Taliban paranoi strikes in Pakistan

LA Times:

Taliban militants and their allies are waging a dirty war in Pakistan's unruly tribal areas, kidnapping and executing people suspected of spying for U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan.

Militants have killed at least 53 accused spies and pro-government elders in Pakistan over the last two years, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Many of their bodies were found with notes that claimed the victims had visited U.S. military bases in Afghanistan. Local residents put the death toll from such executions at about 150.

The headless corpse of the latest victim, taxi driver Khun Majan, was found in a ditch Tuesday near the town of Angoor Adda, a suspected Taliban haven in the South Waziristan tribal region, eight days after relatives reported he had been kidnapped.

"He visited a U.S. forces base in the Birmal area, Paktika province of Afghanistan, and was providing information about mujahedin to our enemies," said a note on his body.

It was not known whether any of the victims were working as informants or spies for U.S. forces.

But secret documents on a memory drive stolen from the American air base at Bagram, north of Kabul, and sold at a bazaar outside its gates, show that U.S. Special Forces apparently used informants in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. The files contained what appeared to be highly sensitive material, including the identities of informants and their families, and some of the information the sources had provided.

None of the informants' names that appeared on the drive sold at the Bagram bazaar, however, matched those of victims killed in Pakistan. And many of the killings predate the files found on the drive.

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There is a real opportunity to screw these guys up with their current level of paranoia. We can give the names of known Taliban as agents or people we get info from. We could release some POW's with information planted on them to draw suspicion to some of the Taliban leadership. They would be very vulnearble to this type of operation because they are looking for excuses for the massive failures over the last few years and it would be easy for them to blame traitors in their midst. In Vietnam, our covert operations people noticed that when they had a failed insert of an agent (which almost all were) the communist would round up and kill dozens more who had nothing to do with the operation. They then developed a plan to parachute communist POW's back into North Vietnam, with incriminating data hidden in their clothing and gear.