A MUST WATCH: Exclusive talk with Col. (R) Imam (Creator of Taliban 1983 – 2001), Brig. (R) Asad Munir (Ex-ISI 1999 – 2004) on Taliban, Al Qaeda, War on Terror, Afghanistan, and the future scenario. Interesting analysis, insightful discussion..

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 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.

Karachi City police chief Wasim Ahmed confirmed Sunday the arrest of four alleged terrorists involved in carrying out Karachi Ashura blast in which more than 50 people were killed and scores injured.

The accused were held with the help of mobile phone SIMs found at the blast site on M A Jinnah Road.

The city police chief disclosed this at a press conference at Central Police Office of Karachi.

Mr Ahmed said intelligence agencies detained four alleged terrorists two days ago, from Bin Qasim town in connection with the Karachi Ashura blast.

Detainees include mastermind Qari Ahmed and three of his accomplice who belong to a banned religious outfit “Jundullah” also known as “Jundallah”. Explosives have also been recovered from their possession, he said.

According to Wikipedia: Jundallah means Soldiers of God‎ or People’s Resistance Movement of Iran (PRMI) not to be confused with People’s Mujahedin of Iran, is an insurgent Sunni Islamic organization based in Balochistan that claims to be fighting for the rights of Sunni Muslims in Iran. It was founded and is currently under the command of Abdolmalek Rigi. It is believed to have 1,000 fighters and claims to have killed 400 Iranian soldiers and many more civilians. It is a part of the Baloch insurgency in Pakistan and in Iran’s Baluchistan Province. The group started under the name of Jundallah and later renamed itself as the People’s Resistance Movement of Iran. The group has been designated a terrorist organization by Iran, which accuses the group of being behind numerous acts of terror, kidnapping and smuggling narcotics. It has been alleged by Iran to have been in receipt of support from the US government.

Jundullah is also accused of involvement in an attack on Karachi corps commander’s convoy during Gen (R) Pervez Musharraf’s regime. The said Sunni outfit is also said to be involved in at least two attacks in Iran behind Iran-Pakistan western border.

The latest arrest was made with the help of mobile phone SIMs, recovered from the site of the blast.

NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial

For years, Pakistan’s leaders denied that extremists — in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan — posed a mortal threat to their country. After the Pakistani Taliban got within 60 miles of Islamabad last April they decided that they had no choice but to fight back. They were right. Unfortunately, their understanding of self-interest seems to stop at a border that the Taliban certainly does not respect.

During his visit to Pakistan this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pressed Pakistan’s military leaders to open a new front against Afghan militants using Pakistani territory to stage attacks into Afghanistan — and was promptly rebuffed.

Displaying an alarming denial about the nature and urgency of the threat, an Army spokesman said there would be no offensive in the tribal region of North Waziristan — where the Afghan Taliban are based — for at least six months and perhaps as long as 12 months. Given the speed and virulence with which the extremists have spread their hatred and violence in the past year, that’s too long to wait.

To its credit, Pakistan’s Army has mounted big offensives against Pakistani Taliban factions in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan and paid a steep price: losing 2,000 soldiers in battle. It may need some time to solidify these gains and prepare a new assault. But that is almost certainly not the real reason behind the delay.

Pakistan’s Army and spy service helped create the Afghan Taliban, and even now they see the group as a proxy force to limit India’s influence in Afghanistan once the Americans leave. That is truly playing with fire.

Pakistan’s failure to pressure both Taliban groups could doom President Obama’s military and political offensive in Afghanistan — or force him to make good on his threat to go after militants in the Pakistan border region if Islamabad does not. This is not just America’s fight. As Mr. Gates warned this week, extremist groups on the border are interconnected and determined to destabilize the entire region.

Pakistan cannot afford to give the Afghan Taliban a pass, and Washington must make sure that Islamabad faces up to that reality. Mr. Gates tried to nudge Pakistan when he spoke publicly about how Islamabad cannot “ignore one part of this cancer and pretend it won’t have some impact closer to home.” We hope he was firmer in private.

Mr. Gates and other officials are working hard to persuade Islamabad that the United States will not repeat past mistakes and abandon Pakistan as it did after the Soviets withdrew 20 years ago.

The Obama administration’s decision this week to grant Pakistan’s longstanding request for aerial spy drones (unarmed, at Washington’s insistence) should help bridge the “trust deficit.” Washington must also do more to help lessen tensions between Pakistan and India. That may be the best chance of persuading Islamabad that it can and must focus more of its troops and attention on fighting all of the Taliban.

New York: US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan (Af-Pak) Richard Holbrooke has said that India is ‘important’ for America’s success in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Underlying “India’s role in Afghanistan” in the newly emerging Indo-US strategic partnership, the Af-Pak envoy told US lawmakers, “I want to be sure that everyone here recognises how centrally important India will be to this (the US success in Afghanistan and Pakistan).”

Holbrooke was addressing lawmakers at a Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke, who visited India recently, told the hearing, which was convened by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator (D) John Kerry, that even though New Delhi is not part of his mandate, it is important to keep it informed about the situation in the troubled Af-Pak region.

“I don”t think it would be valuable to go into details in the public forum, but I do want to stress that the Indians are very, very anxious that we succeed in Afghanistan. They”re supporting us,” Holbrooke said.

He also discussed the numerous projects being carried out by India in Afghanistan.

“They are giving Afghanistan a lot of aid, particularly in the field of agriculture, which is also our primary non-security priority,” Holbrooke said.

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

Reaffirming her full support for US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, PPP Central Secretary Information Fouzia Wahab on Friday underlined that everyone must think before he speaks against the US as it had given us a lot and in return we ought to respect it thick and thin.

Fouzia expressed the views while talking to the media after her meeting with Richard Holbrooke in the capital Islamabad.

Except one member, no other party member asked Holbrooke about the new policy of screening Pakistani passengers at the US airports and drone attacks in Pakistan, she emphasized.

Fouzia accepted the claim of Holbrooke about the anti-US sentiments that exist in the minds of Pakistanis.

She said that relations between US and Pakistan were more than four decades old and “we have seen many ups and downs in this period. The US must be given top priority for doing so many things for Pakistan and we must not disrespect it,” Fouzia held.

Don’t blame the US for what is happening in Pakistan, she said. The US is standing with us and has been helping Pakistan in different fields including that of war against terrorism, she added.

Fouzia further added that despite giving us plenty of financial aid we are against the US which is beyond her imagination. (News sourced from TheNation)

Holbrooke displeased by media criticism against US

LAHORE: US special envoy Richard Holbrooke has expressed displeasure over the Pakistani media’s criticism of the US, and conveyed his concerns to Pakistani politicians, reported a private TV channel on Friday.

According to the channel, PML-N leader Tehmina Daultana said Holbrooke got upset when politicians started criticising the US at a meeting with the US envoy.

PPP Information Secretary Fauzia Wahab said Holbrooke had been upset by the lack of acknowledgment of positive steps taken by the US for Pakistan.

Key leaders of the ruling and opposition parties who met Holbrooke included ANP chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, National Assembly Deputy Speaker Faisal Karim Kundi, PPP Information Secretary Fauzia Wahab, MQM leader Farooq Sattar, the PML-Q’s Salim Saifullah Khan, Aftab Sherpao, and PML-N leaders Tehmina Daultana, Khurram Dastagir and Muhammad Ishaq Dar.

Senator Ishaq Dar later said the politicians at the meeting told Holbrooke that the US should contribute substantially in mega projects for energy.

However, Holbrooke said the Pakistani media should acknowledge the US role in Pakistan’s development, to allow Obama administration to show the US Congress the Pakistani response. He said acknowledgment of the US role would help get more aid for Pakistan.

Separately, addressing reporters at Parliament House, Asfandyar said, “We appreciate the visit by US special envoy Richard Holbrooke to Swat and his government’s humanitarian assistance for development. He said the US commitment to rebuild Swat was a sign that “they are serious about helping the country defeat the militants”.

However, he said Pakistan’s concerns over US drone attacks and new screening measures had been expressed at the politicians’ meeting with Holbrooke. (News sourced from the Daily Times)

A MUST WATCH: PAK-US relations past and present; Pros and Con of Pakistan joining the War on Terror. Guests: Syed Munawwar Hasan (Ameer Jamaat Islami), Haji Adeel (ANP), Imtiaz Alam (Sr Analyst)..

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)

Recalibrating Pakistan’s policies with respect to America’s new terrorism and Afghanistan policy. Guests: Imran Khan (Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf), Bashir Ahmed Bilour (ANP)..