U.S. Withholding $800 Million in Aid to Pakistan as Ties Reach ’Low Point’

The U.S. is withholding about $800 million in military aid to Pakistan over actions by the nuclear- armed country since the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.
“They’ve taken some steps that have given us reason to pause on some of the aid which we’re giving to the

military, and we’re trying to work through that,” Daley said yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Until we get through these difficulties, we’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers have committed to give.”
After crises this year worsened long-standing tensions, the countries’ relationship is “at its low point” following the May 2 U.S. raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader in a Pakistani army garrison town, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with the U.S. military-affairs website This Week in Defense News that was broadcast yesterday.
In those 10 weeks, Pakistan has arrested an army major for allegedly helping the Central Intelligence Agency target bin Laden, according to U.S. officials cited by the New York Times and other newspapers, and has expelled more than 100 U.S. military personnel.
Recent criticisms of the Pakistani military by U.S. officials cited by the Times amount to “a direct attack” on Pakistan’s security, its armed forces spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said in an interview two days ago, Reuters reported.
Anger and Humiliation
The announced aid cutoff may deepen “a feeling of anger and humiliation” that political analyst and retired Pakistani army Lieutenant General Talat Masood says has grown in the country’s military this year. Tensions have risen steadily since January, when a CIA contract employee, Raymond Davis, shot dead two Pakistani men he said were trying to rob him in Lahore.
“We have not received any formal intimation or letter from the U.S. informing us” of a decision to withhold aid, Abbas said by phone to Bloomberg News. He said Pakistan’s operations against Taliban guerrillas in the country’s northwest will be unaffected because the country has conducted them since 2009 “without any external support whatsoever.”
The New York Times, which reported the deferral of military aid earlier, said the amount being withheld represents more than a third of the $2 billion in security assistance given to Pakistan. It includes about $300 million to cover some of the costs of posting more than 100,000 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border as well as training assistance and military hardware, the newspaper reported.
Withholding Visas
A full description of the U.S. assistance on hold is classified, said Navy Captain John Kirby, a spokesman for Mullen. Night-vision devices, helicopter spare parts, radios, and equipment to counter guerrilla-made bombs are delayed because Pakistan is withholding visas for U.S. personnel required to assist with them, Kirby said in an e-mail yesterday.
Since the bin Laden raid by U.S. Navy commandos, American officials have questioned whether some in the Pakistani military were helping to hide the al-Qaeda leader, and whether Pakistan’s investigation of the incident may be aimed more at those who might have helped the U.S. find him. The U.S. didn’t notify the Pakistani government before the raid out of fear that someone might tip off bin Laden.
“Obviously there’s still a lot of pain that the political system in Pakistan is feeling by virtue of the raid,” Daley said. “Something that the president felt strongly about. We have no regrets over.”
Support for Taliban
Another irritant in relations is Pakistan’s covert support for the Taliban and allied groups fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, say analysts such as Imtiaz Gul, chairman of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. “Pakistan is tied in to these groups because it wants to use them to gain influence over Afghanistan in coming years,” and thus block its foe, India, from gaining sway there, Gul said by phone last week.
Mullen said April 20 that Pakistan’s main military spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, still “has a longstanding relationship” with a Taliban faction led by Jalaluddin Haqqani that a recent Defense Department report called “the most significant threat” to U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said in May the U.S. should curtail more than $1 billion in annual economic aid to Pakistan unless the Islamabad government stops harboring groups such as Haqqani’s.
Mullen said July 7 there are indications that suggest the Pakistani government sanctioned last month’s abduction and killing of Saleem Shahzad, 40, a journalist who had written about the infiltration of militants in the military.
Daley echoed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement last month that U.S. interests give it no option but to work with Pakistan. “The Pakistani relationship is difficult, but it must be made to work over time,” Daley said on ABC.
Pakistan has been “an important ally in the fight on terrorism,” he said.

Bin Laden, at work in Abbottabad

Initial analysis of the huge cache of documents seized at Osama bin Laden's compound shows he was not a figurehead but the operational leader of al-Qaeda - an active manager who communicated regularly with terrorist partners about plots and tactics, a senior intelligence official said.

"As a result of the raid, we've acquired the single largest collection of material from a senior terrorist ever," said the official, who spoke Saturday on condition of anonymity. "The materials have already provided us some important insights. . . . We are already disseminating intelligence across the U.S. government based on what we found."

The official, who refused to be identified because of the nature of his work, called the bin Laden operation "the greatest intelligence success in a generation."

Seeking to dispel any doubts that it was bin Laden who was killed, the U.S. government also released five videos seized at the compound, one showing bin Laden as he did not intend to be seen in public.

With a blanket draped over his shoulders, he huddled with a remote control in his hand, sometimes rocking back and forth while watching television footage of himself. His unkempt gray beard contrasted with the dark black and apparently dyed beard in outtakes also released Saturday of bin Laden's appeals to the public.

"It showed that bin Laden was not the superhero he wanted his people to think," said Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The material found in the raid "confirms how important it was to go after bin Laden," CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a statement.

An early review of digital, audio, and paper documents "clearly shows that bin Laden remained an active leader in al-Qaeda, providing strategic, operational, and tactical instructions to the group," the official said. "Though separated from many al-Qaeda members who are located in more remote areas of the region, he was far from a figurehead. He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation's security."

A CIA-led multiagency task force is cataloging, translating, and analyzing the material, the official said, and "the treasure trove of information has provided some golden nuggets on communications within the al-Qaeda group."

Although he lived for five or six years in a compound without telephone or Internet connections, bin Laden continued to issue orders and encourage terrorist plots through a network of couriers, the official said. "He remained focused on inspiring and engineering international terrorism and on attacking the U.S.," the official added.

However, the official would not say what sort of instructions bin Laden issued, what plots might have been in the works, or whether any of the material seized has produced "actionable intelligence" - government jargon for information that can be acted on immediately.

He did allow that bin Laden "appeared to show continuing interest in transportation and infrastructure targets."

The official added that, despite conventional wisdom that bin Laden was living in a remote location and not able to communicate with his followers, "it was always our working assumption that he was involved in aspects of al-Qaeda's operational planning."

U.S. Navy SEALs shot and killed bin Laden on Monday after the CIA tracked him to a compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, 35 miles north of Islamabad.

The evidence seized during the raid also includes phone numbers and documents that officials hope will help lead to other al-Qaeda figures and shed light on whether anyone in the Pakistani government was protecting bin Laden. The United States has not found any evidence that Pakistan's government knew he was there, the official said.

One segment of video footage released Saturday shows bin Laden, looking perhaps older than his 54 years, watching footage of his younger self on television firing weapons. Officials did not play the audio, saying they didn't want to release al-Qaeda propaganda.

These are the sorts of videos only bin Laden would have possessed because he was careful about his public image, the official said.

One video was a never-released "Message to the American People," officials said, believed to have been recorded last year between Oct. 9 and Nov. 5.

In the video, bin Laden condemned U.S. policy and denigrated capitalism, the official said.

"We don't know why the video hasn't yet appeared," the official said.

Other footage showed bin Laden rehearsing for video messages.

"Our takeaway is that he jealously guarded his image," the official said.

The United States released the videos, he said, "to underscore two main points. First, the videos make clear that bin Laden remained active in al-Qaeda's propaganda efforts, especially in shaping his own image. Second, it is highly unlikely that some of this footage would have resided anywhere else but with bin Laden."

The official also recounted the reasons the United States was certain bin Laden was the tall man they shot: His wife called him by name during the raid; facial comparisons of eyes, ears, and nose were a match with a 95 percent certainty, and the DNA matched a profile compiled from his extended family. The chance it wasn't bin Laden is "1 in 11.8 quadrillion," the official said, drawing laughter from reporters.

Al-Qaeda "is damaged by bin Laden's death, but remains dangerous," the official said. He noted that the group released a statement Friday acknowledging bin Laden's death.

"It is noteworthy that the group did not announce a new leader, suggesting it is still trying to deal with bin Laden's demise," he said.

It is an open question who would take over after bin Laden, the official said, because Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's No. 2, is unpopular among some elements.

Did Harsh Interrogation Tactics Lead To Bin Laden?

To find Osama bin Laden, U.S. officials first had to find the man who served as his courier. But the operation that killed the al-Qaida leader has stirred up some controversy: Some of the information about the courier may have come as the result of harsh CIA interrogations.

NPR has learned the courier was a Kuwait-born Pakistani who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. It was in his house that U.S. forces found and killed bin Laden.

Documents from the Guantanamo detention camp show prisoners there and at secret CIA facilities were interrogated over and over about bin Laden's courier network and Kuwaiti in particular.

One man scheduled to be transferred out of Guantanamo, for example, was recommended for continued detention in part because intelligence officials thought he had more information to provide about Kuwaiti.

Every statement was carefully recorded: that Kuwaiti had a guesthouse in Pakistan where he hosted visiting al-Qaida volunteers; that he arranged airline travel and passed along money from al-Qaida financiers; that he was assigned to teach one al-Qaida member to use email.

Enhanced-Interrogation Techniques.

The Guantanamo documents describe Kuwaiti as a senior al-Qaida facilitator and courier. The footnotes reveal how — and when — this information was acquired.

Some of the first leads came from detainees who were interrogated while in CIA custody; this is where the controversy arises.

About a third of the CIA detainees were subjected to what the agency euphemistically called enhanced-interrogation techniques.

"They range from something as innocuous as the 'attention grasp' or 'facial grasp,' you know, grabbing somebody by the lapels or grabbing them by the chin, to a variety of things that have to do with sleep or diet or stress positions," former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said.

In the most extreme case, detainees were subjected to waterboarding, when they experienced what it's like to drown.

Among those who provided information while under CIA control was Hassan Gul, a senior al-Qaida operative from Pakistan. According to the detainee documents, Gul told interrogators that Kuwaiti traveled with bin Laden. A senior U.S. official says the information Gul provided was key to identifying Kuwaiti as bin laden's courier.

But he may have done it under stress.

A 2005 document indicates that Gul was one of the CIA detainees subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." He is now free.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and one of three CIA detainees subjected to waterboarding, indirectly confirmed information about Kuwaiti.

Criticism Of Methods

Critics of "enhanced interrogation techniques" say they are tantamount to torture, and they argue that intelligence gleaned from those interrogations is unreliable. They also point out that some of the most useful information that came from Mohammed and others was obtained only after the harsh interrogations ended.

Hayden says he wouldn't be surprised by that.

"I'm willing to concede the point that no one gave us valuable or actionable intelligence while they were, for example, being waterboarded," he said. "The purpose of the enhanced-interrogation techniques was to take someone who was refusing to cooperate with us and to accelerate the process by which we would move from a zone of defiance to a zone of cooperation."

Moving a detainee from defiance to cooperation — essentially, breaking him.

But how do you know the information the detainee finally provided could not have been acquired some other way?

In an interview with NBC, current CIA Director Leon Panetta said harsh CIA interrogations were only one part of the intelligence-gathering process that led to bin Laden's courier.

"They used these enhanced-interrogation techniques against some of these detainees, but I'm also saying that the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches, I think, is always going to be an open question," Panetta said.

And a hotly debated one, given that finding and killing bin Laden was as much an intelligence triumph as a military achievement.