Yes, I know this is not even news to anyone following the war against al-Qa'ida and their allies, but the US set them up to get evidence, and more than once bomb factories have been moved after the US told the Pakistani military about it. Read about it here.
The latest incidents bring to a total of four bomb-making sites that the United States has shared with Pakistan only to have the terrorist suspects flee before the Pakistani military arrived much later.
More about this and what it means below the fold.
The issue of Pakistani duplicity, or maybe just complicity, with jihadi terrorists, cannot be separated from the issue of the Pakistani military's war against the Pakistani people. No one in Pakistan dares to say this, but the military has been at war with the people and in alliance with Islamists, ever since General Yahya Khan refused to hand over to an elected government dominated by East Pakistan (now Bangla Desh) where the majority of Pakistanis lived.
The West Pakistani military proceeded to wage war against East Pakistan, culminating in the Bangla Desh war of independence and the Indian invasion, which would take too much time to go over here. You can easily google it, or find the articles on Wikipedia. Following the military's defeat democratic government returned to what was left of Pakistan, but once politicized a military is hard to bring back to civilian control. General Zia ul-Haq took power in a bloodless coup and executed the previous civilian leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of the recently assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Militaries can take over governments, but they still need civilian cooperation. They don't need the active support of a majority of the population but they do need to have the passive acceptance of the majority and the active support of enough people to make things work. The Pakistani military found their civilian support from various Islamist groups. These Islamists never supported democracy and had never been able to get more than 15% of the popular vote, but in alliance with the military they were able to impose an increasingly harsh form of Islamic law, and were able to raise the young generation of Pakistanis to believe an increasingly paranoid and violent form of jihadi Islam that was far different from the traditional Islam their parents had been raised in. This is the reason those crazy conspiracy theories are so popular in Pakistan today.
The Pakistani military still need the cooperation of these jihadi groups. Does the United States really need the cooperation of the Pakistani military? Isn't there any way we can appeal directly to the Pakistani people and help them to assert control over their military, giving them a new military if necessary? The interests of the Pakisani people are more and more clearly at odds with those of the military jihadi alliance. Are the interests of the United States really with this military who refuse to renounce their alliance with the jihadis?
What is to be done?