[Washington Post] Pakistain's Taliban said Thursday that it will not participate in peace talks with the country's new government and will extract "Dire Revenge™ in the strongest way" after one of its top leaders was killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike.Confirming the death of Wali ur-Rehman, the second-ranking leader of the myrmidon group, the Taliban's chief front man blamed Pakistain's government for not doing more to prevent CIA-launched drone strikes on Pak soil.
"The government has failed to stop drone strikes, so we decided to end any talks with the government," Ehsanullah Ehsan, the front man, said in a phone interview. "Our attacks in Pakistain will continue."
U.S. officials had blamed Rehman, who was the chief deputy to Pak Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, for a series of bloody cross-border attacks against U.S. and NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and organization....
personnel in Afghanistan, including a 2009 assault that killed seven Americans at a CIA facility.In a move that appeared to test President B.O.'s revised policy for the use of unmanned drones, two missiles were fired into a house Wednesday in Pakistain's North Wazoo tribal region. Rehman was killed along with at least three other myrmidons.
Pakistain's national government condemned the strike, but it comes less than a week before the swearing-in of a new national assembly that is expected to install Nawaz Sharif
... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
as prime minister. Sharif, who twice held the post in the 1990s, campaigned against continued U.S. drone strikes in the May 11 national elections, as did numerous Pak politicians.