Source: SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT Submitted 18 hrs 55 mins ago
The Nation, Pakistan
1/12/2009
WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama has offered Pakistan an expanded strategic partnership, including additional military and economic cooperation, but with a blunt warning that its use of insurgent groups to pursue policy goals “cannot continue,” according to a leading American newspaper. The offer, including an effort to help reduce tensions between Pakistan and India, was contained in a two-page letter delivered to President Asif Ali Zardari this month by Obama national security adviser James Jones, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
It was accompanied by assurances from Jones that the US would increase its military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan and that it plans no early withdrawal, the newspaper said. Obama’s speech Tuesday night at the US Military Academy at West Point, NY, would address primarily the Afghanistan aspects of the strategy, The Post said. “But despite the public and political attention focused on the number of new troops, Pakistan has been the hot core of the months-long strategy review, “ the dispatch said. “The long-term consequences of failure there, the review concluded, far outweigh those in Afghanistan. We can’t succeed without Pakistan,” a senior administration official involved in the White House review was quoted as saying by the Post. “You have to differentiate between public statements and reality. There is nobody who is under any illusions about this”. This official and others spoke about the closely held details of the new strategy on the condition of anonymity, the dispatch said. They emphasized that without “changing the nature of US-Pakistan relations in a new direction, you’re not going to win in Afghanistan,” as one put it. “And if you don’t win in Afghanistan, then Pakistan will automatically be imperilled, and that will make Afghanistan look like child’s play”.
Proffered US carrots, outlined during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s October visit to Islamabad, centre on a far more comprehensive and long-term bilateral relationship, according to the Post. It would feature enhanced development and trade assistance; improved intelligence collaboration and a more secure and upgraded military equipment pipeline; more public praise and less public criticism of Pakistan; and an initiative to build greater regional cooperation among Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.
Obama called for closer collaboration against all extremist groups, and his letter named five: al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Pakistani Taliban organization known as Tehrik-e-Taliban. Using vague diplomatic language, he said that ambiguity in Pakistan’s relationship with any of them could no longer be ignored, the dispatch said.
Jones was more precise in conversations with top Pakistani government and military leaders, US and foreign officials said, stating that certain things have to happen in Pakistan to ensure Afghanistan’s security. If Pakistan cannot deliver, he warned, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan’s western and southern borders with Afghanistan, according to the Post.
Current US policy includes the use of missiles fired from unmanned drones on insurgent locations limited to roughly 50 miles inside the western border; training in two military camps for the Pakistani Frontier Corps; and intelligence exchanges. It prohibits kinetic, or active, operations by US ground forces inside Pakistan. While praising Pakistani military offensives against groups that pose a domestic threat — primarily the alliance of groups known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan — Jones made it clear that the administration expects more.
The rollout of the new strategy is being coordinated with principal US allies, including Britain, whose prime minister, Gordon Brown, said Sunday, “People are going to ask why, eight years after 2001, Osama bin Laden has never been near to being caught”. “Al-Qaeda has a base in Pakistan,” Brown claimed in an interview with Sky News. “That base is still there — they are able to recruit from abroad. The Pakistan authorities must convince us that they are taking all the action that is necessary to deal with that threat.”
Expansion of the US-Pakistan relationship will require overcoming significant public and political mistrust in both countries, the Post said. Officials said that they recognize the difficulty in delivering on either US promises or threats, and that “our leverage over Pakistan is very limited,” the senior administration official said. At the same time, although the administration’s goal is to demonstrate a new level and steadfastness of support, short-term US demands may threaten Pakistan’s already fragile political stability. “It’s going to be a game of cat-and-mouse with them for a while,” another official said, adding that “what we’re trying to do is to force them to recalculate” where their advantage lies. The Pakistan strategy is complicated by a number of factors, including the fact that any indication of increased US involvement there generates broad mistrust, the dispatch said.
Zardari’s political weakness is an additional hazard for a new bilateral relationship, it said. “He (Zardari) is disliked by the military and is challenged by the political opposition and his own prime minister; he also remains under a cloud of long-standing corruption charges. Less than a third of Pakistan’s population voices approval for him in polls. Obama is even less popular there, with approval ratings in the low double digits”.
Asking to do more and Giving threats while letting the criminal escape ... Whose Side is US of A on and whose side are we on ... Read below
Osama was within US reach in '01
Source: SPECIAL COLRRESPONDENT Submitted 19 hrs 7 mins ago
WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden was cornered in the Afghan mountains in 2001 but the United States did not deploy massive force to capture or kill the Al-Qaeda leader, a Senate report says. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, to be formally released Monday, blames former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, the former American commander, for not sending more US troops after Osama bin Laden. “The failure to finish the job,” the report said, “represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now”.
The report said emphatically Osama bin Laden was in a complex of caves and tunnels in Tora Bora in December 2001 before escaping to Pakistan. But the report said the US command severely limited its capacity to get to the al-Qaeda leader. The command relied on air strikes, American Special Operations, CIA officers and untrained Afghan militants to go after bin Laden and on loosely organized Pakistani corps to block his escape, the report said. “The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report said.
The report cites experts saying bin Laden arrived in Tora Bora in November 2001, accompanied by 1,000 to 1,500 fighters and bodyguards. “The decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide,” the report said. The report, “Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get bin Laden and Why it Matters Today,” was prepared at the request of Senator John Kerry, a Democrat who is the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, by the committee’s staff.
In a letter accompanying the report, Kerry said it examines “the consequences of the failure to eliminate Osama and other extremist leaders in the hope that we can learn from the mistakes of the past”. The report’s release is to come a day before President Barack Obama makes an announcement on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. White House aides have reportedly said Obama would announce a troop increase of up to 30,000 US soldiers, in addition to 68,000 already in Afghanistan. Monitoring Desk adds: US President Obama got some political cover Sunday for his upcoming announcement on sending more troops to Afghanistan, reports CNN.
The report blames the Bush administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when the Al-Qaeda leader was cornered in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountain region in December 2001. The report says the situation in Afghanistan presented greater problems today because of the failure to nab bin Laden eight years ago. Osama had written his will, apparently sensing he was trapped, but the lack of sufficient forces to close in for the kill allowed him to escape to tribal areas in Pakistan, according to the report. “Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region,” Kerry, D-Massachusetts, wrote in a letter of transmittal for the report. When Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, he argued that the Bush administration botched the pursuit of Osama and that then-President George W Bush “took his eye off the ball” in Afghanistan to invade Iraq.
Sen Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the new report “does serve as a convenient way for, perhaps, Democrats to say once again, there’s another failing of the past administration” and that “all the problems have accumulated.” Democratic Sen Jack Reed of Rhode Island, responding to Lugar’s comment, told CNN that Obama faced “the culmination of decisions that were made eight years” earlier, which he said “made the situation much more difficult” today.
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