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Can Mrs. Clinton Control CIA In Afghanistan?
There is a reason why her first visit to Pakistan turned into a big
firefighting mission. In less than two years, even Pakistan's elite turned
suspicious of US intentions. Forget Hillary's empty accusations that
Pakistan is protecting al-Qaeda, the truth is that Washington has played a
double game with Pakistan. Afghanistan today is a hub for anti-Pakistan
activities and a source for the supply of weapons to terrorists in Pakistan
[and Iran, and China]. The charm offensive aside: Can Mrs. Clinton and
President Obama control CIA activities in Afghanistan? Who is setting
America's Afghan agenda?
She came, she charmed, she failed to convince.
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091028_ClintonPakistaniFlag.jpg>
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/images/091028_ClintonPakistaniFlag.jpg
By AHMED QURAISHI
Thursday, 28 October 2009.
<http://WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM> WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan-Two years ago, when isolated reports in the Pakistani
media accused the United States of playing a double game in Afghanistan,
most commentators dismissed them as conspiracy theories and kneejerk
anti-Americanism.
Today those reports dominate the mainstream Pakistani media. The distrust
is so serious that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to turn her first
official visit to Pakistan into a firefighting mission, kicking off a charm
offensive to win over skeptic Pakistanis.
Her campaign has included Facebook advertisements targeting young
Pakistanis, town-hall type meetings, and group television interviews with
anchors meant to maximize her on-air exposure.
Before she even landed in Pakistan, Clinton had instructed US diplomats in
Islamabad to get tough with the Pakistani media. At one point, the American
ambassador wrote a secret letter to a large Pakistani newspaper accusing one
of its columnists, a critic of US policies, of endangering American lives.
She gave no evidence of how a policy critique endangered anyone's life. The
columnist was dropped after ten years of working for the paper. The US
embassy in Pakistan is very powerful thanks to a pro-US Pakistani government
that sees Washington as a hedge against the powerful Pakistani military.
Not that Mrs. Clinton and the US diplomats are alone in countering critics
of US policies here. Pakistan's ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani, a
former journalist who is widely derided as 'Washington's ambassador in the
Pakistan embassy', is known to have put his media management expertise in
the service of defending his government's ultra close ties with Washington,
although his planted image-enhancement stories find little buyers among
Pakistanis.
Mrs. Clinton's visit was so carefully choreographed that US diplomats
launched a strict vetting process to determine which Pakistani television
anchors should be allowed to participate in a 'pool interview'. The point
was to exclude anyone critical of US policies ['anti-American' to US
diplomats]. This sharply contrasts with the statements Clinton has been
giving here, like this one she gave to the television anchors, "It is
especially critical that we do more of what you're doing today with your
colleagues so that I have a chance to answer the questions that are on the
minds of the people of Pakistan."
But when time came for the real questions, she dodged them. So much for a
successful public diplomacy.
Despite all this vetting, one anchor, Talat Hussain from Aaj News, managed
to throw a couple of 'real' questions that unsettled Secretary Clinton.
Visibly embarrassed, she kept repeating the line, 'No one can say Pakistani
media is not free after this' and she kept repeating it until the end of the
show.
At one point, media officials in the provincial capital Lahore wrote to
higher-ups complaining against US diplomats who manipulated which Pakistani
journalists should be allowed to interact with Clinton. "She came here to
interact with Pakistanis. US diplomats don't get to decide which Pakistani
media can attend her public events and which one cannot," a senior Punjab
provincial official told me from Lahore.
This kind of media management is normally the prerogative of the host
government and not the guest. In another press interaction with a few
journalists in Lahore, Mrs. Clinton sat down with a handful of predominantly
pro-American media personalities, including one widely known to be a paid
consultant for the US Department of Defense, who normally advises on
Pakistani affairs and is famous for saying everything that American
policymakers want to hear.
So much for Mrs. Clinton's public diplomacy mission, almost every Pakistani
journalist known for well reasoned and calibrated critique of US policies
was excluded from any interaction with the US Secretary of State. Which
says a lot about Washington's tolerance level for criticism despite the
high-sounding lectures on democracy that Mrs. Clinton delivered in Pakistan.
How fake in real sense this public diplomacy trip was can be gauged from the
following: Mrs. Clinton's first day in Pakistan was full of warm imagery
and rhetoric: how she and her husband love Pakistanis, how she and President
Obama enjoy Pakistani food, how honest and straightforward she is, and how
sincere United States is in its friendship with Pakistan.
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00636/Hillary-Clinton...
3a.jpg>
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00636/Hillary-Clinton...
a.jpg
Mrs. Clinton was received by a junior Foreign Office diplomat while for some
reason Foreign Minister Qureshi stayed away
But when it came to substance, she was full of hot air. For example, during
the 'pool interview' with seven television anchors, she curtly ignored a
question about the increasing incidents of arrests of US special operations
officers inside Pakistani cities carrying diplomatic passports and illegal
weapons. You would think she might want to address this point considering
that this and similar stories are stoking Pakistani public's anger. But no,
she didn't.
Merely two days before her arrival, four US 'diplomats' were arrested
somewhere in the Pakistani capital dressed as Afghan Taliban, carrying
illegal and unlicensed weapons, and in possession of pictures of sensitive
buildings. They were released on the intervention of the Interior Ministry,
headed by a close aide of President Zardari. The Ministry is openly accused
in the media of not only covering for the US embassy's illegal actions but
also of licensing the operations of private US security firms across
Pakistan on an unprecedented scale not seen or known even during the reign
of the former pro-US president Musharraf. Interestingly, the Pakistani
intelligence agencies have been kept out of the loop by both the US embassy
and the Ministry. This alone has generated tremendous ill will within the
Pakistani public opinion against Washington.
Last month, a Pakistani journalist published official documents leaked from
within the Interior Ministry that positively showed US Ambassador Anne
Patterson colluding with the Ministry to 'legalize' a cache of weapons that
came from an unknown source [most probably from Afghanistan]. The cache was
handed over to an American security firm that was later stopped from
operating in Pakistan.
Mrs. Clinton had a simple answer when a journalist asked her about such
incidents. "I don't know about this," is what she said to someone asking her
about the latest incident involving four US 'diplomats'.
These are some of the issues that the mainstream US media hides from the
American public. No wonder most Americans don't know how bad their
government and intelligence mess in Afghanistan is. US citizens are
unaware, for example, about the strong Pakistani apprehensions that
Washington - or some powerful lobbies there - decidedly brought in
anti-Pakistan forces into the government in Kabul, and then set them loose
on a course of collision with Pakistan, including recruiting, financing and
training terrorists to incite an ethnic insurgency in Balochistan exploiting
local grievances. For most of the past eight years, the US Ambassador in
Kabul was an anti-Pakistan diplomat who spent more of his Afghan assignment
finding ways and means to target Pakistan.
Pakistanis also have strong evidence that some Americans allowed India to
set up a vast intelligence network there, hidden beneath several development
projects. This network is involved in pumping money and weapons to
terrorists inside Pakistan. [On Oct. 28, Pakistani police arrested five
members of a banned militant outfit and seized about 150 kilos of
<http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pa...>
explosives of Indian origin, automatic rifles and suicide vests from them].
The above cannot happen in US-occupied and controlled Afghanistan without US
knowledge. Or, to be precise, without the knowledge of at least one
influential US actor: the intelligence community. CIA and possibly other US
spy agencies that come under the Department of Defense are involved in
fostering terrorism not just in Pakistan but also inside Iran and western
China.
In Pakistan, elements in CIA aided by the Indians and Karzai's spy groups
have played a role in setting up and feeding insurgencies across western
Pakistan between 2004 and 2008. This was done during the Bush-Cheney
administration as punishment for Pakistan for not completely submitting to
the US project in Afghanistan. Washington then suspected that Musharraf was
double dealing. US did not want Pakistan to have any independent foreign
policy or ideas on Afghanistan, Kashmir and India other than what Washington
was planning.
The spate of recent suicide bombings in Pakistan, killing some 200
Pakistanis in less than a month, is not the work of mountain hillbillies in
South Waziristan on the Pak-Afghan border but the work of trained operatives
who receive support, intelligence and training from organized military
groups.
We know our own citizens are involved in this terrorism, but the small
terror army in South Waziristan is not getting its money and weapons from
inside Pakistan. Rehman Malik's Interior Ministry and the military's spy
agencies have credible, strong and detailed information about how a
US-controlled Afghanistan is being used for anti-Pakistan covet warfare. BLA
and TTP terrorists have a safe haven there. Terrorist Abdullah Mehsud was
killed in 2007 slipping back from Afghanistan through Balochistan [and not
the tribal belt] after meeting his backers. We know why the Chinese working
on different projects in Pakistani were targeted here.
American officials like Hillary Clinton avoid commenting on these issues.
The question she dodged from a Pakistani journalist on armed US 'diplomats'
was a sign that we increasingly recognizing from watching US diplomats work
in Iraq and Afghanistan. US diplomats are averse to commenting on possible
clandestine activities of CIA and or people from the US military in the host
country.
For years, US officials have been praising Pakistan for helping eliminate Al
Qaeda and complaining about lack of Pakistani cooperation in pursuing the
Afghan Taliban. That was Bush administration's refrain. Under Mr. Obama,
his diplomats in Islamabad took turns this month in threatening war against
Pakistan and in confirming the presence of Mullah Omar and Bin Laden inside
Pakistan, without evidence of course, since US statements are enough. In
return we, Pakistanis, are not allowed to make similar conjecture about the
presence of bin Laden in Afghanistan, where the US military can't control
the country eight years later.
Mrs. Clinton has added a twist to this American-Afghan saga. One of her
rather bold statements in Pakistan is so fantastic I must quote it as it was
reported by the Associated Press: "I find it hard to believe that nobody in
your government knows where they [Al Qaeda] are and couldn't get them if
they really wanted to," Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani
journalists in Lahore. "Maybe that's the case. Maybe they're not gettable.
I don't know."
Amazing to see her determination to question the role of Pakistan when she
has no evidence on anything that she is saying.
While the isolated pro-US Pakistani government is understandably reluctant
to confront Washington on this eight-year-old charade, the Pakistani public
opinion, the media, opposition parties and the powerful military have all
had it. Washington is good at messing things up and even better at pinning
the blame on others. For some reason, Mrs. Clinton and her administration
won't admit that they messed up Afghanistan big time and that rogue elements
within the US military and intelligence played a big role in this. [The
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1&ref=world>
New York Times has reported that one of Afghanistan's biggest drug barons, a
brother of the US-backed Afghan president, has been on CIA's payroll for
years. Criminals and warlords in the Afghan government are allies of CIA
and the US military. The US spy agency is also involved in fomenting
trouble inside Pakistan, Iran and western China using the Afghan base. CIA
is not always good at what it does, that's why many Pakistanis have ended up
knowing some of the truth. Late but better than never.]
Can Mrs. Clinton and President Obama control CIA and the increasingly
independent-minded US military in Afghanistan? The answer to this question
will determine if peace returns to our region any time soon.
C 2007-2009. All rights reserved. <http://www.ahmedquraishi.com/>
AhmedQuraishi.com & <http://groups.google.com.pk/group/paknationalists/>
PakNationalists
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any
medium
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