The Forgotten War:12 Years In Afghanistan Down The Memory Hole

Will the U.S. still be meddling in Afghanistan 30 years from now? If history is any guide, the answer is yes. And if history is any guide, three decades from now most Americans will have only the haziest idea why.

Since the 1950s, the U.S. has been trying to mold that remote land to its own desires, first through an aid “war” in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union; then, starting as the 1970s ended, an increasingly bitter and brutally hot proxy war with the Soviets meant to pay them back for supporting America’s enemies during the war in Vietnam. One bad war leads to another.

From then until the early 1990s, Washington put weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalist extremists of all sorts -- thought to be natural, devoutly religious allies in the war against “godless communism” -- gloated over the Red Army’s defeat and the surprising implosion of the Soviet empire, and then experienced its own catastrophic blowback from Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. After 50 years of scheming behind the scenes, the U.S. put boots on the ground in 2001 and now, 12 years later, is still fighting there -- against some Afghans on behalf of other Afghans while training Afghan troops to take over and fight their countrymen, and others, on their own.

Through it all, the U.S. has always claimed to have the best interests of Afghans at heart -- waving at various opportune moments the bright flags of modernization, democracy, education, or the rights of women. Yet today, how many Afghans would choose to roll back the clock to 1950, before the Americans ever dropped in? After 12 years of direct combat, after 35 years of arming and funding one faction or another, after 60 years of trying to remake Afghanistan to serve American aims, what has it all meant? If we ever knew, we’ve forgotten. Weary of official reports of progress, Americans tuned out long ago.

Back in 1991, as Steve Coll reports in Ghost Wars, an unnamed CIA agent mentioned the war in Afghanistan to President George H.W. Bush. Not long before, he had okayed the shipment of Iraqi weaponry captured in the first Gulf War -- worth $30 million -- to multiple factions of Islamist extremists then battling each other and probably using those secondhand Iraqi arms to destroy Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Still, Bush seemed puzzled by the CIA man’s question about the war. He reportedly asked, “Is that thing still going on?”

Such forgetfulness about wars has, it seems, become an all-American skill. Certainly, the country has had little trouble forgetting the war in Iraq, and why should Afghanistan be any different? Sure, the exit from that country is going to take more time and effort. No seacoast, no ships, bad roads, high tolls, IEDs. Trucking stuff out is problematic; flying it out, wildly expensive, especially since a lot of the things are really, really big. Take MRAPs, for example -- that’s Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles -- 11,000 of them, weighing 14 tons or more apiece. For that workhorse transport plane, the C-17, a full load of MRAPs numbers only four.

The equipment inventory keeps changing, but estimates run to 100,000 shipping containers and about 50,000 vehicles to be removed by the end of 2014, adding up to more than $36 billion worth of equipment now classified as “retrograde.” The estimated shipping bill has quickly risen to $6 billion, and like the overall cost of the war, it is sure to keep rising.

Seven billion dollars worth of equipment -- about 20% of what the U.S. sent in to that distant land -- is simply being torn up, chopped down, split, shredded, stomped, and, when possible, sold off for scrap at pennies a pound. Toughest to break up are the weighty MRAPs. Introduced in 2007 at a cost of $1 million apiece to counteract deadly roadside bombs, they were later discovered to be no better at protecting American soldiers than the cheaper vehicles they replaced. Of the 11,000 shipped to Afghanistan, 2,000 are on the chopping block, leaving a mere 9,000 to be flown to Kuwait, four at a time, and shipped home or “repositioned” elsewhere to await some future enemy.

The military is not exaggerating when it calls this colossal destruction of surplus equipment historic. A disposal effort on this scale is unprecedented in the annals of the Pentagon. The centerpiece of this demolition derby may be the brand-new, 64,000-square-foot, $34-million, state-of-the art command center completed in Helmand Province just as most U.S. troops left, and now likely to be demolished. Or the new $45 million facility in Kandahar built as a repair center for armored vehicles, now used for their demolition, and probably destined to follow them. Taxpayers may one day want to ask some questions about such profligate and historic waste, but it’s sure to keep arms manufacturers happy, resupplying the military until we can get ourselves into another full-scale war.

So this exit is a really big job, and that’s without even mentioning the paperwork. All those exit plans, all the documents to be filed with the Afghan government for permission to export our own equipment, all the fines assessed for missing customs forms (already running to $70 million), all the export fees to be paid, and the bribes to be offered, and the protection money to be slipped to the Taliban so our enemies won’t shoot at the stuff being trucked out. All that takes time.

But when it comes right down to it, the United States has a surefire way of ending a war, no matter when it actually ends (or doesn’t). When we say it’s over, it’s over.

Enduring Operation Enduring Freedom

As it happens, things probably won’t be quite so decisively “over” for everybody. More

 

US killer robot policy: Full speed ahead

In November 2012, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed directive 3000.09, establishing policy for the “design, development, acquisition, testing, fielding, and … application of lethal or non-lethal, kinetic or non-kinetic, force by autonomous or semi-autonomous weapon systems.” Without fanfare, the world had its first openly declared national policy for killer robots.

The policy has been widely misperceived as one of caution. According to one account, the directive promises that a human will always decide when a robot kills another human. Others even read it as imposing a 10-year moratorium to allow for discussion of ethics and safeguards. However, as a Defense Department spokesman confirmed for me, the 10-year expiration date is routine for such directives, and the policy itself is “not a moratorium on anything.”

A careful reading of the directive finds that it lists some broad and imprecise criteria and requires senior officials to certify that these criteria have been met if systems are intended to target and kill people by machine decision alone. But it fully supports developing, testing, and using the technology, without delay. Far from applying the brakes, the policy in effect overrides longstanding resistance within the military, establishes a framework for managing legal, ethical, and technical concerns, and signals to developers and vendors that the Pentagon is serious about autonomous weapons.

Did soldiers ask for killer robots? In the years before this new policy was announced, spokesmen routinely denied that the US military would even consider lethal autonomy for machines. Over the past year, speaking for themselves, some retired and even active duty officers have written passionately against both autonomous weapons and the overuse of remotely operated drones. In May 2013, the first nationwide poll ever taken on this topic found that Americans opposed to autonomous weapons outnumbered supporters by two to one. Strikingly, the closer people were to the military—family, former military, or active duty—the more likely they were to strongly oppose autonomous weapons and support efforts to ban them.

Since the 1990s, the military has exhibited what autonomy proponent Barry Watts has called “a cultural disinclination to turn attack decisions over to software algorithms.” Legacy weapons such as land and sea mines have been deemphasized and some futuristic programs canceled—or altered to provide greater capabilities for human control. Most notably, the Army’s Future Combat Systems program, which was to include a variety of networked drones and robots at an eventual cost estimated as high as $300 billion, was cancelled in 2009, with $16 billion already spent.

At the same time, calls for autonomous weapons have been rising both outside and from some inside the military. In 2001, retired Army lieutenant colonel T. K. Adams argued that humans were becoming the most vulnerable, burdensome, and performance-limiting components of manned systems. Communications links for remote operation would be vulnerable to disruption, and full autonomy would be needed as a fallback. Furthermore, warfare would become too fast and too complex for humans to direct. Realistic or not, such thinking, together with budget pressures and the perception that robots are cheaper than people, has supported a steady growth of autonomy research and development in military and contractor-supported labs. In March 2012, the Naval Research Lab opened a new facility dedicated to development and testing of autonomous systems, complete with simulated rainforest, desert, littoral, and shipboard or urban combat environments. But the killer roboticists’ brainchildren have continued to face what a 2012 Defense Science Board report, commissioned by then-Undersecretary Carter, called “material obstacles within the Department that are inhibiting the broad acceptance of autonomy.”

The discrimination problem. Navy scientist John Canning recounts a 2003 meeting at which high-level lawyers from the Navy and Pentagon objected to autonomous weapons. They assumed that robots could not comply with international humanitarian law, core principles of which include a responsibility to distinguish civilians from combatants and to refrain from attacks that would cause excessive harm to civilians. These principles, and the military rules of engagement intended to implement them, assume a level of awareness, understanding, and judgment that computers simply don’t have. Weapons are also subject to mandated legal review, and indiscriminate weapons—that is, weapons that cannot be selectively directed to attack lawful targets and avoid civilians—are forbidden. The lawyers did not think they would ever be able to sign off on autonomous weapons.

Georgia Tech roboticist Ron Arkin has argued that unemotional robots, following rigid programs, could actually be more ethical than human soldiers. But his proposals fail to solve the hard problems of distinguishing civilians, understanding and predicting social and tactical situations, or judging the proportionality of force. Others argue, philosophically, that only humans can make such targeting judgments legitimately. In a world getting used to talking about virtual assistants and self-driving cars, it may not be obvious what the limits of artificial intelligence will be, or what people will accept, in 10, 20, or 40 years. But for now, and for the immediate future, the robot discrimination problem is hard to dispute.

To break the legal deadlock, Canning suggested that robots might normally be granted autonomy to attack materiel, including other robots, but not humans. Yet in many situations it might be impossible to avoid the risk—or the intent—of killing or injuring people. For such cases, Canning proposed what he called “dial-a-level” autonomy; that is, the robot might ordinarily be required to ask a human what to do, but in some circumstances it could be authorized to take action on its own. More

 

Top-secret US intelligence files show new levels of distrust of Pakistan

THE $52.6 billion US intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including Al Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

Pakistani security outside the U.S. consulate in Lahore

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.
A 178-page summary of the US intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counterterrorism sources recruited by the CIA.
Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical US intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear programme are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.
The disclosures — based on documents provided to The Washington Post by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden — expose broad new levels of US distrust in an already unsteady security partnership with Pakistan, a politically unstable country that faces rising Islamist militancy. They also reveal a more expansive effort to gather intelligence on Pakistan than US officials have disclosed.

The United States has delivered nearly $26 billion in aid to Pakistan over the past 12 years, aimed at stabilising the country and ensuring its cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. But with Osama bin Laden dead and Al Qaeda degraded, US spy agencies appear to be shifting their attention to dangers that have emerged beyond the patch of Pakistani territory patrolled by CIA drones.
“If the Americans are expanding their surveillance capabilities, it can only mean one thing,” said Husain Haqqani, who until 2011 served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. “The mistrust now exceeds the trust.”

Beyond the budget files, other classified documents provided to The Post expose fresh allegations of systemic human rights abuses in Pakistan. US spy agencies reported that high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officials had been aware of — and possibly ordered — an extensive campaign of extrajudicial killings targeting militants and other adversaries.
Public disclosure of those reports, based on communications intercepts from 2010 to 2012 and other intelligence, could have forced the Obama administration to sever aid to the Pakistani armed forces because of a US law that prohibits military assistance to human rights abusers. But the documents indicate that administration officials decided not to press the issue, in order to preserve an already frayed relationship with the Pakistanis.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council said the United States is “committed to a long-term partnership with Pakistan, and we remain fully engaged in building a relationship that is based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”
“We have an ongoing strategic dialogue that addresses in a realistic fashion many of the key issues between us, from border management to counterterrorism, from nuclear security to promoting trade and investment,” said the spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden. “The United States and Pakistan share a strategic interest in combating the challenging security issues in Pakistan, and we continue to work closely with Pakistan’s professional and dedicated security forces to do so.”
The Post agreed to withhold some details from the budget documents after consultations with US officials, who expressed concern about jeopardizing ongoing operations and sources.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Critical ‘intelligence gaps’

Stark assessments of Pakistan contained in the budget files seem at odds with the signals that US officials have conveyed in public, partly to avoid fanning Pakistani suspicions that the United States is laying contingency plans to swoop in and seize control of the country’s nuclear complex.
When Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. was asked during congressional testimony last year whether Pakistan had appropriate safeguards for its nuclear programme, he replied, “I’m reasonably confident they do.” Facing a similar question this year, Clapper declined to discuss the matter in open session.
But the classified budget overview he signed and submitted for fiscal 2013 warned that “knowledge of the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and associated material encompassed one of the most critical set of.
The budget documents do not break down expenditures by country or estimate how much the US government spends to spy on Pakistan. But the nation is at the centre of two categories — counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation — that dominate the black budget.
In their proposal for fiscal 2013, which ends Sept 30, US spy agencies sought $16.6 billion to fight Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and asked for $6.86 billion to counter the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Together, the two categories accounted for nearly half of the US intelligence community’s budget request for this year.

Detailed spreadsheets contain dozens of line items that correspond to operations in Pakistan. The CIA, for example, was scheduled to spend $2.6 billion on “covert action” programmes around the world. Among the most expensive, according to current and former US intelligence officials, is the armed drone campaign against Al Qaeda fighters and other militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt.
US intelligence analysts “produced hundreds of detailed and timely reports on shipments and pending deliveries of suspect cargoes” to Pakistan, Syria and Iran. Multiple US agencies exploited the massive American security presence in Afghanistan — including a string of CIA bases and National Security Agency listening posts along the border mainly focused on militants — for broader intelligence on Pakistan.Anxiety over nuclear programme
After years of diplomatic conflict, significant sources of tension between the United States and Pakistan have begun to subside.
The pace of CIA drone strikes has plunged, and two years have passed since US leaders infuriated Islamabad by ordering the secret raid inside Pakistani territory that killed bin Laden.
Although Pakistani anger has abated, Haqqani said the fallout from the raid had broader consequences than widely understood.

“The discovery of bin Laden (in Pakistan) made the Americans think that the Pakistani state’s ability to know what happens within the country is a lot less than had been assumed,” said Haqqani, who is an international-relations professor at Boston University. That realisation may have ratcheted up a long-standing source of concern: Pakistan’s ability to safeguard its nuclear materials and components.
US intelligence agencies are focused on two particularly worrisome scenarios: the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear facilities might come under attack by Islamist militants, as its army headquarters in Rawalpindi did in 2009, and even greater concern that Islamist militants might have penetrated the ranks of Pakistan’s military or intelligence services, putting them in a position to launch an insider attack or smuggle out nuclear material.
Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium. The country is estimated to have as many as 120 nuclear weapons, and the budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies suspect that Pakistan is adding to that stockpile.
Little is known about how it moves materials among its facilities, an area that experts have cited as a potential vulnerability.
“Nobody knows how they truly do it,” said Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani military officer and director of arms control who lectures at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “Vehicles move in a stealthy manner and move with security. But it’s not clear whether the cores are moved to the warheads or the warheads are moved to the core locations.”
Concerns persist that extremists could seize components of the stockpile or trigger a war with neighbouring India. Pakistan also has a track record of exporting nuclear technology to countries that are on Washington’s blacklist.
Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but US export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.
US anxiety over Pakistan’s nuclear programme appears to be driven more by uncertainty about how it is run than specific intelligence indicating that its systems are vulnerable, according to the budget documents.
A lengthy section on counter-proliferation starts with a single goal: “Make Quantitative and Qualitative Progress against Pakistan Nuclear Gaps.” A table indicates that US spy agencies have identified at least six areas in which their understanding of Pakistan’s weapons programmes is deficient.
US agencies reported gaining valuable information through “extensive efforts to increase understanding of the transfer and storage of the associated materials.”
The budget describes the creation of a Pakistan WMD Analysis Cell to track movements of nuclear materials. Agencies, including the CIA and the Defence Department, were able “to develop and deploy a new compartmented collection capability” that delivered a “more comprehensive understanding of strategic weapons security in Pakistan.”
Even so, “the number of gaps associated with Pakistani nuclear security remains the same,” the document said, and “the questions associated with this intractable target are more complex.” The budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies are also focused on the security of the nuclear programme in India, Pakistan’s arch-rival.

Other fields under scrutiny

US surveillance of Pakistan extends far beyond its nuclear programme. There are several references in the black budget to expanding US scrutiny of chemical and biological laboratories. The country is not thought to be running a rogue chemical or biological weapons programme, but US intelligence officials fear that Islamists could seize materials from government-run laboratories.
Even American interdiction operations targeting other countries have stumbled into connections with Pakistan. In one case, a US effort to block an Iranian shipment through a Turkish port “proved to be even more successful when aluminum powder destined for Pakistan was also discovered and detained,” according to the documents. Aluminum powder can be used to increase the power of explosives.
The budget documents don’t disclose CIA payments to its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, which former officials said has totalled tens of millions of dollars. The documents do show that the CIA has developed sophisticated means of assessing the loyalties of informants who have helped the agency find Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal region.
Those measures, which The Post has agreed not to disclose, have allowed the CIA to “gain confidence in each asset’s authenticity, reliability and freedom from hostile control.”

Extrajudicial killings

Other classified documents given to The Post by Snowden reveal that US spy agencies for years reported that senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders were orchestrating a wave of extrajudicial killings of terrorism suspects and other militants.
In July 2011, an assessment of communications intercepts and other intelligence by the NSA concluded that the Pakistani military and intelligence services had continued over the preceding 16 months a pattern of lethally targeting perceived enemies without trial or due process. The killings, according to the NSA, occurred “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers.”The NSA cited two senior Pakistani officials who “apparently ordered some of the killings or were at least aware of them,” read a summary of the top-secret NSA report, titled “Pakistan/Human Rights: Extrajudicial Killings Conducted With Consent of Senior Intelligence Officials.”
The report summary did not provide an estimate of how many people had been killed or their identities. But it generally described the targets as people whom the Pakistani security forces viewed as “undeniably linked to terrorist activity” or responsible for attacks on Pakistan’s armed forces.
The killings “seemed to serve the purpose of dispensing what the military considered swift justice,” the intelligence assessment stated. Pakistani authorities “were conscious of not arousing suspicions. The number of victims at a given time tended to be very small.
Furthermore, the military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas.”
Although Pakistan has been engaged for years in open warfare with Taliban factions and other domestic insurgents, the NSA placed the extrajudicial killings in a much darker category. Pakistani police forces “were reluctant to carry out the killings,” the report said.
The NSA compiled its report shortly after the public exposure of other alleged Pakistani atrocities.
In June 2010, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan charged that Pakistani forces had carried out more than 280 summary executions during an offensive against Taliban fighters and other militants, mostly in the Swat Valley. Five months later, a video surfaced on the Internet showing Pakistani soldiers executing six blindfolded men with their hands tied behind their backs.
An international outcry over the latter incident prompted the Obama administration to withhold aid — but only to a handful of low-level Pakistani army units thought to have been involved in such incidents.
At the time, Pakistani officials dismissed the video and other reports of summary executions as Taliban propaganda, but they later reversed course and launched an internal investigation. Pakistan’s military leaders insisted publicly that they had zero tolerance for such incidents.

Human rights abuses

It was not the first time that US officials sought to keep evidence of Pakistani human rights abuses out of the public eye.
A classified diplomatic cable, sent from the US Embassy in Islamabad to officials in Washington in September 2009, also raised concern about the extrajudicial killings of militants by Pakistani army units. But the cable — originally released in 2010 by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks — advised against public disclosure of the incidents, saying it was more important to maintain support for the Pakistani armed forces.
US intelligence officials have kept quiet about other signs of human rights abuses by the Pakistani military, even though their classified reporting on the subject underscores persistent concerns.
In September 2011, the summary of a top-secret report from a Defense Intelligence Agency task force cited the “systemic practice” of unlawful killings by Pakistani security forces in the tribal regions of western Pakistan.

Pakistan had recently passed a law allowing the military to detain insurgents indefinitely and make it easier to convict them in civilian courts. But the DIA concluded that because extrajudicial killings were “condoned by senior officials” in Pakistan’s security establishment, the new law was unlikely to significantly reduce the number of deaths.
Other US intelligence documents indicate that Pakistani officials weren’t targeting just suspected insurgents Plot to kill Asma JahangirIn May 2012, US intelligence agencies discovered evidence of Pakistani officers plotting to “eliminate” a prominent human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, according to the summary of a top-secret DIA report. Jahangir had been a leading public critic of the ISI for years.
The DIA report did not identify which officers were plotting to kill Jahangir, but it said the plan “included either tasking militants to kill her in India or tasking militants or criminals to kill her in Pakistan.”
The US agency said it did not know whether the ISI had given approval for the plot to proceed. Although the report speculated that the ISI was motivated to kill Jahangir “to quiet public criticism of the military,” the DIA noted that such a plot “would result in international and domestic backlash as ISI is already under significant criticism for intimidation and extra-judicial killings.”
News of the alleged plot became public a few weeks later when Jahangir gave a round of interviews to journalists, revealing that she had learned that Pakistani intelligence officials had marked her for death. The plot was never carried out. More

 

 

 

Clinton's $33m raid on Pakistan shows that, in the end, hypocrisy will win

La Clinton hath spoken. Thirty-three million smackers lopped off Pakistan's aid budget because its spooks banged up poor old Dr Shakeel Afridi for 33 years after a secret trial. And, as the world knows, Dr Afridi's crime was to confirm the presence of that old has-been Osama bin Laden in his grotty Abbottabad villa.

Well, that will teach the Pakistanis to mess around with a brave doctor who is prepared to help the American institution that tortures and murders its enemies. Forget the CIA's black prisons and rendition and water-boarding, and the torture of the innocents in the jails of our friendly dictators. Dr Afridi was just doing the free world a favour. And WOW, Dr Afridi got shopped by Leon Pannetta when he was CIA boss, and now Barack Obama is accused of letting him down.

Well, I pause here. Dr Afridi was brought before a secret trial in the Khyber tribal area – no charge sheets, no lawyers, no statements from the defendant or the prosecution, just a measly accusation of conspiracy against the state of Pakistan and "high treason". I've never known the difference between "treason" and "high treason" but – since Pakistan's security apparatus is a mirror image of the British Empire – I assume it was invented by us. "High treason" means treason against the monarch. By fingering Bin Laden, after using a ruse about vaccinating his family against hepatitis B to gain access to him, Dr Afridi was committing treason against King Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as the President of Pakistan.

But hold on a moment. Let's suppose Vladimir Putin sent a KGB/FSB hit squad to Britain to murder a former agent called Alexander Litvinenko who had turned against his old spymasters. And let's suppose that the Russians murdered Litvinenko. Which – in real life – they did. And Litvinenko – in real life – was indeed a trusted agent of the Russians, just as Bin Laden was a much-admired servant of the CIA when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.

Getting a bit close to home? Well, let's go a stage further. Supposing Litvinenko was murdered after being identified by a friendly British GP – working for the KGB/FSB – who vaccinated the Litvinenko family against hep B. What do Messrs Cameron and Clegg and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord High Executioner and all the other nabobs do? Do they accuse the British GP of treason, clap him in irons, stage a hush-hush trial covered by the Official Secrets Act and send the chap off to rot in the Tower of London for – say – 33 years?

Or do they accept a bribe from Moscow of, say, $33m (£21m) to let the GP out of jug so he can potter off to Moscow to be given a new home and restart his career as a doktor for the nomenklatura?

In other words, are the Pakistanis being so dastardly when they lock up a national who has helped a foreign power murder an exile inside his own country of Pakistan? And, more to the point, wouldn't we do the same?

And let's take the story of hypocrisy a stage further. Wasn't there a brave Israeli citizen called Mordechai Vanunu, who, in opposition to the nuclear weapons that his country was amassing in secret, spoke out to the world about this outrageous threat to international world order and was subsequently kidnapped from Italy by intelligence agents, tried in Israel for "treason" – in secret, of course – and spent 18 years in prison? Now I grant you that's 15 years shorter than poor old Dr Afridi, but Vanunu still lives under grave restrictions to his liberty and has twice been imprisoned again for the heinous crime of chatting to foreign journalists.

And has La Clinton threatened to suspend a single dollar of Israel's annual $3bn in aid from the United States for the next 33 years in order to protest Israel's treatment of Vanunu? Not to mention – not even to utter the words – Sabra and Chatila, Gaza, a 45-year occupation, illegal colonisation of West Bank land, etc, etc, or, indeed, for producing nuclear weapons. And we absolutely must not mention Jonathan Pollard, the former CIA and US Navy intelligence officer sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for spying for Israel. For if Pollard is not released, is Israel threatening to cut its aid to America? Hold on, that doesn't quite compute, does it? But you get the point. More

 

Seals reveal Truth about Ben Laden Raid

Osama Bin Laden was killed within 90 seconds of the US Navy Seals landing in his compound and not after a protracted gun battle, according to the first account by the men who carried out the raid.

The operation was so clinical that only 12 bullets were fired.

The Seals have spoken out because they were angered at the version given by politicians, which they see as portraying them as cold-blooded murderers on a kill mission. They were also shocked that President Barack 0bama announced Bin Laden's death on television the same evening, rendering useless much of the intelligence they had seized.

Chuck Pfarrer, a former commander of Seal Team 6, which conducted the operation, has interviewed many of those who took part for a book, Seal Target Geronimo, to be published in the US this week.

The Seals own accounts differ from the White House version, which gave the impression that Bin Laden was killed at the end of the operation rather than in its opening seconds. Pfarrer insists Bin Laden would have been captured had he surrendered.

There isn't a politician in the world who could resist trying to take credit for getting Bin Laden but it devalued the intelligence and gave time for every other Al-Qaeda leader to scurry to another bolthole, said Pfarrer. The men who did this and their valorous act deserve better.

It's a pretty shabby way to treat these guys. The first hint of the mission came in January last year when the team's commanding officer was called to a meeting at the headquarters of joint special operations command. The meeting was held in a soundproof bunker three stories below ground with his boss, Admiral William McRaven, and a CIA officer.

They told him a walled compound in Pakistan had been under surveillance for a couple of weeks. They were certain a high-value individual was inside and needed a plan to present to the president. It had to be someone important. So is this Bert or Ernie? he asked.

The Seals nicknames for Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are a reference to two Muppets in Sesame Street, one tall and thin and the other short and fat. We have a voice print, said the CIA officer, and were 60% or 70% certain it's our guy. McRaven added that a reconnaissance satellite had measured the targets shadow. Over 6ft tall.

When McRaven added they would use Ghost Hawk helicopters, the team leader had no doubt. These are the most classified, sophisticated stealth helicopters ever developed, said Pfarrer. They are kept in locked hangars and fly so quiet we call it whisper mode.

Over the next couple of months a plan was hatched. A mock-up of the compound was built at Tall Pines, an army facility in a national forest somewhere in the eastern US.

Four reconnaissance satellites were placed in orbit over the compound, sending back video and communications intercepts. A tall figure seen walking up and down was named the Pacer.

Obama gave the go-ahead and Seal Team 6, known as the Jedi, was deployed to Afghanistan. The White House cancelled plans to provide air cover using jet fighters, fearing this might endanger relations with Pakistan.

Sending in the Ghost Hawks without air cover was considered too risky so the Seals had to use older Stealth Hawks. A Prowler electronic warfare aircraft from the carrier USS Carl Vinson was used to jam Pakistan's radar and create decoy targets. More

 

Robert Fisk: The going price of getting away with murder... would $33m be enough?

The Long View: Are the Pakistanis being so dastardly when they lock up a national who has helped in a murder? Robert Fisk

Monday, 28 May 2012

La Clinton hath spoken. Thirty-three million smackers lopped off Pakistan's aid budget because its spooks banged up poor old Dr Shakeel Afridi for 33 years after a secret trial. And, as the world knows, Dr Afridi's crime was to confirm the presence of that old has-been Osama bin Laden in his grotty Abbottabad villa.

Well, that will teach the Pakistanis to mess around with a brave doctor who is prepared to help the American institution that tortures and murders its enemies. Forget the CIA's black prisons and rendition and water-boarding, and the torture of the innocents in the jails of our friendly dictators. Dr Afridi was just doing the free world a favour. And WOW, Dr Afridi got shopped by Leon Pannetta when he was CIA boss, and now Barack Obama is accused of letting him down.

Well, I pause here. Dr Afridi was brought before a secret trial in the Khyber tribal area – no charge sheets, no lawyers, no statements from the defendant or the prosecution, just a measly accusation of conspiracy against the state of Pakistan and "high treason". I've never known the difference between "treason" and "high treason" but – since Pakistan's security apparatus is a mirror image of the British Empire – I assume it was invented by us. "High treason" means treason against the monarch. By fingering Bin Laden, after using a ruse about vaccinating his family against hepatitis B to gain access to him, Dr Afridi was committing treason against King Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as the President of Pakistan.

But hold on a moment. Let's suppose Vladimir Putin sent a KGB/FSB hit squad to Britain to murder a former agent called Alexander Litvinenko who had turned against his old spymasters. And let's suppose that the Russians murdered Litvinenko. Which – in real life – they did. And Litvinenko – in real life – was indeed a trusted agent of the Russians, just as Bin Laden was a much-admired servant of the CIA when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.

Getting a bit close to home? Well, let's go a stage further. Supposing Litvinenko was murdered after being identified by a friendly British GP – working for the KGB/FSB – who vaccinated the Litvinenko family against hep B. What do Messrs Cameron and Clegg and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord High Executioner and all the other nabobs do? Do they accuse the British GP of treason, clap him in irons, stage a hush-hush trial covered by the Official Secrets Act and send the chap off to rot in the Tower of London for – say – 33 years? More