The Graveyard of Empires: America's New Asian Quagmire

With the situation on the ground rapidly deteriorating, U.S. imperialism's South Asian adventure is going off the rails.

The New York Times reported February 4 that supplies "intended for NATO forces in Afghanistan were suspended Tuesday after Taliban militants blew up a highway bridge in the Khyber Pass region, a lawless northwestern tribal area straddling the border with Afghanistan."

The 30-yard-long iron bridge, located 15 miles northwest of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) provincial capital, Peshawar, a thriving metropolis of several million people, was a major supply route ferrying some 80 percent of NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

Tuesday's attacks were followed-up Wednesday when insurgents torched 10 supply trucks returning from Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times reported. Supplies destined for NATO forces in Afghanistan--primarily food and fuel--are trucked through Pakistan by local contractors. Many are now refusing to drive the circuitous route through the Khyber Pass because of the dangerous conditions.

As Asia Times reported January 29, Peshawar "is the commercial, economic, political and cultural capital of the Pashtuns in Pakistan." Increasingly, it is morphing into a major power center for jihadists--on both sides of the border.

Peshawar and its surrounds are also now the epicenter for the Taliban and other militants in their struggle not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but also in their bid to establish a base from which to wage an "end-of-time battle" that would stretch all the way to the Arab heartlands of Damascus and Palestine. (Syed Saleem Shahzad, "On the Militant Trail, Part 1: A battle before a battle," Asia Times Online, January 29, 2009)

With kidnappings--whether by militants or criminal gangs--and beheadings on the rise, the city is cloaked in fear. Residents believe "a major showdown" between the state and the jihadists "is imminent."

Daily Times reported February 4 that the "Talibanization" of Orakzai Agency near Peshawar has accelerated to such an extent that local people have fled the area to "escape Taliban-style rule." Daily Times avers,

Orakzai, which borders Kurram in the west and Hangu district in the east, provides a means to the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to expand its influence to Peshawar through Khyber Agency. The organisation has already made its presence in the region known by attacking truck terminals for Afghanistan-bound supplies for NATO and US forces. Despite government attempts to block their infiltration, the Taliban recently celebrated their "complete control" over the region by inviting a group of journalists to the area in a show of power. (Abdul Saboor Khan, "Orakzai becomes a new have for Taliban," Daily Times, February 4, 2009)

Pakistani officials told the New York Times "it was not immediately clear how soon the trucks carrying crucial supplies for NATO forces would be able to travel through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, in a further setback for U.S. regional plans, The Guardian reported February 3, that the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic, was threatening to close the U.S. airbase of Manas "a key staging post for coalition forces fighting in nearby Afghanistan."

Both US and Nato commanders have expressed dismay at the possible closure.

It comes at a time when Nato is desperately trying to expand its supply routes to Afghanistan via the northern countries of central Asia following a series of devastating attacks on truck convoys from Pakistan. (Luke Harding, "Closure of US base in Kyrgyzstan could alter Afghanistan strategy," The Guardian, February 3, 2009)

In an echo of the 19th century "Great Game" for the control of Central Asia by Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain, Russia has been pressuring Kurmanbek Bakiyev's authoritarian regime to expel the Americans, viewed as a destabilizing power in the region.

The expulsion of U.S. forces from the Manas airbase would be a blow to U.S. efforts to control vital routes of licit and illicit cargo--including the booming heroin trade--and would follow a similar expulsion from Uzbekistan in 2006 following a deal between Moscow and the Uzbek kleptocracy run by President Islam Karimov.

The Kyrgyz Parliament is expected to vote next week on a measure to expel the Americans from Manas. The "loss of the base would present a significant problem for the Obama administration," The New York Times reported February 5. The Times averred, "About 15,000 personnel and 500 tons of cargo pass through Manas each month. The base is also the home of large tanker aircraft that are used for in-air refueling of fighter planes on combat missions over Afghanistan."

But behind the posturing over money and loans to the impoverished Central Asian nation, the Russian government is expecting a quid pro quo from the Obama administration if the U.S. is allowed to continue to use Manas as a launching pad into Afghanistan. In a move designed to pressure the U.S., the Russians are playing hardball, seeking concessions from the administration to scrap planned "missile defense" facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, viewed by Moscow as a first strike weapon.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism and their NATO partners have encircled Russia with a string of bases in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus in tandem with the eastward expansion of NATO. Additionally, the CIA, Britain's MI6 as well as Pakistan's ISI have fueled the on-again, off-again "Islamist" insurgency in Chechnya; a move designed to hasten the disintegration of the Russian Federation into docile statelets aligned with the United States--a familiar playbook used in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia.

With the Obama administration banking on a favorable outcome in Afghanistan as the United States ramps-up military operations, doubling American forces to some 60,000 troops within twelve months, the prospects for resupplying those troops without Russian cooperation are grim.

The Washington Post reported February 4 that "newly installed officials describe a situation on the ground that is far more precarious than they had anticipated." On Monday, The Independent averred that the situation on the ground in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan is particularly unnerving for NATO operations.

During Operation Kapcha Salaam or "Cobra Salute," a joint British and Afghan army offensive that included heavy armor and warplanes, soldiers were under near continuous attack by insurgents firing rockets, heavy mortars and detonating sophisticated roadside bombs. According to The Independent, insurgent ranks were filled with Pakistani and Chechen militants. The fighting has taken a heavy toll on Afghan citizens. The Independent revealed,

Outside Koshtay, Haji Mohammed Amin came up to complain that "Talibans and bandits" were preying on residents. "They come at night and ask us to feed them, sometimes they ask for money; they are not Afghans, they are Pakistanis. We have had 30 years of war and it still continues. Where is our government? Why don't they help us? We hardly have enough to eat." Another, Ahmed Jan, complained: "This is our land, we need this land to live. And you and the Taliban are using it to fight your wars. We want to be left in peace. You are here but then you will go away and the Taliban will come back." (Kim Sengupta, "Under fire in the Afghan badlands," The Independent, February 2, 2009)

If the U.S. administration has its way, there won't be peace any time soon. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, told Congress last week that the war would be a "long slog" with an uncertain outcome. But if history is a predictor of future events, it may not be a pretty finale for imperialism--or the people of South Asia.

While top Obama administration officials and Pentagon bureaucrats are relying on the government of President Asif Ali Zadari to stabilize the situation on Pakistan's side of the border, reports indicate that the ISI continue to fund and advise various proxy armies.

The Los Angeles Times revealed February 3, that Afghan security officials had broken up a suicide bombing cell in the capital, Kabul, and that the 17 men arrested were believed "to be affiliated with a Pakistan-based militant group known as the Haqqani network and that the cell's ringleader was a Pakistani national."

Although relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have "warmed considerably" since Zadari took over the reins from the despised Musharraf regime according to the L.A. Times, the ISI's policy of seeking "strategic depth" over geopolitical rival India by controlling a compliant Afghan client state has not changed, despite billions of dollars in U.S. military and "counterterrorism" assistance showered on the Army and ISI.

The spy agency's long-standing ties to the Haqqani network, led by veteran Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, were spotlighted last year when U.S. intelligence backed up Afghan authorities' assertion that the ISI had aided the group in its bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July. That attack killed nearly 60 people. (M. Karim Faiez and Laura King, "Suicide Bombing Ring Is Brought Down in Afghanistan, Officials Say," Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2009)

With a two month deadline tied to an April 3 NATO summit, the Pentagon is scrambling to come come up with a comprehensive strategy. It won't be an easy sell for America's NATO partners, outraged by orders from NATO's commander, U.S. General John Craddock, to kill opium dealers.

Protected Drug Trade and American Hypocrisy

In a bid to import the Iraqi "surge strategy" into Afghanistan, the United States is fielding armed militias to fight the Taliban, the Associated Press reported.

Afghanistan's interior minister announced the program had begun with the U.S. "paying for all aspects" including "buying Kalashnikov automatic rifles for members of the Afghan Public Protection Force," modeled after the American-sponsored Awakening Councils in Iraq. A sceptical Afghan official told the Associated Press, "only criminals would join because most citizens wouldn't want to face the Taliban in combat."

But perhaps this is precisely the intent of the program; to wrest control of the lucrative heroin trade from unreliable elements beholden to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who allegedly derive $100 million a year from the global drug trade. What better means to disrupt the "Islamist" insurgency than to grant U.S.-allied criminals and warlords a piece of the action.

In this context, Craddock's orders are all the more ironic when one considers that the forces currently battering NATO in Afghanistan grew rich during the 1980s when Washington turned a blind-eye to drug networks they themselves encouraged as a means to wound their Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.

According to scholar Alfred W. McCoy, "During the 1980s CIA covert operations in Afghanistan transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market." As a cats' paw for imperialism, the ISI doled out funds, weapons and expertise to far-right militants such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Coming to prominence as a thug who attacked communist students and infamously threw acid into the faces of unveiled women at Kabul University during the 1970s, Hekmatyar was a major narcotrafficker--and darling of the CIA and their ISI partners in crime. McCoy writes,

As the ISI's mujaheddin clients used their new CIA munitions to capture prime agricultural areas in Afghanistan during the early 1980s, the guerrillas urged their peasant supporters to grow poppies, thereby doubling the country's opium harvest to 575 tons between 1982 and 1983. Once these mujaheddin elements brought the opium across the border, they sold it to Pakistani heroin refiners who operated under the protection of General Fazle Huq, governor of the North-West Frontier province. By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the province's Khyber district alone. Trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC) arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin--protected by ISI papers from police search. (The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 453-454)

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel revealed January 28 that "top NATO commander John Craddock wants the alliance to kill opium dealers, without proof of connection to the insurgency. NATO commanders, however, do not want to follow the order."

In a classified document leaked to Der Spiegel, Craddock issued a "guidance" providing NATO troops with the authority "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan." In other words, the United States wants to widen the free-fire zone that already exists, one directly responsible for thousands of civilian casualties. Der Spiegel reports,

According to the document, deadly force is to be used even in those cases where there is no proof that suspects are actively engaged in the armed resistance against the Afghanistan government or against Western troops. It is "no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," Craddock writes. (Susanne Koelbl, "NATO High Commander Issues Illegitimate Order to Kill," Spiegel Online, January 28, 2009)

German NATO General Egon Ramms and other European commanders are refusing to "deviate from the current rules of engagement for attacks," a move that has outraged Craddock. Considered a loyal Bushist who "fears that he could be replaced by the new US president," Craddock is threatening to remove any commander who doesn't toe the new party line and "follow his instructions to go after the drug mafia."

But here as elsewhere, things aren't always what they seem. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that General Craddock, under pressure from the Obama administration's new anti-Karzai policy, particularly now that Washington is eyeing newer, more compliant "provincial allies" in the Afghan Public Protection Force will target some narcotraffickers--those in Karzai's orbit--while handing their new "best friends forever," Afghan warlords and Pakistani "businessmen," the lucrative opium concession.

As Peter Dale Scott documented in Drugs, Oil and War, "conscious decisions were definitely made, time after time, to ally the United States with local drug proxies." In Central- and South Asia such "drug proxies" and the financial institutions which served powerful political, intelligence and military interests such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and that institution's shadowy "Black Network," helped transform the Afghan mujaheddin into al-Qaeda.

While espousing an overt Islamist discourse, al-Qaeda and their various affiliates continued to serve Western intelligence agencies as disposable assets used in various destabilization operations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 1990s and today. While "the routes shifted with the politics of the times," Scott writes, "the CIA denominator remained constant."

Absurd? Consider this. When the U.S. Army's Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (known as Delta Force) "brought down" Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel in the early 1990s, they relied on other narcotrafficking cartels, notably the larger and more profitable Cali Cartel run by the Orejuela brothers, Gilberto Rodríguez and Miguel Rodríguez, to get the job done.

We now know with last year's release of declassified CIA and U.S. Embassy documents by the National Security Archive that this was indeed the case. More importantly, the documents provided confirmation that CIA "anti-narcotics interdiction efforts" did not target the drug trade per se, but only those criminal gangs who ran afoul of wider U.S. geostrategic interests in resource rich Colombia.

In other words, U.S. policy in the area amounted to a protected drug traffic for allies engaged in anti-left counterinsurgency operations. While U.S. Special Operations Command and the CIA were targeting Escobar's Medellín cartel, they were directly collaborating with a death squad that later morphed into the Colombian Army-allied paramilitary group, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Founded by major international narcotrafficker Carlos Castaño, the AUC were close political allies of the Orejuela brothers and the man who would later become Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe.

The parallels between these two resource rich regions couldn't be more striking. Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid described a similar pattern when the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan began in 2001.

The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies. The United States told its British allies that the war on terrorism had nothing to do with counter-narcotics. Instead, drug lords were fêted by the CIA and asked if they had any information about Osama bin Laden. Thus, the United States sent the first and clearest message to the drug lords: that they would not be targeted. (Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Viking, 2008, pp. 320-321)

Under America's ever so tolerant counterterrorist regional strategy, Afghanistan produced a staggering 8,700 metric tons of opium and now accounts for 92% of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in their 2008 World Drug Report.

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration and the Pentagon prepare a major military escalation in the region and the Taliban expand their writ, "efforts to stem cultivation of opium poppies and the narcotics trade that lines Taliban and government pockets," the Washington Post reports, "have made little discernible progress."

Rather, such "efforts" on the part of NATO allies and Islamist adversaries alike presage a strategic battle for control over the multibillion dollar heroin market. Whoever "wins," the people of South Asia will certainly suffer the consequences.

Afghanistan and Pakistan's "Salvador Option"

With a rightist insurgency raging on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the United States is resorting to a tried-and-true method to stem the rising fundamentalist tide: direct military intervention and massive violence.

On January 23, twenty-two people, including 8 to 10 alleged members of al-Qaeda, the rest civilians, were killed when CIA Predator drones slammed into houses in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

In the last six months of 2008, the CIA mounted some 30 such attacks. Inevitably, civilian casualties were high while American officials predictably reported that the strikes failed to kill "senior al-Qaeda commanders."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates informed the Senate Armed Services Committee January 27 that "both President Bush and President Obama have made clear that we will go after al-Qaida wherever al-Qaida is, and we will continue to pursue them," the Associated Press reported.

Fueled by vast economic disparities, organized crime, widespread corruption and near economic meltdown, options are limited as ruling elites in Islamabad, Kabul and Washington stagger from crisis to crisis.

But as in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, Central America during the 1980s and the Middle East today, America's militarist architects are planning to greatly escalate regional violence through proxy forces and the imperialist army itself as a means to "secure" corporate control over the resource-rich Eurasian heartland.

Welcome to South Asia's "Salvador Option."

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), since 2002 the United States has provided Pakistan with some $11.9 billion in aid, the bulk of the funds in the form of overt assistance to the Pakistani military.

With $6.67 billion in what the CRS terms Coalition Support Funds (CSF), drawn directly from the Pentagon budget and $1.56 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF), the beleaguered Pakistan People's Party (PPP) government of President Asif Ali Zadari, the husband of assassinated PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, finds itself no more capable of defending the Pakistani people from a resurgent Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) than the bankrupt Musharraf regime.

And with the Obama administration poised to ramp-up the "war on terror" by doubling the size of the U.S. troop contingent in Afghanistan, "reconstruction" will take a back seat to overt military and "counternarcotics" operations. However, a glance at the CRS' "Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan" tells the sorry tale of American hypocrisy.

While showering the Army and the corrupt, drug-tainted intelligence services with billions of dollars, including $267 million for what the Pentagon terms International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE)--that's worked out well, hasn't it!--the Pentagon has provided a scandalous $17 million for Human Rights and Democracy funding (HRDF) and an equally paltry $42 million for what Washington terms Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA).

With the Taliban and America's "former" partners, al-Qaeda, advancing on all fronts, the state's writ is shrinking by the day.

Taliban Terror in Swat Valley

Since 2007 the TTP have spread out from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), and are now within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and the capital, Islamabad.

With little support amongst the Pakistani people, but with powerful backers within sections of the shadowy Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the Army, the TTP are solidifying their grip in the NWFP. As investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad documents in a recent report from NWFP's capital, Peshawar, a city of several million people,

Restive North-West Frontier Province is not the destination of choice these days. Those who travel there go for business or family reasons, and the flight I took from the southern port city of Karachi to Peshawar was half empty; clearly, the region is no longer on the tourist map.

After touring the city for an afternoon and speaking to a variety of people, I was struck by its eerie similarity to Baghdad when I visited that capital soon after the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003--it has the distinct atmosphere of impending chaos.

That evening I chatted with a senior al-Qaeda member who told me that the group considered NWFP and southwestern Balochistan province as already wiped off the map of Pakistan as they were now militant country. Although not entirely accurate, it portends a chilling turn in the "war on terror" in which Washington will be more concerned over the stability and security of Pakistan rather than that of Afghanistan.

The indications are that a major battle will be fought in Pakistan before the annual spring offensive even begins in Afghanistan this year. ("On the Militant Trail, Part 1: A battle before a battle," Asia Times Online, January 29, 2009)

In the Swat Valley, the TTP have created a virtual state within a state, imposing a reign of terror under the guise of "Islamization." As The New York Times reports,

Every night around 8 o'clock, the terrified residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from three of Pakistan's most important cities, crowd around their radios. They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing--or a beheading. (Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Pir Zubair Shah, "In Pakistan, Radio Amplifies Terror of Taliban," The New York Times, January 25, 2009)

The situation grows more dire with each passing day. The Lahore-based Daily Times reported Monday,

Swat Taliban have released a list of 43 people--including former and incumbent ministers--who they have declared "wanted" and liable to punishment under the Taliban sharia.

The "wanted" men also include former and current members of the national and provincial assemblies, district and local nazims, officials of political parties, local elders and other influential residents of the restive valley. (Daud Khattak, "Swat Taliban Summon Politicians to Sharia Court," Daily Times, January 26, 2009)

TTP head honcho Maulana Fazlullah declared the 43 leaders targeted for liquidation were "enemies" who would be arrested or killed by his men for their alleged "crimes"--opposing the Taliban. Eight bullet-ridden bodies were recovered Wednesday in Mingora, Swat's largest city.

Incapable of winning "hearts and minds," and hunkered down in secure bunkers, the Pakistan Army rarely venture out from their fortresses. Cut-off from the population, Asia Times reports that "the manner in which the militants have established themselves in the Swat Valley is surprising as 65% of the local population--mostly from secular schools--is literate, yet the central government has failed to muster mass support against the militants."

In a bid to shore-up support, on Friday Fazlullah announced a "relaxation" in the ban on girls' education "up to the fourth grade," The News International reported.

In an interview with the BBC Urdu Service, Fazlullah declared: "We are not against girls' education. We are against obscenity and anti-Islamic practices. We want to create the right conditions so that girls could receive proper education." That's rich considering that since 2008 more than 180 girls' schools have been torched and some 900 remain indefinitely closed.

As a grim warning, the TTP leader defended the practice of beheading opponents and argued such practices were "in accordance with Islamic teachings," aping his more extreme theocratic-minded "crusader" colleagues in America who advocate the death penalty for "adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children."

Asia Times journalist Shahzad reveals that the Army "does not have a ground presence in the valley." Aside from a few "manned checkpoints in the mountains and garrisons," the Army's "offensive" consists primarily of haphazard attacks that "rain from the skies."

From redoubts high in the mountains, the military point their artillery and "fire indiscriminately at villages many kilometers away," greatly increasing civilian casualties while driving terrified residents from their homes or into the arms of the TTP. This is not a strategy with any prospect for success.

Shahzad reports the Army's top brass have come up with the ludicrous claim that the insurgency is "controlled by India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)"!

Loathe to admit--as does Washington--that their former "allies," the jihadist Frankenstein have turned on their masters and now seek to dispense with Pakistan's corrupt ruling elites altogether (the better to install a new and equally corrupt, Islamist elite, drawn from the same landlord and comprador class that currently rules the roost) the Army has resorted to playing a mendacious "blame the Hindu" game.

Shahzad writes: "This has even been repeated by one of the biggest supporters of the Taliban, retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, who has said he has no doubt that RAW is behind the unrest."

Perhaps however, there are other reasons that Gul would level charges against perennial enemy India. Could it be the good general is now looking over his shoulder as the United Nations prepares a brief charging him with support for various terrorist outfits, including al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISI proxy, Lashkar-e-Toiba, the operational asset responsible for last November's murderous attacks in Mumbai?

But as I reported January 25, local residents aren't buying the Army's tale that India is fueling the TTP insurgency or that the military is "stepping-up" actions against the militants. Outraged residents and local politicians forced to flee the area told The Independent on Sunday that "elements of the military and the militants appear to be acting together."

Far-fetched? On November 18, Major-General Faisal Alavi, a former head of Pakistan's Special Forces--sacked under mysterious circumstances--was assassinated in Rawalpindi "after threatening to expose Pakistani army generals who had made deals with Taliban militants," according to The Sunday Times.

In a letter that Alavi shared with The Sunday Times and mailed to Pakistani Army Chief of Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani shortly before being murdered, the former officer named generals he accused of collaborating with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including one with Baitullah Mehsud, a top al-Qaeda commander.

Mehsud, the main suspect in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto late last year, is also believed to have been behind a plot to bomb transport networks in several European countries including Britain, which came to light earlier this year when 14 alleged conspirators were arrested in Barcelona.

Yet, according to Alavi, a senior Pakistani general came to an arrangement with Mehsud "whereby--in return for a large sum of money--Mehsud's 3,000 armed fighters would not attack the army". (Carey Schofield, "UK May Help Find Pakistani General's Killers," The Sunday Times, December 14, 2008)

Meanwhile, Daily Times reported Thursday that "25 projects operated by USAID in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and settled areas of the NWFP have been temporarily closed over security concerns."

According to Daily Times USAID, once a front for CIA covert operations in Asia and Latin America, were working on projects to enhance "the government's legitimacy and writ in FATA" as well as projects meant to improve "economic and social conditions for local communities, and supporting sustainable development." Due to the deteriorating political conditions in the area, "health and educational services" and infrastructure development projects have been forced to shut down.

Ominously, part of the money doled out to "Military Inc." by the Pentagon is for what United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) calls Foreign Internal Defense (FID) a key pillar of Special Forces' Unconventional Warfare doctrine. As I reported December 19, UW establishes a "litmus test" for waging irregular warfare which is conducted "by, with, or through surrogates." Indeed, as revealed in a document published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks,

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Unconventional Warfare, FM 3-05.130, Headquarters, Department of the Army, September 2008, p. 1-3)

According to a new document published by Wikileaks, Foreign Internal Defense is described thusly:

FID is a joint, multinational, and interagency effort. SOF, particularly SF and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) and Civil Affairs (CA) forces are well suited to conduct or support FID operations because these forces have unique functional skills and cultural and language training. FID is a legislatively directed activity for SOF (although it is not exclusively a SOF mission) under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act. SOF may conduct FID unilaterally in the absence of any other military effort, support other ongoing military or civilian assistance efforts, or support the employment of conventional forces. (Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations, FM 3-05.202, Headquarters, Department of the Army, February 2007, p. 1-1, hereafter "FID")

Significantly, as in El Salvador, Colombia and a score of other global "hot spots" tagged for resource extraction or geopolitical control by America's corporatist masters, the USSOC manual calls for the direct training of paramilitary forces, often allied with far-right political parties and international narcotics syndicates in the "Host Nation" (HN).

But to gauge the effectiveness of FID "unilateral" operations by U.S. Special Forces, one need only look over the Pakistani border into southern Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's "Salvador Option"

Vying with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for an "Oscar" for lack of discipline, utter disregard for the lives of civilians as well as those of their reputed allies, U.S. Special Forces and CIA paramilitary operatives are veritable assassination squads on a par with their Taliban and al-Qaeda adversaries in terms of sheer brutality and callousness.

In Laghman Province, Special Operations Forces conducted a series of raids on January 7 and 16 in Masamat, in which 32 people were killed, described by military spokespeople predictably as "Taliban insurgents."

Without warning, commandos broke down doors and "unleashed dogs" on unsuspecting villagers asleep at the time. The January 7 raid killed 13 civilians and wounded nine others. Local residents were so enraged by the assault that they threatened to march on the American military base in the district capital, Mehtarlam. The New York Times reports,

The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after an American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including 2 women and 3 children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai. (Carlotta Gall, "From Hospital, Afghans Rebut U.S. Account," The New York Times, January 26, 2009)

One of the victims of the January 7 raid was a man named Qasem Khan, a member of the U.S.-allied Afghan Border Police who was home on leave. Some allies.

His brother, Wazarat Khan, said the man was killed as soon as he looked out his front door in response to "shots fired." He told Gall, "We did not think they were Americans; we thought they were thieves," he said. "They killed my brother right in the doorway."

Another victim of marauders allegedly occupying Afghanistan in order to "liberate" Afghanis from vicious Taliban killers, Darwaish Muhammad, 18, was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds after coming to the assistance of a neighbor calling for help. Gall reports,

Mr. Muhammad said he and two others rushed to help carry the woman's son on a rope bed down a slope outside the village to get help. They were 10 minutes from the village when a helicopter fired a rocket at them, killing the wounded man and two of the bearers. He and the mother were badly wounded, he said. (NYT, op. cit.)

Operating as a law unto themselves, Special Operations Forces, part of a continuing legacy of the criminal Bush regime, do not coordinate their actions with either their NATO partners or the Afghan government. But while SOF plan and carry out tactical operations on their own, they do have one critical Afghan constituency: narcotrafficking warlords. As investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid documented,

When CIA-U.S. SOF teams set up bases along the Pakistan border to gather intelligence about al-Qaeda, they hired Pashtun tribesmen, paying them up to two hundred dollars a month, plus bonuses to their commanders, when a top monthly salary in Kabul was only fifty dollars. These mercenaries--called the Afghan Militia Force, or AMF--were still being hired as late as 2006. SOF officers had the authority to employ up to one hundred AMF to guard their camps and act as drivers and interpreters. The AMF's Afghan commanders received cash, weapons, uniforms, communications equipment, and their pick of unearthed Taliban weapons caches, which they then sold on the black market--and which were invariably bought by the Taliban. These commanders became an enormously destabilizing factor in the country, as they considered themselves as unaccountable as their American commanders. The irony was not lost on the Afghan people. Although the Americans had liberated them from the evil of the Taliban, they had brought back another evil: the warlords. (Descent into Chaos, New York: Viking, 2008, p. 131)

In 2008 alone, some 4,000 civilian deaths were reported. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission "warned that the lack of accountability of those conducting such raids, and the lack of redress for civilian victims, was stoking resentment," Gall writes. In a December report, the commission concluded, "The degree of backlash and community outrage that they provoke suggests they may often not be an advisable tactic within the Afghan context."

No matter! According to the FID document,

The strategic end state is an HN capable of successfully integrating military force with other instruments of national power to eradicate lawlessness, insurgency, subversion, and terrorism. Ultimately, FID efforts are successful if they preclude the need to deploy large numbers of U.S. military personnel and equipment. Types of military operations related to FID are nation assistance (NA) and/or support to counterinsurgency (COIN); counterterrorism (CT); peace operations (PO); DOS support to counterdrug (CD) operations; and foreign humanitarian assistance (FHA). These categories may, to some degree, include FID operations as an integral component in supporting the fight against subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, and terrorism. FID programs are distinct and will vary from country to country to support that country's IDAD [Internal Defense and Development] program. (FID, op. cit. p. 1-2)

But what happens when FID actually leads to an increase of "lawlessness, insurgency, subversion, and terrorism," the direct result of USSOC's undisciplined actions in the field? Well then, its time to administer a strong dose of perception management! Citing the requirement for a robust "informational instrument," FM 3-05.202 avers:

Effective use of public diplomacy, public affairs activities and PSYOPS are essential to a FID program. Accurate portrayal of U.S. FID efforts through positive information programs can influence worldwide perceptions of the U.S. FID programs and the HN's desire to embrace changes and improvements necessary to correct its problems. (FID, op. cit. p. 1-3)

Under the rubric of Psychological Operations, USSOC planners describe a process whose goal is to defeat insurgency and that PSYOP "can be used to gain the support of the people."

PSYOP can support the mission by discrediting the insurgent forces to neutral groups, creating dissension among the insurgents themselves, and supporting defector programs. Divisive programs create dissension, disorganization, low morale, subversion, and defection within the insurgent forces. Also important are national programs to win insurgents over to the government side with offers of amnesty and rewards. Motives for surrendering can range from personal rivalries and bitterness to disillusionment and discouragement. Pressure from the security forces has persuasive power. (FID, op. cit., p. 4-10)

With an Orwellian sense of humor that would be amusing were it not deadly to those who have the misfortune of encountering SOF teams hell bent on winning their "hearts and minds" even if it means blowing them to smithereens, FID theoreticians declare without a trace of irony:

Each SF unit operation integrates planned PSYOP activities to establish a favorable U.S. image in the HN and further the success of the SF unit mission. SF units coordinate with trained PSYOP assets to capitalize on positive mission successes. SF units can sometimes use HN and commercial media assets effectively to influence public opinion and pass information. (FID, op. cit., p. 4-12)

Try selling that to the citizens of Masamat!

But wait, there's more! USSOC touts the "success" of their "mission" in El Salvador as an applicable model for countering South Asian insurgencies.

For 12 years, beginning in 1979, the United States assisted the El Salvador military in becoming a more professional and effective fighting force against the Communist-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. A U.S. military group assisted the El Salvadoran army by establishing a facility for basic and advanced military training. SF advisors, primarily from the 7th Special Forces Group, served with El Salvadoran units to support small-unit training and logistics. The advisors helped the El Salvadoran military become more professional and better organized, while advising in the conduct of pacification and counterguerrilla operations. Advisors were also present at the brigade levels assisting in operations and intelligence activities. From 1985 to 1992, just over 140 SF officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) served as advisors to a 40-battalion army. From a poorly staffed and led force of 8,000 soldiers in 1980, SF trainers created a hard-hitting COIN force of 54,000 by 1986. U.S. forces supported U.S. interests by creating an effective COIN force that fought the guerrillas to a standstill and established the groundwork for a negotiated settlement by 1991. (FID, op. cit., p. A-6)

Translation: between 1980-1991 SOF "assistance" to the brutal Salvadoran military produced 75,000 civilian deaths, by and large the result of Army massacres carried out in tandem with far-right narcotrafficking death squads who ruled the roost with an iron fist.

The "hard-hitting COIN force," while shying away from battles with tough FMLN guerrillas, kidnapped and "disappeared" peasants, labor organizers, students, Catholic priests and nuns, or just plain folks caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, often subjecting them to hideous torture before lining the roads with their brutalized corpses as an "object lesson" in the fabulous workings of Reaganite democracy.

Today, Pentagon planners and their cheerleaders in the corporate media are touting these tactics as a "fresh approach" to beat back the fundamentalists. In Afghanistan and Pakistan today, to ensure that effective measures of "populace and resource control" (PRC) are brought to bear to stem the insurgent tide, FID theorists recommend widespread political repression and panoptic methods of surveilling the "target" population. The authors' aver:

Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme. PRC measures can also include the following:

* Curfews or blackouts.
* Travel restrictions.
* Restricted residential areas, such as protected villages or resettlement areas.
* Registration and pass systems.
* Control of sensitive items (resources control) of critical supplies, such as weapons, food, and fuel.
* Checkpoints, searches, and roadblocks.
* Surveillance, censorship, and press control.
* Restriction of activity that applies to selected groups (labor unions, political groups, and so on). (FID, op. cit. p. A-12)

Not exactly a recipe for building a democratic society based on the rule of law and human rights!

It isn't as if the Pentagon and the CIA hadn't tried this before. It should be recalled, "the Salvador option" (before it was known as such) was employed in Central Asia during the anti-Soviet Afghan "jihad" of the 1980s. CIA and SOF paramilitary "specialists" showered billions of dollars in training and other forms of assistance--in league with the corrupt Saudi monarchy, Gulf State fat cats, and a gaggle of European and Israeli intelligence operatives and arms dealers who shared their expertise and matched American largess dollar for dollar.

But when the smoke cleared, like marauding Borg the Yankee Empire left nothing but a wide swathe of death and destruction in its wake whilst spawning al-Qaeda, a nexus of disparate jihadists for whom "Islamism" is a cover for Western destabilization operations, organized crime and nihilistic violence under the cynical banner of "monotheism and combat."

CIA-ISI Jihadi "Frankenstein" Sows Chaos, Reaps Death

With 180 girls' schools torched since 2008 in Pakistan's Swat Valley and some 900 indefinitely closed, the future for education for some 125,000 young women is under dire threat by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The latest bombings took place Monday in the district capital, Mingora, "once considered the safest place in Swat," according to The Guardian. Five girls' schools were leveled by TTP militants who last week decreed a permanent ban on education for girls.

In recent weeks, residents who have crossed the TTP have been strung-up from trees, beaten, or had their shops destroyed while markets have been ruled "no go" areas for women.

First mobilized during the 1980s by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) as "plausibly deniable" assets to wage "holy war" against Afghanistan's socialist government, organized crime and drug-linked jihadi groups now threaten Pakistan itself. Call it "blowback" on steroids.

As the Obama administration prepares to the double the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, attacks in Pakistan by the American-led NATO coalition will only accelerate the splintering of the nuclear-armed South Asian nation and fuel new attacks by international terrorist outfits such as "former" allies, the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda.

Amply warned by South Asian and Middle Eastern experts in the 1970s who predicted a slow-moving but inevitable catastrophe for the region, short-term Cold War "gains" against the Soviet adversary trumped long-term strategic planning which, if America were a sane country, would have worked to strengthen, rather than undermine, progressive regional forces.

Despite the inescapable conclusion that the CIA's Islamist Frankenstein monster is running amok, one can only surmise that America's corporatist masters continue to view religiously-inspired neofascists as a reliable auxiliary force to advance geopolitical goals against their capitalist rivals.

As I documented in "Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century: U.S. Surrogates, Terrorists and Narcotraffickers," (Antifascist Calling, December 19, 2008) despite the catastrophes wrought by American global gamesmanship, for United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) and the CIA, this disastrous paradigm is still fully operational.

Indeed a September 2008 USSOC planning document, first disclosed by Wikileaks, avers that unconventional warfare "must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces." For the people of Pakistan, the "irregular forces" ranged against them are driving the country headlong over the edge of a precipice. Unfortunately however, this is not by accident.

As Swiss investigative journalist Richard Labévière wrote, describing Pakistan's descent into chaos, "The Pakistani morass and its profound strategic implications for all of Central Asia have become one of the most alarming and chaotic scenes on the planet. As one of the most strategic areas of the next millennium slips into a criminal state, Uncle Sam looks on with cynicism (if not benevolence)."

Citing the confluence of interests amongst American corporate grifters and far-right Islamist terror networks, Labévière pointedly cites a top U.S. intelligence officials' approval of the reactionary forces set in motion by America's anti-Soviet Afghan gambit as a signpost for future destabilization campaigns:

"The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army," explains a former CIA analyst. "The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia." In a certain sense, the Cold War is still going on. For years Graham Fuller, former Deputy Director of the National Council on Intelligence at the CIA, has been talking up the "modernizing virtues" of the Islamists, insisting on their anti-Statist concept of the economy. Listening to him, you would almost take the Taleban and their Wahhabi allies for liberals. "Islam, in theory at least, is firmly anchored in the traditions of free trade and private enterprise," wrote Fuller. "The prophet was a trader, as was his first wife. Islam does not glorify the State's role in the economy." (Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam, New York: Algora Publishing, 2000, p. 6)

But inevitably, facts on the ground put paid the mad schemes of imperialist architects such as Graham Fuller and his acolytes. Fast forward a decade and it becomes all-too-painfully clear it is the Afghan and Pakistani people who are paying the price in blood for America's bankrupt policies. Having armed, financed and provided an ample array of targets for "free trade liberals" such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda--subsisting on the illicit profits of the international narcotics trade and other dubious ventures--Yankee hubris, as historian Chalmers Johnson reminds us, has called forth the goddess of divine retribution, Nemesis, on all our heads.

Medievalism in Swat Valley: Pakistan, and America's, Future?

While moves to impose sharia law on the Pakistani people through violence is the alleged intent of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and their al-Qaeda "brothers," more mundane, though far-more worldly concerns motivate the jihadists: state power and the loot such a position would afford enterprising charlatans.

What better means than control--through fear--of a terrorized population forced to look the other way as a gang of "holy warriors" steal their resources and process heroin on an industrial scale while turning a quick profit in the bargain!

Investigative journalist Amir Mir, writing in the Lahore-based newspaper The News International reports that

Around 10,000 TTP militants have been pitted against 15,000 Army troops since Oct 22, 2007, when the [Swat Valley military] operation was officially launched. Leading the charge against the Pakistan Army is Maulana Fazlullah, also known as Mullah Radio for the illegal FM radio channel he operates. Through his FM broadcasts, still operational despite being banned by the NWFP [North West Frontier Province] government, the firebrand keeps inspiring his followers to implement Shariah, fight the Army and establish his authority in the area.

Military authorities have repeatedly alleged that Fazlullah, who has thousands of armed supporters ready to challenge the security forces on his command, has close links with the Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives. The cleric has already become a household name in Swat, as his Shaheen Commando Force is destroying and occupying government buildings, blowing up police stations, bridges, basic health units and hotels and burning girls' schools. ("Amid Rising TTP Gains, Army Adopts New Strategy," The News International, January 21, 2009)

Since the military launched an offensive against the clericalist thugs, indiscriminate Army attacks against the civilian population have wrecked havoc. In addition to burning down nearly 200 girls' schools, the TTP have torched 80 video shops, 22 barber shops and have destroyed some 20 bridges in the mountainous region. Mir reports the TTP have carried out some 165 bomb attacks against security forces, including 17 suicide bombings and increasingly sophisticated remote-controlled IED attacks.

So serious has the situation grown in the Swat Valley, that 800 provincial police, half the stated total according to The News International, have either deserted or left the area under pretext of going on "extended leave." Other observers contend that the TTP and the Army are collaborating together.

Local politicians who have fled the valley claim that "elements of the military and the militants appear to be acting together." Bushra Gohara, the Vice-President of the Awami National Party told The Independent on Sunday, "Even if they are not, there needs to be a complete review of the military's strategy."

"The suspicion of collusion, said a local government official in the largest town, Mingora," according to the IoS, "is based on the proximity of army and Taliban checkposts, each 'a mile away from the other'."

Reports indicate that Fazlullah's militia now effectively controls the Swat Valley. "Under these circumstances," Mir writes, "the state writ has shrunk from Swat's 5,337 square kilometres to the limits of its regional Mingora headquarters, which is a city of just 36 square kilometres."

In Mingora itself, once a prosperous urban hub that thrived on the tourist trade, the nature of the crisis can be gauged by the number of bodies that appear each morning after a night of terror. According to Mir, shopkeepers are now finding "four or five dead bodies hung over the poles or trees."

Unsurprisingly, it is the civilian population who have suffered the worst depredations of the TTP and the Pakistani Army. Hemmed-in on all sides, a military spokesperson conceded that a third of the population has fled the area since the Army launched its offensive.

Creating a dual-power situation as the state's hold in the area shrinks, some "70 Taliban courts are now ruling on hundreds of cases of 'immoral activity' every week," The Sunday Times reported.

Fueled by the repressive Saudi-inspired Wahhabi doctrine that fired the Afghan mujahedin during America's anti-Soviet Cold War "jihad," the TTP have embarked on a rule-by-fear strategy that seeks to impose "Sharia law" on an unwilling--and unarmed--population, as part of its long-term strategy to seize state power.

As in Afghanistan under the Taliban however, it is women who face the harshest sanctions by the jihadi thugs. The refusal to wear a veil or dancing in public are "offenses" punishable by death. The Sunday Times averred,

The emergence of a parallel Taliban legal system has a sinister objective. "This is our first step towards the implementation of sharia in Swat," said Muslim Khan, a Taliban spokesman. In the next phase, Khan said, the courts would begin to carry out harsher punishments, such as execution or chopping off hands.

Villagers said the Taliban were already killing people who defied their orders. "They didn’t even spare barbers and women coming out of markets without wearing their veils," said a Mingora resident.

There have been 51 Taliban executions since the start of the year, he added. The victims include politicians, security men, dancers, prostitutes and shopkeepers selling alcohol. (Daud Khattak, "Taliban's deadly 'justice' cows Pakistan," The Sunday Times, January 18, 2009)

Ominously, Fazlullah's state within a state is not staffed primarily by madrassa-educated cannon-fodder, but draw on a surplus of former Army and intelligence officers to fill the ranks, raising suspicions that the TTP enjoys powerful backing from ruling elites.

According to Mir, the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM) and TTP are composed of two Shuras, or councils. One is the Ulema Shura that advises the group on "religious polices," while the Executive Shura, "is the highest policy-making organ of the TNSM, which has a large number of ex-servicemen, including retired commissioned officers, as its members."

Since 9/11, under intense pressure by their American "allies" in the "war on terror," the Army and ISI have been partially purged by military and political elites who rule the roost. However, disaffected ISI cadre who never endorsed former President-General Pervez Musharraf's half-hearted--some would say, deceitful--"break" with the Army's own creation, the Taliban, continue to sponsor retrograde jihadist outfits.

Still allied with the Taliban, al-Qaeda and home-grown terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), elements burrowed deep within the state, including prominent former generals closely associated with former dictator, General Zia ul-Haq and the CIA, are actively conspiring to destabilize the civilian government.

Indeed, last November's terrorist assault on Mumbai, a joint venture amongst disaffected elements of the security/intelligence apparatus, LET and organized crime-linked assets such as Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company, was a shot across the bow of President Asif Ali Zadari's administration meant to further polarize the country and sow doubt amongst ruling class elites as to the efficacy of civilian rule.

Staggering from crisis to crisis, under heavy pressure from imperialism to "show results" for the billions of dollars in "aid" showered on the military by Washington, time is running out as the jihadi Frankenstein flexes its muscles.

From the Lal Masjid Siege to the Bhutto Assassination

Fazlullah's rise, and the TTP's assault on the people of the Swat Valley, can be directly linked to the fall-out from the July 2007 Red Mosque siege.

When the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) controversy exploded, the state was forced, though some would say dragged kicking and screaming, to act against brothers Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the al-Qaeda-linked leaders of the Mosque.

It wasn't always that way. Since its founding in 1965 in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, the Red Mosque enjoyed patronage from influential members of the government, primes ministers, army chiefs and presidents, according to BBC News.

During the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, the Red Mosque played a prominent role in the recruitment and training of fighters and was supported handsomely by the ISI when the Taliban was launched in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. During the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, many Red Mosque fighters were captured or killed by U.S. forces and Northern Alliance militia fighters.

In other words, high state officials, including intelligence chieftains such as Hamid Gul and Mahmoud Ahmad were staunch backers of the Ghazi brothers, hard-line advocates of dictator General Zia ul-Haq's program to "Islamize" Pakistani society come hell or high water. In this bankrupt project to destroy what little remained of Pakistani democracy and civil society, Zia and his retinue of Islamist generals were generously supported by the United States.

Former ISI General Hamid Gul told Asia Times, "It is a pity that our army was preparing youths to seize Lal Qala [the Red Fort of Delhi] and they ended up seizing the Lal Masjid." According to a recent report in The News International, Gul is now wanted by the U.S. "charged ... with providing financial assistance to Kabul-based criminal groups and involvement in spotting, assessing, recruiting and training young men from seminaries," as well as accusations that the ex-general has been "assisting the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in developing high-tech weapons."

Gun battles erupted in 2007 after gangs of burqa-clad seminary students occupied a children's library, kidnapped a group of Chinese women accused of being "prostitutes," and after repeated forays into surrounding commercial districts trashed CD shops accused of selling "pornography." But when the "students" demanded strict enforcement of sharia law, the state's hand was forced.

When police failed to stamp-out the mini-rebellion in the nation's capital, the Army was brought in. By the time the smoke cleared, Abdul Ghazi had been killed and his brother Abdul Aziz was arrested after attempting to flee the scene dressed in a woman's burqa, sparking outrage amongst the fundamentalists and former high-ranking intelligence officials. Conflicting reports claim that anywhere between 200 and 1,000 people lost their lives during the siege. In the aftermath, according to multiple press reports, a huge arms' cache was recovered, including stocks of AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers.

After the raid, Fazlullah joined forces with TTP and Pakistani al-Qaeda "emir" Baitullah Mehsud, "in a bid to provide an umbrella to all insurgent movements operating in several tribal agencies and settled areas of the NWFP," according to journalist Amir Mir.

Scant months after the Lal Masjid affair and in the midst of tumultuous nation-wide demonstrations by tens of thousands of democracy activists, including lawyers and left-wing labor militants demanding the restoration of Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry, sacked by the Musharraf regime after ordering the government to account for Pakistan's "disappeared," Benazir Bhutto was murdered in Rawalpindi.

In the aftermath of Bhutto's December 27, 2007 assassination, state officials alleged that Mehsud claimed responsibility for her murder, a claim he denied. The "targeted killing" of Pakistan's most popular political figure followed on the heels of the October 2007 Karachi bombing that killed 150 of Bhutto's supporters when she returned home from exile.

The official story has undergone several contradictory metamorphoses. Shortly after Bhutto's murder it was alleged that Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), another banned terror group linked to al-Qaeda, were the reputed authors. The story then changed and al-Qaeda commander Mustafa Abu al-Yazid claimed responsibility, telling Asia Times, "We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat the mujahideen." Many analysts believe these serial fabrications by the government were meant to muddy the waters and conceal the true architects of the attacks.

In a letter to Musharraf before her murder, published by the Karachi-based newspaper Dawn, Bhutto named four persons involved in an alleged plot to kill her: Intelligence Bureau (IB) Chief Ijaz Shah, former chief minister of Punjab Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, former chief minister of Sindh Arbab Ghulam Rahim, and the former ISI chief, Hamid Gul. All are prominent pro-Islamist figures within the intelligence and security establishment who favored a continuation of Pakistan's policy of fielding terrorist proxy armies.

While first claiming that Bhutto was killed when she struck her head on the latch of her SUV sunroof fracturing her skull as the result of a suicide bomb blast, video footage surfaced showing a gunman firing several shots at the popular politician prior to the bomb's detonation. This would increase the likelihood that the suicide bomber's actual target was the gunman and therefore, part of a clean-up operation meant to conceal the identities of those who ghostwrote the Bhutto assassination script.

However, conflicting claims of responsibility, the hasty manner in which the security services removed all traces of forensic evidence from the crime scene and threats by police and intelligence officials against physicians who examined Bhutto's body, fueled speculation that Islamist elements within ISI and the Army--or the state itself--either manipulated the militants or carried out the terrorist outrages in a move to bolster Musharraf's waning grip on power.

Though allegedly on the outs with the clericalists, Musharraf was a staunch supporter of the Army's policy of fielding "irregular forces" comprised of far-right thugs such as Lashkar or the virulently anti-Shia communalist group Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP) to carry out "plausibly deniable" strikes against India or internal left-wing political opponents.

Originally founded in 1985 at the behest of dictator General Zia ul-Haq to liquidate secular and leftist forces opposed to his moves to "Islamize" Pakistani society with the blessings of the CIA, the SSP was "banned" in 2002 but quickly regrouped under the banner of Millat-e-Islamia. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was an SSP member as was his uncle, the al-Qaeda operative and alleged architect of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Echoes of the Lal Masjid affair continue to reverberate. On September 21, 2008 a massive truck bomb was detonated outside the Marriot Hotel in downtown Islamabad, killing 60 and wounding some 260 people, virtually obliterating the five-star hotel. Some 700 Pakistanis had gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast. If the bomber had managed to drive the truck into the lobby, the toll would have been far higher.

The conclusion drawn was bleak: if the Marriot could be hit in one of the most secure and upscale neighborhoods in the heart of Pakistan's capital, then no one was safe. It was feared that the bombers' intent was to destabilize and possibly spark an Army coup against the first civilian government in nine years.

With little to hope for from the Army and ISI, President Asif Ali Zadari has expanded the civilian-led Special Investigations Group (SIG), a distinct antiterrorist branch of the Federal Investigations Agency (FIA), The Guardian reported earlier this month. The SIG had languished under Musharraf. According to investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott Clark,

On December 14, the British PM flew to Islamabad to announce a £6m "pact against terror", saying he wanted to "remove the chain" that led from the mountains of Pakistan to the streets of Britain. A significant part of the funding was intended for the SIG currently a tight-knit cell of 37 full-time specialists that was to be expanded into a 300-strong force with an investigation division, an armed wing, an intelligence department and a research section. In return, Britain asked for access to the SIG's raw data and captured extremists who might illuminate British plots. ("On the Trail of Pakistan's Taliban," The Guardian, 10 January 2009)

The need for security would indeed be high. On March 11, 2008, the anniversary of the Madrid transport attacks, a suicide bomber struck the SIG's provincial office in Lahore, killing 25 people, including 13 officers. Tariq Pervez, the SIG's head told The Guardian that since the end of 2007, "suicide strikes from this region had killed 597 security force personnel and 1,523 civilians, including Benazir Bhutto on December 27."

Despite attempts to recruit--or co-opt--poverty-stricken, often unwilling young members of TNSM/TTP head-honcho Baitullah Mehsud's extended clan in Waziristan for use as cannon-fodder, Pervez told The Guardian its a hard sell given Mehsud's brutal methods of dealing with those who oppose him.

Indeed, according to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, when 600 tribal elders spoke out against the TNSM/TTP in 2005, Mehsud had each of them sent a needle, black thread and 1,000 rupees with which to buy some cloth to stitch their own funeral shrouds: all of them were subsequently murdered.

The situation has deteriorated to such a degree for U.S./NATO "coalition" forces that America's main supply route into Afghanistan from western Pakistan's tribal belt, that the military "has obtained permission to move troop supplies through Russia and Central Asia, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in the Middle East, said on Tuesday," according to The New York Times.

In December, hundreds of NATO supply trucks were torched in Peshawar by Taliban, TTP and al-Qaeda fighters and Pakistani truck drivers are now refusing to drive along the supply route.

Frankenstein Turns on its Master: "Round Up the Usual Suspects!"

The alliance forged in the wake of the Lal Masjid siege and the Bhutto assassination amongst forces loyal to Maulana Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud's TTP, Mullah Mohammed Omar's Afghan Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Afghan-Arab database, al-Qaeda, are chickens that have come home to roost for U.S. imperialism. But it is the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who are paying the price.

Despite the grave threats to the people of Central, South Asia and the Middle East posed by a resurgence of far-right fundamentalism sponsored by the United States, Washington still continues to view Islamist terror and organized crime-linked networks such as al-Qaeda and their related complex of jihadi groups as "off-the-shelf," plausibly deniable intelligence assets.

Notwithstanding the severe global capitalist economic meltdown, geopolitical expansion into regions of strategic and economic interest to the United States is a top priority of the Obama administration. A central pillar of the American policy despite "regime change" in Washington, is the destabilization of Iran. As Seymour Hersh reported, the U.S. via their ISI and Saudi "allies" are arming and financing Pakistani-based jihadi groups such as Jundullah to target Iran.

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. "The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda," Baer told me. "These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers--in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties." Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People's Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. "This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists," [Vali] Nasr told me. "They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture." The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support. ("Preparing the Battlefield," The New Yorker, July 7, 2008)

While North American and European Muslim communities remain a target of repressive "counterterrorist" policies that demonize Muslims and Arabs as dangerous "others," internal "enemies" and "usual suspects" to be preyed upon by police and intelligence agencies, real, not fictional, terrorist networks continue to operate, indeed thrive, with impunity. Here, as elsewhere, short-term tactical advantage over capitalist rivals trump democratic processes and economic well-being based on social justice.

As security analyst and historian, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed documented in a Briefing Paper prepared for the British Parliament in the wake of al-Qaeda's 2005 London transport attacks,

The government appears unable to fully extract itself from these strategic interests, continuing to tolerate Islamist extremist networks in the UK, including successor organizations to al-Muhajiroun, and showing an inexplicable unwillingness to investigate them; displaying ongoing reluctance to arrest and prosecute leading extremists despite abundant evidence of their incitement to terrorism, murder, violence and racial hatred (with serious action delayed until public pressure is brought to bear); and refusing to investigate key al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist suspects based or formerly based in the UK connected to 7/7 and other terrorist attacks. In this dire situation, proposing the extension of state power through yet further anti-terror legislation, as the Brown government is now doing, can never hope to contribute to real security. For in this context, such legislation not only fails to rectify the multiple failures of domestic and international security policy behind the paralysis of the British national security system; it simply lends unprecedented powers of social control to a paralysed system operating according to a defunct and dangerous intelligence paradigm. (Inside the Crevice: Islamist terror networks and the 7/7 intelligence failure, London: Institute for Policy Research and Development, August 2007)

Much the same can be said for the United States and its myopic "counterterrorist" policies that rely on the demonization of entire communities, driftnet surveillance of the population, the infiltration of provocateurs into antiwar, socialist and left-wing organizations with no demonstrable ties to international terrorism, and the induced climate of suspicion and fear that breed social paralysis in the face of grave, contemporaneous ruling class threats to democracy.

As a tsunami of Predator drones rain remote-controlled death on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as the Obama administration prepares a major military escalation in Central- and South Asia, girls' schools continue to burn in the Swat Valley with matchbooks labeled "Made in the USA."

Nuclear Proliferation, Terrorism and Deceit. America's Deadly Game

Call it a coincidence, but one headline you're not likely to have read just days after the Mumbai terrorist attacks concerned the quiet release by Swiss authorities of Urs Tinner. One of the key players in Pakistan's nuclear proliferation network run by "rogue" scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and the military, Tinner had been held in administrative detention for nearly four years.

This is all the more ironic given that Dawood Ibrahim, the drugs kingpin, terrorist operative and underworld crime boss who allegedly helped infiltrate Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) commandos into Mumbai, is long-suspected of providing similar "expertise" to A. Q. Khan's shadowy nuclear black market through a web of dodgy Dubai-based companies.

When the Khan scandal broke, some analysts wondered whether the United States "will at least conduct a thorough enquiry into the involvement of smugglers and black-marketers in the process of proliferation."

Asia Times claimed "that a Dubai company run by Ibrahim, which has suddenly disappeared, was involved in procuring nuclear-related material from Pakistan," and then shipping it to the highest bidder. To date, no such investigation has been publicly disclosed.

Just as pertinent however, is the security of the Pakistani people, not just its nuclear arsenal. With formidable internal threats from al-Qaeda and neo-Taliban elements linked to the Army and the shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and external threats from both the United States and geopolitical rival India, Pakistani secular and civil society is under siege.

However, at the center of this spider's web of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and deceit sits the United States. After all, Khan's shady activities have been well-known for decades and yet, to secure advantage over their capitalist rivals, the U.S. has been content to exploit Pakistan as a cats' paw for destabilizing covert operations in dozens of global hot spots from Asia to the Balkans and beyond. But you wouldn't know this by even the most cursory perusal of The New York Times.

One (among many) examples of the Times' shoddy reporting and journalistic duplicity in the service of Pentagon war planners, was brought to light by Russ Wellen in Asia Times. Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured an alarmist screed by David Sanger, "The Worst Pakistan Nightmare for Obama."

Sanger claims that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal faces the threat of being hijacked by jihadi groups intent on provoking "a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai ... officials told me they feared that one of the attackers' motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events."

Neoconservative hawks Frederic Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon, respective members of the "Attack Iran" lobby at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, told Sanger, the "best bet" would be for American forces and the Pakistanis "to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place ... like New Mexico ... More Likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan."

But as Brian Cloughley, a security analyst who writes for Jane's and has contributed to the University of Bradford's Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU) told Asia Times, moving nuclear warheads to remote locations is precisely the worst possible method of securing atomic arms, one that more likely would increase the chances of seizure by extremist elements.

Cloughley accuses Sanger of "cheap, nasty and silly journalese at its most risible depths." As in other reporting by Sanger on the Khan network, alarmist rhetoric, half-truths and outright mendacity is the preferred method, particularly when it comes to covering-up Washington's complicity.

While I necessarily focus here on Pakistan's corrupt nuclear proliferation regime, a state-sanctioned program from which key military and civilian leaders profited handsomely, the biggest proliferator of this deadly technology is Washington. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported earlier this month, "the United States spent over $52 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008, but only 10 percent of that went toward preventing a nuclear attack through slowing and reversing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology."

Why? With profits for America's largest defense firms hanging in the balance, real peace and security are always trumped by the corporatist bottom line.

A Web of Shady Connections

While Washington claims that the 2004 exposure of some elements of Khan's network as a "victory" for its alleged antiproliferation efforts, key players including Khan and his top associates, remain out of reach.

By portraying itself as a "helpless giant" dependent on Pakistani "assistance" in its fraudulent "war on terror," the United States is covering-up its own complicity and silence. As in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the current Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, corporate media, primarily The New York Times, are key players obfuscating Washington's role.

The BBC reported in June that Khan's chief associate, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan "businessman," was quietly released from custody after four years detention by Malaysian authorities. While President Bush had described Tahir as A. Q. Khan's "chief financial officer and money launderer," the United States has "no plans" to seek Tahir's extradition.

This is all the more remarkable considering that the Malaysian Police investigation into the Khan network found that Tahir's family was closely connected with Dawood Ibrahim and that the D-Company's terrorist don had helped the Pakistani nuclear establishment in their clandestine procurement and smuggling activities. According to numerous reports, D-Company has long had a major base of operations in Malaysia.

For years Tinner, along with brother Marco and father, Friedrich, were active in the smuggling network run out of Kahuta, the site of Pakistan's Khan Research Laboratories (KRL). Located near Rawalpindi, KRL is the primary fissile-material production facility and long-range missile development site. For their enterprising efforts the Tinners' allegedly earned millions in commissions.

According to reports, they were instrumental in setting up and operating a machining facility in Malaysia that produced centrifuge components for the production of highly-enriched uranium (HRE). The key element in manufacturing a weapon, thousands of centrifuges were sold by the network to governments such as Libya, North Korea and allegedly Iran, that were seeking to skirt restrictions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

That firm, Scope, was a subsidiary of the Scomi Engineering Group. Urs Tinner was hired by Tahir in 2002 as a full-time "consultant." According to the Malaysian Police investigation, Tinner routinely erased all technical drawings kept in his computer at the Scope plant. When his "term of service" ended in October 2003, Tinner retrieved the hard disc from the company's computer "designated for his use," and gave the impression that he "did not wish to leave any trace of his presence there."

Murkier still, are the relations between Tahir and the son of Malaysia's current Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi. Kamaluddin Badawi sat on the board of a firm plugged into the proliferation network. In 2007, Asia Times reported, that Scomi built

components for centrifuges that were destined for use in Libya's nuclear program. Scomi Group had since acknowledged that its subsidiary Scomi Precision filled a contract negotiated by Buhary to supply machine parts to Libya.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press reveal that Buhary was the chief financial officer of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's underground nuclear-proliferation network. How he was able to forge such high-powered alliances with Malaysia's political elite is a question that remains unanswered. When the scandal broke, Abdullah said Tahir would remain free because there was no evidence of wrongdoing. (Ioannis Gatsiounis, "Malaysia's axis mysteriously shifting," Asia Times Online, August 28, 2007)

While Tahir will continue to be "under police watch," no charges have ever been brought against Kamaluddin. According to the BBC, his firm was investigated "but cleared of wrongdoing." How convenient!

Activities by Khan and the nuclear establishment were well-known to the CIA back in the 1970s. However, when Dutch authorities were alerted by Frits Veerman, a former colleague of Khan's at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO), the Dutch partner of the European consortium Urenco, long after Khan had stolen Urenco plans for constructing high-speed centrifuges, nothing was done. For his troubles, Veerman was threatened with prosecution by Dutch security officials who demanded his silence. According to investigative journalists David Armstrong and Joseph Trento,

The Dutch considered reopening the case [against Khan] in 1986 but backed off at the request of the CIA, according to then-Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. Lubbers had suggested that the United States wanted Khan left alone in part because Pakistan had by then become a key U.S. ally in the battle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (America and the Islamic Bomb, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2008, p. 67)

Among the concessions made by the United States to Pakistan for their support of numerous anticommunist destabilization operations across the decades was a cynical and cultivated blindness when it came to Pakistan's development of atomic weapons and A. Q. Khan's nuclear supermarket.

BCCI, the CIA and Nuclear Proliferation

During the 1970s, the Safari Club, a secret cabal of intelligence agencies including France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Shah's Iran, Morocco and the United States, decided that it required a network of banks to help launder illicit funds and finance intelligence operations, according to investigative journalist John Cooley's account in Unholy Wars. With the blessings of George H. W. Bush, then Director of the CIA, the task fell to Saudi Intelligence Minister Kamal Adham.

Within the space of a few years, Adham helped transform Agha Hasan Abedi's small Pakistani merchant bank into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). According to investigative journalist Joseph Trento's account in Prelude to Terror, under Adham's guidance Abedi created "a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history." Indeed, BCCI was a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, with powerful American intelligence officials deeply involved in the drugs-for-guns financing of the Nicaraguan Contras and Afghanistan's "holy warriors."

In 1991, Time Magazine described BCCI as not just a bank but also as "a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank's offices in Karachi, Pakistan, the 1,500-employee black network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder. The black network--so named by its own members--stops at almost nothing to further the bank’s aims the world over."

While the United States was pouring billions of dollars in aid to finance drug- and organized crime-linked "holy warriors" in Afghanistan such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, much of the money was actually siphoned off by the ISI. Sarkis Soghanalian, a "middleman" profiting from American largess, told Trento that most of the money flowing into Pakistan was diverted into BCCI accounts controlled by the Army and ISI and then distributed to A. Q. Khan's weapons program and proliferation network.

According to Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark's account in Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Abedi created a "charity" called the BCCI Foundation. Pakistani Finance Minister Ghulam Ishaq Khan granted it tax-free status while simultaneously serving as the foundation's chairman and overseeing finances for Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta.

Close to leading Islamists in the Army, Ishaq Khan served as Pakistan's President between 1988-1993 and acquiesced to the Army's "soft coup" against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. As I reported in "Organized Crime, Intelligence and Terror: The D-Company's Role in the Mumbai Attacks," when Bhutto removed Islamist General Hamid Gul as ISI director, Army Chief Aslam Beg and Lt. General Asad Durrani created a BCCI-linked slush fund to finance Bhutto's removal from power.

According to Time Magazine investigative journalists Jonathan Beatty and S. C. Gwynne's 1993 book The Outlaw Bank, BCCI chairman Abedi announced that some 90% of the bank's profits would be donated to the BCCI Foundation. In reality, the Foundation was a tax-dodge and money-laundering instrument that will "donate" most of the money it raised to A. Q. Khan's illicit nuclear program. In 1987, according to Beatty and Gwynne, the Foundation gives a $10 million donation to an "institute headed by A. Q. Khan."

All of this is known at the time and covered-up by the United States. By 1984, BCCI's Black Network enforcement arm had effectively taken control of the port of Karachi ("management" subsequently transferred to Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company by his ISI masters), controlling the flow of arms to the Afghan mujaheddin, as well as overseeing drug flows, arms smuggling and the illicit trade in nuclear technology ebbing towards KRL in Kahuta.

The American response? A Senate investigation by John Kerry (D-MA) and New York City District Attorney Robert Morgenthau stumbled across BCCI's role as an international money-laundering machine for drug dealers and arms merchants. At every step of the way, the investigation was blocked by the United States Justice Department during Bush I's tenure as President. The cover-up accelerated when U.S. Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller took over the BCCI investigation. Mueller subsequently became Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2001 and oversaw the FBI's "investigation" of the 9/11 attacks.

During the course of the investigation the CIA stonewalled Kerry's probe, refusing to hand over documents it provided to a U.S. Customs Service inquiry into Khan's nuclear proliferation network, arms trafficking and BCCI drug money laundering through U.S. banks. While some information on the CIA's clandestine relationship to Abedi's criminal enterprise surfaced, the Agency refused to disclose any information on operations using the bank as an intelligence cut-out. Kerry's public report concluded, "Key questions about the relationship between U.S. intelligence and BCCI cannot be answered at this time, and may never be."

When Kerry's report is issued in 1992, it states that the Justice Department went to extraordinary lengths to block the investigation "through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from not making witnesses available, to not returning phone calls, to claiming that every aspect of the case was under investigation in a period when little, if anything was being done." Once the report is published, official interest in BCCI is allowed to die. For his efforts and those of his staff, Kerry is labeled "a randy conspiracy buff" by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff.

Meanwhile, Khan's illicit nuclear proliferation ring is profiting handsomely.

The CIA and the Tinner Family: Best Friends Forever!

Back in June, The New York Times reported that "American and international investigators" had found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to associates of Khan's network, the Tinners.

According to the report, the designs are for a nuclear device that is half the size of weapons previously believed to be in Pakistan's arsenal and packed with advanced electronics. When IAEA investigators confronted Pakistani officials with the evidence, they insisted that Khan "did not have access to Pakistan's weapons designs." Though less than truthful, Pakistan was again let off the hook by American officials intent on securing Pakistan's "cooperation" in the oxymoronic "war on terror."

But perhaps it helped the Tinners' case when it was revealed by The New York Times last August that the "Swiss Family Proliferation" (my phrase) worked closely with the CIA while simultaneously making millions of dollars illegally selling deadly nuclear technology to any and all comers.

Swiss President Pascal Couchepin announced May 23, that his government destroyed files, including digital copies of advanced nuclear weapons designs in the Tinners' possession. According to Couchepin, the files were destroyed "so that they would never fall into terrorists hands." The Times averred,

Behind that official explanation, though, is a far more intriguing tale of spies, moles and the compromises that governments make in the name of national security.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow of secret information that helped end Libya's bomb program, reveal Iran's atomic labors and, ultimately, undo Dr. Khan's nuclear black market. (William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, "In Nuclear Net's Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals," The New York Times, August 25, 2008)

Mendaciously however, the Times fails to reveal just what "compromises" that successive U.S. "governments make" in the interest of "national security." Perhaps a 30-year history of close collaboration with organized crime, terrorists and nuclear proliferators? While the CIA and Bush administration are keen to claim the Khan network has been rolled-up, the U.S State Department said January 12 that it had "slapped sanctions on 13 individuals and three private companies" because of their involvement in the network, according to Reuters.

The Guardian reported that "two British businessmen," Peter and Paul Griffin, "a father and a son," were added to the blacklist and any assets the pair have in the U.S. are now frozen. While denying the charges, The Guardian reports that

Peter Griffin has been named in court cases in South Africa and Germany as being a member of the Khan network. He has repeatedly confirmed he knew Khan, but has denied knowingly being involved in illicit nuclear bomb programmes. A German judge in 2006 named the elder Griffin as one of Khan's four main associates. (Ian Traynor, "U.S. blacklists father and son over alleged nuclear racket," The Guardian, January 13, 2008)

Several of the individuals named by the State Department are either behind bars such as Gotthard Lerch, currently serving a 5 1/2 year sentence in Germany, have had charges dropped or like Tahir and A. Q. Khan, remain out of reach. The Tinners do not appear on the State Department's list of "sanctioned" individuals and firms. No doubt, their well-paid service as CIA assets has much to do with their escaping sanctions.

Although a "senior intelligence official in Washington," may have been "very happy they were destroyed," European antiproliferation investigators believe that the Swiss government's destruction of evidence "obscured the investigative trail."

According to the Times, the destroyed evidence contained more than frightening electronic blueprints for constructing a compact nuclear weapon, but "decades of records" of the Tinners' involvement in the Khan network, including bomb and centrifuge designs as well as documents linking the family to the CIA. Broad and Sanger write,

One contract, a European intelligence official said, described a C.I.A. front company's agreement to pay the smugglers $1 million for black-market secrets. The front company listed an address three blocks from the White House. (New York Times, op. cit. August 25, 2008)

An unnamed "European official" told the Times, "Maybe that labyrinth held clues to another client or another rogue state," perhaps a new--or old--"best friend forever" of the CIA's such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Indeed, one can plausibly argue this was precisely Washington's--and the New York Times' intent: muddy the waters while covering-up participation by U.S. corporate grifters and high government officials.

Sibel Edmonds' Revelations

While keen to attack official enemies, Washington has aided and abetted nuclear proliferation through key "allies" such as Israel, Pakistan and Turkey as revealed by gagged FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in a series of eye-opening reports last January by The Sunday Times.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. (Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria, "For Sale: West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets," The Sunday Times, January 6, 2008)

According to Edmonds and subsequent reporting by The Sunday Times, that investigation "was compromised" by a senior State Department official and eventually led to the roll-up of the CIA corporate cut-out, Brewster Jennings, by Washington neoconservatives embedded in the Pentagon and the Vice President's office.

While The Sunday Times did not name that official, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi wrote last January that Edmonds told investigators that Marc Grossman, Ambassador to Turkey during the mid-1990s and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs from 2001-2005, was a "person of interest" and had his phone tapped by the FBI during a two year period. Grossman is currently vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a high-powered lobby shop founded by Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen. According to Giraldi,

After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.

Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. (Philip Giraldi, "Found in Translation: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets," The American Conservative, January 28, 2008)

This tracks closely with information revealed by The History Commons that former con man and U.S. government informant Randy Glass told investigators. Glass told MSNBC in 2003 that as part of a sting operation, ISI operative Rajaa Gulum Abbas and arms dealer Diaa Mohsen sought to purchase nuclear material for Osama bin Laden. During a 1999 meeting at a posh New York City restaurant in sight of the Twin Towers, ISI operative Abbas pointed to the Towers and told Glass, "Those towers are coming down." According to the report,

A group of illegal arms merchants, including an ISI agent with foreknowledge of 9/11, had met in a New York restaurant the month before. This same group meets at this time in a West Palm Beach, Florida, warehouse, and it is shown Stinger missiles as part of a sting operation, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. US intelligence soon discovers connections between two in the group, Rajaa Gulum Abbas and Mohammed Malik, Islamic militant groups in Kashmir (where the ISI assists them in fighting against India), and the Taliban. Mohamed Malik suggests in this meeting that the Stingers will be used in Kashmir or Afghanistan. His colleague Diaa Mohsen also says Abbas has direct connections to "dignitaries" and bin Laden. Abbas also wants heavy water for a "dirty bomb" or other material to make a nuclear weapon. He says he will bring a Pakistani nuclear scientist to the US to inspect the material, MSNBC reported in 2002.

According to Dick Stoltz, a federal undercover agent posing as a black market arms dealer, one of the Pakistanis at the warehouse claims he is working for A. Q. Khan. A Pakistani nuclear scientist, Khan is considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and also the head of an illegal network exporting nuclear technology to rogue nations, MSNBC revealed in 2005.

Government informant Randy Glass passes these warnings on before 9/11, but he claims, "The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government." ("ISI Tried to Buy Nuclear Material for Bin Laden," The History Commons, no date)

When the Khan network was allegedly run to ground, it exposed a long collaboration amongst nuclear proliferators and terrorists, many of whom were subsequently revealed to have worked closely with the CIA, Britain's MI6 and Pakistan's ISI in global destabilization operations across Asia, Europe and the Middle East. While the Cold War Safari Club may have passed into history, the global network linking organized crime, intelligence operations and the capitalist deep state continue to flourish.

That the United States continues to utilize the services of extreme right-wing assets that morphed from BCCI's Black Network for "unconventional war" against official enemies was reported in 2007 by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Writing in The New Yorker, Hersh revealed that as part of Washington's covert program to overthrow Iran's theocratic regime the Bush administration "has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."

Talk about inconvenient truths!

A Nuke for Osama? Better Bomb Iran!

Before the 9/11 attacks, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid were taken into custody for interrorgation by Pakistani police. Mahmood, a nuclear scientist who designed and ran the gas centrifuges at the Khushab reactor, had met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan to discuss "scientific matters" with the former CIA-MI6 mujahideen allies.

The founder of a bizarre fundamentalist group, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah, or UTN), Mahmood and his associates were not illiterate cannon fodder "trained up fierce" by ISI-linked madrassas, but the crème de' le' crème of Pakistan's military and scientific establishment.

Former ISI Director Hamid Gul, another UTN founder, is reportedly scheduled to be added to a list of names by the UN Security Council as a sponsor of international terrorism, according to a December 2008 report in the Pakistani newspaper The News. Gul, a darling in some circles for claiming "9/11 was an inside job," continues to play a cynical game and, as alleged by The News, is still linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

When informed of the charges, Gul told The Washington Post, "There seems to be an orchestrated campaign to somehow get me," dismissing them as an effort to "malign" him. While Gul and other former members claimed UTN was a "charity" formed to provide "humanitarian relief" to Afghanistan, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported in 2003,

A few weeks after September 11, however, Pakistani authorities detained Mahmood, Majeed, and other UTN board members amid charges that their activities in Afghanistan had involved helping Al Qaeda in its quest to acquire nuclear and biological weapons as well. The U.S. government, which pressed for Mahmood's and Majeed's arrest, later placed them and their organization on its list of individuals and organizations supporting terrorism. ...

Suspicion about Mahmood and others at UTN increased in November 2001. After the fall of the Taliban, coalition forces and the media began to search UTN facilities in Kabul. Some of the records found there revealed that the charity did indeed help Afghanistan with educational material, road building, and flour mills. But other records demonstrated that UTN was very interested in weapons of mass destruction. (David Albright and Holly Higgins, "A Bomb for the Ummah," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 3, 2003)

But even after these revelations, Khan's illicit smuggling network continued to operate with impunity. In order to secure Pakistani "cooperation" in Washington's "war on terror" senior Bush administration officials and U.S. intelligence agencies turned a blind eye to Khan's global operations and sabotaged efforts to bring the network down.

As in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, evidence of America's deadly complicity with Sunni-based fundamentalist outfits such as al-Qaeda, organized crime- and intelligence-linked mafia groups such as D-Company or with nuclear proliferators such as the Pakistani Army, one discovers reality turned on its head. When it comes to Iran, American mendacity is boundless!

Despite an embarrassing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that disclosed in December 2007 that "in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," covert action against Iran by the Pentagon and CIA continues while Pakistan and other known and unknown proliferators are given a free pass.

Leading Washington neoconservatives linked to Israel's far-right Likud party are encouraging Israel--with an assist from the Pentagon--to bomb Tehran's nuclear research facilities. Chief among them are usual suspects John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. But the incoming Obama administration is replete with its own stable of neocon hawks who have made common cause with the Likudniks. These include Tony Lake, UN Ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle and Dennis Ross.

Indeed, according to Middle East analyst Robert Dreyfuss, Democrats Lake and Rice joined their Republican counterparts last June at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), founded in coordination with the Israel lobby-shop AIPAC, during the group's "2008 Presidential Task Force" meet-up that vigorously supported "a confrontation with Iran."

On and on, Washington's deadly and duplicitous game continues...