This was a noteworthy point from President Obama in his joint appearance at the White House with Presidents Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday:
The United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al-Qaeda, but also to support the democratically-elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
One thing that you didn’t get from Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in yesterday’s hearing on Pakistan: a sense of precisely what accountability measures the Obama administration finds too “inflexible” in the House’s Pakistan funding bill. Nor did he say what the administration’s metrics — I’m told the word “benchmarks” More…
Whatever you do, don’t miss The New York Times’ epic interview with a Pakistani Taliban tactician about what has become “a seamless conflict” on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The tactician is based out of Wana, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but spends much of his time More…
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
Not necessarily from the Taliban, but from a military coup responding to the threat the Taliban poses to the viability of Pakistan. Fox News reports that Gen. David Petraeus is telling people privately that the next two weeks (!) are a test of the Zardari government’s survivability. Anonymous sources More…
I don’t believe it either, but, via Bill Roggio, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says Pakistani intelligence believe it to be so but don’t have any, like, evidence.
Quoth Bill: “If you can’t trust the ISI to give you accurate information on al Qaeda and the Taliban, who More…
Something that didn’t really fit into my piece this morning about Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani’s presentation yesterday with his Afghan counterpart, Said Jawad: Haqqani disputed that there’s any presidential support for the peace deal negotiated with the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley, which essentially More…
Al Kamen at The Washington Post reports that Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) is being considered for a top post at the State Department: undersecretary for arms control and nonproliferation. If Tauscher is tapped, the Pakistani government, which already doesn’t like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, is probably More…
Deep in Karen DeYoung’s piece today in The Washington Post about what ongoing political instability in Pakistan means for its relationship with the Obama administration is this bit of bitterness at Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attempts to broker a compromise between President Asif Ali Zardari and opposition More…
Commenter Ali Ahmed Kurd took me to task the other day for possessing insufficient knowledge of Pakistan when looking at the current clash between President Asif Ali Zardari and leading opposition figure Nawaz Sharif. I plead guilty then and my plea stands. But the situation in Pakistan is getting More…
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