Oil Truck Explosion Kills at Least 15 in Pakistan

The tanker was damaged when a bomb went off near a boys’ college in Landi Kotal in the tribal region of Khyber Agency. Abdul Nabi, a local government official, said that the people died when they gathered around the truck to siphon fuel and it exploded.

Two survivors were being treated for burns at the Landi Kotal Hospital.

Fuel prices in Pakistan, which are controlled by the government, have increased sharply in recent months, setting off protests and demonstrations across the country.

In a separate attack, 16 oil tankers were damaged Friday night in the nearby town of Torkham, at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, when a remote-controlled bomb exploded, Mr. Nabi said. No one was hurt. The tankers were idling at a parking lot, waiting for their turn to enter Afghanistan.

Also on Friday, a bomb aimed at a two-car convoy carrying American consular officials exploded in Peshawar. A Pakistani motorcyclist was killed, but no Americans died or were seriously wounded. Officials have been bracing for attacks on Americans or United States assets since Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan.

On Friday, American officials said files belonging to Bin Laden and captured in the Seal raid had discussed the idea of hijacking oil tankers and blowing them up at sea in the hopes of sending oil prices skyrocketing and rattling the world’s economy.

The bombings of the trucks follow a pattern in Pakistan, where Taliban insurgents and criminals attack vehicles carrying supplies for American and NATO troops. The supplies typically arrive in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi and travel overland to neighboring Afghanistan.

The Abdullah Azzam Brigade, a militant group affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for both the Friday and Saturday attacks.

On Saturday, the opposition politician Imran Khan was also hoping to disrupt the shipment of supplies to NATO troops by organizing a sit-in in Karachi. Mr. Khan, a former cricket player turned politician, said he was staging the sit-in to protest continuing drone attacks by the United States. He said he hoped to hold up the trucks until Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Khan has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the of the drone strikes, which he calls violations of the country’s sovereignty. The United States has used the strikes to kill militants, including those who use Pakistan as a base to attack NATO troops in Afghanistan. The drone campaign has become increasingly unpopular among Pakistan’s politicians.

An earlier sit-in organized by Mr. Khan’s political party Tehreek-e-Insaaf , or Justice Party, in Peshawar in April, drew only a few thousand people, contrary to the expectations of the organizers.

Jamal Siddqui, a spokesperson for the party in Karachi, said that by Saturday evening at least 10,000 people had gathered for the protest.?Mr. Siddqui said the local authorities had suspended the movement of NATO trucks from the city as a result.

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Gunmen on Motorcycles Kill Saudi Diplomat in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Saudi Arabian diplomat was killed on Monday in the volatile southern port city of Karachi, police officials said.

The diplomat, identified as Hassan M. al-Kahtani, was shot by gunmen riding two motorcycles who intercepted his vehicle after he left his home in an upscale neighborhood, the officials said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

“He was shot in the head and died on the spot,” said a police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Police officials said they were investigating motives and did not rule out the possibility that the killing might have been retribution for the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy Seal commandos in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, a few hours’ drive from Islamabad, the capital.

Saudi Arabia’s rulers have long expressed their antipathy toward Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader and plotter of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who came from a wealthy Saudi family.

Officials said the attack on the Saudi diplomat might also have been related to Saudi Arabia’s effort to suppress antigovernment protests in Bahrain. Two months ago Saudi Arabia deployed forces in Bahrain, its smaller neighbor, to help the Sunni-minority rulers there suppress demonstrations by members of the Shiite majority.

Last Wednesday, unidentified assailants threw firecrackers at the Saudi Consulate, but there were no injuries.

A Pakistani security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Saudi diplomat was an intelligence official.

“He was looking into Saudi dissidents who have found refuge in the city, and this is most probably why he was targeted,” the official said.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have traditionally been close allies, and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the political party that controls Karachi, described the killing as an effort to destabilize relations between the two.

Karachi, considered Pakistan’s financial and commercial hub, is a city torn by political and sectarian unrest.

Ikram Sehgal, a defense analyst based in Karachi, said the attack would not affect relations between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

He also said the killing underlined the fragile security situation there.

“There are several militant groups that are acting independently in the city,” Mr. Sehgal said. “There are a lot of soft targets.”

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Pakistan and NATO Forces Exchange Fire

The clash took place at Admi Kot Post in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan, an area that American officials have long regarded as a haven used by militants to attack coalition forces inside Afghanistan. NATO officials said they were looking into the incident, and could not immediately confirm whether the helicopters had indeed entered Pakistan’s airspace.

The exchange of fire between NATO and Pakistani forces appeared likely to worsen frictions between Pakistan and the United States. The Pakistani Army “lodged a strong protest and demanded a flag meeting,” the statement said, referring to a meeting between officials from Pakistan and NATO.

Last September, Pakistan shut down for more than a week the land route through Pakistan that NATO uses to supply its forces in Afghanistan, after two Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed in a similar border clash.

Tuesday’s clash came as Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, traveled to Beijing. Analysts said that visit was meant to signal to the United States that Pakistan saw China as an alternative source of security and economic aid.

On Monday, Senator John Kerry met with top civil and military leaders in Pakistan in an effort to smooth the fraying relations between the two countries in the wake of the American raid by forces that killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Parliament in a closed-door session last week urged the government to renew and revisit its terms of engagement with the United States. It also warned that it might sever supply lines to coalition forces in Afghanistan if there were further unilateral incursions.

Drone attacks, which are operated by the C.I.A., not by the NATO-led coalition force, are highly unpopular in Pakistan. Nationalist and right-wing Islamist political parties regularly denounce the use of drone attacks inside Pakistani territory. Government officials who in the past privately approved the use of drones have lately been joining the chorus of public criticism.

Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s leading spy organization, also maintains that it has stopped cooperating with the United States in choosing targets for drone attacks.

At the same time, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, has resisted American pressure to start a military operation in North Waziristan, a stronghold of the Haqqani network, whose militants cross into Afghanistan to battle American and NATO soldiers.

 

As Rift Deepens, Kerry Has a Warning for Pakistan

 

The United States has increased drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas in the past 10 days in an effort to exploit the uncertainty and disarray among militant ranks caused by Bin Laden’s death on May 2. The latest airstrikes, on Friday, occurred as Pakistan’s spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in a rare appearance before the nation’s Parliament, denounced the American raid as a “sting operation.”

Parliament then passed a resolution declaring that the drone strikes were a violation of sovereignty equivalent to the secret attack on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The lawmakers warned that Pakistan could cut the supply lines to American forces in Afghanistan if there were more such attacks. The resolution contained no condemnation of a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, who killed more than 80 Pakistani paramilitary cadets on Friday.

Pakistan stepped up its condemnations of the United States as Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime emissary to Pakistan in times of crisis, was preparing to land in Islamabad. He was arriving with a list of actions — and some offers from Washington to ease tensions — that he finalized in meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and other top American security officials.

A senior administration official said Saturday that the United States would try to use the threat of Congressional cuts to the $3 billion in annual American aid to Pakistan as leverage. Any evidence of Pakistan’s complicity in sheltering Bin Laden — culled from the hundreds of computer flash drives and documents recovered in the raid — could also be used, the official said. So far, no such evidence has been found.

“In the Congress, this is a make-or-break moment” for aid to Pakistan, Mr. Kerry said in an interview just before he left for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Kerry said he would tell Pakistan that there needed to be “a real demonstration of commitment” to fighting terrorist groups in the next few months. But he will also reassure Pakistani officials that they will be a central part of any political accord with the Taliban in Afghanistan, to ease their fears that India will take over large areas of Afghanistan as the United States pulls out.

The Obama administration has said nothing about the Pakistani government’s criticisms, in the hope that they are designed to alleviate public anger and the Pakistani military’s embarrassment that American forces attacked the Bin Laden compound without being detected. Mr. Donilon and other senior administration officials declined to be interviewed about the administration’s strategy.

The American reticence stems in part from the reality that such ultimatums have been sent before — most recently after the arrest of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency contractor who shot two Pakistanis during what he said was a robbery. Pakistan has repeatedly called the administration’s bluff and revealed the threats as hollow. The United States relies heavily on transit routes in Pakistan to supply American troops in Afghanistan, and any move to cut off aid would probably lead Pakistan to close the supply routes, as it has done during previous disputes.

Mr. Kerry is arriving at the moment of highest tension between the two countries since Pakistan, given little choice, formally broke with the Taliban and allied with the United States just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Kerry said both countries must make “fundamental choices” about their relationship.

“I have had some of these conversations with Pakistan before,” he said, “but never in the context of the world’s No. 1 terrorist being found 35 miles from the capital, next door to Pakistan’s West Point, and with the discovery he was fully, fully operational.”

 

At War: Pakistan Loses Another Journalist

Arshad Arbab/European Pressphoto AgencyNasrullah Afridi, a local journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan, was killed by a bomb planted in his vehicle.

“You better come to your senses.” This was the last threat received by the Pakistani journalist Nasrullah Afridi days before he was killed in a car bomb blast in Peshawar on May 10, his friend and colleague Sher Khan said in a telephone interview.

Pakistan has been listed as one of the deadliest countries for journalists by independent journalists’ associations, and there have been a number of uninvestigated deaths of journalists. However, the harshest and most frequent attacks have taken place in the northwestern region of the country, which includes Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Since the kidnapping and slaying of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, at least 15 other journalists have died in targeted killings in Pakistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mr. Afridi, 35, had been receiving threats since 2007; those threats eventually forced him to leave his home town, Bara, in Khyber Agency, a tribal area in northwest Pakistan. His house was even bombed with low-intensity explosives.

Mr. Afridi, like a number of other journalists from the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan, had to move his base to Peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There, he worked for Mashriq, an Urdu-language daily, and was a correspondent for the state-owned Pakistan Television. He was also president of the Bara Press Club.

“We thought it was safer for us to work from Peshawar,” said Mr. Khan, who was with Mr. Afridi the day before the bombing. That day, he said, Mr. Afridi had been buying wheelchairs for a school for special-needs children with money he had raised. The cause was close to Mr. Afridi’s heart, because three of his six children had disabilities.

Mr. Afridi was widely known to have been a been a target of Lashkar-e-Islam, a banned militant group headed by Mangal Bagh that is known to have ties with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Islam is one of several militant groups fighting for control of the Khyber Agency. The Pakistani military has had limited success in tamping down the fighting among these groups, and Mr. Mangal Bagh has not been captured.

Most of the journalists from the Khyber Agency live in the same building where they work. Mr. Afridi did not.

Mr. Khan said he heard a loud explosion four minutes after Mr. Afridi had called him to let him know that he was leaving early for home because he was tired. Mr. Khan and other journalists ran outside, thinking there had been a blast in the building, but saw Mr. Afridi’s car in flames. When the flames died down, they saw a charred body in the driver’s seat, unrecognizable even by those who had known him for years.

“One could not even tell if that body was of a human being,” Mr. Khan said, his voice breaking during the interview. Mr. Afridi’s associates and relatives decided not to show his body to the family. Mr. Afridi’s father, who caught a glimpse of it during the burial, has still not recovered from the shock. Mr. Afridi’s eldest son is 18, and there is no family member who can support his family now.

Mr. Afridi’s death, like other targeted killings in the region, has created a climate of fear among reporters and residents. “We are scared of our own shadow,” Mr. Khan said.

Rabia Mehmood is the I.W.M.F. Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow at the Center for International Studies at M.I.T., and is a correspondent for Express 24/7 in Lahore, Pakistan. Follow her on Twitter @Rabail26.

 

Questions of Motives in Bombing in Pakistan

Shortly after the attack early Friday, which was aimed at members of the Frontier Constabulary in the town of Charsadda, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility, saying it was retribution for the American raid on May 2 that killed Bin Laden in the small garrison city of Abbottabad, about 75 miles from the capital.

But the Pakistani Taliban have recently issued several statements claiming responsibility for attacks that they did not initiate, the police officials said, adding that they doubted that the suicide bombing was carried out by the group, or that it was in revenge for the American raid.

They said the attack was instead probably the work of a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban that has been fighting the Pakistani Army in the nearby tribal region of Mohmand, where the army has struggled for two years to subdue the insurgents, who are led by Umar Khalid.

Recently, the army opened what it called the third phase of an offensive, suffering heavy losses.

The insurgents in Mohmand have been able to force the Pakistani Army into a lengthy campaign by seeking refuge in sanctuaries across the border in Kunar Province in Afghanistan. NATO forces in Afghanistan have been helping Pakistan by going after the militants as they escape across the border.

Sikandar Hayat Khan Sherpao, a member of the provincial assembly of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, said the training facility that was attacked, at Shabqadar Fort, had been a frequent target of militants before. “Basically, the threat is from Mohmand Agency, where militants still have pockets and are active,” he said.

“I feel that this attack is not in retaliation to the Abbottabad incident,” he added. “Basically, in the last one and a half months, a new military operation has been started in Mohmand, as the army is going against militants. So this attack can be seen as a retaliation to the Mohmand operation.”

Bashir Bilour, a senior minister in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, told reporters that officials were withholding assessing blame for the deadly attack. “We don’t believe in directly blaming any country without any proof,” he said.

The bombing killed 82 cadets and wounded about 150 people, said Muhammad Akbar Hoti, the commandant of the Frontier Constabulary.

The death toll was expected to rise and could end up being the highest number of law enforcement officials killed in a terrorist attack in recent years, said Liaqat Khan, the police chief in nearby Peshawar. A second bomber may have taken part, he said.

The suicide bomber attacked as the paramilitary soldiers were about to return to their homes for a 10-day leave after six months of training, Mr. Khan said. The bomber was in a car outside the fort when he detonated the explosives about 6 a.m.

The death toll was so high because the men were told to wait for their transportation outside the gates, which provided the opportunity to attack them in a cluster, a provincial security official said.

“There are two occasions in one’s life to celebrate: wedding and going home on vacations at the end of six months of training,” said Mohammad Sardar, in his mid-20s, who was admitted to Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar with a head injury. “So we were all happy, celebrating the occasion, with bedrolls on our heads, thinking of home, when the first explosion occurred, followed by a second.”

The Frontier Constabulary forces who were the target of the suicide attack are not involved in the fighting in Mohmand. They are security guards at checkpoints in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, but their graduation, officials said, provided an accessible target for the militants to drive home their message.

The Frontier Constabulary, which dates from the 1800s, is run by the Pakistani police authorities and has about 70,000 paramilitary soldiers. In addition to patrolling checkpoints, the constabulary provides security at foreign embassies and consulates in major cities. For the sons of many poor families, landing a job in the constabulary is considered a prize.

 

U.S. Raises Pressure on Pakistan in Raid’s Wake

Both the adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and Mr. Obama, in separate taped interviews, were careful not to accuse the top leadership of Pakistan of knowledge of Bin Laden’s whereabouts in Abbottabad, a military town 35 miles from the country’s capital. They argued that the United States still regards Pakistan, a fragile nuclear-weapons state, as an essential partner in the American-led war on Islamic terrorism.

But in repeatedly describing the trove of data that a Navy Seal team seized after killing Bin Laden as large enough to fill a small college library, Mr. Donilon seemed to be warning the Pakistanis that the United States might soon have documentary evidence that could illuminate who, inside or outside their government, might have helped harbor Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, who had been the world’s most wanted terrorist.

The United States government is demanding to know whether, and to what extent, Pakistani government, intelligence or military officials were complicit in hiding Bin Laden. His widows could be critical to that line of inquiry because they might have information about the comings and goings of people who were aiding him.

“We have asked for access,” Mr. Donilon said on the CNN program “State of the Union,” “including three wives who they now have in custody from the compound, as well as additional materials that they took from the compound.”

The request had echoes of previous struggles with Islamabad, starting with the days right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Then, the United States insisted that Pakistan clearly choose sides and join the United States in fighting Al Qaeda, and Pakistan formally broke ties with the Taliban government, which was still in power in Afghanistan. But ever since, Washington has frequently lost out in its efforts to seek information about the loyalties and actions of top Pakistani officials.

Eight years ago, for example, the Bush administration demanded interviews with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the chief of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons laboratory, as the United States sought to understand who in the Pakistani military or intelligence apparatus had helped sell nuclear weapons technology and designs to Libya, North Korea and Iran. Pakistan has refused, perhaps because Mr. Khan, while seeking freedom from house arrest, briefly threatened to tell all.

As one American official said after Mr. Donilon spoke Sunday: “Our guess is that the wives knew just who was keeping Bin Laden alive for all these years.” He added later, “It’s the Khan case all over again.” He insisted on anonymity as the United States tries to ease Pakistan’s anger over Mr. Obama’s decision to conduct the raid without telling Pakistani officials in advance, or seeking their involvement.

The Pakistani government has said nothing about allowing interviews of the wives, who were among the handful of survivors of the raid. One wife was shot in the leg by commandos as she tried to protect Bin Laden moments before he was killed.

Pakistan has said it will conduct its own investigation, but American officials doubt it will be credible. For more than two years Pakistan has slow-walked investigations into the 2008 siege in Mumbai, India, by a terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, that is believed to have strong links to portions of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus. To the distress of Pakistani officials, a trial scheduled to start soon in Chicago is expected to reveal evidence about the role in that attack of an officer of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main military intelligence agency.

The sparring over the investigation about Bin Laden’s support structure threatens to go to the heart of what top American intelligence officials now routinely call the “double game” played by Pakistan. Mr. Obama alluded to that on “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening, saying, “We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan.”

Mr. Obama added: “But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

The debate inside the administration over how hard to press Pakistan for answers — and whether to make public any evidence the United States possesses — has revived the question of whether it is time to dispense with, or radically amend, the unspoken bargain between Islamabad and Washington.

For years, the terms of that deal were simple: for the sake of getting Pakistani assistance in hunting down Qaeda leaders, Washington funneled billions of dollars to the Pakistani military. And it said next to nothing about its fears that fundamentalists were burrowed in Pakistan’s huge nuclear complex, or about the country’s race to expand its arsenal, one of the fastest-growing in the world, a buildup that American officials fear could put more nuclear material at risk of falling into the hands of terrorists.

But as Mr. Donilon argued implicitly on Sunday, an alternative to that bargain could be even worse. Severing Pakistan’s funds could end the cooperation on counterterrorism — which still works fairly well in some of the tribal areas — and it would mean losing virtually all visibility into the worrisome nuclear arsenal.

“We have had difficulty with Pakistan, as I said, but we’ve also had to work very closely with Pakistan in our counterterror efforts,” Mr. Donilon said. “More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than in any place in the world.”

As Leonard S. Spector, the director of the Washington office of the Monterey Institute’s nonproliferation center, said, “It is hard to abandon Pakistan because of the danger of the nuclear program and the need for help in counterterrorism.”

On Thursday, the Pakistani chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, threatened a rethinking of all intelligence and military cooperation with the United States if it ever again mounted an operation similar to the Bin Laden raid. (Mr. Donilon refused Sunday to rule out a repeat.)

But the military council, reacting to widespread fears in Pakistan that a similar American commando operation could seize Pakistan’s arsenal of roughly 100 nuclear weapons, told Pakistani reporters that the country’s weapons and materials were “well protected” and that “an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place,” according to The Frontier Post, a Pakistani newspaper.

 

Probing Link to Bin Laden, U.S. Tells Pakistan to Name Agents

The officials provided new details of a tense discussion between Pakistani officials and an American envoy who traveled to Pakistan on Monday, as well as the growing suspicion among United States intelligence and diplomatic officials that someone in Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden’s location, and helped shield him.

Obama administration officials have stopped short of accusing the Pakistani government — either privately or publicly — of complicity in the hiding of Bin Laden in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One senior administration official privately acknowledged that the administration sees its relationship with Pakistan as too crucial to risk a wholesale break, even if it turned out that past or present Pakistani intelligence officials did know about Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Still, this official and others expressed deep frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden. In particular, American officials have demanded information on what is known as the ISI’s S directorate, which has worked closely with militants since the days of the fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

“It’s hard to believe that Kayani and Pasha actually knew that Bin Laden was there,” a senior administration official said, referring to Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha. But, added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, “there are degrees of knowing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that someone close to Pasha knew.”

Already, Pakistani news outlets have been speculating that General Pasha, one of the most powerful figures in Pakistan, may step down as a consequence of the Bin Laden operation.

The increasing tensions between the United States and Pakistan — whose proximity to Afghanistan makes it almost a necessary ally in the American and allied war there — came as Al Qaeda itself acknowledged on Friday the death of its leader. The group did so while vowing revenge on the United States and its allies.

Pakistani investigators involved in piecing together Bin Laden’s life during the past nine years said this week that he had been living in Pakistan’s urban centers longer than previously believed.

Two Pakistani officials with knowledge of the continuing Pakistani investigation say that Bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, one of three wives now in Pakistani custody since the raid on Monday, told investigators that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed, Bin Laden had lived with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway.

In retrospect, one of the officials said, this means that Bin Laden left Pakistan’s rugged tribal region sometime in 2003 and had been living in northern urban regions since then. American and Pakistani officials had thought for years that ever since Bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora in Afghanistan, he had been hiding in the tribal regions straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

A former Pakistani official noted that Abbottabad, the site of the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point military academy, is crawling with security guards and military officials who established a secure cordon around the town, raising questions of how the officials could not know there was a suspicious compound in their midst.

“If he was there since 2005, that is too long a time for local police and intelligence not to know,” said Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani official now teaching at Columbia University.

Mr. Abbas said there was a tight net of security surrounding Abbottabad because Pakistani officials were concerned about terrorist attacks on sensitive military installations in the area.

Art Keller, a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who worked on the hunt for Bin Laden from a compound in the Waziristan region of Pakistan in 2006, said the Qaeda founder’s choice of the garrison town of Abbottabad as a refuge in 2005 raised serious questions. Bin Laden certainly knew of the concentration of military institutions, officers and retirees in the town — including some from the ISI’s S directorate, Mr. Keller said. And because the military has also been a target of militant attacks in recent years, the town has a higher level of security awareness, checkpoints and street surveillance than others.

If Bin Laden wanted to relocate in a populated area of Pakistan to avoid missiles fired from American drones, Mr. Keller said, he had many choices. So Mr. Keller questioned why Bin Laden would live in Abbottabad, unless he had some assurance of protection or patronage from military or intelligence officers. “At best, it was willful blindness on the part of the ISI,” Mr. Keller said. “Willful blindness is a survival mechanism in Pakistan.”

The trove of information taken by the commandos from the compound occupied by Bin Laden may answer some of these questions, and perhaps even solve the puzzle of where he has been in recent years.

A senior law enforcement official said Friday that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had rapidly assembled small armies of analysts, technical experts and translators to pore over about 100 thumb drives, DVDs and computer disks, along with 10 computer hard drives, 5 computers and assorted cellphones. Analysts are also sifting through piles of paper documents in the house, many of which are in Arabic and other languages that need to be translated.

In Washington and New York alone, several hundred analysts, technical experts and other specialists are working round the clock to review the trove of information. “It’s all hands on deck,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

Technical specialists are recovering phone numbers from several cellphones recovered at the compound. The experts need to distinguish foreign telephone contacts from any numbers in the United States, which undergo a separate legal review, the official said.

“We’re also looking through notes, letters, e-mails and other communications,” the official said. “We’re looking at who owns the e-mails and what linkages there are to those people.” The official said that the initial analysis would involve searching for information about specific threats or plots, or potential terrorists sent to the United States or Europe, and that the F.B.I. was pursuing a small number of leads from the information reviewed so far.

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan. Eric Schmitt, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

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Pakistan Sees Shared Intelligence Lapse

The maneuvering came three days after President Obama announced that Bin Laden had been killed in an American commando raid on a compound in Abbottabad, just 35 miles from the Pakistani capital — an event that prompted Western leaders, including senior officials in France and Britain, to say Pakistan had to explain why it said it had not been aware of the presence of the leader of Al Qaeda.

Shortly before he met with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on Wednesday during a long-scheduled visit here, Mr. Gilani was asked the same question by reporters and said, “There is an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone.”

He said Pakistan shared intelligence “with the rest of the world, including the United States,” so if there were what he called lapses in Pakistan “that means lapses from the whole world.”

After the meeting, Mr. Gilani that he did not believe the United States Congress would show its displeasure with Pakistan by cutting aid to his nuclear-armed nation and he said the West would continue to support Pakistan as a “responsible nation.”

“We are working together” against terrorism, he said.

Mr. Gilani’s trip to France is supposed to encourage French investment in his country, despite the momentous events that culminated in Bin Laden’s killing.

“Today, through your forum, I want to convince the world that instead of giving negative messages for Pakistan, rather we should send positive messages to Pakistan,” Mr. Gilani told a French employers’ group, according to Reuters. “We should have positive messages because no one, no single nation, alone can fight terrorism. Pakistan is a part of the solution and not a part of the problem.”

In recent days both the British prime minister, David Cameron, and the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, have raised questions about how Bin Laden could have lived undetected so close to the Pakistani capital while he was the most wanted man in the United States — supposedly Pakistan’s ally in combating terrorism.

But both European leaders concluded that, as Mr. Juppé put it, Pakistan is such an important player in the region, specifically in determining the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, that “we have every interest in keeping good relations with it.”

“There will be no solution in Afghanistan, no long-lasting political solution, if we do not manage to work in trust with Pakistan,” Mr. Juppé said.

As Mr. Gilani visited Paris, another senior Pakistani official, Salman Bashir, told the BBC that “Pakistan has played a pivotal role” in the hunt for Bin Laden and that it had even drawn the attention of American intelligence agencies in 2009 to suspicions about the compound where Bin Laden was killed.

But he stopped shorting of saying Pakistan’s own intelligence agents had known Bin Laden was living there, arguing that it took the superior resources of the Central Intelligence Agency to make that discovery.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said the “intelligence flow indicating some foreigners in the surroundings of Abbottabad, continued till mid-April 2011.”

“It is important to highlight that taking advantage of much superior technological assets, the C.I.A. exploited the intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden,” the statement said.

Pakistani officials have been angered by a widely reported assertion by the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, that Washington did not share advance knowledge of the raid with Pakistan because it might have leaked, allowing Bin Laden to escape.

Romain Parlier contributed reporting.

 

Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers

John O. Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were many questions about how the sprawling compound “was able to be there for so many years with Bin Laden resident there and it didn’t come to the attention of the local authorities.”

“We need to understand what sort of support network that Bin Laden might have had in place,” Mr. Brennan said during an interview with ABC on Tuesday.

The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back American aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.

Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A. has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.

On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what American officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said.

Officials in Washington said they hoped to learn far more about the network that Bin Laden tapped for support by examining the trove of computer files and documents that members of the Navy Seals grabbed during Monday’s raid.

Top Pakistani officials have vehemently denied that Islamabad tried to harbor Bin Laden, and American officials said that at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with Bin Laden.

Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top American officials said it was difficult to believe that Bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where Bin Laden was hiding, but said the government had much to answer for.

“If they didn’t know, why didn’t they know? Why didn’t they pay more attention to it? Was it just benign indifference, or was it indifference with a motive,” she said.

A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, helped Bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the successful American raid was an international humiliation for the agency.

“I’m not denying the possibility,” the official said, referring to the ISI sheltering Bin Laden. “At worst, it’s that. At best, it’s total incompetence.”

He said he hoped the raid would lead Pakistanis — particularly military and ISI leaders — to recognize the deep credibility problem their county now faces internationally.

In his meetings in Islamabad, Mr. Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.

In public, Mr. Grossman was more diplomatic, telling reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday that the United States was committed to its alliance with Pakistan and that Pakistan was “determined to curb terrorism.”

A senior Pakistani general on Tuesday repeated his government’s formal denials that the military or the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s location. Instead, he acknowledged a major intelligence lapse by the Pakistani police and security forces.

“To me, it’s a big embarrassment that the bastard was in this compound near the academy,” said the Pakistani officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, the U.S. had better intelligence than we did about what was inside that compound.”

The general said Pakistan and the United States had cooperated in other counterterrorism operations in the Abbottabad area in recent weeks, notably a C.I.A. tip that led to Pakistan’s recent arrest of Umar Patek, one of the main Indonesian suspects in the 2002 Bali bombing.

The Pakistani government statement went further, saying that the ISI had “been sharing information with C.I.A. and other friendly intelligence agencies” about the Bin Laden compound since 2009.

Several American officials said they were puzzled about the statement, pointing out that the C.I.A. did not know about the compound until last August.

The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move.

? “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship, and I think we need to use this moment to strengthen the ties between our two countries,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan.”

? Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States. “They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,” he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.” ?

In Brussels on Tuesday, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, spoke about Pakistan at a closed meeting of ambassadors to NATO. According to people present for his presentation, which was based on a December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan, Mr. Joeck said American officials had little expectation that the Pakistani government would mount a serious campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda or Taliban safe havens in the most contested border areas of the country.

“He said there were simply too many ongoing suspicions of the U.S.,” said one foreign official.?

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt from Washington; David E. Sanger from Brussels; and David Rohde from New York.

 

India Sees New Reason to Distrust Pakistan

Many Indian officials, who have long accused Pakistan of providing shelter to terrorist groups, felt vindicated by the discovery of Bin Laden in the town of Abbottabad, an hour’s drive north of the capital and home to a large military base.

Now these officials are repeating their demands that the Pakistani government arrest and prosecute all the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, an assault carried out by militants trained in Pakistan who killed more than 160 people.

“We believe that the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack, including the controllers and handlers of the terrorists who actually carried out the attack, continue to be sheltered in Pakistan,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement on Monday.

In recent months, India and Pakistan have made modest progress in reviving a relationship that has been largely frozen since the Mumbai attacks. In February, the foreign secretaries of both nations met on the sidelines of a regional conference in Bhutan.

Last month, Mr. Singh sat with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan during a cricket match between the countries. Mr. Singh had also been considering a possible visit to Pakistan later this year.

“Whether he will go now remains to be seen,” said Salman Haidar, a former Indian foreign secretary. “Certainly, this doesn’t help him.”

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed neighbors that have fought three wars and continue to have a litany of disputes, including deep disagreement over the fate of Kashmir. India’s political establishment is deeply distrustful of Pakistan, especially the Pakistani military, and Mr. Singh has been criticized at home for his persistent efforts to engage Pakistan.

Gopalapuram Parthasarathy, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said Bin Laden’s location inside Pakistan vindicated the Indian belief that Pakistani military and intelligence officials are knowingly sheltering terrorists.

“It is now obvious that at least from 2005, he has been living comfortably in the middle of a Pakistani garrison town, surrounded by the Pakistani military,” said Mr. Parthasarathy, who has been critical of Mr. Singh. “Nobody would believe that the Pakistan military would not have known he was there.”

Similar sentiments were common in India’s news media on Tuesday, and some analysts speculated that domestic pressure would mount on the prime minister to take a harder line on Pakistan.

In his own short statement, Mr. Singh refrained from taking the same tough stance against Pakistan as that of his home minister. He welcomed Bin Laden’s death as “a significant step forward” and called on Pakistan to take steps against groups that harmed innocent civilians.

Mr. Haidar, who has supported the efforts at dialogue, said of Mr. Singh, “He hasn’t really rubbed this in their faces, the fact that they have been caught with their pants down.”

Further, Mr. Haidar said: “My own personal view is we are going too slow and we needed a jolt. Unfortunately, the jolt has come in the opposite direction. It makes life more difficult for Dr. Manmohan Singh.”

He added, “But I don’t think we’re at a full stop.”

 

Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers

 

John O. Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were many questions about how the sprawling compound “was able to be there for so many years with Bin Laden resident there and it didn’t come to the attention of the local authorities.”

“We need to understand what sort of support network that Bin Laden might have had in place,” Mr. Brennan said during an interview with ABC on Tuesday.

The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back American aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.

Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A. has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.

On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what American officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said.

Officials in Washington said they hoped to learn far more about the network that Bin Laden tapped for support by examining the trove of computer files and documents that members of the Navy Seals grabbed during Monday’s raid.

Top Pakistani officials have vehemently denied that Islamabad tried to harbor Bin Laden, and American officials said that at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with Bin Laden.

Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top American officials said it was difficult to believe that Bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where Bin Laden was hiding, but said the government had much to answer for.

“If they didn’t know, why didn’t they know? Why didn’t they pay more attention to it? Was it just benign indifference, or was it indifference with a motive,” she said.

A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, helped Bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the successful American raid was an international humiliation for the agency.

“I’m not denying the possibility,” the official said, referring to the ISI sheltering Bin Laden. “At worst, it’s that. At best, it’s total incompetence.”

He said he hoped the raid would lead Pakistanis — particularly military and ISI leaders — to recognize the deep credibility problem their county now faces internationally.

In his meetings in Islamabad, Mr. Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.

In public, Mr. Grossman was more diplomatic, telling reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday that the United States was committed to its alliance with Pakistan and that Pakistan was “determined to curb terrorism.”

A senior Pakistani general on Tuesday repeated his government’s formal denials that the military or the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s location. Instead, he acknowledged a major intelligence lapse by the Pakistani police and security forces.

“To me, it’s a big embarrassment that the bastard was in this compound near the academy,” said the Pakistani officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, the U.S. had better intelligence than we did about what was inside that compound.”

The general said Pakistan and the United States had cooperated in other counterterrorism operations in the Abbottabad area in recent weeks, notably a C.I.A. tip that led to Pakistan’s recent arrest of Umar Patek, one of the main Indonesian suspects in the 2002 Bali bombing.

The Pakistani government statement went further, saying that the ISI had “been sharing information with C.I.A. and other friendly intelligence agencies” about the Bin Laden compound since 2009.

Several American officials said they were puzzled about the statement, pointing out that the C.I.A. did not know about the compound until last August.

The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.

Speaker John A. Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move.

? “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship, and I think we need to use this moment to strengthen the ties between our two countries,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan.”

? Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States. “They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,” he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.” ?

In Brussels on Tuesday, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, spoke about Pakistan at a closed meeting of ambassadors to NATO. According to people present for his presentation, which was based on a December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan, Mr. Joeck said American officials had little expectation that the Pakistani government would mount a serious campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda or Taliban safe havens in the most contested border areas of the country.

“He said there were simply too many ongoing suspicions of the U.S.,” said one foreign official.?

Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt from Washington; David E. Sanger from Brussels; and David Rohde from New York.

 

Move to C.I.A. Puts Petraeus in Conflict With Pakistan

Pakistani and American officials said that General Petraeus’s selection could further inflame relations between the two nations, which are already at one of their lowest points, with recriminations over myriad issues aired publicly like never before.

The usually secretive leader of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has made little secret of his distaste for General Petraeus, calling him a political general. General Petraeus has privately expressed outrage at what American officials say is the Pakistani main spy agency’s most blatant support yet for fighters based in Pakistan who are carrying out attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

Officials on both sides say they expect the two nations’ relationship to become increasingly adversarial as they maneuver the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan and the United States have deep — and conflicting — security interests.

Repairing the frayed ties between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s primary spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, will be difficult, American officials say. “In its current form, the relationship is almost unworkable,” said Dennis C. Blair, a former American director of national intelligence. “There has to be a major restructuring. The ISI jams the C.I.A. all it wants and pays no penalties.”

One top adviser to General Petraeus sought to play down the animosity with Pakistani officials, noting that the general had regularly met with the Pakistanis for nearly three years, most recently on Monday. Still, the adviser acknowledged that with General Petraeus leading the C.I.A., “the pressure may be more strategic, deliberate and focused — to the extent that it can be.”

A Pakistani official described the mounting tensions as a game of “brinkmanship,” with both Adm. Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been the Obama administration’s point man on Pakistan policy, and General Kayani growing impatient because they have little to show for the many hours they have invested during more than two dozen visits over the past three years.

Admiral Mullen surprised Pakistani officials by publicly accusing the ISI of sheltering fighters from the Haqqani network, a Taliban ally that has long served as a proxy for Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment in Afghanistan. American commanders in eastern Afghanistan say they have killed or captured more than 5,000 militants in the past year, but fighters continue to pour across the border from sanctuaries in Pakistan to Paktia, Khost and Paktika Provinces in Afghanistan.

In a private meeting here in Islamabad last week, Admiral Mullen told General Kayani that the C.I.A. would not reduce the drone strikes until Pakistan launched a military operation against the Haqqani network in Pakistan’s tribal areas, an American official said, pleas that the admiral has been making for the past two years with nothing to show for them.

Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency are increasingly embarrassed by the United States’ drone campaign, which they publicly condemn but quietly allow. They have asked the C.I.A. to remove its personnel from Shamsi air base, about 200 miles southwest of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, where some of the drones are based, a senior American official said.

The withdrawal has not occurred but is expected soon, the official said. The drone attacks would then be flown out of Afghanistan, where some of them are already based, the official said.

There have also been sharp disagreements over a proposed code of conduct that would define what American soldiers and intelligence agents can do in Pakistani territory, a Pakistani official said. The Pakistanis have, for now, dropped the idea of such an accord, fearing that the Americans are looking for “legal cover” for intelligence operatives like Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor who killed two Pakistanis in January, a Pakistani official said.

“The relationship between the two countries is very tense right now,” said Representative William M. Thornberry of Texas, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, who visited Pakistan last week. “And the Pakistan government fuels the anti-American public opinion to increase pressure on us.”

Newly disclosed documents obtained by WikiLeaks have also stoked tensions. One of them, from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lists the ISI along with numerous militant groups as allies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, an indication of how deep American suspicions run when it comes to Pakistani intelligence. The document is undated but appears to be from 2007 or 2008.

Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Scott Shane from Washington.

 

Move to C.I.A. Puts Petraeus in Conflict With Pakistan

Pakistani and American officials said that General Petraeus’s selection could further inflame relations between the two nations, which are already at one of their lowest points, with recriminations over myriad issues aired publicly like never before.

The usually secretive leader of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has made little secret of his distaste for General Petraeus, calling him a political general. General Petraeus has privately expressed outrage at what American officials say is the Pakistani main spy agency’s most blatant support yet for fighters based in Pakistan who are carrying out attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

Officials on both sides say they expect the two nations’ relationship to become increasingly adversarial as they maneuver the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan and the United States have deep — and conflicting — security interests.

Repairing the frayed ties between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s primary spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, will be difficult, American officials say. “In its current form, the relationship is almost unworkable,” said Dennis C. Blair, a former American director of national intelligence. “There has to be a major restructuring. The ISI jams the C.I.A. all it wants and pays no penalties.”

One top adviser to General Petraeus sought to play down the animosity with Pakistani officials, noting that the general had regularly met with the Pakistanis for nearly three years, most recently on Monday. Still, the adviser acknowledged that with General Petraeus leading the C.I.A., “the pressure may be more strategic, deliberate and focused — to the extent that it can be.”

A Pakistani official described the mounting tensions as a game of “brinkmanship,” with both Adm. Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been the Obama administration’s point man on Pakistan policy, and General Kayani growing impatient because they have little to show for the many hours they have invested during more than two dozen visits over the past three years.

Admiral Mullen surprised Pakistani officials by publicly accusing the ISI of sheltering fighters from the Haqqani network, a Taliban ally that has long served as a proxy for Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment in Afghanistan. American commanders in eastern Afghanistan say they have killed or captured more than 5,000 militants in the past year, but fighters continue to pour across the border from sanctuaries in Pakistan to Paktia, Khost and Paktika Provinces in Afghanistan.

In a private meeting here in Islamabad last week, Admiral Mullen told General Kayani that the C.I.A. would not reduce the drone strikes until Pakistan launched a military operation against the Haqqani network in Pakistan’s tribal areas, an American official said, pleas that the admiral has been making for the past two years with nothing to show for them.

Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency are increasingly embarrassed by the United States’ drone campaign, which they publicly condemn but quietly allow. They have asked the C.I.A. to remove its personnel from Shamsi air base, about 200 miles southwest of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, where some of the drones are based, a senior American official said.

The withdrawal has not occurred but is expected soon, the official said. The drone attacks would then be flown out of Afghanistan, where some of them are already based, the official said.

There have also been sharp disagreements over a proposed code of conduct that would define what American soldiers and intelligence agents can do in Pakistani territory, a Pakistani official said. The Pakistanis have, for now, dropped the idea of such an accord, fearing that the Americans are looking for “legal cover” for intelligence operatives like Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor who killed two Pakistanis in January, a Pakistani official said.

“The relationship between the two countries is very tense right now,” said Representative William M. Thornberry of Texas, a senior Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, who visited Pakistan last week. “And the Pakistan government fuels the anti-American public opinion to increase pressure on us.”

Newly disclosed documents obtained by WikiLeaks have also stoked tensions. One of them, from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lists the ISI along with numerous militant groups as allies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, an indication of how deep American suspicions run when it comes to Pakistani intelligence. The document is undated but appears to be from 2007 or 2008.

Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar,

Deadly Drone Strike by U.S. May Fuel Anger in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An American drone attack killed 23 people in North Waziristan on Friday, Pakistani military officials said, in a strike against militants that appeared to signify unyielding pressure by the United States on Pakistan’s military amid increasing opposition to such strikes.

The strike came a day after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and asked that Pakistan do more to fight militants who use North Waziristan as a base from which to attack United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The assault was the second show of the United States’ determination to continue drone attacks since the head of Pakistan’s spy agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, met this month in Washington with Director Leon E. Panetta of the Central Intelligence Agency to request a halt to the strikes.

Friday’s attack could further fuel anti-drone sentiment among the Pakistani public. A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed.

The attack singled out forces of a militant commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, whose loyalists cross the border into Afghanistan to fight American and NATO soldiers, the government official said.

Mr. Bahadur operates under a peace accord with the Pakistani Army that ensures that militants under his control do not attack Pakistani soldiers but concentrate only on allied soldiers.

Those killed Friday were gathered in Spinwam, an area close to Mir Ali in North Waziristan that had become a hub for militants in the past several months, the official said.

In the increasing public war of nerves between the American and Pakistani armies, Pakistan’s government is allowing a planned anti-NATO protest to go ahead in Peshawar this weekend. A political leader, Imran Khan, has called on protesters to stage a sit-in on Saturday to block trucks carrying NATO supplies for the war in Afghanistan. The trucks travel through Peshawar from the seaport of Karachi to Torkham, the gateway to Afghanistan.

The drone strike on Friday came after Admiral Mullen delivered an unusually harsh message during his visit here, saying publicly that Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, directly supported and abetted the Haqqani network of militants in North Waziristan. The network’s militants are responsible for many of the American casualties in Afghanistan, American commanders say.

The United States has long held that the Haqqani network was supported by the Pakistani spy agency, but it rarely says so publicly.

In a separate episode, between the Pakistani military and the Taliban, 16 soldiers from the Pakistani Frontier Corps were killed Thursday when their checkpoint was overrun by 150 militants near the Afghanistan border, a Pakistani security official said.

The battle continued for close to 12 hours at Kharkai in the northern district of Dir in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, formerly North-West Frontier Province. Two officers sent to reinforce the troops were killed in an ambush, the official said.

The attack by the militants on Pakistani soldiers came as the army embarked on a renewed assault in Mohmand, part of the tribal areas that have proved difficult for the Pakistani Army to hold.

In a report to Congress this month, the Obama administration complained that the Pakistani Army had “no clear path” toward defeating the insurgency inside Pakistan, and cited the failed efforts to eradicate the militants from Mohmand as an illustration. The army “was failing for the third time in two years” to clear militants from Mohmand, the report said.

The 150 militants who carried out the attack on Thursday appeared to have fled the army assault to Afghanistan and then re-entered Pakistan to strike at the soldiers.

General Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani military, visited Mohmand on Thursday for the second stage of a new assault focused on the Suran, a narrow valley on the border with Afghanistan.

In the last few months, American and NATO forces on the other side of the border of Mohmand have helped Pakistan to attack militants as they escaped into Afghanistan, the Pakistani security official said. But the Pakistani militants who attacked in Dir on Thursday appeared to have escaped before the assault on the Suran began and were allowed to re-enter Pakistan by elements in the Afghan Army who were assisting them, the official said.

Jane Perlez reported from Islamabad, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

 

News Analysis: U.S. Relations With Pakistan Falter in Rift Over Drone Strikes

The rupture over Pakistan’s demands that the Americans end drone strikes — which the Obama administration rejected — and scale back their intelligence presence within Pakistan exposed the tentative nature of the alliance forged after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And it is increasingly apparent that the two countries have differing, even irreconcilable, aims in Afghanistan.

With the Afghan endgame looming, suspicion is overwhelming faint cooperation between the United States and Pakistan, as each side seeks to secure its interests, increase its leverage to obtain them, and even cut out the other if need be, American and Pakistani officials say.

No one in Pakistan or in Washington now speaks of returning to the strategic alliance made by President George W. Bush and Gen. Pervez Musharraf immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the primary goal was to operate joint intelligence efforts to capture operatives of Al Qaeda. Military officials from both sides say that arrangement was never bound to be a longstanding affair.

“There was never a level of trust,” said a former American military official who served in a senior position in Pakistan. “I’m convinced now they don’t want our help.”

The American official did not want to be identified while discussing the delicate nature of a relationship that, whatever its failings, both nations are reluctant to jettison completely.

But politicians on both sides are disappointed with the results of billions of dollars in American military and civilian assistance since 2001, and the Obama administration acknowledged to Congress in a report this month that the results of the spending fell short of expectations.

In any case, the money has done little to pave over the accumulating strategic differences between the two nations.

Broadly, the Americans seek a strong and relatively centralized Afghan government commanding a large army that can control its territory. Almost all those ends are objectionable to Pakistan, which while it calls for a stable Afghanistan, prefers a more loosely governed neighbor where it can influence events, if need be, through Taliban proxies.

The particular differences revolve around which Taliban factions should be included in any settlement; the role of India, an ally of the United States but the enemy of Pakistan; and the size of the new Afghan Army, which the Americans want big and the Pakistanis want small.

The situation is further complicated, American and Pakistani officials said, by discord within the Obama administration over how the United States should withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and what role, if any, Pakistan should play in the exit.

The overall commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is determined to batter the Taliban as much as possible, a policy that the Pakistanis disagree with, both sides say. Pakistan prefers that the State Department tilt toward reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Even within the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who has met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Afshaq Parvez Kayani, on more than two dozen occasions, has more tolerance for the Pakistani point of view than does General Petraeus, a senior American official said. With his position in Washington, Admiral Mullen could still prevail on persevering with Pakistan.

These American nuances are well known at the Pakistani Army headquarters in Rawalpindi, where General Petraeus is referred to as Mr. Petraeus — a calculated omission of his military title as a way to mock his perceived political ambitions, according to a recent visitor to the headquarters.

For months, Pakistan’s diplomats and military officials have complained that they were being kept in the dark by the Obama administration’s maneuvering, no matter how preliminary, for a negotiated solution in Afghanistan.

“There is no transparency; they are not telling us who they are talking to,” a Pakistani government official said. Another official, in Pakistan’s security apparatus, said: “We don’t know what the Americans’ endgame is in Afghanistan.”

As their nervousness about American intentions have increased in recent months, the Pakistanis have sought to improve their leverage — threatening C.I.A. operations in Pakistan, cracking down on Taliban leaders to coerce their cooperation, and trying to befriend President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who has also felt on the outs with Washington.

In the latest iteration of this new Pakistani-Afghan relationship, General Kayani and the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, accompanied Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on a visit to Kabul on Saturday, the most public of a number of visits to Afghanistan by General Kayani in the past year.

American diplomats in Islamabad and Kabul declined to comment on the Pakistani visit to Afghanistan, and appeared to know little about the intention of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission unveiled with considerable fanfare by the two sides in Kabul as a vehicle to end the war.

Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

 

Karzai: Afghanistan, Pakistan to Boost Taliban Peace Efforts

 VOA News ?April 16, 2011

Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, left, speaks with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai during a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 16, 2011

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani have agreed to boost joint efforts to make peace with the Taliban.

Gilani flew Saturday to the Afghan capital, Kabul, to hold talks with President Karzai. ?

At a news conference after their meeting, Karzai said Pakistan has upgraded a joint Afghan-Pakistan peace commission to the highest government level. He said the Pakistani prime minister is now leading the Pakistani side of the commission along with Pakistan's chief of army staff and the nation's intelligence chief. President Karzai indicated Afghanistan would enact a similar upgrade.

The commission is aimed at working out logistics for negotiations with the Taliban. Gilani said Pakistan supports an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process and said Kabul must set the parameters for any talks. He said imposing conditions or demands on the reconciliation process at this stage is not helpful.

In addition to peace efforts, trade issues and improving security were among the topics the two leaders were scheduled to discuss.

The talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan come at a time when U.S. relations with both nations are strained.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

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Watch Todd Grosshan's report - "What is Radioactivity?"

 

Pakistan militants 'expand' reach

 13 April 2011 Last updated at 10:47 ET  Adm Willard said that India remained LeT's main target A senior US general has expressed concern over the "expanding reach" of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group.

Admiral Robert Willard, head of the Pacific Command, told a Senate hearing that the group was no longer solely focused on India or South Asia.

LeT is one of the largest and best-funded militant groups in the region.

It is blamed for the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai (Bombay), in which gunmen killed more than 165 people.

Adm Willard said the group had declared a jihad (holy war) on America and had carried out attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, although India continued to be its main target.

He said that the US had evidence of LeT's presence in Europe, the broader Asia-Pacific region and even in Canada and the US itself.

"Unquestionably they have spread their influence internationally and are no longer solely focused in South Asia and on India," Adm Willard told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He said that the relationship of the Pakistani government to LeT "is a very sensitive one".

The US was working with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India to help build their capacities to contain the militant group, he said.

Adm Willard's comments on Tuesday came on the same day that reports emerged saying Pakistan had asked the US to reduce the number of CIA agents in the country and to limit drone strikes along the Afghan border.

'Turmoil'

Correspondents say that LeT was cultivated by Pakistan's security apparatus 20 years ago to fight a guerrilla war to wear down Indian security forces in Kashmir.

Adm Willard said that the relationship of the Pakistani government with LeT was 'sensitive'

The group is outlawed in Pakistan, but India maintains that Pakistan's security forces retain ties to the militants.

Adm Willard also said that India and Pakistan were unlikely to resolve their dispute over Kashmir in the immediate future because of the fragile government in Islamabad.

"Unquestionably there remains a level of tension across the border that is very hard to impact," he said.

"And given the turmoil that has been in Pakistan for the past couple of years, it's hard to imagine that the fragile governance in Islamabad is going to rise to a level where the impasse can be broken in the near term."

 

Afghan war 'threatens Pakistan'

 11 April 2011 Last updated at 04:49 ET Mr Zardari said US politicians lacked understanding of the situation The Afghan war is "destabilising Pakistan" and undermining democratic development, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari says.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper he said there was widespread concern at the pace of efforts to bring an end to conflict in Afghanistan.

It comes as ties between Pakistan and the US struggle to recover after the row over CIA contractor Raymond Davis.

Correspondents say it is one of his strongest statements on Afghanistan.

"Just as the Mexican drug war on US borders makes a difference to Texas and American society, we are talking about a war on our border which is obviously having a huge effect," Mr Zardari told the Guardian.

"I think it is maybe 12 years since America has become engaged in Afghanistan and obviously everybody's patience is on edge, especially the American public, which is looking for answers," he is also quoted as saying.

Mr Zardari also said the security situation was undermining attempts to bolster democratic institutions weakened during the military rule of his predecessor, Gen Pervez Musharraf.

"Democracy is evolving. It's a new democracy. It takes time to bring institutions back," he said.

Anti-US sentiment

The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Karachi says that many in Pakistan feel that the US continues to point fingers at the country's instability, while directly contributing to it with its actions along the Afghan border.

Pakistan's leadership increasingly feels its support for the US war in Afghanistan is costing it dear, in terms of popular support, our correspondent says.

He adds that anti-US sentiment, among both ordinary Pakistanis and the country's top civil and military leaders, remains high.

Last month a Pakistani court freed a US CIA contractor after acquitting him of two counts of murder, when relatives of two Pakistani men he shot dead pardoned him in court.

The case had stoked anti-American feeling across Pakistan and led to angry demonstrations. Hardline religious parties were keen to see him punished. The controversy damaged relations between the US and Pakistan.

Meanwhile, a recent White House report said Pakistan lacked its own plan to fight insurgents in the country.

But President Zardari told the Guardian that this was not true and that most US politicians lacked an understanding of the situation.

"The United States has been an ally of Pakistan for the last 60 years. We respect and appreciate their political system. So every time a new parliament comes in, new boys come in, new representatives come in, it takes them time to understand the international situation, " he said in the interview.

Mr Zardari's statements are likely to meet with approval from Pakistan's security establishment, which increasingly feels the US is taking its Pakistani alliance for granted, says our correspondent.