Word: pakistanis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since the capture of the Taliban's purported second in command by Pakistani forces, military relations between Islamabad and Washington have appeared to be on an upswing. Not too long ago, U.S. insistence that Pakistan step up its cooperation in the fight against the Afghan Taliban had riled the military bigwigs in the south Asian nation - Pakistan's 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...
...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...
...Laden's last confirmed presence was at the siege of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, in December 2001, when the al-Qaeda chief and dozens of his men bribed Afghan mercenaries hired by U.S. special forces to let them escape, probably into the Pakistani mountains directly across the border. A Pakistani intelligence officer who was the main liaison with the Taliban before 9/11 tells TIME that he informed then President Pervez Musharraf that bin Laden, who was said to be gravely ill, most likely died several weeks after Tora Bora and was buried in a hastily dug, unmarked grave...
...Pakistanis were anxious to catch Mauawia for other reasons too. Pakistani intelligence officials told the local press that he was chief of operations for the Pakistani Taliban, which views Islamabad as great an enemy as the NATO troops in Afghanistan and has staged dozens of suicide bombings in major Pakistani cities and towns, killing hundreds. Pakistani security forces also arrested two senior Taliban commanders in charge of operations in the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan. The Kunduz commander, Mullah Abdul Salam, was captured far from the Afghan border, in the central Punjabi town of Faisalabad. And according...
...other than a symbolic figurehead for al-Qaeda and the many jihadi groups it has spawned globally. Day-to-day management of the operation is said to be handled by his No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was nearly killed in a drone attack in the Pakistani tribal territory several years back. Nevertheless, the capture of top Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders in Karachi may help solve the mystery: Is bin Laden still alive, and if so, where is he hiding...