Thousands block NATO convoy route to protest US drone strikes in Pakistan
RT | November 23, 2013
Thousands of demonstrators protesting US drone strikes in Pakistan blocked a main road Saturday in the Peshawar province used to transport NATO supplies to and from Afghanistan.
The protests was led by the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which is led by Imran Khan, a former international cricketer now turned politician.
They were supported by their allies in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government and they were also joined by the Jamaat -i-Islami (JI) and the Awami Jamhoori Ittehad (AJIP) political parties.
“We will put pressure on America, and our protest will continue if drone attacks are not stopped,” Khan told reporters.
“We are here to give a clear message that now Pakistanis cannot remain silent over drone attacks,” said Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a senior member of the PTI, addressing the protesters.
Imran Khan has been a fierce critic of US drone attacks, arguing that they violate Pakistan’s sovereignty. Khan said that the Pakistani government is doing nothing to stop drone attacks except for issuing statements of condemnation and that the protest would continue indefinitely.
Khan stressed that NATO supplies would not be allowed to pass through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly called North-West Frontier Province, and added that the province’s PTI-led government had the mandate to block NATO trucks from passing through its territory.
Earlier Imran Khan had warned that NATO supply routes will be blocked if continuing US drone strikes in Pakistan threaten the country’s peace talks with the Taliban.
An attack on November 1 killed the former leader of the Pakistan Taliban, a day before the Pakistani government said it was going to invite him to peace talks. Officials said they were enraged by the attacks, although the Pakistani government is known to have supported some of the drone attacks in the past.
Party workers from the PTI and the JI travelled to Peshawar from across Pakistan and an estimated 10,000 people participated in Saturday’s protests. The protesters shouted anti US slogans such as “Stop drone attacks” and “Down with America”.
“I am participating in today’s sit-in to convey a message to America that we hate them since they are killing our people in drone attacks. America must stop drone attacks for peace in our country,” Hussain Shah, a 21 year old university student, told Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper.
American drones are performing regular extrajudicial killings of Islamist leaders, accompanied by the collateral damage of many civilian casualties.
Strict security measures were in place Saturday, with 500 police personnel on duty. Trucks were directed to use an alternative route, although Tahir Khan, a government official, said there was normally little NATO traffic Saturday as most of the trucks arrive by Friday night to clear the border crossing.
However, protesters said that they would begin to stop trucks carrying NATO supplies through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from Sunday night, which could spark conflict with the federal government in Pakistan.
The US embassy in Islamabad declined to comment.
Pakistanis protest reopening of NATO supply lines
Al Akhbar | July 16, 2012
Thousands of people gathered at a park in northwest Pakistan on Monday for a protest at the reopening of NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, which will culminate in a march the following day.
The protesters will spend the night at the park in the city of Peshawar near a highway used by NATO trucks supplying foreign forces in Afghanistan, as part of the demonstration organized by Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JI).
Between 5,000 and 8,000 party activists had reached the site by the evening, according to police, and the protesters would on Tuesday march towards the town of Jamrud in Khyber tribal district, a key supply route.
Pakistan reopened overland routes to NATO convoys crossing into neighboring Afghanistan on July 3 after closing them in protest at a US air raid that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November.
“Supplying (NATO troops) with goods using Pakistani routes is like arming the enemy,” Qazi Hussain Ahmad, a senior JI member told the gathering.
“NATO are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan.”
A JI spokesman said he expected 50,000 protesters at Tuesday’s march.
The protest came after thousands of Pakistani Islamists at the weekend rallied at the southwestern border post of Chaman, vowing to stop NATO supplies into Afghanistan.
The protesters had embarked on a 120-kilometer journey from the southwestern city of Quetta on Saturday and reached the town of Chaman late Sunday where they held the rally.
The protesters shouted “Death to America,” “No to NATO supply” and “Long Live Mullah Omar” in reference to the Afghan Taliban leader in hiding.
On Sunday, Maulana Samiul Haq, chairman of the Defence of Pakistan group which is a coalition of organizations protesting the reopening of NATO supply routes, said the movement would continue its protests until the convoys stop.
NATO traffic across the border has so far been minimal, with only a few trucks having crossed into Afghanistan since the routes were reopened.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Related articles
- DPC marches on Chaman against supplies (dawn.com)
- Thin Nato traffic on Afghan-Pakistan border (dawn.com)
- You: DPC to continue protest against Nato supplies (nation.com.pk)
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A New Era Of Mass Armies Approaches
BY IAN WELSH | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
The army, or a part of it at the war college, has perked up and noticed some of the lessons of the Ukraine war, and that it’s a war that the US military could not fight. They’ve missed a lot of things, or felt they couldn’t/shouldn’t write about them, but they’ve figured some stuff out and written about them in a new report, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force” by Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe, and Professor John A. Nagle.
The entire thing is worth reading, but I’m going to pull out three of the main points. The first is that a volunteer US military can’t fight a real war.
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks. (emphasis mine)
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