Pakistan seems to be in a double bind: Resist the United States and NATO and open the door to seizure of its nuclear-weapons program — or cooperate and suffer the same results.
Much as the United States needs to withdraw from Afghanistan, it needs to keep in mind the effects that our military standdown would have on India.
Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; Defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the better part of valor in Kandahar. They lost the war because they should never have invaded in the first place; because they never had a goal that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite.
The Times claims that Pakistan’s inequitable tax system helps drive the insurgency, but offers no proof.
You wouldn’t be surprised that the Ghazi force, and not the Taliban, are behind recent attacks in Pakistan’s capital city if you knew the story of the Red Mosque and its late leader.
Some CIA officers involved in the agency’s drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency, because it is helping al Qaeda and its allies recruit.
Has the drone war in Pakistan’s rugged frontier finally come home? Was Faisal Shahzad, the bumbling Times Square bomb maker, a blowback from the Obama administration’s increased use of killer robots? David Sanger of The New York Times asks the question, and the New York Post says an “anonymous law enforcement” source claims Shahzad was driven to his act after witnessing drone attacks in Pakistan.
Turning Afghanistan over to the Taliban may actually be a win-win situation for the United States.
The competing assertions about Times Square-bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s links relationship with Pakistani Taliban reflects a broader debate both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and Pakistan over how to handle Taliban elements in Waziristan province.
It has been a grim start to the New Year and the new decade in South Asia. Vested interests, hardened obsessions, and old habits continue to push India and Pakistan in the direction of ruinous conflict. While military planners in both countries plan and prepare for the next war, politicians and diplomats remain determined not to talk except on their own terms.