Mullen Asserts Pakistani Role in Attack on U.S. Embassy
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, right, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee about ongoing strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
ELISABETH BUMILLER and JANE PERLEZ September 22, 2011
WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s intelligence agency aided the insurgents who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate on Thursday.
In comments that were the first to directly link Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, with an assault on the United States, Admiral Mullen went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining the American military effort in Afghanistan. The United States has long said that the ISI has close links to Afghan insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network, but no one has been as blunt as Admiral Mullen.
Admiral Mullen is to retire at the end of this month, and coming from him the statements carried exceptional weight. He has been the American military official who has led the effort for years to improve cooperation with the Pakistanis. But relations have reached a nadir since American commandoes killed Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan in May. Pakistani officials were not told of the raid in advance, and questions remain about whether Pakistani intelligence was sheltering the Qaeda leader.
The attack on the American embassy, and ISI support for the Haqqani network — which also forms one of the most lethal parts of the insurgency attacking American forces in Afghanistan — is the latest point of tension.
Pakistan’s intelligence agency has supported the Haqqanis as a way to further Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. On Thursday Admiral Mullen made clear that support extended to increasingly high-profile attacks aimed directly at the United States.
“With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” Admiral Mullen told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.”
In short, he said, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.”
The truck bomb attack that Admiral Mullen referred to occurred at a NATO outpost south of Kabul on Sept. 10, when a cargo vehicle packed with explosives killed at least five people and wounded 77 coalition troops. The toll of wounded was one of the worst for foreign forces in a single episode in the 10-year-old war.
It is unclear what steps American officials are prepared to take against the Haqqanis, but the increasingly strong public statements indicated that reining in the group has become a more urgent priority as the United States looks to withdraw from Afghanistan and leave a stable country and viable government behind.
On Thursday the Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, said his government would “not allow” an American operation aimed at the Haqqani network in North Waziristan.
Mr. Malik seemed to indicate that Obama administration officials had threatened Tuesday in their meetings in Washington with the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, that American troops were prepared to cross the border from Afghanistan into North Waziristan to attack the Haqqani militants.
“The Pakistan nation will not allow the boots on our ground, never,” Mr. Malik said in an interview with Reuters. “Our government is already cooperating with the U.S. — but they also must respect our sovereignty.”
In a meeting in Islamabad on Wednesday with the head of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Malik said that the Haqqani network was not present in Pakistan, a statement that American officials said they found disingenuous.
In his remarks to Pakistani reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Malik said that if the United States provided information on the whereabouts of the Haqqani network in Pakistan, Pakistani “law enforcement” would go after it.
In making such claims, Mr. Malik was ignoring several years of effort by senior American military officials and diplomats to persuade the Pakistani Army to launch operations against the Haqqani militants, who are well known to American and Pakistani military officials to be centered around Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan.
The Pakistani Army has a base in North Waziristan not far from compounds of the Haqqani network.
Since the attack on the American Embassy in Kabul, Pakistani military officials have told Pakistani reporters that it is up to the Americans to deal with the Haqqani fighters inside Afghanistan.
The Pakistanis argue that they do not have sufficient troops in North Waziristan to take on the Haqqanis. But aside from the main Pakistani objective of keeping the Haqqanis as a friendly force in a post-war Afghanistan, some Pakistani military experts say the Pakistani Army is reluctant to fight the Haqqanis because there was concern that the army would not prevail against them.
No decisions had been made on what actions the Obama administration might take against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, a senior American official said Thursday.
The options would be discussed at a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Monday, he said.
Admiral Mullen testified alongside Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who told the committee that the attack on the embassy and the assassination this week of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president, were “a sign of weakness in the insurgency.” He cast the attacks as signs that the Taliban had shifted to high-profile targets in an effort to disrupt the progress the American military has made.
“Over all, we judge this change in tactics to be a result of a shift in momentum in our favor,” Mr. Panetta said.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack on Mr. Rabbani.
Despite his optimistic remarks about American progress, Mr. Panetta said the American military had a difficult job ahead and had to do better in preventing the insurgents from carrying out raids like the one on the embassy. “While overall violence in Afghanistan is trending down — and down substantially in areas where we concentrated the surge — we must be more effective in stopping these attacks and limiting the ability of insurgents to create perceptions of decreasing security,” Mr. Panetta said.
The hearing, called by the panel to review American military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the first for Mr. Panetta as defense secretary.
Like Mr. Panetta, Admiral Mullen sought to cast the recent attacks in Afghanistan in the best possible light. “We must not attribute more weight to these attacks than they deserve,” Admiral Mullen said. “They are serious and significant, but they do not represent a sea change in the odds of military success.”
Admiral Mullen voiced a stern warning to Pakistan, who he said was undermining its own interests as well as the American interest in fighting terror networks in the region.
“In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani Army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence,” he said. “They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power. But in reality, they have already lost that bet.
“By exporting violence, they’ve eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being.”
But he said he did not believe he had wasted his time by putting so much effort into improving ties with Pakistan’s government.
“I’ve done this because I believe that a flawed and difficult relationship is better than no relationship at all,” he said. “Some may argue I’ve wasted my time, that Pakistan is no closer to us than before, and may now have drifted even further away. I disagree. Military cooperation again is warming.”
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Afghanistan is a proxy war between India and Pakistan
When Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai visited New Delhi earlier last month to sign a strategic partnership deal, he quickly reassured Islamabad it remained Kabul's most important partner. ................................... Railroad from Chabahar in Iran to Hajigak in Afghanistan will allow Afghan minerals and products to be shipped to Suratm Mumbai or private ports in Gujarat
INSIDE .. Image 1 of 2 .. Railroad from Chabahar in Iran to Hajigak in Afghanistan ...................................
By Dean Nelson, South Asia Editor .. Telegraph.co.uk Wednesday 7:15AM GMT 02 Nov 2011
"Pakistan is our twin brother, India is a great friend. The agreement we signed with our friend will not affect our brother," he explained.
India and Afghanistan's problem is that Pakistan doesn't agree. It sees India's involvement in Afghanistan as a threat to its 'strategic depth', a concept in which Afghanistan is acknowledged as Pakistan's backyard in which India has no right to hang out with its great friend.
The fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 allowed India to expand its influence in Afghanistan dramatically. Its engineers and IT specialists poured in as part of its most ambitious aid package – worth more than $1.5 billion – to build remote mountain roads, establish telephone, internet, and satellite links and reopen schools and hospitals. Washington encouraged India's involvement and believed it could use the soft power of its popular Bollywood film industry and other cultural links to encourage tolerance and pluralism in the country.
For India, which had been frozen out under the Taliban regime as a supporter of the Northern Alliance's warlords, Afghanistan holds the keys to the Central Asian mineral and energy reserves it needs to sustain its rapid economic growth. To that end, and to increase its chances of gaining access to Afghanistan's own rich reserves of iron ore, India has pledged another half a billion dollars in aid.
Afghanistan is keen to encourage India in this: it doesn't want Pakistan to be its sole customs guard or jailer, and it has seen how vindictive its twin can be. When India's Kabul embassy was blown up by a suicide bomber in 2008, killing 41, including India's defence attaché, American officials said they had evidence that members of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service had been involved in the plot. Just over a year later they struck again, killing 17.
A few months later Pakistani officials successfully lobbied for India to be excluded from last year's Afghanistan conference in Istanbul and for its need for 'strategic depth' to be reflected in any peace settlement for the country.
The message for India was that it could only operate successfully in Afghanistan with Pakistan's tacit approval. This message has been received loud and clear by the major Indian companies bidding to mine Afghanistan's deep mineral reserves: Should they invest heavily in rail or oil pipeline projects when their security cannot be protected from attacks by Taliban factions close to Pakistan?
So while India and Iran discuss opening a new Afghan 'silk route' which bypasses Pakistan's tightly-controlled Wagah border with India, fear of Islamabad's militant friends could still jeopardise this latest rail project and other badly needed developments.
Afghanistan is not just the front line in Nato's fight against the Taliban, but also a proxy war between India and Pakistan. Until relations really improve between the nuclear neighbours, Afghanistan will remain another of their battlegrounds – and no safe place for serious investors.
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