In a move away from President Obama’s deadline of July 2011 for the start of an American drawdown from Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all cited 2014 this week as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves. Implicit in their message, delivered at a security and diplomatic conference in Australia, was that the United States would be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for at least four more years.

This is a welcome change. Even though one would not want the US to be in Afghanistan and lose more military members (and also the Afghanistan population who are suffering the confrontation between the US and the Taliban), the mission that the US has set for itself in Afghanistan in terms of ensuring that the country is not a center for terrorism will need this time and effort to come to a result.

Now the situation in Afghanistan is that there are just not enough troops on the ground to support the cities, forget the countryside where the Taleban reigns supreme. The US military commander in Afghanistan (Gen. Stanley McChrystal), who was given charge earlier this year, has now asked for 40,000 – 60,000 troops more, making clear that less number of troops than that will lead to a defeat. Obama is already facing many of his own supporters who are asking for a reduction of troops from Afghanistan, or even a complete removal. It is difficult for him to add the number of troops requested, but any refusals (or even going with his veep’s half-baked proposal of less troops, and more missiles and UAV’s) will open him upto the charges of being weak on national security. And if the US now withdraws or reduces its presence, or allows the Taleban to control more territory, this will be a sign of weakness that the US cannot really exhibit, given that it has foes such as Al-Qaeda (and its linked organizations), enemy states such as Iran and North Korea. For these foes, a US withdrawal means that the US does not have the stomach to go in for fights, and is an open invitation to attack it closer to home. Obama needs to take the correct decision, looking into mind the long term, and disregarding the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to him.

On an immediate basis, the Pakistan Army needs to decide whether or not to go ahead with a fully fledged military operation in South Waziristan, the headquarters of the TTP. But before that, Pakistan’s government, army and intelligence agencies will have to undergo some existential angst articulating Pakistan’s absolute stance on militancy. The outcome of that thought process will determine what happens next. The Pakistan Army should not make the mistake of sitting back and hoping that a battle of succession will lead to rampant infighting that will forever fragment the TTP.
The US, meanwhile, has expressed concern that Pakistan will try to negotiate with Baitullah’s successor. After all, reports suggest that Baitullah’s father-in-law Malik Ikramuddin had been in touch with government officials looking to strike a new peace deal. Striking now will indicate a genuine desire to rid Pakistan of militancy. Talking, on the other hand, will suggest that Pakistan is still engaged in a double game.

Past deals with terrorists have always led Pakistan into more trouble, with the terrorist seeing such deals as being reflective of the inability of Governments to fight with them (or of having the stomach to take losses), and using this time to regroup and build up into being a formidable force again. The international community also suspects the intention of the Government when it strikes such deal.

US troops are withdrawing from towns and cities in Iraq, six years after the invasion, having formally handed over security duties to new Iraqi forces. A public holiday – National Sovereignty Day – has been declared, and the capital, Baghdad, threw a giant party to mark the eve of the changeover. US-led combat operations are due to end by September 2010, with all troops gone from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Some 131,000 US troops remain in Iraq, including 12 combat brigades, and the total is not expected to drop below 128,000 until after the Iraqi national election next January. The US Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, said there would be no major reduction in forces until next year but the pullback was a “milestone”.

The current Iraqi Government is treating the event as a major watershed in its regaining of the total control of Iraq, since the presence of US troops in the cities ensured that the Iraqi Government could not take many steps that they would have liked (such as when the Government wanted to apply pressure on Sunni sections in the cities, they had to face some resistance from the US army). With the general elections also due in the next few months, the Iraqi Government is sure to use the opportunity to claim this withdrawal as a victory.
However, the withdrawal does not really reduce the number of troops in the country, and many of the problems that Iraq faces are still there:
1. Security remains a problem
2. Simmering tension between the Sunni and Shia factions remains in place, increased by the impending elections and signs of fraud
3. The army and police are still not upto the required level of training, and not free from factional bias

At the same time, this inaction was something that the western backers of Pakistan were not able to understand; it seemed like a vindication of the fact that the Taliban was not something that the government or the military seemed to want to tackle; and the pressure exerted was incredible. There was a huge flurry of articles and interviews about how Pakistan is on the verge of collapse, that the institutions have lost credibility and were not able to ensure social justice in the country (which encouraged the growth of a force such as the Taleban), that the nuclear arms hosted by Pakistan were in danger of being taken over by the Taleban, and so on.
There is also another view that is seeming to emerge, that action taken by the Government on the urging of western Governments would turn the population further against the west and against the actions of their own Government; already there is a feeling that this is not Pakistan’s war and that forcing the Pakistani army to fight their own Muslim brothers is just not done. The view was that it needed for people to hear more about the kind of society that the Taleban is bringing on, and that as the Taleban occupied more areas of the country and that people realized that now they were in mortal danger, that this was not something that was happening far away, they would finally turn against the Taleban. This would be a time for the Government to take action.
Currently, the Pakistani Government has declared that the pact in Swat is dead, and fierce military action is underway against the Taleban. There is no common thoughts on whether the Government did indeed plan it this way, or whether the action was taken because the pressure on the Pakistani Government and the army was proving impossible to face; indeed, the fact that the Pakistani military has always been a proponent of the strategic depth option in Afghanistan makes it hard to say either way. It needs to be seen whether the action will go all the way, or will end when Zardari comes back to Pakistan.

- Pakistan is facing an incredible movement by the terrorists and Islamic fanatics to take over increasingly large sections of the country and bring these regions under their influence. This is a violent campaign that is very brutal, and which the army and the political leadership are unwilling to fully face (and supposedly because the army is unwilling to abandon the religious warriors, seeing them as an instrument that can help shape the strategic aims of Pakistan in Afghanistan and Kashmir). The takeover by the Taliban of the Swat valley is still unfolding before the international community, and everybody is still shocked.
- After the latest terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, Pakistan is now thoroughly dubbed as a very unsafe place, and all sort of tourism and foreign interest is now off.
- The traditional tensions between the 3 power centers, the Army Chief, the President and the Prime Minister are again escalating. Gilani, the Prime Minister, is trying to make political space for himself by aligning with the interests of the army and moving away from Zardari. Army chief Kayani in turn is starting to make his pressure public now, with increasing reports about warning the politicians to settle things down
- The tussle between Zardari and Sharif is the biggest problem. These 2 had made an uneasy truce and alliance when they wanted to bring down General Musharraf, but then separated soon after (and they have a long history of animosity – Zardari after all spent about a decade in jail during Sharif’s rule)
- The US and other western countries want the country to be focused on fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and have a great deal of influence and are not wanting in exercising authority. Hence, constant use of missiles from drones that attack inside Pakistan even though it is unpopular in Pakistan, and using their influence to try to arrange political deals inside Pakistan (to the extent that no politician can be truly anti-American and be a strong leader)
In these times, this tension between Zardari and Nawaz Sharif is a truly dangerous escalation of the political conflict, and one that can only lead to a worsening of the situation.

It was in Rawalpindi that Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, the surviving gunman from the terrorist massacre that claimed 165 lives in Mumbai last November, took his first step toward infamy. In 2007 he visited a market stall run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an Islamist extremist group that has been blamed for the Mumbai attacks, among others. Understand Qasab’s story and you begin to understand why young men throw in their lot with Islamic extremists, why Pakistan may be the most dangerous country in the world.
In 1990, Muslims in Kashmir — the Himalayan territory that India and Pakistan have been arguing and fighting over since 1948 — rose up against Indian rule, and the mujahedin soon found a new cause. The Pakistani military used the jihadi movement, hoping that guerrilla warfare would destabilize its enemy India where conventional warfare failed. Jihadi groups in Pakistan collected donations for Kashmir. Young men signed up for training camps, where they concentrated on physical fitness and learned how to use weapons. Jihad wasn’t just a diversion from ordinary life; it was a rite of passage.

When you read the article, it makes it seem so easy. Here is a person who has rebelled away from his family, fled to a city. He comes into contact with a militant group while trying to learn how to live a life of crime, and is sufficiently brain-washed and impressed that he will go in for arms training and learn how to be a terrorist. This is sufficiently scary, but when you combine this story with how it seems so easy for this to happen, how arms training happens right under the umbrella of the state and the army in Pakistan, and you start to realize the dangers. What is to stop such a similar incident happening in a country like Great Britain which has a radicalized minority among its Muslim population, and it is easy enough to plan such an attack.

This aerial and ground campaign by Israel has now laster for 18 days, during which Israel seems to have learned from its previous such conflicts. It has withstood pressure from all around to stop this campaign (and taken heart from the Bush administration’s unwillingness to criticize Israel for these actions), taking the campaign deep inside Gaza. There have been a huge number of civilian casualties in this campaign, but Israel is stone-walling all such pressures. Inside Israel, the realization that Hamas controls a territory from where it can keep on attacking Israel through rockets that are steadily increasing in range (and from where it can soon reach crucial parts of Israel) would be part of the calculations to try and stop Hamas. This is a risky effort, and will not win Israel too many friends (although if the campaign succeeds and Hamas is weakened, there will be a weakening of the push by Iran and Syria to take leadership of the anti-Israeli campaign; something that will make many of the Governments of many of the Islamic countries of the region happy).

Israel says it attacked more than 60 targets overnight in Gaza as its offensive against Hamas entered its 18th day. The air assault came as Israeli troops advanced in the southern and eastern suburbs of Gaza City. The Israeli military also announced another three-hour ceasefire, starting at 0900 local time (0700 GMT), to allow aid lorries into Gaza.
Meanwhile, reports suggest diplomatic efforts between Egypt and Hamas in Cairo are progressing. After meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair said the elements were in place for a ceasefire agreement. “I am hopeful we can put an agreement together but it’s going to have to be worked on very hard and it’s got to be credible,” he told journalists. Israel hopes the scale of its operation will greatly reduce the number of missiles fired from Gaza into southern Israel, while eroding support for Hamas.

There are no easy solutions to the problem. The people of Gaza voted Hamas into a leading position, and pretty soon Hamas had evicted Fatah militarily from the strip of land, and taken command of the small strip of land abandoned by Israel in 2005. Hamas sees a long term aim as the eviction of Israel from the region, and does not recognize its right to exist. Israel is hoping that it will be able to destroy the top leadership of Hamas and scare it enough that Hamas will stop firing rockets into Israel, and one does not know whether that can ever be achieved.

Five missiles fired from an American pilotless aircraft on Monday hit a large compound in North Waziristan belonging to one of Pakistan’s most prominent Taliban leaders, two Pakistani intelligence officials and a local resident said. The strike hit the compound run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom the United States has accused of organizing some of the most serious recent attacks in Afghanistan against American and NATO forces and of masterminding a failed assassination attempt against the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. According to American officials, the two Haqqanis protect forces from Al Qaeda in their enclaves in North and South Waziristan, provide logistics and intelligence for Qaeda operatives, and act as a bridge between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, who share the common mission of driving American and NATO troops from Afghanistan.
The attack was carried out less than a week after the first publicly acknowledged ground operation by American Special Operations forces against Taliban operating inside Pakistan. The commandos struck at militants in a village in South Waziristan on Wednesday at the start of what American commanders said was likely to be a more sustained campaign against the Taliban operating in Pakistan’s tribal region. The attack on Monday was the third American missile strike on Taliban targets in North and South Waziristan since the ground attack on Wednesday.

Pakistani spokespersons have expectedly condemned the strike and vowed of retaliation for some of the attacks (most noticeably for the ground attacks). However, it seems that a large section of the press believes that this protest is for public consumption and that Pakistan has accepted that there will be more such strikes. For a country that has received a large amount of aid from the US, US influence can be very hard and difficult to oppose. At the same time, such strikes will have the effect of making more Pakistanis react negatively and more in favor of the terrorists, making the task of the Pakistani Government all the more difficult.

Three teenage girls have been buried alive by their tribe in a remote part of Pakistan to punish them for attempting to choose their own husbands, in an “honour” killing case. After news of the deaths emerged, male politicians from their province, Baluchistan, defended the killings in parliament, claiming the practice was part of “our tribal custom”.
The girls, thought to have been aged between 16 and 18, were kidnapped by a group of men from their Umrani tribe. They were driven to a rural area and then injured by being shot. Then, while still alive, they were dragged bleeding to a pit, where they were covered with earth and stones, according to the findings of Human Rights Watch, the international campaigning group. Officials, speaking off the record, confirmed the killings. Some reports said that two older relatives of the girls had tried to intervene, but they too were shot and buried with the girls while still alive.

This is an absolutely despicable act, and the fact that the Government refuses to take any action on this even 6 weeks after this cold-blooded murder (in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad) makes it even more horrible. The Pakistani Government as well as the Government of Baluchistan are both run by the Pakistan People’s Party, the party that was run by Benazir Bhutto for the last 2 decades before her assassination, and the refusal to get the people involved arrested (for fear of antagonizing the tribes involved) is a political act. Even Musharraf was better than this, since in a major honor case (where a girl was raped as a means of punishment), he had got the people involved arrested and tried. In this case, what the girls wanted to do was to get married in a civil court, and this was enough to get them killed.
Unfortunately, this sort of custom (should one dignify this sort of act by calling it a custom?) happens in other countries in the region as well to varying degrees – the denial of many rights such as being able to select their own partners, being arrested for meeting people of the other sex, harassed and arrested for not wearing a full length gown, and in the more extreme cases, being ordered to be killed by tribal / caste gatherings that assume the power of life and death. These need to be combated through more education, bringing in more development; at the same time, they need to be accompanied by swift and merciless punishment for the people involved.