Month: May 2011

  • Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers


    Warrick Page for The New York Times

    Commuters in Rawalpindi, northern Pakistan, read the morning newspapers on Tuesday announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden during an American raid. More Photos »

     

     

    May 3, 2011
     

    Tensions Rise as U.S. Officials Press Pakistan for Answers

    By  and 

    WASHINGTON — Tensions between the American and Pakistani governments intensified sharply on Tuesday as senior Obama administration officials demanded answers to how Obama bin Laden managed to hide in Pakistan, and the Pakistani government issued a defiant statement calling the raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader “an unauthorized unilateral action.”

    John O. Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, said there were many questions about how the sprawling compound “was able to be there for so many years with Bin Laden resident there and it didn’t come to the attention of the local authorities.”

    “We need to understand what sort of support network that Bin Laden might have had in place,” Mr. Brennan said during an interview with ABC on Tuesday.

    The suspicions have intensified efforts by some members of Congress to scale back American aid to Pakistan, or cut it entirely, as lawmakers described Pakistan as a duplicitous ally undeserving of the billions of dollars it receives each year from Washington.

    Still, Obama administration officials and some members of Congress seemed determined to avoid the kind of break in relations that would jeopardize the counterterrorism network the C.I.A. has carefully constructed over the last few years in Pakistan, and as the administration tries to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict where Pakistan is a necessary, if difficult, partner.

    On Monday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and delivered what American officials described as a stern message to senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders. The envoy, Marc Grossman, told them that patience in Congress was wearing thin, officials familiar with the discussions said.

    Officials in Washington said they hoped to learn far more about the network that Bin Laden tapped for support by examining the trove of computer files and documents that members of the Navy Seals grabbed during Monday’s raid.

    Top Pakistani officials have vehemently denied that Islamabad tried to harbor Bin Laden, and American officials said that at this point there was no hard evidence that any Pakistani officials visited the compound in Abbottabad, or had any direct contacts with Bin Laden.

    Even as they pledged support for the United States’ deeply strained alliance with Pakistan, several top American officials said it was difficult to believe that Bin Laden could have spent years in a town populated by current and former Pakistani military officers — with a Pakistani military academy close by — without the complicity of some in the country’s government.

    Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she had no evidence that Pakistan’s government knew where Bin Laden was hiding, but said the government had much to answer for.

    “If they didn’t know, why didn’t they know? Why didn’t they pay more attention to it? Was it just benign indifference, or was it indifference with a motive,” she said.

    A civilian official in the Pakistani government said he did not know if the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, helped Bin Laden hide or was simply unaware of his presence in Abbottabad. Either way, he said, the successful American raid was an international humiliation for the agency.

    “I’m not denying the possibility,” the official said, referring to the ISI sheltering Bin Laden. “At worst, it’s that. At best, it’s total incompetence.”

    He said he hoped the raid would lead Pakistanis — particularly military and ISI leaders — to recognize the deep credibility problem their county now faces internationally.

    In his meetings in Islamabad, Mr. Grossman told Pakistani leaders they needed to take steps to stanch the tide of anger in Washington about Pakistan’s behavior, according to Obama administration officials familiar with the meetings.

    In public, Mr. Grossman was more diplomatic, telling reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday that the United States was committed to its alliance with Pakistan and that Pakistan was “determined to curb terrorism.”

    A senior Pakistani general on Tuesday repeated his government’s formal denials that the military or the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s location. Instead, he acknowledged a major intelligence lapse by the Pakistani police and security forces.

    “To me, it’s a big embarrassment that the bastard was in this compound near the academy,” said the Pakistani officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Clearly, the U.S. had better intelligence than we did about what was inside that compound.”

    The general said Pakistan and the United States had cooperated in other counterterrorism operations in the Abbottabad area in recent weeks, notably a C.I.A. tip that led to Pakistan’s recent arrest of Umar Patek, one of the main Indonesian suspects in the 2002 Bali bombing.

    The Pakistani government statement went further, saying that the ISI had “been sharing information with C.I.A. and other friendly intelligence agencies” about the Bin Laden compound since 2009.

    Several American officials said they were puzzled about the statement, pointing out that the C.I.A. did not know about the compound until last August.

    The raid has fueled anti-Pakistan sentiment in Congress, yet it is unclear — perhaps even unlikely — that there would be enough support to cut aid to Pakistan.

    Speaker John A. Boehner, who just returned from a congressional visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said that any discussion about cutting aid or decreasing engagement with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bin Laden strike was premature and that he would strongly oppose any such move.

      “We both benefit from having a strong bilateral relationship, and I think we need to use this moment to strengthen the ties between our two countries,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “This is not a time to back away from Pakistan.”

      Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, also expressed reluctance about limiting aid to Pakistan, saying the country has been an anti-terror partner of the United States. “They’ve lost thousands and thousands of their soldiers fighting terrorists,” he said. “Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have more oversight, and I’m willing to do that.”  

    In Brussels on Tuesday, the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, spoke about Pakistan at a closed meeting of ambassadors to NATO. According to people present for his presentation, which was based on a December 2010 National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan, Mr. Joeck said American officials had little expectation that the Pakistani government would mount a serious campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda or Taliban safe havens in the most contested border areas of the country.

    “He said there were simply too many ongoing suspicions of the U.S.,” said one foreign official. 

    Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger from Washington, and David Rohde in New York.

     

     

    Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • Qaddafi Is Said to Survive NATO Airstrike That Kills Son

    Mahmud Turkia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    Libyan government officials gave a tour of the house they said was hit by a NATO airstrike in Tripoli late Saturday night.

     

     

    April 30, 2011
     

    Qaddafi Is Said to Survive NATO Airstrike That Kills Son

    By  and 

    BENGHAZI, Libya — The government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi said he survived an airstrike in Tripoli late Saturday night that killed one of his sons and three grandchildren, in the sharpest intensification yet of the NATO air campaign intended to pressure the Libyan leader from power.

    The son, Seif al-Arab Muammar el-Qaddafi, 29, and the grandchildren, all said to be younger than 12, were possibly the first confirmed casualties in the airstrikes on the Libyan capital. And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

    It is the second airstrike in seven days to hit a location intimately close to the Libyan leader, following a midnight attack last week that destroyed an office building in his compound where he and his aides sometimes work.

    In a news conference early Sunday morning in Tripoli, a Qaddafi government spokesman called the strike an illegal attack. “This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country,” said the spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim.  “This is not permitted by international law. It is not permitted by any moral code or principle.” He said that the colonel and his wife, who were staying at the house along with “friends and family,” were not hurt.

    American and NATO officials have said they are not seeking to kill Colonel Qaddafi, and some have suggested it might not be very easy. But frustrated by the evasion and resilience of Colonel Qaddafi’s military, NATO has pledged to step up its strikes on the broader instruments of his power, including state television facilities and command centers in the capital.

    In a news release, the NATO mission’s operational commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, said he was aware of the reports of Qaddafi family deaths but called them unconfirmed. He added: “All NATO’s targets are military in nature and have been clearly linked to the Qaddafi regime’s systematic attacks on the Libyan population and populated areas. We do not target individuals.”

    A NATO official in Naples, Italy, reached by e-mail and responding on condition of anonymity, said that allied planners had not known Qaddafi family members were in the building that was attacked, which the official described as a command and control center. The official would not specify the nationality of the aircraft or pilots that carried out the strike.

    In a video broadcast by the satellite channel Al Jazeera, Libyan officials showed reporters what they said was the destroyed house, a large crater, crumbled concrete and twisted metal, and someone dusting off what appeared to be an unexploded bomb. 

    It is not the first time Colonel Qaddafi has survived such a close call. In 1986, the United States struck his compound in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a German nightclub frequented by American service members. Colonel Qaddafi has incorporated his survival into his cult of personality, preserving the wreckage of the building as a “Museum of Resistance” and erecting a statue of a giant fist grabbing an American warplane.

    Although several of Colonel Qaddafi’s seven sons and one daughter play major roles in the Libyan economy and government (including an older brother with a similar name, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi), the son reported killed had been considered a black sheep, believed to spend much of his time in Munich. Many Libyans said they had never seen his picture. In 2007, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that he had been briefly detained by the Munich police after getting into a fight with a nightclub bouncer; no charges were filed.

    In Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital in eastern Libya, and in Misurata, a western city that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces have besieged for months, celebratory gunfire rang out and explosions could be heard.

    But even then, doubts lingered in Benghazi about whether the news was true:  in interviews, residents said they were happy but suspected a ploy by Colonel Qaddafi to win sympathy. Ramadan el-Sheikhy, who said his brother was killed in one of Colonel Qaddafi’s prisons, said any sympathy was misplaced.  “I was truly happy at the news,” he said. “Hopefully, he felt the pain of having a relative killed.” 

    Earlier Saturday, NATO officials had rejected an offer by Colonel Qaddafi to call a cease-fire and negotiate as false. The proposal was delivered in a rambling and often defiant speech, broadcast over Libyan state television, in which Colonel Qaddafi insisted he would never leave Libya.

    “Come France, Italy, U.K., America, come, we’ll negotiate with you,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “You lie and say I’m killing my own people. Show us the bodies.”

    The speech, which was broadcast at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday, was the latest in a series of proclamations from the Libyan leader, and it was made as NATO forces said they would broaden their list of targets to include palaces, communication centers and other administrative buildings that Colonel Qaddafi relies on to maintain power.

    Colonel Qaddafi repeated his assertions that the rebels belonged to Al Qaeda or were terrorists and mercenaries, even as he appealed to them to lay down their weapons.

    “Qaddafi doesn’t have the power, he doesn’t have the position to leave,” he said of himself. “With my rifle, I will fight for my country.”

    There were few signs that he intended to ease the military pressure on his opponents. A rebel military spokesman said that Qaddafi forces began an assault early Saturday on the eastern towns of Jalu and Awjilah, about 120 miles south of the city of Ajdabiya, attacking in trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns and Grad rockets.

    The spokesman, Col. Ahmed Omar Bani, said 5 civilians had been killed in the fighting and 10 had been wounded.

    The attack, which could not immediately be confirmed, seemed to follow an emerging pattern in the conflict in which the rebels have stepped up their resistance in the west — in the Nefusa mountain region, along the Tunisian border and in the strategic port city of Misurata. At the same time, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces have made harassing raids on poorly defended towns near the eastern oil fields in recent weeks, at times straining the rebels’ efforts to keep producing oil.

    The rebels have said that in the coming days they will appoint a new defense minister to replace Omar al-Hariri, a former political prisoner who occupied a largely ceremonial role in the rebels’ transitional government. They were hoping that the appointment of a civilian would impose a measure of organization on an inexperienced fighting force that has been plagued by setbacks on the eastern front and infighting in its upper ranks.

    Fighting continued for Misurata, and early Saturday, large explosions on the outskirts shook the city. Rebels later said they were NATO airstrikes.

    The pro-Qaddafi forces resumed shelling and firing rockets into the city in the morning and again late at night. At least 15 people were reported killed, including at least five rebel fighters, an old man who was struck by shrapnel, and a young father of four children.

    The young man’s children and his wife were all wounded. They huddled at a Red Crescent clinic, unaware he was dead. “It is not easy to tell them,” said Absalom Essid, who stood at the door to the room where the dead man’s wife was being treated.

    At another clinic, the wounded included a baby girl who appeared to be about 10 months old and suffered a broken leg. She was teary-eyed with a pacifier in her mouth as doctors prepared to set the bone.

    Kareem Fahim reported from Benghazi, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Misurata, Libya, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

    Copyright 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved