This Ambassador Is A Sore For US-Pakistani Relationship

By AHMED QURAISHI | WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM

“I have a challenge for Ms Patterson today. I challenge her to repeat every single word she said back then and swear it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth … America’s reputation is lying in the lowest gutters in Pakistan at the moment and it can’t sink any lower.”

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—US Ambassador to Pakistan Ms. Anne W. Patterson is becoming quite controversial. She has overseen the worst spell in the relationship between Washington and Islamabad in sixty years and many say she is responsible for at least some of it. Ties weren’t this bad even when the United States unfairly sanctioned Pakistan in 1990 over its nuclear program.

Mr. Thomas Houlahan, a Washington DC-based expert on Pakistani military issues, accused her in 2008 of conducting ‘bunker diplomacy’—that is, conducting United States diplomacy with Pakistan from the barricaded and isolated confines of her office inside a heavily fortified embassy building which in turn is located inside the isolated Diplomatic Enclave in an outer tip of Pakistan’s federal capital.

Her reports back to Washington are misleading, explained Mr. Houlahan, because she doesn’t really know what Pakistanis are thinking.

Pakistan rejects nuke takeover

Islamabad – Pakistan on Sunday angrily rejected a media report that raised fears of a militant takeover of the Taliban-hit nation’s nuclear weapons and suggested that the US had a hand in protecting the arsenal.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that US officials had negotiated pacts with Pakistan to provide security for the nuclear arsenal in extreme circumstances.

It also raised the possibility that the threat to the security of the nuclear programme might come not from Taliban rebels battling the government, but from a “mutiny” by fundamentalist elements within the powerful military.

In response, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying that the nation’s nuclear materials “are completely safe and secure”.

Pakistan Says Thanks To Hillary, And Shut Up To Chidambaram

Ahmed Quraishi

Pakistan has rejected the US demand for crackdown against members of the so-called Afghan Taliban Shura allegedly hiding in Balochistan and termed the US claims as baseless and unfounded.  At the same time, Islamabad simply brushed aside the noise generated by India’s interior minister who tried to scare Pakistan with the threat of war but ended up producing giggles in the Pakistani capital.

Pakistan, however, accepted to help Washington in intensifying talks with the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, an idea which Mrs. Clinton floated in Islamabad after months of so far pointless attempts at talks with the Afghan Taliban.

Where Is The Mourning, Mr. Zardari?

To Our Elite And Not Just The President: Was a reception for a foreign guest more important than sharing the grief of your people?

More than one hundred innocent Pakistanis killed in one day, more than two hundred in less than a month. Attacks linked to our own and America’s failed Afghan policy. Attacks supported by anti-Pakistan forces in the region and not just unknown ‘extremists’. Children left without parents, a nation terrorized. And the response of our political elite? Dinner, toasts and merrymaking in Islamabad. Was a reception for a foreign guest more important than sharing the grief of your people? A shameless foreign-backed ruling elite.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—One hundred and ten killed in one day. More than two hundred dead in less than a month. If this were any other country, emergency would have been declared, nation would have been mobilized, and intellectuals would have moved to question the policies of rulers who draw their strength from Washington and London and not from the people and the interests of Pakistan.

Ambassador Patterson MUST Be EXPELLED

The United States really will never stop whining. It is time to crush the US war-hysteria for the last time in Pakistan. Pakistan should go on the offensive and we should deliver selective strikes inside Afghanistan destroying drones and whatever equipment is to be used against Pakistan.

KARACHI, Pakistan—After the controlled media leaks about US concerns of a Taliban ‘safe-haven’ in Quetta, the US Ambassador in Pakistan has come out and spoken to the media about it. Instead of denying reports that the US might attack the provincial capital of Balochistan, she says the US will have to do what it has to do to take out terrorists.

US Recruiting Retired Pakistani Military Officers

Who Protected Ali Zaidi, A Frontman For American Mercenaries In Pakistan?

An AhmedQuraishi.com Report

Despite denials by the US Embassy in Islamabad, this incident exposes the presence of American private security operations similar to Blackwater in Pakistan. The embassy and US citizens working for either the US government or the US military are recruiting retired and well connected Pakistani military officers in order to build a network of informants and special operations agents inside Pakistan. This is tantamount to creating a US military presence in Pakistani cities without sending the US army into Pakistan. To counter reports the growing reports of how the US is raising private security militias armed with heavy weapons to supplement the existing information-gathering network and the coming expansion in the US diplomatic presence in Pakistan; the mainstream US media is churning out stories that seek to discredit these reports as ‘conspiracy theories’.

Anti-US Wave Imperiling Efforts in Pakistan

Karen DeYoung and Pamela Constable | Washington Post

A new wave of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan has slowed the arrival of hundreds of U.S. civilian and military officials charged with implementing assistance programs, undermined cooperation in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and put American lives at risk, according to officials from both countries.

In recent weeks, Pakistan has rejected as “incomplete” at least 180 U.S. government visa requests. Its own ambassador in Washington has criticized what he called a “blacklist” used by the Pakistani intelligence service to deny visas or to conduct “rigorous, intrusive and obviously crude surveillance” of journalists and nongovernmental aid organizations it dislikes, including the Congress-funded International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute.

Mazari vs. Patterson

Clarifications By Jang Group, Shireen Mazari & PakNationalists

The ambassador of the US in Pakistan has accused a prominent columnist and US critic of endangering the life of a US citizen without providing any evidence to support this claim. The newspaper puts the burden of proof on the columnist. The US ambassador gets away with making a serious allegation without proof. What is wrong with this picture?

Read Full AhmedQuraishi.com Report

US Embassy Is Helping Recruit Pakistan Government Spies

Senior U.S. diplomats have recently arranged a limited reception in Islamabad where senior civil servants were invited to meet an Indian diplomat suspected of being an intelligence officer. Is this the new mission of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad?

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—While Pakistan is busy in battling a foreign-funded local proxy Taliban in Swat, Malakand and other areas, the Americans and the Indians are exploiting a distracted Pakistani state to recruit influential Pakistanis as spies.

The American embassy in Islamabad is acting as facilitator in hiring influential Pakistani government officials. U.S. diplomats in Islamabad are facilitating meetings between Pakistani officials and Indian intelligence officials representing RAW.

Read Full Report | Zaid Hamid

Concern over officials’ unauthorised contacts

DAWN Report: The government has taken notice of officials attending functions hosted by foreign missions and diplomats in the federal capital without approval from their departments.

One such function held at the residence of a western diplomat was attended by CDA chairman Tariq Mahmood, PM secretariat’s joint secretary Amna Imran, police officer Mir Waiz Niaz, Prof Amar Bhatti of Quaid-i-Azam University, Lok Virsa director Khalid Javed and Pakistan National Council of Arts director-general Naeem Tahir. Indian diplomat Rajinder Kumar Sharma also attended the function..

Pakistan’s Sovereignty On Sale?

This column shows the rising backlash within Pakistan’s middle class against the country’s American puppet rulers.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—When the October 2005 earthquake shook our world, the then American ambassador Ryan Crocker planned taking charge of relief efforts. He convinced the Musharraf government that the Americans were the best thing that could happen to Pakistan at their time of need! ‘We can do a better job than the Pakistanis’ was his loud message. Crocker and his team of army men landed at the PM Secretariat to set up their disaster management headquarters. “Big beefy colonels toting their cell phones and walkie-talkies roamed the corridors barking orders at us,” an eyewitness tells me. “We were running like scared chickens trying not to get trampled.”

Durrani Takes The Battle To Gilani

Counter Attack

Invisible hands in the government, close to Gen. Durrani, are working up the media against Prime Minister Gilani. Mr. Durrani has apparently been advised to uppe the ante. And lucky for Durrani, a media savvy member of the pro-U.S. group within the Zardari government is in Islamabad these days to help in dealing effectively with the media: Husain Haqqani.