CIA Escalates in Pakistan

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704029304575526270751096984.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_world

OCTOBER 2, 2010

Pentagon Diverts Drones From Afghanistan to Bolster U.S. Campaign Next Door

By ADAM ENTOUS, JULIAN E. BARNES And SIOBHAN GORMAN

Reuters

Onlookers in Pakistan's Sindh province after suspected militants set fire to tankers Friday carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA's campaign against militants in their Pakistani havens.

Tensions between the US and Pakistan after a key supply route was closed following NATO air strikes. Video courtesy of Reuters.

The shift in strategic focus reflects the U.S. view that, with Pakistan's military unable or unwilling to do the job, more U.S. force against terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan is now needed to turn around the struggling Afghan war effort across the border.

In recent months, the military has loaned Predator and Reaper drones to the Central Intelligence Agency to give the agency more firepower to target and bombard militants on the Afghan border.

The additional drones helped the CIA escalate the number of strikes in Pakistan in September. The agency averaged five strikes a week in September, up from an average of two to three per week. The Pentagon and CIA have ramped up their purchases of drones, but they aren't being built fast enough to meet the rapid rise in demand.

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The escalated campaign in September was aimed, in part, at disrupting a suspected terrorist plot to strike in Western Europe. (==>. something to do with the alert by state dept. today? ) U.S. officials said Friday their working assumption is that Osama bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda operatives are part of the suspected terror plot—or plots—believed to target the U.K., France or Germany. They said they are still working to understand the contours of the scheme.

U.S. officials say a successful terrorist strike against the West emanating from Pakistan could force the U.S. to take unilateral military action—an outcome all parties are eager to avoid.

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Although the U.S. military flies surveillance drones in Pakistan and shares intelligence with the Pakistani government, Pakistan has prohibited U.S. military operations on its soil, arguing they would impinge on the country's sovereignty. The CIA operations, while well-known, are technically covert, allowing Islamabad to deny to its unsupportive public its involvement with the strikes. The CIA doesn't acknowledge the program, and the shift of Pentagon resources has been kept under wraps.

Pakistan has quietly cooperated with the CIA drone program which started under President George W. Bush. But the program is intensely unpopular in the country because of concerns about sovereignty and regular reports of civilian casualties. U.S. officials say the CIA's targeting of militants is precise, and that there have been a limited number of civilian casualties.

U.S. officials said there is now less concern about upsetting the Pakistanis than there was a few months ago, and that the U.S. is being more aggressive in its response to immediate threats from across the border.

"You have to deal with the sanctuaries," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D., Mass.) said after meeting with Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in Washington this week. "I've pushed very, very hard with the Pakistanis regarding that."

Tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan have been exacerbated in recent days by a series of cross-border attacks by North Atlantic Treaty Organization helicopter gunships. Islamabad responded by shutting a key border crossing used to supply Western troops in Afghanistan and threatening to halt NATO container traffic altogether. On Friday, militants in Pakistan attacked tankers carrying fuel toward another border crossing, in another sign of the vulnerability of NATO supply lines crossing Pakistani territory.

Because U.S. military officials say success in Afghanistan hinges, in large part, on shutting down the militant havens in Pakistan, the surge in drone strikes could also have far-reaching implications for the Obama administration, which is under political pressure to show results in the nine-year Afghan war and has set a goal of beginning to withdraw troops in July.

The secret deal to beef up the CIA's campaign inside Pakistan shows the extent to which military officials see the havens there, used by militants to plan and launch attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, as the primary obstacle to the Afghan war effort.

"When it comes to drones, there's no mission more important right now than hitting targets in the tribal areas, and that's where additional equipment's gone," a U.S. official said. "It's not the only answer, but it's critical to both homeland security and force protection in Afghanistan."

The idea of funneling military resources through the CIA was broached during last year's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review, officials say. The shift in military resources was spearheaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director himself. It also has the backing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and the new commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus.

Mr. Gates helped smooth over initial dissent among some at the Pentagon who argued that the drones were needed in Afghanistan to attack the Taliban.

Since taking command in Afghanistan in July, Gen. Petraeus has placed greater focus on the tribal areas of Pakistan, according to military and other government officials.

The U.S. military has been focused on trying to persuade the Pakistan army to step up its actions against militants in the tribal areas. That effort led to operations in some areas, but not North Waziristan, which is used by the Haqqani militant network to mount cross-border attacks and is believed by U.S. officials to be the hiding place of senior al Qaeda leaders.

Pakistan says its army has been spread thin, limiting its ability to carry out additional large-scale operations. Its resources have also been diverted to responding to the worst flooding in the country's history.

The U.S. now sees the need for a stronger American push in Pakistan because of the growing belief that Pakistan isn't going to commit any more resources to fighting militants within its borders, said a former senior intelligence official. The Pakistani military is tapped out, the former official said. "They've gone as far as they can go."

U.S. officials are also increasingly frustrated by what they see as Islamabad's double-dealing. Some elements of the country's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency continue to support the Haqqanis as a hedge against India's regional influence, and the government has rebuffed U.S. calls for a crackdown on the group.

Pakistani government officials have repeatedly denied that they provide any support to the Haqqanis and said their military is too overstretched to take them on directly in their North Waziristan base.

Gen. Petraeus has taken a hard line on the Haqqani network, calling them irreconcilable. He has also met with top Pakistani military leaders and presented intelligence tying the Haqqanis operating out of North Waziristan havens to attacks on U.S. and Afghan troops, according to a military official.

The Pentagon has allowed loaned equipment and personnel to the CIA several times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to former intelligence officials.

In addition to drone aircraft, officials said the military was sharing targeting information with the CIA from surveillance over-flights

Serbia Turns Back on Virulent Nationalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/world/europe/02iht-serbia.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

October 1, 2010

By DAN BILEFSKY

BELGRADE — Only two years ago Aleksandar Vucic, deputy leader of Serbia’s main opposition Progressive Party, was a leading voice of a party that hosted tens of thousands at nationalist rallies where indicted war criminals spoke and participants sang rousing songs vowing to fight to the last drop of blood for Kosovo.

Now, a chastened Mr. Vucic flies to Brussels and Washington for meetings with European and American diplomats and talks on Serbia’s inevitable path toward the European Union and the West.

“We can’t prosper without the E.U. and the E.U. integration process,” said Mr. Vucic, newly retooled as a moderate. In his political youth, as information minister under the Serbian former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, he imposed punishing fines on independent journalists who opposed the regime.

Mr. Vucic acknowledges what veteran opposition leaders dared to voice as long ago as the late 1980s, when Mr. Milosevic was ascendant and the destruction of Yugoslavia loomed.

“The biggest problem in Serbia is not Kosovo,” Mr. Vucic said in an interview. “It is the Serbian economy, unemployment, corruption, and low living standards.”

Twenty-five years after Serbian intellectuals and politicians began brewing the Serbs’ deep historical attachment to Kosovo into a toxic chauvinism that stoked years of war,,, Serbia is shedding virulent nationalism. It is a fundamental shift in the political landscape of a poor but still worldly Balkan country newly determined to integrate with Europe.

With the global financial crisis roiling economies across the western Balkans, the impulse to end isolation and join the European Union is felt across the region. From Macedonia to Montenegro to Kosovo, governments look to Brussels in hope that stronger integration with the world’s biggest trading bloc will help deliver economic salvation.

Across the border in Bosnia, the prospect of joining the European Union could help bind the fragile multiethnic country together after the economy shrank 3.4 percent last year. Yet analysts fear that parliamentary and presidential elections on Sunday may accentuate ethnic divisions, making European integration even more elusive.

Indeed, Bosnia could even break apart, with the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, making ever louder noises about tearing down the ineffectual, byzantine institutional arrangement that diplomats cobbled together in 1995 to halt three and a half years of war in the heart of Europe.

Other remnants of the old Yugoslavia, however, are doing better. Slovenia is a prospering member of the E.U. and NATO; Croatia, its southern neighbor, hopes to follow it into the Union. Montenegro, small and mired by organized crime, is still on an upward trajectory. Even fledgling Kosovo, desperately poor and struggling to overcome corruption, is finally gaining greater international legitimacy.

In Serbia , cautious optimism is growing. In October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to visit Belgrade and to reaffirm Washington’s support for a Serbia firmly ensconced in European structures. That support has particular resonance given America’s role, when Mrs. Clinton’s husband was president, in leading the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, which aimed to stop Mr. Milosevic’s repression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.

The hope that Serbia has entered a new era in relations with the West was fanned on Sept. 9 when Belgrade supported a compromise United Nations resolution on Kosovo that dropped its earlier demand to reopen talks on the status of its former territory.

Instead, senior Serbian officials have backed the idea of E.U.-mediated talks with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 with the firm backing of the United States and a majority of E.U. nations.

The compromise marked a significant climb-down for the government in Belgrade, which has made joining the E.U. its overriding goal, even as it has remained unequivocal that it considers Kosovo its medieval heartland and has fought an unsuccessful campaign to have Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence deemed illegal. (In July the international Court of Justice in The Hague said it did not breach international law).

Days later, Serbia announced that it had indicted nine Serbian former paramilitaries known as the Jackals over the killing of 43 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

Many Western observers here interpreted the indictments as the latest sign that the determination of Belgrade to join the E.U. was finally coaxing Serbia into a reckoning about its role in the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

While Serbia has yet to seize Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose arrest is a condition for Serbia to join the E.U., the Serbian Parliament in April passed a resolution condemning Mr. Mladic’s most heinous crime: the mass murder of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. In a country where Mr. Mladic is still seen by many as a hero, the resolution was bold.

Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said a conjunction of political, economic and social circumstances had made Mr. Mladic’s arrest possible, while easing the country’s path toward the west.

“Politicians across the spectrum have given a clear message related to Mladic that says cooperation with The Hague is a priority,” she said, referring to the international war crimes court. “This has not been met with the resistance or demonstrations of the past because ordinary people are fed up with Serbia’s isolation. This is a fundamental change.”

Underlying the about-face in Serbian politics, analysts say, is the country’s pragmatic President Boris Tadic, a bland but telegenic former psychology teacher who has become a favorite in Brussels and Washington.

While Mr. Tadic has long supported the European Union, analysts noted that the more surprising development is the transformation of former arch-nationalists like Mr. Vucic.

Mr. Vucic explained that cold-headed economic pragmatism was trumping the nationalism of the past. He noted that about 60 percent of Serbs supported E.U. accession and were willing to compromise in return for economic prosperity.

Last year, Serbia, with foreign investment drying up and tax revenue waning, turned to the International Monetary Fund for a €3 billion bailout.

As other ex-communist countries now in the E.U. and NATO have prospered, the average monthly wage in Serbia is about 320 euros, one of the lowest in Europe. Unemployment in April was officially 19.2 percent.

While economic pain may have produced a more conciliatory stance, Serbian observers and western diplomats stressed that key challenges remained, particularly Kosovo and handing Mr. Mladic over to the international court.

Tellingly, the recent U.N. General Assembly session on Kosovo was delayed for three hours after Serbian officials balked at even being in the same room as their ethnic Albanian counterparts. (==>. is it like Cubans walking out when US is set to speak ? )

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so ,,, ready to abolish death penalty?

one of the reason for the collapse of Italy economy was that it was not ready for EURO. By the same token, since Italy was bound by EURO, it was hard to enforce any monetary policy or reform effective only within its territory.

Serbia will benefit from the integration into EU. But what about on the part of EU?

ECHR is propped up in terms of compliance rate. I suspect Russia is below the average in that regard. What would it be like if Serbia joined the regime - most effectively enforced and deeply internalized regime ?