Stolen secrets pose risks
BAGRAM, Afghanistan – Maps, charts and intelligence reports on computer drives smuggled out of a U.S. base and sold at a bazaar here appear to detail how Taliban and al-Qaida leaders have been using southwestern Pakistan as a key planning and training base for attacks in Afghanistan.
The documents, marked “secret,” appear to be raw intelligence reports based on conversations with Afghan informants and official briefings given to high-level U.S. military officers. Together, they outline how the U.S. military came to focus its search for members of Taliban, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups on the border region with Pakistan and Pakistani territory.
In one report contained in a flash memory drive, a U.S. handler also indicates that the United States discussed with two Afghan spies the possibility of capturing or killing Taliban commanders in Pakistani territory.
Pakistan has long denied harboring Taliban leaders or training bases, and has engaged in several well-publicized battles with insurgents in its tribal territories bordering Afghanistan.
But the documents contained on memory drives sold at a bazaar in front of the main gate of the Bagram base suggest that while Pakistani forces are working to root out foreign al-Qaida fighters from the northwestern tribal regions, the Taliban has been using Quetta, in the southwestern Baluchistan province, as its rear guard for training and coordinating attacks, some by foreign Arab fighters, in Afghanistan.
The theft of the drives became the subject of a full-scale criminal investigation Wednesday, two days after the Los Angeles Times revealed the black-market operation.
The contents of the flash drives appear to be authentic documents, but the accuracy of the information could not be independently verified.
Military officials, however, acknowledged Thursday that the sale of the stolen drives posed a security risk.
“Obviously you have uncovered something that is not good for U.S. forces here in Afghanistan,” said Col. Tom Collins, speaking from the public affairs office at Bagram Air Base. “We’re obviously concerned that certain sources or assets have been compromised.”
In Washington, Lawrence DiRita, a top aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it was “too early to say” whether any commander in Afghanistan will be held responsible for failing to secure the disks.
The drives appear to contain the identities of Afghan sources spying for the U.S. Special Forces that operate out of Bagram, which is the center of U.S. efforts to fight Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents, and includes a secretive detention and interrogation center for terrorism suspects flown in from around the world.
They also include what appears to be the identity of U.S. military personnel working in Afghanistan, assessments of targets, descriptions of U.S. bases and their defenses, and U.S. maneuvers to remove or marginalize Afghan government officials it considers a problem.
Contents on a disk sold at the bazaar Wednesday suggest that the Taliban has been using Quetta for training Afghan and foreign Arab fighters and sending them into Afghanistan for suicide missions.
Pakistan officials rejected the intelligence Thursday.
Gen. Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for Pakistan’s military, said it immediately checks out information on militant activities that it receives from the U.S.-led coalition, but that it sometimes proves incorrect.
“To make a sweeping statement like this, that people are taken to Pakistan to training camps and then brought back (to Afghanistan), is absolutely absurd and I reject this information,” Sultan said from Islamabad.
U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials have long been concerned about liaisons between Pakistani intelligence agents, the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The counterterrorism officials have compiled intelligence alleging that ISI officials were looking the other way, or possibly aiding al-Qaida and Taliban members plotting terrorist activity in the tribal territories in Pakistan.
The concerns were disclosed publicly in a report to Congress last year by its independent research arm, the Congressional Research Service, which questioned whether Pakistan “is fully committed to fighting the war against terrorism.”
“Among the most serious sources of concern is the well-documented past involvement of some members of the Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization with al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the possibility that some officers retain sympathies with both groups,” according to the report.
On the drives from the bazaar, reports from Afghan informants, marked “secret,” outline efforts by U.S. Special Forces in the fall of 2005 to locate and target Taliban insurgents inside Pakistani territory. The focus fell on top Taliban leaders who informants said had been residing in Quetta and facilitating kidnapping and bombing missions around the Afghan city of Kandahar.
An October 2005 cable to U.S. commanders at Bagram, also marked “secret,” said an intelligence source had reported Taliban leaders met in a council, or shura, in Quetta, on September 25, just days before Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. In the meeting, the leaders apparently decided not to launch attacks on election day, but to target government buildings and elected officials afterward, according to the documents on the disk.
“Al-Qaida will finance these activities through Mullah Matin, the Taliban finance liaison to al-Qaida for southern Afghanistan,” an intelligence summary, dated last year and marked “secret,” said. “Al-Qaida is financing because they want the Taliban to keep fighting.”
A U.S. Army Special Forces officer in southern Afghanistan met in November with a local contact and an Afghan operative from Quetta to discuss how U.S. troops might go after Taliban leaders in Pakistan, according to the document on a drive sold at the bazaar Wednesday.
The source told U.S. Special Forces that the Quetta operative could lead them to Taliban “high value targets,” or TB HVTs in the military acronym, according to the document.
The Afghan source also reported last year that Arabs, mainly Yemenis and Syrians, were going through Quetta on the way to carry out suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
“The aspiring suicide bombers are initially trained by insurgency elements in Iraq and then moved through Iran to Quetta where they are staged prior to transportation into Afghanistan,” according to a report on the drive.
In what appears to be a recent computer slide presentation marked “secret,” maps identify eight “major infiltration routes” for al-Qaida and Taliban forces crossing from Pakistan into eastern and southern Afghanistan.
The U.S. struck at targets in Pakistan in the fall of 2005 and early this year. A January 13 attack, aimed at al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, killed about 18 villlagers in the Bajaur region, a tribal area northwest of Peshawar, Pakistan. Officials later said al-Zawahri had not been at the location.
A week earlier, local residents reported that U.S. forces crossed from Afghanistan’s Khowst province into a village in North Waziristan that later was hit by fire from U.S. helicopters, killing eight people.
The Pakistan military denied the incursion, but accused the U.S. of firing over the border into the village. U.S. officials denied any knowledge of the attack.
The region has since been the site of intense fighting between insurgents and Pakistani military forces. That fighting continued Thursday, when an airstrike killed several suspected militants near the Afghan border. The attack was sparked by intelligence that al-Qaida operatives were hiding out in the area, Pakistani officials said.