Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) | Tanzeem-e-Islami | Dr. Israr Ahmed

US Backs Terrorists Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)

USHOSTAGE — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:47:00 GMT

Siphai Sahaba was Once Supported by the Americans

October 18, 2009
alaiwah.wordpress.com

The attack on Establishment on GHQ, was spearheaded by Mr Aqeel, Aliases Dr Usman someone who was serving as Nursing Assistant in AMC, Army Medical Corps in 2004. He was member of Jaish Mohammed and the Lashkar Jahngavi both, the Groups, which operates from District Jhang near Faisalabad. The same places, which were once, head quarter of Sipah Sahaba. Now Jaish Mohammed and Lashkar Jahngavi are splinter groups of Sipah Sahaba.

Sipah Sahaba is mother of all these terror groups that now form the Punjabi Taliban. The latter is now part of Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Interestingly, SSP is headquartered in Jhang (Jahngavi is from Jhang), which also houses the home of Qadianis. SSP targets the Shias but never the Ahmadis. Some claim that killing Shias and Sunnis is a diversion to allow Qadianis to flourish. This seems to be the objectives of TTP as well when the Qadianis of Shabqadar (home of Aftab Ahmad Sharpoa) Achinai, and Nawai Kali villages of Peshawar near Khyber Agency are never persecuted by Taliban and they live among them peacefully.

The Ahmadis in Bannu, the home of Bahadurs Kuli Khan and the Saifullahs (PML-Q Parliamentarians) are never persecuted by Taliban; while the Shias are massacred by the Taliban in Hango and DI Khan PPP promulgated the Second Amendment to Pakistan’s Constitution which declared Qadianis as non Muslims and this made them targets of the Ahmadis.

As a result, ZA Bhutto, his two sons, and Benazir herself were politically assassinated. The Shia Hating Sipah Sahaba was part of IJI , led by Nawaz Shareef and it won seats in Provincial Governments of Punjab. Even now in 2009 a sitting Senator of PML-N is a member of Sipah Sahaba.

The Sipah Sahaba would collect their recruits from Jammat Islami and JUI, Aqeel alias Dr Usman (God knows why he has been given this name while he was just a nursing assistant) was previously connected with Jammat Islami.

The Army is not allowed to have political affiliations but the religious parties are an exception. General Zia allowed many private sessions to be held in homes of army officers and in private soldier barracks. He even included a column in Officers’ ACR (Annual Confidential Report and Dossier in GHQ), about religious interest and fervor of officers and soldiers implying having beards and attending Majlis with such religious party members.

Many power groups were made and promotions in the Army were handed out preferably to attend such Majlises. The bearded officers, although looking religious superficially, are corrupt to the core. For example, Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman’s sons now owns dozens of sugar mills. Gen Hameed Gul owns Varan Bus Service. The indoctrination of Aqeel Alias Dr Usman is proof of this phenomenon, and goes to show that these religious organizations ve been able to infiltrate even the Army.

As he defected in 2006, it shows that religious indoctrination is continuing even now. Many people have different opinions about the Sipah Sahaba and its derivative Lashkers and Jaishes, and their objectives.

Some say that they were created to fight the Iranians. The US wanted the Influence of Iran to be contained. The Americans were afraid of a democratic progressive Islamic Iran, and particularly after help of Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and Hamas in Gaza and Palestine, made Iran target of Israel and America. Sipah Sahba created by the American stooge Gen Zia, who massacred Palestinians in Black September in 1970, proved his loyalty to US and Israel, was a perfect solution to enslave the most important country of Muslims. The Lashkar and Jaishes were used after 1994 onwards when they joined Taliban in Afghanistan. They were used against the Iranians in Afghanistan after the failure of Taliban to control Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, they were used to fight the Shia dominated Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Masood, supported by Iran. During this time, Nawaz Shareef was aiding Taliban through by giving them annually 60 million dollars.

In this period (1994-98), many Shias were killed in Pakistan and their mosques and places of worship were bombed. Our establishment fought a proxy war with Iran while we publicly claimed it to be our friend. Actually, we are fighting it at the behest of America and Israel.

The recent Jandolla groups in Waziristan and Balochistan is an extension of this and our close association with USA. This group was run by Al-Qaeda itself and by Osama Bin Laden right upto 9/11 , as according to recent revelations by Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman in America that Osama worked for US interest towards Iran and China.

President Ahmadinejad last month in September 2009, while addressing United Nations himself warned US and CIA of not using Baluchsitan and FATA against Iran. The Pakistani media kept mum on it. In fact, the Pakistani Ambassador was snubbed and called to foreign office of Iran, when some mosques were bombed just before the Iranian elections in 2009.

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Comment:

Muslim Community Association of the San Francisco Bay Area
Santa Clara County, California

Home to Sipah-e-eSahaba Pakistan (SSP)

Dr.Israr Ahmed

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DLA Piper, Iran: Foreign Policy Challenges and Choices: Empowering the Democratic Opposition, DLA Piper US LLP, 2006, and Global Options, Inc., Independent Assessment of the Mujahedin-e Khalq and National Council of Resistance of Iran, DLA Piper US LLP, 2006 (published together).

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USHOSTAGE — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:28:00 GMT

San Diego DUI Lawyer

Lobbying & Law - Touting 'Terrorists'

by Julie Kosterlitz
nationaljournal.com
Sat. Jan. 19, 2008

On paper, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq sounds like the sort of group the United States government might like to cultivate: well-organized Iranian exiles concentrated in Europe and Iraq who share Washington's antipathy to the theocracy in Iran. The group -- whose name translates as "warriors (or freedom fighters) for the people of Iran" -- has its own "parliament in exile," the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and says it supports a secular government, democracy, human rights, and women's rights in Iran.

In practice, however, the Iranian group has some major shortcomings in the ally department. For the past decade, the State Department has listed the MEK as a "foreign terrorist organization," and more recently has argued that the group displays "cult-like characteristics."

The MEK has been waging a spirited campaign to persuade the U.S. to drop the terrorist designation -- which would require either the secretary of State's say-so or an act of Congress.

Although the group can't make its own case directly, in the past several years two prominent former U.S. government officials have been publicly touting the MEK's virtues and arguing that the United States should remove it from the terrorist list.

At the moment, the more high-profile and influential of these advocates is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, a senior policy adviser at the global law and lobbying firm DLA Piper. Last year, Armey wrote two op-eds for Washington newspapers urging the State Department to drop the MEK's terrorist designation.

"Never has the old adage 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' been more true than in the case of the MEK," he wrote in The Hill in July. And in The Washington Times in December, Armey wrote, "With a stroke of the pen, the secretary of State could, and should, remove the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and the National Council of Resistance of Iran from the list of foreign terrorist organizations."

In 2006, DLA Piper and Global Options, a crisis-management company, issued a 232-page report with a foreword by Armey and Neil C. Livingstone, then-CEO of Global Options, aimed at refuting the U.S. government's allegations against the MEK and calling for an end to its terrorist designation.

Another public advocate for the MEK is Raymond Tanter, who was a senior staff member at the National Security Council in the Reagan administration and is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. In 2005, Tanter co-founded the nonprofit Iran Policy Committee, which lists as directors or advisers a half-dozen former executive branch, military, and intelligence officials and describes its mission as promoting a "central role for the Iranian opposition" in bringing about "democratic change" in Iran. The committee's publications, conferences, and congressional briefings routinely urge the U.S. to take the MEK off its terrorist list, as well as to meet with and fund the group.

The MEK began as an anti-shah leftist group in the 1960s. It got on the wrong side of the United States when members assassinated several of the shah's American advisers in the 1970s. In the three decades since Iran became an Islamic regime, the State Department says, the MEK has waged violent attacks inside that country, and it maintains the "capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond." Over the years, the MEK has periodically reinvented its ideology, which today blends elements of Marxism, Islam, and feminism.

A charismatic husband-and-wife team leads the group: Massoud Rajavi, whose whereabouts are unknown, is the military leader, and Maryam Rajavi heads the political wing from France. The MEK's size is also unknown, but the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that it could have as many as 10,000 members worldwide.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing complaints from a dozen former MEK members that they suffered physical and psychological abuse while they were in the group. The State Department says that members undergo indoctrination and weekly "ideological cleansings," are separated from their young children, and must vow "eternal divorce" -- that is, to remain unmarried or to divorce their spouse.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 took a toll on the MEK, which had set up operations there after being driven out of Iran and, later, France in the 1980s. Because Saddam Hussein had been providing the bulk of its military and financial support, the State Department says, the MEK subsequently began to use "front organizations" to solicit contributions from expatriate Iranian communities.

The U.S. military disarmed the group's foot soldiers in Iraq and now holds some 3,500 of them as "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions at an encampment there. "We are not embracing them, we just don't know how to [disperse] them" without putting their lives in danger, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Peter Rodman, who was an assistant Defense secretary through 2006.

MEK supporters argue that the group has renounced violence, poses no terrorist threat, and, in fact, presents a viable alternative to the theocracy in Tehran. The terrorist designation, they say, was a futile Washington sop to appease that regime. "The U.S. government at any moment can make that decision, and decide [that the designation] is unwarranted," says Alireza Jafarzadeh, the former representative in Washington for the NCRI, and now a self-described consultant and a commentator on Fox News. Jafarzadeh blames "politics" for Washington's failure to act and says that the MEK spends about 80 percent of its resources "to counter the consequences of the designation."

MEK supporters argue that the group provided vital intelligence about Iran's covert nuclear program in 2002, as well as about Iranian-sponsored attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Although more than 220 members of Congress signed a letter in 1998 protesting the group's terrorist designation, the MEK's several legal challenges to the designation have failed, and legislative efforts to remove it have gone nowhere.

Despite the Bush administration's tough line on the Tehran regime, the MEK's political fortunes in the U.S. have declined in recent years. The NCRI was once allowed to maintain an office, hire lobbyists, hold press conferences, and generally operate openly in the United States. But in late 2003, the administration got tough and the Justice Department shut down the office. The group still has some congressional supporters -- led by the ideological odd couple of Reps. Bob Filner, D-Calif., and Tom Tancredo, R-Colo.

And then there is Armey, whose history as an outspoken advocate for the MEK is murky. In their 2006 report, Armey and Livingstone touted regime change in Iran through active support for groups such as the MEK, but said that neither the MEK nor the NCRI provided any direction, control, or financing for the report. Armey's July 2007 article had a similar disclaimer. The December 2007 article identified Armey only as the chairman of the FreedomWorks Foundation, a free-market advocacy group.

DLA Piper has received $860,000 in fees over the past four and a half years from Saeid Ghaemi, whom the firm identifies as an "Iranian-American businessman who works closely with the Iranian-American community in the U.S. to promote human rights and democracy in Iran." Public records identify Saeid Ghaemi as a used-car dealer in the Denver area, but an Internet search turned up no information about his political work with the Iranian-American community. When National Journal reached him by phone to ask about his hiring of Armey and DLA Piper, Ghaemi said he was busy and would return the call. He failed to return that or subsequent calls.

Ghaemi's brother, Tim Mehdi Ghaemi, a Denver-area real estate manager and broker, is a longtime active supporter of the MEK who bills himself as president of the group Colorado's Iranian-American Community. Over the past three years, Tim Ghaemi has helped to organize half a dozen pro-MEK events, including a controversial January 2004 fundraiser that led the Treasury Department to freeze the assets of the event's prime sponsor. In 2007, he provided $8,000 for Filner to travel to Paris to deliver a speech at an MEK rally. The Colorado group has a website that posts news about the MEK and articles about Tehran's persecution of its Iranian opponents, but NJ could find no information about the group, its members, or its board of directors.

Reached by phone, Tim Ghaemi said that his brother, Saeid, was not part of Colorado's Iranian-American Community, which he called a "larger umbrella group." He referred to "other, smaller, organizations that work specifically on other projects" such as women's rights and the rights of minority religious groups in Iran, including Christians and Jews. But "everybody, unanimously, inside and outside [Iran] -- they say there is no other hope" than the MEK, Tim Ghaemi said. The United States does not need to "send one soldier, or spend one dollar" to defeat the Iranian rulers he added, but only has to "stop appeasing the regime and take the [MEK's] name off the list."

Lobbying disclosure records show that Saeid Ghaemi hired DLA Piper in November 2004, and that Armey joined the team representing him in the first half of 2005. Over time, the team has lobbied Congress; the Defense, State, and Treasury departments; and the National Security Council.

National Journal made repeated calls to Armey's office for comment and information on how he became a supporter of the MEK. The office referred all calls to a DLA Piper spokesman, who provided no information.

Last year, Armey and the other lobbyists also worked on Ghaemi's behalf for a House measure urging the secretary of State to designate the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. Shortly after a broader measure targeting Iran and the Quds Force overwhelmingly passed the House last fall, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice designated the force a terrorist group.

DLA Piper also lobbied in the Senate for the Iran Human Rights Act of 2007 that would, among other things, expand U.S. support for Iranian opposition groups to include those outside Iran, and would establish a State Department envoy to reach out to such groups.

Tanter, like some other MEK defenders, says he supports the group because it is the only opposition organization that really worries the mullahs in Tehran. "I did an analysis of all the opposition groups and found that the [Islamic Iranian] regime paid attention to [the MEK] 350 percent more than all the others. I am not here to lobby on behalf of groups on the foreign terrorist organization list. I am an American trying to preserve American national security abroad and save lives."

Tanter's tax-exempt Iran Policy Committee has raised a substantial amount of money in a short period of time. In its latest filing with the Internal Revenue Service, the group reported revenues of nearly $917,000 -- with Tanter receiving about $102,000 in salary, and the group's co-chairs, Bruce McColm and Chuck Nash, getting just over $32,000 and $21,000, respectively.

Tanter says his group raises money on the Web and from speeches. "Every time I speak before a pro-Israel group or an anti-Iranian-regime group, hundreds of people show up, and if I'm in Europe, thousands show up," he said. The average contribution is less than $1,000, he said, but some have been six- and seven-figure donations from his former students who now "make a killing" on Wall Street and "remember me." Tanter added that he drew on his retirement money to start the group.

The law prohibits anyone in the United States or subject to its laws from providing "material support or resources" to a designated foreign terrorist organization. But these financial sanctions don't prohibit "U.S. citizens from expressing their views on economic sanctions matters -- and that includes the designation of the MEK -- to Congress or the Executive Branch" according to the Treasury Department, whose Office of Foreign Assets Control oversees the sanctions. Bill Livingstone, who worked with his brother Neil on the 2006 report, said that the authors made sure the report did not violate Treasury's rules.

"The First Amendment protects Dick Armey to make his opinions known, and protects the Iran Policy Committee's educational mission to find options to reinforce our diplomacy" toward Iran, Tanter said. He has hired an attorney who specializes in the arcane Treasury rules and contends that his group tries "to vet our money to make sure we're not getting any" from prohibited groups. Tanter also points out that several of his group's advisers and directors are retired military and intelligence officers with security clearances that they would do nothing to jeopardize.

The effect of Armey's and Tanter's efforts is unclear. So far, the MEK's efforts to shed its terrorist designation have met with far more success in Europe than here. The group has won court decisions mandating that the European Union unfreeze the group's assets and that Great Britain remove it from that country's list of terrorist groups. The British government says it intends to appeal.

Although the State Department is required to review its designation of the MEK later this year, the group's supporters fear that the decision will reflect a political climate that has become less sympathetic to their cause. Administration hard-liners, who have lost ground to pragmatists, have been further undercut by the recent National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- a conclusion that the MEK disputes. "This so-called hard-line [Bush] administration is more interested in striking a grand bargain with Iran than the E.U. is," Tanter said. He and other MEK boosters also contend that if relations with Tehran worsen, the MEK's prospects could revive.

The neoconservative community, where the MEK has found support in the past, has become sharply divided, with critics becoming as vocal as supporters in conservative publications. I don't think any administration is going to want to include them," said Rodman, who describes himself as a hard-line opponent of the Tehran regime. "Everyone has rejected [the MEK]. They're not the kind of people we want to work with."

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Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan SSP

USHOSTAGE — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:24:00 GMT

Pakistani Reaganism Must End: The New Government must take on the Lashkar

agoravox.com
December 1, 2008

Leaks to the Indian press by security officials in charge of interrogating the captured terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kamal (or Qasab?) are fleshing out the background of the attack on Mumbai and clarifying the evidence that it was an operation of the Lashkar-e Tayiba [the "Army of the Good"].

The Indian counterpart of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), intercepted a cell phone call on November 18 to a number in Lahore, Pakistan, known to be that of a Lashkar-i Tayiba handler, saying that the caller was heading to Mumbai. They later found the phone itself on a hijacked Indian fishing boat, which the attackers had taken over to camouflage their approach to the port.

The sole captured LeT operative, Kamal, is said by the Indian press to be from Faridkot village near Dipalpur Tahsil in Okara District of Pakistani Punjab, southwest of Lahore [I saw one article, which I can no longer retrieve, in which the Indian press mispelled the tahsil or county as Gipalpur]). This is such a remote and little-known place that even Pakistani newspapers were having difficulty tracking it down).

Kamal is said to be telling Indian security that he and the others trained in camps in Pakistani Kashmir. (The original princely state of Kashmir, largely Muslim, is divided, with one third in Pakistani hands and two-thirds in Indian; India joined its portion to largely Hindu Jammu to create the province of Jammu and Kashmir.)

The Kashmir police have gotten good enough at counter-terrorism measures that elements of the LeT may have decided to go after a soft target such as Mumbai instead.

The story begins with the 1977 coup of Gen. Zia ul-Haqq, a Muslim fundamentalist who hanged his boss, PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, after overthrowing him. Zia favored Sunni fundamentalists and introduced discriminatory policies against Pakistani Shiites, secularists, etc.

Then in 1979 the Soviet Red Army came into Afghanistan to prop up a shaky Communist junta. Gen. Zia was suddenly America’s man at the front lines of fighting the Soviets, and his Inter-Services Intelligence helped organize Afghan refugees in Pakistan to fight the Soviets. The ISI favored the most radical fundamentalists among the Mujahideen, such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar, who led the Hizb-i Islami. This model, of using private armies funded by black money (generated by illegal arms or drug sales) to "roll back" leftists, was being applied by Reagan in Nicaragua at the same time.

The military dictatorship was taking a lion’s share of the Pakistani budget, and to whip up popular passions and make itself popular, it promoted the liberation of the rest of Muslim Kashmir from Hindu India as another major project alongside getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan. (This is the language of the military; actually India is a secular multicultural state, not a formally Hindu one; and in opinion polls Kashmiris do not say they want to join Pakistan, though they would like independence).

A lot of Pakistanis probably did not care so much about Kashmir, having other problems in life (and already worried about having to adopt 3 million Afghan refugees). But the military in Pakistan constantly played on the public’s emotions on the issue, as a way of justifying military perquisites. (When British India was partitioned into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India in 1947, Kashmir was the only Muslim-majority province to be successfully grabbed by India; Pakistan insisted it should have gone to the Muslim state; the UN insisted on a referendum, which was never held.)

The model that the Reagan administration pressed on the Pakistani military, of funding rightwing "Islamic" militias to kill Soviets, gradually became standard operating procedure. But then the Pakistani Religious Right began adopting the model for themselves. If it is all right to mobilize death squads in one righteous cause, why not in others?

Emboldened, lower middle class Sunni hate groups grew up in rural areas such as Jhang Siyal, where Shiite Sufi leaders had been given big estates by premodern rulers and so were big landlords. The Sipah-e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), formed in 1985, was one such organization. It turned to violence, killing Shiites. Revivalist Deobandi clergy were important in its leadership. I don’t think Zia much cared if they killed Shiites.

Others, including elements in the Pakistani military began wondering why they should not apply the Reagan Jihad model to Kashmir. And they did. In the late 1980s, Hafiz Muhammad Said (once a professor of engineering at Punjab University) set up the Center for Mission and Guidance (Markaz al-Da’wa wa al-Irshad) in a huge compound at Muridke outside Lahore. The Center soon established the Lashkar-e Tayiba as its paramilitary. With the behind the scenes encouragement of elements in the Pakistani military, the LeT sent guerrillas into Indian Kashmir to attack Indian troops and facilities. The Lashkar prided itself on not killing civilians, on not targeting Shiites, and on keeping its focus on what they thought of as the Indian occupation forces. But they fought alongside Sipah-e Sahaba elements that also took off time from murdering Shiites to infiltrate into Indian Kashmir and stage attacks.

I saw this militarization of Pakistani civil society with my own eyes. I first went to the country in 1981 before you could just buy a Kalashnikov in the bazaar. When I was doing research there in 1988 and then again in 1990, the situation was completely different. Pakistan had never had a drug problem but now there were a million addicts (the US encouraged the Afghan mujahidin to grow poppies for heroin to finance the anti-Soviet struggle, and the drugs spilled into Pakistan). Weapons were freely available. Karachi was having a kind of civil war. I remember that fanatics from the religious right attacked an art exhibition in Lahore, a city of the arts (graven images not allowed & etc.) Political figures were accused of cynically creating Islamic movements for personal and political gain. This deterioration of Pakistan was, in some important part, a direct result of Reagan-Bush policies. They used Pakistan, corrupted it with all those drugs, arms, and radical Muslim militias that they called ’freedom fighters,’ and then threw it away when they did not need it any more. Reagan and the Saudis funneled billions to the Pakistani military. What did ordinary Pakistanis have to show for it?

When the Soviets withdrew in 1988-1989 from Afghanistan and the Mujahideen took over, the Pakistani military lost control of its northern neighbor. It therefore funded and promoted the Taliban (expatriate Afghan young men who had been through Deobandi seminaries in northern Pakistan) from 1994, enabling them to take over Afghanistan. The Taliban ran terrorist training camps, at which the Sipah-e Sahaba and the Lashkar-e Tayiba trained for missions in Kashmir. Afghanistan in essence was the boot camp for Pakistani Reaganism.

The SSP and the Lashkar-e Tayiba was joined by other Sunni militias, including the Movement of the Holy Warriors (Harakat ul Mujahidin). In 2000, Mawlana Massoud Azhar broke off from the latter to form the Jaish-e Muhammad or Army of Muhammad, a particularly violent group focusing on Kashmir. All these Pakistani organizations trained their fighters in the Taliban camps, some of which were actually run by al-Qaeda once Bin Laden allied with the latter in 1996. (It is said that the Inter-Services Intelligence made the introduction).

High Dudgeon of Americans directed at the Pakistani military for this activity is the height of hypocrisy. The Reagan administration actively encouraged Islamabad to mount precisely such activities against the leftist government of Afghanistan (which, while dictatorial and brutally oppressive, was busily educating girls, admitting women to professions, spreading literacy, working against the vestiges of landlord feudalism, etc.) From a Pakistani point of view, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir were morally equivalent.

In 2002, under pressure from Washington, military dictator Pervez Musharraf dissolved the Lashkar-e Tayiba and other similar groups and initially arrested many members. They were later released by the Pakistani courts on the grounds that they hadn’t broken any Pakistani laws. The dissolution was a bit of a farce, since the groups just took other names. Someone who now has a prominent official position in the Pakistani government once wryly observed to me that the Musharraf government couldn’t seem to find the Lashkar-e Tayib headquarters at Muridke just outside Lahore, even though it was huge and a well known landmark at which thousands gathered. And, Lashkar went on raising money, supposedly for civilian relief works in Kashmir.

The Pakistani military is itself now suffering blowback for its past policies. Its name is mud in Pakistan. A Pakistani Taliban has emerged that often declines to be its puppet, and which has killed hundreds of Pakistani troops. The Marriott in Islamabad was blown up by the Pakistani Taliban.

The cell that hit Mumbai was probably a rogue splinter group. They completely disregarded the old Lashkar-e Tayiba concentration on hitting only Indian troops in Kashmir, targeting civilians instead. It is very unlikely that anyone in the Pakistani military put them up specifically to this Mumbai operation. This attack was much more likely to be blowback, when a covert operation produces unexpected consequences or agents that were previously reliable go rogue.

The Mumbai attacks were not the first of this scale on an Indian target by the LeT.

If the Pakistani government does not give up this covert terrorist campaign in Kashmir and does not stop coddling the radical vigilantes who go off to fight there, South Asian terrorism will grow as a problem and very possibly provoke the world’s first nuclear war (possible death toll: 20 million).

The civilian government that has recently taken over Pakistan is weak. If it puts too much pressure on the military too quickly, it risks another coup and destabilization. But the training camps in Azad Kashmir must be closed.

India, Pakistan, and the Obama administration need to do some serious diplomacy on Kashmir, and try to settle this major global fault line before the 10.0 earthquake finally hits.

DLA Piper Law Firm - Pentagon - Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan

USHOSTAGE — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:37:00 GMT

BOYCOTT DLA Piper Law Firm - ENTER HERE - MUST READ

_______________________________________________________________________________________

BOOK REVIEW: Afghan war’s hidden blunders —by Khaled Ahmed

How We Missed the Story:
Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan
By Roy Gutman
Vanguard Books Lahore 2008
Pp322
Available at bookstores in Pakistan

The book brings clarity to the Indo-Pak war number four (or five?) relocated to Afghanistan with India firmly entrenched with the Northern Alliance and the Karzai government, and Pakistan with its proxies embedded in Al Qaeda

Journalist Gutman has certainly produced the most comprehensive and revealing account to-date of the post-Soviet invasion Afghan war. He has moved from the written sources available to all to interviews that he was able to conduct with such key personalities as were involved in the internecine jihad of the triumphant mujahideen after the defeat of the Soviet Union. Everyone who went into the savage cauldron of Afghanistan today finds himself defeated, including the two states that most preened themselves over the victory: the United States and Pakistan.

The story begins in 1988 with Pakistan in the driving seat, putting together a government in exile — Interim Islamic Afghan Government of the mujahideen — in Rawalpindi near the Pakistan Army headquarters. The 519-member shura that was to choose the government was nominated by the seven jihad militias located in Peshawar and was plied with $26 million from Saudi Arabia. Mujaddadi was chosen president but he travelled to Iran and promised the Shia leaders one hundred seats in the shura. Back in the councils of the Sunni seven, the view was different: one hundred was cut down to sixty after which the Shias boycotted.

Bravery comes only with myopia and that was what was practised by the mujahideen. The government represented only 30 percent of the population of Afghanistan. Saudi money ensured that Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Wahhabi warlord the Arabs liked, was nominated prime minister, and Pakistan was able to get its favoured warlord Hekmatyar nominated defence minister with Saudi help although the rest of the militia leaders despised him for his tactics. The 1989 plan to attack the Najibullah regime in Jalalabad and establish the jihadi government there was set afoot with ISI chief Hamid Gul promising Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto that the Afghan government would fall in one week (p.28).

The Jalalabad offensive was a fiasco. The great mujahideen suffered their first defeat after defeating the Soviets, one third of the 12,000 killed being theirs. Soon afterwards, the Massoud-Hekmatyar vendetta made its imprint, the latter’s commanders killing 30 of Massoud’s in an ambush. Mujaddidi denounced Hekmatyar as a criminal and Hekmatyar left the government as defence minister. Jamiat commander Massoud caught four of Hekmatyar’s guilty commanders and executed them. Defeats and killings were to have no moral impact on anything in Afghanistan after that. Those who backed the savages sustained all the damage and warded off punishment in Pakistan by the simple device of taking over power.

The second lethal defeat for Pakistan was the Jalalabad-like offensive of Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997, organised by the ISI once again, based on the defection of a Rashid Dostam second-in-command, Malik Pehlawan, in favour of the Taliban. This was the offensive from the west of Afghanistan; another offensive from the south was mounted after buying the defection of a Massoud commander (p.102). Seeing Pakistan involved, Iran weighed in on the other side, training the troops of Jamiat’s other commander Ismail Khan and airlifting munitions and Hezbe Wahdat Shia warriors to them. Uzbekistan sought to make its own chess-move against Pakistan, conscripting Uzbeks to help despatch supplies to Dostam. Uzbek-dominated Tajikistan came down on the side of Massoud.

Another ally of Dostam, General Abdul Majid Rozi changed loyalty in Badghis province and arrested Ismail Khan whom he handed over to Mullah Razzaq who proceeded to Mazar-e-Sharif to take charge of the city abandoned by Malik. Jamiat chief Rabbani fled to Tajikistan and Dostam sent his family away and made himself scarce too. The promise to Malik was that he would be made governor of Mazar, but soon Mullah Razzaq began to enforce the Sharia, beating up unveiled women and destroying shops selling ‘prohibited things’. He entered Malik’s room and tore down a painting of Omar Khayyam with a goblet of wine because that was ‘against Islam’ (p.104). All TV sets were smashed in the city and Malik was told to go to Kabul as a deputy foreign minister while his transport and other assets were simply taken over.

At this point Pakistan recognised the government of the Taliban, but Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif didn’t know who had okayed the recognition because he hadn’t. Foreign Minister Gauhar Ayub followed orders that came from a source other than the prime minister but that was more or less routine in Pakistan by then (p.105). Then the defeat started. Mullah Razzaq went to the Hazara quarters in the city and asked them to disarm. They refused, and already scared by the ‘enforcement’ of Taliban sharia, began hunting for the Taliban under Malik’s command. They killed 350 of them including Mullah Razzaq. They ended up bagging 3,000 as prisoners. What followed was a massive war crime. The prisoners taken in war were all executed.

The book says Pakistan was the dominant power behind the scenes, the ISI putting Malik in touch with Mullah Ghaus the foreign minister, telling the latter the Taliban could capture Mazar without a fight. But uncannily it also sent in Pakistani Kashmiri militants as military assistance. Hamid Gul told the author, ‘ISI brokered a deal but it was the wrong one’ (p.108). Col Imam, the ISI officer called Ruler of Herat, later denied that the Mazar defeat was a big fiasco and funnily also claimed that the Taliban who invaded Mazar were unarmed and were mostly traders! He also put the blame on Iran for asking the Hazara Shias to resist and start the massacre (p.109).

Col Imam was really the American-trained Amir Sultan Tarar, the commando officer who trained the mujahideen in camps run by Pakistan and the US. He was sent into Kandahar in 1994 to keep the Taliban going in the right direction but he soon moved to the more ‘strategic’ location of Herat, which was to put Pakistan and Iran face to face when the Taliban finally got hold of Mazar in 1998 with a massacre to shame all massacres, including the killing of the Iranian diplomats in the Mazar consulate at the hands of the Sipah Sahaba boys sent in from Pakistan. The book says they arrested the officers but, after taking their cash, handed them over to the Taliban for the killing (p.137).

This book is an epitaph for the doctrine of ‘strategic depth’, but the policy of playing proxies in Afghanistan was never abandoned after 9/11; so the war against India goes on while Washington thinks it is against NATO-ISAF. The book brings clarity to the Indo-Pak war number four (or five?) relocated to Afghanistan with India firmly entrenched with the Northern Alliance and the Karzai government, and Pakistan with its proxies embedded in Al Qaeda. The real epitaph will come later and it will be for a much bigger demise than just the fading of the doctrine of strategic depth. *

_____________________________

Comment:

US government funds Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)

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DLA Piper Our People Mark H. HamerRepresentation of Digital Equipment Corporation in San Diego involving the automated child care support system for the San Diego District Attorney's office. dlapiper.com/mark_hamer/

DLA Piper Albert E. HartmannJournal of Law Reform, Executive Editor Child Advocacy Law Clinic^Certificate of Merit Award, Legal Profession & Legal Ethics, Fall 1997 dlapiper.com/cs/albert_hartmann/

DLA Piper DLA Piper partner Naar receives Making A The child of poor immigrants, Marovitz became the youngest person to serve as a Cook County Assistant State ’s Attorney, then the first Jewish state senator dlapiper.com/ru/global/media/detail.aspx?news=408

Safety in Numbers On 13 November 1992 a child, Declan O'Byrne, was degree of safety in a kitchen knife than it would in a child's dlapiper.com/.../PublicationAttachment/3842e515-1fa0-43e1-b8bc-630246b6548a/Safety_in_Numbers.pdf

Pentagon Blog Pentagon Blog. Inquire about this Domain. Blogs. Boston Globe. Wall Street Blogs. Blogs Wall Street Square Feet. Boston Globe Federal Register
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Pakistan: Now or Never Pentagon Blogs Reuters com
For while the Pentagon might have been trying to send a crisis-tested 33-year The Dawn Blog. Global Voices Online. Carnegie Endowment: South Asia. Bloggers blogs.reuters com/pakistan/tag/pentagon

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The Pentagon wants AMERICAblog's help spreading propaganda about Iraq
News and opinion about US politics from a liberal perspective BicycleMark's blog & podcast - Billmon - Bloggernista - Bonjour America americablog com/2006/03/pentagon-wants-americablogs-help.html

Pentagon Studies Blogs as Terror-Fighting Tool AlterNet
Will the Pentagon's sophisticated search mechanism find any of these blogs? Do I want it to realtime blog analysis can possibly help the Pentagon fight alternet org/columnists/story/39227

"Pentagon missile" hoax distracts from best evidence
ABOUT DOTS MAP BLOG NEWSLETTERS DICTIONARY HAIKU AUDIO BOOKS MOVIES ALL FILES WHAT hit the Pentagon - Flight 77, probably electronically hijacked oilempire us/pentagon html

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BRAD BLOG EXCLUSIVE DOCUMENTS: 'THE PENTAGON PAPERS OF E-VOTING' THE LONG Tonight, The BRAD BLOG is releasing that Go to The BRAD BLOG front page "
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Thomas P.M. Barnett Weblog
Paul Brinkley, head of the Pentagon office who talked Enterra into entering Iraq, Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. • Neo-Traditional Librarian thomaspmbarnett com/weblog

The Pentagon wants AMERICAblog's help spreading propaganda about IraqI'm fascinated to hear that the Pentagon is spending US taxpayer money to BicycleMark's blog & podcast The Gavel (Speaker Pelosi's blog)
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The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.

Designed by the Swedish American architect George Bergstrom (1876 – 1955), and built by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, general contractor John McShain, the building was dedicated on January 15, 1943 after ground was broken for construction on September 11, 1941. General Brehon Somervell provided the major motive power behind the project[1]; Colonel Leslie Groves (whose administrative ability, drive and forcefulness led to his nomination to head the Manhattan Project in 1942) and major Clarence Renshaw were responsible for overseeing the project for the Army.

The Pentagon is the largest[2] or one of the world's largest office buildings.[3] It houses approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees[3]and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel. It has five sides, five floors above ground (plus two basement levels), and five ring corridors per floor with a total of 17.5 miles (28.2 km)[3] of corridors.

The central plaza in the Pentagon is five acres (20,000 m²). The open space in the center is informally known as "ground zero", a nickname originating during the Cold War and based on the presumption that the Soviet Union would target one or more nuclear missiles at this central location. At the center of this plaza was once the "Ground Zero Cafe", a snack bar.[4]

Just south of the Pentagon are Pentagon City and Crystal City, extensive shopping and high-density residential districts in Arlington. Arlington National Cemetery is to the north. The Washington Metro Pentagon station is also located at the Pentagon, on the Blue and Yellow Lines. The Pentagon is surrounded by the complex Pentagon road network.[5]

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.[1] With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something.

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan SSP

USHOSTAGE — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:20:00 GMT

Al Qaeda-linked suspects emerge in Islamabad Marriott attacks

By Bill Roggio
September 25, 2008
longwarjournal.org

Qari Mohammad Zafar, a leader of the Laskhar-e-Jhangvi who is thought to be behind the Marriott bombings. Photo from AKI

Two senior al Qaeda and Taliban-linked Pakistani terrorists are suspected of being behind the Sept. 20 bombing at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. The deadly attack killed more than 50 Pakistanis and foreigners and wounded more than 270, and destroyed the once-popular hotel.

In recent press reports, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, and Qari Mohammad Zafar, a leader of the Laskhar-e-Jhangvi, have both been implicated as being the mastermind of the Marriott bombing. Both men have extensive ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban, and have been in Pakistani custody until recently.

Akhtar is believed to be behind the attacks because "the method of the bombing and the nature of explosives resemble four previous vehicle bomb attacks, carried out by suicide bombers [from the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami] in Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi" earlier this year, The News reported. Several of the bombing are thought to have been conducted to secure the release of Akhtar, who was in Pakistani custody at the time.

Zafar has been implicated by Pakistani intelligence after some of his operatives were detained in Punjab and interrogated. The connection to Zafar was established from phone numbers found on the mobiles of some of those arrested in Punjab,” Adnkronos International reported. "Zafar is behind the planning, arrangement of transportation and procurement of explosives for the attack against the Marriott Hotel on 20 September," an anonymous security official told the news service.

US intelligence believes both Akhtar and Zafar are involved in the operation. "Akhtar is the operational leader while Zafar is the tactical commander," a senior US military intelligence source told The Long War Journal on the condition of anonymity. "We believe Akhtar chose the target and provided the expertise for the bomb, while Zafar provided the muscle" to carry out the operation. US intelligence considers both men to be dangerous and effective leaders.

Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Pakistani terror groups have used the Laskhar-e-Jhangvi to execute operations inside Pakistan for years, the source stated. "Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Laskhar-e-Jhangvi, and other Pakistani terror groups merged with al Qaeda years ago," the source stated.

Qari Saifullah Akhtar, and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami

Qari Saifullah Akhtar and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI or the Movement of Islamic Holy War) have worked with the Taliban and al Qaeda for more than a decade. In 2002, The Friday Times described the HUJI as "the biggest militia we know nothing about."

HUJI was formed Islamist extremists inside Pakistan’s Punjab province the early 1980s to help battle the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, HUJI turned its focus on fighting the Indian Army inside Jammu and Kashmir. The group maintained camps throughout Pakistan. The largest, in Kotli in Azad Kashmir, had "a capacity for training 800 warriors." As of 2002, more than 650 HUJI fighters were killed fighting the Indian Army.

Like many Pakistani-based jihadi groups fighting in Kashmir, the HUJI received support from Pakistan’s military and the Inter-Services Intelligence. The group has officed in more than 40 locations inside Pakistan and maintained "organized seminaries in Karachi, and Chechnya, [Xinxiang], Uzbekistan and Tajikistan." Its members have participated in attacks and fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The Bangladeshi branch of HUJI was one of the original signatories of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against the West. This fatwa, or religious ruling established the International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders and officially incorporated various Islamic terror groups such as Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Akhtar took control of the HUJI after the group's leader was killed fighting the Soviets in 1985. He expanded HUJI's infrastructure throughout Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Akhtar largely stayed off the radar until he emerged as being part of a plot to overthrow the Pakistani government in 1995, when he was implicated along with Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi and three other senior officers in an attempt to assassinate senior military leaders during a Corps Commanders Conference at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. Charges against Akhtar were dismissed after he testified against his conspirators. Abbasi was released from detention after President Musharraf took power in a coup in 1999.

The Pakistani government released Akhtar in 1996 and promptly fled to Afghanistan, where he became a close confidant and adviser to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Three members in the Taliban's cabinet and 22 judges were members of HUJI. The group was affectionately called the "Punjabi Taliban." Akhtar is also described as a "crucial figure" in the efforts to unite Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.

HUJI established training camps in Kandahar, Kabul, and Khost. Taliban military and police forces were also trained at HUJI camps. HUJI became a critical force in the Taliban’s efforts to consolidate power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. More than 300 HUJI fighters were killed fighting against the Northern Alliance. HUJI also used its bases in Afghanistan to conduct operations in Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Akhtar accompanied Mullah Omar as he fled the US onslaught during Operation Enduring Freedom after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Akhtar took shelter in South Waziristan, where he was born, and established links with Baitullah Mehsud. Omar moved his operations to Quetta in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

After being implicated in two assassination attempts of Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, Akhtar fled to Saudi Arabia and then finally took refuge in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE arrested Akhtar in August 2004 and deported him to Pakistan, where he was held for more than two years without trial. The Pakistani security services released Akhtar in May 2007 after the Supreme Court began inquiring on a number of missing persons.

Pakistani security forces detained Akhtar once again in February 2008 after he was implicated in several bombings, the most prominent being the October suicide attack in Karachi that aimed to assassinate former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as she returned from exile to begin her political campaign.

Bhutto, who was later assassinated in an attack in Rawalpindi in December 2007, implicated Akhtar in her posthumously released book. "I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned. However, a bomb maker was needed for the bombs," Bhutto wrote. "Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted jihadi terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government in the 1990s. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail. According to my sources, the officials in Lahore had turned to Qari for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one."

The Pakistani government released Akhtar from jail on bail in June 2008 after claiming insufficient evidence existed to link him to recent attacks.

Qari Mohammad Zafar and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi

The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ or Army of Jhangvi) was formed in 1996 after splitting with the Sipah-e-Sahaba, a radical Sunni group behind sectarian attacks against Shia throughout Pakistan. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi expanded its activity to include terror attacks against the Pakistani state. After Sept. 11, 2001, LeJ was one of two Pakistani terror groups banned by the Musharraf regime.

The size of the LeJ is unknown, but it is believed to have hundreds of members dispersed in small cells throughout Pakistan. The group maintains camps in South Waziristan, under the protection of Baitullah Mehsud.

Pakistani police began to openly admit the LeJ began forging close ties with al Qaeda and the Taliban after a string of attacks during the winter and spring of 2006. The most high-profile attack was the March 3 bombing outside the US Consulate in Karachi. A US diplomat was killed in the suicide car bombing.

LeJ foot soldiers carried out the attack, while the bomb was assembled in Abdullah Mehsud's territory near Wana in South Waziristan. "Police have come to the conclusion that terrorist groups with different priorities have ganged up," Daily Times wrote in 2006. "They are specifically worried about the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Al Qaeda and the Abdullah Mehsud-led group of Afghanistan." Abdullah Mehsud was a Waziri tribesman who was based in South Waziristan and killed by Pakistani forces in Zhob in 2007.

Baitullah Mehsud, Abdullah's cousin and the leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, is known to have absorbed elements of the LeJ in Karachi and placed them under the command of a leader named Raheemullah.

Qari Mohammad Zafar is wanted by the US government for the Karachi Consulate bombing. "Zafar is suspected of being a key figure involved with this attack," the Rewards for Justice website states. A $5 million reward has been offered for information leading the capture of Zafar.

Zafar escaped from Pakistani custody in 2007 and is known to shelter in South Waziristan.

Suicide Bombers - Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)

USHOSTAGE — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Suicide bombers’ Who’s Who

Amir Mir
thenews.com.pk
9/22/2008

LAHORE: Intelligence agencies believe the endless wave of deadly suicide bombings, climaxing with one of the deadliest 9/11 type attack on the Islamabad Marriot on Saturday, signify the revival of al-Qaeda and Taliban networks, which had been forced out of their bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

From the rugged, lawless terrain of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) out west to the spiffy environs of Islamabad, the suicide bombers across Pakistan have made the whole swathe of land their laboratory and the target of these grisly human bombs is anyone, anywhere.

The security situation in Pakistan has been in utter turmoil for the past two years, and it went from bad to worse after the Lal Masjid episode. Since then, it appears that the extremist forces have not only gained strength in the tribal areas but also got a foothold in the country's settled areas. This can be gauged from the fact that even Islamabad is not spared by the human bombs. Investigations by intelligence agencies show the involvement of several kinds of extremist groups in the ongoing spate of suicide strikes.

The first are those which had either been linked with the fanatic clerics of the Lal Masjid or had sympathies with them due to their ideological affinity. Investigations show some of the suicide bombers had been the students of the Ghazi Brothers and some were the relatives of those killed during the Operation Silence. The agencies have already concluded that most of the suicide attacks were carried out by young men in their 20s, coming from the Fata.

As soon as the Operation Silence came to an end in July 2007, the agencies had warned the government that the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad were to suffer from suicide attacks as over 100 potential human bombs, who had been studying at the Lal Masjid-run Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia, had not returned to their homes after the operation.

They had warned that the prospective bombers were hiding in several Madrassas and mosques in and around the twin cities and were firm to blow themselves up anytime, anywhere to avenge the killing of their near and dear ones. The fears proved true after Rawalpindi and Islamabad witnessed a series of bloody suicide attacks, mostly targeting those in khakis.

An 18-year-old suicide bomber killed 22 highly trained commandos of the Special Services Group (SSG) of the Pakistan Army by targeting their Tarbela Ghazi mess, 100 km south of Islamabad, on September 13, 2007. Investigations showed that he was the brother of a girl who was killed during the Operation Silence, carried out by the Karar Company of the SSG Brigade.

The SSG is the same elite unit of the Army to which Musharraf himself belonged. It was specially trained by the US Special Forces for carrying out covert operations and counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations across Pakistan, especially in the tribal belt. Two months before suffering 22 casualties in the Tarbela Ghazi suicide bombing, the elite SSG had lost its 10 commandos, including a colonel, during a weeklong gun battle with the fanatic clerics and students of the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa.

The second kind of groups involved in suicide attacks are those linked to al-Qaeda and Taliban networks based in Waziristan on the Pak-Afghan tribal belt. Intelligence reports say Islamic rebels allied to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda have literally taken control of the entire North Waziristan tribal area on the Pak-Afghan border, gaining a significant base to resist the US-led forces in Afghanistan as well as the Pakistani security forces, especially through their highly motivated suicide bombers. These reports say the security agencies are mostly being targeted by suicide bombers being trained and launched by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Ameer Baitullah Mehsud -- an al-Qaeda-linked tribal chief of the Mehsud tribe, who is ruling the roost in South Waziristan. Mehsud has been named as the prime accused in Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

Intelligence reports say Abu Ali Tunisi, an al-Qaeda-linked commander hailing from Tunis, has managed to bring the rebels of four Pakistani militant groups -- the Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI), the Harkatul Mujahideen (HuM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) -- under the folds of al-Qaeda. Their main aim is to launch a string of terrorist activities, targeting the personnel of the armed forces and all those government figures who are considered to be pro-US. Intelligence circles say besides the Abu Ali Tunisi network based in Waziristan, there is another group led by one Abu Adil -- a militant of Arab origin -- which is working under the name of Al-Jehad. This group was involved in the November 2006 suicide bombing that killed 42 soldiers in Dargai, NWFP. Al-Jehad is further accused of carrying out four other suicide strikes in Islamabad, Dera Ismail Khan, Tank and Mir Ali -- all in 2007.

The last kind of the groups involved in suicide attacks are sectarian, primarily the banned militant Sunni group, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Launched in 1996 as a splinter group of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a Sunni Deobandi offshoot of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the LeJ is infamous for its secrecy, and unrelenting pursuit of its aim of targeting Western interests in Pakistan and the Shias. They want an eventual transformation of the country into a Taliban-style Islamic state. Most of the major terrorist operations carried out in Pakistan since the 9/11 attacks appear to have a common grandmother -- the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

The intelligence sources say all these groups, identified and classified under three different categories of terrorist groups, follow their own techniques for achieving their objectives and use different mechanisms to attack their targets. The group comprising the toughest motivation category is to hit military installations with the help of suicide bombers. They include trained, skilled and equally motivated terrorists.

The second category of bombers attack personnel of law-enforcement agencies and government personalities while the third is deputed to kill the enemy through car bombings or blasts through remote-controlled devices. The message from the human bombs after the Marriot attack is clear -- we can hit you anywhere we want.

United States Building Case Against Pakistan

USHOSTAGE — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:48:00 GMT

US: Pakistan boosting atom bomb ability
September 19, 2008
presstv.ir

Pakistan is building supplementary plutonium-producing reactors to enhance its ability to produce more atomic bombs, a US report says.

Pakistan is close to completing a second plutonium-producing reactor, and is well into building a third, and these reactors could increase its ability to make atomic bombs, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said in a report, the local media highlighted Friday.

A row of cooling towers indicated the second reactor was close to completion and could be ready to operate in a year's time, according to Washington group's report.

The 10-page report estimated the reactors would run on power of “about 100-megawatts or more”, which could enable the two combined to yield plutonium for 8 to 10 atomic bombs a year.

“Once completed, these reactors will increase several-fold Pakistan's ability to make weapons-grade plutonium (fuel),” it added.

“When finished...will allow a significant increase in the quantity and quality of Pakistan's nuclear weapons,” the report noticed.

“The wider implication ... (is that) there is a real risk this will exacerbate an India-Pakistan nuclear arms race and increase tensions more broadly between the two,” it reiterated.

The report included commercial satellite images taken two weeks ago and in February and May showing construction of the second and third Khushab complexes.

A nuclear capable Hatf-VI (Shaheen-II) missile with a range of 1,242 miles takes off during a test flight from an undisclosed location in Pakistan

Pakistan has an operating heavy-water reactor and heavy-water production plant already at Khushab (Punjab province).

The report also said India could easily match Pakistan's moves given its own ability to churn out plutonium in heavy water reactors and a fast-breeder reactor.

The report comes two days after India deployed Russian made fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear warheads in the troubled region of Kashmir as a warning to Pakistan.

Pakistan conducted five nuclear tests in 1998 in response to those of India, becoming a nuclear-armed state.

The regional arch-rivals have fought three wars, are both outside the global Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and have tested nuclear arms with Western technology imported ostensibly for atomic energy.

But a 45-nation Nuclear Supplier Group approved a waiver to its rules this month allowing trade with India as part of a civilian nuclear cooperation pact it struck with the United States. The entire undertaking could erode the NPT, critics say.

UN negotiations on such a treaty, which would ban production of nuclear weapons fuel, have made no headway for years because of the double standards practiced by the nuclear powers.

JR/DT

Pakistan Fires Warning Shots

USHOSTAGE — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:17:00 GMT

Pakistan fires at US helicopters
September 15, 2008
presstv.ir

Pakistan has reportedly fired warning shots at US-led helicopters, repelling them as they entered the country's tribal region.

"The US-led coalition troops in helicopters came close to the border and they tried to enter into Pakistan territory in the early hours of Monday but shots were fired by Pakistani troops and the coalition troops retreated," AFP quoted a security official as saying Monday.

The incident took place near Angor Adda village in South Waziristan, where US troops carried out a heli-borne raid earlier this month and killed at least 20 people including women and children.

Pakistani Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani had earlier warned that Islamabad would not tolerate border violations by US troops stationed in Afghanistan, adding that his country will not accept foreign troops on its soil.

In recent months, there has been an increase in Washington-led missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. While the US claims the strikes have been directed at militants, it has killed scores of civilians in missile attacks this year and has sparked outrage in Pakistan.

Pakistani officials and tribal leaders have also threatened to retaliate should US cross-border attacks continue.

HE/AA/BGH

Pakistan Jet Fighters Ordered To Confront

USHOSTAGE — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:55:00 GMT

Pak jets 'sent to confront US drones'
September 13, 2008
presstv.ir

Pakistan has ordered its jet fighters to confront any attack by the US-led coalition forces on the tribal belt near the Afghan border.

Air force fighters have carried out sorties in the tribal region for the first time after US missiles attacks killed dozens of civilians, sources said on Saturday.

Air Force Chief Marshal Tanvir Mehmood, meanwhile, said that the Air Force could respond to violation of the country's air space by the US forces if the government issued orders.

Tribal elders and witnesses in Miranshah told local news networks that they had seen Pakistani fighter planes hovering over North Waziristan. They had also seen warplanes flying towards the Afghan border area.

Earlier, Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Kayani issued a harshly-worded statement, criticizing cross-border attacks by the coalition forces from Afghanistan and vowing to defend the country "at all cost".

The Air Force's decision followed bloody incursions by the US ground troops into the tribal belt as well as a string of missile strikes by US-operated drone aircrafts.

The reaction comes after US President George W. Bush endorsed US military raids inside Pakistan without Islamabad's agreement.

JR/RE