Pakistan - No Longer Our Ally

Behind The Raymond Davis Fiasco
By Ali K. Chisti
www.military.com
7 March 2011

Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, was in Lahore on his way back from a routine reconnaissance mission when he was intercepted by ISI operatives. Davis has said that he thought he was being robbed and he shot the gun-toting operatives in self-defense. The issue, which could have been one of simple diplomatic immunity has escalated to the point that Senator John Kerry had to come to Pakistan to in an attempt to rescue Davis.

But all efforts seemed to have gone in vain where; Raymond Davis is still in Pakistan's custody and faces a possible death sentence. Things shifted for the worse as a CIA Station Chief in Islamabad was forced to leave Pakistan for security reasons after the country's foreign office deliberately leaked his name in an unprecedented show of animosity towards the US. And another American security official was recently arrested in Peshawar for visa violations and is awaiting trial.
So why is Pakistan, supposedly one of America's biggest allies in the region, turning against the U.S.?

The increase in drone attacks by the CIA has the biggest turn off for the Pakistani military, which is also aggressively pushing for cooperation with the al Qaeda linked Haqqani network as part of their plan of Strategic Depth in Afghanistan. In Oman, where both nations' military chiefs met last week, the Pakistanis asked for drone technology and the list of all CIA staffers in Pakistan in return for seeing to the release of Davis, which shows the widening trust deficit between the two "allies."

Unfortunately the issue cannot easily be resolved. The underlying fact is that Pakistan and the United States have interests in the region that collide. Pakistan, in many ways a proxy of China, is concerned with India more than anything else, while the U.S. is increasingly stepping up against China (the biggest investors in Pakistan's defense industry) by opting to support India.

Al Qaeda may be history in terms of logistical and operational clout, however there are emerging terror threats. Tahreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistani are growing along with the Pakistani Taliban, which orchestrated the recent CIA forward base suicide bombing. While the war might be in Afghanistan the war rooms are in sovereign and nuclear Pakistan where anti-Americanism stands at 70-80 percent.

In the meantime the U.S. has to deal with the blackmailing Pakistani security establishment while trying to support whatever stabilizing force in the country that can be packaged as "democracy."

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Letter from Karachi

Letter from Karachi
By Taimur Khan
Foreign Affairs

"An influx of working poor into Pakistan's cities is leading to violent competition over land and political loyalties -- not to mention changing the very social fabric of the country. Will Karachi, and Pakistan as a whole, be able to adapt?"

Read in on Foreign Affairs: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/67173

"The Karachi Project" ISI and AQ look to control Karachi

"The Karachi Project"

By Ali K. Chisti
Foreignpolicy.com

In a dramatic series of raids in February, Pakistani authorities captured more than two dozen top al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban, and Pakistani Taliban leaders, mostly in Pashtun areas on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan's largest city. The list included Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar's top deputy, Mullah Baradar, whose capture raised hopes that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was finally gaining momentum.

The arrests also sparked a debate in Kabul and Washington over the seeming policy shift on the part of Pakistan, which for years had resisted cracking down on top insurgent leaders despite repeated entreaties from the United States. Some accounts suggested that Pakistan had nabbed Baradar to prevent him from cutting a separate peace deal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was reportedly angered by his arrest.

In fact, NATO sources say, most of the Afghan Taliban frontier leadership -- known as the Quetta Shura -- had for at least three years been sheltered in Karachi under an ultra-secret program run by the Pakistani security establishment and known as the "Karachi Project." The idea that most of the leadership of Taliban's was stationed in Quetta was a "smoke screen," a top NATO source told me. "In reality, it's Karachi Shura," confirmed a top NATO commander.

The origins of the Karachi Project reportedly date back to 2003, when, under intense U.S. pressure, then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf closed "Forward Section 23," a combo of safe houses and camps in Indian-occupied Kashmir that had provided cover and refuge to top militants. The Karachi branch of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate then became the hub for anti-India activities, the Asia Times has reported, led by a coalition of militant groups including Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harukat ul-Jihad al-Islami, as well as elements of the Karachi criminal underworld. According to a recent account in the Guardian, citing "classified Indian government documents," at least two serving ISI officers played a role in the Nov. 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai, which were launched from Karachi.

While analysts have for years accused Pakistan's security establishment of playing a double game with militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba -- disavowing responsibility for their actions while retaining them as "strategic assets" to be deployed against India -- recent revelations emerging from the interrogation of David Headley, a Pakistani-American accused of complicity in the Mumbai attacks, threaten to blow the game wide open.

In Headley's telling, Pakistan is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between "good" jihadi groups -- those that launch attacks in India or Afghanistan -- and "bad" ones that wage against the Pakistani state. Indeed, that may have been the motive for the Mumbai assault.

According to the Guardian, Headley "told the investigators that the ISI hoped the Mumbai attack would slow or stop growing ‘integration' between groups active in Kashmir, with whom the agency had maintained a long relationship, and ‘Taliban-based outfits' in Pakistan and Afghanistan which were a threat to the Pakistani state."
The Karachi Project works under the direct supervision of the ISI, according to accounts in the Indian press confirmed by multiple sources, and also shelters Daud Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, infamous Indian gangsters accused of orchestrating in the 1993 attacks in Mumbai, as well as the Bhaktbal brothers, cofounders of the Indian Mujahideen, the largest Indian jihadi group.

Whether or not one believes such accounts, it is worth noting that Mullah Baradar was reportedly caught at Khudamul Qurun, a hard-line religious seminary located in an area of Karachi that is under the sway of a major Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders were previously accused of sheltering high-profile al Qaeda leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, and other top al Qaeda leaders. Safe houses like this particular seminary are placed and well protected by the Pakistan security establishment.

A former intelligence chief who is actively monitoring the situation noted, "Over the years, it's Karachi which has seen more al Qaeda and Taliban activity than anywhere else."