Taliban torched over 200 schools in Swat in 2 years

Pakistan Created Monster Taliban Devouring Pakistan Itself

Taliban militants have burnt down more than 200 schools in Pakistan's restive Swat valley in the last two years and made all out efforts to prevent girls from receiving education, a media report here said on Sunday.

The militants told the residents in the valley that if they were good Muslims they would stop sending their daughters to schools, 'The Sunday Times' said in a report from Mingora, the capital of Swat.

"Every evening (Taliban commander) Maulana Fazullah, nicknamed 'Radio Mullah', broadcast the names on the radio of girls who had stopped going to school - it would be, 'Congratulations to Miss Kulsoon or Miss Shahnaz, who has quit school.' Then he warned others if they continued with their education they would go to hell," the paper said.

The Taliban have torched over 200 of Swat's 1,500 schools in the last two years, it said.

The military offensive against the militants resulted in what Martin Mogwania, the acting UN humanitarian coordinator, called "the most dramatic displacement in the world."

According to UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, more than 1.7 million people have been rendered homeless in just three weeks. On Friday, the UN appealed for 340 million pounds, while officials urgently tried to find new sites for camps.

The newspaper also gave a graphic account of the havoc created by Taliban in Swat. A 22-year-old medical student from the valley had secretly catalogued the horrors of life in Swat under the Taliban.

The burning-down of schools, bodies hanging upside down, public lashings and decapitated heads with dollars stuffed in their nostrils and notes reading, 'This is what happens to spies,' were all captured on the student's mobile phone at great personal risk, the report said.

The paper noted that Fazullah in December announced a deadline of January 15 for all girls to stop attending school.

The medical student's account was corroborated by Ziauddin Yusufzai, who ran two schools in Swat and was spokesman for the private school association until he fled the bombing three weeks ago.

"Once, my wife went shopping in a market popular with women and a man with long hair and a gun came and terrorised them and shouted, 'Haven't we warned you women not to come to shops? Next time we'll kill you.'"

Yusufzai, too, admitted that Fazullah won widespread popularity early on. "Fazlullah used his radio to spread venomous propaganda," he said.

"He was winning the support of many people. The whole town would go to Friday prayers and he would arrive on a horse, his long hair flowing, as if he were the prophet."

Fazlullah's call for the restoration of Islamic law was broadly supported. The Taliban were also seen by many as a class movement - occupying the homes of wealthy residents. Yusufzai estimated that by the end of 2007 the Taliban controlled 30 per cent of Swat.

Two army operations intended to remove the Taliban merely tightened their grip, the paper said. "The army would tell people to leave their villages, but instead of clearing them of militants it seemed they were cleared for militants."

It was the combination of international pressure and the militants' proximity to the federal capital Islamabad that finally persuaded the army to act. "They're not going to salute a Mullah Omar, no way," explained President Asif Ali Zardari in an interview to the newspaper.

"It was fine when the militants were just tools but now the tools have come to threaten the masters. It's a different fight," he said.

Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, said: "We had a choice: either we hand over the country to the Taliban or we fight, and we have decided to fight. We will not stop now until we have cleared them all."

About 15,000 members of the security forces are fighting between 4,000 and 5,000 militants in Swat. According to the army, more than 1,000 militants and 50 soldiers have been killed, though the lack of media access to the area meant it was impossible to verify those figures.

According to the Interior Minister, Fazullah's forces have been receiving help from Al-Qaeda. Malik said that among those captured in Swat were four Saudis, a Libyan and an Afghan, all currently under interrogation.

Pakistan multiplying Nuclear weapons, increasing Danger to World Civilization

Rogue Pakistan is multiplying its nuclear arsenal much beyond its present stable of 60 to 100 weapons and increasing their destructive power and deliverability system, according to latest satellite photos released.

Pakistan is expanding its plutonium producing production capacity to build smaller, lighter plutonium-fission weapons and deliverable thermo-nuclear weapons.

The new lighter nuclear weapons would use plutonium as a nuclear trigger and enriched uranium in the secondary, a report by US arms control institute said.

Satellite images have revealed that Pakistan now has the fastest nuclear weapons programme and it has considerably expanded two sites producing fissile material for nuclear weapons, the report by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said.

The new plutonium producing sites are located near Rawalpindi and could be engaged in activities to build two new plutonium production reactors. Islamabad so far has only uranium-based nuclear weapons.

"Pakistan's ongoing expansion of its plutonium production programme, which includes new undeclared, unsafeguarded reactors and plutonium reprocessing facilities, is likely linked to Pakistan's strategic plans to improve the destructiveness and deliverability of its nuclear arsenal," ISIS said.

The other sites being expanded, according to the satellite photos released by the ISIS, are located near Dera Ghazi Khan in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which produces natural uranium hexafluoride (UF6) and uranium material, two materials used for making Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Satellite photos taken in August last year, of the chemical plants in Dear Ghazi Khan, show new industrial buildings, new anti aircraft installations and several settling ponds that have come up as part of the expansion.

The satellite photos of the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability come as top US military commander Admiral Mike Mullen confirmed last week that Pakistan was building up its nuclear arsenal.

With the Pakistani security forces waging a war against militant groups in the NWFP, ISIS said that security of country's "nuclear assets remains in question".

"An expansion in nuclear weapons production capabilities, needlessly complicates efforts to improve the security of Pakistani nukes," the report said.

Dera Ghazi Khan nuclear site in the recent past had been a target of at least one ground attack by more than a dozen gunmen, the report said adding that a nearby railway line had also been bombed.

CIA chief Leon Panetta said yesterday that US intelligence doesn't have complete track of Pakistani nuclear weapons, but was sure that they were "pretty secure".

The US report has urged the American government to prevail upon Pakistan to halt production of fissile material and join talks that would ban production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium.

Pak Nuclear Sites already in Radical hands: Report

India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are"already partly" in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington's confidence in the security of the troubled nation's nuclear arsenal.

Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline "Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost." The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of "Muslim extremists." A sub-head to the story said "India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor."

There was no official word from either Washington or New Delhi about the exchanges, with India in the throes of an election and US winding down for the weekend. But US experts have been greatly perturbed in recent days about what they say is Washington's misplaced confidence in, and lackadaisical approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets. The disquiet comes amid reports that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.

"It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach," Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. "Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions... and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world."

Windrem, a former producer with NBC whose book "Critical Mass" was among the first to red flag Islamabad's proliferation record going back to the 1980s, referred to recent reports and satellite images showing Pakistan building two large new plutonium production reactors in Khushab, which experts say could lead to improvements in the quantity and quality of the country's nuclear arsenal. The reactors had nothing to do with power-production' they are weapons-specific, and are being built with resources who diversion is enabled by the billions of dollars the US is giving to Pakistan as aid, he said.

Windrem also pointed out that Khushab's former director, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and offered a nuclear weapons tutorial around an Afghanistan campfire, as attested by the former CIA Director George Tenet in his memoir "At the Center of the Storm." Yet successive US administrations had adopted an attitude of benign neglect towards Pakistan's nuclear program and its expansion at a time the country was in growing ferment and under siege within from Islamic extremists.

US officials, going up to the President himself, have repeatedly said in public that they have confidence the Pakistani nuclear arsenal will not fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, and they have Islamabad's assurances to this effect. But scholars like Windrem fear Pakistan's nuclear program may already be infected with the virus of radicalism from within, as demonstrated by the Sultan Bashiruddin incident.