Pakistan Supreme Court extends PM’s deadline on corruption letter

New post: Hassan Abbas, "Move over military: Police and counterterrorism in Pakistan" (FP).

Déjà vu

Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf another two weeks to write a letter to Swiss authorities asking them to reopen a corruption case against President Asif Ali Zardari, after Pakistan’s attorney general Irfan Qadir told the court that the order is "not implementable" because the president has immunity (AP, AJE, BBC, The News, ET, RFE/RL).

Gunmen in South Waziristan on Wednesday killed Pakistani Taliban commander Maulana Ashraf Marwat, who is suspected to have been behind an attack at a volleyball tournament in northwest Pakistan in 2010 that killed almost 100 people (The News). It is unclear who was behind the attack, but officials say Marwat had previously been in conflict with another local Taliban leader.

Pakistan’s new intelligence director, Lt. Gen. Zahirul Islam, is expected to ask CIA director David Petraeus to allow Pakistan to strike targets that the United States wants to attack using drones, according to an anonymous Pakistani intelligence official (CNN). "It would be ideal if the U.S. provides drone technology to Pakistan," the source said.

Pakistani customs officials said Wednesday that the number of NATO supply trucks crossing into Afghanistan at Pakistan’s northwestern Torkham border crossing has soared over the past two days (AFP). Until then, very few trucks had crossed the border since Pakistan reopened the ground supply routes to NATO over three weeks ago.

Switching sides

Local officials in the western Afghan province of Farah said on Tuesday that a low-level police commander had defected with his men to fight for the Taliban (NYT). Officials differed on how many men had defected with the commander, while the Interior Ministry denied the story entirely.

The U.S.-based analysis group IntelCenter has said that the Taliban in Afghanistan are showing vast improvements in their use of technology to plan more sophisticated attacks and generate high-quality propaganda videos (AFP). A video of their June 1 attack on a U.S. military base in Khost shows fighters being briefed on the target by a commander using a model and satellite images, and the attack itself was shot from at least three different angles in order to piece together a more impressive picture of the assault.

Active duty Army Col. Mark Fassl testified on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell forced him to withdraw a request for an investigation into what another witness called "Auschwitz-like conditions" at a U.S.-funded Afghan military hospital because of political considerations (AP). And the Afghan government has requested that major Western supporters and diplomats provide it with a list of the contractors they use who are "related to senior [Afghan] officials," in an effort to clean up the rampant corruption that worries international donors (Reuters).

Culture swap

Escaping grinding poverty at home, many Pakistanis have immigrated illegally to Barcelona to find a better life, though some are forced to make ends meet as beer vendors in the city’s popular "plaças," where they supply reveling tourists and residents while avoiding the police (ET). One vendor says he and other South Asian immigrants work together to warn each other when law enforcement approaches, though when they do get caught they are rarely arrested because "we taught them corruption."

— Jennifer Rowland