As you said: "Of course, if you're the leader of a weak and corrupt government that is dependent on continued American largesse, that may be just what you're hoping for".

This is exactly what Israel and its Lobby have decided. Afghanistan shall be Obamas Nemesis, just like Iraq was Bush's. All the while focus are removed from Israel, which suits them fine. They prefer a weak and paralysed President, because they fear the pressures he otherwise might put on them.

This is what I have said all along: Israel and their supporters are the most destabilising element in World politics since WW2.

the "confidence-building that is necessary for this relationship to turn into tangible cooperation."

confidence building with imagined states' imagined leaderships?! Yeah, yeah you are right on track;->>
What can I say other than "Remember the Alamo! (Iran!)"
Keep fighting on the wrong side of the fence.
I see on the TV Pakistani Prime Minister says "We got the message! To eliminate Taliban we moved the Army in, sorry to create 100s of thousands refugees but Taliban must be eliminated otherwise we will be made redundant by...", I must be watching the wrong channel Mate!;->
I think they don't know how to count;->

Grand Sen~or.

We should not be surprised at the timing of the latest Pakistani offensive. Anytime a Pakistani leader comes to DC, or an American bigwig visits Islamabad - there is either a sudden offensive against Islamist targets, or an Al Qaeda operative is arrested. Can't pick up that big check empty-handed.

[from a news article:]"If the government, the army wants to control and crush the Taliban, why don't they send ground troops to flush them out? Why they are only shelling, which hurts the public most of all and creates anti-government feeling?" said Yar Mohammad, a 50-year-old stone mason.

=====================

8 years ago the Taliban had no significant outposts in Pakistan. As allied troops and airpower have relentlessly pounded the Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries in the Afghani-Pakistani borderlands over the past years, the militant pressure has been steadily venting into Pakistan proper, inciting the local population. In effect, squeezing the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af-Pak border has simply sent them elsewhere – including deeper into Pakistan.

So the Americans/Pakistanis are going to subdue the Pushtuns which no Empire has ever done? (Even Alex. the great had a short-lived “success”)

The projection based on the past 8 years don’t look promising.

At least the Americans could move in whole-hog like the Brits and admit that they will be there for 100 years, and build schools, and highways and raise families in American South Asia. On a 4-year executive cycle the problem will never be solved with military might.

Since 2001, the problem has gotten worse BECAUSE of what US has done.

Read “Descent into Chaos” by Ahmed Rashid to see why. Here is a review:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22274

Here is why the Pakistani govt will never subdue the Taliban:

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=174880

Can someone kindly send this article from
Foreign Affairs to Hillary and Obama? Who
are we fighting ? For what? When are all the
safe havens gone?

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64932/john-mueller/how-dangerous-are-the-taliban

How Dangerous Are the Taliban?

Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War
John Mueller

George W. Bush led the United States into war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein might give his country’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Now, Bush’s successor is perpetuating the war in Afghanistan with comparably dubious arguments about the danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

President Barack Obama insists [1] that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is about "making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests and our allies" or "project violence against" American citizens. The reasoning is that if the Taliban win in Afghanistan, al Qaeda will once again be able to set up shop there to carry out its dirty work. As the president puts it [2], Afghanistan would "again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." This argument is constantly repeated but rarely examined; given the costs and risks associated with the Obama administration’s plans for the region, it is time such statements be given the scrutiny they deserve.

Multiple sources, including Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower, make clear that the Taliban was a reluctant host to al Qaeda in the 1990s and felt betrayed when the terrorist group repeatedly violated agreements to refrain from issuing inflammatory statements and fomenting violence abroad. Then the al Qaeda-sponsored 9/11 attacks -- which the Taliban had nothing to do with -- led to the toppling of the Taliban’s regime. Given the Taliban’s limited interest in issues outside the "AfPak" region, if they came to power again now, they would be highly unlikely to host provocative terrorist groups whose actions could lead to another outside intervention. And even if al Qaeda were able to relocate to Afghanistan after a Taliban victory there, it would still have to operate under the same siege situation it presently enjoys in what Obama calls its "safe haven" in Pakistan.

The very notion that al Qaeda needs a secure geographic base to carry out its terrorist operations, moreover, is questionable. After all, the operational base for 9/11 was in Hamburg, Germany. Conspiracies involving small numbers of people require communication, money, and planning -- but not a major protected base camp.

At present, al Qaeda consists [3] of a few hundred people running around in Pakistan, seeking to avoid detection and helping the Taliban when possible. It also has a disjointed network of fellow travelers around the globe who communicate over the Internet. Over the last decade, the group has almost completely discredited [4] itself in the Muslim world due to the fallout from the 9/11 attacks and subsequent counterproductive terrorism, much of it directed against Muslims. No convincing evidence has been offered publicly to show that al Qaeda Central has put together a single full operation anywhere in the world since 9/11. And, outside of war zones, the violence perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliates, wannabes, and lookalikes combined has resulted [5] in the deaths of some 200 to 300 people per year, and may be declining [6]. That is 200 to 300 too many, of course, but it scarcely suggests that "the safety of people around the world is at stake," as Obama dramatically puts it.

In addition, al Qaeda has yet to establish a significant presence in the United States. In 2002, U.S. intelligence reports asserted that the number of trained al Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000, and FBI Director Robert Mueller assured [7] a Senate committee that al Qaeda had "developed a support infrastructure" in the country and achieved both "the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning." However, after years of well funded sleuthing, the FBI and other investigative agencies have been unable [8] to uncover a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell or operative within the country. Mueller's rallying cry has now been reduced [9] to a comparatively bland formulation: "We believe al Qaeda is still seeking to infiltrate operatives into the U.S. from overseas."

Even that may not be true. Since 9/11, some two million foreigners have been admitted to the United States legally and many others, of course, have entered illegally. Even if border security has been so effective that 90 percent of al Qaeda’s operatives have been turned away or deterred from entering the United States, some should have made it in -- and some of those, it seems reasonable to suggest, would have been picked up by law enforcement by now. The lack of attacks inside the United States combined with the inability of the FBI to find any potential attackers suggests that the terrorists are either not trying very hard or are far less clever and capable than usually depicted.

Policymakers and the public at large should keep in mind the words [10] of Glenn Carle, a 23 year veteran of the CIA who served as deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats: "We must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are." Al Qaeda "has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation," Carle notes, and "its capabilities are far inferior to its desires."

President Obama has said that there is also a humanitarian element to the Afghanistan mission. A return of the Taliban, he points out, would condemn the Afghan people "to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights." This concern is legitimate -- the Afghan people appear to be quite strongly opposed to a return of the Taliban, and they are surely entitled to some peace after 30 years of almost continual warfare, much of it imposed on them from outside.

The problem, as Obama is doubtlessly well aware, is that Americans are far less willing to sacrifice lives for missions that are essentially humanitarian than for those that seek to deal with a threat directed at the United States itself. People who embrace the idea of a humanitarian mission will continue to support Obama's policy in Afghanistan -- at least if they think it has a chance of success -- but many Americans (and Europeans) will increasingly start to question how many lives such a mission is worth.

This questioning, in fact, is well under way. Because of its ties to 9/11, the war in Afghanistan has enjoyed considerably greater public support [11] than the war in Iraq did (or, for that matter, the wars in Korea or Vietnam). However, there has been a considerable dropoff in that support of late. If Obama's national security justification for his war in Afghanistan comes to seem as spurious as Bush's national security justification for his war in Iraq, he, like Bush, will increasingly have only the humanitarian argument to fall back on. And that is likely to be a weak reed.
Copyright © 2002-2009 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Source URL: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64932/john-mueller/how-dangerous-are-the-taliban

Links:
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/24/60minutes/main4890687.shtml#ccmm
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/politics/27obama-text.html?_r=1
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all
[4] http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6622
[5] http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/ISA2007T.PDF
[6] http://www.humansecuritybrief.info/HSRP_Brief_2007.pdf
[7] http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress03/mueller021103.htm
[8] http://www.newsweek.com/id/32962
[9] http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress07/mueller011107.htm
[10] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102710.html
[11] http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61196/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome

Oooops...looks like we pushed Al Qaeda from Af/Pak to East Africa. Off to Africa boys! There are more "safe-havens" down there to shoot up with drones....Where oh Where will Al Qaeda go next? We have to destroy the whole Earth because it is a big Al Qaeda safe haven.....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30449193/

U.S.: Militants shift from Afghanistan to Africa

Al-Qaida techniques gain ground in Somalia, Pentagon officials say

The Associated Press
updated 7:06 a.m. ET, Tues., April 28, 2009

WASHINGTON - There is growing evidence that battle-hardened extremists are filtering out of safe havens along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and into East Africa, bringing sophisticated terrorist tactics that include suicide attacks.

The alarming shift, according to U.S. military and counterterrorism officials, fuels concern that Somalia is increasingly on a path to become the next Afghanistan — a sanctuary where al-Qaida-linked groups could train and plan their threatened attacks against the western world.

So far, officials say the number of foreign fighters who have moved from southwest Asia and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to the Horn of Africa is small, perhaps two to three dozen.

But a similarly small cell of militant plotters was responsible for the devastating 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And the cluster of militants now believed to be operating inside East Africa could pass on sophisticated training and attack techniques gleaned from seven years at war against the U.S. and allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.

"There is a level of activity that is troubling, disturbing," Gen. William "Kip" Ward, head of U.S. Africa Command, told The Associated Press. "When you have these vast spaces that are just not governed it provides a haven for support activities, for training to occur."

Ward added that American officials already are seeing extremist factions in East Africa sharing information and techniques.

Several military and counterterrorism officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters cautioned that the movements of the al-Qaida militants do not suggest an abandonment of the ungoverned Pakistan border region as a safe haven.

Expansion
Instead, the shift is viewed by the officials more as an expansion of al-Qaida's influence, and a campaign to gather and train more recruits in a region already rife with militants.

Last month, Osama bin Laden made it clear in a newly released audiotape that al-Qaida has set its sights on Somalia, an impoverished and largely lawless country in the Horn of Africa. In the 11-minute tape released to Internet sites, bin Laden is heard urging Somalis to overthrow their new moderate Islamist president and to support their jihadist "brothers" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Iraq.

Officials said that in recent years they have seen occasional signs that sophisticated al-Qaida terror techniques are gaining ground in East Africa. Those harbingers include a coordinated series of suicide bombings in Somalia in October.

In the past, officials said, suicide attacks tended to be frowned on by African Muslims, creating something of an impediment to al-Qaida's efforts to sell that aspect of its terrorism tactics.

But on Oct. 29, 2008, suicide bombers killed more than 20 people in five attacks targeting a U.N. compound, the Ethiopian consulate, the presidential palace in Somaliland's capital and two intelligence facilities in Puntland.

The coordinated assaults, officials said, amounted to a watershed moment, suggesting a new level of sophistication and training. The incident also marked the first time that a U.S. citizen — a young Somali man from Minneapolis — carried out a suicide bombing.

The foreign fighters moving into East Africa complicate an already-rising crescendo of terror threats in the region. Those threats have come from the Somalia-based al-Shabab extremist Islamic faction and from al-Qaida in East Africa, a small, hard-core group also known by the acronym EEAQ.

While not yet considered an official al-Qaida franchise, EEAQ has connections to the top terror leaders and was implicated in the August 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 225 people. The bombings were al-Qaida's precursors to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a plot spawned by a small cell of operatives as far back as 1992. Four men accused as al-Qaida plotters were later convicted in federal court in New York for those bombings.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and several other EEAQ members remain under indictment in the United States for their alleged participation in those bombings. Mohammed is on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list with a reward of up to $5 million on his head.

Al-Qaida has the skills while al-Shabab has the manpower, said one senior military official familiar with the region. The official said EEAQ appears to be a small cell of a few dozen operatives who rarely sleep in the same place twice and are adept at setting up temporary training camps that vanish days later.

Internal squabbling
What worries U.S. military leaders, the official said, is the that EEAQ and al-Shabab may merge in training and operations, potentially spreading al-Qaida's more extremist jihadist beliefs to thousands of clan-based Somali militants, who so far have been engaged in internal squabbling.

The scenario could become even more worrisome, the officials said, if the foreign fighters transplant their skills at bomb-making and insurgency tactics to the training camps in East Africa.

Africa experts, however, said it won't be easy for Islamic extremists to win many converts in East Africa.

Francois Grignon, Africa program director for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization, said in an interview that many clan members generally practice a more moderate Islam, and militants are not inclined to join a fight they do not see as their own.

The U.S., he said, needs to encourage the new government in Somalia to deal with the growing terror threats there and to marginalize the jihadists so they are not able to sustain their activities in Somalia.

Ward said U.S. Africa Command is working with a number of nations to build their ability to maintain security. But he said commanders are less able to do much in Somalia, where the new government is still fragile.

Meanwhile, he said, officials continue to watch as the ties between the terror groups grow.

"I think they're all a threat," said Ward. "Right now it's clearly a threat that the Africans have, but in today's global society that threat can be exported anywhere with relative ease."

More on terrorism | East Africa

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30449193/

Here is a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_Pakistan_2008-09 that -- as far as I am aware -- for the first time attempt to give an overview of all violence in Pakistan in 2008-09 I could go further back, and maybe I will. But it seems clear that violence increased in 2008. I could add 2006-07 when the US began its drone-strikes. What is certain is that they increased dramatically in frequency in September-October 2008, which is very evident from the list, where US attacks are colored in light blue.

My personal view is that these attacks impossibly can have added to the stability of Pakistan, and remember the bombing of the Mariott attack came just after the spike in drone attacks. But I am not yet done in pouring over the list, there may be other trends to deduct from it, and maybe you can help. I would recommend that you view the page in perhaps 80 % of your normal textsize, so as to better get an overview of this, rather long list.

2/3 of Pakistanis are rural. And poor.

Their choice: extremists or the current kleptocracy.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=174880

Thank you, Sufi Mohammad
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Asif Ezdi

NNWFP Chief Minister Amir Haider Hoti announced on April 21 that the government was facing a revolt in the province and that the salaries of the police were being doubled to cope with this threat. Hoti's warning calls to mind a similar foreboding expressed by the king of France at the time of the French Revolution. On July 12, 1789, two days before the storming of the Bastille, when the duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt warned Louis XVI of the state of affairs in Paris, the king is said to have exclaimed, "This is a revolt." The duke's reply: "Non, sire, c'est une révolution." ("No, majesty, it is a revolution.")

In a revolt, only the ruler is toppled as a result of a popular uprising. But in a revolution, the entire ruling class is replaced. In our history, we have only known coup d'états, but neither a revolt nor a revolution. We do not know yet whether we are seeing the beginnings of a revolt or of a revolution in Pakistan. But whatever it is, it is certainly not a law and order problem and it is not going to be stopped by raising the salaries of policemen.

Our newspaper columns, airwaves and cyberspace have been saturated with the bloviations of our "liberal" commentators of different stripes chattering endlessly about the state being threatened by Islamic militants and extremists. In a rare display of unity, the apologists for our political class have also been saying the same thing. Hillary Clinton would be pleased that her call to the Pakistanis to speak out against the Taliban has been heeded.

Following in the footsteps of Musharraf, who not so long ago used to wax eloquent about how his brand of military dictatorship stood for enlightened moderation, the self-appointed protagonists of our hard-won democracy have been lamenting how our modern, enlightened way of life is being challenged by obscurantism and fundamentalism, when actually they are mostly defending only their class interests. Few, if any, votaries of this new enlightened moderation have pointed out that the Taliban movement in Swat has been able to win support among so many young men because the state has failed them, massively and comprehensively.

To portray the ferment in Swat as a medieval backlash against modernism is either a blinkered view or a deliberately misleading one. It ignores or tries to cover up the fact that the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite which has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges, pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness. Past governments, whether military or civilian, dictatorial or democratic, have been little more than convenient tools of the privileged few for perpetuation of the status quo.

What has changed now is that people are much more aware of their rights – and their power. The availability of uncensored information on television has widened their horizons. In much of NWFP, the Afghan jihad gave them access to military training and modern weaponry: the Kalashnikov, the rocket launcher and the machine gun. With an annual population increase of four million in the whole country and an economy which is stagnant, there is a fast growing army of unemployed angry young men waiting to be recruited.

The turmoil in Swat and in the adjoining areas is being portrayed by some as a contest between obscurantism and enlightenment, between bigotry and tolerance and between extremism and moderation. Actually, it is more like a movement of the common man against vast disparities in wealth and the failure of the authorities to provide justice, jobs and those essential services like education and health for which governments are supposed to exist. In some areas at least, it has pitted landless tenants against wealthy landlords and there are reports that big landowners are being forced to leave the valley. Once such a movement gains momentum, it acquires its own uncontrollable dynamic. As Joseph de Maistre, a French political philosopher, wrote in 1796, it is not men who lead revolutions, but it is the revolution which employs men.

The appeal of the sharia and Islamic justice gives the Taliban an unparalleled ideological motivation. As the Persian saying goes, ham khorma wa ham sawab ast. There are rewards both in this world and the next. It is this combination of revolutionary and religious zeal which makes the Taliban such a formidable force. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair came close to the truth in a speech on April 22 in which he likened militant Islam to revolutionary communism for its tenacity. It would not of course be the first time that what began as a religious movement also acquired the character of a socio-economic upheaval. Examples can be found in the history of most civilisations.

The Swat deal, it has been said, signifies a retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan, that it is a negation of his vision. A Pakistani journalist has equated the "capitulation in Swat" with the surrender document signed in Dhaka in 1971, incidentally a comparison first made by a retired colonel of the Indian army by the name of Harish Puri in an op-ed in this newspaper. All this is shocking, because it suggests that before the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation, Pakistan was well on the way to becoming the country of Quaid-e-Azam's conception. Nothing could be farther from the truth, because the retreat from Jinnah's Pakistan and the betrayal of his vision began much earlier. It started shortly after his death, continued under successive civilian and military governments and accelerated under military dictators, reaching its culmination with Musharraf. The responsibility for this betrayal lies not with the Taliban or Sufi Muhammad but largely with the same class which is now howling the loudest.

Fundamental to the Quaid's vision of Pakistan was the concept of Islamic social justice. But we have seen none of that in the policies of the government in the last six decades. Instead, the main role of the state has been to enable the ruling class to keep its hold on power, privilege and national wealth. The gap between a thin upper crust of the rich and the vast majority who live in privation is growing. Greed and rapacity have now been officially sanctioned by the NRO. An ordinary Pakistani born into destitution has little chance of breaking the shackles of poverty. The machinery of government, the political system and the upper classes are all arrayed against him.

In most countries, there is a single universal education system for all, which helps to blunt class differences. In Pakistan, not only is the level of school enrolment abysmally low, but there is a stratified school system which replicates and consolidates the class divisions. The elites send their children to the best schools which are beyond the means of the common man and which generally ensure a secure place in the system in later life. For the others, there are either the government schools or the madressas. Even the most talented of those who go to a government school find it hard to break the glass ceiling which keeps them down in the job market. And the most gifted of those educated in madressas become Taliban.

To accuse those who have risen against our exploitative socio-economic system of obscurantism is scandalous. In reality, it is Pakistan's ruling class, desperately clinging to its privileges, that is seeking to preserve an outdated medieval order. They are the ones who stand for obscurantism. We do not yet have a full-blown class conflict but the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back in.

If – and that is a very big if – our ruling elite and the government are smart, they will have been jolted out of their complacency by the Swat deal and will have focussed their minds on issues of social justice. But that is unlikely. At least, they have been warned. Thank you, Sufi Muhammad.

Now my list on Wikipedia , which for the first time in the World provides an overview of all violence in Pakistan from 2006-09 is ready. In the coming days I will plot all the Drones attack in on a map, and all the major loss of life due to domestic Pakistani action.

What is allready clear is that The United States of America is conducting Hightech Warfare with their typical [over]-reliance and love for technology-- amongst some of the poorest people on Earth. It will lead to nothing, just more hatred , wish for revenge -- and terror.

But the people in the US administration with the clouts - all have ties to the Israel Lobby. And from Israels point of view, this level of violence is just normal; they have known violence and terror for 3 score years and really couldn't care less if the rest of the World should taste the same medicine. Actually from their point of view it might be beneficial for the rest of the world [us>/em>], because then we might begin to share Israel's strategies and view of the World. By getting as many people as possible to share its strategies -- this is the only way this colony with an inhabitable surface-area the size of Delaware and the adjacent County of Maryland can survive.

It is form their domisphere that the suicide-bomb -- sometimes referred to as The poor mans missile has been perfected, and spread with disattisfied Palestinians to Irak, and from 2005 -- for the first time in that country -- to Afghanistan. Yet a clear example of, that it is Israel that is the great culprit ans destabilisiser in the world.

And it is their engineers that pretty much have invented the drones, and they use this to get the tech-savvy Americaqns and their weapons industry interested in using this weapon in afghanistan.