Suspected Taliban blow up “U.S. spies” in Pakistan

May 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Taliban militants strapped explosives to two men accused of being U.S. spies and blew than up at a public execution in northwest Pakistan, intelligence officials and residents said on Friday.

The killings took place on Thursday evening in North Waziristan, a lawless al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary on the Afghan border where the United States has stepped up attacks with missile-firing drone aircraft, fuelling militant fears of spies.

Five masked militants paraded the hand-cuffed men before dozens of people in the Datta Kheil area and accused them of passing information to the United States on targets for its CIA-operated pilotless drone aircraft.

“They strapped explosives around their bodies and then blew them up,” a Pakistani intelligence official in the region told Reuters by telephone.

Militants have killed hundreds of people they suspect are spies for the United States or the Pakistani government over the past few years.

They usually decapitate or shoot the suspects. Residents said this was the first time the militants had blown up suspected spies.

Pakistan’s northwestern ethnic Pashtun tribal lands along the Afghan border have never been under the full control of any government and have for decades been Islamist militant hubs.

During the 1980s, the tribal belt was a staging area for the U.S.- and Pakistani-backed jihad, or Muslim holy war, against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan.

Many Taliban and al Qaeda fighters fled there after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

A separate Pakistani Taliban force then emerged from the Pashtun tribes and they have been waging war against the Pakistani state in recent years.

The army launched a major offensive in the Pakistani Taliban bastion of South Waziristan last October, killing hundreds of insurgents and destroying their main bases. Many militants took refuge in North Waziristan, officials said.

The United States wants Pakistan to extend its offensive to North Waziristan and go after militants there, particularly Afghan Taliban, who launch cross-border attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military, which has long seen the Afghan Taliban as tools for limiting the influence of old rival India in Afghanistan, says it will deal with North Waziristan but in its own time.

(Writing by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)

(For more Reuters coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, see: http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/afghanistanpakistan)

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Burial move shows cracks in Polish unity on crash

April 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

WARSAW, April 14 (Reuters) – A decision to bury Polish President Lech Kaczynski in the crypt of Wawel cathedral in Krakow, a place reserved for the nation’s heroes, poets and kings, has sharply divided Poles days before the funeral.

Kaczynski died in a plane crash in Russia on Saturday along with 95 other people including his wife Maria and many members of Poland’s political and military elite.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz said on Tuesday Kaczynski and his wife Maria would be buried at Wawel on Sunday following consultations with family members, including the president’s twin brother Jaroslaw, who heads Poland’s main opposition party.

Numerous heads of state and government, including U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are due to attend the funeral.

“The decision to bury him in Wawel is hasty and emotional,” said leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza in a front-page editorial.

“It is inappropriate to demand that Lech Kaczynski after his death become the equal of Jozef Pilsudski, architect of Polish independence … This decision will certainly divide Poles.”

Pilsudski helped Poland regain its independence in 1918 and dominated its politics through the 1920s and 1930s.

Oscar-winning film director Andrzej Wajda also urged the church to reverse its decision, saying it risked sparking “the deepest divisions” in Poland since the end of communism in 1989.

As the director of a film chronicling the massacre of Polish officers by Soviet forces in Katyn forest in 1940, Wajda’s view carries moral weight. Kaczynski’s plane had been heading on Saturday to Katyn to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

About 500 people staged a noisy protest in Krakow late on Tuesday against the decision, waving banners that read “Not Krakow, not Wawel” and “Are you sure he is the equal of kings?”

Others joined protests on the social media site Facebook.

By Wednesday, the “No to Kaczynski’s burial in Wawel” group had attracted over 26,000 fans. Nearly 5,000 had joined a group bearing the ironic name “I want to be buried in Wawel too”.

FIRST CRACKS

The protests were the first cracks in a display of national unity since the crash. Tens of thousands of mourners welcomed home Kaczynski’s coffin and that of his wife. People were queuing in rain for hours on Wednesday to view the coffins in Warsaw’s presidential palace.

Lech Kaczynski, president since 2005, was a polarising figure whose support levels had fallen to about 20 percent before his death. He had been expected to lose a presidential election due in the autumn and now likely to be held in June.

To his conservative admirers, Kaczynski was a patriot and man of deep moral and religious convictions. To his foes, he was a narrow-minded reactionary out of step with an increasingly liberal, outward-looking and European Poland.

His supporters defended the decision to bury him at Wawel.

“It’s dangerous to fuel rows over the burial of the first couple,” Witold Waszczykowski, one of the few Kaczynski aides not to die with him on Saturday, told Polish television.

Wawel is a large complex of buildings on the Vistula River that includes a castle, cathedral and fortifications.

The cathedral was the coronation site of virtually all of Poland’s monarchs, and Wawel Castle was the centre of government for five centuries until the end of the 16th century.

As well as Polish kings, the Wawel crypt also contains the bodies of legendary military commander Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought in the U.S. war of independence, Poland’s wartime leader Wladyslaw Sikorski and national poet Adam Mickiewicz. (Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska and Noah Barkin; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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FACTBOX – Russian, Polish PMs remember Katyn victims

April 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

REUTERS – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk paid tribute on Wednesday to 20,000 Polish officers killed by Soviet forces during World War Two at a ceremony marking an improvement in bilateral ties.

Here are some details and background on the massacre:

* BACKGROUND

– Germany invaded Poland from the west in 1939, and Soviet forces occupied the eastern half of Poland. As a consequence of this occupation, tens of thousands of Polish military personnel fell into Soviet hands and were interned in prison camps inside the Soviet Union.

– However after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish government-in-exile (located in London) and the Soviet government agreed to cooperate against Germany, and a Polish army on Soviet territory was to be formed.

* A FALSE TRAIL

– When Poland requested the return of 15,000 prisoners of war from the Soviets, the Soviet government informed Poland in Dec. 1941 that most of those prisoners had escaped to Manchuria and could not be located.

* MASSACRE

– On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced they discovered the mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.

– A total of 4,443 corpses were recovered. The fate of the remainder is still unknown. They had apparently been shot from behind and piled in stacks and buried. Investigators identified the corpses as the Polish officers who had been interned at the Soviet camp near Smolensk and accused the Soviet authorities of having executed the prisoners in May 1940.

– The Soviet government then claimed that the Poles had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk in 1941 and the invading German army had killed them after overrunning that area in August 1941.

– However both German and Red Cross investigations of the Katyn corpses produced firm physical evidence that the massacre took place in early 1940, at a time when the area was still under Soviet control.

– The Soviet government refused demands by the Red Cross to investigate, and in April 1943, the Soviets broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile in London. The Soviet Union then set about establishing a Polish government-in-exile composed of Polish communists.

* KATYN AND RUSSIA

– After blaming Nazi Germany for the Katyn massacre for decades, the Soviet Union admitted in April 1990 that its forces were responsible but none of the culprits has ever been identified and investigations have been shelved.

– A Russian court in July 2008 refused to consider a request for a criminal investigation into the Katyn massacre. The families of some of the victims were trying to use the Russian courts to force prosecutors to launch a new investigation into a massacre seen in Poland as a symbol of the repression the country suffered under Soviet domination.

Sources: Reuters/www.britannica.com

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Hitler’s favourite driver’s Grand Prix car may fetch £5.5M at auction

April 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

London, Apr 13 (ANI): A Grand Prix car of one of Hitler’s favourite racers is expected to fetch a whopping 5.5 million pounds, when it goes under the hammer later this year.

Touted to be the motorsport equivalent of the “Holy Grail”, the 1939 Auto Union D-Type is the only model of the car to have stayed intact to date.

With a rear-mounted 3-litre twin-stage supercharged V12-cylinder engine, the 485bhp vehicle could exceed 200mph.

And galloping on racetracks in the supercar was Hans Stuck, one of an elite group of racers revered by many in Germany under Hitler.

With the war looming over Europe in 1939, Stuck drove the car to place finishes in the EifelRennen race at Nurburg and the French Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux.

“(Stuck profited) constantly and to an astonishing degree from his acquaintance with Adolf Hitler,” the Telegraph quoted German motorsports commentator Eberhard Reuss as saying in his book ‘Hitler’s Motor Racing Battles’.

The Chassis 19, as it came to be known, was one of 13 Auto Unions transported out of Germany by Soviet forces in 1945.

Bonhams has revealed that for 40 years the survival of these cars seemed “little more than unproven myth”, and the search for them “regarded as historic motorsport’s quest for the holy grail.”

While a majority of them were cannibalised for parts, Chassis 19 somehow avoided that fate.

In the mid-1980s, Paul Karassik, a Russian-born American classic car enthusiast, found Chassis 19 intact in Ukraine, and it was later restored by East Sussex-based Crosthwaite and Gardiner.

Bonhams said: “It one of the classic car world’s most charismatic machines, and is exquisitely well-restored to running order.”

Bonhams and Butterfields at Quail Lodge in Carmel, California will sell the car on August 14. (ANI)

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Nicolas Sarkozy’s dad’s riches-to-rags-to-riches journey

April 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

London, Apr 12 (ANI): French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s father spent his first night in Paris sleeping rough in an entrance to the Métro.

Pal Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, the son of an impoverished Hungarian aristocrat, had nothing except the clothes in which he stood and a pair of borrowed shoes when he entered Paris.
oday, however, life is very different for him. He lives in a luxury apartment in an exclusive Paris suburb and is a visitor to the Elysée Palace, where his son holds court.
“I arrive as a refugee and start life on the streets,” The Telegraph quoted Pal, 80, as saying in a rare interview last week.

“And I see my son president of the republic Nicolas is a symbol of the accomplishment and success of the Sarkozy family in France,” he added.

While in the interview, Pal gave an insight into the extraordinary riches-to-rags-to-riches journey that the Sarkozy family had taken over recent generations.

The journey began as landowners in the village of Alattyan, outside Budapest, where Pal’s father and grandfather were also elected officials.

When the Red Army reached Hungary in 1940s, the Sarkozy family fled to Germany, then under Hitler. They returned in 1945, but by then all their possessions had been seized.

“First we had Hitler, then we had Stalin. I didn’t have a childhood at all, we couldn’t do any proper studies. We were refugees – we returned, we left again… It was a very complicated childhood, it was no childhood,” said Pal.
Pal revealed how in 1948 his mother advised him to head west again after the Soviet forces occupying Hungary called him up for forced labour in Russia.

“My mother told me ‘Pal, you must leave Hungary because if you don’t you will find yourself in Siberia and we will never see you again’,” he said.

He then escaped to Austria and then to Germany, while his mother told the authorities he had drowned.

In a German town, near the French border, Pal was recruited to the French Foreign Legion, but was later given a medical discharge.

In the interview with France’s Omega TV channel, he described how he then struggled after arriving in Paris.

“I didn’t have a sou (penny). I arrived without anything, without any shoes and ended up spending my first night in the entrance of the Metro,” said Pal, who eventually found a job as a runner at a film company.

“The poor are more generous than the rich. I had a friend who had two pairs of shoes and he gave me one. The problem was he was size 41 and I was 44, so I had to cut out the toes,” he revealed.

He married Nicolas’s mother Andrée, a law student and daughter of an influential doctor, when he was 22. They had three sons, Guillaume, Nicolas and François, but divorced when the boys were young.

Pal Sarkozy then went on to a successful career as an advertising designer and later a painter of what has been described as “surrealist and erotic art”. (ANI)

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Is Obama set to surrender in Afghanistan? (Article)

March 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

New Delhi: The latest news coming out of Washington sounds extremely ominous for a much battered Afghanistan. It seems President Barak Obama is giving up his policy to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Instead an alternative is being worked out to seek peace with these very terror outfits. The objective is to make sure that Afghanistan and Pakistan are no longer launching pads of terror attacks against the US. It is clear that the US may be working out a deal similar to Pakistan’s surrender to the Taliban in Swat.

Pakistan has obviously succeeded in confusing policy makers in Washington by its talk of good and bad Taliban? Is there an extremist who could be called a good Taliban? The very birth of Taliban has its roots in violence. This was the creed and training that its Pakistani mentors gave this organisation in late eighties.

Taliban was created by Pakistan as a force that carried out inhuman acts in the name of Islam-and justified it as a step to red Afghanistan of Soviet forces. . Such inhuman violence apparently in the cause of Islam was also used to wipe out the tolerant Islamic society of Afghanistan.

The mentors of Taliban wanted to turn Afghanistan into a colony of Pakistan albeit via proxy rule of the demon that Pakistan created. Afghanistan was pushed back into the Stone Age with little chance of being able to regain its individuality.

The entry of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda into Afghanistan consolidated the first terrorist state in the world, As for Pakistan, it got its much needed depth to deploy its missiles against India in that country. That did not worry Al Qaeda or the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.

Let it not be forgotten that the US administration was –directly or indirectly– negotiating with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the late nineties to secure pipeline access from Central Asia. They did not know that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had something else on their mind : the attack of 9/11 on the US.

President Bush reacted by declaring an all out war against terror. It now seems that the Obama administration perhaps treats the “war on terror’ as a legacy of the Bush era that it wants to get away from.

During his tenure as President, Clinton dithered in his response to Al Qaeda even as he bombed their hideouts in Afghanistan. Why did the US administration not go all out against Al Qaeda at that time? Was there a secret understanding with Pakistan or its Agencies? This author came away with that impression after a long interview with the then US Under Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Ms. Robin Raphael.

Whatever explanation one may unearth, the simple fact is that the Taliban and its mentors managed to hoodwink the world’s one super power and mounted the 9/11 attack with impunity. They had the last laugh.

President Barak Obama during his election campaign made his intentions quite clear that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and jehadi terrorism waged around the world had to end. To that extent the US President also made his intentions and policy clear towards Pakistan on this issue. To eliminate the evil if he had to attack it in Pakistani territory he would do so. And he has done that. Why now the cold feet?

Pakistan has mastered the art of deception and double- talk as no other nation in the world. General Musharaff succeeded in keeping the wrath of US administration away even as the various arms of his government kept Al Qaeda and Taliban well protected. No one knows it better than India. It has seen how Pakistan has drawn innumerable circles around its so-called investigation into the Mumbai attacks.

In Pakistan if ever there was a challenge or threat to the existence of Taliban and their supporters it only came through the short lived pronouncements of late Benazir Bhutto as she prepared to return to Pakistan.

She had kept the US administration fully informed. Yet when she landed in Karachi, she had to face a dastardly attack on her life, but survived. Her luck did not last long. She was killed in Rawalpindi as she campaigned for the return of her party to power. In her death a major threat to the Taliban was removed.

Even before Barak Obama formulated his policy for Afghanistan, Pakistan succeeded in planting enough doubts in the minds of US officials about the ability of the Karzai government in Afghanistan. They want the US to accept ‘good’ Taliban and hand the country back to it.

That much for the resolve of the new President of the United States to settle the Afghan issue! If the current confusion about the role of Taliban continues, then the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan could get compounded in a terrible manner.

Pakistan is not interested in a sovereign and independent Afghanistan. It does not want to return to the glorious era of Afghanistan. That was the period when the country was ruled by King Zahir Shah. Afghanistan was a modern state even under the Presidency of Daud or for that matter even Najibullah.

Pakistan wants a puppet regime of Taliban in Kabul, one that would play to its tunes. Is that the kind of peace that the US is looking for in Afghanistan by surrendering that country to Taliban and Pakistan? The US and Pakistan perhaps do not realise that the ‘good Taliban’ hopes to take over Pakistan some day.

This unfolding scenario throws up a huge challenge not just for India, but also for China, Iran and countries of Central Asia. India cannot remain a silent witness to all this.

Afghanistan should be able to regain its sovereignty and independence that it had during the reign of King Zahir Shah, President Daud or under Najibullah after the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Today the United States seems to have lost all respect for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

India can help rebuild the Afghan defence forces. That alone can safeguard that country from the evil designs of Pakistan or the threat of Taliban. US sponsored democracy cannot work in a multi- ethnic and fiercely tribal society of Afghanistan. India can help bring various ethnic groups into an all encompassing “loha jirga” a meeting of the tribal heads.

Being protective as they are of their identity such a “loha jirga” can never permit the country to go under Pakistan or bring back the Taliban. The success of former King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan lay in retaining the loyalty of all such ethnic tribal groups. To back it up, he had a strong and powerful Afghan army and air force.

It is here that India must take the initiative and offer to train and equip Afghan army with or without US help. This alone is a sure guarantee against any evil designs by Pakistan or its proxy the Taliban. It is not something that any US administration can understand easily. They are too used to dealing with pliable sycophantic states.

India cannot afford to allow Afghanistan to slip back into the Stone Age. India’s strategic and economic interests in Central Asia will take a heavy beating if it were to ignore what is happening in Afghanistan. India needs to act on its own. The manner in which the United States and NATO are approaching the Afghan issue is fraught with dangers for India.

Weighed down as it is by its economic woes, clearly the United States does not have the will to take this war on terror to its logical end. The compromise that it now seeks with the evil, can lead to a much greater damage to its interests in the long run. Irrespective of this, it seems that the Obama administration may be looking for some quick fix solution to pull out of Afghanistan. Call it by any name; it would only be surrender.

India has to face the challenge. It should be able to persuade the Obama administration to pause and see the situation with clarity. Surrender by the Obama administration will plunge this region, including Central Asia, into huge turmoil and Pakistan may go the Taliban way. This must not be allowed to happen. By Prem Prakash (ANI)

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Pak’s ISI has close links with Al-Qaeda, Taliban: Admiral Mullen

March 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar.28 (ANI): US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen has confirmed media reports that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has close links with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban network, and is offering logistical support them.

“There are certainly indications that’s the case,” The Dawn quoted Admiral Mullen, as saying.

Talking to media persons right after President Barack Obama announced a revamped strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said that the nefarious network must be severed to thwart the extremist’s upsurge in the region.

Fundamentally that’s one of the things that have to change,” Mullen added.

He said Islamabad has also expressed concern over the increasing influence of the outlawed terror groups and was working to curb the menace, but more sincere efforts were needed to tackle the issue.

Pakistan ,in recent times, has rebuked US allegations that the ISI is backing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against the US led allied forces in Afghanistan.

Admiral Mullen highlighted the fact that although the US is offering Pakistan all help, there still exits a ‘trust deficit’ between both the countries.

Talking about the new policy for the region, he said the Obama Administration has taken a ‘more regional’ approach to the issue so that the Pakistani forces do not always remain occupied with the Kashmir issue.

“One of the reasons the regional approach is so important is to de-tension the Kashmir border so that the Pakistani military is not completely tied up on that border, and they are able to train, equip and fight on the western border in the counter-insurgency effort,” Mullen said.

Head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus also echoed Mullen’s stance.

General Petraeus claimed that the Pakistani intelligence had established some of the militant groups with the help of US funding with an aim to flush out Soviet forces from Afghanistan.

“Those links were very strong and some of them, I think, unquestionably do remain, to this day. It is much more difficult to tell at what level those links are still established,” he said. (ANI)

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