US & Pakistan: The Growing Tensions

[p2prada]

"You will lose an ally," Hina Rabbani Khar told Geo TV in New York.

Poor girl. It shows she hasn't yet met Admiral Mike Mullen. Once she does she will know what to say next.

She is definitely new to diplomacy.

 

[nitesh]

How much time it will take for US to issue a statement praising the terror central of the world? Does US have balls to lose them?

 

[captonjohn]

Hai lagi pol jab khulne tab gaand lagi hai phatne.

Bikhari aur malik me partnership nahi hoti, partnership barabri walo me hoti hai Ms. Heena.

 

[Ray]

It is not that Pakistan that is the victim.

The victim is democracy of Pakistan.

The democratically elected Govt is subservient to the real power - the Army and the ISI and the mullahmen.

Shed a drop of tear for the very concept of democracy of Pakistan.

Democracy stands sold to the highest bidder!

 

[Daredevil]

I think in 90s US considered to declare Pakistan as a terrorist state according to present Pak ambassador to US, Hussain Haqqani


U.S. came close to declaring Pakistan a "terrorist" State in 1992

Amit Baruah

Letter blamed Islamabad for supporting militants in India

Letter talked of the complicity of ISI and Army in training terrorists

Pakistan warned that it would be listed among State sponsors of terrorism

A meeting in 1992 resolved to further cover "tracks of terrorism"
NEW DELHI: Proof is now available to support suggestions that the United States came close to declaring Pakistan a terrorist State in 1992, as Islamabad increased support to militant elements operating in Jammu & Kashmir.

Pakistani scholar Hussain Haqqani reveals that a May 12, 1992 letter from U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif directly blamed Islamabad for extending support to terrorists operating in India.

Handing over the letter to Mr. Sharif, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Nicholas Platt also provided some "talking points," which are, now, in the possession of Mr. Haqqani, who had worked as Press Secretary to both Mr. Sharif and Ms. Benazir Bhutto.

Damning points


The "talking points" are damning. "We are very confident of our information that your intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, and elements of the Army are supporting Kashmiri and Sikh militants who carry out acts of terrorism... This support takes the form of providing weapons, training and assistance in infiltration ... We're talking about direct, covert support from the Government of Pakistan," Mr. Platt's written "talking points"stated.

Credible information


"Our information is certain. It does not come from the Indian Government. Please consider the serious consequences to our relationship if this support continues... If the situation persists, the Secretary of State may find himself required by law to place Pakistan in the U.S.G. [United States Government] State sponsors of terrorism list... You must take concrete steps to curtail assistance to militants and not allow their training camps to operate in Pakistan or Azad Kashmir," the "talking points" added.

In his book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military," Mr. Haqqani referred to a meeting that Mr. Sharif presided over on May 18, 1992. "We have been covering our tracks so far and will cover them even better in the future," Mr. Haqqani, who was present at the meeting, quoted ISI chief Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir as saying.

According to Mr. Haqqani, Mr. Sharif agreed with this assessment and sanctioned a sum of $2 million for stronger lobbying efforts in the U.S. Foreign Secretary Shehryar Khan, however, disagreed with this assessment, the book said.

Note of discord


The Foreign Secretary said Pakistan would "probably be more successful by focussing on diplomacy and political action" in favour of the Kashmiris, instead of "setting off bombs."

At the same meeting, Chief of Army Staff Asif Nawaz said it was not in Pakistan's interest to get into a confrontation with the U.S., but "we cannot shut down military operations against India either."

Pressure off


The removal of Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir as ISI chief in 1993 took the pressure off Pakistan and the Americans backed off from their threat of declaring Islamabad a State sponsor of terrorism.

 

[johnee]

When Pakistan becomes a pain in A$$ for US, then it will be 'declared' a terror state. And fortunately, we are moving in that direction.

 

[johnee]

Lover's tiff!! Lets not take them seriously until atleast one of them shows some guts to do what they threaten to do.

 

[SpArK]

 

[Yusuf]

Lover's tiff!! Lets not take them seriously until atleast one of them shows some guts to do what they threaten to do.

Like the one that happened soon after the US cut aid and the pakis said we dont want your aid and we can do without it and then the next thing you know, Shuja Pasha goes to Washington to bow his head and take the begging bowl out.

 

[Poseidon]

Pakistan & US relations were at their best in the 80's.Their were reports that if USSR attacks Pakistan,US would declare War.
Now Pak & China relations are at an all time high.So we can safely assume that in another 25-30 years,Sino-PAk relations may go down the drain.
Already China is facing troubles due to it's new best friend,Xinjiang & Polio to name a few.God alone knows what will happen to China if China agrees to Visa free travel for Pakistanis.I hope they do agree.

 

[A.V.]

Good riddance for the US i say

 

[johnee]

Like the one that happened soon after the US cut aid and the pakis said we dont want your aid and we can do without it and then the next thing you know, Shuja Pasha goes to Washington to bow his head and take the begging bowl out.

I think we can find many such instances in the past when they tried to coax each other through harsh words. To us, Indians, the standard to judge them should be action on ground and not words. As they say, words without deeds is like a garden full of weeds...

 

[sayareakd]

Good time for US to lose Pakistan as two timing ally............................. then bomb the country to stone age.

 

[nrj]

If this alliance is about to end, it'll be made official by DC within few months. Else, its not happening.

 

[SpArK]

US can't live with or without Pakistan: Gilani

Karachi, Fri, 23 Sep 2011ANI

Karachi, Sep 23(ANI): Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has reiterated that the United States can't effectively fight the ongoing war against terror in Afghanistan without his country's assistance.

"They can't live with us. They can't live without us," the Dawn quoted Gilani, as saying.
"So, I would say to them that if they can't live without us, they should increase contacts with us to remove misunderstandings," he added.


He further emphasized that the US should avoid issuing statements unacceptable to the Pakistani public.
"No compromise would be acceptable on Pakistan's sovereignty," the prime minister said, adding that a stable Afghanistan was in the interests of Pakistan.
Gilani was responding to Senate testimony by US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen about Pakistan on Thursday.
Mullen had accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of supporting the Haqqani network in planning and executing the assault on the US Embassy in Afghanistan last week and a truck bomb that wounded 77 American soldiers days earlier.
He had also said that the US had credible information that Haqqani extremists, with help from the ISI, were responsible for the June 28 attack on the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and other small, but effective assaults. (ANI)



[URL]http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/242288






With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you...

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away
C[/URL]ourtesy :U2

 

[A.V.]

For Pakistan to change, it's army must change

The army and its strategic adventures have brought Pakistan to its present pass. The footprints of the terrorism now haunting the country go back to the first Afghan 'jihad', the one army-inspired event which pushed Pakistan to the frontiers of insanity. The phoenix won't rise from its ashes, and there will be no return to sanity, unless the army can bring itself to change its outlook and reinvent some of its mental apparatus.

Civilians have been poor administrators, in no position to escape their share of the blame for the mess the Fortress of Islam is in. But in the driving seat of Pakistan's steady march to the brink have been our holy guardians. There is little room for quibbling on this point.

Even so, despite the mounting evidence of disorder, the army refuses to change, still obsessed with the threat from the east, still caught up with the quixotic notion of exercising influence in Afghanistan. God in heaven, why should it matter to us if a president of Afghanistan is a Tajik, an Uzbek or a Pathan? Can't we keep our eyes focused on our own problems? The threat we face lies squarely within but our strategic grandmasters insist on being foreign policy specialists.

If a Stalin were around, although fat chance of that occurring, he would lay his hands first not on militants and assorted terrorists but on the foreign policy experts who infest our television studios.

Is Mossad pulling the strings of terrorism in Karachi? Was the CIA behind the attack on Shia pilgrims in Mastung? Was RAW behind the attempt on the life of the Karachi special investigator, Chaudhry Aslam?

By any reasonable computation we have enough of a nuclear arsenal. By any yardstick of common sense, a commodity often in short supply in the conference rooms of national security, we have as much of a deterrent as we need to counter the real or imagined threat from India. This being the case, we should be directing what energies we have to the threat from within: that posed by militancy marching under the banner of Islam.

As part of this undertaking, we need to advertise for a Hakim Luqman who could cure our general staff and the ISI of their preoccupation with the future of Afghanistan. We have been burnt by Afghanistan. We don't need any further burning. For the sake of Pakistan's future we need to distance ourselves from Afghanistan's problems, dire as they are.

Of one thing we should be sure. America's Afghan pacification drive has failed. Far from being defeated or even on the back-foot the Taliban are stronger than ever. When the Americans leave, the mental decision to leave having already been taken, Afghanistan will erupt once more into civil war. This is the writing on the wall, the message emblazoned across the skies. All the more reason for Pakistan's strategic geniuses to avoid the temptation, irresistible as it may be, to take sides in that civil war. Who comes out on top, the Taliban or warriors from Mars, should be none of our business.

The theory of strategic assets for the future thus becomes irrelevant. We paid a heavy penalty for this theory in the past. We can't be repeating the same mistakes. Our old assets were the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. What good did they do us? Our new assets, even though our denials are vociferous, are the likes of Sirajuddin Haqqani and his so-called network. What are we expecting of them? That they will deliver Afghanistan to the ISI's safekeeping? Is this grand strategy or the repetition of grand folly?

The discovery of Sheikh Osama bin Laden in the sylvan surroundings of Abbottabad should have been a wake-up call for the guardians of national security. Having been caught with their pants down some humility was in order. But they seem to have slunk deeper into their bunkers.

The Americans may be asking for too much, and they are certainly in the mood to hunt for scapegoats as their Afghan intervention begins to unravel, but none of this should mean that we remain faithful to the discredited theory of strategic assets. The Haqqanis may be good for Afghanistan but nothing that they have qualifies them to imperil or worsen Pakistan's ties with the United States.

Gen Kayani is perfectly right in saying that any decision to launch an operation in North Waziristan or anywhere else will be Pakistan's decision, taken in the light of what we think is best for us, and that in this respect there will be no taking orders from America. This is also the voice of the nation.

At the same time, however, why must the suspicion be allowed to linger that the Haqqanis enjoy ISI backing? This has been the cocktail circuit gossip in Islamabad for a long time now. If this is a groundless suspicion the ISI's media machine should have been working overtime to dispel it. But we have allowed matters to reach the point where Pakistan's real or alleged support for the Haqqanis has become, at least for the time being, the major sticking point between the Pentagon and General Headquarters. Allowing this suspicion to grow has not been very smart on the part of our national security experts.

The US secretary of defence Leon Panetta and CIA chief Gen David Petraeus are not oracles whose words should be taken on trust. If they say something it doesn't become a divine revelation. But we have to be honest with ourselves. Is North Waziristan a Taliban haven or not? Do the Haqqanis use it as a safe base or not?

If it is a safe haven we should be doing something about it, not because this is what America wishes but because it is in our own interest to do so. But if it be not in our power to do something then our protestations about national sovereignty wear pretty thin.

At America's door can be laid the responsibility of much mischief stretching from the Middle East to Iraq and onwards to Afghanistan. But the demons we are contending with – whether in Mastung or Karachi – are not American inventions. For their creation and nurturing we have to look at ourselves, in this regard our own shoulders bearing the heaviest responsibility.

Let us dread the day the Taliban are victorious in Afghanistan. What a fillip will that be for militancy in the name of the faith in Pakistan? Then America will not come to our rescue. We will be on our own and it will avail us little if the Haqqanis were or were not a strategic asset of ours. By the way, who was the genius who coined this phrase, strategic asset? In a just world he would have some explaining to do.

The militants Pakistan faces baulk at nothing. They are utterly ruthless. But, collectively, we haven't really woken up to this threat, our national response, therefore, a mixture of toughness and softness. How many militants have been sentenced by the courts? Very few if at all. The excuse trotted out is that prosecutions are weak and the evidence often skimpy. But when an Aasia Bibi comes to trial, for an alleged offence with a religious connotation, the punishment is swift and severe, regardless of how persuasive or skimpy the evidence may be.

My Lord the Chief Justice is trying to take the authorities in Karachi, especially the police, to task, although what good mere admonitions will do remains to be seen. But it would also help if their lordships took a closer look at the weaknesses in the judiciary's cupboard.

Decades of misadventure have distorted and even corrupted the Pakistani mind. We do not live in the real world. Our foreign policy notions, our list of assets and threats, have but a remote relation to reality. We must look to first causes. How did we create these bonfires for ourselves? How did we become prisoners of our misconceptions?

Liberating the Pakistani mind from the shackles of these self-imposed errors must be the first of our tasks if, with luck, we are to become a normal nation.



Email: [email protected]

http://thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDet...ID=69052&Cat=9

 

[SpArK]

US warned Pakistan army chief to halt truck bomb, but was ignored
Published: Friday, Sep 23, 2011


An American commander asked Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff to halt a truck bomb two days before an explosion wounded 77 US troops at a base in Wardak, 50 miles southwest of Kabul.


According to a report in The Guardian, General John Allen personally asked General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistan's army chief, to halt an insurgent truck bomb that was heading for his troops, during a meeting in Islamabad two days before a huge explosion wounded 77 US soldiers.


In reply, General Kayani offered to "make a phone call" to stop the assault on the US base in Wardak province.
But his failure to use the American intelligence to prevent the attack has fuelled a blazing row between the US and Pakistan.


Furious American officials blame the Taliban-inspired group the Haqqanis - and, by extension, Pakistani intelligence - for the September 10 bombing and an even more audacious guerrilla assault on the Kabul US embassy three days later that killed 20 people and lasted more than 20 hours.


On Thursday the US military chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, described the Haqqanis as "a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence [spy] agency".

He earlier accused the ISI of fighting a "proxy war" in Afghanistan through the group.
Pakistan's Defence Minister Ahmed Mocha has rejected the American accusations of Haqqani patronage as "baseless".

"No one can threaten Pakistan as we are an independent state," he said.

US warned Pakistan army chief to halt truck bomb, but was ignored - World - DNA


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(Tell me)
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Lil' Kim (Featuring Sisqo) - How Many Licks? (Video) - YouTube

 

[Daredevil]

For Pakistan to change, its army should be dismantled not change. This Army has brought nothing but misery. It neither won wars nor gave a better administration. It has pushed Pakistan into a deep abyss from which it cannot extricate itself. Pakistan has to reform itself from ground up and for that to happen it has to destroy all its weak foundations like Pakistani Army, religious fundamentalism, teaching bigotry in the schools etc. Everyone is waiting with a bated breath for Pakistan's self-destruction.

 

[SHASH2K2]

I dont think USA will sever ties immediately or attack them . USA is not in position to do so. Whats USA will do is try to squeeze Pakistan Financially and China which is already under great economic problems will have another headache in form of pakistan. USA will also fuel separatist organizations within Pakistan. USA is very much in position to do so . IT will be cheaper option for USA to balkanize Pakistan.

 

[johnee]

Eventually, pakistan will be balkanised and re-absorbed into India...for this area to be safe, secure and stable. India may or may not remain in its present form...