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Swat Peace Deal - The Aftermath

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How interesting, so from now on our troops will have to inform terrorists for their movements, in our own country?! :rolleyes:

That is expected from them, after all Fazlullah is Sufi's son in law.
They will always side with each other.
To Sufi his son in law's cause is 100% right but only the approach is a bit too violent.

The Sharia (Islamic law) does not force people to wear turbans, keep beards, keep their shalwar above the ankles, keep their women confined in their homes.
It is absolutely rubbish to associate this with true Islam.
Islam is about equality, justice, decency and reform of society in a positive manner. Even Saudi's (hardcore Wahabi) have much more tolerance than what has been reflected by Taliban's approach.
This shall only be counterproductive as majority of people are now associating this with Islam and shall be driven away from the dream of living by the true Islamic code.
The tableeghi Jamaat in Pakistan and world over spreads the message of Islam without any violence and their results are evident to all those familiar with their work. This supports the idea that violence can never help bring a positive change whereas decency,logic and patient teaching can bring about a miraculous change
The people have to be reformed in a positive way to believe in equality, justice, decency and to demand these things from their representatives, be it their elders, politicians, clerics etc.

To me it seems that Taliban have a very superficial idea of what Islamic law really is and no way will they have it implemented unless their kinsman are appointed in the Sharia courts.The local populace has many grievances against the Taliban and if justice is served then Taliban will also have to be hanged/flogged/imprisoned for their crimes.

If the justice system was good in our country then such elements could not have claimed any support. Islam is all about justice and in this sense we are very far away from Islam and its core values.

If i look at it from this perspective then many western countries are closer to Islam than us (justice, equality, merit etc.).
 
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very impressiv thread thanks for the infos.
 
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Killings, kidnappings jeopardise Pakistan Swat truce

6 hours ago

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) — A fragile ceasefire in Pakistan's insurgency-hit Swat valley was hanging by a thread Tuesday after two soldiers were killed in an ambush and suspected Islamists kidnapped two local officials.

Pakistani troops and Taliban fighters traded accusations about violating a two-week ceasefire in the northwest former ski resort -- ripped apart by a brutal insurgency waged by Islamist hardliners trying to enforce Islamic law.

The soldiers were escorting a water tanker in Swat valley's Matta district when a group of militants fired on them, a security official told AFP.

In the ensuing gunfight, which lasted about an hour, three soldiers were wounded, the official added on condition of anonymity.

"Two of the injured soldiers died later at a medical facility," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.


"The militant attack is a clear violation of the peace agreement. The security forces are exercising restraint and complying with the accord," the military said in a statement.

Muslim Khan, spokesman for Swat militant leader Maulana Fazlullah, said the soldiers were attacked because they moved without giving prior information.

"We had an agreement that whenever the army wanted to move, they should inform us, so that we can alert our men not to feel threatened," Khan told AFP.

Thousands of Fazlullah's militants have spent nearly two years waging a terrifying campaign to enforce sharia law in the area, beheading opponents, bombing girls' schools, outlawing entertainment and fighting government forces.

The sharia deal triggered alarm in the United States, Europe, Afghanistan and India, amid concerns it will embolden militants throughout the northwest, which is rife with Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists.

Another security official claimed the soldiers were attacked by men loyal to commander Ibne Ameen, who has opposed the peace deal.

Police said that Taliban militants also kidnapped two anti-corruption department officials and their friend while travelling in the district of Mingora, the main town in Swat.

Provincial director of the anti-corruption department Yameen Khan, his deputy Bakht Zada and a companion were abducted, police chief Dilawar Bangash said.

"The Taliban have kidnapped them and we have launched a search in the area," Bangash told AFP.

The escalating violence came as pro-Taliban cleric Soofi Mohammad threatened to pull the plug on the peace agreement that he negotiated with the government, accusing the military of violating the ceasefire.

Pakistani authorities had already moved Monday to shore up the fragile ceasefire, vowing to appoint Islamic judges by March 15 to head off threats from Mohammad that the agreement was being implemented too slowly.

The truce was jolted Sunday when a paramilitary officer and five bodyguards were briefly kidnapped and soldiers ambushed elsewhere.
 
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Editorial: Atrophy of Muslim utopia

March 03, 2009

If the idea was to buy peace with sharia in Swat, it is not working so far. The TNSM chief, Maulana Sufi Mohammad, mediating between the ANP government in Peshawar and his son-in-law Mulla Fazlullah in Swat, has clearly decided to side with his son-in-law. He has demanded appointment of qazis and the release of Taliban prisoners by March 15, after which one can imagine all sorts of dire developments. On the basis of which strength is the great Sufi issuing his warning, if not the Taliban led by his son-in-law?

Meanwhile, the Taliban have not stopped attacking convoys and kidnapping soldiers to use as bargain counters. The DCO Swat was picked up by the Taliban before the ink was dry on the ANP-TSNM deal. The message of the kidnapping was: let our jailed men go. The men were released and the DCO was released. Now the Sufi wants the rest of them released too because that is a part of the deal. And who decides on the identity of the persons to be released? The son-in-law. Even if the men have been caught as common criminals in Peshawar?

As the Sufi delivered his latest warning, two Frontier Corps soldiers were injured in an attack on their convoy and an FC commandant was kidnapped. Is the Sufi put off by this? No. He is put off by the tardiness of the Peshawar government in implementing sharia. He wants qazis in place quickly and he doesn’t want magistrates posing as qazis. He has made it clear that he will personally screen all the qazis sent to Swat and will approve only those who accept the kind of sharia he wants. The law under the Constitution of Pakistan still in force has already been dubbed “un-Islamic” by him.

The Sufi says if the peace deal is broken by either of the two parties — Peshawar or the Taliban — they would be held accountable. The fact is that he can’t hold the Taliban accountable for anything. The Taliban are in power; he is merely a go-between. He can punish Peshawar through the Taliban; he can’t punish the Taliban, full stop. Warlord Fazlullah says he will let the Pakistan army and constabulary personnel through if an advanced notice is given to him. He controls the movement of the army and has been able to put an end to the checkposts it had in Swat.

This is not a good state of affairs. We have no desire to criticise the ANP government. It has gone for the deal after clearly stating that the army was making no headway in Swat even after a critical visit of the army chief to the affected region. The ANP leaders have made no bones about what they think of the possible “intent” of the army as it faces up to the Taliban terrorists. Therefore, if it has gone for a peace deal with the Taliban from a position of prostration to save its cadres from being caught and beheaded in Peshawar, one can hardly blame the ANP.

A much bigger damage is being done, however. The people of Pakistan were hoping that sharia would bring about the Islamic utopia in Swat which strangely fulfils the requirements of a set-piece city state where conditions of the ideal state could be created. Discussions on TV are now converging to a consensus that what the Sufi and his Taliban executive will bring about will actually be a dystopia of unlimited cruelty. The “shining city on the hill” will not be the ideal Islamic state but a nightmare comparable to the courts of Somalia that dished out contradictory judgements and finally set up their own armies to force arbitrary punishments down the throats of luckless Somalians.
 
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Dear S-2:

“”I think you should make certain to clear such movements of government security personnel with the taliban. Should they refuse for whatever reason you must not undertake any such plans.””

What is so strange about that? The US / NATO forces in Afghanistan too coordinate their movements in Eastern Afghanistan with “friendly” warlords and drug lords like Badshah Khan Zadran, and Gul Agha Sherzai. Just check this out!
Reachback to Jalalabad, Afghanistan 2009 - Security picture in one province sets goal for all of Afghanistan

In fact the US / NATO forces pay for every advance clearance as well. “Coordination of movements” helps avoid untoward incidents.

Why should Pak Army be denied the protection that your guys buy on their side of the border?
 
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Are you suggesting symmetry? Our home is 6,000 miles from Afghanistan. SWAT IS YOUR HOME.

Your army is captive in it's own land.

I see some sad differences that, evidently, you don't.:tsk:
 
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17 points for enforcement of Nizam-e-Adl

MINGORA: The representatives of the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) and Malakand Commissioner Muhammad Javed on Wednesday agreed on 17 points to be implemented in Malakand Division after the enforcement of the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation 2009.

The 17 points are:

1. Action against drug dealers

2. Campaign against obscenity and vulgarity

3. Ban on music centres and vulgar CDs

4. Closure of markets during prayer timings

5. Ouster of women involved in immoral activities from Malakand division

6. Action against profiteers, hoarders

7. Creating awareness among people against social evils

8. Quick disposal of public complaints

9. Setting up rehabilitation centres for drug addicts

10. Making arrangements for Quranic teachings and reforms in jails

11. Campaign against bribery

12. Uniting ulema from all schools of thought to work against sectarianism

13. Taking steps to restore the public’s confidence in police

14. Looking after rights of employees and employers

15. Expulsion of corrupt and immoral police officials from Malakand division

16. Installation of complaint boxes outside the offices of administrative officials

17. Giving right of inheritance of property to women. app



no agreement education for the girls in swat.
no agreement on the role of the provincial govt.
no agreement on surrender of arms by militants.
no agreement on role of the security forces.


total capitulation!!!
 
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"1. Action against drug dealers

2. Campaign against obscenity and vulgarity

3. Ban on music centres and vulgar CDs...

...5. Ouster of women involved in immoral activities from Malakand division..."


JEEZ LOUISE!!! No hookers, hash n' hot tunes!!!

Lebowski rule #1- Do NOT travel to SWAT until they unphuck this mess.:angry:
 
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Sufi meets Fazlullah, asks Taliban to lay down arms

MINGORA: Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Sufi Muhammad and Swat Taliban chief Mulla Fazlullah met at an undisclosed location on Thursday to discuss the implementation of a Swat peace deal with the government, according to sources. The sources said that Sufi had firmly told Fazlullah to stop armed Taliban from patrolling Mingora and other parts of Swat and lay down weapons immediately. Sufi said talks with the provincial government had been satisfactory and the Taliban’s demands would be met soon, while Fazlullah’s response had also been positive, they said. Meanwhile, TNSM spokesman Izzat Khan told Daily Times after a meeting between a TNSM jirga and the Malakand commissioner that the government had accepted only one demand for the withdrawal of the army from Imamdheri Markaz. He said that Takhtaband-Angrodheri Road was still closed, “and this is making us suspicious … the government should take steps to overcome my group’s mistrust”. The government and the Swat Taliban recently reached a deal – brokered by TNSM chief Sufi Muhammad – on the implementation of sharia in Malakand division, which includes the scenic Swat valley. Analysts, however, fear the benefits of the agreement would be short-lived for the government. staff report

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
 
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Betrayal of Swat

DAWN. Editorial
Friday, 06 Mar, 2009

WHAT is going on in Swat? The direction that negotiations between the NWFP government and the Tehrik Nifaz-i-Shariat Muhammadi have taken is quite intriguing. After having announced a nine-point peace accord on Feb 16 and a ceasefire, the two sides have now entered into a 17-point ‘understanding’ on the enforcement of the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation in Malakand. The new agreement makes further concessions to the Taliban. In fact, some points of the new agreement actually negate the provisions of the one agreed to last month, which required the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan to direct its fighters to remove the barricades erected by them and stop checking people. Now they are being empowered to act as vigilantes to check obscenity and corruption, close down music shops and expel ‘prostitutes’ and ‘pimps’ from the region. As the Taliban’s demands escalate and the government steps back, the metaphor of the camel’s nose getting into the tent, followed by the rest of the beast’s body, immediately springs to mind.

The new understanding points to the problems that will be encountered in the implementation of the agreement. It virtually amounts to handing over charge of Swat to the Taliban and allowing them to determine arbitrarily the distinction between vice and virtue and impose their own values through an extrajudicial system of vigilantes. Is this the form the Nizam-i-Adl is to take? Is the state ready to abdicate its writ and allow the Taliban to take the law into their own hands?

The fact is that the people of the NWFP voted predominantly for the Awami National Party which does not stand for what is provided in the new deal that has just been concluded with the Taliban through the TNSM. Since Swat is gradually becoming a no-go area for the media, it is not very clear if this strategy of appeasement is designed to buy time for the army to be reinforced and redeployed before it takes on the militants who appear to have the upper hand. Or, worse still, is the government surrendering its writ in Swat to the terrorists in the hope of containing them in the region and saving the rest of the country? In either case, the matter is greatly disturbing. Once such unreasonable concessions are made, it is difficult to retract them. It is time the government took the nation into confidence on its plans for Swat, especially where official policy and the limits to which the Nizam-i-Adl will be allowed to go are concerned.
 
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anyone who had a little understanding of the dynamics when one agrees to peace deals with militants and criminals, it is not surprising that this deal will fail !!!
 
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Sufi meets Fazlullah, asks Taliban to lay down arms

MINGORA: Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Sufi Muhammad and Swat Taliban chief Mulla Fazlullah met at an undisclosed location on Thursday to discuss the implementation of a Swat peace deal with the government, according to sources. The sources said that Sufi had firmly told Fazlullah to stop armed Taliban from patrolling Mingora and other parts of Swat and lay down weapons immediately. Sufi said talks with the provincial government had been satisfactory and the Taliban’s demands would be met soon, while Fazlullah’s response had also been positive, they said. Meanwhile, TNSM spokesman Izzat Khan told Daily Times after a meeting between a TNSM jirga and the Malakand commissioner that the government had accepted only one demand for the withdrawal of the army from Imamdheri Markaz. He said that Takhtaband-Angrodheri Road was still closed, “and this is making us suspicious … the government should take steps to overcome my group’s mistrust”. The government and the Swat Taliban recently reached a deal – brokered by TNSM chief Sufi Muhammad – on the implementation of sharia in Malakand division, which includes the scenic Swat valley. Analysts, however, fear the benefits of the agreement would be short-lived for the government. staff report

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan

deal has been made with sufi and not fazlullah... sufi is the one who is supposed to make those talibans lay down their arms or else there will be no deal.
i still think this was the best option available at that moment. if it fails atleast this time ppl wont be blamin GOP for not being sincere.
remember today talibans have been beaten in bajur only bec locals were supportin the troops. and they supported GoP coz they saw talibans violating the truce.
u gain a lot even from a failed deal though ppl sittin outside fail to realise that
 
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From the NYT-

Truce In Pakistan May Mean Leeway For Taliban

You've made Sufi Mohammad an agent of the government and not a very good one at that. Can't negotiate from weakness and that's exactly what's been tried here.

You've got to explain it to all of your citizens-most of all those in FATA, Baluchistan and NWFP that you must FIGHT any way that you know how.

Now.

You must explain WHY. That is harder, isn't it? Doing so means admitting that you left your borders unsecured in 2001/02 for the exact purpose of permitting these very same men an escape path from NATO. You wished to PRESERVE their strategic utility to Pakistan.

In so doing you've miscalculated. Now you must make war within your own country and it won't come easy. Bajaur has taught you the extent of their ability to fortify and their determination to fight. Your nation has allowed these men far too long to prepare their reception.

Your tribal chieftains are dead. Your regional political leaders either hide elsewhere or are as functionally isolated as Karzai in Kabul. All state services have stopped.

Pakistan has made a grave, grave mistake and there'll be hell to pay regaining this lost ground. SWAT is the newest and most beautiful province of the Islamic Republic of Pashtunistan.

Hope that changes but I've more doubt than ever. Unless you're a devoted irhabi minion of the taliban, I'd be checking by bank account and passport status.

Your nation is surrendering itself bit by bit. Soon many of you will have nowhere to run.
 
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Your nation is surrendering itself bit by bit. Soon many of you will have nowhere to run. or hide!!!
 
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Swat deal: US wants fighting, not peace in Pakistan

by Waseem Shehzad

(Thursday, March 5, 2009)

"US-instigated mayhem in the tribal area has now seeped into the rest of the country as well. This is what the US wants to have a pretext to go in and take out Pakistan’s nuclear weapons before they “fall into the hands of the extremists”. This has been the US plan all along; only the naïve rulers of Pakistan have been unable, or unwilling, to see it."


Will the deal announced on February 16 in Swat bring peace to the troubled region that has been engulfed in violence for nearly two years now? More importantly, will it hold considering that it was criticized even before all the details were known? Both the US and its agents in Pakistan have launched a vicious campaign, raising the specter of a Taliban takeover of the rest of the country as well. Is this true and whose purpose does it serve if the military campaign against the people of Swat continues that has claimed hundreds of lives and turned an estimated 800,000 people into refugees that are now herded into the Jalozai camp (located between Peshawar and Nowshehra) in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)?

Prior to the deal, the Taliban, or whosoever was involved in fighting against government forces, announced a 10-day truce. The following day, Pakistani officials said they had struck a deal to accept a legal system compatible with Shari‘ah in Swat in return for peace. This essentially amounted to accepting a de facto situation that had already existed on the ground for years. In much of the tribal belt, local customs mixed with a sprinkling of Islamic laws are applied. In Swat, a group led by Maulana Sufi Muhammad calling itself Tehrik Nifaz-e Shari‘at-e Muhammadi (TNSM) has operated for decades. Sufi Muhammad came to prominence just prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 when he sent thousands of volunteers in support of the Taliban. Many were butchered when US B-52 bombers dropped 1,000-pound bombs. Now his son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah has also joined the fray and rules the roost in Swat.

“After successful negotiations, all un-Islamic laws related to the judicial system, those against the Quran and the Sunnah would be subject to cancellation and considered null and void,” said the Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain who belongs to the secular Awami National Party. This is, in fact, exactly according to the constitution of Pakistan but this provision has never been followed. Though unknown to him, Sufi Muhammad who had long advocated the restoration of Shari‘ah in Swat and pledged in return to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms, was trying to fulfill an article of the Pakistan constitution. It appears that as part of the deal, a Chinese engineer, Long Xiaowei, who had been held hostage since August, was also released.

The fact that the deal materialized amidst intense fighting between government forces and the militants indicates that backdoor discussions were underway for sometime. Further, that the attack on Swat, as elsewhere in the tribal region, was instigated at the behest of the US. Several months earlier, the US ambassador in Islamabad, Anne Paterson had called the World Food Organization (WFO) representative and USAID officials in Pakistan for a meeting. During the meeting the US envoy told the WFO official to prepare plans to cater for 800,000 refugees from Swat to be housed at the Jalozai camp. The US would pay the costs. Why would the US be interested in looking after Pakistani refugees and how did the US envoy know that there would be 800,000 of them from Swat? This clearly points to prior knowledge of what the US expected the Pakistan army to do and what its consequences would be.

It is also interesting to note that the Pakistan army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani accompanied by Pakistan intelligence chief, lieutenant general Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was in Washington a week after the Swat deal was announced. Kiyani’s visit was aimed at coordinating strategy with US military planners for a major offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. US President Barack Obama has made Afghanistan the central plank of his war strategy that includes the tribal areas of Pakistan as well. Last month, the region was attacked twice: in the first drone attack in North Waziristan, 30 people were killed while in the second attack on February 16 another 31 persons perished, this time in Sur Pul in the Kurram Agency. Since becoming president, Obama has intensified attacks against Pakistan despite claiming to change policy to improve US image globally. It would appear the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are dispensable and not included in this “change of policy” deal.

The Swat deal must be viewed in the context of the larger US aim. It is not true that the Pakistani government led by Asif Zardari struck a deal with the Taliban in Swat on its own; Zardari cannot do anything without American permission. The deal is a ruse to draw the fighters into disarming with the ultimate aim of eliminating them. It will, therefore, not be allowed to succeed even if the people support it. There is an even more sinister plan at work. Many of these so-called Taliban leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah, are on the US payroll getting huge sums of money to keep the region in turmoil. Pakistani commentators have asked why Imam Dera, Faz-lullah’s madrassa that sits across Fiza Ghat on the Indus River in Swat, has not been attacked while Jalaluddin Haq-qani’s compound in Waziristan has been repeatedly bombed? Fazlullah is a CIA asset; he serves the US plan to create so much mayhem that the ground would be prepared to remove Pakistan’s nuclear wea-pons for “fear” that they might fall into the hands of “terrorists”.

This is not merely Pakistani paranoia. Carefully placed leaks in the US media point to this fact. In one particularly detailed article, David Sanger of the New York Times wrote on January 11, 2009 about the “threat” posed by militants to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. To get a feel for how US officials think, consider the following from Sanger’s article, “Just last month [December] in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proli-feration and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistan’s nuclear technology going awry. ‘When you map WMD and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan,’ Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. ‘The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because it’s not hard to envision a situation in which the state’s authority falls apart and you’re not sure who’s in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs, the materials’.”

Through their policies, the Americans are working to make sure that the State authority in Pakistan collapses. The release on February 6 of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan from house arrest has provided further grist to the American rumor mill. For the record, Dr Khan, a highly respected Pakistani nuclear scientist and considered father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, was not charged with any crime. In fact, in 2005 he was forced to “confess” on television that he was “solely responsible for smuggling nuclear weapons” and then promptly pardoned by then president, General (retired) Pervez Musharraf, for obvious reasons. Musharraf also declined to allow US interrogation of Dr Khan. Instead, he placed him under house arrest in Islamabad. Dr Khan challenged this in court that finally quashed his house arrest order. The US and Western media outlets paint Dr Khan as a person walking around with nuclear weapons in his suitcase. Regrettably, the ill-informed public in the West believes such propaganda. Dr Khan has not been involved in Pakistan’s nuclear program for many years. Besides, a nuclear bomb is not a toy that people carry in a suitcase but who should educate the ignorant people of America when there is such relentless propaganda against Pakistan? Nearly 30 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Husain was involved in the 9/11 attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Lies repeated endlessly can make people believe anything.

There is another dimension to the Pakistani nuclear file that the US is peddling: they allege Pakistani nuclear scientists with Islamic sympathies could pass critical knowledge to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Western journalists including Sanger, have a habit of quoting unnamed “senior intelligence officials” about how “foreign-trained Pakistani scientists, including some suspected of harboring sympathy for radical Islamic causes, were returning to Pakistan to seek jobs within the country’s nuclear infrastructure…” This is not very different from what the Sunday Times of London had reported on January 4, 1992 when it ran a screaming headline about Iraqi nuclear scientists “helping” Algerian scientists to make nuclear bombs. The story was based on information from the same “anonymous western intelligence sources”. Only a week earlier the Islamic Salvation Front had won a majority of seats in the first round of parliamentary elections in Algeria and was poised to take power. Before the military struck -- with the blessings and encouragement of the West -- the Sunday Times front-page story was aimed at raising the bogey of a “nuclear-armed Islamic Algeria”, and therefore, preparing the ground for Western action to prevent “Islamists” from getting hold of nuclear weapons. When the military in Algeria unleashed its reign of terror and the Islamic Salvation Front was destroyed, the London Times story vanished into the same thin air from where it had emerged, never to be heard again.

Sanger’s January 11 story uses the same technique that the Times story on Algeria utilized 17 years ago. Here is how Sanger’s story continued: ‘“I have two worries,” one of the most senior officials in the Bush administration, who had read all of the intelligence with care, told me one day last spring. One is what happens “when they move the weapons,” he said, explaining that the United States feared that some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai in late November, officials told me they feared that one of the attackers’ motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events. “And the second,” the official said, choosing his words carefully, “is what I believe are steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to infiltrate the labs and put sleepers and so on in there.”’ The function of these “sleepers”, Sanger’s intelligence officials tell us, is that they would “walk out the door with the knowledge of how to produce fuel.”

This knowledge of fuel production would then be passed on to Osama bin Laden in his cave in Afghanistan or wherever he might be, if he is still alive, or to the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar who would promptly build a nuclear bomb! So there you have it from the top intelligence officials of the United States of America! Obviously, the Americans would like the world to believe that making a nuclear bomb is no more complicated than baking bread and since most Pakistani nuclear scientists are either open or closet “Islamists”, the world has much to fear. They are also trying to find out how many nuclear bombs Pakistan has, where they are stored and how they are protected. No self-respecting State would give such critical information away yet Pakistan is under pressure to do so. Not surprisingly, Pakistani officials suspect that the real intent of the US is to gather the information needed to grab, or neutralize, the country’s arsenal.

But the US is not content with mere sniffing for nuclear information; it also has its Pakistani agents in the media, the political establishment, universities and indeed in the tribal belt itself that help advance its agenda. Further, US drone attacks and Pakistani military operations in the tribal area are meant to turn the people of this region against Pakistan. Nobody enjoys being bombed. A commonly heard refrain among the Pathans these days is that they do not wish to live in Pakistan anymore because they are being bombed and butchered by their own army. The US also continues to harp on the point that Pakistan cannot control its own tribal belt so the US must intervene to do it. Successive Pakistani governments--both military and civilian--have provided bases and other facilities to the US to operate there. For instance, the US has established a huge military base near Tarbela Dam where massive stockpiles of weapons are stored. There are fears that an accident could lead to a massive explosion causing breach in the earth-filled dam. This would inundate large parts of the Frontier province causing millions of casualties.

US-instigated mayhem in the tribal area has now seeped into the rest of the country as well. This is what the US wants to have a pretext to go in and take out Pakistan’s nuclear weapons before they “fall into the hands of the extremists”. This has been the US plan all along; only the naïve rulers of Pakistan have been unable, or unwilling, to see it.

Home / Headlines / Swat deal: US wants fighting, not peace in Pakistan - Media Monitors Network (MMN)
 
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