Word: generals
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Britain's Prime Minister emerges in three new books - by Peter Watt, a former general secretary of the Labour Party, Lance Price, a former Downing Street adviser, and Andrew Rawnsley, a political journalist - as a man of volcanic rages, prone to lobbing mobile phones and choice epithets if provoked. And this trio of tomes, carefully timed for publication ahead of parliamentary elections tipped by insiders to take place on May 6, certainly offers provocation. (Read a TIME profile of Gordon Brown...
...military helped create Mullah Omar and his Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and have surreptitiously supported them, for the most part, ever since. The ties have remained testy. When army chief Ashfaq Kayani, the most powerful man in Pakistan, was in Washington a few months ago, General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, remarked, "We're your only friends in Washington." Kayani reportedly replied, "Your friendship is exactly what's causing me headaches back home...
...arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Mohammad Omar's vaunted No. 2, seems to have reversed the momentum. Talking to TIME inside the 2,000-year-old Bala Hissar fortress jutting above Peshawar's old bazaar, Tariq Khan, frontier corps commander major general, admitted that "at first, that commitment with the Americans wasn't there." Now, however, Khan says the U.S. and Pakistani forces along the border are sharing intelligence "in real time, as it's happening." (See why Pakistanis believe there is a U.S. conspiracy against them...
...being generous with its intelligence. Pakistani military sources say the U.S. has passed on GPS coordinates of the bases used by the Pakistani Taliban - extremist tribesmen who see Islamabad as their enemy No. 1, not the NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan - so that the Pakistani military under General Khan can hammer them with artillery or aircraft strikes. These sources say that several dozen American "trainers" are passing on intelligence on the Pakistani Taliban that was gleaned from the eye-in-the-sky drones...
...assistance is paying dividends for Pakistan in the fight against its domestic insurgency. Inside the forbidding mountain ranges along Pakistan's Afghan border, "the drones can hit where the Pakistani military cannot," says Talaat Masood, a retired general and independent military analyst in Islamabad. On Feb. 19, U.S. aerial surveillance helped the Pakistanis find and kill more than 30 militants in a bombing run in a forested valley in South Waziristan, which, until a major Pakistani offensive last October, had been crawling with Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters...