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

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Anti-US rallies held in Pakistan

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:06:57 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=114260&sectionid=351020401

 
Anti-US rallies were held in the major cities of Pakistan on Sunday.


Thousands of supporters of Pakistan's largest religious party have held anti-US rallies in major cities across the country.

Addressing the crowd at the 'Go America Go' rally in Rawalpindi on Sunday, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) leader Syed Munawar Hassan said the US and its allies were pursuing a military agenda in the region, a Press TV correspondent reported.

He went on to say that the US military operations are undermining Pakistan's sovereignty.

Hundreds of people, many of them civilians, have been killed since 2006 in CIA-operated drone strikes targeting militants in Pakistan.

The demonstrators demanded that the Pakistani government keep a strict eye on Blackwater/Xe and other 'US terrorists' operating in the country.

The ralliers said that the US is trying to create a state of anarchy in the South Asian country in order to provide a pretext to take away its nuclear assets.

JI is running an anti-US campaign and has staged several rallies across the country's major cities over the past month.

Pakistan has experienced a wave of violence over the past two years in which nearly 3,000 people have been killed in bomb attacks and other terrorist operations across the country.

JR/SS/HGL

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Pakistan’s Political Turmoil Threatens Obama’s Strategy

With Zardari Govt Struggling to Hang On, Convincing
Them to Fight More Wars Becomes All the Harder

by Jason Ditz, December 20, 2009
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/20/pakistans-political-turmoil-threatens-obamas-strategy/

President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy of December depends, much as his virtually identical new Afghanistan strategy of March, on convincing the Pakistani government to commit ever increasing numbers of soldiers to its northern border.

And while this hasn’t exactly worked to begin with, they have convinced Pakistan to commit 200,000 troops to fighting what have so far been fruitless conflicts. Even this seems to be threatened by the latest Pakistani government crisis.

With the loss of immunity to corruption charges, President Zardari’s ruling faction is fading fast. Their already tenuous credibility is shot, and top officials are facing indictment.

While Zardari’s determination to fight for his office will likely keep him nominally in power for awhile, his ability to order the military into new wars is very much in doubt. President Obama’s demands to attack Balochistan, North Waziristan, etc, will likely seem like a low priority, if Zardari is able to push them through at all.

Which is yet another flaw in President Obama’s strategy, as any plan that rested on the assumption Pakistan would maintain a stable civilian government for more than a few years ignores the realities of the region. Of course, this flaw is secondary to the fact that repeated escalations simply haven’t worked in the past, for the US or anyone else, when fighting in Afghanistan.

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Secret US raids into Pakistan disclosed
 
 
22/12/2009 10:57:00 AM GMT   
 
 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Secret-US-raids-into-Pakistan-disclosed.html

 
A former NATO officer reveals clandestine US incursions into Pakistan as part of a secret war in the northwestern tribal region regularly hit by CIA drone attacks.

American special forces conducted multiple illegal raids into Pakistan's tribal areas, which were never declared to the Pakistani government, the unnamed officer told the Guardian.

The incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involving helicopter-borne elite soldiers crossing the border in the night.

"The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," he said.

The revelation comes amid growing anger in Pakistan against the CIA-led drone program that, according to local media, has killed many civilians in the lawless tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan, due to see an additional infiltration of 30,000 American soldiers shortly.

The US publicly acknowledged only one of the raids by its special forces in September 2008, prompting strong condemnation from Pakistan's foreign office, which described it as "a grave provocation." The military also threatened retaliatory action.

But the ex-NATO officer said that was the fourth raid of previous years, adding one of them was to rescue a crashed Predator drone because they did not trust Pakistani forces.

Washington has recently sent several senior officials to Islamabad to ask Pakistani officials for action against alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants in North Waziristan, and an expansion of CIA drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.

But Pakistan's intelligence officials reject such requests and accuse the US of "scapegoating" Pakistan for its own failures in Afghanistan.
Source: Press TV
 

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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
15:21 Mecca time, 12:21 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/12/20091222715298911.html

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths in Peshawar press club blast 

 
The force of the blast blew out the windows of the press club and damaged vehicles nearby [EPA] 

 
Three people have been killed and several others injured after a suicide bomber attacked a club for journalists in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar.

The attacker blew himself up on Tuesday when stopped by police, an official said.

"It was a suicide attack. The bomber wanted to get into the Press club and when our police guard stopped him he blew himself up," Liaqat Ali Khan, a city police chief, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying.

The city's main Lady Reading Hospital said the victims included a policeman and a press club employee.

"We have received two dead bodies and 12 injured, including one woman," Zafar Iqbal, a doctor at the hospital, was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying.

The force of the explosion blew out the windows in the red brick press club building, damaging the guard hut outside and nearby vehicles.

Peshawar has been a frequent target for bomb blasts.

Pakistan has seen a series of attacks across the country in recent months, attributed to fighters retaliating to the army's offensive against the Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal region.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Pakistan and the Fable of the Hornets

by Jacob G. Hornberger
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-12-21.asp

In December 2001 — three months after the 9/11 attacks — I wrote an article entitled “A Foreign-Policy Primer for Children: The Fable of the Hornets.” The article provides a good description of what is now taking place in Pakistan, in response to the CIA’s drone assassinations in that country. See article :
http://www.fff.org/comment/ed1201b.asp

In the fable, Oscar the policeman provoked a crisis in the village by poking a bunch of hornets’ nests in the woods. The hornets responded to Oscar’s provocations by attacking people in the village.

In response, Oscar and several deputies entered the woods and attacked and destroyed the hornets’ nests. After a grand celebration by the villagers, Oscar reentered the woods and saw something foreboding: dozens of new, smaller hornets’ nests were now under construction throughout the woods.

Last Saturday, the Washington Post reported, “Militants forced to flee their havens in Pakistan’s mountainous tribal areas are establishing new, smaller cells in the heart of the country and have begun carrying out attacks nationwide, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. The spread of fighters is an unintended consequence of a relatively successful effort by the United States and Pakistan to disrupt the insurgents’ operations….”

What began with a post-9/11 police action in Afghanistan to capture the suspected perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, especially Osama bin Laden, morphed into a regime-change operation when the Taliban government refused the U.S. government’s unconditional demand to deliver bin Laden to U.S. officials.

The police action turned out to be unsuccessful, with bin Laden presumably escaping the country, but the regime-change operation did succeed in ousting the Taliban regime from power and installing a U.S. puppet regime in its stead.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban were determined to regain power, which has mired the U.S. government in a brutal 8-year (and counting) occupation of the country and, even worse, defending a crooked, corrupt, and fraudulent puppet regime. In the process of defending that regime, U.S. and Afghan forces continue to kill, torture, and abuse the Afghan people. That has, in turn, succeeded in providing the insurgents and the terrorists with an endless supply of recruits.

Since many of the militants were holing up in neighboring Pakistan, the CIA has now expanded the conflict with its drone-assassination program, killing people in a totally separate country. Additionally, U.S. officials have strong-armed the Pakistani government into killing its own people, under the rationale that anyone opposing the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan must also be considered an enemy of the Pakistani government.

So, we’ve now got both the Afghan government and the Pakistani government killing their own people, at the specific behest of the U.S. government. How can this not bode ill for the American people? How can there not be simmering, if not boiling, anger and rage every time an Afghan or Pakistani family loses a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, or a countryman?

Moreover, by placing U.S. fortunes on one side or the other in these foreign countries, the U.S. Empire risks the possibility that the side it is opposing will ultimately gain power, such as what happened during the Iranian Revolution, when the Iranian people ousted the brutal Shah, who the CIA had installed into power, and replaced him with a radical anti-U.S. Islamic regime.

Consider Switzerland. The Swiss government is not occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not policing the world. It is not propping up crooked, corrupt, and fraudulent rulers. It isn’t killing, abusing, and destroying people and property around the world. The Swiss government minds its own business. Unlike the U.S. Empire, the Swiss government isn’t poking hornets’ nests around the world. And unlike the United States, the hornets leave the Swiss people alone.



Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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US forces mounted secret Pakistan raids in hunt for al-Qaida

Former Nato officer reveals secret night operations in border region which America kept quiet


 Declan Walsh in Islamabad guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 21.18 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/us-forces-secret-pakistan-raids/print


 
Demonstrators in Quetta protest against US threats to extend drone strikes into the Balochistan region, which US military chiefs fear is becoming a Taliban ‘hub'. Photograph: Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images


American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan's tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.

A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.

"The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn't confirm officially with them," said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations.

Such operations are a matter of sensitivity in Pakistan. While public opinion has grudgingly tolerated CIA-led drone strikes in the tribal areas, any hint of American "boots on the ground" is greeted with virulent condemnation.

After the only publicly acknowledged special forces raid in September 2008, Pakistan's foreign office condemned it as "a grave provocation" while the military threatened retaliatory action.

The military source said that was the fourth raid of previous years. Two of the others targeted Taliban and al-Qaida "high-value targets" near the border, while the third was to rescue a crashed Predator drone. He said that one of the capture raids succeeded, the other failed and the US sent elite soldiers to the downed Predator because they did not trust Pakistani forces. "People were afraid they would take the parts and reverse- engineer its components," he said.

The secretive nature of the raids underscores the suspicious nature of the relationship between the two allies as they argue about Washington's latest demands.

Disrupting the Taliban safe haven inside Pakistan is the unspoken part of Barack Obama's "surge" announced this month. Although 30,000 troops will be deployed to Afghanistan by next summer, the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership is believed to be sheltering on the Pakistani side of the 1,600-mile border.

In recent weeks Washington has sent a stream of senior officials to Islamabad seeking Pakistani action on at least two fronts: attacks on Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord with strong al-Qaida ties based in North Waziristan, and an expansion of the CIA-led drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.

"This is crunch time," said a senior Pakistani official. "The tone of the Obama administration is growing more ominous. The message is 'you do it, or we will'."

In a recent New York Times article titled Take the war to Pakistan, Seth Jones, a senior civilian adviser to America's special forces commander in Afghanistan, said the Afghan war was "run and organised out of Balochistan" by the Quetta shura, a 15-man war council led by the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. "Virtually all significant meetings of the Taliban take place in that province, and many of the group's senior leaders and military commanders are based there," he said.

The US demands have drawn an angry reaction from Pakistan's military. A senior official with the ISI, Pakistan's premier spy agency, said it was hunting the Taliban in Balochistan, citing 60 joint operations between the CIA and ISI in the province over the past year. "They are going in for kills, they are apprehending people. CIA and ISI operatives depend on each other for their lives in these operations," he said. The official, who spoke anonymously but with official sanction, said Pakistan's military were overstretched. "We can't fight everywhere at once," he said. Since October the army has been at war in South Waziristan, stronghold of the "Pakistani Taliban" whose suicide bombers have killed more than 500 people in cities over the past two months.

US generals say the army is playing a "double game", turning a blind eye to "Afghan Taliban" sheltering in Balochistan because it considers them strategic assets as part of a wider gambit to check Indian influence in Afghanistan.

The ISI official denied such links and accused the US of "scapegoating" Pakistan for its own failures. "During the past year there has been zilch actionable intelligence about the Quetta shura or Haqqani," he said. "If they are so sure Mullah Omar is in Quetta or Karachi, why don't they tell us where he is?"

The CIA declined to comment. "We don't as a rule comment on the agency's relationship with foreign partners or on reports of our operational activities," it said.

The aggressive American approach to Balochistan contrasts with the low-key British tone, despite the fact Balochistan lies across the border from Helmand, where 9,000 British troops are fighting the Taliban.

A British official said the government was reluctant to publicly criticise Pakistan for fear of endangering the relationship between MI6 and ISI in tracking suspected extremists moving between Britain and Pakistan. "That's our priority. It's a matter of national security," he said.

But SAS soldiers have been active in the province. The former Nato officer said SAS units were active in Balochistan in 2002, 2003 and possibly beyond, attacking drug traffickers. "It was of strategic concern to the UK at the time," he said. Until now the US has heeded Pakistani objections to drone strikes in Balochistan. But that could change, if troop casualties mount, a former senior US official warned. "We could get tired and say 'you know what, we are sending in Predators to take out Mullah Omar and his gang in Quetta'. And then we'll see what happens."

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Strategic Balochistan becomes a target in war against Taliban


Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Monday 21 December 2009 21.18 GMT 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/21/us-taliban-balochistan-strategy-pakistan


Some CIA officials want to extend the controversial drone campaign to include the Quetta shura in Balochistan. Photograph: James Lee Harper Jr./AFP/Getty Images

Look around Balochistan, and you may not see much. Pakistan's largest province is also its poorest and least inhabited – an expanse of rocky deserts and ramshackle villages where hardy tribesmen live by ancient laws. But to outside eyes, Balochistan's barren sands glisten with hidden value.

Mining companies eye its natural riches: vast and largely untapped reserves of copper, natural gas and possibly oil. Criminals see easy money: the world's heroin superhighway, a network of smuggling trails, cuts through its lonely borders. Foreign governments consider its location: wedged between Iran and Afghanistan, and covering two-fifths of Pakistan, Balochistan occupies highly strategic real estate.

But for the black-turbaned clerics commanding the Afghan Taliban, the desolate province offers something else: a welcoming rear base. As the Taliban insurgency oozes across Afghanistan, Nato generals complain that the fighting is being directed from Balochistan.

In a bleak report to President Barack Obama last September, the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, said the "Quetta shura" – a 15-man war council based in or around the Baloch capital and led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, his deputy Mullah Baradar and his military commander Abdullah Zakir – was dictating the pace of the war. It posed the greatest threat to western troops, and was already planning for the 2010 fighting season, McChrystal said. "Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. The Quetta shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Omar announces his guidance and intent for the following year." Yet efforts to break up the Taliban's Pakistan sanctuary have so far been concentrated to the east, in Waziristan. Here, CIA-led drone strikes hit al-Qaida and Taliban hideouts, while the Pakistani army battles with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan – a militant faction that strikes Pakistani cities with suicide bombs. On 17 December, drones fired 10 missiles at a house in North Waziristan, killing at least 12 people.

But in Balochistan militants broadly known as the "Afghan Taliban" operate without fear or hindrance. The long and largely unpatrolled border touches Kandahar, Zabul and Helmand, where almost 10,000 British troops are stationed. Commanders there complain that the Taliban are supplied in men, weapons and bomb parts from Balochistan. But British diplomats are strangely silent, worried that criticism could jeopardise counter-terrorism co-operation with Pakistan.

The Americans, however, are taking a more direct approach. Obama's announcement of another 30,000 troops for Afghanistan has triggered a diplomatic offensive across the border in Pakistan. Officials including the CIA director Leon Panetta and the military chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, have visited, urging Pakistan to act forcefully. Specifically, they want action against Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord with a network of fighters in North Waziristan. They also want to extend the controversial drone campaign to include the Quetta shura in Balochistan.

"It makes perfect sense to focus on Balochistan, which has been largely neglected until now," said Art Keller, a former CIA case officer who worked in Pakistan in 2006. "The question is how."

Such talk deeply irritates Pakistan's military. Pakistan officially ended its support for the Taliban in 2001, and since then has become embroiled in a dirty war against national insurgents in Balochistan. But although it denies covertly supporting the Taliban, the military has conspicuously turned a blind eye.

Five years ago, in a shop selling cassettes of Osama bin Laden speeches in Quetta, two young fighters told the Guardian they were enjoying a rest after a busy stint fighting Americans in Afghanistan. Two years later, Balochistan's health minister delivered the oration at a funeral for a Taliban fighter killed in action near Kandahar.

Things have tightened up: the Osama tapes are no longer sold, and holidaying fighters are more discreet. But the safe haven remains. Wounded fighters are quietly ferried across the border for treatment; commanders find recruits in decades-old refugee camps along the border. The violence is spilling into Balochistan itself: last summer Nato supply convoys heading for the border came under attack for the first time.

"The whole war in Afghanistan is being launched from here," said Abdul Rahim Mandokhel, an outspoken senator from Zhob in northern Balochistan. He accuses Pakistan's intelligence agencies of carrying out a "double" policy. "One thing is clear: the area is being used for cross-border offences," he said.

So far, the only western intervention in Balochistan has been covert. A former Nato officer said SAS commandos had raided heroin convoys along the province's unmanned border in 2002, 2003 and possibly later. "The SAS was performing a service to the rest of the coalition," he said, explaining that other western forces were not allowed to attack drug smugglers at the time.

US special forces have also been active along the border, in the tribal belt east of Balochistan. The source said US commando units had conducted four cross-border raids into Pakistan since 2003. Only one, in September 2008, was reported. The first three went undetected thanks to "constant reporting about American spies" in the tribal belt.

The former Nato officer said: "There's so much bullshit out there – the militants blame everything on American soldiers or spies or helicopters. So [when we did act] it was real easy to become part of the background noise." A US embassy spokesman in Islamabad declined to comment.

The new US approach to Balochistan is driven by battlefield realities. By next summer 30,000 western soldiers – a third British, the rest mostly American – will be based across the border in Helmand. Seth Jones, a civilian adviser to the US special forces commander in Afghanistan, said this month that the US must "target Taliban leaders in Balochistan" through an expanded drone strike campaign. Pakistani officials trenchantly oppose the idea.

"We can't fight everyone, everywhere. We need to be pragmatic. And we will not be dictated to," said a senior official with Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), speaking on condition of anonymity. The official admitted that insurgents "do come and go" in Balochistan, but insisted the ISI was already cooperating with the CIA in the province, citing 60 joint raids over the past year.

Drone strikes in densely populated Quetta would be "disastrous", he said, both in terms of civilian casualties and anti-American hostility. "I think this is just pressure tactics, the Americans aren't stupid enough to [extend drone strikes]. But if their objective is to destabilise Pakistan, that would be a good way to do it."

Analysts say Pakistan is playing a complicated strategic game – fighting the "bad" Taliban in Waziristan, but secretly allying with the "good" militants attacking Afghanistan. "I can imagine the Pakistanis symbolically allowing the Americans to take out a few guys from the Quetta shura," said Rifaat Hussain, a defence studies professor at Islamabad's Quaid-I-Azam University. "But I can't see them entirely turning the tables. Pakistan's main concern is not to burn its boats with all shades of the Taliban."

The reason, he said, is India. Fearing Indian influence in Afghanistan, Pakistani military planner see the Taliban as their ticket to influence once western forces depart. Obama announced a US withdrawal starting mid-2011.

"They see these guys as their allies in the post-American scenario – a strategic asset to be used when power is up for grabs in Afghanistan," he said.

American officials are becoming aware of Pakistani concerns. "Increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan," McChrystal wrote, "is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures." A former US official said the Obama administration was aware of a possible backlash, should drones start hitting Balochistan.

But, the source added, there is a growing recognition that "if we are serious about going after targets in Balochistan, particularly Quetta, then we'll have to do it ourselves". And, he added, should military casualties continue to rise across the border, drones could be sent in regardless of what Pakistan's government says.

"We've already established that precedent with the Pakistanis," he said. "We told them: 'We want you to do this.

"But if you won't, we will. So get out of our way'."

Home to 7 million people, the province of Balochistan occupies 43% of Pakistan's land area. Mostly desert and mountain, it is rich in untapped resources: natural gas, uranium and possibly oil. Since 1948 ethnic Balochs have demanded greater autonomy and more control over revenues from their gasfields, and the Pakistani government has put down four insurgencies; the fifth and current rebellion started in 2003, led by the Balochistan Liberation Army.

There are small Baloch minorities in eastern Iran and south Afghanistan. But north Balochistan, along the Afghan border, is largely inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns, who have different preoccupations. The provincial capital, Quetta, is widely assumed to be the HQ of the Taliban and al-Qaida in their war against Nato in Afghanistan – the US has flown drone aircraft from a desert strip in Balochistan.

[Satyagraha]

Obama Declares War on Pakistan
http://tarpley.net/2009/12/11/obama-declares-war-on-pakistan/

Webster G. Tarpley
December 11, 2009

Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan . This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan , a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.


US Deterred From Open War By Pakistan’s Nukes

The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.

The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq . McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq ” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “Al Qaeda in Iraq ” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg – in other words, he wants to be the next US president.

The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan , Pakistan , Iran , and India . Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan . Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran . The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan , as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind .

Pashtunistan

The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan , but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul , even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.

The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan , where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad . US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.

On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad .
Baluchistan

The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran , which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan . One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Teheran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran , thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.


Obama’s Rube Goldberg Strategy

Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “Al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “Al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan . Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “Al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “Al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?

One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaida is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province . That’s not next door to Waziristan . So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that U.S. policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’[1] Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état.


Malick: “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan ?”

Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan , which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan . Every time he mentioned Afghanistan , Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan , because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’[2] This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”

In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan . This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”[3] The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
Blackwater Accused In Peshawar Massacre Of Women And Children

The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan , attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’ [4]

As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.”[5] This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.

Blackwater Accused In Peshawar Massacre Of Women And Children

The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan , attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’ [4]

As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.”[5] This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.

US Also At War With Uzbekistan?

Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan ,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ [6] Such are the ways of hope and change.

The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005 ). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK , Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005 )…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’[7] The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan : “ TEHRAN , Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran ’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing U.S. involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on Oct. 18 in Iran ’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran ’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[8]


US Goal: Cut The Pakistan Energy Corridor Between Iran , China

Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan ? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China , a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir . This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia . As a recent news report points out: ‘ Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China ’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad , while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran , has also welcomed China ’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China . Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing . The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca , which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar , and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “ Pakistan , Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009 .[9] This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.

Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East . This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.

US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
India And Iran

As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.

Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/feingold-why-surge-where_n_381729.html

[2] Ibrahim Sajid Malick, “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?,” Pakistan for Pakistanis Blog, 2 December 2009. http://ibrahimsajidmalick.com/did-Obama-declare-war-on-pakistan/484/

[3] Scott Shane, “C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan,” New York Times, December 3, 2009. See also David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Between the Lines, an Expansion in Pakistan,” New York Times, 1 December 2009.

[4] Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, November 23, 2009

[5] “Taliban in Pakistan blame U.S. Blackwater for deadly blast,” Xinhua News Agency, 29 October 2009, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12358907.htm

[6] Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, November 23, 2009

[7] Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research, December 30, 2007

[8] “Iran says having evidences of U.S. involvement in suicide bomb attacks,” Xinhua, 29 October 2009.

[9] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE27Df03.html

[Satyagraha]

Pakistan's Peshawar
AFP
Published: Thursday December 24, 2009
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Suicide_bomber_kills_five_in_Pakist_12242009.html

A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with steel pellets attacked
Pakistan's flashpoint city of Peshawar on Thursday, killing five people in the second such strike in days.

Attacks are escalating in the metropolis of 2.5 million people on the edge of Pakistan's northwest tribal belt on the Afghan border, an area Washington brands the most dangerous place on Earth and the chief sanctuary of Al-Qaeda.

The attack occurred at a security checkpoint in one of Peshawar's busiest areas in an army cantonment outside a government office and a church, where Pakistan's Christian minority were preparing to celebrate Christmas.

Pakistan has stepped up security during the holy Muslim month of Muharram, ahead of the Shiite mourning period of Ashura, and one of Peshawar's largest Shiite mosques was also close to the bomb site.

"I was on my bicycle and just passed the checkpoint when I heard a deafening blast. It felt like somebody injected fire in my back. I fell to the ground," said fruit seller Alam Khan, whose back was pierced by flying shrapnel.

"I saw smoke and dust. I wanted to help the injured but was bleeding myself and couldn't move," he added.

Officials said five people were killed, including a policeman and a woman, with 14 wounded, but said the bomber's target was not immediately clear, praising police for "intercepting" the bomber at the checkpoint.

Militant attacks have killed more than 2,700 people since July 2007 and Washington is pressuring Pakistan to do more to crack down on Al-Qaeda and stop insurgents crossing the border to attack Western troops in Afghanistan.

The explosion badly damaged three private vehicles and left police caps and helmets littering the ground, next to a police badge ripped from a uniform by the force of the blast, said an AFP reporter.

"There were several targets," said Sahibzada Mohammad Anis, the top city administration official.

"It could have been a Pakistan International Airlines building or a Shiite mosque. There are also several shopping malls in this area," he said.

Peshawar is on the frontline of Pakistan's two and a half year campaign of suicide and bomb attacks waged by Islamist militants who have carved out havens in the northwest and who oppose Islamabad's alliance with the United States.

Bomb disposal expert Hukam Dad Khan said Thursday's attacker was wearing a vest packed with explosives, nails and steel pellets.

"The suicide bomber was trying to cross the checkpoint. He was on foot. Police stopped him and he blew himself up," Mohammad Karim Khan, a police officer, told AFP.

Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and the US embassy in Islamabad condemned the attack.

"The prime minister said such terrorist acts cannot weaken the government's resolve to fight the menace of terrorism till its complete elimination," said a statement from Gilani's office.

The Taliban have stepped up strikes this year to avenge Pakistan military operations to eradicate their northwest strongholds and Thursday's attack came two days after a teenage suicide bomber attacked a press club in Peshawar.

It was an unprecedented assault on the media in Pakistan, killing three people and forcing the government to promise drastically improved security measures for the local press -- which have received threats from the Taliban.

On December 7, a suicide bomber struck outside a court in Peshawar, killing 11 people and on October 28, a huge car bombing ripped through a Peshawar market killing 125 people in the worst attack in Pakistan in two years.

Eighteen bomb blasts have struck the city in the last three months, most of them blamed on Taliban militants.

Pakistan's military is engaged in multiple offensives across the tribal belt but government attention has been distracted with four cabinet ministers facing legal action after a court lifted an amnesty protecting them from prosecution.

[bigron]

Mr. 10%: Our Man in Islamabad

By Eric Margolis

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24259.htm

December 24, 2009 "Huffington Post" - --- In my office hang photos of this writer with Pakistan's last four leaders. Two of them - Zia ul Haq and Benazir Bhutto - were murdered. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was ousted in a military coup led by photo number four, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was deposed last year by Pakistan's military.

Either leading Pakistan is a job with very poor career prospects, or I'm a jinx. Take your pick.

Now, in a delicious irony, Washington is finally getting the democracy it has been calling for in Pakistan - and it's the Mother of all Backfires.

I've not met Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. But I've written for decades about corruption charges that relentlessly dog him. At one point, I was threatened with having acid thrown in my face if I kept writing about the Bhutto-Zardari's financial scandals.

Asif Ali Zardari became known to one and all as "Mr. 10%" from the time when he was a minister in his wife's government, in charge of approving government contracts. Critics say the 10% and other kickbacks produced millions for the Zardari-Bhutto family.

But Benazir Bhutto repeatedly insisted to me that she and her husband - who was tortured and jailed for years on corruption charges - were innocent and victims of political persecution in Pakistan's utterly corrupt legal system where "justice" goes to the biggest payer of bribes, and politicians use courts to punish their rivals. Small wonder so many Pakistanis are calling for far more honest Islamic justice.

In 2008, Washington sought to rescue Musharraf's foundering dictatorship by convincing the popular but still self-exiled Benazir Bhutto to front for him as democratic window-dressing for continued military rule. Her price: amnesty for a long list of corruption charges against her and her husband. The US and Britain quietly arranged the amnesty for the Bhuttos and thousands of their indicted supporters (and other political figures).

Just before her assassination, Benazir told me jealous associates of Musharraf were gunning for her.

Asif Zardari then inherited Benazir's Pakistan People's Party, the nation's largest. He became president, thanks to strong US and British political and financial support.

Zardari repaid this support by facilitating the US war in Afghanistan, and allowed the Pentagon to keep using Pakistan's bases and military personnel, without which the war in Afghanistan could not be prosecuted. Washington promised Pakistan's elite, pro-western leadership at least $8 billion.

That sleazy deal has now come unstuck thanks to Pakistan's newest, rather improbable democratic hero, Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. As chief justice of the Supreme Court under Musharraf, he was expected to rubber stamp government decisions.

Instead, Justice Chaudhry began enforcing the law by reinstating the dismissed corruption charges and examining the legality of Musharraf's self-appointed second term.
Musharraf, with shameful backing from Washington and London, had Justice Chaudhry kicked off the bench. He, and a score of fellow judges who would not toe the line, were placed under house arrest. Some were beaten. Their pensions were canceled.

But the ebbing of Zardari's power has resulted in the reinstatement by parliament of Justice Chaudhry, who promptly reinstated all the old charges. For the first time, Pakistan was tasting the true institutions of democracy at work.

Zardari has presidential immunity against criminal charges. But his chief lieutenants face prosecution, notably regime strongman, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, and Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar. Both are key supporters and facilitators of US military operations in Afghanistan, America's use of Pakistani bases, and Pakistan's war against its own rebellious Pashtun tribesmen (AKA "Taliban").

Opposition parties are demanding Zardari and senior aides resign. Islamabad is in an uproar just when Washington needs Pakistan's government to intensify the war against the so-called Pakistani Taliban and support President Barack Obama's expanded war in Afghanistan. Washington is also intensifying drone attacks inside Pakistan, that are provoking fierce public outrage against the US, and weighing air attacks on Baluchistan Province.

Skeletons are dancing out of Zardari's closets: $63 million in illegal kickbacks and commissions allegedly hidden in Swiss bank accounts; accusation of laundering $13.7 million in Switzerland. Charges of kickbacks on helicopter and warplane deals. In 2003, Swiss magistrates found Zardari and Bhutto guilty of money laundering, sentencing them to a six month suspended jail term, a fine of $50,000, and ordering them to repay $11 million to Pakistan's government.

Zardari has an estimated personal fortune of $2 billion; luxurious properties in the US, France, Spain and Britain, and on it goes. He avoided trial in Switzerland by claiming mental illness.

In 2008, Gen. Musharraf had all charges against the Bhuttos dropped as part of the US-engineered plan for a diumverate with Benazir.

The Bhuttos remain one of the largest feudal landowners in a desperately poor nation where annual income is US$1,027 and illiteracy over 50%. Pakistan has been ruled since its creation in 1947 by either callous feudal landlords, who bought and sold politicians like bags of Basmati rice, or by generals.

It appears that Zardari's days as Washington's man in Islamabad are numbered. Anti-American fury is surging, with popular claims that Pakistan has been "occupied" by the US, treated like a third-rate banana republic, and is run by corrupt, US-installed stooges and crooks. Shades of Iran under the Shah, and Egypt under Sadat.

Many Pakistanis blame the current bloody wave of bombings in their nation on US mercenaries from Xe (formerly Blackwater), and old foe India staging attacks in revenge for decades of bombings in Kashmir, Punjab and its eastern hill states by Pakistani intelligence.

Most Pakistanis believe Washington is bent on tearing apart their unstable nation to seize its nuclear weapons.

Washington is almost back to square one in turbulent Pakistan. When Zardari goes or is kicked upstairs as an impotent figurehead, attention will turn to Pakistan's 617,000-man military and its commander, Gen - or should we say "president-elect" Ashfaq Kiyani? He is already in almost constant contact with the Pentagon.

In 2010, the ugly acronym, "Afpak," will bedevil, befuddle, and consume the Obama White House that so unwisely and rashly ignored Gen. Douglas MacArthur's wise warning to avoid land wars in Asia.

As the US expands the Afghan War, its strategic rear area in Pakistan is up in flames.   

 

[sociostudent]

To Pakistan from CIA, Mossad, RAW; to govt from GHQ, CIA
By: Zamir Sheikh | Published: December 26, 2009
KARACHI – The troika of spy agencies of US, Israel and India seems to have joined hands and is working covertly through invisible forces not only to destabilise Pakistan but to subvert Pakistan’s nuclear capability, said Barrister Kamal Azfar, a former Governor of Sindh and a confidant of founding Chairperson of PPP, Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in an interview with The Nation here the other day.
Azfar was not shy of naming American CIA, Mossad of Israel and RAW of India which, he alleged were working on a common agenda to undermine the vital national interests of Pakistan. For them Pakistan has become thorn in their flesh and is hurting their regional and international interests.
Kamal Azfar, who recently appeared on behalf of the govt in the NRO case before the SC, said he stood by his statement in the court in which he had stated that the govt feared a threat from the GHQ and CIA. He said he had argued in the Court that there was systematic destabilisation of the govt, and to prove his point, he had maintained before the full bench of the apex court that attacks on GHQ and a number of blasts in Peshawar were beastly acts and a manifestation of destabilisation process.
Mr Azfar, who still vividly recalls the euphoric days of PPP govt under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, recounted how the politicians were sidelined through various announcements such as EBDO during the tenure of first dictator Ayub Khan, who sent the 1956 constitution to the shredding machine and disqualified a number of political goliaths of the country only to harm the democratic process. These are some of the bitter truths of the history, he said. According to him, it was during the long 11 years dictatorial rule of Zia ul Haq that the cancer of Taliban emerged, and Pakistan is now paying a heavy price for that unfortunate phenomenon. Pakistan is already facing a number of security problems and if the American drone attacks were extended to Balochistan, the already brittle security conditions in the country would aggravate to a point of no return, he asserted.
He had a pertinent historical query when he asked why was the first PM Liaquat Ali Khan assassinated and a political stalwart like Hussein Shaheed Suharwardy was banished from politics. Similarly why was PM M Khan Junejo sacked when he was to an official visit on a Far Eastern country, he asked? These historical facts come rushing to one’s mind when one feels that the efforts were being made once again to discredit the political leadership which has come into power through popular vote in a democratic manner.
Responding to a question, Mr Azfar said: The govt respects the judiciary and had already declared that it would accept the decision of the SC. He said today the judiciary is totally and completely free and independent which was not the case in the past. The govt has already, after accepting the SC verdict, declared that the persons affected by the verdict would face the court to seek justice, he added.

[bigron]

U.S. drone aircraft kills 5 in Pakistan

SAMAA

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61468&hd=&size=1&l=e

December 26, 2009


ISLAMABAD: A pilotless U.S. Drone aicraft attacked a suspected militant target in Miran Shah, North Waziristan Pakistan on Saturday, killing five people, intelligence officials said.

Two missiles hit a house in village Saedgi some 20 kilometers away from Miran Shah in North Waziristan in the attack. Five people were killed in the drone attack. Two people were also wounded, the officials said. SAMAA



 

[bigron]

U.S. drone attack kills 13 in NW Pakistan

Xinhua

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61524&hd=&size=1&l=e

December 27, 2009

At least 13 people were killed in suspected United States drone attack in northwest Pakistan's tribal area, local TV channel reported Sunday.

According to details, a missile fired by U.S. unmanned aircraft had initially killed four militants in the border village of Saidgai in North Waziristan tribal agency Saturday.

The death toll in the strike has mounted to 13 on Sunday morning, the private channel GEO News reported.

Following the strike, U.S. B-52 jet plane, along with other spy planes, continued its flights over the tribal areas on Sunday morning, the channel reported.

The flights have reportedly remained confined to areas located in South and North Waziristan Agencies and Kurram Agency, sources claimed.

According to tribal sources, the flights of B-52 jet plane has kept terrifying the people living on the tribal belt for several weeks.

The U.S drones regularly hit hideouts of the militants in the Pakistani tribal region, which Washington considers as the center of Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants. Pakistan opposes the U.S. strikes inside the country's tribal regions and seeks the drone technology. But the U.S. does not accept Islamabad's request.

Source: Xinhua




 

[bigron]

Pakistan Reels as Bombings Continue

Over 100 Casualties in Latest Attacks

by Jason Ditz, December 27, 2009
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/27/pakistan-reels-as-bombings-continue/

                                       

Well over 100 casualties were reported today as Pakistan was rocked by multiple bombing attacks, the latest flurry of strikes in several months of attacks against sites since Pakistan invaded South Waziristan.

The biggest attack was against a military hospital in Muzaffarabad. The bomber detonated at the gates of the hospital, killing at least 10 people and wounding 81 others.

Another blast in Karachi was somewhat mysterious, as officials claimed it was a result of a gas-blockage, while witnesses say it involved a remote explosive. The attack left 31 wounded, and led to clashes between locals and the police.

Other bombings were reported, including the assassination of a political administrator in Pakistani Kashmir. It seems the attacks in the nation are far from over.

[bigron]

Monday, December 28, 2009
16:19 Mecca time, 13:19 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/12/20091228113021243441.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths in Pakistan city blast 
 

Scores of people were injured in the blast, which took place in the city of Karachi  [EPA]


 
At least 20 people have been killed after a bomb blast struck a procession of Shia Muslims in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, according to police sources.

The explosion struck on Monday as Shia worshippers marked Ashoura, the holiest event on the Shia Muslim calendar.

Police sources told Al Jazeera that at least 80 people were injured in the blast, with 30 of those in a critical condition.

The cause of the blast was not immediately clear.

"We are trying to ascertain whether it was a time bomb or a suicide attack, but it is a terrorist attack," Abdul Wahid Khan, a senior police official, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying.

Television footage showed crowds around the blast area, smoke rising over the scene and ambulances going back and forth.

Some people in the crowd, apparently angered at the attack, fired shots into the air, witnesses said.

Building ablaze

Local television stations reported that more than a dozen vehicles and a four-story building were also set ablaze by people reacting to the attack.

Imran Khan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said: "The Shia community would certainly have been the specific target of this attack, but there have been no claims of responsibility so far."

"The Shia are in the minority but make up a significant number of Pakistanis.

"They are woven into the fabric of Pakistan. However, they are under attack for their beliefs."

Rehman Malik, the interior minister, has called for people to show restraint and asked that Shia processions over the next two days be cancelled following the attack.

Talat Hussain, the director of news at the local AAJ TV, told Al Jazeera: "Obviously the main target was the Shia procession.

"Any number of groups come to mind who may have carried out the attack ... The game clearly is to disrupt Pakistan."

Concerning the violent reaction to the strike, Hussain said: "People have been saying that the government has been apathetic to the listening to the warnings of potential attacks and people's fears."

Pakistan had tightened security to protect mass processions ahead of Ashoura, deploying tens of thousands of police and paramilitary forces.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

[Satyagraha]

Further evidence that the US is trying to incite civil war in Pakistan: Shiite's in procession for religious holiday targeted for execution to incite violent reaction:

Suicide Bomber Hits Pakistani Shi'ites in Karachi, Killing 20
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/pakistan/2009/pakistan-091228-voa01.htm
VOA News 28 December 2009

Pakistani officials say a suicide bomber has struck a Shi'ite Muslim religious procession in the southern city of Karachi, killing 20 people and wounding dozens of others.

Officials say the bomber blew himself up Monday while walking in a procession of Shi'ites observing the holy festival of Ashura in Pakistan's commercial capital.

The Karachi bombing is the second major attack on Shi'ite Muslims, a minority in Pakistan, in as many days. A suicide bomber struck a Shi'ite mosque in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir Sunday, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than 80.

Authorities tightened security across the country in the run-up to the Ashura festival, which often has coincided with an upsurge in sectarian attacks.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani army says troops have killed some 15 militants in the ongoing offensive against the Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal region.

A military statement says the militants were killed when they tried to raid a security checkpoint. Two soldiers were reported killed.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

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Death Toll From Pakistan Bombing Reaches 43

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,581274,00.html


Security officials inspect the blast site in Karachi.


KARACHI, Pakistan —  Authorities appealed for calm Tuesday after a bombing against a Shiite Muslim procession killed 43 in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi, setting off riots and igniting fears of sectarian unrest.

Security was tight as thousands of people gathered in central Karachi for funerals of some of those killed in Monday's bombing of a Shiite procession marking the key holy day of Ashoura.

The attack sparked riots as people rampaged through the city, setting fire to markets and stores. Firefighters were still battling the flames Tuesday, with authorities calling for reinforcements from the city of Hyderabad, 105 miles north of Karachi, Pakistan's main commercial hub.

Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal said the city's largest wholesale market was on fire, and that hundreds of shops had been destroyed, with damages estimated to run into millions of dollars.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who visited Karachi on Tuesday, said authorities were still trying to determine whether the attack had been carried out by a suicide bomber, as he had said Monday.

"The investigation is still going on to determine whether it was a suicide attack or some improvised explosive device was used," said Malik, who appealed for calm and said he had ordered an investigation into who was behind the rioting.

"If anyone is trying to cripple Karachi, then he is also trying to cripple Pakistan," the minister said.

Senior health official Hashim Malik said the death toll increased to 43 on Tuesday. Many among the dozens wounded were critically hurt, and several died overnight and on Tuesday morning.

Karachi has largely been spared the Taliban-linked violence that has struck much of the rest of the country, a fact that analysts believe is driven by the group's tendency to use the teeming metropolis as a place to rest and raise money. But the city has been the scene of frequent sectarian, ethnic and political violence.

It was unclear who was behind Monday's bombing. Pakistani authorities say sectarian groups have teamed up with Taliban and al-Qaida militants waging war against the government in a joint effort to destabilize Pakistan. More than 500 people have been killed in attacks since mid-October when the army launched a major anti-Taliban offensive in the country's northwest.

"A deliberate attempt seems to be afoot by the extremists to turn the fight against militants into a sectarian clash and make the people fight against one another," said President Asif Ali Zardari in a statement Monday.

Monday's bombing struck at the start of a procession of Shiites marking Ashoura, the most important day of a monthlong mourning period for the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. Minority Shiites have suffered frequent attacks by Sunni extremist groups who regard them as heretical.

"I fell down when the bomb went off with a big bang," said Naseem Raza, a 26-year-old who was marching in the procession. "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh."

Residents in apartments near the blast site tossed down body parts that had been cast into their homes from the explosion, while birds dove down to pick at the flesh amid damaged vehicles and motorbikes.

Bomb disposal squad official Munir Sheikh said some 35 pounds of high explosive were used in the bombing. He said the intact head and torso of the suspected suicide bomber was found on the third floor of a nearby office building, where it had crashed through a window.

No group claimed responsibility for Monday's attack, but Malik on Monday pointed his finger at a cluster of militant groups, including the Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad, that he said have a joint goal to destabilize Pakistan.

Malik appealed to the Shiite community to cancel processions for the next two days.

Monday's bombing was the third explosion in as many days to hit Karachi, although authorities attributed a blast that wounded 30 on Sunday to a buildup of gas in a sewage pipe. Protests broke out after that blast too, with Shiites torching at least three vehicles.

On Saturday, another blast near a Shiite procession wounded 19 people. Authorities attributed that explosion to a firecracker that was so powerful it left a crater in the road.

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US steps up drone attacks, assassinations in AfPak “surge”


By Bill Van Auken

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61528&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWSDecember 28, 2009

Missiles from US Predator drones struck a village in Pakistan over the weekend, killing at least 13 people. The attack coincided with reports of intensified operations by US Special Forces killing squads on the Afghanistan side of the border.

Amounting to targeted assassinations, these forms of warfare are the most evident feature in the first stages of the "surge" ordered earlier this month by President Barack Obama, who is sending at least 30,000 more US troops into Afghanistan.

The methods are indicative of a dirty colonial-style war to suppress resistance to an occupation that is aimed at establishing Washington’s dominance in the energy-rich and strategically vital region of Central Asia.

Citing Pakistani officials, the Lahore-based daily The Nation reported Sunday that the death toll in a drone attack on a village in North Waziristan had risen to 13. Two missiles reportedly struck a compound in Saidgi village, about four miles from North Waziristan’s principal town, Miranshah.

The drones continued hovering over the area, while a US B-52 bomber also conducted over-flights, terrorizing the local population, according to Pakistani media reports.

The missile strike marked the third such attack on North Waziristan since December 17. The area is part of Pakistan’s northwest tribal region, which has been used by elements of the Afghan resistance, backed by fellow Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan, to launch attacks on the US-led occupation forces in Afghanistan.

The deadly drone campaign has been directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency, using a clandestine airfield in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and with CIA operatives sitting in front of video screens in Langley, Virginia, directing the missiles to their targets. The Pentagon is reportedly conducting its own drone attacks.

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages.

As with virtually all of these attacks, the US media parroted unnamed intelligence officials in claiming that the victims of the latest missile strike were all "militants," without any corroboration of who had been killed.

The Lahore newspaper The News, citing figures supplied by Pakistani officials, reported in April that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes that had been carried out since January 2008. Given that fatality rate, with nearly 30 drone attacks having been launched since, the number of Pakistani civilians slaughtered in this fashion could easily have topped 1,000.

Over the last two years, the Pakistani government—both that of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and that of his successor, Pakistan People’s Party President Asif Ali Zardari—had worked out a modus operandi with Washington whereby Pakistan publicly protested the drone attacks and demanded that they cease, while behind the scenes giving them a green light.

US officials had portrayed the missile strikes as an attempt to kill leaders of al Qaeda. The latest series of attacks, however, has been launched specifically against Afghanistan resistance elements that US military and intelligence agencies refer to as the Haqqani network, named for its leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who operated out of the same North Waziristan sanctuary in the 1980s. Then he was one of the principal recipients of US arms and aid in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet-aligned regime in Kabul.

Since the announcement of the Afghanistan surge, Washington has been pressing the Pakistani government to send its troops against the Haqqani group and other forces aligned with the Afghan Taliban operating out of North Waziristan, just across border from Afghanistan. Islamabad has refused, however, citing its ongoing military campaign in South Waziristan, which is part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

The campaign in South Waziristan is directed against Pakistani Islamist insurgents blamed for a series of attacks across the northwest of the country.

As the Washington Post pointed out, the Pakistani government concluded a truce with the local warlord in North Waziristan, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in return for his forces keeping out of the fighting in the south.

"Missile strikes on his territory could endanger that deal," according to the Post, which added, "However, the United States has indicated in the past that it will not hesitate to launch the drone-fired missiles if it tracks down an important target."

In recent weeks, US officials and military commanders have ratcheted up the pressure on the Pakistani government, warning that if it did not act in North Waziristan, the US military and CIA would intervene unilaterally.

The New York Times reported Monday that the US military is making increasing use of its secretive Special Operations units as a key component of Obama’s Afghanistan "surge." These forces—including the Army Delta Force and Navy Seals—are employed in finding and killing Afghans who are identified as leaders or supporters of the fight against the US-led occupation of their country.

Raids by Special Operations forces had been halted last February on the orders of the head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Vice Admiral William McRaven. The raids were inflicting so many civilian casualties that they were generating popular support for the insurgents that outweighed the military importance of killing supposed leaders of the resistance. The suspension of these operations lasted only two weeks.

Now, General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, has ordered that these attacks by Special Operations troops be greatly expanded. Before assuming command in Afghanistan, McChrystal had been McRaven’s predecessor as head of JSOC, where units under his command were implicated in the torture of detained civilians in Iraq.

The unleashing of these clandestine units against suspected leaders of the Afghanistan resistance will undoubtedly mean another sharp increase in the killing of civilian men, women and children.

The Times also reported that similar death squad operations are being mounted across the border in Pakistan, under the direction of the CIA.

Citing an unnamed official in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Times reported that there have been "more than 60 joint operations involving the ISI and the CIA in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in the past year."

According to the paper, "the missions included 'snatch and grabs’—the abduction of important militants—as well as efforts to kill leaders."

The surge ordered by Obama will mean a sharp escalation of the violence on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, as well as an intensification of the social and political crisis gripping the entire region as a result of the US war.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan were included among the countries confronting the 10 worst humanitarian crises in an annual listing released by the French-based medical aid group, Doctors without Borders.

"Afghan civilians endured increasing levels of violence throughout the country" over the past year, the group reported. The fighting has brought the country’s health care system to the brink of collapse, and Afghans needing medical care "must now make an impossible choice: risk traveling hundreds of miles through a war zone to seek a medical care or allow a condition to worsen until it becomes life-threatening only to arrive at a health structure where services are greatly diminished."

US-led occupation forces, the report said, "have co-opted [medical] assistance for 'hearts and minds’ initiatives, occupied hospitals, and arrested patients in their beds."

Pakistan "was convulsed by intense violence throughout 2009," the report stated, worsening an already desperate situation. "Across the country, people suffer from a general lack of health care, and Pakistan features one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the region."

The campaigns by the Pakistani military, egged on by Washington, created more than 2 million refugees from the Swat Valley and another 300,000 from North Waziristan, according to Doctors Without Borders. The military offensive forced the group to halt its medical assistance in Swat Valley, where it had supported the local hospital and provided ambulance services.

Hospitals and health clinics set up in displacement camps in neighboring districts were "overwhelmed," the group reported, with patients suffering from "serious war-related injuries, among them children with gunshot- and explosive-related wounds."

The past year has also seen a precipitous rise in the number of US troops killed and wounded. Fatalities in Afghanistan for US occupation forces have reached 310 since the beginning of 2009, double the number killed last year. Roughly 2,500 American troops have been wounded during the same period, many of them suffering amputations and severe burns and head injuries resulting from roadside bomb attacks.

As US military commanders readily acknowledge, the pouring of 30,000 more American troops and tens of thousands more private military contractors into Afghanistan will mean a dramatic increase in the killing and dying produced by the eight-year-old US war.




 

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Xe, Formerly Blackwater, Poses Biggest Threat to Pakistan's Nukes


by Dr Shahid Qureshi

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61555&hd=&size=1&l=e

December 28, 2009




Is America out to hurt her trusted ally?





Main photo of Blackwater courtesy: opinion-maker.org
 
(LONDON) - Lawyers from the local bar associations protested outside the 'secret base' of US mercenaries (Xe/Blackwater) inside the 'Sehala’ Police Training College, a few miles from the Kahuta Nuclear Plant. Why did Pakistani media ignore the story?


Kahuta Nuke Plant
 
As the propaganda that Pakistani nukes are likely to fall into the hands of the Taliban continues in the American press, one wonders what might be the U.S. intent.

Seen in the light that American mercenaries have become overt operationally, it appears that the intent is to use them to 'lift’ the Pak Nukes using the threat from the Taliban as an excuse.

It is a most ridiculous statement that the Taliban are going to walk into Pakistani nuclear sites and take control. Are nuclear weapons toys that can be taken away from an errant kid?

It is common knowledge that different sections of the system are stored in different places; "how can Taliban take over all sites and put them together" was my response to a question by Adam Brooks, BBC’s Washington correspondent, in a live program on BBC World Service TV on 23rd December 2009.


Tehrik Taliban in Pakistan, face covered, holding AK-47
 
Some analysts believe that Blackwater is a bigger threat to Pakistan’s nuclear sites than real Taliban. There are reports that (TTP) 'Tehrik Taliban Pakistan’ is co-sponsored by CIA-Raw-Mossad and perhaps some other interested parties.

In fact TTP is created to fight Taliban in Afghanistan and may be entrapments. The attacks on Pakistan's sensitive institutions are serving the purpose of the enemies of Pakistan including India.

The Al-Qaida threat is like a 'swine flu’ which can be used anywhere from Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and FATA depending on the aims, purpose and objectives of the Neoconic emerging policies in the concerned areas.

Al-Qaida is a trump card in the hands of the defence contractors and war profiteers, main benefactors of Global War on Terror and of 9/11 terrorism. Pakistan’s spy chief Lt. General Shuja Pasha reportedly gave proof of the CIA’s involvement into destabilising/terrorist activities in Pakistan.

According to some assessments U.S. mercenaries with support of 'locally recruited agents’ are behind the targeted killings of senior Pakistani military officers in the past few months.

ILIM TV - Blackwater / Xe in Pakistan - Full Version  Watch :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUZ3hk-TTas&feature=player_embedded

In the current scenario it is irrelevant who gave permission, freedom of movement and a base in the Police Training College a few miles from the "Kahuta Nuclear Plant" to US private mercenaries (Blackwater/Xe) in Pakistan. The most important question is what Rehman Malik and Zardari are doing about it?

According to reports, four U.S. nationals, who were dressed in Taliban clothes, speaking Pashto, were arrested by the police approximately 1.5 miles from the Kahuta Nuclear Plant. They were carrying explosives and dozens of hand grenades in a 4x4 jeep with some kind of spying and jamming equipments.

When they were brought to the police station, people from Rehman Malik’s Interior Ministry and allegedly Salman Faruqui Zardari’s NRO partner and beneficiary got these criminals released without charge and handed over to the US embassy."

Lawyers from the local bar associations protested outside the secret base of US mercenaries (Xe/Blackwater) placed inside 'Sehala’ Police Training College. Even the head of the college, a senior DIG, was not allowed in the US facility.

That reminded me of the reported incident where military dictator General Ayub Khan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs - none other than Zulifkar Ali Bhutto, father in law of President Zardari, wanted to visit a U.S. Base in Peshawar.

His request was turned down by the base commander and he was turned away from the canteen. Soon after, a U.S. spy plane U2 was shot down in the Soviet air space and the pilot was taken into custody. Which obviously resulted in shutting down of the base as well as daily U2 flights.


General Ayub Khan
 

In the current scenario without making corruption a moral or political issue, Pakistan is facing two major internal threats from two individuals. Asif Zardari and Rehman Malik are two major threats to Pakistan’s security and sovereignty.

Rehman Malik is responsible for providing safe passages to Blackwater mercenaries via corrupt police officials day in day out. When there is overwhelming evidence that Blackwater/Xe are involved in terrorism and anti-state activities against Pakistan’s armed forces, nuclear program and assassination of Benazir Bhutto, according to former Army Chief General Aslam Baig (whom she awarded with a medal).

Rehman Malik should be tried in open court for aiding, abetting and procuring for all the incidents when foreign mercenaries, who were released on the orders of his interior ministry. In mid September 2009 a senior police officer Nasir Aftab was sacked by Rehman Malik because he arrested and apprehended armed Blackwater agents. The incident took place in Islamabad when Superintendent intercepted some officers of an intelligence agency and marines of a powerful country riding in a vehicle. He took them to the Margala police station where a brawl took place.

The SP later lodged an FIR against some officials of the intelligence agency. The Acting Chief of Islamabad Police DIG (Operations) Bin Yamin said, "reasons of officers' removal were not mentioned in the letter". So the responsibility comes down to Mr. Rehman Malik. He should be questioned. There is a dire need to identify 'local collaborators’ and 'enemies of the state’ in Pakistan.

                                 

 According to a report filed by Fawad Ali of 'The Nation’ on 14th December 2009, "17 Top Pakistani officials are protecting US interests in (NWFP) province neighbouring Afghanistan. Seventeen officials serving in NWFP on various important posts are active members of the notorious American Khyber Club (AKC) that is believed to be a hotbed of conspiracies against Pakistan; highly placed sources informed The Nation. These officials are facilitating American diplomats, operatives of CIA and mercenaries of Blackwater in their activities stretched across the province and FATA. In reciprocation, the local officials get full support in getting lucrative postings, transfers and getting away with inquiries, etc, sources disclosed and added they are taken care of by Americans who have tons of money at their disposal."

"Those who stand out in serving US interests are posted on the posts of their own choice despite lapse of tenure, and this speaks of increasing American influence in our internal matters," an official said.

Their nominees get U.S. visas in no time and the children as well as siblings of some officials are getting free educations in prestigious institutions abroad.

"These days serving American interests is more fruitful for anyone than serving interests of Pakistan," an official who was made OSD for an unforgivable crime of non-cooperation with foreigners told The Nation.

The top 17 officials who have made American Khyber Club their second home include nine from the District Management Group (DMG), six officers representing the Police Service of Pakistan (PSP), while two are in the Office Management Group (OMG). The PSP officers who take pride in having personal relations with American operatives hail from Peshawar, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Waziristan and Kohat.

                         

They have been spotted roaming around with foreigners in their bulletproof cars and holding secret meetings with them in their offices, which is an open violation of rules and regulations, sources informed.

The DMG officials who are protecting U.S. interests in the region hail from Peshawar, Nowshehra, Swabi, Mardan and Charsadda. They also use the American Khyber Club as their unofficial secretariat.

The officials belonging to OMG and PSC Executive Group hail from Waziristan and Shabqadar. Orders have been repeatedly circulated that government officials can’t meet foreigners (Americans) without prior approval from the authorities concerned but no one seems to be interested in abiding by the rules.

On the other hand, those who are not in the good books of the American Consulate have been given insignificant posts or have simply been made Officers on Special (Spiritual) Duty (OSDs). The sources informed that Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency has reported the matter to the highest authorities in Islamabad.

While talking to the writer the above-mentioned senior journalist, Mr. Fawad Ali confirmed that he has "been threatened by the notorious Blackwater," which forced him to go public to save his life. It looks likes a failed attempt to recruit him? So what did Rehman Malik do as all the police service officers are accountable to his ministry?

Rehman Malik is toeing a "U.S. Plan of using minorities" which is becoming more and more visible - which Iranians clearly understand. The questions one should be asking Mr Malik are:

(a) Why majority of the people and companies hired by Xe/Blackwater are Shias?

(b) Why he always names Sunni sectarian groups/organisations minutes after the incidents.

(c) Is he settling scores for someone in the name of counter terrorism?

(d) Why he never mentioned Indian Raw after the attack on a Sri Lankan team in Lahore, when Punjab CID warned of India's plan long before the incident?

                             

On the one hand they are supporting Shia minority elements in private security agencies business, but on the other making majority Sunnis realize that less then 5% Shias of Pakistan are ruling the country from Presidency, State Bank, and media.

The so called Shia left pseudo intellectuals have jumped on the U.S. bandwagon everywhere, both Pakistan and Iran should be careful with them. The US strategy of creating sectarianism failed in Iraq and it was allegedly Blackwater and private mercenaries bombing both Sunnis and Shia mosques.

The Obama Administration must bring to justice those 'friendly spies’ arrested in the U.S., who were releasing information about U.S. troop movements in Iraq as IED's were planted on those routes.

A senior based in the region told me that sometimes these private mercenaries establish fake checkpoints, take people away for search, plant remote control bombs in their cars, tell them to collect their papers from the place where explosion is intended, when vehicles get there, devices are exploded.

These people did not know that they were carriers. Private mercenaries are terrorizing people with the help of the locals. The people who killed senior Pakistani military officers were allegedly re-trained by Xe/Blackwater.

It is a fact that soldiers and officers retire at a young age due to type of profession and need to join other professions. Exposure of these snakes in the grass, aiders and abettors of these foreign mercenaries is important.

Blackwater in Pakistan for "Targeted Killings" : Watch :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTSIXBFLf44&feature=player_embedded

According to a report, "The security company of Ikram Sehgal, MD of Pathfinder and Security Management Services (SMS) was brought into the spotlight for being security providers of American embassy, and the strength of 20,000 plus security guards employed in that organization armed with sophisticated weapons and armoured vehicles were discussed."

The cause of frustration is solely based on suspicious activities of foreign agencies and their agents in Pakistan with local backing. It is important to analyze what owners of these agencies are up and to and where they are going. For Example as reported in the media, Mr Ikram Sehgal’s statement, "No harm in recognizing Israel", is not only treacherous but against the state of Pakistan. Mr Ikram Sehgal, chief editor of the Defence Journal, said on Saturday that there would be no harm in Pakistan’s recognition of Israel if Tel Aviv could be pursued to refrain from a pro-Indian policy.

In a lecture at the Department of International Relations at Karachi University, he said if Jordan and Egypt could recognize Israel, why not Pakistan? He does not understand the legality of the issue and historical stands of the father of the nation on the issue. Should this man be allowed to continue run his 'private army’ which could be converted into Israeli army at any time? A few years back Brinks USA was also among those who jumped into the local security business, but a major cause of panic is the recent recovery of weapons during a raid on the residence of Capt. Zaidi of InterRisk security agency and the discovery of illegal prohibited weapons. It was recently reported that an international company SkyPlan is delivering NATO supplies via Sialkot airport. Why has this matter not been fully investigated as to who is behind these activities?

Did Pakistan Armed Forces train Black water/Xe’s local recruits to work against the national interests of the state? As far as Zardari and Rehman Malik are concerned, they have converted Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party into (PPPP) Pimping, Pleasuring and Profiteering Party.

Source: opinion-maker.org

http://www.opinion-maker.org/

============================================

(Dr Shahid Qureshi is an award winning journalist and writer on foreign policy & security based in London)



 

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Friday, January 01, 2010
17:07 Mecca time, 14:07 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/20101112507938245.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths in Pakistan suicide attack  
 
 
 

 
A suicide bomber has attacked a site where a volleyball game was being played in northwest Pakistan, killing at least nine people and wounding many more, sources say.

The incident took place in Lakki Marwat in the North West Frontier Province, which lies close to North and South Waziristan, two tribal regions where Pakistani Taliban fighters are active.

"Eleven people were killed and more than 25 injured," Habibullah Khan, the police chief of Bannu district, said.

He said the bomber was on foot and blew himself up during the game.

"There was a match between two village teams and a lot of people were watching it," Khan said.

Since the Pakistani army launched a ground offensive in South Waziristan in October, bombings have plagued Pakistan and killed more than 500 people.

Imran Khan, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the capital Islamabad, said: "Lakki Marwat is a place that has seen fighting against Taliban and al-Qaeda elements.

"The people of that area formed tribal militias to fight foreign fighters and the Taliban to push them out. So this was probably a retaliatory attack."

Drone attack

Earlier on Friday, missiles fired by a US drone killed at least three anti-government fighters in North Waziristan, security officials said.

The attack took place early morning in Ghundikala village near the town of Mir Ali.

In depth :

-  Neither wars nor drones 
-  Video: Drones become US weapon of choice 

 
"A US drone fired two missiles, targeting a vehicle and killing three militants," a senior security official in the area told the AFP news agency.

North Waziristan houses Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters as well as members of the Haqqani network, a powerful group known for staging attacks on foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Another US drone attack late on Thursday killed at least three fighters when two missiles hit their hideout.

The use of so-called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which allow the military to operate in highly dangerous areas, is expected to grow in the coming years with the US defence department expected to buy 700 drones next year alone.
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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Friday, January 01, 2010
10:19 Mecca time, 07:19 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/20101161820186658.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
UN to relocate staff in Pakistan 

 
Five UN workers were killed in a blast at the World Food Programme office in Islamabad [Reuters]
 
The United Nations plans to relocate about a fifth of its international staff in Pakistan because of the increasingly poor security situation in the country, a UN official has said.

Ishrat Rizvi, the UN spokeswoman in the capital, Islamabad, said around 20 per cent of the organisation's expatriate workers will either leave Pakistan for six months or be relocated to safer areas within the country.

"We are not closing down any programmes or projects, we are not scaling back," she said on Thursday.

She said some long-term programmes might be suspended and that the organisation would re-evaluate the security situation in six months.

Workers killed

At least 11 UN workers have been killed in Pakistan this year, and fears of further attacks have increased over the past two and a half months.

The organisation started to review its operations after an October attack on the World Food Programme office in Islamabad killed five people.

A UN official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Associated Press news agency that security managers are seeking a reduction of up to 30 per cent in the
UN's international staff working inside Pakistan.

An undetermined number of national staff will likely be moved out of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province and from the western province of Baluchistan, the official said.

The world body employs about 250 international and 2,500 national staff in Pakistan.

UN operations in Pakistan since early 2009 have grown to about $1bn for the nation's "sustainable development" needs, officials said. Since spring they have also handed out some $475mn in emergency humanitarian aid in northern Pakistan.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115099&sectionid=351020401

Press TV
January 1, 2010

US blitz continues to claim lives in Pakistan

At least five people have been killed and several others injured in two separate US drone strikes in the troubled northwestern region of Pakistan.

According to Pakistani officials, the Friday morning attack took place some 15 kilometers east of Miramshah, the main town of North Waziristan.

Missiles fired by an unmanned US drone killed at least three people traveling in a car.

"The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity," Reuters quoted a regional security official as saying.

On Thursday night, a drone strike killed at least two people and wounded many others in the same region.

The drone targeted a house where “militants� were believed to be hiding.

Pakistani officials have said that it's not clear whether any high-value target was in the area at the time of the attacks.

The death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured were said to be in critical condition.

Hundreds of people, many of them civilians, have been killed since 2006 in CIA-operated drone strikes in Pakistan, according to local media.

Although Islamabad has long said the US attacks are counter-productive and violate Pakistan's sovereignty, there are reports that US drones take off from bases inside the Pakistani territory.

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In Pakistan, more civilians fall victim to US drones  
 
 
01/01/2010 05:22:00 PM GMT 
 
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/In-Pakistan-more-civilians-fall-victim-to-US-dron.html

 
The civilian mortalities from US missile attacks on the Pakistani soil in 2009 indicate a threefold increase in compared to the previous year.

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones to carry out the attacks, the US Central Intelligence Agency, in cooperation with the Pentagon, are responsible for more than 700 civilian deaths in Pakistan this year, reports say.

In 2008, there were 32 strikes that killed about 240 people, according to Reuters. The attacks in 2009, meanwhile, had a mere 12.5 percent accuracy in targeting the supposed militants in Pakistan's northwestern tribal area, raising questions about the efficiency of the method.

The attacks, believed to be initiated from airbases located inside Pakistan's territory, have also played a strong role in the growing anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.

The CIA is accused of ignoring legal and moral principles in its running of deadly operations against civilians on a sovereign soil.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the attacks are hailed as a 'surgical' counterinsurgency tool. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi recently condemned the attacks as "counterproductive and unhelpful."

The latest round of the attacks left some seven people dead in the northwestern area of North Waziristan over the past two days.


Source: Press TV
 

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Death toll rises in Pakistan game blast

STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

-Police chief: More than 200 people were watching the game when bomb went off

-Militants made threats to the community, member of local peace committee says


A paramedic treats a suicide blast victim at a hospital in Lakki Marwat, Pakistan, on Friday.

(CNN) -- The death toll climbed to 88 Saturday after a suicide car bomb exploded in the middle of a group of men playing volleyball in northwest Pakistan, police said.

Thirty-seven others who were injured in the Friday attack remained in the hospital Saturday, said Mohammed Ayub Khan, police chief of the Lakki Marwat district. Those killed included six children, and most of the other victims were teenagers who were watching the volleyball game, he added. People who lived near the volleyball court also were among the casualties.

The attack happened in a residential neighborhood in the village of Shah Hassan Khel -- also called Lakki Marwat -- in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, said district police officer Asmat Ullah. The village is about 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of the district capital.

Eight houses in the neighborhood collapsed, and the blast was felt 11 miles (18 kilometers) away, the police chief said.

Volleyball is a popular sport in the area, and more than 200 people were watching the game when the bomb went off, the chief said.

Authorities thought a pickup was loaded with more than 600 pounds of explosives (300 kilograms), Khan added.

The area used to be a hub for militants before the military flushed them out about two months ago, the police chief said. Since then, militants have been making threats to the community, said Mushtaq Marwatt, a member of a local peace committee, to a local TV channel.

The region is near the rugged border with Afghanistan. The border area has been the scene of heavy fighting between Pakistani military forces and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that also is battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Journalists Nasir Dawar and Nazar ul-Islam contributed to this report.
 

 
 
 
 

 
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/01/02/pakistan.attacks/index.html 
 

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44 US drone hits in Pakistan killed 700 civilians in 2009


The Peninsula.

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61716&hd=&size=1&l=e

January 2, 2010

PESHAWAR: Of the 44 Predator strikes carried out by the American drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 12 months of 2009, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of around 700 innocent civilian lives.

According to the figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the Pakistani tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by the American drones, 140 civilian Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 percent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were innocent civilians.

The success percentage for the drone hits during 2009 is hardly 11 percent. On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day. Most of the hits were conducted on the basis of human intelligence, reportedly provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen, who are spying for the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan.

Of the five successful predator attacks carried out in 2009, the first one came on January 1, which reportedly killed two senior al-Qaeda leaders - Usama al-Kin and Sheikh Ahmed Salim, both wanted by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Kin was the chief operational commander of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and had replaced Abu Faraj Al Libi after his arrest in 2004.

The second successful drone attack was conducted on August 5 in South Waziristan that killed the most wanted fugitive chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Baitullah Mehsud along with his wife. The US State Department had announces a $5m head money for information leading to Baitullah , making him the only Pakistani fugitive with the head money separately announced by Islamabad and Washington.



 

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Obama has announced the partition of Pakistan - Webster Tarpley

RussiaToday

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61713&hd=&size=1&l=e

January 1, 2010
WATCH :


Obama has announced the partition of Pakistan - Webster Tarpley - RT News

http://www.uruknet.de/index.php?p=m61713&hd=&size=1&l=e


A former NATO officer claims US Special Forces have conducted secret raids inside Pakistan's border regions. The operations were conducted between 2003 and 2008, but only one was ever made public.

According to reports, troops were looking for high value targets among both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The one that became widely known in September 2008 was condemned as a provocation by the Pakistani government.

Ethnic groups from Pakistan’s Belugistan province where most of the raids occurred blame the government in Islamabad for allowing these things to happen, said RT LIVE investigative journalist Webster Tarpley.

He pointed out that "President Obama’s West point speech of December 2 is a thinly veiled declaration of war against Pakistan in the sense that it announces the intent of the US to promote the dismemberment, the partition of Pakistan along ethnic lines and in order to do that you have to create trouble on the ground."

"Ambassador Richard Holbrook, who is the US tsar for the region, was asked 'Do you have troops in Pakistan?’ and he said 'The US has intelligence personnel in Pakistan but not troops’. And I would ask – "What about the contractors, Mr Ambassador?" asked Tarpley.

Webster Tarpley disclosed information published in The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines about Blackwater Select and Total Intelligence Solutions having massive snatch and grab and even assassination operations run out of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, under the command of the US Joint Special Operations Command and CIA.

The Taliban refused to take responsibility for some explosions in public places in Pakistan and blamed the CIA for destabilizing the situation in the country through terror.

"I guess from some points of view the golden age of Blackwater was perhaps not under Bush/ Cheney but it is now under Obama," Tarpley said, "and they are running wild in ways they trample the sovereignty of Pakistan as a country."




 

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Monday, January 04, 2010
05:50 Mecca time, 02:50 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/20101402939361932.html

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Pakistan blast kills ex-minister 

 
The latest attack came two days after a blast at a volleyball match killed nearly 100 people [AFP]
 
A former provincial cabinet minister was among four people killed by a roadside bomb in the northwest of Pakistan, police have said.

Ghani-ur Rehman, a former irrigation minister in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), died in an explosion in Bagto village, about 10km from the city of Hangu, on Sunday.

"Four people, including Ghani-ur Rehman have died in the attack," Abdul Rashid Khan, the police chief of Hangu city, told the AFP news agency.

"The other three are a bodyguard, his driver and a friend."

Fazal Naeem, a police spokesman, said that a remote-control device was used to target Rehman's car.

"High-intensity explosives were used. The vehicle was completely destroyed," he said.

Taliban blamed

Rehman, who was a former mayor of Hangu, spent time in jail under the previous military government before benefitting from an amnesty that protected 8,000 politicians, businessmen and officials from corruption charges.

That amnesty was scrapped by the supreme court last month.

Hangu has a history of sectarian clashes between Pakistan's majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shia Muslims.

However, Rehman's son blamed the Pakistani Taliban for the bombing.

"My father was targeted twice before. Taliban and militant groups are involved in this attack," Ateeq-ur Rehman told AFP.

Bagto village is close to Orakzai, home of Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the country's main Taliban faction.

The blast follows a suicide car bombing at a volleyball game in a northwestern village that killed at least 98 people on Friday.

More than 600 people have died in suspected Taliban attacks since October in an apparent response to a military offensive against Taliban fighters in the south Waziristan region.

About 30,000 troops have secured key towns in the region since the operation was launched on October 17, but thousands of fighters are believed to have fled into the nearby tribal districts of North Waziristan, Kurram and Orakzai.

Drone attack

Meanwhile Pakistani intelligence officials said suspected US drone missiles struck near the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan on Sunday, killing five men.

Officials said the missiles targeted the house of a well-known tribesman in Mosakki village, about 25km east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

The tribesman's grandson was also reportedly killed in the attack which destroyed a vehicle nearby.

"A total of five militants have been killed, two are local and three are foreigners," a Pakistani security official in Miranshah told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Sunday's attack was the third suspected US missile strike in the tribal belt in less than a week.
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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Afghan Taliban say no links with Pakistani Taliban

The News International

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m61754&hd=&size=1&l=e

Sunday, January 03, 2010

KUNAR: Tehreek-e-Taliban Afghanistan has announced that it has no links with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), adding that it is fighting only against United States.

"Al-Qaeda and us have nothing in common except Jihad against the US troops," a private TV channel reported Qari Zia-ur-Rahman, commander of Afghan Taliban in Kunar province of Afghanistan as saying.

He said a large number of doctors and engineers have joined them, who will struggle to eliminate misunderstandings about Taliban’s armed struggle.

Qari Zia said all the commanders have been directed not to kidnap or harm foreigners, who arrive in Afghanistan for the welfare of Afghan public and a booklet has also been distributed in all parts of the country for this purpose. The Taliban commander made it clear they had no link with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.





 

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South Asia
Jan 6, 2010 
 http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA06Df02.html
 
Pakistan deals with its devils

By Zahid U Kramet

LAHORE - Pakistan and the United States are apparently not on the same page in regard to the Afghan Taliban, particularly insofar as the Haqqani network in Afghanistan is concerned.

Washington clearly sees Sirajuddin Haqqani as the enemy. Pakistan sees him as a possible ally in the exit of the US from the war theater beginning in 2011. The US views Haqqani's fallback position (read sanctuary) in Pakistan as a direct threat to the Western coalition in Afghanistan and has warned of expanded drone strikes into Pakistani territory if it did not move more aggressively against him. Pakistan's reactions to the threat have ranged from sullen silence to outright anger expressed by senior establishment officials who consider Haqqani key to any reconciliation process.

Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kiani, made no bones about his reservations on the subject when he responded to US exhortations "to do more" by saying that he had his hands full countering the al-Qaeda-inspired Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and that the Pakistan army was in no position to open another front. But there seemed to be a level of understanding on the common threat posed by the Afghan Taliban when The Washington Post quoted a Pakistani intelligence official as having said, "The Pakistani Taliban are the clear and present danger. They are what matters most. Once we are done with them, we will go after the Haqqani network" - signaling that no hard and fast lines had been drawn on the issue.

Nevertheless, Pakistan could have reason to be ambivalent on fueling animosity with Haqqani's network, as it remains gravely concerned about the expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan and fears encirclement by India after the US withdrawal begins in 2011. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, attempted recently to allay these fears when he agreed to the need of addressing the Kashmir dispute (the main bone of contention between the two neighbors) for stability in the region. But with there being no signs of a breakthrough on this, Pakistan feels it would be an error to close the door on such former "strategic assets" as Haqqani, irrespective of the complications this presents at the moment.

Pakistan may be living in a time warp. From all the evidence available, Haqqani is as committed to expelling US forces from Afghanistan as any other branch of the Taliban. On this, an expert on al-Qaeda, Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times Online, has no doubts. He contends that sooner rather than later, Pakistan will have to re-evaluate Haqqani as a strategic asset in the broader context of the "war on terror". He believes Pakistan could come off second-best as the voice to be heard by the Taliban insurgents, with al-Qaeda looking beyond Pakistan's borders, toward India to its east, the Central Asian republics to Afghanistan's north and, more recently, towards Yemen, to merchandise its message of a global caliphate.

The US is only too aware of this and has geared itself to act against further al-Qaeda encroachment in the volatile Af-Pak region, with President Barack Obama therefore opting for a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan. At the same time, there has been repeated admittance that without Pakistan's unqualified support in the "war on terror", the US and its allies could end up at the losing end of the stick.

United States Vice President Joseph Biden reaffirmed this when he said in an MSNBC interview recently that "defeating al-Qaeda and stabilizing Pakistan" are America's main strategic interests. At the same time, he identified Pakistan as the flashpoint, as he felt that al-Qaeda was more entrenched there than in Afghanistan, but he said the US would provide more assistance to Pakistan to counter al-Qaeda's growing influence in this country.

But Pakistan has more than one devil to deal with. The ruling Pakistan People's Party is under pressure, with the Supreme Court ruling against former president Pervez Musharraf's National Reconciliation Ordinance, which sought to provide amnesty to a number of PPP stalwarts for past alleged misdemeanors. Foremost among them is the PPP's co-chairman and incumbent president, Asif Ali Zardari, who appears to have America's confidence. Zardari is not as popular with Pakistan's military establishment, and the burning question now is whether or not the judiciary will go along with the constitutional stipulations that immunize a president holding office against past cases registered against him.

Zardari suspects it will not. In a public address on December 27, the second anniversary of his wife Benazir Bhutto's assassination, and repeatedly since, the president lamented that there was a conspiracy afoot to derail democracy through the country's courts. The US Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, however, certifies that Pakistan's military would play no role in this. Testifying before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Petraeus said he had been assured by senior military officials that the Pakistan army under Kiani was not interested in disrupting civilian rule. But a US State Department official, also testifying before said committee, admitted to tension between Pakistan's elected representatives and its military establishment.

Tension does exist. Pakistan's military commands the activities of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the country's premier intelligence service, and thus feels it is infinitely better equipped to tackle Pakistan's security issues (both internal and external) than the country's elected contingent.

However, the US seems to be more inclined toward blanket democratic management of Pakistan's national affairs. And it has leverage. The US funneled close to US$10 billion in military aid to Pakistan between fiscal 2001 and 2009 and has sanctioned $1.6 billion for fiscal year 2010 under the Coalition Support Fund, along with $700 million under the Counter-insurgency Capability Fund. But even that may not be enough to tackle Pakistan's security issues.

Zardari is alert to this reality and sounded fully supportive of the Pakistani military's views on the subject. In a letter to Obama revealed to The Washington Post by anonymous sources in December, Zardari spelled out that the bill for military operations in the Swat Valley alone had come to $2.5 billion, to suggest that the allocated sums for the "war on terror" in Pakistan were grossly inadequate.

The December 28 strike in the heart of Pakistan's densely populated financial capital and, significantly, principal port city, Karachi, substantiated this. The suicide-cum-arson attack left 45 dead and scores injured, with 2,500 shops gutted and a reported 10,000 people jobless. Hardly had Pakistan time to catch its breath when this was followed by the as yet unspoken-for car-bomb attack in faraway Lakki Marwat, close by the restive Waziristan territories, that reportedly killed 96, mostly young people, either playing or watching a volleyball game.

The South Waziristan-based TTP commander, Asmatullah Shaheen, is reported to have claimed responsibility for the Karachi attack, but doubt remains about the authenticity of this claim, as seldom has Shaheen acted as a spokesman for the Taliban. Moreover, as the Shaheen testimonial was delivered over the telephone to news agencies from an undisclosed location, it remains suspect.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in his media address from Gwadur, Balochistan province, to inaugurate a section of the Makran Costal Highway, referred to the attack as a "foreign agenda" to destabilize Pakistan. Interior Minister Rehman Malik took up the refrain from Karachi with his statement reading the hand of "foreign elements cannot be ruled out".

Zardari made his apprehensions on the "foreign agenda" known in the three-page letter to Obama when he "repeatedly referred to Pakistan's core interests, unresolved historical conflicts and conventional imbalances", according to The Times of India. He urged Obama to propel Pakistan's "neighbors" (read India) toward diplomatic engagement. He has since repeated the message in Pakistan's press.

But Shahzad is convinced it is al-Qaeda's game to expand the war into India with more proxy operations along the lines of the Mumbai attacks of 2008, as bringing India and Pakistan eyeball to eyeball again would leave the field wide open for the terrorist organization to spread chaos throughout South Asia.

With this in view, the challenging question now is why the Indian army chief, General Deepak Kapoor, would want to raise a host of devils by issuing a statement to the effect that India had the capacity to fight a two-front war against both Pakistan and China - and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion in 96 hours.

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.

 
 
 

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Pakistan worried U.S. buildup in Afghanistan will send militants across border

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 5, 2010; A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010403335_pf.html


ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- As 30,000 U.S. troops begin to deploy to Afghanistan, fears are rising in Pakistan that a stepped-up war just over the border could worsen the increasingly bloody struggle with militancy here.

Residents in border areas such as the violence-plagued city of Peshawar worry that a tide of militants could flee Afghanistan to seek targets in Pakistan. Doubts linger among Pakistani security officials about the Americans' ability to intensify the campaign against the Taliban without further destabilizing Pakistan's vast southwestern border or the already volatile tribal areas in the northwest.

"With a surge in American troops across the border, the militants facing pressure could come to our place, which will destroy peace and stability," said Haji Adam Khan, the top official in Qilla Abdullah, a mountainous Pakistani district that abuts Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.

U.S. officials disagree with that assessment, reflecting the undercurrents of mistrust between allies whose relationship President Obama has called crucial to success in Afghanistan. Pakistani reservations about the U.S. strategy highlight the limits of an American-led war campaign in Afghanistan that must stop at a famously porous border -- Pakistan does not allow U.S. troops to fight on its soil -- even if the enemy crosses over.

A wave of bombings has swept Pakistan since October, devastating Peshawar but also reaching far beyond the troubled northwest. Attacks on places believed to be safe, such as the military headquarters in Rawalpindi and a popular market in the eastern city of Lahore, have struck fear into the population.

Last week, Pakistan's foreign minister warned in a statement that the U.S. troop buildup could magnify the problems by bringing an "influx of militants and refugees from Afghanistan into Pakistan." The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 led thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda members to flee the fighting and seek refuge in Pakistan. Since then, insurgents have continued to use Pakistan as a staging ground for launching attacks into Afghanistan and within Pakistan.

When U.S. troops launched a major offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province last summer, Pakistani officials feared a fresh influx of militants into their territory. But that did not occur, U.S. and Pakistani military officials said.

"I think it's somewhat exaggerated," Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and security analyst, said of Pakistani fears about a surge of militants. "Why should they come here? They already have all the space they need in Helmand" and other Afghan border provinces, he said.

U.S. military officials said they are working closely with Pakistan's security forces ahead of the troop increase. They note that a stream of top American officials has visited Pakistan to seek support for the strategy.

A senior U.S. military official in Pakistan said a spillover of militancy or refugees is unlikely, in part because of regular meetings in which officials from both nations discuss "where we think the forces are going to go, and if that would cause issues." The Pakistani military is less sure. It is already stretched thin by military operations in South Waziristan and other tribal areas against the Pakistani Taliban, the group it blames for most domestic attacks.

The American plan to focus on control of Afghan cities and improve governance is positive, a Pakistani military official said, but Pakistan fears that U.S. forces might also "go on a wild goose chase" of targeting Taliban fighters without guarding borders. That could push fighters into Pakistan's tribal areas, reversing military gains there, or into Baluchistan in the southwest, where Pakistan -- which concentrates its forces in the northwest and along the eastern border region with arch-rival India -- has insufficient troops, the official said.

Whether or not the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan fuels violence in Pakistan, the border is likely to be a vexing problem for troops. It is certain that militants will seek refuge in Pakistan, but it is just as likely that extremists based in Pakistan will "follow the sound of the guns" into Afghanistan, a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said.

Bolstering border security is a "key part of the strategy" to prevent both militant movement and the import of bombmaking supplies into Afghanistan, the U.S. official said. But the official also suggested that Pakistan could assist more, by moving troops from the Indian border and by focusing more on "eliminating" key insurgent leaders to consolidate its military gains.

Pakistan has not captured top Pakistani Taliban insurgents during its two-month-old operation in South Waziristan and has declined to pursue the Haqqani network and other groups that attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In the border areas where militants already reign supreme, some observers say they are sure a spike in fighters and bloodshed is on the way. That could lead to more U.S. strikes by umanned aircraft -- a possibility American officials have hinted at.

"This will increase bomb blasts, suicide bombs and militants," said Nizam Dawar, chairman of the Tribal Development Forum, an umbrella group of nongovernmental agencies in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt.

But Dawar said he thinks rattled residents are eager for the U.S. troop buildup because they have lost faith in Pakistan's military to tackle extremism. What they fear is the potential drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan starting in 2011, he said.

In the tribal areas, where foreign insurgents mix with the local population, word is already circulating about the jobs militant leaders plan to claim in the Afghan and Pakistani governments they expect to capture once Western soldiers leave, Dawar said.

The troop buildup, with its timeline for starting the withdrawal, he said, "is good news for the Taliban."

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Wednesday, January 06, 2010
10:33 Mecca time, 07:33 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/20101643843829353.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Deaths reported in Pakistan blast  
 
 

 
A bomb attack has killed three security personnel outside an army base in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, close to the line separating it from  Indian territory, police say.

The attack came one day after Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, visited the area.

The injured were removed to a hospital in Rawla Kot, an adjoining town.

The bomb exploded outside a barracks in Tarar Khal, 150km east of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, Pakistan's private Geo television channel said.

Tarar Kehl is a small village with a local population of around 6,500 people.

Raja Farooq Haider, the elected leader of Pakistani Kashmir, confirmed the news of the explosion.

"The bomb blast took place in an army area. The authorities are on site. We have taken the injured to the nearby Rawla Kot hospital," he told Geo.

"Police and experts are investigating whether it was a suicide blast or a planted bomb."

Speaking from the nearby town of Pallandri, Irfan Masaood Kishvi, a senior police officer, told the AFP news agency: "It was a bomb blast. It could be a suicide blast, but we are collecting the evidence.

"It was outside the army barracks ... . Three security personnel have been martyred and three wounded. The injured have been taken to the Combined Military Hospital."
 
 Source: Agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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To hell with Pakistan, they're doing it here.

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US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009

by Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m61831&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, January 5, 2010

US drone missile attacks have claimed the lives of over 700 Pakistani civilians since Barack Obama took office a year ago, according to figures released this week by officials in Islamabad. The escalation of Washington’s AfPak war, now in full swing, will mean the slaughter of thousands more men, women and children in 2010.

The grim death toll was announced in the Pakistani English-language daily Dawn Monday, just as news of the latest strike by a Hellfire missile made its way from an impoverished village near the Afghanistan border.

The missile strike left dead and buried in the rubble of their home a Pakistani teacher and his nine-year-old son. According to media accounts citing unnamed US intelligence officials, the teacher’s home had been targeted for a Predator drone attack because of reports that militants had frequented the house.

Who provided these reports? How were they verified? Was there any evidence that the teacher—not to mention his child—were in any way implicated in the activities of the alleged "militants?"

No answers are forthcoming from the US government or the CIA, which conducts the majority of these attacks, reaffirming the intelligence agency’s reputation as Murder, Inc.

Washington, the CIA and the Pentagon have arrogated to themselves the unlimited right to carry out extra-judicial executions wherever they please, with no need for explanation, much less probative evidence. Initiated under the Bush administration in the name of a global war on terror, this criminal practice has been only intensified under Obama.

Over the course of the past year, US drones have fired missiles into the tribal areas of western Pakistan 44 times—more than twice the number of strikes carried out during the last year of the Bush administration. Citing statistics compiled by Pakistani government officials, Dawn reports that these missile strikes succeeded in killing only "five key Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders," while their so-called collateral damage included the lives of 708 innocent civilians.

"For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die," the newspaper reports. "Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities."

The newspaper listed as one of the drone campaign’s few successes the missile strike that killed the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, and his wife on August 5 of last year. As investigative reporter Jane Mayer pointed out in the New Yorker last October, however, it took "sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the CIA succeeded in killing him." The earlier, failed attacks are believed to have killed as many as 321 innocent civilians, while terrorizing an entire region.

There is no information from the US government to contradict Dawn’s story. The CIA classifies its drone program as "covert" and provides no information as to the number or identity of the people it kills. Citing unnamed intelligence sources (as well as military spokesmen in Afghanistan), the media routinely report that all those killed in drone attacks are "militants." Only when eyewitness accounts of the torn bodies of women and children make it out of the remote tribal areas is there any suggestion that the truth might be otherwise.

"Most of the attacks were carried out on the basis of human intelligence, reportedly provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen who are spying for the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan," the Dawn article added.

Last week’s suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents and a top Jordanian intelligence agent at Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan provided one indication of the reliability of such intelligence. The operatives at FOB Chapman were directly involved in choosing targets for the Predator drones. The bomber, considered one of their key "assets," fed them false information for over a year before calling the operatives—including the CIA chief of the operation—to a meeting in order to kill them.

The drone campaign in Pakistan is a protracted exercise in "targeted assassinations" and mass murder carried out against the people of a country with which the US is supposedly not even at war. It exemplifies everything that is criminal and reactionary in US imperialism’s campaign of military aggression in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.

CIA functionaries and military contractors (i.e., well-paid mercenaries) sit in front of video screens in Langley, Virginia, using joy sticks to send missiles crashing into the homes of Pakistani villagers. After a day spent murdering men, women and children 7,000 miles away, they get in their cars and drive home to their families and dinner.

Between the CIA’s secrecy and the Pakistani regime’s barring of media from the targeted tribal areas, the carnage from these attacks is largely hidden from the American people. To the extent that it is justified to the public, it is in the name of combating terrorism.

Considering the grim equation provided by the report in Dawn—140 dead civilians for every supposed "terrorist" killed by a Predator missile—this is clearly a pretext. The 44 strikes of the last year have done nothing to suppress terrorism. Rather, they have created thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people with a reason to strike back at the United States for the deaths of their families, friends and neighbors.

The drone strikes are part of an explosion of American militarism that has very different aims than combating terrorism or assuring the security of the US population. It is driven by the crisis of US capitalism and the attempt by the American ruling elite to overcome it by military means—first and foremost by imposing US hegemony over the energy-rich and strategically vital regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

The more than 700 killed on Obama’s orders in the drone attacks over the last year is only the beginning. As part of his administration’s military "surge," US officials have demanded that the Pakistani government launch an offensive to crush support for Afghans fighting against the US-led occupation. Washington has threatened that unless Islamabad takes decisive action, the US will act unilaterally, including with possible missile strikes against Quetta, a city of more than one million, where Taliban leaders have allegedly taken refuge.

Every escalation of US operations in Pakistan is further undermining the government, which is complicit in Washington’s crimes, threatening to unleash a civil war in a nuclear-armed country and to destabilize the entire region.

The military-intelligence apparatus has embraced the drone missile attacks as a technological answer to the problem of waging a war that is opposed by the majority of the American people. They do not involve immediate US casualties, and the human toll they inflict remains largely concealed.

Nonetheless, they are sowing the seeds of a far wider military conflagration, which, if it is not stopped, will exact a terrible price on working people in the US and around the world.

Bill Van Auken



 

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Salvador Option Fomenting Civil War In Pakistan

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m61851&hd=&size=1&l=e

05 January, 2010

Countercurrents.org

It was a bloody beginning of the year 2010 in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. More than one hundred people were killed and another 22 injured in a car bomb attack on the packed volleyball ground in Laki Marwat.

At the time when the suicide bomber attacked the volleyball ground, around 25 elders of the 'peace committee’ were holding a meeting at a nearby mosque, but they remained unhurt. Officials say that the bomber apparently decided to target the crowd and the players, as most of them were members of the armed Lashkar that demolished houses of the militants and evicted them from their villages.

Elsewhere in the northwest province, a roadside bomb exploded near a car in the Bajur tribal region, killing a pro-government tribal elder and five of his family members. Tribal leaders who support the government against the militants are frequent targets of attacks.

Borrowing a page from Al-Anbar experiment, the US has advised Pakistan to enlist tribal leaders in the border areas in the fight against the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces. The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province of Iraq where American commanders have worked with Sunni sheiks to turn locals against the militant group. This has been hailed as a great success in fighting insurgents there.

Many experts point out that the experiment as it played-out in Iraq had produced disastrous results in El Salvador where it further polarized the populace and turned the people against the US efforts. Tellingly, the consequences of the Anbar model are emerging in the volatile Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) where even national army is seen as an occupying army by many fiercely independent-mind tribesmen.

The tragic incident of Laki Marwat best reflects the outcome of the new government policy to pit tribes against tribes through bribes. The pro-government tribes are being armed by the Pakistan government. Till this date more than 700 tribal elders have been killed in this strategy.

In October 2008, a suicide bomb attack on a pro-government tribal jirga in Orakzai killed at least 51 people and more than 200 wounded. Orakzai has been the most peaceful of Pakistan's seven semi-autonomous tribal regions. Unlike most of the others, Orakzai does not border Afghanistan. The jirga was about to send a tribal lashkar led by 25 elders to destroy the alleged Taliban headquarters in the area.

South Waziristan Operation

The Laki Marwat bomb attack was not far from South Waziristan, where Pakistan’s mercenary army is waging an offensive, called Rah-e-Nijat (the Salvation Path), against the Pakistani Taliban or militants. That operation has provoked apparent reprisal attacks that have killed more than 500 people since October when the military operation was launched.

The South Waziristan operation is continuing since mid-October 2009 under a smoke screen. No body knows what is going on in the operation theatre since media is not allowed to report about the operation or the plight of the people suffering from the indiscriminate shelling and air strikes on the so-called Taliban targets. No journalists are permitted inside the war zone. Every report on the fighting, Taliban and army casualties, and civilian casualties are based solely on the information, misinformation and propaganda released by the government or military spokesmen.

Ban on media made it impossible to gauge the real extent of civilian casualties which are these days dubbed as collateral damage. A sample of army atrocities in South Waziristan can be found on Youtube.

If the army atrocities in May-July 2009 operation against the militants in Swat has any indication then we may find extra-judicial killings and mass graves in South Waziristan as uncovered in Swat. Returning residents of Swat displaced by the army operation often found unclaimed bodies dumped in agricultural fields, by the roadside or on the banks of Swat River.

On September 1, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn quoted government officials as saying that 251 bodies had been found dumped along the roadside in the Swat Valley since July. On August 27, the newspaper reported that 51 bodies had been found in the area in the space of just 24 hours.
Dawn also reported the discovery of a number of mass graves containing victims of the military and referred to local residents who had "witnessed the crude and inhuman lumping together of the living and the dead."

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) sent a fact-finding mission to Swat which documented accounts of not only extrajudicial killings but also discovery of mass graves.

In what amounted to a massive exercise in collective punishment, many civilians were killed or wounded and some 4 million people of Swat were driven from their homes, triggering a major humanitarian crisis for impoverished Pakistan. While the Swat displaced people are still clamoring for rehabilitation, the South Waziristan operation has displaced 430,000 people. More than two months after the Pakistani military launched the US-financed offensive, humanitarian aid organizations are only now gaining access to the people who have fled the fighting in the region.

New Year Drone attack

As the suicide bomber attacked killed more than 100 people in Laki Marwat, Mir Ali, a major town of North Wazirstan witnessed a US missile attack. According to unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials, the missile struck a car carrying alleged militants, killing three men. Shortly afterward, Taliban fighters arrived at the scene of the attack and moved the bodies to an undisclosed location, the officials said. This is the usual statement by the Pakistani officials as they are don’t want to show the bodies of those who are killed in the missile attacks. Why? Because most of the time they are innocent civilians and children.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, US drones, reportedly launched from Baluchistan’s Shamsi airbase, killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009. For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians. The success percentage for the drone hits during 2009 was hardly 11 per cent. On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day.

The drone attacks, which intensified under the Obama administration, have played a major role in fomenting anti-American feelings among the masses and gradually turning the traditionally highly patriotic tribal population of FATA against the state especially while the US pressured the army into moving into this area in 2004.

Now the army operation is destabilizing the whole country as the people became victims of increased suicide bomb blasts. Economic centers are also being destroyed as we have seen in Karachi on December 28 when around 4,000 shops were set on fire in the main shopping centers.

In short, a civil war is brewing in Pakistan, thanks for US policies adopted by a Washington installed government in Islamabad.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com email: asghazali@gmail.com





 

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Wednesday, January 06, 2010
17:12 Mecca time, 14:12 GMT   
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/20101613294018697.html

News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
US drone strikes hit Pakistan 
 

A bomb exploded in Pakistani-controled Kashmir killing three security personnel [AFP]

 
A suspected double US drone attack has killed at least 15 people in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region.

The strikes on Wednesday occurred in North Waziristan, where several opposition groups stage attacks inside the district and into bordering Afghanistan.

Some officials have claimed that as many as 12 opposition fighters were among those dead.

The first drone attack hit a mud fort in Datta Khel region of the tribal district, with the second missile striking as people were searching in the rubble more than an hour later.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the capital Islamabad, said it was hard to say whether those who died were opposition fighters or citizens.

Tensions

"We never know whether they are militants or civilians because if you look at the number of strikes and the number of casualties on the ground the militants do not figure very prominently," he said.

"Today ... there was the first strike by the drone in which six people were killed. Immediately after that people went to the rescue and as the rescue efforts were still underway the second strike took place, causing the death toll to rise to at least 15 people.

"This is likely to cause considerable anger because that rescue effort was an effort to save lives and as it came under attack it is likely to raise tensions between Pakistan and the US."

The US has identified North Waziristan as an area from where al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the large Haqqani network launch attacks on their own and international forces in Afghanistan and is increasingly initiating crackdowns in the region.

At least seven US CIA agents were killed by a suicide bomber last week across the North Waziristan border in Afghanistan.

There have been a reported four drone attacks in North Waziristan since the CIA deaths, killing at least 20 people.

At least 74 US drone missile strikes have killed nearly 700 people in Pakistan since August 2008.

Kashmir bombing

Separately, a bomb attack has killed three security personnel outside an army base in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, close to the line separating it from Indian territory, police say.

[/img]
 
The attack came one day after Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, visited the area.

The injured were removed to a hospital in Rawla Kot, an adjoining town.

The bomb exploded outside a barracks in Tarar Khal, 150km east of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, Pakistan's private Geo television channel said.

Tarar Kehl is a small village with a local population of around 6,500 people.

Raja Farooq Haider, the elected leader of Pakistani Kashmir, confirmed the news of the explosion.

"The bomb blast took place in an army area. The authorities are on site. We have taken the injured to the nearby Rawla Kot hospital," he told Geo.

"Police and experts are investigating whether it was a suicide blast or a planted bomb."

Speaking from the nearby town of Pallandri, Irfan Masaood Kishvi, a senior police officer, told the AFP news agency: "It was a bomb blast. It could be a suicide blast, but we are collecting the evidence.

"It was outside the army barracks ... . Three security personnel have been martyred and three wounded. The injured have been taken to the Combined Military Hospital."
 
 Source: Al Jazeera and agencies 
 
 
 
 
 

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South Asia
Jan 8, 2010 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA08Df02.html 
 
General alert in Pakistan


By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - At a time when Islamabad is trying to implement a United States-sponsored initiative for a spirit of dialogue between Pakistan and India, an Indian general has stirred up a hornet's nest, eliciting a belligerent response from across the border.

Indian General Deepak Kapoor, according to media reports, last week said in a closed-door seminar that his country could take on Pakistan and China simultaneously and "bring it to a satisfactory conclusion in 96 hours", and even suggested that a "limited war under a nuclear overhang" was possible in South Asia.

Pakistan, tightly allied with the United States-led "war on terror" and tied down with its commitment to Washington to focus on its western border with Afghanistan rather than on India, chose not to officially respond to the Indian general's remarks.

However, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Tariq Majeed, who by virtue of his designation becomes the operational head of all Pakistan's armed forces in the event of war, spoke out.

"Leave alone China, General Deepak Kapoor knows very well what the Indian armed forces cannot do and what the Pakistani armed forces can pull off militarily ... I have doubts that he can be so outlandish in strategic postulations as to put India on a self-destructive path," said Kapoor, known for his anti-American attitude. If the report were correct, he said, the uncalled-for rhetoric only depicted a lack of strategic acumen.

Kapoor identified five thrust areas that would drive a new Indian doctrine.

-While the armed forces prepare for their primary task of conventional wars, they must also factor in the eventuality of "a two-front war" breaking out. In tune with this, after acquiring a greater offensive punch along the entire western front with Pakistan by the creation of a new South-Western Army Command in 2005, India was now taking steps - albeit belatedly - to strategically counter the stark military asymmetry with China in the eastern sector. There is now "a proportionate focus towards the western and northeastern fronts".

-The armed forces need to "optimize" their capability to effectively counter "both the military and non-military facets" of asymmetric and sub-conventional threats like weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and information warfare.

-The armed forces have to substantially enhance their strategic reach and out-of-area capabilities to protect India's geopolitical interests stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait. "This would enable us to protect our island territories; and also give assistance to the littoral states in the Indian Ocean region."

-Interdependence and operational synergy between the army, navy and air force must become the essence of strategic planning and execution in future wars. "For this, joint operations, strategic and space-based capability, ballistic missile defense and amphibious, airborne and air-land operations must be addressed comprehensively."

-India must strive to achieve a technological edge over its adversaries. "Harnessing and exploitation of technology also includes integration of network centricity, decision-support systems, information warfare and electronic warfare into our operational plans."

Pakistan's Majeed, a four-star general, was in mid-2008 twice offered the position of chief of army staff by former president Pervez Musharraf when Musharraf turned against the incumbent army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani. Each time, Majeed refused, as he prefers to stay in the background, although he has emerged as a leader on several issues.

The bulk of the Pakistan army was against Asif Ali Zardari when he announced his decision to run for president, a position he assumed on September 9, 2008. Majeed, however, rallied the top brass, urging that the democratic process should be given a chance and that if the political forces wanted Zardari, their decision should be respected.

Naturally, Zardari was thankful and offered to elevate Majeed, including to a position with complete command and control over all of the branches of the armed services. Majeed declined but continued to exert what influence he had.

From mid-2009, he was at the forefront of the initiative to start a dialogue process with the Taliban, an issue he discussed with senior visiting US military officials. This raised the ire of some sections of Pakistan's strategic quarters which were closely allied with the American war in Afghanistan. Some officers even boycotted Majeed's meeting with his American counterpart, Admiral Mike Mullen, in violation of all protocols.

However, Majeed continued to air his views, which emphasize dialogue with militants. He believes that the American war machine has been badly sucked into Afghanistan and that Pakistan should distance itself from being pulled into that quagmire.

Gradually, Majeed's arguments have taken hold and in the past few weeks there have been some developments concerning Pakistan's dealings with the US.

A stringent mechanism has been adopted in issuing visas to Americans, which has restricted American defense contractors in Pakistan. Their growing presence in the country has for some time been a bone of contention. US diplomats, too, have been under pressure, such as being forced to use regular immigration counters at airports.

This does not mean that Pakistan overnight has become anti-American, or that its cooperation with the US will suddenly cease. These are critical times, though, for both the US and Pakistan, the former embroiled in Afghanistan, the latter struggling with spreading militancy, and what are now just trends could evolve into something bigger.

Three important appointments in Pakistan this year could have an influence on such trends, including Majeed's sentiments.

The director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, is due to retire in March. The government has so far not shown any interest in extending his tenure. Army chief Kiani is due to step down in November. Washington is keen to see his term extended, as he dovetails perfectly with American policies on the region. Majeed, too, is slated to retire in October, which leaves him a matter of months to push his views.

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

 
 
 

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CIA takes revenge with missile strikes in Pakistan

By Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m61908&hd=&size=1&l=e

WSWS, January 7, 2010

In an apparent campaign of revenge at least 20 people have died in drone missile attacks in Pakistan since the December 30 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA operatives and a Jordanian intelligence agent.

The most deadly of the strikes by the CIA’s Predator drone aircraft took place Wednesday in the Datta Khel region of North Waziristan, near the Afghanistan border.

Citing unnamed intelligence officials, the Associated Press reported that one of the pilotless drones fired two missiles into a house, killing seven people. This was followed more than an hour later by another missile, launched as local villagers struggled to rescue survivors and pull bodies from the rubble. This second strike killed at least another five people. Some Pakistani media put the total death toll from the two missile strikes at 15.

The Islamabad-based International News Network Web site reported that the missile strikes had sown widespread panic in the area. There are growing fears in Pakistan that the response to last week’s suicide bomb attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s Khost province, just across the border from North Waziristan, will be an intensified and sustained campaign of drone attacks that will claim many more lives.

The Predator strikes have provoked widespread anger in Pakistan, both because of the loss of life and the blatant trampling on the country’s sovereignty. Government officials have also routinely condemned the attacks, though it is evident that Islamabad has allowed the strikes, many of which are launched from a covert airfield in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

The CIA agents and private contractors killed at the base in Afghanistan were responsible for choosing targets for the drone attacks.

The bomber who killed them, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was a Jordanian doctor, regarded by the US intelligence agency as one of its most important "assets" in the covert war on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In the wake of the bombing, intelligence officials have confirmed that Balawi lured the operatives, including the second highest ranking CIA officer in Afghanistan, to the base with the promise of intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor widely considered to be the real leader of Al Qaeda.

CBS News reported Wednesday that Balawi had provided the CIA with "actionable intelligence" used to choose targets for missile attacks. Given that Balawi was evidently working for Al Qaeda while pretending to be infiltrating it, it can be assumed that the intelligence he provided was false and missiles were directed at targets that had nothing to do with either Al Qaeda or armed elements fighting US occupation forces in Afghanistan.

The bombing at Base Chapman represents a major setback for the CIA campaign in Pakistan and threatens to undermine the Obama administration’s strategy for escalating the US military intervention in the region.

The incident has also raised some troubling questions for the CIA.

Balawi was offered to the CIA by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, the monarchial regime’s secret police agency, also known as the Mukhabarat. One of its operatives, Ali bin Zaid, was also killed in the December 30 bombing. Bin Zaid was reportedly Balawi’s "handler."

The Jordanian doctor was arrested by the Mukhabarat in early 2009 after he volunteered to join a medical mission to Gaza following the Israeli invasion of the Palestinian territory. He was supposedly recruited to infiltrate Al Qaeda while in prison and then dispatched to Pakistan.

The incident has brought into focus the continuing intimate relationship between the CIA and the Jordanian Mukhabarat. The Washington Post quoted former CIA agent Jamie Smith as saying that the Jordanian secret police are "particularly prized for their skill in both interrogating captives and cultivating informants."

Indeed, Jordan was a central hub in the practice of "extraordinary rendition" in which the CIA abducted people from a number of countries, detained them without charges and sent them to third countries—among the most prominent, Jordan—to be interrogated under torture.

Human rights groups have repeatedly pointed to the "expertise" of the Mukhabarat, which routinely tortures Jordanian political dissidents.

As the Post reported, the "special relationship" between the CIA and the Mukhabarat is so close that "the CIA liaison officer in Amman enjoys full, unescorted access to the GID’s fortress-like headquarters."

For the Jordanian regime, these reports are extremely unwelcome. It has attempted to hide its role as Washington’s proxy because of the overwhelming opposition to US policies within Jordan and throughout the Middle East.

As for the CIA’s role, the continuation and deepening of these ties raises the question of whether the Obama administration is still utilizing the "special expertise" of the Jordanian secret police.

The other fallout from the bombing is the identification of two of its victims as employees of Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, the most prominent supplier of mercenaries for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were apparently employed as CIA contractors.

CIA Director Leon Panetta announced last month that the agency had severed a previously secret contract under which Blackwater-Xe contractors were employed loading missiles and servicing Predator drones in Pakistan. Previously, Panetta had revealed to the US Congress the existence of a secret assassination program that was to employ Blackwater mercenaries. He claimed that it had never gone beyond the planning stages.

It would appear that the company continues to operate as a surrogate for the CIA under another, previously undisclosed contract.

The firm changed its name from Blackwater to Xe in an attempt to shed its infamous reputation, which included the slaughter of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.





 

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US pushing Pakistan into the abyss of oblivion

By Zafar Bangash

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m61934&hd=&size=1&l=e

January 7, 2010


We are supposed to hate suicide bombers, those grotesque creatures hell-bent on killing innocent people because of their "demented ideology". There is no shortage of experts delivering sermons from every pulpit pontificating on the evils of terrorism. Government officials and their media sycophants join in this chorus but few bother to ask whence these hateful creatures came? There were no suicide bombers in Pakistan or Afghanistan a mere five years ago. What happened during this period to give birth to the phenomenon of suicide bombings is a question that must be addressed in earnest.

No problem can be tackled or solved properly without understanding its genesis, the circumstances surrounding its emergence and factors that feed its growth. Equally important is the fact that if a particular approach fails to solve the problem, alternatives must be explored.

Pakistan is rapidly hurtling into the abyss of oblivion. Hardly a day passes by without a bomb explosion or suicide bombing in some part of the country. What possible excuse could there be for the murderous attack on a masjid as happened on December 4 that killed more than 40 people in Rawalpindi, we are asked. The coordinated attack by suicide bombers followed by armed men shooting worshippers during Friday prayers when the masjid was full was particularly gruesome. Among those killed were a major general, a brigadier, a colonel, two lieutenant colonels and two majors. Seventeen children were also killed.

Four days later (December , the Moon Market in Iqbal Town, Lahore was bombed when it was full of shoppers; 43 people died in that carnage. On December 9 the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) offices in Multan were attacked. Unable to enter the building, the attackers detonated their lethal wares in the nearby building where families of ISI officials live. The car bombing left 12 dead and scores injured. Many more such attacks will occur in the days to come if past experience is anything to go by. The brief hiatus during Eid al-Adha celebrations has been shattered with far greater bloodletting.

Theories abound about the identity of the perpetrators: Taliban, Indian agents, American agents, Afghan agents, Blackwater mercenaries and Mossad. The list is endless. All of them may be involved but how has this situation evolved? Why were there no suicide bombers a mere five years ago; what circumstances led to their emergence and who else is fishing in the troubled waters of Pakistan? Is the US a friend or foe? The people of Pakistan know the answer but Pakistani elites continue to harbor illusions about America's friendship and believe it wants to help Pakistan — presumably over a cliff.

Immediately after the Moon Market bombing in Lahore, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the government had evidence that weapons were being smuggled from Afghanistan. Perhaps. Lahore Police chief, Pervez Rathore said India was involved. This may also be true. The Lahore daily, The Nation, reported on December 9 that two vehicles were stopped attempting to enter the restricted area of Lahore Cantonment late at night. The occupants were Americans who refused to show their identity papers or allow the police to search their vehicles. Officials from the US Consulate finally arrived at the scene to get the vehicles and their occupants freed. There is widespread belief that these were Blackwater mercenaries.

Thousands of Blackwater operatives (the organization has now renamed itself Xe Service to hide the criminal past associated with its former name) have descended on Pakistan. They carry prohibited weapons and on numerous occasions have been arrested by the police in suspicious circumstances only to be released on orders of Pakistani government officials. The US embassy in Islamabad has also hired a large number of retired army officers that act like warlords, trying to browbeat the police into submission. Poorly paid and lacking motivation, the police are easily intimidated by ex-army officers who throw their weight about driving in expensive, American-provided vehicles.

Last November, a plane load of Blackwater mercenaries arrived in Pakistan and were immediately whisked through Islamabad International Airport without going through immigration and customs formalities, according to officials at the airport quoted by The Nation newspaper (November 4, 2009). "We had instructions to allow the foreigners entry without custom procedure," officials on duty at Islamabad airport said. Blackwater mercenaries have operated in Pakistan for many years. On several occasions Pakistani police have arrested them at odd hours near Pakistan's nuclear sites or other sensitive installations. Every time ex-army officers working for the US embassy have intervened to secure their release. These former military officers and a long list of bureaucrats, journalists and politicians are on the US embassy payroll and are working directly against the interests of Pakistan.

Former Chief of Army Staff Mirza Aslam Baig has gone so far as to accuse the former military dictator Pervez Musharraf of being complicit in Blackwater crimes. General Baig has said it was Musharraf who gave these mercenaries the green light to carry out terrorist operations in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta. The current civilian rulers, led by Asif Ali Zardari, a venal character and a notorious crook, are in no position to say no to the Americans. Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times reported on August 29, 2009 that the CIA hired these mercenaries for targeted assassinations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as early as 2004. Following a particularly gruesome episode in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 Iraqis were murdered in cold blood, the Iraqi regime refused to grant the company an "operating license." In a joint piece in the New York Times on December 11, Mazzetti and James Risen shed light on the tight relationship between the CIA and Blackwater. Hired for security duties, Blackwater operatives have indulged in wanton killings in Iraq. In Pakistan, the US hired them for illegal drone attacks as well as targeted killings.

Blackwater mercenaries are only one, even if the major problem facing Pakistan. There are other factors as well behind the escalating mayhem that is rapidly spinning out of control. The root of the problem is the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that has now spilled over into Pakistan. As a consequence of the US-NATO war and brutality in Afghanistan and the incessant drone attacks, there is great resentment in Pakistan toward the US. With fighting concentrated primarily in the south and southeast of Afghanistan where the Pashtuns reside, mass killings there have aroused much anger among the Pashtuns on the Pakistan side of the border as well.

It was bad enough when the US-NATO forces launched their aerial assault with B-1 bombers in October 2001 killing thousands of people in Afghanistan; the bombing of wedding parties and defenseless villagers in their mud huts in subsequent years has intensified hatred of the US. This has been heightened by the Pakistan military launching operations against its own people in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, Swat, Bajaur and now in Orakzai Agency. This ongoing painful chapter has contributed greatly to escalating tensions in Pakistan where none existed before, leading to the phenomenon of suicide bombings.

We need to consider the timeline of several events.

Military attacks in North and South Waziristan

Under pressure from the US, the former Pakistani dictator, General Pervez Musharraf ordered military operations against the people of South Waziristan in early 2004. The excuse advanced was that Pakistan had to "flush out" foreign fighters, mainly Uzbeks and Arabs. After several weeks of fighting that left hundreds of villagers dead and thousands as refugees, an agreement was reached with Naik Muhammad, the young charismatic tribal leader in the region. As a gesture of goodwill during a ceremony on April 24, 2004, the tribesmen surrendered their pistols and handed a copy of the Qur'an to the Pakistani general.

The agreement horrified Washington; it did not want peace in the area. On May 21, 2004, Musharraf presided over a high-powered meeting in Islamabad and ordered resumption of attacks. While the Corps Commander Peshawar, in charge of military operations in Waziristan, opposed such attacks and warned against breaking the agreement because it would have serious repercussions for the future, Musharraf was adamant. He insisted on attacking the tribesmen because Washington demanded it. The military relaunched its operations in early June. The US also joined with drone attacks and killed Naik Muhammad with whom the Pakistani military had, only a few weeks earlier, signed a widely publicized peace deal. The people of Waziristan were incensed by such betrayal. In order to protect the US, Musharraf claimed the Pakistan army had carried out the attack that killed Naik Muhammad. More than 15,000 people attended his funeral prayer in defiance of threats that the funeral procession would be bombed.

Between 2004 and 2006, Waziristan — both North and South — became a war zone. The US continued drone attacks killing civilians, mostly women and children. Several ceasefires were agreed upon only to be violated as a result of US pressure or drone attacks. As the attacks continued, there emerged a group calling itself Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Suicide bombings increased in Pakistani cities mainly in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The Pakistan army continued attacking its own people while the Americans intensified their demands that Islamabad must "do more".

Lal Masjid attack: July 2007

As if the war in Waziristan that had already spread to other areas of the NWFP and the adjoining tribal areas was not bad enough, Musharraf perpetrated another outrage by attacking the Lal Masjid-madrassa compound in Islamabad in July 2007. Run by two imams, with long ties to the government and several ministers, they became embroiled in a dispute over growing immorality in the capital, especially prostitution. Girl students from the madrassa took it upon themselves to clean up the filth because the government had refused to do so. The girls' action was taken as a great affront by the regime as well as the secular elite. How could government-paid imams demand an end to prostitution when the ruling elites regularly patronize their dens? Several weeks of negotiations between the clerics and government emissaries fell apart because Musharraf did not want a peaceful resolution. He insisted on a military showdown to establish the "government' s writ" and to prove he was in charge. The Americans also demanded crushing the militants.

On July 11, 2007, Musharraf ordered his commandos to attack the Lal Masjid. In the weeklong attack, more than 1,400 students, most of them girls, were brutally murdered. Phosphorous bombs were used to burn people to death. The overwhelming majority of girls belonged to Swat; they were from poor families and had found the madrassa-masjid complex a useful place to educate their daughters and to provide them a roof, being too poor even to feed them (madrassas in Pakistan do not charged fees; Muslim philanthropists often contribute toward such expenses as part of their Islamic duty).

The Lal Masjid attack sent a shockwave throughout the country, particularly in Swat. While the secular elites, including Benazir Bhutto, then still "languishing" in her luxury apartment in London or commuting to her palaces in Dubai, applauded the commando raid and the killing of hundreds of innocent girls, ordinary Pakistanis were horrified. The Americans, too, applauded the killings. The result was catastrophic for Pakistan.

Bombings and suicide attacks immediately escalated. If one can establish a turning point in Pakistan's tortuous history, the Lal Masjid saga must stand out as the one that pushed the country over the brink. Battle lines became so clearly drawn that only the blind could fail to see. The ruling elites have never cared for ordinary people or their children but hitherto it was reflected in lack of services. Now the elites had embarked on a killing spree. The reaction was swift and strong. There has been no turning back since. Soon Musharraf was engulfed in a political crisis that forced him out of office following a British-American brokered deal that facilitated Bhutto's return to Pakistan. Corruption cases against Bhutto, her even more corrupt husband Asif Zardari, and thousands of other thieves and criminals, totaling 8041 people, were withdrawn under what came to be called the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). Critics dubbed it the National Robbers' Ordinance.

Before the January 8, 2008 national elections were held, Benazir Bhutto was shot dead in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. Her death has been engulfed in controversy; few believe the official version that she hit her head on a door handle in the vehicle when she fell down after being hit. There is widespread belief in Pakistan that her husband had a hand in her killing. The street urchin, not fit to be even a doorman, ended up as president of the country and its unfortunate people after Musharraf was forced to resign on August 18, 2008. Musharraf's departure, however, did little to contain the mayhem that was rapidly engulfing the country. More than 100,000 troops were deployed in the tribal area fighting its own people, merely to appease the US.

Attack on Swat

On April 26, 2009, the military attacked Swat. It immediately resulted in more than three million people becoming refugees. In the sweltering heat, people were forced to live in dusty camps in Peshawar, Mardan and Sawabi. There was little or no government help extended to them. Pakistani bureaucrats that had gained notoriety for past corruption were appointed to look after the new refugees referred to as Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), stole donations earmarked for refugees. The Swat operation lasted several months. Massive damage was inflicted on major towns in Swat and the surrounding areas; hundreds of young people were executed in cold blood but leaders of the Taliban, against whom the operation was ostensibly launched, were neither captured nor killed. Some have been apprehended but it is widely believed that they are being sheltered by the regime.

On October 17, 2009, the military launched a fresh attack on South Waziristan, again under the rubric of extending "government writ". This strange animal is invoked each time the Americans exert pressure on Pakistan to "do more". While the military has continued to bomb villages in South Waziristan turning it into wasteland driving 500,000 people from their homes, car and suicide bombings have escalated in cities like Kohat, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore and Multan. October was a particularly bad month with attacks on a number of military targets including the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. A number of brigadiers were also killed in Islamabad.

On December 12, 2009, the Pakistan government announced that it was halting military operations in South Waziristan but attacks against Orakzai Agency had already commenced. Long-range artillery batteries placed in Hangu, the district headquarter bordering Orakzai Agency, are being used to fire at villages like Bagh and other places in the tribal area. An estimated 250,000 people, the overwhelming majority women and children, from Orakzai Agency have been forced to flee and are now living in appalling conditions in refugee camps in Hangu. With the onset of winter that is extremely harsh in that region coupled with lack of proper shelter and heating facilities as well as lack of food, people's suffering will escalate, as will their resentment to seek revenge for the military's barbarous attacks. Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gailani said this would be a 10-12 year war. He is beginning to sound like American officials.

As US President Barack Obama announced his surge for Afghanistan, he also called upon Pakistan to launch military operations in Baluchistan. Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, wants to turn the whole of Pakistan into a war zone. He has threatened to extend drone attacks into Baluchistan as well. The Los Angeles Times reported on December 12 that the US intends to launch drone attacks o the Afghan Taliban Shura's alleged home base in Quetta. Now that would be a real gesture of peace!

When the Pakistan army and American drones kill innocent civilians, it is unrealistic to expect that people will not react. Each killing escalates resentment and stokes the urge to exact revenge, a long-established tradition in that part of the world. Victims have long memories; they do not easily forget their dead no matter how many rhetorical phrases are hurled at them. If for 3,000 American deaths on 9/11, the US can attack two countries and murder more than 1.5 million people, why is it so difficult to understand that other people will feel equally hurt and seek revenge?

The ruling elites in Pakistan should understand that they have aligned themselves with the enemy — the US government — against their own people for a fistful of dollars. They are now enemy agents and therefore, legitimate targets for those who have lost loved ones in the ongoing escalating attacks on their villages where they witnessed their children, mothers or wives blown to pieces. It is not and never was Pakistan's war; it is America's war imposed on Pakistan. And it does not help to prattle about an "extremist ideology" driving people to do crazy things; this is the reaction of very normal, ordinary people. It would be highly abnormal if they did not react this way.

Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist recounts the story of a young boy lying in a run-down hospital in Waziristan. The boy who had lost his limbs in a US Drone attack, told Mir that his mother too had died in a similar strike. In her dying moments, she had instructed him to avenge in Islamabad — where the decisions to maim and kill are made — what was done to her in Bajaur. Years later, his older brother was caught in Islamabad attempting to blow himself up in a high-security area.

The Pakistani elites have embarked on a suicidal policy. Their actions can only invite suicide bombers. They have only themselves to blame. History will render a very harsh verdict because they are actively engaged in destroying Pakistan.




 

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Drone attacks will continue in Pakistan: McCain


Friday, 08 Jan, 2010 
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/14-drone-attacks-will-continue-in-pakistan-mccain-zj-05     



A US congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain called on President Asif Ali Zardari at the Presidency in Islamabad. US Ambassador in Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson and senior officials of the US embassy are also present. –APP Photo Pakistan


ISLAMABAD: In a meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari here on Friday, US Republican Senator John McCain said that there were some differences between Pakistan and the US regarding drone attacks but that both countries have the same views against terrorism and democratic values, DawnNews reported.
 
The Senator said that drone attacks inside the Pakistani territory will continue to destroy the strong holds of Taliban extremists but that the US has no intentions of incursions in Pakistan.

“The (drone) attacks are imperative to defeat the enemy,” he said. “With an improved decision making process the civilian causalities are totally minimized.”

He maintained that in the past both countries have had a trust deficit, but now the US was confident of building a better relationship with Pakistan.

“We can not succeed in Afghanistan without a stable and prosperous Pakistan.”

He added that the US will not start incursions inside Pakistan. “Whenever such an action is required, we will take the Pakistani government in confidence. It is a fact that terrorists inside tribal areas of Pakistan are real threat for US forces in Afghanistan.”

“The financial assistance through the Kerry-Lugar bill is the US taxpayer’s money and we have to take deep look at how the Pakistani government is going to spend it,” he added.

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PAKISTAN

Spreading terror

Dawn Editorial


Friday, 08 Jan, 2010 | 09:37 AM PST | 
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/19-spreading-terror-hh-01
 
 
Army soldiers carry their injured comrade from an ambulance to a hospital after the suicide bomb blast some 80 kilometers from Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir on January 6, 2010. – Photo by AFP.   


For the most part, Azad Jammu and Kashmir managed to escape the violence that has engulfed Pakistan in recent years. But the last six months or so have seen a spike in terrorist activity, the most recent being Wednesday’s deadly suicide attack outside a military barracks in Tararkhel.

Security forces in AJK were earlier targeted by a suicide bomber in June last year, an incident that claimed the lives of two soldiers. Then, in November, three men blew themselves up after they were besieged by police and area residents in Muzaffarabad. Luckily, the only casualties were those suffered by the terrorists. About a month later, a suicide bomber killed at least seven mourners participating in a Muharram procession in Muzaffarabad. Wednesday’s bombing was reportedly the first such attack outside the AJK capital.

Clearly, the tentacles of terror are spreading. When the Taliban and their affiliates first turned against Pakistan, their sphere of operations was limited mostly to the NWFP and Fata. But their reach grew under a government that was ostensibly fighting militancy and at the same time cutting peace deals from a position of weakness. The so-called Punjabi Taliban started making their presence felt and various extremist outfits across the country also closed ranks with the tribal militants. The state capital was attacked, as were several towns and cities in the NWFP, Punjab and the tribal belt. But the worst was still to come in the wake of the concerted military offensive launched last year.

Finding themselves on the run for once, they lashed out with attacks on soft targets as well as security installations. Hundreds of civilians were killed by bomb blasts. Peshawar was hit repeatedly. The terror spread to southern Punjab and last month several Ashura mourners died in a blast in Karachi. The attack has yet to be linked to a specific group. It is clear that extremist elements want to so terrorise the nation that public support for the military operation wanes. That hasn’t happened so far — indeed the opposite has occurred. It is now incumbent on all sections of society to ensure that the battle against militancy is taken to its logical conclusion.
 

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/19-spreading-terror-hh-01