This was another bad week for Pakistanis. Our closest international ally continued bombing our territory. The self-style custodians of our morality kept up the indiscriminate killing of our citizen. One of our most popular television show anchors incited murder in the name of religion through television.Once again, this was a week when  Pakistanis died. Pakistanis cried.

The political machinations in the country continue to be a distraction that is keeping many, too many, glued to the soap opera quality twists and turns in the story of Pakistan’s tortured democratic experiment. But the real story in the country remains what it has for the last two years: a divided society which is at war. Niether the self-styled custodians of our internal identity nor our self-styled freinds abroad seem to be helping. Indeed, they keep making things worse for Pakistanis everywhere.

Meanwhile, Pakistanis continue to die. Pakistan continues to cry.

Whether it is pre-US-election posturing or a deeper shift in US policy, it is clear that the American forces have increased their military incursions into Pakistani territory. Beyond the fact that this is clearly a violation of the sovereign territory of a country they claim to be their ‘closest all,’ one cannot even imagine what the strategic logic of these incursions could possibly be since each incursion only strengthens the hand of the extremist elements that are supposedly after, angers Pakistani public opinion, and pushes the Pakistan goevrnment into a tighter corner. There is no real evidence that they have hit any important militant target but innocent Pakistanis, including children, women and even Pakistani soldiers have certainly been killed; 15 killed this Wednesday; 12 more on Friday.

Meanwhile. Pakistanis continue to die. Pakistan continues to cry.

Meanwhile, the merchants of murder and mayhem thrive even more in this condition and continue their war against Pakistan. Indeed, they seem now to be targetting the places of worship themselves. Only today an alleged suicide bomber was caught in Islamabad. On Thursday, 25 died in a grenade attack at a mosque in the Banai area of Dir during taraweeh prayers. Last Saturday, even as Asif Ali Zardari was being elected President, 31 people were killed and another 81 others injured as a suicide bomber blew himself and his vehicle up at the Zangali police post at Kohat Road, Peshawar.

Meanwhile. Pakistanis continue to die. Pakistan continues to cry.

And those who one might have wanted to bring calm and lessons of peace, are themselves engrossed in preaching hate, and in this case murder, to mass audiences. On September 7, Aamir Liaquat Hussain - GEO TV’s popular religious talk-show anchor, former MQM Minister, a holder of multiple fake degrees, and religious instigator extraordinaire - in his GEO TV Show Alim Online presided over a long discussion instigating that those holding Ahmadiyya beliefs were ‘wajib ul qatl’ (i.e., liable to death). The next day, Dr. Abdul Mannan Siddiqi - a 46 year-old Ahmadi in Mirpurkhas and a US-trained cardiologist who had retruned to work in his community - was murdered in broad daylight while working at his local hospital. The next day, Seth Muhammad Yousuf of Nawabshah was also murdered brutally. Whether there is a direct link between the two or not, the preaching of hatred and the practice of hatred both thrive in our land of the pure.

Meanwhile. Pakistanis continue to die. Pakistan continues to cry.

One sits here, shaken by sadness at this waste of human life, and wonders: at how many hands and for how many reasons should Pakistanis die? How long must Pakistan cry?

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - Fifteen people including civilians were killed in northwestern Pakistan Wednesday in a raid involving helicopter gunships used by international troops in Afghanistan, security officials said.

“Four helicopter gunships from across the border carried out the raid,” a top security official told AFP.

“Reports from the area say 15 people including women and children were killed in the attack,” he said.A local official in South Waziristan tribal district claimed the helicopters dropped soldiers from the NATO-led force in Afghanistan (ISAF) in the border village of Jalal Khel and flew them back after the attack.

The official, Mowaz Khan, said the pre-dawn raid took place as residents were having their last meal before fasting as part of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.He said the foreign soldiers opened fire on the locals when they came out of their houses upon hearing the sound of helicopters.However, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said he was not aware of such an operation.He added that ISAF does not have a mandate to attack outside the borders of Afghanistan unless its troops come under fire from within Pakistan, in which case the force can respond with artillery.

Pakistan’s army confirmed there had been an attack.

“We confirm an attack was carried out in a border village and we are gathering details,” army spokesman Major Murad Khan told AFP.

Raids with helicopters or aircraft are extremely rare but US media recently reported that the United States was planning direct attacks on Pakistani soil, blaming Islamabad for failing to tackle militants based there.A recent series of missile strikes targeting rebels in Pakistan has been attributed to US-led coalition forces or CIA drones based in Afghanistan.Pakistan’s northwest has been wracked by violence since hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels fled there after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.US forces say the border area is being used as a launch pad for attacks on coalition troops.There are about 70,000 international forces deployed under NATO and a separate US-led coalition in Afghanistan in an effort to help local forces repel the Islamic rebels.

Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - U.S. and Pakistani investigators have reached “separate” conclusions about why warplanes killed 11 Pakistani troops at an outpost near the Afghan border, the Pakistan army said Thursday.The June incident has put a heavy strain on cross-border military relations just as NATO commanders in Afghanistan are calling for greater cooperation to combat resurgent Taliban militants.

U.S. officials have said aircraft dropped more than a dozen bombs during a clash with militants near the border post in Pakistan’s Mohmand region. Though they expressed regret over the incident, they have said the action was justified.But Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said a joint investigation set up to try to ease tensions had failed to produce an agreement on what happened.

“We have our separate findings. The findings are different,” Abbas told The Associated Press.

Abbas declined to give details of the findings because they remain confidential, although he said the bombing could not be justified as self-defense.

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Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani lawyers on Thursday fiercely denounced the leader of the main ruling party, potentially heralding a new chapter in their months-long push for the restoration of judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf.About 150 lawyers and political activists gathered outside the Supreme Court building in the capital, Islamabad, and chanted “Go, Zardari, go!” — a reference to Asif Ali Zardari, whose Pakistan People’s Party leads the country’s new coalition government.

Lawyers have held a series of protests to demand the reinstatement of the dozens of judges Musharraf sacked in November last year to avoid legal challenges to his rule. The protests have often demanded the president step aside, and this latest one did as well.But the attorneys have generally avoided a direct confrontation with Zardari and his party, which has promised to restore the justices but has not done so as quickly as the lawyers want.

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Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States is facing a major dilemma as ally Pakistan grapples with surging militant violence fueled by groups who may also have a hand in Afghanistan’s worsening security crisis, experts say.

After Monday’s deadly suicide bombing in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad and alleged Pakistani involvement in another such attack in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, one intelligence report said Pakistan lacked “willingness and ability” to take on the rapidly rising threat posed by Islamist extremism and militancy.

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KARACHI, Pakistan - A total of seven small blasts left 43 people wounded in Pakistan’s commercial capital of Karachi, officials confirmed Tuesday, as investigators probed the previous evening’s chaos and life returned to its more routine bustle.Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf urged national unity, and security forces were on high alert. Monday’s string of explosions followed a weekend suicide blast in the capital, Islamabad, that killed 18 people, most of them police.

Karachi police chief Wasim Ahmed confirmed that at least eight men have been detained so far and that some explosives were recovered in overnight raids. Zulifqar Mirza, the provincial interior minister, told reporters that seven devices were used.The 43 people wounded were all in stable condition, said Mirza, adding that the motive behind the attacks appeared to be creating chaos in a city where political, ethnic and religious violence is common.

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The situation in NWFP is gradually slipping away from the control of government in the face of mounting militant’s attacks in the province and FATA. Amid the fears that the Peshawar too could fall to the militants, authorities have launched an operation in the neighboring Khyber Agency against a militant organization Lashkar-e-Islam (LI), which had established its sway over the agency and was also using it as a launching pad to attack Peshawar.

The photo above shows tanks parked in a Government installation at Hayatabad, Peshawar. Photo  by Riaz Anjum at APP. The operation launched against the LI signifies a turning point in the coalition government policy towards FATA and NWFP, initially aimed at pacifying the troubled areas through dialogue despite intense US and NATO pressure.

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Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/

BARA, Pakistan (AFP) - Pakistan’s government claimed Sunday that it had saved the northwestern city of Peshawar from militants, as troops pushed forward on the second day of a major offensive against the rebels.Soldiers backed by armoured vehicles retook control of the main town in the Khyber tribal district, on the outskirts of Peshawar, and also demolished a building belonging to an Islamist insurgent group, officials said.

The government, under pressure from Western allies over its peace talks with militants, launched the operation on Saturday to counter rebels threatening Peshawar and raiding supply convoys for NATO and US troops in Afghanistan.

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