Pakistan's Descent into Chaos: Terrorist & Drone Attacks

[agentperry]

Horrors of sexual abuse in conflict-stricken FATA
By Iftikhar Firdous
Published: December 15, 2011

" A security officer forced me to have sex in exchange for cooking oil and pulses," 22-year-old Pashmeena.
PESHAWAR:
Kashmala Bibi* says her cousin's breasts were cut into pieces when five militants walked into their house and saw the woman breastfeeding her child. One of the insurgents then asked the other women around to eat the pieces.
This is one of the many tales of horror recorded in a report titled "Impact of crisis on women and girls in Fata".
The report, released by human rights organisation "Khwendo Kor" (Sisters' Home in Pashto) with financial support from UN-women, is based on case studies of women from the tribal belt living in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's IDP camps.
Women in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) are more susceptible to violence and abuse in a post-conflict scenario, whether or not they are part of the conflict, it says.
Another stark revelation made in the report is that women in camps were forced to have sexual intercourse in exchange for food and non-food items. Girls and widows were at greater risk.
The surveys from Nahqai and Jalozai camps further show that women were uncomfortable going to restrooms because there was little privacy as men constantly lurked around.
"A security officer forced me to have sex in exchange for cooking oil and pulses when I was collecting food at the main entrance of the camp," a 22-year-old woman Nighat* from the Jalozai Camp is quoted as telling the discussion group.
The report claims that there was an increase in honour killings in which women were first raped and since the rape was considered a disgrace to the family, they were later murdered.
Forced marriages, honour killings, exchange of women between tribes and marriages with first cousins resulting in disabilities of offspring have made the women in the tribal areas increasingly dependent. The role of women in society has decreased from 39% to 19%.
Akhunzada Chattan, an MNA from the Bajaur tribal region, says that certain rituals practiced with the veneration of religion have deprived women of their rights.
"In Bajaur, the area that I come from, usury is not something against which the cleric will stand up, but if a woman demands her share of property she is stigmatised as culturally blasphemous," he says.
The amendments to the Frontier Crimes Regulation have not significantly helped. Even now women first have to go through a jirga to seek justice. The jirga then decides how to proceed. "Women in Fata cannot directly appeal to any court of law," says Chattan while speaking to The Express Tribune.
Maryam Bibi, the woman behind the project, who belongs to Jani Khel (FR) Bannu, says the findings of the report are based on ground realities. "Although it is hard to digest the facts, this is what the women have to go through. Someone has to speak for change."

 

[bhramos]

 

[bhramos]

destroyed P-3C at PNS Mehran

 

[Blackwater]

destroyed P-3C at PNS Mehran

Best photo after 1971 War,when karachi harbor were destroyed

 

[JAISWAL]

Drone strikes begin again: Suspected U.S. drone kills 3 militants in Pakistan

Suspected U.S. drone kills 3 militants in Pakistan - officials
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MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (Reuters) - Unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles into a home in a tribal region of western Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least three militants, local intelligence officials said, in an attack that ended a lengthy pause in drone strikes that have become the mainstay of U.S. efforts to quash militants fuelling violence across the border in Afghanistan.

The officials said the missiles hit in the outskirts of the town of Miranshah in the North Waziristan, killing at least three. Militants often dispute official versions of such attacks and death tolls.

A source in Washington confirmed that a U.S.-operated drone had been fired at a militant target in Pakistan. The source said that no well-known militants were believed to have been targeted, injured or wounded in the attack.

The strike was the first such attack since November 17 and could deepen anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan, which was already running high after a November 26 cross-border NATO air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

That incident triggered a deep chill in already troubled U.S.-Pakistan relations, prompting Pakistan to close off NATO supply routes into Afghanistan.

Drones armed with missiles have played a significant role in U.S. counter-terrorism operations as the Obama administration winds down the war in Afghanistan and Washington's focus expands to militant havens in countries including Pakistan.

The United States vacated a remote air base, used to stage classified drone flights against militants, in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province last month. Pakistan had asked U.S. forces to leave the base after the November air strike.

The Obama administration contends that drone strikes have helped weaken the central leadership of al Qaeda and put associated militant groups on the defensive.

Many such groups operate in Pakistan's unruly northwestern tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

U.S. officials denied that the drop-off in lethal drone strikes was part of a deliberate moratorium on such flights linked to the political and diplomatic uproar over the air strike. Officials maintained that lethal drone strikes were based on the availability of targeting intelligence, and implied that such intelligence recently had been in short supply.

For whatever reason, the latest lethal drone strike appears to demonstrate that if there was any kind of moratorium on such attacks, it has now been lifted.

(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Mark Hosenball in Washington; writing by Qasim Nauman; editing by Louise Ireland and Mohammad Zargham)
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Suspected U.S. drone kills 3 militants in Pakistan - officials - Yahoo!7

 

[asianobserve]

US drone operator in Nevada desert: "Ooops, I'm sorry I was only reaching for the coffee..."

 

[SpArK]

The Christmas vacation is over.

 

[KS]

LOL didn't the beghairat Kayani say that any more drone entering Pak airspace will be shot down ?

 

[pmaitra]

Pakistan is showered with blessings everyday!

 

[JAISWAL]

LOL didn't the beghairat Kayani say that any more drone entering Pak airspace will be shot down ?

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What else can be expected from the CoS of lair pakistan, who is only talk-talk-talk-talk but no meterial. . .:taunt1:

 

[Daredevil]

We are back in Business .

 

[Ray]

It must have been on Pak Army's request for the same since the Talibans have killed some military men near Miranshah.

 

[bhramos]

The target has to be a HVI or Pakistan is letting us hit back after the TTP collected themselves and renewed operations against the Pakistani State. Pakistan's biggest mistake was holding back US drones and allowing a lull in Waziristan after the TTP were decimated during the 2011 summer and fall drone strikes. Expect more cooperation between Pakistan and the US, at least for a couple a months that is.

 

[nitesh]

It must have been on Pak Army's request for the same since the Talibans have killed some military men near Miranshah.

Sir can we take that as confirmation that paki terrorists in uniform are only good for mass murdering un armed civilians

 

[lcatejas]

If pakis want to stop the Drone than allow US to bomb ISI office.... Half the prob will get solve for US.

 

[Ray]

Sir can we take that as confirmation that paki terrorists in uniform are only good for mass murdering un armed civilians

Come on, you are asking as if I am the local representative of Pakistan!

 

[Singh]

Lull In U.S. Drone Strikes Aids Pakistan Militants

y'all missed this report published just a few days back

[h=1]Lull In U.S. Drone Strikes Aids Pakistan Militants[/h]
Pakistani forces on Tuesday secured the scene of a bomb blast in a tribal region in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan. Attacks by militants on security forces have increased recently.



WASHINGTON — A nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials say.



The insurgents are increasingly taking advantage of tensions raised by an American airstrike in November that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in two border outposts, plunging relations between the countries to new depths. The Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to avoid making matters worse while Pakistan completes a wide-ranging review of its security relationship with the United States, has not conducted a drone strike since mid-November.


Diplomats and intelligence analysts say the pause in C.I.A. missile strikes — the longest in Pakistan in more than three years — is offering for now greater freedom of movement to an insurgency that had been splintered by in-fighting and battered by American drone attacks in recent months. Several feuding factions said last week that they were patching up their differences, at least temporarily, to improve their image after a series of kidnappings and, by some accounts, to focus on fighting Americans in Afghanistan.


Other militant groups continue attacking Pakistani forces. Just last week, Taliban insurgents killed 15 security soldiers who had been kidnapped in retaliation for the death of a militant commander.


The spike in violence in the tribal areas — up nearly 10 percent in 2011 from the previous year, according to a new independent report — comes amid reports of negotiations between Pakistan's government and some local Taliban factions, although the military denies that such talks are taking place.


A logistics operative with the Haqqani terrorist group, which uses sanctuaries in Pakistan to carry out attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan, said militants could still hear drones flying surveillance missions, day and night. "There are still drones, but there is no fear anymore," he said in a telephone interview. The logistics operative said fighters now felt safer to roam more freely.


Over all, drone strikes in Pakistan dropped to 64 last year, compared with 117 strikes in 2010, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that monitors the attacks. Analysts attribute the decrease to a dwindling number of senior Qaeda leaders and a pause in strikes last year after the arrest in January of Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. security contractor who killed two Pakistanis; the Navy Seal raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden; and the American airstrike on Nov. 26.


Pakistan ordered drone operations at its Shamsi air base closed after that airstrike, but C.I.A. drones flying from bases in Afghanistan continue to fly surveillance missions over the tribal areas. The drones would be cleared to fire on a senior militant leader if there was credible intelligence and minimal risk to civilians, American officials said. But for now, the Predator and Reaper drones are holding their fire, the longest pause in Pakistan since July 2008.


"It makes sense that a lull in U.S. operations, coupled with ineffective Pakistani efforts, might lead the terrorists to become complacent and try to regroup," one American official said. "We know that Al Qaeda's leaders were constantly taking the U.S. counterterrorism operations into account, spending considerable time planning their movements and protecting their communications to try to stay alive."


C. Christine Fair, an assistant professor of political science at Georgetown University who just returned from a month in Pakistan, put it more bluntly: "They're taking advantage of the respite. It allows them to operate more freely."


Several administration officials said Saturday that any lull in drone strikes did not signal a weakening of the country's counterterrorism efforts, suggesting that strikes could resume soon. "Without commenting on specific counterterrorism operations, Al Qaeda is severely weakened, having suffered major losses in recent years," said George Little, a Defense Department spokesman. "But even a diminished group of terrorists can pose danger, and thus our resolve to defeat them is as strong as ever."


Analysts say the hiatus coincides with and probably has accelerated a flurry of insurgent activity and new strategies.


In the past week, leaflets distributed in North Waziristan announced that the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda had urged several Pakistani militant groups to set aside their differences and some commanders have reportedly asked their fighters to focus on striking American-led allied forces in Afghanistan.


Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass., and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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The Pakistani groups include the Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella group led by Hakimullah Mehsud that has mounted attacks against the Pakistani state since the group was formed in 2007. The new council also includes the Haqqani network and factions led by Maulvi Nazir of South Waziristan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur of North Waziristan, which already target NATO soldiers and have tacit peace agreements with the Pakistani military.



In telephone interviews, some Pakistani militants said the purpose of the agreement was to settle internal differences among rival factions and improve the image of the Taliban, which has been tarnished because of the increasing use of kidnapping and the rise in civilian killings.


Other analysts say that the Afghan Taliban are also feeling the pinch of American-led night raids and other operations across the border. They said the Taliban needed the militants in Pakistan's tribal region to focus more on helping to launch a final offensive in Afghanistan, in hopes of gaining leverage before any peace talks and the ultimate withdrawal of most American forces from Afghanistan by 2014.


One of the main drivers of the accord was Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, prompting some Pakistani analysts to reason that the Pakistani Army had also prodded the creation of the council, or shura, to maintain its leverage in any peace negotiations. Last summer Adm. Mike Mullen, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Haqqanis "a veritable arm" of Pakistan's main military spy agency.


"No agreement is ever permanent in frontier politics, and it's all very complicated," said one American government official with decades of experience in Pakistan and its tribal areas.


Stuck in a stalemate in the lawless borderlands with this array of militants are 150,000 Pakistani troops. A recent report by an Islamabad-based research organization, the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, said that militant-based violence had declined by 24 percent in the last two years. But it also concluded that terrorist attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province increased 8 percent in 2011 from the year before.


"The security situation remained volatile as militants dislodged from their strongholds constantly managed to relocate to other parts of the FATA," the report said.


In a sign of the shifting insurgent tactics, the number of suicide bombings in the country declined to 39 through November, compared with a high of 81 in all of 2009, according to the Pakistani military.


The number of attacks from homemade bombs, however, increased to 1,036 through November, compared with 877 for all of 2009. More than 3,500 Pakistani soldiers and police officers have been killed since 2002.


One senior Pakistani Army officer with experience in the tribal areas said that insurgents had devised increasingly diabolical triggers and fuses for bombs.


Unlike Americans, Pakistani soldiers still drive in pickups or carriers with little protection. "The effects are devastating," said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Vehicles are basically vaporized."


"The Pakistani Army is overstretched, and that's clearly had an impact on morale," said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. "But we have to maintain the pressure on the militants."


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/w...ids-pakistan-militants.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

 

[Daredevil]

Lull in drone strikes also helped Pakistani Army to make wider contacts with Haqqani Netwrok (good taliban ). This can be bad for Afghanisan, NATO and India. Expect some strikes against any of the above by Haqqani network.

 

[nitesh]

The army's ghairat | Pakistan Today | Latest news, Breaking news, Pakistan News, World news, business, sport and multimedia

 

[rock127]

Lull in drone strikes also helped Pakistani Army to make wider contacts with Haqqani Netwrok (good taliban ). This can be bad for Afghanisan, NATO and India. Expect some strikes against any of the above by Haqqani network.

That has also given the Talibunnies Co. Ltd to breath and re-group against Pak as well.If NATO/US vacates then the Talibunnies would again start conquering Pak as they were doing few years ago when Pak was doing peace deals with Talibbunies thus submitting.