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Swat valley could be worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, UN warns

May 20, 2009

The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world’s most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned.

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. “It’s been a long time since there has been a displacement this big,” the UNHCR’s spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. “It could go back to Rwanda.”

The army reported fierce clashes across Swat, a tourist haven turned Taliban stronghold. After a week of intense aerial bombardment with fighter jets and helicopter gunships the army has launched a ground offensive to drive out the militants to rout the militants from the valley. Commandos pushed through the remote Piochar valley, seizing a training centre and killing a dozen Taliban, a military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said. Gun battles erupted in several villages surrounding Mingora, Swat’s main town. Abbas said the military had killed 27 militants, including three commanders, and lost three members of the security forces. The figures could not be verified, as Swat has been largely cut off since the operation started.

The Taliban leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, remains at large. His spokesman vowed the rebels would fight until their “last breath”.

The operation continues to enjoy broad public support. Opposition parties endorsed the action at a conference called by the government, dispelling the notion that the army was fighting “America’s war”.

But that fragile unity could be threatened by heavy civilian casualties or a further deterioration in the conditions of the 2 million displaced. Returning from a three-day trip to Pakistan, the UNHCR head António Guterres termed the displacement crisis as “one of the most dramatic of recent times”. Relief workers were “struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement,” a statement said.

The main difference with African refugee crises such as Rwanda, however, is that a minority of people are being housed in tented camps. According to the UN just 130,000 people are being accommodated in the sprawling, hot camps in Mardan and Swabi districts, while most are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives, with as many as 85 people in one house.

Nevertheless aid workers and political analysts warn that if international aid to ease the crisis is not urgently delivered, the strain on the displaced and those helping them could lead to political destablisation. Acknowledging the scale of the crisis, the prime minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said: “The displaced men, women and children should not feel alone. We won’t leave any stone unturned in providing them help and protection.”

The UN is expected to launch an international appeal for aid running into hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming days.

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The AfPak Blues: Corpses of Kids By the Truckload

May 14, 2009

By Richard Neville | Counterpunch, May 12, 2009

Millions of warm hearted, fair minded humans live in America, though few are part of the military. If they were, perhaps the carnage could be kept under control. To Americans with a conscience I say – get a grip on what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reign in the White House. To Australians – pull your head out of the keg, ignore the heartwarming hype about “building infrastructure” – we’re part of a pitiless war machine.

It started as a revenge for 9/11, easy as shooting quails in a barrel. “Kill the bastards” screamed Murdoch’s pet Aussie ranter in the New York Post, “a gunshot between the eyes … blow their countries into basketball courts”. And we did. In Afghanistan, the US bombed anything that wasn’t a US franchise, which was … everything: wedding parties, funerals, family compounds, villages, the Al Jazeera office …

Back in January 2002, Marc Herold told ABC radio that a “realistic’ estimate of civilian deaths since the invasion was 5000. Every year since, the slaughter continued.

In 2008, according to the New York Times, American led coalition forces killed 828 civilians, mostly “in airstrikes and raids on villages, which are often conducted at night”.

A few days ago, these same gutless idiots operating in the Western province of Farah, allegedly killed over 100 civilians and are trying to blame it on the Taliban. “No that’s not true” said an MP from the area, Mujammad Naeem Farahi, “and I am someone who supports the American presence”. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates promises to “make amends”. Look at the images. This isn’t flushing out militants. It’s a killing field.

And the murders continue in Pakistan, often hatched and executed from Creech Air Force base in Nevada, where the silent drones glide into the skies every few minutes armed to the teeth.

So far, the “success rate” of drone assassins is abysmal. Two percent of the targeted “bad guys” are killed, and the rest of the dead – 98 percent – are innocent civilians. Today families in Swat are caught in the crossfire. Imran Khan has asked, “what country bombs its own people?” A country caught between a weak leader and an hysterical overlord. The US enforced battle “started without warning and their shells smashed our houses and wounded so many people,” a fleeing resident told the UK Telegraph,”it was needless. The Taliban had already gone.” Mohammed Aurangzeb, a former ruler of Swat says: “Far more people have been killed by the army than by the Taliban during military operations.”

Kathy Kelly, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, asks: “Can we see a pattern in the way that the U.S. government sells or markets yet another war strategy in an area of the world where the U.S. wants to dominate other people’s precious resources and control or develop transportation routes?” You bet we can.

And so Prime Minister Rudd, Defence Chief, Angus Houston and the mainstream media, will you continue to lecture us on the “noble cause” in AfPak? Will you conjure Tobruk, summon up the ANZACS, defend the valor of drone assassinations? Will you dare to cast a glance at the butchered children. No, not the sanitised images in our nursery-maid media, but the true life horrors – corpses of kids by the truckload.

Will the pilots get punished? They’ll get medals. The bereaved might get a fistful of dollars. The odious Taliban will get new recruits.

Aussie soldiers have unwittingly killed their share of innocents. Now our Special Operations Task Group is reportedly carrying out hunt & kill missions that are proudly linked to the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program. This was a lawless torture and execution squad that targeted civilians and is remembered as “the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the Nazi death camps of world war two.” From 1968 to Aug 72, about 26,369 South Viietnamese civilians were slaughted. All for what?

In the past month, 438 bombs have been dropped on Afghanistan, and the tally keeps rising. Hillary Clinton expresses “sincere regret” at the 100 plus deaths, while Obama turns up the heat. This is a war of shame and sadness, a war that reveals what hollow humans we have become, a war that reflects the insatiable appetite of the West for conquest, killing and self delusion. Yet we still think we are the good guys.

Richard Neville lives in Australia, the land that formed him. In the Sixties he raised hell in London and published Oz. He can be reached through his websites, http://www.homepagedaily.com/ and http://www.richardneville.com.au/

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Blaming the Dead Victims

May 12, 2009

By DAVE LINDORFF | Counterpunch, May 11, 2009

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over–and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

In Iraq, we took a city of 300,000, Fallujah, and effectively leveled it. Anyone who died there was presumed to be an insurgent, though the truth was, the Marines encircling the city before the onslaught only allowed fleeing women, girls and male children who were under the age 12 to flee, sending older boys and men seeking to get out back into the city to meet their fate.

Just this week, the brave Marines in Iraq blew away a 12-year-old boy after someone tossed a grenade their way.  Local people said the grenade had been tossed by an older man standing near the boy, who fled. The unlucky boy, who was just a kid who sold gum for a living, had not done anything, local people said.

Now it’s Afghanistan, where upwards of 120 people, including babies and small children, were slaughtered during a battle in a remote part of the country in the latest example of mass deaths at the hands of American forces. Local people say that several villages in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province of were intensely bombarded by US planes, causing most if not all of the deaths. The US response to the initial charges of a mass slaughter of civilians was to blame the deaths on the Taliban. When it became clear that the victims had died of burns and shrapnel, not from bullets, the US came out with a new explanation: The Taliban had tossed grenades at the locals. But reporters at the scene reported seeing huge craters and leveled buildings—not what you get from hand grenades.  Then came reports of unusually deep and localized burns—the type caused by white phosphorus—a weapon that the US has used widely in Iraq–including in densely populated Fallujah—and in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon immediately said it did not use white phosphorus bombs in the battle in question, and suggested instead that perhaps the Taliban had used phosphorus grenades. This again was an absurd argument. The purpose of phosphorus weapons, primarily, is to light up a battlefield, but Taliban fighters don’t want lit up battlefields. They prefer operating the dark. It is the US that wants to light up targets.

Besides, there are those craters to explain.

So the next dance step was to say that the Taliban had caused the deaths, because during their retreat they had fled to the town, miles from the scene of the battle that led to the calling in of air support by US advisers to embattled government forces, and in so doing, had brought the attack upon the villagers.

Well, assuming that is true, there is still the problem that under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to attack an enemy where the risk of harming large numbers of civilians is too great. The extreme example would the bombing of a school full of children on the grounds that a few enemy soldiers were hiding in the school (something that the Israeli military did in Gaza during the recent invasion, causing the deaths of dozens of children). But bombing a town full of people in order to hit a few retreating enemy fighters is equally criminal—a point that the Pentagon, and the compliant US media, are ignoring.

Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan—for it is indeed his war now—is turning into the same kind of bloody imperial slaughter that Iraq was earlier under President Bush.  The stated objective—eliminating Al Qaeda—has been lost. The enemy of all this fighting isn’t Al Qaeda at all; it is the indigenous Taliban—the former governing power in Afghanistan until the US invasion in 2001, and a political organization that never was an enemy of the US.

Whatever one might think of the religious fanatics and misogynists who go under the name Taliban, they are not seeking to overthrow the West. They are simply seeking to return to power in Afghanistan, one of the poorest, remotest, and economically and politically least important countries in the world.

And to defeat that movement, if that can even be done, the US is going to have to kill Afghani civilians by the truckload, as it has been doing.

And then there has to be the inevitable dancing around to hide the criminality of what the US is doing.

The blame-the-victim dance goes on.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

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Phosphorus claim after fatal U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan

May 11, 2009

Afghanistan‘s leading human rights ­organisation is investigating claims that white phosphorus was used during a deadly battle between US forces and the Taliban last week in which scores of civilians may have died.

Nader Nadery, a senior officer at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the organisation was concerned that the chemical, which can cause severe burns, might have been used in the firefight in Bala Baluk, a district in the western province of Farah.

Dr Mohammad Aref Jalali, the head of an internationally funded burns hospital in Herat, said villagers taken to hospital after the incident had “highly unusual burns” on their hands and feet that he had not seen before. “We cannot be 100% sure what type of chemical it was and we do not have the equipment here to find out. One of the women who came here told us that 22 members of her family were totally burned. She said a bomb distributed white power that caught fire and then set people’s clothes alight.”

US forces in Afghanistan denied they had used the chemical, and have also said claims that up to 147 civilians were killed were grossly exaggerated.

As with previous such tragedies, both sides have made wildly different claims, with the Taliban seeking to exploit ­popular fury and US officials attempting to limit the damage and blame the Taliban for allegedly using civilians as human shields.But members of the human rights department at the UN mission in Afghanistan have been appalled by witness testimony from people in the village, according to one official in Kabul who talked anonymously to the Guardian.

He said bombs were dropped after militants had quit the battlefield, which appeared to be backed up by the US air force’s own daily report, which is published online. “The stories that are emerging are quite frankly horrifying,” the official said. “It is quite apparent that the large bulk of casualties were called in after the initial fighting had subsided and both the troops and the Taliban had withdrawn.

“Local villagers went to the mosque to pray for peace. Shortly after evening prayers the air strikes were called in, and they continued for a couple of hours whilst the villagers were frantically calling the local governor to get him to call off the air strikes.”

He said that women and children hid inside their homes while their men went on to the roofs with guns. US forces say these men were militants, but the UN official said they were simply villagers and “it is totally normal for them to have guns”. Also contested is an incident immediately after the battle when people from the village took piles of corpses to the governor’s compound in the provincial capital.

The UN official said their willingness to ignore the Islamic custom of organising burial within 24 hours of death showed the level of anger. A statement by US forces said insurgents forced tribal elders to parade the corpses through neighbouring villages to “incite outrage”.

It said that a joint US-Afghan investigation team confirmed that “a number of civilians were killed in the course of the fighting but is unable to determine with certainty which of those causalities were Taliban fighters and which were non-combatants”. Last week Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, called for all air strikes in villages to be stopped, a view privately backed by many in the UN. Yesterday Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Gen James Jones, ruled out such a change in policy, saying “we can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back”.

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U.S. Foreign Policy Caused the Taliban Problem

May 10, 2009

The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 10, 2009

by Jacob G. Hornberger

U.S. officials are now concerned not only with a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan but also a Taliban takeover in Pakistan. These problems, however, were caused by the U.S. Empire itself.

While most Americans now view President Bush’s Iraq War as a “bad war,” the common perception is that Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was a “good war” (despite the fact that he went to war without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war). The notion is that the U.S. government was justified in invading Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban regime from power because the Taliban and al-Qaeda conspired to commit the 9/11 attacks.

There’s just one big problem with that belief: it’s unfounded.

The reason that Bush ousted the Taliban from office was that the Taliban regime refused to comply with his unconditional demand to deliver Osama bin Laden to U.S. officials after the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban responded to Bush’s demand by asking him to furnish evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Upon receipt of such evidence, they offered to turn him over to an independent tribunal instead of the United States.

Bush never explained why the Taliban’s conditions were unreasonable. After all, as federal judges in the Jose Padilla case, the Zacarias Moussaoui case, and many others have confirmed, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. Thus, while it’s not unusual for one nation to seek the extradition of a foreigner to stand trial for a criminal offense, it’s just as reasonable for the nation receiving the request to be provided evidence that the person has, in fact, committed the crime.

Venezuela is currently seeking the extradition from the United States of a man named Luis Posada Carriles, who is accused of bombing a Cuban airliner over Venezuelan skies, a terrorist act that succeeded in killing everyone on board.

Venezuela and the United States have an extradition agreement. Nonetheless, the U.S. government is refusing to extradite Posada to Venezuela. The reason? It says that it fears that Venezuelan authorities will torture Posada. (Another reason might be that Posada was a CIA operative.)

But if fear of torture is a valid reason for refusing an extradition request from Venezuela, then why wouldn’t the same reason apply with respect to the Taliban’s refusal to extradite bin Laden to the United States? I think everyone would agree that if bin Laden had been turned over to the CIA or the Pentagon, he would have been brutally tortured, perhaps even executed, without ever being brought to trial before a fair and independent judicial tribunal.

What about the Taliban’s request that Bush provide evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks? That request is precisely what is done in extradition proceedings. When one nation seeks the extradition of a foreigner, the rules of extradition require it to provide evidence to support the request.

What was remarkable about the Taliban offer was that there wasn’t even an extradition agreement between Afghanistan and the United States. The Taliban was offering to deliver bin Laden to an independent tribunal even though international law did not require it, so long as U.S. officials provided the same type of evidence that is ordinarily required in an extradition proceeding.

Yet Bush refused to consider either the Taliban’s offer or its request for evidence. His position was effectively this: “We are the world’s sole remaining empire. We have the most powerful military on the planet. We have the capability of smashing you and removing your regime from power. You will comply with our demand, unconditionally and immediately.”

But the Taliban refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional demand. Consequently, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, it not only went after bin Laden, it also took sides in Afghanistan’s civil war, taking the side of the Northern Alliance. Ousting the Taliban from power in a classic regime-change operation, U.S. officials installed Hamid Karzai into office, who has been a loyal, friendly, and compliant member of the empire ever since, but one whose regime is now under constant attack by those who were ousted from power by the U.S. Empire.

While Bush and other U.S. officials promised to disclose evidence that the Taliban regime had conspired with al-Qaeda to commit the 9/11 attacks, that promise was never fulfilled and it was ultimately forgotten. The likely reason for that is that they never had such evidence. After all, if they had evidence of such complicity, they would never have wasted time demanding that the Taliban turn bin Laden over. They would have simply declared war against Afghanistan for having attacked the United States.

What would have been the ideal way of handling bin Laden? The same way that the United States handled Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who committed the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Treating that attack as a criminal offense, U.S. officials simply waited Yousef out, relied on good police work, and finally were able to effect his arrest in Pakistan. He is now residing in a U.S. federal penitentiary. No bombs, no missiles, no destruction, no killing of Pakistani wedding parties, and no needless production of new enemies for the United States.

Instead, treating the capture of bin Laden as a military problem, U.S. officials invaded the country, killed and maimed countless innocent people, wreaked untold destruction on Afghanistan, effected regime change, created new enemies for the United States … and failed to capture bin Laden.

But even given the military invasion of Afghanistan, the aim of that invasion could have been limited to going after bin Laden rather than being used as an opportunity to effect regime change at the same time.

Indeed, that’s precisely what happened after Pancho Villa killed several Americans in a raid on Columbus, New Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. After the raid, U.S. officials sent an expeditionary force into Mexico to capture him and bring him back to justice. While the expedition was unsuccessful, what was noteworthy about it was that the expedition force limited itself to trying to capture Villa, not taking sides in Mexico’s civil war.

We would be remiss if we failed to keep in mind the role that U.S. foreign policy played in bringing into existence and supporting the Taliban. In a November 5, 2001, article, Congressman Ron Paul pointed out:

We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.

Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA….

Incredibly, in May the U.S. announced that we would reward the Taliban with an additional $43 million in aid for its actions in banning the cultivation of poppy used to produce heroin and opium. Taliban rulers had agreed to assist us in our senseless drug war by declaring opium growing “against the will of God.”…

Once the Taliban regime refused to comply with Bush’s unconditional order to turn over bin Laden, the U.S. Empire did what it had done and tried to do in so many other countries — Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, and others — bring about regime change by ousting a recalcitrant regime that refused to comply with the unconditional orders of the U.S. Empire — a regime that the U.S. Empire itself had helped to create — and replacing it with a submissive pro-empire regime. In the process, the empire succeeded in embroiling the United State into one more foreign conflict, one that has now spread to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

It’s just another “success story” in the life of the U.S. Empire and its interventionist foreign policy.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.

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Pakistan fighting sparks exodus

May 9, 2009
Al Jazeera, May 9, 2009

Appeal for funds to shelter the displaced
have been issued by aid agencies [Reuters]

Pakistan is preparing for a humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of people flee fighting between the Taliban and government troops in the country’s northwest.

Helicopter gunships blasted Taliban positions in the Swat valley on Saturday, as frequent curfews prevented residents from joining those who have already fled.

Sohail Rahman, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from Islamabad, said local residents faced heavy odds in fleeing the fighting,

“Its very difficult because as soon as sporadic fighting occurs between the military and the Taliban then the curfew – unannounced – gets reimposed in that area.”

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and Pakistani officials say that about half a million people have been displaced in the last few days since the Pakistani government launched a major offensive against the Taliban.

Another 500,000 people had reportedly been displaced by sustained violence in the region over the last few months, bringing the total number of displaced people to a million.

Aid appeal

Antonia Paradela, a spokeswoman for Unicef, the UN children’s rights organisation, said aid agencies would need more funding to cope with the influx of refugees.

In video

Swat fighting threatens Pakistan army unity
 Behind Buner’s frontlines

“We need urgently more funds – for example Unicef needs at least $10m to continue helping the previous group of displaced families, which is more than half a million people. We’re talking now more than 200,000 – and more [are] on the move,” she told Al Jazeera.

The fighting has prompted the abandonment of a peace deal, agreed in February, between the government and the Taliban.

The pact, brokered by a local religious leader, allowed for the enforcement of the Taliban’s strict interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, across Malakand division – which includes Swat valley – in return for peace.

In depth

Video: Obama says Pakistan is toughest US challenge
 Video: Turning to the Taliban
Video: Thousands flee Pakistan Taliban clashes
Q&A: The struggle for Swat
Talking to the Taliban
Pakistan’s war

The deal had been criticised both at home and abroad and  its critics, especially in the US, have welcomed the government’s offensive.During a visit to Washington, Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, pledged an all-out war against the Taliban fighters.

“This is an offensive – this is war. If they kill our soldiers, then we do the same,” Zardari told America’s PBS public television.

Zardari was in Washington for talks with Barack Obama, the US president, and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

For his part, Obama pledged a “lasting commitment” to both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the US is itself fighting Taliban forces.

‘On the run’

Up to 15,000 members of the security forces have been deployed in Swat, located in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

The military says it has killed scores of fighters and claims to be beating back the Taliban.

“They are on the run,” the army said in a statement on Saturday, without making clear exactly how much progress it had made in driving fighters from their positions.

People fleeing the area have also accused the military of killing civilians in its bombardment of the area.

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Nine killed is US missile strike in Pakistan

May 9, 2009

The Independent, UK, May 9, 2009

By Associated Press 

Nine people were killed in a suspected US missile strike on a militant stronghold near the Afghan border today, Pakistani officials said.

Related articles

And doctors rushed to treat an influx of wounded civilians as thousands of troops backed by bomb-dropping warplanes sought to purge Taliban militants from a north-western valley.

It was not immediately clear who the victims of the suspected US strike were.

Pakistan’s leaders, encouraged by the US, launched a full-scale offensive in the Swat Valley this week to halt the spread of Taliban control in districts within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad.

But the fighting has caused hundreds of thousands of terrified residents to flee, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation’s security, economic and political problems.

Witness accounts indicated that scores of civilians have already been killed or injured in the escalating clashes in Swat and the neighbouring Buner and Lower Dir districts.

Today, medics at the hospital in Swat’s main town, Mingora, were at full stretch to deal with dozens of residents caught up in the fighting.

Riaz Khan, a 36-year-old schoolteacher, his wife and two daughters occupied four of the beds, the shrapnel wounds on their arms and legs covered by bandages.

Mr Khan said his other two daughters were killed three days earlier when a mortar shell hit their home near Mingora.

“We buried our daughters on Thursday when the army relaxed the curfew,” he told an Associated Press reporter. “We reached the hospital only with great difficulty.”

Nisar Khan, one of only three doctors left at the hospital, said there were about 25 war-wounded among the 100 patients.

The unidentified bodies of three women and a man apparently killed in the fighting were also being kept there, even though the hospital had no morgue, he said.

Pakistan’s army is fighting to wrest Swat and neighbouring districts from militants who dominate the adjoining tribal belt along the Afghan frontier, where US officials believe al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is holed up.

Taliban militants seized much of the area under a peace deal, even after the government agreed to their main demand to impose Islamic law in the region.

US officials likened the deal to a surrender. Pakistani leaders said the agreement’s collapse had opened the eyes of ordinary citizens to the extremist threat.

The army formally launched its offensive on Thursday, when Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said the government would wipe out groups trying to “take Pakistan hostage at gunpoint”.

The military said yesterday that more than 140 militants and two soldiers had been killed in Swat in the last 24 hours – roughly doubling the number of casualties reported so far.

Today, an AP reporter saw jet fighters flying over Mingora and later heard explosions from further up the valley. Details of the fighting were not available.

The army said it was reinforcing the 12,000 to 15,000 troops in Swat as they take on 4,000 to 5,000 militants, including small numbers of foreigners and hardened fighters from the South Waziristan border region.

South Waziristan has been the scene of numerous suspected American missile attacks in recent months, including today’s strike in the Tabai area.

Two intelligence officials said several missiles struck a disused hospital building known to be frequented by foreign militants and a tunnel in a nearby mountain, killing a total of nine militants.

The officials said field agents were still trying to determine the nationalities and names of the victims.

Pakistani leaders oppose the strikes, apparently carried out by unmanned CIA aircraft, complaining that they feed anti-American sentiment and help militants to recruit new fighters. Washington says the attacks have killed a string of al Qaida and Taliban leaders without causing mass civilian casualties.

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500,000 fleeing Pakistan fighting, UN reports

May 8, 2009
  • Air strikes target militants in Taliban-controlled Swat
  • Exodus brings total to 1 million since August

Declan Walsh reports on the refugee crisis Link to this video

More than 500,000 people have fled fighting in north-western Pakistan in recent days, bringing the total displaced since August to 1 million, the UN refugee agency said today.

A spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees said the fighting had led to huge displacement in the area. Ron Redmond said up to 200,000 people had arrived in safe areas in the last few days and another 300,000 were on the move or about to flee.

This morning, Pakistani jets bombed suspected militant positions in a Taliban-controlled town as residents appealed for a pause in the fighting so they could escape to safety.

Pakistan’s government yesterday declared an end to peace initiatives with Taliban insurgents controlling Swat, signalling the start of a major military operation to drive them from the valley.

In a televised address, the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said the army was being called in “to restore the honour and dignity of our homeland. We will destroy those elements who have destroyed the peace of our people and our nation,” he said.

The announcement, coming after a day of fierce air bombardment against militant positions, was expected to signal the start of a ground offensive similar to the one already under way in neighbouring Dir and Buner districts, where the army claims to have killed more than 200 militants in the last two weeks.

Gilani appealed for international aid to deal with the humanitarian crisis and to “help enhance the capacity of our law-enforcing institutions”. He called on Muslim clerics to support the government action “and tell the world that Islam does not sanction suicide bombing”.

It promises to be a bloody battle marked by urban warfare, which has rarely occurred in clashes with the Taliban. They have dug into positions across Mingora, the main town in the valley, where helicopter gunships pounded houses under militant control yesterday.

Several militants were killed when a rocket destroyed a lawyer’s house, while a mortar destroyed a house in nearby Matta village, killing five people, including two children. The death toll from the violence was thought to run into dozens.

During the afternoon thousands of Mingora residents took advantage of a break in the curfew to flee; some residents estimated that up to 80% of the population had left. On one street Abdul Qayuum, 61, sat on a suitcase by the roadside as he waited for his son to find a vehicle that would transport them out of the area. “We want to leave as quickly as we can,” he said.

The Taliban took advantage of the curfew to lay mines around the city. Commanders wearing face masks roamed the streets, issuing orders through walkie-talkies. One commander scorned the Islamabad government as an American stooge. “We are Muslims and we want an Islamic system. Who the hell are they [America] to object?” said Marwan, 30.

The Taliban promised the army a bloody reception in Mingora and boasted of having planted hundreds of mines. “The security forces cannot even budge in this area,” he said. Sajjad Khan, 22, said he knew of 14 funerals for civilians in his district of the city. “Now there is fear everywhere and everyone is leaving.”

The violence coincided with a visit by the president, Asif Ali Zardari, to Washington, where the army’s newly aggressive stance against the Taliban has been loudly welcomed by previously critical Obama administration officials. The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said the Taliban push into Buner, 60 miles north of Islamabad, had served as an “alarm call” to the Zardari government.

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What is the Unites States preparing in Pakistan?

May 5, 2009
Keith Jones | WSWS, 5 May 2009

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will undoubtedly come under renewed pressure to allow US military forces to wage war within Pakistan when he visits Washington this week for a trilateral summit meeting with President Obama and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai.

For weeks, the US political and military establishment and the American media have been mounting an increasingly shrill campaign to bully Islamabad into fully complying with US diktats in what Washington has redefined as the AfPak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) war theater.

At the US’s behest, the Pakistani military has for the past 10 days been mounting a bloody offensive—including strafing by warplanes and heavy artillery—against Pakistani Taliban militia in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The offensive has caused large numbers of civilian casualties and forced tens of thousands of poor villagers to flee.

Between 600,000 and a million Pakistanis have been turned into refugees by the Pakistani state’s drive to pacify the NWFP and the country’s traditionally autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), so as to bolster the US occupation of Afghanistan.

The US ruling elite has welcomed the latest round of bloodletting, but it is far from satisfied. The flurry of threats, implicit and explicit, against Pakistan, its people and government has continued unabated in the run-up to Zardari’s Washington visit.

At an April 29th press conference, Obama described Pakistan’s civilian government as “very fragile” and not having “the capacity to deliver basic services” to its people, or to gain their “support and loyalty.” But he praised the Pakistani military and the “strong” US-Pakistani “military consultation and cooperation.”

Given Washington’s pivotal role in sustaining a succession of military dictatorships in Islamabad, Obama’s statement was widely interpreted both in Pakistan and within the US political establishment as signaling that Washington is considering sponsoring a military coup.

This was underscored by reports citing the chief of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, as saying that if the Zardari government did not demonstrate over the next two weeks that it can crush the Taliban insurgency in the country’s northwest, the US will have to determine its “next course of action.” Petraeus went on to declare Pakistan’s military “superior” to the country’s civilian government.

Such was the outcry in Pakistan that State Department spokesman Robert Wood was forced to deny Friday that Islamabad faces a two-week “time frame.” Nonetheless, he bluntly asserted that Washington expects Pakistan to make a “110 percent effort” in the fight against the Taliban, and not for “two days, two weeks, two months,” but for the foreseeable future.

Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, denounced the apprehensions voiced in the Pakistani press that less than nine months after the last US-backed dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, was forced to relinquish the Pakistani presidency, Washington is considering supporting a military-led government. “This is journalistic garbage … journalistic gobbledygook,” declared Holbrooke.

The evidence that the Obama administration is preparing some new crime in Pakistan so as to ratchet up its war in Central Asia is overwhelming.

With the transparent aim of intensifying the pressure on Zardari, the Obama administration, according to high-level administration officials cited last week in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, is now courting his arch-rival, former prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader Nawaz Sharif.

Obama, at his press conference last week, claimed that the US wants to respect Pakistani sovereignty. “But,” he added, “we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure Pakistan is stable.”

In other words, the US will violate Pakistan’s sovereignty at will. Since last August, the US has mounted dozens of missile strikes within Pakistan and one Special Forces ground attack.

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the Obama administration is asking the US Congress to give the Pentagon the same powers in relation to military aid to Pakistan that it has in respect to military assistance to the puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under this “unique” arrangement, military aid to Pakistan would no longer flow through the State Department or be subject to Foreign Assistance Act restrictions, but rather be entirely controlled by the Pentagon.

Then there is the extraordinary lead article in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Pakistan Strife Raises US Doubts on Nuclear Arms.” Written by the newspaper’s White House correspondent, David Sanger, the article has all the markings of a CIA or Pentagon put-up job, concocted with the aim of manipulating public opinion and justifying a major escalation of the US political and military intervention in Pakistan.

The article is based entirely on the statements of unnamed “senior American officials.” It claims, notwithstanding Obama’s statement of last week affirming confidence in the Pakistani military’s control of the country’s nuclear arsenal, that there is a real and growing threat that Taliban or Al Qaeda operatives could snatch a Pakistani nuclear weapon or infiltrate its nuclear facilities.

To explain how the Islamicists could circumvent the elaborate controls the Pakistani military, with US assistance, has placed over its nuclear arsenal, the article advances a thriller-type scenario. Islamicists would first trigger a confrontation between India and Pakistan, then seize a weapon when Pakistan seeks to move it closer to the border with its eastern neighbor.

The Times, it should be recalled, played a major role in seeking to mobilize US public opinion behind the invasion of Iraq. Front and center in this campaign was the lie that the Iraqi government was in league with Al Qaeda and might give them access to nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein was supposedly developing.

That the Times’s article was part of a coordinated campaign was underscored by an interview given to the BBC by Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, on Monday, the same day that the Times article appeared.

Jones singled out as the top US concern the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and made a thinly veiled threat against the Pakistani government, saying, “If Pakistan doesn’t continue in the direction that it presently is, and we’re not successful there, then, obviously, the nuclear question comes into view.”

He went on to say that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban would be “the very, very worst case scenario” and added, choosing his words carefully but pointedly, “We’re going to do anything we can within the construct of our bilateral relations and multilateral relations to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

The Obama administration and the Pentagon are clearly weighing their options in respect to Pakistan and its role in the US thrust for geo-political advantage in oil-rich Central Asia. One thing is certain: What they are preparing will lead to greater violence and suffering for the people of the region and will further subvert the democratic will and aspirations of the Pakistani people.

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30,000 Flee Army Raid on NW Pakistan: Local Official

April 29, 2009

Published on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by Agence France Presse

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Around 30,000 people in northwest Pakistan have been displaced by a military offensive to flush out Taliban militants, a provincial minister said Tuesday.

[Pashtun women in burqa await a ride while sitting inside a refugee camp in the outskirts of Peshawar, located in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, April 26, 2009. (REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood)]Pashtun women in burqa await a ride while sitting inside a refugee camp in the outskirts of Peshawar, located in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, April 26, 2009. (REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood)

“Up to 30,000 people have left Maidan in Lower Dir district over the past few days,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister in the government of North West Frontier Province, told a news conference.”We are making arrangements for them in Peshawar, Nowshera and Timargarah districts.”

Residents said thousands of terrified people, mostly women and children, left the area with their belongings after Pakistan troops and helicopter gunships launched the operation over the weekend.

One local charity said it had registered 2,241 displaced families so far.

Around 50 insurgents were killed in the operation in Lower Dir, near the Taliban-held Swat valley, officials said.

The military said eight paramilitary soldiers had also been killed since it launched Operation Black Thunder Sunday.

Heavy shelling by the paramilitary Frontier Corps continued in the Maidan area of Lower Dir overnight, a senior military officer said Tuesday.

“We destroyed several militants hideouts in heavy artillery shelling of suspected bases in the area,” the officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.

In an earlier statement the military said Lal Qila, a Taliban stronghold in Lower Dir, “has been fully secured after the successful operation.”

“Search and cordon operations are continuing in the area to flush out militants,” it added.

“The military had to retaliate after militants blocked roads, attacked convoys and killed some government officials,” the minister said.

The Pakistan government in February agreed to allow the Islamic justice system of sharia to be imposed in Swat valley and its surrounding districts in the Malakand region, which have been troubled by two years of rebellion.

But the agreement was followed by further militant encroachments, and the government has been in talks with the militants to try to restore peace there.

The Taliban suspended peace talks with the government Monday after the military launched Operation Black Thunder following intense US pressure to stop the extremists’ advance.

“My uncle was working in the fields when he was wounded in helicopter shelling,” Hayat Khan 36, one of those who fled the fighting, told AFP.

“I came to Timargarah with my wife, children and a sister whose husband lives in Dubai. I cannot see them dying there,” Khan said, adding that his uncle had been admitted to a hospital in Timargarah.

“I saw helicopters targeting hills in Maidan yesterday,” said 40-year old Omar Zeb, who arrived in Timargarah with 16 other relatives including brother, nephews and nieces.

“There was intense artillery shelling last night, my children were scared, none of us could sleep the whole night. We left at dawn, fearing the fighting would escalate.”

Information minister Hussain said the government remained “determined to fully implement the deal but some outsiders who do not want peace have infiltrated in Buner and Dir districts to sabotage the accord.”

He invited Soofi Mohammad, leader of a sharia movement in the area, to resume talks to avoid any delay in the implementation of the deal.

Taliban spokesman Amir Izzat Khan said the operation in Lower Dir could endanger the peace deal.

“There can be a reaction to the government action,” he told AFP.

However, President Asif Ali Zardari said Monday the peace deal with the Taliban remained valid until the North West Frontier Province government told him otherwise.

“There will be a reassessment of the situation by the provincial government and if needed we’ll come back to parliament and the parliament will decide,” he said in an interview with foreign journalists.

© 2009 AFP

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