Posted on 01/20/2002 9:25:53 AM PST by CreekerFreeper
MAG: SECRET PAKISTANI AIRLIFT AIDED TALIBAN, AL QAEDA FIGHTERS
Sun Jan 20 2002 12:15:41 ET
American intelligence officials and high-ranking military officers say that Pakistani Army military and intelligence advisers who had been working with the Taliban in Afghanistan were flown to safety in Pakistan during the siege of Kunduz last November, in a series of nighttime airlifts by the Pakistani Air Force!
Controversial Seymour Hersh returns to the pages of the NEW YORKER, according to publishing sources, in the January 28, 2002 edition, hitting racks Monday.
The airlifts "were approved by the Bush Administration," Hersh reports.
The evacuation, which had been conceived of as a limited operation, "apparently slipped out of control, and, as an unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exodus."
MORE
One American defense adviser tells Hersh, "Everyone brought their friends with them. You're not going to leave them behind to get their throats cut."
As one senior intelligence official puts it, "Dirt got through the screen."
Indian intelligence officials tell Hersh that they number the escaped officials and fighters at four or five thousand; American intelligence officials put the total far lower. But "the Bush Administration may have done more than simply acquiesce in the rescue effort," Hersh reports.
"At the height of the standoff, according to both a C.I.A. official and a military analyst who has worked with the Delta Force...the Administration ordered the United States Central Command to set up a special air corridor help insure the safety of Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the northwest corner of Pakistan."
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf won American support for the evacuation, Hersh reports, by warning that losing a large number of Pakistanis would jeopardize his political survival.
In India, a recently retired Indian diplomat tells Hersh, the feeling is that "Musharraf has two-timed you. What have you gained? Have you captured Osama bin Laden?"
A senior Indian intelligence official says, "Musharraf can't afford to keep the Taliban in Pakistan. They're dangerous to his own regime. Our reading is that the fighters can go only to Kashmir."
Kashmir remains the flashpoint. "The situation is bloody explosive," a senior Pakistani diplomat says, suggesting that Musharraf has not been given enough credit by the Indian government for the "sweeping changes" he's brought to Pakistan.
A retired C.I.A. officer who served as a station chief in South Asia tells Hersh he found it especially disturbing that each country had "imperfect intelligence" about the other. "Couple that with the fact that these guys have a propensity to believe the worst of each other, and have nuclear weapons, and you end up saying, 'My God, get me the hell out of here.'"
Developing...
As I recall (and I don't have the time now to research this) there were several articles on FR back before Konduz fell that stated that the Paks were flying Al-Querdos out of the beseiged city. Some of those reports, if I'm not mistaken, actually came from (gasp) DEBKA. There 's fertile ground here for a freeper with an afternoon to kill...
Pakistan has already shot at one of our helicopters.
MM
The guy LIES. He is intent on trying to discredit the armed forces, Donald Rumsfeld, and our war effort.
Why any intelligent person here would even consider believing him in this matter is mind-boggling.
Hersh may be unreliable, but i don't think that means that everything he writes is necessarily wrong.
Believe you have clearly and convincingly described his unreliability here.
The weasel construction of this sentence means that he knows it did happen.
It was widely reported that transport aircraft landed and took off from Kunduz in the black of night during the siege. My own speculation at the time was that Bush et al. had agreed to allow high ranking Pakistanis, or the relatives of high ranking Pakistanis, to exit Kunduz unharmed. I figured maybe a couple hundred people were evacuated. I can see that figure rising maybe to 1000, but not to the 4000 to 5000 figure Hersh is hyping.
Where was that reported?
Look, this story doesn't even make sense from Pakistan's point of view. Musharraf had already withdrawn support of the Taliban. He had fired his top generals who were sympathetic to them. He had fired the head of Pakistani intelligence for the same reason.
The Pakistanis who were fighting with the Taliban were not government soldiers and advisors. They were Pakistani terrorists who volunteered to go over there.
Even if some Pakistanis from the government were there, something which hasn't been proven at all, they were there on their own initiative. Musharraf isn't an idiot. Now, Hersh and others are saying that Musharraf would have wanted to rescue the very people he was cracking down on at home? It makes no sense.
You guys want a respected Conservative journalistic documentation of the Clintonistas (many remain in Sate and Defense as of today) dealings and alliances with al-Qaeda. If you doubt AIM's thesis, in the comments section of the links under the heading Archive I have posted links to articles that show the relationship between al-Qaeda organizations and the Clinton Administration. The Bush administration I am sad to say also has these people within its rank. The so called careerists in State and Defense:
Please read BIN LADEN GATE and see for yourselves if such a thing is possible.
After you get angry, start asking your elected representatives some questions and demand answers.
PS: MY apologies for such a long bump list.
I remember DEBKA reporting it first, so naturally, it was dismissed by most as unreliable info.
However, what you are asking for Rumsfeld to do is say that he has perfect knowledge of everything that has happened in Afghanistan since the war and (based on that perfect knowledge) to then guarantee that nothing like this happened. Because Rumsfeld is a smart guy, he is not going to do that because it is possible (albeit highly unlikely) that some helicopter survived our blitz and was able to get people out of Afghanistan without our knowledge.
All Rumsfeld is going to say (and all that should be expected of him to say) is that as far as the U.S. military knows, nothing like this happened. Given Rumsfeld's track record of not lying, versus Hersh's record of affirmative lies, that should be good enough for reasonable people to conclude that nothing even remotely similar to what Hersh is reporting actually happened.
Plus, how in the world does anybody believe that something like this could be kept a secret for over 2 months time. Does anybody really seriously think that an air corridor could be created so that several thousand Al Queda-affiliated enemies could be flown out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and nobody in the military would say anything about this. That all of our people fighting the war in Afghanistan would just sit by and not say anything to a reporter they respected, like Bill Gertz, about something stupid like this being allowed to take place. Finally, ask yourself this. How is that Hersh, who has always despised that U.S. military, keeps getting people in the military (including SF) to divulge our nation's deepest, darkest military secrets to him. It strikes me as being very strange that Hersh keeps getting 'scoops' that no one else is ever able to confirm.
That would assume that the U.S. government weren't allowing the airlifts to occur. Who would propose that they (U.S. military leaders) were unaware of these airlifts?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.