Word: pakistans
(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...
Counter-arguments abound, of course. There are two interpretations regarding Baradar, who was leaving a seminary in a dingy slum outside Karachi when Pakistani operatives, acting on a tip from the CIA, picked him up. The first theory is that Pakistan owed the U.S. big time for knocking out one of their troublesome insurgents and could not dither when the CIA demanded that Baradar be grabbed. But the second theory, put out by local Pakistani journalists with reliable Taliban contacts, suggests that Baradar was dispensable for the Pakistani intelligence since he broke last December with Omar. According to Peshawar journalist...
That fear is exactly what the U.S. military command wants to stir in the minds of Taliban leaders. Afghan Taliban commanders may now hesitate before heading to Pakistan for refuge. Meanwhile, the U.S. is 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...
...drone strike earlier this month that either killed or severely wounded Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban. Knocking Mehsud out of commission may have been the favor Islamabad was repaying with the capture of Baradar and three Afghan Taliban "shadow" governors who were operating out of Pakistan. Mehsud had masterminded a suicide-bombing campaign that hit schools, police stations, bazaars and garrisons across the country, killing hundreds. (On Tuesday, another Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Qadir, ex-governor of Afghanistan's Nangahar province, was reportedly arrested, though neither Pakistan nor the Taliban spokesman would confirm the capture.) (See pictures...
...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...