'Pak leaders do not have political steel in their backbone':Levin

[glomex]

Pak leaders do not have political steel in their backbone: Levin

Saying that Pakistani leadership lacks "political steel in their backbone", a powerful American Senator today charged them of not convincingly telling their people about the US-led anti-terror operation in the same rhetoric they are telling to the outside world.

"They politically do not have it inside themselves to tell the Pakistan people why we are doing it and that they are aware of it. They do not have that kind of political steel in their backbone. I have been in politics long enough to understand that. I do not condone it," Senator Carl Levin said at a Congressional hearing.

Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Levin said this is one of the issue that has troubled him in recent times.

"I think that in terms of recent events, that the Pakistan army is showing a much greater willingness to take on the enemy for their own sake... Not because we are asking them or we are paying them, but because from their national security perspective, it is in their interest," he observed.

"I do not know how much that has been transmitted to the Pakistan people. I know it is transmitted through interviews in the London papers, but that is not the same as the President and the Head of the Army in Pakistan transmitting that to the Pakistani people themselves," Levin argued.Levin said he is trying to find out the degree to which the statements that they have made recently reflect that they are made publicly in Pakistan.

Another thing which has troubled him, Levin said is the constantly criticism of the US for its drone attacks inside Pakistan.

"I guess yesterday, the day before, we got a number of very high-level targets. There is civilian casualties, which obviously are to be minimized and regretted. But when we knock out high-level targets, terrorist targets, Taliban targets that are out to destroy the government of Pakistan, the least we can expect, I believe, from the Pakistan government is silence," Levin said.

"What I can't understand and do not accept is the attacks on us, the criticism on us, because what that does is undermine the effort. Every time they attack us as being foreigners attacking their sovereign soil, they are creating another generation that are after us instead of after the terrorists," Levin argued.

Levin said he has expressed his views to the President of Pakistan (Asif Ali Zardari) and the Chief of Staff of the Army (Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani).

Noting that this affects his own view as to whether we should be providing support to Pakistan, the Senator said he is willing to support the Pakistan government and to try to get them some economic wherewithal to address all the issues they got, so that they are the ones that are supporting their people's needs.

"I'm for that, providing I believe that they have got the same goal we do, which at least their recent actions suggest they do, which is that it's in their security interest to go after the fanatics and the terrorists. I got that. And if that's real and is sustained, that is somewhat reassuring," he noted.

"But what I do not have yet is assurance that their statements publicly, the rhetoric about the need for them to go after the terrorists, serves their national interest. I am not sure that's done internally yet, in terms of their rhetoric. And I sure as heck deeply object to their criticism of us for using attacks by UAVs, which they obviously acquiesce in, condone and accept, or else we wouldn't be doing them," Levin added.

 

[Cheetah786]

coming from a country where there dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are brought into the country in the middle of the night and media is not allowed to report on them plus everything is kept under wraps so other then the family no one knows what happening yeah i say they have balls of steels themselves.

 

[glomex]

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect...ede-its-tacit-approval-of-drone-attacks-zj-02

The drone attacks are creating new tensions between Pakistan and the United States as US lawmakers urge Islamabad to accept the responsibility for approving the strikes.

Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a recent congressional hearing that the attacks would not have taken place if it were not for the tacit approval of Pakistan’s leadership.

A transcript released on Thursday quoted several US lawmakers as telling the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee that the US administration should urge Pakistan to accept the responsibility for their share in the attacks.

The United States relies heavily on unmanned aircraft to target militants but such strikes also cause an excessively high number of civilian casualties. Official Pakistani sources say that since 2006, the drones have killed only 14 militants and over 700 civilians.

But Senator Levin told the panel that the official Pakistani reaction had hamstrung Washington. ‘For them to look the other way or to give us the green light privately and then to attack us publicly leaves us, it seems to me, at a very severe disadvantage and loss with the Pakistani people,’ he said.

US Deputy Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Paul Jones told the panel that the US administration was developing a new strategy to reduce tensions stoked by drone strikes.

When Senator Daniel Akaka asked Jones to comment on the drone controversy, Jones said he could not discuss the issue in a public hearing.

But, he added, ‘a very important part of our strategy is strategic communications.’ He went on to say that in the PR sphere, ‘we’re making some progress.’

The United States plans to ‘increase quite significantly’ aid to Pakistan to help the government with its own communications strategy, Jones said. That includes distributing radios to Pakistanis in the tribal areas and helping the government of Pakistan with public service announcements.

Such programmes ‘will help people understand what the goals are of the Pakistani government and the international community, and how they are helping the country of Pakistan,’ he said.

 

[Ratus Ratus]

coming from a country where there dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are brought into the country in the middle of the night and media is not allowed to report on them plus everything is kept under wraps so other then the family no one knows what happening yeah i say they have balls of steels themselves.

Kindly have a bit more respect.
The procedure was altered due to the media making a circus out of this. It has hurt some of the families very badly.
There have been other issues as well during the funeral/burial services.

There is more to this specific matter than you tasteless swipe.

 

[Cheetah786]

Kindly have a bit more respect.
The procedure was altered due to the media making a circus out of this. It has hurt some of the families very badly.
There have been other issues as well during the funeral/burial services.

There is more to this specific matter than you tasteless swipe.

PLease dont try to spin it and make me look like a bad guy here i have pointed out the reality and not made up some thing as I go along If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck Guess what.




The American Way of Gore: Casualties of War: Dead, Buried and Discarded

“On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds. On the left the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.” The passage is from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Paul Bäumer, the hero, also reflects about death: “We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.”

In the United States, the dead and wounded of the Iraq war haven’t been so fortunate as to be grown accustomed to. They’ve been ignored. Chalked up to an abstraction indistinguishable from the kind of “dead” Americans see on their nightly television shows and in Shwartzenegger movies. “In any given period during prime time viewing hours,” the Boston Globe once reported, “there are at least 50 people killed, shot, maimed, or raped across the spectrum of broadcast and cable television channels.” The dead and wounded of the Iraq war are barely visible because they can’t compete with the numbers in prime time—neither in factual numbers nor in dramatic effect. Prime time’s dead are more interesting. They’re simple. They usually have no names, make no emotional demands, and they’re excellent props for plots that use them as means to obvious ends: within forty-eight minutes—if it’s an hour-long drama and the ads for vaginal lubricants and other orificial commodities are excluded—“justice” has been done, the dead have been avenged, usually by killing those who killed them, and wisecracks have been exchanged all around. The credits, as they roll, are as meaningless as the names on a war memorial. The 11 o’clock news, local as it is, won’t even mention the real dead in those real war zones far, far away.

When an American soldier dies his story is written up in his hometown paper, powerfully enough usually, but the story’s effect is limited to that newspaper’s readership zone. There is no totality in the reporting of war casualties, no sense that one soldier’s death, no matter where from, affects the whole nation. A town in Montana will ache for a lost son by itself, as if it alone is experiencing loss. What mourning and suffering does take place is solitary because inherently isolated. Existentialism at its bitterest, though don’t expect our information society ever to touch on the subject more than gingerly. It’s an aspect of that sickness of compulsive “localism” in American journalism: if it’s not local, it’s not relevant. If twelve Americans from other states are killed in a single day, your state, should it have been spared, will not care. Newsy attention will rather be focused on Nancy Grace and Larry King, who’ll be busy exploring the depths and breadth of the latest mystery disappearance of the white model with 38-C tits and a million-dollar estate. So news of the dead is forcibly diffused, its impact lessened to the point of irrelevance beyond that daily listing printed in a few newspapers.

The disconnect is a huge benefit to the government, to this government in particular, to whom hiding the dead is official policy, and to this president in particular, who has never showed up at a single soldier’s funeral, and who doesn’t know the difference between a casualty and a cliché: Brit Hume of the Fox-Bush Network once asked him this question: “When things go badly, as many people would feel they have been in Iraq with the continuing casualties and struggles and difficulties, do you ever doubt?” Bush’s reply: “I don't think they’re going badly. I mean, obviously I think they’re going badly for the soldiers who lost their lives, and I weep for that person and their family. But no, I think we’re making good progress. As I said I pray for calmness when the seas are storming, and I—you know, my faith is an integral part of being who I am, and I’m not going to change.” Obviously not: The exchange dates back to September 22, 2003. Notice that Iraqi civilian casualties didn’t register with the president’s concerns—not then, not now. Asked about the recent estimate placing Iraqi deaths at 650,000 since 2003, Bush’s reply was: “600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just—it’s not credible.”
It’s not as if men with the intellectual capacity to address the matter more intelligently do better(Kindly have a bit more respect.
The procedure was altered due to the media making a circus out of this. It has hurt some of the families very badly.
There have been other issues as well during the funeral/burial services.

There is more to this specific matter than you tasteless swipe). To the contrary. They flex the same kind of contemptuous brawn by other means: “Certainly while we were losing relatively small numbers of soldiers early on, I think that was a huge shock,” Max Boot, the columnist and Council on Foreign Relations grunt, tells Reuters this week. “But now that it’s kind of accumulated it doesn’t have as much of a shock value. This is reminiscent of Stalin’s phrase about how ‘one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ There’s some truth to that.” There’s truth to it only if the likes of Boot reinforce the likes of Stalin. And the likes of Boot have been stomping that “truth” into the American way of reporting since the beginning of the war, going as far as making such absurd comparisons between the “low” number of American casualties in this war and those in previous wars. They have the numbers on their side. So far in Iraq, 3,026 “allied” soldiers have been killed, 2,788 of them American. At Antietam on September 17, 1862, 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in a single day. At Shiloh, 24,000 in two days. On D-Day in Normandy 1,465 Americans were killed and 3,184 wounded. In the Battle of the Somme, at least 21,000 men died in the first hour of the first day, and 60,000 by the end of that first day. Then there are the ghastly bombings of World War II— Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But the relativists usually prefer not to mention those because they’re almost entirely civilian casualties.

If even military deaths have essentially been cleansed of their meaning, dehumanized, purposefully and systematically, how are civilian deaths to matter at all? Yet the true devastation of the Iraq war has little to do with soldiers, if we’re into comparing numbers. It’s about the civilians. Right-wingers can’t downplay the number of military casualties in comparison with other wars and ignore the number of civilian casualties, regardless of how those numbers are interpreted—unless they consider an Iraqi civilian death less valuable than an American military death. The open secret here is that they do, and Boot-fetished right-wingers alone aren’t to blame for this. Just look at the way the media report on casualties in general. If American soldiers barely register as numbers, Iraqis don’t register at all. They don’t count. When they are counted, they’re scabrously discounted, as has been the case since that study was published, showing possibly 650,000 Iraqi deaths since 2003. The debate over the study shows up the disconnect of the American public and media over the devastation of the war better than anything to date. No matter how much you downgrade the number, even if it’s cut in half, it still amounts to more deaths in three years, as a result of the American intervention, than all the killings of the Saddam Hussein regime in a quarter century—and all the killings at Hiroshima, Hamburg, Tokyo and Dresden combined. It’s still more than all the American dead of World War I and II combined. It’s still more than all the American dead, northerner or southerner, of the Civil War, and by far more than all the American dead, soldier and civilian, in all wars involving Americans since World War II, combined. (See for yourself.)

But if we care so little about American casualties, we can’t very well be expected to care at all about Iraqi casualties. They’re means to an end, like those 50 prime-time deaths every night. As President Bush said on January 26, 2005, when he was told of a helicopter crash that claimed the lives of 31 Americans that day: “Obviously, any time we lose lives it’s a sad moment …And listen, the story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And—but it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom.”

In other words, don’t Iraqis dare stand in the way. They’ve never mattered in this war—not in 2003, not in 2005, not today. They have only one admissible role. They’re décor to the American way of gore, fillers for the new mass graves.


The American Way of Gore: Casualties of War: Dead, Buried and Discarded

 

[glomex]

PLease dont try to spin it and make me look like a bad guy here i have pointed out the reality and not made up some thing as I go along If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck Guess what.

Well the reality is that Pakistani Government secretly allows drone attacks and then condemns them in Public...jut to make sure that Pakistani Citizens are filled with rage against Americans.....

If they approve of attacks ...then they should own it......and comparing it with American soldiers body being brought in the night is stupid.....

 

[Cheetah786]

Well the reality is that Pakistani Government secretly allows drone attacks and then condemns them in Public...jut to make sure that Pakistani Citizens are filled with rage against Americans.....

If they approve of attacks ...then they should own it......and comparing it with American soldiers body being brought in the night is stupid.....

If one cant understand the subject he or she is discussing and the only thing on there mind oh my bad in your case lets call it tumble weed is to light a fire then you are on the wrong forum try some other forum.

 

[Cheetah786]

Americans on Monday found themselves travelling along Canada's patriotic "Highway of Heroes."

For them, as it has been for many Canadians, the journey was likely emotional and haunting.

The stretch of Highway 401 running from CFB Trenton into Toronto is routinely lined with civilians and veterans as the body of each Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan makes its way home during repatriation.

Earlier this year, the British press took notice of the grassroots show of solidarity and loss when they compared the hallowed homecoming of Canadian fallen soldiers to the meagre reception held for their war casualties returning back to the U.K.

NBC News ran a feature on the Highway of Heroes during its evening newscast Monday as part of its coverage for today's Remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day in the U.S.

The national attention by the American network was inspired by the sudden emotion the section of roadway evoked in journalist Kevin Tibbles, an ex-pat Canadian who's a veteran journalist at NBC.

"It is not often that you witness something for the first time, and find yourself being moved to tears," Tibbles wrote yesterday in his NBC blog.

Last July, Tibbles was driving from Montreal to Ajax to visit his parents.

"I started to notice along the highway there were people standing along the sides with flags and people all over the bridges," he recently explained to Sun Media journalist Pete Fisher who was interviewed for the NBC feature.

"I didn't know what it was," Tibbles explained, "but they were on every single bridge — every one. (When) I found out that it was a grassroots phenomenon that takes place and has just grown among ordinary people ... I just found it fascinating."

Fisher is part of the NBC piece because he and Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington are largely credited with having the section of highway officially recognized as the "Highway of Heroes."

Tibbles says the kind of unified and public show of respect along the repatriation route is unusual in the world today.

"It doesn't happen in the States; it doesn't happen in the United Kingdom.

And I think that's what so fascinating — and the fact that none of it was organized by anyone except, perhaps, by each person's own heart to go and do it."

Writing in his blog — a reporter's notebook on stories he's covering — Tibbles notes: "Here is a grassroots movement that has simply grown out of respect for those who put their lives on the line ... Lest We Forget." His piece ran last night during NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams.

U.S. media pays tribute to 'Highway of Heroes' | Canada | News | Toronto Sun

 

[iPhone]

^why should they own it? Every state has secrets and policies that are not to be made public. Besides this news is just a point of view of one American senator, let Obama admin say the same thing if they're that annoyed by Pak govt's drone policy.

 

[glomex]

If one cant understand the subject he or she is discussing and the only thing on there mind oh my bad in your case lets call it tumble weed is to light a fire then you are on the wrong forum try some other forum.

Then why don't you make me understand your logic of comparing Pakistan not owning up of approval of drone attack with US army silently bringing their marted troops to country..........


Americans are fighting in Afghanistan and they accept that.....Pakistan is allowing drone attack but they don't own up to it. Is it too hard for a fool like me to understand.......


Need your help to enlighten my poor soul...

 

[glomex]

Americans on Monday found themselves travelling along Canada's patriotic "Highway of Heroes."

For them, as it has been for many Canadians, the journey was likely emotional and haunting.

The stretch of Highway 401 running from CFB Trenton into Toronto is routinely lined with civilians and veterans as the body of each Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan makes its way home during repatriation.

Earlier this year, the British press took notice of the grassroots show of solidarity and loss when they compared the hallowed homecoming of Canadian fallen soldiers to the meagre reception held for their war casualties returning back to the U.K.

NBC News ran a feature on the Highway of Heroes during its evening newscast Monday as part of its coverage for today's Remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day in the U.S.

The national attention by the American network was inspired by the sudden emotion the section of roadway evoked in journalist Kevin Tibbles, an ex-pat Canadian who's a veteran journalist at NBC.

"It is not often that you witness something for the first time, and find yourself being moved to tears," Tibbles wrote yesterday in his NBC blog.

Last July, Tibbles was driving from Montreal to Ajax to visit his parents.

"I started to notice along the highway there were people standing along the sides with flags and people all over the bridges," he recently explained to Sun Media journalist Pete Fisher who was interviewed for the NBC feature.

"I didn't know what it was," Tibbles explained, "but they were on every single bridge — every one. (When) I found out that it was a grassroots phenomenon that takes place and has just grown among ordinary people ... I just found it fascinating."

Fisher is part of the NBC piece because he and Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington are largely credited with having the section of highway officially recognized as the "Highway of Heroes."

Tibbles says the kind of unified and public show of respect along the repatriation route is unusual in the world today.

"It doesn't happen in the States; it doesn't happen in the United Kingdom.

And I think that's what so fascinating — and the fact that none of it was organized by anyone except, perhaps, by each person's own heart to go and do it."

Writing in his blog — a reporter's notebook on stories he's covering — Tibbles notes: "Here is a grassroots movement that has simply grown out of respect for those who put their lives on the line ... Lest We Forget." His piece ran last night during NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams.

U.S. media pays tribute to 'Highway of Heroes' | Canada | News | Toronto Sun

Great attempt to derail the thread....

 

[Cheetah786]

Then why don't you make me understand your logic of comparing Pakistan not owning up of approval of drone attack with US army silently bringing their marted troops to country..........


Americans are fighting in Afghanistan and they accept that.....Pakistan is allowing drone attack but they don't own up to it. Is it too hard for a fool like me to understand.......


Need your help to enlighten my poor soul...

If i have to explain the foreign and internal affairs of the governments to you why did U start a post on matter you do not understand.

 

[glomex]

If i have to explain the foreign and internal affairs of the governments to you why did U start a post on matter you do not understand.

This means you don't have the answer.......you just made a statement in your post to sound smart...just to deplore American efforts to make your government realize that Pakistan should own up to their decisions regarding drone attacks....which they don't...

 

[ajpirzada]

y should we promote US war in afghanistan??
dont you think we have already got enough in our plate? if u remember the most recent survery; 70% of pakistanis are against US war in afghanistan. now wat this man is callin for is a political suicide and not 'political steel'.

 

[Patriot]

Yep, it's like saying US Senator should be anti Israel all the time and release Anti Israel Statements.