TTP chief Hakimullah is alive: ISI official

LONDON (Agencies) - Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Chief Hakimullah Mehsud survived an American drone strike in South Waziristan in January and is alive and well, a senior official with Pakistans Inter Services Intelligence agency told the Guardian on Wednesday. The senior intelligence official said he had seen video footage of the missile attack on Hakimullah Mehsud but other intelligence had since confirmed the insurgent leader survived. He declined to elaborate further. He is alive, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He had some wounds but he is basically OK. Mehsuds apparent survival will be a blow to the CIA, which intensified efforts to kill the flamboyant young Taliban leader early this year after he appeared in a video alongside an Al-Qaeda operative who killed seven American spies at a base in southern Afghanistan in late December. The US government is under pressure because it is unable to achieve much in Afghanistan. This is one way of hitting their Al-Qaeda enemies, as they define them, the official said. The New America Foundation recently reported that between January 2009 and March 2010 the drones killed 690 alleged insurgents and 181 innocent villagers. CIA figures put the civilian tally for the same period at 20. The Pakistani official estimated the civilian toll was between the two figures but insisted that targeting had improved. For the Americans, this is an effective way of doing things from a distance with little collateral damage. I give full credit to the CIA for this. The intelligence official denied reports that the Taliban deputy leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been captured in Karachi last January by accident. US intelligence pinpointed Baradar in a housing estate in a well-to-do part of Karachi, he said, but the raid to capture him was entirely Pakistani. There was no American around, he said. Baradar was being jointly interrogated by CIA and ISI agents and had yielded useful information, he said. For example, he claimed to have last met the Taliban leader in Afghanistan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, two years ago. He also rejected claims that Pakistan had captured Baradar to scupper nascent Afghan peace talks, saying that Baradar had disdained President Hamid Karzai as not even a real Pashtun. The senior official said the ISI would be very, very willing to play a role in negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, but only if called upon by both the Afghan and US governments. For now, he said, Pakistans spies are sitting on the sidelines, watching. There are a number of different efforts and nobody knows what anyone else is doing. Its a very fragmented effort. He added that if its meant to confuse the Taliban, its working. One stumbling block, he said, was the clashing policies of Britain and the US. The British are more amenable to negotiations and talking, he said. The Americans are attempting to create conditions where the Taliban will be forced to come to the table. In my opinion they will never achieve that. A western diplomat in Islamabad said British officials were more inclined to talks than their US counterparts, but said policy had not been fixed in either country because otherwise things would be happening. The ISI official denied his agency retains close ties with Jalaluddin Haqqani. He admitted the agency had once been close to Haqqani but insisted that recent US allegations came from people who lived in the past. He regretted that Pakistan had broken its links with the warlord because otherwise, resolution of the problems in Afghanistan today would be so much easier for all of us. The ISI was heavily criticised in a recent United Nations report into the death of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. The official described the report as a sub-standard work with a clear agenda. He said: In the report, statements are made and inferences drawn on condition of anonymity and hearsay. Who in Gods name does that? According to a senior ISI official, Hakimullahs Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan organisation has been weakened by a sweeping army assault on its South Waziristan stronghold. Mehsuds leadership has been challenged by other figures, too, including his rival Wali-ur-Rehman. He may not be in the leadership position, the intelligence official said. His rise was accidental. He was mister nobody, people found it difficult to accept him.