May 6, 2011

PAKISTANI ARMY CHIEF WARNS U.S. ON ANOTHER RAID

Posted by The Himalayan Voice:
[Calling the American raid a “misadventure,” General Kayani told the Pakistani reporters that another, similar, raid would be responded to swiftly, a promise that seemed intended to tell the Pakistani public that the army was indeed capable of stopping the Americans’ trying to capture other senior figures from Al Qaeda.]

 

By 
Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir spoke out 
on Thursday about the American raid 
that killed Osama bin Laden.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The head of Pakistan’s army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said Thursday that he would not tolerate a repeat of the American covert operation that killed Osama bin Laden, warning that any similar action would lead to a reconsideration of the relationship with the United States.
In his first public reaction to the American raid early Monday that left many Pakistanis questioning the capacities of the nation’s army, General Kayani did not appear in person, choosing instead to convey his angry message through a statement by his press office and in a closed meeting with Pakistani reporters.
The statement by the army’s press office said, “Any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States.”
General Kayani had decided that the number of American troops in Pakistan was to be reduced “to the minimum essential,” the statement said.
He did not specify the exact number of American troops asked to leave Pakistan, and it was not clear that the level was below what Pakistan had previously demanded after a C.I.A. contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in January.
Then, the Americans were told that the number of Special Operations soldiers involved in a training program would have to be reduced to 39 from 120, that C.I.A. contractors would no longer be allowed to stay in Pakistan, and that other American officials who appeared to be working for the C.I.A., but whose jobs were not clearly defined, would have to leave, too.
Clearly, the Bin Laden raid has compounded Pakistani anger, and further worsened relations.
Calling the American raid a “misadventure,” General Kayani told the Pakistani reporters that another, similar, raid would be responded to swiftly, a promise that seemed intended to tell the Pakistani public that the army was indeed capable of stopping the Americans’ trying to capture other senior figures from Al Qaeda.
General Kayani’s blunt warnings came after he met with his top commanders at their monthly conference at army headquarters at Rawalpindi, a gathering of the top 11 generals. The meeting was devoted to the consequences of the raid, which has severely embarrassed the Pakistani military, leaving the nation’s most prestigious institution looking poorly prepared and distrusted by its most important ally.
The official statement acknowledged “shortcomings” in developing intelligence on the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan, a reference to the fact that the Qaeda leader was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, a midsize city that is home to a top military academy and is about two hours from Islamabad, the capital.
The C.I.A. had developed intelligence on Bin Laden with the Pakistanis in the early going when the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had provided “initial information.”
But the C.I.A. did not share further development of intelligence on the case with ISI, “contrary to the existing practice between the two services,” an account that generally conformed with what American officials said in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid.
Pakistani officials and Western diplomats have described General Kayani and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, as seething with anger at the American go-it-alone action.
In an earlier account on Thursday, the foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, sought to dispel domestic criticism of Pakistan’s lack of response to the raid, saying that two Pakistani F-16 fighter jets were airborne as soon as the Pakistani military knew about the operation. But, by that time, he said, the American helicopters were on their way back to Afghanistan.
Mr. Bashir, speaking at a news conference, said that the Americans had used technology to evade Pakistani radar.
Alternately combative and defensive, Mr. Bashir said Washington should abandon the idea that Pakistan was complicit in helping Bin Laden hide. But he did not elaborate, saying only that the ISI had a “brilliant” record in counterterrorism.
Defending the Pakistani Army, the fifth largest in the world, Mr. Bashir said, “Pakistani security forces are neither incompetent or negligent about the sacred duty to the nation to protect Pakistan.”
But after withering criticism at home and abroad about how and why the Pakistani security forces could allow Bin Laden to be in Pakistan, the initial reaction here to Mr. Bashir’s appearance was mixed.
One of Pakistan’s best-known television journalists, Kamran Khan, who is regarded as a supporter of the military, dismissed the performance. “They have no answer,” Mr. Khan said. “We have become the biggest haven of terrorism in the world and we have failed to stop it.”
A retired ambassador and newspaper columnist, Zafar Hilaly, who has called for a public inquiry into Pakistan’s military, said that Mr. Bashir had erred in seeming to ask for the world’s sympathy by saying 30,000 Pakistani civilians and more than 3,000 soldiers had lost their lives in the fight against terrorism.
“The world wants to know whether we are effective,” Mr. Hilaly said.
Apparently in response to comments by American officials that the United States decided not to share details in advance with Pakistan because of a lack of trust, Mr. Bashir said, “All we expect is some decency and civility, especially in the public domain.”
The Pakistani authorities first learned of the operation when one of the American helicopters involved in the raid crashed at the Bin Laden compound.
“Immediately our armed forces were asked to check whether it was a Pakistani helicopter,” Mr. Bashir said. Although Abbottabad is home to a major military academy and three military regiments, he said, none of these institutions required sophisticated defenses that could have detected the impending raid.
The authorities learned that Bin Laden had been killed in the raid from surviving members of his family, he said.
Pakistan received the first official word from the United States about the covert operation when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, called General Kayani about 3 a.m. Monday local time, Mr. Bashir said.
That call took some time to arrange, he said, because “secure sets” were needed. Mr. Bashir said Admiral Mullen had been the first to raise the issue of Pakistan’s sovereignty in the call, but he did not specify exactly what the admiral said. Later, President Obama telephoned the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari.
The relationship between the United States and Pakistan will endure, the foreign secretary said, because “we share strategic convergence.”
In Washington, American aid to Pakistan faced new criticism. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday expressed “deep and ongoing concerns” about the United States providing Pakistan more than $1 billion a year in security assistance in light of the discovery of Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad and other recent evidence that Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies are aiding militants.
The lawmaker, Representative Howard L. Berman of California, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that “Pakistan’s continued resistance to cooperate with the United States in counterterrorism bespeaks an overall regression in the relationship.”
Calling the American raid a “misadventure,” General Kayani told the Pakistani reporters that another, similar, raid would be responded to swiftly, a promise that seemed intended to tell the Pakistani public that the army was indeed capable of stopping the Americans’ trying to capture other senior figures from Al Qaeda. 
@ The New York Times
CELEBRATING A DEATH: UGLY, MAYBE, BUT ONLY HUMAN

[Many of the sources of the joyous outburst were obvious: A clear victory after so many drawn-out conflicts. A demonstration of American competence, and of consequences delivered. The public relations value of delivering a public blow to a worldwide terror network. And, it needs to be said, the timing: The news hit just as many bars were starting to clear out for the night.]

By 
Some Americans celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden loudly, with chanting and frat-party revelry in the streets. Others were appalled — not by the killing, but by the celebrations.
“It was appropriate to go after Bin Laden, just to try to cut the head off that serpent, but I don’t think it’s decent to celebrate a killing like that,” said George Horwitz, a retired meat cutter and Army veteran in Bynum, N.C.
Others were much more critical. “The worst kind of jingoistic hubris,” a University of Virginia student wrote in the college newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. In blogs and online forums, some people asked: Doesn’t taking revenge and glorying in it make us look just like the terrorists?
The answer is no, social scientists say: it makes us look like human beings. In an array of research, both inside laboratories and out in the world, psychologists have shown that the appetite for revenge is a sensitive measure of how a society perceives both the seriousness of a crime and any larger threat that its perpetrator may pose.
Revenge is most satisfying when there are strong reasons for exacting it, both practical and emotional.
“Revenge evolved as a deterrent, to impose a cost on people who threaten a community and to reach into the heads of others who may be contemplating similar behavior,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and author of “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct” (Jossey-Bass, 2008). “In that sense it is a very natural response.”
Many of the sources of the joyous outburst were obvious: A clear victory after so many drawn-out conflicts. A demonstration of American competence, and of consequences delivered. The public relations value of delivering a public blow to a worldwide terror network. And, it needs to be said, the timing: The news hit just as many bars were starting to clear out for the night.
But this was much more than a simple excuse to party.
“Pure existential release,” said Tom Pyszczynski, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who has studied reactions to 9/11. “Whether or not the killing makes any difference in the effectiveness of Al Qaeda hardly matters; defeating an enemy who threatens your worldview, the very values you believe are most protective, is the quickest way to calm existential anxiety.”
After almost 10 years, the end was nothing if not final. “The emotions were so strong, I think, because the event was compacted: Bin Laden was found and killed, and it was done — done and over, just like that,” said Kevin Carlsmith, a social psychologist at Colgate University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. “We’re so used to people being brought in, held at Guantánamo, the trials, the appeals; it feels like justice is never done.”
As a rule, people are far more forgiving than they might guess, studies find. After most betrayals, like being dumped by a love interest or insulted, the urge for revenge erodes around the same rate that certain memories do: sharply in the first few weeks, and much more slowly afterward. The same kind of pattern can follow even physical assaults, depending on the circumstances and the personality of the victim.
“The intensity of the emotion falls off precipitously, simply because the body can’t carry such a giant load of outrage and function very well,” Dr. McCullough said.
But the urge for payback — especially for a crime like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed almost 3,000 civilians — never goes to zero. “There is a stubborn part of the memory that hangs on to the urge, to a little piece of it,” and the pain is refreshed every time the memory is recalled, Dr. McCullough said.
It is easy to forget how much fear was in the air after the 9/11 attacks: the anthrax mailings, the airport lines, the color-coded terror alerts. Many of those celebrating late on Sunday and early Monday were teenagers during those years, young people who have lived much of their lives under the threat of terrorism — and this terrorist in particular — and who had the time and energy to hit the streets and share the moment.
“For them this was a chance to be a part of history,” Dr. Pyszczynski said.
In a long series of studies, psychologists have shown that when people are reminded that they will one day die, they fixate on attributes they consider central to their self worth. Those who are religious become more so; those who value strength or physical attractiveness intensify their focus on these qualities; and people generally become more patriotic, more supportive of aggressive military action.
“Even subtle reminders of 9/11 have the same effect,” Dr. Pyszczynski said.
The sight of Bin Laden’s face on television or a smartphone news feed might have been enough to move people from the sidelines into the streets, to cheer for the home team.
Finally, people everywhere have a strong belief in “just deserts” punishment. In a 2002 study, psychologists at Princeton University had more than 1,000 participants evaluate specific crimes and give sentencing recommendations for each. The subjects carefully tailored each recommended sentence to the details of the infraction, its brutality and the record of the perpetrator.
The drive to enforce those sentences varies widely from person to person. But in a crowd of like-minded people, the most intense drives for justice become the norm: People who may have felt a mix of emotions in response to the news can be swept up in the general revelry.
Thus the natural urge for revenge — satisfied so suddenly, releasing a decade of background anxiety, stoked by peers — feeds on itself. Delight turns to chanting turns to climbing on lamp posts.