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

[bigron]

October 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/world/asia/02pstan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Pakistan to Target Taliban ‘Epicenter’


By ISMAIL KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — After fighting peripheral wars against militants for the last several years, the military is poised to open a campaign in coming days against the Taliban’s main stronghold in Pakistan’s tribal areas, South Waziristan, according to senior military and security officials.

For three months, the military has been drawing up plans, holding in-depth deliberations and studying past operations in the area, where previous campaigns ended in failure and resulted in some of the military’s highest levels of casualties.

Even so, military officials said they expected stiff resistance once again in an area that one senior military official called the “epicenter” of the Taliban in Pakistan. It has also become a key base for Al Qaeda. “This is where we will be fighting the toughest of all battles,” the official said.

He and other officials did not want to be identified while discussing confidential preparations for the campaign. But they said the military now seemed ready to try to re-enter the area, having decided it could wait no longer. “If we don’t take the battle to them, they will bring the battle to us,” the official said.

The past two operations in South Waziristan ended up with the military bogged down and suing for peace, resulting in a series of accords that ultimately strengthened the hand of the militants.

An operation in January 2004 led to a peace agreement by that April, followed by another on Feb. 5, 2005, with Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. But with few if any enforcement mechanisms, the accords were never sturdy and allowed the militants to regroup and tighten their hold on the region.

In late January 2008, the military began another operation, called Zalzala, or Earthquake, with the declared goal of dislodging Mr. Mehsud. The operation did not cause even a tremor, and only 12 days later, authorities were struggling to revive the peace accord.

With the failure of the operation went any pretense of state authority in Waziristan, as the government in effect ceded control to emboldened militants.

Military officials hope that things will be different this time, having now taken on militants’ strongholds, each in their turn, in recent years in other areas: first in Bajaur, then in Mohmand and, most recently, in the Swat Valley. Perhaps most critical was the elimination of Mr. Mehsud, whose death in an American drone strike in August helped fracture the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-i-Taliban. “The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan as a monolithic organization remains no more,” a security official said.

Since June, Waziristan has been under an economic blockade, with thousands of army soldiers sitting on the fringes of the area, waiting for orders from the military high command to move in.

Some argue that the military should have mounted an operation immediately after Mr. Mehsud’s death. “As far as we are concerned, the operation should have been launched three months ago,” said a senior government official. “Baitullah is dead and his group seems to be in some form of disarray. And this provides the best opportunity to go after them.”

But a senior military official said that, in addition to needing to wait for the forces and resources to be available, the military wanted to see what would be the repercussions of Mr. Mehsud’s death.

“We thought that Baitullah’s death would unravel the Mehsud militant group and galvanize the tribe to stand up to the people they have suffered from,” the official said. “It didn’t happen.”

Now there is a sense within the military establishment that the situation in South Waziristan cannot be allowed to be perpetuated. The blockade is nearly three months old, and the military, which has been conducting limited airstrikes, is running out of targets.

The Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, described Waziristan as an intelligence black hole. “We have to move in,” he said recently.

A large number of civilians have already relocated to Dera Ismail Khan and Tank, both in North-West Frontier Province, giving the army a relatively free hand to mount an operation.

But all agree that the battle ahead is formidable. Questions remain whether the army will be able to hold territory and sustain operations in a tough and treacherous terrain, where snows arrive in late November.

The Mehsud militants not only have the advantage of familiarity with the area, but their numbers — estimated at 6,000 to 7,000 — have been thickened by foreign elements, in particular Uzbeks, who have a reputation as ferocious fighters.

Then there is the Haqqani network, which uses the area as a base for its operations in Afghanistan, and there is Al Qaeda, which depends heavily on the Mehsud fighting force. “They will defend their power base and fight till the very last,” one officer said.

[bigron]

US RECRUITING RETIRED PAKISTANI MILITARY OFFICERS

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=138283.0

[Satyagraha]

Newly named PTT chief Hakimullah dead: US  
Updated at: 0628 PST,  Saturday, October 03, 2009
http://www.geo.tv/



WASHINGTON: U.S. intelligence agencies believe the newly named leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, Hakimullah Mehsud, might have been killed in a firefight with a rival faction weeks ago, officials said on Friday.

Militants tapped Hakimullah to replace the group's previous leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by a missile fired from a CIA-piloted drone aircraft in his South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border on Aug. 5.
 
 

[Satyagraha]

Presidents’ visits abroad
Aisha Mandi Bahauddin
http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=le&nid=905

It puts one to wonder whether President Zardari’s so frequent tours abroad fall within the constitutional ambit. It seems the Prime Minister and his cabinet is often unaware about President’s another foreign trip and new agreements up his sleeve.

How much his foreign trips have cost the poor’s tax-money and its result thereof except horrendous failures economically, bijli, pani, roti, atta, cheeni, hundreds of times more corruption, enslaving nation to drones, NATO, UK, USA; should be discussed in parliament.

I also wonder why prime minister does not resign under the most extra constitutional acting president or brings the issue to parliament for his impeachment? Why does not SCP-CJP take suo moto notice against extra constitutional steps of the president, what are we waiting for? The nation has gone down the drain due to the complacence of concerned and poor ruined.

Are we waiting signal from UK or USA? 

[bigron]

Video: Baluchistan warns US

AljaeeraEnglish

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58542&hd=&size=1&l=e

October 3, 2009
Watch :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3XGojHmxHc&feature=player_embedded


The Pakistani province of Baluchistan on the border with Afghanistan, has re-emerged as a Taliban sanctuary, according to the US military.

That has made it a potential target for Nato forces in the region.

But, in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Nawab Aslam Raisani, Baluchistan's chief minister has warned that any US attacks on his soil could seriously backfire.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder reports from the border town of Quetta in Pakistan.



 

[bigron]

Monday, October 05, 2009
14:05 Mecca time, 11:05 GMT
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/10/200910563927833874.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA  
 
Blast hits UN office in Pakistan 
 

No claim of responsibility for the attack was immediately made [AFP]


 
A suicide bombing has taken place inside the UN's World Food Programme offices in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, killing at least four people.

One Iraqi and three Pakistani women working for the World Food Programme (WFP) died and several others were injured in the explosion on Monday.

No claim of responsibility for the attack was immediately made.

"I was on the upper floor when there was the sound of a huge explosion downstairs. I found many of my colleagues lying on the floor full of blood," a WFP employee who declined to be named, said.

The UN said that it had closed its offices in Pakistan since the attack, although no specific threat had been received.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "This building is heavily fortified. On the outside it is completely bunkered with bomb proof walls around it.

"According to the reports we are getting there were over 50 people inside the building.

"A bomb or explosive device is said to have gone off inside the building. We can see that the front door has been taken out, the windows are shattered. But there appears to be no structural damage.

"Some smoke is still billowing out [of the building]. The explosive itself does not seem to have been a powerful one.

"We were told that many of the wounded were immediately rushed off in private vehicles, some belonging to the WFP itself. Then ambulances arrived."

Officials said that the assailant, who was in his twenties, was dressed as a paramilitary officer and had asked a guard to use the building's bathroom, before detonating his explosives in the lobby.

Visitors to UN buildings in Islamabad are usually frisked.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

New Pakistani Taliban Chief Vows Strike at U.S.

Monday , October 05, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,560060,00.html

SARAROGHA, Pakistan —

The Pakistani Taliban's new leader met with reporters in the country's tribal areas for the first time since winning control of the militants and vowed to retaliate against the U.S. and Pakistan for drone attacks along the Afghan border.

The appearance by Hakimullah Mehsud ended any speculation that he was killed in a leadership battle within the militant group sparked by the August slaying of his predecessor Baitullah Mehsud in a missile strike.

Mehsud, flanked by other Taliban commanders in a show of unity, spoke to a small group of reporters Sunday on condition the interview only be published Monday.

Mehsud said his group would avenge the killing of Baitullah Mehsud and strike back at Pakistan and the U.S. for the increasing number of drone attacks in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Unmanned drones have carried out more than 70 missile strikes in northwestern Pakistan over the last year in a covert program, killing several top militant commanders along with sympathizers and civilians. The Pakistani government publicly protests the attacks but is widely believed to sanction them and provide intelligence for at least some.

American officials have said they are considering a strategy of intensified drone attacks combined with the deployment of special operations forces against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets on the Pakistani side of the border — part of an alternative to sending more troops to Afghanistan in what is an increasingly unpopular war.

As part of the offensive against the Taliban leadership, Mehsud's brother, Kalimullah, was killed last month. Analysts say the group is struggling to regroup from the attacks on its leaders. Pakistani officials had speculated that Hakimullah had been killed in a recent shootout.

Mehsud accused Pakistan of doing the bidding of the West and pledged to bring Islamic rule to the country.

[bigron]

Jirga threatens to support Afghan Taliban if drone attacks continue

By Malik Mumtaz Khan

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m58581&hd=&size=1&l=e

The News, October 05, 2009

MIRAMSHAH: A tribal Jirga of North Waziristan on Sunday threatened to support the Afghanistan-based anti-US groups, including the Taliban, if the US drone attacks were not stopped.

Addressing a grand Jirga here, the tribal elders, including Malik Jalal Manzarkhel, Malik Inayat Khan Dawar, Malik Muhammad Nawaz Muhammadkhel and Malik Faridullah, unanimously decided the Jirga would support the Afghanistan-based Taliban if the US did not stop killing "innocent people" in North Waziristan through drone attacks.

The elders said they would send volunteers and suicide bombers to Afghanistan to intensify the attacks on the US troops if the Americans did not change their policy of using drones to target the tribal people.

Lashing out at the Pakistani authorities, they alleged the drones were flying all the time in North Waziristan at the behest and with the cooperation of the government. They alleged the drone attacks, meant to dismantle the network of Al-Qaeda and Taliban, were killing innocent people and provoking them to support the militants.

They said the tribal people were peaceful and patriotic Pakistanis and it was the US who was involved in fanning terrorism in the agency. Regarding the media’s role, they alleged that a handful of journalists had been bribed by the Jewish lobby for writing against the so-called terrorism in the agency.






 

[bigron]

Pakistan Resists US Presence, Influence

Nation Poised to Reject Billions in US Aid

Posted By Jason Ditz On October 5, 2009 @ 6:47 pm

Growing opposition to the US attempts to expand its influence in Pakistan is taking shape in the form of increasing resistance to plans by Pakistan’s military and increasingly its civilian government as well.


America's fortress-like Islamabad embassy

Nowhere has American power been more visible than the massive expansion of the embassy in Islamabad, sparking protests against the site that will some day hold Ambassador Anne Patterson, a contentious figure in her own right who has been threatening US military attacks against the city of Quetta if Pakistan doesn’t give in to demands to launch action of its own.

Then last week the US Congress pressed through with overwhelming support a bill to triple aid to Pakistan as part of a “strategic partnership.” The bill was enthusiastically supported by President Obama and was described as expanding America’s commitment to the nation over the next decade.

Less enamored with the bill was Pakistan’s government and particularly its military, which sees assorted requirements under the bill as an attempt to exert growing control over the domestic affairs of the nation. The bill gives the US power to monitor Pakistan’s military and court system, leading to concerns that it is a threat to the nation’s sovereignty.

“This is less an assistance programme than a treaty of surrender,” MP Ayaz Amir wrote in an editorial piece circulating around the Pakistani press, insisting “a convicted rapist out on parole would be required to give fewer assurances of good conduct.”

While there seemed to be little discussion of the bill beforehand, Prime Minister Raza Gilani and military chief Gen. Parvez Kayani met in recent days to discuss the ramifications, and Foreign Minister Qureshi, currently visiting the US, has been ordered not to publicly comment on the bill. Though the US scaled back the demands it linked to the bill and Pakistan is short on funds, it seems the momentum is in favor of the Pakistani government rejecting the offer of aid.

Related Stories
•October 5, 2009 -- Pakistan Poised to Reject US Aid
•October 4, 2009 -- Billions in US Aid Never Reach Pakistan’s Military
•October 1, 2009 -- Pakistan Warns US Against Drone Attacks

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/05/pakistan-resists-expanded-us-influence/

[bigron]

The Many Deaths of Hakimullah Mehsud

Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan Leader Still Not Dead, Despite Reports

Posted By Jason Ditz On October 5, 2009 @ 5:09 pm

They say cats have nine lives. It’s not clear how many Tehreek-e Taliban (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud has, but it’s at the very least more than four.


Hakimullah Mehsud
Hoping to stem reports of his death, Hakimullah met at an undisclosed location with members of the press, and a video clip showing the healthy-looking militant was broadcast around the nation.

Over the weekend US officials declared of the reclusive TTP leader “we’re pretty clear that we think he’s dead.” If that sounds familiar you’re not alone, Hakimullah was also declared killed in early September, and twice in August.

The first of Hakimullah’s many deaths occurred in early August, when he and fellow TTP commander Wali Rehnman reportedly killed one another. Rehman came forward almost immediately and insisted the fight never happened, Hakimullah did the same days later.

The persistent rumors of Hakimullah’s death seemed to center around a conspiracy theory involving his somewhat similar looking brother Kalimullah, who supposedly had been making public appearances in Hakimullah’s place. Kalimullah was reportedly killed last week in a US drone attack.

Related Stories
•October 5, 2009 -- Pakistan Resists US Presence, Influence
•October 5, 2009 -- Pakistan Poised to Reject US Aid
•October 4, 2009 -- Billions in US Aid Never Reach Pakistan’s Military

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/10/05/the-many-deaths-of-hakimullah-mehsud/

[bigron]

South Asia
Oct 7, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ07Df01.html 
 
Pakistan goes for militants' jugular

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari can be well pleased with his recent visit to New York, securing US$1.5 billion annually for five years in non-military aid and gaining unprecedented political support from over two dozen heads of states under the Friends of Democratic Pakistan initiative.

Now it is the turn of the military to deliver following its successful campaign this year in the Swat Valley in North-West Frontier Province: it is poised for a major operation in the heart of Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda territory, the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.

The need for this operation in the two Waziristans, over which the Pakistani armed forces had previously expressed grave concerns, was agreed on in a meeting in New York last week between the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US security officials and Zardari, who is also the supreme commander of the armed forces.

The director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has been in the US to coordinate the operation with the US. The aim, simply, is to conclusively defeat al-Qaeda at its global headquarters in the Waziristans.

Adding urgency to task was the brazen attack on Monday by a suicide bomber dressed as a member of the paramilitary Frontiers Corps on the United Nations' World Food Program's headquarters in the capital Islamabad, killing at least five aid workers.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Tuesday that the Taliban carried out the attack to avenge the August 5 killing in a US Predator drone missile attack in South Waziristan of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. "We should expect a few more [attacks]," he said.

Asia Times Online has learned that the operation in the Waziristans will be actively supported with technical and intelligence support from the CIA for Pakistani ground troops as well as the air force.

Pakistan is confident that the chances of success are higher than ever, even though the military will be venturing into dangerous territory and that previous operations in other tribal areas have proved highly divisive and unpopular across much of the country.

Malik told Asia Times Online recently in New York that the time was now ripe as it is believed all of the top al-Qaeda commanders of the South Asian region, in addition to commanders who have fled Iraq, are now based in the Waziristans.

The Pakistani political establishment is also upbeat in that there is a new positive mood in the country; even the stock exchange has surged to its highest levels in one-and-a-half-years. But most importantly, the tone in the military establishment has changed.

Immediately after the president's return to Pakistan, armed forces spokesman Major General Athar Abbas, who had earlier rejected the idea of an operation in the Waziristans, speaking from the garrison city of Rawalpindi, confirmed that the tribal areas would be attacked.

"It [the operation] is only a matter of time, which of course, the military will not disclose or give any hint about."

Abbas did hint hint, though. He said the weather could be one of the many factors that planners were taking into account - the winter snows are well set in by late November.

"The rudderless leadership of the terrorists provides an ideal opportunity to launch operations and inflict a severe blow to the terrorists," Abbas said, presumably referring to the killing of Baitullah Mehsud.

The army has mounted several operations in the two Waziristans, but they have all resulted in heavy casualties. As a result, the military has tended to sign peace deals, most of them on the militants' terms and conditions. This gave a morale boost to the militants, and after each operation their numbers increased, and numbers which were pumped into Afghanistan to aid the insurgency there.

This time, the stage is better set for the military. With the help of the CIA, many of al-Qaeda's and the militants' leaders have been eliminated, with drone attacks being particularly effective.

The military is also buoyed by its operation in Swat. In late April, the military began a massive offensive and by early June declared that most of Swat had been freed from the Taliban and that Mingora, the main town of Swat, was in complete government control. In the process, though, millions of people were displaced, causing a major humanitarian crisis. Ironically, the attack in Islamabad on Monday targeted the very United Nations organization that had helped with this tragedy.

The Swat operation also saw the military fully commit to its task - indeed, some say it displayed a level of ruthlessness not seen since its crackdown on Bengali separatists in the former East Pakistan, a struggle that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

This was so much so that several Western media outlets, including the British Broadcasting Corporation, have released videos of torture allegedly committed by the armed forced against the Taliban, including extra-judicial killings.

In addition to all this, however, is the key part played by the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which resolved that the best way to sap the strength of al-Qaeda and the militants lay in cutting their financial arteries.

This is not a novel approach to root out militancy, but one that has not successfully been implemented by Pakistan.

Soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted financial institutions and charities that supported al-Qaeda, with some success.

However, US institutions were unable to track the Taliban's financial arteries as these are mostly primitive, based on non-banking and non-traditional financial sources and tribal connections. Asia Times Online has documented how difficult it is to disrupt this flow of money. (See How the Taliban keep their coffers full Asia Times Online, June 10.)

Interior Minister Malik recognized the problem, and tackled it head-on, first with Baitullah's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP - Taliban Movement of Pakistan).

In an interview in New York, Malik confidently claimed that over 80% of the financial arteries of the TTP and al-Qaeda's funds coming from the Middle East had been blocked.

"The TTP's approach was unique in all aspects and it could have been very hard to trace. First, the TTP gathered information from Mehsud tribal people living in the Middle East. They were mostly skilled and unskilled labors who sent money to their families through hundi [non-banking money transfers]. The TTP contacted these labors, individually, and warned them that a certain percentage of the money they sent to their families should be remitted to the TTP," Malik said.

"We carefully studied the whole mechanism before we moved for a clampdown. The first thread of the strategy was the scanning and subsequent clampdown on illegal money transfers through hundi businesses. We studied all the business deals of the money exchange companies who were mostly involved in such transfers.

"Previously, Pakistan received US$3 billion to $4 billion [in remittances] through banking channels. After our operations on the money exchange companies, you will see that our [foreign exchange] reserves have soared [from $7 billion to $8 billion] to $14 billion to $15 billion as we have not left any choice to the remitters except to send their money through [regular] banking channels," Malik said, implying that the money the country now received from remittances had doubled.

"However, in this broader operation, we traced a triangular syndicate based in Pakistan comprising al-Qaeda, the TTP and the jihadi organizations, like the Laskhar-e-Jhangvi. Sometimes they got financial support from Middle Eastern philanthropists. Our intelligence agencies tracked the whole mechanism of how the money traveled from one hand to the other, so, for instance, money aimed for al-Qaeda benefited the whole syndicate. This syndicate had so strongly knitted its financial arteries together that they [militants] were able to hire a fighter for $500 per month," Malik said.

"After 9/11, security institutions tried to break down financial arteries. They spotted several institutions and successfully blocked their financial support. However, in the past few years, the dynamics of the money supply to those terror networks changed. They split themselves into segments and they developed a human chain network which could pass on cash from one hand to the other.

"In the past year, the situation became more complicated as the financial arteries feeding the insurgencies to this region and to Iraq were merged in our region," Malik said, adding that it happened because after the US military operation in Iraq against al-Qaeda, all top al-Qaeda operators relocated in North Waziristan and South Waziristan.

Having begun the process of strangling the financial lifeblood of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Islamabad now feels it is in a position to go for the jugular with an all-out military offensive. In Pakistan's eyes, this battle will be the start of the endgame. The militants might view it differently, as just the beginning of a real war.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

 
 
 

[bigron]

Published on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by The New York Times

US Push to Expand in Pakistan Meets Resistance

by Jane Perlez

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Steps by the United States to vastly expand its aid to Pakistan, as well as the footprint of its embassy and private security contractors here, are aggravating an already volatile anti-American mood as Washington pushes for greater action by the government against the Taliban.


Supporters of the Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami rallied in August against plans to expand the American embassy in Islamabad. (B. K. Bangash/Associated Press)

An aid package of $1.5 billion a year for the next five years passed by Congress last week asks Pakistan to cease supporting terrorist groups on its soil and to ensure that the military does not interfere with civilian politics. President Asif Ali Zardari, whose association with the United States has added to his unpopularity, agreed to the stipulations in the aid package.

But many here, especially in the powerful army, object to the conditions as interference in Pakistan's internal affairs, and they are interpreting the larger American footprint in more sinister ways.

American officials say the embassy and its security presence must expand in order to monitor how the new money is spent. They also have real security concerns, which were underscored Monday when a suicide bomber, dressed in the uniform of a Pakistani security force, killed five people at a United Nations office in the heart of Islamabad, the capital.

The United States Embassy has publicized plans for a vast new building in Islamabad for about 1,000 people, with security for some diplomats provided through a Washington-based private contracting company, DynCorp.

The embassy setup, with American demands for importing more armored vehicles, is a significant expansion over the last 15 years. It comes at a time of intense discussion in Washington over whether to widen American operations and aid to Pakistan - a base for Al Qaeda - as an alternative to deeper American involvement in Afghanistan with the addition of more forces.

The fierce opposition here is revealing deep strains in the alliance. Even at its current levels, the American presence was fueling a sense of occupation among Pakistani politicians and security officials, said several Pakistani officials, who did not want to be named for fear of antagonizing the United States. The United States was now seen as behaving in Pakistan much as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said.

In particular, the Pakistani military and the intelligence agencies are concerned that DynCorp is being used by Washington to develop a parallel network of security and intelligence personnel within Pakistan, officials and politicians close to the army said.

The concerns are serious enough that last month a local company hired by DynCorp to provide Pakistani men to be trained as security guards for American diplomats was raided by the Islamabad police. The owner of the company, the Inter-Risk Security Company, Capt. Syed Ali Ja Zaidi, was later arrested.

The action against Inter-Risk, apparently intended to cripple the DynCorp program, was taken on orders from the senior levels of the Pakistani government, said an official familiar with the raid, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The entire workings of DynCorp within Pakistan are now under review by the Pakistani government, said a senior government official directly involved with the Americans, who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity.

The tensions are erupting as the United States is pressing Pakistan to take on not only those Taliban groups that have threatened the government, but also the Taliban leadership that uses Pakistan as a base to organize and conduct their insurgency against American forces in Afghanistan.

In a public statement, the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, suggested last week that Pakistan should eliminate the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, a onetime ally of the Pakistanis who Washington says is now based in Baluchistan, a province on the Afghanistan border. If Pakistan did not get rid of Mullah Omar, the United States would, she suggested.

Reinforcing the ambassador, the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, said Sunday that the United States regarded tackling Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan as "the next step" in the conflict in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, in an unusually stern reaction last week, said that missile attacks by American drones in Baluchistan, as implied by the Americans, "would not be allowed."

The Pakistanis also complain that they are not being sufficiently consulted over the pending White House decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The head of Pakistan's chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, met with senior officials at the Central Intelligence Agency last week in Washington, where he argued against sending more troops to Afghanistan, a Pakistani official familiar with the visit said.

The Pakistani Army, riding high after its campaign to wrench back control of the Swat Valley from the Taliban, remains nervous about Washington's intentions and the push against the new aid is reflective of that anxiety, Pakistani officials said.

Though the Zardari government is trumpeting the new aid as a triumph, officials say the language in the legislation ignores long-held prerogatives about Pakistani sovereignty, making the $1.5 billion a tough sell.

"Now everyone has a handle they can use to rip into the Zardari government," said a senior Pakistani official involved in the American-Pakistani dialogue but who declined to be named because he did not want to inflame the discussion.

The expanding American security presence has become another club. DynCorp has attracted particular scrutiny after the Pakistani news media reported that Blackwater, the contractor that has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, was also in Pakistan.

Recently, there have been a series of complaints by Islamabad residents who said they had been "roughed up" by hefty, plainclothes American men bearing weapons, presumably from DynCorp, one of the senior Pakistani officials involved with the Americans said.

Pakistan's Foreign Office had sent two formal diplomatic complaints in the past few weeks to the American Embassy about such episodes, the official said.

The embassy had received complaints, and confirmed two instances, an embassy official said, but the embassy denied receiving any formal protests from the Foreign Office. It also declined to comment about the presence of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, in Pakistan.

American officials have said that Blackwater employees worked at a remote base in Shamsi, in Baluchistan, where they loaded missiles and bombs onto drones used to strike Taliban and Qaeda militants.

The operation of the drones at Shamsi had been shifted by the Americans to Afghanistan this year, a senior Pakistani military official said.

Several Blackwater employees also worked in the North-West Frontier Province supervising the construction of a training center for Pakistan's Frontier Corps, a Pakistani official from the region said.

There was considerable unease about the American diplomatic presence in Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, one of the senior government officials said. Politicians were asking why the United States needed a consulate in Peshawar, which borders the tribal areas, when that office did not issue visas, he said.

Another question, he said, was why did the consulate plan to buy the biggest, and most modern building in the city, the Pearl Continental hotel - which was bombed in a terrorist attack this year - as its new headquarters.

As Parliament prepared to discuss the American aid package Wednesday, the tone of the debate was expected to be scathing. On a television talk show, Senator Tariq Aziz, a member of the opposition party, called the legislation "the charter for new colonization."

"People think this government has sold us to the Americans again for their own selfish interests," said Jahangir Tareen, a former cabinet minister and a member of Parliament, in an interview. "Some people think the United States is out to get Pakistan, to defang Pakistan, to destroy the army as it exists so it can't fight India and to break down the ISI's ability to influence events in India and Afghanistan. Everyone is saying about the Americans, ‘Told you so.' "

© 2009 The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/06-2

[bigron]

Pakistan seeks long U.S. commitment


Story Highlights:

U.S. debates whether to send more troops to Afghanistan or scale back mission

Congress just passed an aid package for Pakistan worth $1.5 B a year for five years

Clinton, Gates: U.S. in Afghanistan for long haul

By Elise Labott
CNN Washington Bureau 10/7/09


Pakistani For. Min. Shah Mehmood Qureshi and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meet in Washington.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi met with U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton and urged the United States to articulate a long-term vision for the region, amid debate over U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

"The people of the region have to be assured that the United States has a long-term vision," Qureshi told reporters after his meeting on Tuesday in Washington. "Not just for Afghanistan and Pakistan but the entire region."

Qureshi wouldn't comment on the debate in Washington about whether the U.S. should send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan or scale back the mission, with Qureshi calling it a judgment for "military commanders on the field."

He said that Pakistan has made great strides in combating terrorism on its soil, but still needed U.S. support, and he urged Washington not to abandon the region as it did after helping Afghan fighters drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.

"You have to keep in mind history," he said. "The inconsistency of the past has to be kept in mind and we have to build on learning from the mistakes of the past."

When asked how long he thought the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan, Qureshi said "until the job is done. A peaceful, stable Afghanistan. A peaceful, stable region."

Secretary Clinton said the U.S. and Pakistan enjoyed a "broad strategic partnership" which is "critically important for the security and prosperity of both of our nations."

"This is a commitment that we feel very strongly about and which we are evaluating to determine the best way forward to achieve the results and get the outcomes that we both share," Clinton told reporters.

Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a rare joint interview, said Monday that the United States is committed to a regional strategy to build long-standing relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We're not leaving Afghanistan," Gates told CNN's Christiane Amanpour and former CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno, "There should be no uncertainty in terms of our determination to remain in Afghanistan and to continue to build a relationship of partnership and trust with the Pakistanis. That's long term. That's a strategic objective of the United States."

Congress just passed an aid package for Pakistan worth $1.5 billion a year for the next five years to help combat extremism in the country and foster social and economic development.

All AboutPakistan • World Politics • War and Conflict • Terrorism • Afghanistan • Diplomacy
 

 
 
 
Links referenced within this article

Pakistan
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Pakistan
Afghanistan
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Afghanistan
Pakistan
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Pakistan
World Politics
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/World_Politics
War and Conflict
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/War_and_Conflict
Terrorism
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Terrorism
Afghanistan
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Afghanistan
Diplomacy
http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/Diplomacy

 

 
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/10/06/us.pakistan/index.html 

[bigron]

Obama War Council Focuses on Pakistan's Role

Members of the president's national security team, meeting at the White House on Wednesday, argued that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the U.S., officials said

FOXNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/08/obama-war-council-focuses-al-qaeda/
Thursday, October 08, 2009


President Barack Obama listens during a meeting about the current situation in Pakistan Oct. 7, 2009 in the Situation Room of the White House. Left to right, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Vice President Joe Biden; the President; National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (White House)

 
 WASHINGTON -- Recognizing the U.S. can neither win in Afghanistan nor succeed more broadly against Al Qaeda without Pakistan's cooperation, President Barack Obama's war council is weighing a new role for Pakistan in the 8-year-old struggle in the region.

Obama's national security team marked the war's eighth anniversary on Wednesday with a three-hour session in a secure room in the White House basement. The focus on Pakistan, the suspected hiding place of Usama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists as well as Taliban leaders, could provide a hint into the president's leanings.

Members of the president's national security team argued that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the U.S., officials told The New York Times. It was unclear if everyone in the war council accepted the premise.

Obama and some of his key aides are increasingly pointing to recent successes against Al Qaeda through targeted missile strikes and raids in Pakistan but also in Somalia and elsewhere. Obama said Tuesday that Al Qaeda has "lost operational capacity" as a result.

Vice President Joe Biden has argued against increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying Pakistan poses the greater threat, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both warned that the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain connected. If the Taliban were to regain control of large parts of Afghanistan, the country could serve as a sanctuary for Al Qaeda fighters, the have advisors said.

In Pakistan, though, the government has shown new willingness to battle extremists, with most believed to be operating from the largely ungoverned terrain along the border with Afghanistan. But these operations, as well as the strikes by unmanned U.S. aircraft, continue to stoke controversy throughout the country, causing problems for the already weak U.S.-backed civilian government.

Obama planned sessions Thursday with Biden and Clinton in the Oval Office to continue the intense discussion about the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan. The White House scheduled another, larger war council session -- a fifth of five announced -- for Friday, when the focus may finally shift to just how many additional troops would be needed to execute Obama's vision for a war he inherited but now must execute.

The White House revealed that Obama has in hand -- and has for nearly a week -- the troop request prepared by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is said to include a range of options, from adding as few as 10,000 combat troops to -- McChrystal's strong preference -- as many as 40,000.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama asked for McChrystal's request last week before he flew to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago's bid to host the Olympics and meet with the general on the sidelines. The numbers could become the focus of concentrated White House attention as soon as Friday, Gibbs said.

While Gibbs had said previously that Obama didn't want to see the request until he had determined the strategy, aides said the president decided it had simply become absurd to wait to read it given the high-profile debate.

McChrystal's recommended approach calls for additional troops in Afghanistan for a counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban, build up the central government and deny Al Qaeda a haven. McChrystal, whose plan is somewhat reminiscent of President George W. Bush's Iraq troop surge in 2008, says extra troops -- preferably at the higher end of his option range -- are crucial to turn around a war that will probably be won or lost over the next 12 months.

On roughly the opposite end of the spectrum, an alternative favored most prominently by Biden would keep the American force in Afghanistan around the 68,000 already authorized, including the 21,000 extra troops Obama ordered earlier this year, but increase the use of surgical strikes with unmanned Predator drones and special forces.

Shrinking the number of troops in Afghanistan and turning the effort into a narrow counterterror campaign is not on the table, officials say, and neither is drastically ballooning the footprint.

In weighing whether to follow McChrystal or Biden or land somewhere in between, Obama faces a stern test and difficult politics.

Many lawmakers from his own Democratic Party, aware of rising anti-war sentiment in their ranks and the war protests that have dotted Washington this week, do not want to see additional U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan. According to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, public support for the war has dropped to 40 percent from 44 percent in July.

Republicans, meanwhile, are urging Obama to heed the military commanders' calls soon or risk failure.

With this and Americans' dwindling patience in mind, Obama is engaged in a methodical review of how to overhaul the war.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Satyagraha]

Huge car bomb kills dozens in Peshawar
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/huge-car-bomb-kills-dozens-in-peshawar-1800103.html
By Riaz Khan, Associated Press

Friday, 9 October 2009

A man clambers through the wreckage after today's bombing in Peshawar

Fayaz Aziz / Reuters

A man clambers through the wreckage after today's bombing in Peshawar
A suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle along a road near a well-known market in Pakistan's northwest city of Peshawar today, killing 41 people and underscoring militants' ability to strike in major cities despite US-backed military offensives pressuring their networks.

The attack in the Khyber Bazaar area came as Pakistan's army prepares for another major operation in the al-Qa'ida and Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan tribal region. The militants have threatened bombings if the army doesn't back off, but the US has continued to prod Pakistan to take action against insurgents using its soil to fuel the insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan.

Television footage showed the charred skeleton of a bus flipped on its side in the middle of a major road. Twisted remains of a motorbike lay alongside the bus. A nearby vehicle was in flames.
Related articles

    * Car blast outside India embassy in Kabul

Noor Alam saw the vehicle explode, and suffered wounds on his legs and face.

"I saw a blood soaked leg landing close to me," Alam told The Associated Press at the overwhelmed Lady Reading hospital. "I understood for the first time in my life what a doomsday would look like."

Peshawar Police Chief Liaqat Ali Khan said the attacker was in a car packed with "a huge quantity of explosives and artillery rounds." A minibus apparently carrying passengers nearby was also leveled in the blast.

It came days after a suicide attack killed five at a U.N. office in the capital, Islamabad and two weeks after another explosion killed 11 in a Peshawar commercial area.

It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since a suicide bomber demolished a packed mosque near the northwestern town of Jamrud in March, killing about 50.

Provincial Health Minister Syed Zahir Ali Shah said 41 people were killed and more than 100 wounded Friday.

"Death has to come one day, but we will keep chasing these terrorists, and this attack cannot deter our resolve," Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said as he visited the bloody scene.

Also Friday, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said a suspect had been arrested in Monday's suicide attack at the office of the U.N.'s World Food Program in Islamabad. Malik says the man was alleged to have given the attacker shelter, but gave few details.

Militants in Pakistan also have targeted trucks carrying supplies for US and Nato forces in Afghanistan.

Early Friday, militants ambushed a tanker carrying fuel for the Western troops at a gas station near Peshawar, torching it, said Fazal Rabi, a police official. No injuries or deaths were reported.

The attacks come amid growing tensions between the US and Pakistan over a multibillion-dollar US aid package that is aimed at helping Pakistan's economy and other nonmilitary sectors.

Pakistan's army has raised concern over strings attached to the aid, bolstering critics who say it will invite US interference. (This is in reference to the Kerry-Lugar bill)

The debate over the proposal also has exposed rifts between Pakistan's military and its weak civilian government.

The government has hailed the package, which would provide $1.5 billion a year over the next five years. But the measure, which awaits President Barack Obama's signature, makes US aid contingent on whether Pakistan's government maintains effective control over the military, among other conditions.

The army, which has ruled Pakistan for around half its 62-year existence, raised "serious concern" over the conditions, while the government said nothing in it was against Pakistan's interests.

[bigron]

Army awaiting US resources to begin Waziristan offensive: FM

* Govt intends to take South Waziristan, hold it, integrate it into mainstream
* Pakistan wants US trust, drones, market access

http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\10\09\story_9-10-2009_pg7_14

LAHORE/WASHINGTON: With Pakistan planning a stepped up offensive in South Waziristan to eliminate the Taliban, security units are awaiting military resources promised by the US to begin the assault, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said.

Talking to The Washington Times on Thursday, Qureshi said the new offensive would “be more ambitious than any other in the nation’s history” and the country’s security forces intended to take the agency, hold it and integrate its impoverished tribal population into mainstream society.

“We intend to drive them out, we intend to clear the territories of sanctuaries, we intend to hold that ground, we intend to amalgamate that area into mainstream Pakistan,” he said. Qureshi said the situation in the country had changed since democracy was restored in 2008 and the government and the military were now united against the Taliban threat.

The foreign minister said the timing of the offensive “will depend on the availability of our resources,” such as night-vision equipment and helicopters.

“Now [the US] wants quick delivery. Give us the resources to move at a faster pace,” he told the paper. He said unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan did not require US “boots on the ground” to set its wrongs right.

Qureshi did not comment on the potential US troop increase in Afghanistan, but said he thought US President Barack Obama would decide the matter by the end of this month or early next month, adding that Obama “should share his decision with Pakistan before it is announced”.

The foreign minister said that despite past disagreements, Pakistan was the “most important ally” in the region for Washington.

“We have been your consistent foul-weather friend,” Qureshi said. “Pakistan is going to be critical to your success and failure in Afghanistan.”

He said Pakistanis needed to be reassured that the US was making a “long-term commitment” to the region and was not going to abandon it as it did at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Qureshi said Pakistan “supports and appreciates new US legislation that will give Pakistan $7.5 billion in economic aid over five years”.

He said the bill was “the first demonstration of engaging with the people of Pakistan” and said it would support urgent needs in education, health and poverty alleviation, the paper said.

But Qureshi said a debate was still on over the language of the bill, which he said his government intended to fully explain to parliament, military and the public.

“In politics, in legislation, there are compromises,” he said. “Are we on the same page as far as extremism is concerned? Are we on the same page as far as terrorism is concerned? Are we on the same page as far as democracies are concerned? Are we on the same page as far as social development is concerned? ... And the answer to that is yes, we are,” he said.

Accessible trust: Meanwhile, Reuters reported Qureshi as saying that Pakistan did not just want US aid, but greater market access for its goods, transfer of drone technology and above all, trust.

He said US aid would not harm Pakistan, but said the country was “not asking for you [US] to keep doling out aid, we are asking for greater market access. Better trade with the European Union and the US can help our economy stabilise.”

Qureshi also asked the US to stop doubting the Inter-Services Intelligence.

“If you keep doubting them, and don’t expect them to cooperate with you, that’s a contradiction,” he said. daily times monitor/reuters

[bigron]

Militants torch more NATO trucks in Pakistan

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:28:51 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=108215&sectionid=351020401

   
 
Pakistani militants have destroyed hundreds of NATO trucks over the past months


Suspected pro-Taliban insurgents in Pakistan's troubled northwest have torched several trucks and containers taking supplies to NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.

The incident took place near Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar.

Witnesses said at least six trucks, an oil tanker and a container were totally destroyed by the blaze.

Pakistani militants have repeatedly launched attacks on NATO trucks in region.

The US military sends three quarters of supplies for its troops in Afghanistan through Pakistan.

The attack comes against the backdrop of the US Defense Department's official request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

However, with militants extending the autonomy in Pakistan's tribal areas, the supply routs have increasingly become unsafe.

The attacks have prompted US officials to seek alternative routes for the supplies bound for the foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Violence has been increasing in Pakistan's northwest tribal belt following the 2001 US-led invasion of neighboring Afghanistan.

A series of bombings as well as other attacks have claimed thousands of lives in less than two years across nuclear-armed Pakistan.

[bigron]

Why Obama Has No Business Trying War in the Nuclear-Armed Powder Keg of Pakistan

The U.S. has even less control over events in Pakistan than it does in Afghanistan -- Obama's really playing with fire here.

By Fred Branfman, Truthdig
Posted on October 9, 2009, Printed on October 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143194/

[Under Vice President Joe] Biden’s approach … American forces would concentrate on eliminating the Qaeda leadership, primarily in Pakistan, using Special Operations forces, Predator missile strikes and other surgical tactics. --The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2009

Biden has argued against increasing the number of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan. … --The Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2009

Statesmen must be judged by the consequences of their actions. Whatever Nixon and Kissinger intended for Cambodia, their efforts created catastrophe.  -- William Shawcross, “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia” (2002), Page 396 (Emphasis added.)


“I think you’re closer to the World War II generals than you are to the Vietnam ones.” Dwight Eisenhower was the obvious model. “You may not realize it, but you have more influence than any other military leader in this country right now. More than the Joint Chiefs. You can make a case for you not staying, because there’s no job after this that will compare to it.” The implied suggestion was politics — Bob Woodward quoting Gen. Jack Keane mentoring his protégé, Gen. David Petraeus, in “The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008” (2009) (Emphasis added.)


The Oct. 7 Wall Street Journal reports that President Barack Obama is reading Gordon Goldstein’s “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam,” a warning against heeding inevitable military requests for more troops. But however valuable Goldstein’s book might be, William Shawcross’ book “Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia” is far more relevant and significant. For no matter how much Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and other hawks disagree with the Biden doves on troop increases, both sides reportedly concur on the importance of going after Taliban and al-Qaida “sanctuaries” in Pakistan, a policy eerily reminiscent of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s disastrous decision to widen the Vietnam War into Cambodia in 1969. The Obama administration has already begun to escalate the fighting in Pakistan, a policy that could make even the Nixon-Kissinger destruction of Cambodia seem like a pleasant memory.

If U.S. military leaders are right that they cannot prevail in Afghanistan without escalating into Pakistan, this is the strongest possible argument for withdrawing from Afghanistan. For nothing, not even Taliban rule in Kabul, could justify allowing the tiny Afghan tail to wag a giant, nuclear-armed Pakistani dog whose stability is clearly America’s very top priority in the region. Further instability in Pakistan would only benefit al-Qaida, which has already made deep inroads into Pakistan and is unlikely to return to Afghanistan even if the U.S. withdraws from there. Former N.Y. Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer is right: “It should be engraved on the minds of every American diplomat: Do nothing that will further destabilize Pakistan” (from the “Rethink Afghanistan” video).

Irving Kristol’s recent death reminded us of his phrase “the law of unintended consequences,” referring to neoconservative attacks on well-meaning liberal domestic policies. Both neo- and garden-variety conservatives, however, have never been willing to apply this same “law” to their far greater international disasters. There is no record, for example, of Kristol’s son Bill or his fellow conservatives acknowledging the blow to U.S. interests and the enormous human suffering—including over 1 million Iraqis dead, wounded or made homeless—caused by the neoconservative-engineered invasion of Iraq.

As indifferent to non-American human suffering as have been conservatives, neoconservatives and neo-Stalinists like Dick Cheney, however, they presumably did not intend to see their invasion of Iraq destroy the Bush presidency, bring to power Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, strengthen anti-American terrorist forces around the globe, and vastly increase worldwide hatred for America due to the Bush administration’s making torture an official state policy for the first time in American history.

Given the U.S. history of unintended consequences in Cambodia and Iraq, not to mention Iran and dozens of other instances, it seems at first glance incredible that so-called Obama doves are seriously calling for increasing drone strikes and clandestine U.S. ground incursions into Pakistan, while pressuring the Pakistani army to expand fighting even though its campaign into the Swat Valley has already produced Pakistan’s greatest humanitarian disaster since 1947. The most likely explanation for this irrationality is at least partly that they see escalation in Pakistan as a necessary political counterweight to the Petraeus-McChrystal push for a troop buildup in Afghanistan, which they oppose.

Their concern is understandable. Bob Woodward has reported how Petraeus mentor Gen. Jack Keane has already begun prepping Petraeus for a run for president. A Republican Party desperate for leaders other than Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee will probably draft him as a presidential candidate if he can continue to avoid blame for his disastrous mismanagement of the Af-Pak theater. Petraeus protégé McChrystal’s disloyal and unprecedented public pressure on Obama for a troop buildup has clearly functioned as an attempt to blame Obama for the inevitable Afghan disasters to come even if Petraeus does not run for president. Obama’s aides are undoubtedly desperate to find a credible alternative to a growing U.S. troop buildup and skyrocketing American casualties in Afghanistan.

Though understandable, however, escalating in Pakistan would be dangerously and foolishly myopic, risking “unintended consequences” far exceeding even the disasters of Indochina and Iraq, and crippling the Obama presidency even more than if it were to withdraw from an Afghanistan where al-Qaida is no longer present and to which it is unlikely to return.

Petraeus, as the military chief of the Af-Pak theater enjoying even greater “influence” than the Joint Chiefs, has already seen his forays into Pakistan drive the Taliban and al-Qaida eastward, vastly increase both their strength and that of homegrown terrorists, create a vast upsurge in popular anti-American feeling, divide the Pakistani military, and destabilize an already unpopular and corrupt Pakistani government. Further destabilizing a nuclear-armed Pakistan already engaged in a cold and sometimes hot war with India could lead to a U.S. foreign policy crisis dwarfing Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Shawcross’ “Sideshow” provides a cautionary tale of the kind of unintended consequences that going after enemy “sanctuaries” can lead to. President Nixon, after taking office in January 1969, and Henry Kissinger, who directed U.S. policy and bombing in Cambodia, decided to go after North Vietnamese “sanctuaries” in the sparsely populated northeast regions of an otherwise neutral and peaceful Cambodia. They began by unilaterally conducting secret and massive B-52 bombing raids, violating both the U.S. Constitution and the Nuremberg principles. When the bombing raids did not succeed, they invaded Cambodia with U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. When that failed they escalated their bombing, using B-52s against civilian targets in one of the most savage bombing campaigns of civilians in history. They also created and propped up the corrupt and totally incompetent regime of Gen. Lon Nol, who had overthrown Prince Sihanouk, until Nol’s loss to the murderous Khmer Rouge in April 1975.

The “unintended consequences” of the Nixon-Kissinger attempt to destroy North Vietnamese “sanctuaries” in Cambodia included:

—Driving the North Vietnamese westward into Cambodia, weakening and destabilizing the Lon Nol government.

—Transforming the Khmer Rouge from a small and ineffectual force numbering no more than a few hundred into a large army capable of defeating the combined forces of U.S. airpower and the Lon Nol army. Had Nixon and Kissinger respected Sihanouk and not bombed and invaded Cambodia, there is little reason to believe that the Khmer Rouge would have taken power.     

—Fostering widespread pogroms and massacres of Vietnamese citizens of Cambodia, poisoning Vietnamese-Cambodian relations even further.

—Murdering, maiming, impoverishing and starving countless Cambodians, even before the Khmer Rouge came to power.

And this occurred in a nation of only 7 million that posed little threat to anyone beyond Vietnam. The Pakistan issue, of course, is far, far more serious.

Interestingly enough, Kissinger—like so many others, including his protégé Richard Holbrooke—appears to have learned nothing from his destruction of Cambodia. Writing in Newsweek on Oct. 3, Kissinger opined that “a sudden reversal of American policy would fundamentally affect domestic stability in Pakistan by freeing the Qaeda forces along the Afghan border for even deeper incursions into Pakistan, threatening domestic chaos.” Of course, the opposite is true in reality. It is the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan that has driven “the Qaeda forces”—and the Taliban—further east into Pakistan, threatening the same kind of “domestic chaos” that Kissinger produced 40 years ago when his bombing drove the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge further west into Cambodia.

But Kissinger’s remark about what al-Qaida might do in the event of a U.S. withdrawal is more to the point. He is fatuous in suggesting that an American withdrawal from Pakistan would “free” al-Qaida to move more deeply into Pakistan. Al-Qaida is already making deep inroads into Pakistan beyond the Northwest Frontier Territories and is likely to continue to do so whatever happens in Afghanistan. But if so, this raises a basic question: Why are we fighting in Afghanistan if “Qaeda forces” are unlikely to return there even if the Taliban wins?

It is impossible at this point to predict the precise “unintended consequences” of further U.S. escalation in Pakistan. Experts worry that dissident elements in the Pakistani military might supply one or more of Pakistan’s dozens of nuclear weapons to terrorists; that anti-American terrorist forces could increase as unexpectedly as did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; that a further strengthening of al-Qaida could lead to new 9/11s; that the Pakistani government could be weakened from within; and that tensions between Pakistan and India could reach unprecedentedly dangerous level.

Two things are certain at this point, however.

First, the U.S. has even less control over events in Pakistan than it does in Afghanistan. It is the height of hubris, the arrogance of power and sheer folly to continue unleashing forces there which it cannot control.

Second, despite the horror of the Nixon-Kissinger destruction of Cambodia, it did indeed remain a “sideshow.” Today, it is Afghanistan which is the sideshow. Allowing Pakistan to become the main event would constitute the greatest U.S foreign policy error of the post-World War II era, destroy the Obama presidency and lead to the election of an authoritarian Republican president in 2012 who could make us yearn for the days of George W. Bush.

Originally published in TruthDig-- Click here for the original.


Fred Branfman, the editor of “Voices From the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War” (Harper & Row, 1972), exposed the U.S. secret air war in Laos while living there from 1967 to 1971 and went on to develop solar, educational and Information Age initiatives for California Gov. Jerry Brown and national policymakers.

© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143194/

[bigron]

Pakistan to Attack Militants After Bomb Kills 49

Friday , October 09, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,562900,00.html


Oct. 9: Map of Pakistan locating Peshawar where a car bomb ripped through a crowded market.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A homicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a crowded market in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing 49 people and pushing the country closer to an offensive against militants in their main stronghold along the Afghan border.

The attack, which wounded more than 100 people in Peshawar, was Pakistan's deadliest in six months and was a reminder of the ability of insurgents to strike in major cities despite operations against them and the death of their leader in a U.S. missile strike.

SLIDESHOW: Deadly Blast in Pakistan. (Graphic Content)
http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/world/2009/10/09/deadly-blast-near-pakistan-market

The blast was heard several miles away and left the charred skeleton of a bus flipped on its side in the middle of the road, next to the twisted remains of a motorbike. Passers-by pulled out the wounded and the dead, including a young girl wearing an orange dress who was heading to a wedding with family members.

One man staggered from the scene, his face covered with blood. People rushed to cover the bodies of victims whose clothes were burned off.

"I understood for the first time in my life what doomsday would look like, " said Noor Alam, who suffered wounds to his legs and face and was at a hospital overrun with other casualties.

Peshawar Police Chief Liaqat Ali Khan said the attacker was in a car packed with a "huge" amount explosives and artillery rounds. There was no claim of responsibility for the bombing, the target of which was not immediately apparent. Militants typically attack government, military or Western targets, but blasts have taken place in public places before.

Zafar Iqbal, a doctor at the main Peshawar hospital, said 49 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Seven children were among the dead.

"I pray to Allah, please destroy all these people who are killing the innocents," said Sher Akbar from his hospital bed. "People were crying. They were in pain. I thought we were all are dying."

The United States is pushing Pakistan to take action against insurgents using its soil to fuel the insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan. The army has carried out some offensives in the northwest this year, killing many militants and earning it measured praise in the West, but the insurgents have responded with scores of suicide attacks.

The army has confirmed it is prepared to launch a major offensive in South Waziristan, a region along the Afghan border consider the fountainhead of suicide attacks and other militant activity in Pakistan. It has not given a date for the launch.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the attack meant the country now "had no other option but to carry out an operation in South Waziristan."

"We will have to proceed," he told a local television station. "All roads are leading to South Waziristan."

The bombing came just days after a Taliban suicide attacker evaded tight security to kill five people at the office of the U.N.'s World Food Program in the capital, Islamabad and two weeks after another explosion killed 11 in another part of Peshawar.

Malik said authorities had arrested a man alleged to have been the "handler" of the U.N. bomber. He gave no more details.

Also Friday, militants ambushed a tanker carrying fuel for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan at a gas station near Peshawar, torching it, said Fazal Rabi, a police official. No deaths or injuries were reported in the attack, which highlighted the vulnerability of the American-led mission in landlocked Afghanistan as Washington debates sending more troops.

Pakistani Taliban have often targeted U.S. and NATO supply convoys passing through northwest Pakistan for Afghanistan, though there have been less attacks reported recently. Most of the nonmilitary supplies for foreign troops in Afghanistan are unloaded at Karachi sea port and are then trucked in through the northwest.

Pakistan's army has launched three operations in South Wazirstan since 2001 but each time has been forced to abandon the push amid fierce resistance. U.S. missile strikes and Pakistani mortar and jet bombings have hit targets there over the last year, but no ground operations have been launched.

One such U.S. attack in the region in August killed Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud. The group has since named a new leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. He has threatened suicide attacks and said his men were preparing to repel any push into South Waziristan

[bigron]

Britain building Pakistan border force camp: report

Fri Oct 9, 8:25 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091009/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanunrestbritainpakistan


A member of Pakistan's Frontier Corps (FC) stands guard at the blocked off Indus Highway in the Spina Thana area near Darra Adam Khel, 2008. Britain is building a training camp for Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps to help in the fight against the Taliban in the lawless border area with southern Afghanistan, a report said (AFP/File/Tariq Mahmood)
 
LONDON (AFP) – Britain is building a training camp for Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps to help in the fight against the Taliban in the lawless border area with southern Afghanistan, a report said Friday.

The Times said Britain also planned to base 24 army trainers at the camp in the southwestern province of Baluchistan for a three-year stint from August next year, when construction is due to finish.

The British personnel would work alongside six US trainers at the camp, which is designed to house 550 people, the newspaper reported, quoting a senior official at the British High Commission in Islamabad.

The camp will train 360 Frontier Corps soldiers at a time, on 12-week courses, the official said.

The report said the plan was politically sensitive because the British and US trainers will be the first foreign forces formally stationed in Baluchistan since Pakistan?s independence in 1947, although US special forces operated there during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The development has historical resonance for Britain, which founded the Frontier Corps in 1907 to control rebellious tribes on the North West Frontier, and used to recruit and train troops for the army in Baluchistan.

The British official emphasised to the Times that British and US personnel at the camp would conduct only "conventional military training" and would not operate alongside Pakistani forces outside its confines.

The Frontier Corps recruits would be taught basic skills such as how to deal with an improvised explosive device, how to man a checkpoint and search a vehicle, how to handle light weapons and how to perform first aid.

US officials believe that top Afghan Taliban leaders are sheltering in Quetta, the provincial capital of the border region, and using the area to coordinate attacks on international troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan was the chief ally of Afghanistan's extremist Taliban until the September 11, 2001 attacks, when then military ruler Pervez Musharraf changed tack to make Islamabad the key partner in the US-led "war on terror."

A wide-ranging review of US policy in Afghanistan has concluded that the Taliban poses less of a threat to US security than Al-Qaeda, the White House said this week.

The findings raise speculation that President Barack Obama may not opt for a vastly increased counter-insurgency force in Afghanistan.

The commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has reportedly asked Obama to send up to 40,000 more troops.

[bigron]

October 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/asia/10pstan.html?_r=1&ref=world

Latest Pakistan Bombing Seen as Warning to Government


Victims were removed from a marketplace in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Friday after an explosion that killed at least 48 people

By ISMAIL KHAN and SALMAN MASOOD

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A huge and lethal blast rocked a crowded market in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Friday, in what appeared to be a warning about the government’s plans to launch a military offensive against militants in the frontier region of South Waziristan.

The blast, which police and security officials suspected was caused by a suicide car bomb containing more than 100 pounds of explosives, was the biggest in Pakistan in months, killing at least 48 people, including seven children and one woman, and wounding 148 others.

It was the second attack by militants this week, after the bombing of a United Nations agency on Monday, raising concern that Taliban militants were preparing a new wave of attacks in a country where scores of suicide bombings have occurred.

Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, has long been an easy target for the militants; it is also crucial to both the Taliban and the government because of its proximity to Pakistan’s mountainous frontier. Furthermore, the city is of strategic value to NATO because it serves as a transportation hub for supplies bound for neighboring Afghanistan.

A majority of the people killed were passengers traveling in a public minibus, which was passing beside the car used in the attack. Several pedestrians were also killed or seriously wounded.

The blast was so intense that it overturned the passenger bus, leaving bodies and injured passengers trapped in its wreckage. The bombing also damaged dozens of multistory buildings, shops and offices in the area, a known commercial center, and snapped the power supply cables. Witnesses said many of the dead were damaged beyond recognition.

“Out of the 48 bodies, so far 27 have been identified,” said Dr. Sahib Gul, chief of the trauma center at Lady Reading Hospital, where most of the casualties were taken. He feared that the death toll might increase, as some of the wounded were in critical condition.

Officials said the militants, who largely attack military or police personnel, were expanding their targets to include civilians to press the government and forestall a possible operation in the South Waziristan tribal region.

The Provincial Assembly was in session about a half-mile away, and local television coverage showed legislators emerging from the building and making calls on their cellphones.

The United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, immediately condemned the attack, saying in a statement that it “serves only to highlight the vicious and inhuman nature of the terrorists who aim to instill fear in the hearts of the Pakistani people.”

Meanwhile, Rehman Malik, the Pakistani interior minister, said Friday that investigators had made one arrest and identified those involved in the suicide bombing of the headquarters of the World Food Program in Islamabad, the capital, on Monday. Four Pakistanis and an Iraqi died in the blast.

Speaking to reporters outside the Parliament in Islamabad, Mr. Malik said the government knew who took the bomber to the highly fortified building of the food program.

“The main handler is in our custody, and we have complete information about the persons involved in executing the terrorist plan and facilitating the terrorists,” Mr. Malik said. “We know where the instructions came from, where he stayed.”

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and a Taliban spokesman, Azam Tariq, said there would be more singling out of foreigners and Pakistanis working with overseas agencies.

“Given this aggressiveness and this new threat, we are taking a range of actions to redouble our security efforts,” said Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the food program, which says it supplies food and humanitarian aid to an estimated 10 million Pakistanis.

The program is a United Nations agency, and the organization has temporarily closed its offices in Pakistan. Ms. Sheeran said the withdrawal of World Food Program staff members from the country was “not contemplated.”

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.

[Satyagraha]

Terrorist attack on GHQ islamabad
10th oct 2009
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/4358036-terrorist-attack-on-ghq-islamabad-10th-oct-2009

An attempt to attack the General Head Quarters of the Pakistan Armed Forces has been foiled earlier today as four militants were shot dead while trying to enter the premises. ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations) spokesman Major General Athar Abbas confirmed that four attackers dressed in army uniforms started firing on guards when stopped at the gate.

(Note: This is still ongoing at this time; hostages and 'terrorists' still in the building)

RAWALPINDI – Loud gunfire and blasts were heard near the Pakistan army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi at 11:30 this morning after a team of gunmen brandishing assault rifles and grenades tried to break into the fiercely guarded compound on Saturday, sparking a raging gun battle with troops outside Islamabad.

According to witnesses, four militants in a white Suzuki van attempted to enter the GHQ premises from gate number one. When intercepted by the checkpoint guards, they started firing indiscriminately and throwing hand grenades while making their way towards gate number two, where security officials promptly acted, shooting the terrorists dead after a short but intense pitched battle. It is not clear how many security officials were martyred in the exchange.

The entire area has been cordoned off and roads leading to the GHQ have been closed for traffic, and army helicopters have begun hovering over the GHQ.

---------------------------------------------------------------

6 security men martyred, 4 terrorists killed in attack on GHQ

Saturday October 10, 2009 (1616 PST)
http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=220054

RAWALPINDI: The terrorists attack on GHQ has been foiled as four terrorists were killed and six security personnel martyred in the action whereas search operation for two terrorists still at large is underway.

According to reports, terrorists in army uniform attempted to get entry into GHQ at 11:30 am on Saturday from gate no 1. When stopped by security officials, they reached at check post no 1 and opened fire on security men after taking positions after leaving the car. Four terrorists were killed and two fled during trade of fire between security officials and terrorists. Army gunship helicopters started hovering over the area for vigilance. The commandos seized the bodies of terrorists and shifted them.

DG ISPR Athar Abbas confirmed killing of four terrorists whereas six security officials were also martyred in the operation. Two terrorists managed to flee. Search operation is underway in the area to nab the two terrorists at large. All roads leading to GHQ have been sealed after the incident.

End.

-------------------

Note; Pak news on tv (Geo via sattelite):
"Terrorists" were wearing Army camo uniforms, carrying automatic weapons.. arrived in white van (think about this; same white vans roaming the NWFP picking people off the streets)...

IMO:
This appears to be a well-coordinated attack sort of smells like Blackwater.. an attempted takeover (mumbai-style) of army headquarters in Islamabad?
There are hostages.. more terrorists in the building at this time; 11am est.

[bigron]

Saturday, October 10, 2009
17:51 Mecca time, 14:51 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/10/2009101062024839937.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Pakistan attackers 'take hostages'  
 

 
About two dozen people have been taken hostage by three gunmen after the Pakistani army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi came under attack, officials have said.
WATCH :
Deadly clash at Pakistan army headquarters - 10 Oct 09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U605_-t1Nbg&feature=player_embedded

"There is a hostage situation unfolding," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said.

Earlier reports suggested that the attack on Saturday, which left six soldiers and four assailants dead, had been repelled by the troops.

But officials later said some gunmen are still holding dozens of people hostage in a building adjacent to the army headquarters.

Our correspondent said the hostages are all thought to be mililtary personnel.


In depth :
 Profile: Pakistan Taliban
 Witness: Pakistan in crisis
 Inside Story: Pakistan's military
 Riz Khan: The battle for the soul of Pakistan
 

Mohammed Jamil, a police official, said the attackers drove up to the army compound in a white van shortly before noon, and tried to force their way inside before being challenged by soldiers.

The attackers jumped out of the vehicle, took up positions throughout the area and began firing at the troops, he said.

One attacker hurled a grenade, and others fired sporadically at those manning the checkpoint at the compound's entrance, a senior military official inside said.

At least six soldiers and four of the attackers were killed in the gun battle, the army said.

Officials earlier said that two of the attackers had escaped, but later claimed that one of them had been arrested.

Taliban claim

Tehreek-e-Taliban, or the Pakistani Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the latest attack on the military's headquarters, according to Islamabad's local media.

In a telephone call made to a local media channel, a member of the Pakistani Taliban threatened aid groups operating in the country and asked that they leave Pakistan.

The attack came a day after a suspected suicide car bomber killed 49 people in the northwestern city of Peshawar in an attack the government said underscored the need for an all-out offensive.

Pakistan has been fighting an ever-intensifying campaign against al-Qaeda-linked Taliban and groups linked to al-Qaeda.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[bigron]

Pakistan plotted Kabul embassy attack: Afghanistan


Saturday, 10 Oct, 2009 | 07:02 PM PST | 


‘We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan,’ Jawad said.   
 

WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI was behind the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul which killed 17 people and wounded more than 60 others, the Afghan envoy to the US has claimed.

‘Yes, we do,’ Afghan Ambassador to the US Said T Jawad told the PBS news channel in an interview when asked if he was pointing the finger at Pakistan for the suicide bombing that took place on Thursday.

‘We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan,’ Jawad said. While the Karzai government was quick to point the figure towards foreign players in the attack on the Indian embassy early this week, this is the first time that a top Afghan official has blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI for the terror strike. The Afghan Government had also blamed the ISI in the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy which claimed 60 lives.

The Afghan ambassador also supported the report by General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, which recommends some 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. This is necessary to secure the country, Jawad said. He said Afghanistan would like to have a clear commitment to success from the Obama Administration, which is currently reassessing its strategy for the country.—Online
 

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/13+pakistan+plotted+kabul+embassy+attack+afghanistan-za-01

 

[Satyagraha]

This 'terrorist' attack of the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi comes in the week following a strong Pakistani rejection of the Kerry-Lugar bill currently on its way BACK to congress for some revisions. They reject the enslavement of the NWO elites; and they've been attacked, imo, as a 'lesson' - we WILL F*CK YOU UP if you don't take our instruction.

Current situation: Army surrounding the GHQ building; there are 4 terrorists holding 10-15 hostages in the building. This is reminiscent of the terrorists remaining in the hotel in Mumbai. This is an old script.

The Kerry-Lugar bill:

PML-Q asks Patterson for changes in Kerry-Lugar bill
Staff Report
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\10\06\story_6-10-2009_pg7_17

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) raised objections over certain clauses of the Kerry-Lugar bill during a meeting with US Ambassador Anne Patterson who called on PML-Q President Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain on Monday.

According to a press statement by the party’s media cell, PML-Q Secretary General Mushahid Hussain Syed was also present while Patterson was accompanied by Political Counsellor Bryan D Hunt. Various aspects of Pak-US relations, particularly the Kerry-Lugar bill, were discussed in the meeting. The PML-Q leaders also expressed their stance on the bill.

The party objected to the insertion of a clause "regarding the alleged presence of terrorists in Muridke and Quetta,” in the bill "on the behest of the Indian lobby" active in the US, the statement said. "The PML-Q leadership also presented its reservations on deleting provisions regarding corruption and good governance in the bill, saying it was ‘disappointed’ by the amended version of the bill," it added. The statement said the party leaders also informed the US envoy that instead of appreciating the sacrifices made by Pakistan’s armed forces against the Taliban in Swat and Malakand, the US was levelling false allegations against the country’s security agencies. The PML-Q leaders called for an amendment in the Kerry-Lugar bill to satisfy the people of Pakistan and safeguard national security and interests.

Kerry-Lugar Bill not ideal document
PTI 8 October 2009, 08:26pm IST
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Kerry-Lugar-Bill-not-ideal-document-Pak/articleshow/5102956.cms
   
ISLAMABAD: A day after its powerful army expressed "serious concern" over some of the provisions in the US economic aid bill, Pakistan government on Thursday said the legislation is "not an ideal document" and that it is not binding on it to accept clauses laid in it.

Foreign Office Spokesman Abdul Basit said the Kerry- Lugar Bill that envisages the provision of 7.5 billion dollars in economic aid over five years is not a bilateral pact.

"The Kerry-Lugar bill is not a negotiated document. It is a piece of legislation drafted by the US Congress and it is not binding for Pakistan to accept it," he told the weekly news briefing.

Besides his remarks at the news briefing, Basit also told reporters that the US bill is "not an ideal document" and its "language could have been better".

Basit's comments came a day after the Army expressed "serious concerns" about clauses in the legislation that it said would impact Pakistan's national security interests.

The ruling Pakistan People's Party, which has pulled out all stops to endorse the bill, was put on the back foot by the army's criticism.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has said the Kerry-Lugar bill's conditions are not binding on Pakistan and that his government will seek to forge consensus on the issue among political parties and all stakeholders.

Basit also noted that the US President could send the bill back to the Congress for review but it was "not for Pakistan to comment on or judge" the matter.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi will brief parliament on the bill after his return to the country tomorrow from a visit to the US, he said.

The spokesman evaded several pointed questions on the Kerry-Lugar bill, including one on whether the army could debate the legislation and give its views on it, and said it would be better to let parliament complete its discussions on the issue and take an independent decision.

Replying to a question, Basit said the Foreign Office had given its input on all important foreign policy issues, including the Kerry-Lugar bill.

Pakistan has also conveyed its inputs on the bill to the US Congress and the Obama administration, he said.

The Pakistani military is particularly concerned about clauses in the bill which require the US Secretary of State to provide assessments every six months on whether Pakistan's civilian government has effective control over the armed forces, including "oversight and approval of military budgets" and the promotion for senior military leaders.

Gilani has sought to allay these concerns by making it clear that promotions in the Pakistani military will not "be decided elsewhere".

---------------------------------------------

General Kayani, the Chief of Pakistani Army, is not one to bend over I think. Now he gets his GHQ attacked by 'terrorists'... the NWO's answer to anyone who dares reject their agenda.

[Satyagraha]

Pakistani comments on Kerry-Lugar bill via YouTube from Dawn TV (the recently launched English news network: timing consistent with Blackwater's settlement into homes in Islamabad).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28QQSl0PBpU

[bigron]

Pakistan Hostage Standoff Looms Over Obama's War Deliberations

A hostage standoff in Pakistan highlights growing concerns about the stability of that nuclear-armed country and could influence President Obama's  war deliberations.

By Stephen Clark

FOXNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/10/pakistan-hostage-standoff-hovers-obamas-war-deliberations/
Saturday, October 10, 2009

http://www.foxnews.com/bios/img/101009_pakistan_helicpoter.jpg

A Pakistani army soldier keeps position in a helicopter flies over its headquarters after an attack by gunmen at the headquarters in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009. (AP)

 

 A hostage standoff in Pakistan is adding to growing concerns about the stability of that nuclear-armed country as President Obama decides whether to shift U.S. focus to Pakistan or ramp up the war in Afghanistan.

Further complicating U.S. relations with Pakistan, a key ally in the region, is the Pakistani military's hostility toward conditions recently attached to a nearly $2 billion aid package.

Military advisers are pushing Obama to increase manpower in Afghanistan to battle the Taliban, but some other advisers reportedly are suggesting that the U.S. should consider allowing the Taliban into a political role in Afghanistan's future so that the U.S. can turn its attention toward eliminating roots of the Al Qaeda threat in Pakistan.

But the new violence in Pakistan could undercut any concessions being considered for the Taliban.

"What happened today in Pakistan should encourage [Obama] to follow the advice of the military because they know better the strength of the Taliban," Walid Phares, a terrorism analyst and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told FOXNews.com.

"This is a new model that the Taliban will take and multiply in Afghanistan and Pakistan," unless additional U.S. troops are sent, he said.

The Pakistan military freed 22 hostages during a rescue operation, while 3 hostages and 4 militants were killed.

The attack, which left 10 people dead -- including two ranking officers -- was the third major militant strike in Pakistan in a week. It came as the army was planning an imminent offensive against the insurgents in their strongholds in the rugged mountains along the border with Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Obama is conducting war deliberations to determine which strategy to pursue in Afghanistan, an 8-year-old conflict that military commanders are pressing him to escalate.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, would like an additional 40,000 troops to fight the Taliban and pursue Al Qaeda while some White House officials, including Vice President Biden, prefer to scale back the war effort and focus on defeating Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Phares said Obama should view Saturday's attack as a signal.

"It is a very strong signal to President Obama and he will have to take it into consideration," he said. "And if he doesn't take it into consideration, then the Taliban will escalate it further."

Retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney told FOX News that Obama should shift more resources to Pakistan despite the hostage standoff.

"We need to be targeting more in Pakistan, there's no question," he said. "But what most of all we need to do is get the Pakistani army commander, Gen. Kayani, but we need to get the Pakistani army, which is a very capable army, to be attacking those areas in south and north Waziristan where Al Qaeda is hiding out right now."

McInerney said U.S. counterterrorism forces need to continue their unmanned pilot attacks.

"But that will not solve the problem until the Pakistan army gets on the ground," he said.

Yet shifting the focus of the war to Pakistan may pose more challenges and problems than Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Pakistan's powerful military raised "serious concern" over the strings attached to U.S. legislation that would provide $1.5 billion a year over the next five years, tripling nonmilitary assistance to the country.

The bill authorizes "such sums as may be necessary" for counterterrorism assistance, but only if Pakistan cracks down on militancy and meets other conditions.

The army brass said in an unusual public statement that the conditions would lead to U.S. meddling in Pakistan's affairs -- comments that could bolster opponents of the weak U.S.-backed civilian administration in Islamabad.

The aid bill, U.S. officials say, is meant to alleviate widespread poverty. But many Pakistanis see it as a sign of unwanted U.S. influence.

Phares told FOXNews.com that the Pakistan army does not want to been seen as openly receiving aid from the U.S. because that plays into the hands of the Taliban.

"The Taliban propaganda machine will say this army is receiving help from the enemy, which is killing our brothers," he said.

Phares should the U.S. should be publicly supporting McChrystal and privately sending support to Pakistan, not the other way around.

Pakistan "wants us to send support without bragging about it," he said. "The propaganda machine of the Taliban is making this into a big issue because they want to create a problem between Pakistan and us."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[bigron]

October 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/world/asia/11swat.html?ref=asia

Racing Time and Taliban to Rebuild in Pakistan

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and IRFAN ASHRAF


Mohammed Shah Hussain, a teacher at Nazarabad Government Boys School, walks thought what is left of the school after the Taliban destroyed it in February. About 20 percent of all schools in the Swat Valley are destroyed or unusable, Unicef says.


NAZARABAD, Pakistan — The fighting is over and the villagers have returned, but life here remains suspended. Villagers’ buffaloes are gone, and their harvests are spoiled. Power is still out in many areas. Schools, blown up by the Taliban, lay in heaps. Even the bricks have been sold.

“We are orphans,” said Akbar Khan, a school principal. “No one has come to ask about us.”

           

This is the upper Swat Valley, ground zero for the Taliban in northern Pakistan. While urban areas farther south are bustling and back to life, the real test of Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban in Swat will take place here, in the impoverished villages where the militant movement began.

But more than two months after the end of active combat, with winter fast approaching, reconstruction has yet to begin, and little has been accomplished on the ground to win back people’s trust, villagers and local officials say.

The lag, they argue, is risky: It was a sense of near-total abandonment by the government that opened people to the Taliban to begin with, they say, and the longer people are left to fend for themselves, the greater the chance of a relapse.

“I’m really worried,” said Javed Iqbal, the chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, where Swat is located. “We do not have the luxury of time.

“If you don’t start showing something more tangible,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the state of anarchy returning.”

Pakistan’s government says it is tending to the needs of the people of Swat, an aid effort that was estimated last month to require $1.2 billion. The country’s largest donor, the United States, is about to pump billions of dollars of aid into Pakistan, and there have been international conferences to gather funds.

But money for reconstruction in this battered area is still almost nonexistent, officials say, and aid organizations, encumbered by security rules, have been slow to respond.

“The government thinks people are slowly getting back to normal lives,” said Pervez Tahir, chairman of the economics department at Forman Christian College in Lahore. “The reality is, the poor were ignored before, and the poor are ignored after.”

That pattern has been borne out for much of Pakistan’s troubled 62-year history, and is particularly severe here.

Even before the war, things in Nazarabad were broken. Villagers made donations to replace a coil in the town’s aging electric transformer. There was no running water or indoor plumbing, and teachers chipped in for a water pump for the school. With no one important to lobby for it, the village was left to fend for itself.

So when the Taliban first surfaced, in the form of FM radio broadcasts by a cleric who talked about how people’s needs had been ignored, many here saw salvation.

“The level of deprivation was unbearable,” said Muhammad Shah Hussein, a teacher in Nazarabad. “When the Taliban came, there was a sense of hope.”

But as time went on, the Taliban’s tactics became more coercive, and sympathy evaporated when the group blew up the village’s schools.

“We told them, ‘The people are so poor and weak, please don’t destroy this school,’ ” said Akbar Khan, the principal.

But that was of no use. Now students sit on small stacks of bricks, perched like birds in a strange new outdoor classroom. The girls here still do not go to school at all — their school was never rebuilt after it was destroyed, and local custom frowns on their being out in the open.

About 20 percent of all schools in the Swat Valley are destroyed or unusable, according to figures provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef.

So far, the main aid response here has been the distribution of tents. Unicef, which is leading that effort, says it has had a slow response from donors, receiving about 60 percent of the money it asked for. And after Taliban attacks killed seven United Nations employees, including their director of education, reconstruction has been put on hold in the war-affected areas.

Tired of waiting, Mr. Iqbal took financing from other areas in his province to rebuild 65 schools in Swat.

The United States, which has earmarked $20 million for school reconstruction in the area, last month pledged hundreds of millions of dollars for social development. But Shakeel Qadr Khan, the provincial official in charge of reconstruction, said it was not clear how much, if any, of that would go to rebuilding Swat.

The years of Taliban rule and a summer of military operations have taken their toll on farming, too. Khazwar, a farmer from the village of Guelarai, said his wheat crop spoiled and his fruit was never picked, leaving him without money for seed and fertilizer. The secretary of agriculture for the province estimated that it would cost as much as $800 million to help farmers get back on their feet.

“All of Swat is suffering from this,” said Mr. Khazwar, who like many rural Pakistanis uses one name.

The military offensive here did not cause mass destruction or large numbers of civilian deaths, as it had in past campaigns, and the army now has bases all over the valley. The military presence has been welcomed by an overwhelming majority in Mingora, who felt before that they had been abandoned to the militants.

But in the villages where militants were strong as early as 2003, people have now come to fear the military, too, making getting back to normal even harder.

Mr. Hussein estimated that more than half of his male students were not coming to school because they were afraid the military would arrest them for Taliban involvement. He is also nervous about sticking out, now that he has assumed the role of spokesman for families, mostly illiterate, asking about relatives who are in military custody.

The one task that is proceeding at a rapid pace is the establishment of local militias. Jamal Nasir Khan, a political leader near here, is recruiting hundreds of men in villages in the upper valley to defend against the Taliban. Mr. Khan, who fled to the capital, Islamabad, in 2007 and returned late this summer, argues that security should come first.

“People want normalization in a month — it won’t happen,” said Mr. Khan, who puts on American-style army boots, a flak jacket and an M-16 rifle anytime he leaves his house. “It’s not like a genie will come to make things better.”

Mr. Khan depends entirely on the military. He is driven in military vehicles. His food is cooked by the army. And he is practically alone in the area. None of the seven district officials who used to run the area have come back. Few high school teachers or doctors have returned.

Illiteracy makes villagers easy to ignore. Taja Bibi, a villager who cannot read, but whose bright 12-year-old daughter, Rabihat, aches to return to school, said she had not even bothered to ask when it might reopen.

“We can’t argue, and we can’t respond,” she said, sitting on a dirt floor in a small house that is home to more than 20 people. “They don’t consider us worth talking to.”

For Mr. Hussein, creating an educated class that knows its rights is the only hope for change in Pakistan.

But that requires schools, and the ones in his village are gone.

“We are the losers,” he said.

[bigron]

Thursday, Oct. 08, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1929306,00.html?xid=rss-topstories


How a U.S. Aid Package to Pakistan Could Threaten Zardari

By Omar Waraich / Islamabad


The Pakistani military fires toward Taliban positions at Loi Sam, in Pakistan's Bajur tribal region

After decades of coddling military dictators in Pakistan, Washington wants a different relationship with its key partner in the war against al-Qaeda. The Kerry-Lugar Act which has passed the Senate, after a similar bill passed in the House last month, would provide $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid over the next five years, in an ambitious plan to counter widespread anti-American sentiment there by helping Pakistan's civilian government deliver essential services to its population. Unlike previous no-strings aid packages, Kerry-Lugar makes support conditional on Pakistan's military being subordinated to its elected government, and taking action against militants sheltering on its soil. But by dangling the prospect of a desperately needed aid package on terms deemed intrusive by the military and opposition parties, the legislation may be weakening the very civilian government it hoped to bolster.

The furor over the aid package has left President Asif Ali Zardari increasingly isolated as normally fractious opposition parties unite against its "humiliating" conditions, with even the junior partners in Zardari's ruling coalition expressing misgivings. Public opinion ranges from suspicion to hostility, and the army high command broke with its recent habit of remaining quiet on political matters to issue an ominous statement. Following a meeting of its corps commanders, the army — the country's most powerful institution, long accustomed to keeping the political class in line — expressed "serious concern" over what it said were the "national security" implications of the aid package. The statement said that army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had also "reiterated that Pakistan is a sovereign state and has all the rights to analyze and respond to [national-security threats] in accordance with her own national interests." See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable North-West Frontier Province.

"The army's response builds pressure on the government and encourages tougher opposition to the bill in Parliament," says military and political analyst Hasan-Askari Rizvi. "It's a kind of political move on the part of the military."

Even Pakistani parties that have suffered directly as a result of military intervention in politics have bristled at perceived U.S. interference. "These are matters which have to be decided by us, the Parliament and the government of Pakistan," says opposition leader Nisar Ali Khan, of the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, deposed in a 1999 coup. "If there's external involvement, it does no good to us, our sovereignty." See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.

The generals' ire is focused on the bill's requirements that the U.S. Secretary of State certify, at six-month intervals, that the military remains under civilian oversight, even specifying such details as the need for the government to control senior command promotions. Kerry-Lugar also requires that the Pakistani military act against militant networks on its soil, specifying those based in Quetta and Muridke. U.S. officials believe that the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, including Mullah Omar, operates unmolested from the southwestern city of Quetta — a charge denied by Pakistan. Murdike, just outside Lahore, is the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the militant group most recently responsible for last November's Mumbai massacre.

Both the Afghan Taliban and the LeT have previously served as proxies of the Pakistan army, and many Western observers suspect that those ties have yet to be completely severed. That issue was given new urgency on Thursday when a large bomb exploded outside the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 17 people and injuring over 80. The Afghan Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast. It was the second such attack on the embassy in as many years — last July, over 50 people were killed at the same spot in an attack mounted by the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. That attack prompted U.S. officials to present their Pakistani counterparts with evidence pointing to involvement in the attack by elements in Pakistan's intelligence services — a charge Islamabad heatedly denied. Indian officials lost no time Thursday in accusing Pakistan of involvement in the latest attack. See pictures of a jihadi's journey.

One of the Kerry-Lugar conditions most likely to trigger nationalist resistance is the requirement that Pakistan grant U.S. investigators "direct access to Pakistani nationals" associated with nuclear-proliferation networks. That's a reference to Dr. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who confessed to sharing nuclear-weapons secrets with Iran, North Korea and Libya. Although he was placed under house arrest in Pakistan, authorities there have consistently refused to allow him to be questioned by foreign investigators. "For all his sins, he's still considered a hero in Pakistan," says Tariq Azeem, an opposition senator who served in the government of former President Pervez Musharraf.

The backlash to Kerry-Lugar is fueled by a widely held perception that President Zardari has bowed too easily to foreign demands. According to a recent poll published by the International Republican Institute, 80% of Pakistanis opposed their government's cooperation with the U.S. war on terror. That figure represents a 19-point rise since March, despite the fact that opposition to Pakistan's domestic Taliban militants has risen to an all-time high. But Zardari sees the clamor as politically motivated: "Pakistan received American aid twice before, in 2001 and 2007, and there was no such controversy," says presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar. "At that time Pakistan was being run by a military general who was also the President. The difference now is that the President and the Prime Minister are democratically elected. There is a deliberate attempt now to undermine President Asif Ali Zardari by elements who do not like that fact."

Still, the mounting furor over the Kerry-Lugar Act may produce an outcome quite different from what the legislation intends. In March, after bitterly resisting calls to reinstate the Chief Justice sacked by Musharraf, Zardari was forced into a humiliating climbdown in the face of an array of opponents as formidable as those challenging him over the U.S. aid package. Pakistan is in no position to reject the vast sums of money on offer. But while the combination of opposition from the military, political opponents and the broader public may not topple him, it could further hobble a President that Senators Kerry and Lugar had hoped to help.

— With reporting by Aryn Baker / Kabul

[bigron]

October 7, 2009, 11:00 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/pakistanis-view-us-aid-warily/
 
Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily

By Salman Masood
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times


Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.

I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.


Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Enver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.
Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.

Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”

“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”

He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.

Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.

“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”

Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”

The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.

“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”

Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”

Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.

Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”


Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.

He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman, died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.

Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.

During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.

Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.

“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.

“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”

Everyone gathered in the store nodded.

And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.

“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”

[bigron]

Blast near Pakistan's Swat valley kills 41

Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:09am EDT
By Robert Birsel
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE59B0EY20091012?feedType=nl&feedName=usmorningdigest


Armed soldiers stand guard outside Pakistan's army headquarters in Rawalpindi October 11, 2009.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A suspected suicide bomber killed 41 people in an attack on the Pakistani military on Monday as the Taliban claimed responsibility for a weekend raid on the army's headquarters.

Militant attacks have intensified over the past week as the army prepares to launch a ground offensive on the al Qaeda-linked fighters' South Waziristan stronghold.

Pakistani Taliban militants linked to al Qaeda have launched numerous attacks on government and foreign targets over the past couple of years killing hundreds of people.

The target of the attack in Shangla district, near the Swat valley, was a military convoy, police said.

"It appears to be a suicide attack. The bomber hit one of three military vehicles that were passing through the busiest market in the district," top Shangla police official, Khan Bahadur Khan, said by telephone.

Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said 41 people had been killed, including 35 civilians and 6 soldiers, and 45 people were wounded.

Members of the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda were suspected to have been behind Saturday's attack on army headquarters in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad.

Commandos stormed an office building near the headquarters and rescued 39 people taken hostage by gunmen after an attack at a main gate of the headquarters.

Nine militants and three hostages were killed in the violence in Rawalpindi while the number of soldiers killed rose to 11, with the death of three wounded men, a military official said.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq claimed responsibility and threatened more attacks.

"It was carried out by our Punjab unit," Tariq said by telephone, referring to Punjab province where Islamist militants linked to both al Qaeda and the Taliban operate.

"We will take revenge for our martyrs and will carry out more attacks, whether it's the GHQ or something bigger, he said, referring to the army's General Headquarters.

"NO MERCY"

Pakistani aircraft attacked Taliban militants in their South Waziristan stronghold Sunday, killing about 16 militants, a Pakistani intelligence official in the region said.

The military has been conducting air and artillery strikes in South Waziristan for months, while moving troops, blockading the region and trying to split off militant factions.

But a ground offensive, in what could be the army's toughest test since the militants turned on the state, has yet to begin.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters in an interview in Singapore the offensive was "imminent."

"There is no mercy for them because our determination and resolve is to flush them out," Malik said. "They have no room in Pakistan, I promise you."

Malik said the offensive against the militants in South Waziristan was no longer a matter of choice.

"It is not an issue of commitment, it is becoming a compulsion because there was an appeal from the local tribes that we should do the operation," he said.

About 28,000 troops have been put in place to take on an estimated 10,000 hard-core Taliban, army officials said earlier.

Investors in Pakistan's main stock market had been unperturbed by the weekend of violence outside the army's headquarters but the Monday blast led to selling, dealers said.

"The market witnessed a correction due to security concerns across the country as there were three terrorist attacks in the previous four days which have hurt investor confidence," said Furqan Punjabi, analyst at Topline Securities Ltd.

The main index ended 126.07 points, or 1.29 percent, lower at 9,642.56.

Also Monday, security forces used aircraft and artillery to attack militants in the Bajaur region, about 250 km (150 miles) northeast of Waziristan, government officials in the region on the Afghan border said.

A paramilitary force official said 14 militants had been killed.

(Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony, Junaid Khan, Sahibzada Bahauddin, Hafiz Wazir, Faisal Aziz, Sahar Ahmed and Saeed Azhar and Sanjeev Miglani in Singapore; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

[bigron]

Pakistan Bombs Taliban Hideouts After Siege

Monday , October 12, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,564123,00.html


Pakistani army troops arrive to take positions following an attack by gunmen at the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

KHAR, Pakistan —

Pakistani fighter jets bombed suspected militant hide-outs Monday in a tribal region where the military had previously declared victory over the Taliban, killing 13 alleged extremists a day after the end of a deadly siege of the army's headquarters.

A series of attacks over the past week shows that the Taliban have rebounded and appear determined to shake the nation's resolve as the military plans for an offensive in South Waziristan, the insurgents' main stronghold along the Afghan border that has never been fully under the government's control.

SLIDESHOW: Pakistan Attacks:
http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/world/2009/10/09/deadly-blast-near-pakistan-market

Monday's airstrikes were in Bajur, a separate segment of the lawless northwestern tribal belt where Pakistan waged an intense six-month offensive that wound down in February. Resurgent violence in Bajur could distract the military as it tries to focus on South Waziristan.

"This was a heavy spell of bombing," said local government official Tahir Khan, who put the death toll at 13. Nine other alleged militants were wounded, he said.

Also in Bajur on Monday, a remote-controlled bomb went off in front of the political administration office in the main city of Khar, wounding a passer-by. In addition, militants were suspected of abducting 10 tribal elders after they attended a meeting aimed at forming a citizens' militia to protect against the Taliban, said Faramosh Khan, another local official.

The 22-hour weekend standoff at Pakistan's "Pentagon" in the city of Rawalpindi followed warnings from police as early as July that militants from western border areas were joining those in the central Punjab province in plans for a bold attack on army headquarters.

A team of 10 gunmen in fatigues launched the frontal assault on the very core of the nuclear-armed country's most powerful institution. The violence killed 20, including three hostages and nine militants, while 42 hostages were freed, the military said.

The suspected ringleader in the raid, known as Aqeel, also was believed to have orchestrated an ambush on Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team in Lahore this year. Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the militant's nickname, "Dr. Usman," derived from the time he spent as a guard at an army nursing school before he joined the insurgents.

The U.S. has long pushed Islamabad to take more action against Taliban and Al Qaeda militants, who are also blamed for attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and the army carried out a successful campaign against the militants in the northwestern Swat Valley in the spring.

But the army had been unwilling to go all-out in the lawless tribal areas along the border that serve as the Taliban's main refuge. Three offensives into South Waziristan since 2001 ended in failure, and the government signed peace deals with the militants.

In the wake of the seige in Rawalpindi, the government said it would not be deterred. The military launched two airstrikes Sunday evening on suspected militant targets in South Waziristan, killing at least five insurgents and ending a five-day lull in attacks there, intelligence officials said.

"We are going to attack the terrorists, the miscreants over there who are disturbing the state and damaging the peace," Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira said. "Wherever they will be, we will follow them. We will pursue them. We will take them to task."

Officials have warned that Taliban fighters close to the border, Punjabi militants spread out across the country and foreign Al Qaeda operatives were increasingly joining forces, dramatically increasing the dangers to Pakistan.

The weekend strike on army headquarters was a stunning finale to a week of attacks that highlighted the militants' ability to strike a range of targets.

On Monday of last week, a suicide bomber dressed as a paramilitary police officer blew himself up inside a heavily guarded U.N. aid agency in the heart of the capital, Islamabad. On Friday, a suspected militant detonated an explosives-laden car in the middle of a busy market in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 53 people.

[bigron]

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
14:05 Mecca time, 11:05 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/10/2009101343644984919.html
   
News Middle East 
 
Raid reveals Taliban's Punjab links  

 
More than a hundred Pakistani civilians have died in four attacks carried out in less than a week [AFP]



Officials say the latest deadly attacks reveal the extent to which the Pakistani Taliban is supported by ethnic Punjabi groups, in addition to the Pashto-speaking tribesmen of the northwestern border areas.

Four attacks in less than a week have claimed over 120 lives and include a 22-hour raid on the army's general headquarters just 16km from the capital, Islamabad.

The attacks show it is not only Pashtuns who are opposed to Islamabad's government as well as the Pakistani army and police force, according to representatives of Taliban.

Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility on Monday for that attack, saying "it was carried out by our Punjab unit".

"And we will continue to take revenge for our martyrs and will carry out more attacks, whether it's the GHQ [the army's general headquarters] or something bigger," he said.

And Major-General Athar Abbas confirmed that Muhammad Aqeel, also known as Dr Usman and a former member of the army medical corps, had led the attack on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Aqeel is an ethnic Punjabi.

Previous attacks

Aqeel is believed to have orchestrated an ambush on Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team in Lahore, a failed attempt to shoot down then-president Pervez Musharraf's jet with an anti-aircraft gun, and a suicide attack that killed the army surgeon-general in February 2008, according to Zulfikar Hameed, a police investigator.

Hameed says that Aqeel was recruited into Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Janghvi, armed groups based in the Punjab province.


In depth
http://english.aljazeera.net/mritems/Images//2009/6/24/200962472150239734_8.jpg
  Video: Security crisis in Pakistan 
  Video: Pakistan army HQ attacked
  Profile: Pakistan Taliban
  Witness: Pakistan in crisis
  Riz Khan: The battle for the soul of Pakistan

 
Jaish and Lashkar have long been blamed for attacks on Western targets in Pakistan, as well as on minority Shia populations.

Both groups are believed to have had links with Pakistan security agencies, which used their members to fight proxy wars in Afghanistan and India before 2001.

The Punjab connection is significant because ethnic Punjabis dominate the army and the major institutions of the Pakistani state, Shuja Nawaz, head of the South Asia Centre at the Atlantic Council in Washington, has been quoted as saying.

"Their involvement means that their break with the military and the [intelligence services] is now complete. The question is: Will the military have the capacity to take operations against them?" he told the Washington Post newspaper.

Monday's suicide bombing took place in Shangla, a Pashto-speaking area of the Swat valley region. The attacker was apparently targeting a military vehicle, but most of the victims were ordinary Pakistanis.

Deadliest assault

TV footage of the bombing showed vegetable stands with their wares spilled on the street, two-storey buildings with their fronts torn away and several wrecked cars.

The attack killed 45 people, including six security officers, and wounded dozens of others,  Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, said.


Deadly week
 October 12 - Suicide bomber targets security convoy in Shangla, near Swat valley, killing 45, including 35 civilians and six soldiers.
 October 10 - Fighters attack army GHQ in Rawalpindi. Commandos storm building and rescue 39 hostages. Nine suspected Taliban fighters, 11 soldiers and three hostages killed.
 October 9 - Suspected suicide car bomber kills 53 in Peshawar. About 100 people are wounded.
 October 5 - Suicide bomber dressed as paramilitary soldier attacks UN office in Islamabad, killing five staff members.

 
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but it was the deadliest attack in the region since the army claimed to have cleared the valley of Taliban in an offensive earlier this year.

While many anti-government fighters were killed or captured in the army offensive, others are believed to have gone to rural areas or neighbouring districts.

The Taliban have stepped up attacks in the past week as the military has been preparing to launch another major offensive on the border region of South Waziristan.

On October 5, a bomber blew himself up inside a heavily guarded UN aid agency in the capital, Islamabad, killing five staffers.

On Friday, an attacker detonated an explosives-laden car in the middle of a busy market in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 53 people.

The raid on army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi began on Saturday when 10 heavily armed fighters shot their way past the front gate.

They then seized more than 40 hostages and held them overnight in a building inside the vast compound. Commandos stormed the building on Sunday. The army said nine Taliban members and 14 other people were killed, mostly members of the security forces.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 

[bigron]

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
14:05 Mecca time, 11:05 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/10/2009101343644984919.html
   
News Middle East 
 
Raid reveals Taliban's Punjab links  

 
More than a hundred Pakistani civilians have died in four attacks carried out in less than a week [AFP]



Officials say the latest deadly attacks reveal the extent to which the Pakistani Taliban is supported by ethnic Punjabi groups, in addition to the Pashto-speaking tribesmen of the northwestern border areas.

Four attacks in less than a week have claimed over 120 lives and include a 22-hour raid on the army's general headquarters just 16km from the capital, Islamabad.

The attacks show it is not only Pashtuns who are opposed to Islamabad's government as well as the Pakistani army and police force, according to representatives of Taliban.

Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility on Monday for that attack, saying "it was carried out by our Punjab unit".

"And we will continue to take revenge for our martyrs and will carry out more attacks, whether it's the GHQ [the army's general headquarters] or something bigger," he said.

And Major-General Athar Abbas confirmed that Muhammad Aqeel, also known as Dr Usman and a former member of the army medical corps, had led the attack on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Aqeel is an ethnic Punjabi.

Previous attacks

Aqeel is believed to have orchestrated an ambush on Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team in Lahore, a failed attempt to shoot down then-president Pervez Musharraf's jet with an anti-aircraft gun, and a suicide attack that killed the army surgeon-general in February 2008, according to Zulfikar Hameed, a police investigator.

Hameed says that Aqeel was recruited into Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Janghvi, armed groups based in the Punjab province.


In depth
http://english.aljazeera.net/mritems/Images//2009/6/24/200962472150239734_8.jpg
  Video: Security crisis in Pakistan 
  Video: Pakistan army HQ attacked
  Profile: Pakistan Taliban
  Witness: Pakistan in crisis
  Riz Khan: The battle for the soul of Pakistan

 
Jaish and Lashkar have long been blamed for attacks on Western targets in Pakistan, as well as on minority Shia populations.

Both groups are believed to have had links with Pakistan security agencies, which used their members to fight proxy wars in Afghanistan and India before 2001.

The Punjab connection is significant because ethnic Punjabis dominate the army and the major institutions of the Pakistani state, Shuja Nawaz, head of the South Asia Centre at the Atlantic Council in Washington, has been quoted as saying.

"Their involvement means that their break with the military and the [intelligence services] is now complete. The question is: Will the military have the capacity to take operations against them?" he told the Washington Post newspaper.

Monday's suicide bombing took place in Shangla, a Pashto-speaking area of the Swat valley region. The attacker was apparently targeting a military vehicle, but most of the victims were ordinary Pakistanis.

Deadliest assault

TV footage of the bombing showed vegetable stands with their wares spilled on the street, two-storey buildings with their fronts torn away and several wrecked cars.

The attack killed 45 people, including six security officers, and wounded dozens of others,  Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, said.


Deadly week
 October 12 - Suicide bomber targets security convoy in Shangla, near Swat valley, killing 45, including 35 civilians and six soldiers.
 October 10 - Fighters attack army GHQ in Rawalpindi. Commandos storm building and rescue 39 hostages. Nine suspected Taliban fighters, 11 soldiers and three hostages killed.
 October 9 - Suspected suicide car bomber kills 53 in Peshawar. About 100 people are wounded.
 October 5 - Suicide bomber dressed as paramilitary soldier attacks UN office in Islamabad, killing five staff members.

 
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but it was the deadliest attack in the region since the army claimed to have cleared the valley of Taliban in an offensive earlier this year.

While many anti-government fighters were killed or captured in the army offensive, others are believed to have gone to rural areas or neighbouring districts.

The Taliban have stepped up attacks in the past week as the military has been preparing to launch another major offensive on the border region of South Waziristan.

On October 5, a bomber blew himself up inside a heavily guarded UN aid agency in the capital, Islamabad, killing five staffers.

On Friday, an attacker detonated an explosives-laden car in the middle of a busy market in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 53 people.

The raid on army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi began on Saturday when 10 heavily armed fighters shot their way past the front gate.

They then seized more than 40 hostages and held them overnight in a building inside the vast compound. Commandos stormed the building on Sunday. The army said nine Taliban members and 14 other people were killed, mostly members of the security forces.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 

[bigron]

In Pakistan, a Deadly Resurgence

Spate of Attacks Shows Taliban Waging 'a Real Kind of War'

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/12/AR2009101202941_pf.html


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 12 -- At summer's end, there were hints of optimism in the battle against Pakistan's Islamist insurgents. The military said it had routed the Taliban from the verdant Swat Valley. A CIA missile had killed the Pakistani Taliban's chief -- so shaking the group, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said, that his likely successor was killed in a duel for the top spot. Bombings slowed.

But that successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, is alive, a military spokesman said Monday. And as a spate of mass-casualty attacks during the past week has proven, so is the Taliban.

"They have been able to regroup, and they now feel confident to take on the Pakistani state in the cities," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a professor and security analyst in Lahore. "They want to demonstrate that they have the initiative in their hands, rather than Pakistani authorities. So it's a real kind of war."

As if to punctuate that point, the edge of the Swat Valley became the setting Monday for the fourth major attack in eight days. In a Shangla district market, an adolescent strapped with explosives detonated himself near an army convoy, killing 41 people and wounding dozens, military officials said.

The blast came two days after a stunning attack by militants on the armed forces' headquarters in Rawalpindi, which killed 23. A day before that, about 50 people died in a car bombing in Peshawar. Last Monday, a suicide bomber killed five people at an office of the United Nations.

The surge in attacks comes at a delicate time for Pakistan's civilian government, which is struggling to contain a public relations fiasco over conditions placed by Congress on a massive U.S. aid package. The legislation granting the aid exhorts Pakistan to do more to control its armed forces and to fight Islamist extremists -- stipulations that critics, including the military, view as micromanagement by the United States.

In a statement given to the Associated Press on Monday, a Taliban spokesman called the attack on the military headquarters a "first small effort, and a present to the Pakistani and American governments." He said it was vengeance for the killing of the group's leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in August.

As the Taliban has regrouped in recent months, the military became the obvious target, analysts said. The Swat Valley operation buoyed the military's image, and it has been vocal about a planned ground offensive in South Waziristan, a Taliban and al-Qaeda haven along the Afghan border. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said that "more than 80 percent" of recent attacks in Pakistan have been planned there.

The assault on the military headquarters also was planned there, he said. But he said the fighters who carried it out were from a Taliban-allied sect based in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland.

Punjabi militant groups have long existed, but in the past they were nurtured by intelligence agencies to focus their attacks on Pakistan's archrival, India. Their alliance with the Pashtun-dominated Taliban indicates they are now "up for hire," and represent yet another foe, military analyst Shuja Nawaz said.

"Their involvement means that their break with the military and the [intelligence services] is now complete," said Nawaz, head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "The question is: Will the military have the capacity to take operations against them?"

Previous military offensives in South Waziristan have failed, and the attack on the army headquarters -- which security forces had warned about, Pakistani newspapers reported -- raised doubts about the army's readiness.

But Abbas argued that the assault highlighted the capability of security forces, who prevented militants from venturing far into the compound and rescued 39 of 42 hostages. Military officials were "still judging the situation" in South Waziristan and waiting for the "right time," he said.

The United States has encouraged the offensive into the region, which it views as a hornet's nest of insurgents who focus their violent campaign both within Pakistan and beyond. U.S. officials may think Pakistan is not sufficiently concerned about extremism, one opposition politician said Monday, but the attacks of the past week should leave little doubt that the state knows it is vulnerable.

"If the power of bullets becomes the order in politics, we are all out of business," said Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League-N. "We only have to make sure we fight this war in the right way, and we don't make it look like an American war. It has to have local ownership."

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

[bigron]

South Asia
Oct 14, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ14Df01.html 
 
Kerry-Lugar bill a Catch-22 for Pakistan


By Zahid U Kramet

LAHORE - If, as advised by Bernd Debusmann in his Reuters column "Catch-22 and the long war in Afghanistan", the United States is in a quandary on the question a troop surge or a draw-down in Afghanistan, so too is Pakistan as it readies to launch its largest ever offensive against the Taliban on its side of the border in South Waziristan.

Debusmann's article describes Washington's dilemma as a Catch-22 situation in which, "You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state, and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban." Pakistan ponders, as Debusmann puts it, "Does war better serve to bring about peace, or will peace better serve to bring an end to war."

Beginning with US President Barack Obama's September pledge of economic assistance to Pakistan of $2.3 billion for the year 2008-2009 and a similar amount for fiscal 2009-2010, as both military and non-military aid, the US has since moved on to tripling non-military aid by way of the Kerry-Lugar bill - drafted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John F Kerry and ranking Republican Richard Lugar - which authorizes a grant of $1.5 billion annually over the next five years.

The problem is that the conditions attached have rubbed Pakistan the wrong way and produced negative reactions, particularly in the print media, where some of the country's leading columnists berate the bill on the "sovereignty" factor. As do legislators sitting on the opposition benches and political figures outside, for the same reason.

Of the columnists, the influential Ayaz Amir, who is also an opposition legislator, takes the "conditionalities" to the bill as grossly demeaning. In his weekly The News feature under "Kerry-Lugar: bill or document of surrender", he opines, "A convicted rapist out on parole would be required to give fewer assurances of good conduct."

Fellow columnist, but one of a conspicuous Islamic bent, Dr Muzaffar Iqbal, writing in the same daily on the same day under the heading "Turning Pakistan into a client state", sees Pakistan reduced to insignificant status with the acceptance of the aid bill, and the humiliation of Pakistan as it emerges as an American "satellite ... puppet ... neo-colony".

However, it is this daily's third regular Friday contributor, former senator Shafqat Mahmood, who hits the nail squarely on the head. In an article titled "Are perceptions of instability real?", he contends that there is an "ideological difference within the power establishment regarding relations with the United States and India", and that "the sniping on the Kerry-Lugar bill" is "an example of this".

The potent part of "power establishment" to which Mahmood refers is Pakistan's military bureaucracy, which has directly or indirectly ruled the country for most of its 62 years of existence. It can neither be expected to easily relinquish voice in national affairs, nor ever find true faith in the democratic dispensation of the past, the author infers.

With the fires of emotion then fanned on the "sovereignty question" also falling on deaf ears, it would be such rational reckonings as those posted in the same paper by veteran columnist Mir Jamilur Rehman who reminds, "Sovereignty denotes that the country is free and independent ... However, a country which is submerged up to its neck in debt ... cannot be 100% sovereign. Nor can it dictate terms entirely to its own liking."

This is a view shared by the incumbent Pakistan People's Party government, with Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira pointing to the precarious economic position Pakistan is in. But Kaira lays out battle lines when he draws attention to two of the bill's stipulations: one, that the military budget must be merged with the national budget, and two, that there should be no more military intervention in political and judicial matters.

Constitutionally valid, these qualifying clauses depend on the depth of the US resolve to sponsor democracy. For the moment, it seems the US stands committed to pursuing the democratic path, with the Obama administration stipulating, "It's either the Kerry-Lugar civilian aid, or no aid for the military."

But, here's Catch-22 again: whether to align with the powerful military to combat the militancy or take the principled stand in support of a weak democracy?

The latter option is a long shot. The military is too well entrenched. This was amply demonstrated at the conclusion of the Pakistan Corps Commanders meeting, when the Inter Service Public Relations office issued notice that the armed forces had serious reservations on the conditions laid down in the Kerry-Lugar legislation, which they saw as an offensive piece of legislation directed against Pakistan's armed forces.

This message was reportedly conveyed in strong terms to the commander of the US forces, General Stanley McChrystal, when he met Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, a day earlier at Pakistan's military headquarters. But stronger still, was the official communique which read, "The terms set in the Kerry-Lugar bill on the national security interests of Pakistan are insulting and are unacceptable in their present form."

However, as much as the military might protest the bill's conditions as interference in Pakistan's internal affairs, it is well aware that the country's economy is in dire need of a boost, and has thus given no indication of rejecting it outright. Instead, it has bounced the ball back into the civilian court, admitting that the final verdict must come from parliament, where pertinently, a significant number of legislators subscribe to the military's world view.

Where it goes from here is anybody's guess. With the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration's first focus, and the need for Pakistan's military to stand in support, the chances of it being sidelined are remote. And, while it may be generally acknowledged in civilian circles that the army has too often overstepped its mandate, the fact remains that few, if any, do not recognize it as Pakistan's sheet anchor. The language in the Kerry-Lugar legislation denies that.

As things come to a head with the launch of the military operations in South Waziristan looming, Pakistan's National Assembly has gone into a huddle to debate the best course of action. The press preamble suggests it could boil down to debate for debate's sake, but there are some signs that the opposition will avail the opportunity to press for mid-term elections, which could conceivably bring a new and soured face to US-Pakistan relations.

To obviate this, Obama would need to remove the offending clauses of the legislation (acknowledged by US ambassador Anne Patterson as badly drafted) and sign on the dotted line of a revised bill reported to be lying on his table, without further delay. And then present the bill as a "take it or leave it" option. The chances are that Pakistan will take it, irrespective of the outcome of the parliamentary debate in motion.

Zahid U Kramet, a Lahore-based political analyst specializing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, is the founder of the research and analysis website the Asia Despatch.
 
 
 

[bigron]

South Asia
Oct 15, 2009 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ15Df03.html 
 
AN ATol EXCLUSIVE

Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

                                     

ANGORADA, South Waziristan, at the crossroads with Afghanistan - A high-level meeting on October 9 at the presidential palace between Pakistan's civil and military leaders endorsed a military operation against the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the South Waziristan tribal area - termed by analysts as the mother of all regional conflicts.

At the same time, al-Qaeda is implementing its game plan in the South Asian war theater as a part of its broader campaign against American global hegemony that began with the attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001.

Al-Qaeda's target remains the United States and its allies, such as Europe, Israel and India, and it does not envisage diluting this strategy by embracing Muslim resistances on narrow parameters. In this context, militant activity in Pakistan is seen as a complexity rather than as a part of al-Qaeda's strategy.

Militants have been particularly active over the past few days. Last Thursday, a car loaded with explosives rammed into the compound wall of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, killing at least 17 people. Then on Saturday, militants staged an audacious attack on the the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi, the twin city of the capital, Islamabad. On Monday, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in market town in the Swat Valley region, killing 41 people and injuring 45 others.

Pakistan is at critical juncture, with the armed forces gathered in their largest-ever numbers (almost a corps, as many as 60,000 troops) around South Waziristan to flush out the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban (PTT), al-Qaeda and their allies from the Pakistani tribal areas.

 

In these tense times, Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda leader who, according to American intelligence is al-Qaeda's head of military operations and whose death they wrongly confirmed in a recent US Predator drone attack in North Waziristan, spoke to Asia Times Online.

He invited this correspondent to a secret hideout in the South Waziristan-Afghanistan border area, where drones regularly fly overhead.

This is Ilyas' first-ever media interaction since he joined al-Qaeda in 2005. He is a veteran commander from the struggle with India over divided Kashmir.

In the past few months, the militants have appeared to be on the back foot. A number of leading figures have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan, including Osama al-Kini, a Kenyan national and al-Qaeda's external operations chief; Khalid Habib, the commander of the Lashkar al-Zil or the Shadow Army, al-Qaeda's fighting force; Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; PTT leader Baitullah Mehsud, and several others.

The Pakistani Taliban have also been given a bloody nose by the military in tribal and urban areas. Negotiations were also underway to strike peace deals with some Taliban commanders in various Afghan provinces.

Then last week at least nine US troops along with several dozen Afghan National Army (ANA) personnel were killed in a raid on an outpost in Nuristan province, besides the abduction of over 30 ANA officers and soldiers by the Taliban.

This attack was complemented by a series of other attacks on North Atlantic Treaty Organization bases across the southeastern provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika, forcing top US General Stanley McChrystal to pull out all troops from isolated posts in remote areas in these provinces to relocate them in population centers.

This created immense space for the Taliban to operate freely, meaning that if Pakistan conducted operations in South Waziristan, the militants could easily move across the border to find sanctuary.

The attacks over the past few days have also shown that the militants are still capable of striking important targets almost at will. They also mean a redesign of the war theater in which Pakistan will have to relocate its troops from the eastern front (India) to the western front (Afghanistan), as the Taliban are now the number one enemy.

Washington plans to send at least another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan while India will complement these efforts with its intelligence and military expertise against the common enemy - Muslim militant groups.

The upcoming battle
Ilyas Kashmiri gave his views on what the upcoming battle will look like, what its targets will be, and how it will impact the West in relation to the destabilization of a Muslim state such as Pakistan.

The contact with Asia Times Online began with a call from the militants on October 6, inviting this correspondent to the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. No reason was given. The next day, I traveled to Mir Ali, a town that has been heavily attacked by drones over the past year. After over seven hours of continuous traveling, I was received by a group of armed men who transferred me to a house belonging to a local tribesman.

"The commander [Ilyas Kashmiri] is alive. You know that the commander has never spoken to the media before, but since everybody is sure of his death as a result of a drone attack [in September], al-Qaeda's shura [council] decided to make a denial of this news through an interview by him to an independent newspaper, and therefore the shura agreed on you," a person whom I knew as the key person in Ilyas' famous 313 Brigade told me as soon as I reached the safe house. The brigade, a collection of jihadi groups, fought for many years against India in India-administered Kashmir.

"You will have to stay in this room until we inform you of the next plan. You can hear the voices of drones above your head, therefore you will not leave the room. The area is full of Taliban, but also of informers whose information on the presence of strangers in a house could lead to a drone attack," the man said.

The next day, I was transferred to another house at an unknown location, about three hours away. During this time I was accompanied at all times by an armed escort. I was not allowed to speak to them, and they could not communicate with me. This is al-Qaeda's internal world. Finally, in the early morning of October 9, a few armed men arrived in a white car.

"Please leave all your electronic gadgets here. No cell phone, no camera, nothing. We will provide you pen and paper to write the interview," I was instructed. After several hours of a very uncomfortable journey, passing down muddy tracks and through mountain passes, we reached a room where Ilyas was supposed to meet us.

After a couple of hours, suddenly the sound of a powerful vehicle broke the silence. My escort and the men already present in the room rapidly took up positions. They all wore bullet pouches and carried AK-47s.

Ilyas made his entrance. He cut a striking figure, about six feet tall (1.83 meters), wearing a cream-colored turban and white qameez shalwar (traditional shirt and pants), carrying an AK-47 on his shoulder and a wooden stick in one hand, and flanked by commandos of his famous diehard 313 Brigade.

Ilyas now sports a long white beard dyed with reddish henna. At the age of 45 he remains strongly built, although he carries the scars of war - he has lost an eye and an index figure. When we shook hands, his grip was powerful.

The host immediately served lunch, and we sat on the floor to eat.
"So, you have survived a third drone strike ... why is the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] sniffing around you so much? I asked.

The question was somewhat rhetorical. He is one of the most high-profile al-Qaeda commanders, with a Pakistani bounty of 50 million rupees (US$600,000) on his head. His position is defined differently by various intelligence and media organizations. Some say he is commander-in-chief of al-Qaeda's global operations, while others say he is chief of al-Qaeda's military wing.

If today al-Qaeda is divided into three spheres, Osama bin Laden is undoubtedly the symbol of the movement and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri defines al-Qaeda's ideology and broader strategic vision. Ilyas, with his unmatched guerrilla expertise, turns the strategic vision into reality, provides the resources and gets targets achieved, but he chooses to remain in the background and very low key.

His bases and activities have always remained shrouded in secrecy. However, the arrest of five of his men in Pakistan earlier this year and their subsequent grilling helped lift the veil. Their information resulted in CIA drone strikes against him, the first in May and then again on September 7, when he was pronounced dead by Pakistani intelligence, and finally on September 14, after which the CIA said he was dead and called it a great success in the "war on terror".

"They are right in their pursuit. They know their enemy well. They know what I am really up to," Ilyas proudly replied.

Born in Bimbur (old Mirpur) in the Samhani Valley of Pakistan-administered Kashmir on February 10, 1964, Ilyas passed the first year of a mass communication degree at Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. He did not continue due to his heavy involvement in jihadi activities.

The Kashmir Freedom Movement was his first exposure in the field of militancy, then the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami (HUJI) and ultimately his legendary 313 Brigade. This grew into the most powerful group in South Asia and its network is strongly knitted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, India, Nepal and Bangladesh. According to some CIA dispatches, the footprints of 313 Brigade are now in Europe and capable of the type of attack that saw a handful of militants terrorize the Indian city of Mumbai last November.

Little is documented of Ilyas' life, and what has been reported is often contradictory. However, he is invariably described, certainly by world intelligence agencies, as the most effective, dangerous and successful guerrilla leader in the world.

He left the Kashmir region in 2005 after his second release from detention by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and headed for North Waziristan. He had previously been arrested by Indian forces, but he broke out of jail and escaped. He was then detained by the ISI as the suspected mastermind of an attack on then-president Pervez Musharraf, in 2003, but was cleared and released. The ISI then picked Ilyas up again in 2005 after he refused to close down his operations in Kashmir.

His relocation to the troubled border areas sent a chill down spines in Washington as they realized that with his vast experience, he could turn unsophisticated battle patterns in Afghanistan into audacious modern guerrilla warfare.

Ilyas' track record spoke for itself. In 1994, he launched the al-Hadid operation in the Indian capital, New Delhi, to get some of his jihadi comrades released. His group of 25 people included Sheikh Omar Saeed (the abductor of US reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002) as his deputy. The group abducted several foreigners, including American, Israeli and British tourists and took them to Ghaziabad near Delhi. They then demanded that the Indian authorities release their colleagues, but instead they attacked the hideout. Sheikh Omar was injured and arrested. (He was later released in a swap for the passengers of a hijacked Indian aircraft). Ilyas escaped unhurt.

On February 25, 2000, the Indian army killed 14 civilians in Lonjot village in Pakistan-administered Kashmir after commandos had crossed the Line of Control (LoC) that separates the two Kashmirs. They returned to the Indian side with abducted Pakistani girls, and threw the severed heads of three of them at Pakistani soldiers.

The very next day, Ilyas conducted a guerilla operation against the Indian army in Nakyal sector after crossing the LoC with 25 fighters of 313 Brigade. They kidnapped an Indian army officer who was later beheaded - his head was paraded in the bazaars of Kotli back in Pakistani territory.

However, the most significant operation of Ilyas was in Aknor cantonment in Indian-administered Kashmir against the Indian armed forces following the massacre of Muslims in the Indian city of Gujarat in 2002. In cleverly planned attacks involving 313 Brigade divided into two groups, Indian generals, brigadiers and other senior officials were lured to the scene of the first attack. Two generals were injured (the Pakistan army could not injure a single Indian general in three wars) and several brigadiers and colonels were killed. This was one of the most telling setbacks for India in the long-running Kashmiri insurgency.

Despite what some reports claim, Ilyas was never a part of Pakistan's special forces, nor even of the army. Nearly 30 years ago when he joined the Afghan jihad against the Soviets from the platform of the HUJI, he developed expertise in guerrilla warfare and explosives.

Within just months of arriving in the Afghan war theater in 2005, Kashmiri redefined the Taliban-led insurgency based on legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap's three-pronged guerrilla warfare strategy. For the Taliban, the main emphasis was to be placed on cutting NATO's supply lines from all four sides of Afghanistan, and carrying out special operations similar to the Mumbai attack in Afghanistan.

Over the years, Ilyas has deliberately adopted a low key presence in the militants' hierarchy. His attacks are just the opposite, although he never issues statements or claims responsibility for any operation.

His 313 Brigade is believed to be the main catalyst of high-profile operations such as the one in Mumbai and others in Afghanistan, as well as al-Qaeda's operations in Somalia and to some extent in Iraq.

"Do you believe that the upcoming South Waziristan operation will be the 'mother of all operations' in the region, as some analysts say," I asked after we had finished lunch and I was alone with Ilyas and his trusted confidant.

"I don't know how to play with words during an interview," Ilyas responded. "I have always been a field commander and I know the language of battlefields. I will try to answer your questions in the language I am familiar with. (Ilyas spoke mostly in Urdu, mixed with some Punjabi.)

"Saleem! I will draw your attention to the basics of the present war theater and use that to explain the whole strategy of the upcoming battles. Those who planned this battle actually aimed to bring the world's biggest Satan [US] and its allies into this trap and swamp [Afghanistan]. Afghanistan is a unique place in the world where the hunter has all sorts of traps to choose from.

"It might be deserts, rivers, mountains and the urban centers as well. This was the thinking of the planners of this war who were sick and tired of the great Satan's global intrigues and they aim for its demise to make this world a place of peace and justice. However, the great Satan was full of arrogance of its superiority and thought of Afghans as helpless statues who would be hit from all four sides by its war machines, and they would not have the power and capacity to retaliate.

"This was the illusion on which a great alliance of world powers came to Afghanistan, but due to their misplaced conceptions they gradually became trapped in Afghanistan. Today, NATO does not have any significance or relevance. They have lost the war in Afghanistan. Now, when they realized their defeat, they developed an emphasis that this entire battle is being fought from outside of Afghanistan, that is, the two Waziristans. To me, this military thesis is a mirage which has created a complex situation in the region and created reactions and counter-reactions. I would not like to go into the details, to me that was nothing but deviation. As a military commander, the reality is that the trap of Afghanistan is successful and the basic military targets on the ground have been achieved," Ilyas said.

I responded that the relocation of 313 Brigade from Kashmir was itself proof that foreign hands were involved in Afghanistan.

"The entire basis of your argument is wrong, that this war is being fought from outside of Afghanistan. This is just an out-of-context understanding of the whole situation. If you discuss myself and 313 Brigade, I decided to join the Afghan resistance as an individual and I had quite a reason for that. Everybody knows that only a decade ago I was fighting a war of liberation for my homeland Kashmir.

"However, I realized that decades of armed and political struggles could not help to inch forward a resolution of this issue. Nevertheless, East Timor's issue was resolved without losing much time. Why? Because the entire game was in the hands of the great Satan, the USA. Organs like the UN and countries like India and Israel were simply the extension of its resources and that's why there was a failure to resolve the Palestinian issue, the Kashmir issue and the plight of Afghanistan.

"So I and many people all across the world realized that analyzing the situation in any narrow regional political perspective was an incorrect approach. This is a different ball game altogether for which a unified strategy is compulsory. The defeat of American global hegemony is a must if I want the liberation of my homeland Kashmir, and therefore it provided the reasoning for my presence in this war theater.

Ilyas continued, "When I came here I found my step justified; how the world regional powers operate under the umbrella of the great Satan and how they are supportive of its great plans. This can be seen here in Afghanistan." He added that al-Qaeda's regional war strategy, in which they have hit Indian targets, is actually to chop off American strength.

"The RAW [India's Research and Analysis Wing] has detachment command centers in the Afghan provinces of Kunar, Jalalabad, Khost, Argun, Helmand and Kandahar. The cover operations are road construction companies. For instance, the road construction contract from Khost city to the Tanai tribe area is handled by a contractor who is actually a current Indian army colonel. In Gardez, telecommunication companies are the cover for Indian intelligence operations. Mostly, their men operate with Muslim names, but actually the employees are Hindus."

"So should the world expect more Mumbai-like attacks?" I asked.

"That was nothing compared to what has already been planned for the future," Ilyas replied.

"Even against Israel and the USA?" I asked.

"Saleem, I am not a traditional jihadi cleric who is involved in sloganeering. As a military commander, I would say every target has a specific time and reasons, and the responses will be forthcoming accordingly," Ilyas said.

As I noted Kashmiri's answers, I thought of how several years back he was the darling of the Pakistani armed forces, their pride. The highest military officers were proud to meet him at his base in Kashmir, they spent time with him and listened to the legends of his war games. Today, I had a different person in front of me - a man condemned as a terrorist by the Pakistani military establishment and their biggest wish is his death.

"What impressed you to join al-Qaeda?" I asked.

"We were both victims of the same tyrant. Today, the entire Muslim world is sick of Americans and that's why they are agreeing with Sheikh Osama. If all of the Muslim world is asked to elect their leader, their choice would be either [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar or Sheikh Osama," Ilyas said.

"If it is so, why are a section of militants bent on war on Muslim states like Pakistan? Do you think this is correct?"

"Our battle cannot be against Muslims and believers. As I have mentioned earlier, what is happening at the moment in the Muslim world is a complexity due to American power games which have resulted into reactions and counter-reactions. This is a totally different debate and might deviate me from the real topic. The real game is the fight against the great Satan and its adherents," Ilyas said.

"What turned you from the most-beloved friend to the most-hated foe in the eyes of the Pakistani military establishment?" I asked.

"Pakistan is my beloved country and the people who live there are our brothers, sisters and relatives. I cannot even think of going against its interests. It was never the Pakistan army that was against me, but certain elements who branded me as an enemy to cover up their weaknesses and to appease their masters," Ilyas said.

"What is 313 Brigade?" I asked.

"I cannot tell you, except war is all tactics and this is all 313 Brigade is about; reading the enemy's mind and reacting accordingly. The world thought that Prophet Mohammad only left women behind. They forgot there were real men also who did not know what defeat was all about. The world is only familiar with those so-called Muslims who only follow the direction of the air and who don't have their own will. They do not have their own minds or dimensions of their own. The world has yet to see real Muslims. They have so far only seen Osama and Mullah Omar, while there are thousands of others. Wolves only respect a lion's iron slap; lions do not impress with the logic of a sheep," Ilyas said.

As the shadows of darkness emerged, the conversation ended. The next day, a curfew was to be imposed in North Waziristan in preparation for the grand operation in the region, and I had to leave the area. Ilyas also needed to move to a new destination, as he does on a regular basis to hide from the eyes of Predator drones.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

 
 
 

[bigron]

   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Al-Qaeda number two lashes out at Pakistani military


South Asia News
Oct 13, 2009, 14:00 GMT
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/southasia/news/article_1506815.php/Al-Qaeda-number-two-lashes-out-at-Pakistani-military


   Islamabad - The Pakistan Army has become a tool in the hands of the 'crusaders' to save American and NATO troops from certain defeat in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda's second-in-command said in a new video message on Tuesday.

   'At this moment Pakistani forces are playing the central role in this crusade that has been imposed on Islam and Muslims,' Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a 26-minute video posted on Muslim extremist websites.

   'And this [Pakistan Army] has completely become a tool for the crusaders against its own public, neighbouring countries and the Islamic world,' he added in the message that was recorded some time between July 23 and August 21.

   The message was posted only on Tuesday, three days after 10 terrorists with suspected links with al-Qaeda and Taliban raided Pakistan's military headquarters and held more than 40 people hostage for around 22 hours.

   In a pre-dawn raid Sunday, Pakistani commandos ended the hostage drama, but the attack and following siege left 23 people dead. Among them were 11 soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel and a brigadier, three hostages and nine attackers.

   Al-Zawahiri criticized Pakistan's military over a planned offensive in the tribal South Waziristan district, a rugged and mountainous region which al-Qaeda and Taliban militants use to plan and launch cross-border attacks on western forces in Afghanistan.

   'The only objective of this plan is to save American and allied forces from the humiliation of defeat,' he said. '

   'First of all this plan was agreed upon in Washington, [Pakistan's army chief General Ishfaq Parvez] Kayani later presented in Brussels for approval,' al-Zawahiri alleged.

   He warned that the offensive was destined to fail. 'These puppets of the crusaders, these Pakistani forces, have named this operation 'Path to Deliverance,' but by the grace of God it will cause death and destruction for them.'

   Pakistani forces have carried out several offensives against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters across militancy-plagued north-western Pakistan over the last year, putting pressure on the militants who once enjoyed the state's support.

   In retaliation, the militants repeatedly attacked civilians and military targets. On Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up near a security convoy in Shangla district in north-western Pakistan, killing seven soldiers and 38 civilians.

   Such actrocities have eroded public support for al-Qaeda and Taliban in Pakistan - an Islamic country of more than 160 million people.

   In his latest message al-Zawahiri blamed 'secular' Pakistani rulers and the 'apostate' military for carrying out 'false propaganda' against them and urged Pakistani Muslims to support mujahidin with their lives, property, and information

[bigron]

Pakistan police targeted as attacks kill 24

Thu Oct 15, 2009 4:54am EDT
By Mubasher Bukhari
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE59E0GP20091015?feedType=nl&feedName=usmorningdigest


Policemen take their positions near the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) after it was attacked by gunmen in Lahore on October 15, 2009. Militants launched a string of attacks on police in Lahore in the Pakistani heartland and in the troubled northwest on Thursday, killing 24 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died. An exchange of gunfire was continuing at an elite police academy in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, where two policemen were killed.

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - Militants launched a string of attacks on police in Lahore in the Pakistani heartland and in the troubled northwest on Thursday, killing 24 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died.

The attacks in Lahore, Punjab province capital and near the border with India, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border.

The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan's most economically important province and the country's traditional seat of power.

"First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.

The government says most attacks in the country are plotted in South Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under U.S. pressure to crack down on Islamic militancy as President Barack Obama considers a boost in troop numbers fighting in neighboring Afghanistan.

Gunmen attacked three police centers in Lahore.

Seven people, including one gunman, were killed at a regional headquarters of the police's Federal Investigation Agency. A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March last year killing 21 people.

Gunmen also attacked two police training centers in Lahore, one a training school attacked this year and the other an elite police academy on the city outskirts.

Six policemen and four gunmen were killed at the Manawa training center, said city police chief, Pervez Rathore. Three of the black-clad attackers blew themselves up, he said.

Two policemen and at least five gunmen were killed at the academy and media had reported hostages taken.

Several hours after the attacks began, police said all three centers had been cleared.

"There is no hostage situation. We have cleared the entire elite center," senior police official Chaudhry Shafiq told reporters.

The attacks in Lahore spread fear and sirens from police and other emergency vehicles wailed over the city.

The escalating violence has unnerved investors in Pakistani stocks, but on Thursday the main index was 0.46 percent higher at 9,849.58 at 0822 GMT.

"The market is sort of used to terror attacks," said Mohammed Sohail, chief executive at brokers Topline Securities.

"These high-profile targets are a concern, but investors are optimistic that eventually the Waziristan operation will take place and the terrorists will be attacked."

DRONE KILLS FOUR

Shortly before the attacks in Lahore, a suicide car bomber set off his explosives outside a police station in Kohat killing 10 people, police and military officials said.

Pakistan's government has said a ground offensive against an estimated 10,000 hard core Taliban is imminent in South Waziristan.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday's violence.

The Taliban claimed the brazen assault on the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi and some other attacks and vowed more in revenge for the killing of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in August.

The government in June ordered the army to launch an offensive in South Waziristan. Since then the military has been conducting air and artillery strikes to soften up militant defenses.

The government says the assault is imminent but it will be up to the army to decide when to send in ground troops.

Separately, a U.S. drone aircraft fired two missiles at a house in the North Waziristan region, killing four Afghan Taliban militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The owner of the house, 3 km (2 miles) north of Miranshah, North Waziristan's main town, belonged to an Afghan faction led by veteran militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose men attack foreign forces in eastern Afghanistan.

The United States, struggling with an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and frustrated with Pakistan's failure to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries on its side of the border, stepped up attacks by its drones in September last year.

Hundreds of people, most of them militants but including some civilians, have been killed.

[bigron]

SCENARIOS: Can things get any worse for Pakistan?

Thu Oct 15, 2009 2:26am EDT
By Andrew Marshall, Asia Political Risk Correspondent
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE59E0SL20091015

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Pakistan's military is gearing up for an offensive against Taliban strongholds in South Waziristan, following a week of violence in which militants killed more than 100 people and stormed the army's headquarters.

On Thursday alone, a suicide car bomber set off his explosives outside a police station in the northwestern town of Kohat killing 10 people, gunmen opened fire outside a police agency office in the eastern city of Lahore and a suspected U.S. drone aircraft fired two missiles at a house in North Waziristan.

Following is a summary of the likely scenarios in Pakistan's conflict against Islamic militants:

PROLONGED STALEMATE AND LONG-TERM INSECURITY

The overwhelming likelihood, analysts say, is that Pakistan remains locked in a stalemate for months or years, with militants able to launch frequent destabilizing attacks but no real risk that state control will crumble and Islamists will seize power.

The planned Waziristan offensive is likely to begin soon.

"The military has been hesitant to do this because of complex geopolitical considerations and the difficult operational environment in the area -- the military has carried out three unsuccessful operations in South Waziristan previously," said Eurasia Group analyst Maria Kuusisto.

"Now, Rawalpindi does not have any other option but to pursue the operation."

But the militants fighting the Pakistani state are a loose alliance of several groups, including Islamists in Punjab who are playing an increasingly important role. Even military success in South Waziristan will do little to neutralize the overall threat.

Equally, however, the militants have no prospect of dealing a knock-out blow against the Pakistani state. Even if they expand the areas under their control, or manage to assassinate key political leaders, they cannot score a military victory.

So the likely outcome is prolonged deadlock. This has already been priced in by markets, which show little reaction to individual attacks. The damage to long-term investment and Pakistan's risk profile has already been done.

MILITARY STEPS UP EFFORTS TO CRUSH MILITANTS

Pakistan's military fostered the birth of the Taliban in Afghanistan and has shown reluctance to launch a determined effort to crush the militants, instead seeking to keep them contained in tribal areas and focused on external enemies.

The audacious attack on the military's headquarters in Rawalpindi may well spur the military to take a tougher line.

"We've seen an unprecedented degree of support among Pakistanis for military action against militants this year," said Claudine Fry, Pakistan analyst at Control Risks in London. "This could be an opportunity for civilian and military authorities to push hard against the militants."

But given the nature of asymmetric warfare, the military has little prospect of significantly reducing the capacity of militants to launch destabilizing attacks. Markets would welcome a sustained military drive against the Taliban but Pakistan's risk profile would not change greatly in the short-run.

ATTACK ON PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR ASSETS

One risk scenario that worries policymakers and analysts is that militants manage to penetrate one of Pakistan's nuclear weapons sites, and possibly steal some fissile material that could be used to construct a "dirty bomb" -- a conventional bomb that also spreads radioactive material over a wide area.

This would represent a serious escalation that could spread panic in Pakistan and also lead to a confrontation with the United States and its allies over how to keep nuclear material out of the hands of al Qaeda and its allies.

Security analysts say that Pakistan's nuclear facilities are extremely well defended, and the main risk is not of a militant assault but rather that sympathetic workers inside a nuclear facility manage to smuggle out some fissile material.

The weekend's attack on the army's headquarters again raised questions about the military's ability to prevent attacks. But analysts say the military managed to deal with the incident well.

"The question is whether the government has sufficient security practices in place," geopolitical and security analysis firm STRAFOR said in a commentary on the attack.

"In this case, it appears that it did. Despite losses, the layers of security absorbed the attack and held. A perimeter was established around the building in which the hostages were confined, and elite troops trained in hostage rescue operations were quickly brought to bear in an effective rescue attempt."

INSTABILITY FUELS ANOTHER CONFRONTATION WITH INDIA

A second risk scenario is that Pakistan's government and military, facing prolonged instability and eager to neutralize the internal threat from militants, fall back on the old strategy of trying to export unrest. In a divided and unstable country, animosity toward India is one of the few unifying factors.

Pakistan's government has shown eagerness to improve relations with India, but the ruling coalition is weak, and several militant groups are eager to strike again in India.

Pakistani authorities may decide that renewed confrontation is a price worth paying to keep a lid on internal unrest.

If India suffers more attacks like the militant assault on Mumbai last November, and if Pakistan is seen as failing to prevent such attacks, cross-border tensions would spiral and markets across the region would suffer.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)