“Pakistan” on The Daily Caller

U.S. Army Major General Peter Fuller was relieved of his command in Afghanistan earlier this month because, when asked about Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s recent hand-over-heart vow that “if there is war between Pakistan and America, we will stand by Pakistan,” he called Karzai “erratic” and asked, “Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me.” But what was more surprising than MG Fuller’s reaction — which, if one considers the 1,800 Americans killed protecting Afghanistan, was restrained — was that of a “Western diplomat” who, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of his statement, observed, “The phraseology could have been better.” In other words, weeks after Joint Chiefs Chairman (Ret.) Michael Mullen’s testimony specifically confirming Pakistani intelligence’s support of the Taliban’s September attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, which killed 25 people, six months after the U.S. hunt-down of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani Army town of Abbottabad, and 10 years into a war against a Pakistan-fueled insurgency, criticizing the grammar of a pro-Pakistan statement remains one step too far outside the shade for the coalition of the willing. (more)

As of this writing, text messages containing the words “poop,” “damn,” “athlete’s foot,” “monkey crotch” and “flogging the dolphin” are still making it over the airwaves in Pakistan. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) recently moved to ban the shameless trafficking in profanity, but they appear to have run into enforcement difficulties and postponed the measure. (more)

Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani knocked media coverage of U.S.-Pakistani relations Wednesday and said his country seeks to become independent of American aid. (more)

Even The New York Times is shocked. Here’s how the story begins: (more)

Afghanistan to back Pakistan if wars with US: Karzai (more)

ISLAMABAD — A Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA track Osama bin Laden before U.S. special forces killed the terrorist leader should be charged with treason, the official Pakistani inquiry into bin Laden’s presence in the country recommended Thursday. (more)

Angelina Jolie, a current United Nations goodwill ambassador to the High Commissioner for Refugees, has accepted an expanded position of Special Representative on the Afghan refugee situation, the UN announced Tuesday in Geneva, Switzerland. (more)

The attention of the world has been riveted to Israel, Palestine and Iran in light of the Palestinians’ decision to seek U.N. recognition and Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York City to once again rub America’s nose in his war-mongering, Holocaust denials and 9/11 conspiracy theories. (more)

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) predicted the lower chamber would withhold all U.S. assistance to Pakistan at some point. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top al-Qaida operative was killed earlier this week in Pakistan’s tribal areas, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday. The death landed another blow against the besieged terrorist network. (more)

U.S. officials have reported that a drone strike in Pakistan killed al Qaeda senior leader Atiyah Abd al Rahman. The successful targeting of senior terrorist leaders has become a signature tool in the long war. Yet, as we have seen repeatedly since 2001, the decapitation of leadership in and of itself has not resulted in the dismantling and defeat of terrorist networks. Al Qaeda’s deadly presence in Iraq did not end when American forces targeted and killed al Qaeda in Iraq’s leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. A successful campaign targeting al Qaeda leaders in Yemen after 9/11 did not extinguish al Qaeda’s ability to regenerate in that state. (more)

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. and Pakistani officials said al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, delivering another big blow to a terrorist group that the U.S. believes to be on the verge of defeat. (more)

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — A Pakistani court on Friday sentenced to death a soldier who shot and killed an unarmed youth as he was begging for mercy — an incident that was caught on videotape and repeatedly broadcast on TV, triggering unusual public anger at the country’s powerful military. (more)

Law enforcement sources say the FBI has arrested an agent of Pakistan’s official state intelligence service, accusing him of making thousands of dollars in political contributions in the United States without disclosing his connections to the Pakistani government. (more)

On November 26, 2008, in the afterglow of Barack Obama’s election, gunmen terrorized Mumbai, India’s financial capital, with a siege that claimed 166 lives. The event would have profound implications for the Obama presidency. Blame for the carnage was quickly laid at the doorstep of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani Islamist group long deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, and intelligence showed that LeT was known to sometimes train at camps in Pakistan with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. (more)

The founder of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program asserts that the government of North Korea bribed top military officials in Islamabad to obtain access to sensitive nuclear technology in the late 1990s. (more)

For several years in the late 1990s, I worked for the government of Pakistan, mostly when the late Benazir Bhutto, an inspiring small “d” democrat and charismatic populist leader, was prime minister of Pakistan. I made lots of Pakistani friends, in Pakistan and among the large Pakistani-American community here. (more)

We’ve seen this movie a thousand times before. A guy and a gal are meant for each other. They don’t realize it yet, but everyone in the audience does. Circumstances conspire to keep them apart — a misunderstanding here, an unfortunate coincidence there. They’re both in denial about their obvious romantic chemistry. To make matters worse, she has a jerk boyfriend. Deep down, she must know that she has nothing in common with the jerk boyfriend, but she stays with him for all the wrong reasons. Finally, our hero and heroine wake up and realize that they should have been together all along. Our heroine musters the gumption to dump her jerk boyfriend, and rides off into the sunset with our hero. (more)

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistanis largely disapprove of the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, with a majority believing the al-Qaida chief’s death is a bad thing and relations between Washington and Islamabad will suffer as a result, new polling data show. (more)

The Taliban have begun using child suicide bombers in eastern Afghanistan, underscoring the increasingly brutal nature of the fighting in a volatile region that is emerging as the central front of the U.S.-led war. (more)