Posted on 01/23/2006 5:53:57 PM PST by voletti
Unless the US learns the right lessons from the Damadola incident and frees itself from the fatal attraction of Musharraf, it will be facilitating the execution of bin Laden's threatened second strike in US homeland, the count-down for which has already begun.
The sequel to the missile strike on a cluster of houses at village Damadola in the Bajaur Agency in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the early morning hours of January 13, 2006, which has been attributed to a Predator aircraft of the US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), could prove to be as significant as the sequel to the US Cruise missile attacks on the alleged training camps of Al Qaeda in the Jalalabad area of Afghanistan in August, 1998 and on an alleged factory of Al Qaeda supposedly for manufacturing chemical weapons in the Sudan.
The US authorities had indicated after the Cruise missile attacks of 1998 that the timing was influenced by reliable information that Osama bin Laden, then living under the protection of the Taliban at Kandahar, was to visit the camps that night and have dinner with the trainees. Either he did not turn up or he escaped.
Anyhow, hardly any Al Qaeda infrastructure was destroyed or even damaged. The Cruise missiles missed the training camps of Al Qaeda. Instead, they destroyed some of the training camps of Pakistan's Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), Many Pakistanis, who were being trained by the HUM for being sent to India's Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) state were killed, along with many Afghan civilians.
The Sudanese authorities strongly denied that the factory in their territory belonged to Al Qaeda and that it was producing chemical weapons. They asserted that it was producing anti-malaria medicine.
(Excerpt) Read more at outlookindia.com ...
That, and the fact that "the experts" (whoever they are, as they are usually unnamed) once again assured people that that event was a lot farther off than it actually was. Kind of gives you a warm fuzzy feeling about the current Iranian deal now, doesn't it?
the infowarrior
My thoughts exactly.
Each have nukes, but pakistan is a little more crazy. How long until they have yet another war?
Seems like we're trying to have it both ways with regards to these two.
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