Today a DAWN columnist wrote about the recently published book “Confront and Conceal” by David Sanger. The column misses some key points like Obama administration is dysfunctional and its information sources have often turned out to be completely wrong. The following review published in the New York Times is a more serious and objective (not reverential) critique of the book. Read more »
One day in late November, an unmanned aerial vehicle lifted off from Shindand Air Base in western Afghanistan, heading 75 miles toward the border with Iran. Read more »
The Telegraph
By Dean Nelson, South Asia Editor and Javed Siddiq in Islamabad
US forces are massing on the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan amid reports of an imminent drone missile offensive against fighters from the feared Haqqani Network, a Taliban faction which operates from safe havens in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan Army sources have confirmed. Read more »
Pakistani security officials escort American CIA contractor Raymond Allen Davis, center, to a local court in Lahore. Mr. Davis’ detention soured U.S. – Pak relations, and the fallout of the episode has affected subsequent American strategy in West Asia. File photo Read more »
Mirza Shahzad Akbar
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 June 2011
DAWN has released Wikileaks cables about the role of US ground troops in Pakistan. I would say, my fellow liberal Pakistanis smell coffee! I had no illusions about the Jamaatis and forget about Imran Khan but liberals should wonder if they got anything right since 9/11? I would say hardly. They have been criticising the military leadership for talking about sovereignty in relation to the US drone attacks while ignoring that the presence of foreign militants which, according to them, is also a violation of sovereignty. Read more »
Courtesy: Centre for Research on Globalization, Montreal, Canada , By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Note: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts served as Assistant Secretary of Treasury for President Ronald Reagan. An economist by profession, Dr. Roberts studied at Berkeley and Oxford. Read more »
I have suspected for long that the United States has been conducting false flag operations in Pakistan through covert operatives. I wrote on my blog on January 10, 2008, Could CIA be conducting Operation Gladio in Pakistan? Read more »
This article from the Washington Post is worth a careful read for all who are in denial about CIA’s covert operations.
This Is Michael Vickers’s War
By Ann Scott Tyson, December 28, 2007 Read more »
Shahbaz Bhatti was a principled and brave politician. Which General ever stood up for his beliefs and sacrificed his life? Salmaan was killed by a fanatic. Whether he acted alone or not, we may never find out. But Shahbaz Bhatti’s killing and the pattern of claims and condemnation is rather peculiar and deserves thought. Read more »
The most important fact to come out in the open is not that Raymond Davis is a CIA contractor, but that it is beyond any doubt that he was a covert operations person, as has now been officially acknowledged by the US. Read more »
Pakistan’s polity is so polarized that the case of Raymond Davis has become an highly emotive issue with the ‘liberals’ and the ‘ghairat brigades’ taking positions Read more »
By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – Countless U.S. officials in recent years have lectured and listened to Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the man many view as the most powerful in Pakistan. They have drunk tea and played golf with him, feted him and flown with him in helicopters. Read more »
By: MARTHA RADDATZ and KIRIT RADIA
U.S. forces in Afghanistan have allowed a Taliban member to travel to Kabul from Pakistan to attend peace talks with the Afghan government within the past two weeks, a senior U.S. official told ABC News. Read more »
The latest column of Eric Margolis is a must read:
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and other news sites in Asia. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Lew Rockwell and Big Eye. Read more »
By Greg Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
The CIA is using an expanded arsenal of armed drones and other equipment provided by the U.S. military to secretly escalate its operations in Pakistan by striking targets beyond the reach of American forces based in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. Read more »
Graeme Smith
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
More and more people become terrorists every day
Buzzing robots sail through the sky, and nobody sleeps. Poor villagers spend their meagre savings on pills; at night they swallow sedatives and in the morning they take anti-depressants. They sweep their rooms and courtyards every couple of hours, trying to purge their homes of microchips. Nobody has seen the tiny chips – some say they’re invisible to the naked eye, others say the electric filaments are fine enough to be woven into cloth. Every garment is suspect, every speck of dust. Read more »
Pentagon Diverts Drones From Afghanistan to Bolster U.S. Campaign Next Door
![[DRONEjp]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WO-AC773_DRONEj_G_20101001181301.jpg "[DRONEjp]")
Reuters
Onlookers in Pakistan’s Sindh province after suspected militants set fire to tankers Friday carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Read more »
Wire: BLOOMBERG News
Peter Robison and Gopal Ratnam
Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) — A senior manager at a company that churns out metals routinely used in U.S. smart bombs pauses in mid-sentence when his phone rings: a Wall Street stockbroker looking for information. He makes a note to have an assistant call back — someone who is fluent in English, not just Chinese. Read more »
The following article by Bob Woodward was published today in the Washington Post. It is a combination of insights into Obama administration’s thinking, carefully- fed selected information and spin by the top U.S. officials. Read more »
The Express Tribune published an edited version on Sept. 29, 2010
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui may or may not have lost her sanity due to torture but is there an end to the madness of American military misadventures that have destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes of innocent civilians?
Think about this….
More than one trillion dollars and nine years later the alleged and self-confessed master mind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has not been convicted.Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zahwari, and Mullah Omar have not been caught, dead or alive; Read more »
JULY 20, 2010
WASHINGTON—U.S. Special Operations Forces have begun venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops. Read more »
By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Geneva
The campaign of CIA drone strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan has made the United States “the most prolific user of targeted killings” in the world, said a United Nations official, who urged that responsibility for the program be taken from the spy agency. Read more »
I first wrote this paper in late 2008. The then op-ed editor of a leading newspaper wanted me to cut it to 2000 words so that it could be published in two parts. Although I emphasized that a lot of content would be lost as, in all humility, I considered this to be a comprehensive and unique analysis of what was going on in Pakistan without any liberal or right-wing bias. Read more »
From Antiwar.com, San Francisco
By Justin Raimondo
While most Americans were sitting out on their decks barbecuing over the Memorial Day weekend, our leaders were planning to barbecue a few Pakistanis, as the Washington Post reported:
“The U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country’s tribal areas, according to senior military officials.”
Hey, wait a minute: I thought Attorney General Eric Holder has supposedly already established that the Pakistani Taliban were directly involved in the Times Square bombing attempt – which, although not successful, did succeed in generating shockwaves from Washington to Islamabad. Read more »
How explosives have ignited insurgencies and superpowers
Failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad says he was driven by anger over dozens of unmanned drone attacks that he witnessed during his most recent five-month visit to his home in Pakistan. That seems a plausible enough motive, particularly since he joins a growing list of homegrown U.S. terror suspects who have cited the escalation of U.S. military operations on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in general, or in the drone attacks in particular. They include U.S. resident Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant who pleaded guilty in a plot to bomb the New York subway system; Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S.-born army psychiatrist, charged with fatally shooting 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year; and the five American Muslims from Virginia, accused of plotting attacks against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Read more »
By Greg Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
The U.S. military is reviewing options for a unilateral strike in Pakistan in the event that a successful attack on American soil is traced to the country’s tribal areas, according to senior military officials. Read more »
This is so stupid. The alleged actions of a US citizen who probably could not even kill a mouse and has not been provided with a lawyer so far, are being used for what is obviously a weak and stretched case to make Pakistani Talibans look like al Qaeda. Talibans are a primitive, violent, and abominable lot but let’s keep things in perspective. The fact is there is little of al Qaeda left. Osama bin Laden died in January 2002. Responsible and knowledgeable people like Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Brzezinski, ex-deputy secretary of state for South Asia Teresita Scaffer, and a former CIA officer for the Middle East Robert Baer are on record having disputed CIA’s claims that Al Qaeda exists in Afghanistan.
The case of Faisal Shahzad, a US citizen of Pakistani origin, has been prejudiced so much against him through leaks in the media that he would never get a fair trial. Even if everything that has been reported is true, the official US reactions, from the US Secretary of State Clinton’s remarks, that warned Pakistan of very serious consequences, to the latest from the White House, confirm what many already suspect in Pakistan. This incident, true or false-flag, is being used to mount a new psychological, political, and diplomatic offensive against Pakistan to force an already stretched Pakistan Army to attack the Taliban bases in the North Waziristan. Those who dismiss all such analyses as conspiracy theories are sadly ignorant bunch of people with little knowledge of contemporary history and neo-colonialism. The condemnation of extremism, terrorism, and religious bigotry does not and must not translate into acceptance of the CIA’s political view of the world with its own agendas. Because if we believe that, we should also believe that Saddam Hussein sat on stockpiles of the weapons of mass destruction.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Kamila Hyat
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor
The sordid murder of Khalid Khawaja, the former ISI official, squadron leader and a man thought at various times to have negotiated between the US, the Pak Army and militants, exposes the many inter-linkages relating to terrorism. Read more »
ISLAMABAD: The last mission of ex-ISI officer Khalid Khwaja failed but his assassination exposed many hidden secrets, including differences between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, and has put a spotlight on his highly complex underworld life, as a mediator, sometimes on behalf of the Americans, a power-broker, a mover and shaker besides an ardent Islamic preacher.Squadron Leader (retd) Khalid Khwaja had been playing an active behind-the-scene role in domestic politics of Pakistan for the last 22 years. He became an important international player 11 years ago when he first tried to establish direct links between the Kashmiri militants and the Clinton Administration but failed. Read more »
The following story has been published by Washington Post today. Bear in mind that after eight and half years of the “War on Terror”:
1. We do not know anything about Osama bin Laden, 2. Mullah Omar is still at large, 3. Hakim ullah Mehsud is alive, 4. Mullah Radio (Fazullah) has escaped, and Pakistan’s miliatry is getting advanced version of F16s. It should be noted that the Pakistan’s Army chief had stated on March 25, 2010 in Washington that the military was willing to forgo its requests for hardware to ensure that Pakistan’s energy and economic needs were met. Read more »
The biggest conspiracy theory that I have come across in the recent years is that Benazir Bhutto fell victim to a terrorist attack. Ninety percent of our media analysts have been, deliberately or unconsciously, part of the larger conspiracy to lay the blame for most violence in Pakistan on terrorism and extremism or on the mullahs but do not have the guts to point to the root causes, the principal accused and the main culprit …. the military establishment. Read more »
The following is the executive summary of the report: Click here for the full report
Executive Summary Read more »
It will be late night or early morning in Pakistan when the much awaited United Nations report on Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is released by the UN. There is a litmus test that will determine, for me at least, whether the report has any relevance or meaning. I will come to that later in this article. The United Nations commission was charged with examining the facts and circumstances behind the December 2007 assassination. The Commission is headed by Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz of Chile, and its other members are Marzuki Darusman, the former attorney-general of Indonesia, and Peter Fitzgerald, a veteran of the Irish National Police who has also served the UN in various roles. The UN fact-finders were asked to probe Ms. Bhutto’s assassination in a gun and bomb suicide attack in the closing days of Pakistan’s 2007 elections, as well as her narrow escape from a similar bombing two months earlier, when she paraded triumphantly through Karachi after returning home from eight years in exile. Read more »
From Inter-City Press By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 15 — In investigating the murder of Benazir Bhutto, the UN Commission of Inquiry lead by Chile’s Heraldo Munoz was urged to interview Condoleezza Rice, Hamid Karzai and the intelligence chiefs of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Read more »
From the Wall Street Journal
March 22, 2010
By Jess Bravin
WASHINGTON—A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called “the highest value detainee” at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday. Read more »
A fascinating scandal has erupted in Washington that is exposing the sordid underbelly of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
By Eric Margolis Read more »
by Peter Chamberlin
By following the trail of militant terrorists US forces and American interests have gained access deep in Central Asia, where oil companies have had little luck gaining a foothold on their own. Read more »
