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The CIA needn't bother itself.
Pakistani politics are a cesspool. Thsoe who want it to explode just have to sit back and watch -- no effort required. |
But they have NUKES! We have to do something. Freedom hating terrorists are going to get their hands on nuclear weapons.
One thing is for certain, God did not create the glorious and powerful USA and all of our weapons and mildly over-stretched military to sit back and watch islamo-fascist bikini-hating terrists pick on our little buddy Pervez. :wipes tear: http://coteeriverboatrentals.net/ani_flag_on_white.gif These colors don't run! |
Getting serious for a moment:
Pakistan-U.S. Relations CRS Report for Congress Updated October 18, 2007 (pdf) |
Is there is ANYbody out there that did not see this coming?
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Saw it, didnt truely expect it. Seems she was strung out with low security from the state. Is this what happens to people who care about others now?
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ARRRR!!! She's dead!!!
Lets break some windows!!! You would think she won the playoffs... http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/tongue.png |
US military beefs up Pakistan force
By Bruce Loudon December 28, 2007 12:01am US Special Forces are to increase their presence in Pakistan amid assessments that the country is to become the central battlefield for al-Qaida as it is driven from Iraq. "Pakistan should be carefully watched because it could prove to be a significant flashpoint in the coming year," US think tank Strategic Forecasting said in an evaluation of al-Qaida's tactics as the Islamist group comes under mounting pressure in Iraq. With the "rapid spread of Talibanisation" in Pakistan's insurgent northwest, the country would become "especially important if the trend in Iraq continues to go against the jihadis and they are driven from Iraq", the assessment said. "As the global headquarters for the al-Qaida leadership, Pakistan has long been a significant stronghold on the ideological battlefield. If the trend towards radicalisation continues, the country could become the new centre of gravity for the jihadi movement on the physical battlefield." The Stratfor assessment coincided with reports from Washington suggesting US Special Forces would expand their presence in Pakistan in the new year. The boost in US forces was part of an effort to train and support Pakistan's army in its fight to stem the al-Qaida and Taliban-linked insurgency. The Washington reports reflected Pentagon frustration with the Pakistani counter-insurgency effort, and said the head of the US Special Operations Command, Admiral Eric T. Olson, had made a series of visits to the country for discussions with senior military leaders. "The first US (Special Forces) personnel could be on the ground in Pakistan early in the new year", the report said. US Central Command chief Admiral William Fallon said the US forces would provide training and mentoring based on the US experience with the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. No immediate independent confirmation of the deployment was available in Islamabad. But the US reports coincided with the disclosure of an ambitious 15-year "anti-terror investment plan" for Pakistan that has been high on the agenda of US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte in recent visits to Islamabad. According to reports in Pakistan, areas in the North West Frontier Province, the federally administered tribal areas, Baluchistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir were earmarked for investment that would boost education and employment in an effort to wean local tribesmen away from their support for the jihadi movement. The area, seen as crucial in the battle against al-Qaida and the Taliban, was the subject of a summit meeting in Islamabad involving President Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai. The two leaders held what sources described as "unusually cordial and friendly" meetings on how to boost co-operation in the war against the jihadis. They agreed to intensify their exchanges of intelligence, something Mr Musharraf described as "the key to fighting and enhancing our capability against terrorists and extremists". Mr Karzai said: "Afghanistan and Pakistan are twins. More than that, they are joined at the body." |
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Pakistan and Afghanistan have been "the central battlefield for al-Qaida" since 2001. Iraq never ever was. |
Revealed: Pakistan hosed away scene after Bhutto attack
May have violated law by skipping autopsy Despite official reports by Pakistan's interior ministry claiming that the government had intercepted congratulatory messages sent by al Qaeda urrounding the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a motley of strange occurrences has sparked new suspicion of the government's official story. On Friday, doctors at Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she died, said that Bhutto had been killed by shrapnel to the head from an explosion, not by two bullets that Bhutto supporters cited in the aftermath of the attack. Bhutto, 54, was killed as in the aftermath of a shooting and suicide bombing as she left a political rally in the city of Rawalpindi. The government soon changed their story, saying she'd been killed by hitting the sunroof of her LandCruiser after she'd stood up to wave to a crowd. Doctors said there were no bullet marks on the former prime minister's body, and released a limited x-ray of what they said was her skull. More alarming, however, to Bhutto supporters was the fact no autopsy was conducted prior to burial. The official line -- according to Pakistan's interim prime minister Mohammadmian Soomro -- was that Bhutto's husband had insisted no autopsy be performed. But according to veteran lawyer Athar Minallah who spoke to McClatchy Newspapers Friday, "an autopsy is mandatory under Pakistan's criminal law in a case of this nature." "It is absurd, because without autopsy it is not possible to investigate," Minallah told McClatchy's Saeed Shah and Warren Strobel in a little publicized piece. "Is the state not interested in reaching the perpetrators of this heinous crime or there was a cover-up?" Autopsies are generally not conducted in Islam unless ordered by a court, because the religion calls for burial as quickly as possible. It's unclear whether Bhutto's circumstances would have warranted an exception. According to the reporters, "the scene of the attack also was watered down with a high-pressure hose within an hour, washing away evidence." Shah, who reported from the scene Thursday, wrote in a second piece that police rangers charged with protecting her "abandoned their posts" shortly before the bombing, leaving just a handful of Bhutto's own bodyguards protecting her. "Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts," Shah wrote. "As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: 'Willing to die for Benazir.'" Some of Bhutto's supporters were suspect of the "sunroof theory." A "senior official" of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party called the claim "false," saying he'd seen at least two bullet marks on her body after the attack. "It was a targeted, planned killing," BPP's Babar Awan said. "The firing was from more than one side." Another newspaper also asserted witnesses saw her shot. Multiple reports said Bhutto had shown disregard for her personal safety by waving to the crowd. "In her enthusiasm, she got carried away, and exposed herself in ways" she shouldn't have, a former State Department official told Shah. Pakistan indicated Saturday it would delay January elections because of turmoil caused by Bhutto's death. Protests and looting have left at least 38 people dead. http://rawstory.com/news/2007/New_su...over_1229.html |
Another pig sty.
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January 4, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor Bhutto’s Deadly Legacy By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE New Delhi WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally. There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s. It was under Ms. Bhutto’s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency’s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being. While it is true that the recruitment of jihadists had started before she took office and that Ms. Bhutto was insufficiently strong — or competent — to have had full control over either the intelligence services or the Pakistani Army when she was in office, it is equally naïve to believe she had no influence over her country’s foreign policy toward its two most important neighbors, India and Afghanistan. Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto’s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground. In 1989, when the insurgency in the Indian portion of the disputed region first began, it was largely an amateur affair of young, secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims rising village by village and wielding homemade weapons — firearms fashioned from the steering shafts of rickshaws and so on. By the early ’90s, however, Pakistan was sending over the border thousands of well-trained, heavily armed and ideologically hardened jihadis. Some were the same sorts of exiled Arab radicals who were at the same time forming Al Qaeda in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan. By 1993, during Ms. Bhutto’s second term, the Arab and Afghan jihadis (and their Inter-Services Intelligence masters) had really begun to take over the uprising from the locals. It was at this stage that the secular leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began losing ground to hard-line Islamist outfits like Hizbul Mujahedeen. I asked Benazir Bhutto about her Kashmir policy and the potential dangers of the growing role of religious extremists in the conflict during an interview in 1994. “India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir,” she replied. “India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression.” Hamid Gul, who was the head of the intelligence agency during her first administration, was more forthcoming still. “The Kashmiri people have risen up,” he told me, “and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them.” He continued, “If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?” Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power. Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza’s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home. Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war. William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company |
February 19, 2008
Pakistanis Deal Severe Defeat to Musharraf in Election By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States. Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers. Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him. The early edge went to the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, which seemed to benefit from a strong wave of sympathy in reaction to the assassination of its leader, Benazir Bhutto, on Dec. 27, and may be in a position to form the next government. |
BS, he is doing the same that our own leaders have started doing to us.
He is using the threat of an enemy, in this case religious dissenters, to block an open access internet site that would make news and other outside accounts of what he and his adminstration are doing available to the general public. I am confused though. I did not think Pakistan was THAT religiously dominated. I thought it was a more of a military regime right now...... |
Heavy Battles Are Raging With Taliban In Pakistan
NY TIMES By CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD May 1, 2009 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Heavy fighting raged for a third day in Pakistan’s northwest on Thursday as civilians flooded from the area and the Pakistani military reported some gains in pushing back Taliban insurgents. The Pakistani military secured mountain passes to the west and south of Buner, a district 60 miles from the capital, according to its spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, who spoke at a news briefing at the military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Helicopter gunships also rocketed Taliban positions in the north of Buner, where the militants had apparently fortified positions in areas adjoining their stronghold in the Swat Valley. While government forces consolidated control of Buner’s main town, Daggar, General Abbas said it could take still another week for the operation to clear the whole district of militants, as the military was proceeding slowly to defuse booby traps and avoid civilian casualties. The militants continued to unleash attacks, hitting a checkpoint belonging to government paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps in northern Buner, and seizing several police stations across the region, including two in the upper reaches of Swat. Suicide car bombers also tried to hit government troops in the south of Buner but were destroyed before they could reach their targets, General Abbas said. About 50 members of the police and paramilitary forces were still being held hostage by the Taliban in Buner. Still, the government and the military repeated their support for the peace agreement forged in February with militants, under which the government agreed to install Shariah courts, based on Islamic law, throughout seven districts in the Malakand region, including Swat and Buner. “The army has faced extreme criticism in the last two to three months, but we think that the peace agreement is a good agreement,” General Abbas said. “If peace can be brought in the region without further destruction, then it will be a victory for all. But the other side is violating from Day 1. We have kept informing the government of the violations.” Maulana Sufi Muhammad, who helped negotiate the accord for the militants, said the government had violated the peace agreement and warned that continuing the military operations would further inflame the militants and increase the spread of the Taliban. “The government has violated the peace deal by starting military operations and sending troops to the area,” he told a meeting of elders in the district of Dir, where the Taliban have also been active. He called on the government to re-establish peace and said that if that failed, he would make the same demands for Shariah law from a future government. Compounding Pakistan’s problems, ethnic gang warfare raged in the southern port city of Karachi, leaving more than 30 people dead in two days of street violence. Meanwhile, officials warned of a tense situation in the southwest, in Baluchistan Province, where the government has failed to calm public anger over the killing of three nationalist leaders. In Karachi, paramilitary rangers were deployed to stem the street violence. About 34 people have been killed and 42 wounded in the violence, which began when a group of gunmen opened fire on an outlying settlement in the north of the city, local news agencies reported. About 20 vehicles were set afire, local reporters said. Karachi, a sprawling city of some 14 million, and a melting pot of Pakistan’s ethnic groups, has for decades been racked by ethnic, gang and drug-related violence. Concerns have grown recently that radical Islamists and Taliban sympathizers have established an increasingly aggressive presence in outlying Pashtun neighborhoods and frequently clashed with supporters of the MQM, a secular, immigrant-based party that dominates many of the central urban neighborhoods. Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Salman Masood from Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company |
OK, I just got the database error while submitting.... http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ies/tongue.png
To repeat what I said, Pakistani officials have to seperate the disgruntled citizenry from the radical elements like the Taliban or they will never be able to secure peace. This looks like a war that cannot be won by the military. |
Bombed again
May 27th 2009 From Economist.com Pakistan is increasingly vulnerable to terrorism AT LEAST 23 people died in Pakistan on Wednesday May 27th when a car bomb exploded in Lahore, damaging buildings used by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI. Violence in the country has escalated since the government, prodded by America, stepped up efforts to combat the Taliban who operate mostly in areas near to the border with Afghanistan. Last year some 2,300 people died in terrorist attacks in the country, according to America's National Counter-terrorism Centre. Only Iraq was more bloody. More people were kidnapped last year by terrorists in Pakistan than in any other country. Some 1,264 hostages were taken, 340% more than in 2007. http://media.economist.com/images/ga...erroristsB.jpg |
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