Free Republic

Washington sent Special Forces into Pakistan last summer after intercepting a call by the Pakistani army chief referring to a notorious Taleban leader as a “strategic asset,” a new book has claimed. The intercept was ordered to confirm suspicions that the Pakistani military were still actively supporting the Taleban whilst taking millions of dollars in US military aid to fight them, according to the “The Inheritance,” by the New York Times correspondent David Sanger. In a transcript passed to Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence in May 2008, General Ashfaq Kayani, the military chief who replaced Pervez Musharraf, was...

Pakistan’s Musharraf has resigned, and everyone seems happy. Pakistanis danced in the streets and fired guns in the air, and one retired soldier in Peshawar even declared: “The root cause of all problems has gone.” Yet Pakistan’s future doesn’t look to be problem-free. Pakistan is rapidly becoming the most dangerous nation on earth – if it isn’t that already. As one senior White House advisor recently told HUMAN EVENTS editor Jed Babbin, the “safe havens” for more than one million jihad terrorists that exist in Western Pakistan constitute the most severe terrorism-related problem the world faces today.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A former Taliban fighter has provided a gripping first-hand account of being secretly trained by members of the Pakistani military, paid $500 a month and ordered to kill foreigners in Afghanistan. Mullah Mohammed Zaher offered a vivid description of a bomb-making apprenticeship at a Pakistani army compound where he says he learned to blow up NATO convoys. He's one of three former Taliban fighters introduced to The Canadian Press by an Afghan government agency that works at getting rebels to renounce the insurgency. Zaher insists he was neither forced to go public with his story nor coached...

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: Up until now, Musharraf had been seen by some as a genuine US ally in the war on terrorism, despite having cut deals with terrorists to keep them out of his hair and in the northern part of his country where they could make bombing runs into Afghanistan. However, when these terrorists came into town this past summer to grab some hostages and make trouble for Musharraf in the Red Mosque standoff because they wanted Sharia law in Islamabad, Musharraf’s policy of negotiating with them was proven to be a joke.

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was...

Taliban's 'ideological mentor' warns Musharaff By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 3:13pm GMT 17/12/2006 The cleric accused of being the “ideological mentor” of the Taliban has issued a blunt warning to Pakistan’s president that he risks further radicalising his country if he alienates its religious leaders. Fazlur Rehman Fazlur Rehman, the maulana, or senior Muslim cleric who leads Pakistan’s powerful alliance of Islamic parties, used a rare interview with The Daily Telegraph to respond to a recent plea issued by General Pervez Musharraf for Pakistanis not to vote for “hypocrites” and “extremists”. “With his poisonous propaganda against...

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — Senior Pakistani officials are urging NATO countries to accept the Taliban and work toward a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude President Karzai of Afghanistan. Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some NATO member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and that NATO is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops. Western ministers have been stunned. " Kasuri is basically asking NATO to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," one Western official who met the minister recently said. The...

RUSH: We have a montage of Drive-By Media, CNN's -- well, not just CNN. There's some other people on here, mostly CNN, some from ABC, one from Fox, NBC. Yesterday at the White House, President Bush had a meeting with Presidents Karzai and Musharraf, and they came out and they met the media, and apparently there was not a handshake at the end of the deal between Musharraf and Karzai. That became the subject. That was yesterday's media "gravitas." SYLER: President Bush hosted Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and Musharraf of Pakistan at dinner but could not get them to shake...

IN JANUARY 2002 the world’s media received e-mails saying that the journalist Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped. Pearl, a citizen of both the United States and Israel, was the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. The ransom demands included the release and return to Pakistan of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.The e-mails also stated: “We assure Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan. And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again.” I was incensed when I learnt of this, disgusted that these criminals were distorting...

KABUL, Afghanistan — Key U.S. allies Afghanistan and Pakistan must join forces to fight the "common enemy" of terrorism and extremism being fanned by al-Qaida and Taliban militants, Pakistan's president said Wednesday. But visiting President Gen. Pervez Musharraf also said Pakistan would never allow U.S.-led coalition forces _ currently hunting al-Qaida and Taliban fighters on the Afghan side of the border _ into tribal areas on its side. "On our side of the border there will be a total uprising if a foreigner enters that area," he said at a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "It's not...

WASHINGTON - Before he was captured last spring, Osama Bin Laden's top operational commander was solely focused on killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaff, the Daily News has learned. The capture last May of Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, said a senior Pakistani official, whose information was corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials. "Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told The News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably." "It was...

Irrespective of whether you are dealing with the disaffected youth of Leeds or a brainwashed Jihadi at a madrassa on the North West Frontier, the inescapable conclusion is that Pakistan forms the epicentre of Osama bin Laden's unremitting campaign of terror against the West.This unpalatable, yet irrefutable, truth will no doubt come as a shock to Tony Blair and the other coalition leaders who have placed such faith in President Pervez Musharraf's ability to rein in al-Qaeda's murderous activities. It was, after all, Mr Blair who helped to persuade the Pakistani general to decide whose side he was on after...

India tests missile days after nuclear talks AFP BHUBANESHWAR, India – India yesterday tested a short range variant of its nuclear capable surface-to-surface Agni missile from a testing site off the country’s east coast, a defence official said. The homegrown missile, with a strike range of 700 kilometres, was tested from a mobile launcher at Wheeler Island off the coast of eastern Orissa state, the official said. The missile, one of the variants of the Agni (Fire) series, can carry a one-tonne payload. Defence Ministry spokesman Amitabh Chakravarty in New Delhi described the test as “a perfect launch”. The test...

The detainees are held for weeks or months and are generally deported. Since the summer, the INS has chartered two planes to send about 250 detained Pakistanis back to their homeland, an INS official said. The U.S. Census Bureau counted 24,099 Pakistanis in the city in 2000, although Asghar Choudhri, president of the Pakistani American Federation of New York, estimates there are upward of 200,000 Pakistanis in the five boroughs

Al-Qaeda, Taliban fighters regrouping in Pakistan, says Kabul ANI Kabul, March 26 Afghanistan's minister for border security and a top intelligence official have accused Pakistan of sheltering fleeing Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters and helping them to cross the border back into Afghanistan, where they can attack US forces and destabilise the new government in Kabul. In separate interviews, Minister of Frontiers Amanullah Zadran and a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said on Monday the Afghan government has evidence that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, and fundamentalist Pakistani clerics - both of whom have...

January/February 2002Vol. 58, No.1, pp. 70–71Pakistan's Nuclear Forces, 2001 [Emphasis added] It is extremely difficult to estimate the number and types of nuclear weapons in Pakistan's arsenal. Outside experts estimate the country has between 24 and 48 nuclear weapons. The weapons are based on an implosion design that uses a solid core of highly enriched uranium, requiring an estimated 15–20 kilograms per warhead. Seismic measurements of the tests conducted on May 28 and 30, 1998, suggest that the yields were on the order of 9–12 kilotons and 4–6 kilotons respectively, lower than Islamabad announced. Chinese tests in the 1960s...