US Commando Strike in Waziristan

Arjun 137,

It was very clear that all of the paki bombing raids did not kill any one. They also did not kill nay arabs. Good to see that the Us troops are moving in and the paki bluff is out.

If only they could seek help from India, they need some one to help them out, to take them on the correct path, like south korea for the north.

The day is not very far when the pakis will get hammered by the chinese as well. The jihadis know that well, and that is why they have kidnapped the chinese. Next will be attacks on chinese assets and they know that is the way to make the pak govt to surrender.

Arjun...
Off the topic...After the Paki master (China) failed to prevent the agreement regarding supply of fuel and equipment in NSG, China is demanding similar deal for Pakistan.....

Re: # 82
ahemd...
Can you remember something Richard Armitage, Stone age etc...?

Re: # 134
Arjun...
Marx was quite a decent guy. His theory have the probability of working well within some conditions. Masadi and other islamists try to bring Marx to look the mideaval arab nuicense little decent. Marxism was popular amongst intelligentia in Britain and some section of students in India (JNU and Universities in West Bengal).Jihadi phenomenon of hostility towards USA,Russia and India has nothing to do with Marxism/socialism etc... .It is the 6th century barbaric arab beduinism vs civilisation....

#139 Posted by masadi on September 7, 2008 6:45:49 pm

Are you denying that poverty has gone down in both countries?

Hamid, jokes aside....the next attack from islamist knuckleheads will be manufactured in Fata. And the response is going to be fatal.

Re: # 138

alpha mian,

.... i have been advocating nuking fata, bombing mansoora and akora khattak, spaying the jihadi breeders of jamia hafsa and imposing a tax on beards for a long time .... i am glad to see that i have your support ...... there are only a few hundred thousand of these trouble makers and they can easily be exterminated or re-educated .....

thank you for your support ........

Masadi, I love you :P

Masadi, I love you :P

create alpha writes "I say nuke FATA....na rahay ga baans...myada yada yada"

May what you wish for others befall on you and those you love.

Have a nice day,
TNI Masadi

Arjun writes "Masadi, Marx and the rest of the AIDS(america is doomed syndrome) brigade have been predicting the fall of capitalism...and yet india and china have shown the way forward is capitalism...not marxism or masadism.."

Salam and greetings of peace Arjun sahib. How goes your life? Baal bacha? Raazi Baazi?

India and China have shown what to the world? How poverty can be tucked away under the rug? How advertising your "boom" and becoming peons of the West is the new slavery? or how to separate yourself from the system via nationalism and develop a base and then integrate and let the capitalist system rape you so that its captains, those in America can make smooth transitions out of their misery....way to go India and China...

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Pakis are in the situation they are in because of their obsession with India...

This is from the NYT...

wonder how prophet tahmed will spin this...of course, his spin won't stop the pakiwhackers..but it'll be amusing..


Right at the Edge
By DEXTER FILKINS

I: The Border Incident

Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.� Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.

The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly�; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.

The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.

“When the Americans started bombing the Taliban, the Frontier Corps started shooting at the Americans,� we were told by one of Suran Dara’s villagers, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being persecuted or killed by the Pakistani government or the Taliban. “They were trying to help the Taliban. And then the American planes bombed the Pakistani post.�

For years, the villagers said, Suran Dara served as a safe haven for jihadist fighters — whether from Afghanistan or Pakistan or other countries — giving them aid and shelter and a place to stash their weapons. With the firefight under way, one of Suran Dara’s villagers dashed across the border into Afghanistan carrying a field radio with a long antenna (the villager called it “a Motorola�) to deliver to the Taliban fighters. He never made it. The man with the Motorola was hit by an American bomb. After the fight, wounded Taliban members were carried into Suran Dara for treatment. “Everyone supports the Taliban on both sides of the border,� one of the villagers we spoke with said.

Later, an American analyst briefed by officials in Washington confirmed the villagers’ account. “There have been dozens of incidents where there have been exchanges of fire,� he said.

That American and Pakistani soldiers are fighting one another along what was meant to be a border between allies highlights the extraordinarily chaotic situation unfolding inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban, along with Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, enjoy freedom from American attacks.

But the incident also raises one of the more fundamental questions of the long war against Islamic militancy, and one that looms larger as the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates: Whose side is Pakistan really on?

PAKISTAN’S WILD, LARGELY ungoverned tribal areas have become an untouchable base for Islamic militants to attack Americans and Afghans across the border. Inside the tribal areas, Taliban warlords have taken near-total control, pushing aside the Pakistani government and imposing their draconian form of Islam. And for more than a year now, they have been sending suicide bombers against government and military targets in Pakistan, killing hundreds of people. American and Pakistani investigators say they believe it was Baitullah Mehsud, the strongest of FATA’s Taliban leaders, who dispatched assassins last December to kill Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister. With much of the North-West Frontier Province, which borders the tribal areas, also now under their control, the Taliban are increasingly in a position to threaten the integrity of the Pakistani state.

Then there is Al Qaeda. According to American officials and counterterrorism experts, the organization has rebuilt itself and is using its sanctuaries inside the tribal areas to plan attacks against the United States and Europe. Since 2004, six major terrorist plots against Europe or the United States — including the successful suicide attacks in London that killed 52 people in July 2005 — have been traced back to Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Hoffman says he fears that Al Qaeda could be preparing a major attack before the American presidential election. “I’m convinced they are planning something,� he told me.

At the center of all this stands the question of whether Pakistan really wants to control the Talibs and their Qaeda allies ensconced in the tribal areas — and whether it really can.

This was not supposed to be a major worry. After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf threw his lot in with the United States. Pakistan has helped track down Al Qaeda suspects, launched a series of attacks against militants inside the tribal areas — a new offensive got under way just weeks ago — and given many assurances of devotion to the antiterrorist cause. For such efforts, Musharraf and the Pakistani government have been paid handsomely, receiving more than $10 billion in American money since 2001.

But as the incident on the Afghan border suggests, little in Pakistan is what it appears. For years, the survival of Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders has depended on a double game: assuring the United States that they were vigorously repressing Islamic militants — and in some cases actually doing so — while simultaneously tolerating and assisting the same militants. From the anti-Soviet fighters of the 1980s and the Taliban of the 1990s to the homegrown militants of today, Pakistan’s leaders have been both public enemies and private friends.

When the game works, it reaps great rewards: billions in aid to boost the Pakistani economy and military and Islamist proxies to extend the government’s reach into Afghanistan and India.

Pakistan’s double game has rested on two premises: that the country’s leaders could keep the militants under control and that they could keep the United States sufficiently placated to keep the money and weapons flowing. But what happens when the game spins out of control? What happens when the militants you have been encouraging grow too strong and set their sights on Pakistan itself? What happens when the bluff no longer works?

II. Being a Warlord

Late in June, to great fanfare, the Pakistani military began what it described as a decisive offensive to rout the Taliban from Khyber agency, one of seven tribal areas that make up the FATA. “Forces Move In on Militants,� declared a headline in Dawn, one of Pakistan’s most influential newspapers. Reporters were kept away, but footage on Pakistani television showed troops advancing behind trucks and troop carriers. The Americans were pleased. “We think that’s a positive development and certainly hope and expect that this government will continue,� Tom Casey, the deputy spokesman at the State Department, said.

The situation was serious indeed: Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province and just east of Khyber agency, was almost entirely surrounded by Taliban militias, which had begun making forays into the city. The encirclement of Peshawar was the culmination of the Taliban’s advance: first they conquered the tribal areas, then much of the North-West Frontier Province, and now they were aiming for the province’s capital itself. The Talibs were cutting their well-known medieval path: shutting girls’ schools, banishing women from the streets, blowing up CD kiosks and beating barbers for shaving beards.

A few days into the military operation, the photographer Lynsey Addario and I, dressed in traditional clothes and with a posse of gunmen protecting us, rode into Khyber agency ourselves. “Entry by Foreigners Prohibited Beyond This Point,� the sign said on the way in. As we drove past the dun-colored buildings and corrugated-tin shops, every trace of government authority vanished. No policemen, no checkpoints, no guards. Nothing to keep us from our appointment with the Taliban.

It was a Friday afternoon, and our guides suggested we pull off the main road until prayers were over; local Taliban enforcers, they said, would not take kindly to anyone skipping prayers. For a couple of hours we waited inside the home of an uncle of one of our guides, listening to the muezzin call the locals to battle.

“What is the need of the day?� a man implored in Pashto over a loudspeaker. “Holy war — holy war is the need of the day!�

After a couple of hours, we resumed our journey, traveling down a mostly empty road. And that is when it struck me: there was no evidence, anywhere, of the military operation that had made the news. There were no Pakistani soldiers, no trucks, no tanks. Nothing.

After a couple of miles, we turned off the road and headed down a sandy path toward a high-walled compound guarded by young men with guns. I had come to my destination: Takya, the home village of Haji Namdar, a Taliban commander who had taken control of a large swath of Khyber agency.

Pulling into Namdar’s compound, I felt transported back in time to the Kabul of the 1990s, when the Taliban were at their zenith. A group of men and boys — jittery, clutching rifles and rocket-propelled grenades — sat in the bed of a Toyota Hi-Lux, the same model of truck the Taliban used to ride to victory in Afghanistan. A flag nearly identical to that of the Afghan movement — a pair of swords crossed against a white background — fluttered in the heavy air. Even the name of Namdar’s group, the Vice and Virtue brigade, came straight from the Taliban playbook: in the 1990s, bands of young men under the same name terrorized Afghanistan, flogging men for shaving their beards, caning women for walking alone and thrashing children for flying kites.

The young fighters were chattering excitedly about a missile that had recently destroyed one of their ammunition dumps. An American missile, the kids said. “It was a plane without a pilot,� one of the boys explained through an interpreter. His eyes darted back and forth among his fellows. “We saw a flash. And then the building exploded.�

His description matched that of a Predator, an airborne drone that America uses to hunt militants in the tribal areas. Publicly, at least, the Predator is the only American presence the Pakistani government has so far allowed inside its borders.

We walked into the compound’s main building. In a corner, Namdar sat on the floor, wearing a traditional salwar kameez, but also a vest that looked as if it had been plucked from a three-piece suit. He stood to shake my hand, and he gave a small bow. To break the ice, I handed him a map of Pakistan and asked him to show me where we were. Namdar peered at the chart for several seconds, his eyes registering nothing. He handed it to one of his deputies. He resumed his stare.

Trying again, I asked about the Pakistani military operation — the one that was supposed to be unfolding right now, chasing the Taliban from Khyber.

Why, I asked Namdar, aren’t the Pakistani forces coming after you?

“The government cannot do anything to us, because we are fighting the holy war,� he said. “We are fighting the foreigners — it is our obligation. They are killing innocent people.� Namdar’s aides, one of whom spoke fluent English, looked at him and shook their heads to make him speak more cautiously. Namdar carried on.

“When the Americans kill innocent people, we must take revenge,� he said.

Tell me about that, I asked Namdar, and his aides again shook their heads. Finally Namdar changed his line. “Well, we can’t stop anyone from going across� into Afghanistan, he said. “I’m not saying we send them ourselves.� And with that, Namdar raised his hand, declining to offer any more details.

By many accounts — on the streets, among Western analysts, even according to his own deputies — Namdar was regularly training and dispatching young men to fight and blow themselves up in Afghanistan. An aide, Munsif Khan, told me that his group had sent “hundreds of people� to fight the Americans. At one point, he described for me how the Vice and Virtue brigade had recently set a minimum-age requirement for suicide bombers. “We are opposed to children carrying out suicide bombings,� Khan said. “We get so many young people coming to us — 15, 16 years old — wanting to go on martyrdom operations. This is not the age to be a suicide bomber. Any man who wants to be a suicide bomber should be at least 20 or 25.�

Khan himself, a former magazine reporter in Peshawar, had been gravely wounded in a car-bomb attack last year. His feet were mangled, and he could walk only with crutches. A bloody struggle for power rages among the many Taliban warlords of the FATA; Khan said his assailants had likely been dispatched by Baitullah Mehsud, the powerful warlord in South Waziristan, because Namdar had refused to submit to Mehsud’s authority.

Another of Namdar’s aides had spoken enthusiastically of his commander’s prowess in battle. “He is a great fighter!� the aide told me. “He goes to Afghanistan every month to fight the Americans.�

So here was Namdar — Taliban chieftain, enforcer of Islamic law, usurper of the Pakistani government and trainer and facilitator of suicide bombers in Afghanistan — sitting at home, not three miles from Peshawar, untouched by the Pakistani military operation that was supposedly unfolding around us.

What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?

“I cannot lie to you,� Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.�

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,� he said.

III. Playing the Game

The idea that Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies could simultaneously be aiding the Taliban and like-minded militants while taking money from the United States is not as far-fetched as it may seem.

The relationship dates to the 1980s, when, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became the conduit for billions of dollars of American and Saudi money for the Afghan rebels. Pakistan’s leader, the fundamentalist Gen. Zia ul-Haq, funneled the bulk of the cash to the most religiously extreme guerrilla leaders. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, Pakistani military and intelligence services kept on supporting Islamist militants, notably in the Muslim-majority Indian state of Kashmir, where they threw their support behind a local uprising. Through time, with the Pakistanis closely involved, the Kashmiri movement was taken over by Islamist extremists and foreign fighters who moved easily between Pakistan and Kashmir.

Then, in 1994, Pakistani leaders made their most fateful move. Alarmed by the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan following the Soviet retreat, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her government intervened on behalf of a small group of former anti-Soviet fighters known for their religious fanaticism. They called themselves “the students�: the Taliban.

With Pakistan providing support and the United States looking the other way, the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996. “We created the Taliban,� Nasrullah Babar, the interior minister under Benazir Bhutto, told me in an interview at his home in Peshawar in 1999. “Mrs. Bhutto had a vision: that through a peaceful Afghanistan, Pakistan could extend its influence into the resource-rich territories of Central Asia.� That never happened — the Taliban, even with Pakistani support, never completed the conquest of Afghanistan. But the training camps they ran, sometimes with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers, were beacons to Islamic militants from around the world.

By all accounts, Pakistan’s spymasters were never terribly discriminating about who showed up in their training camps. In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes against camps in Afghanistan following Al Qaeda’s bombings of American embassies in East Africa, several trainers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, were killed. Osama bin Laden was supposed to be there when the missiles struck but apparently had already left.

After 9/11, President George W. Bush and other senior American officials declared in the strongest terms that Pakistani leaders had to end their support for the Taliban and other Islamic militants. Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, promised to do so.

Yet the game did not end; it merely changed. In the years after 9/11, Musharraf often made great shows of going after militants inside Pakistan, while at the same time supporting and protecting them.

In 2002, for instance, Musharraf ordered the arrest of some 2,000 suspected militants, many of whom had trained in Pakistani-sponsored camps. And then, quietly, he released nearly all of them. Another revealing moment came in 2005, when Fazlur Rehman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, one of the most radical Islamist parties, denounced Musharraf for denying the existence of jihadi groups. Everyone knows, Rehman said in a speech before Pakistan’s National Assembly, that the government supports the holy warriors. “We will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jihadis or crack down on them,� Rehman declared. “We cannot afford to be hypocritical any more.�

In 2006, a senior ISI official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told a New York Times reporter that he regarded Serajuddin Haqqani as one of the ISI’s intelligence assets. “We are not apologetic about this,� the ISI official said. For a presumed ally of the United States, that was a stunning admission: Haqqani, an Afghan, is currently one of the Taliban’s most senior commanders battling the Americans in eastern Afghanistan. His father, Jalaluddin, is a longtime associate of bin Laden’s. The Haqqanis are believed to be overseeing operations from a hiding place in the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan.

But such evidence, however intriguing, fails to answer the critical questions: Exactly who in the Pakistani government is helping the militants and why?

THE MOST COMMON THEORY offered to explain Pakistan’s continued contact with Islamic militants is the country’s obsession with India. Pakistan has fought three major wars with India, from which it split violently upon independence from Britain in 1947. To the east, the Pakistani military and intelligence services have long tolerated and sometimes directed militants moving into Indian Kashmir. To the west, Afghanistan has long been seen as a potentially critical arena of competition with India. After the U.S.-led invasion in the fall of 2001, for example, India lost no time in setting up consulates throughout Afghanistan and beginning an extensive aid program. According to Pakistani and Western officials, Pakistan’s officer corps remains obsessed by the prospect of Indian domination of Afghanistan should the Americans leave. The Taliban are seen as a counterweight to Indian influence. “We are saving the Taliban for a rainy day,� one former Pakistani official put it to me.

Another explanation is growing popular hatred of the United States. Pakistan’s leaders — whether Musharraf or the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, or the country’s leading civilian politicians — are finding it more and more difficult to mobilize their own army and intelligence services to act against the Taliban and other militants inside the country. And while the Pakistan Army used to be a predominantly secular institution, increasingly it is being led by Islamist-minded officers.

The pro-Islamist and anti-American sentiments pervading the armed forces might help explain why a group of ill-trained, underpaid Pakistani Frontier Corps soldiers would open fire on American troops fighting the Taliban. Those same sentiments buttress the notion, offered by some American and Pakistani officials, that rogue officers inside the army and ISI are supporting the militants against the wishes of their superiors.

Finally, there is the problem of the Pakistan Army’s competence. For all the myths that officers like Musharraf have spread about the institution, the simple fact is that it isn’t very good. The Pakistan Army has lost every war it has ever fought. And it isn’t trained to battle an insurgency. Each of the half-dozen offensives the army has launched into the tribal areas since 2004 has left it bloodied and humbled.

For all these reasons, when it comes to the militants in their midst, it’s easier for Pakistan to do as little as possible.

“There is a growing Islamist feeling in the military, and it’s inseparable from anti-Americanism,� I was told by a Western military officer with several years’ experience in the region. “The vast majority of Pakistani officers feel they are fighting our war. There is a lot of sympathy for the Taliban. The result is that the Pakistanis do as little as they possibly can to combat the militants.�

These are reasonable explanations, offered by reasonable people. But are such explanations enough? The more Pakistanis I talked to, the more I came to believe that the most reasonable explanations were not necessarily the most plausible ones.

Bubba, bhai mere...I am with you on this. I am not arguing that the bailout is the right thing to do. It is a timing issue. Fanny and freddie have been trouble for over 3 years. Their debt\equity ratio is pathetic. The market has been punishing them.

The bailout should also be looked at in the prism of wealth generated by this industry over the boom time. Zero the bitch out.

impotent rage by pakis used to be amusing..now it's downright pathetic..

Pakistan vows to defend its frontiers after deadly US raid

By Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad

Published: September 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 5 2008 03:00

Pakistan vowed to defend its territory against foreign intrusion yesterday as anger mounted after a raid on a border village, which US officials later confirmed had been carried out by their special forces.

"We have a resolve and we have national consensus in Pakistan to defend our territorial integrity," Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the foreign minister, told parliament. "We will not compromise on any violation of our sovereignty."

Reuters quoted US Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirming that the raid was conducted by US special operations forces. They were targeting suspected al-Qaeda operatives, signalling a possible intensification of US efforts to disrupt militant safe havens in Pakistan.

Masadi, Marx and the rest of the AIDS(america is doomed syndrome) brigade have been predicting the fall of capitalism...and yet india and china have shown the way forward is capitalism...not marxism or masadism..