Obama For Osama
By Brig. (r) Junaid Zaman • Nov 13th, 2008 • Category: Politics • 3 Comments •Washington has made it’s strategy very much clear in regard of deadly air strikes in the North West of Pakistan. The attacks are unfolding without any delay in the FATA region and they are increasing day by day. US now believes that Osama Bin Laden is in the FATA area operating with full liberation and they have reconstituted their ranks of Al Qaeda. Islamabad’s official stance is to ask US to stop this missile attacks at once, but through the backdoor channels the understanding is to carry on them on the targets suspected of Al Qaeda presence.
The tension is mounting rapidly now in the settled areas of Peshawar, Dir, Mardan and other small towns. Talibans are reaching out to these areas, while Peshawar the capital of NWFP is rocking with violence. Pakistani armed forces are methodically fighting in different agencies, and the local Lashkars are also contributing their bits to quash the militancy. When Pakistan is spilling its blood to fight the US war on terror, which has now becomes its own, the policy makers in US are pushing the new administration-elect to go directly in Pakistan and wage full war.
Obama, the new US president-elect has also got a pre-occupation with Pakitan and in his thirst to prove his mettle and to accomplish thing he is sure to come hard on the Pakistani government. He has made it clear that his top priority is to find out Osama, and he has also confirmed that he believes that he is in Pakistan. That was what Bush believed all these years. So where is the change?
Obama needs to understand the dynamics of this region. His color is of no interest to the people of this region. He must not in his bid to please the whites do anything stupid in this region.
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Brig. (r) Junaid Zaman
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[…] For Osama Posted in November 12th, 2008 by in Uncategorized Obama For Osama Washington has made it’s strategy very much clear in regard of deadly air strikes in the North […]
A major Arab Al-Qaeda operative was among six militants killed overnight in a suspected US missile strike in northwest Pakistan, a senior security official told AFP Wednesday.Security sources identified the militant as Abdullah Azam al-Saudi, a senior member of Osama bin Laden’s terror network.They said US intelligence officials had identified him as the main link between Al-Qaeda’s senior command and Taliban networks in the Pakistani border region with Afghanistan.”He was the man coordinating between Al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders on this side of the border, and also involved in recruiting and training fighters,” an Islamabad-based senior security official told AFP.Sources in the Taliban said al-Saudi was also a member of Taliban’s supreme council, or Shura, under its fugitive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar when it moved from Afghanistan to the Pakistani side of the border about a year ago.Following the strike, al-Zawahiri warned US president-elect Barack Obama against sending more troops to Afghanistan saying that US policy was “doomed to failure” in an Internet audio message.A security official said the US missile strike was carried out on intelligence that al-Saudi was in a house belonging to a tribesman in the Bannu district, which borders restive North Waziristan.It was the first alleged US missile strike outside the tribal region which is described by the United States as home to Al-Qaeda’s command and control structure.Terror network chief Osama bin Laden is also widely believed to be hiding in the rugged region, although there is no clear information about his whereabouts.Al-Saudi is the second high-profile Al-Qaeda operative killed in recent apparent US missile strikes near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.Egyptian Abu Jihad al-Masri, described by the US as the terror network’s propaganda chief, was among several rebels killed in a November 1 missile strike in North Waziristan, a known hub of Al-Qaeda and Taliban rebels.At least five Taliban militants were also killed when Pakistani artillery pounded their hideouts through the night in a restive tribal region near the Afghanistan border, local administration official Mohammad Jamil told AFP.The clashes took place in the Mamoon and Nawagai areas in Bajaur tribal region, where the military launched an operation against Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants in August.”Troops fired artillery on militant hideouts and underground bunkers Tuesday night, killing five rebels and wounding three others,” Jamil said.Islamabad says its operation in Bajaur refutes criticism by the US and Afghanistan that Pakistan is not doing enough to stop militants crossing the border to attack US and NATO troops in Afghanistan.Washington has seemingly stepped up its missile strikes on the region since March, when a civilian government took over from General Pervez Musharraf, who turned Pakistan into a close US ally in the “war on terror”Recent strikes against suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban hideouts, all blamed on unmanned CIA drones, have come despite warnings from Pakistan that such attacks violate international law and could deepen resentment of the United States in the world’s second-largest Islamic nation..Pakistan has officially protested to the United States that strikes violate its sovereign territory, although some officials say there was a tacit understanding between the two militaries to allow such action.President Asif Ali Zardari recently promised zero tolerance against violations of his country’s sovereignty.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which declared the Internet unholy and banned its use for millions of Afghan citizens last June, maintained a website until shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and still has at least one e-mail address through its embassy in Pakistan.
The DNS entry for the Taliban’s website currently points to the null IP address 127.0.0.1. Before Sept. 11, however, it directed users to the official page of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an austere, multi-layered website hosted by Brain.net.pk, a Pakistani ISP with a server farm in Singapore.
The most recent version of the website, resurrected by Google’s cache, puts a surprisingly moderate face on the regime: The website offers its readers interviews with Taliban leaders, investment opportunities in various Afghanistan businesses, and even includes a section for questions and comments.
One unanswered question is how the Taliban accessed the Internet from within Afghanistan at all. Bram Abramson, director of Internet Research with Telegeography of Washington, doubts there was ever any high-speed Internet infrastructure placed in Afghanistan to begin with, since the country has been at war almost continuously since 1980.
“There’s just no way to know what their bandwidth is like,” he said, adding that he believed any Internet traffic into and out of Afghanistan before the bombing campaign would have been limited to portable satellite terminals connecting to Singapore or the United Arab Emirates.
Since the U.S. bombing began Oct. 6, he believes Afghanistan has been off the Net completely.
N.R. Liwal, an Internet solutions provider in Peshawar, Pakistan, said that if the Taliban is using satellite terminals to get online, they aren’t using his. Despite a website that proclaims, “We brought the Internet to Afghanistan”, Liwal says his company, the Liwal Group, spent the last two years trying unsuccessfully to bring solar-powered VSAT technology to Afghanistan, with connectivity services to be provided by SingTel of Singapore.
VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) systems use geostationary communication satellites and portable (less than 1 meter) satellite dishes to bring the Internet to otherwise inaccessible places.
“Satellite wireless is the only way to get e-mail and Internet in Afghanistan,” Liwal wrote in an e-mail.
Perhaps worried by Liwal Group’s advertising claims that their system would allow full communications with the outside world from anywhere in the country, Afghanistan’s rulers balked at adopting the technology. “We were trying to establish (an Internet presence),” Liwal said, “but (were) not permitted by Taliban.”
Brain.net.pk, with an internal fiber network connecting 162 Pakistani cities, is the largest ISP in Pakistan, and is the one the Taliban chose to use when it went online. Brain.net provides e-mail service to the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, as well as hosting for the Taliban’s website.
Like most of Brain.net’s consumer traffic, the Taliban’s embassy is connected to Brain.net over a 56K dialup line.
Irfan Shahid, manager of operations for Brain.net, handled the Taliban’s domain setup last April. He said that after the terrorist attacks, http://www.afghanistan-ie.com (and its cognate, http://www.afghan-ie.com) received more traffic than Brain.net permits for its customers, so the ISP shut it down.
Brain.net’s websites are housed in Singapore, which is relatively close to Pakistan, cheap to access and blessed with almost unlimited bandwidth.
Brain.net owns a small place in Internet history. Nearly 20 years ago, a scrap of code written by Brain Computers founders Basit Alvi and Amjad Alvi in Lahore, Pakistan, became the first computer virus to enter the public’s consciousness.
Baber Rabbani, the director of the Peshawar office of Brain.net, refuses to discuss what he knows about the Taliban’s Internet presence. When asked if Brain.net has any users located outside Pakistan, he immediately said no. Rabbani says the Afghanistan phone system has very noisy analog lines that are totally unsuitable for dial-up use.
Even the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, he added, doesn’t have an Internet link to the outside world. He gave an even stronger denial when asked if Brain.net did any domain registration for people outside Pakistan: “No, never,” he said, indicating he did not want to talk about Brain.net’s connection to its neighbor’s government.
Rabbani was enthusiastic, however, when talking about technical information regarding the company, such as Brain.net’s primary link to the outside world (SEA-ME-WE3, an undersea fiberoptic cable that stretches from Germany to Japan), the company’s Unix/Linux server farms in Lahore and Singapore, and about its backup satellite link with Interpacket.
Yet of the four public e-mail addresses the Taliban used, the only one that evidently remains active is afghan@brain.net.pk. However, there has been no response to repeated messages sent to that address.
One person not worried about discussing his supposed connection to the Taliban is Nisar Ahmed Atayee, an expatriate Afghan who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Newbury Park. His website, ShariatOnline.net, was named by the Times of India as an official Taliban website.
Atayee insists he is using his website only to alert the world to the horrific drought in Afghanistan. The placement of the Taliban flag and seal on his website is, he says, merely to identify it as the product of a proud Afghan. “It is the flag of my country, since the 1990s, and that is all,” he explained.