Word: talibans
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...Musharraf maintains the al-Qaeda affiliated pro-Taliban militant leader Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack. But he has also said that Bhutto, who was shot at as she waved to supporters from the sunroof of her armored vehicle, was also partly responsible. She had been warned repeatedly that she was under threat, he told a gathering of journalists on Thursday, but she neglected to take the necessary safeguards and insisted on holding a rally at Liaqat Bagh Park, which intelligence agencies had specifically told her was dangerous. "She went of her own volition, ignoring the threat," he said...
...attacks became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. President Pervez Musharraf threw out the Supreme Court Chief Justice triggering massive street protests. The Swat Valley, a picturesque tourist spot renowned for its skiing and trout fishing, is now, as my colleague Aryn Baker so vividly described just two months ago, Taliban Central. And to end the year, the leading opposition figure was assassinated...
...failed to pass a single piece of major legislation, and during her two periods in power, she did almost nothing to help the liberal causes she espoused so enthusiastically to the Western media. Instead, it was under her watch that Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, helped arm the Taliban and facilitate its rise to power in Afghanistan. And she did nothing to rein in the agency's disastrous policy of training Islamist jihadis to do the ISI's dirty work elsewhere. As a young correspondent covering the conflict in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early...
...Ironically, American support for military dictators has been in the pursuit of U.S. interests not in Pakistan but in neighboring countries - to balance Soviet influence in India or to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the U.S. has rarely kept its eye on the ball. In the 1980s, Washington aided the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, using Pakistan as a fulcrum to help pry the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. The policy succeeded - but when victory was assured, the U.S. lost interest, while thousands of young Muslim extremists who had been armed to combat...
...plotted the assassination, that too is clouded by what many see as either government incompetence or a knee-jerk choice of "usual suspects." On Friday, the Interior Ministery claimed that investigators had intercepted a telephone call that proved that Baitullah Mehsud, a leader of the Pakistani Taliban thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, had instigated the attack. Ministry spokesman Cheema released a transcript of a purported conversation between Mehsud and a follower, offering congratulations for a job well done...