Foreign Policy In Focus

Not everyone found the reporting of the late Pakistani investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad one hundred percent credible. But that may have just been a function of how incredulous they were at the extent to which he was able to insinuate himself with al Qaeda and the Taliban.

One of his most impressive contacts was long-time militant Ilyas Kashmiri, who fought in the Kashmir until President Musharraf wound down fighting there. Kashmiri then moved to Pakistan's tribal areas and turned on the state, once trying to assassinate Musharraf and later named as a mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

In a thought-provoking -- to put it mildly -- article on Shahzad's murder for the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins writes: "Muhammad Faizan, Shahzad's colleague, said, 'The militants used to call him, not the other way around."

Some background by Filkins:

Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said, "After the Abbottabad raid, the Pakistanis were under enormous pressure to show that they were serious about Al Qaeda. 

Four days after Shahzad's body was found,

… a C.I.A. officer, operating a pilotless drone, fired a missile at a group of men who had gathered in an orchard … in South Waziristan. … Among the dead was Ilyas Kashmiri. Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad's death and Kashmiri's, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad?

… If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. … The evidence is fragmentary, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Pakistani intelligence agents gave the C.I.A. at least some of the information that pinpointed Kashmiri. Likewise, it seems possible that at least some of that information may have come from Shahzad, either during his lethal interrogation or from data taken from his cell phone.

If the I.S.I. supplied the C.I.A. with the whereabouts of Kashmiri, it probably didn't reveal to the C.I.A. where it obtained that information. Nevertheless, the C.I.A. should have been aware, as the I.S.I. was, that Shahzad was the go-to guy on Kashmiri. After all, as Filkins also reports, British intelligence officers asked Shahzad to help them contact Taliban leaders (he declined).

If this scenario is true, writes Filkins

… Shahzad's death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America's war on terror. 

Shahzad's reporting was one of the best and most dependable conduits to al Qaeda and the Taliban available to the United States. If the C.I.A. accepted the fruits of their interrogation of Shahzad from the I.S.I. for the sake of killing just one terrorist leader, thus did it signal that it condoned the I.S.I. shutting down the Shahzad pipeline for good. Worse, the C.I.A. is encouraging the I.S.I.'s use of Pakistani journalists as disposable human GPS units.

In the commentary on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the news and infotainment media have predictably framed the discussion by the question of how successful the CIA and the military have been in destroying al Qaeda. Absent from the torrent of opinion and analysis was any mention of how the U.S. military occupation of Muslim lands and wars that continue to kill Muslim civilians fuel jihadist sentiment that will keep the threat of terrorism high for many years to come.

The failure to have that discussion is not an accident. In December 2007, at a conference in Washington, D.C. on al Qaeda, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin offered a laundry list of things the United States could do to reduce the threat from al Qaeda. But he said nothing about the most important thing to be done: pledging to the Islamic world that the United States would pull its military forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and end its warfare against those in Islamic countries resisting U.S. military presence. 

During the coffee break, I asked him whether that item shouldn’t have been on his list.  “You’re right,” he answered.  And then he added, “But we can’t do that.”

“Why not,” I asked. 

“Because,” he said, “we would have to tell the families of the soldiers who have died in those wars that their loved ones died in vain.”

His explanation was obviously bogus. But in agreeing that America’s continuing wars actually increase the risk of terrorism against the United States, Benjamin was merely reflecting the conclusions that the intelligence and counter-terrorism communities had already reached.  

The National Intelligence Estimate on “Trends in Global Terrorism” issued in April 2006 concluded that the war in Iraq was “breeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim World and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” It found that “activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.” And in a prophetic warning, it said “the operational threat from self-radicalized cells will grow in importance…particularly abroad but also at home.” 

Given the way intelligence assessments get watered down as they ascend the hierarchy of officials, these were remarkably alarming conclusions about the peril that U.S. occupation of Iraq posed to the United States. And that alarm was shared by at least some counter-terrorism officials as well. Robert Grenier, who had been head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center in 2005-06, was quoted in the July 25, 2007 Los Angeles Times as saying the war “has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq.”

As the war in Iraq wound down, the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- especially the war being waged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) -- was generating more hatred for the United States. As JSOC scaled up its “night raids” in Afghanistan, it never got the right person in more than 50 percent of the raids, as even senior commanders in JSOC recently admitted to the Washington Post. That indicated that a very large proportion of those killed and detained were innocent civilians. Not surprisingly, the populations of entire districts and provinces were enraged by those raids.  

If there is one place on earth where it is obviously irrational to antagonize the male population on a long-term basis, it is the Pashtun region that straddles Afghanistan and Pakistan, with its tribal culture of honor and revenge for the killing of family and friends.   

Meanwhile, after fleeing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2001, al Qaeda had rebuilt a large network of Pashtun militants in the Pashtun northwest. As the murdered Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad recounted in Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, President Pervez Musharraf, under pressure from Washington, began in 2003 to use the Pakistani army to try to destroy the remnants of al Qaeda by force with helicopter strikes and ground forces. But instead of crushing al Qaeda, those operations further radicalized the population of those al Qaeda base areas, by convincing them that the Pakistani government and army was merely a tool of U.S. control. 

Frustrated by the failure of Musharraf to finish off al Qaeda and by the swift rise of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration launched a drone war that killed large numbers of civilians in northwest Pakistan. An opinion survey by New American Foundation in the region last year found that 77 percent believed the real purpose of the U.S. “war on terror” is to “weaken and divide the Muslim world” and to “ensure American domination.” And more than two-thirds of the entire population of Pakistan view the United States as the enemy, not as a friend, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The CIA and the Bush and Obama administrations understood that drone strikes could never end the threat of terrorist plots in Pakistan, as outgoing CIA Director Michael Hayden had told the incoming President, according to Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. And if the Obama administration didn’t understand then that the drone war was stoking popular anger at the government and the United States, it certainly does now. Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has pointed out that “hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan” because of the drone strikes.

Yet the night raids and the drone strikes continue, as though the risk of widespread and intense anger toward the United States in those countries doesn’t make any difference to the policymakers. 

There is only one way to understand this conundrum: there are winners and losers in the “war on terrorism.” Ordinary Americans are clearly the losers, and the institutions and leaders of the military, the Pentagon and the CIA and their political and corporate allies are the winners. They have accumulated enormous resources and power in a collapsing economy and society.  

They are not going to do anything about the increased risk to Americans from the hatred their wars have provoked  until they are forced to do so by a combination of resistance from people within those countries and an unprecedented rebellion by millions of Americans. It’s long past time to start organizing that rebellion.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam," was published in 2006. 

By now you've probably heard of reports that the al Qaeda franchise based in Yemen is entertaining the idea of implanting explosive devices and/or materials inside the bodies of suicide bombers. At the Financial Times, Daniel Dombey (registration required) reports:

Washington has warned that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may plan to surgically implant explosive devices in suicide bombers in order to blow up US-bound flights and that air passengers face more security measures as a result.

At Slate, William Saletan explains that jihadists have been caught thinking aloud online about potential procedures.

Seal a plastic explosive such as PETN in a packet, cut open your volunteer, insert the packet, stitch up the incision, and let it heal. In a man, the packet could go into the buttocks or abdomen. In a woman, it could be a breast implant. [Never mind if it sounds like a Lady Gaga outfit. – RW] Give the bomber a syringe to inject TATP, which will detonate the bomb.

Said syringe might be allowed past the TSA check via a doctor's note explaining that the passenger is a diabetic. Meanwhile, detecting what's beneath the skin is beyond the capabilities of airport scanning equipment. That kind of technology – X-ray, MRI, CT scans -- is usually confined to medical facilities. But it may soon be coming to an airport near you. Saletan again.

Morpho, a global security firm, is working on a radio-wave device to detect what it calls "bombs in bodies." Nesch, an imaging company, advertises low-dose X-ray technology that can detect explosives "hidden both inside & outside of the human body." Valley Forge Composite Technologies, which makes screening devices for bombs and weapons, is marketing a radiographic imaging system that can "see through individuals"…

Spending exorbitant amounts of money and taking invasiveness of physical privacy about as far as it can go is one way of handling it. Then, of course, the United States could intensify international and domestic surveillance – of necessity, focusing on health professionals – not to mention drone strikes.

It can't be denied that these approaches smack of panic. But, it's unrealistic for progressives to expect the public to live with, however slight, a threat this nightmarish. Who isn't freaked out by the prospect of his or her flight blown up mid-air and the passengers cast out into the sky, spending their last minutes watching the earth rush up at them? (Personally, when flying after 9/11, I needed to play this scenario out in my mind while waiting for take-off. Staring it down seemed to help. I mean, there are worse ways to die. Oh, right, there aren't.)

Along with resisting yet more civil liberties restrictions, as progressives, we seek, of course, to lighten or erase entirely U.S. footprints in the Middle East, perhaps the only sure way to cool jihadists' fevered imaginations. Since that's not happening anytime soon, a word to the wise in the interim: Even though jihadists lose – their lives, anyway – in suicide attacks, ultimately they win. Like bin Laden famously did, their survivors take delight in the extent to which the United States spends down its "national treasure" (as if there's anything left there) on ill-advised invasions abroad and of its own citizens' bodies in airports.

Purely as a military tactic, because those attacked are reluctant to reply in kind, suicide bombing has no answer. We in the West can console ourselves with the thought that we're supposedly too civilized to both use ourselves as weapons and target civilians. But we need to face facts and acknowledge that jihadists, and their terrorist ancestors who also employed the practice, have built a better weapon.

When not an act of desperation, as with the Japanese at the end of World War II, suicide bombing is fundamentally an act of the voiceless. Give them a voice, honor their, uh, commitment to their cause, and bring them to the table. Won't that be an incentive for more groups to use suicide bombing? In fact, if earth is crawling with that many individuals ready and willing to blow themselves up, what's called for are desperate measures – like forging foreign policies that drive fewer people to blow themselves up everywhere from their own marketplaces to our skies.

One reason for the failure of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to make as great an impact on America’s  consciousness as it deserved may have been because that was all it was called. In other words, the incident was never properly branded like -- however simply, but effectively -- 9/11 (along with the other attacks of the day). Our concerns may also have been alleviated because “mastermind" Ramzi Yousef and other conspirators were rounded up post haste as opposed to the decade it took to locate Osama bin Laden.

How quickly we forgot that the 1,336-lb. fertilizer-based bomb -- supercharged with hydrogen cylinders -- tore a 30-yard-wide hole through four concrete sub-basements, killed seven, and injured thousands injured. From one perspective, along with swift apprehension of the suspects, the incident was viewed as a success because the buildinsg survived the bombing. (How did they survive that attack and not planes crashing into them? Oh, sorry. Down, you bad Truther.)

Since the structural damage to the building wasn’t significant, it couldn’t be demolished and insurance money collected. Lessors just had to soldier on. In the years between 1993 and 9/11, one couldn’t help wondering how distracting the threat of another attack must have been to employees of companies that leased space in those buildings.

But even 9/11 failed to prevent plans for the 1,776-foot-tall replacement for the Twin Towers, the Freedom Tower, the name of which was soon changed to One World Trade Center. As Ron Rosenbaum at Slate writes, “The new thinking, I guess: no use in unduly provoking al-Qaida—after all, they hate our freedoms!” But, he calls it a “never-ending security nightmare.”

Because the security concerns that were there from the beginning have not gone away, and the fixes for the flaws in the security have not been proven, and the site planners have been shown over and over again to be shockingly, scandalously inept.

Among the flaws:

One of the things the NYPD counterterrorism squad insisted on was that the base of the tower be moved further back from . . . heavy truck traffic. (Can you say "truck bomb"?) Of course, I may have missed it, but what's the plan to prevent an explosion originating on one of the hundreds of trains that will be passing below the base of the tower?

As for ineptitude, Rosenbaum reminds us of

. . . the "confidential" floor plan leak last month. . . . Documents marked "confidential" and containing floor plans for One World Trade Center were posted and made available to terrorists on New York City's website by mistake in May. . . . There are 17 documents stamped confidential showing every nook and cranny—including load-bearing walls, mechanical rooms, and ground floor entrances—of the still under construction tower.

What’s the big deal? After all, writes Rosenbaum, “al-Qaida has no reason lately for renewed interest in the World Trade Center anyway. That's so 2001. Oh, right.”

In case you didn’t catch his meaning, that last comment is presumably an allusion to the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Perhaps most frightening of all (emphasis added):

Here's what usually savvy NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly (probably under pressure from real estate types) had to say about it last December. See if you find it reassuring (emphasis added):

Landlords, managing agents and tenants will change over time, but the threat to the World Trade Center will persist. . . . the NYPD and the Port Authority are working together to make the World Trade Center the safest work environment in the world. . . . Now is the time for anyone with alternate ideas for securing the site to present them for consideration. They admit they don't know if there's a better plan than the one they're putting in place!

Sounds suspiciously like a disclaimer . After all what could Kelly do “about a Stinger missile (widely available on the black market, I'm told) from across the river?” In the end the name change from Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center (emphasis added)

. . . has not diminished the folly of the whole building-as-symbolic-gesture, nor has it eliminated the fear factor in forcing thousands of middle-class and working-class employees to serve as live bait in World Terrorist Target No. 1. . . . Would you want to go to work in place people are scheming 24/7 to destroy?

If the Twin Towers looked like bowling pins just asked to be knocked down, consider that before conspirators had to make a split; now they need hit only one pin.  

(Pictured: Syed Saleem Shahzad with Taliban fighters.)

Some initial impressions on the murder by beating -- torture -- and gunshot of Asia Times Online reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad. Something of a legend in his own time, his access to al Qaeda and Taliban was light years beyond that of any other journalist.

The central irony of his death is that he was even once detained by the Taliban for a week, but in the end it looks like it was Pakistan's largest intelligence apparatus, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Service) that did him in. Or as Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema, who, as Ron Moreau of the Daily Beast reports, was abducted last September and beaten by individuals he believe were the ISI, said:

But if it's not the ISI then they [the ISI] need to locate the people who did this, because they certainly can.

Moreau adds: 

But the ISI has been in a defensive crouch ever since the discovery of Osama bin Laden living comfortably just down the street from the country's military academy. Pakistani journalists on Shahzad's difficult and dangerous beat fear that the ISI may have made an example of him in order to scare them off of criticizing the directorate. 

I'm sure I speak for many who follow events in Pakistan and Afghanistan when I say this one hurts, as if he were a member of our family. At Pakistan's Dawn, Adnan Rehmat writes:

From the tribal areas in the mountainous northwest to the coastal areas in the sandy southeast, Pakistani journalists have been hounded and killed for reporting the brutalities of a war that has claimed the lives of over 30,000 in Pakistan over the last 10 years. While over 70 have been killed, a staggering 2,000-plus have been injured, arrested or kidnapped. . . . The fact that the killers of not even one Pakistani journalist killed has been found, prosecuted and punished has meant the media has been an easy target.

But . . .

Saleem's death is not ordinary even among the long list of journalists killed in Pakistan in recent years. 

In fact, writes Abbas Nasir, also at Dawn

This wasn't a journalist who'd merely irritated the spooks or someone like that. This was a person who'd be seen as someone who knew too much. His investigative reports on the PNS Mehran attack are not the only example.

What follows may have been among the key words that got Shahzad killed. From one of the reports that Nasir mentions:

Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaida cell operating inside several navy bases in Karachi. "Islamic sentiments are common in the armed forces," a senior navy official told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Though I followed Shahzad at Asia Times Online, you can find his work archived on his own website (his family and friends are no doubt in such a state of shock that they have yet to update his site with news of his death). Also, Shahzad's new book Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11 was just released on May 20 by Pluto Press.

Such was his stature that his death has elicited reactions like these: Though Shahzad didn't work for Dawn, his death prompted its editor to question the wisdom of continuing to put his reporters in harm's way. Second:

Pakistani journalists have been given permission to carry weapons after the killing of [Shahzad. Interior Minister] Rehman Malik told reporters that orders had been approved to permit journalists to carry small arms with them for self-protection.

First, needless to say, Shahzad, should he have consented to carry a handgun, would have been forced to surrender it to talk to militants. Second, a handgun would have been just as much needed as defense against representatives of the ISI -- one handgun against the full force of Pakistan's intelligence apparatus? Besides, as Afzal Butt, the head of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, said in the same article, "It's the responsibility of the government to protect us. . . . We are reporters, not soldiers."

Finally, Abbas Nasir again: 

I am filled with despair, deep, helpless despair.