For the past 23 years, Afghanistan has served as a proxy military playing field for different countries, including the former Soviet Union, the United States and Pakistan. Now, after a year of the US-led war on terrorism, a new proxy war has begun in Afghanistan, this time aimed at Pakistan and involving the intelligence networks of India and Israel.

It has been learned from highly placed intelligence sources that India's Reasearch and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Israel's Mossad are collaborating to train several hundred militants to be used in an attempt to destabilize the administration of President General Pervez Musharraf.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton faced sharp rebukes from Pakistani audiences Friday, including one woman who accused the U.S. of conducting "executions without trial" in aerial drone strikes. Slapping back, Clinton questioned Pakistan's commitment to fighting terrorists.

"Somebody, somewhere in Pakistan must know where these people are," Clinton said in an exchange almost as blunt as her exasperated comments a day earlier that Pakistani officials lacked the will to target al-Qaida.

Pakistan has lost control of rogue military and intelligence officers, who are now aiding the militants, and it might be too late to sanitize the Army, a former French judge has said in his new book.

"The situation in Pakistan is among the most worrisome...the central government has lost control of certain elements of the Army and the ISI," Jean-Louis Bruguiere, an investigative French Magistrate, said.

French secret service documents have cast doubt on a theory that Islamist militants were responsible for a 2002 bomb attack in Karachi that killed 11 French nationals, a source close to the case said on Monday.

It's a classic case of calm before the storm. The AfPak chapter of Obama's brand new OCO ("Overseas Contingency Operations"), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror") does not imply only a surge in the Pashtun Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). A surge in Balochistan as well may be virtually inevitable.

After three days of encounters with America-bashing Pakistanis - who rejected her contention that the U.S. and Pakistan face a common enemy - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that "we're not getting through."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's said on Thursday it was "hard to believe" that no one in Pakistan's government knew where al Qaeda leaders were hiding, striking a new tone on a trip where Washington's credibility has come under attack.

The growing distrust of American influence was even more apparent today than usual, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used to occasion of her visit to Pakistan to chastize its government’s action toward al-Qaeda.

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” Clinton declared. The US maintains that al-Qaeda’s leadership eventually moved to Pakistan after the US failed to capture any of them in Afghanistan, but Pakistani officials insist they see no evidence of that being the case.

Recently, while Pakistan's government may have been saying the things that the White House wants to hear, the country's media and public have often been openly hostile towards the United States.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's charm offensive this week suggests that she recognises that.

Under great pressure from the United States to attack Taliban and tribal fighters in the border regions with Afghanistan, Pakistan has launched a large-scale assault on the tribal region in the northwest of the country. Embroiled in a deep civil crisis, the military campaign is likely to further strain the stability of the U.S.-client state.

According to the New York Times, the Obama administration rushed hundreds of millions of dollars of arms to Pakistan in the last month, including transport helicopters, spare parts for attack helicopters and night-vision equipment for F15 pilots. The Pentagon is also relaying targeting information collected by U.S. drone aircraft to the Pakistani military.

There has always been in American foreign policy circles a virus called arrogance, caused by the hereditary assumption that Americans know better than others. Surprisingly, this does not always prove the case, but the condition seems highly resistant to treatment, even by experience.

A vocal part of the Pakistani population clearly doesn’t want the United States in their country, and it doesn’t even want the aid the United States is sending. A notorious fact in the past has been that civilian and popular opposition to the U.S. was based on the assumption that American aid was meant to keep military governments in place and buy military cooperation with American policy.

Secretary of state responds to student who suggested Washington was forcing Pakistan to use military force on its own territory with: "If you want to see your territory shrink, that's your choice."

Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain blamed the militants for the deadliest blast and said that operation against the militants will continue.

Blackwater USA is looking for mercenaries fluent in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language, and Punjabi, the language spoken by natives of Pakistan’s largest populated province. The US military already deploys officers and commando units manned by people fluent in Pashto, spoken in most of western Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Keeping in view the denials of the US embassy in Islamabad and the expanding American presence on Pakistani soil, these recruitments are obviously not meant for running call centers. Since Washington has unilaterally decided that Pakistan is now a ‘war theater’ after Iraq and Afghanistan, it is only natural that American terrorism will also be unleashed in Pakistan. Blackwater is in Pakistan.

Former Jamaat-i-Islami Chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed has claimed that US private security firm Blackwater is involved in terrorist activities in the country and it is operating under the guise of "XE International", and US intervention in the internal affairs of Pakistan has increased very much.

Talking to reporters at Multan Airport, on Saturday, Qazi said Blackwater was imparting training to ex-commandos, adding India, America and Israel were active in different parts to destabilise the country. He said, "The Nato and American forces are destined for crushing and shameful defeat in Afghanistan and they should immediately withdraw their troops from the country to save themselves from this quagmire."

A huge explosion has partially demolished a luxury hotel in the north-west Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing at least 11 people and injuring dozens.

Reports suggest gunmen stormed the premises of the five-star Pearl Continental just before the blast.

The United Nations has warned Washington about indiscriminate use of drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, saying that it may be breaking humanitarian law.

Washington seems unaware of the fury its heavy-handed, counter-productive policies have whipped up in Pakistan. Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the Obama administration keeps listening to Washington-based neoconservatives, military hawks, and `experts’ who tell it just what it wants to hear, not the hard facts.

As a result, Pakistan’s military, the nation’s premier institution, is being pushed to the point of revolt. Against the backdrop of bombings and shootings come rumors the heads of Pakistan’s armed forces and intelligence may be replaced by the Zardari government. My Pakistani military and intelligence sources report growing unrest in the middle ranks against the pro-US leadership.

Concerned over Pakistan's nuclear activities, US officials have been keeping an eye on the Kahuta nuclear site since 2003 through its Police College Training College in Sihala, which is situated close to the site.

The last 8 years of war on terror has caused plenty of death and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). The war has now been pushed into the interior of Pakistan proper. For the US and other NATO countries, this war is a business investment. For them, it is similar to speculative expenses of drilling oil wells, some bear fruit, and others don’t. But for Pakistan, the participation in the American war is a suicidal mission, the luxury which it cannot afford.

Taking its cue from the White House, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, the US media has been full of commentary lauding the widening civil war in Pakistan. Typical was a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius titled “Pakistan Fights Back: The Offensive in South Waziristan is the Latest Sign It’s Finally Taking the Taliban Seriously.”

No matter that this offensive is being waged by the Pakistani military to assist the US in pursuing its geopolitical ambitions and with callous indifference to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Pakistanis.

A suspected nuclear weapons site in Pakistan was hit by a suicide bomb attack, raising fears about the security of the nuclear arsenal, while two other terrorist blasts made it another bloody day in the country's struggle against extremism.

Friday morning a suicide attacker struck a check post on the boundary of the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, an Air Force base at Kamra, about 40 miles outside Islamabad, killing eight people, including two security personnel, and wounding a further 15.

"There were strict security arrangements, so he [the bomber] was intercepted at the first check post," local police chief Fakhar Sultan told reporters.

The Pakistanis use an earthy metaphor when they want to put their American interlocutors on the defensive. They complain that the United States used Pakistan like a condom, simply discarded it when it is no longer useful, as has happened time and again in the Cold War era. By saying so, they urge the Americans to be constant in friendship.

Thousands of refugees fled a Pakistani offensive against Taliban militants Tuesday, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis compounded by dangerous conditions and the onset of winter weather.

Aid agencies said there were as many as 150,000 refugees already, and the number could rise to 250,000 in coming weeks as the fighting intensifies.

Islamabad's campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan is largely irrelevant to the struggles of the US and NATO in Afghanistan across the Durand Line, according to Afghanistan News Net. The relevant groups are the Old Taliban led by Mullah Omar, based in Quetta; the Haqqani Network of Siraj and Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan and targeting the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika; and the Hizb-i Islami or Islami Party of Gulbadin Hikmatyar, which is mainly based in Afghanistan but has a presence in Bajaur, the northernmost of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan.

Since you're probably not a regular reader of the trade publication Nucleonics Week, let me summarize an article that appeared in its Oct. 8 issue. It reported that Iran's supply of low-enriched uranium -- the potential feedstock for nuclear bombs -- appears to have certain "impurities" that "could cause centrifuges to fail" if the Iranians try to boost it to weapons grade.

A former Pakistani military official has warned that the country's nuclear assets could be the next target of the militants.

“If the militants could attack the most secured military head quarter in Rawalpindi and the police training centers in Lahore... then definitely their next target would be the nuclear enrichment program at Kahota (Islamabad),” the former military chief Aslam Baig told Press TV in an exclusive interview Sunday.

The impulse, fanned by this sort of imperial hubris, to get out of Afghanistan, or at least to narrow the fight to a counter-terrorism campaign against al-Qaida, has gathered US adherents in recent months. But a Washington Post editorial argued this week that with al-Qaida much reduced, the Taliban in both countries now constituted the main enemy. Pakistan was moving towards "full-scale war", it said. Pulling back in Afghanistan could have disastrous, possibly fatal consequences there, too.

By this measure and others, only one conclusion is possible: Pakistan is already so destabilised by US actions since 9/11 that it cannot be left to fend for itself. In such tortuous logic is found the death of empires.

So how do the US and Pakistani governments explain the discrepency between their claims of no Blackwater employees being there and all the Blackwater employees operating in plain sight? In short they don’t.

A week of high profile attacks by the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have left over 150 people killed across the nation and growing questions over whether the Pakistani government is really up to tackling the group the way it has been promising to.

Now, the nation is conceding that it is in the midst of a guerrilla war with an increasingly belligerent enemy, and instead of launching an offensive against South Waziristan the military is faced with defending its home turf, literally.

Former Jamaat-i-Islami Chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed has claimed that US private security firm Blackwater is involved in terrorist activities in the country and it is operating under the guise of "XE International", and US intervention in the internal affairs of Pakistan has increased very much.

People no longer trust Congress, the President, the courts, the media, corporations, political parties, and other institutions of society. People even doubt science and medicine.

The bill, which passed through the US Senate last week, pledges billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan but issues a series of harsh statements and demands, including giving the US formal oversight over the nation’s court system and military. The onerous strings attached have led some in Pakistan’s government to term it a “treaty of surrender.”

Militants were holding between 10 to 15 security officers hostage inside Pakistan's army headquarters Saturday after they and others attacked the complex in an audacious assault on the country's most powerful institution.

The attack, which left at least 10 people dead, was the third major militant strike in Pakistan in a week and came as the government was planning an imminent offensive against Islamist militants in their strongholds in the rugged mountains along the border with Afghanistan.

The section of the legislation that has outraged the army says the secretary of state must report to Congress every six months on whether the government is exercising “effective civilian control over the military.”

When he took power in January, President Obama seemed to have boundless enthusiasm for continuing and escalating the war in Afghanistan, spreading it into Pakistan, throwing more troops and money at it as the whims struck him.

Nine months later, he’s seen as hesitant to approve another massive escalation, or at the very least looking for an opportune moment politically to do so. It’s not hard to see why: the war is increasingly unpopular at home, and his previous escalations have yielded nothing but rising violence.

According to top generals, only $500 million of $6.6 billion in US military aid sent to Pakistan between 2002 and 2008 actually ended up in the hands of the military. Officials say much of it went to then-President Pervez Musharraf’s various subsidy programs to bolster his sagging domestic image.

To beef up air defence capabilities and react in quickest possible time along the international border with Pakistan, the Indian Air Force has decided to station all its MiG 29 squadrons at Adampur, the second largest Air Force base in the country.

A suicide bomber disguised as a security officer struck the lobby of the U.N. food agency's Pakistan headquarters Monday, killing five people a day after the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban vowed fresh assaults, authorities and witnesses said.

The blast raises questions as to how the bomber managed to evade tight security at the heavily fortified World Food Program compound in the capital, Islamabad. It could also hamper the work of WFP and other aid agencies assisting Pakistanis displaced by army offensives against al-Qaida and the Taliban in their strongholds close to the Afghan border.

THE US design to destabilize Pakistan is becoming clearer by the day, even for the most blinkered Pakistani. As the US continues to be stalemated in Afghanistan, it has sought to move the centre of gravity of the "war on terror" to Pakistan. Initially it was assumed that this shift would be restricted to FATA, but now it is evident that the US is seeking to engulf the whole of Pakistan in an asymmetric conflict, which will eventually pit the people against the state, especially the military.

Hundreds of civilians were fleeing al-Qaida and the Taliban's main stronghold in northwest Pakistan after the army and militants asked them to leave, a tribal elder and a witness said Monday, a sign the military could be poised to launch an offensive.

Pakistan has vowed to root out militants in the northwest, many of whom allegedly use the mountainous tribal areas along the border as a base for attacks on American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan jets have bombed targets in the stronghold of Waziristan in recent months, but the military has said it would launch full-scale ground operations at the "appropriate" time.

The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan.

In a move reportedly being spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden, the United States is reportedly considering a dramatic increase in the number of drone attacks on Pakistani soil.

Biden, a skeptic of the Gen. McChrystal plan to add 45,000 more troops to the war in Afghanistan, seems to be presenting “emphasize Pakistan” as an alternative to committing more troops to the unpopular war. Yet Senator Kit Bond, one of the proponents of escalation in Afghanistan, has said the move shouldn’t come at the expense of adding more troops in Afghanistan.

A new wave of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan has slowed the arrival of hundreds of U.S. civilian and military officials charged with implementing assistance programs, undermined cooperation in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and put American lives at risk, according to officials from both countries.

At the highest levels, bilateral cooperation is said to be running smoothly. President Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari met Thursday in New York with a gathering of Pakistan's international "friends." With Obama's enthusiastic support, the Senate on Thursday approved a $7.5 billion, five-year package that will triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan.

The US Senate voted Thursday to triple non-military aid to Pakistan to roughly 1.5 billion dollars per year through 2014 in a bid to build trust and cooperation with a key ally against extremism.

The White House is looking at expanding counterterror operations in Pakistan as an alternative to a major military escalation in Afghanistan.

"The single greatest threat to (Pakistan)", Obama said recently, "comes from Al Qaeda and their extremists allies". This is not true. All our major problems, including terrorism, stem from the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. It has turned our tribal area into a protracted ulcer, a quagmire – a place where Pakistan is spending blood and treasure to protect American interests.

The senior administration officials said the renewed fight against the terrorist organization could lead to more missile attacks on Pakistan terrorist havens by unmanned U.S. spy planes. They spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made.

The proposed shift would bolster U.S. action on Obama's long-stated goal of dismantling terrorist havens, but it could also complicate American relations with Pakistan, long wary of the growing use of aerial drones to target militants along the porous border with Afghanistan.

The reported death of the ameer of the Azad Kashmir chapter of the Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI) Commander Ilyas Kashmiri in a US drone attack has confirmed that the trouble-stricken Waziristan region has become the new battlefield for the Kashmiri militant groups which are increasingly joining forces with the pro-Taliban elements to fight out the NATO troops from Afghanistan.

Amid indication that a few infiltrators might have entered into this side under cover firing given by Pakistan Rangers in the wake of two incidents along the international border in Jammu and Kashmir, India on Friday lodged a strong protest with Pakistan and put its border guarding force on full alert.

Despite growing U.S. military losses in Afghanistan, Pakistan still refuses to target the extremist groups on its soil that are the biggest threat to the American-led mission there, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan told McClatchy.

Eight years after Washington and Islamabad agreed to fight the Taliban and al Qaida, Pakistan has "different priorities" from the U.S., Anne Patterson said in a recent interview. Pakistan is "certainly reluctant to take action" against the leadership of the Afghan insurgency.

Two women were killed and five others, including three minors, sustained injuries when a vehicle came under fire by the security forces for violating curfew on Thursday.

There have been two spectacular attacks over the last few weeks. They came after the 'end' of the Swat military operation, and after Baitullah Mehsud's was killed in a suspected drone attack. (Notably, Mehsud was not killed by the Pakistan army, but by the United States. None of the Taliban leadership was killed or apprehended in the Swat operation.)

Pakistan is about to be destabilized to the point of a completely non-functioning state by the US; that must be the desired outcome here.

And when you see that, coupled with a military confrontation between Georgia and Russia, this is most likely the time that you will see a US/Israeli attack on Iran, as Russia will not be able to supply Iran by land.

The controversial US private security company, Blackwater, is reportedly running a covert recruitment drive through its website in Pakistan.

In a rare incident of its kind on the international border, the Indian forces opened fire from across the Wagah border on Friday night after mistaking an unexplained explosion in a village in East Punjab for ‘rocket fire from Pakistan’.

Former president Pervez Musharraf says the US military aid given to Pakistan during his tenure was used to strengthen defences against India.

The money was used to arm the troops who moved with their equipment from the western border to the east based on the perceived threats, he said.

The US gave $10bn dollars to Pakistan to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

After 9/11 America made it clear that Pakistan had no choice but to co-operate in the War on Terror — and pressed it to purge the ISI of Taleban and al-Qaeda sympathisers. But it continued to play a double game — most controversially airlifting hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taleban, al-Qaeda and ISI operatives out of the northern Afghan region of Kunduz in November 2001. Later that month more al-Qaeda fighters — probably including bin Laden — escaped from the southeastern Afghan region of Tora Bora by slipping over the border into Pakistan.

Thousands of civilians have fled Pakistan's northwest Khyber tribal region where the latest military offensive killed 33 more suspected militants Sunday.

Pakistan is under intense U.S. pressure to crack down on insurgents along its border with Afghanistan, especially the lawless tribal belt where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is suspected to be hiding. The U.S. believes militants use Pakistan's tribal areas as safe havens from which to plan attacks on Western troops across the frontier in Afghanistan.

The region is largely off-limits to journalists, making it difficult to verify the information independently.

Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has said the military operation in Swat would continue till all terrorists were eliminated and peace restored to the valley.

At least 443 militants in northwest Pakistan have been killed in 37 U.S. drone attacks during the last 9 months in which the name of the Pakistan Taliban chief Baitullah Masood was on the top of the hit list, the local NNI news agency reported Friday.

U.S. drones regularly fire missile in the Pakistani tribal regions to target the militants and opposition parties said Pakistani government permitted such attacks. But Pakistan denied the charges.

Undercover armed Americans are swarming the Pakistani capital in the latest sign that the elected government has allowed Washington to dispatch what is believed to be a large number of American special operations agents and contractual security guards, including the infamous Blackwater private militia.

There are indications that the PPP government and some other politicians, like Nawaz Sharif, are encouraging the Americans to get involved in domestic issues especially as a hedge against a powerful Pakistani military.

Suspected militants have blown up more than 20 vehicles carrying Nato supplies from Pakistan's Karachi port to Kandahar in Afghanistan, police said.

In the latest incident late on Sunday, militants detonated remote-controlled explosives to destroy more than 20 oil tankers and trailers.

Obama is fulfilling his campaign promise to Pakistan. The sudden arrival of U.S. marines, U.S. military Hummers, the hired killers of Blackwater, houses barricaded for U.S. personnel in Islamabad and the construction of the world's largest U.S. "Embassy" are terrorizing this nation of 180 million people. The U.S. slaughter and destruction in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan for the last 8 years warn them of what may lie in store for them, their families, their land.

Eye witnesses and informed journalists have been reporting sightings of U.S. personnel in Islamabad for the past week or so, but now they are seen moving freely throughout the capital.

The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials.

While American officials say that the weapon in the latest dispute is a conventional one — based on the Harpoon antiship missiles that were sold to Pakistan by the Reagan administration as a defensive weapon in the cold war — the subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons.

Pakistan's lawless border with Afghanistan is a main front in the battle against al-Qaida and the Taliban, who are destabilizing both countries. Under heavy U.S. pressure, the Pakistani military has launched ground offensives and air attacks on the insurgents in recent months, but much of the region remains under militant control.

The growing movements for civilian rule in Pakistan are seen as undermining counterinsurgency efforts. A New York Times article states how Washington is trying to "convince Pakistan that the insurgency, not internal politics, was the most important challenge." It appears to be lost on successive U.S administrations that U.S policies itself, such as the escalating drone attacks, have created much of this internal dissent about Pakistan's role in the War on Terror.

At least twelve persons, including women and children were killed when alleged US unmanned drones fired missiles at a house in Danda Darpa Khel on early Friday.

But what, I asked General Gul, in his view, were the true reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, and why the US is still there? “A very good question,” he responded. “I think you have reached the point precisely. It is a principle of war that you never mix objectives. Because when you mix objectives then you end up with egg on your face. You face defeat. And here was a case where the objectives were mixed up. Ostensibly, it was to disperse al Qaeda, to get Osama bin Laden. But latently, the reasons for the offensive, for the attack on Afghanistan, were quite different.”

From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.