[Peace-discuss] End the war in Pakistan now

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Here's how the Indian press treated the matter. --CGE]

CIA man in Islamabad leaves as 'ISI exposes his identity'
MARK MAZZETTI and SALMAN MASOOD, NYT News Service, Dec 18, 2010, 05.36am IST

WASHINGTON: The Central Intelligence Agency's top clandestine officer in 
Islamabad was pulled from the country on Thursday amid an escalating war of 
recriminations between American and Pakistani spies, with some American 
officials convinced that the officer's cover was deliberately blown by 
Pakistan's military intelligence agency.

The CIA officer hastily left Pakistan on the same day that an Obama 
administration review of the Afghanistan war concluded that the war could not be 
won without greater cooperation from Islamabad in rooting out militants in 
Pakistan's western mountains.

On Thursday and Friday, the United States appeared to make good on promises to 
expand its own efforts to attack the militants, with drone strikes hitting 
Khyber agency in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. Most drone strikes this year 
have targeted North Waziristan, and attacks on Khyber in recent years have been 
rare. Pakistani government officials said at least 26 militants were killed in 
the most recent attacks.

The outing of the CIA station chief is tied to the spy agency's campaign of 
drone strikes, which are very unpopular in Pakistan, although the government has 
given its tacit approval for them.

American officials said that the CIA station chief had received a number of 
death threats after he was named publicly in a legal complaint sent to Pakistani 
police this week by the family of victims of an earlier drone strike.

The officials said there is strong suspicion that operatives of Pakistan's 
powerful spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, had a 
hand in revealing the CIA officer's identity — possibly in retaliation for a 
civil lawsuit filed in Brooklyn last month implicating the ISI chief in the 
Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008.

The American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not 
immediately provide details to support their suspicions.

A senior Pakistani official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that 
the Pakistani government "believes that the suit in New York does not have a 
sound legal basis, and is based on conjecture. We did not need to retaliate."

"As far as the Government of Pakistan and the ISI are concerned," he said, "we 
look forward to working with the Americans in securing the world from 
transnational threats, especially the shared threat of terrorism."

The Associated Press was the first to report Friday that the station chief had 
left the country.

The intensifying mistrust between the CIA and ISI, two uneasy but co-dependent 
allies, could hardly come at a worse time. The Obama administration relies on 
Pakistan's support for the armed drone program, which this year has launched a 
record number of strikes in North Waziristan against terror suspects.

"We will continue to help strengthen Pakistani capacity to root out terrorists," 
President Obama said on Thursday. "Nevertheless, progress has not come fast 
enough. So we will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe 
havens within their borders must be dealt with."

Michael J. Morell, the CIA's deputy director, met with Pakistani officials in 
Islamabad on Thursday, but American officials said his visit was not the result 
of the station chief's case.

The relationship between the spy services has often frayed in recent years. 
American officials believe that ISI officers helped plan the deadly July 2008 
bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, as well as provided support to 
Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who carried out the Mumbai attacks later that year.

The lawsuit filed in Brooklyn last month, brought by families of American 
victims of the Mumbai attacks, names the ISI chief, Lt Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, 
as being complicit in the terror attacks.

The legal complaint in Pakistan that named the CIA station chief, who was 
working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over an 
attack late last year that killed at least four Pakistanis. The complaint sought 
police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be 
filed.

The agent's name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by 
Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name 
had been reported in local media.

Akbar said in an interview that he did not believe security was the reason for 
the CIA agent's leaving. "Obviously, his name had come out in the open and maybe 
he feared police action or an action by the Supreme Court," Akbar said.

But an American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said 
the threats against the station chief "were of such a serious nature that it 
would be imprudent not to act,"

George Little, a CIA spokesman, would not confirm that the station chief had to 
leave Pakistan, but did say that "station chiefs routinely encounter major risk 
as they work to keep America safe," and that "their security is obviously a top 
priority for the CIA, especially when there's an imminent threat."

Akbar, who said the case would continue despite the station chief's absence, is 
representing Kareem Khan, a resident of North Waziristan who claimed that his 
son and brother were killed in the drone strike last year. The complaint also 
named Leon Panetta, the CIA director, and defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

Khan, a resident of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, is seeking $500 million as 
compensation for the deaths, accusing the CIA officer of running a clandestine 
spying operation out of the United States embassy in Islamabad. He also alleged 
that the CIA officer was in the country on a business passport.

"My brother and son were innocent," Khan had said in a recent interview. "There 
were no Taliban hiding in my house."

Western and Pakistani intelligence officials said the attack also killed Haji 
Omer, a top commander allied closely allied with the Haqqani militant network 
and al-Qaida.

For several years, drone attacks have been a regular element of American tactics 
to counter militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, but the number of such strikes 
has increased markedly this year.

The attack on Thursday struck the remote Terah valley in the Khyber region along 
the Afghan border where Pakistani militants have been taking refuge. At least 
some of the fighters appear to have fled to escape recent Pakistani military 
operations in the Swat, Orakzai, and South Waziristan tribal regions, as well as 
less remote areas of Khyber. There were three more strikes in the same area on 
Friday, a government official said.

The area is home to Lashkar-e-Islami, a militant organization that recently 
allied with the Pakistani Taliban, but which has often clashed with other groups.

As it published its year-end review of its Afghan war strategy on Thursday, the 
Obama administration indicated that it planned to step up attacks on al-Qaida 
and Taliban insurgents in the area.

That would mean using Predator and Reaper drones in Pakistan's tribal areas, and 
possibly carrying out Special Forces operations along the border, officials 
indicated.

Two British converts to Islam appeared to be among those killed in drone attacks 
in recent days, officials in North Waziristan said on Friday.

Two officials, a senior civilian Pakistani official based in Peshawar and a 
security official, who both spoke in return for anonymity because they were not 
authorized to brief reporters, said the Britons were believed to have assumed 
Islamic names — Abu Bakar, said to be his late 40s, and Mansoor in his mid-20s — 
after their conversion to Islam in Britain a few years ago.

The British Foreign Office said diplomats were aware of the reports and were 
trying to confirm them.

The report was the second in recent months suggesting the presence of some 
foreigners among militants fighting American forces in the border area. In July, 
American forces in Afghanistan detained a German citizen, Ahmed Sidiqi, 36, said 
to have ties to the men who helped plot the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Then in 
October, Pakistani officials said that several German citizens were killed in a 
drone strike in Pakistan.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington and Salman Masood from Islamabad, 
Pakistan. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, Alan Cowell 
from Paris, and J. David Goodman from New York.


Read more: CIA man in Islamabad leaves as 'ISI exposes his identity' - The Times 
of India 
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/CIA-man-in-Islamabad-leaves-as-ISI-exposes-his-identity/articleshow/7121001.cms#ixzz18QBDx9L4


On 12/17/10 6:09 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> The US asserts the CIA man was hastily withdrawn because his name was revealed 
> - as if any interested people in the ISI, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Russian and 
> Chinese intelligence, etc. etc. - didn't know who he was!
>
> A more accurate story may be given here:
>
> CIA top spy flees Pakistan over lawsuit
> Fri Dec 17, 2010 5:20PM
>
> The US central intelligence agency (CIA) has been forced to call back its top 
> spy in Pakistan after he was accused of killing civilians in unauthorized 
> drone attacks.
>
> This comes days after a Pakistani lawsuit designated the CIA station chief by 
> name, accusing him of killing civilians in missile strikes.
>
> Kareem Kahn, a resident of the North Waziristan tribal district, filed an 
> official complaint with Islamabad police against CIA station chief Jonathan 
> Bank at the US Embassy in Islamabad on Monday.
>
> The lawsuit has also named CIA Director Leon Panetta and US Defense Secretary 
> Robert Gates.
>
> This is the first such case filed against a CIA official for the use of 
> non-UN-sanctioned drone attacks in Pakistan.
>
> Khan's relatives were slain in an unauthorized US drone attack in the North 
> Waziristan tribal district in 2009.
>
> "That drone attack killed my son, my brother and a local man. We are not 
> terrorists, we are common citizens," Khan told a news conference in Islamabad 
> in late November.
>
> "According to Islamic law the punishment for blood is blood. If I have the 
> means, I will take revenge for this attack," he said.
>
> "We need justice. We are innocent people."
>
> Khan's lawyer Mirza Shehzad Akbar had previously said he would file a lawsuit 
> in Pakistan and, if necessary, one with the International Court of Justice 
> based at The Hague.
>
> The CIA station chief in Islamabad runs the unmanned drone attacks which are 
> said to target militants in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt.
>
> Official figures show that most of the victims are civilians. The unauthorized 
> US drone attacks have drawn strong criticism from the Pakistani people and 
> officials.
>
> In the latest developments, four non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks killed at 
> least 26 people in the Khyber Agency tribal region.
>
> The news that CIA has pulled its top spy out of Pakistan comes just a day 
> after the U-S announced its new Afghanistan-Pakistan war strategy review and 
> also a day after America's drone attacks expanded into a new region in 
> Pakistan, Kheybar Agency.
>
> It is the second consecutive day that US drones target the same region.
>
> Meanwhile, hundreds of people held anti-US protests in Islamabad over the past 
> days. The Protesters condemned non-UN-sanctioned US drone attacks on 
> Pakistan's tribal areas.
>
> US drone strikes have killed 2,000 people in northwest Pakistan since 2004. 
> These airstrikes have intensified since US President Barack Obama took office 
> in 2009.
>
> Washington claims the attacks target militants but figures show most of the 
> victims are civilians.
>
> Militant attacks, unsanctioned drone strikes and political unrest have claimed 
> the lives of over 4,000 people throughout Pakistan since 2007.
>
> http://www.presstv.ir/detail/155905.html
>
> On 12/17/10 12:07 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> Like a gambler raising the stakes each time he loses, the Obama 
>> administration is shifting the emphasis in the "AfPak War" (only one theater, 
>> as Obama says, in the Long War for control of energy Mideast resources) to 
>> the second syllable...
>>
>> The lead article in the semi-official US war gazette today:
>>
>> "US WILL WIDEN WAR ON MILITANTS INSIDE PAKISTAN - ALLY RELUCTANT TO ACT - 
>> Pentagon Planning More Attacks With Drones and Commandos":
>>
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?ref=world>.
>>
>> See also "Top U.S. Spy Flees Pakistan":
>>
>> <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101217/ap_on_go_ot/us_pakistan_cia>.
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