US Officer Claims Pakistan Resupplies Taliban

By Cernig

This report doesn't come as a surprise at all:

Pakistani military forces flew repeated helicopter missions into Afghanistan to resupply the Taliban during a fierce battle in June 2007, according to a Marine lieutenant colonel, who says his information is based on multiple U.S. and Afghan intelligence reports.

The revelation by Lt. Col. Chris Nash, who commanded an embedded training team in eastern Afghanistan from June 2007 to March 2008, adds a new twist to the controversy over a U.S. special operations raid into Pakistan Sept. 3.

...according to Nash, the helicopter missions were just the tip of the iceberg of the support the Taliban and its allies in his area of operations received from Pakistani forces. That support included training and funding — he notes in his briefing that the average Taliban fighter makes four times the average monthly income of an Afghan — in addition to logistical help and, on numerous occasions, direct and indirect fire support, he said.

“What [the Pakistanis] bring to the fight is not only tactical expertise, but [because of] how they’re arrayed along the border, they can easily provide support by fire positions that our enemies are able to maneuver under,” Nash said. “We were on the receiving end of Pakistani military D-30.”

The D-30 is a towed 122mm howitzer.      

“On numerous occasions, Afghan border police checkpoints and observation posts were attacked by Pakistani military forces,” usually those belonging to the Frontier Corps, a locally recruited force in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas that abut the border with Afghanistan, he said.

In addition, he said, his Marines had definitely seen combat with Pakistani forces.

The introduction of al-Qaida and Pakistani military training teams into Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami units resulted in a “dramatic increase in capabilities” for those forces, Nash said.

“The biggest thing is coordination between enemy units,” he said, adding that the Taliban and its allies had evolved from “hit and run” attacks to “hit and maneuver.”

“Their ability to pull something off like a pincer movement or a flanking movement wasn’t necessarily present before,” he said.

But with the injection of “professional” expertise, he said, “You started to see attacks that weren’t conducted by goat herders. These were people who knew what they were doing.”

Shown a copy of Nash’s briefing, a U.S. government official who closely tracks events in Afghanistan and Pakistan said he could confirm everything Nash said about Pakistani support to the Taliban with the exception of the line about “helo resupply.”

Of course, Pakistan is denying it. Nadeem Kiani, the press attaché at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C., denied Nash’s claims. “There is no truth to these sorts of reports,” he said.

And also today, there's a report of another US incursion into Pakistan being beaten back by Pakistani forces. It's being officially denied too:

Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani territory on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani security official said on Monday.

The helicopters violated the border in the area of Lowara Mandi, 80 km west of Miranshah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal region, at around 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

There was no official confirmation.

"We don't have any information on border violation by the American helicopters," Major Murad Khan, a military spokesman, said.

Umm..hmm. Back to that first link:

The U.S. government official who closely follows Afghanistan and Pakistan also said it was difficult to gauge exactly who in the Pakistani government was giving the go-ahead for such extensive support of the Taliban.

“The question that’s hard to answer is what level of senior leadership is that under,” the official said. “The usual Pakistani M.O. is to say ‘Those are rogue elements and we’re trying to get them under control.’ ”

He noted that the Pakistanis used a similar defense when it came to the support its forces gave to the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against Soviet forces.

“I think that’s as much bulls---today as it was 20 years ago,” he said.

Yup. And the Bush administration line for the last eight years that Pakistan is a "staunch ally" is likewise so much manure.

In my opinion, Pakistan is a smarter version of Saddam-era Iraq or Iran vis-a-vis the West. Rather than be overtly hostile and risk the US bombing them "back to the Stone Age" - as Robert Richard Armitage [thanks, editors!] famously threatened Musharraf if he didn't co-operate - The Pakistani leadership have played the West for all it was worth by token gestures of alliance. A couple of thousand dead - peons that as far as I can see the feudal leadership don't give much of a damn about - and a few second-rate terrorists handed over has been their own side of the unstated bargain. F-16s, anti-ship missiles and billions of dollars in military aid with no accountability or oversight have been their reward for this astute bit of business acumen, while Saddam is no more and Iran gets sanctions and saber-rattling.

The Bush administration and neoconservative lobby in general has mostly worked out how badly it was conned, a few years late and billions short, but the political fallout of just saying the made a huge mistake is an unacceptable price for them, so the deception now continues on both sides. The only route that might show some positive results now is exactly the same one as Barack Obama advocates for Iran - engagement and diplomacy while being fully aware that they are no friend to America or the West.

Comments

[1MaNLan]

Nice to see you still connecting the dots in grand style, Cernig

But, I think you meant RICHARD Armitage...a man who truly belongs in the age of stone, with club in hand.