af-pak

More on U.S. efforts to aid Pakistanis displaced by the current military efforts against the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this morning that the Obama administration is sending $100 million for displaced-person assistance through international-aid organizations already on the ground. Clinton explained that the way the aid will work at a White [...]

In one of the most rococo arrangements between patron and client-state imaginable, Afghan President Hamid Karzai might hire Zalmay Khalilzad — who was an extremely powerful U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 — to be something like a chief executive officer. Khalilzad, who was born in Mazar-e-Sharif, had been rumored to consider a [...]

There are something like 900,000 Pakistanis internally displaced because of the ongoing fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistani military, according to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the number is likely to increase by hundreds of thousands more. The United States, however, stands ready to provide aid. [...]

I’m going to head over to the Dirksen Senate office building pretty soon to cover the Soufan/Zelikow hearings. But before I go: it looks like Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan, is the target of increasing insurgent activity.
It seems like every few days I get a press release from U.S. Forces-Afghanistan about another attack — successful [...]

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke repeatedly referred to a recent opinion poll of Pakistanis conducted by the International Republican Institute. So what’s it say?
Conducted between March 7 and 30, it’s a grim one from an American perspective. More Pakistanis believe the United States was behind last year’s Mumbai terrorist [...]

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) cut through the pleasantries. How can Ambassador Richard Holbrooke be sure that the troop buildup in Afghanistan wouldn’t “escalate, rather than diminish the threat” by pushing insurgents eastward into Pakistan?
If this were the Bush administration — and Peter Feaver can disagree with me here — an emissary would have denied Feingold’s [...]

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, right on time to survey the outcome of last week’s trilateral meetings between the U.S., Afghan and Pakistani governments, as well as the beginning of the Pakistani military’s ongoing offensive against the Taliban in and beyond the Swat Valley. Here’s Holbrooke’s overview:
– [...]

If you want a sign of how thoroughly Gen. David Petraeus is taking command of the Afghanistan war, look no further than today’s surprise news that Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who ran special operations in Iraq for Petraeus during the 2007 troop surge, will be the new ground commander. McChrystal is known as one of [...]

So, keeping up on the Pakistani military’s offensive against the Taliban, there’s this:
The government claimed 700 insurgents had died and the Taliban were on the run.
And good for that. But how does that statistic sound compared to this one:
The United Nations said 360,600 refugees had fled Swat and neighboring Dir and Buner districts since operations [...]

Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, can return home from this week’s U.S-Afghan-Pakistani meetings in Washington with full swagger. His longstanding proposal for a joint Afghan-Pakistani border patrol to curb Taliban cross-border movement has finally been endorsed by the once-skeptical Pakistanis. It’s no panacea, but it’s better to have it than not have it. (Thanks [...]