Cogburn
06-13-2010, 02:03 AM
From the May 2002 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 49, No. 5)
Skeletons Rattle in Pakistan's Closet
Was Pearl Onto Something?
Siddharth Varadarajan, The Times of India (conservative), New Delhi, India, March 11, 2002
Daniel Pearl in an undated photo (AFP)
What did Gen. Pervez Musharraf mean when he said that Daniel Pearl—the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was kidnapped and killed by extremists in Pakistan—had been overly intrusive in areas he shouldn’t have been? The remark was vintage Musharraf, delivered off-the-cuff during an impromptu press conference here Thursday. “Unfortunately,” he said, “(Pearl) got over-involved.” But what exactly had Pearl got himself “over-involved” in?
Though he was said to be working on a story about the Pakistani linkages of Richard Reid—the shoe bomber who was overpowered by passengers on a U.S.-bound flight in December—many local journalists feel Pearl had stumbled across information that might have embarrassed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. “We can only presume he came close to finding out the roots of some people with the ISI,” said a senior columnist for [Karachi’s] Urdu Daily Jang. “There were 3,000 Western journalists who worked in or passed through Pakistan during the U.S. war on Afghanistan,” said one editor of a daily newspaper. “Why was he the one picked up? It is possible he had come across some information about a few of the persons on India’s list of 20 terrorists. Persons such as [Indian crime lord who is in hiding in Pakistan] Dawood Ibrahim, for example.” He pointed out that the first time an exposé on Dawood’s Karachi links was published in the Pakistani magazine The Herald, the ISI picked up and interrogated two journalists, Ghulam Hasnain and Amir Ahmed Khan, to find out the source of their story.
Though Pakistani analysts doubt that Pearl’s kidnapping had official sanction, they say the investigation will likely proceed “cautiously.” “I am not saying there will be a cover-up,” said one senior journalist. “But Pakistan’s past policies (regarding the extremist groups) have left a large number of skeletons. Once you begin investigating, you will start opening all kinds of doors.”
Even though they had nothing to do with Pearl’s kidnapping, many people within the ruling establishment would not like matters to be probed very deeply, he said. One noted Pakistani commentator told The Times of India that the manner in which Omar Sheikh, the prime suspect in the Pearl kidnapping, came into police custody itself spoke of these linkages. “He wasn’t arrested. Rather, he turned himself in to the one man he trusted enormously, Punjab Home Secretary Brig. Ijaz Shah, who is a retired ISI man.”
And what was Omar’s connection with Ijaz Shah? “Please re-read the diary Omar Sheikh wrote when he was in prison in India. It is full of adulatory references to the man who inspired him. And that man’s name was Shah Sahab.”
Central Asia: Charges Link Russian Military To Drug Trade
June 08, 2001
By Jean-Christophe Peuch
Drug trafficking from war-torn Afghanistan through the former Soviet Union has dramatically increased over the past 20 years. UN-sponsored regional programs have so far been unable to stem the growth of narcotics-smuggling to Western Europe through Russia and the Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. A major factor in the huge expansion of the Afghan drug trade may be the alleged involvement of some of the Russian military stationed in Tajikistan. RFE/RL correspondent Jean-Christophe Peuch reviews the evidence in light of new accusations recently made by a former Russian military intelligence officer.
Prague, 8 June 2001 (RFE/RL) -- Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia has emerged as a major international drug trafficking route linking some of the world's largest illicit opium producers to the most lucrative markets of Western Europe. Analyst say the amount of drugs moving along the ancient Silk Road has become a major threat to the entire region, and beyond.
Figures published last year by the United Nations Drug Control Program, or UNDCP, show that 80 percent of the heroin consumed in Western Europe originated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that one-half of these drugs traveled there through Central Asia.
The UNDCP estimated that in Afghanistan, some 91,000 hectares of opium poppy were cultivated in 1999. This represented an increase of more than 40 percent compared to the previous year.
But last summer, Taliban leader Mullah Omar officially banned opium poppy cultivation in all areas controlled by the militia. UNDCP officials who recently visited Afghanistan say that the Taliban prohibition is nearly total, while opium poppies continue to grow in territory controlled by the Northern Alliance opposition forces.
The region's drug trade, however, continues to flourish. Geography, porous borders, organizational chaos, local conflicts, and wide-scale corruption are among the main factors that have contributed to the explosion of drug trafficking. The trafficking, in turn, has helped criminalize Central Asian economies.
Some regional experts also believe that the presence of a large Russian military presence in the area has played a significant role in the spread of illicit drug trafficking.
In a report published in March 2000, the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank cited allegations about Russian soldiers headquartered in the Tajik capital Dushanbe or deployed along the 1,200-km-long Tajik-Afghan border. Carnegie researchers Martha Olcott and Natalia Udalova said that Russian soldiers were suspected of helping drug traffickers by providing them with transport facilities.
Yesterday Olcott told our correspondent that as long ago as two years ago she heard stories implicating the Russian military in the regional drug trade when she attended an international seminar in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.
"We got plenty of hints [then] that the Russian military could be involved. But people were not willing to address the issue of whether this was with the overt participation of senior military officials in place or with the covert participation of them. There is no question in my mind that part of the Russian military has been a corrupting influence in Central Asia from the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Part of the Russian military has been engaged in the illegal sale of their own weapons. And part of the Russian military seems to have actively facilitated the sale of drugs."
In an interview published last week (dated 29 May) in the "Moscow News" ("Moskovskie Novosti") weekly, former Russian military intelligence officer Anton Surikov charged that a substantial portion of the drugs produced in Afghanistan had been directly shipped from the Tajik capital Dushanbe on board Russian military planes, helicopters, and trains.
Surikov said: "You can come to an arrangement [with custom officials] so that the search of military transport planes remains purely formal. The same goes for train convoys carrying military cargo [to Russia from Tajikistan]."
According to his account, Afghan opium producers usually sold drugs to Tajik citizens who smuggled them into Tajikistan with the active complicity of Russian border guards. The drugs were then put on board military planes or trains en route to Russia, where they were sold to local criminal gangs.
Surikov, who now is an aide to the chairman of the Duma's committee on industrial policy, said he was posted to Tajikistan in 1993 after the start of the civil war that brought President Imomali Rakhmonov to power. He estimated the number of senior Russian officers involved in the Afghan drug trade to have been between 50 and 100.
In the past, similar allegations against Russian officers serving in Tajikistan have appeared in both Russian and Western media. But Surikov is the first former officer -- and the first official, either military or civilian -- to publicly charge collusion between some Russian high military officers and Afghan drug traders.
What prompted Surikov to talk to the press now is unclear.
"Moscow News" correspondent Sanobar Shermatova specializes in Central Asian affairs. Shermatova told RFE/RL's Tajik Service that she had met in the past with a number of Russian officers, who privately confirmed that some of their peers had been actively involved in the Afghan drug trade.
Shermatova says that even though the Russian high command is aware of the situation, it has failed to do anything to prevent corrupt officers from illegally shipping drugs to Russia.
"For me, it has always been an enigma. How could you explain that neither the Defense Ministry nor any other official body has ever taken any measure when they have very detailed information on what is going on along the [Tajik-]Afghan border?" UNDCP officials told our correspondent that they were not aware of any possible Russian involvement in the Afghan drug trade and that they could therefore "neither confirm nor deny" Surikov's accusations.
In Moscow, Russian authorities have not reacted to Surikov's charges. But a spokesman for the Russian border guards stationed in Tajikistan dismissed the accusations as "groundless."
At the same time, a high-ranking Tajik official has added fuel to the controversy by saying that both Russians and Tajiks control drug transportation routes to Western Europe. In an interview with RFE/RL's Tajik Service, the deputy head of Tajikistan's UN-sponsored Drug Control Agency, Sheravliyo Mirzoavliyoyev said:
"In the course of the emergency actions that we have conducted, many drug traffickers have been caught. Among them are not only Tajik citizens, but also citizens of other countries -- notably, citizens of Russia -- Russian border guards, Tajik border guards, police officials, and government officials."
In a debate broadcast on state television earlier this year (1 February), Tajik officials admitted that an unspecified number of officers of the Interior Ministry, the Customs Office, and even the Drug Control Agency had been arrested on charges of complicity with drug smugglers. The debate followed a Tajik government Security Council meeting, during which Rakhmonov reportedly criticized his law-enforcement agencies for failing to fight drug trafficking effectively.
Four months ago, the chairman of the Tajik state committee on border protection, Saidanvar Kamolov, said that law-enforcement agencies and border guards seized only one-tenth of the drugs smuggled across the Tajik-Afghan border last year.
UNDCP figures show that in recent years the five CIS Central Asian states together were responsible for only 15 percent of all regional seizures of Afghan drugs, while neighboring Iran made more than half (55 percent) of the seizures.
The five-year civil war (1992-97) in Tajikistan, one of the poorest former Soviet republics, contributed substantially to the explosion of the drug trade in Central Asia, with both warring sides turning to trafficking to finance their military campaigns.
The start of large-scale drug smuggling in the Central Asia region goes back to the early 1980s, when Soviet soldiers fighting in Afghanistan first established business relations with local heroin producers. In 1996, when the militantly Islamic Taliban wrested control of most of Afghanistan's territory from forces loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani, it inherited some efficient drug-production facilities and illegal trade routes.
In the early years of its rule, out of religious conviction, the Taliban banned the use of drugs by Afghans. But the militia permitted the export of drugs and taxed the annual opium harvest. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who closely follows Taliban affairs, estimates that its revenues from taxes on opium trade have been at least $20 million a year.
With an opium output of 3,000 to 4,600 tons annually, Afghanistan had accounted for an estimated three-fourths of the world's heroin supply. But now the UNDCP believes Afghanistan will no longer be a major player in the global drug trade.
Some analysts are skeptical of the UNDCP's conclusions. They argue that the recent end of opium-poppy cultivation could simply be the result of the serious drought that hit the country last year. Others suggest that it may also be an attempt by the Taliban to artificially drive up the price of heroin.
Surikov says that in the past, 90 percent of the 300 to 460 tons of heroin produced annually in Afghanistan -- and funneled to Western markets with the help of the Russian military -- came from Taliban-controlled territory. As for heroin and other opium-poppy by-products that originated in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance, Surikov says they reached Western markets "through different channels."
Carnegie Endowment analyst Olcott believes it would be a mistake to see drug traffickers as tied to one group or another. She says: "I would try to see these [drug traders] as neutral because they will deal with whatever regime is in place in Afghanistan. This is a business that the civil war in Afghanistan helped promote, not the other way [around]."
India helped FBI trace ISI-terrorist links
MANOJ JOSHI, TNN, Oct 9, 2001, 11.08pm IST
new delhi: while the pakistani inter services public relations claimed that former isi director-general lt-gen mahmud ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on monday, the truth is more shocking. top sources confirmed here on tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" india produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the world trade centre. the us authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to wtc hijacker mohammed atta from pakistan by ahmad umar sheikh at the instance of gen mahumd. senior government sources have confirmed that india contributed significantly to establishing the link between the money transfer and the role played by the dismissed isi chief. while they did not provide details, they said that indian inputs, including sheikh’s mobile phone number, helped the fbi in tracing and establishing the link. a direct link between the isi and the wtc attack could have enormous repercussions. the us cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior pakistani army commanders who were in the know of things. evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake us confidence in pakistan’s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition. indian officials say they are vitally interested in the unravelling of the case since it could link the isi directly to the hijacking of the indian airlines kathmandu-delhi flight to kandahar last december. ahmad umar sayeed sheikh is a british national and a london school of economics graduate who was arrested by the police in delhi following a bungled 1994 kidnapping of four westerners, including an american citizen.
US turns to drug baron to rally support
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Pakistan and the United States have turned to a tried and trusted "friend" in their efforts to exert control over events in Afghanistan - convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi.
Whatever the outcome of the United Nations-sponsored Bonn talks on the establishment of a Post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan, sensing too much Russian influence being exerted on the Northern Alliance, the US and its allied intelligence networks have decided to cultivate support from within the majority Pashtun belt in the eastern and southern Afghan provinces.
Although the minority groups under the umbrella of the Northern Alliance, which has a firm foothold in Kabul, are also fragmented on the question of a power-sharing formula, most of its central leaders, including President Burhanuddin Rabbani and General Mohamad Fahim, are leaning towards Russia.
Afridi will be central in moves to bring together the shattered Afghan warlords, whom it is hoped will not only become a force to be reckoned with in any future interim set-up, they will also be able to assist in the the tracking down of Osama bin Laden. The Pashtun tribes, although they have no clear vision of ideology or politics at present, are the only ray of hope for American designs in the region.
At present, the Pashtun belts in the south and east are divided among warlords, each of whom is locked into his area of interest, and who cannot see beyond their limited perspectives. Further, many small tribes have taken refuge inside Pakistan and it seems that if the present situation persists, there will be a massive erosion of the Pashtun population in Afghanistan.
Conversely, since northern Afghanistan has been restored to its indigenous strength in the north and in Kabul, the Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik populations that had emigrated to Iran and Pakistan will start returning to these areas, making the pro-Russian Northern Alliance case that they are not a minority more powerful.
Afridi is probably the only person capable of gathering the Pashtun commanders and tribal chiefs together to broker their interests to get them to agree on one leadership - which could be either former monarch Zahir Shah or any of his nominees - to initially form an interim set-up leading to the formation of a constitutional framework to establish an elected government in Afghanistan.
Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s. (He had been in custody for over two years). He had also been fined 5 million rupees (US$82,000). No reasons were given for Afridi's release, or under which legislation he was allowed to return to his home town in Khyber Agency in North Western Frontier Province.
Afridi was a key player in the Afghan war of resistance against the Soviet Union's occupying troops in the decade up to 1989. It is a matter of record that top US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials believed in the early 1980s that they would never be able to justify a multibillion-dollar budget from the government to provide support to the mujahideen in the fight against the Red Army. As a result, they decided to generate funds through the poppy-rich Afghan soil and heroin production and smuggling to finance the Afghan war. Afridi was the kingpin of this plan. All of the major Afghan warlords, except for the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masoud, who had his own opium fiefdom in northern Afghanistan, were a part of Afridi's coalition of drug traders in the CIA-sponsored holy war against the Soviets.
Sources say that Afridi's constituencies in eastern and southern Afghan provinces have been revived following the withdrawal of the Taliban, and with them the drugs trade. Commanders such as Haji Abdul Qadeer, Haji Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali are once again ruling the roost in these areas. These commanders used to be the biggest heroin and opium mafia in Afghanistan's Pashtun belt.
They are all friends and will play a vital part in helping Afridi forge an alliance to push for a strong representation in any future interim council in Afghanistan, and if they can set aside their mutual differences they could work out an effective strategy to nail bin Laden, who is now strongly believed to be in Jalalabad and who has a $25 million price tag on his head.
The saga of Afridi is a good illustration of the troubling links between traffickers and politicians in Pakistan, as well as the shady deals made by the United States with both sides.
Afridi, Pakistan's most wanted drug baron, returned to Pakistan on August 25, 1999, after serving a three-and-a-half year sentence in a US prison and paying a $50,000 fine. His imprisonment is said to have been a face-saving gesture. From his refuge inside Afghanistan, and with an Afghan passport, Afridi voluntarily traveled to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where he "negotiated" with American authorities and from where he boarded a cargo flight to the US in December 1995 to hand himself over as a drug baron.
At the time there was much hue and cry in the international media about Afridi's unholy nexus with drug lords, who happened also to be the leading Afghan warlords. He served his full term before being released by US authorities and returning to Pakistan.
Hardly had his feet touched Pakistani soil, though, when the Anti-Narcotics Force arrested him and detained him, for the first six weeks at a secret location. But it was not until two weeks ago that he was formally sentenced.
Afridi owns a palace straight out of fairy-tale books, reminiscent of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, in Landi Kotal, part of the Khyber tribal agency not far from the Afghan border. The palace was built on about 15 acres at a cost of more than $2 million about 15 years ago. The sumptuous and many rooms are stocked with precious European goods, and each room is named after a Western fashion brand, such as Armani and Lagerfeld.
A warrant for the police to bring Afridi before the courts was first issued in 1983 following the discovery of 17 tons of hashish in a warehouse in Balochistan. Three years later, he was the subject of a wanted notice issued after a smuggler arrested in Belgium denounced him as his supplier. At that time, he was under the protection of the authorities in the virtually autonomous tribal agency, which in theory he was not allowed to leave.
The military conspiracy against then premier Benazir Bhutto on August 6, 1990, leading to her ouster and the installation of Nawaz Sharif allowed allowed Afridi to become one of eight deputies elected to parliament from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and to consequently benefit from parliamentary immunity.
He won under the ticket of the Islamic Democratic Alliance, the coalition headed by Nawaz Sharif. This alliance had been built by an Afghan war hero and former lieutenant-general, Hamid Gul, to fight (unsuccessfully) Benazir Bhutto in the 1988 elections.
However, sensing that the military would not tolerate for too long the corruption and chaos that characterized Nawaz Sharif's first government, the barons of the tribal zones, including Afridi, switched their support to the opposition Pakistan People's Party of Benazir Bhutto, and participated in the maneuvers that allowed the Pakistani President, Ishaq Khan, to dismiss Sharif on April 18, 1993. This favor earned him a new immunity.
However, his candidacy in the following elections was rejected and he was forced to go into hiding, dividing his time between the Pakistan tribal areas, Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates. He was approached by the Americans, (with Benazir Bhutto herself acting as an intermediary), who allegedly promised him a lenient sentence in recognition of the "services" he had provided during the Afghan war, and Afridi accepted to go to the US.
In August, 1999, when Afridi was arrested on his return to Pakistan, many observers believed that his arrest was a ploy on the part of Sharif as the move violated international norms by which a person should not be tried twice for the same crime. It is thought that Sharif hoped to use Afridi's testimony to implicate Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been imprisoned on corruption charges since October 1996, and against Rehmat Shah Afridi, the owner of the Frontier Post, a newspaper sympathetic to the opposition, who had been arrested in April 1999.
Arrest warrants were issued for Afridi and half a dozen members of his family in July 1995 by a special court in Peshawar, which also called for the seizure of his assets, estimated at $2.7 million. The case has been in the courts ever since, which observers attribute mainly to his vast resources.
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