Pakistan and the Taliban

[gordon2007]

Just wondering what peoples thoughts and concerns are about the situation there. The Taliban are very organised and do have $$$ to back them up. I do not have complete confidance in the current government there properly safe guarding their nuclear weaponry.

This situation concerns me far more than Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

Just wondering what peoples thoughts and concerns are about the situation there. The Taliban are very organised and do have $$$ to back them up. I do not have complete confidance in the current government there properly safe guarding their nuclear weaponry.

This situation concerns me far more than Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

More worrying for the Ipod generation is that they ban music in the areas they control and try to control.

 

[Bobby]

Just wondering what peoples thoughts and concerns are about the situation there. The Taliban are very organised and do have $$$ to back them up. I do not have complete confidance in the current government there properly safe guarding their nuclear weaponry.

This situation concerns me far more than Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

Yes it is a worry , I often wonder about their politicians , some would say a corruption diploma from night school is a prerequisite for success

 

[Calanen]

Best guess is that the Taliban will have effective control of Pakistan within 12-18 months. There is the possibility also however, of an Army coup. The Taliban hold the northern regions of Swat and Waziristan now. Not much to stop them moving south.

Pakistan plays a double game with the west, pretending to be against Islamic terror, while letting huge bases of Islamic terrorists like Lashkar E Toiba operate with impunity. Ultimately, we are infidels and the terrorists are not. They do however want the money that goes with allegedly fighting terrorists, so they organise token operations to pretend they are doing something. Often however, this is them shelling empty buildings then telling the Americans 'see we took out a terrorist hideout!'. Pakistan forces have been known to assist the Taliban, even to the point of firing on US troops.

When the western money runs out - you'll quickly see where Pakistan's loyalty lies.

 

[gordon2007]

And what about the nukes?

Best guess is that the Taliban will have effective control of Pakistan within 12-18 months.

 

[metric]

Pakistan May See 500,000 Flee Swat as Peace Crumbles

ISLAMABAD ”” Fighting between Taliban militants and troops in a northwestern valley triggered an exodus the government said Tuesday could see 500,000 people flee and signaled the end of a peace deal in the area widely criticized as a surrender to the extremists.

Hundreds have already fled the Swat Valley, adding to the hundreds of thousands of existing refugees driven from other regions in the northwest over the last year by fighting between soldiers and insurgents, witnesses said.

The deteriorating situation in the valley came as Pakistan's leader prepared for talks in Washington with President Barack Obama on how to sharpen his country's fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which are blamed for attacks in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

U.S. officials said Obama would seek assurances from President Asif Ali Zardari that his country's nuclear arsenal was safe and that the military intended to face down extremists in coordination with Afghanistan and the United States.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518916,00.html

 

[Gilbert]

Very concerning to say the least. Odds on India and Pakistan engaging in nuclear conflict shorten by the day imo.

 

[gordon2007]

I think the whole world needs to get in on this one. Not just the america and not just nato.

Very concerning to say the least. Odds on India and Pakistan engaging in nuclear conflict shorten by the day imo.

 

[Calanen]

And what about the nukes?

The US has drawn up contingency plans to ensure that either the nuke bases are destroyed or captured in this eventuality. They probably wont get all of them though, and perhaps Obama will think that such plans are a terrible violation of sovereignty and quite distasteful - so he will not give the go-ahead. Far better to have some UN sanctions - the Taliban will be brought to their knees with those.

 

[metric]

perhaps Obama will think that such plans are a terrible violation of sovereignty and quite distasteful - so he will not give the go-ahead. .

as if......

as if obama has any real power to make decisions....

as if the crooks that control the west are concerned about borders....




.

 

[Calanen]

as if......

as if obama has any real power to make decisions....

as if the crooks that control the west are concerned about borders....

And here I was thinking he was the Commander in Chief of the United States military with the power of veto over all legislation produced by the US Congress. Feel free to create a conspiracy theory thread about the ebil Illuminati or Vatican Secret Society that *really* controls the White House.

 

[metric]

And here I was thinking he was the Commander in Chief of the United States military with the power of veto over all legislation produced by the US Congress. Feel free to create a conspiracy theory thread about the ebil Illuminati or Vatican Secret Society that *really* controls the White House.

of course obama is controlled. as have all presidents since kennedy. secret societies you say? you mean the ones kennedy spoke of before his murder...? here is the speech, watch it and get educated calanen....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WSGwnz7XpY

or this one...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1smgz-px1Q&feature=related

 

[pilots]

Some years ago a French man I was working with told me that the next big war will be India/Pakistan, it is a long was from all of us, so it won't effect us, and the manufactures of arms will be the ones to start it.

 

[Calanen]

Swat deal is over: Muslim Khan

Monday, May 04, 2009

By Mazhar Tufail

ISLAMABAD: The Swat peace pact stands dissolved and the militants present in Swat, Matta, Kabal and Sangla as well as their commanders have asked for permission to fight everywhere, sources told The News on Sunday.

“Our peace agreement with the NWFP government practically stands dissolved,” confirmed Muslim Khan, a spokesman for the Swat chapter of the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), while talking to The News via telephone. ìForces are attacking us and our fighters are also retaliating,î he said.

The remainder of the article is here: http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=21906

Must have been those 'moderate Taliban' that Obama hoped to negotiate with got voted down at the recent Taliban AGM. Pity.

 

[Calanen]

of course obama is controlled. as have all presidents since kennedy. secret societies you say? you mean the ones kennedy spoke of before his murder...? here is the speech, watch it and get educated calanen....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WSGwnz7XpY

or this one...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1smgz-px1Q&feature=related

Sorry, the ebil conspiracy tin foil hat stuff doesn't really grab me. But rock on there. I bet you are a 9/11 Troofer too.

 

[mayk]

Best guess is that the Taliban will have effective control of Pakistan within 12-18 months. There is the possibility also however, of an Army coup. The Taliban hold the northern regions of Swat and Waziristan now. Not much to stop them moving south.

Pakistan plays a double game with the west, pretending to be against Islamic terror, while letting huge bases of Islamic terrorists like Lashkar E Toiba operate with impunity. Ultimately, we are infidels and the terrorists are not. They do however want the money that goes with allegedly fighting terrorists, so they organise token operations to pretend they are doing something. Often however, this is them shelling empty buildings then telling the Americans 'see we took out a terrorist hideout!'. Pakistan forces have been known to assist the Taliban, even to the point of firing on US troops.

When the western money runs out - you'll quickly see where Pakistan's loyalty lies.

A good thoughtful analysis by an expert in this area is given below.


http://www.juancole.com/2009/04/readers-have-written-me-asking-what-i.html

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.

Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.

Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. Economic growth in recent years has been 6 and 7 percent a year, which is very impressive. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.

The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?

Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.

Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.

If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

I guess it is the corruption and absence of rule of law which is the root cause of the problem. Just political postering, so that the money can easily pass the US congress... It is such a shame that this problem is exaggerated every time to pass money through congress. The cycle is too familiar, first Taliban are creating choas, then Nukes are unsafe, Money and military hardware sale is needed to squash that, then once the money start following, everyone goes to sleep, till next time more money is needed... It is a vicious circle..

Someone wise said, just follow the flow of money and other things fall in place.

The tragedy is that the poor Afghan-Pakistan tribes living in those regions will continue to live miserably, and either suffer under Coalition (NATO/US/PAKISTAN) forces or Taliban. They are truly and royally scr*wed.

 

[metric]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...-radical-hands-Report/articleshow/4537037.cms

India thinks Pak N-sites already in radical hands:
Report
16 May 2009,

WASHINGTON: India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are "already
partly" in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington's confidence in the security of the troubled nation's nuclear arsenal.

 

[Calliope]

Can anyone imagine what chaos will ensue in Pakistan after the floods have receded. The government is so ineffectual that perhaps people will turn to the Taliban for leadership

It is an horrific calamity and the outlook doesn't look good.

UN warns of Pakistan calamity

THE humanitarian crisis of the Pakistan floods is now greater than the combined impact of three of the world's worst recent natural disasters.

They include the 2004 tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir and this year's Haiti earthquake.

The dire assessment came as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to international donors to aid the stricken nation.

About $US102 million ($112m) in international aid has been pledged so far, but only $US20m has been delivered, the Dawn newspaper reported.

About 1700 people have died and 14 million people have been hit by the floods, which were threatening yesterday to inundate two more major cities: Muzaffargarh in Punjab and Hyderabad in Sindh province, further south.

Thousands of people streamed out of Muzaffargarh, a city of 250,000 people, after the authorities issued warnings through mosque loudspeaker

"There is chaos," police official Mohammed Amir told reporters.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...akistan-calamity/story-e6frg6so-1225903657535

 

[derty]

Can anyone imagine what chaos will ensue in Pakistan after the floods have receded. The government is so ineffectual that perhaps people will turn to the Taliban for leadership

It is an horrific calamity and the outlook doesn't look good.

UN warns of Pakistan calamity



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...akistan-calamity/story-e6frg6so-1225903657535

The area where the Taliban are most problematic is the north-western part and much of this already IS under Taliban control. The floods are cutting a huge swathe through Pakistan and the Taliban controlled areas only account for a small part of this. When it comes to disaster management I imagine the Taliban are as ineffective, if not more so, than the Pakistani government. If anything this provides a good opportunity for the western governments to get in there an provide aid and support and improve the image of the west in the area.

 

[Sean K]

If anything this provides a good opportunity for the western governments to get in there an provide aid and support and improve the image of the west in the area.

Yes, I suggest Australia might be sending some aid over very quickly.