A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials. The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.
The decision to confront Pakistan with what the officials described as a new C.I.A. assessment of the spy service’s activities seemed to be the bluntest American warning to Pakistan since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about the ties between the spy service and Islamic militants. That ISI officers have maintained important ties to anti-American militants has been the subject of previous reports in The New York Times. But the C.I.A. and the Bush administration have generally sought to avoid criticism of Pakistan, which they regard as a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism.

For this news to become public could also mean that the Bush Administration is trying to apply public pressure on Pakistan; private pressure does not seem to have worked too much. And the US is now losing more soldiers in Afghanistan than in Iraq, greatly increasing the chance that the next battle-ground for public opinion in the US would be the war in Afghanistan, and how there’s been so little progress despite the US being in control of the country.
For Pakistan, this was a public relations whammy that the country could have done without. Along with the effect of being told that elements of their administration were supporting terrorism, there was the disturbing news that the civilian Government in Pakistan had failed to bring the ISI under their control. The civilian Government passed an order putting the ISI under the control of the elected Government, but within a few hours, had to retract the order. No doubt it had been told by the military to stay within its limits (putting Pakistan as one of the few countries where the chief intelligence agency is not under the control of the political class).

In its statement on the June shooting, the U.S. Army said its soldiers had felt threatened when they saw a car speeding up a road toward them, and the driver did not heed warnings to stop. The military said its June statement describing the dead as criminals was incorrect. Initially, some soldiers thought that someone in the car was shooting and that Iraqi police had found a weapon in the vehicle, the military said. However, no weapon was found and the passengers turned out to be a man and two women who worked at the airport bank.
Some Iraqi officials have demanded that U.S. soldiers not on combat missions face Iraqi courts in cases of violence against Iraqis. And the June 25 shooting looks likely to bolster their case. Parliament member Haidar Abadi, from Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, said, “This would increase the Iraqi insistence about the issue of American soldiers’ immunity.” Abadi said Iraqis were angry about the false accusations against the shooting victims.

This incident will give a fillip to the push by Iraqi lawmakers to try US soldiers involved in incidents like these. This is a demand that no US administration will ever agree to, and will continue to be a bone of contention. Overall, this incident does not reflect well on any of the parties involved; the only redeeming feature is that the US military is probably the only military that seems to investigate incidents impartially and release these findings even if they reflect adversely on itself.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Pakistan needs to do more to prevent Taliban militants from launching attacks into Afghanistan from its territory. “We understand that it’s difficult, we understand that the northwest frontier area is difficult, but militants cannot be allowed to organize there and to plan there and to engage across the border,” Rice said. “So yes, more needs to be done.” The strong message to Islamabad comes just a few days before Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House.
Pakistan has also strongly resisted suggestions that U.S. or other foreign troops should be allowed into the remote region to combat the militants. Gilani is seeking peace deals with militants through tribal elders in the northwestern regions of Pakistan.

It seems more apparent that the steadily increasing level of casualties in Afghanistan, especially among US servicemen has starting having an effect. The US Government is steadily increasing the pressure on the Pakistani Administration to take more action to reduce the support that the terrorists get in these tribal areas.

The United States plans to shift about $230 million in aid to Pakistan from counterterrorism programs to upgrading the nation’s aging F-16 fighter jets. The new government is facing “a terrible financial crisis with food and fuel problems,” the official said, and the Pakistani government “would rather tell its public they are spending their money on food and fuel,” so it asked the United States to pay for the F-16 upgrades from the U.S. aid fund. Last year, Congress mandated that $300 million in aid to Pakistan go toward fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban, partly by beefing up law enforcement and developing tribal areas of the country that are hostile to the United States.
Skeptical lawmakers worry that the F-16 upgrades will divert funding from crucial counterterrorism programs and could be more about helping Pakistan competing with its rival, India, than fighting terror. Nita Lowey, chairwoman of a House subcommittee on foreign operations, said the request from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to reprogram the funding “raises serious concerns.” Lowey is asking for more information before signing off on the change. “Congress provided these funds specifically for counterterrorism and law enforcement activities,” Lowey said in a written statement.

This is about as short-sighted as can be. It is of critical importance that funds be spent on improving the lot of the tribal areas and improve the force that works over there. Instead, if these funds are used for improving F-16’s, machines that are hardly of much use in anti-terrorism except when a force needs the support in a head-on fight with the terrorist, not something that is typically seen in the border regions.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama met today in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been criticized by the Illinois senator for failing to reduce corruption in the nation’s government. The meeting at the presidential palace lasted more than one hour and was followed by a lunch, according to Karzai spokesman Siamac Herawi. The two discussed a range of issues, including “U.S.-Afghan cooperation to defeat terrorism, the root causes of terrorism, Afghanistan’s achievements in recent years and the way forward,” Herawi said.
The journey is Obama’s first to Afghanistan, where the U.S. led an invasion to topple the Taliban following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since then, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters have established themselves in rugged mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border and have used that sanctuary as a base from which to attack U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. Obama, who stopped in Kuwait on the way to Afghanistan to see U.S. soldiers, is also scheduled to go to Baghdad, Amman, Israel and the West Bank, Berlin, Paris and London.

McCain had been egging on Obama to have a trip to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and this trip, if it goes to Iraq and to European capitals, will allow Obama to present himself as having a foreign policy. In that sense, this was an essential trip so that he proclaim that he has met commanders in the field, as well as started the process to mend relations with many partners of the US.

Zimbabwe’s troubled central bank introduced $100 billion banknotes Saturday in a desperate bid to ease the recurrent cash shortages plaguing the inflation-ravaged economy. As high as they are, though, the bills still aren’t enough to buy a loaf of bread. They can buy only four oranges. The new note is equal to just one U.S. dollar. Once-prosperous Zimbabwe has seen an unprecedented economic meltdown since it gained independence in 1980, with the official inflation rate now at 2.2 million percent.
In January, the government issued bills in denominations of $1 million, $5 million, and $10 million — and in May, it issued bills from $25 million and $50 million up to $25 billion and $50 billion. The new bills are actually bearer checks and have an expiration date of December 31. Zimbabwe has not had formal currency since the introduction of bearer checks as a temporary measure in 2003.

This is just another manifestation of the utter lack of governance in the country for the past many years, and the only approach that the Government takes is to blame either the business community, or to blame outside powers.

Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla group. Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.
The fathers of the two Israelis soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the television pictures of their sons’ coffins. “It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But … confronting this reality was difficult, yes,” Shlomo Goldwasser told Israel radio. Zvi Regev said on Army Radio: “It was very moving when we saw it. We couldn’t watch too long. It was a terrible thing to see, really terrible. I was always optimistic, and I hoped all the time that I would meet Eldad and hug him.” Hezbollah’s Safa said Israel had later handed over via the ICRC the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war, and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a bloody 1978 raid on Israel.

These prisoner exchanges somehow give further belief to the terrorist groups that Israel is weak and will submit to more such exchanges; it has been proved in the past that these groups have taken the policy of kidnapping in order to get their own prisoners released.

For the second month in a row, U.S. and allied troop deaths in the Afghan war have surpassed those in Iraq, according to official figures tallied by CNN. In June, 46 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 31 troops died in Iraq. In May, 23 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 21 died in Iraq. A Pentagon report issued last week about Afghanistan said that security in many areas of the country is regarded as “fragile” and that Taliban militants have regrouped into a “resilient insurgency” after the Taliban was toppled from power in 2001.
The United Nations said recently that civilian deaths in Afghanistan have gone sharply upward in the past year, largely because of stepped-up Taliban attacks and an insurgent shift toward tactics like roadside bombings, U.N. officials said Sunday. Afghan civilian deaths in the first six months of 2008 jumped 60 percent, from 430 in the first six months of 2007 to 698 this year, John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said.

If the coalition loses Afghanistan to the Taleban again, they will face a breeding ground for terrorists like never before, and will have to fight a massive battle on all fronts (in Afghanistan and at home) to recover from this situation.

The Pakistani military has launched an offensive against militants near the main north-western city of Peshawar, security officials said. Militants have become more active in and around Peshawar in recent months, say correspondents. Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud said he was suspending peace talks with the government.
The government has been in talks with him in an effort to pacify the tribal areas. The militants the government is acting against are not part of the wider Taleban movement in Pakistan, but are still Islamists who wish to enforce their brand of Islam, says the BBC’s Haroon Rashid in Islamabad. When it took power two months ago, the government said it would negotiate with the tribes of the north-west to curb cross-border raids into Afghanistan and end the domestic militancy that caused havoc in Pakistan last year. But now the government has authorised the army to back the talks with a credible threat of force. The Afghan government and the coalition forces in Afghanistan have complained that Taleban militants are finding safe haven in Pakistan. Increasing activity from militants around Peshawar lately has prompted the military to act.

It is very difficult for the Pakistani Government to strike a peace deal with the militants; they are inspired by the urge to establish a state based on Islamic ideals; the last time such a state was established, it lead to a brutal reign under the Taleban in Afghanistan. Unless the Pakistani Government recognizes the need to take action, it will keep on losing control of the country.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes will immediately shift the legal battle over gun rights to California, the state with some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. Gun rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, plan to file suit in federal court today challenging a San Francisco law that bans handguns in public housing, pouncing quickly on Thursday’s decision striking down Washington, D.C.’s broader ban on the same weapons.
The Supreme Court revived the nation’s gun control debate by directly assessing, for the first time in history, the meaning of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices placed limits on modern society’s efforts to deal with gun violence if they violate a constitutional right established two centuries ago to allow citizens to take up their muskets against government control. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that the ruling does not preclude all regulation of firearms, citing restrictions in schools and government buildings and laws against felons possessing guns. The court left intact D.C.’s requirement that guns be licensed but struck down its requirements that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled.

This is probably for the first time that the Court has actually ruled on the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to individual citizens or was meant to apply to the militia (that were thought necessary at that time since there was no army, and the conception was that militias would be important for ensuring the security of the state). What is going to happen now is that there are a number of cases where existing cases and regulations are going to get challenged at the instigation of the NRA (National Rifle Association). Also, the worries about the changes to the Supreme Court due to the pushing of conservative justices seem to be coming true even more.
This ruling is going to cause a nightmare for administrators trying to control the spread of gun control and crime prevention, especially with regard to handguns (that are the most easily concealed of weapons); expect many more cases and litigation over this. Lower courts, especially in places such as New York, Washington, and California are going to have a much harder time deciphering this ruling and coming out with is permissible and what is not.