PESHAWAR, April 16: Authorities on Monday removed four senior officials over a jail break in the restive northwest and launched a probe into whether it had any link to multiple attacks in Afghanistan.
The provincial government said a “total failure” of intelligence was to blame for the break-out, in which dozens of inmates including Taliban militants and death row prisoners fled a prison after armed militants attacked before dawn on Sunday.
More than 150 heavily-armed militants stormed the jail outside the town of Bannu, near the lawless tribal region where Taliban and al Qaeda linked militants have carved out their stronghold.
“It was a total failure of intelligence agencies,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told a news conference.
The militants came in dozens of vehicles, continued to operate for more than two hours and went back undetected, he said.
“We have removed the deputy superintendent of Bannu Jail, the city commissioner and two other senior police officers,” he said, adding that a five-member committee had been set up to investigate the matter.
The provincial government has also taken note that the jail break in Pakistan coincided with multiple attacks by Taliban insurgents across the border in Afghanistan on Sunday.
Some 36 insurgents were killed nationwide as Afghan forces regained control of Kabul on Monday 18-hour after the Taliban assault, which left 11 members of the security forces and four civilians dead.
Hussain said “the committee will try to find out whether the jail break in Pakistan, claimed by local Taliban, had any link to coordinated attacks in Afghanistan.” Senior Bannu police official Iftikhar Khan earlier told AFP that a total of 384 inmates had escaped the jail, of whom 53 returned voluntarily while 11 others were arrested.
Most of those who escaped were militants, including 34 prisoners on death row.
Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack which he said was launched to free some of their key members.
The attack began around 1:00 am (2000 GMT Saturday) and continued for two hours, with militants in cars and pick-up trucks shooting and throwing grenades to force their way into the prison, which held 944 prisoners.
A former member of the air force sentenced to death for an attack on former president Pervez Musharraf was among the escaped militants, according to officials.
Adnan Rasheed was convicted after a bomb planted under a bridge in Rawalpindi near Islamabad in December 2003 exploded moments after Musharraf’s motorcade passed. His appeal is pending before the Supreme Court.
JALOZAI, April 8 – Banmaroo stands in the dust, tears rolling down her cheeks as she recalls how her husband was killed in Pakistan’s latest battle zone on the Afghan border. “He was just a labourer. Firing started. I don’t know who killed him, but I was handed his body in the afternoon. It was in such a rough condition, just pieces,” she said, wiping her face with her green veil.
Too frightened to cope alone and worried that her children would also become caught up in fighting between the army and local warlord Mangal Bagh, she fled. “We felt danger everywhere. If the situation becomes good and our area gets freedom, we’ll go back. We need peace,” she said.
Travelling from her home in Khyber, Banmaroo and her six children arrived at Jalozai, Pakistan’s largest refugee camp, three weeks ago. She is among more than 250,000 people, mostly women and children, Save the Children says have fled the violence since January.
Khyber lies just outside Peshawar in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt, on the Afghan border, still considered the world’s premier Al-Qaeda hub despite the killing of Osama bin Laden and the impact of US drone strikes. But the war in Bara, where Banmaroo and her children remember a once-idyllic life, is far murkier than a simple fight between the state and Islamist militants who want to impose sharia law and purge communities of infidels.
Troops have struggled since 2009 to defeat Bagh, a former bus conductor who founded Lashkar-e-Islam, a militia better known for kidnapping and extortion than religion. Now soldiers are stepping up the fight, keen to quell Bara to protect nearby Peshawar, the sprawling city where an increase in bomb and rocket attacks has been linked to the fighting in Khyber.
As a result, thousands of refugees stream into Jalozai everyday. Young men queue up to register in droves, standing or squatting under the burning sun. Security guards armed with sticks swipe queue-jumpers. “Five thousand people are expected to register today. Three days back it was 2,900,” UNHCR field officer Changaiz Mataul Hussain told AFP.
It’s a scene that Jalozai knows only too well. For 26 years, it was home to Afghans fleeing Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule. Then in 2007, six years after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban and when life in Afghanistan appeared to be improving, Pakistan closed the camp. Afghans were either voluntarily repatriated or told to find new homes.
But when the Pakistani Taliban rose up against the government in late 2007, Pakistan’s own creeping conflict forced Jalozai to re-open. With a capacity of 140,000, according to Hussain, nowhere else offered temporary shelter to so many Pakistanis displaced by conflict.
In 2008, the refugees came from the tribal district of Bajaur, then from neighbouring Mohmand and in 2009 there was a huge influx from the Swat valley, where the army managed to put down a Taliban insurgency. Today, the majority of the 109,515 in the camp are from Bara. They speak of their horror at gun battles, air strikes and mortar rounds destroying houses, but few go into details, fearful of spies.
Life in Jalozai is hard. Residents say there is no electricity, particularly galling at night. Children complain of eating rice day after day. The newest arrivals are ensconced some distance from the ordered blocks of tents protected by fences of plastic sheeting, on a stretch of desolate land where children scramble across the stone-strewn landscape.
It is only in the relative privacy of a tent that Khayalzar, a wild-haired man squatting on his haunches, is prepared to be more candid. “If you’re against Mangal Bagh, you’ll be slaughtered, so everyone is afraid. One of my neighbours was selling hashish. Mangal Bagh people threatened him many times, but he kept on doing it,” he said.
“Then one day, they came, put him inside a vehicle and drove off. On the second day, a headless body was dumped outside the village. Five or six days later, we found the head.” But it is not just the army fighting Lashkar-e-Islam. The militia is also embroiled in deadly turf wars with rivals, including the Pakistani Taliban.
Two suicide attacks outside Lashkar mosques killed 27 people last month in the Tirah valley, a hashish-growing area well outside government control, where Bagh’s turf war with the Taliban is concentrated.
“It’s very complex,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a tribal affairs expert. “There is no real goal. The main factor now is to be in control.” But the outcome of the army offensive is also unclear. It is not a sweeping operation as in Swat and despite numerous claims to have cleared other parts of the tribal belt, fighting continues and violence remains a problem.
“Mangal Bagh and the government are two faces of the same coin. We’ve suffered from both sides,” snaps Salma, sitting on the side of a dusty track, a crumpled burqa obscuring her face and body. “Mangal Bagh targets us on the ground and government jets target us from the air,” she says. “Only God can bring peace.”
Shoot on sight orders in Gilgit (Credit: nation.com.pk)
GILGIT, April 4 – The authorities issued shoot-on-sight orders to the law enforcement agencies to maintain law and order situation after 17 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in sectarian violence in Gilgit-Baltistan on Tuesday.
The attacks led to an army deployment and imposition of curfew in the city, confining the inhabitants to their homes, as the situation turned violent.
Gilgit-Baltistan map (sananews)
The ISPR in a statement said the Army has been summoned to Gilgit to control the law and order situation. The casualties occurred in two separate incidents in the northern towns of Gilgit and Chilas.
In Gilgit, gunmen opened fire during a strike called by Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) over the arrest of one of their leaders, Attaullah Saqib, for his alleged involvement in a sectarian attack in February that left 18 dead.
Gilgit Baltistan (facho01.blogspot.com)
The rioters ran amok when police refused to release Attaullah Saqib. Angry protesters opened fire and pelted the anti-riot police with stones, leaving several officers injured. Some unknown men hurled hand grenades at Ittehad Chowk that injured two policemen and a passerby. “At least seven people were killed and 50 others were wounded,” said an official.
Ahle Sunnat rally in Gilgit (brecorder.com)
Senior local police official Ali Sher told AFP the gunmen opened fire on a group of Sunnis appealing to people to close their shops in response to the strike call. It is pertinent to mention here that a complete shutterdown strike was observed against the arrest of Attaullah Saqib, who is said to be chief of Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Gilgit chapter.
A curfew was imposed in the city after the incident to bring the situation under control, the official said. Soldiers were given orders to shoot at anyone who defied the curfew order, the local media reported.
Shias protest Kohistan incident (nation.com.pk)
A total of 14 people have reportedly been arrested in the city following the clashes. In the February incident, gunmen disguised in military fatigues hauled 18 Shias off buses and shot them dead in cold blood in the northern district of Kohistan, which neighbours the Swat valley. A local intelligence official, who did not want to be identified, confirmed Tuesday’s death toll and also said a hand grenade had been used.
Noorbakshi sufi sect (siasat.pk)
“But we still don’t know who the attackers were,” he said. He added that tensions had been mounting between the Shias and Sunnis in recent weeks.
In Bonar Das area of Chilas, a Sunni-dominated town about 100 kilometres south of Gilgit, a mob blocked the main Karakoram Highway and killed ten Shias, local police official Alam Jan said.
Pakistan-Army in Gilgit (the newstribe.com)
“The mob took out ten men from buses and shot them dead,” an official said.
Hundreds of people took to the streets in Chilas protesting the killings in Gilgit, he said, adding that the rioters set four buses on fire.
A local intelligence official confirmed the death toll.
Meanwhile, a police officer and his bodyguard were also injured while driving to a bus station in the city to provide security for the passengers from Rawalpindi.
The deteriorating situation in Chilas had prompted the local authorities to impose a curfew there.
Gilgit is the capital of Gilgit-Baltistan region and is popular with mountaineers as a gateway to the Karakoram and Himalayan mountain ranges.
Around 75% of the region’s population follows some form of Shia Islam, almost an exact reversal of the norm in the rest of Pakistan. This makes the Northern Areas the only Shia majority political unit in Sunni-dominated Pakistan. There are four sects in Gilgit-Baltistan; Shia, Noorbakshi and Ismaili communities believe in the offices of Imamat, according to them, runs after the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) through Ali and his male successors. Whereas Sunnis believe in the office of the Khilafat and according to them Abu Bakr, Usman and Ali were the Caliphs after the death of Muhammad (PBUH).
OBL children on right and grandchildren on left (Credit: worldblog.msnbc.msn)
HARIPUR, Pakistan: It’s an ornate but not lavish two-story house tucked away at the end of a mud clogged street. This is where Pakistan’s intelligence agency believes Osama bin Laden lived for nearly a year until he moved into the villa in which he was eventually killed.
The residence in the frontier town of Haripur was one of five safe houses used by the slain al-Qaeda leader while on the run in Pakistan according to information revealed by his youngest wife, who has been detained.
Retired Pakistani Brig. Shaukat Qadir, who has spent the last eight months tracking bin Laden’s movements, told The Associated Press that he was taken to the Haripur house last November by intelligence agents who located it from a description they got from Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.
Al-Sada, a 30-year-old Yemeni, has been in Pakistani custody since May 2 when US Navy SEALs overran the Abbottabad compound, killing bin Laden and four other people inside. Since then, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, known as the ISI, has been trying to uncover the trail that brought him to Abbottabad villa in the summer of 2005.
The best information appears to have come from al-Sada, who was believed to be his favourite and who traveled with bin Laden since his escape from Afghanistan’s eastern Tora Bora mountain range in 2001.
Qadir, a 35-year army veteran who is now a security consultant, was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence’s interrogation of al-Sada and access to other documents on bin-Laden’s movements. He provided the AP with details in a recent interview.
The details of bin Laden’s life as a fugitive – which were first published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn – raise fresh questions over how bin Laden was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.
Yet a senior US official, who is familiar with the contents recovered in bin Laden’s Abbottabad house, said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials were aware of bin Laden’s presence.
“There was no smoking gun. We didn’t find anything,” he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the contents of the Abbottabad house.
According to the interrogation report, bin Laden lived in five safe houses and fathered four children – the two youngest born in a public hospital in Abbotabad. But investigators have only located the houses in Abbottabad and Haripur.
Al-Sada’s descriptions of the homes have been vague and the Haripur house was found only after a series of hits and misses.
She knew only that it was located on the edge of Haripur, it was two stories and it had a basement. It apparently was used by bin Laden while he waited for construction crews to finish his new home Abbottabad, a garrison town just 30 kilometers away.
Investigators scoured the area looking for properties until they found the Haripur house in Naseem Town, a chaotic suburb where relatively affluent houses bump up against sun-baked mud huts that belong to nomadic Afghans.
Like the CIA, the Pakistani agency also tracked the movements of bin Laden’s Pakistani courier who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and his brother. The two were ethnic Pashtuns from Pakistan’s Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province on the border with Afghanistan. They were bin Laden’s front men.
The ISI discovered that the Haripur house, like the land on which bin Laden’s Abbottabad villa was built, was rented by two Pashtun brothers claiming to be from Charsadda, a Pashtun dominated town about 110 kilometers away.
The AP located the Haripur house that Qadir said ISI agents had taken him to last November and found the real estate broker, Pir Mohammed, who rented the four-bedroom house to the two brothers, Salim and Javed Khan from Charsadda, for $150 a month.
At the time Pir Mohammed ran a small real estate firm called Mashallah. He said his meeting with the brothers was random.
“They must have seen my sign and come in,” Mohammed said, adding that he had met the brothers only three times – when they signed the contract, when they moved into the house and when they moved out 11 months later.
Two months ago several ISI agents took all the records of the house and its tenants since its construction in 2000, said Qasi Anis Rahman, the brother of the widow who owns the house.
“All they said was that it was for ‘security purposes,’” said Rahman.
Al-Sada is currently in Pakistani custody, along with bin Laden’s two other wives and several children. They were arrested after the raid. The US Navy SEALs shot al-Sada in the leg during the operation.
Mohammed Amir Khalil, a lawyer for the three widows, said the women would be formally charged for illegally staying in Pakistan on April 2. That charge carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.
Afghan Grief after Massacre by US Soldier - (Credit: pressirtv)KABUL, Afghanistan, March 15 — Prospects for an orderly withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan suffered two blows on Thursday as President Hamid Karzai demanded that the United States confine troops to major bases by next year, and the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans.
Getting talks started with the Taliban has been a major goal of the United States and its NATO allies for the past two years, and only in recent months was there concrete evidence of progress.
And the declaration by President Karzai, if carried out, would greatly accelerate the pace of transition from NATO to Afghan control, which previously was envisioned to be complete by 2014. Defense officials admitted there was a major divide between Mr. Karzai’s declaration and the American goals of training the Afghan security forces and conducting counterinsurgency operations. Successful counterinsurgency requires close working relationships with rural Afghans to help build schools, roads and bring about other improvements.
Asked if it was possible to take all American forces out of villages by 2013 and still train Afghan security forces and conduct counterinsurgency operations, a senior American defense official replied, “It’s not clear that we would be able to.”
Mr. Karzai declaration came in reaction to widespread Afghan anger over the massacre by an American soldier of 16 civilians in Kandahar on Sunday, and the decision of the military authorities to remove the soldier from Afghanistan, which was reported on Wednesday.
The Taliban statement, issued in English and Pashto on an insurgent Web site, said talks with an American representative had commenced over the release of some Taliban members from the Guantánamo Bay prison, but accused the American representative of changing the preconditions for the talks.
The statement did not make clear what preconditions were objectionable, but the statement emphasized that the Taliban were only interested in talking with the Americans, and criticized “propaganda” about the talks that American officials had issued. Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban reached by cellphone at an undisclosed location, said the statement suspending the talks was genuine but declined to discuss it further.
It was unclear if the two developments might have been related. But both came to light just as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta had left Afghanistan after a tense two-day visit that included talks with Mr. Karzai, and the Afghanistan president’s announcement in particular appeared to be a surprise. On Wednesday, President Obama said in Washington that the timetable for an Afghanistan withdrawal would not change.
Defense officials traveling with Mr. Panetta in Abu Dhabi said that the tone of the meeting between Mr. Karzai and Mr. Panetta was more positive than Mr. Karzai’s statement would indicate, and that he made no demands of the defense secretary — suggesting that the statement was in part aimed at a domestic audience enraged not only by the massacre but also by recent Koran burnings.
The officials acknowledged that Mr. Karzai told Mr. Panetta during their meeting that American troops should be confined to major bases by next year, but the officials sought to publicly tamp down the differences and portray the two countries as working together. “Secretary Panetta said, ‘We’re on the same page here,’ ” the Pentagon press secretary, George Little, quoted Mr. Panetta as telling Mr. Karzai.
Mr. Panetta, speaking to reporters after the meeting, said he had told Mr. Karzai that the military pledged a full investigation of the massacre and would bring the gunman to justice. He said that Mr. Karzai had not brought up the transfer of the suspect, an Army staff sergeant, to Kuwait.
Although the move was likely to further anger Afghans, who had called for him to be tried in their country, Lieutenant Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the No. 2 American commander in Afghanistan, told reporters that the Afghans had been informed of the move ahead of time, and he said that “their response is that they understood.”
General Scaparrotti said that the American military would likely not make the suspect’s name public until and if he was formally charged. He did not say when that might happen. “We are conscious of due process,” he said.
American officials said in recent weeks that there had been no talks of any substance since January, when Ambassador Marc Grossman, the United States special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his team last visited the region. Even the meetings held then did little to move the process beyond the “talks about talks” stage, and the Afghan government had not yet begun to play any significant role in the effort, despite statements from Mr. Karzai to the contrary, the officials said.
The main obstacle appeared to be executing the first set of confidence-building measures: A prisoner swap that would transfer five senior Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo to house arrest in Qatar in exchange for a Westerner being held by the insurgents.
The plan faced a series of difficulties, notably uncertainty about what conditions the five Taliban would be living under in Qatar, and American lawmakers on both sides of the political divide expressed deep skepticism about the release of the insurgents.
Faced with substantial political opposition, the Obama administration wanted to wait to release the men until it could get a direct exchange for the Westerner, the American officials said. But it appeared Thursday that the Taliban had grown tired of waiting for the Americans to begin the process, and that the insurgents feared the conditions under which their compatriots would be housed in Qatar would be too restrictive.
“Acknowledging their involvement in Qatar talks was a significant move for the Taliban. They expected that the U.S. would move quickly with confidence-building measures,” said Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “The transfer of Taliban leaders to Qatar was top on the list. The Taliban announcement of suspending engagement in Qatar is a response to their frustration at the U.S.’s slowness to deliver.”
Mr. Semple said a series of crises to beset the Americans in the Afghanistan conflict since the start of the year had added another layer of uncertainty to the talks, emboldening Taliban hardliners to press back against the peace effort. “The Taliban also believe that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is in disarray and their hardliners want to take advantage of that by launching a new fighting season.”
Still, the Taliban statement appeared to leave open the door to a resumption of the process, terming their move a “suspension.”
Angry over its exclusion from the first round of talks, which involved the Taliban opening a political office in Qatar as well as the proposed prisoner releases, Mr. Karzai’s government has tried to establish its own track for peace talks, saying Saudi Arabia should be an intermediary, and sending its own envoy to Guantánamo to talk to Taliban prisoners.
The Taliban statement repeated previous declarations by the insurgents that they viewed Afghan government officials as puppets of the Americans and would not hold talks with them. “Hamid Karzai, who cannot even make a single political decision without the prior consent of the Americans, falsely proclaimed that the Kabul administration and the Americans have jointly started peace talks with the Taliban,” the statement said.
The Taliban were only at the stage of discussing prisoners and the Qatar office, the statement said, adding, “neither have we accepted any other condition with any other side nor have we conducted any talks with Karzai administration.”
On the withdrawal of American forces to major bases by 2013, Mr. Karzai said that Afghan authorities were capable of taking charge of security in rural areas. The massacre Sunday took place in a rural part of Panjwai District, in southern Kandahar Province.
The shooting suspect has been described by sources as a 38-year-old staff sergeant in the Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment, Third Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.
Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.
The Koran burning incident, which has raged in Afghanistan since the last couple of weeks, is symptomatic of the mutual misunderstanding with which the US and regional players have bumbled on for the last 10 1/2 years – with no clear goal in sight.
If the US goal in Afghanistan was to train the security forces to handle their own defenses, the incident of US soldiers burning the Koran outside Bagram prison – allegedly to thwart planning by Taliban soldiers against them – indicates that the decade long war has not taught American soldiers basic cultural norms of Muslim societies.
The Afghans have refused to buy the argument by US soldiers that the notes written on the Korans by Taliban prisoners may have been code words for an insurgency. Instead, the issue has touched a far deeper chord than the video of US soldiers humiliating the corpses of Taliban soldiers…which was repeatedly played in the US media.
The Koran burning incident has thrown world leaders into a bind. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, knowing that his fate will be decided by the Afghans after his US patrons leave, has turned to the Ulema (religious clergy) to defuse the crisis.
On the other hand, US President Barak Obama – with his multi-cultural upbringing – has apologized, but failed to contain the violence that has infiltrated into the Afghan security forces.
If the US had taken a leaf from history, it would found the need for greater sensitivity in a cultural milieu where tribal Afghans have fought off Western influences like the plague.
For example, the former Soviet Union was forced to end its modernity campaign in Afghanistan shortly after its invasion in 1979, after Russian literacy workers were murdered by conservative Afghans. Millions of Afghans migrated to Pakistan, where they coalesced into the Mujahidin. These “holy warriors” were subsequently funded and armed by the US against the Soviets in Afghanistan… in a movement that has fathered the Taliban.
Today, with history come a full circle, Afghan conservatism raises new challenges for the Obama administration.
The Koran burning issue has already spilled into Pakistan where the religious parties (who served as the mid-wives for the Taliban during the 1990s) have used it to capitalize on anti-US sentiment.
In Pakistan, the victimization of religious minorities and even Muslims suspected of sacrilegious acts mushroomed after 1984, when the Gen. Zia ul Haq’s military coup was followed by passage of the Blasphemy Laws to award the death penalty for insulting the Prophet of Islam and the Koran.
In 1994, I visited Gujranwala town in the Punjab to see how a Muslim who had even memorized the Koran, suffered the ultimate penalty for alleged blasphemy. The unfortunate Muslim, Hafiz Farooq Sajjad whose Koran caught fire…it is impossible to verify how it happened… was spotted by his neighbor while the Holy Book was burning, and reported he had burnt it on purpose.
As the news of the Koran burning spread through the town, the clerics announced it from the mosque. An angry mob descended on Sajjad’s home, tied him to the back of his motor bike and dragged him till he died of his wounds.
The most virulent Muslim sects have since emerged from the small towns of the Punjab – groups like the Anjuman Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan and the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi – who have singled out Shias, Christians, Ahmediyas and even Muslims for extermination.
Only last week the anti Iranian group, Jundullah took responsibility for singling out Shias traveling in a passenger bus in Pakistan’s northern areas – whence they were forced to disembark and shot on account of their sect.
In this complex scenario, where nations use religious and ethnic groups to fight proxy wars in the Pak-Afghan region, the dangers of religious extremism rise in proportion to incidents like Koran burning.
Indeed, as the Taliban claims military successes in Afghanistan… the religious extremists moving across the porous borders to Pakistan carry the seeds of intolerance that threaten to destabilize the nation still further.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. – George Bernard Shaw
Bin Laden film settings (Credit: onenewspage.co.uk)Indians have protested against the shooting of a film by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on the hunt for Osama bin Laden on the grounds that the film-makers were portraying Pakistan on Indian soil.
Bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Pakistan in May last year.
The film-makers, denied permission to film in Pakistan, converted parts of the Indian city of Chandigarh to look like the Pakistani city of Lahore.
But for right-wing Hindus, the use of India to portray sworn enemy Pakistan was too much.
“They have made Chandigarh like Pakistan, as if it is Pakistan,” said Vijay Bhardwaj, a leader of the radical Vishva Hindu Parishad group.
“We strongly oppose this and we will not let them put Pakistani flags here and we will not let them shoot for the film.”
Billboards with Urdu signs were put up on shops in a market in the north Indian city and auto-rickshaws were running with Lahore number plates. Burqa-clad women and men dressed in traditional Pakistani clothes roamed the streets.
The small group of protesters shouted slogans and some of them were seen arguing with cast and crew members as police tried to intervene.
The protesters said the government should have denied permission to make the film on Indian soil.
Bigelow, who won an Oscar for her Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, was developing a film on the hunt for Bin Laden before the al-Qaeda leader was killed in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
The film, Zero Dark Thirty, is due for release in late 2012.
KABUL, Jan 28 — Several Taliban negotiators have begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, where they are discussing preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer, several former Taliban officials said Saturday.
The former officials said that four to eight Taliban representatives had traveled to Qatar from Pakistan to set up a political office for the exiled Afghan insurgent group.
The comments suggested that the Taliban, who have not publicly said they would engage in peace talks to end the war in Afghanistan, were gearing up for preliminary discussions.
American officials would not deny that meetings had taken place, and the discussions seemed to have at least the tacit approval of Pakistan, which has thwarted previous efforts by the Taliban to engage in talks.
The Afghan government, which was initially angry that it had been left out, has accepted the talks in principle but is not directly involved, a potential snag in what could be a historic development.
The former Taliban officials, interviewed Saturday in Kabul, were careful not to call the discussions peace talks.
“Currently there are no peace talks going on,” said Maulavi Qalamuddin, the former minister of vice and virtue for the Taliban who is now a member of the High Peace Council here. “The only thing is the negotiations over release of Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo, which is still under discussion between both sides in Qatar. We also want to strengthen the talks so we can create an environment of trust for further talks in the future.”
The State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has said only that Marc Grossman, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had “a number of meetings” related to Afghanistan when he visited Qatar last week.
The Taliban’s announcement this month that they would open an office in Qatar, which could allow for direct negotiations, drew fire from some Afghan factions as well as some American policy makers, who fear the insurgents would use negotiations as a ploy to gain legitimacy and then continue their efforts to reimpose an extremist Islamic state in Afghanistan.
Mr. Grossman, at a news conference in Kabul last week, said that real peace talks could begin only after the Taliban renounced international terrorism and agreed to support a peace process to end the armed conflict.
The Afghan government and the Qataris must also come to an agreement on the terms under which the Taliban will have an office. Mr. Grossman has been regularly briefing the Afghan government but Afghan officials have complained that they were being kept out of the loop.
The Taliban officials now in Doha, Qatar, include a former secretary to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, as well as several former officials of the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, according to Mr. Qalamuddin and Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban minister of higher education.
The former Taliban officials here described fairly advanced discussions in Qatar about the transfer of prisoners. One former official, Syed Muhammad Akbar Agha, who had been a Taliban military commander, said that five Taliban prisoners were to be transferred in two phases, two or three in one group and then the remainder.
There has also been discussion in Qatar of removing some Taliban members from NATO’s “kill or capture” lists, the former Taliban officials said.
Mr. Grossman, in his comments last week, played down talk of detainee releases, saying the United States had not yet decided on the issue. “This is an issue of United States law first of all, that we have to meet the requirements of our law,” he said.
He said the Obama administration would also consult with Congress. Under American law, the defense secretary must certify to Congress that the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to a foreign country would meet certain requirements, including that the country maintains control over its prisons and will not allow a transferred detainee to become a future threat to the United States.
If any detainees were released, Western and Afghan officials said, they would likely be transferred to Qatar and held there, perhaps under house arrest.
The former Taliban officials said that they were most surprised by Pakistan’s decision to allow the Taliban delegates to obtain travel documents and board a plane to Qatar. The former officials have long contended that Pakistan has obstructed talks. “This is a green light from Pakistan,” Mr. Rahmani said.
Pakistan “definitely supported this and is also helping,” Mr. Qalamuddin added. He said that if Pakistan did not approve of the talks, it would have arrested the Taliban delegates to Qatar, just as it did with Mullah Baradar, a senior Taliban official, after he began secret talks with the Afghan government in 2010.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Washington, Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul.
WASHINGTON: US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has urged Islamabad to release a Pakistani physician who helped the United States find Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad on May 2 last year.
In an interview for an episode of “60 Minutes”, a programme run by the Colombia Broadcasting Service (CBS), Mr Panetta acknowledged that the doctor provided vital clues to the United States about Osama’s lair.
The revelation came on the heels of a Friday speech by Vice President Joseph Biden in which he disclosed that he had cautioned President Barack Obama against raiding Osama bin Laden’s hideout, but the president took the decision all alone.
Speaking at a conference of House Democrats in Maryland, Mr Biden said President Obama ignored his reservations and Leon Panetta, then CIA chief, was the only member of the inner circle who backed the president.
In the CBS interview, Leon Panetta said he believed Pakistani officials knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding before US Navy SEALs found and killed him on May 2, last year.
“There is a Pakistani doctor who, as we understand, was helping our efforts there, a man named Shakil Afridi, he is now being charged with treason in Pakistan and I wonder what you think of that?” asked the interviewer.
“I am very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual. This was an individual who, in fact, helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regard to this operation.
“And he was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan. He was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan,” Mr Panetta replied.
Dr Afridi ran a vaccination programme for the CIA to collect DNA and verify Osama bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad compound. Media reports claim that Islamabad had charged Mr Afridi, an employee of the Pakistan government, with treason for working for a foreign intelligence agency.
Mr Panetta headed the CIA when Dr Afridi worked for the agency. Pakistan has so far not issued any official statement on Mr Afridi’s whereabouts. “As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the US have a common cause here against terrorism, have a common cause against Al Qaeda, have a common cause against those who will attack not only our country but their country. And for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think it is a real mistake on their part,” said Mr Panetta.
“Should they free him?” the interviewer asked. “They can take whatever steps they want to do to discipline him, but ultimately he ought to be released,” Mr Panetta replied.
Reports in the US media quoted senior Pakistani officials as saying that they wanted to resolve the issue amicably. Pakistan would release Mr Afridi quietly to US custody, once media attention died down, the reports said. Asked if he believed Pakistani officials knew Osama was hiding in Abbottabad, Mr Panetta said: “I don’t have any hard evidence, so I can’t say it for a fact. There’s nothing that proves the case. But as I said, my personal view is that somebody somewhere probably had that knowledge.”
Mr Panetta said Pakistani military helicopters were reported to have passed over the compound where the late Al Qaeda chief was found. “I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what — what was happening at this compound. Don’t forget, this compound had 18 foot walls. … It was the largest compound in the area.
“So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell’s going on there?’” Mr Panetta said.
The defence secretary also explained why Pakistani officials were not informed when the United States raided the compound.
“We had seen some military helicopters actually going over this compound. And for that reason, it concerned us that, if we, in fact, brought [Pakistan] into it, that — they might … give bin Laden a heads up,” he said.
Diplomatic observers in Washington say that Mr Panetta’s statement was aimed at exerting pressure on Pakistan to release Dr Afridi.
BIDEN EXPLAINS HIS ADVICE: Mr Biden said in his speech he advised President Obama not to carry out the mission because he believed “we have to do more things to see if he’s there”.
The vice president gave an insider account of the internal discussions in the White House before the order was officially carried out and praised Mr Obama as a person with a “backbone like ramrod”.
Mr Biden said that for a four-to-six week period early last year, only six people knew that Osama bin Laden might be hiding in Abbottabad.
When enough information finally surfaced, the president convened his national security staff on April 28.
“The president, he went around the table, with all the senior people, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he said ‘I have to make a decision, what is your opinion’. He started with the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, and he ended with me,” recalled Mr Biden.
“He (Obama) went around the table with all the senior people. … Every single person in that room hedged their bet except Leon Panetta. Mr Leon said, ‘go.’ Everyone else said 49, 51 (percent in favour),” Mr Biden added. “It got to me. (Mr Obama) said ‘Joe — what do you think?’ I said, ‘You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table.’ I said we owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go.” “You end up having to make decisions based on the moon, will there be enough light. And we had to make a decision,” said Mr Biden.
According to the Vice President, Mr Obama left that meeting and said he would make the decision in the morning. “The next morning he came down to the diplomatic entrance, getting in a helicopter I believe to go to Michigan, I’m not positive for that. He turned to Tom Donilon (then national security adviser) and said “go,” Mr Biden related.
The Vice President was not the only person who had second thoughts about pulling the trigger.
Former defence secretary Robert Gates has also admitted he had reservations about the raid.
President Obama, Mr Biden argued, showed leadership. “He knew what was at stake. Not just the lives of those brave warriors, but literally the presidency, and he pulled the trigger,” Mr Biden said.
“This guy doesn’t lead from behind — he just leads.”
A Pentagon official told Fox News that Adm. Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, “certainly recognised the risk, but he did not hesitate in offering his advice that we should go.”
Another official said that Gen. James Cartwright, who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, was leaning against a raid and more toward an air strike in that final meeting.
