taliban

As I’ve been writing since last night, the tale of the CIA’s payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai seems less like a story about corruption than it does a story about the insurgency. Gretchen Peters, author of a recent book about the drug trade in Afghanistan and its effects on the insurgency, helped me flesh that [...]

In August 2003, insurgents in Iraq, as part of a strategy of isolating the United States from the international community, bombed the United Nations compound in Baghdad, killing 19, including the legendary chief of U.N. operations in Iraq. It was a very successful attack: the U.N. quickly left Iraq, taking away a symbol of international [...]

Should it really surprise us that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the suspected druglord and brother of President Hamid Karzai, is, as The New York Times reported last night, on the CIA payroll? Remember how the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001. It wasn’t with infantry and air strikes. It was with CIA operatives meeting with Northern [...]

It’s hard to know what to make of this, but The Times of London has an explosive and very detailed story claiming that Italian intelligence operatives paid bribes to Taliban fighters who ended up brutally killing and mutilating eight French soldiers in Afghanistan last year. The Italian government strenuously denies the charges. But if the [...]

The insurgents could respond by targeting the Pakistani army in Waziristan or sending fighters across the porous border into Afghanistan.

This certainly seems like a prelude to a very long-telegraphed campaign:
“There’s been a heavy bombardment. They targeted some militant hideouts as well as pro-Taliban tribal elders,” said an intelligence agency official in the region, who declined to be identified.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik says the Pakistani Army’s move into Waziristan, home territory of the Pakistani Taliban [...]

This didn’t fit into my piece yesterday, but at his parley with the Council on Foreign Relations, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, said that it’s “in Pakistan’s enlightened self-interest to normalize [and] be at peace with India.” Asked by a distinguished retired U.S. diplomat, Teresita Schaeffer, whether Qureshi’s vigorous denouncement of terrorist groups [...]

Intellectually, it makes sense, since the only reason anyone in the U.S. cares about the Taliban is because the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda ahead of 9/11, and the continuing relationship between elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda provides al-Qaeda in Pakistan with a degree of strategic depth in Afghanistan. Yet it’s still noteworthy that the administration [...]

Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, gave his inaugural press conference yesterday — The Associated Press’ Ishtiaq Mehsud reports in an understatement, “he did not appear to be a nervous fugitive in hiding from Pakistan soldiers and U.S. drones” — and apparently Hakimullah likes to keep things light hearted and flowing. From [...]

This is a very big deal. The Obama administration has been pressing Pakistan to expand its military successes against the Taliban in the Swat Valley for months. Now, it’s about to go down.
And look at what The New York Times credits as a major reason why:
Now there is a sense within the military establishment that [...]