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Attacks could backfire

Posted on Oct. 28, 2009 at 6:48 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

The wave of attacks could backfire against militants as public opinion coalesces in support of military action, says Rifaat Hussain, a security analyst at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

"In a way there's a greater resentment and people are freshwater pearl bracelets much more willing to cooperate with the security agencies and the police and trying to organize themselves with the threat of suicide bombers around them," he says.

A poll released Oct. 1 by the US-based International Republican Institute found that 73 percent of Pakistanis feel the Taliban is a threat to the country. Eighty-seven percent of Pakistani Muslims said that suicide bombing is never justifiable.

Following the tin cup necklace attack Wednesday, Secretary Clinton said in a joint press conference with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi: "I would like to convey my sympathy to the people of Pakistan. I want you to know this fight is not Pakistan's alone."

Her visit is seen as attempt to reaffirm Washington's support for Pakistan's civilian government. She is also expected to try to reduce tensions over conditions set on a pearl jewelry wholesale nonmilitary aid package to Pakistan worth $7.5 billion over five years.

Massive car bomb targets more civilians in Pakistan

Posted on Oct. 28, 2009 at 6:44 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Islamabad, Pakistan - A car bomb ripped through a crowded bazaar in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing at least 74 people on Wednesday. The deadly attack coincided with the start of a three-day visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who told reporters upon arrival that "Pakistanis have rendered extraordinary sacrifices to freshwater pearl beads stamp out extremism."

The bombing, which brings this month's civilian death toll from terror attacks to more than 250, fits an emerging pattern. As the Army pushes its offensive in the Taliban's base of South Waziristan, militants are lashing out with more attacks on civilians rather than security-related targets.

"It is a different pattern that is emerging now," says security analyst Ayesha Siddiqa. "What they are trying to do is maximize the germs of fear in the wholesale pearl jewelry society."

Television footage from Wednesday's blast showed that many shops and vehicles in the area had caught fire while people frantically sought survivors amid the rubble of the Peepal Mandi marketplace. The market sells mostly women's products.

Over the past two years most high-profile attacks have targeted the state's security apparatus. This month alone, militants have attacked the Army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, two police academies and intelligence offices in Lahore, a military convoy in Peshawar, and multi-strand necklaces two military officers. The most prominent exception to these hard targets was a commando-style attack in Lahore on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in April.

Talk to the editor: More US troops for Afghanistan?

Posted on Oct. 28, 2009 at 6:33 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Join us Thursday at 1 EDT for a conversation with the Monitor’s Pentagon correspondent, Gordon Lubold, about Afghanistan, the military, and the Pentagon’s top gun, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gordon will describe what is known about the Obama administration’s emerging strategy for the tumultuous Afghanistan-Pakistan region and the role the freshwater pearl jewelry US military will play. We’ll also discuss counter-insurgency methods and the massive logistics needed as the US maps out its withdrawal from Iraq.

The conversation will be webcast in this blog via Ustream. You can watch it live here.

Send your questions to us:

- via Twitter at #csmonitor

- by posting on the Monitor wall on freshwater pearl jewelry Facebook.

- by submitting a comment below

Ustream will be featuring the 1 pm Thursday webcast live on its site (we’ll embed it on this blog afterwards so you can catch up if you missed the webcast). You can also download a Ustream application for your iPhone at the freshwater pearl Ustream site.

US defense bill approves money for Sons of Afghanistan 1

Posted on Oct. 28, 2009 at 6:31 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

These groups, usually organized around a tribal leader, were known as part of the Sunni “Awakening Movement,” and those among them who have gone on to fight with the US are sometimes called the “Sons of Iraq.”

Will a similar effort work just as well in freshwater pearl ring Afghanistan? That’s hard to say, since Iraq and Afghanistan are very different places in terms of culture and terrain. But trying to identify Taliban groups that are willing to give up the fight in exchange for a better deal is central to the new counterinsurgency strategy being crafted for Afghanistan. And many strategists think an approach of pure force will fail because, as in Iraq, insurgents blend in with the local population and avoid being drawn into battles where US air and artillery dominance can be brought to bear. The total number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, of all stripes (”Taliban” is really a catch-all term for a number of different armed groups in Afghanistan), is about 25,000.

The funds will be drawn from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), which had its genesis in the wads of cash US troops found in Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Officers, frustrated with the bureaucracy that slowed down efforts to, say, fix a well in a village where their soldiers were operating, started turning to the cash they had on wholesale coral jewelry hand from Saddam. The practice was so successful (one Army major in Iraq told me in 2004 that “this money does more for us than bullets”) that the CERP program was formalized and funded by Congress, both for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, loyalty bought and paid for can be fickle. In Iraq, the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki took over responsibility for paying the Sunni Arab insurgents late last year, and there have been ongoing complaints from tribal leaders about foot-dragging in making payments and finding government jobs, as promised, for their followers.

There have been signs of the Iraq insurgency stirring once more, particularly with the massive series of truck bombs that killed more than 150 people in cultured freshwater pearl Baghdad on Sunday, the city’s single worst attack in two years. A number of military analysts believe that some disgruntled Sons of Iraq are, at least, turning a blind eye to the activities of the hardest of the hard-core in their communities once more.

US defense bill approves money for Sons of Afghanistan

Posted on Oct. 28, 2009 at 6:12 PM - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Tucked within the sprawling $680 billion defense bill (which runs to more than $1 billion for each of its 650 pages) that President Barack Obama signed into law on Wednesday afternoon is a provision that allows the Pentagon to dip into a pool of akoya pearl necklace about $1.3 billion “to support the reintegration into Afghan society of those individuals who have renounced violence against the Government of Afghanistan.”

While the dry language of the bill calls it “reintegration,” what it amounts to is the codifying of a practice that yielded enormous success in limiting the Iraqi insurgency over the past few years: Bribing insurgents not to shoot at Americans and, perhaps, start providing the sort of intelligence help that could have headed off an attack in Kabul that killed six UN workers on Wednesday.

Paying one’s enemies to come in out of the cold — and maybe fight on your side — is a practice that’s nearly as old as warfare, and something deeply ingrained in Iraqi and Afghan tribal culture. But there was strong US cultural resistance to paying for people’s acquiescence, if not allegiance, at the start of the Iran and Iraq wars. The feeling was that people should want to pearl jewelry wholesale be America’s allies because they agreed with the US, not because they were on the payroll. Making friends with and financially rewarding a man who was recently trying to kill US troops also didn’t sit well with many officers and soldiers.

But over time, that resistance broke down under the pressures of a war in which the US and its allies always had an overwhelming advantage in fire power, but couldn’t bring it to bear on a shifting foe mixed among the general population. Paying insurgents in Iraq reached its height in 2007 and 2008, when the US paid about 90,000 Sunni Iraqi insurgents to give up their fight against the US. Some took up arms against Al Qaeda affiliates in Anbar Province, others provided information about suspicious goings on in their neighborhoods and freshwater pearl necklace still more simply stayed at home, happy to have an alternative to laying improvised explosive devices (many Iraqi insurgents were paid for such missions).