The London Times reports that Pakistan has sent in 80,000 troops into the area it previously surrendered to Al Qaeda with orders to root out the Islamist extremists.

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Pakistan is still refusing to permit US military actions within its borders, and threatening to withdraw from its American alliance if the US were to act unilaterally, the Chinese Xinhua news agency reports.

Abdullah Mehsud aka Noor Alam

AFP details the unhappy end of one of the innocent lambs unjustly detained by the Bush Administration. Poor Abdulah Mehsud was captured at Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan in December of 2001 and detained for 25 months before being released in March of 2004.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner wanted for the 2004 kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan blew himself up with a grenade during a clash with (Pakistani) security forces on Tuesday, officials said.

One-legged Taliban militant Abdullah Mehsud killed himself to avoid capture after troops raided his hideout, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema told AFP. …

“Abdullah Mehsud blew himself up with a grenade and died when security forces raided his hideout. Three of his accomplices were arrested,” Cheema said.

Mehsud, 32, became the leader of Pakistani Taliban insurgents based in South Waziristan in 2004, after Pakistani forces launched military operations in the troubled tribal region.

In October 2004, Islamic militants led by Mehsud pressed their demand for an end to the army moves by kidnapping two Chinese engineers working on a multi-million-dollar hydroelectric dam project in South Waziristan.

One of the hostages died in a botched rescue bid in a major embarrassment for Pakistan, which counts China as its closest ally and biggest military supplier.

Mehsud, who spent 25 months in the US-run “war on terror” prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba until his release in March 2004, escaped after the incident.

He had been hunted by Pakistani forces ever since. Officials said he had recently been involved in lauching cross-border attacks on NATO and US-led forces in Afghanistan.

“Intelligence reports pointed out his presence at a house and security forces mounted the raid. He sneaked into Zhob from Waziristan,” Cheema said.

Zhob, in southwestern Baluchistan province, borders South Waziristan.

The militant leader and his companions exchanged heavy gunfire with security forces for hours after the house was surrounded late Monday, police said.

“When our forces finally entered before dawn this morning a man blew himself up to avoid being captured. He was identified later as Mehsud,” Zhob police chief Atta Mohammad said.

Meanwhile ABC News reports:

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape …

Teams assigned to carry out attacks in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany were introduced at an al Qaeda/Taliban training camp graduation ceremony held June 9.

A Pakistani journalist was invited to attend and take pictures as some 300 recruits, including boys as young as 12, were supposedly sent off on their suicide missions.

Terrorist graduation slideshow

1:52 video

The Telegraph reports the death of the head of the Taliban’s military forces.

The Taliban’s most prominent military commander has been killed by a combined Nato-Afghan force.

Mullah Dadullah, a senior lieutenant of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was killed yesterday in the southern province of Helmand, an area which has seen intense fighting between British, American and Afghan troops and the Taliban.

Dadullah’s body was shown to journalists in the governor’s office in the city of Kandahar. Three bullet wounds could be seen on his body – one to the back of the head and two to the stomach.

Dadullah, who lost a leg fighting against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, is of the highest-ranking Taliban leaders to be killed since the fall of the hard-line regime following the US-led invasion in 2001.

His death represents a major victory for the Afghan government and the international coalition that has struggled to contain the Taliban insurgency destabilising the south and east of the country.

Bill Roggio reports that Pakistan has made another agreement conceding Bajaur, another portion of the Northwest Frontier territories, to Islamic extremists.

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Red agencies are currently Taliban-controlled. Yellow are threatened.

The much anticipated Bajaur Accord – a peace agreement purportedly with the local tribal leaders of the Mamoond tribe and the government – has been signed in Pakistan’s lawless tribal agency. The details of the agreement are not yet available, however the Daily Times has described it as “a step towards a North Waziristan-like peace accord. Bajaur Agency.” Pakistan conveniently finished negotiations as international attention is on the crisis over the removal of Pakistan’s chief justice.

It appears, like in the North and South Waziristan deals, that the government has openly negotiated with the Taliban and al Qaeda. “We hope that a North Waziristan-like deal is also reached between the government and tribal militants, led by Faqir Mohammad,” sources told Dawnon condition of anonymity. Faqir Muhammad is a senior leader within the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM, or Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Sharia Law), the “Pakistani Taliban” who has sent over 10,000 foot soldiers to fight alongside the Taliban during the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Anne Applebaum, writing at Slate, has the solution for ending the Taliban’s ability to fund itself, and gain Afghan rural support, via the covert trade in opium.

She’s perfectly right.

The Guardian reports:

A top Taliban military commander described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar was killed in an airstrike this week close to the border with Pakistan, the U.S. military said Saturday. A Taliban spokesman denied the claim.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani was killed Tuesday by a U.S. airstrike while traveling by vehicle in a deserted area in the southern province of Helmand, the U.S. military said. Two associates also were killed, it said.

There was no immediate confirmation from Afghan officials or visual proof offered to support the claim. A U.S. spokesman said “various sources” were used to confirm Osmani’s identity.

Osmani, regarded as one of three top associates of Omar, is the highest-ranking Taliban leader the coalition has claimed to have killed or captured since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime in late 2001 for hosting bin Laden.

Perhaps they could have saved themselves trouble by killing him a lot earlier. There is a report that he was captured and released by US forces in July of 2002.

Late July 2002: Taliban General Reportedly Captured, but Released After Questioning US Special Forces apprehend Mullah Akhter Mohammed Osmani, a top general and one of the six most-wanted Taliban, in Kandahar. He is flown to a detention center north of Kabul for interrogation, but is released a few weeks later and escapes to Pakistan. Contradicting the statements of many soldiers in Kandahar, the Defense Intelligence Agency says it “has no knowledge that Mullah Akhter Mohammed Osmani was ever in US custody in Afghanistan.” [Washington Times, 12/18/2002]

And here:

U.S. troops say that the military mistakenly released one of the most-wanted Taliban leaders in Afghanistan in the summer based on faulty intelligence.

U.S. Special Forces soldiers said that in late July, a Green Beret A-Team, backed by about 20 local Afghan fighters, apprehended Mullah Akhter Mohammed Osmani as he left his compound at daybreak in a town west of Kandahar. Soldiers identified him as Osmani, handcuffed him and brought him by truck to Kandahar.
Osmani, among the top six most-wanted Taliban, was flown to a detention center at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, for interrogation, the Special Forces soldiers said. He was one of the Taliban’s top generals, leading thousands of troops as coalition forces ousted the hard-line regime.

But, according to these soldiers, Task Force 180 — the overall command in Afghanistan — released Osmani a few weeks later.

U.S. government spokesmen expressed skepticism about the soldiers’ account in written responses to The Washington Times.

This Washington Postarticle says that many Taliban leaders were allowed to escape to Pakistan:

The Taliban has been driven from power, but almost all its top leaders remain at large, in many cases through battlefield deals that exchanged the peaceful surrender of territory for the safety of the defeated commander…

Among the senior Taliban officials who appear to have made it into Pakistan are Obaidullah Akhund, the defense minister; Abdul Razaq, the interior minister; Akhter Mohammed Osmani, the military commander in Kandahar; Abdur Rahman Zahed, the deputy foreign minister; and Anwar Dangar, a top commander. Afghan intelligence officials said Razaq has been based in Chaman in southwest Pakistan, while Dangar has been in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border, trying to bring together escaped commanders.

The Daily Mail has the story of a 14-day defense in Afghanistan, against overwhelming enemy forces, by twelve British soldiers (including reservists and medics) leading a small force of Afghan soldiers and police.

Actually, the fight at Garmisir seems more impressive in a number of respects than Rorke’s Drift: 12 British soldiers at Garsimir versus 139 at Rorke’s Drift, 14 days of fighting versus 1 day, a better-armed enemy, and undoubtedly considerably more shots fired.

Helmand’s provincial governor, an Afghan trusted by the British, was warning that if Garmisir fell again he would have to resign.

On September 8 the town was overrun, presenting UK commanders with a crisis.

Garmisir must be saved, but there were no British troops available.

Instead, three officers were given 24 hours to scrape together what men and equipment they could, and ordered to lead around 200 Afghan National Army (ANA) and police on a desperate 100-mile dash across Taliban-held desert in open top Land Rovers and trucks, groaning with all the ammunition they could carry.

On the night of September 10 they paused outside Garmisir and at dawn – five years to the day after the Twin Towers fell – they advanced. Captain Doug Beattie of the Royal Irish Regiment was one of the three British officers, and recalls how things went disastrously wrong within minutes, when the ANA got lost and failed to secure a vital canal crossing…

Captain Paddy Williams, the Household Cavalry Regiment officer commanding the operation, realised decisive action was needed.

Nine British soldiers in two Land Rovers raced forward to storm the correct bridge, braving mortar fire, RPGs and heavy machine-gun fire from the Taliban.

The ANA soldiers quickly lost two soldiers killed and refused to go any further, leaving the tiny British force and the Afghan police to fight on.

For 12 hours on the first day the fighting raged, with continuous airstrikes by UK and American aircraft guided in by tactical air controller Corporal Sam New of the Household Cavalry Regiment, who was to play a crucial role in the battle.

By dusk, the British held the small town’s main street, with Doug Beattie and Sam New established on a low hill outside – sheltering in the remains of an ancient fort built by Alexander the Great’s armies…

The Taliban had other ideas, and the British were soon pinned down under withering fire from three sides, sheltering in mud huts while allied jets screamed overhead, dropping precision bombs as close as they dared to the UK ground call sign ‘Widow 77.’..

Wave after wave of Taliban attacks were broken up by airstrikes and machine gun fire, while the British officers led occasional fighting patrols forward, trying to stiffen the ANA soldiers’ wavering resolve…

Finally on the fourteenth day the exhausted British troops were relieved by a force of Royal Marines.

They had fired 50,000 rounds of 7.62mm machine gun ammunition, and thousands more from SA80 rifles. Some had even emptied their pistols – weapons of last resort – as they stormed buildings.

Miraculously, when the dust settled, there were no UK fatalities.

Dozens of Afghan soldiers and police were dead, along with an unknown but certainly large number of Taliban.

Unfortunately, the position was subsequently relinquished to the enemy.

Within days the Taliban attacked again in force and the hard-won, narrow buffer zone south of Garmisir was lost.

Today the frontline is back to where it was after day one of the battle, and Garmisir remains under siege.

Doug Beattie said: “It’s nobody’s fault. The Taliban were too strong, with endless supplies of men and ammunition coming in from Pakistan.”

The Telegraph reports:

Commanders from five Nato countries whose troops have just fought the bloodiest battle with the Taliban in five years, are demanding their governments get tough with Pakistan over the support and sanctuary its security services provide to the Taliban.

Nato’s report on Operation Medusa, an intense battle that lasted from September 4-17 in the Panjwai district, demonstrates the extent of the Taliban’s military capability and states clearly that Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence (ISI) is involved in supplying it….

It is time for an ‘either you are with us or against us’ delivered bluntly to Musharraf at the highest political level,” said one Nato commander.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001 America gave Mr Musharraf a similar ultimatum to co-operate against the Taliban, who were then harbouring Osama bin Laden.

“Our boys in southern Afghanistan are hurting because of what is coming out of Quetta,” he added.

The Taliban use the southern province of Balochistan to co-ordinate their insurgency and to recuperate after military action.

The cushion Pakistan is providing the Taliban is undermining the operation in Afghanistan, where 31,000 Nato troops are now based. The Canadians were most involved in Operation Medusa, two weeks of heavy fighting in a lush vineyard region, defeating 1,500 well entrenched Taliban, who had planned to attack Kandahar city, the capital of the south.

Nato officials now say they killed 1,100 Taliban fighters, not the 500 originally claimed. Hundreds of Taliban reinforcements in pick-up trucks who crossed over from Quetta — waved on by Pakistani border guards — were destroyed by Nato air and artillery strikes.

Nato captured 160 Taliban, many of them Pakistanis who described in detail the ISI’s support to the Taliban.

Nato is now mapping the entire Taliban support structure in Balochistan, from ISI- run training camps near Quetta to huge ammunition dumps, arrival points for Taliban’s new weapons and meeting places of the shura, or leadership council, in Quetta, which is headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the group’s leader since its creation a dozen years ago.

Nato and Afghan officers say two training camps for the Taliban are located just outside Quetta, while the group is using hundreds of madrassas where the fighters are housed and fired up ideologically before being sent to the front.

Many madrassas now being listed are run by the Jamiat-e-Ullema Islam, a political party that governs Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province. The party helped spawn the Taliban in 1994.

“Taliban decision-making and its logistics are all inside Pakistan,” said the Afghan defense minister, General Rahim Wardak.

A post-battle intelligence report compiled by Nato and Afghan forces involved in Operation Medusa demonstrates the logistical capability of the Taliban.

During the battle the Taliban fired an estimated 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,000 mortar shells, which slowly arrived in Panjwai from Quetta over the spring months. Ammunition dumps unearthed after the battle showed that the Taliban had stocked over one million rounds in Panjwai.

In Panjwai the Taliban had also established a training camp to teach guerrillas how to penetrate Kandahar, a separate camp to train suicide bombers and a full surgical field hospital. Nato estimated the cost of Taliban ammunition stocks at around £2.6 million. “The Taliban could not have done this on their own without the ISI,” said a senior Nato officer.

Reuters quotes a broadcast from Al-Aribiya Television which has received a report from an unnamed Taliban official responding to the French reports of Osama bin Laden’s death last August.

The official said bin Laden was alive and that reports that he is ill are not true,” said Bakr Atyani, Al Arabiya’s Islamabad correspondent. “The Taliban checked with members who are close to al Qaeda that these reports are baseless.”

Hat tip to PJM.

The BBC reports that British forces killed Omar Farouq, a senior Al Qaeda leader, in Basra.

British forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda fugitive in a raid on a house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, security sources say.

Officials named the dead man as Omar Farouq, a top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden in south-east Asia.

Farouq was captured in Indonesia in 2002 but escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan last year.

Security sources say although he was hiding in Basra, al-Qaeda was not known to be actively operating in the area.

British military spokesman Maj Charlie Burbridge said Farouq, whom he called a “very, very significant man” had been tracked across Iraq to Basra.

He said about 200 troops surrounded the house, from where they came under fire.

A gun battle erupted and Farouq was killed in the exchange.

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Nato reports that dozens of Taliban were killed in a battle with Afghan government and Nato forces in the Southern province of Helmand on Saturday.

Reuters reports:

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America’s campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes” that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given to Musharraf’s intelligence director.

“The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,”‘ Musharraf said. “I think it was a very rude remark…”

The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were distributed to the media by CBS, said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” Musharraf said.

Before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world to maintain relations with the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and many Pakistanis were sympathetic with the neighboring Islamic state.

But within days of the attacks Musharraf cut his government’s ties to the Taliban regime and cooperated with U.S. efforts to track and capture Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that sought refuge in Pakistan.

They need to have the same conversation with more than one country right now.

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Hat tip to LGF.