By Aryn Baker/Mirpur Bhutto
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008

Bahg Chand has a problem. The jeweler's son was robbed on the streets of his dusty village near Mirpur Bhutto, in Pakistan's Sindh province. The thieves took $100 and a mobile phone. But when Chand went to the police, they told him they had to let the thieves go for lack of evidence, despite the fact there had been witnesses. So Chand took his case to a higher authority: Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, the local landlord.

In the feudal landscape of rural Pakistan, that makes Bhutto a most powerful man. Bhutto had his secretary make a call to the district police chief. "We will tell the police to get those men back. If they have a reason for letting them go — maybe they got the wrong guys — we will pressure them to find the real thieves," said Bhutto. He suspects, however, that the thieves paid the police off. That too can be remedied with a phone call. "But without me, this man would have no recourse."

The last thing Bhutto wants to be doing on this chilly Sunday is administering to the needs of the men who live on his lands. He's got a cold, and the morning's boar hunt was a bust. All he wants to do is relax in his hunting lodge, where the trophies of earlier, more successful hunts stud the walls. But the people keep coming, asking for loans, jobs for their nephews, and help playing interference for the police. "Believe me, if I could give this up, I would. It's a 24-hour job. I'd rather be hunting, or checking my crops. "

As one of Pakistan's largest landowners, Bhutto is both a victim and a perpetrator of the corrosive feudal system that has shaped Pakistani society for most of its 60-year history, and still dictates how politics are done today. Bhutto's family has owned this patch of fertile land alongside the Indus River for nearly half a millennium, and on the wall of his stately home is the family tree to prove it. (He is a cousin of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto.) Sharecroppers till the lands, exchanging half they produce — rice, wheat and sugarcane — for a place to live, seeds and fertilizer. And patronage. "If my tenants are happy with me, they work more efficiently on the lands," says Bhutto. "You help the people and they will help you." That exchange extends into the political realm. Bhutto isn't running in this year's parliamentary elections — he's retired — but his son is. With some 10,000 acres of land being cultivated by a vast network of thousands of sharecroppers dependent on feudal largesse, the Bhutto family can count on a large turnout of supporters at the polls.

Bhutto says his tenants are free to vote for whomever they please — in fact he complains that despite all he has done for them some are still disloyal. But sharecroppers on other feudal properties speak of coercion. Ghulam Abbas, an unemployed villager in rural Dosera, Punjab province, describes a climate of fear on election day. "The feudals have their own cronies on every street. They know who is favoring whom. If they lose in any polling station they can figure out through this system and take revenge." Revenge can come in the form of false police cases, he says, or unfair prices at the mills, which are owned by the feudal lords. Bhutto agrees that these practices have happened, and do happen, but, he's quick to add, not on his lands. "We don't need to do that here, people vote for us already."

With increased migration to the cities, a rise in party identification and better knowledge of democratic rights, direct feudal influence over voting is on the wane. Pollster Ijaz Shafi Gilani, of Gallup International Pakistan, estimates that feudal landlords will dominate only 20% of the vote this year. Abida Hussain, who is campaigning on the Pakistan People's Party in Jang, Punjab province, bristles at the word "feudal," even though she comes from a long landowning line that came to political power before the formation of Pakistan. "I'm not saying it didn't exist — it did, but it's dying out. The balance of power has shifted from landowners to the moneymakers." The term feudal means one small group exercising power over a larger one, she says. "I think the only feudals in Pakistan today are the Army Corps Commanders."

Landowners tend to romanticize the feudal life, describing a connection to the earth, and a loving relationship with tenants. Their long history sets them apart socially and, in Pakistan, they are the elites of the elite. Most of the major names in Pakistani politics today are grounded in vast landholdings. Benazir Bhutto was about to run from her historic holdings in nearby Naudero before she was killed on December 27th. But few feudal landowners will admit that their benevolent patronage also means no choices for their subjects. "Political leaders, most of them feudal, have nothing to offer to poor people. We are like their slaves and we have spent our entire life following the feudal system," said Daim Kandhrani, a 55-year-old villager from Ghotki.

But others see the feudal system as a necessary form of protection from the failures of the state. Pakistan's labyrinthine bureaucracy requires contacts and pulling strings to get anything done. Landlords, with their wealth and stature, can easily cut through red tape that would otherwise prevent a villager from getting a phone line, or a murder case through the courts. "In case there is a dispute over something then it is the feudal who comes to our help, not the police," says Bhural Khan, 51, also from Ghotki. "The courts and police are far behind our reach and take time for judgment and settlements, but in this [feudal] system one does not have to wait long for immediate justice."

Bhutto says he would be happy to see the feudal system of patronage end — if the state stepped in and took its place. "The government should do its job. In every other country government institutions are accessible and functioning. Why do I have to intervene when the police are corrupt? If the courts functioned, I wouldn't have to arbitrate. I only do this because nobody else is. Otherwise I would be vacationing in Majorca." With reporting by Shahzad Shah Jillani/ Ghotki


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http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...712917,00.html

By Scott Macleod/Cairo and Brian Bennett/Washington
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008

Imad Mughniyah, who was assassinated Tuesday in Syria, was a man of the Middle East's shadows. He was a terrorist mastermind behind political causes. For him, though, it was as much about the fight as the cause. He shunned the light. He never gave public speeches or lectures. He is not known to have given any press interviews, not even to sympathetic or politically aligned journalists. Western reporters who sought the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hizballah's help to arrange a rendezvous were politely but sternly advised not to go there.

So, did the CIA or some other American intelligence agency finally do Mughniyah in? Everyone, including some of his friends, may have had a motive.

U.S. officials told TIME today that Mughniyah had traveled to Iraq to train the Shi'ite warlord Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Mughniyah, says one American official, was Hizballah’s "chief of external operations" and "considered the key to their military activity." U.S. officials acknowledge that American spy agencies had intensely been tracking Mughniyah the past five years as he moved between Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.

Apart from his ties to Hizballah, Mughniyah was also believed to have worked closely with Iran. A U.S. official confirmed reports that in 2006, Mughniyah accompanied Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a trip to Syria and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In the 1980s, he had been accused of everything from bombing the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut to the kidnappings of American journalists, academics and the Beirut CIA station chief. More recently, some have claimed that Mughniyeh collaborated with Osama bin Laden. After al-Qaeda's top guns, Mughniyah has the highest price on his head of any terrorist wanted by the FBI — $5 million.

Hizballah immediately blamed Israel for Mughniyah's assassination in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday night. Israel's Mossad spy agency is a reasonable suspect, given Israel's determination to bring him to justice for his alleged involvement in the 1990s bombings in Argentina of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center. Israeli intelligence has a good history of eliminating terrorist masterminds, even when they are located in unfriendly Arab capitals.

A U.S. official told TIME that Mughniyah had been linked to the 2002 discovery of 50 tons of weapons by Israeli Navy commandos who intercepted a freighter called Karine A in the Red Sea. More recently, said the U.S. official, Mughniyah was connected to the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers that led to the July 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

The Israeli Prime Minister's office issued a statement denying any involvement in Mughniyah's killing. A senior ex-intelligence official told TIME: "The Americans wanted him, so did the Saudis and the Lebanese Christians. We weren't the only ones." Still, the former official, who asked not to be identified, has been hunting Mughniyah for over 20 years and described him as "a fanatical killer." "It was as if a big stone had been removed from my heart," he said.

In the John Le Carre world of Middle East terrorism and politics, however, it's impossible to rule out the wildest of conspiracy theories, including that Mughniyah's friends in Syria or Iran may have found his continued existence to be an inconvenience. Or, they may have believed it was politically useful to demonstrate that they can be relied on to control terrorism in the Middle East — as long as the U.S. doesn't try to go after the regimes in Damascus or Tehran. With reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Jerusalem


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http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...712866,00.html

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008





By Nicholas Blanford/Beirut


It took the assassination of Imad Mughniyah for the world to finally get a glimpse of what this most elusive and ruthless of Islamic militants actually looked like. He lived in the shadows of Middle Eastern violence his entire adult life, allegedly altering his features through plastic surgery, travelling on an Iranian diplomatic passport on unscheduled flights and never giving interviews or releasing video-taped statements. The only pictures of Mughniyah, 45, publicly available were a few grainy black and white snaps from the 1980s, portraying a serious, sallow-faced young man with a black pointed beard.

Hours after announcing his death in a car bomb blast in a Damascus suburb, the Shi'ite Hizballah organization's television channel, Al Manar, broadcast a more recent picture of Mughniyah. It showed a plump, middle-aged man wearing combat fatigues and a forage cap and sporting a thick beard streaked with grey. His wire-framed spectacles gave him a benign, almost professorial, look, belying the fact that Mughniyah stood accused of killing more Americans than any other militant before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Indeed, before Osama bin Laden, there was Imad Mughniyah. And his death is a serious blow to Hizballah.

The Shi'ite organization rarely talked in public about Mughniyah and his alleged exploits from the 1980s. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli, a founder of Hizballah who led the organization between 1989 and 1991, once told me that Mughniyah was innocent of the charges leveled against him by the U.S. "He had nothing to do with it," the gruff cleric said, then added "Besides do you think I would tell you if he did?"

In a July 2003 interview, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the current Hizballah leader, told me that the U.S. accusations against Mughniyah were "just accusations." "Can they provide evidence to condemn Mughniyah?" he asked. But he added "Hajj Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of southern Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hizballah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names."

It's true that the long international hunt for Mughniyah threw up many accusations about his misdeeds in the 1980s, but not much evidence has been produced to back them. Although he is alleged to have masterminded the suicide bomb spectaculars against U.S. targets in Lebanon in the mid-1980s and run the Beirut kidnapping networks that took dozens of foreigners hostage, the only crime for which he has been indicted by the U.S. is the hijacking of a TWA airliner in 1985 in which a U.S. navy diver was killed.

Indeed, such was Mughniyah's mythical status that sometimes t was not always certain if he really existed at all. "I sometimes would ask myself if Mughniyah was a real person or a figment of imagination," said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hizballah specialist at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm who has traced Mughniyah's activities for years. "But the intelligence agencies I was in contact with were under no illusions. He was the real deal."

Still, despite the scenes of mourning in Lebanese Shi'ite circles that has greeted Mughniyah's death, his high profile earned the irritation of some grassroots Hizballah fighters busy battling Israeli occupation troops in south Lebanon in the 1990s. "They talk about Imad Mughniyah, but what did he do?" a Hizballah fighter once grumbled to me. "They suspect him of kidnapping American journalists, blowing up the French paratroops and the U.S. embassy. But things we did in the south [fighting Israeli troops] were militarily worth a hundred times more than what they claim Mughniyah did. Kidnapping is the easiest thing in the world. The CIA is crazy."

During the chaotic days of the 1980s, Mughniyah was able to travel with relative ease around the Middle East and even in Europe. In the mid-1980s, the CIA cut a deal with Lebanese military intelligence to fund a sophisticated listening post in the Lebanese mountains that could eavesdrop on conversations throughout the Middle East and was staffed by fluent Hebrew, French and Farsi speakers. In exchange, Lebanese intelligence was obliged to pass on any information gleaned about the kidnappers of Westerners. In 1986, Lebanese intelligence used a voice frequency sample to trace Mughniyah to a hotel in Paris. A former Lebanese officer involved in the operation told TIME that French intelligence agents met Mughniyah in his hotel room, but did not arrest him.

According to Ranstorp, from the early 1990s, Mughniyah was "extraordinarily cautious," in covering his trail, dividing his time mainly between Beirut and Tehran where he moved with his family in 1990. Damascus, therefore, seems an unlikely location for Mughniyah's enemies to catch up with him. "I always thought they would get him in Beirut, so what does it mean that he was killed in Damascus?" asked Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughniyah in 1980s Beirut and is also TIME's intelligence analyst.

Hizballah has blamed Israel, and the organization's expected retaliation will likely aim in that direction. But could the $5 million price tag for Mughniyah's head have proved too tempting for a member of the Syrian regime? Or was it a favor by Damascus to the U.S. in exchange for an easing of international pressure?

The recent history of the Middle East is littered with unsolved assassinations. And perhaps that is for the best. Sometimes the truth can be more dangerous than the crime itself.


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http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...713020,00.html

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Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Thursday, Jan. 03, 2008

Why Pakistan Matters

By Simon Robinson/Islamabad


As the new self-appointed standard bearers of Pakistani democracy, Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari don't inspire much confidence. One is a feudal aristocrat widely reviled as corrupt and blamed for his wife's undoing when she was the country's Prime Minister in the 1990s. The other, their son, is a bookish Oxford undergraduate who talks of democracy but whose political clout derives entirely from his middle name. Yet there they were, three days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, their beloved wife and mother, proclaiming themselves inheritors of her political fief, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and assuring Pakistan that they were the answer to all its problems. "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge," the younger man intoned.

Pakistan is a long way from democracy, but revenge is on the minds of Bhutto's supporters. Their rage is directed not at her presumed assassins — al-Qaeda-linked Islamic extremists from the lawless tribal areas along the northern border with Afghanistan — but at President Pervez Musharraf, a man the Bush Administration deems a vital ally.

Washington struggled to come to terms with Bhutto's death — the White House hoped she would share power with Musharraf and had made her the centerpiece of its latest plan for Pakistan. While the White House continued to back Musharraf's grip on power as the best near-term key to Pakistan's survival, others are more blunt in their assessment. Anthony Zinni, former chief of the Pentagon's Central Command, whose remit includes Pakistan, warns that extremist groups are "trying to ignite Pakistan into the kind of chaos they need to survive, and create a fundamentalist, even radical, Islamic government."

It doesn't take much insight to see the dangers of that outcome. Failure to keep the sole Muslim nuclear power stable, whole and democratic might be catastrophic not just for the war on terrorism and the stability of South Asia but also for the future of Islam and the relations between Islamic states and the West. Yet Bhutto's assassination has exposed how little influence the U.S. — or any other outside power — has on the nation that was bloodily carved out of India when the British left 60 years ago, and which has been bedeviled by violence and venal politics ever since.

Who Lost Pakistan?
Modern Pakistan has been strained to its breaking point by three opposing forces: feudal dynastic politicians who have only a casual acquaintance with democracy; a corrupt, ineffective army; and religious extremists, who at least know what they want, even if the vast majority of Pakistanis find their vision of Islam unpalatable. All three have played their parts in undermining Pakistan's foundational promise as a modern, democratic Muslim nation. But they have had plenty of outside help. A succession of administrations in Washington have backed a series of wrong horses in Islamabad: military dictators like Musharraf or feudal aristocrats like Bhutto. "We have a bad habit of always personalizing our foreign policy," says P.J. Crowley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Little effort has ever been made to look past individuals and encourage or engage with the institutions of Pakistani civil society. The most recent example of this neglect came last summer when Pakistani lawyers and judges protested Musharraf's summary sacking of an independentminded Supreme Court judge; they received little more than lip service from Washington, which was more concerned about Musharraf's survival.

Nor has the cause of Pakistani democracy been helped by the U.S. habit of giving more money to Pakistan's military leaders than to its civilian ones. Husain Haqqani, a former diplomat and political confidant of Benazir Bhutto's, told Congress last October that since 1954 the U.S. has given Pakistan about $21 billion in aid, of which $17.7 billion was given under military rule, and only $3.4 billion to elected governments.

Ironically, American support for military dictators has been in the pursuit of U.S. interests not in Pakistan but in neighboring countries — to balance Soviet influence in India or to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the U.S. has rarely kept its eye on the ball. In the 1980s, Washington aided the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, using Pakistan as a fulcrum to help pry the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. The policy succeeded — but when victory was assured, the U.S. lost interest, while thousands of young Muslim extremists who had been armed to combat the communists turned their weapons against Pakistan and the U.S. With perverse timing, Washington deserted the elected but unstable governments that followed Zia and imposed economic and military sanctions on Pakistan for its effort to develop nuclear weapons. "That's where we began to lose Pakistan," says Zinni. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. has cozied up to Pakistan once more, though with uncertain effects. More than $10 billion in U.S. aid has flowed into Pakistan since 2001, most of it intended to fund the fights against al-Qaeda and remnants of the Taliban. But U.S. officials acknowledge that much of the cash has been diverted to defense programs aimed at India, itself now a U.S. ally.

Pakistani leaders, for their part, insist they never get the respect that is their due. The military has lost hundreds of soldiers battling extremists along the Afghanistan border. But terrorist groups continue to thrive in the lawless tribal areas; Musharraf says they are being protected by sympathetic locals in terrain that is impossible to police. Many Pakistanis — and some U.S. officials — believe Musharraf has been indulging in the most dangerous form of triangulation, balancing U.S. interests with Islamist sympathies to keep himself in power. "Musharraf uses the threat of the extremists to prove his utility and indispensability to the Western world," says Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, a veteran politician and former government minister.

If that is indeed the plan, it has backfired spectacularly. The extremists have spread out from the border region, attacking government buildings in Pakistan's cities. More recently, al-Qaeda-linked groups have launched suicide attacks against military and civilian targets. Such attacks have undermined Musharraf, who had long portrayed himself as the one man capable of keeping Pakistan stable and safe from extremism. But instead of coming down harder on extremists, he suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who threatened to derail Musharraf's bid for a second term as President on constitutional grounds. Within weeks, a nationwide protest movement sprang up, with tens of thousands of middle-class professionals taking to the streets. Musharraf lost his case against the judge in the Supreme Court, and Chaudhry was reinstated. Suddenly the strongman seemed vulnerable.

Doomed Deal
Desperate to shore up Musharraf, the Bush Administration blessed an unlikely plan: bring back Bhutto. Educated at Radcliffe and Oxford, with friends studded throughout the media and government élites of both the U.S. and Britain, the first-ever female leader of a modern Islamic state had left Pakistan just before Musharraf came to power in 1999. She later called it self-imposed exile, but it was also a way to avoid corruption charges Musharraf was pursuing against her. Eight years on, a Bhutto-Musharraf deal seemed to have something for everybody. She would return, contest elections and agree to serve as Prime Minister under Musharraf, thereby giving his rule a veneer of legitimacy. He would drop the charges against her. The White House would look as if it were keeping its word to spread democracy in the Muslim world while still having its man run the country.

Like most such attempts to meddle in Pakistan from the outside, the plan looked better on paper than in the dusty streets of Karachi and Lahore. On Nov. 3, just two weeks after Bhutto had returned home — and survived a double suicide bombing in Karachi that killed some 140 people — Musharraf declared a state of emergency, suspending the constitution and sending his troops into the streets to bludgeon protesters. Bhutto was placed under house arrest but vowed to stand in parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8. When allowed to leave her home, she campaigned with gusto. But as she left a campaign rally in Rawalpindi on Dec. 27, shots were fired near her SUV — and moments later, a suicide bomber detonated himself only yards away. The precise cause of her death remains in doubt, but she was gone, and with her, Washington's latest hope for her nation.

The New Bhutto
As Pakistan tried to find its balance after Bhutto's murder — citing the ensuing violence, the government postponed the election to Feb. 18 — her party settled on a predictable succession plan. Some would have liked for the leadership to go to a candidate with more obvious qualities than Zardari and Bilawal, such as Aitzaz Ahsan, who led the lawyers' protests last summer. But the PPP is a family firm. It was created by Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who ran the country from 1971 to '77 and was executed by military ruler Zia in 1979. The decision to anoint Bilawal, says Haqqani, "will sit very well with the PPP base because he is the son of a martyr and the grandson of a martyr."

It says something — none of it good — about Pakistan that such antecedents should be considered a political endorsement. Bilawal has spent nearly half his young life outside Pakistan, splitting his time between London and Dubai. A 2004 profile in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn said the teenager liked target-shooting, swimming, horseback-riding and squash and regretted being away from Pakistan in part because it meant he could not play more cricket. His grandfather Zulfikar, Bilawal said, "was a very courageous man, and I consider myself very lucky because I have three powerful role models that will obviously influence my career choices when I am older." Zardari, one of the three, is the scion of another of Pakistan's feudal families. He married Bhutto in 1987 and served in her governments as Investment and Environment Minister. But he is widely considered a wheeler-dealer. Opponents christened him "Mr. 10%," suggesting that was how much he pocketed from big government deals. Zardari has spent 11 years in prison on various charges, including blackmail and corruption. His supporters say the charges were politically motivated and point out that Pakistani courts have acquitted him on all the charges for which he has so far been tried. "He's a strong man," says PPP Senator Babar Awan. "All of us are controversial. Wasn't Benazir Bhutto? Wasn't Zulfikar Ali Bhutto? All those who don't accept the military role in politics are controversial."

Aware that he is a divisive figure, Zardari has said he is not seeking the prime ministership for himself. If the PPP wins the elections, that job will in all likelihood go to Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Bhutto's longtime deputy. Zardari and Fahim must now decide how to respond to a call by Nawaz Sharif — an old political foe of Bhutto who was Prime Minister on two separate occasions in the 1990s — for an anti-Musharraf coalition. An alliance between Sharif and the PPP would leave Musharraf vulnerable. He had a deal with Bhutto; he did not have one with Sharif, who was Prime Minister at the time of Musharraf's coup in 1999. Musharraf's successor as army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, has kept a low profile since his promotion and has done little to shore up his former mentor's position. That has led some analysts to speculate that Musharraf's time at the center of Pakistani politics may soon end.

In which case, Washington will, doubtless, decide that it has to find another horse to back. If it follows the usual formula, the Bush Administration will probably decide that Bilawal and Zardari are its new best friends. That may do little for Bhutto's heirs — being seen as a friend of the U.S. is not a great way of ensuring a long and quiet life in Pakistan — and may do little for the U.S. as well. For what the world desperately needs if Pakistan is to avoid another 60 years of tragedy is a political settlement there that does not depend on military men, dynasties — or the infusion of U.S. dollars. No sign of that yet.

With reporting by Aryn Baker/Karachi, Khudar Yar Khan/Islamabad, Mark Thompson and Brian Bennett/Washington and Eben Harrell, Theunis Bates and Jumana Farouky/London


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Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Can Musharraf Survive?

By Simon Robinson
Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has blustered and wriggled his way out of some tricky situations in the past, but the former army commando may have finally met his match. A day after Musharraf's party crashed to a humiliating defeat in parliamentary elections widely seen as a referendum on the President's rule, calls for him to step down are becoming louder and more numerous by the hour. Aitzaz Ahsan, a lawyer and opposition leader who has spent the past three months under house arrest following Musharraf's crackdown on the judiciary, told the French News Agency that the President is "the most hated man in the country and he must resign."

Musharraf is not about to comply willingly with such demands, but he could see his hand forced once the new parliament assembles in the next few weeks. The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif together won more than half the 272 open seats in Pakistan's parliament. Leaders of both parties said Tuesday that they would try to form a coalition; if they can win support from two-thirds of the parliament, they could try to impeach Musharraf. "It is the public mandate, not me, to say that Musharraf should resign," Benazir's husband and PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari told the BBC. "Now we will take the [resignation] demand into the parliament and see which political forces join hands with us."

Sharif, who was ousted in the 1999 coup that brought Musharraf to power, is even more explicit in his calls for his arch-rival to resign, arguing that Musharraf himself recently promised to step down if the people decided they wanted him gone. "Musharraf has said he would quit when people tell him," Sharif told reporters at a press conference today. "People have now given their verdict."

But Musharraf says he's not going anywhere and will work with the new government "for the good of the country." "They [the opposition] are way off in their demands," Musharraf's spokesman said in rejecting calls for the President to resign. "This is not the election for President. President Musharraf is already elected for five years." Officials from Musharraf's party are already reportedly trying to woo Zardari away from a tie-up with Sharif. Such efforts are unsurprising, since the key to Musharraf's fate undoubtedly lies in the ripening relationship between the two opposition leaders. Tough they are publicly making nice for now, Zardari and Sharif might struggle to get along once the glow of the election victory fades. Bhutto and Sharif were longtime political foes, and it is no sure thing that the PPP and PML-N leaderships will be able to overcome that legacy — and the egos involved — and form a stable and workable union.

Whatever the outcome, many Pakistanis are still marveling that the election went off mostly freely and mostly fairly and has ended in a result that reflects voters' wishes. "All the King's men are gone, the King's party has been reduced to ashes and the King's fate is in the hands of the next parliament, which will be strong enough to strip him of his extraordinary powers or impeach him if it so chooses," wrote the editor of Lahore's influential Daily Times Najam Sethi, reflecting the surprise many Pakistanis feel. "So let us give the devil his due, even though he went about it in a particularly devilish way."

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...714773,00.html

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Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Coalition Threat to Musharraf

By Aryn Baker and Simon Robinson


Pakistan's two main opposition parties were the big winners in Monday's parliamentary elections, and they plan to use their gains to form a coalition government that could threaten President Pervez Musharraf's weakening grip on power. The Pakistani People's Party (PPP) of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif have, together, won more than half the seats so far counted, easily defeating the Musharraf-aligned PML-Q party. If the PPP and PML-N win two-thirds of parliamentary seats, they will be in a position to impeach Musharraf, who on Tuesday said he would accept the results of the landmark poll.

According to results reported thus far, the PPP has won 87 seats in the 272-seat parliament and the PML-N 66, a combined total of 153. The ruling PML-Q party, badly tainted by its association with the widely unpopular President, has seen support plummet and has won just 38. Most of Musharraf's cabinet, including his party president, speaker of the house and several other close allies, appear to have lost their reelection bids. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, head of the PML-Q, conceded defeat. "We accept the results with an open heart" and "will sit on opposition benches" in the new parliament, he told the Associated Press.

Turnout in the elections was low. Official estimates put it at less than 40% of Pakistan's 81 million eligible voters. But the resounding win for the opposition parties is seen as a repudiation of Musharraf's eight years in power. The other big losers were Pakistan's fundamentalist religious parties, who have lost control in the North West Frontier Province, which they had ruled since 2002. Frustrated with the religious parties' alliance with Musharraf and with their mismanagement of the NWFP economy, voters opted for secular opposition parties instead.

As the results became known, celebratory gunfire was heard in Karachi; in the streets of Rawalpindi, Musharraf's hometown, PPP supporters danced in the streets. Prior to the election, many Pakistanis said they feared the voting would be rigged to ensure most incumbents won. But PML-N party candidates swept to convincing wins in Punjab, Pakistan's largest province. Results from Sindh province, a PPP stronghold, are not complete and analysts expect further gains for the party as more votes are counted.

If the PPP, which is now led by Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and Sharif's party can agree a workable union — no sure thing in the mercurial world of Pakistani politics — they are likely to make life very difficult for Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless 1999 coup. The former army head and key U.S. ally in the war on terror says he will not resign and will work with the new government.

But that will not be easy. Sharif, who returned to Pakistan on Nov. 24 after eight years in exile following his overthrow by Musharraf, has pledged to reinstate the Supreme Court judges dismissed by Musharraf when he suspended the country's constitution and established emergency rule on Nov. 3. Many of those judges are believed to view Musharraf's controversial election last year to a second presidential term as unconstitutional. Both the PPP and the PML-N also want Musharraf gone. "What we need to clean up the mess is to get back to the beginning," says PPP media coordinator Farahnaz Ispahani. Ultimately both parties share the same goal, she added. "We are like husband and wife. We share love, but we disagree about how to raise the children. We all want to see an independent judiciary."


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...714315,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008




By Jeffrey Kluger


It's a measure of how peacefully human beings have used space in the 50-plus years we've been traveling there that we're a whole lot better at putting things into orbit than we are at blowing them back out. That, of course, is a function of practice. Thousands of pieces of machinery have been lofted into space since the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and almost all of them have either tumbled back down on their own or simply remained in orbit.

This week, the Pentagon tried something different. On Wednesday evening, it announced that it successfully launched a sea-based missile and shot down a crippled satellite gliding 150 miles overhead, in a $60 million effort to blast it out of the sky before it could tumble home and hurt someone. It's been a neat little feat on the part of the military planners — but that doesn't mean they're telling the whole truth about why they bothered in the first place.

The clay pigeon in the military's cross hairs was an unnamed, 5,000-lb. spy satellite that was launched in 2006 and never quite got its purchase in space, suffering a malfunction almost immediately upon its arrival in orbit. Comparatively low-orbiting craft like this one tumble back to Earth faster than high-orbiting ones, as the upper wisps of the planet's atmosphere produce increasing amounts of drag, pulling the object lower and lower. This one was on a trajectory that would have caused it to begin its terminal plunge sometime in March, sending it on a fiery descent that should have entirely — or at least mostly — incinerated it.

So why make the effort at such a complicated bit of sharpshooting just to bag a target that was coming down anyway? The Pentagon says it's all about safety. Five thousand pounds of out-of-control satellite can do an awful lot of damage if it drops on the wrong spot. What's more, this particular satellite is carrying a 500-lb. tank of frozen hydrazine fuel — nasty stuff if you're unlucky enough to inhale it. Striking the ground at reentry speed, the gas could immediately disperse over a patch of ground as big as two football fields.

None of this, however, was likely to happen. For one thing, 70% of the Earth's surface is water. Even considering that the flight paths of most satellites are designed to carry them over as much land as possible, that's still a lot of uninhabited square mileage lying below. NASA acknowledges that 3,000 satellites and 6,000 pieces of space debris are currently circling the planet — a pretty huge swarm of potentially incoming rubbish to justify devoting so much attention to just one.

The hydrazine argument is similarly suspect. It's extremely hard for a spacecraft component to survive reentry even if you want it to. The scientific experiments carried aboard the Apollo lunar modules were powered by radioactive fuel, which was itself encased in heavy ceramic just to ensure that it would survive such an accident. Even then, there were white knuckles whenever one flew since the risk existed that an uncontrolled reentry would crack the cask and leak radiation. The hydrazine tank — a hollow vessel — is nowhere near as robust and is unlikely to make it through the heat and aerodynamic violence of the plunge that awaits it, meaning that it will spill its contents high in the atmosphere, where it will represent barely a breath of gas that will disperse harmlessly.

The more believable explanation for the duck hunt is that it's been an exercise in politics rather than safety. Washington was none too pleased in January of 2007 when China shot down one of its own weather satellites after it had outlived its usefulness, a bit of technological sword-rattling that proved it could target any other nation's orbiting hardware with equal ease. Beijing too made vague claims of worrying about the public weal, but Washington saw the act more as the political statement it probably was, and concluded — correctly — that American spy satellites are not quite as safe as they once were. An American shootdown would be one way to return the gesture. The timing is particularly suspicious since Russia and China issued a joint condemnation of the militarization of space only days before the Pentagon went public with its plans. While Beijing's sudden pacifism is hardly credible after it own exercise in cosmic skeet-shooting, neither is the Washington's insistence that there is no linkage between the two events.

Another possibility is that the Pentagon was indeed nervous about something aboard the satellite, but not the tank of fuel. Spy satellites are, by definition, made of secret hardware, and nothing so pleases one military power as the chance to seize and pick over the technology of another. Should American camera and communications components fall into the wrong hands, whatever tactical advantage was gained in developing them would be lost.

With success announced on Wednesday night, the Pentagon is hardly likely to change its explanation now. They say the mission to destroy the satellite been accomplished, and —for now—any questions that it's raised may be gone along with it.


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/health/arti...714811,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Thursday, May. 01, 2008

The Road to Damascus

By Bill Powell


Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush has tried pretty much everything to get North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to come out of his cage. He has tried to coerce him with economic sanctions and schoolboy bluster — a policy course that ended in 2006, when Kim tested a nuclear weapon, precisely the opposite of the result Bush intended. Since then, the Administration has tried bribery, offering blandishments like free food and fuel oil in hopes that North Korea would stand down its nuclear program. Kim has responded a bit — his nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, which produced the fissile material for the North's estimated eight to 10 nuclear bombs, is being shut down. But Kim has refused to detail, as he had promised to do, other components of his nuclear program, including an alleged uranium-enrichment effort. And it has become clearer that he has continued to sell North Korean nuclear expertise into a buyer's market of rogue states.

Exasperated, the Administration has now unveiled North Korea policy version 3.0. Bush is apparently trying to shame North Korea into complying with its commitments in the so-called six-party talks (with the U.S., China, Russia, Japan and South Korea). In an April 24 presentation in Washington, the Administration produced damning photographic evidence that North Korea was deeply involved in helping Syria build a plutonium nuclear reactor, "basically a copy of Yongbyon," as one Bush official put it.

Last year, on Sept. 6, Israel bombed that project out of existence. Ever since, there had been a cone of silence placed around what happened, with neither Jerusalem nor Washington confirming the operation. In Seoul last March, I pressed a senior South Korean negotiator in the six-party talks for information about the Syrian-North Korean connection. He squirmed a little and said it was his impression that the so-called al-Kibar site was just a "missile factory," not a nuclear facility. That, we know now, was false.

There was a reason for the silence and dissembling: the never-ending struggle over the Bush Administration's North Korea policy. The State Department, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the U.S. point man for North Korea talks, insist the only sensible path is the one they have been on for the past two years: trying, oh-so-patiently, to reach a deal with Kim that will at least eliminate his regime's plutonium program and the weapons it produced. Everything else, they believe, is a sideshow.

Set against them are the North Korea skeptics, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who argue that North Korea has no intention of giving up its nukes, no matter what agreements it signs. The most vocal of this group is Bush's former U.N. representative John Bolton, who likens the State Department to a drunk searching for his car keys near a lamppost, even though he knows he left them in the bar. Asked by a passerby why he keeps looking near the lamppost, the drunk replies: "Because the light is better."

The hawks were delighted by the revelations about Syria, hoping that the North will be so angered that Kim will abandon the six-party talks, finally bringing down the curtain on what they believe has been a feckless effort by the State Department. But Administration officials insist they don't expect that to happen. They believe North Korea 3.0 — the "shame on you" policy — may pay off. "I doubt they're walking away," says one diplomat involved in the talks. Yes, they say, North Korea's serial proliferation is a huge problem. That's why getting Pyongyang to stop making plutonium-based nuclear weapons has already been a significant accomplishment.

Consider the North's motivation in helping Syria build a reactor: "Cash," a CIA official told reporters. The North earns hard currency any illicit way it can. The point of diplomacy is to give Kim sufficient incentives — both economic and diplomatic — to get to a point where his regime doesn't need to proliferate to survive. A return to Bush's "strangulation" strategy only increases the incentive for Kim to behave badly, with very little hope that the Pyongyang government will disappear anytime soon.

Dealing with Pyongyang is a maddening, sometimes humiliating process. Hill privately has let it be known that it drives him nuts to be portrayed as aiding and abetting such an odious crowd. But bribing Kim is the only realistic strategy. When the next U.S. Administration takes over in January, it's going to come to the same conclusion — whether the President is named McCain, Obama or Clinton.


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...736511,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Friday, May. 02, 2008

New Agreement on Iran Nuke Talks

By AP/ANNE GEARAN


(LONDON) — World powers negotiating with Iran have agreed on a repackaged offer of incentives to try to coax the Islamic regime into rolling back its disputed nuclear program, Britain's foreign secretary said Friday.

However, the details of the amended offer being made by the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany were not revealed. "We've got an agreement on an offer that will be made to the government of Iran," Foreign Secretary David Miliband said following a meeting of the group at Britain's Foreign Office.

The group has previously promised to enhance the package of political, security and economic incentives they put on the table in June 2006 if Iran suspends its enrichment of uranium, which critics say could feed a covert nuclear weapons program.

It was not clear whether the current offer sweetens the deal or merely makes clear that the same basic economic and political inducements remain an option if it wants to begin bargaining.

Miliband called the new offer an update, but did not say whether the offer contains any new enticements. A Western diplomatic source later said the offer contains nothing new.

Iran had effectively rejected the previous offer before any bargaining began. The offer contained a precondition — that Iran suspend the enrichment of uranium — that the regime said was insulting.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said that precondition would remain part of any repackaged offer, and she doubted that Iran would accept.

Miliband said he hoped for a response "in a timely manner," but set no deadline and did not say what the group would do if Iran rejected the package or failed to respond.


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...736981,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.

Thursday, May. 01, 2008

How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?

Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq in 2003-2004, has written a new memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story, an account of his life and his service in Iraq. Sanchez was a three-star general — and the military's senior Hispanic officer — when he led U.S. forces in the first year of the war. He was relieved of his command by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 following the revelations of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. In 2005, Marine General Peter Pace, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him to say his career was over and he wouldn't get the promotion to a full general — four stars — that Sanchez says he was promised. Six months later, at Rumsfeld's request, he showed up at the Pentagon for a meeting with the defense secretary shortly before retiring. In this exclusive excerpt, Sanchez details what happened next:

I walked into Rumsfeld's office at 1:25 p.m. on April 19, 2006. He had just returned from a meeting at the White House, and the only other person present in the room was his new Chief of Staff, John Rangel.

"Ric, it's been a long time," Rumsfeld said, greeting me in a friendly manner. "I'm really sorry that your promotion didn't work out. We just couldn't make it work politically. Sending a nomination to the Senate would not be good for you, the Army, or the department."

"I understand, sir," I replied.

Then we walked over to his small conference table. "Have a seat," he said. "Now, Ric, what are your timelines?"

"Well, sir, my transition leave will start in September with retirement the first week of November."

"That's a long time. Why so long?"

"I want to have my son graduate from high school in June. After that, I'll have forty-five days to hit my three years' time in grade, so I can retire as a three-star without a waiver."

"Oh, yes, I remember now. That's why we kept you in Germany in your current job."

"Right."

"Ric, I wanted to tell you that I'm interested in giving you some options for follow-on employment as a civilian in the Department of Defense." Rumsfeld then talked about a possibility with either the Africa Center for Strategic Studies and the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies. There was a director they were thinking of moving to make room for me, he explained.

"Well, I'll consider that, sir, but I'm not making any commitments. I have some other opportunities I need to explore."

Secretary Rumsfeld then pulled out a two-page memo and handed it to me. "I wrote this after a promotion interview about two weeks ago," he explained. "The officer told me that one of the biggest mistakes we made after the war was to allow CENTCOM and CFLCC to leave the Iraq theater immediately after the fighting stopped — and that left you and V Corps with the entire mission."

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"Well, how could we have done that?" he said in an agitated, but adamant, tone. "I knew nothing about it. Now, I'd like you to read this memo and give me any corrections."

In the memo, Rumsfeld stated that one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the war was ordering the major redeployment of forces and allowing the departure of the CENTCOM and CFLCC staffs in May�June 2003.

"This left General Sanchez in charge of operations in Iraq with a staff that had been focused at the operational and tactical level, but was not trained to operate at the strategic/operational level." He went on to write that neither he nor anyone higher in the administration knew these orders had been issued, and that he was dumbfounded when he learned that Gen McKiernan was out of the country and in Kuwait, and that the forces would be drawn down to a level of about 30,000 by September. "I did not know that Sanchez was in charge," he wrote.

I stopped reading after I read that last statement, because I knew it was total BS. After a deep breath, I said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, the problem as you've stated it is generally accurate, but your memo does not accurately capture the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore, I just can't believe you didn't know that Franks's and McKiernan's staffs had pulled out and that the orders had been issued to redeploy the forces."

At that point, Rumsfeld became very excited, jumped out of his seat, and sat down in the chair next to me so that he could look at the memo with me. "Now just what is it in this memorandum that you don't agree with?" he said, almost shouting.

"Mr. Secretary, when V Corps ramped up for the war, our entire focus was at the tactical level. The staff had neither the experience nor training to operate at the strategic level, much less as a joint/combined headquarters. All of CFLCC's generals, whom we called the Dream Team, left the country in a mass exodus. The transfer of authority was totally inadequate, because CENTCOM's focus was only on departing the theater and handing off the mission. There was no focus on postconflict operations. None! In their minds, the war was over and they were leaving. Everybody was executing these orders, and the services knew all about it."

Starting to get a little worked up, I paused a moment, and then looked Rumsfeld straight in the eye. "Sir, I cannot believe that you didn't know I was being left in charge in Iraq."

"No! No!" he replied. "I was never told that the plan was for V Corps to assume the entire mission. I have to issue orders and approve force deployments into the theater, and they moved all these troops around without any orders or notification from me."

"Sir, I don't . . . "

"Why didn't you tell anyone about this?" he asked, interrupting me in an angry tone.

"Mr. Secretary, all of the senior leadership in the Pentagon knew what was happening. Franks issued the orders and McKiernan was executing them."

"Well, what about Abizaid? He was the deputy then."

"Sir, General Abizaid knew and worked very hard with me to reverse direction once he assumed command of CENTCOM. General Bell also knew, and he offered to send me his operations officer. In early July, when General Keane visited us, I described to him the wholly inadequate manning level of the staff, and told him that we were set up for failure. He agreed and told me that he would immediately begin to identify general officers to help fill our gaps."

"Yes, yes," replied Rumsfeld. "General Keane is a good man. But this was a major failure and it has to be documented so that we never do it again." He then explained that he would be tasking Adm. Ed Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to conduct an inquiry on this issue.

"Well, I think that's appropriate," I said. "That way you'll all be able to understand what was happening on the ground."

"By the way," said Rumsfeld, "why wasn't this in the lessons-learned packages that have been forwarded to my level."

"Sir, I cannot answer that question," I replied. "But this was well known by leadership at multiple levels."

After the meeting ended, I remember walking out of the Pentagon shaking my head and wondering how in the world Rumsfeld could have expected me to believe him. Everybody knew that CENTCOM had issued orders to drawdown the forces. The Department of Defense had printed public affairs guidance for how the military should answer press queries about the redeployment. There were victory parades being planned. And in mid-May 2003, Rumsfeld himself had sent out some of his famous "snowflake" memorandums to Gen. Franks asking how the general was going to redeploy all the forces in Kuwait. The Secretary knew. Everybody knew.

So what was Rumsfeld doing? Nineteen months earlier, in September 2004, when it was clearly established in the Fay-Jones report that CJTF-7 was never adequately manned, he called me in from Europe and claimed ignorance, "I didn't know about it," he said. "How could this happen? Why didn't you tell somebody about it?"

Now, he had done exactly the same thing, only this time he had prepared a written memorandum documenting his denials. So it was clearly a pattern on the Secretary's part, and now I recognized it. Bring in the top-level leaders. Profess total ignorance. Ask why he had not been informed. Try to establish that others were screwing things up. Have witnesses in the room to verify his denials. Put it in writing. In essence, Rumsfeld was covering his rear. He was setting up his chain of denials should his actions ever be questioned. And worse yet, in my mind, he was attempting to level all the blame on his generals.

But why now? Why was he doing it in September 2006? I wasn't completely sure. I knew it had been a hectic week. The media was hounding Rumsfeld, because a number of former generals had staged something of a revolt and were calling for his resignation. Perhaps he wanted to set up this link in his chain of denials before I left the service, or gauge how I was going to react to his position. Or Rumsfeld might have been anticipating a big political shift in Congress after the midterm November elections, which, in turn, might lead to Democratic-controlled hearings. I didn't know exactly why it happened at this particular time. I just know that it did happen.

Upon returning to Germany, I had some very long discussions with my wife, especially about Rumsfeld's offer of a possible high-paying job in the Department of Defense. "I'm not sure I want to pursue something like that," I said. "But given my reaction to Rumsfeld's memorandum, he now knows that I'm not going to play along. So I don't think he'll pursue it."

"Ricardo, they are just trying to buy you off and keep you silent," said Maria Elena. "I don't think we should mess with them anymore."

My wife had hit the nail right on the head. "I believe you're right," I replied. And sure enough, no one from the Department of Defense ever followed up. So at that point, I closed out all options of doing anything with DoD after retirement.

On my first day back in the office, I received a phone call from Adm. Giambastiani, who had obviously talked to Rumsfeld. "Ric, what happened in that meeting?" he asked. "The Secretary was really upset."

"Well, sir, I essentially told him that his memorandum was wrong," I said. "I guess he didn't like that."

"Well, no, I guess he didn't. Anyway, he's asked me to make this study happen, so we'll get right on it."

Giambastiani assigned the task to the Joint Warfighting Center and gave them a pretty tight timeline. So it wasn't long before I was giving the investigative team a complete rundown of everything that had happened in Iraq between May and June 2003. I later learned that Gen. Tommy Franks, however, had refused to speak with them.

A few months later, I was making a presentation at the Joint Warfighting Center and ran across several of the people involved with the study. "Say, did you guys ever complete that investigation?" I asked.

"Oh, yes sir. We sure did," came the reply. "And let me tell you, it was ugly."

"Ugly?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. Our report validated everything you told us — that Franks issued the orders to discard the original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment, that the forces were drawing down, that we were walking away from the mission, and that everybody knew about it. And let me tell you, the Secretary did not like that one bit. After we went in to brief him, he just shut us down. 'This is not going anywhere,' he said. 'Oh, and by the way, leave all the copies right here and don't talk to anybody about it.'"

"You mean he embargoed all the copies of the report?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, he did."

From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public.

Continuing the conversation, I inquired about the "original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment," because I wasn't sure what he was talking about. It turned out that the investigative team was so thorough, they had actually gone back and looked at the original operational concept that had been prepared by CENTCOM (led by Gen. Franks) before the invasion of Iraq was launched. It was standard procedure to present such a plan, which included such things as: timing for predeployment, deployment, staging for major combat operations, and postdeployment. The concept was briefed up to the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and the President of the United States.

And the investigators were now telling me that the plan called for a Phase IV (after combat action) operation that would last twelve to eighteen months.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post�major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.

That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.
From the book Wiser in Battle. Copyright � 2008 by Ricardo S. Sanchez. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...736831,00.html

__________________
Regards

Aarwaa

Pakistan is ruled by three As - Army, America and Allah.