Antony Loewenstein

This is a growing issue since 9/11, where the US military and others are perfectly happy to corrupt the NGO process by delivering so-called aid and development themselves, therefore trying to convince people under occupation that the military will “save” them. The vitally important separation between the military and aid has largely disappeared.

This story in the New York Times offers just one example of the CIA, not known for its intelligence when operating overseas, causing yet more harm:

In the shadows of the American operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the fate of a small-town Pakistani doctor recruited by the C.I.A. to help track the Qaeda leader still looms between the two countries, a sore spot neither can leave untouched.

Picked up by Pakistani intelligence agents days after the Bin Laden raid a year ago and now in secret detention, the doctor, Shakil Afridi, has embodied the tensions between Washington and Islamabad. To some American officials he is a hero, worthy of praise and protection; Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has personally appealed for his release. But inside Pakistan’s powerful military, still smarting from the raid on its soil, he is seen as a traitor who should face treason charges that could bring his execution. “We need to make an example of him,” one senior intelligence official said.

Beyond hard feelings and talk, however, his case has had a much wider effect: It has also roiled the humanitarian community in Pakistan, giving rise to a wave of restrictions that have compromised multimillion dollar aid operations serving millions of vulnerable Pakistanis.

…

The danger that American intelligence work can taint an entire profession has been the subject of debate and restrictions since the 1970s. By policy, the C.I.A. has not placed spies abroad under cover as Peace Corps volunteers or American Fulbright scholars. They cannot pose as journalists accredited to American news organizations except with a waiver from the president or the C.I.A. director.

Loch K. Johnson, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia who was on the staffs of Congressional intelligence reform panels in the 1970s and the 1990s, said every job category used by the agency abroad for spying produces complaints.

“If they use an oil rigger, businesses say it endangers all the other oil riggers,” said Mr. Johnson, who recalled discussing the matter with William E. Colby, the C.I.A.’s director from 1973 to 1976, who complained then about “a melting ice floe of adequate cover” as scandal led to new limits.

But Mr. Johnson said he did believe it was a mistake for the C.I.A. to use public health workers like Dr. Afridi in developing countries. “That’s a particularly sensitive group that does ethical and important work in very dangerous areas,” he said.

The relentless US-led drone war against “terrorists” in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and beyond rarely examines who is actually being killed. President Obama has massively expanded the global program.

This weekend saw a Drone Summit held in Washington DC that highlighted this still largely secret war.

A keynote speaker was the leading investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill who has actually done the work of a real journalist and visited the countries in which Obama’s drones are operating;

The life and times of Osama Bin Laden post 9/11 remains shrouded in mystery. During my recent visit to Pakistan, I spent time with Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army Brigadier, who personally investigated the story behind Bin Laden’s killing last year.

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.

…

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.

Today’s Pakistan is a nation with various sources of power but the intelligence services, ISI, are who truly controls the place.

Dilip Hiro writes in TomDispatch about who has been largely funding this degradation since 9/11:

It is common knowledge that Pakistani judges, fearing for their lives, generally refrain from convicting high-profile jihadists with political connections. When, in the face of compelling evidence, a judge has no option but to order the sentence enjoined by the law, he must either live under guard afterwards or leave the country. Such was the case with Judge Pervez Ali Shah who tried Mumtaz Qadri, the jihadist bodyguard who murdered Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer for backing an amendment to the indiscriminately applied blasphemy law. Soon after sentencing Qadri to capital punishment last October, Shah received several death threats and was forced into self-exile.

Aware of the failures of the Pakistani authorities to convict Saeed, U.S. agencies seemed to have checked and cross-checked the authenticity of the evidence they had collected on him before the State Department announced, on April 2nd, its reward for his arrest. This was nothing less than an implied declaration of Washington’s lack of confidence in the executive and judicial organs of Pakistan.

Little wonder that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani took umbrage, describing the U.S. bounty as blatant interference in his country’s domestic affairs. Actually, this is nothing new. It is an open secret that, in the ongoing tussle between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his bête noire, army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Obama administration has always backed the civilian head of state. That, in turn, has been a significant factor in Gilani’s stay in office since March 2008, longer than any other prime minister in Pakistan’s history.

…

There is, in fact, nothing new in the way Islamabad has been squeezing Washington lately. It has a long record of getting the better of U.S. officials by identifying areas of American weakness and exploiting them successfully to further its agenda.

When the Soviet bloc posed a serious challenge to the U.S., the Pakistanis obtained what they wanted from Washington by being even more anti-Soviet than America. Afghanistan in the 1980s is the classic example. Following the Soviet military intervention there in December 1979, the Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq volunteered to join Washington’s Cold War against the Kremlin — but strictly on his terms. He wanted sole control over the billions of dollars in cash and arms to be supplied by the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia to the Afghan Mujahedin (holy warriors) to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. He got it.

That enabled his commanders to channel a third of the new weapons to their own arsenals for future battle against their archenemy, India.  Another third were sold to private arms dealers on profitable terms. When pilfered U.S. weapons began appearing in arms bazaars of the Afghan-Pakistan border towns (as has happened again in recent years), the Pentagon decided to dispatch an audit team to Pakistan. On the eve of its arrival in April 1988, the Ojhiri arms depot complex, containing 10,000 tons of munitions, mysteriously went up in flames, with rockets, missiles, and artillery shells raining down on Islamabad, killing more than 100 people.

By playing on Ronald Reagan’s view of the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire,” Zia ul-Haq also ensured that the American president would turn a blind eye on Pakistan’s frantic, clandestine efforts to build an atom bomb. Even when the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department determined that a nuclear weapon assembled by Pakistan had been tested at Lop Nor in China in early 1984, Reagan continued to certify to Congress that Islamabad was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program in order to abide by a law which prohibited U.S. aid to a country doing so.

Today, there are an estimated 120 nuclear bombs in the arsenal of a nation that has more Islamist jihadists per million people than any other country in the world. From October 2007 to October 2009, there were at least four attacks by extremists on Pakistani army bases known to be storing nuclear weapons.

In the post-9/11 years, Pakistan’s ruler General Pervez Musharraf managed to repeat the process in the context of a new Afghan war.  He promptly joined President George W. Bush in his Global War on Terror, and then went on to distinguish between “bad terrorists” with a global agenda (al-Qaeda), and “good terrorists” with a pro-Pakistani agenda (the Afghan Taliban). Musharraf’s ISI then proceeded to protect and foster the Afghan Taliban, while periodically handing over al-Qaeda militants to Washington. In this way, Musharraf played on Bush’s soft spot — his intense loathing of al-Qaeda — and exploited it to further Pakistan’s regional agenda.

Emulating the policies of Zia ul-Haq and Musharraf, the post-Musharraf civilian government has found ways of diverting U.S. funds and equipment meant for fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to bolster their defenses against India. By inflating the costs of fuel, ammunition, and transport used by Pakistan’s 100,000 troops posted in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, Islamabad received more money from the Pentagon’s Coalition Support Fund (CSF) than it spent. It then used the excess to buy weapons suitable for fighting India.

When the New York Times revealed this in December 2007, the Musharraf government dismissed its report as “nonsense.”  But after resigning as president and moving to London, Musharraf told Pakistan’s Express News television channel in September 2009 that the funds had indeed been spent on weapons for use against India.

Now, the widely expected release of the latest round of funds from the Pentagon’s CSF will raise total U.S. military aid to Islamabad since 9/11 to $14.2 billion, two-and-a-half times the Pakistani military’s annual budget.

My following investigation is the lead story on Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar English:

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.”

My following investigation appears in Australian publication Crikey today:

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 

A serious democracy would try its hardest to protect journalists. Many nations don’t share this goal:

The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply disappointed that a U.N. plan to promote journalist safety and curb impunity in journalist killings was not endorsed during UNESCO’s 28th biennial session held in Paris.

It’s right to be skeptical that this will ever happen – Pakistan is notorious for being a nation whose political and military class simply act above the law – but at least it’s being said (via Dawn):

Members of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) on Saturday unanimously agreed to include two clauses into the draft about not allowing foreign security contractors to conduct covert operations on Pakistani soil and not giving bases to any foreign nation, especially to the United States.

The committee, which met here at the Parliament House with Senator Raza Rabbani in the chair, held deliberations for over three hours.

The meeting was also attended by PPP leader Qamar Zaman Kaira who has replaced Senator Babar Awan.

The initial recommendation draft included that “the activity of foreign private security contractors to be made transparent and subject to Pakistani law” and “parliamentary approval for any use of Pakistani bases by foreign forces, and drafting new flying rules by the defence ministry/PAF and Isaf/US/Nato for areas contiguous to the border.”

Opposition parties including Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Jamiat ul Ulema Islam (JUI-F) had raised their reservations regarding these clauses and regarded them to be tantamount to providing a legal cover to the covert operations.

One of the strongest impressions of my recent visit to Pakistan – meeting journalists, dissidents, writers and intelligence people – was the profound disconnect between Pakistan and the West. The country has suffered due to a range of factors since 9/11 – corrupt government, American bombardment, unaccountable intelligence services, drone attacks, countless murders and economic challenges – and the idea that Pakistan should help Washington in its war against terrorism is dismissed by most (if not all) citizens.

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.

I’ve just visited Pakistan investigating disaster capitalism for a forthcoming book and documentary. Amazing country. Beautiful, troubled, scary, complicated and centre of the world since 9/11 for (mostly) the wrong reasons. And private security is rampant.

Stories coming but in the meantime here’s photos; Islamabad/Rawalpindi/Peshawar and Karachi.

Another day and another fascinating insight into Osama Bin Laden post 9/11 and the real role of Pakistan. Lead story in today’s Dawn:

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.

The explosion of these companies post 9/11, increasingly operating in developing countries with little oversight, shows no sign of abating. Today’s Express Tribune in Pakistan confirms it (though the role of foreign mercenaries is yet another area requiring far more investigation):

Private security guard companies continue to operate in a legal black hole, as key legislation meant to regulate the industry more strictly remains pending.

Worryingly, the government has been silent on the matter.

Sources within the fast-expanding industry say that the regulatory laws do not have the relevant clauses to keep them in check. This provides security companies with many advantages, especially when it comes to dealing with penalties or restrictions imposed by the provincial home departments.

“Why would we complain that the government is sleeping on the issue when we ourselves are at an advantage,” said one leading private security company owner.

The All Pakistan Security Agencies Association (Apsaa) General Secretary Col (retd) Tauqirul Islam admitted that “quite frankly, at present, private security guard companies in the country are operating under the law of the jungle.”

What he meant was that the provincial ordinances, such as the Sindh Private Security Agencies Ordinance 2000, which were promulgated during the regime of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, have inadequate clauses to keep a strict check on and penalise the security companies for any wrongdoing.

“The situation is the same in all the other provinces, where the companies are operating only through no-objection certificates (NOC) issued from the federal interior ministry and the general standard operating procedures that come along with it,” he said.

A businessperson or a group that intends to establish a private security company has to first approach the Security and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), which registers it after all legal formalities are met under the Companies Ordinance 1984. After the registration, the SECP asks the ministry of interior to grant an NOC that is obtained after clearance is given by all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

However, this NOC is not enough to operate in a province unless a licence is granted by the respective provincial home departments, which continues to be done under the old ordinances.

Islam, however, disputed the notion that bodies such as Apsaa were not concerned about the law since this is in the interest of the security companies.

“In fact, in Sindh, we drafted a new law in coordination with the home department which suggested tighter controls on our industry, but unfortunately it remains pending at the provincial law ministry since May 2009,” he said.

He added that the association was aware of the need for changes in the law in all other provinces as well and once the draft gets approved in Sindh, it would be replicated in all other provinces.

Former Apsaa chairman Maj (retd) Munir Ahmed also said that a new law proposal was drafted and sent to the law ministry that never saw the light of the day. However, Sindh Law Secretary Ghulam Nabi Shah said he was not aware of any such draft sent to his ministry.