Antony Loewenstein

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.

Intriguing interview in The Daily Beast that highlights the internal struggles within a movement that has beaten the US and its allies in Afghanistan:

Not so long ago, Agha Jan Motasim was one of the most important men in the Afghan Taliban. That was before he was sacked as head of the ruling Quetta Shura’s political committee—and before the day last August when someone pumped him full of bullets and left him for dead on a street in Karachi. No one has claimed responsibility for the broad-daylight assassination attempt, but it’s clear that hardliners in the group wanted him out of the way, and Motasim believes he knows why. He dared to suggest that the group should respect the civilian population’s humanitarian needs and should open peace talks.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast from his current home in Ankara, Motasim talked about what went wrong. “Due to a lack of understanding, some of my colleagues and friends did not agree with my concept that the Taliban should be a political movement as well,” he says. “My differences of opinion were not with the rest of the shura but with a few Taliban hardliners.” His conversation with The Daily Beast was the Western media’s first on-the-record interview with a senior Taliban minister and leader since the 2001 U.S. invasion.

My following investigation appeared in Australian publication Crikey last week:

The private security compound is on the outskirts of Kabul, along the road to Jalalabad, a notorious strip of highway, the landscape is predominantly industrial, with shipping containers set against a string of mountains on the horizon. Several logistics companies sit behind these concrete walls — this is an industry that has enjoyed a massive growth spurt since the US-led, 2001 invasion in Afghanistan.

While Indian Gurkhas trained outside to join the company’s ranks, “Scott”, a former British soldier and now the Western head of one of the country’s leading private security firms, explains that “we don’t call ourselves mercenaries” but a reliable corporation that provided “static” security for foreign embassies, journalists, aid companies, hotels and other key assets. Launching in Afghanistan soon after the US invaded, “we survive off chaos”.

“From 2002 onwards,” says Scott, “we worked with the Afghan government because the Ministry of Interior (MOI) could not secure businesses or people and Western insurance companies insisted on using a private military company [PMC]. Internationals felt they could not trust MOI when moving province to province.”

This is the reason such an industry self-perpetuates even though President Karzai has demanded for years that these companies be replaced with the interior ministry’s Afghan Private Protection Force (APPF).

According to Scott, the implementation of Karzai’s plan this year has been “chaotic”. During our interview, he received a call from an American client who didn’t understand Karzai’s new PMC rules. “This happens all the time at the moment. For example, an Afghan is supposed to be assigned in every PMC in the country but this has never happened.”

The complicated realities of modern conflict has served as the stated rationale for this massive growth industry globally, especially in war zones since September 11. Scott offers a simpler explanation. “The Americans, British and foreign forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are not big enough to re-build nations, so PMCs are needed to fill the void. We protect contractors building prisons and schools. If the US had used more troops, we would not be necessary.”

The West has now been in Afghanistan longer than both World Wars combined. The US has spent tens of billions of aid money in the country and yet working services are minimal.

Apart from the escalating rate of civilian deaths, from Taliban and Western forces, the rise of private security armies has defined the war, resulting in numerous contractor crimes against Afghan civilians. The record of Western security firms is filled with a troubling lack of justice for victims.

Two Afghan men sit upstairs in a simple restaurant near the centre of Kabul — both have families who’ve suffered privatised violence first hand. Tariq-U-Rahman and Fahim, both from Wardak Province, explain that they’ve faced threats from three elements; the Taliban, the US army and private security companies, and were subsequently forced to move to Kabul.

Afghan firms have been hired and empowered by the US military to transport their equipment across the country. The job is to guard the convoys but they regularly establish so-called security perimeters and in the process engage in fire-fights with the Taliban, wantonly harming civilians. One of the worst offenders is Watan Risk Management, a leading company with close ties to the Karzai family that pays off the Taliban not to attack US convoys.

Fahim says his cousin, a shopkeeper, was shot dead by a Watan guard a year ago for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Watan admitted fault, he said, and offered $US20,000 compensation but the family is still waiting for the money. The victim’s wife and children are now struggling despite the family financially assisting them.

Fahim explains that private security companies could be necessary in other countries with more stability but in Afghanistan it had only brought “misery and violence”.

The current situation in Afghanistan confirms his scepticism. M. Ashraf Haidari, a suave, American educated senior Afghan official who is the deputy assistant national security adviser and senior policy and oversight adviser to Karzai, told me that Afghan authorities were shutting the “illegal and without licence” firms and “the new rules attempt to regulate the system”.

But several Western and local security corporations confirmed to me off the record they were still operating in the area and imagined doing so for years to come, finding ways around the new rules. Furthermore, a couple of PMCs that the Karzai government said had been shut down were still operating even if signs around their compounds were removed.

“Many embassies, for example, simply won’t trust the Afghan Private Protection Force (APPF) and will continue to rely on foreign security companies,” one said.

The supposed logic of the mass expansion of the security industry post-September 11 globally is to replace tasks the state’s military can’t or won’t do. But in a poor nation such as Afghanistan resentment built quickly, I was consistently told, when it was discovered that the Afghan army was getting paid substantially less than the private militias.

Outsourcing security isn’t the only task that has become privatised in the Western-led mission. Intelligence is increasingly collected by private companies and given to American, Australian and British forces.

Some privatised intelligence has involved the hiring of corporations to gather information about Afghans that is then used by the military for so-called counter-insurgency. Jeremy Kelly in the London Times first published extracts in late March of extensive documents by US-based “consultancy company” AECOM — the company had been hired by NATO to spy on mosques, universities and the general community throughout the country. The work started just over a year ago.

I viewed dozens of pages of this intelligence (and extract below different sections to the Times). The files detail conversations from March 2012: people complain about the Karzai government’s corruption and inefficiency; clerics in mosques demand Western forces leave immediately; family members complain about proposed marriages between the Taliban and local girls; others express support for the insurgency and complain of troubles when working in Iran.

The research comes from a range of districts and is separated between “supportive” and “non-supportive” individuals of the NATO mission.

One entry, from March 14 in the Sheberghan District, details an “overheard conversation between two Uzbek males between the ages of 40-45 at market.”

“One man said, ‘The other day I was riding on a bus when it became very windy. It seemed as if it was raining dust. People were saying that this could be a sign God’s wrath. This is happening to us because the Americans have burned the Quran, but we are calmly sitting idle. We should be rising up against the Americans for what they have done. We are being punished for doing nothing.’

“The other resident stated, ‘I do not know, but it might be possible’.”

In another extract, from March 15 in Shahr-e-Safa in a public car, an Afghan spy overheard “two concerned men ages 50 to 60, discussing private escort companies threat to the safety of civilians.”

“The first man said, ‘People distrust the private escort companies because when a Talib fires at them, they return fire at houses, people, even the trees are cut if a Talib is shooting from behind them!’

“The second man replied, ‘Most of the time, innocent people are killed or injured in the crossfire.  People want the government to either make sure escorts do not harm civilians or disarm them’!”

Such details appear as mundane, normal and daily conversations by local villagers across the state, but they can form the knowledge for US-led night-raids that cause deaths and deep Afghan anger. Mistakes are routinely made. Innocent men are kidnapped. Many are killed.

The recent announcement that Afghan forces would now take thelead on night-raids was dismissed as propaganda by sources in Afghanistan, a face-saving exercise by the Karzai government to show it has sovereignty in its own country.

Meanwhile, the US military and its allies have little idea of the agendas of the Afghans giving them intelligence. It’s why respected organisations such as The Afghanistan Analysts Network refuse to undertake commissioned work for clients, concerned that its research may be co-opted for military means.

As soon as the Taliban was toppled in 2001, Northern Alliance forces and its friends routinely issued payback against enemies, real and imagined. Even today, a local warlord and police chief in Uruzgan Province, Matiullah Khan, is using Australian forces to take out his rivals and fuel conflict.

A reporter from the Chicago Tribune witnessed this trend as far back as November 2001.

Western forces enabled this behaviour by using provided intelligence and arresting, bombing and interrogating people they were told were Taliban. In reality, the information was often wrong. Crucially, it reinforced the Western belief that any breathing Taliban should be a dead Taliban.

That was then. Today, the US government realises it will have to negotiate with the Taliban but is hiring private firms to better understand who should be targeted first.

Privatised security and intelligence is now a natural part of Western war making. America simply cannot and will not launch missions without the backing of often unaccountable companies that complement its defence industry. Since the departure of US troops from Iraq, thousands of foreign contractors still populate the country, that doesn’t look set to change any time soon.

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

Joe Glenton fought in the British army in Afghanistan. No more. He explains why in the Guardian:

Recent attacks in Kabul confirm the occupation is falling to pieces. Claims about “decisive years” and “turned corners” are little more than cant. Instead for all their lack of air power, drones and high-tech equipment, the Taliban are gaining ascendancy.

The ability to attack up to seven different locations, to hold one for 20 hours, and to attack the fortified compounds of the occupiers and local supporters cannot sensibly be read as a sign that the insurgency is losing ground. Fighting in Afghanistan is seasonal and the Kabul attacks were the season’s opening game.

No insurgency can survive without broad support from the local population. The insurgent relies upon the people for intelligence, support, safety and more. The fact that insurgents now control great swaths of the country virtually unchallenged tells us the people have been lost, partially due to the occupiers’ bumbling efforts. The argument that Afghans are rejecting the Taliban falls flat.

Let’s not forget there is no mandate in law for aggression nor any mention of – or authority for – brutally occupying Afghanistan in the UN resolutions regarding it. Which is why I refused to serve a second tour in Afghanistan. I was sentenced to five months in military prison for it but other soldiers too have refused and are refusing to serve in Afghanistan – as is their right.

…

Those sending our young men and women to die or be mutilated for nothing have no authority to say what is honourable, courageous, heroic, or cowardly. You can volunteer, and you can un-volunteer. It’s in the contract. Then perhaps our cynical, diamante-poppy-wearing political class will stop using the last dead kid to justify the next dead kid – insisting we must fight on so they have not died in vain. By refusing, I clawed back some honour from an honourless war.

My following investigation is published by Lebanon’s Al Akhbar:

Since the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan has seen multiple private armies take control of the country’s security sector.

The private security compound was on the outskirts of Kabul. Situated along the road to Jalalabad on a notorious strip of highway, the landscape was industrial with sun-drenched low mountains on the horizon, shipping containers, dust swirling in the air, and mud across the ground.

Countless logistics companies are housed behind high concrete walls here. This industry has enjoyed a massive growth spurt since the US-led 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, despite the Hamid Karzai government reportedly taming it this year.

Al-Akhbar met the Western head of one of the country’s leading private security firms. While Indian Gurkhas trained outside, hoping to join the company’s ranks, the former British soldier explained that “we don’t call ourselves mercenaries” but are rather a reliable corporation that provides “static” security for foreign embassies, journalists, aid companies, hotels, and other key assets. The company opened in Afghanistan soon after the US invaded, and according to its head, it “survives off chaos.”

“From 2002 onward,” he said, “we worked with the Afghan government because the Ministry of Interior could not offer security to businesses or people and Western insurance companies insisted on the use of private military companies [PMCs]. Internationals felt they could not trust the Ministry of Interior when moving from province to province.”

Such logic is how the industry self-perpetuates even though Karzai has demanded for years that these companies be replaced with the Ministry of Interior’s Afghan Private Protection Force (APPF) through Presidential Decree 62.

According the head of the company, APPF implementation in 2012 has been “chaotic.” During our interview, he received a call from an American client who didn’t understand Karzai’s new PMC rules. “One Afghan is supposed to be in every PMC in the country, but this has never happened,” he said.

The stated rationale for the massive growth in this industry globally, especially in war zones since September 11, has been the complicated nature of modern conflict. The company head offers a simpler explanation. “The Americans, British, and foreign forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are not big enough to re-build nations, so PMCs are needed to fill the void. We protect contractors building prisons and schools. If the US had used more troops, we would not be necessary.”

The multiple justifications for the 2001 invasion today ring hollow as women’s rights and development in rural villagers are lacking. America has spent tens of billions of aid money in the country and yet working services are minimal.

There is little evidence of lasting infrastructure built by the West, except for a handful of newly built roads and buildings in central Kabul. The outskirts of the capital remain poor and under-developed and districts further away have largely missed investment, except for some power lines and smooth asphalt near Surobi town.

Apart from the escalating rate of civilian deaths, at the hands of both Taliban and Western forces, the rise of private security armies has defined the war. This reality has resulted in recurring contractor crimesagainst Afghan civilians where no one was held accountable. The record of Western security firms post 9/11 is filled with a troubling lack of justice for victims.

Al-Akhbar spoke to two Afghan men in a restaurant near the center of Kabul. Both had families who’d suffered privatized violence first hand. Tariq-U-Rahman and Fahim, both from Wardak Province, explained that they faced threats before being forced to move to Kabul by three elements: the Taliban, US forces, and private security companies.

Afghan firms have been hired and empowered by the US military to transport their gear across the country. The job is to guard the convoys but they regularly establish so-called “security perimeters” and in the process exchange fire with the Taliban, wantonly harming civilians. One of the worst offenders is Watan Risk Management, a leading company with close times to the Karzai family that pays off the Taliban not to attack US convoys.

Fahim said his cousin, a shopkeeper, was shot dead by a Watan private security guard one year ago for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Watan admitted fault, he said, and offered US$20,000 compensation but the family was still waiting for the money. The wife and children were now struggling despite the family financially assisting them.

Fahim, an unemployed engineer, said he wasn’t overly concerned about the proposed 2014 departure of Western forces because the Taliban, who he expects to take over, would “hopefully” at least bring some stability and peace to the country, as had happened before the 2001 invasion. He also hoped that private security companies, whose individuals never face justice for killing and maiming civilians, would become unnecessary because there would no longer be any US convoys to protect.

Fahim said that private security companies could be necessary in other countries with more stability but in Afghanistan they had only brought “misery and violence.” Neither believed the Karzai pledge to completely disband the firms because they are controlled by the “powerful” close to government. “They have too much to lose if the companies shut down,” Fahim said.

The current situation in Afghanistan confirms his scepticism. M.Ashraf Haidari, an American-educated senior Afghan official who is the Deputy Assistant National Security Adviser and Senior Policy and Oversight Adviser to Karzai, said that Afghan authorities were closing the “illegal and un-licenced” firms and said that “the new rules attempt to regulate the system.”

International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] spokesman Jimmie E. Cummings Jr. said the same thing, detailing the Karzai government’s Presidential Decree 62 that “mandated the dissolution of private security companies by the end of November 2010.”

In many cases this has happened. But a number of Western and local security corporations confirmed they are still operating and imagine doing so for years to come, finding ways around the new rules. “Many embassies, for example, simply won’t trust the Afghan Private Protection Force and will continue to rely on foreign security companies,” one said.

The supposed purpose of the industry is to undertake tasks the state’s military can’t or won’t do. But in a poor nation such as Afghanistan, resentment built quickly when it was discovered that the Afghan army was getting paid much less than the private militias.

Outsourcing security isn’t the only privatized resource in the country. Intelligence is increasingly collected by private companies and given to American, Australian, and British forces. This information often forms the basis of the notorious, American-led night-raids across the nation that have caused the death of countless civilians and bred deep anger toward the West.

An Afghan translator who had recently worked with the US on night-raids in Kandahar said that the vast majority of home invasions targeted the wrong people, inflaming anti-Western hatred. He was targeted himself by the Taliban in Kabul.

It was only years after the 2001 invasion, according to a leading Western analyst in Kabul, that the West understood that their policies, alongside a corrupt Afghan government, “were fuelling the insurgency.” This realization convinced the Western military establishment to hire private intelligence firms in order to better understand the people they were fighting. There was the “clean slate idea,” the analyst said. “Namely that you get rid of the Taliban and install new leaders. But they actually empowered old figures with bad records.”

The Western-head of a private information gathering organization said that his company’s work was increasingly common because “today’s wars aren’t between two equal sides.” He used Afghans across the country to prepare briefs about the latest political and security situations for Western embassies but he claimed this information “never serves military purposes.”

The darkest side of privatized intelligence is corporations gathering information about Afghans for use in Western counter-insurgency operations. Jeremy Kelly in the London Times published extracts in March of documents by US-based “consultancy company” AECOM. They had been hired by NATO to spy on mosques, universities, and the general community throughout the country. The work started just over one year ago.

There are files detailing conversations from March 2012. People complain about the Karzai government’s corruption and inefficiency, clerics in mosques demand Western forces leave immediately, personal matters are discussed including vocalized support for the insurgency, proposed marriages between the Taliban and local girls, and complaints about troubles when working in Iran.

The research comes from a range of districts and is separated between “supportive” and “non-supportive” individuals of the NATO mission.

One man in Jowzjān province said: “About 30 percent of our people believe that they should pick up weapons and start a jihad against ISAF soldiers. Another 70 percent believes that the financial situation is too weak and they do not have the ability to organize a fight against ISAF soldiers. Our country has been at war for the past three decades, and we are tired of war. We just want to live in peace.”

Another entry, from 14 March in the Shibirghan District, details an “overheard conversation between two Uzbek males between the ages of 40-45 at market.”

In the report one man said, “The other day I was riding on a bus when it became very windy. It seemed as if it was raining dust. People were saying that this could be a sign God’s wrath. This is happening to us because the Americans have burned the Quran, but we are calmly sitting idle. We should be rising up against the Americans for what they have done. We are being punished for doing nothing.” [A different] resident stated, “I do not know, but it might be possible.”

Such details appear mundane, but this is exactly the point. It is such seemingly insignificant comments that form the basis of Western “intelligence” against an enemy that continues to elude the most powerful military in the world.

These normal and daily conversations of local villagers form the “intelligence” behind US-led night-raids. Mistakes are routinely made. Innocent men are kidnapped. Many are killed. It is a failed counter-terrorism policy that is fuelling the insurgency.

People in Afghanistan believe the recent announcement that Afghan forces would now take the lead in night-raids was spin to show the Karzai government has sovereignty in its own country.

More disturbingly, the US military and its allies have no idea of the agendas of the Afghans giving them intelligence. Respected organizations such as The Afghanistan Analysts Network refuse to undertake commissioned work for clients, because they are worried their research may be co-opted for military means. As soon as the Taliban was toppled in 2001, Northern Alliance forces and their allies routinely sought payback from enemies, real and imagined. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune witnessed this trend as far back as November 2001.

That was then. Today, the US government realizes it will have to negotiate with the Taliban but is hiring private firms to better understand who should be targeted first. Being Taliban or related to Taliban members does not necessarily mean an individual is against the country’s positive future but the US too often sees all Taliban members or affiliates as the enemy.

Wikileaks has revealed countless names of innocent Afghans swept up in the invasion chaos. Their indefinite detention and torture at the hands of Afghan forces – the US still passes captured Afghan prisoners to Afghan-run jails with notorious records of abuse – led some of them to join the insurgency.

Most of the Western media coverage of Afghanistan remains focused on high-profile events such as the recent attack in the center of Kabul. While it is undoubtedly important in the context of Afghan security forces’ ability to assume full control by 2014, it only tells a small part of the picture.

Privatized security and intelligence is now a natural part of Western war making. America simply cannot and will not launch missions without the backing of often unaccountable companies that compliment its defense industry.

Since the departure of US troops from Iraq, thousands of foreign contractors still populate the country. Afghanistan will likely be no different after 2014. The lack of Congressional oversight or judicial review is deeply concerning and reflects an attitude of contempt toward the local laws of the occupied nation.

During Al-Akhbar’s visit to Afghanistan, in Kabul and surrounding districts the main message received was distrust of foreign forces, both fear and admiration of the Taliban, and loathing of Western and local private militias. The key lesson in Afghanistan is that invading, bombing, and empowering local warlords won’t bring either security for locals or safety for the West.

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

Just think about the ramifications of this first paragraph in a Washington Post story:

The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.

A brave first call. Julian Assange speaks to Hassan Nasrallah and doesn’t take the position, as so much of the corporate media, that he’s one of the world’s greatest terrorists (which he clearly is not). They discuss Syria, Assad, Israel, Palestine, religion, God, technology, Wikileaks and the US. Assange could be more forceful with his questioning but it’s an encouraging start. And frankly, Nasrallah hasn’t done a Western interview for years so it’s a real coup:

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 

It’s only terrorism if “they” do it. Here’s a classic case of the American system protecting officials who brazenly break laws and get away with it:

American intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI have won a court ruling allowing them to withhold evidence from British MPs about suspected UK involvement in “extraordinary rendition” – the secret arrests and alleged torture of terror suspects.

Next time you hear Western governments talking about human rights, remember this case. The British and American authorities routinely lie. It’s what power does. Stunning investigation by the UK Guardian:

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.

…

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.