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THE death of Special Air Service soldier Sergeant Matthew Locke on Thursday in Afghanistan is a terrible reminder that there is rarely such a thing as a war without casualties. Sergeant Locke died fighting a barbaric enemy that seeks not just to take Afghanistan back to the dark ages but to use it as a base from which to destroy us. Worryingly, the death of two Australian soldiers in three weeks is not just a tragic coincidence. Things are not going well in the poorly named war on terror. As Frank Furedi writes in Inquirer today, we have been unable...

Early coverage of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, has focused on the fact that the book is largely an assault on the Bush administration. But they have glossed over the most significant and alarming theme that Al Gore has taken up: his alleged defense of "reason" includes a justification for government controls over political speech. Judging from the excerpts of Gore's book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being "assaulted" by a free and unfettered debate in the media--and particularly by the fact that Gore has to contend with opposition from the right-leaning...

In his first extract from his memoir In the Line of Fire the President of Pakistan writes of the anger that he felt at threats made by America after the 9/11 attacks SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, was an uneventful day in Pakistan, at least while the sun was high. That evening I was in Karachi, inspecting work at the beautiful gardens of the mausoleum of our founder Quaide-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. I was happy to be in the city I love. Little did I know that we were about to be thrust into the front line of yet another war, a...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A Pakistani cleric facing deportation was accused Friday during an immigration hearing of trying to incite followers to defend Osama bin Laden and kill Americans. Shabbir Ahmed, 39, seeking bail on a charge of overstaying his visa to head a Lodi mosque in the Central Valley, denied that he had made any speech against the United States. During the same hearing, a government attorney said another Lodi imam being held on immigration charges once had close ties to the Taliban. Justice Department attorney Paul Nishiie argued against releasing Ahmed on bail, saying he was linked to...

PRESIDENTIAL NEWS OF THE DAYL President and Mrs. Bush and the presidential party have safely left Pakistan for home after a remarkable 5-day trip to nuclear rivals, India and Pakistan. Using diplomatic finesse his detractors claim is beyond him, the President balanced vists to both countries while achieving a significant civilian nuclear technology treaty with India. As I post this thread, there are no photos of the presidential party arriving home in Washington.

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres granted an interview in January with Jang, a leading Pakistani paper, in which he said Israel and Pakistan should have "direct, personal contact, publicly, without being ashamed about it." The response to his words was quick in coming: some 25-armed men ransacked the newspaper's offices in Karachi, apparently to protest the interview. They beat security guards, damaged furniture and chanted "Allahu Akbar" [God is Greatest]. So much for Peres's conciliatory overtures. In light of that response, and the harsh criticism Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf came under at home in June 2004 when he dared...

Since the London bombings, there has been a palpable feeling in the air here in the U.S. that another terrorist attack is imminent. Maybe not as bad as 9/11, perhaps a train or subway bombing. Or maybe it will be something worse. There were fevered rumors circulating over the last few weeks about massive attacks on New York and Washington scheduled for Aug. 6 and 9, to mark the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But now Aug. 6 and 9 have come and gone. More significantly, 47 months have come and gone since 9/11 without a major terrorist attack on...

Since the July 7 bombings in London, Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, has again come under severe international pressure to clamp down on local extremist groups linked to Al Qaeda, bring extremist religious schools under control and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base for attacks in Afghanistan. As a result, serious cracks are developing in the 35-year alliance between Pakistan's army, its intelligence services and Islamic fundamentalist parties. Musharraf has parried international criticism of Pakistan by accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair of allowing Islamic extremism to flourish in Britain, but since July 7 he has arrested...

NOTHING better reveals the unreality of Australia's political class than the frequent remarks that global warming, as distinct from nuclear terrorism, is the world's main problem. This is the chatter, loaded with spin, beloved by certain Labor premiers. It displays both an intellectual failure and the fatalism abroad in Australia about the most urgent and intractable issue facing the world. Yet it has become almost politically incorrect to discuss it. The visit to Australia this week of Pakistan's leader, Pervez Musharraf, our friend and ally, is precisely the time to discuss it. Musharraf, after the September 11 attack, took the...

ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Pakistani intelligence agents have foiled a new plot by Al-Qaeda militants to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf, security officials told AFP. Seven conspirators were arrested in a number of raids in central Punjab province in late April, one week before the capture of alleged Al-Qaeda number three Abu Faraj al-Libbi in a northwestern region, the officials said. "This is a spectacular achievement by Pakistan's security agency," said a top security official. "First we smashed the gang plotting a new attack on Musharraf and then a week later we netted two Arabs including al-Libbi." The group included Mushtaq Ahmed,...

Arms Control Today April 2005 Printer Friendly Arming Dictators, Rewarding Proliferators Daryl G. Kimball Last year, Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned his former nuclear weapons program chief Abdul Qadeer Khan for masterminding a global black market trade that delivered advanced nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. For more than a decade, the Khan network secretly transferred some of the most sensitive technology, including uranium-enrichment devices and, in the case of Libya, even design and engineering plans for nuclear bombs. U.S. officials claim there is no evidence of official Pakistani government involvement, but they also acknowledge they...

A High-Risk Nuclear Stakeout The U.S. took too long to act, some experts say, letting a Pakistani scientist sell illicit technology well after it knew of his operation. By Douglas Frantz, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Nuclear warhead plans that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan sold to Libya were more complete and detailed than previously disclosed, raising new concerns about the cost of Washington's watch-and-wait policy before Khan and his global black market were shut down last year. Two Western nuclear weapons specialists who have examined the top-secret designs say the hundreds of pages of engineering drawings and handwritten notes...

When experts from the US and the IAEA came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans...

After dinner, after the dignitaries had left, a guy in a blue suit came back to the kitchen -- a Texan named George. December 05, 2001 | We were in the spacious dining room at the top of the Waldorf Towers, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.'s residence, looking down at the place settings on the table. Good-looking china made especially for the State Department: richly blue-ringed plates and glassware eblazoned with an eagle. I stood off to the side in my tuxedo, a mercenary waiter. One of the U.S. Mission's protocol people had called me the night before. "Please,...

Washington: The US has scotched reports coming out of Pakistan that its forces have captured Osama bin Laden. "That would be news to everybody in this room. No, I haven't heard anything - haven't heard anything like that," spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters at the White House here yesterday. Asked to clarify what prompted President Pervez Musharraf to say a couple of weeks ago that Pakistani forces would have bin Laden by the year-end, the spokesman said, "I speak for the President. Obviously, I don't speak for President Musharraf." As for whether the capture of bin Laden would signal the...

SLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 17 — Hard-line Islamist lawmakers walked out and secular deputies jeered and heckled Saturday as Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, delivered his first speech to the nation's Parliament since seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999. General Musharraf, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts by suspected militants last month, showed no sign of backing off from a renewed promise to crack down on religious extremism or from a historic agreement reached earlier this month to hold peace talks with India. "We will have to launch a massive operation against those foreign elements in our border areas...

Happy New Year's Eve to all at Free Republic!!! Make your predictions for 2004. Good Luck!!!

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's concession on Kashmir is likely to bring a fresh impetus to attempts to improve relations with India. President Musharraf has offered to set aside Pakistani demands for a referendum in the disputed territory in return for a serious dialogue with India. Holding such a plebiscite, which has been called for in UN resolutions, has been Islamabad's major demand for the past 50 years. However, the Pakistani leader believes the time has come for the two sides to show flexibility in their positions and take bold steps for peace in the region. India has yet to respond...

OTTAWA - The West and the Muslim world have to shed misconceptions about each other which contribute to misunderstanding and fear, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said today. He said Muslims perceive the West as targeting Islam in the fight against terror. In turn, the West tends to see Islam as a religion of extremism and fundamentalism. "Both are wrong," he said in a speech to the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies. Musharraf was on a two-day visit to Ottawa, part of a swing which took him to New York for a speech to the United Nations and to Washington for...