Following is a chat log between a Pakistani and an Indian who became friends on the net sometime before the Mumbai Attacks. They both teach us something very valuable. May Allah incite such spirit amongst all of us.

[The chat has been pasted as is, devoid of any additions or rectifications, except for the change of names]

Anand: busy ho?

Ahmad: not much

Ahmad: kee haal hai twada

Anand: k bro

Anand: ind-pak bhai bhai

Anand: kya ho raha hai waha pe

Anand: across the border

Anand: tension hain?

Ahmad: tension on and off scene
still better situation than before

Anand: cool

Anand: zadari kaisa hai?

Anand: usa aur india ke allegations on the bombay blasts, have turned against pakistan

Anand: with all due respect bro

Anand: its a sensitive issue

Ahmad: I understand that the sentiment in india at a lot of places is going against pakistan.

its also a good oppurtunity for right wing extremists to avail

everyone in pakistan is disgusted by the attacks. we’ve been experiencing this for years now so one can understand.

it just happened a coupe of months ago at marriot in islamabad.

what i’ve read until now
they the allegations have come mostly from india

the US has played neutral and have diffused the issue.
it has also been stated by indian officials that they never said that it was organized by the Pakistan per se, but a terrorist group which is known to have operatied from pakistan

however, that has still been unclear. evidence is still being awaited.
some say they’re from hyderabad deccan
some say they were from mossad

Ahmad: whoever they are
ones thing for sure. such people are a danger to everybody and can spark other bloody battles

Ahmad: how are things in your city..?

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We are posting this for a few reasons. First, because every news outlet in Pakistan is reporting the story of a “Secret US Order” that allowed military raids into Pakistan. Second, former President Musharraf’s stand that neither he, nor anyone in his government, approved these raids. Third, the current government’s regular complaints to the US over the ever increasing drone attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan going unheard.

The NY Times story, re-produced below, gives the world the details of a 2004 confidential order signed by Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. According to the news story, this order gave the US military open orders to enter and operate within any country where the US felt al-Qaeda was hiding, including Pakistan and Syria. 

And the American’s wonder why there is so much anti-Americanism in the world today…. I guess when you categorically decided to attack anywhere in the world, kill innocent civilians and destroy people’s homes, people should welcome you with parades and guards of honor… I guess that only happens in Pakistan….

Additionally, this should make us very suspicious of any of the IMF conditions, especially the demand to decrease our military forces by 1/3 and re-vamp, shut down in US terms, our Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). These terms were never acceptable in the past and should not be considered as part of any IMF support package. 

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON - The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission - captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft - in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

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In the 9/11 terrorist attacks on twin towers in New York in which about 3000 persons died, no Afghan or Pakistani was involved. All the 19 perpetrators of the crime were Arabs, mostly hailing from Saudi Arabia. Yet the wrath of USA fell on Afghanistan for a bizarre reason that the so-called master mind behind the attacks was Osama bin Laden based in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar kept requesting that proof of his complicity should be furnished to enable him to hand over his guest but none was provided.

Terrorism became a buzzword and the fuming sole super power pounced upon militarily extremely weak and economically impoverished Afghanistan with utmost ferocity and decimated it. The whole world including UNSC supported the ghoulish invasion and its occupation under the hope that it would help in eliminating global terrorism.

Iraq too was pulverised on a cooked up story of WMDs and linkage with Al-Qaeda. Both charges turned out to be totally fabricated. Saddam as well as UN inspectors kept saying till the last that there were no WMDs, but Bush and Blair ignored them as well as world protests and went ahead with the second invasion without UNSC blessing. After destroying the two countries, USA is now bent upon destroying one of its close allies Pakistan which had played a key role in ousting Taliban and in getting Karzai elected. Without Pakistan?s all out military support, it may not have been possible for US-NATO forces to stay in Afghanistan for that long.

In case of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein refused to buckle under US repeated threats followed by troop mobilisation. Instead of submitting to US diktat they opted to fight the aggressor well knowing that they were non-nuclear states and their conventional means were no match to the military prowess of sole super power duly aided by all the advanced nations of the world. In our case, we had nuclear weapons and adequate conventional means to defend our homeland. However, our commando General who never tired of bragging about his boldness, turned into a kitten when he received a phone call from Washington. He hastily threw in his towel and provided US spy agencies and its military forces large-scale facilities to make easy USA task of achieving its long term objectives. He justified his cowardly act of ditching the friendly Taliban and befriending USA on the premise that had he not done so Pakistan for sure would have been destroyed. Read more »

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Take a restive, nuclear-armed nation with an untested new government, an escalating Islamic insurgency, long-standing tensions with its neighbors and an economy in free fall for months.

Then add in a global financial crisis. Some analysts and diplomats fear that Pakistan could come to exemplify a perilous new phenomenon: a strategic but unstable state at risk of being pushed to the breaking point by external economic factors.

Government officials insist that Pakistan’s economic fundamentals, while weakened, are holding steady. But this politically volatile country of 165 million people, a U.S. ally in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida, can ill afford more upheaval.

Pakistan’s creditworthiness rating is the second-worst among nations ranked by Standard and Poor’s, superior only to that of the Seychelles. Last week, the country’s president, political novice Asif Ali Zardari, felt compelled to offer public assurances that “Pakistan is not going bankrupt.”

On Monday, armed police surrounded the Karachi stock exchange to prevent a recurrence of stone-throwing rioting by investors that occurred in July.

“The global crisis has really added fuel to the fire,” market analyst Muhammad Suhail said. “There was a time window earlier this year to address all this, and we missed it.”

At the onset of days of current mayhem in worldwide markets, Pakistan — a relative economic success story for much of the past decade — was undergoing a punishing reversal of fortune.

In the past six months, its main stock exchange has lost more than half its value. The national currency, the rupee, stands at historic lows, even with propping up by the state bank, which also intervened to improve market liquidity. Foreign-exchange reserves are dangerously depleted, the budget deficit is at a 10-year high, inflation is running about 25 percent annually and debt obligations are looming large. Read more »