U.S. Drone Strikes In Pakistan Are Radicalizing A New Generation

 

 In Swat Valley, U.S. Drone Strikes Radicalizing A New Generation -- CNN 

Swat Valley, Pakistan (CNN) -- The Sabaoon School for boys in northern Pakistan is anything but average.

Nestled amid the bucolic charm of the Swat Valley's fertile terraced fields and steeply rising crags it looks idyllic. But if you get up close, a harsher reality becomes clear.

Two army check-posts scrutinize visitors entering the sprawling site. Once inside, the high razor wire-topped walls around the classroom compounds create a feeling reminiscent of a prison.

The boys here, aged 8 to 18, were all militants at some point. Some are killers, some helped build and plant improvised explosive devices, and others were destined to be suicide bombers until they were captured or turned over to the Pakistani army. All of them are at the school to be de-radicalized.

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My Comment: The madrassas have been a recruiting goldmine for Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Until the Pak government imposes some type of control on these religious schools .... Al Qaeda and radical Islamists will have no problem in recruiting new members. In the meantime .... the U.S. drone war continues.

Pakistan's Osama Bin Laden Report: No One Knew Bin Laden Was There

Pakistan's Osama Bin Laden Report: al-Qaeda Leader Feared To Set Foot Outside Compound -- The Telegraph

Osama bin Laden retreated behind closed doors, refusing to set foot even in the courtyard of his hideaway in the final weeks before he died because of a security lapse, found the official Pakistani report on the al-Qaeda leader.

An independent commission has spent the past year and a half questioning military officers, bin Laden's wives and residents of Abbottabad.

The Daily Telegraph has learnt from a senior government official that no one else in the town knew the world's most wanted man had taken up residence there. It clears Pakistan's government and military establishment of involvement, a verdict that will prompt accusations of a cover-up and infuriate Western diplomats.

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My Comment: The official Pakistani position can be summed up in the following .... see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

US Diplomat Alleges Some Al Qaeda Leaders Are In Quetta, Pakistan

From Dawn:

PESHAWAR: A senior US diplomat on Friday went a step further than restating Washington’s assertion about the presence of Taliban shura in Quetta and insisted that some Al Qaeda leadership could also be there.

‘Our intelligence shows that some of the Al Qaeda leadership is in Pakistan,’ Candace Putnam, the US consul-general in Peshawar told a media roundtable here.

‘I don’t know where Osama bin Laden is on any given day, but we do know that some of the leadership is sitting in Quetta and that they travel back and forth from Afghanistan to Pakistan,’ she said.

‘We know that they are there. And I think your government also knows this. Whether they want to say this in public or not but I think they know they are there,’ she added.

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My Comment: The Americans are getting frustrated with Pakistani unwillingness to clamp down on Al Qaeda and Afghan-Taliban groups in Pakistan. I expect these comments to increase as more U.S. soldiers start to surge into Afghanistan.