Last Week's Suicide Bomb Attack Against CIA In Afghanistan Gets Even More Ominous

The suicide bombing at CIA camp in Afghanistan on 31 December killed seven of our intelligence operatives, a Jordian intelligence official who was also a member of the royal family, and injured several others. The CIA officers killed were very experienced officers whose loss, tragic in human terms, is also a severe blow to our intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We now know that the suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Mohammed, aka Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani, was a physician, a prolific and vitriolic jihadi cyber activist, and a double agent, apparently for the Taliban. He made a "martyrdom video" in the month prior to his death:



There is also a disturbing report suggesting that elements of Pakistan's Intelligence Service, ISI, may have had a hand in this mass murder:

Early evidence in the December 30 bombing that killed seven CIA agents suggests a link to Pakistan, two senior Afghan sources, including an official at their spy agency, told The Daily Beast. The pair said that U.S. has already taken a chemical fingerprint of the bomb used by a Jordanian double agent in the attack, and that it matches an explosive type used by their Pakistan equivalents, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

If there is ISI involvement, then it compounds the issues raised by this bombing significantly.

Nibras Kazimi at Talisman Gate explains how this will reverberate through the jihadi community:

[Khorasani] is someone that many jihad-watchers have followed over the years . . .

If all the facts here are true, then this is huge. Huge. This story's immediate effect is to give the jihadists a massive morale boost. They will mythologize this story into a recruiting tool that encourages more and more young men who sympathize with the jihadists to surmount their instinctual fear of the nebulous intelligence services of the Middle East, and to challenge the autocracies that supposedly keep a lid on jihadism. Khorasani has left a lot of hero-worship material, much of it very smart at manipulating emotions. Now, he himself is the hero in the eyes of jihadist wanna-bes. Many will seek to emulate him, or even outdo him. . . .

This also raises a host of issues regarding security, field craft, and counterintelligence. Anyone can be fooled, but for six senior agents all to be milling about within the kill radius of a suicide bomb before Khorasani was searched is simply inexplicable. Leon Panetta claims that Khorsani was about to be searched when the bomb was set off, as if that somehow is an explanation for six deaths. It actually makes their failure to observe even basic common sense security procedures all that more blatant.

Dave In Boca discusses several of these issues in a very good post and I highly recommend you read it. He also adds this bon mot:

Robert Baer just came back from a visit to Kabul and environs and found that only two CIA officers spoke a local language, Dari, while NONE speaks or understands Pushtun, the language [that] most of the Al Qaeda Pathan in Afghanistan and their Taliban Punjabi brothers in Pakistan and Baluchi Taliban in Quetta converse in.

We are nine years into the war in Afghanistan. If this report is true, then there are more sucking chest wounds in our intelligence wing than merely security and counterintelligence. Indeed, I find this as breathtaking in its implications as is the fact that a suicide bomber was able to kill six senior CIA agents with a single suicide bomb. It means that nine years in, we essentially have an intelligence presence in Afghanistan - now America's main war effort - that is functionally deaf and illiterate. How the hell can the CIA expect to accomplish its intelligence mission without agents in country trained in the primary language spoken in Afghanistan. This isn't the stuff of 007 - its the stuff of a very bad Pink Panther movie. It is so 180 degrees off from what I would expect of a professional intelligence agency that I am near speachless. I am dead serious when I say that, between this failure of basic security procedures and the failure to have Pashtun speakers in a Pashtun speaking country when we are nine years into a war in said Pashtun speaking country, Sylvester Reyes and Leon Panetta should be emasculated and have their testicles hung at the Langley main entrance. This is utterly beyond belief.

Read More...

Summary only...

Dealing With The Pakistani Terrorism Problem

Pakistan's problems are massive and well documented. A nuclear armed Muslim country with a dysfunctional government, a rising tide of radicalism - much of it tied to Saudi funding of salafi / deobandi madrassas, and a large section of the country wholly in control of radical Islamists of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Indeed, most of the terrorism in the world today can be traced through to Pakistan. Arnaud de Borchgrave examines this problem and makes some sound suggestions:

Most terrorist trails lead back to Pakistan, Britain's MI5 (internal intelligence service) concluded a year ago.

An average of some 400,000 Pakistani Brits a year fly back to the old country for vacation or to visit their relatives. From the airports in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, where they land, side trips to the madrassas — Koranic schools — where they were originally radicalized, or to a terrorist training camp in the tribal areas that straddle the Pakistani-Afghan border, go undetected.

There is no way to keep track of thousands of passengers arriving from the United Kingdom every day. Nor can MI5 cope with up to 1,000 a day returning to their U.K. homes from trips to Pakistan.

Since September 11, 2001, German intelligence services were happy to report to Western colleagues they had no such problem with Germany's 2.8 million-strong Turkish minority — mostly second- and third-generation German-speaking Turks long established and integrated in German life.

Last week, a high-ranking German internal security delegation met with heads of several U.S. intelligence agencies to explain how their comfortable assumptions had to be re-examined. German intelligence services have uncovered a direct al Qaeda link from Germany via Turkey to Pakistan — for young radicalized German Turks.

Mostly recruited on the Internet from al Qaeda Web sites, these terrorist wannabes have made their way to al Qaeda's privileged sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal belt that straddles the Afghan border. German security has uncovered more than 100 such cases.

Topic A for last week's German visitors with their U.S. counterparts was Pakistan — and what to do about the privileged sanctuaries al Qaeda and Taliban have secured in at least three of the seven tribal agencies known as FATA (for Federally Administered Tribal Areas).

Western intelligence services agree that U.S. and NATO forces now in Afghanistan can only mark time and lose ground to Taliban until FATA's safe havens are rooted out militarily.

This would have to be coupled with economic aid for tribes whose lifestyle hasn't changed much since the fourth century B.C. when Alexander the Great gave the Hindu Kush a wide berth, hurried through Afghanistan before finding the Khyber Pass to exit into India's Punjab to what is now Pakistan's cultural capital of Lahore.

The terrain is one of the world's most difficult — jagged mountains rising to 15,000 feet interspersed with valleys, deep and narrow ravines, crevices and fissures, all dotted with thousands of caves with concealed entrances.

The millions of Pashtun tribesmen that inhabit the tribal areas share a centuries-old code called "Badal," or revenge. Also a moral code known as Pashtunwalli — or hospitality is sacred.

Under steady Bush administration pressure since the Battle of Tora Bora in November and December 2001, when Osama bin Laden and some 50 terrorist cohorts escaped, then acting President Pervez Musharraf ordered some 35,000 troops into FATA where they had been forbidden to go by treaty since independence in 1947. These were gradually increased to 100,000. (In an interview published Friday, Mr. Musharraf emphatically ruled out having U.S. troops join the fight against al Qaeda on Pakistani soil.)

. . . The way the German visitors understood their interlocutors in Washington last week, three options are being considered by the Bush administration — all admittedly bad:

(1) The United States bypasses Mr. Musharraf, deals directly with the new Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, 55, who has attended several staff courses in the U.S., and is regarded as pro-Western. The next generation of Pakistani officers earned their promotions when the U.S. imposed all manner of punitive sanctions against Pakistan for its then still secret nuclear weapons buildup. No one is sanguine about Gen. Kayani's ability to rekindle any enthusiasm for going after Taliban and al Qaeda in FATA.

(2) More military aid for the Pakistani army in return for acceptance of joint Special Forces operations in FATA — U.S. rangers coming in by helicopter directly into suspected Taliban-controlled villages, and "painting" targets for unmanned Predators to bomb. No optimism here either as Congress is loath to appropriate more military aid beyond the current $1.3 billion for this year. Most of the $11 billion doled out since September 11, 2001, has gone into big-ticket military hardware items of no value for FATA fighting. Pakistani generals also resent U.S. micromanagement of military assistance.

(3) Unilateral U.S. covert operations in FATA. These would not remain secret very long, most probably leaked by Pakistani intelligence to local media. The country, already a giant powder keg since Benazir Bhutto's assassination last month, would erupt. From Peshawar to Karachi and from Lahore to Quetta, an angry anti-Musharraf mood is palpable throughout the country. Pakistan's nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of a rebellious unit led, for example, by an anti-U.S. Islamist one-star general.

The overall Taliban commander in FATA is Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused of having ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Posing as a tribal leader, turban wrapped around his face, he was one of the signatories to the Sept. 5, 2006, nonaggression pact with Mr. Musharraf, which guaranteed (a) Taliban fighters would not be allowed to cross into Afghanistan; (b) Pakistani soldiers would cease operations against Taliban. It was snare and delusion from the get-go.

Already, anti-Musharraf rioters have torched thousands of cars and trucks, video stores, movie marquees, gas stations and electric power pylons in widely scattered parts of the country.

Flour and power shortages and angry citizens abound throughout Pakistan, now clearly the site of the world's most dangerous crisis. Five candidates belonging to outlawed extremist organizations are running in the Feb. 18 elections in Jhang District alone.

Deafening allied silence greeted Defense Secretary Bob Gates' Afghan request for more NATO troops. So the Pentagon is now drawing up plans to move some 3,200 additional troops, all Marines, to Afghanistan, bringing U.S. and coalition forces to 50,000. But it's still the wrong target. The country is fractured, divided — and at war with itself. This won't change until Taliban is booted out of FATA.

Read the article here.It doesn't take a military genuis to know that it is almost impossible to defeat a determined opponent if you allow the opponent a secure base of operations. And that is what our enemies have in the tribal areas of Pakistan today. How to destroy it without destabilizing the Pakistani government is the conundrum.

Read More...

Summary only...