NY TIMES– Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.

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© NY Times, 2010

TELEGRAPH– Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the surge of 21,000 additional US troops into Afghanistan had raised the prospect that Pakistan could face even greater turmoil in the months ahead.”They want Afghanistan back,” he said. “We can’t let them or their al-Qaeda cohorts have it. We can’t permit the return of the very same safe havens from which the attacks on 9/11 were planned and resourced.

“Yet we can’t deny that our success in that regard may only push them deeper into Pakistan.

Adml Mullen said the impact of the surge of troops on Pakistan was an unknown factor in the gambit. “Can I be 100 per cent certain that won’t destabilize Pakistan?” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that.”

The Pakistani army has been fighting the Taliban in Swat and other north-western areas since a peace deal broke down earlier this month, forcing more than two million people from their homes.

Pakistan’s army yesterday predicted its fight to clear the Swat valley of Taliban infiltration would last for up to three months. The army showed captured Taliban positions in caves during a battlefield tour. “You can see by the houses in the valley that we have kept civilian casualties to an absolute minimum and not used air power in built-up areas,” Maj Gen Sajjad Ghani, the commanding officer said.

The United Nations launched an appeal yesterday for $543 million and warned of a long-term humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

© TELEGRAPH, 2009