The US & others working with Pakistan

[VCheng]

I would not be surprised if Dr. Afridi was to serve only a few months and then some pretext was found to release him and get him to the US. From the CIA point of view that is a must because all the other potential Dr. Afridis in the world are watching.

If USA can persuade China to let Cheng Guangcheng go, one can only assume that Dr. Afridi's incarceration for the time being serves a useful purpose for USA, namely allowing Pakistan to blacken its own face for a little bit longer.

[Ray]

If USA can persuade China to let Cheng Guangcheng go, one can only assume that Dr. Afridi's incarceration for the time being serves a useful purpose for USA, namely allowing Pakistan to blacken its own face for a little bit longer.

As I see it,The following requires consideration:

1. The OBL issue has made the Pak Govt, Army and ISI lose face with the public.

2. The Army and the ISI are taken to be the 'saviours' of the country. The OBL case was a body blow to both the Army and the ISI (the Govt is taken to be incompetent, corrupt and sold to the US and so not in the reckoning). It was unbelievable to the common Pakistani that there much acclaimed military could allow a foreign nation to violate the Pakistani airspace and at will come and kill the Islamic messiah OBL!

3. This is more so given the fact, unlike the world, the Pakistanis feel quite proud that Pakistan could hide OBL, a fugitive declared by the world and thus cock a snook at the mighty US. It is also a matter of glee for Pakistanis that the ISI while pretending to be with the US in their War on Terror was actually protecting the Muslim brothers and Islamic warriors against those who wished to decimate Islam.

Therefore, would not the fact that the Doctor who assisted the US be sentenced for treason a vindication that Pakistan, the Army and the ISI are actually saviour of Islam first and then other things necessary for political correctness?

Just a thought!

[Dayuhan]

I personally doubt that the Pak Army or ISI knew anything about the raid, for numerous and obvious reasons.

[omarali50]

I agree. The simplest explanation for the publicly known facts is that they had no bloody idea...not on that night at least.
Its always possible that some trusted US "friends" high up were secretly alerted by their "friends" to prevent a disastrous response, but I cannot see how there could have been any official contact..

[Ray]

What could be the reason that the Pakistani radars could not spot the helicopters infiltrating their airspace, carrying out the raid and then exfiltrating and take action thereof?

That is another mystery!

I wonder if the whole thing was as simple as it appears.

[davidbfpo]

How SHOULD the White house have spun it?

Still thinking that question through, but from my armchair it was obvious that the White House had not prepared for the media storm of a success or a failure. Similar points were made at the time of the OBL raid on the SWC thread.

I know there is the 'message' and the 'tools'.

What was disappointing regarding the 'tools' was for example the use of Geronimo as the operational name and the lack of a site model to "talk" the media through. In fact only recently have I seen an official photo of a model of the compound.

[omarali50]

What could be the reason that the Pakistani radars could not spot the helicopters infiltrating their airspace, carrying out the raid and then exfiltrating and take action thereof?

...

The Pakistani airforce chief claimed that his best radars were turned off because if he keeps them on all the time he has to replace very expensive parts every X hours. That sounds about right to me.
btw, there was a small news item in a Pakistani newspaper the next day about how the radar at Peshawar airport suddenly malfunctioned at 1 am or something. The guy on duty called someone higher up, his boss said push reset and nothing happened but htere are no flights that late so they were not exactly rushing and then at 2-30 or whatever it started working again.
Maybe Uncle Sam can do things like that.
Then again, I am not claiming I know what happened. Maybe Kiyani was told and stood down that night, but later reactions dont seem to bear that out.

[jmm99]

From the Washington Post, Verdict against Pakistani who helped track bin Laden: Guilty of militancy, not CIA links (29 May 2012):

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistan doctor who assisted the CIA in tracking down Osama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in prison for conspiring with an Islamist militant commander, a verdict that could make it more difficult for Washington to argue for his release.

The judgment against Shakil Afridi debunked the widely held assumption that he had been convicted for his involvement with the American spy agency.
...
The verdict said Afridi was guilty of conspiring with a militant group led by commander Mangal Bagh. It said he gave money to the group and treated its leaders at a hospital in Khyber when he was stationed there. According to unnamed witnesses, he did this because of his “deep affiliation with the group.” Others, also unnamed, said the group planned terrorist attacks in Afridi’s office.

The verdict, which was passed down last week, found Afridi guilty of “conspiring against the state” and other charges. ....

(Mangal Bagh - very short Wiki)

More detail from The News International, Court convicted Dr Afridi for links to Mangal Bagh (30 May 2012):

PESHAWAR: As details of the order of the assistant political agent, Bara, convicting Dr Shakill Afridi on four counts of anti-state activities and sentencing him to 33 years imprisonment became available on Tuesday, it recommended that evidence of Dr Afridi’s involvement in activities linking him to foreign intelligence agencies be produced before another relevant court for further proceedings under the law.

The five-page order containing the detailed judgement by Assistant Political Agent (APA) Nasir Khan, who is also Additional District Magistrate, Bara sub-division, Khyber Agency, pointed out that his court could not take into account the evidence obtained by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) regarding the involvement of the accused in acts associating him with foreign intelligence agencies due to lack of jurisdiction.
...
The order regarding the state versus Dr Shakill, son of Mewa Khan belonging to the Malikdinkhel Afridi tribe in Bara, Khyber Agency, noted that the accused was charged under sections 121-A, 123, 123-A and 124-A of the PPC under the 11-Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). It said the accused was produced before the court of APA Bara for further proceedings under the provisions of section 11 of FCR 1901 (Amended) 2011 after completion of investigation into the case.

According to the order, Dr Shakill Afridi was arrested on May 23, 2011 by the political administration of Khyber Agency on the basis of reports that he was involved in anti-state activities. It said the intelligence agencies had received reports that the accused was in league with the Mangal Bagh-led LI and members of the general public too had made complaints against him.

The order said the accused from May 24, 2011 was interrogated by the JIT, which normally includes officials from the intelligence agencies ISI, MI and IB, for five days. It added that later he was handed over to an intelligence agency for further probe. It said his trial in the court of APA Bara began on May 11, 2012.

The order said the case was referred to the counsel of elders, or jirga, for inquiry on May 12, 2012. It claimed the jirga gave ample opportunity to the accused for his defence. Finally, the order said the accused was produced in the APA Bara’s court and given a chance to answer the charges against him.

Explaining Dr Shakill Afridi’s links with the LI, the order said the JIT in its report maintained that he gave Rs2 million to the banned militant group while serving at the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital, Dogra, in Bara area and provided medical assistance there to the LI’s commanders Said Noor Malikdinkhel, Hazrat from the Sepah tribe, Wahid from the Shalobar Qambarkhel tribe and others.

The order said the accused was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to 33 years imprisonment and fined Rs320,000. It added that all the sentences would run consecutively and the conviction should commence from the date of his arrest on May 23, 2011.

Of course, Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion.

Regards

Mike

[ganulv]

What could be the reason that the Pakistani radars could not spot the helicopters infiltrating their airspace, carrying out the raid and then exfiltrating and take action thereof?

That is another mystery!

I wonder if the whole thing was as simple as it appears.

Most suggestive to me is that you had a helicopter go down hard followed by multiple shots fired and yet the team still had time to collect evidence before anyone in uniform responded.

[ganulv]

The Pakistani airforce chief claimed that his best radars were turned off because if he keeps them on all the time he has to replace very expensive parts every X hours. That sounds about right to me.

In other words he announced to the world, “We regularly leave the door unlocked, and by the way, here are the hours.” Was he immediately put up against a wall and blindfolded? If not, color me suspicious. Color me even more suspicious if he trots the same line out every time the Pakistani street gets restive over a drone strike.

[omarali50]

A theory about why supplies are still stuck.
http://www.brownpundits.com/why-is-p...nato-supplies/

What do you think?

[carl]

Omar:

You put point three in there for comic relief right? Other than that it sounds quite good to me, especially the money part.

[VCheng]

Concluding paragraphs from a detailed article with a good historical perspective:

from: What's Wrong with Pakistan? - By Robert D. Kaplan | Foreign Policy

....................

And so we come to the core reason for Pakistan's perversity. The fact that Pakistan is historically and geographically well-rooted is only partially a justification for statehood. Although a Muslim frontier state between mountains and plains has often existed in the subcontinent's history, that past belonged to a world not of fixed borders, but rather of perpetually moving spheres of control as determined by the movements of armies -- such was the medieval world. The Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal dynasty all controlled the subcontinent's northwestern frontier, but their boundaries were all vague and somewhat different from one another -- all of which means Pakistan cannot claim its borders are legitimate by history alone. It requires something else: the legitimacy that comes with good governance and strong institutions. Without that, we are back to the medieval map, which is what we have now -- known in Washington bureaucratic parlance as "AfPak."

The term "AfPak" itself, popularized by the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke, indicates two failed states -- otherwise, they would share a strong border and would not have to be conjoined in one word. Let me provide the real meaning of AfPak, as defined by geography and history: It is a rump Islamic greater Punjab -- the tip of the demographic spear of the Indian subcontinent toward which all trade routes between southern Central Asia and the Indus Valley are drawn -- exerting its power over Pashtunistan and Baluchistan, just as Punjab has since time immemorial.

This is a world where ethnic boundaries do not configure with national ones. Pashtunistan and Baluchistan overlap with Afghanistan and less so with Iran. About half of the world's 40-plus million Pashtuns live on the Pakistani side of the border. The majority of the more than 8 million Baluchis live within Pakistan, the rest in neighboring Afghanistan and Iran.

In recent decades, the age-old pathways in this region have been used by Islamic terrorists, as well as by traditional traders. The link between Pakistan's premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the so-called Haqqani network tied to al Qaeda merely replicates the arteries of commerce emanating from Punjab outward to southern Central Asia. Punjabis dominate the ISI, and the Afghan Pashtun Haqqani network is both an Islamic terrorist outfit and a vast trade and smuggling operation, unto the Amu Darya River to the northwest and unto Iran to the west.

Because al-Hind has historically been so rich in cultural and commercial connections, when modern states do not sink deep roots into the land, the result is a reversion to traditional patterns, albeit with contemporary ideological characteristics. The U.S. State Department and many policy analysts in Washington have proposed a new silk route that could emerge in the event of a peace treaty in Afghanistan. What they fail to recognize is that a silk route is already flourishing outward from Punjab -- it is just not oriented to Western purposes.

The longer the fighting goes on in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, the weaker Pakistan as a modern state will become. As that occurs, the medieval map will come into even greater focus. Jakub Grygiel, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, points out that when states or empires involve themselves in irregular, decentralized warfare, central control weakens. A state only grows strong when it faces a concentrated and conventional ground threat, creating the need to match it in organizational capabilities and thus bolstering central authority. But the opposite kind of threat leads to the opposite result. Pakistan's very obsession with the ground threat posed by India is a sign of how it requires a conventional enemy to hold it together, even as its answer to India in the contested ground of Central Asia -- supporting decentralized Islamic terrorism from Afghanistan to Kashmir -- is having the ironic effect of pulling Pakistan itself apart. It is unclear whether invigorated civilian control in Pakistan can arrest this long-term process.

This process could even quicken. With the Soviets abandoning Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the Americans on their way out in coming years, India will attempt to fill the void partially by building infrastructure projects and providing support to the Afghan security services. This will mark the beginning of the real battle between the Indus state and the Gangetic state for domination of southern Central Asia.

At the same time, as Pakistan is primarily interested in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the part of Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush mountains may, if current trends continue, become more peaceful and drift into the economic orbit of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, especially given that Uzbeks and Tajiks live astride northern Afghanistan's border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This new formation would closely approximate the borders of ancient Bactria, with which Alexander the Great was so familiar.

Indeed, the past may hold the key to the future of al-Hind.

[ganulv]

Concluding paragraphs from a detailed article with a good historical perspective:

from: What's Wrong with Pakistan? - By Robert D. Kaplan | Foreign Policy

Kaplan has always struck me as someone who has done all of the reading and who can identify all of the important concepts. But his publicly available work tends to have a lit review feel to it. I’m not a South Asia expert, but I know enough about geographic theory to find his efforts to employ it pretty middlebrow, if not to say half-baked. I hope his Stratfor stuff is better than the stuff he puts out there for public consumption.

[omarali50]

Kaplan Bahadur's latest article is worse than half-baked. He has noticed that some intellectuals have cooked up "secular" justifications for its existence and he has built the whole article out of rather thin cloth. Facts that do not fit his theory neatly are ignored and facts that fit his thesis are picked out from wherever available.
Before Kaplan sahib takes offense, I would like to confess that I have a similar opinion about most posthoc geographic theories. Geography obviously has a deep influence on history, but history is also full of contingencies and exceptions. Pakistan is sui generis.

[omarali50]

btw, my own latest attempt at prediction and punditry...obviously not in Kaplan's class but being an amateur, I can afford to be more reckless.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd...-ali.html#more

[omarali50]

I should have stayed away from the big shots, but i couldnt: http://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7108

[omarali50]

Things Fall Apart http://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7110

[omarali50]

My take on Ahmed Rashid's latest "no country for armed men" http://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7179

[omarali50]

Sharing a blog post about why some Pakistani liberals are always carrying on about the army: http://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7234

And one about ongoing anti-Shia terrorism in Pakistan: http://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7203