ThereAreNoSunglasses

American Resistance To Empire

New evidence that Hariri assassination was ordered in Washington and Jerusalem

New evidence that Hariri assassination was ordered in Washington and Jerusalem

On April 29, 2009, UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon pre-trial Judge Daniel Fransen ordered the release from prison of four Lebanese generals who had been implicated in the 2005 car bombing assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The special tribunal convened on March 1 of this year and the UN took over the case against the four generals from the Lebanese government.

The four generals, who are considered pro-Syrian, were thought by the initial UN investigators and the Lebanese government to have been involved in a conspiracy hatched by Damascus to kill Hariri. However, as WMR previously reported, the evidence against Syria in the assassinations of Hariri and other leading Lebanese politicians was always flimsy. In fact, the assassinations of Lebanese leaders was cooked up by the Bush administration neo-conservatives and their allies in Jerusalem to force the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

In 2005, under pressure from the Bush administration, a UN investigative committee charged that Syrian and Lebanese intelligence were behind Hariri’s assassination. Prior to the release of the four generals, Mohammad Zuhair al-Siddiq, a former Syrian intelligence officer, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates as a suspect in Hariri’s assassination.

The four Lebanese generals released were Jamil Sayyad, the chief of Lebanese General Security under the Syrian occupation; Ali al-Hajj, the former chief of the Internal Security Forces; Raymond Azar, the former head of Lebanese Army intelligence; and Mustafa Hamdan, the chief of the Presidential Guard under then-President Emile Lahoud. They were held for four years in prison without charges being brought or even being questioned by prosecutors.

Chief UN prosecutor Daniel Bellemare asked Fransen to drop the case against the “four generals” because a key witness against them retracted his testimony, causing the case to collapse.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah welcomed the release of the four generals.

In December 2008, the UN Special Tribunal in a report to the UN Security Council, stated: “Those responsible for the attacks were professional and took extensive measures to cover their tracks and hide their identity. Much of the Commission’s activity at this point . . . focuses on piercing this smokescreen to get at the truth.”

On October 24, 2006, WMR reported: “A senior French DGSE — Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure– intelligence officer has told WMR that Lebanon’s ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was killed in a car bombing arranged by Israel’s Mossad. The revelation from French intelligence is significant as the French government of Jacques Chirac joined the Bush administration and the neo-con policy establishments in Washington and Israel in blaming Syria for the attack. According to the DGSE officer, Israel and its American backers wanted to blame Syria for the assassination of the popular Lebanese leader in order to blame Syria for the attack thus forcing the popular Lebanese revolt that saw the withdrawal of Syrian forces. That left Lebanon defenseless for the ‘Clean Break’ attack launched by Israel, with US support, against Hezbollah and Lebanon’s infrastructure. WMR was one of the first to report Israeli and American involvement in the assassination of Hariri, as well as those of Elie Hobeika, George Hawi, and other Lebanese politicians.”

On March 28, 2008, WMR reported: “A UN panel headed by former Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare has concluded that former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a ‘criminal networK’ and not by either Syrian and Lebanese intelligence or Lebanese Hezbollah as proffered by the neocon propaganda mill operating out of Washington, DC and Jerusalem. The UN panel said that a ‘Hariri Network’ had the ex-Prime Minister under surveillance before the Beirut massive car bombing that killed Hariri and 22 other people in November 2005. WMR previously reported that the ‘criminal network’ was composed of Lebanese and rogue Syrian intelligence agents connected to Israel’s Mossad and a White House operation run by National Security Council senior staff member Elliott Abrams, the formerly convicted Iran-contra figure.”

It is not yet known whether al-Siddiq, the former Syrian intelligence agent arrested in the UAE, is thought to be a member of the criminal network, described by the UN, that killed Hariri.

On March 28, 2008, WMR also stated: “Although for political reasons the UN refrained from identifying the members of the ‘criminal element,’ WMR has reported it included rogue Syrians, Druze, and Palestinian intelligence operatives in Lebanon, as well as mercenaries linked to now jailed international arms smuggler Viktor Bout and members of the Russian-Israeli ‘organizatsiya’ criminal syndicate. WMR was criticized by the neocon press when it first reported on the actual elements behind Hariri’s assassination and charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ were the rule rather than the exception.”

On November 1, 2005, WMR reported: “WMR has obtained the Confidential version of the Mehlis Report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Mehlis is the Senior Public Prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office in Berlin. He was named Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission into the Hariri assassination. Mehlis is a darling of neocons who served in the Reagan administration. It was his investigation of the 1982 La Belle Discotheque bombing in West Berlin that was used as justification by Reagan to launch a 1986 bombing attack on Libya. Mehlis concluded that Libya was behind the attack conveniently at the same time that pro-Israelis in the Reagan administration, including Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Scooter Libby, and others were calling for an attack on Muammar Qaddafi. The Mehlis Report, dated October 19, 2005, states the Commission ‘focused on the crime scene, technical aspects of the crime, analysis of telephone intercepts, the testimony of more than 500 witnesses and sources, as well as the institutional context in which the crime took place.’ The confidential copy indicates that certain information, all of which implicates Syria and pro-Syrian Lebanese officials, was added just before the report was issued.”

The dropping of all charges against the four generals is yet additional proof that the Mehlis Report was a neocon fraud aimed at destabilizing Lebanon in 2005, forcing the withdrawal of the Syrians from the country, sending Syria a warning to close its border with Iraq to prevent fighters from entering Iraq to fight U.S. occupation troops, and leaving Lebanon wide open for a brutal Israeli attack in 2006. WMR’s November 1, 2005 report concluded: “Given all the bogus intelligence emanating from the neo cons and their Israeli, British, Italian, and Iraqi allies prior to the invasion of Iraq, the ‘intelligence’ contained in the Mehlis Report, which may have been placed therein by unconfirmed US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and his staff, makes the charges against Syria highly dubious.”

The dropping of the charges against the four generals is seen as a boost the electoral chances for Hezbollah in June elections. Currently, Lebanon is governed by a pro-U.S. and anti-Syrian government led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The nationalistic and anti-Israeli opposition primarily consists of the Shi’a-dominated Hezbollah and an influential Christian faction led by retired General Michel Aoun.

On April 1, 2005, the a U.S. State Department neocon propaganda unit, referring to this editor as a “self-described journalist,” attacked the reports about Hariri being assassinated by U.S. and Israeli interests. The Obama administration continues to maintain the Bush-era State Department propaganda website that attacks journalists who cite American crimes and malfeasance in other countries.

AFGHANISTAN: ‘US air-raid kills over 100 civilians in Farah’

AFGHANISTAN: ‘US air-raid kills over 100 civilians in Farah’

Ahmad Qureshi

bala_baluk_farah_civilian.jpg
An injured Afghan child from the Bala Baluk, district of Afghanistan, is seen on a bed at the hospital in Farah province of Afghanistan Tuesday, May 5, 2009. Photo AP

Dr Atiqullah, a resident of the village, told they had so far retrieved 123 dead bodies from beneath the debris of the destroyed homes by using tractors.

May 5, 2009

FARAH CITY: Residents of the Bala Boluk district in western Farah province on Tuesday claimed more than one hundred ‘innocent people’ have been killed in the Monday’s air offensive by the US forces.

The air-strike in Bala Boluk district came after an insurgent attack on a police check post that killed six people and three others on spy charges on Sunday.

Following the militant attack, locals say, the American forces bombarded Grani village, inflecting huge casualties to non-combatants.

Dr Atiqullah, a resident of the village, told Pajhwok Afghan News the bombardment destroyed the whole village and some of the mutilated bodies were beyond recognition.

He said they had so far retrieved 123 dead bodies from beneath the debris of the destroyed homes by using tractors.

Some of the injured people were provided first aid, Atiqullah said. One family lost 23 members alone, he claimed.

A tribal elder of the village, Abdul Manaan, told this news agency that 52 people in Ishaqzai area and 65 in Agha Sahiban area had been killed in the blitzkrieg.

“Our homes are destroyed and scores of people are killed, but the government is doing nothing,” he lamented.

Manaan said a team of the Red Crescent society is expected to visit the area to observe the situation.

Public Health Director, Dr Abdul Shaiq, told this agency they had so far received two corpses and 13 injured people, including two police officers, children and women from the area.

Governor Roohul Amin confirmed civilian deaths in the air raid and said the operation was still underway in the district.

He claimed 30 armed Taliban have so far been eliminated in the operation.

A delegation has been formed to visit the affected families and assess the exact number of casualties, he claimed.

A provincial council member, Balqis Roshan said over 100 innocent people have been killed in Monday’s bombardment.

As a protest, the locals also brought some dead bodies to the capital city, Farah.

Balqis blamed both the government and the international forces for what she described not taking care of the civilian lives.

Brian Naran an official at the US forces’ media office in Kabul told this scribe the operations are still going on in Bala Boluk district, but would not say about non-combatant deaths.

Secret Talks Underway to Place Pakistani Nuclear Secrets in “Wrong Hands”

US, Pak in secret talks to secure nuclear materials

Washington, May 05: Non-proliferation experts from the United States and Pakistan began secret talks seeking “greater role” of Washington in protecting Islamabad’s nuclear materials from falling into “wrong hands”, US officials have said.

Key proposals under discussion are a joint program to secure or destroy radioactive materials that could be used to make a crude nuclear device and shipment to the US of some of the highly enriched uranium fuel used in Pakistani civilian power plants, the ‘Boston Globe’ reported today.

The enriched fuel is believed to be sought by terrorists as possible material for a weapon of mass destruction, an unnamed official with direct knowledge of the discussions told the paper.

“We believe the command and control of the nuclear arsenal is a primary concern of the Pakistanis,” the official was quoted as saying.

If successful, the talks between nonproliferation specialists at the State and Energy department and their Pakistani counterparts would mark a breakthrough in efforts to persuade Pakistan to accept greater assistance in preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear fuel or the technology to build a nuclear weapon, the daily said.

“The Pakistanis take this very seriously,” said a senior official involved in the talks who asked not to be identified. “Pakistan faces some unique challenges.”

Pakistan, which is believed to have 100 nuclear bombs, has been very protective about its nuclear activities amid concerns in the US administration about the possibilities of nuclear arms falling into “wrong hands”.

But the growing threat to the Pakistani government from the Taliban – and its allies in the Al Qaeda network – has given Pakistani leaders a new reason to cooperate with the United States, the officials said.

Currently, the US is providing some basic assistance to Pakistan in nuclear security. Measures include training Pakistani officials on export control and providing detection of equipment for its seaports, airports, and border crossings to help thwart nuclear smuggling.

However, the new measures under consideration would for the first time give America access to some of Pakistan’s nuclear ingredients, the report said.

Bureau Report

US urges India, Israel, Pakistan, NKorea on nukes

[US arms control negotiator names Israel in call to NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) adherance.]

US urges India, Israel, Pakistan, NKorea on nukes

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — A top US arms control negotiator at the United Nations has urged presumed atomic powers India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States,” said Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller.

She later praised “India’s willingness to proceed with a fissile material cutoff treaty, in cooperation with the United States, and willingness also to pursue the comprehensive test ban treaty, as well as other lesser but important measures, such as improving its export controls.”

“India is coming closer to the non-proliferation regime and that too is an important goal of US policy,” Gottemoeller added.

The envoy was at the United Nations for a preparatory session for an NPT conference scheduled for May 2010 in New York.

The last such conference, which gathers NPT signatory states and seeks to rescue the treaty from charges it has become obsolete, ended in disarray in May 2005 with no agreement from the participating countries.

The conferences have been held every five years since the NPT was ratified in 1970. There are currently 189 signatory countries to the treaty.

Israel, which has never publicly acknowledged having a nuclear program, is not a member. Pakistan and India likewise have failed to sign the treaty, while North Korea had been a member, but pulled out in 2003.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed hope Monday that the week-long preparatory session would produce agreements on key procedural matters and issue concrete recommendations for the conference next year.

‘Akbar Bugti caused the explosion that led to his death’

‘Akbar Bugti caused the explosion that led to his death’

LAHORE: A close aide of late Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti has claimed that a rocket fired by Bugti caused the explosion that led to the nationalist leader’s death. “When security forces entered the cave where he (Bugti) was hiding, he attempted to fend them off by firing a shell. This caused a massive explosion, which resulted in the cave-in that led to the death of Bugti, one colonel, two majors and three commandoes,” Wadera Muhammad Murad Bugti told a private TV channel. He said the late Bugti had decided that he would rather die fighting than surrender to the security forces. “When forces besieged his cave on August 26, 2006, he asked his comrades to leave the cave and let him fight them alone,” he added. daily times monitor

America’s New Man in Balochistan Stakes-out the Empire’s Position

Nawaz announces launch of struggle for Baloch people

By Iftikhar A. Khan

PML-N Chief Nawaz Sharif exchanging views with former Governor Balochistan Lt. Gen. Abdul Qadir Baloch and Hamid Mir Nawaz who called on him at the Punjab House. –APP Photo

ISLAMABAD: Leader of Pakistan Muslim League (N) Muhammad Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday declared that his party would launch a struggle for the redressal of the grievances of the people of the much neglected province of Balochistan on the pattern of the movement for restoration of judges sacked by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.

Talking to reporters after a party meeting here at Punjab House, he said the Federation cannot be run without harmony with the federating units. The people of Balochistan had genuine grievances which cannot be ignored any more. He said the small provinces had been neglected during the military rule in the country for about 32 years.

‘The time has come when removal of the sense of deprivation in the province had become inevitable’, he remarked.

He termed the assassination of prominent Baloch leader Nawaz Akbar Bugti during a military operation in the days of Musharraf’s rule as a dictatorial act and said it was a deliberate attempt to lead the country towards anarchy and turmoil.

He called for the accountability of Pervez Musharraf for the killing of Akbar Bugti. He said Bugti had always taken the oath of allegiance to Pakistan and was physically eliminated by a person who had violated the constitution and the law and unlawfully sacked judges of the superior courts.

‘We will hold him accountable’, he remarked.

He said the meeting reviewed the report of the committee on Balochistan constituted under the chairmanship of Mamnoon Hussain and decided that it would not leave its Baloch brethren in a lurch.

He urged the Government to take the national leadership into confidence over Balochistan Swat and Fata. He also proposed a national conference to find out a solution to the problem and said it was not possible for any party to single handedly resolve the issue. He said his party was ready to fully cooperate with the PPP led federal Government on all national issues.

Nawaz Sharif said key Baloch leaders including Nawavb Akbar Bugti and Akhtar Mengal were among the political leadership who decided to repeal the 8th amendment during his days as Prime Minister in 1997.

‘We have to think what went wrong during the eight years after the military takeover’ he stressed.

Asked if his party would go for a long march to protect the rights of the Baloch people, he said ‘We will take every positive step to save Pakistan’.

He said his party was not playing to the gallery. He said he had proposed convening of a national conference on Balochistan in a letter to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. He said the issue also came up under discussion during his telephonic conversation with the Prime Minister. He said Gilani had promised to convene a meeting.

He said his party does not want to take the credit and wanted the Government to take the lead.

Answering a question, he said ‘We have certain commitments with the Government and the Government has certain commitments with us. The repeal of the 17th amendment and the implementation on the Charter of Democracy (CoD) can pave the way for more cooperation between the two parties’, he said.

He said the fact-finding committee on the case pertaining to the examination scam against party lawmaker from Rawalpindi Haji Pervez Khan had worked hard and would submit its final report to the party leadership today (Wednesday).

Responding to another question he said Karachi was an important city which cannot be ignored at any cost.

US wants national govt with Nawaz as PM: report

US wants national govt with Nawaz as PM: report

LAHORE: A top Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader from Sindh has revealed that the US wants a national government in Pakistan with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz chief Nawaz Sharif as prime minister and President Asif Ali Zardari to continue as president, a private TV channel reported on Tuesday.According to the channel, the PPP leader, asking not to be named, said Nawaz had become the ‘blue-eyed boy’ of the US and the rest of the West. The PPP leader, who is considered close to President Zardari, said the issue might come be discussed during President Zardari’s visit to Washington, the channel said. daily times monitor

Taliban can flee to Balochistan, says Holbrooke

[Even though they repeatedly deny that any unilateral action is planned, US spokesmen always seem to turn the conversation back to Balochistan.]

Taliban can flee to Balochistan, says Holbrooke

WASHINGTON – Asserting that Pakistan is not a failed state, US President’s special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Tuesday gave President Asif Ali Zardari a much-needed boost on the eve of the tripartite summit here as the Pakistani military stepped up its assault against the Taliban.
“We have not distanced ourselves from President Asif Ali Zardari – the US should unambiguously support the democratic Pakistan led by democratically-elected Pakistani President,” Holbrooke told a congressional committee, rejecting media reports that Obama Administration’s confidence in the Pakistani leader was waning.
Last week, The New York Times, citing senior administration officials, said one move being discussed was to reach out to PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif, Zardari’s main rival.
Holbrooke said the US maintains contacts with the Opposition political parties in Pakistan, as it does in other countries, including with Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif.
“We have the highest strategic interests in supporting this government (of Pakistan),” he underscored, saying both the US and Pakistan have common goals in the fight against violent extremism.
Pakistan’s survival as a moderate, democratic state is critical to US national security, Holbrooke said. “Our most vital national security interests are at stake,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Holbrooke was testifying ahead of meetings this week between President Barack Obama and the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan during which the Administration is expected to press the Pakistanis on combating extremists.
US officials regard Pakistan’s role as key to the success in America’s escalating military operation in Afghanistan.
“We need to put the most heavy possible pressure on our friends in Pakistan to join us in the fight against the Taliban and its allies,” Holbrooke said. “We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s support and involvement.”
He told lawmakers that “we should not confuse this (support) with prediction of collapse (of the Pakistani state).
“Pakistan is not a failed state, “ he said, negating doomsday scenarios painted in the media. Pakistan, he said, is facing challenges but is not in a situation where it could collapse.
Congressman Howard Berman chaired the hearing of the influential committee.
The special representative noted that “relations between the US and Pakistan have been inconsistent over the years. In Pakistan, many believe that “we are not a reliable long-term partner and that we will abandon them after achieving our counter-terrorism objectives. Many in the US question the dedication of some elements of the Pakistani government to ending safe haven for terrorists on Pakistani soil”.

“But our engagement has to be aimed at putting our relationship on a better long-term footing.”
He said in order to assure a strong partnership in the fight against extremists, “constancy and consistency must be the hallmarks of our engagement” with Pakistan. “This engagement must be conducted in a way that respects and enhances democratic civilian authority while also engaging the Pakistani people in our commitment to help them pursue a prosperous economy, a stronger democracy, and a vibrant civil society.”
Agencies add: US special envoy Holbrooke, in his testimony, feared that Taliban could flee to Balochistan from the tribal areas. He vowed unambiguous backing President Zardari despite mounting disquiet in Congress.
“Security assistance for Pakistan has to show results,” he added, suggesting that the US may tie an increase in aid to Pakistan to benchmarks in a variety of areas but it would not be correct to impose tough conditions.
“The administration intends to implement measures of performance in its economic, social and military assistance to Pakistan,” he said, saying such conditions must not worsen “the ‘trust deficit’ that plagues” US-Pakistani relations.
Any attempt by the Pakistan Army to launch a coup against Zardari’s eight-month-old civilian government would be “terrible”, he added in testimony to the House of Representatives.
Wednesday’s (today) summit gathering of US President Barack Obama, Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai was “historically important”, he told restive lawmakers.
The US envoy sought to tamp down speculation that the Obama Administration was seeking to distance itself from Zardari. He said Pakistan was of vital strategic interest to the US both to help stabilise Afghanistan and to prevent either country from becoming a springboard for attacks on the United States.
“Pakistan’s of such immense importance to the US, strategically and politically, that our goal must be to support unambiguously and help stabilise a democratic Pakistan headed by its elected President, Asif Ali Zardari,” Holbrooke said.
“We have the highest strategic interest in supporting this government,” he said, noting that Zardari had ordered a military offensive in the Swat region as a controversial peace deal with the Taliban breaks down.
Rejecting US media reporting that President Barack Obama’s Administration is reaching out behind Zardari’s back to political rival Nawaz Sharif, he added: “ We think it is a state that is under extreme test. We have the same common enemies,” said Holbrooke.
He said the US Administration had absolutely no interest in seeing the Pakistani military return to power in place of Zardari’s shaky government.
“We are strongly opposed to any such event. We have made that unambiguous and made it clear to all parties, publicly and privately,” Holbrooke said.
“We think this would be a terrible event.”
Ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan to take on Taliban whose influence is spreading in the nuclear-armed country, the US envoy said the country must demonstrate its commitment to defeating Al-Qaeda and other militants on its soil.
“Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out Al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders,” he said.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden plotted the Sept 11 attacks on the United States from Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by a Taliban regime that the US-led forces toppled in late 2001.
US lawmakers voiced their deep worries about Pakistan during the hearing, sometimes it remarkably blunt terms.
“We can’t allow Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group that threatens our national security to operate with impunity in the tribal regions of Pakistan,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, a Democrat, said at the hearing.
“Nor can we permit the Pakistani state – and its nuclear arsenal – to be taken over by the Taliban,” Berman added.
Representative Gary Ackerman, also a Democrat, said: “Pakistan’s pants are on fire.” He then launched into a scathing criticism of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and other Pakistani officials.
“President Zardari has said the right things … but in practice his government’s response has been slow, weak and ineffective,” Ackerman added. “The fire is real and they need to respond.”
Meanwhile, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke called on President Asif Ali Zardari and informally discussed relationship between the two countries. Holbrooke warmly welcomed President Zardari on behalf of US President Barack Obama’s Administration, Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told reporters.
Earlier, President Zardari also had a meeting with his advisors to devise and firm up Pakistan’s position on various issues that are likely to come up at the meetings during the visit.

US body agrees to lift India-specific conditions on Pak aid

US body agrees to lift India-specific conditions on Pak aid

By Muhammad Saleh Zaafir

WASHINGTON: Pakistan has ultimately prevailed upon the US House International Committee on Foreign Relations to relax its India-specific conditions proposed in the bill for the provision of $1.5 billion annually for five years.

An understanding in this regard reached here on Tuesday at the Capitol Hill during the meeting of the committee with visiting President Asif Ali Zardari who had a lengthy discussion with the committee members. The president was assisted by Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani and senior officials, accompanying him on the first official visit to the United States.

Pakistan had made it amply clear to the members that it would not agree to the conditions aimed at pleasing India, and any assistance that would be subject to the so-called approval by New Delhi was not acceptable to Islamabad.

A bill seeking to triple US economic assistance to Pakistan, but with rigorous oversight and auditing, was moved in the House of Representatives.

A similar but less restrictive bill was moved in the US Senate early this week. Some US senators are trying to include strict restrictions in the Senate bill as well. Congressman Howard L Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the House version of the bill known as the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act early last month. Berman was of the view that the PEACE Act seeks to establish a new framework for US-Pakistan relations. He said it while presenting the legislation. “To ensure that US assistance is truly benefiting the Pakistani people, the legislation requires rigorous oversight and auditing,” he added.

“This bill has one essential purpose: to strengthen our relationship with Pakistan,” Berman said, adding: “Our commitment to Pakistan’s political stability and economic development is matched only by our sense of urgency in ensuring that Pakistan has the right tools to protect its people, secure its borders and intensify its operations against extremist elements.”

The committee is believed to be crowded with the legislators favourably disposed towards India. The PEACE Act triples US economic assistance to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year, with a particular emphasis on strengthening democratic institutions, promoting economic development and improving Pakistan’s education system. The bill, technically known as HR 1886, also establishes a permanent Pakistan Democracy and Prosperity Fund to demonstrate America’s long-term commitment to Pakistan. The HR 1886 also boosts military aid to help Pakistan disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda and insurgent elements, but requires that the vast majority of such assistance be focused on critical counter-terrorism efforts.

In addition, the bill requires that all military assistance flow through the democratically elected Government of Pakistan. Finally, the legislation establishes conditions on military assistance, including a requirement that the Government of Pakistan has demonstrated a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups and made progress towards that end.

MQM doesn’t believe in Sufi, Taliban’s Shariat

MQM doesn’t believe in Sufi, Taliban’s Shariat

LONDON: Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Chief Altaf Hussain Wednesday said his party does not recognize Shariat as portrayed by Sufi Muhammad and Taliban.

In his telephonic address to the public meeting of women in five districts of the Punjab, Altaf Hussain said: “There is no need of (Taliban’s) Shariah in the presence of the teachings of Qur’an and Sunnah.”

He said terrorism is being unleashed in Swat in the name of Islam where girls are subjected to public flogging.

Chaos by design?

Chaos by design?

Crisis as a way to build a global totalitarian state

As the world teeters on the brink of financial disaster, leaders are calling for a new world order. As early as the late 1990s, David Rockefeller, author of the idea of private power that is due to replace the governments, said that the world was on the threshold of global changes. He invoked the need of “some large-scale crisis that will make people accept the new world order…” Is the current crisis being used as a mechanism to stoke civil fear and unrest, inducing people to succumb to a system of transnational private power? Olga Chetverikova believes we are in the final stage of that long-time planned ’global control’ agenda.


The champions of the New World Order. David Rockefeller is on the far right.

by Olga Chetverikova

As the world financial and economic crisis comes into its own, the Western community leaders are seeking to impress on mankind the idea that this upheaval will end up ‘turning the world into something different’.

Even though the picture of the ’new world order’ remains vague and fuzzy, the main idea is quite clear: A single global government, goes the argument, has to be established if we don’t want general chaos to prevail.

Every now and again, Western politicians mention the need for a ‘new world order’, a ‘new world financial architecture’, or some kind of ‘supranational control’, calling it a ‘New Deal’ for the world. Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to say so, while addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2007 (that is, before the crisis).

During the February 2009 meeting in Berlin convened to prepare the G20 summit, this was echoed by Gordon Brown, who said that a worldwide New Deal was needed. We are conscious, he added, that where the world financial flows were concerned, we would not be able to emerge from this situation with the help of purely national authorities alone. We need the authorities and world watchdogs to make the activities of financial institutions operating in the world markets totally open to us. Both Sarkozy and Brown are protégés of the Rothschilds. Statements made by certain representatives of ‘the global elite’ indicate that the current crisis is being used as a mechanism for provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make mankind – plunged as it is already into chaos and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.

The events are following the same path as the Great Depression in 1929-1933: a financial crisis, an economic recession, social conflicts, establishing totalitarian dictatorships, inciting a war to concentrate power, and capital in the hands of a narrow circle. This time, however, the case in point is the final stage in the ‘global control’ strategy, where a decisive blow should be dealt to the national state sovereignty institution, followed by a transition to a system of private power of transnational elites.

As early as the late 1990s, David Rockefeller, author of the idea of private power that is due to replace the governments, said that we (the world) were on the threshold of global changes. All we need, he went on, is some large-scale crisis that will make people accept the new world order.

Jacques Attali, Sarkozy’s adviser and former EBRD chief, claimed that the elites had been incapable of dealing with the currency problems of the 1930s. He was afraid, he said, that a similar mistake would be made again. At first we’ll wage wars, he went on, and let 300 million people perish. After that reforms will follow and a world government. Shouldn’t we better think about a world government already at this stage, he asked?

Henry Kissinger: “The President-elect is coming into office at a moment when there are upheavals in many parts of the world simultaneously … But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy … I think that his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a ’new world order’ can be created. It’s a great opportunity.”

The same was stated by Henry Kissinger: In the final analysis, the main task is to define and formulate the general concerns of the majority of countries, as well as of all leading states with regard to the economic crisis, considering the collective fear of a terrorist jihad. Next, all of that should be converted to a common action strategy… Thus, America and its potential partners are getting a unique chance for turning the moment of the crisis into a vision of hope.

The world is being led to accept the “new order” idea step by step to avoid provoking events that are likely to make the universal protests against the worsening conditions of human existence take ‘a wrong course’ and become uncontrolled. The main thing that Stage One managed to achieve was to start a wide-ranging discussion on ‘global government’ and the ‘inadmissibility of protectionism’ with an emphasis on the ‘hopelessness’ of the national-state models for emerging from the crisis.

This discussion is proceeding against the background of information pressures that help to build up human anxieties, fear, and uncertainty. Some of those information actions are the following: WTO forecasts to the effect that 1.4 billion people are likely to sink below the poverty line in 2009; a warning by the WTO director general that the biggest world trade slide in postwar history is in the offing; a statement by the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kohn (a protégé of Sarkozy’s) that a world economic crash is impending unless a large-scale reform of the financial sector of the world economy is implemented, and a crash that is most likely to bring in its wake not only social unrest but also a war.

Against this background, the idea to introduce a as a cornerstone of the ‘new world order’ was put forward. The real masterminds of this long-standing project are as yet in the shadow. Let us note that some or other representatives of Russia are pushed to the fore. This is reminiscent of the situation before World War I, where the Anglo-French circles that possessed some well-elaborated plans for a new division of the world instructed the Russian Foreign Minister to draw up a general program for the Entente Cordiale. It went down in history as the ‘Sazonov program’, even though Russia did not play an independent role in that war and was from the start built into the system of interests of the British financial elite.

On March 19, Henry Kissinger came to Moscow as a member of The Wise Men (James Baker, George Schultz, and others), who had meetings with the Russian leaders before the G20 summit. Dmitry Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center and participant in the latest US meeting of the Bilderbergers, called that meeting a ‘positive signal’. On March 25, Moskovsky Komsomolets published an article ‘The Crisis and the World Problems’, by Gavriil Popov (currently President of the International Union of Economists) that openly voiced what was normally discussed behind closed doors.

The article mentioned World Parliament, World Government, World Armed Forces, World Police Force, World Bank, the necessity of placing under international control the nuclear weapons, nuclear power generating capacities, the entire amount of space rocket technology, and the planet’s minerals, the imposition of birth-rate limits, the cleansing of humanity’s gene pool, the fostering of people intolerant to cultural and religious incompatibility, and the like.

The “countries that will not accept the global prospects,” says Popov, “must be expelled from the world community.”

Of course, the Moskovsky Komsomolets article conveys nothing new that would enable one to understand the strategy of the global elite. Another thing is important. The establishment of a totalitarian police order and the elimination of national states is being suggested as an open program of action, and what both the liberals, and the socialists, and the conservatives always viewed as ‘new fascism’ is being recommended as the only possible salutary path for the whole of mankind. Someone wants the discussing of these projects to become a norm. In this context, some ‘particularly trusted’ representatives of Russia are pushed to the fore, Russia that will become the main victim of the policy of total plunder should the ‘global government’ become a reality.

The G20 did not discuss the common world currency issue, since time had not yet come for that. The summit itself was a step forward on the way to chaos, because its decisions, if followed blindly, will only worsen the world socioeconomic situation and, to quote Lyndon LaRouche, will “finish off the patient.”

In the meantime, the crisis is being exacerbated, and analysts are predicting an era of mass-scale unemployment. The most pessimistic predictions come from LEAP/Europe 20201, which regularly publishes them in its bulletins and even set them out in an open letter sent to the leaders of the Twenty before the London summit.

As early as February 2006, LEAP was surprisingly precise in describing the prospects for the ‘systemic global crisis’ as a consequence of the financial illness caused by the US debt. LEAP analysts are viewing the current events in the context of the general crisis that began in the late 1970s and is now in its fourth, final and most grave stage, the so-called ‘elutriation phase’, where the collapse of real economy begins. According to LEAP’s Frank Biancheri, it is not simply a recession but the end of the system, in which its main pillar, the US economy, collapsed. “We are witnessing the end of an entire epoch before our own eyes.”

The crisis may lead to some most difficult consequences. LEAP forecasts a rise in unemployment to 15-20% in Europe and as much as 30% in the United States. If the key dollar problem fails to be solved, the world events will take a most dramatic turn. The dollar collapse may take place as early as July 2009, and the potentially decades-long crisis will trigger off “a world-wide geopolitical disintegration” with social upheavals and civil conflicts, with the division of the world into separate blocs, with the world coming back to Europe’s1914, with military clashes, etc. The most powerful popular unrest will take place in countries with the least developed social security systems and the biggest concentrations of weapons, primarily in Latin America and the United States, where social violence is already now manifest in the activities of armed gangs. Experts note the beginning of US population fleeing to Europe, where the direct threat to life is for the time being not so great. Aside from armed conflicts, LEAP analysts forecast power, food and water shortages in areas dependent on food imports.

LEAP experts describe behavior demonstrated by the Western elites as absolutely inadequate: “Our leaders have failed to understand what happened, and show the same amount of incomprehension to this day. We are amid a period of protracted recession, and it was necessary to engage in introducing some long-term measures to cushion the blows, whereas our leaders still hope to avoid a prolonged recession… All of them have been formed around the American pillar and cannot see that the pillar is a shambles…

But this is not seen by the mid-level leaders, while the top-level world managers are, on the contrary, informed quite well; it is they who are implementing the ‘controlled chaos’ and general disintegration policy, including a civil war and the disintegration of the United States planned for the end of 2009, a scenario that is being widely discussed both by American and world media.

On the threshold of conflicts planned in various areas of the planets, a system is being established that will give a supranational center relying on a large-scale punitive machine total political, military, legal, and electronic control over the population. That system uses the network management principle that allows embedding into any society parallel structures of authority that report to external decision-making centers and are legalized through the doctrine of prevalence of international law over national law. The shell remains national, while real power becomes transnational. Jacques Attali calls this a ‘global law-based state’.

The ruling center of the global law-based state is located in the US. While its fundamentals began to emerge in the 1990s, the fight against terrorism after the 9/11 events has led to radically new phenomena. The passing of the 2001 Patriot Act not only allowed security services to control the American population and suspected foreigners, but also accelerated the passing of state responsibilities into the hands of transnational corporate structures.

Intelligence activities, trade of war, penitentiary system, and information control are passing into private hands. This is done through so-called outsourcing, a relatively new business phenomenon that consists of trusting certain functions to private firms that act as contractors and relying on individuals outside an organization to solve its internal tasks.

In 2007, the American government found out that 70% of its secret intelligence budget is spent on private contracts and that “Cold-War intelligence bureaucracy is transforming into something new, where contractor’s interests dominate.” For American society (Congress included), their activities remain classified, which allows them to gather more and more important functions in their hands.

Former CIA employees say that nearly 60% of their staff are on contracts. Those people analyze most of the information, write reports for those who make decisions in state authorities, maintain communications among various security services, help foreign stations, and analyze data interception. As a result, America’s National Security Agency is becoming more and more dependent on private companies that have access to classified information. No wonder, then, that it is lobbying a bill in the Congress that is supposed to guarantee immunity to corporations that have worked with NSA for the last five years.

The same is happening to private military companies (PMCs), which have been assuming more and more army and police functions. On a significant scale, it started in the nineties in former Yugoslavia, but contract workers were especially widely used in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. They did the ‘dirtiest’ actions, as was the case during the war in South Ossetia, where up to 3000 mercenaries were involved. At the moment, PMCs are real armies, each up to 70,000 strong, that operate in over 60 countries, with annual revenues of up to $180 billion (according to Brookings Institution, USA) For example, over 20,000 employees of American PMCs work in Iraq along with the 160,000 American military contingent.

The system of private prisons is also growing rapidly in the US. The prison industry complex, which uses slave labor and sweatshop practices, is flourishing, and its investors are based on Wall Street. The use of convict labor by private corporations has been legalized in 37 states already, and it is used by major corporations such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, Texas Instrument, Intel, Pierre Cardin, and others. In 2008, the number of inmates in US private prisons was about 100,000, and it is growing rapidly, along with the total number of inmates in the country (mostly African-Americans and Latin Americans), which is 2.2 million people, or 25% of all convicts in the world.

After Bush came to power, privatization of the system for transportation and retention of migrants in concentration camps began. In particular, a branch of the notorious firm Halliburton, Kellog Brown and Root (once headed by Dick Cheney), did just that.

The biggest achievements have been made over the last few years in the area of establishing electronic control over people’s identities, carried out under the pretext of counterterrorism. Currently, the FBI is creating the world’s biggest database of biometric indexes (fingerprints, retina scans, face shapes, scar shapes and allocation, speech and gesture patterns, etc.) that now contains 55 million fingerprints. The latest novelties include the introduction of body scanning system in US airports, tracking of literature read by passengers in flight, and so on. A new opportunity to gather detailed information on people’s private lives follow from the NSA Directive N59, passed in summer 2008, ‘Identification and tracking biometry for the purpose of strengthening national security’, and the classified ‘Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Law’.

Evaluating the policy of America’s authorities, ex-Congressman and 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul said that America is gradually turning into a fascist state, “We are approaching not a Hitler-type fascism, but one of a softer type, which shows in the loss of civil freedoms, when corporations rule everything and… the government lies in the same bed with big business.” May we remind you that Ron Paul is one of the few American politicians speaking for the closing of the Federal Reserve System as a secret unconstitutional organization?

With Obama’s coming to power, the police order in America is getting tighter and tighter in two directions – strengthening internal security and militarization of civilian institutions. Tellingly, having condemned the infringements on individual freedoms done by the Bush administration, Obama has put his own staff under total control by making them fill out a 63-question form that touches upon the most intricate details of their private lives. In January, the US President signed bills that enable the continuation of the illegal practice of abducting people, keeping them secretly in prisons, and moving them to countries where tortures are used. He also proposed a bill called National Emergency Help Center Establishment Act, which stipulates the establishment of six such centers in US military bases to provide help to people who are displaced due to an emergency situation or disaster and thus get into military jurisdiction. Analysts connect this bill with possible disturbances and consider it proof that the US administration is preparing for a military conflict which may follow after the provocation that is being planned.

The American system of police control is actively implemented in other countries, primarily in Europe – through the establishment of American law hegemony on its territory by means of closing various agreements. A big part here was played by US–European talks out of the glare of publicity on creation of the common ‘area of control over the population’ that were held in spring 2008, when the European Parliament adopted resolution that ratified creation of the single transatlantic market abolishing all barriers to trade and investments by 2015. The talks resulted in the classified report prepared by the experts from six participating countries. This report described the project to create the ‘area of cooperation’ in the spheres of ‘freedom, safety and justice’.

The report dwells upon the reorganization of the system of justice and internal affairs of the EU member states in such a manner that it would resemble the American system. It concerns not only the ability to transfer personal data and cooperation of police services (which is already being carried out), but also, for example, extradition of EU immigrants to US authorities in accordance with the new mandate that abolished all the guarantees the European procedure of extradition provided. In the US the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is in force, and it allows persecution or imprisonment of any person who is identified as an ‘illegally fighting enemy’ by the executive authorities and extends to immigrants from any country not at war with the US. They are persecuted like “enemies” not based on some evidence but because they were labeled so by the governmental agencies. No foreign governments have protested against this law which is of international importance.

Soon they will sign the agreement on personal data communication, in accordance with which the American authorities will be able to obtain such personal information as credit card numbers, bank account details, investments, travel routes or communication via Internet, as well as the information concerning race, political and religious beliefs, habits, etc.. It was under the US pressure that the EU countries have introduced biometric passports. The new EU regulation implies the overall switch of EU citizens to electronic passports from the end of June 2009 by 2012. New passports will contain a chip with not only passport info and a photo, but also fingerprints.

We are witnessing the creation of the global electronic concentration camp, and crisis, conflicts and wars are used to justify it. People tend to tremble in the face of an imaginary danger and are too lazy to see the real one.

What is the United States preparing in Pakistan?

What is the United States preparing in Pakistan?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will undoubtedly come under renewed pressure to allow US military forces to wage war within Pakistan when he visits Washington this week for a trilateral summit meeting with President Obama and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai.

For weeks, the US political and military establishment and the American media have been mounting an increasingly shrill campaign to bully Islamabad into fully complying with US diktats in what Washington has redefined as the AfPak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) war theater.

At the US’s behest, the Pakistani military has for the past 10 days been mounting a bloody offensive—including strafing by warplanes and heavy artillery—against Pakistani Taliban militia in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The offensive has caused large numbers of civilian casualties and forced tens of thousands of poor villagers to flee.

Between 600,000 and a million Pakistanis have been turned into refugees by the Pakistani state’s drive to pacify the NWFP and the country’s traditionally autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), so as to bolster the US occupation of Afghanistan.

The US ruling elite has welcomed the latest round of bloodletting, but it is far from satisfied. The flurry of threats, implicit and explicit, against Pakistan, its people and government has continued unabated in the run-up to Zardari’s Washington visit.

At an April 29th press conference, Obama described Pakistan’s civilian government as “very fragile” and not having “the capacity to deliver basic services” to its people, or to gain their “support and loyalty.” But he praised the Pakistani military and the “strong” US-Pakistani “military consultation and cooperation.”

Given Washington’s pivotal role in sustaining a succession of military dictatorships in Islamabad, Obama’s statement was widely interpreted both in Pakistan and within the US political establishment as signaling that Washington is considering sponsoring a military coup.

This was underscored by reports citing the chief of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, as saying that if the Zardari government did not demonstrate over the next two weeks that it can crush the Taliban insurgency in the country’s northwest, the US will have to determine its “next course of action.” Petraeus went on to declare Pakistan’s military “superior” to the country’s civilian government.

Such was the outcry in Pakistan that State Department spokesman Robert Wood was forced to deny Friday that Islamabad faces a two-week “time frame.” Nonetheless, he bluntly asserted that Washington expects Pakistan to make a “110 percent effort” in the fight against the Taliban, and not for “two days, two weeks, two months,” but for the foreseeable future.

Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, denounced the apprehensions voiced in the Pakistani press that less than nine months after the last US-backed dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, was forced to relinquish the Pakistani presidency, Washington is considering supporting a military-led government. “This is journalistic garbage … journalistic gobbledygook,” declared Holbrooke.

The evidence that the Obama administration is preparing some new crime in Pakistan so as to ratchet up its war in Central Asia is overwhelming.

With the transparent aim of intensifying the pressure on Zardari, the Obama administration, according to high-level administration officials cited last week in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, is now courting his arch-rival, former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader Nawaz Sharif.

Obama, at his press conference last week, claimed that the US wants to respect Pakistani sovereignty. “But,” he added, “we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure Pakistan is stable.”

In other words, the US will violate Pakistan’s sovereignty at will. Since last August, the US has mounted dozens of missile strikes within Pakistan and one Special Forces ground attack.

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the Obama administration is asking the US Congress to give the Pentagon the same powers in relation to military aid to Pakistan that it has in respect to military assistance to the puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under this “unique” arrangement, military aid to Pakistan would no longer flow through the State Department or be subject to Foreign Assistance Act restrictions, but rather be entirely controlled by the Pentagon.

Then there is the extraordinary lead article in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Pakistan Strife Raises US Doubts on Nuclear Arms.” Written by the newspaper’s White House correspondent, David Sanger, the article has all the markings of a CIA or Pentagon put-up job, concocted with the aim of manipulating public opinion and justifying a major escalation of the US political and military intervention in Pakistan.

The article is based entirely on the statements of unnamed “senior American officials.” It claims, notwithstanding Obama’s statement of last week affirming confidence in the Pakistani military’s control of the country’s nuclear arsenal, that there is a real and growing threat that Taliban or Al Qaeda operatives could snatch a Pakistani nuclear weapon or infiltrate its nuclear facilities.

To explain how the Islamicists could circumvent the elaborate controls the Pakistani military, with US assistance, has placed over its nuclear arsenal, the article advances a thriller-type scenario. Islamicists would first trigger a confrontation between India and Pakistan, then seize a weapon when Pakistan seeks to move it closer to the border with its eastern neighbor.

The Times, it should be recalled, played a major role in seeking to mobilize US public opinion behind the invasion of Iraq. Front and center in this campaign was the lie that the Iraqi government was in league with Al Qaeda and might give them access to nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein was supposedly developing.

That the Times’s article was part of a coordinated campaign was underscored by an interview given to the BBC by Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, on Monday, the same day that the Times article appeared.

Jones singled out as the top US concern the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and made a thinly veiled threat against the Pakistani government, saying, “If Pakistan doesn’t continue in the direction that it presently is, and we’re not successful there, then, obviously, the nuclear question comes into view.”

He went on the say that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban would be “the very, very worst case scenario” and added, choosing his words carefully but pointedly, “We’re going to do anything we can within the construct of our bilateral relations and multilateral relations to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

The Obama administration and the Pentagon are clearly weighing their options in respect to Pakistan and its role in the US thrust for geo-political advantage in oil-rich Central Asia. One thing is certain: What they are preparing will lead to greater violence and suffering for the people of the region and will further subvert the democratic will and aspirations of the Pakistani people.

Fever Pitch: Obama-Clinton Dream Team Breeds Nightmare in Pakistan

Fever Pitch: Obama-Clinton Dream Team Breeds Nightmare

in Pakistan

Written by Chris Floyd

The headline from McClatchy says it all: “Pakistani Army Flattening Villages as it Battles Taliban.”

This is exactly what the hot-blooded humanitarian interventionists in the Obama Administration have been demanding: that Pakistan “take the fight” to the Taliban forces that, according to such world-historical savants as Hillary Clinton and the President himself, are posing an existential threat not only to Pakistan but even to the sacred Homeland itself.

Last month, when a faction of the Pakistani Taliban (which is not be equated with the Afghan Taliban, but is anyway, repeatedly and deliberately, by the media and political classes) took temporary control of Buner, a city 60 miles from the Pakistan capital of Islamabad, the American power structure went into its customary all-out panic mode, urging the fragile Pakistani government to quit signing peace deals and ceasefires with the sectarian and tribal groups on its frontiers and instead “take action” against them pronto — before they launch cruise missiles into the Mall of America from their floating space platforms….or something.

(To digress: One likes to think that these continual hissy fits of arm-waving alarm are merely cynical ploys to help advance militarist policies and war-profiteering schemes, but who knows? Maybe our fearless leaders really are a bunch of witless, ignorant cowards. Either way, the results are the same: more war — and more war powers — more death, more suffering, and more ever-profitable destabilization.)

So now the Pakistani army — which has been trained to deal with full-scale conventional war with India — is “taking action” against the militants in and around Buner, moving in with heavy, deadly, blunderbuss force, with entirely predictable results: mass slaughter of civilians, vast ruin, thousands driven from their homes into desperate terms — and a further discrediting of the government in the eyes of the local populace, which only strengthens the hand of the sectarian militants. It is also — not at all incidentally — turning the Pakistanis’ peace deals with local Taliban into a dead letter: the very thing that the Obama Administration has been calling for. Isn’t that a remarkable coincidence!

So let’s take a look at how those Obama-Clinton wishes are coming true:

The Pakistani army’s assault against Islamic militants in Buner, in northwest Pakistan, is flattening villages, killing civilians and sending thousands of farmers and villagers fleeing from their homes, residents escaping the fighting said Monday.

“We didn’t see any Taliban; they are up in the mountains, yet the army flattens our villages,” Zaroon Mohammad, 45, told McClatchy as he walked with about a dozen scrawny cattle and the male members of his family in the relative safety of Chinglai village in southern Buner. “Our house has been badly damaged. These cows are now our total possessions.”

Mohammad’s and other residents’ accounts of the fighting contradict those from the Pakistani military and suggest that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is rapidly losing the support of those it had set out to protect.


Now here comes the beauty part. Pakistan, having faced scathing criticism in Washington — not only from the progressive humanitarian peace-loving liberals in the Administration but even more so from the liberalistic progress-loving humanitarians in Congress — for being too scared to “take on” the militants, is now being criticized by Washington for, well, taking on the militants, as McClatchy reports:

The heavy-handed tactics are ringing alarm bells in Washington, where the Obama administration is struggling to devise a strategy to halt the militants’ advances. Officials Monday talked about the need to train the Pakistani military, which has long been fixated on fighting armored battles with India, in counterinsurgency warfare, but it may be too late for that.

Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday that the Pakistani army in recent years has undertaken “bursts of fighting and engagement” fighting insurgents, but that its operations were “not sustained” by follow-up measures… Another U.S. official, who closely tracks Pakistan developments, said the Pakistan army is “just destroying stuff. They have zero ability to deliver (aid) services.”

“They hold villages completely accountable for the actions of a few, and that kind of operation produces a lot of (internally displaced persons) and a lot of angst,” said a senior defense official.


On this narrow point at least we must acquit our gallant leaders of the change of cynicism. The sheer, gold-plated gall and arrogance of their response can only be sincere. Pentagon officials who have been instigating, maintaining and overseeing mass murder, social breakdown, repression, regression, extremism, torture, corruption — not to mention the “displacement” of more than four million people from their homes — in nearby Iraq are shocked and appalled at the “heavy-handed” tactics of the Pakistani forces… forces which would not be undertaking tactics in Bruner on such a scale if not for the constant browbeating of Pakistan’s indispensable paymaster in Washington. The lack of self-awareness in Washington’s reproofs of Pakistan’s operation in Bruner is so jaw-dropping as to reach the level of the sublime.

As we said, the results of the brutal crackdown sought by Washington are predictable:

In Buner, the Pakistani military appears to be losing public support in a stridently anti-Taliban district whose residents had raised their own militia to defend themselves against the militants…

Mohammad, who’d walked for two days with his cattle to escape the offensive against the Taliban, and other farmers accused the military of using poorly directed artillery and air power to pound civilian areas.

“They shouldn’t use the army in this (indiscriminate) way. They should be targeted at the Taliban,” said Saed Afsar Khan, who was leaving Buner with 18 members of his family and two cows. He estimated that the army had destroyed 80 of the 400 houses in his village of Kawga, near the key battlefield of Ambela. “I don’t think they’ve killed even one Taliban,” he said. “Only ordinary people.”


II.
“I don’t think they’ve killed even one Taliban Only ordinary people.”

Of course, we have heard these exact words over and over and over and over again from Afghan survivors of attacks by America’s highly sophisticated, ultramodern “counterinsurgency” operations, so unlike the primitive spear-jabbings of those barbarian darkies in Pakistan. Indeed, we’ve even heard them from Pakistani survivors as well, digging out after yet another bold attack from a drone missile fired by a courageous warrior sitting in a padded chair at a computer console in Tucson, Arizona. Last month, the Pakistani government released the first accounting of the effectiveness of these high-tech counterinsurgency tactics. As we noted here last month:

…Every week brings new reports of deadly attacks in Pakistan’s frontier regions, almost all of them involving the deaths of civilians. Americans generally hear little or nothing about these attacks beyond official snippets about “successful” attacks against the apparently endless, ever-replenishing supply of “top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” [Or to put it in reality's terms, the United States government and its progressive, humanitarian leaders regularly order, admit and applaud the "extrajudicial killing" -- i.e., murder -- of uncharged, untried individuals living within the borders of an allied country. As it saith in the Scriptures: These be your gods, O progressives!] But while Americans turn a deaf ear, in Pakistan the blood cries out, and is measured, as far as possible, by a government that is further shaken by each American attack and the violent extremism it engenders.

This week, Pakistani officials released stunning figures of the civilian death count in the American drone war: almost 700 innocent men, women and children killed so far — as opposed to 14 actual, wanted extremist leaders. As the Pakistani paper The News reports:

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent….

According to the figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities, a total of 537 people have been killed in 50 incidents of cross-border US predator strikes since January 1, 2008 to April 8, 2009…


There’s your bipartisan continuity in action!

Oddly enough, the flood of “internally displaced persons” decried by the deeply concerned and conveniently anonymous “senior defense officials” is not, as it turns out, some new phenomenon related to the current operations in Buner. As we noted here in yet another story on the Progressive War in Pakistan, more than one million people have already fled their homes, driven out by the terror weapon of predator drones — and by earlier attacks from the Pakistani military at Washington’s behest:

So the effects of Obama’s drone war are not limited to the few houses destroyed here and there. The attacks have spawned, or greatly added to, a humanitarian catastrophe that remains largely hidden from the world — and certainly from the well-wadded Western “liberals” who cheer Obama’s savvy toughness in the “good war” on the Af-Pak front. As The Times reports, almost a million people have been driven from their homes in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas to escape the American drones, and the bombs of Washington’s Pakistani proxies:

American drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

As many as 1m people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army….

So far 546,000 have registered as internally displaced people (IDPs) according to figures provided by Rabia Ali, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Maqbool Shah Roghani, administrator for IDPs at the Commission for Afghan Refugees. The commissioner’s office says there are thousands more unregistered people who have taken refuge with relatives and friends or who are in rented accommodation.

Jamil Amjad, the commissioner in charge of the refugees, says the government is running short of resources to feed and shelter such large numbers. A fortnight ago two refugees were killed and six injured in clashes with police during protests over shortages of water, food and tents.


As we noted then:

In the political schizophrenia induced in a state forced to serve a foreign master’s interests as well as its own, the Pakistani government has alternated between savage attacks in Washington’s service and sudden truces and peace deals with militant groups. But even when the local bombs stop falling, the American drones keep sailing across the border in ever-increasing numbers, keeping the people of the region locked in fear and on the run.


Well, at least the dream team of Obama-Clinton has put the kibosh on the “peace deal” angle of this deadly dynamic for the time being. For now, it’s going to be all war, all the time in Buner.

III.
But it’s been all war, all the time in Pakistan for years, as the military, sometimes on their own bent but often at America’s insistence, has been carrying out attacks on militants (and the surrounding villages) since 2002 in a number of regions in the frontier provinces. And here we must say, unequivocally, that America’s leaders are acting with very deliberate, calculated cynicism. For the current hissy fit over Buner has been predicated on the knowing lie from both Obama and Clinton that Pakistan has been dodging a fight with sectarian militants. As Brian Cloughey writes:

There has of late been much international criticism of the [Pakistani] army for allegedly failing to take action against militants, and according to London’s Financial Times on April 26, Hillary Clinton “expressed bewilderment that one of the world’s largest armies appeared unable to confront dozens of militants.”

First of all there are not “dozens” of militants : there are many thousands, most if not all encouraged into insurrection as a result of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Senior officers in Pakistan are extremely angry concerning the accusation that the army is “not doing enough” and it is a fact that since 2002 the army and the para-military Frontier Corps have suffered over 1800 killed and three times that number wounded in battles with insurgents, which is hardly an indication that there has not been action against them.

There is an understandable lack of sympathy for the US throughout Pakistan, stemming in part from the belief that the US does not care about Pakistan army or civilian casualties….

Clinton told the US Congress on April 23 that “I think the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists,” which is the sort of pronouncement to which the world became accustomed during the horrible Bush years – the arrogant insistence that everything bad that happened was the fault of everyone but Washington’s finest. The resentment caused in Pakistan has been immense….


But Clinton and Obama are not worried about the effect their words will have in Pakistan. As under the Bush Administration, all this fervid fear-mongering is being produced for domestic consumption. The point is to drive home, constantly, how unstable and dangerous and incapable Pakistan is, and how our very national existence — and the very lives of our loved ones — are in imminent, deadly peril from the frontier tribesmen grouped under the undifferentiated rubric of “Taliban” (with its by-now automatic equation with “al Qaeda” in the public mind). And thus the “justification” for the slow, creeping spread of the Terror War into Pakistan is continually reinforced, goosed along by periodic panic attacks such as the one over Buner, and by the never-ending denigration, mockery and condescension pouring forth from the imperial court toward its troublesome client states.

And it’s working well. A new poll shows that “the Obama administration’s hyperbole about the Pakistani security situation has caused a 15 percent increase in the percentage of Americans who are “very concerned” about Pakistan’s nukes,” as Juan Cole puts it. The Rasmussen poll shows that 87 percent of Americans are now concerned about “the security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan,” and that Pakistan has now moved up to third place on the list of most threatening nations to the Homeland, behind Iran and North Korea. Think of that: a democratic country allied to the United States is now regarded as one of the “biggest threats to U.S. national security” in the world. That is some sure-enough good fearmongering at work there.

What’s more, a third of American voters already think that the United States should send troops into Pakistan — i.e., launch a war of aggression against an allied nation. Another third are “undecided” on that point — but a few more hissy fits about Taliban-Qaeda devils in charge of Pakistani nukes will surely bring most of them around, as well as a good chunk of the 33 percent currently opposed to invading Pakistan.

For a myriad of reasons — some of them born from ignorant, arrogant, ill-informed blundering, and a fatal lack of vision and imagination, others springing from base and bestial impulses, an evil urge toward domination for its own sake, at whatever cost to others — the bipartisan political establishment in Washington seems determined to expand their “Overseas Contingency Operations” more and more directly into Pakistan.

Every step they take — or urge on others — gives clear evidence of this intent. The Americans oppose — and openly undermine — all moves by the Pakistani government to come to some accord, even temporarily, with the militants, to bring at least a moment of respite and peace to the multitudes ruined and displaced by this civil war. The Americans continue to escalate their drone attacks on Pakistani villages, despite the astronomically disproportionate number of civilian deaths they cause. And as we noted here last week, Obama has already made a major tactical shift that will pour thousands of new troops into some of the most volatile and contested areas on the Pakistan border, virtually guaranteeing ground action across the frontier, along with the already existing air assaults. The inevitable, inescapable, atrocious consequences of these policies are as sure and predictable as the bollixed results of the current action in Buner.

Yet still we march on, toward yet another pit of blood and filth, with scarcely a ripple of opposition to this lunatic course. Perhaps we have seen so much monstrous folly and murderous intent on display from our leaders in recent years that we have grown inured to it. Or it might be more accurate to say that we have been steeped in it from the moment we were born, imbibed it with our mothers’ milk, accepted it, without question or awareness, as the natural, universal order: war, violence, destruction and slaughter, inflicted on grubby half-human creatures in distant lands, in our names, for our (purported) benefit, to keep us in our rightful, God-ordained position of all-devouring superiority.

‘Pakistan’s pants are on fire’

[Authors of “Iran war resolution” once again seek to create conditions that lead to war, while calling it “PEACE.”]


‘Pakistan’s pants are on fire’

By Arun Kumar, Washington, May 6 : Several US lawmakers have questioned President Asif Ali Zardari’s ability to control Pakistan with one of them comparing the country to a man whose pants are on fire but who does not realise the danger.When one’s pants are on fire one has to do two things to survive, said Democrat Gary Ackerman as a House panel Tuesday questioned Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan on America ‘s strategy for the troubled ally.

“First you have to realise your pants are on fire. Then you have to do something about it,” he said. “Let me be blunt. Pakistan’s pants are on fire… but they seem convinced that if left alone or attacked piecemeal, the Islamist flame will simply burn itself out. That hope is, at best, folly.”

Even now with insurgents a mere hour’s drive from the capital, Ackerman said he suspected that among the senior officers of the Pakistani military that “bedrock belief is still that Pakistan’s real enemy is India remains untouched by events.”

Holbrooke urged Ackerman and others to speak with Zardari about their concerns while he is in Washington suggesting that the US has overreacted to the situation in Pakistan “when statements of concern became predictions”.

The US should try “to dispel a self-fulfilling sense of pants-on-fire syndrome. It is not a failed state. It is a state under extreme stress,” said Holbrooke.

“Now he said the pants really are on fire, and I understand exactly what he (Ackerman) said. But I also think it needs to be put in the perspective of what we’re trying to achieve,” he said.

“Pakistan as such is of immense importance to the United States strategically and politically, that our goal must be unambiguously to support and help stabilise a democratic Pakistan headed by its elected president, Asif Ali Zardari,” Holbrooke said.

US Airstrikes on Afghan Villages Kill as Many as 150, Nearly all Civilians

By RAHIM FAIEZ
Associated Press Writer

KABUL (AP) – The international Red Cross said Wednesday that its officials saw women and children among dozens of dead bodies in two villages in western Afghanistan targeted in U.S. bombing runs.

The Afghan president said he would raise the issue with President Barack Obama when the two meet later Wednesday.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross traveled to two villages in Farah province Tuesday, where the team saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations that we went to,” said spokeswoman Jessica Barry.

“There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children. There were women and children.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered a probe Wednesday into the killings, and the U.S. military sent a brigadier general to Farah to head a U.S. investigation, said Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. spokesman. Afghan military and police officials were also part of the investigative team.

Karzai, currently in the United States, will raise the issue of civilian deaths with Obama, a statement from Karzai’s office said. The two presidents were scheduled to hold their first face-to-face meeting later Wednesday.

Karzai called civilian casualties “unacceptable.”

Civilian deaths have caused increasing friction between the Afghan and U.S. governments, and Karzai has long pleaded with American officials to reduce the number of civilian casualties in their operations. U.S. and NATO officials accuse the Taliban militants of fighting from within civilian homes, thus putting them in danger.

Local officials said Tuesday that bombing runs called by U.S. forces killed dozens of civilians in Gerani village in Farah province’s Bala Buluk district.

The fighting broke out Monday soon after Taliban fighters _ including Taliban from Pakistan and Iran _ massed in Farah province in western Afghanistan, said Belqis Roshan, a member of Farah’s provincial council. The provincial police chief, Abdul Ghafar, said 25 militants and three police officers died in that battle near the village of Ganjabad in Bala Baluk district, a Taliban-controlled area near the border with Iran.

Villagers told Afghan officials that they put children, women, and elderly men in several housing compounds in the village of Gerani _ about three miles to the east _ to keep them safe. But villagers said fighter aircraft later targeted those compounds, killing a majority of those inside, according to Roshan and other officials.

A Western official in Kabul said Marine special operations forces _ which fall under the U.S. coalition _ had called in the airstrikes. The official asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.

Villagers brought bodies, including women and children, to Farah city to show the province’s governor on Tuesday, said Abdul Basir Khan, a member of Farah’s provincial council. He estimated that villagers brought about 30 bodies.

Farah’s hospital treated at least three wounded villagers. A girl named Shafiqa had bandages under her chin. Two of her toes were severed in the fighting.

“We were at home when the bombing started,” she told AP Television News. “Seven members of my family were killed.”

Khan said villagers told him more than 150 civilians had died, but he said he had no way to know whether that claim was true.

Journalists and human rights workers can rarely visit remote battle sites to verify claims of civilian casualties. U.S. officials say Taliban militants sometimes force villagers to lie and say civilians have died in coalition strikes.

But the villagers’ claims Tuesday were bolstered by the wounded at Farah’s hospital shown on AP Television News. And Khan’s account of several truckloads of bodies taken to Farah city added more weight to the claims.

In remarks Tuesday, Karzai alluded to the problem of civilian casualties without mentioning the bombing deaths. He said the success of the new U.S. war strategy depends on “making sure absolutely that Afghans don’t suffer _ that Afghan civilians are protected.”

“This war against terrorism will succeed only if we fight it from a higher platform of morality,” he added in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Asked later to clarify, Karzai said, “We must be conducting this war as better human beings,” and recognize that “force won’t buy you obedience.”

An Afghan government commission previously found that an August 2008 operation by U.S. forces killed 90 civilians in Azizabad, a finding backed by the U.N. The U.S. originally said no civilians died; a high-level investigation later concluded 33 civilians were killed.

After the Azizabad killings, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, announced a directive last September meant to reduce such deaths. He ordered commanders to consider breaking away from a firefight in populated areas rather than pursue militants into villages.

___

Associated Press reporters Heidi Vogt, Jason Straziuso and Fisnik Abrashi contributed to this report from Kabul.

We need to put the most heavy possible pressure on our friends in Pakistan

“We need to put the most heavy possible pressure on our friends in Pakistan to join us in the fight against the Taliban and its allies,” Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a congressional committee Tuesday. “We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s support and involvement.”

Fighting erupts in Pakistan as peace deal crumbles

In this photo taken Monday, May 4, 2009, supporters of different religious parties rally against Taliban militants who are fighting with security forces in Malakand division in Peshawar, Pakistan. In this photo taken Monday, May 4, 2009, supporters of different religious parties rally against Taliban militants who are fighting with security forces in Malakand division in Peshawar, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

MINGORA, Pakistan—Taliban militants and security forces battled for control of a northwestern Pakistani town Wednesday as residents hunkered down in their homes ahead of an expected major offensive.

Thousands of men, women and children have fled Mingora and surrounding districts, the first wave of a refugee exodus the government fears could reach 500,000.

The collapse of a 3-month-old truce in the Swat Valley with the Taliban means Pakistan will have to evict the insurgents by force, testing the ability of its stretched military and the resolve of civilian leaders who until recently were insisting the insurgents could be partners in peace.

An Associated Press reporter in Mingora said gun and mortar fire started Tuesday and continued through the night into Wednesday morning.

Dawn News reported that helicopter gunships were attacking militant positions in the town and that more troops had been deployed there.

Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas declined to say whether the events heralded the start of major operations, saying only that “all the contingency plans are worked out” for carrying one out.

The developments brought Islamabad’s faltering campaign against militancy into sharp focus as President Asif Ali Zardari was preparing for talks Wednesday in Washington with President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai on how best to counter an increasingly overlapping spectrum of extremist groups behind surging violence in the neighboring countries.

The Obama administration hopes to build a strong and lasting regional alliance, linking success in Afghanistan with security in Pakistan. Toward that end, the administration is encouraging Pakistan to confront — not make peace with — the Taliban and other militants.

“We need to put the most heavy possible pressure on our friends in Pakistan to join us in the fight against the Taliban and its allies,” Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a congressional committee Tuesday. “We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s support and involvement.”

In an interview with CNN, Zardari defended his country’s ability to fight the militants within its borders. “It doesn’t work like that. They can’t take over,” he said. “How can they take over?”

Fearing that war could consume the region, thousands fled the main Swat town of Mingora on Tuesday. Refugees clambered onto the roofs of buses after seats and floors filled up. Children and adults alike carried belongings on their heads and backs.

“I do not have any destination. I only have an aim — to escape from here,” said Afzal Khan, 65, who was waiting for a bus with his wife and nine children. “It is like doomsday here. It is like hell.”

Shafi Ullah, a student, said the whole town was fleeing.

“Can you hear the explosions? Can you hear the gunshots?” he said, pointing to a part of town where fighting was continuing.

Pakistan agreed to a truce in the valley and surrounding districts in February after two years of fighting with militants who had beheaded political opponents and burned scores of girls schools in their campaign to implement a harsh brand of Islam modeled on their counterparts in Afghanistan.

As part of the agreement, the government imposed Islamic law last month in the hope that insurgents would lay down their arms — something they did not do.

Last week, the Taliban moved from their stronghold in the valley into Buner, a district just 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the capital. That caused alarm at home and abroad.

The army responded with an offensive it says has killed more than 100 militants and was “progressing smoothly” Tuesday, according to a brief statement.

Pakistani Taliban seize control of key Swat valley town

Pakistani Taliban seize control of key Swat valley town

• Pakistani security personnel holed up in Mingora
• Battle signals death knell for peace deal

Declan Walsh

The Taliban have seized control of the main town in Pakistan‘s Swat valley, threatening a return to full-blown fighting with the army and signalling the death knell for a fragile peace deal with the provincial government.

Taliban fighters are laying siege to the main power station in Mingora, where an estimated 46 security personnel were holed up after a firefight last night, residents and officials said.

Elsewhere militants patrolled the deserted city streets and occupied the rooftops of several tall buildings. Yesterday the militants blew up an empty police station and a government school and kidnapped several officers.

Frightened residents, who spent a sleepless night amid sounds of gunfire and explosions, remained in their homes. The government imposed a curfew but the militants were in charge, with police confined to their stations.

“The situation is extremely tense,” a schoolteacher, Ziauddin Yusufzai, said by phone from the funeral of a relative killed by a stray bullet during the night.

Neither side officially declared an end to last February’s peace deal, under which the provincial government acceded to militant demands for sharia law in the one-time tourist destination. But the agreement appeared as good as dead.

As the president, Asif Ali Zardari, arrived in America for talks with Barack Obama, tomorrow , the Taliban were preparing for a fresh army assault on the picturesque valley.

One resident, who requested anonymity, said militants had planted explosives under bridges and along roads leading into the city.

“If they will not follow the peace deal, we will fight them,” the Taliban spokesman, Muslim Khan, told the Guardian.

The tension in Swat was triggered by the situation in neighbouring Buner district, 60 miles north of Islamabad, where a week of intense fighting between government and Taliban fighters has killed dozens and caused tens of thousands of villagers to flee.

The confrontation risks turning into a province-wide conflagration. Early this morning a suicide bomber attacked a security forces checkpost on the border between Peshawar and the tribal areas, killing four soldiers and wounding several passing schoolchildren.

Khan accused the government of acting on US orders. A solution was “impossible”, he said, “because President Zardari has gone to America to get some money”.

Zardari, who is seeking approval for a $7.5bn, five-year aid package, is expected to be greeted in Washington with tough talk from Obama administration officials worried that Pakistan is taking a half-hearted approach to the Taliban threat.

US officials are concerned about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, estimated to number between 60 and 100 warheads. Pakistani officials say such fears are unfounded.

The collapse of the Swat deal has been predicted by analysts, even though it was backed by parliament. Public opinion shifted two weeks ago after a senior pro-Taliban cleric who helped negotiate the pact, Sufi Muhammad, declared that democracy and the superior courts were “infidel” concepts.

Swat residents now face a grim choice between Taliban gun rule and a bloody army operation. Yusufzai said Swat residents initially backed the introduction of sharia law but had grown disillusioned with the cleric Muhammad.

“There is a view that the Taliban have another agenda. They want power. This is the talk of the town,” he said.

Yusufzai said he backed an army operation but feared its human cost. “There will be great bloodshed. Billions of rupees of damage will be done.”

Holbrooke Backs Embattled Pakistan Government

Holbrooke Backs Embattled Pakistan Government

Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Pakistan Testifies to U.S. Support for Ali Zardari

By Spencer Ackerman 5/5/09 4:12 PM
Richard Holbrooke (Flickr: Sanjay Parekh)

Richard Holbrooke (Flickr: Sanjay Parekh)

In his first appearance before Congress as the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke made a forceful, unequivocal and wide-ranging endorsement of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Tuesday afternoon, intended to dispel rumors that the administration was backing away from the current elected government of Pakistan.

“Our goal must be unambiguously to support and stabilize a democratic Pakistan headed by its elected president, Asif Ali Zardari,” Holbrooke said, opting to dodge several questions relevant to concerns over the viability of Zardari’s ability to govern.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Over the past several weeks, the administration has established ties to Zardari’s chief political rival, Nawaz Sharif, and it has been reported that the chief of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, has told legislators in private that the recent Taliban advances from the Swat Valley into the Buner district near Islamabad challenge the viability of the government.

Holbrooke confirmed U.S. outreach to Sharif but compared it to the ties the U.S. maintains with David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, and said that President Barack Obama’s personal invitation to Zardari to attend trilateral talks in Washington with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that formally begin tomorrow proves the administration’s commitment to his government.

“We should not allow comments about how serious the issue is to be confused with predictions of collapse,” Holbrooke said. “Pakistan is not a failed state. It is a state under extreme test.” He averred that the United States is “strongly opposed” to a military coup and “have made that clear to all parties, in public and privately.”

Tomorrow, both Zardari and Karzai will travel to the State Department and then the White House for both individual talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama and joint trilateral sessions, which Holbrooke called “historic.” He said that the interior ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan have never before met, despite U.S. insistence that Pakistan and Afghanistan have a joint security threat from al-Qaeda and the Taliban that has implications for U.S. national security.

Holbrooke, who occasionally appeared impatient with the legislators, made a forceful case that the United States had “vital” national interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan that justified a broad long-term commitment to both countries. “The goal has to be to defeat al-Qaeda,” he said in response to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.). “We can’t let them take over an even larger [amount of] terrain.” Asked for an exit strategy by Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who warned that Congress may only give the administration a grace period of a year to demonstrate progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan before growing weary of the war effort, Holbrooke replied, “There is a difference between an exit strategy and an exit timetable.”

Several members of Congress pressed for linking aid to Pakistan, which is the subject of a recently introduced funding bill written by the committee’s chair, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), to U.S. access to the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, who ran a nuclear proliferation ring before the Pakistanis placed him under house arrest in 2004. Holbrooke rejected the linkage as unproductive but said he “found it inexplicable that A.Q. Khan was not immediately made available to the U.S.” The Pakistanis have forbidden U.S. officials from interviewing Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program and a national hero, despite frequent U.S. protests.

Holbrooke refused to speak in open session about several issues that have caused concern in the United States during the Taliban’s march this year from the Pakistani tribal areas to nearly 60 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss the Pakistani military’s control over its nuclear-weapons arsenal; the Pakistani intelligence service’s ties to elements of the Taliban; and efforts to stop money flowing from Saudi Arabia into radical madrassas. He disclosed that the Obama administration does not currently have a strategy for curbing foreign money from reaching the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan but said the development of one was a “top priority” for the administration. (Defense Secretary Bob Gates is currently in Saudi Arabia seeking to solicit Saudi influence against the Taliban in Pakistan.)

Holbrooke also appeared to soften the administration’s opposition to Berman’s Pakistan bill — its Senate counterpart, introduced yesterday by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), authorizes $7.5 billion in aid to the Pakistani government and civil society over five years — expressed last week by Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, who told the House Armed Services Committee that the bill was “too inflexible.” Holbrooke said that while the administration still had concerns over “some privisos” in the bill that conditioned funding upon a certification from the administration that Pakistan was unambiguously combatting al-Qaeda and Taliban efforts in Pakistan, it represented a “big improvement” over previous efforts that only gave aid to the Pakistani military. “We hope that it will be passed,” he said, offering to meet with lawmakers to resolve administration concerns about the bill’s conditions.

And while Holbrooke said that “we have long felt that our friends in Pakistan could put more resources into the struggle in the west” against the insurgency instead of remaining focused on Pakistan’s traditional threat from India on its eastern border, he suggested that the “momentum” may be shifting away from the Taliban beginning with Monday’s military push to drive the Taliban out of the Swat valley. “Until yesterday, the momentum did not appear be to be in the right hands,” Holbrooke said. “The army has now begun a major offensive… we will have to wait and see how this goes.”

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