The Pendleton Panther

At least seven Taliban deaths were confirmed on Wednesday in a bombing involving two U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles.  The seven insurgents were hunkered down in a Taliban military base located in northern Pakistan.  These drone attacks are part of a growing trend of UAV utilization by the U.S. military as their use has increased by 47% since Obama’s inauguration.  The terrorist stronghold was located in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, usually home to the nomadic tribes that call the province home.  It is unknown at this time the ranks of the seven casualties.  Air strikes are very unpopular with the Pakistani as it is believed that dropping bombs and shooting missiles causes more collateral damage than ground based assaults.  The truth is, however, that stray bullets go much farther than the blast radii of any of these surgical strikes.   Pakistani government has denounced cooperation with these aerial attacks to its public, but has recently been obliging in coordinating these strikes.

Victim of the suicide attacks

Two blasts which targeted military vehicles went off today and killed at least 43 people.  The two suicide bomb blasts were only 15 seconds apart and it happened near a crowded market known as the RA bazaar.  Lahore police official Chaudrhy Shafiq said that the two suicide bombers detonated vests full of explosives as they walked up on the two military vehicles.  More than 95 people were injured from the two explosions.  Just four days earlier in Lahore, Pakistan a suicide car bomb went off that killed 13 people and injured over 80.  This recent attack happened amongst several waves of violence that were against military offensives carried out by Islamic extremists.  The recent violence has killed over 600 people total.  “The nation and its security forces need to keep morale high,” said Rana Sanaullah, law minister for Punjab province, where Lahore is located. “We can only win this fight with unity.”  People that witnessed the recent suicide bombing were frightened.  Shopkeeper Muhammad Hafeez heard the blasts from inside his shop about 200 yards from the site. “Both blasts were huge,” he said. “I also heard gunshots. We stayed inside our shops out of fear, then later shut everything down.”

The list of wanted Taliban leaders is now seven names shorter.   After Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in Pakistan last week, a combined Allied and Pakistani effort to root out the remaining 15 terrorist leaders heading the Afghan Taliban succeeded in reducing the number of targets to eight.  All seven captures were made either by or with the help of Pakistani police, showing that the crackdown on Taliban activity in Pakistan that the US has sought is coming to fruition.  This blow to the leadership council is expected to be very damaging to the Taliban in the short run and may have long term consequences depending on who assumes command of the weakened organization.  In the meantime, however, Pakistan is just that much safer.  A Taliban spokesman claims that all arrests are fictional and nothing more than propaganda, but it’s hard to argue with pictures like this.

$7.5 Billion is nothing to sneeze at, but it would seem that many Pakistani citizens are doing just that.  In a recent Gallup poll, 85% of people living in Pakistan think that the nation should accept the massive amount of aid that would be given to them by the Kerry-Lugar bill.  Only 25% of those polled even think that the billions would improve the life of the average Pakistani.  Pakistan is wary to accept the money as they are less than eager to satisfy some of the conditions.  Senator John Kerry asserts that the conditions will do nothing to infringe on Pakistan’s sovereignty, but exist only to ensure cooperation in counterterrorism and procure direct access to Pakistani Nationals involved with nuclear proliferation.  The Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad, however, goes so far as to call the tone of the bill downright humiliating.  The poll taker, Mr. Galini, conceded that his nation may seem ungrateful, but argues that there is a limited amount of good that foreign aid can do.

The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, is dead from kidney failure, sources told CNN.  Baitullah Mehsud speaks to reporters in the tribal district of South Waziristan near the Afghan border in May.  The Pakistan government blamed Mehsud for the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007.  An unnamed Islamabad-based source with connections within the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan said Mehsud died on Wednesday at about 1 a.m. Military officials in the field confirmed to CNN that Mehsud had died.  Geo Television of Pakistan and other local stations also reported his death.   However, some reports also had the Taliban denying Mehsud’s death.  Earlier reports said the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan was ill and was expected to die within a day. Meshud is said to have succumbed to kidney failure and was believed to be about 34 years old.