Source: Dawn
The US Secretary of State, Dr Condoleezza Rice, is reported to have told Pakistan that there is ‘irrefutable evidence’ of involvement of elements in the country in the Mumbai attacks and that it needs to act urgently and effectively to avert a strong international response.
The information emerging after her departure indicates that in her meetings with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani during her four-hour stay in Islamabad, she had told the them that Islamabad’s options were quite limited.
Contrary to the formal statements issued by Pakistani authorities and her own statement at the Chaklala Airbase before her departure, sources said she “pushed the Pakistani leaders to take care of perpetrators, otherwise the US will act”.
She is reported to have said that the response needed to be “effective and focused” and that India was thinking on similar lines.
Dr Rice had told the media at Chaklala that there had been no talk of military action and the discussions had focussed on ways of dealing with the problem of terrorism.
She hinted at having communicated to Pakistani leaders that the matter of dealing with the perpetrators was more urgent than they might have thought. She said: “There is urgency in getting to the bottom of it; there is urgency in bringing the perpetrators to justice; and there is urgency for using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks.”
Sources privy to the meetings said Pakistan had expressed its readiness to work jointly with India in investigating the incident, but had wanted such a cooperation to be comprehensive and also addressed its own concerns.
However, Ms Rice was reportedly not ready to listen to Pakistan’s grievances about India’s interference in Balochistan, the role of Indian consulates along the Afghan border in promoting instability in Pakistan and other such issues. Instead, she told Pakistani leaders that she would like to discuss only the issue at hand.
Meanwhile, despite Dr Rice’s hopes that the two countries would keep their channels of communication open, the India-Pakistan Composite Dialogue has effectively been put on hold, making the peace process one of the major casualties of the Mumbai attacks.
“Proposed dates for the meetings of different segments of the composite dialogue were being finalised, but the entire process has now come to a halt,” a source in Foreign Office told Dawn.
Sources in the Indian High Commission have indicated that the peace talks would not resume until Pakistan fully addressed their concerns.
The trade talks have already been postponed.
Similarly, a meeting of the defence secretaries of the two countries expected to be held in January is unlikely to go ahead. A visit by a team from India’s Planning Commission has also been put off.
A meeting of technical experts on the Sir Creek was postponed earlier because of technical reasons and it is not being rescheduled.
The fifth round of the composite dialogue began in July this year with a meeting of foreign secretaries of both countries in New Delhi.
The composite dialogue was last suspended by India in July 2006 after another terrorist attack on Mumbai’s commuter trains.
Foreign Minister Qureshi had earlier said that the peace process was under stress because of the terrorist incident, but expressed the hope that the two countries would soon overcome the hiccup in their ties.
After a meeting with the Indian High Commissioner, MQM leader Dr Farooq Sattar told DawnNews TV that the four-year-old peace process between Pakistan and India had suffered a major setback as a result of the Mumbai attacks.
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Tags: Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Dr Condoleezza Rice, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Mumbai attacks, President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, U.S. Secretary of State
1 response so far ↓
1 Kabool Shah // Aug 4, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I dont know why I read newspapers. But i love this one that i want to share. is it Mullen or Mullan
The following is an account of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking to Albert Jazeera:
“When asked why the United States was not in FATA despite having the knowledge that Al Qaeda was present there, he [Admiral Mullen] said, ‘Because FATA is in Pakistan and Pakistan is a sovereign country and we don’t go into sovereign countries.’”
Hahn? The hell we don’t. What was this buoyant cannibal thinking? The US loves to go into sovereign countries. It hardly does anything else. I suppose Iraq wasn’t sovereign. It isn’t now, but it was. How about Panama, Laos, Cambodia,? We gave Pakistan, until recently sovereign, the choice of inviting us to kill its people with drones, or else be bombed into the Stone Age. Recently we have bombed Somalia, technically sovereign.
When the Pentagon’s alpha-floater says something so transparently nonsensical, so patently false, one wonders: Is he merely lying, or does he somehow actually believe this stuff? I mean, drugs are supposed to be discouraged by the Navy.
Next, more comic-book moral leadership, this time from Ralph Peters, the pay-per-view Clausewitze for Fox News. Walphie, a retired colonel, is hugely in favor of the war against Islam. Grrrrr. Fierce he is. He is a retired “intelligence” officer, and therefore all-wise in things military. And he is Upset. Good.
Before exploring his upsettance, we might note that Walph is of the school of martial ferocity holding that other people should go get killed. Not Walph. He is what in a forgotten war in Asia we called a REMF. That’s Rear-Echelon Motherfucker. It refers to paper-pushers who sit safely way behind the lines while men in the military fight. Walph spent his career largely in Europe, a real hardship post . I mean, sometimes your martini might not be properly chilled. A veritable Tamerlane of the cocktail circuit, Walph.
But don’t underestimate him. The blood lust of a podium doughnut is a thing to reckon with, I reckon. Kings faint. Empires quail.
Another point worth considering is that “intelligence officer” doesn’t mean “an intelligent officer.” Except during WWII, the intel analysts have had a dismal record. Just off the top of my head, Naval Intelligence didn’t know where the Japanese fleet was in 1941, oops. The Korean War caught the spooks flatfooted, as did the entry of the Chinese into the war. The intel weenies didn’t predict that the Viets would fight, though the French experience wasn’t secret. There was the comic-opera Son Tay raid, in which the military choppered into Hanoi to rescue American POWs, only to find that the spooks hadn’t noticed the prisoners had been moved. The CIA didn’t predict that the Cubans would fail to turn against Castro in the Bay of Pigs. They were surprised when the Berlin Wall went up, and when it came down, and again when the USSR, its chief object of study, went tits up. There was the clownish business of the Glomar Explorer. The Air Force bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade because the weenies didn’t know where it was (try the phone book, maybe?). They didn’t warn that the Arabs might fight in Iraq, perhaps never having heard of Israel. They didn’t predict 9/11, and can’t find bin Laden.
I’m impressed, Walph. You’re an intelligence officer.
Now, why is Peters all wrought up? It seems that an American private by name of Bowe Bergdahl got captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or got tired of killing Afghans and deserted, or something. Bergdahl then showed up all over the internet drinking tea with his captors in a video in which he pleaded for America to bring its troops home. Peters waxed wroth over this “disloyalty,” and opined that it would be a good thing if the Taliban killed the kid to save the cost of a trial.
There is something unseemly in this over-promoted clerk, for whom a war wound would mean a paper cut, savaging a young man in the hands of the Taliban. If Bergdahl was captured against his will, and the Taliban are as bad as the Walphies tell us, he faces torture if he doesn’t cooperate. How manly of Walph to urge that Bergdahl be peeled alive and have his joints crushed. Typical officer.
After the death of my father, a veteran of the Pacific in WWII, I found a published letter he had written to the Washington Post during Korea. Dad, who spent his life as a weapons-development mathematician, was no peacenik. He said that captured American troops should be told to confess to anything whatever rather than be tortured.
You are a hell of a man, Walph. You really are.
But suppose that Bergdahl got tired of killing people he had no reason to kill, and escaped to the Taliban. Why would this be disloyalty to the United States? Where is the benefit of the war to America? The Pentagon is killing GI after GI after GI for no reason. It is also killing Afghans for no reason. Loyalty to America would seem to consist in refusing to do it.
There are countervailing retired colonels. Try Ltc. Karen Kwiatowski, (she has an archive at lewrockwell.com). She suspects that Peters is worried because the Bergdahl affair may indicate that the troops are getting fed up and preparing to bail by one route or another. True? I don’t know. Yet it has to be the prevailing nightmare in the Five-Sided Death Box. This sure happened in our Asian foray into the dissemination of democracy. Fraggings were the most conspicuous form of disagreement, but there were enough unreported mutinies and refusals to fight.
Then I find this: “A U.S. military spokeswoman in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, said the Taliban was [sic] using their captive for propaganda. ‘They are exploiting the soldier in violation of international law,’ she said. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian added, “We condemn the use of this video and the public humiliation of prisoners.”
Most harrumphish, Christine is. This brings me back to the question of Admiral Mullen’s assertion of the obviously untrue. Humiliation of prisoners? Does this twit Christine Whatever compartmentalize her mind to the point that she isn’t aware of Guantanamo? As for international law, I have the impression that torture of prisoners transgresses it. Torture is American national policy. Anyway, who was humiliated, the prisoner or the Pentagon? Christine will of course say whatever she is told to say, that being the function of flacks, flacks being the low-rent Goerings that they are. I need a drink.
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