Whose side are you on? A question for Pakistan

America has presented hard evidence that the upper echelons of Pakistan’s military is leaking top secret intelligence to al-Qaeda.

It has been an almost open secret for years that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, and the military have been infiltrated despite strenuous denials from Pakistan. The evidence, carried in person by CIA boss Leon Panetta to Pakistan for a show-down meeting this weekend is damning. The CIA passed surveillance images showing the location of two terrorist bomb making factories to their opposite numbers in Pakistan. The Americans continued to monitor the factories and observed them being evacuated shortly before they were raided by the Pakistani army. Telegraph article: Pakistan accused of tipping off al Qaeda.

Pakistan's army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, right, and Pakistan's intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha met with Mr Panetta on Friday (Photo: AP)

Less than two weeks ago, a Pakistani journalist was tortured and murdered for writing about an al-Qaeda link with Pakistan’s navy. Telegraph article: Journalist murdered. One particular story he wrote about is the alleged involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agency in the Mumbai massacre. According to his information, the original idea had been put to the ISI by Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior commander in al-Qaeda as a way of provoking war with India, but ISI eventually shelved it. The plan was then taken over by Haroon Ashik, a former commander of Lashkar e Taiba, who spiced it up and put it into operation, murdering 166 people in a three day killing spree. It’s not so much a case of the ISI being innocent of involvement in the actual atrocity, if that’s the case, but that they are part of the terrorist network passing the plan amongst themselves. Telegraph article: Mumbai attack.

Do we know whose side Pakistan’s military is on?

We are still seeing the fall-out of trust between America and Pakistan now that we know bin Laden was living under Pakistan’s nose close to their top military academy in Abbottabad. Pakistan has nuclear weapons under the control of the military who are refusing American requests for access. Are we safe? Does ISI cooperation with al Qaeda and Lashkar e Taiba extend to nuclear weapons?

Update 16th June 2011

A really good article in today’s New York Times gives us the answer:  Pakistan’s military are against us.

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who has led the army since 2007, faces such intense discontent over what is seen as his cozy relationship with the United States that a colonels’ coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question.”

…demanding that General Kayani get much tougher with the Americans, even edging toward a break.”

His goal was to rally support among his rank-and-file troops, who are almost uniformly anti-American.”

That Bin Laden was living comfortably in Pakistan for years has evinced little outrage here among a population that has consistently told pollsters it is more sympathetic to Al Qaeda than to the United States.”

…they were gradually “strangling the alliance” by making things difficult for the Americans in Pakistan.”

Seems pretty clear. Now, what about those nuclear weapons?

Bin Laden: A Death on the Field of Battle

Some people find it difficult to square the killing of Osama bin Laden with the actions of a law abiding state. There are questions in some quarters about extrajudicial killings, even of execution, and suggestions that he ought to have been captured alive – at any cost – and put on trial like the Nazi leaders of Germany were after the Second World War. But I think that confusion is entirely the result of regarding al-Qaeda “operatives” as ordinary criminals who should be prosecuted according to civil law. That is wrong. al-Qaeda is at war with us, and consequently, we with them.

It is true that we have developed the concept of war crimes since Nuremberg and we now have a permanent international court to aggressively prosecute anyone, including heads of state who offend international morality. Former President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic is the most recent high-profile defendant to have been arrested and brought to trial. He died before his trial was completed, but the warning is currently being given to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria regarding the mass murder of their respective civilian populations.

However, in all of these cases, prosecution followed, or would follow, the end of hostilities. The war with al-Qaeda is still on-going. So yes, bin Laden had a case to answer for war crimes, but that had to take second place to dealing with him not just as an active combatant, but as the leader of al-Qaeda. He was actively engaged in planning and directing continuing acts of terrorism against the West. He had a “second front”, as it were, against other Moslems who did not conform to his radical vision of Islam and his legacy is that he killed more Moslems than Christians.

Any reasonable person should accept that bin Laden was actively directing al-Qaeda from his Abbottabad compound and that he was not just a legitimate military target, but a necessary target. His death was therefore no different to any other combatant on the field of battle. An opportunity to surrender is not always offered to an enemy, a soldier’s first duty is to himself and his comrades, especially with an enemy who uses suicide as a weapon of war. As it is, the actions of the US Navy SEALs will go down in history as one of the outstanding commando raids.

In brief, we are at war with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed at a location where he was actively planning and directing a war against us.

It is a nonsense to regard al-Qaeda as civilians and to put them through civil courts and prosecute them in the ordinary way, as if they had committed a traffic offence. These people are at war with us and their chosen weapon is terrorism. The fiasco of Guantanamo Bay shows the folly of such an approach, releasing combatants to go back and resume fighting against us when they should remain locked-up for the duration. We didn’t treat German prisoners of war that way, nor Argentines taken prisoner on the Falklands. We didn’t hand them their weapons back and say, “Now don’t do it again.”

I have blogged on these aspects before:

The problem with treating enemy combatants as civil defendants. It doesn’t work.

What part of “We’re at war” do you not understand?