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This article titled “Pakistani PM: US promises not to repeat Bin Laden raid” was written by Julian Borger, diplomatic editor, for The Guardian on Thursday 21st July 2011 15.19 UTC

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, says he has received US assurances there will be no repeat of the unilateral raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in May.

Gilani’s remarks, in an interview with the Guardian, contradict assertions by the US president, Barack Obama, and other American officials that US forces would take similar action against other al-Qaida leaders if necessary.

Gilani was speaking in London at a time when Pakistani relations with the west, particularly the US, are at a low in the wake of the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on 2 May.

After the special forces operation, US officials voiced suspicions that Bin Laden must have had a network of local supporters, possibly inside the Pakistani state, while Pakistani leaders were outraged not to have been consulted over the raid inside their territory.

“Since we were sharing information with US and there was a tremendous relationship with the CIA and ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], therefore we could have done a joint operation in Abbottabad, but it didn’t happen. Therefore we had a lot of reservations,” Gilani said.

He added: “They have assured us in future there will be no unilateral actions in Pakistan, and there would be co-operation between both agencies.”

The Pakistani prime minister said he had received the assurance personally from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In her public statements, however, Clinton has declared the US would strike unilaterally against other top militants if others did not.

She said in May: “We’ve made it clear to people around the world that if we locate someone who has been part of the al-Qaida leadership, then you get him or we will get him.”

Speaking to the BBC just before his visit to Britain the same month, Obama was equally blunt on the issue. He said: “We are very respectful of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But we cannot allow someone who is planning to kill our people or our allies’ people – we can’t allow those kind of active plans to come to fruition without us taking some action.”

On Thursday, however, Gilani said any repeat of the Abbottabad raid would be “totally unacceptable”.

“Public opinion would further aggravate against the United States and you cannot fight a war without the support of the masses. You need the masses to support military actions against militants,” he said.

He said another raid would damage “not only our relationship, but also our common objective, to fight against militants. We are fighting a war and if we fail that means that it’s not good for the world. We can’t afford losing.”

After the raid against Bin Laden, the Pakistani government said it had stopped the US launching drones from its territory in pursuit of militants in tribal areas. Nevertheless, drone strikes on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan have continued.

“We don’t allow our bases to be used. They have other bases they use,” Gilani said. Asked where those bases were, he replied: “I don’t know. You ask the Americans. This is a question to put to them.”

The prime minister said: “Drone attacks are against our strategy too, because we have been isolating the militants from the local population and when there are drone attacks they get united again.”

Gilani deflected questions on some of the other irritants in US-Pakistan relations. On the allegation this month by the US chairman of the joint chief of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, that the Pakistani government had “sanctioned” the killing of journalist Saleem Shahzad, the prime minister said Mullen should present his evidence to the inquiry into the killing. He said he was not aware if the American had done so.

On FBI allegations this week that the Pakistani military, including the ISI, had spent $4m (£2.4m) on trying to influence US policy on Kashmir in Pakistan’s favour, and the arrest of a Kashmir separatist lobbyist alleged to have been involved, Gilani claimed he was not sufficiently well informed to comment. “I have been travelling. I don’t have full information,” he said.

On Wednesday night, Gilani told an audience of British and Pakistani business leaders at a London hotel that his country’s most important foreign relationship was with China.

“China is a rising power and Pakistan’s all-weather friend. This is a relationship that has no parallel. Uniquely, there are no downs but only ups in Pakistan-China relations. China is a source of pride and strength for us,” Gilani said.

The emphasis on the Chinese relationship has been a Pakistani government theme since the raid on Abbottabad and the cutting of US aid to Pakistan, but Gilani denied Islamabad was playing one world power off against another.

“We want to have relationships with both China and the United States. We don’t want to lose our relationship with the United States. We want to improve our relationship with the US [on the basis of] mutual respect and mutual interest,” the prime minister said.

However, he made it clear there was some way to go before that state was achieved. “It will take some time,” he said. “There can’t be a quick fix.”

Amid near-constant sniping from Washington, Gilani’s government found support from General David Petraeus, the departing US commander in Afghanistan who is soon to become CIA chief.

“I do believe they want to eliminate the al-Qaida presence and I do believe they want to eliminate the Taliban Pakistani presence,” Petraeus told journalists in Paris.

According to Reuters news agency, he said “it is credible [Pakistan] did not know” Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.

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This article titled “Taliban behind surge in attacks on western troops and advisers” was written by Jason Burke in Kabul, for The Guardian on Tuesday 31st May 2011 19.35 UTC

Commanders of international troops in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly concerned at the growing number of attacks by members of local security forces on western forces or advisers.

The Taliban ordered insurgents to step up infiltration of the Afghan national army and police earlier this year, Nato officials believe, leading to an alarming rise in the number of “blue on green” attacks.

Increasing the numbers of local security forces is a key part of the coalition strategy to allow international combat troops to leave the country before the 2014 deadline set at the Lisbon conference last year.

Recent months have seen dozens of incidents – many unreported – of Afghan soldiers or policemen turning their weapons on western troops or facilitating attacks by insurgents.

The latest saw an Australian mentor killed by an Afghan soldier in Oruzgan province on Monday. Lance Corporal Andrew Gordon Jones, 25, was shot three times by a soldier, who then fled. A Taliban spokesman said the killer was a hero. “Every soldier who joins us is rewarded with medals and great honour,” he said.

The Taliban regularly claim responsibility for attacks in which they had no immediate role. Intelligence officers said most are by “disgruntled guys”.

One spark for violence may be widespread anger in Afghanistan at continuing civilian casualties caused by international troops. The most recent incident saw 14 civilians killed by an airstrike in the southern province of Helmand at the weekend. Reports suggest insurgents fled into a home after attacking US troops.

President Hamid Karzai said he would take “unilateral action” if the airstrikes did not stop, adding that Afghans would react as they have to previous occupying forces if attacks continued. Afghans are proud of their history of repelling invaders, including the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the British in the 19th century. Karzai has repeatedly made similar threats.

Data collected by the UN shows most civilian casualties in Afghanistan are from Taliban attacks, particularly suicide bombs and remote-controlled blasts.

Western officials fear a “rising trend” of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on western forces, though they stress that the numbers involved are a small minority of Afghan security forces.

In the past 18 months Nato has recorded around 20 incidents in which Afghan soldiers or policemen have attacked international forces, killing more than 50.

Two Nato trainers were killed by a police officer in Helmand earlier this month. In April, a veteran Afghan air force major shot and killed eight US troops and an American contractor in Kabul. Other recent incidents include the shooting of two Americans during police training in the northern Faryab province and the killing of three Germans in the north of the country by an Afghan soldier.

In November last year six US troops were killed when an Afghan border police officer shot them. Three British soldiers were killed by a soldier last July. In November 2009 five British soldiers were shot dead by a “rogue” Afghan policeman in an attack at a police checkpoint.

Hanif Atmar, the former interior minister, said most incidents were the result of “cultural misunderstandings” between foreigners and the police or troops they were trying to train. “There is an Afghan way of doing things that sometimes they don’t respect and that leads to angry outbursts and then shootings,” he said.

In addition, there are frequent but much less often reported incidents of members of the Afghan security forces involved in attacks on fellow Afghans.

Two recent incidents – the killings of the police chief of Kandahar province on 15 April and of the police chief of northern Afghanistan last weekend – involved individuals wearing police uniforms. It is unclear whether they were serving officers or imposters, although Afghan officials said a senior police bodyguard was involved in the attack in Kandahar.

The Afghan army has almost doubled in size in three years to more than 164,000. The Afghan national police has grown from fewer than 95,000 in late 2009 to 126,000 today.

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This article titled “Pakistan to return Osama bin Laden helicopter wreckage to US” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Monday 16th May 2011 18.45 UTC

Pakistan will return the wreckage of the US special forces helicopter used in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a tentative first step towards hitting the reset button in their badly damaged relations.

Senator John Kerry announced the offer in Islamabad after 24 hours of meetings with Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership amid deep mutual mistrust and recriminations since Bin Laden’s killing on 2 May.

The US feared cutting-edge military technology in the tail of the helicopter, abandoned after US forces blew up the rest of the craft, could be reverse-engineered in China.

A joint statement following the talks reported “a constructive exchange of views” – diplomatic speak for tough-talking – but also an agreement to work together against “high value targets”. It was not clear if these targets included the Taliban leader Mullah Omar or al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom are believed to be in Pakistan.

Kerry, considered the “good cop” of US diplomacy with Islamabad, stressed the “extraordinary” nature of the mission that killed Bin Laden, saying it had been kept secret for operational reasons and not due to US mistrust of Pakistan. This claim contradicted earlier comments by the CIA chief, Leon Panetta, that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) had been excluded in case someone tipped off the al-Qaida leader.

“This had to be an American operation, and it had to be as secure as humanly possible,” he said. But he stopped short of alleging Pakistani complicity with Bin Laden, saying there was “no evidence at this point in time”.

The deal comes amid growing anti-American anger inside Pakistan, which on Friday passed a motion condemning the US raid and calling for a complete review of the relationship with the US, including potentially cutting Nato’s supply line to Afghanistan.

A senior Pakistani military official told the Guardian the raid had sparked vivid anti-American sentiment inside the armed forces, and that General Kayani had faced anger during a tour of military bases last week. There were also questions about the poor perfomance of the ISI, the official said, but rejected suggestions that agency personnel had helped Bin Laden.

Instead, he suggested, the US needed to make major concessions to rebuild the relationship including, he said, a nuclear cooperation deal similar to the one between Washington and India. But there are few signs that the US will make any concessions, with Kerry also under pressure from US senators who want to slash aid to Pakistan or cut relations entirely.

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This article titled “Taliban is demoralised, says British forces commander” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for The Guardian on Wednesday 13th April 2011 19.26 UTC

Amid widespread predictions of a bloody fighting season in Afghanistan, the commander of British forces there has described the Taliban-led insurgency as “increasingly fractured and increasingly demoralised”.

Brigadier James Chiswell, said that in response to increasing attacks from British, US, and Afghan, forces in Helmand province, insurgents were “examining their options”.

However, though he suggested the insurgency had been badly hit by the deployment of 30,000 US marines who joined the 9,500 British troops over the past year, the insurgency had proved in the past to be “adaptable and resilient”.

Chiswell, just returned from Helmand after commanding 16 Air Assault Brigade there, predicted that the Taliban would shift to asymetric tactics and intimidation – soft civilian targets. Referring to recent spectacular attacks in neighbouring Kandahar province, he said those were unlikely to endear the Taliban to the local population.

Taliban suicide bombers used an ambulance to attack a police training centre in Kandahar in an incident the Taliban promised to investigate. A suicide bomber killed 10 people in an attack on peace talks between tribal elders in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province.

However, Chiswell said the insurgency was “under pressure” and there was a sense of optimism, above all confidence, among the local population. Whether it was the result of a “seasonal feel-good factor or something more profound and enduring”, could really only be answered this time next year.

Senior British officials in London predict that the forthcoming fighting season will be bloody and that there is a political vacuum around the commitment to end Britain’s military combat role in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Growing frustration about the lack of political or diplomatic progress, was reflected by David Miliband, the former foreign secretary who wrote in the New York Times: “Our leverage will decline, not improve, as 2014 approaches.” He added: “The insurgency can spread, outstripping the ability of international and Afghan forces to check its growth.”

Asked whether it was time for a political surge, Chiswell replied: “Our take is it is all politics, as much politics as war amongst the people”. He added: “If you get the politics locally right, it sucks the oxygen out of the insurgency… Only time will tell but I’m very positive we are heading in the right direction. It comes down to a local sense of confidence”.

British military chiefs, including General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, are foremost among those increasingly frustrated by the lack of political progress now that they say they have sufficient troops in Afghanistan and that the international – foreign – force there cannot achieve more. It is now up to Afghan leaders at the local as well as national level, and the growing number of Afghan security forces, they say.

The new fighting season, which will start as soon as the poppy harvest is in, is likely to hit Afghans, security forces in uniform, as well as civilians, observers – including senior British government officials, warn.

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This article titled “Pakistan’s secret dirty war” was written by Declan Walsh, for The Guardian on Tuesday 29th March 2011 22.00 UTC

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.

This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.

If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don’t worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all.

The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan’s greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country’s powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men.

This is Pakistan’s dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years, is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues – US spy bases, Chinese business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold.

And in recent months it has grown dramatically worse. At the airport in Quetta, the provincial capital, a brusque man in a cheap suit marches up to my taxi with a rattle of questions. “Who is this? What’s he doing here? Where is he staying?” he asks the driver, jerking a thumb towards me. Scribbling the answers, he waves us on. “Intelligence,” says the driver.

The city itself is tense, ringed by jagged, snow-dusted hills and crowded with military checkposts manned by the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force in charge of security. Schools have recently raised their walls; sand-filled Hesco barricades, like the ones used in Kabul and Baghdad, surround the FC headquarters. In a restaurant the waiter apologises: tandoori meat is off the menu because the nationalists blew up the city’s gas pipeline a day earlier. The gas company had plugged the hole that morning, he explains, but then the rebels blew it up again.

The home secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrani, a neatly suited, well-spoken man, sits in a dark and chilly office. Pens, staplers and telephones are neatly laid on the wide desk before him, but his computer is blank. The rebels have blown up a main pylon, he explains, so the power is off. Still, he insists, things are fine. “The government agencies are operating in concert, everyone is acting in the best public interest,” he says. “This is just a . . . political problem.” As we speak, a smiling young man walks in and starts to take my photo; I later learn he works for the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.

We cut across the city, twisting through the backstreets, my guide glancing nervously out the rear window. The car halts before a tall gate that snaps shut behind us. Inside, a 55-year-old woman named Lal Bibi is waiting, wrapped in a shawl that betrays only her eyes, trembling as she holds forth a picture of her dead son Najibullah. The 20-year-old, who ran a shop selling motorbike parts, went missing last April after being arrested at an FC checkpost, she says. His body turned up three months later, dumped in a public park on the edge of Quetta, badly tortured. “He had just two teeth in his mouth,” she says in a voice crackling with pain. She turns to her father, a turbaned old man sitting beside her, and leans into his shoulder. He grimaces.

Bibi says her family was probably targeted for its nationalist ties – Najibullah’s older brother, now dead, had joined the “men in the mountains” years earlier, she says. Now a nephew, 28-year-old Maqbool, is missing. She prays for him, regularly calling the hospitals for any sign of him and, occasionally, the city morgues.

Over a week of interviews in Karachi and Quetta, I meet the relatives of seven dead men and nine “disappeared” – men presumed to have been abducted by the security forces. One man produces a mobile phone picture of the body of his 22-year-old cousin, Mumtaz Ali Kurd, his eyes black with swelling and his shirt drenched in blood. A relative of Zaman Khan, one of three lawyers killed in the past nine months, produces court papers. A third trembles as he describes finding his brother’s body in an orchard near Quetta.

Patterns emerge. The victims were generally men between 20 and 40 years old – nationalist politicians, students, shopkeepers, labourers. In many cases they were abducted in broad daylight – dragged off buses, marched out of shops, detained at FC checkposts – by a combination of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothes intelligence men. Others just vanished. They re-emerge, dead, with an eerie tempo – approximately 15 bodies every month, although the average was disturbed last Saturday when eight bodies were found in three locations across Balochistan.

Activists have little doubt who is behind the atrocities. Human Rights Watch says “indisputable” evidence points to the hand of the FC, the ISI and its sister agency, Military Intelligence. A local group, Voice for Missing Persons, says the body count has surpassed 110. “This is becoming a state of terror,” says its chairman, Naseerullah Baloch.

The army denies the charges, saying its good name is being blemished by impersonators. “Militants are using FC uniforms to kidnap people and malign our good name,” says Major General Obaid Ullah Khan Niazi, commander of the 46,000 FC troops stationed in Balochistan. “Our job is to enforce the law, not to break it.”

Despairing relatives feel cornered. Abdul Rahim, a farmer wearing a jewelled skullcap, is from Khuzdar, a hotbed of insurgent violence. He produces court papers detailing the abduction of his son Saadullah in 2009. First he went to the courts but then his lawyer was shot dead. Then he went to the media but the local press club president was killed. Now, Rahim says, “nobody will help in case they are targeted too. We are hopeless.”

Balochistan has long been an edgy place. Its vast, empty deserts and long borders are a magnet for provocateurs of every stripe. Taliban fighters slip back and forth along the 800-mile Afghan border; Iranian dissidents hide inside the 570-mile frontier with Iran. Drug criminals cross the border from Helmand, the world’s largest source of heroin, on their way to Iran or lonely beaches on the Arabian Sea. Wealthy Arab sheikhs fly into remote airstrips on hunting expeditions for the houbara bustard, a bird they believe improves their lovemaking. At Shamsi, a secretive airbase in a remote valley in the centre of the province, CIA operatives launch drones that attack Islamists in the tribal belt.

The US spies appreciate the lack of neighbours – Balochistan covers 44% of Pakistan yet has half the population of Karachi. The province’s other big draw is its natural wealth. At Reko Diq, 70 miles from the Afghan border, a Canadian-Chilean mining consortium has struck gold, big-time. The Tethyan company has discovered 4bn tonnes of mineable ore that will produce an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold per year, making it one of the largest such mines in the world. The project is currently stalled by a tangled legal dispute, but offers a tantalising taste of Balochistan’s vast mineral riches, which also includes oil, gas, platinum and coal. So far it is largely untapped, though, and what mining exists is scrappy and dangerous. On 21 March, 50 coal workers perished in horrific circumstances when methane gas flooded their mine near Quetta, then catastrophically exploded.

Two conflicts are rocking the province. North of Quetta, in a belt of land adjoining the Afghan border, is the ethnic Pashtun belt. Here, Afghan Taliban insurgents shelter in hardline madrasas and lawless refugee camps, taking rest in between bouts of battle with western soldiers in Afghanistan. It is home to the infamous “Quetta shura”, the Taliban war council, and western officials say the ISI is assisting them. Some locals agree. “It’s an open secret,” an elder from Kuchlak tells me. “The ISI gave a fleet of motorbikes to local elders, who distributed them to the fighters crossing the border. Nobody can stop them.”

The other conflict is unfolding south of Quetta, in a vast sweep that stretches from the Quetta suburbs to the Arabian Sea, in the ethnic Baloch and Brahui area, whose people have always been reluctant Pakistanis. The first Baloch revolt erupted in 1948, barely six months after Pakistan was born; this is the fifth. The rebels are splintered into several factions, the largest of which is the Balochistan Liberation Army. They use classic guerrilla tactics – ambushing military convoys, bombing gas pipelines, occasionally lobbing rockets into Quetta city. Casualties are relatively low: 152 FC soldiers died between 2007 and 2010, according to official figures, compared with more than 8,000 soldiers and rebels in the 1970s conflagration.

But this insurgency seems to have spread deeper into Baloch society than ever before. Anti-Pakistani fervour has gripped the province. Baloch schoolchildren refuse to sing the national anthem or fly its flag; women, traditionally secluded, have joined the struggle. Universities have become hotbeds of nationalist sentiment. “This is not just the usual suspects,” says Rashed Rahman, editor of the Daily Times, one of few papers that regularly covers the conflict.

At a Quetta safehouse I meet Asad Baloch, a wiry, talkative 22-year-old activist with the Baloch Students’ Organisation (Azad). “We provide moral and political support to the fighters,” he says. “We are making people aware. When they are aware, they act.” It is a risky business: about one-third of all “kill and dump” victims were members of the BSO.

Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth, Balochistan is desperately poor – barely 25% of the population is literate (the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7% have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the supply grid.

The insurgents are demanding immediate control of the natural resources and, ultimately, independence. “We are not part of Pakistan,” says Baloch.

His phone rings. News comes through that another two bodies have been discovered near the coast. One, Abdul Qayuum, was a BSO activist. Days later, videos posted on YouTube show an angry crowd carrying his bloodied corpse into a mortuary. He had been shot in the head.

The FC commander, Maj Gen Niazi, wearing a sharp, dark suit and with neatly combed hair (he has just come from a conference) says he has little time for the rebel demand. “The Baloch are being manipulated by their leaders,” he says, noting that the scions of the main nationalist groups live in exile abroad – Hyrbyair Marri in London; Brahamdagh Bugti in Geneva. “They are enjoying the life in Europe while their people suffer in the mountains,” he says with a sigh.

Worse again, he adds, they were supported by India. The Punjabi general offers no proof for his claim, but US and British intelligence broadly agree, according to the recent WikiLeaks cables. India sees Balochistan as payback for Pakistani meddling in Kashmir – which explains why Pakistani generals despise the nationalists so much. “Paid killers,” says Niazi. He vehemently denies involvement in human rights violations. “To us, each and every citizen of Balochistan is equally dear,” he says.

Civilian officials in the province, however, have another story. Last November, the provincial chief minister, Aslam Raisani, told the BBC that the security forces were “definitely” guilty of some killings; earlier this month, the province’s top lawyer, Salahuddin Mengal, told the supreme court the FC was “lifting people at will”. He resigned a week later.

However, gross human rights abuses are not limited to the army. As the conflict drags on, the insurgents have become increasingly brutal and ruthless. In the past two years, militants have kidnapped aid workers, killed at least four journalists and, most disturbingly, started to target “settlers” – unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Some 113 settlers were killed in cold blood last year, according to government figures – civil servants, shopkeepers, miners. On 21 March, militants riding motorbikes sprayed gunfire into a camp of construction workers near Gwadar, killing 11; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Most grotesque, perhaps, are the attacks on education: 22 school teachers, university lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January 2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs.

As attitudes harden, the middle ground is being swept away in tide of bloodshed. “Our politicians have been silenced,” says Habib Tahir, a human rights lawyer in Quetta. “They are afraid of the young.” I ask a student in Quetta to defend the killing of teachers. “They are not teachers, they work for the intelligence agencies,” one student tells me. “They are like thieves coming into our homes. They must go.”

The Islamabad government seems helpless to halt Balochistan’s slide into chaos. Two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari announced a sweeping package of measures intended to assuage Baloch grievances, including thousands of jobs, a ban on new military garrisons and payment of .4bn (£800m) in overdue natural gas royalties. But violence has hijacked politics, the plan is largely untouched, and anaemic press coverage means there is little outside pressure for action.

Pakistan’s foreign allies, obsessed with hunting Islamists, have ignored the problem. “We are the most secular people in the region, and still we are being ignored,” says Noordin Mengal, who represents Balochistan on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In this information vacuum, the powerful do as they please. Lawyer Kachkol Ali witnessed security forces drag three men from his office in April 2009. Their bodies turned up five days later, dead and decomposed. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the country. “In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle,” he says by phone from Lørenskog, a small Norwegian town where he won asylum last summer. “Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war criminals,” he says. “They don’t even respect the dead.”

Balochistan’s dirty little war pales beside Pakistan’s larger problems – the Taliban, al-Qaida, political upheaval. But it highlights a very fundamental danger – the ability of Pakistanis to live together in a country that, under its Islamic cloak, is a patchwork of ethnicities and cultures. “Balochistan is a warning of the real battle for Pakistan, which is about power and resources,” says Haris Gazdar, a Karachi-based researcher. “And if we don’t get it right, we’re headed for a major conflict.”

Before leaving Quetta I meet Faiza Mir, a 36-year-old lecturer in international relations at Quetta’s Balochistan University. Militants have murdered four of her colleagues in the past three years, all because they were “Punjabi”. Driving on to the campus, she points out the spots where they were killed, knowing she could be next.

“I can’t leave,” says Mir, a sparky woman with an irrepressible smile. “This is my home too.” And so she engages in debate with students, sympathising with their concerns. “I try to make them understand that talk is better than war,” she says.

But some compromises are impossible. Earlier on, students had asked Mir to remove a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, from her office wall. Mir politely refused, and Jinnah – an austere lawyer in a Savile Row suit – still stares down from her wall.

But how long will he stay there? “That’s difficult to say,” she answers.

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This article titled “Shahbaz Bhatti: another voice against Pakistan’s extremists dies” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Wednesday 2nd March 2011 21.55 UTC

Mariam Pervaiz held up a quavering hand, its palm stained with the blood of her uncle, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s latest political martyr.

“I touched his face,” said the 22-year-old, who rushed to the scene after hearing the rattle of gunfire that killed Pakistan’s minorities minister. “I pulled the car door but he was covered in blood. I said ‘uncle, uncle’ and tried to take his pulse. But he was already dead.”

The sound of wailing women rose from the next room; a rainstorm poured from the skies over Islamabad, washing the streets of a capital city that has witnessed two political deaths in as many months.

Bhatti, an unassuming man with a gentle manner, was not the most powerful of Pakistan’s politicians, nor the most prominent. But he was unquestionably among the bravest.

As the only Christian minister in a country buffeted by extremism and violence, he fought for the rights of Pakistan’s beleaguered minorities. On Wednesday he paid the price of principle with a brutal act that he himself had predicted.

“These Taliban threaten me,” he said in a videotaped message recorded four months ago, and released after his death. “But I am a follower of the cross. I am living for the suffering of my people, and I am ready to die for them.”

And so it was. His killers met little resistance. Witnesses said Bhatti’s killers arrived in a small white car that blocked the road as Bhatti left the tidy suburban home he shared with his mother, whose husband died six weeks ago.

First they fired a burst of Kalashnikov that tore through the windscreen. Then they dragged the driver out. Then they continued firing through a side window. Bhatti was alone; his police guard was due to meet him at his office, officials said.

Bhatti had requested a bulletproof vehicle and a house in the heavily protected ministers’ enclave, a government official said in a TV interview . But other ministers also reported threats and Bhatti’s request was not met, he admitted.

The gunmen fired at least 25 bullets, eight of which struck Bhatti, according to medics at the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. As they left they scattered pamphlets spelling out their motive. Bhatti was an “infidel Christian” who deserved death for challenging Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, it said.

Those following his example would meet a similar fate. “With the blessing of Allah, the mujahideen will send each of you to hell,” it read, signed: “Taliban al-Qaida Punjab”.

International condemnation followed. The UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said Pakistan was being “poisoned by extremism” and urged immediate reform of the blasphemy laws. “I hope the government of Pakistan will … reflect on how it can more effectively confront the extremism poisoning Pakistani society.”

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who recently met Bhatti, said she was “shocked and outraged”. Barack Obama said the Christian minister “courageously challenged the blasphemy laws of Pakistan”. “He was clear-eyed about the risks of speaking out, and, despite innumerable death threats, he insisted he had a duty to his fellow Pakistanis to defend equal rights and tolerance.”

Yet inside the country there was an odd sense that Pakistanis were adjusting to their politicians being picked off, or at least a certain type. TV stations that normally cleared the decks after such traumas, offering dirges and dramatic headlines, reported the news, but then turned to the cricket and the story of Raymond Davis, the CIA official charged with murder.

At the scene of the shooting there was little of the forensic rigour that follows attacks on more influential politicians. A policeman jingled a handful of bullet casings that he then put in his pocket; journalists roamed behind the yellow cordon. The rain washed everything else away.

Pakistan’s Christians, already poorly represented in power, worried about what Bhatti’s death meant for them. “We do not have the freedom of expressing our point of view,” said Bishop Samuel Azariah, presiding bishop of the Church of Pakistan. “Why is the majority in the sin of silence?” Bhatti’s brother-in-law, Yousaf Nishan, said he felt “very insecure”. He said: “In this society you can’t open your mouth, even if you want to say something good, because you’re afraid who you might offend.”

Bhatti’s death casts an ever longer pall over the case of Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy last November. Bhatti was one of three politicians who agitated for the release of the mother-of-five; now all three have been silenced. Salmaan Taseer, the Punjab governor, was killed by his own guard outside an Islamabad cafe while Sherry Rehman lives in hiding, advised against public appearances for fear of assassination.

The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and the interior minister, Rehman Malik, rushed to the hospital where Bhatti was taken . His death was a major security failure for their government, which has some odd priorities.

Last week Malik caused outrage by announcing restrictions on artists, actors and journalists travelling abroad; analysts said he would be better served protecting his cabinet colleagues.

“These people have a long list of targets, and we are all on it,” said human rights campaigner Tahira Abdullah outside Bhatti’s house .

The government’s greatest failing, however, was the lack of political protection for liberals like Bhatti. Politically embattled, the Zardari administration has ruled out any changes to the controversial law – isolating any reformists in its own party. Critics warn this appeasement policy could backfire disastrously. The government must “replace the political cowardice and institutional myopia that encourages such appeasement,” said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. But the turmoil also has strong military roots – the extremist forces responsible for Bhatti’s death and Taseer’s were nurtured under the dictator General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. According to the recent WikiLeaks cables, the army still supports some jihadist groups today.

That thinking still pervades Pakistani society. On TV Zaid Hamid, a rightwing commentator, said Bhatti’s killing was part of a CIA plot to divert attention from the Davis affair. On another channel Zia’s son, Ijaz ul-Haq, rejected the notion of Taliban involvement, calling the killing part of a “foreign plot”. Meanwhile Pakistan’s gunmen of hate retreated into the shadows, another day’s work done. Their message – that discussion of the blasphemy law is itself a death sentence – had been received loud and clear.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “The minefields of Afghanistan” was written by Peter Beaumont in Talukan, for The Guardian on Wednesday 22nd December 2010 20.19 UTC

The man comes to the gate of the outpost of 1/187 battalion of the 101st Airborne. He introduces himself as one of the village’s doctors. He is short and round-faced in a clean white shalwar kameez, waistcoat and ornate prayer cap. He wants to show the soldiers where the Taliban have left anti-personnel mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) around his house.

He explains that he lives not far away, so a handful of soldiers go out after him. At his request they follow at a distance behind, as he walks through the bazaar, so other villagers do not know he is guiding the Americans.

But his house is not nearby. The route on which he guides the soldiers twists through the lanes of the village of Talukan in southern Afghanistan and beside a dirty shallow stream until finally we are out of the village and walking a narrow road between two high mud walls.

The confidence that marked the beginning of the walk dissipates rapidly to be replaced with a nervous tension among the soldiers. “I don’t like this,” mutters Sergeant David Fiske. “This guy could be leading us into an ambush.”

The road opens out to an intersection of several roads. To the left, where the larger of the roads passes a large ploughed field, locals have placed cut branches and stones to block the road.

The man says that there are IEDs in that direction. But the soldiers are uneasy. The junction is a perfect place for IEDs, says one. Two cross the junction carefully to the man’s house. Its walls, for some reason, are topped with concertina wire.

The man’s story changes. Now the mines are not around his house but in the field. Mention of the anti-personnel devices, which he described at first, has gone. They don’t exist. Instead, he tells the soldiers that the Taliban came more than a month ago and told him not to tell anyone what he saw as they seeded the field with the homemade bombs.

The soldiers are increasingly anxious about the man. By now a “cousin” has appeared from where he has been hiding among some trees and joined the group. He has his own version of events.

The two men are now leading the patrol out into the fields. Suddenly, the first seems very scared. “Petrified,” says Fiske. Now is the hard part. The soldiers step into each other’s footsteps imprinted in the soft soil, calling to each other for reassurance: “Did you go this way?” “Which way?”

It is a daily ritual.

I follow, realising that the whole world narrows to this path of marks in the dust that other feet have touched and weighed down heavily upon – a guarantee of relative safety.

On patrols such as these, soldiers look for more compacted areas of soil, places where it is obvious recent traffic is evident. Some walk slightly on the balls of their feet as if trying to make themselves lighter.

They rationalise their progress on these routes in different ways. By saying, “today is not my day” or “fuck it”.

The soldiers know the risk and the consequences in a war where far more men are killed by IEDs than bullets.

“There have been only two of us from my house who haven’t been blown up,” one young soldier told me. “One lost a limb, the other lost some teeth and part of his jaw.”

In the field the man is now pointing out the location of three IEDs, two in the road and one marked by three little bushes by a wall.

The soldiers become aware of being watched. The heads of some teenage boys poke over a haystack in the distance. The doctor says the Taliban are using youths as spotters here. Tentatively, the soldiers try to find the IEDs but the area is too large. So they fire grenades to trigger the mines’ pressure plates. But there is no secondary explosion. By now another idea has occurred to them: they are being “baited” by hidden watchers who want to see how the US soldiers behave looking for mines – to set up an ambush.

The soldiers now no longer trust the man. His story has changed too often. That night, sitting around the fire in their compound, Fiske expresses his frustration, talking with the other sergeants of the company. “We’re playing on the Taliban’s terms here. It’s inevitable that eventually someone will stand on an IED or one of the [bomb disposal] guys will trigger one while trying to disable it.” A few days after we leave, emails come from two of the soldiers, describing the realisation of the company’s fears. Specialist Justin Culbreth, aged 26, has been killed stepping on a mine in one of the grape fields.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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The failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life in prison without parole this morning. Shahzad parked an SUV filled with explosives in the middle of Times Square and attempted to detonate it. Smoke pouring from the vehicle alerted street vendors who alerted police. The US only avoided another mass casualty terrorist attack because of the incompetence of Faisal Shahzad and nothing else. He was trained in Pakistan by the Taliban and returned to America with the intention of doing this nation great harm.

Faisal Shahzad, 31, pleaded guilty in June to a failed May 1 bombing in Midtown Manhattan. He admitted to investigators he received bomb-making training from the Pakistani Taliban — called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan — and that the group had funded the bomb plot. He was sentenced on Tuesday morning in Manhattan federal court by U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum to life with no chance for parole.

This case is the best example yet that we can never take our eye off the ball. Muslim fanatics continue to plot and plan against us and we must do everything in our power to stop them. We got incredibly lucky with Shahzad. Had he been as competent as a single one of the 9/11 hijackers there would have been hundreds killed in Times Square.

On June 29th, the FBI recreated the Times Square car bomb and detonated it to study the effects. They used the exact vehicle and explosives that Shahzad used.

That was in an open field. You can imagine the devastating effects of a blast like that in between buildings in NYC. What’s it going to take for liberals to drop the PC crap and realize these Muslim fanatics are not playing around? They’re deadly serious about wanting to kill us.

The NY Times is reporting that CIA and Pakistan intelligence agents raided the hideout of the Taliban’s number two man — and took him alive.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader is currently in Pakistani custody and is the most important terrorist we’ve captured in some time. This is the guy who works directly for reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

As others have said, the fact that Pakistani intel worked so closely with us to apprehend a guy they could have gotten all along signals a new and more robust cooperation. Maybe Pakistan has finally come to the realization that the Taliban wants to topple the government of Pakistan as much as it does the one in Afghanistan.

The biggest concern I had when I first heard about this was with the interrogation. Since Obama took all the interrogation tools that mean anything off the table, we’ll have to just hope he feels like talking — which isn’t likely.

However, I’m heartened to learn that he remain in Pakistani custody where he’s being interrogated by both Pakistani and US agents.

That means when our sweet talk doesn’t work we can just walk out of the room for an hour or so and let the ISI agents work him over a little bit.

The irony here is that Obama and his ACLU cronies are merely outsourcing enhanced interrogation to a third country. Only it’s not “enhanced interrogation” in Pakistan — it’s actual torture. Barader will be praying to Allah that he’s sent to a humane facility like Gitmo.

Nevertheless, the important thing is that he’ll be made to talk one way or the other, and we can be thankful for that. The information that’s locked away inside Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader could well be what ultimately wins the war in Afghanistan.