Violence restricts Pakistan’s election campaign

A Pakistani boy walks past election posters in Quetta on April 28, 2013 after two Taliban bomb attacks targeted the offices of election candidates in Pakistan. (AFP)

Attacks by the Pakistani Taliban are forcing the main party in the country's restive northwest, an important battleground in the upcoming general election, to campaign in the shadows.

The Awami National Party (ANP) ruled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province for the past five years, but it is now bearing the brunt of a wave of Taliban violence as the country heads towards the May 11 general election.

The umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) faction has vowed to target the country's three main secular parties which formed the outgoing national government -- the ANP, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Pakistan People's Party of President Asif Ali Zardari.

More than 50 people have been killed in shootings and bombings on political targets since April 11, according to an AFP tally, and around half of the deaths have come in attacks targeting the ANP.

Ghulam Bilour, a leading figure in the ANP, narrowly escaped with his life on April 16 when a suicide bomber targeted his car in Peshawar, the main city of the northwest, killing 16 people.

Since the TTP assassinated his younger brother Bashir, the number two in the provincial government, in December, Ghulam has carried the fight and is determined to carry on.

"Every day I think I might not make it home at night. But I am a Pashtun: I'll face death and won't surrender," he told AFP.

But in the face of Taliban threats, the ANP has abandoned large meetings and only meets activists and supporters in small secure places.

Haroon Bilour, Bashir's son and a candidate for the provincial assembly, says the threats have hampered the party's ability to campaign.

"Our hands and feet are tied and we are supposed to run a marathon," he said.

His rivals from the conservative right -- religious parties and ex-cricketer Imran Khan's PTI party -- already boosted by a desire for change among voters, have had no problem organizing large meetings.

Haroon complained that his rivals "are not even condemning Taliban attacks against us".

The TTP is opposed to secular democracy in principle, viewing it as incompatible with Islamic belief, and their dislike of the secular PPP, ANP and MQM was intensified by the federal government's backing of military operations against militants in the northwest.

Even in its traditional stronghold Peshawar, the ANP has suffered the pains of incumbency: judged to be incapable of stopping Taliban violence and held responsible for the rampant inflation and crippling power shortages that make ordinary voters' lives a misery.

Its strong stance against the TTP and association with military offensives have also led to the ANP being accused of being too "pro-American" -- electoral poison in a country where anti-US feeling runs high.

The party has a fight on its hands, but the threat of violence has forced Haroon to order his activists to mount a low-key campaign.

"Go door-to-door in small groups. And go at night. And focus on evening, late night because people are home. Ask them if there is any complaint, and if so I'll go and meet them personally!" he told them at a meeting in the gardens of the Bilours' luxurious -- and heavily guarded -- Peshawar mansion.

He has learned from his father Bashir, who he says never missed a single reception in Peshawar, sometimes going to 12 weddings in a single day.

"Being present, coming to receptions and weddings, is very important for people and voters. Bilour supporters know that if there is a problem, Bilours are there," a local journalist explained.

His colleague Mian Iftikhar Hussein, another ANP leader, has also been reduced to pacing like a caged lion in the party headquarters in Peshawar, because the threats have stopped him campaigning for reelection even in his home town of Pabbi.

Hussein's rival in Pabbi, Khaliq ur-Rehman of the PTI, is doing well with a plan promising to eradicate hepatitis C and his calls for dialogue with the Taliban. The attacks on the ANP do not move him.

"Deaths threats are the consequences of what they did and said since five years. They should have been more careful. They promised to bring peace, but it's not our war," he said, echoing a common complaint that Pakistan has become embroiled in an American fight against Islamist militants.

But where Hussein and most of the rest of the ANP candidate are fighting the election with one hand tied behind their backs, the Bilours at least have the local strength of the family name to fall back on.

Ghulam faces Imran Khan, the rising star of Pakistani politics, as he seeks re-election and the old campaigner has form for seeing off celebrity candidates -- in 1990 he beat the PPP icon and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
 

29 Apr, 2013

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Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/04/29/Violence-restricts-Pakistan-s-election-campaign-.html
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Report: CIA pumps ‘ghost money’ to Afghan president’s office

CIA pumps "Ghost money" to Afghanistan president's office. (AFP)

For more than a decade, suitcases, plastic bags, and backpacks filled with tens of millions of U.S. dollars were delivered monthly to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai as a "courtesy" from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The New York Times reported, citing current and former Afghan advisers on Monday.

Karazi's former chief of staff, who served between 2002 until 2005, Khalil Roman told NYT that the money which they called "ghost money" came in "as secret, and it left in secret."

Although the "ghost money" was snuck to buy influence for the CIA, a U.S. official told NYT that instead the money fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan.

"The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States."

When asked for a statement by the U.S. newspaper, the CIA declined to make any comment over this matter. According to the newspaper, the CIA is known to support some of Karzai's relatives.

For more than a decade the cash was dropped off every month or so at the Afghan president's office, the newspaper said.

Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the CIA in Afghanistan since the start of the war.

The cash payments to the president's office do not appear to be subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or the CIA's formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies, and do not appear to violate U.S. laws, said the New York Times.

There was no evidence that Karzai personally received any of the money, Afghan officials told the newspaper. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.

U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the payments were quoted as saying that the main goal in providing the cash was to maintain access to Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the CIA's influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan's highly centralized government.

Much of the money went to warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban, the New York Times said. U.S. and Afghan officials were quoted assaying the CIA supported the same patronage networks that U.S. diplomats and law enforcement agents struggled to dismantle, leaving the government in the grip of organized crime.

In 2010, Karzai said his office received cash in bags from Iran, but that it was a transparent form of aid that helped cover expenses at the presidential palace. He said at the time that the United States made similar payments.

The latest New York Times report said much of the Iranian cash, like the CIA money, went to pay war lords and politicians.

For most of Karzai's 11-year reign, there has been little interest in anti-corruption in the army or police. The country's two most powerful institutions receive billions of dollars from donors annually, according to Reuters, but struggle just to recruit and maintain a force bled by high rates of desertion.

29 Apr, 2013

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Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/world/2013/04/29/CIA-pumps-Ghost-money-to-Afghanistan-president-s-office-.html
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Fighting reported near suspected chemical arms site in Syria

Fighting erupted in Damascus on Sunday near a complex linked to Syria's chemical weapons program, on the third day of an offensive by President Basharal-Assad's forces aimed at driving rebels from main sectors of the capital, activists said.

The fighting occurred near the Scientific Studies and Research Center on the foothills of Qasioun Mountain in the northern Barzeh district, opposition sources said from Damascus.

Barzeh is one of several working class neighborhoods that have turned into footholds for opposition brigades, who have infiltrated Damascus from swathes of farmland dotted with built-up areas on the outskirts of Damascus known as al-Ghouta.

The rebels lack the firepower to breach the heavily fortified Research Center complex and the compound is being used to shell Barzeh, the sources said.

The U.S. administration said last week that Assad's forces had probably used chemical arms in the conflict and congressional pressure has mounted on the White House to do more to help the rebels.

Republican senators on Sunday pressed President Barack Obamato intervene, saying America could attack Syrian air bases with missiles but should not send in ground troops.

Neutralizing Assad's air advantage over the rebels "could turn the tide of battle pretty quickly," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told a CBS news program.

In Barzeh at least nine people were killed and 70 were wounded in the last three days, mostly from army shelling. The district is home to a military hospital, hit by rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds on Sunday, and an electronic eavesdropping facility, as well as a military police compound and another army unit, the sources said.

Air raid

Syrian warplanes bombed on Sunday the adjacent district of Qaboun, through which Barzeh is being supplied from the Ghouta. There were no immediate reports of casualties, according to activists in the neighborhood.

The Syrian official state news agency said "units of the heroic Syrian army have inflicted heavy losses on terrorists" in Barzeh, eastern Damascus and Ghouta.

Speaking form Barzeh, opposition activist Abu Ammar said there search center was the only military facility in Barzeh that the rebels have not managed to hit. He added that a chemical weapons storage facility is located near the center.

"It is very heavily fortified and there are heavy calibrate-aircraft guns deployed in the complex and in large tracts of land that are part of it," he said.

He said opposition fighters in Barzeh repulsed an attack on their strongholds in the district from the adjacent Ushal-Warwar area, part of several hilltop enclaves inhabited by Assad's minority Alawite sect.

"Barzeh has been besieged for the last fifty days; with an arrow supply line to Ghouta through Qaboun," Abu Ammar said.

"Fighting has intensified in the last three days and the regime sent down his militia today from Ush al-Warwar but the fighters forced them to turn back," he added.

Activists reported fighting in the nearby district of Jobarto the south, where an air strike near a mosque set off a huge plume of white smoke, according to video footage taken by the opposition, as fighting continued across the Ghouta.

The army seized the town of Otaiba, near the Damascus International Airport, in Ghouta last week, cutting a weapons supply route into the eastern fringes of Damascus that rebels had used for eight months.

Syria's uprising is the bloodiest and longest of Arab revolts that erupted more than two years ago.

It began with peaceful protests against Assad that were met with force, sparking armed opposition and eventually civil war pitting Assad's minority Alawite sect against the Sunni Muslim majority.

The army appears to have made gains in the north and center of the country in recent weeks.

29 Apr, 2013

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Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2013/04/29/Fighting-reported-near-suspected-chemical-arms-site-in-Syria.html
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