As the battle for Marjah goes on, NATO is making plans for an even larger campaign in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and a center of the Taliban insurgency.

To help manage that growing effort, the Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. and its allies will create a new U.S.-led command in Southeast Afghanistan.

For more on the challenges that lie ahead, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and former State Department analyst on Afghanistan.

To shed light on the legacy of conflict in Afghanistan, our German partner Deutsche Welle reports on the lessons of Russia’s long war there through the experience of one former soldier.

At least 16 people were killed and several dozen wounded in a four-hour assault that involved two suicide attacks and a car bomb.

The targets were two hotels used by foreigners and at least six Indians were among the dead, along with an Italian diplomat and French filmmaker.

Hoda Abdel-Hamid of Al Jazeera English reports from Kabul during the deadly attacks.

Martin Savidge interviews Rajan Menon, professor of international relations at Lehigh University for more on the attack.

The top Afghan commander said the military goals had almost been achieved after 13 days of fighting by fifteen thousand NATO and Afghan troops.

For more insight into the developments out of Marjah and the ongoing war against the Taliban, Martin Savidge speaks with Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. Menon discusses whether the Afghan government is prepared to govern the area and what to expect next.

James Bays of Worldfocus partner, Al Jazeera English, reports from Marjah.

For more coverage on Afghanistan visit the Worldfocus extended coverage page: War in Afghanistan.

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.

Coalition forces are said to be engaged in numerous firefights throughout the city.

Meanwhile, the ongoing problem of civilian casualties again reared its head when two U.S. rockets hit a house over the weekend. And today a NATO airstrike killed five people mistaken for insurgents.

Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, joins Daljit Dhaliwal for more on the NATO offensive.

Katulis discusses the strategic significance of the assault on Marjah and the Afghan army’s involvement. He also talks about the Afghan government’s ability to take control of Marja once international forces leave.

For more on Afghanistan visit the Worldfocus extended coverage page: War in Afghanistan.

She discusses the likelihood of success with this strategy and the difficulties that arise from working with militias rather than central governments.

In northern Afghanistan, a local effort to drive out the Taliban has been highly successful. It’s in the province of Kunduz, where the German military, the Bundeswehr, has part of its force.

Our German partner, Deutsche Welle, went to the region to report on how the people there organized a militia to drive the Taliban out. Deutsche Welle takes a look at a grassroots campaign against the insurgents.

For more Worldfocus coverage of Afghanistan, visit our extended coverage page: War In Afghanistan.

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 administration has sent its top guns to Capitol Hill to make the case for a massive troop surge.

Many troops are hopeful that Obama’s plan will help wind down the war.

For more on Afghanistan and what lies ahead, we’re joined by Masood Aziz, who is formerly the second highest ranking diplomat at Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington D.C.

Did President Obama convince you that sending more troops to Afghanistan is necessary?

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.

Daljit Dhaliwal speaks with Gideon Lichfield, deputy editor of The Economist online in New York, about British public sentiment and the reaction of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Read more about his experience overseas in his blog, Embedded in Afghanistan.

The wait continues for the president’s decision on General McChrystal’s recommendation. The unfortunate aspect of all of this business is that the debate is taking place in the public eye. While having a public debate on the efficacy of sending more troops certainly satisfies the exigencies of American politics, it’s most certainly not beneficial to the war effort as a whole. I say this because if the decision is made to not send more troops, or even not send as many as asked for the by the general, we will be perceived by the Afghan government, people, and security forces as abandoning them and losing our will to fight the insurgents. I can confirm that the ANA leaders I habitually talked with were always worried about our ability to stick things out and did not want to see us go anywhere until the country had progressed significantly.

Perception is an incredibly important part of any counter-insurgency, as winning the support of the people should ultimately lead to victory. I can confirm that many of the people of Afghanistan don’t really care who wins this war, just so long as someone wins it, and they can live a semblance of a normal life…i.e. the people will support the side that appears to be on the path to victory.

For these reasons, any action leading to the perception of weakness or lack of commitment on our part needs to be scrupulously avoided. It would have been better to avoid all of this public debate on the issue…unless the request is granted of course, in which case we may take some small benefit from all of this publicizing of our intentions on the matter.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Approximately 150 miles away In the northwestern city of Peshawar, a car bomb tore through a busy market. The death toll from today’s terror attacks in Pakistan has risen to some 100 people. The bombing is thought to be the work of militants allied with the Taliban.

Ahmad Kamal, a Pakistani diplomat for 40 years - 10 of them as Pakistan’s UN ambassador - speaks with Daljit Dhaliwal about the relationship between the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the escalation of attacks. He also examines what it will take to end the violence in both countries.

Zeina Khodr of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports the Afghan capital Kabul on the difficult decisions that now face U.S. President Barack Obama.

Hassan Abbas, a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the Asia Society in New York, discusses links between Taliban factions and endorses the U.S. aid package for Pakistan.

A new report from the humanitarian organization Oxfam says that a third of the population is now at risk of hunger, and aid has been insufficient.

Shannon Scribner, a senior policy advisor on humanitarian issues for Oxfam America, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the dire situation facing much of the Afghan population.

On Tuesday, with the election two days away and the campaign winding down, the Taliban launched a series of attacks on the capital city of Kabul. A suicide car bomber attacked a NATO convoy on the outskirts of the city, killing at least seven people and wounding another 50. Two mortar rounds also landed near the presidential palace.

U.S. President Barack Obama insists winning the war in Afghanistan is vital to America’s security interests, and a free and fair election no doubt would help that cause. But security concerns remain front and center.

Kimberly Marten, a professor of political science at Columbia University’s Barnard College, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the impending vote, U.S. strategy ahead of the election and the role of warlords.

Read what a U.S. Marine embedded trainer with the Afghan National Army had to say about the atmosphere ahead of elections: Securing the vote in volatile northeastern Afghanistan

Hundreds of Marines, along with Afghan troops, went into battle under the cover of darkness to take back control of the town of Dahaneh in Helmand Province, a key base for Taliban fighters.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who worked on an advisory board to General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the offensive and the next phase of the war in Afghanistan.

The remote-controlled bomb went off on a crowded street near a fruit market in Herat and apparently targeted the police chief as he drove into town.

This month has also gotten off to deadly start for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with a total of nine killed over the weekend. Afghanistan’s elections are less then three weeks away and the number of foreign troops in the country is increasing steadily.

Karin von Hippel, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the casualty rate in Afghanistan, the upcoming elections and the status of the massive offensive that was launched in the south.

(View full post to see video)

The war is weighing heavily on the British public, as a new poll revealed on Tuesday. The survey was commissioned by The Independent newspaper and found that 58 percent think the war is unwinnable, and 52 percent want British forces withdrawn immediately.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who worked on an advisory board to General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan, joins Martin Savidge to discuss if “victory” is possible for NATO forces.

On Tuesday, in the eastern part of the country, Taliban militants and suicide bombers launched a highly-orchestrated attack. A shootout followed, and by the time it was over, 14 people were dead.

Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, joins Martin Savidge to discuss how the attacks were carried out, the presidential elections scheduled for next month and the security situation throughout the country.