US to hit militant safe havens in Pakistan

[Awaaz]

what is the point of having a military if it can not protect its people, most pushtoons condemn terrorism and violence but foreign attacks continue in the region.

Pakistan military the so called guardian of Pakistan and its people turns a blind eye to the killing of innocent in the tribal areas as aid package is more important then,sovereignty and protection of its people.

I wonder if the government would not do anything if this was blood of people of Sindh and punjab, but as i mentioned previously baloch and pushtoon blood is cheap and people are expendable.

it is not an official stance say khrian-beast, why would the state admit that it is the official stance, it will be incriminating itself.

 

[IceCold]

government of pakistan does not care about cross border raid as pushtoon blood is cheap and the people are expendable as long as the finances are being provided to the government.

I think the ANP represents the majority of that area which is the part of the current collation government. SO to say that no one cares for pashtoons is rather far fletched from reality and nor is their blood cheap. By the way the people who you call your brothers in afghanistan are the ones responsible for the murder of so many innocent Pashtoon Pakistanies as they were directly involved in the attack.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Pakistan’s parliament says future US raids should be repelled “with full force”

By Keith Jones

WSWS - 6 September 2008

Both houses of Pakistan’s parliament voted unanimously Thursday in favor of a motion calling on the government to take military action to thwart armed incursions into Pakistan like Wednesday’s US Special Operations forces raid in South Waziristan.

At least twenty villagers were killed when US forces staged a pre-dawn raid on a village near Angoor Adda.

The joint National Assembly and Senate motion urges “the government of Pakistan to take all necessary measures to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and repel such attacks in the future with full force.”

The Bush administration has refused to admit that US forces, in what constitutes a gross violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and a major escalation of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, mounted Wednesday’s raid. But in off-the record briefings unnamed Pentagon officials have confirmed the action, terming the wanton slaughter of Pakistani civilians a success.

Over the past nine months a consensus has emerged in the US elite in favor of a dramatic escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Toward this end the Pentagon recently initiated a “surge” in troop deployments to the Central Asian country.

This strategic change of focus has involved a ratcheting up of pressure on Islamabad to quell the rebellion that has erupted in Pakistan’s Pashtun-speaking border regions in opposition to the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan and the Pakistani government’s associated attempts to bring the historically autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) under its control.

A parade of US politicians, including Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama, retired generals, and foreign relations experts have all said that the US must be prepared to militarily intervene if the Pakistan government fails to rapidly pacify its border regions.

In fact, the Pakistani military has been involved in large-scale operations in the region for some five years. Its forays, which have involved the imposition of colonial-style collective punishments on tribes and villages, heavy civilian casualties, and disappearances, have only served to antagonize the populace and enflame the region.

An editorial in the Friday edition of the Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language daily, warned that further unilateral US military action in Pakistan “will spell nothing but trouble for everyone,” while conceding that Wednesday’s helicopter raid is likely to be repeated. Said the Dawn, “All evidence of recent weeks points to the fact that the raid will not be the last of its kind: ‘There’s a potential to see more,’ a ‘senior US official’ has told the New York Times.”

On Friday, a US drone killed at least three children when it leveled a house in the North Waziristan village of Goorweck Baipali.

For several years and with much greater frequency this year, the US has staged drone attacks in Pakistan. Invariably Islamabad has protested these attacks, especially those that have resulted in heavy civilian casualties. But it is an open secret that the Pakistani government, led until only a half-year ago by the US-backed dictator General Pervez Musharraf, has effectively sanctioned such strikes. Indeed, earlier this year the New York Times reported that the CIA has a military base within Pakistan itself.

Nevertheless coming in the midst of the storm of protest over Wednesday’s incursion by US troops into Pakistan, yesterday’s drone attack clearly bore the message that, all the official protest emanating from Islamabad notwithstanding, the US asserts the right to violate Pakistani sovereignty at will.

Pakistan authorities, meanwhile, appear to have sent a message of their own. Citing “security concerns” Pakistan on Friday shut down the Torkham border crossing, which is the most important land conduit for oil and food destined for US and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The (Pakistan) Daily Times cites the Khyber Agency Political Agent Tariq Hayat as denying any connection between the border closure and the US incursion: “All Afghanistan-bound supplies for the International Security Assistance Force have been stopped as the [Torkham] highway is vulnerable. This decision has nothing to do with the situation in Waziristan or the US attacks.”

Such denials, however, would be expected, as Pakistan seeks to convince the US to restore the pre-Wednesday terms of the US-Pakistani alliance.

Also on Friday, the chairman of Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Tariq Majid, told visiting German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung that “Pakistan reserves the right to appropriately retaliate in future” in response to cross-border strikes carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Jung later told German reporters “I think it is important that Pakistan fights against militants in its territory on its own. We should not conduct military operations from the Afghan side. Pakistan’s territorial integrity needs to be respected.”

The Pakistani parliamentary motion threatening to repel a further US raid “with full force” is a gesture. But one that speaks to the depth of the popular opposition to the United States and the elite’s apprehensions and resentments over Washington’s bullying.

Benazir Bhutto’s widower and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) co-chairman, Asif Ali Zardari, who is poised to be chosen as the country’s new president, has repeatedly pledged his support for the US “war on terror”. He argues that the insurgency in Pakistan’s border regions is destabilizing the Pakistani bourgeois state and that its suppression is, therefore, “our” war, not Washington’s.

But he too has been forced to strongly condemn the US action for he cannot afford to entirely ignore the popular antipathy to Washington. Opinion polls conducted by right-wing US think tanks have repeatedly found that ordinary Pakistanis view the US as a far greater threat to Pakistan than terrorism or the Taliban. And with good reason. After years of staunchly supporting Musharraf’s dictatorship, the US is now hell-bent on turning much of the country into a killing-field in order to secure its interests in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military has a decades-long intimate partnership with the US and has benefited handsomely from the billions Washington has paid Islamabad for its logistical support of the Afghan invasion and for providing the US security services with torture sites and other services.

But Washington’s escalating demands are stoking resentments. There have been repeated reports of dissension and insubordination in the military over the pacification campaigns in the border areas, particularly among the Pashtun who are understandably perturbed at having to suppress people they view as their brethren. Both the ranks and officer corps of the Pakistani military contain a high percentage of Pashtun.

Wednesday’s incursion undermines the military’s claim to be the guarantor of the sovereignty of Pakistan—a claim that is at the heart of its ideological justification for laying claim to a massive share of the country’s revenue and immense political power.

Moreover, like the rest of the Pakistani elite, the military is alarmed by American acquiescence, if not encouragement, of ever-closer ties between Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government and India, Pakistan’s historic rival. Last but not least, the Pakistani elite believes that by facilitating India’s access to advanced nuclear technology, Washington is fundamentally altering the balance of power in South Asia in India’s favor.

Today’s presidential election

An electoral college comprised of the members of Pakistan’s national and four provincial assemblies will today chose a successor to Musharraf, who resigned last month to avoid impeachment and possible criminal prosecution.

Overshadowing the elections are not just the crisis in US-Pakistani relations and the effective loss of government control over significant swathes of the country; Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Economic growth has fallen to a six-year low. Inflation is running at 25 percent, with food and energy prices spiking even hirer. For close to a year there have been significant shortages of wheat flour, the staple of the Pakistani diet. The Pakistan rupee has depreciated against the US dollar by 40 percent since the beginning of the year and the country’s currency reserves have fallen by well over a third to $9.8 billion.

According to all observers, Zardari’s election is a foregone conclusion. He is being supported by a wide array of parties, including groupings such as the MQM (which purports to represent those who migrated to Pakistan between 1947 and 1950 from north India) and the Islamicist JUI-F, that loyally supported Musharraf until the rout of his army-sponsored PML (Q) in last February’s elections.

The two other candidates are former chief justice Saeed uz Saman and Mushahid Hussain Syed. They are being sponsored respectively by Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim league (Nawaz) and the PML (Q).

On August 20, just two days after Musharraf’s resignation and shortly after the PPP had announced that Zardari would be its party nominee for the presidency, Sharif withdrew his party’s support to the PPP-led ruling coalition.

The PPP and PML (N) are longtime bitter rivals. The PML (N) repeatedly connived with the military and bureaucracy to oust PPP governments in the 1990s. Benazir Bhutto initially supported Musharraf’s 1999 coup against then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

Sharif justified his party’s withdrawal of support to the PPP-led coalition with the claim that Zardari had reneged on a promise to present a “common candidate” for the presidency and by pointing to the government’s failure to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and other judges illegally purged by Musharraf under a state of emergency last November.

The president has vast constitutional powers, including the right to sack the government and dissolve the National Assembly.

The PML (N) is now demanding that the PPP ministers in Punjab’s PML (N)-led coalition government resign, raising the prospect of a clash between the federal government and the government of Punjab, the country’s wealthiest province and home to a majority of its population.

The PPP and PML (N) are both parties of the bourgeois-landlord establishment. Although the PPP, whenever it has held office over the past two decades has imposed privatization, marketization and other right-wing austerity measures, it continues to posture as the party of the poor.

Sharif, an industrialist and avowed right-winger, owes his political career to the former dictator Zia-ul Huq. That has prevented him trying to develop a popular following by portraying himself as a victim of Musharraf and by making calibrated appeals to popular anti-US sentiment.

Both parties claim to be champions of democracy. Their actions over the past 18 months of the unraveling of the Musharraf regime demonstrate, however, that they are determined to prevent the entry of the masses into political life, are beholden to the military, and in thrall to Washington and the other imperialist powers.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/****-s06.shtml

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Use of special forces in this and other following incidents marks a return to 2001 tactics to persue enemy combatants into the heart of their base of operations. There are many political senstivities in Pakistan that stress their objections, that is clear, and this could lead to added instability to an already weakened and reeling political establishment - which itself finds itself the complete target of the very same forces that NATO is persuing.

A defacto situation of no go areas where enemy combatants can launch from, draw their breath, prepare for their operations, and then retreat without them being engaged will cease to exist wheter by joint initiatives or by increased use of penetrative covert counter insurgency. It is noted that while there are those like yourself who repeat that this is "Pakistans War so Pakistan will fight it". That in itself and the subsequent 'outcry' shows all what you are willing to do, and not do to fight that War. There are those in Pakistans leadership who also insist on treating the Taliban militancy as a form of strategic depth for Pakistan itself. Pakistans abilities have been and are continuing to be limited in that respect.

We shall therefore see what Pakistan will do to fight it's War, and what in addition NATO will do. And as you state it the intention is to put houses in order.

That weakened and reeling political establishment is what is needed to govern the country and whose credibility with the electorate is going to be in similar tatters (to Musharraf) pretty soon going by the shortsightedness shown by US defense planners.

One would think that the lessons would have sunk in by now - local support and cooperation is essential - if the capabilities don't exist then they have to be built up. Unilateral raids do not offer progress in any sphere, especially when your targets are a handful of militants. Pakistan has demonstrated that high value targets can be captured by its own SF's several times, far more than what US forces have managed to achieve in their operations on Pakistani soil, and that alone belies your claim of 'those in Pakistan leadership', so the argument that intelligence cannot be shared is bogus.

The political fallout, destabilization and loss of support for any government not seen to be retaliating strongly to such measures (unrealistic, I admit) continues to erode the very capabilities you decry are already lacking, and so we are caught in a vicious downward spiral.

The capabilities that do exist have to be divided between two threats on both East and West, and what exactly has the US done to address concerns emanating from the threat on the Eastern front?

There is no dichotomy between my support for Pakistani actions against extremism and my 'outcry' against redneck gun-toting yanks putting boots on my nation's soil - SEAL Team X and the Taliban are both just as unwelcome.

Houses do have to be put in order - work on yours before finding fault in others.
I repeat; 300 million USD annually in funds for the Taliban emanating from territory under NATO control -- Fix it.

 

[IceCold]

Pakistan’s parliament says future US raids should be repelled “with full force”

By Keith Jones

WSWS - 6 September 2008

Both houses of Pakistan’s parliament voted unanimously Thursday in favor of a motion calling on the government to take military action to thwart armed incursions into Pakistan like Wednesday’s US Special Operations forces raid in South Waziristan.

At least twenty villagers were killed when US forces staged a pre-dawn raid on a village near Angoor Adda.

The joint National Assembly and Senate motion urges “the government of Pakistan to take all necessary measures to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and repel such attacks in the future with full force.”

The Bush administration has refused to admit that US forces, in what constitutes a gross violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and a major escalation of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan, mounted Wednesday’s raid. But in off-the record briefings unnamed Pentagon officials have confirmed the action, terming the wanton slaughter of Pakistani civilians a success.

Over the past nine months a consensus has emerged in the US elite in favor of a dramatic escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Toward this end the Pentagon recently initiated a “surge” in troop deployments to the Central Asian country.

This strategic change of focus has involved a ratcheting up of pressure on Islamabad to quell the rebellion that has erupted in Pakistan’s Pashtun-speaking border regions in opposition to the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan and the Pakistani government’s associated attempts to bring the historically autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) under its control.

A parade of US politicians, including Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama, retired generals, and foreign relations experts have all said that the US must be prepared to militarily intervene if the Pakistan government fails to rapidly pacify its border regions.

In fact, the Pakistani military has been involved in large-scale operations in the region for some five years. Its forays, which have involved the imposition of colonial-style collective punishments on tribes and villages, heavy civilian casualties, and disappearances, have only served to antagonize the populace and enflame the region.

An editorial in the Friday edition of the Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language daily, warned that further unilateral US military action in Pakistan “will spell nothing but trouble for everyone,” while conceding that Wednesday’s helicopter raid is likely to be repeated. Said the Dawn, “All evidence of recent weeks points to the fact that the raid will not be the last of its kind: ‘There’s a potential to see more,’ a ‘senior US official’ has told the New York Times.”

On Friday, a US drone killed at least three children when it leveled a house in the North Waziristan village of Goorweck Baipali.

For several years and with much greater frequency this year, the US has staged drone attacks in Pakistan. Invariably Islamabad has protested these attacks, especially those that have resulted in heavy civilian casualties. But it is an open secret that the Pakistani government, led until only a half-year ago by the US-backed dictator General Pervez Musharraf, has effectively sanctioned such strikes. Indeed, earlier this year the New York Times reported that the CIA has a military base within Pakistan itself.

Nevertheless coming in the midst of the storm of protest over Wednesday’s incursion by US troops into Pakistan, yesterday’s drone attack clearly bore the message that, all the official protest emanating from Islamabad notwithstanding, the US asserts the right to violate Pakistani sovereignty at will.

Pakistan authorities, meanwhile, appear to have sent a message of their own. Citing “security concerns” Pakistan on Friday shut down the Torkham border crossing, which is the most important land conduit for oil and food destined for US and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The (Pakistan) Daily Times cites the Khyber Agency Political Agent Tariq Hayat as denying any connection between the border closure and the US incursion: “All Afghanistan-bound supplies for the International Security Assistance Force have been stopped as the [Torkham] highway is vulnerable. This decision has nothing to do with the situation in Waziristan or the US attacks.”

Such denials, however, would be expected, as Pakistan seeks to convince the US to restore the pre-Wednesday terms of the US-Pakistani alliance.

Also on Friday, the chairman of Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Tariq Majid, told visiting German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung that “Pakistan reserves the right to appropriately retaliate in future” in response to cross-border strikes carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Jung later told German reporters “I think it is important that Pakistan fights against militants in its territory on its own. We should not conduct military operations from the Afghan side. Pakistan’s territorial integrity needs to be respected.”

The Pakistani parliamentary motion threatening to repel a further US raid “with full force” is a gesture. But one that speaks to the depth of the popular opposition to the United States and the elite’s apprehensions and resentments over Washington’s bullying.

Benazir Bhutto’s widower and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) co-chairman, Asif Ali Zardari, who is poised to be chosen as the country’s new president, has repeatedly pledged his support for the US “war on terror”. He argues that the insurgency in Pakistan’s border regions is destabilizing the Pakistani bourgeois state and that its suppression is, therefore, “our” war, not Washington’s.

But he too has been forced to strongly condemn the US action for he cannot afford to entirely ignore the popular antipathy to Washington. Opinion polls conducted by right-wing US think tanks have repeatedly found that ordinary Pakistanis view the US as a far greater threat to Pakistan than terrorism or the Taliban. And with good reason. After years of staunchly supporting Musharraf’s dictatorship, the US is now hell-bent on turning much of the country into a killing-field in order to secure its interests in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military has a decades-long intimate partnership with the US and has benefited handsomely from the billions Washington has paid Islamabad for its logistical support of the Afghan invasion and for providing the US security services with torture sites and other services.

But Washington’s escalating demands are stoking resentments. There have been repeated reports of dissension and insubordination in the military over the pacification campaigns in the border areas, particularly among the Pashtun who are understandably perturbed at having to suppress people they view as their brethren. Both the ranks and officer corps of the Pakistani military contain a high percentage of Pashtun.

Wednesday’s incursion undermines the military’s claim to be the guarantor of the sovereignty of Pakistan—a claim that is at the heart of its ideological justification for laying claim to a massive share of the country’s revenue and immense political power.

Moreover, like the rest of the Pakistani elite, the military is alarmed by American acquiescence, if not encouragement, of ever-closer ties between Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government and India, Pakistan’s historic rival. Last but not least, the Pakistani elite believes that by facilitating India’s access to advanced nuclear technology, Washington is fundamentally altering the balance of power in South Asia in India’s favor.

Today’s presidential election

An electoral college comprised of the members of Pakistan’s national and four provincial assemblies will today chose a successor to Musharraf, who resigned last month to avoid impeachment and possible criminal prosecution.

Overshadowing the elections are not just the crisis in US-Pakistani relations and the effective loss of government control over significant swathes of the country; Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Economic growth has fallen to a six-year low. Inflation is running at 25 percent, with food and energy prices spiking even hirer. For close to a year there have been significant shortages of wheat flour, the staple of the Pakistani diet. The Pakistan rupee has depreciated against the US dollar by 40 percent since the beginning of the year and the country’s currency reserves have fallen by well over a third to $9.8 billion.

According to all observers, Zardari’s election is a foregone conclusion. He is being supported by a wide array of parties, including groupings such as the MQM (which purports to represent those who migrated to Pakistan between 1947 and 1950 from north India) and the Islamicist JUI-F, that loyally supported Musharraf until the rout of his army-sponsored PML (Q) in last February’s elections.

The two other candidates are former chief justice Saeed uz Saman and Mushahid Hussain Syed. They are being sponsored respectively by Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim league (Nawaz) and the PML (Q).

On August 20, just two days after Musharraf’s resignation and shortly after the PPP had announced that Zardari would be its party nominee for the presidency, Sharif withdrew his party’s support to the PPP-led ruling coalition.

The PPP and PML (N) are longtime bitter rivals. The PML (N) repeatedly connived with the military and bureaucracy to oust PPP governments in the 1990s. Benazir Bhutto initially supported Musharraf’s 1999 coup against then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

Sharif justified his party’s withdrawal of support to the PPP-led coalition with the claim that Zardari had reneged on a promise to present a “common candidate” for the presidency and by pointing to the government’s failure to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and other judges illegally purged by Musharraf under a state of emergency last November.

The president has vast constitutional powers, including the right to sack the government and dissolve the National Assembly.

The PML (N) is now demanding that the PPP ministers in Punjab’s PML (N)-led coalition government resign, raising the prospect of a clash between the federal government and the government of Punjab, the country’s wealthiest province and home to a majority of its population.

The PPP and PML (N) are both parties of the bourgeois-landlord establishment. Although the PPP, whenever it has held office over the past two decades has imposed privatization, marketization and other right-wing austerity measures, it continues to posture as the party of the poor.

Sharif, an industrialist and avowed right-winger, owes his political career to the former dictator Zia-ul Huq. That has prevented him trying to develop a popular following by portraying himself as a victim of Musharraf and by making calibrated appeals to popular anti-US sentiment.

Both parties claim to be champions of democracy. Their actions over the past 18 months of the unraveling of the Musharraf regime demonstrate, however, that they are determined to prevent the entry of the masses into political life, are beholden to the military, and in thrall to Washington and the other imperialist powers.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/****-s06.shtml

The million dollar question is,will the PA repel such attacks with full force and with every means provided within its arsenal or its just another far cry as been so far.

 

[Kharian_Beast]

I really doubt that we are capable of sustaining a war even against a swarm of humming birds with such corrupt politics. It's always held Pakistan back from true potential.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The situation, and the responses in the political elite, all media and public domain are being carefully measured and monitored at all levels.There are some in the chain of command who percieve the risks outweigh the gains at this juncture, so understand the frequency and need to employ these strikes is not taken without a great deal of deliberation. SEAL Team 6 conducted a similar action in 2006, and the channels which were used then to gain cooperative acknowledgement and authority were the same that was used here. Force projection over the border none the less remains a strictly curtailed event.

Good to know.

I will assume then that the decision making behind the raid was not merely to go after a dozen or so militants, but high value targets, though Pakistani officials claim the intelligence was faulty (which also indicates that your point about 'cooperative acknowledgment and authority' may be valid).

I would nonetheless maintain that Pakistan has suitably illustrated that high value targets can be delivered by its forces.

 

[Kharian_Beast]

Good to know.

I will assume then that the decision making behind the raid was not merely to go after a dozen or so militants, but high value targets, though Pakistani officials claim the intelligence was faulty (which also indicates that your point about 'cooperative acknowledgment and authority' may be valid).

I would nonetheless maintain that Pakistan has suitably illustrated that high value targets can be delivered by its forces.

This view is not shared by the US who will stick to their claims that Pak army has too many casualties when engaged with taliban and that our efforts aren't serious. There is no gain for us to deliver useless "valued" targets anymore.

Joke khatum hogya hei bahi, abhi sochlo Pakistan ka future kya hai.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

This view is not shared by the US who will stick to their claims that Pak army has too many casualties when engaged with taliban and that our efforts aren't serious. There is no gain for us to deliver useless "valued" targets anymore.

Joke khatum hogya hei bahi, abhi sochlo Pakistan ka future kya hai.

It is a credible argument that without depleting its Eastern front Pakistan does not really have the capability to go after all of the taliban groups operating within its borders.

We have argued over 'good and bad Taliban' on this forum before. The idea behind the 'good Taliban' isn't that they are actually 'good' (we can't accept and support groups that, while not acting inside Pakistan, are nonetheless attacking NATO and Afghan forces from Pakistani territory).

The idea behind the 'good taliban' was to divide the taliban, and isolate those that were acting inside Pakistan. Pakistan's operations have focused almost exclusively against the TTP (bad Taliban) and its associates, and those operations have also been hard fought and extremely difficult, especially with the number of resources we can allocate to that theater. Going after all of these groups (good and bad) will require a much more massive undertaking, and this is where I fault the Bush administration for having tunnel vision and being shortsighted.

The NSG may have taken India at its word when it came to a moratorium on testing, but Pakistan cannot do the same with India, and US has willfully ignored that constraint to Pakistani efforts.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

US should respect Pak territorial integrity: Germany​

ISLAMABAD: The United States-led coalition forces in Afghanistan should respect Pakistan’s territorial integrity and avoid launching unilateral military strikes inside the country, German Defence Minister Dr Franz Joseph Joung said on Friday. “I think it is important that Pakistan fights against militants in its territory on its own. We should not conduct military operations from the Afghan side. Pakistan’s territorial integrity needs to be respected,” he told a small group of German reporters at a local hotel. Joung said every action inside Pakistan should be executed in collaboration with Islamabad. sajjad malik

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
---------------------------------------

Well, after the Iraq invasion there really wasn't any doubt that the clearheaded, long term strategists, analysts and policy makers were not inhabiting the Pentagon or White House.

While Pakistan does have limitations in fighting the insurgency in its territory, the answer isn't to destabilize it further through unilateral raids or invasions, but to help build its capacities and institutions, and address its strategic constraints that prevent her from applying more of the resources that she does possess in the WoT.

 

[Spring Onion]

The million dollar question is,will the PA repel such attacks with full force and with every means provided within its arsenal or its just another far cry as been so far.

Unlikely they are all vultures busy in looting the country they dont have guts to do that.


US agains attacked North Waziristan today and till now 5 people have been reported killed all of them innocent people.

7 missiles were fired by US from Afghanistan. dron attack.

 

[nitesh]

US-led attack on Taliban hideout kills 3 in Pak-Pakistan-World-The Times of India


US-led attack on Taliban hideout kills 3 in Pak
8 Sep 2008, 1200 hrs IST,PTI

ISLAMABAD: Three persons were killed and 15 others, including women and children, injured as several missiles on Monday hit a madrassa in Pakistan's restive North Waziristan tribal region, which houses Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani's residence.

A drone operated by US-led forces in Afghanistan fired six to seven guided missiles at the seminary in Tanda Darpakhel, two kilometres from Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, TV channels reported.

Senior Taliban leader Haqqani's residence and madrassa are also located in the Tanda Darpakhel area and it was not immediately clear whether they had been the target of the attack.

Taliban fighters surrounded the area around the madrassa that was attacked and did not allow people to approach the site. North and South Waziristan tribal regions are considered strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban led by Baitullah Mehsud.

Pakistan's tribal belt has witnessed a sharp increase in attacks by drones operated by the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan over the past week. More than 40 people have died in these attacks.

Twenty people, a majority of them women and children, were killed in a raid at Angoor Adda in South Waziristan by gunship helicopters and commandos of the US-led coalition forces on September 3.

That attack marked the first time that US-led ground forces from Afghanistan had intruded into Pakistan.

 

[BanglaBhoot]

A Precursor to More War Crimes?

The September 3 Attack on Pakistan

By GARY LEUPP

In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday, September 3, three U.S. helicopters carrying U.S. Special Operations Forces swooped down onto the Pakistani village of Musa Nika, in South Waziristan, killing fifteen to twenty people according to early reports. The U.S. press noted that this is the first known ground assault of U.S. troops in Pakistan. The provincial governor said twenty civilians including women and children were killed. The Foreign Minister denounced the attack, declaring that “no important terrorist or high-value target” was hit. The chief spokesman for the Pakistani Army registered its “strong objection.” Gen. Athar Abbas declared that the attack could provoke a general rebellion of local tribes against his government, and threaten NATO supply lines from Karachi into Afghanistan. The Foreign Minister angrily declared that “no important terrorist or high-value target” was hit. The U.S. ambassador was summoned to receive Islamabad’s official protest.

This is heavy stuff. But this news got sidelined by the star coverage conferred by the mainstream media on Sarah Palin, whose ringing oration, dripping with ignorance and contempt for the world, brought down the house Wednesday night in that celebration of stupidity in St. Paul. That speech, authored by George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully for whatever vice presidential candidate McCain selected, asserted among other things that Bush’s “surge” had prevented al-Qaeda from taking over Iraq. The message is clear: all U.S. military action is designed to protect the U.S. from al-Qaeda terror.

Why would the mainstream media, pronouncing “a star is born,” want to highlight the little news story about remote Waziristan? Palin was splashed all over the front page of the Boston Globe on Thursday; the Pakistan story was on page A-3. On Friday a follow-up AP story made page A-26. It emphasized how the raid had “complicated life for presidential front-runner Asif Ali Zardari.”

But this largely ignored event holds potentially horrifying significance. “Top American officials” have told the New York Times that this raid “could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.” The plan of course enjoys the support of John McCain, who never met a warlike action he didn’t like, as well as his opponent in the presidential race. Barack Obama has been saying for over a year that is the U.S. has “actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan and the chance to hit them, it should do so. The hell with Pakistani sovereignty! Why should such a detail matter after “we were attacked”?

Why should the outraged opposition of the Pakistani government constitute a major news story? Pakistan’s only a nuclear-armed Muslim country of 165 million people, which has at great cost to itself agreed---under duress, indeed the threat of being “bombed back into the Stone Age”---to abet U.S. objectives in neighboring Afghanistan. It’s just a country that having helped create and nurture the Taliban in order to stabilize Afghanistan, broke with that organization at the demand of the U.S. in 2001 and then found its frontier provinces flooded with Islamist militants fleeing across the border.

According to a White House “fact sheet” issued in August 2007:

o Pakistan has worked closely with the United States to secure the arrest of terrorists like Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al Shibh. Pakistan has killed or captured hundreds of suspected and known terrorists, including Mullah Obaidullah, who ranked second in the Taliban hierarchy at the time of his capture.
o About 100,000 Pakistani troops are deployed in the region near the Afghan border, and hundreds of Pakistani security forces have given their lives in the battle to combat terrorism post-9/11.
o Pakistan provides vital logistical support to coalition forces in Afghanistan.
o President Musharraf has a comprehensive strategy that combines three critical components--strengthened governance, increased economic development, and improved security--aimed at eradicating extremism in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

No government has provided more assistance to Washington as it pursues its goals in Southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation. But not only does the U.S. political class take this disasterous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will. It insults the sensibilities of a population that holds bin Laden in far greater esteem than the U.S. president. It provokes the powerful Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), originally the creation of the CIA, once a close partner with the U.S. in the project of destroying the secular pro-Soviet state that existed in Afghanistan from 1978 to 1993. (The ISI, a power unto itself, is already annoyed that Afghanistan, where anti-Indian Kashmiri jihadis used to hone their skills in training camps, has been cozying up to India.) Its embrace undermines any leader who seeks nationalist and religious credentials in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

“There’s potential to see more [attacks on Pakistan],” an unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times. Who do these people think they’re dealing with?

It is one thing to ignore the government of Iraq, placed in power by the U.S. invasion, when it says no to a permanent U.S. military presence, U.S. forces’ immunity from Iraqi law, or the privatization of Iraq’s petroleum resources. It’s one thing to laugh at al-Maliki & Co. and say, “Well, they don’t mean that,” confident that they’ll eventually knuckle under. It’s another thing to suppose that the Pakistanis, when they say “No,” mean anything other than “No” and will simply burn with quiet resentment indefinitely as U.S. forces violate their sovereignty. But that sort of insane arrogance stems naturally from the post 9-11 “us vs. them” mentality of U.S. leaders. Not just the neocons, mind you, but the entire political mainstream.

Pakistan, these leaders will note, is not doing enough to prevent militants from crossing over the border to attack U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. One should respond to this assertion with the following points:

* The U.S. is conflating Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. But these are not the same thing. (This is perhaps the most obvious but obviously neglected point of fact in the post 9-11 era.) The Taliban is an indigenous Afghan movement and--however unsavory--unquestionably enjoys a social base. Al-Qaeda is a mostly Arab force rooted in the U.S.-sponsored anti-Soviet Mujahadeen of the 1980s.
* Nobody in Afghanistan asked the U.S. to invade, bomb, or continue bombing Afghanistan for seven years. Nor did the Pakistanis.
* The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, against the advice and will of Pakistan, and the failure of that invasion to crush al-Qaeda, pushed al-Qaeda and Taliban forces into Pakistan. It’s likely the latter far outnumber the former.
* Pakistan’s government had never firmly controlled the frontier provinces or deployed large-scale military forces there in deference to the sensibilities of local tribes. Washington, oblivious to Pakistan’s realities, demanded that Islamabad suppress the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that fled into the region. In effect, it demanded that Pakistan clean up a mess that the U.S. invasion had created.
* Pakistan’s efforts to obey Washington have taken a terrible toll on the Pakistani Army, solidified local resistance to the central government, and in fact produced a Pakistani Taliban rooted in the local Pashtuns who identify with the Afghan Pashtuns and have no use for the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan drawn by colonialists who never consulted with them in drawing the map.
* Faced with the prospect of a general tribal-based rebellion, Islamabad has cut deals with local Taliban-linked groups. Washington has expressed its disapproval, claiming such deals continue to allow militants to cross back and forth across the border attacking its forces and their allies in Afghanistan. Washington is, in effect, asking Pakistan’s government to risk civil war and its own collapse to prevent Afghans from attacking its forces in Afghanistan whose deployment Pakistan opposed in the first place.
* Washington is saying to this nuclear power, Pakistan: “You must obey!” And some in Pakistan are saying: “You do not know this region. You’ve responded to 9-11 by lashing out in all directions, creating enemies you never had before. You created this problem, our headache, in Waziristan and adjoining regions. And you make it worse by saying that since we’re not handling it to your satisfaction, you’re going to start landing your troops in our villages, shooting on our civilians. And you’re expecting us to say, ‘Ok, no problem, boss?’ You’re crazy.”

It is crazy, even for a cocky hyper-imperialist power, to manifest such arrogance and contempt. Such attacks on Pakistan say to the Muslims of the world: “You are the problem and we reserve the right to slaughter you, because back home, we have powerful politicians who respond to a mass base that thinks fighting you all is, as Sarah Palin put it, ‘a task from God.’ (USA! USA! USA! USA!) If you don’t agree with our program to restructure your region, supporting our misogynistic fanatical Islamists in the Northern Alliance as opposed to the Taliban misogynistic fanatical Islamists you used to sponsor, we’ll invade you and take care of the problem ourselves. (USA! USA! USA! USA!) Get used to it. It’s not just the Bush crowd. We’ve got Obama on board now too. We will strike Pakistani targets as we see fit. Screw international law, which we invoke when it serves our needs and ignore when it might restrain us. Nobody is allowed to cross any border to attack our brave Americans, no matter where we invade, or why. Just accept that, world, and avoid our wrath. (USA! USA! USA!)”

That’s indeed the message to Pakistan. If there were a free press in this country, honest education and genuine discussion, the people would recoil in horror from the crimes committed in their name and the premises---largely lies---behind those crimes. But we have none of that, just some posts on the internet. The outlook is grim.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

Gary Leupp: The September 3 Attack on Pakistan

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Please limit this thread to discussions of actions like the SF raid into Pakistani territory - the drone attacks can go into the regular FATA thread.

US boots on the ground in Pakistan present an entirely different dynamic.

 

[muse]

Such attacks on Pakistan say to the Muslims of the world: “You are the problem and we reserve the right to slaughter you, because back home, we have powerful politicians who respond to a mass base that thinks fighting you all is, as Sarah Palin put it, ‘a task from God.’ (USA! USA! USA! USA!) If you don’t agree with our program to restructure your region, supporting our misogynistic fanatical Islamists in the Northern Alliance as opposed to the Taliban misogynistic fanatical Islamists you used to sponsor, we’ll invade you and take care of the problem ourselves. (USA! USA! USA! USA!) Get used to it. It’s not just the Bush crowd. We’ve got Obama on board now too. We will strike Pakistani targets as we see fit. Screw international law, which we invoke when it serves our needs and ignore when it might restrain us. Nobody is allowed to cross any border to attack our brave Americans, no matter where we invade, or why. Just accept that, world, and avoid our wrath. (USA! USA! USA!)”

That’s indeed the message to Pakistan. If there were a free press in this country, honest education and genuine discussion, the people would recoil in horror from the crimes committed in their name and the premises---largely lies---behind those crimes. But we have none of that, just some posts on the internet. The outlook is grim

I find my thinking to be in general agreement with the quote above - and I say that with a genuine sense of sadness -- The GWOT is a failed project, but that too is too horrible a prospect in it's implications not just for Pakistan but for the world - we cannot allow ourselves to think of it as failed, it must "evolve" and there is hope that it may, the first six months of the new political administration may allow us to be conclusive in this regard.