Drives Outline Military Tactics
Computer devices sold at an Afghan bazaar appear to hold data
showing how insurgents use Pakistan as a base for cross-border
strikes.
By Paul Watson Times Staff Writer
link
BAGRAM, Afghanistan Maps, charts and intelligence reports on
computer drives smuggled out of a U.S. base and sold at a bazaar
here appear to detail how Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders have been
using southwestern Pakistan as a key planning and training base for
attacks in Afghanistan.
The documents, marked "secret," appear to be raw intelligence
reports based on conversations with Afghan informants and official
briefings given to high-level U.S. military officers. Together,
they outline how the U.S. military came to focus its search for
members of Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups on both
sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
In one report contained in a flash memory drive, a U.S. handler
also indicates that the United States discussed with two Afghan
spies the possibility of capturing or killing Taliban commanders in
Pakistani territory.
Pakistan has long denied harboring Taliban leaders or training
bases and has engaged in several well-publicized battles with
insurgents in its tribal territories bordering Afghanistan.
But the documents contained on memory drives sold at a bazaar in
front of the main gate of the Bagram air base suggest that although
Pakistani forces are working to root out foreign Al Qaeda fighters
from the northwestern tribal regions, the Taliban has been using
Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan in the southwest, as
its rear guard for training and coordinating attacks, some by
foreign Arab fighters, in Afghanistan.
The theft of the drives became the subject of a full-scale criminal
investigation Wednesday, two days after the Los Angeles Times
revealed the black-market operation.
The contents of the flash drives appear to be authentic documents,
but the accuracy of the information could not be independently
verified.
Military officials, however, acknowledged Thursday that the sale of
the stolen drives posed a security risk.
"Obviously you have uncovered something that is not good for U.S.
forces here in Afghanistan," said Col. Tom Collins, speaking from
the public affairs office at the Bagram base. "We're obviously
concerned that certain sources or assets have been
compromised."
In Washington, Lawrence Di Rita, a top aide to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld, said it was "too early to say" whether any
commander in Afghanistan would be held responsible for failing to
secure the drives.
The drives appear to contain the identities of Afghan sources
spying for U.S. Special Forces that operate out of the Bagram base,
which is the center of U.S. efforts to fight Taliban and Al Qaeda
insurgents and includes a secretive detention and interrogation
center for terrorism suspects flown in from around the world.
The memory drives also apparently include the identities of U.S.
military personnel working in Afghanistan, assessments of targets,
descriptions of American bases and their defenses, and maneuvers by
the U.S. to remove or marginalize Afghan government officials it
considers a problem.
Pakistani officials rejected the reputed intelligence Thursday.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for Pakistan's armed forces,
said the military promptly checks out information on insurgent
activities that it receives from the U.S.-led coalition and that
the intelligence sometimes proves incorrect.
"To make a sweeping statement like this, that people are taken to
Pakistan to training camps and then brought back [to Afghanistan],
is absolutely absurd, and I reject this information," Sultan said
from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials have long been
concerned about liaisons between Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence agents and the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The counter-terrorism officials have compiled intelligence alleging
that ISI officials were looking the other way, or possibly aiding,
as Al Qaeda and Taliban members plotted militant activity in the
tribal territories of Pakistan.
The concerns were disclosed publicly in a report to Congress last
year by its independent research arm, the Congressional Research
Service, which questioned whether Pakistan "is fully committed to
fighting the war against terrorism."
"Among the most serious sources of concern is the well-documented
past involvement of some members of the Army's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) organization with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and
the possibility that some officers retain sympathies with both
groups," the report said.
On the drives from the bazaar, reports from Afghan informants,
marked "secret," outline efforts by U.S. Special Forces in the fall
of 2005 to locate and target Taliban insurgents inside Pakistani
territory. The focus fell on top Taliban leaders who informants
said had been residing in Quetta and facilitating kidnapping and
bombing missions around the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
An October 2005 cable to U.S. commanders at Bagram, also marked
"secret," said an intelligence source had reported that Taliban
leaders met in a council of elders, or shura, in Quetta, on Sept.
25, just days before Afghanistan's parliamentary elections. In the
meeting, the leaders apparently decided not to launch attacks on
election day but to target government buildings and elected
officials afterward, according to the documents on the
drives.
"Al Qaeda will finance these activities through Mullah Matin, the
Taliban finance liaison to Al Qaeda for southern Afghanistan," said
an intelligence summary dated last year and marked "secret." "Al
Qaeda is financing because they want the Taliban to keep
fighting."
A U.S. Army Special Forces officer in southern Afghanistan met in
November with an Afghan source and an operative from Quetta to
discuss how U.S. troops might go after Taliban leaders in Pakistan,
according to the document on a drive sold at the bazaar
Wednesday.
The source told U.S. Special Forces that the Quetta operative could
lead them to Taliban "high value targets," or "TB HVTs" in the
military shorthand, according to the document.
The Quetta operative "is willing to take American personnel to the
current safesites of TB HVTs in Pakistan particularly Quetta and
conduct on the ground reconnaissance/surveillance on their behalf
with the endstate being the capture/kill of selected TB leaders,"
the report said.
The Afghan source warned the Special Forces officer "that it would
be extremely difficult to capture a HVT and move them to
Afghanistan even if they were dead," the report said.
The American then asked the source whether his contact in Quetta
"could arrange specific direct-action operations in Pakistan on
behalf of U.S. Forces," the document added.
The Afghan source also reported last year that Arabs, mainly
Yemenis and Syrians, were going through Quetta on the way to carry
out suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
"The aspiring suicide bombers are initially trained by insurgency
elements in Iraq and then moved through Iran to Quetta where they
are staged prior to transportation into Afghanistan," according to
a report on the drive.
"A portion of the suicide bombers trained during the same cycle
remain in Iraq to conduct attacks on behalf of the Sunni extremist
entities," it added.
In what appears to be a recent computer slide presentation marked
"secret," maps identify eight "major infiltration routes" for Al
Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing from Pakistan into eastern and
southern Afghanistan.
Documents based on conversations with informants outline how fresh
Afghan recruits carrying English-language identity cards would be
waved through border checkpoints into Pakistan, where they would
train before returning to southern Afghanistan for suicide
missions.
In Pakistan, the recruits were blindfolded "and loaded into trucks
by armed guards who transported them into the mountains," the
report continued.
They received eight days of instruction, including the use of soap
to mold about 10 pounds of "nails, bolts, or whatever metal scrap
is available" onto the top of a round container filled with
explosives to make the blast more lethal, the report says.
The U.S. struck at targets in Pakistan in the fall and early this
year. A Jan. 13 attack, targeting Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri,
killed about 18 villagers in the Bajaur region, a tribal area
northwest of Peshawar. Officials later said Zawahiri had not been
at the location.
A week earlier, local residents reported that U.S. forces crossed
from Afghanistan's Khowst province into a village in Pakistan's
North Waziristan that later was hit by fire from U.S. helicopters,
killing eight people. The Pakistani military denied the incursion,
but accused the U.S. of firing over the border into the village.
American officials denied any knowledge of the attack.
A mysterious explosion in another North Waziristan village killed a
top Al Qaeda bomb-making operative Dec. 1 in what Pakistani
officials ruled an accident. A local newspaper reported, however,
that missiles fired from a drone aircraft hit the house where the
bomb-maker and up to five others were killed.
The region has since been the site of intense fighting between
insurgents and Pakistani military forces. That fighting continued
Thursday, when an airstrike killed several suspected militants near
the Afghan border. The attack was sparked by intelligence that Al
Qaeda operatives were hiding out in the area, Pakistani officials
said.
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Times staff writer Peter Spiegel contributed to this report from
Washington.