pakconnects

How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect

2012-02-24T22:53:00.000+05:00

It is important to note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. More information at the end of this post.
On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.
Here's how you can do that:
1. Sign into your Google account.

2. Go to https://www.google.com/history

3. Click "remove all Web History."

4. Click "ok."

Note that removing your Web History also pauses it. Web History will remain off until you enable it again.
[UPDATE 2/22/2012]: Note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be sought by law enforcement.
With Web History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented. If you want to do more to reduce the records Google keeps, the advice in EFF's Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy white paper remains relevant.
If you have several Google accounts, you will need to do this for each of them.

Pakistani Families of slaughtered children to sue the CIA

2012-02-24T22:07:00.001+05:00

President Barack Obama condoned America’s drone program last month, dismissing allegations that it's caused more harm than good. In Pakistan, the families of civilians killed in these strikes are pleading with the UN to tell America otherwise.
Reprieve, a legal action charity based out of London, UK, has delivered a complaint to the United Nations on behalf of the families of slain Pakistani civilians. More than a dozen families in Pakistan have appealed to Reprieve for assistance after their own pleas for the abandonment of drone use in their country have been ignored by the US. Now with the aid of the British-based organization, they hope that the UN will intervene and put an end to American drone attacks.
Drone strikes have taken the lives of as many as 775 civilians so far, the authors of a Bureau of Investigative Journalism warned in a report made last year. American officials insist, however, that the strikes are necessary to continue fighting the War on Terror.

Last month, the topic of drones was addressed to President Obama during a virtual town hall meeting that was broadcast live over the Internet on YouTube. Defending the program, Obama said that unmanned aircraft strikes were imperative if the US wanted to continue tackling insurgency without sending any more troops on the ground.
"For us to be able to get them in another way would involve probably a lot more intrusive military action than the ones we're already engaging in,” insisted Obama.
The president would also use the engagement to dispute claims that the death toll of the innocent was not substantial enough to stop the US from continuing its drone program. Drones had "not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” said the president, who added that it’s "important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.”
Pakistanis, on the other hand, say that the regular air raids that have leveled their land and killed their families are too intrusive as it is, and disagree that Americans are controlling those craft to the best of their ability. In the statement sent to the UN by Reprieve this week, the group demands for intervention, saying that the strikes violate an established treaty that guarantees the protection of their rights.
What’s more, says Reprieve, is that the US penned and ratified that treaty themselves. It’s the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights(ICCPR), and Pakistanis say that the US has violated it by killing their loved ones.

Reprieve charges that under the ICCPR, civilians should be protected from these strikes that continue to take the lives of innocents. The group cites six provisions in particular that they say the US has violated with drone attacks, which includes items such as “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life,” “No one shall be subjected to torture” and “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.”
“If the US is not prepared to face up to the reality of the suffering the strikes are causing, then the UN must step in,” insists Shahzad Akbar to Reprieve. “The international community can no longer afford to ignore the human rights catastrophe which is taking place in North West Pakistan in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.”
“If President Obama really believes the drone strikes have ‘pinpoint’ accuracy, it has to be asked where the deaths of kids like Maezol Khan’s eight-year-old son fit into the CIA’s plan,” continues Akbar, who is a human rights lawyer for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which is also representing the families backed by Reprieve.
Khan’s son was indeed only eight when he was killed by a missile fragment while sleeping in Pakistan. The father of the deceased boy is among those appealing to Reprieve, along with the families of an eight-grade student rendered blind and deaf by a drone strike and the son of a man executed while attending a peaceful town hall meeting.
In all, 18 Pakistanis have signed their name to the complaint, which was this week sent to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council.
“There is no plausible legal basis for the attacks,” reads the complaint, “There is no declared war between the United States and Pakistan. Pakistan has not – and, indeed, could not – given legally effective ‘consent’ for the killing of its own innocent civilians by American drones. The US has taken no steps to claim self-defense, and the facts would anyway not fit such an argument.”
Reprieve adds that the drone casualties are not isolated, “but are a part of a consistent pattern of strikes by the United States.”
“Because innocent citizens of Pakistan continue to be killed in the illegal CIA drone war in Pakistan, it is respectfully suggested that this application be considered with the utmost urgency,” adds the group.
The UN has not publically responded to Reprieve’s complaint yet. In recent weeks, however, the United States has acknowledged that, under its new Department of Defense budget, the US is looking to spend $23 billion over the next few years on expanding its drone program.

US bomb girls school in afghanistan, killing 11

2012-02-23T18:17:00.000+05:00

US-led airstrikes have hit a religious girls school in eastern Afghanistan, leaving at least 10 students and the school’s janitor injured and dead.
Afghan officials told Press TV that US-led NATO helicopters carried out the aerial attacks against the girls religious school in Nangarhar province on Wednesday as the students were studying.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed the attack, saying it has launched an investigation into the air raids.

On February 8, US-led airstrikes killed eight Afghan children in the Nejrab district of Kapisa province as the victims were herding sheep in heavy snow.
Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives in US-led airstrikes and ground operations in various parts of Afghanistan, with Afghans becoming more and more outraged over the seemingly endless number of deadly assaults.
Eleven people including 8 girl students got martyred in the US invaders airstrikes on a school in Shiwa district of Nangarhar province on Wednesday morning at about 8:30 a.m. local time, Zabihullah Mujahid a Mujahideen official spokesman said.

Worst military disaster for US in Afghanistan, 12 Protester Killed so far

2012-02-23T17:22:00.003+05:00

Defense and military analyst Syed Zaid Hamid on America's current plight in Afghanistan.One person has been killed in the third day of protests in Afghanistan in condemnation of the burning of the Holy Qur'an by US-led forces in the war-ravaged country.The latest death in Laghman brings to 12 the number of people killed in protests over the past 48 hours.The protesters strongly condemned the blasphemy of the Holy Quran demanding to put the violators to death, while chanting anti-American slogans wanting an immediate pullout of American invaders and all its allies.

Afghan protesters set compound ablaze

Death to America Protest against burning Quran at Bagram Afghanistan

Five dead in Afghan protest over Quran burning(Dawnnews)

U.S. Pakistan relations pass point of no return

2012-02-22T18:56:00.000+05:00

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis protest continued assassinations and airstrikes on Pakistan soil that have left thousands of innocent bystanders dead.

Massive rallies were held today in Pakistan in response to over 2,000 soldiers being killed by NATO forces and constant drone strikes that leave innocent woman and children dead. The protests also denounced the U.S. assassination attacks by U.S. military forces on Pakistani soil.

The sparking point for the rallies began when a U.S airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November. Since the U.S. has repeatedly ignored requests to end or coordinate them with Pakistani intelligence in order to prevent so-called collateral damage.

While it may be hard to imagine the anger of Pakistani citizens given all of the one-sided reporting and anti-terrorism propaganda reported in the corporate media, anyone who objectively questions the morality situation can clearly understand there anger. As reported some time ago, 1 in 7 U.S. drone strikes worldwide kills a child. In Pakistan those statistics are worse, were in 1 in 3 drone strikes kills a child. See this: Report: 1 in 3 Pakistan Drone Strikes and 1in 7 of all CIA Drone Strikes Kills a Child.

Furthermore, just imagine Russia or Iranian special forces conducting raids every day to assassinate people here inside the U.S. Also imagine, when every a target is assassinated any innocent bystander, be they a man, women or child, who is unfortunate to be in the surrounding area is also killed as part of collateral damage.

Press TV: It does seem that anti-US sentiment is growing increasingly in Pakistan as Washington refuses to stop its drone attacks. Can, however, action on the popular front force the Pakistani government to make a more demanding position against the drone strikes?

Ahmad: There is no doubt Pakistani people are really getting to a point of no return about the US Pakistan relations and the real issue that Pakistani people are facing is indifference by the leadership.

There was a rally of about a thousand people in Islamabad which had a cluster of leaders but hardly one or two of them could be elected from a constituency in a general election which is fair.

So the problem is that all these people who are taking credit or trying to cultivate on this anti-US sentiment do not have much credibility in the people. The ones who have actually, are not in the parliament.

That is the dilemma of Pakistan, and I am talking about the newly emerging opposition which is led by Imran Khan, that is not really the one which has some presence in the parliament but they have to mobilize people and he has done that as well earlier.

The problem in an overall sense in Pakistan is that there are multiple centers apart and everyone is looking after its own particular spheres interests. Pakistan’s overall ownership is not with any leadership or institution.

For example, there comes a point when military is being hurt by the American actions, then definitely there are going to be stronger actions. If politicians are really facing some music, they will become kind of an opposition and similarly the civil society or the media. But there is no general consensus as to how to deal with Pak-US relations in the next say decade or so.

Press TV: We know that the relations between the two sides did become tense after those soldiers were killed in the US drone strikes; however, after that phase, we have seen the drone attacks continue and some observers were telling us that this is coming where the tacit, support or acceptance of the Pakistan authorities.

So basically how bad are relations between Islamabad and Washington after the US air strike in November? When you say that there are different versions of policies in the Pakistani government, are you saying that there is no unified policy in terms of relations with the United States?

Ahmad: There is no doubt about that, there is no unified policy; there is no doubt about that that there is some kind of tacit understanding between the Pakistan’s existing political elite which is led by Mr. Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari, and other parties are really not taken into confidence or they are still siding with the US.

With the hope that in case there is a situation of a coup or something, Washington’s nod goes with the political elite that are on the fringes.

Only one or two political parties which are really serious are taking it up as an issue.

Now coming to the question of how Pakistan-US relations should be seen given this kind of understanding, after the attack that killed 24 Pakistani military men, Pakistan’s relations have gone to the lowest ebb, and I keep defining lowest ebb since Osama was killed in Abbottabad. I said the same and others said the same and then we had other incidents which really proved that, no, we have yet to explore the rock bottom and probably this is the rock bottom.

Pakistani intelligentsia, Pakistani media and of course Pakistani parliamentarian committees are really working on how should Pakistan set the agenda for the relations ahead. And the same is happening back there in Washington.

There was a resolution that has been tabled in front of Congress about the situation in Balochistan which really has a larger canvas in which, on the one hand, Balochistan is bordering Iran on the other Afghanistan, and the situation that you see in Afghanistan and relations, all the animosity with Iran, really puts Balochistan in a very different context.

So the US also is pondering about Pakistan-US relations in its own way by imposing sanctions, by trying to create and fuel all these organizations which are working for a kind of an agenda which is not theirs.

But at best, I would say that the Pakistani government is to be blamed for ignoring Balochistan despite its strategic significance, despite the Middle East resources and despite being the region making 40 percent of Pakistan’s geographical landmass.

So on the overall conclusion, I would simply say that Pakistan-US relations are not going to improve just because of one decision or the other. NATO supplies are not going to be restored very soon in a real sense of the word.

alexanderhiggins.com

Death to America Protest against burning Quran at Bagram Afghanistan

2012-02-21T22:48:00.014+05:00

Protesters firing petrol bombs and slingshots besieged the largest US-run military base in Afghanistan yesterday, Mohammad nabi, 45, introducing himself as a worker on the military base, said: “night shift colleagues informed us that us soldiers burnt four copies of the Quran on the airfield.”The enraged crowd shouted “Death to Americans”, "victory of islam" and “Death to infidels” as guards at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul, responded by firing rubber bullets from a watchtower, said an AFP photographer, who was hit in the neck. Hundreds of other people protested in the Afghan capital as security forces dispatched reinforcements in a bid to stop the demonstrations from spiraling out of control in the fiercely conservative Islamic country.

Zahed said five Afghans working at the pit told him that the Qurans were in the garbage that two soldiers with the U.S.-led coalition transported to the pit in a truck late Monday night. When they realized the books were in the trash, the laborers worked to recover them, he said.“Some were all burned. Some were half-burned,” Zahed said.“The laborers there showed me how their fingers were burned when they took the Qurans out of the fire,” he said.

“They should leave Afghanistan rather than disrespecting our religion, our faith,” Hakim said. “They have to leave and if next time they disrespect our religion, we will defend our holy Quran, religion and faith until the last drop of blood has left in our body.”

Five dead in Afghan protest over Quran burning(Dawnnews)

The BLA will die a natural death the day the CIA leaves Afghanistan

2012-02-21T10:45:00.000+05:00

Baluchistan is 42 % of Pakistan territory. Its population is only 4% of Pakistan, about 8 million. Out of this, nearly 5 million are Pashtuns, Brahwis, Makranis, Punjabis and Sindhi Pakistani Muslims who have no problem at all. Within the Baluch Muslims Pakistanis, 90% are with Pakistan alhamdolillah. The separatists are just a few thousand misguided men from only 4 districts out of 28 districts of the province.

Washington refuses to designate BLA as a terror group. Its links to multiple intelligence agencies in Afghanistan was exposed in 2009 when a UN worker in Quetta who was kidnapped by the BLA turned out to be a US citizen.

A detailed probe by Pakistani officials and US diplomats in Islamabad and Kabul found the kidnapping remote-controlled from a house in the Afghan capital not far from President Karzai’s residence. Since then, the US intelligence has moved the BLA assets to Europe.

Even now,Pakistan choke the BLA from the Pakistani side but it continues to get money, fuel and weapons from the Afghan side. The BLA terrorists have a support network in Afghanistan that operates with the CIA’s knowledge and is sustained by Indians and anti-Pakistan elements in the Afghan intelligence, which, again, is an offshoot of the CIA.BLA kill Pakistanis in streets and market places. They sprang up after Americans landed in Afghanistan.First it was the USSR and India. Now it is the US and India.

Baluchistan is not going anywhere. The enemies and the traitors within cannot break away Baluchistan. There is a deliberate information war by the likes of SAFMA to create the hype to give this perception that Pakistan is breaking up. Stay firm and stay united. There is no power on earth which can undo Pakistan, InshAllah.

Hyberyar Marri, Brahmadagh Bugti and Attaullah Mengal are taking help from US and India to wage a war against Pakistan but the reality is even within Bugti and marri tribe, there are thousands of youth who are great patriot Muslims and love Pakistan.

Nawab Akbar Bugti had exiled his own tribe of Raheja, Kalpar and Messori sub-tribes into Multan and Dera Ghazi Khan for 15 years and had taken over their lands in Sui and Dera Bugti. He persecuted his own Baluch people and killed his own family members for demanding rights.

This is where Pakistan army intervened in 2004 to protect Baluch Bugti tribe from the crimes of Akbar Bugti in 2004 and helped the Kalpar, Messori and Raheja Bugtis to come back to their native lands. Upon this Akbar Bugti started a war against Pakistan and was then chased out into the hills where he committed suicide. Yes, Akbar Bugti committed suicide and he was NOT killed by the army.
Today, the MNA from dera Bugti is Mir Ahmadan Bugti, a patriotic Raheja Baluch, a first cousin of Akbar Bugti, who was exiled with over a hundred thousand Baluchs by Akbar Bugti. Army brought him back. He is the MNA and has been elected by the entire Bugti tribe and he defends Pakistan against terrorists of Brahmadagh Bugti. You hear the interviews of Brahmadagh in this SAFMA controlled media but you never hear the voice of Mir Ahmadan Bugti, the real patriotic Bugti Baluch Muslim and Pakistani! This is how media manipulates the truth. Go and ask Mir Ahmadan Bugti about the truth of Bugtis being against Pakistan and he will show you how proud Bugtis stand with Pakistan!

There is no government in Pakistan today, even in Islamabad and the country is in a state of war being invaded by enemies from all sides. If Pakistan army does not stop the TTP and the BLA terrorists, the country would be destroyed by now. That is why you see all the fake propaganda against the missing persons and army atrocities against the Baluch. In reality, FC and Pak army are defending Pakistan against Indian backed insurgencies where even the CIA is involved. There is a massive infighting between the BRA and BLA also where both groups are killing each other for weapons, money and turf. They kill each other and then blame army for the murders. Many have gone to Afghanistan for training and their families register them as missing persons. This is all part of the war against Pak army and the media is fuelling this war.

Americans want to take over Gawader. The recent resolution in US congress has encouraged the exiled separatists that they can use the CIA and India for a Libyan styled invasion. Never InshAllah! As long as Pakistan can block the NATO supplies, US do not have the resources and the weapons to make a landing at Gawader. If we release the supplies, then the Americans can make such a plan but even then, there will be fighting but Baluchistan can never be separated from Pakistan, InshAllah.

The situation in Baluchistan is NOT like of East Pakistan. The few thousand insurgents can blow up few pipelines and kills a few Muslims and soldiers but they can never break Pakistan which is under the shadow of Rasul Allah (sm).
Even today, from Governor to Chief Minister to ministers, all are Baluch in the government. The President of Pakistan is also a Baluch. Farooq Leghari was a Baluch also. Mazari was the prime Minister and was a Baluch also. Jamali was the PM and was a Baluch also. Baluchis Pakistanis Muslims from Baluchistan have reached the highest offices of this country. If Baluchistan have not received developments, they are responsible, not the army or the ISI. The whole country is suffering today not just Baluchistan.

We invite all Baluch youth to join hands with us in Takmeel e Pakistan to bring in the system of Khilafate Rashida so that all zulm can be eliminated and due rights can be shared within Muslims. But we will fight against all those who want to break the Pakistan of Rasul Allah (sm). By Allah, we will! This Pakistan is here to stay, alhamdolillah. The BLA will die a natural death the day the CIA leaves Afghanistan. Enemies can go to hell !

Zaid Hamid

Pakistan-Iran-Afghan talks 'a message of defiance' to the US,Pakistan Major Policy Shift

2012-02-20T10:42:00.001+05:00

With trilateral talks between the leaders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan underway in Islamabad, one question arising is what each side has to gain. Political analyst Ahmed Quraishi says Pakistan is sending a message of defiance to the US.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Pakistan for a trilateral summit aimed at addressing how Islamabad should facilitate negotiations between Afghanistan and the Taliban. Many see the move as a defiance of US will by two traditional American allies -- Pakistan and Afghanistan -- who are now seeking to include Iran, a stated adversary of the US, into the negotiation process.

Ahmed Quraishi, the President of the Paknationalists Forum, believes each side is pursuing its own goals.

"Washington considers Iran as some sort of an enemy," he told RT, "and Pakistan is sending a message that Pakistani policy -- for quite some time, actually -- would be independent and that Pakistan would pursue its interest even if those interests do not fall within the larger, strategic plan of the United States in the region."

Quraishi noted that Iran timed the visit specifically because of rising fears brought on by war rhetoric coming from the US and its allies. He noted that Iran's principal aim was to ensure that it would not become encircled by Washington's allies.

"They're worried about the rhetoric and drums of war -- the psychological warfare, and I think they're very keen to ensure that at least two neighbors -- Pakistan and Turkey -- will not join the pro-US encirclement of Iran," Quraishi noted. "Pakistan continues to be the weak link because there are people within the Pakistani power structure who would probably support US use of Pakistani territory against Iran."

As for Afghanistan, Quraishi said the country's leadership isn't keen on pursuing the American method of fighting the Taliban, and is now willing to include the Taliban in the national power structure. That, according to Quraishi, is Karzai's main goal in Pakistan

"He's meeting with key Pakistani political and religious leaders, Islamic leaders who have maintained traditionally very close ties to the Afghan Taliban and other Afghan resistance groups," he remarked. This move, Quraishi says, is a major shift for Afghanistan, as it had previously shunned those groups.

The analyst said he does not believe President Karzai is really thinking of fighting the Afghan Taliban, but that he is looking toward integrating them and opening his own direct talks. "And I think everybody is," he added.

Pakistan Navy: Ready To Face Challenges

2012-02-20T00:05:00.000+05:00

Akula II Russian nuclear Submarine

“The persistence of unresolved regional conflicts makes nuclear weapons a powerful lure in many parts of the world—to intimidate neighbours and to serve as a deterrent to great powers who might otherwise intervene in a regional conflict.” Henry Kissinger*
Whenever any country acquires some ambitious role, be its own or playing proxy to some bigger power like the USA; it changes the dynamics of the region. Till the late 70s, India solely focused on Pakistan but thereafter it was prompted up by the USA to counter China. Whatever India acquires under this pretext would be free to use against Pakistan. To meet the threats, Pakistan is acquiring what it needs for an effective deterrence.
In May 1998, India exploded nukes thereafter, India’s language and tone changed immediately. Vajpai began to threaten Pakistan, some of the words still echo in our ears but within days, Pakistan demonstrated her nuclear capability that was superior to that of India. It brought a gloom over the Indian sky.
This initiative brought US sanctions against Pakistan that she faced with determination to overcome the difficult times.
One of the fundamental objectives of the US to move into Afghanistan was to isolate Pakistan from China and take out her nukes. To that end all sorts of pressures have been applied on Pakistan to destabilise her in every possible way. This has been no easy time; every day brought new threats that Pakistan had to face. Internally through media manipulation and political pawns, the public perception against Pakistan Army took new dimensions. Here some mismanagement by the army leadership cannot be ruled out. This perception became very dangerous; a gulf had been created between the public and the army that had to be bridged. To overcome this perception, army leadership went very cautious and it did succeed.
Then post 9/11 America showed a major tilt towards India, declared her as a strategic ally and treaties signed to that effect. Pakistan was declared as the frontline state to counter so called terrorism where Pakistan was made to suffer heavily through her economy, human loses and political destabilisation. India was not only given lucrative contracts but also was provided room to establish herself in Afghanistan.
During this period, besides civilian nuclear technology, India was also offered massive defence hardware including fighter aircraft and strategic air transporters. Taking advantage of the situation, India extended its reach and dominance even beyond the region.
Recently, Obama announced the new US policy to contain China that resulted in a shift from Atlantic to Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean known as the Pacific Club. This club has the US, UK, Australia and other NATO members where India has also been given a role. Only time would tell if India remains a committed member of the Pacific Club but through this club it will acquire what it needs to dominate the region and work on its expansionist agenda – Hindutwa Manifesto.
India on the pretext of Chinese threat core philosophy of dominating the Indian Ocean to dominate the world is spending on her military muscle that is very threatening for the region, more so for Pakistan with which it has open and declared hostility. Under this doctrine, the major shift has come in her naval fleet where it has acquired nuclear submarines to extend its reach and dominance not only over the region but to some extent in the global context.
Pakistan Navy has never been adverse to the situation or the new developments taking place, she kept augmenting her fleet through up-gradations and modifications. Some are known but most are kept as operational secrets.
The development of nuclear weapons and its delivery systems were effectively integrated within the Pakistan Navy; even without nuclear submarines, Pakistan Navy has developed sub-surface nuclear strike capability that can engage targets both on sea and land. In spite of this, to maintain an edge, the need to acquire nuclear submarines cannot be ruled out for its obvious strategic advantages.
In the 60s, India had only one aircraft carrier, Vikrant an old vintage that could not pose any threat to Pakistan both in 1965 and 1971 wars; instead it was a liability for the Indian navy to hide and protect it from a smaller but more aggressive Pakistan Navy. In 1965 war, Pakistan Navy was the only navy in the region that had submarine capability that was utilised effectively. In 1971 war though India had acquired Russian Foxtrot class submarines but did not play any role of significance. Now with the new developments, Pakistan Navy is making all efforts to maintain her over half a century dominance of the sea.
After the collapse of Soviet Union, it was an opportunity for India that it acquired INS Vikramaditya that is expected sometimes this year. Indian navy that has INS Viraat is decommissioning it after the induction of the first domestically built Vikrant class aircraft carrier.
Besides acquisition of the aircraft carriers, Indian navy has also acquired nuclear powered submarines; the first of Akula II Class has already been handed over to the Indian Navy to augment its fleet of 14 diesel electric powered submarines (4 Shishumar and 10 Sindhugosh class submarines) and a dozen midgets known as chariots.
Indian navy as mentioned by Commander M Azam Khan in his article S-2 Options For Pakistan launched INS Arihant SSBN, ATV based on Kilo class Russian submarines. An indigenous effort that is currently undergoing trials is said to be facing some problems with its reactor.
Nuclear submarines have glaring advantages over conventional diesel electric powered that are as follows:

A nuclear submarine is a strategic weapon that gives a navy the unique strategic advantage over its adversary to attain strategic goals.
The nuclear subs are truly independent AND CAN OPERATE UNDERWATER FOR MONTHS UNLIKE CONVENTIONAL SUBMARINES THAT HAVE LIMITED ENDURANCE BELOW SURFACE.
The nuclear reactor allows it to operate at high speeds for SUSTAINED PERIODS

Akula class nuclear submarine is officially deemed Project 971 Shuka B designed as follow-up to Victor and Sierra classes to set a new standard in stealth operations and serve as the vanguard of the modern Russian Navy. Some analysts opine that Akula is superior to American Los Angeles class (that was US Navy’s hallmark) but not being disclosed by the Russians.
Like the shark, this Russian machine is a deadly killer that needs very little reaction time. According to the available information, it attains underwater speed of 35 knots or more and can sit at 500 meters below water.
Its weapons configuration is formidable that it can singularly take on multiple targets without being located. It carries a mix of nuclear and conventional weapons. But her weaponry is only meant for sea warfare and not hitting the land targets. If modified, it can also launch nuclear attack on land based targets.

Agosta 90-B PNS Saad

Pakistan that has a total compliment of 7 submarines comprising of Agosta 70s and 90s, would not only be outnumbered but also put on the back foot. In conventional weaponry, French and Germans are leading builders of submarines; by opting for French Agostas, Pakistan had maintained her parity over others in the region that is now threatened with the induction of Akula II nuclear submarines.
A diesel-electrical submarine has to surface to periscope depth to recharge the batteries using the diesel engine, leading to increased risk of detection. The MESMA air-independent propulsion system, being fitted to the Agosta 90B submarines for Pakistan, allows the submarine to remain submerged three times longer.
The MESMA system consists essentially of a turbine receiving high-pressure steam from a combustion chamber, burning a gaseous mixture of ethanol and liquid oxygen. The Agosta 90B’s dimensions remain the same in all other respects, except that the length increases from 67m to 76m and submerged displacement from 1,760t to 2,050t.
In future conflicts, it is very likely that even Israel would also conduct a covert operation in tandem with India to take out Pakistan’s nukes; an opportunity that it has always been looking for in the past.
Therefore the options of the bigger powers become the compulsion of the smaller countries that find themselves in catch 22 situation but with calculated measures, such adverse situations can always be averted. Pakistan defence forces have such a history to back them up.

By Raja G Mujtaba VT

Despite Ban, Hafiz Saeed, Maulana Ludhianwi Reach Rawalpindi For Difa-E-Pakistan Rally

2012-02-19T21:31:00.001+05:00

Despite being banned in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) by the administration, Jamaatud Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Ahle Sunnat wal Jamat (ASWJ) chief Maulana Ahmed Ludhianwi reached Rawalpindi on Sunday to participate in the Sarbarahi Ijlas.

The media coordinator of the Sarbarahi Ijlas, Ubaidullah Usmani, confirmed to The Express Tribunethat the rally had started in the adjacent city of Islamabad.

Other party leaders including Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-S) chief Maulana Samiul Haq, JUI-Functional chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Jamaat e Islami (JI) Secretary General Liaqat Baloch also reached Rawalpindi to participate in the rally.

Haq, while addressing the rally, rebuked the Pakistan Army and said that the Army had claimed that it will bring down the American drones, but still have not done anything yet, thus compelling the DPC to stand up for the cause.

The party leader also took up Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s case during his address and said that their “innocent sister” is being “shamefully treated”.

The leaders, in a meeting today, will also review the arrangements and the strategy for the sit-in on Monday in Islamabad.

They will also look into the matter of the ban on three Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) leaders in Islamabad for seven days, confirmed the ASWJ spokesman, and added that the meeting will be chaired by DPC chairman Samiul Haq.

The spokesperson said that the DPC will formally announce at 2pm today the change in venue of the sit-in. It was earlier supposed to be in front of the parliament, but now it will be held at the Aabpara Chowk in Islamabad, he said.

DPC asks Defence Minister to resign

Difa-e-Pakistan Council has demanded the immediate resignation of Defence Minister for resumption of supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan on US pressure. DPC's Maulana Sami-ul-Haq presided the meeting of the Council in Rawalpindi to decide the strategy for the sit-in at Islamabad tomorrow to protest the resumption of NATO supplies. Addressing a news conference Maulan Sami-ul-Haq condemned the ban slapped on the netry of the Council's leaders Hafiz Saeed Ahmad and Maulana Ahmad Ludhnianvi. The ban would be challenged in the court tomorrow, he said.

Switzerland Main Balochistan Ke Aazadi Kay Elan Ke Teyareyan Ho Rahi Hen

2012-02-17T21:59:00.002+05:00

CIA's nefarious activites in Balochistan have become now quite intolerable creation of "Greater Balochistan".

America again stabs Pakistan in the back

Crossing the limits that apply to the international relations barring all states from interfering in the internal matters of other sovereign states, the US once again stabbed its terror-war ‘ally’ in the back by introducing a resolution in Congress calling for ‘independence’ of Balochistan.
A week after he chaired a Congressional committee’s hearing on Balochistan, US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher tabled a resolution in the US Congress, calling for giving the Baloch ‘right of self-determination’ and their ‘own sovereign country’, raising Pakistan’s ire as the authorities resented the move. A private TV channel quoted Foreign Office spokesperson as saying that the move was an irresponsible act, violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and violation of international laws.
Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan in the south-west, bordering Iran and Afghanistan. The security forces of the country and the provincial law enforcement agencies have been fighting insurgents, who are duly supported by India, US, Afghanistan and even Israel. Pakistan has repeatedly raised the issue with all these countries, except Israel with which the country has no diplomatic relations, but the flow of men and material from Afghanistan has been continuing.
UN charter binds all the states to fully respect other sovereign countries’ sovereignty and integrity – but the US has a long history of flouting all laws and treaties of international engagement.
The House Concurrent Resolution in the US House of Representatives has been co-sponsored by Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King. It highlights the US perspective of the history of Balochistan, and says that revolts in 1958, 1973 and 2005 “indicate continued popular discontent against rule by Islamabad, and the plunder of its vast natural wealth while Balochistan remains the poorest province in Pakistan.”
Bringing Israeli interest more fully into the picture, the text says that there is also an insurgency underway in Sistan-Balochistan, which is being repressed by Iran. Sistan-Balochistan is the Iranian province bordering Pakistani Balochistan and both these cross-border territories share large part of their cultural and historical traditions.
Rohrabacher’s resolution says that it is the US policy to “oppose aggression and the violation of human rights inherent in the subjugation of national groups as currently being shown in Iran and Pakistan against the aspirations of the Baloch people.”
The resolution then involves Afghanistan, saying the people of Balochistan that are “currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country and they should be afforded the opportunity to choose their own status among the community of nations, living in peace and harmony, without external coercion.”
Afghanistan was invaded by US-led western forces at the pretext of fighting global militancy following September 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Centre. The country is still under effective occupation of the US and her allies.
In a statement from his office, Rohrabacher, who is also the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said, “The Balochi, like other nations of people, have an innate right to self-determination. The political and ethnic discrimination they suffer is tragic and made more so because America is financing and selling arms to their oppressors in Islamabad.”
The press release further added that Balochistan is “rich in natural resources but has been subjugated and exploited by Punjabi and Pashtun elites in Islamabad, leaving Balochistan the country’s poorest province.”
Rohrabacher is the same Congressman who had earlier this week introduced a bill calling for awarding the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award, to Dr Shakil Afridi for ‘revealing the location of Osama bin Laden, directly aiding in the SEAL team operation to kill the former al-Qaeda leader’. Rohrabacher had previously introduced a bill in Congress seeking US citizenship for Dr Afridi.
Media reports had earlier said that Dr Afridi, who is now in the hold Pakistan’s security agencies, had organised a polio vaccination campaign in the city for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in order to collect DNA sample to prove that the al-Qaeda leader was present in the Abbottabad compound.
The US clandestine raid in Abbottabad and following incidents including the Nato raid on Pakistani border posts in Mohmand in November last year that martyred over two dozen Pakistani soldiers – plunged Pak-US relations to their lowest ebb. Pakistan responded by stopping the passage of Nato supplies through the country and boycotted an international conference on Afghanistan. It also asked the US to evacuate two airbases in Balochistan that were reportedly being used for carrying out drone attacks in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan.
The US overtures on Balochistan were previously being taken in Islamabad as mere pressure tactics to coerce Pakistan back into the fold, but Friday’s resolution is surely something that would lead to more sharp and concrete reaction from Pakistan.
Interestingly Islamabad was a venue of a three-way Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan summit on the sidelines of which bilateral talks between Islamabad and Kabul were also held on Thursday and Friday. President Karzai made a torrid attack on the Pakistani leadership in a face-to-face meeting with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Thursday, demanding that Islamabad produce top Taliban leaders to negotiate with him, forcing Gilani to halt the meeting where the country’s military and intelligence brass was also present.
The arrogance of Karzai, who considered a puppet of the US by his own countrymen, earned him a sharp rebuke from Pakistani foreign minister on Friday who said: “We are willing to look at anything. But if you have unrealistic, almost ridiculous expectations, then you don’t have sort of common ground to begin with”. This made clear enough that the Afghan delegation is returning with gaining little form this important bilateral engagement.

thenation

US involvement in Balochistan

High-level talks between the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be started on May 3, 2011. Earlier, the talks have been postponed due to the arrest of CIA’s Spy Raymond Davis in a murder case of two Pakistani in January this year. However, Raymond Davis case left two conspicuous impacts on U.S. Pakistan ties. Firstly, it has increased the strain in Pakistan and U.S. relationship and secondly also uncovered the CIA nefarious activities in Balochistan and FATA (Pakistan). The tension between two supreme intelligence agencies (ISI & CIA) further aggravated when American top political and military brass instead paying tribute to Pakistani security forces in Global War on Terror (GWOT) started maligning ISI for providing shelter to Haqqani Group of Taliban. In this regard Moassad and RAW’s financed Western and American media also launched a deliberate campaign against Pakistani security and Intelligence agencies. Pakistan has already condemned and rejected American political and military officials’ statements regarding ISI and declared it a part of blame game against her security and Intelligence agencies.

Above all, CIA’s activities in Balochistan have become now quite intolerable which also put a big question mark over U.S. growing interest in this region. In fact, Creation of “Greater Balochistan” is the top most agenda of U.S., India and Israel collaboration. Their obvious objectives are: (1) weakening Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, (2) establishing strong hold in Central Asian Region even after culmination of war on terror, (3) denting Chinese economic interests in African and Middle East while creating impediment in full scale operation of Gawader Port and the last is looking after Indian and Israeli interests in the region. Therefore, the American establishment has started supporting pro Independent Balochistan Movement, and anti Pakistan elements in Balochistan. In this connection, CIA supported elements are using America, UK, India and Afghanistan as their platforms for organizing, planning and operational bases for execution of the plan of Independent Balochistan. Moreover, some militarily supported political lobbies of America and Uk are facilitating anti Pakistan elements (so called liberators) to carryout nefarious activities against Pakistan. On April 28, 2011 US Ambassador Cameron Munter, visited first time Balochistan and attended a Pashtun tribal Jirga in Quetta. He went there on the invitation of convener of Pakhtun Ulas Qaumi Jirga Nawab Ayaz Jogezai. The jirga brought together 16 Pashtun tribal elders from Balochistan who discussed issues of mutual interest, including economic development in the province and matters pertaining to security. American interest can be very easily judged from her ambassador statement in which he mentioned that “Balochistan is a proud province with a rich history, wonderful people, who have strong traditions. I feel very fortunate to experience this firsthand by being included in this Pashtun tribal jirga,” He further added that by meeting face to face interaction can address the difficult issues facing Balochistan , in a spirit of open communication and collaboration,”. U.S. Ambassador meeting with Pakhtune leaders in Balochistan should not be taken as simple interaction and need to be monitored persistently since such type of meetings might create rift between three segments (Pakhtune, Balochis, and Punjabi).

In the last week of April 2011 Carnegie Endowment for Intl Peace has rented its space to the Balochistan Society, of North America (BSO - NA) to hold conference on Balochistan. Alongside this development, United States Institute of Peace (USIP) has also held an event “Turmoil in Balochistan. The participants of meeting were (1) jaz Haider (a journalist from Pak),(2) Shazadi Beg (member of Department of Justice UK),(3)Selig Harrison (a contentious journalist known for his critical views on Pak),94) Marvin Weinbaum (Middle East Institute). The speakers fomented venom against Pakistan very openly as directed by their masters.

On learning about first event, our Ambassador to USA Mr Haqqani has already written an unequivocal letter to the President of the Carnegie essentially arguing that Carnegie’s renting of its space to the BSO – NA could potentially damage Pak – US relations; legitimise the activities of the BSO – NA who is an adjunct of a terrorist organisation BLA banned in Pak and urged the Carnegie Endowment to revoke its decision of renting space to the BSO – NA. Response has not yet been rendered by Carnegie Endowment and the meeting have been conducted in the manners as desired by CIA. The government of Pakistan is extremely concerned over USIP holding of an event “Turmoil in Balochistan” on an integral part of Pak, Balochistan. Since USIP is a congressionally funded body, one would presume that the event is being held under the patronage of Congress. Its implications on Pak – U.S. relations will be extremely negative. American leadership should think that it is not just academic freedom or analysis that is important, what the USIP must assess is also the impact on our bilateral relations of holding this event. It is time to help consolidate the democratically elected Government of Pakistan. It is obvious that arranging such events, which are ideologically or politically motivated, serve to undermine Pak’s solidarity and its elected govt and defiantly causes hatter against U.S. character in Pakistani masses too. American supported political leadership tried to inflame public opinion in Pakistan and Balochistan.

The think tanks in U.S. are independent and completely autonomous in their policies. Despite the efforts made by our embassy at Washington, it is less likely that USIP will change its stance. In spite of the liberty accorded to think tanks, there always remains influence of state institutions. Therefore, the possibility of U.S. state authorities’ involvement in this case cannot be ruled out. After analysing events of last decade and especially of last two years, we can conveniently derive that: - FATA has been focus of US attention for last few years in relation to GWOT. US always insist that Taliban are being provided sanctuaries / safe havens by Pak in FATA. Therefore, all the drone strikes and border violations have been taking place in this area. But mainly due to faulty U.S. policy, a worthwhile success is still not in sight in GWOT. When Gwadar Port started emerging as key project which could boost the economic activities of Pakistan, China and including Central Asia, many stake holders emerged on the scene incl Iran (Chah Bahar), UAE (Dubai) and India.

At the same time terrorist activities sped up in Balochistan and Nooristan (Iran). Nationalist elements in Balochistan have started voicing their concerns on Human Rights Violations and so called atrocities committed by Pakistani LEAs and demand for Independent Balochistan. Indian involvement in Balochistan is a major concern for Pakistan. There have been concrete evidences of Indian involvement in providing funds and weapons to dissident elements in Balochistan. The dissident Baloch leaders living in exile (Harbyar Marri in UK & Brahmdagh Bugti in Switzerland) were incited to raise their voice for Independence of Balochistan. Seeing the ripe situation, India with the connivance of CIA joined the cadres to destabilise Balochistan and ultimately Pakistan. Moreover, killing two birds with one stone, the Chinese interest in Balochistan is automatically countered if this province remains mired in unrest.

Due to convergence of interests, India and USA are pursuing this agenda jointly. To exert pressure on Pakistan to succumb to U.S. demands (for undertaking ops in North Waziristan against Hqqani and against Quetta Shura in Balochistan), the US is hosting activities of dissident Balochs in USA and Canada. Although the event (Rally “Save Balochistan Campaign” at Vancouver at Summary) could not attract a big number but remains a source of concern for Pak.

Anyhow, the trilateral talks have been rescheduled to review the progress on already set agenda of removing extremism and its related matters. The issue must be taken up in coming trilateral engagements with USA and bilateral talk with India. Thus it is suggested that Pakistan should make the American authorities realize that Balochistan is an integral part of Pakistan and discussion on an integral part of a sovereign country and is abrogation of international norms. The government should also exposed Indian involvement in Balochistan and it must be addressed in bilateral engagements at Sectary level talks b/w India and Pakistan. Government should also highlight the issue of harbouring Baloch dissidents in Pak–U.S.–Afghanistan Trilateral meeting, similarly Afghanistan should be asked to stop Indian to use her territory since, the Baloch youth is being trained and supplied with arms and ammo by Indians on Afghan soil. Afghanistan needs to provide assurance of closing these training camps and not to undertake such steps which could harm bilateral relations as well as destabilise Pakistan.American should also be asked to redefine drone attack policy and provide drone technology to Pakistan. At the same time The “Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan” package announced by Pakistan Government must be implemented in letter and in spirit to address the deprivations of Baloch people.

Lt Col Zaheerul Hassan (R)

Baloch students shout Long Live Pakistan,US is now planning to invade Baluchistan to wage the last phase of Af-Pak

US send killer-spies into Pakistan used NGO in Kashmir quake to penetrate the ISI &Eye on Nuclear Weapons

2012-02-16T22:38:00.003+05:00

The Pentagon used NGO in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to send operatives from the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC — the elite military unit thats Why 19 American NGO workers(Spies or JSOC) to be tried in Egypt, reveals a new book.
That’s the disclosure made in just-published eBook ‘The Command: ‘Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army’ written DB Grady and Marc Ambinder, saying the JSOC has proven to be the most lethal weapon in President Barack Obama’s arsenal. The JSOC’s counterterrorism units are credited with capturing or killing many of the most wanted terrorists and insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

The book comes at a time when Admiral William McRaven, who leads the JSOC, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy.
Did the US use the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to send JSOC operatives into Pakistan? That’s the bold-faced charge the authors make in ‘The Command’. They say that the US intelligence community “took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own” into Pakistan.” Using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.
“Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country’s tribal areas, largely because of the ISI’s benign neglect. In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai, training and recruiting for the Taliban, which it viewed as the more reliable partner. The political system was in chaos. The Pakistani army was focused on the threat from India and had redeployed away from the Afghanistan border region, the Durand Line, making it porous once again. A JSOC intelligence team slipped in alongside the CIA,” says the book.
The authors have detailed the JSOC team’s goals in Pakistan. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about Al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and it wanted to penetrate the ISI and target Pakistani officers who were hand-in-glove with the terrorists.

“Under a secret program code-named Screen Hunter, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorised to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare,” reveals the book.

The Obama administration finally curtailed the Screen Hunter programme after Pakistan slammed the covert US presence inside the country. Still, Pakistani outrage didn’t stop the JSOC from rotating teams of Navy Seals from DEVGRU Black Squadron, aided by Rangers and other special operations forces, and establishing a parallel terrorist-hunting capability called ‘Vigilant Harvest’.

“They operated in the border areas of Pakistan deemed off limits to Americans, and they targeted courier networks, trainers, and facilitators. (Legally, these units would operate under the authority of the CIA any time they crossed the border),” said the book.

“A senior Obama administration official said that by the middle of 2011, after tensions between the United States and the Pakistani government had reached an unhealthy degree of danger, all JSOC personnel except for its declared military trainers were ferreted out of the country. (They were easy to find using that same secret cell phone pinging technology.) Those who remained were called Omegas, a term denoting their temporary designation as members of the reserve force. They then joined any one of a dozen small contracting companies set up by the CIA, which turned these JSOC soldiers into civilians, for the purposes of deniability,” added the book.

According to media reports, unassuming office buildings around the Washington area and beyond have become “unlabeled spy centres that process untold volumes of information” extracted from JSOC’s hunting missions, with such a rapid analytic turnaround time that the “shooters” of the unit can quickly begin planning their next kills. In fact, Ambinder reports in ‘The Command’ that the “integration of tactical spying within JSOC is so thorough” that it’s hard to distinguish “shooters” from analysts.

The JSOC has grown since September 11 as the US military focuses on combating terrorism. As defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld wanted the JSOC to work unilaterally so that it could be more aggressive in hunting down terrorists. There are concerns, however, that the JSOC operates with practically no accountability. In Iraq, they reportedly ran a torture chamber at a place called Camp Nama. In 2004, Rumsfeld gave the US military the go-ahead to carry out secret offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and JSOC operatives carried them out in Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

US aid operations as cover for CIA agents and black ops.

You don't need to be a cynic of US overseas aid to know that cash is generally directed to those countries in which Washington has a clear foreign policy objective: Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan are among the top recipients. But perhaps more shocking is the increasing evidence of the way in which the US has been exploiting aid operations as cover for CIA agents and black ops.

Last year it emerged that a Pakistani doctor had set up a fake vaccination programme in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad as a ruse to obtain DNA from members of Osama bin Laden's family. Dr Shakeel Afridi and his family have since disappeared into custody.

Now, a new book claims that the US used the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir as cover to send intel officers into Pakistan posing as aid and construction workers. They were tasked with gathering information on al-Qaeda members and their Pakistani handlers.

As if aid workers in Pakistan did not already have enough to cope with. American charities in particular have long been suspected of habouring Blackwater staff or CIA agents. Local newspapers with close links to Islamabad spies have delighted in falsely revealing NGO offices as hubs of covert intelligence networks. Now they will be able to say: "We told you so."

As Charles Kennedy and Justin Sandefur point out in a post on the Center for Global Development Blog…

First, fake aid and fake aid workers are worse than nothing from a development perspective. Rumors that vaccination drives were actually a Western plot have been rife before – and distrust of aid workers as agents of neo-imperialism is as old as aid itself. It is a lot harder to run a successful development project without any trust. And, of course, running an aid project when it is assumed you are a spy can be dangerous.
Second, fake aid is a risky strategy from a military and diplomatic perspective as well, because it can undermine the goal of winning hearts and minds. While beneficiary goodwill helps development projects run smoothly, building that goodwill is the whole point of aid as a weapons system or a diplomatic tool. Deceiving beneficiaries undermines trust and thus the hearts and minds mission – at least if they find out about the deception.

Not only will these secret programmes put aid workers in harm's way, but they will add to the culture of mistrust and suspicion that currently characterises relations between Pakistan and the US.

NYTimes

What Americans are truly doing in Afghanistan?

2012-02-14T18:07:00.000+05:00

True strategy of Americans in these regions !

Obama Proposes $2.4 Billion in Aid to Pakistan, while adding 3.6 billion dollars to the American debt every single day

2012-02-14T10:40:00.000+05:00

The new proposal from President Obama would have $2.4 billion in aid for the fiscal year 2012-13, including significant funding for Pakistan’s “counter-insurgency capability fund,” despite US officials repeatedly accusing Pakistan of being on the side of the insurgents.Officials insist that the aid is “conditional” and that Pakistan will only get the money if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signs off on Pakistan “cooperating” and insists Pakistan isn’t “supporting terrorist activities against the US.”
Barack Obama: Let's steal 150m dollars an hour from American children Do you think that someone could steal 150 million dollars and get away with it? Well, the truth is that such a theft is taking place every single hour of every single day. The federal government is stealing 150 million dollars an hour from American children and American grandchildren and Barack Obama thinks that is a good thing. The new Obama budget projects a $1.33 trillion federal budget deficit for the 2012 fiscal year. That is significantly higher than the $1.15 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office was projecting because it includes a whole bunch of stimulus spending that the Obama administration plans to do.
So let's do a little math.

When you divide $1.33 trillion by 365 days, you get 3.6438356 billion dollars. So on average, the United States will be adding more than 3.6 billion dollars to the national debt every single day during fiscal 2012. And when you divide $3.6438356 billion by 24 hours, you get 151.8 million dollars. So on average, the U.S. national debt will be going up by more than 151 million dollars every single hour during fiscal 2012 if Obama has his way. This is a theft from American children and American grandchildren that is so vast that it is almost unimaginable.

At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,355,838,921,022.16. That is an amount that is so large that it is hard to even put into words.

American founders never intended for this to be the case.Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a complete ban on all borrowing by the federal government.

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Thomas Jefferson believed that it was fundamentally immoral for one generation to run up debts which must be paid back by future generations. Basically, he believed that such debts represented theft on a grand scale.(presstv)

PM Gilani indicted in contempt case,So now what next?

2012-02-13T11:45:00.001+05:00

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has been indicted by the Supreme Court in the much-talked about contempt of court case, a private TV reported Monday.
Gilani is the first prime minister of the country who has been indicted. In a short verdict, the apex court stated that the PM had failed to implement the court’s order to write a letter to Swiss authorities despite several warnings.
A seven-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk and comprising Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa, Justice Sarmad Jalal Osmani, Justice Ijaz Afzal Khan, Justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry, Justice Gulzar Ahmed and Justice Athar Saeed heard the case.
Prime Mininister Gilani reached Supreme Court to appear beforce the bench for contempt proceedings. His counsel Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan and Interior Minister Rehman Malik was also accompanied with the prime minister.
A large number of government officials and political leaders were present in the apex court for the contempt proceedings including government allies Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and other leaders of the ruling coalition.

Gilani has lost moral justification to continue as PM: Imran Khan said no moral justification is left for PM Gilani to stay in his office after he was indicted by the apex court.

MaxxPro Totally Destroyed by Powerful IED + Aftermath (FULL VERSION - NO SOUND)

2012-02-12T21:45:00.000+05:00

Videos

Pakistan PM Slapped With Contempt Charge, Is Jail Next?

2012-02-11T21:56:00.000+05:00

Rejecting Appeal, Pakistani Court Says Premier Must Face Charges.The Supreme Court says it will start contempt-of-court proceedings against Mr. Gilani on Feb. 13. If convicted, Mr. Gilani faces up to six months in prison and disqualification from office.

The investigation centers on charges of corruption involving Mr. Zardari and a Swiss company dating from the 1990s. For more than two years, the government resisted the court order through a variety of delaying tactics, but the judges lost patience last month.

Marines Pose With Flag Nazi SS Logo

2012-02-11T17:03:00.003+05:00

Nazi flag puts culture of Marine snipers in spotlight.The photo of Marine snipers in Afghanistan posing in front of a Nazi flag has prompted the top Marine officer to start a review of sniper protocol and training. Members of the SS pledged an oath of loyalty to Adolph Hitler and carried out many crimes including torture and murder during World War II.

Video

The blockade hurts NATO

2012-02-11T00:08:00.001+05:00

Pakistan must move to end use of its airspace for US and NATO. Paraprosdokian, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” —Winston ChurchillWar is a complex issue and is fraught with blunders. In the final analysis the one who commits more blunders is the ultimate loser. Military history is replete with such blunders but the Americans learn after committing the blunder. The myth regarding Russia; that it cannot be conquered by external power, was true on account of Napoleonic experience, that the logistic chain cannot be maintained at longer distances and for a prolonged period of times. It is easy to fight the enemy on the battle field but far difficult to fight the nature i.e. weather and terrain.

The unconventional warfare known as, asymmetric, bush, shadow, guerilla, and war of attrition is cost prohibitive on human resource, material and time matrix. It is easy to initiate, difficult to maintain and next to impossible to cease it on a win, win note. The neo-cons with the premise of new-imperialism initiated the War on Terror, and occupied Afghanistan by stationing almost 140,000 Extra Regional Forces and around 50,000 foreign logistic and security personnel including infamous Blackwater to the detriment of regional stability. The corporate war managers miscalculated the cost and dividends of war and Pakistan military dictator drew wishful inference from the fog of war to be short and confined to the boundaries of Afghanistan. However, the decade long war has so far devoured more than three trillionUS dollars. The sustenance level is around 3,500 tons per day for the foreign security elements. They require almost one and a half million litres of fuel, oil and lubricants to grease their war machine on daily bases. The destruction, burning, looting, pillage and diversion of NATO’s supplies in route take a sizable piece of NATO’s cake.There are two main routes available to support the war efforts in Afghanistan. The primary NATO main supply route passes through Pakistan via Karachi—Torkham/ Chaman border towns and then up to Kabul and Kandahar respectively. The secondary Northern Distribution Network (NDN) connects Baltic and Caspian Sea ports with Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia and the Caucuses. And they combine sea, rail and truck transport at multi-transit staging stations. The twin routes are passing through the volatile areas and are exposed to subversion and interdiction at the hands of US/NATO resisting forces. The safe passage of these trucks is captive to the check posts, taxes, and extortion of Afghan warlords, tribal chieftains and Taliban, up to their final destination. The levies are paid in US dollars by the US/NATO Forces or support companies. The logistic need is so large and dominant that it requires a sustained, continuous and uninterrupted supply chain to feed the armies which marches on their bellies; and to fuel the burning exhausts of tanks and gunships puffing smoke in the gusty winds of Afghanistan.The closure of NATO supplies passing through Pakistan since the attack on Salala check post by NATO forces on Nov 26, 2011, has inflected a severe blow on the logistic chain. The supply chain through the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is not only cost prohibitive by three times but unviable in time and space dimensions. The road communication network in Northern Afghanistan is long, sluggish for heavy cargo and more prone to interdiction and severance due to heavy snow falls during winters. Russia still feels the headache of traversing this route during their occupation of Afghanistan, but NATO and US will not learn. The geo-strategic compulsion dictates that the logistic support for the war on terror is subject to the Pakistan’s sea, ground and air space traverse. So, by implication Pakistan holds the key to the NATO operations in Afghanistan. As the chips are down to the level of parting the ways, then NATO should discuss strategy, while Pakistan should profess logistics. The adage “Amateurs discuss strategy while professionals talk logistics.” will assert it self again and again.Realizing the gravity of the situation,General William Fraser, Commander US Transportation Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing that they are working on reducing their dependency on supply routes in Pakistan by placing more dependence on the ND network and air cargo. The US logisticians have an ambitious logistic undertaking to bring down the dependence via Pakistan to 35%, almost half of the present material bulk and load. The US logistic wizards have been working on this logistic flexibility since the fissures became visible in the US-Pak nexus in the war on terror due to Raymond Davis episode and May 2 unilateral raid on Osama’s compound by US Navy Seals in Abbottabad. To meet the end game with little scathing and maximum advantage the American logisticians have drawn the lines to reduce their dependence on Pakistan and lessen the leverage available to Pakistan under the present logistic arrangements. Their approach is two prongs, one to reduce the size of war machine and second to explore and pipeline new and secure routes. The race is against the time, as evident from the question of Senator John McCain from General Fraser, “how long it would take you to adjust to keep the same level of logistics into Afghanistan”? The inference drawn from the diversion of logistics routes is that the sooner they achieve that, the earlier they will abandon Pakistan. The US will keep Pakistan engaged at low level strategic plinth till their objectives are fulfilled in the next couple of years. The leverage Pakistan enjoys in the severance of NATO’s umbilical cord is just a matter of time, if not taken advantage in the limited time and space dimensions the umbilical cord may become that of a still-baby. The storage capacity of Extra Regional Forces in Afghanistan has shrunk below the war wastage rate; therefore operations in southern and eastern Afghanistan have been kept on hold. The logistic needs are being met through smuggling, cost prohibitive air cargo and local purchase on higher rates. NATO is also using the umbrella of Afghan Transit Trade in narrowing down the fuel shortfalls. The troops’ movements have been restricted to the bare minimum with the result that Taliban have gone on the offensive and the local police and army personnel resort to bizarre killing of Allied forces. The cracks in the coalition forces are visible that France and Australia are mulling withdrawal of their forces. The sustenance cost has gone up by 87 million dollars i.e. six times higher per month.It is ironic that the NATO heavy load cargo/carriers rutting our roads were paying only toll tax. It suffices to say, that they were winning the heads and we were losing the tails in this whole gambit of war and logistics. Besides, a bloody nose we got bullies, threats, bruised sovereignty and trust deficit on all fronts. Lately, hope lastly, the Non-NATO Ally Status State was treated as an enemy rather than a feeble ally. The lesson learnt from this estranged bed fellowship is that Pakistan was taken for granted due to our submission before submission. It is high time to take a stand and draw lines in the supreme national interest rather than individual/institutional interests. The noose around the supply chain be kept tight till they submit an apology, renounce drones attacks, all sorts of incursions and pay for the damages caused to our main road communication infrastructure. A calibrated approach be adopted to de-escalate on the war on terror and each drone attack or incursion shall cost the NATO in a measured quid pro-co response. Let the reported one billion dollars bill shall not lure us again on the beaten track. Let there be no more U-turns and shall restrict our cooperation towards peace making rather than war mongering. We can choose or abandon a friend but not a neighbour. The bocked is working as a catalyst in advancing the US/NATO withdrawal time lines.

Brig (Retd) Said Nazir Mohmand

Baloch students shout Long Live Pakistan,US is now planning to invade Baluchistan to wage the last phase of Af-Pak

2012-02-10T21:37:00.009+05:00

US is now planning to physically intervene and invade Baluchistan to wage the last phase of Af-Pak in exactly the same way they did with Libya and now doing with Syria. Under the facade of Human rights violations, they invaded Libya and killed hundreds of thousands of Libyan Muslims. Now they plan to attack and capture Gawader to cut a land route to Afghanistan. All the CIA and RAW assets are now fully on the offensive in Baluchistan with US government's backing.

Arrogant and hypocritical US lawmakers focus on Balochistan but forget Kashmir where the entire population is up against Indian terrorism. In Balochistan, the US and Indian backed terrorism has failed to create an insurgency and CIA had to escort terrorist Brahamdagh Bugti to safety in Switzerland. Terrorist group BLA is now involved in low-level attacks for media effect. Pakistani Baloch are not involved. This is the work of organized intelligence agencies operating out of Afghanistan. So let the American legislators bark all they want. They're getting their brief from Langley, and Langley has already led US to defeat in Afghanistan.

China will never be a Super Power if CIA&Langley split Balochistan from Pakistan

Rights violations shame Pakistanis at Congress hearing

Guilt and shame were the two dominant feelings that overwhelmed many Pakistanis at a US congressional hearing room on Wednesday as witnesses detailed human rights abuses in Balochistan. Some were also troubled – while some felt elated – as all five US lawmakers who attended this unusual hearing of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations stressed the Baloch right to self-determination.
But this emotive session – which often drew warm applause from Baloch nationalists – offered little insight into how to resolve this difficult issue. Perhaps, that’s not even the intention of those who had organised the meeting. They wanted to highlight Balochistan as a possibly explosive spot close to a US war-theatre and they succeeded in doing so.
There was some score-settling as well, particularly from US lawmakers upset with Pakistan over Osama bin Laden’s discovery in Abbottabad and with Islamabad’s decision to close Nato’s supply lines to Afghanistan.
“They sheltered the man who master-minded the slaughter of 3,000 Americans. Those who still believe Pakistan is a friend, they need to wake up,” said Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, who organised and chaired the hearing.

Dr. M. Hosseinbor, a Baloch nationalist scholar, assured the Americans that the Balochs were natural US allies and would like to share the Gwadar port with the United States, would not allow the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline through their lands and will fight the Taliban as well.
Ralph Peters, a retired US military officer, urged the US administration to break up its ties with Pakistan and support the Baloch struggle for freedom.
C. Christine Fair, an assistant Professor at Georgetown University, in her written statement, disagreed with the suggestion, saying that given the ethnic diversity of the province, its complicated history, and the existing geographic constraints, an independent Balochistan was untenable.
But such comments on Baloch politics were not what shamed the Pakistanis, and others, in the room. It was rampant human rights violations by both sides that shamed them.
According to the statistics submitted at the hearing, around 6,000 people were displaced and scores killed in 2005 around Dera Bugti district alone.
Estimates of total number of people displaced from all districts range from tens to hundreds of thousands.
After Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s ouster, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry estimated that 1,100 Baloch had disappeared during his rule. So far, the government has only uncovered the fate of a handful of these people.
Armed Baloch groups are also responsible for targeted killings and destroying private property. In the past several years, they have increasingly targeted non-Baloch civilians and their businesses, as well as major gas installations and infrastructure. They have also killed teachers, physicians and lawyers and struck police and security forces and military bases throughout the province.
Militant religious groups also have carried out targeted killings of those Muslims who belong to sects different from there.
It was Prof. Fair, who was the first to point out, that while she understood emotions ran high, targeted killings were also being carried out by the Baloch.
Amnesty International’s Advocacy Director T. Kumar called on the US to “apply the Leahy Amendment without waivers to all Pakistani military units in Balochistan” to prevent the Pakistani military from using US-made weapons against the Baloch.
Ali Dayan Hasan, the Pakistan director for Human Rights Watch, said that Pakistan’s security forces and its intelligence agencies were involved in the enforced disappearance of Baloch nationalists.
He asked the US government to “communicate directly to the agencies responsible for disappearances and other abuses including the army, ISI, IB, Frontier Corps, police, to demand an end to abuses and facilitate criminal inquiries to hold perpetrators accountable.”
Congressman Rohrabacher declared that the hearing was no stunt, and that they wanted to start a national dialogue on what US policy should be in that part of the world.

I Am A Baloch and I Love Pakistan/ Facebook Communityhttps://www.facebook.com/BalochLovesPakistan?sk=wall

India funneling weapons, money to terrorists in Balochistan: report

As many as four terrorist groups have been operating in Pakistan’s southwestern volatile province Balochistan, a military report said.

According to report, the groups are backed by some foreign powers, including India and Israel, are involved in deteriorating situation in the province.

It said several foreign powers, including Iran, US, India have interests in the region. The report revealed that the terrorist organizations also have their offices in Europe.

It said that the Baloch separatist leaders Barhamdagh Bugti, Javed Mengal, Herbyar Marri and Dr Nazrullah were involved in the violence while India was providing weapons and money to Dr Nazrullah inTurbat and Makran areas of Balochistan.

The military report said that situation in five of 30 district was deteriorated while police and local administration have ceased to function. It said that insurgent camps were set up during 1997 and 2004 while terror activities were started in 2005.

No Army operation in Balochistan – Gen.Kayani

February 12, 2012

By Ghulam Sarwar

Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani on Saturday said that there is no military operation being carried out in Balochistan and not a single soldier is involved in any operation in the province.

Gen Kayani said this while talking to the media persons during a reception arranged by the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in the honour of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The rumours about military operation in Balochistan were mere propaganda while the Frontier Core (FC) was helping out the provincial government under the article 245. The situation that appeared after the murder of a Balochi leader Habib Jalib tells enough who was behind creating law and order situation, but unfortunately the blame has been put on to the army. To a question, he said Balochistan has a great strategic importance, particularly for the Central Asian States and Afghanistan.

Pakistan: US Balochistan Hearing ‘Meddling’ Foreign Ministry Summons US Official for Warning by Jason Ditz, February 13, 2012

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry has summoned the US Charge d’Affairs today to express “serious concern” over last week’s House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight hearing on Balochistan, warning that they amount to a unacceptable level of US meddling in internal Pakistani affairs.

Calls by Rep. Rohrabacher and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R – TX) for the US to impose independence on Balochistan and predicting that an independent Balochistan would be a better ally for the US than Pakistan is.

Switzerland Main Balochistan Ke Aazadi Kay Elan Ke Teyareyan Ho Rahi Hen

The BLA will die a natural death the day the CIA leaves Afghanistan

Listen what DR. ATTA UR REHMAN has to say about HAARP

2012-02-10T06:08:00.000+05:00

Was HAARP involved in bringing rain and floods in Pakistan recently.

For more detail please visit HAARP Page http://pakconnects.blogspot.com/p/us-earthquake-weapon.html

Syria Actvists Peaceful Protester or Armed Terrorists

2012-02-10T05:27:00.000+05:00

Western media has been running repeated footage of claiming to show Syria engaging in a brutal crackdown on innocent civilian protestors? These photos, videos and international observers tell a different story. You decide.

For more Photos and Videos and Detail Please visit this Link http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/02/09/syria-activists-peaceful-protestors-terrorsists-decide-82351/

Difa e Pakistan Upcoming Event: 12-Feb-2012-Karachi

2012-02-08T21:33:00.000+05:00

Difa-e-Pakistan Council aspires to unite Pakistan above all differences and defend it at all fronts against serious challenges posed by US and NATO along Indian plans to sabotage Pakistan's economy and conspire for regional supermacy. We will assure that no one plays with our sovereignty and honor.

No choice but to support Iran if Israel attacks: Wajid

2012-02-08T21:16:00.001+05:00

Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Britain Wajid Shamsul Hasan said that Pakistan would be left with no option but to support Iran if Israel attacks it.
PAKISTAN yesterday warned Britain to help stop the American "Drone Wars" that are slaughtering hundreds of its innocent civilians.

In an interview to a British newspaper The Sun published

“We know the damage — destroyed schools, communities, hospitals. They are civilians — children, women, families. Our losses are enormous,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
“I think time is running out until the Pakistan government can take a stand. They will have to at some stage take punitive actions to stop them. They have got means to take such actions to defend their own frontier and territories,” Hasan further added.
Hasan urged British Prime Minister David Cameron to convince the US that the drone attacks were counter-productive, making the American “the most hated people in the minds of the people in Pakistan.”
Talking about Iran, he said: “We wouldn’t like to be seen as part of Israel’s campaign against any country. If Israel attacks Iran, it will have an impact on Pakistan as well.”
“We will have to safeguard our own interests. We also have a Shia population in Pakistan who will not take it lying down.”

The nuclear power chillingly declared it "has the means" to retaliate unless the carnage ceases.
Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain Wajid Shamsul Hasan told The Sun in an exclusive interview that his country's relations with America are at their lowest ebb.
He said: "Patience is definitely reaching exhaustion levels." Mr Hasan said Pakistan backs the War on Terror waged by Britain and the US.
But he urged PM David Cameron to condemn US drone attacks on al-Qaeda and Taliban training camps in the north west of his country — dubbing them as "war crimes" and "little more than state executions".
Tough-talking Mr Hasan also declared Pakistan would have no choice but to support Iran if "aggressive" Israel attacks it.
But his immediate concern is the drones known to have killed 535 civilians, including 60 children, in three years.
Pakistan claims the real death toll is more than 1,000. The unmanned aircraft blast missiles at targets, directed by a computer thousands of miles away.
The High Commissioner said: "I think time is running out until the Pakistan government can take a stand.
"They will have to at some stage take punitive actions to stop them. They have got means to take such actions to defend their own frontier and territories.

"But that will inflame the situation and stop the War on Terror and that is not what we want."

The US military claim drones have "decimated" the al-Qaeda leadership since 2008 with no reported civilian casualties.
But Mr Hasan said: "We know the damage — destroyed schools, communities, hospitals. They are civilians — children, women, families. Our losses are enormous.
"Generally people think that deaths caused by drone attacks should be treated as war crimes.

"There is so much animosity that perhaps the Americans are the most hated people in the minds of the people in Pakistan."

Mr Hasan urged Britain to tell the US its drone strikes are counter-productive.

On Iran, Mr Hasan said: "We would not like Israel to attack any country, irrespective of whether it's Iran or any nuclear country. We wouldn't like to be seen as part of Israel's campaign against any country. If Israel attacks Iran, it will have an impact on Pakistan as well.

"We will have to safeguard our own interests. We also have a Shia population in Pakistan who will not take it lying down.

He warned that India and Gulf countries could also get involved in any conflict.
Historian Mark Almond said of Mr Hasan's declarations: "This represents an escalation in tension."

Thesun

Afghan Girl rape, Protesters burned Sari-Pul governor’s office

2012-02-08T20:44:00.000+05:00

Protesting people were demanding action against the governor’s guards who had raped a girl. Protesters demanding removal of the provincial governor.About 10000 took out a protest demonstration in Sar-i-Pul to force the government to remove the provincial governor Syed Anwar Rehmati, the protesters attacked the governor’s office when they came to know that the governor had entered his office secretly. Guards of governor opened fire on them, leaving a protester dead and three more injured.

Bush Knew Bin Laden Murdered in 2001-VT

2012-02-08T09:10:00.000+05:00

Bin Laden Death Deemed Murder of CIA Case Officer as 9/11 Coverup

President George W. Bush knew Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent and in no way ever involved in 9/11.
He knew bin Laden personally from family visits and knew bin Laden had been to the White House while living in the US under the cover name of “Tim Osmon.”
This has been verified by CIA officials.
Bush also knew bin Laden died on December 13, 2001. How did he know? He read it on Fox News:

Report: Bin Laden Already Dead
Published December 26, 2001 FoxNews.com

Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader.
“The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead,” the source said.
Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief.
About 30 close associates of bin Laden in Al Qaeda, including his most trusted and personal bodyguards, his family members and some “Taliban friends,” attended the funeral rites. A volley of bullets was also fired to pay final tribute to the “great leader.”
The Taliban source who claims to have seen bin Laden’s face before burial said “he looked pale … but calm, relaxed and confident.”
Asked whether bin Laden had any feelings of remorse before death, the source vehemently said “no.” Instead, he said, bin Laden was proud that he succeeded in his mission of igniting awareness amongst Muslims about hegemonistic designs and conspiracies of “pagans” against Islam. Bin Laden, he said, held the view that the sacrifice of a few hundred people in Afghanistan was nothing, as those who laid their lives in creating an atmosphere of resistance will be adequately rewarded by Almighty Allah.
When asked where bin Laden was buried, the source said, “I am sure that like other places in Tora Bora, that particular place too must have vanished.”

Tora Bora

CIA officials report that, even after 9/11, they were actively seeking a kidney transplant for bin Laden to keep him alive. They confirmed that he was actively being paid, had security clearances and was working on assignments received on or after 9/11.

Tim Osmon and Brzezinski

They also confirmed bin Laden had, because of health reasons, not been living in Bahrain as thought but San Diego. While there, he visited the White House and met with George H. W. Bush and other members of the Bush family including George W. Bush.
Bin Laden felt betrayed when the President, a man he knew as a personal friend, ordered his killing after 9/11, particularly since bin Laden was an active CIA agent.
Other “hunts” for bin Laden were staged to provide him cover while his severe illness put him in and out of American hospitals, something that would have destroyed his credibility with many groups he worked with.
I confirmed bin Laden’s death in a personal meeting with General Athar Abbas and his staff in 2010. They confirmed that America has been aware of bin Laden’s death for all along. General Abbas refused to answer other questions on this subject.

MURDER

Bin Laden died of kidney disease, being forced to leave his dialysis machine behind when American troops came to his home to kill him. As a response, bin Laden did an interview with Al Jazeera denying any involvement with 9/11 and suggesting America look elsewhere.
This is from the official CIA transcript of Osama bin Laden’s last public statement:

CIA Official Transcript
“The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive.”
“They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia.”
“Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.”
“Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 180) agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taliban and then this incident happened.”
“Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat.”
“President Bush or any other US President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks.”

General Hamid Gul

This statement was made September 24, 2001.
There are no further statements from Osama bin Laden.
This transcript is officially certified by the Central Intelligence Agency.
By what information we have, from the CIA, from Pakistan, from interviews with ISI Director General at the time, Major General Hamid Gul, the death of Osama bin Laden was the murder of a CIA agent by Presidential order so as to silence dissent and cover up what appears to be a conspiracy of sorts, as many now see 9/11.

MORE MURDER

Presidential Orde

With bin Laden, a CIA operative, murdered through denial of needed medical care, at presidential order, who else was similarly murdered?
Minimally, we can consider all who died searching for, not just someone uninvolved in 9/11, but a decorated CIA operative, as a victim of an illegal cover operation meant to hide a criminal act.
Every soldier killed in Afghanistan, hunting the imaginary Al Qaeda or the long dead Osama bin Laden was murdered.

EVEN MORE MURDER

Pakistani television interviewed individuals who witnessed a helicopter crash killing its American crew and passengers at Abbottabad, a mission supposedly meant to credit President Obama with the killing of a long dead CIA agent.
The video has been suppressed, classified and removed from Youtube and the records of the TV network that held it. However, Veterans Today has a full translated transcript of that video:

This is a screenshot from the interview you are reading
Anchor: Welcome back, Mohammad Bashir is a resident of Abboottabad’s Bilal Town. Muhammad Bashir might seem an ordinary guy but he is no ordinary guy.
Muhammad Bashir lives in front of Osama Ben Laden’s house in Bilal Town Abbottabad.
On 2nd of May, Muhammad Bashir was present on his rooftop from where he saw the whole American operation against Osama Ben Laden with his own eyes.
Yesterday when our team was present In Bilal Town, Abbottabad, near Osama Ben Laden’s hose, Muhammad Bashir came to us and said, “Sister, I need to tell you something, something that is a burden on my heart and soul”, just listen to what he said.
Bashir: I am going to share something about the Abbottabad operation which till this day nobody else has told you.
Anchor: But Muhammad Bashir was a little afraid too, while talking to me he telephoned his relative, Vice President of Jummat-e-Islami, Abdur Razzaq Abasi, watch it

Who Really Was There?

Reporter: Tell me your name and tell me whare do you live
Bashir: Let me first, Let me talk to him one minute, i will give you full interview, full or half?
Reporter: Full Full
Bashir: Let me first talk to him
Reporter: To whom? To Abbasi?
Bashir: yes, to Abbasi
Anchor: Muhammad Bashir told us something that no one said before. So we checked his identity card, we also confirmed that he really lives there, we asked from the senior fellows about him. We were very astonished by his story just see and listen what he said.
Bashir: We were awake, not asleep, a helicopter came, some men came down from that, into that house, then that helicopter went away
Reporter: How many men?
Bashir: 10-12, then that helicopter took rounds of those rear hills, then he came bac…k and when he came bach, two more helicopters arrived, one from the west and other from the north, there was a blast in the first helicopter and it was on fire, we immediately came out, when we reached there, the helicopter was burning, then after about 20 minutes the army and police arrived, they pushed us back, now we are asking that if Osama was here then who took him to america because all those men that came in the helicopter died in the blast, now if Osama was in that helicopter he must have died and got burnt in that helicopter too, then how they took him? this is a question of serious concern. America claims they they killed him and picked him up. How they picked him up? This is what we are thinking

Pakistani Video Screenshot
Reporter: Was there only one helicopter?
Bashir? Yes the other that came flew away to Mansehra, there was only one that landed the men and came back to pick them but as he was picking them up, it blew away and caught fire.
Reporter: Then were in it when it blew?
Bashir: Yes They were.
Reporter: How you know?
Bashir: We saw it with our own eyes
Reporter: You saw dead man?
Bashir: Yes, dead men,
Reporter: How many?
Bashir: I couldnt count them because then the compound was on fire. The gate was open, we went in, the army and police hadnt arrived then, there were some people but they werent stopping them. The whole neighborhood has seen that but they are silent now.
Bashir: We saw the helicopter burning, we saw the dead bodies, then everything was removed and now there is nothing

The only unburned part of the helicopter

Reporter: How many dead bodies you saw?
Bashir: We couldn’t count them because they were blown into pieces.
The reporter asked Bashir to narrate the story again.
Bashir said we could see the faces of those men but they were speaking pashto. I dont know whether they were Pakistani or American army or people of agencies, as you know that agency people can speak many languages.
May be they were speaking Pashto so that we consider them Pakistani.
They knocked and banged at our doors and told us not to come out.
I laid down on my rooftop and was watching them.
My kids were calling me, I told them to go to their rooms and let me check whats going on.
The reporter asks Bashir, that when he saw that the helicopter was American what was he thinking then?
Bashir said that he got afraid. He didn’t had in his mind that they will attack that house. He thought that they might have come to attack the Pakistan Army.
The reporter asked so when was your cousin Shamraiz taken away?
Bashir: Shamrez was at our home, as the helicopter exploded, me and many others went out of our homes to see what happened. Shamrez also came out and the gate of the compound was open, we went in, every thing was lying scattered, as it is a huge compound, some body parts were lying here, some there, legs, arms, heads, broken and torn body parts, during that time some part of the helicopter inside, may be the engine or other fuel related part had an explosion so we rushed out. During that time Shamrez was taken away, he is in his home now, but no one is allowed to meet him and i couldn’t get a chance to talk to him later.
Then the anchor says that they had vegetations inside the compound and Shamrez was their gardener. We know that two men Arshad and Tariq used to live there. They had good relations with the neighbours, they used to buy things from the local store. Sometimes imported dates and used to send many things to their neighbours.

Burned helicopter wreckage
Then the reporter is at Abdullah Ben Zubair Mosque, which is the nearest to compound of Osama.
She asks a guy: do you think people would have been glad and happy if they would have ever met osama?
The guy : Yes, possibly. Because he was a muslim and he believed in God.
This is the whole story! Every aspect and point translated.
The gentleman being interviewed lives across from the compound. His cousin Sahab Jamrez Khan used to grow vegetables in the compound. He was taken away in all the hullabaloo on tape @10.29 Bashir says he did not see when they wisked his cousin away.
Interviewer asks “Have you spoken to your cousin?”
Bashir “No, I have not seen him yet he in in the house. “They will not let him get out” “They will not let me get in.”
2 other men Arshad Sahib and Tariq Sahib used to go to market to shop for that compound and bought international brand items. Dates, dried meat found in compound. Also food used to come from compound to Bashir’s house Kabulu Pilau and things like that used to be presented to Bashir. They will follow up with more information. In the end the lady is standing in front of Abdullah Bin Zubair mosque. The mosque was with in walking distance of the compound. She asks people if Osama did attend this mosque people would have be happy? The one answered maybe. The other said Osama did “not” live here but he was muslim and believed in God. Interview ends.
Another thing to note is that Bashir mentioned that we are very “sharif” meaning law abiding honest people. His town was a peaceful place no excitement no murders, fights, and he is unhappy how they have made his town so frightful with all this news. One thing is very clear in this video. Two helicopters hovered never landed. One landed dropped Pashto speaking poeple on the roof 10-12 of them Helicopter left fo 20 minutes returned to load people in and small blast engine failure fire helicopter parts all over. Body parts arms, legs, head, all over. Pakistani Army/Police came in dispersed crowd. The whole scene is cleaned up totally now. No evidence left to examine.

This is the Official Media Version – One that has gone through several stages of evolution

Several days later, an “official” helicopter crash happened to account for the deaths of those who died on the staged phony bin Laden killing, victims of poor planning and a helicopter pilot who flew into a wall when his night vision goggles were disabled by light sources on the ground. I’ve been to this dance once or twice before.

From a Veterans Today story, August 6, 2011:

Today 31 NATO troops, 20 of them Navy Seals from the Osama bin Laden operation died in what is reported as a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
The chances of this story being true is almost nil. The chances of this being a staged coverup is over 80%. We believe these people were murdered to silence them. This is why.
We have solid information on two areas:
Osama bin Laden died in 2001 as an active CIA employee and his body was recovered in Afghanistan and taken to “the sand box.” We were told it was frozen. We have so much verification from this, CIA, ISI, US military and top officials. I have a direct confirmation from Bin Laden’s CIA handler who I grilled mercilessly on this.
The Abbottabad operation involved numerous American deaths, witnessed, bodies all over, a helicopter crash. (suppressed translated TV interview below) (now classified and “missing”) These bodies were recovered by land vehicle from Islamabad and there was NO “successful” bin Laden operation of any kind. There was and has been a CIA safe house in Abbotabad where terror suspects were stored for years.

Depleted Uranium Ammunition

How do we count murders? Was bin Laden a murder? Were the 3000 on 9/11 murdered and, if so, by whom?
Were all killed in the War on Terror, nearly 1.4 million dead, murder victims including some found to have died of radiation sickness, not from Depleted Uranium but from the illegal use of nuclear weapons by US forces.
That story including a BBC report and interview transcripts is available here.
Do we include the terrorist deaths in Pakistan, now numbering over 30,000 or their 8500 military dead as murders tied to 9/11?
Then we have the planes though no part, be it black box, engine, wing component or even cocktail napkin survived 9/11. Every piece of evidence was systematically destroyed immediately in direct contravention of law.
Do you now wonder why a man dead for a decade was thrown into the sea or why Navy Seals were piled onto a National Guard helicopter for the first time in history and then conveniently plowed into the side of a mountain?

When and if you vote, realize you will be voting for people who chose silence or to be silenced over so many deaths, so many crimes, crimes and deaths so obvious, so easy to prove. Choose carefully.

by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor veteranstoday

This is our message to the Ptriots and warning to the Enemies

2012-02-07T17:52:00.000+05:00

Today, Pakistan is sorrounded by enemies and being betrayed by the traitors. This is our message to the ptriots and warning to the enemies.This is our final and intense message to those whom Allah has given power, authority and status today. The decisions taken today will have the staggering impact to shape the present and the future of this millat.

US considers apologising on Nato attack: NYT

2012-02-07T17:04:00.000+05:00

New York Times claims that the US is considering to tender an apology on Slala check post attack.

A senior American military commander is expected to travel to Pakistan this month in what Obama administration officials say is the first step toward thawing a strategic relationship that has been in effect frozen for more than two months.

Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of the military’s Central Command, will meet Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief of staff, to discuss the investigations of an exchange of fire at the Afghan border that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, as well as new border coordination procedures to prevent a recurrence of the episode.

General Mattis’s visit, the first by a high-ranking American official since the cross-border confrontation in November, was to have begun Thursday, but has been postponed by at least a week pending what is expected to be a spirited debate in the Pakistani Parliament over a new security policy toward the United States.

Pakistani and American officials are quietly optimistic that both events will trigger a chain of public engagement and private negotiations that will reboot the two nations’ frayed strategic relationship, although along more narrowly defined lines than before.

Pakistani officials say they will probably reopen NATO supply lines running through their territory, which have been closed for more than two months. The State Department is supporting a proposal circulating in the administration for the United States to issue a formal apology for the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers in the Nov. 26 airstrike by American gunships.

“We’ve felt an apology would be helpful in creating some space,” said an American official who has been briefed on the State Department’s view and who spoke on the condition of anonymity as internal discussions continued.

Soon after the lethal airstrike, the White House decided that President Obama would not offer formal condolences to Pakistan, overruling State Department officials who argued for such a show of remorse to help salvage relations.

dunyanews.tv

German colonel georg klein orderd this massacre in Afghanistan

2012-02-07T11:24:00.000+05:00

New Video have emerged on the internet filmed by Drone show fighter jet bombed two fuel trucks.The german commander colonel georg klein orderd this cold blooded massacre.over a 100 civilians murdered in Afghanistan.Among the dead included women and children.

'Israeli attack on Iran will prompt Pakistani response' Diplomat

2012-02-06T22:13:00.000+05:00

Is the world counting down to "D-Day"? After US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that Israel would attack Iran by June, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned government officials against "Iran chatter," A European diplomat based in Pakistan said that if Israel attacks, Islamabad will have no choice but to support any Iranian retaliation.The diplomat's statement raised the specter of putting a nuclear-armed Pakistan at odds with Israel, which is widely believed to have its own significant nuclear arsenal.

Israeli ynetnews

The diplomat's statement raised the specter of putting a nuclear-armed Pakistan at odds with Israel, which is widely believed to have its own significant nuclear arsenal.
A diplomat based in Islamabad said on Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iran would force Pakistan to support a Iranian response, according to the Israeli website Ynetnews.com.

The diplomat did not say if the Pakistani retaliation would be diplomatic or involve a conventional military or nuclear response.
Although estimates of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile vary, it is believed the Islamic country has between 70 and 90 warheads. In 2000, U.S. military and intelligence sources put the number at 100. In 2007, retired Pakistani Brigadier-General Feroz Khan told a Pakistani newspaper that his country has “about 80 to 120 genuine warheads.”
Pakistan also has a number of delivery system for its nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear MIRV-equipped medium range ballistic missiles with ranges up to 2500 kilometers. It also has cruise missiles and is believed to be working on tactical nuclear weapons.
In August of 2011, it was reported that the United States considers Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal a threat and it has a “snatch-and-grab” plan for a worse case scenario.
Both Russia and China have said that an attack on Iran would be an attack on their national security.
“Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister and former envoy to NATO, said in mid-January.
“China will not hesitate to protect Iran even with a third world war,” said Major General Zhang Zhaozhong in December.

infowars

US Army Colonel: Pentagon lies about Afghanistan,Dereliction of Duty II

2012-02-06T19:29:00.007+05:00

Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.(NewyorkTimes)

“The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read“, Rolling Stone

Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war.
The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.

The version Rolling Stone released: “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort“, 86 pages posted a pdf version.

Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down

By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

From Bad to Abysmal

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”

According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.

“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.

“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”

That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

Credibility Gap

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.

A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.

A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.

A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

(Magazine )

It was easy for the American military to lock up private Manning punishing him for leaking embarrassing facts of wrongdoing in the US Army. Now the Pentagon is faced with a more difficult challenge. Colonel Daniel L. Davis who serves in the US Army since 1985 and has spent two years in Afghanistan, launched a unique one-man campaign, accusing senior military leaders of inability to conduct a successful operation and, what is even more important, of constantly lying about results of the war. His article titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down,” published online on Sunday by The Armed Forces Journal followed numerous reports and interviews, which puts US military in an extremely uncomfortable position. Davis, a senior officer and a war veteran could hardly be silenced as easing as Manning. At the same time his campaign vividly demonstrates that reports of progress from US military leaders are nothing but a pack of blatant lies.

“No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on, - says Colonel Davis in his article published in the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. Besides this material, Davis managed to write two reports, one of which is classified, speak with a New York Times reporter and brief several members of Congress. All of his efforts are dedicated to the one goal – to prove that claims of the US military leaders about progress are false and few of the troops dislocated in Afghanistan believe them. According to Davis, the situation in Afghanistan is completely catastrophic. The American troops report cowardice, unprofessionalism and double-dealing of the local security forces, while civilians believe that the same security forces have unofficial pacts with Taliban fighters. It harshly contradicts a picture drawn by the military leaders, who promise an early withdrawal from the troubled region.

Colonel Davis seems to be a person whose view on the situation can be trusted. “I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy,” – writes Davis. According to the Colonel, his rich experience made him doubt the reports from the US military leaders, assuring that the operation was on its way to success. Davis argues that most of the troops don’t believe the words of their senior commanders, including David H. Petraeus – the former commander of International Security Assistance Force and the current Director of Central Intelligence Agency whose last year’s testimony before the Senate said that the Taliban’s leaders had been “arrested in much of the country”.

While a spokeswoman for Mr. Petraeus, Jennifer Youngblood of the C.I.A., says the agency director “has demonstrated that he speaks truth in each of his leadership positions over the past several years”, the development of the situation has already proved that Petraeus’s testimony is wrong. As the recently leaked classified military reports have revealed, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, is getting ready to retake control over Afghanistan using the wide support from the Afghan civilians.

While numerous reports back the position of Colonel Davis, there are no reasons not to believe his words. “I’m going to get nuked,” said Davis last month. The only reason, he still didn’t face the reaction from the military is the fact he managed to get the support from several Congressmen.

But even their interference might me insufficient to stop the Army elite from persecuting Davis. It’s impossible to deny that the Colonel’s campaign turned out to be a serious blow for the White House and Pentagon with their plans of early withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the situation described by Davis, the withdrawal will lead to absolutely disastrous consequences. US relations with its former ally – Pakistan, are broken, Taliban is gaining power in Afghanistan and the local security forces are unable to confront the extremists without the US troops’ support. Despite the optimistic reports of Pentagon, Afghanistan may turn into a hive of international terrorism any day after the withdrawal.

Colonel Davis is not the first to criticize Pentagon

“It only takes the right leader”, the late David H. Hackworth (Colonel, US Army), 1 July 2001
“Fire the Generals!“, Douglas A. Macgregor (Colonel, US Army, retired), posted at Defense and the National Interest, 30 April 2007
“A Failure in Generalship“, Paul Yingling (Lieutenant Colonel, US Army), Armed Forces Journal, May 2007
“The Core Competence of America’s Military Leaders ”, FM website, 22 May 2007
Careerism and Psychopathy in the US Military leadership, GI Wilson (Colonel, USMC, retired), 2 May 2011

Posts about American war in Afghanistan

We are withdrawing from Afghanistan, too (eventually), 21 April 2008
The good news about COIN in Afghanistan is really bad news, 20 August 2008
The simple, fool-proof plan for victory in Afghanistan , 1 June 2009
The trinity of modern warfare at work in Afghanistan, 13 July 2009
Important: You can end our war in Afghanistan, 20 August 2009
How many troops would it take to win in Afghanistan?, 15 September 2009
About those large and growing Afghanistan security forces…, 26 September 2009
DoD did not consider troop levels when devising our latest Af-Pak war plans, more evidence that their OODA loop is broken, 8 October 2009
The future of Marjah, after the invasion and occupation, 23 February 2010
A powerful story from Afghanistan, an illustration of our un-strategy at work, 18 April 2010
On Strategy (specifically in Afghanistan), 1 September 2010
Presidential decision-making about Vietnam and Afghanistan: “You have 3 choices, sir”, 5 October 2010
Kubler-Ross gives us a good perspective on the evolution of the Afghanistan War,19 October 2010
About our operations in Kandahar – all that’s old is new again, 20 October 2010

Previous news about Colonel Davis

Introducing the controversy: A letter from Lt Col Daniel L. Davis, who is a fulcrum that can move a nation – should we choose to help him
“Truth, lies and Afghanistan – How military leaders have let us down“, Daniel L. Davis (Lt Colonel, US Army), Armed Forces Journal, February 2012
“Important news about our war in Afghanistan“, New York Times, 6 February 2012
His website, with links to his many articles

The Next War on Washington’s Agenda

2012-02-05T00:11:00.001+05:00

Only the blind do not see that the US government is preparing to attack Iran. According to Professor Michel Chossudovsky, “Active war preparations directed against Iran (with the involvement of Israel and NATO) were initiated in May 2003.”

Washington has deployed missiles directed at Iran in its oil emirate puppet states, Oman and the UAE, and little doubt in the other US puppet states in the Middle East. Washington has beefed up Saudi Arabia’s jet fighter force. Most recently, Washington has deployed 9,000 US troops to Israel to participate in “war games” designed to test the US/Israeli air defense system. As Iran represents no threat unless attacked, Washington’s war preparations signal Washington’s intention to attack Iran.

Another signal that Washington has a new war on its agenda is the raised level of Washington’s rhetoric and demonization of Iran. Judging by polls Washington’s propaganda that Iran is threatening the US by developing a nuclear weapon has met with success. Half of the American public support a military attack on Iran in order to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capability. Those of us who are trying to awaken our fellow citizens start from a deficit that the minds of half of the US population are under Big Brother’s control.

As the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports from its inspectors on the ground in Iran have made clear for years, there is no evidence that Iran has diverted any enriched uranium from its nuclear energy program. The shrill hype coming from Washington and from the neoconservative media is groundless. it is the same level of lie as Washington’s claim that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Every US soldier who died in that war died in behalf of a lie.

It could not be more obvious that Washington’s war preparations against Iran have nothing to do with deterring Iran from a nuclear weapon. So, what are the war preparations about?

In my judgment, the US government’s war preparations are driven by three factors.

One is the neoconservative ideology, adopted by the US government, that calls for the US to use its superior military and economic position to achieve world hegemony. This goal appeals to American hubris and to the power and profit that it serves.

A second factor is Israel’s desire to eliminate all support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel’s goal is to seize all of Palestine and the water resources of southern Lebanon. Eliminating Iran removes all obstacles to Israel’s expansion.

A third factor is to deter or slow China’s rise as a military and economic power by controlling China’s access to energy. It was China’s oil investments in eastern Libya that led to the sudden move against Libya by the US and its NATO puppets, and it is China’s oil investments elsewhere in Africa that resulted in the Bush regime’s creation of the United States Africa Command, designed to counter China’s economic influence with US military influence. China has significant energy investments in Iran, and a substantial percentage of China’s oil imports are from Iran. Depriving China of independent access to oil is Washington’s way of restraining and boxing in China.

What we are witnessing is a replay of Washington’s policy toward Japan in the 1930s that provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s bank balances in the West were seized, and Japan’s access to oil and raw materials was restricted. The purpose was to prevent or to slow Japan’s rise. The result was war.

Despite the hubris in which it wallows, Washington understands the vulnerability of its Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and would not risk losing a fleet and 20,000 US naval personnel unless it was to gain an excuse for a nuclear attack on Iran. A nuclear attack on Iran would alert both China and Russia that they could suffer the same fate. The consequence would be that the world would face a higher risk of nuclear armageddon than existed in the mutually assured destruction of the US-Soviet standoff.

Washington is getting all of us in over our heads. Washington has declared the “Asia-Pacific” and the South China Sea to be areas of “America’s national interest.” What sense does this make? It makes the same sense as if China declared the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea to be areas of China’s national interest.

Washington has deployed 2,500 Marines, promising more to come, to Australia in order to do what? Protect Australia from China or occupy Australia? Encircle China with 2,500 Marines? It would not mean anything to China if Washington deployed 25,000 Marines in Australia.

When you get right down to it, Washington’s tough talk is nothing but a silly pointless provocation of Washington’s largest creditor. What if Washington’s idiocy causes China to worry that Washington and its UK and European puppets will seize its bank balances and refuse to honor China’s holdings of $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds? Will China pull its balances from the weak US, UK, and European banks? Will China decide to strike first, not with nuclear weapons, but by selling its $1 trillion in Treasury bonds all at once?

It would be cheaper than war.

The Federal Reserve would have to quickly print another $1 trillion dollars with which to buy the bonds, or US interest rates would shoot up. What would China do with the $1 trillion in newly printed paper? In my opinion, China would dump it all at once in the currency market, because the Federal Reserve cannot print euros, UK pounds, Japanese yen, Swiss francs, Russian rubles, and Chinese yuan with which to buy up its newly printed currency.

The US dollar would take a beating. US import prices–which now include, thanks to offshoring, almost everything Americans consume–would rise. The hard-pressed 90% would take a further beating, endearing their Washington oppressors to them to an even greater extent. The rest of the world, anticipating nuclear war, would flee the dollar, as Washington would be a primary attack target.

If the missiles aren’t launched, Americans would wake up the next day a bankrupt third world country. If the missiles were launched, few Americans would wake up.

We, as Americans, need to ask ourselves what all this is about? Why is our government so provocative toward Islam, Russia, China, Iran? What purpose, whose purpose is being served? Certainly not ours.

Who benefits from our bankrupt government starting yet more wars, picking this time not on defenseless countries like Iraq and Libya, but on China and Russia? Do the idiots in Washington think the Russian government does not know why Russia is being surrounded with missile bases and radar systems? Do the Washington morons really believe that the Russian government will fall for its lie that the missiles are directed against Iran? Only American idiots who sit in front of Fox “news” could possible believe that the real issue is an Iranian nuclear weapon.

How much longer will the Russian government permit the US National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, to interfere in its elections by financing opposition parties led by the likes of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny, who organize protests of every election that Putin’s party wins, alleging without any evidence whatsoever, but providing propaganda for Washington, who no doubt pays well, that the election will be and was stolen?

In the US, such activists would be declared to be “domestic extremists” and be subjected to rough treatment. In Amerika even anti-war activists are subjected to home invasions by the FBI and grand jury investigations.

What this means is that “the criminal state of Russia” is a more tolerant democracy than the US, or for that matter, Amerika’s puppet states in Europe and the UK.

Where do we go from here? If not to nuclear destruction, Americans must wake up. Football games, porn, and shopping malls are one thing. Survival of human life is another. Washington, that is, “representative government,” consists only of a few powerful vested interests. These private interests, not the American people, control the US government.

That is why nothing that the US government does benefits the American people.

The current crop of presidential contenders, except for Ron Paul, represent the controlling interests. War and financial fraud are the only remaining American Values.

Will Americans again give the sheen of “democracy” to rule by a few by participating in the coming rigged elections?

If you have to vote, vote for Ron Paul or for a more extreme third party candidate. Show that you do not support the lie that is the system.

Stop watching television. Stop reading newspapers. Stop spending money. When you do any of these things, you are supporting evil.

by Paul Craig Roberts

swat valley shining again Off-Road 4x4 Snow Rally

2012-02-04T10:27:00.029+05:00

Swat Valley once Terrorised by CIA&RAW back Tehreek Taliban Pakistan(TTP).Now shining again After years of extremist violence, a military offensive and devastating floods, local tourists started coming back to the lush valleys.1st Jeep Snow Rally MalamJabba by Frontier 4x4 Club show to the world that swat is now a peaceful place.

Off-Road 4x4 Snow Rally Swat Malamjaba Pakistan by Asifshah4

Syed Zaid Hamid Inside Story ( secret Nato & U.S report blame ISI ) - Aljazeera

2012-02-02T14:35:00.001+05:00

liars caught once again.You will note that a massive coordinated attack has been launched against Pakistan army and ISI in global media.A strategic triangle whose sides are in India, Israel and the American participants in the single goal of destroying the last stronghold of Pakistan's strong in the Muslim world.

Full version

ISI aiding Afghan militants: Nato(Blame Game)

LONDON - Pakistan’s security services are secretly aiding Afghanistan’s Taliban, who assume their victory is inevitable once Western troops leave, a secret NATO document says, according to reports Wednesday.Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, confirmed the existence of the document, reported by Britain’s Times newspaper and the BBC.But he said it was not a strategic study. “The classified document in question is a compilation of Taliban detainee opinions and ideals but clearly should not be used as any interpretation of campaign progress,” he said. “It’s not an analysis, nor is it meant to be considered an analysis.” The leaked report was compiled from information gleaned from insurgent detainees and was given to NATO commanders in Afghanistan last month, the media reports said.The “State of the Taliban” document claims that Islamabad, via Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, is “intimately involved” with the insurgency.The BBC said the report was based on material from 27,000 interrogations of more than 4,000 captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives.“Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly,” the report was quoted as saying.Taliban captives revealed how Islamabad was using a web of intermediaries and spies to provide strategic advice to the Taliban on fighting Western coalition troops.“The government of Pakistan remains intimately involved with the Taliban,” the report said.“ISI is thoroughly aware of Taliban activities and the whereabouts of senior Taliban personnel. Senior Taliban leaders meet regularly with ISI personnel, who advise on strategy and relay any pertinent concerns of the government of Pakistan.“ISI officers tout the need for continued jihad and expulsion of foreign invaders from Afghanistan.”However, there was little evidence from the detainees that Islamabad was providing funding or weaponry.Kabul, which accuses Islamabad of supporting the 10-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, put relations on ice after the September murder of its peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani, which one Afghan minister blamed on Pakistani spies.The Times quoted the report as saying the Taliban’s “strength, motivation, funding and tactical proficiency remains intact”, despite setbacks in 2011.“Many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban,” it said.“Once (NATO force) ISAF is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable.”The US Department of Defense said it could not comment on the report but set out its fears about Pakistan and its influence in Afghanistan.“We have not seen the report, and therefore cannot offer comment on it specifically,” Pentagon spokesman George Little told AFP.“We have long been concerned about ties between elements of the ISI and some extremist networks.”US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta “has also been clear that he believes that the safe havens in Pakistan remain a serious problem and need to be addressed by Pakistani authorities.”The report said there had been unprecedented interest in joining the Taliban cause in 2011 - even from members of the Afghan government.“Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption,” it was reported as saying.It said the Taliban were deliberately going soft in some areas to encourage NATO troops to leave faster, while doing local deals with the Afghan forces who take over.Some in the Afghan security forces collaborated with the Taliban, selling arms and sharing intelligence, the report said.The Times, in an editorial, said Pakistan was “actively hindering reconciliation” between the Taliban and Kabul with a “systematic effort” to destabilise President Hamid Karzai’s government.“The ISI emerges from this document looking considerably more villainous, even, than the Taliban itself,” it said.Meanwhile, Pakistan on Wednesday hit out angrily at a leaked NATO report accusing its spies of secretly aiding the Afghan Taliban. “This is frivolous, to put it mildly. We are committed to non-interference in Afghanistan and expect all other states to strictly adhere to this principle,” foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told AFP.A senior security official condemned the leak, as reported by the BBC, which also broadcast a documentary “Secret Pakistan” last year accusing parts of Pakistan’s intelligence service of complicity with Taliban militants. “The report is not available, leaks not worth commenting,” he told AFP.“We are also committed to an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned reconciliation process,” foreign ministry spokesman said.Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar who is visiting Kabul has dismissed the NATO report, saying it can be “disregarded.”“We can disregard this as a potentially strategic leak... This is old wine in an even older bottle,” she told reporters in Kabul.The leaked NATO report overshadowed a fence-mending visit by Khar to Kabul.The leak came as spectacularly bad timing for the one-day visit, which was aimed at thawing frosty ties between the two neighbours, blighted by mutual accusations over the violence in both countries.Later, Nato insisted that the Taliban have been weakened as the alliance downplayed the impact of a leaked report showing the insurgents confident of victory once Western combat troops leave in 2014.“The Taliban have suffered tremendous setbacks on the battlefield in the last year, and we know that they’ve lost a lot of ground and they’ve lost a lot of leaders,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu told reporters in Brussels.Support for the Taliban is also “at an all-time low,” she said, adding that Afghan security forces, which are meant to take over from NATO troops by the end of 2014, are “getting stronger and more capable every day.”The spokeswoman said she would not comment on a classified document but she added that it was “basically a summary” of statements made by Taliban detainees during interrogations.“So it’s what they think or what they would like us to believe they think,” she said on the eve of a two-day meeting of NATO defence ministers in Brussels.

Pakistan Denies Leaked Report’s Claim of Alliance with Taliban

Pakistani warplanes bombarded Taliban hideouts in Peshawar. Pakistan dismissed renewed accusations that elements of the Pakistani government are aiding the insurgency in Afghanistan, claims made in a leaked U.S. military report on the war.

“It seems to be a report that is detached from reality,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit. “Pakistan’s commitment to end the insurgency along the Pak-Afghan border has been very strong over the years and we had to pay a very high price for that. Thousands of our soldiers and civilians have lost their lives in the fight against militancy.”

The leaked document was reported to have been based on interviews with some 4,000 detainees at Bagram airbase, allegedly members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda as well as civilians. Bagram is well known as a Guantánamo-like base for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

As Pakistani officials were out denying any ties with Afghan insurgents and Taliban leaders, Pakistani warplanes bombarded militant hideouts in the northwestern tribal area of Peshawar early Wednesday morning, killing at least 20 Taliban insurgents, according to Pakistani officials.

Shireen Mazari On Haqqani’s Escape: Victory Of Sleaze In Pakistan

2012-02-02T09:45:00.000+05:00

The military leadership especially has once again come out looking bad with promotions and other such interests leading to what is a major national compromise.
The departure of Husain Haqqani to United States reflects the sorry state of affairs of the government and state of Pakistan. In fact the whole Memogate issue was a reflection of the depths of absurdity and sleaze that the state of Pakistan and its rulers have sunk to.

Two of the sleaziest characters were being used to invite American intervention into the most sensitive issue-areas of Pakistan.

To see the affairs of State being conducted through such unsavoury conduits was a reflection of the bizarre state of affairs in Pakistan today. To see the Prime Minister’s House become a sanctuary for all manner of alleged criminals was yet one more insult hurled in the face of the people of Pakistan for electing the present set of rulers.

Now with Hussain Haqqani going off to the US scot-free it appears that no justice will ever be done in this case. The government as well as the military seem to have compromised not only with the US – once again in a long list of damaging compromises – but also put their own personal interests before those of the nation.

The US media and government started targeting the Pakistan military and judiciary from the moment Haqqani’s case was taken up with a blatant intrusion into the country’s internal affairs.

Yet there was no need for any state institution to have succumbed to this blatant US interference and attempt to obstruct justice.

The military leadership especially has once again come out looking bad with promotions and other such interests leading to what is a major national compromise of the most despicable kind given how it were Pakistan’s security interests that were being bargained with in the notorious Memo.

Husain Haqqani himself has a record of selling out Pakistan’s national interests to the US in the past. For instance, when he was Pakistan’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, he revealed a highly sensitive piece of information to then US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Teresita Schaeffer regarding one of our covert operations. This almost destroyed Pakistan-Sri Lankan relations.

His book on Pakistan, written now it appears through a hefty payment from a US sponsor, also targets the Pakistani state. And the language in the Memo is similar to the Haqqani style of writing in his book.

Whatever the real truth behind the Memo, especially how far up the ruling hierarchy it went, the fact is that sleaze has come to dominate Pakistan’s state today with underhand deals, all manners of compromises with foreign powers and cronyism and criminals running free to conduct serious business of government and state.

Husain Haqqani symbolises this sleaze factor; but he is simply one of many in the same category who are ruling the roost today and with whom the civil and military leadership is making all manner of deals. Thus the Pakistani state and nation stand preyed upon from those meant to protect and safeguard their interests and their lives.

DR. SHIREEN M. MAZARI(Paknationalist)

Currency Warfare: What are the Real Targets of the E.U. Oil Embargo against Iran?

2012-02-02T00:22:00.001+05:00

Against whom is the European Union’s so-called “oil embargo on Iran” really aimed at?

This is an important geo-strategic question. Aside from rejecting the new E.U. measures against Iran as counter-productive, Tehran has warned the member states of the European Union that the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will hurt them and their economies far more than Iran.

Tehran has thus warned the leaders of the E.U. countries that the new sanctions are foolish and against their national and bloc interests. But is this correct? At the end of the day, who will benefit from the chain of events that are being set into motion?

Are Oil Embargos against Iran New?

Oil embargos against Iran are not new. In 1951, the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh with the support of the Iranian Parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry. As a result of Dr. Mossadegh’s nationalization program, the British militarily blockaded the territorial waters and national ports of Iran with the British Royal Navy and prevented Iran from exporting its oil. They also militarily prevented Iranian trade. London also froze Iranian assets and started a campaign to isolate Iran with sanctions. The government of Dr. Mossadegh was democratic and could not be vilified easily domestically by the British, so they began to portray Mossadegh as a pawn of the Soviet Union who would turn Iran into a communist country together with his Marxist political allies.

The illegal British naval embargo was followed by regime change in Tehran via a 1953 Anglo-American engineered coup d’état. The 1953 coup transformed the Shah of Iran from a constitutional figure head to an absolute monarch and dictator, like the monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. Iran was transformed overnight from a democratic constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship.

Today, a militarily imposed oil embargo against Iran is not possible like it was in the early 1950s. Instead London and Washington use the language of righteousness and hide behind false pretexts about Iranian nuclear weapons. Like in the 1950s, the oil embargo against Iran is tied to regime change. Yet, there are also broader objectives that go beyond the boundaries of Iran tied to the Washington’s project to impose an oil embargo against the Iranians.

The European Union and Iranian Oil Sales

Iran’s largest customer for oil is the People’s Republic of China. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), which was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo as the strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Iran exports 543,000 oil barrels per day to China. Iran’s other large customers are India, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. India imports 341,000 barrels per day from Iran, Turkey imports 370,000 barrels per day from Iran, Japan imports 251,000 barrels per day from Iran, and South Korea imports 239,000 barrels per day from Iran.

According to the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum the European Union only accounts for 18% of Iranian oil exports, which means less than one-fifth of Iranian oil sales. Only “collectively” is the European Union the second largest customer of Iran. All the E.U. countries together import 510,000 barrels per day from Iran. This collective rank that all Iranian oil importing E.U. countries have together is being highlighted by those that want to emphasize the effectiveness of the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

Iran can replace oil sales to the European Union via new buyers or by increasing sales to existing customers like China and India. An Iranian agreement to work with China for stockpiling Chinese strategic reserves would fill a large portion of the vacuum left by the European Union. Thus, the oil embargo against Iran will have minimal direct effects on Iran. Rather, it is most likely that any of the effects that the Iranian economy feels will be tied to the global ramifications of the oil embargo against Iran.

Iran and Global Currency Warfare

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both the U.S. dollar and the euro together constitute 84.4% of the world’s currency exchange reserves (end of 2011 date). The U.S. dollar alone, consists of largest share of the world’s currency exchange reserves in 2011, namely 61.7%.

Energy sales are an important part of this equation, because the American dollar is tied to the oil trade.

Thus, oil trade, through what is called the petro-dollar, is helping sustain the American dollar’s international standing. Countries around the world have been virtually forced to use the U.S. dollar to maintain their energy and trade needs and transactions.

To highlight the importance of the international oil trade to the U.S., all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have their national currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar and thereby sustain the petro-dollar by trading oil in American dollars. Moreover, the currencies of Lebanon, Jordan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Belize, and several tropical islands in the Caribbean Sea are also all pegged to the U.S. dollar. Aside from the overseas territories of the United States, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Panama also all officially use the U.S. dollar as their national currencies.

The euro on the other hand is both a rival of the U.S. dollar as well as an allied currency. Both currencies work in tandem against other currencies in many cases and seem to be controlled by increasingly merging centres of financial power.

Aside from the seventeen European Union members using the euro as their currency, the Principality of Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have issuing rights and both Montenegro and the Albanian-majority Serbian province of Kosovo also use the euro as their national currencies. Outside of the euro area (Eurozone), the currencies of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania in Europe; the currencies of Cape Verde, Comoros, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, and the two CFA zones in Africa; and the currencies of several Western European overseas dependencies, such as Greenland, are all pegged to the euro.

Several monetary zones are directly tied to the euro. In Oceania, the Comptoirs Français du Pacifique (CFP) franc, simply called the Pacific franc (franc pacifique), used in a monetary union of the French dependencies of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and the Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands is pegged to the euro. As mentioned earlier, both the CFA zones in Africa are also pegged to the euro. Thus, both the Financial Community of Africa (Communauté financière d’Afrique, CFA) franc or West African CFA franc in West Africa – used by Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – and the Financial Cooperation in Central Africa (Coopération financière en Afrique central, CFA) franc or Central African CFA franc – used by Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon – have their fates tied to the monetary value of the euro.

Iran is not looking for military confrontation in the rising hostilities with the United States and European Union. Despite the warped narrative being presented, Tehran has said that it will only close the Strait of Hormuz as a last resort. The Iranians have also said that they will not let U.S. or hostile ships go through Iranian territorial water, which is their legal right, and that hostile ships could navigate through Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz instead. As a side note, among other things, the problem for the U.S. and Iran’s other adversaries is that the waters on the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz are too shallow.

Instead of military confrontation, Tehran is fighting back economically in several ways. The first step, which started before 2012, was Iranian international oil sales and trade were diversified in regards to their currency transactions. This is part of a calculated move by Iran to move away from using the American dollar just like Saddam Hussein of Iraq did in 2000 as a means to fight back against the sanctions imposed on Iraq. In this context, Iran has created an international energy exchange or bourse competing with the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), which both operate using the American dollar for transactions. This energy exchange, called the Kish Oil Bourse, was officially opened in August 2011 on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. Its first transactions were made using the euro and the Emirati dirhem.

In context of euro and U.S. dollar rivalries, the Iranians originally wanted to turn to the euro and a petro-euro system with the hope that the competition between the American dollar and the euro would make the European Union an ally of Iran and de-link the E.U. from the United States. As political tensions have mounted with the E.U., the petro-euro has become less attractive for Tehran. Iran has realized that the European Union is submissive to U.S. interests under corrupt leaders. Thus, to a lesser extent, Iran has also tried to move away from the euro.

Moreover, Iran has broadened its move away from the use of the U.S. dollar and the euro as policy in bilateral trade relations. Iran and India are talking about gold payments for Iranian oil. Iranian and Russian trade is conducted in Iranian rials and Russian roubles, while Iranian trade with China and other Asian countries is conducted using the Chinese renminbi, Iranian rial, Japanese yen, and other non-dollar and non-euro currencies.

While the euro could have been a big winner from a petro-euro system, the actions of the European Union have worked against this. The E.U. oil embargo against Iran is merely hammering the nails in the coffin. Globally, the emerging matrix of Eurasian and international trade and transaction outside of the umbrellas of the American dollar and the euro is weakening both currencies. The Iranian Parliament is now passing legislation to cut oil exports to the members of the European Union that will be part of the sanctions regime until they rescind the Iranian oil sanctions. The Iranian move will be a blow to the euro, especially since the European Union will not have time to prepare for the Iranian energy cuts.

There are several possibilities that could emerge. One of them is that this could be part of what Washington wants and it could be playing into its hands against the European Union. Another is that the U.S. and specific E.U. members are working together against strategic economic rivals and other markets.

Who Benefits? The Economic Targets are beyond Iran...

The end of Iranian oil exports to the European Union and the decline of the euro will directly benefit the United States and the U.S. dollar. What the European Union is doing is merely weakening itself and giving the U.S. dollar the upper hand in its currency rivalry against the euro. Moreover, should the euro collapse, the American dollar will quickly fill much of the void. Despite the fact that Russia will benefit from higher oil prices and greater leverage over E.U. energy security as a supplier, the Kremlin has also warned the European Union that it is working against its own interests and subordinating itself to Washington.

Many important questions are at play about the economic consequences of increased oil prices.

Will the European Union be able to weather the economic storm or a currency collapse?

What the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will do is destabilize the euro and snowball globally hurting non-E.U. economies. In this regard, Tehran has warned that the U.S. aims to hurt rival economies through the adoption of E.U. oil sanctions against Iran. Within this line of thinking, this is the reason why the U.S. is trying to force China, India, South Korea, and Japan in Asia to reduce or cut Iranian oil imports.

Within the European Union, it will be the most fragile and struggling economies, such as Greece and Spain, which will be hurt by the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

The oil refineries in the European Union countries that import Iranian oil will have to find new sellers as sources and will also be forced to adjust their operations. Piero De Simone, one of the leaders of Italy’s Unione Petrolifera, has warned that approximately seventy oil refineries in the E.U. could be shutdown and that Asian countries could start selling refined Iranian oil to the European Union at the expense of the local refineries and the local petroleum industries.

Despite the political claims supporting an oil embargo against Iran, neither will Saudi Arabia be able to fill the void of Iranian oil exports to the European Union or other markets. A shortfall in oil supplies and the production changes could have spiralling effects in the European Union and on the costs of industrial production, transportation, and market prices. The prediction is that that the E.U. will effectively be deepening the crisis in the euro area or Eurozone.

Moreover, the rise in everyday prices, ranging from food to transportation, will not be limited to the European Union, but will have global ramifications. As prices rise on a global scale, the economies in Latin American, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific countries will face new hardship, which the financial sector in the U.S. and several of its partners – including members of the European Union – could capitalize on by taking over certain sectors and markets. The IMF and World Bank, as the Bretton Woods proxies of Wall Street, could get into the mix and impose more privatization programs benefiting the financial sectors of the U.S. and its main partners. Furthermore, how Iran decides to sell the 18% of oil it will stop selling to E.U. members will also be a mediating factor.

The Ghosts of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo: Libya and the International Energy Agency

While countries in Africa or the Pacific have no strategic oil reserves and will be at the mercy of global price increases, the U.S. and the European Union have worked and tried to strategically insulate themselves from such scenarios. This is where the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) comes into the picture. Libyan oil reserves are also a factor to the hostilities and petro-politics involving Iran.

The IEA was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. As mentioned earlier it is a “strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” The OECD is a club of countries that includes the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and New Zealand. It is essentially based on the contours of the Western Bloc, which is comprised of America’s allies and satellites. Aside from Israel, Chile, Estonia, Iceland, Slovenia, and Mexico all the members of the OECD are members of the IEA.

Since its creation in 1974, one of the responsibilities of the IEA has been to stock strategic oil reserves for the OECD countries. During the NATO war against Libya the IEA actually opened its strategic oil reserves to compensate for the void left by a lack of Libyan oil exports. The only other two times this happened were in 1991, when Washington led a military coalition in its first war against Iraq, and in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the United States.

The war in Libya had many purposes:

(1) preventing African unity;

(2) driving China out of Africa;

(3) strategically controlling important energy reserves; and

(4) guarding oil supplies in the scenario of any American-led conflicts against Syria and Iran.

What the NATO war in Libya has done is secure oil output from Libya, because there was a chance that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Colonial Muammar Qaddafi could have suspended oil sales to the European Union in support of Syria or Iran in possible conflicts with the U.S., NATO, and Israel. It is also interesting to note that one of the Libyan figures that helped enable the war against Libya in the United Nations was Sliman Bouchuiguir, the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR) and the current Libyan ambassador to Switzerland, who worked on formulating a strategy against allowing oil from being used as a strategic weapon to insure that that the 1973 oil crisis never repeat itself for the U.S. and its allies.

Aside from Iran, the Syrians have also been a source of oil imports for the European Union. Like Iran, the E.U. has also cut their bloc off from Syrian oil via a sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government. With Iranian and Syrian oil cut off from the E.U., the strategic value of Libyan oil rises. In this regard, the reports about the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Libyan oil fields can also be analyzed as being coordinated or tied to the growing U.S. and E.U. hostilities with Syria and Iran. Rerouting Libyan oil shipments to the E.U. that were intended for China can also be part of such a strategy.

The Psychological War

In reality, the sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government against Iran has gone as far as it can go. All the speeches about Iranian isolation are bravado and far from the reality of current international relations and trade. Brazil, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and various countries in the post-Soviet space, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have all refused to join the sanctions against the Iranian economy.

The E.U. oil embargo, coupled with the broader sanctions against Iran, has broad psychological implications. Iran and its ally Syria both face a multi-dimensional war that has economic, covert, diplomatic, media, and psychological scopes.

The psychological war, which involves the mainstream media as a tool of foreign policy and war, constitutes an efficient propaganda instrument for the U.S. due to its lower costs. Yet, the psychological war can be fought on both sides.

Much of the power of the U.S. is psychological and tied to fear. Like the geography of the Persian Gulf, time is on Iran’s side and working against the United States.

If Iran continues on its present course and is undeterred by sanctions, this will help break a critical psychological threshold, which around the world tends to discourage countries from confronting and opposing the United States.

Should many countries continue to refuse to bow down to the Obama Administration pertaining to the impostion of sanctions against Iran, this will also be a blow to the prestige and power of the U.S., which would also have economic and financial implications.

Moreover, at the end of the day, the E.U. oil embargo will hurt the E.U. instead of Iran. In the long-term it could also hurt the United States.

Structurally, the effects of the E.U. oil embargo will further entrench the E.U. in the orbit of Washington, but these effects will catalyze growing social opposition to Washington, which will eventually manifest in the political and economic arenas.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya(is a Sociologist and award-winning author)

US, NATO using Depleted Uranium to destroy Afghan's Gene Pool

2012-02-01T00:13:00.000+05:00

May such wonderful humanitarian champions of peace, rot in the best humanitarian hole of hell till eternity along with their "peaceful, free and humanitarian" supporters!

Three US Armored vehicles struck by multiple IED's(Video)

2012-01-31T13:06:00.000+05:00

An IED goes off in the background at (20 sec). Another IED hits the two vehicles behind the recording vehicle at (1:07) leaving the vehicles a mangled mess. Then when the recording vehicle turned around to investigate, an IED hits them as well at (4:10)
"Sangin, Valley Afghanistan. Task Force T.H.O.R Conducting route clearance down route 601, suspicious hole over short bridge is interrogated by the buffalo. Nothing is found. Once given the all clear the 2nd vehicle strikes the first IED...

Haqqani's Memo And Boabdil's Memo

2012-01-30T20:58:00.000+05:00

If it is forgiven today, wait for the Indus River to turn red with Pakistani blood. If the government can violate the constitution so audaciously to destroy the country, why can’t our military do the same to save Pakistan?
In 1487, Abu Abdallah Mohammad was the 22nd sultan of the great city of Alhambra. Known to the Spaniards as Boabdil, his tiny physique also won him the nickname el chico.

In that year, he sought foreign help against his father and uncle.

He wrote a memo to Ferdinand and Isabelle, the most powerful sovereigns in the region, to seek help and promised assistance in helping them take over Spain.

He offered to make his emirate a tributary kingdom under Ferdinand and Isabella.

His wish was granted. But within five years, in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella turned to Alhambra and forced Abu Abdallah, or Boabdil, to surrender and leave for exile.

Boabdil was the author of the treacherous memo. The name of his prime minister was Yusuf.

Under another Yusuf, a memo was written last year to a foreign power, seeking help to weaken Pakistan’s military and intelligence. In exchange, a promise was made to make Pakistan a denuclearized vassal of that foreign power.

Five hundred years after Boabdil’s memo, history is being repeated. Another memo has been written on identical terms.

The only difference is that the Pakistani memo has been exposed.

But even then the courts and opinion makers are playing games, while the Pakistani military watches.

A compromise or a deal on the Memo would fatally damage Pakistan. There is no turning back now. The ghosts of Agartala still haunt us after 40 years.

Treason-democracy-elections-rebellion-civil war-invasion-defeat-dismemberment-humiliation! Memo is today’s Agartala. If it is forgiven today, the dreaded sequence would turn Indus River red with Pakistani blood. The war would annihilate us as it did in 1971. Pakistani media must wake up and see how history is repeating itself.

The Pakistani nation must clearly understand that a sinister web of treachery is being woven against Pakistan and ISI by the government and its allies in political parties and media. The Memo case has almost been killed. Now the Asghar Khan/Mehran Bank case has been revived. The authors of The Memo wanted this case revived to divert attention away from The Memo and to take revenge from the military.

The links and timings between memo case and the Mehran Bank case are stunningly clear. Also, the missing person's case is also being used as a tool to settle scores against ISI. The traitors, snakes and idiots have all joined hands to attack, humiliate and destroy the last defense wall of Pakistan. Memo is a reality just as the Agartala conspiracy was. But back then, too, the political parties joined hands against our military and protected the main accused, the Husain Haqqani of that time, Sheikh Mujeeb.

The result was elections and war and breakup.

History is being repeated today. Political parties and media are ignoring The Memo, attacking ISI and demanding elections when Pakistan is encircled for war.

Shame on our politicians, media, judges and the ulema of this nation who have willingly decided to ignore and bury The Memo. Those who compromise their honor, freedom and faith deserve to be invaded.

For God sake, wake up.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan has already declared NRO unconstitutional. The court has also declared voting lists as bogus. These were the voting lists that brought this government to power in 2008.

What is the moral standing of a government that has come to power through unconstitutional and bogus means?

If the government can violate the constitution so audaciously to destroy the country, why can’t our military do the same to save Pakistan? Overthrowing the government is no more a legal or constitutional issue. It is a national duty and patriotism.

Zaid Hamid(a Pakistani analyst)paknationalist

CENTCOM Wants You To Consider Pakistan Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa As “Silk Road” Gateway To Central Asia

2012-01-30T00:28:00.000+05:00

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have a bright future ahead as a gateway to Central Asia and Afghanistan as these countries need this area for access to Indian Ocean for trade and economic activities, experts say.
“Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and FATA are of great interest to the landlocked Central Asian States and Afghanistan for access to the Indian Ocean as the KP provide the shortest access route”, Chief Collector Customs (North) Nisar Ahmad told a seminar on ‘Border Divide and Customs Connects’ in Peshawar January 27 . He said terrorism has badly shattered the economies of KP and FATA but the future for this region is bright as it would be the hub of an economic boom as an easy access route for Central Asiato Middle East and European Markets.
He said that the government also has a vision for a National Trade Corridor, the Peshawar-Torkham Expressway, the Northern By-pass and agreements with Central Asian countries to facilitate the traffic of goods, people and services in the region.

Zahir Shah

(CentralAsiaOnline.com is a website sponsored by USCENTCOM to highlight movement toward greater regional stability both through bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements.)

Violence spikes in key Afghan regions

2012-01-28T13:06:00.000+05:00

Attacks by the Taliban in southern and eastern Afghanistan have risen sharply in recent months, according to figures released by the U.S.-led coalition, a sign that the allied offensive against the insurgency is yet to blunt its potency.
The figures are in contrast to the broader trend of decreasing violence nationwide depicted by the NATO mission. That depiction is challenged by non-government organizations active in Afghanistan; Human Rights Watch describes 2011 as "the most violent year ever."
NATO's International Security and Assistance Force, or ISAF, says overall enemy attacks declined by 9% across the country in 2011. But the number of attacks by the insurgency rose last year by 19% in the east when compared to 2010. A smaller rise was seen in the south of the country, 6%.
These two areas - known by ISAF as RC South and RC East - account for nearly two-thirds of insurgent attacks across the country.The statistics are significant, as NATO is consistently reporting a decrease in violence nationwide, which should pave the way for a handover to Afghan security forces and a NATO withdrawal.
One analyst said the figures from the south are especially noteworthy, as this region was the target of major NATO operations in 2010. Even taking into account the insurgent violence triggered by those 2010 operations, last year was still more violent.
The increase suggests a continuation of fighting during the traditionally quieter winter months. In fact, the south and east of Afghanistan, according to NATO figures, saw a decline in violence in late summer (compared to 2010) only to spike as winter approached.
An ISAF spokesman, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, said the rise in insurgent attacks was a result of coalition forces taking the fight to the enemy.
"This increase in enemy-initiated attacks is attributed to deliberate operations (surge) in both the east and south by Afghan and ISAF forces in the fall designed to further pressure insurgents in former Taliban strongholds," he said in an e-mail statement.
Cummings added that operations in the south had helped reduce high-profile attacks in the city of Kandahar by about a third compared to 2010.
The issue of whether violence across Afghanistan is rising or falling is key to the NATO-led mission's objective of pacifying the country and handing it over to Afghan forces so NATO combat troops can slowly withdraw by 2014.
Human Rights Watch takes issue with NATO's depiction of declining violence, especially as it affects civilians. The organization's Afghanistan researcher Heather Barr told CNN: "This has been the most violent year ever and the worst year for civilian casualties. If this is what winning looks like, it does not look that way for the Afghan communities experiencing this violence first hand."
Barr said the group's analysis was based on data that it considered credible from the United Nations and from the Afghan Non-government Safety Organization, or ANSO, which uses similar data to ISAF's to evaluate the risk for charity and development groups working nationwide.
A recent U.N. report highlighted a considerable rise in security incidents. ANSO said in its last quarterly report that there was a continuing rise in violence, and that attacks by the insurgency nationwide were 14% higher last year than in 2010.
But ANSO said that is significantly lower than year-on-year rises recorded previously, and it's unclear whether that's because ISAF has the insurgency under pressure or because the insurgents have, ahead of the 2014 withdrawal, made "the calculus that there is no point sprinting to the finish if everyone else has dropped out of the race."

Nick Paton Walsh

Sheikh Imran Hosein's Interview with Professor Jim Fetzer

2012-01-27T13:03:00.000+05:00

ISI chief confirms no underhand deal to stop probe into Haqqani Memo

2012-01-27T00:00:00.001+05:00

ISI chief confirms no underhand deal to stop probe into Haqqani Memo. Possibility for more treason cases because of the Memo and Zardari govt's role in allowing CIA into Pakistan.
Husain Haqqani is a front man for other traitor Pakistanis who collaborated to sell Pakistan cheap to foreign powers. Nation awaits full exposure and accountability

According to the businessman Mr. Ijaz , he had sent a memo at the behest of the former Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani, to the former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen seeking Washington's intervention to pre-empt a military takeover after the American raid in Abbottabad to take out al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Fasten your seatbelts. This one is going to hit hard.
The Memo case of today was the biggest treason case in recent history of the country after Agartala Conspiracy of 1968, which broke Pakistan.Instead of punishing the traitors in Agartala sazish, the political parties, courts and the media joined hands against the army to demand the release of traitor Mujeeb ur Rehman and demanded elections. The result was that army was forced to hold elections in an environment where the traitors had taken complete control. The result was a civil war and dismemberment of Pakistan.
Today, the exact repeat is taking place with the Memo scandal. The government is part of this treason. The political parties are supporting the government. Media is already sold out and attacking army and the Supreme Court is dragging the case to the point while the nation continues to slip into the chaos and anarchy. Army and ISI is being surrounded from all sides.
The army is now in an extremely difficult situation. It trusted the Supreme Court to be firm on memo scandal and NRO. Instead, the cases are being dragged without decision and the government remains busy in robbing, looting and plundering the nation ruthlessly.The traitors in Memo case rule Pakistan today and would never let justice prevail while they are in power. They are accused and must be arrested. (Zaid Hamid)

Dr Afia Siddiqui gets pregnant, contracts cancer in US jail

2012-01-25T15:01:00.000+05:00

America who claims itself to be the justice country, is this its justice. Pakistani scientist Dr Afia Siddiqui, who is serving 86-year imprisonment in a US prison cell, has contracted cancer and allegedly become pregnant as a result of sexual abuse during her confinement.Talking to The News Tribe, her sister Dr Dr Fouzia Siddiqui said she had come to know through Pakistani Consul General in Houston that Dr Afia Siddiqui had been diagnosed with a cancer. She added that earlier there were reports that the Pakistani scientist had become pregnant due to alleged sexual abuse during imprisonment. However, the Pakistan Embassy has not playing its role in either confirming or rejecting the reports.She said that former Pakistan Ambassador to US Hussain Haqqani was called back the next day when he told us the condition of Dr Afia.She quoted Pakistan Consul General Aqil Nadeem as saying that he was requesting the jail authorities for providing medical facilities to the Pakistani scientist.Dr Fouzia said keeping in view the reputation of the Roswell jail and the nature of her sister’s disease the request was insufficient.She urged the Pakistan Embassy to arrange a team of physicians comprising doctors from jail as well as from private sector for Dr Afia Siddiqui.Dr Fouzia said that newly-appointed Pakistan Ambassador to US Sherry Rehman had assured her all possible help before leaving for America to take up her new assignment. However, despite making contact with her, the envoy has not given any response in this regard.Speaking about the reports of Dr Afia’s alleged pregnancy, she said that her family was told about it after the Pakistani scientist showed some symptoms in the women jail.Dr Fouzia appealed to the US and Pakistani authorities to arrange a telephonic conversation of her mother with�site has approached Pakistan Ambassador to US Sherry Rehman through an email to get her point of view on the issue but received no response till the filing of this news.

Imran Khan next PM: CNN

2012-01-25T10:44:00.000+05:00

The Cable News Network (CNN) has declared Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan the most popular politician in Pakistan. During an interview with the cricketer-turned politician, the CNN said Imran Khan was an expected prime minister of Pakistan. The TV gave significance to Khan’s view on US drone campaign inside Pakistan. The dangerous US machines have been wreaking havoc in the Tribal Areas while Khan has been a staunch opponent of the attacks and drew large support from the Pakistanis.

Chinese Military Exercise Shows Soldiers Performing A Drill Pass Around LIVE GRENADE

2012-01-25T10:32:00.000+05:00

People's Liberation Army of China one of their training exercises involves a life-and-death game of 'hot potato' with a live grenade.

Incredible video footage shows Chinese troops stationed in Hong Kong passing around the live explosive from one soldier to the next until the last one finally throws it in the hole.

German Intelligence Cell Busted In Peshawar

2012-01-24T18:53:00.001+05:00

A German intelligence official and a married couple gathering intelligence around Peshawar.A house located in University Town was raided on Saturday and three German citizens were taken into custody for their alleged involvement in ‘suspicious activities’, police said.

The suspects, who were interviewed after reports they were living in the house on the Park Lane Street illegally, failed to produce documents validating their stay in Pakistan.
They were identified as Curtain Wild, a colonel in German army who has spent time in Afghanistan and Kosovo, Lauren and Rhodwolf Smith.
An official said statements of the three men did not match with each other. First they claimed to be associated with a non-governmental organisation but later they said they were staff of the German embassy living in Peshawar.
The official said four Pakistanis, who were working for the Germans, had also been held. They included two security guards whose services had been acquired without informing the police.
“They said they were deputed by their embassy to keep an eye on the German-funded development projects but they had no documentary proof to this effect,” the official said.
The Germans came to Peshawar during the Soviet war in Afghanistan more than 30 years ago, he said, adding the house was raided after police came to know about their suspicious activities.
The official would not give details about the foreigners’ activities but said they used to carry out their work on a rotation basis in the garb of NGOs. He said the foreigners previously lived in a house on Jamaluddin Afghani Road and moved to Park Lane about a year ago.
Talking to reporters, Cantonment Circle SP Dr Mian Saeed Ahmed said police maintained record of all foreigners and the NGOs but the three Germans had not informed them about their stay nor did they seek any security.
He said they had opened a ‘German Liaison Office’ in the building which was being used as the office-cum-residence. He said the office had been sealed and the suspects had been taken to Islamabad for interrogation.
The official said police came to know about their illegal stay when security agencies started enlisting foreigners and NGO workers living in the city. “We have taken copies of their passports and investigation is under way,” the SP said.

German ‘Secret Agents’ ordered Pakistan Army Uniforms
Three German nationals who had been arrested on Jan 21 in Peshawar had ordered army and police uniforms to a local contractor, intelligence sources said on Thursday.

According to reports the alleged German spies had been living in Peshawar since 1981 and shifted to a bungalow at Parklane one year ago.

The source said that Burqas (veils) and receipt of uniform order were also recovered from their custody.

The intelligence sources said the foreigners had sent a negative reports about Pakistan to Bonn Conference held in Germany last year to discuss Afghanistan post-troops future.

Intelligence agencies on Jan 21 raided their house and arrested them. The German nationals have been handed over to German embassy(TheNewsTribe)

Pakistan releases three German spies
Berlin: Pakistan on Tuesday released three German national who were member of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency after tension between the two states.

According to reports, the Germans were detained by police for running illegal office but eventually released after protest by Germany.

After the incident, Germany’s Foreign Ministry summoned Pakistan ambassador in Germany to lodge protest.

The arrested German belonged to an unauthorized liaison bureau of the German embassy in Pakistan and the office had been sealed.

BM-21,BM-1,82 mm mortar attacks against US Military Base - by Uzbeki and Pashtun Mujahidin

2012-01-24T13:12:00.000+05:00

Cia back TTP executed 15 members of Pakistani Border Guard

2012-01-24T12:55:00.000+05:00

Pakistan Closure of Nato supply routes is bitting U.S

2012-01-20T09:57:00.000+05:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon says the U.S. is paying six times more than before to send war supplies to troops in Afghanistan through alternate routes since Pakistan's punitive decision in November to close border crossings to NATO convoys.
Pentagon figures provided to the AP show it now costs about $104 million per month to move the supplies through a longer northern route, instead of $17 million a month when the cargo moved through Pakistan. Islamabad shut down two key Pakistan border crossings after a U.S. airstrike killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in late November, and it is unclear when it might reopen them.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that using alternate transportation routes for Afghan war supplies is more expensive and takes longer, but the total costs had not been revealed until now.

The Associated Press