Same weapons being used in Karachi violence

Same Weapons Being Used in Karachi Violence
Imran Ayub, Dawn, December 28, 2012 http://dawn.com/2012/12/28/forensic-examination-same-weapons-being-used-in-tit-for-tat-sectarian-killings/

KARACHI: As the city descends into fear amid a renewed wave of killings, the police authorities see one or more organised groups behind what was earlier being called ‘tit-for-tat sectarian attacks’ as forensic investigations into nearly 90 cases found that same weapons had been used in targeting people from different sects and political parties, it emerged on Thursday.

A top police official confirmed to Dawn that under forensic findings it seemed ‘crystal clear’ that the recent wave of killings had nothing to do with sectarian rivalry rather it was an attempt to ‘destabilise the city peace’ to achieve ‘certain targets’.

However, the real face of a ‘third force’ still remains a mystery for both the authorities and police investigators.

“There is definitely a third force,” Sindh IG Fayyaz Ahmed Leghari told Dawn. “It’s not yet ascertained that it’s external or internal as no major arrest has been made on these lines.”

He said: “But it has nothing to do with sectarian differences. If they were the cause, you would have been witnessing violence in every street of the country.”

Asked about reasons for his confidence about the ‘third force’ involved in the killings, he based his conclusion on findings of forensic investigations into a number of recent incidents that had earlier been described as sectarian killings.

“For instance, we have found that the weapon used in one targeted attack was also used in another,” said IG Leghari.

He explained that on Nov 29, a young couple, Iqbal Hussain and Dilshad Fatima who were employees of the Karachi Institute of Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine (KIRAN), was gunned down near Safoora Goth and the following day another man, Nazar Abbas, was killed on Shaheed-i-Millat Road whose 12-year-old daughter, Mehzar Zehra, was wounded in the attack.

The police investigators and the media then suspected sectarian motives for both attacks as all the victims belonged to the Shia sect, he said.

However, he added, the Dec 3 killing of a seminary teacher off Abul Hasan Ispahani Road and forensic analysis of spent bullet casings one after another incident told a different story.

“On Dec 3, Maulana Mufti Mohammad Ismail of Madressah Ahsan-ul-Uloom was shot dead, off Abul Hasan Ispahani Road. Interestingly, the forensic examination in all these cases suggested that the same weapon was used in all three shootings,” said IG Leghari, reiterating that it was for this reason that the police believed “it’s not the sectarian violence or shooting on an ideological basis”.

Violence returned to the city mainly in the second quarter of 2012 with frequent killings and targeted attacks apparently on sectarian grounds after a gap of some months when Karachi started limping back to normality after the Supreme Court of Pakistan had taken suo motu notice of series of killings.

Many people belonging to the Shia sect — with a significant number of them from same families — lost their lives to the menace. Similarly, a number of men belonging to the Sunni sect, including seminary students and teachers, were killed in incidents of firing in different parts of the city.

While no serious effort from government quarters was witnessed to track the attackers and expose their motive, the Sindh police forensic division has made some progress on these lines.

“We have digital images of over 7,000 empties [spent bullet casings],” said Additional IG forensic division Muneer Sheikh. He said: “After a forensic analysis so far in some 90 cases this year we have found weapons of different calibers used in the multiple killings. Modern technology is being used for the analysis of every spent bullet casing according to global standards of forensic investigations,” he added.

Syria's Stalemate

Below, Vali Nasr discusses the probable implications of the ongoing turmoil in Syria:

Syria's Stalemate - Vali Nasr - July 27, 2012 - ABC News Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-27/syrias-stalemate/4159398

Take this clip with a pinch of salt though. Consider, for instance, these issues:

1. The problematic characterization of the conflict as primarily a "sectarian war". Given the involvement of many regional and global powers in Syria, the equation is much more complicated than just a communal-political conflict among different sects;

2. There is no probe into who this "international community" is and its interests and hypocrisies. For instance, why all of a sudden the monarchical states of the Persian Gulf have become the champions of human rights and democracy?;

3. No probe into the role of this "international community" in supporting and sending al Qaeda and other militant elements to Syria;

4. No probe into the role of this "international community" (and its propaganda machinery of media, political pundits, and gullible, involuntary, or fake lesbian bloggers) for not seeing the distinctions between Saddam's Iraq and Qaddafi's Libya on the one hand and Assad's Syria on the other**. For one, Assad still retains significant popularity among the masses, as Vali Nasr points out in the above clip, and even greater numbers of Syrian people are against a regime change, as verified by the Qatar Foundation. This "international community", however, actively supported the more uncompromising and militant elements in the opposition*** to hijack the whole opposition movement (to sabotage the possibility of the pro-democracy opposition pushing the Assad's government to engage in democratic reforms, which the Assad's government was willing to concede to stop the early protests and violence);

5. No probe into the impact of a debilitating Syria on the anti-colonial/hegemonic resistance in the region;

6. And, whether, perhaps, this debilitation of Assad's government was the goal of (at least some elements of) this "international community" from the first day? As discerning analysts knew from the beginning that the hegemonic forces could not have toppled Assad's government that easily, and even if they did, the alternative would not have been very desirable to them. Instead, perhaps, the "international community" wanted to make Syria engulfed into internal conflicts and bloodshed, so that it could not play its regional role in support of the anti-hegemonic resistance?

Another scenario is that perhaps the global and regional powers have already extracted enough from the Syrian turmoil -- in terms of weakening the regime and in terms of dividing the public/activist opinion (in the Middle East and beyond) and dividing the public/activist support for the anti-hegemonic resistance efforts -- that these powers now do not feel that a regime change would be necessary (they probably took into consideration the alternatives of either al Qaeda type extremists taking over power or the eruption of a full-fledged civil war if Assad's government were toppled. Either of these options would have destablized the border regions, and that would not have been desirable to the bordering countries, including Israel, Turkey, and Lebanon).

In both of these scenarios it is also possible that the foreign powers were hoping to remove Assad but retain the government (to keep Syria from a plunging into a full-fledged chaos), but haven't been successful at that, yet (despite their attempts to demoralize Assad's aides -- through rumors, bribes, bombings, defections, and so on).

** The emphasis on this distinction is not meant to support Washington's wars on the former two states.

***This was a repeat of the "strategic victimhood" and prolonging of conflict that was seen in the case of Darfur. As Kuperman argues in the following op-ed, the rebels became uncompromising because they believed that the Western powers and its support (including the Save Darfur movement) were behind them: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/opinion/31kuperman.html

In conclusion, no morality tale is being told here with the above questions -- just exhortation of doing a realistic assessment of the situation.

Some references:

""al-Qaeda" All Over Syria"

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31974.htm

"Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria’s Conflict"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/world/middleeast/al-qaeda-insinuating-its-way-into-syrias-conflict.html?pagewanted=all

On Arab League's human rights concern for Syria, see

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/06/20126221714569625.html

And, simultaneously, see this: "Saudi Arabia condemns Russian comments on human rights"

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/15/us-syria-crisis-saudi-russia-idUSBRE86E00420120715

On Qatar Foundation's poll, see:

"Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda

On the fake lesbian blogger, see

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom-macmaster

Here is an honest blogger who is rethinking his earlier assessment of Syrian violence

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/07/was-i-wrong.html

Another blogger: Check out the map given at Michigan Professor Juan Cole's site. The regions on the Lebanese and Turkish borders are the most volatile one. But, Cole does not analyze this observation the way Ron Paul does (see below). Is it because this is a democrat's war, not republican's? (Cole opposed Washington's wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, but supported the wars on Libya and now Syria.)

http://www.juancole.com/2012/03/syria-revolt-enters-second-year-as-world-stands-feckless.html

(A clearer map of Syria's neighbors:
http://www.yourchildlearns.com/online-atlas/images/map-of-syria.gif )


US Congressman Ron Paul on Washington's involvement in Syria (June 19, 2012)

"There’s no benefit for us to be picking sides, secretly providing assistance and encouraging civil strife in an effort to effect regime change in Syria. Falsely charging the Russians with supplying military helicopters to Assad is an unnecessary provocation. Falsely blaming the Assad government for a so-called massacre perpetrated by a violent warring rebel faction is nothing more than war propaganda. Most knowledgeable people now recognize that the planned war against Syria is merely the next step to take on the Iranian government, something the neo-cons openly admit. Controlling Iranian oil, just as we have done in Saudi Arabia and are attempting to do in Iraq, is the real goal of the neo-conservatives who have been in charge of our foreign policy for the past couple of decades."

Karachi Ashura Bombing Revisited

In parts of his new book, Instant City (2011), NPR’s Steve Inskeep investigates the Ashura bombing of December 28, 2009 against Karachi's urban, cosmopolitan context. I haven’t read the whole book yet except for the parts on the Ashura bombing. In these parts, Inskeep engages different theories and evidence about the perpetrators. Some of these theories and evidence were shared on this blog after the said bombing. Inskeep’s investigative narrative provides some additional insights and evidence, which if taken with a grain of salt, would be relevant for any evaluation of the (so-called) “sectarian” violence in Karachi.

Before I copy the relevant excerpts, it is important to note that Karachi’s politics – or Pakistan’s politics, for that matter – is not Inskeep’s specialized area, so it is not surprising that Inskeep makes some blatant errors in his narrative. One such error is his suggestion that the 2006 Nishtar Park bombing of the Sunni Tehreek gathering was carried out by Shia militants (p. 17). Inskeep seems to assume that if the blast is on a Sunni gathering, it must have come from the ‘opposite’ side – the Shias. Anyone familiar with the politics on the ground knows that that political gathering of this Barelvi Sunni group, Sunni Tehreek, on the 12th of the Islamic month of Rabiulawwal was targeted by the same criminal elements who had been targeting the Shias for many years. Many Sunni Tehreek leaders have also publicly pointed the finger at these criminal elements (See here, here, and here, in Urdu).

Looking closely at the text of Inskeep’s allegation, it appears that he felt compelled to insert some reference to Shia militants in order to create a journalistic ‘balance’ or ‘objectivity’ – ‘if you point out “Sunni” “extremists”, then you must also mention some “Shia” “extremists” to create that balance.' Inskeep imposes this 'balance' regardless of the asymmetry of Shia killing in Pakistan, and regardless of the fact that in the case of the Nishtar Park bombing, the same criminal elements may have been involved (the criminal elements who were killing both Sunnis and Shias).

Consider Inskeep’s text:

“One of the first stories I covered as a reporter in Karachi involved the Shia community: in 2002, men on motorcycles were following Shia professionals and community leaders – doctors, lawyers, engineers – and shooting them in the head. The killings had become normal. They happened all the time. Presumably the culprits were Sunni extremist groups who considered the Shias to be apostates.

The Shias had their own militants. In 2006 a gathering of Sunnis was bombed in Nishtar Park, around the corner from Abbas Kumeli’s home.

As accustomed as he was to sectarian violence, Kumeli sensed something different in December 2009...” (p. 17)

Note in the middle short para above how Inskeep connects the Nishtar Park bombing to the presumed Shia militancy: not by directly stating it, but by having the two sentences in the same paragraph. Some would consider this sleight of hand a lazy journalistic “balancing”; others would see this serious and unfounded charge as quite unethical.

In the above quoted text, Inskeep also mixes the description of violence with the explanation of it when he reduces the motivation of the “extremists” to be about doctrinal dispute ("Shias to be apostates"). This implied explanation (that focuses on sectarian-religious impulses) undermines the politics of such violence, such as the ethnic politics of Karachi; the interests and support of the country’s security agencies and their rogue elements; the security establishment’s “Good Taliban, BadTaliban” policy; and the involvement of foreign powers, their interests, and their spy elements in Pakistan (for instance, see here and here).

Another more subtle error could be seen in the way Inskeep describes the Muharram/Ashura procession. It sounds like the procession is exclusively a Shia gathering where the Sunnis are largely spectators. However, anyone familiar with the history and culture of these gatherings in South Asia would know that the reality is more complicated than this simplistic dichotomy. Muharram commemorations are attended by Muslims from various backgrounds and even by non-Muslims. The Ashura blast itself provides an indication of this complexity. As a previous post pointed out, 15 of the 50 killed were Sunnis; two were Bohra Shias; and one was Christian; and the rest were Twelver Shias. Some of these were participants and some were also part of volunteer services (as indicated in this partial list here). A senior reporter for the Geo News, Fahim Siddiqui, was also among those hit by the blast on that day. His son and niece who were with him died in the blast. In the simplistic, Sunni/Shia classifications, Fahim Siddiqui would be considered a Sunni, and yet he (along with his son and niece) attended the said procession on that day, and not as a spectator but as a participant. I think there is a more nuanced story to be told here about Muharram commemorations.

Excerpts from the book, Instant City (2011), starting form page 17:

Shortly before the procession, Pakistan’s interior minister visited Karachi. “He met with me in this room where we are sitting,” Kumeli said. The interior minister brought along the governor of Sindh, the province of which Karachi is the capital; each man represented a leading political party – one came from the mayor’s party, known as the MQM, and the other from the rival People’s Party. Both parties had joined an uneasy coalition that was attempting to share power in the province as well as the national government. And today these two officials were delivering a carefully calibrated message to Shia leaders around the city. “They were saying that they had made foolproof security arrangements, and also expressing the satisfaction they were hopeful that no such thing would take place.

“But they were expressing their fears as well.”

The visitors didn’t say exactly why they were afraid, but the list of plausible suspects was well known, starting with Sunni extremist groups that targeted the Shias. Then there were Taliban insurgents, who were bombing Pakistani cities that year in response to an army offensive against their mountain sanctuaries. Karachi politicians who showed up for the parade could become targets for enemies or rivals. And as Kumeli mulled the possibility of attack, he learned of the explosions at two smaller Shia processions on the two days before the climactic march. The blasts increased the tension, even though police blamed one of the explosions on gas from an open sewer line.

:
:

One the day of the Ashura procession in 2009, many Karachi residents of other sects and faiths volunteered their time to ensure the safety and comfort of the Shias as they marched. And chief among them were scores of young men who turned up now and again in the city’s security videos, often wearing distinctive khaki uniforms. They were Pakistan Boy Scouts, including Sunni Muslims, Hindus, even Christians…

[A] metal box stood next to a light pole. It was a box of considerable size, more than six feet high on metal legs, with a sloping metal roof. If anyone should come across a damaged Koran, or discarded paper with a Koranic inscription, people were supposed to drop it though a slot in the box so that no one would throw the holy words in the garbage or trample them underfoot. The book stood near the banyan tree, and it was inside that box of wayward scripture that someone had planted a bomb. (p.24)

[My notes: Since Koran (Quran) is considered sacred by all Islamic schools of thought, and perhaps equally by the religious “extremists,” the choice of the place to hide the bomb should complicate any analysis of the motivations and background of the perpetrators.]

:

:

The city surveillance video includes no sound.

The camera looks silently down on Jinnah Road from the old city hall. The banyan tree is visible in its little triangular park, across the street and maybe a hundred yards away.

The video recording shows the mourners coming into sight, walking toward the camera. The lead ranks, including the Shia scouts, have just passed the tree, which is visible behind them. They calmly pass in front of the blue-and-white sign of the Subhanallah Bakery.

Then the explosion rips into the body of the crowd. Within two seconds, thick gray smoke has risen as high as a five-story building…

Survivors affirmed later that there were two explosions. The first was sharp and small, like a firecracker, coming from near a water barrel. It may have been designed to startle people, fix them in place. Then the main explosion knocked Najeeb Ilyas to the ground…

:
:

We have only begun to recount the multiple events of December 28, but the Ashura bombing alone demands some explanation. Authorities made their first efforts to assign some meaning to the blast well before the day reached its disastrous conclusion. Early media reports quoted government officials who blamed a “suicide bomber.” Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik said the bomber had links to two militant groups, including Pakistan’s version of the Taliban. The Taliban soon claimed responsibility, also describing it as a suicide attack. Evidence, however, began pointing in another direction. Federal investigators studied steel nuts that were strewn on the road, the same ones Faisal Edhi had noticed, and the nuts made them doubt that a suicide bomber was responsible. Hundreds of nuts were too heavy to carry as shrapnel. When choosing a final wardrobe, investigators believed, the discriminating suicide bomber would prefer lightweight ball bearings… (p. 27)

Even more proof came in the form of torn metal fragments. They originated from the box of Koranic scripture. Video images from before the blast showed an Edhi ambulance parked beside the box. Images taken afterward showed the ambulance crumpled like an aluminum can, but still parked in place. The box was gone, blown apart, with pieces flung outward in all directions. The explosion could only have come from inside it, likely detonated by remote control.

A dead boy who had been mistakenly described as a suicide bomber was identified as a Boy Scout.

Police eventually dismissed the Taliban as suspects, instead linking the attack to a little-known Pakistani militant group with ties to al Qaeda [the police and news sources named this group as Jundallah. This group is known to have links with Washington]. We will see as our story unfolds that this militant group was originally organized to punish Pakistan’s government for cooperating with the United States in hunting down militants. So if the police were correct, we can read the attack as one bloody episode in al Qaeda’s long war with the West.

But on another level, the Ashura bombing had little to do with the West. No Americans were targeted. The bombers did not even directly strike America’s allies in the Pakistani government, instead wiping out common citizens on the street. People in the United States barely noticed the attack, which received only brief coverage in the midst of the American holiday season…. The Ashura bombing was instead an atrocity staged for a local audience, in which attackers and victims alike were Muslims. We may better understand it as part of a long battle within Islam [Is Inskeep calling it a “sectarian” battle between the “Shias” and “Sunnis”?], as well as a struggle for power in Pakistan. The details of the attack – the targeting of a vulnerable minority, the state’s failure to provide effective security, and explosives placed with awful symbolism in a box of damaged Korans – reflected disturbing trends through much of the modern Muslim world. [Inskeep needs to read the history of Taliban and al Qaeda and their creators once again; for instance, see here] They also reflected Pakistan’s own peculiar problems….

Karachi also faces a diversity of conflicts, which came into play after the Ashura bombing. [Why only after the bombing? Why separate the two incidents - bombing and fires? Is it possible that the pre-pared arsonists did not know about the bombing? If they did, were they and their interests then not involved from the beginning?] A second event extended the day’s destruction, and revealed more of the competing pressures that shape the instant city. Rival politicians, businessman, soldiers, and thugs jostle for power and land. Religion, while often invoked, is just one of several social divides; people are at least as likely to be split by their class, the location of their ancestral village, or the language they speak at home. Few people trust the government to mediate their differences. All these conflicts combine and intensify one another, like pouring chemicals on a building that’s already on fire, creating unpredictable conflagrations that define life and death in Karachi. (p. 29)

:

:

The fires spread along the route we have just traced, beginning at the banyan tree.

Minutes after the Ashura blast, people began breaking into the closed stores in the Lighhouse Bazaar. They pried open the corrugated metal gate to a store selling bolts of cloth and shiny men’s suits. The shop reached far back into the building; the men set it all on fire. Other shops were torched the same way. Some people crossed the street from the bazaar to the old city hall. They smashed the windows of the city fumigation trucks parked by the building and torched them one after another. Soon the flames reached a portion of the building itself. Fire trucks began arriving within minutes, but the crews were quickly driven away by the enraged survivors…

[Compare the above text in which Inskeep describes the scene at the Lighthouse area in terms of an “enraged” crowd that had lost control or gone mad, to how he describes (just four paragraphs later) the scene at the Bolton Market and its coordinated and pre-planned logic. Bolton Market was just a mile away from the Lighthouse area.]

“There was fire all around,” remembered Faisal Edhi of the ambulance service. “I was there about one and a half hours. We were asking the fire brigade to fight against the fire, but they were not present there, they were afraid to come.” They only came later, and “the markets were burned by that time.”

The thousands of police and paramilitary troops along the route made little effort to control the situation, choosing instead to make a tactical retreat.

In the video room at the Civic Centre, Bobby Memon and the police officials saw the chaos unfolding and made no effective response. In Memon’s view, it was a simple lack of coordination. “We always talk about that in a city like Karachi, there should be a central command system; they should have a camera working; and that should be linked to the barricade – should be linked to the ambulances – linked to the hospitals. And that’s only where you can respond to a crisis situation,” he said. Any police officer watching those scenes “was just in there watching. If something happened, what were they going to do?”

Other accounts suggested that the chain of command worked only too well – and that it restrained the police from acting. A Pakistani newspaper, the News International, reported that police requested permission to shoot the arsonists and were refused. Officials feared that if they responded to the violence with force, the situation would escalate and the whole city would explode.

During that first hour after the blast, two dozen or more men appeared on Jinnah Road. Many were about a mile ahead of where the parade had stopped – on the far side of the old city hall. Here they stood between long grand buildings of yellow stone – Gizri stone, it was called, after the location of the quarry that produced it. This was the wholesale district, known as Bolton Market.

The men broke into National Arms, a store that had sold weapons on this spot since 1948, and made off with Chinese- and Turkish-made handguns. They broke into a second gun store. Some men had torches. Soon entire buildings were in flames.

Television crews broadcast much of this live, which was how the shopkeeper learned of the destruction of his property… (p. 31)

Once the fire crews felt secure enough to operate, they moved from one burning building to another, yet the fires did not die. Mustafa Kamal, the younger mayor of Karachi, moved among the firefighters, offering exhortations and encouragement. It was much too late. The fires burned all night and for several days afterward. Hundreds of shops were destroyed. More than a dozen people were killed in the chaos on the streets.

“Who do you think did all the burning?” I asked Rashid, the plastic seller.

“I just don’t understand,” he replied. He reminded me that the fires in the Bolton Market only seemed to have spread to one side of Jinnah Road. “You will see that all the shops on the right side are affected. Not a single shop on the left side was burnt. Not a single shutter was broken.” That was one of many observations that shopkeepers made to each other as they speculated that certain buildings or blocks might have been deliberately targeted.

A question began forming in their minds – a question without any firm foundation [??], but one shopkeeper after another was asking it.

Was someone trying to clear off certain properties for later use?

Their question was spreading like the fires. (p. 32)

Flames and smoke still rose over Bolton Market, visible for miles through Karachi’s haze, as police began to investigate. Agents from Pakistan’s equivalent of the FBI arrived up the street at the Lighthouse Centre; we have already glimpsed them, peering at steel nuts and dead bodies. They were joined by the special investigations unit of the Karachi police, which handles terrorism cases.

The antiterrorism specialists who focused on the bombing case did not examine the fires at all, classifying them as, essentially, unrelated crimes. “There were two different things,” said Raja Umer Khattab, a senior superintendent of police, when we talked about the case. “One is the blast, and the second is after the blast.” He told me that separate investigators were assigned to the fires, and their examination produced only the arrests of a few Shia Muslims, in line with the policy theory of the case: the fires were set by people in the procession who were enraged by the bombing.

This explanation appeared to satisfy almost nobody outside the police force. Abbas Kumeli, the Shia Muslim leader, argued that the theory made no sense. Granted, the Shia marchers were standing there at the Lighthouse Centre, where some of the fires took place, but the marchers were nowhere near the Bolton Market. Why had the worst fires been set there? Why would angry Shia marchers walk past a mile of buildings and leave them all untouched, then start lighting fires again?

In the absence of a convincing official explanation, people were already supplying their own. (p.33)

In search of more information, I visited the local office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan… In the commission’s offices… [t]he man I had come to see led the way to a conference table in the breeze near an open window. His name was Abdul Hai. In the days after the fires, he was part of a Human Rights Commission team that conducted its own interviews with shopkeepers and others. Their report released on January 9, 2010, included this provocative paragraph:

“After interviewing and listening [to] the sufferers points of view, the team was of the opinion that the burning and looting was preplanned and was done by 25 to 30 persons who were fully trained and were possessing steel cutters, tools, fire arms and chemicals. It is very important to note that [the] procession of mourners after the bomb blast passed away and there was none of them at burning and looting sites.”

An operation that was preplanned? It was a strong statement in an otherwise carefully worded report. A covering note minimized its key finding: “This report is a mere compilation of the views of people affected directly by the attack.” Not, in other words, any sort of official conclusion.

Abdul Hai made a copy of his report on the Ashura bombing and gave me a chance to look it over. He emphasized again that the report simply passed on the claims of shopkeepers. “I have no opinion,” he said, gradually becoming more vague and evasive, or so it seemed to me.

I pressed him politely. He was a professional; he knew Karachi, he had talked with victims, some of whom may have witnessed the fires; he had even issued this report. What did he think might have happened? Who was responsible for burning several blocks of the city?

Some kind of mafia, he said.

And who might that be?

“Ah,” he said, in a tone that suggested: Now there’s the hard part. “Everybody knows, but nobody will tell you,” he said. “These mafias are all under the shelter of the police.”

As I moved across the city asking questions, it sometimes seemed that Abdul Hai had it right: everybody knew, but nobody would tell. Usually, however, it seemed to be the other way around. People across the city opened their lives and their hearts to me. Many were eager to tell me what happened that day.

I just wasn’t sure if anybody knew…

After the Ashura fires, everybody seemed to have a conspiracy theory. One came from Faisal Edhi. “I think it was a conspiracy to cause a clash between Shias and Sunnis,” he told me. He believed that the burned shops belonged to Sunni Muslims, who were deliberately attacked in tandem with the bombing of the Shia procession. Maybe so, though I later met a Shia shop owner who had also lost everything.

Other theories implicated the city’s two leading political parties. The major parties had armed wings as well as links to various criminals. One notion pointed to the city’s ruling party, Mayor Kamal’s [Altaf Hussain's] party, the MQM. Some hypotheses said the MQM destroyed the shops of political opponents, or tried to repossess the land for the city’s use [“city’s use”??]. No proof emerged.

Another theory blamed arsonists under the protection of the MQM’s political rivals, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP. That wasn’t proven either, although the police and Rangers, who failed so miserably to stop the fires, were under the authority of PPP government ministers.

When I met with Raja Umer, the police investigator, I asked about the claims of storekeepers and other witnesses, who believed that chemicals had been poured on the fires to accelerate the burning. People traded stories of arsonists wearing gloves and holding weapons. “No, no, this is wrong,” said Raja Umer. “Totally wrong. People said those who were burning the shops were wearing gloves they kept with them so they would not leave fingerprints. But after investigation it was decided that there was a medical store that was broken into.”

“They were wearing surgical gloves?”

“Yes,” he said. And the fires burned so fiercely not because of chemical accelerants, but simply because the buildings and their contents were so flammable. “It was a chemical market, a plastic market, clothes market, so it can burn easily. There is no evidence we can get about chemicals used for burning.”

Raja Umer’s assurances did not prevent members of Karachi’s elites from casting their own suspicions. One of the more chilling theories came from Yasmeen Lari, a woman who was well connected to Karachi’s political establishment and among the city’s most distinguished architects – she was known as “the first woman architect in Pakistan.” She led Pakistan’s Heritage Foundation, dedicated to preserving historic buildings and other artifacts; when thousands of old documents were found in that giant pile in the city hall clock tower, it was Yasmeen Lari’s foundation that organized an effort to begin preserving and archiving them. She also went into action after the fires. She rushed to the ruined markets, many of which were in buildings dating back to colonial times. City officials were inclined to tear down what little of buildings remained, but she sought to save historic facades. And this work led to her theory: she, like the shopkeepers, believed that somebody wanted the land beneath the stores.

“I’ve come to this conclusion,” she told me, “because M. A. Jinnah Road is now prime commercial land. These buildings are three or four stories high. They were burned down to try to see if, you know, a multistory tower could be put up in their place. Because as soon as we got to the site, within a few days, although we were offering that we would try to raise money for them to restore buildings, these owners kept on saying to me, ‘Don’t worry, we have no problem of money, we have people who are sitting there saying they will build it for us.’ So the question is how come?” Many of the buildings were full of shopkeepers whose families rented space at exceedingly low rates, having held on to their shops for generations. It would not be unprecedented for real estate owners to seize a chance to burn out tenants. “There is a huge mafia in this city,” Yasmeen Lari said, “which really wants to get this prime piece of land to build these multistory towers. I have no doubt in my mind there was great conspiracy.”

I heard an even darker version of this theory from Arif Hasan, a Karachi urban planner and architect who was writing a five-volume history of his city. Hasan was a broad-faced and solid man, whose stern expression somehow carried with it a hint of mirth. Sitting behind the white table in his home office, Hasan spoke in his quiet and precise voice. “Land mafias” had been growing in power for many years, he said, seizing real estate by any means and maximizing its value. “Our politicians became a part of it,” Hasan said. At first the politicians were in control of the mafias, or imagined that they were. “But then the Bolton Market tragedy happened,” he said, “and that showed our politicians that the mafia was stronger than them.”

Hasan had identified something that drove a city when it grew this rapidly – drove its economy, its politics, its conversation, its dreams and its nightmares. Real estate was the heart of the instant city in the early twenty-first century. It was a swiftly growing city’s true faith, a source of passion, hope, mystery, and superstition. Even if all the conspiracy theories were completely wrong (and certainly none was ever proved), the political result was the same. The abruptly vacant land took center stage in the political debate.

Even the bombing of the Shias prompted less comment than the real estate. A reporter for the News International wrote a few days later, “Within an hour of the Ashura blast, which tragically was quickly forgotten, the battle for prime real estate of Karachi began in earnest.” Shias were always being killed in Pakistan. But real estate on Jinnah Road did not become available every day. The question of what to do with the Bolton Market land instantly became a problem for everyone, including Karachi’s mayor, Mustafa Kamal. It even attracted interest and money from the United States.

When I thought about Arif Hasan’s theories of the Bolton Market fires, I recalled something he’d told me a couple of years before. He compared the situation in Karachi to man’s ancient lust for gold.

“Land has replaced gold,” he said. “Everything that was done for gold, is now done for land.” (p. 37)

:
:

Fire crews put out the last of the flames after hundreds of shops were destroyed, but it would be harder to tamp down the political debate. The People’s Party claimed the MQM had failed to properly mobilize the fire crews, which were under the control of MQM politicians. The MQM said the People’s Party had failed to unleash the police. This distraction came at a moment of great tension, when the People’s Party, the MQM, and other political parties were maneuvering against each other for the long-term control of Karachi. The provincial law that had created the local government was about to expire. The parties disagreed on whether and how to renew it, and their indecision raised the possibility that the mayor, the city council, and every other elected official could see their offices changed or even abolished. The moment was even more dangerous because Karachi’s political parties were generally divided between ethnic groups – or more precisely language groups, because each major group had its own tongue, such as Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Baloch, and Pashto, and language was the way many defined themselves. A man’s political rival was also his blood enemy, implicated in ethnic warfare that gone on for decades… [I feel that Inskeep is overgeneralizing from the “ethnic” warfare of particular political parties.]

They year of 2009 was an unusually deadly one for politicians and activists, hundreds of whom were killed [in many cases these were common, innocent persons who would be killed in this warfare and later claimed by one political party or the other as its member], but the monthly pace actually increased in January 2010, according to the figures compiled by the Human Rights Commission. During that month thirty-seven deaths fell under the heading of “targeted killing,” which was the typical phrase for the shootings by gunmen who rolled away on motorcycles. Twenty-six more deaths were labeled “political workers killed.” These figures included a political worker who was beheaded in early January. Were the killings related? Unrelated? Who really knew? Many people had theories, but few of the crimes were ever solved. (p. 38)

-------

My notes: Considering the footage of arsonists and their preparation, among other pieces of evidence, the Ashura bombing was clearly a pre-planned and well-coordinated crime. There is a penchant among many international news reporters of dismissing the possibility of hidden hands and their interests by citing lack of evidence or calling such a possibility a conspiracy theory, instead of uncovering these hands. What this often does (although Inskeep’s account is more nuanced than this) is that the ‘obvious’ causes are taken as the real and only causes – the extremists and their fanatic mindset in the case of the Ashura bombing. The discerning observers who are familiar with Karachi’s politics know which political “ethnic” groups have connections to land mafia in that particular area on the M. A. Jinnah road. And, which “ethnic” political groups have connections to the extremist militants, and which groups have tried to use the specter of Talibanization to target other political groups, their constituencies, and property. And the discerning observers also know the politics of the statements (of condemnation of such crimes and condolences to all bereaved) released to the news media by the same political groups. With such  background information, it is not that difficult to reduce the possibility of the hidden hands to one to two equations - as opposed to throwing this possibility into the basket of “conspiracy theory”. Many local journalist know the hands behind the Ashura bombing, but they would not name these perpetrators because of the risk to their life (and other reasons). But international journalists have more room and security. They should present some conclusions, instead of calling this pursuit as doing conspiracy theory.

Incompetence or Conspiracy in Iraq?

In deliberating on the outcomes of Washington's misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strategy of analysis that many Washington pundits use is to prefer 'incompetence' over 'conspiracy' ("They really wanted to spread democracy, but they messed up!"). But below I quote an interview clip of Dick Cheney from 1994 which shows that the Neocons clearly knew what would happen in Iraq. And, not just that, I believe they knew the fault lines (polarized and exacerbated by Saddam's neo-tribal and sectarian policies) and pro-actively exploited them to create instability in the country to justify their prolonged presence (A close scrutiny of Paul Bremer's policies immediately after the occupation and of the presence of John Negroponte and Blackwater would provide ample illuminations. Washington did at first flirt with the idea of installing the puppet Ahmed Chalabi, while utilizing the ongoing instability as the pretext for its longer stay, but the plan failed due to Iraq's Ayatollah Ali Sistani's timely intervention calling for open elections in 2005.)



A longer stay in Iraq not only had financial incentives for the military-industrial complex, but also was crucial for Washington's long-term hegemonic ambitions for the region. (It is for similar reasons that Washington wants to maintain its presence in the so-called "Af-Pak" region. Having Obama in the White House hasn't 'changed' anything.)

But perhaps it was Israel that hoped to benefit the most from the instability in Iraq. Since at least 1967, Israel has followed the policy of carrot-and-stick, co-opting the cooperative Arab regimes (like Anwar Sadat's Egypt with the Camp David Accord in 1978 which was facilitated by Washington's aid in billions of dollars), and dividing and destabilizing the non-cooperative states. As a strategic policy for its immediate neighbors, Israel has persistently sought to see them politically and economically weak and preoccupied within themselves. That was one of the reasons why Israel indiscriminately bombarded the basic infrastructure and economically viable facilities in Beirut (and the rest of the country) in the Summer 2006. (The other reason was to turn the Lebanese factions against the resistance movement.) It was also Israel that in its air strike on June 7, 1981 destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant near Baghdad and then tried to justify that as an act of "self-defense".

The first benefit that Israel hoped to see with the American invasion was an even weaker and fragmented Iraq (which would also destabilize Turkey, Iran, KSA, Syria, Lebanon). The second was a continued presence of American forces in the region. The third was the convergence of Israeli and Neocons' interest in targeting Iran, as they surely hoped that the road to Tehran went through Baghdad.

However, their plans did not always bear the fruits they desired.

On Critically Reading the Wikileaks

On Critically Reading the Wikileaks

Only a small proportion of the announced documents has been released so far by Wikileaks. As such, it is a bit early to conclusively suggest anything as to the value of these documents and their impact. While following the release, a few tentative thoughts came to mind that I want to share here in the interest of starting a constructive discussion. The examples I mention below are not from Wikileaks, but they are close to some of the released bits I have seen in news. The purpose here is not to analyze specific cables, but to elaborate a critical perspective for reading these leaks. (And, more broadly, for reading news on government- and corporate-owned media as well as non-corporate and user-generated forums like blogs and wikis.)

Rarely do diplomats speak out their minds in candid terms. The most sensitive information is almost always communicated in person, not over digital lines or mails. Therefore, one needs to think about not only what was said in these cables but also what was not said.

Even for communications over digital lines and mails, on important issues the US diplomats and other government officials usually use plain but coded language. The person sitting on the other end has to decipher the language and read between the lines. The dots can be hard to connect for an outsider, who may understand no more than just the apparent meaning of a leaked text. However, the added layers can be uncovered by placing such texts in the context of the politics and interests of the involved political players.

A person's perspective matters a lot for this reason. For example, a leak could suggest that, “Iran is a threat to regional stability and the Arab nations fear its nuclear capabilities.” Now, this message may mean one thing to a devout FOX News follower and another to the one critical of the American hegemonic ambitions and support to the status-quo regimes of the Middle East. Hence, the interpretation and value of such a statement depends on the perspective with which people judge it and how critically informed are those perspectives.

In my view, when Washington talks about ‘regional stability’, it first and foremost means the protection of the American and Israeli interests in the region. Iran is a ‘threat’ because it challenges those interests and supports the resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon, among other things.

Words like ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘terrorist groups’ may also be codes in these cables which could refer to different groups in different countries. In Yemen, for example, they could also refer to the Houthi rebels who are challenging the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Both Washington and Riyadh are against that and have provided heavy financial and military support to the regime against these rebels. In Egypt, such labels may also be used to refer to the Sunni opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been repeatedly cracked down by the US-backed regime of Hosni Mubarak. Similarly, the terms “moderate states” and “moderate Muslims” are also codes that often refer to those who are in favor of and are protecting the American and Israeli interests in the region (for more on this, see “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”).

One also needs to distinguish the Arab rulers from the Arab masses. Many Arab rulers surely fear Iran, but the majority of their people support Iran’s stance on the nuclear issue and Iran's support to the resistances in Palestine and Lebanon. In a recent poll carried out by Zogby International and the University of Maryland in the summer of 2010, the people in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates were asked to name the countries that they thought were the greatest threat to their security. 88% replied Israel, 77% the US, and only 10% Iran.

At times, factual-sounding statements in diplomatic communications may in reality be policy statements. For example, a statement that, “Iran will further isolate itself if it continues to pursue nuclear ambitions,” could very well be a statement of what they would like to see in case Iran does not follow their wishes, not necessarily what the ground reality is, even from their own perspective. Because, again, the same Summer 2010 poll suggests that a “majority of the Arab public now see a nuclear-armed Iran as being better for the Middle East.”

The poll results, moreover, suggest an increasing support for Iran in the Middle East on a number of critical issues that also discredits the argument of some US scholars that ‘old feuds between Shia and Sunnis’ define the political attitudes of the region. Yet, 'sectarian divisions' and 'specter of a rising Shia crescent', both codes for what they would like to promote, is continually used by both the US and Israeli diplomats and their supported status-quo regimes of the Middle East with the hope of dividing up the masses and re-aligning their politics on sectarian lines (for more on this, see “Bahrain and Pakistan: The Shia Dilemmas”).

Without a critical interrogation, and with media spins, these codes and policy objectives may in fact perpetuate themselves through these leaks. No surprise if due to the media coverage of some of the latest leaks, the general public in the US got the impression that 'all Arabs are against the Iranians and see the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to their security' and that the fault lines in the Middle East politics lie within their ‘ethno-sectarian’ divisions. Both the Neocons and the Hawkish-Pragmatists in Washington are surely going to capitalize on such a gross misunderstanding. For one, the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated last Monday (Nov 29, 2010): "So if anyone reading the stories about these alleged cables thinks carefully, what they will conclude is that the concern about Iran is well-founded, widely shared, and will continue to be at the source of the policy that we pursue with like-minded nations to try to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Hence, in view of the above discussion, the leaked cables should not be taken at face value, even in instances where they may be authentic.

The Impact

Not many people will go through all the leaked documents. They will mostly hear what the mainstream media and political groups choose to focus on. The media spins and the politics of appropriation of these leaks, therefore, would make for an interesting discussion in coming days.

In Iran, for example, while quoting the leaks some have criticized the current government for its defiant stand on the nuclear issue which to them has resulted in Iran’s ‘increasing isolation’ in the international arena. While some others have expressed qualms about the veracity of these leaks in instances where they may suggest that direct US support was given to the post-election rioters (true or not, and whether they discredit any of the opposition's claims, that's another debate). President Ahmadinejad also has questioned the ‘legal value’ of the leaks.

What is troubling many governments is not necessarily the exposure of their 'ill-feelings' toward each other by Wikileaks. The governments already know these truths, and also that embassies and diplomats regularly do espionage for their respective governments. In the arena of international relations, interests and power largely drive politics, not feelings of good will. Mutual suspicion among states is often normal. Pak-US relations is one example (on the issues of the nuclear arsenal, ISI, and PPP/Zardari). Iran-Saudi relations is another (particularly on Iraq and Palestine-Lebanon).

The concern that many governments have with these leaks is that this politics is out in public and now more susceptible to media spins and the perceptions of their national and international masses. After the leaks, the thoughts and prejudices of people against other countries or their own governments may solidify (and in some instances, radically change), and it would become more difficult for these governments to put an all-friendly public face, or make pragmatic political shifts, or claim to support causes that they really don't (like the Saudi (non)support to the Palestinian cause. Also, the Saudi and other status-quo Middle Eastern regimes would not be happy if their geo-political interests appear too much in line with that of Israel).

Particularly for Washington, the leaks are not only an embarrassment in front of the world but they may also promote a further disillusion regarding Washington’s claim of championing democracy, freedom, and human rights. In this sense, the leaks are a direct attack on the propaganda machinery of its hegemonic ambitions. Hence, Washington might also charge Wikileaks with promoting "anti-Americanism", in addition to calling it "a crime", "risking lives of troops", "compromising national security", etc.

The Truth

Despite the huge uproar in the media, most of the fundamental strategic and policy related knowledge that has come out in the leaks so far was already known to the discerning observers; the leaks, surely, added further confirmation to it.

Among the things that the leaks confirm is that ‘Israel tried to plan the Gaza War with Egypt and PA’ (The Jerusalem Post, Nov 29, 2010). This suggests a) the Gaza massacre in 2008-9 was pre-meditated (we already knew it then, but now we have further support), and b) the Egyptian and the West Bank authorities knew about Israel's plan well ahead of time, even if, according to the leaks, the two (supposedly) did not say 'yes' to Israel. We do not know what was worked out in the later communications. Egypt and West Bank’s PA may have had logistical concerns but from looking at their policies during the massacre we know that their strategic interests were aligned with those of Israel. Egypt, for instance, refused to open its Rafah border to allow food and other daily supplies to the Gazans. For reading the leaks, this also suggests that the fragments of cables, even if they are authentic, can be very misleading if we do not scrutinize them with a critically informed perspective.

Wikileaks reports also "indicate that the US has mounted a secret effort to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani reactor since 2007..." (CSMonitor, Nov 29, 2010). Indeed, this was one of the key issues that embittered the relationship between Washington and Pakistan’s powerful military establishment in the last few years and perhaps explains some of the dramatic political changes and turmoil. Yet, this nuclear connection was persistently and emphatically dismissed by some journalists in the liberal elite circles of Pakistan who might still call it a “conspiracy theory”.

One should not discount the possibility of a good number of forged and fragmented documents intentionally released to Wikileaks by government apparatuses. That reason alone is enough to suggest that Wikileaks cannot be a measure of truth per se, but it is the perspective with which one judges its content, and since there can be multiple perspectives, the truth of these leaks will remain contested. Further, the accuracy of some documents in the leaks should not be taken as a verification of the rest of the documents. On the question of verification, Wikileaks website itself suggests that the "simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.”

Lastly, in any review of these leaks, one should also interrogate the sources used and the background and politics of the people working for Wikileaks. Because these considerations have a huge impact on what Wikileaks editors choose to release (and what they do not), their timing, and their targets. Perhaps, their politics and agenda will become clearer with the release of more leaked documents.



---
For some bits on what has been released so far, check out the following report:

US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis
David Leigh, The Guardian, Nov 28, 2010
Source

The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

Among scores of disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:

• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, with officials warning that as the country faces economic collapse, government employees could smuggle out enough nuclear material for terrorists to build a bomb.

• Inappropriate remarks by Prince Andrew about a UK law enforcement agency and a foreign country.

• Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable alleging that vice-president Zia Massoud was carrying $52m in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Massoud denies taking money out of Afghanistan.

• How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticising him personally.

• Allegations that Russia and its intelligence agencies are using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations, with one cable reporting that the relationship is so close that the country has become a "virtual mafia state".

• The extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, which is causing intense US suspicion. Cables detail allegations of "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and the use by Berlusconi of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italiango-between.

• Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan by US commanders, the Afghan president and local officials in Helmand. The dispatches reveal particular contempt for the failure to impose security around Sangin – the town which has claimed more British lives than any other in the country.

The US has particularly intimate dealings with Britain, and some of the dispatches from the London embassy in Grosvenor Square will make uncomfortable reading in Whitehall and Westminster. They range from political criticisms of David Cameron to requests for specific intelligence about individual MPs.

The cables contain specific allegations of corruption, as well as harsh criticism by US embassy staff of their host governments, from Caribbean islands to China and Russia. The material includes a reference to Putin as an "alpha-dog" and Hamid Karzai as being "driven by paranoia", while Angela Merkel allegedly "avoids risk and is rarely creative". There is also a comparison between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler.

The cables names Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of terror groups, and provide an extraordinarily detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of US planes to bomb al-Qaida targets. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, then US commander in the Middle East, Yemeni president Abdullah Saleh said: "We'll continue saying they are our bombs, not yours."

Other revelations include a description of a near "environmental disaster" last year over a rogue shipment of enriched uranium, technical details of secret US-Russian nuclear missile negotiations in Geneva, and a profile of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who they say is accompanied everywhere by a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse.

Clinton led a frantic damage limitation exercise this weekend as Washington prepared foreign governments for the revelations, contacting leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, France and Afghanistan.

US ambassadors in other capitals were instructed to brief their hosts in advance of the release of unflattering pen-portraits or nakedly frank accounts of transactions with the US which they had thought would be kept quiet. Washington now faces a difficult task in convincing contacts around the world that any future conversations will remain confidential.

As the cables were published, the White House released a statement condemning their release. "Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the US for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."

In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "We condemn any unauthorised release of this classified information, just as we condemn leaks of classified material in the UK. They can damage national security, are not in the national interest and, as the US have said, may put lives at risk. We have a very strong relationship with the US government. That will continue."

The US ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, said: "We have briefed the UK government and other friends and allies around the world about the potential impact of these disclosures … I am confident that our uniquely productive relationship with the United Kingdom will remain close and strong, focused on promoting our shared objectives and values."

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was British ambassador to the US in the Blair years, thought the leaks would have little impact on diplomatic behaviour. "This won't restrain dips' [diplomats'] candour," he said. "But people will be looking at the security of electronic communications and archives. Paper would have been impossible to steal in these quantities."

The state department's legal adviser has written to the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his London lawyer, warning that the cables were obtained illegally and that the publication would place at risk "the lives of countless innocent individuals … ongoing military operations … and co-operation between countries".

The electronic archive of embassy dispatches from around the world was allegedly downloaded by a US soldier earlier this year and passed to WikiLeaks. Assange made it available to the Guardian and four other news organisations: the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. All five plan to publish extracts from the most significant cables, but have decided neither to "dump" the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals. WikiLeaks says that, contrary to the state department's fears, it also initially intends to post only limited cable extracts, and to redact identities.

The cables published today reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.

Classified "human intelligence directives" issued in the name of Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.

The most controversial target was the UN leadership. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top officials and their staff and details of "private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys".

PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman in Washington, said: "Let me assure you: our diplomats are just that, diplomats. They do not engage in intelligence activities. They represent our country around the world, maintain open and transparent contact with other governments as well as public and private figures, and report home. That's what diplomats have done for hundreds of years."

The acting deputy spokesman for Ban Ki-moon, Farhan Haq, said the UN chief had no immediate comment. "We are aware of the reports."

The dispatches also shed light on older diplomatic issues. One cable, for example, reveals, that Nelson Mandela was "furious" when a top adviser stopped him meeting Margaret Thatcher shortly after his release from prison to explain why the ANC objected to her policy of "constructive engagement" with the apartheid regime.

"We understand Mandela was keen for a Thatcher meeting but that [appointments secretary Zwelakhe] Sisulu argued successfully against it," according to the cable. It continues: "Mandela has on several occasions expressed his eagerness for an early meeting with Thatcher to express the ANC's objections to her policy. We were consequently surprised when the meeting didn't materialise on his mid-April visit to London and suspected that ANC hardliners had nixed Mandela's plans."

The US embassy cables are marked "Sipdis" – secret internet protocol distribution. They were compiled as part of a programme under which selected dispatches, considered moderately secret but suitable for sharing with other agencies, would be automatically loaded on to secure embassy websites, and linked with the military's Siprnet internet system.

They are classified at various levels up to "secret noforn" [no foreigners]. More than 11,000 are marked secret, while around 9,000 of the cables are marked noforn.

More than 3 million US government personnel and soldiers, many extremely junior, are cleared to have potential access to this material, even though the cables contain the identities of foreign informants, often sensitive contacts in dictatorial regimes. Some are marked "protect" or "strictly protect".

Last spring, 22-year-old intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was charged with leaking many of these cables, along with a gun-camera video of an Apache helicopter crew mistakenly killing two Reuters news agency employees in Baghdad in 2007, which was subsequently posted by WikiLeaks. Manning is facing a courtmartial.

In July and October WikiLeaks also published thousands of leaked military reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. These were made available for analysis beforehand to the Guardian, along with Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to the US authorities, said the soldier had told him in chat messages that the cables revealed "how the first world exploits the third, in detail".

He also said, according to Lamo, that Clinton "and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in searchable format to the public … Everywhere there's a US post … there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed".

Asked why such sensitive material was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs."

He added: "We have been taking aggressive action in recent weeks and months to enhance the security of our systems and to prevent the leak of information."