Word: pakistan
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...this transformation also provides Western military commanders with opportunities they can exploit. Local populations that tolerated or supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda for ideological reasons are less likely to back criminal gangs. If Western commanders and the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan can help protect and organize local communities, they stand a better chance of winning...
...they are actually more violent and more dangerous. But one opportunity that comes out of this is that they are also far more hated by the local population. If you read the reports coming out of Swat, out of Southern Afghanistan, out of Kandahar, Helmand, the tribal areas in Pakistan, increasingly the people of the border areas refer to them as criminals and gangsters. They really are more similar to Tony Soprano than the Che Guevara image we have. They are hardly behaving like pious Muslims...
Skeptics have long sniffed at the official Franco-Algerian version of how the monks were abducted and murdered. But Buchwalter's statement - given to investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, who also happens to be overseeing the Pakistan case - blows the biggest hole yet in the idea that the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) killed the seven men. According to Buchwalter, an army intelligence official serving as military attaché to France's embassy in Algiers at the time of the killings, he was told by Algerian colleagues that the monks had died when an Algerian army helicopter patrolling an area...
Similar doubts exist about the official story in the Pakistan bombing case. French counterterrorism officials have been privately airing their skepticism about jihadist responsibility for the 2002 attack for months. In June, word leaked to the press that the investigating magistrates handling the case had all but abandoned the idea that al-Qaeda was behind the bombing. Lawyers representing families of the attack's French victims told reporters they'd received a briefing by Trévidic and fellow judge Yves Jannier in which they were told that Pakistani officials may have organized the strike. This new theory hinges...
Investigators speculate that in 2000, when France applied an international anticorruption convention banning all kickbacks, those Pakistani officials grew angry. French authorities suspect that members of Pakistan's overlapping military, intelligence and political circles then decided to settle their score by symbolically targeting the French submarine engineers tied to the contract, manipulating extremists whom Pakistan has long been accused of supporting to carry out the suicide bombing. Pakistan has denied all the accusations; a spokeswoman for President Ali Zardari calls them "farcical at best." (Read "Mounting Terror in Algeria...