summary:
Because the pakistani government has lost ground in flood hit provinces KP and Balochistan, and the international relief response has not yet met minimum requirements, it is likely that extremism will increase rapidly in the area. That will not only affect the war in Afghanistan, as the Pakistan Army is not capable of defending the [...]
Raul R. Pillar is probably right with his theory , that terrorists (foremost al-Qaeda) do not necessarily need Afghanistan as a safe haven to attack the US in future and that the presence of US troops in the area should not be justified with just this target – to eradicate such breeding places.
Peter Tomsen (former chargé d’affaires of the US to the Northern Alliance) has proclaimed a possible exit strategy from Afghanistan based on an Austrian State Treaty Model from 1955. in: Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 25, Winter 2001
The same guy had a shot at the predictioner’s game concerning the Taliban way back in 2000, [...]
Qalandar Bux Memon has recently published an article commenting on Hillary Clinton’s visit and her statements in Pakistan. Read it here at the Samosa, but it was also published in DAWN and referred to by Yasir here. I recieved emails from Pakistani Leftist Political Activists who praised the article and I guess it was cheered [...]
In April this year the Asia Society published a Task Force report (led by Barnett Rubin and Thomas Pickering, the team including Ahmed Rashid and Peter Bergen among others) on the strategy the US administration should take on AfPak. It can be downloaded here.
The presentation of the report was recorded on video and included a [...]
From a review by Ahmed Rashid (”Afghanistan: On the Brink” in the New York Review of Books) I turned towards another assessment by Barnett Rubin – his pragmatic comments on the targets set by the US and during the Bonn conference, written in 2006 but already addressing many points some pundits pretend to have invented only recently.