The Wrong Ally: 2001-2014

 By Sohail Parwaz

It has always been a problem with the American establishments of all times that they would go to any extent, when they need a support, even if it’s beyond morality but when the job is done, out of nowhere the moral values and ethics pop up. When the Americans had to avenge the 58000 US soldiers’ death in Vietnam then the Congressman Charles Wilson would not vacillate while confessing in front of media, “We owe the Russians one……. I have a slight obsession with it because of Vietnam. I thought the Soviets ought to get a dose of it.” But when they are out of troubled waters and missions achieved then precipitously the state’s mouth pieces like Carlotta Gall and many other would start preaching the ethic and morality lessons. What one is failed to understand is, that why it always happen late-night? And why so, when the affairs are concluded? Where these preachers and their sermons were during all the time of Afghan Jihad? Why the intelligence people of Pakistan, declared as angels during the 80s era, are knighted as the thugs by Carlotta now after three decades? William Casey must have had some firm grounds to snatch a heavy fund out of Congress’s mouth and was compelled to say that, “To hell with politicians. We are fighting a war.” Why it’s so that the Americans always tuck the napkins around their necks nicely, politely and passionately, before the feast but when the party is over the first thing one would notice is a rude hurling away of the ‘Napkins’ by them.

Carlotta Gall is a British journalist; the spawn of Sandy Gall, an English journalist, who started her newspaper career with the Moscow Times in Moscow in 1994. If one disparagingly analyzes her journalistic career then it would be found shuttling between London, Moscow and New York while covering the ‘Bermudian Triangles’ of Chechnya, Afghanistan and Serbia. One fails to understand that how come a reporter who dug-out the real cause of an Afghan taxi driver Dilawar’s shadowy murder during his confinement at Parwan Detention Facility at Bigram Airbase is failed to assess the root causes of the US failure in Afghanistan?

It can only be wished that she should have addressed the controversies about Osama’s death also as the world has refused to buy the story of his killing in an Abbottabad Compound for a number of hypothesizes, which were and still are being discussed by people including one I fictionalized in my 2011’s novel “The Cornered Rogue”. What Carlotta forgot to mention is, that in case the Pakistani authorities were involved in aboding Osama’s at Abbottabad then couldn’t they find some other safer, more common and least expected place to merge him with the routine life? Of all the places, why Abbottabad on earth only? Especially when hundreds of Caucasians are busy in clandestine operations here in Pakistan and are successfully still untraceable?

Its felt important to know that why Carlotta hastily scribbled a book before finding the answers to many critical questions, like; what tussle was going on between President Obama and General Petreaus and why he was made to takeover CIA just a day before Obama signed the orders for operation Geronimo? Why a large number of American generals and other key officials were coming to Pakistan frequently and fleetingly and meeting military high ups here just a week before this operation? Why this operation was planned only after Raymond Davis’s clean exit and why not when he was still around? Is that because his presence in Pakistan could spoil the storyboard? Why one of the Black Hawk choppers was deliberately torched in the compound of Osama’s alleged residence? Why Bruce Riedel, a Whitehouse advisor, showed nervousness over Pakistan’s nukes weeks before this controversial operation and sent on air an indirect threat to neutralize them? What general Mullin was doing in Pakistan days before this operation?

There is another question lurking in everyone’s mind that why every major meddlesome operation planned by the US authorities is named after Geronimo, may that be the 2007’s counterinsurgency operations in Iraq (OG-I & II), the 2007’s strike against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, northwest of Iskandariyah, Iraq (OG- III), the 2009–2010 operation in Afghanistan, the 101st Airborne Division’s search operation during Vietnam war or the so called operation ‘Get Osama’ which was confidentially named as Operation Neptune Spear, to be more exact.

Carlotta Gall has reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost the whole length of the American invasion and occupation, beginning shortly after 9/11. She claims to know that “How much this war has cost the Afghan people and how much destruction can be traced to Pakistan and its ‘duplicitous’ government and intelligence forces”. Well if she claims so then she should also know about the way this ‘twofaced’ government and its prime intelligence agency had been looking after a ‘Wrong Ally’ during the full length of Afghan Jihad in 80s. This intelligence agency also reserves the right to repent for sponsoring and abetting a wrong confederate all along. They must be cursing those times when they would receive huge C-141 Starlifters in the middle of the nights without letting anyone having a wind of them even. If she honestly go through the facts omitted by her wittingly or unwittingly then during the coming days Carlotta may decide to write the next account about the “Wrong Ally”.

Ms. Gall intends revealing in her upcoming book that how Osama was hiding inside Pakistan with the consent of Pak Army and ISI, whereas, on the other hand a Turkish politician and former US intelligence agent Berkan Yashar has a different story to tell us. He claimed some time ago that the American did not kill the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and in fact, he died naturally. According to him, in September 1992, he was in Chechnya, when he met Bin Laden for the first time. This meeting took place in a two-story house in the city of Grozny and Osama was given the name Abu-Bakr, by CIA. Berkan also claims that Osama was protected by the Chechen nationals since he trusted them entirely, and knew that they would never betray. Berkan revealed some astounding facts when asked about bin Laden’s death in Pakistan on May 2 last year. He said: “Even if the entire world believed I could not possibly believe it. I personally know the Chechens who protected him, they were Sami, Mahmood, and Ayub, who were with him until the very end. I remember that day very well, there were three sixes in it: 26/6/06. These people, as well as two others from London and two Americans, all seven of them, saw him dead. He was very ill, he was skin and bones, very thin, and they washed him and buried him. According to his will, only three Chechens buried him in the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghan border. Berkan was sure that, “There was no assault. I know the American operations from the inside: they find the grave, dig out bin Laden and tell everyone about this. They need to show how technologically the security services worked, how each step was controlled, and then present it as a great victory to show that taxpayers are not paying taxes for nothing.”

Berkan was the first one who announced the date of Osama’s death in November of 2008 at a conference in Washington, not naming any names, and it looks like it was when the Americans began to track his contacts. According to him, the last security he saw was Sami, who was abducted by the CIA before bin Laden was declared killed and most likely it was Sami who disclosed to them the exact place of burial in the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Now, when the American troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan and Carlotta has considered it as a right time to tell the full history of how the US have been fighting the wrong enemy, in the wrong country then how could she overlook the other side of the story before declaring Pakistan army and the intelligence agency a rogue? Were there not the chances that Pak intelligence agency was tipped to accommodate the already deceased Osama’s family at Abbottabad’s ill-fatted compound for a greater plot to be executed in the coming months? Knowing our war ally’s modus operandi well, it’s just a thought that is given.

Carlotta Gall is currently the New York Times’ North Africa correspondent and “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014″, is her new book. It could only be wished that she should have written few more, prior to this, to make it a sequel; The Wrong Enemy: America in Vietnam, The Wrong Enemy: America in Iraq etc. The lady may not be sure about the America’s enemy but in Pakistan people are convinced about their ‘Wrong Ally’.

It’s quite strange that after launching a multi-dimensional attack on Pakistan and its security institutions our dear American friends asks us that why the American governments are hated in Pakistan. “I did kill my dad but I am failed to understand that why I am called an orphan?”