The Battle for Bajaur - PA seizes control

[Kasrkin]

That might not matter, in the end its a political decision...it always is.

 

[fatman17]

BREAKING NEWS!

FATMAN17 APPOINTED AGENT FOR STEVE COLL'S BOOK ON AFGHANISTAN "GHOST WARS".

PLEASE FIND BELOW THE PROMO FOR THIS EXCELLENT BOOK.

From the Managing Editor of The Washington Post, a news breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled islamic militancy and gave rise to bin laden's al qaeda.

For nearly the past quarter century, while most americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by US and foreign intelligence agencies -- invisible wars that sowed the seeds of the september 11 attacks and that provide its context. From the soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's ISI and the Saudi Arabian GID all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles bin laden conceived and then built his global organization.

Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Steve Coll tells the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, including its covert program against soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, and examines the rise of the taliban, the emergence of bin laden and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin laden in Afghanistan after 1988. Based on extensive first-hand accounts, Ghost Wars is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on US Involvement in Afghanistan. It chronicles the role of midlevel CIA officers, their afghan allies, and top spy masters such as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al-feisal and George Tenet. And it describes heated debates within the american government and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.

Ghost Wars answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of september 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin laden and why did they fail?

 

[fatman17]

That might not matter, in the end its a political decision...it always is.

by who - the military or the civilians!

 

[fatman17]

The Pakistan army and the Afghanistan war

Written by Shaun Gregory

Pakistan’s military and intelligence services are involved in a different power-play to that of their ostensible United States and Nato allies. The implications for western strategy are grave, says Shaun Gregory.

Pakistan's internal turmoil and conflict continues, even if much current external media coverage of the country is filtered through the lens of the transfixing global financial crisis and United States election. Both these events indeed reverberate in a Pakistan desperately short of funds and more hesitant than much of the rest of the world about its prospects under a Barack Obama presidency. But the country's crisis will not be salved by an emergency loan or a new figure in the White House: indeed, it is being reinforced under the influence of Pakistan's key institutional actors.

The heart of Pakistan's conflict is the violence in Pakistan's tribal areas, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province (NWFP); this in turn has a key impact on the United States-led war in Afghanistan. To understand what is happening, it is necessary to distinguish between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban; and to grasp the relationship of each to the Pakistan military and Pakistan's lead intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

A state of duplicity

The Pakistan army and the ISI supported the Afghan Taliban in the movement's rise to power in Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996. Pakistan was one of only three states (the others being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) to offer diplomatic recognition to the Taliban regime under Mullah Omar (see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia [Yale University Press, 2000]). The Taliban offered Pakistan stability in Afghanistan after the chaos of the post-Soviet years and, more importantly, a pro-Pakistani leadership in Kabul that denied India influence in Afghanistan. After 9/11 Pakistan was given no choice other than to support the US war in Afghanistan; but Pakistan stayed loyal to the Afghan Taliban, providing Mullah Omar and his leading commanders with sanctuary in Pakistan's Pashtun-dominated tribal areas and in northern Balochistan (see Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos [Penguin, 2008]).

Pakistan opposes the post-Taliban Afghan leadership of Hamid Karzai because Karzai is antipathetic to Islamabad and is permissive of Indian influence in Afghanistan (evidenced by, for example, the proliferation of Indian "consulates" across Afghanistan). Pakistan also opposes the presence of the US and Nato in the Afghan theatre - in part because the west props up Karzai and thus colludes in Indian influence, in part because the west complicates Pakistan's regional calculus, and in part because the US and Nato war continues to destabilise Pakistan (see the analyses of the Pakistan Security Research Unit [PSRU]).

The the Afghan Taliban may no longer be as subject to Pakistani influence as in the past, but they continue to serve Pakistani interests - as the instrument most likely to force Hamid Karzai from power, India out of Afghanistan, and the US and Nato out of the region. Thus the Pakistan army and the ISI have either turned a blind eye to Afghan Taliban activity on Pakistani territory after 9/11 or (to a more cynical eye) actively supported the Afghan Taliban in its resurgence; in any event, the result is that the movement now exercises a permanent presence in more than half of Afghanistan (see "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink", Senlis Council, November 2007).

While Pakistan's apologists may contest this analysis, there is no doubt that under the presidency of Pervez Musharraf - the supposed darling of Washington - no move was made against Mullah Omar or against other Afghan proxies such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaludin Haqqani.

A boomerang war

The US-led war in Afghanistan has however also radicalised tens of thousands of Pakistanis, including many amongst the Pashtun tribal groups in the FATA and NWFP. It is these groups which have grown stronger in recent years and which have come together to form the Pakistani Taliban, the core of which is Baitullah Meshud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) based in Waziristan but with strong following across the FATA not least in Bajaur agency; affiliates such as Maulana Fazlullah's Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) based in Swat; and Mangal Bagh Afridi's Lashkar-e-Islami (LI), based in the Khyber Agency. These groups have the Pakistani state in their sights - fired by the intention of overthrowing the pro-western leadership of Pakistan and establishing a sharia-based state (see Jayshree Bajoria, "Pakistan's New Generation of Terrorists", Council for Foreign Relations, February 2008).

The Pakistan army tried to negotiate with these groups, even bribing them into curbing their violence against the state. A series of "peace" deals in 2005 and 2006 appeared to have achieved a degree of stability, but since 2007 it has become clear that these deals - and the money handed over - only empowered the TTP and TNSM - which have since launched an unprecedented campaign of violence and suicide-attacks against the Pakistan state. The targets have included many members of Pakistani security forces, leading Pakistani officials, the Marriott hotel, and - many suspect - the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 (see Ayesha Siddiqa, "Pakistan: a country on fire", 24 September 2008).

The ferocity of this violence has finally provoked the Pakistan military under General Musharraf's successor, General Ashfaq Kiyani, to take the fight directly into the tribal areas with a sustained campaign in Bajaur agency in particular. This has allowed Kiyani and Pakistan's new civilian administration, which takes the international political flak but is not in control of Pakistan's military operations, to claim that a new era of Pakistani realism about the terrorist threat now obtains. The Pakistan army is taking heavy casualties in its war with the TTP, TNSM and affiliated tribal militants - and is trying to hang on to its remaining "peace deals" with other Pakistani militant groups - but it and the ISI are still making no moves against the Afghan Taliban who continue their rise in Afghanistan from safe havens in Pakistan.

This Pakistani duplicity and its implications for the faltering war in Afghanistan seemed at last, in July 2008, to have dawned on the US military and the CIA. The straw that broke the camel's back appears to have been evidence which linked the ISI, through the Pakistan-backed Jalaludin/Sirajuddin Haqqani network, to the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul (see Kanchan Lakshman, "India in Afghanistan: a presence under pressure", 11 July 2008). Pakistani denials of involvement notwithstanding, the bombing undercut the Pakistan army's supporters in Washington by demonstrating Islamabad's continued commitment to terrorism as an instrument of state policy and the tensions between the US's and Pakistan's objectives in Afghanistan.

From July 2008 the George W Bush administration articulated a new strategy for Pakistan's tribal areas which included stepping up cross-border air-strikes ever deeper into Pakistan against Afghan Taliban targets and escalating cross-border US ground incursions into Pakistan, the latter of which have been met with gunfire from the Pakistan army. At the same time the US has stepped up the hunt for the al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas amid continued rumours of ISI and Pakistan army involvement in their protection (see Syed Saleem Shazad, "US Strikes Deeper in Pakistan", Asia Times, 20 November 2008).

The ground beneath

The United States-Pakistan relationship is consequently under extreme strain. This will present president-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on 20 January 2009, with one of his most difficult and pressing foreign-policy challenges. Washington has recently sought to put the Pakistani army and the ISI under intense pressure through military aid in particular, and Obama had spoken about getting tough with Pakistan; the Pakistanis have countered by reminding the US and Nato that more than 80% of the logistics for the war in Afghanistan pass through Pakistanis ports and have to make a long and perilous journey across Pakistan through the tribal areas (see Paul Rogers, "A Pakistani dilemma", 15 November 2008).

The Pakistan army thus has its thumb on Nato's jugular. As US-led air-strikes continue to escalate inside Pakistan so too do Taliban attacks on Nato logistics convoys. Pakistan knows that the war in Afghanistan is not going well for the west, and that domestic political pressure is building in some western states for a Nato withdrawal. The Pakistan army and the ISI are therefore calculating that they need only bear the current pressure from the west and keep the Pakistani Taliban under control, for their objectives in Afghanistan to be eventually realised.

The US and Nato for their part find themselves in the invidious position of fighting a faltering and grinding war in Afghanistan from a position of unavoidable dependency on a dangerously unreliable, if nominally allied, state. It will not be lost on the US or Nato that the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu - widely read at both West Point and Sandhurst - argued that the army which does not fight on firm ground is lost.

This article is published by Shaun Gregory, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.

Shaun Gregory is professor in the department of peace studies at the University of Bradford, northern England, and head of the Pakistan Security Research Unit there. He is the author of Pakistan: Securing the Insecure State (Routledge, 2008)



...and the hits just keep on coming!

 

[fatman17]

Screw The Khyber Pass

November 26, 2008: The Taliban are trying to cut the U.S./NATO supply line from Pakistan to Afghanistan. To do this they have to halt the truck traffic going through the Khyber pass, which is the main road from Pakistan to landlocked Afghanistan. Some 75 percent of the supplies for foreign troops come via this road. The rest are flown in, or come via Russian and Central Asian railroads.

Normally, about 700 large trucks a day make the Khyber run, but several times this year, trucks have been attacked by Taliban gunmen, and destroyed, stolen or looted. This has halted traffic for as long as a week. This has not hurt U.S. or NATO troops, who, as is the military custom, maintain reserves of all supplies.

Moving goods across the border is a major business for Pakistan, and vital to the economy of Afghanistan. So both countries have responded to the Taliban threat by moving more troops and police in to guard the road. Local tribes have also sent more armed men along the route, as they have long done, to go after anyone who threatens the vital trade, and the money they get out of it.

Meanwhile, NATO and the U.S. have negotiated with Russia to allow supplies to move to Afghanistan via Russian rail lines and those of Central Asian nations. These only go as far as the Afghan border. There are no railroads in Afghanistan. Thus from the Uzbek border, the freight containers would have to be trucked south to where most of the U.S. and NATO troops are stationed. The U.S. is seeking a Russian contractor to arrange for the movement of 50,000 freight containers a year via the trans-Siberian railroad. Afghans would have the opportunity of forming trucking companies to move the containers south, along with civilian cargo that could also move in and out of the existing rail yard on the Uzbek border. This would amount to a large loss of business for Pakistani transportation firms, and is an incentive for the Pakistanis to protect the traffic going through the Khyber pass.


here's a good bit of advice for NATO.

 

[fatman17]

Good Governance and Economic Development

Idea of the Day: Approach Pakistan's Military Establishment in Ways that Support Good Governance and Economic Development

November 24, 2008

The United States should continue to strengthen relations with Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies, but do so in a way that does not undermine civilian control and political reform in Pakistan. The United States should support and interact with the Pakistani military establishment with policies that encourage Pakistani civilian oversight. This means engaging with its military as a component of the government as a whole rather than as an autonomous institution, allocating more funding through the government of Pakistan and not the Pakistani military, and meeting Pakistani military officials while keeping Pakistani civilian leadership informed or present. U.S. funding to Pakistan's military should be targeted toward specific shared objectives, and tied to performance, such as good faith efforts by the Pakistani military to crack down on militant groups in Pakistan, and to stop cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

For more on this topic, please see:

Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and the Region by Caroline Wadhams, Brian Katulis, Lawrence J. Korb, and Colin Cookman

 

[fatman17]

Put Up or Shut Up Time for U.S. in Pakistan

By THOMAS HOULAHAN

Published: November 25, 2008

'ANYONE NEED MORE AMMO?' The U.S.'s policy for Pakistan’s tribal areas is basically: ‘We're not going to help build schools, hospitals or roads, or do job training, or feed anyone. We want the Pakistani army to get us a respectable body count and we'll pay for the ammo.’

The U.S. government has been quick to lecture our Pakistani allies about their duty to fight terrorists and to constantly demand that they do more. However, so far, the United States has not been willing to give Pakistan the aid it needs to successfully wage that war.

While politicians have attempted to score points at Pakistan's expense by claiming that Pakistan has reaped some sort of windfall in American aid, the decision to join the United States in the war on terror has been a financial disaster for Pakistan.


Pakistan's critics crow about the almost $10 billion in American aid Pakistan has received since 2001, but they don't mention that its participation in the war on terror has cost Pakistan around $34.5 billion.


Because of Pakistan's decision to ally itself with the United States, it now has a major insurgency on its hands. Fighting it and providing the additional security it necessitates has been expensive.


One should quickly add that the United States government's failure to get the opium situation in Afghanistan under any semblance of control has made it a much more expensive fight than it should be for Pakistan. Hordes of nasty people are coming from Afghanistan armed to the teeth with serious weapons bought with drug money.


The security climate the insurgency has engendered has also resulted in Pakistan taking a beating on foreign investment. Meanwhile, tourism revenue has collapsed.


Pakistan has taken a $5 billion hit on lost exports as well. In addition, because insurance underwriters felt that terrorists might target Pakistan, insurance rates for Pakistani shipping companies and air carriers skyrocketed. The yearly cost of the higher rates has been estimated at around $200 million.


Then there are the costs to reconstruct the roads, bridges, schools, government offices and other buildings the insurgents have been destroying. Also, there is the cost of moving families out of combat zones and establishing them elsewhere.


These critics also don't mention that more than half of U.S. aid money was used to reimburse Pakistan for military operations that the United States has insisted on.


A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that of the approximately $5.8 billion the United States provided for efforts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the region bordering Afghanistan from 2002 through 2007, about 96 percent was reimbursement for military operations there.


Basically, the U.S. government's policy for these wild areas was: We're not going to help the Pakistani government build any schools, any hospitals or any roads. We're not doing job training and we're not feeding anyone either. We're going to demand that the Pakistani army go in, shoot the place up and get us a respectable body count. Don't worry. We'll pay for whatever ammo the army uses.


The policy not only didn't work, it created a severe backlash against the government in the FATA.


It's not surprising that the policy failed. It is shocking that any sane government official would have proposed such a policy in the first place, or that it would have struck U.S. President George W. Bush as a good idea.


A lot of the other "aid" is reimbursement for logistic support Pakistan has given the United States in support of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.


Critics within the U.S. government continue to claim that Pakistan isn't doing enough in the war on terror. They claim that if the Pakistani government really wanted to, it could stamp out terrorism along its frontier in short order.


That assertion is ridiculous. If will and military offensives were all it took to break insurgencies, American troops would have been home from both Iraq and Afghanistan long ago.


Given that Pakistanis have killed more than 4,000 insurgents and have lost more members of their security forces than every foreign nation in Afghanistan combined, it might not be a bad idea for the government to discontinue its present policy of feeding Pakistan a steady diet of insulting lectures, cheap slogans, criticism and threats.


The fact is, fighting terrorism isn't simple or easy. It has to be fought on many fronts. Pakistan's newly elected government understands that and is preparing to supplement military action by cleaning up the festering problems that provide fertile ground for the recruiters of terrorists. That's going to require money.


Since the U.S. government is responsible for a lot of the problems now confronting Pakistan, it should consider stepping up and providing the kind of assistance that will help Pakistan effectively fight its war on terror (which is also the U.S.'s war) and achieve its goal of becoming the kind of model Islamic democracy the United States government says it wants to see.

Thomas Houlahan is the Director of the Military Assessment Program of the Center for Security and Science in Washington, D.C. He served as an election monitor with the Center for Media and Democracy-Pakistan.



thomas my man! where have u been all this time!

 

[S-2]

"here's a good bit of advice for NATO."

Move supplies through the north? Maybe. I think that it'd be fine for the Russians minus military hardware. They may even agree to that with oil at 48% of it's value two months ago.

I do think that NATO/ISAF/America likely viewed the use of Karachi as a windfall to the Pakistani gov't and transportation companies within your country. Don't know this for sure but I'd suspect that it was part of the original calculus. Clearly, as risk increases, that rationale (if true) would bear recalculation.

Can anybody explain how there are truck routes via roads south into Afghanistan from CAR but no rail links? Simply never done for inexplicable reasons or are there physical/political barriers to establishing rail lines into Afghanistan? My guess is that the absence of extensive commercial transactions and 28 years of war has meant that goods and services have never reached a level to justify building rail lines.

The more I think about it, how extensive is the rail network in Pakistan or Iran also? Are there, for instance, rail links from Lahore west to Gwadar?

 

[fatman17]

The more I think about it, how extensive is the rail network in Pakistan or Iran also? Are there, for instance, rail links from Lahore west to Gwadar?

Pakistan has extensive rail links in Sindh and Punjab but for Baluchistan there is one major rail line (broad gauge) from Karachi to Quetta and then to Zahidan (Iran) and Chaman (Afghan border). none to Gawadar. in the FATAland (as u put it) rail link is available upto Landi-kotal/Torkham (Afghan border). there are also minor gauge rail-lines in the aforementioned areas but with-in the pak territory.

these rail-lines were laid by our colonial masters and no major rail-line has been laid in the last 60 years by the GoP. shows the strategic deficiency of our planners!

 

[fatman17]

Pakistan's spreading Taleban war

By Damian Grammaticas
BBC News, Peshawar

There are growing fears in Pakistan that the war against the Taleban is widening.

Pakistan's army is opening up new fronts against the militants, who are responding by spreading the conflict, destabilising even the city of Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Deep in Pakistan's frontier a war is raging.

Pakistan's army is on the offensive, pushing into the tribal agencies of Bajaur and now Mohmand, fighting a slow, hard battle against Taleban fighters.

Bit by bit, and at huge cost, territory is being seized back.

With tanks, artillery and airstrikes, the army is trying to clear villages, towns and roads of militants, attempting to drive the Taleban from the sanctuaries they have occupied.

Once each village or town is taken, bulldozers move in, flattening houses so the Taleban cannot sneak back and occupy them again.

Across the tribal areas that border Afghanistan, unmanned US aircraft have also stepped up their activity in recent weeks, launching missile strikes every few days against al-Qaeda targets.

We have no helicopters, no aerial mobility and in transport we are 50% down

says Gen Malik Naveed Khan, head of police for NWFP

The war against the Taleban has come to Pakistan's tribal districts and the consequences are being felt across NWFP.

Standing among the ruins of the town of Loi Sam, Pakistan's chief army spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas, told the BBC last month that its capture had put the militants "at a great disadvantage and had broken their back".

Battered the Taleban may be, but they are retaliating.

Under pressure from the Pakistani offensives and the American missile strikes they are being forced further inland, resulting in the conflict ballooning and spreading to new areas.

First they have struck back near the Khyber Pass, hijacking and burning trucks driving towards the Afghan border.

The vehicles they have been targeting are trucks carrying supplies meant for Nato forces in Afghanistan and the Afghan army.

Militants posed for photos alongside the stolen Humvee armoured cars

In the most brazen attack a fortnight ago, Humvee armoured cars destined for Afghanistan were seized.

The Taleban filmed themselves triumphantly driving off with their booty of Nato vehicles.

The alliance's supplies heading for the border were suspended while security was stepped up, and the convoys have only recently restarted.

Just a few kilometres from the tribal areas our BBC team, including cameraman Paul Francis and producer Peter Leng, discovered Nato equipment stacked up in guarded compounds.

It all now needs a military escort to reach the border.

There were Humvees piled on trailers and huge armoured trucks lined up and hidden under tarpaulins. All is vital equipment that has now been held up.

Ransom

Almost 75% of all supplies for Nato forces in Afghanistan come through Pakistan, the majority through Peshawar. That means that Nato's most important supply route is under threat.

Haji Haghaley points to his bullet riddled truck

One trucker, Haji Haghaley, showed me his vehicle. It was riddled with holes made by Taleban bullets a few days ago.

Haji Haghaley says three Taleban fired from the side of the road and he drove as fast as he could.

Other drivers we met taking a break at a roadside tea stall have had similar escapes. One, too afraid to talk openly, said his cousin was attacked last week.

"He was carrying US army trucks, and the Taleban stopped him," the man told me. "The Taleban burnt his truck. They took my cousin. They demanded 10 lakh rupees in ransom ($11,500), but then lowered it to 35,000 rupees ($400)."

Also under threat is the NWFP capital, Peshawar.

The war is pushing the Taleban deeper into Pakistan. So Peshawar is now on edge. Westerners have fled, there are none to be seen.

In recent weeks there have been a spate of attacks targeting foreigners.

An American diplomat escaped an assassination attempt because her armoured car protected her, but a US aid worker was killed in a second attack.

'Better equipment'

Iranian and Afghan diplomats have been kidnapped and foreign journalists injured in shootings.

The police have stepped up security in the city, there are new checkpoints, more armed patrols. But Peshawar's police say they are outgunned and ill-equipped for the fight on their hands.

"The militants I think have far better equipment, they have rocket-propelled guns and we have none," Ins Gen Malik Naveed Khan, the head of police for NWFP, told me.


Nato's most important supply route through Pakistan is under threat


"We have no helicopters, no aerial mobility, in transport we are 50% down on peacetime requirements and presently we are at war," he said.


As for the Taleban's tactics, Ins Gen Khan says they are clear.

"They would like to destabilise the city centres so they can put pressure on the government to get concessions in the tribal areas," he says.

"And they want to open up more fronts for us to dilute the effect of the law enforcement agencies.

"Their agenda is to cause problems for the government to check its commitment and resolve in the war against terror."

On the edge of Peshawar we watched as police searched vehicles entering the city.

There were just a handful of officers, armed only with machine guns, no sand-bagged positions, no heavy weapons, no armoured vehicles.

Beyond the checkpoint lay the tribal areas, the realm of the Taleban.

The few police officers and their light weapons were all that was protecting the outskirts of Peshawar, keeping the Taleban at bay.

Deeper in the tribal lands Pakistan's army is opening up new fronts. Now it's fighting in Mohmand, closer to Peshawar.

The war will probably spread much further too. But just as Nato has found in Afghanistan, the Pakistani security forces are now discovering too that the Taleban is a foe that is hard to corner, even harder to defeat.

 

[JK!]

The situation with Police equipment also needs to be addressed especially given that comment.

After the army has done its thing it will be the police who have to carry out duties in these areas.

 

[fatman17]

The situation with Police equipment also needs to be addressed especially given that comment.

After the army has done its thing it will be the police who have to carry out duties in these areas.

this area belongs to the FC. the police job is law and order in the cities and towns IMHO!

 

[TruthSeeker]

Put Up or Shut Up Time for U.S. in Pakistan

By THOMAS HOULAHAN

Published: November 25, 2008

'ANYONE NEED MORE AMMO?' The U.S.'s policy for Pakistan’s tribal areas is basically: ‘We're not going to help build schools, hospitals or roads, or do job training, or feed anyone. We want the Pakistani army to get us a respectable body count and we'll pay for the ammo.’

.......

thomas my man! where have u been all this time!

This point that the US should do more for civil infrastructure to help the front line areas develop economically applies to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Indonesia, Philippines, etc., etc., etc., as well as to FATA. However, whenever the US attempts to do development projects in a "near war zone", the result seems to be that any civilian, domestic or foreign, who tries to help becomes a sitting duck target for assassination or kidnap by the jihadis. So, the projects fail. This seems to be one of those "chicken and egg" problems. Which comes first? Development aid leading to a reduction in the insurgency or defeat of the insurgency leading to conditions that are ripe for development projects? If the aid is not targeted to the underdeveloped local area, but siphoned off for some other project somewhere in the most developed areas of the country, then the "locals" are incensed on two counts.

 

[Kasrkin]

TruthSeeker has a valid point, but at the end of the day with enough determination and consistent effort we can break through this problem...the terrorist cannot kill every one and as it were killing of locals working on development projects by insurgents bodes ill for the insurgency in the long term as far as local support/sympathies are concerned, which is always the decisive factor in these wars. So we should not sit on our hands on the basis of terrorist intimidation alone, but use it to intensify our efforts so that the locals will know who is trying to help them and who isn’t.

 

[fatman17]

Pakistan may pull back troops from Afghan border

* Defence officials say Pakistan could shift focus on more immediate threat

ISLAMABAD: Tensions with India would force Pakistan to pull nearly 100,000 troops from its western borders, Defence sources said on Saturday.

The officials said Pakistan had already made it clear to the US and NATO that in case of mounting escalation with India, Pakistan’s priority on the war on terror would shift and it would to take care of the more immediate threat to its security.

They said Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee threatened Pakistan and its leadership and that forced Pakistan to adopt a tougher line. India had already put its air force on high alert, they said, adding Pakistan would take measures to ensure its security and safeguard its interests.

They said India had not given any evidence of the alleged involvement of groups or individuals from Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks, and Pakistan would take action against such elements if there was credible evidence.

“I can say with my authority under my command that there’s no involvement of any Pakistani institution in any manner,” Reuters quoted a high-ranking officer as telling reporters at a briefing. “It’s not an ideal situation for a country to go to war. Coercion is there and it’s going up and it needs to be neutralised.”They said that instead of blaming Pakistan, India should try to find the real culprits.

According to a private TV channel, the defence officials said the next 48 hours would be crucial.

“”They’ll have clarity of thought and we’ll have clarity of the situation in next 24-48 hours,” Reuters quoted officials as saying. staff report/agencies

http://www.thedailytimes.com.pk