4. September 2010 by admin.

How the US army protects its trucks – by paying the Taliban

Insurance, security or extortion? The US is spending millions of dollars in Afghanistan to ensure its supply convoys get through – and it’s the Taliban who profit

The lawyers for Hamed Wardak and NCL Holdings, Mishcon de Reya say: NCL and Mr Wardak learned of the contracting opportunities for the provision of trucking services in Afghanistan from the “fedbizopps” website, which is hosted by the US Government, and open to all, with all of the stringencies required in such an exercise. NCL competed for the contract according to the advertised criteria and were awarded it on the merits of its tender in a fair and open exercise. Neither NCL nor Mr Wardak were the recipients of the contract because of Mr Wardak’s connections in Afghanistan. The contracts were not awarded unfairly. Although each tendering party has been awarded transit contracts with a value of up to US$360 million for a period of two years, NCL have so far, nearly half way through the first year, performed contacts to the value of US$18.5 million. Mr Wardak and his family have dedicated their political lives to the welfare of Afghanistan, in vocal opposition to the Taliban. He does not directly or indirectly provide funds to the Taliban. There is no evidence that any money from NCL was received by the Taliban.

On 29 October 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad in neighbouring Pakistan gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahideen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1998.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin, President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn in a separate case.

The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan [its senior personnel are ex-British army, many of them from Special Services]. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA ^­ officials and ex–military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahideen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban.

“It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials admits. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10% of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts – hundreds of millions of dollars – consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the complex web of connections that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and a good place to pick up this thread is a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings.

Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan. What NCL Holdings is most notable for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghan’s current defence minister, General Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahideen against the Soviets.

Earlier this year, the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named as one of the six companies that would handle all the US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

Striking contracting gold

At first the contract, for “host nation trucking”, was large but not gargantuan. But over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a weapons system”, the US military expanded the contract 600% for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “Service members will not get the food, water, equipment and ammunition they require.”

Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360m, or a total of nearly $2.2bn. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10% of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defence minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Host nation trucking does, indeed, keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here,” one American trucking executive told me. “We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.”

The epicentre is Bagram air base, just an hour north of Kabul, from where virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the army calls “the battlespace” – that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.”

That is something everyone seems to agree on. Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the host nation trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas – some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force – to move your trucks through.”

Hanna explained that the prices charged are different depending on the route. “We’re basically being extorted. Where you don’t pay, you’re going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to.”

Sometimes, he says, the fee is high, and sometimes it is low. “Moving 10 trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It’s based on a number of trucks and what you’re carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they’re not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying Mraps [mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles] or Humvees, they are going to charge you more.”

Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”

The private security industry in Afghanistan has developed quite differently from the private military model seen in Iraq, where firms such as Blackwater were arms of the US government. The industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

The heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of US military goods here because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s co-operation.

One of the big problems for the companies that ship US military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. Insurgents are “shooting the drivers from 3,000ft away” with Kalashnikovs, a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. “They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that’s just a joke. I carry an AK – and that’s just to shoot myself if I have to!”

The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna points out, “An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade – you are going to lose.”

That said, at least one of the host nation trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International (FHI). Instead of payments, it tried to fight off attackers. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but insiders in the security industry say that FHI’s convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.

Watan’s secret weapon

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, “What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat.”

He is an army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he is not happy about what is being done. He says that, at a minimum, American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off. “Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He is a Pashto and former mujahideen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. “Two Taliban is enough,” she told me. “One in the front and one in the back.” She shrugged. “You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible.”

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by the Popals, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war – to the south and to the west. If the army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan has a deal with the local warlord who controls the road.

Watan’s secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.

According to witnesses, Ruhullah works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4×4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Ruhullah is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah “charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300km.”

Security, extortion or insurance?

It is hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly – security, extortion or a form of “insurance”. Then there is the question, does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That is impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route says, “He works both sides . . . whatever is most profitable. He’s the main commander. He’s got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows.”

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, is reputed to pay. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan and Commander Ruhullah’s convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 a month for Watan’s services. To underline the point, NCL, operating on a $360m contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is apparently paying millions a year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.

Cleaning up what looks like cronyism may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline from Department of Defense contracts to potential insurgents. Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS is a well-run service, trusted by the international forces. The NDS delivered what I’m told are “very detailed” reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies. The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the US was to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Colonel David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents?

“The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at forward operating base Shank in Logar province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ‘Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board, 10-20% goes to the insurgents. My intel [intelligence] guy would say it is closer to 10%. Generally, it is happening in logistics.”

In a statement about host nation trucking, the US army’s chief public affairs officer in Afghanistan, Colonel Wayne Shanks, says international forces are “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring”. He adds that, in spite of oversight, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent”.

In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that – as with so much in Afghanistan – the United States doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.

This is an edited version of an article that appears in the current edition of the Nation magazine

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18. August 2010 by admin.

Obama: Muslim missionary? Part 1 

Posted: August 16, 2010

By Chuck Norris

Unlike any other time in U.S. history, our First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion are in jeopardy. As if recently passed “hate-crime” laws and a politically correct culture weren’t bad enough, now our president is using internationalpressure and possibly law to establish a prohibition against insulting Islam or Muslims.

Let me remind us how we got here.

Speaking for most founders in his day, John Jay, America’s first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by George Washington himself, said, “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

Two hundred years later, President Obama has already denied America’s rich Judeo-Christian heritage before the eyes and ears of other countries, as he publicly declared in Turkey on April 6, 2009, for the whole world to hear: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.”

Then there was Cairo in June 2009, when President Obama vowed to establish “a new beginning between the United Statesand Muslims around the world … I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. … I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. … And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. … So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.”

He goes on to say, “That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

That last line is really one of the most unique U.S. presidential religious passions and missions stated to date: “And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

Another big question is: What did the president mean when he said, “That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t”? It makes no sense at all to refer to a partnership between a country and religion – America and Islam. Why not say partnership between America and Muslim nations or a partnership between Americans and Muslims or even a partnership between Christianity and Islam? That comment is very strange to me and has a much deeper meaning.

Roughly six months later, in February 2010, Obama appointed Rashad Hussain to serve as his special envoy to theOrganization of the Islamic Conference, or OIC, an inter-governmental body of 56 Muslim countries that also forms an official body represented in the United Nations. (Where is the same treatment from this White House for countries that uphold Judeo-Christian values to unite and have the same treatment that allows them to form an official body represented in the U.N.? Or any religion, for that matter? There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark!)

Obama rejoiced, “I’m proud to announce today that I am appointing my special envoy to the OIC – Rashad Hussain. As an accomplished lawyer and a close and trusted member of my White House staff, Rashad has played a key role in developing the partnerships I called for in Cairo. And as a hafiz of the Quran, he is a respected member of the American Muslim community, and I thank him for carrying forward this important work.”

In 2007, then President George W. Bush explained the initial purpose for a OIC representative: “Our special envoy will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states, and will share with them America’s views and values. This is an opportunity for Americans to demonstrate to Muslim communities our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship.”

But Obama has considerably upped the OIC ante. Today, the White House purports from its website that special envoy, Muslim and hafiz of the Quran, Rashad Hussain, “will deepen and expand the partnerships that the United States has pursued with Muslims around the world since President Obama’s speech in Cairo last June.”

Again, notice the differences between the Bush and Obama plans with the special OIC envoy: from Bush’s mission to “listen and learn from representatives” to Obama’s mission to “deepen and expand the partnerships.”

The OIC members (including U.S. Special Envoy Rashad Hussain) pledge to its charter mission to rid the world of “the defamation of religion.” But the “defamation of religion” translates to mean “defamation of Islam.” An article on the OIC website explains, “Western foreign policy is considered to be the single most significant factor determining the attitudes of many Muslims toward the West. … Unfortunately, Islam often conjures in the Western minds images of authoritarian government, subjugation of women, cruel punishments of Shariah law and violence in the popular Western mind.”

“Unfortunately”?!

The world also just learned recently from the assistant secretary for public affairs in the State Department, P.J. Crowley, that theWhite House has repeatedly sent out as an American ambassador of peace the Islamic fundamentalist and executive director of the Ground Zero mosque, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is being sponsored by the U.S. State Department for repeated trips to the Middle East, where he is teaching on Muslim life in America and promoting religious tolerance.

But doesn’t one who called the U.S. an “accessory” to Sept. 11 just a few weeks after the tragic event and one who still refuses to call Hamas a foreign terrorist organization seem a strange choice for a U.S. ambassador of peace who promotes religious tolerance?

It is absolutely no surprise, therefore, though gravely unfortunate and disappointing for our commander in chief to blurt out last Friday night, while celebrating the holy month of Ramadan at a White House dinner, that he is in favor of building the mosque near Ground Zero!

The president explained the next day, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

White House spokesman Bill Burton reiterated the next day about Obama’s stance on constructing the mosque: “Just to be clear, the president is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night. It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans. What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque.”

But I could not agree more with Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11: “As an Obama supporter, I really feel that he’s lost sight of the germane issue, which is not about freedom of religion. It’s about a gross lack of sensitivity to the 9/11 families and to the people who were lost.”

And Debra Burlingame, a spokeswoman for some Sept. 11 families and the sister of one of the pilots killed in the attacks, summed it up perfectly: “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see.”

Obama is not just rebooting America’s image in the Muslim world. He’s deepening and expanding Islamic belief, practice, culture around the world, like a Muslim missionary.

(Next week in Part 2, I will discuss how the Obama administration has changed course in just this past year regarding passing anti-First Amendment defamation of religion resolutions, as well as demonstrate how Obama has been prejudice in his treatment of Islam versus Christianity).

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18. August 2010 by admin.

In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect.  They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

(N.B. This version of the document contains even more tax hikes than the original version did)

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families.  These will all expire on January 1, 2011: Personal income tax rates will rise.  The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed).  The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent.  All the rates in between will also rise.  Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.  The full list of marginal rate hikes is below: - The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6% Higher taxes on marriage and family.  The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income.  The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child.  The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level.  The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut. The return of the Death Tax.  This year, there is no death tax.  For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million.  A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones. Higher tax rates on savers and investors.  The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011.  The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011.  These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013. Second Wave: Obamacare There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare.  Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011.  They include: The Tanning Tax.  This went into effect on July 1st of this year.  It imposes a new, 10% excise tax on getting a tan at a tanning salon.  There is no exemption for tanners making less than $250,000 per year. The “Medicine Cabinet Tax”  Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin). The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike.  This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent. Brand Name Drug Tax.  Starting next year, there will be a multi-billion dollar tax assessment imposed on name-brand drug manufacturers.  This tax, like all excise taxes, will raise the price of medicine, hurting everyone. Economic Substance Doctrine.  The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly-legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks “economic substance.”  This is obviously an arbitrary empowerment of IRS agents. Employer Reporting of Health Insurance Costs on a W-2.  This will start for W-2s in the 2011 tax year.  While not a tax increase in itself, it makes it very easy for Congress to tax employer-provided healthcare benefits later. Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired.  These major items include: The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year.  According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million.  These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level.  The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers. Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear.  Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000.  This will be cut all the way down to $25,000.  Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment.  In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.” Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses.  There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place.  The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others.  Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs. Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced.  The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available.  Tax credits for education will be limited.  Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses.  Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut.  Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed.  The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families. Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed.  Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA.  This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.”  This ability will no longer be there. Read more: http://www.atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171##ixzz0wuEeV0XS

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29. July 2010 by admin.

ISI: Wikileaks logs reflect soldiers’ fears, suspicions, and anxieties 

The following article is an excerpt from this week’s SPIEGEL cover story. The facts in the story come from a database of almost 92,000 American military reports on the state of the war in Afghanistan that were obtained by the WikiLeaks website. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the New York Times and SPIEGEL have all vetted the material and reported on the contents in articles that have been researched independently of each other. All three media sources have concluded that the documents are authentic and provide an unvarnished image of the war in Afghanstan — from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

“The truth is that not all documents from this treasure trove are beyond any doubt.”

Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, has been in a tight spot since the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington. Officially, the country is part of the worldwide anti-terrorism coalition forged by former United States President George W. Bush. Unofficially, however, the Pakistani security forces are the patrons of the Taliban forces that gave refuge to Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. It is clear that the Taliban would not exist without help from abroad. The Pakistani intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), helped build up and install the Taliban after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the country descended into a fratricidal war among the victorious mujahedeen, creating the threat of a power vacuum.

Despite all assurances by Pakistani politicians that these old connections were severed long ago, the country still pursues an ambiguous policy, in which Pakistan is both an ally of the United States and a helper of its enemies. Now there is new evidence to support this. The war logs make it clear that the Pakistani intelligence service is still presumably the Taliban’s most important supporter outside Afghanistan. The fact is that the war against the Afghan security forces, the Americans and their allies within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is still being conducted from Pakistani soil, with the country serving as a safe haven for all hostile forces. It also serves as a staging ground from which they can deploy. The Taliban’s new recruits, including feared foreign fighters, are streaming across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The three main enemies of the Western coalition forces, the Taliban under Mullah Omar, the fighters led by former mujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the militias of the Haqqani clan of warlords all have important quarters and operations centers in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, the original justification for this war, is also believed to have found safe haven in Pakistan, where he is still involved in the day-to-day operations of jihad against the infidels. On one occasion, according to the documents, bin Laden planned to attack his enemies with a poison called, in his honor, “Osama Kapa,” and on another he reportedly gave the gift of a wife to a particularly zealous Taliban fighter who had designed effective remotely triggered explosive booby traps. Pakistan ‘s Assurance of Future InfluenceThe Pakistani intelligence service has excellent relations with all groups. In the constant fear that Pakistan’s archrival India could gain a foothold in Afghanistan and thus have Pakistan in its pincers, so to speak, the ISI supports everything that could preserve and strengthen its own influence in Kabul. And because many ISI strategists cannot believe that the Americans will remain in Afghanistan for long (after all, Washington has already announced the beginning of its withdrawal), the Taliban remains Pakistan’s assurance of future influence in Kabul. This reasoning is particularly clear in the Afghanistan war logs. According to the warnings of new attacks and suicide bombings by the enemy, ISI envoys were present when Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s commanders met for a war council in northern Waziristan.A document dated Sept. 1, 2007 reports on an imminent attack by a group of Hekmatyar’s fighters on one of the Allies’ forward operating bases in Kunar, the Afghan province bordering Peshawar in Pakistan. The elaborate and carefully planned attack was to involve four suicide bombers, and the Americans’ source even knew where they were from: one Pakistani, one Arab and two Afghans. The plans also included a rocket attack and artillery fire. Finally, foot soldiers were to storm the outpost and take enemy soldiers prisoner, if possible. The Pakistani intelligence service supplied Chinese ammunition to the insurgents. The ISI, as partial financier of the operation, wanted to retain control and thus intended to send an officer to observe the attack and advise the fighters. Nothing Works without the ISIPakistan’s western Balochistan Province is believed to be the area where Taliban leader Mullah Omar spends most of his time. The Shura, the Taliban’s decision-making body, meets once a month in the city of Quetta, or at least it did in the first few years after the Taliban fled Afghanistan. Some of the documents, such as the Aug. 16, 2006 warning of an impending attack, even claim that bin Laden himself has attended this meeting. The American intelligence gatherers, skeptical about this claim, classified the document as 3F, which means that it does not require verification. A man who undoubtedly attended the Shura was Mullah Baradar, a brother-in-law of Mullah Omar and the former Taliban military chief. The documents describe Baradar as the chairman of the Shura, and state that he monitors the financing, procurement and distribution of weapons, ammunition and other materials. As it happens, Baradar is also a confidant of the ISI. He designed the Taliban’s strategy and, according to the war logs, is also responsible for the use of suicide bombings. Why, then, would Pakistani security forces have arrested Baradar on Feb. 8, 2010?Many observers believe that the Pakistani security forces struck after the mullah had begun communicating with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. If this interpretation is correct, then the arrest of Baradar constituted a clear signal to the Taliban and their allies that nothing works without the ISI. Anyone reading through the material already comes away with this impression. In document after document, it is the ISI that controls the course of the war, and suicide bombers are apparently one of its preferred weapons. In fact, it is the ISI itself that often deploys them, as a threat warning note dated Oct. 30, 2008 indicates. The note reads: “According to a source (C6) AQ (al-Qaida) and ISI formed an attack group that was called ‘General.’ There are six suicide bombers in the group, two of them are Chinese, two of them are Uzbek and the others are Arab. The suicide bombers intruded into Khost (province) … .”The ISI also issues precise orders to murder certain individuals. According to the documents, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is at the top of its hit list. Some of the documents are shockingly succinct and to the point. According to a warning dated August 21, 2008, for example, an ISI colonel “had directed Talib Maulawi Izzatullah to see that Karzai was assassinated. Izzatullah assigned Abdulbari from Sarobi District to assassinate Karzai in a suicide mission at the Presidential Palace.” Archenemy India a Frequent TargetPakistan’s archenemy India is mentioned again and again. According to the documents, the intelligence service instructed its Afghan allies to kill Indians who worked in Afghanistan. Their efforts apparently did not go unrewarded, with the ISI promising fighters in the Haqqani network large sums of money for killing Indians. The ISI’s other preferred targets included all Indian consulates in Afghanistan, roads built by Indian workers and a telephone network installed by Indians. There is only one warning about a planned attack that does not include any indication of the ISI’s involvement, this time on the Indian embassy in Kabul — which did in fact happen, on July 7, 2008, claiming 58 lives. That warning came from intelligence agents within the Polish ISAF contingent. The documents also contain information about attacks ordered on strategic targets, like dams, key roads and the Kabul power supply. Some of the plans the intelligence service apparently had developed were relatively extreme. One report, for example, states that the ISI planned to have its agents poison drinking water and alcoholic beverages sold on the black market. All attacks, including the suicide bombings on foreign troops, came with financial incentives, although the reports vary widely on the level of compensation. For example, the ISI was allegedly willing to pay between $15,000 and $30,000 to fighters in the Haqqani network for each attack on Indians. Former ISI Chief Plays Key Role in LogsPakistan’s former intelligence chief Hamid Gul plays a special role in the documents. Gul, a former army general who headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, was one of the key supporters of the mujahedeen when they were fighting the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan. When speaking with the Western media, Gul later proved to be a propagandist of sorts for the Taliban and someone who could easily see himself sympathizing with their struggle against the Americans. The United States accuses him of maintaining ties to al-Qaida. In the newly leaked documents, Gul is also portrayed as an ally and, in one case, even as “a leader” of the Taliban. According to a threat assessment dated Jan. 14, 2008, he coordinated plans to kidnap United Nations employees on Afghanistan’s Highway No. 1 between Kabul and Jalalabad. Some 15 to 20 Taliban fighters were to stop the UN vehicle and threaten the passengers with their weapons. There was to be no mercy. As the report reads, if the Taliban encountered resistance during the kidnapping, the hostage-takers “will use the AK47 guns to fight the resistance or kill the hostages.” According to the reports, the retired general continued to supply his protégés with weapons. One source mentions that Gul had organized a convoy of 65 trucks filled with ammunition for the Taliban, although the authors of the report do not completely trust the source. Another report mentions that the ISI sent 1,000 motorcycles to the Haqqanis and delivered 7,000 weapons to Kunar Province, including Kalashnikovs, mortars and Strella missiles. Skepticism over Veracity of Some DocumentsBut it is precisely the especially transparent attempts to portray the Taliban’s supporters at the ISI as the most sinister of monsters that give rise to skepticism about the documents.On May 29, 2006, for example, the Afghan intelligence service reported on an ISI campaign to burn down Afghan schools. Was this truly the work of a generally secular military, or was the campaign in fact the brainchild of Taliban religious fanatics?And the claims about the ISI’s alleged recruitment of children as suicide bombers? According to the documents, the child bombers were sent out with explosive vests attached to their bodies, and the explosives were then detonated remotely. Was this also the work of the Pakistani intelligence service, which was supposedly being overrun by domestic and foreign candidates for martyrdom? Did the ISI truly ask women to hide explosive vests under their burqas, and is it true that ISI agents tenderly concealed an explosive device inside a gold-colored, fake Koran? These and other claims appear in this collection of reports assembled by the Americans. But are they true? The truth is that not all documents from this treasure trove are beyond any doubt.

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18. June 2010 by admin.

U.S.: Hurricane Season and the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

The 2010 hurricane season has kicked off with the first low-pressure weather system in the Atlantic. While this system does not appear likely to kick up a major storm, this year’s season in Hurricane Alley threatens to worsen the ongoing oil leak disaster in the Gulf.

The National Hurricane Center announced June 16 that a low-pressure weather disturbance in the Atlantic Ocean moving toward the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean has only a 20 percent chance of turning into a tropical storm or hurricane and that conditions over the next two days should prevent it from strengthening to this level. The National Hurricane Center has predicted an 85 percent chance of above-average tropical cyclone activity in the 2010 hurricane season, which began June 1. In addition to all the usual risks, this year hurricanes could derail efforts to contain the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf of Mexico is of great strategic importance to the United States, as it serves as the nexus between the Mississippi River system — a region of vast agricultural and industrial output — and global seaborne trade. The Gulf area is also a crucial, though declining, location for domestic energy production and refining. It produces about 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, or roughly one-third of total domestic production and one-tenth of the 17 million bpd of total U.S. oil consumption. It also hosts nearly half the country’s petroleum-refining capacity, with refineries in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama receiving domestic- and foreign-produced oil into refineries with a total operating capacity of 8.4 million bpd.

Storms during hurricane season threaten this activity. High winds and waves, tidal surges and subsea waves have the potential to disrupt shipping lanes, offshore energy production, undersea pipelines carrying oil and natural gas, and refineries and port activity. In worst-case scenarios — as with hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 — all Gulf oil and natural gas production was temporarily taken offline, along with 4.7 million bpd of refining. Adding in the nearly 5 million people forced to evacuate, and these storms, especially Katrina, created social and political disturbances, particularly in New Orleans. Ultimately, they sapped considerable political support from the Bush administration.

Only one major hurricane — Hurricane Ike — has slammed into the Gulf coast since 2005, though some storms have appeared capable of it. The threat of hurricane formation in 2010 is thought to be higher than the year before because of factors relating to a climatic phenomenon called the Southern Oscillation, which is divided into two phases: El Nino and La Nina. During El Nino, vertical wind shear greatly increases throughout the Atlantic basin, which decreases the chances for the development of tropical storms and hurricanes (since among other things, they require low vertical wind shear). During La Nina, the vertical wind shear is virtually nonexistent, making the climate in the ocean basin quite conducive to the development of hurricanes. The most recent El Nino phase has just concluded, and La Nina — expected to last from June to August — is now in effect. This transition factored into the National Hurricane Center’s forecast of an 85 percent chance of having above-average tropical cyclone activity in the 2010 season (as compared to 25 percent the previous year during El Nino).

The increased risk of hurricanes is especially bad news for the United States because of the ongoing massive oil leak at a BP drilling site in the Gulf deepwater, which is directly in the path of recent major hurricanes. It is feared storms could cause any number of problems. For example, while the oil well itself is 5,000 feet beneath the surface — out of the range of disturbances from a hurricane — a tropical storm or hurricane could halt the work of response teams on the surface struggling to siphon off about 15,000 bpd of oil out of the estimated 35,000-60,000 bpd total flow. If these crews are disrupted along with the ad hoc pipes and equipment they are using — which would be vulnerable to subsea waves closer to the surface — then the oil will continue spewing directly into the ocean without being dispersed by chemicals, burned off, collected or mitigated by other means. A coming storm would require disconnecting both the containment dome on the leaking pipe below and stopping the process of drilling two relief wells, and then reconnecting after the storm passes. Attempts by response teams to develop a “freestanding” riser pipe that could be disconnected rapidly in the event of a storm to enable quick reconnection afterwards could minimize delays, but while they are in use in West Africa there is some debate over whether they will work in this case. The risk of interruption of containment efforts on the sea surface was highlighted June 15, when lightning struck an oil collection vessel, causing a fire and a 25 percent decrease in oil collection for half the day.

The oil slick from the leak has expanded across the gulf since late April. The slick now covers large swaths offshore of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. In the past, major hurricanes have caused fierce winds and tidal surges that drenched anywhere from 20-40 miles of land with seawater — seawater that would be contaminated with a thin slick of oil this season. Authorities readily admit the situation is unprecedented. Depending on which side of the slick the storm passes over, it could have a greater or lesser effect on the oil drift. Hurricanes spin counter clockwise, so if the storm passes west of the oil slick it could push the oil toward the coast and if to the east it could push it out to sea. If the storm scores a direct hit on the oil slick, the surge could maximize the amount of oil-contaminated water that pours into the coastline. In short, there is a great deal of uncertainty. Several scenarios could see a multitude of problems for those onshore, to say nothing of the even stronger political backlash they would spark.

As mentioned, while the gulf is important to U.S. domestic energy production, its importance has been declining. Output mostly has fallen since 2003, worsened by the aforementioned hurricanes, which took years to recover from. The BP oil spill itself threatens to create such a heavy political and regulatory cost for offshore drilling, especially deepwater offshore (highlighted by U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for tougher legislation during his June 15 speech on the subject, evidence of the already strong political backlash on the subject), that the region’s energy relevance will be under even greater pressure. The full ramifications for the industry will not be known until long after the leak stops.

One potentially positive note is that about 96 percent of major hurricanes occur in the peak period between late August and early October, and BP hopes to have completed the drilling of two relief wells to gather up the oil by that time (effectively stopping the leak). But while the relief wells have a high chance of succeeding once they reach their target, they are not guaranteed to do so immediately, and months could pass as drillers redirect their aim to get directly at the existing well and oil flow. This period would overlap with peak hurricane season.

The question of what happens if the relief wells do not solve the problem is creating headaches behind closed doors in the U.S. government. The Gulf of Mexico has already hurt Obama, distracting him from dealing with urgent foreign policy matters, including military engagements and withdrawals in the Middle East and the ongoing challenges of a troubled economic recovery. A hurricane would only make matters worse.

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8. June 2010 by admin.

Arabs, Israelis and the Strategic Balance  Last week’s events off the coast of Israel continue to resonate. Turkish-Israeli relations have not quite collapsed since then but are at their lowest level since Israel’s founding. U.S.-Israeli tensions have emerged, and European hostility toward Israel continues to intensify. The question has now become whether substantial consequences will follow from the incident. Put differently, the question is whether and how it will be exploited beyond the arena of public opinion. The most significant threat to Israel would, of course, be military. International criticism is not without significance, but nations do not change direction absent direct threats to their interests. But powers outside the region are unlikely to exert military power against Israel, and even significant economic or political sanctions are unlikely to happen. Apart from the desire of outside powers to limit their involvement, this is rooted in the fact that significant actions are unlikely from inside the region either.The first generations of Israelis lived under the threat of conventional military defeat by neighboring countries. More recent generations still faced threats, but not this one. Israel is operating in an advantageous strategic context save for the arena of public opinion and diplomatic relations and the question of Iranian nuclear weapons. All of these issues are significant, but none is as immediate a threat as the specter of a defeat in conventional warfare had been. Israel’s regional enemies are so profoundly divided among themselves and have such divergent relations with Israel that an effective coalition against Israel does not exist — and is unlikely to arise in the near future. Given this, the probability of an effective, as opposed to rhetorical, shift in the behavior of powers outside the region is unlikely. At every level, Israel’s Arab neighbors are incapable of forming even a partial coalition against Israel. Israel is not forced to calibrate its actions with an eye toward regional consequences, explaining Israel’s willingness to accept broad international condemnation.

Palestinian Divisions

To begin to understand how deeply the Arabs are split, simply consider the split among the Palestinians themselves. They are currently divided between two very different and hostile factions. On one side is Fatah, which dominates the West Bank. On the other side is Hamas, which dominates the Gaza Strip. Aside from the geographic division of the Palestinian territories — which causes the Palestinians to behave almost as if they comprised two separate and hostile countries — the two groups have profoundly different ideologies.Fatah arose from the secular, socialist, Arab-nationalist and militarist movement of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s. Created in the 1960s, Fatah was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. It was the dominant, though far from the only, faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO was an umbrella group that brought together the highly fragmented elements of the Palestinian movement. Yasser Arafat long dominated Fatah; his death left Fatah without a charismatic leader, but with a strong bureaucracy increasingly devoid of a coherent ideology or strategy.Hamas arose from the Islamist movement. It was driven by religious motivations quite alien from Fatah and hostile to it. For Hamas, the liberation of Palestine was not simply a nationalist imperative, but also a religious requirement. Hamas was also hostile to what it saw as the financial corruption Arafat brought to the Palestinian movement, as well as to Fatah’s secularism.Hamas and Fatah are playing a zero-sum game. Given their inability to form a coalition and their mutual desire for the other to fail, a victory for one is a defeat for the other. This means that whatever public statements Fatah makes, the current international focus on Gaza and Hamas weakens Fatah. And this means that at some point, Fatah will try to undermine the political gains the flotilla has offered Hamas.The Palestinians’ deep geographic, ideological and historical divisions occasionally flare up into violence. Their movement has always been split, its single greatest weakness. Though revolutionary movements frequently are torn by sectarianism, these divisions are so deep that even without Israeli manipulation, the threat the Palestinians pose to the Israelis is diminished. With manipulation, the Israelis can pit Fatah against Hamas.

The Arab States and the Palestinians

The split within the Palestinians is also reflected in divergent opinions among what used to be called the confrontation states surrounding Israel — Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Egypt, for example, is directly hostile to Hamas, a religious movement amid a sea of essentially secular Arab states. Hamas’ roots are in Egypt’s largest Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian state has historically considered its main domestic threat. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime has moved aggressively against Egyptian Islamists and sees Hamas’ ideology as a threat, as it could spread back to Egypt. For this and other reasons, Egypt has maintained its own blockade of Gaza. Egypt is much closer to Fatah, whose ideology derives from Egyptian secularism, and for this reason, Hamas deeply distrusts Cairo. Jordan views Fatah with deep distrust. In 1970, Fatah under Arafat tried to stage a revolution against the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. The resulting massacres, referred to as Black September, cost about 10,000 Palestinian lives. Fatah has never truly forgiven Jordan for Black September, and the Jordanians have never really trusted Fatah since then. The idea of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank unsettles the Hashemite regime, as Jordan’s population is mostly Palestinian. Meanwhile, Hamas with its Islamist ideology worries Jordan, which has had its own problems with the Muslim Brotherhood. So rhetoric aside, the Jordanians are uneasy at best with the Palestinians, and despite years of Israeli-Palestinian hostility, Jordan (and Egypt) has a peace treaty with Israel that remains in place.Syria is far more interested in Lebanon than it is in the Palestinians. Its co-sponsorship (along with Iran) of Hezbollah has more to do with Syria’s desire to dominate Lebanon than it does with Hezbollah as an anti-Israeli force. Indeed, whenever fighting breaks out between Hezbollah and Israel, the Syrians get nervous and their tensions with Iran increase. And of course, while Hezbollah is anti-Israeli, it is not a Palestinian movement. It is a Lebanese Shiite movement. Most Palestinians are Sunni, and while they share a common goal — the destruction of Israel — it is not clear that Hezbollah would want the same kind of regime in Palestine that either Hamas or Fatah would want. So Syria is playing a side game with an anti-Israeli movement that isn’t Palestinian, while also maintaining relations with both factions of the Palestinian movement. Outside the confrontation states, the Saudis and other Arabian Peninsula regimes remember the threat that Nasser and the PLO posed to their regimes. They do not easily forgive, and their support for Fatah comes in full awareness of the potential destabilizing influence of the Palestinians. And while the Iranians would love to have influence over the Palestinians, Tehran is more than 1,000 miles away. Sometimes Iranian arms get through to the Palestinians. But Fatah doesn’t trust the Iranians, and Hamas, though a religious movement, is Sunni while Iran is Shiite. Hamas and the Iranians may cooperate on some tactical issues, but they do not share the same vision.

Israel’s Short-term Free Hand and Long-term Challenge

Given this environment, it is extremely difficult to translate hostility to Israeli policies in Europe and other areas into meaningful levers against Israel. Under these circumstances, the Israelis see the consequences of actions that excite hostility toward Israel from the Arabs and the rest of the world as less dangerous than losing control of Gaza. The more independent Gaza becomes, the greater the threat it poses to Israel. The suppression of Gaza is much safer and is something Fatah ultimately supports, Egypt participates in, Jordan is relieved by and Syria is ultimately indifferent to. Nations base their actions on risks and rewards. The configuration of the Palestinians and Arabs rewards Israeli assertiveness and provides few rewards for caution. The Israelis do not see global hostility toward Israel translating into a meaningful threat because the Arab reality cancels it out. Therefore, relieving pressure on Hamas makes no sense to the Israelis. Doing so would be as likely to alienate Fatah and Egypt as it would to satisfy the Swedes, for example. As Israel has less interest in the Swedes than in Egypt and Fatah, it proceeds as it has.A single point sums up the story of Israel and the Gaza blockade-runners: Not one Egyptian aircraft threatened the Israeli naval vessels, nor did any Syrian warship approach the intercept point. The Israelis could be certain of complete command of the sea and air without challenge. And this underscores how the Arab countries no longer have a military force that can challenge the Israelis, nor the will nor interest to acquire one. Where Egyptian and Syrian forces posed a profound threat to Israeli forces in 1973, no such threat exists now. Israel has a completely free hand in the region militarily; it does not have to take into account military counteraction. The threat posed by intifada, suicide bombers, rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, and Hezbollah fighters is real, but it does not threaten the survival of Israel the way the threat from Egypt and Syria once did (and the Israelis see actions like the Gaza blockade as actually reducing the threat of intifada, suicide bombers and rockets). Non-state actors simply lack the force needed to reach this threshold. When we search for the reasons behind Israeli actions, it is this singular military fact that explains Israeli decision-making. And while the break between Turkey and Israel is real, Turkey alone cannot bring significant pressure to bear on Israel beyond the sphere of public opinion and diplomacy because of the profound divisions in the region. Turkey has the option to reduce or end cooperation with Israel, but it does not have potential allies in the Arab world it would need against Israel. Israel therefore feels buffered against the Turkish reaction. Though its relationship with Turkey is significant to Israel, it is clearly not significant enough for Israel to give in on the blockade and accept the risks from Gaza. At present, Israel takes the same view of the United States. While the United States became essential to Israeli security after 1967, Israel is far less dependent on the United States today. The quantity of aid the United States supplies Israel has shrunk in significance as the Israeli economy has grown. In the long run, a split with the United States would be significant, but interestingly, in the short run, the Israelis would be able to function quite effectively.Israel does, however, face this strategic problem: In the short run, it has freedom of action, but its actions could change the strategic framework in which it operates over the long run. The most significant threat to Israel is not world opinion; though not trivial, world opinion is not decisive. The threat to Israel is that its actions will generate forces in the Arab world that eventually change the balance of power. The politico-military consequences of public opinion is the key question, and it is in this context that Israel must evaluate its split with Turkey. The most important change for Israel would not be unity among the Palestinians, but a shift in Egyptian policy back toward the position it held prior to Camp David. Egypt is the center of gravity of the Arab world, the largest country and formerly the driving force behind Arab unity. It was the power Israel feared above all others. But Egypt under Mubarak has shifted its stance versus the Palestinians, and far more important, allowed Egypt’s military capability to atrophy. Should Mubarak’s successor choose to align with these forces and move to rebuild Egypt’s military capability, however, Israel would face a very different regional equation. A hostile Turkey aligned with Egypt could speed Egyptian military recovery and create a significant threat to Israel. Turkish sponsorship of Syrian military expansion would increase the pressure further. Imagine a world in which the Egyptians, Syrians and Turks formed a coalition that revived the Arab threat to Israel and the United States returned to its position of the 1950s when it did not materially support Israel, and it becomes clear that Turkey’s emerging power combined with a political shift in the Arab world could represent a profound danger to Israel.Where there is no balance of power, the dominant nation can act freely. The problem with this is that doing so tends to force neighbors to try to create a balance of power. Egypt and Syria were not a negligible threat to Israel in the past. It is in Israel’s interest to keep them passive. The Israelis can’t dismiss the threat that its actions could trigger political processes that cause these countries to revert to prior behavior. They still remember what underestimating Egypt and Syria cost them in 1973. It is remarkable how rapidly military capabilities can revive: Recall that the Egyptian army was shattered in 1967, but by 1973 was able to mount an offensive that frightened Israel quite a bit.The Israelis have the upper hand in the short term. What they must calculate is whether they will retain the upper hand if they continue on their course. Division in the Arab world, including among the Palestinians, cannot disappear overnight, nor can it quickly generate a strategic military threat. But the current configuration of the Arab world is not fixed. Therefore, defusing the current crisis would seem to be a long-term strategic necessity for Israel.Israel’s actions have generated shifts in public opinion and diplomacy regionally and globally. The Israelis are calculating that these actions will not generate a long-term shift in the strategic posture of the Arab world. If they are wrong about this, recent actions will have been a significant strategic error. If they are right, then this is simply another passing incident. In the end, the profound divisions in the Arab world both protect Israel and make diplomatic solutions to its challenge almost impossible — you don’t need to fight forces that are so divided, but it is very difficult to negotiate comprehensively with a group that lacks anything approaching a unified voice.

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22. May 2010 by admin.

The U.S.-Pakistan Conundrum and Europe’s Existential Test

May 20, 2010

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER JIM JONES and CIA Director Leon Panetta met with Pakistan’s top civil and military leadership Wednesday and reportedly urged it to take more aggressive action against jihadists, especially in North Waziristan. (The region is the main hub of an array of international jihadist actors, which the Pakistanis have yet to target in their yearlong counterinsurgency campaign.) The visit was prompted by revelations about the deep connections the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, had with Pakistan’s jihadist community as well as its military. Shahzad’s father is a retired Air Vice Marshal, the third highest rank in the Pakistani air force. His uncle is a retired two-star general who once headed the Frontier Corps in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province. The Frontier Corps is the paramilitary force currently playing a key role in the counterinsurgency campaign against Taliban rebels in northwest Pakistan.

Given the level of religious radicalization that the country has experienced over the past three decades or so, it is not unusual for a person with Shahzad’s pedigree to have joined al Qaeda transnational jihadists. Furthermore, being from an elite family also does not mean that senior people within the army have ties to the global jihadist nexus involved in plots to attack the United States. However, Tuesday there were reports that Pakistani authorities had arrested a serving army major suspected of being an accomplice to Shahzad, which further exacerbates an already complicated U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

Cooperation between Washington and Islamabad on dealing with the jihadist menace had just begun to improve when the Times Square bomb incident took place. It had hardly been three months since U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus had applauded Pakistani efforts against the militant infrastructure. He said Islamabad’s forces were doing the best they could with limited resources, and should not be expected to expand the scope of their operations anytime soon. The shifting paradigm in Washington vis-a-vis Islamabad came to a screeching halt when it became clear that Shahzad had been dispatched by jihadist elements based in Pakistan.

The problem is not that the United States has completely reverted to the old policy of pressuring Pakistan. Rather it has to do with the dilemma where on one hand U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration needs to stabilize Pakistan to deal with the Afghan Taliban, while on the other it needs to pressure Pakistan to take tougher action against al Qaeda, which could further destabilize the already dangerously weakened Pakistani polity. In other words, the U.S. strategy for the region has been knocked off balance.

This precarious situation should not be considered an unintended outcome of the plot to detonate an improvised explosive device in the heart of Manhattan. It is very clearly the work of transnational jihadists headquartered in Pakistan who view increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation as a lethal cocktail. The jihadists have been able to exploit the weakness of the Pakistani state and the contradictions within its security establishment to their advantage.

But in the past year they have faced a major onslaught and find themselves caught between U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle strikes and Pakistani ground assaults. They are in no position to resist the combined U.S.-Pakistani offensive. Their only way out is to undermine the bilateral relationship, which, given its fragility and the tools at the disposal of the jihadists, is not hard to do.

This strategy mimics efforts to ignite conflict between India and Pakistan by staging attacks in India in an attempt to force New Delhi into taking unilateral action against militant facilities on Pakistani soil. Doing so would lead to an all-out war between the two South Asian rivals, giving militants even more room to maneuver. In the case of the United States and Pakistan, an attack does not have to be successful, such as the case with the Times Square plot. All that is required is an attempt by an individual with easily traceable connections to Pakistan and its security establishment, which would undermine the ties between the two. Ideally, the goal is to create a situation where the United States is forced to be more aggressive about unilateral action on Pakistani soil. Doing so would create further chaos, which is the environment in which the jihadists thrive.

It should be noted that the whole idea of the al Qaeda-allied Pakistani Taliban claiming responsibility for the failed Times Square attack makes no sense. Why would the jihadists expend resources on an individual who did not have the skill set to pull off a real bombing? It only makes the organization appear weak, unless of course the intent was not to stage an actual attack, but rather undermine U.S. strategy for the region by creating problems between Islamabad and Washington.

Lest our readers think there isn’t anything going on in the world beyond Pakistan, the financial crisis in Europe has not gone anywhere — in fact, it continues to build. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament that Europe is facing an “existential test” from the Greek-triggered crisis, noting that “if the euro fails, then Europe fails.” The chancellor is laying the groundwork for a Friday vote on approving Germany’s 123 billion euro contribution to a eurozone bailout fund.

While it was not designed that way, the euro has become the EU. The euro was intended to inject German economic dynamism into the rest of Europe, providing capital and markets that would act like the ocean tide and raise all boats. Instead, the common currency allowed poorer Southern Europe to delay reforms.

The issue of the day focuses on German subsidization of the South versus a series of rolling collapses should Berlin refuse. Unintended or not — and economically beneficial or not — the link between Germany’s checkbook and “the preservation of the European idea” is undisputed. If Germany is to seek global stature, it will have to make donations of similar scale to the European South over and over again. And should it refuse to participate, the great unraveling of Europe will begin with a vengeance.

It is not so much that we are attracted to the drama in Berlin — although it is worth noting that there has not been this type of drama in Berlin since the 1940s — but rather that the Germans are enacting policies that have a hint of desperation to them. On Wednesday the Germans instituted a ban on naked short selling, market parlance for betting that a certain horse will lose badly. Such trades usually only affect the margins of the market, and governments only get nervous about them when the ship seems about to go down. 

For comparison, the United States instituted a similar policy in July 2008, just before the American markets degraded from wobbly to free fall.

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15. May 2010 by admin.

The U.S.’ Eurozone Problem

May 14, 2010

The debt crisis that began in Greece and spread to other eurozone countries has served as a painful reminder of the risks associated with high public debt in a globalized financial system. The threat of contagion to countries outside Europe has divided experts on what the impact will be on the U.S. economy–whose debt is expected to rise to 90 percent of GDP by 2020. Some economists argue the U.S. economy will benefit from the eurozone crisis, since the euro’s continued weakness will secure the U.S. dollar’s status as a global reserve currency. Others say the U.S. debt problem will escalate if bloated entitlement programs go unaddressed. Some analysts argue the greater impact of the crisis will be on U.S. growth, which relies on market confidence and exports to Europe.

CMC Markets’ Ashraf Laidi, Mesirow Financial’s Adolfo Laurenti, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Carmen Reinhart and the American Enterprise Institute’s Vincent Reinhart agree that the crisis buys the U.S. government time to tackle its debt–for better or worse. Of greater concern is the impact of the crisis on U.S. market confidence and growth, say the Carnegie Endowment’s Uri Dadush and Invesco’s Ron Sloan. Finally, American University’s Anna Gelpern says the crisis heightens the need for strong financial reforms that can “shield banks–and by extension the public–from government failure.” –Roya Wolverson, Staff Writer on Economics, CFR.org

Ashraf Laidi, Chief Market Strategist, CMC Markets

The most common arguments against a destabilization of the U.S. economy by the eurozone sovereign debt crisis are 1) the activism of the U.S. federal government in mobilizing another TARP-like aid package for U.S. banks, 2) a compliant Federal Reserve willing to reopen the liquidity taps by buying (again) U.S. government bonds, and 3) the sole ability to print a currency in which globally held U.S. debt is denominated. These measures–enacted in 2008 and 2009–effectively restored confidence in U.S. and global financial markets. The 60 percent surge in equity markets since March 2009 offered a jolt of confidence, while government-stimulus programs helped cap the unemployment rate and revived the role of consumers in lifting the U.S. economy out of recession.

To be sure, these solutions came at a cost. The Federal Reserve balance sheet swelled to a record $2.29 trillion as a result of purchasing government debt, while the U.S. debt ceiling was raised to $14.3 trillion, nearly triple the level of 2001. Currency and bond markets took notice. The U.S. dollar lost more than 20 percent of its value, and U.S. bond yields doubled throughout the stimulus period. Yet, as debt concerns escalated in the eurozone, the U.S. dollar benefited from flows exiting risky European currencies into the safety of U.S. treasury paper.

Today, German and French banks are exposed to as much as $900 billion in Greek and other eurozone countries’ debt. This exposure could bolster speculative attacks on U.S. equities on the rationale that a deteriorating European economy could quash the recovery of the Chinese economic engine as well as the U.S. consumer. Under such a scenario, a double dip U.S. recession is a stark possibility. Yet, as long as the corroding euro retards the process of global currency diversification away from the greenback, the United States will have little difficulty continuing to finance its debt from overseas lending. The power of printing its own currency will deflect credit agencies’ scrutiny from the United States, as they focus on more pressing cases in the eurozone and Britain.

Adolfo Laurenti, Deputy Chief Economist and Managing Director, Mesirow Financial

The 750 billion euro stabilization package implemented in the eurozone was instrumental in stopping the panic and restoring some semblance of order in increasingly volatile financial markets.

Nonetheless, upon closer scrutiny, the plan doesn’t fix the structural fiscal imbalances that impair countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent, Italy and Ireland. The massive aid package only buys time for these embattled states to execute much-needed corrective policies. In order to bring government spending under control, additional measures of fiscal tightening must be adopted.

The eurozone plan also buys some time for the United States. The sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone has reasserted the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Yet the flight to safety out of Europe and the resulting strong demand for Treasury bonds should not be an excuse to delay action on our own weak fiscal position.

The concern is twofold. In the short run, we need to pay for the cost of bailouts and stimulus policies that followed the financial crisis and the “Great Recession.”

More importantly, long-term demographic trends make the burden of Social Security and Medicare unsustainable. Within a decade, American public finances will be under severe pressure to keep up with the exploding costs of our entitlement programs. Unless Congress resolves to undertake prompt and profound revision of the federal budget, the country may face dire consequences from our current profligate spending attitudes.

Thus, fiscal complacency is a major threat to the economic outlook for the United States. A slowdown in Europe will reduce our exports across the Atlantic, but the overall effect on the U.S. economy will be negligible when compared to the potential damage that a fiscal crisis may produce on our economy–if we let the opportunity to reduce our deficit and debt slip by.

The European malaise has given us some precious, borrowed time. We’d better not waste it.

Carmen Reinhart, Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research; and Vincent Reinhart, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Recent weeks have shown that, although Greece may have a small footprint on global economic output, it casts a long shadow on financial markets. These funding difficulties have mostly resonated in the United States as a morality play. Borrowers with dubious prospects of repayment will ultimately be confronted by angry lenders.

The message has taken hold with such force domestically because our own fiscal path seems unmoored. While the current debt stock relative to national income, at 85 percent, does not directly trigger alarms, fiscal deficits run at 10 percent of income. More worrisome, public confidence that there are enough political leaders with the courage to arrest the process seems at a low ebb.

All true. But there was another message from Europe with equally profound implications. This was quieter and directed to an elite group controlling the official foreign exchange reserves of about a dozen sovereign governments, mostly located along the Asian Pacific Rim. Greece’s funding problems and the continent’s contagion established that the euro is not ready to be a reserve currency.

The economies in the world that are growing faster than the rest–China, India, and Korea, among others–are also saving more. After the Asian Crisis of 1998–a devastatingly deep but localized predecessor to what the world just went through–those countries have been directing a good-sized share of that saving to building up foreign exchange reserves.

Reserve managers, however, do not buy foreign currencies. They buy the safest assets, government securities, denominated in those foreign currencies. Buying safe dollar-denominated assets is easy; they are called U.S. government securities. Buying safe euro-denominated assets has been revealed to be patently more difficult. Many gilt-edged bonds have an embossed “€” somewhere, but their repayment prospects differ according to where they were printed, say, in Germany or Greece. Simply put, U.S. government securities satisfy a need as a reserve asset that is less likely to be satisfied by those from Europe, at least for some time.

In these circumstances, any noble exhortation based on the European experience is likely to fall flat. As long as reserve managers are buying U.S. government securities, U.S. politicians will not be pressed to change their ways by financial markets. A benefit, but perhaps only for a time. Politicians who are not disciplined are not likely to show discipline on their own. Thus, the faltering of the euro as an asset class because of the bad behavior of some may enable bad behavior for longer here at home.

Uri Dadush, Director, International Economics Program, the Carnegie Endowment

The United States has a vital interest in assuring that the euro crisis is controlled. The EU represents 20 percent of U.S. exports. More than 50 percent of U.S. overseas assets are held in Europe, while close to 40 percent of Europe’s foreign assets invested in the United States.

In fact, the euro crisis has already had a significant impact on the U.S. economy: Since late November, the euro has lost 17 percent of its value vis-à-vis the dollar, making U.S. exports less competitive, even as the Obama administration’s goal is to double exports in five years. U.S. exports are also adversely affected by Europe’s sluggish recovery–in the first quarter, European GDP was up only 0.3 percent on the same quarter a year before, compared to a 2.5 percent rise in the United States and 11.9 percent in China. U.S. investors in Europe should expect to take large balance sheet and income translation losses due to the lower euro.

But the most important effects of the euro crisis on the United States will operate not through the real channels of trade and foreign direct investment, but through broader effects on confidence and banks. Stock market volatility (as measured by the VIX index) has more than doubled in the last two months, and the confidence that banks have in lending to each other–measured by the TED spread (the difference between three-month inter-bank lending rate and the yield on Treasury Bills) was as wide as 30.8 basis points at the end of last week, a nine-month high, up from this year’s low of 10.6 basis points in March.

This is against a backdrop of a crisis largely confined thus far to Greece, a country accounting for a mere 2.6 percent of the eurozone GDP. Imagine what would happen if the crisis spread to Spain or Italy, countries five or six times larger. Though the exposure of U.S. banks to the most vulnerable countries in Europe is limited–about $176 billion, or 5 percent of their total foreign exposure–the indirect exposure is much larger, since U.S. banks do business with all the large international banks, which are themselves exposed to these vulnerable countries.

A spreading euro crisis would hurt U.S. interests in two other ways. First, although U.S. government debt may increase in popularity initially due to a safe haven effect, a spreading crisis would likely eventually place the spotlight on rising U.S. debt as well, aggravating the country’s unstable debt dynamics.

Ron Sloan, Chief Information Officer, Invesco

The 2009 private sector debt crisis has morphed into the 2010 sovereign debt crises, as the private debt was swapped into government debt. In fact, the pea was just moved under a different shell in a replay of this classic scam. Deleveraging on this scale is going to take a long time, and not everyone has the patience for this. Hence, rioting in Greece.

The eurozone crisis begs the question of what will fuel the growth that an increasingly export-driven developed world needs. We can’t all export to the smaller emerging world, and we can no longer count on significant growth within the developed world as new austerity measures become the rule of thumb throughout much of Europe. Once inventory restocking is finished, sustainable growth assumptions will have to move lower in the debt-laden developed world, and an emerging world that is increasingly moving to tighten its own fiscal and monetary policies.

The eurozone crisis is really a growth crisis. Debt-laden companies and countries–including those in the United States–will lose many reinvestment/growth options. Without growth, social instability and economic volatility will follow. The euro is certainly at risk in its current configuration. Southern European countries are looking to revalue their way out of their crisis, and German and French citizens are becoming more resistant to the austerity measures required to save the euro. The developed world has absorbed two decades (the ’80s and ’90s) of social and economic tailwinds–driven by low interest and tax rates, inflation, and increasing consumption and leverage–that are now turning into headwinds. Deleveraging will be a long and messy process.

Anna Gelpern, Associate Professor of Law, American University

The crisis in Europe reinforces the central message of the past two years: Governments and financial institutions are locked in a dysfunctional loop. When banks and shadow banks go under, they draw in governments to protect credit flows, payment systems, and people’s savings. When governments go under, they sink their creditors–banks, pension funds, insurance companies. Financial reform is essential not only to shield people from bank failure, but also to shield banks–and by extension the public–from government failure.

Greek banks and pension funds hold more than a quarter of Greek government debt. If Greece defaults, it wipes out popular savings and freezes credit essential to recovery. Elsewhere, European banks, pension funds, and insurance companies hold over half of Greek debt. Thus default threatens the broader European financial system, needed to finance Greek growth. This is the same system that nearly collapsed in 2008 from the U.S. housing bust, and was deeply shaken by the failures of Lehman Brothers, Fortis and Dexia, and the Icelandic banking crisis. But it is also the system that benefited from the U.S. government support for AIG, which had sold credit derivatives to European banks, absorbing their risks so they could hold less regulatory capital.

This leads to a paradox: Even if Greek debt is deeply unsustainable, and even if Greek debt contracts contain relatively few barriers to restructuring, uncertainty about the effects of default on the financial systems threatens to reduce or eliminate the benefits of debt reduction. To be sure, links between governments and financial institutions were central in the crises of the 1980s and 1990s as well, but now no part of the global financial system can be presumed immune.

In the past, we had thought that the best way to ensure a timely and orderly sovereign debt restructuring was through reforming sovereign debt contracts, or sovereign bankruptcy. One lesson from Greece is that stronger financial reforms–on both sides of the Atlantic–may be the surest way forward to manage sovereign distress. That means boosting capital so firms can absorb losses, comprehensive resolution so conglomerates may die in peace, and transparent derivatives markets to reveal the true risks of default.

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13. May 2010 by admin.

Conflicting Objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan

May 11, 2010 

AFGHAN PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI ON MONDAY began a four-day trip to Washington, where he is reportedly scheduled to have candid conversations with U.S. President Barack Obama and other senior American officials about the war effort in the southwest Asian nation. Karzai’s visit comes after a rather nasty spat that broke out between Washington and Kabul largely over corruption within the Karzai government, which the Obama administration sees as a major impediment in regards to its exit strategy from the insurgency-wracked country. Responding to repeated statements from U.S. officials criticizing the Afghan leader, his family and close associates, Karzai accused the United States and its European allies of attempting to subvert his government by engaging in fraud in the presidential polls held last year.

Karzai went on to warn his Western allies that their pressure on him would only strengthen the Taliban, and that he could be forced to join the Afghan insurgent movement. These remarks from the Afghan president stem from the bitterness between his government and the Obama administration that kicked off shortly after Obama took office, and which largely manifested itself in the controversy surrounding the presidential vote. Therefore, it is unlikely that this one visit will heal matters –-regardless of any handshakes, press statements or photo- or video-ops.

In addition to the issue of corruption, there is significant disagreement over how to approach the matter of negotiating with the Taliban. Washington insists on reaching out only to low- to mid-level leadership to divide the movement from within, while the Karzai regime wants to talk to the senior leadership. This state of affairs between Kabul and Washington is deleterious for their mutual interests, especially at a time when anti-Taliban forces need to be on the same page to effectively deal with the Afghan jihadist insurgency. This is particularly true given the short time frame Washington has set for itself.

Islamabad presents an even greater case of conflicting goals for the United States than Kabul. Having realized that their policy of pressuring the Pakistanis to “do more” in terms of aggressive action against the diverse gamut of Islamist militant actors had dangerously weakened the Pakistani state, the Americans recently altered course and rushed toward stabilizing the Pakistani polity. This shift in U.S. attitude to a great degree was facilitated by Pakistan’s own rude awakening about a year ago when it launched a full-scale offensive against rogue jihadists who had declared war on Islamabad.At the end of the day, the Obama administration will likely have to seriously scale back its expectations of good governance on the part of the Karzai regime — whose nature is partially reflective of the nature of Afghanistan — to be able to focus on the core objective: containing the Taliban insurgency. Ironically, Washington is not just in the throes of uneasy relations with its Afghan partners. The failed Times Square bombing attempt appears to have adversely affected the nascent process of improving relations with Pakistan, whose cooperation is critical to the success of the American mission in the region.

It was only a few months ago that Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus came out praising Pakistan and defending its position, saying that Islamabad was doing the best it could. He said its security forces were overstretched in terms of their human and material capacity, and argued that it was not reasonable to ask for more for the time being. This new approach toward Islamabad is also based on the fact that the United States cannot deal with Afghanistan if Pakistan is destabilizing.

Effectively dealing with Afghanistan requires not just Pakistani action east of the Durand Line but also U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation to its west, which is the key to being able to distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable jihadist actors in Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that while such a policy might help the United States deal with the Afghan Taliban, it does not address the challenge posed by al Qaeda and its local and transnational allies based in Pakistan. And here is where the Times Square bomb plot has created a policy dilemma for the United States.

That the attack has been traced back to Pakistan’s murky jihadist landscape forces the Obama administration to return to pressuring Islamabad’s civil-military leadership to once again “do more.” In fact, there have been reports that U.S. officials have warned Pakistan of “serious consequences” if it does not expand its counterinsurgency efforts to North Waziristan, the main hub of a variety of jihadist forces. Many of these forces are hostile to Pakistan, some are neutral and still others are somewhat friendly. Despite this tough talk, which has the potential to throw a wrench into the process of growing cooperation between the two sides, the Obama administration cannot really afford to return to the status quo ante with the Pakistanis because of the larger goal of exiting Afghanistan within a very narrow window of opportunity.

Ultimately, Washington is faced with difficult policy choices in the case of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. In terms of the latter, how does it balance the need for improved relations with Pakistan while at the same time dealing with the threat posed by transnational jihadism? As for Afghanistan, how does President Obama work with Karzai vis-a-vis the Taliban problem and at the same time deal with Kabul’s corruption? It is unclear that the Obama administration will be able to balance these conflicting objectives, especially since its current relationships with its two key partners are far from where they should be from the point of view of U.S. national interests.

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11. May 2010 by admin.

Pakistan: Faisal Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban

May 10, 2010 

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said May 9 that the United States has evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the man who confessed to the failed bombing attempt at Times Square in New York City on May 1. Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen who demonstrated a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, his status as a U.S. citizen would have been problematic for the Pakistani Taliban, who must remain wary of potential infiltration from U.S. intelligence. Furthermore, the attempted bombing showed little to no signs that Shahzad had help from an outside group.

The Case of Faisal Shahzad U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced May 9 that the United States had uncovered evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent who confessed to the botched May 1 attempt to bomb Times Square in New York City. Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, made essentially the opposite contention May 7, arguing that Shahzad acted alone. Any link between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban is not as meaningful as it appears, but it does draw attention to the need for a more sophisticated discussion of the Pakistani Taliban phenomenon and the way in which Shahzad approached the organization.

In the wake of the attack, Shahzad allegedly has been linked not only to the Pakistani Taliban but also to Anwar al-Awlaki, the former U.S.-born radical imam of a mosque in a Virginian suburb of Washington, D.C., who is now thought to be in hiding in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was also linked to two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers and U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 at Fort Hood in November 2009.

But even Hasan, who appears to have had closer ties to al-Awlaki, acted as a lone wolf and did not inform anyone of his intentions. In other words, despite some loose ideological affinity, the connection played no operational role in the attack, as the old apex leadership of al Qaeda prime did in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. What made Hasan an effective lone wolf was not his ideological connections, but his insider knowledge of a good location for an attack at Fort Hood, his professional and personal proficiency with small arms and an appropriate target selection commensurate with his skill.

Shahzad was more of a “Kramer” jihadist in the tradition of Richard Reid — an ultimately inept radicalized individual with no operational understanding of basic tradecraft, no self-awareness of that lack of skill and ambition to carry out an attack utterly beyond his capabilities. Shahzad’s skill set is strikingly similar to that of Najibullah Zazi or the Glasgow group — they were all failed bomb makers.

The ‘Walk-In’ Jihadist

About the only thing Shahzad brought to the table was the passport of a naturalized U.S. citizen and a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, that entails more problems than opportunities.

A militant group that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence are actively targeting has to be inherently skeptical of outsiders — especially if one shows up on their doorstep (as Shahzad did) with an offer that appears to be too good to be true. Any entity must balance operational security with the active pursuit of its goals and objectives. But the lack of tradecraft that Shahzad exhibited is only further evidence that if Shahzad interacted with the Pakistani Taliban meaningfully — and there is not yet much evidence either way about how far he made it up the chain of command during his visit – they did not help him attain any meaningful skills. Although subsequent events might have shown that the group — if it was behind the plot — missed a chance to strike at the U.S. homeland, the ensuing investigations and focus of both U.S. and Pakistani intelligence efforts will only make operational security all the more important and any Shahzad-like offers all the more difficult to trust.

Shahzad’s childhood in Pakistan afforded him both cultural and filial connections in the country. There are even reports that a childhood friend was behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Childhood has little bearing on adult operational capability, though it did make it easier for Shahzad to travel outside Peshawar, where he once lived, and make contacts with innumerable individuals — some invariably with some degree of connection to the shadowy, amorphous world of the Pakistani Taliban and their local and transnational allies.

However, a naturalized U.S. citizen who had spent more than a decade in the United States — even one with some historical acquaintance among militants — is problematic. It is next to impossible for a jihadist group to have any confidence in the trustworthiness of an individual who walks in and volunteers in a scenario such as this. The potential for that individual to be a double agent is simply too high to meaningfully compromise operational security — especially as the United States and others are trying very hard to enhance their intelligence for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes in the region. The lack of tradecraft in Shahzad’s device is compelling evidence that whatever “contacts” or “training” he might have received in northern Pakistan was largely confined to physical training and weapons handling, not the far more sophisticated skill set of fashioning improvised explosive devices.

So whoever he did talk to in Pakistan — and the list of potentials is virtually endless for someone who grew up in the area — reveals almost nothing. More information may become available about whom he spoke with and what was discussed but there is no meaningful context for these conversations. Basic tradecraft and Shahzad’s Times Square device that make it clear that at most, the Pakistani Taliban sent a low-level representative to speak with him. It is unclear who provided the training, but it is reasonable to assume that he underwent basic guerilla training courses, but not advanced bomb-making courses. (Zazi received the bomb-making training but still failed in his attempt to attack New York’s subways because training without experience is insufficient.) However, the May 3 video of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud claiming he had not been killed in a 2009 U.S. UAV strike probably gave the group an almost irresistible opportunity to claim credit for the May 1 attempted attack in the United States — even if it was an inept one — in order to bolster the larger movement’s standing (although the Pakistani Taliban is so fractious and diffuse, it can hardly be said that the claim was from “the group”).

Pakistani Taliban

The Pakistani Taliban is an outgrowth of the Afghan Taliban that Islamabad nurtured in the 1990s. The radical Islamist ideology and militant training that Pakistan (along with the United States and Saudi Arabia) had cultivated in Afghanistan during the 1980s war against the Soviets in order to consolidate control over the country eventually spilled back across the border. With a recent rise in attacks against Pakistani government targets, Islamabad began to grasp the implications and consequences of its existing policies. Consequently, in April 2009, it initiated an unprecedented counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the leading group in the amorphous and diffuse phenomenon that is the Pakistani Taliban (even though the TTP itself is fractious), certainly has had ambitions to attack the continental United States, a supporter of the regime in Islamabad that it opposes.

However, it is important to note that at its strongest, the TTP demonstrated the ability to strike at urban targets in Pakistan. It has never demonstrated the capability to strike far afield, much less on the opposite side of the world. Others, such as splinter factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Jihad al-Islami, have demonstrated that capability recently, but not the TTP. So while it has the intent, it has never had the capability to carry out an attack at that distance. The closest it has come to an international attack is the suicide bombing on the CIA facility in eastern Afghanistan across the border from the FATA, which for all intents and purposes should be considered a local operation given the close proximity and porous nature of the border. In that instance, the group got lucky in that the bomber had independent access to agency officials. And the ongoing campaign in FATA is only further pressuring the Pakistani Taliban. Facing both the Pakistani military and American UAV strikes, the group has seen its operational reach within Pakistan severely constrained. The idea that the group has sufficient capacity to plot and support a strike on the continental United States is increasingly far-fetched, despite its desire to do so. In any event, Shahzad’s actions were not only carried out ineptly by an untrained individual, but have no evidence of meaningful outside support.

So while there are links that should not be underestimated, the botched Times Square bombing is merely the latest in a now well-established trend of “grassroots” and “Kramer” jihadists. They absolutely pose a danger — and an ongoing one at that — but they must not be mistaken for the coherent, transnational phenomenon of al Qaeda 2.0.

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