In an interview? she said that Pakistan Peoples Party government is taking all decisions in consultation with its allies. The Minister said democratic forces are always looking for resolving issues through dialogue and PPP always followed the way of dialogue in all matters. Replying to a question? she said for holding general elections? all the stakeholders will be taken on board. Dr. Firdous Ashiq Awan said the PPP wants to remove political unrest from the country. She said in the history of Pakistan first time smooth transition will take place? adding all the challenges in this regard will be confronted unitedly by all political parties.
Monday, 13 February 2012
Information Minister Dr. Firdous Ashiq Awan says consensus has almost developed on 20th constitutional amendment.
Information Minister Dr. Firdous Ashiq Awan says consensus has almost developed on 20th constitutional amendment.
President Asif Ali Zardari says the government is taking all possible steps for the welfare of the people and to strengthen economy as economically strong and stable Pakistan is our future and the future of our children.
President Asif Ali Zardari says the government is taking all possible steps for the welfare of the people and to strengthen economy as economically strong and stable Pakistan is our future and the future of our children. He was addressing a dinner hosted by him in honour of outgoing Senators in Islamabad. The President said that the government is doing a lot on all fronts but much more needed to be done to face various challenges and put the economy on the fast track of growth and development. He said that credit goes to all political parties for what have been achieved over the last 4 years on various fronts as no single party can do all this on its own. President Zardari said outgoing senators will be remembered in the parliamentary history as proud Members of the Parliament that unanimously removed the traces of dictatorship from the Constitution by passing historic 18th and 19th Constitutional Amendments. He said they will also be remembered for making possible the realization of shared national ideal of restoring democracy by their wisdom and selflessness while being members of the upper House. While commending the role of Senate? the President said that? driven by the spirit of reconciliation and consensus? the outgoing senators have to their credit as members of the senate that passed some very important pieces of legislation unanimously including the recently adopted far reaching pro-women bill. He said that the work of senators and parliamentarians has enhanced the trust of the people not only in politicians? but also in the parliamentary democracy as a guardian of our national aspirations? which is a big achievement. While commenting on the fight against militancy? the President said we have to defeat this mindset so as to leave a peaceful? stable and prosperous Pakistan for our coming generations. He said during his meetings with foreign delegations he has been pointing out that drug trafficking is a major missing element in the war on terror which is a great source of funding for the militants. President Zardari said Pakistan has abundant natural resources of all kinds and we have to work together to build and strengthen our economy for the sake of prosperity of our future generations. While recounting the achievements of the government? he said that peace and development of Balochistan is a pillar of the present government\'s policy. He expressed the hope that a series of initiatives and development projects initiated by the present government will heal the wounds of Baloch people made during the previous regimes.
The United Nations and the Arab League are considering sending a joint observer mission to Syria to try to end crisis there.
The United Nations and the Arab League are considering sending a joint observer mission to Syria to try to end crisis there.
This has been stated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Araby after their talks on the Syrian crisis. They also agreed to send a joint special envoy to Damascus for this purpose.
This has been stated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Araby after their talks on the Syrian crisis. They also agreed to send a joint special envoy to Damascus for this purpose.
ISI in Pakistan Faces Court Cases
The cases against the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, have uncertain chances of success, analysts say, and few believe that they can immediately hobble it. But they do represent a rare challenge to a feared institution that is a cornerstone of military supremacy in Pakistan. In the first case, due for a hearing on Wednesday, the Supreme Court has ordered the ISI to produce in court seven suspected militants it has been holding since 2010 — and to explain how four other detainees from the same group died in mysterious circumstances over the past six months. The second challenge, due for a hearing on Feb. 29, revives a long-dormant vote-rigging scandal, which focuses on illegal donations of $6.5 million as part of a covert, and ultimately successful, operation to influence the 1990 election. The cases go to the heart of the powers that have given the ISI such an ominous reputation among Pakistanis: its ability to detain civilians at will, and its freedom to meddle in electoral politics. They come at the end of a difficult 12 months for the spy service, which has faced sharp criticism over the killing of Osama bin Laden by American commandos inside Pakistan and, in recent weeks, its role in a murky political scandal that stoked rumors of a military coup. Now its authority is being challenged from an unexpected quarter: the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Only weeks ago, Justice Chaudhry, an idiosyncratic judge, faced accusations of being soft on the military when he inserted the courts into a bruising battle between the government and army. Now Justice Chaudhry seems determined to prove that he can take on the army, too. “This is a reaction to public opinion,” said Ayaz Amir, an opposition politician from Punjab. “The court wants to be seen to represent the popular mood.” The court’s daring move has found broad political support. Last Friday, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the leader of the opposition in Parliament, compared the military to a “mafia” during a National Assembly debate about the plight of the four detainees who died in ISI custody. On Saturday, Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious party, tabled a proposed law that would curtail the ISI’s powers of detention — a symbolic act, given the party’s limited support base, but nonetheless a significant one. Wednesday’s court hearing could be a significant step for the “disappeared” — hundreds of Pakistanis who have vanished into ISI custody over the past decade, amid allegations from human rights groups of torture and extrajudicial executions. The case concerns the plight of 11 men accused of orchestrating three major suicide attacks against army and ISI bases from November 2007 to January 2008. The men were tried by an antiterrorism court and acquitted in April 2010, only to disappear moments after their release from jail. Months later, the men turned up in ISI custody, and then they started to die. One detainee died last August and two more in December, within 24 hours of each other. Then on Jan. 21 a fourth man, 29-year-old Abdul Saboor, was declared dead. An unidentified ISI official called the detainee’s brother, Abdul Baais, with the news. “I stopped my car and started crying,” Mr. Baais, recalled in an interview in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, where he runs a store that sells Islamic texts. The ISI directed Mr. Baais to a fuel station on the outskirts of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, formerly North-West Frontier Province, where he found his brother’s body lying in an ambulance. “His body was cold as ice and thin as a crow,” said Mr. Baais, producing a flush of photographs that showed an emaciated corpse with long, scarlet welts across the back.
U.S. Drone Strikes Are Said to Target Rescuers
The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals. The findings were published on the bureau’s Web site and in The Sunday Times of London. The bureau’s findings are based on interviews with witnesses to strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, where reporting is often dangerous and difficult. American officials have questioned the accuracy of such claims, asserting that accounts might be concocted by militants or falsely confirmed by residents who fear retaliation. But most other studies of drone strikes have relied on sketchy and often contradictory news reports from Pakistan. The bureau’s investigation, which began last year with a detailed study of civilian casualties, involved interviews with villagers who said they saw strikes, wounded people and family members of those killed. The bureau counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones since President Obama took office, and it said that 282 to 535 civilians had been “credibly reported” killed in those attacks, including more than 60 children. American officials said that the number was much too high, though they acknowledged that at least several dozen civilians had been killed inadvertently in strikes aimed at militant suspects. A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.” Getting a full picture of the drone campaign is difficult. It is classified as top secret, and Obama administration officials have refused to make public even the much-disputed legal opinions underpinning it. But Mr. Obama spoke about the program in an online appearance last week. “I want to make sure that people understand: actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” he said in the forum on YouTube. “For the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.” He called the strikes “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” However, American officials familiar with the rules governing the strikes and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that many missiles had been fired at groups of suspected militants who are not on any list. These so-called signature strikes are based on assessments that men carrying weapons or in a militant compound are legitimate targets.
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Drone Kills Pakistani Militant, Official Says
The militant, Badar Mansoor, who led his own group of fighters, was affiliated with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan — an umbrella organization representing the many shades of Pakistani militants — and Al Qaeda, the official said. “He was one of the main militant commanders out there,” said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Mansoor, said to be in his late 20s, was among five people killed after two missiles struck the house in Miram Shah, the capital of the North Waziristan tribal agency. A local official in Miram Shah who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that he also believed Mr. Mansoor had been killed. The strike comes as fraught relations between Pakistan and the United States, which had been virtually frozen since American warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a disputed border attack in November, have been slowly warming. Mr. Mansoor has been accused of attacks that have killed dozens of Pakistanis, and by midevening Pakistani officials had not spoken out against the strike. A local resident said he was woken by two loud explosions around 4 a.m. on Thursday. Militants rushed to the site immediately after the attack to clear the rubble and retrieve the bodies, he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. It was only the second drone strike in Miram Shah since the campaign started in 2004 — the first occurred last November — suggesting that the C.I.A. has expanded its targeting “box” in the tribal belt to include more densely populated areas, which had been previously avoided. Tehrik-i-Taliban, which controls large areas of North and South Waziristan, issued no statement on the drone strikes, but reports of Mr. Mansoor’s death circulated among local residents. Amir Rana, a militancy expert based in Islamabad, said Mr. Mansoor was an ethnic Punjabi who started his militant activities with Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, a jihadi group with links to Pakistani intelligence, fighting in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the 1990s. In recent years he moved to North Waziristan, where he headed a faction of Punjabi Taliban fighters who used their base in the tribal area to orchestrate suicide bombings and kidnappings across Pakistan. Mr. Rana said officials believed Mr. Mansoor had been behind an attack on a Sufi shrine in Lahore in 2010. The police in Karachi accused him of kidnappings and bank robberies. It was the second drone strike in two days in North Waziristan. On Wednesday missiles struck a house in the village of Spilga, killing nine people, whom the security official described as Qaeda associates. North Waziristan is home to an array of Pakistani and foreign militant groups including Al Qaeda, but Pakistan has resisted pressure from the United States to undertake a military operation there. Islamabad has closed NATO supply routes into Afghanistan since the Nov. 26 attack on the Pakistani forces. In recent weeks the country’s political and military leaders have been engaged in a review of their relationship with Washington. Recommendations from a parliamentary committee on Pakistan-United States relations are expected to go before Parliament next week, news media reports said.
Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, and Declan Walsh from Islamabad, Pakistan.
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