International and Bilateral Issues

Hamas to free Shalit in prisoner swap deal

Israel and the Palestinian Hamas have on Tuesday signed a complex swap deal mediated by Egypt that would result in the release of the abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and over 1000 Palestinian prisoners.
Mr. Shalit, then 19 was abducted in June 2006 when a Hamas-affiliated group mounted a daring cross-border raid, in which two Israeli soldiers were also killed.
Both sides claimed victory after the protracted negotiations lasting several agonising years came to fruition in Cairo.
But expressions of victory, achieved at great cost and sacrifice, were no less palpable in Gaza, the stronghold of Hamas.
Observers say that the deal has boosted the popularity of Hamas, which had been upstaged recently after Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas sought United Nations recognition for an independent Palestinian state.

Pleads guilty to U.S. aeroplane bomb bid

A young Nigerian man on Wednesday pleaded guilty to attempting to kill nearly 300 people aboard a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day, 2009, by igniting explosives secreted in his underwear.
When asked by the Judge whether he was pleading guilty because he “was guilty,” the accused said: “That's right.”
The plot, which U.S. officials say was the work of the al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, failed because the explosives stitched in his underwear never detonated fully and instead caused a massive fireball.

China rules out Brahmaputra diversion

China had no plans to divert the Brahmaputra, or Yarlung Tsangpo as it is known in Tibet, considering “technical difficulties, environmental impacts and state relations,” referring to India's concerns.
166.1 billion cubic meters of water from the Brahmaputra flows outside China's borders.
Influential State-run hydropower companies have been campaigning for the government to kick-start suspended plans for 28 proposed dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo, leaving the future of the projects uncertain.
China planned to harness more than 5,000 rivers over the next five years, and double its annual spending on water conservation to reach 4 trillion yuan ($ 635 billion) over the next decade.
most of the spending — 38 per cent — would be used for flood control and disaster reduction water and soil conservation projects, with another 35 per cent invested in water-supply projects. The rest, he said, would be used for farmland irrigation projects.
power shortage this year meant that China had “to build more hydroelectric dams”.
The technology, he said, was “sufficient”, except in the “Great Bend” of the river, where the Tsangpo turns towards India — a terrain, he said, where “it is difficult to put in equipment.”
Sinohydro, a major State-owned hydropower company, has put up a proposal on its website for a 38-gigawatt plant at Motuo, near the Great Bend
Hydropower projects, he said, unlike diversion plans, would not affect India, although many experts say even large run-of-the-river dams, such as the one proposed at Motuo, could impact downstream flows.
Last November, China began damming the Yarlung Tsangpo for the first major hydropower project on the river, a 510 MW run of the river project at Zangmu, which will come into operation in 2014.

Baghdad attacks kill 23 in worst day in a month

Attacks mainly targeting security in Baghdad, including two suicide car bombs minutes apart against police stations, killed 23 people on Wednesday, the Iraqi capital's deadliest day in more than a month.
showed insurgents' ability to plan and carry out coordinated attacks on well-secured targets, as Iraq weighs its options over a post-2011 American military training mission.
the terrorists want to confirm that they exist here just before the departure of U.S. soldiers

Hardboiled animosity towards India

Indian “intellectuals” and bleeding heart liberals have zealously believed that “dialogue” alone can address the animosity of the Taliban and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) mentors towards India.
Perhaps, they have forgotten about the Taliban-ISI nexus to destabilise India through terror attacks.
The Americans accidentally did India a favour. Instead of eliminating Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, the cruise missiles destroyed an ISI camp in Khost, training terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen for terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.
A few months later, the then ISI Chief Lt. General Ziauddin met the Taliban “President” Mullah Mohammad Rabbani and asked him to provide 20-30,000 “volunteers” for “Jihad” in Kashmir.
Throughout the hijacking of IC 814 in December 1999, the Taliban was guided by ISI handlers
Omar Saeed Sheikh, proceeded to kill American journalist Daniel Pearl.
Maulana Masood Azhar, another recipient of Indian generosity during the hijacking, soon met Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in Kandahar and organised the December 13, 2001, attack on our Parliament.
The third released terrorist, Mushtaq Zargar, now arranges cross-LOC infiltration from Muzaffarabad.
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The ISI has a long-standing tradition of destabilising elected governments and meddling in elections within Pakistan.
Former ISI Chief Lt. General Asad Durrani revealed in Pakistan's Supreme Court that, during the 1990 elections, the ISI had provided “logistic support” to a Right-wing alliance, the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), and even received funds for the IJI from a Karachi businessman
on the instructions of then Army Chief General Aslam Beg, a small proportion of funds collected for the 1990 elections was given to politicians
The bulk of the money collected from businessmen, according to Durrani, was deposited in the “K Fund” of the ISI, to finance external operations.
Durrani's successor, Lt. General Javed Nasir, a fundamentalist of the Tablighi Jamaat, earned an even more notorious reputation.
When ISI involvement in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts was established and Pakistan faced threats of further American sanctions, Nawaz Sharif was forced to fire Nasir, who has recently been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and faces charges of having violated UN sanctions by providing weapons to Muslim elements during the Bosnian civil war.