White House 28 August 2008 |
America’s top military officer says he is encouraged by Pakistani actions to quell violence along the border with Afghanistan. VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns reports, senior U.S. and Pakistani military leaders met this week on an American aircraft carrier to discuss the violence.
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| Navy Adm. Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gestures during a news conference at the Pentagon, 28 Aug. 2008 |
The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, says he met with the Chief of Staff for the Pakistani Army, General Ashfaq Kayani, to better understand the problem of cross-border Taliban violence as seen through the eyes of the Pakistani commander who has to fight the extremist problem in his own country.
“He is very consistent in what he is doing,” Adm. Mullen said. “He has thought this through. And he continues to move forward in an area that involves obviously the Pak military, his authorities over the Frontier Corps as well. And so expectations for instantaneous results I think are probably a little bit too high.”
Mullen and Kayani were joined Wednesday on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean by the top American commander in Iraq, General David Petreaus, as well as other ranking U.S. and Pakistani officers.
Briefing reporters at the Pentagon Thursday, Mullen says he is encouraged by Pakistani actions to try to stop cross-border attacks. Pakistani security forces say they killed at least 44 militants in a tribal region Wednesday in a weeks-long offensive that has displaced thousands of people.
Mullen says the Indian Ocean meeting was not about U.S. commanders demanding greater action from their Pakistani colleagues, but rather an effort to discuss how best the two countries can confront the problem together.
“There was no ultimatum. In my view, that does not work in this kind of relationship building,”he said. “More than anything else, I think it was that we clearly went through what the challenges are, the specifics of it, what we think the threat is, how to get at it.” Read more »
| Deeply hurt PML-N feels Zardari will self-destruct |
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| Sunday, August 24, 2008 ‘The coalition is almost dead’  By Shaheen Sehbai LAHORE: The PML-N will field a very respectable and honourable person as its candidate for the president’s post as its coalition with the PPP is almost over, a top notch PML-N leader said in Lahore, deeply regretting that the PPP leadership had wasted a God-given opportunity to politicians to reassert their collective right to rule the country.The leader told me at the Club Road Secretariat of the Chief Minister the coalition could now be saved only if Asif Ali Zardari showed political maturity and grace instead of displaying insecurity and immaturity, which he had done in the recent weeks and months breaking every public and private promise he had made, whether verbal or written. The PML-N leadership is almost in a state of mourning after what is now being considered as the death of a dream which, the party leadership claims, was kept alive by Mian Nawaz Sharif by showing extreme patience, maturity and vision, despite repeated and embarrassing betrayals by Zardari. |
Urged on by separatist leaders, Muslims in Srinagar, Kashmir, have taken to the streets over the past few weeks to demand an end to India’s control of the region.
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Born and reared during the bloodiest years of insurgency and counterinsurgency, inheritors of rage, a new generation of young Kashmiris poured into the streets by the tens of thousands over the past several weeks, with stones in their fists and an old slogan on their lips: “Azadi,” or freedom, from India.
Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008
“He may be an SOB,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said about then Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. “But he’s our SOB.” That lesser-evil outlook might just as easily have described the U.S. attitude toward Pakistan’s General-turned-President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned on Aug. 18 in the face of looming impeachment. Nor was it only the West that saw Musharraf as preferable to the chaos and venality of the political system he overturned to seize power in 1999. He carried the support of the urban middle class, which was desperately looking for the stability and modernity that had eluded a political system dominated by competing feudal baronies. Read more »