Bin Laden `umzingelt`, Spezialkräfte warten auf den Befehl ihn festzusetzen. - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Joerver]

Der `Sunday Telegraph` meldet in seiner Sonntagsausgabe, dass Bin Laden an der Nord-West Grenze zwischen Afganistan und Pakistan von US-Spezialkräften umstellt sei.
Die Truppen warten auf den Befehl ihn festzusetzen.
Bin Laden soll von 50 Leibwächtern umgeben sein.
Im `Sunday Telegraph` ist die Meldung noch nicht zugänglich!

Bin Laden `surrounded`

February 22, 2004: The Sunday Telegraph

A BRITISH Sunday newspaper is claiming Osama bin Laden has been found and is surrounded by US special forces in an area of land bordering north-west Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Sunday Express, known for its sometimes colourful scoops, claims the al-Qaeda leader has been "sighted" for the first time since 2001 and is being monitored by satellite.

The paper claims he is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta. The region is said to be peopled with bin Laden supporters and the terrorist leader is estimated to also have 50 of his fanatical bodyguards with him.

The claim is attributed to "a well-placed intelligence source" in Washington, who is quoted as saying: "He (bin Laden) is boxed in."

The paper says the hostile terrain makes an all-out conventional military assault impossible. The plan to capture him would depend on a "grab-him-and-go" style operation.

"US helicopters already sited on the Afghanistan border will swoop in to extricate him," the newspaper says. It claims bin Laden and his men "sleep in caves or out in the open. The area is swept by fierce snow storms howling down from the 10,000ft-high mountain peaks. Donkeys are the only transport."

The special forces are "absolutely confident" there is no escape for bin Laden, and are awaiting the order to go in and get him.

"The timing of that order will ultimately depend on President Bush," the paper says. "Capturing bin Laden will certainly be a huge help for him as he gets ready for the election."

The article says bin Laden`s movements are monitored by a National Security Agency satellite.

On Thursday last week, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said America had been engaged in "intense" efforts to capture bin Laden, who was believed to be hiding in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But he insisted that the focus of the search had not narrowed for months.

Copyright: The Sunday Telegraph

[lassmichrein]

Schon wieder ???...

[Joerver]

Bis zu den Wahlen jede Woche.
Andere sagen er sitzt schon und soll rechtzeitig vor den Wahlen vorgeführt werden.
Beim Telegraph besteht eine Chance, dass es stimmt.
Ob sie größer ist als die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Meldung der Welt vor einigen Wochen, weiss ich nicht.

[lassmichrein]

Wahrscheinlich wurde er von ein paar Bauerntölpeln gestellt, und jetzt wird nur noch gewartet, bis die Amis mit ein paar Foto- und Videokameras eintreffen...

[Joerver]

Vielleich will man auch Angela M. zum Taliban-Abschrecken einfliegen.
Ein Einsatz ohne Burka erspart jegliches Blutvergiessen.

[DerIslaender]

Friday: January 23, 2004


German Newspaper Says Bin Laden Captured
Via Buzzflash: UPI in Berlin reports that Osama bin Laden has been captured:

BERLIN, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has been captured, Germany`s Die Welt newspaper reported Thursday. The newspaper, on its Web site, cited "unconfirmed reports" as the basis for its report.

14:16 2003-03-07

Bin Laden Captured in Pakistan?

Nine al-Qaeda terrorists were arrested as a result of a police raid in Pakistan.

As Pakistan-s influential newspaper News reported Friday, in accordance with unconfirmed data, Osama bin Laden or his son may be among the arrested.

On Wednesday, a large-scale operation was held by Pakistani police together with American special force in two helicopters in the settlement of Noshki in the province of Baluchistan close to the Afghan border.

Witnesses say that Pakistani troops were especially active in the district on Thursday.

As The News International reports, he hunt for Osama bin Laden intensified Friday in two remote districts on Pakistan`s border with Afghanistan. As a governmental official reports, information gleaned from captured al-Qaeda operative, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, led to Chitral in the northwest, and somewhere along southwest border with Afghanistan in Baluchistan. There is a possibility that bin Laden could be hiding in Baluchistan close to the Afghan border or in Chitral, these areas are being searched.

PRAVDA.Ru

[Joerver]

http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&e…

Osama look-alikes fill lawless region of Pakistan
Indo-Asian News Service
Islamabad, February 21
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_580758,00050002.htm
Ask any farmer in Pakistan`s Khyber tribal region, "Have you seen Osama bin Laden?" and you`re likely to find a similar-looking, tall, bearded man at the restaurants of the area`s main bazaar, reports UPI.

Ask a tribesman in Darra Adam Khel, the region`s largest arms bazaar and the main source of homemade and smuggled weapons in South Asia and he`ll tell you: "Shut up, you son of Satan."

Brigadier Mahmud Shah, chief administrator of the region, said that asking about bin Laden might even get you a bullet.

Warriors and renegades have hidden in the mountains and valleys of the rugged frontier that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout history.

Now, US officials believe that Osama bin Laden, reputedly this century`s biggest terrorist, also has taken refuge here.

Dozens of the fiercely independent Pashtuns tribes live in the region. Most of them are tall and bearded. They wear the loose trousers and long shirts that bin Laden adopted when he moved to Afghanistan in 1995.

If bin Laden is hiding among them, as US officials operating across the border in Afghanistan believe he is, it will be difficult to single him out from other bearded tribesmen, all of whom carry guns.

Pashtun tribes have an arrangement with Pakistan, originally negotiated by the British before they left the area in 1947, preventing the government from sending troops and policemen to the remote region.

That`s why there are no trained law enforcement agents to spot and catch bin Laden and his men who, US officials say, are conducting raids deep into Afghanistan from their hideouts.

US officials in Afghanistan say that Taliban forces and affiliated fighters associated with Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar also participate in these raids.

Last month, US military and civilian officials in Iraq intercepted a courier carrying a 17-page letter they said was written by Abu Mussab al Zarkawi, a convicted Jordanian terrorist.

It was allegedly intended for his Al-Qaeda contacts in Pakistan`s tribal belt.

The discovery added urgency to a US plan to drive Al-Qaeda from the area. Late last month, Washington said it intends to launch a major military offensive in the spring to flush out terrorists from the region.

Gen. David Barno, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, says Pakistan has already launched an offensive in the region.

Now "US and Afghan forces will be waiting on the other side to catch them," as Pakistani troops drive them out.

Despite the presence of thousands of US, Pakistani and Afghan troops in the region, nobody seems to know where the Al-Qaeda leader is.

The tribal belt is an almost thousand-mile long stretch across a mountainous region peppered with hundreds of gorges. Fugitives can easily move in and out of the area.

It is inhospitable, tribesmen are suspicious of outsiders, and tribal caravans have moved across the border without any documents for centuries. US officials worry that any effort to impose travel restrictions may be fiercely resisted.

"We believe that bin Laden is being very careful. He does not move with large groups, if he moves at all," says administrator Shah.

Shah, a Pashtun who maintains close ties to Pashtun tribal chiefs, says his sources tell him that bin Laden has about "about 100 to 200 die-hard followers who have built a protective net around him. They do not get close because that would draw attention."
Although Shah insists that bin Laden spends more time on the Afghan side of the lawless region, he said the Al-Qaeda chief might have fled to the Pakistani side two years ago when US forces bombed his hideouts in the eastern Afghan valley of Tora Bora.

"Pakistani troops are confronting the tribal elders and making them accountable for the behaviour in their area. Tribal chiefs who do not comply could face destruction of homes and things of that nature," Barno said.

For example, Pakistan troops recently detained hundreds of tribesmen for cooperating with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces and destroyed their homes and schools.

Pakistan is also trying to establish permanent military posts in these areas. It has built roads and schools with the money it received from the US.

Many in the region still sympathise with the Taliban, if not Al-Qaeda for religious and ethnic reasons, however. Like most of the Taliban, the tribesmen also are staunch Muslims and ethnic Pashtuns.

Religious sentiments are strongest in northern tribal regions. In the south, Pashtun nationalism is stronger. But Pashtun clerics operate freely in both the regions and do not hide their sympathy for the Taliban.

The Taliban are a reality in Afghanistan... and they should be recognised as such," says Mufti Kifayatullah, a leader of a seven-party religious alliance that which controls the provincial government in Pakistan`s Northwest Frontier Province.

"The Taliban was an ideological force, and an ideological force can be beaten but it cannot be rooted out," he said.

Aware of these sentiments, the Americans are encouraging moderate Taliban leaders, such as Mullah Sabir and Mullah Jalil, both members of the deposed Taliban government, to replace the old guard.

Despite financial assistance from the US, anti-US sentiments remain strong. Even those opposed to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda do not openly associate themselves with the US.

[DmComeBack]

War wohl wieder nichts -

[Fuller81]

Sie haben ihn doch schon.

[DmComeBack]

[fesdu]

!

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[Joerver]

Der Gegenangriff

[Joerver]

Die Titelseite der heutigen Post. Ist das Zufall, dass die mit der Geschichte über die Jagd nach Bin Laden aufmachen, oder wird dort der Endkampf vorbereitet?
Weiter unter der Link zum ersten Teil der Geschichte über die Jagd nach Al Kaida.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59775-2004Feb…

Ghost Wars
Page A16
This report was adapted from "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," The Penguin Press (New York: 2004), by Washington Post Managing Editor Steve Coll. Coll will be online to answer questions about the book at 10 a.m. Monday at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline. NBC`s "Dateline"
will broadcast a story about the book and the hunt for bin Laden at 7 tonight.

[webmaxx]

Der SPIEGEL schreibt:

"Wahlkampfhelfer Bin Laden" Wer solche Busch-Freunde hat, braucht eben keine Feinde mehr

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,287498,00.html

[Joerver]

Das ist im gegenseitigem Interesse.
Sozusagen Fundamentalisten unter sich.
Der eine stützt den anderen.

[derdieschnautzelangsamvollhat]

Sektenmitglied, religiöser Eiferer und Gotteskrieger Bush, schickt seine amerikanischen Kampfheuschrecken ins letzte Gefecht gegen die Barfüßigen der Konkurrenzreligion; dessen Führer, wie aus dem Nichts aufgetaucht, zum Staatsferind Nr. 1 wurde.

[Schachy]

Natürlich sollte Bin Ladem gefasst werden und seiner gerechten Strafe zugeführt werden!
Aber was ändert sich dann an der politischen Situation? Die Medien haben vier Wochen ihre Nachrichten und das wärs!!!
Was ändert sich an der wirtschaftlichen Situation usw? NICHTS!
Die Bush - Kriegsverb. werden ihre Strategie nicht ändern! Sie werden weiterhin die Welt mit ihrer militärischen Überlegenheit tyranisieren!
Sie werden weiterhin ihre nichtgerechtfertigten Aggressionskriege der Welt zu ihrem " Glück" schenken und es als Freiheit und Demokratie verkaufen!

[Joerver]

_______________
Die Grafik zeigt den Grund für den verzweifelten Versuch Bin Laden zu finden.
Nur wenn er jetzt gefunden würde, wäre die Wirkung bis zum 02.11. verflogen.
Deshalb auch immer wieder die Meldungen, dass man Bin Laden schon längst festgesetzt hat.
Aber lt. Grafik wäre der richtige Zeitpunkt knapp 14 Tage vor der Wahl, um ihn der erstaunten Öffentlichkeit vorzuführen.

[SchwarzerLord]

Ich bin froh, wenn dieser Schwerverbrecher endlich hinter Gefängnismauern sitzt und auf die Todesstrafe wartet. Bush hin oder her: Diesen Terror-Islamisten muß klargemacht werden, daß es so nicht geht.

[Joerver]

Was hinter den Meldungen vom Wochenende steckte. Ist das alles?

February 23, 2004
Pakistani Offensive Aims to Drive Out Taliban and Al Qaeda
By DAVID ROHDE and CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 22 — Pakistan is preparing for a major military offensive against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces along its border with Afghanistan in the next several weeks, Pakistani government officials said this weekend.

The operation may be the first act of a violent, and potentially pivotal, spring season along the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to Western diplomats, Pakistani military experts and American military officials.

American military officials said they expected Taliban and Qaeda fighters to try to disrupt national elections scheduled for June in Afghanistan. American and Pakistani officials said they would step up their efforts to gain control of the rugged border region, the area where they believe the fugitive Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, is hiding.

Pakistani officials denied recent news reports that the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been narrowed down to an area of several dozen square miles. Instead, they said the planned offensive was part of a calculated, step-by-step campaign to drive Qaeda members over the border to where American forces would be waiting for them.

"There has certainly been pressure building up on Al Qaeda and their tribal supporters," a senior Pakistani official said Saturday. "They are on the run and we will not let this momentum peter out."

Muhammad Azam Khan, the top Pakistan government official in the South Waziristan tribal agency, said he had requested a steep increase in the number of Pakistani troops in the area — to 12,000 from 4,000. Hundreds of Qaeda members, including Chechen and Uzbek fighters, are thought to be hiding in the border area and mounting attacks on American forces in nearby Afghanistan.

"We are waiting for the troops to come," Mr. Khan said in an telephone interview Sunday. "Ours is a large area that requires a large number of troops."

Last Tuesday, the commander of the American-led forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, told reporters that American and Pakistani forces were trying to work together like a "hammer and anvil" to trap and destroy Taliban and Qaeda forces.

Lt. Col. Matthew P. Beevers, director of public affairs for coalition forces in Afghanistan, said Saturday the new tactics included having small groups of soldiers deployed to villages for days at a time. By distributing aid and becoming a more permanent presence, American officials hope to gain the trust of Afghans and collect better intelligence. In the past, large groups of American forces carried out vast offensives and sweeps, and then returned to their bases.

"We are using small units much more than big-scale offensive operations," Colonel Beevers said.

Afghan officials and Western diplomats in Kabul said they were now, finally, getting "full cooperation" from Pakistani forces along the border. Since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Afghan officials had complained that Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was not making a serious effort to crack down on Taliban fugitives.

In recent weeks, however, there has also been a sharp shift in General Musharraf`s public statements. After months of playing down the presence of Qaeda and Taliban fighters on the Pakistan side of the border, he has repeatedly stated in speeches that Qaeda members are in Pakistan and must be eradicated. He has also promised that militants who surrender to the Pakistan authorities will not be handed over to the United States.

"I am fully confident that we will combat them," General Musharraf said in a speech to Islamic scholars last Wednesday, referring to foreign militants who he said misused Pakistan territory to advance their own agenda, state-run media reported.

A Western diplomat and senior Afghan official in Kabul, as well as a leading Pakistani military expert and senior Pentagon officials, said the shift occurred after General Musharraf was nearly assassinated by suicide bombers on Dec. 25.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani military expert, said the militants, whom the Pakistan Army covertly backed in the past, were now directly challenging the military, which has dominated the country for decades.

"These groups are challenging the army," Mr. Rizvi said. "And the army never likes to let the initiative slip out of their hands."

Pakistani military officials dismissed those explanations and insisted that they had always aggressively tracked Qaeda and Taliban members. They point out that General Musharraf brought the army into the tribal areas in 2001 for the first time in Pakistan history and that Pakistani forces have arrested 500 suspected Qaeda members. Afghan and Western critics, for their part, point out that nearly all those arrested were low-level Qaeda members, and that few senior Taliban have been apprehended in Pakistan.

On Sunday, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the Pakistan Army`s chief spokesman, denied reports from Kabul that coalition forces were now able to enter Pakistan in "hot pursuit" of militants. He also played down talk of an offensive and declined to describe troop movements.

"The president has said many times where we will carry out an operation whenever it is necessary," General Sultan said.

Preparations for a new offensive are being made two months after Pakistan adopted a harsh, British colonial-era tactic of collective responsibility in the tribal areas.

Under this system, Pakistani officials massed troops in South Waziristan and handed tribal leaders a list of Pakistani men suspected of sheltering Qaeda members. If the tribe did not hand over the men, the entire tribe would be punished. The houses of the wanted men would be destroyed, state spending in the area would be cut and, if necessary, tribal members would be detained until the men surrendered.

In recent days, Pakistani officials said the tactic had not produced the desired results. Tribes have handed over only 48 of 82 wanted men, all low-level figures who lack the information Pakistani officials want.


David Rohde reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, for this article and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan. Mohammed Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[dickdiver]

#5:

[Joerver]

!

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[Joerver]

Pakistan denies al-Qaeda chief trapped
From correspondents in Islamabad
23Feb04

PAKISTAN has denied any knowledge of al-Qaeda terror network leader Osama bin Laden being cornered by US and British special forces in a mountainous area in the northwest of the country.


Britain`s Sunday Express newspaper quoting "a US intelligence source" said bin Laden and "up to 50 fanatical henchmen" were inside an area 16km wide "north of the town of Khanozai and the city of Quetta".

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said bin Laden had not been "boxed in".

"I do not have any such information," he said.

"He is boxed in," the unidentified source was quoted as saying, adding that US special forces were "absolutely confident" that he could not escape.

According to the source, bin Laden moved into the area, "in the desolate Toba Kakar mountains", about a month ago from another area 240km to the south, the Sunday Express said.

In Washington, a Defence Department spokesman declined to comment.

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was believed to be with bin Laden, the report said.

Pakistan has stepped up security near the rugged border with Afghanistan ahead of new operations aimed at cornering Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Pakistani intelligence sources said yesterday.

Bin Laden was not the immediate target of the operation, they said.

This report appears on NEWS.com.au.

[Joerver]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 24. Februar 2004, 10:23
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,287707,00.html
Offensive

Pakistan beginnt Jagd auf al-Qaida und Taliban

Pakistanische Soldaten durchkämmen derzeit das Grenzgebiet zu Afghanistan auf der Suche nach Anhängern des Terrornetzwerkes al-Qaida und der Taliban. An der Operation sind auch Hubschrauber und paramilitärische Einheiten beteiligt.
Islamabad - In dem Gebiet wird auch Terrorchef Osama Bin Laden vermutet. Ein Militärsprecher sagte, es gebe Informationen, dass ausländische Terroristen sich im Grenzgebiet Süd-Waziristan versteckt hielten.
Die Militäraktion begann am Morgen nahe der Stadt Wana, wie Informationsminister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed sagte. Bewohner der Region sagten, sie hätten mindestens 14 Hubschrauber gesehen und später zwei Explosionen gehört. Schwer bewaffnete paramilitärische Einheiten hätten alle Straßen in die Region Süd-Waziristan abgeriegelt. Anscheinend sei eine Bodenoffensive im Vorbereitung.

Pakistan erklärte, es seien keine amerikanischen Truppen an Aktionen auf seinem Territorium beteiligt. Bewohner der Region sagten jedoch, sie hätten US-Spezialeinheiten gesehen.

Nur Stunden zuvor hatte US-Präsident George W. Bush in einer Rede vor Gouverneuren im Weißen Haus gesagt: "Wir sind auf der Jagd nach al-Qaida. Dies erfordert alle Mittel, Aufklärungs- und militärische Mittel, um sie zur Strecke zu bringen und der Gerechtigkeit zuzuführen; und es läuft ziemlich gut, besser als ziemlich gut."

Die pakistanischen Streitkräfte hatten von den Stämmen in der Region verlangt, bei ihnen vermutete ausländische Kämpfer auszuliefern. Das Ultimatum war am 20. Februar ausgelaufen. Bislang wurden den Behörden 58 Verdächtige übergeben, nach weiteren 38 wird gesucht.

Pakistans Außenminister Khursheed Kasuri hatte gestern versichert, ranghohe Mitglieder der al-Qaida würden den USA übergeben. Präsident Pervez Musharraf hatte dagegen den Stammesführern versichert, wer sich stelle und seine Waffen abgebe, werde nicht ausgeliefert.

Sicherheitskräfte haben in den vergangenen Tagen verstärkt Razzien im Stammesgebiet im Nordwesten des Landes an der Grenze zu Afghanistan durchgeführt. Die Behörden wiesen aber Spekulationen zurück, Bin Laden sei das unmittelbare Ziel der Aktionen.

Gestern hatten die USA und Pakistan einen Zeitungsbericht vom Sonntag dementiert, wonach sie Bin Laden dicht auf den Spuren seien. Er sei im Grenzgebiet zu Afghanistan von Spezialkräften umzingelt worden, war gemeldet worden. Derartige Meldungen seien wenig glaubwürdig, sagte US-Militärsprecher Bryan Hilferty gestern in Kabul. "Wenn wir wüssten, wo er sich in Afghanistan aufhält, würden wir ihn schnappen. Wenn die Pakistaner wüssten, wo er sich in Pakistan befindet, würden sie ihn ergreifen."

Die britische Sonntagszeitung "Sunday Express" hatte berichtet, Spezialkräfte der USA und Großbritanniens hätten den meistgesuchten Mann der Welt in einem 16 mal 16 Kilometer großen Gebiet in der pakistanischen Grenzregion zu Afghanistan eingekreist. Die Fläche werde von einem US-Spionage-Satellit beobachtet, hieß es in der Meldung.
Auch ein pakistanischer Militärsprecher wies die Berichte über eine Umzingelung des Chefs der radikal-islamischen al-Qaida in der pakistanischen Bergregion nördlich von Quetta zurück. "Dieses Gebiet liegt in der Tat in Pakistan, aber dort ist derzeit nichts los: Das Leben verläuft dort ganz normal. Sie können hingehen und es sich anschauen", sagte er bei einer Pressekonferenz. In dieser Region habe es in jüngster Zeit keinen Militäreinsatz gegeben. Auch seien dort keine ausländischen Truppen stationiert.

Das US-Militär hat für das kommende Frühjahr eine groß angelegte Offensive gegen Muslim-Extremisten und versprengte Taliban in Afghanistan angekündigt. Hilferty sagte jedoch, dieser Einsatz unterscheide sich kaum von den bisherigen. Zudem gehe es dabei auch nicht um die Ergreifung Einzelner. "Der globale Kampf gegen den Terrorismus richtet sich nicht nur gegen eine oder zwei Personen, sondern ganz allgemein gegen alle Terroristen, sagte der Militärsprecher. Hilferty hatte sich zuletzt zuversichtlich geäußert, Bin Laden noch in diesem Jahr zu fassen.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

So unterstützt man sich gegenseitig. Die einen helfen beim Wahlkampf und die anderen helfen bei der Rekrutierung vom Nachwuchs.
Fundamentalisten unter sich.

Bin Laden Deputy Warns of More Attacks on the U.S.
Tue February 24, 2004 07:40 AM ET

By Andrew Hammond
DUBAI (Reuters) - A top al Qaeda leader warned President Bush in an audiotape broadcast Tuesday to prepare for more attacks on the United States.

In the tape aired by Al Jazeera television, Ayman al-Zawahri said: "Bush, strengthen your defenses and your security measures for the Muslim nation which sent you the legion of New York and Washington has determined to send you legion after legion seeking death and paradise."

Zawahri, Osama bin Laden`s right-hand man, also appeared on Tuesday to single out France in its league of enemies, accusing Paris of displaying "Crusader hatred" toward Islam by banning Muslim headscarves from state classrooms.

By turning on France in an audiotape broadcast on Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, Zawahri -- identifiable by his voice and rhetorical style -- went beyond now familiar tirades against the United States, Britain, Gulf Arab states and other supporters of last year`s U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"France is the country of freedom which defends freedom to show the body and to be immoral and depraved. In France you`re free to show yourself but not to dress modestly," he said in reference to the headscarf ban newly approved by parliament.

"This is a new sign of the Crusader hatred which Westerners harbor against Muslims while they boast of freedom, democracy and human rights," said the voice on the tape.

The authenticity of both recordings aired on the two Arab televisions could not immediately be verified, but they sounded like previous messages attributed to the Egyptian Zawahri, who is regarded as Osama bin Laden`s deputy and thought to be hiding with him somewhere near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

In the Al Jazeera tape, Zawahri said Bush had lied in last month`s State of the Union address when he asserted that most of al Qaeda had been crushed and that U.S. troops were spreading freedom and democracy.

"Bush alleged that his troops have spread freedom in the world, that Iraq had achieved democracy thanks to his coalition forces, that his government has crushed more than two-thirds of al Qaeda and that...Afghanistan is secure," he said.

"The leader of the most powerful country on earth is not embarrassed to say these deceptions and lies. It`s gotten to the stage that he can ridicule his listeners to this degree," he said.

Bush defended his war on terrorism and policy in Iraq in his State of the Union address that set the tone for his re-election campaign later this year.

DRIVING A WEDGE

Al Qaeda is widely seen as bent on radicalizing Muslims worldwide and encouraging them to rise up against the West in what some analysts have termed a "clash of civilizations."

The network, held responsible for the September 2001 attacks on the U.S. cities and a string of others, has portrayed Bush`s "war on terror" as a modern-day crusade against Islam.

By focusing on the French headscarf ban, it appeared to be seizing on a fresh opportunity to promote that agenda and drive a wedge between Islam and the West.

Previous statements attributed to al Qaeda have usually focused on the United States and countries which backed the invasion of Iraq last year. French President Jacques Chirac was one of the war`s most vocal opponents.

Along with France, the tape attacked Muslim countries which have made moves to secularize their societies along Western lines. "This is a campaign planned by the Crusader Zionists with their agents in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia and other Islamic countries," Zawahri said.

His use of "Zionists" referred to supporters of Israel.

He said the French veil ban, which was also accompanied by bans on shows of Christian and Jewish faith in state schools, was part of a series of attacks on Muslims.

He also cited Israel`s treatment of Palestinians, the U.S. occupation of Iraq and detention of Muslims in Guantanamo Bay, where foreign terrorism suspects are held by Washington:

"America has given itself the right to kill or detain anyone anywhere and to deport anyone to anywhere for any period, without anyone daring to ask why, who, where or until when."

"Atomic weapons are banned for everyone except Israel," he added, referring to U.S. ally Israel`s presumed weapons arsenal.

"Banning the veil conforms with all these crimes and the moral and ideological hypocrisy of the Zio-Crusaders."

[Joerver]

___

[Joerver]

Pakistan quizzes terror suspects
Pakistani forces are trying to identify around 25 people held in an operation on the Afghan border on Tuesday.
Interrogators want to establish whether the detainees have links with al-Qaeda or its leader Osama Bin Laden.

The suspects appeared well-trained and were often changing their story, a cabinet minister told Associated Press.

But Faisal Saleh Hayyat denied a Pakistani newspaper report that the son of Bin Laden`s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahri, was among those captured.


`Speculation`

Mr Hayyat, the interior minister, said: "Neither al-Zawahri nor his son have been arrested. It is not true."

The Urdu-language Jang newspaper had reported that Khalid al-Zawahri was detained in Tuesday`s army operation against al-Qaeda suspects in the South Waziristan tribal region.


The report, which quoted diplomatic sources, said that Khalid had been transferred to US custody and flown out of Pakistan.

However, a spokesman for the US coalition forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-Colonel Matt Beevers, said he had no information on the Pakistani arrests.


Initial reports on Tuesday quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as saying those held included Saudi, Egyptian and Yemeni nationals.

However, military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan said on Wednesday the identities had not yet been determined and that the reports of Khalid al-Zawahri`s arrest were "speculation".

Hundreds of Pakistani troops, supported by helicopter gunships, swooped on an area around the town of Wana, 300km (190 miles) west of the capital, Islamabad, in a six-hour operation on Tuesday.


The troops seized weapons, ammunition, passports and audiocassettes, along with the 25 suspects.

The detainees were questioned through the night.

Mr Hayyat said: "It is always difficult to establish the identity of terrorists, especially if they are members of al-Qaeda, because they are well-trained and keep changing their statements.

"We hope that the investigations of the people who were arrested will help to find clues about Bin Laden. These investigations are being carried out to reach other terrorists - if they are hiding in Pakistan."

`Sands running out`


A recording attributed to Ayman al-Zawahri was broadcast on the al-Jazeera TV station on Tuesday threatening new attacks against the US.


The arrest of his son would be a major boost in US-led efforts to track down Bin Laden.

On Wednesday, US forces in Kabul said again that they were optimistic of tracking down the al-Qaeda leader soon.

Colonel Beevers said the "sands in this guy`s hourglass... are running out".

"We are going to continue to present the leadership of al-Qaeda, the Taleban, Hek [the faction of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar] with impossible situations that they are not going to be able to get around, through, under or over," he said.

Pakistan has denied reports that its operation was targeting Bin Laden following information that he had been tracked down to a stretch of the Pakistan-Afghan border.


It said the operation was launched after militants ignored a 20 February deadline to surrender.

South Waziristan has long been considered a sanctuary for Taleban and al-Qaeda fugitives who fled Afghanistan after the arrival of US forces in 2001.

Over the past few weeks, the Pakistani authorities have tried to persuade tribal leaders to hand over foreign fighters.

Pakistan has been a key ally of the United States in its campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taleban.

About 500 suspects have been detained in Pakistan and many sent to US military detention at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/3485340.stm

Published: 2004/02/25 11:22:13 GMT

© BBC MMIV

[Joerver]

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Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

[Joerver]

Hier noch ein kritischer Bericht über die Abläufe in Pakistan von der Asia Times aus Hongkong. Ist als serioese Quelle zu betrachten.

http://www.atimes.com

Central Asia

THE ROVING EYE
Bring me the head of Osama bin Laden
By Pepe Escobar

The war in eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas in Pakistan is barely on, but the Pentagon`s spinning machine is in high gear. Who will prevail: al-Qaeda`s number two, Ayman "The Surgeon" al-Zawahiri, or Commando 121?

The Pentagon`s creative directors ruled that Commando 121, or Task Force 121, of General William Boykin - a self-described Islamophobe and a known Christian fanatic - was responsible for the capture of Saddam Hussein, when in fact the former dictator was arrested by Kurdish peshmerga (paramilitary) forces acting on a tip by one of his cousins and then sold to the Americans, according to Asia Times Online sources in the Sunni triangle. This week, without a blip in many a strategic radar screen, Commando 121 transferred from Iraq to Pakistan. On October 25 of last year, Asia Times Online reported that Boykin had been appointed in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It`s snowing on Rumsfeld`s parade.

European intelligence sources tell Asia Times Online to expect the same scenario "Saddam" for the eventuality of the capture of bin Laden and Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar. Bin Laden will be "smoked out", probably on a tip by an Afghan tribal leader willing to make a cool US$25 million. And all credit will go to the secretive Commando 121, which is known to comprise navy Seals and commandos from the army`s Delta Force.

The Pentagon has fired its first rhetorical Tomahawks of the season - via a leak this past weekend by a "US intelligence source" that bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar and about 50 top al-Qaeda operatives had been located in Pakistan`s Balochistan province. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf was said to be on the brink of authorizing an American intervention. According to the Pentagon script, the fugitives are "boxed in", packed in a tight group, surrounded by an array of US and British special forces, and apparently with no chance of escaping.

This sounds like a replay of Tora Bora in December 2001, when US-led forces were convinced that they had bin Laden trapped in the mountainous range of that name in Afghanistan, only to learn that he had moved on long before the worst of the massive US assault on the area. The difference this time is that the fugitives are now said to be in the "isolated" Toba Kakar mountains in Balochistan, northeast of the provincial capital Quetta, and very far from the Afghan province of Zabol, on the other side of the border.

The fugitives are supposed to be in an area between the villages of Khanozoi and Murgha Faqizai. There is a road between both villages - and not much else. The average altitude in these mountains is 3,000 meters. There is an obvious escape route: a tortuous mountain trail towards the Afghan border village of A`la Jezah. And there are the not-so-obvious routes, known only to bin Laden and a few Arab-Afghans familiar with the country since the early 1980s.

According to the Pentagon leak, the fugitives were found through "a combination of CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] paramilitaries and special forces, plus image analysis by geographers and soil experts". Predictably, local Balochistan authorities deny everything. But even if bin Laden and the whole al-Qaeda leadership are in fact encircled in this area - and not further north, between the provinces of Kunar in Afghanistan and Chitral in Pakistan, where they were supposed to be hiding - what`s the point of telling the whole world about it?

CIA vs Pentagon
It`s no less than a coincidence, then, that a new Ayman al-Zawahiri tape surfaced on Arab networks only one day after these Pentagon leaks claimed that they had al-Qaeda surrounded, with the Americans just waiting for some "authorization" to capture them. Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld will be in Afghanistan this week. Exasperated diplomats suggest to Asia Times Online that he may have personally negotiated the terms of the "authorization" with Musharraf. After all, these are the stakes that really matter for the Bush administration: when, where and how to spin the capture of bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

The CIA is already covering its back - just in case. CIA supremo George Tenet was on a secret mission to Islamabad in early February - arguably to discuss the modalities of spinning concerning bin Laden`s whereabouts. Tenet will do anything to help George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as the president has firmly kept Tenet in his job, even after the "intelligence failure" before September 11 and the "intelligence failure" concerning the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To further fireproof his cover this time, Tenet told the US Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda was capable of more September 11-style attacks inside American territory, citing evidence that al-Qaeda was planning to recruit airline pilots for such missions.

According to the CIA chief, bin Laden has "gone deep underground". He was not specific, and unlike the Pentagon, he did not point to the exact global positioning satellite coordinates of bin Laden and his crew of 50. Rumsfeld clearly knows something that Tenet does not.

Another key actor, Musharraf, is duly following his script - stationing "tens of thousands" of Pakistani army troops in the tribal areas and vigorously trying to "smoke out" the usual al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects. But sources tell Asia Times Online that very few Afghan-Arabs remain active in the Afghan resistance movement - only the ones who fought in the jihad of the 1980s against the Soviets, speak local Pashtun dialects and know each piece of rock in the Afghan and tribal area mountains. Musharraf`s job is much easier now that the whole porous area has been declared off limits to the foreign press. Moreover, any Pakistani official source insists on strictly denying the presence of any American troops of any size, color or structure operating inside Pakistani territory.

But where are they?
Sources in Peshawar confirm to Asia Times Online that Pakistani and American forces are raising hell on both sides of the porous Pak-Afghan border, with Islamabad contributing with helicopter gunships, paramilitary forces and regular ground troops. This is the hors d`oeuvre for the already well-flagged upcoming spring offensive by the resistance. The American offensive at first will be concentrated in North and South Waziristan, on the Pakistani side, and the provinces of Paktia and Paktika on the Afghan side.

Pashtun tribals in the Afghan province of Khost confirm that after a bombing campaign, American forces and local Afghan allies brought with them the usual suitcases full of dollars and are now involved in house-to-house searches. This area used to be a stronghold of famous former Taliban minister and commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Americans will soon be forced to start a real war in Paktika - as the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul has admitted losing nine districts in the province, and running the risk of losing the rest. Some of the Paktika districts are now ruled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar`s Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan party, others by tribal leaders simply hostile to the American-backed Karzai regime. The Taliban also say that they now control several districts in Zabul province.

Islamabad is taking no prisoners. Now, Pashtun tribals cannot even indulge in their favorite pastime: to roll in their beloved Toyota Land Cruisers with tinted windows. Anyone not removing the tinted glass faces three years in jail, confiscation of the vehicle and a $1,200 fine.

Pakistan`s information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, confirms that the army is now deployed "all over the tribal areas". "Our rapid action forces are there, they have sealed the border." The information minister`s assurance that "no one is allowed to come in from Afghanistan" is part of the new official spin from Islamabad, "part of Pakistan`s commitment to the international community against terrorism".

The information minister insists that Pakistan has not received from Washington any satellite pictures of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri or the al-Qaeda top 50 hiding in Pakistani territory. But much more interesting is his current estimation that US forces "would never enter Pakistan". Pakistan may have "sealed the border" with Afghanistan, but how to unseal it for the Americans is a matter to be discussed face-to-face by Rumsfeld and Musharraf this week. For this meeting, Rumsfeld can draw on his experience of discussing touchy issues with former CIA asset Saddam back in Baghdad in 1983.

The previous, official Pakistani script that its army could not legally enter in the semi-autonomous tribal areas has been reduced to dust. Hardline Islamist, anti-American sectors in Pakistan will not be amused. While the Musharraf system sells to Washington once again the idea they are trying to help the Americans to fight "the terrorists", nobody can tell with any degree of certainty what exactly Musharraf`s game is, the Inter-Services Intelligence`s game or the army`s game.

And what if bin Laden decides not to follow the script? According to sources close to the Pakistani newspaper Khabrain, bin Laden has made his seven bodyguards take an oath to kill him in the event that he is in any danger of being arrested. He will try to blow himself up. Western diplomatic sources, on the other hand, prefer to insist that if bin Laden is arrested according to the current Pentagon plan, the whole operation will be kept secret - to be disclosed only a few weeks or days before the American presidential election in November.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

[Joerver]

U.S. Pressing Hunt for Osama Bin Laden

Wednesday February 25, 2004 10:46 PM


By STEPHEN GRAHAM

Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The U.S. military said Wednesday that a ``renewed sense of urgency`` is firing the search for Osama bin Laden, even as it dismissed reports that the fugitive al-Qaida leader had been located near the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The new impetus comes amid plans to provide security to the lawless regions outside the capital, Kabul, before national elections planned for June. President Hamid Karzai also suggested an unprecedented move that could promote peace, saying he would consider talks with a former Taliban leader to promote reconciliation with less extreme elements of the former regime.

``The sands in their hour glass are running out,`` Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, said of bin Laden and other fugitives. ``We remain committed and reaffirm our effort to track these guys down and get `em.``

Still, Beevers played down speculation that American forces had closed in on bin Laden, saying that if coalition forces knew where he was, ``we`d already have him.``

The U.S. military is planning a new push to improve security across the troubled border regions and is rolling out a plan that involves delivering millions in badly needed reconstruction aid to remote areas where a bloody Taliban insurgency is strongest, a move the military says should yield better intelligence.

``It`s a combination of all those that gives us a renewed sense of urgency`` in the hunt for top fugitives, Beevers told a news conference in Kabul. ``Nothing is for certain but we remain unwavering in our commitment.``

Beevers made no mention of audiotapes purportedly of bin Laden`s top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, that were broadcast Tuesday on Arabic TV stations, taunting President Bush and threatening more attacks on the United States.

CIA Director George Tenet said Tuesday that the al-Qaida leadership is seriously damaged, even though the group remains committed to attacking the United States.

``We are creating large and growing gaps in the al-Qaida hierarchy,`` Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee. ``And, unquestionably, bringing these key operators to ground disrupted plots that would otherwise have killed Americans.``

Tenet added that ``al-Qaida central continues to lose operational safe havens, and bin Laden has gone deep underground. We are hunting him in some of the most unfriendly regions on Earth. We follow every lead.``

The U.S. military has said it is confident that before the year is out it will catch bin Laden - accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

That optimism has sparked intense speculation about the fugitives` whereabouts - and a slew of reports that they have been tracked down in the rugged border region. ABC News reported Wednesday that bin Laden had slipped back into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

Beevers declined to comment on that report. He also said the U.S.-led coalition had honed its tactics since invading Afghanistan two years ago to smash al-Qaida`s bases and oust the Taliban for hosting them.

Beevers praised the Pakistani military for a sweep through the border region that netted 25 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects. Pakistani security forces searched an area near the town of Wana, 190 miles west of Pakistan`s capital, Islamabad, on Tuesday.

Authorities interrogated the suspects through the night, trying to determine who they are - and whether they had any links to bin Laden. Among those detained were three Arab women and other foreigners, officials said.

Pakistan has been a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, capturing more than 550 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban members, including key figures in bin Laden`s terror network.

Karzai, meanwhile, cautioned that thousands of supporters of the Taliban regime ousted by a U.S.-led invasion have done no wrong. The U.S. military has also recently appealed to former Taliban to join the reconstruction effort.

``Those who committed crimes, in my opinion, do not go beyond 100 people,`` Karzai told Pakistani television. ``Those are the ones we cannot accept.``

Karzai said former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil had written him a ``nice letter,`` and that he was considering talks in an effort to reintegrate one-time Taliban supporters into society.

``He has asked to meet me, and I am considering that proposal,`` Karzai said.

Such reconciliation efforts could improve the security necessary for the critical vote to go forward.

Karzai said that if U.N. plans to register millions of voters by May succeed, ``we will definitely go ahead and have elections in July. I don`t think we can have it in June.``







Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[konns]

Nun soll er schon längst gefangen sein:

http://www.netzeitung.de/spezial/kampfgegenterror/275363.htm…

[Joerver]

Osama Bin Laden “Captured” In Pak’s NWFP: Iran State Radio

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Tehran/Islamabad, Feb. 28 (NNN): The most wanted man on earth, Al-Qaeda terror network kingpin, Osama Bin laden has been captured by the combined forces of the United States and Pakistan in the tribal region of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Iran`s state radio quoting its “highly-placed source” in the area has reported on Saturday.


Quoted unnamed source the Radio said that the dreaded terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was captured in Pakistan “a long time ago.”

It further said that US President George Walker Bush personally wanted to announce the big news.

Iran’s official news agency IRNA also quoted a `Pushtu’ language (spoken in NWFP) broadcast to say that Bin Laden has been arrested.

When approached to verify the news, IRNA, merely said that it “this information from the Pushtu language broadcast”.

However, both the American as well as Pakistan Governments have strongly denied the report, saying there was no truth whatsoever in it.

Eminent Iranian journalist, Irfan Pervez, while commenting on the report said that none in the country’s administration was ready to confirm the news. He said the even IRNA news agency refused to verify it and merely said that it has been quoting Pushtu language broadcast.

When asked whether there could be any truth in the report, Irfan Pervez maintained that Osama Bin Laden is most sought-after person by most nations and his arrest couldn’t be hidden for long.

Pak expands Anti-Osama operation: Meanwhile, Islamabad admitted expanding its operation to nab the dreaded terrorist with security forces moving into targeted areas along the border with Afghanistan, after satellite telephone intercepts indicated that some al-Qaeda members were hiding there.

Though the top Pakistan officials insist there was no indication that Osama bin Laden was involved in the conversations, last year, wherein the participants discussed a man called "Shaikh", which is believed to be a code name for the al-Qaeda leader.

The operation was based in part on information gleaned from satellite telephone intercepts from the United States and local intelligence data, the security officials said on condition of anonymity. "Some people who were speaking in Arabic have been heard saying Shaikh is in good health," a security official told the AP. It was not immediately clear when the US shared its data with Pakistan.

US, Pakistani and Afghan officials have long suspected that Osama has been hiding in the border region. There has been no confirmation or any hard evidence of his whereabouts in more than two years. The border operations came even before a sweep in Wana in which some 25 suspects were arrested, most of them appeared to be local tribesmen.

Though the troops have been in the tribal regions for more than two years, the security officials say they are being adjusted to suit fresh intelligence data. It was not immediately clear precisely, where the forces were placed or how many were involved.

"We are not close to capturing Osama, but all efforts and operations are directed at finding clues about his whereabouts," a senior government official told AP. "It is a tiring and long process."

The officials told AP news agency they the security forces were also "quietly operating" in other "marked areas." Osama remains the ultimate target. "We are after him, because his capture will help eliminate terror threat in the region," one official told AP.

However, qnalysts doubt the existence of specific intelligence pinpointing the whereabouts of Osama. The 2,450-km Pak-Afghan border is an ideal place to hide, running through sparsely populated mountains and deserts, where many local Pushtun tribesmen are sympathetic to Osama and fiercely protective of fugitives.

"My gut feeling is that still there is no definite clue and I think that we will have to wait," said journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai. Yet Pakistan has beefed up its military presence in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) along the frontier and the 10,600-strong US-led force in Afghanistan has promised a major spring offensive to hunt militants.

"A focus of political will and resources will clearly increase the chances of high quality targets being hit," said Jason Burke, a leading expert and author on al-Qaeda. "The problem is that the practical difficulties operating there remain, as do the obstacles posed by massive local support for the fugitives."

Exactly what the Wana operation yielded is shrouded in mystery. Officials would not say a word on reports that al-Zawahri’s son, Khaled, was among the people detained and handed over to US custody in recent days. He could provide vital clues to his father’s whereabouts, and, therefore, Osama’s.

"I think al-Zawahri will be together with Osama as they have always been," Yusufzai said. "Having met him (Osama) twice and talked at length to al-Zawahri, I don’t think they would surrender or be captured alive," said Yusufzai.

And even if bin Laden was caught or killed, the "war on terror" would not be over, a US official in Kabul said. "In terms of broad Islamic militancy, it doesn’t matter that much." US officials say splinter groups and other extremist outfits also exist to wage attacks on American and other Western targets.

[Joerver]

U.S. denies Iran`s claim bin Laden held



TEHRAN, Iran, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department Saturday denied an Iranian news report that Osama bin Laden has been captured, the Daily Telegraph said.

Iran`s government news agency quoted the state Pashtun radio service to the effect that bin Laden had been captured and was the real reason for U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s Thursday trip to Pakistan.

"The capture of the al-Qaida leader has been made sometime before, but the U.S. President George W. Bush is intending to announce it when the American presidential election is held," the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The Iranian agency attributed the report to a "very reliable source."

Asheq Hossein, the director of Iran`s Pashtun radio service, identified one of the sources as Shamim Shahed of the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation. But Shahed denied being a source for the story.

Hossein said the second, unidentified, source was "a man with close links to intelligence services and Afghan tribal leaders."

The Iranian correspondent responsible for the report said the al-Qaida leader had been seized "a long time ago."

The Saudi-born terrorist is accused of masterminding the Sept.

11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.

[Joerver]

Alle Pressemeldungen, die Mehrzahl der Zeitungen widerspricht der Meldung, dass Bin Laden gefangen wurde.


http://news.google.com/news?dq=&num=30&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&ed…

[rv_2011]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 28. Februar 2004, 16:32
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,288463,00.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,288463,00.html

US-Offensive in Afghanistan

Gerüchte um Bin-Laden-Verhaftung

Die neue Offensive auf der Jagd nach Osama Bin Laden hat eine Flut neuer Gerüchte hervorgerufen. Während iranische Quellen melden, der Terroristen-Führer sei schon seit langem in Gewahrsam, steht die Ergreifung einer britischen Zeitung zufolge unmittelbar bevor. Die Amerikaner werden nicht müde zu dementieren.

Teheran/Wana - So widersprach das US-Verteidigungsministerium am Samstag auch dem iranischen Medienbericht, wonach Bin Laden bereits gefasst worden sein soll. Die iranische Nachrichtenagentur Irna bezog sich dabei auf eine Meldung des staatlichen Rundfunks, der wiederum eine "sehr verlässliche Quelle" zitierte. Auch Pakistans Außenminister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri sagte, er könne den Inhalt der Meldung nicht bestätigen.
...
Der iranische Journalist, der für die Rundfunkmeldung verantwortlich ist, sagte, der Sender habe schon vor einem Jahr die Festnahme Bin Ladens gemeldet. Aus einer neuen Quelle habe er am Freitag die Bestätigung erhalten, dass der al-Qaida-Chef bereits "vor langer Zeit" festgenommen worden sei. "Das kann ein Monat sein, das kann ein Jahr sein, aber er ist festgenommen worden."

Er weigerte sich, seinen Informanten zu nennen oder zu sagen, woher dieser über die Festnahme Bin Ladens Bescheid weiß. "Meine Quelle hat es gesagt, und er weiß es", erklärte er lediglich und fügte hinzu, die US-Regierung halte die Information zurück, um zum passenden Zeitpunkt der Kampagne von Präsident George W. Bush für seine Wiederwahl damit einen Schub zu geben. In den USA finden am 2. November Präsidentenwahlen statt.

Hintergrund der Gerüchte ist die derzeitige Offensive der Terroristenjäger. US-Truppen in Afghanistan und pakistanische Soldaten gehen derzeit in einer abgestimmten Operation gegen Qaida-Mitglieder und Angehörige der radikal-islamischen Taliban im Grenzgebiet beider Länder vor. Am Samstag töteten pakistanische Soldaten dabei mindestens elf Menschen beim Beschuss eines Lieferwagens, in dem sie radikale Muslime vermuteten.
... Ein Geheimdienstvertreter sagte Reuters, erste Ermittlungsergebnisse deuteten darauf hin, dass die Getöteten keine Extremisten seien. Zeugen berichteten, unter den Toten seien fünf Angehörige eines lokalen Stammes und sechs Afghanen.

Vor wenigen Tagen hatte eine britische Zeitung bereits gemeldet, Bin Ladens Versteck in Pakistan sei weiträumig umstellt, seine Festnahme nur eine Frage der Zeit.

[Joerver]

http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb29.html

February 29, 2004
Campaign checklist - first, find Osama ...
Bush must find al-Qaida leader before November election
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
President George W. Bush`s re-election campaign opened this month on the wild mountainous frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan where, according to Pentagon leaks, a cornered Osama bin Laden is about to be captured by U.S. Special Forces.

We have heard such claims before. But this time, large numbers of U.S. troops hunting America`s arch enemy have been told by the White House to get bin Laden at all costs - well before next November`s elections.

And they may be close to their quarry.

Pakistan`s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is playing the key role in hunting bin Laden. He has put his powerful armed forces and intelligence services at the disposal of the U.S., in spite of intense public opposition.

Musharraf is also allowing U.S. forces pursuing bin Laden to covertly operate inside Pakistan.

Politically isolated and increasingly unpopular, Pakistan`s strongman has come to depend on U.S. support to maintain his grip on power, like another U.S. client, Afghanistan`s figurehead leader, Hamid Karzai.

Musharraf`s recent one-sided diplomatic concessions to India over the bitter Kashmir dispute, which shocked and angered many Pakistanis, are a sign of his political weakness and growing U.S. influence over his regime.

Last year, Osama bin Laden predicted his own death in combat in 2004. He may well prove to be right about his own fate. But will removal of Saddam Hussein and then bin Laden make America safer, as Bush claims?

No. According to CIA Director George Tenet, the terrorist threat will remain high, "with or without al-Qaida."

Tenet - for once - is right. Al-Qaida, an organization that never exceeded a few hundred men even at its height, was never the vast threat claimed by the White House and U.S. media. At least a score of other anti-American groups are active from Morocco to Indonesia, the North African Salafist groups being among the most dangerous.

The Bush administration has inflamed most of the Muslim world by its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, antagonistic rhetoric, and tacit support for Israel`s harsh treatment of the Palestinians.

Host of new enemies

Bush`s anti-Islamic policies, designed to play to domestic special interests, have generated a host of new enemies abroad - a perpetual-motion conflict machine run by a president who thrives on war and crises. No wonder anti-American foes are popping up faster than they can be counted.

We are still not even sure al-Qaida was responsible for 9/11, as Bush insists.

After promising in 2002 to release proof of al-Qaida`s guilt for 9/11, the administration never did. Much of the legal evidence cited so far by the U.S. against al-Qaida comes from a former fugitive member who embezzled its funds.

Interestingly, much of the "evidence" about Iraq came from another convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi.

German courts recently determined the 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, not Afghanistan, and could find no direct link to al-Qaida. Al-Qaida leaders certainly applauded 9/11 - after the fact - but may not have been actively involved in planning or finance.

There is little doubt al-Qaida was behind the bombings of U.S. targets abroad, like the USS Cole and attacks in East Africa. The 9/11 plotters were mostly from Saudi Arabia and operated from Germany. Yet 9/11 was the pretext the U.S. used to invade Afghanistan.

U.S. supplied Taliban

Many of what the White House called "terrorist training camps" in Afghanistan were actually bases for groups fighting to liberate communist-ruled Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and Tajikistan; Chinese-ruled Eastern Turkestan; Indian-ruled Kashmir; and the southern Philippines. Their members (some of whom may now be prisoners in Guantanamo) had nothing to do with 9/11. As for the Taliban, the U.S. supplied it with millions in aid until four months before 9/11.

The White House should show the world proof of its claims about al-Qaida and bin Laden. Doing so would convince millions of people who regard him as a hero that he was indeed a cold-blooded murderer.

Capturing Saddam did not long arrest Bush`s falling polls. But eliminating bin Laden, and proclaiming victory in the war on terrorism, will certainly keep Bush in office.

But this strategy has a dangerous flipside. If, before November elections, al-Qaida finally manages to stage a devastating attack on the U.S. mainland, as its No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, threatens, Bush will face popular outrage and be sliced and diced by Democrats.

Luckily for the U.S., what`s left of al-Qaida has so far produced more hot air than explosions. Hopefully, the alleged dangers from al-Qaida will be no more substantial than Iraq`s infamous but non-existent "drones of death."

Bin Laden vows before his death to punish America for Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Unfortunately, he`s usually been a man of his word. So optimism is not yet in order.

[Joerver]

_____________

[Joerver]

Wie mit Hilfe von Handys Terroristen gejagt werden. Chips verschlechtern die Möglichkeiten für El Kaida. Da ich von der Technik keine Ahnung, lest lieber selber.



Sylvain Savolainen for The New York Times
SIM cards connect cellphones to networks. A Swiss company once sold such Subscriber Identity Module cards without asking buyers for identification, making its cards a favorite with criminals. But investigators were able to match the numbers with terror suspects and track some down in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and several countries in Europe. Switzerland is ending anonymous card sales on July 1.
March 4, 2004
How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DESMOND BUTLER

LONDON, March 2 — The terrorism investigation code-named Mont Blanc began almost by accident in April 2002, when authorities intercepted a cellphone call that lasted less than a minute and involved not a single word of conversation.

Investigators, suspicious that the call was a signal between terrorists, followed the trail first to one terror suspect, then to others, and eventually to terror cells on three continents.

What tied them together was a computer chip smaller than a fingernail. But before the investigation wound down in recent weeks, its global net caught dozens of suspected Qaeda members and disrupted at least three planned attacks in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, according to counterterrorism and intelligence officials in Europe and the United States.

The investigation helped narrow the search for one of the most wanted men in the world, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to three intelligence officials based in Europe. American authorities arrested Mr. Mohammed in Pakistan last March.

For two years, investigators now say, they were able to track the conversations and movements of several Qaeda leaders and dozens of operatives after determining that the suspects favored a particular brand of cellphone chip. The chips carry prepaid minutes and allow phone use around the world.

Investigators said they believed that the chips, made by Swisscom of Switzerland, were popular with terrorists because they could buy the chips without giving their names.

"They thought these phones protected their anonymity, but they didn`t," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe. Even without personal information, the authorities were able to conduct routine monitoring of phone conversations.

A half dozen senior officials in the United States and Europe agreed to talk in detail about the previously undisclosed investigation because, they said, it was completed. They also said they had strong indications that terror suspects, alert to the phones` vulnerability, had largely abandoned them for important communications and instead were using e-mail, Internet phone calls and hand-delivered messages.

"This was one of the most effective tools we had to locate Al Qaeda," said a senior counterterrorism official in Europe. "The perception of anonymity may have lulled them into a false sense of security. We now believe that Al Qaeda has figured out that we were monitoring them through these phones."

The officials called the operation one of the most successful investigations since Sept. 11, 2001, and an example of unusual cooperation between agencies in different countries. Led by the Swiss, the investigation involved agents from more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Britain and Italy.

Cellphones have played a major role in the constant jousting between terrorists and intelligence agencies. In their requests for more investigative powers, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other officials have repeatedly cited the importance of monitoring portable phones. Each success by investigators seems to drive terrorists either to more advanced — or to more primitive — communications.

During the American bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001, American authorities reported hearing Osama bin Laden speaking to his associates on a satellite phone. Since then, Mr. bin Laden has communicated with handwritten messages delivered by trusted couriers, officials said.

In 2002 the German authorities broke up a cell after monitoring calls by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been linked by some top American officials to Al Qaeda, in which he could be heard ordering attacks on Jewish targets in Germany. Since then, investigators say, Mr. Zarqawi has been more cautious.

"If you beat terrorists over the head enough, they learn," said Col. Nick Pratt, a counterterrorism expert and professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. "They are smart."

Officials say that on the rare occasion when operatives still use mobile phones, they keep the calls brief and use code words.

"They know we are on to them and they keep evolving and using new methods, and we keep finding ways to make life miserable for them," said a senior Saudi official. "In many ways, it`s like a cat-and-mouse game."

Some Qaeda lieutenants used cellphones only to arrange a conversation on a more secure telephone. It was one such brief cellphone call that set off the Mont Blanc investigation.

The call was placed on April 11, 2002, by Christian Ganczarski, a 36-year-old Polish-born German Muslim whom the German authorities suspected was a member of Al Qaeda. From Germany, Mr. Ganczarski called Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, said to be Al Qaeda`s military commander, who was running operations at the time from a safe house in Karachi, Pakistan, according to two officials involved in the investigation.

The two men did not speak during the call, counterterrorism officials said. Instead, the call was intended to alert Mr. Mohammed of a Qaeda suicide bombing mission at a synagogue in Tunisia, which took place that day, according to two senior officials. The attack killed 21 people, mostly German tourists.

Through electronic surveillance, the German authorities traced the call to Mr. Mohammed`s Swisscom cellphone, but at first they did not know it belonged to him. Two weeks after the Tunisian bombing, the German police searched Mr. Ganczarski`s house and found a log of his many numbers, including one in Pakistan that was eventually traced to Mr. Mohammed. The German police had been monitoring Mr. Ganczarski because he had been seen in the company of militants at a mosque in Duisburg, and last June the French police arrested him in Paris.

Mr. Mohammed`s cellphone number, and many others, were given to the Swiss authorities for further investigation. By checking Swisscom`s records, Swiss officials discovered that many other Qaeda suspects used the Swisscom chips, known as Subscriber Identity Module cards, which allow phones to connect to cellular networks.

For months the Swiss, working closely with counterparts in the United States and Pakistan, used this information in an effort to track Mr. Mohammed`s movements inside Pakistan. By monitoring the cellphone traffic, they were able to get a fix on Mr. Mohammed, but the investigators did not know his specific location, officials said.

Once Swiss agents had established that Mr. Mohammed was in Karachi, the American and Pakistani security services took over the hunt with the aid of technology at the United States National Security Agency, said two senior European intelligence officials. But it took months for them to actually find Mr. Mohammed "because he wasn`t always using that phone," an official said. "He had many, many other phones."

Mr. Mohammed was a victim of his own sloppiness, said a senior European intelligence official. He was meticulous about changing cellphones, but apparently he kept using the same SIM card.

In the end, the authorities were led directly to Mr. Mohammed by a C.I.A. spy, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, said in a speech last month. A senior American intelligence official said this week that the capture of Mr. Mohammed "was entirely the result of excellent human operations."

When Swiss and other European officials heard that American agents had captured Mr. Mohammed last March, "we opened a big bottle of Champagne," a senior intelligence official said.

Among Mr. Mohammed`s belongings, the authorities seized computers, cellphones and a personal phone book that contained hundreds of numbers. Tracing those numbers led investigators to as many as 6,000 phone numbers, which amounted to a virtual road map of Al Qaeda`s operations, officials said.

The authorities noticed that many of Mr. Mohammed`s communications were with operatives in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Last April, using the phone numbers, officials in Jakarta broke up a terror cell connected to Mr. Mohammed, officials said.

After the suicide bombings of three housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 12, the Saudi authorities used the phone numbers to track down two "live sleeper cells." Some members were killed in shootouts with the authorities; others were arrested.

Meanwhile, the Swiss had used Mr. Mohammed`s phone list to begin monitoring the communications and activities of nearly two dozen of his associates. "Huge resources were devoted to this," a senior official said. "Many countries were constantly doing surveillance, monitoring the chatter."

Investigators were particularly alarmed by one call they overheard last June. The message: "The big guy is coming. He will be here soon."

An official familiar with the calls said, "We did not know who he was, but there was a lot of chatter." Whoever "the big guy" was, the authorities had his number. A Swisscom chip was in the phone.

"Then we waited and waited, and we were increasingly anxious and worried because we didn`t know who it was or what he had intended to do," an official said.

But in July, the man believed to be "the big guy," Abdullah Oweis, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in Qatar. "He is one of those people able to move within Western societies and to help the mujahedeen, who have lesser experience," an official said. "He was at the very center of the Al Qaeda hierarchy. He was a major facilitator."

In January, the operation led to the arrests of eight people accused of being members of a Qaeda logistical cell in Switzerland. Some are suspected of helping with the suicide bombings of the housing compounds in Riyadh, which killed 35 people, including 8 Americans.

Later, European authorities discovered that Mr. Mohammed had contacted a company in Geneva that sells Swisscom phone cards. Investigators said he ordered the cards in bulk.

The Mont Blanc inquiry has wound down, although investigators are still monitoring the communications of a few people. Christian Neuhaus, a spokesman for Swisscom, confirmed that the company had cooperated with the inquiry, but declined to comment.

Last year, Switzerland`s legislature passed a law making it illegal to purchase cellphone chips without providing personal information, following testimony from a Swiss federal prosecutor, Claude Nicati, that the Swisscom cards had become popular with Qaeda operatives. The law goes into effect on July 1.

One senior official said the authorities were grateful that Qaeda members were so loyal to Swisscom.

Another official agreed: "They`d switch phones but use the same cards. The people were stupid enough to use the same cards all of the time. It was a very good thing for us."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[rv_2011]

Dass man Mobiltelefone überwachen kann, deren Nummer bekannt ist (ohne dass der Besitzer bekannt ist) ist technisch ein alter Hut. Ich würde mich sehr wundern, wenn das den Al-Khaida-Leuten unbekannt wäre.

Sie hatten möglicherweise nicht damit gerechnet, dass diese Nummer in Verdacht geriete. Nachdem dies über die Duisburg-Connection geschehen war, war der Rest Routine.

Der Standort von eingeschalteten Mobiltelefonen lässt sich leicht (nicht nur während eines Gesprächs) bis auf wenige 100 m lokalisieren; durch gezieltes Anpeilen mit Spezialempfängern lässt sich diese Genauigkeit noch wesentlich verbessern.

Natürlich versuchen die Geheimdienste auch, verdächtige Nummern durch Scannen des Mobilfunkverkehrs nach verdächtigen Stichwörtern herauszufinden.

[Joerver]

RV
dass man mit Hilfe von Mobiltelefonen den Standort des Telefonieres orten kann, ist mir bekannt, und das wurde auch schon in manchem Hollywood-Film verbraten.

Da nun die NYTimes den Beitrag so groß aufbereitet und auf der Titelseite veröffentlichte, ließ mich annehmen, dass ich nur aus Mangel an technischen Kenntnissen, den Fortschritt nicht erkennen konnte.

Aber es scheint nicht so zu sein. Man hatte nur mal Glück gehabt.

Und Glück können die US-Dienste wirklich gebrauchen, nachdem sie so gebäutelt wurden.
________________

[Joerver]

Die neusten Meldungen über die Jagd nach Bin Laden. Asia Times ist immer auf dem neusten Stand.

http://www.atimes.com

Middle East

THE ROVING EYE
Get Osama - but where, and when?
By Pepe Escobar

Asia Times Online has learned from tribal-connected sources in Peshawar in Pakistan that Osama bin Laden is believed to have left southeastern Afghanistan late last week for South Waziristan in Pakistan. According to the sources, and as has been reported in sections of the Pakistani Urdu Press, bin Laden is said to be under the protection of concentric rings formed by dozens of al-Qaeda fighters and more than 1,200 Taliban - all easily blended in as local Pashtun tribals.

This means that bin Laden and his entourage were previously hiding in Paktika province in Afghanistan, and may have crossed to South Waziristan via the Khand pass - in the easternmost flank of the rugged Toba Kakar mountain range, where the weather is unforgiving and the desolation extreme: the nearest town is Wana, in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan.

This information, if confirmed, also contradicts reports of a previous bin Laden sighting, already reported in Asia Times Online, according to which the fugitives - in much smaller number - were placed further south, between the tiny villages of Khanozai and Murgha Faqirzai, in Balochistan province. So bin Laden was not in Kunar province in Afghanistan or in Pakistani Balochistan, but in an Afghan province, Paktika, where every day there are clashes between Taliban and US forces.

The Peshawar sources confirm numerous local reports that bin Laden and his close entourage have come practically face-to-face with US patrols on several occasions in the past few weeks in Paktika - so they had to find a safer refuge.

But it could be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. US Commando 121, headed by General William Boykin, with input from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is preparing to pounce. According to the ISI version currently circulating in Peshawar, the bin Laden group was located through an intercepted satellite phone call. Al-Qaeda has not used satphones in the Pak-Afghan border since December 2001, but Taliban commanders still frequently do.

What the ISI rumor mill is actually disseminating in the axis of Islamabad-Peshawar is that now they seem to know exactly where bin Laden and his group of fugitives are hiding. The ISI has even laid out the overall strategy: apply maximum pressure on Pashtun tribals in the Wana area, squeeze the fugitives out of access to food, water and crucial supplies, and then attack them en masse by about mid-March.

Pashtun ISI operatives are supposed to be blending in with the tribals to gather local intelligence before the final assault. The ISI-concocted endgame would be to capture bin Laden inside Pakistani territory, and then move him to Afghanistan - where the big news would be announced by Commando 121, or by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, or by both.

Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan has admitted on the record that "a special operation" will soon begin in Wana to capture al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. But he has vehemently denied that at least 11,000 US troops and Special Forces will be fighting along with the Pakistani army. "If they come, they will remain on the other side of the border in Afghanistan and only Pakistani troops will take part in the `special operation` on our side." Pakistan has already deployed more than 70,000 troops to the Pak-Afghan border, and more are planned.

Independent sources in Peshawar tell Asia Times Online that the whole arrangement may be part of a secret deal discussed face-to-face last week between US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President General Pervez Musharraf. The Pakistanis do the hard work to capture bin Laden in the volatile, tribal Pakistani side - helping Commando 121 and other Special Forces. But the big news will come from Afghanistan. Understandably, the director general of Inter-Services Public Relations, Major-General Shaukat Sultan, vehemently denied on Pakistani TV any suggestion of a deal.

Interior Minister Syed Saleh Hayat admits that a huge operation is already going on in Wana, saying: "We have secured our borders as far as it is possible. On the other side of the border, in Afghanistan ... US government and coalition forces and even NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] are increasing their forces." But the interior minister regards the tribal whereabouts of bin Laden as "mere speculation ... According to intelligence reports and our own assessment, it seems that Osama and his chief lieutenant may be present in this area. But this is not the final word."

Which begs the question: Does anybody really know where Osama is hiding? As to the final word, the whole point is to determine when the Pentagon and the White House want bin Laden captured: now - eight months before the US presidential election - or in October, just before the polls.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

[Joerver]

Diesmal war der Spiegel 1 Minute schneller.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 05. März 2004, 15:22
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,289214,00.html
High-Tech-Fahndung am Hindukusch

"Fangt Osama!"

Acht Monate vor der US-Präsidentenwahl ist die Jagd nach Osama Bin Laden massiv ausgeweitet worden. Durch den Einsatz von Hightech-Geräten soll die Bergregion zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan nun lückenlos überwacht werden. Kürzlich soll der Terrorchef seinen Häschern jedoch im letzten Moment erneut entkommen sein.

Hamburg - Die Suche nach dem Chef der Terrororganisation al-Qaida soll mit den Spionagegeräten rund um die Uhr möglich sein, berichtet der US-Sender CNN. Pakistanische und US-Spezialeinheiten wollen in ihrer gemeinsamen Offensive dem Staatsfeind Nummer eins so nahe kommen wie seit Ende 2001 nicht mehr. Hohe US-Regierungsmitarbeiter seien davon überzeugt, dass Bin Laden bereits die Truppenbewegungen um ihn herum registriert habe, berichtet CNN.
Laut "Asia Times", die sich auf Verbindungsleute in den afghanischen Stämmen beruft, soll Bin Laden allerdings deshalb schon vergangene Woche den Südosten Afghanistans verlassen haben und ins pakistanische Süd-Waziristan geflohen sein - eine Region in der das Klima hart und die Umgebung extrem trostlos ist. Demnach soll sich der Qaida-Chef unter dem Schutz der Bergvölker befinden, die mit Dutzenden von Qaida-Kämpfern und mehr als 1200 Taliban eine Art Schutzring um Bin Laden gebildet haben. "Fangt Osama - aber wo, und wann?", kommentiert die "Asia Times" die verstärkten Anstrengungen.

Die Online-Ausgabe des britischen Rundfunks BBC berichtet unterdessen von einem Fax eines pakistanischen Regierungsmitarbeiters, demzufolge Bin Laden vor drei Tagen nur knapp pakistanischen Häschern auf deren Gebiet entkommen konnte. Gerüchte, Bin Laden könnte sich wieder in den Bergen um Tora Bora nahe der afghanischen Stadt Jalalabad aufhalten, hält der BBC-Reporter Andrew North allerdings für unwahrscheinlich - nach seinen Recherchen vor Ort hält er diese Region mittlerweile für zu stark überwacht.

Elvis und Bin Laden

Unterstützt werde die Jagd der Eliteeinheiten von U-2-Spionageflugzeugen, die aus 21 Kilometer Höhe Bilder liefern können, berichtet CNN weiter. Zudem würden unbemannte "Predator"-Drohnen eingesetzt, die aus mehr als 7000 Meter Höhe Fahrzeuge und Personen sehr genau ausmachen können und zum Teil mit Raketen bestückt seien. Sensoren an den Bergpässen sollen darüber hinaus jede Bewegung von Fahrzeugen registrieren und umgehend über Satellit an die Spionagezentren der Amerikaner melden. Laut CNN hat die US-Armee in jüngster Zeit zu diesem Zweck die Übertragungsmelder in der Region verstärken lassen.

Offiziell gibt es für diese Aufrüstung bei der Jagd nach Bin Laden natürlich keine Bestätigung. Auch nicht für die Zahl von 70.000 pakistanischen Soldaten, noch für die 11.000 US-Soldaten, die in der Grenzregion aktiv sein sollen.

Doch das nährt vor allem die Gerüchteküche: Wie eine irakische Zeitung jüngst meldete, sei der Terroristenchef längst gefangen worden und es werde nur noch der richtige Termin für seine Zurschaustellung abgewartet - nämlich kurz vor der Präsidentschaftswahl in den USA. Anderslautende Gerüchte besagen, das die US-Regierung genau wisse, wo er steckt, und doch erst im Oktober - kurz vor dem Urnengang in den USA - zuschlagen will.

All diese wilden Spekulationen und Verschwörungstheorien haben US-Militärs immer wieder zurückgewiesen. Müde von den ewigen Dementis belustigen sie den US-Armeesprecher für die Region, Leutnant Bryan Hilferty, mittlerweile: "Ich kann nicht auf jede Spekulationen über jede Sichtung von Elvis oder Bin Laden eingehen", sagte er heute der Nachrichtenagentur Reuters.

Auch General John Abizaid, Chef des US-Zentralkommandos, sagte kürzlich, er habe keine Veranlassung anzunehmen, dass Bin Laden noch in diesem Jahr gefangen genommen oder getötet werden könne, wie immer wieder kolportiert wird. Aber, sagt der General, "wir bereiten der Qaida bis Ende des Jahres eine sehr schmerzvolle Zeit."

Lars Langenau


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

Und da sich auch Heise dem Thema gewidmei hat. Dieser Artikel ist eine Kurzfassung des NYTimes Artikels in #38.
Es war die Nachtigall und nicht die Lerche! Es war die Prepaid-Karte nicht das Handy!

Al Qaida und die Abhöroperation "Mont Blanc"

Michaela Simon 05.03.2004
Sie sind verhaftet. Und Swisscom bedankt sich für Ihre Treue

Einem Bericht [1] in der New York Times zufolge haben sich Prepaid-SIM-Karten der Schweizer Firma Swisscom [2] bei Al Qaida-Terroristen großer Beliebtheit erfreut.

Die Markentreue des Terrornetzwerkes soll zu einer Reihe wichtiger Verhaftungen beigetragen und geplante Anschläge in Indonesien und Saudi-Arabien vereitelt haben. Die Swisscom-Chips sollen von den Terroristen verwendet worden sein, da beim Kauf keine Identifikationspflicht besteht; die Karte kann anonym mit dem gewünschten Betrag nachgeladen werden. (Eine dementsprechende Gesetzesänderung greift im Juli dieses Jahres.)

Die Operation hieß "Mont Blanc" und sie dauerte mehr als zwei Jahre und umspannte mehrere Länder. Zwei Jahre, in denen mit der Hilfe von Swisscom Gespräche abgehört und Bewegungen von Al Qaida Mitgliedern beobachtet wurden. "Sie dachten, diese Telefone würden ihre Anonymität schützen, aber das taten sie nicht", zitiert die New York Times einen europäischen Geheimdienstler. Denn auch ohne persönliche Informationen waren die Behörden imstande, die Gespräche routinemäßig zu überwachen. Es waren "Gespräche", die meist kürzer als eine Minute dauerten und in denen oft kein Wort gesprochen wurde. Aber das Schweigen von Teilnehmer zu Teilnehmer war den Ermittlern aussagekräftig genug.




So führten die stummen Signale die Terroristenjäger in verschiedene Zellen des Terrornetzwerkes und sollen u.a. auch die Verhaftung des mutmaßlichen 9-11-Masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [3] ermöglicht haben. Obwohl es nicht einfach gewesen sei, "Mr. Mohammed" zu fassen, da er "viele viele Satellitentelefone" besessen habe, sei er, so die New York Times, letztlich ein Opfer seiner eigenen Unvorsichtigkeit ("sloppiness"), geworden. Denn während er geradezu manisch seine Handy gewechselt habe, habe er immer wieder die gleiche SIM-Karte benutzt. So auch viele seiner Kollegen. Erstaunlich naiv, doch wie es die Legende will, soll sich auf dem Gebiet der Telefonüberwachung auch die andere Seite schon peinliche Ausrutscher erlaubt haben. So kursiert die Mär, dass Bin Laden während der Belagerung von Tora Bora seine Verfolger abschütteln konnte, indem er sein Telefon einfach einem treuen Gefolgsmann gab, der damit erfolgreich falsche Fährten gelegt haben soll (vgl. Bin Ladin und das Satellitentelefon).

Die gestern in der New York Times vorgestellte Operation "Mont Blanc", bis vor wenigen Wochen noch "eines der effektivsten Mittel, um Al Qaida zu lokalisieren", da sich die Terroristen im Schutz einer vorgeblichen Anonymität gewiegt hätten, soll nun vorbei sein, da die Verfolgten Verdacht geschöpft hätten. Deshalb könne nun auch ein entsprechender Artikel erscheinen. Laut Informationen, die BA-Sprecher Hansjürg Mark Wiedmer der Nachrichtenagentur sda gegeben haben soll, ist die Operation, an der neben der Schweiz noch die USA, Pakistan, Saudi-Arabien, Deutschland, Großbritannien und Italien teilgenommen haben, jedoch noch gar nicht ganz abgeschlossen.

Klarheit gibt es in solchen Geschichten selten. Wahrscheinlich war den Behörden einfach mal wieder an einer Erfolgsgeschichte gelegen, nachdem in den letzten Tagen wieder etwas über die Jagd auf Bin Laden gespottet worden war (vgl. Auf der Jagd nach Bin Laden). Über die Ausweichtaktiken der Terroristen als Folge der Antastbarkeit der telefonischen Kommunikation wird viel spekuliert (vgl. Die al-Qaida-Terroristen und die Steganografie). Vor allem die von Hand überbrachte Botschaft soll sich wieder zunehmender Beliebtheit erfreuen.


Links

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/international/europe/04PHO…
[2] http://www.swisscom.com/GHQ/content?lang=de
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Shaikh_Mohammed

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/te/16886/1.html

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Forces Kill Nine Suspected Taliban


By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
The Associated Press
Saturday, March 6, 2004; 6:18 AM


KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. special operations forces killed nine suspected Taliban rebels in a firefight in eastern Afghanistan after the militants tried to sneak by their position, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday.

The clash occurred Friday east of Orgun, about 105 miles south of Kabul and not far from the border with Pakistan, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a military spokesman, said.

No casualties were reported among the 10 Americans involved or an Afghan army battalion that was with them. It was not clear whether Afghan army forces took part in the shooting.

Hilferty said the clash began when a "platoon sized" unit of suspected Taliban - about 30-40 armed men - tried to flank the position held by the Americans and their Afghan army allies.

"I don`t know who opened fire first," Hilferty said at a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

After the clash, the remaining rebels ran off, he said.

On Feb. 27, U.S. troops shot dead a gunman in a clash near the American base at Orgun, in a turbulent swath of rugged country where the military has vowed a spring offensive against al-Qaida and Taliban suspects.

Orgun is in Afghanistan`s Paktika province, just across the border from Pakistan`s South Waziristan tribal region. Pakistani authorities recently launched a military operation in the semiautonomous tribal belt to capture al-Qaida suspects or force them to flee. No major arrests have been made.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are both believed to be hiding out in the long border region, though there has been no specific word on their whereabouts for some time.

On Thursday, American forces detained 14 suspected Taliban north of Khost, another Afghan town near the Pakistan border, Hilferty said.

Hilferty on Saturday declined to say whether the promised stepped-up spring offensive has begun, saying only that Americans and their allies had been patrolling through the winter as well.

However, he denied that U.S. forces were searching for bin Laden around Tora Bora, the southeastern cave complex where the military believes bin Laden was hiding as the Taliban collapsed during U.S.-led airstrikes in late 2001.

Hilferty also said that revised American tactics - including basing smaller groups of U.S. forces in communities - were starting to pay off with better intelligence.


© 2004 The Associated Press

[Joerver]

The Council on Foreign Relations ist der bekannteste US-ThinkTank, relativ überparteilich für US-Verhältnisse.
In regelmäßigen Abständen bekommt man unter `Q&A` Informationen zu aktuellen politischen Ereignissen oder Fragen.
URL: http://www.cfr.org/

Q&A: Catching bin Laden

From the Council on Foreign Relations, March 4, 2003

Are coalition forces closing in on Osama bin Laden?

We don`t know. U.S. and Pakistani administration and military officials have announced stepped-up efforts to find bin Laden and other Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. The spring campaign is focused on the mountainous region along the 2,450-kilometer Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and ousted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar are believed to be hiding. The crackdown includes an increase in the number of troops devoted to hunting bin Laden, new intelligence efforts, and major shifts in tactics by ground forces.

What have officials said about the hunt?

Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hilferty, senior spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said January 29, "We have a variety of intelligence, and we`re sure we`re going to catch Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar this year." Officials have since backpedaled. At a press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul February 26, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said forces hunting bin Laden are no "closer or farther at any given moment. ... I suspect that we`ll find [the capture] is accomplished at some point in the future, and I wouldn`t have any idea when."

What new tactics are coalition forces using?

Press reports say Task Force 121, the secret team of Special Operations forces and CIA personnel established in the fall 2003 to find Saddam Hussein, will shift its efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan. The team will use tactics similar to those that led U.S. forces to Saddam Hussein, press reports say, including questioning people with familial and tribal bonds to the fugitives. Additionally, Lieutenant General David W. Barno, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, said in a briefing February 17 that the 11,000 American forces in Afghanistan have shifted tactics over the last three months. Instead of mounting short raids into the border region, 50-soldier platoons are living in area villages for months at a time in order to develop relationships with locals, glean intelligence, and work with international aid groups.

How do forces cooperate with the aid groups?

In order for Afghan locals to welcome U.S. forces into their villages and share intelligence with them, many experts say, the United States must make inroads by providing aid, reconstruction, and security. "Based on my experience [operating locally] in the Balkans, if American soldiers, when they show up, do good things, they can win over gradually all but the most violently antagonistic," says Colonel Peter A. Henry, U.S. Army military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. By maintaining a military and international aid presence in the tribal border regions, U.S. forces "will present terrorist organizations with an impossible situation, one where they cannot demonstrate any viable alternative of value to the Afghan people," Barno said. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan are developing Regional Development Zones (RDZs), within which officials will coordinate reconstruction, international aid, and security in each region of the country. Coalition-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams, made up of 60 to 100 military and civilian personnel, will be integrated in the RDZ program. The first RDZ is being established in Kandahar.

Will the locally based tactics work?

Experts disagree. It`s a "viable strategy ... the better friends you are with the people who live there, the more likely you are to uncover the bit of knowledge that will lead to the capture of enemy forces," says Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Coss, military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. So far, the tactics have generated some success: in the last month, civilians have turned in more weapons caches than in the prior six months, Barno said.

But some experts say the strategy is flawed. The relatively small number of U.S. forces will have difficulty covering a significant portion of the vast border area, Henry says. While some locals may cooperate, others who have strong bonds to the fugitives may alert them to the presence of U.S. forces, says Mahnaz Ispahani, the Council`s senior fellow for South and West Asia. The language barrier will impede close relationships between soldiers and locals. The troops` use of Afghan translators from other parts of the country may provoke hostility among border-area residents, according to Kathy Gannon, Associated Press bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She adds that publicity surrounding the crackdown is sure to put al Qaeda on the run. "Everybody is talking about this spring offensive, so what are these people doing? [Just] sitting in the border area thinking, `Do you think they`re coming?`"

Has the U.S. Army successfully used these locally based tactics before?

Yes. Press reports say U.S. forces living in Iraqi villages were able to gather intelligence on Saddam Hussein`s whereabouts from locals and, because they were based nearby, act on it almost immediately. The army has received training in the tactics at least since the early 1990s--they were used in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia--and some military experts say the tactics were also employed successfully in Vietnam. Coss, who used this approach in the Balkans, says, "The more you interact with the population, the more you can find out valid grievances and the more you can address, the more you become a trusted agent--then they`re willing to tell you more and more information."

What are Pakistan`s new methods?

For the past two months, Pakistani officials have been using a new strategy in the semi-autonomous border region called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). They demand that tribal elders hand over Qaeda members hidden in their villages or face punishments, including destruction of houses and withholding of government funds, inflicted on the entire tribe. In December, officials insisted that tribal leaders hand over some 80 suspected Qaeda members. Only about half--mostly low-level operatives--were turned in by the February 20 deadline. British colonialists used similar tactics in the early 1900s to control criminal activity in the tribal areas.

Pakistani officials say they will also increase the number of troops in the border region from 25,000 to some 80,000, and the number of troops in the South Waziristan Agency--which falls within the FATA and is believed to be a Qaeda hideout--from 4,000 to 12,000. The FATA traditionally were under the control of local authorities; Pakistani forces entered for the first time in December 2001. While U.S. troops are not authorized to patrol on Pakistan`s side of the border, Barno said they are using a "hammer-and-anvil approach," in which Pakistanis drive terrorists over the border to Afghanistan, where coalition troops are waiting to capture them.

Will Pakistan follow through on its threats to punish tribes for failing to produce Qaeda suspects?

Experts are uncertain. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has strong ties to the religious parties that support the Taliban in the border region, Ispahani says. While reports say some tribal leaders burned the houses of villagers harboring Qaeda members who weren`t handed over by the deadline, it`s unclear whether Pakistani troops followed through on their threats. They did, however, conduct raids February 24 in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, to find the Qaeda members not turned over by tribal elders, Pakistani officials said. They captured some 25 people, along with weapons, passports, and documents.

Will Pakistan`s tactics work?

"It`s not such a simple matter to have them turn over their brethren" related by blood, marriage, and tribal affinity, says Ispahani. Gannon agrees that while the threats may persuade people not to harbor Qaeda members, there is no incentive for tribes to hand them over. But others say the raids will be successful if they put al Qaeda on the run, especially over the border toward coalition troops patrolling in Afghanistan. Citing U.S. intelligence officials, ABC News reported February 25 that bin Laden and Zawahiri had crossed the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan in the wake of the Pakistani raids.

Have these tactics worked before?

Yes. The Taliban, for instance, significantly decreased opium production in the tribal areas using a similar strategy, Gannon says. They told village elders and mullahs that they would face consequences if any villager grew poppies, "so you had enforcement done by villagers because they would be held responsible," she says. "It makes sense to look at what worked ... and use the traditional systems."

What are Musharraf`s motives?

The spring offensive marks a sharp shift for Musharraf, many experts say. U.S. officials had complained about a lack of full Pakistani cooperation in anti-Qaeda efforts in the tribal regions. But experts say two attempts on Musharraf`s life in December, blamed on Islamist extremists, spurred him to intensify his efforts. Many experts say the situation on the Pakistan border is critically important to Afghan security, and the United States, in the wake of attacks in Afghanistan against local residents and aid workers and concerns about guaranteeing the security of elections scheduled for this summer, has increased pressure on Musharraf to crack down. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet made an unpublicized visit to Pakistan in February. Events surrounding the recent discovery of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan`s illicit sale of nuclear secrets and his subsequent pardon--uncontested by the United States--may also have affected Musharraf`s actions, some experts say. "Khan may be related in the sense that the Pakistanis are more cooperative as we have been more cooperative with them," says Nicholas Platt, president of the Asia Society and former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

Why are U.S. forces in Afghanistan shifting their tactics now?

Several reasons, experts say. Qaeda members resume activity as the warmer weather approaches--and last spring, many Special Operations forces and intelligence analysts were tied up in Iraq. Al Qaeda has stopped moving in large, easily detectable groups, and now travels in smaller units, according to Barno. To adapt to al Qaeda`s changing tactics, it`s advantageous for troops to be in the border area. Some analysts have said the United States may be cracking down to improve Bush`s re-election prospects, but others--like Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs and former Clinton National Security Council official--say national security operations of this magnitude are generally not affected by purely political motives. The new strategy may also be a sign that the situation in the border region is improving. "The local security environment must be permissive enough that we`re willing to send our forces out in the populace for long periods of time," Henry says. But some experts say the reason for the shift in tactics might be just the opposite--the region may be so dangerous that international aid groups cannot work without military forces beside them.

Does it matter if bin Laden is caught?

His capture would have an "enormous symbolic impact on jihadism and al Qaeda, but ... we`re not under any illusions that it will solve terrorism," says Bruce Hoffman, an expert on global terrorism and director of the RAND Corporation`s Washington, D.C. office. It may even have the opposite effect, he says, because jihadis might rally around the terror leader as a martyr. "Fundamentally, he built a movement ... that he believes should and would outlive him," and has provided money to sustain it beyond his lifetime, Hoffman says. And, he adds, "getting bin Laden and not getting [al Qaeda No. 2] Zawahiri doesn`t give us anything."

-- By Claire Miller, research associate, cfr.org



Copyright 2004 |

[Joerver]

Es ist und bleibt ein Thema:

The Hunt Heats Up
The man in charge of catching Osama bin Laden `can drive a knife through your ribs in a nanosecond.` Inside the search.

Bertrand Meunier / Agence Vu for Newsweek
On the trail: Pakistani soldiers hunt for al Qaeda in Karachi
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
NewsweekMarch 15 issue - Admirers of Bill McRaven like to tell a story of his courage and grit. Not against the enemy, but against the legendarily ruthless Dick Marcinko, a gung-ho Navy SEAL commander in the Vietnam era who used to swallow sacs of cobra venom and boast that "killing is my mission." Marcinko once ordered McRaven, then a young lieutenant on the super-elite SEAL Team Six, to perform "some questionable activities," recounts a former Special Forces commander. McRaven refused and "would not back down." (Marcinko did not return phone calls seeking comment.) "McRaven was a hero among all the junior officers for his stand," says the commander. "It was considered a career-ending move."
Not quite. William H. McRaven, it seems, was too good an officer. Today he is a rear admiral, and his new job is one that could not rank higher on President George W. Bush`s to-do list in election year 2004: nailing Osama bin Laden. It is a job that will require much ruthlessness—a good deal more of that, perhaps, than personal honor. NEWSWEEK has learned that McRaven is heading up Task Force 121, a covert, miniature strike force with a command structure so secretive that McRaven`s role hasn`t even been reported until now.

Task Force 121, which also helped to capture Saddam Hussein under McRaven`s command, represents something brand-new in warfare, a pure hybrid of civilian intelligence and military striking power. It is the most ambitious melding yet of CIA assets, Special Forces (mainly the Army`s Delta Force) and the Air Force. Formed late last year as part of Joint Special Operations Command—the secret "black ops" under Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who until recently was deputy operations director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—it is designed to produce a lightning-fast reaction should intel locate bin Laden or any other "high-value targets" anywhere for a few hours. It`s a work in progress: CIA Director George Tenet meets frequently with Gen. John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, to nurture the marriage.

McRaven has managed to bridge both the civilian and military worlds. While working at the National Security Council after 9/11, he was principal author of the White House strategy for combating terrorism. McRaven also literally wrote the book on Special Ops, a 1995 history of surgical strike teams from the Nazi rescue of Mussolini in 1943 to the 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe. And his thesis at naval postgrad school is now mandatory reading for Special Ops commanders. "Bill is reputed to be the smartest SEAL that ever lived," says a former commander who knows McRaven well. "He is physically tough, compassionate and can drive a knife through your ribs in a nanosecond." According to his former boss at the White House, Gen. Wayne Downing, "if anybody is smart and cunning enough to get [bin Laden], McRaven and the Delta and SEAL Team Six guys he now commands will do it."

Is anybody good enough? The hunt for bin Laden is an unprecedented confrontation between 21st-century technology and age-old guerrilla tactics. While the elusive terror chieftain hides in mountain caves and scurries along mule trails, Task Force 121 "bytes" away at him and his chief deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, with the best the Information Age has to offer. Using powerful software called Analyst`s Notebook, which helps to piece together data on criminal and terror networks—Special Forces command just ordered up more copies—military and intelligence officials are increasingly confident they are narrowing bin Laden`s whereabouts.

It`s a classic cat-and-mouse game in which tactics abruptly shift on both sides. In years past, U.S. officials listened in on bin Laden`s cell-phone conversations. But he apparently no longer dares to use electronic means of communication. So McRaven and his hunters are now trying to snare his couriers in transit. They scored a major victory two months ago with the capture of Hassan Ghul, a Qaeda operative who was carrying what U.S. officials say was a strategic memo from Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the mysterious terror leader allegedly behind the bombings of Shiites in Iraq. Ghul also yielded intel on bin Laden`s position. Key to the search is "accumulated humint," or human intelligence, says one insider. Other officials tell NEWSWEEK that an increasing number of "data points"—reports of sightings—have created an ever-clearer picture of bin Laden`s area of operation as he appears to shuttle between Pakistan and —Afghanistan. Now they`ve focused that picture to the point where they have been able to send in Predator unmanned aerial vehicles to search for him.

If the hunters are getting closer to their prey, it`s also thanks to a renewed effort by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to infiltrate the border regions sympathetic to Al Qaeda. On Saturday, the BBC reported that bin Laden narrowly escaped one such Pakistani raid, and NEWSWEEK confirmed that such an incident occurred. Within the past few weeks, some intelligence sources say, a U.S. Predator also spotted a suspect believed to be Al-Zawahiri somewhere in the border area.

NEWSWEEK ON AIR | 3/07/04
Terror: Al-Qaeda Inside and Out
Michael Hirsh, NEWSWEEK Senior Editor/Washington, and Richard Pollak, Author of The Colombo Bay

• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air show
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4467755/

Some Afghan and Pakistani sources, however, insist that bin Laden is several steps ahead—and that he will continue to outsmart his pursuers. A Taliban official in Pakistan, contacted by NEWSWEEK, says he`s heard that both top Qaeda leaders moved to more secure and separate locations in January, before the spate of publicity about an American "spring offensive." The Taliban official learned that, he said, from a ranking Qaeda operative, a Yemeni who told him that other Qaeda and Taliban fighters had moved into Afghan provinces more than 100 miles from the Pakistani border. "We decided to leave the dangerous zone for safer areas," the Arab told the Taliban official, who goes by the nom de guerre Zabihullah. "The sheik is now in the most secure area he has ever been in," the Arab said, referring to bin Laden. "We were all laughing at all these recent reports that the Americans had our sheik cornered."

Zabihullah also said he received an encrypted e-mail last Thursday from a senior Qaeda source in Saudi Arabia. The Qaeda operative told him not to be taken in by the American "psychological warfare" campaign about bin Laden`s imminent capture. He assured Zabihullah in the e-mail that "the sheik is in a safer place than ever and is more healthy than he`s ever been."

McRaven could be using psyop to flush bin Laden and others out of their hiding places. But the real key to success, the Task Force 121 commander knows, may be the "hammer and anvil" of converging U.S. Special Forces teams in Afghanistan and some 70,000 Pakistani forces in the border areas. In one recent operation in Waziristan, Pakistani security forces arrested several women married to foreign fighters, hoping for a lead on bin Laden. Similarly, they have destroyed the houses of tribesmen suspected of sheltering Qaeda fugitives. Pakistani officials said the tactic has worked, providing valuable information while apparently helping to drive Qaeda and Taliban fighters back across the Afghan border—into the hands, they hope, of Task Force 121. The standing U.S. offer of $25 million for bin Laden`s head provides an extra incentive. "We now have all the ingredients in place for more effective operations in the days to come," says a senior Pakistani official. The man who`s been tasked with blending those ingredients together, Bill McRaven, is betting on it.

With Mark Hosenball in Washington, Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai in Afghanistan and Zahid Hussain in Pakistan

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

[Joerver]

Dafür dass sie ihn schon längst gecatcht haben, machen sie einen ganz schön großen Wirbel.
Auch die Amis hängen keinen, wenn sie ihn nicht hätten.
Augenblicklich warte ich noch auf das neue Tape von Bin Laden.
Aber vielleicht ist die CIA dazu auch zu dämlich.

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Launches New Afghan Push Against Bin Laden


By David Brunnstrom
Reuters
Saturday, March 13, 2004; 4:26 AM


KABUL (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces have launched a sweeping new hunt in Afghanistan`s remote southern and eastern mountains where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be in hiding.

The operation, codenamed "Mountain Storm," began on March 7 and involved troops from the 13,500-strong U.S.-led force backed by air support, U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Hilferty told a news briefing on Saturday.

"We believe that this will help bring the heads of the terrorist organizations to justice by continuing to place pressure on them," he said.

Asked whether the operation could lead to the arrest of al Qaeda leader bin Laden, Hilferty replied:

"This operation is aimed like the rest at rebuilding and reconstructing and providing enduring security in Afghanistan, so it`s certainly about more than one person.

"We do have confidence though, and the leaders of al Qaeda and the leaders of the Taliban need to be brought to justice and they will be."

Hilferty said "Mountain Storm" was a continuation of previous operations and involved patrols, searches and small-scale air assaults. But he declined to provide details.

"We have air support, close-fire support from the air 24-hours a day, circling overhead ready to assist coalition forces. It is a continuing effort to keep pressure on the terrorist organizations and their infrastructure."

The fresh campaign comes after a surge in militant attacks on aid workers and foreigners, as well as against Afghan and U.S.-led forces.

U.S. defense officials in Washington on Friday described "Mountain Storm" as a broad spring offensive to hunt down al Qaeda fugitives, including bin Laden.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters it was timed to exploit improving weather in the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be.

A Taliban spokesman said U.S. forces had launched an offensive in at least two eastern provinces but elusive Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who headed the Afghan Taliban government that harbored the al Qaeda network, was safe.

"Mullah Omar is in a very safe place. But we don`t know about Osama bin Laden," Taliban official Abdul Latif Hakimi told Reuters by telephone.

SECRET TASK FORCE

U.S. officials said the secretive Task Force 121, a covert commando team of Special Operations troops and CIA personnel involved in the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in December, has relocated people and equipment to the border region to search for bin Laden and other al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas.

Pakistan has in recent weeks moved forces into the lawless tribal lands on its side of the Afghan border in the search for militants. Hilferty said the Pakistanis had done "a great job."

Lieutenant-General David Barno, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, said last month the United States and Pakistan were moving toward coordinated operations along the border -- "a hammer and anvil approach" -- to prevent fleeing guerrillas from escaping by crossing from one country to the other.

Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan dismissed the suggestion Pakistan represented the "anvil" but said militants would not be able to cross the border.

"We are doing the surveillance, we are carrying out regular patrolling to ensure that the border if effectively sealed off."

U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, in an invasion launched in the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities, for which al Qaeda is blamed.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has declined to add his voice to predictions by some U.S. military officers in Afghanistan that bin Laden will be caught this year.

"I`m not going to get into that," Rumsfeld told Reuters in a recent interview. "He`s probably alive. And he`s probably in Afghanistan or Pakistan. And we`re probably going to catch him or kill him."


© 2004 Reuters

[Joerver]

Wo Rumsfeld Recht hat, hat er Recht. Bin Laden zu fangen würde die Situation nicht ändern. Die einzelnen Gruppen scheinen so autark zu sein, dass sie auf Bin Laden nicht mehr angewiesen sind.
Bin Laden scheint mehr die Galionsfigur zu sein, die immer mehr Menschen zu den terroristischeb Gruppen zieht.
Anstelle seine Zeit und die miltärischen Resourcen mit dem Irakkrieg zu vergeuden, hätte Bush sich auf die Jagd nach den Terroristen machen sollen.
Und dann viel mehr Druck auf Israel ausüben müssen, damit der Konflikt nicht weiter eskaliert.
Aber der Terrorismus scheint Bush nicht sehr zu interessieren, denn eine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Untersuchungsausschuß zu
911 findet von seiner Seite aus nicht statt.
Und wenn man nicht bereit ist zu Hause die Fehler aufzuarbeiten, wird man auch nicht erwarten können, dass Bush sich einer Aufarbeitung des Terrorismus in den arabischen Ländern stellt.

March 16, 2004
Rumsfeld: Bin Laden Isn`t Only Problem
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:31 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Capturing or killing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden would not ``change the problem`` of international terrorism, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

Rumsfeld also raised the possibility that bin Laden was dead.

``The reality is that bin Laden is spending a great deal of his time -- if he is alive today -- hiding and running and trying to communicate and trying to survive,`` Rumsfeld said in an interview at the Pentagon with WTN radio in Nashville.

Because of the pressure on bin Laden, al-Qaida and its affiliates have become more decentralized, Rumsfeld said.

``It would be a good thing if he were not there, but it certainly isn`t going to change the problem. We`re going to have to find the rest of the terrorists and his associates and see that they`re put in jail.``

The interview was one of a series that Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials gave to radio stations around the country Tuesday as part of a Bush administration public relations offensive marking the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. The war began March 19.

In an interview with WPHT radio in Philadelphia, Rumsfeld was asked about a reported remark Monday by the chief of France`s armed forces that bin Laden several times had narrowly escaped capture by French troops in Afghanistan.

``We don`t know`` whether U.S. or coalition troops have come close to bin Laden, Rumsfeld said.

``We haven`t caught him,`` he added. ``Close doesn`t count. This isn`t horseshoes or hand grenades. We`re trying to capture or kill this man. We don`t even know if he`s alive for sure.``

The consensus of intelligence analysts is that bin Laden is hiding out in the Afghan-Pakistan border area.

Last weekend the U.S. military command in Afghanistan announced the start of an offensive, dubbed Operation Mountain Storm, aimed at destroying al-Qaida and the Taliban and ultimately finding bin Laden.



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

[StellaLuna]

Dazu sag ich nur WAHLPROPAGANDA!

[Joerver]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 18. März 2004, 19:26
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,291335,00.html
Pakistan

Hoher al-Qaida-Führer umzingelt

Erbitterte Gefechte im pakistanischen Grenzgebiet: Pakistanische Truppen haben nach Angaben von Präsident Musharraf einen hochrangigen al-Qaida-Kommandeur umzingelt. Laut Informationen des Geheimdienstes ISI soll es sich um Bin Ladens Stellvertreter Aiman al-Sawahiri handeln.
Islamabad - "Es herrscht ein erbitterter Kampf", berichtet ein pakistanischer Militär aus der Provinz Waziristan, dem pakistanisch-afghanischen Grenzgebiet. Die Art und Weise, wie die Leute Widerstand leisteten, deute darauf hin, das dort jemand Wichtiges ist, so der Armeevertreter. "Wir gehen davon aus, dass al-Sawahiri dort eingekreist sein könnte", hieß es weiter.

Pakistans Präsident Pervez Musharraf sagte gegenüber dem amerikanischen Sender CNN, man habe ein Ziel umzingelt, indem sich eine wichtige Figur des Terrornetzwerks al-Qaida befinde. Auf die Frage, ob Osama Bin Laden in die Falle gegangen sei, sagte Musharraf, dass dies zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt nur Spekualtion sei. Ein führender Regierungsbeamter teilte später mit, dass es sich nicht um Bin Laden handele.

Aiman al-Sawahiri ist die Nummer zwei des Terrornetzwerks al-Qaida, ein enger Mitarbeiter Osama Bin Ladens.
Die Armee war bereits vor Tagen mit Artillerie und Hubschraubern ins unzugängliche Bergland der Provinz Waziristan vorgedrungen. Sie erreichte drei entlegene Dörfer nahe der afghanischen Grenze: Azam Warzak, Shin Warzak und Kaloosha. In der Gegend war es in den vergangenen Tagen zu schweren Gefechten gekommen. Allein am Dienstag starben 41 Menschen - 15 Soldaten und 26 mutmaßliche Extremisten.
Nach Angaben der pakistanischen Behörden waren die meisten der getöteten Feinde Ausländer. Es wurden jedoch lediglich die Nationalitäten zweier Toter bekannt gegeben. Dabei handelte es sich um einen Tschetschenen und einen nicht genauer bezeichneten Mann aus dem Nahen Osten.

Im Grenzgebiet zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan wird auch al-Qaida-Führer Osama Bin Laden vermutet.

Nach Musharrafs Äußerungen gab der Euro im Vergleich zum Dollar nach.

Bereits im Februar hatten pakistanische Einheiten das Gebiet durchkämmt und etwa 20 Verdächtige festgenommen.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

Bin Laden`s right-hand man slips net

By Rodney Dalton, New York correspondent and Agencies

March 20, 2004 (The Australian) -- BULLETPROOF LandCruiser at high speed bursting out of a tribal compound in Pakistan`s South Waziristan region was just the latest infuriating setback in the US`s quest to bring down the top of the al-Qa`ida tree.

The car, followed by two armoured vehicles and a phalanx of heavily armed militants able to wipe out dozens of crack troops sent to blast the terrorists from their nest, is believed to have contained Ayman al-Zawahiri, right-hand man to Osama bin Laden.

After mounting speculation that US and Pakistani forces ranged on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border were about to pounce on al-Qa`ida`s key planner, a senior Taliban spokesman yesterday made the claim Washington least wanted to hear - that both Zawahiri and bin Laden were safe in Afghanistan.

"He may have slipped the net," the official said.

Al-Zawahiri, a 52-year-old Egyptian doctor, is one of the FBI`s most wanted terrorists and has a $US25million ($33.4million) price on his head. So desperate is Washington to nail the pair, the House of Representatives yesterday doubled the reward for bin Laden`s capture to $US50million.

Stiff resistance from about 200 well-armed fighters holed up in fortified mud huts early in the week -- in the onslaught of Operation Mountain Storm, designed to rid the lawless border area of foreign fighters -- had led Pakistani officials to conclude they were close to a "high-value" target.

Pakistan`s leader, General Pervez Musharraf, told CNN exactly that, and said the fighters "are not coming out in spite of the fact that we pounded them with artillery".

He did not refer to al-Zawahiri by name, but officials later said that was who they believed the President meant. The White House, keen not to raise false hopes, sought to play down the significance of the strategist`s scalp.

"It would be of course a major step forward in the war on terrorism ... but I think we have to be careful not to assume that getting one al-Qa`ida leader is going to break up the organisation," US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said.

It now appears it was not to be. While it is still not certain al-Zawahiri was in the car, one Pakistani security official said the presence of high-powered bulletproof vehicles, and the high level of force used to provide covering fire for their getaway, supported that theory.

The battle against militants dug into the 30km-diameter region continued yesterday, with hundreds more troops joining the thousands already engaged, and mortars and helicopter gunships laying down a barrage of fire.

Hundreds of al-Qa`ida fighters are believed to be hiding in South Waziristan, the remotest and most conservative of Pakistan`s seven semi-autonomous tribal districts.

The Bush administration sees Pakistan -- an overwhelmingly Muslim country -- as an invaluable ally in the war on terrorism. This has come at great personal risk to General Musharraf, who has narrowly escaped two recent assassination attempts.

Former al-Qa`ida No 3 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was caught in Pakistan in March 2003 and the US has maintained pressure for further victories.

During a visit to Islamabad on Thursday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell praised General Musharraf for his country`s help and announced Washington now regarded it as a "major non-NATO ally".

In recent broadcasts, al-Zawahiri has described the war on terrorism as a war on Islam, and criticised Islamic leaders who co-operated with the US.

"(George W.) Bush appoints corrupt leaders and protects them," he said in a tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television.

© The Australian

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-paki…
THE WORLD
Pakistani Army Convoy Hit; Secret Tunnel Found
By Zulfiqar Ali
Special to The Times

March 23, 2004

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Amid suspicions that some militants along the Afghan border had escaped a Pakistani military cordon through a secret tunnel, hit-and-run attackers in a nearby area ambushed an army convoy Monday.

Assailants firing rocket-propelled grenades damaged six military vehicles, including an oil tanker, along a highway near the town of Wana, according to witnesses interviewed by telephone. It was unclear whether Pakistani forces suffered casualties, the witnesses added, but some suggested at least 12 soldiers died in the afternoon ambush.



The attack is likely to test the patience of the Pakistani army, which announced Sunday it would hold fire to give tribal elders another chance to talk as many as 500 suspected militants in the region into surrendering. A senior commander said Monday that the lull in the fighting was not a formal cease-fire and that the offensive could resume at any time.

Fierce fighting erupted last Tuesday near Wana as security forces searched for suspected Al Qaeda fighters believed to be hiding in the semiautonomous South Waziristan region near the Afghan border.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Thursday that the militants` fierce resistance indicated they might be defending a "high-value target," such as senior Al Qaeda leaders. But Pakistani officials have since backed away from suggestions that Osama bin Laden`s top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, was among the militants surrounded by a military cordon.

Retired army Brig. Mahmood Shah, chief of security for northwest Pakistan`s tribal region, said Monday that security forces had discovered a tunnel more than a mile long in the cordoned-off zone. It connected the mud-brick houses of the two most wanted tribesmen, Mohammed Sharif and Maulvi Nek Mohammed, Shah told reporters in Peshawar.

"There is a possibility that the tunnel may have been used before the [cordon] operation," he said, adding that the tunnels begin at the homes in the village of Kaloosha and continue toward a mountain range that straddles the Afghan border.

Pakistani military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan confirmed Monday`s attack against the army convoy, though he said only two or three vehicles had been destroyed. The number of casualties was being checked, he said, adding it was still unclear who was responsible for the attack.

The ambush took place about 25 miles northeast of Wana, where security forces were preparing to demolish shops belonging to members of the Yargulkhel tribe as collective punishment for allegedly harboring Al Qaeda militants. The local government warned Monday that about 500 small businesses were marked for demolition once the owners removed their goods. About 400 homes also will be destroyed, officials said.

Under the 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation, a law imposed by the subcontinent`s former British colonial rulers, the government can demolish property to punish a tribe that disobeys state orders.

A delegation of 22 Pushtun tribal elders passed through a military cordon Monday to deliver the national government`s demands to members of the Yargulkhel tribe. The government wants fighters to set free 16 soldiers and officials taken captive last week, surrender tribesmen involved in the fighting, and expel foreign fighters or show the military where to find them.

Malik Beha Khan, one of the delegates, said in a phone interview that Yargulkhel elders near the village of Azam Warsak denied that any foreign militants were in the area under their jurisdiction.

He said shelling by the security forces may have killed as many as 40 civilians, including children. Wana residents contacted by phone said the situation was worsening by the day, forcing many to flee. About 400 families are living in the open without sufficient food or clean drinking water, they said.

Shah, the security chief, told reporters that the bodies of six suspected foreign terrorists were sent to the city of Rawalpindi for DNA tests. He said that 123 suspects had been arrested in the weeklong offensive and the houses of 13 tribesmen accused of harboring terrorists had been demolished.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[konns]

Kampf gegen Terror
Bin Ladin im Visier

23. März 2004 Auf ihrer Suche nach Mitgliedern der Al Qaida im Grenzgebiet haben die pakistanischen Truppen einen Rückschlag erlitten. Bei einem Überfall auf einen Militärkonvoi wurden zwölf Soldaten getötet. Die Truppen waren auf dem Weg ins Grenzgebiet, um die Offensive dort zu verstärken, wie Militärsprecher am Dienstag erklärten.

Französische Spezialeinheiten in Afghanistan trugen nach den Worten von Verteidigungsministerin Michèle Alliot-Marie kürzlich dazu bei, den Aufenthaltsorts von Usama bin Ladin aufzuspüren. Rund 200 Soldaten überwachten eine etwa 200 Kilometer lange Zone im Süden Afghanistans, sagte die Ministerin dem Nachrichtenmagazin „L`Express“. Alles deute darauf hin, daß sie Bin Laden geortet hätten. Doch könne sie aus Gründen der Sicherheit und der Vertraulichkeit nicht mehr dazu sagen. Generalstabschef Henri Bentégeat hatte in der vergangenen Woche gesagt, der Al-Qaida-Führer sei französischen Truppen vermutlich mehrfach nur knapp entkommen.

Bei einem Angriff auf einen Militärstützpunkt in Parachinar wurden drei pakistanische Soldaten getötet. Die Streitkräfte bestätigten den Angriff, wollten aber keine Einzelheiten nennen. Parachinar liegt etwa 200 Kilometer nördlich des Kampfgebiets.

Verhandlungen mit Stammesführern

Eine Delegation von Stammesältesten, die zu Verhandlungen über eine Herausgabe mutmaßlicher All-Qaida-Mitglieder ins Kampfgebiet gereist war, machte unterdessen kaum Fortschritte. Der Sicherheitschef der Region, Brigadegeneral Mahmood Shah, erklärte, die Delegation treffe sich derzeit mit örtlichen Vertretern in Wana und berate über weitere Schritte. Der Stamm Yargul Khel hatte zuvor mehr Zeit verlangt, um über die Forderungen der Regierung zu beraten. Diese verlangt die Ausweisung aller Ausländer aus dem Gebiet.

Die Sicherheitskräfte hatten am Montag erklärt, sie hätten einen zwei Kilometer langen Tunnel entdeckt, der von Wohnhäusern im Dorf Kaloosha in Richtung einer Bergkette in Grenznähe führe. Möglicherweise entkamen Terroristen der Al Qaida durch diesen Tunnel ihren Verfolgern. Die pakistanische Regierung hatte noch am Wochenende erklärt, sie vermute in dem eingekreisten Gebiet einen ranghohen Terrorverdächtigen. Bei ihm könnte es sich Spekulationen zufolge um El-Kaida-Führer Ajman el Sawahri handeln könnte. Letzte Gewißheit darüber gibt es jedoch nicht. Laut Sicherheitschef Shah wurden im Rahmen der Offensive 123 Verdächtige festgenommen.

[Joerver]

Das ist ein Bericht aus der heutigen Asia Times von Pepe Escobar. Escobar ist immer eine gute Quelle genauso wie die Asia Times für Vorgänge in der Gegend. Die Asia Times erscheint in Hongkong.
Jedenfalls haben bei der Jagd auf Al Keida einige Leute den Mund recht voll genommen. Im Augenblick nur in Englisch.

http://www.atimes.com

South Asia
Mar 24, 2004
THE ROVING EYE
The al-Zawahiri fiasco
By Pepe Escobar

It featured all the trappings of a glorified video game. Thousands of Pakistani army and paramilitary troops played the hammer. Hundreds of US troops and Special Forces, plus the elite commando 121, were ready to play the anvil across the border in Afghanistan. What was supposed to be smashed in between was "high-value target" Ayman al-Zawahiri, as Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf enthusiastically bragged - with no hard evidence - to an eager CNN last Thursday. But what happened to this gigantic piece of psy-ops? Nothing. And for a very simple reason: al-Qaeda`s brain and Osama bin Laden`s deputy was never there in the first place. And even if he was, as Taliban-connected sources in Peshawar told Asia Times Online, he would choose to die as a martyr rather than be captured and paraded as a US trophy.

It now appears that world public opinion fell victim to a Musharraf-inspired web of disinformation. In the early stages of the battle west of Wana in South Waziristan, Taliban spokesman Abdul Samad, speaking by satellite telephone from Kandahar province in Afghanistan, was quick to say that talk of al-Zawahiri being cornered was "just propaganda by the US coalition and by the Pakistani army to weaken Taliban morale". Subsequently, Peshawar sources were quoting al-Qaeda operatives from inside Saudi Arabia as saying that both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had left this part of the tribal areas as early as January.

On the Afghan side, General Atiquallah Ludin at the Defense Ministry in Kabul was saying that "al-Qaeda cannot escape or enter Afghan soil". But by this time the majority of the mujahideen previously based in South Waziristan had already managed to cross back to Paktika province in Afghanistan - mostly to areas around Urgun, Barmal and Gayan. This rugged, mountainous territory is quintessentially Taliban. Many local Pashtun tribals don`t even know who (Afghan president) Hamid Karzai is.

It would have been almost impossible for the mujahideen to cross to Paktika after the start of operation "hammer and anvil". By last Saturday, Mohammed Gaus, district mayor of Orgun - where the Americans keep a base - was saying that "the Pakistanis seem to have closed the border". The Americans have a main base in the village of Shkin, in Paktika, less than 25 kilometers to the west of the battleground cordoned off by the Pakistani army in South Waziristan. This base accommodates not only the US Army, but contingents of the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Forces, as well as members of commando 121 itself (the "anvil" side). On the "hammer" side, the Americans supply the Pakistani army with satellite photos, intelligence collected by drones and listening stations, and have installed electronic sensors and radars along the border.

All the time the Pakistani government and army were insisting that the US did not put any pressure on them to launch operation hammer and anvil. So according to military spokesman Major General Sultan, it was "just a coincidence" that US Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Islamabad at the height of the operation, and that Pakistan was being rewarded with the status of major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally.

High-value target
Musharraf swore that his commanders told him a "high-value target" was in the South Waziristan tribal area, based on American intelligence. Washington believed it, quoting Pakistani intelligence. In the end, it was local intelligence that revealed that the target may in fact be Tahir Yuldash, who took control of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan after its leader Juma Namangani was killed by American bombing in November 2001 in Afghanistan.

Yuldash may be the man in charge of coordinating all Central Asian al-Qaeda and/or affiliated jihadis: Uzbeks, Tajiks, Uighurs from China`s Xinjiang and Chechens. He is suspected of being holed up in South Waziristan ever since he escaped the American bombing of Tora Bora in December 2001. Alongside him there is one Danyar, a Chechen commander, and of course hundreds of Pashtun tribals.

Sources in Peshawar told Asia Times Online that the "high value target" actually managed to escape in the early stages of the battle last week in a black, bullet-proof Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows from a fortress-cum-farmhouse right in the middle of the battlefield, in the village of Kolosha. These sources also confirm the Taliban claim that al-Zawahiri may have left South Waziristan as early as January and no later than early February, when word was rife all over the tribal areas about the upcoming spring offensive.

The connection in Wana of Cobra helicopters shooting missiles and a local hospital receiving a stream of civilian victims, including women and children, inevitably led the coalition of six religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, which won last year`s elections in the tribal areas, to furiously accuse the Musharraf government. Many people believe that the operation has been undertaken at the insistence of the US, and as such it is tearing national unity apart. Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the firebrand leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), said this would lead to "more terrorism in reaction to the persecution of innocent civilians". And Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, who directs one of the most important madrassas (religious schools) in Karachi and who is close to the Taliban, added that "it will only create more hatred in the country, and it won`t solve the problem of terrorism".

The way in which Islamabad has alienated the Pashtun tribals suggests that the whole operation may end up as a complete fiasco. The Pakistanis had to arrest the wives of some mujahideen to extract some kind of intelligence. Peshawar sources tell Asia Times Online that average Pashtun tribals have been the main victims all along. Local trucks and minibuses have been nowhere to be seen for days. The roads are sealed. Electricity has been cut off. Families fled heavy bombing of "strategic targets" - on foot for dozens of kilometers. Villagers were hit by mortar fire. The Pakistani army used 15 Cobra helicopters, two F-17 fighters and dozens of artillery batteries. Contrary to Islamabad`s version, the mujahideen were not cornered in one area - but in eight villages around the cities of Wana and Azam Warsak: Kluusha, Karzi Kot, Klotay, Gua Khua, Zera Lead, Sarahgor, Sesion Warzak and Wazagonday.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, chairperson of the Pakistan People`s Party, grumbled that elected tribal leaders were not consulted about an operation which had been planned for three months: "Every high value target was allowed to escape months in advance while the tribal population was used as a sacrificial lamb to satisfy the power lust of the regime." Benazir added that "even the international media were duped into believing that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was besieged, when in fact Chechen and Uzbek fighters were said to be holed in the area".

The roughly 100 "suspects" captured so far by thousands of Pakistani troops amount to an overwhelming majority of Pashtun tribesmen - with a few low-ranking Chechens and Uzbek fighters and certainly no high-value Arab jihadis thrown in the mix. Word in Peshawar is that the Pashtun fighters and jihadis had much better intelligence than the Pakistani military. Peshawar sources estimate that less than 10 jihadis were killed, as opposed to almost 70 Pakistani soldiers and paramilitary troops.

A graphic sign of failure is that Islamabad was actually forced to negotiate after a de facto ceasefire. Three-hundred to 500 mostly Pashtun tribals, along with some low-level jihadis and Taliban, do remain surrounded. Islamabad`s line is that tribes protecting "foreign terrorists" have no option but to surrender them, or else die fighting. Coincidentally, General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, happens to be in Islamabad at the moment on a semi-secret visit.

Any remaining "high value target" in Wana may have escaped by now - in a scheme not totally dissimilar to bin Laden`s spectacular escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. At that time, hundreds of Arab and Chechen mujahideen put up very strong resistance in the frontline, while the "Sheikh" escaped to the Pakistani tribal areas using, among other means, a few tunnels. So it`s no surprise that the Pakistanis have now also "discovered" a two kilometer long tunnel under the houses of the most-wanted tribal, Nek Muhammad. The tunnel may be instrumental in covering the Pakistani army`s backs.

An occupation army
As Islamabad has declared the tribal areas a no-go area for the foreign press - unless in short, highly-choreographed escorted tours - it`s crucial to get a feeling of the terrain. There`s no "border" to speak of between both Waziristan tribal agencies, North and South, and the Afghan province of Paktika. During the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, Waziristan was a prime mujahideen base. Afghan jihadis married locally and became residents, along with their families. During the Afghan war in 2001, al-Qaeda jihadis also took local Pashtun wives. This means that every mujahideen - Arab, Afghan and Arab-Afghan - enjoys popular support.

As in most latitudes in the tribal areas, most people carry a tribal-made Kalashnikov and have been raised in madrassas maintained by the JUI. Musharraf may now call them terrorists, but the fact remains that every mujahideen is and will be respectfully regarded by the locals as a soldier of Islam. Moreover, al-Qaeda jihadis who settled in Waziristan have managed to seduce tribals young and old alike with an irresistible deluge of Pakistani rupees, weapons and Toyota Land Cruisers.

The Pakistani army is regarded as an occupation army. No wonder: it entered Waziristan for the first time in history, in the summer of 2002. These Pakistani soldiers are mostly Punjabi. They don`t speak Pashto and don`t know anything about the complex Pashtun tribal code. In light of all this, the presence of the Pakistani army in these tribal areas in the name of the "war on terror" cannot but be regarded as an American intervention. These tribes have never been subdued. They may even spell Musharraf`s doom.

What disappeared from the news
Musharraf`s version of "wag the dog" - call it "wag the terrorist" - may have served to divert world attention from the tragedy in Iraq to the real "war on terror". It was great public relations for Washington, as the hunt for the invisible "high value target" buried the fact that two Iraqi journalists working for the al-Arabiya network were killed by the US military; it buried Amnesty International reminding everyone that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war; and it buried weekend protests against the war in the US and Western Europe.

Musharraf himself has a lot to answer for. Why did his government and the Pakistani army not arrest al-Qaeda jihadis after Tora Bora in December 2001, when everybody knew they were in the tribal areas? It could have been only a matter of military incompetence. But the word in Peshawar is different: then, this was part of an American-organized covert ops destined to keep the al-Qaeda leadership alive, the main reason for the "war on terror". Today, the "war on terror" still has no credibility in these parts because it allows civilians to be terrorized - just as has happened in Wana.

As Asia Times Online has warned ( More fuel to Pakistan`s simmering fire) what Islamabad has bought with hammer and anvil is not just the resentment of a particular tribal clan, but a full-fledged tribal revolt. Without the support of tribal leaders and mullahs, there`s no way that Musharraf can play George W Bush`s local cop in the "war on terror" to Washington`s satisfaction. Yet he risks civil war in trying to do just this.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

[Joerver]

Heute wieder einen Artikel zu der Entwicklung bei der Jagd auf Bin Laden. Es scheint so, dass die Jagd auf Bush in den USA viel erfolgreicher ist.
Im Grenzgebiet zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan ist wohl alles in die Hose gegangen, was in die selbe gehen konnte.
Anstelle des großen Erfolges hat Präsident Musharraf viel Kritik aus dem eigenen Land am Hals.
Und die USA sollten sich nicht so sicher sein, dass er alle Mord- und Umsturzversuche überlebt.
Und bei einer Änderung der Machtverhältnisse würden auch leicht alle Strategien für die Gegend über den Haufen geworfen.
Denn beliebter sind die USA in diesen Regionen in den letzten Monaten ganz bestimmt nicht geworden.

March 27, 2004
8 Hostages Executed in Pakistan Siege
By AMY WALDMAN

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Saturday, March 27 — Eight Pakistani soldiers who had been taken hostage by militants in Pakistan`s tribal areas have been executed, officials said Friday, in the latest sign that the effort by Pakistan`s government to flush foreign militants from the region has gone badly awry.

The operation has proved a demoralizing embarrassment for Pakistan`s army, the country`s most powerful institution. While several dozen militants have been killed, and nearly 200 taken prisoner, the government does not appear to have captured the high-profile targets that it claimed last week to have surrounded in a mud-walled compound.

At least 30 security workers have been killed in the operation, according to government officials, along with at least a dozen civilians. Twelve paramilitary soldiers and two low-level government officials are still being held hostage separately.

Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in the tribal areas, and resentment against the army is prompting fears that the violence could spread beyond South Waziristan, the area where the fighting has been concentrated.

Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is under increasing pressure to resolve the standoff. Islamist parties staged scattered protests in cities throughout the country on Friday but over all were quite muted in their response.

But criticism of the operation has been rising in the news media and, more important, among former military officials — General Musharraf`s most important constituency. One of them, a former major general, Anwar Sher, said Friday, "Because of our inefficiency we lost many soldiers."

The news of the executions came along with confirmation that the voice on a tape broadcast on Thursday was that of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda`s second in command. Pakistani officials had suggested last week that a high-profile target the militants were protecting could be Dr. Zawahiri. It is not clear whether the militant leader escaped through a network of tunnels emanating from the compound or whether he was never surrounded at all. But the tape, in which he calls for Muslims in Pakistan "to get rid of their government, which is working for Americans," can only increase the pressure on General Musharraf. Pakistani officials have said that a similar message from Dr. Zawahiri prefigured the two assassination attempts against him in December.

The eight soldiers were taken hostage on Monday in an ambush of a supply convoy in Serwakai, about 20 miles east of Wana, the regional headquarters, in which 12 other soldiers were killed. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultant, the director general of Inter Services Public Relations, said the eight soldiers appeared to have been killed a few days ago.

The administrator for South Waziristan, Muhammad Azam Khan, said the bodies of the eight soldiers were first spotted by a woman going to get water in a mountainous region near Serwakai. The soldiers were in uniform with their hands tied behind their backs, according to Haji Muhammad Nawaz, an Abdullai Mehsud tribesman. An official who saw the bodies said they had been shot at close range.

Armed tribal volunteers from the Mehsud tribe turned the bodies over to the authorities, General Sultant said. He would not specify what action, if any, the government would take in response.

Under the largest deployment of military and paramilitary forces in any tribal region since Pakistan`s inception, about 5,000 paramilitary and regular army soldiers have been battling an estimated 400 to 500 local and foreign militants for 11 days in South Waziristan, not far from the border with Afghanistan.

The operation began just days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited Islamabad with the aim in part of securing greater cooperation in cracking down on militants using the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. Pakistani forces met unexpected resistance when they tried to flush out foreign militants, and events quickly spiraled because of the belief that troops had surrounded Dr. Zawahiri.

On Sunday the government had more or less called a halt to fighting in an effort to negotiate with tribal leaders for the surrender of militants and the release of hostages. But those efforts have so far failed, and the executions appear to have complicated matters further.

A jirga, or tribal council, which had gone to meet militants at an undisclosed location near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Thursday, returned with little to show. Officials said the jirga conveyed to the militants the government`s demands that they surrender foreign and local militants and release the remaining hostages. But a tribal elder said the militants wanted the military to pull back from its siege and allow those trapped to leave.

Another jirga is scheduled for Saturday between elders of the Zalikhel tribe, which has five members the government accuses of harboring militants, to try to secure the release of the paramilitary soldiers and two low-level government officials. The Zalikhels have been joined by a group of clerics and some influential tribesmen from other regions to reinforce efforts to help recover the hostages.

In recent days, Pakistani officials have begun conceding that most of the important targets likely slipped away through tunnels that offered not only a way out to the militants, but also cover to an army eager to scale back its pursuit of them. The corps commander in Peshawar, Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, had said Thursday that he planned to wind up the operation by Saturday. "We have achieved our objective of destroying and denying sanctuary to militants," he said.

An official said the army had completed 75 percent of the work involving demolition of houses of suspected militants. "They would leave the area the moment they demolish the remaining targeted houses there," the official said. A senior Afghan intelligence official with connections in the area said that about 300 homes had been destroyed, and close to 200 people arrested. Of those, 60 are Afghan refugees, the official said, and 17 are foreigners.


Mohammad Khan contributed to this article from Peshawar, Pakistan.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 29. März 2004, 11:16
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,292989,00.html
US-Angriff in Afghanistan

Taliban-Chef Mullah Omar soll schwer verwundet sein

Taliban-Führer Mullah Omar soll bei einem US-Bombenangriff in Afghanistan schwer verwundet worden sein. Vier seiner Leibwächter seien dabei getötet worden, berichtet eine pakistanische Zeitung.
Islamabad/Kabul - Omar sei außer Lebensgefahr, werde sich aber für rund zwei Monate nicht bewegen können, zitiert die Zeitung "Ausaf"den Arzt Jabbar Aziz. Bei dem Angriff in der südostafghanischen Provinz Zabul seien vier Leibwächter Omars getötet worden, heißt es in dem Bericht. Ein weiterer Taliban-Führer habe überlebt. "Ausaf" war ivor Beginn des Anti-Terror-Kampfes für gute Kontakte zur Führung von Taliban und zum Netzwerk al-Qaida von Osama Bin Laden bekannt gewesen.

Omar und Bin Laden sind seit dem Sturz der Taliban Ende 2001 auf der Flucht und werden im Grenzgebiet zu Pakistan vermutet. Pakistanische Truppen hatten am Sonntag nach tagelangen schweren Kämpfen mit dem Rückzug aus Stammesgebieten nahe der Grenze begonnen. Ein Armeesprecher hatte zuvor gesagt, die Ziele der Anti-Terror- Operation seien weitgehend erreicht worden. Bei dem Einsatz war wegen der heftigen Gegenwehr über einen eingekesselten al-Qaida-Führer spekuliert worden.

Die US-Streitkräften hatten am Samstag die Stationierung von 2000 weiteren Soldaten in Afghanistan angekündigt. Sie sollen die Jagd auf Taliban- und al-Qaida-Kämpfer verstärken. Derzeit sind rund 13.500 US-geführte Koalitionstruppen in Afghanistan stationiert, davon 11.500 Amerikaner.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

Kein Bin Laden und auch sonst nichts ereicht, außer wieder weitere Zustimmung im eigenen Land verloren.
Aber dafür hat Rumsfeld Musharraf verziehen, dass Musharrafs Leute mit Atomwaffen gedealt haben.
Wie heißt es immer so schön für die US-Amerikaner. Er mag ein Halunke sein, Hauptsache er ist unser Halunke.
Das nennt man sonst auch Realpolitik.

Pakistan-Afghan border battles end
Officials claim victory, but political fallout widens
Pamela Constable, Washington Post
Monday, March 29, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/29/MNG415SS0O1.DTL


Islamabad, Pakistan -- A deadly, 12-day confrontation between government troops and Islamic fighters in a remote tribal region reached a peaceful settlement Sunday, after the militants released 12 paramilitary troops held hostage for more than a week, and soldiers began pulling out of the area.

Officials claimed victory in the operation in South Waziristan, a rugged tribal area near the Afghan border, in which 5,000 troops participated in Pakistan`s largest-ever anti-terrorist raids. They said the government had killed 60 foreign militants or their local supporters, arrested 163 others and dismantled a nest of "hardened miscreants."

But even as calm was restored, political fallout from the episode continued to widen. The operation, which left 130 people dead, has embroiled the government in a controversy that pits tribal traditions and religious passions against the need to establish state authority across Pakistan and root out Islamic terrorism from the region.

Initially, officials hoped the Waziristan operation would yield important members of the al Qaeda terrorist network, who they believed were being sheltered in village compounds. President Pervez Musharraf, who is also the army chief, heightened such expectations by hinting last week that his troops were zeroing in on a "high-value target."

But by Sunday, government forces had still not identified any senior terrorist figures among the captured or killed fighters, and a number of others appeared to have escaped. Analysts said the ambitious operation was marred by poor intelligence, hasty planning and mistrust between officials and tribal leaders. The grimmest development came Friday, when eight captured Pakistani soldiers were found executed in a ditch.

The protracted operation has drawn increasingly vocal and widespread public criticism. Tribal groups accustomed to self-rule protested the military intrusion into their way of life and vented their anger with scattered rocket and grenade attacks on government targets. Muslim politicians called Musharraf a traitor to Islam and a slave of the United States, while secular parties staged a walkout from parliament.

"Some people are playing politics, but there has also been a genuine sense of outrage," said Rifaat Hussain, a scholar who specializes in defense issues. "This has given the army a bloody nose and a black eye." Many Pakistanis support the war against terrorism, and there was an outpouring of sympathy for Musharraf after he was nearly assassinated twice in December. But there is a competing public perception that the army chief has bowed to U.S. pressure at the expense of Pakistan`s political and religious sovereignty.

Azizuddin Ahmad, a columnist for the Nation newspaper, wrote Thursday that the government was being pushed to produce a "dazzling achievement," such as capturing Osama bin Laden or another senior al Qaeda leader, to help President Bush win re-election, "irrespective of the price our citizens have to pay."

In northwestern Pakistan, where conservative Islamic values and informal but harsh tribal codes govern daily life, there is also a radically differing perception of the foreign Muslim militants in Waziristan, including Chechen, Uzbek and Arab fighters, whom Western and Pakistani officials have called criminals and terrorists.

Experts and tribal leaders described the militants as longtime residents who had participated in the U.S.-backed Afghan guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, then settled in Pakistan, bought land and married into local tribes.

"The Americans and Pakistanis brought these people among our tribes," Mohammed Mirajuddin, a legislator and Islamic cleric from South Waziristan, said on a television news program. "They are humble people who just want the right to live. We can ask them to surrender, but if you want to hand them over to the United States ... and shave off their beards, we will never help."

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan`s military spokesman, said the government had repeatedly offered amnesties to the militants and waited for local elders to negotiate settlements with them.

But several tribal leaders said that by staging surprise raids inside their territory, the army had sabotaged the talks and offended tribal traditions of self-rule. They also said many tribes felt compelled to protect foreign "guests" who lived among them.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

[Joerver]

Ich wußte noch garnicht, dass El Kaida auch einen Nachrichtendienst hat. Ansich sind sie doch schon selbst im Untergrund.

Al Qaeda Spy Chief Killed in Pakistani Raid
Mon Mar 29, 2004 09:31 AM ET


By Hafiz Wazir
WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani troops killed a spy chief in Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda network in a 12-day sweep on its desolate Afghan frontier, an army official said Monday, vowing to step up the hunt for Islamic militants.

The army said it would flush foreign fighters from its mountainous tribal territories bordering eastern Afghanistan after a bloody offensive in South Waziristan district ended on Sunday with more than 100 people killed.

"The casualties were relatively high but a small cost for the lofty cause of elimination of terrorism from Pakistan society," military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told reporters.

He said troops had killed 63 militants, including an al Qaeda intelligence chief whom he identified only as "Mr. Abdullah." He would not provide further details such as the man`s nationality, full name or how and when he was killed.

"He was killed in this operation," he told reporters.

U.S. forces are hunting on the other side of the border in a pincer operation. Militants linked to al Qaeda are widely believed to be behind bomb blasts in Madrid this month that killed 190.

Sultan said a wounded senior Uzbek al Qaeda leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was on the run. Yuldashev was the 10th most senior member of al Qaeda and was now hiding somewhere along the Afghan border, he added.

The military claimed victory after securing the release on Sunday of 12 paramilitary troops taken hostage when the fighting began, but about 50 soldiers were killed and an unknown number of fighters escaped, possibly through a labyrinth of tunnels.

The raid, Pakistan`s biggest on its semi-autonomous South Waziristan tribal territory, netted 163 militants, including 73 foreigners, Sultan said.

More than a dozen civilians are believed dead.

About 50,000 army troops have been deployed in Pakistan`s rugged Afghan frontier to clear foreign militants.

"There are no other tribal communities that we know of sheltering and harboring militants. But if there are, we will find out," said Sultan.

But in the latest of a series of small attacks elsewhere on the border, two rockets were fired at a paramilitary camp in North Waziristan late Sunday, causing some damage but no injuries, residents in the area said.

HUNT FOR YULDASHEV

Capturing Yuldashev would be a prize for President Pervez Musharraf, accused by conservative Islamic politicians of pandering to President Bush at the expense of Pakistani Muslims in the South Waziristan offensive.

Musharraf says al Qaeda militants with links to the tribal area were behind two attempts on his life in December.

Yuldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, was accused of a series of bomb deadly blasts in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, in 1999 and is rumored to have led resistance to U.S. forces during fighting in Afghanistan in the spring of 2002.

As convoys of troops withdrew from the area around the militant hideout to a nearby base near South Waziristan`s capital of Wana, families returned on wagons and tractor-trolleys to the site of the fighting, many finding their homes destroyed.

"My family has nothing to do with any group or militants, but my house is totally destroyed. We are poor people. They have ruined us," said one, from Serwakai, near Wana. Some schools were hit and a number of water wells damaged, they added.

Military bulldozers had flattened nearly all the mud-walled fortress-like homes where Pashtun tribesmen had given refuge to al Qaeda and foreign fighters believed to include Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens, the residents said.

Tribal elders in the Afghan border district of Zhob, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Wana, met with a Pakistani general and agreed to fight if al Qaeda-linked militants reach their area.

The fighting began when paramilitary forces hunting al Qaeda and other militants ran into a hail of bullets on March 16, suggesting tribesmen were helping to protect a "high-value target," perhaps bin Laden`s deputy Ayman al-Zawahri.

Pakistan, while supporting the U.S. war on terror, had come under pressure for not doing enough to flush out militants who have been blamed for a campaign of violence in Afghanistan.

[Joerver]

Lt. Brian Harber, right, of the 501st Parachute

Ich hoffe, dass die Army es nicht zu wörtlich nimmt mit den Köpfen und Herzen der Einwohner. Bis jetzt waren viel zu häufig auf die Köpfe Bomben gefallen und die Herzen haben Kugeln zerfetzt.
Über die Vorfälle wurde ausführlich berichtet.
Sehr viel Distanz kann man von den `embedded` Reportern nicht erwarten.

Infantry Regiment, talking with a village elder this month in Khost Province, in eastern Afghanistan.

March 30, 2004
G.I.`s in Afghanistan on Hunt, but Now for Hearts and Minds
By DAVID ROHDE

DWAMANDA, Afghanistan — Standing in a bleak, dust-covered village 15 miles from Pakistan, Lt. Reid Finn, a 24-year-old Louisiana native known as Huck, supervised as his men unloaded a half dozen wooden boxes with American flags on them.

Wearing helmet and flak jacket and toting an M-4 assault rifle, the 6-foot-3, 200-pound lieutenant and former West Point football star represented his family`s third generation at war. But on this afternoon, his mission was not combat. It was the distribution of blankets, shirts and sewing kits to destitute Afghan villagers.

For the previous hour, American Army medics had doled out free antibiotics, asthma medication and antacids. Lieutenant Finn sipped tea with Muhammad Sani, a wizened village elder, and offered to pay for a new school or well.

"The more they help us find the bad guys," Lieutenant Finn explained, "the more good stuff they get."

As the effort to find Osama bin Laden and uproot the Taliban intensifies, the United States military is shifting tactics. A mission once limited to sweeps, raids and searches has in recent months yielded to an exercise in nation building. The hope is that a better relationship with local residents and a stronger Afghan state will produce better intelligence and a speedier American departure. But the tension between building schools one day and rounding up suspects at gunpoint the next makes the prospects for success far from clear.

In a new American tactic, Lieutenant Finn`s platoon and two other 50-soldier platoons are expected to patrol and get to know every detail of a 15-to-25-mile chunk of Afghan territory that runs along the border.

The area holds more than 300 villages, three major ethnic Pashtun tribes, countless subtribes and a smuggling route used by the Taliban and Al Qaeda to slip from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

The troops` mission is to win the trust of Afghans who have seen the Soviets, then the mujahedeen and the Taliban sweep through this area promising a better life.

Now it is the turn of the Pentagon and a budget of $40 million earmarked for projects like village schools and wells. American soldiers are offering major reconstruction and relief aid in an area parched for it.

Both desperation and promise appeared abundant in the isolated border areas during a three-day patrol by the company that Lieutenant Finn`s platoon is part of.

In one village, a brawl broke out over the free American blankets and sewing kits, with one man hitting another with a shovel.

In another, a teacher announced that after offering only religious lessons under the Taliban, his school now taught 400 students subjects like chemistry, physics and English. Another man said he had re-enrolled in school to become the village`s first doctor. At the age of 33, he is an eighth grader.

The Americans hope their new approach will pry information about militants from reluctant Afghans. The battle, said Capt. Jason Condrey, Lieutenant Finn`s company commander, centers on winning the allegiance of the population, which he called Al Qaeda`s "center of gravity."

But the same American troops still use the standard tactics of military power to achieve their aims: intimidation, overwhelming force, hands tied behind backs and faces in the dirt.

Over the course of the three-day patrol, it was not clear whether they had won, or lost, more hearts and minds.

Day 1: Arrests

Lieutenant Finn`s platoon and three others — the Comanche Company of the First Battalion of the Anchorage-based 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment — had gathered at 2:40 a.m. to set out on their three-day field mission.

Under a blanket of silence and bright stars, the Americans prepared to venture from a familiar enclave into a confusing Afghan mosaic.

On base, the Americans watch N.B.A. games live via satellite in a morale hall, and the latest episodes of "The Shield," "C.S.I." and "The Sopranos" on pirated DVD`s in their tents. On Fridays, they have "surf and turf" — steaks, crab legs and corn on the cob — in the new chow hall operated by the Halliburton Corporation.

Out in the field, they wear 40 pounds of armor and equipment in sweltering heat. Their skin, clothes and equipment are caked with dust so fine that one soldier compared it to talcum powder. At night, they sleep in the open in 40 degrees, risk rocket attack and wake up soaked with dew.

Before departing, Captain Condrey, a burly, soft-spoken 28-year-old Alaska native, briefed the soldiers. The unit would first try to arrest four brothers believed to be members of a local terrorist cell. Two days of "village assessments," where soldiers distribute aid and meet elders, would follow.

Across Afghanistan, the Taliban have in recent months shifted their attacks from American forces to Afghan officials.

Continued attacks with mines and improvised explosive devices here in Khost Province, meanwhile, have prompted most aid groups to refuse to work in Khost, slowing reconstruction projects. That, in turn, has bolstered a Taliban propaganda effort that says the United States is not committed to Afghanistan and will soon abandon the country as it did after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

The convoy arrived at 6:30 a.m. In a display of overwhelming force, an A-10 attack jet circled overhead and dozens of American vehicles surrounded seven mud compounds spread across a barren hillside.

A squad of scouts, led by Staff Sgt. David Jarzab, a tall, lanky 26-year-old native of Pennsylvania, raided one of the compounds and quickly found one of the wanted brothers.

American soldiers threw that brother, Rashid Rahman, a small, bony man who appeared to be over 60, to the ground, pushed his face in the dirt and tied his hand behind his back with plastic strips. His 30-year-old son, Abdel Malik, was also bound and left face down in the dirt.

The Americans ordered all women to leave the compound so it could be searched, a tactic that angers conservative Pashtun tribesmen who generally ban women from appearing in public and abhor having strangers enter their houses.

Searches of all seven compounds yielded only a handful of century-old Lee-Enfield rifles and Kalashnikov assault rifles, standard household fare in Afghanistan, and large amounts of opium and hashish. The Americans concluded that the raid had been the product of a bad tip, not uncommon in an area where feuding tribes use the Americans to settle old scores.

A 16-year-old named Muhammad Rahman, meanwhile, was caught in a lie. He told the Americans that he had no weapons, then later showed them where he had hidden two Kalashnikov rifles and a Chinese-made mortar round.

Visibly angry, the Americans tied the teenager`s hands, placed a burlap sack on his head and pushed him down a steep hillside. As an American soldier knelt on the boy`s back and pushed his face into the dirt, Sergeant Jarzab demanded to know if there were more hidden weapons.

"He`s a liar, and he`s going to Cuba," the sergeant shouted, although he later ordered the boy freed. The boy insisted he had found the mortar and planned to sell it.

As watching Afghan women wailed and recited prayers, one sergeant placed the mortar round on the teenager`s back, and another held the captured rifles in the air. A soldier snapped a souvenir photo of the Americans and their quarry.

After his release, the boy did not complain about his treatment. Instead, as the soldiers stood nearby, he praised the Americans for stabilizing Afghanistan "I am very happy they came," he said. "I just request that they build a school for us."

Day 2, Morning: Helping

The next day, the patrol visited a police station, one of several newly established posts on the main road. In recent months, masked gunmen had stopped cars on the road and berated Afghans for listening to music, a practice the Taliban consider blasphemous.

Faiz Muhammad, the 44-year-old police chief, wore a flowing Afghan robe, dark turban and long beard. After inviting the Americans in for tea, he quickly agreed to Captain Condrey`s request to hand over a large stockpile of mortar rounds and mines discovered by the scouts the previous day. But he sheepishly explained that he had no car, no phone, no radio and no way to make contact with his superiors and get their permission.

Flagging down a taxi on the main road, he said he would go to the nearest police station — at a cost of $10 to himself — and return in 20 minutes. "If this police station gets attacked," Captain Condrey said, "they have no way to call for help."

The captain toured the station. Its four crumbling mud-brick buildings seemed to epitomize the half-finished effort to rebuild Afghanistan. Signs of the Afghan government are slowly appearing in the border region, but it is a skeleton state.

Two years after the fall of the Taliban, construction work on the key road the men guarded — a jumble of crumbling asphalt, yawning holes and dirt ruts — had finally begun. The station had a generator and roll of barbed wire given to it by Italian soldiers who once patrolled in the area. It had winter police uniforms and two desks issued to it by the provincial government. Six of the station`s 14 policemen were even in a nearby city receiving nine weeks of American-financed police training.

But the station`s equipment was archaic. It had 66 rocket-propelled grenades, but no launcher to fire them. Each policeman had a Kalashnikov rifle, but only 120 rounds of ammunition.

Mr. Muhammad was the third police chief to be assigned to the station in five months. Policemen complained that they had not been paid their monthly salary of 800 Afghanis, or $16, in three months.

They also complained that the Italians had promised the village a new school and clinic, but that nothing was built. The last group of American soldiers to patrol the area said they would repair the police station, but nothing happened.

"Where is the help America promised?" Muhammad Rasul, a 37-year-old former farmer who is now deputy police chief, asked the Americans.

Mr. Rasul said the village needed a new school and hospital. Lt. Brett Sheats, a 25-year-old West Point graduate from central Pennsylvania, said aid workers had refused to come to the area because of the poor security. "That`s where we need your help," he said.

"We can build a clinic, but it is just a building," the lieutenant added. "You need doctors to put in the building."

"There are no doctors," Mr. Rasul admitted. The conversation ended.

When Chief Muhammad returned, Captain Condrey said he would look into the purchase of radios, a satellite telephone and uniforms for the station. He gave the chief several hundred rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition that the Americans had confiscated the previous day.

Before the soldiers left, the chief asked to speak to the captain out of earshot from the station`s officers.

Mr. Muhammad explained that the previous police chief had feared that some of his own officers were Taliban. Mr. Muhammad also said he was from the Mangal tribe, while most of the policemen were members of the local tribe, the Zadrans.

The chief is part of a nationwide Afghan government effort to create a police force that mixes tribes and ethnic groups. But Mr. Muhammad said he felt vulnerable.

"I am by myself and don`t have any gun," he said. "Is it possible to provide me with a gun?"

Day 2, Afternoon: Danger

That afternoon, the Americans set out on the most dangerous leg of their three-day mission, an overnight patrol down the dry riverbed used by suspected Qaeda and Taliban members to sneak into Afghanistan from Pakistan. No conventional American unit had ventured into the area in seven months.

Recent Pakistani military operations on the other side of the border had apparently forced some Taliban and Qaeda fighters to flee into Afghanistan up this very riverbed, Captain Condrey said. But without the aid of local residents, he and his men struggled to spot the militants, who tend to operate in teams of three to five men.

"We can`t pinpoint the enemy," he said. "They don`t wear weapons."

There were also questions about the sincerity of the Pakistani effort. During a December patrol near the border, a group of Taliban or Qaeda fighters positioned between two Pakistani military posts fired a rocket at Captain Condrey and his men from inside Pakistan.

"There is no doubt that our enemy knows that we can`t enter Pakistan, and they use it," he said.

The narrow one-lane dirt road that snaked along the riverbed appeared to present a perfect opportunity to ambush the Americans. Wherever they drove, an Afghan on a hilltop or in a riverbed seemed to be silently staring at them, tracking their movements.

Thirty minutes into the drive, the convoy`s lead platoon passed through a small village. A teenage boy whispered into a walkie-talkie as the Americans approached, and ran. In the past, the Taliban used walkie-talkies to relay the movements of American forces and time ambushes.

Within 20 minutes, a platoon of American soldiers had surrounded the village. The leader of the initial patrol, Sgt. First Class Donald L. Thomas, 33, of Houma, La., took an aggressive stance.

The 6-foot-2 sergeant, who wears a New York City Police Department baseball hat while on patrol, told villagers that if they "want this village to stand like it is," they would voluntarily produce the radio, the laser pointer and every weapon in the village within 20 minutes.

"I will destroy these houses if they lie to me," he warned.

Yet villagers seemed more bemused by the Americans than frightened, smiling at one another as the Americans blocked them from returning to their homes.

Everyone, it seemed, was lying. While looking for the boy, a sergeant found a blue bag holding hundreds of rounds of ammunition tucked behind a woodpile.

As the deadline approached, men produced hundreds of rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition, some of it armor-piercing, but no Kalashnikov rifles. The Americans staged house-to-house searches.

Exhausted and caked in dust, the Americans scoured dilapidated mud houses, haystacks and woodpiles using metal detectors, but found no weapons. Instead, one squad discovered 2,000 pounds of raw hashish in the house of a village elder. Captain Condrey ordered it burned.

The boy who had run with the radio eventually appeared, giving conflicting accounts about whom he had been speaking to. A village elder who was questioned — at gunpoint — about more radios insisted that there were none.

Five exhausting hours after they had arrived in the village, the Americans departed. That night, they camped in the riverbed six miles from the Pakistan border, posted guards and braced for a Qaeda or Taliban attack. Nothing happened.

Day 3: Outsiders

At 6 the following morning, Captain Condrey and his soldiers woke up in the riverbed. Within an hour, 80 curious Afghan villagers were sitting on the riverbank staring at them.

The moment seemed to epitomize the overwhelming power the American military wields in Afghanistan, but also how separate it remains from Afghan society. With the support of Afghans, there appeared to be few limits to what the Americans could do. But Captain Condrey said that until Americans proved to Afghans that they will, in fact, give them a better life, he and his men would be another group of outsiders.

"These people have seen military forces for 30 years," the captain said as he stood in the riverbed that morning. "Nothing is going to change until they see schools built and wells dug."

Darren McCollester/Getty Images, for The New York Times

Soldiers from the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment with a rocket taken during a search in Khost Province. The Army has continued raids and arrests in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and uproot the Taliban.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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DER SPIEGEL 15/2004 - 05. April 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,293930,00.html
Pakistan

Die Meister des Dschihad

Armenhaus und Atommacht, Verbündeter der USA und Brutstätte islamistischer Gewalt: Pakistan ist ein Land der Gegensätze - und eine Gefahr für die Welt. Washington setzt auf Militärherrscher Musharraf, der radikale Mullahs hätschelt, aber CIA-Spezialeinheiten Bin Laden jagen lässt.




Pakistanische Soldaten im Grenzgebiet. Jagd auf "hochrangige Qaida-Ziele"
Verrat, sagen die amerikanischen Parlamentarier. Und die Mitglieder der Untersuchungskommission zum Terror gegen die USA sind auch davon überzeugt, den Verräter zu kennen: Der ehemalige pakistanische Geheimdienstchef Hamid Gul habe den Taliban-Führern im Juli 1999 zugesagt, ihnen bei jedem beabsichtigten amerikanischen Raketenangriff "drei bis vier Stunden Vorwarnung" zu geben, schreiben die Politiker in ihrem Bericht, der in diesen Tagen Washington erregt.

Peinlich, gerade jetzt, da so viel von der Achse Islamabad-Washington die Rede ist, von Pakistan, dem wichtigsten Alliierten im Anti-Terror-Kampf des George W. Bush.

Ist der Ex-Spionageboss den amerikanischen Verbündeten tatsächlich in den Rücken gefallen? Tut er das womöglich heute noch, in diesen Stunden, da Islamabads Elitesoldaten gemeinsam mit US-Militärberatern Osama Bin Laden und seine Qaida-Kampfgenossen im wild zerklüfteten Grenzgebiet zu Afghanistan jagen und dabei auf einen erstaunlich gut präparierten Gegner treffen?

Hat Gul zu verantworten, dass Bin-Laden-Vize Aiman al-Sawahiri womöglich im letzten Moment vor den Angreifern durch einen geheimen Tunnel flüchten konnte?

Ein luxuriöser Bungalow in Rawalpindi, Wembley-Rasen, geschmackvolle Rattanmöbel. Refugium der pakistanischen Reichen und Einflussreichen, Alterssitz des mit allen Ehren pensionierten Geheimdienstchefs und Generalleutnants Hamid Gul. Der Beschuldigte zuckt die Achseln: "Ach, die Amerikaner", sagt er, als erklärte das alles, und lässt Tee servieren.

Dann zeigt er voller Stolz die Souvenirs aus alten Zeiten. Den Gebetsteppich, den er von seinem damaligen saudi-arabischen Geheimdienstkollegen Prinz Turki Ibn al-Feisal ("ein großer Freund der Taliban und Bin Ladens") geschenkt bekommen hat; die Plakette vom Bundesnachrichtendienst, mit einem aus der Berliner Mauer herausgebrochenen Stein und der Inschrift: "Unserem respektierten Bündnispartner, der sich große Verdienste erworben hat".

Natürlich habe er Bin Laden gut kennen gelernt, diesen "bescheidenen und brillanten Kämpfer", erzählt der Islamisten-Sympathisant Gul. Und er sei Ehrengast der Taliban bei deren Regierungsfeier in Kabul gewesen. "Aber nicht ich habe die gemeinsame Linie verlassen, sondern die Amerikaner und die Europäer machten den Schwenk - einst waren sie doch alle für den heiligen Krieg, Dschihad gehörte zu ihren Lieblingsvokabeln. In den Achtzigern, als es gegen die Sowjets in Afghanistan ging, konnten sie nicht genug Waffen an die Mudschahidin liefern, und auch später mit den Taliban haben sie noch gedealt. Damals nutzten die USA meine Dienste, jetzt verleumden sie mich. Ich habe längst keine Exklusiv-Informationen mehr."



DER SPIEGEL
Das Telefon klingelt: eine Einladung zu einer exklusiven pakistanischen Konferenz über Geheimdienst- und Sicherheitsfragen. Gul will sich eine Zusage überlegen.

Nach seiner Meinung ist Pakistans Präsident Pervez Musharraf dabei, zum Lakaien George W. Bushs zu werden - und sich damit sein eigenes Grab zu schaufeln. "Amerikanische Soldaten, die auf unserem Territorium operieren, das wird unser stolzes Volk ihm nicht verzeihen." Und dann beugt sich Ex-Spionagechef Gul nach vorn, flüstert, nun ganz Verschwörungsfanatiker: "Einige CIA-Kollegen, US-Militärs und der israelische Mossad müssen in das Attentat auf die Twin Towers eingeweiht gewesen sein." Warum wären sonst so lange keine Abfangjets aufgestiegen?

Willkommen in Pakistan, dem Reich der Schizophrenie und schroffen Gegensätze: Armenhaus (mit rund 54 Prozent Analphabeten) und Atommacht (mit bis zu 50 Nuklearsprengköpfen); Heimat eines der besten Teams im Kolonialsport Cricket wie im urzeitlichen Reiterspiel Buskaschi, dessen Spielwerkzeug ein kopfloses Kalb ist. Bush-Land und gleichzeitig Bin-Laden-Land: enger Verbündeter der USA, aber auch Brutstätte islamistischen Terrors.

Dies ist der einzige Staat der Welt, der seine Existenz - bei der blutigen Teilung des Subkontinents 1947 in ein hinduistisch geprägtes Indien und ein muslimisches "Land der Reinen" - dem Islam verdankt. Mit seiner Gründung wurde dieses Pakistan ins Zentrum der Weltpolitik hineinkatapultiert; drei Kriege mit Indien folgten. Spätestens nach dem 11. September 2001 sowie dem dramatischen Kurswechsel Richtung Westen ist Pakistan wieder in den Mittelpunkt gerückt, vom Terror zerrissen, von einem Atomkrieg mit dem Nachbarn wie vom Auseinanderbrechen bedroht.

Den "gefährlichsten Staat der Welt" nennt die Schweizer Wochenzeitung "Die Weltwoche" Pakistan; den "bedrohlichsten für die Zukunft der USA" der CIA-Berater Robert Gallucci. 540 der 620 derzeit im US-Stützpunkt Guantanamo Bay auf Kuba festgehaltenen Terrorverdächtigen hat man auf pakistanischem Boden verhaftet.

Dreimal allein im letzten Vierteljahr machte Islamabad weltweit Schlagzeilen, ein Ereignis Besorgnis erregender als das andere. Im Dezember wurden auf den Präsidenten Musharraf, 60, im Abstand von zwölf Tagen zwei Mordanschläge verübt, die er nur um Haaresbreite überlebte und die offensichtlich von einem Mann aus seinem innersten Kreis vorbereitet worden waren. Im Februar leistete der Atomwissenschaftler Abdul Qadir Khan auf internationalen Druck hin einen Offenbarungseid. Er gab zu, über Jahre hochgeheimes wie hochgefährliches nukleares Know-how an Nordkorea, Libyen und Iran weitergegeben zu haben - angeblich auf eigene Faust, ohne Wissen von Militärs und Politikern; schon am Tag nach seinem Eingeständnis begnadigte der Präsident den Sünder, nannte ihn "seinen Helden".

Musharraf und Powell: Privilegien für den umstrittenen Alliierten
Washington akzeptierte die Farce, US-Außenminister Colin Powell machte Musharraf bei seinem Besuch in Islamabad Mitte März sogar noch ein besonderes Geschenk: Pakistan wurde zu einem privilegierten "Nicht-Nato-Alliierten" aufgewertet, ein Status, den so traditionelle US-Freunde wie etwa Israel, Südkorea und Japan genießen - nicht aber Islamabads langjähriger Erzfeind Indien. Er berechtigt zum Einkauf modernster US-Waffen, geliefert zu Vorzugspreisen. Musharraf schlug freudig ein: Faustischer Pakt Nummer eins.

Im Gegenzug gab Musharraf den Amerikanern offensichtlich freie Hand beim Terrorkampf. Militärberater aus Washington und die Spezialeinheit 121, die schon Saddam Hussein mit aufgespürt hat, sind bei der gegenwärtigen Operation entscheidend beteiligt. Sie fordert allerdings auch viele zivile Opfer. Voller Stolz sprechen US-Politiker von ihrer neuen "Hammerund-Amboss-Taktik" auf beiden Seiten der Grenze: Sie wollen mit Hilfe der Musharraf-Armee und regionaler Stammeskrieger die Qaida-Kämpfer über die Bergpässe Pakistans in die afghanische Falle locken.

So viel versprechend scheint Washington der Plan, dass die US-Regierung den im Oktober 1999 durch einen Militärputsch an die Macht gekommenen Musharraf wie ein rohes Ei behandelt und ihn sogar für seine "Demokratisierungsschritte" lobt.

"Welche denn, bitte?", fragt in Islamabad die Sozialwissenschaftlerin Samina Ahmed von der International Crisis Group.

"Keinem anderen Verbündeten würde George W. Bush so viel Undemokratie durchgehen lassen", sagt die resolute Dame. Und zählt dann auf: massive Wahlfälschung beim Referendum über General Musharrafs Verlängerung seines Präsidentenmandats wie bei den Parlamentswahlen; das Blasphemiegesetz, das religiöser Willkür Tür und Tor öffnet; die "Hudud"-Verordnung, nach der eine weibliche Aussage vor Gericht auch bei einem Sexualdelikt nur den Bruchteil einer männlichen zählt (weshalb 88 Prozent der inhaftierten Frauen in Pakistan wegen "Unzucht" einsitzen, obwohl sie nach Recherchen unabhängiger Anwälte fast alle missbraucht wurden).

Musharraf gilt als wenig religiös. Er schätzt seinen abendlichen Whisky, plädiert für einen toleranten Islam und outet sich beim SPIEGEL-Gespräch im April 2002 als Bewunderer des laizistischen Erneuerers Atatürk. Er hat im umstrittenen Kaschmir vorsichtige Entspannungsschritte gegenüber Indien eingeleitet. Aber das hat ihn nicht gehindert, aus machtpolitischem Kalkül sein wichtigstes Versprechen zu brechen: den selbst proklamierten "Dschihad gegen den Extremismus".

Nachts kommen die Boten ins Grenzland und bringen Briefe von Taliban-Chef Mullah Omar.

Kaum eine der radikalen Koranschulen im Land wurde registriert. Nach wie vor müssen die Medressen, die mehr als 1,5 Millionen junge Männer ausbilden, keine Lehrpläne vorlegen. Gewalt predigende Extremisten-Organisationen arbeiten nach dem Verbot unter neuem Namen weiter, keinem ihrer Führer wurde der Prozess gemacht. Der Extremist Azam Tariq durfte trotz 20 anhängiger Terrorverfahren für einen Sitz im Parlament kandidieren - und unterstützte nach seiner Wahl die Musharraf-Regierung.

Der General sperrt mit Benazir Bhutto und Nawaz Sharif weiterhin die ins Exil gedrängten Spitzenpolitiker der säkularen Oppositionsparteien aus. Er machte im vergangenen Dezember einen dubiosen Deal mit der oppositionellen Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), dem Bündnis von sechs islamistischen Parteien. Die MMA sagte zu, Musharraf bis zum Jahr 2007 als Präsidenten zu akzeptieren, wenn er bis Ende 2004 als Armeechef zurücktritt: Faustischer Pakt Nummer zwei.

Doch die Anbiederung bei den Ultras dürfte dem General nicht bekommen - jedenfalls dann nicht, wenn die Medresse Jamia Darul Uloom Haqqania ("Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit") in der Stadt Akora Khattak zum Lehrbeispiel der religiösen Schulen im ganzen Land wird.


Terror-Verdächtiger in pakistanischem Gewahrsam nahe der Stadt Wana: "Präsident Bush sollte sich fragen, was junge Menschen dazu bringt, ihr Leben zu opfern"
Schon am Eingang wird klar, worum es hier geht: Poster zeigen den Institutsleiter Sami ul-Haq, 66, mit dem Koran in der einen und der Kalaschnikow in der anderen Hand vor Hunderten seiner Anhänger. Der Mann mit dem religiösen Titel eines Maulana gilt als parlamentarischer Anführer der radikalsten Fraktion innerhalb der MMA und als Förderer der Qaida wie der Taliban - acht ehemalige Minister erfuhren hier ihre religiöse, womöglich auch militärische Ausbildung. Mullah Omar sandte jahrelang Grußbotschaften an dieses West Point der Islamistenbewegung, Bin Laden soll seine arabischen Gefolgsleute bevorzugt hierher geschickt haben.

Als Senator des pakistanischen Oberhauses steht Sami ul-Haq ein großer Dienst-Toyota zu. Aber meist fährt er einen brandneuen Turbo-Geländewagen, das Geschenk saudi-arabischer Glaubensgenossen. Der Maulana verspätet sich, Sami ul-Haqs Neffe bittet schon einmal ins Haus zu Gebäck und Orangen. Einer der letzten westlichen Besucher in dem schlichten Besucherzimmer, ausgestattet nur mit Kissen, war vor gut zwei Jahren der amerikanische "Wall Street Journal"-Reporter Daniel Pearl. Dass seine Entführung und Ermordung kurze Zeit danach etwas mit dem Aufenthalt in der "Universität des Dschihad" zu tun hatte, gehört ins Reich der Spekulationen.

Dann kommt Sami ul-Haq: ein stattlicher Mann mit langem schwarzem Bart, randloser Brille und einer überraschend sanften Stimme. Sein Vater habe 1947 die Medresse gegründet, erzählt er, fast 3000 Studenten lebten derzeit auf dem Campus und studierten hier den Koran, die jüngsten fünf Jahre alt. Die Schule finanziert sich nach Aussagen ihres obersten Lehrers nur aus Spenden, darunter sind auch Computer, die "aus verschiedenen Quellen angeliefert werden". Staatliche Zuschüsse habe man ausdrücklich abgelehnt, weil man unabhängig bleiben wolle.

Ob er Terror predige? Bei dieser Frage verzieht sich Sami ul-Haqs strenger Mund zu einem süffisanten Lächeln. "Da müssten wir erst mal Terror definieren. Die Taliban und al-Qaida kämpfen gegen die amerikanische Unterdrückung. Ihre Wege mögen nicht immer unsere Wege sein, aber sie haben das Recht dazu. Bush sollte sich einmal fragen, was junge Menschen dazu bringt, ihr Heiligstes zu opfern, ihr Leben."

Bin Laden: Zuflucht im Grenzgebiet?
Senator Sami ul-Haq hat als Mitglied der MMA der Politik eine Chance gegeben, jetzt glaubt er nicht mehr an den Parlamentarismus. "Musharraf hat mit seinem Kampf an der Seite der Amerikaner jede Gemeinsamkeit aufgekündigt", sagt der Manager des heiligen Krieges zum Abschied. Es klingt, als sei das Schicksal des Präsidenten schon besiegelt.

Die Koranschule liegt nur eine Autostunde von Peschawar entfernt, der Hauptstadt der North West Frontier Province. Die NWFP ist Pakistans Wilder Westen, ein gebirgiges, unzugängliches Land, wie die gegenüberliegenden afghanischen Provinzen Kunar, Nangarhar, Paktia und Khost fast ausschließlich von Paschtunen bewohnt. Weder den Truppen Alexanders des Großen noch den Großmoguln oder den britischen Kolonialherren gelang es, die ebenso stolzen wie eigenwilligen Kämpfer auf Dauer zu zähmen oder gar zu unterjochen. Ihrer grausamen Blutrache untereinander beim Streit um "Zar, Zan und Zamin" ("Gold, Frauen und Land") steht ein Ehrenkodex gegenüber, der Gästen unbedingten Schutz gewährt. Und fast jeder Mann trägt eine Waffe, mit einer Selbstverständlichkeit, als fühlte er sich ohne sie kastriert.

Peschawar, letzte große Station vor dem legendären Khyber-Pass, war immer eine wilde Frontstadt voller Waffenverkäufer und Opiumdealer, Nachrichtenhändler und Spione, die sich am Qissa Khawani trafen, dem Basar der Geschichtenerzähler. Ganz in der Nähe der traditionellen Märchenstunde gab am Montag vergangener Woche auch der Sprecher des pakistanischen Militärs eine Erklärung ab. Bei den groß angelegten Vorstößen der Armee in die weitgehend autonomen Stammesregionen von Süd-Waziristan nahe Wana habe man zwar bei heftiger Gegenwehr ausländischer Kämpfer - und zugegebenermaßen auch der heimischen Stämme - etwa 50 Soldaten verloren, aber bedeutende Erfolge errungen: 163 Militante, darunter 73 Ausländer, seien festgenommen worden, "der Qaida-Geheimdienstchef Mister Abdullah wurde getötet".

Und was ist mit der Ergreifung der wirklich "hochrangigen Ziele", von denen die pakistanische Armeeführung gesprochen hat, allen voran Aiman al-Sawahiri?

Dass Bin Ladens Vize tatsächlich unter den etwa 500 Eingekesselten war, gilt nicht mehr als vollständig gesichert. Kurz nach seiner vermeintlichen Belagerung sendete vorvergangene Woche der TV-Sender al-Dschasira eine Tonbandnachricht. Darin erklärte Sawahiri es zur Pflicht aller pakistanischen Muslime, Musharraf zu stürzen. Und auch die angebliche Nummer zehn der Qaida, der usbekische Extremist Tahir Juldaschew, scheint trotz angeblicher Verletzungen den Jägern entkommen zu sein; vermutlich in Sicherheit gebracht durch das Labyrinth der Bergtunnel - wenn er denn überhaupt in der Region war.

"Was unsere Freunde so als Erfolg verkaufen, beispielsweise einen Mister Abdullah, den keiner kennt", sagt am Abend in Peschawar kopfschüttelnd ein angetrunkener Amerikaner im Ausländer-Club. Seit die Islamisten von der MMA im Provinzparlament regieren, mussten selbst die Hotels ihre den Nicht-Muslimen vorbehaltenen Bars dichtmachen; der Club ist der einzige Platz in der Stadt, wo Alkohol serviert wird. Außerdem sind die Musik-CDs vom Markt verschwunden, die "unislamischen" Filmplakate mit indischen Schönheiten, alle "sexuell aufreizenden" Schaufensterpuppen. Dafür gibt es Bin-Laden-Bonbons, Bin-Laden-Poster und Bin-Laden-Telefonkarten.

"So eine militärische Pleite", fährt der Gast im Club fort. "Und das bei all unserer logistischen Hilfe mit Satelliten und neuerdings auch noch mit Manpower ..." Dann verstummt der Mann. Er hat, wie er an den vorwurfsvollen Blicken merkt, ohnehin schon zu viel gesagt.

Die Amerikaner im pakistanischen Grenzgebiet sollen sich auf Washingtons und Islamabads dringenden Wunsch unsichtbar machen. Jeder US-Militär, der im - für Journalisten ohnehin abgesperrten - Kampfgebiet gesichtet wird, könnte für Musharraf zum Problem werden, zum Aufstand führen. Unvorsichtigerweise sprach ausgerechnet der US-Botschafter in Kabul davon, "einige der wichtigsten Qaida-Leute" seien inzwischen auf der pakistanischen Seite der Grenze, man müsse sie dort jagen - was ein wütendes Dementi aus Islamabad nach sich zog.

Die US-Militärberater haben sich in ihre Kommandozentralen zurückgezogen, aufgebaut in der Nähe der von ihnen genutzten Flugfelder Mianwali und Kohat. Glaubt man Geheimdienstberichten, soll sich seit einigen Tagen in Kohat, 90 Kilometer südlich von Peschawar, auch der neue Gegenspieler Nummer eins von Osama Bin Laden aufhalten: US-Konteradmiral William McRaven, Chef der Task Force 121.

Die klandestine Sondereinheit umfasst Geheimdienstler von der Paschtu sprechenden Abteilung der CIA, militärische Haudegen von der Army-Delta Force und schlagkräftige Fachleute der Luftwaffe und der Marine. Sie soll "schnell wie der Blitz" reagieren können, wenn die Aufklärung Bin Laden mit einer der unbemannten "Predator"-("Raubtier"-)Drohnen ortet. Ähnlich wie schon beim erfolgreichen Zugriff auf Saddam Hussein legt die US-Sondertruppe aber auch besonderen Wert auf "humint", auf die von Verbindungsleuten vor Ort gesammelten "menschlichen" Nachrichten.

Jedes Auftauchen eines Qaida-Führungsmitglieds wird auf einer Karte eingetragen, jede Verwandtschaftsbeziehung. Viele der "arabischen Afghanen" um Osama Bin Laden halten sich schon seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten im Paschtunengebiet auf und haben in den Dörfern geheiratet. Pakistanische Militärs verhaften derzeit auf amerikanischen Wunsch gezielt auch Frauen, um mehr über die Qaida-Führungskader und deren Aufenthalt zu erfahren. Sie locken mit Geld (auf Bin Laden sind 50 Millionen Dollar, auf Sawahiri 25 Millionen Dollar ausgesetzt) und neuen Waffen, mit Schulen und Straßen.

Kommandochef McRaven gilt in Washington als Wunderknabe. Er schrieb ein Buch über Spezialeinheiten und war nach 2001 einer der wichtigsten Anti-Terror-Berater im Weißen Haus. "Wenn einer clever genug ist, Bin Laden zu fangen, dann McRaven mit seinem Trupp", sagte General Wayne Downing dem US-Magazin "Newsweek", das einen früheren Kommandeur mit dem Satz zitiert, McRaven sei auch physisch extrem fit. Er könne "binnen einer Nanosekunde ein Messer durch die Rippen eines Feindes jagen".

Aber lässt sich in Waziristan ein Spinnennetz aufbauen wie im Irak, in dem sich der Meistgesuchte schließlich verfängt? Ist Bin Laden hier nicht weit populärer als Saddam in seinem Zielgebiet - und das Terrain mit seinen Bergpässen und Höhlen ungleich schwieriger?

Letzte Meldung, unbestätigt: Bin Laden wurde nahe dem pakistanischen Grenzdorf Arnawai gesehen, beim Übertritt in die afghanische Kunar-Provinz. Taliban-Chef Mullah Omar wurde bei einem US-Bombenangriff verletzt, leicht, mittelschwer, lebensbedrohlich, je nach Quelle; "Shabnamah"-Zettel sind aufgetaucht, Briefe mit seinen persönlichen Anweisungen, die Boten nachts erst jüngst in die Grenzregion gebracht haben sollen. Sind sie echt? Wenn ja: Ist eine Festnahme womöglich finanzielle Verhandlungssache?

"Man kann Paschtunen nicht kaufen", heißt es. In ihrer Kommandozentrale sollen McRaven und Co. den Spruch ergänzt haben: "Aber manchmal kann man sie mieten."

ERICH FOLLATH




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© DER SPIEGEL 15/2004

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A Pashtun boy rides his mule past poppy fields near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Officials are predicting that land under poppy cultivation will rise by 30 percent or more this year, possibly yielding a record crop.

April 10, 2004
Afghan Route to Prosperity: Grow Poppies
By AMY WALDMAN

HORABAK, Afghanistan — Rahmatullah trudged toward his village with his donkey, as men across Afghanistan have done for centuries. But in this century, men in Jeeps and on motorbikes were passing him by.

So this year Rahmatullah, a 37-year-old father of three, speaking in front of the village mosque and its mullah, said he would join his neighbors in growing poppies to harvest Afghanistan`s most lucrative cash crop, opium.

His hierarchy of dreams is all sketched out. First he will pay off some $1,200 in debt. Then he will build a house to replace the one room he shares with his family, then buy cows for plowing.

"Then, if I get richer, I`ll buy a car," he finished, eyes agleam.

Across Afghanistan, opium cultivation is surging, defying all efforts of the Afghan government and international officials to stop it. Officials are predicting that land under poppy cultivation will rise by 30 percent or more this year, possibly yielding a record crop. Last year the country produced almost 4,000 tons — three-fourths of the world`s opium — in 28 of its 32 provinces. The trade generated $1 billion for farmers and $1.3 billion for traffickers, according to the United Nations, more than half of Afghanistan`s national income.

The expansion of the trade presents a gathering threat to the new democratic government and a severe challenge to the American and international forces here. But American officials, reluctant to open a new front in the campaign against terror or engage in an antidrug war here, are conflicted about how aggressively to combat it.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said in a recent interview that with Afghanistan`s elections approaching — they are now scheduled for September — "the politics of it may require not to go too harsh" with eradication.

But as opium production underpins ever more of Afghanistan`s economic life, from new business growth to home construction, officials also fear that the economic and political risks of uprooting it will only increase. To the chagrin of Afghan and international officials, the narcotics industry has far outpaced the legal reconstruction of Afghanistan, with a capitalist intensity they would otherwise applaud.

It has lured private capital for investment and created a free-market system. With Thuraya satellite phones, farmers in distant Kandahar, a rival source of poppy in the south, know almost in real time about changing weather conditions here in this northeastern province, Badakshan, and adjust prices accordingly.

Landowners and traffickers offer credit to farmers willing to grow poppy. Trafficking has linked Afghanistan to the global economy. It even brought the first real industry here, a heroin processing laboratory that villagers estimated had operated for six months to a year before it was destroyed by Afghan and British forces in January. One local referred to it as "the company."

Afghanistan`s opium production peaked under the Taliban, who partly financed their movement from the profits. But in July 2000 the Taliban banned opium cultivation, to the distress of many farmers, and the price soared.

Many experts say the ban was simply meant to drive the price up, amounting to an effective cornering of the market for the Taliban and others who had amassed stockpiles.

British and Afghan officials are now counting on mullahs to spread the word that it is haram, or forbidden, under Islam to cultivate opiates. But interviews in many villages found that such preachings were ignored. Other mullahs were growing it themselves.

For many Afghans, poppy has allowed for piety. A United Nations report on Afghanistan`s opium economy noted that 85 percent of opium traders surveyed had performed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is incumbent on every Muslim but too costly for most Afghans.

The growth in opium production is among the gravest threats facing the administration of President Hamid Karzai. It has corrupted the government from bottom to top, including governors and cabinet officials, according to senior Afghan and American officials.

American and Afghan officials say opium is financing warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, local militias, the Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda.

Even as some American officials remain wary of fighting the spread of opium too aggressively, others have criticized the British, who have taken the lead against the drug trade here, for being too soft and slow on eradicating poppy crops. A British plan in 2002 to compensate farmers for eradication is widely seen to have acted as a "perverse incentive" to grow, as one official put it.

Citing the link between narcotics and terrorism, United Nations and British officials, meanwhile, are urging the American-led military alliance to take on laboratories and traffickers. The Americans, who will put $73 million toward antidrug operations in Afghanistan this year, say such an approach will simply send the laboratories over the border to places like Pakistan`s tribal areas, while doing nothing to stop the surge in new cultivation.

But an American official also pointed out that many of those in the drug trade "are the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001" from the Taliban and on whom the American military continues to rely in its hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

"The military just does not want to go down that road," he said.

Ideally, officials say, eradication efforts would focus on wealthy landowners growing poppy, not poor farmers. But many struggling farmers have become sharecroppers on the vast fields of the rich and would share the punishment, just as they share the profit.

The American forces have so far limited their intervention against traffickers and laboratories to encounters as they come across them in the course of other military action.

But Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of the American-led forces, said in March that his troops were finding growing connections between extremism and drugs, which could augur a more assertive approach to the drug trade.

Afghan commando units, with British support, have recently raided as many as 30 laboratories in Nangarhar Province, often meeting well-armed resistance. An American A-10 attack plane shelled "the company" — the processing laboratory near here — when the British and Afghan commandos raided that site.

As the effort to treat the laboratories as targets increases, officials expect violence to rise. American officials say raids on laboratories have already provoked conflict among drug traffickers convinced that their competitors informed on them.

Recent fighting in the Argo district prompted the removal of the governor and police chief after officials in Kabul, the capital, concluded that the two men were working for rival traffickers.

The opium trade is transforming life in Argo, a remote district in Badakshan where a cover of green poppies climbs up steep, desolate hills. The street that runs through the bazaar is mud, but the $200 television sets in the stalls glitter.

In the last four years, said Abdul Rahman, 18, poppy provided his family with a motorbike, a television, an electric generator, a VCR and a CD player — and a new house to hold it all. Last year his family accumulated $4,000 in poppy profits.

Badakshan, here in the north, lays bare narcotics` distorting economic effects. Poppy cultivation has driven up dowry prices and raised the cost of labor so much that wheat was not harvested last year.

So many people are building new homes and businesses with their poppy profits that Atiqullah, 23, a mason, said his daily rate had doubled.

Criminal calculation is partly driving the spread of the drug trade. Residents of Pashtun-inhabited regions long known for poppy growing have turned into outlaw Johnny Appleseeds, crossing the country with loans, expertise and seedpods to generate more opium for heroin laboratories, American and United Nations officials and Afghan farmers say.

But a calculus of human longing is also at work. With the price of opium stubbornly stuck at more than $135 a pound, no legal crop can compete.

"We see in Daryan" — a district thick with poppy — "other people getting rich," said Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses one name. "Their life is better. We want to make our life better too."

Today, growing poppies is less about survival — as it was during a drought in this country — than about upward mobility. It is about a new consumer class and an even larger class of aspirants to it.

"Those who had a donkey have a motorbike," said Ahmed Shah, a young farmer in Badakshan. "Those who had a motorbike have a car. Those who have one wife want a second one."

In Dari, the local language, there is a saying: if your donkey lags behind, cut his ear off. It reflects, Afghans say, the central role of envy in their culture — and in cultivation.

The Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, is full of first-time growers, many of them mujahedeen soldiers. A young commander, Mayel, denied that he was growing poppy, then whispered in earshot of a translator that he was too ashamed to admit that he was.

"We see the people in the south and east getting rich," he told a confidant with righteous logic. "Why shouldn`t we cultivate too?"



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company







Mahbul, 12, helping to weed his father`s poppy field on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul. Opium cultivation is surging across Afghanistan, defying all efforts of Afghan and international officials to stop it.

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-osam…
THE WORLD
Military Backtracks on Prediction of Capturing Bin Laden This Year
From Associated Press

April 11, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. military has pulled back from a prediction that Osama bin Laden would be captured this year, even while preparing its largest force to date for operations along the Pakistani border where the Al Qaeda chief is suspected to be hiding.

Catching Bin Laden and other top fugitives remains a priority of the expanding U.S. operation in Afghanistan, but the growing mission is "not about just one or two people," a spokesman said Saturday.

"We remain committed to catching these guys. It`s pretty much … just about everything that we do here," Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers said.

But he declined to make any new predictions of when the fugitives might be behind bars.

Beevers said U.S. forces in Afghanistan were "still confident" of capturing their top targets, but he added: "At the end of the day, it`s not about just one or two people. It`s about … ensuring that there is stability and security throughout Afghanistan."

Buoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, said in January that he was confident Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar would also be in U.S. hands this year.

At the time, a spokesman even said the military was "sure" it would catch the two men. Those remarks, and talk of a spring offensive in Afghanistan by defense officials in Washington, triggered speculation that Bin Laden had been located.

But now the military has followed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld`s lead in seeking to lower expectations that a top fugitive would be taken into custody and unveiled during election campaigns in both the United States and Afghanistan.

"Close doesn`t count," Rumsfeld said during a February visit to Kabul, the Afghan capital. "I suspect that we`ll find that it is accomplished at some point in the future, but I wouldn`t have any idea when."

There have been no firm indications of Bin Laden`s whereabouts since he eluded capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in Afghanistan in December 2001.




Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Aus dem Spiegel, leider nicht in Deutsch, sondern aus der NYTimes.

April 12, 2004
TERRORISM
Volleyball with bin Laden
By STEFAN SIMONS,
Der Spiegel

Canadian, who was the Al Qaeda leader`s neighbor in Afghanistan, has now been released from detention in Guantanamo Bay, and reports on daily life in the Jihad camp.

The incarnation of evil appeared in a turban and flowing garments, and it was worship at first sight. When Abdurahman Khadr was introduced to the preacher of Jihad six years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan, he was surprised by Osama bin Laden`s gentle nature. "This," thought Khadr, an adolescent at the time, "is supposed to be one of the world`s most feared terrorists?"

The Al Qaeda leader`s unassuming appearance in a remote mountain village not far from the eastern Afghani city of Jalalabad simply did not match the description of a wanted man, a man the fundamentalists, even then, were describing as the perfidious mastermind of the dual attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. When encountered in person, Abdurahman says today, the fanatical ideologue of Islamist expansion was occasionally even capable of showing gentle affection: "He`s really quite normal."

Until 2001, Abdurahman, now 21, experienced the elusive Al Qaeda leader from a very close distance. For many years, his family was on friendly terms with the bin Laden clan, and lived next door to the sheik`s rather large household in his sparsely furnished mountain camp near Jalalabad.

Abdurahman was born in the Gulf state of Bahrain. His father, Ahmed Said, emigrated to Canada from Egypt in 1977, and acquired wealth and status working as an engineer in Ottawa. In the early 1980s, after the Soviets had marched into Afghanistan, the entire family relocated to Pakistan, where Abdurahman`s father took a position as the head of an international refugee assistance organization.

That was when the family first came into contact with bin Laden. Following a brief return to Canada in 1996 - the Pakistani authorities had accused Abdurahman`s father of involvement in a bombing attack - Khadr eventually took his family to Afghanistan, where he worked for the Taliban regime, building schools and orphanages.

A short time later, Khadr, nicknamed "Al-Canadi" because of his origins, was placed in charge of Al Qaeda`s finances, which brought him into the inner circle of advisors surrounding bin Laden and his chief strategist, Aiman al-Zawahiri. The sheik of terror was the guest of honor at the wedding of Khadr`s daughter Zaynab to a Jihadi from Yemen.

Abdurahman, just 15 years old when the family moved to the mountains, did not adapt well to the monotonous daily life of the Al Qaeda camp. Like his three brothers, Abdurahman, the second-eldest son, was given a Kalashnikov ("it was a rather large weapon"), but showed little interest in pursuing a career as a devout fighter.

Instead, the son of bin Laden`s friend became known as a prankster, once even blowing up a soda can filled with gunpowder in front of the Al Qaeda leader`s office. "For some time," Abdurahman now recalls, "I was considered too unreliable to take part in explosives training."

In his mountain camp, Osama bin Laden emphasized the strictest adherence to Islamic principles, especially for his wives. Nevertheless, the Al Qaeda boss, always reverently addressed by the title of "Emir," was not the undisputed master of his own house. Abdurahman observed that "sometimes there were quarrels about the lack of money, and sometimes about the children."

Bin Laden was an extremely modest man. Not only did he do without modern conveniences, such as ice cubes and electricity, he also forbade his family from consuming Pepsi or Coca-Cola, things he viewed as the incarnation of the US society he despised: "America has destroyed our culture, our economy and our daily life."

Nevertheless, frowned-upon Western goods were secretly smuggled into the camp, and even bin Laden`s children bought forbidden soda pop. But the Al Qaeda leader was generous in other respects, promising a horse to those of his children who did well in their Koran studies, which encouraged even the youngest to diligently study the Suras of the holy scriptures.

In the pious atmosphere of this mountain camp, Khadr`s son Abdurahman, with his Western notions, soon emerged as someone with little respect for bin Laden`s strict rules. In defiance of the Taliban`s rigorous precepts, he listened to music and openly flirted with girls, behavior that threatened to thoroughly destroy his family`s reputation and status.

The senior Khadr finally took his "misguided son" to task, telling him that "if you stay with us, you will lead your younger brothers astray, with your smoking and drinking," and scolding and cursing his first-born as a "scourge on the family."

There could be only one way to save the family`s honor, said the father: Abdurahman was to be trained as a suicide assassin, a prospect the son categorically rejected: "I did not believe in killing innocent people."

Given this mindset, he was also unable to share the general euphoria that prevailed in bin Laden`s surroundings after the attacks of September 11, 2001. When US troops marched into Afghanistan, Abdurahman`s father went into hiding, and he was shot in a twelve-hour battle last October. The Americans also arrested the son, Abdurahman, and sent him to Guantanamo.

Allegedly to help his younger brother Omar, who is still in detention in the prison camp in Cuba, Abdurahman offered to assist the CIA by spying on his fellow Al Qaeda prisoners. It was a rather unsuccessful endeavor. The fewest of the Guantanamo inmates, "no more than ten percent," says Abdurahman, were hardcore Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.

Meanwhile, the Americans have released their useless collaborator and deported him to Canada. In his new home, he has recently been plagued by misgivings. Former friends and members of his family curse him as a rebel and traitor, and his mother continues to assert that she would be willing to give her life at any time for the cause of Islam.

Abdurahman still finds it difficult to recognize his erstwhile neighbor as the mastermind of international terrorism.

In his opinion, bin Laden is fundamentally a "human being." He is also unable to forget his memories of daily life in the camp, where the godfather of the terrorists, a man whose head is now worth a US-proclaimed bounty of 50 million dollars, played volleyball with his children almost every afternoon.

"He had his own special serve, like a Russian grenade launcher: First the ball went up in the air, and then it began to rotate," recalls Abdurahman. "When the ball came back, it was virtually unstoppable."


Translated by Christopher Sultan



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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April 19, 2004
Fearful of a Pakistani Drive, Tribesmen Hunt Qaeda Supporters
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WANA, Pakistan, April 18 (AP) — Fearing another offensive by the Pakistani Army, a 2,000-member local militia began a sweep through mud-brick villages in their tribal homeland on Sunday, saying their intention was to hunt down supporters of Al Qaeda and hand them over to the government.

The tribal force headed off in two groups into South Waziristan, near the Afghan border. A military operation last month seeking Al Qaeda members who might be hiding in the largely lawless territory killed more than 120 people, including soldiers, militants and civilians.

The government has threatened more tough military action if five tribesmen accused of harboring foreign terrorists do not surrender by Tuesday.

The earlier two-week operation was Pakistan`s boldest since it joined the United States in the effort to prevent terrorism in late 2001.

The offensive angered local residents, though, as well as Islamic hard-liners and the political opposition.

The military said it killed 63 militants and captured 163, but none of them were top Qaeda members, and hundreds are believed to have escaped. Dozens of homes in the region, one of Pakistan`s poorest, were destroyed.

At least 46 soldiers were killed in that operation, which was undertaken by President Pervez Musharraf to demonstrate that he was serious about evicting hundreds of suspected foreign militants he says are hiding in Pakistan`s semiautonomous tribal regions. Those regions have long remained outside central government control.

The region is suspected of being a hideout for the Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, and his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri.

In the aftermath of the operation, tribal elders anxious to prevent a repeat have appealed for the five chief local renegades to surrender, without success. The tribal force, consisting of volunteers from the Yargul Khel and two other local tribes, appears to be a last-ditch effort to avoid more bloodshed.

Such tribal forces, however, have been marshaled before and achieved little, and there have been doubts about whether they are willing to attack fellow tribesmen. Many of the foreign militants are thought to be veterans of the war in the 1980`s against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan who settled across the border in Pakistan and married into local families.

Inhabitants said the tribal force did not face any resistance on Sunday, and there were no reported arrests. The militia destroyed the mud-brick home of one local man accused of sheltering foreign terrorists in the Azam Warsak area, but he had fled a day earlier, said Barkatullah Wazir, a local villager.

The 2,000-member force, armed with assault rifles, grenade launchers and heavy weapons, had gathered in the town of Wana before heading off in two groups toward outlying regions closer to the Afghan border.

Malik Khadin, a tribal elder leading the hunt, told his troops they would clear the area of terrorists, and vowed that the wanted men would be handed over to the government "dead or alive," said one of the tribesmen, Allah Dad Khan Wazir.

Mr. Khadin also urged inhabitants to cooperate by handing over the five wanted local tribesmen.

Elders from across the tribal regions also met in Wana on Sunday and appealed for the government to postpone by 10 days its Tuesday deadline for tribesmen to hand over the wanted men, Mr. Wazir said.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

________________
Why Bush Can`t Find bin Laden

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Al-Qaeda has more than 18,000 potential terrorist around the world, think tank warns
http://www.iiss.org/
By Barry Renfrew
ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:10 p.m. May 25, 2004

LONDON – Far from being crippled by the U.S.-led war on terror, al-Qaeda has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks, a report said Tuesday.

Al-Qaeda is probably working on plans for major attacks on the United States and Europe, and it may be seeking weapons of mass destruction in its desire to inflict as many casualties as possible, the International Institute of Strategic Studies said in its annual survey of world affairs.

Osama bin Laden`s network appears to be operating in more than 60 nations, often in concert with local allies, the study by the independent think tank said.

Although about half of al-Qaeda`s top 30 leaders have been killed or captured, it has an effective leadership, with bin Laden apparently still playing a key role, it said.

"Al-Qaeda must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe, potentially involving weapons of mass destruction," IISS director Dr. John Chipman told a press conference releasing "Strategic Survey 2003/4."

At the same time it will likely continue attacking "soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq," he added.

The report suggested that the two military centerpieces of the U.S.-led war on terror – the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – may have boosted al-Qaeda.

Driving the terror network out of Afghanistan in late 2001 appears to have benefited the group, which dispersed to many countries, making it almost invisible and hard to combat, the story said.

And the Iraq conflict "has arguably focused the energies and resources of al-Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition that appeared so formidable" after the Afghan intervention, the survey said.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq brought al-Qaeda recruits from across Islamic nations, the study said. Up to 1,000 foreign Islamic fighters have infiltrated Iraqi territory, where they are cooperating with Iraqi insurgents, the survey said.

Efforts to defeat al-Qaeda will take time and might accelerate only if there are political developments that now seem elusive, such as the democratization of Iraq and the resolution of conflict in Israel, it said.

It could take up to 500,000 U.S. and allied troops to effectively police Iraq and restore political stability, IISS researcher Christopher Langton told the news conference.

Such a figure appeared impossible to meet, given political disquiet in the United States and Britain and the unwillingness of other nations to send troops, he said.

The United States is al-Qaeda`s prime target in a war it sees as a death struggle between civilizations, the report said. An al-Qaeda leader has said 4 million Americans will have to be killed "as a prerequisite to any Islamic victory," the survey said.

"Al-Qaeda`s complaints have been transformed into religious absolutes and cannot be satisfied through political compromise," the study said.

The London-based institute is considered the most important security think tank outside the United States. Its findings on al-Qaeda`s expanding structure and growing support by allied terrorist networks around the world track with similar assessments from governments and other experts.

The IISS said its estimate of 18,000 al-Qaeda fighters was based on intelligence estimates that the group trained at least 20,000 fighters in its camps in Afghanistan before the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban regime. In the ensuing war on terror, some 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters have been killed or captured, the survey said.

Al-Qaeda appears to have successfully reconstituted its operations by dispersing its forces into small groups and through working with local allies, such as the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders` Front in Turkey, the report said.

"Al-Qaeda is the common ideological and logistical hub for disparate local affiliates, and bin Laden`s charisma, presumed survival and elusiveness enhance the organization`s iconic drawing power," it said.




Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20040525-14…

[Joerver]

Bis gestern wurden 124 US-Soldaten in Afghanistan getötet.
http://lunaville.org/OEF/default.aspx


SPIEGEL ONLINE - 30. Mai 2004, 13:27
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,302101,00.html

Bin Laden und die Taliban


Offensive im Grenzland der Paschtunen

Von Claus Christian Malzahn

Wenn der Schnee schmilzt am Hindukusch, flammen die Kämpfe auf. US-Truppen und Pakistanis versuchen zur Zeit, die Taliban in die Zange zu nehmen - doch bei den Kämpfen im Grenzland verlor die US-Armee am Wochenende bereits vier Soldaten.

Frieden gibt es in Afghanistan meistens nur im Winter, und auch der ist eher fragil. Von November bis April sind die meisten Pässe durch Schneemassen blockiert - selbst die aggressivsten Kämpfer kämen durch Eis und Kälte nicht durch. Wenn aber der Schnee schmilzt in den Bergen vor Kabul und die Sonne die Ebene von Kandahar braungebrannt hat, greifen die Stämme zu den Waffen - das ist seit hunderten von Jahren so und in diesem Frühling nicht anders.

Die Bilanz des vergangenen Wochenendes liest sich für die Regierung in Kabul nicht gut. Im Süden des zerklüfteten Landes griffen paschtunische Anhänger der Taliban ein Büro der Bezirksregierung von Helmand an - sieben regierungstreue afghanische Soldaten und ein Angreifer kamen bei dem Feuergefecht ums Leben. In der Nachbrarprovinz Zabul musste die US-Armee einen ihrer größten Verluste seit dem Einmarsch im Herbst 2001 verzeichnen: Vier Soldaten wurden dort in einem Guerilla-Angriff getötet.

An der Grenze zu Pakistan, in dem Hinterhalt-Attacken und Überraschungsangriffe der Taliban besonders häufig vorkommen, wurden außerdem mehrere US-Soldaten bei einer Attacke verletzt. Damit stieg die Zahl der in Afghanistan gefallenen US-Soldaten auf 90; 56 von ihnen starben bei Gefechten. Seit vergangenen Sommer starben in Afghanistan etwa 700 Menschen durch Angriffe der Taliban, darunter auch viele Zivilisten: das Land befindet sich längst wieder im Krieg.

Neue US-Truppen in Kandahar

Die Amerikaner haben sich für diesen Sommer offenbar vorgenommen, die zum Teil völlig außer Kontrolle geratene Situation in den südöstlichen Provinzen militärisch zu bereinigen. Im Pentagon und im weißen Haus träumen manche Strategen sogar davon, endlich Osama bin Laden zu fangen, dessen Versteck im Grenzland der Paschtunen vermutet wird.

Die Luftschlagskapazität der in Kandahar stationierten US-Streitkräfte wurde deshalb dem Vernehmen nach verdreifacht. Doch Bomber und Jets können in der unübersichtlichen, von Schluchten und Höhlen durchzogenen Bergwelt tatsächlich wenig ausrichten. Dennoch werden die in Kandahar stationierten US-Truppen seit einigen Monaten stufenweise ausgetauscht und teilweise durch Elite-Einheiten aus Hawaii ersetzt. Die US-Armee verfügt in Afghanistan über etwa 20.000 Soldaten, hinzu kommen etwa 10.000 Soldaten der noch im Aufbau befindlichen Karzai-treuen "Afghan National Army", die in der Regel die Hauptlast von Bodenoffensiven tragen muss. Die in Kabul stationierten Soldaten der Internationalen Schutztruppe ISAF, an der sich Soldaten aus 30 Nationen beteiligen, ist an der offensichtlich bevorstehenden Offensive gegen die Taliban nicht direkt beteiligt. Etwa 6500 Soldaten der "International Security Assistance Force", zu der Deutschland seit dem Januar 2002 einen erheblichen Truppenanteil stellt, sichern die Hauptstadt Kabul. Die Stadt gilt, trotz einiger Anschläge und Attacken, als relativ sicher.

Doch im Grenzland, dem Hauptaufmarschgebiet der Taliban, stoßen die US-Armee und die Truppen Karzais auf objektive, kaum lösbare geographische und politische Probleme. Viele der islamistischen Guerilleros ziehen sich nach ihren Angriffen wieder nach Pakistan zurück. Dorther kommen sie meistens. Die pakistanische Grenzarmee ließ die islamistischen Guerilleros lange Zeit gewähren, afghanische und amerikanische Politiker sowie neutrale Beobachter mußten sogar davon ausgehen, dass Pakistan den Kampf der Taliban auf kleiner Flamme weiterkochen läßt, um Kabul nicht zur Ruhe kommen zu lassen.

Pakistanis kesseln Wannu ein

Nachdem Islamisten im vergangenenen Jahr mehrfach vergeblich versucht haben, das pakistanische Staatsoberhaupt, General Pervez Musharraf umzubringen, scheint man in Islamabad aber von seiner gefährlichen bisherigen Linie abzurücken. Die pakistanische Armee ist seitdem mehrfach in die autonomen Stammesgebiete einmarschiert, um Islamisten dingfest zu machen und zu bekämpfen.

Seit einigen Tagen blockiert die Armee die Zufahrtsstraßen zur vor allem von Paschtunen bewohnten Provinzhauptstadt Wannu, die unweit der Grenze zu Afghanistan liegt. Die Stadt ist umzingelt, Scharfschützen der Armee sind in Wannu in Position gegangen. Der Handel liegt lahm, kaum jemand wird die Durchfahrt erlaubt. Mit den Aktionen sollen paschtunische Stammesführer gezwungen werden, militante Islamisten, die sich in der Stadt versteckt halten sollen, an die Armee zu übergeben.

Wannu ist die Hauptstadt von Süd-Waziristan, einer Gegend, die neben anderen Provinzen als möglicher Schlupfwinkel von al-Kaida Offizieren gilt. Waziristan grenzt wiederum an die afghanische Provinz Paktika, einer Berggegend, aus der die Taliban nie richtig vertrieben werden konnten. Die letzte Anti-Terror-Aktion der pakistanischen Armee fand hier im Herbst 2001 statt.

Bisher ist es den Guerilleros aber bei solchen Aktionen meistens gelungen, zu fliehen, manchmal sogar durch kilometerlange Erdtunnel. Das Vertrauen der US-Armee in die Fähigkeiten ihrer pakistanischen Bünispartner ist außerdem nicht sehr groß. Immer wieder kam es in letzter Zeit deshalb zu Grenzübertritten - US-Soldaten im Einsatz auf pakistanischem Territorium.

Solche militärisch mitunter sinnvollen, politisch aber fragwürdigen Aktionen schätzt man gar nicht in Islamabad. Denn sie kratzen am selbstbewußten Image der Nation und sind Wasser auf die Mühlen der Prediger, die Musharraf als Marionette der Amerikaner denunzieren. Doch um im Grenzland der Paschtunen endlich Boden gut zu machen, werden solche Übertritte für die Amerikaner in diesem Sommer vermutlich kaum zu vermeiden sein.



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

Wir geben Euch Osama"

ZDF: Taliban wollten Bin Laden ausliefern

Nach Recherchen des ZDF-"auslandsjournals" gab es zwischen 1999 und 2001 mehrere Angebote der damaligen Taliban-Regierung Afghanistans, den El Kaida-Chef Osama bin Laden auszuliefern.

03.06.2004


Das behauptet der afghanisch-amerikanische Geschäftsmann Kabir Mohabbat gegenüber dem ZDF. Nach eigener Aussage war er damals als Vermittler zwischen den Regierungen in Washington und Kabul tätig. Der Außenminister der Taliban Ahmed Mutawakil habe zu ihm gesagt: "Ihr könnt ihn haben, wann immer die Amerikaner bereit sind. Nennt uns ein Land und wir werden ihn ausliefern."

Auf einem geheimen Treffen zwischen Ministern der Taliban und hochrangigen Vertretern der US-Regierung im November 2000 in einem Frankfurter Nobelhotel unterbreiteten die Afghanen nach Angaben von Mohabbat mehrere Angebote. Unter anderem sollen sie bereit gewesen sein, Osama bin Laden an ein Drittland auszuliefern, das ihn an den internationalen Gerichtshof in Den Haag überstellen könne.

Logistische Gründe
Ort und Zeitpunkt der Übergabe bin Ladens sollten bei weiteren Treffen in der US-Botschaft in Pakistan ausgehandelt werden. Trotz angeblichen Drängens seitens der Taliban kam es vor dem 11. September 2001 zu keinen weiteren Verhandlungen.

Erst nach den Anschlägen von New York und Washington setzte man sich am 16. und 17. September im pakistanischen Quetta wieder an den Verhandlungstisch. Laut Kabir Mohabbat drängten die USA auf eine Auslieferung binnen 24 Stunden - eine Forderung, die die Taliban angeblich aus logistischen Gründen nicht erfüllen konnten.

Seriöses Angebot
Gestützt werden die Aussagen Mohabbats durch den Vorsitzenden des Auswärtigen und Sicherheitspolitischen Ausschusses des Europäischen Parlamentes, Elmar Brok von der Fraktion der Europäischen Volkspartei. Er war in dieser Angelegenheit als Vermittler zwischen Khabir Mohabbat und den Amerikanern tätig. "Ich muss sagen, dass ich dieses Angebot im Nachhinein noch sehr viel seriöser ansehe als damals. Aber ich habe mir (damals) schon gesagt: Wenn etwas dran sein sollte, muss man es weitergeben. (...) Im Nachhinein wird sicher mancher der Beteiligten denken: Hätte man diese Möglichkeit doch wahrgenommen (...), damit wäre viel Leid erspart geblieben."

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Was ist Aus Afghanistan zu erwarten. Die Jagd nach den Taliban und nach Bin Laden.

PART 1: The legacy of
Nek Mohammed
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The name of Nek Mohammed made international headlines in the middle of last month when the charismatic former Taliban commander was killed in a Pakistani army raid near Wana, the district headquarters of the South Waziristan tribal area.

Nek was a key figure in the area, acting as a rallying point for the Afghan resistance, and as a procurer and facilitator for the many foreign and al-Qaeda fighters sheltered in the region.

Nek was a wanted man, and his death marked a significant victory for Islamabad, which is under relentless pressure from Washington to get rid of the foreign militants from the sensitive Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas from where they have declared war on US interests in Afghanistan. The foreigners include Arabs, Chechens and Chinese Muslims who have set up base camps in remote areas.

By killing Nek, though, the authorities have not been able to erase his legacy and the profound influence he has had in the area.

Nek Mohammed belonged to the Ahmed Zai Wazir tribe`s sub-clan, the Yargul Khai. He received his early education at an Islamic school run by Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam leader Maulana Noor Mohammed. Nek`s father, Nawaz Khan, was a tribal elite and owned property in the village of Kalosha, South Waziristan, close to the Afghanistan border.

From childhood Nek showed a tough, rigid personality, which resulted in him being expelled from the Islamic school. He joined a regular school and fared much better, before being admitted to a college run by Pashtun nationalists, the Pakhtunkho Awami Party.

He never completed schooling, though, and started a general store in Wana`s main bazaar. At this time, the region was under the influence of military leader General Zia ul-Haq`s policies to promote jihad in Afghanistan. In fact, the Pakistani tribal areas served as base camps for the Afghan resistance movement against the former Soviet Union, which had began a 10-year occupation in 1979.

South and North Waziristan agencies - two of Pakistan`s seven tribal areas - were part of a supply line that ran to Paktia to Zabul across the border to reinforce the positions of Afghan fighters. Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence set up exclusive camps in Wana, where youngsters were recruited, "motivated" and trained to supply fresh blood to the Afghan resistance movement.

Different commanders of the Afghan resistance belonging to the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) and other organizations established underground bunkers where they stored their heavy ammunition. The US Central Intelligence Agency, which had been drawn into Afghanistan`s affairs to counter its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, financed thousands of Arab fighters to gather in and around Wana, where many purchased land and established base camps and training centers.

To reinforce the Afghan jihad, ideological support was as necessary as military assistance, so policymakers in Islamabad laid the foundations for dozens of new religious schools. The young Nek, like many others at the time, was drawn into this world, and he signed on for a training camp.

And where Nek had been a mediocre pupil, he took to fighting with the zeal of a leopard, so much so that he rubbed shoulders with such frontline luminaries of the Afghan war as Saifullah Mansoor and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

These acquaintances were to bring handsome dividends.

In September 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul, ending several years of political anarchy in the country after the withdrawal of the Soviets. On the recommendation of Mansoor and Haqqani, Molvi Gul was appointed commander of the Kargha garrison, but when he was killed, 18-year-old Nek took over.

This made Nek a frontline Taliban commander against the Northern Alliance, which still controlled sections of the country. Soon he was a veteran, seeing action in the battlefields of Bagram, Bamyan and Pansher. By now Nek was a key figure in the Taliban, in charge of 3,000 men and a hero who frequently interacted with foreign fighters.

During this period Nek met al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at the Rash Khor training camp, south of Kabul. He also met bin Laden`s deputy, Aiman al-Zawahir, and became friends-in-arms with Mullah Nazir, a Taliban minister; the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yaldevish, and Chinese separatist leader Hasan Mohsin.

These new friendships were to be critical to Nek, as well as to developments several years later.

In late 2001, the US bombardment of Afghanistan began in retaliation for the country harboring the al-Qaeda masterminds of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. Kabul soon fell as the Taliban retreated with hardly a fight, and action switched to the Tora Bora, near the Pakistan border, which featured a vast network of tunnels and caves in the mountains.

An Afghan go-between, Haji Zaman, in exchange apparently for hefty bribes from the US, negotiated a ceasefire under which Arab fighters were to surrender. During a recent interview, a Taliban commander, Mohammed Rahim, who was stranded in the Tora Bora along with 100 other Taliban, revealed that during the ceasefire more than 1,000 Arabs and the 100 Taliban fled, some to Shahi Kot and others across the border to the tribal areas.

In early 2002, in a showdown in Shahi Kot, about 18 US soldiers were killed and the US mobilized heavy land troops as well as air support and bombed the hideouts of hundreds of Arabs and Chechen fighters who had made Shahi Kot their hub. As a result, the militants melted into the mountains, from where Nek helped them to settle in South Waziristan.

New housing, training camps and recruitment centers for the new Afghan jihad were established in South Waziristan, which became the operational headquarters. Money flooded in from al-Qaeda, and Nek, being the character he was, became rich.

By December 2003, Nek owned more than 40 pickup trucks and bulletproof vehicles. The Taliban leaders were underground, but the aid kept on flowing in from around the world, with Nek as the point man to distribute it.

Training camps and the resistance
By now the scattered Taliban and al-Qaeda had regrouped. They had restored their supply lines and sources of financial aid, and had begun to build new bases, hideouts and training camps on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

In this process, Nek thrived, utilizing his networks in the Pakistani tribal areas from which he hailed, especially in South Waziristan.

Nek and his foreign comrades formed a new jihadi outfit called Jaishul al-Qiba al-Jihadi al-Siri al-Alami. Another group, Jundullah, two of whose members, Attaur Rehman and Abu Musab al-Balochi (al-Baloshi), were later arrested in Karachi in connection with the recent unsuccessful attack on the Corps Commander Karachi, was formed with members from the Jaishul al-Qibla to conduct operations all over Pakistan and to "take the battle to all possible fronts".

Both organizations are aligned with al-Qaeda, but have different ways of operating.

Jundullah
Jundullah is a purely militant outfit whose objective is to target Pakistan`s pro-US rulers and US and British interests in the country. Members receive training in Afghanistan and South Waziristan, and it is now actively recruiting.

The organization produces propaganda literature, including documentary films, and has a studio named Ummat. It does similar work for al-Qaeda`s media wing, which is called the al-Sahab Foundation.

These media outlets incite the sentiments of Muslim youths by producing films showing Western - particularly Israeli and US - "atrocities" against Muslim communities. This is the basic tool through which a new generation of jihadis is being raised.

Jundullah was allegedly headed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operational commander of the September 11 terrorist attack in the US. He was arrested in Pakistan early last year.

Suspects grilled
The US has exclusive facilities across the world to interrogate militants, many of them captured in Pakistan. They are believed to number about 3,000, and they are spread over different areas. The biggest interrogation center for al-Qaeda detainees is Bagram Air Base north of the Afghan capital Kabul. Al-Tamara detention center, eight kilometers out of Rabat in Morocco, houses dozens of people arrested in Pakistan, while others are kept in Egypt, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Soon after the attack on the Corps Commander Karachi, a number of Jundullah Pakistanis were arrested, as well as four Arabs, including al-Baloshi. During their interrogation they fingered two prominent doctors (brothers) from Karachi, Dr Akmal Waheed and Dr Arshad Waheed, who were said to have provided medical treatment to members of Jundullah. The doctors, associated with the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association, were heavily involved in relief work in Afghanistan during the US invasion of that country. Later they treated several high-profile al-Qaeda leaders in South Waziristan. They are also said to have raised funds for al-Qaeda and helped several Arab families return to their countries of origin.

The doctors have since been arrested.

The interrogators also learned of two girls from Karachi who had been recruited and trained for suicide attacks against Western interests in Pakistan. As a result, the United States and the United Kingdom temporarily shut down their diplomatic facilities for fear of a terror attack.

Jundullah is now believed to have penetrated deeply into the Pakistan army, police and air force, with core centers in Rawalpindi (the twin city to Islamabad), Peshawar and Quetta.

Jaishul al-Qiba al-Jihadi al-Siri al-Alami
This organization prepares literature and films to incite hatred against the West for a new generation of jihadis. It widely facilitates training for new recruits, with facilities in South Waziristan and in the inaccessible regions of North Waziristan, beside some fresh training centers in Afghanistan in Taliban-controlled areas.

These centers mostly started operating in the middle of 2003, after the Taliban and al-Qaeda had regrouped. Initially, camps were established in Wana, Azam Warsak, Kalosha, Zareen Noor, Baghar, Dhog, Angor Ada in South Waziristan. In North Waziristan, camps were established in the border areas of Shawal, including Darey Nishtar and Mangaroti, where neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan is in control.

In Afghanistan, Zawar (Khost) was the most protected place where foreign fighters established their bunkers and hideouts. The area is under the command of Jalaluddin Haqqani.

In South Waziristan, the centers were under the command of Nek, and he is known to have hosted bin Laden and al-Zawahir on numerous occasions.

Information extracted from Jundullah detainees indicates that most were trained in South Waziristan. They claim that villages around Kalosha had been handed over to the families of Arab fighters. From the same training camps, several groups were raised to fight in Iraq.

PART 2: The US moves on South Waziristan

(Muqadar Iqbal and Zafar Mehmood Shiekh helped research this article, as well as obtain material from Rawalpindi.)

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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The final Countdown noch vor der Wahl in den USA? Werde dieweiteren Folgen im Auge behalten. Die Asia Times bringt vieles aus einem anderen Sichtwinkel. Sie haben einige sehr gute Schreiber. Die Zeitung erscheint in Hong Kong. Weiteres siehe unten.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FG21Df02.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FG21Df02.html

Stage set for final showdown
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

See also: The legacy of Nek Mohammed


KARACHI - A recent report by US think-tank Strategic Forecasting suggested that since "sovereignty" had now been transferred to Iraq, the United States would give its full attention to the problem of al-Qaeda fugitives in Pakistan`s rugged tribal areas. Already this year, at the instigation of Washington, the Pakistani army has launched two military offensives into South Waziristan to track down foreign elements, with marginal success.

All signs now point to another offensive, but this time Islamabad and Washington have agreed that US troops stationed across the border in Afghanistan will take an active part in the action on Pakistani soil, rather than wait for suspects to be flushed out into their waiting arms. Similarly, Pakistani troops will be able to engage in hot-pursuit operations into Afghan territory.

In its single most important strike yet in the tribal areas, the Pakistani army in mid-June killed former Taliban commander Nek Mohammed, a key facilitator for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Afghan resistance in the tribal areas. The United States, however, played a vital role in this operation by tracking down Nek through his mobile-telephone calls, and there is even some suggestion that the US in fact launched the missiles that killed Nek and a few others in a house near Wana, the provincial capital of South Waziristan.

Given the complexities of fighting in the inhospitable tribal territories, where conventional forces face huge natural obstacles, the involvement of high-tech US forces is critical.

It is just such cooperation that is believed to have topped the agenda when General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, visited Pakistan recently, in addition to Pakistan sending troops to Iraq.

Shortly after Abizaid`s departure, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf announced that foreign terrorists had a base camp in South Waziristan, and that the military would "use power to smoke them out" in as many operations as were needed to achieve this goal.

With a little help from friends, of course.

According to contacts in Pakistan`s strategic circles who spoke to Asia Times Online, over the past few months the US has been engaged in espionage operations, including the use of spy planes, in South and North Waziristan, Chitral, the Hindu Kush mountain chain, Zhob, and the mountainous belt between Kandahar in Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan. Tracking devices have also been installed in a number of places to monitor movements in the border areas.

US intelligence is concerned that in the previous Pakistani army incursions into South Waziristan, their targets were forewarned, and simply relocated to the mountains of Balochistan. Now a strategy has been worked out in which operations will cover the whole 2,240 kilometers of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Militant revival
After two operations and exhaustive scouting in South Waziristan, the region`s network of underground bunkers and tunnels has been exposed. As a result, the estimated 600 foreign fighters who were holed up there have moved to other regions and provinces.

One of these areas, Jani Khail, is full of Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers, and Osama bin Laden is said to have spent some time there after fleeing from Afghanistan, along with hundreds of Arab families, in 2002.

The Eidak tribes in North Waziristan are also known for their commitment to jihad against foreigners. According to one estimate, 85% of Eidak youths are engaged either in Wana, Afghanistan or the Iraqi fronts. Jamia Eidak (Islamic school) is the catalyst for this movement. Recently, a few attacks have been made on Pakistani troops in the Eidak area, and several security personnel have been killed.

Darpakhail was the center of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s, and has retained its commitment for the cause of jihad against the United States. Siraj Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former Taliban minister and commander who acts as a go-between for al-Qaeda and the Taliban on both sides of the border, regularly ferries fresh jihadis in a fleet of brand-new jeeps to Khost, Paktia and Paktika in Afghanistan.

After the arrest of Jalaluddin Haqqani`s nephew, Ishaq Haqqani, by Pakistani authorities, Siraj Haqqani (see Through the eyes of the Taliban, May 5) now orchestrates all jihadi activities. The Manbaul Ulom seminary in North Waziristan, which the authorities had shut down, is once again a center of jihadi activities, and where top Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders meet.

Already, the Taliban have stepped up operations in Afghanistan, especially in the provinces of Urzgan, Kandahar, Khost, Zabul, Paktia and Paktika, and the scattered movement of the past has managed to re-establish a chain of command in the hands of Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Given these developments, it is only a matter of time before Pakistani and US forces swing into action.

(Additional reporting by Muqadar Iqbal in Rawalpindi.)

TOMORROW: Lessons from Waziristan

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


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Jul 21, 2004
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July 21, 2004
Pakistan Army Ousts Afghan Refugees in Militants` Area
By CARLOTTA GALL

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 19 - The Pakistani Army, backed by United States intelligence and surveillance, has stepped up its operations against supporters of Al Qaeda in the area near the Afghan border in recent weeks, displacing thousands of Afghan refugees.

Some 200,000 Afghan refugees have been living in the remote border areas of Pakistan, in poor and insecure conditions. In the past few weeks, as the Pakistani operations in the tribal area of South Waziristan have risen in strength and, according to some reports, prompted a matching increase in militant resistance, 25,000 people have poured back into Afghanistan, refugee officials said.

In the past five months, the Pakistani Army, at the behest of the United States, has pushed into the normally autonomous tribal areas, in an attempt to capture or kill an estimated 500 foreign fighters - many of them hardened Uzbek and Central Asian militants - and supporting tribesmen, and to search for Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who are often rumored to be sheltering in the area.

The United States military, which has 17,000 troops across the border in Afghanistan, has provided satellite intelligence and aerial surveillance to assist Pakistani operations, the Pakistanis have said. Last month a Pakistani tribal leader was killed in what officials in Pakistan said was a strike by a Hellfire missile launched from an American drone. Both Pakistan and the United States say American troops have not moved into Pakistani territory.

As the fighting has increased, the Pakistani military has hardened its position against the Afghan refugees living in the area, officials in Afghanistan said.

Refugees have been given as little as two hours` notice to leave before their houses were bulldozed, according to officials with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Some have returned to Afghanistan with no belongings, homeless once again.

The Pakistani authorities have acknowledged closing and bulldozing two refugee camps, Zarinoor 1 and Zarinoor 2, in South Waziristan. A Pakistani official in Kabul said the government had decided to dismantle all camps within about three miles of the border "as part of a cleanup of the area, so militant-saboteurs would have no place for asylum."

"Inevitably that caused hardship to families," he said. "It`s unfortunate, but it had to be done as part of the overall campaign against terrorism."

United Nations and Afghan refugee officials have raised grave concerns about the refugee exodus with the Pakistani government, saying people being forced to leave should be given adequate warning to collect their belongings and some choice as to where to go.

New arrivals interviewed in the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul, said they had been given 72 hours to leave their houses as the military moved to clear their area. Others said they fled in general panic as the fighting intensified around their villages and refugee camps as recently as four days ago.

The scale of the problem has only recently come to light after a nongovernmental organization, Tribal Liaison Office-Swisspeace, interviewed 1,500 families in Paktika, the province bordering South Waziristan.

The organization has estimated that nearly 4,000 families have taken shelter in Paktika Province alone. Afghan government officials say the total is nearer 5,000 families, with almost 200 more families arriving in Ghazni Province, and another 200 families in Baghlan Province, north of Kabul.

The United Nations refugee officials have been unable to travel to Paktika but also use the figure of 24,000 to 25,000 people. Daniel Endres, acting head of the United Nations refugee office in Afghanistan, said their ejection from Pakistan amounted to forcible repatriation.

Refugees interviewed in Ghazni said they had left homes not just on the border but also deep inside South Waziristan. One man called Afghan, 29, head of a family of nine, said people living in his Wachkala settlement, on the edge of the town of Wana, about 25 miles from the border, had been given 72 hours to evacuate their homes.

A long-distance truck driver, he arrived home a day after the announcement was made in the mosque and scrambled to pack up after 18 years in Pakistan. "When I saw everyone was leaving, I got very nervous and started planning to leave," he said. "Four to six trucks were leaving every day."

With no home to go to in Afghanistan, he came to Ghazni, where his parents used to live. He and his family slept in his truck for three days before someone took them in.

Two brothers, Amir Muhammad, 50, and Khaori Muhammad, 55, left with 15 family members just a few days ago, abandoning their home in the village of Piba, near Wana, when fighting came so close that helicopters were hovering over the village and bullets were winging overhead.

"We were scared we would be killed in the fighting, so we came here," Amir Muhammad said. The family lived near a Pakistani Army base, and when militants fired on the base, the military threatened to destroy homes in the nearby village, he said. "The government told us that if they came under fire from any place, they would destroy it," he said.

They were camping out in the ruins of their old house, destroyed more than 20 years ago in Soviet bombing raids. "For four days we have been sitting in the open under the sun," Mr. Muhammad said. "We left everything behind; we just brought ourselves."

Members of another family that arrived three weeks ago, said their father had tried to stay on but had had to abandon the house three days ago after fighting came too close. Ghumcha Gul, 15, said they had seen helicopters pounding an area called Shakai, where there is a refugee camp and a militant training camp, and soldiers being dropped from Chinooks in the mountains above.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Siehe #70/71
Die Jagd nach den Taliban und Bin Laden.

Unlearned lessons from Waziristan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

Jul 22, 2004
See also: The legacy of Nek Mohammed
Stage set for final showdown

KARACHI - Under constant pressure from Washington, since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 Pakistan has launched several operations of varying sizes in its tribal areas to flush out Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives, the first major one beginning on June 22, 2002, at Azam Warsak, South Waziristan.

In the Azam Warsak operation, the Pakistani army launched its first-ever attack against al-Qaeda. The assault included paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps and the Waziristan Scouts. A total of 17 people were killed - 11 members of the security forces and six Chechen and Uzbek militants. More than 50 foreigners are believed to have fled the attack.

Before that operation, Pakistani security forces clashed with foreign militants on December 20, 2001, when they intercepted a group of 60 militants while they were crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan. The militants were taken to jail, where they managed to snatch some rifles and in an ensuing gunfight 13 people were killed, including six security people and seven foreign fighters. The rest of the militants escaped.

The June 22 operation failed because of the sympathy of the Pakistani tribals toward the defeated Taliban regime and foreign fighters, and extreme anger at the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. When the Pakistani armed forces tried to catch the fleeing members of al-Qaeda, the rage also turned toward Pakistan`s rulers. In particular, the Mehsood tribe heavily resisted the military, and provided safe passage to the foreign fighters.

The chief of Waziristan and other tribal elders clearly warned Pakistan of retaliation. The said the operation was US-sponsored and any further ones would be tantamount to open war against the tribals.

On June 27, 2002, Pakistani army officers, including Shaukat Hayat and Colonel Saeed Khan, met with the tribal jirga (council) and pledged that before any further action was taken against al-Qaeda, the tribals would be taken into the military`s confidence, and then the tribals themselves could take action against the militants. The army would only enter the fray if the tribals failed to deliver.

Nevertheless, Pakistani security forces and the local political administration continued to undertake small operations in which a few foreigners were arrested. The tribals expressed their anger, but did not resist.

Then on October 2, 2003, Pakistan blatantly violated its agreement with the tribals when, without any warning, it air-dropped 2,500 commandos into the village of Baghar, near Angor Ada, with aerial support from 12 helicopter gunships. According to local residents, some of the helicopters flew from Machdad Kot US air base from across the border in Afghanistan. According to witnesses, 31 Pakistani soldiers and 13 foreign fighters and local tribals died. A large number of militants fled.

The operation left behind deep resentment against the Pakistani army, which itself now became a target. Previously the militants - often led by former Taliban commander Nek Mohammed - would only attack US targets in Afghanistan, then melt back into the Waziristan tribal areas. Now the Pakistani army and US forces were an "equal enemy". The militants also received renewed support from angered tribals.

On February 24 this year the Pakistani army launched another operation against the panthers and the wolves of the terrain - during British rule, the Mehsood tribals of Waziristan were called wolves, and the Wazirs panthers. During this operation, US helicopters were clearly seen overhead supervising the operation. Twenty-five people were arrested, but all were released as none of them were "high-value" targets.

By this time, the Pakistani army had lost its moral and political ground in Waziristan, and the tribals were actively opposed to it: military camps, patrolling vehicles, army installations and scout forts were all now the targets of heavy weapons and rocket launchers.

The Pakistani army intensified its action against militants, but unfortunately it targeted two passenger vehicles in which 13 people were killed and six wounded. Initially, the Army Inter-Services Public Relations claimed that the dead were militants, but later admitted that it was a case of mistaken identity and announced monetary compensation to the families.

Then President General Pervez Musharraf declared (falsely, it later proved) that top al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy Aiman al-Zawahiri, were hiding in the tribal areas, and Musharraf alleged that a murder attempt on his life had been hatched in South Waziristan. For the first time, Musharraf also admitted to the presence of US officials in South Waziristan providing intelligence support to Pakistani security forces. At the same time, the US Army commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General David Barno, admitted that US forces were pinpointing targets for the Pakistani army.

These factors further convinced the tribals that the Pakistani army`s presence in the tribal areas was US-sponsored and Pakistan would have to go through with it at all costs, and that negotiations would only be a showcase.

In this environment, on March 16 the army began a new offensive centered on Wana involving the Frontier Corps, the Baloch Regiment, the Punjab Regiment, the Waziristan Scouts, the Khasadar Force and elite commandos of the Special Services Group of the army.

Just a day before the operation began, in Kalosha village, all top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders gathered, including legendary commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, al-Qaeda commander Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, alias Abu Mohammed, Qari Rashi Maqtoom of al-Qaeda`s special training cell, Taliban commander Abdul Bari Sayyaf, and the supreme commander of the Harkatul Islami Uzbekistan, Tahir Yuldevish. By the time the offensive began, they had all fled, apart from Tahir Yuldevish, who got away after sustaining some injuries.

The offensive ended after 10 days, with several hundred soldiers and tribals killed. According to sources in the army, 500 soldiers surrendered, either because they came under attack or because they refused to fight their countrymen. They now face court-martial. Asia Times Online has acquired a letter written on a General Headquarters Pakistan letterhead, part of which says:

It was the first time in the history of the Pakistan army when officers and soldiers refused to fire bullets on their fellow nationals. As a result, help from US forces was sought and tribals were brutally killed. At present, a big number of soldiers and officers belonging to 37 Division - 313 Brigade - 24 Sindh, 31 Baloch Regiment, 12 Punjab Regiment and Frontier Corps Peshawar have been arrested. These people have been detained in Gujranwala, Mangla and Jhelum and they will be court-martialed.

As a consequence of the Wana operation, 20 candidates at the Pakistan Military Academy had their beards forcibly shaved. A similar thing happened at the Naval Academy.

The only outcome of the Wana operation was the arrest of 163 tribals, but once again they turned out to be local people. Eleven of them were released on April 29 and 78 on May 1. Several of the arrested included school-going children. No Taliban or al-Qaeda suspects were apprehended.

Worse, the operation caused a severe backlash. A religious ruling signed by 500 leading scholars called militants who died in the action martyrs, and warned the public not to say prayers for the dead soldiers "who died for the cause of the US". The ruling demoralized the army and gave a moral boost to the insurgent tribals.

On April 24, the Corps Commander Peshawar endorsed the failure of the operation and confirmed Pakistan`s retreat when he declared an amnesty for all wanted people. Nek Mohammed was even decorated with garlands of flowers, and the officer vowed not to operate in the tribal areas again.

But such euphoria was to be short-lived. The Pakistani army once again put its troops in forward positions and on June 9 a new operation was launched. It continued for several days, culminating in the death of Nek, who sustained fatal injuries when the house in which he was sheltering was attacked with laser-guided missiles, which many believe were fired by US forces.

At the time of his death, Nek had become somewhat isolated, with tribes going their different ways and differing over the presence of the foreign militants in the area. However, his end brought all the tribes together again under his slogan, "No compromise on the question of foreigners." That is, no handing them over to the authorities.

In this context, the comments of a former US Central Intelligence Agency official are pertinent. Writing under the name Anonymous, his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made the United States safer.

In a recent interview with a British newspaper, the official described al-Qaeda as a much more proficient and focused organization than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them. He said bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organization from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" with the killing of Nek, who was one of al-Qaeda`s protectors in Waziristan. But Anonymous, who had been centrally involved in the hunt for bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes that Musharraf "cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt".

Yet this is exactly what the US is forcing Pakistan to do, with a major attack expected any time soon. Anonymous believes that President George W Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction bin Laden wants, toward all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.

The first steps down this deadly path could well have been taken already in Pakistan`s tribal areas.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)



Jul 22, 2004

[StellaLuna]

aber klar doch!
Immer wenn Bush bei den Umfragen unten liegt,
ist mit einem Terroranschlag zu rechnen oder
aber er hat bereits Tuchfühlung mit Bin Laden!

[Joerver]

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[raubritterloulou]

Bin Laden ist seit Jahren tot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Joerver]

@Raubritter
Um so schlimmer für Bush.
Geister kann er nicht fangen.
Dann wäre ihm sein Überraschungsei für den Wahlkampf abhanden gekommen.

[Joerver]

Noch eine Ergänzung zu der Gefahr von Bin Laden. Dazu einen Ausschnitt aus einem Kommentar von MAUREEN DOWD aus der heutigen NYTimes.
Auch eine Gefangennahme von Laden würde die Situation nicht mehr ändern, weil sich seine Ideen verselbstständigt haben. Daraus ist schon längst eine Ideologie entztanden.
Die wirkliche Gefahr durch die Ideen eines Bin Laden ist erst aus dem sinnlosen Krieg gegen den Irak entstanden. Und durch das Aufeinandertreffen von zwei fundamentalistischen Ideologien.

Spinning Our Safety
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/25dowd.html
oderThread: Guten Morgen Mr. Bush#19411

The commissioners warn that the price for the Bush bullies` attention deficit disorder could be high: "If, for example, Iraq becomes a failed state, it will go to the top of the list of places that are breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home. Similarly, if we are paying insufficient attention to Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban or warlords and narcotraffickers may re-emerge and its countryside could once again offer refuge to Al Qaeda, or its successor."

And, if that`s not ominous enough, consider this: "The problem is that Al Qaeda represents an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and inspires, even if it no longer directs."

"Yet killing or capturing" Osama, the report says, "while extremely important, would not end terror. His message of inspiration to a new generation of terrorists would continue."

If the Bush crowd hadn`t been besotted with the idea of smoking Saddam, they could have stomped Osama in Tora Bora. Now it`s too late. Al Qaeda has become a state of mind.

[Joerver]

Der Stoff aus dem die westlichen Träume sind und mit dem sie verfliegen.

Opium trade booms in `basket-case` Afghanistan
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor and Andrew Clennell

28 July 2004

The opium harvest in Afghanistan this year will be one of the biggest on record, the Foreign Office said yesterday, and it has triggered a flood of heroin on Britain`s streets.

The revelation will prove highly embarrassing for Tony Blair, who cited cutting the supply of heroin as one of the main reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, in addition to removing the Taliban regime and rooting out al-Qa`ida from the training camps run by Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban had cracked down on drugs cultivators but the regime`s fall led to an increase in production and this year`s harvest will be the largest since the invasion.

Health workers warned yesterday that the consequences of the rise were already evident: cheaper, better quality heroin was arriving in Britain, luring thousands more youngsters into addiction than ever before.

At the time of the invasion, Mr Blair said: "We act because the al-Qa`ida network and the Taliban regime are funded in large parts on the drugs trade ­ 90 per cent of all heroin sold in Britain originates from Afghanistan. Stopping that trade is directly in our interests."

He also told the Labour Party conference on 2 October: "The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime that we should seek to destroy."

The Foreign Office revelation about the heroin crop, on the eve of the publication of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee`s long-awaited report on Afghanistan, underscores the failure to meet a crucial policy objective. It is a severe embarrassment to the Prime Minister, who has long faced criticism over his professed grounds for war in the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee will record its fears over the rising heroin production tomorrow. As The Independent reported two months ago, members of the committee returned from a fact-finding mission to the country dismayed at what they had witnessed. Eric Illsley, a Labour member of the select committee, described Afghanistan as "a basket case".

Members believe that large areas of Afghanistan are back under the rule of warlords, controlling militias of up to 10,000 men, which are paid for by the profits of the illegal heroin trade.

MPs from all sides last night accused the Government of complacency and said the Prime Minister was betraying his clear promises to reduce opium production after the invasion of Afghanistan.

David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "British youngsters are dying for Blair`s incompetence. If we cannot do the job, we should not have undertaken the task.``

David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat MP and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said: "This is scandalous. This is a key fact that we picked up on our visit to Afghanistan.

"Nato is not coming across with the resources it promised. It is a great concern to me that the poppy harvest has increased. They must find a way of persuading the farmers to switch back to wheat or cereal, but they earn five times as much by growing the poppy."

Details of the rise in opium production emerged in a parliamentary written reply to the Labour MP Harry Cohen from the Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell.

Mr Rammell said: "The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is in the process of assessing the 2004 harvest in conjunction with the Afghan government. Its report will be published in the autumn. We expect to see a rise in levels of cultivation.

"This is unwelcome but experience of counter-narcotics policies in Pakistan and Thailand, which both had much lower initial levels of production and were more stable countries, shows that cultivation tends to increase before declining."

Mr Cohen said: "The rise in cultivation and production of opium poppies in Afghanistan has horrendous portents for us in the UK bearing in mind the PM`s statement that 90 per cent of heroin sold on British streets comes from Afghanistan.

"The claim that cultivation tends to increase before declining gives no comfort and ... is not necessarily the case. It seems to me a hope more akin to peeing in the wind."

Sue Clark, manager of the team that tackles substance abuse for the London homeless charity, St Mungo`s, said last night: "Our concern is that more drugs on the streets will create more problems for the vulnerable people who we work with daily.

"It makes our job to get them further away from the streets and to get them help much harder."

David Chater, a spokesman for the social care charity Turning Point, said an increase in poppy production could mean lower heroin prices and make life tougher for people trying to treat addicts.

"From a treatment point of view it`s obviously a bad thing if much more heroin is available," he said.

"Both police activities and treatment programmes have to be going well to make an impact. The Government`s invested quite a lot in the treatment side, [but] this is going to pose problems for them on the supply side, the police activity side."

In June, Nato agreed to deploy an extra 1,200 troops to Afghanistan after its summit in Istanbul. The troops were deployed to help provide security for the forthcoming elections in September.

The country is struggling to maintain a democratic veneer, amid sporadic violence, but meanwhile, the strength of the heroin trade shows no sign of being cut back.


28 July 2004 12:07

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

July 30, 2004
Pakistan Reports Arrest of a Suspect in `98 Embassy Bombings
By SALMAN MASOOD and DAVID ROHDE

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Friday, July 30 - Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is among the 22 people on the F.B.I.`s most-wanted-terrorist list, was arrested Sunday, Pakistani officials said Thursday night.

Officials in Washington said it appeared that Pakistani officials had indeed arrested Mr. Ghailani, a Tanzanian who has been indicted for murder in connection with the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa. In May, American officials said Mr. Ghailani was one of seven people about whom the United States was seeking information regarding a possible terrorist attack. The United States had offered up to $25 million for his arrest.

"Ghailani is a terrorist facilitator and an operative," said an American intelligence official. "He`s a very bad man, and his arrest is good news."
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A handout photo of terror suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

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Mr. Ghailani, who is believed to be about 30, was indicted in federal court in Manhattan in 1998 on murder and other charges connected to the embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans.

This appears to be the first high-level arrest resulting from military operations that Pakistan began in the North-West Frontier Province five months ago. An intelligence official said earlier this week that the operation had forced some foreign militants to flee the tribal areas and seek shelter in Pakistani cities, but said no new evidence about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden had been discovered.

Mr. Ghailani was arrested after a fierce gun battle on Sunday between Pakistani law enforcement officials and 13 Qaeda suspects in Gujrat, in eastern Pakistan, Pakistani officials said. They said the suspects had been hiding at a rented house for more than a month. The suspects were believed to be in Gujrat to obtain false travel documents as part of a plan to flee the country, officials said. Gujrat is a notorious hub of illegal human trafficking.

A cache of weapons, foreign currency and chemicals were also recovered, according to Pakistani officials.

Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan`s interior minister, said the confirmation of Mr. Ghailani`s identity did not come until Thursday evening. He said Mr. Ghailani would be handed over to American officials.

"It is very important to find the networks and linkages of the terrorists operating in Pakistan," Mr. Hayat said. "After we are through with our investigations, then definitely we will hand him to U.S., according to the norms and procedures of international practices."

Until Thursday night, Pakistani officials had only acknowledged the arrest of two South Africans and one Tanzanian. The two South Africans have now been identified as a Zubair Ismail, 20, a student of Islamic studies, and Feroz Aboobaker Ganchi, a Johannesburg doctor.

Pakistan, a major ally of the United States in the campaign against terrorists, has arrested 457 suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, according to Pakistani officials. But American officials have said privately that they have had to keep constant pressure on the Pakistanis to act, particularly in the remote tribal areas.

On Wednesday, the chief minister of Punjab, the province where Gujrat is, suspended 64 police officers, including 14 senior officials, accusing them of negligence in allowing a Qaeda cell to operate in the area.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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August 1, 2004
Taliban Fighters Increase Attacks
By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID ROHDE

WASHINGTON, July 31 — Attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and Afghan security forces and civilians have increased steadily in the past several months, posing new hurdles for reconstruction and political stability efforts, American commanders and Afghan officials say.

Fighting has intensified, particularly in the east along the rugged, 1,500-mile border with Pakistan and in the south near Kandahar. Twenty-three American troops have died from ambushes, land mines and other hostile fire this year, compared with 12 combat deaths in all of 2003, according to military statistics. An increasingly popular weapon may have been inspired by insurgents in Iraq: remote-controlled bombs.
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Members of the 501st Parachute Infantry searched a house in Khost, Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border.
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The Taliban have stepped up recruiting in the south and intensified strikes against newly trained Afghan soldiers and police officers, as well as foreign-aid workers. This week, the international aid agency Doctors Without Borders said it was withdrawing from Afghanistan after 24 years, in part because of the deteriorating security there.

The attacks appear to be having the most impact in rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Afghan government is still struggling to establish its authority nearly three years after the Taliban fell. That part of the country has been a traditional Taliban stronghold. Reconstruction in some areas has come to a near standstill, and local people remain hostile to the Americans and the Afghan government.

American commanders nonetheless paint an optimistic picture, saying the increased attacks are signs of the Taliban`s desperation and of expanding allied operations. The United States has doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan in the last year, to about 20,000 troops at its peak recently, and expanded their presence throughout the country. Commanders say a new counterinsurgency strategy adopted late last year has paid dividends, by providing security for fledgling reconstruction projects and enabling soldiers to gather fresh intelligence to use in their attacks against militants.

`Huge Challenges` Remain "There are still some huge challenges, mainly in the security area," Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said by telephone from his headquarters in Kabul, the capital. "But on a broad scale, as we look to the election, we think this country is very much on the road to success."

While the attacks have increased, they still do not approach the level of violence in Iraq and have failed in many ways to halt reconstruction efforts, American and Afghan officials say. A Taliban campaign to derail a voter registration drive for the Afghan presidential election in October has largely failed, with roughly 8 million of 10 million eligible voters defying Taliban death threats and registering.

Taliban attacks appear to have virtually no effect on Afghanistan`s main cities, where foreign reconstruction money, remittances from Afghans living abroad and the opium trade are fueling a construction boom. But the Taliban appear to be hampering the flow of aid in rural areas, particularly in remote regions in the south.

Stepped-Up Security This month, General Barno announced that American-led forces, joined by thousands of Afghan soldiers and police officers, would increase security operations for the Afghan presidential elections.

"Without question, the Taliban view this year as a political watershed," said General Barno, a West Point graduate who assumed command in October. "They have a very specific objective: voter registration and the elections. They`re seeking to disrupt them with attacks against soft targets. That`s helped to drive up the attacks."

General Barno is the architect of tactics adopted late last year in which American units down to the level of 40-soldier platoons have been dispatched to live in villages where they can forge ties with tribal elders and glean better information about the location and activities of guerrillas.

Previously, American forces typically gathered intelligence about hostile forces, carried out focused raids for several days against those targets, then returned to base to plan and prepare for their next mission.

American commanders say they are getting better cooperation in some areas, while pockets of hostility persist in others.

The United States is now operating in 26 locations around the country, including military outposts and provincial reconstruction teams aimed at enhancing reconstruction and extending the reach of the government, General Barno said; a year ago, there were 11 such locations.

American commanders say the increased American military presence has initiated new attacks against the insurgents and drawn fire from militants. Marines who recently withdrew from Oruzgan Province, home to the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, say they have killed more than 100 fighters in their four-month stay.

After the recent withdrawal of some 2,000 marines, there remain 18,000 American and other allied troops, including Romanian infantry and South Korean engineers, who are operating in Afghanistan alongside a 6,500-member NATO peacekeeping force in and around Kabul. Army and Marine helicopter gunships and Air Force A-10`s and B-1`s provide air power.

General Barno said he had repositioned two Army battalions to replace the departing marines, and would see if more troops were necessary.

An additional 1,800 NATO troops from Spain and Italy are to arrive in the coming weeks to help bolster security for the election, a far smaller force than Afghan officials have requested.

American forces are also trying to integrate 14,000 members of the new Afghan Army and 21,000 newly trained Afghan police officers. But some Pentagon officials expressed disappointment that the Afghan police and other security forces have been poorly integrated into the overall security structure.

Several hundred Special Operations forces are also spread across the country, conducting tasks including road-building, other civil works duties and paramilitary strikes against senior insurgent leaders.

Hundreds of additional troops have also been assigned to 16 provincial reconstruction teams around the country, part of General Barno`s strategy to assert "ownership" of an area rather than hopscotch around the country.

"The bottom line is, even though attacks are up, we`re getting done the business we need to get done," Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, General Barno`s top ground commander, said in a telephone interview from his headquarters at Bagram Air Base.

Along the border with Pakistan, an array of spy satellites and reconnaissance aircraft help in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other militants who slip back and forth across the mountainous border, and use their sanctuaries to launch nightly rocket and mortar attacks against American military outposts.

After little action for two years, roughly 40,000 regular Pakistani army troops and 30,000 paramilitary scouts mounted an offensive this spring to sweep foreign militants out of the tribal areas, according to Pakistani officials.

Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier general who is in charge of security in the tribal areas, said a new operation started by the Pakistani military in the South Waziristan tribal area in June had resulted in the clearing of the Shakai valley, where several hundreds of foreign militants had been sheltered for the past two years.

Gains, But Deaths Mount But while there are successes in Afghanistan, the death toll continues to mount. Afghan government officials said they had kept no overall tally of the number of Afghans killed across the country, including soldiers and police officers.

But the review of attacks reported by news agencies indicates that in the first six months of 2003, Taliban fighters killed 119 Afghans. In the first six months of 2004, they killed 179 Afghans, an increase of 50 percent. Most of the killings involved Afghan police officers or soldiers being killed in ambushes, attacks or clashes with Taliban forces in rural areas in the south and east.

Beginning in early 2003, Taliban fighters also began singling out aid workers, killing at least 16 Afghan aid workers and at least one foreign aid worker between March 2003 and the present, according to the review.

This year numerous other attacks on foreigners have occurred, but it has been unclear whether the Taliban are responsible. In the first six months of 2004, attacks on foreigners soared, with 17 foreign contractors and foreign aid workers killed across the country. But it is not known whether the unidentified assailants were factional fighters, Taliban supporters or simple thieves.

Rural Attacks Increase In rural Zabul, Oruzgan, Khost, Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, attacks have grown in intensity in the last year, according to the review. Zabul Province, in particular, now produces reports of clashes between Afghan and American forces and Taliban fighters roughly each week.

An example of the trend in rural areas is northern Helmand, a drought-stricken area where the Taliban have gained strength this year, Afghan officials and aid workers said.

Mullahs in local mosques in northern Helmand have begun openly preaching jihad against Americans and the Afghan government, they said. A local warlord who tolerated the provincial governor has begun threatening government workers.

Shir Mohammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province, said in an interview in late June that Taliban forces had killed 15 to 20 soldiers in the province in the past four months. In all of the previous year, they killed 14 soldiers.

Mr. Akhundzada and his intelligence chief said that for the first time since 2001 the Taliban were recruiting young people in northern Helmand. Until now, fresh Taliban recruits had come from Pakistan, they said, where three million Afghan refugees still live. "Nowadays, I`m feeling that lots of local people also join them," the governor said. "Some of the people are a little bit angry with the Americans and some are unhappy with the government."

He said severe drought in northern Helmand continued to fuel poverty and frustration. He also called on American forces to "act very carefully with the people," as elections approach, and ensure that intelligence tips they receive are genuine and do not lure them into local feuds.

Fueling Local Anger House searches and arrests of innocent Afghans by American forces have angered the local population, highly conservative ethnic Pashtuns, he said. He complained about one raid where American soldiers confiscated heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades from a government police station. "When they are going and arresting the police, the police will get very disappointed and angry," he said. "There are no other people to send there to north Helmand."

Malim Dadu, the intelligence chief in Helmand Province, estimated that the Taliban were 50 percent stronger now than a year earlier and were increasingly well financed. He said that local people were now helping the Taliban "a lot" and admitted that the Afghan government was failing on its own in some areas. He said security was lacking on the highways and government "administrative people are taking bribes."

Afghan officials say the situation is not yet dire. But they expressed concern about the growing strength of the Taliban in rural areas. "God willing, we are stronger than the Taliban now," said Mr. Akhundzada, the Helmand governor. "But we don`t know about the future."

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington for this article and David Rohde from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Zu #80 und zu den Meldungen von gestern wegen der befürchteten Anschläge. Siehe auch #19728 in meinem `Guten Morgen-Thread`. Ein Artikel der NYTimes über die geplanten Anschläge gegen Finanzzentren der USA und den Hinweis, dass diese Warnungen schon bis zu 3 Jahre alt sind.

August 2, 2004
Pakistan plays down impact of al-Qaeda arrest
By Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad

Information gleaned from a prominent al-Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan last week did not provide sufficient evidence of an imminent terrorism threat in the US, senior Pakistani officials familiar with the case said on Monday.

Last week`s arrest created speculation that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 attacks at two US embassies in east Africa, might have provided fresh information on al-Qaeda`s operational plans.

According to one report, a Pakistani minister claimed that e-mails retrieved from Mr Ghailani`s computer revealed new plans for attacks in the US and UK.

"There is a lot of unnecessary speculation making the rounds," a senior Pakistani official said. "The fact is that Ghailani may have been on the run for so long that there can be no basis for assuming that he was central to the planning in Europe and the US."

Pakistani authorities on Monday also denied media reports that a valuable al-Qaeda suspect had been in government detention since mid-July. The suspect was reported to have been the source of information leading to the heightened security alerts in Washington and New York City.

The interior minister denied a computer expert who managed an e-mail communication system for key al-Qaeda figures was arrested last month. "We have not arrested anyone like this, I can tell you categorically," Faisal Saleh Hayat told the FT.

Monday`s New York Times reported the July 13 arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 25, who allegedly helped operate a secret communications system using coded messages to transfer information for al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda`s largely amorphous structure, dependent on autonomous cells in different parts of the world, "made it highly unlikely that its command and control structures for future attacks in the US" would operate from a distant country such as Pakistan, the official said.

"The circumstances suggest that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani had been ineffective for a long time, on the defensive, being chased and on the run," said Lieutenant General (Rtd) Talat Masood, a prominent Pakistani commentator. Circumstantial evidence available so far suggested Mr Ghailani had been on the run in the Pakistan-Afghan region, unable to play a role as a planner of terrorist attacks in the western world, Lt Gen Masood said.

Other officials said the information extracted from Mr Ghailani was more likely to concern the whereabouts of other al-Qaeda leaders and operatives in the region. Interrogations of previously arrested suspects are believed to have yielded similar information.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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They seek him here, they seek him there
Despite the US`s huge intelligence-gathering network and diplomatic clout - and even a $25m reward on his head - there`s not been a single sighting of Osama bin Laden since 2001. Justin Huggler reports from Peshawar on the search for the world`s most wanted man

04 August 2004

Somewhere, a man huddles in the shadows, speaking into a tape recorder, bringing his latest message to the outside world. His face is instantly recognisable. There is a $25m price tag on his head, and just a snippet of information on his whereabouts could make a man rich for life. He is the most wanted man in the world, but for more than three years, nobody has been able to find a trace of Osama bin Laden`s whereabouts.

With Washington and New York this week on orange alert, and the US releasing what it claims is the most detailed evidence yet of an al-Qa`ida plot to strike inside its borders, the focus is suddenly back on the hunt for Bin Laden. Al-Qa`ida allies are being blamed for the loathsome beheadings of foreigners that have become almost a grisly routine in Iraq. And with a US national election looming and President George Bush doing badly in the polls, the White House is said to be desperate to capture their man in time for November.

But the trail appears to be remarkably cold. Unless something is being hidden from the public - and it would have to be remarkably well hidden - there has not been a single confirmed sighting of Bin Laden since he fled the US bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001. Nor, according to Pakistani sources, has there been any intercepts of satellite phones call by him, or any e-mails. Drones fly constantly over the Afghan-Pakistan border monitoring all movements. They have failed to detect detected anything. He has disappeared from the US`s electronic surveillance network, the most sophisticated the world has even known. The last heard of him was a tape recording in April in which he offered Europe a ceasefire if it stopped co-operating with the US.

The central al-Qa`ida organisation has been decimated since 2001. Estimates vary, but as many as 3,400 out of 4,000 members are said to have been captured or killed, according to experts. Some put the number still at large as low as 200; the continued bombings and other attacks are believed to be the work of related groups, many of whose militants were trained by Bin Laden`s organisation in Afghanistan, but not of the central al-Qa`ida itself.

But if the organisation has been hit badly, its most senior commanders - Osama and his mentor Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri - remain elusive. Bin Laden, it appears, has pulled off one of the most remarkable disappearing acts in history.

Or has he? Rumours abound that he has already been captured by the US, or maybe Pakistan, and that his captors are waiting for the perfect moment to announce his capture: just in time for President Bush`s re-election bid, for example, or in order for Pakistan`s President Musharraf to wring the most glittering rewards from the US. The internet is bursting with innuendo and speculation on the possibility, but respected sources insist they are not to be taken seriously.

If Bin Laden has been captured, then his captors have pulled off a disappearing act as extraordinary as Osama`s. Not one official has given the slightest hint. Not one sardonic smile. More than that, there has been no noise from Bin Laden`s supporters to suggest he has been hunted down and captured or killed.

The official version is still that he is in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan; which side he is actually on depends on which side you ask the question. Ask the Americans or President Hamid Karzai`s interim government in Afghanistan, and they`ll tell you Osama is in Pakistan. Ask in Pakistan, and the authorities will tell you he`s in Afghanistan. Everyone is passing the buck across the border.

The area is certainly a prime hiding place. The border is some 1,520 miles long and runs through some of the wildest and most inaccessible terrain on earth. "Even if Pakistan and Afghanistan were to put their complete armies there, they couldn`t seal the border," says Dr Rohan Gunaratna, the author of Inside al-Qa`ida. Much of the land on either side of the border is populated by Pashtun tribesmen whose loyalties to Bin Laden and al-Qa`ida date back to the mujahadeen war against the Soviets and who have little sympathy for the US, the new Afghan government or the Pakistani authorities.

The Americans claim they have combed the Afghan side of the border exhaustively. But the Afghan government has repeatedly accused Pakistan of not doing enough. On a trip to Islamabad last month, the Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah of Northern Alliance fame, made some pretty vicious swipes in the direction of the Pakistani authorities at a press conference.

In fact, almost all the major successes in the hunt for al-Qa`ida have been made in Pakistan. The country has seen the most high-profile targets arrested to date: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged planner of September 11; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, believed to be the 20th hijacker who couldn`t make it because he couldn`t get a visa; and only last week, Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who is one of the prime suspects in 1998`s US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. And, as many as 470 al-Qa`ida members have been captured in Pakistan, according to Dr Gunaratna.

In recent months there has been more action on the Pakistani side of the border than ever before in its history. In March, the army sent 70,000 soldiers into the South Waziristan, a tribal area where the army had never gone before under a long-standing arrangement with the tribes that dated back to British colonial times. A welter of excitement followed when President Musharraf said a high-value target had been pinned down. The speculation, fuelled by official sources, was that it was Dr Zawahiri, Bin Laden`s mentor and al-Qa`ida comrade- in-arms; but Dr Zawahiri never showed up.

The Pakistani authorities have blocked access to South Waziristan for all journalists, foreign and local, for months now. Even the Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations have been refused access. But a phone call across the police cordons to Wana is all you need to get the details of what is happening. The local Pashtun journalists do not take kindly to be told to stay away from the action, and tapped phones do not trouble them.

It appears the Pakistani soldiers moved in and surrounded a position held by some foreign militants. But they in turn were surrounded by a huge force of local tribesmen sympathetic to the militants, and there was a battle. According to the locals, more than 100 Pakistani soldiers were killed, and as many as 200 of the foreign militants and the local tribesmen combined. The Pakistani army claims considerably lower figures for its own troops, but has still conceded that it took heavy casualties. There were foreign militants in the area, but only 600, fewer than the Pakistani authorities claimed. Most were Uzbeks, but there were also Afghans, Chechens, Uighurs from China and a small number of Arabs. Many may be fighters from al-Qa`ida and its allies who fled the bombing of Tora Bora in 2001.

Well-connected Pakistani journalists say the offensive was based on real information that Dr Zawahiri had been in the area - though not Bin Laden. But local sources insist the only "high-value target" in the area was Tahir Yildashev, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an ally of al-Qa`ida, who escaped alive when his jeep burst through the Pakistani army cordon at high speed. He has not been heard of since.

The Waziristan briefly made a hero out of Nek Mohammed, a local tribesman who led the resistance to the army and was later killed after he threatened to take the fight into Pakistan`s cities. The tribesman appears to have been killed by the Americans - he was hit in a missile strike shortly after making a satellite phone call, and the Pakistani military does not have the technology to track satellite phone calls.

American special forces advisors and intelligence appear to have been heavily involved in the South Waziristan operation, despite Pakistan`s repeated insistence that US troops are not operating on its soil. The word in Islamabad is that the FBI has an office in the city, from which it is directing the hunt for Bin Laden and other senior al-Qa`ida figures. But, like so much in this subject, the claim is impossible to confirm.

Such a major operation suggests there may have been a high-value target in the area, but, dramatic though it was, the Waziristan operation failed to net any - and Bin Laden`s name appears never even to have cropped up in it. Its most significant achievement appears to have been that the Pakistani army has now set up posts on the Afghan border inside the tribal agency, "in places you could never imagine before", according to one local source.

But the operation has also been heavily criticised because the Pakistani authorities announced it in advance and because there have been no concurrent operations in neighbouring areas, allowing militants to flee south to Baluchistan, or north to North Waziristan agency.

But there are many in Pakistan who question whether Bin Laden is in the border region at all. "It`s an assumption," says the Pakistani journalist, Rahimullah Yusufzai. "Most of the arrests in Pakistan have been in urban areas. What does this tell you? That these guys were all hiding in big cities." Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, just a stone`s throw from the army headquarters, according to the Pakistani authorities, although reports have emerged he was actually caught three months earlier in Karachi. Ramzi bin al-Shiibh was caught in Karachi. And Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, last week`s big catch, was in the town of Gujrat in Punjab.

There are many who say the world is focussing on the wrong place, that instead of looking among the mountain valleys of the border it needs to look in the vast, undocumented suburbs of Pakistan`s cities. It is as easy to disappear in a crowd as in a remote, empty place. After all, the Pakistani police were unable to find the US journalist Daniel Pearl, who was held in a house in Karachi, before he was killed.

Against this theory, officials argue that Bin Laden is too distinctive to be able to hide in a city. With so much money on his head, some one would spot him.

Then there are those who argue that Bin Laden may be being protected by rogue elements within Pakistan`s own security forces. Recent press reports in Pakistan pointed out the disturbingly high number of militant attacks in which members of the security forces have been involved. The Pakistani military and intelligence establishment worked for years alongside Bin Laden`s organisation in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and if the current leadership is thought to be sincere in the hunt for Bin Laden, some of the lower ranking are believed to remain highly sympathetic to his cause.

Bin Laden is still a popular figure in Pakistan. T-shirts bearing his picture are still on sale. Karachi`s second-highest-selling Urdu language newspaper, the Daily Ummat, prints his picture on its masthead every day, together with an extract from one of his speeches. "If Bin Laden is caught or killed in Pakistan, he will be taken to Afghanistan and they will say it was done by the American forces," says Yusufzai, adding that President Musharraf could face serious unrest if Bin Laden were known to have been caught in Pakistan.

But there are those in Pakistan who suggest it is not even in Musharraf`s interest to capture Bin Laden, if he is in the country. "There is a view among some that they don`t really want to pick OBL up, because if they do, then Musharraf would lose his utility to the US," says Sherry Rehman, an opposition member of parliament.

American funds are flowing to Pakistan. The country has even been named as a major non-Nato ally. Find Bin Laden, the argument goes, and all that could dry up. But Pakistan is facing problems. The pressure from the US is increasing. Pakistan got some 200 mentions in the September 11 commission`s report - more than Iran and Iraq combined. Congress is putting Pakistan`s efforts in the "war on terror" under scrutiny.

And now it seems that al-Qa`ida is declaring war on Pakistan, with last week`s attempted assassination of the prime minister-designate, Shaukat Aziz, in a suicide bombing that a group claiming to be affiliated to al-Qa`ida said it carried out. Are the hunted becoming the hunter? Shortly before his death, Nek Mohammed threatened attacks inside Pakistani cities. President Musharraf has accused al-Qa`ida of being behind two of the recent assassination attempts against him, and Dr Zawahiri called for his killing in his own recent tape recording.

And all the while the world`s most wanted man remains silent, hidden. The only thing for sure is that if he has been killed or captured, we`ll hear of it well in time for November`s elections. But don`t bet on it yet.

With additional reporting by Nick Meo in Kabul


4 August 2004 11:08


© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Winning hearts, minds and firefights in Uruzgan
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Text and photos by Carsten Stormer
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FH06Ag01.html
KABUL - In the south of Afghanistan, American and Afghan units continue the fight against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants, taking prisoners and trying to win over the
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hearts and minds of the population. It is an effort that is often in vain. There are simply not enough soldiers to create a durable presence in remote and rugged areas like Uruzgan.

Fire mission
"Fire mission," screams a voice. The call immediately causes a strained tension in camp. American and Afghan soldiers jump out of tents and temporary dwellings and throw on their flak jackets and helmets. Artillery gunners
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jump to their weapons. American scouts hidden in the mountains around the US camp have discovered Afghans with radios who have been observing the camp and passing on information about US troop movements.

American army specialists intercept the radio messages and confirm that they have come from Taliban hidden in the mountains. The position of the fundamentalist holy warriors is quickly ascertained and the coordinates immediately passed on to the infantry and howitzers. "Fire!" The command is barked three times. In turn, the guns erupt, letting off three successive rounds of 105-millimeter shells. Thundering explosions echo in the mountains, in the distance white smoke spirals from the ground, marking a point of impact. A sergeant gives the thumbs-up sign, confirming that the rounds have hit their target. "Two satellite phones less for the bastards," a soldier shouts in the direction of the infantry. That means also two Taliban less. In Sergeant Jose Zambrano`s face, warring emotions of pride and doubt battle. "Now I am a killer," says the infantryman from New York.

Zambrano belongs to the 2-5 Infantry Division from Hawaii. A battalion of this division has been operating with soldiers of the Afghanistan National Army for the past three weeks. They have orders to search the extremely poor
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mountainous areas of the Afghan province of Uruzgan, before withdrawing to base in Tirin Kot. The joint aim: to kill and arrest Taliban and al-Qaeda militia, to increase security and lay the foundations for the reconstruction of the country.
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Rumors abound that one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar is in the area. "Osama, Omar? Who cares?", says the commander of the battalion, Colonel Terry Sellers, in reference to Osama bin Laden. "These are mystical figures. It`s not only about them. This war is about the people who share the same ideology." Nevertheless, there is a reward of US$50 million for the capture of bin Laden, dead or alive. If US troops succeed in killing bin Laden, the Islamic world would have a great martyr and President George W Bush the biggest success of his political career. As the Americans would say, a classic "catch 22" situation.
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Thin brown line
One of the major challenges for US troops is that the 20,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are not sufficient to establish durable bases in the mountains. "The Taliban will probably return as soon as we abandon the area and everything will go back to the way it was," says Sellers.

This sentiment is shared by Afghans. Many, therefore, are unwilling to support the Afghan or US armies out of fear of retaliation by the Taliban. "The Taliban have forbidden us to help the soldiers," says a village inhabitant. "If we do they will punish us as soon as the soldiers take off."
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"That`s why we have to win the minds and hearts of the population," says Sellers. "The tribal elders know where the Taliban are. If they do not want their asses whipped, they will have to start cooperating with us." In order to garner the support of the local populace, the US army helps with the building of new wells, mosques, schools and roads, in addition to providing medical assistance wherever it is needed.

"Only last week we flew out a little girl with malaria. She would have died otherwise," says Sergeant Ralph "Doc" Mendez proudly. The almost inaccessible mountain region has hampered the delivery of much-needed medical supplies, to the extent that mortality from disease is catastrophic. Tuberculosis and malaria rage, with almost a third of tick bites resulting in fatalities.

Hearts and minds
The big question, though, is whether uniformed armed doctors and engineers can win over the trust and confidence of the local population. "We want to establish security here, so that the UN and relief organizations can help those in need," says platoon leader Lieutenant Gonzales. For simple and uneducated mountain peasants it is difficult to understand how one day soldiers come armed with candy and medicine and build wells and schools, and then the next night raid houses, searching for weapons, contraband and militants.
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The fact that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the mountains of Uruzgun have a large and loyal base of supporters represents a far larger problem. The conservative interpretation of Islam in this area is fertile soil for fundamentalists. Suspicion of strangers and the Pashtun code of ethics, which states that guests must be protected against enemies, contribute to hostility against foreigners. The mountains, with innumerable caves, hideouts and escape routes, provide the Taliban with optimal conditions to escape their trackers. "It is like voodoo," says Specialist Shawn Gibbs. "Once they are in the mountains they simply disappear."

Information about suspicious persons comes not only from American military espionage, but also from the Afghan population. The information received by the local populace is not always accurate or indeed truthful. In many instances old feuds result in enemies being imprisoned by US troops, or presumed Taliban turning out to be Central Intelligence Agency informants - embarrassing setbacks in the fight against terrorism.
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On patrol
Friday, 11pm. Several Humvees and trucks are silhouetted in the bright moonlight. The vehicles slowly maneuver along the difficult terrain, often becoming stuck in dry river beds. Six hours after leaving camp, the convoy arrives at a village. The soldiers are covered in thick layers of dust and dirt. In the distance the outlines of buildings suspected of harbouring militia are barely visible.

Lieutenant Gonzales gives the troops instructions. The soldiers stealthily make their way towards a compound. Suddenly they storm and kick in the doors of a building. Men flee. Warning shots are fired. The fleeing are overwhelmed. Three suspects are arrested, their hands are tied behind their backs and they are loaded onto trucks. They are referred to as "persons under control" (PUC). Conversation with the prisoners is strictly forbidden. Jute bags are placed over the heads of the PUCs. "Bagging" is used as a means to prevent escape attempts and also serves as a tool to intimidate PUCs prior to questioning. More houses are searched, from village to village, into the next day. The soldiers find suspicious documents and army supplies. There are further arrests.
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Meanwhile, heart-tearing scenes take place before the convoy. Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the PUCs throw themselves into the dust, wailing incessantly, begging for the return of their men. They do not know what will happen to the men arrested, or if indeed they will
ever see their fathers, husbands or brothers again. Interpreters try to calm the women down, in vain. The next day, however, brings the release of some of the prisoners. They are sent home with a few hundred dollars in compensation. The remaining prisoners are sent to a US airbase. Their next destination: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Journalists are not permitted at the US airbase during medical investigation and interrogation of prisoners. The shock of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq is still fresh in the memory of the US military.

The distrust felt by the US soldiers against the native populace is widespread. Who is a friend, who is an enemy? A majority of the soldiers are convinced they are waging a fair war and are proud of what they are doing - even if they are killed for it or have to kill. "The Afghani people have suffered enough. We are here to give them a chance at something better," says one of the soldiers. Another says in rage, "I am here to hunt the Taliban. The pigs attacked my country." The fears and emotions ignited by September 11 are still pervasive, and have been instrumental in many young men joining the US Army.

Saturday, 4am. The Taliban are due to meet in a mosque. Again a convoy makes its way into the mountains. A helicopter drops off a platoon in a valley. Immediatetly the soldiers face bombardment and are encircled by the Taliban. The enemy are very well equipped, possessing satellite telephones and night-vision devices. Reinforcements hurry over steep mountain slopes to provide assistance to the soldiers under attack. Men with long beards are among the enemy forces. Special Forces forbid any photography. They are also under attack. Apache combat helicopters fly air raids on hostile positions.
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For hours, machine-guns fire and rocket explosions can be heard, then the fundamentalists dissolve as if into thin air. A soldier is wounded, several Taliban have been killed. The meeting in the mosque did not take place. It did not have to. The Taliban have time. This was the last large operation of 2-5 Infantry in this region. The next day they withdraw and head back to base.

Carsten Stormer is a freelance writer and journalism student from Germany. He has worked in Burma and Cambodia and studied in India. He plans to specialize in foreign and war correspondence when he finishes his studies this year.

(Copyright Carsten Stormer 2004)

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Man tut immer nur so viel in Pakistan, dass die USA nicht unzufrieden werden und auf der anderen Seite nic ht zu viel Widerstand aus der eigenen Bevölkerung kommt.
Man fährt einen Zick-Zack-Kurs und alles was aus Pakistan kommt ist mit äußerster Vorsicht zu betrachten.

washingtonpost.com

Pakistan Pressures Al Qaeda
Military Operation Results In Terror Alert and Arrests

By Kamran Khan and Dana Priest
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 6, 2004; Page A01

KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug. 5 -- An intense Pakistani military operation directed at suspected al Qaeda hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistan border has led to the seizure of a number of al Qaeda suspects and the discovery of a cache of computer information that contributed to last weekend`s decision to increase the terror alert in several U.S. cities, Pakistani officials said Thursday.

The Pakistani operation has employed sophisticated American eavesdropping technology and computerized identification systems, they said. Three wanted al Qaeda operatives have been arrested, and computer files were found with detailed surveillance reports on terrorist targets and information about the whereabouts of other al Qaeda members, according to the officials.
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A Pakistani paramilitary soldier takes position in a bunker in the volatile Waziristan tribal region, near the Afghan border.
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The military effort has forced the fighters out of the rugged remote tribal areas, just inside Pakistan, and into more urban areas, where they are more visible and vulnerable to capture, they said.

The operation is being paid for with millions of dollars from the CIA, supported with equipment from the National Security Agency and carried out by Pakistani soldiers and intelligence units. It has netted more than 100 suspects in recent days, the officials said. Eighteen detainees have been identified by the officials as al Qaeda members, according to Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan`s interior minister.

"We have a bead on some people," a U.S. military officer said in a comment echoed throughout the U.S. government on Thursday.

The heightened security alerts in the United States came after data seized in Pakistan suggested that the group was targeting five financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark.

One Pakistan intelligence official said: "U.S. assistance comes in the shape of incredible data and analysis based on electronic and signal intercepts of al Qaeda suspects all over the world. Their information is also based upon the detailed debriefing of the arrested suspects and a scientific follow-up of these debriefings held at unidentified locations."

In London, Scotland Yard announced the arrest of Babar Ahmad, a British subject of Pakistani descent, on a U.S. extradition request from the U.S. District Court in Connecticut. Ahmad, 30, is accused of soliciting funds and property through the Internet for "acts of terrorism in Chechnya and Afghanistan," including political murder between 1998 and the end of 2003, U.S. officials said. They said that Ahmad had been under surveillance for several years but that information obtained in other counterterrorism operations in the past week allowed them to make the arrest.

Late Tuesday, British authorities arrested 12 people, including a key al Qaeda figure, Eisa Hindi, and several others who have since been identified as members of the organization. According to U.S. officials, Hindi is suspected of helping to produce, before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the surveillance of the five buildings that led officials on Sunday to raise the terror alert level.

Also on Thursday, Saudi Arabia`s security forces arrested a leading militant, Faris Zahrani, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television reported. The report said Zahrani did not resist when he was arrested in southern Saudi Arabia. Zahrani was on a list of that country`s 26 top wanted militants with suspected links to al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, a Pakistani intelligence officer said that "there was a definite link" between a June 10 attack on a Pakistani corps commander, in which 11 troops were killed, and the arrest two days later of Mussad Aruchi, a suspected al Qaeda operative. The commander, Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, was not hurt.

Aruchi is reportedly a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the planners of the Sept. 11 attacks. Aruchi was arrested in Karachi on June 12. The operation was supervised by the CIA, and the agency provided crucial information indicating his location, Pakistani intelligence sources said.

Aruchi possessed information about U.S. financial targets as well as the names of his associates. He had old street maps of New York City and addresses of other significant buildings, along with a number of compact disks containing information useful to investigators.

Aruchi`s arrest, according to Pakistani officials, led authorities to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in the city of Lahore on July 13. Khan`s e-mail traffic has helped lead authorities to other al Qaeda suspects.

The interrogations of Khan and Aruchi then led officials to Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was captured on July 25. Ghailani is a Tanzanian wanted by the United States in connection with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A laptop computer seized with him contained maps and messages, apparently from scouts who had entered some of the targeted locations in the United States.

These documents were produced before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. officials have said they included updated information on one building as late as January 2004, but the officials were not certain whether it amounted to new surveillance or whether it was information publicly available.

In most cases, Pakistani officials said, once suspects have been captured, the CIA has taken control of the interrogations and custody of the computer files and other documents.

The intensity of the recent fighting in Waziristan, a northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, has surprised Pakistani officials. Thousands of troops have been fighting in Waziristan for two months, when the military launched an offensive against the suspected hideout of Osama bin Laden`s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. Although Zawahiri has not been located, the fierceness of the resistance indicated to Pakistan troops that they were likely attacking an area populated by major al Qaeda suspects.

"We had fairly solid intelligence that at least Ayman al Zawahiri was roaming in this region," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "Once we penetrated the area, we didn`t find Zawahiri, but we definitely confronted and killed many future Zawahiris in this area."

"The Pakistanis are pounding away at Waziristan," one senior U.S. national security official said.

Thirteen Pakistani troops, including three officers, were killed Thursday when a military helicopter crashed in Waziristan, near the garrison town of Kohat. A suicide bomber attacked the house of a senior military commander in the town last month, killing two senior intelligence officials. At least 100 Pakistani troops and 200 people, including local tribesmen, non-Pakistani Arabs and other foreigners, have been killed in the region. Authorities said hundreds of people have fled their homes.

After a fierce rocket attack Wednesday night on military checkpoints in the tribal town of Shikai, authorities imposed economic punishment on the community, restricting the flow of local produce -- apricots, plums and dry fruit -- into local markets.

"The situation is still explosive because al Qaeda elements and their local supporters are running hit-and-run operations in a different terrain," said a Pakistani intelligence officer based in Peshawar.

Priest reported from Washington. Correspondent Glenn Frankel in London contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com

Taliban Maintains Grip Rooted in Fear
In Afghan Mountains, U.S. Forces Face Elusive Foe Bent on Disrupting Elections

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 9, 2004; Page A10

PARLAY, Afghanistan, Aug. 8 -- Sifullah is just 14 years old, but he knows enough to be afraid to bring tea.

"If anybody sees me bringing tea, they`ll ask me why I am helping the coalition forces," he said softly to a small group of U.S. soldiers and a reporter. "I`m afraid of the Taliban."

The Taliban guerrillas usually come out at night, walking from the other side of the mountain, Sifullah said. They have long beards and usually dress in white, with big black or white turbans. Often they carry AK-47 assault rifles on their shoulders and 9mm pistols at their sides. Sometimes they have satellite telephones. They search the stone huts of this village for weapons, making the women wait outside.
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Members of the Afghan national army, trained by U.S. Special Forces, on patrol earlier this year in the country`s south, where Taliban guerrillas remain active.
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And they come with a message: Do not help the Americans and their allies fighting in Afghanistan, and do not register to vote in the Oct. 9 presidential election, or you and your family will be killed.

Here in the northeast corner of Kandahar province, still considered a Taliban stronghold more than 2 1/2 years after the repressive Islamic movement was ousted from power, Sifullah`s story was corroborated over and over -- by an old man who fled to a nearby village after receiving threats, by a 16-year-old who was held for five hours while the Taliban searched for his older brother, and by a local militia commander whose brother was killed by the Taliban and who now works closely with U.S. forces.

Taliban fighters are abundant in the mountains, they all agree. When U.S. forces are in the area, the guerrillas emerge, staging hit-and-run attacks before disappearing back into the rock-strewn landscape.

U.S. troops say their battle against the Taliban is a classic guerrilla war against an elusive foe who refuses to show his face.

"They`re scared," said Capt. Brian L. Peterson, commander of Alpha Troop, a reconnaissance and surveillance unit of the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, based in Honolulu. "We`ve got to pry them out of the rocks to come out and fight."

"They know the air power that we command is devastating for them if they try to mass in number, so they are comfortable working at the small-unit level," said Staff Sgt. Joe Schoch, 29, a member of a long-range surveillance team. He added: "The tactic they are using right now is either hit-and-run or bait-and-ambush. As soon as the choppers come, they`re dropping their weapons and picking up their goats."
[Table align=left]

[/TABLE]

The biggest problem, U.S. soldiers and residents here say, is that as soon as the Americans leave, the Taliban will return. "We are happy that you guys are here," said Sifullah, who wore a green traditional Afghan shirt that was stained and dirty, a cap and black sandals. "But we are worried when you go back. They will ask why we were talking to coalition forces, and who helped them."

To Peterson and Schoch, Sifullah pleaded: "Please, make a base here and stay for a long time. When you are here, they are not disturbing us."

Taliban tactics were underscored as Peterson`s unit left Parlay on Sunday, heading back toward Kandahar. At 5 p.m., the convoy discovered the bodies of seven men close to the roadside; all apparently had been killed at close range. Most appeared to have been shot in the back of the head, with the bullet wounds exiting in front, and one seemed to have had his head bashed in.

The soldiers collected the bodies using the only two available body bags, as well as rain ponchos, and carried the corpses on the hoods of their Humvees. The blood was still fresh, indicating that the attack had taken place only hours before, according to an Army doctor traveling with the group who inspected the bodies.

The initial speculation among U.S. troops was that Taliban forces might have executed members of an anti-Taliban Afghan militia. Peterson said the victims also could have been government workers or others helping with the forthcoming national elections.

Local Afghan officials said they thought the men might have been killed for having voter registration cards, but no cards were found among them. The position of the bodies indicated that the men might have been trying to flee their attackers.

At 6:30 p.m., word flashed over the soldiers` radios that a smaller contingent of 20 U.S. troops left behind at Parlay, the Third Platoon of Alpha Troop, had come under a brief but intense ambush by suspected Taliban attackers firing small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. No U.S. soldiers were reported hurt in the ambush, in which the attackers fired at least five mortar rounds and 15 RPGs.

The ambush appeared timed to coincide with the departure of the main force of Alpha Troop soldiers Sunday morning, and the tactic of ambushing and retreating was familiar to these soldiers. "That`s what they do," said Staff Sgt. Sean Shirey of Culver City, Calif. "They won`t come out and fight."

A similar incident occurred when Peterson and his 35-man unit arrived Thursday, along with a truckload of local militiamen. They were acting on tips from residents that as many as 300 armed Taliban members were in the area, intimidating villagers and making voter registration all but impossible.

But when Peterson`s convoy of eight armored Humvees arrived, positioning themselves on a plain between the mountains and between two villages, the soldiers found most of the stone huts occupied by women, children and elderly men.

The Americans saw men racing away over the mountains as they arrived. The reconnaissance team and the militia fighters briefly gave chase, and two helicopters circled overhead. But the men disappeared over the rocks. The Americans found only a freshly burned pile of what appeared to be clothes.

The U.S. soldiers could also tell that they were under constant surveillance as they set up a temporary position. "See that guy over there!" shouted Spec. Nick Plummer, 25, of Klamath Falls, Ore., peering through binoculars from the gunner`s hatch of Peterson`s Humvee. "He appears out of nowhere. Then he disappears into the rocks whenever the aircraft fly overhead."

On Saturday morning, Peterson decided to lead a foot patrol through one of the tiny villages where the Americans had spotted suspicious activity at night. They also had, from local informants, the names of several high-ranking Taliban leaders in the area. But as the 16 soldiers and their Afghan militia allies arrived, racing through the almond groves, about 20 Afghan men could be seen fleeing across the mountains -- again, leaving behind women, children and elderly men sitting among sacks of almonds and dried apricots.

A quick search of one stone building in the compound found sleeping mats that could accommodate as many as 30 people -- far more people than were found there. There was also a rusting metal container, which, when opened, revealed a false bottom leading to a deep shaft, which could have been either a well or an escape tunnel.

The remaining villagers denied that any of the men who fled were with the Taliban. The men ran away, they said, because they feared being arrested. Peterson was unconvinced.

"When I come in and they run, that makes no sense to me," he told the villagers through his interpreter. "Who am I supposed to believe?"

For the troops, it was a familiar story. "We aren`t going to find anything here," Schoch said. "We just have to wait for them to hit us."

Added Shirey : "This gets old."

The same unit did run into a Taliban ambush two weeks ago while returning from the same village. It was a classic ambush, with the Humvee convoy caught on low ground and peppered with automatic-weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The U.S. troops returned fire, killing perhaps five attackers, although they did not recover the bodies. They took four prisoners, including a 12-year-old boy who picked up an assault rifle dropped by another fighter and began firing on the troops. The boy was shot in the buttocks and is undergoing treatment at the U.S. base at the Kandahar air field.

"They probably shot 500 rounds at us," said Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Bishop, 34, of Fairfield, Ohio. Bishop was in the last vehicle of the convoy, which was hit with a grenade and several bullets, causing a flat tire. "I thought the vehicle was on fire because of all the smoke," he said.

Another threat to U.S. troops in this area has been the proliferation of improvised roadside bombs. Because the armored Humvees are able to withstand many such explosions, the Taliban fighters have switched to a new tactic -- triple-stacking antitank mines for more lethal effect.

With the enemy so elusive, little is known about the Taliban guerrillas here and how they continue to exert control in the area, except for the information coaxed from locals who are not too frightened to talk, and from Abdul Satar, the local militia leader.

Abdul Satar returned from exile in Pakistan when U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in late 2001. The Taliban has put a price on his head, he said, and has warned anyone here against cooperating with him or joining his forces.

About two months ago, the Taliban in Parlay killed Abdul Satar`s 30-year-old brother, Abdul Ghaffar, along with another man, Abdul Ghani, who was working with Abdul Satar. They killed the two in front of a group of villagers, according to Abdul Satar and Hayatullah, Abdul Ghani`s father.

"First they shot him, then they hit him with stones," Abdul Satar said of his brother. "They said, `If you work with the Americans, this will happen to you.` "

He spoke during a meeting with Peterson and two dozen members of his own militia in the village of Mianishin, about two hours south of Parlay over rugged road. In a bare, unlit building that serves as the community mosque, with the militiamen`s AK-47s hanging from pegs in the stone wall, the men conversed over strongly sweetened tea and biscuits.

Other Afghans who made their way to Mianishin told similar stories about the Taliban in the area. They spoke of as many as 300 Taliban guerrillas in the mountains, and how they threaten people not to vote and not to cooperate with the U.S. forces. They said the Taliban also leave what the Afghans called night letters -- warnings at the homes of people they want to scare.

Besides making contact with local militia leaders, Peterson`s team also is assisting with basic medical needs in this desolate area. Every contact, Peterson said, is a chance to glean new insights into an enemy they cannot see.

"Everybody is an intelligence operative out here," he added. "Everybody we interact with is a chance to collect information. But it doesn`t happen overnight. The further we spread out, the better picture we build."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

Bin Laden Trail Still Cold, Pakistan Says
Joint sweep with the U.S. has caught more than a dozen other Al Qaeda suspects, official notes.
By Paul Watson
Times Staff Writer

August 16, 2004

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Despite a surge in arrests of Al Qaeda suspects, a senior Pakistani anti-terrorism official said investigators still had not found the trail of their main target, Osama bin Laden.

"You can only be sure you`re closing in on someone when you at least have a hint of his whereabouts," Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema said in an interview last week. "With regard to Osama bin Laden himself, I would say that we are not getting any substantial leads as yet."

Cheema, head of the National Crisis Management Cell at the Interior Ministry, said Pakistan was "working hand in glove with the U.S. government" in a sweep that had netted more than a dozen suspects in the last two weeks. Among those detained was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who had been indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa.

Pakistani intelligence sources say FBI agents are playing a crucial role in tracking suspects by intercepting cellphone calls and other actions.

One source familiar with the investigation said Washington had stepped up pressure on Pakistani authorities to turn their latest leads into the capture of more high-level targets before the U.S. presidential election in November.

Bush administration officials have warned that intelligence indicates Al Qaeda may be planning an attack before the election.

"The next month and a half is absolutely crucial," said the Pakistani source, who spoke on condition that he not be identified because his superiors had not approved the interview. "The way the Americans are pressuring Pakistan, they want Osama bin Laden."

Bush administration officials have denied U.S. media reports that the United States was pressuring Pakistan to capture or kill Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda fugitives before the election. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack told the New Republic, which published one such account, that U.S. policy on pursuing those fugitives was unchanged by the election schedule.

Last month`s capture of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer specialist suspected of operating an information hub for Al Qaeda, set off the latest wave of arrests, including 13 in Britain. U.S. investigators are pursuing leads based on his computer files.

A Western diplomat confirmed reports that laptop computers and dozens of computer disks contained surveillance reports and apparent plans for attacks in the United States.

Cheema confirmed news reports that after his arrest, Khan worked undercover with Pakistani authorities, sending e-mail messages to Al Qaeda members in several countries. But Khan`s cover apparently was blown when his name was leaked to the U.S. media.

Pakistani officials have made conflicting statements about the importance of Khan`s arrest in the broader war against the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Some raised expectations of a breakthrough in the nearly three-year hunt for Bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri. Others have been more cautious.

In Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday, Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told Arab satellite television that investigators had "penetrated deep inside this network." He also seemed to suggest that recent arrests had brought Bin Laden and Zawahiri closer to capture.

"Undoubtedly, we have received some information, and all the arrests at the Al Qaeda leadership level bring us closer toward reaching the desired objective," Hayat said.

Cheema, who is one of Hayat`s top aides, said the interior minister had been quoted out of context. Although Khan`s arrest was "a significant success," it had not generated new momentum in the search for Bin Laden and his deputy, Cheema said.

"We should not be very optimistic," he said. "Yes, we got 13 to 14 [Al Qaeda] people in the last two weeks` time, but there is no reason for euphoria."

Arrests of mid- and low-ranking Al Qaeda members such as Khan usually lead to more arrests over a period of 10 to 15 days, Cheema said. Then the surge slows, and investigators have to force new breaks in Al Qaeda`s defenses. The network`s cell structure isolates units from one another, limiting the damage when one is broken up.

Bin Laden was last heard in public on an audiotape broadcast in April. His last videotape was broadcast in September 2003, on the eve of the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The satellite television station Al Jazeera, which aired the video, said it was produced in late April or early May 2003.

The Al Qaeda leader appeared gaunt and tired in the videotape. Cheema would not say whether there was any recent information on Bin Laden`s health, but said investigators were working on the assumption that he was alive.

Pakistan`s crackdown on Al Qaeda is complicated by another conflict: the 57-year dispute with India over the Kashmir region. Several militant groups allegedly trained and armed by the Pakistani military`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, to fight in Kashmir are allied with Al Qaeda.

Shedding those ties and removing Al Qaeda sympathizers from Pakistan`s security and intelligence services are among President Pervez Musharraf`s biggest and most dangerous challenges.

Some of the militant groups are splintering or spawning "freelance terrorists who are drifting away from the established organizations and setting up shop on their own," said the Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The groups have been involved in high-profile attacks in Pakistan, including at least one of two assassination attempts against Musharraf in December and an attempt in June to kill an army corps commander in the southern port city of Karachi.

The diplomat said Musharraf needed significant concessions from India to dismantle the militant groups. India and Pakistan are negotiating a possible bus link across the cease-fire line that would make it easier for Kashmiri families to reunite, but Musharraf needs much more than that, the diplomat said.

India`s government appears to believe that it doesn`t need to meet Musharraf halfway with a compromise on Kashmir because a new security fence and pressure from the U.S. are limiting militant infiltrations, the diplomat added.

"The Indians are asking, `Why should we settle for a tie when we can win?` " the diplomat said. "That`s seriously not good…. It will horribly undermine Musharraf. It will horribly undermine rapprochement with India."

India`s approach will not work in the long term, the diplomat said. "It might buy them five years, maybe even a bit more," the diplomat said. "But there are very serious grievances there."

The United Arab Emirates recently returned militant leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar to Pakistan. He is suspected of masterminding last year`s assassination attempts against Musharraf and a suicide car bomb attack in July on Prime Minister-designate Shaukat Aziz.

Akhtar`s links to the conflict in Kashmir go back more than a decade. He once headed a leading militant force, Harkat Ansar, which kidnapped six Western tourists in 1995. One escaped, another was found beheaded, and three others, including an American, were never found. The body of the sixth hostage, a Briton, was exhumed in 1997.

Declared a terrorist group by the U.S., Harkat Ansar renamed itself Harkat Mujahedin, whose leader was Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil. He was also detained recently in Pakistan.

Khalil co-signed Bin Laden`s 1998 decree declaring it a Muslim`s duty to kill Americans and Jews. He also provided training camps for Bin Laden in Afghanistan, which the U.S. struck with cruise missiles after the 1998 embassy bombings.

During testimony in March to the U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, former national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger drew a link between Pakistan`s military intelligence and Khalil`s operations in Afghanistan.

The cruise missile barrage in Afghanistan "killed, apparently, a number of Pakistani ISI — Pakistani intelligence officials who were at the camps at the same time," Berger said.

The timing of Khalil`s detention, on suspicion that he trained guerrillas to attack U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, suggests that Musharraf`s government may be taking a more aggressive line against militant leaders, whom many Pakistanis consider heroes.

Seven months ago, responding to a Times report that Khalil and his outlawed group were recruiting and training militants, Hayat, the Pakistani interior minister, dismissed him as a "small fish" who was being carefully monitored.

Musharraf has detained Khalil and other leaders of militant groups fighting in Kashmir, only to release them. Without a settlement in Kashmir, the Western diplomat said, it would be impossible for Musharraf to accuse militants fighting there — with Pakistan`s support — of a crime.

The Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers are scheduled to hold a summit Sept. 5-6 in New Delhi to review what progress has been made during several months of lower-level talks.

Musharraf recently said New Delhi had sent feelers on the Kashmir issue, which he planned to discuss with India`s new prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in New York on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly meeting next month.

Special correspondent Mubashir Zaidi contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

August 21, 2004
Pakistani Forces Attack Terrorist Lairs
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 4:46 a.m. ET

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani troops backed by artillery and aircraft attacked two suspected terrorist hideouts near the rugged Afghan border on Saturday, security officials said.

The attack was launched near Shakai in the South Waziristan tribal region, scene of several military counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida fugitives and renegade tribesmen in the recent months.

Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said that Pakistani troops on Saturday exchanged fire with ``foreign miscreants`` who had suffered casualties, but he had no details. He denied a major new military operation was underway.

An intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity in the capital Islamabad, said the troops had surrounded two hideouts of foreign terrorists and their local supporters who had reportedly used light weapons to attack the army.

In Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, local journalist Allah Noor Wazir cited local residents as saying that three Pakistani fighter planes had launched an attack on Saturday in a forested area near Shakai where militants were believed to be hiding.

Officials could not confirm the report.

Although the last major military operation in South Waziristan ended in June -- leaving more than 100 people dead -- sporadic clashes have continued, with militants frequently launching rockets against security forces.

Pakistan is a key ally of the United States and has been hunting remnants of al-Qaida and Taliban in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, where hundreds of militants, including Arabs and Central Asians, have taken refuge since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Officials say the military operations have forced some al-Qaida operatives to flee the area and move elsewhere in Pakistan. In the past month, authorities say they have captured more than 60 terror suspects around the country.

Among them was Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in east Africa that killed more than 200 people. He was captured in eastern Punjab province last month.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

[raubritterloulou]

Der Mann ist tot!

[Joerver]

Die sogenannte Oktoberüberraschung vor den Wahlen im November. Nur ein großes Problem hat die ganze Sache im Umfeld der pakistanischen Regierung sind zu viele Al Kaida Sympathiesanten.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 04. September 2004, 10:14
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,316668,00.html

Pakistan

US-Terroristenjäger glaubt an baldige Festnahme Bin Ladens

Geht der "Scheich" seinen Häschern bald ins Netz? Cofer Black, Koordinator der amerikanischen Terrorabwehr im State Department, soll gegenüber pakistanischen Journalisten entsprechende Bemerkungen gemacht haben. George W. Bush käme ein solcher Scoup kurz vor der Wahl sehr gelegen.

Berlin - Journalisten der pakistanische Tageszeitungen "Dawn" und "The Nation" hatten Black in einem Pressegespräch in Islamabad gefragt, ob man der Verhaftung Osama bin Ladens näher gekommen sei. Black habe daraufhin mit "Ja" geantwortet, schrieben beide englischsprachigen Blätter. Der Koordinator für Terrorabwehr hatte sich zu Gesprächen in Islamabad aufgehalten und anschließend auf einem Pressebriefing Fragen von pakistanischen Reportern beantwortet.

"Es könnte morgen passieren, übermorgen, in einer Woche oder einem Monat," sagte Black den Journalisten. "Ein kleines bisschen" sei noch nötig, um "diese Leute" zu lokalisieren und zu fangen, wurde Black in den Zeitungen zitiert. Der Chef des Terrornetzwerks al Kaida wird im Grenzgebiet zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan vermutet. Seit der Schneeschmelze im April in den Bergen läuft dort eine umfangreiche Offensive amerikanischer, afghanischer und pakistanischer Truppen, um die dort noch immer aktiven Taliban zu besiegen - und endlich bin Laden zu fangen.

In den vergangenen Monaten war den pakistanischen Sicherheitsbehörden immer wieder spektakuläre Schläge gegen das Terrornetzwerk gelungen. Führende al-Kaida Mitglieder wurden gefangen und an die USA ausgeliefert. Kritiker glauben an eine bewusste Erhöhung des Fahndungsdrucks in zeitlicher Nähe zu den Präsidentenwahlen in den USA. Die US-Zeitschrift "The New Republic" hatte im Sommer einen Artikel entsprechenden veröffentlicht und behauptet, ein hoher US-Beamter habe von Pakistan in Islamabad verlangt, im Sommer 2004 al-Kaida-Kader "abzuliefern".

Erst vor wenigen Wochen war den Fahndern in Pakistan Achmed Khalfan Ghailani ins Netz gegangen, der für die Anschläge auf US-Botschaften in Ostafrika 1998 verantwortlich sein soll. Außerdem wurden mehrere mittlere Funktionäre der Kaida festgesetzt.

Black hatte jetzt bei seinem Aufenthalt die pakistanische Regierung angeblich um mehr Hubschrauber und Truppen im Grenzgebiet gebeten. Pakistan hat nach eigenen Angaben etwa 70.000 Soldaten im Grenzgebiet zu Afghanistan stationiert. Am Willen Pakistans, bin Laden und seine Verbündeten tatsächlich zu fangen, war lange gezweifelt worden. Vor allem die Regierung in Kabul hatte Islamabad oft wegen unterlassener Aktionen und der Duldung terroristischer Aktivitäten kritisiert.



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[Joerver]

September 6, 2004
Afghan Strife Exposes Deep and Wide Ethnic Tensions
By AMY WALDMAN

SHINDAND, Afghanistan - The Pashtuns say they fled persecution in their home villages, at the hands of Tajiks. The Tajiks say their homes have been raided by Pashtun fighters.

In an Afghanistan struggling to build a cohesive nation after 23 years of war, ethnic tensions have supposedly been submerged in the name of national unity. But recent fighting here in western Afghanistan shows that those tensions remain like spider cracks in china, and run all the way to the nation`s capital, Kabul.

The fighting pitted a Pashtun commander, Amanullah Khan, who has long maintained a base near here, against the Tajik governor of Herat Province, Ismail Khan. Their animosity is bitterly personal, but it has also taken on an ethnic cast.
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Amanullah Khan`s men attacked
Ismail Khan`s forces in Shindand.
[/TABLE]
At issue is not just how their dispute is resolved locally, but the central government`s ability to establish itself as a fair arbiter when it is also sometimes polarized along ethnic lines.

On the night of Aug. 13, Amanullah Khan`s men carried out an apparently unprovoked attack against Ismail Khan`s forces, capturing the air base here. One of the attackers` grievances, in this district that is 80 percent Pashtun, was that Ismail Khan had not appointed Pashtun officials, particularly to the district governor`s office.

"Ismail Khan did not want Pashtuns to have a good life," said Abdul Zaher, an ally of Amanullah Kahn. "His men stole houses and cars. They killed commanders in Pashtun areas. They didn`t give any Pashtuns positions."

A Pashtun official in the central government largely echoed that assessment, contending that Ismail Khan should be removed as governor partly because he had not appointed a Pashtun to any senior post, although they are a majority in the province.

"There is a feeling Pashtuns were discriminated against, they were terrorized, killed, their property seized," the official added.

Many of Amanullah Khan`s fighters were Pashtuns from elsewhere in the province who were driven from their villages, they said, by persecution by Tajik soldiers loyal to Ismail Khan.

Zalmai, 26, a shopkeeper, said he had fled his district, as had 4,500 families, because of harassment by Tajik soldiers.

"After the Taliban left, the Tajik-Pashtun issue was raised," he said. "We finally had to start fighting against them. They got our cars, all our properties, they even cut our trees because they said they belonged to Pashtuns."

He and about 1,000 men from his district, Ghurian, joined Amanullah Khan, seen as a Pashtun champion, to fight or offer support.

Ismail Khan said in an interview that charges that he had been unfair to Pashtuns were "baseless." "The reality is that all ethnicities are involved in government and positions," he said. Besides, he added, if such accusations were true, it was up to the central government, not the rebels, to deal with the problem.

Whatever the truth, new grievances are being nursed here, in this case largely by Tajiks angry about what they say were atrocities by Amanullah Khan`s soldiers in the recent attacks.
[Table align=right]

Fighting in western Afghanistan pitted
Ismail Khan, left, the Tajik governor
of Herat Province, against a Pashtun,
Amanullah Khan, right.
[/TABLE]
The United Nations and the Afghan Human Rights Commission have begun to investigate. At least 42 people were confirmed dead in the fighting, most of them Ismail Khan`s soldiers, and some had been brutally killed.

One army battalion commander, Wali Muhammad Touhid, said he had seen the bodies of two soldiers who had been killed with their hands tied behind their backs. A senior Afghan official in Kabul said he believed that the commander of Shindand Air Base had been beheaded, and Mr. Touhid said Amanullah Khan`s men had told him the same thing.

Rumors in villages near here put the number of casualties as high as 200, and villagers say the bodies were buried in unmarked graves. Mr. Touhid said local people had told of seven bodies hidden in a well, then moved. He said Afghan soldiers and American Special Forces soldiers who had searched the well had found clothes and three election registration cards.

After the initial attack, Amanullah Khan`s men pillaged the area, officials in Kabul and here agree. Pashtuns and Tajiks were victims, but Tajiks in particular were singled out.

Three men in different locations here gave similar accounts of seeing Amanullah Khan`s soldiers raid and rob Tajik homes, and, in some cases, kill the inhabitants. One man, who insisted on the protection of a wall and anonymity before he would speak, said the fighters had particularly sought to attack homes of Tajik soldiers and government officials.

The central government official in Kabul said Amanullah Khan had "dark, dark" spots, including a possible role in narcotics smuggling and ties with fighters who supported Afghanistan`s former Taliban rulers. Many Tajiks here and in Kabul, then, question why the government has never acted against him, particularly now that he has attacked government installations and officials.

"If the central government, NATO and the U.N. want peace, they should act against these rebels because their job is insurgency, nothing else," said Noor Ahmad, 28, a tailor.
[Table align=right]

[/TABLE][Table align=center]
The body of one of Ismail Khan`s fighters was recovered by a relative last week with help from Afghan National Army forces, background.
[/TABLE]
"Look at these wild people," said one Tajik in a village here as two of Amanullah Khan`s fighters, guns on display, rode by on a motorbike. "If the central government does not react against these people then it`s not the central government."

Ismail Khan`s intelligence chief, Naser Alawi, said he believed that some in the central government who were trying to play the ethnic card supported Amanullah Khan`s attack.

In Herat city, residents say the recent violence has worsened ethnic polarization. The fighting "is mostly an issue of Pashtuns and Tajiks," said Nasir Ahmad, a Tajik shop owner. "There was no problem in the city, but after the fighting there are ethnic problems."

During the fighting, he said, as word spread that Amanullah Khan`s troops were approaching the city, Pashtuns mocked Tajiks, saying, " `Your authority might be gone in an hour or two.` "

"They were happy," he said. "We realized there is an ethnic problem."

A Pashtun shoe salesman, Ahmadullah, 22, said he felt new tensions since the fighting. "People now are saying they don`t like the people of Zirkot," Amanullah Khan`s base, and a synonym, he implied, for Pashtun.

Against this canvas, the Afghan National Army, whose soldiers were sent here after Amanullah Khan`s soldiers attacked the air base, stands apart. Its soldiers are drawn from all of the country`s ethnic groups and provinces. One unit contained men from all over the country, Panshir, Paktia, Ghazni, Kunar.

A Pashtun battalion commander, Serbat Wardak, said he refused to view things through an ethnic lens, and did not believe that his men took such a view either, in part because they were from outside the area.

Speaking of the national army, he said, "This is now the only force that people can trust."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

[Joerver]

September 9, 2004
Pakistani Jets Attack Suspected Militants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:10 a.m. ET

WANA, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani jets pounded a suspected training camp for foreign militants in a tribal area near the border with Afghanistan on Thursday, killing 50 people, officials said.

The military said the camp was located near Dila Khula, a South Waziristan village about 15 miles northeast of the region`s main town, Wana.

``There were confirmed reports of training activity being conducted by foreign elements including Uzbeks, Chechens and a few Arabs,`` the military said in a statement. ``These trained terrorists were indulging in sabotage and terrorist acts in the country.``

Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told the private ARY television channel that 50 people were killed and most were foreigners. He said the camp was totally destroyed and all the people there were believed killed.

Sultan said the men had been involved in terrorist acts inside Pakistan, but gave no details. He said they were not connected to suspected Chechen militants who took hundreds hostage at a school in southern Russia last week. At least 330 people -- many of them children -- died in the end to that siege.

``We came to know about this camp after investigations into recent terrorist attacks in Pakistan,`` Sultan said. ``Most of the people there were foreigners.``

A large number of Central Asian and Arab militants are believed to be living in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Many came to fight alongside U.S.-backed Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and some never left.

Pakistan has frequently overstated the scope of its military operations, claiming to have captured or killed foreigners that turn out to be local tribesmen, or to have focused on top al-Qaida men who never turn up.

Alam Khan, a resident of Ladha, a village near Khunkhela, told The Associated Press by phone that three other nearby villages were also hit in the operation. He said he saw at least two jets and about 10 army helicopters flying over the scene during the fighting, which lasted about two hours.

Dust and smoke could be seen rising from houses in the villages, Khan said. He had no word on casualties.

Pakistan`s army has launched frequent attacks in North and South Waziristan to flush out Islamic militants. The area is considered a possible hide-out for Osama bin Laden, though there is no hard evidence of his whereabouts.

The bombing came after a land mine wounded three soldiers in Wana on Wednesday, prompting a firefight that left seven tribesmen dead, an intelligence official said Thursday. Later, a rocket landed in a field near a military base, but no one was hurt.

Pakistan, an ally in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, has deployed tens of thousands of troops along the Afghan border to fight al-Qaida and Taliban fighters operating there.

The military said that troops had come also under fire after the mine attack, but residents accused the troops of firing indiscriminately at civilians.

About 50 people were rounded up in an effort to find out who planted the mine, and 28 were still being held for questioning on Thursday, the military said.

^--------

Associated Press reporters Munir Ahmad and Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad, and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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Musharraf in Land auch Busharraf genannt wird auch immer mehr zu einem Präsidenten ohne Land, denn ein großer Teil Pakistans ist nicht mehr unter seiner Kontrolle.
Aber sein Kampf gegen Al Kaida geht angeblich weiter.


September 21, 2004
Pakistani May Stay in Uniform
By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 - Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said in an interview on Monday that his leadership was freeing his country from the menace of extremism and that this national "renaissance" might be lost if he kept his pledge to step down as army chief at the end of this year.

And while General Musharraf asserted that he had succeeded in breaking up the network of a top Pakistani scientist who provided illicit nuclear technology to other countries, he said the full extent of that network was not yet known.

Of his promise to serve only as the country`s civilian president after Dec. 31, General Musharraf said, "Yes, I did give my word that I would." The step has been viewed as fulfilling his larger promise to return Pakistan to democratic rule, "but the issue is now far greater than this," he said.

Speaking in a one-hour interview with The New York Times after his arrival in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, General Musharraf said Pakistan was making significant inroads into Al Qaeda, arresting some 600 suspects, ending the terrorist network`s illicit fund-raising in major cities and breaking up long established bases in remote border areas. That effort, he said, required "continuity."

"This was a culture, a society which was moving towards extremism and fundamentalism, and I am trying to reverse this trend and give voice to the vast majority of Pakistanis who are moderate," said General Musharraf, 61, the target of two assassination attacks last December and a plot on his life in August, all, he said, planned by Al Qaeda. "Now these are not easy things which can be done by anyone, may I say."

Dressed in a gray business suit, seated in a straight-backed chair in his midtown hotel suite and speaking with regimental rigor, General Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan since seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999, asserted that Pakistan was already enjoying the fruits of democracy, with local elections, functioning legislatures, freedom of speech and an independent press and empowerment of women.

"I`m sorry, I don`t want to boast about myself," he said, "but there is a renaissance, there is a big change we are trying to bring about."

Though he said he had not yet decided to remain army chief beyond the Dec. 31 deadline, he asked pointedly, "How did General de Gaulle continue in uniform all through his period as president of France, and France is a democratic country?"

In discussing Al Qaeda, he said that among the 600 suspects detained were Uzbeks, Chechens, Yemenis and other Arabs, as well as people from Tanzania, South Africa and even China.

He said the recent seizure of computer disks in the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore had shown that Al Qaeda was thinking of uprooting to Somalia or Sudan. "I think that speaks volumes for the actions we have taken against them in our cities and in the mountains," he said.

General Musharraf, a crucial ally of President Bush, who is scheduled to meet with him twice this week, firmly denied that any influence had been brought on Pakistan to produce a dramatic arrest before the November election. "This is absolutely untrue," he said.

He expressed intense irritation with critics of Pakistan`s level of commitment to the campaign to capture the Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "When I read about this issue of we are not doing enough and all that, I really don`t like that at all for Pakistan," he said, his voice rising. "Who else is doing enough? Who else is doing anything, by the way? Only Pakistan is doing enough."

He said that Pakistan`s Army was taking action to end the teaching of religious extremism and hatred of the West in the religious schools known as madrasas, but that given the remoteness, the inhospitable terrain and 2,500-mile length of the border where extremism most flourished, the job was difficult.

"We are squeezing the religious teachers who preach extremism , we are taking them to task and removing them, but it is a slow process because there are thousands of mosques, and you don`t know who is saying what," he said. "The army is not omnipresent everywhere."

General Musharraf cited similar difficulties in keeping resurgent forces of the Taliban, Afghanistan`s former rulers, from using border areas for initiating attacks on their homeland and attempting to disrupt elections there.

"We are trying to do our best not to let them do that,`` he said. "Our resolve is to not allow them to interfere in the elections. But we cannot guarantee it. We do not have the capability to seal the border in a watertight manner."

He said he was certain that he had dismantled the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan`s atom bomb who was exposed this year as a major furnisher of illicit nuclear know-how and material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

But he said he was not certain that he had discovered the full extent of Mr. Khan`s activities. American intelligence officials say the three countries may have accounted for less than 50 percent of the network`s customers.

"I`m 200 percent sure that it has been shut down," Mr. Musharraf said of Dr. Khan`s network. "But if you say whether I am sure over what he`s provided in the past, no sir, I`m not. I can`t say surely that he has honored everything that he has done."

He rejected charges that his government had denied American investigators the chance to question Dr. Khan, whom he pardoned, saying the Americans never requested it. And what would be the response if they did ask?

"We wouldn`t let them," he said. "That would show a lack of trust in ourselves. I mean, we must trust our own agencies."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Surprise, Surprise! Bin Laden lebt schon seit langem in Texas!
Dafür wird jetzt ein anderer Terrorstaat mit Waffen hochgerüstet und wenn sie Busharraf zum Mond schießen, muß irgendjemand die Waffen wieder einsammeln.
Kriegsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 23. September 2004, 8:56
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,318954,00.html

Jagd auf Bin Laden

Die Zange greift nicht

Von Alexander Schwabe

Die Zeit wird knapp. Zu gerne würde Präsident Bush dem Wahlvolk noch vor dem Urnengang am 2. November den meistgesuchten Terroristen der Welt als Gefangenen präsentieren. Doch trotz massiver militärischer Operationen im Grenzgebiet zwischen Afghanistan und Pakistan fehlt von Osama Bin Laden weiter jede Spur.

Als sich Waffenverkäufer und -einkäufer aus aller Welt vergangene Woche im Sheraton-Hotel in Karatschi trafen, waren die pakistanischen Militärs guter Dinge. Insbesondere Luftwaffenchef Kaleem Sadat war gelöster Stimmung, stellte die US-Regierung dem General nichts Geringeres als die Lieferung von F-16-Kampfjets in Aussicht.

"Die westlichen Länder verweigerten uns den Zugang zu ihren Märkten und Produkten", beschrieb der General die Lage während der vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnte, in denen Pakistan mit Sanktionen belegt war. Doch seitdem sich das Land vor drei Jahren der Anti-Terrorallianz der Amerikaner angeschlossen hat, ist alles anders. Inzwischen ist die Supermacht gar gewillt, dem Verbündeten, der sich phasenweise an der Schwelle zum Krieg mit Indien befindet, besagte High-Tech-Jagdbomber zu liefern.

Auffällig, dass Islamabad unmittelbar bevor der Deal bekannt wurde, seine Bemühungen verstärkt hat, in Kooperation mit den USA al-Qaida- und Talibangruppen im Grenzland zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan in die Zange zu nehmen. Die Amerikaner von Afghanistan aus, Pakistan von der Provinz Waziristan aus.

US-Major Scott Nelson lobte am Montag das "aggressive Vorgehen" des pakistanischen Militärs. Zwischen 70 und 150 Menschen sind dort in den vergangenen Tagen von der Armee getötet worden. Pakistanische Sicherheitskräfte haben eigenen Angaben zufolge zudem im Haus eines Stammesführers ein Waffenlager mit 400 Raketen, Kalaschnikows und Handgranaten ausgehoben.

Die Schlinge zieht sich zu - und wer ist drin?

Wieder einmal verbreitet die Antiterror-Allianz Optimismus. Die Schlinge ziehe sich immer enger um Bin Ladens Leute in der rauen Berggegend Süd-Waziristans zu, sagt Generalmajor Niaz Khattak in der Provinzhauptstadt Wana, rund 400 Kilometer südwestlich der Hauptstadt Islamabad. Sechs-, siebenhundert islamistische Kämpfer hielten sich in dem unwegsamen Gebiet an der Grenze zu Afghanistan auf. Ihnen stehen nach Angaben Pakistans 70.000 Soldaten der Armee gegenüber.

Ob allerdings der Gesuchte Nummer eins, Osama Bin Laden, der Gesuchte Nummer zwei, Stellvertreter Aiman al-Sawahiri, der Gesuchte Nummer drei, Taliban-Chef Mullah Omar, oder der Gesuchte Nummer vier, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, unter den Umzingelten ist, wissen die Jäger nicht. Generalmajor Shaukat Sultan räumt ein: "Wir haben keinerlei sichere Geheimdienstinformation darüber, ob sich hier hochrangige al-Qaida-Anführer aufhalten."

Pakistans Präsident Pervez Musharraf wies denn auch kurz vor seinem Abflug zur Uno-Vollversammlung in New York Spekulationen zurück, wonach er dem amerikanischen Präsidenten bei der Gelegenheit Bin Laden servieren werde. "Wir haben keine Ahnung, wo Osama ist", sagte Musharraf am Wochenende.

Hekmatyar verteilt Flugblätter

Als sicher gilt lediglich, dass unter den Kämpfern im Grenzland Usbeken, Tschetschenen und Araber sind. Gesuchte zweiter Klasse. Möglicherweise hält sich dort der jordanische Bombenbastler Abdullah al-Haj auf, der Verbindungen zum Terrorstrippenzieher im Irak, Abu Musab al-Sarkawi, haben soll. Und Tahir Yuldasch, Anführer der Islamischen Bewegung Usbekistan, könnte in der Gegend sein.

Trotz der intensiveren Suche nach mutmaßlichen Terroristen gelingt es Anführern der Qaida, der Taliban und Leuten des radikalen Fundamentalisten Hekmatyar noch immer, Zusammenkünfte abzuhalten. Amerikanischen Erkenntnissen zufolge stimmten die Rebellen erst jüngst ihr Vorgehen ab, um die afghanischen Wahlen am 9. Oktober möglichst effektiv zu torpedieren. Hekmatyar verteilte in den Flüchtlingslagern im pakistanischen Peschawar Flugblätter, auf denen zum Boykott der Wahlen aufgerufen wird.

Die Jagd nach Bin Laden gleicht mehr und mehr der nach einem Phantom. Bereits im Februar hatte David Barno, ranghöchster US-General in Afghanistan, das Totenglöckchen für al-Qaida und die Taliban geläutet. Er kündigte eine neue "Großoffensive" an, die Bin Laden und Mullah Omar liefern sollte.

Einen Monat später zeigte die pakistanische Armee, was sie konnte: In der Provinz Waziristan waren Dutzende feindlicher Islamisten eingekesselt. Musharraf persönlich verkündete, man habe Bin-Laden-Aktivisten, darunter Sawahiri, umzingelt. Ein Entkommen sei ausgeschlossen. Und dann entwischten die meisten durch Tunnels.

Die halbherzige Aktion zeigte einmal mehr: Die Verlässlichkeit des stärksten US-Verbündeten in der Region ist zweifelhaft, auch wenn die Bush-Regierung Pakistan in den Rang eines bevorzugten "Nicht-Nato-Alliierten" wie Israel, Japan und Südkorea erhoben hat.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung der SPIEGELnet GmbH

[Joerver]

September 23, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Hope Amid the Rubble
By PETER BERGEN

Washington

Based on what Americans have been seeing in the news media about Afghanistan lately, there may not be many who believed President Bush on Tuesday when he told the United Nations that the "Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." But then again, not many Americans know what Afghanistan was like before the American-led invasion. Let me offer some perspective.

This summer I visited Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, for the first time since the winter of 1999. Five years ago, the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies were at the height of their power. They had turned Afghanistan into a terrorist state, with more than a dozen training camps churning out thousands of jihadist graduates every year.

The scene was very different this time around. The Kandahar airport, where I had once seen Taliban soldiers showing off their antiaircraft missiles, is now a vast American base with thousands of soldiers, as well as a 24-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa and a PX the size of a Wal-Mart. Next door, what was once a base for Osama bin Laden is now an American shooting range. In downtown Kandahar, the gaudy compound of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, now houses United States Special Forces units.

As I toured other parts of the country, the image that I was prepared for - that of a nation wracked by competing warlords and in danger of degenerating into a Colombia-style narcostate - never materialized. Undeniably, the drug trade is a serious concern (it now compromises about a third of the country`s gross domestic product) and the slow pace of disarming the warlords is worrisome.

Over the last three years, however, most of the important militia leaders, like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Uzbek community in the country`s north, have shed their battle fatigues for the business attire of the politicians they hope to become. It`s also promising that some three million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with spectacular traffic jams and booming construction sites. And urban centers around the country are experiencing similar growth.

While two out of three Afghans cited security as their most pressing concern in a poll taken this summer by the International Republican Institute, four out of five respondents also said things are better than they were two years ago. Despite dire predictions from many Westerners, the presidential election, scheduled for Oct. 9, now looks promising. Ten million Afghans have registered to vote, far more than were anticipated, and almost half of those who have signed up are women. Indeed, one of the 18 candidates for president is a woman. Even in Kandahar, more then 60 percent of the population has registered to vote, while 45 percent have registered in Uruzgan Province, the birthplace of Mullah Omar. With these kinds of numbers registering, it seems possible that turnout will be higher than the one-third of eligible voters who have participated in recent American presidential elections.

According to a poll taken in July by the Asia Foundation, President Hamid Karzai is drawing substantial support around the country. He has emerged not only as a popular leader, but also as a shrewd player of the kind of hardball politics that would have warmed the heart of Lyndon Johnson. This summer he dropped his running mate, Mohammad Fahim, a power-hungry general who had pompously awarded himself the title of field marshal after the fall of the Taliban. And this month Mr. Karzai forced Ismail Khan, the governor of the western province of Herat, to resign. These moves not only neutralized two powerful rivals, men who could field their own private armies, but also increased the stability of the central government.

What we are seeing in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but it`s better than so-so. Disputes that would once have been settled with the barrel of a gun are now increasingly being dealt with politically. The remnants of the Taliban are doing what they can to disrupt the coming election, but their attacks, aimed at election officials, American forces and international aid workers, are sporadic and strategically ineffective.

If the elections are a success, it will send a powerful signal to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, none of which can claim to be representative democracies. If so, the democratic domino effect, which was one of the Bush administration`s arguments for the Iraq war, may be more realistic in Central Asia than it has proved to be in the Middle East.

Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Zwei Meinungsartikel aus der NYTimes zum Thema Afghanistan.

September 23, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Chance of Success Slips Away
By J ALEXANDER THIER

Stanford, Calif.

President Bush describes Afghanistan, the first front on the war on terrorism, as a success. In comparison to Iraq, perhaps it is. But if you look at Afghanistan on its own merits, the lack of progress is disheartening. In 2002, President Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for the country, with the goal of turning Afghanistan into a stable, democratic state. On Tuesday, before the United Nations General Assembly, the president said that "the Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." Yet in nearly three years we have failed to create security, stability, prosperity or the rule of law in Afghanistan.

These failings are not just a reflection of the great difficulties of nation-building in places like Afghanistan, they are also the direct result of the Bush administration`s policy decisions. Our efforts in Afghanistan are underfinanced and undermanned, and our attention is waning.

The root of the problem is that we invaded Afghanistan to destroy something - the Taliban and Al Qaeda - but we didn`t think much about what would grow in its place. While we focused on fighting the terrorists (and even there our effectiveness has been questionable), Afghanistan has become a collection of warlord-run fiefs fueled by a multibillion-dollar opium economy. We armed and financed warlord armies with records of drug-running and human rights abuses stretching back two decades. Then we blocked the expansion of an international security force meant to rein in the militias. These decisions were made for short-term battlefield gain - with disregard for the long-term implications for the mission there.

Our Army continues to hunt insurgents in the mountains, but we have refused to take the steps necessary to secure the rest of the country, and it shows. More coalition and Afghan government soldiers and aid workers have died this year than in each of the previous two. This summer, Doctors Without Borders, which has worked in the most desperate and dangerous conditions around the world, pulled out of Afghanistan after 24 years. In other words, the group felt safer in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed than it did three years after the United States-led coalition toppled the Taliban.

Last month, after a United Nations-backed voter registration office was bombed, the vice president of the United Nations Staff Union urged Secretary General Kofi Annan to pull employees out of Afghanistan. The opium trade is also out of control, fueling lawlessness and financing terrorists. Last year, the trade brought in $2.3 billion; this year, opium production is expected to increase 50 to 100 percent.

Amid terrorist attacks and fighting among regional warlords, the country is preparing for presidential elections on Oct. 9. A recent United Nations report warned that warlords were intimidating voters and candidates. This month, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has monitored post-conflict elections in trouble spots like Bosnia and Kosovo, declared that Afghanistan was too dangerous for its election monitors (it is sending a small "election support team`` instead). President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped assassination last week on his first campaign trip outside Kabul, and eight other presidential candidates have called for elections to be delayed, saying it`s been too dangerous for them to campaign.

Many of these problems flow from early mistakes. Rather than moving quickly to establish security and then gradually turning over control to a legitimate domestic authority, we have done the opposite. As fighting among warlord militias in the countryside intensifies, we are slowly expanding our presence and being dragged into conflicts. The American "advisers" in Afghan Army units, the ubiquitous heavily armed "private" security forces and the fortress-like American Embassy are garnering comparisons to the day of the Soviets.

In Kabul, the effort to build a stable, capable government has also lagged dangerously. President Karzai has begun to show great fortitude in challenging warlords. But his factious cabinet, born of political compromise, has collapsed under the pressure of the country`s hurried presidential elections. Outside Kabul, his control remains tenuous in some places, nonexistent in others. Kabul`s Supreme Court, the only other branch of government, is controlled by Islamic fundamentalists unconcerned with the dictates of Afghanistan`s new Constitution. On Sept. 1, without any case before the court, the chief justice ordered that Latif Pedram, a presidential candidate, be barred from the elections and investigated for blasphemy. His crime? Mr. Pedram had suggested that polygamy was unfair to women. These clerics are trying to establish a system like that in Iran, using Islam as a bludgeon against democracy.

It`s true that there have been several important accomplishments in these three years: the Taliban and Al Qaeda no longer sit in Kabul`s Presidential Palace; girls are back in school in many parts of the country; some roads and buildings have been rebuilt; and more than 10 million Afghans have registered to vote for the presidential elections. Thousands of international aid workers have been working with the Afghans, often at great risk, to make things better. Despite the slow progress, most Afghans are more hopeful about their future than they have been in years.

But many people working there are left with the nagging feeling that much more could have been done both to help Afghanistan and fight terrorism over the last three years. Our experience demonstrates that you can`t fight wars, or do nation-building, on the cheap. Afghanistan should be a critical election issue this year, but Iraq looms much larger in the public mind. Unless the next administration steps up to the plate, it may well be an issue in four years, when we start asking, "Who lost Afghanistan?"

J Alexander Thier, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, was a legal adviser to Afghanistan`s constitutional and judicial reform commissions.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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FRONTLINE/World correspondent
Sharmeen Obaid.
By Sharmeen Obaid
September 14, 2004

On a warm afternoon in August, I traveled by car along the old caravan route toward Wazirdhand, a village in the tribal belt of the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan. The road is lined with camels and mules that make their way from Afghanistan into Pakistan laden with smuggled wares, including spare parts for cars, Chinese television sets and -- especially since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- drugs and guns.

For security reasons, the Pakistani government deters foreigners from entering the tribal belt, and there are several police checkpoints along this route. The ban had been imposed when the United States began bombing Afghanistan. At that time, tribal emotions were running high, and it was feared that foreigners might be attacked on sight. Our car was flagged down at one checkpoint, and my driver and I were provided with two local policemen as armed escorts.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan are located on a narrow strip of land that runs along the Afghan border. One of these tribal areas is South Waziristan, where Osama bin Laden is rumored to be hiding and where the Pakistani army has in recent months arrested hundreds of al Qaeda operatives.
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At the start of the tribal belt,
signs such as this one warn
foreigners from entering the area.
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The terrain here is a tangle of difficult mountains intersected by long narrow valleys. Clusters of fortified hamlets dot the land. Our car passed several signboards warning motorists not to wander off the main highway because just a few meters off the main road Pakistani law gives way to tribal law. Our car passed half a dozen shops crammed with guns and -- as my driver pointed out -- hashish and opium paste. This is a region where women seldom leave their homes unaccompanied. The few women that I did see were scurrying along, wrapped in bright blue burqas, reminiscent of the Taliban. Yet here I was, traveling alone but for my driver.

Under pressure from the United States after 9/11, Pakistan deployed its army in the tribal belt for the first time in the country`s history. In March 2004, notwithstanding stiff resistance from tribal leaders and leading religious clerics, President Pervez Musharraf`s government launched its massive "spring operation" in South Waziristan, deploying 70,000 troops along the Afghan border to capture members of al Qaeda who were seeking refuge in the area. Just last week the Pakistani army announced it had bombed a suspected al Qaeda border camp, killing at least 50 people, including Uzbeks, Arabs and Chechens.

When I was in the North-West Frontier province earlier this year, doing a television segment for FRONTLINE/World, I met with Maulana Sami ul-Haq, a founding member of Muttahida Majlis-e-Ama, a coalition of powerful religious parties. Sami ul-Haq is best known for his madrassah (Islamic religious school), which has trained thousands of students over the years to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir as jihadis. He accused Pakistan`s President Musharraf of allowing U.S. troops to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border in search of al Qaeda. "They will leave our borders in shambles," he protested. "They want Muslims to be tied up like goats and sheep so that they can slaughter us at their will."
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Gul Zaman Jahan, who fought
in Afghanistan against the
Soviets and later alongside
the Taliban, poses with his
horse in Wazirdhand`s market.
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Sami ul-Haq`s views are shared by a large segment of the uneducated Pakistani population, who strongly oppose the Pakistani army`s incursions into the tribal belt. Although there are no official figures as to how many soldiers have lost their lives in the conflict, the army has faced fierce opposition. But that has not deterred Musharraf`s government, which signed an agreement with tribal representatives earlier this month stipulating that any tribesman found guilty of providing shelter to foreign militants would have to pay a fine of approximately $80,000 and would have his house demolished.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, many in the tribal belt are worried that terrorist attacks within Pakistan will intensify. Al Qaeda has a strong following in Pakistan because of the Pakistani madrassa system (Islamic religious schools), which has a student population of close to two million. A large number of recruits for al Qaeda come from these schools. As the hunt for bin Laden continues, so do the assassination attempts on the lives of the Pakistani president and his government officials. Nevertheless, the Pakistani government does not seem to be backing down. Neither, however, are the followers of bin Laden backing down, leaving the country in a precarious state.

Now Entering Wazirdhand

In the village of Wazirdhand`s main market, turbaned Pashtuns, armed with semi-automatic guns, sat sipping tea. Loud Indian music blared from colorfully decorated buses that were crammed with passengers heading to Afghanistan. Young boys made their way through narrow mud alleys carrying trays of green tea for shopkeepers. Vegetable sellers lined the streets, screaming their prices to whoever cared to hear them. And at one end of the market, a few children played marbles in the dirt, occasionally stopping to stare at me.
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Under the practice of swara,
young Pashtun tribal girls are
often handed over to rival
parties to settle disputes.
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The tribal belt is unlike any other part of Pakistan, and people living in the cities sometimes consider practices here to be barbaric. Local women are rarely educated and never work outside their homes. The Pashtuns are renowned for their ferocity and for their feudal code, Pashtunwali, which is based upon hospitality, revenge and honor. Under the code, swara persists, a practice in which young girls and women are handed over to rival parties to settle disputes or conflicts. If a man has committed an offense against a particular family, his younger sister is frequently delivered to the aggrieved family to keep them from prosecuting or initiating other formal redress.

Few of Pakistan`s federal laws apply in its tribal areas. To settle differences, a system of jirga is enforced. A jirga is a group of tribal elders, mostly uneducated, who sit together and solve problems in accordance with their customs and traditions and in as short a time as possible. The jirga is in charge of prescribing punishments to offenders as well as maintaining law and order.

Of late, conversations in Wazirdhand have centered on the role of the Pakistan army in South Waziristan. A large number of Pashtuns are upset with the Musharraf government because the army incursions go against the tribal laws of hospitality. Whether outlaw, defector or long-lost relative, anyone who takes refuge in the tribal belt is considered a guest, and tribal leaders do not turn their guests over to the police or the army.
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Tribal men relaxed the rules
to allow the reporter, a woman,
to join them for a meal.
Many Muslims sit on the ground
and eat because their Prophet
Mohammed did so. These men are
eating a typical lunch of barbecued
meat, flat bread and green tea.
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On this afternoon, Malik Niseer Khan, a tribal elder of Wazirdhand, was sitting in his courtyard discussing politics with tribal leaders from adjoining areas. When I walked in, they grew silent. The silence lasted for a few minutes -- the leaders were deciding what to make of me. Women have never been allowed to listen to their deliberations, indeed, are not even allowed to enter the male-dominated courtyard. However, because I was Malik Niseer Khan`s guest, the conversation soon resumed.

I was apprehensive and unsure of how I was supposed to act around tribal elders. As a sign of respect, I had to keep my head covered at all times, and I had to keep reminding myself not to interrupt a conversation between two elders because to do so is considered disrespectful. I sat down in one corner of the courtyard and remained there until Malik Niseer gestured in my direction and asked me to join the conversation. I later learned that there had been an intense debate about how I was to be treated, and it was decided that I would be regarded as an "honorary male" because I was a journalist.

I was surprised to hear a few elders blaming the militants for disrupting the peace in this region. "We gave the Afghans refuge and look what they did to us -- they brought in arms and drugs and took away our sons for jihad. Now these very same Afghans are planning attacks on our soil. The Pakistani government needs to send them home," argued 65-year-old Gul Zaman Jahan, who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets and later against the Northern Alliance. Jahan felt that the Afghans have never been loyal to Pakistan and that their influences have ruined the Pashtun society.

Through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, there were more than 2 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, almost 80 percent of them in the tribal areas. These refugees took jobs away from Pakistanis by working for lower wages, and their sheer numbers put pressure on the already fragile social system of schools and hospitals.

Among the guests I met that afternoon was a young man named Abdur Hameed, who had just started a computer training school for young adults in the area. He had briefly served in the Pakistan army a few years ago and was very proud of their incursions into South Waziristan. "The terrain there is very hostile," he told me, "and the Pakistani soldiers are not familiar with the area at all, yet they have managed to arrest a large number of these terrorists."

His younger brother, Abdur Ghani, who had recently spent some time in Afghanistan fighting alongside the Taliban, was not so convinced. "The Pakistan army has no right to be in the tribal belt. They claim that the militants are members of al Qaeda, but the people they are arresting are Pakistanis who have no connection to militant groups. It`s all a show. The army just wants to please the Americans," he said.
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Discussing politics with locals
from Wazirdhand, in the courtyard
of Malik Niseer Khan, a tribal elder.
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The courtyard was buzzing with multiple conversations, and I noticed that the younger members of the group had far more radical views about Islam and Pakistan`s future than the elders had. These young men had either grown up during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or had fought alongside the Taliban. Their religious indoctrination was far more rigorous than that of their parents, and they seemed more inclined to use violence to achieve their goals. Naik Ali Khan, a retired government official, pulled me aside and told me, "The so-called militants in Waziristan will fight until they die, but they won`t give up. These young men believe in their cause, and there`s nothing you and I or the army can do to stop them."

Where`s Osama?

People here believe that President Musharraf is under pressure from the United States to hunt down Osama bin Laden before November 2, 2004. "The Musharraf government has to produce results before the U.S. elections," said Naik Ali Khan. "And it is very apparent to us that they are trying hard to capture or kill as many [al Qaeda] suspects as they can, not only in the tribal belt but all over Pakistan." A number of young men sitting around him in the courtyard nodded in agreement, and one of them voiced his opinions, directing them at me, "We should catch all the small fish, but we should not catch Osama bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri because once we do, America will no longer need us, and we may suffer the same fate as Iraq."

People here want the United States to help them build schools and hospitals and wells for water. They like that the U.S. government is providing $400 million in aid to Pakistan, and they hope that some of this money will find its way to the tribal areas, where the literacy rate is as low as 18 percent among men and is less than 1 percent among women.
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This young man carries a Klashinkov,
a Russian gun that is frequently
copied by Pakistani craftsmen in
a tribal village not far from
Wazirdhand. Guns are part of daily
life in the tribal belt.
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"If our government has decided to help the U.S., then they should be compensated for it properly," said Gulzar Khawar, a tribal leader from the neighboring village. "We don`t like what the Musharraf government is doing, but if they have decided to go down this path, they should at least benefit from it in some way, and the only thing that we need from the Americans is their money."

In 2002, during the first phase of the U.S. war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, there was a lot of support for Osama bin Laden here because the Pashtuns considered him a hero for standing up to the Americans and for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. Posters and toys bearing bin Laden`s face flew off store shelves, and almost every child in the area showed off bin Laden memorabilia. Nearly three years after 9/11, bin Laden is still considered a hero, but his support has diminished as political violence increases and law and order break down. "We never had suicide bombings or bomb attacks until a few years ago," said Malik Niseer. "All of this started happening to us once Osama bin Laden came into the picture. But because he is a great Muslim, we cannot hand him over to our American enemies. Still, Osama`s followers should not attack the very country that they are hiding in."

But not everyone shared Malik Niseer`s views. His 12-year-old son, Jamun Khan, disagreed with him, saying, "The Musharraf government is forcing Osama bin Laden and his followers to attack Pakistan. We are straying away from the true path of Islam and jihad and are becoming subservient to America and its policies. Once we give up these un-Islamic ways, bin Laden`s followers will leave us alone."

Many villagers of Wazirdhand said they believe bin Laden is hiding in the mountains on the Afghanistan side of the border. It is unlikely, they said, that he is hiding in the tribal belt of Pakistan because of the enmity that exists in this region between clans. "If he was hiding with one clan," explained Khawar, "and the other clan found out, they would tell on him. That is one of the main reasons we think that he is shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If he stays on the Pakistani side for a long period of time, there is reason to believe that he will be caught -- and we think he knows that."
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Earlier this year in Peshawar,
demonstrators protested the U. S.
invasion of Iraq.
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Reluctant Allies

Outside the tribal areas, many Pakistanis view President Pervez Musharraf as a leader who salvaged Pakistan in the post-9/11 era. Although most Pakistanis do not agree with his pro-American policies, a large segment of the educated middle classes and the elite understand why Pakistan has had to take such an active stance in the war against terrorism. Since 9/11, they have seen Pakistan`s economy grow, the Karachi stock exchange prosper and a free press flourish, and there are fears that all of this may disappear if Musharraf is assassinated or if America`s support for Musharraf diminishes.

Pakistanis know that the November 2004 elections in the United States can have a wide-ranging effect on their country. The Democrats are often viewed with suspicion because their policies have generally favored India, not Pakistan. People here still remember President Clinton`s reluctant stopover of a mere few hours in Islamabad in 2000, after he had spent five days in India.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have adopted policies that have benefited Pakistan, including generous monetary aid packages, and many here hope that the administration in Washington does not change in November. "We in Pakistan are paying a very high price for friendship with the United States," said Naik Ali Khan."Come November, we hope that Bush is re-elected -- because it is better to know an old enemy than to have to face a new one in the form of John Kerry."

[Joerver]

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The school of death
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KABUL - Zurmat is a district in Paktia province south of Kabul. In the parched village of Naik Nam the earth and walls are a blinding white, the mud baked by an unforgiving sun. Drought and poverty have led to neglect of the mud structures, which look like half-destroyed sand castles after the first wave has hit them. A maze of barely perceptible paths winding through the desert leads to the dunes and homes that hide behind them. Described by United Nations workers as a hotbed, the Taliban are said to be very active in Zurmat, a former Taliban stronghold, after six or seven in the evening.

My guides are two doctors from Zurmat, Dr Omar and Dr Mohammed Qasim. Both men were very nervous as we made our way from Gardez, the provincial capital, to their hometown. At first they took a taxi and then opted for a private car. They dressed me in a salwar kamis, a long shirt draped over matching baggy pants, and gave me a cap to complete the disguise. They would be telling locals I was a Saudi, they said, because people there liked Saudis. With an American base nearby, I doubted the wisdom in spreading rumors of a six-foot Saudi visiting a pro-Taliban village, but kept my skepticism to myself.

Dr Mohammed tried to reassure me along the way. "We are Afghans, we are Pashtuns, we will give our heads instead of your`s," he said, slitting his throat with his finger and not inspiring confidence. As we approached the village they turned off the music in the car and became silent.

The last journalist to visit Zurmat was Pamela Constable of the Washington Post, for her September 5 article entitled "Afghan Blast Has Alarming Implications". To visit the village the police chief escorted her with two trucks full of Afghan soldiers.

A random sampling of various United Nations daily internal security reports reveals nearly daily "security incidents" in Zurmat. According to the UN, "On August 3, two Maltesier [a German humanitarian organization] employees, traveling back from Zurmat to Gardez in a yellow-white rental car were shot by two unknown gunmen standing on each side of the road, near Niknaam Village, Zurmat District. CFs [coalition forces] found the car, and two persons inside it - one dead and the other, shot six times, severely injured ... The attackers reportedly escaped in their black vehicle."

On August 15, a bomb exploded at a voter registration site in Zurmat, that night rocket-propelled grenades and small arms were fired at the home of a government employee working on the elections. The following day, American soldiers were shot at by a group of men on motorcycles in Zurmat. That same day an American military base was attacked with grenades. Two days later a bomb planted under a bridge killed three and wounded two civilians in Zurmat. Not only are there terrorist and insurgent attacks, but internal violence as well. The security reports describe a September 14 incident in which two tribes clashed with small arms because of an old dispute in Zurmat.

The Post`s Constable had come to investigate an explosion in a madrassa, or school, that had killed 10 people. On August 29 three American employees of defense contractor Dyncorp were killed when a car bomb detonated outside their offices. This high profile attack obscured the afternoon explosion in the Mullah Khel school in Zurmat, 90 miles to the south. In her article Constable claims the school was targeted by the Taliban, speculating that the motives were either its relatively modern curriculum or the involvement of its teachers in voter registration. The bomb, she said, was hidden in a motorcycle and caused the deaths of nine students and one teacher.
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The notion that children were targeted is terrible indeed, but the truth is no less disturbing in its implications. In reality, according to Mullah Qari Nazir Mohammed, a teacher in the school, as well as Drs Mohammed and Omar, who work in the town and other witnesses, the school was hosting seven young Taliban, or religious students, aged 18 to 21, who were being instructed in the construction of remote-controlled bombs. As often happens elsewhere, including Palestine, the inexperienced teacher accidentally detonated the bomb, bringing the lesson to a terrible end. All seven Taliban were killed and their corpses had no arms and bore signs of close exposure to the explosion. In the adjacent pathway between the next classroom a parked motorcycle was destroyed, though it did not contain the bomb, as Constable`s article claimed. Tragically, the ceiling collapsed on the classroom across the narrow pathway, killing three students in teacher Sahar Gul`s class. The seven dead Taliban, whom Constable had mistakenly included in her count of dead students, were visiting from different madrassas in the region, including Logar and Ghazni provinces.
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Another religious student, Qari Daud, described his shock at witnessing Taliban training openly in bomb construction in madrassas in the border area of Miran Shah and elsewhere. The townspeople in Zurmat were reluctant to admit to Constable that their school was being used for a dual purpose, educating previously unschooled children in an "accelerated learning program", including mathematics, Pashtu, religion and art and providing a regional seminar in bomb-making techniques. There had been 25 students officially in the class, and an additional 13 who were not registered but attended anyway to receive a basic education. After the blast people from the neighboring 50 families in the area rushed to the site to dig the victims out of the rubble.

Twenty-six-year-old Sahar Gul still limps from wounds he suffered when a wall collapsed on him in his classroom, pinning him for an hour. It was his students who were killed, as he was teaching, and in the remaining wall of the classroom a chalkboard with some scribbling and a map of the world still hung unscathed. The slightly cross-eyed Gul was paid US$50 a month by the Afghan Women`s Education Center, an Afghan organization run by a female doctor originally from Paktia, Shinkai Zahine, that supports 400 teachers like Gul in Paktia province alone. Gul sat with the village elders in his guest room, its floors and walls decorated with colorful traditional carpets and tapestries. A silent anonymous female hand reached into the room from behind a door offering a tray with green tea, and raisins, nuts and toffees were also served.
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Gul and the village elders feigned ignorance when asked about the presence of Taliban forces in their area. Bismillah Shah, a weathered elder who lost two nephews in the explosion, says, "These people who fight the Americans or Afghan army don`t want to develop our country, but we don`t know who they are." Like many Pashtuns, he was ambivalent about the American presence in his country. "We have not had any problems with the Americans, we have not seen anything from them, good or bad," he said.

Paktia has one of the highest rates of voter registration in Afghanistan ahead of the October 9 presidential elections, and Shah proudly pulled out his registration card from his front pocket. "Elections are very good," he said, "we need them for the future of our country." Forty-seven percent of Paktia`s women are registered, as were all the wives of the men present in the room. Shah added that they aspired only for "security, to be able to walk, talk and work". The men agreed that they wanted an Islamic government. Dr Omar explained to me that "people here think democracy means boys and girls will be together and women will walk uncovered".
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In the Zurmat bazaar, a dusty collection of barely standing wooden shacks, 40-year-old shopkeeper Zainullah sat drinking tea surrounded by mounds of spices, henna, nuts, soaps and every imaginable item. He had been waiting excitedly to get his registration card, he said. "After 25 years it`s the first chance the Afghan people have." He was pleased with the American presence nearby. "Nowadays our government cannot stand by itself. Security was good under the Taliban and now it is not," he said, "With the help of these forces our government will stand. The Americans are here temporarily, not permanently. We don`t have a full army." When asked whom he might vote for, he was unequivocal. "All of Zurmat, no all of Kabul, no all Afghans want [President Hamid] Karzai. He has no enemies and doesn`t make differences between Tajiks and Pashtuns."

Dr Mohammed left Afghanistan when he was seven and lived as a refugee in Pakistan, returning to Afghanistan to work as a doctor. He worried about the support Pakistan was giving to radical elements in his country. "The main enemy of out country is Pakistan," he said, "They don`t want us to have peace. We are between two fires, Pakistan and Iran." Though he aspired to specialize in the chest and receive training abroad, Dr Mohammed was working as a social worker in Zurmat now. "People here have spent 25 years with guns and it will take time to turn their attention to knowledge," he said, and worried that "the madrassas are tools for terrorists pretending to teach but making students into terrorists."

Idealism in a hostile territory

Gardez, capital of the southern province of Paktia, was once called Gard-rez, which means "spreading dust". It is a singularly apt name for the city, which lies 145 kilometers to the south of Kabul. A Turkish company is rebuilding the road from Gardez to Kabul, and soldiers guard the laborers. A lone soldier sat on a rock at the top of a mountain range that leads to a flat plain spotted with the occasional collection of patchwork tents belonging to the Kuchi tribespeople, and the colorful dresses of their women, nomads who are largely unregistered to vote in the elections on October 9, most of them not even understanding the significance of the elections.

The journey from Gardez to the town of Chamkani was a tortuous and turbulent six-hour ride over riverbeds and boulders accomplished at 20km/h - and this in a four-wheel-drive vehicle that left one feeling seasick and bruised. Fertile valleys are sandwiched between parched mountaintops and the makeshift road snakes through fields of wheat, rice paddies and miles of pungent cultivated cannabis, grown for hashish. Along the road there is no sign of electricity or of any security forces.
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Ancient mud irrigation canals gleam in the sun as empty-handed men lead a line of women wearing brightly colored dresses and scarves overloaded with bundles of sticks or straw like giant porcupines. The only concession to modernity is the occasional four-wheel-drive parked in front of a cracked mud house. Chamkani lies only 20 minutes from the Pakistani border, and US attack helicopters fly overhead. Chamkani is listed as a "high-risk/hostile environment" on the United Nations "risk map" for Afghanistan.

Gulab Sha, 52, is one of four election commissioners for the greater Chamkani region employed by the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB), the organization tasked by the United Nations and the Afghan Transitional Islamic Government with running the elections. With his dark-red skin, long gray beard, white cap and prayer beads, he did not look like a man who possesses a master`s degree in political science from Bulgaria. Referring obliquely to the Soviet occupation, he grinned and said, "There once was a suitable time for us to study in Bulgaria."

Although unemployed for the past 10 years, he had been a teacher and headmaster in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan after his six years of study in Bulgaria during the 1980s were completed. He has worked for the election since May. "People don`t know the importance of elections," he explained, an importance he himself did not likely learn in the universities of communist Bulgaria. "We want to inform them of the importance of elections so they can choose the people they like. Elections are a condition for democracy. People can get their rights this way. Democracy is freedom. If there is no democracy we will have anarchy and war."
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When asked what democracy meant to him, he explained, "Democracy is a system of equality where law rules." Using his hands expressively, like a politician, he insisted that "elections are important to have at this time. If we have a strong central government then security will slowly come. If it were not for the Bonn transitional government [of Hamid Karzai] then the fighting would not stop."

Though he admitted that educating a largely illiterate population of the value of voting was difficult, he pointed to their successes. "Our target was 12,000 voters registered and we registered 28,000. Twelve thousand was just an estimate, we didn`t have statistics for the population." He did not acknowledge that some people might have registered more than once, a possibility that has led to 129.5% of the estimated number of eligible voters registering in the central highlands region of the country, and 133.6% registering in the southeast.
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Fifty-six percent of Chamkani`s registered voters are women, a great success in highly traditional Pashtun society. That so many women have registered in much of the country is due to the valiant efforts of a few. Forty-seven percent of women in Paktia are registered. An impressive figure, but most women are illiterate and will vote for whomever their husbands tell them to. Only men listen to radios at night, the main source of information on the world outside the village.

Shinkai Zahine, head of the Afghan Women`s Education Center, rallied Paktia`s majority Pashtun population to register to vote. She was the first woman to enter the province`s shura , or council. She benefited from her reputation as the daughter of a respected tribal leader and dressed conservatively, using religious language when she spoke to mobilize female voter registration.
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"It`s very difficult to change the mentality of the people," she said, but she appealed to their ethnic concerns. "I said, `Look, Pashtuns, you will lose if you stay like this. You claim you are the majority [in the country], but if only your men vote you will be the minority.`" This is not an approach likely to satisfy feminists, but it appealed to local concerns. Likewise, some United Nations workers express unease with UN efforts to register women by going "door to door saying `if your wife votes you get two votes`".

At first the commission in Chamkani only planned to have 12 voting locations in their region, but to accommodate the large numbers of registered voters they increased it to 47 locations, each with one box for the ballots. Gulab explained that a "voting station has to be a suitable place for 600 people, a mosque, shop, school or large house". The furthest voting station is 40km from the center of Chamkani.
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Gulab pulled out of his pocket a sample ballot he used to educate people. It was a blurry copy of the final version, which was printed in Canada, with 18 unrecognizable black-and-white portraits of the candidates, their names illegible and the symbol or geometric design for their party equally unclear. There will be somebody to assist voters who were confused, he explained, not adding that he could just as likely tell them whom to vote for. Every voting center is supposed to have one armed policeman, five armed villagers and six armed people to transport the ballot boxes to the Chamkani election center.

After voting ends the 47 boxes will be locked and the number of votes cast in them recorded and they will then each make their way to the Chamkani voting center, spending the night there before being taken over the rocks and rivers to the provincial capital of Gardez the following day. Here they will be opened and the number of ballots compared to the number on the box.

Thus in Chamkani alone 47 boxes will be moving and lightly defended targets heading to the district office, and then one bonanza collection heading to Gardez, should anybody be inclined to derail the elections. And some people have already acted on these inclinations.
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In the month of August there were 21 attacks against election sites, including six bombs or mines placed next to voter registration locations and the homes of election officials, and four attacks against voting locations and homes of staff involved, with rockets, grenades or stones. Between May 1 and August 20, the second phase of voter registration, 12 voter registration staff were killed and 33 injured in attacks.

When pressed as to who most people in Chamkani might vote for, Gulab remained firm: "We know whom they like but I cannot say. We are not allowed to say." When pressed further he smiled obstinately. "I cannot say because I work for the commission, but at the time of the elections I can say, I will say, and I will vote."

Safe haven in Bamiyan

Bamiyan, a predominantly Shi`ite Hazara town, reached after an excruciating eight-hour, 180-kilometer ride west from Kabul through dramatic mountain passes, is a success story in Afghanistan. Probably the safest place for internationals to work in the country, it slumbers under the shadows of mountain ranges pocketed with caves, some still inhabited. A French humanitarian organization tried to resettle the cave dwellers into homes, but the project failed when they refused to abandon their way of life.
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At night, hundreds of lights from their caves glow like stars in a black sky. The tall niches - the highest at 53 meters - carved into the mountain where immense 4th century AD Buddha statues stood until the Taliban destroyed them stare at the town like empty eye sockets. The Japanese government is funding the stabilization of the niches and the restoration of an extensive network of caves carved into the cliff face, some of which still hold intricate grotto murals of sacred Buddhist iconography.

The Hazaras, descendants of Genghis Khan, were singled out by the radical Sunni Taliban for oppression, and when the Taliban destroyed the buddhas, which they called the "Hazara gods", they slaughtered dozens of local cows, a loss Hazaras still complain about.

United Nations officials in Bamiyan live a relaxed life, free from the ubiquitous security concerns that govern the lives of their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Their security reports grant Bamiyan only "NTR", or nothing to report. They enjoy weekends at Band-i-Amir lakes, a UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site of renowned natural splendor further on in the Bamiyan Valley,. An old travel book describes the area: "Band-i-Amir is above matters of taste, it is beauty itself ... to describe the scene more fully would be to rob the uninitiated of the wonder and amazement it produces on all who gaze upon it - be it for the first time, or for the 10th time." Driving for two hours in the desert, past minefields and cultivated villages, one discovers a series of pure lakes separated by natural dams and visited by the rare tourist and shepherd.

UN representatives organizing the October presidential elections in Bamiyan have half a million registered voters in their purview, 107% of the expected amount, 54% percent of whom are women. Within their region, however, are two Pashtun districts, one of which had zero women registered and one of which had 14 women registered, though more than 5,000 men signed on. A hundred gray Russian jeeps sit outside the UN headquarters in Bamiyan, waiting to be dispatched on election day.
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According to a UN official, "Hazaras really feel great that they have some kind of representation for the first time." The US mistake, he said, "was to give warlords their old positions and strengthen them". His concern is that US-backed President Hamid Karzai might not receive more than 50% of the vote. This would require a second round of voting, theoretically two weeks after the official results of the first round were received. It is a nightmare scenario for those involved in the elections.

When asked if there might be a second round, the official responded, "I hope not, man. We have no plan for it and we would only have a few weeks to set it up. And then there is the weather." It would take a few weeks for the results from the entire country to be counted, and rain has already started to fall in parts of the country, by the time of a second round, many roads would be impassible and villages cut off from one another.

French non-government organization workers in Bamiyan defend the need for elections, despite concerns over their fairness. "If you wait for 10 years they won`t be fair either. Can the Western idea of democracy fit in this society?" They pointed to an alleged democratic precursor in Afghan society, the traditional shura, or assembly, and explained that it is dominated by the biggest landowners. "It`s a mix of paternalism and feudalism. Fair for us is not same thing as fair for them. The shura is not fair in our conception, to them it is the most fair organization."

They explained that Afghanistan is still a very traditional society where 80% of the population are farmers. "There is no tradition of elections, only negotiations and appointments. A leader is not elected. He is recognized for being able to provide resources and it`s totally normal." They added, "Karzai is trying to buy off the competition," but one quipped, "He is not buying, only renting."

Most of the international community in Afghanistan do not expect the elections to adhere to standards of fairness that would be acceptable in their home countries. According to one UN security official, "These elections are not about freedom or fairness. They will be bought, communities will vote according to their chieftain."
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Another high-level UN official involved in organizing the elections complained, "We have been trying to uphold the free and fair requirement of the elections, but the Afghan concept is different." He brought up the example of Faruk Wardak, the ethnically Pashtun head of the JEMB (Joint Election Management Body), the organization holding the elections. "He is supposed to be neutral," he said of Wardak, "but the northeast co-regional coordinator is a friend of Wardak`s and has been pushing to get his friends hired. Wardak has placed a lot of friends in the co-regional director position, and they are incompetent and that has been very hard to deal with. I am very disappointed and ready to leave. There was supposed to be a list of the electorate in the country provided at the local level so people could verify if voters really existed and if somebody had stolen their identity. But this was only done at the regional level and nobody is going to go all the way to the regional capital to check his name. When they ram down your throat that it`s free, fair and transparent, that`s when I throw the towel in."

The UN elections official was departing the country pessimistically, explaining, "I have a fear that corruption, greed, mullahs and armed forces are too powerful." Another UN official involved in organizing the logistical aspect of the polls complained, "Afghans are a lot less cynical than Westerners about the elections." He recounted the story of a female in Jalalabad who had been wounded registering people to vote, but went right back to work after being released from hospital. "The important thing," he said, "is that elections will be held, not if they will be fair."

According to Owen Kirby of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a US organization promoting democracy, "The international community can`t judge it by their standards, let Afghans judge it by their standards." In a recent publication titled "Free, Fair or Flawed: Challenges for Legitimate Elections in Afghanistan", the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), a think-tank that provides policy advice to the Afghan government and international community, lamented this prevailing attitude. According to a recent report by AREU, "While the international community may be willing to accept a deeply flawed election given current conditions in Afghanistan, the Afghan public may not."

An American with decades of experience organizing elections in emerging democracies, who described himself as an "elections junky", said he is not concerned with the fairness of the process. So what if under-age voters might have registered, he said, they are citizens at least and will vote, but he was worried that even the technical aspects of the elections have not yet been addressed. The ballots have not been delivered to all the 25,000 voting locations in the country and not all of the over 100,000 polling staff have been hired or trained.

Another issue of concern to him is that although every voting location only receives 600 ballots, Afghans are allowed to vote anywhere, so 1,000 voters could show up at one location and be turned away. Like Bosnia in 1996 and the upcoming Iraq elections, he points to Afghanistan as a classic example of the "mistake of having elections too soon in post-conflict societies. Politicians dictate it instead of putting food in people`s mouths and roofs over their heads and then they send in us election cowboys to put it together for them." He is also concerned about the roll of US ambassador Zalmay Khalizad, complaining that "Khalizad is so over the line. It`s obvious he`s Karzai`s campaign manager. He meets Karzai every day. He doesn`t realize you are supposed to keep your distance."

Hussein Ramoz is the program manager for governance and political parties for the National Democratic Institute, a sister organization of Kirby`s IRI. An Afghan doctor who speaks like a political scientist, Ramoz described the problems his organization has had in its attempts to support the development of political parties in the country. "People have a bad impression of political parties," he said, "after years of parties involved in fighting." When they first approached parties to offer them assistance, they found that "the parties wanted money, not training and technical support". Ramoz acknowledged that some people claim traditional Afghan institutions can be seen as mildly democratic, explaining that "Afghans have been solving problems through councils, but it was mostly patriarchal, with the elders making decisions". Ramoz` main concern is "election and registration fraud, which are very serious issues". He has seen many cases of multiple registration. "In parts of the country more cards have been distributed than the size of the population," he said, adding that he has friends who have shown him dozens of registration cards. "If principles are compromised, the election will cause instability," he warned.

One UN worker familiar with the election process in much of the country admits that they are expecting between 10% and 20% duplicate registration, but he does not attribute it all to corruption. "People are afraid they will lose their registration cards so they get two or three just in case," he said. According to a UN report though, "On August 16, a man carrying Pakistani rupees equivalent to $12,000 was detained by the coalition forces in Tirin Kot. He stated that he got the money from selling voter registration cards and that the money was supposed to be handed over to governor Jan Mohammad."

An Afghan who worked for non-governmental organizations under the Taliban, then helped set up the loya jirga (grand council) that paved the way for the installation of the present interim government, and who is now involved in organizing the elections, is especially cynical. "Everybody knows it`s a waste of money, but it`s a lesson, to get ready for the next elections in four years," he said, viewing corruption as a way of life in Afghanistan.

"When money passes through 10 hands here it is not the same amount of money in the end." He expects a very low turnout, not higher than three-and-a-half million voters. "Even people who registered once won`t come to vote," he said. "People thought they would receive something for voting. There is an Afghan expression, `having is useful`, having something is good, just in case. If you`re walking down the street and you see a nail, pick it up and put it in your pocket, just in case you might need it later."

This Afghan official recounted that he persuaded his brothers to register by telling them, "If a car hits you, at least you`ll have an ID card in your pocket so people will know who you are."

Ominous signs

On September 7 the Afghan presidential election campaign officially started, scheduled to last a month, ending 48 hours before this Saturday when polls will be open from 7am to 4pm and the 10.5 million registered Afghan voters will choose from 18 candidates.

In the capital city of Kabul, if one were to judge purely based on whose visage dominates the election posters, billboards and car windshields, then the most popular candidate is Ahmad Shah Masoud, the ethnic-Tajik leader of the Northern Alliance who fought the Soviets and then the Taliban. Yet he was assassinated on September 9, 2001, by two Arabs posing as journalists, masterminded by al-Qaeda, in part as a "thank you" for the Taliban allowing Osama bin Laden to stay in Afghanistan. That date is now an official day of mourning.

Though Masoud, known as the "Lion of Panjshir", had been a hero in the jihad against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, in the civil war that followed the fall of the communist regime in Kabul he and other warlords turned their guns on one another and on Kabul, killing tens of thousands and causing much of the city still to look like excavated archeological ruins. Many Afghans blame Masoud and the other warlords for their past quarter-century of poverty, oppression and war.

The end of the Taliban regime in late 2001, they hoped, would usher in a new era that would sweep the old leaders away. They were disappointed first by the 2001 Bonn Accords, held under United Nations auspices, which saw many of the warlords who had caused havoc on their country for so long returned to power and then legitimized by a loya jirga, or grand assembly, which appointed many of these warlords to official positions in the government of US-backed Hamid Karzai.
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And with the numerous posters festooning their city walls, for many Afghans it must feel like deja vu as the same faces compete for power.

According to Shinkai Zahine, a medical doctor and women`s activist and head of the Afghan Women`s Education center, "Elections are a good opportunity to get rid of these people," meaning the warlords. Shinkai does not think the warlords have support. "The Taliban removed the warlords very easily," she reminded. "Everybody thought they were strong, but they fled. In the beginning everybody was ready to welcome the Americans, and they were disappointed when the Americans brought back the warlords."

Her husband Shahir, a former medical student, then mujahideen fighter against the Soviets, then aid worker, now runs the Kilid media group, which boasts a radio station and the country`s only national newsmagazine and national women`s magazine, recalled, "I was so emotional the day I went to register. I fought for my country and for a better future. For us it`s the chance to practice something we have never done. I see a chance even if I know that most of the game is fake and most people are unaware of their rights. But this is the first step in the process. Our warlords will see how much they are `cherished` by the people."

According to New York University`s Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan who has consulted the UN and was interviewed in September, "Elections are the most complex operation a government carries out in peacetime. Almost all the adult population is registered with the state for the first time. There has never been a census. The elections are costing $100 million, or 20% of the budget or half of the government`s revenue."

And actually holding the elections themselves will cost an additional US$100 million. According to Rubin, the obstacles are daunting in a country with "no roads, no electronic communication except for the military commanders. The one technology in abundance is weapons. There will be no international observers flooding the country because of security issues. The Taliban want to stop the elections from happening and they operate in Pashtun areas and in Pakistan. They are killing voters and election officials and police. There are localities of whose existence the government doesn`t know. And there are three different distinct sets defined by three different agencies."

Andrew Wilder runs the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think-tank intended to provide policy advice to the Afghan government and the international community. Wilder has been working in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1986 and lives with his wife and two children in Kabul. He is one of the few experts or non-governmental organization experts willing to criticize the elections on the record. Most Westerners do not want to criticize the elections they pushed for and undermine Karzai`s campaign, since he is the candidate they want to win.

Interviewed in early September, Wilder maintained that "it`s pretty clear that this is not an ideal time to be holding elections in Afghanistan. Elections should not be equated with democracy. Afghanistan is not yet in a post-conflict phase, and pushing for presidential and parliamentary elections prematurely in a deteriorating security environment and before warlords have been disarmed could end up with very undemocratic results. Externally imposed elections according to an artificial and unrealistically short time frame have been an incredible distraction from the more important issues of re-establishing security and the rule of law and rebuilding state institutions."

Like many of the expatriates in Kabul, and Yunus Qanooni, Karzai`s main rival in the elections, Wilder sees the election timing as dictated by US election politics, adding, "The elections at this time are a Republican Party agenda rather than a US government interest." Qanooni, a prominent Tajik in the Northern Alliance - which helped US forces overthrow the Taliban in 2001 - has the backing of Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, who was dropped by Karzai as his running mate.

Wilder said, "Afghans have high hopes - in some ways dangerously high - that the elections are going to result in positive political change. They had high hopes for the Bonn agreement, but these hopes were crushed when they saw many of the most powerful positions in the newly formed government handed over to representatives of the warring factions who they held accountable for much of the tragedy of the last two decades in Afghanistan. Their hopes were raised again during the election of delegates for the emergency loya jirga when many of the candidates of the warlords were defeated by candidates calling for disarmament and political change. At the loya jirga , however, they were only given the opportunity to re-elect President Karzai, whom most delegates supported, but then saw nearly all the same old faces reappointed to cabinet positions. Many Afghans see the upcoming elections - the parliamentary elections [next year] in particular - as their last opportunity to reject the status quo and the politics of the past, which is why it is so important that these elections not be a third-rate rush-job election."

FACT BOX On Saturday, October 9, 2004, Afghanistan holds its first-ever direct presidential ballot. The election is a major step in the post-Taliban democratic reforms known as the Bonn process. Who will vote? About 10.5 million Afghans are registered for the election. Women make up 41% of registered voters. Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and Iran are expected to represent 10% of all votes cast. The United Nations, which is organizing the polls, says there have been many multiple registrations. Voters will have their fingers marked with indelible ink on election day in an attempt to prevent multiple voting. Actual turnout is expected to be closer to 6 million. Who are the candidates? There are 16 contenders out of an initial 18 registered candidates. The incumbent, Afghan Transitional Administration chairman Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, is widely considered the front-runner. Karzai`s strongest challenger is expected to be Yunus Qanooni, an ethnic Tajik. Other key candidates include Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum; Mohammed Mohaqiq, a leader of the Hazara minority; and Mas`uda Jalal, the only female candidate. When will results be available? Partial results are expected by the middle of next week - around Wednesday, October 13. A candidate must receive more than 50% of the votes in order to win a first-round victory. If no candidate wins a clear majority on Saturday, there will be a runoff between the two leading candidates. The runoff would likely be held in November. Karzai is expected to win, but the large number of candidates may make it difficult for him to win in the first round. A runoff could give Taliban rebels and other Islamic militants more opportunities to disrupt the democratic process in Afghanistan. Regional warlords who oppose a centralized government are also seen as a threat to peaceful elections. A runoff could also compromise Karzai`s authority and give him less freedom in selecting his cabinet. Will the vote be safe? Militants and other elements have vowed to disrupt polling. At least a dozen election workers have died so far in a string of attacks. Security issues are considered most pressing in the country`s south and southeast. Some 18,000 US-led troops in Afghanistan battling militants will participate in securing the vote. Another 9,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization-commanded soldiers in the International Security Assistance Force, will patrol in the capital, Kabul, and much of the north. They, together with some 60,000 Afghan police and troops will be fanning out to protect the roughly 5,000 polling stations throughout the country. What are the issues? Ethnicity is likely to be a crucial factor in most Afghan votes. Widespread illiteracy and limited campaigning by the candidates means few Afghans are familiar with all 16 candidates or their political platforms. But general issues of concern include improving security, reducing poverty, and speeding reconstruction. Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036

Wilder thinks the underlying problem was the failure early on to recognize that the warlords were part of the problem and not part of the solution. "The American strategy was to use these warlords who were terrorizing the Afghan people to fight the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan. In return they were offered most of the most powerful positions in the new government apart from the presidency. But by keeping the troublemakers inside the tent - factional leaders with a vested interest in keeping the central government weak and ineffective and their regional fiefdoms strong - we essentially tied the hands of President Karzai and the few reformers in the new government who did want to bring about positive political change. As a result we have a government in name only overseeing dysfunctional and increasingly corrupt ministries who most Afghans perceive as doing nothing. Worse still, Afghans see a deteriorating security situation, with the US-led coalition fixated on the Taliban and al-Qaeda but doing little to address the primary security concern of Afghans, which is to see the warlords and commanders who are making their lives so miserable disarmed."

Wilder, like the doctor Zahine, believes that the warlords are paper tigers. "These warlords who we now think are so powerful were relatively easily defeated by the Taliban and barely retained control of one province of Afghanistan when the US-led coalition took on the Taliban after September 11 [2001]. The Americans won the war, but then we acted like the Northern Alliance won the war, let them enter Kabul despite the US telling them not to, and then handed power over to them on a silver platter. The recent moves that were supported by the US to drop Minister of Defense [Mohammed] Fahim as Karzai`s vice-presidential candidate, and the removal of Ismael Khan as the governor of Herat province, are important and positive moves that are sending an important signal that the rules of the game are changing. I hope they are changing and that there is now a recognition that the old strategy of accommodating the warlords was a flawed one. It will be a tragic mistake if these positive moves were just part of a short-term deal that will be reversed after the elections. I am not saying that there should never be any room at the table for any of the political power-holders of the past, only that if they are given a seat at the table they must agree to play by the new rules of the game, which is rule by law, and reject the old rules of the game of ruling by the gun. They can`t continue to be allowed to have it both ways and have positions of power in the government but play by the old rules," said Wilder.

Interviewed again at the end of September, Wilder was no longer fighting to postpone the elections. "It`s now passe, we lost that battle," he said, adding that his concerns are now "even at this late date, what can be done to make the process credible and the results perceived as legitimate? At this point we just don`t know how Afghans will react to the elections. We don`t know how many logistical flaws will get turned into conspiracy theories in this deeply suspicious political environment which, in turn, could help reduce the perceived legitimacy of the election results."

One of the biggest concerns, according to Wilder, remains the deteriorating security situation and whether or not fear of Taliban attacks on voting centers could keep voters in some regions from turning out to vote on Saturday. "A climate of fear could keep voters away from the polls, especially female voters. Too-low turnout figures could call into question the legitimacy of the result." Wilder feels that on the one hand the international community has pressured Afghanistan into holding elections prematurely, but on the other hand has been unwilling to commit the necessary security resources to protect the electoral process. He does point to the newly committed 1,100 troops from the US Army`s 82nd Airborne as a "useful addition", but it critical of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states for not doing enough. "NATO claims Afghanistan is its top priority in the world, but it certainly doesn`t look that way sitting here in Kabul."

Returning to his concerns about the warlords, Wilder explained that what happens after the elections could do more to determine the perceived legitimacy of the elections in the eyes of Afghans than what happens on election day. "If what happened at Bonn and the loya jirga happens again after the elections, and Afghans see the new president appoint a cabinet dominated by the same faces they blame for much of the past 25 years of war, Afghans will ask what was the point of holding elections. Elections are an incredibly important tool - one of the only political tools we have left in Afghanistan to legitimize a new political order. It`s therefore very important that they are done right and that they are perceived to bring about positive political change. If the end result of the presidential and parliamentary elections is to legitimize the status quo, and to have a parliament dominated by warlords [some of whom are war criminals] and drug lords, we will have squandered an incredible opportunity and discredited electoral democracy in the eyes of Afghans. I don`t think we`re going to have another opportunity like this one to get it right in Afghanistan."

Wilder is concerned that all the rumors of deal-making are leading to increasing apathy as well as cynicism among many voters who suspect that there still is a "business-as-usual agenda". "Very few of my staff even registered to vote because they feel it`s already a done deal because of the strong US support for President Karzai. I actually think turnout in urban areas where voters are best informed will be quite low because people don`t see candidates campaigning in the streets, only in the backrooms, where they suspect unholy deals and alliances are being made. I think particularly damaging for the US is the strong perception that the US Embassy is playing a role in facilitating deal-making between President Karzai and some of his major opponents to ensure that Karzai wins in the first round of the election and that there`s no need for a runoff election [some cynically point out that this would be after November 2]. This is dangerous because if we do end up with a `business as usual` government in Afghanistan it will be the US that is blamed, and not President Karzai, who many Afghans view as a puppet of the US."

In Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, the United Nations has already reduced its staff by 75% amid rumors that armed men with turbans and long beards are prowling the streets on motorcycles, ie, Taliban. On September 16, all roads to Gardez were blocked off from miles away, first by teenage Afghan soldiers then by American marines. Thousands of men carrying traditional swords and shields danced in circles to welcome the visiting Karzai, beating up a cloud of dust. Gardez actually means "dust spreading" in Pashtu, and as visibility lessened it became clear how well suited the appellation was.

Uniformed men with rocket-propelled-grenade launchers stood on rooftops. After two helicopters landed, there was a telltale whistle in the air, followed by the interminable second of wondering what to do and where would the incoming missile land, and then a muffled explosion in an empty lot. The locals were nonplussed, but Karzai`s security did not greet the missile, which was at least a kilometer away from where he was to land, with the same aplomb, and promptly canceled the visit, to the disappointment of the expectant throngs of men. Karzai later claimed that it was not his decision to cancel the visit, rather it was taken by his US security detail, an admission of how little control he has. But the incident highlighted the complete dependence the international community has on Karzai. "We have no plan B," confessed one UN official. A high-ranking police officer from the Dari-speaking Shi`ite sect that inhabits Pashtun-majority Gardez was dismissive as he watched Karzai`s helicopter turn around. "I feel embarrassed," he scoffed. "Who is he? He should learn from [ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini`s revolution in Iran," recalling that Khomeini had landed in Iran unescorted by security, whereas the Shah whom he deposed had, like Karzai, been dependent on US support.

A UN official dealing with security and demobilizing the militias in Gardez saw the incident as prescient. "Karzai is president now and he`ll be president on October 10," he said. "What`s going to change? On October 10 he still won`t be able to land in Gardez."


(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


Oct 9, 2004

[Joerver]

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Bin Laden is in China

This confirms Gordon Thomas, a journalist with contacts in the most important intelligence services. The terrorist had reached an agreement with China, which now negotiates its surrender with Bush. It is his greatest electoral trick.

Translated from El Mundo

Gordon Thomas

10/13/04 [url"El Mundo"]http://www.el-mundo.es/cronica/2004/469/1097487207.html[/url] -- During the home stretch of the Northamerican elections, Osama bin Laden could prove to be the ace in the sleeve of president Bush. As we speak, Washington is negotiating a highly secretive agreement with Beijing, the Chinese capital, for the eviction of bin Laden from his sanctuary in the turbulent Muslim provinces of China, in the Northwest of the Great Wall nation.

More than five million people, many of them fanatic followers of Osama, live in that region, which can be called one of the most volatile regions of Earth. Thousands of them work for the mafias who specialize in the trafficking of humans and drugs to the West. Last summer, Bin Laden sealed an agreement with the authorities in Beijing, in which he was granted asylum in return for his guarantees that the guerilla war of the Muslim Chinese against the Chinese nation would end.

Over the years, tens of thousands of troops of the Popular Liberation Armee had been sent to the region with the intent to squash the insurgents.

Since the arrival of the Saudi Osama Bin Laden, the region has been relatively quiet, and the Muslims who live there are allowed to continue their trafficking of humans and drugs.

However, Bin Laden could now see himself trapped in his refuge, if an extraordinary agreement between Beijing and Washington would come to pass, in which China would hand over to the United States the most wanted terrorist in the world.

The capture of Bin Laden would virtually guarantee the reelection of George Bush Jr., as it would confirm to the millions of undecided voters of the U.S. that the war against terrorism was judstified after Bin Laden had authorized the attacks of 9/11 against New York and Washington.

"A new administration Bush would present China as its great new ally in the war against terrorism. China would enjoy in Washington the status of a most favored nation with all of its facets. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be approved by fast track. The history of human rights violations in China would be ignored," confirmed last week a high-level representative of the Pentagon. He added that only a small number of "members of very high rank" in the Bush administration knew about the plan to "seize Bin Laden in exchange for a special relationship with China." With almost certainty, among them would be the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Agreeing to speak under anonymity, the functionary offered details of the plan to capture Osama Bin Laden as a means to keep Bush in the White House. He explained that this is not the first time that an American administration has resorted to similar maneuvers during an electoral campaign.

Towards the end of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a secret deal was signed between the then future president of the U.S., Ronald Reagan, and Iran, in which the American diplomats, who had been kidnapped in Teheran, the Capital of Iran, would be freed the very day that Ronald Reagan would be inaugurated to the White House.

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, the former national security advisor of the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, " they paid an enormous sum of money to the Ayatollas of Iran." Ben-Menashe affirms that this deal formed a pivotal piece in the negotiations that later became known as Reagan`s October surprise.


Theresa on the campaign trail

Theresa, the wife of the senator and democratic candidate, John Kerry, gave to understand that another October surprise could be imminent. Two weeks ago, she surprised the political advisors of her husband by declaring in public: "I wouldn`t be surprised if, prior to the elections, president Bush were to capture Osama." Since then, Mrs. Kerry rejected to further comment on her explosive declaration. However, there are rumors in the intelligence community that both she and her husband had been advised that any further comments concerning an agreement that would include the capture of Bin Laden could comprimise the national security of the U.S.

Furthermore, also the Washington analyst, Al Santoli, the national security advisor and Californian Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, and the editor of the respected bulletin China Monitor, affirmed that "an October surprise wouldn`t surprise me in the least."

In his first confirmed sighting in many months, the refuge of Bin Laden has been pinpointed by an NSA satellite, one of many that the supersecret U.S. agency utilizes in their search for him. His hideout is located near a lake at the border between China and Pakistan.

At the other side of the Zaskar mountains, the white summits that majestically look out over Bin Laden`s sanctuary, a detachment of special forces of the Pakistani and U.S. armies are awaiting orders to capture Bin Laden, and move him by plane to Pakistan.


Escorted by 50 guerillas

During the last six months, Bin Laden has been sighted several times in the mountains and open ranges of the Northwest. American intelligence agents in the region are of the opinion that the Saudi millionaire, accompanied by an escort of 50 guerilla mujaheddin, moved East towards Cachemira, and from there crossed into China.

The agents furthermore believe that, previously, Bin Laden held various meetings with high officials of Beijing. He convinced them that he would be capable of obtaining peace in their Muslim provinces. "We know about these meetings," confirmed Mansur Ahmed, police chief of Bandipoor, North of Cachemira. "However, they took place on Chinese territory."

Bin Laden is accompanied by Ayan al-Zawahiri, his primary advisor and personal physician (Bin Laden suffers from a serious renal ailment). Al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, educated in Cairo, accused of terrosrism in Egypt, and condemned to death for rebellion. After Bin Laden, he is the second most wanted terrorist world-wide.

White House sources reject to comment on this issue publicly. "If the negotiations should fail, this would not be the most suitable moment for the president to be seen directly involved in these negotiations," affirmed one source.

It is believed that the possibility for such a deal emerged early this year, after Donald Rumsfeld had met with a delegation of the Chinese government during a visit to the far East. Later, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, requested a viability study for an operation to capture Bin Laden. Tenet was informed that the only possibility would be if they could count on the cooperation of the Chinese.

"To what extent that collaboration will occur in the few weeks remaining until the elections, will depend to a good extent on the confidence that Bush can inspire in the Chinese that he will be able to live up to his promises," confirmed the functionary of the Pentagon.

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General Franksäußert sich zu den Vorgängen in Tora Bora. Es scheint wohl einiges daneben gegangen zu sein.

October 19, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
War of Words
By TOMMY FRANKS

President Bush and Senator John Kerry have very different views of the war on terrorism, and those differences ought to be debated in this presidential campaign. But the debate should focus on facts, not distortions of history.

On more than one occasion, Senator Kerry has referred to the fight at Tora Bora in Afghanistan during late 2001 as a missed opportunity for America. He claims that our forces had Osama bin Laden cornered and allowed him to escape. How did it happen? According to Mr. Kerry, we "outsourced" the job to Afghan warlords. As commander of the allied forces in the Middle East, I was responsible for the operation at Tora Bora, and I can tell you that the senator`s understanding of events doesn`t square with reality.

First, take Mr. Kerry`s contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don`t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.

Second, we did not "outsource" military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.

Third, the Afghans weren`t left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help - as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Contrary to Senator Kerry, President Bush never "took his eye off the ball" when it came to Osama bin Laden. The war on terrorism has a global focus. It cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Both are part of the same effort to capture and kill terrorists before they are able to strike America again, potentially with weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist cells are operating in some 60 countries, and the United States, in coordination with dozens of allies, is waging this war on many fronts.

As we planned for potential military action in Iraq and conducted counterterrorist operations in several other countries in the region, Afghanistan remained a center of focus. Neither attention nor manpower was diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq. When we started Operation Iraqi Freedom we had about 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, and by the time we finished major combat operations in Iraq last May we had more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

We are committed to winning this war on all fronts, and we are making impressive gains. Afghanistan has held the first free elections in its history. Iraq is led by a free government made up of its own citizens. By the end of this year, NATO and American forces will have trained 125,000 Iraqis to enforce the law, fight insurgents and secure the borders. This is in addition to the great humanitarian progress already achieved in Iraq.

Many hurdles remain, of course. But the gravest danger would result from the withdrawal of American troops before we finish our work. Today we are asking our servicemen and women to do more, in more places, than we have in decades. They deserve honest, consistent, no-spin leadership that respects them, their families and their sacrifices. The war against terrorism is the right war at the right time for the right reasons. And Iraq is one of the places that war must be fought and won. George W. Bush has his eye on that ball and Senator John Kerry does not.

Tommy Franks, a retired general and former commander in chief of the Central Command, is the author of "American Soldier." He is a member of Veterans for Bush.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[SittinBuII]

Bin Laden`s exact location is known, says 9-11 panelist Lehman


http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?stor…

...Bin Laden is living in South Waziristan in the Baluchistan Mountains of the Baluchistan region, Lehman told The San Bernardino Sun after delivering
a keynote speech on terrorism at Pitzer College in Claremont...

... "There is an American presence in the area, but we can`t just send in troops. If we did, we could have another Vietnam, and the United States cannot afford that right now."...



Lehmann ist ein enger Vertrauter Kissingers, eng mit dem Pentagon verbandelt. Stellen sich einige Fragen: Warum geht er damit an die Öffentlichkeit? Er ist sich doch seiner Geheimhaltungspflicht brisanter Daten bewußt.
Wie glaubwürdig ist seine Aussage, man wüßte, wo Bin Laden ist, und last but not least: Ist die Begründung, warum man ihn nicht fangen konnte ( like another Vietnam ) wirklich glaubwürdig, wenn man nach Afghanistan 10.000 Mann schickt und in den Irak zwischen 120.000 und 140.000 ?

[Joerver]

THE ROVING EYE
How Bush blew it in Tora Bora
By Pepe Escobar

"And again, I don`t know where he is. I - I`ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him." - President George W Bush, March 13, 2002

"Gosh, I don`t think I ever said I`m not worried about Osama bin Laden. That`s kind of one of those exaggerations." - President Bush, October 13
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"Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001 and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field." - President
Bush, October 25[/TABLE]

So where is the October surprise? The US presidential election is less than a week away, and still he refuses a great Hollywood-style entrance - or a Lazarus-like resurrection from his cave. The whole world is asking: where is Osama bin Laden?

Don`t ask the Pakistanis. "No one knows where bin Laden is," Pakistan`s Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan said last Sunday. So maybe we should ask the Pentagon. According to a number of leaks by Pentagon officials, bin Laden is hiding in South Waziristan, in the Pakistani tribal areas, not far from the Toba Kakar mountain range in Baluchistan province. Khan seemed to be startled by this revelation: "We are getting in touch with them [the Pentagon] to clarify this matter." Don`t ask the Pakistani military. Major General Shaukat Sultan has said they have been pursuing all of the Pentagon`s leads, to no avail. So maybe we should ask Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf. In a recent interview with NBC he referred to "some broad indications" to proclaim he was "reasonably sure" that bin Laden is alive and absolutely sure he would be captured or killed. But he "didn`t know his location".

Musharraf also said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is working "very closely" with the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) in the hunt for bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So maybe the ISI knows something Musharraf doesn`t. ISI officials in Karachi told Asia Times Online correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad "they have no clue" where both bin Laden and his No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, might be. But they reconfirmed they are in Afghanistan. Other sources in Peshawar, very close to the tribal areas, told this correspondent bin Laden has been "for months" on the Afghan side of the border, because the Pakistani tribal areas "are infested with FBI and ISI operatives".

According to Musharraf, "there`s no pressure" on him by the White House and the Pentagon to find bin Laden. "What pressure? he asked in his NBC interview. "Their [al-Qaeda] leadership, a few high level, and others mid and low level have been arrested - then we have attacked them in the mountains. We have attacked three of their very big sanctuaries in the valleys in the South Waziristan agency in tribal areas - but they`re on the run now. And they`re in smaller groups. Maybe there are a few more concentrations, which we don`t know. But they are on the run, as far as al-Qaeda is concerned, they`re on their own, surely."

Trekking in Tora Bora
So bin Laden won`t surface as an October surprise. He won`t be captured and exhibited "Saddam-in-chains" style as another Bush hunting trophy. Funny, when we think that he should have surfaced as a November surprise - way back in 2001.

On November 17, 2001, as the Taliban regime was self-disintegrating, Osama bin Laden, his family and a convoy of 25 Toyota Land Cruisers left Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan headed toward the mountains of Tora Bora. In late November, surrounded by his fiercest and most loyal Yemeni mujahideen in a cold Tora Bora cave, bin Laden delivered a stirring speech. One of his fighters, Abu Bakar, later captured by Afghan mujahideen, said bin Laden exhorted them to "hold your positions firm and be ready for martyrdom. I`ll be visiting you again very soon."

A few days later, around what would probably have been November 30, bin Laden, along with four Yemeni mujahideen, left Tora Bora toward the village of Parachinar, in the Pakistani tribal areas. They walked undisturbed all the way - and then disappeared forever.

By the time the merciless American B-52 bombing raids were about to begin, bin Laden had already left Tora Bora - as a number of Afghan mujahideen confirmed to Asia Times Online at the time. They said they had seen him on the other side of the frontline in late November. Hazrat Ali, the warlord and then so-called minister of "law and order" in the Eastern Shura (traditional decision-making council) in Afghanistan, was outsourced by the Pentagon to go after bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Tora Bora. He bagged a handful of suitcases full of cash. He put on a show for the cameras. And significantly, he was barely in touch with the few Special Forces on the ground.

The crucial point is that while bin Laden was already in Pakistan, General Tommy Franks at US Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, was being directed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to concentrate on toppling Saddam Hussein. According to Bob Woodward`s Plan of Attack, on "December 1, a Saturday, Rumsfeld sent through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a Top Secret planning order to Franks asking him to come up with the commander`s estimate to build the base of a new Iraq war plan. In two pages the order said Rumsfeld wanted to know how Franks would conduct military operations to remove Saddam from power, eliminate the threat of any possible weapons of mass destruction, and choke off his suspected support of terrorism."

Also in early December, Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the man responsible for intelligence operations in eastern Afghanistan, was absolutely puzzled: why didn`t the Pentagon block all the obvious exit trails from Tora Bora, when all of Hazrat Ali`s mujahideen, paid by the US, knew them by heart? Only a few Arab al-Qaeda fighters were captured in Tora Bora - after bin Laden had left (later they were sent to Guantanamo, along with hundreds of Afghan bystanders). Most of the al-Qaeda fighters that remained in Tora Bora died in battle, as "martyrs", buried under the rubble caused by bunker-buster bombs. As far as the American military was concerned, Pir Baksh was adamant: "Al-Qaeda escaped right out from under their feet."

So it was a major Pentagon blunder. It was a major Rumsfeld-Franks blunder. It was a major White House blunder. And there were two reasons for it: 1) The Pentagon outsourced the war in eastern Afghanistan to the wrong warlords, who were collecting suitcases full of cash with one hand and spreading disinformation with the other. 2) The White House`s and the Pentagon`s attention were already directed toward toppling Saddam. This all amounts to Senator John Kerry being fundamentally correct when he charges on the campaign trail that Bush blew it in Tora Bora. This is not a "wild claim", as Bush puts it: it`s a serious charge that debunks the whole myth of Bush as a strong and resolute commander-in-chief of the "war on terror".

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)



Oct 27, 2004

[Joerver]

On Kerry, Bush and bin Laden
By B Raman

In his campaign for election as president of the United States, Democratic Senator John Kerry has been blaming incumbent President George W Bush for the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden during the battle at Tora Bora in Afghanistan toward the end of 2001. According to Kerry, the US failure was due to the fact that instead of using US troops in the battle, Bush outsourced the job to the Afghan warlords, who let bin Laden escape.

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Kerry`s claims are partly true and partly incorrect. They are true to the extent that the US military did use Afghan warlords and Pakistani and Afghan narcotics barons, who know the topography of the Tora Bora area like the palms of their hands, to help it in its battle against al-Qaeda. The US narcotics-control authorities were asked by the Pentagon not to take any action against the narcotics barons until bin Laden was caught, and some Pakistani narcotics barons arrested before September 11, 2001, under US pressure and jailed in Pakistan were released at the Pentagon`s behest for use in Tora Bora.

Kerry`s claims are incorrect in the sense that contrary to what he has been stating, the command and control of the Tora Bora operations remained in the hands of the US military and a large number of US troops and aircraft participated in the battle and suffered casualties. However, the US troops did not raid the caves. They made the Afghans do it. They avoided a frontal confrontation with al-Qaeda.

Before the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq last year and coinciding with the end of the Muslim fasting period, bin Laden issued a detailed message to the Iraqi people advising them as to how they should confront the Americans. In his message, which was broadcast by al-Jazeera on February 11, 2003, he described how al-Qaeda under his leadership had fought the Americans at Tora Bora and advised the Iraqis to emulate their example (see The new Iraq-bin Laden connection, Apr 1). Presuming what bin Laden stated was correct, a perusal of his message would show that the US military played an active role in the Tora Bora battle and that Kerry`s contention is wrong. However, bin Laden did refer to the role of the Afghan warlords, whom he described as the "forces of the hypocrites, whom they prodded to fight us for 15 days non-stop".

The Tora Bora operation failed for two reasons. First, the warlords and the narcotics barons played a double game. While ostensibly helping the US forces, they kept bin Laden and his fighters informed of the US military movements. Second, Pakistan, on which too the US depended for sealing off its border with Afghanistan to prevent the escape of bin Laden and other jihadi terrorists into Pakistani territory, quietly let them pass.

In fact, bin Laden, who was incapacitated by a shrapnel injury at Tora Bora, was shifted to the Binori madrassa in Karachi, where he was under treatment until August 2002. Since then he has disappeared. He was keeping in touch with his followers through video and audio messages until this April. Since then, he has been observing even electronic silence.

He used to circulate at least three messages every year to his followers - on the anniversary of September 11, 2001, to pay homage to the terrorists who participated in the terrorist strikes in US territory; before the beginning of the Ramadan fasting period; and at the end of the fasting period. This year, he did not issue any message coinciding with September 11. Instead, there was a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, his No 2. Nor was there a message before the start of the fasting period this Ramadan.

The continuing silence of bin Laden could be due to one of the following reasons.

# He is dead. Reliable Shi`ite sources in Pakistan believe there is a greater possibility of his being dead than alive. Though their arguments are strong, I am disinclined, for the present, to believe them because if he were really dead the news would have spread like wildfire in the tribal areas of Pakistan. He is literally worshipped there and his burial site, if in tribal territory, would have become a place of pilgrimage. The Sunni tribals insist he must be alive, though none of them claims to have seen him.
# He is observing electronic silence for his own physical security.
# He has been sidelined by his followers and has no longer any de facto or de jure control over al-Qaeda or the International Islamic Front (IIF) formed by him in February 1998. The increasing audibility of al-Zawahiri indicates the possibility of his playing the leadership role at least in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, though not in Iraq. I have been writing since April 2003 that bin Laden is no longer in day-to-day control of the IIF. This is now being exercised by Pakistan`s Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), which has been in the forefront of recruiting volunteers and collecting funds for the jihad in Iraq.

If bin Laden is still alive, where will he be? In the past, US military officials were saying that he ought to be in the tribal areas on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Now they are increasingly saying he is most probably in Balochistan - possibly in the Pashtun majority areas of Balochistan. If he goes into the Baloch-majority areas, the Baloch people, though Sunnis, and the Shi`ite Hazaras would hunt him.

In my past articles, I have argued as to why it was unlikely that he would take shelter in the tribal areas near the Afghan border. The most important argument was that US troops were right across the border in Afghan territory and if they came to know of bin Laden`s presence in the adjoining Pakistani territory, they would make a foray into Pakistan with or without the permission of President General Pervez Musharraf and kill or whisk him out.

Shi`ite sources in Pakistan say that if he is alive there is a greater likelihood of his being in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) than in the tribal areas near the Afghan border. The POK is Pakistan`s Fallujah, a stronghold of diehard Sunni elements. And it is outside the easy reach of US troops.

B Raman is additional secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, government of India, and currently director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter. E-mail: [e-mail].

[SittinBuII]

Im neuen Eminem-Video "Mosh" wird Bin Laden im Fernsehen gezeigt, bis dieses Bild nach hinten wegkippt und man merkt, dass es sich nur um eine Attrappe handelte. Im Hintergrund sieht man nun Cheney und noch jemanden, so schnell konnte ich das nicht erkennen.

[Joerver]

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Lyrics - `Mosh` by Eminem


Screenshot from `Mosh`
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands
One nation under God
Indivisible
It feels so good to be back..)

Scrutinize every word, memorize every line
I spit it once, refuel, reenergize, and rewind
I give sight to the blind, mind sight through the mind
I ostracize my right to express when I feel it`s time
It`s just all in your mind, what you interpret it as
I say to fight you take it as I’m gonna whip someone`s ass
If you don`t understand don`t even bother to ask
A father who has grown up with a fatherless past
Who has blown up now to rap phenomenon that has
Or at least shows no difficulty multi task
And juggling both, perhaps mastered his craft slash
Entrepreneur who has held long too few more rap acts
Who has had a few obstacles thrown his way through the last half
Of his career typical manure moving past that
Mister kiss his ass crack, he`s a class act
Rubber band man, yea he just snaps back

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won`t steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors

To the people up top, on the side and the middle,
Come together, let`s all bomb and swamp just a little
Just let it gradually build, from the front to the back
All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black
Don`t matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain`t gonna stop us, they can`t, we`re stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home come on just . . .

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won`t steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors, come on

Imagine it pouring, it`s raining down on us,
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone`s trying to tell us something, maybe this is God just saying
we`re responsible for this monster, this coward, that we have empowered
This is Bin Laden, look at his head nodding,
How could we allow something like this, Without pumping our fist
Now this is our, final hour
Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six
Teen million people are equal of this high pitch
Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech
Let the President answer on high anarchy
Strap him with AK-47, let him go
Fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our soil
No more psychological warfare to trick us to think that we ain`t loyal
If we don`t serve our own country we`re patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes, it`s all lies, the stars and stripes
They`ve been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight you`ll know why, because I told you to fight

So come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won`t steer you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors

(Eminem speaking angrily)
And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present, and mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator
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[Joerver]

Mosh das Video. Dauert etwas beim laden. Quicktime:
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http://www.gnn.tv/content/emosh_hi.html




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Rapper Eminem: Marsch aufs Weiße Haus


Spiegel-Online[/TABLE][/TABLE]

[Joerver]

"Mosh" - der Songtext "Wir werden kämpfen" Rap als Agitation und das vom HipHop-Rabauken Eminem: eine wortmächtige Veranstaltung. Hier der Text des Anti-Bush-Hits - als Übersetzung und im Original. Ich schwöre auf die Flagge der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika Und auf die Republik, für die sie steht, Eine Nation unter Gottes Führung Unteilbar ... Es ist so gut, zurück zu sein. Ich prüfe jedes Wort, merke mir jede Zeile, Ich sag es einmal, tanke neu auf, lade auf und spule zurück, Ich verhelf` den Blinden zum Sehen, zu Einsicht durch mein Bewusstsein, Ich übe mein Recht aus, die Meinung zu sagen, wenn die Zeit reif ist, Alles eine Frage der Anschauung, wie du es interpretierst, Ich sage kämpfen und du verstehst, ich mache jemanden fertig, Wenn du`s nicht kapierst, mach dir keine Mühe zu fragen, Ein Vater, der ohne Vater aufgewachsen ist Und der zu einem Rap-Phänomen aufgestiegen ist, Das keine Probleme mit Multitasking hat Und das mit der Bewältigung von beidem (Vaterschaft und HipHop-Geschäft; Anm. des Übers.) seine Meisterschaft bewiesen hat, Schrägstrich Unternehmer, der ein paar Rap-Acts herausgebracht hat, Dem man einige Steine in den Weg gelegt hat in der letzten Hälfte Seiner Karriere, der übliche Dreck, hab ich hinter mir, Mister Arschkriecher, er ist ein Top-Act, Ein Gummiband-Mann, yeah, der einfach zurückschnellt. (Refrain) Kommt mit, folgt mir, ich führe euch durch die Dunkelheit, Mit gerade ausreichend Licht, das wir brauchen, um weiterzukommen, Haltet durch (im Orginal ein Wortspiel: In Carry on klingt der Präsidentschaftskandidat Kerry an), gebt mir Hoffnung, gebt mir Kraft, Kommt mit mir und ich werde euch nicht in die Irre führen, Schenkt mir euren Glauben und euer Vertrauen, während ich uns durch den Nebel führe, Zum Licht am Ende des Tunnels, Wir werden kämpfen, wir werden anklagen, wir werden aufrütteln, wir werden marschieren, Durch den Sumpf, wir werden uns durch den Morast kämpfen, Geradewegs durch die Türen. Alle, ob oben, an der Seite oder in der Mitte, Kommt zusammen, lasst uns alle ein wenig Bomben werfen, Stress machen, Lasst es sich allmählich aufbauen von vorne nach hinten, Alles, was ihr sehen könnt, ist ein Meer von Leuten, manche weiß, manche schwarz, Egal, welche Hautfarbe, was zählt, ist, dass wir zusammenhalten, Um für dieselbe Sache zu feiern, egal welches Wetter, Wenn`s regnet, lasst es regnen, je nasser, je besser, Sie werden uns nicht aufhalten, können sie nicht, wir sind stärker denn je, Sie sagen nein, wir sagen ja, sie sagen uns Stopp, wir sagen weiter, Rebellen, die mit einem Rebellenschrei die Hölle heraufbeschwören, Wir werden es sie wissen lassen, Stampft, stoßt, drängelt, zermatscht, macht Bush fertig, bis er unsere Soldaten zurück nach Hause bringt. (Refrain) Stellt euch vor, es schüttet, regnet auf uns herab, Schlammgruben vor dem Oval Office, Jemand versucht, uns etwas mitzuteilen, Vielleicht ist es Gott, der uns sagt, dass wir verantwortlich sind Für dieses Monster, diesen Feigling, Dem wir die Macht gegeben haben, Das ist Bin Ladin, schaut, wie sein Kopf nickt, Wie konnten wir so was erlauben, ohne die Fäuste zu ballen, Jetzt schlägt unsere letzte Stunde, Lasst mich die Stimme eurer Kraft und eurer Entscheidung sein, Lasst mich den Reim vereinfachen, um den Lärm zu verstärken, Dreht die Lautstärke auf und multipliziert es mit sechs, Zehn Millionen Menschen haben die Kraft dieser Lautstärke, Vielleicht können wir Al Qaida durch meine Rede erreichen, Lasst den Präsident auf eine Anarchie reagieren, Gebt ihm eine Ak-47, soll er gehen und seinen eigenen Krieg führen, Soll er so seinen Daddy beeindrucken, Kein Blut mehr für Öl, wir haben unsere eigenen Kämpfe hier zu Hause auszutragen, Keine psychologische Kriegsführung mehr, um uns einzureden, wir seien nicht loyal, wenn wir uns nicht verpflichten, Dass wir auf Helden herabsehen, Schaut in seine Augen, alles Lügen, Die Stars and Stripes sind zerschlagen, ausgewaschen und weggewischt Und mit seinem Gesicht ersetzt, werdet wild oder sterbt, Wenn ich heute Nacht abgeknallt werde, wisst ihr warum, Weil ich euch aufgefordert habe zu kämpfen. Während wir fortfahren, Uns durch den Wüstensturm zu kämpfen Mit diesem abschließenden Statement, wenn sie gegen uns argumentieren, Lasst uns genau sein, Wir legen unsere Differenzen bei Und versammeln unsere eigene Armee, Um diese Massenvernichtunsgwaffe zu entschärfen, Die wir heute noch unseren Präsidenten nennen, Und kämpft für die Zukunft der kommenden Generation, Sprechen und gehört werden, Mister President, Herr Senator, Hört ihr Typen uns ... hört uns (Lachen)

[Joerver]

Zum Downloaden nur kurze Zeit:

http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2149/Fahrenheit.911.SV…

Fahrenheit 9/11 the Movie
Der Film über Windows Media Player:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/video1035.htm
Zum Downloaden nur kurze Zeit:
http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2149/Fahrenheit.911.SV…

[SittinBuII]

Saubere Recherche-Arbeit, Joerver, vielen Dank!

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,325792,00.html




Bin Laden droht USA mit neuem Terror

In einen goldfarbenen Umhang gewandet, steht er an einem Pult und verliest mit ruhiger Stimme im Stile eines Regierungschefs eine Erklärung: Vier Tage vor der US-Wahl hat der Nachrichtensender al-Dschasira eine neue Videobotschaft von Osama Bin Laden ausgestrahlt, in der der Terroristenführer den US-Präsidenten verhöhnt.


Ansprache im Stil eines Regierungschefs: Osama Bin Laden
Kairo/Washington - Auf dem 18-minütigen Band, das der in Katar ansässige Fernsehsender um 22 Uhr europäischer Zeit am Freitagabend in Ausschnitten veröffentlichte, richtet sich der Anführer des Terror-Netzwerks al-Qaida direkt an die amerikanische Bevölkerung. Er trägt auf dem Video ein weißes Gewand unter einem goldfarbenen Umhang und einen Turban. Er spricht ruhig und mit fester Stimme und zeigt hin und wieder mit dem Finger in die Kamera, um seinen Äußerungen Nachdruck zu verleihen.

Die US-Regierung stuft das Video als authentisch ein. Sie geht ferner davon aus, dass es erst vor kurzer Zeit erstellt wurde, wie der Sprecher des Weißen Hauses, Scott McClellan, am Freitag erklärte. Die Terrorwarnstufe werde nun aber nicht erhöht. Derzeit gilt in den meisten Teilen der USA die dritthöchste Alarmstufe Gelb.

In einer ersten Reaktion auf das Video sagte US-Präsident George W. Bush am Freitagabend, das amerikanische Volk werde sich "nicht einschüchtern und beeinflussen lassen". Darin stimme sicher auch der demokratische Präsidentschaftsbewerber John Kerry mit ihm überein. "Wir befinden uns im Krieg mit dem Terrorismus und wir werden erfolgreich sein", sagte Bush, der sich auf Wahlkampftour im US-Bundesstaat Ohio befand. Auch Kerry verwies in seiner ersten Stellungnahme zu dem Video auf die Einigkeit der USA. Er kritisierte jedoch, dass die US-Truppen im Jahr 2002 die Suche nach Bin Laden in Afghanistan örtlichen Gruppen überlassen hätten, statt Eliteeinheiten einzusetzen. Er werde als Präsident den Kampf gegen die Terroristen erfolgreicher als die jetzige Regierung führen und "Amerika sicherer machen", so Kerry.

Vorwürfe Bin Ladens an Bush

In seiner "an das amerikanische Volk" adressierten Botschaft wirft Bin Laden dem amerikanischen Präsidenten Bush vor, die Menschen in den USA in den Jahren seit den Angriffen in New York und Washington getäuscht zu haben. Die Regierung in Washington stütze sich zudem auf "korrupte arabische Regierungen", sagte der Terrorführer.

Bin Laden spricht auf dem Video auch über die Hintergründe und die Einzelheiten der Planung für die Flugzeugattentate. "Wir haben beschlossen, Türme in Amerika zu zerstören" aus Enttäuschung über die proisraelische Nahostpolitik, sagte er unter Hinweis auf die Zerstörung der Zwillingstürme des World Trade Centers in New York. Die USA seien angegriffen worden, "weil wir ein freies Volk sind ... und wir die Freiheit unserer Nation zurückgewinnen wollen", fügte er hinzu. Er drohte den USA zugleich mit weiteren terroristischen Angriffen: Amerika müsse mit neuen Attacken rechnen, da die Gründe für die Durchführung der Anschläge des 11. Septembers noch immer bestünden.

Weiter wirft Bin Laden Bush auf dem Video vor, die Amerikaner zu täuschen. Die Anschläge wären nicht so verheerend gewesen, wenn der Präsident aufmerksam gewesen wäre, höhnte der Qaida-Chef. Er deutete auch an, dass die US-Regierung auf die Ereignisse am 11. September langsamer reagiert habe als die Flugzeugentführer es erwartet hätten. Dies habe diesen mehr Zeit gegeben, ihre Anschläge erfolgreich auszuführen. Dann machte sich Bin Laden über Bush lustig: "Es wäre uns nie in den Sinn gekommen, dass der Oberbefehlshaber des Landes (Bush) 50.000 Bürger in den beiden Türmen mit diesem Horror alleine lassen würde, weil er es für wichtiger hielt, Kindern bei einer Plauderei über Zicklein zuzuhören." Bush war zum Zeitpunkt der Anschläge zu Besuch in einer Schule in Sarasota in Florida gewesen und hatte Kindern aus einem Buch über Tiere vorgelesen.



"Ihr solltet die gleichen bitteren Früchte schmecken wie wir": Bin Laden kündigt weitere Anschläge an
Zu den Motiven für die Anschläge vom 11. September erklärte Bin Laden, für ihn persönlich sei es ein Schlüsselerlebnis gewesen, die amerikanische Unterstützung für die israelische Invasion im Libanon im Jahr 1982 mit anzusehen. Damals habe er beschlossen, dass man den Ungerechten alles mit gleicher Münze heimzahlen werde, sagte er und fügte hinzu: "Ihr solltet die gleichen bitteren Früchte schmecken wie wir". Aus seiner Sicht seien die Flugzeugattentate in den USA "ein Erfolg" gewesen.

"USA ähneln arabischen Diktaturen"

Dann sprach Bin Laden die Folgen der Anschläge an. Er wolle den USA "raten", wie sie weitere Anschläge vermeiden könnten, meinte er. Die Art und Weise wie Ex-Präsident George Bush seinem Sohn zur Macht verholfen habe, so Bin Laden weiter, ähnele der Nachfolge in den Monarchien und Militärdiktaturen der arabischen Welt. Zwar behaupte der jetzige Präsident George W. Bush, die Al-Qaida-Anhänger hassten die Freiheit. Doch das Gegenteil sei der Fall: "Wir wollen Freiheit für unsere (islamische) Nation", sagte Bin Laden.

Dann bezog er sich auf die Präsidentschaftswahlen in den USA am kommenden Dienstag. Er sprach das amerikanische Volk direkt an: "Eure Sicherheit liegt nicht in den Händen von Bush, Kerry oder al-Qaida, sondern in Euren eigenen Händen." Um weitere Katastrophen zu vermeiden, dürfe man den Zorn der Araber nicht provozieren.

Bin Laden, auf den die US-Regierung ein Kopfgeld von 25 Millionen Dollar ausgesetzt hat und der im Grenzgebiet zwischen Afghanistan und Pakistan vermutet wird, erscheint auf dem Video bei guter Gesundheit zu sein. Er sieht lediglich etwas dünner aus als auf früheren Aufnahmen. Es ist das erste Video Bin Ladens seit einem Jahr. Wiederholt war über den Gesundheitszustand des Terrorführers spekuliert worden

Al-Dschasira teilte mit, es habe das Band am Freitag erhalten, machte jedoch keine Angaben über die Quelle. Man gehe davon aus, dass die Botschaft Bin Ladens "neu" sei. Der Sender hatte die Ausstrahlung des Bandes kurz vorher angekündigt. Er hat in der Vergangenheit wiederholt Videos von Bin Laden und anderen islamistischen Terroristen ausgestrahlt.

Vor einem Jahr hatte al-Dschasira ein Video gezeigt, in dem Bin Laden und sein Stellvertreter Aiman al-Sawahiri in einer gebirgigen Gegend zu sehen waren und die Attentäter vom 11. September lobten. Im April hatten arabische Fernsehsender ein Tonband ausgestrahlt, das vermutlich von Bin Laden stammte. Darauf bot der Terroristenführer den europäischen Staaten einen dreimonatigen Gewaltverzicht an, wenn diese ihre Truppen aus dem Irak abzögen. Das Ultimatum lief ab, ohne dass zunächst eine weitere Botschaft von Bin Laden auftauchte.



Irgendwie habe ich ja geahnt, dass so was kommt...

[Joerver]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 05. Dezember 2004, 09:28
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,331063,00.html

Suche nach Bin Laden

"Wir haben seine Spur verloren"

Noch am Samstag hatte US-Präsident George W. Bush die pakistanische Regierung für ihren entschiedenen Kampf gegen den Terrorismus gelobt. Einen Tag später muss Präsident Pervez Musharraf eingestehen, dass sein Land die Spur des muslimischen Extremisten Osama Bin Laden verloren hat.

Washington - Musharraf sagte der "Washington Post", die pakistanischen Sicherheitskräfte suchten zwar noch aggressiv nach dem al-Qaida-Chef. Jedoch hätten die jüngsten Einsätze und Verhöre nur ergeben, dass Bin Laden noch am Leben sei. "Wir wissen nicht, wo er ist", sagte Musharraf. Die seit drei Jahren anhaltende Suche nach Bin Laden im afghanisch-pakistanischen Grenzgebiet gilt als eine der schwierigsten Fragen in der Beziehung zwischen den USA und Pakistan. Musharraf hatte sich am Samstag mit US-Präsident Bush in Washington getroffen.

Anlässlich des Besuchs hatte Bush seinen pakistanischen Kollegen für dessen Engagement im Kampf gegen den internationalen Terrorismus gelobt. "Der Präsident hat sich entschlossen gezeigt, nicht nur Personen wie Osama Bin Laden der Gerechtigkeit zuzuführen", sagte Bush am Samstag nach einem Treffen mit Musharraf in Washington. "Er ist entschlossen, all diejenigen der Gerechtigkeit zuzuführen, die seinem Volk Schaden und Schmerz zufügen."

Der Extremisten-Anführer und Al-Kaida-Chef Bin Laden, der für die Anschläge vom 11. September 2001 verantwortlich gemacht wird, wird im afghanisch-pakistanischen Grenzgebiet vermutet, konnte bislang jedoch weder von amerikanischen noch von pakistanischen Truppen aufgespürt werden. Medien hatten berichtet, die pakistanische Armee habe zuletzt weniger Anstrengungen zur Ergreifung Bin Ladens unternommen.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2004

[raubritterloulou]

Der Mann ist seit Jahren tot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[DerArbeitslose]

bin zu faul und desinteressiert um entsprechend nach zu lesen,
aber is schon mal jemand auf die idee gekommen das sich binladen nur unter einer burka verstecken muss um jeder suchaktion zu entkommen ?

ob us-soldaten (oder andere) es bei einer suche wagen unter rumlaufenden burkas nach zu sehen,ob denn da auch wirklich nur frauen drunter sind ?

wohl kaum,oder ?

[Punk24]

Pakistan Das ist doch das moslemische Land mit der Atombombe, dass seinem Nachbarn Indien schon mehrfach mit einem Ersteinsatz gedroht hat.

[Birk35]

@derarbeitslose

Hm, ob es wohl viele 196 cm große Burkaträgerinnen gibt?


"Osama bin Laden, auch bekannt als: der Prinz; der Emir; Abu Abdullah. Geboren: um 1957. Geburtsort: Saudi-Arabien. Größe: 194-198 cm. Gewicht: 62-71 kg. Augenfarbe: braun. Haarfarbe: braun (rot nach arabischer Definition, das heißt nicht wirklich schwarz). Andere Merkmale: Vollbart, geht am Stock. Status: flüchtig."

[Joerver]

Punk
Osama ist nichts anderes als eine Erfindung des US-industriell-militärischen Komplexes.

[DerArbeitslose]

na prima.
das macht die suche doch nur noch einfacher.
bei der nächsten razia in dem gebiet wo bin laden vermutet wird,einfach mal alle auffällig großen burkas lüften und schon haben sie ihn.

wo muss ich mich melden um die belohnung zu erhalten die auf ladenbin ausgesetzt ist ?

[Joerver]

Einige Gründe weshalb Osama tod ist, aber nicht tod sein darf, weil er noch gebraucht wird.
Ohne den Buhmann Osama wäre ein Krieg gegen den Terrorismus noch schlechter zu erklären, weil dann der Fear-Factor, besonders in den USA, fehlen würde.
Man sollte einmal die Relationen zwischen Terroismusopfern und dem Aufwand den Terroismus zu bekämpfen herstellen.
Rumsfeld sagte vor einiger Zeit die Opferzahl bei den GI im Irak sei geringer als die Anzahl der Mordopfer in Washington.
Damit löste er großen Beifall aus bei den Kriegsbeführwortern.
Die Anzahl der KFZ-Unfalltoten in den USA liegt bei ca. 40 000 im Jahr.
Wie hoch ist die Anzahl der Terroropfer in jedem Jahr in der ganzen Welt?
Da stellt sich doch die Frage weshalb wird die Gefahr durch Terror so überzeichnet, obwohl es doch viele größere Gefahren als den Terror der Islamisten gibt.
Gibt es noch andere Gründe weshalb ein so kostspielige Krieg gegen den Terror geführt wird und deshalb im Irak die neuste Waffentechnik vorgeführt wird?
Hier erst mal der Artikel von Michael Scheuer(Anonymous)von UPI:
Ex-CIA official predicts eventual terror war defeat for U.S.
http://www.wpherald.com/North_America/storyview.php?StoryID=…
Dann der Artikel, der sich damit auseinander setzt, weshalb Bin Laden tod ist, aber nicht tod sein darf und wie das Buch von Scheurer da hinein passt.

http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/

December 05, 2004
CIA Operative Michael Scheuer and Bin Ladenism

Consider the following excerpts from an article on the “former” CIA employee Michael Scheuer posted on the Moonie owned and influenced Washington Times site:

In a conversation with United Press International’s reporters and editors, Michael Scheuer, newly revealed as the author of the best selling book “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror,” said bin Laden was now possibly the Arab world’s most popular leader, adding al-Qaida’s domination of the Internet in the Muslim world was leading to the United States losing its battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide.

For some reason they didn’t bother to mention that Osama bin Laden is the Arab world’s most popular dead leader. “I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a … kidney patient,” Pakistan’s Gen. Pervez Musharraf told CNN on January 18, 2002. As a former ISI big shot, Musharraf should know (the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI created not only al-Qaeda, or what the corporate media calls al-Qaeda, but the Taliban as well). “The first assignment given by Zia to [Musharraf] was in the training of the mercenaries recruited by various Islamic extremist groups for fighting against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan,” writes B.Raman, Director, Institute of Topical Studies. “It was during those days that Gen. Musharaff came into contact with Osama bin Laden, then a reputed civil engineer of Saudi Arabia, who had been recruited by the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and brought to Pakistan for constructing bunkers for the Afghan Mujahideen in difficult terrain.”

Speaking of “difficult terrain,” there is absolutely no way somebody in need of renal dialysis would be able to endure mountains, caves, Tora Bora, and the constantly on the run lifestyle of the most wanted man in the world. “Once … you’re separated from your dialysis machine—and incidentally, dialysis machines require electricity, they’re going to require clean water, they’re going to require a sterile setting—infection is a huge risk with that. If you don’t have all those things and a functioning dialysis machine, it’s unlikely that you’d survive beyond several days or a week at the most,” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN medical correspondent, said on January 21, 2002. I guess we’re expected to believe there was a medical facility in the caves of Tora Bora.

On December 26, 2001, the Egyptian newspaper, al-Wafd, published a notice of Bin Laden’s death and funeral. “A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qa’da organization, stating that bin Laden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, stated to The Observer of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora 10 days ago.” I guess there wasn’t a hospital in the caves of Tora Bora after all.

Michael Scheuer is billed as an “expert” on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Is it possible he missed the news of Osama’s passing?

Scheuer, who resigned last month from the CIA because of the agency’s refusal to allow him permission to grant media interviews, added that before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the United States had between eight and 10 chances to kill bin Laden, but failed to because of inaction by the upper echelons of the U.S. bureaucracy. He said the Bush administration’s claims that two-thirds of al-Qaida’s leadership had been killed and destroyed were “ludicrous,” noting the group functioned with terrorists, insurgents, financiers and administrators across the globe.

Either the CIA is run by total incompetents, or there was a reason not to kill Osama. Is it possible they didn’t kill him because—that is before he died of natural causes—he was a very useful asset? Or as the former CIA agent Milt Bearden said in an interview with Dan Rather on September 12, 2001, “If they [the CIA] didn’t have an Osama bin Laden, they would invent one.” Osama was simply too valuable to kill. He was the best thing since George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein. Osama was—and continues to be, even though he is dead—a creation of Reality Control.

As for the awesome powers Scheuer attributes to al-Qaeda, consider the following (by Kimberly A. McCloud and Adam Dolnik):

The United States and its allies in the war on terrorism must defuse the widespread image of Al Qaeda as a ubiquitous, super-organized terror network and call it as it is: a loose collection of groups and individuals that doesn’t even refer to itself as “Al Qaeda.” Most of the affiliated groups have distinct goals within their own countries or regions, and pose little direct threat to the United States. Washington must also be careful not to imply that any attack anywhere is by definition, or likely, the work of Al Qaeda. … In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow it out of proportion. Posters and matchbooks featuring bin Laden’s face and the reward for his capture in a dozen languages transformed this little-known “jihadist” into a household name and, in some places, a symbol of heroic defiance.

No doubt the al-Qaeda myth also helps sell Scheuer’s book.

When asked if the United States could win the “war on terror,” which was undertaken following the Sept. 11 attacks, Scheuer said: “No. It can’t be won. We’re going to eventually lose it. And the problem for us is that we’re going to lose it much more quickly if we don’t start killing more of the enemy.”

Maybe like Bush and the Pentagon killed thousands of innocent people in Fallujah, or 100,000 Iraqis for that matter? Remember, Bush says the terrorists are now in Iraq, he is not concerned about Osama these days, probably because he knows the Evil One is dead. “I truly am not that concerned about him,” Bush said of Osama back in March of 2002, not long after Osama kicked the bucket. Bush and the Strausscon Crew are more focused on killing “terrorists” in Iraq—that is to say the resistance. Is this what Scheuer means when he says “more of the enemy” must be killed? He doesn’t elaborate.

Scheuer highlighted several instances of legal or bureaucratic hurdles that hampered the targeting of militant leaders, including bin Laden, before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The CIA had a perfectly good chance to kill Osama when he was in that Dubai hospital for kidney treatment two months before September 11, 2001, as reported by the French newspaper Le Figaro. “Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA,” the Guardian reported on November 1, 2001. “Bin Laden has often been reported to be in poor health. Some accounts claim that he is suffering from Hepatitis C, and can expect to live for only two more years.” Actually, he only lived a few more months and died at Tora Bora.

Scheuer said al-Qaida was winning the propaganda war in the region, especially on the World Wide Web with regular political, military and religious discourses and justification for many of al-Qaida’s actions. The core of the movement was made up of true believers and it was controlling the debate in the Islamic world. It also had suspected success in infiltrating U.S., Saudi and Jordanian military and security services.

Frankly, the so-called “propaganda war in the region” would be won with or without a mythical al-Qaeda. Arabs and Iranians understand two very important things: 1) the United States supports everything the state of Israel does—primarily killing a whole lot of Palestinians–and 2) the United States supports repressive Arab governments, including but hardly limited to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, mentioned above and supposedly infiltrated by al-Qaeda. Of course, this may be true, considering al-Qaeda is a CIA contrivance and if the CIA does anything it is the infiltration (and overthrow) of governments.

“They’ve beaten our pants off, especially with their Internet capability,” Scheuer said. “They dominate discourse on the internet in the Islamic worlds.”

It would seem Scheuer is on-script with General John Abizaid, who is outraged “that people have the right to get on the Internet and spread this hatred [beheadings] and insanity without there being some curb, some law,” in other words censorship or scrubbing certain domain names. I don’t know if Scheuer has bothered to visit one of these so-called al-Qaeda web sites. Is there a reason the United States has not gone after the people who build these sites? It’s extremely easy to find out who the contact people are for these sites. Maybe the Pentagon has never heard of a whois search?

“Unless we change or at least consider changing our policies in the Middle East, the room for bin Laden or bin Ladenism to grow is virtually unlimited,” Scheuer said.

Next, Scheuer makes perfect sense (and this may be the CIA’s policy for all we know):

“They’re attacking us because of our unqualified support for Israel. They’re attacking us because we’ve helped cement on their heads tyrannies in the Arab world … for the last 40 years,” he said. They’re attacking us because we’re in the Arabian Peninsula and it happens to be a holy place for them.”

As we know, before Porter Goss launched his midnight massacre at the CIA at the behest of the Strausscons, the CIA had big problems with Ariel Sharon’s friends in the White House and the Pentagon, mostly because they wanted the agency to lie for them. It didn’t help that they outed Valarie Plame, a CIA operative.

Finally, Scheuer believes the United States should fight terrorism—he calls it insurgency warfare, not terrorism—in a more logical fashion. Of course, this will fail miserably as Arabs and Iranians are sick and tired of the United States meddling in their affairs. As William Blum notes, there is really only one way to stop terrorism, or rather the struggle against the United States in the Middle East:

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now—oddly enough—a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.

[Joerver]

December 13, 2004
INTELLIGENCE
A Hostile Land Foils the Quest for bin Laden
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID ROHDE

Hunting for Osama bin Laden, the C.I.A. established a series of small, covert bases in the rugged mountain frontier of northwest Pakistan in late 2003. Mr. bin Laden, the terrorist leader, was being sheltered there by local tribesmen and foreign militants, the agency had concluded, and controlled a group of handpicked operatives dedicated to attacking the United States.

But since the bases opened, the C.I.A. officers stationed there have been strictly supervised by Pakistani officials, who have limited their ability to operate and have escorted them wherever they travel in the Pakistani border region. As a result, it has been virtually impossible for the Americans to gather intelligence effectively, say several officials familiar with the operation who would only speak anonymously.

More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York transformed Osama bin Laden into the most wanted man in the world, the search for him remains stalled, frustrated by the remote topography of his likely Pakistani sanctuary, stymied by a Qaeda network that remains well financed and disciplined, sidetracked by the distractions of the Iraq war, and, perhaps most significantly, limited by deep suspicion of the United States among Pakistanis.

Prodded by the United States, Pakistan began an offensive along its northwest border this spring to flush out forces of Al Qaeda that had escaped from Afghanistan and to help find Mr. bin Laden. But after suffering heavy casualties and causing civilian deaths that stirred opposition, the Pakistani Army declared victory two weeks ago and announced that Mr. Bin Laden was not in Pakistan. Many American intelligence officials are confident that he is, however - and that he is as dangerous as ever.

The war in Afghanistan inflicted severe damage on Al Qaeda, forcing it to adapt to survive, intelligence specialists agree. Today, they say it functions largely as a loose network of local franchises linked by a militant Islamist ideology. But Mr. bin Laden remains much more than just an iconic figurehead of Islamic militancy, most American intelligence officials now say. From a presumed hiding place on the Pakistani side of the Afghan-Pakistan border, he controls an elite terrorist cell devoted to attacking in the United States, the officials say they suspect. They contend that he personally oversees the group of Qaeda operatives, which he hopes to use for another "spectacular" event, like the Sept. 11 hijacking plot.
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American counterterrorism analysts say this special Qaeda unit is probably dispersed, though they do not know where. This "external planning group" can communicate with regional affiliates around the world to work with them when needed, one senior intelligence official said. "There is a strong desire by bin Laden to attack the continental United States, and he wants to use the external planning node to do it," the official said.

But the United States has failed to penetrate the group and has no idea when or where it will try to strike, the officials acknowledged. Intelligence officials would not provide any details of how they reached their conclusions about Mr. bin Laden`s current role, which have not previously been reported.

Protective Network

Many analysts are convinced that he is being protected by a well-financed network of Pakistani tribesmen and foreign militants who operate in the impoverished border region, and that they have helped him communicate with major figures in his network. "Bin Laden is getting his logistical support from the tribes," said one intelligence official. "He still has operational communications with the outside."

The place suspected of being Mr. bin Laden`s hide-out, in the shadow of the Hindu Kush mountain range, is in one of the most isolated and backward corners of the world. Pakistan`s frontier is a barren terrain of mountains and mud. The fiercely independent ethnic Pashtun who inhabit the region are farmers and smugglers, most of them poor and illiterate. Local mullahs preach a radical Islamic ideology that portrays the United States as bent on enslaving Muslims and destroying their culture.

Sympathetic to the Taliban, many of whom attended madrasas, or religious schools, in the region, militant young tribesmen perceive American soldiers as dangerous aggressors who have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and they view Mr. bin Laden as an avenging hero. Pakistan prohibits Western reporters from entering the area without a military escort.

The seven semiautonomous tribal areas in the region have been a virtual no man`s land for American forces since the Sept. 11 attacks, making them a natural haven for Qaeda figures who fled Afghanistan after the battle of Tora Bora in 2001.

Pakistan does not permit American military and intelligence forces in Afghanistan to cross the border to go after militants. This prohibition on cross-border "hot pursuit" makes it relatively easy for Taliban and Qaeda fighters to initiate attacks on American bases in Afghanistan, and then quickly escape to the safety of Pakistan. American soldiers have complained about being fired on from inside Pakistan by foreign militants while Pakistani border guards sat and watched.

Has Hot Pursuit Cooled?

As a result of the restrictions, American military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan are no longer really hunting for Mr. bin Laden, an intelligence official said. They are trying to provide stability for Afghanistan`s new government while battling a local Taliban insurgency and a scattering of Qaeda fighters. On Saturday, the United States military began an offensive in Afghanistan to pursue those militants.

While the United States conducts some air operations over Pakistan, they are tightly controlled. Unmanned Predator drones are authorized to fly over Pakistani airspace, but only with approval from the Pakistani military chain of command, frequently leading to costly delays, C.I.A. officials say.

Electronic surveillance of the border region by the National Security Agency has proved frustrating as well, American intelligence officials say. Mr. bin Laden is believed to avoid using any electronic devices that could be monitored, and probably communicates only through trusted couriers, American intelligence officials say. Without cellphone towers along the frontier, satellite phones and push-to-talk radios are widely used often by drug smugglers, making it difficult to zero in on Qaeda operatives using the same kind of equipment.

Hoping to collect more intelligence, the C.I.A. opened secret bases with small numbers of operatives in Pakistan in late 2003, but it has been unable to use them for aggressive counterterrorism operations, intelligence officials say. The operatives, many of whom are C.I.A. paramilitary officers, depended on Pakistani Army commanders, whose views on cooperation with the C.I.A. vary widely, American officials say.

"There are real limits on our movement" inside Pakistan, said one American official, and it has deeply frustrated intelligence officers. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to discuss any aspect of the clandestine bases.

Pakistani officials said that the Americans were instantly identifiable and unlikely to succeed working alone. They say the Americans are escorted to prevent them from being kidnapped or killed, or their presence exposed, which would be damaging to the Pakistani government.

The decision to allow the bases is one of President Pervez Musharraf`s most significant steps to help the United States, intelligence officials say. He is trying to balance his alliance with the United States with his need to avoid setting off a broader insurgency in the border region, where the central government is resented for its long neglect. Government officials said that some militants from other parts of Pakistan have gone to the tribal areas to join the fight.

Reluctant Allies

Though the Americans had pressed the Pakistanis to search for Qaeda forces since late 2001, the military campaign was begun only after two assassination attempts against General Musharraf in December 2003 were traced back to the tribal areas. Before that, Pakistani officials had stated that there were no foreign militants in the region.

The army eventually deployed 25,000 troops in South Waziristan, one of the tribal areas, and found several terrorist training camps. In October, Pakistani commanders said they had killed 246 militants and captured 579. The raids and sweeps had a heavy cost. About 200 Pakistani soldiers were killed, and tribal members said hundreds of civilians had died.

On Sept. 9, for example, an air raid near the village of Dela in South Waziristan killed as many as 80 civilians. Young men from the Mehsud tribe, many of whose members died in the incident, began flocking to the militants. "That was a turning point," said Rahimullan Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist. "Their friends, their relatives and people they knew were killed."

No precise numbers exist, but Pakistani officials estimated that 500 to 1,000 of the tribesmen were fighting beside 150 to 300 foreign militants, most of them Uzbeks. Pakistani analysts say the area`s tribal structure is fraying. Drawn by the wealth, sense of belonging and promise of paradise that the militants offer, unemployed young tribesmen are openly defying edicts from tribal leaders and taking up arms, Mr. Yusufzai said. "These young men refuse to listen to their elders, to their families," he added.

Local residents have said that they were caught between the army and the militants. Nisar Wazir, 56, a teacher in Wana, a town in South Waziristan, said in a telephone interview that the American and Pakistan governments had neglected the tribal areas after supporting militants there in the 1980`s anti-Soviet jihad. Asked if Mr. bin Laden was hiding in the tribal areas, Mr. Wazir responded angrily. "America brought Osama bin Laden to this region," he said. "They know his whereabouts better than me."

Despite the Pakistani government`s efforts to win over residents by building schools, wells and roads there, cooperating with Pakistani and American investigators continues to be considered "napak kam," or dirty work, among many tribesmen, Pakistani officials say.

Aside from tribal members, the militants may be getting help from some officers in Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence, the country`s powerful intelligence agency. The agency was the hidden power behind the Taliban`s rise to power in Afghanistan and was close to Al Qaeda. Pakistani civilian security and police officials complained in the past that intelligence agency personnel have sometimes interfered with their efforts to arrest Qaeda members.

Pakistani officials warn that suspicion of the United States prevents a significant American presence. Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, many Pakistanis fear that the United States will bomb Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, and that Pakistan will be next.

One Pakistani security official said opposition to American forces in the country would be widespread. "The day the American troops cross into Pakistan territory, that will be the day when the Pakistani government will be hard put to stop the people who say, `Why don`t you reverse your position on helping America?` " said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They already say, `You have done too much to help America.` "

Some American intelligence officials say that the war in Iraq provided a powerful new recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. The conflict has diverted resources - C.I.A. paramilitary personnel and pilotless Predator surveillance aircraft - from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002, several current and former intelligence and administration officials said. They contend the war in Iraq weakened the focus of the United States, giving Al Qaeda time to regroup. Pakistan has been a sanctuary for some Qaeda figures since soon after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan. When the Taliban government fell in the winter of 2001, some Qaeda leaders went west to Iran, but a large group of Qaeda members, including many of Mr. bin Laden`s lieutenants, went south to Pakistan, intelligence officials say.

By spring 2002, South Waziristan had become "the hub of Al Qaeda operations in the whole world," one senior Pakistani official said. Local religious leaders offered the militants houses, while poor tribesmen collected handsome rents on their homes.

They soon established a highly effective security system. A network of tribesmen augmented by radios and satellite phones acted as lookouts and notified them whenever more than one vehicle left a new Pakistani army base in Wana. "They could get warnings," said a senior Pakistani official.

The foreign militants are flush with cash, use a highly sophisticated code when communicating, travel in small groups at night, are disciplined and have access to laptop computers, Pakistani military officials say. The network has even sent e-mail messages, letters and DVD`s to Pakistani soldiers fighting in the tribal areas urging them not to kill their fellow Muslims on behalf of America, according to Western diplomats.

A Pre-Election Warning

The C.I.A. has intermittently received information about Mr. bin Laden`s movements along the Pakistani frontier, but it has always come too late to act against him, officials said. "There is no credible information that he has ever left the border region" since Tora Bora, one American analyst said.

Many American analysts have concluded that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who is Mr. bin Laden`s chief deputy, is also along Pakistan`s border - in the tribal lands or an adjacent region - but is no longer with Mr. bin Laden. American officials contend that the two men separated for security reasons, but remain in close communication. That may explain why over the last year or more they have each issued audio and videotapes broadcast over Arab television, but have not been seen or heard together.

Days before the American presidential election this fall, Mr. bin Laden released a videotape warning the United States to change course to prevent future attacks. In contrast to his haggard appearance in his videotaped message televised in September 2003, Mr. bin Laden appeared vigorous. C.I.A. officials say they are not certain of the state of his health, but have long been dismissive of reports that he suffered from kidney disease or some other serious ailment.

Despite the shortcomings of the Pakistani border campaign, the Bush administration contends that General Musharraf has taken great personal and political risks to side with the United States against Al Qaeda, and is unwilling to push him too hard or too publicly. Out of deference to President Musharraf, the official United States position on Mr. bin Laden`s whereabouts is that he is on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a description that avoids pointing fingers at Islamabad.

American counterterrorism officials cite the vital role Pakistani security services have played in catching Qaeda operatives, including several important figures, in Pakistan cities. In urban areas, security officials can argue that they are doing police work, and can arrest Qaeda operatives one by one without much political unrest. "The key high value targets that have been picked up in Pakistan have been picked up in the cities," one American intelligence official said. "We haven`t gotten any out of the border." A benefit of the recent campaign is that it has forced foreign Islamic fighters from lowlands of South Waziristan into mountains and forests, other tribal areas or Pakistani cities, American and Pakistani intelligence officials say. "It caused movement, and hopefully that will expose them and we can target them," an American said.

A `Success` Meets Skepticism

At the end of November, the Pakistani government called the South Waziristan operation a success, saying that Mr. bin Laden was not there. Meeting with President Bush in Washington recently, General Musharraf declared that Pakistani forces had "broken the back" of the Qaeda network in his country and destroyed its training bases.

Many American intelligence officials have been skeptical of the effort, though, noting that the Pakistanis often alerted tribal leaders to raids beforehand and mostly only snared foot soldiers. To rout Al Qaeda and find Mr. bin Laden is going to require a much more sustained campaign by the United States and Pakistan, intelligence officials from those countries say. The United States is spending $4.5 million to help build roads, wells and schools in the tribal areas, an amount dwarfed by the $18 billion the United States is spending on the reconstruction of Iraq. Pakistani officials and others say economic development, locally elected government and full integration of the tribal areas into Pakistan are the only way to eradicate militancy from the isolated area.

"To really neutralize and eliminate them, it will have to be a lot more effort," said Talat Masood, an Islamabad political analyst and former general. "They are still a very potent force."

James Risen reported from Washington for this article, and David Rohde from Peshawar, Pakistan. Mohammed Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

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Aus Bushs Notizbuch!

[Joerver]

Guantanamo: Three years on
Today is the anniversary of the founding of America`s prison camp for `enemy combatants`, And despite evidence of systematic abuse and widespread international condemnation it looks set to stay open
By Rupert Cornwell

10 January 2005

Three years ago, the world caught its first glimpse of a new breed of prisoners, captured in a new sort of war. They were shackled, orange-suited figures, seen through telephoto lenses, arriving in a makeshift jail on an American base on a tropical island, 8,000 miles from where they had been captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan.

According to US officials at the time, they were "the worst of the worst." They had been chained to the seats of their transport plane for the journey half way round the world because "these are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines on a C-17 to bring it down," General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, explained in an interview on 10 January 2002, as the first 20 prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay in south-eastern Cuba.

Today the "the worst of the worst" better describes the prison than those who are confined there. At its height, Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo housed about 660 detainees. The number has fallen to around 550 today, from 42 countries. The place and manner of their detention, however, has become the embodiment of much that the world detests in President George Bush`s global "war on terror". "Guantanamo has become an icon of lawlessness," the human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement marking Camp X-Ray`s third anniversary, "a symbol of the US government`s attempts to put itself above the law."

Naturally, that is not how the Bush administration sees it. No official spokesman will admit that Guantanamo was a mistake that has besmirched the US image around the world. The Pentagon claims that detainees have provided valuable information, which has helped thwart several planned terrorist strikes. If they were not under lock and key at Guantanamo, says Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, many inmates might be plotting such attacks, or back fighting US troops in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

But many of these claims do not survive scrutiny. Privately, Pentagon officials admit that most detainees are low-level figures. Outside experts query the intelligence value of many prisoners, insignificant figures now behind bars for two years or more.

In the meantime, the charges of prisoner abuse and torture multiply. With each one, it becomes more apparent that wittingly or unwittingly, Guantanamo was a test bed for the techniques - and incubator of the mentality - that the world discovered in the horrific prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.

From the outset the US authorities insisted that the detainees were not conventional soldiers, but "enemy combatants" who did not qualify as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Nonetheless, the Pentagon said, they would be treated as if they were. Accounts by those who have been released from Guantanamo, as well as leaked reports by an alarmed FBI, suggest otherwise.

Prisoners have not just been denied effective legal representation. According to Amnesty, interrogation techniques used include stress positions, isolation, hooding, sensory deprivation and terrifying dogs. Alarmed FBI agents who visited Guantanamo have reported prolonged use of shackling, loud music and strobe lights, and dogs.

In the latest allegation, reported in Newsweek today, one FBI agent said he saw a detainee sitting on the floor of an interrogation cell with an Israeli flag draped around him while he was bombarded by loud music and a strobe light.

Former prisoners have told even more shocking tales, of being tightly chained to the concrete floor of their cells for 15 hours, and of savage beatings handed out by guards known as the Extreme Reaction Force.

In shades of Abu Ghraib, devout Muslim prisoners were humiliated by naked prostitutes parading themselves in front of them.

Various investigations are in progress. But the fate of the detainees remains murky. The US Supreme Court last year rejected the absurd claim by the Pentagon that Guantanamo Bay (though leased in perpetuity by Cuba to the US) was not technically on American soil, and therefore foreigners held there had no right to bring cases before a US civil court of law.

The authorities countered by promising to speed up so-called "Combatant Status Review Tribunals," consisting of panels of military officers, to examine each detainee`s case. As of now, four low-level prisoners have been sent for trial by military commissions. But these proceedings are stalled, after a federal judge ruled against the commissions. The US government is now appealing.

The tangle exasperates even some Republican supporters of the war against terror. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina`s junior senator, spoke last week of the damaging "legal chaos" surrounding Guantanamo Bay. The US, said Mr Graham, had "lost its way" by playing fast and loose with the law.

Few observers would disagree. But Guantanamo will not soon disappear. Plans have been announced for a $25m (£13m) jail to hold 200 prisoners, and for a permanent guard force to replace the 330 infantry troops there now. Like the "war on terror" itself, America`s most notorious jail for terrorists is here to stay.

Shameful regime of detention without trial

2001 7 OCTOBER: American and British forces invade Afghanistan.

2002 10 JANUARY: The first al-Qa`ida prisoners are moved from Afghan detention centres to the Guantanamo Bay US naval base in Cuba. Britons are found to be among the captives.

25 JANUARY: White House counsel Alberto Gonzales writes, in a memo to President Bush, that the fight against terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva`s (Convention`s) strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners, and renders quaint some of its provisions".

27 JANUARY: The family of a Camp X-Ray detainee, Shafiq Rasul, 24, from Tipton, West Midlands, lobby for him to be returned to Britain. He is there with Asif Iqbal, 20, also from Tipton, and Feroz Abbasi, 22, from Croydon, Surrey.

7 FEBRUARY: President Bush signs an order declaring that he has the authority to suspend compliance with the Geneva Conventions and reserves the right to do so "in this and future conflicts".

19 FEBRUARY: A legal team for Mr Iqbal, 20, and Mr Rasul, 24, file papers at a court in Washington DC calling on the US government either to justify their detention by bringing charges, or to free them.

6 MARCH: Lawyers for Mr Abbasi begin proceedings at the High Court seeking a judicial review of the Government`s co-operation with the United States.

15 MARCH: Mr Abbasi loses his High Court battle against the Government over the conditions of his detention at Camp X-Ray.

1 JULY: Three senior judges give permission for a full hearing of Mr Abbasi`s claims that the Government is not protecting his rights while he is held by the US at Camp X-Ray.

10 OCTOBER: The US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, left, says that "a relatively small number" of men will be freed from Camp X-Ray.

6 NOVEMBER: The Court of Appeal rules that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, cannot be compelled to intervene over Mr Abbasi.

2003 26 FEBRUARY: Moazzam Begg, 35, from Birmingham, is made a detainee at Guantanamo Bay after being arrested in Pakistan.

17 JUNE: Freed Guantanamo Bay prisoners say they had tried to commit suicide due to the draconian conditions. Several of the 35 Afghans and Pakistanis released say that while they were physically unharmed they were subjected to psychological abuse by being confined to tiny cells and being kept uncertain about the future.

4 JULY: It is revealed that two Britons could be among the first detainees to face trial by secretive military tribunals. Mr Begg and Mr Abbasi are on an initial list of six who could face military commissions.

18 JULY: The US agrees to suspend the threat of secret military hearings against the nine Britons being held at Guantanamo Bay.

20 NOVEMBER: Following talks at Downing Street with President Bush, right, Tony Blair says the fate of the British detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be resolved "soon".

25 NOVEMBER: One of Britain`s most senior judges condemns the US for a "monstrous failure of justice" over how it holds detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Lord Steyn says prisoners are being held in a state of "utter lawlessness".

2004 19 FEBRUARY: The Foreign Office says five of the nine British prisoners are to be released. They are named as Ruhal Ahmed, Tarek Dergoul, Jamal Udeen, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.

7 MARCH: The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, criticises the treatment of the remaining detainees by the US authorities.

9 MARCH: Mr Blunkett confirms the five Britons have been released. They arrive in London later the same day to be questioned. Jamal Udeen is soon released without charge.

10 MARCH: Tarek Dergoul, Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal are released without charge.

10 MAY: The International Committee of the Red Cross accuses the US government of using methods "tantamount to torture" on detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

22 JUNE: The US Justice Dept announces that it is withdrawing legal memos of 2002. These gave a narrow definition of torture which provided legal arguments for US personnel to escape prosecution under anti-torture laws, and also argued that the President`s wartime authority superseded international laws and treaties.

26 AUGUST: The first US military tribunal since the Second World War opens in Guantanamo Bay. Salim Ahmed Hamdan is charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts with Osama bin Laden.

14 OCTOBER: Three months after the US Supreme Court rules that the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a right to challenge their imprisonment in US courts, none has appeared so far. Most have not been allowed to speak to their lawyers.

9 NOVEMBER: A US district judge, James Robertson, rules that the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals are illegal.

12 DECEMBER: Lawyers acting for four British prisoners in Cuba say they are "losing their sanity" after being held for more than two years in solitary confinement. They urge Mr Blair to intervene.

16 DECEMBER: Law lords rule that foreign prisoners being held at Belmarsh and Woodhall prisons, described as "Britain`s Guantanamo Bay", are being detained illegally.

21 DECEMBER: Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show that FBI agents repeatedly complained about torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to their superiors.

2005 2 JANUARY: The Bush administration is preparing to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely without trial, replacing Guantanamo Bay with permanent prisons. Congress will be asked for $25m (£13m) to build a new facility.


10 January 2005 11:02
Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

[wellen]

Unger Varnsdorf

Die den Teufel an die Wand malen...
Sie beherrschen das gesamte ABC
Der Große Terroranschlag ist angesagt
Wir militärischen Analphabeten haben keine Ahnung von dem, was ansteht, was auf uns zukommt, womit die Menschheit rechnen muß, die Propaganda hat unsere Sinne getäuscht und den Blick verstellt...

Aus ihren Warnungen haben wir indessen nur noch ihre Absichten herauszulesen, dann ist die Welt gleich wieder leichter zu verstehen.

Wenn die hypermächtige Progaganda sagt, daß Al-Qaida bald mit Gas und Viren uns ans Leben wolle, so müssen wir nur noch das Wort Al-Qaida heraus nehmen und neu einsortieren.

Wer oder was ist Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida ist der Teufel...

Die Teufelsbrut an der Wand!

Das Gemälde des Schreckens.

Al-Qaida ist das Fundament, ist die Basis, ist die Begründung und Rechtfertigung des staatlichen Terrorismus ("War on Terrorism").

Der Teufel an der Wand ist die Antwort auf alle Fragen, die Lösung sämtlicher "Probleme":

Das politische Erwachen der geburtenfreudigen Völker ("Bevölkerungsexplosion"), die Demokratisierung (!) der Menschheit, indem die Mehrheit sich zu Wort meldet und ihre Rechte einfordert...

Das ist der gemeinsame Nenner aller kriegerischen ("anti-terroristischen") Bemühungen des Nordens gegen den Süden, des Westens gegen den Osten.

Den lebensfrohen, gebärfreudigen Proletariern (Kinderreichen) lauern die lebensschwachen, dekadenten, reichen, sich per Technik ersetzenden, minoritären Westler/Nordler auf, die Menschen auszurotten, sich ihrer Länder zu bemächtigen.

Der Westen hat im demografischen Ungleichgewicht - der "Übervölkerung" Asiens und Afrikas... - sein existentielles Problem.

Wenn der minoritäre Westen überleben will, muß er seine Geburtenrate erhöhen - wofür es wahrscheinlich schon zu spät ist - oder die wachsenden Mehrheiten vernichten.

Die Versuche, durch "Familienplanung" - "Verhütungspille", "Abtreibung"... - dem Problem beizukommen, hatten zur Folge, daß die "Weißen" vor allem sich reduzierten, während sie mit ihrem Hauptanliegen, die farbigen Völker zu minimieren, offensichtlich gescheitert sind.

Die "feine Methode" hat das Ziel verfehlt, ja das "Problem" noch vergrößert.

Die "grobe" Form der "Problemlösung" besteht im Rückgriff auf die "Massenvernichtungswaffen".

Im Hinblick auf die seit Jahrzehnten - synchron mit der Waffenentwicklung - als Menschheitsgefahr an die sprichwörtliche Wand gemalte "Bevölkerungsexplosion" - die "Grenzen des Wachstums" bezogen sich offenbar nur auf die materiellen Ressourcen - wird die Bedeutung der Massenvernichtungsmittel plausibel.

Nur wer Menschen in großen Massen umbringen will, legt sich solche Vernichtungsmittellager an.

Der Triangel des Bösen verfügt über ein Riesenarsenal an chemischen, biologischen und natürlich auch atomaren "Waffen".

Der Einsatz von Gas und Viren geschieht eher verborgen, weil dieses Teufelswerk selbst für skrupellose Monster hinter einer Hemmschwelle liegt.

Erst wenn der "Feind" das Zeug "gegen uns" einsetzt, haben wir "endlich" einen Grund, angemessen zu "reagieren".

Nur scheint der "Feind" derlei nicht zu besitzen, so daß er es auch nicht einsetzen kann.

Gegen diesen Mangel hilft nun Al-Qaida bzw. das Phantom gleichen Namens.

Wenn ich der Al-Qaida den Besitz von Massenmordmitteln nicht nur zuschreibe, wenn ich den Massenmord im Namen von Al-Qaida auch einleite, gebe ich mir grünes Licht für das Undenkbare und Unfaßbare.

In dieser Situation befindet sich die heutige Welt.

Die Ausrottung der "terroristischen" Menschheit ist für die Zivilisation des Triangels existenznotwendig.

Da ein Geburtenzuwachs bei den "Weißen" auch nicht im Ansatz ernsthaft erwogen wird, muß davon ausgegangen werden, daß der Menschheitsmord seit langem geplant ist, die Massenvernichtungsmittel allein zu diesem Zweck erfolgreich entwickelt, in unübersehbaren Mengen produziert und gelagert worden sind.

Die Wissenschaft des Völkermords ist so weit voran gekommen, daß die "Waffen" ihr Ziel auch "genetisch" finden, daß Viren eine ethnische Auslese treffen, nur spezielle Adressen angreifen und "anstecken".

Die besonders an kleine Kinder geschickte "konventionelle" Streubombe - die Mutter aller Bomben - haben wir darüber nicht vergessen.

Im übrigen war und bleibt Napalm ein chemisches Massenvernichtungsmittel.

kokhaviv publications Styleskji

[Joerver]

Immer wenn man meint, Bush habe die Suche schon längst aufgegeben, gibt es mal wieder einen Artikel über die ach so eifrige Suche nach Osama.
Aber ich glaube, dass von den Falken im Pentagon niemand so richtig dran glaubt, dass Osama noch lebt.
Wie soll auch ein Mensch, der alle paar Wochen in die Klinik muß zur Dialyse wegen eines Nierenleidens, in der Wildnis Afghanistans überleben.
Es kannt schon was dran sein an der Behauptung, dass er vor einiger Zeit in Kairo gestorben sein soll.
Aber nichts genaues weiß man nicht.
Jedenfalls haben die USA mit Zarqawi schon einen neuen Popanz aufgebaut. Die irakische Regierung soll heute auch neue Fotos von ihm rausgegeben haben.
Der große Zarqawi, Analphabet und Straßenräuber als Nachfolger für Osama.
Ein Sinnbild für den absteigenden Ast, auf dem sich die US-Nahostpolitik befindet.
Die augenblicklichen Erfolgsmeldungen über die Demokratisierung der arabischen Welt, entsprechen eher dem berühmten Pfeifen im Walde.
Mar 8, 2005

Why can`t the US find bin Laden?
By Andrew Tully
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC08Ak01.html

WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush says he has no illusion about the difficulties his government faces in trying to catch Osama bin Laden. According to Bush, finding bin Laden and thwarting his plans are "the greatest challenge of our day".

He highlighted the urgency, saying: "Recently we learned that Osama bin Laden has urged the [Iraq-based suspected] terrorist [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi to form a group to conduct attacks outside Iraq, including here in the United States. We`re on a constant hunt for bin Laden. We`re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding. And today Zarqawi understands that coalition and Iraqi troops are on a constant hunt for him as well."

But the hunt for bin Laden so far has been fruitless. Two months ago, General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, said his trail had "gone cold". And on March 1, General John Abizaid, the man in charge of the US part of the search, cautioned Congress that success is not guaranteed.

Kenneth Allard says he wholeheartedly agrees with Abizaid`s assessment. Allard, a retired US Army colonel who served as an intelligence officer, tells RFE/RL that a manhunt is not the right job for an army.

"Military forces typically do not engage in the apprehension of individuals," Allard says. "Our stock in trade is taking down a regime. It`s like looking for individual grains of sand, when your objective is to shovel out a foundation. We do a great job of foundation digging. We don`t do a very good job of finding individual grains with names on them."

But Allard says it is likely that US special forces and paramilitary personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), are part of the search. He says they are trained not to fight pitched battles but to undertake missions such as the hunt for bin Laden and are prepared to fight only in emergencies.

The next question, Allard says, is what happens if bin Laden is eventually captured? He says if bin Laden is killed, many Muslims probably would revere him as a martyr. If he is captured alive, he could speak at his trial to rally his fellow militants.

Either way, according to Allard, Americans can expect bin Laden`s followers to mount vengeance strikes in the US.

But Allard says this probably would leave Americans no more vulnerable to attack than they are now. And he adds that failing to capture bin Laden is not an option, and that the US is better off if bin Laden is dead.

"I would much rather have the dead Osama as a potential martyr than a live Osama running around right now," Allard says. "Because the most powerful symbol that he exerts to his followers is that he has been able to defy the United States. He`s been able to pull off [the attacks of September 11, 2001] and effectively get away with it. Symbols really matter."

But symbols have limited value, according to Nathan Brown, who specializes in Middle Eastern affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a private policy-research center in Washington.

Brown points out that the US is not just fighting al-Qaeda but many additional groups with at best only a loose affiliation with bin Laden`s organization. Now that bin Laden has inspired them, he says, they can act autonomously.

"Capturing or killing [bin Laden] wouldn`t end the problem that he`s come to symbolize," Brown says. "What he managed to do was to get disparate groups together and get them to focus on attacking Western targets rather than their own governments. But it`s unclear that he`s really knitted those disparate groups into one single movement. And so cutting it off at the top is not going to completely end what those various groups do."

Brown says he prefers to sidestep the question of whether the US would benefit more from a dead bin Laden than a living one. Instead, he says: "Putting [bin Laden] on trial raises all kinds of difficult issues, because you are giving him a platform by which he can address his various constituencies. And he can speak fairly effectively to those constituencies. So in a sense, a trial would be a very mixed blessing for the United States."

Brown says that while he expects capturing bin Laden would have no immediate effect, it might pay off in the long term. It could discourage some young Muslim men from joining militant groups.

Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

[QCOM]

Was ist denn mit Dir los? Haben sie Dir Deinen maniac endless thread endlich abgeschnitten? Oder hast Du ihn gar verloren?

[Joerver]

Nee der Osama mußte mal wiederhochgebracht werden, nachdem man schon geklagt hat, es besteht kein Interesse mehr an Bin Laden.
In den USA sind sie so sehr mit der Rentenversicherung und mit Jackson und Stewart beschäftigt, da kommt im Augenblick nicht so viel.
Du fühlst dich wohl dort. Weiterhin viel Erfolg.

[Joerver]

Es scheint augenblicklich wirklich Saure-Gurken-Zeit zu sein.
Eine Zeitung nach der anderen erinnert sich an den `Geist` Osama.

We justfailed to catch Bin Laden last year, admits Musharraf
By Nick Meo
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=620…
16 March 2005

The trail of Osama bin Laden has never been colder, despite millions of dollars worth of Pakistani and US Army resources ploughed into the hunt for the al-Qa`ida leader, Pakistan`s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, has admitted.

The general claimed his security forces had come close to capturing America`s most wanted enemy, last summer. But since those operations in the anarchic tribal lands along the border with Afghanistan, they had lost track of his movements.

"There was a time when the dragnet had closed and we thought we knew roughly the area where he possibly could be," General Musharraf said yesterday. "That was, I think, some time back ... maybe about eight to 10 months back. But after that, this is such a game, this intelligence, that they escape. They can move and then you lose contact."

The startling admission was the first confirmation for some time from Pakistan`s ruler that he believed Bin Laden had been on his soil, and has provoked heart-searching in the American military establishment over how the hunt is being conducted. The US military spends nearly $1bn (£500m), a month in Afghanistan, including CIA teams in Pakistan tribal areas and FBI investigators in the cities, and the Pakistan army has killed or arrested hundreds of al-Qa`ida operatives. Every possible tool has been used, from satellites searches to TV advertising.

General Musharraf had always tried to play down speculation that al-Qa`ida`s leader was on his side of the border, perhaps fearing the political fallout at home if the symbolic capture is inside Pakistan. Yesterday that was underlined with the arrest of yet another would-be assassin after a string of failed Islamist plots on the general.

Later, Pakistani officials said privately that for months they have had no idea where Bin Laden could be and they have no information on possible planned terrorist attacks. They claimed the silence from al-Qa`ida suggests they have destroyed its network inside Pakistan. An indication of America`s thoughts on the most-wanted man`s whereabouts was a major TV and radio advertising campaign trying to win over possible supporters of al-Qa`ida by stressing the violence terrorists have brought to Pakistan and reminding viewers of the $25m bounty still on Bin Laden`s head.

Most security experts in the region believe the Yemen-born Saudi is still in the rugged mountains between Afghan-istan and Pakistan. Waziristan, a tribal territory adjoining Khost Province in Afghanistan where many of the CIA`s operatives are based, has always a likely hiding place for Bin Laden and other al-Qa`ida leaders.

Last spring and summer, Pakistan`s army launched ferocious operations into the region, which has never been controlled by Islamabad, killing hundreds of foreign fighters and tribesmen in missions which were bitterly criticised by Musharraf`s Islamist opponents at home.

The general`s comments yesterday appeared to confirm the rumour that was widely circulated at the time, that Bin Laden`s capture in Waziristan had been close. This would be the second time he has slipped free of a tightening noose. Bin Laden is widely believed to have escaped US and British special forces at the battle of Tora Bora inside Afghanistan at the beginning of 2002.

Since then, he has routinely taunted his hunters with videotaped messages delivered to al-Jazeera`s office in Islamabad. The most recent one, calling for fresh attacks on America, popped up just before the US presidential election in November, although there was no indication where it was made.

Few in the American military believe he is still in Afghanistan, patrolled by 18,000 US troops and scoured with satellites and the latest electronic eavesdropping devices. The risk of a US combat mission unexpectedly raiding a village where he is hiding is thought too great.

Other possible hiding-places for Bin Laden have been suggested, including Pakistani Kashmir, Yemen, where he has family links, Somalia or Sudan, where he has been before.

Yesterday the new US commander in Afghanistan tried to play down the failure to find Bin Laden, stressing instead the successes of military hearts and minds policies.


16 March 2005 11:47


©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

[Joerver]

[Table align=center]

Partners in crime: Bin Laden (right) saw Zarqawi as exactly what Al Qaeda
needed
[/TABLE]

Eine Legende wird lebendig gehalten?

Terror Broker
Bin Laden needed a role in the Iraqi insurgency, and Zarqawi needed outside support. How a deadly deal was made.
By Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau
Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7369892/site/newsweek/

April 11 issue - Hardly anyone was more surprised by Iraq`s insurgency than Osama bin Laden. The terrorist chief had never foreseen its sudden, ferocious spread, and he was likewise unprepared for the abrupt rise of its most homicidal commander, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Bin Laden and his aides knew the Jordanian-born Palestinian from Zarqawi`s Afghan days, but mostly as a short-tempered bully and a troublemaker. So in the late summer of 2003, unwilling to sit on the sidelines, bin Laden sent two of his most trusted men to assess the Iraqi resistance and carve out a leading role for Al Qaeda. "The resistance happened faster than we expected, and differently, so we were not prepared to assist and direct it," one of the two envoys later told a senior Tali-ban official. "The sheik sent me to see how we could help."

The Taliban man recently told the envoy`s story to NEWSWEEK. He personally heard the account from the envoy, a top-ranking Qaeda member known as Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, at a meeting last December in western Pakistan. The Taliban official, who uses the name Zabihullah, is a liaison between his group and Al Qaeda. Many of the account`s details are borne out by interviews with other well-informed jihadis. Officials familiar with U.S. intelligence, while refusing to discuss many of the story`s specifics, confirm that its fundamentals are accurate.

The two bin Laden envoys traveled overland from Afghanistan separately. One never got to Iraq. Authorities in Iran later announced that they had apprehended the Egyptian-born Saif al-Adel, and he seems to be there still. Al-Iraqi did better. Those who know him say he fits in perfectly wherever he goes. Born in Iraqi Kurdistan about 1960, he rose to the rank of major in Saddam Hussein`s Army before joining the jihad in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. He speaks not only Arabic but Urdu, Kurdish, the Waziri tribal dialect of Pashtu and a courtly form of Persian. In the palatial salons of the gulf states he has raised millions of dollars for Al Qaeda. But dressed for the part he can easily pass for a mountain tribesman. "He`s just like any Afghan," says Zabihullah. "He doesn`t have the arrogance and formality of other Arabs."

Al-Iraqi needed all the poise and charm he could muster for his mission to the insurgents. By the time he reached Iraq, in late 2003, Zarqawi had built a fearsome team of resistance fighters. The Jordanian considered himself to be the obvious choice for Al Qaeda`s top man in Iraq. He was livid at the news that bin Laden had chosen al-Iraqi for the job. "I`m already here!" Zarqawi told al-Iraqi. "So why is the sheik sending someone else?"

No one but Zarqawi could see much mystery there. Zarqawi was widely disliked in Afghanistan. Even bin Laden was repulsed by reports of his vicious temper and gratuitous cruelty. In the late 1990s, commanding a unit of Arab irregulars near Afghanistan`s Iranian border, the Jordanian terrorized local civilians and infuriated Taliban leaders. Mullah Mohammed Omar`s men had just taken control of the area and were trying to win the trust of its mostly Shiite inhabitants. When Zarqawi wasn`t busy persecuting Shiites, he wrangled with other Arabs and with the local Taliban chief.

Zarqawi had "a terrifying face," al-Iraqi recalled later. But the envoy said he knew at once that Zarqawi was exactly what Al Qaeda needed. "There is no —doubt that he is the best man to lead foreign and Iraqi insurgents in Iraq," al-Iraqi told bin Laden when he got back to the caves, according to Zabihullah`s account. "He deserves our support." The envoy has made three trips to Iraq since then. Just before the last, in September, a London-based Arabic-language daily quoted Zarqawi as repudiating bin Laden and Al Qaeda: "I have not sworn allegiance to the sheik and I am not working within the framework of his organization." But after meeting again with al-Iraqi, the Jordanian proclaimed his loyalty to bin Laden and announced a new name for his terrorist group: "Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers." "I`m a loyal soldier and ready to sacrifice myself to the sheik, who is our leader," he told al-Iraqi.

Bin Laden replied by issuing an audiotape that praised Zarqawi`s exploits and called him the "prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq." The tape instructed all Qaeda supporters to follow Zarqawi`s orders. Bin Laden had already made his wishes known to Zarqawi via al-Iraqi. "My greatest wish is for you to keep the resistance alive and growing, to increase the number of local insurgents and give the Iraqis more decision-making powers," Zarqawi was told. "Make it as much of an Iraqi organization as possible." Bin Laden also urged his prince to widen the war against America: "We have to expand our attacks on the enemy outside Iraq."

The envoy is proud of his work. "I`m the person who broke the silence and solved the difficulties between Zarqawi and the Al Qaeda leadership," he told Zabihullah. Donations to Al Qaeda`s coffers had dried up as bin Laden`s top men were killed or captured. Now private money is once again flooding in. Bin Laden himself is looking more confident and relaxed—maybe too relaxed, al-Iraqi said. When he visited the Qaeda leader in November, the envoy noticed fewer checkpoints than previously along the trail. "The sheik has a new mentality and is more healthy," he told Zabi-hullah. On his last visit to Iraq, the envoy got an offer from Zarqawi: if life got too risky in the mountains along Pakistan`s border, bin Laden would be welcome to take refuge with him among the insurgents in Iraq. The envoy politely declined. At present, the Qaeda leader seems to be doing just fine where he is.

With Mark Hosenball in Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7369892/site/newsweek/

[Denali]

Bin Laden ist längst untergetaucht und tarnt sich perfekt mitten im Feindesland

[Joerver]

Osama darf nicht sterben, denn Zarqawi ist kein Ersatz!


SPIEGEL ONLINE - 03. Mai 2005, 12:08
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,354431,00.html
Terrorismus

Die mageren Ergebnisse der Binladologen

Von Georg Mascolo, Washington

Die US-Regierung hat ein ganzes Heer von Spitzen-Forschern engagiert, um Osama Bin Laden auf die Spur zu kommen. Sie analysieren mit riesigem Aufwand Flora, Fauna oder Geräusche auf den Ton- und Videobänder, um Hinweise auf den Aufenthaltsort des Terrorfürsten zu entdecken.


Der Flüchtige, so heißt eine kriminalistische Faustregel, taucht ab, schweigt, verschwindet. Einer, den die ganze Welt sucht, hält sich nicht an diesen Lehrsatz. Osama Bin Laden, Megaterrorist und Massenmörder, meldet sich in Videos und Tonbandbotschaften zu Wort. In blumigem Arabisch formuliert er seine Ultimaten und apokalyptischen Drohungen.

Auf 18 Auftritte bringt es der Saudi allein seit den Anschlägen des 11. Septembers 2001 - und geht es nach den Geheimdiensten, dürften es gern noch mehr sein. Denn wenn Bin Laden oder sein Stellvertreter Aiman al-Sawahiri auf Sendung gehen, tritt eine akademische Hilfstruppe in Aktion, auf der inzwischen die Hoffnung ruht, die Terroristen doch noch zu erwischen.

Audiotechniker suchen im Hightech-Labor nach Hintergrundgeräuschen: dem Lärm einer Straße, dem Klingeln eines Telefons, dem Kindergeschrei im Hinterhof. Wie in einem wissenschaftlichen Kolloquium sitzen Geologen stundenlang vor den Bildern der Felsformationen, durch die Bin Laden schreitet, Kollegen der botanischen Zunft begutachten das karge Grün unter den Sandalen der Flüchtlingen. Zwitschert ein Vogel, müssen die Ornithologen ran.

"Binladologen" nennen Spötter jene Wissenschaftler, die den einen, entscheidenden Hinweis liefern sollen, wo sich die Flüchtigen verborgen halten. Jede Spur von ihnen fehle, räumte der pakistanische Präsident Pervez Musharraf unlängst ein, auch eine seit Wochen im abendlichen Fernsehprogramm offerierte Millionen-Belohnung der Bush-Regierung ("Sie liefern - wir zahlen") hat keine Hinweise gebracht. Die US-Armee, die noch vergangenes Jahr tönte, bald sei Bin Laden gefasst, schweigt inzwischen betreten. So müssen jetzt die Akademiker ran, damit die Suchtrupps wieder ausrücken können.

So bizarre Züge trägt der Rummel um jedes neue Band, dass der amerikanische Terrorismusexperte Roger Cressey sie mit der Arbeit der Kreml-Astrologen im Kalten Krieg vergleicht. "Statt herauszufinden, wer neben Leonid Breschnew steht und was das für dessen Machstellung bedeutet, brüten wir heute über den Bändern", sagt Cressey, der zwei US-Präsidenten beriet. Und Michael Scheuer, einst Chef der CIA-Truppe, die Bin Laden jagt, hat für die Aktion nur Hohn übrig: "Ich habe jeden, der mir mit Steinen und Vögeln kam, aus meinem Büro geworfen. Bin Laden ist nicht so blöd, uns zu verraten, wo er ist."

Bisher hat der Skeptiker Recht behalten; bedeutende neue Hinweise hat die wissenschaftliche Zuarbeit nicht gebracht. Einen Felshang, über den Bin Laden und Sawahiri, die Kalaschnikow über der Schulter, marschierten, erwies sich als typisch für die gesamte afghanisch-pakistanische Grenzregion. Flora und Fauna waren nicht ergiebiger. Kein Strauch, kein Baum ließ sich finden, der nicht überall am Hindukusch wächst.

Der Bundesnachrichtendienst ließ ein melodisches Trillern als Ruf des Sperlings identifizieren. Und ähnlich hilfreich war die Einbestellung einer Gruppe CIA-Pensionäre mit Ortskenntnis. Nach eingehender Betrachtung der für diesen Anlass auf Postergröße gebrachten Bilder der Einöde, erklärten sie, das könne eigentlich überall sein.

Wenig ergiebiger ist der Ton, den Techniker im Labor nach für das Ohr nicht zu hörenden "akustischen Ereignissen" absuchen. Auf einem Band Sawahiris isolierten Techniker im Mai 2003 die Geräusche spielender Kinder in einem Hinterhof oder Treppenhaus. Jeder Verkehrslärm aber fehlte. Fazit: eine Siedlung, irgendwo auf dem Land.

Noch dünner ist es bei Bin Laden. Er neigt dazu, mit Papier zu rascheln, einmal schien es, als sei ein Telefon oder eine Hausrufanlage in der Nähe. Ohne durchschlagenden Erfolg blieb auch ein Hinweis des deutschen Bundeskriminalamts, das im Oktober 2003 auf einem Band ein rätselhaftes "Quietschgeräusch" ausmachte. Wahrscheinlich ein "mangelhaft gewartetes Scharnier", befanden die Tontechniker.

Inzwischen bleiben selbst so dürre Erkenntnisse aus; Bin Laden hat offenbar technologisch aufgerüstet. Neueste Aufnahmen klingen, als bediene sich der Terrorist digitaler Aufnahmetechnik und eines schallgedämmten Raums.

Glücklich mit der Ausbeute sind bislang nur die Experten der medizinisch-psychologischen Analyseeinheit der CIA, eine Truppe, die sich an langen Fernsehabenden schon an Boris Jelzins Trinkgewohnheiten und Fidel Castros Gesundheitszustand versuchte.

Osama Bin Laden, so wollen sie herausgefunden haben, wurde bei den Kämpfen um Tora Bora im Herbst 2001 tatsächlich an der Schulter verwundet. Eine von ihnen begutachtete Videoaufnahme zeigt den Saudi, gestützt auf eine Krücke, der linke Arm hängt schlaff herab. Die Erkenntnis stammt aus dem September 2003. Inzwischen aber soll sich der Terrorist schon wieder gut erholt haben.


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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005

[Joerver]

CIA agents told to deliver bin Laden`s head on ice
04 May 2005 23:16:11 GMT
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N04473815.htm
Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The CIA officer who led the first American unit into Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said on Wednesday that his orders included an unusual assignment: bring back Osama bin Laden`s head on ice.

Gary Schroen and his six-member CIA team arrived in Afghanistan`s Panjshir Valley two weeks after bin Laden`s al Qaeda network orchestrated the attacks on Washington and New York that killed 3,000 people, prompting the Bush administration`s war on terrorism.

A 32-year CIA veteran with long experience in South Asia and the Middle East, Schroen`s prime task was to build up Northern Alliance forces so they could join U.S. troops in the overthrow of the Taliban.

But in the days that followed the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, Schroen said his boss at the CIA also told him and his deputy in no uncertain terms to kill the al Qaeda leadership.

"What he said (was), `I would like to see the head of bin Laden delivered back to me in a heavy cardboard box filled with dry ice, and I will take that down and show the president. And the rest of the lieutenants, you can put their heads on pikes`," Schroen told Reuters in an interview.

He was quoting Cofer Black, a prominent U.S. intelligence figure who was then the director of the CIA`s counterterrorist center.

"I don`t think he meant that in detail ... I think he meant to impress upon me and my deputy that this was very serious business and he wanted to get our adrenaline charged," Schroen added.

Black was not immediately available for comment.

Schroen recounts his post-Sept. 11 Afghan experience in the book, "First In: An Insider`s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," which will be published next week.

Schroen, 63, who is officially retired but continues to work for the CIA as a contractor, said the conversation was a turning point.

"Other than in paramilitary operations, I have never in 32 years heard of an order to kill anyone. And in fact up to that day, my orders and the orders the CIA was operating under were primarily to try and capture bin Laden alive," he said.

Bin Laden`s trail grew cold after the Bush administration withdrew its most highly trained special operations and intelligence units from Afghanistan in preparation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Schroen said.

But he was encouraged by news on Wednesday that Pakistani security forces had arrested senior al Qaeda operative Abu Faraj Farj al Liby, reportedly in Pakistan`s North West Frontier Province, a rugged tribal region where he believes bin Laden is hiding.

"Bin Laden is almost a Robin Hood among certain elements of the Islamic world," said Schroen, who believes bin Laden`s popularity is so great that Pakistan may not want to risk a potentially devastating political backlash by capturing him.

"Going after al Liby is much easier than going after bin Laden. He`s by name a Libyan and he has no standing within the community," he said.

As the war in Afghanistan unfolded, Schroen never got close enough to strike at bin Laden himself. But he worked on a plan to use Northern Alliance fighters to kill bin Laden`s top lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri.

"He was supposedly hiding out in the eastern part of Kabul. We paid for assets the Northern Alliance said they were running within the Taliban to go after him," he said.

The effort failed, however. "It was far-fetched," Schroen said. "It was like to do something long-range while blind-folded."

[Joerver]

May 14, 2005
Back on Osama`s trail
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GE14Df04.html
ISLAMABAD - Both Pakistani and US intelligence believe that they are hot on the heels of Osama bin Laden, after his trail went cold months ago.

"Both the US and concerned Pakistani authorities are positive that in the coming days we shall be around Osama bin Laden," a senior Pakistani official told Asia Times Online in an exclusive interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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The potential breakthrough in the hunt for bin Laden follows the arrest of al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libbi in Pakistan last week, and an important lead he divulged during interrogation. Abu Faraj was interrogated by various agencies, including Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence, Britain`s MI6 and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This is according to the Pakistani official, who was assigned by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf - the target of two assassination attempts allegedly masterminded by Abu Faraj - to coordinate and oversee investigations involving recent al-Qaeda detainees in Pakistan.

"The arrest of al-Libbi has only one significance for Pakistan, and that is that he was involved in assassination plots on Musharraf. Apparently there is no way that we will get Osama bin Laden through al-Libbi. MI6 also interrogated al-Libbi separately, and they are also of this opinion, that al-Libbi is little more than a foot soldier and no way eligible to be named as an operational chief. However, US interrogators have a different opinion and they call al-Libbi the catch of the year," the official said.

"Nevertheless," said the official, "the arrest cannot be down-played as insignificant. During interrogation, al-Libbi pointed [out] Bajur Agency, a tribal area situated in North West Frontier Province, where we found an al-Qaeda sanctuary and arrested many important operatives, including an Uzbek."

Despite repeated questioning from Asia Times Online, the official refused to say whether the Uzbek was the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yaldevish, who has been widely reported to have been seen in Pakistan`s tribal areas. "This is a state secret," the official said.

"Neither will I tell you his name nor give you any hint, but it is true that there is big `head money` on him, and as a result of interrogations so far we are quite sure that through him we will be getting Osama bin Laden, or at least we will be around his sanctuary and be able to track his area of rotation. At present, we are completely in the dark."

The official believes that a breakthrough will come soon, but this carries problems. "After that [bin Laden`s apprehension] a new debate will start on whether Osama should be arrested in Pakistan`s tribal areas or not," said the official.

"I am not part of any strategic community, but my political acumen suggests that in the present drive we will find Osama bin Laden in our tribal areas, and I am sure we will soon ... we should try to push him to the other side of the border and then let US troops arrest him. He should not be arrested by or in Pakistan. Because if that happens, I tell you that the Pakistan army will lose its honor among the masses forever, and at the same time there would be retaliation against the government beyond our comprehension, and in that process anything is possible, real terrorism, bloodshed and even revolution," he continued.

Recalling his experience in dealing with the interrogation of the Uzbek, the official maintained that it had been "truly incredible".

"You can differ in ideologies, but it is difficult not to be impressed by conviction. We are politicians - compromise, retreat and lies are part of our business, but believe me, I passed one hour with that Uzbek and I admitted to myself some guilt - his unbreakable conviction for his cause was the reason.

"He was blindfolded, and when an interrogator served him a glass of water, he said, `Make sure that it is [served] with the right hand, and not the left hand.` [as per Muslim custom] He gave a full lecture on their cause, and said that he had no regrets that he had joined al-Qaeda. He even recognized me from my voice, as he said that he had often heard me on television, and advised that I should take care as soon everybody `would be accountable before Allah`.

"I am the person who is monitoring things very closely, and I see the arrest of bin Laden not very far away, this is the same opinion of the US authorities following al-Libbi`s arrest. But whether it will bury extremism once and for all, or spark it, is a different debate," the Pakistani functionary commented.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail]

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

[Joerver]

Die Geschäfte mit Osama.

Jun 3, 2005
Cashing in on Osama
By Richard S Ehrlich
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GF03Ae01.html

BANGKOK - The Osama bin Laden cigarette lighter is adorned with his raised, chrome portrait, an embossed "9-11", sketches of the New York World Trade Center, an approaching airplane, and a big red splotch. When you flick the sleek, metal lighter open, a light-emitting diode illuminates the splotch so it glows bright red on one of the buildings, emphasizing the site of the first crash. Loud, computerized music beeps out a loop of Mozart.

Made in China - as are many of the latest gimmicky Osama bin Laden souvenirs - the butane lighter recently showed up in Cambodia.

"I paid US$2 for it, in the old Soviet market in Phnom Penh," a Canadian traveler, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview after visiting the Cambodian capital. "One man`s catastrophe is another man`s cheesy souvenir," he said. "I bought three, for the novelty. I`ll give them to people who would appreciate the irony that they even exist. When you open it, it plays a classical tune. It`s quite freaky, eh?"
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The lighter came boxed with a gold-and-black cigarette holder, and was manufactured by Boerda Smoking Set Co Ltd. An Internet search indicated the Chinese company makes various lighters for domestic use and export.

In a crammed, middle-class shopping mall in Bangkok, other bin Laden souvenirs are also currently on sale. A Thai shop selling lava lamps, magic tricks and embarrassing gifts to surprise recipients, offers a small, inexpensive hand puppet of bin Laden wearing boxing gloves. Stick your fingers inside and wiggle them, and little Osama punches the air.

On Bangkok`s popular Khao San Road, where thousands of backpackers flock to cheap hotels, restaurants, discos and an avant garde street market, stalls sell droopy, rubbery bin Laden masks alongside other scary faces.

The souvenirs appear to be made not by bin Laden supporters, but by profit-seeking factories that have slapped bin Laden`s visage, and symbols of his international Islamist war, onto existing generic toys and other items in a crass effort to reach a fresh demographic of buyers.

While Asian customers often appear non-plussed or bored with the al-Qaeda leader`s appearance in their markets, many foreign tourists express shock and awe at the commercialization of the world`s most-wanted killer. Other tourists, including Americans, can be seen laughing with sarcastic delight at the cruel globalization of absurdity, despite the outrageous insult to bin Laden`s victims.

Thai clothing sellers cater to both sides by offering a high-quality T-shirt adorned with a reverently painted, color portraits of bin Laden; another hangar dangles a T-shirt with the al-Qaeda leader`s face targeted inside a red bull`s-eye. One common T-shirt in Thailand, which seems to attract mostly cynics and anti-right-wingers, is printed with the faces of bin Laden and President George W Bush side-by-side, and captioned, "CIA and FBI Presents: Twin Terrors".

"I bought one of the T-shirts of the Twin Terrors," said a snickering New Yorker who visited Bangkok`s tourist-friendly Patpong Road night market. "But I`m afraid of bringing it back to America. Can you imagine what customs might do to me if they find it in my luggage?"

Much bigger and more bizarre is a 15-inch (37-centimeter), battery-powered action figure of bin Laden. Its "Warfare Puppetry" box promises it "can dance and sing, hands can act, waist can wobble". The plastic bin Laden doll`s excited singing is reminiscent of India`s Bollywood film songs.
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Two fake, plastic hand grenades clip onto the figure`s vest. Five tiny, fake rockets, a pistol and a knife are stuffed into its pockets. The doll brandishes a plastic dagger in its right hand and waves a "V" - for victory - sign with its other. Long, gray, lifelike hair flows from its beard.

"Not suitable for children under 3-years-old due to the danger of tearing off and swallowing small parts," the box warns.

In October, French police demanded an investigation when the doll appeared in a Paris shop, amid allegations it was "apologizing for terrorism". The Paris police bust made headlines in Le Parisien magazine. Associated Press picked up the story and it was splashed worldwide, including in the Jerusalem Post.

Around the same time, the high-quality "action singer" doll also appeared in Bangkok`s so-called Arab Quarter, where dozens of Middle Eastern, African and South Asian restaurants, travel agencies, hotels, shops, shipping agencies and other businesses cater to Muslims and other visitors who enjoy its crammed lanes lined with signs in Arabic and other languages.

Selling for about $12, the bin Laden doll is often found next to a near-identical one of Saddam Hussein. Both figures are "Made in China". Their boxes show illustrations of four other dolls, similarly armed, including what appears to be a Palestinian guerrilla with its head wrapped in a black-and-white checkered scarf.

Another is a Caucasian wearing a white shirt and bright red tie under its weapons-heavy vest. A bigger picture shows the doll wearing a hat featuring the official seal of the US government - an eagle holding arrows and olive branches.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, a hand-held, "Laden vs USA" computerized game is available in Hanoi, Vietnam. The game includes photos of bin Laden wearing a white turban alongside a grimacing Bush. As one plays, using the game`s 10 white push-buttons, a matchbox-sized screen shows an image of one of the World Trade Towers exploding while a second airplane bursts into flames after hitting the other tower. The player`s low-flying airplane has to defend itself from attacks by jet bombers.

"The game is divided into 20 levels," the package explains. "What`s more, the inspiring music will play during the game." On sale for $5, it is similar to a Nintendo Game Boy but built by Panyu Gaming Electronic Co Ltd in China.

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California. He has reported news from Asia since 1978 and is co-author of Hello My Big Big Honey!, a non-fiction book of investigative journalism. He received a master`s degree from Columbia University`s Graduate School of Journalism.

(Copyright 2005 Richard S Ehrlich.)

[Joerver]

Vielleicht sollte Mr. Goss mal nach Kairo fliegen und dort auf den Friedhöfen nachschauen.
Das Interview mit Goss von Time:
[url10 Questions for Porter Goss]http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1074112,00.html[/url]

washingtonpost.com
Goss Says He Has `Idea` Where Bin Laden Is
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06…

Reuters
Tuesday, June 21, 2005; A02

CIA Director Porter J. Goss said that he has an "excellent" idea where Osama bin Laden is hiding but that the al Qaeda leader will not be brought to justice until weak links in counterterrorism efforts are strengthened, Time magazine reported Sunday.

Goss, in his first interview since becoming head of the CIA last year, did not say where he thinks bin Laden is hiding. But intelligence experts have said the al Qaeda leader, who has evaded an extensive U.S.-led manhunt, is probably in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I have an excellent idea of where he is. What`s the next question?" Goss said in the interview.

"In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we`re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice," Goss said. "We are making very good progress on it."

He cited some of the difficulties as "dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you`re dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play."

[Joerver]

Heute hat die NYTimes in ihrem Sonntagsmagazin Bin Laden als Thema unter dem Motto `Is bin Laden Winning?`
Dafür grabe ich meinen alten Thread wieder aus, auch weil die Artikel sehr lang sind und den Rahmen anderer Threads sprengen.

September 11, 2005
Lost at Tora Bora
By MARY ANNE WEAVER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11TORABORA.html


Well past midnight one morning in early December 2001, according to American intelligence officials, Osama bin Laden sat with a group of top aides - including members of his elite international 055 Brigade - in the mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. Outside, it was blustery and bitterly cold; many of the passes of the White Mountains, of which Tora Bora forms a part, were already blocked by snow. But inside the cave complex, where bin Laden had sought his final refuge from the American war in Afghanistan - a war in which Washington, that October, had struck back for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - bin Laden munched on olives and sipped sugary mint tea. He was dressed in his signature camouflage jacket, and a Kalashnikov rested by his side. Captured Qaeda fighters, interviewed separately, told American interrogators that they recalled an address that bin Laden had made to his followers shortly before dawn. It concerned martyrdom. American bombs, including a 15,000-pound "daisy cutter," were raining from the sky and pulverizing a number of the Tora Bora caves. And yet, one American intelligence official told me recently, if any one thing distinguished Osama bin Laden on that cold December day, it was the fact that the 44-year-old Saudi multimillionaire appeared to be supremely confident.

The first time bin Laden had seen the Tora Bora caves, he had been a young mujahedeen fighter and a recent university graduate with a degree in civil engineering. It had been some 20 years before, during Washington`s first Afghan war, the decade-long, C.I.A.-financed jihad of the 1980`s against the Soviet occupation. Rising to more than 13,000 feet, 35 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Jalalabad, Tora Bora was a fortress of snow-capped peaks, steep valleys and fortified caves. Its miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls, had been part of a C.I.A.-financed complex built for the mujahedeen. Bin Laden had flown in dozens of bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment from his father`s construction empire, the Saudi Binladin Group, one of the most prosperous construction companies in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Persian Gulf. According to one frequently told story, bin Laden would drive one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, constructing defensive tunnels and storage depots.

Indeed, by December 2001, when the final battle of Tora Bora took place, the cave complex had been so refined that it was said to have its own ventilation system and a power system created by a series of hydroelectric generators; bin Laden is believed to have designed the latter. Tora Bora`s walls and the floors of its hundreds of rooms were finished and smooth and extended some 350 yards into the granite mountain that enveloped them.
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Dec. 16, 2001 - Despite the Afghan and American assault on Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden escaped.
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Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign.


Yunis Khalis long worried that such a moment would arrive. A theologian and warrior of considerable repute, Khalis knew the Americans well: he had fought for them two decades before. And if there was one thing that the octogenarian leader knew, it was that he really didn`t like the Americans much at all. Nevertheless, as one head of the fratricidal alliance of Afghan resistance groups, he had accepted Washington`s largess, and over the years, as the war against the Soviet occupiers progressed, Khalis, among the seven resistance leaders, would receive the third-largest share of the more than $3 billion of weapons and funds that the C.I.A. invested in the jihad. As the godfather of Jalalabad, the capital of the province of Nangarhar, Khalis controlled a vast territory, including Tora Bora. It had been a key operational center for his fighters during the anti-Soviet war. And it was a key operational center for Osama bin Laden now. The caves were so close that Khalis could see them from the verandah of his sprawling stucco home.

One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. "They`re rugged, formidable and isolated," he said. "If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don`t, they`re a labyrinth that you can`t penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they had, but to absolutely no avail. Another reason they`re so important is their proximity to the border and to Pakistan" - less than 20 miles away.

Bin Laden knew the caves as well as Farivar and Khalis did. He had fought in nearby Jaji and Ali Khel and in the 1989 battle of Jalalabad. He knew every ridge and mountain pass, every C.I.A. trail. For this was the area where bin Laden had spent more than a decade of his life.

It was also during the war years that bin Laden first met Khalis; the two men became very close friends. Indeed, when bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in May 1996 from his base in the Sudan (after the United States insisted that the Sudanese government expel him), it was Khalis, along with two of his key commanders - Hajji Abdul Qadir and Engineer Mahmoud - who first invited him. And it was also Khalis who, later that year, would introduce bin Laden to the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who had fought with Khalis - and would later become his protégé - during the jihad.

"Khalis had an avuncular interest in bin Laden," Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.`s bin Laden unit and the author of "Imperial Hubris," told me recently when we met at a Washington coffeehouse. "Osama lost his father when he was young, and Khalis became a substitute father figure to him. As far as Khalis was concerned, he considered Osama the perfect Islamic youth."

Bin Laden, along with his four wives and 20-some children, moved into the well-fortified Khalis family compound nine years ago and then to a farm on the outskirts of Jalalabad. But shortly thereafter, Engineer Mahmoud was assassinated, and there were two assassination attempts against bin Laden, too. "They were both very crude," Scheuer said, "and they smacked of the Saudis" - who had earlier tried to assassinate bin Laden in Khartoum. "As a result, bin Laden wanted to move away from the main road. So Khalis gave him two of his fighting positions in the mountains - Tora Bora and Milawa. Bin Laden immediately began to customize and rebuild the two: Tora Bora for his family and his key aides; Milawa for his fighters and as a command center and logistics hub. By the time bin Laden moved to Kandahar" - then a Taliban stronghold - "in May of 1997, the two mountain redoubts had been completely refurbished and modernized: they were there, just waiting for him in 2001."

Some six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly two weeks after the bombing of Afghanistan began on Oct. 7, American military leaders - who had no off-the-shelf invasion plans, not even an outline, for Afghanistan - finally succeeded in getting the first forces in: a 12-man Special Forces A-team helicoptered in from Uzbekistan to the Panjshir Valley. There they joined forces with the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia that controlled only 10 percent of Afghanistan but to whom Washington delegated the ground war. The view prevailing among senior American military leaders was that overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash and surrogate militias could win the war. The intricacies of Afghan tribal life appeared to elude everyone.

In late October or early November, according to Scheuer, American operatives went to see Khalis to seek his support. "Khalis said that he was retired and doing nothing now," Scheuer told me. "It was the last time" American intelligence officials saw him. "It was so bizarre! Didn`t anybody know about Khalis`s friendship with bin Laden? Or that Khalis was the only one of the seven mujahedeen leaders who remained neutral about, and sometimes even supported, the Taliban?" He shook his head and then went on: "And even after Sept. 11, indeed in spite of it, as soon as our bombing of Afghanistan began, Khalis issued a well-publicized call for jihad against U.S. forces in Afghanistan."

When Khalis turned the Americans down, Special Forces troops recruited two of his former commanders. They made an unlikely couple: Hazarat Ali and Hajji Zaman. The former, with just a fourth-grade education, was barely literate, a bully and unrefined; the other was a wealthy drug smuggler, fluent in English and French, and a polished raconteur who was lured back to Afghanistan from his exile in France by the United States. Both were schemers who had come of age on the battlefields of the anti-Soviet war, Ali as a teenager in Tora Bora and Zaman in Jalalabad. Ali had joined the Taliban for a time, then moved north and embraced the Northern Alliance; Zaman had supported neither, and when the Taliban came to power, he chose exile. Ali owed his rise largely to the Pentagon, which ultimately enlisted him to lead the ground battle in the Tora Bora caves; Zaman, a Pashtun leader and member of the Khugyani Tribe, had his own base of support, something that Ali, a member of a minor, non-Pashtun tribal grouping, lacked.

A third militia leader - less experienced but of more distinguished pedigree - who would bring his forces to Tora Bora was Hajji Zahir, the 27-year-old somewhat skittish son of Hajji Abdul Qadir, Yunis Khalis`s former military commander and one of the three men who had welcomed bin Laden when he returned to Afghanistan. Indeed, as the Americans were recruiting his son, Hajji Abdul Qadir was about to reclaim the governorship of Nangarhar Province, a post he had relinquished when the Taliban arrived, in a power transfer Khalis and bin Laden would help to consummate.

Bin Laden had returned to Jalalabad on or about Nov. 10, a U.S. intelligence official told me recently, and that same afternoon, according to a March 4, 2002, report in The Christian Science Monitor, he gave a fiery speech at the Jalalabad Islamic studies center - as American bombs exploded nearby - to a thousand or so regional tribal leaders, vowing that if united they could teach the Americans "a lesson, the same one we taught the Russians" when many of the chieftains had fought in America`s first Afghan war. Dressed in a gray shalwar kameez, the long shirt and bloused trousers favored in Afghanistan, and his camouflage jacket, bin Laden held a small Kalakov, a shorter version of the Kalashnikov, in his hand. As the crowd began to shout "Zindibad [Long live] Osama," the leader of Al Qaeda moved through the banquet hall dispensing white envelopes, some bulky, some thin, the thickness proportionate to the number of extended families under each leader`s command. Lesser chieftains, according to those present, received the equivalent of $300 in Pakistani rupees; leaders of larger clans, up to $10,000.

Bin Laden really didn`t have to buy the loyalty of the Pashtun tribal chiefs; they were already devoted to him. He was, after all, the only non-Afghan Muslim of any consequence in the past half-century who had stood with the Afghans. But on that November afternoon, and on the nights that followed it, as bin Laden began to lay the groundwork for his escape from the Tora Bora caves, the elusive Qaeda leader was determined to be absolutely sure.

The following evening, or the evening after, bin Laden, according to an Afghan intelligence official, dined in Jalalabad with other Pashtun tribal chiefs from Parachinar, Pakistan, an old military outpost I first visited nearly 20 years before. Parachinar had been a key staging area for the C.I.A. during the jihad, and its tribal leaders had profited immensely. A picturesque town in the Kurram Valley, Parachinar was also Pakistan`s first line of defense against any Afghan incursion. Beyond it lie only the White Mountains - and the caves of Tora Bora - and desolate stretches of no man`s land.

The last time bin Laden was seen in Jalalabad was the evening of Nov. 13, when he, along with Khalis`s son, Mujahid Ullah, and other tribal leaders negotiated a peaceful hand-over of power from the Taliban to a caretaker government. Under its terms, Khalis would take temporary control of the city until the formation of a newly appointed U.S.-backed government. He, of course, made certain that the Eastern Shura, as the government is called, was stacked with men who owed their loyalty to him. Hajji Abdul Qadir, his former military commander, became Nangarhar Province`s governor again.

Bin Laden`s Arab fighters had used Jalalabad as a base and as a command center for a number of years, and now they dispersed, loading their weapons and their clothing, their children and their wives into the backs of several hundred lorries, armored vehicles and four-wheel-drive trucks. Some Taliban fighters followed suit. Others disappeared, removing their signature black turbans and returning to their villages and towns.

As the convoy was being readied, bin Laden said his goodbyes: to the Taliban governor; to Mujahid Ullah, Khalis`s son; and to scores of the tribal leaders who had received his white envelopes three days before. He was dressed now as he had been dressed then and cradled his Kalakov, even though he was surrounded by some 60 armed guards.

Then he entered a custom-designed white Toyota Corolla, and the convoy sped away toward the mountains of Tora Bora, where he waited for the Americans to arrive.

By late November, Hazarat Ali, Hajji Zaman and Hajji Zahir had assembled a motley force of some 2,500 men - supplemented by a fleet of battered Russian tanks - at the base of Tora Bora. The Afghans were ill equipped and poorly trained. They also lacked the commitment that bin Laden`s fighters had. Hidden from view at 5,000 feet and above in the scores of valleys, forests and caves, the Qaeda fighters not only had the tremendous advantage of the terrain; their redoubts were replete with generators, electricity and heat and copious stocks of provisions. Snow covered the mountain, and it was bitterly cold. The Afghan fighters at its base grumbled and quarreled endlessly. It was also the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and some of the Afghans had the irritating tendency to leave their posts and return home to celebrate iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast.

Perhaps more ominous was the growing antipathy between Hazarat Ali and Hajji Zaman: both ruthless, both greedy, both corrupt, both flashing fistfuls of new $100 bills - one a Pashtun, the other not. Their mutual loathing became so intense that on more than one occasion they and their fighters, instead of fighting Al Qaeda, shot each other`s men.

The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden`s commanders to abandon Tora Bora. Three days later, on Dec. 3, in one of the war`s more shambolic moments, Hazarat Ali announced that the ground offensive would begin. Word quickly spread through the villages and towns, and hundreds of ill-prepared men rushed to the mountain`s base. The timing of the call to war was so unexpected that Hajji Zahir, one of its three lead commanders, told journalists at the time that he nearly slept through it.

On a map, it was little more than a mile from the bottom of the White Mountains to the first tier of the Qaeda caves, but the snow was thick and the slopes were steep and, for the Afghan fighters, it was a three-hour climb. They were ambushed nearly as soon as they arrived. The battle lasted for only 10 minutes before bin Laden`s fighters disappeared up the slope and the Afghans limped away. Over the coming days, a pattern would emerge: the Afghans would strike, then retreat. On some occasions, a cave would change hands twice in one day. It was only on the third day of the battle that the three dozen Special Forces troops arrived. But their mission was strictly limited to assisting and advising and calling in air strikes, according to the orders of Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, who was running the war from his headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

Even after the arrival of the Special Forces, the Afghan militias were making little headway in their efforts to assault the Qaeda caves - largely as a result of heavier resistance than they had expected - despite having launched simultaneous attacks from the east, west and north. They had sent none of their forces to the south, where the highest peaks of the White Mountains are bisected by the border with Pakistan. The commanders, according to news reports, argued vehemently among themselves on what the conditions on the southern side of the mountain were: some insisted it was uncrossable, closed in by snow; other commanders were far less sure.

By now, the Taliban`s stronghold in Kandahar had fallen or, more correctly, had been abandoned by the soldiers of the regime. The Taliban retreat from Kandahar was emblematic of the war. None of Afghanistan`s cities had been won by force alone. Taliban fighters, after intense bombing, had simply made strategic withdrawals. A number of American officers were now convinced that this was about to happen at Tora Bora, too.

One of them was Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of some 4,000 marines who had arrived in the Afghan theater by now. Mattis, along with another officer with whom I spoke, was convinced that with these numbers he could have surrounded and sealed off bin Laden`s lair, as well as deployed troops to the most sensitive portions of the largely unpatrolled border with Pakistan. He argued strongly that he should be permitted to proceed to the Tora Bora caves. The general was turned down. An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration later concluded that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the marines - along with their failure to commit U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan generally - was the gravest error of the war.

A week or so after General Mattis`s request was denied, the turning point in the battle of Tora Bora came. It was Dec. 12. Hajji Zaman had by now realized that the Qaeda fighters were better armed than his men and that they were also prepared to die rather than surrender to him. He was also becoming increasingly irritated with Hazarat Ali and with the snow. And in a few days the feast of Eid al-Fitr, which ends Ramadan, would begin. The stalemate, the Americans` surrogate commander decided, simply had to end. So, through a series of intermediaries and then directly, Hajji Zaman made radio contact with some of bin Laden`s commanders and offered a cease-fire. The Americans were furious. The negotiations - to which Hazarat Ali acquiesced since he, too, was now holding secret talks with Al Qaeda - continued for hours. By the time they came to an end, Hajji Zaman`s interlocutor, hidden somewhere in the caves above, was probably bin Laden`s son Salah Uddin. If the Qaeda forces surrendered, Hajji Zaman`s contact said, it would be only to the United Nations. Then he requested additional time to meet with other commanders. He would be back in touch by 8 the following morning, the younger bin Laden said.

American intelligence officials now believe that some 800 Qaeda fighters escaped Tora Bora that night. Others had already left; still others stayed behind, including bin Laden. "You`ve got to give him credit," Gary Schroen, a former C.I.A. officer who led the first American paramilitary team into Afghanistan in 2001, told me. "He stayed in Tora Bora until the bitter end." By the time the Afghan militias advanced to the last of the Tora Bora caves, no one of any significance remained: about 20 bedraggled young men were taken prisoner that day, Dec. 17.

On or about Dec. 16, 2001, according to American intelligence estimates, bin Laden left Tora Bora for the last time, accompanied by bodyguards and aides. Other Qaeda leaders dispersed by different routes, but bin Laden and his men are believed to have journeyed on horseback directly south toward Pakistan, crossing through the same mountain passes and over the same little-known smugglers` trails through which the C.I.A.`s convoys passed during the jihad years. And all along the route, in the dozens of villages and towns on both sides of the frontier, the Pashtun tribes would have lighted campfires along the way to guide the horsemen as they slowly continued through the snow and on toward the old Pakistani military outpost of Parachinar.

TTora Bora was the one time after the 9/11 attacks when United States operatives were confident they knew precisely where Osama bin Laden was and could have captured or killed him. Some have argued that it was Washington`s last chance; others say that although it will be considerably more difficult now, bin Laden is not beyond our reach. But the stakes are considerably higher than they were nearly four years ago, and terrain and political sensibilities are far more our natural enemies now.

There is no indication that bin Laden ever left Pakistan after he crossed the border that snowy December night; nor is there any indication that he ever left the country`s Pashtun tribal lands, moving from Parachinar to Waziristan, then north into Mohmand and Bajaur, one American intelligence official told me. The areas are among the most remote and rugged on earth, and they are vast. Had bin Laden been surrounded at Tora Bora, he would have been confined to an area of several dozen square miles; now he could well be in an area that snakes across some 40,000 square miles.

Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don`t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader`s location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped.

The document`s release came at a particularly delicate time for the United States. A newly resurgent Taliban was on the rise. Its attacks on American forces - launched from Pakistan, according to Afghan officials - were more lethal, better organized and more widespread than at any time since the war against terror began. And President Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan who is ostensibly our key ally in that war, had, to a growing extent, become an ally on his own terms. It was only in the last days of July that he once again committed himself to embark on a campaign against his country`s Islamic militants. And this was only as a result of suggestions that there were Pakistani links to the bombings that month in London and the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

At the same time, to Musharraf`s irritation, reports surfaced again - from Indian and Afghan officials, Taliban prisoners and opposition politicians in Pakistan - of terrorist training camps in the Mansehra district of northern Pakistan and the restive southern province of Baluchistan. There, the provincial capital of Quetta had, for all intents and purposes, become a Taliban town. Black-turbaned Talibs swaggered through its bazaars, photographs of bin Laden and Taliban banners adorned its muddy lanes and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar was believed to be in residence.

I puzzled over whether Musharraf`s new determination would include finally becoming serious about the hunt for bin Laden. No one to whom I spoke was at all convinced. A few weeks earlier, I had asked George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an expert on South Asian security issues, what he thought about Musharraf`s commitment to the search generally. "For me, the outstanding question is, At the highest levels in Islamabad is there a conviction that capturing or killing bin Laden would be good for the leadership of Pakistan?" Perkovich replied. "And given the answer to that question, how hard are they willing to try? And can they afford to be seen as being solidly on America`s side? I think Musharraf also worries about whether or not Washington will stay the course. Therefore, he`s got to keep the Americans online: hold back something that they want. And, in that respect, Osama could be seen as an insurance policy for them."

According to Gary Schroen, the former C.I.A. officer, "We`re never going to get bin Laden without the total cooperation of Pakistan, and there`s a lot more they could do."

"Such as?" I asked.

"Winning over their military is imperative," he said. "We`ve got to convince them that it`s in their interest to bring bin Laden in. And that means allowing us to send Special Forces and C.I.A. teams, in sufficient numbers, into the northern areas with the ability to move around, to establish networks on the ground. We`ve also got to refocus U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan in order to have coordinated military operations between the two sides of the frontier." He paused and said, "It`s all up to the Pakistanis now."

"How would this affect Musharraf if he agreed?" I asked.

He thought for a moment, and then he replied, "If his hand was ever seen as the one that turned bin Laden over, he wouldn`t be able to survive."

Dec. 16, 2001: Despite the Afghan and American assault on Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden escaped.

#photograph by erik de castro/reuters/corbis

Mary Anne Weaver, who has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Council on Foreign Relations fellow this year, is the author of "Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Das ist der 2.Artikel aus dem heutigen NYTimes-Magazine!

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September 11, 2005
Taking Stock of the Forever War
By MARK DANNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11OSAMA.html?page…

I. Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man`s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven. The demise of the World Trade Center gave us an image as newborn to the world of sight as the mushroom cloud must have appeared to those who first cast eyes on it. I recall vividly the seconds flowing by as I sat gaping at the screen, uncomprehending and unbelieving, while Peter Jennings`s urbane, perfectly modulated voice murmured calmly on about flights being grounded, leaving unacknowledged and unexplained - unconfirmed - the incomprehensible scene unfolding in real time before our eyes. "Hang on there a second," the famously unflappable Jennings finally stammered - the South Tower had by now vanished into a boiling caldron of white smoke - "I just want to check one thing. . .because. . .we now have.. . .What do we have? We don`t. . .?" Marveling later that "the most powerful image was the one I actually didn`t notice while it was occurring," Jennings would say simply that "it was beyond our imagination."

Looking back from this moment, precisely four years later, it still seems almost inconceivable that 10 men could have done that - could have brought those towers down. Could have imagined doing what was "beyond our imagination." When a few days later, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen remarked that this was "the greatest work of art in the history of the cosmos," I shared the anger his words called forth but couldn`t help sensing their bit of truth: "What happened there - spiritually - this jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life, that happens sometimes poco a poco in art." No "little by little" here: however profoundly evil the art, the sheer immensity and inconceivability of the attack had forced Americans instantaneously to "jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life" and had thrust them through a portal into a strange and terrifying new world, where the inconceivable, the unimaginable, had become brutally possible.
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From top: New York, Sept. 11., 2001;
Madrid, March 11, 2004;
Kirkuk, June 28, 2005;
London, July 7, 2005.
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In the face of the unimaginable, small wonder that leaders would revert to the language of apocalypse, of crusade, of "moral clarity." Speaking at the National Cathedral just three days after the attacks, President Bush declared that while "Americans do not yet have the distance of history. . .our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Astonishing words - imaginable, perhaps, only from an American president, leading a people given naturally in times of crisis to enlisting national power in the cause of universal redemption. "The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology," declared the National Security Strategy of the United States of America for 2002. "The enemy is terrorism - premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." Not Islamic terrorism or Middle Eastern terrorism or even terrorism directed against the United States: terrorism itself. "Declaring war on `terror,"` as one military strategist later remarked to me, "is like declaring war on air power." It didn`t matter; apocalypse, retribution, redemption were in the air, and the grandeur of the goal must be commensurate with the enormity of the crime. Within days of the attacks, President Bush had launched a "global war on terror."

Today marks four years of war. Four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. troops ruled unchallenged in Japan and Germany. During those 48 months, Americans created an unmatched machine of war and decisively defeated two great enemies.

How are we to judge the global war on terror four years on? In this war, the president had warned, "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign." We could expect no "surrender ceremony on a deck of a battleship," and indeed, apart from the president`s abortive attempt on the U.S.S. Lincoln to declare victory in Iraq, there has been none. Failing such rituals of capitulation, by what "metric" - as the generals say - can we measure the progress of the global war on terror?

Four years after the collapse of the towers, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. Terrorists have staged spectacular attacks, killing thousands, in Tunisia, Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Istanbul, Casablanca, Jakarta, Madrid, Sharm el Sheik and London, to name only the best known. Last year, they mounted 651 "significant terrorist attacks," triple the year before and the highest since the State Department started gathering figures two decades ago. One hundred ninety-eight of these came in Iraq, Bush`s "central front of the war on terror" - nine times the year before. And this does not include the hundreds of attacks on U.S. troops. It is in Iraq, which was to serve as the first step in the "democratization of the Middle East," that insurgents have taken terrorism to a new level, killing well over 4,000 people since April in Baghdad alone; in May, Iraq suffered 90 suicide-bombings. Perhaps the "shining example of democracy" that the administration promised will someday come, but for now Iraq has become a grotesque advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror.

As for the "terrorist groups of global reach," Al Qaeda, according to the president, has been severely wounded. "We`ve captured or killed two-thirds of their known leaders," he said last year. And yet however degraded Al Qaeda`s operational capacity, nearly every other month, it seems, Osama bin Laden or one of his henchmen appears on the world`s television screens to expatiate on the ideology and strategy of global jihad and to urge followers on to more audacious and more lethal efforts. This, and the sheer number and breadth of terrorist attacks, suggest strongly that Al Qaeda has now become Al Qaedaism - that under the American and allied assault, what had been a relatively small, conspiratorial organization has mutated into a worldwide political movement, with thousands of followers eager to adopt its methods and advance its aims. Call it viral Al Qaeda, carried by strongly motivated next-generation followers who download from the Internet`s virtual training camp a perfectly adequate trade-craft in terror. Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The answer is clearly no. "We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer."

What has helped those little bits of quicksilver grow and flourish is, above all, the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, which has left the United States bogged down in a brutal, highly visible counterinsurgency war in the heart of the Arab world. Iraq has become a training ground that will temper and prepare the next generation of jihadist terrorists and a televised stage from which the struggle of radical Islam against the "crusader forces" can be broadcast throughout the Islamic world. "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," Porter J. Goss, director of the C.I.A., told the Senate in February. "These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in, and focused on, acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

As the Iraq war grows increasingly unpopular in the United States - scarcely a third of Americans now approve of the president`s handling of the war, and 4 in 10 think it was worth fighting - and as more and more American leaders demand that the administration "start figuring out how we get out of there" (in the words of Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican), Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror`s "central front."

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in "ridding the world of evil." We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished - as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show - by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.

II. Facing what is beyond imagination, you find sense in the familiar. Standing before Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, George W. Bush told Americans why they had been attacked. "They hate our freedoms," the president declared. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." As for Al Qaeda`s fundamentalist religious mission: "We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history`s unmarked grave of discarded lies."

Stirring words, and effective, for they domesticated the unthinkable in the categories of the accustomed. The terrorists are only the latest in a long line of "evildoers." Like the Nazis and the Communists before them, they are Americans` evil twins: tyrants to our free men, totalitarians to our democrats. The world, after a confusing decade, had once again split in two. However disorienting the horror of the attacks, the "war on terror" was simply a reprise of the cold war. As Harry S. Truman christened the cold war by explaining to Americans how, "at the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life," George W. Bush declared his global war on terror by insisting that "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." The echo, as much administration rhetoric since has shown, was not coincidental. Terrorists, like Communists, despised America not because of what our country did but because of who we are. Hating "our values" and "our freedoms," the evildoers were depicted as deeply irrational and committed to a nihilistic philosophy of obliteration, reawakening for Americans the sleeping image of the mushroom cloud. "This is not aimed at our policies," Henry Kissinger intoned. "This is aimed at our existence."

Such rhetoric not only fell easily on American ears. It provided a familiar context for a disoriented national-security bureaucracy that had been created to fight the cold war and was left, at its ending, without clear purpose. "Washington policy and defense cultures still seek out cold-war models," as members of the Defense Science Board, a Defense Department task force commissioned to examine the war on terror, observed in a report last year. "With the surprise announcement of a new struggle, the U.S. government reflexively inclined toward cold-war-style responses to the new threat, without a thought or a care as to whether these were the best responses to a very different strategic situation."

Al Qaeda was not the Nazis or the Soviet Communists. Al Qaeda controlled no state, fielded no regular army. It was a small, conspiratorial organization, dedicated to achieving its aims through guerrilla tactics, notably a kind of spectacular terrorism carried to a level of apocalyptic brutality the world had not before seen. Mass killing was the necessary but not the primary aim, for the point of such terror was to mobilize recruits for a political cause - to move sympathizers to act - and to tempt the enemy into reacting in such a way as to make that mobilization easier. And however extreme and repugnant Al Qaeda`s methods, its revolutionary goals were by no means unusual within Islamist opposition groups throughout the Muslim world. "If there is one overarching goal they share," wrote the authors of the Defense Science Board report, "it is the overthrow of what Islamists call the `apostate` regimes: the tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and the gulf states.. . .The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward - and potentially dangerous - situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the U.S., these regimes could not survive. Thus the U.S. has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle that is both broadly cast for all Muslims and country-specific."

The broad aim of the many-stranded Salafi movement, which includes the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and of which Al Qaeda is one extreme version, is to return Muslims to the ancient ways of pure Islam - of Islam as it was practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers in the seventh century. Standing between the more radical Salafi groups and their goal of a conservative Islamic revolution are the "apostate regimes," the "idolators" now ruling in Riyadh, Cairo, Amman, Islamabad and other Muslim capitals. All these authoritarian regimes oppress their people: on this point Al Qaeda and those in the Bush administration who promote "democratization in the Arab world" agree. Many of the Salafists, however, see behind the "near enemies" ruling over them a "far enemy" in Washington, a superpower without whose financial and military support the Mubarak regime, the Saudi royal family and the other conservative autocracies of the Arab world would fall before their attacks. When the United States sent hundreds of thousands of American troops to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Al Qaeda seized on the perfect issue: the "far enemy" had actually come and occupied the Land of the Two Holy Places and done so at the shameful invitation of the "near enemy" - the corrupt Saudi dynasty. As bin Laden observed of the Saudis in his 1996 "Declaration of Jihad": "This situation is a curse put on them by Allah for not objecting to the oppressive and illegitimate behavior and measures of the ruling regime: ignoring the divine Shariah law; depriving people of their legitimate rights; allowing the Americans to occupy the Land of the Two Holy Places."

But how to "re-establish the greatness of this Ummah" - the Muslim people - "and to liberate its occupied sanctities"? On this bin Laden is practical and frank: because of "the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, i.e., using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy. In other words, to initiate a guerrilla warfare." Such warfare, depending on increasingly spectacular acts of terrorism, would be used to "prepare and instigate the Ummah. . .against the enemy." The notion of "instigation," indeed, is critical, for the purpose of terror is not to destroy your enemy directly but rather to spur on your sleeping allies to enlightenment, to courage and to action. It is a kind of horrible advertisement, meant to show those millions of Muslims who sympathize with Al Qaeda`s view of American policy that something can be done to change it.

III. Fundamentalist Islamic thought took aim at America`s policies, not at its existence. Americans tend to be little interested in these policies or their history and thus see the various Middle East cataclysms of the last decades as sudden, unrelated explosions lighting up a murky and threatening landscape, reinforcing the sense that the 9/11 attacks were not only deadly and appalling but also irrational, incomprehensible: that they embodied pure evil. The central strand of American policy - unflinching support for the conservative Sunni regimes of the Persian Gulf - extends back 60 years, to a legendary meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Saud aboard an American cruiser in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt. The American president and the Saudi king agreed there on a simple bond of interest: the Saudis, rulers over a sparsely populated but incalculably wealthy land, would see their power guaranteed against all threats, internal and external. In return, the United States could count on a stable supply of oil, developed and pumped by American companies. This policy stood virtually unthreatened for more than three decades.

The eruption of Iran`s Islamic revolution in 1978 dealt a blow to this compact of interests and cast in relief its central contradictions. The shah, who owed his throne to a covert C.I.A. intervention that returned him to power in 1953, had been a key American ally in the gulf, and the Islamic revolution that swept him from power showed at work what was to become a familiar dynamic: "friendly" autocrats ruling over increasingly impatient and angry peoples who evidence resentment if not outright hostility toward the superpower ally, in whom they see the ultimate source of their own repression.

Iran`s Islamic revolution delivered a body blow to the Middle East status quo not unlike that landed by the French Revolution on the European autocratic order two centuries before; it was ideologically aggressive, inherently expansionist and deeply threatening to its neighbors - in this case, to the United States` Sunni allies, many of whom had substantial Shia minorities, and to Iraq, which, though long ruled by Sunnis, had a substantial Shia majority. Ayatollah Khomeini`s virulent and persistent calls for Saddam Hussein`s overthrow, and the turmoil that had apparently weakened the Iranian armed forces, tempted Saddam Hussein to send his army to attack Iran in 1980. American policy makers looked on this with favor, seeing in the bloody Iran-Iraq war the force that would blunt the revolutionary threat to America`s allies. Thus President Reagan sent his special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983 to parlay with Hussein, and thus the administration supported the dictator with billions of dollars of agricultural credits, supplied the Iraqis with hundreds of millions of dollars in advanced weaponry through Egypt and Saudi Arabia and provided Hussein`s army with satellite intelligence that may have been used to direct chemical weapons against the massed infantry charges of Iranian suicide brigades.

The Iraqis fought the Iranians to a standstill but not before ripples from Iran`s revolution threatened to overwhelm American allies, notably the Saudi dynasty, whose rule was challenged by radicals seizing control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979, and the Egyptian autocracy, whose ruler, Anwar el-Sadat, was assassinated by Islamists as he presided over a military parade in October 1981. The Saudis managed to put down the revolt, killing hundreds. The Egyptians, under Hosni Mubarak, moved with ruthless efficiency to suppress the Islamists, jailing and torturing thousands, among them Osama bin Laden`s current deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Merciless repression by both autocracies` effective security services led thousands to flee abroad.

Many went to Afghanistan, which the Soviet Red Army occupied in 1979 to prop up its own tottering client, then under threat from Islamic insurgents - mujahedeen, or "holy warriors," who were being armed by the United States. "It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter`s national security adviser, recalled in 1998. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." It was a strategy of provocation, for the gambit had the effect of "drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.. . .The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam War."

If, to the Americans, supporting the Afghan mujahedeen seemed an excellent way to bleed the Soviet Union, to the Saudis and other Muslim regimes, supporting a "defensive jihad" to free occupied Muslim lands was a means to burnish their tarnished Islamic credentials while exporting a growing and dangerous resource (frustrated, radical young men) so they would indulge their taste for pious revolution far from home. Among the thousands of holy warriors making this journey was the wealthy young Saudi Osama bin Laden, who would set up the Afghan Services Bureau, a "helping organization" for Arab fighters that gathered names and contact information in a large database - or "qaeda" - which would eventually lend its name to an entirely new organization. Though the Afghan operation was wildly successful, as judged by its American creators - "What is most important to the history of the world?" Brzezinski said in 1998, "some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" - it had at least one unexpected result: it created a global jihad movement, led by veteran fighters who were convinced that they had defeated one superpower and could defeat another.

The present jihad took shape in the backwash of forgotten wars. After the Soviet Army withdrew in defeat, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, leaving the mujahedeen forces to battle for the ruined country in an eight-year blood bath from which the Taliban finally emerged victorious. In the gulf, after eight years of fantastically bloody combat, Saddam Hussein forced the Iranians to sign a cease-fire, a "victory" that left his regime heavily armed, bloodied and bankrupt. To pay for his war, Hussein had borrowed tens of billions of dollars from the Saudis, Kuwaitis and other neighbors, and he now demanded that these debts be forgiven - he had incurred them, as he saw it, defending the lenders from Khomeini - and that oil prices be raised. The Kuwaitis` particularly aggressive refusal to do either led Hussein, apparently believing that the Americans would accept a fait accompli, to invade and annex the country.

The Iraqi Army flooding into Kuwait represented, to bin Laden, the classic opportunity. He rushed to see the Saudi leaders, proposing that he defend the kingdom with his battle-tested corps of veteran holy warriors. The Saudis listened patiently to the pious young man - his father, after all, had been one of the kingdom`s richest men - but did not take him seriously. Within a week, King Fahd had agreed to the American proposal, carried by Richard Cheney, then the secretary of defense, to station American soldiers - "infidel armies" - in the Land of the Two Holy Places. This momentous decision led to bin Laden`s final break with the Saudi dynasty.

The American presence, and the fatal decision to leave American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia as a trip wire or deterrent even after Hussein had been defeated, provided bin Laden with a critical propaganda point, for it gave to his worldview, of a Muslim world under relentless attack, and its central argument, that the "unjust and renegade ruling regimes" of the Islamic world were in fact "enslaved by the United States," a concrete and vivid reality. The "near enemies" and their ruthless security services had proved resistant to direct assault, and the time had come to confront directly the one antagonist able to bring together all the jihadists in a single great battle: the "far enemy" across the sea.

IV. The deaths of nearly 3,000 people, the thousands left behind to mourn them, the great plume hanging over Lower Manhattan carrying the stench of the vaporized buildings and their buried dead: mass murder of the most abominable, cowardly kind appears to be so at the heart of what happened on this day four years ago that it seems beyond grotesque to remind ourselves that for the attackers those thousands of dead were only a means to an end. Not the least disgusting thing about terrorism is that it makes objects of human beings, makes use of them, exploits their deaths as a means to accomplish something else: to send a message, to force a concession, to advertise a cause. Though such cold instrumentality is not unknown in war - large-scale bombing of civilians, "terror bombing," as it used to be known, does much the same thing - terrorism`s ruthless and intimate randomness seems especially appalling.

Terror is a way of talking. Those who employed it so unprecedentedly on 9/11 were seeking not just the large-scale killing of Americans but to achieve something by means of the large-scale killing of Americans. Not just large-scale, it should be added: spectacular.

The asymmetric weapons that the 19 terrorists used on 9/11 were not only the knives and box cutters they brandished or the fuel-laden airliners they managed to commandeer but, above all, that most American of technological creations: the television set. On 9/11, the jihadists used this weapon with great determination and ruthlessness to attack the most powerful nation in the history of the world at its point of greatest vulnerability: at the level of spectacle. They did it by creating an image, to repeat Peter Jennings`s words, "beyond our imagination."

The goal, first and foremost, was to diminish American prestige - showing that the superpower could be bloodied, that for all its power, its defeat was indeed conceivable. All the major attacks preceding 9/11 attributed at least in part to Al Qaeda - the shooting down of U.S. Army helicopters in Mogadishu in 1993, the truck-bombing of American military housing at Khobar in 1996, the car-bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, the suicide-bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden in 2000 - were aimed at the same goal: to destroy the aura of American power. Power, particularly imperial power, rests not on its use but on its credibility; U.S. power in the Middle East depends not on ships and missiles but on the certainty that the United States is invincible and stands behind its friends. The jihadis used terrorism to create a spectacle that would remove this certainty. They were by no means the first guerrilla group to adopt such a strategy. "History and our observation persuaded us," recalled Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister who used terror with great success to drive the British out of Palestine during the mid-1940`s, "that if we could succeed in destroying the government`s prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would follow automatically. Thenceforward, we gave no peace to this weak spot. Throughout all the years of our uprising, we hit at the British government`s prestige, deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly." In its most spectacular act, in July 1946, the Irgun guerrilla forces led by Begin bombed the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, most of them civilians.

The 9/11 attacks were a call to persuade Muslims who might share bin Laden`s broad view of American power to sympathize with, support or even join the jihad he had declared against the "far enemy." "Those young men," bin Laden said of the terrorists two months after the attacks, "said in deeds, in New York and Washington, speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs - even by Chinese.. . .(I)n Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last 11 years." To this, a sheik in a wheelchair shown in the videotape replies: "Hundreds of people used to doubt you, and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you." Grotesque as it is to say, the spectacle of 9/11 was meant to serve, among other things, as an enormous recruiting poster.

But recruitment to what? We should return here to the lessons of Afghanistan, not only the obvious one of the defeat of a powerful Soviet Army by guerrilla forces but the more subtle one taught by the Americans, who by clever use of covert aid to the Afghan resistance tempted the Soviets to invade the country and thereby drew "the Russians into an Afghan trap." Bin Laden seems to have hoped to set in motion a similar strategy. According to a text attributed to Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Army colonel now generally identified as bin Laden`s military chief, "the ultimate objective was to prompt" the United States "to come out of its hole" and take direct military action in an Islamic country. "What we had wished for actually happened. It was crowned by the announcement of Bush Jr. of his crusade against Islam and Muslims everywhere." ("This is a new kind of evil," the president said five days after the attacks, "and we understand. . .this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.")

The 9/11 attacks seem to have been intended at least in part to provoke an overwhelming American response: most likely an invasion of Afghanistan, which would lead the United States, like the Soviet Union before it, into an endless, costly and politically fatal quagmire. Thus, two days before the attacks, Qaeda agents posing as television journalists taping an interview murdered Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, with a bomb concealed in a video camera - apparently a pre-emptive strike intended to throw into confusion the United States` obvious ally in the coming invasion of Afghanistan.

For the jihadists, luring the Americans into Afghanistan would accomplish at least two things: by drawing the United States into a protracted guerrilla war in which the superpower would occupy a Muslim country and kill Muslim civilians - with the world media, including independent Arab networks like Al Jazeera, broadcasting the carnage - it would leave increasingly isolated those autocratic Muslim regimes that depended for their survival on American support. And by forcing the United States to prosecute a long, costly and inconclusive guerrilla war, it would severely test, and ultimately break, American will, leading to a collapse of American prestige and an eventual withdrawal - first, physically, from Afghanistan and then, politically, from the "apostate regimes" in Riyadh, Cairo and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

In his "Declaration of Jihad" in 1996, bin Laden focused on American political will as the United States` prime vulnerability, the enemy`s "center of gravity" that his guerrilla war must target and destroy. "The defense secretary of the crusading Americans had said that `the explosions at Riyadh and Al-Khobar had taught him one lesson: that is, not to withdraw when attacked by cowardly terrorists.` We say to the defense secretary, Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place in 1983?

"But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia.. . .When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you.. . .The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear."

In Afghanistan, bin Laden would be disappointed. The U.S. military initially sent in no heavy armor but instead restricted the American effort to aerial bombardment in support of several hundred Special Operations soldiers on the ground who helped lead the Northern Alliance forces in a rapid advance. Kabul and other cities quickly fell. America was caught in no Afghan quagmire, or at least not in the sort of protracted, highly televisual bloody mess bin Laden had envisioned. But bin Laden and his senior leadership, holed up in the mountain complex of Tora Bora, managed to survive the bombing and elude the Afghan forces that the Americans commissioned to capture them. During the next months and years, as the United States and its allies did great damage to Al Qaeda`s operational cadre, arresting or killing thousands of its veterans, its major leadership symbols survived intact, and those symbols, and their power to lead and to inspire, became Al Qaeda`s most important asset.

After Tora Bora, the Qaeda fighters who survived regrouped in neighboring countries. "We began to converge on Iran one after the other," Saif al-Adel recalled in a recent book by an Egyptian journalist. "We began to form some groups of fighters to return to Afghanistan to carry out well-prepared missions there." It is these men, along with the reconstituted Taliban, that 16,000 American soldiers are still fighting today.

Not all the fighters would return to Afghanistan. Other targets of opportunity loomed on the horizon of the possible. "Abu Mus`ab and his Jordanian and Palestinian comrades opted to go to Iraq," al-Adel recalled, for, he said, an "examination of the situation indicated that the Americans would inevitably make a mistake and invade Iraq sooner or later. Such an invasion would aim at overthrowing the regime. Therefore, we should play an important role in the confrontation and resistance."

Abu Mus`ab is Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi - or A.M.Z. to the American troops who are pursuing him and his Qaeda in Mesopotamia forces all over the shattered landscape of occupied Iraq. The United States, as Al Qaeda had hoped, had indeed come out of its hole.

V. It was strangely beautiful, the aftermath of the explosion in Baghdad: two enormous fires, bright orange columns of flame rising perhaps 20 feet into the air, and clearly discernible in the midst of each a cage of glowing metal: what remained of two four-wheel-drive vehicles. Before the flames, two bodies lay amid a scattering of glass and sand; the car bomb had toppled the sandbags piled high to protect the building, collapsing the facade and crushing a dozen people. It was Oct. 27, 2003, and I stood before what remained of the Baghdad office of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In the distance, I heard a second huge explosion, saw rising the great plume of oily smoke; within the next 45 minutes, insurgents attacked four more times, bombing police stations throughout the capital, killing at least 35. Simultaneity and spectacle: Qaeda trademarks. I was gazing at Zarqawi`s handiwork.

Behind me, the press had gathered, a jostling crowd of aggressive, mostly young people bristling with lenses short and long, pushing against the line of young American soldiers, who, assault rifles leveled, were screaming at them to stay back. The scores of glittering lenses were a necessary part of the equation, transforming what in military terms would have been a minor engagement into a major defeat.

"There is no war here," an American colonel told me a couple of days before in frustration and disgust. "There`s no division-on-division engagements, nothing really resembling a war. Not a real war anyway."

It was not a war the Americans had been trained or equipped to fight. With fewer than 150,000 troops - and many fewer combat soldiers - they were trying to contain a full-blown insurgency in a country the size of California. The elusive enemy - an evolving, loose coalition of a score or so groups, some of them ex-Baathists from Saddam Hussein`s dozen or so security agencies, some former Iraqi military personnel, some professional Islamic insurgents like Zarqawi, some foreign volunteers from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Syria come to take the jihad to the Americans - attacked not with tanks or artillery or infantry assaults but with roadside bombs and suicide car bombers and kidnappings. Iraq, bin Laden declared, had become a "golden opportunity" to start a "third world war" against "the crusader-Zionist coalition."

Amid the barbed wire and blast walls and bomb debris of post-occupation Iraq, you could discern a clear strategy behind the insurgent violence. The insurgents had identified the Americans` points of vulnerability: their international isolation; their forced distance, as a foreign occupier, from Iraqis; and their increasing disorientation as they struggled to keep their footing on the fragile, shifting, roiling political ground of post-Hussein Iraq. And the insurgents hit at each of these vulnerabilities, as Begin had urged his followers to do, "deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly."

When, during the summer of 2003, the Bush administration seemed to be reaching out to the United Nations for political help in Iraq, insurgents struck at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing the talented envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others and driving the United Nations from the country. When the Americans seemed to be trying to attract Arab forces to come to Iraq to help, the insurgents struck at the Jordanian Embassy, killing 17. When the Turks offered to send troops, the insurgents bombed the Turkish Embassy. When nongovernmental organizations seemed the only outsiders still working to ease the situation in Iraq, insurgents struck at the Red Cross, driving it and most other nongovernmental organizations from the country.

Insurgents in Iraq and jihadists abroad struck America`s remaining allies. First they hit the Italians, car-bombing their base in Nasiriyah in November 2003, killing 28. Then they struck the Spanish, bombing commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004, killing 191. Finally they struck the British, bombing three London Underground trains and a double-decker bus this July, killing 56. It is as if the insurgents, with cold and patient precision, were severing one by one the fragile lines that connected the American effort in Iraq to the rest of the world.

With car bombs and assassinations and commando attacks, insurgents have methodically set out to kill any Iraqi who might think of cooperating with the Americans, widening the crevasse between occupiers and occupied. They have struck at water lines and electricity substations and oil pipelines, interrupting the services that Iraqis depended on, particularly during the unbearably hot summers, keeping electrical service in Baghdad far below what it was under Saddam Hussein - often only a few hours a day this summer - and oil exports 300,000 barrels a day below their prewar peak (helping to double world oil prices). Building on the chaotic unbridled looting of the first weeks of American rule, the insurgents have worked to destroy any notion of security and to make clear that the landscape of apocalyptic destruction that is Baghdad, with its omnipresent concrete blast walls and rolls of concertina wire and explosions and gunshots, should be laid at the feet of the American occupier, that unseen foreign power that purports to rule the country from behind concrete blast walls in the so-called Green Zone but dares to venture out only in tanks and armored cars.

"With. . .officials attempting to administrate from behind masses of barbed wire, in heavily defended buildings, and. . .living in pathetic seclusion in `security zones,` one cannot escape the conclusion that the government. . .is a hunted organization with little hope of ever being able to cope with conditions in this country as they exist today." However vividly these words fit contemporary Baghdad, they are in fact drawn from the report of the American consul general in Jerusalem in 1947, describing what Begin`s guerrilla forces achieved in their war against the British. "The very existence of an underground," as Begin remarked in his memoirs, "must, in the end, undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence. Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow to its standing."

In Iraq, the insurgents have presided over a catastrophic collapse in confidence in the Americans and a concomitant fall in their power. It is difficult to think of a place in which terror has been deployed on such a scale: there have been suicide truck bombs, suicide tanker bombs, suicide police cars, suicide bombers on foot, suicide bombers posing as police officers, suicide bombers posing as soldiers, even suicide bombers on bicycles. While the American death toll climbs steadily toward 2,000, the number of Iraqi dead probably stands at 10 times that and perhaps many more; no one knows. Conservative unofficial counts put the number of Iraqi dead in the war at somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, in a country a tenth the size of the United States.

Civil wars, of course, are especially bloody, and a civil war is now being fought in Iraq. The country is slowly splitting apart along the lines where French and British negotiators stitched it together early in the last century out of three Ottoman provinces - Mosul, Baghdad and Basra - and it is doing so with the enthusiastic help of the Islamists, who are doing all they can to provoke a Shia-Sunni regionwide war.

The Kurds in the north, possessed of their own army and legislature, want to secure what they believe are their historic rights to the disputed city of Kirkuk, including its oil fields, and be quit of Iraq. The Shia in the south, now largely ruled by Islamic party militias trained by the Iranians and coming under the increasingly strict sway of the clerics on social matters, are evolving their oil-rich mini-state into a paler version of the Islamic republic next door. And in the center, the Baathist elite of Saddam Hussein`s security services and army - tens of thousands of well-armed professional intelligence operatives and soldiers - have formed an alliance of convenience with Sunni Islamists, domestic and foreign, in order to assert their rights in a unitary Iraq. They are in effective control of many cities and towns, and they have the burdensome and humiliating presence of the foreign occupier to thank for the continuing success of their recruitment efforts. In a letter to bin Laden that was intercepted by American forces in January 2004, Zarqawi asked: "When the Americans disappear. . .what will become of our situation?"

As Zarqawi described in his letter and in subsequent broadcasts, his strategy in Iraq is to strike at the Shia - and thereby provoke a civil war. "A nation of heretics," the Shia "are the key element of change," he wrote. "If we manage to draw them onto the terrain of partisan war, it will be possible to tear the Sunnis away from their heedlessness, for they will feel the weight of the imminence of danger." Again a strategy of provocation - which plays on an underlying reality: that Iraq sits on the critical sectarian fault line of the Middle East and that a conflict there gains powerful momentum from the involvement of neighboring states, with Iran strongly supporting the Shia and with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria strongly sympathetic to the Sunnis. More and more, you can discern this outline in the chaos of the current war, with the Iranian-trained militias of the Shia Islamist parties that now control the Iraqi government battling Sunni Islamists, both Iraqi and foreign-born, and former Baathists.

In the midst of it all, increasingly irrelevant, are the Americans, who have the fanciest weapons but have never had sufficient troops, or political will, to assert effective control over the country. If political authority comes from achieving a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans, from those early days when they sat in their tanks and watched over the wholesale looting of public institutions, never did achieve political authority in Iraq. They fussed over liberalizing the economy and writing constitutions and achieving democracy in the Middle East when in fact there was really only one question in Iraq, emerging again and again in each successive political struggle, most recently in the disastrously managed writing of the constitution: how to shape a new political dispensation in which the age-old majority Shia can take control from the minority Sunni and do it in a way that minimized violence and insecurity - do it in a way, that is, that the Sunnis would be willing to accept, however reluctantly, without resorting to armed resistance. This might have been accomplished with hundreds of thousands of troops, iron control and a clear sense of purpose. The Americans had none of these. Instead they relied first on a policy of faith and then on one of improvisation, driven in part by the advice of Iraqi exile "friends" who used the Americans for their own purposes. Some of the most strikingly ideological decisions, like abruptly firing and humiliating the entire Iraqi Army and purging from their jobs many hundreds of thousands of Baath Party members, seemed designed to alienate and antagonize a Sunni population already terrified of its security in the new Iraq. "You Americans," one Sunni businessman said to me in Baghdad last February, shaking his head in wonder, "you have created your own enemies here."

The United States never used what authority it had to do more than pretend to control the gathering chaos, never managed to look clearly at the country and confront Iraq`s underlying political dysfunction, of which the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was the product, not the cause. "The illusionists," Ambassador John Negroponte`s people called their predecessors, the officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer III. Now, day by day, the illusion is slipping away, and with it what authority the Americans had in Iraq. What is coming to take its place looks increasingly like a failed state.

VI. It is an oft-heard witticism in Washington that the Iraq war is over and that the Iranians won. And yet the irony seems misplaced. A truly democratic Iraq was always likely to be an Iraq led not only by Shia, who are the majority of Iraqis, but by those Shia parties that are the largest and best organized - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Islamic Party - which happen to be those blessed by the religious authorities and nurtured in Iran. Nor would it be a surprise if a democratic Saudi Arabia turned out to be a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and one much less friendly to the United States. Osama bin Laden knows this, and so do American officials. This is why the United States is "friendly" with "apostate regimes." Democratic outcomes do not always ensure friendly governments. Often the contrary is true. On this simple fact depends much of the history of American policy not only in the Middle East but also in Latin America and other parts of the world throughout the cold war. Bush administration officials, for all their ideological fervor, did the country no favor by ignoring it.

In launching his new cold war, George W. Bush chose a peculiarly ideological version of cold-war history. He opted not for containment, the cautious, status quo grand strategy usually attributed to the late George F. Kennan, but for rollback. Containment, by which the United States determinedly resisted Soviet attempts to expand its influence, would have meant a patient, methodical search for terrorists, discriminating between those groups that threaten the United States and those that do not, pursuing the former with determined, practical policies that would have drawn much from the military and law-enforcement cooperation of our allies and that would have included an effective program of nonproliferation to keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands. Rollback, on the other hand, meant something quite different; those advocating it during the 1950`s considered containment immoral, for it recognized the status quo: Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. They wanted instead to destroy Communism entirely by "rolling back" Communists from territory they had gained, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur did briefly and, it turned out, catastrophically, in North Korea, and as President Eisenhower refused to do when he declined to support the Hungarian revolutionaries against the Soviet invasion in 1956.

The original advocates of rollback lost that struggle. In this new cold war, the rollback advocates triumphed and adopted as the heart of their policy a high-stakes, metaphysical gamble to "democratize the Middle East" and thus put an end, once and for all, to terrorism. They relied on a "domino theory" in which the successful implantation of democracy in Iraq would lead to a "democratic revolution" across the region. The ambition of this idea is breathtaking; it depends on a conception of American power as virtually limitless and on an entirely fanciful vision of Iraqi politics, a kind of dogged political wish-fulfillment that no sober analysis could penetrate. Replacing any real willingness to consider whether a clear course existed between here and there, between an invasion and occupation of Iraq and a democratic Middle East, was, at bottom, the simple conviction that since the United States enjoyed a "preponderance of power" unseen in the world since the Roman Empire, and since its cause of democratic revolution was so incontrovertibly just, defeat was inconceivable. One detects here an echo of Vietnam: the inability to imagine that the all-powerful United States might lose.

American power, however, is not limitless. Armies can destroy and occupy, but it takes much more to build a lasting order, especially on the shifting sands of a violent political struggle: another Vietnam echo. Learning the lesson this time around may prove more costly, for dominoes can fall both ways. "Political engineering on this scale could easily go awry," Stephen D. Biddle, a U.S. Army War College analyst, wrote this past April in a shrewd analysis. "If a democratic Iraq can catalyze reform elsewhere, so a failed Iraq could presumably export chaos to its neighbors. A regionwide Lebanon might well prove beyond our capacity to police, regardless of effort expended. And if so, then we will have replaced a region of police states with a region of warlords and chronic instability. This could easily prove to be an easier operating environment for terrorism than the police states it replaces."

The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic. But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops. By the spring of 2006, nearly every active-duty combat unit is likely to have been deployed twice. The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, make up an unprecedented 40 percent of the force, and the Guard is in the "stage of meltdown," as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, retired, recently told Congress. Within 24 months, "the wheels are coming off." For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft. In the end, the president judged his tax cuts more important than his vision of a "democratic Middle East." The administration`s relentless political style, integral to both its strength and its weakness, left it wholly unable to change course and to add more troops when they might have made a difference. That moment is long past; the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative.

Of the many reasons that American leaders chose to invade and occupy Iraq - to democratize the Middle East; to remove an unpredictable dictator from a region vital to America`s oil supply; to remove a threat from Israel, America`s ally; to restore the prestige sullied on 9/11 with a tank-led procession of triumph down the avenues of a conquered capital; to seize the chance to overthrow a regime capable of building an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons - of all of these, it is remarkable that the Bush administration chose to persuade Americans and the world by offering the one reason that could be proved to be false. The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, and the collapse of the rationale for the war, left terribly exposed precisely what bin Laden had targeted as the critical American vulnerability: the will to fight.

How that collapse, reflected in poll numbers, will be translated into policy is a more complicated question. One of 9/11`s more obvious consequences was to restore to the Republicans the advantage in national security they surrendered with the cold war`s end; their ruthless exploitation of this advantage and the Democrats` compromising embrace of the Iraq war has in effect left the country, on this issue, without an opposition party. Republicans, who fear to face the voters shackled to a leader whose approval ratings have slid into the low 40`s, are the ones demanding answers on the war. The falling poll numbers, the approaching midterm elections and the desperate manpower straits of the military have set in motion a dynamic that could see gradual American withdrawals beginning in 2006, as Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, acknowledged publicly in July. Unless Iraq`s political process, which has turned another downward spiral with Sunni negotiators` rejection of the constitution, can somehow be retrieved, American power in Iraq will go on deteriorating.

Two and a half years into the invasion, for U.S. policy in Iraq, the time of "the illusionists" has finally passed. Since the January elections, which Sunnis largely boycotted, American officials have worked hard to persuade Sunni leaders to take part in the constitutional referendum and elections, hoping thereby to isolate the Baathist and Islamist extremists and drain strength from the insurgency. This effort comes very late, however, when Iraqi politics, and the forces pulling the country apart, have taken on a momentum that waning American power no longer seems able to stop. Even as the constitutional drama came to a climax last month, the president telephoned Abdul Aziz Hakim, the Shia cleric who leads the Sciri Party, appealing for concessions that might have tempted the Sunnis to agree to the draft; the Shia politician, faced with the American president`s personal plea, did not hesitate to turn him down flat. Perhaps the best hope now for a gradual American withdrawal that would not worsen the war is to negotiate a regional solution, which might seek an end to Sunni infiltration from U.S. allies in exchange for Shia guarantees of the Sunni position in Iraq and a phased American departure.

For all the newfound realism in the second-term administration`s foreign policy, in which we have seen a willingness finally to negotiate seriously with North Korea and Iran, the president seems nowhere close to considering such an idea in Iraq, insisting that there the choice is simple: the United States can either "stay the course" or "cut and run." "An immediate withdrawal of our troops in Iraq, or the broader Middle East, as some have called for," the president declared last month, "would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations." These words, familiar and tired, offering no solution beyond staying a course that seems to be leading nowhere, have ceased to move Americans weary of the rhetoric of terror. That does not mean, however, that they may not be entirely true.

VII. We cannot know what future Osama bin Laden imagined when he sent off his 19 suicide terrorists on their mission four years ago. He got much wrong; the U.S. military, light years ahead of the Red Army, would send no tank divisions to Afghanistan, and there has been no uprising in the Islamic world. One suspects, though, that if bin Laden had been told on that day that in a mere 48 months he would behold a world in which the United States, "the idol of the age," was bogged down in an endless guerrilla war fighting in a major Muslim country; a world in which its all-powerful army, with few allies and little sympathy, found itself overstretched and exhausted; in which its dispirited people were starting to demand from their increasingly unpopular leader a withdrawal without victory - one suspects that such a prophecy would have pleased him. He had struck at the American will, and his strategy, which relied in effect on the persistent reluctance of American leaders to speak frankly to their people about the costs and burdens of war and to expend the political capital that such frank talk would require, had proved largely correct.

He has suffered damage as well. Many of his closest collaborators have been killed or captured, his training camps destroyed, his sanctuary occupied. "What Al Qaeda has lost," a senior Defense Department official said five months after the attacks, "again, it`s lost its center of gravity.. . .The benefits of Afghanistan cannot be overestimated. Again, it was the one state sponsor they had." This analysis seems now a vision of the past. Al Qaeda was always a flexible, ghostly organization, a complex worldwide network made up of shifting alliances and marriages of convenience with other shadowy groups. Now Al Qaeda`s "center of gravity," such as it is, has gone elsewhere.

In December 2003, a remarkable document, "Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers," appeared on the Internet, setting out a fascinating vision of how to isolate the United States and pick off its allies one by one. The truly ripe fruit, concludes the author, is Spain: "In order to force the Spanish government to withdraw from Iraq the resistance should deal painful blows to its forces. . .[and] make utmost use of the upcoming general election.. . .We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three blows, after which it will have to withdraw.. . ."

Three months later, on March 11, 2004 - 3/11, as it has come to be known - a cell of North African terrorists struck at the Atocha Train Station in Madrid. One hundred ninety-one people died - a horrific toll but nowhere near what it could have been had all of the bombs actually detonated, simultaneously, and in the station itself. Had the terrorists succeeded in bringing the roof of the station down, the casualties could have surpassed those of 9/11.

In the event, they were quite sufficient to lead to the defeat of the Spanish government and the decision of its successor to withdraw its troops from Iraq. What seems most notable about the Madrid attack, however - and the attack on Jewish and foreign sites in Casablanca on May 17, 2003, among others - is that the perpetrators were "home-grown" and not, strictly speaking, Al Qaeda. "After 2001, when the U.S. destroyed the camps and housing and turned off the funding, bin Laden was left with little control," Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer who has studied the structure of the network, has written. "The movement has now degenerated into something like the Internet. Spontaneous groups of friends, as in Madrid and Casablanca, who have few links to any central leadership, are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training."

Under this view, Al Qaeda, in the form we knew it, has been subsumed into the broader, more diffuse political world of radical Salafi politics. "The network is now self-organized from the bottom up and is very decentralized," Sageman wrote. "With local initiative and flexibility, it`s very robust."

We have entered the era of the amateurs. Those who attacked the London Underground - whether or not they had any contact with Al Qaeda - manufactured their crude bombs from common chemicals (including hydrogen peroxide, bleach and drain cleaner), making them in plastic food containers, toting them to Luton Station in coolers and detonating them with cellphone alarms. One click on the Internet and you can pull up a Web site offering a recipe - or, for that matter, one showing you how to make a suicide vest from commonly found items, including a video download demonstrating how to use the device: "There is a possibility that the two seats on his right and his left might not be hit with the shrapnel," the unseen narrator tells the viewer. Not to worry, however: "The explosion will surely kill the passengers in those seats."

During the four years since the attacks of 9/11, while terrorism worldwide has flourished, we have seen no second attack on the United States. This may be owed to the damage done Al Qaeda. Or perhaps planning and preparation for such an attack is going on now. When it comes to the United States itself, the terrorists have their own "second-novel problem" - how do you top the first production? More likely, though, the next attack, when it comes, will originate not in the minds of veteran Qaeda planners but from this new wave of amateurs: viral Al Qaeda, political sympathizers who nourish themselves on Salafi rhetoric and bin Laden speeches and draw what training they require from their computer screens. Very little investment and preparation can bring huge rewards. The possibilities are endless, and terrifyingly simple: rucksacks containing crude homemade bombs placed in McDonald`s - one, say, in Times Square and one on Wilshire Boulevard, 3,000 miles away, exploded simultaneously by cellphone. The effort is small, the potential impact overwhelming.

Attacks staged by amateurs with little or no connection to terrorist networks, and thus no visible trail to follow, are nearly impossible to prevent, even for the United States, with all of its power. Indeed, perhaps what is most astonishing about these hard four years is that we have managed to show the world the limits of our power. In launching a war on Iraq that we have been unable to win, we have done the one thing a leader is supposed never to do: issue a command that is not followed. A withdrawal from Iraq, rapid or slow, with the Islamists still holding the field, will signal, as bin Laden anticipated, a failure of American will. Those who will view such a withdrawal as the critical first step in a broader retreat from the Middle East will surely be encouraged to go on the attack. That is, after all, what you do when your enemy retreats. In this new world, where what is necessary to go on the attack is not armies or training or even technology but desire and political will, we have ensured, by the way we have fought this forever war, that it is precisely these qualities our enemies have in large and growing supply.

Mark Danner is a professor of journalism and politics at the University of California at Berkeley and Bard College and the author, most recently, of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Ein westlicher Journalist hat jemals Osama interviewt. Das war Fisk. `The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East` by Robert Fisk heißt das Buch, das Fisk geschrieben hat und das in den nächsten Tagen im Independant in Auszügen veröffentlicht wird.

Robert Fisk on finding Osama
Only one Western journalist has gained access to the inner sanctum of al-Qa`ida. In this extraordinary account from his new book - serialised all next week in `The Independent` - Robert Fisk recalls meeting the world`s most wanted man
Published: 01 October 2005
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article314…

Knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn`t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.

A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought, when Major General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British Empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don`t forget. "Farangiano," the driver shouted and pointed down into the gorge and grinned at me. "Foreigners."

It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of the mountain.

An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at once from our last meeting in a ruined village. "I am sorry Mr Robert, but I must give you the first search," he said, prowling through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad, it is easy," he said, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time, lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see us," he said.

After an hour, two armed Arabs - one with his face covered in a kuffiah scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank rocket-launcher over his right shoulder - came screaming from behind two rocks.

"Stop! Stop!" As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head on the windscreen. "Sorry, sorry," the bespectacled man said, putting down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another search. The road grew worse as we continued, the 4x4 skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. "Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising slogan the Toyota company would probably forgo.

There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas - the first Arab fighter in the battle against Moscow - was back again in the mountains he knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt. Then Bin Laden himself appeared, in combat uniform f and wearing shades. He carefully patted my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. "Salaam aleikum," I said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied "Aleikum salaam" to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He was a machine, checking out another machine.

IT HAD not always been this way. Indeed, the first time I met Osama bin Laden, the way could not have been easier. Back in December 1993, I had been covering an Islamic summit in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum when a Saudi journalist friend of mine, Jamal Kashoggi, walked up to me in the lobby of my hotel. Kashoggi led me by the shoulder outside. "There is someone I think you should meet," he said. Kashoggi is a sincere believer and I guessed at once to whom he was referring. Kashoggi had visited Bin Laden in Afghanistan during his war against the Russian army. "He has never met a Western reporter before," he announced. "This will be interesting." Kashoggi was indulging in a little applied psychology. He wanted to know how Bin Laden would respond to an infidel. So did I.

Bin Laden`s story was as instructive as it was epic. When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi royal family - encouraged by the CIA - sought to provide the Afghans with an Arab legion, preferably led by a Saudi prince, who would lead a guerrilla force against the Russians. Not only would he disprove the popularly held and all too accurate belief that the Saudi leadership was effete and corrupt, he could re-establish the honourable tradition of the Gulf Arab warrior, heedless of his own life in defending the umma, the community of Islam. True to form, the Saudi princes declined this noble mission. Bin Laden, infuriated at both their cowardice and the humiliation of the Afghan Muslims at the hands of the Soviets, took their place and, with money and machinery from his construction company, set off on his personal jihad.

A billionaire businessman and himself a Saudi, albeit of humbler Yemeni descent, in the coming years he would be idolised by both Saudis and millions of other Arabs, the stuff of Arab schoolboy legend from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Not since the British glorified Lawrence of Arabia had an adventurer been portrayed in so heroic, so influential a role. Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Algerians, Syrians and Palestinians made their way to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to fight alongside him. But when the Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and Bin Laden`s Arab legion had driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Afghans turned upon each other with wolflike and tribal venom. Sickened by this perversion of Islam - original dissension within the umma led to the division of Sunni and Shia Muslims - Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

But his journey of spiritual bitterness was not over. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden once more offered his services to the Saudi royal family. They did not need to invite the United States to protect the place of the two holiest shrines of Islam, he argued. Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited God`s message, should only be defended by Muslims. Bin Laden would lead his "Afghans", his Arab mujahedin, against the Iraqi army inside Kuwait and drive them from the emirate. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia preferred to put his trust in the Americans. So as the US 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the north-eastern Saudi city of Dhahran and deployed in the desert scarcely 400 miles from the city of Medina - the place of the Prophet`s refuge and of the first Islamic society - Bin Laden abandoned the corruption of the House of Saud to bestow his generosity on another "Islamic Republic": Sudan.

Our journey north from Khartoum lay though a landscape of white desert and ancient, unexplored pyramids, dark, squat Pharaonic tombs smaller than those of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus at Giza. "The people like Bin Laden here," Kashoggi said, in much the way that one might comment approvingly of a dinner host. "He`s got his business here and his construction company and the government likes him. He helps the poor." I could understand all this. He had just completed building a new road from the Khartoum-Port Sudan highway to the tiny desert village of Almatig in northern Sudan, using the same bulldozers he had employed to construct the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan; many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the battle against the Soviet Union. The US State Department took a predictably less charitable view of Bin Laden`s beneficence. It accused Sudan of being a "sponsor of international terrorism" and Bin Laden himself of operating "terrorist training camps" in the Sudanese desert.

But when Kashoggi and I arrived in Almatig, there was Osama bin Laden in his gold-fringed robe, sitting beneath the canopy of a tent before a crowd of admiring villagers and guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, silent figures, they watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers lined up to thank the Saudi businessman who was about to complete the road linking their slums to Khartoum for the first time in history.

My first impression was of a shy man. With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, he would avert his eyes when the village leaders addressed him. He seemed ill at ease with gratitude, incapable of responding with a full smile when children in miniature chadors danced in front of him and preachers admired his wisdom.

Kashoggi put his arms around Bin Laden, and Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the foreigner for a reason. That is what Bin Laden was thinking. For as Kashoggi spoke, Bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally nodding. "Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama," Kashoggi half-shouted through children`s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the English reporter. "Salaam aleikum". His hands were firm, not strong, but, yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was lean and had long fingers and a smile which - while it could never be described as kind - did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at the back of the tent where we could avoid the shouting of the children.

Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever - or, more to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of "terrorism" gave no hint. The Egyptian press was claiming that Bin Laden had brought hundreds of his Arab fighters with him to Sudan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum was suggesting that some of the Arab "Afghans" whom this Saudi entrepreneur had flown to Sudan were now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Bin Laden was well aware of this.

"The rubbish of the media and embassies," he called it. "I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn`t possibly do this job." The "job" was certainly ambitious: not just the Almatig connection but a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200km on the old road, now shortened to 800km by the new Bin Laden route that would turn the distance from the capital into a mere day`s journey. In a country that was despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait almost as much as it was by the United States, Bin Laden had turned the equipment of war to the construction of a pariah state.

I did wonder why he could not have done the same to the blighted landscape of Afghanistan, but he refused at first to talk about his war, sitting at the back of the tent and cleaning his teeth with a piece of mishwak wood. But talk he eventually did about a war that he helped to win for the Afghans whom the Americans and the Saudis - and the f Pakistanis - all supported against the Russians. He wanted to talk. He thought he was going to be interrogated about "terrorism" and realised that he was being asked about Afghanistan and he wished to explain how his experience there had shaped his life.

"What I lived through in two years there," he said, "I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere. When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once and I went on going back for nine years. I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan. It made me realise that people who take power in the world use it under different names to subvert others and to force their opinions on them."

With his Iraqi engineer Mohamed Saad, who was now building the highway to Port Sudan, Bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazai mountains of Paktia province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a mujahedin dirt trail across Afghanistan to within 25km of Kabul, a remarkable feat of engineering that the Russians could never destroy. But what lessons had Bin Laden drawn from the war against the Russians? He was wounded five times and 500 of his Arab fighters were killed in combat with the Soviets - their graves lie just inside the Afghan border at Torkham - and even Bin Laden was not immortal, was he?

"I was never afraid of death," he replied. "As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven." He was no longer irritating his teeth with the piece of mishwak wood but talking slowly and continuously, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. "Before a battle, God sends us seqina - tranquillity. Once I was only 30 metres from the Russians and they were trying to capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled ... My time in Afghanistan was the most important experience of my life."

But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan - members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States to fight the Russians, and who were forgotten by their mentors when the war was over? Bin Laden seemed ready for the question. "Neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help," he said. "When my mujahedin were victorious and the Russians were driven out, differences started so I returned to road construction in Taif and Abha [in Saudi Arabia]. I brought back the equipment I had used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Yes, I helped some of my comrades come here after the war." How many? Bin Laden shook his head. "I don`t want to say. But they are here with me now, they are working right here, building this road to Port Sudan."

What did he think about the war in Algeria? I asked. But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa - he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese government security agent - tapped me on the arm. "You have asked more than enough questions," he announced. So how about a picture? Bin Laden hesitated - something he rarely did - and I sensed that prudence was fighting with vanity. In the end, he stood on the new road in his gold-fringed robe and smiled wanly at my camera for two pictures, then raised his left hand like a president telling the press when their time was up. At which point Osama bin Laden went off to inspect his highway.

Two months after I met Bin Laden, gunmen burst into his Khartoum home and tried to assassinate him. The Sudanese government suspected the potential killers were paid by the CIA. Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship later that year. In early 1996, he was permitted to leave for the country of his choice - and that was bound to be the one refuge in which he had discovered so much about his own faith.

And so it was that one hot evening in late June 1996, the telephone on my desk in Beirut rang with one of the more extraordinary messages I was to receive as a foreign correspondent. "Mr Robert, a friend you met in Sudan wants to see you," said a voice in English but with an Arabic accent. I thought at first he meant Kashoggi, though I had first met Jamal in 1990, long before going to Khartoum. "No, no, Mr Robert, I mean the man you interviewed. Do you understand?" Yes, I understood. And where could I meet this man? "The place where he is now," came the reply. I knew that Bin Laden was rumoured to have returned to Afghanistan but there was no confirmation of this. So how do I reach him? I asked. "Go to Jalalabad - you will be contacted."

5 JULY 1996. "CLACK-CLACK-CLACK." It was as if someone was attacking my head with an ice-pick. "CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK." I sat up. Someone was banging a set of car keys against the window of my room in the Spinghar Hotel. "Misssster Robert," a voice whispered urgently. "Misssster Robert." He hissed the word "Mister." Yes, yes, I`m here. "Please come downstairs, there is someone to see you." It registered only slowly that the man must have climbed the ancient fire escape to reach the window of my room. I dressed, grabbed a coat - I had a feeling we might travel in the night - and almost forgot my old Nikon. I walked as calmly as I could past the reception desk and out into the early afternoon heat.

The man wore a grubby, grey Afghan robe and a small round cotton hat but he was an Arab and he greeted me formally, holding my right hand in both of his. He smiled. He said his name was Mohamed, he was my guide. "To see the Sheikh?" I asked. He smiled but said nothing.

I followed Mohamed all the way through the dust of Jalalabad`s main street until we arrived next to a group of gunmen in a pick-up truck in the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shattered gateway. There were three men in Afghan hats in the back of the pick-up. One held a Kalashnikov rifle, another clutched a grenade-launcher along with six rockets tied together with Scotch tape. The third nursed a machine gun on his lap, complete with tripod and a belt of ammunition. "Mr Robert, these are our guards," the driver said quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to set off across the wilds of Afghanistan`s Nangarhar province under a white-hot afternoon sun with three bearded guerrillas. A two-way radio hissed and crackled on the shoulder of the driver`s companion as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us.

We were about to set off when Mohamed climbed back down from the pick-up along with the driver, walked to a shaded patch of grass and began to pray. For five minutes, the two men lay half-prostrate, facing the distant Kabul Gorge and, beyond that, a far more distant Mecca. We drove off along a broken highway and then turned on to a dirt track by an irrigation canal, the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor, the guards` eyes peering from behind their chequered scarves. We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the face of the moon.

By dusk, we had reached a series of cramped earthen villages, old men burning charcoal fires by the track, the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. There were more guerrillas, all bearded, grinning at Mohamed and the driver. It was night before we stopped, in an orchard where wooden sofas had been covered in army blankets piled with belts and webbing and where armed men emerged out of the darkness, all in Afghan clothes and soft woollen flat hats, some holding rifles, others machine guns. They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab "Afghans" denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States of America. Very soon, the world would know them as al-Qa`ida.

They came from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. Two of them wore spectacles, one said he was a doctor. A few of them shook hands in a rather solemn way and greeted me in Arabic. I knew that these men would give their lives for Bin Laden, that they thought themselves spiritually pure in a corrupt world, that they were inspired and influenced by dreams which they persuaded themselves came from heaven. Mohamed beckoned me to follow him and we skirted a small river and jumped across a stream until, in the insect-filled darkness ahead, we could see a f sputtering paraffin lamp. Beside it sat a tall, bearded man in Saudi robes. Osama bin Laden stood up, his two teenage sons, Omar and Saad, beside him. "Welcome to Afghanistan," he said.

He was now 40 but looked much older than at our last meeting in the Sudanese desert late in 1993. Walking towards me, he towered over his companions, tall, slim, with new wrinkles around those narrow eyes. Leaner, his beard longer but slightly flecked with grey, he had a black waistcoat over his white robe and a red-chequered kuffiah on his head, and he seemed tired. When he asked after my health, I told him I had come a long way for this meeting. "So have I," he muttered. There was also an isolation about him, a detachment I had not noticed before, as if he had been inspecting his anger, examining the nature of his resentment; when he smiled, his gaze would move towards his 16-year-old son Omar - round eyes with dark brows and his own kuffiah - and then off into the hot darkness where his armed men were patrolling the fields. Others were gathering to listen to our conversation.

Just 10 days before, a truck bomb had torn down part of the US Air Force housing complex at al-Khobar in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and we were speaking in the shadow of the deaths of the 19 American soldiers killed there. US Secretary of State Warren Christopher had visited the ruins and promised that America would not be "swayed by violence", that the perpetrators would be hunted down. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who had since lapsed into a state of dementia, had foreseen the possibility of violence when American military forces arrived to "defend" his kingdom in 1990. It was for this very reason that he had, on 6 August that year, extracted a promise from then President George Bush that all US troops would leave his country when the Iraqi threat ended. But the Americans had stayed, claiming that the continued existence of Saddam`s regime - which Bush had chosen not to destroy - still constituted a danger to the Gulf.

Osama bin Laden knew what he wanted to say. "Not long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops from Saudi Arabia. Now let us give some advice to the governments of Britain and France to take their troops out - because what happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar showed that the people who did this have a deep understanding in choosing their targets. They hit their main enemy, which is the Americans. They killed no secondary enemies, nor their brothers in the army or the police in Saudi Arabia ... I give this advice to the government of Britain." The Americans must leave Saudi Arabia, must leave the Gulf. The "evils" of the Middle East arose from America`s attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia had been turned into "an American colony". Bin Laden was speaking slowly and with precision, an Egyptian taking notes in a large exercise book by the lamplight like a Middle Ages scribe. "This doesn`t mean declaring war against the West and Western people - but against the American regime which is against every American." I interrupted Bin Laden. Unlike Arab regimes, I said, the people of the United States elected their government. They would say that their government represents them. He disregarded my comment. I hope he did. For in the years to come, his war would embrace the deaths of thousands of American civilians. "The explosion in al-Khobar did not come as a direct reaction to the American occupation," he said, "but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims, its support of Jews in Palestine and of the massacres of Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon - of Sabra and Chatila and Qana - and of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference."

But what Bin Laden really wanted to talk about was Saudi Arabia. Since our last meeting in Sudan, he said, the situation in the kingdom had grown worse. The ulema, the religious leaders, had declared in the mosques that the presence of American troops was not acceptable and the government took action against these ulema "on the advice of the Americans." For Bin Laden, the betrayal of the Saudi people began 24 years before his birth, when Abdul Aziz al-Saud proclaimed his kingdom in 1932. "The regime started under the flag of applying Islamic law and under this banner all the people of Saudi Arabia came to help the Saudi family take power. But Abdul Aziz did not apply Islamic law; the country was set up for his family. Then after the discovery of petroleum, the Saudi regime found another support - the money to make people rich and to give them the services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied." Bin Laden was picking away at his teeth with that familiar twig of mishwak wood, but history - or his version of it - was the basis of almost all his remarks. The Saudi royal family had promised sharia laws while at the same time allowing the United States "to Westernise Saudi Arabia and drain the economy." He blamed the Saudi regime for spending $25bn (£14bn) in support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war and a further US$60bn in support of the Western armies in the 1991 war against Iraq, "buying military equipment which is not needed or useful for the country, buying aircraft by credit" while at the same time creating unemployment, high taxes and a bankrupt economy. But for Bin Laden, the pivotal date was 1990, the year Saddam invaded Kuwait. "When the American troops entered Saudi Arabia, the land of the two Holy places, there was a strong protest from the ulema and from students of sharia law all over the country against the interference of American troops. This big mistake by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed their deception. They were giving their support to nations which were fighting against Muslims."

Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. "The Saudi people have remembered now what the ulema told them and they realise America is the main reason for their problems ... the ordinary man knows that his country is the largest oil-producer in the world yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services. Now the people understand the speeches of the ulemas in the mosques - that our country has become an American colony. What happened in Riyadh and al-Khobar is clear evidence of the huge anger of Saudi people against America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America." The overthrow of the Saudi regime and the eviction of US forces from the kingdom were one and the same for Bin Laden. He was claiming that the real religious leadership of Saudi Arabia - among whom he clearly saw himself - was an inspiration to Saudis, that Saudis themselves would drive out the Americans, that Saudis - hitherto regarded as a rich and complacent people - might strike at the United States. Could this be true?

Bin Laden sometimes stopped speaking for all of 60 seconds - he was the first Arab figure I noticed doing this - in order to reflect on his words. Most Arabs, faced with a reporter`s question, would say the first thing that came into their heads for fear that they would appear ignorant if they did not. Bin Laden was different. He was alarming because he was possessed of that quality which leads men to war: total self-conviction.

Bin Laden had asked me - a routine of every Palestinian under occupation - if Europeans did not resist occupation during the Second World War. I told him no Europeans would accept this argument over Saudi Arabia - because the Nazis killed millions of Europeans yet the Americans had never murdered a single Saudi. Such a parallel was historically and morally wrong. Bin Laden did not agree. "We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together ... We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon ... When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine" - he was talking about Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel - "all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children did not receive the same reaction." It was Bin Laden`s first reference to Iraq and to the United Nations sanctions that were to result, according to UN officials themselves, in the death of more than half a million children. "Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam," Bin Laden said. "We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future." It was the first time I heard him use the word "crusade".

But it was neither the first - nor the last - time that Bin Laden would distance himself from Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship. Much good would it do him. Five years later, the United States would launch an invasion of Iraq that would be partly justified by the regime`s "support" for a man who so detested it. But these were not the only words which Bin Laden uttered that night to which I should have paid greater attention. For at one point, he placed his right hand on his chest: "I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against all Muslims everywhere," he said. "Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans."

For some time, there had been a steadily growing thunderstorm to the east of Bin Laden`s camp and we could see the bright orange flash of lightning over the mountains on the Pakistan border. But Bin Laden thought this might be artillery fire, the continuation of the inter-mujahedin battles that had damaged his spirit after the anti-Soviet war. He was growing uneasy. He broke off his conversation to pray. Then, on the straw mat, several young and armed men served dinner - plates of yoghurt and cheese and Afghan naan bread and more tea. Bin Laden sat between his sons, silent, eyes on his food.

I said to Bin Laden that Afghanistan was the only country left to him after his exile in Sudan. He agreed. "The safest place in the world for me is Afghanistan." It was the only place, I repeated, in which he could campaign against the Saudi government. Bin Laden and several of his Arab fighters burst into laughter. "There are other places," he replied. Did he mean Tajikistan? I asked. Or Uzbekistan? Kazakhstan? "There are several places where we have friends and close brothers - we can find refuge and safety in them." I told Bin Laden he was already a hunted man. "Danger is a part of our life," he snapped back.

He began talking to his men about amniya, security, and repeatedly looked towards those flashes in the sky. Now the thunder did sound like gunfire. I tried to ask one more question. What kind of Islamic state would Bin Laden wish to see? Would thieves and murderers still have their hands or heads cut off in his Islamic sharia state, just as they do in Saudi Arabia today? There came an unsatisfactory reply. "Islam is a complete religion for every detail of life. If a man is a real Muslim and commits a crime, he can only be happy if he is justly punished. This is not cruelty. The origin of these punishments comes from God through the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him." Dissident Osama bin Laden may be, but moderate never. I asked permission to take his photograph, and while he debated this with his companions I scribbled into my notebook the words I would use in the last paragraph of my report on our meeting: "Osama bin Laden believes he now represents the most formidable enemy of the Saudi regime and of the American presence in the Gulf. Both are probably right to regard him as such." I was underestimating the man.

Yes, he said, I could take his picture. I opened my camera and allowed his armed guards to watch me as I threaded a film into the spool. I told them I refused to use a flash because it flattened the image of a human face and asked them to bring the paraffin lamp closer. The Egyptian scribe held it a foot from Bin Laden`s face. I told him to bring it closer still, to within three inches, and I physically had to guide his arm until the light brightened and shadowed Bin Laden`s features. Then without warning, Bin Laden moved his head back and the faintest smile moved over his face, along with that self-conviction and that ghost of vanity which I found so disturbing. He called his sons Omar and Saad and they sat beside him as I took more pictures and Bin Laden turned into the proud father, the family man, the Arab at home.

Then his anxiety returned. The thunder was continuous now and it was mixed with the patter of rifle fire. I should go, he urged, and I realised that what he meant was that he must go, that it was time for him to return to the fastness of Afghanistan. When we shook hands, he was already looking for the guards who would take him away. Mohamed and my driver and just two of the armed men who had brought me to these damp, insect-hungry fields turned up to drive me back to the Spinghar Hotel, a journey that proved to be full of menace. Driving across river bridges and road intersections, we were repeatedly stopped by armed men from the Afghan factions that were fighting for control of Kabul. One would crouch on the roadway in front of our vehicle, screaming at us, pointing his rifle at the windscreen, his companion sidling out of the darkness to check our driver`s identity and wave us through. "Afghanistan very difficult place," Mohamed remarked.

WITHIN NINE months, by March 1997, I would be back in a transformed, still more sinister Afghanistan, its people governed with a harsh and ignorant piety that even Bin Laden could not have imagined. The Taliban had finally vanquished 12 of the 15 venal Afghan mujahedin militias in all but the far north-eastern corner of the country and imposed their own stark legitimacy on its people. It was a purist, Sunni Wahhabi faith whose interpretation of sharia law recalled the most draconian of early Christian prelates. Head-chopping, hand-chopping and a totally misogynist perspective were easy to associate with the Taliban`s hostility towards all forms of enjoyment. The Spinghar Hotel used to boast an old television set that had now been hidden in a garden shed for fear of destruction. Television sets, like videotapes and thieves, tended to end up hanging from trees. "What do you expect?" the gardener asked me near the ruins of the old royal winter palace in Jalalabad. "The Taliban came from the refugee camps. They are giving us only what they had." And it dawned on me then that the new laws of Afghanistan - so anachronistic and brutal to us, and to educated Afghans - were less an attempt at religious revival than a continuation of life in the vast dirt camps in which so many millions of Afghans had gathered on the borders of their country when the Soviets invaded 16 years before.

The Taliban gunmen had grown up as refugees in these diseased camps in Pakistan. Their first 16 years of life were passed in blind poverty, deprived of all education and entertainment, imposing their own deadly punishments, their mothers and sisters kept in subservience as the men decided how to fight their foreign oppressors on the other side of the border, their only diversion a detailed and obsessive reading of the Koran - the one and true path in a world in which no other could be contemplated. The Taliban had arrived not to rebuild a country they did not remember, but to rebuild their refugee camps on a larger scale. Hence there was to be no education. No television. Women must stay home, just as they stayed in their tents in Peshawar.

Did we care? At that very moment, officials of the Union Oil Co of California Asian Oil Pipeline Project - Unocal - were negotiating with the Taliban to secure rights for a pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan; in September 1996, the US State Department announced that it would open diplomatic relations with the Taliban, only to retract the statement later. Among Unocal`s employees were Zalmay Khalilzad - five years later, he would be appointed President George f W Bush`s special envoy to "liberated" Afghanistan - and a Pushtun leader called Hamid Karzai. No wonder Afghans adopted an attitude of suspicion towards the United States. America`s allies originally supported Bin Laden against the Russians. Then the United States turned Bin Laden into their Public Enemy Number One - a post that was admittedly difficult to retain in the Pentagon wheel of fortune, since new monsters were constantly being discovered by Washington, often in inverse proportion to its ability to capture the old ones. Now the Taliban were being courted. But for how long? Could Bin Laden, an Arab whose political goals were infinitely more ambitious than the Taliban`s, maintain the integrity of his exile alongside men who wished only to repress their own people? Would the Taliban protect Bin Laden any more courageously than the failed Islamic Republic of Sudan?

19 MARCH 1997. On the mountainside, the machine continued his search of the machine. We were at 5,000 feet. Lights flashed until we turned a corner past a massive boulder and there before us in the moonlight lay a small valley. There was grass and trees and a stream of water that curled through it and a clutch of tents under a cliff. Two men approached. There were more formal Arab greetings, my right hand in both of theirs. Trust us. That was always the intention of these greetings. An Algerian and an Egyptian, they invited me to tour this little valley.

We washed our hands in the stream and walked over the stiff grass towards a dark gash in the cliff face above us. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could make out a vast rectangle in the side of the mountain, a 6m-high air-raid shelter cut into the rock by Bin Laden`s men during the Russian war. I walked into this man-made cave, the Algerian holding a torch, until I could hear my own crunching footsteps echoing softly from the depths of the tunnel. When we emerged, the moon was almost dazzling, the valley bathed in its white light, another little paradise of trees and water and mountain peaks.

The tent I was taken to was military issue, a khaki tarpaulin roped to iron stakes, a flap as an entrance, a set of stained mattresses on the floor. There was tea in a large steel pot and I sat with the Egyptian and Algerian and with three other men who had entered the tent with Kalashnikovs. We waited for perhaps half an hour.

There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and Bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other`s face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

"Mr Robert," he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. "Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim." This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood Bin Laden`s meaning a split second in front of each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently staring at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the "brother." I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the "dream" lest I suggest Bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me - that I should accept this "dream" as a prophecy and a divine instruction - might be fulfilled. For this man to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice, that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim to gain an adherent to the faith? Was Bin Laden really trying - let us be frank - to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper - not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin - would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even - as I would contemplate just over four years later - learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

"Sheikh Osama," I began, even before I had decided on my next words. "Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim." There was silence in the tent. "I am a journalist." No one could dispute that. "And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth." No one would want to dispute that. "And that is what I intend to do in my life - to tell the truth." Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now Bin Laden`s turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. "If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim," he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved. As the old cliché goes, I "breathed again". No deal.

Perhaps it was out of the need to curtail this episode, to cover his embarrassment at this little failure, that Bin Laden suddenly and melodramatically noticed the school satchel lying beside my camera and the Lebanese newspapers partially visible inside. He seized upon them. He must read them at once. And in front of us all, he clambered across the tent with the papers in his hand to where the paraffin lamp was hissing in the corner. And there, for half an hour, ignoring almost all of us, he read his way through the Arabic press, sometimes summoning the Egyptian to read an article, at others showing a paper to one of the other gunmen in the tent. Was this really, I began to wonder, the centre of "world terror"? Listening to the spokesman at the US State Department, reading the editorials in The New York Times or The Washington Post, I might have been forgiven for believing that Bin Laden ran his "terror network" from a state-of-the-art bunker of computers and digitalised battle plans, flicking a switch to instruct his followers to assault another Western target. But this man seemed divorced from the outside world. Did he not have a radio? A television?

When he returned to his place in the corner of the tent, Bin Laden was businesslike. He warned the Americans of a renewed onslaught against their forces in Saudi Arabia. "We are still at the beginning of military action against them," he said. "But we have removed the psychological obstacle against fighting the Americans ... This is the first time in 14 centuries that the two holy shrines are occupied by non-Islamic forces ..." He insisted that the Americans were in the Gulf for oil and embarked on a modern history of the region to prove this.

"Brezhnev wanted to reach the Hormuz Strait across Afghanistan for this reason, but by the grace of Allah and the jihad he was not only defeated in Afghanistan but was finished here. We carried our weapons on our shoulders here for 10 years, and we and the sons of the Islamic world are prepared to carry weapons for the rest of our lives. But despite this, oil is not the direct impetus for the Americans occupying the region - they obtained oil at attractive prices before their invasion. There are other reasons, primarily the American-Zionist alliance, which is filled with fear at the power of Islam and of the land of Mecca and Medina. It fears that an Islamic f renaissance will drown Israel. We are convinced that we shall kill the Jews in Palestine. We are convinced that with Allah`s help, we shall triumph against the American forces. It`s only a matter of numbers and time. For them to claim that they are protecting Arabia from Iraq is untrue - the whole issue of Saddam is a trick."

There was something new getting loose here. Condemning Israel was standard fare for any Arab nationalist, let alone a man who believed he was participating in an Islamic jihad. But Bin Laden was now combining America and Israel as a single country - "For us," he said later, "there is no difference between the American and Israeli governments or between the American and Israeli soldiers" - and was talking of Jews, rather than Israeli soldiers, as his targets. How soon before all Westerners, all those from "Crusader nations", were added to the list? He took no credit for the bombings in Riyadh and al-Khobar but praised the four men who had been accused of setting off the explosions, two of whom he admitted he had met. "I view those who did these bombings with great respect," he said. "I consider it a great act and a major honour in which I missed the opportunity of participating." But Bin Laden was also anxious to show the support for his cause which he claimed was now growing in Pakistan. He produced newspaper clippings recording the sermons of Pakistani clerics who had condemned America`s presence in Saudi Arabia and then thrust into my hands two large coloured photographs of graffiti spray-painted on walls in Karachi.

In red paint, one said: "American Forces, get out of the Gulf - The United Militant Ulemas." Another, painted in brown, announced that "America is the biggest enemy of the Muslim world." A large poster that Bin Laden handed to me appeared to be from the same hand with similar anti-American sentiment uttered by mawlawi - religious scholars - in the Pakistani city of Lahore. As for the Taliban and their new, oppressive regime, Bin Laden had little option but to be pragmatic. "All Islamic countries are my country," he said. "We believe that the Taliban are sincere in their attempts to enforce Islamic sharia law. We saw the situation before they came and afterwards and have noticed a great difference and an obvious improvement." But when he returned to his most important struggle - against the United States - Bin Laden seemed possessed. When he spoke of this, his followers in the tent hung upon his every word as if he was a messiah. He had, he said, sent faxes to King Fahd and all main departments of the Saudi government, informing them of his determination to pursue a holy struggle against the United States. He even claimed that some members of the Saudi royal family supported him, along with officers in the security services - a claim I later discovered to be true. But declaring war by fax was a new innovation and there was an eccentricity about Bin Laden`s perspective on American politics.

But this was a mere distraction from a far more serious threat. "We think that our struggle against America will be much simpler than that against the Soviet Union," Bin Laden said. "I will tell you something for the first time. Some of our mujahedin who fought in Afghanistan participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia and they were surprised at the collapse in American military morale. We regard America as a paper tiger." This was a strategic error of some scale. The American retreat from its state-building mission in Somalia under President Clinton was not going to be repeated if a Republican president came to power, especially if the United States was under attack. True, over the years, the same loss of will might creep back into American military policy - Iraq would see to that - but Washington, whatever Bin Laden might think, was going to be a far more serious adversary than Moscow. Yet he persisted. And I shall always remember Osama bin Laden`s last words to me that night on the bare mountain: "Mr Robert," he said, "from this mountain upon which you are sitting, we broke the Russian army and we destroyed the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he will permit us to turn the United States into a shadow of itself." I sat in silence, thinking about these words as Bin Laden discussed my journey back to Jalalabad with his guards. He was concerned that the Taliban - despite their "sincerity" - might object to his dispatching a foreigner through their checkpoints after dark, and so I was invited to pass the night in Bin Laden`s mountain camp. I was permitted to take just three photographs of him, this time by the light of the Toyota which was driven to the tent with its headlights shining through the canvas to illuminate Bin Laden`s face. He sat in front of me, expressionless, a stone figure, and in the pictures I developed in Beirut three days later he was a purple and yellow ghost. He said goodbye without much ceremony, a brief handshake and a nod, and vanished from the tent and I lay down on the mattress with my coat over me to keep warm. The men with their guns sitting around slept there too, while others armed with rifles and rocket-launchers patrolled the low ridges around the camp.

In the years to come, I would wonder who they were. Was the Egyptian Mohamed Atta among those young men in the tent? Or any other of the 19 men whose names we would all come to know just over four years later? I cannot remember their faces now, cowled as they were, many of them, in their scarves.

Exhaustion and cold kept me awake. "A shadow of itself" was the expression that kept repeating itself to me. What did Bin Laden and these dedicated, ruthless men have in store for us? I recall the next few hours like a freeze-frame film; waking so cold there was ice in my hair, slithering back down the mountain trail in the Toyota with one of the Algerian gunmen in the back telling me that if we were in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under Bin Laden`s orders to protect me and thus would give his life for me. The three men in the back and my driver stopped the 4x4 on the broken-up Kabul-Jalalabad highway to say their dawn fajr prayers. Beside the broad estuary of the Kabul river, they spread their mats and knelt as the sun rose over the mountains. Far to the north-east, I could see the heights of the Hindu Kush glimmering white under a pale blue sky, touching the border of China that nuzzled into the wreckage of a land that was to endure yet more suffering in the coming years.

Most of all I remember the first minutes after our departure from Bin Laden`s camp. It was still dark when I caught sight of a great light in the mountains to the north. For a while I thought it was the headlights of another vehicle, another security signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. "It is Halley`s comet," one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale-Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000km an hour through the heavens.

So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qa`ida men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. "Mr Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?" It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. "It means that there is going to be a great war." And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

Extracted from `The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East` by Robert Fisk, to be published by 4th Estate on Monday, £25. To buy the book at the special price of £22.50, including p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Read more exclusive extracts from The Great War for Civilisation tomorrow in The Independent on Sunday and all next week in The Independent

Knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town. The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me. But I didn`t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber over a rock.

A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought, when Major General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the greatest armies of the British Empire on this very stretch of road, and high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands. The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War. But Afghans don`t forget. "Farangiano," the driver shouted and pointed down into the gorge and grinned at me. "Foreigners."

It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of the mountain.

An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at once from our last meeting in a ruined village. "I am sorry Mr Robert, but I must give you the first search," he said, prowling through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain. "When you believe in jihad, it is easy," he said, fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres, tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time, lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. "Our brothers are letting us know they see us," he said.

After an hour, two armed Arabs - one with his face covered in a kuffiah scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank rocket-launcher over his right shoulder - came screaming from behind two rocks.

"Stop! Stop!" As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head on the windscreen. "Sorry, sorry," the bespectacled man said, putting down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another search. The road grew worse as we continued, the 4x4 skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. "Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising slogan the Toyota company would probably forgo.

There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas - the first Arab fighter in the battle against Moscow - was back again in the mountains he knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt. Then Bin Laden himself appeared, in combat uniform f and wearing shades. He carefully patted my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. "Salaam aleikum," I said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied "Aleikum salaam" to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He was a machine, checking out another machine.

IT HAD not always been this way. Indeed, the first time I met Osama bin Laden, the way could not have been easier. Back in December 1993, I had been covering an Islamic summit in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum when a Saudi journalist friend of mine, Jamal Kashoggi, walked up to me in the lobby of my hotel. Kashoggi led me by the shoulder outside. "There is someone I think you should meet," he said. Kashoggi is a sincere believer and I guessed at once to whom he was referring. Kashoggi had visited Bin Laden in Afghanistan during his war against the Russian army. "He has never met a Western reporter before," he announced. "This will be interesting." Kashoggi was indulging in a little applied psychology. He wanted to know how Bin Laden would respond to an infidel. So did I.

Bin Laden`s story was as instructive as it was epic. When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi royal family - encouraged by the CIA - sought to provide the Afghans with an Arab legion, preferably led by a Saudi prince, who would lead a guerrilla force against the Russians. Not only would he disprove the popularly held and all too accurate belief that the Saudi leadership was effete and corrupt, he could re-establish the honourable tradition of the Gulf Arab warrior, heedless of his own life in defending the umma, the community of Islam. True to form, the Saudi princes declined this noble mission. Bin Laden, infuriated at both their cowardice and the humiliation of the Afghan Muslims at the hands of the Soviets, took their place and, with money and machinery from his construction company, set off on his personal jihad.

A billionaire businessman and himself a Saudi, albeit of humbler Yemeni descent, in the coming years he would be idolised by both Saudis and millions of other Arabs, the stuff of Arab schoolboy legend from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Not since the British glorified Lawrence of Arabia had an adventurer been portrayed in so heroic, so influential a role. Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Algerians, Syrians and Palestinians made their way to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to fight alongside him. But when the Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and Bin Laden`s Arab legion had driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Afghans turned upon each other with wolflike and tribal venom. Sickened by this perversion of Islam - original dissension within the umma led to the division of Sunni and Shia Muslims - Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia.

But his journey of spiritual bitterness was not over. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden once more offered his services to the Saudi royal family. They did not need to invite the United States to protect the place of the two holiest shrines of Islam, he argued. Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited God`s message, should only be defended by Muslims. Bin Laden would lead his "Afghans", his Arab mujahedin, against the Iraqi army inside Kuwait and drive them from the emirate. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia preferred to put his trust in the Americans. So as the US 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the north-eastern Saudi city of Dhahran and deployed in the desert scarcely 400 miles from the city of Medina - the place of the Prophet`s refuge and of the first Islamic society - Bin Laden abandoned the corruption of the House of Saud to bestow his generosity on another "Islamic Republic": Sudan.

Our journey north from Khartoum lay though a landscape of white desert and ancient, unexplored pyramids, dark, squat Pharaonic tombs smaller than those of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus at Giza. "The people like Bin Laden here," Kashoggi said, in much the way that one might comment approvingly of a dinner host. "He`s got his business here and his construction company and the government likes him. He helps the poor." I could understand all this. He had just completed building a new road from the Khartoum-Port Sudan highway to the tiny desert village of Almatig in northern Sudan, using the same bulldozers he had employed to construct the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan; many of his labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the battle against the Soviet Union. The US State Department took a predictably less charitable view of Bin Laden`s beneficence. It accused Sudan of being a "sponsor of international terrorism" and Bin Laden himself of operating "terrorist training camps" in the Sudanese desert.

But when Kashoggi and I arrived in Almatig, there was Osama bin Laden in his gold-fringed robe, sitting beneath the canopy of a tent before a crowd of admiring villagers and guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, silent figures, they watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers lined up to thank the Saudi businessman who was about to complete the road linking their slums to Khartoum for the first time in history.

My first impression was of a shy man. With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, he would avert his eyes when the village leaders addressed him. He seemed ill at ease with gratitude, incapable of responding with a full smile when children in miniature chadors danced in front of him and preachers admired his wisdom.

Kashoggi put his arms around Bin Laden, and Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the foreigner for a reason. That is what Bin Laden was thinking. For as Kashoggi spoke, Bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally nodding. "Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama," Kashoggi half-shouted through children`s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the English reporter. "Salaam aleikum". His hands were firm, not strong, but, yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was lean and had long fingers and a smile which - while it could never be described as kind - did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at the back of the tent

[Joerver]

http://www.independent.co.uk/

VI. The victims of war, a conflict of interest and the story of Staff Sergeant Nolde.

The Independent
Back at Safwan, the empty clover-leaf motorway interchange had transformed itself from Western-normal to Eastern-terrible; drifting down the highway towards us came the damned. Some were Iraqi soldiers, others frightened women, many were wounded. Around us flowed a mass of huddled, shuffling figures, many crying, others throwing themselves into the motorway ditches to sleep.

Hundreds of Kuwaitis kidnapped in the last hours of the occupation but newly freed by the Basra insurgents were now on the road with terrible stories of hospitals crammed with the dead and dying. One of them was a pharmacist and former Kuwaiti MP called Ahmed Baktiar. He had been taken to Basra hospital to help the wounded men and women littered across the floors, he said.

"A young man just died in front of me. The tanks were coming and they were firing straight into the houses on each street, reducing the houses to ashes. There are lots of people dying of a strange sickness. Some think it`s because they have to drink the water lying in the streets which is contaminated. Others say it`s because the water in Basra now contains oil from the smoke over the city."

And all the while, the tide of sick and starving and frightened people shuffled past us. Some came in hand-pushed carts, old men and babies with filthy blankets thrown over them, and I thought of the medieval carts that went from house to house when the Great Plague struck Europe, collecting the dead. Some of the people in these carts were dead. There were two television crews pointing their lenses at close range into the faces of the refugees, and I noticed how, for once, the faces did not react to the cameras. It was as if every face was also dead.

Two US embassy officials were standing beside a station wagon along with a senior American officer. "We can`t have them just all coming down here," one of the embassy men said to Staff Sergeant Nolde of the 1st Armored Division. "They can`t cross the border. We have no facilities to handle this. They`ve got to go back."

I noticed Fred Cuny, an American aid official, standing beside the embassy men, listening in silence. "Look, you`ve got to stop them moving down this road," the embassy man was saying. "It`s tragic, I know that, but we simply don`t have the facilities for them." Cuny asked if extra first-aid tents couldn`t be erected for the refugees, and the embassy man sighed. It wasn`t supposed to be like this. Liberation, a clean victory - and now this mess. And on television. You could see his problem. "You`ve got to stop them, Sergeant," the embassy man repeated. The officer joined in. "Iraqi agents could infiltrate back into Kuwait among the refugees."

But suddenly, there on this cold, damp, hellish road, all the bright sunlight of what was best about America - all the hope and compassion and humanity that Americans like to believe they possess - suddenly shone among us. For the young, tired 1st Armored staff sergeant turned angrily on the man from the US embassy. "I`m sorry, sir. But if you`re going to give me an order to stop these people, I can`t do that. They are coming here begging, old women crying, sick children, boys begging for food. We`re already giving them most of our rations. But I have to tell you, sir, that if you give me an order to stop them, I just won`t do that."

You could see the embassy men wince. First it was these pesky folk cluttering up the highway, then the television cameras, and now a soldier who wouldn`t obey orders. But Sergeant Nolde just turned his back on the diplomat and walked over to a queue of refugee cars. "Tell these people to park at the side of the road over there," he yelled at the soldiers on his checkpoint. "Tell them to be patient but we`ll try to look after them. Don`t send them back."

Around Nolde, two famished Iraqi families, the women in filthy black chadors, the children barefooted, the men`s faces dazed, were sitting in the dirt, tearing open the American military ration packs with their nails, scoffing the cold lumps of stew, pouring the contents of the sauce packets into their mouths. Across the cold sand, Nolde`s soldiers had already helped to house an Iraqi woman and five children.

Their story was simple and terrible. Their father had been executed for refusing to join the Republican Guard, their mother raped afterwards. The children were taken by their aunt southwards towards the American lines and here they all were now, squatting in an abandoned electricity shed. The Americans were feeding them, and had found four puppy dogs and a small, gentle-faced donkey which they had given to the grimy children.

Now a line of battered cars was driving steadily towards Nolde`s position, packed with fearful civilians. Many had not eaten for days. The men were unshaven, the women in tears, the children had urinated in the car in the long journey across a devastated Iraq. Whole families were crying for civilian relatives killed in the allied air assault. Their convoy stank. A little girl was held out of the window of an old black Mercedes by a screaming woman. The child`s body was jerking grotesquely, the convulsions about to kill her. This was not quite what the generals in Riyadh had been thinking about when they announced their days of "battlefield preparation` and `communications interdiction".

Nolde ordered one of his men to run down the line of cars. "Where is the car with the sick child?" the soldier kept shouting in English, until someone translated his question into Arabic. There was a wail from the Mercedes. "Get a medic down here, fast," the soldier ordered.

Two more Americans arrived, a big, black soldier who took the little girl into his arms and touched her brow. "Oh, Jesus, she`s having a fit," he said. "Tell the field hospital we`re coming down with her." The stricken child, together with her distraught mother, was taken from the car. Nolde arrived to order the vehicle out of the column. "Tell the rest of the family we need to search their vehicle then they can go and wait by the Red Cross truck," he said. Nolde and his 12 soldiers of the 1st Armored handed out more of their own rations. There would be no medals for performing these duties. And with good reason. For a conflict of interest was becoming apparent. That is why the American officer and the US diplomats had arrived to inspect Nolde`s position. The newly returned and "legitimate" government of Kuwait - on whose behalf the Americans had gone to war - had no desire to see these refugees given sanctuary in Kuwait.

The officer even muttered into Nolde`s ear the following revealing sentence: "We had an Iraqi soldier give himself up near here the other day and a Kuwaiti soldier just took him to one side, shot him in the head and pushed his body into a ditch. If you let these people through Safwan, they could face the same danger."

Nolde looked at the officer in contempt. He must have known very well what was going on. He was being ordered to send these people back to their deaths - not because of "lack of facilities" or "Iraqi infiltration" but because the Kuwaitis didn`t want them cluttering up their newly liberated treasure-house emirate.

VII. Who did you shoot in the war, daddy? Exclusive extract from Robert Fisk`s new book.

The Independent
Published: 07 October 2005

Bill Fisk, my father, must have been the second lieutenant tasked to write up the battalion war diary each night. Sometimes the entries were only a few words in length, a remark about the "inclement weather", but there were other, longer reports in the dry military language that Bill would have been taught to use.

"Strong fighting patrols out by day and night," Bill was reporting in early October. "Patrols active and touch constantly maintained with the enemy. During the morning of the 5th contact patrols moved N and S from newly gained positions...Hostile opposition entirely in the form of MG [machine gun] Fire; machine guns appeared to be very numerous." In the diaries, Bill always referred to the Germans as "the enemy". All his life, he called them "the Bosche".

He had been billeted in Douai with the King`s Liverpool Regiment. I knew that. Everywhere Bill was stationed, he bought postcards. Some showed the devastation caused by German shells. Most had been printed before the war - of medieval towns with spires and cobbled streets and Flemish façades, of delicate tramcars rattling past buildings with wooden verandas - and were even then, as Bill collected them, souvenirs of a France that no longer existed.

A quarter of a century ago, I travelled with a young Irishwoman to the Belgian city of Ypres, where in stone upon the Menin Gate are inscribed the names of those 54,896 men who fought in the same British Army uniform as my father - but whose bodies were never found. They were fighting, they believed, for little Belgium - little Catholic Belgium - which had been invaded by the German armies in 1914. Looking at all those names on the Gate, the young woman was moved by how many of them were Irish.

"How in God`s name," she asked, "was a boy from Tralee dying here in the mud of Flanders?`

After a few minutes, an elderly man approached, holding a visitor`s book. He asked if she would like to sign it. My friend looked at the British Army`s insignia on the memorial book with considerable distaste.In the end, she wrote in the book, in Irish, do thiortha beaga - "for little countries".

How carefully she eased the Irish soldier`s desire to help Little Belgium - one of my father`s reasons for going to war - into the memory of a tragedy of another little country, how she was able to conflate Ireland into Flanders without losing the integrity of her own feelings.

For many Britons, the Great War is an addiction, a moment to reflect upon the passing of generations, of pointless sacrifice, the collapse of empire, the war our fathers - or our grandfathers - fought. How much further could I go in my search for Bill`s life amid those gas attacks and shelling and raids mentioned in the war diaries - across the very same no man`s land that was portrayed so vividly in the tiny snapshot I had received from my father?

In his battalion war diaries, under the date 10-11 November 1918, my father had written the following: "At 07.30 11th instant message from XVII Corps received via Bde [Brigade] that Hostilities will cease at 11.00 today - line reached at that hour by Advanced troops to remain stationary." Then, later: "Billets in Louvencourt reached at 18.00 hours."

My father had arrived at the barn-like cabin that was to be his home until the end of the following January. I turned to the notes my mother, Peggy, had taken from him before he died. "Most of the officers were billeted in the chateau because the occupants had gone and the junior officers were put in these scruffy little farmhouses. I found myself in a derelict cottage and to get into my room I had to go through a room where an `old biddy` was in bed. Every morning I had to go through her room... she was always in bed smoking a pipe."

One freezing winter`s day, I travelled the little road back to Louvencourt on the Somme. I had my mother`s snapshot with me, which showed the house where Bill was billeted. I`m not sure what I expected to find there. Someone who remembered him? Unlikely. He had left Louvencourt 60 years earlier. Some clue as to how the young, free-spirited man in the 1918 photograph could have turned into the man I remember in old age, threatening to strike even Peggy when she began to suffer the first effects of Parkinson`s disease, who had grieved her so much that she contentedly watched him go into a nursing home, never visited him there and refused to attend his funeral?

I found the house, the roof still bent but the wall prettified with new windows and shutters. Unlike Bill in 1956, I knocked on the door. An old French lady answered. She was born in 1920 - the same year as Peggy - and could not have known Bill. But she could just remember her very elderly grandmother - the "old biddy".

I walked back up the road. Opposite the house I found another very small British war cemetery. And two of the graves in it were those of men who were shot at dawn by firing squad.

Private Harry MacDonald of the 12th West Yorks - the father of three children - was executed here for desertion on 4 November 1916. Rifleman FM Barratt of the 7th King`s Royal Rifle Corps was shot for desertion on 10 July 1917. Their graves are 20 metres from the window of the room in which 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk lived.

After I first wrote about my father`s billets in Louvencourt in The Independent, I received a letter from a reader who said she now owned the chateau. She was British and told me that many of the officers had carved their names on the table and walls in the basement. Bill`s name, of course, was not among them.

Had their graves, so near to him, spoken to his conscience when he was asked to command a firing party and kill an Australian soldier? From Paris, I called up the Australian archivist in charge of war records in Canberra. No soldiers from Australian regiments were executed in the First World War, he said. But when the war ended, two Australians were under sentence of death, one for apparently killing a French civilian. The archivist doubted if this was the man Bill spoke of, but was not sure. And - it would have pleased my father, I thought - the condemned man was spared. Alas, the truth was more cruel.

Another Independent reader wrote to me, referring to the case of an Australian soldier, an artilleryman serving in the British Army, who had indeed been sentenced to death for killing a British military policeman in Paris. His name was Frank Wills and his file was now open at the National Archives in London. When I read that file number WO71/682 was waiting for me, I knew that these papers would contain a part of Bill`s life. If he did not read them, he must have been familiar with their contents. He must have known the story of Gunner Wills.

The story was simple enough, and the trial of No. 253617 Gunner Frank Wills of "X" Trench Mortar Battalion of 50 Division, Royal Field Artillery, was summed up in two typed pages. He had deserted from the British Army on 28 November 1918 - more than two weeks after the Armistice - and was captured in Paris on 12 March 1919. He and a colleague had been stopped in the rue Faubourg du Temple in the 11th arrondissement by two British military policemen, Lance Corporals Webster and Coxon. It was the old familiar tale of every deserter. Papers, please. Wills told the military policemen that his papers were at his hotel at 66 rue de Malte. All four went to the Hôtel de la Poste so that Wills could retrieve his documents.

According to the prosecution: "The accused and L/Cpl Webster went upstairs. Shortly afterwards two shots were fired upstairs...the accused came down and ran out with a revolver in his hand, he was followed by L/Cpl Coxon and fired three shots at him. One of the shots wounded L/Cpl Coxon in the arm slightly. The accused made off...but was chased by gendarmes and civilians and arrested. The revolver was taken from him and found to contain five expended cartridges. L/Cpl Webster was found at the top of the stairs, wounded in the chest, abdomen and finger...He died three days later..."

The Australian soldier, the dead policeman, the involvement of French gendarmes, Paris. This must have been the same man whom Bill was ordered to execute. Gunner Wills had joined the Australian army in 1915 at the age of 16 - he was Bill`s age - and was sent to Egypt, to the Sinai desert and to the Dardanelles. Gunner Wills took part in Churchill`s doomed expedition to Gallipoli and fought the Ottoman Turks. But in 1916 he had been sent to hospital suffering from "Egyptian fever" - which left him with mental problems and lapses of memory. The prosecution at his court martial did not dispute this. Frank Wills was discharged from the Australian army in 1917, then travelled to England and - a grim reflection, this, on the desperation of the British Army at this stage of the war - was allowed to enlist in the Royal Artillery in April 1918. He arrived in France before Bill Fisk. Unlike Bill, however, 19-year-old Frank Wills was already a veteran.

Wills, according to his own defence, had been drinking. "He came to Paris for a spree...Had no breakfast on 12th March, 1919...He was not drunk, but getting on that way. Does not remember whether he fired at L/Cpl Coxon or not. He knew the revolver was loaded, and had been loaded since November 1918."

A sad, eight-page handwritten testimony signed with an almost decorative "F Wills" explained how the two British military policemen asked him if he was carrying a pass to be in Paris and how, when he arrived with them at his hotel, "I rushed up the stairs to my room. I found the door of the room locked. Within a few seconds I heard someone coming upstairs. I had my great coat over my arm at the time. In a pocket of the great coat I had a revolver with six rounds. The revolver was issued to me by my unit...I took the revolver out of my pocket in order to hide it under the carpet on the landing. I did not want to be arrested with a revolver in my possession as I had a large amount of money on me and I had been playing crown and anchor. I thought a more serious charge would be brought against me in consequence. Scarcely had I taken my revolver out of my pocket when someone came up the stairs...This person rushed at me and I then saw it was Cpl Webster. No conversation passed. Cpl Webster had me by the right wrist. I was frightened and excited and in wrenching my wrist the revolver went off twice. Cpl Webster then let go my wrist and gave me a blow on the head and knocked me down the stairs. I was stunned by the blow on the head...I found the revolver lying on the stairs in front of me. I picked up the revolver. I was under the impression that Cpl Webster was following me down the stairs. I was bewildered and greatly excited.

"When I reached the street I heard one shot go off as I reached the pavement. I do not remember what happened after that until I was arrested."

Wills`s testimony was that of a very young and immature man. "When I left my unit," he wrote, "I had no intention of remaining away. I met some of my friends and they persuaded me to come away for a spree. I eventually got to Paris. I intended to go back to my unit after seeing Paris: there was very little work being done at the time and things were rather slow. I got mixed up with bad company and had been gambling and drinking heavily..."

Wills was to repeat this admission of his drinking problems in his last testimony. The two shots had been fired because Corporal Webster had "wrenched" his wrist. After his arrest, he wrote, French police had driven him away in a taxi and only after one of the policemen had hit him with a bayonet had his memory returned. "I was not drunk but was getting on that way. The deficiency in memory is brought on by drink..." It was not difficult to picture the young man, drunk, desperate, slowly realising the fate that might await him.

I fly back to France yet again. The rue de Malte remains, a narrow one-way street cut in two by a boulevard, still home to a clutch of small, cheap hotels. And incredibly, No 66 is still a hotel, no longer the Hôtel de la Poste, now the Hôtel Hibiscus. What on earth can I find here? The receptionist is Algerian and I ask for a second-floor room, nearest the stairs, the room in which Wills stayed.

I tell the Algerian why I have come here and he suddenly bombards me with questions. Why did Wills come to Paris? Why did he shoot the military policeman? His name is Safian and he tells me that for his university degree in Algiers he studied the effect on children of a massacre at a village called Bentalha.

Bentalha. I know that name. I have been there. I have seen the blood of a baby splashed over a balcony in Bentalha, a baby whose throat had been slit by young men who killed hundreds of civilians in the village in 1997. The Algerian government blamed Islamists for the slaughter. But I had always suspected that the Algerian army was involved. I repeat this to Safian.

"I have heard this," he replies. "There is much to clear up about this massacre. I had a friend, he said the military were there and they advanced and they stayed just short of where the massacre was taking place. They did nothing. Why? I cannot say too much. Remember, I am an Algerian."

I remember. I remember the villagers who survived. They said the same thing to me, that the Algerian army refused to come to their rescue. The killing of a soldier here more than 80 years ago is a safer subject.

I translate Wills`s testimony for Safian. He cannot understand why Wills shot Corporal Webster when he would have received a lesser charge for desertion. I climb the stairs twice. It only takes 15 seconds to reach the second floor. When I run up the staircase, I reach it in five seconds - the length of time it must have taken Corporal Webster. Wills would have had no time to conceal his gun - if he intended to. The second floor is only five metres square. Here Frank Wills struggled with Webster and left him lying in his blood on the floor. I walk into room 22, nearest the stairs, Wills`s room, the last place he slept in freedom before his death. Here he kept his great coat and his service revolver.

He had been drinking on the morning of 12 March 1919, probably in this room. Punch, cognac and "American grog", he told the court. I sit on my bed in Wills`s room and read again through his testimony, this young man whom my father was ordered to kill, his last words written to spare his life.

"I am 20 years of age. I joined the Australian Army in 1915 when I was 16 years of age. I went to Egypt and the Dardanelles. I have been in a considerable number of engagements there, & in France. I joined the British Army in April 1918 and came to France in June 1918. I was discharged from the Australian Army on account of fever which affected my head contracted in Egypt. I was persuaded to leave my unit by my friends and got into bad company. I began to drink and gamble heavily. I had no intention whatever of committing the offences for which I am now before the Court . . . I ask the Court to take into consideration my youth and to give me a chance of leading an upright and straightforward life in the future."

I could see how this must have affected Bill Fisk. Wills was not only the same age - he had been sent to France only two months before Bill arrived on the Somme. Wills had not deserted in time of war. But he had killed a British military policeman. I remember how Bill believed in the law, justice, the courts, magistrates, the police.

The court martial summary states that Wills was "sentenced to suffer death"; he was taken to the British base at Le Havre on the French coast on 24 May. Bill was based there in May 1919 - he took two snapshots of the camp, one of them with a church-tower in the background - and was present when Wills arrived. In the British archives, I had turned to the record of his execution with something approaching fear. Bill had spoken of his refusal to command the firing party. I believed him then. But the journalist in me, the dark archivist that dwells in the soul of every investigative reporter, needed to check. I think that Bill`s son needed to know that his father did not kill Frank Wills, to be sure, to be absolutely certain that this one great act was real.

And there was the single scrap of paper recording Wills`s death. Shot by firing squad. "Sentence carried out 0414 hours 27th May," it read. The signature of the officer commanding was not in my father`s handwriting. The initials were "CRW". A note added that, "The execution was carried out in a proper and humane manner. Death was instantaneous." Was it so? Is death really instantaneous? And what of Wills in those last minutes, in the seconds that ticked by between four o`clock and 4.14am, how did a man of only 20 feel in those last moments, in the dark in northern France, perhaps with a breeze off the sea? Did Bill hear the shots that killed him? At least his conscience was clear.

Bill Fisk was born 106 years ago but still remains an enigma for me. His medals, when I inherited them, included a Defence Medal for 1940, an MBE and an OBE for post-war National Savings work, and two medals from the Great War. On one of them are the dates 1914-1919, marking not the Armistice of November 1918, but the 1919 Versailles Treaty which formally ended the conflict and then spread its bloody effect across the Middle East. This medal bears the legend "The Great War for Civilisation".

In Peggy`s last hours in 1998, one of her nurses told me that squirrels had got into her loft and destroyed some photographs. I climbed into the roof to find that, although a few old pictures were missing, the tin box containing my father`s snapshots was safe. But as I turned to leave, I caught my head on a beam. Blood poured down my face and I remember thinking that it was Bill`s fault. I remember cursing his name. I had scarcely cleaned the wound when, two hours later, my mother died. And in the weeks that followed, a strange thing happened; a scar and a small dent formed on my forehead - identical to a scar my father bore from a Chinese man`s knife.

From the afterlife, Bill had tried to make amends. Amid the coldness I still feel towards him, I cannot bring myself to ignore the letter he left for me, to be read after his death. "My dear Fellah," he wrote: "I just want to say two things to you old boy. First - thank you for bringing such love, joy and pride to Mum and me. We are, indeed, most fortunate parents. Second - I know you will take the greatest possible care of Mum, who is the kindest and best woman in the world, as you know, and who has given me the happiest period of my life with her continuous and never failing love. With a father`s affection - King Billy."

Extracted from `The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East` by Robert Fisk, published by 4th Estate, £25. To buy the book at the special price of £22.50, including p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

[Joerver]

http://www.independent.co.uk/

IV. When I tasted fear: Robert Fisk describes the terrifying experience of coming under fire during the Battle of Fish Lake, in the Iran-Iraq war.

The Independent
Published: 04 October 2005

The Fish Lake was a stretch of desert west of Shalamcheh - the Iran-Iraq border post where I had been partially deafened by the Iraqi gun batteries shelling Khorramshahr more than six years earlier - but now Shalamcheh was back in Iranian hands and its vast army was moving towards the Shatt al-Arab river and the city of Basra.

Once more, I was in "Iranian-occupied Iraq", but in a desert that the Iraqis had flooded as they retreated. The Iranians were now advancing on a series of dykes above the waterlogged desert, under intense and constant shellfire from Iraqi artillery whose gunners quickly worked out their trajectories to hit the dykes.

The Iranians provided another army truck for the press, a Japanese open-top lorry with a pile of old steel helmets in one corner that we could wear when we reached the battlefield. Between earthworks and dugouts and lines of trenches we drove, the marching soldiery of the Islamic Republic walking beside us, grinning and making victory signs and holding up their rifles like conquering heroes. I suppose that`s what they were, the victims at last overcoming their aggressors, the winners - or so they thought - after so many years of pain and loss.

Over to my left, as we climbed on to a plateau of rock and sand, I suddenly saw the shining white warheads and fuselages of a battery of Hawk missiles, gifts from Oliver North, along with the spare parts which had now turned them into a new and formidable air defence for the victorious Iranian army.

And then we were on the causeway, a long, narrow, crumbling embankment of sand surrounded by lagoons of water filled with still-burning Iraqi tanks, overturned missile launchers, half-submerged Iraqi personnel carriers and dozens of bodies, some with only their feet protruding above the mire. Far more fearful, however, were the whine and crash of incoming shells as the Iraqis directed their artillery on to the dykes. I squeezed the old Russian helmet the Iranians had given me on to my head.

In front of us, an Iranian truck burst into pink fire, its occupants hurling themselves - some with flames curling round their bodies - into the water. The convoy backed up and our lorry came to a halt. We would hear the splosh in the water beside us as the next shell hit the lagoon, sending a plume of water into the sky, cascading us with mud and wet sand. Ian Black of The Guardian, one of the sanest reporters with whom one could go to war, was sitting opposite me on the truck, looking at me meaningfully through his big spectacles. "This," he said, "is bloody dangerous." I agreed.

Around us, on little hillocks amid the great green-blue lakes of water, Iranian gunners fired 155mm shells towards Basra, shouting their excitement, throwing their arms around each other. The young Iranian boys did not even bother to keep their helmets on amid the shellfire. They lounged around the earthworks of the captured Iraqi front lines, smoking cigarettes, hanging out their washing, waving good-naturedly at us as the Iraqi artillery rounds hissed overhead. The explosions even made them laugh. Was it contempt for death or merely their reaction to our fear.

Another big splosh and Black and I hunched our shoulders, and sure enough there was an eruption of water and earth behind me and a downpour of muck and brackish liquid descended on us. The shells came five at a time, zipping over the breakwaters. On a similar trip a few hours earlier, the British correspondent of US News and World Report had summed up his feelings under fire along the dykes with eloquent understatement. "I don`t think," he said, "that I could take more than a day of this."

The road surface was only a few feet above the water but the causeway seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, a dwindling taper of sand that reached a horizon of fire and smoke. The strap of my helmet suddenly snapped and it slid off my head and bounced onto the floor of the truck. I picked it up and stuck it back on my head, holding it on with my left hand. But what was the point? If I was hit on the head, my fingers would be chopped off.

Black was frowning. We were all concentrating. The idea of instant death was indeed a concentrating experience. And all the while, the army of boys and elderly volunteers and Revolutionary Guard commanders tramped past us in the sun as we ground slowly towards the battle front. "War till victory," they kept screaming at us from the mud. Would I never hear the end of this? And when we had driven for perhaps three kilometres along those earthworks and reached and passed Shalamcheh, the ghastly Mazinan suddenly appeared beside our truck, pointing in a demented way towards the north-west. " Basra," he kept shouting. "BASRA! BASRA! BASRA!"

Black and I peered through the smoke and flames and the waterspouts that were now rising eerily around us, volcanic eruptions that would carry the dark-brown mud high into the sky, where it would hover for a second before collapsing on us. Black was looking at me again. A bit like The Cruel Sea, I said stupidly. "Much worse," he replied. Mazinan was obsessed. " Come, come," he kept ordering us, and we crawled up to an embankment of mud that physically shook as the Iranians fired off their 155s from the waterlogged pits behind me.

I peered over the lip and could see across an expanse of bright water the towers and factory buildings of Basra`s suburban industrial complex, grey on the horizon, silhouetted for the gunners by the morning sun. A mob of boys stood around us, all laughing.

"Why be afraid?" one asked. "Look, we are protected. Saddam will die." A few hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had declared that the causeway here would be turned into a "furnace" - Black and I had a shrewd suspicion he meant what he said - in which the Iranians would perish. Yet this boy`s protection consisted of just one red bandanna wound tightly round his head upon which was inscribed in yellow God`s supposed invocation to destroy the Iraqi regime. Good God, said God, I remembered God saying in John Squire`s poem, "I`ve got my work cut out."

Nor was the First World War a cliché here. With at least a million dead, the battle of Fish Lake was the Somme and Passchendaele rolled into one but with the sacrifice turned maniacally cheerful by Mazinan and his comrades. One small boy - perhaps 13 or 14 - was standing beside a dugout and looked at me and slowly took off his helmet and held a Koran against his heart and smiled. This was the "Kerbala 5" offensive. And this boy, I was sure, believed he would soon be worshipping at the shrine of Imam Hossein.

It was, in its way, a sight both deeply impressive and immensely sad. These young men believed they were immortal in the sight of God. They were not fearless so much as heedless - it was this that made them so unique and yet so vulnerable. They had found the key, they had discovered the mechanism of immortality. We had not. So he was brave and laughing, while I was frightened. I didn`t want to die.

The mudfields around us were littered with unexploded bombs, big, grey-finned shark-like beasts which had half-buried themselves in the soggy mass when the Iraqi air force vainly tried to halt "Kerbala 5". " We are winning," a white banner proclaimed above a smashed dugout whose walls were built with empty ammunition boxes and shell cases. Who could doubt it? The Iraqis had five defensive lines before Basra and the Iranians had overrun the first three. The Iraqi T-72s that had been captured by the Iranians were being dug back into their own revetments but with the barrels traversed, firing now towards Basra.

Mazinan claimed - truthfully - that the Revolutionary Guards had won this battle, that the regular Iranian army provided only logistics and fire support, that Iraq had lost 15,000 dead and 35,000 wounded, that 550 tanks had been destroyed and more than a thousand armoured vehicles. But the Iranians, I unwisely protested, were still a long way from the centre of Basra. Mazinan`s eyes widened behind his giant spectacles. "Come," he said. And I was propelled by this idiotic giant - who was in reality rather too rational when it came to religious war - towards another vast embankment of mud. We struggled towards the top of it. And down the other side.

It was the third Iraqi line and we were now in front of it. Bullets buzzed around us. I remember thinking how much they sounded like wasps, high-speed wasps, and I could hear them "put-putting" into the mud behind me. Mazinan clutched my right arm and pointed towards the pillars of black smoke that hung like funeral curtains in front of us. "Do you see that building?" he asked. And through the darkness I could just make out the outline of a low, rectangular block. "That," Mazinan cried, " is the Basra Sheraton Hotel!"

The Iranians were using their artillery at three times the Iraqi rate of fire, the muzzle flashes streaking out across the water. Still the boys and the bearded old men lounged along the causeway, sometimes playing taped religious music from loudspeakers. Back on the truck, Black and I looked at each other. Brent Sadler and a crew from ITN had been taken to view a pile of Iraqi bodies in a swamp churned up by shells. "Very dangerous but I`ve got no option," Sadler told me with just a twinkle of death in his eye. `It`s television - you know, we`ve got to have pictures." Sadler would survive, he always did. But Black wasn`t so sure. Nor was I.

"We would like to go now," I hollered at Mazinan. He raised his eyebrows. "Go," Black shouted at him. "We want to go, go, go." Mazinan looked at us both with something worse than contempt. "Why?" he roared. Because we are cowards. Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.

Mazinan nodded at the driver. Then he raised his right hand level with his face and closed and opened his fingers, the kind of wave one gives to a small child. Bye-bye, bye-bye, he said softly. He was mimicking the mother taking leave of her babies. And so our truck turned left off the dyke and chuntered down a long causeway towards the ruins of Khorramshahr.

In a factory warehouse, a thousand Iraqi prisoners were paraded before us, including Brigadier General Jamal al-Bayoudi of the Iraqi 506th Corps, who described how the Pasdaran and the Basiji clawed their way through swaths of barbed wire 60 metres deep to reach their third line of defence. The Iraqis half-heartedly chanted curses against the very Iraqi leader for whom they had been fighting only a few days before. Several smiled at us when the guards were not looking. One of them muttered his name to me. "Please tell my family I am safe," he said softly. "Please tell them I did not die."

I returned from the battle of Fish Lake with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed - believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there - the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays - if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself. In a nation that looked backwards rather than forwards, in which women were to be dressed in perpetual mourning, in which death was an achievement, in which children could reach their most heroic attainment only in self-sacrifice, it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia rather than on the ancient battlefield of Kerbala.

I would spend days, perhaps weeks, of my life visiting the cemeteries of Iran`s war dead. Less than a year after the capture of Fao - the offensive that was supposed to lead Iran into Basra and then to Kerbala and Najaf - I was standing in the little cemetery of Imam Zadeh Ali Akbar on the cold slopes of the Alborz mountains at Chasar, where they had been preparing for the next Iranian offensive. The bulldozers had dug deep into the icy graveyard and there was now fresh ground - two football pitches in length - for the next crop of martyrs.

The thin, dark-faced cemetery keeper was quite blunt about it. "Every time there is a new Kerbala offensive, the martyrs arrive within days," he said. "We have three hundred already over there and 12 more last week. The graves of ordinary people we destroy after 30 years - there is nothing left - but our martyrs are different. They will lie here for a thousand years and more."

His statistics told a far more apocalyptic story than might have appeared; for Chasar - distinguished only by an ancient, crumbling shrine - merely contained the war dead of one small suburb of north Tehran.

V. The choirs of Kandahar: Robert Fisk describes a spine-tingling experience during a visit to Afghanistan under Soviet occupation
The Independent

Published: 05 October 2005

I returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 1980, flying into Kabul with a tennis racket and an unbelievable claim to be a tourist. The Khad attached a cop to me this time and I was taken under escort to the Intercontinental, where I paid him off in return for a taxi ride around the capital.

The dust hung in layers of heat over Kabul and the Soviet soldiers were now on the defensive, escorting civilian cars in long armoured convoys across the highways of Afghanistan, their airbase at Bagram now flying bombing sorties against the mujahedin every three minutes.

Soviets now occupied senior "advisory" positions in all the Kabul ministries, their large black limousines gliding through the muggy streets of the city at midday, curtains pulled across the back windows and plain-clothes men peering from the front passenger seats. The occupants were not the large, bulky commissars of popular mythology but, for the most part, small, respectable men in glossy grey business suits, narrow, slightly unfashionable ties and hair thick with oil, family men from an autonomous republic with five-year plans to meet.

In the stifling summer, the Russian soldiers were wearing floppy, wide-brimmed sombreros and their trucks jammed the streets of Kabul. Their "limited intervention" had spawned a spring offensive - that tactic beloved of all generals confronted by an armed insurrection - which had now turned into a full-scale military campaign. Helicopter gunships stood in rows five deep at Kabul airport. Four-engined Ilyushin transport aircraft en route to Tashkent turned all day over the city, trailing fuel exhaust as they banked sharply above the international airport to avoid ground-to-air missiles.

At the airport, the two faces of Afghanistan`s revolution could be seen within 800 metres of each other. Above the main terminal building, the faded outline of January`s triumphant greeting to Soviet troops could still be observed - "Welcome to the New Model Revolution" - although the 1.5m-high letters had long ago been taken down and the sun had bleached the red paint a drab pink. Just across the airfield, at the eastern end of the main runway, lay the other symbol of Afghanistan`s revolutionary conflict: a Soviet SA-2 missile with a 130-kilogram warhead, a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum altitude of 50,000 feet; this was the same weapon used with devastating effect against US B-52 bombers over Hanoi in the Vietnam war.

And Vietnam was the word that more and more Afghans were using to describe their own conflict. President Carter and Mrs Thatcher were urging the world to boycott the Olympics in Moscow. Kabul`s schoolchildren were refusing to attend classes since hundreds of them were taken ill; rebels, according to the government, had put sulphur in the schools` water supplies. A thousand children had been taken to the Aliabad hospital in one week alone. At night, gun battles crackled around the city as gunmen attacked Russian patrols and rival Parcham and Khalq party members assaulted each other. A doctor who was a member of President Karmal`s Parcham party was shot dead while visiting a patient at Bandeghazi - within the city limits - but the police could not discover whether he was killed by mujahedin or by Khalq agents.

One of the cops assigned to me was a Khalq man who, in the privacy of the hotel elevator, suddenly burst out: "It is bad here and I am sick. We want Soviet help - we need it. But if anyone stays longer than we want - anyone, and that includes the Soviet Union - we will shoot them."

On 14 June, Karmal ordered the execution of 13 former Khalq functionaries for "hatching conspiracies against the state". Most were minor officials - Sidaq Alamyar, the ex-planning minister, for example, and Saeb Jan Sehrai, who was in charge of "border affairs" - while the deputy prime minister, Asadullah Sawari, who was head of Taraki`s secret service, remained untouched. I was lucky to have stolen 48 hours in Kabul, albeit under secret police surveillance.

When I was taken back to Kabul airport for my flight out, an Aeroflot jet was standing on the apron, its fuselage evidence for Mrs Thatcher`s profound cynicism towards the Soviets. The aircraft bore Aeroflot`s proud English-language slogan "Official Olympic Carrier" on both sides of its fuselage, but from its doors it was disgorging Soviet combat troops, young men - some with blond hair - carrying their rifles in the hot sun as they walked down the steps.

They looked happy enough - one raised his arms towards the sun and said something that made his comrades laugh - although their chances of returning home in similar mood had decreased in recent weeks. More than 600 seriously wounded Soviet servicemen had been admitted to the Kabul military hospital, another 400 to Soviet clinics near the bus station at Khai Khana; of these 1,000, 200 had died - and this figure only included those who died of wounds, not those who were killed in combat. The dead were loaded in square wooden coffins aboard Antonov-12 aircraft and no one knew what they contained until a young Soviet soldier was seen saluting one of the boxes. Even the Khad secret policeman who followed me so assiduously agreed the Soviet army was experiencing "very big trouble".

But back in that chill February of 1980, I still had two days of precious freedom before my visa expired and I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I decided this time to be greedy, to try once more a long-distance bus ride, this time to a city whose people, so we were told in Kabul, had rediscovered their collective faith in confronting the invaders of their country: Kandahar. I took the bus before dawn, from the same station I had set out from on my vain trip to Mazar, wearing the same Afghan hat and hunched under the same brown shawl.

Men and women sat together - they all appeared to be families - and the moment I announced my nationality, I was deluged with apples, cheese, oranges and the big, flat, sagging nan bread that Afghans use as an envelope to contain their food. When I gently expressed my concern that there might be "bad" people on the bus - the very word Khad usually had the effect of silencing any conversation for an hour - I was assured there were none. I would be safe. And so the passengers, with scarcely any English, gave me their silent protection on the 14-hour journey across the moonlike, frozen landscape to Kandahar.

It was an epic of a country at war. Our coach passed the wrecks of countless vehicles beside the road. Sixty-five kilometres west of Ghazni, the town from which Gavin and I and his crew had fled the previous month - it already felt another life ago - a convoy of civilian buses and trucks had just been ambushed. All of the vehicles were burning fiercely, sending columns of black smoke funnelling up from the snow-covered plains. Small, darkened mounds lay beside the buses, all that was left of some of their passengers. Soviet convoys passed us in the opposite direction, each vehicle carrying a Russian soldier standing in the back, pistol in hand. The Soviets were now too busy ensuring their own safety to worry about the civilians they had supposedly come to rescue from the "bandits".

In one village, three Afghan soldiers, including an officer, boarded our bus and tried to arrest a postman who had deserted from the army. There was a brutal fist-fight between soldiers and passengers until two uniformed conscripts who were smoking hashish in the back seats walked down the aisle and literally kicked the officer out of the vehicle. So much for the morale of Karmal`s Afghan army.

In another village, the passengers hissed at Soviet Tajik troops who were standing beside the barbed wire of a military depot. But the passenger behind tapped me urgently on the shoulder. "Look!" he gasped, and pointed to his forehead. I looked at his face and could not understand. "Look!" he said more urgently and placed his right hand flat on top of his head, as if it was a hat. Hat. Yes, there was something missing from the Soviet Tajik soldiers` grey fur hats. They had removed the red star from their hats. They stood looking at us, darker-skinned than their Russian comrades, bereft now of the communist brotherhood in which they had grown up.

I should have understood at once. If Soviet troops in Afghanistan - Muslim Soviet soldiers - would remove the very symbol of their country, the badge that their fathers had worn so proudly in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945, then already the cancer of Afghanistan must have eaten deep into their souls. They had been sent to war against their Muslim co-religionists and had decided that they would not fight them. No more telling portent of the imminent collapse of empire could have confronted me in Afghanistan. Yet my trek across the snowlands was so vast, the dangers so great, my exhaustion so overwhelming that I merely jotted in my notebook the observation that the soldiers had "for some reason" removed their hat-badges.

A few miles further on, an Afghan soldier could be seen standing in the desert, firing into the dusk with a sub-machine-gun at an enemy he could not possibly have seen. When our bus stopped at a chaikhana in the frozen semi-darkness, an old man from the burned convoy we had passed told us that of the 300 passengers taken from the buses, 50 were detained by more than 100 armed rebels, all of them told - quite openly - that they would "probably" be executed because they were party men. Each scene spoke for itself, a cameo of violence and government impotence that our frightened passengers clearly understood.

It was night when we entered Kandahar, the ancient capital of Afghanistan, our bus gliding past the shrine in which lay the cloak of the Prophet Mohamed, circling a set of 19th-century cannon that had belonged to General Roberts`s army in the Second Afghan War. I was dirty and tired and checked into a seedy hotel in the old city, a place of cigarette smoke, sweat and overcooked meat. My bedroom was small, the sheets stained, the threadbare carpet smallpoxed with cigarette burns. But two big rust-encrusted doors led on to a tiny balcony from where I could see the moon and the stars which glistened across the winter sky.

I was lying on my bed when I first heard the sound. Allahu akbar. God is great. It was a thin, pitched wail. Allahu akbar. God is great. I looked at my watch. This was no fixed time for prayers. It was 9 o`clock. The curfew had just begun. Allahu akbar. Now the chant came from the next roof, scarcely 20 metres from my room, more a yodel than an appeal to the Almighty.

I opened the door to the balcony. The cry was being carried on the air. A dozen, a hundred Allahu akbars, unco-ordinated, overlaying each other, building upon a foundation of identical words, high-pitched and tenor, treble and child-like, an army of voices shouting from the rooftops of Kandahar. They swelled in volume, a thousand now, ten thousand, a choir that filled the heavens, that floated beneath the white moon and the stars, the music of the spheres.

I saw a family, husband, wife and a clutch of children, all chanting, but their voices were lost in the pulse of sound that now covered the city. This extraordinary phenomenon was no mere protest, a lament at the loss of freedom. When the Prophet entered Mecca in the year 630 of the Christian era, he walked to the great black stone, the Kaaba, touched it with his stick and shouted in a strong voice that supreme invocation of Islam: Allahu akbar. His 10,000 followers chorused those same words and they were taken up by members of the Prophet`s own Qureishi tribe who had gathered on their roofs and balconies of Mecca.

Now these same holy words were being chanted by another 10,000 voices, this time from the roofs and balconies of Kandahar. A Westerner - or a Russian - might interpret this as a semi-political demonstration, a symbolic event. But in reality, the choirs of Kandahar were an irresistible assertion of religious faith, the direct and deliberate repetition of one of the holiest moments of Islam. In the last year of his life, the Prophet had entered the newly purified shrine in Mecca and seven more times chanted Allahu akbar. In Kandahar, the voices were desperate but all-powerful, mesmeric, unending, deafening: an otherwise silent people recognising their unity in God. This was an unstoppable force, an assertion of religious identity that no Afghan satrap or Kremlin army could ultimately suppress.

[Joerver]

Extracted from `The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East` by Robert Fisk, published by 4th Estate on 3 October, £25. To buy the book at the special price of £22.50, including p&p.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/

I. siehe Robert Fisk on finding Osama #136

II. Shock and awe: the night Baghdad burned. Robert Fisk watches in the Iraqi capital as the US air offensive begins in March 2003

The Independent
Published: 02 October 2005

A pulsating, minute-long roar of sound brought President George W Bush`s crusade against "terrorism" to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping against our ears.

Tubes of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top. Looking out across the Tigris from the river bank, I could see pin-pricks of fire reaching high into the sky as America`s bombs and missiles exploded on to Iraq`s military and communication centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as well.

Valhalla, I said to myself. This needed Wagner, the twilight of the gods, Götterdämmerung. No one in Iraq doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair had said just that in the House of Commons debate that very same week.

But I wondered, listening to this storm of fire across Baghdad, if he had any conception of what it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those Iraqis who were, as I wrote my report an hour later, cowering in their homes and basements. Just before the missiles arrived, I talked to an old Shia Muslim woman in a poor area of Baghdad, dressed in traditional black with a white veil over her head. I pressed her for what she felt. In the end, she just said: "I am afraid." The explosions now gave expression to her words.

Donald Rumsfeld was to assert that the American attack on Baghdad was "as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed". But he could not have told that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looks at me on the first morning of the war, drip-feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tries vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her legs - they were bound up with gauze - and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg, which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha`s mother thinks that if her child`s two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of the patients brought to the Mustansariya College Hospital after America`s blitz on the city began.

There is something sick, obscene, about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we reporters turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi Minister of Health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the "bestial" nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don`t intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain.

So let`s forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the cocky moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip - this bright morning in March 2003 - around the Mustansariya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about "coalition forces" which our "embedded" journalists were already telling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy - which this war does not - is primarily about suffering and death.

Take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs, who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders - they are now twice their original size. She was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missiles struck Baghdad. "I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere," she told me. "It was on my arms, my legs, my chest."

Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest. Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt`s front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding, although the blood has clotted around her toes and is stanched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two boys are in the next room. Saad Selim is 11, his brother Omar 14. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest.

Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs, sustained when she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf, but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, "multiple shrapnel wounds" sounds like a natural disease, which I suppose - among a people who have suffered more than 20 years of war - it is.

So was all this, I asked myself, for 11 September 2001? Was all this to "strike back" at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali had nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than had the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wondered, that these children, these young women, should suffer for September 11th?

Driving across Baghdad was an eerie experience. The targets were indeed carefully selected, even though their destruction inevitably struck the innocent. There was a presidential palace with four 10m-high statues of the Muslim warrior Saladin on each corner - the face of each, of course, was Saddam`s - and, neatly in between, a great black hole gouged into the façade of the building. The Ministry of Air Weapons Production was pulverised, a massive heap of prestressed concrete and rubble. But outside, at the gate, there were two sandbag emplacements with smartly dressed Iraqi soldiers, rifles over the parapet, ready to defend their ministry from the enemy that had already destroyed it.

The morning traffic built up on the roads beside the Tigris. No driver looked too hard at the Republican Palace on the other side of the river, or the Ministry of Armaments Procurement beside it. They burned for 12 hours after the first missile strikes. It was as if burning palaces and blazing ministries and piles of smoking rubble were a normal part of daily Baghdad life. But then again, no one under Saddam`s regime would spend too long looking at such things, would they?

Iraqis were puzzled as to what all this meant. In 1991, the Americans struck the refineries, the electricity grid, the water pipes, communications. But on day two of this war, Baghdad could still function. The land-line telephones worked, the internet operated, the electrical power was at full capacity, the bridges over the Tigris remained unbombed. My guess was that when - "if" was still a sensitive phrase - the Americans arrived in Baghdad, they would need a working communications system, electricity, transport. What had been spared was not a gift to the Iraqi people, I concluded; it was for the benefit of Iraq`s supposed new masters. How wrong I was.

The Iraq Daily emerged with an edition of just four pages, a clutch of articles on the "steadfastness" of the nation - steadfastness in Arabic is soummoud, the same name as the missiles Iraq partially destroyed before Bush forced the UN inspectors to leave by going to war - and a headline that read: "President: Victory Will Come in Iraqi Hands". During the bombing on Friday night, Iraqi television - again, there had been no attempt by the US to destroy the television facilities - showed an Iraqi general, appearing live, to reassure the nation of victory. As he spoke, the blast waves from cruise missile explosions blew in the curtains behind him and shook the television camera.

So where did all this lead us? In the early hours of the next day, I looked once more across the Tigris at the funeral pyre of the Republican Palace and the colonnaded ministry beside it. There were beacons of fire across Baghdad and the sky was lowering with smoke. The buttressed, rampart-like palace - sheets of flame soaring from its walls - looked like a medieval castle ablaze.

That second afternoon, the Iraqis lit massive fires of oil around Baghdad in the hope of misleading the guidance system of the cruise missiles. Smoke against computers. The air-raid sirens began to howl again just after 6.20pm on 22 March, when Saddam`s biggest military office block, a great rampart of a building 20 storeys high beside his palace, simply exploded in front of me, a cauldron of fire, a 100ft sheet of flame and a sound that had my ears singing for an hour afterwards. The entire, buttressed edifice shuddered under the impact. Then four more cruise missiles came in. It was the heaviest bombing Baghdad had suffered in more than 20 years of war.

To my right, a long colonnaded building looking much like the façade of the Pentagon coughed fire as five missiles crashed into the concrete. In an operation officially intended to create "shock and awe" - Rumsfeld`s latest slogan - shock was hardly the word for it. The few Iraqis in the streets around me - no friends of Saddam, I would suspect - cursed under their breath.

From high-rise buildings, shops and homes came the thunder of crashing glass as the shock waves swept across the Tigris in both directions. Minute after minute the missiles came in. Many Iraqis had watched - as I had - the television tape of those ominous B-52 bombers taking off from Britain only six hours earlier. Like me, they had noted the time, added three hours for Iraqi time ahead of London and guessed that, at around 9pm, the terror would begin. The B-52s, almost certainly firing from outside Iraqi airspace, were dead on time.

Policemen drove at speed through the streets, their loudspeakers ordering pedestrians to take shelter or hide under cover of tall buildings. Much good did it do. Crouching next to a block of shops, I narrowly missed the shower of glass that came cascading down from the upper windows as the shock waves slammed into them.

A few Iraqis - husbands and wives, older children - could be seen staring from balconies, shards of broken glass around them. Each time one of the great golden bubbles of fire burst across the city, they ducked inside before the blast wave reached them. As I stood beneath the trees on the corniche, a wave of cruise missiles passed low overhead, the shriek of their passage almost as devastating as the explosions that were to follow. How, I asked myself, does one describe this outside the language of a military report, the definition of the colour, the decibels of the explosions? The flight of the missiles sounded as if someone was ripping to pieces huge canopies of silk across the sky.

There is something anarchic about all human beings, about their reaction to violence. The Iraqis around me stood and watched, as I did, the tongues of flame bursting from the upper storeys of the building beside Saddam`s palace, reaching high into the sky. Strangely, the electricity grid continued to operate, and around us the traffic lights continued to move between red and green. Billboards moved in the breeze of the shock waves; floodlights continued to blaze on public buildings. Above us, curtains of smoke were moving over Baghdad, white from the explosions, black from the burning targets. How could one resist this? How could the Iraqis ever believe - with their broken technology, their debilitating 12 years of sanctions - that they could defeat the computers of these missiles and of these aircraft? It was the same old story: irresistible, unquestionable power.

III. How the world was duped: the race to invade Iraq.
When Colin Powell made his notorious final pitch for war at the UN Security Council, Robert Fisk was there. He recalls a tragi-comic occasion

The Independent
Published: 03 October 2005

The 5th of February 2003 was a snow-blasted day in New York, the steam whirling out of the road covers, the US secret servicemen - helpfully wearing jackets with "Secret Service" printed on them - hugging themselves outside the fustian, asbestos-packed UN headquarters on the East River. Exhausted though I was after travelling thousands of miles around the United States, the idea of watching Secretary of State Colin Powell - or General Powell, as he was now being reverently redubbed in some American newspapers - make his last pitch for war before the Security Council was an experience not to be missed.

In a few days, I would be in Baghdad to watch the start of this frivolous, demented conflict. Powell`s appearance at the Security Council was the essential prologue to the tragedy - or tragicomedy if one could contain one`s anger - the appearance of the Attendant Lord who would explain the story of the drama, the Horatio to the increasingly unstable Hamlet in the White House.

There was an almost macabre opening to the play when General Powell arrived at the Security Council, cheek-kissing the delegates and winding his great arms around them. CIA director George Tenet stood behind Powell, chunky, aggressive but obedient, just a little bit lip-biting, an Edward G Robinson who must have convinced himself that the more dubious of his information was buried beneath an adequate depth of moral fury and fear to be safely concealed. Just like Bush`s appearance at the General Assembly the previous September, you needed to be in the Security Council to see what the television cameras missed. There was a wonderful moment when the little British home secretary Jack Straw entered the chamber through the far right-hand door in a massive power suit, his double-breasted jacket apparently wrapping itself twice around Britain`s most famous ex-Trot. He stood for a moment with a kind of semi-benign smile on his uplifted face, his nose in the air as if sniffing for power. Then he saw Powell and his smile opened like an umbrella as his small feet, scuttling beneath him, propelled him across the stage and into the arms of Powell for his big American hug.

You might have thought that the whole chamber, with its toothy smiles and constant handshakes, contained a room full of men celebrating peace rather than war. Alas, not so. These elegantly dressed statesmen were constructing the framework that would allow them to kill quite a lot of people - some of them Saddam`s little monsters no doubt, but most of them innocent. When Powell rose to give his terror-talk, he did so with a slow athleticism, the world-weary warrior whose patience had at last reached its end.

But it was an old movie. I should have guessed. Sources, foreign intelligence sources, "our sources", defectors, sources, sources, sources. Ah, to be so well-sourced when you have already taken the decision to go to war. The Powell presentation sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the front page of The New York Times - where it was, of course, treated with due reverence next day. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Hadn`t we heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean, not Saddam. Certainly we didn`t trust Saddam, but Powell`s speech was a mixture of awesomely funny recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone intercepts à la Samuel Beckett that just might have been some terrifying proof that Saddam really was conning the UN inspectors again, and ancient material on the Monster of Baghdad`s all too well known record of beastliness.

If only we could have heard the Arabic for the State Department`s translation of "OK, buddy" - "Consider it done, sir" - this from the Republican Guard`s "Captain Ibrahim", for heaven`s sake. The dinky illustrations of mobile Iraqi bio-labs whose lorries and railway trucks were in such perfect condition suggested the Pentagon didn`t have much idea of the dilapidated state of Saddam`s railway system, let alone his army. It was when we went back to Halabja and human rights abuses and all Saddam`s indubitable sins, as recorded by the discredited Unscom team, that we started eating the old soup again. Jack Straw may have thought all this "the most powerful and authoritative case" for war - his ill-considered opinion afterwards - but when we were forced to listen to the Iraqi officer corps communicating by phone "Yeah", "Yeah" , "Yeah?", "Yeah . . ." - it was impossible not to ask oneself if Colin Powell had really considered the effect this would have on the outside world.

From time to time, the words "Iraq: Failing to Disarm - Denial and Deception" appeared on the giant video screen behind General Powell. Was this a CNN logo? some of us wondered. But no, it was the work of CNN`s sister channel, the US Department of State.

Because Colin Powell was supposed to be the good cop to the Bush- Rumsfeld bad cop routine, one wanted to believe him. The Iraqi officer`s telephone-tapped order to his subordinate - "Remove `nerve agents` whenever it comes up in the wireless instructions" - seemed to indicate that the Americans had indeed spotted a nasty new line in Iraqi deception. But a dramatic picture of a pilotless Iraqi aircraft capable of spraying poison chemicals turned out to be the imaginative work of a Pentagon artist. And when Secretary Powell started talking about "decades" of contact between Saddam and al-Qa`ida, things went wrong for the " General ". Al-Qa`ida only came into existence in 2000, since bin Laden - " decades" ago - was working against the Russians for the CIA, whose present-day director was sitting grave-faced behind Mr Powell. It was the United States which had enjoyed at least a "decade" of contacts with Saddam.

Powell`s new version of his President`s State of the Union lie - that the " scientists" interviewed by UN inspectors had been Iraqi intelligence agents in disguise - was singularly unimpressive. The UN talked to Iraqi scientists during their inspection tours, the new version went, but the Iraqis were posing for the real nuclear and bio boys whom the UN wanted to talk to.

General Powell said America was sharing its information with the UN inspectors, but it was clear already that much of what he had to say about alleged new weapons development - the decontamination truck at the Taji chemical munitions factory, for example, the "cleaning" of the Ibn al- Haythem ballistic missile factory on 25 November - had not been given to the UN at the time. Why wasn`t this intelligence information given to the inspectors months ago? Didn`t General Powell`s beloved UN Resolution demand that all such intelligence information should be given to Hans Blix and his lads immediately? Were the Americans, perhaps, not being "proactive" enough? Or did they realise that if the UN inspectors had chased these particular hares, they would have turned out to be as bogus as indeed they later proved to be?

The worst moment came when General Powell discussed anthrax and the 2001 anthrax attacks in Washington and New York, pathetically holding up a teaspoon of the imaginary spores and - while not precisely saying so - fraudulently suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the anthrax scare. But when the Secretary of State held up Iraq`s support for the Palestinian Hamas organisation, which has an office in Baghdad, as proof of Saddam`s support for "terror" - he of course made no mention of America`s support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land - the whole theatre began to collapse. There were Hamas offices in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran. Was the 82nd Airborne supposed to grind on to Lebanon, Syria and Iran?

How many lies had been told in this auditorium? How many British excuses for the Suez invasion, or Russian excuses - the same year - for the suppression of the Hungarian uprising? One recalled, of course, this same room four decades earlier when General Powell`s predecessor Adlai Stevenson showed photographs of the ships carrying Soviet missiles to Cuba. Alas, Powell`s pictures carried no such authority. And Colin Powell was no Adlai Stevenson.

If Powell`s address merited front-page treatment, the American media had never chosen to give the same attention to the men driving Bush to war, most of whom were former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years they had advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush`s most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected US president. And they weren`t doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by Perle. The destruction of Iraq would, of course, protect Israel`s monopoly of nuclear weapons - always supposing Saddam also possessed them - and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon had in store for them.

Although Bush and Blair dared not discuss this aspect of the coming war - a conflict for Israel was not going to have Americans or Britons lining up at recruiting offices - Jewish-American leaders talked about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish-American groups who opposed this madness were the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresaw Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic had to be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University tried to do in The Wall Street Journal the day after Powell`s UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations` objections to the war might - yet again - be ascribed to " anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent". This nonsense was opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argued that an Iraq war would leave Israel with even more Arab enemies.

The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lay behind Rumsfeld`s insulting remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that opposed this war were the "new" Europe, the continent that refused, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It was Rumsfeld and Bush who represented the "old" America; not the " new" America of freedom, the America of F D Roosevelt.

Rumsfeld and Bush symbolised the old America that killed its native inhabitants and embarked on imperial adventures. It was "old" America we were being asked to fight for - linked to a new form of colonialism - an America that first threatened the United Nations with irrelevancy and then did the same to Nato. This was not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But it might well have been the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.

Israeli and US ambitions in the region were now entwined, almost synonymous. This war, about oil and regional control, was being cheer-led by a president who was treacherously telling us that this was part of an eternal war against "terror". The British and most Europeans didn`t believe him. It`s not that Britons wouldn`t fight for America. They just didn`t want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that included the prime minister, they didn`t want to fight for Blair either. Still less did they wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, was now sending America`s poor to destroy a Muslim nation that had nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.

Those who opposed the war were not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they`ve biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included. But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons and many Americans were a lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children. Perhaps Henry VIII`s exasperation in that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition to this war might ultimately have made them feel more, not less, European.

[Joerver]

Ein Artikel für alle, die immer schon wissen wollte, wo die vielen kleinen Osamas herkommen und auch weshalb Osama, wenn er noch unter den Lebenden weilt(Es gibt einige ernstzunehmende Stimmen, die behaupten, er wäre vor einiger Zeit in Kairo an Niereninsuffizenz gestorben, denn er braucht regelmäßig eine Dialyse und obwohl es mobile Geräte gibt, kann es zu Komplikationen kommen, absolut stichhaltige Beweise gibt es keine.) sich in der Grenzregion zwischen Afganistan und Pakistan absolut sicher fühlen kann.

Myths and madrassas
By William Dalrymple
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GK24Df01.html

Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrassas.

Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrassa`s director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrassa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes - in the form of the Taliban - military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.

A dust storm was blowing as we crossed the Indus just below the massive ramparts of the fortress of Attock, once the great bulwark protecting India against incursions from Afghanistan. The road was lined with poplars. In the distance towered the jagged dragons` backs of the blue Margalla Hills; a graveyard lay to one side, its green grave flags fluttering in the breeze. A few kilometers beyond the river stood a ramshackle line of buildings, all built in a crude modern concrete version of Mughal architecture. Washing was hanging up to dry from the roofs and verandas of the dormitory blocks, and in the main courtyard students were bustling around. All were male, all wore turbans, and all were heavily bearded.

Maulana Sami proved, however, to be an unexpectedly dapper and cheery figure for a man supposed to be such an icon of anti-Western hatred. He wore a blue frock coat of vaguely Dickensian cut, and his neatly trimmed beard was raffishly dyed with henna. He had a craggy face, a large outcrop of nose, and the corners of his eyes were contoured with laughter lines. I was ushered into his office and introduced to his two-year-old granddaughter, who was playing happily with a yellow helium balloon. I remarked that there did not seem to be much evidence of the Haqqania suffering from the crackdown on centers of radicalism promised by President Pervez Musharraf. Sami`s face lit up:

"That is for American consumption only," he laughed cheerfully. "It is only statements to the newspapers. Nothing has happened."

"So," I asked, "You are not finding the atmosphere difficult at the moment?"

"We are in a good, strong position," replied Sami. "[President George W] Bush has woken the entire Islamic world. We are grateful to him."

Sami smiled broadly: "Our job now is propagating Islamic ideology. We give free education, free clothes and books. We even give free accommodation. We are the only people giving the poor education."

Sami paused and his smile faded: "The people are so desperate," he said. "They are fed up with the old ways in Pakistan, with the secular parties and the army. There is so much corruption. Musharraf only fights Muslims and follows the wishes of the West. He is not interested in the people of Pakistan. So now everyone is looking for Islamic answers - and we can help provide that. Only our Islamic system gives justice."

For better or worse, the sort of change in political attitudes that Sami ul-Haq has overseen from his madrassa in Akora Khattack is being reproduced across Pakistan. An Interior Ministry report after September 11 revealed that there are now 27 times as many madrassas in the country as there were in 1947: from 245 at the time of independence, the number shot up to 6,870 in 2001. [1]

A significant proportion of these are run by, or connected to, the radical Islamist political parties such as the MMM, which under Sami`s vice presidency have just imposed a Taliban-like regime on Pakistan`s North-West Frontier Province, banning the public performance of music and depictions of the human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new KFC restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.

The Islamic political parties are quite clear about the benefits that can accrue to them by controlling places of education. The headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore, for example, doubles as a madrassa where 200 students receive a Koranic education with a distinctively political spin. On a visit this summer I found one maulana preaching a sermon on the subject of Musharraf`s obedience to US dictates and his willingness to abandon the Taliban. A spokesman for the party told me quite explicitly: "The political transformation our madrassas are bringing about is having a massive effect on the future of Pakistan. The recent success of the Islamic parties is very much associated with the work we do in our madrassas."

Across Pakistan, the tenor of religious belief has been correspondingly radicalized: the tolerant Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now deeply out of fashion in Pakistan, overtaken by the sudden rise of the more hardline and politicized reformist Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi strains of the faith.

The sharp acceleration in the number of these madrassas first began under General Zia ul-Haq at the time of the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, and was financed mainly by the Saudis. Although some of the madrassas so founded were little more than single rooms attached to village mosques, others are now very substantial institutions: the Dar ul-Uloom in Balochistan, for example, is now annually enrolling some 1,500 boarders and a further 1,000 day-boys. Altogether there are possibly as many as 800,000 students in Pakistan`s madrassas: an entire free Islamic education system running parallel to the moribund state sector.

A mere 1.8% of Pakistan`s gross domestic product is spent on government schools. As a result, 15% of the schools are without a proper building; 40% without water; 71% without electricity. There is frequent absenteeism of teachers; indeed many of these schools exist only on paper. Last year when Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned politician, investigated the government schools in his constituency, he found that 20% of those on the rolls did not exist at all, while 70% of those that did were semi-permanently closed.

In education Pakistan is lagging behind India in the most striking way: in India 65% of the population is literate, and the number rises every year; in the new budget, the Indian education system received a substantial boost of state funds. But in Pakistan only 42% are literate, and the proportion is falling. Instead of investing in education, the Pakistan military government is spending money on a new fleet of American F-16s for its air force. The near collapse of government schooling has meant that many of the country`s poorest people who wish to improve their children`s hope of advancing themselves have no option but to place the children in the madrassa system, where they are guaranteed a rigidly traditional but nonetheless free education.

Madrassas are probably now more dominant in Pakistan`s educational system than they are anywhere else; but the general trend is one that is common throughout the Islamic world. In Egypt the number of teaching institutes dependent on the Islamic university of al-Azhar increased from 1,855 in 1986 to 4,314 10 years later. The Saudis have stepped up their funding so that in Tanzania alone they have been spending $1 million a year building new madrassas. In Mali madrassas now account for a quarter of the children in primary schools. [2]

Seen in this wider setting, Sami ul-Haq and his madrassas raise a number of important questions: how much are these madrassas the source of the problems that culminated in the Islamist attacks of September 11? Are madrassas simply terrorist factories? Should the West be pressing US client states like Pakistan and Egypt simply to close them down?

In the panic-stricken aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the answers to these questions seemed obvious. Former secretary of state Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were not know for their agreement on matters of foreign policy, but one thing that they were united on was the threat posed by madrassas. In 2003, Rumsfeld posed the question: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" A year later, Powell described madrassas as a breeding ground "for fundamentalist and terrorists".

Since the revelations that three of the four future British Muslim suicide bombers visited Pakistan in the year preceding the July 7 attack, the British media have been quick to follow the US line on madrassas, with the Sunday Telegraph helpfully translating the Arabic word madrassa as terrorist "training school" (it actually means merely "place of education"), while the Daily Mirror confidently asserted over a double-page spread that the three bombers had all enrolled at Pakistani "terror schools".

In actual fact, it is still uncertain whether the three bombers visited any madrassas while they were in Pakistan: madrassas only entered the debate because the bombers told their families they were going to Pakistan to pursue religious studies, just as they told them they were going to a religious conference when they set off to bomb London.

According to sources at the prime minister`s offices in Downing Street there is in fact no evidence that any madrassa was visited by any members of the cell at any point on their journey. Still less is there any proof that madrassas were responsible for "brainwashing" the trio, as the British media assumed after the bombings. Instead, there is considerable evidence to show that the trio were radicalized in Yorkshire through the Islamist literature and videos that were available beneath the counter of their local Islamic bookshop. And while it is now certain that the group made contact with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, there is no reason to assume that a madrassa acted as the conduit.

In this case, as in so many others, the link between madrassas and international terrorism is far from clear-cut, and new research has been published that has challenged the much-repeated but intellectually shaky theory of madrassas being little more than al-Qaeda training schools.

It is certainly true that many madrassas are fundamentalist and literalist in their approach to the scriptures and that many subscribe to the most hardline strains of Islamic thought. Few make any effort to prepare their students to function in a modern, plural society. It is also true that some madrassas can be directly linked to Islamic radicalism and occasionally to outright civil violence.

Just as there are some yeshivas in settlements on the West Bank that have a reputation for violence against Palestinians, and Serbian monasteries that sheltered war criminals following the truce in Bosnia, so it is estimated that as many as 15% of Pakistan`s madrassas preach violent jihad, while a few have been said to provide covert military training. Madrassa students took part in the Afghan and Kashmir jihads, and have been repeatedly implicated in acts of sectarian violence, especially against the Shi`ite minority in Karachi.

It is now becoming very clear, however, that producing cannon fodder for the Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, the World Trade Center and the London Underground.

Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between madrassa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication - and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds. Neither Osama bin Laden nor any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were trained in a madrassa or was a qualified alim, or cleric.

The men who planned and carried out the September 11 attacks have often been depicted in the press as being "medieval fanatics". In fact, it would be more accurate to describe them as confused but highly educated middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was an architect; Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden`s chief of staff, was a pediatric surgeon; Ziad Jarrah, one of the founders of the Hamburg cell, was a dental student who later turned to aircraft engineering; Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, was a product of the London School of Economics.

As the French scholar Gille Kepel puts it, the new breed of global jihadis are not the urban poor of the third world so much as "the privileged children of an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism an Silicon Valley, which [Ayman] al-Zawahiri visited in the 1990s. They were heirs not only to jihad and the umma but also to the electronic revolution and American-style globalization." [3]

This is also the conclusion drawn by the most sophisticated analysis of global jihadis yet published: Understanding Terror Networks by a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Marc Sageman. Sageman examined the records of 172 al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, and his conclusions have demolished much of the conventional wisdom about who joins jihadi groups: two thirds of his sample were middle-class and university-educated; they are generally technically minded professionals and several have a PhD. Nor are they young hotheads: their average age is 26, most of them are married, and many have children. Only two appear to be psychotic. Even the ideologues that influence them are not trained clerics: Sayyid Qutb, for example, was a journalist. Islamic terrorism, like its Christian and Jewish predecessors, is a largely bourgeois enterprise.

Peter Bergen of John Hopkins recently came to similar conclusions when he published his study of 75 Islamist terrorists involved in anti-Western attacks. According to Bergen, 53% of the terrorists had a university degree, while "only 52% of Americans have been to college." [4] Against this background, it should not have come as a surprise that the British Muslim bombers attended universities and that one drove a Mercedes.

It is true that there are several examples of radical madrassa graduates who have become involved with al-Qaeda: Maulana Masood Azhar, for example, leader of the jihadi group called Jaish-e-Muhammad and an associate of bin Laden, originally studied in the ultra-militant Binori Town madrassa in Karachi. A madrassa dropout took part in last year`s bombing of Musharraf`s convoy. In Indonesia, the Bali bombings were the work of the Lashkar-i-Jihad group, which partially emerged from a group of Salafi madrassas in Indonesia.

By and large, however, madrassa students simply do not have the technical expertise necessary to carry out the kind of sophisticated attacks we have recently seen led by al-Qaeda. Instead the concerns of most madrassa graduates remain more traditional: the correct fulfillment of rituals, how to wash correctly before prayers, and the proper length to grow a beard. All these matters are part of the curriculum of Koranic studies in the madrassas. The graduates are also interested in opposing what they see as unIslamic practices such as worshiping at saints` graves or attending the Shi`ite laments called marsiyas, for the death of the Prophet`s son-in-law Ali at the battle of Kerbala. [5]

Their focus, in other words, is not on opposing non-Muslims or the West - the central concern of the global jihadis - so much as fostering what they see as proper Islamic behavior at home, the personal law governing which is a central subject of madrassa teachings. In contrast, few al-Qaeda agents seem to have more than the most perfunctory grasp of Islamic law or learning. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence that bin Laden himself actually despises what he sees as the nit-picking juridical approach of the madrassa-educated ulema (clerics), regarding his own brand of violent Islamism as a wholly more appropriate answer to the problems of the Muslim world.

This was graphically illustrated when, shortly after September 11, bin Laden told a group of visiting Saudis that the "youths who conducted the operations did not accept any fiqh [school of Islamic law] in the popular term, but they accepted the fiqh that the Prophet Mohammed brought". It is a telling quote: bin Laden showing his impatience with legal training and the inherited structures of Islamic authority. The hijackers, he implied, were taking effective practical action rather than sitting around discussing legal texts. As such he set himself up as a challenge to the madrassas and the ulema, bypassing traditional modes of religious study and looking directly to the Koran for guidance.

A brilliant discussion of bin Laden`s usurpation of the role of the madrassa-based ulema can be found in the illuminating essay Landscapes of the Jihad, by Faisal Devji, who teaches at the New School. Devji points out just how deeply unorthodox bin Laden is, with his cult of martyrs and frequent talk of dream and visions, all of which derive from popular, mystical, and Shi`ite Islamic traditions, against which the orthodox Sunni ulema have long struggled. Moreover, bin Laden and his followers "routinely attack the most venerable clerics and seminaries, accusing them of being slaves of apostate regimes ... They also issue their own legal opinions or fatwas without possessing the learning or clerical authority to do so."

All this highlights how lacking in intellectual sophistication the debate about al-Qaeda still is. Again and again, we are told that terrorism is associated with poverty and the basic, Koranic education provided by madrassas. We are told that the people who carry out this work are evil madmen who hate our wealth and our freedoms, and that no debate is possible as they "aim to wipe us out" (as one British cabinet minister told the BBC after the attacks on London). That the hostility of the Islamists may have links with US foreign policy in the Middle East, especially the Anglo-American adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, is consistently denied, despite the explicit video testimony to the contrary by both Zawahiri and Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the London bombers. [6]

In reality, al-Qaeda operatives tend to be highly educated and their aims explicitly political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques, has always been unambiguous about this. As he laconically remarked in his broadcast timed to coincide with the last US election, if it was freedom they were against, al-Qaeda would have attacked Sweden. The men who planned the September 11 attacks were not products of the traditional Islamic educational system, even in its most radical form. Instead they are graduates of Western-style institutions. They are not at all the proteges of the mullahs.

Obscured debate
The debate about the alleged links between madrassas and terrorism has tended to obscure both the madrassas` long histories and the differences among them. Throughout much of Islamic history, madrassas were the major source of religious and scientific learning, just as church schools and the universities were in Europe.

Between the 7th and 12th centuries, madrassas produced free-thinking luminaries such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina and al-Khwarizmi. They also produced America`s bestselling poet throughout the 1990s, the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a madrassa in Konya. It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an insider, from within the system.

None of this should be a surprise. In the entire Koran there are only about 200 verses directly commanding believers to pray and three times that number commanding the believers to reflect, to ponder and to analyze God`s magnificence in nature, plants, stars and the solar system. The oldest and greatest of all the madrassas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the modern sense - a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects under a number of teachers - is generally regarded as an innovation first developed at al-Azhar.

In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having "fellows" holding a "chair", or students "reading" a subject and obtaining "degrees", as well as practices such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels and academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrassas.

It was in cities not far from Islamic Spain and Sicily - Salerno, Naples, Bologna and Montpellier - that the first universities in Christendom were developed, while the very first college in Europe, that of Paris, was founded by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim newly returned from the Middle East. [7] Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars such as Adelard of Bath would travel to the Islamic world to study the advanced learning available in the madrassas. Alvaro of Cordoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under Muslim rule, wrote in the 14th century:

My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the work of Muslim theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads Latin commentaries on Holy scripture? At the mention of Christian books they disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy of their notice.

When the Mongol invasions destroyed the institutions of learning in the Islamic heartlands, many learned refugees fled to Delhi, turning northern India for the first time into a major center of scholarship. By the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 16th century, the curriculum in Indian madrassas blended the learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of the teachings of Hindu India, so that Hindu and Muslim students would together study the Koran (in Arabic), the Sufi poetry of Sa`adi (in Persian), and the philosophy of Vedanta (in Sanskrit), as well as ethics, astronomy, medicine, logic, history and the natural sciences. Many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrassas.

However, following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence that accompanied the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858, disillusioned scholars founded an influential but narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrassa at Deoband, a 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital in Delhi. Feeling that their backs were against the wall, the madrassa`s founders reacted against what they saw as the degenerate ways of the old elite. The Deoband madrassa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum. [8]

It was, unfortunately, these puritanical Deobandi madrassas that spread throughout North India and Pakistan in the 20th century, and that particularly benefited from the patronage of General Zia ul-Haq and his Saudi allies in the 1980s. Ironically, the US also played an important part in this harnessing of madrassas for holy war as part of the Afghan jihad, with the CIA financing the production by the US Agency for International Development of some notably bloodthirsty madrassa textbooks "filled", according to a Washington Post report, "with violent images and militant Islamic teachings".

One page showed a picture of a jihadi carrying a gun, but with his head blown off, accompanied by a Koranic verse and a tribute to the mujahideen who were "obedient to Allah ... Such men will sacrifice their wealth and their life to impose Islamic law." When the Taliban came to power, these textbooks were distributed for use in schools. [9] At the height of the Afghan jihad, Ronald Reagan is said to have praised mujahideen madrassa students as "the moral equivalent of the founding fathers [of America]".

It is certainly true that many madrassas in Pakistan have an outdated curriculum: some still teach geometry from Euclid and medicine from Galen. Emphasis is put on rote learning rather than the critical study of the Koran, and considerable prestige is still attached to becoming a hafiz - knowing the Koran by heart. Deobandi madrassas teach that the sun revolves around the earth and some even have special seating for the invisible Islamic spirits, the djinns. [10] This is, however, by no means the case with all madrassas, some of which are surprisingly sophisticated.

In Karachi, the largest madrassa is the Dar ul-Uloom. Its green lawns resemble a cross between a five-star hotel and a rather upmarket university campus. It is clean an prosperous-looking: well-watered gardens and palm trees give onto smart, well-kept classrooms and computer rooms; all around, embalmed in scaffolding, new libraries and dormitories rise from the ground

Inside, the atmosphere was earnest and scholarly. In room after room, students sat cross-legged on carpets, reading from Korans that lay open before them, resting on low wooden bookstands. In others students were listening intently as elderly maulanas expounded to them commentaries on the meaning of verses in the Koran and the Hadiths, the traditions of the prophets. A computer room was filled with bearded men struggling with the mysteries of using Urdu and Arabic versions of Microsoft Word and Windows XP; in the senior years, I learned, all essays are expected to be typewritten on computers and handed in as printouts. Of course some other madrassas lack such equipment.

After the beheading of Daniel Pearl, I had taken the precaution of informing the British consulate about my movements; but there was nothing threatening about the Dar ul-Uloom. The students were almost all eager, friendly and intelligent, if somewhat intense. When I asked one bearded student what music he listened to on his new cassette player, he looked at me with horror: the machine was only for listening to sermons. All music was banned.

Puritanical it may be, but it is clear that the Dar ul-Uloom, like many Pakistani madrassas, performs an important service - especially in a country 58% of whose population, and 72% of whose women, are illiterate - indeed half of the population never sees the inside of a school.

Madrassas are often backward in their educational philosophy, but they provide the poor with a real hope of advancing themselves. In certain traditional subjects - such as rhetoric, logic and jurisprudence - the teaching can be excellent. And although they tend to be ultra-conservative, only a small proportion of them are militant. To close them down, without first attempting to build up the state sector, would relegate much of the population to a state of ignorance. It would also be tantamount to instructing Muslims to stop educating themselves about their religion, hardly the best strategy for winning the war for Muslim minds.

You don`t have to look far from Pakistan to find a madrassa system that has effectively engaged with the problems of both militancy and educational backwardness. For although India was originally the home of the Deobandi madrassas, such colleges in India have no record of producing violent Islamists, and are strictly apolitical and quietist. Indeed, several of modern India`s greatest scholars - such as the Mughal historian Muzaffar Alam of the University of Chicago - are madrassa graduates.

An important study of the madrassas of India by the Hindu scholar Yoginder Sikand, Bastions of the Believers, demonstrates how forward-looking and dynamic some madrassas can be. In the southwest Indian state of Kerala, for example, Sikand found a chain of educational institutions run by the Mujahid group of professionals and businessmen which aim to bridge the differences between modern forms of knowledge and the Islamic worldview.

The Mujahid group has been at the forefront of Muslim women`s education in Kerala, and in many of their madrassas girls outnumber boys by a considerable margin. Mujahid intellectuals have written extensively about women`s rights from an Islamic perspective, and Sikand quotes the Zohra Bi, the principal of one of the group`s colleges: "Islam is wrongly thought of as a religion of women`s oppression," she told him. "Through our work in the college we want to show that Islam actually empowers Muslim women."

This would seem to confirm that it is not madrassas per se that are the problem so much as the militant atmosphere and indoctrination taking place in a handful of notorious centers of ultra-radicalism, such as the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, whose students are taught that jihadism is legitimate and noble. Some graduates have allegedly been involved in the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan. The question remains, however, whether Musharraf`s government has the will to carry out the necessary reforms that would reproduce the success of madrassas in India.

So far attempts at reforming Pakistan`s more militant madrassas have proved at best halfhearted. Immediately after the London bombings there were around 250 arrests in Pakistani madrassas, and there have been some attempts at curbing the attendance of foreign students: an estimated 1,400 non-Pakistanis have been expelled since July. Some statements have also been made about standardizing the syllabus and encouraging madrassas to teach some modern subjects.

However, the more extreme madrassas have been able to resist the enforcement of even these mild measures; recently, fewer than half of Pakistan`s madrassas complied when asked to register as educational institutions with the authorities. To date, the Pakistani government, far from having found ways of curbing the excesses of the more radical madrassas, does not even possess exact statistics about the number of madrassas in the country. Moreover, the military government`s close alliance with the Islamist parties, which now virtually control two of Pakistan`s provinces, prevents Musharraf from acting more strongly against the extremist madrassas. As a result not even one militant madrassa has yet been closed.

Such militant madrassas are, however, likely to create more problems for Pakistan`s internal security than for the safety of Western capitals. For that, as the July 7 London bombings showed, rather than blaming seminaries in Pakistan we would do better to examine the Islamic extremism blossoming on our own campuses, and the way that the excesses of American and British foreign policies can fatally alienate so many previously moderate Muslims and lead to violence at home as well as in Muslim lands.

Notes
[1] There is considerable disagreement over the number of madrassas in Pakistan and the proportion of the country`s students they educate. Most authorities agree that the number has greatly increased in recent years, and a widely quoted report by the International Crisis Group in July 2002 indicated that there could be as many as 10,000 in Pakistan educating over a million and a half students. This was, however, challenged by a March 2005 World Bank report based on government census figures that puts the figure much lower and suggested that less than 1% of all Pakistanis were educated in madrassas. There now seems to be some consensus that the ICG slightly exaggerated the scale of the problem, while the World Bank report seriously underestimates it. A recent survey by Saleem Ali of the University of Vermont argues that the true figure probably stands somewhere between these two reports. See Saleem H. Ali, "Islamic Education and Conflict: Understanding the Madrassahs of Pakistan", a paper presented at the US Institute of Peace, June 24, 2005.
[2] Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, p 93; see the review by Max Rodenbeck, "The Truth About Jihad", The New York Review, August 11, 2005, which also discusses several other books mentioned in this article.
[3] Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, p 112.
[4] Peter Bergen, "The Madrasa Myth", The New York Times, June 14, 2005.
[5] See Olivier Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?" in Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghanistan and the Taliban, edited by William Maley (New York University Press, 1998). See also Barbara Metcalfe`s excellent "Piety, Persuasion and Politics: Deoband`s Model of Social Activism", in The Empire and the Crescent: Global Implications for a New American Century, edited by Aftab Ahmad Malik (Amal, 2003), p 157.
[6] On September 1, al-Jazeera aired a video recorded by Mohommad Sidique Khan before his suicide bombing. His statement included the following words: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war."
[7] George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
[8] The Deobandis have received an excellent study in Barbara Daly Metcalf`s great magnum opus, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton University Press, 1982). See also Jamal Malik, Colonisation of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988).
[9] There is a full report on these textbooks on the Washington Post Web site by Joe Stephens and David B Ottaway, "From US, the ABC`s of Jihad," March 23, 2002, at www.washingtonpost .com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22 ?language=printer.
[10] See the superb discussion in Yoginder Sikand`s recent Bastions of the Believers: madrassas and Islamic Education in India.

William Dalrymple is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and lives in New Delhi. His most recent book, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, won the Wolfson Prize for history.

(Copyright 2005, New York Review of Books.)

[PrinzValiumNG]

Seit 21.02.04 ist Osama nun umzingelt und die Spezialkräfte warten offensichtlich immer noch auf den Befehl.

Wie immer bei historischen Ereignissen die schön langsam in Vergessenheit geraten wird sich vor Ort vermutlich schön langsam die Realität des Alltags eingespielt haben.

Einiger der Spezialkräfte haben vermutlich schon kleine Kinder mit den lokalen Zivilistinnen in die Welt gesetzt, in den Wohnungen der Spezialkräfte stehen schon Einbaugeräte von IKEA, man hat sich gemütlich eingerichtet, und am Abend schaut auch oft Osama vorbei, man trinkt eine Kleinigkeit auf der Terasse, diskutiert über Allah und die Welt, über afghanischen Fussball, die Vorteile und Nachteile von Kunstrasen, über Frauen sowieso. Manchmal wird auch eine Runde Skat gespielt und der Verlierer schmeisst eine Runde Wasserpfeifen.

Im weißen Haus hat man die Spezialtruppe die auf den Befehl wartet längst vergessen weil man beschäftigt ist weltweit die verlorenen gegangen CIA-Folterkeller wieder zu finden, und auch Osama hält mittlerweile die abendlichen Schwätzchen mit der Spezialtruppe amüsanter als ein paar seltsame Videos in Erdlöcher zu drehen, er wird ja auch nicht jünger und im Alter kann man etwas Komfort schon gebrauchen.

Einzig die arabische Welt glaubt immer noch an den großen Freiheitskämpfer, und die westliche Welt an die Spezialtruppen die Osama suchen und fangen wollen. Es ist wohl so ne Art Mediendings...

[Sealion]

Man könnte richtig neidisch werden auf diese Spezialeinheiten...das Fest der Liebe steht vor der Tür und Osama soll ja Freunden gegenüber nicht knauserig sein.

[derdieschnautzelangsamvollhat]

Prinz,

schade das nicht mehr solcher postings von dir kommen. Habs mir grade bildlich vorgestellt.

Zu thanksgiving kam sicher jemand von der Botschaft mit nem Truthahn vorbei.

[detektivrockford]

[posting]19.051.632 von PrinzValiumNG am 28.11.05 15:25:34[/posting]Dazu passt das hier:
http://media.skoopy.com/vids/vid_00863.wmv

[Joerver]

[posting]19.051.632 von PrinzValiumNG am 28.11.05 15:25:34[/posting]Werter Prinz,

erst seit 21.02.04 ist Osama umzingelt.

Wenn ich dran denke, wie Mythen sich verselbstständigen, kann ich sagen: erst.

Irgendwann wird Tora Bora so etwas sein wie ein islamischer Kyffhäuser, in dem man Osama an einem Tisch sitzen sieht und seinen roten(naja) Bart durch den Tisch wachsen läßt.

Und Generationen von Suicidebomber (in der 10.Generatin SB) werden zu dem Wallfahrtsort pilgern und auf das Zeichen seiner Wiederkehr warten und hoffen, dass er die heiligen Stätten von den Ungläubigen befreien wird.

Aber vielleicht ließe sich das verhindern, bevor Suicidebomben zum Lehrberuf wird.

[PrinzValiumNG]

[posting]19.056.695 von Joerver am 28.11.05 22:24:03[/posting]Werter Joerver,
es stellt sich ja die Frage - ist alles wirklich so kompliziert oder in Wahrheit wahnsinnig simpel. Jetzt haben wir zB hier bei WO xtausende Seiten über Osama, George, das Universum und den ganzen Rest gelesen und wohin hat uns das gebracht? Osama ist erst immer noch umzingelt und keinen interessiert das mehr. Brasilianische Betriebsratshuren oder Georges letzter Lapsus bringt halt doch mehr Quoten.

Vielleicht war die Sache ursprünglich ja wirklich viel banaler. Also Osama nicht der große Bösling, sondern ein Zufallsprodukt?
Hierzulande wird ja die arabische Welt oft als rückständige Zivilisation dargestellt, aber das ist bloß Wüstensand in die Augen gestreut - die pfeifen am letzten Zahn der Zeit. Über meine SAT-Anlage bekomme ich mittlerweile mehr arabische Sender rein als deutsche, Tendenz steigend. Die sind also Up-To-Date.

Ich glaube das war ursprünglich gaaanz anders. Arabische Medienmogule, ja, Medienmogule. Wahrscheinlich sind da ein paar Herren zusammen gesessen, nennen wir sie mal Al-Morduch, Al-Bakschisch und Ben-Grud und hatten da eine Vision.
"Wir brauchen eine Ikone, so wie Che Guevara."
"Aber der hatte hispanoide Gesichtszüge, so einen hamma bei uns nicht."
"Wir wäre es mit vollen dicken Lippen. Das pfeift auch so richtig. Denkt an Yassir Arafat."
"Ja, Lippen sind gut. Kann man verkaufen. Und vielleicht noch was Typisches. Bart, ja Bart muss sein. Kein westlicher Mensch, also unser Markt, weiß worums den Taliban wirklich geht, aber dass sie Bärte tragen müssen weiß ein jeder."
"Also volle Lippen und Bart, wie sind uns einig!"

Und dann machte man halt nach dem Muster Deutschland sucht den Superstar so ein arabisches Casting Heiliger Kampf sucht den Superhelden, natürlich mit einem etwas geschönten Titel damit die CIA nicht Lunte riecht.

Und irgendwie hat es dann einen völlig unbedeutenden Kamelverleiher aus dem Hinterland erwischt, Osama. Der eigentlich voll zufriedener Kamelverleiher war (`bringen Sie Ihr Kamel vollgetankt zurück sonst müssen wir Ihnen einen Aufpreis verrechnen, wir akzeptieren keine American Express`). Und auf einmal mitten im Weltgeschehen. Bloss wegen den Lippen und dem Bart. Die Welt ist so oberflächlich. Das ganze folgende Brimborium haben dann die Medienmogule im Hintergrund veranstaltet, Osama nur als Marionette. George war voll eingebunden, Halliburton hält 30% an den arabischen Medienkonzernen, John Kerry und seine wichtigsten Teammitglieder bekamen arabische Praktikantinnen für den `persönlichen Gebrauch` und Michael Moore hat sich die Verwertungsrechte für den amerikanischen Raum gesichert.
Einmal jährlich treffen sich alle dann in Putins Datscha zum Saunagang, schlurfen Borschtsch und spielen Sackhüpfen im Garten.
(die ganze Geschichte dann in Prinz Valium - Das Buch, also paid-content, man muss mit der Zeit gehen...)

---

P.S: Was jetzt sicherlich wieder Anlass zu neuen Verschwörungstheorien geben wird ist dass die von Dir verwendete Abkürzung SB auch gleichzeitig die Abkürzung vom Nicknamen des größten WO-Dokumentationsposters aller Zeiten ist. Ohne dass ich damit was andeuten möchte.

[Joerver]

[posting]19.081.979 von PrinzValiumNG am 29.11.05 08:28:08[/posting]Prinz

ich muß zugeben SB ist leicht zu mißdeuten.

Ich dachte eher an `wir können nur K-Bum` oder `hier werden Sie bedient` weniger an eine Seite der Medaille der beiden Board-Hauptkomplizierkatoren SB und SP.

Ich halte die Wahrheit einfach für simple.

Du als Mitglied des österreichischen Hochadels wirst dieses Problem der absoluten Langeweile kennen, wenn du in deinem Kaffeehaus sitzt und dir Gedanken über die Sinnlosigkeit der Welt machst.

Nur stell dir vor, du wärst der 13. Sohn der 25. Frau eines saudischen Millionärs.
Hättest schon alles durch, was die Welt zu bieten hat und suchst eine neue Herausforderung.
Du triffst deine gleichgesinnten Kumpel Morduch, Bakschisch und Grud(MGB).

Ihr kommt zu dem Ergebnis, lasst uns Revolution machen. OK. Was braucht man für eine Revolution?

1. Eine charismatische Figur (Da blenden wir Österreich am besten aus)

2. Irgendetwas zum Revolutonieren.

3. Irgendeine Gegend für eine Revolution.

Das ist leicht gefunden Osama, Islam und Afganistan.
(Notiz:Für einen saudischen Prinzen ist Osama sehr charismatisch.)

MGB übernehmen die publizistische und finanzielle Vermarktung.

Als erstes wird der größte Medienmarkt kontaktiert.
Dort ist man begeistert, man hat sowieso mehr Fernsehkanäle und Presseorgane als Nachrichten.
Dann werden dort auch gleich die finanziellen Beteiligungen mit BFEE (Bush family evil empire)abgesprochen und die Gewinne prozentual aufgeteilt und dann konnte es losgehen.

Und dann lief die Aktion an. Und wir sind alle voll dabei.

[Joerver]

[posting]19.086.415 von Joerver am 29.11.05 12:29:20[/posting]Prinz

PS.: Ich hoffe, ich habe nicht die Pointen aus deinem Buch vorweggenommen.

[Joerver]

Diesmal kommt die Erfolgsmeldung direkt von Präsident Gen. Pervez Musharraf, einem der aufrechten Demokratoren des Mittleren Osten, Verbreiter von Atomwaffen und gefüttert von den USA mit allen möglichen von ihm gewünschten Waffen.

December 3, 2005
Senior Al Qaeda Operative Said to Die in Blast
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Al…

Filed at 11:10 a.m. ET

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- One of al-Qaida`s top five leaders, a key associate of Ayman al-Zawahri, was tracked down with U.S. help and killed by Pakistani security forces in a rocket attack near the Afghan border, officials said Saturday.

Hamza Rabia, believed to have become al-Qaida`s operational commander after the arrest of Abu Farraj al-Libbi in northwestern Pakistan in May, ranks somewhere between third and fifth in the terror network`s hierarchy, officials said.

He was among five people who died in an explosion Thursday in the North Waziristan tribal area. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Rabia`s remains were identified via a DNA test.

In Kuwait, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf confirmed that Rabia was killed.

``Yes, indeed, 200 percent confirmed,`` Musharraf said at the start of a three-nation visit in the Middle East.

Ahmed backed the official line that the blast was set off as the victims were making explosives inside a suspected al-Qaida hideout.

However, a senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said a missile attack triggered a huge explosion in a stockpile of bomb-making materials, grenades and other munitions.

Another intelligence official said U.S. help was involved in tracking Rabia down and ``eliminating the threat`` that he embodied. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

On Saturday, Pakistan`s Dawn newspaper, citing sources it did not identify, reported that the attack on a mud-walled home near Miran Shah may have been launched from two pilotless planes.

Miran Shah is a strategic tribal region where remnants of al-Qaida are believed to have been hiding and where Pakistani forces have launched several operations against them.

Intelligence officials said Rabia -- who is Syrian -- was the target of the attack because of his alleged involvement in dozens of terror attacks and killings of government officials in Pakistan`s lawless tribal regions. He was brought to the area by al-Zawahri, who is believed to have been on the run along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

However, officials said they have no clue on the whereabouts of al-Zawahri or Osama bin Laden.

Another official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his job, said Rabia became operational commander of the terror network after the arrest of al-Libbi, known to be al-Qaida`s No. 3 leader.

Al-Libbi -- who twice tried to assassinate Pakistan`s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for making the Islamic nation a key ally of the United States in its war on terrorism -- was later turned over to Washington for further investigation.

Pakistan`s information minister described Rabia as al-Qaida operational commander in Pakistan`s tribal regions.

``He was al-Qaida`s No. 5 and this is what we know,`` Ahmed told The Associated Press.

Earlier, a top government administrator, Syed Zaheerul Islam, said Rabia died in an explosion while making bombs at a home near Miran Shah. Islam said the blast also killed four other people, including two area residents, and left two others injured, who have not been identified.

Associates from outside Pakistan retrieved the bodies of Rabia and two other foreigners and buried them in an unknown location, the Dawn newspaper report said.

Military officials have said hundreds of Arab, Afghan and Central Asian militants are in North and South Waziristan.

Pakistan -- a key ally of the United States in the war against terrorism -- has deployed thousands of troops in the area, fighting intense battles with militants and killing and capturing several of them.

------

Associated Press reporters Sadaqat Jan and Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

* Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

[raubritterloulou]

Ali aus Wiesbaden ist vermutlich der neue Darsteller des Bin Laden in der neuen Staffel der Abenteuervideos bei Al Dschasira !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Joerver]

Rummy erklärt Osama für schein-/halbtot. Da hat der große Lauschangriff doch noch was bewirkt: Kein Anschluß unter dieser Nummer.

Bin Laden may be unable to command, Rumsfeld says
Wed Dec 21, 2005 5:46 AM ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=fundLaun…

By Lesley Wroughton

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden may no longer be able to run the militant network and has not been heard from for nearly a year, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday.

Rumsfeld said on a trip to Pakistan the Bush administration still considers it a priority to capture the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, who is believed to be hiding somewhere in mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

"I think it is interesting that we haven`t heard from him for close to a year," Rumsfeld told reporters en route to Islamabad.

"I don`t know what it means, but I suspect in any event if he is alive and functioning that he is spending a major fraction of his time trying to avoid being caught," Rumsfeld said.

"I have trouble believing he is able to operate sufficiently to be in a position of major command over a worldwide al Qaeda operation, but I could be wrong," he said.

Rumsfeld`s comments echoed earlier assessments by the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan Crocker, but contradicted the assertion of al Qaeda`s deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, in a video interview this month that bin Laden`s battle against the West was only just beginning.

Said Rumsfeld: "We just don`t know".

The most recent al Qaeda message from bin Laden came on December 27, 2004, with the broadcast of an audiotape in which he urged Iraqis to boycott elections the following month.

Rumsfeld`s visit to Pakistan, an ally in the U.S. war on terrorism, is intended to reinforce America`s support and assess U.S. relief operations after an October earthquake that killed 73,000 people. His visit comes a day after a similar trip by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Before flying on to Afghanistan, Rumsfeld toured a U.S. military field hospital in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, and stopped in neighboring North West Frontier Province, which was also badly hit in the quake.

Rumsfeld posed for photographs with U.S. personnel and told them their efforts were appreciated both in Pakistan and in the United States.

The United States and its military have headed Western relief efforts for Pakistani earthquake victims, a gesture U.S. officials hope will improve Washington`s image in the region.

Some key al Qaeda members, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been captured in Pakistan, and President Pervez Musharraf recently announced that a senior al Qaeda figure, Abu Hamza Rabia, had been killed in a tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

As the United States helps Pakistan recover from the earthquake`s devastation, Rumsfeld also said it was important that the world recognize the U.S. relationships with moderate Muslim countries like Pakistan.

"I`ll leave it to the historians to say what happens, but certainly as a friend and partner in this effort, we are pleased to be working side-by-side with President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani military to do whatever can be done to reduce the suffering of so many Pakistanis," he said.

© Reuters 2005. All rights reserved.

[derdieschnautzelangsamvollhat]

Eines Tages wird Musharraf verkünden: "Wir haben ihn gefangen, getötet, anschliessend verbrannt und die Asche wurde von Terroristen gestohlen".

[Joerver]

Der glücklichste Mann der Welt
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive…
Übersetzung:anonym

23.09.2003

Harley Sorensen

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive…

Gewinnfrage: Wer ist der glücklichste Mann der Welt?

Nein, nicht der Typ, der den Lottojackpot gewonnen hat, und sicher nicht Ben Affleck (außer die Aufschiebung wird zu einer Aufhebung). Aber die Antwort ist leicht. Der glücklichste Mann in der Welt ist Osama bin Laden.

Wie unser George W. Bush selbst wurde Osama in Reichtum hinein geboren und mußte sich nie selbst ernähren. Aber sogar ohne dieses Glück hätte der Mann einen leichten Lebensunterhalt für sich durch arbeiten als ein Jesus-Double verdienen können. Mit seinem guten semitischen Aussehen und seinem träumerischen versonnenen Lächeln wäre er ein Naturtalent für die Aufgabe. Die alten Meister wären in Verzückung geraten.

Aber was bin Laden wirklich zu dem glücklichsten Mann in der Welt macht, ist sein überraschender Verbündeter. Als bin Laden die Angriffen des 11. September 2001 anordnete (angenommen, er hat es getan), wollte er mehr als Tausende von Ungläubigen töten. Er wollte die Welt verändern, die amerikanische Gesellschaft zerschlagen und eine amerikanische Kultur zerstören, die langsam den ganzen Planeten übernahm.

Als bin Laden seinen Zug machte, gab es keinen Weg, wie er hätte vorhersagen können, daß sein größter Verbündeter der gegenwärtige amerikanische Präsident, der ehrenwerte George W. Bush sein würde.

Das ist wirklich Glück!

Amerika, war immer, trotz seiner Fehler, ein Leuchtfeuer der Hoffnung für Menschen auf der ganzen Welt. Obwohl viele Nationen unseren Lebensstandard übertroffen haben, sind wir immer noch das Land wirtschaftlicher Möglichkeiten, praktisch uneingeschränkter Meinungsfreiheit, religiöser Freiheit und weitgehend der Toleranz des Nonkonformismus.

Selbst nach den Ereignissen des Jahres 2000, als der Präsidentschaftskandidat, der ganz klar die Wahl der Bürger und der qualifizierteste für diesen Job war, gegen einen texanischen Taugenichts verlor, dessen Hauptqualifikation es war, daß er ein Sprößling einer reichen und politisch prominenten Familie ist.

Als die saudischen Entführer und ihre Helfer ihre schrecklichen Verbrechen am 11. September begingen, weinte 2001 die Welt für Amerika. Niemals zuvor in unserer Geschichte, nicht einmal am Tag, als John F. Kennedy ermordet wurde, blutete der Rest der Welt so für Amerika, wie es an diesem 11. September und den Tagen danach geschah.

Also wurden die zusammengenommenen Tragödien des 11. September zu einer Art Gelegenheit für Amerika. Wir den Spieß für unsere Peiniger umdrehen können, in dem wir bewiesen, daß wir das sind, wofür uns die meisten Menschen in der Welt halten: eine gute und freundliche und großzügige Nation, wahrhaftig das Land der Freien und das Zuhause der Tapferen.

Aber wir taten das nicht. Wir machten genau das Gegenteil. Unter der Führung des ehrenwerten George W. Bush zeigten wir, wie kleinlich wir sein können, wie bösartig und sogar wie feige. Wir blamierten uns wirklich in den Augen der Welt, da wir unter Bush mit der methodischen Zerstörung unserer wunderbaren Freiheiten im Namen des Selbstschutzes begannen.

Wir krochen, wir versteckten uns, und, als sich die Gelegenheit es zu tun ergab, tyrannisierten wir. Und, als die Chance für George W. Bush kam, eine alte persönliche Rechnung mit Iraks Saddam Hussein zu begleichen, pfiffen wir auf den Rest der Welt und beleidigten sie. "Altes Europa" sagten unsere Politiker verächtlich.

Wir erfanden "Freedom Fries", um unsere Verachtung für die Nation zu zeigen, die Amerika im 18. Jahrhundert ermöglicht hatte.

Wir nahmen uns an den Despoten dieser Welt ein Vorbild und begannen, Menschen verschwinden zu lassen. Wir entdeckten die Folter von Gefangenen wieder, um sie zum Reden zu bringen, entweder durch Stellvertreter ("Die Saudis wissen, wie man mit dieser Art von Problemen umgehen muß") oder durch moderne, wissenschaftliche, nicht verletzende Methoden.

Wir drückten den Patriot Act durch, ein unlesbares Durcheinander von gesetzgeberischem Kauderwelsch, ohne daß auch nur einziger Senator oder Abgeordneter genau wußte, was darin stand. Es stellte sich heraus, daß es solch ein schlechtes Paket Gesetzgebung war, daß Gemeinden überall im Land Gesetze verabschiedeten, die gelobten, nicht mit ihm zusammenzuarbeiten. Sogar Bibliothekare vereinigten sich, um sich seinen unbefugten schnüffelnden Bedingungen zu widersetzen.

Der ehrenwerte Herr Bush und seine getreuen Kohorten schufen das Mammut der "Behörde für die Sicherheit des Heimatlandes" (Department of Homeland Security), eines Mischmasches von Abteilungen, die schon so groß waren, daß sie nicht richtig funktionieren konnten. "Eine große Regierung ist nie so groß, als daß sie nicht größer und unpersönlicher werden kann" - das schien die Logik hinter "Sicherheit des Heimatlandes" zu sein.

("Heimatland" ist übrigens nie definiert worden. Ist es alles, was amerikanisch ist? Nur der nordamerikanische Teil? Nur die 48 zusammenhängenden Bundesstaaten? Schließt es Hawaii, Guam, die Virgin Inseln und Amerikanisch-Samoa mit ein? Was ist mit Puerto Rico? Kingman Reef? Weiß das irgendjemand?)

Kurz gefaßt, hat Herr Bush es darauf abgesehen den Job, den Osama bin Laden angefangen hat, zu beenden. Sogar seine Wirtschaftspolitik - von den Armen zu geben, den Reichen zu geben - ist darauf ausgerichtet, die finanziellen Unterschiede zwischen Amerikanern zu steigern, genau wie in bin Ladens Heimatland.

Auch über religiösen fundamentalistischen Aberglauben ist Herr Bush nicht erhaben. Was vielleicht auch ein Signal an bin Laden war, welche Art Führung Amerika nun habe, hat Herr Bush im Jahr 2001 der Stammzellenforschung die Daumenschrauben angelegt (während er behauptete, sie auf niedrigem Niveau zu halten). Seine finstere "Logik", der zufolge er wissenschaftliche Studien beschränkt widersetzt sich allen rationalen Erklärungen. Das ist Stoff des Mittelalters, direkt aus dem Drehbuch Osama bin Ladens. Osama mußte glücklich sein.

Es scheint ziemlich gut möglich zu sein, daß das Nichtvorhandensein weiterer Angriffe auf Amerika mit einem Mangel an Notwendigkeit für sie erklärt werden kann. Von bin Ladens Standpunkt aus geschieht alles in Amerika, wie er es mag. Wir werden mehr und mehr wie ein Emirat im Mittleren Osten und immer weniger wie die führende Demokratie der Welt.

Warum sollte bin Laden uns wieder angreifen und für Aufruhr sorgen? Herr Bush macht seine Arbeit für ihn.

Wird es hier jemals einen weiteren Terroranschlag geben? Die Experten sagen ja, und damit haben sie höchstwahrscheinlich Recht. Wann wird er geschehen? Meine Annahme: irgendwann nächstes Jahr, zeitlich abgestimmt, um die Furchtsamen näher zu Herrn Bush zu bringen und seine Wiederwahl zu sichern.

Das Beste, auf das der glückliche bin Laden hoffen kann, sind vier weitere Amtsjahre mit George W. Bush.

[Joerver]

Neues aus Osama County, nicht Texas, sondern Pakistan. Wenn man das so liest, braucht man sich nicht zu wundern, weshalb Osama, wenn er noch lebt, nicht gefasst wird.
Oder auch aus USA Sicht. Wer solche Freunde hat, braucht keine Feinde mehr.
Und die Waffen, die man liefert werden demnächst direkt an die Jihadisten weitergereicht.
So macht der `Krieg gegen den Terror` doch richtig Spaß!

Jan 5, 2006

Al-Qaeda`s man who knows too much
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HA05Df03.html

KARACHI - He was once close to Osama bin Laden, has intimate knowledge of al-Qaeda`s logistics and financing and its nexus with the military in Pakistan, yet US intelligence has not been able to get its hands on him.

Ghulam Mustafa, 38, was picked up about 10 days ago in Lahore, and no charges have been brought against him: he is expected to disappear into a "black hole" and quietly be forgotten.

This is because Mustafa, erstwhile head of al-Qaeda`s Pakistani operations, has some tales to tell, but the authorities in Pakistan would rather they were not heard, especially by the Americans, even though Islamabad is a signed-up member in the "war on terror".

Mustafa`s rise and fall provide a case study of the complexities within Pakistan and of the powerful forces that make the country`s intelligence and military such unpredictable allies of the United States.

The making of a jihadi
Mustafa comes from the Punjab, where he was once the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami (Punjab), Pakistan`s most prominent Islamic party. In the 1980s, believing that the party`s ideology was being diluted by election politics, he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen in the fight against the occupying Soviet forces.

His educated background and clarity of thought on ideological matters soon drew him into the camp of the Arab fighters in the country, and it was not long before he entered bin Laden`s inner circle.

The year 1989 proved significant on two fronts for Mustafa, also known by his jihadi name of Omar, or Shahjee among friends.

First, when the Soviets withdrew, Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) decided to "win" at least one Afghan city in which it could set up a puppet mujahideen government and get it endorsed by the world community. Jalalabad was selected, and the main commanders of the Afghan resistance, including Arabs, Pakistanis and Afghans, were gathered into an ISI cell to achieve this. Both bin Laden and Mustafa were in the cell.

Also in 1989, the uprising in Kashmir started. The ISI was involved in providing logistical and financial support both to Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir fighting Delhi`s writ, and to militants based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir engaged in cross-border activities.

Many of the militants were trained in guerrilla warfare in camps established by the Afghan resistance in and around Jalalabad. Mustafa was assigned by the ISI to oversee these operations, in conjunction with bin Laden, bringing him even closer to the al-Qaeda leader.

Meanwhile, Mustafa had penetrated deeply into the circle of Syed Mubarik Ali Gilani, a revered Sufi and custodian of the Mian Mir shrine in Lahore, from where the ISI runs one of its most effective networks. (Slain US reporter Daniel Pearl made his ill-fated visit to Pakistan to investigate Gilani`s network.)

In handling logistical and financial matters for the Kashmiri mujahideen, on behalf of the ISI, Mustafa came into contact with army officers of Corps 10 who were involved in Kashmir operations.

Indeed, he was the point man for contact between bin Laden and the army in arranging for militants to be trained in Afghanistan.

In this way, Mustafa wore two hats, the one as chief coordinator of militant activities in Kashmir, the other as organizer of al-Qaeda`s transfer of money and human resources from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and vice versa.

After September 11, 2001, Mustafa was placed in charge of al-Qaeda`s Pakistan circle. His basic assignments included coordination between bin Laden and his followers in Pakistan. He took dictates directly from bin Laden and passed them on to al-Qaeda men scattered all over Pakistan. He also remained involved in al-Qaeda`s money matters.

However, by this time Pakistan had joined in the "war on terror" and was under pressure from Washington to deliver al-Qaeda members.

On August 11, 2004, Mustafa`s brother-in-law Usman was arrested in Islamabad in connection with alleged sabotage activities in the capital. Calls from Usman`s phone were traced to Mustafa in Karachi and he was also arrested.

Calls from the minaret
At this point two prominent religious personalities enter the story, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz are the sons of slain religious leader Maulana Abdullah of the Lal Mosque in Islamabad. Abdullah was close to the late dictator, General Zia ul-Haq. His Friday sermons were popular among the military and the civilian bureaucracy, and he often preached the cause of jihad.

His sons have continued his legacy, both his calls for jihad and his mysticism, and were the driving force behind a religious decree insisting that Pakistani army personnel killed while fighting against tribals in South Waziristan be denied a Muslim burial.

They were literally calling for mutiny in the army, which some heeded. However, given the background of the brothers and their clout, the government chose to ignore their defiance.

But after the arrest of Mustafa and Usman, a car was recovered from Usman that was owned by one of the brothers, Rasheed. For President General Pervez Musharraf this was clear proof of a link between the Lal Mosque and al-Qaeda.

Orders of arrest were issued at the highest level, but the brothers succeeded in escaping from their seminary - tipped off by sympathizers in the security forces.

While the brothers were in hiding, the minister of religious affairs and the son of General Zia, Ejaz ul-Haq, met with Musharraf and explained that if the government dared to put a hand on the pair, devastation would result.

Musharraf was convinced, and the brothers returned to Lal Mosque`s pulpit after striking a deal with Ejaz.

In the meantime, Mustafa and Usman were still in separate ISI interrogation centers. Detained in a safe house in Karachi, Mustafa spelled out his strong links with bin Laden, army officials and the Kashmiri struggle.

Most likely fearing that Mustafa knew far too much that might implicate Pakistan, the ISI never handed him over to US intelligence. Instead, they put him into the hands of the police, who took him to an anti-terrorism court. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the court found no charges against him and he was released last September.

But by now Mustafa was tainted, and al-Qaeda would have nothing to do with him as he was seen as a marked man.

A new enemy
Being a part of the "mainstream" al-Qaeda, Mustafa was single-minded in the belief that jihad should be waged against the US, but not against pro-US Muslim countries.

An al-Qaeda faction in Pakistan led by Sheikh Essa believes that any sympathizers of the US are targets, whether or not they are Muslims.

When Mustafa was first arrested, many of his supporters, bitter that the state had turned against one of its prime assets, joined Essa`s camp. These disgruntled al-Qaeda supporters were behind several attempts on Musharraf`s life. Other assassination attempts were made by jihadis and army personnel.

And now that Mustafa has been detained again, more people are expected to fall in line with Essa`s hardline vision, which includes targeting Musharraf.

At the same time, the authorities are pushing Lal Mosque against the wall. While they are still too scared to arrest the brothers, they have been declared "wanted terrorists" and "criminals".

This is a dangerous move as the deal struck between Ejaz and the firebrand brothers was that in return for their freedom, they would use their influence where possible to rein in those going after Musharraf.

Mustafa might be out of sight, but his detention has stirred an already volatile pot.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail].

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

[Joerver]

January 8, 2006
The Bush Administration vs. Salim Hamdan
By JONATHAN MAHLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08yemen.html

In 1996, Salim Hamdan, a 26-year-old Yemeni with a thick mustache and kinky black hair, was working part time as a taxi driver, dividing his modest income between the mattress he rented in a crowded boardinghouse in the dirty, bustling city of Sana and his daily supply of khat leaves, the stimulant that most Yemeni men chew by the fistful. Then one day the low-hanging horizon of his life lifted: he was recruited for jihad. He joined about 35 other Muslims, mostly Yemenis, who were preparing to leave for Tajikistan to fight alongside that country`s small Islamic insurgency against its Russian-backed government.
[Table align=right]


The Breeding Ground of Jihad: Poverty and piety
in the Old City of Sana, Yemen.
[/TABLE]
One of the group`s leaders was a self-assured young man named Nasser al-Bahri. Hamdan, an orphaned only child from a rural tribal village in southern Yemen, was naturally drawn to strong personalities. Although two years his junior, al-Bahri, who grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, was far more worldly and sophisticated than Hamdan and was without question the most educated person he had ever met. Al-Bahri had studied business in college, but he was also deeply steeped in the Koran, having become a devout Muslim as a teenager in rebellion against his bourgeois upbringing. He spoke comfortably and forcefully about the plight of Muslims all over the world, and he had traveled extensively, to places as far as Bosnia and Somalia, to defend his oppressed Islamic brethren.

Hamdan, who had the rough equivalent of a fourth-grade education, wasn`t especially religious and had no grand plans for his life other than the hope that he might someday be married, but he nevertheless embraced the idea of becoming a holy warrior. It didn`t hurt that the trip was to be paid for - al-Bahri told him that the group had raised money from a handful of Saudi-based Muslim charities - and that Hamdan would also receive a salary.

The jihadis convened in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and started working their way north toward Tajikistan, first by jeep and then, when the roads were impassable, on foot. After six months traversing Afghanistan`s mountainous, often snow-covered terrain, they were turned back at the Tajik border.

At loose ends, one of the jihadis suggested that they go see a man named Osama bin Laden, a well-known sheik among radical Islamists who led a militant group of itinerant Muslim holy warriors called Al Qaeda. Having only recently been expelled from Sudan, bin Laden had relocated to Afghanistan, where he planned to rebuild Al Qaeda with the help of his new hosts, the Taliban. Bin Laden earned his reputation during the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980`s, but he was now enlisting soldiers for his new crusade to drive the United States from the Arabian Peninsula.

Al-Bahri, Hamdan and the rest of the group made their way back through Afghanistan to bin Laden`s home in Farm Hada, a village outside Jalalabad, not far from the Khyber Pass. They arrived in late 1996 shortly before Ramadan, the holiest time of year. For three days, bin Laden preached to his prospective recruits about the religious imperative of reversing America`s corrosive presence in the gulf. Seventeen of the original 35 jihadis decided to stay; Hamdan and al-Bahri were among them.

For the next several years, both men worked for bin Laden, first in Farm Hada, then, when he relocated for security reasons in 1997, to a better-fortified compound in the desert outside Kandahar. In 1999, al-Bahri and Hamdan`s lives became further entwined. At bin Laden`s urging and with his financial help, they married Yemeni sisters in Sana and returned to Afghanistan with their new wives.

By Sept. 11, 2001, however, al-Bahri and Hamdan`s paths had diverged. Al-Bahri was in prison in Yemen for his suspected links to Al Qaeda`s bombing of an American Naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000. Hamdan was still with bin Laden, though not for long. In late November 2001, with America`s military campaign in Afghanistan well under way, he was picked up near the border of Pakistan by a group of Afghan warlords. They hogtied him with electrical wire and within a matter of days turned him over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty. The interrogations started, and Hamdan was soon identified as Saqr al-Jedawi, his alias during his years with bin Laden. He spent the next six months in U.S. prison camps in Bagram and Kandahar, before being flown to Guantánamo Bay in May 2002.

Today, Salim Hamdan lives in a 6-by-9-foot cell in Guantánamo, awaiting trial by a special military tribunal established by presidential order in the aftermath of 9/11. If everything goes according to the government`s plans, the Bush administration will prosecute Hamdan for violating the laws of war by conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against the United States. The government has revealed little about its case against Hamdan - my portrait is drawn principally from his lawyers, family members and al-Bahri - but it has charged him with serious offenses, including transporting weapons and serving as a bodyguard to bin Laden. If convicted on all charges, Hamdan could receive a life sentence.

Hamdan`s attorneys, a government-appointed Navy lawyer and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, don`t deny that their client worked directly for bin Laden, but they play down his importance to Al Qaeda, portraying him as an employee, an uneducated and far-from-devout driver and mechanic who was grateful for a paycheck but generally ignorant of the terrorist enterprise for which he worked. Moreover, they say that the tribunals, known officially as military commissions, are illegal and have sued the American government to block them from going forward.

This spring, the detainee`s lawyers will have the chance to make their case to the Supreme Court, when it hears Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The name alone guarantees that it will be one of the most closely watched arguments of the year, and the eventual ruling will have far-reaching implications not just for Hamdan and the rest of the Guantánamo detainees, but also for presidential war powers and quite possibly for the future of democracy in the Middle East. If the war on terror is, at its heart, a battle to show the Islamic world that there is an alternative to oppressive theocracies and autocratic dictators, nothing is more important than how the United States government dispenses justice to detainees like Salim Hamdan. Until now, America`s wartime practice has been to hold onto captured combatants until the end of hostilities, when there is no longer a threat of them returning to the battlefield. In this case, though, the battlefield is unmapped and the hostilities could continue for decades. For the moment, the government has broadly classified nearly all of the more than 500 detainees at Guantánamo as enemy combatants, but eventually it`s going to have to start sorting them out. This will entail answering some difficult questions. Are all Muslim men who answered the call to jihad equally guilty? Which detainees represent a threat to the United States? Who is worth prosecuting, and how?


Just outside the Old City of Sana, a maze of densely packed, intricately adorned stone houses and centuries-old shops that rise like drip castles from narrow cobblestone streets, sits the modern Martyrs` Mosque. If the Old City evokes Yemen`s prosperous, cosmopolitan days at the center of the world`s spice trade, the Martyrs` Mosque, an imposing, ash-colored monolith, speaks to its present as the poorest and most primitive of the Arabian Peninsula states.

The big open square that fronts the mosque is a gathering place for the dispossessed. Homeless people lie on flattened cardboard boxes with gasoline cans repurposed as water jugs beside them. Dababs, minivans stuffed with passengers, career around Sana`s crowded streets, jockeying for fares. Drivers struggle to be heard above the music issuing from loudspeakers on the three-wheeled cycles pedaled by cassette vendors. The smells of grilling meat and corn on the cob commingle with perfumed oil, urine and exhaust.

There are no women in sight here, only young men and boys, a reflection of Yemen`s conservative Islamic culture. And although roughly 40 percent of all Yemeni men are unemployed, everyone here seems to be in a big hurry, hustling around, often holding hands, always in standard Yemeni dress: sandals, white robes and Western-style blazers with the labels showing on the outside of the left sleeve, just above the cuff. Long curved daggers known as jambiyas, reminders of the country`s enduring tribal culture, hang from belts. Cheeks bulge with khat, which brightens the mood and sends the mind in every direction, an apt emblem of the combination of aimlessness and restlessness on display.

Ten years ago, Salim Hamdan was one of these men. He was born in about 1970 (no one, including Hamdan himself, knows for sure), hundreds of miles from Sana in the Wadi Hadhramaut, a 100-mile oasis in the mountainous desert of southeastern Yemen. His father was a farmer and shopkeeper, and the family lived modestly in a small, mud-brick home in a cliff town overhanging the fertile valley below. He was still a child when his parents died from illness, one a few years after the other. With no other family nearby, Hamdan went to live with relatives in Mukalla, a bleak port city of about 150,000 on Yemen`s southern coast. By that point, Hamdan had already quit school, which is not unusual in Hadhramaut, where the imperatives of helping your family earn money far outweigh the comparatively abstract virtues of an education.

Within a few years he was on his own, living on the streets of Mukalla and working odd jobs. In 1990, Yemen, which had long been divided into two separate nations, the Islamic north and Marxist south, was officially unified. Hamdan, who was then 20, joined the mass migration north in search of work. There was a widespread sense that Sana, the new nation`s capital, would soon be booming. As it turned out, the job prospects were not so promising, particularly for someone with Hamdan`s limited qualifications. He soon found his way to the Martyrs` Mosque - where he picked up work driving a dabab - and then, six years later, to jihad.

Jihad - literally, "struggle" - is a slippery concept, one that has been subjected to almost endless interpretation, violent and nonviolent alike, emanating from a Muslim`s basic religious duty to encourage the spread of Islam. In recent years, though, it often has come to be understood as a violent religious crusade against the United States. Hamdan and al-Bahri`s routes to jihad could not have been more different, but in many ways each is emblematic of the men`s respective countries, which represent the two biggest contingents at Guantánamo. In Saudi Arabia, jihad resonated with particular force with the educated, affluent and devout; in Yemen, it exerted an especially strong pull on the country`s poor. Nearly half of the country`s population lives below the poverty line; unlike its neighbors in the gulf, Yemen has very little oil, and what it does have is hoarded by the government. "Unless they are the sons of sheiks or political leaders, the young people have no way to use their energies," Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for Islah, Yemen`s Islamic party, told me recently in his office in Sana. "The one option that is in front of anyone who wants to achieve anything is jihad."

Jihad has an almost mythic appeal in Yemen. Its roots run all the way back to the seventh century, when the Prophet Muhammad is said to have declared, "Allah, give me fighters from behind me," his back turned conspicuously to Yemen. In its more modern incarnation, jihad can be traced to 1967, when Yemen was still divided and the British withdrew from its southern half. Finally free of its longtime occupiers, South Yemen quickly established ties to the Soviet Union, Cuba and China, and in 1970 became the Arab world`s first Communist state.

South Yemen`s new identity inaugurated two decades of hostilities with North Yemen, a Muslim state whose allegiances were to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It didn`t take long for North Yemen`s rulers - including the president of today`s unified Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh - to exploit the conflict`s religious undertones. By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, many young North Yemenis already accepted that it was their duty as Muslims to confront Communist unbelievers. And so, over the next several years, scores of young Yemeni men answered their clerics` calls for jihad. Afghanistan`s mujahedeen received support from many Arab countries, in addition to the United States, but the Yemenis were among the fiercest of the so-called Afghan-Arab fighters. Unlike the jihadis from wealthier states in the Persian Gulf, they were accustomed to hard living, and the rugged, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan was similar to that of Yemen.

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the leaders of many Arab countries, understandably worried about the combustible mix of religious zealotry and combat experience in which these men had been steeped, discouraged the jihadis from returning home. North Yemen, for its part, not only welcomed back its own fighters, it opened its borders to jihadis from other Arab countries as well. The heroic stature of these fighters was cemented in 1994, when the still-simmering tensions between Yemen`s Islamists and Marxists erupted into a full-fledged civil war and President Saleh called on the ex-jihadis to help defeat the Communists. The north emerged victorious, and Saleh rewarded many of these men for their efforts. For his help mobilizing the troops, Sheik Abdul Majid al-Zindani, an ex-Arab-Afghan warrior and bin Laden`s onetime spiritual mentor, was awarded the chancellorship of Iman University in Sana, a platform from which he has since steered countless young Yemeni men toward the path of jihad.

The Yemeni government did little to stanch the flow of jihadis, even in the face of increasing international pressure. A consummate pragmatist, President Saleh gave the U.S. permission to use its ports to refuel in the 1990`s, but to the Arab world he presented himself as a leader who was not afraid to stand up to the West. In the wake of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, Saleh scoffed at rumors that the U.S. was planning to intensify its military presence in the country: "Yemen is a graveyard for the invaders," he told Al Jazeera. After 9/11, however, President Saleh went to Washington to pledge his support for the war on terror. But having spent so many years nurturing and exploiting the country`s culture of jihad, he had to be careful about how he went about dismantling it. Extraditing Islamic radicals, or even putting them in jail for more than a couple of years, would provoke the country`s powerful extremist element.

The centerpiece of Saleh`s solution was to appoint a respected jurist and cleric, Hamoud al-Hitar, to meet with imprisoned extremists and persuade them that Islam does not, in fact, condone acts of terrorism. When I visited al-Hitar at his heavily guarded home in Sana one night last fall, he explained to me how the so-called Committee on Thoughtful Dialogue works. He called it "intellectual surgery" and described it as a simple process: he leads radicals through a series of questions about their beliefs, using the Koran or the hadith, a collection of the Prophet Muhammad`s teachings, to show them how they have been misled. At the end of the program, those participants who vow not to take part in future acts of terrorism are granted presidential pardons and set free. To the obvious question - Why believe that they`ll honor the vow? - Judge al-Hitar gave the obvious answer: These are men who take their ideology seriously; they would never sign a pledge renouncing their beliefs if they didn`t mean it. A couple of years ago, President Saleh released hundreds of men with connections to Al Qaeda under the auspices of Judge al-Hitar`s dialogue program. One of those men was Nasser al-Bahri.


Al-Bahri declined to see me for the better part of the two weeks I spent in Yemen. Then, the night before I was scheduled to fly home, he agreed to meet me the following evening at a relative`s home in Sana. A tall, rangy man with a receding hairline and a neatly trimmed beard, al-Bahri looked older than his 33 years. He sat on a floor cushion, his long legs extending from the bottom of his creaseless white robe. Early in our conversation, which lasted more than five hours, the power failed. For the rest of the night, the narrow room was illuminated by two candles. Al-Bahri apologized for excusing himself repeatedly to urinate, explaining that he was diabetic.

According to al-Bahri, his decision to renounce Al Qaeda and terrorism had nothing to do with Judge al-Hitar`s dialogue program, which he doubts has truly changed any minds. Rather, he said that during his two years in prison in Yemen, almost half of which was spent in solitary confinement, he had the chance to do a lot of reading and thinking. He continues to believe that America is oppressing and exploiting Muslims, but he no longer accepts that the random murder of innocent people is a legitimate expression of jihad, which, he said, "has its time and place, like prayer." There was also the issue of maturity. "When we reach our 30`s, we come to regret what we did in our 20`s," he told me matter-of-factly, like an ex-campus radical reflecting on a minor act of civil disobedience in his distant past.

Al-Bahri was not eager to talk about Hamdan; because he feels responsible for his brother-in-law`s fate, he said that discussing him was too depressing. Not surprisingly, what he did say distanced Hamdan from the military operations of Al Qaeda. Al-Bahri described Hamdan as almost childlike, a cheerful, simple-minded man. According to al-Bahri, Hamdan at first seemed excited about jihad, but he lacked both the zeal of a holy warrior and the religious grounding or inclination to grasp the ideology of the movement. As al-Bahri tells it, Hamdan went to Tajikistan for jihad but stayed in Afghanistan because working as a driver and mechanic in bin Laden`s motor pool paid better than driving a dabab in Sana.

If al-Bahri was quick to exonerate Hamdan, he showed no hesitation implicating himself as a senior member of what may be the most notorious terrorist organization the world has ever known. Al-Bahri sounded neither nostalgic nor remorseful talking about his years as one of bin Laden`s chief bodyguards; he could have been a retired executive dispassionately recollecting his years with the firm. Yet he was, in one sense, cautious: while he was willing to answer any question I asked, he explicitly disassociated himself from each specific attack that took place during his time with bin Laden.

Al-Bahri`s future had come into focus as a teenager in Jidda, when he first fell under the influence of radical Saudi clerics. "I saw that my function was to carry guns and defend Muslims wherever they were," he told me. "That was the holy work that would lead me to paradise." Having grown up in Saudi Arabia, Islam`s holiest land, he responded personally when he heard bin Laden describe his country as an agent of the Americans and pledge to drive America from the Arabian Peninsula. What`s more, al-Bahri had left Saudi Arabia for Bosnia in the early 90`s and had been without the guidance of a religious leader ever since. In bin Laden, al-Bahri said, he had found "a new spiritual father."

Al-Bahri rose quickly through the ranks of Al Qaeda. Under the alias Abu Jandal, he helped create new training camps that bore little resemblance to the kind he attended as a young man in Bosnia, where jihadis learned such conventional skills as assembling and firing weapons and reading maps. The focus now was on fighting in cities and preparing for martyrdom operations, which meant learning how to blend in with local populations and attack civilian targets. Bin Laden was clear about the goals. "He would say over and over again that we must carry out painful attacks on the United States until it becomes like an agitated bull," al-Bahri recalled, "and when the bull comes to our region, he won`t be familiar with the land, but we will." During the late 90`s, al-Bahri fought with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and served as one of bin Laden`s personal bodyguards during his frequent tours of Qaeda training camps around Afghanistan.

After the attacks on the U.S. embassies in East Africa in the summer of 1998, al-Bahri said, bin Laden placed him in charge of the organization`s guest houses in Kabul and Kandahar, where it was his duty to help inspire and train new recruits to undertake terrorist operations against the United States. It was at this point, al-Bahri says, that he started having second thoughts about Al Qaeda, not because he doubted its mission, but because he wasn`t convinced these recruits were prepared to carry it out.

Jihad, it occurred to al-Bahri, had evolved from a genuine religious mission to a cattle call for any and all Muslims. Even years later, having renounced terrorism, he seemed irritated by what he characterized as Al Qaeda`s failures of management. "We were getting young people who were not committed to jihad, also very young people, 15 or 16 years old," he told me. "What could we do with them? I said we should accept only religious young people. Only the religious understand what jihad means. But my voice was not being heard." Al-Bahri told me that bin Laden knew he was becoming disillusioned, and that`s why he encouraged him and Hamdan to marry sisters in 1999; in al-Bahri`s interpretation, by tying him to Hamdan, who had fewer options and was thus less likely to leave, bin Laden would have a better chance of keeping al-Bahri in the fold.

During the summer of 2000, Hamdan and al-Bahri came back to Sana for a brother-in-law`s wedding. Within a matter of weeks, several Qaeda operatives in a small boat filled with explosives rammed the U.S.S. Cole, which was on a refueling stop in Yemen. Shortly after the attack, Yemeni intelligence agents started rounding up suspected extremists. Al-Bahri tried to flee but was arrested at the airport trying to return to Afghanistan. Hamdan had already taken his wife and her parents on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and word quickly reached him in Saudi Arabia that if he came back to Yemen he`d be picked up, too. Instead, he went back to bin Laden, taking his wife with him.

In the wake of Sept. 11, al-Bahri told me, three F.B.I. agents came to the prison where he was being held in Yemen to interrogate him. The transcripts from their interviews are classified, but al-Bahri says they were mainly interested in the structure and ideology of Al Qaeda. Asked if bin Laden had access to chemical or nuclear weapons, al-Bahri replied that bin Laden had something far more powerful: men who are determined to complete their covenant with God and carry out martyrdom operations against the United States.


Detainees` lawyers estimate that there are currently about 100 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo. If even a fraction of this many Americans had been imprisoned in a foreign country for four years, the vast majority without charges, there would be a national outcry. In Yemen, however, most of the detainees` families are completely in the dark. Half of the people in the country are illiterate. Those who can read find few stories about Guantánamo. Many of the papers are state-run, and the rest are under intense pressure to toe the government line. President Saleh knows that drawing attention to the detainees would only further inflame anti-American sentiments and in so doing create more problems for him.

A Yemeni human rights group called HOOD has a rough list of Yemenis who are being held at Guantánamo and has made contact with some of their relatives, but the families are not in communication with anyone in the U.S. government. The detainees` defense lawyers periodically come to Yemen to meet with the families who have authorized them to represent their relatives, though in some cases the detainees themselves doubt their American lawyers` good intentions. While I was in Yemen, I spent several days visiting the families of detainees with David H. Remes, a partner at the Washington firm Covington & Burling, which represents 17 of the Yemenis at Guantánamo. Remes prefaced several of his meetings by saying that their sons, brothers or husbands would be very angry if they knew he was there.

Hamdan, too, sent word through his lawyers that he didn`t want me to contact his family, but I was able to get in touch with his wife`s brother, Muhammad al-Qala, through HOOD. Al-Qala, a staff sergeant in the Yemeni army, invited me to his home to meet his sister, Hamdan`s wife, Um Fatima. Since her husband`s arrest, she and her two daughters have been living with her brother, his family and their mother in a cramped two-story stone house in central Sana. Hamdan`s lawyers came to Yemen about a year and a half ago to see her, and the lawyer`s interpreter is in fairly regular contact with al-Qala, but no one whom Hamdan left behind seems to have any real sense of the gravity of his situation or the significance of his case: what could a superpower like the United States possibly want with Salim?

Sitting perfectly straight on the shiny, floral-patterned blue floor cushions that lined the small upstairs living room in her brother`s home, Um Fatima spoke for three hours through an interpreter about her husband. Al-Qala, a stocky man with a dark mustache and glassy, expressionless eyes, sat beside her chain-smoking Marlboros and working on a big wad of khat. Um Fatima and Hamdan`s two daughters, 6 and 4, raced in and out in T-shirts and sweatpants. Um Fatima`s full-length covering revealed only her eyes, but the difficulty of talking about her husband was evident; several times, she became so upset that she had to excuse herself and leave the room.

Um Fatima and Hamdan were married in Sana in 1999. She had not met him before their wedding day but was nevertheless a happy bride. They stayed in Sana for a few months before returning to Afghanistan. Um Fatima was reluctant to go, and was shocked at the conditions once they arrived. Their mud-brick home had dirt floors and no running water or electricity. It was also remote: Tarnak Farms, the walled Qaeda complex in which they lived, was tucked into a vast expanse of treeless desert and brush about 30 minutes outside Kandahar. Um Fatima`s days were spent alone inside the house with her infant daughter. Hamdan, she told me, would return in the early evenings, often with clothes stained with grease from his work fixing the various cars and trucks used on the farm. Um Fatima said she would occasionally complain to him about their life there. "Salim would always tell me to be patient, that someday we would return to Yemen," she said.

In her telling, Um Fatima was doing hardship duty for a few years so that her husband could earn good money working for a sheik she`d never heard of. Even now, years later, the fact that she had lived inside the walls of a heavily fortified Qaeda compound while her husband worked for the most infamous terrorist of our time does not seem to have penetrated her version of reality.

Um Fatima last saw her husband on Nov. 24, 2001. She was eight months pregnant. At the time, U.S. forces were closing in on Kandahar, the Taliban`s last stronghold in Afghanistan. Hamdan, who had been away for a couple of months with bin Laden, had recently returned to take Um Fatima and their daughter to Pakistan. In a borrowed car, with American B-52`s circling the skies overhead, they made their way through the Maruf mountains toward the border. Hamdan decided to let Um Fatima cross into Pakistan alone; security was tight, and even if the border guards had no idea that he worked for bin Laden, being a Yemeni man trying to leave was enough to cause suspicion. He told her he would find another way through and come find her in a few days.

Over the course of the next few weeks, as Um Fatima traveled deeper into Pakistan in the back of a pickup truck with a group of Afghan refugees, she gradually lost hope that she would ever see her husband again. Entering her ninth month of pregnancy, she became so hysterical, she told me, that some sympathetic strangers in Karachi bought her a plane ticket home. At the airport in Sana, she was interrogated for five hours about her husband`s whereabouts. Um Fatima said she assumed he was dead.

Two and a half months later, she received a letter from him on International Committee of the Red Cross stationery. "My sweetheart, peace and blessings be upon you," it began. "I did not die. Allah prescribed a new life for me. Now I am a detainee with the Americans.. . ."

Um Fatima showed me all of the letters she has received from Hamdan since then. Later that night, the interpreter who read the dozen or so letters to me told me how unusual they were. Yemeni men tend to be commanding and aloof with their wives. Hamdan`s letters were emotive, like those of a longing schoolboy. There are drawings of his dagger ("please take care of my jambiya for me"), simple poems ("the bird danced and the bird sang. . .") and the promise to "see each other very, very, very, very, very soon, God willing."

In a three-page military order issued on Nov. 13, 2001, President Bush authorized the special tribunals before which Salim Hamdan and other non-American enemy combatants are to be tried. The trials will held in Guantánamo before panels of three to seven military officers selected by an administration appointee. Two-thirds of a majority will be required for non-death-penalty convictions. (A death sentence requires unanimity.) These are war-crimes tribunals, though unlike the recent international tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the list of offenses pertain to acts of terrorism rather than genocide.

The administration opted for these special tribunals over the U.S. criminal courts for a number of practical reasons. Broadly speaking, certain rights that would be considered fundamental in a civilian court wouldn`t apply. If defendants were suspected terrorists, for instance, they couldn`t very well be permitted to see all the evidence against them as some of it would no doubt be classified for national-security reasons.

Practical considerations aside, the creation of the nation`s first war-crimes tribunals since World War II sent a symbolic message, putting the war against Islamic extremism in the same class as the war against Nazism. Moreover, the tribunals fit with the Bush administration`s larger strategy to reassert and expand presidential authority in the aftermath of 9/11. The executive branch would have complete control. Not only was Congress - the body empowered by the Constitution to convene military tribunals - left out of the decision to establish them, but it also wasn`t consulted on how the tribunals would work. Instead, the administration`s lawyers wrote all of the rules, from the composition of the panels to the standards for admissible evidence to the definition of a war crime. The judiciary branch was also cut out of the process: contested verdicts would be reviewed not by a federal court of appeals but by a three-member panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The first batch of defendants for the tribunals, Hamdan and three others, were carefully selected and then repeatedly vetted on their journey up the chain of command. Case summaries were passed from the military lawyers assigned to the prosecution team to the Pentagon`s adviser for the tribunals to Paul D. Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, to President Bush. Hamdan was originally slated to be the first Arab tried.

While the government has not accused Hamdan of being a member of Al Qaeda per se, it does say that he picked up and delivered weapons for use by Qaeda associates, trained at a Qaeda camp and served as a bodyguard and driver for bin Laden. The formal charge being brought against him is conspiracy, which the administration defines as having "joined an enterprise of persons who shared a common criminal purpose." In a sense, the conspiracy charge is a logical one for prosecuting members of organizations like Al Qaeda that deliberately subdivide tasks and inform very few people about operations. "To capture the nature of some enterprises, to deconstruct what makes them effective, you have to focus on the different kinds of contributions, from the target spotter to the weapons transporter to the financier," says Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Johns Hopkins who helped the Pentagon revise some of the rules for the tribunals.

In the U.S. criminal courts, conspiracy is especially popular among prosecutors going after organized-crime rings; it gives them leverage to lean on foot soldiers to testify against their superiors. In the context of war-crimes tribunals, however, conspiracy becomes more complicated. Because it can be applied to people at every level, it can create a moral equivalence between low-level players and leaders. This very issue came up at Nuremberg, when an assistant attorney general in the Roosevelt administration attacked a Pentagon proposal to file conspiracy charges against German foot soldiers because it might, in the world`s eyes, weaken the impact of the charges against the Nazi leaders. (The proposal was never adopted.) What`s more, because conspiracy is such a broad, catch-all charge, it`s an easy one for prosecutors to fall back on when their proof of guilt is thin. The U.S. criminal-court system has numerous protections against this - jury trials, judges who are insulated from politics, access to an independent court of appeals - most of which are absent from the tribunals. "In the American criminal system, we can have a conspiracy doctrine because we have this unique set of vibrant protections," says Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor, the architect of Hamdan`s lawsuit against the Bush administration and a champion of the conspiracy charge in the criminal context. "But when it comes to war-crimes trials, the international consensus is that conspiracy is a no-no. When the U.S. Congress itself defined war crimes in two statutes in 1996 and 1997, it didn`t include conspiracy."

Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, an Air Force judge advocate general who is currently serving as the Pentagon`s adviser on the tribunals, wouldn`t discuss the government`s evidence against Hamdan other than to point out that the prosecution has already given the defense 18,000 pages of discovery, including incriminating photographs and summaries of Hamdan`s numerous statements to interrogators. "You want a one-word characterization of the case against Hamdan?" General Hemingway asked me. "Solid."

The government is certainly aware that the first trials will be closely scrutinized, and it seems improbable that it would choose a case that wasn`t airtight. Hamdan`s story also has narrative appeal. Unlike the vast majority of enemy combatants, who came to Afghanistan with the cresting wave of jihadis after 1999, he worked for bin Laden from 1996 until his capture in November 2001, a stretch of time that spanned not just 9/11 but also the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. And while many jihadis never even met bin Laden, Hamdan has not disputed working directly for him. A skilled prosecutor could turn his trial into the history of Al Qaeda`s decade-long war against America and in so doing illuminate the nature of our enemy; the tribunals will be open to the press, except for when classified evidence is presented. Whatever evidence the government may have against Hamdan, it`s hard to believe he could have worked for bin Laden for five years, through several high-profile terrorist attacks, without the knowledge of Al Qaeda`s intentions or bin Laden`s trust. And given that he has admitted to being a driver, the progression to transporting weapons is hardly a leap.

Yet it seems clear that Hamdan was not a high-ranking officer of Al Qaeda. By the time the United States decided to try him in 2003, there were certainly people in custody suspected of more serious crimes. Why not prosecute the more heinous offenders first? The government won`t discuss how it settled on Hamdan, but it`s easy to make some logical inferences. It stands to reason that the more hard-core the suspected terrorist, the more useful the information he possessed. The government may not have been done questioning the "highest value" detainees when it decided to issue its first indictments. (Hamdan`s once-regular interrogations, which started almost immediately after his arrest and continued for the better part of two years, ceased in early 2004, shortly before the government announced that he`d been selected for trial.) The United States was also entering uncharted waters with the tribunals; terrorism is not yet codified as a war crime in international law. It`s possible that the government wanted to wait to try its most prized detainees until it had the opportunity to test its legal theories on smaller players.

The treatment of the prisoners may have been a factor as well. Lawyers for the administration had long since built their legal defense of coercive interrogations. Nevertheless, for the first tribunals the government may have wanted "clean" - as in not mistreated or tortured - defendants, both to avoid embarrassment and to prevent issues about the veracity of their statements to interrogators. This, however, is not a point that Hamdan`s lawyers intend to concede. Hamdan has already implied in an affidavit that some of his statements were coerced. He says he was punched and kicked after failing to answer certain questions, and that one of his interrogators placed a pistol on the table between them during their sessions.


In late November, a few weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan was moved from his regular cellblock in Camp Delta to a separate, smaller cellblock called Tango. When his lawyers learned about the development in early December, they were not pleased. Not only had Hamdan`s relocation violated the explicit order of a federal judge that he be kept among the general population at Delta, but he also would be right next to Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, a supposed Qaeda propagandist with a reputation for turning other detainees against their U.S. attorneys. "He`s getting put with a known advocate for firing lawyers - against a federal order - and I don`t even get told about it?" Katyal`s co-counsel, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, told me after Hamdan`s move. Swift and Katyal promptly filed an emergency motion to have their client returned to a normal cellblock, and the authorities at Guantánamo complied.

Many detainees assume that their lawyers are American spies, a suspicion fed by the fact that nearly every document or letter that they bring in or take out of the camp has to pass through military censors. Hamdan`s lawyers say they have a good relationship with him; still, they worry about losing him to what they consider to be the prison`s more radical element. So while Katyal plots strategy from his office near Capitol Hill in Georgetown, Swift, a voluble, boyish-looking 44-year-old Navy JAG, shuttles back and forth to Guantánamo Bay with their interpreter, Charles Schmitz, a soft-spoken professor of geography and an expert in Yemeni culture, to reassure their client that they are on his side and to persuade him to have faith in a legal system that he doesn`t understand.


It was hard enough for Swift, who was appointed by the government, to earn Hamdan`s confidence when he first started meeting with him - in his Navy uniform - in early 2004; he now finds himself having to constantly earn it back. As the indefinite detentions of hundreds of Muslim men, many of whom were already predisposed to Islamic extremism, enters its fifth year, Guantánamo is turning into an anti-American hothouse. For the government, the radicalization of Guantánamo is a complicated issue. The main form of protest in the camps is the hunger strike, and a prisoner`s starving himself to death would turn Guantánamo, already a public-relations problem, into a full-scale disaster. (As of Dec. 30, more than 30 detainees had been hospitalized and were being force-fed.) Radicalization also undermines one of the principal goals of imprisonment: deterrence. As Guantánamo`s critics like to say, "If you weren`t a terrorist when you went in, you will be when you`re let out."

But radicalization has its advantages for the Bush administration too. Last summer, some detainees told their American lawyers that they would no longer meet with them, and a number went so far as to formally fire them. The government considers the legions of adversarial defense attorneys working pro bono for the detainees - from corporate lawyers to human-rights lawyers to law professors - to be an impediment to their ability to prosecute the war on terror. Among other things, the lawyers have filed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions in order to challenge their clients` continued detention without recourse.

More broadly, radicalization helps validate Guantánamo`s existence. The more anti-American the detainees become, the greater the danger they pose and thus the more necessary it is to continue to detain them. So when Swift first heard about the decision to move Hamdan next to al-Bahul, he wondered whether it wasn`t deliberate. "If they succeed in radicalizing Salim," he said, "then they`ve justified his trial." (The Pentagon would not comment on why an individual detainee might have been moved.)

Last August, Hamdan joined a prisonwide hunger strike to protest the conditions on Guantánamo. The detainees` numerous demands included the return of religious books that had been taken from them. When Swift next visited Hamdan in late August, he found him unusually intransigent. For two days, Hamdan refused to meet with him altogether. Not long after Swift returned home to Northern Virginia, he got a call from another lawyer at Guantánamo informing him that Hamdan, a slight man to begin with, had passed out from dehydration in his cell and was taken to the medical clinic at Delta and put on an IV drip. Swift flew back down to Guantánamo Bay almost immediately and managed to persuade Hamdan to start eating again by appealing to the same sense of solidarity that he says prompted him to join the strike in the first place. The best way to help his fellow detainees, Swift told him, was not to martyr himself but to follow through on their challenge to the system.

Like the government, Hamdan`s lawyers also see him as much more than a detainee; to them, he represents the pretext for a historic and unconstitutional presidential power grab. As Hamdan`s lawyers and other critics see it, the administration, by unilaterally creating the tribunals, defining the offenses and handpicking the panels, is not only denying detainees fair trials, it is also violating bedrock principles of the American government. To put an even finer point on it, they say the Bush administration is undermining the very values it purports to be defending in its war against Islamic extremism. They would like to see Hamdan and other enemy combatants tried before a traditional military court, a pre-existing legal system approved by Congress with built-in provisions for the complications that arise during wartime.

Katyal, who served as Vice President Gore`s co-counsel in the suit over the 2000 election, draws a sharp distinction between waging war, an act over which the president should have broad authority, and meting out justice. And so, working at his own expense with research support from a loose network of law students from Georgetown, Yale and the University of Michigan along with attorneys from the law firm Perkins Coie, Katyal has written more than a thousand pages of briefs arguing that the president has neither the authority to create the tribunals without explicit Congressional approval nor the right to deny Hamdan status as a prisoner of war, and in so doing strip him of protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. "The Geneva Conventions were written precisely to make it difficult for political leaders facing political pressure to suspend basic rights and P.O.W. protections," Katyal says. "The moment we let a president say he can determine whether someone is a prisoner of war, other countries are going to start doing it back to us."

Katyal`s arguments found traction in federal court in Washington in the fall of 2004. Just as Hamdan`s second round of preliminary hearings were getting under way at Guantánamo, Judge James Robertson, a former Naval officer, ruled in his favor, declaring the tribunals illegal and abruptly halting the proceedings 30 minutes after they had begun. In July 2005, however, a three-judge appeals panel that included John G. Roberts Jr., now chief justice of the Supreme Court, overturned the decision. Katyal and Swift petitioned the Supreme Court for review, and in November, after delaying action on the case for several weeks, the court announced that it would hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

This was not the final word, though. No sooner had the Supreme Court agreed to consider Hamdan`s case than a Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, introduced a last-minute amendment to a defense-authorization bill explicitly denying all Guantánamo detainees habeas corpus rights, or access to the U.S. federal courts. This had been the administration`s intent from the moment it started sketching out its legal strategy in the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but the last time the issue came before the Supreme Court, in the spring of 2004 in another detainee case, the court ruled against the president (with a loud dissent from Justice Scalia). Now Graham was effectively interceding on the administration`s behalf in what amounted to an end run around the Supreme Court.

Days later, however, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, persuaded Graham to change the wording of the amendment so that it would not derail pending cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It has since passed both the House and the Senate and at press time awaited the president`s signature.


What about the hundreds of detainees who have not yet filed suits protesting their imprisonments? Aside from trial or continuing detention, the only option for the United States is to send them back to their respective nations. To date, it has released about 260 men, including a handful of Yemenis, all of whom remain in prison in Yemen, no doubt at the behest of the Bush administration. But Yemen is an unpredictable ally. In November, the United States suspended it from an aid program worth hundreds of millions of dollars, citing enduring governmental corruption, fiscal irresponsibility and the failure to enact democratic reform. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalism continues to gather strength in Yemen. Recently, three of the country`s best-known extremists, including al-Zindani, one of bin Laden`s spiritual mentors, called for a new coalition dedicated to confronting Islam`s enemies and promoting Muslim values. The ongoing detention of 100 Yemenis at Guantánamo Bay may only help their cause and increase their leverage with President Saleh. So the United States finds itself trapped between two unappealing choices: hold these men as the potentially endless war against terrorism goes on, or return them to a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism in Yemen.

For his part, Hamdan`s immediate concerns have more to do with day-to-day life at Guantánamo Bay - how much time detainees are permitted to exercise and at what time of day, what books they are allowed to read, what comfort items they are allowed to keep in their cells - than with the future of his historic lawsuit against the United States government. As Schmitz, his interpreter, told me recently, "The most important thing to him is what we can deliver in the camp, and that is zip."

Shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Swift visited Hamdan`s cell armed with several front-page newspaper articles about the development. When Swift delivered the news, Hamdan smiled. Within a matter of minutes, though, his mood had visibly darkened, Swift says. Then Hamdan asked him, "What is this exactly that I`ve won?"

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for the magazine, is working on a book about the Hamdan case, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Osama bin Laden: Is it him? Almost certainly.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article339819.ece

By Robert Fisk
Published: 20 January 2006

So why only on audio? Why no video tape? Is he sick? Yes, say the usual American "intelligence sources". It`s the same old story: Osama bin Laden talks to us from the mouth of a cave, from within a cave, from a basement perhaps, from a tape almost certainly recorded down a telephone line from far away. Yesterday`s message, broadcast as ever by al-Jazeera television, was a reminder that security - not sickness - decides his method of communication.

We invaded Afghanistan to find Bin Laden and we fight and die in Iraq to kill his supporters - yet still he eludes us, still he threatens us, still he taunts us.

How much longer can this nonsense go on? President Jacques Chirac warns that France - of all countries - might use nuclear weapons, if attacked. On whom, I wonder? America blows Pakistani children to pieces and claims it has killed five wanted men, including a bomb-maker. But there`s absolutely no evidence. Bin Laden says that America will be attacked again unless it accepts a truce in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weren`t we supposed to be winning the "war on terror"? Oh no, the "experts" tell us, Bin Laden and al-Qa`ida are losing, that`s why they want a truce. Some hope.

It`s a game. Bin Laden has no intention of calling an end to his own war and nor has George Bush and nor has Tony Blair. The Bin Laden offer, almost certainly, is intended to be rejected. He wants Bush and Blair to refuse it. Then, after the next attack, will come the next audio tape. See what happens when you reject our ceasefire? We warned you. And we`ll ask: is it him? So why no video tape? Never before in history have so many wanted men sent pictures and messages and video tapes out of the dark.

The irony, of course, is that Bin Laden is now partly irrelevant. He has created al-Qa`ida. His achievement - that word should be seen in context - is complete. Why bother hunting for him now? It`s a bit like arresting the world`s nuclear scientists after the invention of the atom bomb. The monster has been born. It`s al-Qa`ida we have to deal with.

So we are told that America`s security hasn`t prevented an attack, that " operations" take time to prepare. "It is better not to fight the Muslims on their land," Bin Laden says. "We`d not mind offering you a truce that is fair in the long term ... so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan," he says. Forget for a moment the deep cynicism behind this message - deconstructing the Shia of Iraq seems to be one of the Iraqi insurgents` aims - it also reveals one of Bin Laden`s old themes: the idea that these wars will bankrupt the United States.

"There is no shame in this solution because it prevents the wasting of billions of dollars ... to the merchants of war." These are almost the same words Bin Laden used to me when we last met. "The Americans will be bankrupted," he said, not realising that war primes the pumps of a superpower economy.

It is as if both "sides" in this conflict live on illusions. Mssrs Bush and Blair keep telling us things in Iraq are getting better, when we all know that they are getting worse. Anarchy has seized that entire country. American bodies coming home to the United States? Just don`t let the press take photographs of the coffins. Bombs in London? Nothing to do with Iraq, Blair haplessly told us last July.

Now there`s a website in Spanish about Iraq on the White House screens. Why? Because the Spaniards are interested in the war their army has left? Or because so many of the American soldiers dying in Iraq are Hispanics? And now we have Paul Bremer, America`s equally hapless former pro-consul in Baghdad, telling us that those same Spanish troops contributed to the uprising in Najaf because they weren`t performing their tasks in Iraq. More nonsense. What started the uprising was Bremer`s own anger at an attack on him in a tiny Shia Muslim newspaper which he ordered to be closed (in an announcement of execrable Arabic). It was this which prompted Muqtada al-Sadr to fight the Americans.

And so we go on. Blame foreign fighters - even if 158,000 of them in Iraq happen to be wearing American uniforms - blame Syria, blame Iran. And blame Spain of course. Blame anyone who is not "with us".

In truth, it will need Iran and Syria to help get the US and Britain out of this shameful adventure. Yet what do we do? Raise the stakes on Iran by claiming that it intends to make nuclear weapons. And why Iran? Why not that infinitely more unstable Islamic state called Pakistan whichhas nuclear weapons? Because its dictator, President General Musharraf is on "our side". Why not attack North Korea, whose leader is more unstable than any Iranian cleric? Because he also has nuclear weapons.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are slowly returning. Outside Kabul every woman wears a burqa. Weren`t they supposed to have taken them off? Weren`t women now "free" in Afghanistan? US troops are being killed at an increasing rate there. Weren`t they supposed to have won? Now Canada has split its troops and sent a battalion to Kandahar to fight the Taliban and al-Qa`ida. What are the Canadians now doing in combat operations? What risks does this now pose for the Canadian nation which kept out of Iraq?

It was only a few months ago that Bin Laden was bombarding us with explanations for his movement`s attacks. Why did no one ask, he said, why Sweden was not assaulted? And so, I suppose, we can indeed fear more attacks on the United States, more bombing raids, further chapters in the "war on terror".

And all the time we in the West fail to look for a way to end this "war" . How about some justice in the Middle East? How about lifting the blanket of injustice that has lain across the region for so many decades? Muslims there will probably like some of the democracy we say we`re trying to export to them. They would also like human rights off our Western supermarket shelves.

But they would also like another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this, it seems, we are not going to give them. So the war goes on. Stand by for more audio tapes, and more threats, and more death.

The text of Osama bin Laden`s message

The text of excerpts from the Bin Laden tape

My message to you is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end them... Our situation, thank God, is only getting better and better, while your situation is the opposite.

But I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show that an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he [Bush] has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them [Bin Laden`s followers] on their land than them fighting us [Americans] on our land. I can reply to these errors by saying that war in Iraq is raging with no let-up, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favour, thank God, and Pentagon figures show the number of your dead and wounded is increasing not to mention the massive material losses...

The reality shows that war against America and its allies has not been limited to Iraq as he [Bush] claims ... The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the European nations who are in this aggressive coalition. The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through [with preparations]...

We don`t mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush`s election campaign with billions of dollars.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

[Joerver]

Bin Laden: Where is he? Who`s protecting him? Why can`t we find him?

The latest audiotape proves the al-Qa`ida figurehead has pulled off one of the most remarkable disappearing acts in history.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article340218.ece

By Raymond Whitaker and Justin Huggler
Published: 22 January 2006
[Table align=left]

Bin Laden: Where is he? Who`s protecting him?
Why can`t we find him? Bin Laden has already
achieved what he set out to do, by creating
al-Qa`ida
[/TABLE]It is almost as if he is taunting his enemies. Having remained silent for more than a year, allowing speculation to grow that he might be mortally ill or dead, Osama bin Laden came back like a bad memory last week.

An audiotape from the al-Qa`ida figurehead was broadcast on al-Jazeera, just days after an unsuccessful American missile strike aimed at his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The tape, certified as authentic by the CIA - presumably from voice pattern analysis - made no reference to the attack. But bin Laden discussed events of only a few weeks ago, including US opinion polls on Iraq and the claim that President George Bush had talked of bombing al-Jazeera`s headquarters.

Not only did this show that the fugitive Saudi billionaire did not die in last autumn`s south Asian earthquake, as some had suggested, his message also demonstrated that wherever he is, and whatever communications difficulties might exist, he is still taking a keen interest in affairs on planet Earth. So he must be savouring the tsunami of speculation that followed his re-emergence.

Some analysts commented that bin Laden`s voice sounded more laboured, wondering whether this indicated a deterioration in his health. There was also a pronounced echo, as if he were speaking in a room, in contrast to previous recordings that seemed to have been made outdoors or in large spaces.

Then there was the content: an eye-catching, though vague, offer of a "truce" in Iraq and Afghanistan, on his terms, and a warning to Americans that al-Qa`ida was still seeking to attack them. For Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit dedicated to hunting him down, this was almost a specific threat to make a fresh attack on Washington. Al-Qa`ida failed to hit the Capitol building and destroy the Pentagon in 2001, said Mr Scheuer, pointing out that it had first attempted to destroy New York`s World Trade Center in 1993 before returning to finish the job eight years later.

The US swiftly rejected any notion of a truce, with Vice-President Dick Cheney declaring: "I think you have to destroy them. It`s the only way to deal with them." This was a mistake, in the view of Loretta Napoleoni, an expert on terror financing who recently published a book on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qa`ida in Iraq. "I think the US should have called his bluff," she said. "This tape was an attempt by the old leadership of al-Qa`ida to relaunch themselves. There is a power struggle between them and Zarqawi, and the US could have exploited it."

For George Kassimeris, senior research fellow in conflict and terrorism at Wolverhampton University, the response to the message fulfilled bin Laden`s aims: "He wanted to show his followers he still calls the shots. What happened? He was front-page news. The US immediately replied to him, and the media around the US began reporting increased security as a result of his threats.

"The fact that he had been silent for a year increased the impact - if he spoke out too often, it would be less dramatic. Bin Laden is no longer in operational control of al-Qa`ida, but he doesn`t want to be. He sees himself as a prophet, an ideological focus, not as a strategist or commander."

All the same, capturing or killing bin Laden or his deputy would be a priceless coup for a President who, as the al-Qa`ida leader noted, is losing support because of his entanglement in Iraq. But while the US or its allies have twice claimed to have got close to Zawahiri, there have been no such claims about bin Laden, who has pulled off one of the most remarkable disappearing acts in history.

There has not been a single confirmed sighting of him since the battle of Tora Bora, al-Qa`ida`s last stand against the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. If "intelligence sources" are to be believed, he has not even shown up on America`s electronic surveillance network. Not a satellite phone call. Not an email. Yet between them, he and Zawahiri have issued at least 28 video and audiotapes from hiding. Both of them were heard from last week.

So where are they? As this month`s missile strike shows, the assumption is that they are still in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The frontier runs 1,530 miles through some of the most rugged terrain on earth, and is inhabited by fearsome tribesmen who have no love for any outside interference from Kabul or Islamabad, let alone America.

For all the speculation that bin Laden might be sheltering in a Pakistani city, which is where other senior al-Qa`ida figures have been captured, or could have escaped by boat to Yemen or Saudi Arabia, his safety seems best assured by staying in an area where neither American nor Pakistani troops dare venture.

Even if he is finally hunted down, by this stage it would have little strategic impact. Bin Laden has already achieved what he set out to do, by creating al-Qa`ida. As an ideology, it is far more dangerous than a single group of conspirators.

[Joerver]

Wo kommen sie her? Die Al Kaida Kämpfer, die Selbstmordattentäter und was hat Osama mit den Madrassen in Pakistan zu tun.
Ziemlich überraschende Erkenntnisse biete dieser Artikel.

Was lehren Pakistans Koranschulen?
http://www.monde-diplomatique.de/pm/2006/03/10/a0010.text.na…
von William Dalrymple

Das Regime von Präsident Pervez Musharraf hat es schwer. Es soll im Auftrag der USA den Terrorismus bekämpfen, ist aber im Innern auf islamistische Bündnispartner angewiesen. Eine Schlüsselrolle spielen deshalb die Madrassen, die als Kaderschulen der Taliban gelten.

Kurz vor dem 7. Juli 2005, an dem sich vier britische Muslime, von denen drei pakistanischer Herkunft waren, in der Londoner Untergrundbahn in die Luft sprengten, reiste ich den Indus entlang in die nordwestliche Grenzprovinz Pakistans nach Akora Khattak. In dieser Stadt, an der lauten, von donnernden Lastern befahrenen Autobahn Richtung Islamabad, steht die Haqqania, eine der radikalsten jener religiösen Schulen, die man Madrassen nennt.

In dieser Lehranstalt, die zu einer Moschee gehört, wurden viele Taliban-Führer ausgebildet, darunter auch Mullah Omar, der bis 2001 in Afghanistan an der Spitze des Regimes stand. Die hier vermittelte Lehre, heißt es, habe die brutale, ultrakonservative islamische Rechtsauffassung inspiriert, nach der das Taliban-Regime funktioniert hat. Doch in der Haqqania deutet nichts darauf hin, dass man sich seiner Schüler schämt. Im Gegenteil: Maulana (so der übliche Titel eines Madrasse-Lehrers) Sami ul-Haq, der Direktor der Schule, erzählt immer noch voll Stolz, dass er, wann immer die Taliban einen Aufruf zur Rekrutierung neuer Kämpfer erlassen, seine Madrasse einfach zumacht und die Schüler in den Kampf schickt. Akora Khattak steht also in vieler Hinsicht für alles, was US-Politiker in dieser Region am wenigsten mögen und am meisten fürchten: Es ist eine Bastion des religiösen, intellektuellen und manchmal auch militärischen Widerstands gegen die Pax Americana und alles, was sie repräsentiert.

Ein Sandsturm war aufgekommen, als wir unterhalb der mächtigen Festungswälle von Attock, einst Indiens Bollwerk gegen Einfälle aus Afghanistan, den Indus überquerten. Die Straße war von Pappeln gesäumt. In der Ferne stand die blaue Margalla-Bergkette wie ein gezackter Drachenrücken gegen den Horizont. Die Straße führte an einem Friedhof vorbei, auf den Gräbern flatterten grüne Fahnen im Wind. Wenige Kilometer jenseits des Flusses tauchte eine Gruppe heruntergekommener Gebäude auf, alle eine moderne, rohe Betonversion der traditionellen Mogul-Architektur. Auf den Dächern und Veranden der Studentenwohnheime hing Wäsche zum Trocknen; der große Platz zwischen den Gebäuden wimmelte von Islamschülern, alle mit Turban, alle mit dichten Bärten.

Maulana Sami erwies sich wider Erwarten als ein Mann von gepflegtem Aussehen und heiterem Gemüt, den man nicht für eine Verkörperung antiwestlicher Hassgefühle gehalten hätte. Er trug einen blauen Gehrock, der fast aus Dickens' Zeiten hätte stammen können, und hatte eine leichte Hennatönung im getrimmten Bart. Das zerklüftete Gesicht prägte eine mächtige Hakennase, die Augenwinkel waren voller Lachfalten. Ich wurde ins Büro gebeten und seiner zweijährigen Enkeltochter vorgestellt, die fröhlich mit einem gelben Luftballon spielte. Ich bemerkte, dass die Haqqania nicht unter dem harten Kurs zu leiden scheine, den Präsident Musharraf gegen die Zentren des islamischen Radikalismus verkündet hat. Sami lachte: "Das ist doch nur für die Amerikaner. Nichts als Verlautbarungen für die Presse, passiert ist nichts."
Madrassen bieten kostenlose Bücher, Kleider, Unterkunft

"Sie finden also das politische Klima zurzeit nicht schwierig?", frage ich. "Wir haben eine gute, starke Position", antwortet Sami, "Bush hat die gesamte islamische Welt aufgeweckt. Dafür sind wir ihm dankbar." Und fügt mit breitem Lächeln hinzu: "Unsere Aufgabe ist es jetzt, islamische Ideologie zu verbreiten. Wir bieten Ausbildung umsonst, Kleider und Bücher umsonst, sogar freie Unterkunft. Wir sind die Einzigen, die den Armen eine Ausbildung bieten." Er macht eine Pause, und das Lächeln weicht aus seinem Gesicht: "Die Menschen hier sind verzweifelt. Sie haben die alten Verhältnisse satt, mit den säkularen Parteien und der Armee. Es gibt so viel Korruption. Musharraf bekämpft nur die Muslime und tut, was der Westen will. Für die Menschen in Pakistan interessiert er sich nicht. Deshalb warten jetzt alle auf islamische Antworten - und wir können mithelfen, sie zu geben. Nur unser islamisches System bietet Gerechtigkeit."

Man mag es gut finden oder nicht, der Wandel im politischen Klima Pakistans, den Sami ul-Haq in Akora Khattak registriert, hat das ganze Land erfasst. Nach einem Bericht des Innenministeriums, der nach dem 11. September 2001 entstanden ist, gibt es heute 27-mal so viel Madrassen wie im Jahr der Unabhängigkeit: 1947 waren es 245, im Jahr 2001 schon 6 870 solcher Schulen.(1)

Viele Madrassen werden von oder in Zusammenarbeit mit radikalen islamistischen Parteien wie dem Bündnis Vereinigte Aktionsfront (MMA) betrieben, bei dem Sami ul-Haq als stellvertretender Vorsitzender fungiert. Die MMA hat in der nordwestlichen Grenzprovinz ein talibanähnliches Regime errichtet, das zum Beispiel öffentliche Musikaufführungen und die bildliche Darstellung von Menschen verbietet. Wobei es eine bizarre Ausnahme gibt: das Bild von Colonel Sanders am neuen Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-Restaurant in Peshawar. Offenbar bleibt es von der sonst überall verordneten Bilderstürmerei verschont, weil der Colonel einen korrekten islamischen Bart trägt.

Die islamischen Parteien wissen genau, welche Vorteile sich aus der Kontrolle von Ausbildungsstätten ziehen lassen. So ist etwa die Zentrale der Dschamaat-i-Islami-Partei in Lahore gleichzeitig eine Madrasse, die 200 Schülern einen entschieden politisierten Koranunterricht bietet. Bei einem Besuch im Sommer 2005 erlebte ich die Predigt eines Maulana, der sich über die Willfährigkeit von Präsident Musharraf gegenüber den USA ausließ und ihn beschuldigte, die Taliban im Stich zu lassen. Und ein Sprecher der Partei erklärte mir ganz unverblümt: "Die politische Transformation durch unsere Madrassen hat für die politische Zukunft Pakistans ungeheure Folgen. Der jüngste Erfolg der islamischen Parteien hat sehr viel mit der Arbeit zu tun, die wir in unseren Madrassen leisten."

Das religiöse Leben hat sich überall in Pakististan radikalisiert. Die tolerante Tradition der Barelvi-Bewegung, die sich an der Sufi-Lehre orientiert, hat gegenüber den strengeren und politisierten reformistischen Strömungen deutlich an Boden verloren. Neben den wahhabitischen und salafitischen Richtungen erlebt vor allem die von der geistlichen Hochschule (Darul-Ulum) im indischen Deoband ausgehende fundamentalistische Lehre einen rasanten Aufstieg.

Die rapide Ausbreitung der Madrassen in Pakistan begann unter General Zia ul-Haq in den 1980er-Jahren, während des afghanischen Dschihad gegen die Sowjetunion, und wurde vor allem von den Saudis finanziert. Zwar waren einige der damals entstandenen Madrassen nicht mehr als ein einziger Schulraum neben einer Dorfmoschee, aber es wurden auch sehr große und einflussreiche Religionsschulen gegründet. Die Darul-Ulum( )in Belutschistan beispielsweise beherbergt 1 500 Internatsschüler, zu denen 1 000 weitere Externe kommen. Insgesamt betreuen die pakistanischen Madrassen wohl bis zu 800 000 Schüler - ein umfassendes System kostenloser islamischer Erziehung, das parallel zum heruntergekommenen staatlichen Bildungssektor existiert.
Staatliche Schulen ohne Lehrer, Wasser, Strom

Nur 1,8 Prozent des pakistanischen Bruttoinlandsprodukts werden für das staatliche Bildungswesen ausgegeben. 15 Prozent der Schulen haben keine richtigen Klassenräume, 40 Prozent sind ohne Wasser und 71 Prozent ohne elektrischen Strom. Die Lehrer erscheinen häufig nicht zum Dienst. Viele dieser Schulen existieren gar nur auf dem Papier. Als Imran Khan, der frühere Kapitän des pakistanischen Kricket-Teams, Politiker wurde und die staatlichen Schulen seines Wahlkreises inspizierte, fand er heraus, dass es eine von fünf registrierten Schulen überhaupt nicht gab und über zwei Drittel der existierenden Schulen einen großen Teil der Zeit geschlossen blieben.

In Indien dagegen sind 65 Prozent der Bevölkerung alphabetisiert, mit weiter steigender Tendenz, und die staatlichen Mittel für das Erziehungswesen wurden erheblich aufgestockt. In Pakistan liegt der Alphabetisierungsgrad bei 42 Prozent, mit fallender Tendenz. Statt in die Bildung zu investieren, gibt die Militärregierung Milliarden Dollar für neue F-16-Kampfflugzeuge aus. Weil das staatliche Schulwesen kurz vor dem Zusammenbruch steht, haben gerade die Ärmsten kaum eine andere Wahl, als ihre Kinder dem Madrassen-System auszuliefern, das ihnen eine streng traditionelle, aber immerhin kostenlose Schulbildung garantiert.

Wahrscheinlich spielen die Madrassen heute in keinem anderen Land eine so dominierende Rolle wie in Pakistan, aber der Trend, den wir hier beobachten, ist in der gesamten islamischen Welt derselbe. In Ägypten ist die Zahl der Lehrinstitutionen, die an die islamische Al-Azhar-Universität angebunden sind, zwischen 1986 und 1996 von 1855 auf 4314 gestiegen. Die Saudis stecken immer mehr Geld in die islamische Erziehung; allein in Tansania fördern sie den Bau neuer Madrassen mit einer Million Dollar pro Jahr. Und in Mali besucht inzwischen jedes vierte Kind im Grundschulalter eine dieser Koranschulen.(2)

Betrachtet man einen Mann wie Sami ul-Haq und seine Madrassen in diesem größeren Zusammenhang, ergeben sich einige wichtige Fragen. Inwieweit sind diese Madrassen die Quelle der Probleme, die in den islamistischen Anschlägen vom 11. September kulminierten? Sind Madrassen schlicht und einfach Terroristenfabriken? Und sollte der Westen auf Klientelstaaten der USA wie Pakistan und Ägypten Druck ausüben, damit sie diese Anstalten einfach verbieten?

In der Panikstimmung nach den Angriffen der Islamisten auf die USA schien die Antwort auf diese Fragen offenkundig. Zwar weiß man inzwischen, dass US-Außenminister Colin Powell und Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld in außenpolitischen Fragen unterschiedlicher Meinung waren, aber in einem Punkt waren sie sich einig: dass die Madrassen eine Gefahr darstellen. So formulierte Rumsfeld 2003 die Frage: "Können wir jeden Tag mehr Terroristen festnehmen und töten oder von ihren Taten abhalten, als die Madrassen und die radikalen Geistlichen rekrutieren, ausbilden und auf uns loslassen?" Ein Jahr später bezeichnete Colin Powell die Madrassen als Orte, an denen "Fundamentalisten und Terroristen" herangezüchtet werden.

Seit man weiß, dass sich drei der vier Londoner Selbstmordattentäter vor dem 7. Juli 2005 in Pakistan aufgehalten haben, ist ein Großteil der britischen Presse schnell auf US-Linie eingeschwenkt. So übersetzte der Sunday Telegraph das arabische Wort mit "Ausbildungsstätte" für Terroristen, obwohl es schlicht "Ort der Erziehung" bedeutet. Und der Daily Mirror klärte seine Leser quer über eine Doppelseite auf, dass die drei Attentäter alle in pakistanischen "Terrorschulen" eingeschrieben waren.

Tatsächlich ist bis heute völlig unklar, ob die drei in Pakistan jemals eine Madrasse von innen gesehen haben. Noch weniger gibt es Beweise dafür, dass das Trio in Koranschulen einer "Gehirnwäsche" unterzogen wurde, wie die britische Presse nach den Attentaten vermutete. Hingegen weist einiges darauf hin, dass die drei an ihrem Wohnort in Yorkshire radikalisiert wurden, und zwar durch islamistische Literatur und Videokassetten, die in der örtlichen islamischen Buchhandlung unter dem Ladentisch zu haben waren.

In diesem wie in vielen anderen Fällen ist die Verbindung zwischen Madrassen und internationalem Terrorismus keineswegs eindeutig. Neuere Studien wecken erhebliche Zweifel an der oft wiederholten, aber fragwürdigen Theorie, dass diese Institutionen nicht viel mehr als Ausbildungsstätten für die al-Qaida seien. Es trifft sicher zu, dass viele Madrassen eine fundamentalistische und buchstabengetreue Auslegung der Schriften pflegen und viele der allerstrengsten Richtung islamischen Denkens anhängen. Nur wenige dieser Schulen versuchen, ihre Schüler auf das Leben in einer modernen, pluralistischen Gesellschaft vorzubereiten.
Sektiererische Schlägertypen für lokale Konflikte

Gewiss kann man einige Madrassen direkt mit radikalen Islamisten und gelegentlich auch mit handfesten Gewalttaten in Verbindung bringen. Aber ebenso gibt es in Siedlungen im Westjordanland Jeschiwas, jüdische geistliche Hochschulen, die für ihre Gewalttaten an Palästinensern bekannt sind, und serbische Klöster, die nach dem Waffenstillstand in Bosnien serbische Kriegsverbrecher aufgenommen haben. In Pakistan schätzt man, dass bis zu 15 Prozent der Madrassen den bewaffneten Dschihad propagieren, darunter einige wenige, die eine klandestine militärische Ausbildung anbieten. So haben Schüler von Madrassen am Dschihad in Afghanistan wie auch in Kaschmir teilgenommen; und wiederholt waren sie an sektiererischen Gewaltaktionen innerhalb des Landes beteiligt, vor allem bei Angriffen auf Moscheen der schiitischen Minderheit in Karatschi.

Inzwischen erkennt man aber immer deutlicher, dass es eine Sache ist, Kanonenfutter für die Taliban zu liefern und sektiererische Schlägertypen für lokale Konflikte auszubilden, eine ganz andere Sache hingegen, einen technisch versierten Al-Qaida-Terroristen auszubilden, der so teuflisch genau vorbereitete Angriffe wie die gegen das US-Kriegsschiff "Cole", die US-Botschaften in Ostafrika, das World Trade Center und die Londoner U-Bahn ausführt. Weder Bin Laden noch einer der Männer, die die Anschläge in den USA und Großbritannien begangen haben, war Absolvent einer Madrasse oder ausgebildeter Ulema (geistlicher Gelehrter) oder Kleriker.

In der Presse wurden die Attentäter vom 11. September häufig als "mittelalterliche Fanatiker" dargestellt. In Wahrheit wäre es zutreffender, sie als verwirrte Mittelschichtler mit Universitätsabschluss zu bezeichnen. Mohammed Atta war Architekt; Aiman al-Sawahiri, Bin Ladens wichtigster Mitstreiter, war Kinderchirurg; Ziad Jarrah, einer der Gründer der Hamburger Zelle, studierte Zahnmedizin; Omar Sheikh, der Anfang 2002 den Journalisten Daniel Pearl in Karatschi entführt und ermordet hat, war Absolvent der London School of Economics. Wie Gilles Kepel ausführt, ist die neue Generation globaler Dschihadis nicht etwa ein Produkt der städtischen Armut in der Dritten Welt; diese Gotteskrieger sind vielmehr "die privilegierten Kinder einer merkwürdigen Ehe zwischen Wahhabismus und Silicon Valley, das al-Sawahiri in den 1990er-Jahren auch besucht hat. Sie sind nicht nur die Erben des Dschihad und der Umma, sondern auch der elektronischen Revolution und der Globalisierung amerikanischen Typs."(3)

Zum selben Befund kommt die bislang genaueste Analyse der globalen Dschihadisten, die ein ehemaliger CIA-Mitarbeiter unter dem Titel "Understanding Terror Networks" vorgelegt hat. Marc Sageman hat die Lebensläufe von 172 Terroristen mit Verbindungen zu al-Qaida untersucht. Zwei Drittel von ihnen stammen aus der Mittelschicht und haben einen Universitätsabschluss; sie haben im Allgemeinen technische Akademikerberufe, manche auch einen Doktortitel. Auch sind sie keine jugendlichen Hitzköpfe: Ihr Durchschnittsalter liegt bei 26 Jahren, die meisten sind verheiratet, viele haben Kinder. Nur zwei von ihnen scheinen psychotisch zu sein. Und selbst die Ideologen, unter deren Einfluss sie stehen, sind keine ausgebildeten Geistlichen: Sayyid Qutb zum Beispiel, der 1966 hingerichtete Ideologe der ägyptischen Muslimbruderschaft, war Journalist. Der islamische Terrorismus ist, wie seine christlichen und jüdischen Vorläufer, ein vorwiegend bürgerliches Unternehmen.

Zu ähnlichen Schlüssen kam Peter Bergen von der Johns Hopkins University in seiner Untersuchung von 75 islamistischen Terroristen, die an Angriffen auf westliche Ziele beteiligt waren. 53 Prozent hatten einen Universitätsabschluss, wohingegen "nur 52 Prozent der US-Bürger ein College besucht haben"(4). Vor diesem Hintergrund dürfte es kaum überraschen, dass die Attentäter von London an Universitäten studierten und dass einer von ihnen Mercedes fuhr.

Nun stimmt es freilich, dass mehrere radikale Islamisten, die sich mit al-Qaida eingelassen haben, Absolventen einer Madrasse sind. Zum Beispiel Maulana Masud Azhar, Führer einer Dschihad-Gruppe namens Jaish-i-Muhammad, der Verbindungen zu Bin Laden hat. Er hatte ursprünglich an der ultramilitanten Binor-Town-Madrasse in Karatschi studiert. Und an dem Bombenattantat auf den Autokonvoi von Präsident Musharraf im Dezember 2003 war ein Mann beteiligt, der seine Ausbildung an einer Madrasse abgebrochen hatte. Die Anschläge in Bali wiederum waren das Werk der Organisation Lashkar-i-Dschihad, die aus einem Verband salafitischer Madrassen Indonesiens hervorgegangen ist.

Insgesamt aber haben Studenten von solchen Koranschulen einfach nicht die nötigen technischen Kenntnisse, um raffinierte Anschläge im Stil von al-Qaida auszuführen. Das Hauptinteresse der meisten Absolventen gilt vielmehr der Einhaltung der traditionellen Vorschriften wie des korrekten Waschens vor dem Gebet oder der richtigen Länge des Bartes - Themen also, die im Curriculum der Madrassen behandelt werden. Die Absolventen wenden sich denn auch gegen alle als unislamisch eingestuften Praktiken wie etwa das Beten an Gräbern von Heiligen oder die Teilnahme am schiitischen Marsiya-Ritus.(5) Ihnen geht es also nicht in erster Linie darum, gegen Nichtmuslime oder den Westen vorzugehen - was das zentrale Motiv der globalen Dschihadis ist -, sondern vielmehr darum, im eigenen Lande für eine korrekte islamische Lebensführung zu sorgen.

Die meisten Al-Qaida-Leute haben dagegen nur sehr oberflächliche Kenntnisse des islamischen Rechts oder der einschlägigen Schriften. Auch gibt es Hinweise darauf, dass Bin Laden die an den Madrassen ausgebildeten Geistlichen wegen ihres engstirnigen juristischen Herangehens an Glaubensfragen verachtet. Seine eigene gewalttätige Version des Islamismus hält er für die weit angemessenere Antwort auf die Probleme der muslimischen Welt.

Dies wurde deutlich, als Bin Laden kurz nach dem 11. September gegenüber Besuchern aus Saudi-Arabien meinte: "Die jungen Leute, die diese Operationen durchgeführt haben, befolgten nicht irgendein fiqh (islamische Rechtslehre) im üblichen Sinne, sie befolgten vielmehr den fiqh, den der Prophet Mohammed gebracht hat." Das Zitat ist sehr aufschlussreich, zeigt es doch die Aversion Bin Ladens gegen die auf das Recht zentrierte Ausbildung und die überkommenen Strukturen der islamischen Autoritäten. Die Flugzeugentführer dagegen, scheint er indirekt zu sagen, haben effektiv und praktisch gehandelt, anstatt herumzusitzen und über islamische Gesetzestexte zu disputieren. Damit setzte er sich in Widerspruch zu den Madrassen und den Ulema; die traditionellen Methoden religiöser Unterweisung umgeht er und bezieht seine Leitlinien direkt aus dem Koran. Entsprechend haben Bin Laden und seine Gefolgsleute selbst hoch geachteten Geistlichen und Gelehrten mehrfach vorgeworfen, "Sklaven abtrünniger Regime" zu sein.(6)

All dies verweist auf die gewaltigen intellektuellen Defizite in der Debatte um al-Qaida. Denn immer noch bekommen wir ständig zu hören, dass der Terrorismus zum einen der Armut entspringt und zum andern der an den Madrassen vermittelten Koranlehre. Umgekehrt wird beharrlich abgestritten, dass die feindselige Haltung der Islamisten etwas mit der Politik der USA gegenüber dem Nahen und Mittleren Osten und speziell mit den angloamerikanischen Abenteuern im Irak und in Afghanistan zu tun haben könnte. Die Aussagen von al-Sawahiri wie von Mohammed Sidique Khan, einem der Attentäter von London, besagen das Gegenteil.(7)

In Wahrheit haben die Al-Qaida-Täter in der Regel eine moderne Ausbildung genossen und formulieren ihre Ziele explizit politisch. Daran hat Bin Laden in seinen Verlautbarungen keinen Zweifel gelassen. Auf dem vor der Präsidentenwahl in den USA veröffentlichten Video merkte er lakonisch an, dass man, wenn al-Qaida gegen "die Freiheit" kämpfen wollte, Schweden angegriffen hätte. Nein, die Männer, die den 11. September planten, waren nicht das Produkt eines traditionellen islamischen Erziehungssystems und keine Zöglinge der Mullahs, sondern Absolventen westlicher Universitäten.

Die Diskussion über die angeblichen Verbindungen zwischen den Madrassen und dem Terrorismus trägt auch dazu bei, dass die lange Geschichte dieser Koranschulen wie auch die Unterschiede zwischen ihnen aus dem Blick geraten. In der Geschichte des Islam waren die Madrassen jahrhundertelang der wichtigste Ort religiöser und wissenschaftlicher Gelehrsamkeit, so wie es in Europa die kirchlichen Schulen und die Universitäten waren. Zwischen dem 7. und dem 12. Jahrhundert brachten Madrassen freie Denker wie Alberuni, Ibn Sina und al-Khwarizmi hervor. Dasselbe gilt für den Sufi-Mystiker und Verfasser von Liebes- und Sehnsuchtslyrik, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, der im 13. Jahrhundert lebte und dessen Gedichte in den USA während der 1990er-Jahre zu Bestsellern wurden. Dieser Poet war ein muslimischer Rechtsgelehrter, der zeit seines Lebens in einer Madrasse im anatolischen Konya lehrte.

Dies sollte eigentlich nicht überraschen. Im gesamten Koran gibt es nur etwa 200 Verse, die eine direkte Anordnung zum Beten darstellen, aber dreimal so viele Verse, die dem Gläubigen auftragen, die Größe Gottes zu betrachten, zu bedenken und zu analysieren, wie sie sich in den Pflanzen, der Natur, den Sternen und im gesamten Sonnensystem offenbart. Die älteste und größte aller Koranschulen, die Al-Azhar-Universität in Kairo, kann wohl mit Recht von sich sagen, dass sie im frühen Mittelalter unter allen Universitäten des Mittelmeerraums das höchste intellektuelle Niveau besaß. Man geht allgemein davon aus, dass die Idee der Universität im modernen Sinne - als ein Ort, an dem Studenten gemeinsam unter Anleitung mehrerer Lehrer mehrere Wissensfelder studieren - zuerst an der al-Azhar entwickelt wurde.

Bezeichnend ist auch, dass die ersten Universitäten des christlichen Abendlands in Städten wie Salerno, Neapel, Bologna und Montpellier entstanden, also unweit der islamischen Reiche von Spanien und Sizilien. Und das allererste europäische Kolleg, das "Collège des Dix-Huit" in Paris, wurde im Jahr 1180 von Jocius de Londoniis gegründet, als er von einer Pilgerfahrt in den Nahen Osten zurückgekehrt war.(8) Während des gesamten Mittelalters bereisten Gelehrte wie Adelard of Bath die islamische Welt, um das fortgeschrittene Wissen zu studieren, das in den Madrassen gelehrt wurde.
Dichtung auf Persisch Vedanta auf Sanskrit

Als die Bildungsinstitutionen der islamischen Kernländer durch die Mongolen zerstört wurden, flüchteten viele Gelehrte nach Delhi, womit der Norden Indiens erstmals zu einem bedeutenden Zentrum der Gelehrsamkeit wurde. Bis zur Epoche des Mogulkaisers Akbar vollzog sich in den indischen Madrassen eine Verschmelzung des Wissens aus dem islamischen Nahen und Mittleren Osten mit den Lehren des hinduistischen Indien. In dieser Zeit studierten Hindus und Muslime gemeinsam den Koran (auf Arabisch), die Sufi-Dichtung eines Sa'adi (auf Persisch) und die Philosophie des Vedanta (auf Sanskrit), aber auch Ethik, Astronomie, Medizin, Logik, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaften.9

Die Absetzung des letzten Mogulherrschers Bahadur Shah Zafar (1858) war für das islamische Selbstbewusstsein auf dem Subkontinent ein harter Schlag. In der Folge gründeten desillusionierte muslimische Gelehrte in Deoband, nördlich von Delhi, eine einflussreiche Madrasse, die eine sehr engstirnige, am Wahhabismus orientierte Koranauslegung pflegte. Es war eine Reaktion auf das, was sie als Degeneration der alten Eliten empfanden. In dieser Anstalt wurde alles, was nach europäischen oder Hindu-Einflüssen aussah, aus dem Lehrplan getilgt.(10)

Unglücklicherweise haben sich im 20. Jahrhundert vor allem die puritanischen Deobandi-Madrassen in Nordindien und in Pakistan ausgebreitet. In den 1980er-Jahren wurden sie außerdem gezielt von Staatspräsident Zia ul-Haq und seinen saudischen Verbündeten gefördert. Auch die USA trugen maßgeblich dazu bei, die Madrassen im "Heiligen Krieg", der damals in Afghanistan tobte, einzuspannen. Dabei finanzierte die CIA unter anderem ein Programm der US Agency for International Development, das besonders blutrünstige und militant islamische Schulbücher für die Madrassen produzierte.

In einem dieser Bücher war ein Dschihadi abgebildet, mit abgerissenem Kopf und Gewehr in der Hand. Im dazugehörigen Text werden die Mudschaheddin, die "Allah Gehorsam leisten", mit den Worten gewürdigt: "Diese Männer opfern ihren Besitz und ihr Leben, um das islamische Recht durchzusetzen." Als die Taliban an die Macht kamen, wurden diese Lehrbücher an den afghanischen Schulen verteilt.(11)

Ohne Zweifel vermitteln viele pakistanische Madrassen völlig überholte Lehren. Das Medizinstudium zum Beispiel orientiert sich noch immer an dem antiken Gelehrten Galenos, der im zweiten nachchristlichen Jahrhundert lebte. Der Koran wird nicht kritisch studiert, sondern mechanisch gelernt, und noch immer gilt als erstrebenswert, ein hafiz zu werden, der den Koran auswendig hersagen kann. Die Deobandi-Madrassen lehren, dass die Sonne um die Erde kreist, und in einigen hat man noch besondere Sitze für die djinns, die unsichtbaren islamischen Geister, reserviert.

Die Darul-Ulum von Karatschi präsentiert sich mit ihren palmengesäumten Rasenflächen wie eine Kreuzung aus Fünfsternehotel und elitärer Campus-Universität. Es gibt gut ausgestattete Unterrichts- und Computerräume, und überall entstehen neue Bibliotheken und Studentenwohnheime. Im Unterricht herrscht konzentrierte Lernatmosphäre. Die Schüler sitzen mit gekreuzten Beinen auf Teppichen und lesen den Koran, der auf einem hölzernen Buchständer vor ihnen liegt. In einigen Räumen hören sie aufmerksam einem älteren maulana zu, der ihnen die Bedeutung von bestimmten Versen des Korans oder des hadith, der Sammlung überlieferter Geschichten über den Propheten, erläutert. In einem Computerraum kämpfen bärtige Männer mit der Urdu- bzw. der arabischen Version von Microsoft Word. Wie man mir erklärt, wird von fortgeschrittenen Studenten erwartet, dass sie ihre Referate mit dem Computer schreiben und ausgedruckt vorlegen. Aber natürlich sind nicht alle Madrassen entsprechend ausgestattet.

Bedroht fühlte ich mich in der Dar-ul-Ulum in keiner Weise. Die Schüler waren fast durchweg freundlich und bemüht, wenn auch etwas angespannt. Als ich einen bärtigen jungen Mann fragte, welche Musik er auf seinem neuen Kassettenrekorder hört, starrte er mich entsetzt an - das Gerät war nur dazu da, Gebete zu hören. Jede Art von Musik ist verboten.

Eine Darul-Ulum erfüllt eine wichtige Aufgabe: Obwohl ihre Erziehungsmethoden häufig rückständig sind, kann die Unterrichtsqualität in traditionellen Fächern wie Rhetorik, Logik und Jurisprudenz ganz hervorragend sein. Die Lehrinhalte sind in der Regel ultrakonservativ, aber nur selten militant. Würde man diese Schulen schließen, ohne zuvor das staatliche Bildungswesen auszubauen, wäre ein Großteil der Bevölkerung zu Unwissenheit verdammt. Und man würde damit den Muslimen sagen, dass sie ihre eigene Religion nicht mehr selbst lehren dürfen.

Im Nachbarland Indien kann man Madrassen finden, die sowohl die pädagogische Rückständigkeit als auch den Extremismus erfolgreich angehen. Obwohl die ultrakonservativen Deobandi-Madrassen ihren Ursprung in Indien haben, sind die indischen Koranschulen von heute strikt apolitisch und haben keine gewalttätigen Islamisten hervorgebracht. Einige von ihnen beweisen eindrucksvoll, wie zukunftsorientiert und dynamisch Madrassen sein können. So betreibt im Bundesstaat Kerala eine Mudschaheddin-Gruppe von Unternehmern und Freiberuflern Bildungsanstalten, die explizit die Kluft zwischen modernen Wissensinhalten und der islamischen Weltanschauung überbrücken wollen. Diese Mudschaheddin-Gruppe kämpft auch an vorderster Front für die Ausbildung muslimischer Frauen. An vielen ihrer Schulen in Kerala werden erheblich mehr Mädchen als Jungen unterrichtet.(12)

Das indische Beispiel zeigt, dass nicht die Madrassen als solche das Problem sind, sondern vielmehr die militante Atmosphäre und die Indoktrination, die in einigen wenigen Zentren eines ultraradikalen Islamismus vorherrschen. Eine dieser berüchtigten Anstalten ist die Binor-Town-Madrasse in Karatschi. Einige Absolventen dieser Koranschule sind, wie es heißt, aktiv an der Aufstandsbewegung beteiligt, die derzeit im Osten Afghanistans läuft.

Die entscheidende Frage ist jedoch, ob die Regierung von General Musharraf gewillt ist, Reformen durchzusetzen, die auch in Pakistan eine ähnliche Entwicklung wie in Indien herbeiführen könnten. Doch die Versuche, die militanteren Madrassen zu reformieren, fallen bislang bestenfalls halbherzig aus. Unmittelbar nach den Anschlägen in London wurden in pakistanischen Madrassen etwa 250 Männer festgenommen. Auch hat man sich bemüht, die Zahl der ausländischen Studenten zu beschränken. Seit Juli 2005 wurden schätzungsweise 1 400 von ihnen ausgewiesen. Es wird diskutiert, ob die Lehrpläne standardisiert oder ob den Madrassen staatlich empfohlen werden solle, einige moderne Fächer anzubieten. Doch die extremeren Schulen haben sich selbst diesen zaghaften Plänen erfolgreich widersetzt. Einer jüngst erfolgten Aufforderung, sich von den Behörden als Erziehungseinrichtungen registrieren zu lassen, kam weniger als die Hälfte der Madrassen nach.

Die pakistanische Regierung kennt also noch nicht einmal die exakte Zahl der Madrassen im Lande. Noch viel weniger hat sie einen Weg gefunden, die Exzesse der radikaleren Anstalten einzudämmen. Schlimmer noch: Angesichts der engen Allianz der Militärregierung mit den islamistischen Parteien, die inzwischen zwei Provinzen kontrollieren, kann es sich Musharraf nicht leisten, härter gegen die extremistischen Madrassen vorzugehen. Noch keine einzige dieser Anstalten wurde geschlossen.

Allerdings dürften militante Madrassen für die innere Sicherheit Pakistans ein weit größeres Problem darstellen als für die Sicherheit der westlichen Metropolen. Statt mit dem Finger auf die Koranschulen in Pakistan zu zeigen, sollten wir lieber den islamischen Extremismus untersuchen, der an unseren eigenen Universitäten blüht, und uns die Frage stellen, wie die außenpolitischen Exzesse der USA und Großbritanniens vormals gemäßigte Muslime auf so fatale Weise dem Westen entfremden und zu Gewalttaten motivieren können - bei uns selbst wie auch in muslimischen Ländern.

Fußnoten: (1) Über die Zahlen und den Prozentsatz der Schüler, die in Pakistan an Madrassen ausgebildet werden, gehen die Ansichten auseinander. Die meisten Experten sind sich darin einig, dass die Zahl der Madrassen in den letzten Jahren enorm zugenommen hat. In einem Bericht der International Crisis Group (ICG) vom Juli 2002 ist von 10 000 Koranschulen mit über 1,5 Millionen Schülern die Rede, was ein Report der Weltbank vom März 2005 (basierend auf Daten der pakistanischen Regierung) jedoch anzweifelt. Der Report nennt viel niedrigere Zahlen und geht davon aus, dass nicht einmal 1 Prozent aller Pakistaner in Madrassen ausgebildet wird. Experten halten die ICG-Zahlen für leicht übertrieben, glauben aber, dass der Weltbank-Report das Problem deutlich unterschätzt. So auch Saleem H. Ali, "Islamic Education and Conflict: Unterstanding the Madrassahs of Pakistan", Referat beim US Institute of Peace vom 24. Juni 2005.
(2) Olivier Roy, "Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah", London (Hurst) 2004, S. 93. Siehe auch Max Rodenbeck, "The Truth About Jihad", "The New York Review of Books, 11. August 2005.
(3) Gilles Kepel, "Die neuen Kreuzzüge. Die arabische Welt und die Zukunft des Westens", München (Piper Verlag) 2004.
(4) Peter Bergen, "The Madrasa Myth", "The New York Times, 14. Juni 2005.
(5) Es handelt sich um die Totenklage für Ali, den Schwiegersohn des Propheten, der in der Schlacht von Kerbala gefallen ist. Siehe Olivier Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?", in: "Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghanistan and the Taliban", hrsg. v. William Maley, New York (New York University Press) 1998. Siehe auch Barbara Metcalfe, "Piety, Persuasion and Politics: Deoband's Model of Social Activism", in: "The Empire and the Crescent: Global Implications for a New American Century", hrsg. v. Aftab Ahmad Malik, Amal 2003, S. 157.
(6) Siehe Faisal Devji, "Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality and Modernity", Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press) 2005. Devji weist darauf hin, dass Bin Laden mit seinem Märtyrerkult und seiner Berufung auf Träume und Visionen eher an volkstümliche, mystische und schiitische Traditionen anknüpft, die aber die orthodoxe sunnitische Ulema seit langem bekämpft.
(7) In der Videobotschaft, die Sidique Khan vor seinem Selbstmordattentat aufgenommen hat, heißt es u. a.: "Eure demokratisch gewählten Regierungen begehen fortwährend Grausamkeiten an meinem Volk in der ganzen Welt. Solange ihr mit dem Bombardieren, dem Einkerkern und dem Foltern meines Volkes nicht aufhört, werden wir diesen Kampf nicht beenden. Wir befinden uns im Krieg."
(8) Siehe George Makdisi, "The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West", Edinburgh (Edinburgh University Press) 1981. Er zeigt, dass Begriffe wie "Lehrstuhl" und "Vorlesung", aber auch akademische Gepflogenheiten wie die mündliche Verteidigung einer "These", bis hin zu den akademischen Ornaten auf die islamischen Madrassen zurückgehen.
(9) Viele bedeutende indische Denker, etwa der große Reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), waren Absolventen einer Madrasse.
(10) Siehe Barbara Daly Metcalf, "Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860-1900", Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1982; sowie Jamal Malik, "Colonisation of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan", New Delhi (Manohar) 1988.
(11) Siehe www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer.
(12) Siehe Yoginder Sikand, "Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India", New Dehli (Penguin Books India) 2005.
Aus dem Englischen von Niels Kadritzke

William Dalrymple (Neu-Delhi) ist Reiseschriftsteller und Historiker. Sein jüngstes Buch, "White Mughals. Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India", London (Penguin) 2004, wurde 2003 mit dem Wolfson Prize of History ausgezeichnet. Zurzeit arbeitet er an einer Biografie von Bahadur Shah Zafar, dem letzten Herrscher des Mogulreichs (1837-1857). In "Le Monde diplomatique erschien von ihm im Dezember 2003 "Wer tötete Daniel Pearl? Ermittlungen im Dickicht von Karatschi". www.williamdalrymple .uk.com.

Le Monde diplomatique Nr. 7918 vom 10.3.2006, Seite 1,10-11, 161 Dokumentation, William Dalrymple

© Contrapress media GmbH Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung des taz-Verlags

[Joerver]

Irgendwann erinnern sich die US-Offizellen, da war doch noch was!

Und damit nicht der Verdacht aufkommt, es wäre irgendjemand in Bushregierung Schuld, dass Osama noch nicht hinter Schloß und Riegel ist, wenn er überhaupt noch lebt, was von vielen bezweifelt wird, macht man diese Aussagen lieber bei dem verbündetem Pakistan.

Die können sich nicht wehren, denn einerseits brauchen sie die USA als Waffenlieferanten und Unterstützer bei ihrer Stellung als Atommacht, auf der anderen Seite können sie sich auch nicht mit den Schüler der Madrassen total verderben, und die Suche mit letzter Konsequenz durchführen, weil ihnen dann das ganze Land um die Ohren fliegt.

M.E. liegt in Pakistan noch eine schwelende Bombe, die dank der US-Hilfe irgendwann mit großem Knall uns allen um die Ohren fliegen wird. Es ist ein Meisterstück der US-Politik dieses Land mit allem zu versorgen, um die Region weiter zu destabilisieren.

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Ich bin immer dafür, dass man Arbeitslose beschäftigt.
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Denn dieser Mr.Khan, der sogenannte Vater der pakistanischen Atombombe, der von den USA schon vor einiger Zeit die Absolution erhielt, ist auch dafür verantwortlich, dass die Mullahs in Teheran die Möglichkeit haben, die Bombe zu bauen, was die USA i.A. als Vorwand nehmen, um die alte Rechnung von 1980 zu begleichen.

Natürlich wird von dem Regime in Pakistan bestritten, dass sie nicht intensiv genug nach Osama suchen, oder was von diesem übrig ist.

Das andere ist, dass mit oder ohne Osama die Idee in der Welt ist, und ein Krieg gegen den Terror wird diese Idee nicht vernichten können.



Bin Laden most likely hiding on Pakistan side of border with Afghanistan: U.S. official
http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=WOR…
JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer

May 6, 2006 8:33 AM

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - A top U.S. counterterrorism official said Saturday that parts of Pakistan are a ''safe haven'' for militants and Osama bin Laden was more likely to be hiding there than in Afghanistan.

Henry Crumpton, the U.S. ambassador in charge of counterterrorism, lauded Pakistan for arresting ''hundreds and hundreds'' of al-Qaida figures but said it needed to do more.

''Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no. I have conveyed that to them, other U.S. officials have conveyed that to them,'' he told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after talks with Afghan officials.

Crumpton said U.S. officials continue to believe that bin Laden is somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border, and was more likely to be on the Pakistani side.

''If we knew exactly where bin Laden was, we'd go get him,'' Crumpton said. ''But we're very confident he's along the Pakistan-Afghan border somewhere,'' he said.

He added that there was a ''higher probability'' that the al-Qaida leader was hiding on the Pakistan side.
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Osama bin Laden in a photo from the 1990s
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Crumpton also gave Islamabad credit for last year's capture of a top al-Qaida strategist with a $5 million bounty on his head.

U.S. and Pakistani officials said earlier this week that Mustafa Setmarian Nasar was arrested in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in November. Crumpton said that this showed that Pakistan is working to arrest al-Qaida leaders.

Pakistan also has launched repeated counterterrorism operations in its lawless tribal regions close to the Afghan border over the past two years, in which hundreds of militants and soldiers have died.

''Our expectation is that they will continue to make progress, and we know that it's difficult,'' he said. Pakistan ''can't remain a safe haven for enemy forces, and right now parts of Pakistan are indeed that.''

Und hier die sofortige Retourkutsche aus Islamabad

Pakistan rejects U.S. remarks on al Qaeda, Taliban
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNe…

Sun May 7, 2006 3:35 PM IST

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Sunday angrily rejected remarks by a senior U.S. security official that Islamabad was not doing enough to help flush out Taliban and al Qaeda leaders from its territory.

U.S. State Department Coordinator for counter-terrorism Henry Crumpton said in Kabul on Saturday that most of the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership had found safe haven in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt that borders Afghanistan.

While the United States did not know where Osama bin Laden was hiding, the al Qaeda leader was probably on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, he said.

Pakistani military spokesmen, Major-General Shuakat Sultan, denounced the remarks.

"He (Crumpton) came here and met Pakistani officials and praised Pakistan's role in the war on terror. He did not mention these things.

"But, going there and making such a statement is a highly irresponsible act. We condemn such media projections," Sultan told Reuters.

Pakistan is a vital ally in the U.S.-led war on terrorism but U.S. and Afghan officials often complain that militants were able to gather support among conservative Pashtun tribes living in the border region and launch attacks inside Afghanistan from the safety of Pakistan's tribal territory.

Pakistan rejects these accusations, saying it has deployed nearly 80,000 troops along the long, porous frontier to curb cross-border movements and to fight militants hiding in the rugged region.

More than 300 militants and around 56 soldiers were killed in battles in the troubled North Waziristan tribal region in recent months alone.

Hundreds more were killed in fighting in the neighbouring South Waziristan in 2004.

Pakistan says the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan and Afghan forces should do more on their side to curb militants activities.

Sultan said U.S. officials should pass on information about the whereabouts of bin Laden to Pakistani authorities instead of making statements through the media.

"He (Osama) can't be caught by such statements. They should share intelligence with us, if they have, so we can take action."

On Saturday, militants distributed leaflets in the name of bin Laden in two towns of North Waziristan, calling for the assassination of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf has survived several attempts on his life by Pakistani militant groups since siding with the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved.

SPON hat auch ein deutsche Kurzfassung:

[urlUS-Beauftragter vermutet Bin Laden weiter in Pakistan]http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,414904,00.html[/url]

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Mit Kollegem
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[Robert_Reichschwein]

Bin Laden ist doch eine Erfindung von al CIAda.

Oder nicht?

[Joerver]

Mal wieder was aus Pakistan von Osama und Anhängern. Nach dem Bericht soll es einen neuen Anführer geben, Osama hat sich vom aktiven Geschäft zurückgezogen und Dr. [Ayman] al-Zawahiri ist jetzt der Führer der El Kaida Aktivitäten und Taliban leader Mullah Omar leitet den heiligen Krieg von Jerusalem bis Afghanistan.

The new power behind Osama's throne
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE18Df04.html

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN border - Whether he is viewed as a living legend for jihadis or as a reviled terrorist, the mere mention of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's name provokes strong reactions, and is an invaluable tool in the propaganda war between the two sides.

On the ground, though, at least in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that span Pakistan and Afghanistan, the reality is that bin Laden, while remaining a source of inspiration in the anti-West struggle, is acknowledged as no longer being in command of al-Qaeda's operations.

In that role, he has been superseded by Taliban leader Mullah Omar, according to investigations and interviews conducted by Asia Times Online in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Indeed, in the four years since the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda, after years of financial blockades and arrests, has emerged more as a loose (and ideologically divergent) grouping of mujahideen waging open jihad - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It would be absolutely wrong to say that al-Qaeda has evaporated into the air," a man from the Pakistani tribal areas of Waziristan told Asia Times Online. "The organization is very much active on the ground, but the sharp edges of circumstance have modified it into a new shape and it is now part of mainstream jihadi activity. The ultimate goal of the [jihadi] organization is to launch jihad from Khorasan [Afghanistan] to Jerusalem."

Calling himself Nasir ("supporter"), the man claimed to have intimate knowledge of Taliban and al-Qaeda activities in the region, where the Taliban have gained a strong foothold for their insurgency in Afghanistan and where al-Qaeda operatives are known to have taken shelter since being driven out of Afghanistan in 2001.

"It is true that Osama's activity has not been heard of for a long time, but Dr [Ayman] al-Zawahiri [al-Qaeda deputy leader] is active and moves all over and is now the main engine behind a lot of activity, even outside Afghanistan," Nasir asserted.

Another man, whom Asia Times Online had met in the northern mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who just called himself a mujahid, said, "The al-Qaeda command structure, as it was known at the time of September 11, which carried out specific missions to target US interests, has largely been abandoned, but it has quickly been replaced.

"Nowadays, Arabs go straight into Afghanistan and join various Taliban commanders. At the same time, the Pakistani Taliban have formed bases in North and South Waziristan. All of them pledge their allegiance to Mullah Omar," the mujahid said.

"All global operations have been shunned for now. Sheikh [bin Laden] is inactive. Actually, Sheikh does not have any money left," a colleague of the mujahid said. Introducing himself as Abdullah ("Servant of Allah"), he was from the Afghan province of Nuristan and said he was part of the Taliban-led resistance. He also described himself as a "host", a term generally used for those who provide shelter to Arab-Afghans - those Arabs who have joined the insurgency and spent time in Afghanistan.

"He [bin Laden] kept changing his location; he spent a lot of money on his people and associates, and of course for his survival. The channels of money kept choking one by one and finally dried up," said Abdullah with a forlorn look on his face.

"This was a strange situation in which everybody [Arab-Afghan] was striving for survival, and once Osama's shelter [money] was off, they were scattered," Abdullah explained.

The most significant result of this was a sharp turn by al-Qaeda toward mainstream jihadist activity, mainly against allied forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The switch, though, carries with it inherent dangers, both for al-Qaeda and for some Muslim countries.

A visit from Iraq
The Taliban, and to a lesser extent al-Qaeda, have established a de facto Islamic state in the North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan. In effect it is beyond the control of Islamabad. This correspondent planned to travel there, but was warned that it would not be "fruitful", presumably in terms of life expectancy.

Instead, some contacts from North Waziristan traveled to the city of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, to speak to Asia Times Online, including Nasir.

They related that about two weeks ago, three men representing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in charge of Iraqi operations, were summoned from that country. The men met with Zawahiri in South Waziristan and were bluntly told to "immediately stop attacking Shi'ites in Iraq" and to "bring about [Sunni] reconciliation with Shi'ite groups" in Iraq. Further, they were ordered to "develop a common anti-US strategy along with the Shi'ites in Iraq".

This development is significant in the context of the vacuum that now exists within al-Qaeda, given bin Laden's reduced influence. In essence, three forces are in play: the jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan who answer to Mullah Omar; the jihadis centered in Iraq under Zarqawi; and the "traditional" al-Qaeda represented by Zawahiri (and bin Laden).

The first two forces are moving further away from the core of al-Qaeda, largely over the issue of takfiri (a belief that sects that are not Wahhabi-based are infidel and apostate).

Bin Laden has opposed this concept, arguing that al-Qaeda should not attack other Muslims, but takfiris see anyone beyond their beliefs as fair game, hence Zawahiri's advice to Zarqawi's men that they stop attacking Shi'ites in Iraq and concentrate on driving out the US-led forces, the "true" infidel.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, powerful figures such as Qari Tahir Yaldevish of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Sheikh Essa (an Egyptian) are very well respected among the al-Qaeda leadership, but they have been at the head of a successful drive to expand the influence of takfiris in Waziristan.

They have found comrades in the likes of Moulvi Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, who are committed to waging pitched battle against Pakistani military forces in what they call a "real" jihad as the troops represent the Pakistani administration, which they say has become a facilitator of the Americans.

From the wounded body of al-Qaeda, underground networks have largely been abandoned and replaced by open jihad. This jihad, though, has a deadly twist, especially for Pakistan: although Muslim, it's now a fair target.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail].
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

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[urlOsama back in the US crosshairs ]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE17Df01.html[/url]

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[urlIt's showdown time in Pakistan]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE05Df02.html[/url]

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[Joerver]

Eine neue Geschichte aus der ATimes über die Entwicklungen im Grenzgebiet zwischen Pakistan und Afghanistan und auch über die vermehrten Aktivitäten der Taliban und deren wiedergewonnen Verbündeten in Afghanistan.

Die Situation soll der Situation ähneln, die schlußendlich zum Rückzug der Sowjets und dem Ende der UDSSR führte.

"Once again we are facing a mid-1990s-like situation when bloodshed was everywhere and the situation went from bad to worse and these circumstances allowed the Taliban movement to emerge and boot our government out," said former Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzaid in a telephone conversation with Asia Times Online. Ahmad Shah was the acting premier before the Taliban took power in 1996.

Ich will nicht wieder Scholl-Latour zitieren, dass die westlichen Truppen, auch die Bundeswehr, in Afghanistan in der Falle sitzen.

Hoffen wir, dass Geschichte sich nicht wiederholt.

Taliban's new commander ready for a fight
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE20Df02.html

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The Taliban's military offensive has begun in earnest in southern Afghanistan, with many key districts already captured by the militia that retreated from power in 2001 after the US-led invasion.

The scale and frequency of the Taliban's revitalized insurgency can be attributed directly to the recent appointment by Taliban leader Mullah Omar of legendary mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani as overall military field commander.

In the latest action - the biggest since the Taliban's ousting - in Helmand province, between 300 and 400 heavily armed Taliban

China Business Big Picture


fighters stormed a remote village. At least 100 people were killed, including 15 or more Afghan police and a female Canadian soldier.
Haqqani, a cleric, rose to fame during the decade of opposition to the Soviets in the 1980s. Coincidentally, at that time he was an ally of the United States.
... Meet Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani, the only real hope for the Taliban resistance movement to be successful against US-led forces in Afghanistan. Saleem Shahzad is spot on with his assessment, Through the eyes of the Taliban (May 5, '04)

Mullah Omar has provided Haqqani with major powers, funds and huge stockpiles of arms and ammunition and, most important, hundreds of youths who have been trained by the Iraqi resistance in urban guerrilla warfare.

Mullah Omar has demarcated specific areas of Afghanistan to different commanders, but now Haqqani is commander-at-large. He has also been charged with coordinating suicide attackers throughout the country. He is authorized to wage battles anywhere he chooses in Afghanistan.

Haqqani was not part of the Taliban movement when it first emerged from Zabul, but he was the first and most powerful commander of the Afghan resistance to surrender to the Taliban, unconditionally, in 1995. The defection paved the way for the Taliban to secure territorial advantage and finally victory in 1996.

Haqqani, in his 50s, had stunningly captured the first major city since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 - Khost - in 1991, from the puppet communist government of president Mohammad Najibullah.

Afghan parents still tell their children about the hero Haqqani, a thin man of small stature, who refused to stay in Peshawar in Pakistan, preferring the mountains, from where he kidnapped Soviet soldiers and ambushed their convoys. Haqqani stood out from other mujahideen as he was never blamed for warlordism, and he appeared to be truly dedicated to the cause of peace in Afghanistan.

Haqqani held relatively low-key positions throughout the Taliban's tenure, but remained loyal to Mullah Omar. During this time he is said to have run several al-Qaeda training camps for Osama bin Laden, with whom he was friendly.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Haqqani was invited to Islamabad, where the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with which he had close ties, offered him the presidency of Afghanistan, but on the condition that he break all ties with Mullah Omar and carve out a "moderate Taliban" faction. (In declassified US State Department documents, Haqqani is described as the tribal leader "most exploited by the ISI [and US] during the Soviet-Afghan war to facilitate the introduction of Arab mercenaries". [1])

Haqqani refused the offer and went back to the Ghulam Khan mountains between Khost and Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area and began his campaign of pitched battles against US-led forces. He then became a prime US target, with a number of attacks aimed specifically at eliminating him.

But although Haqqani still commanded great respect all over Afghanistan and especially among the tribal elders of Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Gardez, he still did not belong to the Taliban core - Mullah Omar's "kitchen cabinet".

He thus was not given a central role in the Taliban resistance, although he continued to mount random attacks in his area.

Mullah Akhtar Osamani and Mullah Dadullah were the central commanders, but they were not able to make any significant military breakthroughs when the Taliban's spring offensive was launched last month. Thus Haqqani's elevation.

Fresh funds, arms and human resources, and Haqqani's unquestioned military acumen honed in years fighting the Soviets, have revitalized the insurgency. An immediate spinoff was that veteran Afghan resistance figures, such as Saifullah Masoor, the commander of the renowned resistance leader Nasrullah Mansoor, who were previously sitting on the fence in Gardez and other areas, are now hand in hand with Haqqani.

The regions that the Taliban have targeted and the patterns of mobilization are similar to those used in the mid-1990s when the student militia emerged as a force to fill the chaotic political vacuum created after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and seize Kabul.

There are, though, two main distinctions today: the Taliban do not have the support of Pakistan, as they did to a large extent in the 1990s, and many independent groups have now gathered under the Taliban umbrella.

Thus the Taliban-led movement has converted into an organized revolt, concentrated in the southern provinces of Zabul, Helmand and Kandahar. Strengthened by loyal tribes, the targets are US-led coalition forces, as well as the Afghan National Army (ANA).

According to Asia Times Online contacts in Afghanistan, intense and constant battles have virtually paralyzed the ANA's ability to retaliate, and many villages and districts in the three key southern provinces are now under Taliban control. The ANA is therefore concentrating on keeping the major Afghan cities under the writ of the Kabul administration of President Hamid Karzai.

"Once again we are facing a mid-1990s-like situation when bloodshed was everywhere and the situation went from bad to worse and these circumstances allowed the Taliban movement to emerge and boot our government out," said former Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzaid in a telephone conversation with Asia Times Online. Ahmad Shah was the acting premier before the Taliban took power in 1996.

"The Karzai administration writ is nowhere, and the Afghan nation is once again in limbo," Ahmad Shah maintained.

Solid spadework
While Haqqani has provided the spark for the resistance, he could not have succeeded had thorough groundwork not been laid over the past year or so.

The Taliban launched a major recruitment drive last year. This coincided with the government of Pakistan clamping down on jihad activities in Indian-administered Kashmir.

This played right into the Taliban's hands as many former members of Pakistani jihadi organizations, including from the banned Laskhar-i-Toiba and the banned Jaish-i-Mohamed, gathered in North and South Waziristan, where the Taliban have established a virtual Islamic state along the lines of the former uncompromising fundamentalist religious Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All have pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar.

According to authoritative estimates obtained by Asia Times Online, about 27,000 fighters are gathered in North Waziristan alone. More than 13,000 are believed to be in South Waziristan. The Taliban leadership there had formed about 100 suicide squads by February, assembled under the motto "fight until the last man and the last bullet".

Partners, not followers
Now that the spring offensive has gained sustainable momentum, some of the old guard of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets have jumped into the fray, but as partners of the Taliban rather than followers of Mullah Omar.

One such is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, who operates in the Kunar Valley and Nooristan province on the border with Pakistan. According to reports from the area, his commanders and their men are grouping to pitch battle before the Taliban mobilize cadres in eastern Afghanistan.

In the Khugiani district in eastern Nangarhar province, Moulvi Yunus Khalis, the chief of his own faction of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, and his two sons, especially Anwarul Haq Mujahid, have started up activities and are instigating all tribes to revolt against the Kabul administration, as well as against foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Sporadic information coming out of the country also suggests revolts by many small warlords in the southern Pashtun heartland against the Karzai administration. However, at present they lack effective coordination among themselves, and with the Taliban.

Should they get organized, say people with close knowledge of the insurgency, a military mobilization all the way to Kabul could be only a few weeks away.

Note
1. Asia Times Online, Pakistan through the US looking glass, September 20, 2003.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at [e-mail].

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

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Außer ein paar Videobändern, deren Echtheit niemand beweisen kann, gibt es schon lange keine Spur mehr von Osama Bin Laden.
Es ist nie das Gegenteil bewiesen worden, dass Osama nicht vor einiger Zeit in Ägypten an Nierenversagen gestorben ist.
Aber wer gibt einen solchen Boogeyman schon aus der Hand, wenn man mit ihm immer noch immer die Leute erschrecken kann.

Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'
U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground is Lacking
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09…

By Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006; A01

The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."

But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.

"Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," said T. McCreary, spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center. "And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem."

Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.

Many factors have combined in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make the pursuit more difficult. They include the lack of CIA access to people close to al-Qaeda's inner circle; Pakistan's unwillingness to pursue him; the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the strength of the Iraqi insurgency, which has depleted U.S. military and intelligence resources; and the U.S. government's own disorganization.

But the underlying reality is that finding one person in hiding is difficult under any circumstances. Eric Rudolph, the confessed Olympics and abortion clinic bomber, evaded authorities for five years, only to be captured miles from where he was last seen in North Carolina.

It has been so long since there has been anything like a real close call that some operatives have given bin Laden a nickname: "Elvis," for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.

After playing down bin Laden's importance and barely mentioning him for several years, Bush last week repeatedly invoked his name and quoted from his writings and speeches to underscore what Bush said is the continuing threat of terrorism.

Many terrorism experts, however, say the importance of finding bin Laden has diminished since Bush first pledged to capture him "dead or alive" in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Terrorists worldwide have repeatedly shown they no longer need him to organize or carry out attacks, the experts say. Attacks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East were perpetrated by homegrown terrorists unaffiliated with al-Qaeda.

"Will his capture stop terrorism? No," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a recent interview. "But in terms of a message to the world, it's a huge message."

Despite a lack of progress, at CIA headquarters bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still the most wanted of the High Value Targets, referred to as "HVT 1 and 2." The CIA station in Kabul still offers a briefing to VIP visitors that declares: "We are here for the hunt!" -- a reminder that finding bin Laden is a top priority.

Gary Berntsen, the former CIA officer who led the first and last hunt for bin Laden at Tora Bora, in December 2001, says, "This could all end tomorrow." One unsolicited walk-in. One tribesman seeking to collect the $25 million reward. One courier who would rather his kids grow up in the United States. One dealmaker, "and this could all change," Berntsen said.
Bin Laden Still Alive

On the videotape obtained by the CIA, bin Laden is seen confidently instructing his party how to dig holes in the ground to lie in undetected at night. A bomb dropped by a U.S. aircraft can be seen exploding in the distance. "We were there last night," bin Laden says without much concern in his voice. He was in or headed toward Pakistan, counterterrorism officials think.

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2001.

White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment on the specific allegation. "Military and intelligence units move routinely in and out," she said. "The intelligence and military community's hunt for bin Laden has been aggressive and constant since the attacks."

The Pakistani intelligence service, notoriously difficult to trust but also the service with the best access to al-Qaeda circles, is convinced bin Laden is alive because no one has ever intercepted or heard a message mourning his death. "Al-Qaeda will mourn his death and will retaliate in a big way. We are pretty sure Osama is alive," Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistani intelligence officials also say they think bin Laden remains actively involved in al-Qaeda activities. They cite the interrogations of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a key planner of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, who served as a communications conduit between bin Laden and senior al-Qaeda operatives until his capture last year.

Libbi and Ghailani, who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004, were the last two people taken into custody to have met with and taken orders from Zawahiri and to hear directly from bin Laden. "Both Ghailani and Libbi were informed that Osama was well and alive and in the picture by none other than Zawahiri himself," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Two Pakistani intelligence officials recently interviewed in Karachi said that the last time they received firsthand information on bin Laden was in April 2003, when an arrested al-Qaeda leader, Tawfiq bin Attash, disclosed having met him in the Khost province of Afghanistan three months earlier.

Attash, who helped plan the 2000 USS Cole bombing, told interrogators that the meeting took place in the Afghan mountains about two hours from the town of Khost.

By then, Pakistan was the United States' best bet for information after an infusion of funds from the U.S. intelligence community, particularly in the area of expensive NSA eavesdropping equipment.

"For technical intelligence ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) works hand in hand with the NSA," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. "The U.S. assistance in building Pakistan's capabilities for technical intelligence since 9/11 is superb."

Since early 2002, the United States has stationed a small number of personnel from the NSA and the CIA near where bin Laden may be hiding. They are embedded with counterterrorism units of the Pakistan army's elite Special Services Group, according to senior Pakistani intelligence officials.

The NSA and other specialists collect imagery and electronic intercepts that their CIA counterparts then share with the Pakistani units in the tribal areas and with the province of Baluchistan to the south.

But even with sophisticated technology, the local geography presents formidable obstacles. In a land of dead-end valleys, high peaks and winding ridge lines, it is easy to hide within the miles of caves and deep ravines, or to live unnoticed in mud-walled compounds barely distinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles. Pakistan deploys 70,000 troops there. Its army had never entered the area until October 2001, more than a half century after Pakistan's founding.
Pakistani Sources Lost

A Muslim country where many consider bin Laden a hero, Pakistan has grown increasingly reluctant to help the U.S. search. The army lost its best source of intelligence in 2004, after it began raids inside the tribal areas. Scouts with blood ties to the tribes ceased sharing information for fear of retaliation.

They had good reason. At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005. "Al-Qaeda footprints were found everywhere," Interior Minister Sherpao said in a recent interview. "They kidnapped and chopped off heads of at least seven of these pro-government tribesmen."

Pakistani and U.S. counterterrorism and military officials admit that Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden. "The dirty little secret is, they have nothing, no operations, without the Paks," one former counterterrorism officer said.

Last week, Pakistan announced a truce with the Taliban that calls on the insurgent Afghan group to end armed attacks inside Pakistan and to stop crossing into Afghanistan to fight the government and international troops. The agreement also requires foreign militants to leave the tribal area of North Waziristan or take up a peaceable life there.

In Afghanistan, the hunt for bin Laden has been upstaged by the reemergence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and by Afghan infighting for control of territory and opium poppy cropland.

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said he thinks bin Laden kept close to the border, not wandering far into either country. That belief is still current among military and intelligence analysts.

"We believe that he held to a pretty narrow range of within 15 kilometers of the border," said Vines, who now commands the XVIII Airborne Corps, "so that if the Pakistanis, for whatever reason, chose to do something to him, he could cross into Afghanistan and vice versa."

He said he thinks bin Laden's protection force "had a series of outposts with radios that could alert each other" if helicopters were coming or other troop movements were evident.

Pakistani military officials in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, described bin Laden as having three rings of security, each ring unaware of the movements and identities of the other. Sometimes they communicated with specially marked flashlights. Sometimes they dressed as women to avoid detection by U.S. spy planes.

Pakistan will permit only small numbers of U.S. forces to operate with its troops at times and, because their role is so sensitive politically, it officially denies any U.S. presence. A frequent complaint from U.S. troops is that they have too little to do. The same complaint is also heard from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where there were few targets to go after.

Although the hunt for bin Laden has depended to a large extent on technology, until recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were in short supply, especially when the war in Iraq became a priority in 2003.

In July 2003, Vines said that U.S. forces under his command thought they were close to striking bin Laden, but had only one drone to send over three possible routes he might take. "A UAV was positioned on the route that was most likely, but he didn't go that way," Vines said. "We believed that we were within a half-hour of possibly getting him, but nothing materialized."

Faced with the most sophisticated technology in the world, bin Laden has gone decidedly low-tech. His 23 video or audiotapes in the last five years are thought to have been hand-carried to news outlets or nearby mail drops by a series of couriers who know nothing about the contents of their deliveries or the real identity of the sender, a simple method used by spies and drug traffickers for centuries.

"They are really good at operational security," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, a private company that analyzes terrorist information and has obtained, analyzed and published all bin Laden's communiques. "They are very good at having enough cut-outs" to move videos into circulation without detection. "It's some of the simplest things to do."
Uncertain Command Structure

Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.

In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous." The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.

At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007.

Rows and rows of temporary buildings sprang up on SOCOM's parking lots in Tampa as Rumsfeld refocused the mission of a small group of counterterrorism experts from long-term planning for the war on terrorism to manhunting. The group "went from 20 years to 24-hour crisis-mode operations," one former special operations officer said. "It went from planning to manhunting."

In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the "Global War on Terrorism."

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who recently stepped down as deputy director of counterterrorism under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "In order to find Osama bin Laden, certain departments will come together. . . . It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy, but in terms of advancing United States power for that mission, I think that process is effective."

But Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the JSOC commander since 2003, has become the de facto leader of the hunt for bin Laden and developed a good working relationship with the CIA to the extent that he recently was able to persuade the former station chief in Kabul to become his special assistant. He asks for targets from the CIA, and it tries to comply. "We serve the military," one intelligence officer said.

McChrystal's troops have shuttled between Afghanistan and Iraq, where they succeeded in killing al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killed or captured dozens of his followers.

Under McChrystal, JSOC has improved its ability to quickly turn captured documents, computers and cellphones into leads and then to act upon them, while waiting for more analysis from CIA or SOCOM.

Industry experts and military officers say they are being aided by computer forensic field kits that let technicians retrieve information from surviving hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, as was the case in the Zarqawi strike.

McChrystal, who has commanded JSOC since 2003, now has the authority to go after bin Laden inside Pakistan without having to seek permission first, two U.S. officials said.

"The authority," one knowledgeable person said, "follows the target," meaning that if the target is bin Laden, the stakes are high enough for McChrystal to decide any action on his own. The understanding is that U.S. units will not enter Pakistan, except under extreme circumstances, and that Pakistan will deny giving them permission.

Such was the case in early January, when JSOC troops clandestinely entered the village of Saidgai, two officials familiar with the operation said, and Pakistan protested.

A week later, acting on what Pakistani intelligence officials said was information developed out of Libbi's interrogation, the CIA ordered a missile strike against a house in the village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Pakistani and American officials thought Zawahiri to be hiding.

The missile killed 13 civilians and several suspected terrorists. But Zawahiri was not among them. The strike "could have changed the destiny of the war on terror. Zawahiri was 100 percent sure to visit Damadola . . . but he disappeared at the last moment," one Pakistani intelligence official said.

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near Damadola, shouting, "Death to America!"

"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."

Contributing to this report were staff writers Bradley Graham, Thomas E. Ricks, Josh White, Griff Witte and Allan Lengel in Washington, Kamran Khan in Islamabad and John Lancaster in Wana, Pakistan, and staff researchers Julie Tate and Robert E. Thomason.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

Dies ist zwar nur ein Kommentar, aber er enthält doch einige Anmerkungen zu der Ernsthaftigkeit mit der Pakistan Osama, sofern er noch lebt, sucht.

On the subject of Osama,... tried to persuade Mr. Bush that the shabby truce he recently made with tribal leaders, agreeing that the Pakistani Army would stay out of the wild border area next to Afghanistan — where Osama and other Al Qaeda and Taliban members are believed to be hiding — was really “against” the militants.

Für Musharraf ist es eine Frage des Überlebens die militanten Gotteskrieger in der Grenzregion zu Afghanistan in Ruhe zu lassen.

Mr. Musharraf could not survive if he truly tried to break up the cozy relationship between militants, tribal leaders and some in his Army and intelligence service.

Wie heißt es so schön bei solchen Freunden braucht man keine Feinde.


Axis of Sketchy Allies
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/opinion/23dowd.html?hp=…

WASHINGTON

It helps to plug your book at the White House.

At a news conference with President Bush, Pervez Musharraf was asked about his claim on “60 Minutes” that Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it did not cooperate in routing the Taliban in Afghanistan. After coyly sidestepping the question, saying he had to save such juicy tidbits for his book’s publication next week, he shot up over 1,000 spots on Amazon.com.

General Musharraf told Steve Kroft he found the Stone Age crack “very rude,’’ and Mr. Armitage was on the defensive yesterday, explaining that he had been tough with Pakistan just after 9/11 but had not made any Flintstones threats.

The former deputy to Colin Powell needn’t apologize. That was the last time our foreign policy was on track, when we were pursuing the real enemy. It’s all been downhill from there.

The Pakistan president is a smooth operator, a military dictator cruising around the capital with his elegant wife and enormous security contingent, talking about how much he likes democracy, which he won’t yet allow.

He may have more respect for checks and balances than Dick Cheney, but that’s not saying much.

On the subject of Osama, he’s so slippery you want to lock him in a room with the muscle-bound Mr. Armitage. General ... General, as W. called him in that famous campaign pop quiz, tried to persuade Mr. Bush that the shabby truce he recently made with tribal leaders, agreeing that the Pakistani Army would stay out of the wild border area next to Afghanistan — where Osama and other Al Qaeda and Taliban members are believed to be hiding — was really “against” the militants.

The Pakistan government has, in effect, simply turned over the North Waziristan area to the militants. ABC News quoted Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan Khan of Pakistan as saying that the deal was an implicit amnesty, and that Osama “would not be taken into custody” as long as he was “being like a peaceful citizen.”

American officials are dubious about Mr. Musharraf’s commitment to destroying Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But at the press conference, W., who no doubt thinks he has seen into General ... General’s soul, acted as though he were willing to believe the Pakistani president when he says he is “on the hunt” for Osama and the Taliban at the same time he’s setting up a safe haven for them — and getting huffy at the idea that American forces have the right to go into Pakistan to track Osama.

“Americans who are concerned about a recurrence of 9/11 are worried about the Axis of Evil when the real problem is the Axis of Allies — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Britain,’’ the British historian Niall Ferguson says. “The terrorists are funded in Saudi Arabia, they’re trained in Pakistan, and they organize their plots quite easily in London.’’

Mr. Ferguson, who analyzes evildoers and despots in his new book, “The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West,’’ observes that Mr. Musharraf could not survive if he truly tried to break up the cozy relationship between militants, tribal leaders and some in his Army and intelligence service.

The Paks, as W. and Vice like to call them, are at the heart of the Faustian deal the Bush administration has made. The justification for invading Iraq was that they couldn’t allow a dictator who might be harboring terrorists to stay in power. But their great ally in the war on terror is General Musharraf, a dictator who appears to be harboring terrorists, including the one we want most.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, who will dine with W. and General ... General at the White House next week, expressed a sly skepticism about his neighbor’s protestations that he is strategizing against militants. As David Sanger reported, Mr. Karzai told Times editors and reporters that he had tried to get Pakistan’s help in repelling the resurgent Taliban by giving the Pakistanis “information on training ground, on operation, people, their phone numbers, their G.P.S. locations.’’

“Our friends come back to us and say this information is old,’’ Mr. Karzai continued. “Maybe. But it means they were there.”

Asked where Osama was, he smiled and replied: “If I said he was in Pakistan, President Musharraf would be mad at me. And if I said he was in Afghanistan, it would not be true.”

We may not have Osama, but at least W. helped General ...General with his Amazon ranking. “Buy the book,” the president recommended as the two allies wrapped up.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

!

Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

[InvestigativTrader]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTcwpUw94s

[Joerver]

Nein, es gibt nichts Neues von Osama, seine neue Villa in den pakistanischen Bergen soll bald fertig sein, neue Huris sind bestellt und geliefert. Also, wenn er nicht gestorben ist, lebt er in Freuden und unter dem Schutz von Präsident Musharraf ruhig bis an das Ende seiner Tage.
Der folgende Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem Terrorismus und dem Umgang mit diesem durch den [url"worst president ever"]http://www.google.de/search?q=worst+president+ever&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org[/url] und seiner Chaostruppe. Damals zu Zeiten des 9/11 und heute.
Die im Text eingestellten Links zu den Aussagen von gestern und heute habe ich verlinkt.
Da nach dem glorreichen Relaunch von Wvom letzten Jahr Verlinkungen mühsamer sind, hoffe ich, dass alles funzt. Wenn nicht oder ein Link nicht erreichbar ist, mailt mich an.

February 25, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

Where Were You That Summer of 2001?
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/opinion/25rich.html?hp

By FRANK RICH

“UNITED 93,” Hollywood’s highly praised but indifferently attended 9/11 docudrama, will be only a blip on tonight’s Oscar telecast. The ratings rise of “24” has stalled as [urlaudiences defect]http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/02/19/8400166/index.htm[/url] from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of “Heroes.” Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: [urlthe battle over Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23smith.html[/url]. Set this cultural backdrop against last week’s terrifying but little-heeded [urlfront-page Times account]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/world/asia/19intel.html[/url]of American “intelligence and counterterrorism officials” leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda’s comeback, and ask yourself: Haven’t we been here before?

If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and [urlshark attacks]http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F50A16FA3B550C768EDDA10894D9404482[/url]. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system [url“was blinking red,”]http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch8.htm[/url] as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, [urltold MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17240518/[/url] that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and [urlWest Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress]http://armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/TUTC021407/Hoffman_Testimony021407.pdf[/url]. Tony Blair is [urlpulling troops out of Iraq]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/world/middleeast/22blair.html[/url] not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the [urlPentagon’s last report]http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/9010Quarterly-Report-20061216.pdf[/url] — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq “surge” is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what’s going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we [urllost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11TORABORA.html[/url]http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/9010Quarterly-Report-20… The public would not learn about that failure [urluntil April 2002]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62618-2002Apr16[/url] (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on “Meet the Press” that [urlSaddam had something to do with 9/11]http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20011209.html[/url]. It was “pretty well confirmed,” he said (though it was not), that bin Laden’s operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

In the Scooter Libby trial, Mr. Cheney’s former communications aide, Catherine Martin, said that delivering a message on “Meet the Press” was [url“a tactic we often used.”]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012501951.html[/url] No kidding. That mention of the nonexistent Prague meeting was the first of five times that the vice president would imply an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration on that NBC show before the war began in March 2003. This bogus innuendo was an essential tool for selling the war precisely because we had lost bin Laden in Afghanistan. If we could fight Al Qaeda by going to war in Iraq instead, the administration could claim it didn’t matter where bin Laden was. (Mr. Bush pointedly stopped mentioning him altogether in public.)

The president now says his government [urlnever hyped any 9/11-Iraq links.]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060821.html[/url] “Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq,” he said last August after finally conceding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact everyone in the administration insinuated it constantly, including him. Mr. Bush told of “high-level” Iraq-Qaeda contacts “that go back a decade” in the same [urlnotorious October 2002 speech]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html[/url] that gave us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds. So effective was this propaganda that by 2003 some [url44 percent of Americans]http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html[/url] believed (incorrectly) that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis; only 3 percent had seen an Iraq link right after 9/11.

Though the nonexistent connection was even more specious than the nonexistent nuclear W.M.D., Mr. Bush still leans on it today even while denying that he does so. He has to. His litanies that we are “on the offense” by pursuing the war in Iraq and “fighting terrorists over there, so that we don’t have to fight them here” depend on the premise that we went into that country in the first place to vanquish Al Qaeda and that it is still the “central front” in the war on terror. In January’s [urlState of the Union address]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html[/url] hawking the so-called surge, Mr. Bush did it again, warning that to leave Iraq “would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy.”

But now more than ever, the opposite is true. It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn’t used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: “Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that’s where it is.” It’s typical of Mr. Bush’s self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake — dropping the ball on Al Qaeda — was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had [urlnegotiated a “truce” with the Taliban]http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20B13FA3D550C758CDDA00894DE404482[/url] in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House [urldenied any of this was happening]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060922.html[/url]. “This deal is not at all with the Taliban,” the president said, claiming that “this is against the Taliban, actually.” When Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post reported that same month that the [urlbin Laden trail was “stone cold”]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/09/AR2006090901105.html[/url] and had been since Mr. Bush diverted special operations troops from that hunt to Iraq in 2003, the White House branded the story [urlflat wrong]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060910-1.html[/url]. “We’re on the hunt,” [urlMr. Bush said.]http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0609/20/sitroom.01.html[/url] “We’ll get him.”

Far from getting him or any of his top operatives dead or alive, the president has sat idly by, showering praise on General Musharraf while [urlTaliban attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan have increased threefold]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/asia/16cnd-gates.html[/url]. As The Times reported last week, now both bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be “steadily building an operations hub” in North Waziristan. We know that last year’s London plot to bomb airliners, like the bus-and-subway bombings of 2005, was not just the work of home-grown jihadists in Britain, but also of Qaeda operatives. Some of the would-be bombers were trained in Qaeda’s Pakistan camps much as their 9/11 predecessors had been trained in Afghanistan.

All of this was already going on when Mr. Bush said just before the election that [url“absolutely, we’re winning”]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061025.html[/url] and that “Al Qaeda is on the run.” What’s changed in the few months since his lie is that even more American troops are tied down in Iraq, that even more lethal weapons are being used against them, that even more of the coalition of the unwilling are fleeing, and that even more Americans are tuning out both the administration and the war they voted down in November to savor a referendum that at least offers tangible results, “American Idol.”

Yet Mr. Bush still denies reality. Ten days ago [urlhe told the American Enterprise Institute]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070215-1.html[/url] that “the Taliban have been driven from power” and proposed that America help stabilize the Pakistan border by setting up “Reconstruction Opportunity Zones” (remember that [url“Gulf Opportunity Zone”]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050915-8.html[/url] he promised after Katrina?) to “give residents the chance to export locally made products to the United States, duty-free.” In other words, let’s fight terrorism not by shifting America’s focus from Iraq to the central front, but by shopping for Taliban souvenirs!

Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us — asleep — even as the system is blinking red once again.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company