Well, it looks like after years and years of working as an independent freelance, I’m off to join Reuters as a special correspondent, which is a roving role within Europe and the Middle East as part of a wider global enterprise team. It’s an exciting time to join the organisation as they’ve decided to give a real boost to long-form explanatory and investigative work. Serious journlism, in other words, of the sort that is often in short supply. Details announced today in Press Gazette. I’ll start there in December.

While getting rather bored in London, I glanced through some old emails of mine and found this to friends of a trip to Karachi, in Pakistan, dated 16 May 2000. So i publish it here for the sake of amusement> it shows even when you discover almost nothing, the act of searching can be quite interesting.

It was the machine gun that rather betrayed his profession.  It was hanging from his shoulder down to his knees and he strode into my room at the Sheraton. Quite disconcertingly, he was also carrying a bouquet of roses and lilies. The note attached said: “With best wishes from Mr Shakeel”.

For those not familiar with Asian criminals, Chota Shakeel is the brother of what Indian papers like to call the “dreaded” or “notorious” gangster Dawood Ibrahim: the arch criminal master said to be in league with Pakistan intelligence in spreading all kinds of dastardly terror across the sub-continent, including hijacking a jet from Nepal and blowing up the Bombay stock exchange a few years ago and killing a large number of people.

Shakeel too has his own reputation. He is an “arch gangster and henchman”: blamed for almost every big explosion and murder in his hometown of Bombay.

Last week, I tracked down Shakeel’s people in Karachi with the help of a mobile phone number provided by the Delhi Police’s phone-tapping department. The same crew of line listeners, by following other Shakeel cronies, had exposed the involvement of Hansie Cronje, the South African cricket captain, in match-fixing. Dawood Ibrahim and Shakeel were supposed to be the Mr Bigs in the affair.

If Mr Shakeel is a gangster, then he is at least is a very friendly one. So friendly that it was difficult, once he was contacted, to refuse his generosity. His pressman, ambassador, or whoever it was that answered the phone introduced himself as “Osman”. And Osman announced: “You are our guests in Karachi. Whatever you want, we will provide. DO NOT be shy!”

As it was I was extremely shy. Osman had arrived bearing gifts: not just the flowers but two boxes, which when  opened later, contained what appeared to be gold jewellery and an expensive, if grossly tacky, watch. I tried desperately to hand these gifts back.

“No, no. Mr Shakeel would be very offended if you gave those back,” insisted Mr Osman. That was before he started offering to move me into a guest house, offered me women (“They can arrive here at our table  in minutes”), something to drink (alcohol is banned in Pakistan), or something to smoke (what could he have meant, I do not know).

Later, as my translater was trying to argue to hand back his presents. Osman told him, rather ominously, in Urdu: “Look, we have our way of showing our respect to people. And we have our way of taking up that respect.” Osman and his companion, a Gujerati who spoke little English, started laughing.

My aim had been to arrange a chat on the phone with Ibrahim Dawood. From where-ever he might be hiding. That proved difficult. But at least I could get to find out what gangsters were like.

-  “Are we the sort of Dons you expected? We are not ordinary gangsters, are we?” said Osman, a 45-year-old balding man dressed in a white shalwah-kameez and black slippers, and with rather penetrating black eyes.

One of the tallest Indians I’ve met. I protest I have not been out with that many gangsters. “I’m not sure what the average gangster is actually like,”I said.

As we sat in the Sheraton bar, sipping lime and soda,  Osman became very frank about his gang. Yes they had killed some people in Bombay recently in retaliation to Muslims that were killed by the police in ‘encounters’. “We take things very personally. You know, when they do things to our people, we have to retaliate.”

- What about the bombing of the Bombay stock exchange. Did you do that?

- Well our community was under attack in riots: our women were being raped and menfolk taken and hanged. So we did this bomb. We had to do something.

We are not terrorists, so it gave us no pleasure.

- So you regret it?

- Whatever we did, we did for the Muslims of India.

Osman stood up and took us to his car, a Saab. We were off on an air-conditioned gangsta’ tour of Karachi, a troubled city of 12 million people which also has its share of home-grown talent in this department.

On the way we passed the white fortress, complete with high wall, block houses and machine gun slits, that passes for the Karachi home of the ousted premier Benazir Bhutto. Then on to the long tree-lined avenue where police lay in wait and gunned down her brother in what is known locally as an ‘encounter’, a cross between an execution and a police identity check.

Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari, has been languishing in jail for some time accused of being behind the brother’s murder by the police. Osman explained that the origin of the alleged execution was a  marital tiff between Benazir and Asif. The brother, who came to the rescue, was the unfortunate victim.

Finally, we went to one of Karachi’s biggest architectural highlights, the Masjid-e-Tooba, the Tooba mosque, which is a 90 metre diametre perfect dome with a mirror ceiling. The place was closed, so the faithful were praying outside. But Osman had little problem opening the place up and ushering us inside.. The  acoustics are incredible,  turning the tiniest whisper into an echo. It probably helped that we were the only ones inside.

Driving back, we stopped at a barbeque and I was handed a chicken tikka roll. It seemed the wrong time to discuss vegetarianism. Well, in fact, I had brought it up earlier. But the comments were ignored. “Chicket tikka is the best speciality of Karachi,” said Osman. I said it was actually the national dish of Great Britain, but he was not convinced.

Osman and his companion, were beginning to reminisce about Bombay. When we first me, Osman had denied coming from India at all. Now, he admitted to fleeing at the same times as Ibrahim and Shakeel in the late 80s, when they faced imminent arrest.

He started protesting about the climate.  “You know there is no real weather here in Karachi. It is always the same, just a bit hot and humid.

Any weather they  do have is just second hand.”. Later he added: “We do miss our cities you know, our Bombay. There it rains for four months on end. That’s real weather.”

Osman says that he,, like Shakeel and Ibrahim, would love to return if only the Indian government would cut some kind of deal on the charges they would face. “It is our home, you know, our motherland.”

The poor things are such a long way from home. A gangters’ lot is, not always, a happy one.

FIRST PUBLISHED ON THE BBC WEBSITE – SEPTEMBER 20th 2011

By Stephen Grey File on 4, BBC Radio 4

Technology was used to monitor the conversations of pro-democracy activists, evidence suggests

A UK firm offered to supply “cyber-spy” software used by Egypt to target activists, the BBC has learned.

Documents found in the headquarters of the country’s security service suggest it was used for a five-month trial period at the end of last year.

Hampshire-based Gamma International UK denies actually supplying the program, which infects computers with a virus that bugs online voice calls and email.

The foreign secretary says he will “critically” examine export controls.

William Hague, who speaks for the government on computer security issues, said: “Any export of goods that could be used for internal repression is something we would want to stop.”

He also admitted the law governing software exports was a grey area.

Egyptians searched through secret police files after storming the building

The documents seen by the BBC were found at the looted headquarters of the Egyptian state security building earlier this year.

They describe an offer by Gamma International UK Ltd to supply a software programme called Finfisher.

Finfisher is described as a toolkit “used by many global security and intelligence services” for secretly gaining access to people’s computers.

The files from the Egyptian secret police’s Electronic Penetration Division described Gamma’s product as “the only security system in the world” capable of bugging Skype phone conversations on the internet.

They detail a five-month trial by the Egyptian secret police which found the product had “proved to be an efficient electronic system for penetrating secure systems [which] accesses email boxes of Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail networks”.

Another document discovered by German public television network MDR is thought to reveal the first-known victims of the Finfisher program.

The document describes how, during the period of the software trial, the secret police successfully broke into and recorded encrypted Skype calls.

Sherif Mansour, from the US democracy group Freedom House, was in Egypt last year to help monitor parliamentary elections.

‘Outsourcing repression’

Named in the document as a victim of the bugging, he blamed the Finfisher software and urged the British government to take action.

“We democracy and human rights activists already face a lot of troubles and get a lot of threats. I expect that from government but not from software companies.

“We have never looked to them to [be] enabling repression, to outsourcing repression.”

According to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Finfisher does not require an export licence because it does not use encryption.

Mr Hague told File on 4 that the UK had a strong export licence system.

He said a number of licences had been withdrawn from companies exporting items of concern to Libya, Tunisia and Bahrain – but he conceded software was a difficult product to legislate for.

“This will be a greyer area because there can be many many uses for a given piece of software.

“But nevertheless, we will look at that critically and if any evidence is supplied to the government – or we come across any evidence of British technology used for internal repression in other countries – then we will take the same very tough line on that as we do on other items.”

Gamma International UK Ltd is owned by a 49-year-old Briton, Louthean Nelson, who is listed as having addresses in Salisbury, Hamburg and Beirut.

The BBC wanted to ask Mr Nelson about the contradiction between Gamma’s claim it did not supply the software, and the information contained in the Egyptian documents. He did not reply.

‘Abuse of technology’

But although Gamma has refused to comment publicly, a company representative called Martin Muench is due to speak next week at a conference in Berlin on cyber warfare.

Gamma is listed as a “sponsor and exhibitor” with a speaker due to address the conference on “applied hacking techniques used by governmental agencies”.

Also speaking at the conference are colonels from the British, US and German armies, and the director of intelligence at US Cybercommand.

Continue reading the main story 

Find out more

File on 4 is on BBC Radio 4 on 20 September at 20:00 BST and Sunday 25 September at 17:00 BST

• Listen via the Radio 4 website
• Download the podcast

Elsewhere in the Middle East, reports emerged this month of claims that French and South African firms helped monitor phones and the internet for Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi.

In Bahrain – where the regime has so far survived the protests – human rights activist Abdul Ghani al-Khanjar says he only learned the extent of surveillance in his country after being arrested.

He had just returned from London where he spoke at a meeting in the House of Lords.

“Within two days, masked civilians and riot police raided my house and arrested me and I have been tortured about my many activities,” he told the BBC.

“It was amazing when they showed me some text messages from my phone and told me about my calls.”

He added: “This is a bad abuse of technology.”

The Bahraini government says it has launched an inquiry into torture allegations. But Siemens and Nokia have both been implicated in the bad publicity surrounding the case.

In the past Siemens sold Bahrain a “monitoring centre”, which is thought to have allowed the regime to secretly track and bug its citizens’ phones. The company is said to have sold the same system to 60 countries worldwide.

But Ben Roome, a spokesman for Nokia Siemens Networks – a joint venture between the two companies, says it has now pulled out of making interception tools, precisely because of concerns that they can be abused.

“If you provide technology you cannot be blind to how potentially it can be used,” he said.

File on 4 is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 20 September at 20:00 BST and Sunday 25 September at 17:00 BST. Listen again via the Radio 4 website or download the podcast.

As the Space Shuttle carries out it’s final mission, here is a look at the result of decades of space flight – the debris of missions and the clutter of so many satellites.
This view – from 8700km – is a visualisation in Google Earth with data from the Union of Concerned Scientists satellite database and the US Space Track record catalog, pulled together here.  (Click on the picture to enlarge)

Enjoyed joining a discussion last night at the Frontline Club. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

UPDATED: 29/9/11 – Despite a UN report released today reporting higher violence than ever in Afghanistan – the latest figures show fatalities trending massively down for US and UK troops in Afghanistan. The number of US servicemen and women killed is significantly down despite the unusual loss of so many SEALS in a helicopter crash. Details see amended graphs here:

At NATO’s HQ in Kabul it was confidently predicted that 2011 would be the most violent yet of the war in Afghanistan. But one thing missing from the debate over Obama’s drawdown – as far as I’ve noticed – is the fact that casualties seem to be levelling off for foreign troops, at least. As the charts below (compiled from data from the http://icasualties.org/oef/ website) show, UK deaths in Afghanistan have dropped sharply as UK troops have ceded the most dangerous territory of the upper Sangin valley, Musa Qala and Now Zad to the Marines in Helmand. But even for US troops, despite taking on more dangerous areas, the number killed appears to be levelling off, even as the surge reaches its highest intensity of operations. Is this a sign of progress or a result of no major offensives and more consolidation in the last six months?

US DEATHS IN OPERATING ENDURING FREEDOM (AFGHAN WAR)

UK DEATHS IN AFGHANISTAN

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times on June 5, 2011.
BY STEPHEN GREY:

BY the light of a full moon, a team of America’s most elite Special Forces fast-roped from helicopters into the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

Creeping through the pine nut groves of Qalandar district, Khost province, they approached a hide-out of bunkers, tents and make-shift buildings that was now used as a training camp for suicide bombers.

Their target, tracked to this location from Pakistan, was a senior leader of the Haqqani Network – a ruthless branch of the Taliban.

In the fire fight that ensued, the special force operators faced counter-fire from machine guns and RPG rockets, and even a suicide bomber that attempted to creep up on them. But at the end, they had killed both their target and 18 of his fighters.

Michael Waltz, a reserve officer with US special forces, was deployed to the region. And he recalled the attack won support from local people: “The elders were thrilled, even though we had destroyed some of their crop. There was an actual procession that came down from the mountains, down to our base to thank us.”

The raid that night was the work of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the same force that last month killed Osama bin Laden and includes some America’s most feared operatives like the Navy Seals or Delta Force.

In Afghanistan, I’ve learned, they are now leading an extraordinary blitz of what the military calls its “Kill Capture” mission.

After killing more than 3000 enemy leaders and fighters in the last 12 months, and capturing over 8000 — in raids mounted both by JSOC and by Britain’s own SAS and Special Boat Squadron, and also by wider teams from NATO conventional and special forces, – the military believes the Taliban is now, almost ten years into the war, finally on the back foot.

But there is a downside. A relentless pace of these operations can risk killing or injuring or simply angering Afghan civilians, particularly if they believe that innocent have been wrongly targeted.

When I travelled un-embedded to Khost to investigate the attack in the pine nut forest, a local elder, Khan Afzal, confirmed he supported the raid. “Yes, that was a Taliban training centre. After the Americans wiped them out, things got better for us. We felt safe. We felt secure.”

And yet almost in the same breath he condemned other operations, including air strikes and the manhunt missions that raid Afghan homes under cover of darkness – so-called “night raids”.

Last week, after 12 children and two women were said to be killed in air strike in Helmand, Afghan president Hamid Karzai reacted furiously. Issuing what he called his “final warning”, he ordered that night raids come under Afghan control – and banned airstrikes on Afghan homes.

If his warning was ignored, he threatened, then foreign troops would become “an occupying force. And in that case, Afghan history is witness to how the Afghans deal with occupying forces.”

For all the protests, is this Kill-Capture strategy working? Can it be decisive in helping end the war?

OVER the last six months, I’ve had significant access to the US and NATO command in Afghanistan now led by General David Petraeus — and to those involved in the closed and ultra secret world of special forces.

Researching a television documentary for the PBS series Frontline and the UK’s Channel 4, I learned of some of the dazzling intelligence techniques now being used not just to hunt down the world’s most wanted terrorists like Osama bin Laden but also employed in the bigger war against the Taliban.

It is the nerve centre of JSOC’s forward headquarters at Bagram, the former Soviet airbase north of Kabul, where everything comes together: CIA intelligence, “debriefs” from Taliban prisoners, video feeds from pilotless drone aircraft or spy satellites, intercepts from mobile phones and radios used by the Taliban, analysts who piece it together, lawyers who authorise mission, and finally the “direct-action” teams of soldiers who get to pull the trigger.

This “fusion” approach was invented by a former JSOC commander, General Stan McChrystal, who declared in the Iraq war “it takes a network to fight a network.”  When McChrystal became commander in Afghanistan, he asked for JSOC to move its effort across from Iraq.

And, since replacing McChrystal last July, Petraeus has doubled the pace of  “Kill-Capture” missions from all military units – an astonishing shift in a campaign sold publicly as a “counter-insurgency” aimed at protecting the Afghan population, not at wiping out the enemy.

John Nagl, a Pentagon adviser and a historian of counter-insurgency, said the combination of JSOC’s accuracy and ruthlessness had created something without parallel in the history of warfare. “JSOC is  this extraordinary machine, an almost industrial scale counter terrorism killing machine.”

Nagl said that many misunderstood counter-insurgency. “The doctrine believes in killing people.  It just believes in killing the right people.”

Most of JSOC’s attacks take place at night. It provides surprise and helps reduce casualties on all sides. And despite the vehement protest of many Afghans, who say a night raid violates local culture, its soldiers are conducting night-raids at the rate of 200 a month, we can reveal — more than six times more than two years ago.

The aim usually is to ‘capture’ not kill, and often their targets, known as ‘jackpots’, will surrender without a shot. “We are not Team America – we don’t want to obliterate everything in our path to get to some guy.” said one senior US special forces officer.

But plenty do get killed.

One source formally attached to JSOC explained there was little hope of defeating the Taliban but the raids could keep it suppressed. “It’s like hitting a boxer with body blows; its’ not a knockout but you stop them from breathing; you’re keeping them off-balance.”

I investigated these raids by speaking to all sides – the US military, to the Afghan government and to villagers in many parts of the country, and to the Taliban.

Few disagree these “targeted raids” are mostly on target. They are removing hundreds of Taliban fighters. But how the JSOC methods sometimes go wrong – and cause political harm – was illustrated by an airstrike in a remote part of Takhar province, Northern Afghanistan.

Early one morning last September, a convoy of six vehicles drove across a mountain range and was beginning its descent to a fertile plateau. As the vehicles entered a gorge, an American F16 jet roared overhead and dropped two bombs. Helicopters swooped down with machine guns firing. When a silence returned to the valley, ten men lay dead.

After the strike, in which ten people died, the military said they had killed a senior Taliban commander and his fighters. But survivors, local Afghan officials and the government in Kabul said the dead were all innocent. The attack had struck a convoy of campaign workers in the national elections, they said.

Three months later, we visited the scene of the strike together with several survivors and local officials. Among them was schoolteacher, Ihsanullah, who was in the convoy but survived. “That day was like a party,” he recalled. “We were campaigning for the elections. Altogether there were six vehicles. Our vehicle was at the end. Then there was a huge bang.”

The first explosion overturned one of the cars – but didn’t kill anyone. Ihsanullah got out of his car. “As soon as I took a few steps . . . the second bomb hit. I hurled myself to the ground. I heard helicopters. I thought the government was coming to help us. I thought the helicopters were coming to help the wounded.”

In fact, the helicopters had been sent to finish the job. “They only left when body parts and blood were all over the ground,” said Ihsanullah.

After doubts were raised over who had been killed, JSOC conducted a review of the evidence. Petraeus challenges the account of witnesses like Ihsanullah and insists the military struck the right target.

He told me: “This was a very significant figure, a very precisely targeted operation, and those who were killed, were bad guys.” He said the target had been tracked for days. “So again, there is not a question about this one.”

The US military named the man they killed as Mohamed Amin, the deputy Taliban “shadow governor” of the province and also a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which works with Al Qaeda.

However, our research revealed a different story. The most prominent man actually killed was called Zabet Amanullah, a former Taliban commander who had reconciled and now supported the Government. Known as “The Ant” for his distinctive small stature, he had been living in Kabul and had travelled to his former home province, after a gap of more than a decade, to campaign publicly and support the US-backed election. When we visited the scene, local police showed us the charred remains of election posters near his wrecked car.

Kate Clark, a former BBC Kabul correspondent, has investigated the case independently for months and knew Amanullah before he was killed.

Briefed on the case by US Special Forces, Clark said she got the impression the US military were so dazzled by their own high-tech intelligence. They appeared un-interested in common sense details from the real world. “Somehow they mixed up this man. If they just had just turned on the television or listened to the radio they would have realized they were killing a public figure, someone who everyone knew. It’s like they are in a parallel world.”

And then it emerged that Mohamed Amin, the man JSOC supposedly killed, was also alive and well. A former EU diplomat and expert on the Taliban, Michael Semple, tracked him down in Pakistan. “Mohammad Amin is alive,” said Semple. “He’s flesh and blood, he’s real, he’s got an identity that can be checked out and that we have checked out and he’s still alive”

Asked about his  apparent resurrection, senior US officials insisted this man must be an imposter, and that very specific secret intelligence confirmed “beyond all doubt” they had struck the correct target and that he was dead. They said the name “Zabet Amanullah” was just “an alias used by the Mohamed Amin.”

For all the military’s self-belief, all our evidence suggests that, in this case, JSOC killed the wrong man. Interviews with Afghan pro-NATO and pro-Government officials all suggested these were two different men from two different places with two different families.

US military sources, for instance, disclosed that Mohamed Amin had a nephew called Abdul Rahman whose arrest in January last year had helped to locate Amin. And in Amin’s home district, Kalafghan, a former Mujehedin fighter against the Russians, Haji Khair Mohammad, confirmed he knew the family and its connections to the Taliban. He said he knew that Abdul Rahman had been arrested and knew his uncle “is now in Pakistan and is the deputy [shadow] governor for Takhar province.”

The family that Mohamed described was a completely different family from that of Zabet Amanullah, the man targeted in the JSOC air strike.  “What’s disturbing about this case is not that special forces made a mistake,” said Clark. “It’s that they won’t admit a mistake and learn the lessons.”

General Daud Daud, a former commander with Mujahidin leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, and now police commander for all northern Afghanistan, praised US special forces for its Kill-Capture campaign and urged them to be even more ruthless.

But Daud was also adamant they got it wrong in Takhar. He blamed political rivals for feeding the Americans with bogus intelligence. “All of those killed that day including Zabet Amanullah were innocent,” he insisted.

A once relatively peaceful part of the country, anger has grown in Takhar against NATO.  Earlier this month, riots in which 11 protestors died were triggered by a US night raid which left four people dead, allegedly including two women. The military said the four were armed insurgents.

Last Saturday, two weeks after I last spoke to him, General Daud was on a visit to the provincial governor in Takhar when a suicide bomber walked in and blew himself up , killing Daud. He was the third Afghan official we interviewed in our research who has died since.

Daud’s killing was a reminder that the Taliban have their own campaign just as ruthless, to assassinate their opponents. And – whatever the rights and wrongs of controversial raids – it raised the wider question of whether, for either side, do they bring peace any closer?

SITTING at the edge of an irrigated field, a Taliban commander showed us a pictures on a mobile phone that explain how the relentless campaign of targeted Kill-Capture raids is shaping NATO’s enemy.

Talking to an Afghan colleague, who filmed the encounter, Khalid Amin and the images he showed of his two dead predecessors, are proof of the effect the US military campaign is having on the Taliban.

“This is Juma Khan. One of our distinguished commanders,” he says of the first casualty. “This is Maulvi Jabar, our district chief,” he says of the second.  “He was killed with 30 others in a night raid.

With its leadership in flux, the enemy that American and British troops are fighting this year is being transformed. But is the Darwinian “Survival of the Fittiest” going to make things worse or better?

Amin, for one, is bullish. “When Khan died,” he said, “the enemy said the Taliban was finished here. But three months later our Islamic Emirate is still strong. We have many more fighters than back then.

But is the Taliban really so resilient?  Last week, Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles argued they were.. He accused General Petraeus of trying too hard to kill the Taliban – and not hard enough on securing a political settlement to bring peace. “There is no doubt that Petraeus has hammered the Taliban extremely hard,” he said. “I am sure that some of them are more willing to parlay. But, equally, for every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge.”

And, even if their ranks think, will the new Taloban be more or less dangerous? One great concern is that experienced Taliban leaders will simply be replaced with a generation that is more extreme, less willing to make peace. “Every time a Taliban leader is killed,” questions Andrew Mackay, the retired major general and former British commander in Afghanistan, “my concern are we potentially killing a future Jerry Adams or Martin McGuineess?”

Those close to General Petraeus and JSOC recognize these risks. But, most argue, without Kill Capture operations, the Taliban would be able to impose its will with impunity – and attempts to establish security and restore the legitimate Afghan government would simply flounder.

“On targeting, we’re sort of damned if we do and damned if we don’t”, said one senior officer.

Petraeus told me: “The Taliban had the momentum and when you’re faced with a serious deteriorating situation, you have to do something about it. And the best way to do something about it is to use every tool available to you, and that includes everything from the very soft end of things … all the way to the hardest of the hard end, which is of course, targeted raids.”

Petraeus believes that Kill-Capture and other parts of his campaign are making a difference. “Our assessment is that we have halted, the momentum of the Taliban in much of the country – not all – and that we have reversed the momentum in some important areas,” he told me.

But even those close to Petraeus argue that, without even a mildly effective Afghan government in place, all the efforts of both special forces and conventional troops may still just be temporary. “It’s like spear-fishing.,” said one former JSOC officer. “You’re striking a series of points but you can only expect to have as limited impact on transforming conditions in the pond.”

The former JSOC officer added: “We’re trying to build the 20^th floor of the skyscraper while you’re still digging the foundations.”

Whatever its longterm consequences, with President Obama pledged to start “bringing home” troops from next month (July), most in the military feel boxed in with few options.

“A lot of what’s driving what we’re trying to do is the ridiculously truncated timeline,” added David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer and a former senior adviser to Petraeus on counter-insurgency. “In a perfect world, given enough time, we might be choosing different approaches, but we don’t have that option.”

All agree that 2011 will be the most violent year in the campaign so far. Petraeus hopes his relentless campaign has wounded the Taliban badly. But if the Taliban are starting to lose they haven’t realized yet.

In an isolated Afghan village– driven far from his own turf to escape JSOC’s clutches – we found Mullah Yunus, one of those new young Taliban commanders that the Kill-Capture campaign has put in power. Special Forces killed his predecessor as shadow governor of Baghlan province in an operation last year.

Rocking back and forth as he fingered his AK47, Yunus boasted: “This war has become  like delicious food for us. When a day passes without fighting, we get restless.”

In his eyes, peace talks will never be possible while the Americans remain in Afghanistan. “We will only talk when they compensate us for all our losses. Otherwise we will attack Americans in foreign countries”

Additional reporting: Shoaib Sharifi.

On another moonlit runway every month these days, another bearded man is hustled aboard a military jet. He is an ‘intermediary’ from the Taliban and  is about to be flown many hours before sitting down for another chance to talk about ending this war.

As Spiegel reported this week, Germany is one country that his hosting very preliminary “peace talks” in a hope of ending a war in Afghanistan that has cost so many lives. It’s not the only show in town. According to intelligence officials and senior diplomats I’ve interviewed, various “representatives” of the Taliban movement have also been flown to Norway and to Turkey in parallel tracks.

Fresh impetus to this process has been given by President Obama. As terrorism analyst Peter Bergen reports, a little-noticed shift of US policy has all but abandoned pre-conditions for talks to start.

Bergen is sceptical the Taliban is ready for talks – or, citing Pakistani truces with the Talban in its tribal areas, he argues they cannot be trusted anyway.

But while I judge the Taliban is becoming ever more extreme (despite attempts to argue the opposite by former Taliban ambassador Mullah Zaeef and indeed by Mullah Omar himself), if the White House is serious about a peace process, as I believe it is, then the critical question is what path could be chosen that could firstly make the Taliban less extreme and therefore an acceptable partner in a future accord and secondly make the peace process acceptable to the Taliban itself.

As Michael Semple (the Irish former deputy EU envoy to Afghanistan and frequent interlocutor with the Taliban), argues, what’s critical is to allow the Taliban to develop politically and begin its own internal debate on solutions to the conflict. It is only then that its leadership, as the IRA’ leadership did in Northern Ireland, might reach a point of abandoning violence. As a hunted underground military organisation, argues Semple, like the IRA, the Taliban needs its own Sinn Fein, a ‘political wing’ that is tolerated as a legal organisation that can open and office and engage with the wider world. This is the point behind the much-debated plan to allow the Taliban to open an ‘embassy’ in a third-country. (When I last checked, most support this plan – but cannot agree if it should be in Pakistan, as the Pakistanis argue, or in Turkey, as the Afghans and US/UK want). There is also the question here, explored in our Frontline film the other week, of whether the military strategy of ‘decapitation’ with the Kill-Capture program – IF applied too intensely – will or is having the effect or regenerating the Taliban leadership with hot bloods who will neither seek peace nor be an acceptable partner.

Secondly, how to make the peace process acceptable to the Taliban.

Beneath the all the public statements about “Afghan-led Afghan solutions”, there’s no doubt the key parties here are the United States and the Taliban itself. What undermines the US position is a fundamental split within its ranks.

While all may agree that ‘talk is good’, from talking at length to many key players involved, I’ve noted two contradictory positions.

At the White House and State Department, there is a greater support for the strategic track – a meaningful dialogue with the very top of the Taliban, even those close to Al Qaeda, with the hope that all the military pressure applied these last months, will make the movement’s senior leadership begin to realise their best hope of an acceptable deal is now – before they are further eviscerated or lose control of their ranks.

But many in the military take the opposite tack – that no meaningful deal with the Taliban’s ‘Quetta shura’ hierarchy is ever likely to happen in the short or medium term, although there’s no harm in stringing them along. Instead, as in Iraq, the best hope is bludgeon them militarily as hard as possible, seize their strongholds and then use dialogue as way to weaken and split the Taliban – sew dissension and split off its “reconciliable elements”.

Whatever their virtues, these two approaches – good faith talks vs picking them off — are in-compatible. No Taliban leader in his right mind would send an emissary to talk of peace, if he was convinced the main purpose of such contacts was to suborn that envoy and either turn him into a spy, or persuade him to split off and announce he was to ‘re-integrate’.

The hope and intentions are clearly there at the highest level. For President Obama to be successful, there’s much that needs to be done in secret. But more important than discretion is a broader strategy in place that align all elements of the political and military campaign to the bigger goal of ending the war.

The film I’ve been working on the last few months has aired on PBS Fronline in the USA.

Here’s the link to watch it if you live in the US.

A film i made with Dan Edge and Martin Smith on the secret war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan was broadcast on Frontline PBS in May 2011.

Here’s the link to watch it (if you live in the USA):