[Fox News video] Krauthammer is correct, but at least a portion of the back story is likely the 800 pound gorilla in the family room, ie, Congressman Mike Rogers and his wife's former Aegis LLC connection. Unrelated, but their CISPA advocacy is yet another interesting piece.
[DAWN] In another month, there will be new faces in government in both New Delhi and in Kabul, but it is unlikely there will be new policies. But then, Pakistan deserves none. By negotiating with the TTP, the government has reduced itself to parity with anti-state terrorists. By releasing imprisoned insurgents without demanding the return of political captives like the sons of a slain governor Punjab and a former prime minister (both happened to belong to the PPP), it has betrayed partisanship. And by pursuing without vigour an Oedipal trial of a former chief of army staff, it has exposed its judicial flaccidity.
Perhaps the canny old lady was right. She refused to vote in elections because she felt it merely encouraged politicians.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/11/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[DAWN] TWO major blasts on two consecutive days in Islamabad and Sibi have once more brought to the fore the helplessness of the state in the face of frontal assaults by Death Eaters. Both attacks involved soft targets -- the Jaffar Express in Sibi and a vegetable market in the capital. The proscribed United Baloch Army, a separatist group, has grabbed credit -- reportedly as a response to security operations in different parts of Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... -- for both incidents in which ordinary men, women and kiddies died. While there is reason to doubt the veracity of the claim in the case of Islamabad, given that Baloch faceless myrmidons from various proscribed groups have so far limited their attacks to targets in Balochistan, if indeed the UBA is involved, it marks the advent of a dangerous trend: the war against the state by Baloch faceless myrmidons is being extended beyond provincial boundaries.
On the other hand, even though no claim has been forthcoming so far from religiously inspired Death Eater groups, the possibility of one of them carrying out the Islamabad attack cannot be discounted. The outlawed TTP may have condemned the Islamabad blast, which took place a day before the Taliban-declared ceasefire ended. But going by other attacks that have occurred after the faceless myrmidons entered into talks with the government and that were claimed by bad boy splinter groups, the likelihood remains that the market blast was the work of one of them. In fact in theory the attack could also be the handiwork of groups other than the Baloch faceless myrmidons or religious bad boys.
In all this murkiness regarding the perpetrators and their motives, what is tellingly clear is the government's inability to tackle militancy -- from the first step of intelligence-gathering to coming up with measures to put an end to the growing violence in the country. No one in government is addressing the key questions regarding counterterrorism. Even the basics of counter-insurgency don't appear right. For example, the National Counter Terrorism Authority-- the front-line agency designed to deal with the terror threat -- is tied up in legal wrangles and for all practical purposes is dormant. At the other end, the security establishment is not learning from its mistakes so that it could evolve an effective and cohesive counterterrorism strategy. The state is lurching from one incident to the other in confusion, which is not limited to strategy but also includes its muddled narrative regarding militancy. The state must now ask itself some hard questions: does the counterterrorism infrastructure have the capabilities to neutralise the threat, and if not what is being done to remedy this? In short, unless the state focuses on the terror threat with clarity, faceless myrmidons of various stripes will continue to run circles around it.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/11/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
