Pakistan's secret dirty war: The battle for Balochistan

By artappraiser on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 12:34am |

By Declan Walsh, Guardian.co.uk, March 29, 2011

In Balochistan, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture keep turning up, among them lawyers, students and farm workers. Why is no one investigating and what have they got to do with the bloody battle for Pakistan's largest province?

....This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.

If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all....

URL:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/balochistan-pakistans-secret-dirty-war

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Of course the Balochs are pissed...they didn't get any spot in the acronym that is Pakistan's name.

BTW, I'm given to understand that when the Pashtuns want to scare their kids, they tell them the Baloch are gonna get them. In other words, they are badder than the baddest tribe around.

by jollyroger on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 2:03am

The article is a bit of an eye-opener, isn't it? What it doesn't even touch on is the U.S. role in funding and arming Baloch separatist groups in Iran, while Pakistan's ISI -- the West's supposed ally -- tries to crush the corresponding nationalist movement on its side of the border.

Similarly, the ISI aids (some say directs) Taliban forces within Pakistan that are fighting Hamid Karzai's Afghan government that western troops are trying to prop up, as well as bankrolling Islamist extremists carrying out terror attacks in India, another western ally.

These are very, very tangled webs -- and if the West were smart, we'd know we are out of our depth here and being played for suckers. We're apparently not very smart.

by acanuck on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 5:19pm

out of our depth here and being played for suckers. .

Like the million bucks we gave the fake Talib to bribe him over to our side?

by jollyroger on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 5:56pm

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