INDIA RED-FACED AS MOST-WANTED FUGITIVES ARE FOUND NOT IN PAKISTAN BUT AT HOME

[But the discovery that two people on the list were in India all along provoked ridicule from the media in both countries and outrage from India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which said it would undermine Indian efforts to pressure Pakistan to stop supporting terrorism.]

 By Simon Denyer, 

Hafiz Saeed figures prominently on India'smost wanted list 

NEW DELHI — The Indian government said Friday that it would review a list of 50 most-wanted fugitives it said were hiding in Pakistan, after two of them were found to be in India after all. One was living at home on bail in Mumbai, and the other was in jail in the same city.

The list was handed over by Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai to his counterpart in Pakistan in March and consists mainly of Islamist extremists accused of committing violent attacks on Indian soil before allegedly being sheltered by its neighbor.

It was made public May 11, slightly more than a week after U.S. Navy SEALs stormed a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, as some in India questioned why their country could not mount a similar operation against militants in Pakistan.

But the discovery that two people on the list were in India all along provoked ridicule from the media in both countries and outrage from India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which said it would undermine Indian efforts to pressure Pakistan to stop supporting terrorism.

“It is very unfortunate and shameful for the country,” BJP President Nitin Gadkari was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India. “The international community will not take our case seriously.”

On Tuesday, Wazhul Kamar Khan, accused of involvement in bomb attacks in Mumbai in 2003, was found to have been living in his Mumbai home for years, after being released on bail.

Then on Thursday, Feroz Abdul Khan, accused of involvement in bomb attacks in Mumbai in 1993, was discovered in Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail, where he had been locked up for more than a year.

“The entire list is being reviewed,” U.K. Bansal, the secretary for internal security in the Home Ministry, told Indian media Friday. “We have no plan to recall the list from Pakistan.”

Other officials were quoted as saying an updated list would be sent to Islamabad in due course.

A separate master list of the most-wanted suspects in all criminal cases in India was then removed from the Central Bureau of Investigation’s Web site on Friday for “list updation.” The Times of India reported that its investigations showed that one of the militants on the list was dead and another was already in jail.

@ The Washington Post

PAKISTAN ORDERED ABOUT A FIFTH OF U.S. SPECIAL FORCES TRAINERS TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY AS RELATIONS DETERIORATED

By Karen DeYoung and Karin Brulliard,

Pakistan has ordered the departure of up to 20 percent of the roughly 150 U.S. Special Operations forces trainers in that country in the wake of a series of clashes between the two governments, a U.S. military official said.

Between 25 and 30 trainers were “told to leave” in the weeks before the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden this month, apparently in response to an earlier incident involving a CIA employee who shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive relationship. Pakistan had threatened to reduce the U.S. presence there after grudgingly releasing the employee, Raymond Davis, in March.

Since the al-Qaeda leader was fatally shot in his hideout in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, relations have become even more frayed. The Obama administration has asked pointed questions about bin Laden’s support system in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis assert that U.S. raiders violated their sovereignty.

Marc Grossman, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with military and government officials in the Pakistani capital this week as the administration moved to reestablish the partnership with one of its key counterterrorism allies even as it continued to demand answers about bin Laden. In an interview with Pakistan’s Express Tribune, Grossman said the two countries “need to work together” against the shared terrorism threat.

Also Friday, news services reported that an airstrike by a suspected CIA drone killed at least four people in the tribal area of North Waziristan, home to rear bases used by al-Qaeda and other militant groups for attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In what was likely to further complicate the task of repairing ties, the Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn published U.S. cables, obtained by the WikiLeaks Web site, that depicted the Pakistani army chief’s approval of the U.S. drone campaign and his request, in 2008, for its expansion. Pakistan has long publicly denied approval of the drone campaign, and a senior Pakistani military official said the request had only been for drone-provided intelligence.

Another cable, released Friday by WikiLeaks, said that the military had twice, in late 2009, approved the deployment of U.S. Special Operations teams to North Waziristan and South Waziristan to provide intelligence and surveillance assistance during Pakistani military operations. The secret cable, dated Oct. 9, 2009, and signed by then-U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson, noted that the cooperation would likely end if it became public. It was first reported in a New York Times article last fall.

The Special Operations trainers are assigned to Pakistani Frontier Corps troops that operate in the tribal areas. The Pakistani military official said any reduction in their numbers was not an expression of displeasure; rather, it was due to reduced need.

“They have conducted . . . so much instruction that their presence is now inconsequential,” he said. “We have more than the required number of . . . instructors who got trained by Americans.”

Referring to another sore point between the two countries, the official said that Pakistan’s greatest need is for long-promised, but still-undelivered, U.S. equipment, including communications gear and sniper rifles for the Frontier Corps. “What is the point of training on equipment that has not been delivered?” he said.

Meanwhile, a bomb attack on a U.S. convoy in the volatile northwestern city of Peshawar killed a Pakistani passerby and slightly injured two American consular employees Friday, in what the Pakistani Taliban said was a strike meant as revenge for the killing of bin Laden.

The bombing was the latest in a string of militant attacks in the country since bin Laden’s death and the first to target Americans.

Brulliard reported from Islamabad. Staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington and special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

@ The Washington Post

OCCUPATION IS “HUMILIATION” : OBAMA DRAWS THE LINE

[The president got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Perhaps those words will cost him some of those votes — although sentiment toward Israel among American Jews is slowly shifting. But true friends are critical friends. And the American and Israeli national interest do not lie in the poisonous Israeli-Palestinian status quo.] 

By Rroger Cohen

LONDON — On the eve of an election year, with Jewish donors and fund-raisers already restive over his approach to Israel, President Obama made a brave speech telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation” and urging him to accept Israeli borders at or close to the 1967 lines.

The president got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Perhaps those words will cost him some of those votes — although sentiment toward Israel among American Jews is slowly shifting. But true friends are critical friends. And the American and Israeli national interest do not lie in the poisonous Israeli-Palestinian status quo.

Netanyahu, who will address the U.S. Congress next week, will certainly attempt in response to go over the president’s head to those restive donors and fund-raisers. He’s Israel’s leader, but knows that a core constituency lies in the United States. He will try to outlast Obama, noting that Republican hopefuls like Mitt Romney are already talking of the president throwing “Israel under the bus.” He will try to kick the can down the road. Process without end favors Israel.

Therein lurks the political fight of the next several months. The best Obama and Netanyahu will ever be able to do is position a fig-leaf of decorum over their differences. The worst poison is distrust. These two men have it aplenty for each other.

Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Each leader believes Israel’s long-term security depends on his view prevailing.

A Republican-dominated Congress awaits Netanyahu with open arms. So does the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Aipac. Netanyahu is no less susceptible to adulation than the average man. These are not backdrops that encourage tough choices. But he must make them or watch Israel’s isolation and instability grow.

Does Netanyahu, with democratic change and movement coursing through the region, have it in him to move beyond short-term tactics to a strategy for his nation that ushers it from its siege mentality? I doubt it. I do know he will be judged a failure if he refuses, now, to make a good-faith effort to see if Israel’s security can be squared with Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. That involves revealing Israel’s hand on borders with the same frankness the president has just shown.

As Obama noted, occupation is “humiliation.” It was humiliation as experienced by a young Tunisian fruit vendor that sparked the unfurling of the Arab Spring. There is no reason to believe this quest for dignity and self-governance will stop at Palestine’s door or that Israel’s quest for security can be sustained by walls alone.

Arabs by the tens of millions have been overcoming the paralysis of fear. It is past time for Israel to do the same. A specter — Iran, Hamas, delegitimization campaigns — can always be summoned to dismiss peace. These threats exist. But I believe the most corrosive is Israeli dominion over another people. That’s the low road.

Obama got it right. The essential trade-off is Israeli security for Palestinian sovereignty. Each side must convince the other that peace will provide it.

Israeli security begins with a reconciled Fatah and Hamas committing irrevocably to nonviolence, with Palestinian acquiescence to a nonmilitarized state, and with Palestinian acceptance that a two-state peace ends all territorial claims. Palestinian sovereignty begins with what Obama called “the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli security forces” — including from the Jordan River border area — and with the removal of all settlements not on land covered by “mutually agreed swaps.”

This is difficult but doable. The 1967 lines are not “indefensible,” as Netanyahu declared in his immediate response to Obama’s speech. What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging. The president was therefore right to pull back from President George W. Bush’s acceptance of “already existing major Israeli population centers” beyond the 1967 lines.

Palestinians have been making ominous wrong moves. The unilateralist temptation embodied in the quest for recognition of statehood at the United Nations in September must be resisted: It represents a return to useless symbolism and the narrative of victimhood. Such recognition — and of course the United States would not give it — would not change a single fact on the ground or improve the lot of Palestinians.

What has improved their lot is the patient institution-building of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on the West Bank, his embrace of nonviolence, and his refusal to allow the grievances of the past to halt the building of a future. To all of this Netanyahu has offered only the old refrain: Israel has no partner with which to build peace.

It does — if it would only see and reinforce that partner. Beyond siege lies someone.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen .


@ The New York Times