Pakistan - Tag Search

When the U.S. Transportation Security Administration in January instituted mandatory airport pat-downs and bag searches for citizens of 14 countries -- all but two of them in the Middle East and all but one majority Muslim -- you knew it was just a matter of time before the institutionalized racial profiling caused an outcry.

On Sunday, a group of Pakistani lawmakers who had been invited to visit the United States and meet with Obama administration bigwigs refused to go through the additional screening in Ronald Reagan National Airport on their way to a flight to New Orleans, according to the New York Times. Pakistan is on the of the 14 countries whose citizens have been selected for more scrutiny. The legislators returned to Pakistan, where they've been hailed for their actions.

There's scant information on the wires this morning, but NBC News and the AP are both reporting that a U.S. drone fired at least two missiles at a house in Miram Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan province on Monday.

The AP reported three dead and one wounded, while NBC said five were killed and four wounded in the attack. Neither outlet reported their identities, though the Washington Post said that three foreigners were among the dead.

Also in Pakistan today, a car bomb struck a police building in Lahore where security forces interrogate "high-value suspects," killing 13 people and wounding 61, including civilians. The Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility and said that the attack "was to avenge drone attacks and military operations in the tribal areas.

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

A drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan on Wednesday killed Mohammed Qari Zafar, a Taliban commander wanted for planning a 2006 bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, which left diplomat David Foy and three Pakistanis dead, according to Pakistani officials.

Zafar was the operational commander of the Fedayeen-e-Islam, "an alliance between the Pakistani Taliban, the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Jaish-e-Mohammed," according to Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal.

Wednesday's strike was the 18th of the year and the 19th since a Dec. 30 suicide bomber struck a CIA team in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven officers who were involved in planning operations against the Taliban in Pakistan's border regions. The Obama Administration is on pace for around 115 strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan this year.

Over the weekend, Pakistan's Supreme Court blocked two judicial nominees proposed by President Asif Ali Zardari after Zardari passed over the man who had been favored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. At issue in the dispute is whether the president must confer with the chief justice before making judicial nominations, an area in which there is some legal disagreement, according to the Washington Post.

And yet here's Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari, talking to the AFP (via Dawn): "If the Supreme Court goes ahead and tries to pull [Zardari] down, then perhaps the system will collapse ... and perhaps there will not be constitutional government in Pakistan."

Is it me, or does every seemingly technical bureaucratic maneuver in Pakistan now come loaded with tons of questionable baggage?

Apologies for taking a day to cover the roadside bombing of a U.S. convoy in Pakistan, but sometimes good things come to those who wait: in this case, a Jeremy Scahill article in the Nation that provides some nice context to the first-ever U.S. military deaths in the country.

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.

Pakistani tribesmen in Miranshah claimed on Wednesday to have shot down another U.S. drone, according to Press TV and other Web sites. If true, it would be the second such incident in five days: A drone crashed in the same area of North Waziristan on Sunday, and local reports said tribesmen were congratulating each other for shooting it down.

Meanwhile, there have been no reports of drone missile strikes in Afghanistan or Pakistan for a week -- a marked drop-off following an early January blitz. Between Dec. 30, when a suicide bomber struck a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan, and Jan. 19, the date of the most recent drone attack, the United States was launching drone strikes almost every other day.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

A U.S. drone aircraft fired multiple missiles into a former religious school in North Waziristan on Thursday, killing a handful of suspected Taliban militants and likely injuring Hakimullah Mehsud, the man who has led the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) for the past five months.

The attack took place near the town of Razmak in North Waziristan, a division of the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where America is now concentrating its efforts against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The strike on Mehsud was the eighth of the year in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was preceded by two on Wednesday that killed 13 people in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.

There was also a ninth strike on Friday, again in North Waziristan, killing five suspected militants, according to the AFP. At this rate, the United States is on pace to launch 195 drone strikes in 2010, a vast increase over any previous year.

Correction (1/10/09 5:54 p.m.): I originally wrote that the United States has launched three drone strikes over the weekend. In fact, there were two, making five total since Jan. 1.

Original Post: Heading into 2010, all indications pointed to an increase in the frequency of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal border regions. President Obama and his national security team seem to favor them; there were 56 percent more drone attacks in 2009 than in 2008.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that America is set to blow the 2009 number out of the water. Granted, it's still early, but with the two strikes since my last post on Jan. 6, we're now at five since the New Year, a pace that if kept would yield around 183 in the next 12 months.

Colin Cookman of the Center for American Progress pointed us via Twitter to 2010's third American drone strike in Pakistan: a two-fisted attack on a Taliban training camp in the Datta Khel region in North Waziristan, according to the Long War Journal.

Update (1/3/09 7:55 p.m.): The New York Times has rounded out the list of the 14 countries that have earned special scrutiny under the new travel rules that will be instituted at midnight tonight. All but two are in the Middle East, and all but one have a majority Muslim population.

Original post: The Obama administration is instituting new rules for the Transportation Security Administration that will require pat-downs and bag searches for every passenger flying into the United States from 14 "terrorism-prone" countries, Politico reports. The 14 countries of origin that have been singled out for extra scrutiny are: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria - the State Department's four "state sponsors of terrorism" - as well as Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria.

The man who detonated a suicide bomb in an underground gym at a U.S. Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing seven CIA agents and wounding six others, was a Pakistani informant from the Wazir tribe who had been persuaded by the Taliban to double cross his American handlers, according to ABC News.

The security director at FOB Chapman, an Afghan named Arghawan, would regularly pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing from Pakistan to Afghanistan and drive him to Chapman. Because Arghawan accompanied the informant, he was not searched when entering the base, ABC reported.

Heading into Wednesday, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari already had problems. The husband of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari took office in September 2008 and by this past August owned a disapproval rating of 42 percent. A Pew survey found that only 11 percent of the population thought he was doing a "good" job.

Zardari, known as "Mr. Ten Percent" for his crooked reputation, was imprisoned between 1994 and 2004 on various charges of corruption and murder, though he has never been convicted of any crime. When former President Pervez Musharraf issued the National Reconciliation Ordinance in 2007, barring the prosecution of public officials for crimes including corruption and murder, it paved the way both for Bhutto's return to Pakistan and, after her assassination, for Zardari's assumption of the presidency.

But on Wednesday, Pakistan's Supreme Court, led by independent-minded Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, declared the Ordinance unconstitutional, opening the door to a raft of cases against hundreds of government officials, including Zardari.

Over the past two weeks, a series of American officials have visited Pakistan to deliver a blunt message about the Taliban to that country's military and intelligence divisions: Either you help us take them down, or we'll do it ourselves.

On Monday, General David Petraeus traveled to Islamabad to meet with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of Pakistan's military, and reiterate the demand. Despite the pressure, Pakistan appears resolute in its response: No.

The New York Times adds another data point to the ongoing saga of Blackwater, reporting today that the company's private mercenaries have participated in CIA "snatch and grab" raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater expert-in-residence at the Nation, reported last month that an ongoing Blackwater operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is helping plan and possibly execute U.S. military operations against Taliban and Islamist insurgents in those two countries.

More recently, Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky has written that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was actually a CIA asset - an agent on the payrolls.

Combined, the press is starting to put together a pretty frightening story - a private branch of the military and intelligence communities, available for hire but not subject to oversight or governmental regulation. What does it mean when a country outsources its lethal force, and should I, as a U.S. citizen, be troubled that this work is being carried out in my name, though I have very little power to stop it?

Five young Americans have been arrested in eastern Pakistan, reportedly for possible links to terrorism, NBC News reports. Citing anonymous government sources and leaders of Islamic-American groups, NBC says the five men left a "farewell video" for their families in Northern Virginia featuring "scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended."

Family members took their concerns to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which got them a lawyer and notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to NBC. The men range in age from 19 to 25.

One of them, Ramy Zamzam, is a dental student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I've been told second-hand from someone in Zamzam's program that he is a "straight A student" and was likely to be class president next year. Zamzam is likable and "charismatic," according to this person, and he apparently left during his program's finals, which can't be made up.

A teenage boy blew himself up at the gates of the Pakistani Navy headquarters in Islamabad today, killing himself, a guard and wounding two others, Bloomberg reports.

The New York Times reports that the boy, somewhere between 16-18 years old, blew himself up when "naval officials" asked him to remove his coat at one of the heavily barricaded building's main gates.

There's some newsworthy stuff in the just-released Vanity Fair profile of Xe Services (né Blackwater) CEO Erik Prince, but most important for readers of the Majlis is the assertion, attributed anonymously, that CIA assassination teams aided by Prince targeted Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, among others.

The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's aborted post-9/11 plan to put together paramilitary hit squads focused on Al-Qaida leaders broke this summer. A month later, the New York Times connected Prince and Blackwater to the program.

Regarding Khan, VF writer Adam Ciralsky says:

The C.I.A. team supposedly tracked him in Dubai. In both cases, the source insists, the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger. Khan's inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged.