Taliban chief Mullah Omar in Karachi: The Washington Times

[New Shivaji]

Washington: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, is living in Karachi with the help of Pakistan's intelligence service, The Washington Times said on Friday.

Mullah Omar, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders when they plotted the 9/11 attacks, had been residing in Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban shura - or council - had moved from Kandahar after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Two senior US intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times that Mullah Omar travelled to Karachi last month after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

He inaugurated a new senior leadership council in Karachi, a city that so far has escaped US and Pakistani counter-terrorism campaigns, the officials said.

Pakistani officials said they were perplexed by the US reports, the newspaper reported.

The US officials, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) helped Taliban leaders move from Quetta, where they were exposed to attacks by US drones.

The development reinforces suspicions that the ISI, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s to expand Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, is working against US interests as the Obama administration prepares to send more US troops to that country, the newspaper said.

Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran and analyst on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, confirmed that Mullah Omar had been spotted in Karachi recently.

"Some sources claim the ISI decided to move him further from the battlefield to keep him safe" from US drone attacks, said Riedel, who headed the Obama administration's review of policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"There are huge madrassas in Karachi where Mullah Omar could easily be kept."

A US counter-terrorism official said: "There are indications of some kind of bleed-out of Taliban types from Quetta to Karachi, but no one should assume at this point that the entire Afghan Taliban leadership has packed up its bags and headed for another Pakistani city."

A second senior intelligence officer who specialises in monitoring al-Qaeda said US intelligence had confirmed Mullah Omar's move through both electronic and human sources as well as intelligence from an unnamed allied service.

The official said that neither Osama bin Laden nor al-Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri has been spotted in Karachi.

The official said the top two Al Qaeda figures are still thought to be in the tribal region of Pakistan near Afghanistan's border.

But, the official said, other mid-level al-Qaeda operatives who facilitate the travel and training of foreign fighters had moved to the Karachi metropolitan area, which with 18 million people is Pakistan's most populous city.

Al-Qaeda has had a presence in Karachi since at least 2001.

 

[Imran Khan]

what a joke then UBL should be in new york or tokyo .lol

 

[Skywalker]

Yea he might be renting the same house where daniel pearl and that bitc4h Asra nomani was living in zamzama blvrd.

 

[Cheetah786]

Two senior US intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times

Two senior US intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times that osama bin LADEN was Golfing with George bush AND SENIOR BUSH near BUSH ranch and later seeing taking of in Airforce one WITH SENIOR US GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS.


ITS FUNNY HOW INDIANS PICK UP ON THIS AND help SPREAD created news ALL OVER THE WORLD FOR THERE JEWISH COSUINS YET ASK FOR EVIDENCE WHEN PEOPLE POINT FINGERS AT RAW and other terrorist indian government agencies involved in pakistan and afghanistan.
They accept Mumbai terrorist testimoney as evidence(india till today has not given any evidence other then declaring he said so) of pakistani involvement yet when we catch indian trained terrorist they tell us (you going to listen to a terrorist or take his word as evidence)

 

[Imran Khan]

i think they have to visit karachi its modren karachi greande city not like bollwood 's karachi

 

[mshoaib61]

Mullah omer might be sharing a room with dawood ibrahim lol ,,

if some american saw mullah omer in karachi at sadar bazar then why they didnt bother to capture him at that time, instead of beating the drum later on .

 

[DaRk WaVe]

Americans are just too good at leaking sensitive info to media & they love to quote 'unnamed sources' God knows what kind of sources they are any ways.
Americans are confused once they think that co operation & money given to ISI has produced results

It has given hundreds of millions to the ISI, for operations as well as rewards for the capture or death of terrorist suspects. Despite fears of corruption, it is money well-spent, ex-officials say.

Reporting from Washington - The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI's assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan's tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence.

The White House National Security Council has "this debate every year," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official involved in the discussions. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Despite deep misgivings about the ISI, the official said, "there was no other game in town."

The payments to Pakistan are authorized under a covert program initially approved by then-President Bush and continued under President Obama. The CIA declined to comment on the agency's financial ties to the ISI.

U.S. officials often tout U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship have never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $15 billion over the last eight years in military and civilian aid.

Congress recently approved an extra $1 billion a year to help Pakistan stabilize its tribal belt at a time when Obama is considering whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a variety of purposes, including the construction of a new headquarters in Islamabad, the capital. That project pleased CIA officials because it replaced a structure considered vulnerable to attack; it also eased fears that the U.S. money would end up in the private bank accounts of ISI officials.

In fact, CIA officials were so worried that the money would be wasted that the agency's station chief at the time, Robert Grenier, went to the head of the ISI to extract a promise that it would be put to good use.

"What we didn't want to happen was for this group of generals in power at the time to just start putting it in their pockets or building mansions in Dubai," said a former CIA operative who served in Islamabad.

The scale of the payments shows the extent to which money has fueled an espionage alliance that has been credited with damaging Al Qaeda but also plagued by distrust.

The complexity of the relationship is reflected in other ways. Officials said the CIA has routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina, even as U.S. intelligence analysts try to assess whether segments of the ISI have worked against U.S. interests.

A report distributed in late 2007 by the National Intelligence Council was characteristically conflicted on the question of the ISI's ties to the Afghan Taliban, a relationship that traces back to Pakistan's support for Islamic militants fighting to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.

"Ultimately, the report said what all the other reports said -- that it was inconclusive," said a former senior U.S. national security official. "You definitely can find ISI officers doing things we don't like, but on the other hand you've got no smoking gun from command and control that links them to the activities of the insurgents."

Given the size of overt military and civilian aid to Pakistan, CIA officials argue that their own disbursements -- particularly the bounties for suspected terrorists -- should be considered a bargain.

"They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead," said one former senior CIA official who worked with the Pakistanis. "Getting these guys off the street was a good thing, and it was a big savings to [U.S.] taxpayers."

A U.S. intelligence official said Pakistan had made "decisive contributions to counter-terrorism."

"They have people dying almost every day," the official said. "Sure, their interests don't always match up with ours. But things would be one hell of a lot worse if the government there was hostile to us."

The CIA also directs millions of dollars to other foreign spy services. But the magnitude of the payments to the ISI reflect Pakistan's central role. The CIA depends on Pakistan's cooperation to carry out missile strikes by Predator drones that have killed dozens of suspected extremists in Pakistani border areas.

The ISI is a highly compartmentalized intelligence service, with divisions that sometimes seem at odds with one another. Units that work closely with the CIA are walled off from a highly secretive branch that has directed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

"There really are two ISIs," the former CIA operative said. "On the counter-terrorism side, those guys were in lock-step with us," the former operative said. "And then there was the 'long-beard' side. Those are the ones who created the Taliban and are supporting groups like Haqqani."

The network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani has been accused of carrying out a series of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

Pakistani leaders, offended by questions about their commitment, point to their capture of high-value targets, including accused Sept. 11 organizer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. They also underscore the price their spy service has paid.

Militants hit ISI's regional headquarters in Peshawar on Friday in an attack that killed at least 10 people. In May, a similar strike near an ISI facility in Lahore killed more than two dozen people. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who served as ISI director before becoming army chief of staff, has told U.S. officials that dozens of ISI operatives have been killed in operations conducted at the behest of the United States.

A onetime aide to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described a pointed exchange in which Kayani said his spies were no safer than CIA agents when trying to infiltrate notoriously hostile Pashtun tribes.

"Madame Secretary, they call us all white men," Kayani said, according to the former aide.

CIA payments to the ISI can be traced to the 1980s, when the Pakistani agency managed the flow of money and weapons to the Afghan mujahedin. That support slowed during the 1990s, after the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan, but increased after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In addition to bankrolling the ISI's budget, the CIA created a clandestine reward program that paid bounties for suspected terrorists. The first check, for $10 million, was for the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda figure, the former official said. The ISI got $25 million more for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's capture.

But the CIA's most-wanted list went beyond those widely known names.

"There were a lot of people I had never heard of, and they were good for $1 million or more," said a former CIA official who served in Islamabad.

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet acknowledged the bounties in a little-noticed section in his 2007 memoir. Sometimes, payments were made with a dramatic flair.

"We would show up in someone's office, offer our thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of $100 bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction," Tenet wrote.

The CIA's bounty program was conceived as a counterpart to the Rewards for Justice program administered by the State Department. The rules of that program render officials of foreign governments ineligible, making it meaningless to intelligence services such as the ISI.

The reward payments have slowed as the number of suspected Al Qaeda operatives captured or killed by the ISI has declined. Many militants fled from major cities where the ISI has a large presence to tribal regions patrolled by Predator drones.

The CIA has set limits on how the money and rewards are used. In particular, officials said, the agency has refused to pay rewards to the ISI for information used in Predator strikes.

U.S. officials were reluctant to give the ISI a financial incentive to nominate targets, and feared doing so would lead the Pakistanis to refrain from sharing other kinds of intelligence.

"It's a fine line," said a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official involved in policy decisions on Pakistan. "You don't want to create perverse incentives that corrode the relationship."

CIA says it gets its money's worth from Pakistani spy agency -- latimes.com

& on the other hand Americans think that now ISI is protecting Mullah Omer
If they have credible, actionable intelligence, why do they always leak it to Media, Why not tell Pakistan, Are they still not sure about the role of Pakistan & its commitment on WoT,

In late 2001, a cell likely commanded by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the admitted operational planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- abducted and killed journalist Daniel Pearl.

Mohammed, who was captured by the CIA with ISI help in Pakistan in 2003,

various terror plots were busted because of Pakistan/ISI but the thing is that 'good things' done by ISI are somewhat forgotten & these kinds of allegations without any proof are made
there has been crackdown in Karachi & many militants which escaped before operation in SWA were captured

Mr. Riedel also noted that there had been few suicide bombings in Karachi

Absurd, its is extremely difficult for them to reach Big cities out side NWFP due to Tight security & Karachi has already got Police & Sindh Rangers in action
If u note the location of Recent of bombings you will see they have all been done in Peshawar, Charsada & surrounding areas, This is because its easy for them to reach these areas & do their Job...

 

[Awesome]

This just in, two senior members from defence.pk have reported that Obama is actually Osama with a B.

 

[Imran Khan]

he cant because when he pray dawood play bollywood songs in high vol.and when dawoood sleep early morning mullah umer read quran that was issue then ISIgive them saprate rooms.now they enjoy in korangi 2 rooms apartment on 10007 floor in karachi.lol

 

[Awesome]

link/source of news?

 

[DaRk WaVe]

link/source of news?

Washington Times - EXCLUSIVE: Taliban chief hides among Pakistan populace

 

[SSGPA1]

Don't worry he is in Karachi to get a US visa because he will be recognized in Islamabad.

I am a little surprised though, he could have catch a flight with his buddy visiting PM, the CIA chief.

 

[AstanoshKhan]

Washington: Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, is living in Karachi with the help of Pakistan's intelligence service, The Washington Times said on Friday.

Right... This is how media shapes minds of people.

 

[Spring Onion]

drone attack drone attack.

when we are going to see a drone attack on Karachi by US to get him.

 

[DaRk WaVe]

drone attack drone attack.

when we are going to see a drone attack on Karachi by US to get him.

No drone attack this time F-18s from their A/C carriers lolzzzz

To hell with their unnamed sources