Imtiaz Gul
Isn’t the Western treatment of Pakistan – with all its self-serving contradictions turning into a farce with the cancellation of New Zealand cricket tour of Pakistan? The FIVE EYES intelligence alliance detected the threat to a cricket team in Pakistan but utterly failed in assessing capacity of Afghan security forces. It miserably also failed in forecasting the apocalyptic storm (read Taliban) heading towards Kabul.
For the evacuation of thousands of US and European nationals from Afghanistan the FIVE EYES found in Pakistan a safe lodging and transit station. The best intelligence agencies did not detect any security threat despite the perceived threats to American and European Marines/Officials. Hundreds, if not thousands, were present in Islamabad and elsewhere for several days. And it was a known fact that most Islamabad hotels hosted these evacuees for several days if not weeks.
But – bizarrely – the same agencies – FIVE EYES – promptly detected a serious security threat only hours before the first game between the Pakistani and New Zealand teams at Rawalpindi on September 19, 2021.
“The threat was deemed credible before the match, and led to phone calls between New Zealand Cricket (NZC) and their counterparts at the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), and Pakistan and New Zealand Prime Ministers Imran Khan and Jacinda Ardern,” the NZ Herald daily had reported.
The FIVE EYES intelligence alliance comprises New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US and the UK – and supposed to provide best intelligence assessments.
Strangely as well as tragically, the lead of the same FIVE EYES i.e. the American CIA was quick in droning an innocent family in the Afghan capital Kabul on August 29 that left 10 civilians dead, including children. Even an emphatic expression of triumph against a presumed ISIK bomber had followed the attack, only to be rectified over three weeks later, when General Frank McKenzie, the head of the US Central Command, acknowledged that it was “unlikely” that those killed were associated with the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), as originally claimed by the US military.
The strike on August 29 came days after a deadly suicide bombing near the Kabul airport that was claimed by ISKP and killed at least 175 people, including 13 US service members.
Imagine, how many innocent people must have fallen to such deadly attacks in Afghanistan in the last two decades? The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) recorded over 900 deaths in at least 13,072 drone strikes in Afghanistan between January 2004 and Feb 2020.
For Pakistan the Bureau recorded up to 430 drone attacks with over 4000 casualties.
In one of such incidents in July 2008, a US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in eastern Afghanistan. The bride was among the dead. Another nine people were wounded in the attack.
On another occasion on September 23 in 2019, faulty and probably motivated information led to the death of at least 40 civilians attending a wedding party taking place near a reported Taliban hideout in Helmand province.
Imagine the number of deaths from attacks based on false or motivated information? At times also strikes that are carried out to appease the audience at home – very much similar to the August 28 attack.
Such attacks and the reported combined intelligence on the threat to the New Zealand team raise questions on the capacity as well as the intent of the galaxy of intelligence agencies from five countries.
Strangely, the FIVE EYES missed the Kabul airport attackers, who had managed to slip into a critical area despite the presence of hardened fighters drawn from the Khost, Paktia and Paktia Protection Forces but were able to detect an obscure, unknown threat, unless one of them, or their undeclared partners in the region was privy to the entire plan.
How can states or state institutions conduct bilateral or multi-lateral sports events if they start reacting to what had looked like a hoax? And if they were so certain about the threat why wouldn’t they share it with Pakistani institutions for action against such non-state actors? The intent also becomes questionable if the FIVE EYES withhold critical terrorism-related information from a country they admit has been a victim of terrorism.
Or did they inadvertently play into the hands of the string-pullers of the proxy war that Pakistan has been facing for over a decade?
