The India-Pakistan border at Wagah. Photo: Dharmesh on Flickr

Ambassador S. Azmat Hassan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan to Malaysia, Syria and Morocco and Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

U.S. policymakers probably rue the day when the Bush Administration decided to broaden its intervention in Afghanistan. Eight and a half years after evicting the Taliban and installing the ineffectual Hamid Karzai as President, the U.S. finds itself bogged down in Afghanistan.

The Karzai government has failed to provide its war-weary countrymen a reasonable measure of peace or security. Suicide bombs kill foreigners and Afghans alike with disturbing frequency in the bigger cities, while guerrilla attacks by a resilient Taliban insurgency continues to take a toll of U.S. and NATO troops.

Corruption and drug-running is rampant. To remain in power, Karzai has had to consort with a number of unsavory warlords who are masters in their fiefdoms. Karzai’s brother, the overlord at Kandahar, has the reputation of being both a CIA agent and the province’s biggest drug dealer.

In the witches’ brew that is Afghanistan today, India and Pakistan are both jockeying for influence. The poor Afghans are caught in the middle of this zero-sum game.

India, seizing on Afghanistan’s travails, has pumped in over a billion dollars toward improving Afghanistan’s economic and social infrastructure. On the face of it, this magnanimity should be considered a praiseworthy gesture.

But the Pakistani ruling circles and especially its Armed Forces are alarmed at India’s burgeoning influence in Afghanistan. India’s economic largesse coupled with the opening of its consulates in Afghan provinces close to Pakistan’s border, have rung alarm bells in Islamabad.

Pakistan’s fears of Indian encirclement both from its eastern and now increasingly its western borders, would prevent regional cooperation in pacifying Afghanistan.

General McChrystal has alerted his superiors in Washington that Karzai’s pro-India orientation — plus India’s forward posture in Afghanistan by alienating Pakistan, a crucial ally — would adversely affect U.S. interests in Afghanistan.

It is not known whether McChrystal’s advice has been heeded by the Obama administration. However, a recent statement by General Petraeus suggests that he understands and perhaps supports Pakistan’s quest for gaining strategic depth in a friendly Afghanistan.

While the war in Afghanistan drags on, U.S.-Pakistani relations are currently facing a downward trajectory. The U.S. is unhappy that Pakistan is not going all out against some Afghan Taliban factions based in Pakistan who are battling U.S. and NATO troops.

The Pakistanis are unhappy about U.S. foot dragging on meeting its financial commitments to the Pakistani Army, which has made a significant contribution in the “war on terror” against the Taliban.

This level of mistrust between the two allies is troubling. A continuous dialogue at the political and military level is the only antidote to prevent a further erosion of this crucial alliance.

Hopefully, in his forthcoming visit to Washington, astute Pakistani Army Chief General Kayani will help clear the air. Both the U.S. and Pakistan need each other to get over the hump in Afghanistan. Pakistan needs U.S. assistance to appreciably increase its economic and social development indicators.

Without Pakistan’s support and cooperation, it is difficult to envisage the U.S. achieving its objectives in Afghanistan. This in turn might affect the exit strategy of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

The U.S. needs to become much more proactive in nudging Pakistan and India to resolve their disputes — the principal one, from Pakistan’s perspective, being Kashmir.

India does not want to engage Pakistan in a composite dialogue till Pakistan curbs terrorist attacks from its territory — like the Mumbai killings — by non-state actors. India thinks that some elements in Pakistan’s government encourage such attacks, to destabilize India. Better India-Pakistan relations could possibly help dampen their rivalry in Afghanistan.

The truth of the matter is that both India and Pakistan have been victims of violent extremism. Both are facing multiple insurgencies within their borders. Instead of playing the blame game, both should be prodded to work together in curbing this common menace.

The United States should pay much more attention to removing mutual mistrust between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Being a neutral bystander issuing anodyne statements is not good enough in the current scenario.

A coordinated regional approach between Pakistan, India and the Karzai regime with active U.S. encouragement could possibly ameliorate the situation in Afghanistan. Then the U.S. can depart with a semblance of dignity and honor.

- S. Azmat Hassan

At least 43 people were killed, including about 10 soldiers, and 100 more were wounded. Insurgent groups are still very much a force in Pakistan, a year after the army claimed it defeated them.

For more, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Ahmad Kamal, a Pakistani diplomat for 40 years.

Hashem Ahelbarra of Al Jazeera English obtained unusual access in the Swat Valley.

In our weekly roundtable, we also look at the big offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and what’s likely to be achieved.

Joining Daljit Dhaliwal are Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and Susan Chira, foreign editor of The New York Times.

The joint raid conducted by U.S. and Pakistani special forces suggests a change in tactics by Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence service. For years ISI was reluctant to target the Taliban, a movement initially cultivated by Pakistan to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan.

For more, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani government official who is now with the Asia Society and the Quaid-i-Azam Chair Professor at Columbia University’s South Asian Institute.

Influential al-Qaeda-linked Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Worldfocus takes a look at the evolution of al-Qaeda into a fragmented network of jihadi terrorist elements, often united more by philosophy than by concrete linkages between AfPak and cells in Iraq, Yemen, North Africa and beyond.

The escalated drone war in northwest Pakistan has brought attention to the attenuated al-Qaeda core that moved from Afghanistan in late 2001.

But two events in late December — a failed Christmas Day bombing and a suicide attack on CIA operatives in Afghanistan — have led analysts to re-assess al-Qaeda’s perceived decline in popularity and power.

The somewhat resurgent organization is highly decentralized and relies more on a brand name and local franchises than on ideological, communications and operations control by the group’s top leaders.

An Asia Times commentary article from 2004 addresses the al-Qaeda brand name:

Legitimized by President George W Bush’s administration’s declaration of war, al-Qaeda has now become a global phantom, plagued by its own reputation and in need of solid ground. Indeed, the post-September 11 security environment finds al-Qaeda lacking not only a physical safe haven as it had in Afghanistan, but also the critical manpower and expertise that it had in the moments prior to September 11.

This, by any means, is not the end of al-Qaeda, however. The ultimate power in such groups is not necessarily the leadership, but always the cause that defines the legitimacy of the group and the leadership that guides it. Bin Laden’s existence, perhaps as it always has been, is largely political and symbolic - but will nevertheless remain a powerful source of his straining influence on various members of the global umma. Thus the “war on terror”, although controversial in many minds, has undermined both the conventional and unconventional abilities of al-Qaeda and its global entities…

In sum, the power of the al-Qaeda cause, once inherited and customarily altered from the Muslim Brotherhood, has remained close to the political spirit of many radical variations of Islam. The twist here is that the elimination of the “physical” al-Qaeda nexus and the resulting decentralization of its regional elements into like-minded, local leadership groups may ultimately prove more of stratagem advantage versus US policy than a vulnerability.

Then a 2005 BBC article examined the terrorist organization as a global, corporate franchise:

Most newspaper reports encourage us to visualize al-Qaeda as an army, with a high command; or perhaps as a multinational organization, with bin Laden as its chief executive officer and men like Ayman al-Zawahri as his senior management.

We are told that the Bali bombings, like those in London, Madrid and half a dozen other places since the attacks of 11 September 2001, “bear all the hallmarks of” al-Qaeda - formulaic language that has not varied since the days when the violence of the IRA and ETA was at its peak.

The implication is that its senior figures order these attacks, and that local operatives carry them out…

Just as you can buy the franchise for, say, a Holiday Inn or an Intercontinental Hotel, so you can adopt the principles of Osama bin Laden and set up your own deadly group, murdering those you identify as the enemies of the faith - and anyone else, of course, who happens to be passing at the time.

And an AP article from July 2009 compares al-Qaeda’s expansion to fast food franchising:

The al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is perhaps the best example of how al-Qaeda is morphing and broadening its reach through loose relationships with local offshoots. The shadowy network of Algerian cells recruits Islamist radicals throughout northern and western Africa, trains them and sends them to fight in the region or Iraq, according to Western and North African intelligence officials who asked to remain anonymous because of the nature of their jobs. In turn, AQIM gets al-Qaeda’s brand name and some corporate know-how.

“The relationship with the al-Qaeda mother company works like in a multinational,” says Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France’s former top counterterrorism judge and an expert on North African networks. “There’s a strong ideological link, but the local subsidiary operates on its own.”

Another Western intelligence official compares AQIM to a local fast food franchise, “only for terrorism.”

The cover of The Guardian Weekly from September 11, 2009. Photo: Wikipedia

The Guardian published a piece in September 2009 — on the 8th anniversary of the September 11 attacks — about the organization’s perceived decline:

Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in Western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organization…

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to “affiliates” or “franchises” in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the center are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

Lethal strikes by CIA drones – including two this week alone – have combined with the monitoring and disruption of electronic communications, suspicion and low morale to take their toll on al-Qaeda’s Pakistani “core,” in the jargon of western intelligence agencies.

Interrogation documents seen by the Guardian show that European Muslim volunteers faced a chaotic reception, a low level of training, poor conditions and eventual disillusionment after arriving in Waziristan last year.

“Core” al-Qaida is now reduced to a senior leadership of six to eight men, including Bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, according to most informed estimates. Several other Egyptians, a Libyan and a Mauritanian occupy the other top positions. In all, there are perhaps 200 operatives who count.

Yet, after a failed Christmas Day bombing and a successful Khost attack on CIA operatives, The Economist ran a piece last month that refuted assumptions about al-Qaeda’s imminent demise:

ONLY a few months ago, intelligence experts were saying that al-Qaeda and its allies were in decline, both militarily and ideologically. But two bombs less than a week apart, one failed and the other successful, have put an end to such optimism.

The talk of al-Qaeda’s downfall did not come from thin air. In the view of many analysts, the network’s central leadership had been decimated through drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt; al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch was all but defeated; its brethren in Iraq were marginalized; and those in other regions could mount only local attacks. Al-Qaeda had failed to land a blow in the West since the London bombs of 2005. Funds were dwindling, and more Muslims were eschewing global terror.

Though still dangerous, “al-Qaeda is under more pressure, is facing more challenges and is a more vulnerable organisation than at any time since the attacks on 11 September 2001,” declared Mike Leiter, the director of America’s National Counterterrorism Center last September.

Such assessments are being hurriedly revised. Mr Leiter, Barack Obama’s favorite spook, is now among those having to explain why his newish organization, which is supposed to fuse all information on terrorist threats, failed to connect several partial warnings about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The Nigerian student, who moved from London to Yemen last year, tried to set off explosives sewn into his underpants on board a Northwest Airlines flight, carrying 290 people from Amsterdam, as it prepared to land in Detroit on Christmas Day.

For more on al-Qaeda in Yemen, listen to Worldfocus Radio: Yemen’s Multiple Wars.

- Ben Piven

Hailed as a major victory in the war in Afghanistan, last week’s raid was revealed today by the New York Times.

The seizure has raised big questions about whether the Pakistani government knew of Baradar’s whereabouts all along.

Zeina Khodr of Al Jazeera English has more on the Afghan reaction to this major development.

Will the capture of the Afghan Taliban military chief make life any easier for U.S. troops there?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

A Predator armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. Photo: USAF

This week, the Pakistani Taliban finally confirmed what the Pakistani army had claimed many days ago — that Hakimullah Mehsud was killed last month in a missile strike by U.S. drones.

While there are conflicting reports about which strike dealt Mehsud the mortal blow, the Pakistani Taliban are left leaderless for the second time in six months.

As the late Mehsud’s faction — as well as various other Taliban-affiliated groups — scramble to defend themselves from unmanned aerial vehicles, some policymakers are wondering whether these assassinations are strategically sound.

Although many of President Barack Obama’s harshest critics at home have lavished praise on the administration for its escalation of the drone campaign, some naysayers now contend that the U.S. may be killing high-value targets before being able to extract information from them — in northwest Pakistan, as well as in other anti-terror arenas such as Yemen.

Marc Thiessen explains this problem in Foreign Policy:

The Predator has become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton — an easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.

To be sure, unmanned drones are critical in the struggle against al-Qaeda. They allow the United States to reach terrorists hiding in remote regions where it would be difficult for special operations forces to reach them, or to act on perishable intelligence when the only choice is to kill a terrorist or lose him. Constantly hovering Predator (or Reaper) drones also have a psychological effect on the enemy, forcing al-Qaeda leaders to live in fear and spend time focusing on self-preservation that would otherwise be used planning the next attack. All this is for the good.

The problem is that Obama is increasingly using drone strikes as a substitute for operations to bring terrorist leaders in alive for questioning — and that is putting the country at risk…

With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al-Qaeda leader, actionable intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can’t tell you their plans to strike America.

Meanwhile, Dawn reports that the Obama administration’s recent budget proposal includes a 75 percent increase in funds for the drone campaign, which also includes new, more advanced crafts.

View our interactive map showing approximate locations of all U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004:

See larger map. [Yellow = pre-2008 strikes / Red = 2008 strikes / Green = Obama administration strikes]

In a Sydney Morning Herald analysis piece America’s Deadly Robots Rewrite the Rules, Paul McGeough writes:

The changed ground rules making extrajudicial killing more acceptable are a product of post-September 11 thinking. In 2001 Bush overturned President Gerald Ford’s 1976 prohibition on assassinations by US intelligence agencies - but there’s something else in the works, too…

But, as critics of the drone wars struggle to get traction in public debate, it is curious that in the absence of any negative reaction to Obama’s expansion of his remote killing program last year, the former Bush administration was under attack for revelations that it had considered dispatching more traditional hit-squads abroad to take out al-Qaeda operatives.

Forty-four countries now use unmanned aircraft for surveillance - only the US and Israel deploy them as killers.

In the first weeks of his presidency Obama reportedly wrestled with the moral and strategic implications of the program. But, as reported in The New York Times, he pointedly declared to one of his earliest Situation Room gatherings: “The CIA gets what it needs.”

The American Civil Liberties Union explained in a Freedom of Information application last month: “It appears … that lethal force is being exercised by individuals who are not in the military chain of command, are not subject to military rules and discipline; and do not operate under any other public system of accountability or oversight.”

A Democrat’s targeted killings, it seems, are not quite the same as those of a Republican.

The first drones flew before the September 11 attacks - searching for Osama bin Laden. Now the US Air Force estimates that about 15 per cent of its $US230 billion ($260 billion) arms-procurement program will be spent on robot equipment within five years.

Predators can fly [420 miles], then hover for 30 hours at a stretch, feeding real-time video and other data through 10 simultaneous streams to controllers in 10 locations. Priced at $4.5 million, Predators carry sensors that intercept electronic signals and listen in on phone conversations - and they carry missiles. The newer Reapers cost $17 million and can fly nearly [3600 miles].

The US Air Force now has more drone operators in training than fighter and bomber pilots.

A recent article from the Associated Press argues that two main factors have enabled the drone war to take off: the drawdown of troops and resources in Iraq and the Obama administration’s increased intelligence-sharing with the governments of Pakistan and Yemen:

Intelligence officials and analysts say the drawdown of troops in an increasingly stable Iraq is part of the reason for the increase in drone strikes. The military once relied on drones for around-the-clock surveillance to flush out insurgents, support troops in battle and help avoid roadside bombs.

With fewer of those missions required, the U.S. has moved many of those planes to Afghanistan, roughly doubling the size of the military and CIA fleet that can patrol the lawless border with Pakistan, officials said.

“These tools were not Obama creations, but he’s increased their use and he has shifted the U.S. attention full front to Afghanistan,” said Thomas Sanderson, a defense analyst and national security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The article goes on to explain the second reason for the drone war’s escalation:

Obama has also abandoned terms like “radical Islam” and “Islamo-fascism,” rhetoric that was seen as anti-Muslim by many in the Arab world and which [Yemen's Ambassador to the UN] al-Saidi said made it harder for governments to openly cooperate with Washington.

View our original post: U.S. intensifies drone attacks on Pakistan’s tribal region

- Ben Piven

But as Alan Fisher of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English discovered when he visited comedian Saad Haroon’s standup show, political comedy is alive and well in Islamabad.

They discuss power-sharing with the Taliban, drone strikes along the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan and broader American foreign policy challenges in the region.

For more on the Obama and the World series click here.

Afghan Taliban hold a meeting. Photo: Deutsche Welle

As the U.S. and its coalition fight an increasingly tough war against the Taliban, there is also new talk of reaching out to elements of the group with the aim of a political settlement.

On Thursday, an international conference in London will explore ways of bringing the Taliban into the government and how to transfer more security responsibility to Afghan forces.

Today the issue was also discussed in Istanbul with the presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.

There is growing hope that an agreement with the Taliban could end the war.

Should the U.S. and its allies start engaging the Taliban in order to iron out a power-sharing agreement?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

While drone attacks are more frequent than ever before, there is wide disagreement about civilian deaths.

On the New America Foundation’s AfPak Channel, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann wrote in October that about one-third of those killed in drone attacks since 2006 were civilians.

Yet, Pakistani government statistics, as reported by the Dawn news service, said that these strikes killed more than 700 civilians — amounting to 90% of casualties.

The Long War Journal, a site that tracks drone attacks, reported that U.S. missiles have assassinated 16 al-Qaeda leaders and 16 mid-level al-Qaeda or Taliban militants since January 2008.

View our interactive map showing approximate locations of all U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004:

See larger map. [Yellow = pre-2008 strikes / Red = 2008 strikes / Green = Obama administration strikes]

According to published reports, most of the strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles are against terrorists who operate out of North and South Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Our Bombs shows how the attacks are concentrated in the mountainous region on the Afghan border, an area largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government in Islamabad.

The U.S. military had long remained silent about remote-controlled C.I.A. missile strikes.

But a delegation of U.S. senators visiting Islamabad last week expressed their support of the “drone war,” which was started by the Bush administration in 2004 and has escalated dramatically since President Obama took office.

The Pakistani government officially objects to the attacks but is lobbying for the U.S. to share drone technology.

Meanwhile, the attacks have generated increasing popular resentment toward the U.S.

Critics argue that raising the level of anti-Americanism in Pakistan might outweigh the benefits of successful strikes.

The Dec. 30 suicide bombing of the Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, may have been an attempt to avenge the South Waziristan attack that killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud on Aug. 5.

Seven C.I.A. employees died in the Khost attack, many of whom were integral to the coordination of the drone war from their base, according to ABC News.

- Ben Piven

On January 4th, the Transportation Security Administration imposed tougher screening rules for passengers originating in 14 mostly Muslim nations:

View TSA Enhanced Security Screening in a larger map

Additional safety precautions following the Christmas Day incident initially included checks at flights gates, restrictions on leaving airplane seats and using electronics/blankets in the hour prior to landing.

But the new strategy is based mostly on enhanced screening techniques. It requires that passengers with suspicious behavior — as well as passengers who are traveling from or citizens of one of the 14 nations — undergo full-body and explosive-detection scanning, pat-downs, and extensive searches of carry-on baggage. Only four of the 14 countries are currently deemed state sponsors of terrorism by the U.S. government: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria.

This citizenship-based profiling has been met with controversy. Opponents argue that it unfairly targets some passengers and violates travelers’ privacy. The ACLU disapproves of whole-body imaging technology.

Michael German, National Security Policy Counsel with the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent said:

We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion,

Over-broad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats.

Singling out travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening is essentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective, unconstitutional and violates American values. Empirical studies of terrorists show there is no terrorist profile, and using a profile that doesn’t reflect this reality will only divert resources by having government agents target innocent people.

Profiling can also be counterproductive by undermining community support for government counterterrorism efforts and creating an injustice that terrorists can exploit to justify further acts of terrorism.

Many bloggers see the new efforts as superficial. Bruce Maiman writes:

How many of these procedures at the airport and on the airplane really work? They seem more like theatre designed to make you feel safer when in fact that do little to make you safer.

Tunku Varadarajan, Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and professor at NYU’s stern Business School writes about the aftermath of the failed attempt by the “jock-strap jihadist“:

The Transportation Security Administration went predictably into Pavlovian overdrive, announcing a series of new security measures that would take immediate effect. This is the other, less reassuring, side of the episodic nature of the terrorist threats against us. We seem always to react, never to anticipate—and in this form of hasty reaction, with its flavor of humiliation, and of having been outwitted by a wearer of dangerous underwear (or shoes), there lurk always the seeds of over-reaction…

The broader point is that we need, constantly, to recalibrate our bandwidth of stoicism. We are at war with al-Qaeda; that organization is doing its best to kill us. Our need is, of course, to make it as near to impossible for it to do that. But our reaction to each new threat must not be to grant al-Qaeda small, but important, victories, in the form of an imposition by the TSA of inconveniences on travelers that have not been thought through, inconveniences that are, themselves, a form of theater—the extempore theater of homeland security.

- Michael Ramirez

Amna Nawaz of NBC News traveled to Pakistan on a grant from the International Reporting Project. She reports on a charity called The Citizens Foundation, which has built 600 schools and enrolled over 80,000 Pakistani students.

The flag of Pashtunistan. Courtesy: Wiki user Jolle

Worldfocus multimedia producer Ben Piven writes about the U.S. war in Pashtunistan, an often misunderstood place not found on any world map.

The knee-jerk American reaction after September 11th was to strike at the Taliban-ruled nation that was harboring a sizable, international al-Qaeda contingent: Afghanistan.

But these days, it is becoming ever more clear that the U.S. has widened its campaign to the region that some people call Pashtunistan — the area historically inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns.

The vast majority both of al-Qaeda operatives and of Taliban militants who oppose the U.S. are located in Pashtunistan, with little regard for the arbitrary Durand Line drawn by the British that technically separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. The Guardian described the region last year as a “Grand Central Station for Islamic terrorists.”

A number of recent articles highlight that the U.S. is no longer merely involved in counter-insurgency against Afghan terrorists. As drone attacks against targets in Pakistan escalate, allegations arise that the U.S. is actually much more involved in Pakistan than previously known.

A New York Times article from earlier this month suggests that the Obama plan for a troop increase ignores the reality of Pashtunistan:

In his address [December 1], the president mentioned Pakistan and the Pakistanis some 25 times, and called Pakistan and Afghanistan collectively “the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda.”

But he might have had an easier time explaining what he was really proposing had he set the national boundaries aside and told Americans that the additional soldiers and marines were being sent to another land altogether: Pashtunistan.

That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent people that number 12 million on the Afghan side and 27 million on the Pakistani side. They have a language (Pashto), an elaborate traditional code of legal and moral conduct (Pashtunwali), a habit of crossing the largely unmarked border at will, and a centuries-long history of foreign interventions that ended badly for the foreigners.

Whether Mr. Obama will have better luck there than President George W. Bush, the Soviet Politburo and British prime ministers back to the early 19th century remains to be seen. But it is there that the war will be fought, because it is there that the Taliban were spawned and where they now regroup, attack and find shelter, for themselves and their Qaeda guests.

Today, the enemies of the United States are nearly all in Pashtunistan, an aspirational name coined long ago by advocates of an independent Pashtun homeland. From bases in the Pakistani part of it — the Federally Administered Tribal Areas toward the north and Baluchistan province in the south — Afghan Taliban leaders, who are Pashtuns, have plotted attacks against Afghanistan. It is also from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan that Qaeda militants have plotted terrorism against the West.

And an article by Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times looks at the region’s hopes for self-determination:

Tribal Pashtuns (from eastern Afghanistan to western Pakistan) have never given up on being united again. Everyone familiar with AfPak knows the region is still paying the price for the fateful and - what else - divide-and-rule British imperial decision in 1897 to split tribal Pashtuns through the artificial Durand Line. The line remains the artificial border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Anyone who ever crossed it at, for instance, Torkham, at the foot of the Khyber pass, knows it is meaningless; people swarming on both sides are all cousins who never stopped dreaming of a pre-colonial, Afghan Durrani empire that straddled a great deal of contemporary Pakistan.

Few have noticed that Pashtuns were recently insisting on a very basic demand - that North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan have its name changed to Pakhtunkhwa (”Land of the Pashtuns”). The demand was shot down this past September by the dominant Punjabis in Pakistan. Pashtun nationalists protested en masse in fabled Peshawar, the NWFP capital. Pashtun national liberation is at fever pitch. Pashtun Guevaras are already issuing a call to arms.

But as much as Washington, now with a little help from its friend/client government of President Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad, has been conducting essentially a war on Pashtuns since 2001, this is no monolithic movement. It all goes back to the early 21st-century maxim that virtually every Taliban is a Pashtun, but not every Pashtun is a Taliban. There are significant strands of secular Pashtuns that shun the TTP [Pakistani Taliban] and its brand of Islamic fundamentalist dystopian dogma, even while the Pashtun masses may see in the TTP the ideal vehicle for the advent of Pashtunistan.

If we follow the money, we see that the TTP in Pakistan is now being financed mostly by wealthy, pious Gulf businessmen and not anymore by Islamabad. The financiers are more interested in jihad than in Pashtun nationalism, and that undermines the legitimacy of the Taliban as vehicles for Pashtun nationalism.

An opinion piece titled “Welcome to Pashtunistan” in The National last week described a covert CIA-funded operation in Pakistan by Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater. The author, retired Pakistani military officer Shaukat Qadir, alleges that the U.S. has plans to destabilize Pakistan’s government in order to stabilize the broader region in the long-term.

Qadir also suggests that even though U.S.-funded operatives are in Karachi and Peshawar, they have failed to hunt down most of the top al-Qaeda figures.

Security analysts often argue that the current Afghan insurgency is at heart a Pashtun movement — organized and directed by Pashtuns in Pakistan.

If true, Qadir’s assertions would prove that the U.S. has long been devoting significant resources to combating terror in the Pakistani half of Pashtunistan:

[Blackwater's] presence in Pakistan has been an open secret for some years. The investigative journalist and writer Jeremy Scahill, an authority on Blackwater and author of the bestselling Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revealed last month that it has been there since 2006. He says Blackwater is being employed for covert ops, essentially intended to target high-value al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, but it has also assisted in providing information for drone attacks and has kidnapped suspects and transported them covertly to the U.S. for interrogation…

Mr. Scahill does not engage in speculation, and is not to be taken lightly. So when he states that Xe is sitting in Karachi, he is not likely to be wrong. He has added that the operation is so secret that many senior people in the Obama administration were unaware of it.

However, he seems to have erred in one respect: Xe is not only in Karachi. It also has a massive presence in Islamabad and Peshawar, where I understand the organization has rented up to seven adjacent houses. Neighbors who heard muffled explosions soon after the houses were occupied suspect that they are linked by underground tunnels.

Along with massively expanded counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, the U.S. appears to be quickly but quietly escalating its war in Pakistan.

Over the next few years, we can expect more intensive drone strikes, heightened Pakistani military efforts and a increasingly blurry line that separates the two halves of Pashtunistan.

- Ben Piven

Read their most compelling personal accounts and commentary from 2009, touching on subjects ranging from the seemingly-endless war in eastern Congo to pop culture in North Korea.

	INDIA “Slumdog” immigrant waits for U.S. Green Card lifeline	Rajeet Mohan is an Indian living in the U.S. on an H-1B visa. He shares his frustrating immigration experience and offers some solutions to retain and leverage highly-skilled immigrants in the U.S.
	CONGO War still rages on in corners of eastern Congo	Michael J. Kavanagh reports on the conflicting news coming out of eastern Congo. In the region’s most remote areas, Kavanagh has seen victims of attempted massacres, torture and kidnappings, as well as sex slaves.
	TAIWAN Taiwanese baseball fans outraged by game-fixing charges	Hsin-Yin Lee writes how a game-fixing scandal has rocked Taiwanese professional baseball. Fans are wondering whether there is a future for the island’s beloved sport. Evidence says Taiwan’s league is all mobbed up.
	JAMAICA Gay men in Jamaica must lead two separate lives	Lisa Biagiotti shares the story of a gay Jamaican who received asylum in the U.S. on the basis of his sexuality. While he is now free from persecution, he struggles with his identity and still conceals his sexuality from family members.
	SYRIA Watching Oprah in a Syrian refugee camp	Kristen Gillespie produced two signatures stories out of Jordan for Worldfocus. She writes about the global reach of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which has impacted a refugee living in a Syrian refugee camp.
	PAKISTAN Drone attacks deaden diplomatic track in Pakistan	S. Azmat Hassan argues that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan will not succeed in fighting the Taliban. He outlines Taliban groups on both sides of the border and explains the Pakistani reluctance to take on the Afghan Taliban.
	NORTH KOREA Sweet dreams of Beyonce in N. Korean people’s paradise	Part 4 of 6 of our Inside the Hermit Kingdom series on the people and culture of North Korea. Ben Piven writes about popular music, food and beer in the most isolated country on earth. Believe it or not, North Koreans know Beyonce.
	CUBA Cuba provides free health care without the worry	Apropos of the current health care debate in the United States — what happens when a government you dislike does some good things? Cuba has a startling level of health care, writes Worldfocus blogger Peter Eisner.
	MYANMAR A Burmese family’s story of multiple arrests, weekly bribes	Karen Zusman writes about one Burmese family caught up in the human trafficking on the border. In June, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report blacklisted Malaysia for trafficking refugees into Thailand.
	CHINA Post-Tiananmen, it’s no easier seeking human rights abroad	On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Nina Hachigian writes that in the last 20 years, while standards of living in China have risen dramatically, political reform has stalled and dissidents continue to live in terror.

President Obama delivering a speech. Photo: Flickr user Jurvetson

Ambassador S. Azmat Hassan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan to Malaysia, Syria and Morocco and Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He is currently an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is a contributing Worldfocus blogger.

Barack Obama’s election as President was universally welcomed. A masterful orator, his speeches promised an attitudinal sea change from the haughty neo-conservatism of the Bush administration.

He said in Prague last April that he wanted to see nuclear weapons abolished from the face of the globe. He put new energy into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by appointing veteran trouble-shooter George Mitchell to oversee a two-state solution. And he imparted new impetus in calming the troubled waters of Afghanistan and Pakistan by recalling to service another diplomatic heavy weight, Richard Holbrooke.

His professions of friendship and goodwill toward the Muslim peoples around the globe, have created a huge impact from Morocco to Indonesia.

It seemed that this modern day Galahad had almost single-handedly succeeded in changing the negative perceptions of the United States abroad. The international community was electrified at the positive change between the Obama and Bush approaches to the world.

Almost a year later, even Obama’s fervent supporters will have to concede that the gap between intention and achievement seems to be distressingly wide. Both his domestic ratings as well as his international allure have shown a downward trend.

In his defense, it could be argued that Obama was dealt a particularly difficult hand. The collapse of the entire financial system was a frightening possibility in September 2008. Therefore much of his time and effort had to be spent in righting the economic ship of state.

Mercifully, a total meltdown, which would have created global chaos, seems to have been averted by Obama and his economic managers. However, markets are still skittish. Unemployment continues to be unacceptably high, while the US is suffering from conditions not experienced since the 1930’s Great Depression. Nonetheless it is possible at least to envisage a recovery around the corner.

Domestic constraints have rightly taken up the lion’s share of Obama’s attention. He is about to spearhead a landmark health care reform, an objective which had eluded Bill Clinton and earlier presidents. His foreign policy priorities therefore continue to remain more of a wish list than as metrics that have been implemented.

I believe that Obama, in his outreach to the global community, had good intentions. He did not want the U.S. to be perceived abroad any longer as a bullying hegemon, but as a thoughtful partner in multilateral endeavors.

I also believe that 2010 will be crucial for Obama to demonstrate that he is not just a good speech maker. He will have to show that he has the perseverance and political will to reestablish U.S. leadership in foreign affairs.

Obama’s expertise was in law and community work. As an intelligent, calm and deliberative man, he excelled in both fields.

Acquiring knowledge and experience in foreign affairs requires time and patience. Navigating Afghanistan, building up Pakistan, nudging India and Pakistan to resolve Kashmir, being the catalyst on Israel-Palestine, normalizing with Iran and North Korea – to name just a few major issues – would require much hard work, patience and luck.

I leave President Obama to ponder over the wisdom of Al Masudi, a 10th century Arab chronicler, who stated:

He who stays at home besides his hearth, and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his lifespan between different lands and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.

Al Masudi, who lived over a millennium ago, is encouraging us all to get more educated and more involved with international issues that affect everyone.

How about that for a New Year’s resolution?

- S. Azmat Hassan

A woman in Garhi Habibullah, Pakistan. Photo: Flickr user UNphoto

Ambassador S. Azmat Hassan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan to Malaysia, Syria and Morocco and Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He is currently an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is a contributing Worldfocus blogger.

U.S. and Pakistani interests in Afghanistan converge but only up to a point. From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. poured in over $10 billion to the Musharraf government for its support in the “war on terror” in Afghanistan.

The money was largely utilized to replenish the Pakistani military’s capabilities. Not much was devoted to human development in the most needy and impoverished tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Today, the United States and Pakistan are no doubt allies battling violent extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas. It was inevitable that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, after being routed by the United States in 2001, would cross the porous border to seek sanctuary among fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt.

The media tends to conflate the Pakistani Taliban, who are battling the Pakistani government, and the Afghan Taliban, whose main motive is to drive away foreign forces from Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army, in its counterinsurgency campaign, has achieved some success against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan. This group had directly challenged the writ of the state.

But despite the U.S. prodding Pakistan to go after the Afghan Taliban — whose leadership is reportedly hiding in Pakistan’s border areas — the Pakistani government is reluctant to do so.

The reason is simple: the Afghan Taliban do not launch attacks against the Pakistani people. Secondly, the Pakistanis do not want to antagonize a group which could play a dominant role in a future Afghan government.

It would be much wiser if the U.S. and Pakistan undertook a more realistic appraisal of the limits of their alliance. For the Pakistanis, the U.S. has often been an unreliable ally, which has abandoned them in the past. Bitter memories of these episodes remain.

President Obama has announced that the U.S. will start withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. Nobody can predict how long the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan after that date.

Meanwhile, the Taliban will remain a major force in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s influence there will grow if the Afghan Taliban become a partner in a new government in Kabul, which could be on the horizon sooner rather than later.

The U.S. should not feel offended if the Pakistanis cannot meet its demands regarding the Afghan Taliban. On the contrary, since a military defeat of the Afghan insurgency is practically impossible to attain, the U.S. should open serious negotiations with Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban.

Omar has publicly stated that his fight is against the Karzai government. He is not against the United States.

If Omar is promised a share in power, a new coalition government can come into being in Afghanistan. This scenario will further marginalize the dwindling fortunes of al-Qaeda.

Nobody knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, or whether he is dead or alive. He has not been sighted for the past 8 years. His allure as an Islamic leader has been considerably dented. It is unwise to give him an importance or stature that he does not have any longer.

The U.S. should use its considerable soft power in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By helping to build schools, roads and hospitals in the region, the U.S. will achieve much more success in winning hearts and minds.

Hard power has been tried for the past 8 years. It was not successful. The drone attacks targeting Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed some al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

Regrettably, they have also killed many more innocent people. Much ill will against the US was created in both countries by this “collateral damage.”

Ultimately, drone attacks are not likely to make an appreciable difference to the insurgencies raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A negotiated political approach has a better chance of success.

- S. Azmat Hassan

Pakistan’s president speaks at the U.N. in September. Photo: Flickr user UNPhoto

President Obama wrote a letter last month to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari calling for a quick expansion of military operations against insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal region.

The Washington Post reports that Zardari responded by saying that his government is determined to take action against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups — but will do so according to Pakistani priorities.

Meanwhile, widespread anti-American sentiment appears to be growing in Pakistan, as the U.S. military expands its operations against the Taliban.

Will Pakistan actually crack down on militants operating along the border with Afghanistan?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please remember to be respectful and on-point in your comments. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.

A de-miner near Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo: Flickr user Haumont

Ambassador S. Azmat Hassan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan to Malaysia, Syria and Morocco and Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He is currently an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is a contributing Worldfocus blogger.

Nonaligned India was perceived by most analysts to be largely in the Soviet camp during the Cold War. But the demise of the Soviet Union prompted India to recalibrate its relationship with the world’s only remaining superpower: the United States.

Another major factor assisting in this realignment was India’s embrace since the early 1990’s of free market reforms, trade liberalization and privatization measures. These changes opened up the vast Indian market to U.S. exporters and foreign investors. While millions of Indians are still desperately poor, around 300 million Indians have joined the middle class. Thus a new and expanding Indian market is opening up for a wide variety of U.S. exports, and U.S. investment in Indian industry and infrastructure has risen appreciably in the last few decades.

As a rising regional power, India is anxious to be recognized as a major player not only in South Asia but on the international stage. The importance of India to the U.S. was highlighted by the choice of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the first foreign dignitary to be accorded the honor of a state visit.

A major impediment retarding India’s quest towards great power status is its perennial dispute with neighboring Pakistan over Kashmir. The two oldest conflicts on the agenda of the UN Security Council from the late 1940’s are the Arab-Israeli and Kashmir conflicts.

Despite a number of diplomatic meetings spread over five decades, India and Pakistan have yet to overcome the hurdle of Kashmir, over which they have fought three wars. For Pakistan, Kashmir remains the unfinished agenda of the 1947 Partition. For secular multicultural India, Kashmir is a symbol of its heterogeneity.

President Obama has publicly stated that the U.S. would help India and Pakistan to normalize their relations,  including the dispute over Kashmir. The U.S. can help both countries. If the U.S. can persuade India to withdraw some of its forces on its border with Pakistan, this gesture would enable the latter to commit more of its troops now facing India to its lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

While the Pakistan army has achieved encouraging gains against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan, its counterinsurgency efforts need to achieve more success. Once the tribal areas are pacified, they will no longer afford a sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda elements that cross the mountainous and porous Pakistan-Afghanistan border at will, to attack U.S. and NATO troops fighting the Taliban insurgents.

So it is patently in the U.S. interest to invest more diplomatic capital in New Delhi and Islamabad. India and Pakistan have both suffered from violent extremism. They continue to be plagued by domestic insurgencies. Whether they admit it or not, they have a shared interest in combating the ravages of terrorism in their territories.

As the U.S. footprint in both Pakistan and India assumes greater depth, hopefully the U.S. will nudge both countries to consistently focus on a resolution of the Kashmir imbroglio. A mutually acceptable settlement of this issue should be placed on the same pedestal as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in U.S. calculations.

- S. Azmat Hassan

The suspects, who lived in the Washington, D.C. area and allegedly wanted to fight against America in Afghanistan, were detained by Pakistani authorities.

To discuss more about the arrests, Edie Magnus interviews Irshad Manji, professor at New York University and author of “The Trouble with Islam Today.”

Are you surprised that some Americans are allegedly trying to join up with insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please remember to be respectful and on-point in your comments. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.