WaPo’s Jeff Stein reports the Pakistani intelligence service has rushed Mullah Omar, spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban insurgency, to a hospital for heart surgery.
Now why would Pakistan, an ostensible U.S. ally on the proverbial “war on terror,” provide health care for the one-eyed Taliban leader who is wanted for acts of terrorism? Continue reading »
If we don’t negotiate with the Taliban, he will. So says Ahmed Rashiid in FT.com with a bottom line policy recommendation that the wounded White House won’t like:
If Mr Karzai and most Afghans really do want peace talks with the Taliban then that should be Nato’s focus.
Talk of negotiation is ramping up because the Obama administration thinks it necessary to draw up a feasible plan to exit with dignity, this given the electoral “shellacking” it recently received with barely a flexed muscle. A sullen defeat, stretched out over time, tanks rolling on into adjacent border, replaying the recent Soviet past, will not do– especially with an opposition ascendant waiting by the sidelines for news of stubborn, drowning failure.
Overall strategic environment is not conducive to U.S. success, says former State Department policymaker, one of the band known as Bush Liberals. Admit and scale back, he says in touting last week’s Council on Foreign Relations report on Afghanistan
maybe we have to change things. And look around. You’ve seen al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula now; al-Qaeda in Maghreb. We’re fighting a difficult and flat organization. Given that we have a weak partner in the Karzai government and only a partial partner in Pakistan, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
Armitage was clearly anchoring the left-wing of the panel. Eight dissenters called for staying the course showing that the policymaking consensus and in the South Asia press the story is playing as U.S. troops will fight Until 2014
It won’t: because of India–So says a pundit for The Nation in Pakistan. Taliban “moderates” will balk at dealing with India.
That’s not the only problem with talking to the Taliban but it is true that the world’s biggest secular democracy is a forgotten factor in Afpak politics.
Get out, says The Guardian.
“…stop the fighting by offering the Quetta Shura, the Taliban HQ, a ceasefire. Progress should not be contingent on a ceasefire. The Shura have said they will only stop fighting when the foreigners leave. But this is a matter of sequencing, if a ceasefire entails, as it must, a commitment to leave.”
