He'll do anything to save himself. He's not a patriot and he's got no love for Pakistan. He's a third-rater."

Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn't think the Army was capable of mutiny—not the Army he knew. "There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don't think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These 'fundos' were disliked and not popular."

He added, "Muslims think highly of Obama, and he should use his acceptability—even with the Taliban—and try to deal with them politically."

Musharraf spoke of two prior attempts to create a fundamentalist uprising in the Army. In both cases, he said, the officers involved were arrested and prosecuted. "I created the strategic force that controls all the strategic assets—eighteen to twenty thousand strong. They are monitored for character and for potential fundamentalism," he said. He acknowledged, however, that things had changed since he'd left office. "People have become alarmed because of the Taliban and what they have done," he said. "Everyone is now alarmed."

The rise in militancy is a sensitive subject, and many inside Pakistan insist that American fears, and the implied threat to the nuclear arsenal, are overwrought. Amélie Blom, a political sociologist at Lahore University of Management Sciences, noted that the Army continues to support an unpopular President. "The survival of the coalition government shows that the present Army leadership has an interest in making it work," she said in an e-mail.

Others are less sure. "Nuclear weapons are only as safe as the people who handle them," Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, "the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine." There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said.

The current offensive in South Waziristan marked a significant success for the Obama Administration, which had urged Zardari to take greater control of the tribal areas. There was a risk, too—that the fighting would further radicalize Pakistan. Last week, another Pakistan Army general was the victim of a drive-by assassination attempt, as he was leaving his home in Islamabad. Since the Waziristan operation was announced, more than three hundred people have been killed in a dozen terrorist attacks. "If we push too hard there, we could trigger a social revolution," the Special Forces adviser said. "We are playing into Al Qaeda's deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two." He added, "The Pakistani military knows that if there's any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes." More escalation in Pakistan, he said, "will take us to the brink."

During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown. In the past, military officers, politicians, and journalists routinely served Johnnie Walker Black during our talks, and drank it themselves. This time, even the most senior retired Army generals offered only juice or tea, even in their own homes. Officials and journalists said that soldiers and middle-level officers were increasingly attracted to the preaching of Zaid Hamid, who joined the mujahideen and fought for nine years in Afghanistan. On CDs and on television, Hamid exhorts soldiers to think of themselves as Muslims first and Pakistanis second. He claims that terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year were staged by India and Western Zionists, aided by the Mossad. Another proselytizer, Dr. Israr Ahmed, writes a column in the Urdu press in which he depicts the Holocaust as "divine punishment," and advocates the extermination of the Jews. He, too, is said to be popular with the officer corps.

A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. "They've penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army," he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.

"Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?" the Obama Administration official asked. "In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics." 


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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/16/091116fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all#ixzz0Wj1XlkKR

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