India Believes Terrorists Already Control Some Nuke Sites In Pakistan

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India believes the Taliban and other Islamic extremists already have some control on nuclear sites in the frontier province:

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan’s restive frontier province are “already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington’s confidence in the security of the troubled nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline “Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost.” The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of “Muslim extremists.” A sub-head to the story said “India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor.”

Amid all that some experts in the US are pissed off that Obama and his lackeys are shrugging their shoulders at Pakistan and the Taliban:

“It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach,” Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. “Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions… and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world.”…

And as the Taliban gain strength, they also gain the upper hand and are now going mano y mano with Pakistan forces:

Taliban insurgents in Pakistan’s Swat valley may be preparing to fight the army on the streets of the scenic district’s main city, as soldiers and guerrillas adopt surprising conventional war tactics. … Shaukat Saleem , a Mingora resident who escaped from Swat on Friday, said the Taliban had blocked roads in the city with trees and boulders. They’ve mined the streets, dug trenches, made bunkers and occupied many civilian homes, he said. He said that he saw “lots” of Taliban as he was leaving the city, who stopped him for questioning at 10 to 12 of their checkpoints.”

The Long War Journal is reporting that we have struck inside the frontier province of Waziristan again against Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists:

The US has struck at Taliban and al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agencies for the third time this week. Twenty-five Taliban and al Qaeda operatives are reported to have been killed and several more were wounded in an airstrike in North Waziristan.

Predator strike aircraft fired two Hellfire missiles at a Taliban madrassa and a vehicle in the town of Khaisor, which is just outside of the town of Mir Ali, Geo News reported. The strike reportedly detonated an ammunition dump at the madrassa, causing a massive explosion. No senior al Qaeda or Taliban leaders have been reported killed.

The town of Mir Ali is a known stronghold of al Qaeda leader Abu Kasha al Iraqi, an Iraqi national who is also known as Abu Akash. He has close links to the Taliban, a senior US intelligence official told The Long War Journal in January 2007. He serves as the key link between al Qaeda’s Shura Majlis, or executive council, and the Taliban.

His responsibilities have expanded to assisting in facilitating al Qaeda’s external operations against the West, a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal in October 2008.

Included in the Long War update is the fact that the Abu Kasha network has been hit three times by the US and that we have stopped telling Pakistan about the strikes since the intelligence just gets passed onto al-Qaeda forces.

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Debka is barely one step above the National Enquirer. I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything Debka has to say.

“It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach,” Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. “Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions… and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world.”…

Curt, this is a cheap shot. What precisely did the Bush administration do to prevent Pakistan from “quantitatively and qualitatively step(ing) up production of fissile material” ?

Where is the evidence that there has been a qualitative or quantitative change in Pakistan’s nuclear activities since Obama’s inauguration?

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

Larry, who is President now and did his National Security Team have anything in place?
That is like blaming Bush for the Cole Bombing, the Kenyan Embassy and 9.11,01. Please lest get off the cheap shot commentary. It is Obama’s responsibility now.

Old trooper 9/11 occurred 8 months after Bush became POTUS

And of course they planned and executed the 911 assault in a span of a mere 8 months, John Ryan.

Bozo

Facts are this. Taliban seized Afghanistan in 1996. By the time the Clinton admin felt the importance to “roll back” the jihad movement’s increasing assaults was after the USS Cole attack in Yemen. They came up with “a plan”, but didn’t want to implement it just before a transition to a new government. So they passed the buck with some warnings.

The Bush admin officials wanted to do their own assessment, and wanted a stronger plan that didn’t “roll back” jihad and the Taliban/AQ in Afghanistan, but attempt to decimate it.

Time Magazine, no fans of Bush, document how Washington, as a whole (and not excluding those idiots in Congress), is culpable for 911.

The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own “policy review process” on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved “as fast as could be expected.” And Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to “roll back” al-Qaeda but to “eliminate” it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone—an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps—should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11.

No single person was responsible for all this. But “Washington”—that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown—failed horribly.

And indeed say that it’s unlikely that had Bush launched the Clinton Dec 2000 plan, it would have stopped 911. By then the perps were already in the US and well advanced into their plans.

Could al-Qaeda’s plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001? Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security, generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash—not wire transfers—wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored, Atta’s team might still never have been caught.

But there’s another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide—to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended—just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure.

The second paragraph is somewhat disingenuous. We only got the world’s support… including that of Pakistan and UAE… to freeze terrorist assets financially *after* the towers fell. Without that infamous event, what was the likelihood that the UAE and Pakistan… two major financial enablers… would shift their position?

This is like examining a parallel universe and claiming the powers of a seer. But one thing is certain. Your unhealthy partisanships is only surpassed by your utter stupidity.

@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Larry, I don’t think that’s the point – regardless of what stance Bush had or did not have with regards to Pakistan/Musharaf, it’s clear that we’re in need of a policy shift. I don’t know how much we can trust Indian sentiment on this, as they have a clear ideological stake in Kashmir, but clearly the Taliban is gaining ground. On this issue, though, I think Obama is much less liberal than the right gives him credit for: in the way he has gotten behind predator strikes as well as the Tokyo pledge of infrastructure support, I see a fairly conservative continuation of Bush policy.

Larry #2. Pakistan upgraded a reactor in Punjab in 2006, which doubled their national capacity to 50 warheads in a year. This was in response to Bush’s agreement with India to supply nuclear fuel and technology, and boosted their capacity. The House ratified that agreement.

In contrast, China has an estimated 450 warheads and India has about 100.

Pakistan has a no first strike policy, and only now has a comparable 2nd strike capacity.

According to YaleGlobal in April of this year, Pakistan had increased that to possess about 80 or so weapons.

As I pointed out in a comment on another thread about Pakistan’s arsenal, they do have a multi-layered system that seems effective. Not only are these stored disassembled in well fortified bunkers, and strewn over more than a dozen undisclosed locations, they do not allow any fly over capabilities of their nuclear facilities.

But like any country… including ours… there are areas of vunerability. According to the YaleGlobal article, Aug 2008 had a thwarted attack by jihadis at the gates of an ordinance factory that was producing non-nuclear weaponry components. Another area of vunerability is the transport system when moving around to different fabrication sites.

Unless the nation is completely swarmed by jihad cockroaches in a coup, the security system appears adequate… altho it’s always good policy to keep a watchful eye. What I find amusing is the Dem “warmongers” on the prowl on this issue…

I forgot to mention, Larry… the reason it comes up about increasing their arsenal again is because they made no secret of their intentions for expansion with their two new production facilities being south of Islamabad. They are also upgrading an existing facility. They are further along that the US knew, and it’s most likely that the plans and beginning started under Dubya. No argument there.

“The addition of the two reactors does two things,” Mian notes. “It allows them to make a lot more warheads, four or five a year, but it also allows them to make much lighter and more complex weapons for longer-range missiles and cruise missiles. … And triggers for thermonuclear weapons are almost always plutonium-based.”

Pakistan has not, and will not, sign a nonproliferation treaty. And their current capacity still remains lower than that of China or India.

Considering it’s the Taliban’s back yard, does that make a body nervous? Yes. Panicky? No. They’ve had both the jihad movements and a nuclear capacity for some time now, and have managed to protect it under more jihad friendly regimes… including Bhutto’s, which is the creator of the dreaded Taliban in Afghanistan.

I do not share that same degree of (somewhat) trust for an Iranian or NK system. Both have maniacs at the helm.

And triz, I am one that gives Obama points for being Bush-lite on foreign policy on many issues.

John ryan, sadly too few folks understand the meticulous planning that takes months to refine before a terrorist event takes place. Having spent 8 years in the Middle East, that was understood by those with “need to know” and warnings were sent to the Clinton folks, classified in detail but sent.

Most of you read about events ex post facto and draw conclusions. A few of US had to go back to clean up the mess and “put out some fires”. I was recalled from retirement to do that. I won’t do that again. I refuse to have bad intel from Panettas crew or take orders from a Pretender in Chief.
Be thankful for the Service of those that kept you safe and know that your timeline is way off.

Terrorists plan for many months before they execute and wait for that gap in vigilance. Obama is giving them that right now. Sadly true.