U.S. to shift Aghanistan drug policy

Good news:

The United States announced a new drug policy Saturday for opium-rich Afghanistan, saying it was phasing out funding for eradication efforts and using the money for drug interdiction and alternate crop programs instead.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, told The Associated Press that eradication programs weren't working and were only driving farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, where he said it had been warmly received, particularly by the United Nations.

The previous policy was always short-sighted and more or less put our stupid war on drugs before the war in Afghanistan. It didn't reduce significantly the cash flow to the Taliban and just gave Afghans another reason to hate the U.S. for destroying their livelihoods.

Maybe along with an increased force and a real policy to reduce civilian casualties, we might actually salvage our efforts there.

Saturday Morning Reading

A few things of interest this morning:

1. Did you know that Georgia still has segregated proms? Separate but equal you know, except not really. I think the quickest way to fix this would be for the black high schoolers to crash the white proms. Once white parents predictably overreact and thus demonstrate their racism to one degree another, there will be enough public pressure to change this.

2. More on Obama's "preventive detention" proposal. Thanks, but no thanks. Personally, I don't feel like living in The Minority Report. Either people are planning to commit a terrorist attack, and thus committing a crime, or they aren't.

3. Bob Herbert weighs in on Troy Davis, who is slated to be executed even though there is compelling evidence that he did not commit the crime he is convicted of. When a man can conceivably be put to death despite compelling questions regarding his guilt, it is an indictment of the death penalty in general.

4. The Pakistan Army's offensive against the Taliban in Swat is not going as terribly as was feared it might, but neither are the Taliban proving to be an easy enemy to oust.

5. Republicans are staking their electoral hopes on a desperate wish for Obama to fail, and therefore doing the best they can to avoid dealing with ever-increasing unpopularity of their proposals and any need for party reform.

6. A profile of Leah Ward Sears, the first African-American woman to be Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and potential nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

7. I had a chance to watch the streaming webcast of the Cliburn Competition, which kicked off yesterday. I was very impressed by the fact that their webcast is actually a full-fledged broadcast, complete with commentary, fillers between the performances, and backstage interviews with the competitors. Various camera angles make it easy to watch the competitors as they play, and the sound quality is impressive. The competition continues through June 7th, and you can watch it online here.

"Pakistan on the Brink"

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid warns that Pakistan "now reaching a tipping point" between an effective resistance of the "Talibanization" of the country, and collapse and chaos. The entire article is a good overview of the present situation and how Pakistan arrived to this point, but there are a few passages that deserve highlighting. While many fear that the Pakistani government will be overthrown by the Taliban, Rashid says that Pakistani is in reality facing the danger of a permanent state of anarchy and the Pakistani government is largely paralyzed in the face of the danger:

Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.

In northern Pakistan, where the Taliban and their allies are largely in control, the situation is critical. State institutions are paralyzed, and over one million people have fled their homes. The provincial government of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) has gone into hiding, and law and order have collapsed, with 180 kidnappings for ransom in the NWFP capital of Peshawar in the first months of this year alone. The overall economy is crashing, with drastic power cuts across the country as industry shuts down. Joblessness and lack of access to schools among the young are widespread, creating a new source of recruits to the Taliban. Zar-dari and Gilani have spent the past year battling their political rivals instead of facing up to the Taliban threat and the economic crisis.

Much press is focused on the threat that the Taliban will somehow get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons. While this possibility cannot be completely dismissed, it seems silly to focus on that possibility over the very tangible catastrophe of Pakistan's slow descent into chaos. We should be under no illusions that we can or should secure Pakistan against their own domestic insurgencies, but we do have to understand that a failed Pakistani state will result in a level of danger to us that we haven't seen since prior to 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan:

The Taliban in Swat quickly grew to more than eight thousand fighters, including hundreds of foreign and al-Qaeda militants, seasoned Pashtun fighters from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and extremist groups from Punjab and Karachi. They invited Osama bin Laden to come live in Swat. In fact al-Qaeda and the Taliban had targeted Swat three years earlier in their search for a safe, secure sanctuary that would be at a good distance from the Afghan border, with better facilities for an insurgency than FATA, as well as far away from the US drone missiles that have been falling on the tribal areas, killing Taliban leaders. 

If al Qaeda has their way then, Swat will become the sort of safe haven that they haven't operated in since the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. This is by far the greatest danger that the deteriorating situation present to us. Naturally, if the Pakistani army is engaged in combat with the Taliban al Qaeda will not be entirely free to plot attacks against the West, and much of their effort may be focused on launching suicide attacks and other terrorist operations on parts of Pakistan still controlled by the government. But they will be freer to operate than at any time since the Taliban fell and barring operations on the part of our military deeper into Pakistan than anything we've seen before, they will be entirely free of harassment by our forces.

Rashid also answers the question of why Pakistan is so much worse off than Afghanistan, which faces a related Taliban insurgency:

The insurgency in Pakistan is perhaps even more deadly than the one in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there is only one ethnic group strongly opposing the government—the Pashtuns who make up the Taliban—and so fighting is largely limited to the south and east of the country, while the other major ethnic groups in the west and the north are vehemently anti-Taliban. Moreover, more than a few Pashtuns and their tribal leaders support the Karzai government. In Pakistan, the Pashtun Taliban are now being aided and abetted by extremists from all the major ethnic groups in Pakistan. They may not be popular but they generate fear and terror from Karachi on the south coast to Peshawar on the Afghan border.

In Afghanistan the state is weak and unpopular but it is heavily backed by the US and NATO military presence. In addition, the Afghans have several things going for them. They are tired of nearly thirty years of war; they have already suffered under a Taliban regime and don't want a return of Taliban rule; they crave development and education; and they are fiercely patriotic, which has kept the country together despite the bloodshed. The Afghans have always refused to see their country divided.

In Pakistan there is no such broad national identity or unity.

Rashid notes the domestic insurgency in Baloch, where separatists are looking to break away from Pakistan, and the growing divide between rich and poor, are divisions that the Taliban are capable of exploiting. Decades of war and an eagerness for peace helped fuel the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Social disunity and division may do the same for the Pakistani Taliban.

Rashid arrives at this conclusion:

The last two years have bought some hope in the growth of the middle class, an articulate and increasingly influential civil society made up partly of urban professionals and publicly involved women. Most Pakistanis are not Islamic extremists and believe in moderate and spiritual forms of Islam, including Sufism. However, Pakistan is now reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership, whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari's decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically distant battlefields. The Taliban's campaigns to assassinate politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.

The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the Taliban and show the country a way forward.

In other words, there's almost nothing we can do about the worsening security situation in Pakistan without more decisive action by the Pakistani government. Despite all of our weapons and money, the fate of Pakistan is almost entirely out of our hands.

Pakistan Launches Assault on Taliban

The truce between the Taliban and Pakistan in the Swat valley comes to an end:

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in a late-night televised address to the nation, said Pakistan would launch a full-scale offensive against Pakistani Taliban guerrillas who've seized control of the vast Swat valley, which is about 100 miles north of the capital.

Pakistan will no longer "bow our heads before the terrorists," Gilani said in an 11 p.m. address as he called on citizens to rally behind the armed forces. He said that the government had tried peaceful negotiation with Taliban entrenched in the Swat valley, but the strategy hadn't worked.

Pakistan had "reached a stage where the government believes that decisive steps have to be taken," he said, and the army's job now was to "eliminate the militants and the terrorists."

Thousands of civilians have fled from Swat and neighboring districts in the fighting between the army and militants in the past week, but hundreds of thousands are unable to move and could be caught in the crossfire. Gilani appealed to the international community for humanitarian aid.

The government's call to arms only seemed possible because of a seismic shift in public opinion against the militants, which only took place in the past few weeks after a deal with the Taliban in Swat went badly sour.

"After a long time, the people see a ray of hope," said analyst Khadim Hussain, of the Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, an independent research organization in Islamabad. "For the first time, the majority of the population, the people in the conflict zone, and the military, are thinking along the same lines."

The February peace accord, following two half-hearted army operations against the Taliban, would've imposed Islamic law in Swat. The Taliban, however, failed to disarm as they'd pledged, and invaded the neighboring district of Buner — which put them within 60 miles of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The Taliban may have overestimated their invincibility and their popular support.

Many Pakistanis thought that the Taliban and other extremists sought only to root out vices and usher in Islamic law in a country that's almost entirely Muslim.

Brutal behavior by the Swat extremists had the nation recoiling in horror, realizing that the real agenda was to seize territory and power. As well as the shock of the Buner incursion, a video emerged last month of a young woman being publicly beaten in Swat for alleged adultery, and the Taliban's political representative, Sufi Mohammad, gave a speech in which he denounced democracy as an "infidel" system.

The Taliban may have overplayed their hands, but it's not at all clear that the Pakistan army possesses the capability to rout the Taliban. As is usual in war, the offensive will hardest on civilians who are unable to get out of the line of fire.

Pakistan to Retake Swat Valley

Or so they say, though the campaign hasn't begun yet:

The Taliban have dominated Swat since February, when the government agreed to establish Islamic courts in exchange for a cease-fire, and last month they sent forces into neighboring Buner, where the government capitulated without a fight.

After more than a week of heavy public pressure from the Obama administration, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke Monday night that the army would retake the territory.

"The army is going back in as we speak," Holbrooke quoted him as saying on the eve of Zardari's meeting Wednesday with President Barack Obama in Washington.

Despite Zardari's assurance, however, there was no sign Tuesday that a major army operation had begun in Swat, and residents reported that Taliban had mined the roads into Mingora to block any army offensive.

It is not clear at all that the Pakistani army is capable of unseating Taliban fighters in Swat, given their record of failures against the militants. The results of a failed campaign would be...well, catastrophic.

Friday Morning National Security News

Things you should be reading:

1. Yesterday suicide bombers killed eighty Iraqis in three separate attacks. Today at least sixty more residents of Baghdad have died in two suicide bombings. It's stating the obvious to say that this raises concerns that progress on the security front is being undermined. So far, nobody really seems to understand what's prompted the new attacks.

2. Pakistan's Taliban insurgency is worsening. Fighters from neighboring Swat moved into the Buner district earlier this week, only seventy miles from the capital of Pakistan Islamabad. The Pakistani government responded by sending police forces to the district, who were promptly repelled by the militants, and other reports indicate that Taliban forces have moved into districts even closer to the capitol. Al Jazeera reports that the Taliban are now pulling their fighters out of Buner, but none of this encourages American officials to believe that Pakistan is capable of dealing with their home grown Taliban insurgency...or securing their nuclear weapons against those fighters.

3. The Washington Post reports that the debate within the Obama administration over whether to release four OLC memos was intense. One of the arguments against releasing them was surely the political furor that the move has provoked. The Obama administration says they intend to oppose any investigation in torture by Congress, a move that some Democratic members are pushing for.

4. The Jane Harman story grows even more troubling with the revelation that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales intervened to prevent then director of the CIA Porter Goss from informing members of Congress that one of their own had been captured on an NSA wiretap speaking with an agent of Israeli government, and that Gonzales also intervened to quash any investigation of the matter by the FBI. All of this was done allegeldy so the administration could continue to count on Harman's help in protecting the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program (and on that score, Harman didn't disappoint.) My only question is...how long do we have to wait to get rid of her?

Saturday Links

1. More on studies showing that children do not in fact make people happier. I'm not sure how much I can add to what I said last year; children actually make some people happier (as opposed to making them think they're happier) but yes, children also make a lot of people less happy. I don't know why we're pitter-pattering around the obvious truth, which is that there are a lot of people who should never have kids. That does not mean that the people who are having kids are falling prey to a "noble lie."  

2. Senate Democrats are considering increasing funding to the Legal Services Corporation, which in turn funds legal aid programs across the country. The poor in our country are in desperate need of adequate legal representation. This won't provide it, but more money is always better than less.

3. Tribal disenrollments over gambling money? Gambling has benefited Native tribes immensely, but it's hardly made some tribal members less selfish or short-sighted.

4. Disappointingly, the Obama administration indicates no interest in settling the over a decade long case against the Federal government over misappropriated trust funds. The the Federal government's ineptitude has long been highlighted by this case, officials in the Interior Dept. apparently believe that more time in court is the way to go.

5. Afghanistan: Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, says we need a "complete rethink" of drug policy towards Afghanistan. No ideas what this means yet, but it's better than the more of the same approach that's failed so far. Fred Kaplan breaks down the Obama administration's war plan in Afghanistan; "counter terrorism plus" but again, nobody seems to know what success in Afghanistan will entail.

Early Afternoon Links

For your reading pleasure:

1. Obama's plan for Afghanistan: once again, the key appears to be figuring out what an administration means by "benchmarks."

2. Pakistan: suicide bomber kills upwards of fifty people in a mosque in Peshawar. Part of Baitullah Mehsud's campaign against the Pakistani government?

3. Iraq: U.S. forces are largely withdrawing from the cities as agreed upon, but may remain behind in areas where sectarian violence is still widespread, like Mosul.

4. Building nanobots...with DNA. Incredible.

5. How health care reform benefits small businesses.

6. Lawyer's should not be judged for who they represent...except when they worked for the tobacco companies, and were balls-deep in the tobacco companies' wrong-doing.

More Recommended Reading

End of the day links for your edification:

1. John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, in which Atwood takes something of a meta-view of debt. In essence our profligate ways with our own money reflect our attitudes towards the capital that is our planet, but that the Earth will not be so kind as the present crisis when it's time to pay it back.

2. U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's ISI of supporting Taliban attacks in Afghanistan in a very direct manner, with ISI agents going so far as to strategize with the Taliban about attacks on American forces. Meanwhile, former members of the Taliban say that talks with the Taliban are a possible route to peace, though one says of American forces: "They have a right to ensure that there is no danger to them from Afghanistan...[but] That is the limit of their rights in this country."

3. An aging Dalai Lama concedes that his strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership on Tibet has failed not only to gain traction for Tibetan autonomy, but to slow down the Chinese makeover of the country. China's response to any burgeoning demonstrations of Tibetan independence is met only with repression and violence, but alternative strategies are wanting.

4. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister-delegate, insists that Israel is a "partner for peace" while at the same time he's making backdoor deals to expand Israeli settlements in a particular part of the West Bank, a move that the U.S. government has long opposed as an impediment to peace.

5. In an op-ed for the WSJ, three former Presidents of Latin American countries argue that the "war on drugs" is a dismal failure, and it's time for a new course of action.

"Fundamental Question"

Regarding this post yesterday, encouraging signs from the Obama administration:

As part of the same set of decisions, according to senior civilian and military officials familiar with the internal White House debate, Mr. Obama will have to choose from among a range of options for future American commitments to Afghanistan.

His core decision may be whether to scale back American ambitions there to simply assure it does not become a sanctuary for terrorists. “We are taking this back to a fundamental question,” a senior diplomat involved in the discussions said. “Can you ever get a central government in Afghanistan to a point where it can exercise control over the country? That was the problem Bush never really confronted.”

A second option, officials say, is to significantly boost the American commitment to train Afghan troops, with Americans taking on the Taliban with increasing help from the Afghan military. President Bush pursued versions of that strategy, but the training always took longer and proved less successful than plans called for.

A third option would involve devoting full American and NATO resources to a large-scale counterinsurgency effort. But Mr. Obama would be bound to face considerable opposition within NATO, whose leaders he will meet with early next month in Strasbourg, France. At the very time the United States is seeking to expand its presence in Afghanistan, many of the allies are scheduled to leave.

Emphasis mine. Of course this anonymous statement comes in the same article that discusses how administration officials are weighing drone strikes even deeper into Pakistan...but still, at least they're talking a good game.

Those Nagging Foreign Policy Questions

Last night I discussed our need to have a broad conversation on the limits of American power and how our foreign policy goals should be shaped by those limits. This applies to any number of foreign policy conundrums we find ourselves facing as a nation, but nowhere is this question more urgent than in Afghanistan, where we find ourselves bracing for a long war that will consume vastly more resources than it has to this point, with no clear exit strategy or signs of victory (does that all sound familiar?) There are two questions that come to mind when we approach the feasibility of fighting in Afghanistan. First, can we afford what it would cost us to "win" in Afghanistan?

Unless [Fred Kagan's] views have changed over the past year and a half, Kagan seems to think that the "war on terror" - defined as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - must be "won" no matter the cost.

This kind of Bush-era strategic laziness has got to go. Containing international terrorism needs to be recast as a high priority among several in our national security strategy, rather than George W. Bush's "defining ideological struggle of the 21st century" or Senator McCain's phrase, "transcendent challenge."

Those of us who question whether throwing more troops, money, and political capital into Afghanistan makes sense need to point out the opportunity costs of an escalation and we need to challenge folks like Frederick Kagan and others to explain how much their plan will cost and why it is worth spending our limited resources in Afghanistan instead of addressing our other interests at home and around the globe.

Of course, we can't hope to answer that question without an honest assessment of what we hope to achieve in Afghanistan? Democracy? A stable state? A state free of the Taliban, or a state that integrates elements (or all) of the Taliban? Or are we hoping simply to deny the Taliban their victory, however long that may take? Each of these goals require a different amount of resources. Since the overarching goal is protecting America from future terrorist attacks, we must ask if securing Afghanistan (and necessarily Pakistan to some extent) is the best way to go about that. Or are we better served spending the billions of month we'll spend on war in Afghanistan on counter-intelligence, securing our borders, or paying someone else to fight the Taliban?

The second question that arises then is, can we actually hope to achieve any of these goals? The default position on Afghanistan that the administration and most American proponents of the war seem to have adopted is that we must "defeat" the Taliban; prevent them from returning to power and destroy the ability of their allies in Al Qaeda from plotting and launching future attacks from safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In his review of counter-insurgent David Kilcullen's book, Andrew Bacevich arrives at this conclusion (via Abu Muquwama):

Here we arrive at the nub of the matter. According to a currently fashionable view, the chief operative lesson of the Iraq War is that counterinsurgency works, with U.S. forces having now mastered the best practices required to prevail in conflicts of this nature. Those who adhere to this view expect the Long War to bring more such challenges, with the neglected Afghan conflict even now presenting itself as next in line. Given this prospect, they want the Pentagon to gear itself up for a succession of such trials, enshrining counterinsurgency as the preferred American way of war in place of discredited concepts like “shock and awe.” Doing so will have large implications for how defense dollars are distributed among the various armed services and for how U.S. forces are trained, equipped and configured. Ask yourself how many fighter-bombers or nuclear submarines it takes to establish an effective government presence in each of Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages and you get the gist of what this might imply.

Yet given the costs of Iraq—now second only to World War II as the most expensive war in all U.S. history—and given the way previous efforts to pacify the Afghan countryside have fared, how much should we expect to spend in redeeming Afghanistan’s forty thousand villages? Having completed that task five or ten years hence, how many other villages in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt will require similar ministrations? And how many more accidental guerrillas will we inadvertently create along the way?

Kilcullen the apostate knows full well that an approach that hinges on wholesale societal transformation makes no sense. The consummate counterinsurgency professional understands that the application of technique, however skillful, will not suffice to salvage the Long War. Yet as someone deeply invested in that conflict, he cannot bring himself to acknowledge the conclusion to which his own analysis points: the very concept of waging a Long War as the antidote to Islamism is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed.

If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?

Bacevich is right to wonder whether or not the new adherence to counter-insurgency (fashionably notated in military circles as COIN) presents with a feasible method of defeating enemies like the Taliban. Proponents of COIN point to the success of Iraq, but everyone knows that we were lucky that Al Qaeda overplayed it's hand and we were able to turn the Sunni tribes against them and convince them to buy into a national government (for now at least.) That likelihood of repeating that feat in Afghanistan is considerably lower thanks to vastly different circumstances on the ground. The Soviets waged something of a counter-insurgency themselves, though brutally so, and failed to subdue Afghanistan. Of course we benefit from the Taliban having already demonstrated the unpleasantness of their rule; many Afghans would rather not see the Taliban return to power. But how long do the Taliban need merely hang around before the option of having the Taliban in control of a peaceful country starts to look acceptable to the average Afghan civilian?

I'm sure these questions are all being asked by people at all levels of the military and the Obama administration. The problem is, proponents of escalation in Afghanistan seem to accept that if we simply  spend enough money, apply enough force, use the right tactics and stay long enough, we can subdue the Taliban (or at least they argue in the alternative that we can't afford not to subdue the Taliban.) But such assurances seem to ignore a long history of failed counter-insurgencies, among which we have one very noteworthy failure of our own.

Truce in Swat Good for...the Taliban

But not so much for Pakistan, or the Pakistani government, or anybody forced to live under the harsh rule of Taliban militant Mauluna Fazlullah's version of the Sharia law:

The Taliban and the Pakistani Army signed a truce last month in Swat, the once popular tourist area just an hour north of the capital. But far from establishing peace, the pact seems to have allowed the Taliban free rein to expand their harsh religious rule.

Just days after the truce was signed, a member of a prominent anti-Taliban family returned to his mountain village, having received assurances from the government that it was safe. He was promptly kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and murdered.

The militants then erected roadblocks to search cars for any relatives who dared travel there for his funeral. None did.

This week, two Pakistani soldiers who were part of a convoy escorting a water tanker were shot and killed because they failed to inform the Taliban in advance of their movements.

On Wednesday, the provincial government signed an accord with the local Taliban leader that imposes Islamic law, or Shariah, in the area, and institutes a host of new regulations, including a ban on music, a requirement that shops close during calls to prayer and the installation of complaint boxes for reports of anti-Islamic behavior. Local residents are skeptical that girls’ schools will be allowed to reopen.

Previous accords with the militants in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas have effectively created ministates with sanctuaries for Qaeda and Pakistani militants. The Pakistani government argued that the truce in Swat would free up the Pakistani Army, reduce civilian suffering and satisfy popular dissatisfaction with the local judiciary.

[...]

The government said it saw the truce as a way to separate what it considered to be more approachable militants, like Mr. Muhammad, from hard-line Taliban leaders like Maulana Fazlullah, his son-in-law, who is a young warlord flush with money and weapons. Mr. Fazlullah, backed by the main Pakistani Taliban group and Qaeda fighters, led the fight in Swat against the Pakistani Army in the past year.

Critics of the deal say that it has accomplished nothing like that, and that it has simply handed Swat, once a tolerant, princely kingdom, to the Taliban.

[...]

Despite the truce, most people remain terrified of the Taliban, said Mohammad Amad, executive director of a private aid group, the Initiative for Development and Empowerment Axis. Militants continue to hunt down anyone who backs the government and the army.

He cited the death of a relative, Rahmat Ali, the man who was killed after returning home to his mountain village, Mandal Dag.

Mr. Ali was a cousin of Pir Samiullah, a moderate religious leader who took up arms against the Taliban and fought them with a band of followers for three months, killing about a hundred militants.

Mr. Ali banked on the government’s assurances that he would be safe. “He went back because of the stupid claims of the government,” Mr. Amad said. “He wanted to wind up his business.” He owned a transportation company and planned to sell the vehicles, Mr. Amad said.

Mr. Ali was abducted and held for five days, Mr. Amad said. His body was found on Feb. 25.

“There was no skin on his back,” he said. “We had advised him, ‘You shouldn’t go, you shouldn’t trust.’ ”

The Taliban also announced in the local mosque that every family in the village would have to contribute one young man to their ranks, Mr. Amad said.

Local and provincial officials appear to be powerless in the face of the Taliban, and many remain in exile in Peshawar.

Some officials have fled to Islamabad, the capital, some as far afield as London.

Those who have ventured into Swat to negotiate the accords with the Taliban have been shown who is in charge.
The district coordination officer, Kushal Khan, was kidnapped with several of his assistants soon after arriving in Swat last weekend to talk to the militants. They were later released.

In some places, the Taliban have established new training camps, villagers said.

Near Mandal Dag, a resident reached by telephone said that the militants were using a government school in the mountains as a training camp for target practice. Young boys were being taught to hit moving objects by shooting at dogs that were let loose on the firing range, the resident said.

Sadly, this result was not unanticipated. This truce is evidence more of the Pakistani government's weakness, and not so much a sincere effort to calm the Taliban, though I guess that effect was hoped for.

Pakistani Taliban "United"

This isn't good news:

The Pakistani Taliban, an extremist movement that apes its older Afghan Taliban cousin, is centered in Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban previously was split, with a powerful group led by Baitullah Mehsud at odds with rival warlords Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur. Among the three, they control North and South Waziristan with little interference from the Pakistani state.

While Mehsud has targeted Pakistan itself in a vicious campaign of violence and is accused of being behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Nazir and Bahadur sent their men to fight alongside other insurgents in Afghanistan.

The alliance, reached in the last couple of weeks, means they have settled their differences and have committed to re-direct their efforts into the Afghanistan campaign, according to officials and locals from Waziristan.

The three factions formed a new grouping calling itself Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen, or Council of United Holy Warriors. The move directs attacks away from Pakistan and focuses the warfare against international and Afghan forces, especially those stationed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border.

"It's of concern to us when we see a grouping like that," said a Western security official in Pakistan, who couldn't be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. "This can't be ignored."

Just as we are reinforcing our troops in Afghanistan, so do they appear to be reinforcing theirs. And with little challenge from the government Pakistan, they are free to focus on Afghanistan to our detriment.

"Save Our Swat"

Via Spencer Ackerman, this video tells the heartbreaking story of a young Pakistani girl whose school was shut down, along with all other schools for girls, by the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley. As you may recall, the government of Pakistan recently negotiated a cease-fire with the Taliban of Maulana Fazlullah, which essentially controls the Swat Valley and which has now instituted Sharia law in the district. Like Spencer, I'm extraordinarily skeptical of claims that this cease-fire will help split Fazlullah away from Beitullah Mehsud's Taliban of the frontier provinces. According to this theory, Fazlullah's main goal was to impose Sharia law upon the Swat Valley, but I have yet to meet a religious fundamentalist of any variety, let alone those who are armed to the teeth, who are content merely to live and let live.

U.S. Backs Pakistan-Taliban Cease Fire?

So says the Telegraph:

On Tuesday night however, US officials in Islamabad privately backed the deal as an attempt to drive a wedge between Swat's Taliban, which is focused on its demand for Sharia law, and the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban led by Baitullah Mehsud, the notorious commander who controls much of North and South Waziristan and other tribal areas along the Afghan border.

While they expressed fears that the deal might yet be sabotaged by some Swat Taliban militants who support al-Qaeda, they said that if successful, the deal would break up the alliance between the two groups, which has caused alarm throughout Pakistan and in Washington.

Of the two Taliban groups, Mehsud's is the most feared – he has been accused of masterminding the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and trained Osama bin Laden's son as one of his commanders – but it is the alliance with Swat Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah which alarmed Pakistanis in the country's main metropolitan centres.

American officials in Islamabad said they hoped it would divide Fazlullah's Swat Taliban and his father-in-law's TNSM from Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

"The strategy has to be to divide the two groups. The TNSM and Baitullah's TTP found some common cause briefly, but a peace deal will separate them," said one US official, who explained that while Mehsud's TTP is part of the global jihad, Maulana Radio is regarded as more focused on local issues and the campaign for Sharia law.

Clever, though I suspect that American officials are over-estimating the divide between Fazlullah and Baitullah. I suppose a cease-fire with Fazlullah is the lesser of two evils, the other evil being unity between Fazlullah and Baitullah. Still, who imagines an area dominated by Fazlullah's Taliban where Sharia law is the law of the land, is a positive development for Pakistan?

Cease Fire With Pakistani Taliban

In another sign of the increasing power of the Taliban in Pakistan:

Pakistan has agreed to suspend military offensives and impose Islamic law in part of the restive northwest, making a gesture it hopes will help calm the Taliban insurgency while rejecting Washington's call for tougher measures against militants.

A U.S. defense official called the deal Monday "a negative development," and some Pakistani experts expressed skepticism the truce would decrease violence. One human rights activist said the accord was "a great surrender" to militants.

Monday's peace agreement applies to the Malakand region, which includes the former tourist destination of the Swat Valley, where extremists have gained sway by beheading people, burning girls schools and attacking security forces since a similar agreement broke down in August.

U.S. officials complained the earlier accord allowed militants to regroup and rearm and urged Pakistan's government to concentrate on military solutions to the insurgency in the rugged frontier region, where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

The new agreement intensified that unease.

"It is hard to view this as anything other than a negative development," a senior Defense Department official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of relations with Pakistan and because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said later: "We have seen the press reports and are in touch with the government of Pakistan about the ongoing situation in Swat."

Was Missile Strike Aimed at Mehsud?

Baitullah Mehsud, as the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has proven to be a scourge of the Pakistani government. Was the latest U.S. missile attack aimed at him?

wo missiles fired from American pilotless drones killed up to 32 people, including Arab and Uzbek fighters of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, in South Waziristan on Saturday morning, according to a Pakistani intelligence official and local residents.

The attack, which occurred between 9:30 and 10 am, targeted an area close to Makeen, the headquarters of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.

The intelligence official said the missiles had hit a mud-walled compound owned by a local resident, Roshaan Khan, in an area said to be a hub of local and foreign fighters aligned with Mr. Mehsud and that they could have been intended for Mr. Mehsud himself. But Mr. Mehsud was not among those killed, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

If Mr. Mehsud was the target of the attack, the intelligence official said, it would be one of the first times that American missiles were aimed at the Pakistani.

And another interesting tidbit:

The attack followed the statement in Congress on Friday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the pilotless aircraft take off from a base inside Pakistan.

“As I understand, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” Ms. Feinstein said during a hearing attended by the director of U.S. national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair. In his testimony, Admiral Blair said that the drone attacks had achieved their goal. “Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago,” he said.

It's hardly unimaginable that the Pakistani government maintains two faces about these attacks; private glee that we're targeting Talibani militants in their country, and public condemnation to suit the mood of their countrymen (who are not at all happy with the repeated attacks and were not hesitant to tell special envoy Richard Holbrooke that very thing earlier this week.) I'm not a savvy diplomat, but it seems to me that revealing that the Pakistani government is complicit in the attacks was probably a bad move.

Kabul Attack

Taliban fighters launched a major attack on Kabul today:

Attackers firing automatic rifles and wearing explosive vests stormed the Justice Ministry in central Kabul on Wednesday while others burst into another government building in the north of the city, triggering chaos as ministry workers fled, witnesses said.

Coming on the eve of a scheduled visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama’s newly appointed special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the attacks displayed the apparent ease with which Taliban insurgents who control much of the Afghan countryside can also breach the defenses of the heavily-fortified capital.

At least 19 people were killed and 54 wounded in the coordinated attacks, the ministry of public health said. Eight attackers also died, the authorities said. The Taliban took responsibility for the assaults.

[...]

In one incident on Wednesday, assailants stormed into the Justice Ministry in central Kabul. In another at around the same time, suicide bombers blew themselves up at the ministry’s corrections department in northern Kabul, according to Gen. Mohammad Arif, a senior officer in the prisons service.

The Taliban claimed that several other suicide bombers could still be at large in the city.

Police officials said five gunmen wearing suicide vests burst into the Justice Ministry, shot dead an official at the entrance and then spread out into the building. The police initially said all of them were killed by Afghan intelligence officers who entered the building in pursuit.

Hours after the attack, the police said they believed one assailant had been cornered in the ministry but security forces were unable to move in further because children were trapped at a kindergarten inside the building.

But, after a gun battle in which 60 shots were fired, the police said that the attacker had been killed.

Although Kabul has been the target of bombings in the past, this is by far the most audacious attack launched by the Taliban. Clearly they intend to remind the Karzai government and NATO forces that they have the ability to carry out attacks even in the most "secure" parts of the country.

The Worsening Outlook for Pakistan

Yesterday I listened to NPR's Terry Gross interview the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid on the state of Pakistan today. Gross began by asking Rashid about the present state of Pakistan, and for his response to a column by the NY Times' Nicholas Kristof on the worsening state of Pakistan. Here's Kristof:

Reporting in Pakistan is scarier than it has ever been. The major city of Peshawar is now controlled in part by the Taliban, and this month alone in the area an American aid worker was shot dead, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped, a Japanese journalist shot and American humvees stolen from a NATO convoy to Afghanistan.

I’ve been coming to Pakistan for 26 years, ever since I hid on the tops of buses to sneak into tribal areas as a backpacking university student, and I’ve never found Pakistanis so gloomy. Some worry that militants, nurtured by illiteracy and a failed education system, will overrun the country or that the nation will break apart. I’m not quite that pessimistic, but it’s very likely that the next major terror attack in the West is being planned by extremists here in Pakistan.

If you think that's quite a lot of doom and gloom Rashid, who is well-known for his reporting on Paksitan, Afghanistan, the Taliban and Central Asica in general, did nothing to reassure. He was frank in stating that the situation in Pakistan has worsened dramatically in recent years, as the Pakistani Taliban have essentially declared war on the government of Pakistan. Peshawar in particular has seen a dramatic upswing in violence; thanks to its role as the administrative center of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas its a prime target for the Taliban, and an American aid worker was killed there the week before last. But the situation is even worse than that. Rashid went on to say that roughly 1/3 of the country is essentially outside of the control of the Pakistani government and unsafe for any foreigners to travel in.

Our commitment to Afghanistan is ramping up, and Obama will be expected to press our European allies for greater support in the conflict there. But we face a very serious question for which there is no easy answer (and perhaps no answer at all); how can we hope to secure Afghanistan, weaken the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda, if Pakistan falls apart? To what purpose do we defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan if they are more powerful than ever in Pakistan? Such would be the equivalent of ridding your barn of mice, only to find that they've taken over your house.

American Killed In Peshawar

The Pakistani Taliban have stepped up their attacks in Pakistan, and are now targeting Americans:

An American aid worker involved in a U. S. government program to bring development to a lawless tribal region of Pakistan was assassinated in his car Wednesday morning as he went to work in the provincial capital, Peshawar.

The American, Steve Vance, and his Pakistani driver, were shot as their car approached the house in Peshawar where Mr. Vance ran a project to bring small-scale projects and jobs to the Federally Administered Tribal Area, a stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, his associates said.

Pakistani officials in Peshawar said they did not know who was responsible for the shooting at around 8 a.m. in a residential area of the city known as University Town. The killings came after a suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded sports stadium in the center of Peshawar Tuesday night, moments after leading politicians of the city had left the arena.

The umbrella Taliban group, Tehrik-i-Taliban, claimed responsibility for the stadium attack.

Tehrik-i-Taliban is the name of the Taliban umbrella organization commanded by Baitullah Mehsud which is now banned in Pakistan and appears to be mostly at war with the Pakistan government.