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Just another day of building a democracy …
Lahore, 30 March (AKI) – By Syed Saleem Shahzad – Home-grown Al-Qaeda led militants are behind Monday’s deadly attack on a police training academy in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, according to interior ministry chief Rahman Malik and some security analysts, including former general Talat Massood.
Such attacks have in the past been blamed on foreign intelligence agencies. While militant violence has surged in Pakistan since mid-2007, most violence has been in the northwest near the Afghan border.
Militant sources confirmed the early-morning grenade and rifle assault on the police academy was retaliation by Al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud and Punjabi militants for Pakistan’s recent cooperation with the United States in hunting down Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
The attack marks a new front in the war against Pakistan’s security forces, the sources said.
Between 18 and 20 gunmen reportedly killed up to 50 people, wounded up to 90 and took hundreds of police cadets hostage during an eight-hour siege of the academy.
More below the fold …
BAGHDAD (NYT) — The shooting died down in a Sunni enclave of the capital where neighborhood guards had faced off with Iraqi and American soldiers over the previous 24 hours; the guards were disarmed and stripped of their badges, but tensions remained high.
The leader of the Awakening Council in the Fadhil neighborhood, Adil al-Mashhadani, was arrested Saturday by American-backed Iraqi soldiers. Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, the spokesman for the security forces in Baghdad, accused him on Sunday of leading an armed military wing of the Baath Party, which is a violation of the Constitution.
The American military said Sunday that he was suspected of illegally searching and detaining Fadhil residents, extorting bribes of more than $160,000 a month from them and leading cells that organized attacks using homemade bombs and mortars. He also is suspected of colluding with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and with another insurgent network, Jaish al-Islami.
KIRKUK, Iraq – Seeking to head off an explosion of ethnic violence, the United Nations will call for a power-sharing system of government for Iraq’s deeply divided region of Kirkuk in the oil-rich north.
A draft U.N. plan, outlined to The Associated Press by two Western officials, aims to defuse dangerous tensions. Kurds, a majority in the region, have been trying to wrest control from Arabs, Turkomen and other rival ethnic groups. If open warfare breaks out, it could jeopardize the U.S. goal of stability across Iraq before elections at year’s end.
Peaceful elections are critical to reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq, promised by President Barack Obama.
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THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Senior officials from around the world are gathering in The Hague in The Netherlands for a U.N.-backed conference on Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Participants include U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, along with the foreign ministers of the Netherlands, Japan and Australia.
Nearly 90 countries are participating, including delegates from Russia, China and Pakistan, although their representatives were not yet known.
Dutch media said Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Asia-Pacific affairs Mahdi Akhoundzadeh would attend. Tehran had no comment.
NATO, the OECD, European Union, Asian Development Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Bank are all sending delegates.
WHO PROPOSED THE MEETING?
The meeting was proposed by Clinton. It will be jointly chaired by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen.
FOCUS ON REGIONAL COOPERATION
Organisers stress the conference will focus on regional cooperation rather than seeking extra troops or money for Afghanistan, facing problems of economic under-development and drug production along with the growing Taliban insurgency.
“The meeting … reflects the desire to reassess what the goals are and how to achieve them so that we have a strategy that is agreed on by all parties,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, U.S. State Department Director of Policy Planning, told the BBC.
US has no plan to have bilateral meeting with Iran in The Hague
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Iraq’s about ready to turn way ugly again… so much for the “success” of the surge.
and our friend bibi over in Israel is clamoring for the U.S. to “stop Iran”.
maybe because he knows their facilities are 100 feet underground contained in hardened bunkers.. why should the IAF waste their bombs on this futile effort?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/31/netanyahu-to-obama-stop-i_n_181293.html
Iraq hasn’t gotten un-ugly since the U.S. liberated it.
I don’t believe for a moment that Israel’s blood lust against Iran is about any nuclear program. That’s just a pretext.
what’s it about then.. Israel not wanting a third regional power, three’s a crowd?
A third regional power? Who’s the second?
And yes, as with all of Israel’s conflicts it is not about any existential threat. That has always been a pretext. Israel is about grabbing territory and resources, as well as power and hegemony in its relations in the region.
PS Just in case anyone thinks that 1948, at least, was all about self-defense against an existential threat, here is a revealing 1948 quote from David Ben Gurion uttered months before the war he refers to began: “The war will give us the land. The concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, and in war they lose their whole meaning.” In fact, by that time the efforts of ethnically cleansing certain areas, including West Jerusalem, had already begun.
Israel on one side.. Saudi Arabia on the other.. neither want, or need, Iran in the center.
yeah, Billions of petrodollars make you a regional power. having another power, the U.S., kissing your ass and doing your dirty work in Iraq and Iran makes you a regional power.
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in a casual meeting at the Afghanistan Conference in The Hague. Clinton spoke of her appreciation for the Iranian response.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."