The Obama administration plans to spend nearly $50 million on Pakistani media this year to reverse anti-American sentiments and raise awareness of projects aimed at improving quality of life, confirms a Washington insider.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday that India is ready to talk all issues with Pakistan, including Kashmir, in an atmosphere free from terror, reported the Press Trust of India.

India’s ruling coalition refrained from singling out the perpetrators of yesterday’s bombing in the western city of Pune that killed nine people as the main opposition party demanded a suspension of talks with Pakistan.

Pakistan's Supreme Court suspended the presidential appointment of two top judges in an emergency ruling late Saturday that could cause a destabilizing clash between the judiciary and the unpopular, Western-backed government.

As local media reported the country was headed into a political and judicial crisis following the decision, President Asif Ali Zardari's spokesman issued a statement dismissing rumors the government was planning to declare a state of emergency.

In comments published today in a Pakistani business paper, US Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin pressed for Pakistan to dramatically raise taxes, insisting that “Pakistanis pay less for their government than nearly any other country in the region.”

According to the official, the plan will build a number of smaller training centers in the Northwest. Senior US officials have said they hope to train more than 9,000 members of the Pakistani Frontier Corps paramilitary force. The plan will also slash their previous four-year training time by half.

This comes at a time when anti-US sentiments are running high in Pakistan. Indiscriminate US drone attacks have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas, resulting in a surge in anti-American sentiments.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari may become a figurehead before March 23, celebrated as Pakistan Day, official sources said.
“Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has begun efforts to create a consensus on repealing the 17th Amendment (which empowers Zardari to sack the elected Assemblies) before the presidential address to the joint sitting of Parliament,” a government official said.
He added, “The Prime Minister talked over the phone to PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif and Awami National Party president Asfandyar Wali Khan on Monday night and discussed the constitutional amendments being debated by the parliamentary committee on constitutional reforms.”

THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

To many Pakistanis the most shocking aspect of the latest Taliban suicide bombing the question was: What was a team of American soldiers doing in a volatile corner of North West Frontier province?

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

India has offered to resume bilateral talks with Pakistan that were halted after the deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks nearly 15 months ago, an official said Thursday.

India proposed the resumption of discussions between the foreign secretaries on terrorism and other issues, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the matter. Pakistan welcomed the offer.

The attack is just the latest confirmation of the commitment President Barack Obama has made to the assassination campaign inside Pakistan -- a close US ally -- that began under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

A new bill passed by the Pakistani parliament may snatch the remote control of the country's nuclear bombs from President Asif Ali Zardari.

The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) has been assigned a significant role in the National Command Authority (NCA) while the president of Pakistan, despite being the supreme commander of the armed forces under the Constitution, figures nowhere in an extremely essential law passed by the National Assembly last week, The News reports.

Pakistani troops killed eight Islamist militants Tuesday in an Afghan border region where insurgents are staging a comeback after a military operation there was declared a success, a local official said.

The fighting came amid continuing reports that the head of the Pakistani Taliban had died as a result of injuries sustained in a U.S. missile strike elsewhere in the northwest in mid-January. On Monday, a Taliban commander said chief Hakimullah Mehsud was alive and promised to provide proof soon.

Rahul Bhatt, son of director Mahesh Bhatt, is “convinced” David Headley was working for FBI when he was in Mumbai before the attacks.

“I’m convinced Headley was working for Americans, for FBI. I’d nicknamed him agent Headley,” Rahul said in an interview to UK’s Channel 4.

“It was the Americans’ deepest wish to infiltrate al-Qaeda. And David did exactly that for them.

According to Indian officials, Pakistan in the past has used Sargodha to store M-11 missiles which had been delivered unassembled to it by China. However, the pace at which these tunnels are coming up suggests that, as the official put it, Pakistan is up to something. Sargodha is also the place which the Chinese are said to regularly visit to train the Pakistanis in handling weapons and missiles.

The US' success in Afghanistan is directly linked to Pakistan's willingness to co-operate and act against al-Qaida, Taliban and other extremist organisation, as Af-Pak region remains the epicentre of violent extremism, a top Obama Administration official has said.

"It was beyond question that the speed with which we were able to achieve our goals in Afghanistan has a link to the willingness of Pakistan to take on the fact that safe havens exist in the border region," said General (rtd) James Jones, National Security Advisor.

The world appears to be sleep walking towards a mega-crisis during 2010 and beyond resulting from that of continuing and escalating terrorist insurgency fed by U.S. policy, that is spreading like a cancer across Pakistan resulting in the disintegration of the Pakistani economy and by consequence the disintegration of many areas of the state into lawless areas despite the size of the Pakistani Army, this would result in fallout across the whole region and the wider world on a scale of several magnitudes greater than that which followed the collapse of Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

This wariness extends into the civilian government and more importantly the Pakistani populace in general, who are seeing Obama Administration courting as thinly veiled attempts to buy Pakistani loyalty so as to use their troops as cannon fodder in Waziristan.

Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

Beginning the day after the attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, the agency has carried out 11 strikes that have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani news reports, which make almost no mention of civilian casualties.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that 'an organized propaganda campaign' was under way to taint Pakistani people's perceptions of the United States while assuring the South Asian country that ties between the two nations were based on 'common interests and mutual respect.'

Two Pakistani employees of an American defense contractor engaged by the US Embassy in Islamabad have been linked to two attacks on Pakistani military and the assassination of a Brigadier. If this is not alarming, then consider that US Ambassador Anne Patterson’s name has come up in an investigation where thousands of dollars were paid in bribes to Interior Ministry to smuggle illegal weapons into Pakistan. Not to mention how Washington is empowering India in Afghanistan at Pakistan’s cost. When Pakistan takes countermeasures, US officials like Mr. Gates and Mr. Holbrooke accuse Pakistan of ‘anti-Americanism’ and harassing US diplomats. Time for some straight talk.

The Pentagon has gone into damage control mode after Defense Secretary Robert Gates appeared to confirm that security contractor Blackwater is operating in Pakistan.

The admission, quickly denied by Defense Department officials, has set fire to long-simmering rumors inside Pakistan about the involvement of for-profit contractors in the war against the Taliban.

After months of angry denials and accusing Pakistani media outlets reporting the story of engaging in “conspiracy theories,” the United States government has finally come clean about Blackwater forces operating in Pakistan, in the form of an interview by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on local Pakistani television.

Police are trying to determine whether five Americans detained in Pakistan had planned to attack a complex that houses nuclear power facilities.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington, D.C., area, were picked up in Pakistan earlier this month in a case that has spurred fears that Westerners are traveling to the South Asian country to join militant groups.

Agents for Britain's MI6 Secret Intelligence Service say they are "certain" al-Qaida is poised to try and grab some of the 80 nuclear weapons that Pakistan possesses, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

“We have various kinds of US-made arms, which we procure from Afghan arms smugglers”, an arms dealer from the town of Darra Adamkhel in Pakistan’s western frontier province (NWFP) told IslamOnline.net.

Mr Qasab told a court that three of the four gunmen who stormed the Taj Mahal hotel were from Indian-administered Kashmir, Gujarat and Mumbai.

He did not reveal details about the identity of the fourth hotel attacker but claimed that he too was Indian.

India maintains that all the gunmen involved in the Mumbai attacks were from Pakistan.

Pakistan’s strategic assets are as safe as that of any other nuclear weapon state and these assets are fully safeguarded and secure under the protection of a well-established command and control system, a Foreign Office (FO) spokesman said on Sunday.

The brutality of Taliban attacks in northwest Pakistan has cost the militants public support, the U.S. special envoy to the region said Saturday.

At least 20 people have been killed in Pakistan in the latest US drone attacks that picked up pace after seven CIA agents were killed in late December.

Attacks that have continued across Pakistani towns and cities are being blamed on Tehreek e-Taliban, Pakistan's Taliban.

However, the group has issued its first video statement denying involvement in targeting civilians and has blamed external forces for at least two recent blasts.

Perhaps the most frightening detail of the ever-growing U.S. war in the “Af-Pak” theater — even expanding into the usually quiet off-season of the cold Afghan winter — is that the war could be lost for the U.S. in a country where it can’t acknowledge putting boots on the ground: Pakistan.

With more C.I.A., more drone strikes, and more subsequent civilian deaths, Obama may be digging himself right out of Pakistan. The problem is that without Pakistani support, digging himself out of the Afghanistan mess will be impossible.

Pakistan’s government reported US drones killed only civilians in 39 of 44 attacks on their country in 2009; with over 700 innocent civilians killed, according to Pakistan's most widely-read English newspaper. Pakistan has repeatedly publicly denounced the US attacks, making the US guilty of War Crimes as they do not have explicit permission from Pakistan’s government.

Pakistani officials have expressed increasing consternation with the growing number of civilian casualties in the strikes, with President Zardari warning that it was undermining support for the war effort that the US has demanded Pakistan start in those regions. Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani added that US policies on this and other issues were threatening bilateral ties.

Despite the growing complaints and increasing questions about the policy’s effectiveness, a delegation of US senators to the region praised the strikes and vowed that they would continue. If the strikes continue at the frenzied pace so far throughout 2010, the issue will likely become a much bigger one.

Pakistan says it has done more than any other country to end terrorism and its people have suffered the most. Greater US expectations would be politically explosive. Anti-American sentiment is running high, in large part because of US pilotless drone aircraft attacks on Taliban hideouts in Pakistan.

Drones: Washington may decide – with or without Pakistan’s consent – to intensify the drone hits in North Waziristan, where Haqqani operates and which is a Pashtun tribal region seen as a hub for global militants. But that could hurt Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban.

"This region of Balochistan, which has seen civilisation for thousands of years, is being oppressed by Pakistan. We're ready to accept assistance from anyone in our fight. We appeal to India for help."

This public plea for help from the country's sworn enemy will alarm Pakistanis.

So too might the fact that almost everyone we came across in the town supported moves for their province to break away from Pakistan.

President Asif Ali Zardari has said that Pakistan is ready to wage a thousand-year war with India over the Kashmir.

"When Zulfikar had spoken of waging a thousand-year war, he never said he would not do it through talks or negotiations," he said. President Zardari said regional peace was inextricably linked to the settlement of the decades-old dispute over Kashmir.

As 30,000 U.S. troops begin to deploy to Afghanistan, fears are rising in Pakistan that a stepped-up war just over the border could worsen the increasingly bloody struggle with militancy here.

Residents in border areas such as the violence-plagued city of Peshawar worry that a tide of militants could flee Afghanistan to seek targets in Pakistan. Doubts linger among Pakistani security officials about the Americans' ability to intensify the campaign against the Taliban without further destabilizing Pakistan's vast southwestern border or the already volatile tribal areas in the northwest.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found.

The United Nation is to withdraw a quarter of its international staff from Pakistan as the country descends further into violence.

At least 11 UN workers have been killed in Pakistan in the last year, and over 500 people have died in attacks since the army began an offensive against militants in the Taleban stronghold of South Waziristan in October.

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages.

Over the last two years, the Pakistani government—both that of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and that of his successor, Pakistan People’s Party President Asif Ali Zardari—had worked out a modus operandi with Washington whereby Pakistan publicly protested the drone attacks and demanded that they cease, while behind the scenes giving them a green light.

As the propaganda that Pakistani nukes are likely to fall into the hands of the Taliban continues in the American press, one wonders what might be the U.S. intent.

Seen in the light that American mercenaries have become overt operationally, it appears that the intent is to use them to ‘lift’ the Pak Nukes using the threat from the Taliban as an excuse.

US President Barack Obama's Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke has admitted that there are American spies on Pakistani soil, but has rebuffed reports about the presence of any combat troops inside the troubled country.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is desperately trying to get out of a political crisis, bordering chaos, created by his own colleagues but, unfortunately, he is looking helpless.

He invited more than three dozen TV anchorpersons and journalists from across the country to the Prime Minister’s House on Thursday evening and tried to impress upon them that “I am the government and my government is strong, I am not threatened by any conspiracy. There is no conspiracy going on.

It was his sheer bad luck that at the Bilawal House in Karachi the same evening, President Asif Ali Zardari was saying something totally different. “Certain mercenary elements are involved in conspiracies to topple the government. We will foil all these conspiracies,” said Zardari.