Pakistan, the US and Afghanistan - things are getting tough

Pakistan is a weak nation, one in which the central government does not control all of its' assumed land area or all of its' internal institutions. The Pakistani Army is probably more powerful than the civilian government, and the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) agency, ostensibly an agency of the Army, is very probably more powerful than either the civilian government or the Army itself. The Obama White House has rather clearly decided that the ISI obstructionism has gone on long enough.

(Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top U.S. military and intelligence leaders delivered a tough warning to Pakistan on Thursday to cut suspected ties with militant groups which have upset relations between the uneasy allies.

Clinton led a heavyweight U.S. team at talks in Islamabad to

press Pakistani counterparts on U.S. accusations that Pakistan assists militants who launch attacks on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border and increasingly threaten U.S. interests.

"The meeting lasted for four hours. It was extremely frank, the discussion was very detailed," a senior U.S. official said after the meeting, adding that more discussions were planned for Friday.

The visit by Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, was a sign that Washington is determined to get its message across amid rising tensions among three key players in the Afghanistan war.

The meeting included Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, the powerful army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who heads the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) agency which U.S. officials have singled out for its alleged support of militant groups.

Earlier on Thursday during a visit to Kabul, Clinton said it was time to send a "clear, unequivocal message" to Pakistan that it must step up efforts to broker an end to the decade-long war in Afghanistan and crack down on safe havens used by militants.

"They must be part of the solution and that means ridding their own country of terrorists who kill their own people and cross the border to kill in Afghanistan," Clinton said.

It's clear that Pakistan's cooperation is going to be necessary to resolve the US combat situation in Afghanistan, and the leaders of the ISI are aware of that. They are depending on that fact to keep the US from punishing Pakistan as a nation for the bad behavior of the ISI. The message from Secretary Clinton is clearly part of the process of ramping up the pressure on Pakistan.

All we are seeing is what each side is willing to tell the media. The US may be ramping up the pressure, but Pakistan has both India and China sitting on its borders threatening it. With those two nations as immediate threats, the US is going to have to really ramp up the pressure to even be noticed. So I do not envy Secretary Clinton in delivering the message that the US has had enough. I'm glad she is doing it, though. It is necessary.

The Pakistani ISI it part of the South Asia problem

The recent problem in which the American CIA station chief in Islamabad was "outed" and forced to leave the country, probably by members of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, is just part of the South Asia problem. The arrest and convictions of David Coleman Headley, an American who participated in the Mumbai terror attack, has provided a great deal more information about the relationship between the Pakistani ISI and the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence service has been accused for years of playing a "double game:" acting as a front-line U.S. ally in the fight against terror while supporting selected terrorist groups which serve Pakistani interests.

Now, for the first time, there is a detailed inside account of how that game is played. The U.S. investigation of the 2008 Mumbai attacks [1] has built a strong case that officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) collaborated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in the plot that killed 166 people, six of them Americans. U.S. and Indian investigators say their understanding of the ISI-Lashkar alliance is drawn from the confessions of David Coleman Headley, an American convicted of participating in the Mumbai plot, as well as documents, phone records and electronic eavesdropping.

Officials from both countries say they are persuaded that ISI officers recruited and trained Headley in spying techniques and gave him money and instructions to scout targets in Mumbai and elsewhere. Headley has told investigators that a Pakistani Navy frogman helped plan the maritime attack on Mumbai, according to a 119-page report recounting his interrogation this year by Indian authorities. The report, which was obtained by ProPublica, quotes Headley as saying his Pakistani intelligence handler took part in a discussion about a subsequent Lashkar plot to attack a Danish newspaper -- information that Pakistan did not share with Danish authorities.

In essence, U.S. and Indian officials say, Headley was more than a terrorist: He served as a Pakistani spy.

During the period that ISI officers allegedly helped Lashkar plan to kill Americans and Jews in Mumbai, the intelligence service was working closely with the CIA and U.S. military in counter-terrorism efforts and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was pledging his support for the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials deny any link to Lashkar and point out that hundreds of ISI officers have died in clashes with militants. They accuse India of politically motivated distortion in the report on Headley's interrogation.

"It is a stereotype, a Pakistan-specific version of an Indian interrogation," said a Pakistani official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "The Indian version is totally distorted and fabricated as there was no involvement of the ISI whatsoever. Nor did any serving official interact with Headley or any of the perpetrators."

But U.S. investigators see much of Headley's account as credible, U.S. officials said. The investigators believe his main handler, a man identified only as Major Iqbal, was a serving member of ISI and one of several Pakistani intelligence officers who had contact with Headley, according to U.S. officials.

The Obama administration has expressed frustration with Pakistan's failure to bring to justice the suspected masterminds of Mumbai and to rein in Lashkar, the ISI's longtime proxy army against India. Recent intelligence shows Lashkar remains intent on striking the West, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity.

While the civilian government of Pakistan denies that the ISI was involved in the attack on Mumbai, their denial has to be recognized as necessary because if they failed to deny the ISI involvement then they would be admitting that the Pakistan government is so weak that it cannot prevent rogue elements of the ISI from attacking Pakistan's neighboring countries. Admission of that weakness could easily attract internal opponents to try to replace them. The same dynamic applies to the public complaints the government makes about the American drone strikes against the Taliban in North Wiziristan even though elements of the government are said to be providing targeting information to the Americans in order to guide the drone attacks.

My previous articles on Pakistan are

• CIA Chief in Islamabad reportedly exposed by Pakistani ISI
• US reported to be considering expanding operations inside Pakistan

US reported to be considering expanding operations inside Pakistan

Reuters reports that U.S. Commanders are considering expanding U.S. special operations activities inside Pakistan..

The U.S. troops in Afghanistan are reported to be gaining control over previously Taliban controlled portions of Afghanistan, but Taliban leaders and fighters have a reasonably safe sanctuary inside neighboring Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is not going after those Taliban, so U.S. commanders are talking of doing it themselves.

The following analysis is mine. As indicated in the previous post, I have no credentials that give me any special qualifications to perform this analysis, nor do I have an information that I have not provided links to in this and the previous post.

The leak of the identity of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad may have been the initial public example of the battle between the CIA and the ISI. The Pakistan government over the weekend denied that the ISI had anything to do with that leak, but what would they say? We did it?? It seems reasonable that the leak that led Reuters to post this report is the next stage in bringing that conflict into the public and putting additional public pressure on the ISI, the Pakistani military and on the Pakistan government.

As indicated in today's Reuters story, the U.S. and its NATO allies are all discussing leaving Afghanistan beginning next Summer. But as long as the Taliban leaders are sitting fat, dumb and happy in Pakistan next door and the Afghanistan government cannot control anything outside of Kabul then for the U.S. and NATO to leave means the Taliban will swoop in and regain control over all the territory they had previously held. Unless...

An escalation on the weak point in the battle for Afghanistan - Pakistan - is a very rational move to be making at this time. Either the U.S, will have to carry out the threat to go into Pakistan or the Pakistanis are going to have to clean out the Taliban on their territory themselves.

The next step in this will happen quite soon. No telling what it is or what we will see in the media, but it has to happen soon.

CIA Chief in Islamabad reportedly exposed by Pakistani ISI

The Indian English-language on-line newspaper The Hindu today reported that the CIA station chief in Islamabad had to leave Pakistan in a hurry because his cover was blown. The leak was suspected to have come from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Jonathan Banks was identified as the head of the CIA’s Pakistan office, in a lawsuit filed against the United States’ secretive spy agency by a resident of North Waziristan. The resident, Kareem Khan, was said to have filed the case against the CIA and Mr. Banks for their role in organising drone strikes that killed his son and brother.

The legal case brought by Mr. Khan called for murder charges to be brought against Mr. Banks and the CIA, and also reportedly said they should be executed for their crimes. Mr. Khan’s lawyer was quoted by the Guardian saying he had obtained Mr. Banks’ name from Pakistani journalists.

While Pakistan was quick to deny any involvement in leaking Mr. Banks’ name, U.S. officials were quoted as saying that since he had been identified publicly Mr. Banks “had received a number of death threats,” and they “strongly suspected” that the ISI had a hand in the leak.

[...]

Intelligence officers here were also quoted by the New York Times as saying that the leak may have been in retaliation for a civil lawsuit filed in New York City last month implicating the ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha in the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008.

The incident laid bare the deep and growing mistrust between the U.S. and Pakistani spy agencies even as U.S. President Barack Obama made a speech this week in which he warned that “terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with.”

That's the news as reported from India. I am no expert on Pakistan, but my reading of news reports over recent years has often included statements that the Taliban in Afghanistan was a creation of elements of the ISI and that some elements of the ISI still support the Taliban.

The removal of the military dictator Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in 2008 allowed a civilian government to be put into place and returned Pakistan to more of a nation under the rule of law. But the civilian heads of government do not appear to have control of all elements of the government and certainly do not have control of all of the territory that is generally recognized as part of the nation of Pakistan. Politically, from what I can tell Pakistan has both a strong fear of its neighbors, resulting in a demand for military power, but that the same time a surprisingly strong desire for a democracy operating under the rule of law.

The core of the problem is often described in the American media as centered on the conflict between Pakistan and India over control of the disputed the state of Kashmir. A quick review of the Wikipedia article on Pakistan suggests that is much too simplistic. In the period since Pakistan became independent in 1947 that nation has constantly been at war or defending its borders on all sides. Briefly, during this period Pakistan has fought wars against India, against China and has fought against aggression from Afghanistan. It is no surprise then that Pakistan has the 7th largest military in the world. Nor should it be a surprise that the ISI would set up and support the Taliban to weaken any Afghanistan government. A strong government in Afghanistan would appear to threaten Pakistan. Since Pakistan faces both China and India on other borders it would be very much to their military advantage to ensure that Afghanistan remains militarily weak and politically divided. However, the Taliban in the Province of Wizirastan are reported to be a threat to the civilian government of Pakistan. The military elements of Pakistan may not consider the Taliban as much of a threat. Since the Taliban are religious extremists, they are unlikely to have much interest in a secular government under the rule of law.

Then there are Pakistan's nuclear weapons. In the threatening neighborhood where Pakistan exists it is no surprise that they would do almost anything to become stronger in a military sense. From the point of view of their neighbors, though, the threat of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India is unthinkably dangerous. (That's assuming such a war would not create a world-wide nuclear winter.) America considers the control of those nuclear weapons by the religious extremist terrorists of the Taliban or al Qaeda to be unthinkable. That remains a major motivation for America to continue to fight against the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and using drone attacks, inside nominally Pakistani territory. Since those drone attacks display the weakness of the current government as well as the inability of the Pakistani military to control the Taliban reliably but at the same time but at the same time weaken the Taliban in Pakistan the mostly negative public response to those attacks is quite reasonable. A government publicly known to be weak draws attackers.

With all of these threats to Pakistan what is really surprising is the effort the Pakistanis are putting into recreating and maintaining a democracy that operates under the rule of law. But the fear of attack from any of their neighbors is very likely a major cause of the weakness of the civilian government since that fear encourages people who want to return to a military-controlled government. That fear also strengthens extremist religious factions, to include those focused on the dispute over Kashmir. So it is organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba which planned and conducted the Terror attack on Mumbai, India in 2008. It seems very likely that Lashkar-e-Taiba has support from some of the military factions inside the Pakistani government and from significant elements of the public.

In short, the entire region including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern India and Southwestern China is politically highly unstable. The instability makes it susceptible to disruption by religious extremists, but it is the political instability that is creating and attracting the religious extremists and allowing them to operate. The religious extremists are a symptom of the problems rather than their cause.

That said, elements of the ISI which dislike the interference by the Americans (who for the most part seem to not understand the situation) are unsurprisingly upset about the American drone attacks on elements of the Taliban operating inside Pakistan. Leaking the identity of the Islamabad CIA station chief looks a lot like a statement from Pakistani hardliners to the Amricans to tell them to back off their pressures.

The recent death of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke who reputedly understood this part of the world may leave American diplomacy in the hands of conservative Ugly Americans who think that American military power can solve such problems. Whether that is the case or not, it certainly reflects the reputation that Americans in Asia have had as being ignorant ham-handed clueless cowboys since the Vietnam era.

This is a highly speculative article based on news reports, Wikipedia and my own unresearched opinions. The statement in The Hindu stating that the CIA chief in Islamabad has quickly left Pakistan is probably reasonably accurate. The attribution of the leak to the ISI seems reasonable, but doesn't have the same likelihood of being true since the source is not attributed. The rest of this is a collection of facts from Wikipedia (the history found there is probably quite accurate) and my speculations built on those reported facts. We all know that Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, but it usually provides a decent overview of any subject.

Anyone who has better information is requested to leave a comment.

Pakistan supporting Taliban in Afghanistan; Shooting at American helicopters

Two interesting news reports.

First, the Army Times reports that Pakistani military helicopters have been flying over the border into Afghanistan and resupplying Taliban base camps.

Second, BBC reports that Pakistani troops have been shooting at U.S. military helicopters "forcing them back into Afghanistan".

Bush, of course, had pinned all the U.S. hopes on President Musharraf remaining in power in Pakistan. Now that Musharraf is gone, the opposition is reacting to their political base by opposing support for the American troops in Afghanistan. It is clear that at least parts of the Pakistani military Intelligence agency, the ISI, still support the Taliban. The ISI created the Taliban during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, using Saudi Arabian money. The Pakistani government has never controlled the borderland officially inside Pakistan but next to Afghanistan, not even when the British government in India was supposedly in control of that territory.

The combat in Afghanistan is more important than Iraq ever was, and if anything, the Afghan and Pakistani relations are more complicated than Iraq was or is. The Bush administration has never done "complicated" well, preferring brute force military solutions which often don't work. If anything, McCain is even less capable of dealing with complicated than Bush is.

Another reason to vote for Obama in November.

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Addendum 9 23 2008 2:10 pm CDT
A real question is how close is Pakistan to being a failed state. The bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad over the weekend certainly leads to that question. According to the LA Times article, that bombing would have taken out the top leadership of the Pakistani government.

On Monday, the government described just how close those militants may have come to dealing Pakistan an almost fatal blow. A senior official said that President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani and top Cabinet members were supposed to dine together at the Marriott on Saturday night -- but switched venues just before the bombing.

"At the eleventh hour, the president and prime minister decided that the venue would be the prime minister's house," Rehman Malik, the Interior Ministry's top official, told reporters. "It saved the entire leadership."

Malik did not explain what inspired the change in plans. A representative of the hotel later cast doubt on the statement, telling the Associated Press that there were no plans for a government dinner at the Marriott on Saturday.

Malik's disclosure, if true, betrayed the alarming extent to which militants have beefed up their intelligence capabilities and upgraded their planning and operations accordingly.

These recent news reports indicate that Pakistan is having real problems not becoming a failed state.

Obviously the Bush administration has no solution to Pakistan's problems, but the entire Muslim world as well as America and India are effected by it. Both Bush and McCain will look for American military solutions to the problem of Pakistan, while neither can imagine any other possible solutions. But there better be some other solutions. Pakistan is too important to be allowed to fail.

In the meantime, spokepersons deny that U.S. helicopters invaded Pakistani airspace and that Pakistani military fired on them.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan - Pakistani troops and tribesmen opened fire on two U.S. helicopters that crossed into the country from neighboring Afghanistan, intelligence officials said Monday. The U.S. denied the report.

The helicopters did not return fire and re-entered Afghan airspace without landing, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.

"There was no such incursion, there was no such event," said Col. Gary L. Keck, Defense Department spokesman.

So apparently the events that happened didn't really happen.

That's what the Associated Press reports, anyway. It's a good thing that the AP has such great and objective reporters on their staff - the Republican shill Ron Fournier in Washington, D.C. reporting on the American Presidential election, for example.

Bush has allowed Pakistan to go to Hell in a handbasket

It looks like while playing his idiotic games in Irag Bush has allowed Pakistan to become the most dangerous country in the world, and now will simply hand the problem off the his successor. From the New York Times Asia Edition:

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so. [Snip]

The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

¶Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.

None of the former intelligence officials who spoke to The New York Times agreed to be identified when talking about the ISI, an agency that has gained a fearsome reputation for interfering in almost every aspect of Pakistani life. But two former American intelligence officials agreed with much of what they said about the agency’s relationship with the militants.

So did other sources close to the ISI, who admitted that the agency had supported militants in Afghanistan and Kashmir, although they said they had been ordered to do so by political leaders.

The former intelligence officials appeared to feel freer to speak as Mr. Musharraf’s eight years of military rule weakened, and as a power struggle for control over the government looms between Mr. Musharraf and opposition political parties.

The officials were interviewed before the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, the opposition leader, on Dec. 27. Since then, the government has said that Pakistani militants linked to Al Qaeda are the foremost suspects in her killing. Her supporters have accused the government of a hidden hand in the attack.

While the author of Ms. Bhutto’s death remains a mystery, the interviews with the former intelligence officials made clear that the agency remained unable to control the militants it had fostered.

The threat from the militants, the former intelligence officials warned, is one that Pakistan is unable to contain. “We could not control them,” said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”

ISI ("Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency — Inter-Services Intelligence") has admitted to rigging the election of 2002. They have been an extremely powerful force dominating much of Pakistan, and they have considered India to be Pakistan's greatest enemy, even as the terrorists in the Northwest provinces and Afghanistan have been causing problems.

Go read the entire article to see what a complex mess Pakistan is in, and don't forget - they have nuclear weapons ready to use.

So who is suspected in Bhutto's assassination?

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent for the Times online reviews who the most probable suspects are:

The main suspects in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination are the Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who saw her as a heretic and an American stooge and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

But fingers will also be pointed at Inter-Services Intelligence, the agency that has had close ties to the Islamists since the 1970s and has been used by successive Pakistani leaders to suppress political opposition.

Those are the groups. Page goes on to name likely individuals:

Earlier that month, [October] two militant warlords based in Pakistan's lawless northwestern areas, near the border with Afghanistan, had threatened to kill her on her return.

One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top commander fighting the Pakistani army in the tribal region of South Waziristan. He has close ties to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban.

The other was Haji Omar, the “amir” or leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought against the Soviets with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

After that attack Ms Bhutto revealed that she had received a letter signed by a person who claimed to be a friend of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden threatening to slaughter her like a goat. [Snip]

Analysts say that President Musharraf himself is unlikely to have ordered her assassination, but that elements of the army and intelligence service would have stood to lose money and power if she had become Prime Minister.

The ISI, in particular, includes some Islamists who became radicalised while running the American-funded campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan and remained fiercely opposed to Ms Bhutto on principle.

Saudi Arabia, which has strong influence in Pakistan, is also thought to frown on Ms Bhutto as being too secular and Westernised and to favour Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister.

President Musharraf is going to have to quickly act to prevent Pakistan from devolving into Civil War. This action is also going to have severe effects on the legitimacy and public acceptance of the government formed after the January 8 election - assuming that the election is held at all.

Pakistan has just joined Afghanistan and Iraq as nations in real trouble internally.

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Addendum 11:11 AM CST
Aryn Baker of Time Magazine reports:

Just days before parliamentary polls in Pakistan, leading Prime Ministerial contender and anti terrorism crusader Benazir Bhutto was shot dead during an election rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. "She has been martyred," said party official Rehman Malik. The Associated Press, citing Malik, reported that Bhutto was shot in the neck and the chest before the gunman blew himself up. At least 20 bystanders were killed in the blast. Bhutto was rushed to a hospital But, at 6:16 p.m. Pakistan time, she was declared dead.

So this was not just a bombing. It was an assassination with more than one method of killing Ms. Bhutto planned and executed.

Who was close enough to shoot her in the back of the head?

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Addendum 2 11:24 AM CST
From the Guardian we get some further reports of how Benazir Bhutto was assassinated:

Bhutto was killed as her jeep pulled away from an election rally in Rawalpindi. Standing up in an open-top jeep, she presented a clear target.

Eyewitnesses spoke of hearing gunshots followed by a bomb blast. Bhutto's security adviser, Rehman Malik, said the former PM was shot in the chest and neck. Conflicting reports from Pakistan's interior ministry said Bhutto was killed by the suicide bomber's collision with her jeep. [Snip]

Malik, Bhutto's security adviser, questioned the adequacy of protection for Bhutto.

"We repeatedly informed the government to provide her proper security and appropriate equipment including jammers, but they paid no heed to our requests," he said. [Snip]

It appears the Musharraf government had been considering ways to strengthen her security, and it forced Bhutto's PPP to cancel a rally in Rawalpindi in November due to security fears.

Today's Rawalpindi rally only went ahead after hundreds of riot police had set up security checkpoints. Rawalpindi is a so-called garrison city and popularly regarded as one of the most secure cities in Pakistan.

The Hindu reports that Bhutto's security chief, Malik, had complained prefiously that the government provided faulty radion jammers on at least three occasions.

Rehman Malik, a Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leader and Security Advisor to Bhutto, asked the Interior Ministry to provide "fault-free jammers along with a technician to ensure full protection" to her from any attempted attack.

This is the third time that the PPP has complained to the Interior Ministry about jammers provided to Bhutto being faulty. Bhutto survived a suicide bomb attack on her homecoming rally in Karachi on October 18 that killed 140 people.

In his letter to the Interior Secretary, Malik, a former Federal Investigation Agency chief, said: "I regret to inform that the jammers provided by Sindh Police to cover the movements of Benazir Bhutto on 23-12-2007 did not work, which is a serious lapse in the light of the serious security threat already conveyed to us by Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema, Director General, National Crisis Management Cell, Ministry of Interior."

"Similarly, the jammers provided for the protection of Benazir Bhutto during her trip to Rahimyar Khan on 24-12-2007 also failed to work, exposing (her) to a high risk."

Malik said the PPP had "made repeated requests for provision of proper fault-free jammers for the protection of Benazir Bhutto but in every trip the jammers have failed to work."

Jammers should make it more difficult for assassins to know where the target is. In this case it looks like both a gunman and a bomber knew where Benazir Bhurro was. If the police have failed three times to deliver working jammers, then the police appear implicated. Whoever ran security for the government should not have let that happen a second time unless he was complicit in this assassination.

If Rawalpindi, Pakistan, is considered a Garrison City and is the headquarters of the Army, then suspicion must also be directed at the Pakistani Army.