A meeting between CIA Director Leon Panetta and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) head Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha in Washington was cut short on Monday, apparently over disagreements about joint US-Pakistan cooperation on the war on terror within Pakistan itself.

Pasha has demanded a sharp reduction in the number of US Special Forces operatives in Pakistan, as well as a halt to drone strikes against militants, according to RFERL. However, Reuters quotes a senior Pakistani intelligence official as saying that the demands might be more about appearances than genuine pique, since many Pakistanis object to foreign troops on Pakistani soil.

These demands come after a major scandal involving Raymond Davis, an America CIA security contractor. On January 27, 2011, he shot and killed two Pakistani motorcyclists while waiting for a traffic light in Lahore. He said that they had been following him, and that they were intending to kill him.

The Pakistanis wanted to prosecute Davis for murder, but the Obama administration demanded that he be returned to the U.S. under diplomatic immunity. Finally, he was released to the U.S., after the relatives of the two victims received $2.3 million in “blood money,” according to CNN.

The Raymond Davis affair has frightened and infuriated the Pakistanis for two reasons. First, the public had been demanding a trial, and many believe that Davis has gotten away with the murder of two Pakistanis.

And second, the existence of one covert CIA operative on Pakistani soil indicates that there may be many more of them, spying on Pakistan for the United States. Pakistan’s nuclear capability is very sensitive, since many Pakistanis believe that American policy is to some how destroy Pakistan’s nuclear capability, according to the Express Tribune (Pakistan).

Then on March 17, a missile strike from a US drone killed 39 people, including civilians, according to AFP, once again infuriating the Pakistani public.

The last straw came last week. The White House issued a bi-annual report on terrorism, harshly condemning Pakistan. The report says that Pakistan has “no clear path” to defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, according to VOA. The White House report accuses Pakistan of not following through when targeting militant strongholds. The report claims the Pakistani military takes territory ,but falls short of completely securing the area, creating a power vacuum that allows the insurgents to return when the army moves out.

The result is the US-Pakistani relations are facing the biggest crisis since 9/11, according to the Guardian. Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, is quoted as saying, “We will not accept the stigmatising of Pakistan. We need to re-examine the fundamentals of our relationship with the United States to get greater clarity. There has been a pause. Now we must start again.”

The article quotes Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, as saying that Americans should stop blaming others for their difficulties in Afghanistan, where the situation has worsened in the last year.

Pakistan and the United States are bound together in a deadly embrace. The U.S. needs Pakistan as an ally on the war on terror. Pakistan’s economy has been devasted by the financial crisis and by massive floods last year, and Pakistan depends on the U.S. as its largest aid-giver.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Pakistan and India are headed for a major ethnic and religious war, refighting the genocidal war between Muslims and Hindus that followed Partition, the 1947 partitioning of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India. Since India is a close ally of the United States and Russia, and Pakistan is a close ally of China and Saudi Arabia, the war between Pakistan and India will be a significant component of the coming Clash of Civilizations world war.

Deposed president Laurent Gbagbo arrested in Ivory Coast

Deposed president Laurent Gbagbo was arrested on Monday and taken into custody in Ivory Coast. Alassane Ouattara had been declared the winner of last November’s presidential election, but Gbagbo refused to step down. (See “7-Mar-11 News — Escalating violence in Ivory Coast leads to enlarged U.N. peacekeeping force.”)

According to a report that I heard on al-Jazeera on Monday, the arrest was actually accomplished by French armed forces. But credit for the arrest was given to Ouattara’s “Republican Forces,” so that Ouattara wouldn’t be called a tool of France.

Gbagbo has been taken to an undisclosed location, and is under the protection of the United Nations, according to Bloomberg. Since the arrest, there has been gunfire and looting. Some of the fighting appears to be Gbagbo’s militias firing on Ouattara’s troops, dashing hopes of a quick peace.

The hope is now that with United Nations humanitarian aid, the violence will tamp down, and there will be peace in the land.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, that’s not what’s going to happen. When a country goes through a civil war, there are aften peace agreements and periods of relative calm separating periods of violence, with each violent period worse than the previous one. The war doesn’t end until there’s a massive genocidal climax that’s so horrible that all the survivors vow that they’ll never let anything like it happen again.

I dicussed these concepts frequently in the context of the Sri Lanka civil war. (See “Tamil Tigers surrender, ending the Sri Lanka crisis civil war.”) As I described, the climax is comparable to the surrender of the Germans and Japanese in 1945, following slaughter on the beaches of Normandy and the firebombing and nuking of German and Japanese cities.

Gbagbo’s arrest is nowhere close to a crisis war climax. There’s still a great deal of genocidal energy remaining in both sides of the Ivory Coast civil war, and we can expect violence to continue until a real climax is reached.

Tony Blair to endorse a Palestinian state

The momentum for the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state will take a major step forward, when Mideast peace envoy and former British prime minister Tony Blair endorses a Palestinian state, in a report to Brussels. Australian

White House sends personal letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

As we’ve reported, relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have worsened precipitously because of the Obama adminstration’s rapid abandonment of long-time ally Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and after the administration criticized the deployment of Saudi troops to quell the Bahrain uprising. On Tuesday, a personal letter from President Obama was sent to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, in an attempt to repair the relationship. Washington Post

Granddaughter of Benito Mussolini criticizes Carla Bruni

As we’ve reported in past days, France is closing its border to Italy to keep thousands of Tunisian migrants who flee to Italy from crossing the border into France. Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, is furiously criticizing Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, for not talking her husband into keeping the borders open. (One can just imagine that conversation. Carla to Nicolas: “I won’t have sex with you unless you open the borders to Italy.”) Telegraph

The best computer software for learning a foreign language

Reviews of the best computer software for learning a foreign language, RocketLanguages, Rosetta Stone, Tell Me More, and others. PC Magazine