Haq's Musings

Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ

Showing posts with label Blackwater. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2009

American CIA's "Secret" War in Pakistan

The publicly-acknowledged recent deaths of several CIA agents and Blackwater personnel in a suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, have once again brought the CIA's and its private contractors' combat role into sharp focus. Apparently, the attacker was a potential CIA "asset" recruited to identify targets for covert missions in Pakistan. He appears to have worn an explosives-laden suicide vest under an Afghan National Army uniform, two NATO officials told the media. The attack happened close to dusk, when some people at the base were relaxing before dinner. In a statement to the C.I.A.’s work force, President Obama said that the spy agency had been “tested as never before,” and that C.I.A. operatives had “served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century.”

The CIA personnel regularly take foreign agents onto their base along the border before sending them on intelligence collection missions in eastern Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan, said one Pentagon consultant who works closely with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan, according to a report in the New York Times.

The CIA's drone war over Pakistan has recently been in high gear. Under the Obama administration, the CIA launched more than 50 reported robotic strikes, killing several hundred people, reportedly mostly civilians. Compare that to 2008, when there were just 36 drone attacks, according to an article by Noah Schachtman in Wired magazine. Slightly at variance with the Wired report, Pakistani government estimates indicate there were 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, and only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians. These statistics represent the loss 140 innocent lives for every militant killed by US drones, a reckless disregard for lives of Pakistanis in the tribal belt. And now there are strong rumors of further expansion of the U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan in 2010, with potential for even greater innocent civilian casualties fueling further unrest in the country already wracked by extreme violence.

The false denials by both the American and the Pakistani officials of the existence of an understanding on the drone attacks and the presence of Blackwater personnel on Pakistani soil have been exposed by the investigative media and Google Earth images showing U.S. Predators parked on a Pakistani runway. In fact, the CIA publicly acknowledged what it has been doing for years when it announced that it was cutting Blackwater’s contract for servicing and arming the drones in Pakistan. The US Air Force acknowledged its attacks in Pakistan when it let slip that their drones were running missions east of the Durand Line. But counterinsurgency experts continue to worry that the robotic attacks could destabilize the region as they continue into 2010 and expand to a new front: Yemen.

While the new and more restrictive guidelines have been enacted for drone attacks by the US Air Force in Afghanistan to prevent growing civilian death toll, the CIA drone strikes in Pakistan remain essentially unconstrained. As the CIA demands cooperation from the ISI, it refuses to share with the ISI any intelligence from the CIA informants and "assets" on the ground in Pakistan that help pick the targets. Such secrecy raises suspicions that the CIA agents and "assets" in Pakistan are possibly engaged in subversive activities that the Americans want to hide from their Pakistani allies. There are also concerns about the Americans preparing to "secure" Pakistani nuclear weapons as alleged in a recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh.

In addition to the increasing drone attacks and rising suspicions about the role of the CIA, there are new and explosive revelations about the role and the strength of Blackwater contractors in the region. A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine have alleged that Blackwater chief Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." The number of US contractors working for the US military and the CIA in the region exceeds the total strength of the US troops and CIA personnel, according to estimates by Jimmy Scahill who has researched and written extensively about Blackwater. The presence of over 80,000 US military and intelligence contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes the level of privatization of war unprecedented.

There have also been credible reports by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation that Blackwater has been working with US special forces JSOC on American forward operating bases (FOBs), like the one in Khost, in various parts of Pakistan, including Karachi, on "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive actions inside and outside Pakistan. The US FOBs in the region are known to recruit and create an informants network, as confirmed by the accounts of what happened with suicide bombing and killing of CIA agents at Khost FOB in Afghanistan.

While Pakistanis must accept responsibility for their own unwise actions in the past, there is no doubt that the US presence in the region has had a huge negative impact on Pakistanis. Some of the actions by Americans, starting with the use of the "Mujaheddin" during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, have clearly contributed to the problems Pakistan faces today. These problems have been further exacerbated by the use of heavy-handed US tactics in the region, American policy of targeted assassinations by the CIA, and the use of private contractors like Blackwater who view themselves as "Christian Crusaders tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe". There were few religious militants and no incidents of suicide bombings in Pakistan before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. There was only a small presence of the Taliban or al Qaeda in Pakistan prior to the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States. But in recent years, thousands of Pakistani soldiers have died fighting, killing or capturing the militants who fled into Pakistan from Afghanistan. And the civilian death toll from terrorist attacks in Pakistan is continuing to increase on a daily basis. The US secret war in Pakistan is not so secret any more, and it is clearly counterproductive with the rapidly deteriorating situation threatening to destabilize the nuclear-armed Islamic nation.

Pakistan is just too big to fail. Although things are likely to get worse with the latest US surge before they get better, the United States will eventually leave the region, in a year or two. And in spite of all of the serious problems it faces today, I remain optimistic that Pakistan will not only survive but thrive in the coming decades. With a fairly large educated urban middle class, vibrant media, active civil society, assertive judiciary, many philanthropic organizations, and a spirit of entrepreneurship, the nation has the necessary ingredients to overcome its current difficulties to build a democratic government accountable to its people.

Here's a video clip of Jeremy Scahill talking about the US covert war in Pakistan:

Here's former CIA official Michael Scheuer talking to NPR about the Chapman incident involving suicide bombing and killing of CIA agents:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Blackwater Bribing in Pakistan?

US private contractor Blackwater, renamed Xe after it gained notoriety in Iraq, is now facing charges of secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support.

The New York Times is reporting that "Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees".

There have been strong rumors swirling about the arrival of Blackwater personnel in Pakistan in recent months. The rumors and the opposition have gained strength with a November 4 report in the Nation newspaper alleging the arrival of 202 Blackwater personnel in Islamabad.

“Of the 274 passengers, who boarded Pakistan’s national flag carrier-PIA, flight PK-786 from Heathrow Airport UK, 202 were foreigners but they were fluently speaking Urdu language,” the paper said. The report quoted officials on duty at Shaheed Benazir International Airport Islamabad as saying, “We had instructions to allow the foreigners entry without custom procedure.”

It seems that the Blackwater personnel have been on Pakistani soil for years before the current rumors surfaced. From a secret division at Blackwater's North Carolina headquarters, it has assumed a role in Washington's most important counterterrorism program: the use of drones to kill Al Qaeda's leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees who talked with the New York Times.

The division's operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Blackwater contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by C.I.A. employees. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

Last month, the CIA disclosed that it had hired Blackwater to kill senior al-Qaida leaders. The targeted assassination program has come under strong criticism in Washington. However, German publication Der Spiegel has learned that the level of cooperation between the CIA and the paid mercenaries at Blackwater has been deeper than previously known. The firm has also been heavily involved in CIA's secret rendition program of kidnapping, jailing and torturing terrorism suspects, according to persistent reports.

In addition to the increasing drone attacks and rising suspicions about the role of the CIA, there are new and explosive revelations about the role and the strength of Blackwater contractors in the region. A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine have alleged that Blackwater chief Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." The number of US contractors working for the US military and the CIA in the region exceeds the total strength of the US troops and CIA personnel, according to estimates by Jimmy Scahill who has researched and written extensively about Blackwater. The presence of over 80,000 US military and intelligence contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes the level of privatization of war unprecedented.

There have also been credible reports by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation that Blackwater has been working with US special forces JSOC on American forward operating bases (FOBs) in various parts of Pakistan, including Karachi, on "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive actions inside and outside Pakistan.

The stakes are now much higher in Pakistan than in Afghanistan or Iraq. The elite commandos of US Navy Seals, mentioned recently by Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article, are reportedly part of a US team allegedly training to "secure" Pakistani nukes. Blackwater, renamed Xe, was founded in 1998 by former Navy Seals. Xe is on record as saying it has prepared tens of thousands of security personnel to work in hot spots around the world, without naming such hot spots. Soon after 911 terrorist attacks, the Bush-Cheney administration deployed private security firms on an unprecedented scale. Almost overnight, Blackwater transformed itself into a huge business funded to the tune of $1 billion by US taxpayers. The company obtained 70 percent of its contracts without going through the normal bidding process.

With the resources and backing of the US government agencies, Blackwater, aka Xe, has developed a lot of clout using a combination of large bribes and US government pressure. Given the well-known and widespread lack of transparency in Pakistan, is it possible that Blackwater is using the same combination of money and power to persuade Pakistani politicians and officials to allow it operate with impunity? Only time will tell. But the signs are clearly troubling.

Here's a video about Blackwater mercenary army activities:

Here's another video clip about Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill: