Taliban

The New York Times reports:

From Afghanistan, some surprising news: U.S. and coalition forces have arrested a member of Iran’s notorious Qods Force who was simultaneously serving as a Taliban commander. But sophisticated foreign policy observers have said for years that the Taliban and Iran were adversaries, even enemies – that they come from different strains of Islam and have cultural differences that would preclude cooperation? They would never work together, right?

A State Department cable released by WikiLeaks earlier this week contains a stunning new detail about the relationship between Iran and al Qaeda. The Saudis have privately complained to the Obama administration that Iran harbors a dangerous network of al Qaeda operatives who are targeting the kingdom. And at the heart of the relationship is one of Osama bin Laden’s little-known sons.

In his op-ed for the Washington Post this morning, David Ignatius writes (emphasis added):

WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Max Boot talks Afghanistan with the Foreign Policy Initiative:

When Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani traveled to Afghanistan to fight alongside al Qaeda and the Taliban, he probably never imagined that he would be captured and his detention would be turned into a legal fight over what role, if any, international law plays in restricting the president of the United States’s wartime powers.

Amazingly, that is precisely what happened.

Kabul

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.

As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?”

He said, “Americans must understand that Afghanistan is a country of honor. The honor of an Afghan is in his gun, his land, and his women. You take a man’s honor if you take his gun, his land or his women.”

And the same goes for where I live in New Hampshire. I inquired whether exceptions could be made, on the third point of honor, for ex-wives.

“Oh yes,” he said.

Afghanistan—so foreign and yet so familiar and, like home, with such wonderful lamb chops. I asked the restaurateur about other similarities between New Hampshire and Afghanistan. “I don’t know,” he said. “Most of my family lives in L.A.”

The Taliban's responsibility for the vast majority of civilian deaths is perhaps the most underreported story from Afghanistan since the war began.

Time magazine's cover, featuring a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears were chopped off by her Taliban husband for dishonoring him, has sparked plenty of outrage from folks who should be rising to the young woman's defense.

The people of Pakistan, and Muslims as well as non-Muslims around the world, were horrified when, at midnight on July 1, three bombers struck the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore.

Iran is at war with the United States in Afghanistan. Documents released as part of the Wikileaks dump show that U.S. commanders receive regular reports of collusion between the Iranians, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) Islamist group. The Iranians arm, train, shelter, and fund the jihadists.