A great piece in The Washington Post gives real reason to believe that the apparently-torrid pace of arrests in Pakistan of Afghan Taliban leaders is the result of a real strategic shift by Pakistani leadership that cultivated and then tolerated the Taliban for years. The arrest of More…
Maybe this post requires an addendum. The Pakistani Supreme Court just took a major step toward ousting beleaguered President Asif Ali Zardari:
Pakistan’s top court has declared an amnesty that had protected the president from corruption charges was illegal, state and private TV outlets reported. The ruling Wednesday
As I report in my piece on Pakistan this morning, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is taking pains to avoid “demand[ing] a sovereign country,” say, go after the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan or al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. The Obama administration believes that would be counterproductive. Instead, the More…
From the White House, readouts of President Obama’s communications with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari about the administration’s revised Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Try to guess which one is in better favor with Obama.
Zardari:
President Obama spoke with Pakistani President Asif Zardari by telephone this
Tonight’s Afghanistan strategy rollout comes at a tense moment for congressional Democrats. President Obama will announce an escalation of U.S. forces, an adjustment of his March strategy, and an ultimate time-horizon for an exit strategy. But the war, now in its ninth year, has become unpopular — and especially More…
There’s talk about how Iran’s apparent rejection of President Obama’s outreach represents the end of a 2008 campaign goal. And it’s not exactly wrong, though it may be premature. But in today’s Washington Post, it’s clear that another, darker campaign vow is returning, this time about Pakistan. More…
The foreign minister of Pakistan vowed that President Asif Ali Zardari’s government had forged an “unprecedented national consensus” to defend a “stable, democratic country where terrorism and extremist ideologies have little or no support” in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday afternoon.
Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who met More…
After months of negotiations over the summer between the House, the Senate and the Obama administration, the Senate has passed a bill to triple non-military aid to Pakistan. The bill, upping civilian foreign aid to the Pakistanis to $7.5 billion over five years, was hailed by its Senate authors, John More…
As long as we’re talking about the future composition of the Afghan government, a reliable source informs me that the next round of the U.S./Pakistani/Afghan governmental talks is scheduled for October. More as it develops, as I’m not yet sure whether the meeting will be in Washington again.
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 More…
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