Ashfaq Pervez Kayani

With Pakistani public opinion behind the military push against the Taliban, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the Army chief of staff, declared that the tide has “decisively turned” in the government’s favor in the Swat Valley. This is as premature a claim of victory as when Lt. Gen. John Sattler claimed in 2004 that the Marine [...]

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 [...]

Great piece from The New York Times’ Jane Perlez about the Pakistani army’s impending urban combat with the Taliban in the Swat Valley city of Mingora. About 10,000 civilians remain in the mostly empty city, if the government’s claims are to be considered credible, and the Taliban appear to be awaiting an army that has, [...]

About two weeks ago I was talking to an Obama administration official about the prospects for Pakistan accepting a larger contingent of U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. The administration was pressing somewhat gingerly, the official indicated, not wanting to push the Pakistani military too far — it would be counterproductive to imply too strongly that the Pakistanis [...]

As the Zardari government in Pakistan has an increasingly precarious hold on power, one option for the Obama administration is to turn to Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani to foment a coup, as an ex-intel official tells Laura Rozen:
“Look at [Secretary of State Hilary Clinton]’s comments over the  last week to the effect that the Zardari government [...]

Here’s another dimension to the Pakistani government’s public-denouncement-but-private-cooperation with U.S. military attacks on extremists in the tribal areas. The New York Times reports that Army Special Operators are training elite Pakistani forces to do the job for them. Pakistani Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the Army chief of staff, prefers the training to the fusillade of [...]

In public, Pakistani officials complain about missile strikes in the tribal areas from the CIA’s Predator unmanned aerial vehicles. Barely two weeks ago, for instance, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani called the strikes “counterproductive.” That can be frustrating: credible reports, like this one from The Washington Post, say that Pakistan quietly allows the strikes to [...]