Intel Warning To Obama: Clean-Up Pakistan’s Gathering Shit Storm Or Another 9/11 Is Coming
Mar 16, 2009 12 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Barack Obama told: help Pakistan or risk a repeat of 9/11 in America or Britain
Barack Obama, the US president, is to be told that to avoid a repeat of the devastating 9/11 attacks on America or Britain he must dramatically step up aid to Pakistan.
By Tim Shipman
A team headed by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA Middle East expert, asked to overhaul US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, has concluded that stabilising Pakistan is now the higher priority, a source familiar with the discussions has revealed.
The report, prepared in conjunction with the National Security Council, will focus on the need to co-opt moderate Taliban elements and shut down militant safe havens in Pakistan’s he lawless northwest border region. It will also urge a sharp increase in military and civil assistance.
But The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the need to prevent a repeat of the September 11 attacks has become the driving force behind the review, which could be published as early as this week.
Mr Riedel, who served on the NSC under three previous presidents, believes that unless serious action is taken, Pakistan will become a “terrorist university”, posing a far greater threat to the security of the US and Europe than Afghanistan before the September 11 atrocities.
Recent “apocalyptic” intelligence on the situation in Pakistan has sent shockwaves through the upper echelons of the Obama administration and convinced Mr Riedel’s review team that radicals trained in Pakistan are the greatest threat to Western security.
One White House aide emerged from an intelligence briefing on Pakistan three days after Mr Obama’s inauguration to exclaim: “Holy s–t!”
A source who knows the substance of the White House policy review discussions said: “Bruce is on record saying that a failed state in Pakistan is America’s ‘worst nightmare’ in the 21st century.
“What we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is truly apocalyptic warnings from the analysts, which suggest that that is now a live possibility. The Pakistani government seems unable to control its own military or intelligence people. The tribal areas are already a failed state and a safe haven for terrorists.
“If that spreads the whole country will become a terrorist university. The chance of a spectacular in the US, or Britain, is exponentially increased. And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.”
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph in January Mr Riedel argued that British al-Qaeda or Lakshar-e-Taiba militants, trained in Pakistan, are the likeliest source of a new terrorist spectacular in America.
The threat from Pakistan was a centrepiece of discussions between Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and US Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano in Washington on Friday. Ms Smith also met Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI, who has publicly voiced fears about British-born Pakistani militants entering the US under the visa waiver scheme.
Amid fears that Pakistani militants have already entered the US to radicalise and recruit terrorist cells, US officials have been invited to visit the UK to observe the Home Office’s anti-radicalisation programme.
A British diplomat said that British and American intelligence experts have concluded that while Pakistan used to be blamed for destabilising Afghanistan, the process has now been reversed and risks plunging the nuclear power into lethal chaos.
The US official agreed: “Everyone’s calling it the Af-Pak report, but really it ought to be Pak-Af.” US intelligence reports have expressed concern about the recent decision of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to allow militants to set up Shariah law in the strategic Swat Valley in the tribal areas of the northwest frontier.
The Riedel review will conclude that seven out of 10 Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan are “reconcilables” who might be bribed, cajoled and persuaded to turn away from extremism.
But it concludes that Pakistani military and civilian leaders do not yet have the resources to hold the line, let alone roll back the al-Qaeda safe havens along the border.
The review, due to be circulated to senior officials early this week, will recommend that non-military aid to Pakistan quadruple. In return, the Pakistani government will be expected to agree to a wholesale overhaul of its military which will see US special forces re-train Pakistani soldiers in counter insurgency warfare.
The army is currently configured to fight a conventional war with India. The US has 200 special forces ready to deploy and there is even talk of taking Pakistani officers to training camps in the US.
CIA and FBI chiefs are also demanding greater cooperation from Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency in locating militants in the region and potential terrorists who may already have travelled to the US.
President Obama will explain his new approach to Afghanistan at the Nato summit in Strasbourg next month. The Riedel review is recommending increased payments to Afghan tribal chiefs and moves to improve economic development and a clamp down on corruption in the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai., European nations, excluding Britain, will be asked to help train the Afghan armed forces.
Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a co-chair of the Riedel review, has warned that “there is no way that the international effort in Afghanistan can succeed unless Pakistan can get its western tribal areas under control”.
David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, appears to agree with the expected conclusions of the Riedel review. In an interview last week he said that Pakistan’s government needs to realise that it is not just the West that is threatened by the militants, but its very own survival that is at stake. “The situation in Pakistan is extremely dangerous,” he said. “I would say it’s very grave. I think Pakistan faces a mortal threat, not from India, but from domestic terrorism.”
WaPo:
Pakistani Leader Bows to Pressure
Judges Reinstated After Protests, in Sign of Zardari’s Weakening Grip
By Pamela Constable
LAHORE, Pakistan, March 16 — Unable to crush street protests Sunday that spilled out of this city and threatened to reach the capital, the Pakistani government announced early Monday morning that it would restore the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and a group of other deposed judges in a major capitulation to opponents.
The move reflected the weakening position of President Asif Ali Zardari, a key U.S. ally, but it also signaled a peaceful end to a mounting political crisis in the nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 172 million. Zardari had resisted bringing back former chief justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry for months, but he faced mounting pressure from a broad coalition of opponents who demanded the reinstatement of Pakistan’s independent judiciary and threatened to march on the capital, Islamabad, until Chaudhry was brought back.
The decision marked an extraordinary victory for Pakistan’s legal community, which has been agitating peacefully for the judges’ reinstatement for the past two years, and for Zardari’s major political rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who joined the lawyers’ crusade last month and quickly became its most forceful advocate.
Sharif, who led an all-night protest caravan on a highway towards Islamabad, the capital, halted it at the town of Gujranwala on Monday morning and announced he was calling off the “long march” in response to the government’s move. Sharif congratulated Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, who announced the measure in a brief televised address at 6 a.m.
“It is time to fulfill promises,” Gillani said. “Democracy cannot flourish without strong institutions.” He said Chaudhry would be reinstated by executive order March 21, and he also announced that the government would immediately lift an emergency ban on all public gatherings and release all political and legal activists arrested in the last week.
The U.S. government, which had been pressing Zardari and Sharif to find a peaceful way out of the crisis, immediately welcomed the move. In a statement, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad called Gillani’s announcement “statesmanlike” and a “substantial step towards national reconciliation.”
As word of the expected announcement spread early morning Monday, Pakistani television stations showed jubilant crowds gathering around Chaudhry’s house in Islamabad. Celebrations also erupted in the Sharif-led caravan, which was traveling through the night from Lahore.
“This will restore stability to Pakistan,” Athar Minallah, a spokesman for Chaudhry, said early Monday, as analysts suggested the move and other concessions offered by the government might heal the rift between Zardari and Sharif.
Pakistan faces a raging Islamist insurgency and a deepening economic crisis. The growing confrontation between Zardari and a coalition of primarily secular opponents has alarmed Washington and raised the prospect of a possible army coup, just one year after Pakistan emerged from a decade of military rule.
The government had sealed off Islamabad with shipping containers and other barricades late Saturday in an attempt to prevent the marchers from entering the federal government district. But as rumors of Chaudhry’s restoration spread, many police barricades were withdrawn from the Grand Trunk Road and hundreds of people joined the procession in towns along the way.
Chaudhry and the other judges were fired in 2007 by Pakistan’s former military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, because they refused to take an oath under his amended constitution.
Zardari had publicly insisted that the judges could not be restored until Pakistan’s Parliament had a chance to make broader changes to the constitution. But many Pakistanis and foreign observers believed the president reneged on his pledge to restore them because he feared that the independent-minded Chaudhry would reopen old corruption cases against him and might also overturn many of his actions as president.
Zardari’s turnabout came after thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets of this leafy capital of Punjab province Sunday, throwing rocks at police and cheering wildly. A wide cross section of Pakistan’s political, social and religious sectors joined the day-long protests.
As the demonstrations escalated, police first responded with volleys of tear gas. But by mid-afternoon they suddenly withdrew from the streets, while numerous city and provincial officials were reported to have resigned. The swift collapse of authority signaled the end of Zardari’s bid to seize control of Punjab, the most politically influential region of the country, and raised serious questions about his ability to remain president.
“The present rulers are defaming every norm of democracy, and Zardari is behaving worse than a dictator. We will continue our march until the rule of law is restored,” vowed Iqbal Haider before the judges’ reinstatement was announced. Haider, a white-haired lawyer, was attorney general under slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
Bhutto, a charismatic leader and champion of democracy who was married to Zardari, held power twice and was assassinated in 2007 while planning a political comeback. Her widower became leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and pledged to mend fences with her rival, Sharif, but the alliance quickly soured.
There was no public appearance or statement Sunday by Zardari, but his new information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, told journalists in Islamabad that the government hoped to resolve its differences with the opposition through amicable negotiation. Kaira replaced Sherry Rehman, who abruptly resigned from the post late Friday night after the government temporarily blocked transmission of a major independent news channel. Several members of Zardari’s party have defected in the past week, including three members of Parliament.
In another sign of the government’s weakening grip, key opposition leaders in Lahore, including Sharif and legal dissident Aitzaz Ahsan, began the day under house arrest and ended it leading caravans of supporters through the streets. At dusk, Ahsan addressed supporters inside the Lahore High Court compound.
Pakistani news media reported that several other opposition leaders, including Sharif’s brother Shahbaz and the heads of other political parties, had reached Rawalpindi, a garrison city about 15 miles from Islamabad, and were hiding in private homes waiting to join the marchers and move toward the capital.
“The writ of the government has ended. Nobody can stop us from reaching Islamabad,” Ahsan told a cheering crowd of lawyers. As night fell in Lahore, streets that had been full of tear gas and flying rocks during the day became scenes of celebration. People danced, sang and waved banners atop cars and trucks as smiling police watched from the sidelines, riot gear discarded on the ground.
Several police officers said they were relieved to have been pulled back from the protest areas, and also said they supported the Sharifs. Punjab has traditionally been a stronghold of the Sharif brothers, and Zardari’s imposition of central authority last month was extremely unpopular.
With Zardari rapidly losing control, officials in Islamabad scrambled to find a way out. Kaira said officials would ask the high court to review its decision last month to bar the Sharifs from politics.
But the protesters, flush with success, were in no mood to negotiate. They included hundreds of lawyers, activists from Sharif’s Muslim League, conservative Muslims from the Jamaat-i-Islami religious party, women from civic and human rights groups, followers of former cricket champion and politician Imran Khan, and disaffected members of Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party.
“We have already achieved success. The whole city has come out to support us, and the government is helpless,” said Mohammed Fareed Chaudhry, 55, a lawyer. “We respect and appreciate all the parties and groups that have joined our cause. It is only a matter of hours or days before Zardari will have to leave power.”
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