Baghdad
(AP) — There's been a claim of responsibility for a suicide car bombing at Baghdad's main crime lab that killed at least 22 people. An al-Qaida front group, the Islamic State of Iraq, says it pulled off the Tuesday bombing. The group has already said it carried out suicide car bombings at three hotels on Monday that claimed at least 41 lives. The group's statement appeared on militant Web sites today.
KABUL (AP) — A clash between a joint NATO-Afghan force and another Afghan unit in eastern Wardak province this morning killed four Afghan soldiers when they were hit by a NATO airstrike. The Afghan Defense Ministry has condemned the killing and wants those responsible to be brought to justice after an investigation.
MIR ALI, Pakistan
(AP)— Suspected U.S. missile strikes have been raining down on alleged Pakistani militant strongholds in unprecedented numbers since the Dec. 30 bombing against the CIA in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials say nine militants are dead in the latest, which hit a North Waziristan (vah-ZEER'-ih-stahn) compound and bunker.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Up to a foot of snow is forecast today along a line that follows the borders of Arkansas and Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky and into western North Carolina and Virginia. Several interstates through mountainous parts of North Carolina are shut down. It's the same storm that walloped northern Texas and Oklahoma.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Police in Utah say a 70-year-old woman who allegedly shot and killed a Head Start teacher in the Salt Lake area knew her victim and called 911 herself after the shooting. Dead is 34-year-old single mother of two Tetyana Nikitina. Police say the alleged shooter had a concealed weapons permit.
Source:kvue.com/
Showing posts with label American fall in Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American fall in Afghanistan. Show all posts
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Obama Takes on the Muslim World
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush recognized that Israel’s endless war on the Palestinians, a grossly unequal struggle waged with the military, financial, and diplomatic support of the United States, had put America at risk. For a brief moment, Bush spoke strongly of the need to establish a Palestinian state and bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a speedy and just conclusion. Bush even demanded an end to Israeli incursions into the West Bank and the targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders.
In very little time, the president realized that acknowledging America’s own foreign policy in the Middle East had put America in the terrorist crosshairs was unlikely to be a vote-getter, particularly among the Republican Party’s Evangelical faithful, who view the establishment of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. So the president, with the eager support of both parties and a tame corporate media, chose the explanation that foreigners willing to fly airplanes into buildings must hate America’s freedom and openness, our margaritas and miniskirts. This facile and entirely specious assertion was a much more palatable explanation for 9/11 than that American intervention, particularly U.S. support of corrupt Arab kings and potentates, a blank check for Israeli adventurism, and a murderous embargo on the Iraqi people, had provoked an intense hatred of the U.S. among a small but growing percentage of Muslims around the world.
Fast forward though the invasion of Iraq, justified by entirely bogus intelligence, through years of fighting in Afghanistan, bringing nothing but misery to the Afghan people, and through Israel’s brutal pounding of Lebanon and Gaza, to the election of a new American president determined to make a fresh start with the Muslim world. Barack Obama’s visit to Cairo in June of last year to deliver a much-ballyhooed speech seemed to break with the policies of the Bush administration, which had been perceived, especially in the Arab states, as blatantly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. As part of Obama’s determination to change America’s profile among the world’s billion Muslims, he subsequently insisted that Israel end all settlement activity in Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, a stance consistent with international law and favored by most of America’s allies.
As Bush learned in 2001, pressure on Israel, no matter how justified, takes courage and has political costs. The Democratic Party has long received a large proportion of its financial support from Israel’s friends in the United States, and Israel has many advocates in the Obama administration, the best example being the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Israeli army. So President Obama quickly surrendered to Israel’s American constituency, dropped his insistence that settlement of Palestinian lands cease, and began to pressure the Palestinian Authority’s weakling President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations without preconditions.
To put a seal on Obama’s humiliation at the hands of right-wing Israeli politicians Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the Obama administration sidelined the Goldstone Report detailing war crimes during the Gaza war (“willful killings and willful causing great suffering” to the civilian population and “collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip”), signed a multi-year, $30 billion defense protocol with the Israelis, and rebuked U.S. Middle East negotiator George Mitchell for saying quite accurately that the U.S. had once withheld U.S. loan guarantees as a way showing displeasure at settlement activity.
At the same time, President Obama did nothing to alleviate the sufferings of 1.4 million desperate Palestinians under Israeli siege in Gaza. How bad are conditions in Gaza? Some 80 percent of its residents rely on foreign assistance, and unemployment is above 40 percent. Medical supplies, fuel, and food are routinely held up at the Israeli border. Half of Gaza’s schools have not been repaired from Israel’s onslaught a year ago. Almost unbelievably, the Obama administration has made suffering in Gaza worse by pressuring the Egyptian government to close smuggling tunnels connecting Gaza with Egyptian Sinai, which provided an alternative means of moving a trickle of goods around the Israeli blockade. Although Americans may close their eyes to the miserable existence Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza, who have done nothing to harm the United States and do not threaten us in any way, Americans may be certain that our complicity has not gone unnoticed across the Muslim world.
The Obama administration has also maintained the Bush administration’s hostility to Syria. The Commerce Department recently vetoed the sale of European-manufactured Airbus commercial airliners to Syrian Air, which the Commerce Department was apparently able to do because 10 percent of the aircraft’s components are made in the U.S. Just what American strategic objective is furthered by forcing Syrians to fly around in clapped-out, Soviet-vintage commercial aircraft is unknown. Will the Syrian man in the street love us for putting his life at risk when he flies from Damascus to Aleppo? Or is this simply another case in which the interests of Israel trump those of the U.S.?
It is also worth noting that Gen. David Petraeus, that most political of all generals, has continued to accuse Syria of supporting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. This charge is beyond absurd. Why would the government in Damascus seek to undermine the regime in Baghdad when both governments are closely allied with Iran? It is of course possible that some of the 1.5 Sunni Iraqi refugees in Syria are covertly supporting resistance in Iraq, but that is as might be expected and reflects the desperate mess the U.S. has created in Iraq, where some 25 percent of the population has fled to Syria or Jordan, or are internally displaced.
Although President Obama also sought a “new beginning” with Iran, he never directed any of the policy changes that would make that possible. Crucially, the U.S. continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to bring about regime change in Iran, prompting Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to remark, “Money, arms, and organizations are being used by the Americans directly across our western border to fight the Islamic Republic.” U.S. anti-Iranian activities range from protecting the MEK terrorist group in Iraq for use in cross-border raids and subversion to funding American NGOs, whose support of “Twittering revolutionaries” on the streets of Tehran may be passed off as “promoting democracy” in the West, but which looks to the Iranian government like just another American attempt to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
American diplomacy certainly does not aim for reconciliation with Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sought international help, particularly in Europe, to impose “crippling” sanctions on the country. After a meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, Obama himself agreed to set up an American-Israeli working group to consider what coercive steps could be taken against Iran if it did not abandon nuclear enrichment. And American officials have continued to threaten military action over Tehran’s nuclear program, even though there is no meaningful data to overturn the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which held that the country gave up work on an atomic weapon in 2003. To suggest that Iran, with a military budget one one hundredth of what the U.S. spends on its armed forces, is a threat to the U.S. is the height of absurdity. To brand Iran a proliferator for its low-level enrichment of uranium while ignoring Israel’s 200 nuclear weapons is the height of hypocrisy.
In Afghanistan, the Obama administration added 17,000 U.S. troops last year and is in the process of adding 30,000 more. In eight years of war, the U.S. has brought misery to the civilian population and a gang of corrupt politicians to power in Kabul in an obviously bogus election. What is the Obama administration going to do in the next seven years that hasn’t been tried in the last eight? To give the situation a bit of perspective, the last man to pacify Afghanistan was Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C. Why Gen. McChrystal thinks an American-trained Afghan army recruited from various ethnic minorities in the north of the country will ever suppress an insurgency centered on Pashtun tribes, which comprise almost half the population of Afghanistan, is difficult to fathom. Well, no one would ever confuse McChrystal with Alexander, except maybe Victor Davis Hanson.
The war in Afghanistan has now spilled over into Pakistan, where administration pressure on the Pakistani army to fight the Taliban and its allies has produced hundreds of thousands of refugees and is destabilizing the country. America’s contribution to the widening war has been drone strikes on suspected Taliban leaders. The U.S. is also conducting anti-terrorist operations in Somalia and Yemen in the same way. The problem with this strategy is twofold. First, the drone would be a great weapon if it only killed the bad guys. Many drone strikes (and strikes from conventional aircraft, for that matter) have killed completely innocent people, undoubtedly increasing the number of America’s enemies. Second, where the U.S. relies on an ally’s intelligence service for targeting data, as in Yemen, there is a very good chance that enemies of the local regime, not al-Qaeda, are being hit.
Sometimes the Obama administration lashes out at the Muslim world in ways that are difficult to comprehend. In the wake of the failed underwear bombing, the TSA named 14 countries whose citizens would receive “full-body pat-downs” before boarding U.S.-bound aircraft: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Obviously, any suspicious passenger ought to be selected for special screening, but the TSA’s message seems to be that if someone hails from Syria or Algeria, they possess murderous intent, thus confirming to millions of Muslims that the U.S. is deeply prejudiced against them.
As long as the Obama administration believes it can bomb, starve, invade, occupy, and intimidate the Muslim world into submission, and as long as the administration willingly makes Israel’s enemies America’s enemies, the U.S. will be a terrorist target and locked into endless wars in faraway places.
Source:original.antiwar.com/
In very little time, the president realized that acknowledging America’s own foreign policy in the Middle East had put America in the terrorist crosshairs was unlikely to be a vote-getter, particularly among the Republican Party’s Evangelical faithful, who view the establishment of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. So the president, with the eager support of both parties and a tame corporate media, chose the explanation that foreigners willing to fly airplanes into buildings must hate America’s freedom and openness, our margaritas and miniskirts. This facile and entirely specious assertion was a much more palatable explanation for 9/11 than that American intervention, particularly U.S. support of corrupt Arab kings and potentates, a blank check for Israeli adventurism, and a murderous embargo on the Iraqi people, had provoked an intense hatred of the U.S. among a small but growing percentage of Muslims around the world.
Fast forward though the invasion of Iraq, justified by entirely bogus intelligence, through years of fighting in Afghanistan, bringing nothing but misery to the Afghan people, and through Israel’s brutal pounding of Lebanon and Gaza, to the election of a new American president determined to make a fresh start with the Muslim world. Barack Obama’s visit to Cairo in June of last year to deliver a much-ballyhooed speech seemed to break with the policies of the Bush administration, which had been perceived, especially in the Arab states, as blatantly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. As part of Obama’s determination to change America’s profile among the world’s billion Muslims, he subsequently insisted that Israel end all settlement activity in Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, a stance consistent with international law and favored by most of America’s allies.
As Bush learned in 2001, pressure on Israel, no matter how justified, takes courage and has political costs. The Democratic Party has long received a large proportion of its financial support from Israel’s friends in the United States, and Israel has many advocates in the Obama administration, the best example being the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Israeli army. So President Obama quickly surrendered to Israel’s American constituency, dropped his insistence that settlement of Palestinian lands cease, and began to pressure the Palestinian Authority’s weakling President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations without preconditions.
To put a seal on Obama’s humiliation at the hands of right-wing Israeli politicians Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the Obama administration sidelined the Goldstone Report detailing war crimes during the Gaza war (“willful killings and willful causing great suffering” to the civilian population and “collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip”), signed a multi-year, $30 billion defense protocol with the Israelis, and rebuked U.S. Middle East negotiator George Mitchell for saying quite accurately that the U.S. had once withheld U.S. loan guarantees as a way showing displeasure at settlement activity.
At the same time, President Obama did nothing to alleviate the sufferings of 1.4 million desperate Palestinians under Israeli siege in Gaza. How bad are conditions in Gaza? Some 80 percent of its residents rely on foreign assistance, and unemployment is above 40 percent. Medical supplies, fuel, and food are routinely held up at the Israeli border. Half of Gaza’s schools have not been repaired from Israel’s onslaught a year ago. Almost unbelievably, the Obama administration has made suffering in Gaza worse by pressuring the Egyptian government to close smuggling tunnels connecting Gaza with Egyptian Sinai, which provided an alternative means of moving a trickle of goods around the Israeli blockade. Although Americans may close their eyes to the miserable existence Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza, who have done nothing to harm the United States and do not threaten us in any way, Americans may be certain that our complicity has not gone unnoticed across the Muslim world.
The Obama administration has also maintained the Bush administration’s hostility to Syria. The Commerce Department recently vetoed the sale of European-manufactured Airbus commercial airliners to Syrian Air, which the Commerce Department was apparently able to do because 10 percent of the aircraft’s components are made in the U.S. Just what American strategic objective is furthered by forcing Syrians to fly around in clapped-out, Soviet-vintage commercial aircraft is unknown. Will the Syrian man in the street love us for putting his life at risk when he flies from Damascus to Aleppo? Or is this simply another case in which the interests of Israel trump those of the U.S.?
It is also worth noting that Gen. David Petraeus, that most political of all generals, has continued to accuse Syria of supporting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. This charge is beyond absurd. Why would the government in Damascus seek to undermine the regime in Baghdad when both governments are closely allied with Iran? It is of course possible that some of the 1.5 Sunni Iraqi refugees in Syria are covertly supporting resistance in Iraq, but that is as might be expected and reflects the desperate mess the U.S. has created in Iraq, where some 25 percent of the population has fled to Syria or Jordan, or are internally displaced.
Although President Obama also sought a “new beginning” with Iran, he never directed any of the policy changes that would make that possible. Crucially, the U.S. continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to bring about regime change in Iran, prompting Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to remark, “Money, arms, and organizations are being used by the Americans directly across our western border to fight the Islamic Republic.” U.S. anti-Iranian activities range from protecting the MEK terrorist group in Iraq for use in cross-border raids and subversion to funding American NGOs, whose support of “Twittering revolutionaries” on the streets of Tehran may be passed off as “promoting democracy” in the West, but which looks to the Iranian government like just another American attempt to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
American diplomacy certainly does not aim for reconciliation with Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sought international help, particularly in Europe, to impose “crippling” sanctions on the country. After a meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, Obama himself agreed to set up an American-Israeli working group to consider what coercive steps could be taken against Iran if it did not abandon nuclear enrichment. And American officials have continued to threaten military action over Tehran’s nuclear program, even though there is no meaningful data to overturn the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which held that the country gave up work on an atomic weapon in 2003. To suggest that Iran, with a military budget one one hundredth of what the U.S. spends on its armed forces, is a threat to the U.S. is the height of absurdity. To brand Iran a proliferator for its low-level enrichment of uranium while ignoring Israel’s 200 nuclear weapons is the height of hypocrisy.
In Afghanistan, the Obama administration added 17,000 U.S. troops last year and is in the process of adding 30,000 more. In eight years of war, the U.S. has brought misery to the civilian population and a gang of corrupt politicians to power in Kabul in an obviously bogus election. What is the Obama administration going to do in the next seven years that hasn’t been tried in the last eight? To give the situation a bit of perspective, the last man to pacify Afghanistan was Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C. Why Gen. McChrystal thinks an American-trained Afghan army recruited from various ethnic minorities in the north of the country will ever suppress an insurgency centered on Pashtun tribes, which comprise almost half the population of Afghanistan, is difficult to fathom. Well, no one would ever confuse McChrystal with Alexander, except maybe Victor Davis Hanson.
The war in Afghanistan has now spilled over into Pakistan, where administration pressure on the Pakistani army to fight the Taliban and its allies has produced hundreds of thousands of refugees and is destabilizing the country. America’s contribution to the widening war has been drone strikes on suspected Taliban leaders. The U.S. is also conducting anti-terrorist operations in Somalia and Yemen in the same way. The problem with this strategy is twofold. First, the drone would be a great weapon if it only killed the bad guys. Many drone strikes (and strikes from conventional aircraft, for that matter) have killed completely innocent people, undoubtedly increasing the number of America’s enemies. Second, where the U.S. relies on an ally’s intelligence service for targeting data, as in Yemen, there is a very good chance that enemies of the local regime, not al-Qaeda, are being hit.
Sometimes the Obama administration lashes out at the Muslim world in ways that are difficult to comprehend. In the wake of the failed underwear bombing, the TSA named 14 countries whose citizens would receive “full-body pat-downs” before boarding U.S.-bound aircraft: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Obviously, any suspicious passenger ought to be selected for special screening, but the TSA’s message seems to be that if someone hails from Syria or Algeria, they possess murderous intent, thus confirming to millions of Muslims that the U.S. is deeply prejudiced against them.
As long as the Obama administration believes it can bomb, starve, invade, occupy, and intimidate the Muslim world into submission, and as long as the administration willingly makes Israel’s enemies America’s enemies, the U.S. will be a terrorist target and locked into endless wars in faraway places.
Source:original.antiwar.com/
Success in Afghanistan hindered by Pakistan's dangerous balancing act
Pakistan's complicated relationship with Islamic militant groups, its internal and external strategic aims and its need for Western aid and support is hindering progress in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
More than eight years on from the US-led invasion of Afghanistan which forced the Taliban from power and sent its al Qaeda allies into hiding, the somewhat naïve objective of a democratic and stable Afghanistan free of fundamentalists and terrorists seems as far away as ever.
The Taliban is resurgent, al Qaeda has returned and the Western-backed Afghan government has even less credibility after the chaos of last year's fraudulent presidential elections continues to reverberate. Western military planners appear to be at a loss as to how to end an increasingly difficult war which looked to have been won in the early months of 2002.
Representatives of those nations involved with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) meet with officials from the Afghan government this week in London in an attempt to find a way out of this seemingly intractable conflict. One of the most important aspects of any discussion will be Pakistan's role in ending the counter-insurgency and its potential involvement in the stabilization of a post-war Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long been seen as the key to success against the Taliban insurgency. While the Taliban has returned in significant numbers to its heartlands in the southern provinces of Afghanistan, the tribal areas along the Afghan border inside Pakistan are accepted as being the main center of operations from which the insurgency is planned and executed.
Mixed messages from Pakistan's tribal region offensive
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Pakistan's offensive has made gains in South Waziristan
In what appears to be a concerted effort to eliminate the Taliban in the restive tribal regions of North and South Waziristan, Pakistan launched an on-going military offensive last October. Pakistan has since claimed victories in South Waziristan where its army has dismantled Taliban bases and infrastructure while expelling thousands of their fighters from the region over which they once had complete control.
On the surface, it appears that Pakistan is making good on the promises it made to the Bush administration in the first years of the war when then President Pervez Musharraf agreed to help in the 'war on terror' in exchange for financial and military aid from the United States.
Pro-government Taliban in north remain free
However, while the operation in South Waziristan has seen some positive results, this is offset by Pakistan's apparent reluctance to target insurgents who infiltrate into Afghanistan from North Waziristan to attack the foreign forces across the border.
So far, the Pakistani Army has only hit militants which it holds responsible for attacks within Pakistan, leaving thousands of pro-government Taliban fighters in North Waziristan to freely cross the border to strike NATO troops on the other side.
The complicated involvement of Pakistan both in fighting and facilitating the insurgency is based on its long-term internal and external strategic policies as well as its concern over its economic interests.
History of cultivating militant groups for own ends
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Taliban operates freely from North Waziristan
Pakistan, a country which has been ruled by military dictatorships for most of its 62 years of existence, has long fostered a policy of using Islamic militant groups for its own ends, specifically in its proxy war with India over Kashmir. These militant groups, both trained and funded by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - Pakistan's secret service, have in turn found their own battles to fight, namely the jihad against Western forces in Afghanistan.
"It's an open secret that the military and intelligence services still have a hand in supporting what they call their strategic assets," Dr. Farzana Shaikh, the director of the Pakistan Study Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House in London, told Deutsche Welle. "These are mainly groups attached to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and are groups which Pakistan could use in the event of a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan to ensure their interests there are not compromised.
The fear is that India will expand the influence its been gaining since 9/11 in Afghanistan, and Pakistan sees these Taliban-affiliated groups in North Waziristan as a handy bunch to have around and so they are very reluctant to take on these groups who could be assets in the future."
Source:dw-world.de/
More than eight years on from the US-led invasion of Afghanistan which forced the Taliban from power and sent its al Qaeda allies into hiding, the somewhat naïve objective of a democratic and stable Afghanistan free of fundamentalists and terrorists seems as far away as ever.
The Taliban is resurgent, al Qaeda has returned and the Western-backed Afghan government has even less credibility after the chaos of last year's fraudulent presidential elections continues to reverberate. Western military planners appear to be at a loss as to how to end an increasingly difficult war which looked to have been won in the early months of 2002.
Representatives of those nations involved with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) meet with officials from the Afghan government this week in London in an attempt to find a way out of this seemingly intractable conflict. One of the most important aspects of any discussion will be Pakistan's role in ending the counter-insurgency and its potential involvement in the stabilization of a post-war Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long been seen as the key to success against the Taliban insurgency. While the Taliban has returned in significant numbers to its heartlands in the southern provinces of Afghanistan, the tribal areas along the Afghan border inside Pakistan are accepted as being the main center of operations from which the insurgency is planned and executed.
Mixed messages from Pakistan's tribal region offensive
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Pakistan's offensive has made gains in South Waziristan
In what appears to be a concerted effort to eliminate the Taliban in the restive tribal regions of North and South Waziristan, Pakistan launched an on-going military offensive last October. Pakistan has since claimed victories in South Waziristan where its army has dismantled Taliban bases and infrastructure while expelling thousands of their fighters from the region over which they once had complete control.
On the surface, it appears that Pakistan is making good on the promises it made to the Bush administration in the first years of the war when then President Pervez Musharraf agreed to help in the 'war on terror' in exchange for financial and military aid from the United States.
Pro-government Taliban in north remain free
However, while the operation in South Waziristan has seen some positive results, this is offset by Pakistan's apparent reluctance to target insurgents who infiltrate into Afghanistan from North Waziristan to attack the foreign forces across the border.
So far, the Pakistani Army has only hit militants which it holds responsible for attacks within Pakistan, leaving thousands of pro-government Taliban fighters in North Waziristan to freely cross the border to strike NATO troops on the other side.
The complicated involvement of Pakistan both in fighting and facilitating the insurgency is based on its long-term internal and external strategic policies as well as its concern over its economic interests.
History of cultivating militant groups for own ends
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Taliban operates freely from North Waziristan
Pakistan, a country which has been ruled by military dictatorships for most of its 62 years of existence, has long fostered a policy of using Islamic militant groups for its own ends, specifically in its proxy war with India over Kashmir. These militant groups, both trained and funded by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - Pakistan's secret service, have in turn found their own battles to fight, namely the jihad against Western forces in Afghanistan.
"It's an open secret that the military and intelligence services still have a hand in supporting what they call their strategic assets," Dr. Farzana Shaikh, the director of the Pakistan Study Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House in London, told Deutsche Welle. "These are mainly groups attached to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and are groups which Pakistan could use in the event of a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan to ensure their interests there are not compromised.
The fear is that India will expand the influence its been gaining since 9/11 in Afghanistan, and Pakistan sees these Taliban-affiliated groups in North Waziristan as a handy bunch to have around and so they are very reluctant to take on these groups who could be assets in the future."
Source:dw-world.de/
Afghan leader to outline peace plan
Afghan President Hamid Karzai says a London conference on Afghanistan this week offers a major opportunity for his government to present its plans for reconciliation.
Karzai spoke in Turkey on Tuesday after a meeting of nations that seek to help Afghanistan emerge from instability with aid, trade, training and political support. Delegates included Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
The London meeting on Thursday is expected to focus on Afghanistan's efforts to persuade Taliban militants who are not part of al-Qaida or other terrorist groups to give up their fight.
Miliband says the international community must mobilize more resources to help Afghanistan.
Source:etaiwannews.com/
Karzai spoke in Turkey on Tuesday after a meeting of nations that seek to help Afghanistan emerge from instability with aid, trade, training and political support. Delegates included Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
The London meeting on Thursday is expected to focus on Afghanistan's efforts to persuade Taliban militants who are not part of al-Qaida or other terrorist groups to give up their fight.
Miliband says the international community must mobilize more resources to help Afghanistan.
Source:etaiwannews.com/
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Another Brit, American fall in Afghanistan
A British soldier and an American GI have been killed in separate explosions in southern Afghanistan, where international forces are struggling with rising militancy.
Britain's Defense Ministry said in a statement on Saturday that a trooper on foot patrol in the Nad-e Ali area of Helmand province was killed in an explosion.
This brings the total number of British troops killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion to 240.
Meanwhile, a US soldier lost his life to an improvised explosive device (IED) in southern Afghanistan.
IEDs are widely used by militants in their campaign against US-led troops across the war-torn country.
This year alone, almost 500 foreign troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan, with Americans accounting for more than 300 of the casualties.
The United States currently commands 113,000 American and other foreign troops in Afghanistan and plans to deploy another 30,000 forces in the violence-ravaged country.
JR/MMN
Source:presstv.ir/
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