Do Americans Planned to Destroy Pakistan Nukes?

TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday accused Washington of planning to sabotage Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. He was speaking at a media conference in in the Iranian capital. Ahmadinejad also said Iran was ready to resume nuclear talks with world powers but would press ahead with its atomic activities, including uranium enrichment. “We have precise information that America wants to sabotage Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in order to control Pakistan and to weaken the government and the people of Pakistan,” the president said. “The United States would then use the UN Security Council and some other international bodies as levers to prepare the ground for a massive presence (in Pakistan) and weaken the national sovereignty of Pakistan,” he added, without elaborating. Pakistan is the only Islamic nation with nuclear weapons, and has close relations with Iran. In order to fight al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, Washington has intensified its aerial operations in Iran’s southeastern neighbour. Pakistani Islamist groups have at the same time multiplied their assaults through Pakistani territory on military convoys 

“The Northern Alliance is dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks, and has 10,000 to 15,000 fighters,” report Michael Gordon and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times, referring to the minority coalition that controls roughly 10 percent of the mostly Pashtun country. Primarily funded by Iran and Russia, the coalition “comprises three main groups with a number of smaller factions drifting in and out of its sphere of influence,” according to the BBC. “If the U.S. were to mount any kind of ground offensive, the Northern Alliance could prove indispensable.” The alliance suffered a devastating blow to its leadership only days before the strike on the World Trade Center, when its commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, was assassinated. Masood, a defense specialist, represented the ethnic Tajik Jamiat-I Islam movement, along with Afghanistan's ousted ethnic Tajik President Burhanuddin Rabbani, according to John Pike of Global Defense.org. A second group, Junbish-I Milli-yi Islam, is made up of mostly Uzbek warriors led by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, and are said to be some of the most heavily armed factions funded by the Russians. The final group within the Northern Alliance is Hizb-I Wahdat, a band of ethnic Hazara Shia, presumably supported by Iran, where a similar form of Shiite Islam is practiced that differs from the Sunni Islam adhered to by the Taliban. Dennis Kux, senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, says that two events triggered Iranian support for the anti-Taliban rebels. “In 1995 Tehran was upset by the Taliban capture of Heart in western Afghanistan, an area where Iranian influence has traditionally been strong,” Kux wrote in a Foreign Policy Association Headline Series about the region. “Tehran was even angrier in 1998 when the Taliban killed a number of Iranian diplomats during the capture of the northern city of Mazir-I-Sharif