This is a 10 pages long article, but I’m posting last 3 pages. If true, as its alleged, than what is difference between our army and Taliban or Mafia?
The first order to harm Shahzad was issued shortly after his article on the Mehran attack appeared. The initial directive was not to kill him but to rough him up, possibly in the same way that Cheema had been dealt with. But a senior American official confirms that, at some point before Shahzad was taken away, the directive was changed. He was to be murdered.
Five weeks after the killing, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly that it had been “sanctioned by the government” of Pakistan. In fact, according to the American official, reliable intelligence indicates that the order to kill Shahzad came from a senior officer on General Kiyani’s staff. The officer made it clear that he was speaking on behalf of Kiyani himself. (General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army, called this allegation “preposterous.”)
After the discovery of Shahzad’s body, some of his friends and family members told me they believed that the I.S.I. agents had meant only to beat him, and that things got out of hand. They had reason to think so. A year earlier, during an altercation with a guard outside a social club in Islamabad, Shahzad had been shot. Shahzad’s brother-in-law, Hamza Ameer, told me that the guard had become angry after Shahzad complained about being denied entry, because he had forgotten his membership card. The bullet had penetrated his liver, and it remained lodged near his spine. (According to Ameer, Shahzad eventually pardoned the guard in a Pakistani court, as is allowed under the law, so the guard went free.) Shahzad’s autopsy report says that a ruptured liver is one of the things that killed him.
But Dr. Mohammed Farrukh Kamal, one of the physicians who performed the autopsy, told me that Shahzad had been beaten with a heavy instrument, like a metal rod, and he dismissed the notion that Shahzad had been killed by mistake. “You don’t hit a person that hard by accident,” he told me. “They meant to kill him.”
Shahzad’s journalism may not have been the sole reason that he was targeted. I.S.I. officials may have become convinced that Shahzad was working for a foreign intelligence agency. This could have elevated him in the eyes of the military from a troublesome reporter who deserved a beating to a foreign agent who needed to be killed.
In fact, Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several foreign intelligence officials. He told me that a Saudi intelligence official was among those who had told him that bin Laden had met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen now considered a terrorist. Shahzad himself, under questioning from the I.S.I., had admitted that another source for that story was General Bismillah Khan—then the Interior Minister of Afghanistan, and a loathed figure in the Pakistani military.
More crucially, it appears that, in the months before Shahzad was killed, some foreign intelligence agencies tried to recruit him. Roger van Zwanenberg, the publisher of Pluto Press, the London imprint that released Shahzad’s book, told me that members of British intelligence had asked Shahzad for help during a short visit that he made to London in March. The intelligence officers wanted Shahzad to help them get in touch with Taliban leaders. “Saleem declined,” van Zwanenberg said. He added that, when Shahzad attended a conference in New Delhi this spring, officers from an Indian intelligence agency offered to put him on a retainer. Several of Shahzad’s colleagues confirmed this.
There is no evidence that Shahzad was working for any foreign intelligence agency, but mere suspicion on this front could have imperilled him. “What is the final thing that earns Shahzad a red card—the final thing that tips him over from being a nuisance to an enemy?” a Western researcher in Islamabad said to me. “If someone concluded that he was a foreign agent, and that the stories he was putting out were part of a deliberate effort to defame the I.S.I. and undermine the I.S.I.’s carefully crafted information strategy—if anyone in the I.S.I. concluded that, then Saleem would be in grave danger.”
On June 3rd, four days after Shahzad was found in the Upper Jhelum Canal, a C.I.A. officer, operating a pilotless drone, fired a missile at a group of men who had gathered in an orchard outside the village of Ghwa Khwa, in South Waziristan. Locals who ran to the scene saw many bodies, but a group of militants who had survived told them to stay back. “Kashmiri Khan! Kashmiri Khan!” one of them yelled. Among the dead was Ilyas Kashmiri—the terrorist whom Shahzad had once proved to be still alive, and who he said was responsible for the attack on the Mehran base
Three days later, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, announced that, this time, Kashmiri was definitely dead.
Given the brief time that passed between Shahzad’s death and Kashmiri’s, a question inevitably arose: Did the Americans find Kashmiri on their own? Or did they benefit from information obtained by the I.S.I. during its detention of Shahzad? If so, Shahzad’s death would be not just a terrible example of Pakistani state brutality; it would be a terrible example of the collateral damage sustained in America’s war on terror.
If the C.I.A. killed Kashmiri using information extracted from Shahzad, it would not be the first time that the agency had made use of a brutal interrogation. In 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative held by the Egyptian government, made statements, under torture, suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden; this information was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.
Kashmiri, who was forty-seven, was a guerrilla fighter who received training from both the Pakistani Army and the I.S.I. According to American officials, he fought in the guerrilla war inside Indian Kashmir, working closely with the I.S.I. According to one frequently heard story, Kashmiri, returning from an operation in India, presented Musharraf—then the chief of the Army staff—with the head of an Indian soldier.
But, as Musharraf began to curtail the activities of militant groups operating in India, Kashmiri moved to the tribal areas and started waging war against the Pakistani state. He brought together the 313 Brigade, an amalgam of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other fighters. Kashmiri was accused of playing a key role in one of the two unsuccessful plots to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, and he is believed to have helped orchestrate the 2009 attack on the Army’s headquarters. Earlier this year, David Headley, the Pakistani-American who testified in Chicago about the Mumbai attack, named Kashmiri as a key terrorist planner.
On May 27th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Islamabad, and she presented to Pakistani leaders a list of high-value targets. According to ABC News, Kashmiri was on the list. That morning, Shahzad had published the article naming Kashmiri as the perpetrator of the attack on the Mehran base—broadcasting, once again, his connection to the militant leader.
Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said, “After the Abbottabad raid, the Pakistanis were under enormous pressure to show that they were serious about Al Qaeda.”
Shahzad, at the time of his death, was in contact with several Taliban and Al Qaeda militants. It’s obvious from his book that Kashmiri was one of them. Muhammad Faizan, Shahzad’s colleague, said, “The militants used to call him, not the other way around.”
After Shahzad’s murder, the Pakistani government appointed a commission, led by a justice of the Supreme Court, to investigate. In late July, the justice, Mian Saqib Nisar, summoned a group of Pakistani reporters and editors and briefed them on his progress. Bani Amin Khan, the inspector general of the Islamabad police, also appeared at the meeting, with some of his investigators. According to reporters who attended the briefing, one of the investigators said that he had seen something unusual in Shahzad’s cell-phone records: more than two hundred and fifty-eight calls to and from a single number during a one-month period.
FROM THE ISSUECARTOON BANKE-MAIL THIS
Imtiaz Alam, the secretary-general of the South Asian Free Media Association, told me that after the briefing he approached Khan and pressed him for details. Khan’s answer, according to Alam: “The calls were with Ilyas Kashmiri.” When I asked Khan about Shahzad’s case, he threw me out of his office.
The evidence is fragmentary, but it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Pakistani intelligence agents gave the C.I.A. at least some of the information that pinpointed Kashmiri. Likewise, it seems possible that at least some of that information may have come from Shahzad, either during his lethal interrogation or from data taken from his cell phone. In the past, the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. have coöperated extensively on the U.S. drone program.
This relationship has been strained since the bin Laden killing. For the moment, much of the drone program, once based in Pakistan, appears to be frozen. According to the senior American military officer, the drones are no longer flying out of Shamsi Air Base, in Pakistan, but from Afghanistan, and the intelligence used to target militants is now being collected almost entirely by American networks. Most of the drone strikes are being carried out without prior Pakistani knowledge.
“We want the Pakistanis’ coöperation, but we are prepared to go without it,” the military officer told me. The Americans’ unilateral approach to drone strikes is causing intense tension with Pakistani leaders, and not just because of their claims that the strikes kill many civilians. The drone strikes sometimes reveal that the Americans and the I.S.I. are working against each other.
On March 17th, four missiles fired from a drone hit a group of men who had gathered at a market in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan. As many as forty-four people died. The Pakistani government denounced the strike, claiming that it had killed a number of tribal elders, and demanded an apology.
As with nearly all drone strikes, the precise number and nature of the casualties were impossible to verify. The high-level American official told me that the “tribal elders” were actually insurgent leaders. But he offered another reason that the Pakistani officials were so inflamed: “It turns out there were some I.S.I. guys who were there with the insurgent leaders. We killed them, too.” (The I.S.I. denied that its agents were present.)
What were I.S.I. agents doing at a meeting of insurgent commanders? The American official said that he did not know.
A senior counterterrorism official said that the Kashmiri strike was not connected to Shahzad’s death. At the same time, the official acknowledged that in the past the U.S. had received intelligence from the Pakistanis on Kashmiri, and confirmed that the Pakistanis continue to share information on targets.
Commodore Iqbal, the I.S.I. spokesman, reiterated the agency’s insistence that it had no involvement in Shahzad’s death. But he said that the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. were still coöperating. “We are giving the Americans a lot of intelligence,” Iqbal told me. “We don’t feel like we are getting much in return.” When I asked him if the I.S.I. had coöperated on the strike that killed Kashmiri, he said, “I can’t answer that.”
These days, the high-level American official told me, most drone attacks in Pakistan are “signature strikes,” which are carried out when a group of people match a certain profile—they are operating a training camp, for instance, or consorting with known militants. Such strikes are not directed at specific individuals—like, say, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s new leader. Usually, the agency doesn’t know the identities of the people it is firing at. “Most of the high-value targets have been killed this way,” the American official told me.
In the case of Kashmiri, the American official initially told me that he had been killed in a signature strike. “We did the strike, and we found out later that it was him,” the official said. When I pressed him, though, he said, “We sort of thought he would be there.” He declined to elaborate.
Bruce Riedel, the former C.I.A. officer, said that helping the agency kill Kashmiri would have made eminent sense to the I.S.I. Kashmiri had become an enemy of the Pakistani state, and had maintained potentially embarrassing contacts with Pakistani security services.
“If you start from the premise that the Pakistanis had something to do with hiding bin Laden, then you have to assume that they were trying very hard to put everything back into the tube,” Riedel said. “And so it would have made sense for them to get rid of Saleem Shahzad. And Kashmiri, too.”
In Pakistan, reporting on Shahzad’s case ceased, for the most part, after a few weeks. Shahzad’s wife, Anita, recently communicated with me, via e-mail. “I don’t want to rewind to that bitter time,” she said, adding that Shahzad had been “a brave man.” She assured me that “here in Pakistan they are trying their level best to find the culprit.”
In the wake of Shahzad’s death and the Abbottabad raid, the tone of the Pakistani press darkened. Some columnists argued that the Pakistani state was poised to fall to Islamist militants. Ayman al-Zawahiri “is the man waiting to become the caliph of Pakistan,” Khaled Ahmed wrote in the Friday Times, an influential weekly.
This spring, Umar Cheema, still recovering from his ordeal with the I.S.I., was invited to the U.S., where he was honored by Syracuse University for his journalism. Cheema told me that while in America he was offered several fellowships, as well as the prospect of asylum. He decided to come home. “If Pakistan were not in such dark shape, I would leave,” he told me. “But it is my duty to try to make this a better country for the next generation.” He quickly broke a number of important stories, including one charging that Yousaf Raza Gilani, the Prime Minister, and the twenty-five members of his cabinet paid no taxes last year.
Zafar Sheikh, Shahzad’s friend and colleague, took a different path. Years ago, Sheikh said, he regularly accompanied Shahzad on road trips to the tribal areas, and sat in mud huts and interviewed Taliban commanders. He, too, had aspired to write revelatory stories about the inner workings of the I.S.I. But now he has set those ambitions aside.
“I used to be a brave journalist,” Sheikh told me one day as we rode in a car across the Punjabi plains. “But I will be frank with you. I don’t want to get killed like Saleem. I don’t want to suffer like Saleem did. So I’m not part of the war anymore. I am just writing stereotypical bull**** stories—and no one is angry.”
We drove on for a little longer, toward the Upper Jhelum Canal, and, a few minutes later, we found the place where the laborer had discovered Shahzad’s body. The water was streaming into the intake grates.
“I used to look for stories that would open people’s eyes,” Sheikh said. “Now I am just a stupid correspondent doing stupid stories. And I am happy. I am happy.” 