Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Look who's friends

The Taliban has friends in the ISI (not that no one had an idea).
Baitullah Mehsud, the brazen Taliban
chief based in Waziristan, has been able to escape several attempts to kill and
capture him because he has friends in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) agency, according to a Newsweek report. [
Link]
And this is how Mehsud gives officials the slip -
An unnamed Pakistani official told
Newsweek that senior US officials had even shared with their counterparts in
Islamabad “some intelligence indicating that renegade ISI elements helped
Mehsud's group train for the December 2007 assassination of Pakistan's former
prime minister Benazir Bhutto”. But despite that and Pakistan's purported
knowledge of his whereabouts, “it's a puzzle why they're ignoring and avoiding
any strike against him,” one tribal elder in the region told the magazine. “On
several occasions over the past couple of years, security forces in Pakistan
have launched operations to kill or capture him, and each time he has vanished
without incident,” the magazine writes citing unnamed officials in Islamabad and
Washington. “Mehsud's contacts, the theory goes, are tipping him off before
Pakistani troops can pounce.” [
Link]
Now, with reports of some Talibani terrorists entering India, Mehsud's friend circle seems to be wider than expected.

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