Pakistan Information & News

PENTAGON

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has had ancient contacts with India on missile protection topic but is not in talks to put up for sale it missile defense systems, a defense spokesman said.

“The United States and India recently are not talking about the auction of any U.S. missile defense systems to India,” said Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Upton.

A U.S. daily, citing U.S. embassy officials in New Delhi, said the United States was in first round talks about sales of U.S. missile defend systems to guard New Delhi against nuclear threats.

A U.S. defense official explained the communication with the Indians as being on “a very elementary level.”

“We have called them to scrutinize two tests this year to make easy discussions of the two countries’ ballistic missile defense test programs,” the official said.

But the official said the summons was comprehensives with the understanding that it did not signal “U.S. purpose or eagerness to sell the systems caught up.”

Dana Perino

Washington: The United States today called for a “durable and lasting” ceasefire in Gaza but said any such truce should have pre-conditions including an end to Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel.

“We want to get to a durable and lasting cease-fire as soon as possible and, if that is immediate, then we would certainly welcome that,” White House spokesperson Dana Perino said.

Perino said the US is looking into three elements of such a ceasefire.

“We want the rocket attacks from Hamas into Israel to stop. We want the smuggling to stop. This is in regards to the tunnels. And we want to return to the open border crossing in the way that we had in the 2005 access agreements,” she said.

“Those are the three things that we would like to get to in a cease-fire, and that’s what Secretary Rice will be working,” she said referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to New York to hold consultations with the world leaders at the UN and attend meeting of the UN Security Council.

“We have counseled our ally, Israel, to be very cautious about protecting innocents. And I do think that the Israelis take great care to do so,” she said.

Gaza War

GAZA CITY: The death toll from Israel’s 12-day-old unpleasant on Hamas in the Gaza Strip has conceded 700, medics said on Wednesday.

The disgusting unleashed on December 27 has killed 702 people and wounded more than 3,100, the head of Gaza emergency services, Moawiya Hassanein, told media.

At least 220 of the dead have been children, he said.

India-America

WASHINGTON: U.S. cities are vulnerable to an attack like the gun-and-grenade assaults that terrorized Mumbai for three days and killed 179 people, the White House homeland security adviser said on Wednesday.

Ken Weinstein told a Washington think tank that the Mumbai attacks in November showed the effectiveness of a low-technology coordinated assault on an open city.

“You can envision that happening in any American city, and it’s chilling when you think about it,” Weinstein told policymakers and others in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That’s the kind of thing that is all too realistic anywhere in the world.”

Weinstein’s comments reflected a growing unease among international security officials that the Mumbai attacks may have established a new model for terrorism.

He spoke a day before government and local officials were to testify to Congress on the Mumbai attacks. The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday will consider the response by Indian officials, and what is needed to prevent such an attack in the United States.

“We’re going to go through where they screwed up, and how do we fix it — how do we make sure we don’t make the same mistakes?” committee spokesman Seam us Hughes said.

Stephen Hadley

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush’s national security adviser said Tuesday that Iran is the major challenge President-elect Barack Obama will face in the Middle East and that more approves will be needed to force Tehran to relinquish its nuclear objectives and hold up for radicals.

Exterior the Mideast, the next administration’s pinnacle priority should be stabilizing an increasingly unstable Pakistan, Stephen Hadley said.

In a nearly hour-long discussion with media, Hadley said the Bush White House has been trying to “prop up and store up influence” on Iran to bestow to the Obama government. Obama’s challenge, he said, will be to use those sanctions to force Iran to change its actions.

Saying that European officials have pointed to Tehran’s dependence on gasoline imports and its need for additional refining equipment, Hadley added that “one of the questions is whether these kinds of vulnerabilities provide a potential source of leverage, and this is the kind of dialogue that we will continue to have with the Europeans.”

While the Middle East presents challenges, he said Obama might also find his largest far-off policy prospect there, in the form of a calm agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That’s a supercilious goal considering the current growth of aggression between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that joystick the Gaza Strip.

Last month, Obama recommended a mixture of economic inducements and tighter sanctions might influence the Iranian administration to change its behavior and change its nuclear program. The U.S. and its associates think that Iran is following nuclear weapons capabilities and has demanded it hang up its enhancement program, but Tehran persists it is concerned only in nuclear power generation.

Iran, however, has cast off the carrot-and-stick move toward as intolerable and insists it has the right to continue.

Hadley would not offer suggestion on whether the inward government should boost dialogue with Iran. But, he said, the U.S. “would be idiotic to talk without influence, because talking and negotiating without leverage won’t get you a deal that will go forward your interests. If you want to change the deeds of a country like Iran, you have to have leverage.”

And right now, he said, the U.S. is still short of the leverage needed to force that change.

Barack Obama

WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama Monday spoken anxiety about the Gaza calamity but harassed he would not obstruct in “fragile discussions” by the gregarious US government.

Asked about whether Israel’s unpleasant against Hamas was off-putting him from his economic agenda, Obama told reporters “obviously, worldwide affairs are of bottomless alarm.”

“I sturdily consider that a president or president-elect or his team should be able to do more than one thing at a time. With the circumstances in Gaza, I’ve been getting briefed every day,” he said.

Obama has countenanced censure for his silence on the Middle East violence, especially in the Arab world and European press. It adds to the huge challenges awaiting him when he succeeds President George W. Bush on January 20.

But the president-elect stressed: “I will continue to insist that when it comes to foreign affairs, it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time, because there are delicate negotiations taking place right now and we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake.”

George W Bush

CRAWFORD: US President George W. Bush strut with Indian and Pakistani leaders Wednesday and decided on the need to shun any moves that could intensify tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Speaking individually with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Bush “advised mutually … to lend a hand with each other in the Mumbai attack examination as well as on oppose terrorism in general,” said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

“All three leaders from the United States, India and Pakistan agreed that no one wanted to take any steps that unnecessarily move up tensions,” he added.
Bush, India, Pakistan concur on have to to drench tensions
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Zardari retell to Bush his administration’s position “that it would not permit its territory to be used by non-state actors for launching attacks on other countries,” his spokesman Farhatullah Babar told a foreign news agency.

“Anybody found concerned in such attacks from the soil of Pakistan will be dealt with strictly,” he added.

Pakistan Tuesday called for talks with India to resolve tensions, as New Delhi starved of asserts it had enthused troops into nasty positions on the border.

Officials in Islamabad said last week that Pakistani troops had been shifted from the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to the eastern border with India, following intelligence that New Delhi had redeployed troops to the area.

But an Indian army spokesman said there had been no troop movements on its side of the frontier.

Earlier Wednesday Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram said Pakistan was in “denial” over the Mumbai attacks and refusing to acknowledge evidence linking the gunmen to elements in Pakistan.

He told reporters the Pakistani father of the sole surviving gunman had confirmed to Pakistan television that his son was involved. “If that is not evidence, then what is?” Chidambaram asked.

And India’s subordinate foreign minister, Anand Sharma, said New Delhi had supplied key proof to Islamabad connecting the invaders to groups in Pakistan.

“Everyone knows who are the schemers and from where they came. We have given sufficient evidence,” Sharma said in the Indian city of Chandigarh.

“Proof is not only with India but also with the investigating agencies of the United States and Britain (and) instead of being in a rebuff method, Pakistan should take effectual steps to bring those accountable to fair dealing,” he said.

McCain

WASHINGTON: U.S. Senator John McCain has expressed his profound fear over anxious South Asian state of affairs, saying India was planning for some kind of attack on Pakistan in the wake of last month’s Mumbai attacks.

The earlier Republican presidential candidate’s report precedes a relative de-escalation in the anxiety as both Islamabad and New Delhi harassed evasion of war and talked peace over the weekend.

“The Indians are on the edge of some kind of attack on Pakistan,” such as an air attack on alleged militant camps, he told to Daily News in his home state Arizona published Monday.

Pakistan Tuesday saw some optimistic signs over the last two days in Indian leaders’ statements but optional New Delhi de-activate its forward air bases and move its ground troops back to peacetime locations to recommence friendly atmosphere.

“I think it’s a very risky circumstances,” McCain said, noting how both countries have nuclear weapons.

Canadian Soldiers

TORONTO: Canada, which attached the US-led alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002, has gone astray over one hundred soldiers and the number of offended has ascended over to 360.

The current information geared up by the Defence Department show that 106 soldiers have died in Afghanistan and the number of injured increased to over 360 plow yesterday.

In early December, the country surpasses the psychological highlight of 100 deaths and over the last few weeks six extra soldiers have lost their lives in wayside bomb attacks.

Under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Canada has organized 2,500 soldiers for the Afghan assignment to be in charge of rebellion in the southern Afghanistan’s unstable Kandahar region.

Yesterday two Canadian soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb blast in Panjwayi district of southern Afghanistan.

In spite of the fact that the Canadian troops have been targeted with volatile devices (IEDs) by the Taliban in the current months, Canadian mission, which was to end next year, has been comprehensive till December 2011.

Barack Obama

CRAWFORD: President-elect Barack Obama’s evolution team is wishing its words cautiously in commerce with Israel’s attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The losses of hundreds of Palestinians in Israel’s deadly air stabbing on Hamas will extra make difficult Obama’s challenge to attain a Middle East peace, something that escaped both the Bush and Clinton administrations.

David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, chose his words carefully, saying the president-elect would honor the “important bond” between the United States and Israel.

Pressed about how much support Obama will offer Israel, Axelrod said: “He’s going to work closely with the Israelis. They’re a great ally of ours, the most important ally in the region, but he will do so in a way that will promote the cause of peace, and work closely with the Israelis and the Palestinians on that, toward that objective.”

The Bush administration has blamed the renewed violence on the militant Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, saying it broke a cease-fire by firing rockets and mortars deep into Israeli territory. The Arab world, however, has reacted with rage to the aggressive Israeli counterattacks, which have left at least 290 Palestinians dead and more than 600 wounded.

It’s unclear whether Obama will be as supportive of Israel as President George W. Bush has been.

Bush, who is staying at his Texas ranch, spoke on the phone with national security adviser Stephen Hadley to receive an update on the situation and was being kept abreast of developments throughout the day, said Gordon Johndroe, a presidential spokesman. He said Bush would receive an intelligence briefing via a secured video hookup at the ranch early Monday morning and would be briefed then on any overnight developments.

According to an aide on Obama’s transition team, the president-elect, who is in Hawaii, continues to closely monitor global events, including the situation in Gaza. He had an intelligence briefing Sunday and plans to talk with his incoming national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his nominee for secretary of state.

Foreign Minister Ali Babacan

ANKARA: Turkey’s foreign minister warned Monday that Israeli air strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza threaten to escalate into a wider crisis across the region.

Foreign Minister Ali Babacan called for an immediate cease-fire as Israel continued its attacks for a third day Monday. The air strikes have killed more than 300 people.

“There should be an immediate cease-fire,” Babacan told a joint news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

“Otherwise, the situation will not be limited to Gaza only, but it might develop to extended challenges in the region and make thesituation worse.”

Aboul Gheit signaled that the two countries could join forces towork to end hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will this week travel to four Middle Eastern states _ Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt _ for consultations on ways to “restore peace” in the region, Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek told reporters following a Cabinet meeting.

Babacan said Turkey was keeping channels of communication open, including with the Hamas leadership.

However, he said Turkey was suspending its role as mediator for peace talks between Israel and Syria. Syria announced Sunday it was suspending the peace talks launched in May because of the attacks on Gaza.

Syria and Israel held direct talks in the late 1990s and early2000 but negotiations broke down over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, a strategic territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Syria insists on the complete return of the Golan Heights, while Israel wants to keep a strip of land around the Sea of Galilee.

On his return to Cairo, Aboul Gheit told reporters that Turkey and Egypt both agree on the need for an immediate cease-fire. He also suggested that once a new truce is established, European and Arab observers could be assigned to check that both Hamas and Israel abide by it.