Pakistan : Terrorist Wahabi Islamic Rep Pakistan 7

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.samaa.tv/newsdetail.aspx?ID=32746"]Death toll in Nowshehra's bakery blast rises to 18[/url]



NOWSHEHRA : At least 18 people were killed and several others injured in a powerful blast at a crowded bakery in Nowshehra, SAMAA reported on Sunday.



According to initial reports, a powerful blast ripped through a bakery on Mall Road in Nowshehra this evening, leaving 18 unidentified persons dead and several others injured. It is feared that the number of casualities can go up as many injured were in critical conditions.



The bakery was engulfed by high flames after the powerful blast. The rescue teams and fire brigade rushed to the blast site and started rescue efforts while police cordoned off the area.



The rescue teams moved all dead bodies and the injured to the hospitals while fire brigade was busy to control rapidly spreading fatal fire.



Cheers

[Naresh]

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Mudy Ji :



Many thanks for the files.



In respect of Economic Survey 2010 – 2011 found following “Pork Pies” in Economics and Population :



1. Population : The full set of figures from 2003-2004 (2009-2010 Survey) have been revised upwards



2. The Population figure for the year 2010-2011 is taken as 175.31 Million whereas per State Bank of Pakistan the Population on 30-06-2010 was 184 Million. For 2010 – 2011 should be about 188 Million.



As such the Per Capita Income for 2010 – 2011 is not US$ 1,254 – as claimed – but about US$ 1,169.



The other figures are not only Interesting but Breathtaking although one would be more accurate in terming them as “Very, very funny”!



I am sure that Pakistan’s GDP of Pak Rs. 18,062.901 Billion = US$ 210 Billion has been arrived at by the following Formula :



A. Pakistan must keep its Defence Budge within Three Per Cent of the GDP.



B. Pakistan’s Defence Budgetary Requirements are US$ 6.3 Billion. Thus Pakistan’s GDP is US$ 21o Billion.



Of course we have in addition the Pakistani Defence Forces Pensions and “Other” Expenses plus, of course, the US$ Military Aid of US$ 1.5 Billion and as such Pakistan officially expends about US$ 9 Million annually on Defence.



Now even God is going to have a Very Tough Time trying to correct the situation in Terroristan.



As the Chinese say “We are, indeed, living in Interesting Times!”



Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=6445&Cat=13&dt=6/3/2011"]Are we being misled on the $1,254 per capita income?[/url]



ISLAMABAD : The economic mandarins of the incumbent regime show the economy to have grown to a little over Rs18,000 billion. This expansion, however, is not due to meaningful growth [color="#FF0000"]but primarily because of inflation[/color], which has apparently been factored into recalculating the per capita income as having increased to $1,254 in 2010-11 from $1,073 in the last fiscal year. This appears to be a misleading statistic, to say the least.



“Yes, I agree that the per capita income figure is extremely misleading,” Dr.Ashfaq H Khan, Dean of the Economics Department at the NUST Business School, told The News. [color="#FF0000"]“In reality, there is a zero growth in per capita income,[/color] as the increased almost at the rate of real GDP growth, which has been estimated at 2.05 percent. This is the main reason that the masses are facing such hardships,” Dr Khan said.



According to Finance Ministry sources, the economic mangers have decided to show the masses the success of their policies by inflating the size of the economy. GDP deflator (this is the ratio of GDP at current market price and GDP at constant market price), which is the broader definition of inflation, has increased by almost 20 percent in fiscal year 2010-11. In other words inflation in Pakistan as defined by changes in GDP deflator stood at about 20 percent. As a result of rise in inflation, the size of the GDP has jumped to 18000 billion rupees 2010-11.



Dividing by the average exchange rate for the year, the size of Pakistan ‘s GDP in dollars terms has surged to slightly over Rs18,000 billion with per capita income surging to $1254.



This rise in per capita income [color="#FF0000"]presents, the source said, a misleading picture of the average prosperity of the people of Pakistan. In fact, when adjusted for inflation, the real per capita income has remained constant at last year’s level. “In other words, the living standard of the people of Pakistan has not improved during the outgoing fiscal year 2010-11,”[/color] the source said.



Domestic investment, according to the official, is down to a 40-year low at 13.4 percent, which is why the country will not experience GDP growth at a reasonable rate in the next 2 to 3 years, except 2-2.5 percent. “This means that Pakistan ‘s future growth prospects will remain clouded as a result of sharp decline in domestic investment” It may be pointed out that the investment rate was all time high at 22.5 percent in 2006-2007.



The finance ministry official disclosed that the country had experienced a more than 9 percentage point decline in investment in the last 4 years, which did not auger well for future growth prospects. “In the coming years Pakistan ‘s unemployment and poverty will continue to rise with serious social consequences for the country,” the official lamented.



As far as foreign direct investment (FDI) is concerned, the FDI has tumbled by 29 percent to $1.232 billion during July-April 2010-11 as against $1.725 million in last year.



The official also said the average inflation has been at 14 percent. Forty-five months in a row, inflation has been in a double digit which has broken the back of the fixed income group as well as poor and vulnerable sections of society. It is unparalleled in the 64 years of the history of Pakistan that inflation has persisted at a high double digit for so long a period. - Khalid Mustafa



Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13739949"]Deadly blasts at market in Pakistani city of Peshawar[/url]



[color="#FF0000"]At least 15 people have been killed[/color] after two explosions ripped through a market in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, police have said.



Officers said they were investigating the cause of the blasts, which also wounded more than 30 people.



The number of attacks by militants in Pakistan has risen sharply since al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in a US commando raid last month.



On Thursday, eight soldiers were killed at a checkpoint in South Waziristan.



Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://tribune.com.pk/story/186284/land-of-the-impure/"]Land of the impure[/url]



By a quirk of fate, the Indian Campaign of Alexander the Macedonian was restricted entirely to what is now Pakistan. After his death in 322 BCE, his empire disintegrated and the brilliant Chandragupta Maurya rose to power in a great kingdom that spread across much of the subcontinent. Asoka, who outshone his grandsire, extended his rule to most of Afghanistan, even wresting bits of that country from its Greek masters.



The decay of the Mauryan Empire gave rise to a new wave of Greek adventurers. In or about the year 184 BCE, Demetrius, the first of the Euthydemid line of kings, left his seat of power at Balkh from where he controlled Afghanistan, and annexed Taxila. Not two decades had passed when another line of Greek adventurers, the descendents of Alexander’s general Seleucus Nikator, displaced the Euthydemids to become masters of first Taxila and Sialkot and eventually most of what is now Pakistan.



Far away in the east, the caste-conscious rulers of Patliputra (Patna) looked upon this parade of outsiders with disdain. The Yavanas (the local pronunciation of the Persian Yunani from Ionian) were despised people. For the Pundits of the east, these people were the Mlechha — unclean ones. There was, in that early pre-Islamic age, no appreciation for the white-skinned foreigners. By extension, the land of the outsiders became Mlechha Desa — Land of the unclean.



The power of the Greeks eventually waned and a hundred years after Eucratides, the Seleucid king, had taken Taxila, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa fell to Scythian hordes. Under their able king, Maues, these people rose in power and even before Maues died, they had spread across what is now Pakistan.



Having been in fashion for more than a hundred years, the title of Mlechha Desa now stuck fast. This was the land customarily under control of the impure, unclean outsiders. Little did it matter to the high caste Pundits of the east that they and outsiders in reality sprang from the common Indo-Aryan stock separated only by some scores of generations. [color="#FF0000"]Nevertheless, there was clearly no admiration for the newcomers; there was only revulsion.[/color]



This remained the case for the next millennium. It was only subsequent to the Muslim influx into the subcontinent when a sufficiently large number of conversions led to friction between the old established belief system and the new, that the first seeds of ‘love for the tormentor’, the invading newcomer, were sown. This was largely because the invader was now always Muslim (save Chengez Khan) and looked upon by the converts of India as a saviour.



Mahmud Ghaznavi, a Turk erroneously adopted by the Pathans as one of them, who raped and looted regardless of the religion of his victim, was lionised simply for being a Muslim. Few care to know that while this common brigand descended upon India in the winters, he routinely pillaged the rich (Muslim) cities of Central Asia. Only Abu Rehan Al Beruni got the real measure of this robber chief : Never in his life did he refer to him as Imad ud Daula, Sultan Ghazi etc. For Al Beruni, he was forever plain Amir Mahmud.



The cowardly Jalaluddin Khwarazm flying in front of the superior arms and tactics of Chengez Khan was turned into a hero by that sham historian Nasim Hijazi. This spineless man abandoned his family to the Mongols, knowing full well what they did to their adversaries, and fled to watch their rape and plunder from the safe side of the Sindhu River.



Subsequently, he indulged in wholesale slaughter in Multan, Uch and Bhambore (all Muslim cities) and utterely sacked Pari Nagar, a rich and fabulous city shared by Hindus and Muslims in Tharparkar. Mindless of all this savagery, we, in our ignorance, shamelessly permitted the spurious work of Hijazi to hone our love for this tormentor.



[color="#FF0000"]There is clearly a lack of national pride.[/color] There can be no other reason that we worship invaders who raped, looted and sacked our cities. We worship them and name sons after them only because we share the same religion with them.



Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110611/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_255"]Blasts kills 34 in Pakistan, as CIA chief visits[/url]



PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Two explosions went off minutes apart in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar Sunday, [color="#FF0000"]killing 34 people and injuring nearly 100[/color] in one of the deadliest attacks since the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden last month, officials said.



The blasts, [color="#FF0000"]one of which was caused by a suicide bomber,[/color] occurred just after midnight in an area of the city that is home to political offices and army housing.



The attack took place as CIA Director Leon Panetta and Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Islamabad, 95 miles (150 kilometers) to the east, to speak separately with senior Pakistani officials about intelligence sharing and efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.



The first explosion was relatively small and drew police and rescue workers to the site, said Dost Mohammed, a senior local police official. [color="#FF0000"]A large explosion rocked the area a few minutes later, causing the fatalities and injuring 98 people, 18 critically,[/color] said Rahim Jan, a senior doctor at a local hospital.



The second blast was caused by a suicide bomber riding a motorcycle packed with 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of explosives, said Ejaz Khan, a senior police official. The source of the first explosion was unknown.



No group claimed responsibility, but the Pakistani Taliban have pledged to carry out attacks in retaliation for the covert U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden in an army town outside Islamabad on May 2.



Saturday's attack took place across the street from the offices of the top political agent to Khyber, part of Pakistan's volatile tribal region, and only about 100 yards from army housing units. Peshawar borders the tribal region and has been repeatedly hit by bombings over the past few years.



The dead included at least one journalist, said Mohammed Farooq, a hospital doctor. Another four journalists and at least 10 police were injured, he said. Many of the people killed were so badly burned they were difficult to identify.



Jamal Khan, a 22-year-old student, was in his apartment when the first blast went off. He rushed to the scene as the second explosion occurred, peppering his face and arms with flying debris.



"The explosion was so huge I will never forget it all my life," said Khan as he recovered in a hospital. "It was deafening, and then there was a cloud of dust and smoke. When the dust settled, I saw people crying for help and body parts scattered everywhere."



The attack followed a second day of meetings between Panetta, the CIA chief, and senior Pakistani officials. The talks were slated to focus on the size and scope of U.S. intelligence activities in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden, said a Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.



The bin Laden operation plunged an already strained relationship between the CIA and Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the ISI, to new lows and threatened cooperation that is key to the U.S. fight against al-Qaida and Taliban militants battling foreign troops in Afghanistan.



The U.S. also needs Pakistan's help to promote and guide negotiations with the Taliban that can help end the decade-long Afghan war. Pakistan and Afghanistan inaugurated a joint peace commission Saturday during a visit by Karzai, the Afghan president.



In an attempt to rebuild their relationship, Washington and Islamabad have agreed to form a joint intelligence team to track down militant targets inside Pakistan, drawing in part from the trove of records taken from bin Laden's personal office during the raid.



Panetta and Pakistani officials planned to discuss what U.S. intelligence officers will be permitted to do, and how many will be allowed into the country as part of the team, said the Pakistani official.



But new suspicions have marred this attempt at renewed cooperation.



As an act of faith to restore relations with the Pakistanis, U.S. intelligence shared the suspected location of explosive material held by the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network at two compounds in the Pakistani tribal areas, according to a Pakistani and a U.S. official.



[color="#FF0000"]The U.S. official said that after the intelligence was shared, the explosive material was moved.[/color] The Pakistani official told The Associated Press that they checked out the locations, but nothing was there, and that they intend to investigate to dispel U.S. suspicions that the Pakistani intelligence service had tipped off the militants.



Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence operations.



Panetta's visit is his first to Pakistan since the bin Laden raid. His ties with Pakistan will be key in his new role as U.S. defense secretary, presuming he is speedily confirmed by Congress.



The U.S. wants the proposed joint intelligence team under discussion Saturday to pursue a list of five high-value targets it handed to the Pakistani leadership recently. The target list included al-Qaida's military operations chief in Pakistan, Ilyas Kashmiri, who was reportedly killed by a drone strike in the Pakistani tribal areas June 3.



Karzai pressed Pakistan for support in facilitating negotiations with Taliban militants with whom the Pakistani government has historical ties.



There is a significant level of distrust between the two countries, but Pakistan promised to help as Afghanistan sees fit.



"We both want stability in Afghanistan and in Pakistan," said Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in a news conference held with Karzai after the first meeting of the joint peace commission. "Our only aim is to support the peace process, which is Afghan-led."



Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=6520&Cat=13&dt=6/6/2011"]Poverty up by 12.7 percent in three years [/url]

LAHORE : The Economic Survey 2010-11 reveals that increase in poverty is directly related to the level of food inflation and [color="#FF0000"]factoring food inflation of last five years in accordance with given formula reveals that 41.2 percent or 74.16 million Pakistanis are living below poverty line.[/color]

Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/12/smokers-corner-sovereignty-and-hysteria.html"]Smokers’ Corner : Sovereignty and hysteria - Nadeem F. Paracha[/url]



Pakistan has become a classic case of a callous socio-political contradiction. Its people and politicians, its army and holy men can be seen lovingly engaging with the most ubiquitous symbols and gadgets of what they all ridicule as ‘western materialism/imperialism’, and yet without even blinking for a second, many can be expected to roll out high and mighty examples of oratory about political and cultural sovereignty.



Exactly what does a politically and culturally sovereign Pakistan mean? This question is bound to bag numerous different answers. And that should be expected in the diverse ethnic and political milieu of Pakistan. However, this diversity is yet to be recognised and respected by the state and parts of its society which strives rather unsuccessfully to define and defend Pakistan’s identity as a cohesive and singular whole, constantly dragging in religion believing it to be the glue that could hold the centre of this ideological singularity.



But it hasn’t. Because religion here has many sects and sub-sects, and each sect has its own take on the religious traditions and rituals. It is vital that to keep tensions between these sects at a minimum, government and the state, as well as the media, stop dragging religion out of peoples’ homes and into the public sphere.



The more religion remains inside the privacy of homes and in the individual family domain the better. Otherwise, Pakistanis of various sects and sub-sects will not only continue judging the validity and authenticity of one another’s faith, they will clash with the cohesive version of the religion that the state of Pakistan has been peddling for years now.



Sovereignty, like charity, begins at home. We delude ourselves and glorify our importance by constantly suggesting how powerful nations are so interested in us. Conspiracy theorists, fringe politicians, mullahs, Islamists and the chattering classes [color="#FF0000"]put us at the centre of the universe around which malicious superpowers supposedly hatch conspiracies and schemes to destabilise our wonderful Islamic republic.[/color]



This is just a mirage; a feel good, rather paranoid, projection, splashed to obscure the many state and social failures this unfortunate republic has been suffering in the name of religion, patriotism and, of course, now sovereignty. On what basis do we demand sovereignty? What do we have to deserve it? Isn’t Pakistan behaving like a society that molested itself and then called the act ‘ghairat?’



Many would turn around and instantly remind you that we are a nuclear power and a democracy. If so, then perhaps we are only slightly better than the isolationist, poverty-stricken and repressive North Korea. The bomb’s all we have, and as an acute case of collective neurosis, we so passionately worship our ‘fathers of the bomb’, a device that can wipe out whole populations and countries.



Where are new, quality schools, hospitals, a welfare system, political stability, democratic accountability, a healthy economy, and a life free of sectarian and religious bigotry, bloodshed and hatred? We are all prisoners of certain delusions—about ourselves and about the many countries that we believe are constantly scheming against us.



We refuse to free ourselves from these paranoid, self-serving apparitions and yet we demand sovereignty from the nefarious designs of our many (largely imagined) enemies? [color="#FF0000"]The enemy is us.[/color] Each one of us is to be blamed.



Once we manage to openly recognise and confess our own shortcomings, our journey to a sovereign state based on religious tolerance, economic progress and political plurality shall begin. Till then all we can do is to keep hugging our bomb and raise our bony fists in a delusional exhibition of empty triumph and hysteria.



Cheers

[Guest]

[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/world/asia/15policy.html?_r=2&hp"]Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid[/url]

Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.



At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.



“Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.



The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.



Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.

Green Card to his family.

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/terrorist-tactics-in-pakistan-threaten-nuclear-weapons-safety"]Terrorist Tactics in Pakistan Threaten Nuclear Weapons Safety[/url]

Two high-profile attacks by terrorists on highly secure military bases in Pakistan, the first on the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi in October 2009 and the second on the naval aviation base at PNS Mehran near Karachi in May 2011, have renewed international anxiety about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Cheers

[Naresh]

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[url="http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/7410839.html"]Ethnic violence claims 14 lives in Pakistan's Karachi[/url]



At least 14 people have been killed in a fresh wave of ethnic and political violence in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi over the past 24 hours, police and rivals said.



Rival nationalist groups met with the governor of Sindh Province, of which Karachi is the capital, Tuesday night and discussed ways to stop the violence, officials said.



The Muttahida Qaumi Movement or MQM, the group of Urdu-speaking people and Awami National Party or ANP, which represents the Pashto-speaking population, accuse each other of target killings.



Both MQM and ANP are part of the ruling coalition in Sindh province but their ethnic and political rivalry has gripped Karachi, also the commercial city of some 18 million population.



Police said that at least 14 people were gunned down in separate armed attacks blamed on a wave of ethnic violence that spread from the affected areas to several parts on Tuesday.



Businesses remained closed in different parts of the violence- hit areas amid a rattle of gunfire with public transport off the roads.



The ethnic violence also reached educational institution and student groups of the two parties clashed at a major university on Tuesday. A student leader of the ethnic Pashtun group was injured and shifted to hospital.



The breakdown of law and order, however, failed to make the city's security establishment take additional measures to restore peace.



A spokesman for the ANP said that gunmen attacked the party office in the Muslimabad area, killing two of its activists.



Leaders of the MQM and ANP met Governor of Sindh Province Dr. Eshrat-ul-Ebad and condemned the renewed wave of killings in the city and agreed to work together to prevent such incidents and weed out criminals who were causing a breakdown of law and order.



The two sides agreed that those involved in the killings had no political support. They also agreed to constitute neighborhood committees to keep an eye on such elements and frustrate their designs.



Cheers

[Guest]

[url="http://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/june-15-2011.html"]Lunch with CIA - John Thomas (Hedge Fund Manager) [/url]

Panetta’s final piece of advice: don’t even think about making a cell phone call in Pakistan. I immediately deleted the high risk numbers from my cell phone address book.

<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':lol:' />

[Guest]

Afraid of Paki National Bird - Drones. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':lol:' />

[HareKrishna]

what are drones?

[Naresh]

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http://www.geo.tv/6-18-2011/82651.htm





[url="http://www.geo.tv/6-18-2011/82651.htm"]Police receive DNA report of PNS Mehran terrorists [/url]





KARACHI : Police have received the DNA report of four terrorists killed during the attack on PNS Mehran, Geo News reported. The samples from the four terrorists do not match the DNA databank in Pakistan.



According to police officials, the DNA samples of the four terrorists were sent to Islamabad for testing. The officials added that these samples did not match the DNA databank in Pakistan.



According to sources, [color="#FF0000"]DNA cannot be used to determine the nationality of an individual[/color]. NADRA currently has a record of the registration of approximately 100 million people. In order to identify the terrorists, their pictures were taken using the most advance cameras along with their fingerprints. These did not match with the data maintained by NADRA.



Cheers

[Guest]

[url="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/06/18/national/w115701D75.DTL&tsp=1"]AP sources: Pakistanis tip off militants again[/url]

U.S. officials say Pakistan has apparently tipped off militants at two more bomb-building factories in its tribal areas, giving the terror suspects time to flee, after U.S. intelligence shared the locations with the Pakistani government.



Those officials believe Pakistan's insistence on seeking local tribal elders' permission before raiding the areas may have most directly contributed to the militants' flight, though they also suspect low-level security officials may have tipped the militants off.



U.S. officials have pushed for Pakistan to keep the location of such targets secret prior to the operations, but the Pakistanis say their troops cannot enter the lawless regions without giving the locals notice.



All officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.



.............



The U.S. officials explained Saturday how they first offered the location of the third, and then the fourth site, in order to give Pakistan another chance to prove it could be trusted to go after the militants.



In the tradition of `trust but verify,' the Americans carefully monitored the area with satellite and unmanned drones, to see what would happen, after sharing the information a third and fourth time, the officials said.



In each case, they watched the militants depart within 24 hours, taking any weapons or bomb-making materials with them, just as militants had done the first two times. Only then, did they watch the Pakistani military visit each site, when the terror suspects and their wares were long gone, the officials said.



Pakistan's army on Friday disputed reports that its security forces had tipped off insurgents at bomb-making factories after getting intelligence about the sites from the United States. The army called the assertions of collusion with militants "totally false and malicious."



Army officials further claimed they had successfully raided two more sites, after finding nothing at the first two, but a Pakistani official reached Friday offered no details of what they found there.



The official admitted that in each raid, however, the Pakistani security services notified the local elders who hold sway in the tribal regions. The official said they would investigate U.S. charges that the militants had been tipped off.

<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Two U.S. officials said they were asking the Pakistanis to withhold such sensitive information from the elders, and even their lower ranks, to carry out their raids in secret, to prove they could be trusted to go after U.S. enemies.



At least two of the sites were run by the Haqqani network, which is part of the Taliban, closely allied with al-Qaida, and blamed for some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops and civilians in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan has long resisted attacking the Haqqani network, saying the group has never attacked the state of Pakistan.

[Guest]

[url="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110619/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan"]Attack on Pakistan military triggers heavy clashes[/url]

Oh well, yesterday US caught them pants down, now this drama. Can they show us 50 dead militant face?

[ramana]

Something to watch for as prelude to the Colonels coup is any unusual air movements, activity at PAF bases that have the clown jewels, any movement of armored columns for re-deployment, cancellation of leave etc.



Also after PNS Mehran, its likely that AlQ or Pakiban already have pried some jewels.

Not necessarily from PNS Mehran but other places.



Its message of power and impunity to TSPA.



The sister services TSPN and Fizzleya have become more jihadi it counter the TSPA primacy in pecking order.



Again case of more green taking out less green.

Not to lose track off in the MV Suez caper. Who knows if it was ferrying stuff out of TSP?

Seems that the master was keen to scuttle the ship.



If its not to much I would send divers to examine the wreckage a la Thunderball.



and

Can some one with access to ship movements look at the MV Suez's past five years of movements?



Biju with TSP never rule out anything. Maybe they were using it to transport something. Not necessarily directly related to coup.



And the Egyptian owners are they MB free?

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/20/for-pakistan-time-to-try-india-as-a-friend.html"]For Pakistan, time to try India as a friend[/url]



Is Pakistan set to implode in its exasperating persistence to define itself in only security terms vis-à-vis India as did the Soviet Union with the United States in a nuclear-shadowed Cold War that lasted 40 years, a numbing fear that consumed three generations, but ended in a barren inevitability 20 years ago of the former collapsing into 13 new countries?



It seems more likely than not, given the few signs that a fundamental rethink in underway in Pakistan in determining what it stands for rather than what it doesn’t stand for, which passes for its schizophrenic identity.



Two specific WikiLeaks cables published in Dawn in recent weeks reveal more than just what is already known about Pakistan’s paranoid obsession with India and the authorship and control of the policy of paranoia by the military establishment. In the first, President Asif Zardari, the commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, counters the suggestion of Senator John Kerry that New Delhi is interested in pursuing peace with Islamabad by arguing that India has five times more tanks than Pakistan and that these are Pakistan-specific because the Sino-India border terrain cannot support a tank battle. In the second cable, severe civil-military tensions are revealed over access to and control of American aid flows to Pakistan with the army insisting for, and getting, direct aid and refusing to share details with the elected government even during drafting of the annual budgets.



The oversimplification of the link between military prowess and bilateral relationship – no doubt handed to Zardari in briefings from the military leadership – is disturbing. [color="#FF0000"]If Pakistan has to match India tank to tank, plane to plane, soldier to soldier, frigate to frigate and missile to missile before making peace, then it’s a lost battle in perpetuity.[/color] If matching military might was the precondition to peace then the world would have been blown up 200 times over because the unending Indo-Pak tensions and Indo-Pak like wars would have been replicated on every shared national border on the planet. What use was there to acquire super-expensive nuclear capability if it didn’t solve the problem of imbalance in conventional military capability? No two nuclear powers have fought a conventional war. Tensions are one thing but war is another. So why still sacrifice national prosperity at the cost of national dignity, as Army chief General Kayani said days after Osama bin Laden was taken out.



The farcical civil-military equation in Pakistan that has kept political forces emaciated and socio-cultural progress stunted is insulting enough it itself but for the military to have its cake (of American aid) all these decades and eat it too is going too far for even weak states. The military is twice richer and the elected governments twice the poorer when it comes to foreign aid. America has been Pakistan’s biggest civilian and military aid provider. In the last 10 years alone it has received over $21 billion in American aid. General Kayani and his corps commanders may have gingerly offered recently that the US military aid to Pakistan may be diverted for civilian development spending but it is neither here nor there since it managed to prevail on the government to secure the highest ever defense budget in the country’s history this year (over Rs500 billion).



Tellingly, seven of the last 10 years have been ruled by the military. So they have ended up getting $17 billion of this aid, whether military or ‘civilian’ (the “uniformed” Musharraf had a ‘civilian prime minister’). The civilian government – in place for the last three years only – has received barely $3 billion but the bulk of this too has gone to the military and spent on fighting a war on terror. No wonder there is nearly a trillion-rupee budget deficit crippling Pakistan at the joints – [color="#FF0000"]this is why the economy is tanking, social development is at a standstill and unemployment, starvation and poverty are soaring according to the government’s own statistics.[/color] Pakistan is fighting a war with its own proxies who also take money and dictation from al Qaeda.



The two WikiLeaks cables on Pakistan’s security obsession with India and the skewed civil-military equation are at the root of Pakistan’s sorry state. The deficit of trust between Washington and Islamabad that is so wide that despite being allies the former had to invade Pakistan militarily to eliminate bin Laden has thrown up for public debate – and pressure on the military – the need to define “sovereignty”, the concept that the military has traditionally used to reinforce its stranglehold over the national polity.



The military early on crafted a national security doctrine that helped it manufacture a national security state (as opposed to a national welfare state). This is based on the supposed “clear and continuing” danger from India to unravel Pakistan. The doctrine extrapolates that this “perpetual threat” is a projection of India’s supposed “capacity” to hurt Pakistan rather than its intention to make peace.



The problem with this contention is that India may have the same stance on Pakistan, which means this is a formula for an unending arms race and not a remedy to war, which should be state’s priority. India’s ruling elites may have been averse to the idea of Pakistan and hostile to the new country in the early decades but it follows that after the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and their testing in 1998, the deterrent has demolished any existential threat to Pakistan from India. The Lahore summit between the popularly elected civilian governments of both countries (Sharif’s in Islamabad and Vajpayee’s in New Delhi) within a year of the nuclear tests was an affirmation of this new reality. So why no let-up in the paranoia even 15 years down the line?



If 9/11 (New York) was the moment America and 27/11 (Mumbai) that India changed forever, 2/5 (Abbottabad) could be Pakistan’s crossroads of opportunity to likewise choose the path of being a state that protects its own people by fighting terrorism unconditionally. Sovereignty is not about nurturing dubious proxies to fight your wars but to fight against the instinct to do so. The real violation of sovereignty is the imbalance in receiving foreign aid flows in-country and then not accounting for it. It is the civil-military imbalance within Pakistan that has distorted the nature of civil society and crippled the economy, thus opening up the space for non-state actors and terrorists to appropriate the sovereignty by propelling the country into a suicidal conflict with America and India instead of forces like al Qaeda and Taliban that espouse violence and extremism. Having plans in place in perpetuity to fight India and not even contemplating plans to fully and decisively fight the terrorists (foreign and local) in the border regions (particularly North Waziristan) of your own country – this is not stuff sovereignty is made of. A German delegation that met Kiyani last week was quoted by a local newspaper as saying to them that Afghanistan’s stability is not a priority for Pakistan Army if its strategic interests don’t match it.



Of course, like any country that has the resources to do so, Pakistan should have a robust military and adequate defense preparedness not only against an overarching India but also an unstable Afghanistan. But India throwing its weight around and building its military muscle is a function of its political, economic and cultural stability and durability, not the other way round. After all, doesn’t Pakistan do the same when it comes to the other six states in South Asia? Pakistan wants political and military parity with India (without matching the democratic and economic stability that India has) but how come it is in a virtually one-sided relationship with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan who can’t match it in military terms?



The only way to protect Pakistan against threats, perceived and unperceived, is to build trust, peace, trade and interdependence with India, Afghanistan and Iran and key global allies like America and Europe that have deep interest in the region’s stability. Safety and protection will not come from the military’s policy of paranoia to serve in ‘national interest’ which forces the unwilling country to weaken or leverage regional and international players by internal and external state and non-state provocations. These include supporting some militant organisations allied with al Qaeda and Taliban while going after others and by both doing little and seen to be doing even less to stem the involvement of people in attacks or attempted attacks in India, Afghanistan, the US and Europe.



There is no shame in acknowledging that some things are wrong and accepting that these need to be set right. Pakistan must stop equating sovereignty with defiance. Sovereignty is neither abstract nor absolute but a function of power, which in turn is also not absolute or abstract. Power is relative to the demonstrated power of others and dependent on the discipline of political and economic stability both of which elude Pakistan. Beneficial and lasting power flows from the social contract between a people and its rulers via a consensus constitution in which universal rights are adopted and elected civilian parliaments are supreme and empowered to make all policies, including security and foreign policies, both of which are the military’s handmaidens in Pakistan and therefore without public support or sanction.



Pakistan needs rigorous and sustained accountability of outmoded, unchanging self-serving institutional doctrines that don’t have public sanction and which have propelled Pakistan into an unsustainable arms race with India and are seeking to control Afghanistan, and which seek to leverage terrorist non-state actors against even allies. It is due to these policies that, according to yet another WikiLeaks cable published by Dawn, a French national security advisor told an American envoy “Pakistan is an army in search of a country.”



Misplaced bravado does not make pride and there’s no shame in desiring peace with someone we’ve painted as an enemy. The only way the delusional mindset that ill-serves Pakistan will be righted is when the national security doctrine puts the people, not the military establishment, at the center of Pakistan’s raison d ‘etre. [color="#FF0000"]We have tried India as an enemy and it has cost us dearly.[/color] It’s time to try India as a friend because the cost of being a friend is far, far less than the cost of being an enemy. For this to happen, what we need to do in Pakistan is what Peter Feaver suggested as the perfect civil-military equation: “The civil-military challenge is to reconcile a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize”. Good luck Pakistan!



Adnan Rehmat is a journalist, analyst and media development specialist. He heads Intermedia, a Pakistani media support NGO



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