Pakistan Taliban chief in Swat surrounded - minister

By Kamran Haider

ISLAMABAD, Sept 13 (Reuters) - The senior Taliban leader in northwestern Pakistan's Swat Valley has been surrounded and will be captured, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Sunday, adding the back of the Taliban insurgency had been broken.

Pakistani Taliban advances and attacks early this year raised fears for nuclear-armed Pakistan's stability but the Islamist militants have suffered a series of setbacks in recent weeks including the killing of their overall leader.

Security forces launched an offensive in the Swat valley, about 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, in late April and killed more than 2,000 fighters, according to the army. There has been no independent verification of that casualty estimate.

The group's leader in the former tourist valley, a self-styled cleric called Fazlullah, and most of his commanders have evaded security forces, leading to fears they could regroup.

But Malik said Fazlullah's days on the run would soon be over. "Fazlullah has been surrounded. He can't run away," Malik told reporters after meeting leaders of ethnic Pashtun tribes from the northwest. "Fazlullah is now irrelevant, he's a vegetable. I think he'll be captured."

The Pakistani Taliban under the command of Baitullah Mehsud were held responsible for a wave of attacks across the country from 2007, including the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December that year.

The violence contributed to a slide in investor confidence, exacerbating an economic crisis that forced Pakistan to agree to a $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund bail-out in November.

Mehsud was killed in a missile attack by a U.S. drone aircraft in his South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border in early August.

"RUNNING AWAY"

U.S. and Pakistani officials said Mehsud's death left the militants in disarray and riven by rivalry. Analysts say it is too early to say if their setbacks are a permanent blow or if they might regroup and strike back.

Malik said intermittent attacks could be expected but the militants were on the run.

"The back of anti-state and anti-Islam elements has been broken. Today they're seen running away," he said.

Asked when Fazlullah would be captured, Malik said the security forces would determine that.

Military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said efforts were being made to capture Fazlullah but he dismissed media reports of his imminent capture as speculation.

"Efforts are there but stories in the media are all speculative," Abbas said. The army said in July that Fazlullah was believed to have been wounded in fighting.

The Pakistani militants are allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where violence is at its most intense since the overthrow of their government in 2001, despite the arrival this year of thousands more U.S. troops.

Pakistani action against militants in lawless border lands where Afghan Taliban have bases is seen as vital to U.S. efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan. But the Pakistani army has yet to go after the factions that attack into Afghanistan.

The army said on Friday one of Fazlullah's top aides, the Taliban spokesman in Swat, and four other leaders had been captured near the valley's main town of Mingora.

Malik said the spokesman, Muslim Khan, was providing his interrogators with much information. "Muslim Khan is singing and telling everything about his friends," Malik said. Link...

'You lie!' yeller Rep. Joe Wilson tells truth about GOPers' fringe

By Albor Ruiz - Ny Local

Sunday, September 13th 2009, 4:00 AM

A class act he is not, but South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's boorish behavior during President Obama's speech on health reform more than earned him his 15 minutes of infamy.

It is understandable that he chose - or as some suggested, was told - to bellow "You lie!" when the President was explaining for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants would not be covered under health care legislation. After all, Wilson's extreme anti-immigrant positions are well known.

His outburst, for which he has half-heartedly apologized, not only exposed Wilson for the uncouth nativist he is, but made clear that immigration is still very much one of the Republican Party's war horses.

"Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst is not only a massive breach of decorum," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, "but the latest example of how race-baiting and immigrant bashing have become standard fare for hard-right elements of the Republican Party."

One has to wonder if Wilson and his ilk are intent on committing political suicide - and in the process taking down with them the entire GOP - or if their prejudices are so deep that they just cannot help themselves.

Many believe that Wilson's outburst was planned to distract from the President's speech. If it was, the plan worked like a charm. Shamefully, media coverage of Obama's message became a sidebar to Wilson's disgusting show of coarseness.

Yet, the plan could turn out to be no more than a pyrrhic victory.

After all, even if Wilson and his cohorts do not like it, Latinos are the fastest-growing group of new voters in the nation. And they can be sure that mistreating, dehumanizing and disrespecting Latinos - and immigrants in general - is not going to help them win their hearts and minds. There will be hell to pay at the polls.

The anti-immigration hysteria and inflammatory rhetoric of people like Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and others have already made record numbers of Latinos flee the GOP. Wilson's outburst is sure to accelerate the exodus.

In New York alone, 715,000 new voters registered between January and November of last year, 200,000 of them in the two weeks leading up to the national election. Many were African-Americans or Latinos, and it is a sure bet that most of them did not join the GOP ranks.

In the nation as a whole, the number of Latino voters went up from 7.6 million in 2004 to 9.8 million in 2008. The number of Asian voters increased from 2.8 million in 2004 to 3.4 million in 2008. Again, the GOP was not the party of choice for the majority of new voters.

Come to think of it, Wilson's boorish behavior may turn out to be a political blessing in disguise.

Rob Simmons, his Democratic opponent, reportedly raised over $300,000 on the online Democratic political fund-raising Web site ActBlue in a few hours immediately following the crass "You lie!" bellow.

The results of a national poll released last May confirmed once more that immigration is a defining issue for the 12 to 13 million Hispanics who are eligible to vote in the U.S.

"The anti-immigrant movement's divisive tone and demagogic rhetoric keeps politicizing Hispanics and bringing them together in support of a new immigration policy," said Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen and Associates, which conducted the survey. Not good news for the flag bearers of nativism and intolerance.

Ironically, after all is said and done, Joe (You lie!) Wilson's outburst could go down in history as the death knell for the most reactionary and extremist wing of the Republican Party. Link...

Nuclear Talks Are Possible, Minister Says

Iran is not ruling out talks about its nuclear program with world powers but conditions have to be right, the country's top diplomat said Saturday, signaling an apparent softening of Tehran's persistent refusal to discuss the issue.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said he welcomed talks with the United States and its partners, adding that "should conditions be ripe, there is a possibility of talks about the nuclear issue."

The White House reiterated Saturday that talks with Iran should focus on the country's nuclear program. "We're not talking for talking's sake," spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "This may not have been a topic they wanted to be brought up, but I can assure you it's a topic that we'll bring up." Link...