Wikileaks: truth or a myth
Although the Wikileaks fiasco is embarrassing for both the US and Pakistan, as it reflects the mistrust between the two closest allies in the war on terror, though without each other’s support they cannot win the war on terror.
However, General Hamid Gul denies aiding the Afghan Taliban and calls Wikileaks a work of fiction. Even President Obama has claimed that there is nothing new in the Wikileaks.
Lieutenant General Gul is a retired Pakistan Army general known for heading the Inter-Services Intelligence Pakistani intelligence agency, after the Soviet-Afghan War, and for instigating the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir against India in 1989 with the support of the militants, who fought in the Soviet-Afghan war. Hamid Gul served as the director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence during 1987-89.
The most disturbing aspect of the WikiLeaks is the ISI’s “working alongside al Qaeda” to plan attacks and, as the New York Times puts it, “The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani dishonesty contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Islamabad as an ally by American officials looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens.”
Another document on WikiLeaks points towards how the ISI trains group of insurgents and has a pool of suicide bombers, who are used to destabilize peace in Afghanistan. One such report from December 18, 2006 describes how suicide bombers are recruited and trained in Pakistan and sent out on missions where the Afghan National Police (ANP) helps them to carry out their missions reported Ali K Chishti for Daily Times.
Yasmeen Ali of Pakistan Potpourri reports:
There is general consensus that these “tens of thousands of classified documents” procured by the Wikileaks are mostly raw battlefield reports from Afghanistan, and reveal little that was not already known. All the same, it has created an impact and confirmed many fears: that the war in Afghanistan was not going too well for the US led forces; that it was largely because of Pakistan’s inter-services intelligence (the ISI) playing a “double game”; also that the Karzai led dispensation in Kabul did little to help; and that the indiscriminate use of force by the American military, a euphemism for war crimes, too has contributed to this failure.
Though, Hamid Gul’s name appears no less than eight times in documents leaked by the online whistle-blower WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, a Swedish whistleblower project, consists of activist journalists who have previously leaked videos and articles.
It leaked more than 90,000 top secret documents of the US military, consisting of cables, internal memos and e-mails sent out to various Department of Defense (DoD) officials related to Afghanistan, revealing: i) how the coalition forces have killed thousands of civilians in unreported incidents; ii) Taliban attacks have soared; and iii) how NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency, report by Ali K Chishti.
According to The National Post, Always impeccably dressed, Gen. Gul frequently entertains foreign reporters at his home, in a gated compound for retired officers near army headquarters in Rawalpindi. After the WikiLeaks accusations were made public, he took delight in dismissing the claims as “fiction and nothing else.”
“If this is the condition of U.S. intelligence, then I am afraid it is no wonder they are losing in Afghanistan,” he said.
“I am their favorite whipping boy and it is not the first time that such allegations are made against me. It is almost two decades since I retired from the ISI, but they keep accusing me of everything,” Gul added.
Currently, Wikileaks starts a tsunami of Anti-Americanism in Pakistan which will be hard to put down. The only solution seems here is to have strategic discussions between U.S and Pakistan to co-operate in so called war on terror and not tolerate with such reports and propagandas to divide them.General Hamid Gul pic