Why does it always take angry phone calls from America to make us do this? Why can’t we do the right thing on our own for once? The Taliban, like all extremists, are not Pakistan’s friend. Musharraf keeps saying that he wants security in Afghanistan but he let these people fighting the Karzai government live freely in Pakistan.
Haven’t the government lies once again been exposed? They kept saying that Afghanistan’s allegations were false and there were no Taliban based in Pakistan, so what is this now? The duplicity of Musharraf is getting out of hand. For once, just once, I would like an honest government in power. Instead we have to deal with idiots who try to make everything into a game of lies and deceit. And that too with childish lies which anyone can tell our false. Everybody knows that LeT under their new name (Jammat-ud-Dawa) still operates in Muridke.
After Kargil, nuclear scandal, training camps for jihadis, is it any wonder that there is zero credibility in the words of the Pakistan government? Does it not offend anyone else that Pakistan’s name is dragged through the mud by our successive governments and army establishment? Thank God Jinnah was not alive to see any of this.
Ok, so I’m a little frustrated. I welcome the move to arrest these Taliban members, but I just wish we could have done this sooner and without lying to the whole world.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060718/wl_nm/pakistan_taliban_dc_2
Pakistan arrests scores of Taliban in crackdown Tue Jul 18, 8:11 AM ET
QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan arrested scores of Taliban militants in raids overnight in the southwest province of Baluchistan, taking action that Afghanistan, the United States and NATO powers have long called for.
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More than 150 Afghans were arrested during an operation ordered by the Baluch government in the past two days.
According to police almost all of them were Taliban fighters, though some were held for lack of proper documents.
“All of them are Taliban and veteran fighters, not seminary students. They are Afghans and were living here illegally,” said Salman Saeed, deputy chief of police in the province.
The hardline Islamist Taliban movement sprang out of Pakistani madrasas in the early 1990s, and talib means student in the Urdu language.
Saeed said there would be more raids elsewhere in Baluchistan over the coming days.
Among those caught in Quetta on Monday evening, police said, was Mullah Hamdullah, a former commander of Taliban forces in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, where British troops have met fierce resistance since their deployment a few months ago.
The Afghan government, the United States and NATO powers with forces in Afghanistan all want Pakistan to act more forcefully against the Taliban, particularly in the Baluch capital Quetta where many settled after they were ousted from power in 2001.
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have spoken to President Pervez Musharraf in the past few months about the need to do more to help quell the insurgency in the southern Afghan provinces.
Orders for the crackdown came from the provincial government, a coalition that includes pro-Taliban Islamists, and officials spoke of growing impatience with Afghans in Quetta, while stressing they were not targeting genuine refugees.
“The cabinet, last week, instructed the law enforcement agencies to drive them out of the province. They are trouble makers in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan and all of them will have to go back,” said Raziq Bugti, a spokesman for the provincial Baluchistan government.
Arrests of Taliban in Pakistan have been relatively rare, leading to accusations that while the government has aggressively hunted al Qaeda remnants, particularly in the tribal regions of north and south Waziristan, it has been soft on the Taliban.
Musharraf’s government had backed the Taliban prior to 2001.
A war of words had broken out earlier this year over what Afghanistan calls Pakistan’s inaction. Pakistan countered by saying Afghan intelligence was out of date, and a rising insurgency was being fueled from within Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s past failures to follow through in the campaign against the Taliban has led to Afghan suspicions that it is letting the movement thrive in case it needs them to exert influence over its western neighbor at some point in the future.
Pakistani hesitancy in tackling the Taliban could be due to fear of igniting sentiments among millions of ethnic Pashtuns in the border areas, as the Taliban are mainly Pashtuns.
Pakistan is also fighting a revolt led by powerful ethnic Baluch tribal chieftains, and would be wary of risking further instability in its mineral-rich western province, analysts say.
(Reporting by Kamran Haider, writing by Simon Cameron-Moore, editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Islamabad newsroom +92 51 281 0017))