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Sunday, January 22

"Beneath the surface in Abbottabad" is the Pakistani regime's routine use of terrorism as a policy tool

Peaceful City? Scratching Beneath the Surface in Abbottabad
By Walter Mayr
May 18, 2011
Der Spiegel
Translated from the German by Josh Ward
[...]
This drama concerning Pakistan's identity and its duplicity vis-à-vis Islamist violence offers an opportunity for catharsis. But no one, it would seem, wants to take advantage of it. The country has fought alongside the Americans in the "war on terror" for almost a full decade -- even as some among Pakistan's elite tolerated the activities of radicals.

Asad Durrani, a former head of the ISI and Pakistani ambassador to Germany, went on record recently as saying that the strategy is legitimate. Terrorism, he wrote, "is a technique of war, and therefore an instrument of policy."
[...]
The problem with Pakistan deploying this technique, Mr Durrani, is that Pakistan has not actually declared war on anyone. A secondary problem, you freakin' ghoul, is that no legitimate government considers it policy to conduct terrorist operations against non-combatants. A third problem is that only the pasha mentality finds nothing wrong with raising up an army of suicide bombers.

That last is a way of saying that Durrani would not consider strapping his children into suicide vests; such a policy tool is to be used on Pakistan's underclasses -- the low castes, the Afghan refugees, the mentally and physically afflicted; i.e., the disposables -- which aren't seen as fully human by Pakistanis steeped in the pasha mentality.

The following excerpts from a Long War Journal report relate to a wing of the ISI that sponsors terrorism, but of course Bill Roggio and everyone else who closely follows the Afghan War knows that the policy outlined by Durrani is not ISI policy of the policy of any one wing of the intelligence service; it's the policy of the entire regime, both military and civilian. Period.
Pakistani ISI's Wing' aids terror groups in South and Central Asia
By Bill Roggio
May 28, 2011
Long War Journal

One interesting byproduct of the ongoing trial of Tahawwur Rana is the additional information that is emerging about the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan's military intelligence service known as the ISI. Rana is the Canadian citizen who is on trial in the US for his role in the 2008 terror assault on Mumbai, India. His accomplice, David Coleman Headley, has decided to testify against Rana and in so doing has exposed the ISI's role in spreading terror throughout the world.

This report from The Times of India, republished here in full, provides excellent details of the ISI's "S Wing," the division of the notorious intelligence service that liaises and directs terror organizations on the subcontinent. The existence of the ISI's S Wing has been known for some time (see these reports from The Guardian and The New York Times back in the summer of 2009). [...]

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