Photo from “U.S. Training Center.” If you do a Google search for Blackwater and click on blackwaterusa, it directs you to the “U.S. Training Center.”

Blackwater, renamed Xe (pronounced zi) earlier this year, is a private military company and claims to operate the world’s largest tactical training facility. According to its Wiki profile, it is currently the largest of the US State Department’s three private security contractors.

Erik Prince, the founder of the company, has been called “America’s best-known mercenary” by the London Times: He “packed a mobile phone on one hip and a handgun on the other as he flew in and out of the world’s troublespots.”

Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, and the company's old and new logos. Photos: Wiki

In a long profile of Prince, Vanity Fair reveals that the CIA had asked Blackwater to kill Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan but the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger.

From Vanity Fair:

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

Click here to read the full article.

The US political weekly The Nation had earlier carried an article titled “Bush’s Shadow Army” adapted from a book by Jeremy Scahill,  ”Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Below, an excerpt:

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince–the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince’s private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party’s takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.

While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the “war on terror” that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.” More here in The Nation.

]]> http://www.asianwindow.com/afghanistan/tycoon-contractor-soldier-spy/feed/ 0 http://www.asianwindow.com/pakistan/pakistan-and-the-global-war-on-terror/ http://www.asianwindow.com/pakistan/pakistan-and-the-global-war-on-terror/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:10:52 +0000 asianwindow http://www.asianwindow.com/?p=11956 An interview with Tariq Ali by Mara Ahmed and Judith Bello in CounterPunch. [via 3quarksdaily]

What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror. Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?

Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we’re just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they’re not like us, they’re Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.

It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and the Judeocide of the Second World War is having an impact. What sort of education is it if they can’t relate what happened then to some of the things that are happening now. Education which just centers on one atrocity and that’s all, where people feel very opposed to that [one atrocity], but they can support other atrocities, is in my opinion not a proper education. And some of the level of ignorant comment on Islam and the Islamic world in the United States is deeply shocking. That’s all it is. It’s ignorance. More:

On May 11, Rehman Malik, the ubiquitous and consistently enervated Pakistani interior minister, declared the military’s ongoing operation against the Taliban in the Swat Valley a resounding success. “We haven’t given them a chance,” he boasted. “They are on the run. They were not expecting such an offensive”. He added that the operation, then barely a week old, had already killed 700 Taliban. Over the summer the declarations of victory continued: prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani called the conflict “a great success”; the Pakistan Army spokesman, Major Gen Athar Abbas announced that “we have beaten the Taliban decisively in Swat”.

Since the army maintained a media blackout in the region, there were few voices to dissent from these cries of victory. But the extent of the army’s achievement remains unknown: areas of Swat are still under Taliban control, and many militants simply fled the territory for more favourable terrain elsewhere. What is clear, however, is that the army campaign – waged with heavy artillery and aerial strikes – forced some three million civilians to flee.

After declaring victory in Swat, and under pressure from the Americans to “take the fight to the Taliban”, the Pakistan army announced that it would soon proceed towards Waziristan, the hunting-ground for the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), whose founder and leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was assassinated by a US drone in early August. The targets struck back with a wave of terrorist attacks in October, many directed against the state itself – killing over 250 Pakistanis and injuring hundreds more. More here:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written a searing critique of government efforts at “strategic communication” with the Muslim world, saying that no amount of public relations will establish credibility if American behavior overseas is perceived as arrogant, uncaring or insulting.

The critique by the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, comes as the United States is widely believed to be losing ground in the war of ideas against extremist Islamist ideology. The issue is particularly relevant as the Obama administration orders fresh efforts to counter militant propaganda, part of its broader strategy to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. More:

Gojra, Pakistan – “It was the Taliban,” stuttered the young Christian man, trying to explain who had killed seven family members. “The Taliban came and killed them.”

We were standing in his broken house in central Pakistan, next to a collapsed bird cage. The day before, an angry mob had swept through his neighborhood like a storm, pillaging and burning houses belonging to Christians.

Little was known about the attackers. They did look like members of the Taliban. Many had beards. Some had wrapped scarves around their faces. Others were brandishing weapons.

But as easy as it would have been to think of them that way, the fact was, they were not the Taliban. We were in central Pakistan, far from the western mountains where the Taliban hold sway. They were part of a local sectarian group, Sipah-e-Sohaba.

But the man’s assumption raised an interesting question, one that had been nagging at me. As a journalist writing about the war in Pakistan, I thought I should know: Who are the Taliban? More:

On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai. War was raging in Helmand and Kandahar. And yet there was an atmosphere of burlesque about the place. Waiters hammed up their service, skidding across the floor balancing mounds of rice, bananas and chicken, whirling shopping carts of Coke and Fanta. The organizer of the event and master of ceremonies was none other than Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the five-foot-tall ex-governor of Helmand and probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker. From a velvet couch he barked out to the speakers: “Not so many poems! Keep your speeches short!” – but no one was listening.

At my table, an elderly Helmandi engineer described how awful things were in his region – families killed in coalition airstrikes, villages overrun by the Taliban. So why more Karzai? “If we choose someone else, it will only get worse,” he said through an interpreter. Another man said that at least Karzai had brought education and unity. “They are all lying,” a third said in English. He was the son of a prominent Kandahari elder who, a year before, was assassinated outside the family’s house. He’d also lost his uncle, brother and 45 other members of his extended family, he told me. He blamed the government. He was shaking his head at the spectacle in the wedding hall. “I told the men at my table, ‘You just came to show your faces on camera so if Karzai wins he will give you privileges.’ ” He laughed and said, “They told me they just came for lunch.” I asked what he thought would happen during the election in Kandahar. “Fraud,” he said. He himself claimed to have made 8,000 fake voter-registration cards. They were selling for $20. More:

The name Quetta comes from the Pashto for fort. In colonial times its nickname was “Little London”, a reference to its vast urban sprawl, home to more than a million souls. Both are appellations Barack Obama should consider before sending in missiles to strike at the black-turbaned Taleban that walk unharassed through its dusty streets.

I arrived in Quetta several days after the September 11 attacks having looked on a map and figured out that this was the closest I could get to Kandahar, the forbidding stronghold of Mullah Omar and his Taleban ilk.

When I finally reached Kandahar three months later I realised I had already been in Taleban central all along, right there in Quetta.

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“Droned” is a verb we use now in Pakistan. It turns out, interestingly enough, that those US predator drones that have been killing Pakistani citizens almost weekly have been taking off from and landing within our own country. Secret airbases in Balochistan – what did we ever do before Google Earth?

The PPP-led government, hailed as being “democratic”, capitulated to the Pakistan Taliban’s demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley in February. There was no vote, no referendum, nothing. The government, tired of fighting those pesky militants who’ve been burning down Sufi shrines and local girls’ schools, just declared that a part of the country would be ruled no longer by federal law, but by a myopically interpreted and Taliban-approved “Islamic” code. And verily it shall be.

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Two gunmen are captured on CCTV walking through the streets of Lahore after the ambush of a bus carrying Sri Lanka's cricketers.

Hamida Ghafour in The National:

Experts say the Mumbai and Lahore atrocities represent a new face of terrorism. These are the new jihadists – small, well-armed groups of angry young men bringing devastation and capturing international headlines through highly co-ordinated, commando-style attacks.

They are changing the way Islamist extremists are perceived. They are not necessarily indoctrinated in the al Qa’eda creed and the invisible hand of Osama bin Laden no longer guides their every move. As support for al Qa’eda appears to be waning in the Muslim world, this new generation of extremists is more likely to lash out in response to local grievances. So what will this change mean for the future?

More here. And click here for The new jihadist hotspots

Q. Do you see a time when you might be willing to reach out to more moderate elements of the Taliban, to try to peel them away, towards reconciliation?

A. I don’t want to pre-judge the review that’s currently taking place. If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region. But the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex. You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, so figuring all that out is going to be a much more of a challenge.

Click here to read the rest of the story, and here for the full text of the interview

The rich have left for Peshawar – 70 miles away, and the richer for more posh Islamabad – 100 miles in the south. The poor, with no place to go, suffered the trauma that makes Hollywood horrors look like a picnic. Intelligence sources dubbed as ‘spies’ and government officials – particularly from law-enforcing agencies – were specifically targeted by the Taliban. They were abducted and maimed and their killing turned into a gruesome spectacle in order to send a message to others.

The reign of terror is symbolised by what has come to be known as Khooni Chowk – the Crossing of Blood. A band of Taliban would, late at night, block the central crossing in the city centre of Mingora, the district headquarters the size of Srinagar and no less beautiful. They hung amputated bodies – some headless – on an electrical pole in the middle of the crossing, with notes giving their name and details of their ‘misdeeds’ against Islam. The bodies were not to be removed before a given date. Anybody violating this dictat could do so only at the risk of being himself put up headless.

Click here for the rest of the story.

Also in Tehelka, Ahmed Rashid, author of a book on the Taliban, tells that even India needs to worry enormously. In an interview with Harinder Baweja, Rashid said: “The fact is that there are Pakistani Taliban fighting in Afghanistan and there are Afghan Taliban fighting in Pakistan. I think it would very immature for us to be in a state of denial about that. The Afghans are not in denial about that but elements in Pakistan certainly are.” More here:

British soldiers are engaged in “a surreal mini civil war” with growing numbers of home-grown jihadists who have travelled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, senior Army officers have told The Independent.

Interceptions of Taliban communications have shown that British jihadists – some “speaking with West Midlands accents” – are active in Helmand and other parts of southern Afghanistan, according to briefing papers prepared by an official security agency.

The document states that the numbers of young British Muslims, “seemingly committed jihadists”, travelling abroad to commit extremist violence has been rising, with Pakistan and Somalia the most frequent destinations.

More:

As the Obama Administration transitions to power already burdened with global economic crises and two wars, two events underscore India’s importance for US interests: the brutal Mumbai attacks and the financial sector meltdown. The Mumbai attacks reminded Americans of India’s vulnerability to global terrorism, our shared struggle against violent Islamic extremism, and the potential for crisis to rapidly escalate in the region. The financial sector meltdown and the emerging global response showed how India can be a key part of the solution through leadership in global bodies such as the G20.

India matters to virtually every major foreign policy issue that will confront the United States in the years ahead. A broad-based, close relationship with India will thus be necessary to solve complex global challenges, achieve security in the critical South Asian region, reestablish stability in the global economy, and overcome the threat of violent Islamic radicalism which has taken root across the region and in India. The members of this task force believe that the US relationship with India will be among our most important in the future, and will at long last reach its potential for global impact-provided that strong leadership on both sides steers the way.

Click here for a summary and to download the full report:

Asif Ali Zardari

Pakistan looks forward to a new beginning in its bilateral relationship with the United States. First, we congratulate Barack Obama and the country that had the character to elect him, and we welcome his decision to name a special envoy to Southwest Asia. Appointing the seasoned diplomat Richard Holbrooke says much about the president’s worldview and his understanding of the complexities of peace and stability and the threats of extremism and terrorism. Simply put, we must move beyond rhetoric and tackle the hard problems.

Pakistan has repeatedly been identified as the most critical external problem facing the new administration. The situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India is indeed critical, but its severity actually presents an opportunity for aggressive and innovative action. Since the end of the Musharraf dictatorship, Pakistan has worked to confront the challenges of a young democracy facing an active insurgency, within the context of an international economic crisis. Ambassador Holbrooke will soon discover that Pakistan is far more than a rhetorical partner in the fight against extremism. Unlike in the 1980s, we are surrogates for no one. With all due respect, we need no lectures on our commitment. This is our war. It is our children and wives who are dying.

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The pros and cons of continuing or escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be gleaned from two recent books, “The Search for Al Qaeda,” by Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and adviser to three presidents, and “The Duel,” by the Pakistani writer and filmmaker Tariq Ali. One thing they agree on – and which was underscored by the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai – is that Pakistan is going to be at the forefront of foreign policy concerns for the Obama administration.

It’s hard to get more apocalyptic than Riedel. “Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world today, where every nightmare of the 21st century – terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the danger of nuclear war, dictatorship, poverty and drugs – come together in one place.” It is, he adds, the country most critical to the development and survival of Al Qaeda.

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It was a brick shack with a thatched roof, a mud floor, a wooden door at the front, and gaping hole at the back. A cow rested in the straw outside. It was the sort of scene scarcely seen in Britain except in school nativity plays. But one day this little corner of Uttar Pradesh could emerge as a historical curiosity in its own right.

This hut was home on Wednesday night to two young politicians on their way up: David Miliband and Rahul Gandhi. They slept side by side on rudimentary wooden cots, or charpois, under thin covers in the January chill. Needless to say this was not part of the foreign secretary’s normal diplomatic round. The private secretary and the red dispatch box had been sent to a nearby town leaving only security guards behind. There was not a canape in sight.

Gandhi, on home ground, clearly weathered it better than the visiting Londoner. “I have to say it was a pretty rough night,” Miliband conceded in the morning. “The cows kept me up a bit.”

More:

And a BBC report:

It’s late at night in the village of Semra, in rural Uttar Pradesh. David Miliband and Rahul Gandhi are sitting on mats on the floor listening by lamp light to the stories of a group of local women.

The British foreign secretary and the general secretary of India’s governing Congress party are visiting a self-help group, where the women pay 20 rupees (£0.3) into a pool each week and invest their money together. More:

In the Indian Express: Miliband says settle Kashmir to shut out terror, Delhi not amused

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s first visit to India ended on a controversial note today as New Delhi took offence to his comments seeking to link the Kashmir dispute to Lashkar-e-Toiba and terrorism in the region even as he expressed faith in Pakistan’s judicial system to try the perpetrators of 26/11 and referred to the poor status of Muslims in India.

In an article published today in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, Miliband wrote that during his visit to South Asia, he would be arguing that the “best antidote to the terrorist threat in the long term is cooperation”. “Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,” he wrote. More:

Kabul: When it comes to governing this violent, fractious land, everything, it seems, has its price.

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

“It is very shameful, but probably I will pay the bribe,” Mohammed Naim, a young English teacher, said as he stood in front of the Secondary Courthouse in Kabul. His brother had been arrested a week before, and the police were demanding $4,000 for his release. “Everything is possible in this country now. Everything.”

More:

Supporters of Maulana Fazlullah, a hardline cleric who began an uprising against the Pakistani government, in Charbagh, a Taliban stronghold on the Afghan border. Reuters / The Independent

There was a loud, sharp sound followed by flames and a massive blast of wind that threw the boy 20 yards. He said it felt as if he had fallen off the mountain. When he pulled himself to his feet, dazed and battered, he found nine members of his family dead and his mother badly wounded. All fell victim to an artillery shell fired by the Pakistani army fighting Taliban fighters in the country’s mountainous borders. As soon as the boy’s remaining family were able, they fled with the rest of his village. Two months on, 12-year-old Ikram Ullah sits with thousands of others in a wretched, fly-ridden refugee camp, his face streaked with dirt and tears as he tells his story and wonders what will happen to him. “Life here,” he says, crouching in the dust among rows of canvas tents, “is filled with sadness and grief.”

Ikram is far from alone. Up to 200,000 desperate people have fled their villages and the fighting. Some 20,000 refugees have even crossed the border into Afghanistan. As the Pakistan army bends to pressure from the US to step up its confrontation with Taliban militants in the semi-autonomous tribal areas of Pakistan, the fallout for the civilian population worsens. Every day, their lives are threatened by the pounding jets that sweep into the valleys on bombing and strafing runs and by the clattering helicopter gunships that the Pakistani military uses to spearhead assaults. The people in the dust are the so-called “collateral damage” of Pakistan’s own war on terror.

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We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential debate last week, “and we will come home with victory and with honour.” This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes that the “surge” has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam.

On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to assault “safe havens” for terrorists in Pakistan’s wild west. Both candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist, with Richard Nixon, of the “peace with honour” formula in Vietnam, which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.

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Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.

The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.

The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.

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The lorry drivers who bring the Pepsi and petrol for Nato troops in Kabul have their own way of calculating the Taleban’s progress towards the Afghan capital: they simply count the lorries destroyed on the main roads.

By that measure, and many others, this looks increasingly like a city under siege as the Taleban start to disrupt supply routes, mimicking tactics used against the British in 1841 and the Soviets two decades ago.

Abdul Hamid, 35, was ferrying Nato supplies from the Pakistani border last month when Taleban fighters appeared on the rocks above and aimed their rocket-launchers at him, 40miles (65km) east of Kabul. “They just missed me but hit the two trucks behind,” he said. “This road used to be safe, but in the last month they’ve been attacking more and more.”

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“Ma’am, are you happy with this decision?” was what the makeup woman at the GEO television channel asked me on President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation. The uncertainty in her voice brought home to me the fact that there was no consensus on the future of the country now that the greatest challenge to democracy, as official voices from Islamabad claimed, was gone. She did not even belong to the chattering classes of Islamabad – she was just an ordinary women asking a simple question, answering which in today’s Pakistan is a sobering experience.

Since Musharraf took over in October 1999, he had been claiming that he had turned the country around. In his resignation speech on August 18, he claimed that the economy was in good shape, showing a seven percent GDP growth rate, Pakistan has been declared part of the Next-11 states to show signs of rapid development, and was now taken seriously by international players. His development indicators were the increase in the number of mobile phones, cars and motorcycles. Yet, people were out on the streets distributing sweets and dancing at his departure. Ironically, in 1999 the same people had welcomed the ouster of the Nawaz Sharif regime by Musharraf.

Is something wrong with Pakistanis? Can they not make up their minds about whether they like a military dictatorship or democracy? Are Pakistanis not capable of handling democracy?

More:

After Musharraf, U.S. Struggles to Find New Pakistan Ally Against Taliban

In the New York Times, Jane Perlez analyses the situation in Pakistan:

With Mr. Musharraf out of power, recent visitors to the United States Embassy here say American officials have been at a loss – one used the word “struggling” – to figure out who America should throw its weight behind.

On Friday, the country’s biggest party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, said it was nominating its leader, Asif Ali Zardari, for president, a post he may end up winning in an electoral college vote scheduled for Sept. 6.

That could make Mr. Zardari America’s default ally, though the next president’s full range of powers, and his commitment and ability to fight the Taliban insurgency, as Washington would like, are far from clear.

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India’s legion of street dogs are being offered the chance to make their country proud by joining a crack cadre of the country’s military.

The elite Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) last year picked four mongrel puppies from the streets with the hope of transforming them into a unit of explosive-detecting sniffer dogs.

The mongrels – Lily, Sally, Teja and Kareena – have just passed an intensive nine-month training course with flying colours. After they were found to be “tougher, harder and sharper in battle” than their pampered pedigree peers, there are plans to collect more for similar work.

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Haji Juma Khan leads something of a charmed existence. A towering tribesman from Afghanistan’s border badlands, Khan uses the title “Haji” because he has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine. But piety is not his sole concern: he is also one of about 20 men who run Afghanistan’s £2bn heroin trade. Business is good. Last year the country’s fields of pretty pink poppies produced a record harvest, sending drug production soaring to new heights, funding the Taliban and thrusting Afghanistan into ever greater chaos. And despite the best efforts of western counter-narcotics specialists – who have spent six years and more than £1.7bn in fighting the heroin trade – Khan is free as a bird.

His empire is centred on Baramcha, a scruffy town in the Chagai Hills on the Pakistani border. Khan, an ethnic Baluch, seized control of this parched area in the dying days of Taliban rule in late 2001 and turned it into a bustling hub of smuggling and gun running. It is dotted with heroin labs: rough shacks where turbaned men, tutored by imported chemists from Iran and elsewhere, use chemicals and vats of boiling water to refine bars of sticky brown opium into bags of powdery white or brown heroin. The drug departs on convoys of high-speed jeeps, bristling with weaponry, that dash across the desert towards the Iranian border. It is then sold to criminal gangs who push the heroin to its end customers: addicts in Europe and Russia.

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The express bus from Hyderabad to Dantewada takes fifteen hours on a good day. As the suburbs of the software hub are left behind, and then the wrought-iron gates of Ramoji Film City, the smooth pavement falls apart. But the sweep of paddy fields and palms-a facsimile of the INCREDIBLE INDIA! billboard hanging at the Delhi airport when I first arrived-grew more hypnotic with each mile, making up for the rough going. Hills loomed in the hazy distance. Cowherds shunted their stock out of harm’s way, and women carried grain in clay pots on their heads. Passing into virgin forest so dense that hardly a ray of light broke through, I finally dozed off, rustled by the occasional thwack of a tree branch as we hurtled into dusk.

Dantewada, the main town of Chhattisgarh state’s remote Bastar Division, seemed bucolic enough. The smell of freshly fried samosas wafted from the corner dhaba, where lanky men took cover from a sun that beat down like a fist. Long-distance coaches to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa came and went in a fit of honking. At either end of town, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) barricades, reading WE NEED YOUR COOPERATION, were the only signals that something might be wrong.

[Photo: Teenage "special police officer" scans the forest around Rani Bodli camp, scene of a midnight Naxalite raid early last year that left 55 security forces dead, South Bastar region, Chhattisgarh state.]

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And click here for Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. And below, a video, Kashmir’s uneasy peace, made by the Center.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww0btNX1dv4

Chitral, Pakistan: There are new casualties in the hunt for Osama bin Laden: yak-mounted, polo-playing herdsmen who have been told to shift their annual competition from a remote corner of Pakistan for “security reasons”.

Pakistan’s intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has ordered polo players to move their contest to a neighbouring district because the current site is too near a secret CIA surveillance post.

The hugely popular festival takes place in the Hindu Kush mountains – on what is probably the highest polo ground in the world – in Chagril, on the ancient Silk Road bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor.

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No one expected that one fatal move – the removal of the Chief Justice – would have unleashed such a rash of democratic forces that would so rapidly lead to the serious political impasse Pakistan is faced with today. In the process, President Musharraf lost much of his most important constituency – the professionals and the middle class.

For the U.S., the assassination of Benazir Bhutto means that it is left with little or no options, seeing that Washington had pinned its hopes on the “Musharraf Plus” package. The latter envisaged the President in control of foreign policy and national security matters, and a Benazir Bhutto-led government focusing on all other matters of state (and giving the country a democratic façade).

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