30 June 2011
Pakistani troops backed by jets and helicopter gunships have killed 40 militants in a restive tribal area bordering Afghanistan in the past three days, a military commander said Thursday.Brigadier Aftab Ahmad told AFP by telephone that his forces had destroyed 17 militant hideouts in the Baizai region under his command in the lawless tribal area of Mohmand. "Militants were regularly attacking our posts on the Afghanistan border at Shonkari and Mithai...
Read the post »
30 June 2011
President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy is narrowly focused on al-Qaeda and its ability to strike the U.S. homeland and is “not designed to combat directly every single terrorist organization in every corner of the world,” White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan said Wednesday. Acknowledging that the president’s goals “track closely with the goals” of the George W. Bush administration, Brennan said...
Read the post »
28 June 2011
The announcement by President Obama on 22 June 2011 of substantial withdrawals of United States troops from Afghanistan by September 2012 marks an important moment in the almost decade-long war in the country. The impact of the decision will be felt on the current diplomatic calculations over the nature of a settlement that will bring the war to an end. It may also impinge on the presidential-election campaign in the US that reaches a climax in November...
Read the post »
27 June 2011
Fighting across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border will overshadow talks when the two countries meet along with the United States on Tuesday to map out plans for reconciliation with the Taliban. Pakistan on Monday rejected Afghan allegations it had fired 470 rockets into Afghanistan over the past three weeks, saying only that "a few accidental rounds" may have crossed the border when it pursued militants who had attacked its security forces. But the...
Read the post »
27 June 2011
Pakistan has expelled a team of British military trainers sent to help with the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida, as the fallout from the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden continues to rock relations between Islamabad and its western allies. The Ministry of Defence confirmed that at least 18 military advisers, deployed as part of a £15m programme to train the paramilitary Frontier Corps, have been withdrawn from Pakistan. Most are already...
Read the post »
24 June 2011
Afghanistan on Friday complained to Pakistan for a second time in a week about its shelling of Afghan villages in which four children were killed, fighting that threatens to raise regional tensions as the United States begins a gradual troop withdrawal. The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs first complained on Monday about Pakistan shelling soon after an assault by Pakistani forces drove militants across the border. The two sides blame each other...
Read the post »
23 June 2011
President Barack Obama on Wednesday vowed the United States will “insist” Pakistan fulfill its promises to counter militant sanctuaries on its soil. “We will work with the Pakistani government to root out the cancer of violent extremism, and we will insist that it keep its commitments,” Obama said in a televised speech on troop withdrawal plans for the war in Afghanistan. Obama’s comments underscored festering tensions...
Read the post »
20 June 2011
For the second time this month, bomb-making factories in Pakistan were evacuated shortly after American intelligence officials notified Pakistani security forces of their existence, fueling suspicions that such intelligence is being shared with insurgents. It remains unclear whether the evacuations — four of them in the past month alone — were the result of deliberate or inadvertent leaks or were planned in advance of the intelligence...
Read the post »
17 June 2011
Pakistan assured US lawmakers on Thursday it was investigating a complaint that Pakistani security agencies asked by the CIA to act against two IED factories in Fata had instead alerted the militants and allowed them to escape. The assurance conveyed to senior US lawmakers in a meeting with a Pakistani delegation headed by Ambassador Husain Haqqani, followed a series of congressional hearings that focused on the allegation. During the meeting, US...
Read the post »
16 June 2011
The Army on Wednesday confirmed media reports that it had made several detentions in connection with the US raid killing Osama bin Laden and other unspecified incidents under ‘a purge’, but denied holding any military officer. “The arrests are part of ongoing cleansing process and are not related to any single incident,” an ISPR spokesman said while commenting on a New York Times report that five persons, an Army major among...
Read the post »