The Times - Page 3

tx_ned · #21 Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Richard Beeston
April 21, 2010

The region has been described by the US President as the most dangerous place in the world. No one who lives here would disagree.

Pakistan’s rugged tribal areas are now in the fourth year of a fierce struggle that shows little sign of ebbing and every indication that the daily toll in lives will continue to grow.

The past few days provide a telling snapshot. More than 70 people were killed in a bungled Pakistani air raid against suspected militants; 45 Shia Muslims were killed by Sunni suicide bombers in burkas; a police station was hit by a suicide car bomber, killing 7; and 25 died in another suicide attack on a market in Peshawar, the regional capital.

During this period US military drones continued their daily strikes in North Waziristan, while Pakistani forces engaged in fierce battles with Taleban fighters over their strongholds in Orakzai. The impact is starting to show on the deeply conservative Pashtun population that straddles the mountainous frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Which way they turn could decide the future of the American campaign and ultimately the fate of this country.

In the village of Ghazni Khel, the arrival of three Western visitors this week came as a huge surprise to locals. Young children have never met anyone from London. Their parents say that the last time anyone bothered to visit was four years ago — that includes politicians from the capital only a few hours’ drive away.

In particular, local residents were horrified when not a single representative of the central Government came to the funeral of 100 young people killed on New Year’s Day by a Taleban suicide bomber during a volleyball game at the village of Shah Hasan Khel.

“We feel we have been forgotten,” said Salim Saifullah Khan, the local tribal leader, who represents the area in the Pakistani senate. He has been trying to lobby for development projects — such as a new hydroelectric dam — and demonstrating to visitors that the real victims of the present war are civilians.

Their world changed dramatically four years ago when the Taleban began to assert their authority. Militant checkpoints appeared on the major roads. Music was banned and hi-fi systems ripped out of cars. Some changes were welcome, such as Taleban courts that administered justice in a matter of hours where the local authorities could take months. In some areas they also redistributed land, giving peasants areas previously owned by landlords. But Taleban rule also meant brutal summary justice. Money was extorted in the name of jihad against America. Kidnapping became commonplace and the local authorities found themselves under siege.

Doctors and other professionals have been hit particularly hard. They are frequently abducted and pressed into work before being ransomed.

Last year a GP, Dr Inshaullah, was intercepted by gunmen on his way home with his 13-year-old son. The two spent 70 days in North Waziristan, where their abductors demanded a ransom of £150,000. He eventually managed to escape but some of his colleagues are still missing.

The military insists that it has gone a long way to reassert control over the area at considerable cost. Certainly Taleban strongholds such as Bajaur, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan are now largely under government control. But the campaign of intimidation continues through skilful propaganda. Those who stand up to the militants receive threatening phone calls and are accused of being CIA spies. In Dr Inshaullah’s case the police made it clear that they were not interested in pursuing his abductors even though he can identify them and knows where they live.

“People are very intimidated,” Khalid Munir, a former army officer, said. “They have been terrorised by the Taleban. They are scared to go out at night. They are scared to speak. The war is not over.

“The Taleban may not be as visible as they were before but they are still there.”

tx_ned · #22 Thursday, April 22, 2010

Hugh Tomlinson in Dubai
April 22, 2010

A girl aged 12 has won a divorce from her 80-year-old husband in Saudi Arabia in a case that may help to introduce a minimum age of marriage in the kingdom for the first time. The girl’s unusual legal challenge to the arrangement generated international media attention and scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s record of child marriages.

It also prompted the state-run Human Rights Commission to appoint a lawyer to represent her. The commission has capitalised on the case and pushed for a legal minimum age for marriage of at least 16.

Three committees have been assembled to examine the possibility. Medical experts, child psychologists, social workers and scholars in Islamic law will debate the issue over the coming months before submitting their recommendations to a public hearing.

Based on these findings, the commission and the Ministry of Justice will issue new guidelines and impose a legal minimum age for the first time. “The main aim is to not allow cases like this to happen again,” said Alanoud alHejailan, a lawyer for the commission.

“There will be some opposition, of course, but we feel that public opinion has changed on this issue. We want to gather all the public support we can for a minimum age for marriage.”

Since the girl’s case became public, judges and clerics in Saudi Arabia have waded into the debate about whether child marriages should be banned.

The Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a nine-year-old girl has been used as justification for the practice in some quarters. In January, however, Sheikh Abdullah al-Manie, a senior Saudi cleric, spoke out in defence of the girl, declaring that the Prophet’s marriage 14 centuries ago could not be used to justify child brides today. The 12-year-old has been fighting her case through the courts in the conservative town of Buraidah, near Riyadh, the capital. She was married against her wishes to her father’s elderly cousin last year. A dowry of 85,000 riyals (£14,500) was paid and the marriage consummated.

She has now reached agreement with her family that a divorce will be settled privately, and has dropped her legal challenge to the marriage.

Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Commission said that it would continue to monitor her situation. It is also looking to increase co-operation with international bodies on children’s rights and human trafficking.

Under King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, slow but steady progress has been made to improve human rights within the kingdom, helped by the foundation of the commission in 2005. Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, is on a tour of the Middle East and met King Abdullah in Riyadh on Monday.

UN officials confirmed that child marriage was discussed with King Abdullah and the Ministry of Justice. Ms Pillay noted an “encouraging level of government activity to improve human rights” in the region, but rogress has been particularly difficult on women’s rights.

King Abdullah faced down criticism from orthodox clerics last year when he opened Saudi Arabia’s first mixed university in Jedda.

tx_ned · #23 Friday, April 23, 2010

Jerome Starkey in Kabul
April 23, 2010

Two of the Taleban’s most senior military commanders are involved in a bitter power struggle, which insiders claim has split the insurgents’ leadership council and could turn violent in parts of southern Afghanistan.

The commanders are vying for military control of the insurgency, district elders and mid-level Taleban commanders have told The Times.

Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir and Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor were both named as the successors to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taleban’s second in command, who was arrested in Pakistan in February.

Mullah Zakir, according to reports at the time, was given responsibility for military operations, while his rival was put in charge of logistics. District elders in Helmand said that Mullah Mansoor was disappointed not to get his former leader’s operational role, referred to as the Taleban’s defence minister.

“When Mullah Baradar was arrested, Mullah Mansoor thought he would be his replacement,” the elder with links to the insurgency said. “When Zakir was introduced as the defence minister, [Mansoor] was disappointed.”

Tensions are reportedly highest in central Helmand, where British troops are based and where fighters loyal to both men massed before Operation Moshtarak, the US, British and Afghan offensive to clear the insurgents out.

Fighters loyal to Mullah Baradar have been forced to take sides, after his arrest in Karachi. Haji Sar Mualem, the deputy head of the Marjah community shura, said that relatives told him about the tensions. “There are problems between Zakir and Mansoor,” he said. “Each of them says ‘I am the commander in Helmand’ .” Both men have supporters in Helmand, but sources said that Mullah Mansoor was trying to flood the province with fighters from his own tribe to wrest control from his rival. “He sent his soldiers to every district,” one said. “There wasn’t any fighting but it created tension.”

Mullah Mansoor served as the Taleban’s Minister of Civil Aviation and Transportation from 1996 to 2001. He has been linked to the narcotics trade in provinces bordering Pakistan according to Interpol, and in 2007 he was made shadow governor in Kandahar.

Mullah Zakir is a former detainee at the American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba who was released in December 2007. He quickly rejoined the insurgency.

Mullah Mansoor reportedly asked the Taleban’s leadership council for military control of Helmand after Baradar was detained. Mullah Zakir and his supporters refused. “He [Zakir] said, ‘I’m the defence minister. I control all of Afghanistan, we should work together’,” the elder said.

“Now there’s a big division,” he added. “Some of the members went to Zakir’s side. Some of the members went to Mansoor’s side.” It wasn’t clear last night if either man was in Helmand, or in hiding elsewhere.

A spokesman for Daoud Ahmadi, Helmand’s Governor, said that he was unaware of the rift. Zabiullah Mujahed, the Taleban spokesman, meanwhile insisted that it wasn’t true. “Mullah Zakir is the defence minister,” he said. “He is Mullah Baradar’s replacement. The Taleban don’t have time to fight each other, they are too busy fighting their enemies.”

Taleban commanders reached by telephone told a different story. Haji Mullah Ibrahim, who said that he was in central Helmand, insisted that Mullah Mansoor was his defence minister. He said that the tensions were nothing more than everyday friction between commander and deputy.

A spokesman for British Forces in Helmand refused to comment directly on the rift, insisting that their attention was focused on the population, the Government and the Afghan security forces — not on the Taleban.

tx_ned · #24 Monday, April 26, 2010

Jeremy Page in Delhi
April 26, 2010

The Indian Government is to answer accusations today that it tapped ministers’ phones, including one involved in a growing money-laundering scandal surrounding the Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

As tens of millions tuned in to watch the IPL final last night, opposition parties were threatening to disrupt Parliament unless Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, responded personally to allegations in a magazine last week that the State had eavesdropped on ministers’ calls. “This is turning out to be the biggest scandal,” said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a spokesman for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. “Why is the Government silent? We will not accept anybody’s answer except the Prime Minister,” he said.

Lalit Modi, the flamboyant chairman of the IPL, was suspended late last night pending a ruling by the tournament’s governing council that could decide whether he remains in charge of the $4.13 billion (£2.69 billion) franchise he created three years ago.

The Government began an investigation into Mr Modi and the IPL last week after allegations of tax evasion, money laundering, kickbacks, match fixing and illegal betting in cricket’s most lucrative competition.

The scandal has already led Shashi Tharoor, a junior minister and former UN under-secretary-general, to resign. Sharad Pawar, the Agriculture Minister, and Praful Patel, the Civil Aviation Minister, have been linked with the events.

There have also been tax raids on an IPL team owned by Shah Rukh Khan, a Bollywood star, and on the offices of Sahara Group, a conglomerate owned by Subrata Roy, the billionaire.

The scandal now threatens to paralyse Parliament, just as the Government is trying to push through the budget and other key reform Bills, and faces protests over rising food prices.

The latest twist in the saga came when Outlook, a news magazine, reported that the Government had tapped telephone conversations involving four senior political figures since 2007.

It said that the National Technical Research Organisation, an intelligence agency, used new technology to monitor the calls. Among the exchanges said to be recorded were some between Mr Pawar and Mr Modi in the past fortnight, allegedly discussing deals done during the bidding process for IPL teams, it claimed.

The magazine said that the agency had also targeted Prakash Karat, a leader of the Communist Party of India, during a stand-off over an Indian-US nuclear deal in 2008.

Digvijay Singh, a Congress leader whose conversations were also allegedly monitored, said: “I don’t believe this story because Manmohan Singh’s Government cannot do such an unethical and illegal task.”

The Government has not officially denied the story, and the Prime Minister’s office said yesterday that it was looking into it.

The opposition has compared the Government’s alleged actions with those of Indira Gandhi when she imposed emergency rule from 1975 to 1977. L.K. Advani, the opposition leader, called for a cross-party parliamentary committee to investigate the allegations.

The drama in Parliament will be matched by today’s meeting of the 14-member IPL Governing Council. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, which owns the IPL, was widely expected to suspend Mr Modi and had an emergency meeting just before last night’s final. But he has made it clear that he will not go down without a fight, pointing out that one IPL Governing Council member has vested interests because he has a stake in an IPL team.

“People pressurising me to resign — I can tell you will not happen,” he tweeted on Saturday. “Let them remove me then.”

tx_ned · #25 Saturday, May 01, 2010

Anthony Loyd
May 1, 2010

The battle was brief — a sudden stab of tracer fire into the remote police post from the surrounding mountains that left a US staff sergeant bleeding from his face, hit by a ricochet or fragment of flying rock. “It’s like shooting at ghosts,” the soldier beside him complained, staring into the silent darkness after the shooting had stopped.

At least the two soldiers knew which way to face — outwards from their gun position on the roof of Police SubStation 7, on the western outskirts of Kandahar. In the sleeping quarters below, a pair of Canadian police officers, sent there to help to mentor the Afghan National Police (ANP), had trained their guns inwards, on the door of their own accommodation.

“I don’t mind admitting it,” one said. “I thought the firing was coming from inside the post. I thought it was one of the ANP, a little unhappy with the way I spoke to him on the patrol today, turning his gun on us.”

For coalition troops working with the Afghan police, life has its unique strains and dangers. Five British soldiers were killed last year by a renegade Afghan police officer they were mentoring. American soldiers have died in similar circumstances. Afghan law enforcers, regarded as part of the key to stability, include the dregs of society — heroin addicts and common criminals — as well as professional officers. A word of criticism at the wrong moment, a perceived slight, a loss of face, can have fatal consequences.

Furthermore, corruption at the top of the Interior Ministry continues to ensure a system of appointments whereby many senior police commanders buy their positions for as much as $50,000 (£30,000) — and pay a monthly bond to maintain them to exploit opportunities for extortion and bribery along prime drug-smuggling routes.

“That system cascades down to the lowest of police levels,” admitted a senior coalition army officer in Kandahar, “so that we often find that the commanders of small ANP checkpoints have, effectively, bought their post.”

An extra 30,000 US troops are expected to arrive this summer in an effort to halt the violence in and around the city where a combination of weak governance, poor policing, a deep-rooted insurgency and drugrelated violence has grown.

For now, though, the situation for the 20 US troops in Sub-Station 7, members of the 293rd Military Police Company, remains typically complex. Their area of operations straddled two big vegetated areas used by the Taleban to infiltrate Kandahar. They had to juggle combat missions with police mentoring tasks in a slice of territory that included at least ten villages over an area of more than 35sq km (15sq miles). At least 30 of the 170 Afghan police they were training, spread among 14 small checkpoints, had been killed or wounded and 15 had deserted in the eight months since the MPs arrived in August. Most casualties were the result of roadside bombs, though one officer was shot in the arm yesterday morning only hours after the attack on SubStation 7.

Last week the Taleban used two children riding a pack-laden donkey as unwitting bombers to attack a police post in the neighbouring district. “They detonated the device at the checkpoint right outside the house of Fazluddin Agha, a famous elder,” police Lieutenant-Colonel Abdul Qadir said. “The children would never have known they were riding aboard a bomb.”

As well as attacks on the security forces, a wave of killings — by insurgents as well as drug gangs — has plagued the western edges of the city. “We found two more bodies by the roadside just a few days ago,” Lieutenant-Colonel Qadir said. “They were both well-dressed men, shot in the head and chest. One had a phone number in his pocket, the other a voter registration card.

“We worked out that one was from Kabul, the other from Uruzgan. But what they were doing here, and why they were killed, we may never know.”

Reflecting on the nine months of his tour to date, half an hour before Taleban gunfire split his cheek, Staff Sergeant Schaffer considered the various bombings, dead policemen, murder victims and a double beheading that had occurred during his time mentoring the Afghan police.

“I guess the weirdest thing I’ve seen here was the investigation into a missing farmer from Korcaran village,” he concluded. “It was the closest thing I’ve seen to normal police work. Last December a local family came here and told the police the man was missing. The police took a description, filed a report and looked for him. Beside everything else that happens it almost seemed normal — a missing persons investigation.

“Not that they ever found him.”

tx_ned · #26 Sunday, May 02, 2010

Christina Lamb
May 2, 2010

Across fields of cotton and baked mud in the village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh in southern Pakistan rises a white marble mausoleum with Mughal-style cones that shim-mer in the heat. Inside lie four bodies — a father and his three children — all murdered over a 30-year span. The father was hanged by a military dictator, one son poisoned and one son shot, both by unknown assailants. The daughter was still building the mausoleum when she, too, was assassinated. Her killing was captured on live TV, yet who did it remains a mystery, as well as how.

Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s most important political figure, the leading female politician in the Islamic world, an Oxford and Harvard graduate who was the West’s best hope of tackling terrorism. Yet 2½ years on, and despite a $5m United Nations commission of inquiry, her murder remains unresolved.

Almost every Pakistani has a theory about who did it; practically nobody expects to find out. Pakistan’s history is dotted with unexplained political assassinations, but this time there was an unexpected twist. Bhutto’s widowed husband ended up as president, with all the government apparatus at his disposal. One might think that for once there was a good chance of establishing a culprit. Instead he had called in the UN to investigate, claiming “This thing is bigger than us.”

I had my own reasons for wanting answers. I’d known Bibi, as friends called her, since 1987, when her kind wedding invitation to a 21-year-old led to me falling in love with her country and starting a life as a foreign correspondent, covering both her spells as prime minister. I was with her on the truck in Karachi the first time they tried to kill her: two bombs killed 150 people, but she survived.

Ten weeks later, just after 5pm on December 27, 2007, they succeeded. As Bhutto left an election rally in Liaquat Park, Rawalpindi, she stood up through the sunroof of her armoured car to wave. Moments later she was dead, blood gushing from a wound to her temple, as a suicide bomber exploded himself in the crowd.

Bhutto’s action had been foolhardy when she knew there were people out to kill her, and her death sadly unsurprising in a family that has sacrificed everything for politics. What was less explicable was what happened next.

“Everything was manipulated,” says Athar Minallah, a leading lawyer who sits on the board of the Rawalpindi hospital where Bhutto was taken. “The evidence was washed away and no autopsy or investigation allowed. As a lawyer I can’t come to any conclusion, but it’s all too sinister to believe there wasn’t mala fide in this.”

In the 20 years I knew Benazir I had been both captivated by her and infuriated by her, once even deported by her. But I had also personally witnessed the lengths gone to to stop her by what she called “the Establishment”, the old guard of Pakistan’s military and intelligence, which at the time of Bhutto’s death had ruled the country for 32 of its 60 years. Despite being warned off by friends in the Pakistani media, I travelled from London to Dubai, Karachi to Kabul, Waziristan to Washington, asking questions from those involved, many of whom had never spoken out before.

If ever there was a death foretold, this was it. Bhutto’s days were numbered from the time she decided to end eight years in exile in Dubai and return home, following a deal with President Pervez Musharraf backed by the US and Britain. Under the deal, corruption charges against her, her husband and senior members of her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) would be dropped, enabling them to contest elections. In return they would allow Musharraf to remain president. But neither trusted the other, and the military ruler had sworn he would never allow her back in power.

“We might as well have painted a bull’s-eye target on her head,” admitted a British Foreign Office minister involved in the negotiations.

Her closest friends begged her not to go back. “I said, ‘You’ve been prime minister twice, why do this?’ ” said Peter Galbraith, a former UN envoy to Afghanistan, who had been a friend since 1969, when a primly dressed Bhutto arrived at Harvard aged16 and went to dinner at his parents’ house.

Mark Siegel, a Democrat strategist who co-wrote her last book, said goodbye to her in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington. As he turned back to wave, he recalled the scene in The Graduate of a rain-soaked Anne Bancroft standing bereft after realising that her lover, Dustin Hoffman, is in love with her daughter. “I had this terrible feeling,” he said.

In London before her return, Bhutto told me she knew the risk. “I know there are people who want to kill me and scuttle the restoration of democracy,” she said. “But with my faith in God and the people of Pakistan, I’m sure the party workers will protect me.”

She then flew to Dubai to say goodbye to her daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa. On October 16, the day before she was due to fly to Pakistan, she was warned by UAE and Saudi intelligence of a plot to kill her. She immediately wrote to Musharraf naming three suspects: Pervez Elahi, then chief minister of Punjab; General Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); and Brigadier Ejaz Shah, the former head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB). But there was no changing her mind. “The time of life is written and the time of death is written,” she insisted.

When the plane landed at Karachi and Bhutto came down the steps, she could not hold back the tears. Huge crowds had lined the streets. Waving from the top of a special bus, she was transformed, her face alive, so different to the Bhutto of the last few years in exile, gorging on ice cream and reading self-help books. I understood then why she had gone back.

But her security people were worried. The jammers promised by the Pakistan government to impede remote-control bombs were not working. Bhutto refused to go behind the special bulletproof screen in her bus that would separate her from her people. Eventually, she went to the armoured compartment on the lower deck to work on her speech. It was nearly midnight and we had been on the bus nine hours when the first blast came, throwing us to the ground. Moments later came a second, much larger, blast. There was silence, then screams, sirens and little pieces fluttering down like black snowflakes: bits of charred skin.

Bhutto had no doubt who was behind it. She emailed Mark Siegel on October 26: “Nothing will God-willing happen. Just wanted u to know if it does I will hold Musharraf responsible.”

She also called Musharraf. “He told her, ‘I warned you not to come back until after the elections,’ and threatened her, ‘I’ll only protect you if you’re nice to me,’ ” said Husain Haqqani, a former Bhutto aide who was living in the US and is now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington.

Instead of stepping up her security, it was reduced. She was even told not to travel in vehicles with tinted windows, as this was against the law of the local government.

She appealed to the American and British officials who had helped negotiate her return. “I called everyone,” said Haqqani. “I even got the US ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to visit her.” It did not go well. “Patterson wasn’t nice to her,” said Bhutto’s cousin and confidant, Tariq Islam. “She harped on, ‘You must not talk against Musharraf.’ The Americans never trusted her. It was a marriage of convenience.”

In November, Bhutto returned to Dubai for a few days. Her daughters believe she knew then she would not see them again. “She kept on telling us life is in God’s hands,” said her youngest, Asifa, interviewed for Bhutto, a film about her mother’s life that opens in June. “It was going to be my 18th birthday in January, and she said she wanted to wish me happy birthday in advance,” said her older daughter, Bakhtawar. “I said, ‘Don’t wish me in advance, wish me then.’ ”

The next morning, after her mother left, she found a be-ribboned box containing a silver jaguar head on a pendant. A note wished her “Happy birthday, all my love, Mummy”.

Back in Pakistan, on December 26, the day before the Rawalpindi rally, she addressed a public meeting in Peshawar and a suspected suicide bomber was caught trying to get in. That night her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, called her, begging her to let him campaign in her place. “I pleaded with her, ‘You stay home and I’ll go do the rallies. You’re the mother.’ But she said, ‘What can I do? I have to go and meet my people.’ ”

In the early hours of December 27, she was visited by General Nadeem Taj, the head of the ISI, the agency that in the past had done all it could to stop her becoming prime minister, from printing propaganda leaflets to creating a new political party. What he told her is unknown. Despite the late night, Bhutto was up early sending emails, including one to Peter Galbraith asking him to contact his friend, the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, to send some of his jammers.

Back at her Islamabad home for a light lunch, she called her political secretary, Naheed Khan, to sit with her. Naheed had worked for her for 23 years and accompanied her through beatings, tear gas and arrests. Bhutto told her some American politicians would be coming that evening. Convinced that Musharraf was planning to rig the elections, Bhutto had collected information of a secret ISI rigging cell based in a house in Islamabad, which she planned to present to the Republican senator Arlen Specter and the Democrat congressman Patrick Kennedy.

Around 2pm, the two women climbed into her armoured, white Toyota Land Cruiser with an entourage of five men, including Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who had led her party while she was in exile, and Senator Safdar Abbas, Naheed’s husband and also a long-time aide.

As they left manicured Islamabad for the dusty streets of Rawalpindi, passers-by waved at the motorcade. In front was a blue police van and a black Mercedes containing her security chief and other officials. Behind were two pick-up trucks of her bodyguards.

Once they reached Rawalpindi and saw people massing, Bhutto stood up as usual. “ ’Pindi was hard for her,” said Naheed. Her father was killed in ’Pindi jail and she was too much excited. It was a huge gathering, we weren’t expecting, and such a charged crowd.”

As they drove out of the back of the park with dusk falling, the gates were opened. The crowd flooded out and gathered round her chanting “Jiye Bhutto” [long live Bhutto], “wazir-i-azam Benazir” [prime minister Benazir]. She stood up, climbing on the seat so that she could be seen.

Then they heard shooting. “Suddenly I felt some pressure, she had fallen on me,” said Naheed. She sobs as she recalls cradling Bhutto’s bleeding head. “She was completely unconscious, her blood seeping over me. That scene is still going on in front of me two years on,” she said.

All those in the car, and her spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, in the car behind, insist that Bhutto fell first, then a bomb went off. “As soon as she ducked down, after three to four seconds there was a bomb blast,” said Naheed. Safdar checked Bhutto’s pulse. “There was nothing.”

A bodyguard shouted “Move the car!” but the left tyres had burst in the blast. The backup car had mysteriously disappeared, so the bodyguard carried her into Sherry Rehman’s 4x4 and they rushed to Rawalpindi general hospital.

“I thought she was already dead,” said Zahid, the driver, showing the back seat of the Jeep where the bloodstains are still visible. “She was unconscious and bleeding from the left side of her neck and top right of her skull.”

At the hospital, doctors tried to resuscitate her. Sherry Rehman describes the chaos of bloodied, injured and dead victims being brought in and party workers crowding the building. Rehman found Naheed and Makhdoom Fahim in a state of shock. “The hospital wanted us to get the body out,” she said. “The whole place was heaving with people. Makhdoom and I created a diversion by driving out so they could get the body out without supporters realising. It didn’t occur to us to demand the medical report. I was sure she was shot, I heard the shots, then our heads being shoved down in the drill we’d had since Karachi, then the boom of the bomb. We never thought anyone would contradict this.”

In Dubai, Bhutto’s family had been watching on television. “All we knew was something had happened,” said Zardari. “I said, ‘Arrange a plane.’ When I came back into the room, the TV was announcing she was dead.” Bhutto’s body was placed in a makeshift plywood coffin and taken to the nearby military airbase of Chaklala.

Around 1am, the family arrived, and both they and the coffin were flown to Moenjodaro in the southern province of Sindh, to drive through the night to Bhutto’s ancestral home town of Naudero. In keeping with the Muslim tradition, she was buried the next day.

On December 30, just three days after her death, Zardari summoned a meeting of the party’s central executive committee. He asked their son, Bilawal, to read out a handwritten letter from Bhutto to the PPP. It stated: “I would like my husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to lead you in this interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honour.”

Zardari told me afterwards he had no idea she had drawn up such a will. “The day her remains came to Naudero, a person came from Dubai and said, ‘I have this document Madam left with me.’ ” He said he did not know the person.

It was dated October 16, two days before Bhutto returned to Pakistan. “That was the day she’d been warned not to go back,” Zardari said, “and she wrote that letter to Musharraf showing apprehensions about certain people.”

In a shrewd move, Zardari named their son, Bilawal, as co-chairman, adding Bhutto to his name to make him Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and said he would take over the leadership when he was old enough. Bilawal was then only 19, and starting his second term at Christ Church college, Oxford. He freely admitted he was more interested in Facebook and movies than politics.

Still in shock, nobody on the party’s executive questioned the document. Afterwards, Fahim, the party’s former leader, who had expected to take over, told me he was astonished that Bhutto would hand the party over to Zardari. Known in Pakistan as Mr Ten Per Cent, his alleged corruption was thought to be largely responsible for the demise of both Bhutto’s governments.

Torn apart with grief, Naheed was also too stunned to say anything. “She never mentioned it [the will] to me, nor had I seen it,” she told me.

Back in Islamabad, the Musharraf government appeared to be in panic. Within an hour of the attack the scene had been washed down with high-pressure hoses, wiping out almost all the evidence. Saud Aziz, then chief of Rawalpindi police, said he issued these orders after receiving a phone call from a close associate of Musharraf. The interior ministry said they were worried about “vultures picking up body parts”.

This was in stark contrast to what had happened after two assassination attempts on Musharraf in the same city, when the area had been sealed off for weeks.

With the country in chaos, there was an unseemly rush to announce the cause of death and to name an assassin. At 5pm on Friday December 28, less than 24 hours after her death, Brigadier Javed Cheema, the interior ministry spokesman, held a press conference. He said the hospital report showed Bhutto had been killed by striking the lever of the sunroof as she ducked to avoid the bomb. “There was no bullet or metal shrapnel found in the injury,” he said.

He also said intelligence services had intercepted a call from Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, proving he was behind it. A transcript was later made available — though no audio tape — on which the militant leader is self-congratulatory and gives away his location. A week later, journalists including myself were called in to our respective embassies to be told that MI6 and the CIA had authenticated the transcript and were convinced Baitullah had carried out the attack. The former Pakistani cricket captain-turned-politician Imran Khan was incredulous. “The day after the murder they produce a tape of Baitullah saying, ‘I’m sitting here, tomorrow I’ll be having breakfast. Well done, boys.’ Is this a joke? The guy is being hunted down, on the run. Would he be talking like that?”

Baitullah insisted he was not responsible. “I strongly deny it,” he said via his spokesman, Maulvi Omar. “Tribal people have their own customs. We don’t strike women.”

In years of reporting on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, never once had I known them not take responsibility for something. Moreover, Bhutto had told me that after the Karachi attack Baitullah had sent a message saying: “Identify your enemy. I’m not your foe.”

Meanwhile, footage had emerged in which a clean-shaven man in dark glasses was clearly visible waving a gun and firing three shots. A TV station had filmed bullets lying on the ground. Other footage showed Bhutto’s chief bodyguard, Khalid Shahenshah, gesticulating strangely from the stage as Bhutto left.

Aside from Bhutto, 22 others were killed in the attack. Family members told Pakistani media that some had bullet wounds. But no autopsies were carried out, even though they are required by law.

I started my own investigation in the sprawling port city of Karachi on the basis that whoever had tried to kill her there on October 17 was probably the same person that eventually got her.

That bombing was Pakistan’s most lethal terrorist attack, yet I was shocked to find from the local police chief that there was no investigation under way. It wasn’t even clear whether it was a suicide bomb or a car bomb, though a retired army colonel who lived round the corner sent me photographs of a burnt-out car that had its chassis number scratched off so it could not be identified.

Many of those who died were “Martyrs for Benazir”, young party volunteers who formed a human chain round the bus and prevented the bomb getting nearer. One was 25-year-old Intukhab Alam. I went to see his widowed father, Mahmood Yunis, 70, in Muhammadi Colony, Liaquatabad, one of the poorest parts of Karachi. He cannot believe the government is not investigating Bhutto’s death. “My son was a small person, but she was a great leader,” he said. “No Zardari can take her place.”

Someone else with little time for Zardari is Benazir’s niece Fatima. It was eerie going to see her: she lives in 70 Clifton, the house of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, her grandfather and Benazir’s father. He was the first Bhutto to be murdered, hanged by his former army chief, General Zia, in 1979.

Fatima was just 14 in September 1996 when her father, Murtaza, the elder of Benazir’s two brothers, was gunned down on the street, along with six of his men. The murder scene was also washed clean before investigators could arrive.

Fatima and her stepmother, Ghinwa, Murtaza’s second wife, invited me to stay for lunch. They talked of the rivalry between Zardari and Murtaza, who they told me kept a cartoon of his brother-in-law genuflecting to the Sultan of Oman in the guest toilet. It is clear who his wife and daughter believe responsible for his death. “The orders could have only come from the highest levels,” said Fatima. Her Aunt Benazir was prime minister at the time.

Bhutto’s friends and family say she was devastated by Murtaza’s death. Her cousin Tariq Islam accompanied her to the morgue in Karachi. “We went to the cold room where his blood-soaked body was and she collapsed, put her head between his feet and cried and howled, ‘You’re my baby brother, don’t do this to me.’ ”

Bhutto, who was prime minister at the time, called in a Scotland Yard team to investigate and asked Islam to be the liaison person. “Even though it was her government, they were stymied at every turn,” he said. “They wanted to see the scene, but within hours it had been pressure-washed. They wanted to see the vehicle in which Murtaza’s body was flung and taken to hospital but were told it had been taken to a garage.”

Six weeks after the murder, a coup took place and Benazir was ousted as prime minister. Scotland Yard was sent home.

Zardari was detained for allegedly being involved in the murder, as well as a number of corruption cases. He was released from jail into exile in 2004 by Musharraf and acquitted on the murder charge in 2008 owing to lack of evidence.

Last December, 18 police officers also alleged to have been involved in Murtaza’s murder were all acquitted. Some had been highly promoted. “Shoaib Suddle, the police chief who was there on the night, was made head of the IB,” said Fatima. “Zardari’s defence lawyer in the case is now attorney general.”

Similarly, following Benazir’s death, nobody has lost their job despite clear lapses in security and failures to investigate. Bhutto’s security chief, Rehman Malik, who disappeared with the backup car, is now interior minister and Zardari’s closest adviser. “My enemies are talking nonsense that I ran away,” he said when I asked why he left the spot. “I wasn’t a security officer that I had to be there. I’m not a guard or a gunman.”

Musharraf’s interior secretary, Kamal Shah, is still in his post, though it was his ministry that put out the version of events Bhutto’s friends and family dispute. Saud Aziz, who ordered the roads to be washed, was transferred to Multan, the prime minister’s constituency, but was suspended last week following the UN report.

Then there is the unexplained shooting of Benazir’s bodyguard Khalid Shahenshah, who was also in the car the night of her killing. I tracked down his best friend, Mohammed Yarwar, a former US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent, who met me in a house full of caged snakes on a busy Karachi road. A student activist for the party, Shahenshah ran a grocery store in Connecticut and seems a strange choice as chief bodyguard. “We hung out in New York,” said Yarwar. “He had a connection with Zardari and got to know Benazir because he would drive her when she visited.”

Shahenshah was heading security at Bhutto’s residence in Karachi, Bilawal House, when, on July 22, 2008, Yarwar got a panicked call from one of his guards, who was outside his friend’s house. “He was screaming, ‘There’s firing going on!’ ”

The guard later told him that Shahenshah had arrived home and got out of his car outside the gate. A small car approached with three men inside who began firing. “They shot 62 rounds, of which seven bullets hit Khalid,” said Yarwar. The car was later abandoned. Yarwar denied rumours that it was a gangland killing. “There was no proper investigation,” he said. “People say he might have known something about Benazir’s death. If he did, he never told me: all he ever said was that she was definitely shot. But I don’t like it. I’ve quit the PPP. ”

Fear is tangible when I start asking about Benazir’s death, something the UN commission noted, describing themselves as “mystified by the efforts of certain high-ranking government authorities to obstruct access”.

In Rawalpindi I went first to Liaquat Road, where Benazir was killed. The spot is marked by a garish painting of her on a red background surrounded by what look like pink bathroom tiles. In front lay a dried-up wreath. Behind a few barricades was a cabin where five policemen were sitting around drinking tea under a lightbulb hanging from a wire.

When I started to take photographs they became animated, telling me to go away. They noted down my driver’s numberplate, after which he refused to take me anywhere else.

I hailed another cab to take me to Rawalpindi’s police headquarters and found the charming chief police officer, Rao Iqbal. When I asked what was the usual procedure after a bombing, he said: “Our priority is to get life back to normal and remove all the rubble, but after collecting the evidence, not before.” Why did this not happen after Bhutto’s death? “The orders may have come through the mouth of CPO Saud Aziz, but it was a government agency that ordered the washing, not a policeman,” he replied, adding: “In my view it should not have been washed.”

As a result, they collected only 23 pieces of evidence, in a case where there would normally be thousands. One of the pieces was her car, and that had also been washed of any evidence. The UN commission pulled no punches, stating: “The failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms Bhutto’s assassination was deliberate.”

Police did find the blown-off face of the suicide bomber, who they say was a 15-year-old boy, on a roof. And to my surprise they told me they have five suspects in custody picked up in 2008, and five more they plan to arrest. They believe they were recruited from madrasahs and part of a team sent to target Bhutto in different cities — but they did not seem to be interested in who had sent them.

The lack of evidence has made it very difficult to establish how Bhutto died. Under pressure, Musharraf called in Scotland Yard to investigate her death. They backed his government’s version that Bhutto died after hitting her head, rather than from an assassin’s bullet. Yet every single person in her car insists she fell before the blast.

I went to the hospital hoping to see Professor Mussadiq, who led attempts to resuscitate Bhutto. I was first refused entry, then told he was at the Holy Family hospital. When I got there, they told me he was not at work. Eventually I met one of the other doctors who attended her; he would only speak off the record.

“Our main concern was saving her life, not what caused the injury, because that is done in an autopsy,” he said. “We all thought she had been shot.”

Because she was an emergency patient, the medical team had made no official report, just clinical notes. They were horrified then when the interior-ministry spokesman held the press conference in which he cited their report, attributing the cause of death to hitting the lever of the sunroof.

“They were very perturbed,” said Athar Minallah, the lawyer who sits on the hospital board. “When they couldn’t revive her, they told the police chief three times there needed to be an autopsy. He was constantly on the phone to someone else and refused, even though by law it’s mandatory.”

If how Bhutto died cannot be properly established, it seems unlikely we will ever find out who did it. In August last year, Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban suspect, was killed by an American drone.

The person fingered by Bhutto, Musharraf, now lives in exile in London, accompanied everywhere by six Scotland Yard officers. Before Christmas I met him at a dinner at the home of a mutual Pakistani friend, where he lounged on the sofa, drinking whisky, smoking a fat cigar and handing out £50 notes to the singers.

When a reporter asked him if he had blood on his hands, he retorted that the question was “below my dignity”, going on to say: “My family is not a family which believes in killing people. For standing up outside the car I think she was to blame — nobody else. Responsibility is hers.”

The UN disagrees. “Ms Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken,” states the report. Describing the government protection as “fatally insufficient”, they point out that there were few police present to guard her, and that those posted on roofs to watch for threats did not even have binoculars.

Ask most Pakistanis who killed Benazir and they ask who benefited. A Google search on Zardari turns up Zardari jokes, Zardari corruption, Zardari assets and Zardari killed Benazir as among the most common searches. Bhutto had told friends that she would not let her husband be involved in politics again. The plan was for him to stay in Dubai. They had lived separate lives for years. He argues this was because in 20 years of marriage, he spent 11 years in jail. But when he was released, instead of Dubai he went to New York, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Her closest friends say the will is in her writing, and they believe she wanted to keep the party in the family, in the South Asian tradition. “She thought it would split into factions otherwise,” said Bashir Riaz, who knew her all her life. But they are at a loss to explain why, when Zardari became Pakistan’s president in September 2008, he did not begin an investigation.

I put this to Zardari when I went to his house in Islamabad. “The stature of Bhutto called for an independent, transparent and above-board investigation so no accusation of bias could be made,” he said. “This is bigger than us.”

He showed me a framed copy of the will. “This was the joker in the pack,” he said. “Whoever killed her wanted a weak PPP minus Benazir. They thought they would get their own choice.”

His interior minister, Malik, claimed the government are now investigating and will soon release their own report. “We are after just one more person, then the circle will be complete,” Malik said.

“I don’t want nine people strung up to avenge her death — it’s the whole system,” said Zardari. “Only when we’re prospering and we’re Singapore will she be avenged.”

Fine words. Last week, Pakistan’s parliament voted to repeal a constitutional amendment used by military dictators to give themselves sweeping powers. But it remains a nation besieged by bombings and power cuts where militant leaders go free, even holding public rallies, and intelligence agencies make people disappear. When a government delegation went to Washington last month it was clear that the army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, was the real power. This is the same army whose generals suggested to Zardari last time Bhutto was prime minister that he replace her because they didn’t like saluting to a woman.

tx_ned · #27 Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Tim Reid,
Joanna Sugden
May 4, 2010

US police have arrested a US citizen of Pakistani origins in connection with the failed car bomb plot in New York's Times Square, amid increasing concerns that the failed attack was connected to international terrorism.

The man, identified as Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised American who had immigrated from Pakistan, was arrested at John F. Kennedy airport as he was trying to board a flight to Dubai, according US Attorney General Eric Holder.

Emirates Airlines said today that three passengers were removed from the aircraft prior to take off after it was called back by local authorities. A spokeswoman for the airline would not confirm whether one of those removed for questioning was Mr Shahzad, raising the prospect that the suspect was able to get through security before any alarm was raised.

"it’s clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans," said Mr Holder.

FBI agents searched Mr Shahzad’s home in Bridgeport Connecticut at dawn today. They removed filled plastic bags from the house, which is in a mixed-race, working-class neighbourhood. A bomb squad arrived at the address but did not enter.

Mr Shahzad, 30, is believed to have recently returned from a five month trip to Pakistan, where his wife lives, to his home in Connecticut. US officials believe he bought the Nissan Pathfinder for cash and no paperwork within the last three weeks.

Pakistani authorities vowed to help the US in its inquiries into the attempted bombing.

Mr Shazad will appear in Manhattan Federal Court later today. His arrest comes as officials said the failed attempt appears to have been masterminded by several people with international ties.

White House officials said that fresh clues were pointing in the direction of a “foreign nexus”. “I would say that whoever did that would be categorised as a terrorist,” Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s spokesman, said.

Britain's Foreign Office has upped its security advice to travellers to the United States since the failed attack. "Given that terrorist attacks have taken place in public areas, there is a risk that you could be caught up if there were other attacks in the future. You should therefore be particularly vigilant in high-profile public places," it said in a statement.

But the Home Office has not yet increased security at airports as a result of the incident in New York.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, “We will cooperate with the United States in identifying this individual and bringing him to justice”.

Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said they were awaiting details from the US authorities about Mr Shahzad.

Police and FBI agents said that they were looking for a second suspect, a man filmed on a tourist’s video camera running from the car shortly after it was parked in Times Square on Saturday. They also want to identify a white man, aged in his forties, who was videotaped on surveillance cameras removing a shirt and putting it in a backpack.

Police said that they had tracked down the registered owner of the dark, 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that contained the crude home-made bomb but he was not a suspect. He sold his car three weeks ago to a man described as of Hispanic or Middle Eastern appearance, aged about 30.

The vehicle identification number (VIN) had been removed from the Pathfinder's dashboard, but it was stamped on the engine and axle, and investigators used it to find the owner of record ,said Paul J. Browne of the New York Police Department .

"The discovery of the VIN on the engine block was pivotal in that it led to the identifying the registered owner," said Mr Browne.

Investigators tracked the license plates to a used car parts shop in Stratford, Connecticut, where they discovered the plates were connected to a different vehicle.

The Taleban in Pakistan said yesterday that it planted the bomb to avenge the killing in April of al Qaeda’s two top leaders in Iraq as well as US interference in Muslim countries.

Some officials voiced scepticism about the claim. But former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, who last year oversaw an Obama Administration strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, cautioned against dismissing a possible role by the Taleban.

Mr Browne said that had the bomb gone off there was a “good possibility of people being killed, windows shattered, but not resulting in a building collapse”. Police were also investigating whether there were links between the aborted plot and the botched car bomb attacks at Glasgow airport in 2007. Both involved cars containing propane and petrol that did not explode. The Glasgow attack allegedly had its roots in Iraq.

Another possible motive being explored centres on the cartoon South Park, which outraged many Muslims after a recent episode depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. The Nissan was parked near the headquarters of Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central which is the channel that airs South Park.

The car, whose number plates had been stolen from a junkyard, entered Times Square at 6.28pm on Saturday. Two minutes after it was parked, with the engine running and its hazard lights flashing, street vendors noticed smoke coming from inside it and alerted police.

The bomb was big but amateurish. Dozens of firecrackers appeared to be intended as a triggering mechanism to light two jugs of petrol, which in turn were meant to cause three tanks of propane, similar to that used in barbecues, to explode. Eight bags of fertiliser had also been placed inside a metal gun locker but the fertiliser was not the right type to cause explosions.

NOTE: That is the sense of west if Amir Khan wins the title of Boxing, "The Times" says British Amir Khan instead of Pakistani Amir Khan but now in this case "The Times" declares a US citizen a Pakistani

tx_ned · #28 Sunday, May 09, 2010

Marie Colvin,
in Marjah,
Afghanistan
May 9, 2010

Rebels have returned to terrorise a former stronghold with shootings and beatings, raising doubts about America’s ability to secure Kandahar

The sniper’s aim was merciless. Lieutenant Brandon Barrett was shovelling sand into bags to fortify his post in the Helmand town of Marjah when a Taliban gunman slotted a bullet between armoured vehicles pulled around for protection, hitting him in the chest.

Although the sun was setting and the fierce heat of the day had softened, it was still hot and Barrett and LanceCorporal Marcus Lounello had taken off their flak jackets as they worked.

The sniper’s second bullet hit Lounello in the chest.

The call came in to the US marines’ forward operating base (FOB) Marjah at 6pm last Wednesday: “Two down, gunshot wounds to the chest, non-responsive.”

Barrett, 27 and unmarried, from Indiana, was dead before the medical team reached them. Lounello, 21, lost a kidney, his spleen and part of his diaphragm but will survive.

“It’s surreal,” Captain Tony Zinni, Barrett’s commanding officer in the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, said yesterday outside his tented office on a barren base. “I keep expecting him to walk around the corner, big smile on his face.”

Barrett had been running a post that checked traffic coming in and out of Marjah, a former Taliban stronghold that was taken by the marines and their Afghan allies with an overwhelming show of force in February. A small, wiry officer, he was a favourite at FOB Marjah at the centre of the market town.

Zinni held his emotions in check as he described his last visit to Barrett’s post. “It was a really boring duty but he was good about it,” Zinni said, smiling at the memory.

Some elders arrived and Barrett had chatted to them. “I said where the hell did you learn Pashto,” Zinni recalled. Barrett had been visiting the neighbourhood’s elders, trying to win them round, learning words and phrases.

Zinni thinks the lieutenant was targeted and it makes him angry. “Everyone in the block knew him, knew he was the officer,” the captain said. Barrett had 60 days left in Afghanistan. His was the first death in Marjah for the battalion’s weapons company.

That night Zinni gathered Barrett’s platoon for what he said had been one of his toughest moments in his 10 years in the Marine Corps. One of the men still had blood on his trousers.

The 41 soldiers had been together since they were at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where Barrett held weekend parties at his beach house. He would dress up as a penguin with aviator sunglasses and a cigar to make people laugh. There were only tears last week.

“I don’t even know what to say to you. Our loss is so great,” Zinni said. “But I do know that Barrett would have wanted us to make a success of this mission.”

Last week was the worst in living memory for weapons company, the first unit to enter Marjah on D-Day, February 13.

Hours before the sniper killed Barrett, another 13-man squad in the company had been walking down a dusty street in the fierce morning heat, spread out on either side of the road so that only one of them would die if anyone stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED), when an insurgent jumped out from behind a building 40 yards ahead and fired three shots.

One bullet hit Lance-Corporal Matthew Hunter, the point man, in the stomach, just below his flak jacket. The second skidded around the armoured vest of a lucky Lance- Corporal Kyle Schneider, leaving him uninjured. Hunter, known in the squad for his 60 socks, which he would wear for two days and then discard, was seriously injured but survived.

On Thursday a member of the elite Afghan National Civil Order Police, which works side by side with the marines, was also shot and killed. The unidentified officer had arrived at FOB Marjah only two days earlier, determined to get his men out of the checkpoints and onto the streets.

Marjah was supposed to be safe. When 5,000 marines and their Afghan national army partners rolled in to oust the Taliban who had ruled the town for almost three years, the fighting lasted just two weeks.

“If you go to Marjah today, you will find a city that is free of the Taliban, that has schools that are open, a marketplace, a bazaar,” Major-General Richard Mills, commander of the US Marine Corps in Afghanistan, said just last month.

Marjah has indeed improved. The idea was to set up “security bubbles”, to get the economy and normal life going inside them in the hope that at some point the locals would throw in their lot with the government. Major David Fennell, a civil affairs officer for the marines, explained that his men had moved as soon as the fighting eased.

“We decided to get in there immediately and spend money. To use money as a weapon system,” Fennell said. He started a project paying $5 (£3.40) a day to clean the canals. Only a few nervous locals turned up on the first day, but when cash started to flow, 1,000 workers soon came on board, defying Taliban threats.

Contractors are now engaged in what the marines call “quick impact projects” — bridges, wells, mosque restorations, anything that shows tangible improvement.

Last week hundreds flocked to the unpainted concrete villa that is the district government’s headquarters, a building said to have been commandeered from a local drug lord.

Some farmers received cash in hand for destroying their poppy crop. Others pushed new wheelbarrows full of cheaply purchased mung beans, alfalfa seeds and huge 50kg (110lb) bags of fertiliser. Down the street the stalls of the once shuttered Loy Chareh bazaar lined the street with wooden crates spilling okra, tomatoes, chilli peppers, mint, watermelon.

All that progress is threatened by the Taliban “surge”. There were always fears that they would re-emerge, bolstered by poppy taxes levied from farmers. But nobody expected their return to be so swift and bloody.

My first night in Marjah had left little doubt that the Taliban were back. On Tuesday I walked out of FOB Marjah with a weapons company squad charged with “rolling up” an IED-maker called Izra, or “signature” in Pashto, probably a nom de guerre.

Izra was thought to be sleeping in a small local mosque. There was no moon and it was pitch black. After 20 minutes a light glowed on a rooftop, a suspicious sight in an area where there is no electricity and everyone sleeps during the hours of darkness.

The flashlight followed our progress. Corporal Josh Hurst, the squad leader, realised we had been spotted by the Taliban when his point man saw four men slipping through the tree line. Hurst motioned the squad down a path to a field of dry furrows and mud channels. I realised why I was slipping and sliding while the marines remained sure-footed — they all had night-vision goggles.

I slid noisily into a canal that I had not noticed. LanceCorporal Tim Ryan hauled me out by the scruff of my flak jacket. Dogs barked. I was terrified that we were walking into an ambush.

After three hours we found the mosque, but Hurst decided to move on because of the danger. “It just kept getting worse and worse and worse,” Hurst said with good humour when we were back on base.

The strength of the Taliban’s presence is gradually becoming clearer. One of their targets is Wafa Aghasheran, a contractor for the marines who builds bridges and wells. He sat cross-legged in his cream-coloured shalwar kameez and dark wool vest last week recalling how Hazrat Gull, 19, his young business partner, had been killed by the Taliban several weeks ago.

“They pulled up on a motorcycle at our project, asked who is the contractor and shot him in the head,” Aghasheran said. “I ran to the bridge and found him. His head was in the canal. All our workers had run away.”

More recently two motorcycles carrying four Taliban converged on Aghasheran’s truck and pointed Kalashnikovs at the driver. They broke both the driver’s arms with the butts of their guns and set fire to the vehicle. Their aim was to stop anyone from working with the Afghan government and marines.

They then put up a letter to Aghasheran in the local mosque saying: “Stop your business or we will kill you and your family.” He smiled and said that he could not afford to stop: at 42, he has three wives and 18 children.

The Taliban are growing bolder. A man in his early twenties known only as Sharitulla was at home about two weeks ago when the Taliban came knocking in broad daylight. When he refused their demand for taxes, they took him out to the desert and beat him to death. His body was left on the doorstep of his elderly father.

While they may not want the Taliban back, many of Marjah’s people are reluctant to commit themselves to the administration that has replaced them. “The local residents don’t trust we will provide security,” said Naimatullah, the acting district governor of Marjah, in a late-night interview.

“They are taking a wait-and-see attitude to the government,” he said, fingering black worry beads. “The people are worried that the Taliban will return and punish them for supporting the government.”

The offensive in which Marjah was captured was the largest in Afghanistan since 2001, when the Taliban regime was driven out by US-supported Afghan warlords after the September 11 attacks on America.

After that victory, Afghanistan was largely neglected as America and Britain became bogged down in the war in Iraq. Only last year did attention shift back. Heavy-handed military operations that killed civilians helped the Taliban to reestablish support and organise a virulent insurgency.

General David Petraeus, who came up with the idea of the “surge” that quelled the violence in Iraq, has tailored his theory to Afghanistan at a pivotal moment in the nine-year war. The Obama administration is deploying 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan as part of a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy.

Until recently Marjah was seen as a success story that could serve as a template for an expected operation against the Taliban in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

“In many ways [the Marjah operation] is a model for the future: an Afghan-led operation supported by the coalition, deeply engaged with the people,” General Stanley McChrystal, leader of Nato and American forces, said.

Yet worries are growing in the Pentagon that if thousands of marines and Afghan security forces cannot entirely defeat the Taliban in Marjah, a town of only 50,000, securing the far larger prize of Kandahar may be an even greater struggle than has been foreseen.

This week Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, flies to Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama. The two men know that success in Kandahar will be crucial both to persuading the Taliban to the negotiating table and to enabling Nato forces to leave.

Yet after Marjah, McChrystal is playing down expectations. Last week he warned that it could be the end of the year before any progress is seen.

Additional reporting: Christina Lamb, Washington

tx_ned · #29 Monday, May 10, 2010

Tim Reid, Washington
May 10, 2010

President Karzai arrives in Washington today for crucial talks to mend relations with the US as the Taleban threaten a new assault in Afghanistan.

The four-day visit by Mr Karzai comes at a critical moment in his strained relationship with the Obama Administration and in the eight-year Afghan war.

With a US-led military operation aimed at routing the Taleban in their heartland of Kandahar to be launched within weeks, the insurgent group warned last night that a counter-offensive — called “Operation Victory”, in opposition to Nato’s “Operation Hope” — would begin today.

Mr Karzai, who at the request of the White House is bringing key ministers with him, lands in the US at a time when Mr Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy is in a dangerous state of flux.

The volatile situation in northern Pakistan is threatening to undermine the war effort in Afghanistan, particularly because of Taleban activity in Pakistan’s border region of Waziristan.

Eric Holder, the US Attorney-General, announced that US authorities believed that the Pakistani Taleban group was responsible for last week’s unsuccessful car bomb plot in Times Square, New York, in a development that reflects the ambition and reach of the group.

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taleban was behind the attack,” Mr Holder said. He added that the group probably financed the plot and had been “intimately involved” with Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen who allegedly tried to detonate the device.

Mr Shahzad, who was arrested trying to leave America on a commercial aircraft, has told the FBI that he received bombmaking training in North Waziristan.

Mr Holder divulged the new intelligence as a US unmanned drone fired two missiles into a Taleban camp in North Waziristan, killing nine militants, according to Pakistani officials. Pakistani army helicopter gunships also killed 18 militants in the northwestern region of Orakzai, according to local officials.

It emerged that the Obama Administration had delivered severe warnings to Pakistan that it must move against Taleban and al-Qaeda strongholds in Waziristan.

Pakistani officials have been warned that a failure to take on the border militants could lead to US troops being sent into the region, a prospect that has been opposed by Islamabad. Pakistani officials are already sensitive to the drone strikes, which have claimed many civilian lives.

General Stanley McChrystal, the US ground commander in Afghanistan, met General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani military chief, on Friday to insist that he confronts the Taleban and al-Qaeda in Waziristan.

Mr Karzai will be welcomed publicly in Washington today, weeks after the visit looked in jeopardy. After being rebuked by Mr Obama during a brief visit to Kabul last month over his failure to end corruption, Mr Karzai said that he might join the Taleban.

Mr Obama believes that the public feuding has been counter-productive. The Afghan leader is the only partner that the US has in Afghanistan and the American President, in an attempt to inject discipline into the war strategy, has ordered aides to treat Mr Karzai well and to end anonymous briefings against him.

Before Mr Karzai meets Mr Obama on Wednesday he will hold talks with Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, and senior members of both parties on Capitol Hill.

Mr Karzai’s desire to negotiate with the Taleban, a topic fraught with tension, will be central to the talks. The White House has agreed to the co-opting of low-level Taleban but there is a wariness in Washington to Mr Karzai’s suggestion of wooing the Taleban leadership.

tx_ned · #30 Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Anthony Loyd,
Kandahar
May 11, 2010

The campaign to drive the Taleban out of Kandahar province has until the end of the year to succeed if it is to capitalise on maximum troop numbers and political unity, Nato commanders and Western diplomats told The Times.

“Our mission is to show irreversible momentum by the end of 2010 — that’s the clock I’m using,” Brigadier-General Frederick Hodges, the US Director of Operations in southern Afghanistan, said. “We’ll never have more capacity than we have by late summer 2010. We ’ll never have it any better.”

The joint Nato-Afghan campaign — codenamed Hamkari, which is the Dari word for co-operation — will use the biggest number of troops and police in the country yet. Thousands of Afghan National Army soldiers and paramilitaries are to combine with the existing coalition force in Kandahar as well as additional units from among the 13,000 troops being sent in the second phase of the US surge.

The military strategy involves combining regular US soldiers and special forces with Afghan police and paramilitaries to establish 32 posts around Kandahar city at every access point along the key route through the province. Afghan army units and coalition troops will then attempt to clear the Taleban from the outlying districts of Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwayi.

President Karzai and Western commanders have avoided calling Hamkari an operation and have emphasised its political and administrative focus. Kandahar is the Taleban’s traditional heartland and its population has become disaffected with the nepotism, ineptitude and corruption that have characterised the local government.

“I’m not going to talk about a D-day or an H-hour or even, for that matter, military operations,” said Major-General Nick Carter, the British officer commanding coalition forces in the south. “This is much more about getting the population to feel secure in the hands of its own government and its own security forces so that it then begins to work . . . as an informing population, so that it denies the insurgent the freedom of movement to come in and intimidate and mount ‘spectaculars’.”

The first phase of Hamkari began a fortnight ago and the strategy will include measures such as registering weapons, vehicles, hotels, madrassas and seminaries. Western officials are keen to have a broader range of village and tribal representation in the shuras, or councils, which communicate with officials. They are also keen to bolster the authority of Tooryalai Wesa, the Governor, at the expense of the city’s current strongman, Ahmad Wali Karzai, the half-brother of the President.

Nato commanders estimate that up to 75 per cent of Taleban fighters in Kandahar province, most of whom are concentrated in the three districts targeted by the military campaign, are locals who may reintegrate if they are offered the right incentives. The commanders are also encouraged by the absence of foreign fighters. “We’ve seen no hardcore al-Qaeda links here,” a senior Nato intelligence officer told The Times. “Zero al-Qaeda.”

Yet Nato officers know that they have a tough deadline. By the end of the year troop numbers will decline and Dutch forces will withdraw. In November political attention in Washington will be focused on the midterm elections and critics of the war will remind President Obama of his pledge to start pulling out combat troops in 2011.

“If there’s a change in the game and it looks like we can run the table then Obama will gain some political oxygen,” noted a senior Western diplomat involved closely with the Hamkari campaign. “But if we can’t deliver by Christmas ... people at home will remind the President of the deal [to begin the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2011].”

Apart from the need for evidence of success, Nato planners have several other concerns. Officers note that it took the Afghan Government too long to put ministry level representatives in two districts of Helmand that were cleared of the Taleban during Operation Moshtarak this year, and question how it will fare in Kandahar, which is four times the size.

Although the Western officials are keen for the Taleban fighters to reintegrate, as yet there is no plan from the Government to encourage this. “There has to be a carrot at the end of the stick if these fighters are to reintegrate,” one officer said, “but as yet we don’t see one from Kabul.”

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