Islamic Republic of Pakistan : News, Discussions & Updates

Got to hand it to the Paxtanis. Absolutely criminal Minds. Ever since the Taliban US agreement, it's obvious they aren't sure if the Taliban would do their bidding entirely. Hence they've co opted all those Paxtanis who've served in Syria, Iraq, Libya etc and along with existing tanzeems like the LeT, JeM, etc they've forged a new front to keep everybody from the US, the Afghan Taliban to the Afghan government off balance. It also gives them plausible deniability.
 
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Can’t locate UNSC listed terrorists in Pak, Imran Khan govt tells UNSC panel

Pakistan authorities acknowledge the presence of only 19 terrorists who figure in the UNSC 1267 Sanctions List. For the rest, they have told the UNSC that they cannot locate them due to insufficient information.


Updated: May 01, 2020 06:07 IST
By Shishir Gupta
Hindustan Times, New Delhi
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Islamabad has told a visiting team of a UNSC monitoring committee that it had been unable to act against numerous individuals listed in its sanctions list because the UN panel had given “insufficient information”.(PTI)

The decision by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government to delete nearly 4,000 names from its terror watch list was part of a well-orchestrated effort to scrub its terror record clean not just at home, but also at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), people familiar with the developments told Hindustan Times.

Islamabad has told a visiting team of a UNSC monitoring committee that it had been unable to act against numerous individuals listed in its sanctions list because the UN panel had given “insufficient information”.

The UNSC 1267 Sanctions List has 130 names from Pakistan. Islamabad, however, acknowledges the presence of only 19 of them including Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed. It has already moved the UNSC to delist 6 terrorists including Matiur Rehman, described in UN records of 2013 as the chief operational commander of terror group Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a top official in North Block that houses India’s internal security establishment said.

The UN analytical support and sanctions monitoring team, which was on a five-day visit to Pakistan in March, was told that the UN Sanctions List did not have the accurate date of birth, nationality, national ID number, passport number or a specific address of the men sanctioned for their terror links.

Pakistan had put out a similar set of explanations when it was asked about the deletion of 3,800 names from its domestic terror watch list.
In October 2018, Islamabad showed off this list to the counterterror financing watchdog Financial Action Task Force to demonstrate that it was coming down heavily on terrorists. This terror watch list, according to FATF records, then had 7,600 names of terrorists.

Indian counterterror officials suggested that the effort to prune Pakistan’s terror watch list is a more recent development.

The deletions were first spotted by Castellum AI, a New York-headquartered tech firm that tracks watch lists globally. In a statement in April, the tech firm started by a former US treasury department official said many of the names were removed sometime after October 2018. But there were about 1,069 names in the watch list that were deleted between March 9-27. Another 800 names were removed after March 27.

“This means the process to delete the names started the day the UNSC monitoring team landed in Pakistan,” a counterterror operative told Hindustan Times. The UNSC monitoring team was in Pakistan from March 9-13.

Indian officials said they had not been able to access the details of the UNSC panel’s visit but had learnt that the UNSC panel did convey, on March 18, that Pakistan could file requests for delisting “inappropriate” names from the UNSC sanctions list.

Pakistan hopes to get the support of the Chinese in this endeavour given how Beijing had blocked an international effort to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist for years. Beijing eventually had to give in last year but started backing Islamabad’s attempts to include Indian professionals working in Afghanistan in the UNSC 1267 list.

The exercise to get names of terrorists deleted, a top source in the internal security establishment said, appears to be driven by the desperation to stay out of the FATF’s black list. Pakistan has been on the terror financing watchdog’s grey list since June 2018 and faces the risk of being placed in the black list if it does not demonstrate that it was really acting against terrorists.

“By getting rid of half of the proscribed entities, Pakistan authorities attempted to reduce its obligation to freeze the assets of such entities,” the source said.

The FATF, which was due to review the status of steps taken by Pakistan, has pushed the meeting by four months in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In any case, officials said, Pakistan had always kept out the most prominent of the terrorists that it supports out of the watch list.
Top terrorist leaders who had been designated by the UNSC such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s chief operations commander and 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind Zaki ur Rehmani Lakhvi have always stayed out of Pakistan’s terror list. So did Dawood Ibrahim and others such as Mohammed Yahya Mujahid, head of LeT’s media department (sanctioned in 2009) and LeT co-founder and Hafiz Saeed’s deputy Hafiz Abdul Salam Bhuttavi.

Can’t locate UNSC listed terrorists in Pak, Imran Khan govt tells UNSC panel
 
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Back to back killings! Got to appreciate Pakistani army for not giving a damn about anything. They are target killing in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Sweden, in India.


Here Indian Army is still struggling over question of handing over body of killed terrorists to families or not, and government is so sacred of front page criticism that a protest can burn down the capital, kill over 50 when state visit of leader of free world yet they couldn't find the courage to hit back. What a shit show.
 

Back to back killings! Got to appreciate Pakistani army for not giving a damn about anything. They are target killing in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Sweden, in India.


Here Indian Army is still struggling over question of handing over body of killed terrorists to families or not, and government is so sacred of front page criticism that a protest can burn down the capital, kill over 50 when state visit of leader of free world yet they couldn't find the courage to hit back. What a shit show.

The fact that Pakistan doesn't care is the reason why it's a sh!thole of a country.
 

Back to back killings! Got to appreciate Pakistani army for not giving a damn about anything. They are target killing in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Sweden, in India.


Here Indian Army is still struggling over question of handing over body of killed terrorists to families or not, and government is so sacred of front page criticism that a protest can burn down the capital, kill over 50 when state visit of leader of free world yet they couldn't find the courage to hit back. What a shit show.
The person killed was a journalist & the cousin of Ali Wazir, an independent Member of the National Assembly ( MNA) from FATA- KPK. Incidentally both cousins have been targets of assassinations for a long time. The MNA Ali Wazir has had his father, brother, uncles, cousins, etc - a total of more than 16 members of his family assassinated by the Taliban. Of course, the latter is mostly a front of the PA.

One must confess the Punjabi Musalmaan dominated PA has certainly taken a leaf out of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's playbook in dealing with these turbulent people , however much they may try to deny it. The only difference is MRS's governors - initially for a brief period were Pashtuns( more vassals than governors ) followed by Sikhs like Nalwa & later by Avitable - an Italian adventurer known to hang people for the slightest offense. This brutal reign certainly helped keep the peace.

The PA, of course, has gone one step further. Apart from utilizing the PA to conduct so called counter terror operations, they employ the Afghan Taliban to use murder, intimidation, kidnapping, destruction of property, etc to keep recalcitrants under check. Set a Pashtun to take care of a Pashtun. This policy of sowing discord among the Pashtuns & dividing them OTOH to maintain peace in KPK / FATA & OTOH use Islam as the glue to bind mutually antagonistic tribes in Afghanistan to keep the insurgency there alive has paid the PA & the state of Pakistan rich dividends indeed. It's helped them keep their territorial integrity intact for the past 73 years & achieve some amount of strategic depth in Afghanistan too .

How long will this policy of diminishing returns continue is anyone's guess? But , as they say in a game of cards, they've made the most out of a bad hand.
 
Pls move #3353 & #3356 to this thread

& #3354, 55 , 57 & 58 to this thread in the interest of continuity.