|
Heat on Pakistan, 'terrorism central'
 IT is mountainous country so remote and inhospitable that it has given Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants refuge, despite the unceasing efforts of the world's most potent and best-equipped intelligence services, using the most sophisticated methods, to track them down. This is the tribal territory of Waziristan, on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, nominally part of Islamabad's Northwest Frontier Province, but in reality an area where even Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's soldiers now fear to tread. For this, by all accounts, is the effective heart of the global war on terror. This is from where bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, together with the one-eyed Mullah Omar, notorious leader of the Taliban, are waging their offensive in Afghanistan. Increasingly, Pakistan is "terrorism central", and as coalition forces in Afghanistan do battle in the southern provinces where the Taliban pose the greatest challenge, what is clear is that Islamabad is now central to the rapidly intensifying conflict there, just as it is to the war on terror being waged across the world. And when in Havana, Cuba, yesterday General Musharraf sat down for a much-anticipated meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, of India, what was clear was that the Pakistani military ruler is at the centre of a growing firestorm of controversy over just what role the country is playing in the fight against extremism. Posted by: Fred 2006-09-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=166031 |