Internally, the US President is coming under huge strain; his fellow Democrats don’t support adding more troops to the Afghan war since it is highly unpopular with their base; the Republicans did not support his announcing of a deadline to commence withdrawal of troops. The biggest fear of everyone is that by announcing a date, the Taleban, which has been out of power for 8 years now and fighting the insurgency, can afford to wait 2 more years and then make the effort to overthrow Karzai when the US leaves. Pakistan would no longer be willing to invest in an effort to fight the Taleban if it sees the US disengaging from the area, and needs a friendly Afghanistan to counter India.
So now, you have US officials trying their best to persuade leaders from all over that the US has not announced a disengagement, that the withdrawal would only happen if the Afghan army and security services are in a good enough condition, and that the end date for the withdrawal is not decided. Further, the US would set up bases in the area to ensure that it retains a sizable balance. However, Obama is also being accused of making decisions based on politics by ensuring that a withdrawal is in place when he is fighting for re-election.

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.

A lot of this is also due to wrong US policies in the past. The US treated Afghanistan as only a military campaign, with the amount of effort required to reconstruct the country and ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the populations slackening soon after the Taleban were routed; with the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan slipped even further in priority for the US. This was the period that saw a lack of effective governance in many of the provinces of Afghanistan, accompanied by a rule of the warlords with all the corruption and other ills that such a rule bring on. The Taleban and Al-Qaeda have used this time to regroup and become an effective force again, threatening the stability of Afghanistan again, and the US would be paranoid about the terrorist supporters coming back into influence again. So, now the US is taking on the troubled areas in Pakistan directly:

Pakistan’s military chief said Wednesday that no foreign forces will be allowed to conduct operations inside Pakistan in light of last week’s “reckless” U.S. military ground operation. Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all cost and no external force is allowed to conduct operations … inside Pakistan,” according to a military statement attributed to Chief of Army Staff Gen. Parvez Kayani, who succeeded Pervez Musharraf after he stepped down as Pakistan’s army chief last year.
A ground incursion last week by U.S. forces into Pakistan strained relations between the two countries. Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad to complain about the incident, which it said killed 15 civilians. The Pentagon has not confirmed the raid, but a senior U.S. official who declined to be named told CNN’s Barbara Starr that U.S. helicopters dropped troops into the village of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan. The official said there was no evidence of any civilian deaths.

Such operations however cause huge problems in Pakistan. After all, no country would like to see foreign troops invading your country, and killing people (including innocents). And specially in the border areas, there is huge sympathy for the Taleban. As a result, there is less sympathy and support for the actions of the United States, and of any Government that is seen to be supporting them. Actions by the Pakistani army also meets disapproval, and given the increase in Islamic tendencies among the rank and file of the Pakistani army, there is a buildup of resentment against such military actions.

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.

This much movement must have been expected by the West, but this was not it. Russian forced moved out from these territories and moved towards the strategic city of Gori, a city that sits on the central part of Georgia. Georgians considered this move as an attempt to split the country into 2 separate sections and hollered mightily, expecting action from their allies (the West and the United States). The United Nations was out since Russia would have vetoed any such resolution. And the United States depends on Russia to help it on Iran (something that is more important than the action in Georgia), so except for calling for a cease-fire and speaking about how this action of Russia would have far-reaching consequences, it was not able to do anything greater.
It was Russia that is deciding the course of actions, and one is waiting to see how its other interest, of preventing an oil pipeline that would remove Russian influence from oil shipments will play through. In this case, the West can only try and hope that it will be able to influence Russia, and even though a cease-fire is now signed, Russian troops are not currently retreating:

A day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went close to the front lines in Georgia to press for immediate withdrawal of Russian forces there, the Kremlin announced Saturday that it had approved a framework for a cease-fire. On the ground in Georgia on Saturday, the situation remained largely unchanged, with Russian troops occupying large swaths of territory. The Kremlin gave no indication when they would be pulled out.
The six-point arrangement had been negotiated by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, but a dispute soon followed over one of its provisions, which the Russians had interpreted as allowing them to maintain a military presence on Georgian territory outside the two disputed enclaves, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The vagueness of the original provision appeared to have allowed the Russians to occupy Gori even after the two countries had agreed to the cease-fire framework. A senior Western diplomat in Tbilisi, speaking on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules, contended that the Russian military maneuvers near the capital on Friday around the time of the Rice visit were deliberate. The diplomat said troops were “moving around to weaken the civilian administration and perhaps create the conditions for political upheaval down the line.”

For all the bluster that Rice and other leaders could raise, it was clear that the initiative lay with Russia. Both Russian Prime Minister (and true force behind the throne) Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev had raised the stakes very beginning with the fast deployment of Russian forces, with some pointed comments and speeches, and with not stopping at the border of South Ossetia, but taking the fight inside Georgia.

So, when Ukraine tried to show itself as more hostile towards Russia, there was a sudden crippling blockade of the oil and gas it gets from Russia; and now Georgia. Ever since President Mikheil Saakashvili came to office and had a campaign of getting back the pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and a second separatist area, Abkhazia, Russia has been seething. It already knows that it is much more powerful. The US wants its support in the initiatives against Iran and North Korea, and cannot afford to antagonize Russia. And the Georgian leader gave Vladimir Putin just that chance. He tried to take one of the provinces, South Ossetia back, and met such overwhelming Russian force (without any check by any other party) that Western leaders were worried that Putin may be trying to gain more geographic control inside Georgia. Right now, things are moving towards a cease-fire, but Russia must have intended this as a show of force to Georgia and others, that they are truly helpless when faced with this great bear.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Pakistan needs to do more to prevent Taliban militants from launching attacks into Afghanistan from its territory. “We understand that it’s difficult, we understand that the northwest frontier area is difficult, but militants cannot be allowed to organize there and to plan there and to engage across the border,” Rice said. “So yes, more needs to be done.” The strong message to Islamabad comes just a few days before Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House.
Pakistan has also strongly resisted suggestions that U.S. or other foreign troops should be allowed into the remote region to combat the militants. Gilani is seeking peace deals with militants through tribal elders in the northwestern regions of Pakistan.

It seems more apparent that the steadily increasing level of casualties in Afghanistan, especially among US servicemen has starting having an effect. The US Government is steadily increasing the pressure on the Pakistani Administration to take more action to reduce the support that the terrorists get in these tribal areas.