US shrugs off Pakistan-Taliban links
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Despite evidence implicating current Pakistani army chief General
Ashfaq Pervez Kiani in a major military assistance program for Taliban
insurgents in Afghanistan over the past few years, senior officials of the
Barack Obama administration persuaded the US Congress to extend military
assistance to Pakistan for five years without any assurance that the Pakistani
assistance to the Taliban had ended.
Those officials, led by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike
Mullen, have been arguing that Kiani is committed to ending support the Taliban
and other radical Islamic movements receive from the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, but that he is not yet able to control ISI
operatives.
Late last year, US officials were reportedly pressing Kiani for far-reaching
changes in the ISI that would end its role in support of
insurgents in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Democratic Senator John Kerry demanded
that the ISI be put under civilian control and threatened to introduce
legislation making military assistance to Pakistan conditional on evidence that
the Pakistani military had ended such support to the Taliban.
But Kerry dropped his proposal for conditioning US military assistance to
Pakistan on ending the ISI-Taliban program. In February, Kerry said
conversations with Mullen and "other players" had persuaded him that Kiani and
his choice for new ISI chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, had "a willingness to engage
in transformation" of the ISI.
The Kerry-Lugar legislation passed by Congress in June provides US$2 billion in
military aid as well as $4 billion in economic assistance to Pakistan over five
years and makes no mention of evidence of military aid to the Taliban. It
merely requires the secretary of state to certify that the "security forces of
Pakistan are making concerted efforts to prevent the Taliban and associated
militant groups from using the territory of Pakistan as a sanctuary from which
to launch attacks within Afghanistan".
Obama's national security team established a critical basis for its argument to
Congress by leaking a story to the New York Times asserting that Kiani would
not be able to control the activities of ISI in the short run.
The story, published March 26, acknowledged "direct support from operatives" of
the ISI for the Afghan Taliban insurgency, but quoted anonymous US officials
saying it is "unlikely that top officials in Islamabad are directly
coordinating the clandestine efforts" - a carefully chosen formula that does
not deny that they are presiding over a policy of aiding the Taliban.
The story said unnamed US officials "have also said that mid-level ISI
operatives occasionally cultivate relationships that are not approved by their
bosses". That statement diverted attention away from whether the Pakistani
military leadership has approved military assistance to the Taliban.
Mullen has been suggesting that Kiani has demonstrated good faith by purging
the ISI. He told Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer in early April that
the new head was "handpicked" to change the ISI.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 21, Mullen
emphasized that Kiani had changed "almost the entire leadership of ISI" over
the previous six months.
After a conversation with Mullen, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius
quoted him in a June 29 article as saying that Kiani and his choice for ISI
chief "have committed very specifically to change the culture of ISI", but that
"that's not going to happen overnight".
Mullen has, however, carefully avoided saying that Kiani has given assurances
he intends to halt the military assistance to the Taliban.
The historical evidence on Kiani's past relationship to the issue suggests that
he has no intention of changing Pakistani policy toward the Taliban.
Kiani himself served as head of ISI from late 2004 to late 2007 and presided
over the development of a major logistical and training program for the Taliban
forces operating out of Pakistan's Balochistan province.
The ISI military assistance program was first revealed in a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) report of a two-week battle by NATO forces against a
determined Taliban offensive in Kandahar province in September 2006.
During the battle, NATO forces captured a number of Pakistani fighters who
detailed the ISI role in supporting the Taliban offensive. The NATO account,
reported in The Telegraph by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on October 6,
2006, described two ISI training camps for the Taliban near Quetta in
Pakistan's Balochistan province. It also documented the provision by the ISI of
2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition - just for
that one Taliban campaign.
The size and scope of the program of support described in the report were
hardly consistent with the idea that assistance to the Taliban is a rogue
operation by ISI operatives.
Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates presumably know about Kiani's past
support for the Taliban assistance program. Evidence of continuing ISI
assistance to, and safe have for, Taliban forces after Kiani replaced Pervez
Musharraf as the top army general was compiled in an intelligence assessment
circulated to the top national security officials of the George W Bush
administration in mid-2008, according by David Sanger's book The Inheritance.
Kiani was also overheard in a conversation intercepted by US intelligence
referring to a high-ranking Taliban leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a
"strategic asset", according to Sanger's account. Haqqani was a Taliban
minister during that organization's brief period in power during the late
1990s, and his network has been a key target for the US campaign of Predator
drone strikes in Pakistan during 2008 and 2009.
Kiani is not the first Pakistani military leader to assure the US that he is
purging the ISI of pro-Taliban elements. President Musharraf did the same thing
to ease pressure from Washington to toe the line on Afghanistan in early
October 2001.
Musharraf claimed he had made far-reaching changes in the ISI by removing its
director, Mahmood Ahmad - who he said had been affiliated with Islamic
extremists. But Musharraf never changed his pro-Taliban policy; despite his
pledge to do so immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks.
The March 26 New York Times story reported Pakistani officials as portraying
their Taliban policy as "part of a strategy to maintain influence in
Afghanistan for the day when American forces would withdraw" leaving "a power
vacuum to be filled by India".
After the Times story, Gates began arguing that the US must convince Pakistani
leaders that it will not abandon the war in Afghanistan.
In a March 29 interview with Fox News, Gates said the Pakistanis had ties with
the Taliban "partly as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan if we
were to walk away or whatever". The US has to convince the Pakistanis that
"they can count on us and that they don't need that hedge", Gates said.
Mullen and other US military leaders have an interest other than Afghanistan -
which appears to driving their willingness to overlook Kiani's past and present
support for the Taliban. They once had close ties with the Pakistani military,
which they touted for decades as a basis for US influence in the country,
despite persistent and sharp divergences in US and Pakistani strategic
interests.
Those ties were cut off in the 1990s because of legislation requiring an end to
military cooperation over Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Mullen and other
military leaders now argue that close relations must be a top US priority.
As Mullen told the Inquirer's Rubin, "One of my strategic objectives is to
close this gap in the relationship with the Pakistani military."
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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