Daily brief: 5 N. Va. men arrested, questioned in Pakistan on possible jihadist links

Afghanistan hearings on Capitol Hill
Today, 9:30am: Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry, House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFA)

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Questions await

Five U.S. citizens from the suburbs of northern Virginia were arrested at the home of an activist allegedly affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed in Sargodha, a town in Punjab province in Pakistan, after going missing from their U.S. homes about a week ago, and are currently being questioned by Pakistani authorities on suspicion of links to terrorism (NYT, AP, BBC, Telegraph, Dawn). JeM was involved with the 2002 murder of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and an assassination attempt on former Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, though its roots are fighting Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir territories (AJE, Bloomberg, AFP).

The families of the men, aged 19 to 25, contacted authorities out of concern that their sons had made a “terrible decision” (AP). One of the men reportedly left behind a “disturbing” 11-minute video suggesting “young Muslims have to do something,” with “jihadist overtones,” but legal authorities caution that they do not have evidence that the tape was intended as a farewell, while a Washington-area imam said yesterday that there were no early signs the men had been radicalized (Wash Post, AP).

However, recent reports say that a police source in Sargodha said the five men have told FBI investigators that they went to Pakistan to take part in jihad, while security officials report that the men were allegedly planning to strike “sensitive installations” in Pakistan (CBS, AP, Reuters, AFP, McClatchy, AP). Three Pakistanis have also been detained, one on suspicion of links to the 2007 suicide attack outside the Pakistani air base at Sargodha (AJE).

Another U.S. citizen who allegedly traveled to Pakistan with suspect motivations, David Headley, yesterday pleaded not guilty to charges of helping coordinate the 2008 attacks in Mumbai that left some 160 people dead, and of plotting to attack a Danish newspaper (WSJ, AFP, BBC). Headley reportedly told investigators he has been working with the Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba since 2002, and his next hearing is set for January 12, 2010. India is planning to seek Headley’s extradition (Reuters).

The hearings continue

The head of Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, yesterday told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan could last for years and cost at least $10 billion annually to fund an adequate Afghan security force (NYT). The U.S.’s rapid expansion of Afghanistan’s army and police will be supplemented by a renewed effort by the United States to hunt terrorists in the country, the general told Congress (AP, Wash Post). “We actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy,” General Petraeus said, though he declined to provide details in the open hearing.

General Petraeus said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he expects casualties to rise in the next six months, cautioning, “This will be a longer and harder fight” than Iraq (WSJ, LAT). During the Senate hearing, he also cautioned that observers should “withhold judgment on the success or failure of the strategy in Afghanistan” for a year. The general praised the Pakistani military for its recent campaigns in the tribal regions, but noted that Pakistan has “not directly engaged the sanctuaries of the Afghan Taliban groups in Pakistan” (AFP, Dawn).

Top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal sat down yesterday with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for an in-depth interview about the insurgency, the role of Pakistan, and the meaning of “defeat” (CNN). A transcript is available here (CNN).

Funding and polling

The Afghan National Security Forces have seen a much-needed bump in recruitment following a recent pay raise, as nearly 2,700 Afghans applied in the first week of December — about half of this month’s recruiting objective (Wash Post, AP, NYT). The American commander in charge of training Afghan security forces, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said yesterday that a key issue in boosting the forces is ensuring a balance of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups; currently, Tajiks make up 27 percent of the population but 41 percent of the officers.

A new New York Times/CBS poll finds that following U.S. President Barack Obama’s address to the nation last week about his Afghanistan strategy, public approval of his handling of the war there jumped 10 points, to 48 percent, while 51 percent of those surveyed approve of the president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to the Afghan theater, compared with 43 percent disapproval (NYT). The full results of the poll are available here (NYT).

Cheaper internet

A $70 million project to lay fiber optic cables in Afghanistan will bring the price of internet access down drastically, according to the minister for communications and information technology (Pajhwok). In a country of some 30 million people, only one million have internet access.

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