Washington: Pakistan and United States have tried to repair their latest diplomatic clash by forging a new joint intelligence team to go after top terrorism suspects, officials said.
According to US media reports, the move comes after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented the Pakistanis with the U.S. list of most-wanted terrorism targets, U.S. and Pakistani officials said. The list includes some groups the Pakistanis have been reluctant to attack, U.S. officials said.
It’s one of a host of confidence-building measures meant to restore trust blown on both sides after U.S. forces tracked down and killed al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden during a secret raid deep inside Pakistan on May 2.
But it also amounts to a new test of loyalty for both sides as Pakistanis asserted that the U.S. has failed to share its best intelligence, instead running numerous unilateral spying operations on its soil while US officials said they need to see the Pakistanis target militants they’ve long sheltered, including the Haqqani network, which operates with impunity in the Pakistani tribal areas while attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The US and Pakistan have engaged in a diplomatic stare-down since the May 2 raid, with the Pakistanis outraged over the unilateral action as an affront to its sovereignty and the Americans angry to find that bin Laden had been hiding for more than five years in a garrison town just 35 miles from the capital, Islamabad.
The U.S. deliberately hid the operation from Pakistan, recipient of billions in counterterrorism aid; for fear that the operation would leak to militants.
A series of high-level U.S. visits has aimed to take the edge off. Marc Grossman, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell met with intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha last month. Last week, the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, held a day of intensive meetings with top Pakistani military and civilian leadership. After that outreach, Pakistan allowed the CIA to re-examine the bin Laden compound last Friday. Pakistan also returned the tail section of a U.S. stealth Black Hawk helicopter that broke off when the SEALs blew up the aircraft to destroy its secret noise- and radar-deadening technology.
The CIA has also shared some information gleaned from the raid, and Pakistan has reciprocated, U.S. and Pakistani officials said. The investigative team will be made up mainly of intelligence officers from both nations, according to two U.S. officials and one Pakistani official. It would draw in part on any intelligence emerging from the CIA’s analysis of computer and written files gathered by the Navy SEALs who raided bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, as well as Pakistani intelligence gleaned from interrogations of those who frequented or lived near the bin Laden compound, the officials said.
The joint intelligence team will go after five top targets, including al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri, a possible bin Laden successor, and al-Qaida operations chief Atiya Abdel Rahman, as well as Taliban leader like Mullah Omar, all of whom U.S. intelligence officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, one U.S. official said.
Pakistani officials said the U.S. has never provided them accurate intelligence as to the Haqqani leadership’s location. Pakistani officials also argue that as the Haqqani network has been careful never to attack the Pakistani government, there is no reason to attack them. One official said a final target on this preliminary list is Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, leader of a group called Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, which the State Department blames for several attacks in India and Pakistan, including a 2006 suicide bombing against the U.S. consulate in Karachi that killed four people.
A second U.S. official confirmed that the Pakistanis and Americans have agreed to go after a handful of militants as a confidence-building measure, but the official would not confirm the specific names on the list.
Pakistani officials said those five have always been top targets, but they also did not confirm that the new agreement specifically names them as joint targets.
Intelligence-sharing operations between the U.S. and Pakistan were already strained before the bin Laden raid, particularly by the arrest and detention in January of CIA security contractor Raymond Davis in the shooting deaths of two Pakistani men. Davis said the two were trying to rob him.
Two of the five "intelligence fusion centers" where the U.S. shares satellite, drone and other intelligence with the Pakistanis were mothballed last fall, long before either the Davis or bin Laden controversies, the Pakistani official and another U.S. official say. It was part of the fallout of the public embarrassment of the WikiLeaks cables disclosures, which revealed a closer U.S.-Pakistani military relationship than publicly acknowledged by Pakistan. Online
