Here is a quick scorecard of the drawbacks and benefits of this development for regional neighbors:

1. Iran is a winner given that US troops will be out of Afghanistan. In the early zeroes, Iran was surrounded militarily, with over 100,000 troops in each of Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the Biden administration intends to get all troops out once the Kabul U.S. embassy personnel are safe. The US presence in Iraq is negligible. The US has tried to squeeze Iran economically in a bid to weaken or overthrow its government and to dissuade Tehran from its civilian nuclear enrichment program. With fewer US troops on their borders, Iranian leaders will rest a little easier.

Although Iran is being cautious in its statements on Afghanistan, and denies rumors of border clashes with the Taliban, the dominance of Iran’s neighbor by a hard line Sunni fundamentalist movement will raise some fears in Iran, which almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998.

There will also be a new wave of Afghan refugees into Iran, which the government says it will allow on humanitarian grounds.

2. Pakistan is a winner in this situation regarding foreign affairs, since its main concern is its enemy India, and says it will recognize the Taliban government. The Pakistani military had been unhappy with the governments in Kabul after 2001, viewing them as tilting toward India and hostile to Pakistan’s interests. Just two months ago former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani accused Pakistan of sending 10,000 militants over the border and of declining to push the Taliban to negotiate. Prime Minister Imran Khan called the charge “unfair,” stressing that Pakistan had indeed urged the Taliban to enter talks. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar complained that India could not pursue commerce with Afghanistan as it wished to because of Pakistan’s interference. Pakistan lies between India and Afghanistan, and the latter is potentially a route for Indian overland trade to Central Asia and even, if fast rail lines are built, all the way to China. Imran Khan retorted that India’s isolation was a result of militant Hindu fundamentalism, embodied in the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that is the handmaid of the governing far right wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

Pakistan had been afraid of being surrounded, with India on one side and a pro-New Delhi government in Afghanistan on the other. With a Taliban victory, Pakistan now has an ally in Kabul.

There are nevertheless drawbacks of this development for Pakistan. At a recent conference a Pakistani academic, Professor Shabir Ahmad Khan warned that developments in Afghanistan could have a “massive spill-over on the neighboring countries in the form of drug trafficking, violence, and refuge crises.” In the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan had come to host some 3 million Afghan refugees in the north, a heavy burden for a poor country. More than half of those families had returned to Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era, but Pakistan must be bracing for a new influx. Islamabad says it has built fences to keep Afghan migrants out, but it has a long and rugged border with its northern neighbor and I doubt the fences will stop people.

In 2008-2016 the Pakistani military had to fight a Taliban insurgency of its own, centered in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the northwest, which spilled over onto Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Emboldened by the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan could see a resurgence, roiling domestic Pakistani security. Certainly, urban, secular-minded Pakistanis will be alarmed at the fundamentalist takeover of such an important neighbor.

3. India is a loser. Its access to Central Asian markets is further blocked. Pakistan has a new ally. The future of its Chabahar Port in southern Iran, which had been intended to bypass Pakistan, is in doubt.

4. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, neighbors of Afghanistan, are afraid of the influence of hard line Muslim fundamentalism. Uzbekistan’s elite is post-Soviet and secular-minded, and views Taliban-type thinking as a form of terrorism. Tajikistan had a big fundamentalist movement of its own after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which elites in Dushanbe suppressed. Both will likely strengthen their military ties with Russia, as Nikola Mikovic points out in his column today.

5. Russia is a potential winner. Since relations with the US soured after the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has been less supportive of a US presence in Afghanistan. Having the US military out of Central Asia will be seen as a plus for Moscow. Likewise, it is an opportunity to reassert Russia’s security umbrella over former Soviet Socialist Republics in the region, and the latter will welcome Russian bases more readily.

The downside for Russia is that 15 percent of its population is Muslim, and Putin made his bones by putting down a Muslim fundamentalist separatist movement in Chechnya. A Taliban victory could inspire more such movements. Likewise, Moscow fears Afghanistan’s poppy production for fear of a big heroin addiction problem among Russian urban youth, and it is possible that poppy production will see an uptick, with the turmoil in Afghanistan.

6. The U.S. looks like a clear loser, especially the Biden administration, which has egg on its face from the rapid collapse of the Afghanistan government and military. There are fears that the Taliban victory will embolden the fringe of Muslim radicals. On the other hand, the U.S. did not suffer appreciably from the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in 1975. As long as the Taliban victory remains a domestic Afghanistan development, and assuming there is no uptick in international terrorism, especially in the US itself, it could well be that President Biden will weather this storm. The American public after all has a pandemic and economic crisis to worry about and may not be very interested in foreign affairs.

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Bonus Video:

France 24 English: “UN call on Afghanistan’s neighbours to keep borders open as crisis looms • FRANCE 24 English”

An anti-terror court in Pakistan has sentenced 10 men for their roles in the 2012 attack on Malala Yousafzai.

France24 English: “PAKISTAN – Court jails 10 for life over Malala attack”

China and Pakistan announced, with considerable fanfare in Islamabad, a $46 billion dollar investment program to build a transportation corridor from the western Pakistani port of Gwadar to Xinjiang region in northwestern China. In time, the route will link with Chinese railways bringing Afghanistan’s wealth to world markets.

The agreement will give China a land route with the Middle East and South Asia that does not pass through potentially-contested chokepoints near Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. The move may bring greater prosperity to the region but there are risks of greater tensions and unrest.

The India-Pakistan rivalry

The arrangement is not being welcomed in India. Its security bureaus see it as part of China’s “string of pearls” strategy of surrounding India with potential foes.. India knows well that the recent deal was preceded by the announced sale of eight Chinese submarines to Pakistan.

China is not acting artlessly. Only last September, it inked a $20 billion arrangement with India to modernize its railways, develop industrial parks, and allow Indian products greater access into China. The aim of the Pakistani deal, then, may be less to bolster China and Pakistan vis-a-vis India than to strengthen China’s influence with both countries and to benefit from greater cooperation and trade between the rivals.

There will also be concern – in India, the US, and elsewhere – that China will one day establish a sizable naval base at Gwadar, the port that China developed over the last few years which is three hundred miles from the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan publicly offered such a base at a Beijing parley but China rather pointedly declined, much to Islamabad’s embarrassment. Nonetheless, the prospect of a base so near vital oil sources will appeal to parts of the Chinese state, especially the navy whose ambitions may be increasingly influenced by navalist geopolitical thought.

Three insurgent groups

The 1800-mile route will pass through some of the most unstable parts of the region and likely aggravate local discontent. The southern terminus is in Baluchistan, a mineral-rich region comprising forty percent of Pakistan’s territory. Unfairly deprived of its autonomy by Pakistan over the years, at least in the view of separatists, the region has seen continuous unrest.

Prosperity in Pakistan has not been shared in a remotely equitable manner, especially in the Baluch region. The boon that the China deal promises is unlikely to usher in a new era and wealth will continue to go disproportionately to Punjabis in military and business elites. Baluch grievances will be underscored; the ongoing insurgency will almost certainly grow. Chinese workers have been targeted in recent years; they will be again. This problem contributes to Beijing’s coolness to a military base at Gwadar.

The transportation network will not run through restive Pashtun tribal areas. However, Afghan iron, copper, rare earths, and other minerals will pass through the storied Khyber Pass, a Shinwari- and Afridi-Pashtun region. Pashtuns have never been adequately integrated into Pakistan. They have enjoyed considerable autonomy stemming from nineteenth-century treaties with the British that Islamabad has generally respected. The Pakistani Taliban has battled state encroachments and will continue to do so. Regionalist and fiercely Islamist, the Pakistani and Afghan Pashtuns are unlikely to welcome a greater Chinese presence, even if it comes at the expense of the US.

The northern terminus is in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, home to ten million Uighurs who resent the increasing economic and political dominance of the politically-dominant Han Chinese. Uighurs have rioted in Xinjiang and launched attacks in train stations in eastern and southern China. Perhaps most unsettlingly, Uighurs have gone abroad, often by way of Vietnam, to learn the skills of war from al Qaeda fighters in eastern Afghanistan and the Islamic State in the Middle East. The link to South Asia and the Middle East will bring new wealth, greater Han dominance, and a capacious path for fighters returning to the Uighur homeland.

* * *

The investment program with Pakistan will make China even more of a world actor. China is heady with its remarkable economic success over the last few decades. But the zeal to return their country to its leading position in the world may cause it to overlook the problems and perils that come with involvements around the world.

Tensions with India and danger of insurgency aside, China is tying itself more closely to Pakistan – a country that is politically unstable, desperately poor and overcrowded, and held together, if tenuously, by an extreme form of Islam. Most importantly, China will have to steer clear of being drawn into the ambitions of Pakistan’s officer corps and intelligence services, the leaders of which have undoubtedly convinced themselves that they now have China firmly on their side.

Brian M Downing is a political-military analyst, and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning at gmail d o t com.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

VOA: “Chinese Billions Boost Friendship with Pakistan (On Assignment)”

The tragic deaths last January, just now being revealed, of two Western hostages in drone strikes on a relatively empty housing complex in northern Pakistan near the Afghanistan border underlines that the Obama administration is killing people from the air without knowing who they are and is killing significant numbers of innocent civilians. Just as hostages don’t move around outside so that spy cameras can observe them, so too in gender-segregated Pushtun society, women are often immured at home and so the CIA or US military who are running the drones do not know if they are in the sights.

Contrary to assurances given by President Obama a couple of years ago, the US government admits that it had no idea who it was targeting when it hit that building. Indiscriminate fire is a recognized war crime, and it seems to characterize the US drone program.

These are the figures for the US drone assassination program in Pakistan, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Total strikes: 415
Obama strikes: 364
Total killed: 2,449-3,949
Civilians killed: 423-962
Children killed: 172-207
Injured: 1,144-1,722

That is, as many as a fourth of those killed by US drone assassinations are non-combatants.

Death by drone is inherently lawless. There is no constitutional or legal framework within which the US government can blow people away at will. For a while in the 1970s through 1990s, assassination was outlawed.
Now it is back, but has taken this freakish form where bureaucrats thousands of miles away fire missiles from large toy airplanes. The US is not at war with Pakistan, so this action is not part of a war effort. You can’t be at war with an organization– a state of war has a technical legal definition.

The US government maintains that it is only shooting when it sees a high value target. This is a lie. They had no idea who was in the building. The US government maintains that it kills hardly any local civilians with its drone assassinations, whereas journalists on the ground find evidence of substantial non-combatant deaths. The killing of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto is not just a tragedy; it reveals the US assassination technique for the world to see.

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related video:

TomoNews: “CIA drone strike accidentally kills Al Qaeda hostages Warren Weinstein, Giovanni Lo Porto”

When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.

The fact is that both governments of Muslim-majority countries and the chief religious institutions have been engaged in a vigorous war on religious extremism for some time.

Egypt has gone too far in this direction, criminalizing the activist members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But it is also committing troops to fight extremists in Sinai. Egyptian acquaintances of mine in Cairo say that it has become unpleasant to wear a beard there (for long a sign of religious commitment).

Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi spoke to an audience of clerics at the Department of Religious Endowments a few days ago. He made waves by denouncing terrorism among Muslims, and said it wasn’t right for the rest of the world to be afraid of 1.5 billion Muslims. He pointedly insisted that the al-Azhar clerics do something about this stain on the honor of Islam, implying that they were not effectively combating extremist ideas. He called for a new sort of “religious discourse” and a “new revolution” to combat extremism.

Then al-Sisi attended Christmas Mass at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo (the first time an Egyptian president has done so). MENA reports that he told them, “It was necessary to attend the Mass to greet you on Christmas . . . Throughout thousands of years Egypt has taught the world humanity and civilization and the world expects the humanity and civilization to kick off again from our country. . . God willing, we Muslims and Christians will build our country and will accommodate and love each other.”

When he left, the Christians were applauding loudly, shouting “we love you Sisi” and “Muslims and Christians are one hand.”

Sisi has put thousands of Muslim fundamentalists in prison, most of them certainly not terrorists. He has gone too far in attempting to curb political Islam. But he cannot be accused of being soft on Muslim extremism or terrorism, for heaven’s sake.

The Egyptian Foreign Minister roundly denounced the assault on the magazine staff.

Al-Azhar Seminary, the chief religious authority in the Sunni world, condemned forcefully the Paris attacks and expressed solidarity with the victims and their families, saying that such acts of violence are forbidden in Islam.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has since last June committed himself to rooting out the Taliban Movement of Pakistan along with other extremist movements. He is having his air force actively bomb them and scatter them from their Waziristan base.

In Iraq, the government is dedicated to defeating the al-Qaeda offshoot, Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) and hundreds of troops and tribesmen have already been killed in the process. The day of the attacks, Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi expressed his solidarity with Paris. After all, what happened there is a common occurrence in Baghdad, which faces ongoing car bombings and sniping.

Not only are most Muslim authorities in the Middle East denouncing the al-Qaeda massacres,, but they are engaged in active warfare against extremists and risking the soldiers lives, with hundreds or thousands killed. And those killed by the extremists in Paris included a Muslim policeman named Ahmad and a Muslim copy-editor, a man of broad learning. How many commemorations of the victims mention that they included Muslims?

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Related video:

AFP: “Top Muslim body condemns deadly Paris attack”

“Drone strikes are the weapon of choice in America’s so-called War on Terror. They’ve been used nearly 500 times in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. But while U.S. officials praise their “surgical precision,” the reality on the ground tells a different tale. Here’s what you need to know about the U.S. drone war and its unintended consequences.”

AJ+: “Is America’s Drone War Crashing And Burning?”

KATHMANDU/PESHAWAR, Pakistan (IPS) – The goal is an ambitious one – to deliver a polio-free world by 2018. Towards this end, the multi-sector Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is bringing out the big guns, sparing no expense to ensure that “every last child” is immunised against the crippling disease.

Home to 1.8 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world’s population, Southeast Asia was declared polio-free earlier this year, its 11 countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste – joining the ranks of those nations that live without the polio burden.

United in the goal of eradicating polio, an infectious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can result in paralysis within hours, governments across the region worked hand in hand with community workers, NGOs and advocates to make the dream a reality.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of polio cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide.” — Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan

According to GPEI, immunisation drives reached some 7.5 billion children over the course of 17 years, not just in city centres but also in remote rural outposts. During that time, the region witnessed some 189 nationwide campaigns that delivered over 13 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

High-performing countries like Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bhutan eradicated polio a decade-and-a-half ago while India, once considered a stubborn hotbed for the disease, clocked its last case in January 2011, thus bringing about the much-awaited regional ‘polio-free’ tag.

But further north, dark clouds in the shapes of Afghanistan and Pakistan blight Asia’s happy tale. Together with Nigeria, these two nations are blocking global efforts to mark 2018 as polio’s last year on this planet.

Celebrating success from Nepal to the Philippines

For countries like Nepal, home to 27 million people, the prevalence of polio in other nations in the Asian region threatens its hard-won gains in stamping out the disease.

“There’s always fear that polio may see a resurgence as the disease hasn’t been eradicated everywhere,” said Shyam Raj Upreti, chief of the immunisation section of Nepal’s child health division (CDH).

Anxious to hold on to the coveted polio-free status, Nepal recently introduced the inactivated injectable polio vaccine (IPV) into its routine immunisation programme, the first country in South Asia to do so.

“While the oral polio vaccine has been the primary tool in polio eradication efforts, new evidence shows that adding one dose of IPV – given to children of 14 weeks by intramuscular injection – to the OPV [schedule], will maximise immunity to poliovirus,” Upreti explained.

He credits his country’s success to a high degree of social acceptance of the importance of child health in overall national development. “Female health volunteers play a key role in making the community understand why immunisation is important,” he said, adding that these volunteers provide services to some of the poorest segments of the population.

Between 1984 and 2011, Nepal’s immunisation coverage more than doubled from 44 to 90 percent. Ashish KC, child health specialist at UNICEF-Nepal, said that immunisation programmes didn’t stop even during the ‘people’s war’, a brutal conflict between the Maoists and the Nepali state that lasted a decade and killed 13,000 people.

“We understood that [we] needed a multi-sector approach, so service delivery was decentralised, and access was made easier,” KC told IPS. “Immunisation went beyond health, it became a part of [our] development plans.”

Such a mindset is also apparent in the Philippines, where the government recently decided to include the IPV into its national health plan, making it the largest developing country to do so.

According to a press release by Sanofi Pasteur, the multinational pharmaceutical company working closely with the Philippine government on its eradication initiatives, many Filipinos feel deeply about polio, having had a prime minister who was a survivor of the disease and lived with lifelong disabilities as a result.

“What’s striking about the Philippines is how strong a partnership there is around vaccinations,” said Mike Watson, vice president of vaccinations and advocacy at Sanofi Pasteur, referring to the unprecedented support shown by government officials and civil society at an event in Manila earlier this month that ended with several children receiving the IPV, the first of some two million children who will now be vaccinated every year.

“Getting the vaccine out to distribution centres on the smaller islands obviously poses a logistical challenge, but the Philippines has proven it’s really good at that,” Watson told IPS.

He added that strong networks of community health workers have enabled the Philippines to move into the “endgame”, the last stage in global eradication efforts that will require the 120 countries that aren’t currently using the IPV to introduce it by the end of 2016, representing one of the biggest and fastest vaccine introductions in history.

Over 5,700 km away from the Philippines, however, lives the lingering threat of polio, with thousands of children still at risk, and hundreds suffering from the debilitating results of the disease.

Pakistan’s polio troubles

This past June, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended a travel ban on all those leaving Pakistan without proof of immunisation, in a bid to prevent the spread of polio outside the country’s troubled borders.

But absent swift political action, travel bans alone will not staunch the epidemic.

A 2012 Taliban-imposed ban on the OPV has effectively prevented over 800,000 children from being immunised in two years, health officials told IPS.

In 2014 alone, Pakistan has recorded 206 cases of paralysis due to wild poliovirus, the most savage strain of the disease. Last week, 19 new cases of this strain were brought to the attention of the authorities.

“Pakistan has the highest [number of cases] among the three endemic countries worldwide,” Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication with the WHO in Pakistan, told IPS.

The situation is most severe in the northern tribal areas, where the Taliban has used both violence and terror to spread the message that OPV is a ploy by Western governments to sterilise the Muslim population.

“The militancy-racked Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) accounts for 138 cases, while the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province has 43 cases,” Pervez Kamal, director of health in FATA, told IPS.

North Waziristan Agency has registered 69 cases, while the Khyber Agency and South Waziristan Agency are struggling with 49 and 17 cases respectively.

In a tragic development, an 18-month-old baby girl named Shakira Bibi has become the latest in a long line of polio victims. Her father, Shoiab Shah, told IPS that “Taliban militants” were responsible for depriving his daughter of the OPV.

In an unexpected twist, a military offensive aimed at breaking the Taliban’s hold over northern Pakistan has given health officials rare access to hundreds of thousands of residents in the tribal areas.

With close to a million people from North Waziristan Agency fleeing airstrikes and taking refuge in the neighbouring KP province, community health workers have been delivering the vaccine to residents of displacement camps in cities like Bannu and Lakki Marwat.

Still, this is only a tiny step towards overcoming the crisis.

Altaf Bosan, head of Pakistan’s national vaccination programme, said 34 million children under the age of five are in need of the vaccine but in 2014 alone “about 500,000 children missed their doses due to refusals by parents to [defy] the Taliban’s ban.”

The government has now elicited support from religious leaders to convince parents to submit to the OPV programme.

“Islamic scholars from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt [and] Afghanistan have issued a fatwa [edict], reminding parents that it is their Islamic duty to protect their children against disease,” Maulana Israr ul Haq, one of the signatories, told IPS.

According to the WHO, Pakistan is responsible for nearly 80 percent of polio cases reported globally, posing a massive threat to worldwide eradication efforts.

Mallika Aryal contributed to this report from Kathmandu, Kanya D’Almeida from Colombo and Ashfaq Yusufzai from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Licensed from Inter Press Service

——

Related Video:

DW: “The Dangers of Fighting Polio in Pakistan | Journal”

Pakistan politics has been mired in stagnation for some time now. In September of 2013, Pakistan undertook the first successful civilian hand-off of power in its entire history. Then-president Asaf Ali Zardari was succeeded by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Despite this milestone, Pakistan’s politics have been full of tumult ever since.

Small but significant political forces refused to accept the legitimacy of the victory of the Muslim League in the fall, 2013 parliamentary elections. What is odd is that on the whole it is not the previous ruling party, the Pakistan People’s Party, that charged electoral fraud but rather the Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaf (PTI or Pakistan Movement for Change) of former cricket star Imran Khan. Also disgruntled are elements on the Punjabi religious right, the neo-Sufi movement of Tahir Qadri. These two political tendencies have staged big rallies all over the country and in the capital of Islamabad demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sharif, which is a little unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, some politicians and economists have complained that Imran Khan and Qadri are taking points off economic growth because of the turmoil they are fomenting.

Ironically, Nawaz Sharif himself set the precedent here, inasmuch as he led an effort to unseat President Zardari, with a long march from Lahore to Islamabad, and he gave speeches threatening revolution and pledging that Zardari would not serve out his five year term (he did).

So the first problem Pakistani politics has to resolve is losing elections gracefully. Al Gore probably actually won in 2000, but decided not to put the country through a highly divisive process by contesting Bush’s victory. Both Zardari and Sharif actually did win their elections in 2008 and 2013, but rivals refused to acknowledge it, undermining the legitimacy of the state. In a good sign, Imran is keeping politics out of his mourning for the dead children of Peshawar.

The military in Pakistan has been too interventionist in the country’s affairs. It was the branch of government that backed the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Group terrorists. The officers believed that such paramilitary terrorist groups would protect Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

For years now, there has been large-scale blow-back from Pakistani military’s unhealthy obsession with extra–judicial means of power, including backing the Taliban and the Haqqani group even when they hit US interests in the country. Since July, the military has been fighting its former allies among the Pakistani Taliban, producing profound resentments among the neo-Taliban.

So the second problem in Pakistani politics is achieving a political culture in which the military is subordinate to elected officials, and in which the military ceases cooperating with paramilitary groups.

The third problem is that the Federally Administered Tribal areas or FATA need to be made a province and integrated into the Pakistani state. The standard of living of people in Waziristan is extremely low. Maybe some of the investment of China in Pakistan could be slotted for FATA. This is an area where some 800,000 people have been displaced by the Pakistani military campaign against militants in North Waziristan. There are torture facilities and bomb-making workshops. These need to be rolled up and FATA needs to be developed.

Related video:

AFP from last summer: “Pakistani army confident after North Waziristan offensive ”

“”In one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s history, militants belonging to the Pakistani Taliban on Tuesday launched a brazen attack on a military-run school in the city of Peshawar. Officials said the eight-hour siege left at least 141 people dead, most of them students.

Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility for the deadly assault, saying the attack was a response to the military’s recent offensive against the militants. “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” Muhammad Umar Khorasani told reporters. “We want them to feel the pain.”

Tuesday’s attack started around 10 a.m. local time, when gunmen entered the Army Public School and Degree College in Peshawar and opened fire on students and teachers. Security forces quickly rushed to the scene.”* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur breaks it down.”

The Young Turks: “Even Other Terrorists Denounce Taliban School Attacks In Pakistan”