Reports the Telegraph. Some are actually also apparently fighting with the Taliban in the field.

British Muslims are providing the Taliban with electronic devices to make roadside bombs for use in attacks against British forces serving in southern Afghanistan. ...

Details of how British electronic components have been found in roadside bombs were given to David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, when he visited British troops at their military compound at Lashkagar, in Helmand province, earlier this week.

In a briefing on British operations in southern Afghanistan by Brigadier Gordon Messenger, the Royal Marine commander of the British battlegroup, Mr Miliband was shown examples of the crude, home-made devices that are being used in attacks against British patrols.

They included mobile phones filled with explosives, which could kill or seriously injure British soldiers patrolling on foot, and more sophisticated devices that can be used against military vehicles.

Explosives experts who have examined the devices say they have found British-made electronic components that enable Taliban insurgents to detonate their home-made, road-side bombs by remote control.

The electronic devices smuggled into Afghanistan from Britain range from basic remote control units that are normally used to fly model airplanes to more advanced components that enable insurgents to conduct attacks from up to a mile away from British patrols.

“We have found electronic components in devices used to target British troops that originally come from Britain,” a British explosives officer told Mr Miliband during a detailed briefing on the type of improvised explosive device (IED) used against British forces.

When asked how the components had reached Afghanistan, the officer explained that they had either been sent from Britain, or physically brought to Afghanistan by British Muslims who had flown over. ...

In August, Brigadier Ed Butler, the former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, told the Telegraph that there are “British passport holders” in the Taliban ranks. Other officers believe their soldiers have killed British Muslims fighting alongside the Taliban.

And last year, it was revealed that RAF Nimrod surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio signals in Afghanistan had heard militants speaking with Yorkshire and Midlands accents.

Remember the “How to Catch a Lion in the Sahara Desert” science jokes which often used to be found on departmental bulletin back when my generation was young?

Examples:

The Hilbert (axiomatic) method

We place a locked cage onto a given point in the desert. After that we introduce the following logical system:

Axiom 1: The set of lions in the Sahara is not empty.
Axiom 2: If there exists a lion in the Sahara, then there exists a lion in the cage.
Procedure: If P is a theorem, and if the following is holds: “P implies Q”, then Q is a theorem.
Theorem 1: There exists a lion in the cage.

The geometrical inversion method

We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it and lock it from inside. We then perform an inversion with respect to the cage. Then the lion is inside the cage, and we are outside.

The projective geometry method

Without loss of generality, we can view the desert as a plane surface. We project the surface onto a line and afterwards the line onto an interiour point of the cage. Thereby the lion is mapped onto that same point.

The Bolzano-Weierstraß method

Divide the desert by a line running from north to south. The lion is then either in the eastern or in the western part. Let’s assume it is in the eastern part. Divide this part by a line running from east to west. The lion is either in the northern or in the southern part. Let’s assume it is in the northern part. We can continue this process arbitrarily and thereby constructing with each step an increasingly narrow fence around the selected area. The diameter of the chosen partitions converges to zero so that the lion is caged into a fence of arbitrarily small diameter.

This type of scientific approach to real world tasks has not completely gone out of style, it seems. The LA Times reports that Thomas W. Gillespie and John A. Agnew, two UCLA professors of geography, et alia, in an article in MIT’s International Review, have undertaken to pin down Osama bin Laden’s current hideout, using biogeographic theory. They may be wrong, but I think we should bomb the buildings they’ve identified just for luck.

While U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching fruitlessly for Osama bin Laden, UCLA geographers say they have a good idea of where the terrorist leader was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since.

In a new study published online today by the MIT International Review, the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan

The researchers advocate that the U.S. investigate — but not bomb — the three buildings. ...

The UCLA findings rely on two principles used in geography to predict the distribution of wildlife, primarily for the purposes of designing approaches to conservation. The first, known as distance-decay theory, holds that as one travels farther away from a precise location with a specific composition of species — or, in this case, a specific composition of cultural and physical factors —the probability of finding spots with that same specific composition decreases exponentially. The second, island biogeographic theory, holds that large and close islands have larger immigration rates and will support more species than smaller, more isolated islands.

Inspired by distance-decay theory, the seven-member team started by drawing concentric circles around Tora Bora on a satellite map of the area at a distance of 10 kilometers — or 6.1 miles — apart.

“The farther bin Laden moves from his last reported location into the more secular parts of Pakistan or into India, the greater the probability that he will be in an area with a different cultural composition, thereby increasing the probability of his being captured or eliminated,” Gillespie said.

Then, informed by island biogeographic theory, the researchers scoured the rings for “city islands” — or distinctly separate settlements of considerable size.

“Island biology theory predicts that he would find his way to the largest but least isolated city of that area,” said Gillespie, an authority on measuring and modeling biodiversity on Earth from space. “If you get stuck on an island, you would want it to be Hawaii rather than one with a single palm tree. It’s a matter of resources.”

The approach netted 26 cities within a 12.4-mile radius of Tora Bora on imagery from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), a global archive of satellite photos managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. With a 2.7-square-mile footprint, Parachinar turned out to be the largest and fourth-least isolated city, the team determined.

“Based on bin Laden’s last known location in Tora Bora, we estimate that he must have traveled 1.9 miles over a 13,000-foot-high pass into Kurram and then headed for the largest city, which turns out to be Parachinar,” said Agnew, who is the current president of the Association of American Geographers, the field’s leading scholarly organization.

The researchers ruled out cities on the Afghanistan side of the border because the country was occupied at the time by U.S. and international forces and has been particularly unstable ever since.

“The Pakistan side of the border is much better for hiding because of its ambiguous political status within the country and the formal absence of U.S. or NATO troops,” Agnew said.

Faced with the prospect of picking from more than 1,000 structures clearly portrayed in the satellite imagery of Parachinar, the team decided to come up with a short list of the criteria that bin Laden would need for housing, based on well-known information about him, including his height (between 6’4” and 6’6”, depending on the source), his medical condition (apparently in need of regular dialysis and, therefore, electricity to run the machine) and several basic assumptions, such as a need for security, protection, privacy and overhead cover to shield him from being spotted by planes, helicopters and satellites.

So they looked for buildings that could house someone taller than 6’4” and were surrounded by walls more than 9 feet tall (both as judged by mid-afternoon shadows depicted on the satellite imagery), and that had more than three rooms, space separating them from nearby structures, electricity and a thick tree canopy.

Only three structures fit the criteria. The buildings also appeared to be the best fortified and among the largest in Parachinar. Two are clearly residences, the study states. The third may be a prison. But whatever the third structure is, it has “one of the best maintained gardens in all of Parachinar,” the study says.

While the three structures meet all six of the criteria that the researchers believe would be required for lodging bin Laden, an additional 16 structures in Parachinar appear to meet five of the six criteria. If bin Laden is not in the first three structures, the U.S. military should investigate these other buildings, the study urges.

Michael Yon links a SPMAGTF (Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force) Force Reconnaissance Platoon PowerPoint After Action Review of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan ambushes and attacks, well-planned, highly effective, and often cleverly designed to take advantage of characteristic Marine Corp aggressiveness.

A.Q. Khan celebrates the end of his house arrest

Another foreign policy triumph for the new Obama Administration was recorded when Pakistan announced that, there being no big, bad Republican administration to push Pakistan around any more, the need to keep up the pretence of confining A.Q. Khan, the father of the Islamic nuclear bomb and the world’s key source of nuclear proliferation, under house arrest had passed.

Presumably now the lovable old gnome can get back to work assisting the oppressed and indignant of the Third World win the respect of the decadent and Imperialist West by brandishing brand new nuclear weapons in its face.

Guardian:

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist at the centre of the world’s largest proliferation scandal, has been freed from five years of house arrest by a court in Islamabad.

Khan, lionised as the “father” of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, confessed in 2004 to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He was immediately pardoned but detained in his home.

Since then Khan has retracted his tearful televised confession. Speaking outside his house today after the high court ruling, Khan said: “It’s a matter of joy. The judgment, by the grace of Allah, is good. It is because of this judgment that I am speaking to you.”

Khan’s lawyer said the high court had declared him a free citizen. “The court has said as he was not involved in nuclear proliferation or criminal activity, there is no case against him, therefore he is a free citizen,” Ali Zafar said. ...

His confinement had been progressively relaxed over the past year as he was allowed to meet friends and give selective interviews. He travelled to Karachi at least once under tight security.

Last year a UN nuclear watchdog said Khan’s network smuggled nuclear blueprints to Iran, Libya and North Korea and was active in 12 countries. Last month the US state department imposed sanctions on 13 individuals – two of them British – and three private companies because of their involvement in Khan’s network.

Pakistan has prevented foreign investigators from questioning Khan, insisting it has passed on all relevant information about nuclear proliferation.

Khan said he had no need to answer to any foreign government. “I will always be proud about what I did for Pakistan,” he told reporters. “I am obliged to answer only to my government, not to any foreigners.”

Taliban militants have concentrated their efforts for months on interdicting US supply routes to Afghanistan from the port of Karachi, Pakistan.

75 percent of the supplies for the Afghan war pass through Pakistan, including 40 percent of the fuel used by US military forces.

The Khyber Pass, described by Kipling as “a sword cut through the mountains,” features a winding road 30 miles/48 km long through the mountains of the Hindu Kush a crucial part of the trade route between Peshawar and Jallabad.

LA Times:

Reporting from Istanbul, Turkey, and Peshawar, Pakistan—A day after blowing up a crucial land bridge, Taliban militants torched 10 supply trucks returning from Afghanistan to Pakistan on Wednesday, underscoring the insurgents’ dominance of the main route used to transport supplies to Afghan-based U.S. and NATO troops.

Months of disruptions on the route from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the historic Khyber Pass have forced NATO and American military authorities to look for other transit options. About three-quarters of the supplies for Western forces in Afghanistan—mainly food and fuel—are ferried through Pakistan by contractors, usually poorly paid, semiliterate truckers. Many now refuse to drive the route because of the danger.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said last month during a visit to the region that routes outside Pakistan had been found, but he provided no details and gave no timetable for their use. The supply question has taken on added urgency with the planned deployment of up to 30,000 more U.S. troops in the Afghan theater in the next 18 months.

The complications of moving supplies through Central Asia were also highlighted Tuesday when the government of Kyrgyzstan said it would close a U.S. air base important to the Afghan war effort. U.S. officials said talks were underway to keep the base open.

Investors Business Daily:

The Russia of Vladimir Putin and his puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, threw some sand in our gears by getting the Kyrgyz government to close a vital NATO air base in that country in exchange for more than $2 billion in aid for that country’s struggling economy.

Russia has long resisted and resented U.S. interference in former Soviet republics as well as the expansion of NATO and democracy to the Russian border. It has put economic pressure on Ukraine, invaded Georgia and threatened Poland with missile attack. Now it wants to sabotage our efforts in Afghanistan, a country it failed to swallow up.

Two weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, met with senior Kyrgyz officials during a tour of the region, and they assured him there were no discussions with Moscow about closing the base in exchange for aid.

Petraeus announced on inauguration day that Russia and neighboring Central Asian nations had agreed to let supplies pass through their territory to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, lessening our dependence on dangerous routes through Pakistan.

That need was shown Tuesday, when insurgents in Pakistan blew up a bridge in the Khyber Pass, disrupting one of two truck routes from the port of Karachi by which the 60,000 U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan receive about 80% of their supplies.

“We have sought additional logistical routes into Afghanistan from the north. There have been agreements reached,” Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said.

But as Moscow was offering new supply lines, it was also bribing the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to close the base at Manas by agreeing to provide Kyrgyzstan with $150 million in aid, to extend $2 billion in loans and to write off debt worth $180 million. Bakiyev made the announcement in Moscow.

The Russian business daily Kommersant, citing a “source close to the negotiations” with Bakiyev, said Moscow had made the U.S. base closure a strict condition for Kyrgyzstan getting aid.

A rather timid person, who knows nothing about guns, gets himself an escort and takes a ride through the Khyber Pass to go shopping at one of the arms bazaar villages in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribal province.

He finds locals making 9mm autos with hand tools. The shop he visits is loaded with swords, British Model 1853 Enfield Rifles, and Artillery Lugers at derisory prices. Xavier would love this place.

7:46 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

According to the New York Times, last July, President Bush for the first time authorized US special forces ground incursions into Pakistan without the authorization of the Pakistani government.

PressTV reports big talk from the turban-wearing set:

The Pakistani Army has been given orders to retaliate against any unilateral strike by the Afghanistan-based US troops inside the country.

Army Spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas confirmed the orders in a brief interview with Geo News on late Thursday night.

The decision was made on the first day of the two-day meeting of Pakistan’s top military commanders to discuss the US coalition’s ground and air assault in Waziristan region which killed dozens of civilians.

Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani chaired the meeting which began in Rawalpindi on Thursday at the Army General Headquarters.

Pakistan’s military commanders expressed their determination to defend the country’s borders without allowing any external forces to conduct operations inside the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, sources said. ...

The development also brought into the open the increasing mistrust between the Americans and the Pakistanis over how to handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda linked militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Some political expert predict the break out of an all-out war between the United States troops and Pakistani army following the Bush administration’s approval of ground and air assaults inside the country.

They’ll be sorry if they try.

The Telegraph reports that al-Qaeda’s American-born propaganda chief has been silent for so long that Western intelligence sources are concluding he’s gone to ask Allah for his virgins.

Months of attacks by unmanned US predator aircraft have caused carnage among the middle ranks of terrorist leaders in the lawless lands along the border with Afghanistan, where al-Qa’eda remains dangerous despite suffering a serious defeat in Iraq.

Their victims have included experienced Arab leaders and, it is now thought, Adam Gadahn, a former heavy-metal fan and so-called “killer computer nerd” originally from California. Nothing has been heard from him for months, leading intelligence experts to conclude that he may be dead.

Mr Gadahn has been credited with helping transform al-Qa’eda’s al-Sahab propaganda wing into a slick operation which communicates in fluent English and produces professional quality DVDs, including one for Osama bin Laden last year.

But he may have fallen victim to an expanded programme of predator assassinations which in the last year has targeted and killed many of al-Qa’eda’s military commanders, terrorist trainers and facilitators.

Jihadists around the world will be watching as closely as intelligence officials this week to see whether Mr Gadahn – also known as Azzam al-Ameriki – produces a new video message to mark September 11, as he has done every year since 2003.

If there is no message it will be taken as near certain confirmation that he is dead – killed either in a strike by Hellfire missiles, or perhaps by jihadi colleagues who have grown jealous of his success.

Mr Gadahn is now thought to have been killed in an attack launched from a remotely piloted aircraft in January which killed al-Qaeda’s then military commander, Abu Laith al-Libi, in Mir Ali, Waziristan. ...

Gadahn has taken on real importance as al-Qa’eda’s best known Westerner. He also became the poster boy of would-be jihadis around the world who are radicalised on the internet – and identify with a former Orange County teenager who once reviewed heavy metal bands before finding radical Islam and travelling to Pakistan in 1998.

Aafia Siddiqui

Several news agencies are describing the capture in Afghanistan last month of Aafia Siddiqui, a 1995 graduate of MIT who later earned a doctorate in neuroscience at Brandeis, as the capture of most important al Qaeda operative since 2003.

ABC story with 2:55 video.

The Pakistani scientist has been on the FBI’s top list of suspects wanted for questioning. She also had become a favorite issue for nationalists in Pakistan and the international leftist community which contended that Siddiqui had been captured several years ago, tortured, and held anonymously in Bagram Prison.

Clearly, they were wrong.

The Federal Complaint filed July 31th in the Southern District of New York provides the following details of her arrest.

b. On or about the evening of July 17, 2008, officers of the Ghazni Province Afghanistan National Police (“ANP”) discovered a Pakistani woman, later identified as SIDDIQUI, along with a teenage boy, outside the Ghazni governor’s compound. ANP officers questioned SIDDIQUI in the local dialects of Dari and Pashtu. SIDDIQUI did not respond and appeared to speak only Urdu, indicating that she was a foreigner.

c. Regarding SIDDIQUI as suspicious, ANP officers searched her handbag and found numerous documents describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons involving biological material and radiological agents. SIDDIQUI’s papers included descriptions of various landmarks in the United States, including in New York City. In addition, among SIDDIQUI’s personal effects were documents detailing United States military assets, excerpts from the Anarchist’s Arsenal, and a one gigabyte (1 gb) digital media storage device (thumb drive).

d. SIDDIQUI was also in possession of numerous chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.

Shootout at Police Station:

a. On or about July 18, 2008, a party of United States personnel, including two FBI special agents, a United States Army Warrant Officer (the “Warrant Officer”), a United States Army Captain (the “Captain”), and United States military interpreters, arrived at the Afghan facility where AAFIA SIDDIQUI, the defendant, was being held.

b. The personnel entered a second floor meeting room. A yellow curtain was stretched across the length of that room, concealing a portion of it from sight. None of the United States personnel were aware that SIDDIQUI was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.

c. The Warrant Officer took a seat with a solid wall behind him and the curtain to his right. The Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot. The weapon was loaded, but was on safe.

d. Shortly after the meeting began, the Captain heard a woman’s voice yell from the vicinity of the curtain. The Captain turned to the noise and saw SIDDIQUI in the portion of the room behind the curtain, which was now drawn slightly back. SIDDIQUI was holding the Warrant Officer’s rifle and pointing it directly at the Captain.

e. The Captain heard SIDDIQUI say in English, “May the blood of [unintelligible] be directly on your [unintelligible, possibly head or hands].” The Captain saw an interpreter (“Interpreter 1”), who was seated closest to SIDDIQUI, lunge at SIDDIQUI and push the rifle away as SIDDIQUI pulled the trigger.

f. The Warrant Officer saw and heard SIDDIQUI fire at least two shots as Interpreter 1 tried to wrestle the gun from her. No one was hit. The Warrant Officer heard SIDDIQUI exclaim, “Allah Akbar!” Another interpreter (“Interpreter 2”) heard SIDDIQUI yell in English, “Get the fuck out of here”, as she fired the rifle. The Warrant Officer returned fire with a 9 mm service pistol and fired approximately two rounds at SIDDIQUI’s torso, hitting her at least once.

g. Despite being shot, SIDDIQUI struggled with the officers when they tried to subdue her; she struck and kicked them while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans. Interpreter 2 also saw SIDDIQUI strike and kick the officers trying to restrain her. After being subdued, SIDDIQUI temporarily lost consciousness. The agents and officers then rendered medical aid to SIDDIQUI.

Abu Saeed al-Masri aka Mustafa Abu al-Yazid

Reuters reports another leading al Qaeda figure has been put out of the jihad business.

Senior Al Qaeda commander Abu Saeed al-Masri has been killed in recent clashes with Pakistani forces in a Pakistani region near the Afghan border, a security official said on Tuesday.

“He was believed to be among the top leadership of al Qaeda,” the senior security official said on condition of anonymity.

Al-Masri, which means Egyptian, was the most senior al Qaeda operative to have been killed in Pakistan’s tribal belt since the death of his compatriot, Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Qaeda chemical and biological weapons expert, last month.

Television channels identified the dead man as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid and said he was also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri.

He was killed in recent clashes in the Bajaur tribal region, a known sanctuary for al Qaeda operatives on the Afghan border, the security official said.

Yazid, commander of al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, was an Egyptian who served time in jail with al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

He has been referred to as al Qaeda’s third most senior figure, after the elimination or capture of five earlier occupants of the number three spot since 2001.

Earlier, the September 11 Commission described Yazid as the network’s “chief financial manager”.

Nearly 160 people have been killed in clashes between Pakistani security forces and the militants in Bajaur since last Wednesday.

“There are many foreign elements there, more than local militants,” the security official said.

Yazid gave a rare interview to Pakistan’s private Geo Television, aired last month, in which said a suicide bomber who carried out an attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad in June came from the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Mahmood Shah, a former security chief of Pakistan’s northwestern ethnic Pastun tribal areas, said al-Masri and Yazid appeared to be the same person.

George Friedman’s latest from the Stratfor subscription service.

The endgame of the U.S.-jihadist war always had to be played out in Pakistan. There are two reasons that could account for this. The first is simple: Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda command cell are located in Pakistan. The war cannot end while the command cell functions or has a chance of regenerating. The second reason is more complicated. The United States and NATO are engaged in a war in Afghanistan. Where the Soviets lost with 300,000 troops, the Americans and NATO are fighting with less than 50,000. Any hope of defeating the Taliban, or of reaching some sort of accommodation, depends on isolating them from Pakistan. So long as the Taliban have sanctuary and logistical support from Pakistan, transferring all coalition troops in Iraq to Afghanistan would have no effect. And withdrawing from Afghanistan would return the situation to the status quo before Sept. 11. If dealing with the Taliban and destroying al Qaeda are part of any endgame, the key lies in Pakistan.

U.S. strategy in Pakistan has been to support Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and rely on him to purge and shape his country’s army to the extent possible to gain its support in attacking al Qaeda in the North, contain Islamist radicals in the rest of the country and interdict supplies and reinforcements flowing to the Taliban from Pakistan. It was always understood that this strategy was triply flawed.

First, under the best of circumstances, a completely united and motivated Pakistani army’s ability to carry out this mission effectively was doubtful. And second, the Pakistani army was — and is — not completely united and motivated. Not only was it divided, one of its major divisions lay between Taliban supporters sympathetic to al Qaeda and a mixed bag of factions with other competing interests. Distinguishing between who was on which side in a complex and shifting constellation of relationships was just about impossible. That meant the army the United States was relying on to support the U.S. mission was, from the American viewpoint, inherently flawed.

It must be remembered that the mujahideen’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan shaped the current Pakistani army. Allied with the Americans and Saudis, the Pakistani army — and particularly its intelligence apparatus, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) — had as its mission the creation of a jihadist force in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The United States lost interest in Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the Pakistanis did not have that option. Afghanistan was right next door. An interesting thing happened at that point. Having helped forge the mujahideen and its successor, the Taliban, the Pakistani army and ISI in turn were heavily influenced by their Afghan clients’ values. Patron and client became allies. And this created a military force that was extremely unreliable from the U.S. viewpoint.

Third, Musharraf’s intentions were inherently unpredictable. As a creature of the Pakistani army, Musharraf reflects all of the ambivalences and tensions of that institution. His primary interest was in holding on to power. To do that, he needed to avoid American military action in Pakistan while simultaneously reassuring radical Islamists he was not a mere tool of the United States. Given the complexity of his position, no one could ever be certain of where Musharraf stood. His position was entirely tactical, shifting as political necessity required. He was constantly placating the various parties, but since the process of placation for the Americans meant that he take action against the jihadists, constant ineffective action by Musharraf resulted. He took enough action to keep the Americans at bay, not enough to force his Islamist enemies to take effective action against him. ...

the United States now faces its endgame under far less than ideal conditions. Iraq is stabilizing. That might reverse, but for now it is stabilizing. The Taliban is strong, but it is under pressure and has serious internal problems. The endgame always was supposed to come in Pakistan, but this is far from how the Americans wanted to play it out. The United States is not going to get an aggressive, anti-Islamist military in Pakistan, but it badly needs more than a Pakistani military that is half-heartedly and tenuously committed to the fight. Salvaging Musharraf is getting harder with each passing day. So that means that a new personality, such as Pakistani military chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, must become Washington’s new man in Pakistan. In this endgame, all that the Americans want is the status quo in Pakistan. It is all they can get. And given the way U.S. luck is running, they might not even get that.

Read the whole thing.

IBNNews reports that Pakistan’s government has denied that she died of bullet wounds at all.

Mystery shrouds the death of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto. In an explosive revelation, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz on Friday said that Bhutto did not die of bullet wounds.

Nawaz said that Bhutto died from a head injury. At least seven doctors from the Rawalpindi General Hospital – where the leader was rushed immediately after the attack – say there were no bullet marks on Bhutto’s body.

The doctors have submitted a report to the Pakistan government in which they say that no post-mortem was performed on Bhutto’s body and they had not received any instructions to perform one.

“The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically says there’s no wound other than that,” Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel.

Government sources say there will be an investigation to determine why no autopsy was conducted.

According to agency reports doctors at the Rawalpindi General Hospital tried desperately for 41 minutes to revive former prime minister Bhutto after she was shot but failed in their efforts.

Bhutto was declared dead 41 minutes after she was brought the hospital’s emergency department at 1735 hrs (local time) (1805 hrs IST) with open wounds on her left temporal bone from which “brain matter was exuding”, the report said.

It said Bhutto was not breathing at the time and her pulse and blood pressure “were not recordable”.

IANS adds: According to the report, “immediate resuscitation (process) was started” and she was taken to the operation theatre where she was attended by a team of doctors headed by Musaddiq Khan, principal of the Rawalpindi Medical College, Dawn reported Friday.

“Left antrolateral thoracotomy for open cardiac massage was performed,” the hospital report said, adding: “In spite of all the possible measures she could not be revived and (was) declared dead at 1816 hrs IST (6.16 p.m.).”

An autopsy was not carried out at the hospital “because the district administration and police had not requested the hospital authorities (for this)”, the report said.
Bhutto was shot not far from where Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan was killed by an assassin’s bullet on Oct 16.

Nasir Jaffry, a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, who was present at the assassination, reported that in its immediate aftermath:

A truck came from the local fire brigade. They took their hoses and started spraying water on the street, trying to wash away the blood.

And all forensic evidence.

CNN quotes an aide from Bhutto’s political party, who insists that she was shot.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan People’s Party information secretary, said it was clear that the former Pakistani prime minister suffered bullet wounds to her head, contrary to a government report that she died because she hit her head on a sunroof lever.

Cheema noted that if Rehman—as she said—believes she saw bullet wounds that caused Bhutto’s death, “We don’t mind if the People’s Party leadership wants her body to be exhumed and post-mortemed. They are most welcome, but we gave you what the facts are.”

Cheema emphasized that the government’s conclusion on the cause of death was based on “absolute facts, nothing but the facts.”

“It was corroborated by the doctor’s report; it was corroborated by the evidence of the footage we showed you.”

Rehman—who had been riding in the car behind Bhutto’s when it was attacked—called the government’s conclusion that Bhutto was not shot “the most bizarre, dangerous nonsense.” Watch Sherry Rehman’s interview with CNN »

“It’s beginning to look like a cover-up to me,” Rehman said in a CNN interview.

Rehman said Bhutto was hemorrhaging on the way to the hospital and that the two cars used to get her there were blood-soaked.

“There were clear bullet injuries to her head,” said Rehman. “When we bathed her we saw that.”

This 0:50 video shows the gunman firing three shots.

Al Qaeda is taking credit for the assassination, and may very well have accomplished it using Pakistani military forces, abetted by Pakistani security services, Eli Lake, at the New York Sun reports.

American and Pakistani military leaders are seeking to account for what may be renegade commando units from the Pakistani military’s special forces in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan’s opposition leader and former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

The attack yesterday at Rawalpindi bore the hallmarks of a sophisticated military operation. At first, Bhutto’s rally was hit by a suicide bomb that turned out to be a decoy. According to press reports and a situation report of the incident relayed to The New York Sun by an American intelligence officer, Bhutto’s armored limousine was shot by multiple snipers whose armor-piercing bullets penetrated the vehicle, hitting the former premier five times in the head, chest, and neck. Two of the snipers then detonated themselves shortly after the shooting, according to the situation report, while being pursued by local police.

A separate attack was thwarted at the local hospital where Bhutto possibly would have been revived had she survived the initial shooting. Also attacked yesterday was a rival politician, Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister who took power after Bhutto lost power in 1996.

A working theory, according to this American source, is that Al Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups had effectively suborned at least one unit of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s elite SAS commandos. This official, however, stressed this was just a theory at this point. Other theories include that the assassins were trained by Qaeda or were from other military services, or the possibility that the assassins were retired Pakistani special forces.

“They just killed the most protected politician in the whole country,” this source said. “We really don’t know a lot at this point, but the first thing that is happening is we are asking the Pakistani military to account for every black team with special operations capabilities.”

Abu Muqawama reminds us not believe everything we read in the MSM.

The folks on NBC, though, are making it sound as if Bhutto was some brave liberal alternative to the Musharraf regime, swallowing hook, line, and sinker this narrative that Benazir Bhutto was some kind of Pakistani Aung San Suu Kyi.

Okay, folks, we all know she was eloquent, went to Harvard and Oxford and was a darling of the English-language media. But she was arguably the most corrupt woman in the history of South Asia. She was removed from office not once but twice on corruption charges. And ruthless? She killed her own brother in 1996.

Andrew C. McCarthy thinks Benazir Bhutto’s assassination should be no surprise, considering the real nature of Pakistan.

A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

Read the whole thing.