Welcome Home Ms Bhutto heh..

'Ban on Bhutto' leaving Pakistan

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been banned from leaving the country, her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) says.

PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar told the BBC the party had written to the interior ministry over the issue.

Ms Bhutto survived an assassination attempt on Thursday on her return to the country after years of self-imposed exile. Nearly 140 died in the attack.

The government often bans opponents from leaving Pakistan.

The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Karachi says that the ban may be a move to put pressure on Ms Bhutto in her negotiations with the government.

The interior ministry has not commented on the ban.

Ms Bhutto's family did not accompany her on her return to Pakistan.

Farhatullah Babar told the BBC that the ban on Ms Bhutto leaving the country had been re-imposed after her return.

It had been in place for many years but was supposed to have been lifted as part of an amnesty against prosecution granted to her by President Musharraf earlier this month.

'Taped messages'

Meanwhile Ms Bhutto says she will start campaigning soon for parliamentary elections due in the coming months.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto #245 Posted by GT on October 23, 2007 8:20:31 am

A new party was formed to counter that..

the WPP..white phosphorus party

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto maulana urstruly

your tax $$ are paying for the helicopters that will be killing your jihadi brothers...and a whole bunch of women and children

US delivers 30 helicopters to Pakistan: officials

The United States on Monday handed over 30 military helicopters to key ally Pakistan to help fight extremism and provide humanitarian relief in the region, officials said. US ambassador Anne Patterson turned over the aircraft during a ceremony with Defence Secretary Kamran Rasool at an aviation base in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, the military said. Pakistan's army aviation personnel were an asset to "to our combined effort to fight extremism and bring peace and stability to the region," Patterson said in a statement. "This event demonstrates the continued commitment of the United States to cooperate with Pakistan," she said.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto #99 Posted by zeemax on October 22, 2007 5:21:02 am

you all talk big but that's about it...

are we on track for 2010 for kashmir banega pakistan?

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto A few days after, this great analyst who went by the nick romair told us that the US army would have to be led into afghanistan by the paki army, with the paki army holding the US army's hand, because they were the only ones who "knew the language and knew the terrain"...

Now this brilliant analyst also told us India would have to hand over kashmir to pakistan ASAP because pakistan was sure to grow stronger over time, with uncle sam's wind in it's sails, to the point where it could sic the jihadis on india and bleed india to death..

wonder where that poster is..he hasn't posted in a while..it would be great to get some of his insights..hope he is ok..

Pakistan's Army: Unprepared to tackle terrorism?
In her first statements since her return, former Prime Minister Bhutto says the bloody attack last week has hardened her resolve.

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - Before returning to Pakistan Oct. 18, Benazir Bhutto boldly claimed that she would take the fight to militants in Pakistan's lawless border regions. Hours after she arrived, her motorcade was bombed, killing about 136 people.

The attack has only emboldened Ms. Bhutto, saying that it is evidence of the forces she must defeat if she is elected prime minister in January parliamentary elections.

But among experts, there is doubt about what any Pakistani leader can do in the short term.

Bowing to international pressure, President Pervez Musharraf has restarted an offensive in the remote tribal areas that are rapidly becoming a hub of global terrorism. Yet early indications are that, no matter who is in charge, the Pakistani Army is ill-suited – and perhaps incapable – of doing the job.

Significant casualties and scant public support for the operation, "will become a problem in the future," says Moeed Yusuf, director of strategic studies at Strategic and Economic Policy Research, a think tank in Islamabad. "If this continues, the Army will tone it down because there will be too many losses."

It suggests that America must temper its expectations of what Pakistan can do militarily in the war on terror or risk inflaming the situation further, through increased anti-American attitudes or even possible defections from the Army, experts say.

In late August, for instance, some 250 Pakistani soldiers, including officers, surrendered to a smaller group of militants without firing a shot. Since then only 30 have been released. Meanwhile, conservative estimates suggest that 1,000 of the 90,000 soldiers deployed in the three-month operation have been killed.

For a military revered as Pakistan's proudest institution, such a disgrace at the hands of ragtag rebels is symptomatic of a broader malaise. The offensive is almost universally perceived to be an American war contracted out to its Pakistani ally. In the past, perhaps, the Army was willing to play this role – most notably when it bred and supported resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s.

But now, an Army built to counter the massive threat of the Indian military is being asked to fight its own citizens in an unpopular counterinsurgency campaign that it has neither the will nor the skill-set to fight.

"The Army officers have started realizing that this battle is not worth the cost," says Hassan Abbas, a Pakistan expert at Harvard University. "It has had a huge impact on the psychology of the Army."

An Army turned on its own nation

For her part, Bhutto, the former prime minister who is back in the country after an eight-year exile, says she remains unbowed. On Saturday, she accused three members of the government with links to militancy of trying to kill her, though she declined to name them and refused to blame President Musharraf. In the past, she has also said that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are targeting her.

She expects the attacks to continue, she told the BBC this weekend, but added, "What I really need to ask myself is: do I give up, do I let the militants determine the agenda?"

Despite misgivings about the current offensive in Pakistan's mountainous tribal territories, the Army brass does not dismiss the need for action there. "The military is thinking about it very seriously," says Mr. Yusuf, who recently co-wrote a report titled "Counterinsurgency in Pakistan" for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Pakistan's future threat, he says, is not from India: "The threat is an internal one for years to come."

But an array of factors plays into the Army's unwillingness to put those thoughts into decisive action.

For one, some elements of the Pakistani Army still believe the militants are a useful and manageable tool: If the West leaves Afghanistan – as many here believe it will – they will give Pakistan a means to influence events there.

Moreover, the Army is hardly designed to take them on in their own territory. Since its inception, the Pakistani Army has looked eastward to India, focusing on the plains of Punjab and sands of Sindh, from where any invasion might come – probably in columns of tanks and sorties of jet fighters.

Now it is being asked to look westward to its rugged Afghan border and wage a completely different style of warfare for which it is unprepared. "This is not what we were trained to do," asks Yusuf.

On one hand, it is the same predicament that besets the US Army, which was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a fighting force and has since been forced to learn the more nuanced tactics of counterinsurgency on the fly.

But America, at least, has entered its conflicts of its own accord and is fighting enemies abroad. That is not so here, says Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's top intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI): "People think there is an American agenda … and that America has arm-twisted Pakistani politicians."

Pakistanis worry about a 'false war'

To be sure, the Taliban are viewed differently here than they are in the West, not least because they are Pakistani. While the West sees an Islamist war against its liberties, many here see a US-led war against Islam itself.

Voicing an opinion commonly heard on Pakistani streets, Mr. Gul says: "This is a false war. People are not convinced that 9/11 was done by Al Qaeda."

From this perspective, Pakistan's Muslims are being asked to kill Muslims at America's behest. In a recent speech in Washington, a Pakistani diplomat spoke of these frustrations.

"When we hear people in Washington or London say that Pakistan needs to do more, the question is: Do you understand what you're asking us to do?" asked Zamir Akram, a Pakistani foreign-policy adviser, in an address to the Middle East Institute. "Would you go into Texas or wherever on the border areas and actually kill Americans?"

For this reason, many experts do not expect the current offensive to continue. If it does, the Army "will get divided vertically," with officers remaining loyal to headquarters and the rank and file becoming increasingly alienated, says Ayesha Siddiqa, author "Military Inc.," a book about the Pakistani Army. "Cracks are appearing," she adds.

Like other analysts, she agrees that the way forward is not militarily – it is by developing the region economically over the next 15 to 20 years, undercutting the poverty and lack of education that feeds extremism.

"There is no quick solution," says Yusuf. "These tribal areas want to maintain their quasi-independence, but they also want economic development now."

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto benazir praying with the women whose husbands were killed in the big boom thing.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto #90 Posted by zeemax on October 22, 2007 4:26:46 am

Used to be that the paki army lost to india but always prevailed against it's own people...

now even that isn't true..no wonder they're surrendering like the surrender monkeys they are.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto well lookie here...allah's army using bombers and artillery against allah's homies..hmm..where else have we seen this? some place in the middle east..

Tales of horror

Some critically injured patients were brought to hospitals in Peshawar after the recent attacks in Waziristan. A few accounts...

By Riffat Rani

President Musharraf was running his presidential campaign, even as death chased the tribesmen of Waziristan in another part of the country. The poor people were running for their life, unable to cope with the speed of jet fighter aircrafts hovering in the air to hunt them down, not to forget the huge artilleries looking for flesh and blood.

It was Iftar time, on October 7, 2007. Horrifying sounds of bombs and shelling had the poor residents of the Agency scared all right. Faujada, like thousands of his fellow villagers, was desperate to arrange for the safety of his family. He scurried them off to the nearby village Hurmaz -- unscathed -- and later led them to the next village Hassokhel. His three-month pregnant wife, Parizada, was not comfortable running, but she had to in order to save her own life and that of her children -- Abdullah, 10, and Nasima, 12. Faujada's sister-in-law Rozmina was also accompanying them, along with her three children.

Fear and panic hounded this little caravan, forcing Faujada to run faster. He tried to drag his wife along, but the pounding bombs caught hold of them, rendering this bunch of eight people unconscious on the street of Hassokhel.

Parizada was the first to come back, though she could still see nothing in the pitch dark of the night. All she could do was to hear the sounds of the bombing, and groan in pain. She felt her bleeding tummy. Ignoring the pain in her body, she summoned all her strength and called out her husband's name. But, Faujada didn't live to answer her.

Terrified, Parizada pulled herself up and began to look around, only to find most of her family reduced to a mere mass of dead meat.

A picture of complete desolation, thirty-something Parizada spoke to TNS about her tale of woe at a hospital in Peshawar.

"Allah gave me the courage to reach out to a nearby place where my relatives lived, and ask for help. Fortunately, they had survived the attacks, and their house was intact. They immediately rushed my folks to the spot. But, it was too late," she said, sobbing.

"I cried like mad, wanting to take a last look at my husband and son, but the people would not let me."

The place is full of such tales of horror. To quote Parizada's brother Hajibullah, "Army and Taliban are two faces of the same coin. Both are killing us to appease the Americans."

An enraged Rozmina wanted to bomb the Mirali camp as this was the place that killed her innocent children.

A young man in his early thirties, Ihsanullah had just been discharged from the operation theatre in Khattak Medical Centre. His grim face and icy eyes were telling a myriad stories. When this scribe tried to talk to him, he did not show any interest. A relative accompanying him said that Ihsanullah had lost his wife and three children to the counter-attack by the militants. His only son left is fighting for life in the ICU next door. His general store in the village has also been bombed.

Standing close to the bed of his sixteen years old wounded son, Shahpur said, "The Taliban lot -- all masked -- commonly emerge out of nowhere and slaughter the locals. We can do nothing!"

Samoda, 14, shifted from Hassokhel to Hurmaz with her family, and then to Zeraki village for safety. But misfortune did not leave her. She was looking forward to celebrating the Eid day with her children, and had prepared dresses specially for the occasion. But, one night, when they were asleep, Samoda and her two female relatives were ambushed in a fierce shootout that left everybody except Samoda dead.

Poor Samoda ended up in Hayatabad Medical Complex with injuries galore. Missile splinters had pierced into her face and disfigured her. Samoda's teeth and eyes were damaged majorly. It was the unfortunate night of October 10 -- precisely two days ahead of the local Eidul Fitr day.

Her misery didn't end there. Samoda was in the hospital during the Eid, without proper medical care, until the ICRC came to her rescue and shifted her to Khattak Medical Centre, a private hospital. The Plastic Surgery ward of HMC had not reopened.

"People think we are uncivilised and fanatics, but this is not true. We understand everything," says Jamal who is waiting for his BA result (Govt Degree College Mirali).

"I wanted to send Hafizullah, my five years old son, into army, but not now.

"Earlier, if we were on the road and an army convoy was passing by, we would stand still in reverence. But, today, the situation has changed altogether."

Jamal is worried for his young son Hafizullah who was hit by a splinter right in the skull.

Hafizullah's mother is also laid up in the hospital bed with a fractured arm, while her daughter was brutally killed on the spot.

Noreda had a similar fate who was hiding with a three-month-old daughter in her lap. got killed.

"Hassokhel is probably the largest village in Waziristan, with a population of some 20,000. It was targeted in the week ahead of Eidul Fitr. They didn't even leave the schools, the hospitals and the mosques" a resident of the area told TNS, requesting anonymity.

"Pakistan army did not drop warning pamphlets before attacking the place," he went on, "In Afghanistan, the Americans dropped pamphlets telling the people to vacate the places, but our army wasn't bothered."

Some residents of Waziristan even claimed to have seen American soldiers in the area, though this could not be verified.

More than 10 patients from Waziristan were seen in Khattak Medical Centre, while the same number was noticed in HMC.

In Peshawar, reportedly, more than four people gave in to injuries while the remaining lot were left to mourn the deaths of their near and dear ones.

Sabir Rahman, 16, and the three-year-old Saima breathed their last in HMC, while the corpses of most of their relatives didn't even get coffins.

Earlier, Sabir Rahman was shifted from the operation room to the ICU on Wednesday last, and in a matter of twenty minutes he was declared dead. Lying unattended in the Head Injury ward of HMC, little Saima passed away right in front of this scribe.

In another incident, the details about the family of a four-year-old dead Salma were not known. The men who brought her told TNS that they had found the injured kid in bazaar. She was unconscious and carried a Rs 20 currency note in her hand.

Septuagenarian Abdul Ghafoor was shot inside the Bakhmal Jan mosque at around 8pm, on Sunday, October 7. He was taken to HMC but he could not sustain the injuries and passed away on October 10.

Mushtaq Ali of Hassokhel, a sub-engineer serving at the C&W department since 1986, told TNS, "Uncertainty prevails in Waziristan . No one knows the whole truth. It seems to be a part of some big international conspiracy."

"We cannot leave our homes. We have not committed any sin or crime. So what are we being targeted for?" asked Shahpur of Waziristan.

The situation today is such that the tribal people never leave the doors of their homes locked. Besides, one male member has to essentially stay back.

Jalil, owner of the New Waziristan Medicose store, was quite critical of the army presence in the area. "The army misbehaves with the bearded males at check posts. Miranshah, Sargardan, Amin, Gora Qabristan, Stadium and Dattakhel check posts have all become places for humiliation.

"Attacks and curfew have badly affected the quality of life. It is hard to find a bag of flour, even if one is ready to cough up a Rs 2000 amount. Closure of roads has led to an increasing death rate of the injured. People are dying and no one is there to stop the madness."

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto India Feels Pakistan’s Pain, and Shows It
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

CALCUTTA

AS Pakistan fell into fresh bloody turmoil last week, an unusually poignant statement arrived from its neighbor and rival, India.

Late Friday, the Indian Foreign Ministry released a three-line statement describing a conversation between Pranab Mukherjee, the external affairs minister, and Benazir Bhutto, whose convoy was attacked in Karachi on Thursday after Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister, returned from exile.

Mr. Mukherjee, it said, “spoke to Mrs. Benazir Bhutto late this evening. He expressed his sorrow at the dastardly act and was thankful that she had escaped unhurt. He also expressed condolences for those who had lost their lives.”

Rather than a bland statement of condolence, customary after incidents of mass violence, the statement named Ms. Bhutto, a politician trying to make a comeback, with sympathy. In another era, Indian leaders might have avoided such a display for fear of being accused of interfering in Pakistani politics.

“The messages conveyed suggest an implicit recognition of the authenticity of her credentials,” said Salman Haidar, a retired Indian diplomat. “It’s a signaling of readiness to do business with her should the occasion arise. It’s unusual.”

It was also an implicit recognition that the forces operating against Ms. Bhutto in Pakistan were those that threaten India: religious extremists, presumably, who would not welcome peace with India; or peace in Afghanistan, India’s ally; or a peaceful resolution in Kashmir. Few other countries are as directly affected by instability in Pakistan as India.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto zeemax: pureland, in prisonspeak, is america's wife..

so you have no control..the big dog has decided that benazir is the one who's going to be bombing your jihadi brothers..

as pakis, the only freedom you have is to pick the seller of the white phosphorus...the F-16s and other things have already been decided for you in DC..and in interesting configurations too...

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto from dawn

Survey shows Benazir more popular than Musharraf



By Our Correspondent


NEW YORK, Oct 20: A poll taken in the weeks before Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan finds that a plurality of Pakistanis (50 per cent) approve of her return, while one in three are opposed.

Views are mixed about the possibility of Ms Bhutto becoming prime minister. Equal numbers (40 per cent) favour and oppose her becoming prime minister. Twenty per cent declined to respond.

However, the poll says Ms Bhutto appears to be a bit more popular than President Gen Pervez Musharraf. Asked who would be the best person to lead Pakistan, Ms Bhutto wins an anemic plurality with 27 per cent favouring her over 21 per cent for Gen Musharraf.

The WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 907 Pakistanis was conducted in urban areas of Pakistan.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto here's the video of the paki surrender monkeys getting a "shave" by the militants

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=W4BZXs5zs7Q

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto COVER STORY: PAKISTAN
Where the Jihad Lives Now

Islamic militants have spread beyond their tribal bases, and have the run of an unstable, nuclear-armed nation.

Welcome Home Ms Bhutto WOO HOO....cover story!! party over here party over there...

Where\'s the news? #76 Posted by shankar on October 19, 2007 5:37:26 pm


Jihadis are fanatics & suicidal. If they get their hands on nuclear bombs you dont think they will use it?


you greatly underestimate the willingness of the paki army and ruling class to hold on to their ruling position in pureland..

if the jihadis launch an attack, india is sure to retaliate and retaliate big..if it does, all the land the paki army top brass is getting for growing "vegetables" and for "poultry" will be useless..they'll do whatever they need to do to keep that from happening..

don't believe me? take a look at pureland today...allah's army is using F-16s and artillery against their own citizens..other than captain clueless, who is always right in hindsight, who could have predicted that?

besides.. think about kargil and the islamic terrorism in kashmir..that could have led to a full war too..and that was done by the supposedly non-suicidal and non-fanatical paki army...so I don't see the difference..

Of Carnage and Triumph Old leash for an older dog...

Backstage, U.S. Nurtured Pakistan Rivals’ Deal
By HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — To lay the groundwork for Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, some of the highest ranking officials in the Bush administration lavished attention on her as they worked to broker a power-sharing arrangement between Ms. Bhutto and her longtime rival, President Pervez Musharraf.

But the violence that greeted Ms. Bhutto on her return after eight years in exile and the finger-pointing between her camp and General Musharraf’s after the attack on her motorcade on Thursday has raised questions about whether the tenuous deal that the United States helped midwife can survive.

Bush administration officials on Friday publicly played down the potential for a deepening rift between General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, pointing out that the opposition leader herself had praised the rescue efforts of Pakistan’s security forces after Thursday’s attack and that General Musharraf had called Ms. Bhutto to make sure she was safe after the blast.

On Friday, American officials acknowledged that there was no clear basis for confidence that the two leaders could work cooperatively. Now that Ms. Bhutto has returned to the country, they acknowledged that their control over events was limited, as Thursday’s bombing showed.

“There’s really not much left to say or do at this point,” one Bush administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss American policy on Pakistan. “But there’s no clear indication that there is a foundation for both sides to work together cooperatively.”

Ms. Bhutto used her time in exile to nurture influential connections within Washington’s power corridors. Still, the Bush administration had long kept her at arm’s length, in large part out of deference to General Musharraf, who cast his lot with the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Two years ago, Ms. Bhutto could not even get the State Department’s top official for South Asia to show up at a dinner party in her honor. (A desk officer in charge of Pakistan was sent instead.)

But in recent months that began to change. The American courtship of Ms. Bhutto included a private dinner and a jet ride with Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, and, over the last month, several telephone calls to Ms. Bhutto from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“The Bush administration for a long time decided that the only telephone number in Pakistan they were going to call was Musharraf’s,” said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Ms. Bhutto and a professor of international relations at Boston University. “But Bhutto made it clear to them that her phone number was available to call anytime.”

In turning back to Ms. Bhutto, administration officials said they acted with reluctance, after General Musharraf’s own political missteps and the mounting opposition to his military government had weakened his grip on power and threatened to plunge Pakistan deeper into turmoil.

The administration concluded over the summer that a power-sharing deal with Ms. Bhutto might be the only way that General Musharraf could keep from being toppled.

It began quietly nurturing the accord, under which Ms. Bhutto’s party did not boycott General Musharraf’s election last month, and the president issued a decree granting Ms. Bhutto and others amnesty for recent corruption charges, opening the way for her return.

Administration officials say that Ms. Rice stepped up her personal involvement last month, when it seemed possible that General Musharraf’s other political nemesis, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, would make his own bid to return to power, and upset the deal.

In addition to her conversations with Ms. Bhutto, Ms. Rice had several phone conversations with General Musharraf, including one in which she called him at 2 a.m. Pakistan time to urge him not to seize emergency powers.

John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, and Richard A. Boucher, the top State Department official for Pakistan, each went to Islamabad to press General Musharraf into the deal.

For Ms. Bhutto, years of relentless networking among America’s political, diplomatic and media elite also helped to vault her back into position to lead one of the United States’ most critical allies. “She is a networker par excellence, and she’s been keeping her contacts,” said Karl F. Inderfurth, the former assistant secretary of state for South Asia who dined across the table from her at a dinner party during her last swing through Washington, in September.

Ms. Bhutto was first introduced to America’s political power brokers in 1984, via the dinner party circuit. Peter Galbraith, whose family was friends with the Bhutto family and who at the time was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, escorted the visiting Ms. Bhutto around Washington.

he also maintained her close ties to Washington during the Clinton administration, both while she was prime minister and afterward, when she was living in exile in London, Dubai and New York after being forced from power, accused of corruption. In 1998, Ms. Bhutto asked Mark Siegel, a well-connected Democratic Party operative, to set up a meeting for her at the White House with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

One close Bhutto friend described that meeting as “intimate and warm,” and as one that had touched, at Ms. Bhutto’s prompting, on Mrs. Clinton’s personal struggles in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.