Thread: Proof..the truth starts to come about

Seems many Pakistanis have realized the emptiness of the PA "military might" rhetoric.

Its a butt of jokes, many SMS jokes seem to be floating around about its incompetence and cowardice.

Originally Posted by vsdoc

Is that all you got?!

Speaking of d1ck measuring, my relative outranks yours - and his Pakistani cronies. So snap to it - or not.

Who do you infer to? FM Sam Manekshaw?

If so, than with that attitude I highly doubt you are related to someone as great as him. He was a man of a much higher character and thoughts. A brilliant man! I'm not competing here, General Harbaksh and Field Marshal Manekshaw were both the right men at the right time for India. Its stupid if you think I'm indulging in some sort of my relative is better than yours; they both fought for India, and they both have my highest respects.

Oh, and FM Manekshaw himself had a lot of high ranking friends in the Pak military, his previous regiment, before the country was partitioned, was the Frontier Force Regiment, which now is part of the Pak army.

"I see you - and America - still do not get it. You cannot be in bed with Pakistan and India at the same time."

I see us in bed with neither, sir. We serve the interests of the mission to which we're committed-one in which Pakistan plays a reluctant role and India a peripheral one that's largely self-serving.

"The trust you speak of is a two way street sir. And will come when you finally see the light."

Ah, but that's YOU suggesting we must find a regional and global partner of trusting merit and military and financial strength in "somebody else" (i.e., India)-

"...Someone they could trust, regionally and globally.

Someone militarily strong and financially sound..."

"America may have its own agenda in Afghanistan. That does not have to be reciprocated in toto by India, who have their own interests to protect and further."

America serves the interests of the internat'l community as those interests are in alignment with ours. India? That's for your government to answer but, to date, their response hasn't been sufficient in my view to become that "regional and global partner" to whom you allude.

"...After all, you have the luxury of moving back to your home base thousands of miles away, when you choose to do so. We do not. You seem to imply that we are riding piggy-back on your presence in the area..."

Conversely we also have the burden of fighting an enemy while building a community thousands of miles from our home. It is from Afghanistan that we were attacked so nowhere is too far for our obligation of self-defense.

"...Imply..."? I thought I was more direct than that. You ARE riding piggy-back on our presence there...and the presence of many others who've shed a great deal of blood and money for the same objectives as America and the U.N.

"Well, India will pay what it can, towards what it wants to, and what the Afghans want."

I'm only interested in "...what the Afghans want..." and how India might serve that role as a trustworthy "...regional and global partner...".

"...We will use our ducats for our homeland sir - when the time comes. As we have in the past. Till then - there seem to be enough ducats on hire floating around to get the job done - or not. Bottom line - if Afghanistan could have been won by money or ducats, first the Brits, then Soviets, and finally America and its allies would have done so. I am not saying India will come up with the elusive answer. All I am saying is that India is not stupid to know quicksand when it sees it, and still proceed to knowingly walk into it. Not via the same path definitely. And definitely not on its own coin and boots..."

So much for your role as a trusting regional and global partner both militarily strong and financially sound. Thus, vsdoc (if you're any indication), India may not be ready to assume any burden of regional much less global leadership. That takes sacrifice in all its forms at a scale you've made clear is too costly for too little apparent immediate gain.

"...P.S. If CAR access is all that is at stake here, then that goal for India is more profitably and way less painfully served by our continuing trade relations with Iran..."

Self-serving myopia. My reference was to an Afghanistan serving a community of nations towards such. It is land-locked, if you haven't noticed, and will require connection to both Iran (remember your Zaranj-Delaram road project) AND Pakistan.

"...And it does not have to be a zero-sum game at the cost of our relationship with Israel either, as has been demonstrated in the recent past..."

That's for Iran, Israel and India to determine.

America won't be the chief beneficiary of CAR resources. Far from it. America won't be the chief beneficiary of Afghanistan's development either. Yet it's America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe that have assumed the U.N.'s mandate while India, China, Japan and others count their looming advantages from such and carp on the sidelines.

In sum, vsdoc, your response has largely validated my suggestion that India is hardly prepared to look beyond narrow self-interests in regional development for the global community's greater good. I'll not draw any inference to your government from it, however. That would be unfair.

Talk about hurt egos.



And on the topic of comparing the budgets, even Pakistani masses feel having a large defence budget is the main requirement, not education or health. They are conditioned to think that way.

Sure that isn't a photo from a Pakistani Army veterans convention?

Meanwhile



Pakistan may cut Nato's Afghan supply line after Osama bin Laden killing

The security of Nato's main supply line into Afghanistan came under threat on Saturday as Pakistani parliamentarians voted to review all aspects of their relationship with the US amid worsening political fallout from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The unanimous motion was passed in the early hours of Saturday morning at the conclusion of an extraordinary 10-hour parliamentary session when the military's top brass offered apologies and admissions of failure, and the country's spy chief offered to resign.

Condemning the 2 May raid on bin Laden's house in Abbottabad, 35 miles northeast of Islamabad, as a "violation of Pakistan's sovereignty", parliament voted unanimously to review the country's terms of engagement with Washington.

In feisty speeches lawmakers warned against further "unilateral action", including CIA drone strikes, and urged the government to consider cutting the Nato supply line that runs from Karachi to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and Balochistan.

Suspicious of Pakistan's failure to capture bin Laden but recognising the importance of the supply line and pursuing other al-Qaida fugitives, the Obama administration is dispatching Senator John Kerry – the "good cop" of US diplomacy with Pakistan – to Islamabad on Sunday.

"We're not trying to find a way to break the relationship apart, we're trying to find a way to build it," he told reporters in Kabul on Saturday.

Kerry arrives in Pakistan at a time of unprecedented criticism of the powerful military. On Friday night top generals were submitted to harsh questioning from parliamentarians during a marathon session that stretched late into the night.

The inter-services intelligence (ISI) chief General Shuja Pasha, one of the most powerful figures in the country, admitted to an "intelligence failure" on Bin Laden, insisting that the ISI had been kept in the "complete dark" by the US over the raid, and tendered his resignation to prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. It was not accepted – a sign that the government, led by Asif Ali Zardari, has decided to support the weakened military.

The fragile civilian government is gambling that its pro-army stance will guarantee it a full term in office. "It was politically a very astute move," said Talat Masood, a retired general and political analyst.

Another striking revelation came from the deputy air force chief, who admitted that CIA drones take off from Shamsi airbase in Balochistan province. But he insisted that the drones were unarmed – those carrying missiles came from Afghanistan, he said – and that Shamsi was actually under the authority of the United Arab Emirates, which built the remote airstrip in the 1990s for rich sheikhs on bird-hunting expeditions.

Despite having been technically held in camera, details of the parliamentary session leaked out to the media. One MP told the news website Dawn that the air force chief claimed to have ordered his jet fighters to shoot down US helicopters with Bin Laden's body on board when they were leaving Pakistan, but they were too slow.

Although generally apologetic, in some instances the generals struck back at their critics. When an MP from a religious party attacked Pasha, the spy chief told the mullah that was in no position to talk because he had received funds from Libya and Saudi Arabia.

The parliamentary motion appeared intended to deflect attention from uncomfortable questions about Bin Laden's Pakistan sanctuary onto complaints about US breaches of sovereignty. But the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted from power in a 1999 military coup, said he was determined to seek greater accountability of army power. "The elected government should formulate foreign policy. A parallel policy or parallel government should not be allowed to work," he told a news conference yesterday.

Deteriorating relations with the US are further complicated by a bitter row between spies on both sides. The fact that the CIA could run such a massive operation to capture Bin Laden had deeply embarrassed the ISI, said Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration advisor. "It's not just a diplomatic embarrassment, it's a counter-espionage failure," he said. "Suddenly the ISI is scared of what the CIA is capable of doing."

In a further sign of cooling relations General Khalid Wynne, chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff committee, has cancelled a five-day visit to the United States due to start on 22 May.

The US has begun to look to central Asian countries to reduce its reliance on Pakistan for military supplies to Afghanistan. The cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has already threatened to have his supporters block military trucks passing through Peshawar.

But outside parliament, the gap between political rhetoric and ground realities is as stark as ever in Pakistan. On Friday a CIA drone fired missiles that killed five people in the tribal belt, the fourth such attack since 2 May.

Yesterday the death toll from Friday's Taliban suicide attack on a paramilitary training centre climbed to 89; a Taliban spokesman said the vicious bombing was to avenge the al-Qaida leader's death and warned of more to come.

Firstly I can think of no better job for John Kerry than to be yelled at by Pakistanis and secondly the ISI should be scared of the CIA: very scared indeed.

Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants

WASHINGTON — Two years before terrorists struck the Indian port city of Mumbai, a Pakistani-American man named David Coleman Headley began laying the groundwork for the attack, financed, he claims, by $25,000 from an officer in Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service.


Mr. Headley told Indian investigators that the officer, known only as Major Iqbal, “listened to my entire plan to attack India.” Another officer with the intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, “assured me of the financial help,” Mr. Headley said.

As the United States presses Pakistan for answers about whether the ISI played a role in harboring Osama bin Laden, Mr. Headley is set to recount his story of the Mumbai attack in a federal courthouse in Chicago. What he discloses could deepen suspicions that Pakistani spies are connected to terrorists and could potentially worsen relations between Washington and Islamabad.

India, the site of the November 2008 attacks, will be closely monitoring the trial for evidence of the ISI’s duplicity. Pakistan will also be listening to — and is likely to deny — Mr. Headley’s every word. So far, Islamabad has dismissed Mr. Headley’s accusations against the ISI as little more than a desperate performance by a man hoping to avoid the death penalty.

An American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the United States government’s view of Mr. Headley — like so much else surrounding the ISI — was murky. No agreement exists in Washington on whether the ISI guided Mr. Headley and the attacks on Mumbai.

“It’s not very clear,” the official said. “A lot of this is going to come out of the trial. His claim could just be his claim.”

Still, the very fact that the government is presenting Mr. Headley as a prosecution witness suggests that at least some in the government believe he is telling the truth. And the authorities said they expected the government to present e-mails and tapes of telephone conversations to support his story.

Any new evidence of ISI malfeasance that emerges from the trial will reverberate in Washington, with the relationship between the United States and Pakistan at its most tenuous in years.

A growing chorus on Capitol Hill argues that the discovery of Bin Laden’s hideout and the evidence in Mr. Headley’s case leave no doubt that the ISI and its Pakistani military overseers have played a cynical double game with the United States. Pakistan has received $20 billion in military and development assistance since 2001, and its military, they say, has sheltered Bin Laden, supported Afghan Taliban who kill American troops and guided the militants who attacked Mumbai.

Mr. Headley himself is not on trial. But he will be the main witness against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Chicago businessman who is accused of providing financial and logistical support for the 2008 siege in Mumbai. The attack, a barrage of gunfire and grenades, killed at least 163 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana’s defense is that he agreed to support Mr. Headley’s activities in India because he was led to believe he was working for the ISI, and therefore the Pakistani government.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and a critic of the ISI, predicted that the trial would be “the next nail in the coffin of U.S.-Pakistan relations, as the ISI’s role in the murder of six Americans is revealed in graphic detail.”

With precisely that possibility in mind, the American authorities have kept much of the evidence secret. Citing national security concerns, they have successfully moved to quash the defense lawyers’ subpoenas for State Department cables and records held by the F.B.I. that discuss Pakistan’s links with militants.

And though the government has charged four other men with aiding and abetting the murder of American citizens, including the officer known as Major Iqbal, the indictment refers to them either as commanders or associates of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, not as having links to the ISI.

In interviews in recent days, American military and intelligence officials who have served in Pakistan argued that the ISI’s story is complex. Some of them portray it as an unwieldy third-world bureaucracy that even Pakistani generals struggle to control. The United States should try to reform the ISI, they argue, not abandon it.

“I think we’re at an extremely critical juncture,” said James Helmly, a retired general who served as the senior American military representative in Pakistan from 2006-8. “We need to mature the relationship.”

Arguably the most feared institution in Pakistan, the ISI has a mythic reputation among Pakistanis as a shadow government with a hand in virtually every major development in the country. Human rights and democracy activists say the agency is out of control and accuse it of carrying out hundreds of disappearances, systematically rigging elections and harassing civilians who support peace with India.

They say the American raid that killed Bin Laden has created a rare moment when the ISI’s judgment and effectiveness is being challenged. Whether the ISI was sheltering Bin Laden or was unaware of his presence, the agency must be revamped, they say.

In a series of unusual developments in a country long dominated by its powerful military, the ISI chief twice offered to resign last week. News commentators are criticizing the agency, and political parties are demanding that the ISI be reined in.

“It depends on the caliber and the grit of the political leadership,” Rasul Baksh Rais, a leading Pakistani political scientist, said in an interview. “How they can use this opportunity to restructure the civilian-military relationship and bring the military under civilian control.”

American and Pakistani officials said the ISI was still dominated by military officers wedded to an outdated, paranoid and dangerous mindset that the C.I.A. helped create during the 1980s anti-Soviet conflict in Afghanistan. More ultranationalists than jihadists, the ISI’s officers consider themselves to be Pakistan’s true guardians. They see the United States as a feckless and immoral power that is in deep decline, India as Pakistan’s main threat, and militants as proxies they can control.

A former American intelligence official said the C.I.A. funneled vast amounts of covert aid to more cooperative sections of the ISI in an effort to strengthen them. Former American officials said they did the same with the Pakistani Army. But progress has been slow.

American critics of the ISI say it will never be reformed or weakened by Pakistan’s civilian leadership. They say that proponents of continued American aid to the ISI are naive and “apologists” for an agency that has repeatedly double-crossed the United States.

The man who is suddenly an important figure in the relationship between Pakistan and the United States, Mr. Headley, may not be the most reliable witness, despite evidence that he has worked closely with intelligence and drug agencies here and abroad. His adult life is a blur of deceit, involving multiple marriages, illegal business deals and numerous turns in and out of jail.

Mr. Rana’s defense will succeed or fail on his lawyers’ ability to discredit Mr. Headley, who, according to court records, has a history of alcohol and drug abuse. Under threat of prosecution for drug trafficking, he became an informant in Pakistan for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The defense lawyers are expected to show that Mr. Headley has a long history of deceiving American law enforcement authorities. One anticipated piece of evidence is an informant agreement that would provide the most conclusive evidence yet that Mr. Headley was under contract with the D.E.A. when he began training with terrorists.

Authorities with knowledge of the case say the lawyers are also considering summoning one of Mr. Headley’s ex-wives, a New York woman who works at a department store make-up counter. The lawyers may want the woman to describe how she warned the F.B.I. that her husband was plotting with terrorists, and how the government failed to thoroughly investigate her accusations because Mr. Headley persuaded them that she was lying.

The case is a microcosm of the missteps, distrust and confusion that has marked the American efforts in Pakistan since 2001, according to current and former American officials. But whatever evidence the trial produces, current and former American officials said, it would be a mistake to cut off all American aid to the ISI or the Pakistani military.

Marty Martin, a retired C.I.A. official who oversaw the hunt for Bin Laden from 2002 to 2004, said cutting assistance would further isolate Pakistani officers who cooperated with the United States and embolden the powerful militant groups that span Pakistan.

“There is no option except to continue working with them,” Mr. Martin said. “Why? This is not over.”