Militants overran observation post in attack that killed 9 US troops

[Ray]

[QUOTE=Parihaka;518082]

You know what I mean Ray, they don't own it to own the country, they own it as in they control it. A very far stretch from AGM's "the US has been able to get a foothold in Iraq ". If the US has a foothold, the irhabi must be dangling by a pubic hair.
I agree with everything else you say except to point out tens of thousands of US troops will be freed up over the coming months to send to Afghanistan, and both Presidential candidates are treating it as a top priority.

What's up?

You are in a real aggressive mood. Quite unlike you.

No matter what the Presidential candidates may say, we should not count the chickens before they are hatched.

Never underestimate your enemy.

For all one knows, they have kept the terrorism low to bring in complacency and given the rhetoric of the Presidential
campaign allow the next President to pull some troops away.

Then strike with vigour in Iraq!

What happens then?

The President, whoever that be, will be left with cleft foot!!

As far as redeployment in Afghanistan after a pull out from Iraq, those deployed again will be real sore, having had the euphoria of returning home after a huge slog!

[Parihaka]

Pari:

Your exchange with MA is interesting from the point of view of pure pragmatism. Informed Pakistani observers present a wealth of regional complexities and historical events to argue what actions can and cannot be
taken, while in the west, the picture is far simpler, i.e., we're fighting an enemy to defeat him and where he goes is where we want to fight him; the rest be hanged. Pragmatic to a fault, I am sure we could prevail in the fight, but will we be able to prevail in the victory? I think if GoP comes out of it strengtened, we will be no less popular than before. Seems like a wash.

Presenting escalating complexities as a means of confusing and weakening your enemy is a tactic as old as the hills: the Alexander-Gordian knot parable is a classic example. Afghanistan's future relies on the current problems being sorted out. For every solution bar returning it to the Taliban, Pakistan is the obstacle.
It's had since 2001 to sort out it's problems as a rational player, including massive amounts of both military and financial aid.
Instead over that period it has made matters for it's neighbours and the west much worse by providing large territories to the Taliban and Al Qaeda to do with as they wish, all the while guaranteeing the security of those territories against foreign attack.
It has also over the period prior to 2001 passed detailed blueprints of it's nuclear programme to other countries including Libya and Iran, and as you yourself recently posted has seemingly updated those plans with smaller more efficient bomb plans on sale to whoever has the cash.
Beside these issues, worries about who is related to whom and whose sensibilities will be offended pale in comparison.
Alexander was a wise man.

[Ray]

[QUOTE]

Honored more in the breech than in practice it seems. Sunni vs Shia, T-Ban vs all sorts of Muslim adherents--the list is long. Pakistan's concerns in that regard seem to be less religious than tribal.

The Frontier Constabulary is from the region and hence tribal.
The Pakistan Army is Punjabi majority and the Punjabis are the ones who are most affected by the secessionists, since they wont be able to lord about and live of the fat of the land as they have been doing so far.

If you observe Pakistan, you will notice that there is a lot of resentment against the Punjabis since genetically they have a superiority streak in their bones, which is totally misplaced.
That is why Bangladesh came about. They refused to hand over power to the legitimate victor of the election - Mujibur Rehman, who was a Bengali. That led to civil disturbances and military repression in East Pakistan and Ms Gandhi stepped in to make the best of the manna!!

Two ideas there. That they protest all ISAF incursions runs counter to what one of the article posted in this thread related, namely a cross-border, hot-pursuit incursion carried out with Pak military cooperation.

That the Pakistanis are against a major incursion because it would expose their failure to live up to their reputed warrior status would be the GoP's dirty little secret, surely not public policy. The sum of all the rest of their excuses for failing to root out the T-Ban would then be a cover which becomes less credible the more the T-Ban nibble away at Pak territorial control.

Officially GoP cannot allow any ISAF action within its own territory. It would tantamount to abdicating her sovereignty and giving credence to the South Asia jibe that they depend on others i.e. US and China to exist. That is insulting to their self hyped superiority as Moslems.

Unofficially, it is believed that even the Predators are flown from Pakistani air bases!

The GoP would love to get rid of the Taliban since they are making the GoP look like a joke. But the majority of Pakistanis are starry eyed that the Taliban are the soldiers of Allah; and the GoP cannot go against the majority of Pakistanis. Musharraf did marvels for Pakistan, but since he was taken by the majority to be a client of the US and against Islamic warriors, he came a cropper in the elections. From a thriving economy, they are in the midst of a galloping inflation which is said to be at 21%!

I meant posture, as in deployment of forces. It seems to me that India and Pakistan are in tension and each side deploys forces accordingly. If true, can Pakistan redeploy forces to wrest control of the badlands from the evil gunslingers without undermining the former? And if now, wouldn't it be logical to make the excuses it does to avoid redeploying?

They are using their Army reserve formations in FATA and elsewhere. Indeed, they cannot denude their frontline facing India since there is a trust deficit. I don't blame them for it since this is a historical baggage.

If true, how long can Pak allow the situation to deteriorate before it must act, and if it is true that their own forces would be reluctant to fight their own kind, wouldn't it make sense to turn the ISAF loose in the badlands?

Once again, officially they cannot let the ISAF loose in Pakistan. The GoP hopes that somehow the ISAF will be able to rid NWFP and FATA of this menace.

At the same time, they also hope that the Taliban wins in Afghanistan so that an anti Indian pro Pakistan govt comes in place and Pakistan thus gets her strategic depth as also is able to influence the CAR nations as the leader of Islamic countries.

Pardoxical, but the reality!

[Parihaka]

What's up?

You are in a real aggressive mood. Quite unlike you.

I've got toothache
In truth, sometimes the pot needs stirring. Seeing the same old lines of 'it's too complex for you, just give us more money and we'll take care of it' grinds me down. This is the same hook that idiot McNaughten swallowed whole from Mohammad Akbar Khan. Seeing it play out again in exactly the same fashion is depressing, especially as this time the stakes are global and megadeaths may ensue.

[Ray]

Pari,

I understand your anguish.

If AM goes away, then the lone voice of Pakistan on this board will be lost.

We will then become a mutual admiration society.

As I have always maintained we must have a conduit to see the other side of the hill!!

Sun Tsu in his Art of War had said Know your Enemy! Though Pakistan is not anyone's enemy.

[Parihaka]

Okay. I promise I'll leave the poor wee hothouse flower alone.

[Ray]

Khaled Ahmed
The united Pakhtun 'nation' in control of the south of Afghanistan will be even less willing to recognise the Durand Line as a frontier between the two countries. And it will draw the new line along the Indus River at Attock

Adjust Font Size The Friday Times The Friday Times




An Afghan National Army (ANA) soldier keeps watch at a checkpoint in the Arghandab District of Kandahar on June 18, 2008. Afghan and NATO troops backed by helicopter gunships have launched a massive “clean-up” operation to drive Taliban militants from villages near Kandahar – AFP

On June 13, 2008, the Taliban did something that shook the confidence the NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan had developed over a period they characterised as one of reversal for the Al Qaeda-Taliban invaders. They attacked the Sarposa prison in Kandahar and sprang the entire population of the main prison, forcing the Afghan government to believe the rumour that the Taliban may be about to take Kandahar and mount a serious challenge to the Afghan government in the south.

The Taliban had used a combination of suicide-bombers, many of them Pakistanis, and heavily armed fighters, many of them Arabs, that blasted the mud walls of the prison open and sent more than a thousand inmates scurrying into the countryside. There was a fleet of mini-buses outside with their engines running ‘to collect the 450 Taliban militants housed in the jail’. This was heart-breaking for Kabul and the NATO commanders: they had thought that since the Taliban had not attacked much after the summer snowmelt, they must be in retreat.

That is when President Karzai lost his cool and delivered the famous threat of June 15, 2008. He said Afghanistan would target locations inside Pakistan to end terrorist infiltration into Afghanistan. Karzai certainly lowered the bar on negative exchanges and said something serious, but he specifically named warlords Baitullah Mehsud, Maulvi Umar and Maulana Fazlullah, for whom he will “send troops across the border”. He also specified that their houses would be targeted, which implied the use of air power too.

Suddenly the enemy is across the border. A TV anchor queried the Afghan ambassador in Islamabad on when the Afghan government would start getting the Americans out of Afghanistan since the Americans tended to destabilise any region they enter. But what about the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) inviting Islamabad to make peace with the ‘emirate’ of Baitullah Mehsud and his Al Qaeda masters on their terms?

Islamabad has a stance towards Afghanistan based on legal jurisprudence. Pakistan accepted the 2001 Resolution 1373 of the UN Security Council and thus the NATO-ISAF presence there. If it has problems with these forces, there is a mechanism of regular consultation provided by the UN.

Now contrast the enemy in Afghanistan with the enemy in South Waziristan which has annexed territory in the Tribal Areas and invades the settled areas of the NWFP to impose its writ there too. There is no mechanism of resolution of disputes with the ‘emirate’ and all the talking is done through raids and through suicide-bombings from Peshawar to Karachi. This ‘talking’ tames the politicians and TV anchors alike and makes them act hostile towards the American presence in Afghanistan, and terms any counter-measure to the terrorism of the ‘emirate’ as war ‘against our own people’.

The usual stereotypes are being deployed: the continuing disorder in Afghanistan, the lopsided representation of different ethnicities in its democratic system, the failure of the NATO-ISAF forces to provide security to the population, and the “puppet” nature of the presidency whose incumbent doesn’t feel secure a few miles outside Kabul. Add to that the ‘theorising’ about the advance into Afghanistan of the United States to secure the supply of strategic oil and gas resources of Central Asia, and you have the sum total of what Pakistanis have to say about the current political order in Afghanistan. The man who used to fling accusations from our side, President Musharraf, is about to bite the dust, but President Karzai is still there. The question very soon will be which state is more chaotic?

General Dan K McNeill, who left Afghanistan after 16 months of commanding the NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan, has said in Washington that raids into Afghanistan arose by 50 percent in April, and the reason was lack of ‘a more robust military campaign against insurgents in Pakistan’. He pointed to collusion between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani tribals and even indirectly explained the recent killing of Pakistani border guards together with the Taliban raiders by criticising a US-funded programme to train and equip Pakistan’s Frontier Corps (FC), and questioning ‘the effectiveness and loyalty of the tribally recruited guards’.

While Pakistan was busy witnessing the mammoth Long March in Islamabad on June 14, 2008, the Taliban had broken free of all peace deals and attacked half a dozen checkposts in the Tribal Areas, bombing the paramilitary forces there. Attacks on music shops, cell-phone shops and girls’ schools continued in the settled areas on which there was an agreement of truce with the NWFP government. Making clear who the Taliban were after, they even tried unsuccessfully to kidnap the son of Mr Amir Muqam, a prominent member of the PMLQ in the NWFP. So unsure is the provincial government of the capacity of the federal government to defend the country against the Taliban that when the federal government tried to wriggle out of the peace deals, the NWFP government refused to go along.

The problem is that Pakistan is finding it politically difficult to face the enemy in the Tribal Areas. The political parties now in government had rejected the policy of confrontation adopted by President Musharraf and cannot own it after coming to power. President Musharraf’s policy of facing up to the Taliban in Pakistan also lacked conviction because he sought repeatedly to strike the emotional chord among the Pakhtun of Pakistan by criticising how the Americans had botched another operation after Iraq in Afghanistan.

So flimsy was the resolve behind taking on Baitullah Mehsud after declaring that he had killed Ms Bhutto, that the caretaker government under Musharraf actually declared, through its interior minister General (Retd) Hamid Nawaz, that the attacks inside Pakistan, including suicide-bombings, were being organised by the United States!

Pakistan is faced with two enemies. The one in the Tribal Areas it is in the process of disowning as an enemy inside its own territory. It feels more comfortable having just one enemy across the border in Afghanistan. That harmonises with the prevailing emotion of the people. This strategy is that of subterfuge. If it was clever, one would support it even at the risk of accepting something immoral. It is a subterfuge that is going to harm Pakistan, and that may be sooner rather than later.

Islamabad will have to decide to deal with the ‘emirate’ of the warlords in South Waziristan whether it likes it or not. The TV anchor who asked the Afghan ambassador to get rid of the Americans from Afghanistan had not weighed the post-exit situation in Afghanistan and how it would benefit Pakistan.

Let us assume that the NATO forces leave Pakistan. (The non-Americans always wanted to leave till the French changed tack under President Sarkozy.) That will be followed by the flight of Karzai to possibly India and the retreat of the Northern Alliance to the North, to lick its wounds in what is considered the area of influence of Uzbekistan, backed by Turkey among others. The Taliban will form the next government and this time the effects of what happens in Kabul will be palpable inside Pakistan.

It will be found to the shock of all Punjabi patriots of PPP and PMLN that this united Pakhtun ‘nation’ in control of the south of Afghanistan is even less willing to recognise the Durand Line as a frontier between the two countries. And it will draw the new line along the Indus River at Attock.

A view from Pakistan.

[Ray]

Okay. I promise I'll leave the poor wee hothouse flower alone.

You sure are a trifle off colour of late.

Go and have a beer! Australian preferably! ;) :))

[Ray]

JAD,

See Post #82.

It is from Paksitan!

[JAD_333]

JAD,

See Post #82.

It is from Paksitan!

Thanks, Ray.

I gather the writer believes all hell is about to break loose, specifically that Pak soon will be forced confront the real threat to its establishment, the Taliban.

Is his paper associated with any party?

[Ray]

Not to sure.

AM would be better qualified to answer.

[n21]

[QUOTE=Ray;518334]

The GoP would love to get rid of the Taliban since they are making the GoP look like a joke.

Sir,
Does the GOP really want to get rid of Taliban? May be not.
I dont think they consider Taliban as a threat. If you observe the efficiency by which Pakistan was able to reduce the sucide bombing post-mosque attack,just by talking to the Taliban. Amazing!

Just make a deal,let the Taliban do what they want do in Afghanistan & FATA and Pakistan is spared of all the trouble! They are keeping the faith that NATO would leave afghanistan sooner or later and everything will be normal for them.

NATO is telling Pakistan to fight NATO's enemies,not Pakistan's.

[ArmchairGeneral]

Pari,

I understand your anguish.

If AM goes away, then the lone voice of Pakistan on this board will be lost.

We will then become a mutual admiration society.

As I have always maintained we must have a conduit to see the other side of the hill!!

Sun Tsu in his Art of War had said Know your Enemy! Though Pakistan is not anyone's enemy.

Seconded.

[Parihaka]

Gentlemen, I'm not sure what you are suggesting.
I disagree with AGM's posts, therefore I argue against them. Perhaps you're confusing my attitude toward his claims with my moderator duties, in which case I can assure you nothing could be farther from the truth. AgnosticMuslim has never shown anything other than courtesy and respect and I and the rest of the moderation team value him as a member.
If however you're suggesting that I allow him to post what I personally regard as honey scented propaganda in the vein of, but more sophisticated than the recent barrage of Chinese literature unchallenged; or that he is too delicate a flower to face up to that challenge, I will remind you of what seems to have become the forum maxim: this isn't a knitting circle.
AGM is welcome to post any time he likes and he's welcome to respond to or ignore my posts any time he likes. Does that clear it up?

[Ray]

Gentlemen, I'm not sure what you are suggesting.
I disagree with AGM's posts, therefore I argue against them. Perhaps you're confusing my attitude toward his claims with my moderator duties, in which case I can assure you nothing could be farther from the truth. AgnosticMuslim has never shown anything other than courtesy and respect and I and the rest of the moderation team value him as a member.
If however you're suggesting that I allow him to post what I personally regard as honey scented propaganda in the vein of, but more sophisticated than the recent barrage of Chinese literature unchallenged; or that he is too delicate a flower to face up to that challenge, I will remind you of what seems to have become the forum maxim: this isn't a knitting circle.
AGM is welcome to post any time he likes and he's welcome to respond to or ignore my posts any time he likes. Does that clear it up?

Parihaka,

You seem to have been divorced from your roots - Christian compassion.

That sums it up!

I have high regards for you. You disappoint. Say what you want to say with a little easier words. You are shoving it up the arse without oil!!

Sorry I am being crude for the first time, but it is because I think you are an intellectual and capable of saying the same thing in better words.