Word: islamabad
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...roiling across the country. It is whipped up by the often sensationalist, ratings-hungry Pakistani TV news talk shows - think of Fox News cranked up to full volume, in Urdu. It resounds from the mosques, in virulent anti-U.S. sermons during Friday prayers. But most ominously, according to Islamabad observers, this deep suspicion of America's intentions in the region seems to be shared by elements within Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence services...
...Washington as a tad ungrateful - not to mention misplaced - given that last fall, Congress enacted the Kerry-Lugar bill granting Pakistan over $7.5 billion in economic aid over the next five years. In addition, Pakistan receives military hardware and training to combat Pakistani Taliban - whose wrath is focused on Islamabad - in the mountainous borderlands with Afghanistan...
Pakistan has long been characterized as a country whose rulers may be pro-American but whose people are decidedly not. In 1979, for example, Pakistani radio falsely reported that U.S. aircraft bombed Islam's holiest site in Mecca, prompting a mob to storm the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, killing five American and Pakistani staffers. This simmering hostility was stirred again after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and boiled over, more recently, with drone missile strikes inside Pakistan's tribal territory in which dozens of suspected terrorists - and civilians - died. The Feb. 3 conviction in New York...
...Some Taliban experts in Islamabad believe that doubts about Mehsud's death are greatly exaggerated. They point to the fact that the Taliban commander, whose eyes are rimmed with kohl and who wears shoulder-length locks, loves publicity and would pop up in a minute if he were still alive. Last October, Mehsud posed for visiting journalists like a B-movie action hero with a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder, and then again leering behind the wheel of a humvee that his men had looted from a NATO convoy trapped in the canyons of the Khyber Pass. (See pictures...
...ranking fellow Mehsud tribesman from South Waziristan. But he may not be acceptable to other Taliban fighters scattered across the lawless borderlands. Although various regional commanders are united under the organization Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, their reasons for becoming Taliban are varied. The ideology of replacing the pro-Western Islamabad government with an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic caliphate is often a flag of convenience for other motives. Some joined the Taliban for revenge against Islamabad for past assaults against their tribes and for U.S. drone strikes. Others, especially along the Khyber Pass, are common bandits, while still others are sectarian...