German Islamists try to justify their existence

The NEFA Foundation has published the transcript of a statement written in German from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan which reads like a kind of end of term report for last year. Dozens of Germans Islamists of Arab and Turkish origin have settled in Pakistan's tribal territories where they are in an uneasy alliance with both al-Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
Written by Abu Adam al-Almani - in reality German national Mounir Chouka - the statement confirms the dependency of this organisation on money and support from Germany - although as Chouka notes: "in recent times lots of brothers, including German mujahidin, opened the gates to martyrdom." These include, for example, Abu Askar from Hamburg and the German-Turkish Abu Imran, who were settling down for breakfast with three Mahsud tribesmen from the TTP on 4 October last year when they were hit by a drone missile strike. "All five were eating together, when a sneaky US drone shot a rocket right into the middle of them", says Abu Adam.
Abu Adam's statement claims that Bekkay Harrach, a prominent German Moroccan jihadist, was killed last April during a joint al-Qaeda, IMU and TTP attack on the massive US base at Bagram, north of Kabul. It says 20 mujahidin took part in what was effectively a suicide operation, in the process killing 200 defenders - a claim that is clearly untrue. Detailed videos of the operation will soon be released, says Abu Adam.
Interestingly, Abu Adam is forced to answer the question he says he gets in emails "all the time" from "all over the world" about whether or not Pakistan's tribal areas are still a place that Islamists should come and fight. Even many dedicated Islamists are beginning to wonder if the carnage in Pakistan can really be justified by their religion.
Abu Adam notes the lies and confusion about what is going on there and reports that there are many spies betraying the jihadists, saying that "the spy who nailed down the honored (al-Qaeda) commander Abu Laith al-Shahid al-Libi, ...was paid $50,000 in a Pakistani camp" and that in the first part of 2009 the drones killed a lot of jihadis. He justifies the decision to attack the Pakistan army on the basis that it is supporting the drone attacks. The Pakistan army was able to clear much of Waziristan of jihadis by a merciless bombardment and clearance which left only the jihadis in the hills, fighting a guerrilla war. Now that the families have left the area, says Abu Adam, it is still a place for Hijra.
There are three combat areas, he says: Orakzai, South-east Waziristan and South-west Waziristan. Then he  presents his statistics which purport to show that in the last year the IMU has mounted a total of 330 attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan which have killed 373 Pakistani soldiers, destroyed 5 tanks and 36 cars. In Afghanistan they claim to have carried out a total of 88 attacks, killing 145 NATO soldiers and 125 ANA soldiers. They says they have destroyed 25 armoured cars, shot down two drones and captured two prisoners.
Abu Adam does not mention the hatred that is felt for them by many Pashtuns in the tribal areas, nor the fact that they were driven out of Waziristan by the Waziri tribesmen themselves. That does not fit with his view of the 'pure' brotherhood fighting the infidels.

Raymond Davis case gets messier.

The Raymond Davis case in Lahore is getting messier and messier. Today he was remanded in custody for a further two weeks as police rejected his explanation that he had killed two men in self-defence. Former special forces soldier Davis, who shot the two men a total of eight times through the windscreen of his hired car on 26 January, claims he was working as a consultant to the US consulate in Lahore. In his pocket he carried business cards for a company called Hyperion Protective Consultants of Orlando, Florida.
However, an investigation by Counterpunch magazine in the United States has revealed that the address for the company is an empty shop front and that the phone numbers and website are fake. They also point out that Davis was able to shoot both men twice in the front and twice in the back before stepping out of his rented car to photograph the results on his mobile phone. Police who searched the car found a loaded Glock pistol gun and three full magazines, plus the Beretta used to kill the men, along with other paraphernalia associated with special forces operations.
There is also a strong suggestion coming from witnesses in Lahore that the second vehicle involved in the incident in which a third man was run down and killed was not responding to an emergency call from him but was actually with Davis at the time of the shooting. According to this scenario, the bystander was killed as the second vehicle fled the scene at speed, hitting other cars in the street and knocking down the unfortunate person.The driver of the second vehicle is being sought by the Pakistani police, but it is likely he or she has long since left the country.
Proof that Davis photographed the two men he had just shot dead comes from Dunya TV, which has published what it claims are still photos from Davis' camera, plus some video of part of his interrogation bythe Lahore police. The film appears to have been shot from a mobile phone lying on a table in front of Davis.You can see the footage here or on YouTube.

As more and more evidence comes to light it is becoming clear that this incident was no simple attempted robbery. Davis was fully tooled up, in an unmarked, rented car with a back-up vehicle. He opened fire and expertly shot dead the two men on a motorbike. Eveyone knows this now and the room for political manoeuvre is shrinking by the minute.
One theory, examined by ABC reporter Nick Schifrin, is that the two dead men were actually ISI (Pakistan intelligence service) agents, tasked to trail Davis. If that is true, there will be no quick end to this affair.

US aid strategy in Pakistan beset with problems.

US-Pakistan relations are in a mess. When Raymond Davis, a US Embassy employee, allegedly shot dead two men on a motorbike in Lahore on 26 January, he precipitated a major crisis. Despite threats from US Congressmen to cut aid to Pakistan unless Davis is released, the Pakistani government will find it difficult to bow to pressure, knowing full well that there will be a swift and bloody reaction if Davis is allowed to leave the country.
Davis should never have been armed - it is illegal in Pakistan and has already been the source of previous tensions between the two countries - and his apparent crime was compounded when another US Embassy vehicle ran over and killed a bystander while responding to a call for help from Davis. Since then, the widow of one of the dead men has also committed suicide. Further problems have been caused by the failure of US officials to offer a clear explanation of what Davis was doing in Pakistan.
Will the US go ahead with its threat to cut its aid budget? That is not certain, but a recent report on USAID's programme in Pakistan makes it clear that there are serious problems in that quarter too. The Quarterly Progress and Oversight Report on the Civilian Assistance Program in Pakistan, as of December 31, 2010, which is a joint publication of the State Department, Department of Defense and USAID, makes for sobering reading. Despite a $1.5bn annual budget, USAID "has not committed to a set of performance indicators to measure the success of its programs as traditionally required for proper project management". Not has the US Embassy in Islamabad identified any indicators by which to measure the success of the development strategy.
Various inspection offices have been set up in Pakistan to guard against inefficiency and corruption, but research from specific projects suggest waste and inefficiency is widespread.
For example, during the last quarter of last year, the USAID inspectors completed four audits, including performance audits of two livelihood development projects in FATA designed to counter the growing threat from militants. The audits found that little progress had been achieved, partly due to lack of security, but mainly because of a lack of baseline data and inadequate oversight. Costs of three-quarters of a million dollars have been identified as ineligible.
In another project, USAID broke off relations with the partner - the US-based Academy for Educational Development - after investigations revealed "fraud stemming from false statements and claims, failure to perform in accordance with the terms of the agreement, and violation of statutory or regulatory provisions contained in the agreement." AED's president, chief executive and four other senior executives have been forced to leave the organisation. (Note: they have not been prosecuted).
The report says USAID's work has been disrupted by Wikileaks - which revealed private diplomatic thinking (mostly negative) about Pakistan - and by the death of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
There is some very useful material in this report, which breaks down the aid budget for the last three years into categories. This we find that $40 million has been spent on road construction in FATA and $82.9 million on "Border Security (Aviation), while only $8.5 million has been spent on counter-narcotics. There is also a good breakdown of how $570 million was spent providing humanitarian assistance after the devastating floods of last summer that displaced over 20 million people.
There are also many details of various high-profile aid projects, including roads, schools, water and electricity infrastructure. However, as the report notes: "One year after the launch of the civilian assistance strategy in Pakistan, USAID has not been able to demonstrate measurable progress."

Taliban and al-Qaeda 'distinct groups with different goals'

"The Taliban and al-Qaeda remain distinct groups with different goals, ideologies and sources of recruits; there was considerable friction between them before September 11, 2001, and today that friction persists."
This is one of the main findings of a study of the relationship between the two organisations, published today by the Centre on International Cooperation and written by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
Separating the Taliban from Al-Qaeda: the core of success in Afghanistan also argues that elements of current US policy in Afghanistan - especially night raids, house searches and attempts to fragment the Taliban - are "changing the insurgency and inadvertently creating opportunities for al-Qaeda to achieve its objectives and preventing the achievement of core goals of the United States and the international community".
The authors argue that there is room to engage the Taliban on renouncing their relationship with al-Qaeda and providing guarantees against the use of Afghanistan by international terrorism.
These findings are worthy of notice, not least because the authors, who have spent several years as almost the only Westerners living in Kandahar, are well equipped to know the views of the Afghan Taliban. They edited Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef's autobiography, My Life with the Taliban and have access to people who are close to the Taliban leadership.
They point out that the original Taliban leadership around Mullah Omar was never very close to Osama bin Laden and that he exploited his friendship with regional leaders, in particular with the Haqqani clan, and ultimately betrayed the trust shown to him by Mullah Omar. But as military attrition has hit the Taliban, a new younger generation of fighters, radicalised by the events following 9/11, is now in place and more sympathetic to the al-Qaeda programme of international jihad. This nexus is being intensified as a result of current US policy in Afghanistan.
This short paper is well worth reading, although it is limited in its scope. It does not, for example, go into much details of the links between the Haqqani clan and the Arab fighters around bin Laden or indeed the other foreign fighters based in Pakistan's tribal territories. Nor does it discuss the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. More information is certainly needed on these relationships.

SIGAR boss goes out with a bang

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), General Arnold Fields, appears to be going into overdrive in his last few weeks in the job. After being criticised for little activity, he has published his second report in a week.
Like the previous report (see below) the most recent offering concerns reconstruction funds that may be at risk due to lack of planning.
This audit of the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) in Laghman found that 27 of the 69 CERP projects in the province, worth $49.2 million out of a total budget of $53 million, were at risk or have questionable outcomes.
The CERP program is basically a large pot of cash that military officers can dole out locally for humanitarian and reconstruction projects without having to go through the tiresome business of tenders and all that. Since 2004 Congress has appropriated nearly $2.64 billion for CERP projects in Afghanistan.
What the SIGAR report has found out is that most of the money spent so far has gone on road contracts, but there appears to be no money in the pot to pay for maintenance, meaning the roadways may simply revert to tracks in a few years. "“Our audit found that these projects and groups of related infrastructure initiatives were approved without adequate assurance that the Government of Afghanistan had the resources to operate and maintain them. This suggests that the Afghans have not been sufficiently involved, despite a U.S. strategy emphasizing Afghan First,” said General Fields, who visited Laghman in September last year. "Building multimillion dollar projects, and then trying to figure out a sustainability plan, is a nonsensical way of planning," he added.
Is it possible that General Fields is trying to prove a point, now he has been sacked from his job?
In his final report to Congress, issued today, Fields notes that there are 16 ongoing audits in his office. The Investigative Directorate opened 35 new cases and closed seven bringing the total number of ongoing cases to 105. At present 86 per cent of current investigations are focussed on contract or procurement fraud. Presumably this includes the case of the lying, cheating Sarah Lee Mitcham of Bennett-Fouch and K5 Global, who I have written about before and who left Afghanistan last year without paying her local contractors.

UK Defence Ctte publishes transcript of Afghan evidence

The UK House of Commons Select Committee on Defence has published a transcript of oral evidence given to the committee in hearings on 15 December last year as part of its inquiry into operations in Afghanistan.
Giving evidence to the committee were Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, Chief of Joint Operations Air Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, and Peter Watkins, director of Operational Policy at the Ministry of Defence.
Some interesting tidbits in the evidence:
"Chair: How much is a judge paid in Afghanistan?
Peter Watkins: I’m afraid I don’t know that.
Chair: Am I right in thinking that it is, or at least was a year ago, half the amount that is paid to a private soldier?
Peter Watkins: The Committee has asked this before and we have been trying to find out the answer. There does not seem to be an available figure. It seems to vary considerably, depending on the rank of the judge, obviously, and the location."
And:
"Dr Fox: It’s worth pointing out that just over 50% of all the violence in Afghanistan is in just nine of the country’s 401 districts, four of which are in Helmand and four of which are in Kandahar. That gives us an idea of the dynamic within which we are operating."
And:
"Dr Fox: I have studiously avoided questions on WikiLeaks disclosures. First, they are fragments and incompletely disclosed. They are designed to damage the United States in the eyes of the outside world, and drive a wedge between the United States and its allies. We should have no part in playing the WikiLeaks game. It is trying to set a particular agenda and put particular ideas into the public mind and the wider public discourse. I think that it is extremely regrettable that some organs of the British media have played along with it. I find the whole concept of WikiLeaks and its activities completely loathsome."
Nine members of the committee have just returned from a four-day visit to Afghanistan as part of its current inquiry. The final report is due to be published later this year.

Planning failure puts billions at risk - SIGAR

An audit released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)  found that $11.4 billion is at risk due to inadequate planning for the construction of nearly 900 Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF) facilities.
“SIGAR initiated this audit when our auditors found that the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) could not provide the plans or justifications for the ANA facilities being built across Afghanistan,” said Inspector General Arnold Fields, who recently announced that he is leaving his post following widespread criticism.
The report found that there was no long-range capital construction plan, needed to improve accountability over the proposed new facilities which are being built to accommodate the expected increase in ANSF personnel. Numbers are already projected to reach 305,000 this year and may reach 400,000 by October 2013. Without such a plan, it would be impossible to adapt to changing requirements, prioritize resources, achieve strategic goals or avert potential waste. Nor was there any long-range maintenance plan for the ANSF facilities now being built, even though contracts worth $800 million had already been let to maintain more than 660 sites.

Restrepo nominated for an Oscar

Great news that Restrepo has been nominated for an Oscar. This film is certainly one of the best war documentaries I have ever seen. It tells the story of the deployment of Second Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade to the Korengal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan. Named after a dead comrade, Restrepo is a remote 15-man outpost, built in the middle of the night from Hescos and dirt. Most days it comes under fire. At one point, one soldier is says he would really have liked to see some of the people he is actually fighting against. Most of the time they are invisible.
The soldiers, most of whom were on  a 14-month deployment, tell the story, sometimes direct to camera, sometimes during action as it is filmed. There are no interviews with anyone not based in Restrepo, just the grunts.
Some parts of the film are heartbreaking. At one point the platoon visits a local village where they had called in an airstrike. Although some of those killed were combatants, most of the victims and wounded appeared to be children. The soldiers struggle to justify to themselves what they see. Some of them try to explain the difficulties of returning to America after a deployment like this, recognising that no-one will be able to understand the pressures they have faced.
Restrepo has already won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and surely deserves the ultimate film accolade. It was made by noted war journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, both of whom have written books about the Korengal Valley, which was abandoned by US forces last spring.

Colonel Imam murdered by his kidnappers in Wazirstan

Colonel Imam, the former Pakistani ISI officer responsible for training many of the current leaders of the Afghan Taliban, including leader Mullah Omar, has been found murdered outside the town of Mir Ali in North Wazirstan, according to media reports.
Imam - real name Sultan Amir Tarar - was kidnapped last April along with another former ISI officer, Khalid Khwaja and British journalist Asad Qureshi and his driver. Khwaja was later murdered, but Qureshi was released after his family paid a large ransom.
It is believed the men were kidnapped by a group calling itself the Punjabi Taliban, made up from expelled members of the Pakistan Taliban and the sectarian Lashkar-Jhangvi group. Some of the group's leaders, including Usman Punjabi, died last August in a shoot-out over how Qureshi's ransom should be divided.
Col. Imam and Khwaja were both Taliban sympathisers and had accompanied Qureshi to Waziristan so that he could make a film. However, the kidnappers believed the two former ISI officers were spies. Despite attempts to secure their freedom by Taliban officials the two men were killed.
Videos were made of both men before they were killed. Khwaja was shown allegedly confessing to being a CIA spy, while Col Imam begged the authorities to do something to save him.
Once report says that he was killed when his family failed to deliver a $590,000 ransom. The killers now say they want a ransom before they will hand over the body.

Apathy rises in Pakistan as the killings continue

Trail of Tragedy: A chronicle of violence in Pakistan 2010, by Pakistan's Strengthening Participatory Organisation, is a chronology compiled from the online archives of the two Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and The News. Produced in the form of a day-by-day record, it includes - but is not limited to - suicide attacks, bombings, ambushes, target killings, casualties resulting from military operations and drone attacks.
Depressingly, the authors say that as terrorism has increased in Pakistan during the last decade, so public apathy and indifference towards it has also risen. They note the attacks on schools and, more recently, Sufi shrines, which are symbols of "tolerance, peace and coexistence".
"This report is being presented with the hope that terrorism should be seen in a holistic way by government as well as by the public. This is the most important problem in Pakistan today, because the development and progress is not achievable unless peace and stability are restored. We also understand that the promotion of peace is one of the foremost responsibilities of civil society, and it should be placed at the top of our day to day work schedule, or at least alongside everything that we are doing and that we stand for."
While not as comprehensive as the PIPS study published recently (see below), it still brings home the devastating impact terrorism is having on Pakistan. According to the report, 4678 people were killed in Pakistan last year - about half the number recorded by PIPS

US designates Qari Hussain as a global terrorist

The US government decided yesterday to designate Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan leader Qari Hussain Mahsud as a terrorist, saying that the action will "help stem the flow of finances to Hussain by blocking all property subject to US jurisdiction in which Hussain has an interest and prohibiting all transactions by US persons with Hussain."
Hussain himself is one of the TTP's senior leaders and has said in the past that he is the trainer of the group's suicide bombers, many of whom are young boys.
The official terrorist designation says that Hussain has taken responsibility for numerous bombings including a car bomb in Peshawar in November 2009, two attacks on Pakistan government offices in Lahore, a September 2010 attack on a rally in Quetta that killed 54 and one in Lakki Marwat the same month that killed 17. He is also thought to have trained the Jordanian bomber who blew himself up in a CIA base in Eastern Afghanistan a year ago.
The odd thing about this announcement is the timing. Hussain was widely reported to have been killed in a drone missile strike in October 2010 and nothing has been heard of him since. It is unlikely that he has any interests in US property, having been brought up in the tribal areas of Pakistan and educated at madrassahs. Either the State Department knows something we don't know, or this is another example of pointless bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

Transport is the key to Afghanistan's development

Almost without thinking, many of us accept that the Western mission in Afghanistan is to build up the Afghan National Army and security forces, so that foreign troops can leave the country. President Obama has made it very clear that he sees the task in Afghanistan, not as nation-building (a hated concept since Vietnam), but as winning the war.
What of economic development? Little if any thought has gone into that, according to a new paper.
Afghanistan: Beyond the Fog of Nation Building, written by S Frederick Starr for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and the Silk Road Studies Program, based at Johns Hopkins University and the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm, highlights this point. "In fact, the US has no strategy for economic and social assistance to the new Afghanistan," says Starr.
He recommends five measures: an effective economic programme for Afghanistan must bring tangible and substantial benefits to large numbers of ordinary Afghans; it must be capable of being advanced simultaneously with the military effort; it must provide the government with a sustainable income stream; it must dovetail not only with the efforts of the Afghan government but also with those of key regional neighbours; any such measures must begin to bear fruit quickly.
Efforts to date have focussed on agriculture and minerals, both of which are flawed. The former, says Starr, takes more time than is available and the latter breeds governmentalisation and corruption. Both depend on transport infrastructure, which does not exist at present and was ignored in the 2010 US policy review.
Starr says "The U.S. must concentrate its 'economic' energies on opening transport corridors within Afghanistan and between Afghanistan, its neighbours, and the broader world. Transport and trade in goods manufactured locally and abroad, resources, and energy are the essential foundation of any successful economic policy for Afghanistan and the region."
Starr refers to a 2010 World Bank study which states that Afghanistan's single greatest comparative advantage is its geostrategic location. It is a hub for continental trade between India, south-east Asia, Europe, Russia, the Middle East and China. "Whatever its larger geopolitical significance, the reopening of continental transport and trade to, from, and across Afghanistan is the single most important determinant of the future of Afghanistan itself".

Final report on kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl

After a three-year investigation, The Pearl Project, based at Georgetown University has published its final report on the January 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl says that 27 men were involved in Pearl's kidnapping and murder, although only four have been charged and convicted, including former British public schoolboy Omar Sheikh. Fourteen others remain free. The murder itself was carried out personally by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on America.
KSM has previously confessed to the murder. There were doubts about the veracity of the confession after it was revealed that KSM had been 'waterboarded' - an extreme form of torture. However FBI and CIA officials later used a technique called vein-matching to compare the hand of the killer in the murder video with a photograph of KSM's hand.
The report says that the conspirators were inept, failed to cover their tracks and were even unable to operate video equipment properly. However, the Pakistani investigation into the murder was even more inept. The Pakistani authorities knowingly used perjured testimony to pin the actual murder on Omar Sheikh, even though he had only been involved in the kidnapping. Neither Sheikh nor his three co-conspirators were present when Pearl was decapitated by KSM. They, in turn, are using KSM's confession as the basis for an appeal that is now before the Pakistani courts.

Mullah Omar has not had a heart attack - Taliban

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan categorically refutes this baseless and fatuous claim and believes that circulation of this rumour,  is part and parcel of the propaganda war launched by the enemy."

Thus does Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid deal with the story that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was admitted to a Pakistani hospital in Karachi following a heart attack a few days ago.

He adds: "The esteemed Amir-ul-momineen (may Allah protect him) has never suffered from such disease, that would have required to rush him to a hospital. The enemy is circulating these rumours to cover up its  own defeat at the military field and to distract the attention of the common man."

The real question is whether or not the Taliban itself knows the location of its own leader. As I reported last October, he had not been seen for several months and was believed to be a 'guest' of the ISI.

Young and uneducated - the leaders of the Pakistan Taliban

Many of the new layer of leadership of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan are in their thirties, with little or no formal education and come from relatively poor socio-economic backgrounds. There are likely to be upwards of 10,000 militants in the organisation, which is riven by factional disputes.
These are some of the findings from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, An attempt to deconstruct the umbrella organization and the reasons for its growth in Pakistan's North-West, published by the Danish Institute for International Studies.
The author of this 74-page report, Qandeel Siddique, is a research assistant at DIIS. She says that bombings, including suicide attacks, appear to be the group's preferred tactic. They promote themselves through illegal FM channels and the circulation of DVs, CDs and pro-TTP newspapers and websites. Child recruitment is common and particular TTP leaders are responsible for training suicide bombers. Money for the organisation comes from criminal activity, protection rackets and donations from sympathisers both within and outside Pakistan.
The organisation's main aims are to enforce sharia law, unite against Coalition forces in Afghanistan and to perform a defensive jihad against the Pakistan Army.
However, the organisation is also tinged with sectarianism, mainly due to the injection of leaders and cadres from other organisations. Its aims have swung in behind those of al-Qaeda.
The factional nature of the organisation, itself based primarily on tribal affiliations, means that groupings such as the Muqami Tehrik-e-Taliban and the Haqqani group are focussed on Afghanistan, while the Hakimullah Mahsud group and Fidayeen Islam claim that the fight against the Pakistani security forces is the 'real' jihad.