The Obama Syndrome - Interview with Tariq Ali

"Surrender at Home, War Abroad"

We speak with British Pakistani political commentator, writer, 
activist and editor of the New Left Review, Tariq Ali. 

He is the author of numerous books; 

his latest is The Obama Syndrome: 
Surrender at Home, War Abroad.

AMY GOODMAN: Coming up, Glenn Greenwald joins us, usually in Brazil, but here he’s in New York. But right now we’re staying with Tariq Ali. He has a new book out; it’s called The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. Some might say that’s a little harsh.

TARIQ ALI: I know some of his supporters might feel it’s a little harsh, but I think that we’ve had two years of him now, Amy, and the contours of this administration are now visible. And essentially, it is a conservative administration which has changed the mood music. So the talk is better. The images of the administration are better, the reasonable looks. But in terms of what they do—in foreign policy, we’ve seen a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies, and worse, in AfPak, as they call it, and at home, we’ve seen a total capitulation to the lobbyists, to the corporations. The fact that the healthcare bill was actually drafted by someone who used to be an insurance lobbyist says it all.

So, it’s essentially now a PR operation to get him reelected. But I don’t think people are that dumb. I’ve been speaking to some of his, you know, partisan supporters, and they’re disappointed. So the big problem for Obama is that if you do nothing and promise that you would bring about some changes, you will not have people coming out to vote for you again. And building up the tea party into this great bogey isn’t going to work. It’s your own supporters you have to convince to come out and vote for you, as they did before. I can’t see that happening.

AMY GOODMAN: The cover of your book, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, is a picture of the face, the head of President Obama, and half of it is peeled away to reveal President Bush.

TARIQ ALI: Well, this, you know, I think, is a sort of very brilliant West Coast montage artist, and they are the best. Whenever there’s a crisis, they come up with an image which says it all. And I like that image a lot, and I used it very deliberately to show the continuation, that it’s not a case that we have a new administration. We do, technically, but it’s continuing with many of the old policies in the—how it deals with the economy. When you have people like Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, occasionally Frank Rich in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, these people who were desperate for a Democrat administration being incredibly critical of some of its things, when you have venerable professors like Gary Wells saying, "I’m disappointed," the honeymoon didn’t last long with Obama. It lasted much, much longer with Clinton. And one reason for that is that he had raised hopes and was unable to deliver. He turned out to be an apparatchik and a political operator from one of the worst Democrat areas in the country, Chicago, and that’s what he behaves like.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Gibbs, the White House press spokesperson, going after the so-called "professional left"? Your thoughts?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, it’s interesting that they are incapable of dealing with the right. With the right, it’s conciliation. That’s what they feel they have to appeal to. With critics from the left, they tend to be very harsh, as if they are saying to us, "You don’t know how lucky you are." But why are we lucky? I mean, you know, we judge people not by how they look or what they say, but by what they do. And what Obama has been doing is, you know, to put it mildly, extremely disappointing at home, and abroad it’s murderous. On Palestine, on Iran, no changes at all. So, one has to spell this out, because if they don’t realize that they’re doing this, they’re going to get more shocks. And Rahm Emanuel refers to people on the liberal left who are critical of Obama, and he uses a bad swear word and then says, "effing retards"—well, we’ll see who the retards are after the midterms, Amy. That’s all I can say.

AMY GOODMAN: Surrender at Home, War Abroad You were born in Pakistan. You ultimately went to Britain, where we just came from last night. It’s been interesting to see the politics there, but also the devastation of the war, the effects of the wars, on the population at home in Britain. A report in the paper the other day, when we were in London, saying that 20,000 veterans are in prison, mainly Iraq, Afghanistan war veterans, for committing violent and sexual crimes. But what about the war abroad and what President Obama is doing—says he’s scaling back Iraq, still about 50,000—actually, well more than that—military, and you could say paramilitaries with a mercenary armies there, and in Afghanistan, the surge?

TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean, again, let’s look at it concretely. Bush had promised exactly the same withdrawal pattern from Iraq: by this time, we will be out. Obama has followed it. They’re not going out. What is essentially happening, they’re reducing the presence of combat troops and eliminating it in the big cities, and building six huge military bases all over Iraq, in which they’ll keep between fifty and sixty thousand soldiers, ready to act when the need be—just like the British did when they occupied Iraq in the '20s and ’30s of the last century. And the British were then driven out by a violent upheaval and revolution in the ’50s. So the US is keeping these bases in, (a) to control Iraq, and (b) as a warning to Iran. And I think there's going to be trouble. 

The war isn’t over at all. We’ve seen, just a few days ago, huge explosions in Baghdad and Fallujah. It’s a total disaster and a mess. And to present that as somehow "mission accomplished part two" is a joke. That country has been wrecked, a million Iraqis dead, its social infrastructure destroyed. And in Afghanistan, they are now going from bad to worse. They know, and General Eikenberry knows and says, we cannot win this war militarily. They can’t lose it, but they can’t win it, either. So, political solution is the only way out, and that means that they have to have an exit strategy. Obama isn’t even talking about that, because that might be construed as a sign of weakness. But by who? The army knows what’s going on. They can’t stay there forever.

AMY GOODMAN: It was quite astounding, with the tremendous attention on Terry Jones threatening to burn a Quran, a horrific symbol all over the world, as it would be for any religious book, but at the same time, what was coming out of Afghanistan, a report of a kill team—this is a US kill team—who was taking souvenirs of fingers and other body parts, that getting very little attention in terms of what it means for not just the Muslim community, but for people all over the world.

TARIQ ALI: But, you know, Amy, some of us who are sort of elderly now remember exactly the same things happening in Vietnam during that war, where there were lots of report—in those days publicized much more, I have to say—of US soldiers in Vietnam taking trophies, which were parts of bodies of Vietnamese dead or who they had killed or tortured to death.

AMY GOODMAN: And just this report we read today, Michael Ware, well known face on CNN, constantly on talking about Iraq— 

TARIQ ALI: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: —saying when he had this footage of a US soldier killing an Iraqi teen, they did not allow him to run that footage. And CNN owns it, so he can’t get it.

TARIQ ALI: It’s a disgrace that CNN did that, but that is a sign of how the global media corporations have been reporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Self-censorship has been the order of the day. They haven’t wanted to offend the US military, in sharp contrast to how the Vietnam War was covered. I remember Morley Safer on CBS News reporting a family’s home being destroyed by US Marines and Safer commenting, "We’re fighting for freedom." That sort of stuff is not permitted now. The global corporations don’t do it, which is why programs like this are important. But now that if he can’t even use the footage that he took, what is that? I mean, how people in that part of the world know exactly what’s going, and it’s not the Quran burnings that upset them so much—but they do, too—but what is happening to their daily lives with the US and NATO presence. That is what upsets them, and that is the root of the problem.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, we were just in London and saw a production that’s based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, but it’s The People Speak. It’ll air on History Channel UK on October 31st, a remarkable production of British people’s history. And one of the people who is portrayed there was you, talking about "Blair-faced liars." But you have a long history of decades of organizing around global politics in Britain. What about solutions right now? I mean, you have this One World March that’s going to be taking place on October 2nd in Washington, DC, based on jobs, justice and education. What about the kind of organizing that you feel is the most effective? People say, well, what should Obama do? What should Obama do? He is one person, albeit occupies the most powerful position on earth. But isn’t it really about movements, pressuring these individuals? That’s what makes history.

TARIQ ALI: I agree with you entirely. And I remember saying to lots of activists in the United States during the Obama election campaign—you know, people mobilized by MoveOn.org, etc.—and I would say to them, "Fine. You’re campaigning for Obama. You want him elected. OK, good. Let’s hope he delivers what you hope he’s going to deliver. But he’s not going to deliver even that if you just elect him and go back home." And I remember arguing for a massive antiwar gathering for the inauguration, which would pressure right from day one on the new administration, saying, "Congrats, Barack. Now out of Baghdad and Iraq. Out of Kabul and Afghanistan," from the word go. Without that, politicians don’t do anything. We wouldn’t have won any democratic rights, unless people had fought for them. The right of women to vote would never have been got, unless there’d been suffragettes fighting for it. So, that is the lesson, I’m afraid. And, you know, when people tell me in this country, "Oh, but there’s pressure from these kooks on the right, the tea party and this and that," I said, "Obama boasts, and his office boasts, that they have 13 million supporters online. Well, what the hell are they doing with them? I mean, why couldn’t they mobilize even a tiny proportion of these to come out and give them support?" They don’t do that. So, someone has to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Or they’re there and the media doesn’t cover them. When you had one of the tea party rallies in Washington—I believe it was right on the anniversary of the war—there were about 500 members of the tea party there. There were thousands of people protesting the war. It got almost no coverage, certainly not equal to what happened with the tea party.

TARIQ ALI: Exactly. So the exaggerated threat of the tea party is played up by the right-wing media, Fox and many others, because they see it as a useful way to hammer the administration. But the administration’s inability to take them on in terms of arguments, that is what’s worrying, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Tariq Ali, I want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to talk about the tea party with Glenn Greenwald. Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad is the name of his new book.

Source : http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/21/tariq_ali_on_the_obama_syndrome

WESTERN SOCIETY

The Collapse of Western Morality

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 23, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse. 

In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.

I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.

And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls. 

This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people. 

US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime. 

In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”

US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning. 

If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need. 

The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq. 

When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon Brown.

The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.

As the Israeli official said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the American Indians.

The Israeli army uses female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500 meters of the enclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children and old people who come to tend to their fields.

If the crimes were limited to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in effect.

Alas, the collapse of morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing where 200 mph speeds are routine. 

Prior to 1988, 22 years ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss called “dirty driving” became the norm.

Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.” Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.” Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could win.

When asked about the ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed certain tactics were unacceptable.” 

In today’s Western moral climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds. 

Confronted with his attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One. Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”

Neither does the US government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the EU. 

The deformation of the police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in “law and order,” still think are “on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic extremists.” 

The police have been off the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of children (see, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AaSLERx0VM ).

Anyone who googles videos of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples, and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of videos. 

In one of the most recent of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night time
towing of his car. The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.

Americans will be the first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of the Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.” The Americans call themselves “the indispensable people.”

Source : http://www.todaysalternativenews.com/index.php?event=link,150&values[0]=&values[1]=9177

The ISI and Terrorism: Behind the Accusations

Authors : Jayshree Bajoria, Staff Writer

Updated: July 26, 2010

1. Introduction
2. Supporting Terrorism?
3. Control over the ISI
4. Resistance in FATA
5. Mixed Record on Counterterrorism
6. The Taliban as a Strategic Asset
7. Allegations of Terrorist Attacks

Introduction

Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has long faced accusations of meddling in the affairs of its neighbors. A range of officials inside and outside Pakistan have stepped up suggestions of links between the ISI and terrorist groups in recent years. In autumn 2006, a leaked report by a British Defense Ministry think tank charged, "Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism-whether in London on 7/7 [the July 2005 attacks on London's transit system], or in Afghanistan, or Iraq." In June 2008, Afghan officials accused Pakistan's intelligence service of plotting a failed assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai; shortly thereafter, they implied the ISI's involvement in a July 2008 attack on the Indian embassy. Indian officials also blamed the ISI for the bombing of the Indian embassy. Pakistani officials have denied such a connection.

Numerous U.S. officials have also accused the ISI of supporting terrorist groups, even as the Pakistani government seeks increased aid from Washington with assurances of fighting militants. In a May 2009 interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "to a certain extent, they play both sides." Gates and others suggest the ISI maintains links with groups like the Afghan Taliban as a "strategic hedge" to help Islamabad gain influence in Kabul once U.S. troops exit the region. These allegations surfaced yet again in July 2010 when WikiLeaks.org made public (NYT) a trove of U.S. intelligence records on the war in Afghanistan. The documents described ISI's links to militant groups fighting U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan's government has repeatedly denied allegations of supporting terrorism, citing as evidence its cooperation in the U.S.-led battle against extremists in which it has taken significant losses both politically and on the battlefield.

Supporting Terrorism?

"The ISI probably would not define what they've done in the past as 'terrorism,'" says William Milam, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Nevertheless, experts say the ISI has supported a number of militant groups in the disputed Kashmir region between Pakistan and India, some of which are on the U.S. State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. While Pakistan has a formidable military presence near the Indian border, some experts believe the relationship between the military and some Kashmiri groups has greatly changed with the rise of militancy within Pakistan. Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within, says the ISI "has certainly lost control" of Kashmiri militant groups. According to Nawaz, some of the groups trained by the ISI to fuel insurgency in Kashmir have been implicated in bombings and attacks within Pakistan, therefore making them army targets.

On Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan, the ISI supported the Talibanup to September 11, 2001, though Pakistani officials deny any current support for the group. [Pakistan's government was also one of three countries, along with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, that recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan]. The ISI's first major involvement in Afghanistan came after the Soviet invasion in 1979, when it partnered with the CIA to provide weapons, money, intelligence, and training to the mujahadeen fighting the Red Army. At the time, some voices within the United States questioned the degree to which Pakistani intelligence favored extremist and anti-American fighters. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the ISI continued its involvement in Afghanistan, first supporting resistance fighters opposed to Moscow's puppet government, and later the Taliban.

Pakistan stands accused of allowing that support to continue. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly said Pakistan trains militants and sends them across the border. In May 2006, the British chief of staff for southern Afghanistan told theGuardian, "The thinking piece of the Taliban is out of Quetta in Pakistan. It's the major headquarters." Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2006, then President Pervez Musharraf responded to such accusations, saying, "It is the most ridiculous thought that the Taliban headquarters can be in Quetta." Nevertheless, experts generally suspect Pakistan still provides some support to the Taliban, though probably not to the extent it did in the past. "If they're giving them support, it's access back and forth [to Afghanistan] and the ability to find safe haven," says Kathy Gannon who covered the region for decades for the Associated Press. Gannon adds that the Afghan Taliban need Pakistan even less as a safe haven now "because they have gained control of more territory inside Afghanistan."

Many in the Pakistani government, including slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, have called the intelligence agency "a state within a state," working beyond the government's control and pursuing its own foreign policy. But Nawaz says the intelligence agency does not function independently. "It aligns itself to the power center," and does what the government or the army asks it to do, says Nawaz.

Control over the ISI

Constitutionally, the agency is accountable to the prime minister, says Hassan Abbas, research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. But most officers in the ISI are from the army, so that is where their loyalties and interests lie, he says. Experts say until the end of 2007, as army chief and president, Musharraf exercised firm control over the intelligence agency. But experts say it is not clear how much control Pakistan's civilian government--led by Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari--has over the agency. In July 2008, the Pakistani government announced the ISI will be brought under the control of the interior ministry, but revoked its decision (BBC) within hours. Bruce Riedel, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution, says the civilian leadership has "virtually no control" (PDF) over the army and the ISI.

In September 2008, army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani replaced the ISI chief picked by former President Musharraf with Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Some experts say the move signals that Kiyani is consolidating his control over the intelligence agency by appointing his man at the top. In November 2008, the government disbanded ISI's political wing, which politicians say was responsible for interfering in domestic politics. Some experts saw it as a move by the army, which faced much criticism when Musharraf was at the helm, to distance itself from politics.

"I do not accept the thesis that the ISI is a rogue organization," Milam says. "It's a disciplined army unit that does what it's told, though it may push the envelope sometimes." With a reported staff of ten thousand, ISI is hardly monolithic: "Like in any secret service, there are rogue elements," says Frederic Grare, a South Asia expert and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He points out that many of the ISI's agents have ethnic and cultural ties to Afghan insurgents, and naturally sympathize with them. Marvin G. Weinbaum, an expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Middle East Institute, says Pakistan has sent "retired" ISI agents on missions the government could not officially endorse.

Resistance in FATA

Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border have emerged as safe havens for terrorists. Experts say because of their links to the Taliban and other militant groups, the ISI has some influence in the region. But with the mushrooming of armed groups in the tribal agencies, it is hard to say which ones the agency controls. Also, there appears to be divisions within the ISI. While some within the intelligence agency continue to sympathize with the militant groups, Harvard's Abbas says others realize they cannot follow a policy contradictory to that of the army, which is directly involved in counterterrorism operations in the area.

Pasha, former head of military operations in charge of offensives against militants in the tribal areas, was appointed as the ISI chief in September 2008 amid growing U.S. and international pressure on Pakistan to combat terrorism. It was not immediately clear whether his appointment would lead to policy changes in the spy agency.

Mixed Record on Counterterrorism

Pakistan has arrested scores of al-Qaeda affiliates, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The ISI and the Pakistani military have worked effectively with the United States to pursue the remnants of al-Qaeda. Following 9/11, Pakistan also stationed eighty thousand troops in the troubled province of Waziristan near the Afghan border. Hundreds of Pakistani soldiers died there in resulting clashes with militants, which, as Musharraf told a CFR meeting in September 2006, "broke the al-Qaeda network's back in Pakistan."

But Musharraf did crack down on terrorist groups selectively, as this Backgrounderpoints out. Weinbaum in 2006 said the Pakistani military has largely ignored Taliban fighters on its soil. "There are extremist groups that are beyond the pale with which the ISI has no influence at all," he says. "Those are the ones they go after." In 2008, Ashley J. Tellis, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote (PDF) in The Washington Quarterly that Musharraf tightened pressure on groups whose objectives were out of sync with the military's perception of Pakistan's national interest.

The Taliban as a Strategic Asset

Pakistan does not enjoy good relations with the current leadership of Afghanistan, partly because of rhetorical clashes with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and partly because Karzai has forged strong ties with India. But there have been increased efforts by the United States to close this gap. The Obama administration's regional strategy unveiled in March 2009 focused on creating new diplomatic mechanisms;  a trilateral summit of the leaders of the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan has been one such step toward helping reduce the level of distrust that runs among all three countries. But lingering suspicions about ISI's support for the Taliban continue to pose problems. In an October 2006 interview, Musharraf said some retired ISI operatives could be abetting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, but he denied any active links. Zardari too, denies any ISI links with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  In a May 2009 interview with CNN, he remarked all intelligence agencies have their sources in militant organizations but that does not translate to support. "Does that mean CIA has direct links with al-Qaeda? No, they have their sources. We have our sources. Everybody has sources."

Some experts say Pakistan wants to see a stable, friendlier government emerge in Afghanistan. Though the insurgency certainly doesn't serve this goal, increased Taliban influence, especially in the government, might. Supporting the Taliban also allows Pakistan to hedge its bets should the NATO coalition pull out of Afghanistan. In a February 2008 interview with CFR.org, Tellis said the Pakistani intelligence services continue to support the Taliban because they see the Taliban leadership "as a strategic asset," a reliable back-up force in case things go sour in Afghanistan.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis. According to Weinbaum, Pakistan has two policies. One is an official policy of promoting stability in Afghanistan; the other is an unofficial policy of supporting jihadis in order to appease political forces within Pakistan. "The second [policy] undermines the first one," he says. Nawaz says there is ambivalence within the army regarding support for the Taliban. "They'd rather not deal with the Afghan Taliban as an adversary," he says.

Allegations of Terrorist Attacks

Indian officials implicated the ISI for the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed nearly two hundred people. India's foreign ministry said the ISI had links (Reuters) to the planners of the attacks, the banned militant groupLashkar-e-Taiba, which New Delhi blames for the assault. Islamabad denies allegations of any official involvement, but acknowledged in February 2009 that the attack was launched and partly planned (AP) from Pakistan. The Pakistani government has also detained several Islamist leaders, some of them named by India as planners of the Mumbai assault. Gannon says this is an unusual step by Pakistan which never got enough credit in India because the country was in the middle of a national election. "I don't see any evidence" to believe that the ISI was behind the Mumbai attack, she says. However, she doubts the agency has severed all its ties with groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba which it supported to fight in Indian-administered Kashmir. Indian officials also claim to have evidence that the ISI planned the July 2006 bombing of the Mumbai commuter trains, but these charges seem unlikely to some observers of the long, difficult India-Pakistan relationship. The two nations have a history of finger-pointing, and while some of the allegations hold water, there is a tendency to exaggerate.

Following the release of the British report regarding its July 7, 2005 bombings of London's mass transit system--which London insists is not a statement of policy--Weinbaum said it makes "too broad a statement." Though Pakistan does offer safe haven to Kashmiri groups, and perhaps some Taliban fighters, the suggestion that the ISI is responsible for the 7/7 bombings is "a real stretch," Gannon says.

Source : http://www.cfr.org/publication/11644/isi_and_terrorism.html

BRITISH MUSLIMS - Racial Profiling

Fears of racial profiling after rise in number of British Muslims held by border officials

'They asked me where Bin Laden was, then they took my DNA'

By Robert Verkaik, Home Affairs Editor
Tuesday, 21 September 2010

Hundreds of British Muslims leaving and returning from holidays abroad face harassment and intimidation by security forces when they pass through UK airports and seaports, an investigation by The Independent has found.

One man interrogated by police over his British credentials was asked whether he watched Dad's Army, while another was questioned over the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

New figures seen by this newspaper show that the number of innocent people stopped and questioned at airports and other points of entry to the UK has doubled in the last four years, raising serious concerns about racial profiling. Many British Muslims have cancelled future vacations rather than risk being questioned and held for up to nine hours by anti-terrorist officers. 

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Senior Muslim police officers are also understood to be concerned about the overuse of the special powers granted under the Terrorism Act 2000. The frequent searches at ports and borders have been criticised by Lord Carlile QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who argues that the number of cases can be "reduced in number without risk to national security".

Earlier this year the Home Secretary, Theresa May, scaled back section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which gives police officers the power to stop and search members of the public without any reasonable suspicion. But under Schedule 7 of the same legislation, police officers have greater powers to stop and detain travellers leaving and entering Britain, including taking samples of their DNA.

Figures obtained by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) under the Freedom of Information Act show that the number of people stopped and questioned has risen from 1,190 in 2004 to 2,473 in 2008. The most recent numbers of Schedule 7 cases of stopping, questioning and searching last year show that, between January and September, police and Special Branch officers carried out 1,773 operations. 

In the last five years 1,110 people were held and questioned by the police for up to nine hours. And despite a total of 10,400 "stops" carried out over the same period, only 99 people have been arrested. Of these, 48 were charged with terrorist or terrorist-related offences.

Mohamed Nur, 26, was stopped at Heathrow airport in June after returning from a holiday in Dubai. He was held for nine hours and forced to give DNA samples and fingerprints. During the questioning, one of the police officers asked about his British credentials. "He asked me 'Do you consider yourself to be English?' I said I consider myself to be British, rather than just English," Mr Nur said.

"He said 'How do you consider yourself to be British when you have no historical links with Britain? It's like me going to Somalia and living there and people still not considering me to be Somali because of the way I look.' 

"I said 'I've lived most of my life in Britain so that's why I'm British'. Then he asked me about Dad's Army, and whether I watched it or not. I said 'Yes'. He said 'Do you find it funny?' and I said 'Yes'. Then he said 'I consider you British'."

Mr Nur's complaint is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police. 

Asif Ahmed, 28, a property developer from Renfrew in Scotland, was stopped at Edinburgh airport as he returned from Stansted airport with his wife. The couple were collecting their bags when two plain-clothed officers approached them. They were taken to an interrogation room, separated and questioned for more than an hour. During the questioning Mr Ahmed claimed: "I was asked if I knew where [Osama] bin Laden was."

Zin Derfoufi, civil liberties officer for FOSIS, told The Independent: "Schedule 7 is the most wide ranging 'stop' power in the UK but it is also the least transparent. This new information will not only assist the public's understanding of how this power is being used but, significantly, 10 years after it was first introduced, it is also the very first step in empowering us all to be able to monitor its use and to hold the police to account."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "Stopping people at airports is, on occasion, a necessary activity to protect public safety. These figures cover from 2004 to 2009. No figures are kept on ethnicity of individuals who are stopped and it is therefore not possible to conclude if any particular group is targeted unfairly."

Adil Hussain, 26: Detained and quizzed on beliefs for six hours

The PhD computer student at Imperial College London was stopped by police at Dover in April this year at the start of his walking holiday in the Alps.

Although Mr Hussain and his companions protested that they were simply spending the weekend on a short break, anti-terrorist officers told them that some of the terrorists who attacked Britain were also well educated and enjoyed hill walking.

They were held for six hours, during which time they were searched and had their phones confiscated. At first the group believed their detention would last no longer than a few minutes.

Mr Hussain said: "Half an hour or so passes and one of the officers comes by for me to sign a paper outlining my rights and declaring that I have been held under the Anti-Terrorism Act. I am asked whether I would like anything to drink or eat – they have halal food. It turns out to be lamb curry and I think they must have a lot of Muslim visitors. They even have a prayer mat. I am reminded that I do not have the right to remain silent – if I refuse to answer any questions I could be arrested. "

For the next six hours the men were separately interrogated about their interest in Islam, their friends in the UK and their views on British and American troops in Afghanistan. Finally they were released, but all their electronic equipment was confiscated.

Mr Hussain added: "My being singled out randomly for a 'pat down' and for my car to be inspected for dangerous materials is understandable – all of this delaying me an hour or so. 

"However, I find it wholly unacceptable to be held a further five hours late into the night simply for the officers to profile me, questioning my religious and political views and threatening to charge me for refusing to answer any questions. I find this outrageous and do not see why I have to be subjected to such treatment merely on account of my ethnicity and religion."


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