PAKISTAN
Like unto the Dark Ages.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of an ex-minister of its southern Balochistan province for allegedly attempting to force two underage girls into marriage and torturing their relatives, media reports said Friday.
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The case came to light after relatives of the girls, aged seven and nine, refused to accept his decision that they be wed. In retaliation, the accused kidnapped five male members of the family and subjected them to torture at an illegal jail run under his supervision.
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He previously evaded arrest due to his status and the influence of his wife, who is a sitting minister in Balochistan. Article
Sometimes it sounds like a broken record, but, one more time: all the threads always lead back to Pakistan.
President Bush promoted Pakistan in 2004 to MNNA, the same status enjoyed by close allies Israel, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Egypt and Jordan. Major Non-NATO allies get priority in defense purchases. They have no North Atlantic Treaty obligations, but club rules preclude undermining NATO.
Pakistan has been violating club rules — big time. President Pervez Musharraf presumably knows about his Inter-Services Intelligence agency’s major operations. Official fiction holds that Pakistan is not assisting Taliban’s comeback insurgency in Afghanistan.
Yet the interrogation of Taliban prisoners and suspected agents reported to Hamid Karzai’s intelligence service — a total of about 1,500 so far — shows that every single one (not even one exception) had come from Pakistan, many of them former pupils in madrassas (Koranic schools).
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The British, Canadian, Dutch and German NATO allies fighting in Afghanistan know the score on ISI’s assistance to the Taliban. Now fighting with battalion-size units, the Taliban enjoys ISI-protected privileged sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border. But Musharraf’s hanky-panky diplomacy is running out of hokey-pokey disinformation. Article
Related:
the Taliban leadership is still banking on asymmetrical tactics founded on historical precedent to oust NATO forces. Two successful, low-intensity campaigns against the British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 1980s have kept geographical advantages fresh in mind. And the lawless Afghan-Pakistani borderlands that have been a sanctuary to the hardline movement and al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden to this day serve as a rear base par excellence.
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Pakistan’s underhanded support of the Taliban to destabilize its neighbor is no secret in the Western intelligence community, nor is the deep-seated corruption of an Afghan government that includes warlords and other officials with connections to the booming narcotics industry. Afghanistan watchers say all of these factors are interconnected and must be dealt with in unison to rebuild a country shattered by 30 years of war.
But as the United States leads the call for more NATO troops and firepower, critics counter that the Bush administration’s overemphasis on military spending versus reconstruction aid has hamstrung efforts to win hearts and minds. By some estimates, military operations have cost US$82.5 billion since 2002, compared with $7.3 billion spent on development - a 900% disparity.
“In Afghanistan, military force, understandably a vital part of a counter-insurgency strategy, has for too long been the only strategy and one that will lose any utility if it is reduced to fighting for ‘business as usual’,” says the latest report from the International Crisis Group. “The desire for a quick, cheap war followed by a quick, cheap peace is what has brought Afghanistan to the present increasingly dangerous situation.” Article
Noted FYI: A nuclear-capable missile test.
