Herr Musharraf, whom one commenter claims is our ‘best option,’ is reportedly training the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan:
Afghan officials allege that Taliban and allied fighters who fled to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 are learning new, more lethal tactics from the Pakistani military at numerous training bases. “Pakistan is lying,” said Lt. Sayed Anwar, acting head of Afghanistan’s counter-terrorism department. “We have very correct reports from their areas. We have our intelligence agents inside Pakistan’s border as well… They say they are friends of Americans, and yet they order these people to kill Americans…” [Link]
Clearly Anwar hasn’t had any PR training — he has the balls to call a spade a spade. In contrast, newspapers always hasten to add the Pakistani military’s denial, injecting artificial ‘balance’ by spreading that threadbare lie.
Zulfiqar Ali, a Pakistani journalist who freelances for the Los Angeles Times, recently reported that at least some training camps that were closed on Musharraf’s orders have been reopened. The government denies that there are training camps. But Ali, who also writes for the Pakistani magazine the Herald, visited one camp and found armed militants with fresh recruits as young as 13 undergoing 18-day “ideological orientation” and weapons training. Several sources said 13 militant camps had been reactivated in the Mansehra region alone in the first week of May…“Our transport fleet is back, electricity has been restored and the communications system is in place,” a militant guide reportedly boasted to Ali. The reported reopening of militant training camps in Pakistan coincides with the discovery of the high-tech bombs in Afghanistan. [Link]
The triggers consisted of long-range cordless phones attached with black electrical tape to electronic boxes… “These phones are Pakistani-made phones,” he said… “They have Pepsis in the mountains while I can’t find them here in the city,” Nooristani said. “That means they are well supported.” [Link]
Al Qaeda commanders have been caught in major Pakistani cities, not just in the North-West Frontier Province:
Several highly wanted al Qaeda leaders who have been captured in recent years by the FBI and CIA were caught not in the remote terrain along the Pakistani border, but in major cities such as Karachi, Rawalpindi and Lahore.
“Why is it that all the roads keep going back to Pakistan?” said M. J. Gohel, a terrorism analyst and chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based think tank. “Is it a coincidence, or is there something more? The linkages there are just too strong and consistent. The whole backbone of the jihadi infrastructure is not being dismantled. It is still functioning…” [Link]
And the guy behind the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history is believed to be holed up in Pakistan:
Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Kabul who is now the U.S envoy in Baghdad, has been more blunt and said that bin Laden is in Pakistan. [Link]
But the ever-tenacious general, like O.J. Simpson, will continue to search for the real killers. Now he weeps that terrorist training camps aren’t in Pakistan, they’re in Britain:
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan also noted that some Islamic groups banned in Pakistan “operate with impunity” in Britain. [Link]
Meanwhile, our favorite South Asian ally pretends it didn’t sell nukes to North Korea, Iran, Libya and possibly Saudi Arabia, and our president pretends not to notice. But if a suitcase nuke ever goes off in the U.S., chances are good that it’ll be of Pakistani provenance. If you judged Musharraf by his scary behavior rather than his words, you’d think he was Kim Jong-Il.
This is supposed to be a friendly dictator? I’ll take what’s behind the second curtain. We’ve chosen our friends wisely indeed.
