Word: pakistani
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...situation, to be widely considered a nation's most popular politician yet simultaneously barred from ever holding public office again. But that's the situation facing Pakistani opposition leader and long-time political mainstay Nawaz Sharif after a Feb. 25 decision by Pakistan's Supreme Court. The ruling declared both Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz, ineligible to hold office, ostensibly because of Sharif's criminal convictions after he was tossed from office in a 1999 coup by Gen. Pervez Musharraf...
...interviews with TIME, a former Cabinet minister in the government of President Pervez Musharraf and a current senior government official have confirmed that the previous government agreed to allow the CIA to target militants operating on Pakistani soil. Both sources refused to be named because of the sensitivity of the information. "Musharraf gave them the base in Shamsi [in a remote part of Baluchistan] to use for drones, logistics, everything," says the current government official, who insists that the air strikes are "counterproductive" because they inflame public opinion against Islamabad's alliance with Washington. "We have inherited all these problems...
...alliances is also illustrated by the U.S.'s use of drones to target two groups of militants, led by Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadar, based in Waziristan. These men, from the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe, which straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, had formed an alliance with the Pakistani army against Mehsud and other militants. In fact, backed by the army, Nazir and his men had routed some 250 al-Qaeda-aligned Uzbek militants from Wana, in South Waziristan, in 2004. But despite their nonaggression pact with the Pakistani military, both men continued to mount cross-border attacks...
...That's certainly how Nazir and Bahadar see it. The two men and Mehsud, the militant commander against whom they fought on behalf of the Pakistani military, have now formed an alliance with ambitions on both sides of the border. The Shura Ittehad Mujahedin, or Council of United Jihadists, has declared war on the governments of the U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan and proclaimed its fealty to Mullah Mohammed Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban. (The Pakistani Taliban has, until now, been a separate if like-minded group.) In this instance, the drone war may actually have strengthened...
...government hopes its peace deal in Swat will drive a wedge between militants there and the stronger, more ambitious Mehsud - and, if successful, that it can be replicated on other fronts. But as is demonstrated by the shifting alliances in Waziristan, the basic problem facing the Pakistani government is that most of the population in the areas it's trying to pacify, while not inherently opposed to the Pakistani state, nonetheless support the principle of fighting the Americans in Afghanistan...