[Raj_Copi_Jin]

What about their nukes?

Well, I've said again and again we don't invade countries that have nukes. But then, we invaded Iraq because they had them, didn't we? At least our government THOUGHT they did. Let's see what happens when the tire hits the road.

[brraverishhh]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4449330.ece

Rogue Pakistan spies aid Taliban in Afghanistan
Bush warns of ‘serious action’ after evidence of agents masterminding deadly embassy bombing

The United States has accused Pakistan’s main spy agency of deliberately undermining Nato efforts in Afghanistan by helping the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants they are supposed to be fighting.

President George W Bush confronted Yusuf Raza Gillani, Pakistan’s prime minister, in Washington last week with evidence of involvement by the ISI, its military intelligence, in a deadly attack on the Afghan capital and warned of retaliation if it continues.

The move comes amid growing fears that Pakistan’s tribal areas are turning into a global launch pad for terrorists.

Gillani, on his first official US visit since being elected in February, was left in no doubt that the Bush administration had lost patience with the ISI’s alleged double game.

Bush warned that if one more attack in Afghanistan or elsewhere were traced back to Pakistan, he would have to take “serious action”.

Gillani also met Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, who confronted him with a dossier on ISI support for the Taliban. The key evidence concerned last month’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed 54 people, including the military attaché.

An intercepted telephone conversation apparently revealed that ISI agents masterminded the operation. The United States also claimed to have arrested an ISI officer inside Afghanistan.

Yesterday ministers said they had left Washington reeling from what they described as a “grilling” and shocked at “the trust deficit” between Pakistan and its most important backer.

“They were very hot on the ISI,” said a member of the Pakistan delegation. “Very hot. When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with your guys, the bad guys always run away’.”

“The question is why it’s taken the Americans so long to see what the ISI is doing,” said Afra-siab Khattak, provincial president for the Awami National party which runs the government in the Frontier province bordering Afghanistan. “We’ve been telling them for years but they wouldn’t buy it.”

The American accusations were categorically denied by Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s de facto interior minister. “There is no involvement by the ISI of any form in Afghanistan,” he told The Sunday Times. “We requested evidence which has not yet been given.”

Malik admitted that in meetings in London, senior British government and intelligence officials had also told him they were convinced of ISI involvement in the embassy bombing.

It is the first time the White House has openly confronted Pakistan since just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York when General Pervez Musharraf’s regime was told to drop its support for the Taliban or be bombed back to the Stone Age.

Musharraf agreed and went on to change the director of the ISI and build a close relationship with Bush who described him as his “best friend”. But many middle-ranking officers continued to hold close links with militants built up over 20 years since the mujaheddin was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.

There were persistent reports of Pakistani territory being used for terrorist training camps and recruitment. Foreign journalists were banned from Quetta “for our own security” – those of us who have ventured there to investigate have generally ended up arrested.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has repeatedly accused Pakistan of harbouring Taliban leaders, providing lists of addresses and at one time claiming that its leader, Mullah Omar, was living in a military cantonment.

For the West, confronting Islamabad is a risky strategy as Pakistan’s support is critical to the war on terrorism. Afghanistan is landlocked and much of the logistical support and food for the 53,000 Nato troops, including water for the British forces in Helmand, has to be shipped into Karachi and driven through Pakistan.

“It’s a calculated risk,” said a western diplomat in Islamabad, pointing out that Pakistan could not afford to do without US aid, which averages £1 billion a year. The military has also benefited: only last week four more F-16 fighter jets were handed over to the air force.

An open challenge to the ISI was welcomed by Nato troops operating in Afghanistan, particularly the American forces fighting in the east.

For years their commanders have expressed frustration at militants coming across the border to take pot shots at them, before moving back to the sanctuary of the triba areas. These areas are seen as the new battleground in the war on terror. Originally created by the British as a buffer between the Indian empire and Afghanistan, they stretch along Pakistan’s 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan.

As the poorest and most backward part of Pakistan with a literacy rate of just 3%, but fiercely martial, they are the breeding ground for militant groups. Political parties are not allowed. As militant groups have grown in influence, local people have nowhere else to turn.

Most of the attacks on US soldiers in eastern Afghanistan are ordered by Maulvi Jalalud-din Haqqani, who operates from Miramshah in North Waziristan, and whom the United States believes to have close ties with Al-Qaeda.

Neighbouring South Waziristan is dominated by Baitullah Mehsud, a former gym teacher, whose Pakistan Taliban is believed by the CIA to be responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, last December.

“The security of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire region and maybe that of the whole world will be determined by developments in the tribal areas over the next few months,” said Khattak.

The United States has carried out a number of bombings and missile strikes inside the areas, although each time the key targets seem to have escaped. So concerned is the Bush administration that the ISI is tipping militants off that in January it sent two senior intelligence officials to Pakistan. Mike Mc-Connell, the director of national intelligence, and Hayden asked Musharraf to allow the CIA greater freedom to operate in the tribal areas.

Of particular US concern was the ISI’s alleged involvement with Haqqani, one of its former allies, and its links to Lashkar-i-Toiba, a Punjab-based militant group, which is thought to have been behind the attack on an American outpost in Kunar last month in which nine US soldiers were killed.

Many US intelligence officials have long suspected that ISI officers accept their money and then help their foes, but it has been difficult to find proof. In June the Afghan government publicly accused the ISI of being behind an assassination attempt on Karzai in April and threatened to send their own troops into the border. But they were unable to produce any concrete evidence.

“The Indian embassy bombing seems to have finally provided it. This is the smoking gun we’ve all been looking for,” a British official said last week.

On the eve of the Washington visit, the Pakistan government tried to tame the ISI by announcing that it would henceforth come under interior ministry control. It was forced to revoke the decision within three hours after angry phone calls from the army chief.

Malik, on behalf of the government, claimed the decision had been misinterpreted. “What we were trying to do was bring national security and the war on terror under the interior ministry but it was wrongly announced,” he said.

US officials say the number of attacks on their soldiers in Afghanistan have increased by 60% since the civilian government took power this year.

There is widespread disillusion with Gillani’s government after elections in the wake of Bhutto’s assassination brought her Pakistan People’s party (PPP) to power as head of a coalition government. Nearly six months on, Musharraf is still president.

In a reflection of who really calls the shots, while the government party was in Washington Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, acting commander of Centcom, the US military command, was in Islamabad handing over F-16 fighter planes and holding meetings with the top brass. A British officer who was present at the meeting said Pakistani generals had spoken of their frustration with the civilian government: “They said they were still waiting for a signal to act in the tribal areas. To be honest, none of us could think of a thing they had done in six months.”

The sensitivity of the intelligence issue became clear on Friday night when Sherry Rehman, the information minister, acknowledged to journalists that the ISI might still contain pro-Taliban operatives. “We need to identify these people and weed them out,” she said, only to change her statement later to maintain that the problems were in the past and there would be no purge.

For its part, Islamabad says America is interested only in countering attacks in Afghanistan and gives it no help to confront militants causing problems in its own territory nor vital equipment, such as drone spy planes.

Pakistan ministers were particularly incensed when the United States launched a missile strike inside one of the country’s tribal areas on Monday, while the government party was still en route to Washington. “It was the first thing I read on my BlackBerry when I got off the plane,” said a member of the delegation. “What a nice gift.”

[Lillie_Steins]

Paks can all be considered pro-Jihad, with the differences between them merely a matter of who is trying to grab power.

The main issue IMO is control of Pak nukes, rather than terrorism. Sanctions don't work against serious people, and it is utterly foolish to believe in them.

What is needed is a plan for a multinational assault to get the nukes when Pakistan collapses, and a credible plan to destroy it if for some reason it resists forcible denuclearization.

Pakistan isn't a country, it's a large infestation. It should be dealt with accordingly.

[softy54534]

Go for it. That is the center of terrorism and if they aren't reliable allies, something must be done. I think whatever America does to slow operations on the border is a good thing. Hopefully we can continue cooperation, but if not...

[tgs]

http://www.reuters.com/article/polit...080731?sp=true

U.S. says Pakistani spies forewarn al Qaeda allies
Thu Jul 31, 2008 4:11am EDT
By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The United States has accused members of Pakistan's main spy agency of tipping off al Qaeda-linked militants before U.S. missile attacks on targets in Pakistani tribal lands, Pakistan's defense minister said.

defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar openly acknowledged American mistrust of Pakistan's main military spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in remarks aired on Thursday on Pakistani television.

"They think that there are some elements in the ISI at some level that when the government of Pakistan is informed of targets, then leak it to them (militants) at some level," Mukhtar told Geo in Washington, having accompanied Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on a maiden visit to the United States.

"This is an issue on which they were a bit annoyed."

The disclosure of American displeasure by a minister in the four-month-old civilian government of American could embarrass President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani military, and reawaken concern about the stability of the nuclear armed state.

The U.S. no longer gives Pakistan advance notice when it targets militants in tribal areas.

The News, a Pakistani daily from the same media group as Geo, reported that Bush had asked who was controlling the ISI.

The ISI is the main intelligence arm of the military, which directs its operations, though under the law it reports to the prime minister.

Pakistan's security apparatus consists of the ISI, and Military Intelligence, which deals solely with military matters, and their civilian cousins, the Intelligence Bureau, Federal Investigation Agency, and the police Special Branch.

Pakistan is going through a transition to civilian rule after 8 years of military-led government, and the new leaders want to streamline reporting lines.

Last Saturday the government issued a decree saying the ISI and the Intelligence Bureau would be placed under the Interior Ministry, but backtracked the next day with a clarification that raised doubts in sections of the media about its own competence.

The coalition government has still to find its feet, and is fraught with internal tensions while also dealing with a economic and energy crisis, and analysts say it would be unwise to get into a confrontation with the military.

Past civilian rulers, including Nawaz Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto, appointed men of their choice as head of ISI, but each time it led to differences with the army, which has led the Muslim nation for more than half the 61 years since it was carved out of the partition of India.

U.S. ally Musharraf stepped down as army chief last November, and promoted General Ashfaq Kayani, who had been head of the ISI, to succeed himself, and also chose the current ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj.

After abandoning support for the Taliban government in Afghanistan after al Qaeda's September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, Musharraf ordered a clear out of the ISI's Afghan desk dealing with the Islamist militia, but has defend the agency from periodic criticism that it retains links.

Gilani, whose Pakistan People's Party has its own history of mistrust with the army, spoke up for the ISI calling it a "great institution" and saying he found reports that some members of the ISI were sympathetic to the militants to be unbelievable.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a top Central Intelligence Agency official confronted Pakistani officials earlier this month with evidence of ISI ties to militants, and involvement in a suicide car bomb attack outside the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed 58 people, including two senior Indian diplomats.

(Writing by Simon Cameron-Moore; Editing by David Fox)

Muslims can just not be trusted. I saw in the UK where there are numerous AQ members working in their police department and how other Muslim policeman help the Muslims that are being investigated. The same thing will happen here.