Exclusive interview with Ex-DG ISI Lt Gen (R) Hameed Gul aka Hamid Gul. Mr Gul, now an articulate analyst, gives his views on “9/11 bahana hai, Afghanistan thikana hai, pakistan nishana hai”, War on Terror, Taliban, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, US presence in the region, America’s stated vs actual objectives, etc..

The flow of high-grade intelligence from Pakistan’s leading security organization that has led to the recent capture or death of a dozen top Taliban chiefs was the result of high-level pressure from Saudi Arabia, diplomatic sources said.

The close links established over the years between the Saudi royal family and the upper echelons of Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence establishments has given Riyadh unusual influence in Islamabad.

The Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s, was persuaded to cooperate with the United States by the powerful head of Saudi Arabia’s principal intelligence service, the General Intelligence Presidency, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, younger half-brother of King Abdallah.

He conducted shuttle diplomacy between Riyadh and Islamabad, where he convinced Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of staff of the Pakistani army, to order the ISI to play ball.

Saudi petrodollars had a lot to do with that. The sources say that Riyadh has been helping the Pakistani military pay for its recent offensive against the Taliban.

Riyadh partly financed Pakistan’s $1.6 billion purchase of three Agosta 90-B diesel attack submarines built by DCNS of France in 1994 and to buy Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jets from the United States.

At the same time, Western governments, hit by the global recession, have been urging Riyadh to finance efforts to buy off some of the more “moderate” Taliban leaders in an effort to negotiate a settlement that would isolate the hard-line elements within the fundamentalist movement in much the same way the Americans bought off Sunni insurgents in Iraq to allow U.S. forces to withdraw.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been advocating a negotiated settlement for some time, enlisted the Saudis two years ago, which resulted in a meeting between Karzai’s envoys and Taliban chieftains in Riyadh.

Karzai visited Saudi Arabia in February, supposedly on a personal pilgrimage to Mecca, but in fact to meet King Abdallah and Muqrin to discuss Saudi help in accelerating efforts to bring about a settlement.

Muqrin met several times with Kayani, who was director general of ISI from October 2004 to October 2007 and retained immense influence with that organization when he was promoted to chief of staff in November 2007 to replace Gen. Pervez Musharraf when he relinquished his army commands.

Kayani has long been close to the Saudis. In May 2006, while still ISI’s chief, he visited Riyadh with Gen. Mohammad Zaki, then head of ISI’s counter-terrorism section, for closed-door talks with Muqrin on intelligence cooperation.

Amid all this activity, U.S. and British intelligence chiefs have been involved with the Saudis, too.

CIA Director Leon Panetta and John Sawers, who took over as head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, in June 2009, have both visited Riyadh in recent weeks.

At the behest of the Pakistani military, the Saudis sent their long-serving foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, to New Delhi in a bid to reduce tension with arch-rival Islamabad so that the Pakistani military could pull troops from the northwestern border to move against the Taliban.

For now, at least, the ISI appears prepared to work with the Americans against the Taliban but the Islamists are believed to still have many sympathizers within the powerful and highly secretive organization.

It remains to be seen whether these elements will sabotage the new-found cooperation with Western forces.

One indication may have been provided by the ISI’s refusal to hand over Abdul Ghani Baradar, military commander of Afghanistan’s Taliban and its No. 2 figures after leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, captured while hiding in Karachi Feb.16, to the CIA for interrogation.

However, the U.S. global security consultancy Stratfor notes that the fact that Baradar was arrested at all underlines a significant shift in ISI policy.

Nonetheless, there remains considerable distrust of the CIA and other Western intelligence services within some sections of the ISI and it remains to be seen how long the policy of cooperation will continue. (EU News Network)

The Taliban claimed on Tuesday to have developed a new bomb nicknamed Omar after their leader, which they say is impossible for Western mine sweepers to detect.

The biggest killer of Western troops in Afghanistan are homemade bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

The Taliban have claimed that they have developed a new IED using materials that make them undetectable.

A Taliban spokesman, who identified himself as Yousuf Ahmadi, said the new bomb has been named after Taliban leader Mullah Omar. “It’s an effective bomb, which can’t be detected by mine-sweeping vehicles and it causes more deaths,” Ahmadi said.

Meanwhile the US Army is closing in on the largest Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

US Army soldiers launched a preliminary operation on Tuesday in support of a planned US-Afghan attack on the largest Taliban-controlled town of Marjah in southern Afghanistan.

US officials have not said when the main attack on the town would take place but have nonetheless heavily publicised plans to attack, causing hundreds of people to flee in advance of the fighting.

Helmand Governor Muhammad Gulab Mangal said authorities were prepared for a possible civilian exodus ahead of an assault that could be launched within days aimed at clearing Taliban from one of their main bastions of control.

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud is dead, the US media reported on Thursday, citing counter-terrorism officials.

Both CNN and Fox News quoted senior US intelligence officials as saying that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief was killed in a drone attack last month, although his death still remains unconfirmed by the Pakistani military.

Fox News noted that this was so far the strongest signal that Washington had offered about Hakimullah’s fate.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that Afghan Taliban commander Sirajuddin Haqqani was the target of the heaviest US drone strikes in North Waziristan earlier this week, but he might just have escaped the assault.

A commander of the Haqqani group told CNN that “Siraj was in the area but had left moments before the strike”.

The TV network said the reported strike on Tuesday night were unusual for the relatively high number of missiles fired — at least 19 — and for the high death toll.

Neither Islamabad nor Washington has officially confirmed the death of Hakimullah, who is complicit in a deadly attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan late last year that left 7 CIA officers dead.

Hakimullah Mehsud issued his own death warrant when he appeared on an Al-Jazeera video sitting beside Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi. Balawi is believed to be the person behind attacks on the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan. Shortly before the release of this video, he died while carrying out a suicide bombing, killing eight people including 7 CIA officers at Fort Chapman.

Western intelligence agencies vowed to avenge death of its officials. Drone strikes were increased taking out many including Hakimullah. Attempts are being made to take out Haqqanis – both Jalaluddin and his son Sirajuddin who support Taliban in Afghanistan but have bases in North Waziristan and adjoining areas.

As a confidence building measure towards reconciliation, the UN Security Council Tuesday removed five top Taliban officials from its list of individuals who were subjected to sanctions imposed over their alleged links with Al-Qaeda.

The five officials removed from the UN list are Abdul Wakil Mutawakil, who was foreign minister under the now ousted Taliban regime; Faiz Mohammad Faizan, a former deputy commerce minister; Shams-US-Safa, a former foreign ministry official; Mohammad Musa, a deputy planning minister; and Abdul Hakim, a former deputy frontier affairs minister.

Under the resolution, UN member states are required to impose travel bans, an asset freeze and an arms embargo on any individual or entity associated with Al-Qaeda, bin Laden and/or the Taliban.

A Western diplomat said the five Taliban leaders were now believed to be “moderate Taliban officials” with whom Karzai could start a dialogue.

A UN statement said the Security Council panel on Monday “approved the deletion (de-listing) of the five entries” from its blacklist of individuals subjected to a travel ban, assets freeze and arms embargo.

The move coincided with several announcements today marking a major shift in West’s policy towards the Afghan Taliban.

One of the announcements was by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai who said today he would press for Taliban names to be removed from the UN blacklist at a major conference on Afghanistan in London Thursday. Karzai hopes to win Western support at the London talks starting Jan 28 for a plan to offer money and jobs to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their weapons.

The UN move came ahead of the January 28, 60-country conference in London that is expected to discuss moves to reintegrate into mainstream Afghan society those Taliban who renounce terrorism and armed conflict.

The conference will also discuss a framework for handing over security to Afghan forces.

The Pakistan Taliban on Sunday claimed to have shot down a US Predator drone in in North Waziristan’s Hamzoni village near Miramshah and got hold of its wreckage.

North Waziristan is said to be the stronghold of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Sirajuddin Haqqani who the US says have been organizing and staging attacks on US and NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan.

Pakistani Government and military officials in Miramshah, the main town in North Waziristan, confirmed that a drone had crashed somewhere on the Pakistani side of the Pak-Afghan border but they did not know about the cause of the incident.

They, however, said seven US drones were flying over the town on Sunday. In some of the areas, officials said, the drones were seen flying at a low altitude due to cloudy weather.

An official confirmed the plane crash, but didn’t agree that the Taliban would have shot down the spy aircraft. “There is possibility that the plane might have crashed due to a technical fault and the militants claimed responsibility just for boosting the morale of their people. They often do such things,” the official argued.

Other government officials, however, said the militants had installed some heavy weapons on hilltops and that they might have shot down the pilotless plane. “They have well-trained people for such types of job,” a senior official said but wished not to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media. He said the militants used to fire at the US drones before but they were never able to hit and destroy the spy planes.

“We certainly know militants possess some heavy weapons such as anti-aircraft guns for shooting down the plane,” military sources in Miramshah said.

On the other hand, sources among the Taliban led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur claimed they had fired at and destroyed the unmanned aircraft. Taking to The News from North Waziristan, the Taliban said they possessed the weapons required for downing the aircraft. They said anti-aircraft guns were used in downing the CIA-operated spy plane.

The militants also claimed their men were now in possession of wreckage of the destroyed drone and would show it to the media. They said the drones were flying at a low altitude and shots were fired at one of the drones from anti-aircraft guns installed on a mountain peak.

“It is our big success against our enemy today. Now they will shoot down more such planes,” an excited militant commander told The News by phone. If true, it would be the second US spy aircraft downed in the tribal areas of Pakistan so far.

Earlier in September 2008, the Taliban had claimed shooting down a US drone in South Waziristan. Later, the US forces in Afghanistan confirmed that their spy plane had crashed in the area.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is visiting Pakistan with a 125-member team for a two-day talks with Islamabad administration after completing his visit to India.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates along with his 125-member delegation will arrive in Islamabad later this week, US sources told Dawn newspaper’s Washington Correspondent Anwar Iqbal.

The two-day talks are expected to focus on the new Afghan strategy, which revolves around Pakistan as the central player in the US-led war against terror in the Pak-Afghan region.

The two sides will also discuss America’s military assistance to Pakistan while the Pakistanis are likely to underline the “slow pace of delivering US military equipment to the country,” said a source familiar with the expected agenda. US sources say that Pakistan wants increased military support to combat extremists while Washington wants Islamabad to expand the war from South to North Waziristan, where it says the Afghan Taliban are located. Pakistan has yet to make the strategic decision to expand the war but the Obama team is pushing hard for that as part of their new surge strategy.

Pakistan is also likely to raise the issue of delay in reimbursement of the Coalition Support Funds. Islamabad is still waiting for the reimbursement of up to $2 billion of claims it has already submitted to Washington.

Another item on Pakistan’s agenda is likely to be the drone attacks that have killed some prominent terrorists since they began in the final year of the Bush administration. But the drones have also killed hundreds of civilians, causing a widespread resentment against the US-led war.

Mr Gates may raise the drone issue as well, urging Pakistan to stop public criticism of the air strikes because it believes that Islamabad’s reaction further increases anti-American sentiments in the country.

The American delegation may also discuss military supply routes to Afghanistan, which run through Pakistan, and the expansion of the military presence at the US embassy in Pakistan.

The Pentagon’s representation at the embassy, known as the Office of the Defence Representative, is growing from 45 to 280 personnel, causing some concern among the Pakistani military.

Secretary Gates’ high-powered delegation includes assistant secretary of defence, a deputy assistant secretary and several senior advisers, besides dozens of security experts.

This will be Mr Gates’ first visit to Islamabad under the Obama administration and also his first in two years. Mr Gates is expected to meet the entire Pakistani leadership, including President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

In the Pakistani defence establishment, he is scheduled to meet Army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha.

Mr Gates will be among a host of senior US officials to visit Islamabad since Washington started contemplating a new strategy for the Pak-Afghan region late last year. Senior administration officials who have gone to Islamabad lately include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Special Representative Richard Holbrooke, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and others.

While Pentagon is reluctant to publicly discuss Mr Gates’ visit to Islamabad, it has confirmed that the US defence secretary will visit New Delhi from Jan 19 to 21.

Regional security, Afghanistan and the tense relations between India and Pakistan will top the agenda for Mr Gates’ meetings with India’s prime minister, the Pentagon said.

Agencies add: Mr Gates leaves the US for India on Monday seeking to strengthen military ties with New Delhi, even as Washington focuses on Pakistan as a top foreign policy priority.

The Jan 19-21 visit includes talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has sought US help getting Islamabad to crack down on extremists blamed for the attacks in Mumbai in 2008.

US officials, briefing journalists ahead of the trip, acknowledged the meetings would likely touch on tensions between India and Pakistan as well as efforts by both US and Indian militaries to work closer together, including counter-terrorism efforts. “We obviously share an interest in protecting both of our homelands from attack from terrorist organisations,” a senior US defence official said.

The United States is also calling on allies like India to step up their roles in Afghanistan following President Barack Obama’s decision last month to send an additional 30,000 troops to battle a resurgent Taliban.

The latest Kabul attack comes two weeks before the January 28 conference on Afghanistan in UK.

It demonstrates Taliban’s ability to cause mayhem at a time when the planned conference is to be held and at a time when US President Barack Obama is trying to rally support for an expanded military mission to fight them.

Sixty nations are expected to meet in London to decide the future of Afghanistan, reminiscent of the famous Geneva Conference two decades back that decided the fate of Afghanistan after Soviet pullout in 1988.

At least 14 people were killed in the fighting between the Taliban and Afghan security forces in the Afghan capital.

The Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the attack that was led by at least seven suicide bombers, reports say.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was swearing in new members of his cabinet at the time of the raid.

The attack set off explosions and sparked a gun battle between the Taliban and Afghan security forces near the Serena Hotel and the presidential palace.

Around 20 Taliban fighters were involved, reports have emerged.

This is the latest in a series of increasingly brazen attacks on Kabul

NOTE: Below is an Op-ED by Nicholas Schmidle on Dr Shireen Mazari and her views as it appeared in the conservative right-wing influential American magazine “The New Republic”. Mazari was dumped by The Jang Group after her strong views on War on Terror, US foreign policies, its national securities interests aborad and Pakistan government’s alliance with it. Arguably a lone ranger among the pack, Mazari now heads The Nation as its Editor and continues to vent her views in articles and popular Pakistani Talk Shows. She has regularly been called “belonging to the Establishment” for whatever it is meant to be at different stages of Pakistan’s engagement with the West..

By Nicholas Schmidle

In late August, a couple of weeks after a U.S. drone strike incinerated Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s most popular televised chat show, “Capital Talk,” hosted a panel to discuss national security. Among the guests was a squat, middle-aged woman with short black hair, streaked with silver dye, named Shireen Mazari. A defense analyst and public intellectual, Mazari is known for her hawkish nationalism–and deep suspicions of India and the United States. Her presence in the studio suggested that, despite the enormous threat her country faced from homegrown terrorists, the conversation that night wouldn’t center around Mehsud or the Pakistani Taliban.

Instead, over the course of the next half hour, the panel discussed reports that Blackwater, the North Carolina–based defense contractor that recently changed its name to Xe Services, was operating in Pakistan. Hamid Mir, the host of “Capital Talk,” showed video footage of Islamabad’s most expensive neighborhoods, featuring multi-story villas with high walls and satellite dishes. The homes looked like any other on the street. But red arrows, superimposed on the screen, pointed to allegedly incriminating electrical generators and surveillance cameras perched atop the walls. “American undercover people are coming,” Mazari said. “They are renting homes, and Blackwater is providingsecurity, running death squads and assassination squads … It is an occupation, by default.”

Mazari’s hunt for American spies and undercover defense contractors was only getting started. In September, she was named editor of The Nation, an English-language daily often described as “Fox News in Pakistan.” (Earlier this year, one columnist dubbed Mazari the “Ann Coulter of Pakistan.”) Throughout the fall, The Nation has published multiple front-page stories on the location of new “Blackwater dens” around Islamabad. It featured a news story last month titled “mysterious us nationals,” which described “two suspicious foreigners wandering in the guise of journalists … [who] seemingly belonged to the US spy agency CIA.” The proof? That they “were driven towards the US Consulate.” (The “mysterious US nationals” turned out to be an English freelance photographer and an Australian photographer who works for Getty.)

The low point, however, came a couple of weeks earlier, when The Nation fronted a story titled “journalists as spies in fata?”–a reference to Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas–that cited anonymous law enforcement sources accusing Matthew Rosenberg, an American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, of working as a “chief operative” for the CIA, Blackwater, and the Mossad. “We put in a question mark,” said Mazari, referring to the punctuation at the end of the headline, when I asked her whether she realized she was endangering Rosenberg’s life. (Daniel Pearl, also a Journal reporter, was kidnapped in Karachi in early 2002, accused of being a CIA agent, and beheaded.)

In the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States and Pakistan are ostensibly on the same side. But, as the Obama administration prepares to pour tens of thousands of new troops into Afghanistan, it faces a daunting array of challenges from its allies in Islamabad. Perhaps none is as disturbing as the anti-Americanism that is being fueled by Pakistan’s mainstream media. In a twisted development, most Pakistanis now view the United States as their greatest threat and enemy, usurping a place that India seemed primed to occupy eternally. And Mazari, who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, may represent the vanguard of a well-educated, English-speaking, secular elite increasingly charged with hypernationalism and antipathy toward the United States. Mixing fact with demagoguery, and sometimes outright fiction, she represents yet another obstacle to Washington’s war on the Taliban.

For most of the past decade, Shireen Mazari wrote a regular column in The News, a popular English-language newspaper owned by the largest private media conglomerate in Pakistan. The country does not exactly have a free press–this fall, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan in the bottom 10 percent of its Press Freedom Index, squeezed between Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea–but there is no shortage of dissenting opinions aired on any of the country’s myriad private TV channels. Over the past couple of years, much of the commentariat’s energy has gone into denouncing President Asif Ali Zardari and U.S. foreign policy. It’s an effort that Mazari, whose articles often criticize the country’s civilian leadership and breathlessly recount CIA plots to dismember Pakistan and seize its nuclear weapons, has played a large part in leading.

I first met Mazari in 2006, when I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad (issi), a foreign ministry–funded think tank. She was the head of the institute, and I was in the country as a freelance journalist, but, at dinner parties, Mazari often introduced me as her “resident CIA agent”–a joke that’s never really funny and grew awfully uncomfortable over time. Eventually, in January 2008, I was expelled from Pakistan following months of reporting in Taliban-affected parts of the country. Last month, in a TV interview, Mazari said, “There is a history of American journalists misbehaving in Pakistan,” after which she mentioned my travels to supposedly off-limits regions and added, “Eventually, he had to be deported.”

Far from being on the fringes of Pakistani society, Mazari is something of an establishment figure. She was appointed director general of the institute by Pervez Musharraf’s government not long after the general seized power in an October 1999 coup. In subsequent years, Mazari says she enjoyed considerable influence within Musharraf’s circles, and those ties, combined with her writing, have led to charges that she is merely a pawn for Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, which remain critical of U.S. power and are critical of Zardari’s floundering attempts at governance. “It’s quite obvious that her views are in consonance with people in the agencies,” explained Arif Nizami, the former editor of The Nation, who led the paper from 1986 until this September, when Mazari took over. “She’s let loose by certain people in the agencies who would like to see the pot burning,” said an acquaintance of Mazari’s in Islamabad. “She’s just a mouthpiece.”

That doesn’t mean that Mazari’s charges are all without merit. There is, of course, a U.S. military and intelligence presence in Pakistan, and, two weeks ago, the New York-based liberal magazine The Nation–no relation to its Pakistani namesake–published a lengthy article alleging the activities of Xe/Blackwater in Pakistan on behalf of the U.S. military. Xe and the U.S. government deny the charges, but, when I spoke with Mazari soon after, she said, “I certainly feel vindicated.” She later added, “Our interests and the Americans’ interests don’t coincide.”

During Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Pakistan, the secretary of state spent much time arguing that U.S. and Pakistani interests did, in fact, coincide. To a cynical questioner who believed that Pakistan was fighting America’s war, Clinton replied, “We have a common enemy.” Indeed, in the past six months alone, the Pakistani Taliban has exploded bombs in Islamabad; attacked police and military sites in Punjab; overrun the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi; and bombed sites throughout Peshawar. More than 400 people have been killed in terrorist attacks since October. Behind closed doors, senior Pakistani leaders seem to realize the threat, which is why Islamabad accepts U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, silently condoning the drone strikes, for example, while condemning them for public effect. Mazari’s objections–like those of many other Pakistanis–are certainly understandable, but the reckless, oftentimes unsubstantiated way in which Mazari presents them only deepens the so-called “trust deficit” between the two countries.

In August, for example, Mazari wrote that an American citizen named Craig Davis had been arrested in Peshawar and deported because of his alleged ties to Creative Associates, a government contractor that she dubbed the “central organization” for U.S.-funded “suspicious, covert operations” in Pakistan. “Clearly there is a threatening US agenda seeking out our nuclear sites and assassinating people, thereby adding to our chaos and violence,” she continued. Weeks later, she wrote that Davis was back in the country. The U.S. Embassy objected to the story, and The News’s editorial-page editor went back and fact-checked the column. Some of Mazari’s assertions–Davis had not, in fact, been deported–didn’t check out. So, before her next column ran, the editor opted to hold the piece an extra day and show it to a lawyer. In the interim, Mazari announced that she was taking the job as editor of The Nation, though not before accusing the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson, of interfering with Pakistan’s free press. (It wasn’t the first time Mazari had accused the Americans of disrupting her career. When the Pakistan People’s Party won elections in 2008, they promptly removed her from her position at the issi, a development for which she also blamed Patterson.)

Mazari and The Nation, though smaller than The News, were a perfect fit; The Nation’s publisher has advocated nuking India and is also noted for his conspiracy-mongering. Since taking over, Mazari claims that the paper has been “seeing a big revival,” with circulation having “jumped up tremendously.” According to both Pakistanis and Pakistan-watchers, The Nation has become a right-wing outlet like Fox News. But Hamid Mir, the host of “Capital Talk,” cautioned against making the comparison–for fear of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. “The Nation is not very big and not very influential,” he said. “If The Nation becomes Fox News, then Pakistan will burn.”

Already, the Taliban have seized on the propaganda opportunity that Mazari has opened. When a bomb ripped through a Peshawar market in late October, killing more than 100 people, the Taliban, increasingly concerned about alienating the Pakistani public, refused to take credit for the blast. Instead, Mehsud’s successor, the Fu Manchu–styled Hakimullah Mehsud, blamed Blackwater. If that line becomes accepted, then not only will Pakistan continue to burn, but the U.S.-Pakistan relationship may burn along with it. (Courtesy: The New Republic)

(Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan. The opinion expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of PKonweb)

The death toll in Friday’s Lakki Marwat suicide blast has risen to 95 as more bodies are being pulled from the rubble of a sports complex in NWFP. Officials warn the number of victims is likely to increase as recovery efforts moved through their second day.

According to reports, the bombing may be a militant revenge attack against local residents who set up a militia force to combat Taliban insurgents.

The suicide bomber drove onto a crowded field and detonated his explosive-laden vehicle while hundreds of spectators watched the match, including women and children. According to eyewitnesses, at least 400 people were present there during the match.

The bombing marked a bloody start to 2010 for Pakistan, which has seen a surge in attacks blamed on the Taliban in recent months as Islamist fighters avenge military operations aimed at crushing their northwest strongholds.

The huge blast was Pakistan’s deadliest in more than two months, triggering the collapse of more than 20 houses, some with families inside, in a village bordering a Taliban stronghold, officials said.

The bomber detonated his explosives-packed vehicle as fans gathered at a volleyball court to watch two local sides face off in the village of Shah Hasan Khan, in Bannu district, bordering Taliban stronghold South Waziristan.

“The villagers were watching the match between the two village teams when the bomber drove his double-cabin pick-up vehicle into them and blew it up,” district police chief Mohammad Ayub Khan said.

There have been no claims of responsibility, but police officials say it is revenge act by Pakistani Taliban and their operatives as the village which was once their strong hold had turned against them and created a militia to fight them.

Eight CIA operatives have died in a bomb attack in Afghanistan, the worst against US intelligence officials since 1983.

A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest entered Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province of southeastern Afghanistan, near Pakistan.

A Taliban spokesman said a member of the group working for the Afghan army had carried out the attack.

It has raised questions about the coalition’s ability to protect itself against infiltrators, analysts say.

The bombing was one of at least three deadly incidents across Afghanistan on Thursday. Elsewhere:

* Taliban militants beheaded six men they suspected of being spies for the government in the southern province of Uruzgan, police said
* Four Canadian soldiers and a journalist died in a roadside bomb attack in Kandahar, in the most deadly attack on Canadians in the country for more than two years
* Two French journalists were kidnapped in Kapisa province, north-east of Kabul, along with their Afghan driver and interpreter, reports say.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told the BBC the Khost bomber was wearing an army uniform when he managed to breach security at the base, detonating his explosives belt in the gym.

A further six Americans are reported to have been wounded.

The death-toll was the worst suffered by the CIA since eight officers were killed in a 1983 attack on the US embassy in Beirut.

Reports say the Chapman base is used by provincial reconstruction teams – which include soldiers and civilians – and is protected by some 200 Afghan soldiers.

The base has been described as “not regular” – a phrase that implies it was a centre of CIA operations in Khost province, the BBC’s Peter Greste in Kabul says.

It is the biggest single reported loss of life for the CIA since the war began in Afghanistan eight years ago, and the biggest loss for the US since October.

Khost province – which is one of the Taliban’s strongholds – has been targeted by militants in the past year.

This has been the deadliest year for foreign troops since the 2001 invasion. (Content sourced from BBC online)

Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington, D.C., area, were picked up in Pakistan earlier this month in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to the South Asian country to join militant groups.

Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory allegations about the men’s intentions, while U.S. officials have been far more cautious, though they, too, are looking at charging the men.

A Pakistani government official alleged Saturday that the men had established contact with Taliban commanders and planned to attack sites in Pakistan. Earlier, however, local police accused the men of intending to fight in Afghanistan after meeting militant leaders.

The men had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province. He stressed the men were not carrying a specific map of any nuclear power plant, but rather the whole of Chashma Barrage.

The detained men also had exchanged e-mails about the area, Islam said.

“We are also working to retrieve some of the deleted material in their computers,” he said.

Pakistan has a nuclear weapons arsenal, but it also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.

Any nuclear activity in Pakistan tends to come under scrutiny because of the South Asian nation’s past history of leaking sensitive nuclear secrets due to the actions of the main architect of its atomic weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan. But as militancy has spread in Pakistan, officials have repeatedly insisted the nuclear weapons program is safe.

Pakistani police plan to recommend that courts charge the five men with collecting and attempting to collect material to carry out terrorist activities in Pakistan, police official Nazir Ahmad told The Associated Press. The punishments for those charges range from seven years to life in prison, he said.

Officials in both countries have said they expected the men would eventually be deported back to the United States, but charging the men in Pakistan could delay that process. Pakistan’s legal system can be slow and opaque.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday, Punjab province Law Minister Rana Sanaullah said the men had established contact with Taliban commanders. He said they had planned to meet Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and his deputy Qari Hussain in Pakistan’s tribal regions before going on to attack sites inside Pakistan.

The nuclear power plant “might have been” one of the targets, Sanaullah alleged.

The FBI, whose agents have been granted some access to the men, is looking into what potential charges they could face in the U.S. Possibilities include conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.

The U.S. Embassy has declined to comment on the potential charges and would not say what efforts Washington was making to bring the men back. The five were arrested in Sargodha earlier this month, but are being held in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.