A mammoth 'Go America Go? rally organized here on Sunday by Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Karachi chapter lambasted the USA for interference into Pakistani affairs and asked local rulers to shun toeing the US agenda and keep supreme the interests of Pakistani nation and country.

David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, was in Pakistan Sunday for talks with the army chief and other senior officials, the US embassy and Pakistani military said.

According to sources close to Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kiyani, senior officers are alarmed at the president's plans to divert troops and aircraft defending Pakistan's border with India and deploy them in a new offensive against Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

His comments raised hopes of a new thaw in the frosty relationship between India and Pakistan, but were questioned by analysts who said it defied the two nation's experience of three wars. They accused Mr Zardari of yielding to British and American pressure.

Lt-Gen Masood said Pakistan's military chiefs firmly believed that there must first be progress in finding a solution to their dispute over the Kashmir region before a better relationship could be considered worth having.

"If the worst, the unthinkable, were to happen,” Hillary Clinton recently told Fox News, “and this advancing Taliban encouraged and supported by Al Qaeda and other extremists were to essentially topple the government … then they would have keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.” Many will note that the extremists posing this unthinkable prospect were set up in business by the U.S. in the first place. Very well buried is the fact that the nuclear arsenal that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of our former allies has been itself the object of U.S. encouragement over the years and is to this very day in receipt of crucial U.S. financial assistance and technical support.

Pakistan's prime minister Thursday told Washington's visiting top security adviser that the United States must halt drone attacks on its soil, after they killed dozens of people in the northwest.

James Jones held talks with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as part of a short regional tour that has already taken in neighbouring Afghanistan to assess the United States' new strategy in the region.

There was no prominent militant commander among the 60-plus people killed in missile strikes by a US drone on funeral prayers in the violence-stricken South Waziristan on Tuesday.

The Americans do not want Pakistanis to capture Baitullah Mehsud alive, and they cannot eliminate him with an air strike anymore since Pakistan Army is advancing towards him already. They will either take him out before he is captured, or he will mysteriously disappear only to re-emerge later at a different location. The U.S. military has moved troops near Mehsud’s area under the pretext of finding Osama or Mullah Omar. This is a deception. They have been saying Osama is in Pakistan for years. Why haven’t they acted earlier? This American move has something to do with Pakistani military’s march to destroy Mehsud and his proxy militia. We already know that terrorists are using American weapons to kill us while pretending to be Taliban.

At least 43 people have died in missile strikes by a US drone aircraft in a militant stronghold of Pakistan, a Taliban spokesman has told the BBC.

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.

The US Congress on Friday approved $1.4 billion in economic and security assistance for Pakistan as the Senate passed a $106 billion war supplemental bill, giving the Obama administration an urgently needed $225 million in relief assistance for the displaced people of Swat.

Clearing out Islamic hard-liners is tough enough on the battlefield. Yet even as Pakistan's Army wraps up operations to clear the Taliban from Swat Valley, religious groups with militant ties or sympathies have set up shop among the war's refugees – and are winning popular support with their truckloads of aid.

Among the organizations providing relief is the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF), the charity wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the banned militant group blamed for last November's Mumbai (Bombay) attacks.

The government says that total victory is imminent. But military success has come at a human price. More than one million people have fled Swat, according to revised government figures. And inside the valley, hidden from the world, a second crisis is brewing.

"The fields cannot hold them any longer. We have to do it now," said Muhammad Sher, a squat man in a white turban who wrenched onions from his riverside plot. His 23-year-old nephew, Razaullah, lifted his shirt to reveal a shoulder wound.

With Pakistan poised to launch a massive military invasion of South Waziristan, the latest US drone strike into the restive agency could cause serious harm to delicate negotiations the Pakistani government is engaged in to convince a key warlord to remain neutral during the offensive, analysts warn.

US drones launched an apparent attack on a compound near South Waziristan’s capital of Wana today, killing at least 13 people and wounding an unknown number of others. Four missiles were said to be fired at a compound belonging to a suspected commander in the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

In the conflict between Pakistan and Islamist extremists, a fight that has drawn in the United States, trust is in short supply. Holbrooke's visit to this refugee camp and another earlier this month was an attempt to build confidence on all sides, and to seek some ground truth for the administration in a situation where it is sometimes as scarce as good faith. In the end, his presence boosted America's image in Pakistan but brought the refugees no closer to home.

Pakistan braced for militant reprisals on Monday as the army conducted softening-up operations ahead of an assault on the stronghold of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, one of al Qaeda's main allies.

he 56-year-old leader of Pakistan’s Movement for Justice party has been branded pro-Taliban for speaking out against the military operation, which has driven 2.5m people from their homes.

“I’m not pro-Taliban,” he said. “But my point is: shouldn’t we have looked at other options? How do you justify using heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-jets in civilian areas? Who in the world does this? Meanwhile all the top Taliban leadership have escaped. It’s so inhuman, what they have done; it will backfire.”

The number of attacks in South Waziristan and indeed throughout Pakistan is growing, and analysts caution that the sophistication of the attacks is on the rise. In particular this week’s Peshawar bombing has shown the group is capable of attacking fortified gates and barricades, and is able to cope with security measures that once made such targets almost impossible to successfully hit.

The Swat Valley offensive in particular seems to have driven the group to make more outlandish attacks, as it is now clear that the Pakistani government is no longer willing to entertain a political settlement to the disputes of the tribesmen that make up the bulk of the groups. The Swat attack has killed over a thousand, and driven millions of civilians out of their homes.

Cash shortages and bottlenecks in delivering supplies to people uprooted by fighting in Pakistan's Swat valley have triggered the biggest humanitarian funding crisis in a decade, relief organisations warn today.

Out of the 52 organisations requesting UN appeal funds, 30 have received no funds at all. Worse, most of the funds the UN appeal has received came before the exodus from the Swat valley that swelled the number of displaced people from 500,000 to 2.5 million in early May, the largest displacement in Pakistan's history.

Richard Holbrooke, the American "viceroy", has arrived in Pakistan to take a report on the killings in Swat and to entertain himself through the miseries of the displaced, homeless Muslims of Swat. Hizb ut-Tahrir condemns the arrival of the ‘Butcher of Swat' to Pakistan. Holbrooke's visit to the camps of the displaced people and announcing an "aid" package is a sick joke against the people of Swat. It is the US herself who destroyed the happy families and their homes, and now rubs salt in their wounds by pretending to be a "saviour".

Indian President Pratibha Patil unveils New Delhi's new foreign policy which includes an offer to reshape ties with Pakistan but ignores any mention of Israel.

A meeting between U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani included a plea for debt forgiveness, officials said.

Gilani asked Holbrooke during their Friday meeting to help Islamabad's struggle against Taliban militants by writing off $1.35 billion it owes to the United States, Pakistan's English language newspaper Dawn reported.

While US special envoy Richard Holbrooke cheered Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in the Swat Valley as a sign the nation had “turned the corner,” he predicted that the nation would once again face destabilization when the US surge into neighboring Afghanistan picks up speed.

The army offensive has sparked an exodus of more than 2 million people. Only a fraction of these refugees have ended up in camps, where food is being distributed. The vast majority have been absorbed into the host community in neighbouring districts in Buner, Swabi and Mardan. World Vision, one of the aid agencies operating in Buner, quoted the example of a man who has taken 37 people into his home. He said the host community, not rich to start with, was simply being exhausted.

The Obama administration has appealed to China to provide training and even military equipment to help Pakistan counter a growing militant threat, U.S. officials said.

The proposal is part of a broad push by Washington to enlist key allies of Pakistan in the effort to stabilize the country. The U.S. is seeking to persuade Islamabad to step up its efforts against militants, while supporting the fragile civilian government and the nation's tottering economy.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said on Saturday that terrorists might carry out retaliatory attacks in the country as they have suffered heavy losses in the wake of the military offensives in North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

"There are intelligence reports that terrorists can carry out attacks in any part of the country as reaction," Gilani told reporters in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.

The Pakistani army has retaken control of key parts of the contested Swat Valley in recent days, but the Taliban has kept its grip on some of the area's largest towns nearly a month into a massive military offensive, army commanders said Friday during a visit near the front lines.

Roughly 200,000 civilians remain trapped in the northern Swat Valley as the bulk of Pakistan’s military engages in a slow battle further south attempting to unseat the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and assorted other militant factions from control over the region.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the surge of 21,000 additional US troops into Afghanistan had raised the prospect that Pakistan could face even greater turmoil in the months ahead."They want Afghanistan back," he said. "We can't let them or their al-Qaeda cohorts have it. We can't permit the return of the very same safe havens from which the attacks on 9/11 were planned and resourced.

"Yet we can't deny that our success in that regard may only push them deeper into Pakistan."

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. "It's been a long time since there has been a displacement this big," the UNHCR's spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. "It could go back to Rwanda."

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan's political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan's turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

Unable to pacify Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes (a.k.a. Taliban), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan's media, the rest civilians.

Whatever the actual chain of events that transpires, the great (and avoidable) tragedy is that the policies the US is pursuing in the region greatly increase the likelihood of the loss of Pakistan to the Islamists. The frightening consequences of this, for both Pakistan and the US, are easy to imagine. Any successes the generals can achieve in their war in Afghanistan would be meaningless; military campaigns divorced from the real needs of national policy usually end up as expensive failures. The pages of history are littered with them.

As the Pakistani military’s offensive against the Swat Valley continues, around 1.45 million are reported to have successfully fled. For several families today attempting to leave their homes, that trek ended in disaster as the Pakistani military attacked and killed several of them, and wounded an unknown number of others. Women and children were among the slain

Senior U.S. officials said 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel are deploying to two new training camps in Baluchistan, a Taliban stronghold on the porous Afghan-Pakistani border. The deployment brings U.S. personnel deeper than before into tribal regions of Pakistan, which the Obama administration views as among the world's most-dangerous flashpoints.

An apparent U.S. missile strike annihilated a Taliban raiding party mustering to cross into Afghanistan, officials said, while Pakistani troops claimed another 47 kills in their bid to retake the Swat Valley.

Brigadier Fiaz Mehmood Qamer, who led a Frontier Corps assault on the area nearly three weeks ago, today urged residents to return home and ease the strain on relief camps where almost one million war displaced have fled.

US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher has said that Pakistan’s nukes are in safe hands and the US has no plans to seize them, a private TV channel reported on Thursday.

The United States has a detailed plan for infiltrating Pakistan and securing its mobile arsenal of nuclear warheads if it appears the country is about to fall under the control of the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists.

The source said JSOC has been updating its mission plan for the day President Obama gives the order to infiltrate Pakistan.

Suspected US drone aircraft fired missiles in a Pakistani region on the Afghan border today, killing at least eight people, military and intelligence officials said.

Taliban militants set fire to 10 NATO supply terminals Wednesday in northwest Pakistan, local officials said.

They said the attack near Peshawar, capital of violence-wracked North-West Frontier province, was launched by about 70 Taliban fighters, resulting in a gun fight with police, CNN reported quoting the police.

The problem with assessing President Barack Obama’s foreign policy after little more than 100 days is that it is nearly impossible to distinguish what has already become policy from approaches that might be termed more tentative. Does he really think that a continued American engagement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and on behalf of Israel serves the national interest? Maybe not. There are signs that a broad reassessment of U.S. policy is underway, though critics who have been rightly soured by eight years of George W. Bush’s blundering note that Obama appears to have embraced the interventionist formula that has proven so disastrous.

A potentially major clash appears to be developing between powerful factions inside and outside the U.S. government, pitting those who see the Afghanistan/Pakistan ("AfPak") theater as the greatest potential threat to U.S. national security against those who believe that the danger posed by a nuclear Iran must be given priority.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said his country isn’t adding to its nuclear arsenal and doesn’t have to disclose the location of its weapons to the U.S.

Putting to rest the reports that the Obama Administration was considering halting the drone strikes onto Pakistani soil, US drones fired a missile at a village in the Sararogha district of the South Waziristan Agency, killing a minimum of 10 people and injuring at least 11 others.

Swiss judicial authorities said on Tuesday they had closed a money-laundering case against Pakistani presidential candidate Asif Ali Zardari and released $60 million frozen in Swiss accounts over the past decade.

Daniel Zappelli, Geneva's chief prosecutor, said that he had no evidence to bring Zardari, 55, the widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to trial.

The signs are misleading. War between the US and Pakistan is not imminent. It's ongoing. So far the US has made more than 60 airstrikes against Pakistan using unmanned aircraft, and one commando raid using ground troops and attack helicopters. These attacks have killed more than 700 people, and even the most "optimistic" government reports count only 14 al Qaeda leaders among the dead.

If you'll stay with me for a few more minutes, I'll try to explain. But it's not easy, because we have to untangle a pack of interwoven lies.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been made homeless by the conflict.

With jet fighters screeching overhead, tens of thousands of people fled Pakistan’s once-idyllic Swat Valley yesterday, increasing a humanitarian crisis that threatens to undermine public support for the military campaign against the Taleban.

The UN says that more than 200,000 people have left Swat in the past few days, and another 300,000 are on the move or trying to leave after the collapse of a three-month-old peace deal between the Government and the Islamists this week. They will join the estimated 555,000 who have fled other conflict zones in northwestern Pakistan since August, taking the total number of displaced people in the region to more than one million.

This week brings yet another bumper crop of panic buttons and alarm bells from the powers-that-be, with ever-increasing emphasis on the "Taliban kooks with Muslim nukes" theme: one more variation on the old "mushroom clouds rising in American cities" ploy that has worked like a charm for our militarists lo these 60 years or more.

Some of the war-pushing powers-that-be are public figures in the Obama Administration (including Obama himself, who has dutifully taken on the Bushian mantle of Fearmonger-in-Chief), and some of them are shadowy, unnamed eminences in the military-security apparat, clearly aiming to act for Obama as those daggers of the mind did for Macbeth: "Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going."

Speaking to about 300 Marines at Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, Gates assured them that they wouldn't be fighting in the neighboring sovereign nation.

U.S. President Barack Obama met this week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, while another U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan resulting in dead civilians set the tone for the visit.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will undoubtedly come under renewed pressure to allow US military forces to wage war within Pakistan when he visits Washington this week for a trilateral summit meeting with President Obama and Afghanistan?s Hamid Karzai.

We are now in the midst of a full-blown campaign to "roll out the product" for a new war: this time, in Pakistan. Anyone who lived through the run-up to the invasion of Iraq should be able to read the signs -- anyone, that is, who is not blinded by partisan labels, or by the laid-back cool of a media-savvy leader far more presentable than his predecessor.

Thriving on media attention, Lieberman keeps up a barrage of inanities like his statement in an interview to a Russian publication to the effect that the US will do what we tell it to do. Despite his appearance as a thug and a buffoon, Lieberman has a broad geo-political agenda and even presumes to explain to Obama that Pakistan and Afghanistan and not Iran are the chief problem. Lieberman is working on his very own contribution to world security by pushing the idea of a USA-Russia alliance against the Islamic world (civilization) to be brokered by you guessed it Israel and its foreign minister.

The Pakistani army's assault against Islamic militants in Buner, in northwest Pakistan, is flattening villages, killing civilians and sending thousands of farmers and villagers fleeing from their homes, residents escaping the fighting said Monday.

"We didn't see any Taliban; they are up in the mountains, yet the army flattens our villages," Zaroon Mohammad, 45, told McClatchy as he walked with about a dozen scrawny cattle and the male members of his family in the relative safety of Chinglai village in southern Buner. "Our house has been badly damaged. These cows are now our total possessions."

Citing unnamed officials, the newspaper late on Sunday said the administration of President Barack Obama is worried about the potential for militants to snatch a weapon in transport or to insert sympathizers into laboratories or fuel-production facilities.

A flurry of visits to Washington by senior Pakistani military officers is underway, to be followed on May 6th-7th by visits by Pakistan President Zardari and Afghan President Karzai. Neither man is held in high regard in Washington. Indeed, a prime reason for the military visits is that Administration officials believe some form of military rule is likely to emerge in Islamabad in the foreseeable future.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Congress Thursday that unless it quickly approved some $400 million requested by the Pentagon for a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund the Pakistani military would run out of funding within weeks for its operations against insurgents in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and other areas of western Pakistan.

The New York Times quotes Abdul Bakht as saying that “they have not fired on a single Taliban yet. All they are doing is hitting the houses.” Anecdotal reports point to several civilians being killed and a growing humanitarian crisis, but the Pakistani military rarely reports civilian killings and the overall civilian toll rarely emerges until long after the offensive.