US owes $688 Million to Pakistan

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US to Reimburse Pakistan $688 Million

Submitted by Aurangzeb on December 20, 2012 – 12:05 am



WASHINGTON — With the US Pakistan relations on the mend, the Pentagon quietly notified Congress this month that it would reimburse Pakistan nearly $700 million for the cost of stationing 140,000 troops on the border with Afghanistan, according to media report.In a dispatch, The New York Times called it an effort to normalize support for the Pakistani military after nearly two years of crises and mutual retaliation.The biggest proponent of putting foreign aid and military reimbursements to Pakistan on a steady footing is the man President Barack Obama is leaning toward naming as secretary of state: Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the newspaper said. Kerry has frequently served as an envoy to Pakistan, including after the killing of Osama bin Laden, and was a co-author of a law that authorized five years and about $7.5 billion of nonmilitary assistance to Pakistan.The United States also provides about $2 billion in annual security assistance, roughly half of which goes to reimburse Pakistan for conducting military operations to fight terrorism.Until now, many of these reimbursements, called coalition support funds, have been held up, in part because of disputes with Pakistan over the Bin Laden raid, the operations of the C.I.A., and its decision to block supply lines into Afghanistan last year.The $688 million payment — the first since this summer, covering food, ammunition and other expenses from June through November 2011 — has caused barely a ripple of protest since it was sent to Capitol Hill on Dec 7, the Times said.


The absence of a reaction, American and Pakistani officials say, underscores how relations between the two countries have been gradually thawing since Pakistan reopened the Nato supply routes in July after an apology from the Obama administration for an errant American airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November 2011.Kerry’s nomination would be welcomed in Pakistan, where he is seen as perhaps the most sympathetic to Pakistani concerns of any senior lawmaker, according to the Times. He has nurtured relationships with top civilian and military officials, as well as the ISI.But if he becomes secretary of state, Kerry will inherit one of the hardest diplomatic tasks in South Asia: helping Pakistan find a role in steering Afghanistan toward a political agreement with the Taliban, it said. As the United States, which tried and failed to broker such an agreement, begins to step back, Pakistan’s role is increasing.“For a relationship rocked in the past two years by a CIA contractor’s shooting of two Pakistanis, the Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden and the ‘accidental’ airstrike, perhaps the most remarkable event in recent months has been relative calm.” the Times said. A senior American official dealing with Pakistan said recently that “this is the longest we’ve gone in a while without a crisis.”Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, said, “Pak-US relations are settling down to a more stable trajectory.”

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The interlude has allowed the United States to reduce the huge backlog of Nato supplies at the border — down to about 3,000 containers from 7,000 when the border crossings reopened — and to conduct dry runs for the tons of equipment that will flow out of Afghanistan to Pakistani ports when the American drawdown steps up early next year.Moreover, the two sides have resumed a series of high-level meetings — capped by Secretary of State Hillary linton’s meeting this month with top Pakistani officials in Brussels. — on a range of topics including counterterrorism, economic cooperation, energy and the security of Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal.Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, was quoted as saying, “There’s greater convergence between the two countries than there has been in eight years. It’s been a fairly quick kiss and make up, but it’s been driven by the approaching urgency of 2014, and by their shared desire for a stable outcome in the region.”

The one exception to the state of calm has been a tense set of discussions about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, according to the Times. United States officials have told their Pakistani colleagues that Islamabad’s move to smaller, more portable weapons creates a greater risk that one could be stolen or diverted, it said. A delegation of American nuclear experts was in Pakistan last week, but found that the two countries had fundamentally divergent views about whether Pakistan’s changes to its arsenal pose a danger.The greatest progress, officials say, has been in the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, after years of mutual recrimination. A high-level Afghan delegation visited Pakistan in November, resulting in the release of several midlevel Taliban commanders from Pakistani jails as a sign of good will in restarting the peace process.The United States, which was quietly in the background of those meetings, approved of the release of the prisoners, but has still held back on releasing five militants from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a key Taliban demand.

One American official said there was a “big push” to move the talks process forward during the current winter lull in fighting. The United States is quietly seeking to revive a peace channel in Qatar, which was frozen earlier this year after the Taliban refused to participate.Despite the easing of tensions in recent months, there are still plenty of sore spots in the relationship, the Times said.Lt-Gen Michael D Barbero, who heads the Pentagon agency responsible for combating roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IED’s, told a Senate hearing last week that Pakistan’s efforts to stem the flow of a common agricultural fertilizer, calcium ammonium nitrate, that Taliban insurgents use to make roadside bombs had fallen woefully short.“Our Pakistani partners can and must do more,” General Barbero told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing.American officials have also all but given up on Pakistan’s carrying out a clearing operation in North Waziristan, a major militant safe haven.“Pakistan’s continued acceptance of sanctuaries for Afghan-focused insurgents and failure to interdict IED materials and components continue to undermine the security of Afghanistan and pose an enduring threat to US, coalition and Afghan forces,” a Pentagon report, mandated by Congress, concluded last week.

Source: The Nation

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Al Qaeda; US’s Best Friend

Submitted by Aurangzeb on January 3, 2013 – 5:00 pm

Al Qaeda in Yemen offer gold bounty for killing U.S. ambassador

A saying goes in our language ‘a sensible enemy is better than a insensible friend’, the saying goes really good for the friendship the US holds with an insensible Pakistan, who usually cannot be trusted by the US due to its inability to maneuver covet acts that fulfill ‘US interest’ and at the same time make Pakistan look like the ‘axis of evil’ but AlQaeda can do exactly that. AlQaeda is simply ‘a friend in need’ and ‘a friend indeed’.

Most recently news has come out that Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen have offered a golden bounty for the killing of the U.S. ambassador, sending American troops — and even the diplomat’s mother — into high alert. The terrorists offered three kilos of gold, worth $160,000, for the head of Ambassador Gerald Feierstein. A smaller bounty — roughly $23,000 — is being offered to anyone who kills a US soldier in Yemen. The gold bounty in this news is actually for the American, for whom the so-called AlQaeda has set another easy target.


In the War of Terror, whereby humanity is being savagely culled and exhausted, the US and the AlQaeda seem to work hand in gloves; wherever AlQaeda leads the US is sure to go. It’s hard to say if the AlQaeda baits the US or the US baits itself, but it’s easy to see that every time AlQaeda makes the call, it is the one that gets beaten down and the US is the one that stands victorious on its slain body; only it never really fully killed, it is allowed to sprout somewhere else again. If the AlQaeda are terrorists, the US seems no less in madness, when they, supposedly being the most organized nation of the world, coarsely follows loose trails of a crude enemy, destroying everything that comes in the path. They say in Chinese ‘why use an ox-knife to kill a chicken’, and that’s exactly the strategy the US seems to be following. Common sense tells us that to tackle with small targets that have infiltrated in civilian population the right tool is the police and intelligence agencies that have the ability to make man-to-man contact and catch the infiltrators on individual or group basis, not by the use of missiles and tanks.

Right at the end of the US fiscal cliff melodrama, which itself has ended in confusion; with reserved decisions upon what the spend-cuts will really be like and what the new debt-ceiling status will be, and only declaring parts of the deal which present more taxes on the American people and cuts that are speculated on public-spending like the Medicare and the pensions. It seems clear to some analysts that in the first step the US administration has only done to cut down the income of its people, almost certainly pushing them into another recession, which again will serve to raise the income of the government. Whereas on the other hand, as President Obama said before leaving for Hawaii, ‘While open to compromise on budgetary issues, I will not offer Congress spending cuts in return for lifting the government’s borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling’. In other words he will not allow the major spending–cuts plus he will opt for a debt-ceiling raise. Does this not mean that the military will be getting all it wants and the government will be richer and more powerful now, as it has more money from the people and the usual debt-ceiling raise of a few trillion or so. But all this will be injected slowly into the American people, stepwise, until by the end of March, the whole nation would be over the cliff, only unable to understand the injuries it has suffered.

And the military and the US administration are all set to open their new-year gift, probably in the form of Yemen or some other poor-fated part of humanity that would be, in their say, in dire need of someone who would deliver it the bliss of democracy and civilization.

This report is based on obvious factual analysis; not on conspiracy.