INDIA
DEFENCE CONSULTANTS
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WHAT'S HOT?
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ANALYSIS OF
RECENT HAPPENINGS |
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Letter
From America –– 04 AUGUST
2004 (With inputs from Ben Boothe)
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04 August 2004 Election
Fever Signs
of confusion and concern were evident in USA on what to do with the crazy
threat of Islamic terror as also its strategy in Iraq. Gen Tommy Franks,
the retired Force Commander in Afghanistan and Iraq at inception, has just
published his book full of criticism of the Administration. Criticism of
this variety would have landed him in the dock in India, which though a
thriving democracy, has the draconian Official Secrets Act, 1977 and he
could never have got away with it. The
election campaign in USA also took vicious turns with ex Democratic
Presidents Carter and Clinton and other speakers openly criticising most
policies of President Bush, especially his Iraq policy to go it alone. The
death toll in Iraq was approaching 1000 –– more than what India lost
at Kargil –– and that figure will hurt a nation where life is
precious. All
this took place at the Democratic Convention last week where John F Kerry
(JFK!) was formally nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate and
John Edwards as his running mate for Vice President. It is a free for all
but Bush still leads in the polls by a whisker and TV commentators keep
saying that only 6% of the voters were undecided and they will decide the
outcome in November. The
9/11 Commission Report was tabled and the debate on how to improve
coordination of 17 Intelligence agencies in USA was the main item of
current debate. President Bush may well appoint a National Intelligence
Director as recommended. The NID would be responsible for budgets too and
the Pentagon does not like it. It was evident that Defence Secretary
Rumsfeld was low key as Gen Colin Powell struck to roam the world and
soothe feathers. This
subject of a formal National Intelligence Director was debated in India
too, and in the PM's office M K Narayan, Security Adviser could perform
some of the functions as he has vast experience. Pakistan
finds special mention in the report as a culprit who was aware of 9/11 in
advance (See Washington Post article of 2 August tabled below). It makes
interesting reading as Iran's connections with Al Queda are also unfolded
and India comes out clean. Yet these facts are not fully appreciated by
the Administration in USA as they say Musharraf did not know. Pakistan has
deflected all this and now all financial institutions in New York and
surrounding areas were being guarded in Orange Alert as Pakistan claimed
it had captured an Al Queda operative Muhammed Naeem Noor Khan, a 25 year
old computer engineer and intelligence emerged that an attack was in the
offing. Democrats led by Howard Dean say it was a bogey enacted by
President Bush. Other
Snippets The
US Commerce Department announced a slow down in the US economy with the
following startling facts:
This
unprecedented report could not have come at a worse time for the Bush
Administration, with elections so near, but to our surprise, the Democrats
hardly mentioned it in public speeches. Republicans were ignoring it by
trying to avoid the facts by saying, "the economy is growing".
It would seem that the economic policy to provide tax cuts for the wealthy
(Bush Policy) has not been as effective as the economic policy to expand
technology, housing, and provide incentives for small business (Clinton
Policy). It was not yet clear what the John Kerry economic policy would
be, but former Secretary of the Treasury; Robert Ruben was sitting beside
John Kerry's wife at the Democratic Convention. He presided over the
economic policy that was so successful during the Clinton administration. Al
Qaeda –– Questionable
Sources Of Information Douglas
Jehl of the New York Times reported that Ibn al-Shaykh Alibi, who
purported to be a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle recanted the
claims that he had made, about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda that
involved poisons, gases and other illicit weapons. His claims were the
basis for statements made by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
and Secretary of State Colin Powell –– linking Iraq with Al Qaeda.
These links had since been dismissed as false. The Senate Intelligence
Committee raised questions about reports prepared by the CIA and the
validity of the claims made by Mr. Alibi. This again questioned the
"justification" for the Iraq war, and seemed to imply that the
Bush Administration had grasped at straws, even from poor and unreliable
sources, to find justification for the invasion of Iraq. The American
families who had lost sons and daughters in Iraq would take little comfort
from this latest revelation. “We
again suggest that it is time to bring our children home from Iraq. We
cannot afford it financially, we are hated in Iraq, our presence will do
nothing to solve the disputes between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, and
all of the oil resources of Iraq, are not worth one drop of the American
blood of our sons and daughters, nor is it worth the blood of the innocent
people of other nations who have died in the war in Iraq.” Real
Terror Culprit By Arnaud de Borchgrave The
Washington Times, August 2, 2004 The
September 11 commission found troubling new evidence Iran was closer to al
Qaeda than was Iraq. More importantly, and through no fault of its own,
the commission missed the biggest prize of all: Former Pakistani
intelligence officers knew beforehand all about the September 11 attacks. They
even advised Osama bin Laden and his cohorts how to attack key targets in
the United States with hijacked civilian aircraft. And bin Laden has been
undergoing periodic dialysis treatment in a military hospital in Peshawar,
capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to the Afghan
border. The
information came to the commission's attention in a confidential report
from Pakistan as its own report was coming off the presses. The
information was supplied with the understanding the unimpeachable source
would remain anonymous. Pakistan
still denies President Pervez Musharraf knew anything about the activities
of A.Q. Khan, the country's top nuclear engineer who had spent the last 10
years building and running a one-stop global Wall-Mart for
"rogue" nations. North Korea, Iran and Libya shopped for nuclear
weapons at Mr. Khan's underground black market. Pakistan has also denied
the allegations by a leading Pakistani in the confidential addendum to the
September 11 commission report. After
U.S. and British intelligence painstakingly pieced together Mr. Khan's
global nuclear proliferation endeavors, Deputy Secretary of State Rich
Armitage was assigned last fall to convey the devastating news to Mr.
Musharraf. Mr. Khan, a national icon for giving Pakistan its nuclear
arsenal, was not arrested. Instead, Mr. Musharraf pardoned him in exchange
for an abject apology on national television in English. No one in
Pakistan believed Mr. Musharraf's claim he was totally in the dark about
Mr. Khan's operation. Prior to seizing power in 1999, Mr. Musharraf was
— and still is — Army chief of staff. For the past five years,
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence chief has reported directly to Mr.
Musharraf. Osama
bin Laden's principal Pakistani adviser before September 11, 2001, was
retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief who, since the 2001 attacks, is
"strategic adviser" to the coalition of six politico-religious
parties that governs two of Pakistan's four provinces. Known as MMA, the
coalition also occupies 20 percent of the seats in the federal assembly in
Islamabad. Hours
after September 11, Gen. Gul publicly accused Israel's Mossad of fomenting
the plot. Later, he said the U.S. Air Force must have been in on it since
no warplanes were scrambled to shoot down the hijacked airliners. Gen.
Gul spent two weeks in Afghanistan immediately before September 11. He
denied meeting bin Laden on that trip, but has always said he was an
"admirer" of the al Qaeda leader. However, he did meet several
times with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader. Since
September 11, hardly a week goes by without Gen. Gul denouncing the United
States in both the Urdu and English-language media. In
a conversation with this reporter in October 2001, Gen. Gul forecast a
future Islamist nuclear power that would form a greater Islamic state with
a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia after the monarchy falls. Gen.
Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan when he was ISI chief. He was "mildly"
fundamentalist in those days, he explained after September 11, and
indifferent to the United States. But he became passionately anti-American
after the United States turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989
Soviet withdrawal, and began punishing Pakistan with economic and military
sanctions for its secret nuclear buildup. A
ranking CIA official, speaking anonymously, said the agency considered
Gen. Gul "the most dangerous man" in Pakistan. A senior
Pakistani political leader, also on condition of anonymity, said, "I
have reason to believe Hamid Gul was Osama bin Laden's master
planner." The
report received by the September 11 commission from the anonymous,
well-connected Pakistani source, said: "The core issue of instability
and violence in South Asia is the character, activities and persistence of
the militarized Islamist fundamentalist state in Pakistan. No cure for
this canker can be arrived at through any strategy of negotiations,
support and financial aid to the military regime, or by a 'regulated'
transition to 'democracy.' " The
confidential report continued: "The imprints of every major act of
international Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right
from September 11 — where virtually all the participants had trained,
resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through
Pakistan — to major acts of terrorism across South Asia and Southeast
Asia, as well as major networks of terror that have been discovered in
Europe. "Pakistan
has harvested an enormous price for its apparent 'cooperation' with the
U.S., and in this it has combined deception and blackmail — including
nuclear blackmail — to secure a continuous stream of concessions. Its
conduct is little different from that of North Korea, which has in the
past chosen the nuclear path to secure incremental aid from Western
donors. A pattern of sustained nuclear blackmail has consistently been at
the heart of Pakistan's case for concessions, aid and a heightened
threshold of international tolerance for its sponsorship and support of
Islamist terrorism. "To
understand how this works, it is useful to conceive of Pakistan's ISI as a
state acting as terrorist traffickers, complaining that, if it does not
receive the extraordinary dispensations and indulgences that it seeks, it
will, in effect, 'implode,' and in the process do extraordinary harm. "Part
of the threat of this 'explosion' is also the specter of the transfer of
its nuclear arsenal and capabilities to more intransigent and irrational
elements of the Islamist far right in Pakistan, who would not be amenable
to the logic that its present rulers — whose interests in terrorism are
strategic, and consequently, subject to considerations of strategic
advantage — are willing to listen to. ... "It
is crucial to note that if the Islamist terrorist groups gain access to
nuclear devices, ISI will almost certainly be the source. ... At least six
Pakistani scientists connected with the country's nuclear program were in
contact with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden with the thorough instructions
of ISI. "Pakistan
has projected the electoral victory of the fundamentalist and pro-Taliban,
pro-al Qaeda Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in the November elections as
'proof' the military is the only 'barrier' against the country passing
into the hands of the extremists. The fact, however, is that the elections
were widely rigged, and this was a fact acknowledged by the European Union
observers, as well as by some of the MMA's constituents themselves. The
MMA victory was, in fact, substantially engineered by the Musharraf
regime, as are the various anti-U.S. 'mass demonstrations' around the
country. "Pakistan
has made a big case out of the fact that some of the top-line leadership
of al Qaeda has been arrested in the country with the 'cooperation' of the
Pakistani security forces and intelligence. However, the fact is that each
such arrest only took place after the FBI and U.S. investigators had
effectively gathered evidence to force Pakistani collaboration, but little
of this evidence had come from Pakistani intelligence agencies. Indeed,
ISI has consistently sought to deny the presence of al Qaeda elements in
Pakistan, and to mislead U.S. investigators. ... This deception has been
at the very highest level, and Musharraf himself, for instance, initially
insisted he was 'certain' bin Laden was dead. ... "ISI
has been actively facilitating the relocation of the al Qaeda from
Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the conspiracy of substantial segments of
serving Army and intelligence officers is visible. ..." "The
Pakistan army consistently denies giving the militants anything more than
moral, diplomatic and political support. The reality is quite different.
ISI issues money and directions to militant groups, specially the Arab
hijackers of September 11 from al Qaeda. ISI was fully involved in
devising and helping the entire affair. And that is why people like Hamid
Gul and others very quickly stated the propaganda that CIA and Mossad did
it. ... " "The
dilemma for Musharraf is that many of his army officers are still deeply
sympathetic to al Qaeda, Taliban militants and the Kashmir cause.... Many
retired and present ISI officers retain close links to al Qaeda militants
hiding in various state-sponsored places in Pakistan and Kashmir as well
as leaders from the defeated Taliban regime. They regard the fight against
Americans and Jews and Indians in different parts of the world as
legitimate jihad." The
report also says, "According to a senior tribal leader in Peshawar,
bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically
undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and
approval of ISI if not of Gen. Pervez Musharraf himself." The
same source, though not in the report, speculated Mr. Musharraf may plan
to turn over bin Laden to President Bush in time to clinch Mr. Bush's
re-election in November. Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large for The Washington Times and for United Press International.
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