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Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan : "Durrani, who participated in the joint Pakistan-Afghanistan peace efforts in the Pakistani city of Peshawar last year, continued, 'Nobody is in favor of operations, not even those who are actually doing the operations. Even people from [the port city of] Karachi, who are considered ultra-liberal [are against operations] and on the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque] operation, I found them calling it irrational.' Durrani was referring to security forces storming the radical mosque in Islamabad last year to root out militants. Should Pakistan scale down or halt its operations in the tribal areas, where it has thousands of troops, the US might be forced to act. Reports have been swirling for some time of US plans to undertake aggressive covert operations inside Pakistan."

New U.S. Tactic: Bomb Roads, Before the Iraqis Do | Danger Room from Wired.com : "ince the Iraq insurgency started, I must have heard a thousand idea for beating roadside bombs -- from lightning guns to radio-controlled toys to mine-mashers to microwave blasts to new roads to just plain walking. But this NPR report reveals a brand new tactic for dealing with deep-buried improvised explosives: fly a B-1 overhead, and bomb the living crap out of the road itself. Detonate all those weapons, in other words, before the insurgents do. It's all part of an absolutely ginormous U.S. assault on Sunni insurgent strongholds north and south of Baghdad -- seven battalions, in an region that was once patrolled by just 500 soldiers, Phil Carter points out. Phil spent a year where all those troops are now. He's confident that American forces can kick around any insurgents they find there. But he's still pessimistic about how far this war can move beyond wack-a-mole. Or bomb-a-ro...

Iraq Less Violent and Hellish Only in Numbers - by Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail : "Iraqi people do not speak of improvement. They do not see it; they see only that these claims have become important for the US elections."

Bush Fails Again - by Charley Reese : "To understand the failure of the president's trip to the Middle East, which is foreordained and doesn't have to be completed in order to fail, take note of two words that the president will not utter: 'occupied territories.' Let's review the situation from the standpoint of international law. The West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and a smidgen of Lebanon the Israelis still occupy are officially designated as occupied territories. They were seized in war. Jerusalem is officially an international city, so designated by the United Nations partition resolution that created the state of Israel. The Israelis, of course, long ago declared the resolution null and void. As occupied territories, they fall under the Geneva Conventions. An occupying power is not allowed to take land or to build settlements in occupied territory. It is not allowed to destroy homes, to uproot olive groves, to deport people, and to wall ...

Six Years Of Guantánamo: Enough Is Enough - by Andy Worthington : "For two and a half years, the administration succeeded in its aims, running an illegal offshore interrogation center, which mutated into a torture prison when the detainees proved resistant to interrogation. The 'enhanced interrogation techniques' introduced by the administration included prolonged solitary confinement, forced nudity, sexual and religious humiliation, sleep deprivation, the use of extreme heat and cold, and the use of painful stress positions. Despite condemnation by world leaders, international legal experts, global bodies including the United Nations and an unprecedented array of former US military commanders, the administration defined torture so narrowly – as being equivalent to organ failure or death – that it refused to concede that it was actually engaged in torture."