Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from Afghan Journal:
Pakistan military: the enemy within ?
The breach of security at a major Pakistani navy base in the southern city of Karachi has, inevitably, raised questions of complicity, which must be the greatest worry once the night-long siege by the militants ends and the military has finished counting its losses.
That a group of 15 or more attackers armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades could gain access to the inner perimeter of the Mehran base and succeed in blowing up one U.S.-supplied P -3 Orion maritime aircraft and damaging another aircraft, while holding off security forces for more than 12 hours speaks of a large, complex attack that needs some level of help from within. One former Pakistani navy official told a TV channel that the attack appeared to have been planned from a map of facility.
Time magazine's Omar Wahraich wrote that most analysts believe the success of an apparently well-organized attack on this scale would have required at least some complicity from within the military. In terms of the sheer audacity of the attack, this one is similar to the Oct. 10, 2009 attack on the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, in which militants penetrated the heavily guarded installation and held several senior and junior officers hostage. The attackers were found to have links to low-ranking military personnel with fundamentalist sympathies, Wahraich notes.
Is the ground starting to shift under the Pakistan military ? First the militants that it nurtured turned against it. such as the Pakistani Taliban which has vowed a war against the state and has claimed responsibility for the Mehran attack. Now, are elements within the military turning against the state as it comes under unprecedented international pressure to roll up the militant networks ?
An effective weapon in the war on terror: women
C.M. Sennott serves as a GlobalPost correspondent, where this article first appeared.
BOSTON — In Peshawar, Pakistan, the sermons of radical imams are carried on loudspeakers atop the minarets of mosques, and the words echo in the narrow streets.
from FaithWorld:
Almost two million vanish from Obama’s estimate of U.S. Muslims
(Dawn front page for Sunday, 21 June 2009)
Almost two million people have inexplicably disappeared from the estimates of the U.S. Muslim population that President Barack Obama has given recently. In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, he spoke about "nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today." On Sunday, the Karachi daily Dawn published an interview with him where he said "we have five million Muslims."
There was no explanation for the change, but his reason for citing the figure seemed to be the same. Shortly before his Cairo speech, Obama told the French television channel Canal Plus that "one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." He cited no figure there but mentioned seven million in Cairo three days later.
