Pak misusing US aid for war against India: Obama

WASHINGTON: Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has said Pakistan is misusing US aid to prepare for war against India.

In an interview to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, Obama bluntly articulated what has been said discreetly in Bush administration audits: that US aid worth billions to Pakistan, ostensibly meant for the war on terror, has been used by Islamabad's military rulers to tone up for a possible confrontation against India on its eastern front.

"We are providing them military aid without having enough strings attached. So they're using the military aid that we use - they're not, to Pakistan, they're preparing for a war against India," Obama told O'Reilly, the conservative TV host.

Obama had taken a hard line against Pakistani's descent into fundamentalism, a position that is in part attributed to his familiarity with the country. He visited there as a student during the Zia ul-Haq years when Pakistan began its move towards ardent Islamisation, and his mother, a liberal NGO, worked in Pakistan for five years.

Obama's remarks come at a time when the US Senate is considering a bill piloted by his running mate Joseph Biden to give Pakistan $ 15 billion in developmental aid over a period of a decade - again without strings.

The $ 1.5 billion annual aid is meant solely for the social and developmental sector, Biden aides have said, while rejecting arguments that money is fungible and infusion into social spending without oversight over military expenditure defeats the idea of rolling back Pakistani's militarisation.

Obama did not address the issue at any great length but suggested he would make sure US military aid to Pakistan needs to be targeted against terrorists, rather than India.

O'Reilly: "So you're going to pull it out and let the Islamic fundamentalists take them over?"

Obama: "No, no, no, no. What we say is, look, we're going to provide them with additional military support, targeted at terrorists, and we're going to help build their democracy and provide ..."

O'Reilly: "He's doing that now. Funds over there, and he's doing that."

Obama: "That is not what we've been doing, Bill. We've wasted $10 billion with Musharraf without holding them accountable for knocking out those safe havens... We can't - we can't have - and nobody talked about some full-blown invasion of Pakistan, but the simple point that I made was we've got to put more pressure on Pakistan to do what they need to do"

The Democratic candidate had raised hackles in Pakistan by suggesting he would authorize US military incursion into Pakistan if there was information about Osama bin Laden's presence there and Islamabd did not act on the information.

Administration officials and foreign policy mavens, including Obama's current running mate Joesph Biden and John McCain, had criticised such a public utterance, preferring the policy to be unsaid.

In the past week, the Bush administration has begun covert attacks inside Pakistan aimed at eliminating terrorists, but according to Pakistan, they are resulting only in civilian deaths.

Originally Posted by Agnel

War against india
Bring it on

Originally Posted by champu

^ market ll collapse when war ll start .... So BSE ll fail.... we ll loose our jobs ....

nd many more horrible things may be happened ....

Originally Posted by The Joker

like beer prices will go up