THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

To many Pakistanis the most shocking aspect of the latest Taliban suicide bombing the question was: What was a team of American soldiers doing in a volatile corner of North West Frontier province?

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

India has offered to resume bilateral talks with Pakistan that were halted after the deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks nearly 15 months ago, an official said Thursday.

India proposed the resumption of discussions between the foreign secretaries on terrorism and other issues, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the matter. Pakistan welcomed the offer.

The attack is just the latest confirmation of the commitment President Barack Obama has made to the assassination campaign inside Pakistan -- a close US ally -- that began under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

A new bill passed by the Pakistani parliament may snatch the remote control of the country's nuclear bombs from President Asif Ali Zardari.

The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) has been assigned a significant role in the National Command Authority (NCA) while the president of Pakistan, despite being the supreme commander of the armed forces under the Constitution, figures nowhere in an extremely essential law passed by the National Assembly last week, The News reports.

Pakistani troops killed eight Islamist militants Tuesday in an Afghan border region where insurgents are staging a comeback after a military operation there was declared a success, a local official said.

The fighting came amid continuing reports that the head of the Pakistani Taliban had died as a result of injuries sustained in a U.S. missile strike elsewhere in the northwest in mid-January. On Monday, a Taliban commander said chief Hakimullah Mehsud was alive and promised to provide proof soon.

Rahul Bhatt, son of director Mahesh Bhatt, is “convinced” David Headley was working for FBI when he was in Mumbai before the attacks.

“I’m convinced Headley was working for Americans, for FBI. I’d nicknamed him agent Headley,” Rahul said in an interview to UK’s Channel 4.

“It was the Americans’ deepest wish to infiltrate al-Qaeda. And David did exactly that for them.

According to Indian officials, Pakistan in the past has used Sargodha to store M-11 missiles which had been delivered unassembled to it by China. However, the pace at which these tunnels are coming up suggests that, as the official put it, Pakistan is up to something. Sargodha is also the place which the Chinese are said to regularly visit to train the Pakistanis in handling weapons and missiles.

The US' success in Afghanistan is directly linked to Pakistan's willingness to co-operate and act against al-Qaida, Taliban and other extremist organisation, as Af-Pak region remains the epicentre of violent extremism, a top Obama Administration official has said.

"It was beyond question that the speed with which we were able to achieve our goals in Afghanistan has a link to the willingness of Pakistan to take on the fact that safe havens exist in the border region," said General (rtd) James Jones, National Security Advisor.

The world appears to be sleep walking towards a mega-crisis during 2010 and beyond resulting from that of continuing and escalating terrorist insurgency fed by U.S. policy, that is spreading like a cancer across Pakistan resulting in the disintegration of the Pakistani economy and by consequence the disintegration of many areas of the state into lawless areas despite the size of the Pakistani Army, this would result in fallout across the whole region and the wider world on a scale of several magnitudes greater than that which followed the collapse of Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

This wariness extends into the civilian government and more importantly the Pakistani populace in general, who are seeing Obama Administration courting as thinly veiled attempts to buy Pakistani loyalty so as to use their troops as cannon fodder in Waziristan.

Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

Beginning the day after the attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, the agency has carried out 11 strikes that have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani news reports, which make almost no mention of civilian casualties.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that 'an organized propaganda campaign' was under way to taint Pakistani people's perceptions of the United States while assuring the South Asian country that ties between the two nations were based on 'common interests and mutual respect.'

Two Pakistani employees of an American defense contractor engaged by the US Embassy in Islamabad have been linked to two attacks on Pakistani military and the assassination of a Brigadier. If this is not alarming, then consider that US Ambassador Anne Patterson’s name has come up in an investigation where thousands of dollars were paid in bribes to Interior Ministry to smuggle illegal weapons into Pakistan. Not to mention how Washington is empowering India in Afghanistan at Pakistan’s cost. When Pakistan takes countermeasures, US officials like Mr. Gates and Mr. Holbrooke accuse Pakistan of ‘anti-Americanism’ and harassing US diplomats. Time for some straight talk.

The Pentagon has gone into damage control mode after Defense Secretary Robert Gates appeared to confirm that security contractor Blackwater is operating in Pakistan.

The admission, quickly denied by Defense Department officials, has set fire to long-simmering rumors inside Pakistan about the involvement of for-profit contractors in the war against the Taliban.

After months of angry denials and accusing Pakistani media outlets reporting the story of engaging in “conspiracy theories,” the United States government has finally come clean about Blackwater forces operating in Pakistan, in the form of an interview by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on local Pakistani television.

Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington, D.C., area, were picked up in Pakistan earlier this month in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to the South Asian country to join militant groups.

Agents for Britain's MI6 Secret Intelligence Service say they are "certain" al-Qaida is poised to try and grab some of the 80 nuclear weapons that Pakistan possesses, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

“We have various kinds of US-made arms, which we procure from Afghan arms smugglers”, an arms dealer from the town of Darra Adamkhel in Pakistan’s western frontier province (NWFP) told IslamOnline.net.

Mr Qasab told a court that three of the four gunmen who stormed the Taj Mahal hotel were from Indian-administered Kashmir, Gujarat and Mumbai.

He did not reveal details about the identity of the fourth hotel attacker but claimed that he too was Indian.

India maintains that all the gunmen involved in the Mumbai attacks were from Pakistan.

Pakistan’s strategic assets are as safe as that of any other nuclear weapon state and these assets are fully safeguarded and secure under the protection of a well-established command and control system, a Foreign Office (FO) spokesman said on Sunday.

The brutality of Taliban attacks in northwest Pakistan has cost the militants public support, the U.S. special envoy to the region said Saturday.

At least 20 people have been killed in Pakistan in the latest US drone attacks that picked up pace after seven CIA agents were killed in late December.

Attacks that have continued across Pakistani towns and cities are being blamed on Tehreek e-Taliban, Pakistan's Taliban.

However, the group has issued its first video statement denying involvement in targeting civilians and has blamed external forces for at least two recent blasts.

Perhaps the most frightening detail of the ever-growing U.S. war in the “Af-Pak” theater — even expanding into the usually quiet off-season of the cold Afghan winter — is that the war could be lost for the U.S. in a country where it can’t acknowledge putting boots on the ground: Pakistan.

With more C.I.A., more drone strikes, and more subsequent civilian deaths, Obama may be digging himself right out of Pakistan. The problem is that without Pakistani support, digging himself out of the Afghanistan mess will be impossible.

Pakistan’s government reported US drones killed only civilians in 39 of 44 attacks on their country in 2009; with over 700 innocent civilians killed, according to Pakistan's most widely-read English newspaper. Pakistan has repeatedly publicly denounced the US attacks, making the US guilty of War Crimes as they do not have explicit permission from Pakistan’s government.

Pakistani officials have expressed increasing consternation with the growing number of civilian casualties in the strikes, with President Zardari warning that it was undermining support for the war effort that the US has demanded Pakistan start in those regions. Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani added that US policies on this and other issues were threatening bilateral ties.

Despite the growing complaints and increasing questions about the policy’s effectiveness, a delegation of US senators to the region praised the strikes and vowed that they would continue. If the strikes continue at the frenzied pace so far throughout 2010, the issue will likely become a much bigger one.

Pakistan says it has done more than any other country to end terrorism and its people have suffered the most. Greater US expectations would be politically explosive. Anti-American sentiment is running high, in large part because of US pilotless drone aircraft attacks on Taliban hideouts in Pakistan.

Drones: Washington may decide – with or without Pakistan’s consent – to intensify the drone hits in North Waziristan, where Haqqani operates and which is a Pashtun tribal region seen as a hub for global militants. But that could hurt Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban.

"This region of Balochistan, which has seen civilisation for thousands of years, is being oppressed by Pakistan. We're ready to accept assistance from anyone in our fight. We appeal to India for help."

This public plea for help from the country's sworn enemy will alarm Pakistanis.

So too might the fact that almost everyone we came across in the town supported moves for their province to break away from Pakistan.

President Asif Ali Zardari has said that Pakistan is ready to wage a thousand-year war with India over the Kashmir.

"When Zulfikar had spoken of waging a thousand-year war, he never said he would not do it through talks or negotiations," he said. President Zardari said regional peace was inextricably linked to the settlement of the decades-old dispute over Kashmir.

As 30,000 U.S. troops begin to deploy to Afghanistan, fears are rising in Pakistan that a stepped-up war just over the border could worsen the increasingly bloody struggle with militancy here.

Residents in border areas such as the violence-plagued city of Peshawar worry that a tide of militants could flee Afghanistan to seek targets in Pakistan. Doubts linger among Pakistani security officials about the Americans' ability to intensify the campaign against the Taliban without further destabilizing Pakistan's vast southwestern border or the already volatile tribal areas in the northwest.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found.

The United Nation is to withdraw a quarter of its international staff from Pakistan as the country descends further into violence.

At least 11 UN workers have been killed in Pakistan in the last year, and over 500 people have died in attacks since the army began an offensive against militants in the Taleban stronghold of South Waziristan in October.

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages.

Over the last two years, the Pakistani government—both that of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and that of his successor, Pakistan People’s Party President Asif Ali Zardari—had worked out a modus operandi with Washington whereby Pakistan publicly protested the drone attacks and demanded that they cease, while behind the scenes giving them a green light.

As the propaganda that Pakistani nukes are likely to fall into the hands of the Taliban continues in the American press, one wonders what might be the U.S. intent.

Seen in the light that American mercenaries have become overt operationally, it appears that the intent is to use them to ‘lift’ the Pak Nukes using the threat from the Taliban as an excuse.

US President Barack Obama's Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke has admitted that there are American spies on Pakistani soil, but has rebuffed reports about the presence of any combat troops inside the troubled country.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is desperately trying to get out of a political crisis, bordering chaos, created by his own colleagues but, unfortunately, he is looking helpless.

He invited more than three dozen TV anchorpersons and journalists from across the country to the Prime Minister’s House on Thursday evening and tried to impress upon them that “I am the government and my government is strong, I am not threatened by any conspiracy. There is no conspiracy going on.

It was his sheer bad luck that at the Bilawal House in Karachi the same evening, President Asif Ali Zardari was saying something totally different. “Certain mercenary elements are involved in conspiracies to topple the government. We will foil all these conspiracies,” said Zardari.

It appears that Zardari's days as Washington's man in Islamabad are numbered. Anti-American fury is surging, with popular claims that Pakistan has been "occupied" by the US, treated like a third-rate banana republic, and is run by corrupt, US-installed stooges and crooks. Shades of Iran under the Shah, and Egypt under Sadat.

In 2010, the ugly acronym, "Afpak," will bedevil, befuddle, and consume the Obama White House that so unwisely and rashly ignored Gen. Douglas MacArthur's wise warning to avoid land wars in Asia.

As the US expands the Afghan War, its strategic rear area in Pakistan is up in flames.

A second Pakistani court called on Interior Minister Rehman Malik to answer questions over corruption following a scuttled amnesty law, lawyers said.

Amjad Iqbal, a lawyer for the interior minister, held a news conference in Rawalpindi, saying his client is not afraid to face the charges, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reports.

"The accountability court has summoned my client to appear on Jan. 2. Mr. Malik will appear in court," he said. "We are not afraid of appearing in the courts."

A Pakistani high court last week overturned the National Reconciliation Ordinance that placed a moratorium on corruption investigations into several high-ranking figures.

Pakistan will not go as far as Washington wants, and there's nothing the U.S. can do about it: That's the sobering reality as the U.S. tries to persuade a hesitant Pakistan to finish off the fight against terrorists.

Pakistanis are deeply suspicious of America's power and motives, making it difficult for their leaders to accede to Washington's pressure in public, lest they look like U.S. puppets.

A senior U.S. diplomat hinted at a separate agreement that would allow the U.S. itself to take on some of the hidden war against Pakistan's militants.

The diplomat said the stepped-up U.S. action would come with Pakistani support, but would not elaborate on the potential cooperation.

THE political crisis in Pakistan has deepened after the Government's anti-corruption agency sought a warrant for the arrest of the country's Interior Minister.

Officials from the National Accountability Bureau asked for permission to arrest Rehman Malik, the minister in charge of law and order and the war on terrorism.

Americans arrested in Pakistan were going to terrorist safe havens to train to fight against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani police said Thursday.

In the meantime, with the winter months fast approaching, hundreds of thousands of "unintegrated" refugees who do not find more durable shelter, even as military sweeps continue, could face exposure and starvation. Some aid groups are demanding that the United States pressure Pakistan to respect international humanitarian law and allow independent access to the refugees. However, in this, as in all other national policy matters, Pakistan will remain highly resistant to American aid leverage, making token gestures, but always insisting on its own prerogatives. It’s a dangerous sign of even worse things to come.

Pakistan, a country that's critical to the U.S.-led war on terrorism, Friday appeared to be sliding toward a judicial coup, in which judges are moving to oust top officials in the civilian government, but without putting the military, or anyone else, in charge.

Just who's running this nuclear-armed country of 165 million — the independent judiciary or another arm of the state — is unclear. The government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, appeared paralyzed, and a creeping change in command seemed to be under way.

In an interview on Pakistani television today, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen declared that Pakistan’s Army would soon launch an invasion of North Waziristan to crack down on the Haqqani network, a long-time US rival.

It seems to have come as something of a surprise to the Pakistani Army, whose spokesman also gave an interview today insisting that they were in no position to invade North Waziristan.

Pakistan's government this morning dismissed rumours of a coup in the country as the fallout from a supreme court verdict continued to rock President Asif Ali Zardari's government.

Opposition politicians are clamouring for Zardari's resignation, but he has insisted he will not go. As the president, he enjoys immunity from prosecution.

The Centre today tied itself in knots over the alleged disappearance of the visa documents of terror suspects David Headley and Tahawwur Rana from the Chicago consulate.

The foreign ministry said it would not be “accurate to conclude that these visa applications are missing”. The home ministry took a similar line, hinting the visa papers were not missing but were probably lost in the pile of documents at the consulate.

The drama started weeks before the terrorist attacks – at a Jewish residential complex In Mumbai run by the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-orthodox movement.

David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

The extensive use of terrorist tradecraft by Pakistani American terror suspect David Headley makes it evident that he "was not merely a low-level cannon fodder-type operative", according to US strategic think tank Stratfor.

The visa holdup is the latest tangible sign of the volatility of official U.S.-Pakistani relations. The two nations have an improving military relationship but mistrust and suspicion still shadow many government interactions, including U.S. attempts to help Pakistan.

Pakistan’s top court struck down a controversial amnesty deal yesterday that has protected President Zardari and his allies from corruption charges, deepening the country’s political turmoil as it battles Islamic militants.

The Supreme Court’s ruling prompted calls for Mr Zardari to step down and face criminal charges that were shelved two years ago as part of the amnesty. Legal experts said that the judgment could also open the way for a challenge to the legitimacy of Mr Zardari’s election.

A suicide car bomb exploded in a market close to the home of a politician in Pakistan's most populous province Tuesday, killing 22 people and wounding 70 others.

The blast in the Punjabi town of Dera Ghazi Khan was the latest in a series of attacks that have killed more than 500 people in Pakistan since October. The bloodshed has been blamed on Taliban militants avenging an army offensive against the Taliban in the northwest.

A Pakistani government attorney claims that the United States' CIA and General Headquarters pose a serious threat to the federal government.

Azfar's remarks in the court sent ripples across the country the moment they were broadcast on television.

This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly.

The US has warned Pakistan that if it does not act more aggressively, it will use considerably more force on the Pakistani side of the border to shut down Taliban attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, US and Pakistani officials said.

The United States said Sunday it was pressing Pakistan to move against Taliban and Al-Qaeda sanctuaries in its territory, saying success in Afghanistan depended on disrupting the cross-border safe havens.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry rejected with anger as information about President Barack Obama’s plan to escalate drone strikes against Pakistani territory, a somewhat-secret addendum to his Afghanistan escalation, continued to emerge today and a top Congressmen confirmed the move was “under discussion.”

The foreign ministry cautioned that the attacks would only serve to inflame anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and that the government’s cooperation with the US had limits.

As rumors swirl about the status and ultimate fate of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, some in the State Department are making it clear that they don't see him as leaving office anytime soon.