Reading between the lines: for “balance,” read “quash.”

The US administration should step in and ‘balance’ proposed legislation to curtail military assistance to Pakistan if it does not step up its fight against terrorism, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad said Wednesday.

[snip]

Non-compliance would result in a suspension of military assistance, including sales of weapons and spares.

Pakistan is due in the coming years to receive F-16 fighters worth 5 billion dollars as well as hundreds of air-to-air missiles from the United States. Article

Ping-pong pronouncements. One day, a government minister blithely announces there are “no Taliban” in Pakistan whatsoever, today they are for all intents and purposes an entrenched, sophisticated (and covenient) network.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the involvement and instigation of government and ISI-related elements is always papered over.

Pakistani investigators said yesterday they had found leads linking a string of suicide bombings to Taleban militants, as the death toll from a wave of Islamist violence rose to 23.

They said six men arrested in a northwestern town at the weekend told interrogators about a web of militants, connected to a senior Taleban commander, who were plotting suicide and car bomb attacks across the country. Article

Noted FYI:

A group of Pakistani men has been accused of raping a teenaged girl and forcing her to parade naked through her village because one of her relatives eloped with a young women from the men’s family, police said on Wednesday.

[snip]

Another senior police official, Mushtaq Khoso, said police had arrested four of the 11 men named in the complaint and police were awaiting a medical report to confirm the 16-year-old had been raped.

Another police officer said certain influential people were pressing the girl’s father to drop his complaint.

The case brings to mind a similar attack on a village woman in 2002. Article