A suicide bomber rammed a car into a mosque during Friday prayers, killing 11 people in the town of Timergara in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), police said.

Muhammad Idrees Khan, deputy inspector general of police in Lower Dir, told AFP that the blast hit a mosque next to local police headquarters.

Houses have been destroyed to either side where dead bodies have not yet been retrieved, so the death toll is expected to go up. Hospitals report that there are injured children too.

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Obama’s speech Tuesday night at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., will address primarily the Afghanistan aspects of the strategy. But despite the public and political attention focused on the number of new troops, Pakistan has been the hot core of the months-long strategy review. The long-term consequences of failure there, the review concluded, far outweigh those in Afghanistan.

“We can’t succeed without Pakistan,” a senior administration official involved in the White House review said. “You have to differentiate between public statements and reality. There is nobody who is under any illusions about this.”

One problem has been double-dealing with violent extremists that has long made Pakistan a state sponsor of these groups, and it appears Obama has called them out on this, a marked difference from the Bush administration where Musharraf was favored by Dick Cheney who would not allow any criticism:

Obama called for closer collaboration against all extremist groups, and his letter named five: al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Pakistani Taliban organization known as Tehrik-e-Taliban. Using vague diplomatic language, he said that ambiguity in Pakistan’s relationship with any of them could no longer be ignored.

This doesn’t sound like a particularly strong message however, though there was this:

If Pakistan cannot deliver, he [Jones] warned, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan’s western and southern borders with Afghanistan.

The Afghan insurgency won’t be stopped or even slowed down much if its bases in Pakistan are not dismantled.

Every reason and rationalization for invading Afghanistan that allowed even reliably antiwar Democrats to call it ‘The Good War’ can now be said about invading Pakistan’s FATA.

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New radio station in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA):

The new station, set up by the FATA authorities, aims to counter several illegal stations run by the extremists who air anti-West and pro-Jihad propaganda and has raised a few eyebrows for breaking away from social norms in the region severely hit by the Taliban-led insurgency.

“We initially got a tough response and often resistance for having women. We had to air songs asked for by women under men’s names. But now situation is gradually easing out,” a station official said. “We’re glad to have become a harbinger for change that was awaited for long,” said another official.

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The local police official was vague about the device, saying that it may have been unexploded ordinance from previous conflicts, (an explosive device that looks like a soccer ball near a children’s school, that’s a lot of coincidences), but the prime minister came down hard on “miscreants” who would face “the wrath of Allah”…

Which reminds me yet again of this excellent essay in Aziz’s Hirabah Watch series. Bloodthirsty orcs indeed…

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