Comment by Riaz Haq on March 9, 2012 at 10:41pm

Here's an LA Times Op Ed on US democracy groups working in developing nations:

Now that seven American pro-democracy workers have been allowed to post bail and return to the United States, perhaps we can examine what the U.S. was up to in Egypt using reason instead of patriotic emotion. The Egyptian furor over such seemingly idealistic work may strike us as wild and idiotic, but in fact, the Egyptians have a right to be suspicious. America's attempt to promote democracy around the world through private organizations has unsavory beginnings and a sometimes troubling history.

The program stems from a discredited CIA operation. In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cold War, the CIA set up a group of phony foundations to funnel CIA money to private groups that were either anti-communist or, at least, non-communist. Among the recipients were the AFL-CIO, the National Student Assn. and the magazines Encounter in London and Transition in Africa. Some did not even realize they were operating with CIA subsidies. When the secret operation was exposed in Ramparts magazine and other U.S. publications, there was great embarrassment, and President Lyndon Johnson put a stop to such CIA funding.

But many in Congress felt that the program's problem lay only in its ties to the CIA. Cut those ties and make everything aboveboard, they argued, and the attempt to win hearts and minds to the American way would be useful and benign. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy to take the place of the defunct CIA program.

Under the law, the endowment divided its money among four new institutes created to sponsor programs encouraging democracy throughout the world. The four institutes were run by the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, supposedly ensuring the participation of the major American ideologies and interests.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meisler-prodem...

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 19, 2014 at 8:39am

Kathy Gannon of The Associated Press reported in September that militants from Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, were massing in the tribal areas to join the Taliban and train for an anticipated offensive into Afghanistan this year. In Punjab, mainstream religious parties and banned militant groups were openly recruiting hundreds of students for jihad, and groups of young men were being dispatched to Syria to wage jihad there. “They are the same jihadi groups; they are not 100 percent under control,” a former Pakistani legislator told me. “But still the military protects them.”...

The haul of handwritten notes, letters, computer files and other information collected from Bin Laden’s house during the raid suggested otherwise, however. It revealed regular correspondence between Bin Laden and a string of militant leaders who must have known he was living in Pakistan, including Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a pro-Kashmiri group that has also been active in Afghanistan, and Mullah Omar of the Taliban. Saeed and Omar are two of the ISI’s most important and loyal militant leaders. Both are protected by the agency. Both cooperate closely with it, restraining their followers from attacking the Pakistani state and coordinating with Pakistan’s greater strategic plans. Any correspondence the two men had with Bin Laden would probably have been known to their ISI handlers.

Bin Laden did not rely only on correspondence. He occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow militants, one Pakistani security official told me. “Osama was moving around,” he said, adding that he heard so from jihadi sources. “You cannot run a movement without contact with people.” Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/magazine/what-pakistan-knew-about...

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 20, 2014 at 9:24pm

Here's Carlotta Gall of New York Times talking to "New Republic" about her book "The Wrong Enemy: American in Afghanistan":

Carlotta Gall's blockbuster story in The New York Times Magazine this week claims that the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) had knowledge of Osama Bin Laden's hiding place in Abbottabad. According to Gall, the ISI and Pakistan's military establishment also supported the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The piece is an excerpt from her new book, The Wrong Enemy: American in Afghanistan, 2001-2014, which argues that the failing American mission in Afghanistan is largely the result of Pakistani duplicity, which has consisted of the country taking American aid dollars while still covertly supporting the Taliban and other extremist groups.

Gall has reported extensively from Pakistan and Afghanistan for The New York Times, and is currently the newspaper's North Africa correspondent. We spoke by phone this week about the details of Pakistan's relationship to Bin Laden, the war in Afghanistan, and the long, depressing history of U.S.-Pakistan relations.

Isaac Chotiner: What is the newest or biggest revelation about Bin Laden and his relationship with the ISI?

Carlotta Gall: The ISI was actually running a special desk within the organization to handle Bin Laden, which meant hide him and talk to him. They knew he was there and protected him. That has never been said before by anyone. I only have one source but it’s very convincing source and it had to be said and put out there.

IC: You took some criticism for the single source but there were two other interesting revelations. The first is that when you brought the issue of Pakistani knowledge up with American officials, who don’t want to criticize a nominal ally, they were sympathetic to what you had heard.

CG: Yes.

IC: And the second point, which I found the most convincing, was that Bin Laden was communicating with ISI assets, such as Hafiz Saeed, who is the head of a Pakistani extremist group. The point, I think, is that he wouldn’t be communicating with these people if he was concerned about the ISI finding him.

CG: Yes, he was communicating with people that the ISI talks to and is in close touch with.

IC: Do you have any sense of the substance of those communications, for example how much Bin Laden was revealing about where he was or what he was up to?

CG: There was a cell phone in the compound that revealed numbers to other connections in Pakistan. There were letters between him and Mullah Omar and him and Hafiz Saeed, and those are two people very close to the ISI. It is inconceivable to anyone who follows all this that the ISI did not know he was corresponding with them.

IC: But do you think he was communicating where he was?

CG: We know from the Americans that his courier was going to Peshawar and talking to people and bringing black flash drives with news and email for Bin Laden.
---------
IC: You seem to be saying that we have made too many excuses for Pakistan, but what would full-on confrontation look like? That is very scary.

CG: I hope I am not suggesting that. Some people think I have it in for Pakistan. I don’t. I think the right course is diplomacy and pulling out of Afghanistan but still supporting both those countries and trying to move them to a better place. More openness with their people is required. You have to run a better government with more democracy and more openness. You have to discuss this. They need civilians to come in and get a grip on the country.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117074/osama-bin-ladens-hideout-...

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 21, 2014 at 10:12pm

CNN security analyst says no evidence to support NY TIMES's Carlotta Gall's claims about Pakistan knowingly hiding bin Laden

The bin Laden story in the New York Times magazine is an extract from Gall's forthcoming book, "The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014."
Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.
The first claim: An unnamed Pakistani official told her, based on what he had in turn heard from an unnamed senior U.S. official that "the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad." ISI is Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency.
The second claim: "The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden...the top military bosses knew about it, I was told."
It is, of course, hard to prove negatives, but having spent around a year reporting intensively on the hunt for al Qaeda's leader for my 2012 book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad," I am convinced that there is no evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence agencies knowingly sheltered bin Laden.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?
On three reporting trips to Pakistan I spoke to senior officials in Pakistan's military and intelligence service. They all denied that they had secretly harbored bin Laden. OK, you are thinking: "But they would say that, wouldn't they?"
Well, what about the dozens of officials I spoke to in the U.S. intelligence community, Pentagon, State Department and the White House who also told me versions of "the Pakistanis had no idea that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad"?
During the course of reporting for my book I spoke on the record to, among others, John Brennan, now the CIA director and then President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser; then CIA Director Leon Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash; then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen; then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. James Cartwright; then director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter; then senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, Nick Rasmussen; then head of policy at the Pentagon, Michele Flournoy; Michael Vickers, who was then the civilian overseer of Special Operations at the Pentagon; Tony Blinken, who is now the deputy national security adviser; and Denis McDonough, who held that position before Blinken.
These officials have collectively spent many decades working to destroy al Qaeda, and many are deeply suspicious of Pakistan for its continuing support for elements of the Taliban. But all of them told me in one form or another that Pakistani officials had no clue that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
Indeed, an early debate between senior national security officials at the White House, once CIA intelligence established that bin Laden could be hiding in Abbottabad, was whether to mount a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on bin Laden's suspected hideout.
This plan was rejected because the officials were concerned that such a joint operation carried the risk that word would leak out about the bin Laden intelligence. This debate would have been moot if the Pakistanis already knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
And, by the way, if the U.S. government had any evidence that the Pakistanis were knowingly sheltering bin Laden, as Gall claims, why cover this up?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/21/opinion/bergen-bin-laden-new-york-times/

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 19, 2015 at 10:15am

Ex CIA Agent and chief Bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer on ISI:

1. ISI is like all other intelligence services--like the Australian service or the American service.

2. ISI works for the interest of their country, not to help other countries.

3. The idea that ISI is a rogue organization is very popular--and even the Pakistanis promote it---but having worked with ISI for the better part of 20 years, I know the ISI is very disciplined and very able intelligence agency.

4. Pakistanis can not leave the area when we do. They have to try and stabilize Afghanistan with a favorable Islamic government so they can move their 100,000 troops from their western border to the eastern border with India which---whether they see as a bigger threat.

5. We (US) have created the mess and the Pakistanis have to sort it out. Our (US) problems in Afghanistan are of our own making.

6. Al Qaeda has grown from just one platform (Afghanistan in 2001) to six platforms now.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fyk8u

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 24, 2015 at 10:14pm

I'm sorry: #UK Ex PM #Blair takes blame for #Iraq War, Creation of #ISIS. #BlairWarCriminal http://dailym.ai/1LULZMT via @MailOnline

Former PM makes the confession after 12 years of refusing to apologise
Blair says he is sorry for his conduct which has now led to 'hell' in Iraq
Says there is an element of truth that the war caused the rise of ISIS
Comes after Lord Blunkett revealed he had challenged Blair about the war

Tony Blair has finally said sorry for the Iraq War – and admitted he could be partly to blame for the rise of Islamic State.
The extraordinary confession by the former Prime Minister comes after 12 years in which he refused to apologise for the conflict.
Blair makes his dramatic ‘mea culpa’ during a TV interview about the ‘hell’ caused by his and George Bush’s decision to oust Saddam Hussein.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 3, 2015 at 7:26am

A.S. Dulat, Former Head Of #India’s Spy Agency #RAW, Believes #Pakistan’s #ISI Is Tops http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/12/as-dulat-pakistan-isi-praise/… via @ValueWalk

While affection might be a strong word for his feelings for Pakistan’s (the Directorate for) Inter-Service Intelligence, but admiration was certainly on display from the former spy master.

“The most powerful intelligence agency is either KGB which no more exists or ISI, because they are very anonymous.”

“I believe we’re as good as anybody else. We don’t have technical abilities but are fast catching up,” he said backtracking a bit and praising India’s own intelligence agencies.

Considering a world inhabited by MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and others, that’s pretty high praise.

Dulat versus ISI in Kashmir

Earlier this year, in July specifically, Dulat made it clear that intelligence agencies had, for year, paid politicians, militants and separatists in Indian Kashmir in order to keep up with ISI efforts to foment trouble in the region.

“So what’s wrong? What is there to be so shocked or scandalized by. It’s done the world over,” Dulat said when he was speaking to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt.

In his book, Dulat further explained his methods without issue, and as he has said repeatedly, violating any Indian state secrets.

“If anybody …has any doubts about the path I took – of talking, talking, talking – and how unbeatable dialogue is as both a tactic and a strategy then I will tell them what Agha sahib (Kashmiri educationatist Agha Ashraf Ali) said to me — you were sent to disrupt the Kashmir movement in the friendliest possible manner.”

But as Dulat is quick to point out, his successes were, generally short lived as nearly all of the assets he developed were “bumped off” by ISI.

RAW and ISI

Both RAW and the ISI were formed based on the failures of intelligence agencies that preceded them. Each were formed with an agenda but, few would argue, the ISI’s reach and power far surpasses that of RAW.

The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) came into being following the disgraceful performance of the leftover Intelligence Bureau during both the Sino-Indian War in 1962 and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. It was decided that RAW’s formation would supplant the Intelligence Bureau and become the primary agency responsible for foreign intelligence gathering in India.


RAW has been rightfully credited in its work secreting the Indian nuclear weapon program from the world as well as its safeguarding today. While the agency has enjoyed numerous successes since its inception, the attacks on Mumbai in 2008 showed both India and the world that detection and prevention are two different animals.

http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/12/as-dulat-pakistan-isi-praise/ 

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 11, 2016 at 8:32am

#Musharraf never double-crossed #US: SaysRobert Grenier, Ex #CIA Station Chief in #Islamabad Pakistan http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/islamabad/11-Mar-2016/musharraf-never-... …

Former CIA top spy in Pakistan has conceded that General (r) Pervez Musharraf never double-crossed the Americans in the aftermath of 9/11.

“I can say with good authority that General Musharraf never double-crossed us,” Robert Grenier, former Islamabad station chief of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told Daily Times in an interview. Several American journalists, analysts and politicians had repeatedly accused Musharraf of playing both sides, just to stay relevant in the eyes of the world superpower. After the US Marines’ raid to kill Osama bin Laden, another former CIA official Bruce Riedel had claimed that Gen Musharraf knew where the al Qaeda chief was hiding. Though, Riedel was quoting former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) director general, Ziauddin Butt.

Grenier is visiting Pakistan after 11 years to promote local publication of his book “88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary.” After his assignment in Islamabad, he spearheaded CIA operations, in Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein. He also worked at CIA’s Counter Terrorism Centre. He was reportedly fired by then CIA chief Porter Goss, after he opposed the torturing of captured al Qaeda operatives. He also testified against Lewis Scooter Libby, adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, who was accused and later sentenced for leaking the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

Grenier recounted how at several occasions Gen Musharraf went the extra mile to help the Americans. He claimed it was Gen Musharraf who had made explicit instructions to powerful ISI to extend full cooperation to the CIA whether it was about convincing Mullah Omar expel bin Laden from Afghanistan or capturing important al Qaeda leaders. He was given the task of running CIA Islamabad station several months before 9/11. “Despite my request, I could not meet then DG ISI Gen Mehmood. He was too busy digging up corruption cases against (deposed prime minister) Nawaz Sharif,” he revealed.

On page 58 of his book, Grenier termed the ISI “an infamous organisation.” Asked to elaborate his position on the ISI, he took a diametrically opposite view and denied his own words. “What I wrote was merely a set perception about the ISI in the world. That was not my estimation. Throughout in my book I praised the role and services of the ISI,” he said. Grenier said the most important catches from Pakistan were Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, popularly known as KSM and Abu Zubeyda, two key al Qaeda leaders. He refused to comment on who had pocketed big bounties the Americans were offering on al Qaeda operatives.

The former CIA station chief sent an important memo to Washington in September 2001, which he described as the most important three-hour work of his entire 27-year career. In that memo he recommended covert operations in Afghanistan enabling Northern Alliance and Pushtun tribal leaders topple Taliban regime.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 5, 2017 at 8:16pm

The Spooks of Pakistan
How could bin Laden’s ‘secret’ compound in Abbottabad have gone undetected? Was the ISI deceitful or merely incompetent? Maxwell Carter reviews “Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan” by Hein Kiessling.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-spooks-of-pakistan-1483660934

The ISI was established in 1948, the year after Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which authorized the CIA to coordinate, evaluate and disseminate American intelligence. The nascent Pakistani government created the ISI within months of partition, partly to address the mistakes of the First Kashmir War with India, and partly, Mr. Kiessling suggests, to tend the dying embers of the “Great Game,” the contest between Great Britain and Russia for primacy in Central and South Asia. Maj. Gen. Walter Joseph Cawthorne, an Australian holdover from the Raj, drew up its organizational structure. The original mandate of the ISI, which was initially comprised of Muslims formerly in the Indian Intelligence Bureau, was restricted to reconnaissance in India and Kashmir.

A domestic remit wasn’t long in coming. General Ayub Khan’s military coup in 1958 expanded the ISI’s responsibilities to monitoring and suppressing internal dissent. Even so, Ayub favored its peer organizations, the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence, referring to the ISI witheringly in his diary: “ISI were nearly asleep . . . we are babes in intelligence.” The ISI’s blunders under Ayub included misjudging support for his opponent in the 1965 election; failing to uncover various anti-Ayub conspiracies; and, above all, its Bay of Pigs-style “fiasco,” Operation Gibraltar.

In 1965, the ISI plotted to send “groups of armed men, disguised as freedom fighters, to infiltrate Kashmir and carry out a campaign of sabotage in the territories under Indian occupation.” Gibraltar (along with its second phase, code-named Grand Slam) was calamitous, exposing Pakistan’s logistical and military shortcomings. The 17-day conflict brought “only significant losses and no territorial gains,” writes Mr. Kiessling.

The ISI survived the resulting military inquiry and redoubled its internal efforts for General Yahya Khan, who deposed Ayub in 1969, and his successor, Z.A. Bhutto, who assumed the presidency in December 1971. Both would live to regret the ISI’s domestic intriguing. Once again, in 1970, its election predictions proved inaccurate: The Awami League’s near-sweep in East Pakistan (contemporary Bangladesh) led to civil war and Yahya’s early retirement. The ISI would subsequently be linked by the Pakistani press to Bhutto’s overthrow and, later, to his infamous hanging in 1979 at the behest of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Islamist general who ruled from 1977-1988.


The ISI’s greatest undertaking took shape under Zia. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 brought the CIA and ISI into strategic alignment. Over the next decade, the CIA provided arms and funds, while the ISI recruited, coached and handled mujahedeen insurgents. The Soviets were expelled in 1989, but creeping distrust and Zia’s mysterious plane crash in 1988 marred the outcome. By then, the CIA had become disaffected by ISI corruption, and Pakistan’s civilian leadership post-Zia—namely the freshly elected prime minister, Z.A. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir—was out of the loop.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 3, 2020 at 11:20am

Declan Walsh on #Pakistan: #ISI is omnipresent but certainly isn’t omnipotent. I was really struck by how much freedom we had to report pretty much what we wanted to and, with some exceptions, to travel around the country pretty freely as well. #NYTimes


https://scroll.in/article/974695/isi-is-omnipresent-but-certainly-i...

--------------
When I was there, I found myself torn between other reporters who were either incredibly critical of Pakistan and believe that the [intelligence agency] ISI was at the root of all evil. And that the military was all powerful. And that Pakistan was essentially a kind of malevolent place.

---------

And, while the ISI and the military have very tight control over certain things, and they are very good at doing certain things, there’s a lot of things that they do not have tight control over. And there’s a lot of things, frankly, that they’re not great at controlling either. And so within that space, there was quite a lot of room for someone like me, and that was part of what really excited me about being there.
-------------

I came to the conclusion that the ISI is an intelligence service that is immensely powerful, of course, and in some respects, is very competent, and even very good at what it does. But in many other respects, it is a part of the Pakistani military and a part of Pakistani bureaucracy like any other and it is afflicted by the same weaknesses, the same bureaucracy, the same bungling, the same corruption.

----------------

If you had to summarise for the reader, what took you to Pakistan? And what eventually drove you to write this book?
Well, you know, I went to Pakistan, really, as a bit of a naïf. I mean, I’m Irish. So unlike British people, I do not have the kind of cultural memory of South Asia, India, Partition – all of that – that I think a lot of my British counterparts had. And I arrived in Pakistan from Kenya, where I’d been living for five years working as a journalist.

I arrived there not knowing a huge amount about the country. It was 2004. Of course, I knew that this was a country that was strategically very important. It was the place where many people presumed al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were based. It had a military ruler.


But beyond that, I didn’t arrive with a whole lot of preconceived notions about the place, or, indeed about its history. And I remember for the first couple of years and there’s a little bit of this in the book, I wasn’t hugely impressed by Islamabad. I arrived in the middle of the summer, it was incredibly hot. I found it to be not very dynamic at all. And in fact, the whole setup at that particular time, was a little bit stagnant.

It was really a midpoint in the Musharraf years. He was very much in control. He was doing a strategic dance with the Americans. The country was relatively calm in comparison to what would follow just a number of years later. And it was a relatively quiet posting for a lot of foreign correspondents. They were much more intrigued by what was happening across the border in Afghanistan.

And so, that was my introduction to Pakistan. After a while, I discovered that this was actually a far more interesting country than I had realised. And I really started to get around. I started to meet people, and I discovered a lot of things that I found absolutely fascinating. And then three years in came the protests against Pervez Musharraf in March of 2007, which kind of came out of nowhere.

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