pakistan

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy thinks he sees light at the end of the Obama administration’s strategy and resource review tunnel:
Reliable sources tell The Cable that the review has entered its final stages, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones now taking the lead and putting on the final touches.

In an interview with Pakistan’s Dawn-TV, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out some goals for her trip this week to Pakistan. “I talk about people-to-people diplomacy,” she said, “because for me, being Secretary of State is not just going somewhere and sitting in a government office or a conference room talking across the [...]

President Obama will host this morning what’s expected to be his final meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan strategy ahead of a revision of/re-commitment to what the strategy will be and how to resource it. Attendees will include the chairmen of the military services, which means that this meeting will focus on how [...]

Refugees International, a humanitarian non-governmental organization recently headed by former Pentagon official Kenneth Bacon, is out this morning with a new paper sounding an alarm about the ongoing displaced-persons crisis in Pakistan, a result of insurgent violence and Pakistani military reprisal. The group calls on the Obama administration to “insist that the [Pakistani] government prioritize [...]

As far as I’m aware, this is a first:
A suicide bomber attacked a suspected nuclear-weapons site Friday in Pakistan, raising fears about the security of the nuclear arsenal, while two other terrorist blasts made it another bloody day in the country’s struggle against extremism.
Police say the bomber was “intercepted at the first checkpost.” But still…

Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a critic of the CIA’s Predator drone program in the Pakistani tribal areas, writes:
I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it’s been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing [...]

Matthew Yglesias digs through the archives of the Royal Air Force and emerges with a certain deja vu:
March – May 1925-Outrages by Mahsud tribesmen in Waziristan, India, see the RAF involved in its first independent air action. Aircraft from Nos. 5, 27 and 60 Squadrons, commanded by Wing Commander RCM Pink, bomb and strafe mountain [...]

One more thing about the New America Foundation’s drone-strike report, which found that the drones have “only” killed Pakistani civilians one-third of the time. (We’re talking about “250 to 320″ civilians killed, according to the report.) One of the reasons the report exists is to push back against criticism of the program, such as the [...]

The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out tallying how many civilians have died in the Pakistani tribal areas thanks to the CIA’s drone strikes. Their conclusion: the strikes have killed, since 2006, between 750 and 1000 people; 20 of them have been “leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, [...]

A piece in the Pakistan paper the News accused the U.S. military of taking the inexplicable step of abandoning “checkposts” on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border while the Pakistani military offensive in nearby Waziristan intensifies. According to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff, it’s just not true.