Offensive in Waziristan imminent: Pak minister

SINGAPORE, Oct 12: A long-planned operation to flush out militants from Pakistan’s Waziristan region is imminent, the government said on Sunday, blaming suspected al Qaeda-backed militants for striking at the heart of the military, reports Reuters.
“It has been decided, the civilian leadership has decided ... the operation is imminent,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters in an interview in Singapore.
Hours earlier Pakistani commandos stormed an office building in Rawalpindi and rescued 39 people taken hostage by militants in a raid on the army headquarters.
Malik said members of the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda were suspected to be behind Saturday’s attack which ended a week when suicide bombers struck in the capital Islamabad and Peshawar, killing more than 50 people.
“The man who has been arrested, his name is Usman. He is a TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) guy, but we have some indications he’s also from al Qaeda,” said Malik, who was in Singapore for an Interpol conference.
A security official in Pakistan’s Punjab province earlier said he believed Usman was from the Lashkar-e-Jhanghvi group and another security official said some of the men involved in the attack spoke Punjabi.
But Malik said it was too early to conclude that Punjab-based groups were involved in the attack, which has stoked renewed concern that militants have taken the battle to Pakistan’s heartland.
“We’ve heard that some people are Punjabi speaking. But you never know from the language, you can’t make (it) out. The language can be deceptive.”
The men who planned the Rawalpindi attack had hired a house for the last two months, where they were living. “The day they had to do the action, they disappeared from the house,” he said.
On Saturday, gunmen wearing army uniforms attacked the army headquarters, killing six soldiers including a brigadier and a lieutenant colonel in a gunbattle at a main gate.
Five gunmen were killed there and two of their wounded colleagues captured. But others fled and took hostages in a building housing security offices near the headquarters. The militants were overpowered on Sunday.
Malik said the planned offensive against the militants in south Waziristan was no longer a matter of choice. “It is not an issue of commitment, it is becoming a compulsion because there was an appeal from the local tribes that we should do the operation,” he said.
Pakistan’s military has been conducting air and artillery strikes in south Waziristan for months, while moving troops, blockading the region and trying to split off militant factions. But a ground offensive, in what could be the army’s toughest test yet since militants turned on the state, has yet to begin.

US anxiously waiting for Afghan poll results: Hillary

LONDON, Oct 12: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said whoever wins Afghanistan’s recent election will be expected to do more to address the country’s problems, reports BBC.
Speaking to the BBC while in London, Clinton said the next leader needed to build better relationships with the US, the army and the Afghan people.
She said America’s goal in Afghanistan was still to defeat al-Qaeda.
But the current US review of the conflict was “leading to some welcome clarity” on the best tactics, she said.
Clinton, currently on a European tour, told the BBC’s Today programme that the US was “anxiously awaiting” the outcome of the presidential elections which were held in Afghanistan in August.
The results have been delayed over accusations of fraud and malpractice.
Incumbent Hamid Karzai leads preliminary results with about 55% of the vote, considerably ahead of his nearest rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has 28%.
BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins said Mrs Clinton appeared unusually hesitant when asked whether the US would be proud to stand beside Mr Karzai if he emerged as the winner.
She said simply that the president had been “very helpful on many fronts”.
“ We intend to get this as right as is humanely possible ”
“We often overlook the progress made in Afghanistan, because of the serious challenges that still exist,” she said.
“But we are very clear that if this election results in him being re-elected, there must be a new relationship between him and the people of Afghanistan, between his government and governments which are supporting the efforts in Afghanistan to stabilise and secure the country.”
Clinton said the next president would also have to do more to train and deploy Afghan forces to take over from foreign troops.
“It is a more complex picture than sometimes emerges from snapshot views. But clearly we expect more, we’re going to be working towards more,” she said.
Late on Sunday, the New York Times quoted senior administration officials as saying the president was impatient and “not satisfied” with progress on developing civil institutions, the judiciary and security forces in Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama’s civilian goals had been largely unmet, the officials said.
Obama announced in March he would deploy hundreds of civilians to work in the country but the officials told the paper that because of deteriorating security many aid workers could not travel outside the capital to advise farmers.
The US president is currently undertaking a review of the US military involvement in Afghanistan and the wider region, eight years after the operation first began.
The commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McCrystal, has formally requested a significant increase in troop numbers.
Obama is reported to have ruled out troop cuts or a major scaling back of the US effort in Afghanistan, but it remains unclear whether he will approve a significant escalation to an increasingly unpopular war.

Brown urges MPs to repay expenses claim

LONDON, Oct 12: Gordon Brown has urged MPs to repay expenses claimed up to five years ago if asked to do so following an audit ordered after the furore, reports BBC.
There are reports that some MPs plan to defy calls to repay money and may challenge the request in the courts.
The PM is among hundreds of MPs expected to be asked to repay sums following a review of all claims by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg.
He told GMTV he would do so if asked and urged MPs all to “get it done”.
MPs returning to the Commons on Monday after the summer recess will receive letters asking them for more information about some claims.
Many are expected to be asked to repay some money or do more to justify them.
Sir Thomas was asked to scrutinise all MPs’ claims after details of what they had been claiming under their second homes allowance and others were leaked and published by the Daily Telegraph in May.
The BBC understands he has set retrospective limits for some items and annual limits on what he believes they should have claimed.
“ Let’s get it sorted out and let’s get it back to a system that people have confidence in ” Gordon Brown These are £1,000 a year for gardening, and £2,000 a year for cleaning. It is believed to have angered some MPs who say they will not repay the money.

Blast rocks north-west Pakistan

SHANGLA, Oct 12: At least six people have been killed in an explosion in the Shangla district near the Swat valley in north-west Pakistan, officials say, reports BBC.
The explosion hit a security forces convoy as it was passing through a market in Alpurai, reports say.
It is the latest in a series of militant attacks in the country. On Saturday militants attacked the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Pakistan vowed to hit back “imminently” against militants in South Waziristan.
The attack happened at a crossroads in the market. Dozens are said to have been injured in the explosion including a number of security personnel.
There are fears the death toll could rise considerably.
The district of Shangla borders the Swat valley. Parts of it are thought to be under Taliban control.
In June the army declared an anti-Taliban offensive in the Swat valley a success. But there have been isolated incidents of violence since then.
Some analysts say that in the wake of the army onslaught a number of militants fled to neighbouring districts.
During the anti-Taliban offensive fighting also spilled into Shangla district.

South Korea seeks talks with North on deadly floods

SEOUL, Oct 12: South Korea proposed on Monday holding talks with the North on preventing flooding from a river flowing across their border that killed six South Koreans last month when the communist state released a surge of water without warning, reports Reuters.
The proposal is part of a series of working-level contacts between the rivals, whose ties have remain chilled since President Lee Myung-bak came to office in the South last year and ended a decade of free-flowing aid for its impoverished neighbor.
The six were swept away by a surge of water in the middle of the night in early September while camping on the banks of the Imjin River.
North Korea said it had no choice but to open flood gates at its dams because of rising water levels. South Korea has rejected that explanation, saying there were no indications of dangerous water level rises.

Taliban claim responsibility for army HQ attack

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, (Pakistan), Oct 12: Pakistan’s Taliban have claimed responsibility for a brazen weekend attack on the army’s headquarters compound in the city of Rawalpindi, reports AP.
Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq called The Associated Press on Monday and said the attack that killed 20 people was only the first in a planned series of strikes intended to avenged the killing of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a CIA drone attack in August.
He said the raid on army headquarters was carried out by a Punjabi faction of the militant group and it had given orders to other militant branches across the country to launch similar operations.
He also warned the army that if it launched a planned offensive into Waziristan it would be its undoing.
Local Mayor Bakhte Alam says many more are wounded in the Monday blast in a Shangla district market.

US softens tone to improve China relations

WASHINGTON, Oct 12: The United States is going out of its way to build a warmer economic relationship with China and the strategy seems to be paying early dividends, reports Reuters.
In the past two weeks, China has endorsed a US-backed commitment to rebalance the global economy, and impressed some European officials by backing up the pledge with specific steps it planned to take to reconfigure its own economy.
In addition, what looked like it could have been the start of a trade war when the United States imposed tariffs on Chinese tires fizzled out with minimal drama.
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said China had delivered a surprisingly forthright speech at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Istanbul this past week.
“What really hit me was the change of speech, and I suppose of economic policy of China,” she said, adding that China had spelled out policy goals on improving social security, pensions, infrastructure and other areas that “correspond to calls to rectify imbalances.”
Some officials and private analysts credit a change in tone out of Washington for helping build credibility in Beijing. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner held a series of phone conversations with Chinese finance officials within weeks of taking office in late January, and visited Beijing in June.
He has fought for greater representation for China on the international economic stage, even though it put him in direct conflict with some European allies who saw it as a threat to their own global influence.
Last week, President Barack Obama broke with tradition when he declined to meet with the Dalai Lama who was visiting Washington, opting instead to delay the meeting until after his official trip to China in mid-November.
And at bilateral talks in Washington in July, the United States downplayed the touchiest issues including human rights violations and whether China’s yuan currency is undervalued. Obama sought common ground over a non-controversial topic—basketball. He referenced Chinese star Yao Ming and presented the Chinese delegation with a signed basketball.

Abbas defends delay in Gaza war crime report vote

RAMALLAH, (West Bank), Oct 12: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Sunday defended his decision to back the deferral of a vote on a UN war crimes report, saying he wanted to secure broad support for the document, reports Reuters.
Palestinians criticized Abbas for agreeing on October 2 to defer a vote at the UN Human Rights Council on a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s failure to cooperate with an investigation into alleged war crimes during the Gaza conflict and forwarded the report to the Security Council.
The investigation found that both the Israeli armed forces and Hamas militants committed war crimes in the December-January war in Gaza.

Blasts strike Iraqi city

RAMADI, Oct 12: Three blasts have rocked the Iraqi city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing at least 22 people and wounding 61, police have told the BBC, reports BBC.
A car packed with explosives ploughed into a concrete wall at the police headquarters. A motorcycle bomb then went off among the crowd that gathered.
The third blast, an apparent car bomb, went off outside the main hospital.
A curfew has been imposed in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, which was once a centre of the Sunni insurgency.
Eyewitness Musaab Ali Mohammed said he was buying cigarettes near the police headquarters when he heard a big explosion.
“I saw police cars and firefighters, and they started to carry out the wounded and dead. Minutes later, a second explosion took place,” he told the Associated Press news agency.
“After that, policemen started to fire in the air and called upon civilians to leave, fearing a third blast,” the eyewitness added.
Anbar has been relatively stable since Sunni fighters turned against al-Qaeda and joined forces with the US and Iraqi security forces.
But recent weeks have seen a series of attacks on police and Iraqi army checkpoints in Anbar.

WORLD NOTES