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Charges that members of the 9/11 Commission Report were bribed to play down Pak?s role expose India?s inability to change Washington?s mindset, writes PN Khera.
The allegation that Pakistani lobbyists successfully bribed the US 9/11 Commission to tone down the anti-Pakistani observations in their report is shocking. The fact that this has been reported by one of Pakistan’s most respectable publications, the Friday Times, makes the charge credible, and from the US point of view, indefensible. “The disclosure sheds doubt on the integrity and honesty of the members of the 9/11 Inquiry Commission and above all on the authenticity of the information in their final report,” according to a source cited by the weekly. The details of the Pakistani operation, masterminded by its Foreign Office were apparently revealed to the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly.
One of the more controversial elements that was not probed was the charge, first reported in the media in October 2001, that the ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmed was behind the $ 100,000 transferred by Umar Sheikh to Mohammed Atta, leader of the hijackers who crashed their aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. Ahmed was in Washington visiting his American counterparts at the time, and on the morning of the incident, was breakfasting with Porter Goss and Bob Graham, a Republican and a Democrat, then heads the House and Senate committees on intelligence, respectively. Goss has since been appointed CIA chief. They were later involved in the Commission, yet nothing has appeared on the Pakistani connection in the Commission report or its follow up.
Information on the transfer of money came through Indian diplomatic sources but was followed up by intelligence agencies tracking Umar Sheikh, since convicted for Daniel Pearl’s murder. Apparently the FBI has detailed knowledge of this, and this is what was left out of the 9/11 report.
Mahmoud Ahmed was subsequently sacked by Pervez Musharraf on October 8, 2001, when the smoking gun was revealed to the Pakistani leader. At the time it was put out that he had resigned because he had been superseded. However, it is now clear that it was a part of a purge of Islamist generals who had, ironically enough, actually helped Musharraf to come to power in October 1999.
The Friday Times report cited a Pakistani Foreign Ministry official who said that “dramatic changes” were made in the final draft of the 9/11 Commission Report “after Pakistani lobbyists convinced the commission’s members to remove anti-Pakistan findings.” Obviously, any direct connection between high-ranking Pakistani officials and the perpetrators of history’s worst act of urban terrorism would have had devastating consequences for Pakistan. Instead the Bush administration seems to have used the knowledge to pressure Musharraf to act against al-Qaeda. That his strategy has not worked is obvious, because rogue elements in the ISI have ensured that the so-called war against terrorism has gotten nowhere near capturing Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar.
According to the Friday Times report, some 75 US Congressmen have been won over by lobbyists through the obvious process of bribing and inducements to support the Pakistani cause. If so, this is bad news for the Indo-US nuclear deal. Because if US Congressmen are willing to look the other way on an issue that directly affected their security such as the 9/11 tragedy, what will they not do to ensure that India does not gain on the nuclear front?
Pakistani officials now want to gloss over the charge, claiming that their efforts were part of the normal lobbying processes that go on in Washington. This may well be so. We cannot blame the Pakistanis from trying to save their skins. But what does it tell us about the US and its system ?
In these circumstances, India needs to watch its back carefully. While cooperation with the US on counter-terrorism or nuclear issue is fine, India must ensure that it retains its strategic autonomy to operate on both areas. The intelligence agencies must also take care about sharing information with the US, because some of it could flow back to the ISI. The Pakistani intelligence and the CIA have had links that go back to the Sixties. The CIA, of course, funded the ISI to create a jehadist army to take on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a fact detailed by Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars. Even today, the two services have a high level of cooperation in fighting al-Qaeda, despite their differences in fighting the Taliban, a creation of the ISI.
While the US has suffered terribly from the terrorist acts of 9/11, India has been suffering terrorist violence almost continuously since the Eighties. Through draconian measures the US has insulated itself from terrorist attacks, but India remains vulnerable to terrorist violence whose base has now shifted to Bangladesh. Yet the outfit that is masterminding the violence remains in the same place — Islamabad.
Till date India has not been able to convince the US that the fight against terrorism must be united and that there can be no difference between the terrorists who plan strikes against India and those who attack the US. And that it is in our interest to ensure that the ISI is effectively dismantled.
