Hakimullah Mehsud threatens US in new video

May 3, 2010

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has appeared in a new video issued months after his reported death, vowing revenge attacks on the United States, US monitoring groups said Monday.

Mehsud threatened to retaliate against the United States within a month for the killing of Al-Qaeda militant leaders, in the nine-minute video allegedly made on April 4, after his supposed death in January.

“The time is very near when our fedayeen will attack the American states in the major cities,” said Mehsud, who was seen flanked by two armed and masked men in the video released by the SITE and Intelcenter monitoring groups.

Mehsud was reported to have been killed in a US drone strike in northwestern Pakistan on January 14, but his militant group denied his death and Pakistani intelligence officials were quoted as saying last week that he had survived.

The man who took over leadership of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group last August, poured scorn on reports of his death, describing them as an “open lie and propaganda by the kuffar (non-believers)”.

“InshaAllah (God willing) very soon in some days or a month’s time, the Muslim ummah (world) will see the fruits of most successful attacks of our fedayeen in USA,” Mehsud said.

Intelcenter, a US-based group that monitors extremist websites, said its analysis indicated that the video was “credible” and that it had been issued by the TTP’s media arm Umar Studio.

Another video allegedly issued by the TTP on Sunday claimed it was behind an attempted car bombing in New York’s Times Square at the weekend, but US officials have dismissed the claims.

“There is no evidence that this is tied in with Al-Qaeda or any other big terrorist organisation,” New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

If the TTP claim were authenticated, it would be the first attack by the militant group against a target in the United States, but Intelcenter cast doubt on its credibility as it was not issued on usual extremist websites.

Mehsud assumed leadership of the TTP, which is blamed for the deaths of thousands of people in attacks across Pakistan, after his predecessor Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike in August last year.

The January US missile attack was launched after Mehsud claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing by a Jordanian double agent on a US base in eastern Afghanistan in December that killed seven CIA agents.

Islamabad has offered a reward of 50 million rupees (about 590,000 dollars) for information leading to the militant’s capture, dead or alive.

Mehsud, believed to be aged about 30, said the TTP would attack the United States “for having martyred many of our great Muslim leaders including Baitullah Mehsud and many respected brothers from Al-Qaeda”, SITE reported.

“Our fedayeen have penetrated the terrorist America, we will give extremely painful blows to the fanatic America.” Mehsud, bearded and with long hair, also warned members of NATO and other allies to abandon the United States, telling them: “You will face even worse humiliation, destruction and defeat than America itself.” SITE also reported that an audio message from Mehsud allegedly recorded on April 19 and making similar threats against the United States was released on the Internet.

A Pentagon spokesman had said last week that it was unclear if Mehsud was dead or alive, but that he was no longer running the TTP.

“I certainly have seen no evidence that the person you speak of is operational today, or is executing or exerting authority over the Pakistan Taliban as he once did,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.

“I don’t know if that reflects him being alive or dead but he clearly is not running the Pakistani Taliban anymore.” – AFP

Obama's Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Graham E. Fuller

For all the talk of "smart power," President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

-- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

-- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The "Durand Line" is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan's 28 million Pashtuns.

-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.

-- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

-- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

-- The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible -- with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives -- to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

-- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

-- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that -- something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule -- not what Pakistan needs -- will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad's basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education -- areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

(C) 2009 GLOBAL VIEWPOINT NETWORK; (TM) TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

Between the Lines, an Expansion in Pakistan

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama focused his speech on Afghanistan. He left much unsaid about Pakistan, where the main terrorists he is targeting are located, but where he can send no troops.

Mr. Obama could not be very specific about his Pakistan strategy, his advisers conceded on Monday evening. American operations there are classified, most run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Any overt American presence would only fuel anti-Americanism in a country that reacts sharply to every missile strike against extremists that kills civilians as well, and that fears the United States is plotting to run its government and seize its nuclear weapons.

Yet quietly, Mr. Obama has authorized an expansion of the war in Pakistan as well — if only he can get a weak, divided, suspicious Pakistani government to agree to the terms.

In recent months, in addition to providing White House officials with classified assessments about Afghanistan, the C.I.A. delivered a plan for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.

The expanded operations could include drone strikes in the southern province of Baluchistan, where senior Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, officials said. It is from there that they direct many of the attacks on American troops, attacks that are likely to increase as more Americans pour into Afghanistan.

“The president endorsed an intensification of the campaign against Al Qaeda and its violent allies, including even more operations targeting terrorism safe havens,” said one American official. “More people, more places, more operations.”

That was the message delivered in recent weeks to Pakistani officials by Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser. But the Pakistanis, suspicious of Mr. Obama’s intentions and his staying power, have not yet agreed.

General Jones was one of a series of American officials who arrived in Pakistan in recent weeks with the same message: no matter how many troops the president commits to Afghanistan, the strategy will founder unless the safe haven inside Pakistan is dealt with.

However, the United States does not have much leverage and is counting on a new attitude and a huge acceleration of efforts from a weak government. Making matters worse, the president, Asif Ali Zardari, is often at odds with the nation’s powerful military and intelligence establishment.

The question about Mr. Obama’s Pakistan strategy is whether the new commitment of troops and resources can ultimately make America safer at a time of an evolving terrorist threat. Mr. Obama insisted that was his central focus.

“This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda,” he said to the cadets at West Point, speaking of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the murky border area between the two that offers refuge to extremists of many stripes. The region was the birthplace of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he said, and “it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.” Many times in the speech he returned to that threat, saying it was what made this war different from Vietnam.

And he referenced another threat, one that focuses the attention of Mr. Obama’s national security team daily, but which it speaks about rarely.

“The stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that Al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them,” he said.

Mr. Obama’s decision to raise the nuclear specter was notable because a succession of American officials have publicly stated recently that the Pakistani arsenal is secure. In private, however, they have commissioned new intelligence studies on how vulnerable Pakistani warheads and laboratories would be if insurgents made greater inroads, with one official saying recently, “It is the scenario we spend the most time thinking about.”

Even if Mr. Obama is successful in lessening the terrorist threat in the region, many analysts say that Al Qaeda has changed into a transnational movement beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the former C.I.A. officer who was sent into Pakistan after 9/11 to determine if Osama bin Laden had access to the country’s nuclear technology. The nature of modern terrorism, Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued, is that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.

Even Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, acknowledged in an interview this evening that the steps announced by the president would not address Al Qaeda cells in Africa or the Middle East, or even homegrown extremists. But she argued that he had to begin somewhere.

“Can you totally eliminate the threat from Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda types in Yemen or Somalia? No,” she said. “But what you have done is taken a major action to limit their ability out of this major theater, from which their leaders and major actions emanate.”

Making the Pakistan plan even more complex was Mr. Obama’s effort to reconcile two seemingly contradictory messages on Tuesday evening. He had to convince the Pakistanis that he was not planning to leave the region — as the United States did 20 years ago, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan — while reassuring American citizens that after an 18-month buildup, he would begin to head for the exits.

The United States, he said, simply could not afford an open-ended war. Unlike President Bush, he suggested, he would not set “goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.”

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

Baitullah's era

By: Iqbal Khattak

The death of the head of the Taliban in Pakistan appears to have confused the insurgency as much as it has the rest of the world.

In May last year, in a schoolroom in the village of Kotkai in South Waziristan, a member of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) named Qari Hussain, a man who trains potential suicide bombers, patted an Arabic-language television reporter on his back, telling him, “Please wrap up the interview – there is danger coming.” But the man being interviewed merely gestured with his left hand to let the interview continue, all the while holding a small automatic assault rifle in his right.

In that small classroom, the danger was clearly mounting by the minute, as the sound of a US unmanned drone overhead became louder and louder. The more you hear the sound of a drone – bmmmmm – the more it hurts your head. The lower the pitch means the drone is higher in the sky; the louder it is, the closer. Sitting on a chair, I looked through a broken window to see whether I could see any sign of impending attack. There was good reason to be nervous: the man being interviewed was claimed by Washington DC to be ‘hosting’ al-Qaeda in Pakistan, actively engaged in planning attacks on US and NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan. Islamabad, meanwhile, held him responsible for all the major terrorist activities in the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

After the interview, I asked the man about the drone that we had heard. “I have no fear,” said the short, stocky Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the TTP, the umbrella of militant organisations that since early 2007 had spread throughout the tribal belt along the Afghan border. In retrospect, of course, perhaps he should have. On 5 August, a drone killed him at his father-in-law’s house in South Waziristan, in an attack that left his second wife dead as well – if Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik is to be believed. Indeed, the days following 5 August were suddenly rife with rumours, claims and counterclaims, by various governments and those close to Baitullah himself. His lieutenants continue to deny his death, though the 17 August arrest of TTP spokesperson Maulvi Omar seemed to confirm the reports of Baitullah’s death. Either way, this ‘chief terrorist’, whom American and Pakistani intelligence officials have said to be as dangerous as Osama bin Laden, has not been heard from or seen in public since.

How was Baitullah able to create such a large and powerful organisation as the TTP within two years? Personally, I found the man far more mature, serious and intelligent than I have found other militant commanders, such as Nek Muhammad and Abdullah Mehsud. Others agree. “He was gentle and very friendly in his dealings, but that did not hide the real militant within him,” says BBC journalist Haroon Rashid. “He was one of the most dangerous militants … but his biggest weapon was his ability to organise, such as what he did with the TTP – to make it, within a few years into a widespread umbrella organisation.” Indeed, Baitullah’s primary achievement was not his much-expanded militancy network, but how he took the war out of his relatively remote area of Waziristan and directly to the Pakistani metropolis, which are today barricaded and literally under siege. Until his death, he was leading the single largest group of hardened militants in Pakistan, which officials believed numbered some 10,000 – including Pakistanis, as well as Uzbeks, Arabs and other foreign militants. His spending on military activities is said to have exceeded PKR 3 billion (USD 36.2 million) per year.

Dodging drones
The Mehsud are a Pashtun tribe based in the very centre of South Waziristan, which it dominates along with its bitter rivals, the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe. The Mehsud are divided into three clans, the Manzai, Bahlolzai and Shamankhel, which are collectively referred to as the dre maseed, or the Three Mehsud. In the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, the one-time governor of the British Indian frontier, the Mehsud tribe is made up of “a people who could never dream of submitting to a foreign power.” From 1860 to 1937, English forces repeatedly attacked Mehsud positions, but were never able to get a foothold in the area.

Baitullah Mehsud, who turned 37 on his last birthday, appeared for the first time in 2004 as deputy to Abdullah Mehsud, another militant leader whom Washington found innocent after keeping him for more than two years in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Having served as a commander with the Taliban during its rule in Afghanistan, Baitullah formed his own group after Abdullah went underground following Islamabad’s displeasure with his October 2004 kidnapping of two Chinese workers at a key hydropower project in South Waziristan. A strong military push in November 2004 against the Mehsud militants resulted in ‘peace deal’ with Baitullah the following February; since then, there has been little reliable information about the militant leader.

Baitullah was obsessed with the concept of jihad. “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Quran extols Muslims to wage jihad,” he used to say when pressed as to why he was waging a war he could hardly sustain. “We only fulfil god’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” Accepted Pashtun hatred for invaders ran high in his blood. “Believe me, these infidels want to capture Afghanistan. We should not let them do this,” he said in April 2007. I asked him what logic he could offer for attacks inside Pakistan or on the Pakistani security forces. “The Pakistan Army’s support for the Americans is delaying the defeat of the Americans in Afghanistan,” he said. Baitullah developed his ‘nuisance value’ through small groups in different places, using them as pressure groups against the government to extract concessions in Waziristan.

After the peace deal, the military moved back to its barracks in Wana and other towns in and around South Waziristan. What followed was the targeted killing of a slew of pro-government tribal elders by the militants; all the while, the federal government simply sat on the sidelines watching, as it were. The government had at that time been following a “policy of retreat”, admitted NWFP Governor Owais Ahmed Ghani during a speech on 14 August this year. He said the new policy was to “hold-the-line” against militancy. Yet by the time the government officials began to wake up to reality in 2007, considerable damage had already been done: Baitullah had extended his influence beyond the Waziristan border, far into the NWFP. According to many, the government of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a conglomerate of religious parties with considerable sympathy for the Taliban that was in power in NWFP from 2002 until 2007, may have assisted Baitullah’s spread across the province.

In the early years of its rule in Afghanistan, the Pakistani Taliban restricted itself to jihad in Afghanistan. However, the militants began to see increased public support in the Pakistani frontier areas following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. This was particularly so as General Pervez Musharraf’s approval rating in Pakistan plummeted following the ‘unprecedented concessions’ that the public saw him giving the US to track down al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives on Pakistani soil. Thereafter, the militant influence spread slowly. Outside of the tribal areas, for instance, there was no attack of any kind until 8 November 2006, when a young suicide bomber walked towards army recruits in the town Dargai, near Swat District, to avenge the 30 October US strike in a seminary in Bajaur during which some 80 students had been killed.

The Dargai attack opened something of a floodgate of militancy across the country by the Taliban, and Baitullah Mehsud missed no opportunity to take credit for every attack his men executed successfully. Pakistanis first tasted real Taliban-style ‘justice’ in Mingora, the district headquarters of Swat, where beheaded bodies were hung in public as a warning to those who could resist Taliban diktat. The violence then spread massively. Within the next year and a half 1366 attacks had taken place with 2686 killed.

Yet similarly disastrous has been the state’s response, something that Baitullah said was good for his own recruiting purposes. In early spring 2007, I asked him, “Your guerrilla tactics may pose a threat to the US and the Pakistani military. But how can you face the US dominance in the sky?” To which he responded, “If the US morale is as high as mine, then we have a long war to fight. If I go on a three-month campaign for the hearts and minds of the civilians, I may win over 50 or 60 people. But a single air strike brings out the whole population, because it kills more innocent people than wanted men.” Indeed, the US drones might be good at taking out wanted targets; but the cost of these attacks seems incredibly high in terms of losing hearts and minds. David Kilcullen, a former adviser to the US Army, has stated that drone attacks inside Pakistani territory are today “creating more enemies” than they eliminate.

Importantly, the Baitullah killing comes following sharp criticism by senior Pakistani civil and military officials of the US role in ‘allowing’ militants to harm Pakistan while specifically targeting militants who are seen as posing serious challenge mainly to American security and strategic interests. Indeed, the US has been seen to focus increasingly on Baitullah’s strongholds in South Waziristan. Last year, the CIA carried out 26 drone attacks in South and North Waziristan and the Orakzai tribal region, mainly targeting groups that cross into Afghanistan to strike against coalition forces. The number of drone attacks also increased significantly following the swearing-in of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led coalition government on 25 March 2008, with a total of 50 drone attacks having taken place in the last 17 months.

TTP finished?

Iqbal Khattak

Baitullah Mehsud is now the third top militant leader, after Nek Muhammad and Abdullah Mehsud, to have been pursued and killed since Pakistan joined the US-led ‘war on terror’. Yet one mystery will remain regarding Baitullah: Who he was ‘working’ for? The Afghan government claims the militant groups operating in the border areas are protected by the Pakistani state as ‘assets’ to use for achieving ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan. But the fact is that it will take years if not decades to deal with the damage that Baitullah caused to the Pakistani psyche and infrastructure. Since militancy spiked in 2002, Islamabad says the country has suffered USD 35 billion in losses due to the collapse of the tourism industry and, plummeting domestic production, and loss of investment. Alas, the question of just whom Baitullah was working for was buried with him.

On the assumption that Baitullah is indeed now dead, what is to happen to the TTP? Public sentiment in Pakistan has dramatically shifted towards the government in recent months, with Taliban, be gone! and similar slogans for the first time being seen on Pakistan’s streets. In the past, any time a top militant leader has been killed, the group that he was leading has also quickly disappeared or merged into other groups. The passing of Nek Muhammad and Abdullah Mehsud are both cases in point, with both leaders being replaced by pro-government commanders.

To date, no militant leader has publicly stated that Baitullah is dead. However, in what appears to be a ‘silent coup’, on 19 August the TTP deputy chief, Maulvi Faqir, elevated himself to the post of amir; two days later, Baitullah’s deputy, Hakimullah Mehsud (see photo below), was likewise nominated. Theses are indications of internal differences over the selection of new leader – with rumours of significant violence between potential torchbearers immediately after Baitullah’s alleged death. Regardless, though, the most significant question today is whether the government will finally be able to utilise the current situation to its advantage. One way or another, the war against militancy will not be won unless the damage done by Baitullah Mehsud is undone.

Iqbal Khattak is bureau chief for the Daily Times in Peshawar.