Our Future War With Pakistan Report #460

I haven't covered this one for a while, but we remain on the forward path to a future war with Pakistan. It will be one of our making. Our actions will slowly destabilize the country and create enough anger for an extremist Muslim group to take control, then we will go to war. It's so predictable, it's almost boring.

This week, 3 American soldiers were killed in Pakistan. That's right, motherfuckers, IN Pakistan.

Three US special forces soldiers were killed in northwest Pakistan this week, confirming that the US military is more deeply engaged on the ground in Pakistan than previously acknowledged by the White House and Pentagon. The soldiers died Wednesday in Lower Dir when their convoy was hit by a car bomber in what appeared to be a targeted strike against the Americans. According to CENTCOM, the US soldiers were in the country on a mission to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps, a federal paramilitary force run by Pakistan's Interior Ministry that patrols the country's volatile border with Afghanistan.

Weeeeeeee.

Leaders in Pakistan have been vehemently denying claims started by a religious leader that security company Xe, formerly Blackwater, has thousands of contractors working in the nation’s capital of Islamabad. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi political party, has said there are as many as 9,000 Xe contractors working in Islamabad, which would outnumber the 7,000 local police in the capital, if his assertion proves accurate.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik has denied there are any Xe security guards in Islamabad, or that they have been hired to protect the president and prime minister.

However, in an interview with Pakistan’s Express TV in January, U.S. Secretary of Defense Roberts Gates appeared to confirm the presence of Xe, as well as contract employees from DynCorp. According to a transcript issued by the U.S. Department of Defense, when asked about subject, Gates replied, “Well, they're operating as individual companies here in Pakistan. In Afghanistan and in Iraq, because they are theaters of war involving the United States, there are rules concerning the contracting companies. If they're contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”

Oh, good. Blackwater has to follow "rules."