Civil War is being Incited in Pakistan - a new murderous phase begins

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Al Jazeera exclusive: Pakistanis flee Swat


AljaeeraEnglish
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54147&hd=&size=1&l=e

 

Local residents flee from Mingora, the main town of Pakistan troubled Swat Valley, Sunday, May 10, 2009.


May 10, 2009

The Pakistani military has ordered hundreds of thousands of people in Swat valley to leave the area, ahead of an expected assault on Taliban fighters there.

This exclusive raw footage from Al Jazeera shows some of those fleeing the fighting in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.

"Al Jazeera exclusive: Pakistanis flee Swat - 10 May 09"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJHlwNW0tEg&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Euruknet%2Einfo%2F%3Fp%3Dm54147%26hd%3D%26size%3D1%26l%3De&feature=player_embedded


 

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009
14:01 Mecca time, 11:01 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/20095126353696929.html

 
Pakistan 'captures Taliban hideout' 

 
The UN says hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled the fighting in recent days [AFP]

 
The Pakistani military claims to have captured a Taliban rear-base - believed to be the stronghold of Mullah Fazlullah, a pro-Taliban leader, and a centre for 4,000 fighters.

The hideout in Gatt Puchar, a mountainous region in the Swat valley, was taken on Tuesday morning, with helicopters being used in the assault, military sources told Al Jazeera.

Troops were dropped into the area, which has so far proved impenetrable by land.

There has been no confirmation of Fazlullah's whereabouts following the attack.

Fazlullah is the son-in-law of Sufi Muhammad, a pro-Taliban religious leader in the North West Frontier Province where Swat is located.

'Parachuted commandoes'

Al Jazeera's Sohail Rahman, in Islamabad, said: "Whether he [Fazlullah] was there or not is still unclear."


Imran Khan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Peshawar, said: "The army is telling us that they started to use heavy bombardment against a mountain stronghold that belongs to Mullah Fazlullah.

"Once that bombing was over they sent in helicopters and then parachuted in commandoes to take the area," he said.

"This area is home to nearly 4,000 Taliban fighters and it is home to Pakistan Taliban in the Swat valley's arms dump and training camps for suicide bombers and armed fighters. So it's really the hub.

"It's a crucial blow to the Pakistani Taliban."

Another military air attack on Tuesday killed at least eight people in a house in Sara Mhora, in South Waziristan, on the Afghan border, according to intelligence sources.

The assault is thought to have been carried out by a US drone.

Athar Abbas, Pakistan military spokesman, said that 751 opposition fighters had been killed so far in their military offensive in Lower Dir, Buner and Swat valley. Twenty-nine security personnel had also been killed in fighting.

Abbas said that a "search and destroy operation" was now underway.

'On the run'

On Monday, Rehman Malik, the country's interior minister, said that Pakistan's armed forces have put Taliban fighters "on the run" as the military stepped up its offensive in the Swat valley.


"The operation will continue until the last Taliban is flushed out," Malik said, adding that the offensive was "continuing successfully".

"Our strategy has succeeded. We haven't given them a chance. They are on the run. They were not expecting such an offensive."

However Muslim Khan, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman, told Al Jazeera that the military was "lying" about their successes.

"They simply want to impress the Obama administration, because that's where they get their money from," he said.

"The operation in Swat is being carried out at the behest of the American administration."

The escalation in operations comes as the United Nations warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis, with about one million people thought to have been forced from their homes since August last year.

'Pashtun genocide'

Abdur Rahman, one displaced resident who fled to a refugee camp in the town of Mardan, told Al Jazeera: "People from all over - from Matta, Mingora and from everywhere - [are fleeing] on foot. Women and children and even old women and old men."


It is unknown whether Mullah Fazlullah was in the hideout at the time of the offensive


Rustam Shah Mohmand, former ambassador to Afghanistan and security expert at the Institute of Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera: "It's a Pashtun genocide. How can you assess the success of an operation that has resulted in the displacement of one million people so far, that has caused the flattening of whole villages?

"The scars will not heal for many, many years to come.

"There will be a tremendous amount of hatred against the government because it's believed that the government perhaps created an environment in which a military operation had become so necessary.

"Pakistani Taliban would never have posed any danger to the state. That is grossly exaggerated. They do not even hold Buner. A small security force could have defeated them. Instead, the option of resorting to full-scale military operation was used by the government.

"It is a very, very disproportionate reaction."

'Sacrifices'

Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister, has said the Taliban poses an existential threat to the country and has urged civilians to leave the Swat valley area to avoid casualties.

 
The government has called on civilians to leave the Swat valley area [EPA]
He said the government was devoting millions of dollars to help the refugees.

"These people have left their areas to save the country - we appreciate their sacrifices," Gilani said.

"The nation is ready to provide them all required facilities."

The offensive in the Swat valley, located 130km northwest of Islamabad, the capital, is seen as a test of the government's resolve to get to grips with an increasingly powerful Taliban.

But some analysts have said the government must get results quickly and minimise civilian suffering or else it risks growing public opposition.

Mehdi Hasan, a Pakistani political analyst, told the Associated Press: "If the disappointment of the people and the resentment of displaced persons increases, then it will be difficult for the government to continue this military action."
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[darsie]

So the Pakistan government - it's army - and US special services have dealt a 'devastating blow' to the Taliban.

The Swat valley will just become - even more - an extension of the disaster currently prevailing in Afghanistan.

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751 militants killed, 29 troops martyred in operation: ISPR

Tuesday May 12, 2009 (1724 PST)

Director General Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) Maj. General Athar Abbas Tuesday said 751 militants have so far been killed while 29 security men martyred.

http://www.paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=214793

RAWALPINDI: Director General Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) Maj. General Athar Abbas Tuesday said 751 militants have so far been killed while 29 security men martyred and 77 others injured in operation Raah-e-Haq underway in Swat and other parts of Malakand.


Giving updates of the ongoing operation, DG ISPR said the security forces have accomplished significant achievements, adding the images and videos of the dead militants will be released tomorrow.

He said today Pakistan army’s heliborne troops landed in Peochar, a key Taliban stronghold in the northwest district of Swat. Militants’ hideouts were destroyed in Baba Ziarat area and some arrests were also made, he told the reports.

Four security personnel lost their lives in militants’ attack on Kanju Police Station and Kilay while 4 militants were killed in Imam Dheri.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the army is setting up hospitals and camps for the IDPs coming from the battle zones and so far 1.3 million people have migrated. In this connection, services of NADRA are being used, he added.

He said Ibn-e-Aql, brother of Ibn-e-Umer, has been killed in the ongoing operation and added that no information has been received of any significant foreign militant’s presence.

The ISPR Chief said efforts are on to drive out the militants from the area. Operation has been conducted from Chakdarra to Gulabad and the militants are swiftly losing ground.

He said the military is abstaining from using helicopters for carrying out offensives to avoid collateral damage and main focus is on ground operation.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the militants have planted land mines on roads and ground in Mingora and Swat.

Government spokesman on the occasion announced that a special fund has been set up for the families affected by terrorist activities.

DG ISPR replying to a question said action is being taken after receiving report from the intelligence agencies but stopped short of giving any details.

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83 militants killed in Swat, Dir Lower

Tuesday May 12, 2009 (0935 PST)

http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=214739

83 militants killed in Swat, Dir Lower



MINGORA: Security forces claimed to have killed 52 militants in restive Swat Valley during the last 24 hours, while 31 persons, including three civilians were killed in Lower Dir on Monday.

Three soldiers were also killed in Swat operation besides injuries to 14 others. In addition, seven bodies, including one of a Pesh Imam, were found in different towns of the troubled valley.

Also, construction work on Lowari Tunnel Project, connecting Chitral with rest of the country, was suspended and foreign engineers and consultants moved to Islamabad due to deteriorating security situation and persistent curfew that hindered construction activities.

The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said that the security forces shelled the suspected positions of the militants in Kabal, Tutano Bandai, Deda Khura, Peuchar, Sarband and Matta. It claimed that 30 militants were killed in these strikes.

Locals said that Shagai, Panr and emerald mines were also shelled. However, it could not be confirmed whether casualties took place in these attacks. The security forces also pounded the hideouts of the militants in Peuchar, Taliban’s headquarters situated in Matta tehsil along Nihag Darra of Upper Dir, and Mingora killing 11 militants. At Ayub Bridge, the ISPR claimed, the forces killed seven Taliban.

It said the militants had a tunnel and hideouts in Qambar Ridge which were blitzed by choppers, resulting in the killing of three militants, besides injuring five others. A militant was killed in Chamtalai when he was planting an improvised explosive device. The forces encountered IEDs in the same area on Sunday.

The ISPR added the security forces killed 52 militants in the ongoing operation in the last 24 hours. However, this claim could not be confirmed from independent sources. In Monday’s clashes, the security forces also suffered casualties. Three soldiers were killed and several others injured in Benai Baba Ziarat when the forces were clearing the area. The security forces were advancing on foot from Banai Baba to Khwazakhela when the incident occurred. The injured included a captain identified as Rahid.

The advancing troops are facing fierce encounters with militants, military sources said. However, Banai Baba has now been secured, ISPR said. The security forces also cleared the route up to Khwazakhela.

In attack on Kanju Fort, five security forces’ personnel sustained injuries while two were injured in firing on Circuit House, the forces headquarters in Mingora for Rah-e-Haq-II operation. Militants fired mortar shells at Mingora police station, injuring four soldiers.

They also demolished Government Primary School for boys at Fazalabad, Barikot. The forces claimed they had been gaining success in operation against the militants in Swat Valley. As the operation escalated, incidents of violence recorded a surge.

Seven bodies were found in different towns on Monday. Four bodies were recovered from Alamganj area of Khwazakhela. A corpse found in Charbagh was believed to be of a Pesh Imam. A prayer leader was killed in Mingora on Sunday. A police official Anwar Ali, kidnapped a few days back, was also killed and his body was thrown in Naway Killay area. A beheaded body was found near Palwasha Cinema.

Due to continuing operations in Swat and Dir Lower, construction work on Lowari Tunnel was suspended till May 31. Sources said the reason behind the decision was frequent imposition of curfew on road leading to Dir Upper that blocked supplies to the tunnel. The foreign engineers and consultants were moved to Islamabad.

Meanwhile, people from Mingora continued to stream out to Mardan to camps in unfavourable conditions. They did not have the facility of transportation to move out from the troubled valley, where the security forces had asked them to vacate their houses.

A number of families were stuffed in rickshaws to reach the IDPs camps in Jalala, Mardan. “We started our journey on Sunday morning in this rickshaw and spent night at a hospital in Dargai. We restarted the journey at 10:00 am today (Monday) and reached Takhtbhai at 1:00 pm where we accommodated our parents in a camp. Two of my brothers and their families are coming on foot in Malakand,” a resident of Mingora Said Karim said. He said that Mingora had turned into a ghost city due to mass migration.

Said Karim said he saw five bodies of Taliban on the way out from the city. “The security forces seem serious in operation this time as Taliban’s positions are targeted precisely,” he observed.

At Government Higher Secondary School, the newly arrived IDPs showed their blistered and swollen feet to a reporting team of our sources. For about 237 families there was no food as the authorities said they could not provide food to IDPs staying at schools. “The people of this village are making announcements from mosques’ loudspeakers to collect food for us,” the IDPs said.

Our Timergara correspondent adds: About 31 persons, including three civilians, were killed in Dir Lower in the ongoing military operation. Local sources said that seven bodies of militants were found in one house and four in another in Hayaserai area of Maidan. They said that nine bodies of suspected Taliban were lying in Badwa primary school while eight corpses were found on Warsak road.

The sources said that three civilians were killed and eight others injured in Chakdara area of the district. Two persons were killed when a vegetable-laden vehicle was targeted. Another person identified as Sohail was killed when a mortar shell landed on his house in the same area. Eight persons were wounded when a shell hit a vehicle of Al-Khidmat Foundation in Chakdara.

Sources said that four soldiers also sustained injuries in clashes. ISPR said that the security forces resumed search-and-cordon operation in Gulabad and Hayaserai areas to clear them. Troops, it claimed, also secured a ridgeline on west of Chakdara-Gulabad road, overlooking Gulabad.

End.

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Eyewitness: Trapped in Mingora

 A curfew remains in place in Mingora, the main city in Swat district

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8045732.stm

Fighting in the Swat valley between the Pakistani army and Taleban militants has almost completely destroyed the communications network and links with the rest of the country.

Tens of thousands of people have fled the area, but there are some who have not managed to escape.

The BBC's Urdu Service has been able to get in contact with one such person, who described the situation in the city of Mingora.

He agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.

The Taleban are still patrolling Mingora, and from where I am based, I can only see the army troops at the emerald mines.

The sound of firing can be heard intermittently in various areas of Mingora.

I hear of people who were killed or wounded after being caught in the fighting, but no arrangements have been made to take the injured to hospitals, or to provide them with any medical aid.

Neither the Taleban, nor the security forces are providing any help to ordinary people trapped in this situation.    Everybody wants to leave but the strict curfew by the government has given us no choice but to stay put



Someone told me that the Taleban have put the headless corpse of a government official on the Nawakalay intersection in Mingora.

He said that they later moved the body and left it in front of Palwasha cinema.

My neighbour, who is a shopkeeper, told me that he helped the Taleban bury four of their men in the Qazi Baba graveyard near Charbagh on Monday.

The body of another Taleban fighter was also there, but it was taken away for burial elsewhere.

Thousands of people are still trapped in Mingora, but the town is like a ghost city as no one dares to come out in the streets.

Even the gas connection was switched off today, adding to all our problems.

With no gas and food stocks running very low, everybody wants to leave. But the strict curfew by the government has given us no choice but to stay put.

[Biggs]

Country should abandon war on terror: Imran Khan

http://www.thenews.com.pk/updates.asp?id=77394

    Updated at: 2035 PST, Monday, May 11, 2009 
    KARACHI: The chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan has said that the country should dissociate itself from the so-called war against terrorism.

Talking to journalists here on Monday, the PTI chief said that unemployment poses a more serious challenge to the country than terrorism. Imran urged the government to constitute an all-party commission for undertaking a fact-finding mission in Swat.

Imran said the government’s policies should aim at providing relief to the browbeaten sections of society. He said that his party has set up a relief camp for the affectees of Swat operation.

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Taliban: All local leaders must quit



Story Highlights :

Taliban spokesman threaten Pakistan's ruling political class

Muslim Khan says leaders from Swat Valley must resign within three days

Meanwhile artillery and helicopters pound Taliban targets in Swat Valley

Taliban attack NATO supply terminals, torch at least 10 supply trucks


By Ivan Watson
CNN


Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan has courted local and international media in jovial telephone conversations.


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- A Taliban spokesman issued a series of threats and ultimatums against Pakistani officials Wednesday as the country's military continued its offensive against the militant group in the Swat Valley.

Speaking on the telephone with CNN, Muslim Khan announced that all national and provincial parliament members from the Malakand Division, the northwestern region where the Swat Valley is located, must resign within three days.

"Otherwise, we will arrest all their families," Khan threatened, "and we will destroy all their buildings."

The Taliban spokesman issued a separate directive aimed at prompting a public show of support for the militants from Pakistan's Islamist political parties. "All these parties must help the Taliban," Khan said. "They must give a press conference to show the people that we need sharia [Islamic law] in the Malakand Division."

Members of the Islamist party Jamaat-i-Islami have spoken out against the military's offensive in the Swat Valley, but they have stopped short of announcing support for the Taliban. Watch more about the victims of the war »

Throughout the fighting over the past three weeks, the gray-bearded Khan has been the public face of the Taliban, enthusiastically courting local and international media in jovial telephone conversations. In an earlier phone interview with CNN, he described how he had spent four years living in the United States, working as a painter in the Boston, Massachusetts, area.

On Wednesday, Khan denied reports from many refugees emerging from the Swat Valley that Taliban militants had carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation in the region for the past two years.

Several terrified Swat residents, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Taliban, described how insurgents kidnapped and killed their critics, beheaded government informers and blew up girls' schools.

Khan denied the accusations.

"We are killing the people which are only no good for society, like thieves and people who are making problem for the poor people, like people who are working for army," he said. "We are only killing these people."

On Tuesday, the Pakistani army announced that it had dropped special forces soldiers by helicopter into the Peochar area of Swat, which is thought to be the headquarters for the region's Taliban's leader, Maulana Fazliullah. Local media report that the Taliban have training camps in Peochar.

Khan confirmed that Pakistani troops had attacked Peochar, which he described as a "place for mujaheddin," or holy warriors.

The Taliban spokesman said militants and soldiers have been fighting in the mountains around Peochar since Tuesday, and that the clashes continue. He said two Taliban fighters had been killed so far in the battle, along with five Pakistani troops.

Meanwhile Wednesday, Taliban militants attacked NATO supply terminals, torching at least 10 supply trucks in northern Pakistan, local officials said.

About 70 Taliban fighters attacked the facility in Peshawar, police said. A gunfight ensued between the insurgents and police.

No casualties were reported.

Peshawar is the capital of the North West Frontier Province, which intelligence officials say is rife with Islamic extremists and has been the site of recent clashes between Pakistani security forces and militants.

Because Afghanistan is landlocked, many supplies for NATO-led troops fighting Islamic militants there must be trucked in from Pakistan. Convoys carrying food and military supplies have regularly come under attack in the area.

Journalist Janullah Hashimzada contributed to this report.

All AboutThe Taliban • Pakistan
 

 
 
 
Links referenced within this article

Taliban
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/The_Taliban
Watch more about the victims of the war »
#cnnSTCVideo
Pakistani
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Pakistan
The Taliban
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/The_Taliban
Pakistan
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Pakistan

 

 
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/13/pakistan.taliban.threat/index.html 
 

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Published on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by Consortium News



Obama, Pakistan, and the Rule of Law


by Peter Dyer


(worldculturepictorial.com) Since the start of the Obama admin about 170 people have been killed inside Pakistan


"Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake."

In his first full day in office President Obama said: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this administration."   The remarkable campaign and inspiring oratory of the first African-American to be elected to the planet's most powerful public office sparked worldwide optimism and hope for new and creative approaches to serious national and international challenges.           Two days later, on Jan. 23, the CIA launched two missile attacks on Pakistan. Fifteen people in Waziristan, in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, were killed by Hellfire missiles launched from unmanned drones.

The attacks were the latest in a series that began several years earlier and intensified in 2008.

As such, despite the Obama campaign mantra, "Change We Can Believe In," they represented the President's commitment to a critical component of the Bush administration's foreign and military policy: expansion of what George W. Bush dubbed the "global war on terror" - from one key theater of the GWOT in Afghanistan across the border into Pakistan.

The attacks are ostensibly aimed at leaders of al-Qaeda who are blamed for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and at Taliban militants who slip across the Afghan border to attack U.S., NATO and Afghan government forces.

Hawkish Address

Candidate Obama outlined his position in a hawkish address [1] at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington on Aug. 1, 2007. He said:

"Al-Qaeda terrorists train, travel, and maintain global communications in this safe haven. The Taliban pursues a hit-and-run strategy, striking in Afghanistan, then skulking across the border to safety. This is the wild frontier of our globalized world. ...

"But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. ... If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [Pakistan's leader] won't act, we will."

Since the start of the Obama administration about 170 people have been killed inside Pakistan in at least 17 of these attacks. The Pakistan newspaper, "The News [2]," says the great majority have been civilians.

For many, the killings have thrown a shadow over early hopes for new thinking about Bush's GWOT, which the Obama administration rebranded as the "Overseas Contingency Operation."

The missile attacks indicate, as well, that President Obama's perspective on the rule of law may have less in common with the uplifting eloquence of January than with the disdain consistently displayed during the previous eight years by his predecessor in the Oval Office.

Killing people in Pakistan with Hellfire missiles is against the law.

The attacks violate the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, the United Nations Charter, UN General Assembly Resolution #3314 and the Nuremberg Charter.

Even when the missiles hit their intended targets in Pakistan, the orders to fire are given from thousands of miles away by CIA officials watching on computer screens in North America. CIA teams sit, in effect, as collective judge, jury and executioner.

Protocol II, Article 6(2) of the Geneva Conventions says: "No sentence shall be passed and no penalty shall be executed on a person found guilty of an offence except pursuant to a conviction pronounced by a court offering the essential guarantees of independence and impartiality."

Extrajudicial Killings

The 170 or so people who have been killed by Hellfire missiles in Pakistan since Inauguration Day represent 170 extrajudicial killings - outlawed not only by the Geneva Conventions but by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:   Article 6(1): "Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."

Article 6(2): Sentence of death "can only be carried out pursuant to a final judgment rendered by a competent court.

Unless the Pakistani government has invited the United States to fire missiles into Pakistan, the attacks violate the United Nations Charter Article 2(4): "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."

Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of the illegality of the drone attacks is that each is an act of aggression.   The United Nations Definition of Aggression, General Assembly Resolution #3314, provides a list of acts defined as aggression, including Article 3(b):  "Bombardment by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State or the use of any weapons by a State against the territory of another State."   Article 5 makes it clear -- aggression is never legal: "No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise may serve as a justification for aggression."

This was the position of the Tribunal at the first Nuremberg Trial. At Nuremberg 22 of the most prominent Nazis were tried for war crimes, crimes against peace (aggression), crimes against humanity and conspiracy following World War II.

In the judgment the Tribunal left no doubt as to the enormity of the crime of aggression, labeling it "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Eight German leaders were convicted of aggression at Nuremberg. Five of these received death sentences.

Certainly the scale of American aggression in Pakistan is small compared to that of German aggression in World War II.

But how many civilian deaths, destroyed homes and summary executions does it take for the firing of remote-controlled missiles into Pakistan to qualify as a crime?

Creative Alternatives

It's not as if there is a lack of compelling and creative alternative visions being proposed by smart people with experience in and knowledge of the region.

For example, as recently reported in The Nation [3], Akbar Ahmed, former High Commissioner from Pakistan to the UK emphatically told the Congressional Progressive Caucus on May 5 that the best strategy in Pakistan is to work through tribal organizations and networks. He emphasized aid, education and the certain failure of an approach that is primarily military:         "The one thing every Pakistani wants for his kids is education.... Within one to three years you will turn that entire region around. The greatest enemies of the Americans will become their allies."   In the book outlining Barack Obama's vision, Change We Can Believe In -- Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise, are these words (p. 104) "To seize this moment in our nation's history, the old solutions will not do. An outdated mind-set which believes we can overcome these challenges by fighting the last war will not make America safe and secure."

Unfortunately, in its first few months the Obama administration has been fighting the last President's war. As far as Pakistan is concerned, neither the President's foreign policy nor his perspective on the rule of law seem to be materially different from those of President Bush.         However, President Obama apparently is now "re-evaluating" the missile strikes, in light of their widespread unpopularity in Pakistan and the threat to the survival of Pakistan's government.

Perhaps now is a good time to look for an approach that is both legal and more effective in the long term than extra-judicial killings of Taliban militants, al-Qaeda extremists and Pakistani civilians.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for change we can believe in.

© 2009 Consortium News
Peter Dyer is a freelance journalist who moved with his wife from California to New Zealand in 2004. He can be reached at p.dyer@inspire.net.nz [4] .


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/13-7

[bigron]

Friday, May 15, 2009
12:50 Mecca time, 09:50 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/20095157280977637.html
 
 
'Thousands flee' Taliban-held town
 

Thousands of displaced people are facing an uncertain future in refugee camps [AFP]

 
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled from a Taliban-occupied town in northwest Pakistan's Swat valley after the country's military suspended a curfew, officials have said.

People on Friday rushed out of Mingora after the government relaxed its restrictions on the city and advised civilians to leave.

"People are leaving in large numbers ... They are vacating their homes," Arsha Khan, a local administration official, said.

Pakistan's military is pursuing its 19th day of operations against suspected Taliban bases in the districts of Swat, Buner and Lower Dir in the country's North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

At least 124 suspected Taliban fighters have been killed over 24 hours by Pakistani government forces in the NWFP, the military said late on Thursday.


Another military official said troops were 16km from Mingora.



'Overwhelming' refugee crisis



At least 834,000 civilians from the Swat and Buner districts are registered as displaced persons with the United Nations after leaving their homes to escape the fighting.
 

Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the scale of the refugee crisis is overwhelming.


"Pakistan has no capacity to deal with these people and to provide them with the basic needs they require. The Pakistani people are in need of massive humanitarian support from the international community," he said from the Swabi refugee camp on Thursday.

"If you look at the movement [of people from the war zone], it is indeed the biggest movement in present times. Massive humanitarian support is required or else there will be a humanitarian disaster."


The Pakistani military has up to 15,000 troops in place against about 4,000 Taliban fighters in the northwest of the country.

At least 750 suspected Taliban fighters and 33 troops have died in military operations in Lower Dir, Buner and Swat since April 26th, the military says.

The military onslaught comes after increasing pressure by the US government to take a stronger line against the Taliban.

Drone co-operation

The US military on Thursday confirmed newspaper reports that it had shared with Islamabad surveillance data from drones flying over Pakistani territory.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a US senate hearing that Pakistan had requested surveillance support missions up until April.

"In terms of support and information, they have asked for that, and where they have asked for that, we've supported them," Mullen told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Those requests have ceased over the period of about the last month."

The New York Times had earlier reported that the US military had shared intelligence data from drones with the Pakistani military.

Mullen said the newspaper report was an "accurate portrayal" of co-operation between Washington and Islamabad.

Pakistani denial

But the Pakistani military has strongly denied that it is co-operating with US forces in the deployment of the drones.

"In terms of Pakistani control of or liaison with those drones, the Pakistani military is absolutely adamant - they are operating completely by themselves in this campaign [against the Taliban] and are receiving no help from any outside force," Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said.

"There appears to be a very keen realisation, by the military in particular, that this [current] campaign is dependent on public support, and of ongoing political support within this [country's] divided political nexus."

Pakistan has in recent months stated its opposition to US drone flights over its territory.

Bombs launched from drones have been responsible for the deaths of at least 390 people in Pakistan, many of them civilians, since August 2008.

Islamabad has called the drone flights and bombing runs a violation of its territorial sovereignty.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

Out of Range


Posted By Ryan McCarl On May 14, 2009 @ 9:00 pm



The ongoing U.S. military strikes in Pakistan generally do not constitute front-page news in the United States.  There has been little or no debate about their legitimacy or their efficacy.

But what to one community is a series of "strikes" or "special operations," a footnote in the news, to the community on the receiving end is aggression and war.

Take, for example, a common event of recent months: the U.S. attacks, by means of robot drones, suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.  In the process, civilians are killed and civilian property and infrastructure is destroyed.  Our headline, buried on the third page, behind the latest political scandal and the fluctuations of the stock market, reads: "Eight killed in Pakistan Drone Strike." 

The same event, as understood by someone directly affected by it, will be seen as: my cousin (or parent, friend, or acquaintance) was killed by an American missile that fell without warning from the sky.

Everything depends on the direction one is looking down the gun: down the shaft, or up the barrel?  And this difference in perceptions has consequences, especially over the long term.  How much of the rise of anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim Middle East can be explained by the enormous gaps that separate the way each side of the "War on Terror" understands the history of America’s involvement in the region?

This perception gap is the result of at least two closely related factors: first, spatial and temporal distance from the conflict, and second, the asymmetrical power relationship between the U.S. and its enemies.  Technology and wealth have made it possible for the U.S. to exercise decisive military power anywhere in the world.  But our technology and our wealth often outrun our wisdom, our prudence, and our moral sensibilities. 

Perhaps a particular drone strike carried out by the U.S. on Pakistani soil is ethical, or at least sensible – say, it eliminates an active al-Qaeda terrorist or Taliban leader without destroying too many civilian lives or too much civilian property.  But how would we know?  The truth is that most of us aren’t paying close enough attention to determine whether our strikes into Pakistan are ethical or sensible.  The distance between the American public and the conflict makes the issue too easy to avoid.

America’s drones conduct offensive military operations against targets living in destitute, remote tribal communities on the other side of the world.  But that is a one-way street, and the story, for Americans, ends there.  The voices of those on the receiving end of the strike are rarely heard.  If there is video footage of the strike, it is generally shot from above, from the perspective of the drone, rather than from below, the perspective of its targets and victims.  The robot presumably returns to its base and tells no war stories, and at no point need any American soldier or citizen come face-to-face with victims of the attack.

With the exception of the pacifist and nonviolent traditions, most of our moral thinking about war acknowledges that there are at least some circumstances under which violence and killing, including organized political violence (or war), is morally acceptable.  But are our theories about the ethics of warmaking up to the task of determining when, if ever, it is permissible to kill a relatively impotent enemy from a safe and anonymous distance, by robot or missile?

When we think about the ethics of drone strikes (and, for that matter, long-distance missile strikes), we must remember that we are missing a critical piece of information: namely, knowledge of the individuals and communities whom our missiles affect, and a multidimensional understanding of them in the fullness of their humanity.  Such knowledge and understanding is a prerequisite for empathy, and without empathy, we cannot imagine the concrete reality of the suffering and death our military actions cause.  And neither can we understand the depths of rage and grievance that these actions sow abroad, or the way this rage fuels anti-Western terrorism.

For their operators, controlling these "drones" must not be so different from playing a video game – something almost fictional, bearing at most a tangential relationship to the reality of face-to-face killing and dying that informed our ability to understand the depth of the tragedies of previous wars we have fought.

For the communities, families, and individuals on the receiving end of the drone strikes, however, it is no game.  For them, there is no projection of power across unimaginable distances; war and its terrors come to them.  We can understand what this means only by reflecting on what our own families and communities mean to us, and by reasoning through analogy toward a sense of what it might mean to have one’s family and community directly threatened by war.



Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/mccarl/2009/05/14/out-of-range/

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Saturday, May 16, 2009
14:55 Mecca time, 11:55 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200951685929373672.html

 
Pakistani forces raid Taliban bases 

 
The number of people registered as refugees in northwest Pakistan by the UN is growing [AFP]
 
Pakistan's military has launched fresh attacks on suspected Taliban positions in the northwest of the country as thousands more civilians flee the conflict zone.

At least 47 suspected Taliban fighters have been killed in raids by Pakistani forces across the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) in the last 24 hours, the military said on Saturday.

A military official earlier said that helicopter gunships and fighter jets had shelled militant hideouts in Peochar, Shamozai and Khwaza Khela areas of Swat, a district in the NWFP.

The assaults by the military came hours after it relaxed a curfew to allow civilians to leave their homes in Mingora, a Taliban-occupied town in Swat.

Bomb attack

As fighting raged in the NWFP on Saturday, a suspected car-bomb attack in Peshawar, the province's main city, killed at least 11 people and wounded about 30 others, news agencies said.

Four children and two women were among the victims, Sifwat Ghayyur, Peshawar's police chief, said.

 
Imran Khan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Peshawar, said: "It goes to show how dangerous the situation is, not only in the areas where the Taliban is being fought, but across Pakistan.

"We have talked to civilians and military and political analysts and their biggest fear has always been the aftermath if the army went into Swat valley - obviously that [army assault] has happened [in Swat].

"The big fear was a wave of [retaliatory] suicide bombings."

The majority of those fleeing the fighting between the Taliban and the military in the NWFP are heading towards 23 refugee camps set up across the NWFP by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

"By Friday evening, 987,140 people were registered as displaced since May 2," Ariane Rummery, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, said.
 
"There may be thousands more who fled Swat but have not been registered as yet."

Offensive criticised

Many of those displaced as a result of the army offensive against the Taliban have fiercely criticised the Pakistan government.

"The government should give us peace. We have no need for tents, for food or for money. Give us peace and give us our homes," Hayat Ullah, a grandfather who fled Mingora with his wife, daughters and children, said.


 
Speaking from a government-run Jalala camp in Mardan, a town in NWFP, he said: "We didn't come here because of the Taliban, we came here after the shelling and bombardment of the government."

The military says that it has killed more than 940 suspected Taliban fighters since April 26 in the NWFP's districts of Lower Dir, Swat and Buner.

But there is no independent confirmation of the figures and no word on civilian casualties.

About 15,000 troops are in Swat as part of the government's attempt to rout an estimated 4,000 Taliban fighters.

The army says its troops have encircled Mingora, where Taliban fighters are believed to be hiding.

The Taliban had in recent weeks tried to enforce their version of sharia (Islamic law) across large parts of the NWFP.

Positive steps

The military assault against the Taliban comes after Barack Obama, the US president, said he would make focus Pakistan and Afghanistan the focus of US foreign policy.

John Kerry, the US senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Al Jazeera that Pakistan had taken some positive steps in recent months.

"First of all, there is the first peaceful transfer of the presidency in [Pakistan's] history, at the ballot box, from one sitting president to a new president that was elected by the people," he told Al Jazeera.

"[There have been] early difficulties in the government getting its footing; that is natural when Pakistan has had a military-run government over the course of the last eight years.

"I think there are signs that [Islamabad is] taking seriously the nature of the insurgency and that they will address the question of better governance, putting services in place that reach the people."
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 

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Saturday, May 16, 2009
11:54 Mecca time, 08:54 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/20095164639783704.html

 
Deaths in US drone raid on Pakistan 


 
At least 10 people have been killed in an attack on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets by an unmanned US drone aircraft in Pakistan, security officials have said.

The drone fired two missiles into the Khaisor area of North Waziristan's ethnic Pashtun tribal region on Saturday, hitting a house and a vehicle.

"Ten militants were killed. Two of them are Arabs but we do not know their nationalities," an intelligence official in the region told Reuters news agency.

The bombing is the third such raid this month, and comes days after eight people were killed in an attack by a US drone in neighbouring South Waziristan.

The US has increased the frequency of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal regions bordering Afghanistan over the last few months.

More than 40 drone air raids have taken place since the beginning of last year, most of them since September.

More than 320 people have been killed in the raids, according to a tally of reports from Pakistani security officials, district government officials and residents.

Drone co-operation

Islamabad says the drone flights are an affront to Pakistan's territorial sovereignty and that they harm efforts by the government to deal with Taliban- and al-Qaeda-led fighters.

IN VIDEO

Pakistan fights to keep sovereignty over war  :
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200951514252618240.html
 
More Videos... :
http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish


But the US military on Thursday confirmed newspaper reports that it had shared with Islamabad surveillance data from drones flying over Pakistani territory.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said at a US senate hearing that Pakistan had requested surveillance support missions up until April.

"In terms of support and information, they have asked for that, and where they have asked for that, we've supported them," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Those requests have ceased over the period of about the last month."

The New York Times had earlier reported that the US military had shared intelligence data from drones with the Pakistani military.

Reports 'accurate'

Mullen said the newspaper report was an "accurate portrayal" of co-operation between Washington and Islamabad.

However, the Pakistani military has strongly denied that it is co-operating with US forces in the deployment of the drones.

"In terms of Pakistani control of or liaison with those drones, the Pakistani military is absolutely adamant - they are operating completely by themselves in this campaign [against the Taliban] and are receiving no help from any outside force," Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said.

"There appears to be a very keen realisation, by the military in particular, that this [current] campaign is dependent on public support, and of ongoing political support within this [country's] divided political nexus."
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 

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America Creating 'Talibanization' in Pakistan, Say Arab Media


by Jalal Ghazi

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54289&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 15, 2009

The specter of a Taliban takeover of Pakistan has been haunting Western media. As the fighting between Pakistani forces and the Taliban intensifies, Arab media are pointing the finger at the United States. The Obama Administration does not understand Pashtun cultural traditions, say the media. It is using force first, just as the Bush administration had done. In fact, the air strikes killing many civilians are actually creating more "Talibanization," say Arab media.

Western media’s major focus is Taliban’s treatment of women. A video of a Pakistani teenager being whipped on her buttocks was played by Western televisions over and over, turning the Swat Valley crisis into women vs. the Taliban.

"This is how the Taliban dispenses justice," said an ABC report. "Whipping a teenager 13 times because they say she was alone with a man who was not her husband." "The video of the flogging has galvanized women and civil society groups to protest against 'Talibanization,’" reported the BBC. CNN featured a woman who had fled Swat Valley out of fear of the Taliban.

Arab media, however, regard the collapse of the Swat Valley peace agreement as a catastrophe. Many Arab televisions focused on the suffering of the hundreds of thousands who were forced to flee from the fighting areas to poorly prepared camps lacking food and water. Arab media do not condone the Taliban’s treatment of women, but they see what is happening in the Swat Valley as much bigger than women vs. Taliban.

Arab political observers believe that the U.S. decision to oppose the agreement showed a lack of understanding of the Pashtun tribes who make up the backbone of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Arab observers warn this will only increase the Taliban and al Qaeda influence.

Political analyst Hasan Abu Ghaniya told Al Arabiya, "Implanting Islamic Sharia is not a wild idea that is newly introduced by the Taliban, Sharia is rather widely accepted in the region and it is the major uniting factor between all tribal leaders there." He added, "Different leaders emerge in different regions of the tribal area of Pakistan and take on the responsibility of leading the area. It is well known that these leaders are responsible for implementing the Sharia law and Islamic courts."

In order to help women in Afghanistan and Pakistan tribal areas, a coordinated international effort must be made to build the infrastructure and empower women there with better economic and social opportunities. Abu Ghaniya told Al Arabiya, "The infrastructure must be built in the region which is desperately needed, and schools must be opened." Force, he said, was the "wrong strategy" and should be the last resort.

Obama apparently wants to be tougher than Bush, which is evident in the increase of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the escalation of unmanned drone strikes against the so-called "valuable targets," including recent ones that killed more than 100 civilians in the Afghan province of Fara. That has strengthened the bond between al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

Abu Ghaniya explained that, unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has one supreme leader - Mullah Omar- the Pakistani Taliban have many local leaders. In some cases, these leaders are at odds with one another, but after the U.S. air strikes and repeated Pakistani government military operations, they have become more united under the Taliban banner.

Pakistani political observer Abdel Ghafar wrote on Al Jazeera’s website that different local Pashtun leaders decided to join the Taliban after U.S. attacks in their areas when they realized that the Pakistani government would not defend them.

For example, local leaders Baitullah Mahsud, Nazer Ahmad and Mullah Gul recently pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar and declared Osama bin Laden a religious mentor.

According to Al Arabiya, Mahsud, the leader of the Taliban in Northern Waziristan, has threatened the United States and Europe with attacks. This shows that local leaders in Pakistan are not only joining ranks with the Taliban but also they are drifting closer to al Qaeda’s international agenda by threatening to expand their attacks outside Pakistan.

Like many Arab analysts, Ghaniyah said that the solution is political not military. Obama must use "soft power." A road map must be made to deal with economic and social crises in the region. Peace agreements must be respected, and local autonomy must be given to local regions.

Ghafar wrote for Al Jazeera that "negotiations have led to peace agreements between armed groups and the Pakistani government, but strangely all these agreements were criticized by the American administration and destroyed before being implemented."

It is as if the United States insists on adding Pakistan to list of failed states, which now includes Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. Of course, the United States would also do well to remember that the Pashtuns have defeated other empires, including Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the armies of Alexander the Great.

 

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Missiles strike by US drone kills 17 persons in NWA


Associated Press of Pakistan


http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54316&hd=&size=1&l=e


PESHAWAR May 16, 2009 (APP): At least 17 people were killed and several others injured in US missiles attack in Mirali Sub-Division of North Waziristan Agency on Saturday morning. Official sources and eyewitnesses in Mira Ali said that two missiles apparently fired by US drone have targeted a madrash and vehicle in Khesoor area, some 25 kilometer South of Mirali around 8 am this morning.

Resultantly, 12 persons were killed instantly while the local residents later recovered five more bodies from the rubbles of the madrash. Two rooms of the Madrasah’s building were collapsed due to high intensity of the deadly explosion while others were damaged.

The identity of the victims could not be immediately ascertained. The sources said the death toll might have increased further. Some reliable sources have claimed the killing of 25 people in the attack. The vehicle was smashed into pieces. The officials of local administration rushed to the site and cordoned off the areas.





 

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Iran to host summit with Afghanistan, Pakistan


AFP

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54311&hd=&size=1&l=e
 

May 17, 2009

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will on Tuesday host a summit with his counterparts from Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is expected to discuss rebulding of war-shattered Afghanistan.

Announcing the summit on Saturday, Ahmadinejad's office did not reveal the agenda for the talks to be attended by Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan.

But the gathering comes less than three months after the three met in Tehran for a regional economic summit, along with leaders from other neighbouring states.

That summit pledged to help rebuild Afghanistan, and also the Gaza Strip after Israel's devastating military assault in December and January.

The May 19 meeting also comes soon after a US-backed international conference on Afghanistan in The Hague which was attended by Tehran following diplomatic overtures by arch-rival Washington towards the Islamic republic.

The Tehran talks are expected to discuss efforts to rebuild Iran's eastern neighbour which is battling a resurgent Taliban insurgency and also to find ways to rein in the rising violence in Pakistan.

The administration of US President Barack Obama has been working towards engaging Tehran in efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.

It is part of Obama's strategy to secure the help of Afghanistan's neighbours in reconstructing the Muslim country.

Iran has not had diplomatic relations with the US for nearly three decades, and was included in former president George W. Bush's so-called "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq.

But since taking office in January, Obama and his top officials have approached Tehran diplomatically in a bid to break the deadlock over several issues concerning Iran and to secure its help in stabilising the region.

Shiite Iran, which has close ethnic and religious ties with Afghanistan, has long suffered from the effects of opium production in its eastern neighbour, with easily available heroin fuelling a rise in drug use at home.

Despite their rivalry, the US and Iran are both sworn enemies of the Taliban, a Sunni Muslim militia initially backed by Pakistan, that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Tehran has been a vocal critic of Obama's strategy to increase US troops in Afghanistan, however.

At the March 31 economic conference, Iran's representative Mohammad Mehdi Akhoondzadeh warned that Obama's surge of US troops in Afghanistan was a mistake.

"The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective too," the Iranian deputy foreign minister told the gathering.

But Akhoondzadeh also said Tehran was "fully prepared to participate in the projects aimed at combatting drug trafficking and the plans in line with developing and reconstructing Afghanistan."

Afghanistan is the source of 90 percent of the world's heroin.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.




 

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Cloud of Unknowing: Ignorance and Arrogance in the Af-Pak 'Surge'


by Chris Floyd

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54355&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 17, 2009

Señor, señor, do you know where we're headin'?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
Seems like I been down this way before.
Is there any truth in that, señor ?
-- Bob Dylan "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)"

Yesterday, we briefly took up a Daily Kos piece that declared, with quivering fervor, that America's ever-expanding and ever-more-deadly military intervention in Central Asia is actually an act of purest altruism, aimed solely -- solely, we were told -- at preventing those lesser breeds under the law on the subcontinent from blowing their silly-billy selves up in a nuclear war. We were also informed that anyone who didn't like Barack Obama's "continuity" -- and expansion -- of Bush's policies in the region was just a malevolent malcontent who didn't care about the millions of people who would surely die if America withdraw its entirely benign protection from Pakistan.

I didn't engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of the post -- even thourgh there was certainly meet food to feed upon in that regard -- because, quite frankly, I couldn't see the point in wasting time and energy on such a -- how to put it charitably? -- jejune production.

So today let us depart from the fairy tale Pakistan concocted by our ever-earnest "progressives" in their increasingly desperate, well-nigh contortionist efforts to justify the brutal, bloody, lawless policies of the latest "safe pair of hands" picked to manage the militarist empire for a season or two. Instead, let's listen to someone who might actually know what he's talking about -- always a rarity in our modern political discourse. Here's Eric Margolis on "stirring a hornet's nest in Pakistan." It's worth quoting at length:



Pakistan finally bowed to Washington's angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) -- collectively mislabelled "Taliban" in the West. The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan's political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan's turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 "terrorists" killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people -- most of Swat's population -- made refugees.


By the way, these many deaths and gargantuan discolations are what our eternally hopeful progressives call the positive results of "our policy in Pakistan." [Emphasis added.] Yes, many progressives now identify themselves personally with the same war machine -- and the same policies -- they were condemning with such vociferous heat just a few months ago. It becomes clearer all the time that for many, many "dissidents" of the past decade, it was not really the substance of the Bush Regime's high crimes and monstrous follies that bothered them; it was the fact these crimes and follies were being committed by the wrong side in the factional tussles of the imperial court. Once their guy had been draped with the purple, the Terror War and its discontents were suddenly transformed into wise, far-seeing acts of benevolence. Now back to Margolis:


Unable to pacify Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes (a.k.a. Taliban), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan's media, the rest civilians.

Pashtun, also improperly called Pathan, are the world's largest tribal people. Fifteen million live in Afghanistan, forming half its population. Twenty-six million live right across the border in Pakistan. Britain's imperialists divided Pashtun by an artificial border, the Durand Line (today's Afghan-Pakistan border). Pashtun reject it. Many Pashtun tribes agreed to join Pakistan in 1947, provided much of their homeland be autonomous and free of government troops. Pashtun Swat only joined Pakistan in 1969.

As Pakistan's Pashtun increasingly aided Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, U.S. drones began attacking them. Washington forced Islamabad to violate its own constitution by sending troops into Pashtun lands. The result was the current explosion of Pashtun anger.

I have been to war with the Pashtun and have seen their legendary courage, strong sense of honour and determination. They are also hugely quarrelsome, feuding and prickly....

 Now, Washington's ham-handed policies and last week's Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan's second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan's Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.


That's right: the nightmare scenario of subcontinental nuclear war that is evoked so shamelessly by Obama and his sycophants to "justify" the "Af-Pak" escalation is in fact made much more likely by Obama's own policies. Indeed, it would probably not be too much to say that at this juncture in history, it is only such American policies that could tip the region over into nuclear war. For as Margolis makes clear, the jejeunistas' fearmongering fantasies of a "nuclear Taliban" are baseless. The real dangers lie elsewhere:


The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan's other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a "Taliban takeover of Pakistan" are pure propaganda. Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided. Nor are Pakistan's well-guarded nukes a danger -- at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan's nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein's bogus weapons.

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad's military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless... 

As in Iraq, profound ignorance and gung ho military arrogance drive U.S. Afghan policy. Obama's people have no understanding what they are getting into in "AfPak." I can tell them: An unholy mess we will long regret.


II.
This genuine nightmare scenario -- Pakistan's proxy-warring against the Pashtuns on behalf of America's energy-driven dominationist policies -- is growing apace. Pakistani military forces are preparing to follow the American leader in an upcoming attack on the largest town in the Swat Valley, ready to turn Mingora into another Fallujah. As AP reports:


The Pakistan army readied a major assault to rid the main town in the Swat Valley of entrenched Taliban militants...The dusty streets of Mingora were mostly empty on Friday — one resident said some unidentified bodies lay unburied there. The government relaxed a curfew to allow thousands of refugees to leave with whatever possessions they could carry ahead of what is expected to be bloody fighting.


McClatchy has more:


So far, the nine-day-old army offensive in Swat — which is 100 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital — hasn't moved into the valley's towns. Those who managed to escape Mingora, where five headless bodies were found this week, warned that the army would face tough resistance from deeply entrenched Taliban in the city.

Shaukat Saleem, a Mingora resident who escaped from Swat on Friday, said the Taliban had blocked roads in the city with trees and boulders. They've mined the streets, dug trenches, made bunkers and occupied many civilian homes, he said. He said that he saw "lots" of Taliban as he was leaving the city, who stopped him for questioning at 10 to 12 of their checkpoints....

The army estimated earlier this week that as many as 200,000 civilians were still in Mingora, and it was unknown how many remained there after Friday's exodus. The army said that it had cleared the area that leads to Mingora from the south as far as Udigram, a village on the outskirts of the city.


In Fallujah, American forces ringed the city for months -- after one failed attempt to take the town -- and allowed thousands of citizens to flee into destitute exile, while thousands more remained behind, with nowhere to go. Shortly after Bush's re-election in 2004, Fallujah was systematically destroyed -- Gronzy-style, Guernica-style -- in an operation that openly targeted medical centers (to prevent bad press about civilian casualties) and mowed down many civilians in its relentless churning.

The Fallujah operation was of course only one small part of a vast, sprawling, still-ongoing war crime that has killed more than one million innocent human beings -- an "extraordinary achievement" indeed, in President Obama's laudatory words. But even in the midst of this burning lake of corpses, the murderous beserkers in the Beltway and the Pentagon have the gold-plated gall to criticize the Pakistanis for their "heavy-handedness" in an operation urged on them by -- the Americans! McClatchy:


The U.S. military has encouraged its Pakistani allies to embrace counterinsurgency tactics, which call for winning civilian support, not just killing the enemy and seizing ground. Some U.S. officials, however, worry that the Pakistani army isn't willing or able to move away from traditional war-fighting tactics.

"If you talk to the (Pakistani) military leadership, they say they get it, but do they understand it the way we understand it?" a senior U.S. military official told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be more candid. "Often their definition of counterinsurgency is warning a village before an attack. That's it."


Really, this sort of thing is almost beyond comment. "Do they understand it the way we understand it?" says the spokesman of a military that launched a Hitlerian war of aggression on knowingly false pretenses, and has just had one of its main practitioners of murderous "dirty war" put in charge of its entire "Af-Pak" operations -- at the order of the "progressive" president. To find apt comparisons to such horrific irony, you'd have to reach back to the Eastern Front in World War II: "Reichsfuhrer Himmler, I regret to inform you that some of our Lithuanian auxilliaries have been entirely too primitive in their counterinsurgency tactics against the Jews. Our proxies are too openly brutal -- sometimes clubbing old men and children to death right in the center of town, causing unnecessary distress among the locals. They are sorely lacking in the efficiency and professionalism of our SS cadres, who escort their charges calmly and humanely to carefully pre-prepared pits far beyond the outskirts. It is more regrettable."

Washington is also upset because Pakistan refuses to put its military entirely at the disposal of the imperial agenda:


To the frustration of Washington and other Western allies, Pakistan continues to deploy most of its army on its eastern border to safeguard against its traditional enemy, India, which it fears might attack while it's fighting the Taliban on its western border.


Just think of that: a sovereign nation having the nerve to decide its own strategic priorities, and actually commiting the bulk of its forces to defend against a much larger, nuclear-armed nation with which it has fought several major wars over the decades across a still highly volatile, hotly disputed border! What effrontery to the Great Sahib!

Meanwhile, even as Pakistan's American-fueled "surge" in Swat was driving more than a million people from their homes, Washington was throwing more gasoline on the flames of extremism with more drone strikes, killing at least 40 people, as Pakistan's The News reports:


Forty people, most of them militants, were killed and several others critically injured in two successive attacks by US spy planes at Khaisur village of Mirali subdivision of North Waziristan Agency on Saturday morning.... It is astonishing that despite a full-scale military operation launched by Pakistan against the Taliban in the Malakand region, the US forces are yet to stop targeting the tribal areas while the drone strikes have been fuelling anger among the people against the Pakistan government and the armed forces.


Yes, there does seem to a bit of miscommunication between the imperial center and its servants in the hinterlands. But not to worry: soon they'll all be singing from the same hymn sheet, as AP reports:


U.S. forces are already training a Pakistani paramilitary force in the frontier region, considered the likely hiding place of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.


I think they mean "resting place," but never mind.


A senior U.S. defense official said the Pentagon was considering plans to accelerate and expand that training.

U.S. and Pakistani officials are discussing a program that would increase the number of U.S. special operations trainers in the country and expand the schooling to the regular army, said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are preliminary and no decisions have been made.


Obviously, the War Machine is floating a trial balloon to habituate the hoi polloi -- and the dimbulbs of the political and media elite -- to the idea of a direct, on-the-ground American military presence in Pakistan. Hey, it's only "advisers"! It's only a bit of training, a bit of "schooling" -- you know, like those nice old lady teachers in your grammar school. How dangerous could it be? I mean, come on -- when in American history has the presence of a few American military "advisers" in country roiled by civil conflict ever led to any kind of bad result?

 Bob Dylan - Senor  :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh2KjOy_tl0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Euruknet%2Einfo%2F%3Fp%3Dm54355%26hd%3D%26size%3D1%26l%3De&feature=player_embedded




 

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US drone attack kills 29 in North Waziristan

By Dawn Correspondent

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54341&hd=&size=1&l=e

May 16, 2009

MIRAMSHAH: Twenty-nine people were killed when a US drone fired two missiles at a residential compound in the Mirali tehsil of North Waziristan tribal region here on Saturday.

Residents said that a remotely-piloted US aircraft which was hovering over the area fired two missiles at the house of Hikmat Roshan in the Khaisore village of Mirali at around 8am, killing 29 tribesmen present there. The house was reduced to rubble, while a religious seminary near it was also damaged.

They said that it was the third drone attack on the Khaisore village, about five kilometers to south of Mirali town, since the US forces fighting Taliban in Afghanistan started drone attacks in the Pakistan tribal belt. The village is populated by the Khushali Torikhel clan of Wazir tribe.

In another incident, helicopters gunship shelled houses of suspected militants in the Pir Kalli area, 10 kilometers east of Miramshah on Saturday.

Sources said that the security forces blocked the Bannu-Miramshah road from both sides during the air strikes. A number of houses were damaged in the attack.

Residents said that the shelling was conducted in the area where an army convoy was attacked with an improvised explosive device on Thursday (May 14). Three security personnel were killed and four others were injured in the IED attack.





 

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Criminal Intent: Obama-Bashing=Mushroom Cloud, Says Prez Fans

BYChris Floyd

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54328&hd=&size=1&l=e


May 17, 2009

Where he leads me I will follow,
Where he leads me I will follow,
Where he leads me I will follow;
I'll go with him, with him all the way.
-- "Where He Leads Me," E.W. Blandy & J.S. Norris

Arthur Silber states a plain if unpleasant truth in the title of his latest piece: Barack Obama, Murderer and War Criminal-in-Chief. But as that great American military leader Jack Nicholson once said -- on the witness stand in a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, no less -- some folks "can't handle the truth."




However, looking into the earnest concerns of the latter, I was genuinely enlightened to learn that "the whole purpose of current US strategy" on the Af-Pak front is to prevent nuclear war between Pakistan and India. The whole purpose! This, I must admit, I did not know. I had thought -- along with a preponderance of experts whose opinions cry far in the top of mine -- that "current US strategy" in the region was actually exacerbating extremism and violent resistance like throwing gasoline on a roaring fire, while destabilizing Pakistan to an unprecedented degree. Killing civilians, cross-border strikes, blunderbuss "counterinsurgency" attacks sending hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives -- I guess it's all good, as the man says.

What's more, I also learned that anyone who criticizes "our policy" in Pakistan is actually aiding and abetting the "possible deaths of millions of civilians" in that apparently inevitable nuclear war between India and the "nuclear-armed Taliban" that is apparently a "certainty" if we don't follow the new Leader. So who's the "war criminal" now, huh? The man with his hand on the throttle of a voracious war machine killing actual innocent human beings right now in reality -- or all of the stupid, crap-peddling, poo-flinging critics who are blithely unconcerned about the "possible deaths of millions of civilians" under far-fetched fantasies spun from Dick Cheney's paranoiac "One Percent Doctrine", now adapted to the righteous progressive cause?

I think it's clear who the real criminals are in this case, don't you?

 

[bigron]

Pakistan Seen Rapidly Expanding Nuclear Arsenal



Monday , May 18, 2009

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520469,00.html


May 16: Pakistani Army soldiers patrol on a military vehicle near Mardan, in northwest Pakistan.



Pakistan is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, raising questions in Congress whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid to the war-torn country could be diverted to its nuclear program, The New York Times reported on Monday.

According to the report, members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings about Pakistan's nuclear drive, Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in Senate testimony with a single-word answer: "yes."

Pakistan's effort to build new atomic weapons has been a source of growing concern in Washington, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when the U.S. is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of Pakistan's 80 to 100 weapons which it fears could fall into the hands of Islamic militants, the report said.

RELATED: Pakistan to Attack Taliban in Bin Laden's Lair:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520413,00.html

The administration's effort is complicated by the fact that Pakistan is producing an unknown amount of new weapons-grade uranium and, once a series of new reactors is completed, weapons-grade plutonium for a new generation of arms, the paper added.

President Obama has called for passage of a treaty that would stop all nations from producing more fissile material.

Obama administration officials said they had communicated to Congress that their intent was to assure that military aid to Pakistan was directed toward counterterrorism and not diverted, The Times noted.

But Admiral Mullen's confirmation that the arsenal is expanding seems certain to aggravate the level of discomfort in Congress, the report said.

The briefings have taken place as Congress has considered proposals to spend $3 billion over the next five years to train and equip Pakistan's military for counterinsurgency warfare, the paper pointed out. The aid would come in addition to $7.5 billion in civilian assistance.

[bigron]

Pakistani Taliban Vow to Fight Until 'Last Breath'

Monday , May 18, 2009

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520470,00.html


BATKHELA, Pakistan —

The Pakistani Taliban have vowed to resist until the "last breath" as security forces entered two militant-held towns and fought on the outskirts of a third in what could turn into bloody urban battles near the Afghan border.

Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan made the defiant statements late Sunday after a top official said the military offensive in the Swat Valley and surrounding areas had killed more than 1,000 suspected militants and would proceed until the last insurgent is "flushed out."

"We will fight until the last breath for the enforcement of Islamic law," Khan told The Associated Press in a brief phone call from an undisclosed location. "We consider ourselves on the right path."

Washington has pressed Islamabad to crack down on Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds along the Afghan frontier, saying the militants threaten not only U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan but also nuclear-armed Pakistan's future.

Swat was once a tourist destination that fell prey to Taliban advances over the past two years. The military's latest offensive in Swat and neighboring districts has already led to an exodus of nearly 1 million people. About 100,000 of them are now in sweltering refugee camps.

The battle in Swat's towns in particular could prove a stiff test for Pakistan's military.

The army is geared toward fighting a conventional battle against longtime rival India on the plains of the Punjab region using tanks and artillery, and it has limited experience battling guerrillas in urban settings.

The military has tried operations in Swat before but failed to force out the Taliban, many of whom could blend in easily with the regular population or had hideouts in the mountains. Civilians in Swat said the military's heavy use of airstrikes killed many innocents instead of militants.

In a statement Sunday afternoon, the army said 25 militants and a soldier died in the previous 24 hours of the operation.

Security forces engaged in firefights with militants on the outskirts of Swat's main town, Mingora, where many of the estimated 4,000 Taliban fighters in the valley are believed to be holed up, the statement said.

It also said security forces had surrounded and entered the towns of Matta and Kanju to take on the militants, and it requested civilians still in those areas stay away from the Taliban hide-outs.

Troops were making gains in the remote Piochar area, the rear base of Swat Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah, it added.

Army spokesmen reached Monday morning said they had no new updates.

In giving the 1,000-plus death toll Sunday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the operation was going well and would "continue till the last Taliban are flushed out."

It was not possible to independently verify the death toll.

The territories bombarded over the past three weeks are now too dangerous for journalists to freely roam. The army also hasn't explained how it is differentiating militant deaths from civilian ones. It hasn't given a civilian death toll. Accounts from witnesses and doctors suggest dozens of civilians have been killed or wounded.

"The operation is going in the right direction as we had planned," Malik said. "I cannot give a time but we will try (to complete the operation) at the earliest."

The military also did not detail how many ground troops were involved in the latest advances.

[Biggs]

US drone attack kills 29 in North Waziristan By Dawn Correspondent
Dawn

www.uruknet.info?p=54341


May 16, 2009

MIRAMSHAH: Twenty-nine people were killed when a US drone fired two missiles at a residential compound in the Mirali tehsil of North Waziristan tribal region here on Saturday.

Residents said that a remotely-piloted US aircraft which was hovering over the area fired two missiles at the house of Hikmat Roshan in the Khaisore village of Mirali at around 8am, killing 29 tribesmen present there. The house was reduced to rubble, while a religious seminary near it was also damaged.

They said that it was the third drone attack on the Khaisore village, about five kilometers to south of Mirali town, since the US forces fighting Taliban in Afghanistan started drone attacks in the Pakistan tribal belt. The village is populated by the Khushali Torikhel clan of Wazir tribe.

In another incident, helicopters gunship shelled houses of suspected militants in the Pir Kalli area, 10 kilometers east of Miramshah on Saturday.

Sources said that the security forces blocked the Bannu-Miramshah road from both sides during the air strikes. A number of houses were damaged in the attack.

Residents said that the shelling was conducted in the area where an army convoy was attacked with an improvised explosive device on Thursday (May 14). Three security personnel were killed and four others were injured in the IED attack.

[Biggs]

Pakistan: Offensive kills 1,000 alleged militants
Bloody urban battles could lie ahead as security forces battle Taliban
Greg Baker / AP
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30791770/

updated 12:14 p.m. ET May 17, 2009

ISLAMABAD - Pakistani security forces fought Taliban militants on the outskirts of the main city in the northwest's Swat Valley and entered two other Taliban-held towns there, the army said Sunday, foreshadowing what could become bloody urban battles.

A top government official said the offensive near Afghanistan had already killed more than 1,000 Taliban fighters, while a group of pro-government religious leaders endorsed the operation but condemned U.S. missile strikes in the northwest.

The developments underscored Pakistan's resolve and frustration in its battle against militancy.

Washington has pressed Islamabad to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds along the Afghan frontier, saying the militants threaten not only U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan but also nuclear-armed Pakistan's future. But many in Pakistan believe the militancy here has metastasized because of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Potential for more discontent
Recent Taliban forays into a district just 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the capital, Islamabad, seem to have swayed many Pakistanis to support the most recent military operation, but that could easily change if the toll on the hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced mounts, and if more U.S. missiles strikes stoke greater popular discontent.

In giving the 1,000-plus death toll Sunday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the operation in Swat and surrounding areas would "continue till the last Taliban are flushed out." It was not possible to independently verify the figure. The territories bombarded over the past three weeks are now too dangerous for journalists to freely visit.

In a statement Sunday afternoon, the army said 25 militants and a soldier died in the previous 24 hours.

Security forces were facing off with militants in "intense fire engagements" on the outskirts of Swat's main town, Mingora, where many of the estimated 4,000 Taliban fighters in the valley are believed to be holed up, the statement said.

It also said security forces had surrounded and entered the towns of Matta and Kanju to take on the militants, and it requested civilians still in those areas stay away from the Taliban hide-outs. Troops were making gains in remote Piochar area, the rear base of Swat Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah, it added.

"The operation is going in the right direction as we had planned," Malik said in a televised news conference from Mardan, where he went to relief camps to see some of the new refugees. "I cannot give a time but we will try (to complete the operation) at the earliest."

The military did not detail how many ground troops were involved in the latest advances.

Limited experience battling militants
Pakistan's army is geared toward fighting a conventional battle again longtime rival India on the plains of the Punjab region using tanks and artillery, and it has limited experience battling guerrillas in urban settings.

Its most recent major offensive, in the Bajur tribal region, drew praise from U.S. officials for dismantling a virtual Taliban mini-state but was criticized for the large amount of destruction it caused. The number of civilians killed in Bajur is unknown.

Suicide attacks denounced
At a convention in Islamabad, hundreds of religious scholars and leaders — many of them Barelvis, a Sufi-influenced strain of Sunni Islam — denounced suicide attacks and other Taliban tactics in urging the government to continue the operation until peace is restored.

The attendees also blasted the U.S. missile strikes, saying Pakistan should take up the matter at the United Nations.

"Internally, terrorists were attempting to weaken Pakistan by spreading terrorism and killing people and on the other hand drone attacks are on ... This is a conspiracy against Pakistan and we will foil it," said Sahibzada Fazl Karim, one of the speakers.

[bigron]

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
12:38 Mecca time, 09:38 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200951983717124554.html
 
Pakistan grapples with Swat exodus 

 
The UN says only 20 per cent of registered Pakistani refugees are actually in the camps [AFP] 
 
About 1.5 million refugees have fled the Pakistani military's offensive against Taliban forces in the northwest of the country, officials say.

The fighting has resulted in an exodus with a speed and size that could rival the displacement caused by Rwanda's genocide, the UN said.

The humanitarian challenge comes as the military said its troops are fighting street battles against fighters in important towns in the Swat valley.
 
Lieutenant-General Nadeem Ahmed, who leads a group dealing with the uprooted Pakistanis, said that the government had enough food for the displaced, but said it needed donations of fans and high energy biscuits.

Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "The staggering figure, in details released by the UN, shows that only about 2,000 people are actually in the refugee camps."

Around 20 per cent of the Pakistani displaced are in about 24 camps at the moment, John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, said.

Hanna said: "The rest are staying with family and with friends.

"This is obviously placing an immense amount of strain on the resources of the society as a whole inreasing the magnitude of what is the biggest movement of people since the formation of Pakistan in 1947."

Risk of return

Earlier offensives had caused about 550,000 people to flee, though Ahmed said on Tuesday that 230,000 people had returned to Bajaur, a tribal region overrun by the Taliban and targeted in a lengthy military operation.
 
Speaking in Geneva, Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency, said the massive displacement of people in such a short space of time "could go back to Rwanda" - a reference to the 1994 massacre of ethnic Tutsis by the majority Hutus in the African country.
 
The genocide displaced some two million people.

A UN statement had said earlier that 130,950 people had been registered in camps. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the difference.
 
"The situation is volatile and changing rapidly," Holmes said at the UN headquarters in New York.
 
Redmond said a lack of help for the displaced and the many thousands of families hosting them could cause more "political destabilisation" for the country.
 
The US has praised Pakistan's military operation in Swat and surrounding districts, which comes amid long-standing American pressure to root out al-Qaeda and Taliban hide-outs along the border with Afghanistan.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 

[bigron]

Pakistan troops in Taliban urban warfare


by Lehaz Ali Lehaz Ali
Mon May 18, 5:30 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090518/wl_afp/pakistanunrest


AFP – Pakistani army soldiers patrol a village in Mardan district. Pakistan said troops were locked in bloody …

 
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – Pakistan said Monday troops were locked in bloody street battles with Taliban fighters in the northwest as rival politicians united behind the offensive to eliminate Islamist militants.

Pakistan's deadly operation against Taliban fighters entered a fourth week on Monday as jets and helicopters pounded militant targets, and infantry troops fought street battles in towns of the Swat district.

Nearly 1.5 million people have been displaced in the massive onslaught, waged under tough US pressure to clamp down on militants in the northwest of the country which Washington branded the greatest terror threat to the West.

Fighter jets and attack helicopters pounded militant hideouts and supply lines in Swat, once a tourist destination popular with Westerners until two years ago, when it was plunged into a Taliban insurgency to enforce sharia law.

The military says its troops are closing in on Mingora, the capital of Swat under Taliban control, and have issued a map showing security forces in a pincer movement of troops pushing down from the north and up from the south.

It reported "fierce clashes" in different places and said security forces were locked in street fighting in the Taliban-held towns of Kanju, two kilometres (one mile) from Mingora, and Matta, further to the north.

"The ground offensive has now started in the cities and the towns, before that we were fighting in the countryside," military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas told a news conference.

"We are closing towards Mingora. We have started the street fighting, the urban warfare in Matta... And now the infantry is going into the cities and the towns," Abbas told a news conference.

He said 27 militants and three soldiers were killed in the last 24 hours, and that forces were advancing in Peochar, the suspected bastion of Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah in a two year uprising to enforce sharia law.

Pakistani authorities say more than 1,000 militants and at least 49 soldiers have been killed in a three-pronged onslaught launched in the northwest districts of Lower Dir on April 26, Buner on April 28 and Swat on May 8.

Pakistan's rival politicians united behind an offensive to "eliminate" the Taliban on Monday with troops locked in urban combat in a thrust towards Mingora, the rebel-held capital of Swat.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani won support at a cross-party conference in Islamabad, reiterating calls for the Taliban to disarm in what he has called a fight to "eliminate" Islamist militants threatening the nation's sovereignty.

Refugees from the cool, mountainous conflict zone have suffered in the stifling heat of the lowlands while crowding into camps or with relatives, and many decided to return home Monday as officials said battles were subsiding.

Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said people were returning to their homes in Buner and the semi-autonomous tribal area of Bajaur, where the military launched operations last August, putting the figure at around 20,000.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Sunday that the government had regained control in Lower Dir and Buner, and urged the displaced to return.

"It is too hot in Peshawar, it is impossible for my kids to live in the sizzling weather," 55-year-old Janbaz told AFP by telephone as he headed back to his hometown just west of Swat.

The military says up to 15,000 troops were taking on about 4,000 well-armed fighters in Swat.

Islamabad ordered the offensive under mounting US pressure after the insurgents took up positions just 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Pakistani capital, having broken out of their hub in Swat.

The UN refugee agency said more than two million people have fled fighting in northwest Pakistan since August 2008 in a displacement that officials fear is the worst here since partition from India in 1947.

That number includes 1.45 million people registered as displaced during the Pakistani army's offensive against militants since May 2.

The US Defense Department said Monday it was drawing up preliminary plans to ferry food, water and tents to help them.

Meanwhile the US said Monday it was not helping Pakistan to expand its nuclear arsenal.

"I am not aware of any US aid that's gone towards nuclear weapons," US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told a gathering at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.

[Biggs]

Civilians fleeing Swat come under attack

http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=22211


Tuesday, May 19, 2009
27 militants killed in ‘Rah-e-Rast’ operation

By our correspondent

PESHAWAR: Several persons, including women and children, were killed and a number of others sustained injuries when families fleeing the military operation in Swat’s Matta town were shelled while crossing a mountainous path to reach Karo Darra in Dir Upper on Monday, eyewitnesses and official sources said.

Eyewitnesses, who escaped the attack or were able to reach Wari town of Dir Upper in injured condition, said they were targeted by gunship helicopters. However, police officials said they might have been hit by a stray shell. Local people said they saw some 12 to 14 bodies on a mountain on the Swat side but could not go near to retrieve them or help the injured for fear of another aerial attack.

Talking to local journalists, an eyewitness Bacha Zada claimed that a number of families were going to Dir Upper from Matta and Kabal areas of Swat when they were attacked by a helicopter. He said as they rushed to the help of the victims, the gunship helicopter re-appeared and again fired at them. He said at this stage all of them ran away and abandoned the dead and the injured.

Confirming the incident, police sources said the families might have been hit by a stray shell as the survivors did not remember source of the attack. “There might have been some killings in the incident but we cannot comment on it because the dead and the injured were found on the Swat side and not in Dir Upper,” a police official told The News.

It was learnt that some of them with minor injuries were being treated in Wari while seriously wounded persons were rushed to Timergara. A woman Sardara, whose son Rahmat Sher was killed in the incident, said she left the body of her child on the mountain and fled to save her life. The woman, who managed to cross into Wari while injured, said her son breathed his last in her lap.

Though information from the area was sketchy, villagers put the number of those killed by in shelling by helicopter at 12 to 14. Some of the dead were identified as Rahmat Sher, Amanul Mulk, Irfanullah and Hasina.

Among the injured included Sardara, Ajab Khan, Azam, Lakhtay, Ismail, Raham Bibi, Muhammad Sher, Zahir Mina, Bakht Rawan, Shagai, Nawab Sher, Begum, Shtamand and Dost Muhammad. It may be mentioned that Karo Darra and Nihag Darra areas of Dir Upper share border with Matta’s Peuchar area, a stronghold of Maulana Fazlullah-led Taliban militants.

Intense fighting is taking place in Matta and other areas of Swat to rout the Taliban. Tens of thousands have already left the valley but a vast majority of the people were still trapped due to fighting and continuous curfew. The trapped people have been trying to move out of the valley using mountainous and unfrequented paths as they don’t have enough time in curfew relaxation, or transportation, to flee the intensified military operation.

The injured said those who had sustained minor injuries were able to come to Wari while the critically wounded persons were lying near Shagai in Karo Darra, where the attack was carried out.

Meanwhile, thousands of residents of Doog Darra, which was attacked by warplanes on Sunday, fled the area. The authorities got vacated some buildings at the Shringal campus of the University of Malakand and declared it a camp for the IDPs. Another camp was established in the Government Middle School at Rehankot in Dir town. The displaced persons had no food and other facilities and were stated to be in a miserable condition.

Muhammad Anis adds from Islamabad: As the security forces started ground offensive in troubled Swat Valley, street battle has started in Matta tehsil with infantry going into streets of cities and towns.

“Three important commanders including Okasha, Malanga and Riaz were among 27 militants killed during the operation that has now been named as Rah-e-Rast, military spokesman and the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Maj Gen Athar Abbas told newsmen at a briefing.

He said the dead body of Malanga was lying with the security forces, but did not tell if the rest of the bodies had been removed by the militants.

He said Mamdherai Markaz was targeted by the security forces and 10 to 15 terrorists hiding inside were killed. He said the security forces continued cordon and search operations in Matta town.

He said three security forces’ personnel including an officer were also killed and 17 others injured during the fighting. The DG ISPR said the security forces were engaged with militants inside Kanju town to clear the area. Operation is in progress in Takhtaband area, where seven combatants were killed in a close encounter, he said, adding that the security forced had also expanded their foothold in Peuchar and killed 12 militants in the area.

The troops attacked and secured Dumber training centre, which was also being used by miscreants as their logistics base. When asked, if the militants arrested by the security forces have made any disclosures during investigations about the source providing weapons and finances to them, he said those so far arrested were low level Taliban fighters.

To another question, he said an inquiry has been ordered into the abduction and killing of army officers by the Taliban, allegedly in collusion with some government officials The military spokesman assured the nation that the security forces were strictly resorting to precision targeting and that no heavy weaponry will be used in the populated areas. “Our target is to clear the area of miscreants while ensuring minimum collateral damage”, he said.

AP adds from Batkhela: The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Swat chapter spokesman Muslim Khan has said the Taliban would resist the security forces until the “last breath”. “We will fight until the last breath for the enforcement of Islamic law,” Muslim Khan told The Associated Press in a brief phone call from an undisclosed location late Sunday. “We consider ourselves on the right path,” he insisted.

[bigron]

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
14:26 Mecca time, 11:26 GMT   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200952074222970396.html
 
Humanitarian crisis worsens in Swat 



 
The US has pledged $110m in aid to Pakistan to ease the plight for the two million displaced [EPA]

 
Two million people have been displaced in northwest Pakistan and fears are raised more could be fleeing after the president said the offensive against the Taliban would be expanded to include Waziristan.

The government has set up camps, but a vast majority of the displaced are staying with relatives or in private accommodation.

Asif Ali Zardari, the president, was scheduled to convene a high-level meeting of government and UN officials on Wednesday on relief and rehabilitation efforts.

Yousuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, said Pakistan was fighting the Taliban on two fronts - militarily in the mountains and in trying to cope with the humanitarian crisis.

For her part, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, pledged $110m in humanitarian aid on Tuesday to Pakistan as part of Washington's new strategy for helping Islamabad counter the Taliban.

Meat and supplies

The funds would be used to deliver tents, FM radios, meat, water lorries, generators and other supplies, Clinton said.

Some of the money would also be spent on buying Pakistani wheat to boost the local economy.

 

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said the amount of aid was not near to enough of what Pakistan needs as fighting between government forces and the Taliban appears to be spreading.

"People from Matta, who had endured weeks of curfews, are now escaping over the mountains. Families are being separated from each other and it's another humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there," Hyder said.

"If the government offensive will be extended, it will be become a very serious issue to contain."

Hyder said the number of displaced is expected to increase, as thousands of people reportedly are leaving the Mehsud area in South Waziristan.

"They are not being helped entirely by the government. The people of this country are going out of their way to give them some kind of shelter."

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that the military could move into Pakistan's semi-autonoumous tribal areas.

"We're going to go into Waziristan, all these regions, with army operations," the paper quoted Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, as saying.

"Swat is just the start. It's a larger war to fight."

'Horrible speed'

Rashid Khalikov, director of the United Nations' humanitarian office in New York, has said that aid workers are struggling to reach many of those who fled as the number of displaced increased with "absolutely horrible speed."

The UN estimates that about 1.4 million people have been displaced since fighting in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) started at the end of April.

That estimate is in addition to about 550,000 people already displaced by fighting across the NWFP and in other Pakistani regions.

John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, has said only about 20 per cent of displaced civilians are inside about 24 refugee camps at the moment.

Pakistan's military has said up to 15,000 troops are fighting 4,000 well-armed Taliban in Swat.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 

[Biggs]

Humanitarian crisis worsens in Swat
Aljaeera.net

www.uruknet.info?p=54431

Link: www.english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200952074222970396.html


The US has begun delivering humanitarian aid to people displaced by fighting in northwest Pakistan, the US embassy says.

A military aircraft landed on Wednesday afternoon at an
air base near the capital, Islamabad, carrying items including air-conditioned tents and 120,000 pre-packed meals, US officials said.

The government has set up camps, but a vast majority of the estimated two millions of displaced people are staying with relatives or in private accommodation.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, pledged $110m in humanitarian aid to Pakistan on Tuesday as part of Washington's new strategy for helping Islamabad counter the Taliban.

The funds would be used to deliver tents, FM radios, meat, water lorries, generators and other supplies, Clinton said.

Some of the money would also be spent on buying Pakistani wheat to boost the local economy.

'Humanitarian catastrophe'

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said the amount of aid was not near to what Pakistan needs as fighting between government forces and the Taliban appears to be spreading.

"People from Matta, who had endured weeks of curfews, are now escaping over the mountains. Families are being separated from each other and it's another humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there," he said.

"If the government offensive will be extended, it will become a very serious issue to contain.

"However, as far as the military is concerned, it has to first clear Swat.

"It has already cleared Buner [district bordering Swat] and that would allow the people of Buner to go back.

"But it has a big fight on its hands in Swat and what happens [there] will determine what happens in Waziristan as well."

Asif Ali Zardari, the president, told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper during the weekend that the military offensive could be expanded.

"We're going to go into Waziristan, all these regions, with army operations," the paper quoted the president as saying.

"Swat is just the start. It's a larger war to fight."

Our correspondent said the number of displaced is expected to increase, as thousands of people reportedly are leaving the Mehsud area in South Waziristan.

"They are not being helped entirely by the government. The people of this country are going out of their way to give them some kind of shelter."

'Horrible speed'

President Zardari convened a meeting of government and UN officials on Wednesday on relief and rehabilitation efforts.

Yousuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, said Pakistan was fighting the Taliban on two fronts - in the mountains and in trying to cope with the humanitarian crisis.

Rashid Khalikov, director of the United Nations' humanitarian office in New York, has said that aid workers are struggling to reach many of those who fled as the number of displaced increased with "absolutely horrible speed."

The UN estimates that about 1.4 million people have been displaced since fighting in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) started at the end of April.

That estimate is in addition to about 550,000 people already displaced by fighting across the NWFP and in other Pakistani regions.

John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, said only about 20 per cent of displaced civilians are inside about 24 refugee camps at the moment.

Pakistan's military has said up to 15,000 troops are fighting 4,000 well-armed Taliban in Swat.

[bigron]

The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ...

It Has a David Albright Problem

By Peter Lee

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22669.htm

May 20, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- - As AFP tells us, the Institute for Science and International Security just published a report on Pakistan’s nuclear program that seems designed to pour gasoline on the “the Pakistani nuclear program is outta control” story.

And, when you look at the story, there isn’t a whole lot of there there.

The commercial [satellite] images reveal a major expansion of a chemical plant complex near Dera Ghazi Kahn that produces uranium hexalfuoride and uranium metal, materials used to produce nuclear weapons.

Big whoop, I must say. The Pakistanis love their nuclear weapons, and it’s not surprising—as a sovereign state outside the NPT—they might decide to make some more.

The only conceivable takeaway from this report is muddled alarmism, which ISIS obligingly provides.

Given turmoil in Pakistan with the army waging war against Taliban militants in the northwest, the ISIS said the "security of its nuclear assets remains in question."

"An expansion in nuclear weapons production capabilities needlessly complicates efforts to improve the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets," it said.

I don’t get it. How are things suddenly more complicated by an expansion in capacity?

Washington, apparently believing that it doesn’t have enough on its plate with al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban, is suddenly awash with dramatic plans to add a self-created problem to the mix: a quixotic effort to wrest Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Army if the situation deteriorates.

And selling that idea seems to require fomenting an irrational panic concerning Pakistan’s nuclear program, as a metastasizing cancerous problem that’s getting BIGGER and BIGGER if we don’t DO SOMETHING.

You know what it smells like to me?

It smells like an effort by some to put a radical U.S. nuclear counterproliferation doctrine on the table now, so when it’s the end of the year and it’s time to deal with that other Muslim country with the destabilizing nuclear capability—you know, the one on the other side of Afghanistan, the one that the Israelis are so upset about—public opinion has been primed to accept the idea that some combination of air strikes, special ops, and insertion of U.S. forces is needed to save the world from an Islamic nuclear program that’s…outta control!

A crisis in Pakistan—and high-profile U.S. handwringing over those dangerous Muslim nukes—might be the best thing that happens to Benjamin Netanyahu this year.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I don’t think we have a Pakistan nukes problem.

We have a reckless and cynical fearmongering problem that should ring alarm bells for anybody who remembers the Iraq war.

In a small way, I think we also have a David Albright problem.

ISIS is run by David Albright.

Scott Ritter delivered a devastating rip job on Albright in Truthdig last year, entitled The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was.

He characterized Albright as a dilettante wannabe nuclear weapons guy, who has self-promoted himself, his honorary doctorate, and his institute using the flimsiest of pretexts.

More importantly, Ritter identifies Albright’s key credential as a willingness to offer up uninformed and tendentious alarmism when the situation demands it.

Ritter’s conclusion sums up his feelings about Albright’s role in the nuclear non-proliferation debate:

Albright, operating under the guise of his creation, ISIS, has a track record of inserting hype and speculation about matters of great sensitivity in a manner which skews the debate toward the worst-case scenario. Over time Albright often moderates his position, but the original sensationalism still remains, serving the purpose of imprinting a negative image in the psyche of public opinion. This must stop. It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes.

Amen to that.

Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs. Lee can be reached at peterrlee-2000@yahoo

[Biggs]

80 militants killed as Pakistani army takes Taliban base

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0521/1224247035648.html

Pakistani soldiers have captured the main Taliban stronghold in a district 100km (60 miles) from the capital in heavy fighting in which 80 militants were killed, the military said yesterday.

Fighting in the Swat valley and the neighbouring districts of Buner and Dir has forced about 1.5 million people from their homes in addition to about 550,000 people displaced earlier.

The United States has offered Pakistan $110 million to help the displaced and said it was trying to redress 30 years of “incoherent” US policy toward the country.

The military said security forces had captured the village of Sultanwas in Buner district, where the Taliban had built a stronghold, complete with concrete bunkers.

“Security forces cleared Sultanwas last night after intense clashes. Reportedly 80 militant terrorists were killed,” military spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas told a briefing. One Pakistani soldier was killed and nine wounded, he said.

Emboldened by a February peace pact, Taliban from Swat moved into Buner in early April, clashing with police and villagers in a drive to impose their rule.

The thrust into an area so close to Islamabad raised alarm both at home and abroad. The United States criticised the February pact, which authorities hoped would bring peace to Swat, as akin to abdicating to the militants.

Pakistani action against militants, especially in areas near the Afghan border in its northwest, is an essential part of US plans to defeat al-Qaeda and bring stability to Afghanistan.

The army attacked militants in Buner and Dir late last month and launched an offensive in Swat on May 8th.

The United Nations has warned of a long-term humanitarian crisis and called for massive aid for the displaced.

The White House said the United States would provide $100 million in humanitarian aid, such as food, tents, radios, generators and other items and that the US defence department would give a further $10 million in unspecified assistance.

“Providing this assistance is not only the right thing to do but we believe it is essential to global security and the security of the United States and we are prepared to do more,” US secretary of state Hillary Clinton told reporters.

She also described the last three decades of US policy toward Pakistan – which would include the eight years of her husband, Bill Clintons, presidency – as “incoherent”.

[Biggs]

Five Pakistani troops killed in Swat fight - Summary
Posted : Thu, 21 May 2009 13:11:40 GMT

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/269843,five-pakistani-troops-killed-in-swat-fight--summary.html

Islamabad - Five soldiers and "a number of" Taliban fighters, including an important commander, were killed during intense battles in Pakistan's north-western Swat valley, the Pakistani army said Thursday. According to a statement from Pakistan's army, the security forces have cleared a number of the insurgents in Peochar, a side valley in Swat where Taliban militants have established training camps and their command and control system.

"Fire battles are taking place between "miscreants-terrorists" and the troops - few miscreants-terrorists were killed," said the statement. Seven militants were also apprehended in the operation while three soldiers were injured.

In the Kanju and Takhtaband area of Swat fierce clashes left five soldiers dead and four others, including an officer, were injured. A number of "miscreants" also died in the action.

The military announced a full-scale operation in Swat on May 8 after a controversial peace agreement fell apart in the face of Taliban insurgency and militants' advance to within 100 kilometers of the capital city, Islamabad.

But deadly clashes erupted in neighbouring districts of Buner and Dir even earlier in late April.

Pakistan's government and security forces have pledged to continue the fight till the last militant is eliminated, and the move has been hailed by its Western allies, including the United States which heavily relies on Pakistan to win its war in Afghanistan.

But the conflict is resulting in the biggest displacement of people in country's 63 years of existence.

Nearly 1.5 million people had been displaced just by this month's intense fighting in the Taliban bastions of Swat, Buner and Dir. Another half a million were uprooted last year.

A donors' conference began in Pakistan on Thursday to drum up humanitarian aid for the anti-Taliban war refugees who continue to influx from the conflict zone.

"There is an urgent need for (a) joint and comprehensive response to this issue by all those who are committed to fighting terrorism," Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told the meeting in Islamabad.

Gilani said the all-out offensive had started to produce positive results but they came with "grave repercussions" in terms of massive dislocation of civilian population.

Prior to the Swat onslaught, the authorities were confident of managing the displacements, but this month's massive influx has led to "a manifold increase in the magnitude of the crisis," Gilani said.

International agencies have called upon the international community for urgent support to overcome the crisis.

United Nations refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres last week described the mass exodus as "one of the most dramatic humanitarian crises in recent times," warning that, if left languishing, this population could become "an enormous destabilizing factor."

Officials estimate that troops are taking on between 4,000 and 5,000 well-trained Taliban fighters in the north-west. According to the army, more than 1,100 militants and up to 60 soldiers had been killed so far.

There is broad political and public support for the military action, but that could vanish quickly in case of a high count of civilian deaths and if the displaced persons were not taken care of.

[bigron]

Tom Dispatch
posted 2009-05-21 11:14:07

Tomgram: The Pressure of an Expanding War

Going for Broke

Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding


By Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war


Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak -- that is, expanded -- war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches" -- to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words -- that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here's the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the Army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'"

It's no different today in what's left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..." and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal... I think of no body fat."

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the "elite" world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we're told here and elsewhere, what's so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we're assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to "take the gloves off" on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."

Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage -- far more ominous than he means it to be:


"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a "surge" of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a "civilian surge" of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn't be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region's "desert of death." When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the "largest such project in the world in a combat setting."

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a "targeted" assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks -- the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 -- have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:


"According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed 'at least 25 militants.' In the local media, the dead were simply described as '29 tribesmen present there.' That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors."

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq "surge" months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. ("Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent -- hardly 'precision.'") As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, "Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports -- hotly denied by Holbrooke and others -- broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to "undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government." Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to "figurehead" status, while a "chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers" not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He "could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials." He would then be "the chief executive officer of Afghanistan."

Cooper's report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.

Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It's best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration's 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.

5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military -- pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) -- has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call "the Pakistani Taliban."

It's been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.

With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, U.N. officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.

In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an "Islamic Pashtunistan" would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true," applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.

6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).

Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban "militants"; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as "thinly sourced"); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were "extremely over-exaggerated," and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.

An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a "very exhaustive" investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.

Two things make this "incident" at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines' version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself "Taskforce Violence"), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal's appointment, reports Starkey, has "prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban."

Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai's repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "Well, I think he understands that... we have to have the full complement of... our offensive military power when we need it... We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back..."

In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. "No hands," he said, "are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam."

Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge "I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back" is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.

Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one "hand" tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.

The Pressure of an Expanding War

President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General McKiernan believed that, "as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas."

That the "responsibilities" of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War "ended at the border with Pakistan," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an "old mind-set." McChrystal represents those "fresh eyes" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, "Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border."

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already "Obama's war." With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.

So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive "team" in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn't go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint."

And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the "Washington coalition" is the one that cracks first? What then?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

[bigron]

Slouching towards balkanization

Pepe Escobar
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m54448&hd=&size=1&l=e


 

May 21, 2009

Happy Days are here again. It's as if the George W Bush years in Afghanistan had never left, with Washington still wallowing in an intelligence-free environment. A surge is coming to town - just like the one General David Petraeus engineered in Iraq. A Bush proconsul (Zalmay Khalilzad) wants to run the show - again. A hardliner (General Stanley McChrystal) is getting ready to terrorize any Pashtun in sight. A new mega-base is sprouting in the "desert of death" in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. And as in Bush time, no one's talking pipeline, or the (invisible) greatest regional prize: Pakistani Balochistan.

Bush's "global war on terror" (GWOT) may have been rebranded, under new management, "overseas contingency operation" (OCO). But history in Afghanistan continues to repeat itself as farce - or as an opium bad trip.

Zalmay does Pipelineistan
It was hardly stunning that Bush's pet Afghan hound Zalmay Khalilzad, a US citizen born in Afghanistan and former envoy to both Afghanistan and Iraq, would now be angling - via his pal President Hamid Karzai, who tried to get President Barack Obama on board - to become the unelected CEO of Afghanistan, or a sort of "unofficial" prime minister. Any Afghan that believes the West is not behind this racket must be a stone statue in the Hindu Kush.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama's AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke are supposed to be very excited about the scheme. Karzai and Khalilzad have had what the New York Times quaintly described as "a long and sometimes bumpy relationship". Khalilzad certainly has CEO experience - acquired as US ambassador to Afghanistan (2003-2005), when he was the real power behind Karzai's shaky throne (as much as he was totally blind to anything happening outside of Kabul).

Karzai has always denied - including to this correspondent - he was a minor Unocal employee plus entertainer of Taliban delegations visiting Houston and Washington in 1997. Khalilzad's relationship is less murky: he was a certified Unocal advisor. The "prize" - from president Bill Clinton to Bush and now Obama - is still the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline, then known as TAP and now known as TAPI, with the inclusion of India (See Pipelineistan goes Af-Pak Asia Times Online, May 14, 2009).

Khalilzad was a key player in setting up the Afghanistan-America Foundation in the mid-1990s, a lobby that during the Clinton administration became very influential because of its spinning of TAP, hyped as a key pipeline to bypass both Iran and Russia.

Karzai's brother Qayum was on the advisory board, along with Khalilzad and Ishaq Nadiri, who later conveniently became "economic advisor" to Karzai. Qayum and another Karzai brother - Mahmoud - owned a Baltimore-based restaurant chain in the US (that's why people in Kabul and western Pakistan call Karzai "the kebab seller"). Hamid got a lot of kebab money during his exile in Quetta right up until the end of 2001, when he was miraculously parachuted into Kabul by US special forces.

Khalilzad, as Bush's Afghan pet, was absolutely key in convincing suspicious former mujahideen, many of them Tajiks, to have Hamid (from a minor Pashtun tribe) installed as "interim" leader of Afghanistan after the Taliban fell in December 2001. The mujahideen wanted King Zahir Shah. With the puppet guaranteed in power, Karzai, Pakistan's president General Pervez Musharraf and Turkmenistan's Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Nyazov signed an agreement to build TAP in December 2001. The pipeline, now TAPI, is an absolutely key plank of Washington's Central Asia strategy. Khalilzad as CEO will move mountains to make sure that TAPI defeats its much more sound rival, IPI, the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline".

It will be a bumpy ride. And - tragedy of tragedies - it will eventually lead to Khalilzad having to talk pipelines with the Taliban all over again. Karzai does not even control Kabul, not to mention the rest of a ravaged country ranked as the fifth-most corrupt in the world by Transparency International. The more Karzai's local governors get corrupted, the more the Taliban advance village by village and tribal clan by tribal clan, propelled by their nasty mix of outright threats and hardcore punishment. The Taliban, on top of it, have struck alliances with myriad criminal groups, and are supported by their Pashtun cousins in the Pakistani tribal areas.

The helpless Karzai, profiting from the good services of Islamabad and Riyadh, is trying to talk to everybody - from the neo-Taliban to the historic Mullah Omar-commanded Taliban and also old Saudi/Pakistan favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. And this while Obama's strategic advisers spin that the war is "winnable" if Washington captures - with a lot of cash - the hearts and minds of tribal Pashtuns.

Some of this new US cash flowing into Afghanistan has been diverted to the Orwellian Afghan Social Outreach Program, which builds anti-Taliban local councils, while the no less Orwellian Afghan Public Protection Force has started to build Sunni Awakening-style militias. Arming Pashtun militias who will inevitably turn against the Western occupiers does not exactly qualify as brilliant counter-insurgency.

Balochistan revisited
Meanwhile, Balochistan, the biggest prize in the region (see Balochistan is the ultimate prize Asia Times Online, May 9, 2009) remains totally under the radar of the frenetic US news cycle. Numerous Balochi readers pointed out to this correspondent that it is now in fact a 50% Balochi/Pashtun province. Most Pashtuns live near the Afghan border. And many happen to be neighbors of Afghanistan's Helmand province - the key site of the upcoming Obama surge.

In case of a hypothetical balkanization of Pakistan, Balochis and Pashtuns would go separate ways. Quetta, the provincial capital, in terms of population and business activity, is already dominated by Pashtuns.

Balochistan's internal politics are complex. Balochis and Brahvies are separate nationalities - with different spoken languages and culture. Quite a few Balochis do not accept Brahvies as Balochis. What all Balochi tribal leaders agree on is to demand maximum autonomy and control over their natural resources. Islamabad always responds with firepower.

What is now Balochistan and Sind in Pakistan was conquered centuries ago by the Balochi Rind tribe. They never submitted to the British. During the Ronald Reagan 1980s, Balochis tried - in secret - to strike a deal with the US for an independent Balochistan in return for the US controlling regional Pipelineistan. Washington procrastinated. Balochis took it very badly. Some decided to go underground or go for armed struggle. Islamabad still doesn't get it. Washington may.

If the Pashtunwali - the ancestral Pashtun code - is still king (don't threaten them, don't attack them, don't mislead them, don't dishonor them, or revenge is inevitable), Balochis can be even more fearsome. Balochis as a whole have never been conquered. These are warriors of ancestral fame. If you think Pashtuns are tough, better not pick a fight with a Balochi. Even Pashtuns are terrified of them.

The geopolitical secret is not to antagonize but to court them, and offer them total autonomy. In an evolving strategy of balkanization of Pakistan - increasingly popular in quite a few Washington foreign policy circles - Balochistan has very attractive assets: natural wealth, scarce population, and a port, Gwadar, which is key for Washington's New Great Game in Eurasia Pipelineistan plans.

And it's not only oil and gas. Reko Diq (literally "sandy peak") is a small town in the deserted Chaghi district, 70 kilometers northwest of already remote Nok Kundi, near the Iran and Afghanistan borders. Reko Diq is the home of the world's largest gold and copper reserves, reportedly worth more than US$65 billion. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn, these reserves are believed to be even bigger than similar ones in Iran and Chile.

Reko Diq is being explored by the Australian Tethyan Copper Company (75%), which sold 19.95% of its stake to Chile's Antofagasta Minerals. Only 25% is allocated to the Balochistan Development Authority. Tethyan is jointly controlled by Barrick Gold and Antofagasta Minerals. The Balochis had to have a serious beef about that: they denounce that their natural wealth has been sold by Islamabad to "Zionist-controlled regimes".

Washington is focused on Balochistan like a laser. One of high summer's blockbusters will be the inauguration of Camp Leatherneck, a vast, brand new US air base in Dasht-e-Margo, the "desert of death" in Helmand province in Afghanistan. Quite a few of Obama's surge soldiers will be based in Camp Leatherneck - a cross-border, covert ops stone's throw from southeast Iran and Pakistani Balochistan.

Under McChrystal, the new US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization top commander in Afghanistan, one should expect a continuous summer blockbuster of death squads, search-and-destroy missions, targeted assassinations, bombing of civilians and all-out paramilitary terrorization of tribal Pashtun villages, community leaders, social networks or any social movement for that matter that dares to defy Washington and provide support for the Afghan resistance.

"Black Ops" McChrystal is supposed to turn former Chinese leader Mao Zedong upside down - he should "empty the sea" (kill and/or displace an untold number of Pashtun peasants) to "catch the fish" (the Taliban or any Afghan opposing the US occupation). There couldn't be a better man for the counter-insurgency job assigned by Obama, Petraeus, Clinton and Holbrooke.

American journalist Seymour Hersh has detailed how McChrystal directed the "executive assassination wing" of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command. No wonder he was a darling of former vice president Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Rumsfeld. The Obama administration's belief in his extreme terrorization methods qualifies as no more than Rumsfeldian foreign policy.

And McChrystal still has the luxury of raising any amount of calibrated hell in neighboring Balochistan to suit Washington's plans - be they to provoke Iranians or incite Balochis to revolt against Islamabad.

According to Pakistani writer Abd Al-Ghafar Aziz, writing for al-Jazeera's Arabic website, Balochistan has been accused by the US for years of "supporting terrorism and harboring the leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda". US Predator drones "have been striking 'precious targets', resulting in the death of over 15,000 people". Aziz described Balochis as "orphans without shelter and without protection".

Neighboring Iran is taking no chances; it is testing sophisticated border patrolling techniques this week in its southeast province of Sistan-Balochistan, along the 12,500 kilometers of border with both Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan. One of Tehran's ultimate national security nightmares is US-cross border covert ops launched from Pakistani Balochistan, the kind of stuff that's music to McChrystal's ears.

Slouching towards balkanization
There's little doubt Obama's surge will fail. Washington's plan B is also lame - it boils down to some kind of arrangement with the Taliban, something that Saudi Arabia has been frantically mediating.

The problem is the military/Inter-Services Intelligence nexus in Islamabad will continue to support the Taliban in Afghanistan - no matter what Washington concocts - because the only possible outcome in their minds is the defeat of the "pro-India" Northern Alliance, which is the de facto power in Kabul with Karzai as a puppet. The Northern Alliance will renege on its alliance with India over their dead bodies. And backed up not only by India but also Iran and Russia, they will never allow the Taliban in power.

In the long run, Obama's AfPak strategy may acquire its own relentless, volatile momentum of addicting the military in Islamabad to make war on their own people - be they Pashtuns or Balochis. So Washington may in fact be setting the slow but inexorable march towards the balkanization of Pakistan. If Pashtun cousins on both sides of the border - 26 million in Pakistan, 13 million in Afghanistan - would eventually find an opening to form a long-dreamed-of Pashtunistan, Pakistan as we know it would break up. India might intervene to subdue Sind and Punjab, keeping both under its sphere of influence. Washington for its part would rather concentrate on exploiting the natural wealth and strategic value of an independent Balochistan.

Thus a Pakistan not unlike an Iraq still under US occupation - broke up into three parts - now starts to emerge as a distinct possibility. Unless an improbable Pakistani popular revolt, backed by middle-ranking Pakistani soldiers, rumbles on to make the top heads of the army/security/politico establishment roll. But drones, not guillotines, are the flavor of the moment in AfPak.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. P

 

[bigron]

Mullen: Afghan Surge May Endanger Pakistan

Admiral Tells Senate War Success "May Only Push Them Deeper Into Pakistan"

by Jason Ditz, May 21, 2009
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/21/mullen-afghan-surge-may-endanger-pakistan/


 
Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen insisted that the United States has “a clear national security interest” in taking on the Taliban in Afghanistan and that the 21,000 additional troops coming in the surge is “about right.” At the same time, Adm. Mullen cautioned that the attempt to reverse the Taliban’s gains in Afghanistan could have dire consequences for neighboring Pakistan.

“We can’t deny that our success in that regard may only push them deeper into Pakistan,” Mullen conceded, adding that “we may end up further destabilizing Pakistan without providing substantial lasting improvements in Afghanistan.” The Admiral’s only answer to this seemingly enormous problem was to call for more military and economic aid to Pakistan.

Pakistan is seemingly plenty destabilized as it is. Millions of civilians have been driven from their homes by a military offensive north of the capital city of Islamabad, and President Asif Ali Zardari intends to expand the war across the nation’s entire border with Afghanistan. He too seems to think the big answer to the growing problem is more international aid.

Pakistan’s stability has been a serious concern for the US, particularly given the nation’s significant arsenal of nuclear weapons. There has even been speculation that the US may attempt to seize the weapons from Pakistan, though whether they will or even can remains very much in doubt.

[bigron]

200,000 Civilians Trapped in Northern Swat

Kalam Residents Tried Unsuccessfully to Oust Taliban

by Jason Ditz, May 21, 2009
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/21/200000-civilians-trapped-in-northern-swat/




Roughly 200,000 civilians remain trapped in the northern Swat Valley as the bulk of Pakistan’s military engages in a slow battle further south attempting to unseat the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and assorted other militant factions from control over the region.

The situation in the north is increasingly dire, as TTP patrols block the roads into southern Swat. In the town of Kalam, the residents tried unsuccessfully to oust the Taliban from their town, but were eventually forced to accept a cease-fire against the militants. The town of Bahrain reports they are running out of food, and have had no provisions from the government.

The only way to escape from the northernmost portions of Swat is through mountain passes, but earlier this week the Pakistani military attacked and killed several civilians trying to leave that way, making the voyage far too dangerous to be attempted.

The Pakistani raid on the Swat Valley has displaced roughly 1.5 million civilians, many of whom are living in poorly supplied government run camps. Yet while the government struggles to cope with the civilians who have managed to escape its onslaught, they appear to be content to leave an enormous number of trapped civilians to fend for themselves, even as they plan for more such offens

[bigron]

Saturday, May 23, 2009
15:27 Mecca time, 12:27 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/2009523111020448920.html

   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Pakistani troops storm Swat town 
 


 
The Pakistani army offensive against Taliban fighters in the country's northwest has entered a new phase after troops entered the main town in Swat valley and engaged the armed fighters in fierce street battles.

Major General Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said on Saturday that the troops have killed at least 17 Taliban fighters in Mingora in the latest fighting.

"Street fights have begun," Abbas said. "We have cleared some of the area in the city."

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Islamabad, said the army has pledged to fight house-to-house and street-to-street in Mingora.

"What the army has said to us is that Mullah Fazlullah, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, is said to be in that town. So this could well be a decisive phase in the battle for the Swat valley," he said.

"The army has said they are expecting heavy fighting because those Taliban fighters know the area very well ... and they have been preparing for awhile now."

Civilian exodus

The offensive in Swat and surrounding areas in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) has triggered an exodus of nearly two million refugees from the region.

While some of those displaced have taken refuge in government camps, a majority of them have taken shelter with friends and relatives.

About 15,000 Pakistani troops are fighting 4,000 well-armed Taliban in Swat.

The military said it had inflicted heavy losses on the Taliban.

"They believe they will be taking the city [of Mingora] in the next 34 to 48 hours," said Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, who travelled to the war zone, escorted by the Pakistani military.

"The army says it has secured large areas and that it has hit the militant movement very strongly, but the fact that we are still escorted by helicopter gunships ... indicates that there is still a fear of ongoing action," he reported.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

Sunday, May 24, 2009
14:20 Mecca time, 11:20 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/20095241042352364.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 

 
Pakistan troops 'make Swat gains' 


   
Scenes from the conflict zone


Pakistani security forces have seized several key areas in the main town of the Swat valley, as part of a continuing operation against Taliban fighters in the country's northwest, the military has said.

Military officials on Sunday said troops were in control of several main intersections and three main squares in Mingora, the AFP news agency reported.

Pakistani troops entered the town a day earlier, engaging in street battles with the Taliban and killing at least 17 fighters, Major-General Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said.

"We have blocked all the entries and exits [in Mingora]," Abbas told Al Jazeera.

"Now the forces that were already present inside have linked up with the outside forces, and with this increased ratio they are moving from one end to the other.

"It will take more time."

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said that the urban battles being fought by the Pakistani infantry marked a new phase in the conflict in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

'Key phase'

"The army is telling us that street fighting will be one of the key phases of this battle for Mingora; so far they have used heavy artillery and air power to pound Taliban targets," he said.

 
"But the Taliban know this area very well and it is likely they will have been preparing for this moment for some time. It is likely they will have built tunnels and will know exactly what rooftops to get on."

Mingora, the administrative and business hub of Swat in the NWFP province has been under the effective control of Taliban fighters for weeks.

There are reports that Mullah Fazlullah, one of the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, is in the town.

Many of the 300,000 people who live in Mingora are believed to have fled since the military began its offensive in Swat, Lower Dir and Buner districts of the NWFP several weeks ago.

Abbas told Al Jazeera the troops are slowly advancing through Mingora to avoid casualties among any civilians in the town.

"We have to go deliberately, avoiding the civilian casualties, taking every house - first clearing it, then moving forward. The uncertainty is there because [the Taliban] can come up from any house, any rooftop."

Military commanders have stressed that they are under orders to avoid collateral damage and avoid using heavy weaponry in built-up areas.

'Desperate' conditions

But Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, who travelled to the war zone with the Pakistani military, said on Sunday that conditions for residents still in Mingora are getting "desperate".

"The situation in Mingora is compounded by the fact that by the army's own action in taking the town, at the same time the civilians are being cut off," he said.

Many of the displaced are staying in the homes of friends, families or complete strangers, putting a massive strain on people who were previously untouched by the conflict, he said.

The offensive in Swat and surrounding areas in the NWFP has triggered an exodus of nearly two million refugees from the region.

Meanwhile, Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister, has played down the suggestion of Asif Ali Zardari, the country's president, that the military offensive could be extended to the semi-autonomous South Waziristan region.

"It is not like this," Gilani said in response to a reporter's question about a possible new front. "We are not foolish to do it everywhere."
 
 


 
 

[Satyagraha]

Karachi tense as citizens brace for strike

By Imran Ayub
Monday, 25 May, 2009 | 04:10 AM PST | 

KARACHI: A state of fear and uncertainty gripped the city on Sunday evening, as citizens of Karachi, who have suffered two days of strikes in two weeks, braced themselves for yet another strike call for Monday.

This strike has been called by the Arisar faction of the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM) against the expected influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Malakand division to Sindh. Another faction of the JSQM had earlier called a strike on May 23 on the same issue.

Though traffic is usually thin on Sundays, almost all public transport and other vehicles remained off the roads by the evening, after a few incidents of arson and firing were reported in different parts of the city. The majority of fuel stations were closed in the second half of the day, and the few which remained open were seen catering to long queues of vehicles.

Announcements from different trade bodies and educational institutions regarding the suspension of activities on Monday served to influence citizens’ opinions regarding the severity of the strike. The University of Karachi announced the postponement of all examinations of degree classes, which was followed by a decision from the Board of Secondary Education of Karachi to adopt the same line over the scheduled practical examinations.

The transporters, who were already raising a hue and cry over losses incurred by them during recent violent incidents, have decided not to operate their buses on Monday even if the government agrees to provide them with protection and security.

‘We have lost nearly 50 vehicles in two weeks,’ said a member of the executive body of the Karachi Transport Ittehad, which represents the private sector’s stakeholders in public transport. ‘We have nothing to do with tomorrow’s (Monday’s) strike, and neither do we support the issue of that strike. But we have decided to stay away from regular business, as it is becoming risky with each passing day.’

He went on to say that the transporters could extend their protest and announce an indefinite strike if they failed to get a positive response from the government for compensation of losses.

Pillion-riding ban

Amid such warnings from transporters, the government decided to continue to enforce its ban on pillion-riding, which is likely to add to people’s suffering. In a statement issued by the provincial home department, the ban was extended in Karachi and Hyderabad.

The ban on pillion-riding has been criticised by citizens, particularly members of the working class, as they say it makes it difficult for them to travel around the city.’ The home department, government of Sindh has under sub-section of Section 144 CrPC prohibited pillion-riding on motorcycle/scooter with effect from May 24, 2009 till further orders,’ said the brief statement.

Transporters and traders believe it was the support of the MQM, a major partner in the coalition government, coupled with the scattered incidents of violence which actually led to the shut-down on May 23, and the same combination could yield similar results on Monday.

Such observations were reinforced by a recent MQM statement, which said: ‘We have been very loud and clear on the issue of IDPs and suggest that these people should be settled in the NWFP or Punjab, but it has been observed that Sindh is being stormed. We completely support the JSQM on such issue.’

The statement quoted Anis Advocate, a London-based member of the MQM’s coordination committee.

 

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/metropolitan/13+karachi+tense+as+citizens+brace+for+strike-za-07
 

[Satyagraha]

Strike call is not justified, says Sindh CM

By Our Staff Reporter
Monday, 25 May, 2009 | 06:42 AM PST |

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/metropolitan/13+strike+call+is+not+justified+says+cm-za-14

The battle for hearts and minds KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah has said there is ‘no justification’ for Monday’s strike call given by Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz against the influx of internally displaced people into Sindh, while provincial Home Minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza has given shoot-at-sight orders to law-enforcement personnel to keep miscreants in check.

The Arisar faction of the JSQM gave the call for strike after a similar strike observed on Saturday on call by another action of the JSQM. The MQM coordination committee has expressed support for the JSQM.

Speaking at a crowded press conference, Sindh CM Shah termed the strike an extreme step, which would not only disrupt the progress of the province, but would also make people suffer, particularly daily wage-earners.

The chief minister said the government had taken steps to maintain peace and protect the life and property of the people by mobilising law- enforcement agencies, including the Rangers, who would be patrolling the city.

He requested all those who had decided to observe the strike on Monday to ensure people’s safety and said that this was the responsibility not only of the government and its coalition partners, but also of those who had given the strike call.

He regretted that ‘our coalition partners, who are also in favour of the registration of the IDPs and for keeping them in camps, are supporting those who are giving strike calls’.

Speaking at the same press conference, Sindh Home Minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza announced that law-enforcement agencies had been authorised to shoot at sight miscreants who might indulge in acts of arson, damaging private or public property or endangering lives of citizens.

‘Those who want to disturb city’s peace and take the law into their own hands must let their family members know before taking to the streets that their bodies might return home,’ he warned.

Karachi tense

Karachi, meanwhile, was tense on Sunday evening with people having all types of fears and apprehensions.

Most public transport went off the road by the evening, after a few incidents of arson and firing in different parts of the city.

Various trade bodies, educational institutions and the Karachi Transporters Ittehad announced suspension of their activities, with the KTI pointing out that it did not support the strike call, but would keep vehicles off the road because of the risk of arson.

After the transporters’ announcement, the government decided to keep in force its ban on pillion-riding, which is likely to add to people’s suffering.

[Satyagraha]

Shoot-at-sight order issued: Dr Zulfiqar Mirza

By Our Staff Reporter
Monday, 25 May, 2009

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/13+shoot-at-sight+order+issued+zulfiqar+mirza-za-04

Silhouettes and Sunsets KARACHI: Sindh Home Minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza has said that the law-enforcement agencies have been authorised to shoot at sight miscreants found indulging in arson, damaging private or public property or endangering the lives of citizens.

He said no one could be allowed to take the law into his own hands and the law would take its course without taking into consideration the affiliation of the people arrested while disturbing the peace in the province, including Karachi.

The home minister, who was present with the chief minister during his press conference on Sunday afternoon at the Chief Minister’s House, in reply to a question said that neither the Sindh government nor the federal government was so weak that a few ‘miscreants’ could hijack their policy.

‘Those who want to disturb the peace in the city and take the law into their own hands must let their family members know before taking to the streets that their bodies might return home,’ he warned, pointing out that instructions had already been given to the police and Rangers that miscreants should be dealt with sternly, including opening fire on them.

Later, talking to a group of media-men, he said that so far, 8,500 internally displaced persons (IDPs) had arrived in the province through Kashmore, whose borders meet with D.I. Khan’s, while about 200 had entered from the Ghotki route bordering Punjab.

In reply to a question, he said he was keeping a tab on the list of those arrested for disturbing the peace, indulging in arson and damaging private and public property in connection with Saturday’s strike, and those who were being arrested while taking the law into their own hands with regard to Monday’s strike call.

He said that if any police official released any suspect under influence or political pressure, the minister would personally see to it that the official was put behind bars.

Answering another question, he explained the background of extending the ban on pillion-riding in Karachi and Hyderabad for another month, saying that in most arson and firing incidents motorcyclists with pillion-riders were involved.