swat valley

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 [...]

If Bruce Riedel, chairman of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review, has a bottom line as to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence’s relationship with extremist groups, it’s that such relationships are deliberately murky. ISI is not a “rogue intelligence agency,” he told a crowd last night at the International Spy Museum, but instead mostly follows the [...]

As the number of displaced people rises due to the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to up the totals for U.S. relief aid, according to this just-released statement:
“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which is why it’s so critical that [...]

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:
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Probably the best possible conclusion to this week’s Afghanistan-Pakistan-U.S. trilateral talks didn’t come from Washington. Last night, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani went on television to pledge that the military will drive the Taliban out of Swat. Whether the Pakistani government will be satisfied with a Taliban presence in the tribal areas remains to [...]

I wrote a bit Friday about the, uh, ambition inherent in assigning U.S. trainers to mentor the Pakistani army in counterinsurgency. An excellent and chilling PBS Frontline documentary that aired last night had a scene that underscored the point better than I could have.
In “Children of the Taliban,” reporter Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy presented an overview of [...]

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 left them in control of Swat [...]

Brandeis University’s Micah Zenko has an interesting op-ed in The Boston Globe looking at the stepped-up use of missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. Long story short, they’re alarmingly effective. But more importantly, look at why:
From a purely military perspective, the Predator surge has largely succeeded in tracking and killing high-value terrorist suspects. [...]

I keep mentioning the Swat Valley in Pakistan as the real center of the war on terrorism. The Al Qaeda-aligned Pakistani Taliban of Beitullah Massoud and affiliated extremist organizations have been trying for years to seize control of the bucolic former tourist attraction in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, often with stunning brutality, and over the [...]

The Swat valley in Pakistan might actually be the center of the war on terrorism. Nestled in the Northwest Frontier Province, Swat is home to the psychotic Pakistani Taliban, affiliated extremists, and quite possibly, senior Al Qaeda and Taliban officials. In recent days, the Pakistani military has undertaken a major operation against the insurgents in [...]