af-pak

President Obama convenes the national security team for another debate on Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, and I notice an addition to the guest list is Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew. Lew is the deputy in charge of management and personnel for Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, so perhaps part of today’s session will include an assessment of [...]

The powerful special envoy fielded questions about what the Obama administration considers success in Afghanistan.

The New York Times has a big, excellent piece about the Obama administration’s inability or unwillingness to produce its long-promised metrics for measuring success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I’ve been covering that for months, as you can read here, and it remains almost surreal that there aren’t any metrics announced five months after President Obama [...]

It’s easy and cheap to grouse about Pakistan’s “will” to confront extremism in the tribal areas, but this Washington Post piece about how the Pakistani military is taking its sweet time to conduct its much-boasted-about military offensive in the tribal areas contains quite a dash of cold water:
“It’s an insane dream to expect anything different [...]

It is not a question I can answer. Ever since the not-quite-State-Department-Iran-envoy got scheduled to move over to the White House, all I’ve heard is that… he was moving to the White House, taking a position of some undefined scope. Pretty much every State Department briefing for the last week has had an element of [...]

Buried within the guts of a very good New York Times story about problems with the Afghan security forces is word of this effort at rooting out police corruption:
The United States is also retraining uniformed police units in a process called Focused District Development. Under this program, police units in districts are mentored intensely through [...]

The Cairo speech has eaten up most of my day, but last night, Bruce Riedel, the chairman of the Obama administration’s strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, appeared on a panel at the International Spy Museum to talk about the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence organization and its relationship to Afghan and Pakistani extremism. (More on [...]

As the number of displaced people rises due to the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to up the totals for U.S. relief aid, according to this just-released statement:
“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which is why it’s so critical that [...]

The Pakistani Army is claiming that it has practically cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley. Now comes the real counterinsurgency test: holding the area. In this (sadly unembeddable) video from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, you can see a lot of creative angles of Pakistani soldiers letting off shots. But listen to what analyst [...]

Take a look at this Washington Post piece about a measure of optimism emerging from the Obama administration about Pakistan. Discount the happy talk — apparently al-Qaeda is taking some hits in Pakistan, and that would be nice to believe, but the claim is asserted and not demonstrated — and focus on the balance sheet [...]