`Pakistan`s ISI aids insurgency in India, Afghanistan`

US intel mega leak exposes Pak games

New York/Washington, July 26: Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harboured strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington to help combat the militants, according to a trove of secret US military field reports made public on Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organisation called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its Inter-Services Intelligence spy service to directly meet the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise networks of militant groups that fight against US soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that US soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to Kabul.

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan — cannot be verified and might be from sources linked to Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place. But many of the reports rely on sources that the US military rates as reliable. While current and former US officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said the portrait of the ISI’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.

Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the ISI with Al Qaeda is difficult.

The records also contain firsthand accounts of US anger at Pakistan’s unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by senior US officials looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Al Qaeda havens.

US administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard Nato supplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan. Earlier this month, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced $500 million in assistance and called the US and Pakistan “partners joined in common cause.”

The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what US officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top US commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.

Benjamin Rhodes, deputy US national security adviser for strategic communications, said Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the US to capture or kill Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Still, he said the “status quo is not acceptable,” and that the havens for militants in Pakistan “pose an intolerable threat” that Pakistan must do more to address.

“The Pakistani government — and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders,” he said. US military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.

Several US congressional officials said despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and CIA.

Nonetheless, senior US legislators say they have no doubt that Pakistan is aiding insurgent groups. “The burden of proof is on the government of Pakistan and the ISI to show they don’t have ongoing contacts,” said Senator Jack Reed, a member of the armed services committee, who visited Pakistan this month. He said he and Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, had confronted Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani yet again over the allegations.

Such accusations are usually met with angry denials, particularly by the Pakistani military, which insists that the ISI severed its remaining ties to the groups years ago. An ISI spokesman in Islamabad said the agency would have no comment until it saw the documents. Pakistan’s ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani said: “The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities.”

The man the US has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn.

US officials have described Pakistan’s spy service as a rigidly hierarchical organisation that has little tolerance for “rogue” activity. But Pakistani military officials give the spy service’s “S Wing” — which runs external operations against India and Afghanistan — broad autonomy, a buffer that allows top military officials deniability.

US officials have rarely uncovered definitive evidence of direct ISI involvement in a major attack. But in July 2008, CIA deputy director Stephen R. Kappes confronted Pakistani officials with evidence that the ISI helped plan the deadly suicide bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul.

One report from the current trove identifies an ISI colonel plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The report says there was no information about how or when this would be carried out.

The coordinating general
Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the CIA joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias then battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahideen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.

More than two decades later, it appears Gen. Gul is still at work. The documents indicate he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jaluluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.

Gen. Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan’s current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities.

For example, one intelligence report describes him meeting a group of militants at Wana, capital of South Waziristan, in January 2009. There, he met three senior Afghan insurgent commanders and three “older” Arab men, presumably representatives of Al Qaeda, who the report suggests were important “because they had a large security contingent with them.”

The gathering was designed to hatch a plan to avenge the death of “Zamarai,” the nom de guerre of Osama al-Kini, who had been killed days earlier by a CIA drone attack. Mr Kini had directed Al Qaeda operations in Pakistan and spearheaded some of the group’s most devastating attacks.

The plot hatched at Wana that day, the report says, involved driving a dark blue Mazda truck rigged with explosives from South Waziristan to Afghanistan’s Paktika province, a route well known to be used by the insurgents to move weapons, suicide bombers and fighters from Pakistan.

In a show of strength, the Taliban leaders approved a plan to send 50 Arab and 50 Waziri fighters to Ghazni province in Afghanistan, the report said.

Gen. Gul urged Taliban commanders to focus their operations inside Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan turning “a blind eye” to their presence in Pakistan’s tribal areas. It was unclear whether the attack was ever executed.

The US has pushed the United Nations to put Gen. Gul on a list of international terrorists, and top US officials said they believed he was an important link between active-duty Pakistani officers and militant groups.

Gen. Gul, who says he is retired and lives on his pension, dismissed the allegations as “absolute nonsense,” speaking by telephone from his home in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army has its headquarters. “I have had no hand in it.” He added: “American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes.”

Suicide bomber network
The reports also chronicle efforts by ISI officers to run the networks of suicide bombers that emerged as a sudden, terrible force in Afghanistan in 2006.

The detailed reports indicate that US officials had a relatively clear understanding of how the suicide networks presumably functioned, even if some of the threats did not materialise. It is impossible to know why the attacks never came off — either they were thwarted, the attackers shifted targets, or the reports were deliberately planted as Taliban disinformation.

One report, from December 18, 2006, describes a cyclical process to develop the suicide bombers. First, the suicide attacker is recruited and trained in Pakistan. Then, reconnaissance and operational planning gets under way, including scouting to find a place for “hosting” the suicide bomber near the target before carrying out the attack.

In many cases, the reports are complete with names and ages of bombers, as well as licence plate numbers, but the Americans gathering the intelligence struggle to accurately portray many other details, introducing sometimes comical renderings of places and Taliban commanders.

In one case, a report rated by the American military as credible states that a grey Toyota Corolla had been loaded with explosives between the Afghan border and Landik Hotel, in Pakistan, apparently a mangled reference to Landi Kotal, in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The target of the plot, however, is a real hotel in downtown Kabul, the Ariana.

Several of the reports describe current and former ISI operatives, including Gen. Gul, visiting madrasas near Peshawar to recruit new fodder for suicide bombings.

One report, labelled a “real threat warning” because of its detail and the reliability of its source, described how commanders of Mr Hekmatyar’s insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, ordered the delivery of a suicide bomber from the Hashimiye madrasa, run by Afghans.

The boy was to be used in an attack on American or Nato vehicles in Kabul during a Muslim festival. The report says the boy was taken to Jalalabad to buy a car for the bombing, and later brought to Kabul. It is unclear if the attack actually took place.

Some bombers were sent to disrupt Afghanistan’s presidential elections held last August. In other instances, US intelligence learned that the Haqqani network sent bombers at the ISI’s behest to strike at Indian officials, development workers and engineers in Afghanistan. Other plots were aimed at the Afghan government.

Sometimes the intelligence documents twin seemingly credible detail with plots that seem fantastical or utterly implausible assertions. For instance, one report describes an ISI plan to use a remote-controlled bomb disguised as a golden Quran to assassinate Afghan officials. Another report documents an alleged plot by the ISI and Taliban to ship poisoned alcoholic beverages to Afghanistan to kill American troops.

ISI lashes out at US inteligence leak

Islamabad/Washington, July 26: Pakistan’s most powerful spy agency lashed out against a trove of leaked US intelligence reports that alleged close connections between it and Taliban militants fighting Nato troops in Afghanistan, calling the accusations malicious and unsubstantiated.

The reports, which were released by the online whistleblower Wikileaks, raised new questions about whether the US can succeed in convincing Pakistan to sever its historical links with the Taliban and deny them sanctuary along the Afghan border.

Stung by a stunning leak of classified records indicating links between the ISI and the Taliban-Al Qaeda network, the White House came out in defence of Pakistan, insisting that the US-Pak alliance has led to significant blows against Al Qaeda leadership since 2009.

“Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our important bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against Al Qaeda’s leadership,” National Security Adviser, Gen. James Jones (Retd.), said in a statement.

Incidentally, the report releases documents of the period when General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani was head of the ISI.

Knowing the adverse impact of the release, the White House lauded Pakistan’s military establishment for its anti-Taliban drive.

Sohrabuddin had several cases in MP - Times of India Report on May 7 - 2007

PTI, May 7, 2007

INDORE: Gujarat fake encounter victim Sohrabuddin Sheikh had several criminal cases filed against him in Madhya Pradesh besides those in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

One of them relates to the recovery of 26 AK-56 assault rifles allegedly from a well next to Sheikh's family land in Jhirinya village of ujjain district, police sources said here.

The rifles were recovered by gujarat police in november 1995 following a tip-off by an arrested indore-based person, the sources said.

Sheikh had dumped the rifles in the well situated on a government land to avoid suspicion, a senior police officer told PTI.

It was a smart move by Sheikh (to dump the arms in the well) which ultimately led to his acquittal in the case, he said.

It still remains a mystery how such a big cache of sophisticated weapons reached the non-descript village, the sources said.

Madhya pradesh police has records of Sheikh's alleged involvement in a number of crimes, including extortion and transportation of deadly weapons at the behest of Latif, a member of the Dawood Ibrahim gang, for spreading terror in the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992, the sources added.

Facts of Shah's involvement are concocted, says Jaitley

NEW DELHI: Leaders of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley respectively on Friday charged the UPA government with shelving cases against its own allies, victimising Opposition party leaders and using CBI cases as a sword of Damocles against leaders such as Mulayam Singh and Mayawati to force them to support it whenever it was in difficulty, as during the trust motion on the India-U.S. nuclear bill and the cut motion during the Budget session.

Mr. Jaitley said, “The strategy of the UPA was to allow a media trial of Amit Shah, feed the people with half-truths through the media, create a prejudicial environment, use this to further its vote-bank politics [among Muslims] and break up the Opposition unity on the price rise and other issues.”

Asked which facts were distorted as the Gujarat government had admitted in the Supreme Court to the fake encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kausarbi and friend Tulsi Prajapati, he said: “Today's press conference is not about those three encounter deaths/ killings.” The “facts of Amit Shah's involvement are concocted,” he alleged.

He “regretted” and “condemned” the recent killing of an RTI activist in Gujarat, allegedly by a BJP legislator, saying “whoever is guilty must be taken to task.”

Any move to target Modi will boomerang on Cong: BJP

PTI

Striking a combative note after the resignation of Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah, the BJP today said it fully supported Chief Minister Narendra Modi and any move to target him will “boomerang” on the Congress.

“The Congress needs to learn that the more they try to scratch Modi, It will boomerang on them,” party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

He ruled out any possibility of Mr. Modi stepping down as demanded by the Congress. Mr. Shah, a close aide of Mr. Modi’s, resigned today after CBI brought murder and kidnapping charges against him in the fake encounter killing of alleged gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi in 2005.

Mr. Prasad alleged that the UPA government was trying to frame the Gujarat Home Minister in a case against Sohrabuddin from whom several AK-47s were recovered and who was linked to underworld don Dawood Ibrahim.

“This is the Congress design to divert attention from the fiasco in Pakistan, the mess-up in Kashmir, price rise, rotting of grains and the historical mess-up on Warren Anderson,” he said.

Mr. Prasad said the BJP will expose the “duplicity and misuse” of the CBI by the Congress.

“We will expose this device of distraction adopted by the Congress....we have enough ammunition to nail this government on the abuse CBI,” he said.

On P. Chidambram’s statement that the BJP should have objected when Mr. Shah’s name first figured in the case, Mr. Prasad said the Home Minister has been in the Congress for long and would remember “how CBI was used to help Bofors accused Ottavio Quattrochi escape, to give a clean chit to Jagdish Tytler (in anti-Sikh riots) and a ‘bounty’ to Satish Sharma (apparent reference to petrol pump allotment scam).

“We have seen how CBI was abused as a tool to manage Lalu Prasad, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati,” he said.

He further alleged that though “Rs. 2000 crore were recovered from the chamber” of UPA Minister A. Raja, the Prime Minister did not take any action.

On Amit Shah’s resignation, the party said he was being framed and it stood by him.

“BJP took a position that once the chargesheet was filed, which we will contest strongly as it is a frame-up, he (Shah) resigned immediately. This the standard of BJP,” it said.

The party said the “mischievous designs of the CBI” will be exposed in court. “We have always had the highest regard for our judicial system and always cooperate with law, so there will be a legal fight,” BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said.

He maintained that though Shah has resigned, the party was fully with him and will be raising its voice against “abuse of CBI for political purposes.”

“He will fight against the mischievous designs of CBI in the court and the truth will be upheld,” Mr. Javadekar said.

Narendra Modi announces Shah's resignation, alleges conspiracy

New Delhi: Gujarat Minister Amit Shah, allegedly involved in the 2005 staged shootout of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, has resigned, Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced here Saturday while accusing the Congress-led UPA government of 'misusing' the CBI and 'fabricating' the charges against Shah.

'Amit Shah has sent his resignation to my bungalow. I will complete the formalities after returning from here. I accept his resignation,' Modi told reporters here.

Modi, who arrived in the national capital Saturday morning, announced he has accepted Shah's resignation, adding that Shah was innocent.

'As per provisions of the constitution, I have accepted his resignation,' he said.

He alleged that the charges against Shah were part of the Congress-led central government's 'conspiracy' against Gujarat.

'It is an example of a conspiracy to trouble the development of Gujarat. Amit Shah is totally innocent. The allegations are fabricated and politicised,' the chief minister said.

Modi said getting the CBI involved in the case was a reaction from a 'failed' central government.

'When the people of India expressed their anger and warned the government in Delhi against price rise in the form of a massive bandh, the Congress-led central government which has failed on all fronts completely politicised the CBI, and misusing it they are trying to create obstacles in the way of Gujarat's journey to development' Modi said.

He added that the due legal course will be followed by Shah.

'Amit Shah will respect the legal system of the country. And I believe the Indian law will give him justice,' said Modi, who is considered close to Shah.

The CBI mounted a massive search for Shah after naming him an accused with 17 others in the killing of Sheikh, in a chargesheet filed Friday.

Shah has been missing after a court rejected his anticipatory bail plea. He failed to appear before the court after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) summoned him.

Friday's chargesheet named 18 people, of who only three are yet to be arrested - Shah, Ajay Patel and Yashpal Chudasama. Both Patel and Chudasama are reportedly close to the minister.

All the 15 who are in jail are police personnel. The charges against them include murder, abduction and conspiracy.

They include three Indian Police Service (IPS) officers -- D.G. Vanzara, Rajkumar Pandey and Dinesh M.N.

The high-profile case relates to Rajasthan resident Sheikh, who was killed in a Nov 26, 2005 alleged gun battle with police. Police accused him of being a Lashkar-e-Taiba activist. They claimed he had come to Ahmedabad to target senior political leaders. His wife Kausar Bi went missing later.

The dead man's family alleged that Sheikh and his wife were abducted from a bus and then killed in cold blood near Ahmedabad.

Abu Salem attacked inside Mumbai jail by Dawood gang member

Extradited gangster Abu Salem was today injured in an attack allegedly by his fellow inmate, a member of the Dawood Ibrahim gang, inside the high security Arthur Road Jail here, police said. 'Salem was attacked by Mustafa Dossa with sharp object. He was injured and doctors are treating him inside the jail. A police team is at the spot,' Vasant Tajane, Senior Inspector at N M Joshi Marg police station, told PTI.

42-year-old Salem, a key accused in the 1993 serial bomb blasts, has been lodged in the South Mumbai jail since his extradition from Portugal in 2005. He is currently housed in barrack number 10 of the jail along with scores of other prisoners. Salem is facing trial in nine cases, including two murders. PTI