The United States is quietly being drawn into an escalating conflict in Yemen. Following the discovery earlier this month of a new bomb plot aimed at American airliners, the US government has been aiming drones at alleged members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) at an unprecedented rate. Last week, US and Yemeni officials revealed that US special operations forces are on the ground in Yemen and that more may be on the way. Meanwhile AQAP, the Yemen-based organization now regarded by some officials as one of the principal terrorist threats to the United States, has stepped up attacks around the country, including asuicide bombing in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on Monday, that killed at least sixty people.

The new conflict may be as much about Saudi Arabia, the longtime US ally and Yemen’s northern neighbor, as it is about Yemen. To its continuing embarrassment, Saudi Arabia has long been known as the country that produced Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers. In recent years, the Saudi government has done much to reverse that image, in part by dramatically beefing up its own counterterrorism credentials and by becoming one of Washington’s key backers in the war against Al Qaeda. And yet, as I learned during a visit to Riyadh and other Saudi cities this month, it has struggled to contain another reality: that many members of AQAP are Saudi nationals who have relocated to Yemen, where they have been able to operate in relative freedom.

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What seems clear is that Saudi Arabia has become a key backer—and at times coordinator—of the accelerating US drone war and special operations offensive in Yemen, partly for its own security interests. Interior Ministry officials in Riyadh speak enthusiastically about the US drone program, and on May 12, drone strikes allegedly killed some eleven AQAP suspects, two of them Saudi nationals. (It is worth noting, following the controversial killing of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki, that Saudi Arabia does not appear to have many qualms about killing its own citizens in Yemen.)

Perhaps most important for the Saudi government, a successful counterterrorism policy carries enormous political value amid the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Even more than democratization or regime change in the region, the Saudi rulers seem to fear instability and unpredictability: though they have reluctantly supported the transition of power in Yemen, they are particularly nervous about the kind of extremism that has emerged in neighboring countries like Iraq, Yemen, and now Syria, when uprisings turn into violent conflict or authority breaks down entirely—places where Saudi jihadists have often found new causes. “Syria will be tempting to al-Qaeda,” Abdulrahman Alhadaq, a Saudi counter terrorism official, said in a briefing in Riyadh. “We need to avoid another Iraq.”

This lead story in the Guardian by Jason Bourke adds more details to the picture (though frankly, after more than a decade of Western-led war in AfPak, and our empowering of brutal warlords in the process, the role of Al Qaeda and the Taliban seem almost secondary):

Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against Nato forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.

The communications show a three-way conversation between Bin Laden, his then deputy Ayman Zawahiri and Omar, who is believed to have been in Pakistan since fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of his regime in 2001.

They indicate a “very considerable degree of ideological convergence”, a Washington-based source familiar with the documents told the Guardian.

The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban – seen by many as following an Afghan nationalist agenda – might once again offer a safe haven to al-Qaida or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.

One possibility, experts say, is that although Omar built a strong relationship with Bin Laden and Zawahiri, other senior Taliban commanders see close alliance or co-operation with al-Qaida as deeply problematic.

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A reliable account of Bin Laden’s life on the run can now be established, pieced together from the testimony, viewed by the Guardian, of one of Bin Laden’s wives, the recollections of the ISI officers who interviewed her compiled by retired Pakistani army brigadier Shaukat Qadir, statements of militants detained by the US published by WikiLeaks and interviews with former US officials.

Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Bin Laden’s wives and children fled Afghanistan , travelling first to Karachi, the vast Pakistani port city, where they spent several months. Bin Laden himself headed north into the remote Afghan province of Kunar after the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. According to ISI officials quoted by Qadir, a senior militant detained by the ISI in 2006 told interrogators that Bin Laden had met Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan insurgent leader, in Kunar at this time. ISI officials also maintain that Khaled Sheikh Mohamed told them that the al-Qaida chief was there.

Former American officials this weekend told the Guardian that there was considerable intelligence indicating that Bin Laden was in eastern Afghanistan and making occasional journeys across the border into Pakistan at this time.

By the summer of 2004, Bin Laden appears to have moved into Pakistan permanently. According to the testimony of his youngest, Yemeni-born wife, she and her two children were reunited with her husband in a house in a remote district of the rugged Swat valley, in northwest Pakistan, in March 2004, before moving to another safe house in a small town called Haripur, 20 miles from Abbottabad, that autumn. In early summer 2005 the family then moved into the newly constructed compound where they would spend the next six years. They were joined there by Bin Laden’s second wife and her three children.

According to ISI officers interviewed by Qadir, the location had been scouted a year previously by senior militant Abu Farraj al-Libbi who then travelled to Swat to get Bin Laden’s approval for the move. The al-Qaida chief insisted that the land for the house be bought, not rented, and sketched out a design for the construction – currently in the possession of the ISI.

The al-Qaida leader himself evaded detection while on the move by pretending to be an ailing Pashtun former militant, still on Pakistan’s wanted list, who hoped to return home to die, Qadir has written.

Western security officials believe Bin Laden’s oldest wife joined him in Abbottabad after being released in deal between Iranian authorities and a Pakistani militant group holding an Iranian diplomat.

By November 2010, the crucial courier had been identified and located. He then led the hunters to the Abbottabad house.

The past decade has seen a significant increase in foreign investments in the private security market around the Middle East. Pakistan is one of the countries that attracted the most attention in this global mercenary business.

The American killing of Osama bin Laden last year in Abbottabad still resonates across Pakistan. Newspapers are filled with establishment outrage that Washington has treated the country like an abused cousin for too long. “Give us some respect,” military and government figures opine on the airwaves. “We are an independent nation that won’t tolerate drone attacks and extra-judicial killings,” commentators scream on the radio.

It’s all an elaborate sham. Front page stories in leading publications explain that President Asif Ali Zardari is attempting to negotiate a better deal to allow supply lines that service American troops in Afghanistan through Pakistan to be reopened. This after they were severed in November when US airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. There has been fierce opposition to this proposal, including on the part of leading Muslim groups who want to keep America isolated.

However, a leading national security journalist in Karachi told Al-Akhbar that 90 percent of the supply lines never stopped and journalists in the mainstream media were knowingly publishing lies that the routes had been closed. “This is how our media operates,” he said, “the truth is rarely clear.”

The Pakistani city of Peshawar is situated an hour from Afghanistan. Driving there from Islamabad, the landscape was mostly lush green fields, poor villages and mud houses. After being stopped at five checkpoints along the way, an attempt to intercept foreigners and militants entering the sensitive city, on arrival there was a dramatic change in mood.

Dust filled the air and the roads were in various states of disrepair. Kidnappings and suicide attacks were common. During the days of President Pervez Musharraf, religious fundamentalists were empowered to rule the area and any photos of women were prohibited. Today, however, countless posters of women selling cleaning products were visible. All females wore burqas and men grew thick beards.

The city has become a focal point for the growing tension between Pakistan’s various political and militant factions. Pakistan, more than 10 years after the September 11 attacks, is a broken country. Militants are eating their host, launching attacks inside Pakistan and Afghanistan and demanding the overthrow of the central government. The ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) is effectively a state within a state, detaining, kidnapping and killing civilians and journalists at will.

Crikey spoke to some of Pakistan’s leading reporters in Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar to understand how Pakistan remains, as writer Ahmed Rashid calls his latest book, on the brink. The private security industry is integral to this equation, inflaming a militarised and unaccountable situation and providing vital surveillance to a heavily monitored state.

At a government building in Peshawar, everybody was on edge as I entered because militants continued to attack every few days. I spoke to a senior official who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.

“Mohammad” was a wealth of knowledge about the role of privatised security and development companies in the area since September 11. He said that mapping of local communities in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) had taken place, conducted by private companies, that was then used by the US for intelligence against suspected militants.

It was a version of the “human terrain system”, a US army program that attempts to better understand local communities. Its record has been an abject failure, with accurate cultural sensitivity impossible when night raids, drone attacks and bombings accompany friendly chats in the village.

Villagers in FATA were asked personal questions about their children, ID numbers, families and how many people slept in the houses. Local Pakistanis were employed by Western contractors to do the interviews, due to language fluency, but locals weren’t told how the information would be used.

Mohammad told Crikey the company, Gulf Associates, did a survey of Peshawar on water supply and drainage. Every household was asked questions about family size but “people were told they needed to provide these details to get water”. This was the twisted logic of outsourcing essential services in the “war on terror”.

The nexus in Pakistan between the ISI, federal government, militants and private security operates with no official transparency.

Shaukat Qadir has been at the centre of these discussions for years. He was given official permission in 2011 to visit the Osama bin Laden house in Abbottabad and interview some of the key players in the Pakistani government and intelligence in an attempt to understand how the world’s most infamous fugitive was able to live in supposed hiding for so long.

A retired Pakistani Army brigadier, Qadir, in a white salwar kameez, invited me to his home in Rawalpindi to discuss his report’s findings. He said he believed only a few ISI and Pakistani officials knew the whereabouts of bin Laden before his death. “I refuse to believe it was due to incompetence or complicity,” he argued.

His most explosive allegation was that one of bin Laden’s wives eventually sold him out as a way to share in the $US25 million reward money. There was intense rivalry among bin Laden’s wives (some of whom are soon to be deported from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia and Yemen: but Qadir didn’t know if that reward had been paid.

He’d heard that al-Qaeda, “who were totally broke before this”, had received — not directly from the US although Qadir claimed Washington had unwittingly paid al-Qaeda this money — about $US12 million and his wife $US1.5 million.

Al-Qaeda, which had seemed irrelevant when the Arab Spring began and country after country overthrew autocratic regimes, was now back in the game, he believed. This was due to the crushing of the revolutions by US client states in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain that showed Islamists as key figures of resistance. Qadir wasn’t claiming that al-Qaeda was an all-powerful organisation, too many leaders had been captured or killed, but they remained a potent force.

Aside from the ISI, private security companies were another state within a state. Crikey has been given exclusive access to a list of 62 retired military men who joined private security companies. The national security journalist source told me that at least half of these men had been arrested and then released for corruption and working for the Americans. Although it was an open secret that many Pakistani officials worked with the US, these men were targeted briefly for pushing the murky rules too far.

The most revealing company name on the list was G4S Wackenhut Pakistan. G4S is a British-based behemoth in the industry with atroubling human rights record. It remains the world’s largest security firm on revenues, operating in 125 nations and employing more than 650,000 people. I saw countless men in G4S uniforms across the country.

In many nations since September 11, private security companies have too much power and often replace functions of the state. In Pakistan, however, the government uses former military people to work for private security companies, giving them unique access to the gathered intelligence. The war economy fuels an elite group of companies and individuals determined to make money from political instability. It is the definition of vulture capitalism.

Journalists rarely report this deep collusion between intelligence, private security and the state because they face threat of death or assault. According to the Committee to Project Journalists, Pakistan is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to practise reporting.

Hamid Mir is arguably Pakistan’s most famous talk-show host and journalist. He interviewed bin Laden three times, including once after 9/11, the only journalist known to have spoken to the al-Qaeda leader after the attacks: ”His words and deeds were very different,” Mir told me. In person, he remembered, bin Laden was gentle and calm, far from the image of a radical. But his actions and desire to cause carnage showed him a person capable of extreme violence.

Mir has been the victim of countless ISI attacks and kidnappings, loved and loathed at various times by the Pakistani government, Taliban and militants. He has sent his son out of the country to ensure his safety. He takes big risks by naming and shaming ISI officials who threaten him and other journalists. Very few others follow his lead.

He claimed that recently President Asif Ali Zadari called him personally and asked him to cease criticising some military figures. He refused. Zadari then urged him to organise more security for his protection and use state-provided services. Mir said he didn’t trust them but he had arranged a guard to accompany him day and night. “Zadari is only President in the papers,” Mir mused, confirming that the real power in Pakistan lies with the military and intelligence services.

I asked him about the role of private security and intelligence and he reached for his copy of the Pakistani constitution; clause 256 states, “Private armies forbidden”. Mir said they operated far more frequently in past years, mostly former military men out to make more money in the private sector, but less often today.

Mir’s story was sadly familiar. If he was given a degree of protection because of his fame — this didn’t save journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad who was murdered by the ISI last year in all likelihood because he had uncovered a connection between al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Army  — such comforts were not shared by many other reporters.

Journalists who report on Waziristan, the area suffering US drone bombardment, face some of the toughest conditions.

The New York Times employee Ihsan Tipu is from the area and told me that incessant buzzing of drones is always in the air, bringing deep anger to villagers and psychological problems to families. Despite US claims that “terrorists” were targeted, countless civilians were being killed, he said. “A main driver there is revenge,” he said.

Crikey met several journalists who travelled from the tribal reasons to Islamabad to tell their stories. They felt threatened by militants, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISI and local officials. Leading investigative journalist Umar Cheema told me that this insecurity was exactly what the authorities wanted. Having been himself kidnapped and tortured by the ISI in 2010, Cheema said the ISI wanted to instil fear in anybody who challenged its behaviour and individuals to believe they could be reached, harassed or hurt no matter where they were.

America and the West have backed the Pakistani state’s brutality since September 11.

This is the enigma of Pakistan. It is a nuclear-armed nation that is seemingly always on the verge of collapse due to a desperate need for American money and to secure its regional position against India and Afghanistan. The result is a quasi- police state, backed by private security, silencing critics of its politics of capitulation towards militants and Washington.

It is only brave journalists and human rights workers who are showing a viable alternative.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author who is currently working on a book and documentary on disaster capitalism 

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinaryrendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the “alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment” of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

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Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised “a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism”. At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

I’ve rarely been to a country where getting to the truth about matters is so difficult. Key elements of the state quite clearly act above the civilian government, an out of control intelligence service that sometimes backs militants, kills journalists and still loves US largesse.

This piece by Steve Coll in the New Yorker indicates a Pakistani elite that both criticises America but enjoys getting money from them:

“I think it’s important for us to get it right,” President Obama said on Tuesday of the American relationship with Pakistan. Lately, though, we haven’t. After 2009, the United States and Pakistan constructed what they called a “strategic dialogue”—addressing Pakistan’s needs for economic growth, its search for energy and water security, Afghanistan, and possible negotiations with the Taliban—to define and solidify a long-term partnership. Three years later, those ambitions are in tatters, undone by the Raymond Davis affair, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and continuing drone strikes, which most Pakistanis regard as acts of war.

In late February, I travelled to Pakistan and met with a number of military officers there, including several senior ones. They explained how they saw, from their side, the rise and collapse of the strategic dialogue with Washington.

It is a story laced with the generals’ resentments, geopolitical calculations, fears, and aspirations. Listening to them after absorbing the recent months of Pakistan ennui and Pakistan bashing in Washington was like watching one of those movies where a single narrative is told and retold selectively, from irreconcilable points of view.

Some of the basics of the Pakistan Army’s arguments about the Afghan war and the struggle against Al Qaeda-influenced terrorist groups are contained in a twelve-page document called “Ten Years Since 9/11: Our Collective Experience (Pakistan’s Experience).” The document, labelled “Secret,” is below; it has not previously been published.

Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden moved to Pakistan in 2002, a few months after US started large-scale air strikes on Afghanistan, particularly in the Tora Bora region, during its anti-Taliban war which it launched in 2001 in the wake of 9/11 attacks.

The information about Osama crossing over into Pakistan and staying in different cities and towns before moving to Abbottabad came in the testimony given by his widow Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah during interrogation by a joint investigation team (JIT) comprising civilian and military officials.

She told the investigators that after 9/11 she reunited with her husband in Peshawar in 2002. From Peshawar they went to Swat where they lived for about nine months. Later, they stayed for about two years in Haripur before moving to Abbottabad where the Al Qaeda leader was killed in a raid by US commandos in May last year.

In the first full account of Osama’s movement after 9/11, she told the investigation team in Islamabad that she had lived with him in four cities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but declined to say if any Pakistani official had been in contact with him.

The 29-year-old Yemeni woman said she had a desire to marry a mujahid. Osama was available. “So in this connection when she got a message of marriage with Osama bin Laden, she came to Pakistan and landed at Karachi airport on 17/07/2000,” the JIT report said.

But she overstayed her three-month visa and later went to Kandahar in Afghanistan. Ms Amal told the investigators that she got married to Osama before 9/11, but did not specify any date. According to her, Osama was living with his three wives, including her, and some Arab families. Then came 9/11 and the family scattered.

“She stayed in a flat in Karachi for almost 8/9 months and all the things were arranged by some Pakistani families and Saad, elder son of Osama, was coordinating all the things,” the report said.

She told the investigators that during her stay in Karachi she changed her residence six or seven times. The investigators say they have not been able to trace Saad.

According to the JIT report, after their reunion in Peshawar Osama and Amal went to Swat where they stayed for 8/9 months.

Thereafter they stayed in Haripur for two years and subsequently shifted to Abbottabad and lived there for almost six years till the time Osama was killed.

Among the last known images of Osama bin Laden is a video seized at his compound the night he was killed, which shows the al-Qaeda leader hunched before a television screen studying a video of himself. It’s testimony to bin Laden’s obsession with the media side of his war against the United States.

This modern face of bin Laden’s jihad comes through clearly in a 21-page letter from his media adviser, a U.S.-born jihadist named Adam Gadahn. The letter is undated, but it appears to have been written after November 2010, in the last six months of bin Laden’s life.

Gadahn wrote much as if he were a media planner corresponding with a client. He included suggestions about the timing of video appearances after the 2010 U.S. midterm elections and use of high-definition video, and made snarky evaluations of major U.S. networks.

As I wrote last week, Gadahn hated Fox News (“falls into the abyss”); he liked MSNBC but complained about the firing of Keith Olbermann; he had mixed feelings about CNN (better in Arabic than in English) and made flattering comments about CBS and ABC. Basically, he wanted to play them all off to al-Qaeda’s best advantage. He also mentioned print journalists, most prominently Robert Fisk of The Independent of Britain. He cites three Americans (“Brian Russ,” “Simon Hirsh” and “Jerry Van Dyke”), though it’s uncertain whom he meant.

The media guidance was among the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound the night of May 2. It was made available to me, along with a small sample of other documents in the cache, by a senior Obama administration official.

Gadahn’s memo shows an organization struggling to stay on the media offensive despite devastating U.S. attacks. It’s partly aspirational, with dreams of jihad, but there’s a core of sharp self-criticism that makes clear Gadahn, like his boss, understood that al-Qaeda was losing its war.

Gadahn even worried that al-Qaeda’s reversals in Iraq and elsewhere represented “punishment by God on us because of our sins and injustices.” Like bin Laden, he was deeply upset that al-Qaeda’s affiliates had killed so many Muslims and listed 13 operations that showed “the tragedy of tolerating the spilling of [Muslim] blood.”