Just one day after General Stanley McChrystal's report on the way forward in Afghanistan was leaked to the press, the Obama administration is floating the idea of expanding the U.S. air campaign in Pakistan to defeat al Qaeda instead of ramping up forces in neighboring Afghanistan. From the Associated Press:

The White House is considering expanding counterterror operations in Pakistan to refocus on eliminating al-Qaida instead of mounting a major military escalation in Afghanistan.

Two senior administration officials said Monday that the renewed fight against the terrorist organization could lead to more missile attacks on Pakistan terrorist havens by unmanned U.S. spy planes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made. ...

The two senior administration officials said Monday that one option would be to step up the use of missile-armed unmanned spy drones over Pakistan that have killed scores of militants over the last year.

The armed drones could contain al-Qaida in a smaller, if more remote area, and keep its leaders from retreating back into Afghanistan, one of the officials said.

Most U.S. military officials have preferred a classic counterinsurgency mission to keep al-Qaida out of Afghanistan by defeating the Taliban and securing the local population.

However, one senior White House official said it's not clear that the Taliban would welcome al-Qaida back into Afghanistan. The official noted that it was only after the 9/11 attacks that the United States invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban in pursuit of al-Qaida.

There are two very, very big problems with this idea. First, the U.S. air campaign in Pakistan has been effective; over the past two months alone, three senior al Qaeda leaders and a senior Taliban leader are thought to have been killed during the strikes. But, despite chest-thumping reports from senior U.S. officials, al Qaeda has not be reduced to a handful of leaders seeking shelter in the caves of Pakistan's tribal agencies. The attacks have been effective in forcing al Qaeda to deal with leadership issues and focus efforts on force protection, but the attacks themselves will not defeat al Qaeda.

Second, the unnamed U.S. officials are assuming that the Afghan Taliban have little to do with al Qaeda. But if you listen to what senior Taliban leaders say, the groups are closely integrated. Here is what Mullah Sangeen Zadran, one of the most senior military commanders of the Haqqani Network and the shadow governor of Paktika province, had to say during an interview with As Sahab, which, by the way, is al Qaeda's propaganda arm. Sangeen is the Taliban leader that has custody Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who left his post at the end of June.

As-Sahab: How is your relation with your brothers in Al-Qaeda and what is the level of cooperation between you?

Mawlawi Sangeen: All praise is for Allah, Al-Qaeda and Taliban all are Muslims and we are united by the brotherhood of Islam. We do not see any difference between Taliban and Al- Qaeda, for we all belong to the religion of Islam. Sheikh Usama has pledged allegiance to Amir Al-Mumineen (Mulla Muhammad Umar) and has reassured his leadership again and again. There is no difference between us, for we are united by Islam and the Sharia governs us. Just as the infidels are one people, so are the Muslims, and they will never succeed in disuniting the Mujahideen, saying that there is Al- Qaeda and Taliban, and that Al-Qaeda are terrorists and extremists. They use many such words, but by the Grace of Allah, it will not affect our brotherly relationship. Now they are also trying to disunite the Taliban, saying that there are two wings, one extremist and another moderate. However, the truth is that we are all one and are united by Islam.

The use of Predator strikes is a tactic to help defeat al Qaeda. Focusing efforts on al Qaeda alone in Pakistan at the expense of ignoring groups like the Haqqani Network is a losing strategy.

I've been saying for months now that Pakistan has no desire to move into South Waziristan, the Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. According to Time magazine, a Pakistani official with close ties to the military said that no such operation would occur, and in fact the military would resume the disastrous policy of signing peace agreements with the Taliban:

A top Pakistani general, Nadeem Ahmed, recently said preparation for such an operation could take up to two months. Now, there will be no ground assault at all, according to a senior Pakistani politician known to have strong military ties; instead, the politician tells TIME, the military will try and buy off some TTP [Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan] factions through peace deals.

Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute thinks the Pakistani military is seeking to keep its policy of strategic depth — keeping the Taliban in reserve as a chip against India and hedging against a US withdraw from Afghanistan — in place, and thus threatening President Obama's AfPak strategy to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban:

But the experts — like some U.S. officials — suspect the Pakistani military lacks the desire to eliminate the TTP entirely. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute, who conducted the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, says the military may simply want "to get the TTP back to where it was two years ago — a malleable force that doesn't attack the Pakistani state, and particularly not the Army." A somewhat tame TTP is a useful boogeyman, "to keep civilians appreciative of the need for the Army to be getting resources and priority attention," Riedel adds.

For the Obama administration, the Pakistani military's reluctance to take on the TTP doesn't bode well for the pursuit of U.S. interests. Washington would like Islamabad to confront the groups that pose a direct threat to NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan — the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. But "its not clear that the Pakistanis are prepared to pay more than lip service to that," says Riedel.

Finally, after weeks of speculation about whether Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud is dead or alive, the Pakistani Taliban has confirmed he was indeed killed. Two Taliban leaders named Hakeemullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman Mehsud phoned the AP and other news services to state Baitullah died from wounds suffered in the Predator attack.

Hakeemullah and Waliur phoned the press from the same room, and both also confirmed that Hakeemullah was the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban. This put a dent in authoritative reports from the Pakistani government, which insisted the Taliban were openly battling each other and that the two commanders killed each other in a shootout at a meeting to choose Baitullah's successor. Now that the dead have spoken and professed mutual admiration for each other, the Pakistani government is taking a page straight from the X-files and is claiming Hakeemullah's twin brother is pretending to be the new leader.

Baitullah's death is a victory for the Pakistani government as well as the U.S. Predator campaign, which has been much maligned as being incapable of effectively killing senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders. Baitullah is about as big as it gets, and his death will be held up as a reason to keep the program in operation.

Don't expect much to change from the Pakistani Taliban under Hakeemullah. He has maintained that he will continue to conduct attacks inside Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. He's an effective military commander but it remains to be seen if he can keep the patchwork Taliban groups throughout Pakistan's northwest united. Given that Hakeemullah's chief rival openly endorsed his leadership, it shouldn't be a problem in the short term. And al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban have a vested interest in seeing the Pakistani Taliban remain united.

The real thing to watch over the short term is the Pakistani government and military's reaction. They've signaled they have no intention of meaningfully going into South Waziristan to take on the Taliban head on until sometime next year. If the Taliban was in such disarray, the military should have taken advantage of the confusion in the Taliban ranks and moved in for the kill. That the military never did so indicates the Taliban wasn't as divided as we've been told.

For some time I've argued that the Pakistani military, despite its operation against the Taliban in Swat, has no intention of going into the real Taliban strongholds of North and South Waziristan. And just one day after Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud's death was reported, I said the Pakistani military may actually use his death as a reason to declare victory against the Taliban and avoid going into South Waziristan. US officials agree:

The problems in Afghanistan have been aggravated by what the American commanders call the Pakistani military’s limited response to the threat of militants based there. Although General Scaparrotti said that cooperation by Pakistan and the United States against the militants had improved recently, he stressed that it was important for the Pakistanis to keep up the pressure, particularly after the reported killing of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.

That echoed concerns from Obama administration officials who worry that with the absence of Mr. Mehsud, who was the Pakistani government’s enemy No. 1, the military would shift its emphasis away from the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda operate. “They think it’s ‘game over,’ ” one senior administration official said. “It’s more like, ‘game over, next level.’”

Last week, the Pakistani Army said it needs "months" before it could move into South Waziristan and that an operation against the Taliban may not start until after the winter. If the Pakistani governemnt really believes the Taliban is in disarray after the death of Baitullah and is serious about taking out the Taliban, it would have struck while the iron was hot. Instead, the military and intelligence services appear to be relying on a clumsy and ineffective information campaign designed to cause Taliban infighting while these services continue to support Taliban leaders that have sworn allegiance to Mullah Omar and vowed to fight the NATO forces in Afghanistan.

For all of the tough talk from Paksitan on defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban in their strongholds int he northwest, the latest strategy shows just how unserious the government is when it comes to taking on the Taliban. Syed Saleem Shahzad is a Pakistan-based reporter and has been ahead of the story there for year. According to him, the government is backing one Taliban warlord to defeat the main Taliban warlord:

As part of this strategy, the government is backing Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud’s rival Haji Turkestan Bhittani's tribe, which has in recent days been battling Mehsud’s tribe in its South Waziristan stronghold, while the army has pounded the Mehsud tribe's mountain sanctuaries...

The government wants Turkestan’s men to take control of Mehsud's stronghold, dismantle terrorist training camps and slay of Uzbek militiamen commanded by Mehsud's ally Qari Tahir Yuldeshiv. The ground deployment of the Pakistani armed forces would be the second step of the government's strategy, which would aim to route Al-Qaeda in the tribal areas.

Here's the problem, Haji Turkestan Bhittani is really not much better than al Qaeda ally Baitullah Mehsud. He and his Taliban confederation, the Abdullah Mehsud Group, which is named after a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who immediately returned to Pakistan and fought the U.S. military, have vowed to continue attacks in Afghanistan even if his forces defeat Baitullah's.

The odds of the Abdullah Mehsud Group ejecting Baitullah and his allies forces from South Waziristan are slight at best; he just doesn't possess the manpower or enjoy tribal support. Even if he did somehow win, the odds of him removing al Qaeda and the Uzbeks are even slighter.

The Pakistanis continue to try to look to replace the Taliban leaders that have turned against them with ones they believe are far more agreeable. This can be seen in the recent history of South Waziristan. The government cut deals with Baitullah's predecessor, Abdullah Mehsud, before he was killed in a shootout in 2007. The government also viewed Abdullah's predecessor, Nek Mohammed, as someone who could be dealt with before he was killed during a U.S. Predator strike in 2004. Why they believe Bhittani would be any different isn't clear.

After last week's jubilation over the purported death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, it is now starting to appear as if he survived the airstrike that killed his wife and several of his bodyguards. Five very senior Taliban leaders have come out and said Baitullah survived the attack and would issue a videotape. Several tribal leaders and politicians with close ties to Baitullah and the Paksitani Taliban have also claimed Baitullah is alive.

The reports of Baitullah's death have been largely driven by Pakistani intelligence, which is known to be suspect in past cases. Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister who is the source for many of the reports, just recently fell flat on his face when he insisted Swat Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah was dead. The Taliban said he was alive, and Fazlullah later turned up on the radio.

Back to the Baitullah death story--a strange twist developed over the weekend. In a story too good to be true, Malik claimed that two of Baitullah's potential successors killed each other in a gun battle during a meeting to decide on his replacement. When both Taliban leaders spoke to the media and denied the meeting even took place, the wheels started falling off Malik's assertion. But that didn't stop Malik, who insisted the two commanders prove that they and Baitullah are alive.

Over the weekend I wrote about why it is likely that Baitullah is indeed alive and the purported clash at the Taliban shura probably never happened. The situation is still in flux; Baitullah may indeed be dead and the clash may have actually happened. If I'm correct, the media, which by and large has swallowed the reports from Pakistan uncritically, should do some explaining. The initial Los Angeles Times article, for instance, never questioned Rehman's version of events (the online article has since been modified).

U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials are pretty certain that Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban in Pakistan, is dead. Last night my sources were skeptical, and the reports have not yet been definitively confirmed, but Pakistani Taliban leaders, including one of Baitullah's senior deputies, are now confirming he is dead.

Baitullah Mehsud was one of the nastiest Taliban commanders in South Asia, and his death should be celebrated. But, ironically, one negative outcome of his death may be that Pakistan will now have the excuse it needs to cancel the Waziristan operation. Over at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, I've posted a more detailed analysis of the likely impact of Mehsud's death in both Pakistan and Afghanistan:

In Pakistan, the government and military may seize upon Baitullah's death to decide to declare victory in South Waziristan and end the military blockade and air strikes designed to defeat his Taliban forces. The military has previously stated it does not want to move into South Waziristan by force, and has no intentions of taking on other influential Taliban leaders in the region, such as North Waziristan's Hafiz Gul Bahadar and the Haqqani Family, and South Waziristan's Mullah Nazir .

An end to operations by the Pakistani government in South Waziristan would negatively impact NATO operations in Afghanistan, as pressure on the Pakistani Taliban would be lifted and would allow them to redouble efforts in Afghanistan as opposed to defending their territory in Pakistan's northwest.

The death of Baitullah will cause a crisis in the Pakistani Taliban's leadership, and may disrupt operations in the short term. Although the Pakistani Taliban has often been described as disparate, Baitullah effectively united the factions and directed operations that led to the Taliban's takeover of significant territory in Pakistan's northwest. The Taliban will expend time and effort determining Baitullah's successor, the restructuring of the group's leadership, and outlining its new direction. Already, attacks in Pakistan have decreased over the past month after the Pakistani Army took on the Taliban in Swat. Since going underground, the Pakistani Taliban have been regrouping and are planning the next phase of their insurgency. It is unclear if the Taliban will refocus effort onto Afghanistan or continue attacks against the Pakistani state.

More over at FDD.

The Pakistani government is touting its move to ban major terror groups that operate in the country.

The Pakistan government has banned 25 religious and other organisations, including the Jamaat-ud-Dawah, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashker-e-Taiba, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.

The ministry presented a list of the banned organisations in the National Assembly or lower house of parliament. It also said the Sunni Tehrik had been put on a watch list.

Among the organisations included in the list of outlawed groups are JuD, LeT, JeM, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariah Muahammadi, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Al-Akhtar Trust, Al-Rasheed Trust, Tehreek-e-Islami, Islamic Students Movement, Khair-un-Nisa International Trust, Islami Tehreek-e-Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Islam, Balochistan Liberation Army, Jamiat-un-Nisar, Khadam Islam and Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan.

The Times of India astutely picked up on the fact that some of these groups are already banned:

Pakistan banned the JuD after the UN Security Council declared it a front for the LeT in December last year. The LeT and JeM were banned by the country in 2002.

The Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariah Muahammadi, the pro-Taliban group behind the disastrous Malakand Accord that ultimately ceded more than 10 percent of the country to the Taliban, was banned after its leaders sent more than 10,000 fighters into Afghanistan to battle the United States in 2001-2002. Lashkar-e-Islam was banned during the summer of 2008. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was labeled by Pakistan as a terror group in 2003.

So what does re-banning these groups accomplish other than gratuitous headlines that make it appear the government is taking meaningful action?

And if Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the latter being a front for the former) both have been banned twice, why was its leader, Hafiz Saeed, freed from house arrest?

For several years Pakistani government and military elites have accused India, Israel, and even the United States of backing Taliban leaders such as South Waziristan's Baitullah Mehsud and Swat's Mullah Fazlullah. This week, Pakistani officials claimed the government handed over evidence of Indian backing of the Taliban to the United States and NATO:

They said evidence of New Delhi’s involvement in aiding Mehsud were also provided to US commander of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, Lt. General Stanley McChrystal.

Sources said that Pakistan had provided enough evidence to prove ‘India’s covert links with Baitullah Mehsud and provision of aid to him through Indian consulate in Afghanistan.’

So if the Pakistani government and military have extensive evidence of their arch-rival backing Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah, why did they cut a deal with Sufi Mohammed, Fazlullah's father-in-law and a known front man for the Taliban, this spring? Why are Pakistani officials currently seeking negotiations with Baitullah now? Why would a senior Pakistani generals describe Baitullah as "a patriot"when tensions between Indian and Pakistan flared late last year after the Mumbai assault?

If Pakistan is going to blame everyone but themselves for the mess their country is, the least they can do is be logically consistent.

This should come as no surprise to those who closely watch Pakistan's military operations in the tribal areas. According to a senior politician, the government is conducting a faux offensive against Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and scores of suicide bombings across the country that have killed thousands.

"These are mere mock operations in order to convince NATO as well as the United States of America that Pakistan is very serious against the extremists," says Lateef Afridi, a central committee member of the Awami National Party, a coalition partner of the government. [Note, the Awami National Party runs the government of the Northwest Frontier Province in the heart of the Taliban insurgency.]

Instead, he says, Pakistani leaders are protecting the militants as proxy fighters in Afghanistan and a lure for Americans to "give them dollars."

The military announced a combined operation consisting of air and ground elements would dislodge Baitullah's forces from South Waziristan in mid-June. This offense has yet to materialize and instead the Pakistanis have conducted punitive strikes with air power.

The military purposefully has excluded Taliban groups in North and South Waziristan who are considered "good Taliban" because they focus their operations in Afghanistan and don't advocate toppling the government. But even after these "good Taliban" reneged on their peace agreements and began attacking security forces in the region, the military insisted the peace agreements are intact.

While the Pakistani military is quick to tout the success of its military in Swat, other developments show the country has a long way to go in tackling the native terrorist problem.

Today, the Lahore High Court released Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Saeed was placed under house arrest after the UN declared the group a terrorist entity just weeks after the deadly November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Saeed was released despite the government's presentation of evidence linking Saeed to al Qaeda.

Several days ago, police captured a senior terrorist leader that established a terror camp in the northwest and was behind two recent suicide attacks that targeted security forces in Islamabad. The terrorist and a former member of parliament were detained outside the home of radical cleric Maulana Abdullah Aziz, the leader of the Red Mosque. Aziz was arrested for inciting a rebellion in the capital in the spring of 2007. Pakistani troops captured him during the siege of the Red Mosque. He was released in April and immediately preached jihad. Aziz was not detained in the May 2009 raid despite his connections to the Islamabad terrorist commander.

Here is what two US intelligence officials who closely track the situation in Pakistan told me just this morning:

"Forget what you are seeing in Swat," an intelligence official closely watching Pakistan said. "More than six months after Mumbai, there has yet to be a single conviction or even a trial of anyone involved in the attack. Pakistan does not have the capacity to try and convict known terrorists."

"Saeed is untouchable, And don't think the courts and the police don't know this," another official said, warning that the continuous release of leaders like Saeed, Red Mosque leader Maulana Abdullah Aziz, and others is sending a terrible message to those on the front lines against the terror groups.

"As long as he and other like him are free, Pakistan will remain a terror state," the official said. "Until Pakistan shows it is serious about taking down the leadership of the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, these groups will regenerate and prosper. And law enforcement in Pakistan will shy away from taking them on."

As the Taliban moved into the district of Buner in April after securing the peace agreement that humiliated the Paksitani government, Pakistani political and military leaders rushed to assure the world that there was no threat to Islamabad or Pakistan's nuclear weapons. But Ahmed Rashid, the author over several authoritative books on the Taliban, describes what it is like to travel in Islamabad to meet the president. The city has taken on a siege mentality:

To get to President Asif Ali Zardari's presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan's once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car's license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country's only genuine national leader. Zardari's isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its creation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.

Islamabad and the city of Peshawar remain cities under siege, while Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi are bracing for the next suicide attack.

Only after intense international pressure did the Pakistani military decide to take on the Taliban in Swat and the neighboring districts of Buner, Dir, and Shangla. The military has been battling to retake control of these districts for more than five weeks, and government officials state the operation will be finished within days, despite the fact that much of the district has yet to be cleared. Yet no senior Taliban leaders have been killed or captured during the offensive.

The Taliban have conducted what appears to be a tactical retreat into neighboring districts, some where they never maintained a presence. If the Pakistani Army fails to pursue the Taliban into these northern districts or the tribal areas, the short-term tactical success in Swat will be erased within the year.

One of the main reasons large swaths of Pakistan has fallen under Taliban control is that the military has nearly no capacity to fight a counterinsurgency operation. The Pakistani Army is built to battle the Indians on the eastern plains, not the Taliban in the mountainous northwest. The Pakistani Army's idea of fighting a counterinsurgency is to move the artillery up or call in air or helicopter strikes, and level entire villages. This of course makes the Army hated: why would a country's own Army indiscriminately kill their own people and destroy their property?

Just as the U.S. and Britain have been given the green light to send additional special forces trainers to help teach the Pakistani Army counterinsurgency techniques, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, Chief of Army Staff, tells us not to bother. Everything is fine, says Kiyani, all we need are your shiny new weapons:

Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani on Saturday said that Pakistan Army has developed a full range of counter insurgency training facilities tailored to train troops for such operations. “Therefore, except for very specialized weapons and equipment, high technology, no generalized foreign training is required,” the COAS said in a press statement issued here.

Owing to its vast experience, Pakistan Army remains the best suited force to operate in its own area, the COAS said. So, the comments from various quarters coming on the level of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) training of Pakistani troops and about their shifting from eastern borders is unsuited. Uncalled for aspersions through various quarters on our training methods/orientation are apparently due to lack of knowledge and understanding of our training system in vogue, he said.

Perhaps someone should tell the more than 1.1 million internally displaced persons who are leaving the northwest due to the heavy handed tactics of the Pakistani military that they were wrong to leave as the soldiers are well trained in taking the needs of civilians into consideration.

Many Pakistan watchers are hard on the Pakistani Army and the government--with good reason. Statements like Kiyani's demonstrate a lack of seriousness in addressing the spread of the Taliban, and make the government appear to be panhandling for international aid and advanced weapons.

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S. appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart last evening to explain his government's fight against the Taliban. The interview highlights the schizophrenia that is Pakistan. Haqqani describes the Taliban as "a nuisance" and tries to convince us that the government pulled a bait and switch on the Taliban by signing the most recent peace deal. Here is what he said:

"President Zardari He did something very smart, when he was with President Obama recently he explained it. He actually told the American government 'I am going to do this deal to try to prove to those within Pakistan and in Pakistan's state apparatus who think that these guys can be negotiated with, I will negotiate with them only to prove that you can't negotiate with them because they will break the deal, and as soon as they broke the deal the Army is back in, the fighting is going on and you can see the results."

But nothing could be further from the truth. The Zardari government has a long history of cutting peace deals with the Taliban since it took power in March 2008. Prior to the signing of the Malakand Accord this February, peace agreements were made with the Taliban in South Waziristan, Swat, Malakand, Mohmand, Mardan, Hangu, Khyber, Arakzai, and Bajaur. Each of these agreements failed. So why did President Zardari need to prove yet again that the agreement would fail?

Also, Haqqani told us just a few weeks back that the government never negotiated with the Taliban, but local clerics. So which is it?

If we take Haqqani at his word (or his latest word) then government has knowingly condemned a large segment of its population to the deprivations of the Taliban for, as John Stewart called it, a dose of reverse psychology, after it had ample evidence that peace deals aren't worth the paper they are signed on. And none of this takes into account the fact that the Pakistani government implements policies by actively lying to its people.

The Economist published a good article on the state of play with the potential Taliban takeover in Pakistan. Give it a read. The article was close to perfect, but there is one point that is incorrect and needs to be clarified so the situation in Pakistan is understood. The Economist claimed that the Swat Taliban has no links to al Qaeda:

The Taliban, almost exclusively Pushtun, are not popular in Pakistan. Though often anti-American, and bothered by a growing extremist fringe, most Pakistanis are moderate. Unlike some Taliban leaders, Mullah Fazlullah is not known to have links to al Qaeda.

Given the rapid expansion of the Taliban and the corresponding apathy of the Pakistani people, there's plenty of room for debate about the popularity of the Taliban and the moderation of the Pakistani people. But the real error here is that al Qaeda and other non-Taliban Islamist terror groups are known to operate in Swat.

The largest contingent, the Tora Bora Group, is led by a brutal and efficient al Qaeda commander known as Ibn Amin. The Tora Bora Group is estimated to have more than 1,000 fighters operating in Swat. Amin is known to run an al Qaeda training camp in the village of Peuchar. Amin and the Tora Bora Group couldn't operate in Swat without the countenance of Fazlullah.

This is an important point because Pakistani officials, including Ambassador Husain Haqqani, want us to believe the Swat deal was signed with "local" clerics who have influence with the local Taliban. In fact, this has been the Pakistani government's justification for signing peace deals in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Swat, Mohmand, Bannu, Arakzai, etc. And when they finally cut a new peace deal in Dir and Buner (where Amin is now leading operations) the Pakistanis will also claim the deals were struck with disaffected locals.

Pakistan's latest excuse for its inability to put down the the Taliban insurgency is lack of "capacity," which means they don't have the proper military equipment. Every senior Paksitani politician has claimed that if only the United States would provide items like night vision goggles and helicopters, Pakistan's fight would be going swimmingly.

'As far as our capacity is concerned, obviously there are gaps. For instance, we face shortage of helicopters as well as night vision equipment,' said Foreign Office Spokesman Abdul Basit at the weekly media briefing.

Pakistan had contacted some of the leading Western capitals including Washington and London for the provision of the needed equipment, but its pleas were not heeded by the international community.

'We have been making approaches not only to the US but to other major countries as well for the provision of the required equipment to counter terrorism and violent extremism. But unfortunately there has been no worthwhile response from those capitals.'

But the reality is that the Pakistanis could fill these equipment needs without Western assistance. Russia and other former Soviet nations, as well as China, sell helicopters and night vision gear. If these items were so critical to the fight, then the Pakistanis wouldn't be sitting around waiting for a handout; they'd go buy the equipment needed and push it to the front lines. Instead, the Pakistanis wait for the United States and other nations to open their wallets yet again.

Pakistan is also offering excuse as part of an effort to hide the very real problem that exists within its military: the Army leadership is reluctant to send its regular troops into the fight out of fear that the Army will fracture and elements will defect to the enemy. And this would detract from the real purpose of the Army: to secure the eastern border from their arch enemy, the Indians. The problem with that is that if the Army remains on the sideline for too long, it might not have a country left to defend against the Indians.

Earlier today, Pakistan's prime minister said the situation in Swat is "returning to normal," despite the fact that four members of the security forces were kidnapped, and the cleric that the government negotiated the peace deal with called the Pakistani government illegitimate and advocated for Islamic law nation wide.

As if on cue, the Taliban gave Prime Minister Gilani another reason to reconsider his statement. Muslim Khan, the spokesman for the Swat Taliban, invited Osama bin Laden and others terrorists to shelter in Swat. "Osama can come here. Sure, like a brother they can stay anywhere they want," he said. "Yes, we will help them and protect them."

Khan also admitted to an alliance with other international and Pakistani terror groups:

The Taliban spokesman counted among his allies several groups on U.N. and U.S. terrorist lists: Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year's bloody siege in Mumbai, India; Jaish-e-Mohammed, which trains fighters in Pakistan's populous Punjab province; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; al-Qaida, and the Taliban of Afghanistan.

"If we need, we can call them and if they need, they can call us," Khan said.

The Pakistani government's reaction was predictable: shock and outrage, and even an empty threat:

"We would have to go for the military operation [if Osama shelters in Swat]. We would have to apply force again," said Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira. "We simply condemn this. We are fighting this war against al-Qaida and the Taliban."

The Pakistani Taliban have been clear about their loyalties to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The government knows exactly who they are dealing with, so the charge that they are fighting the Taliban in Swat rings hollow.

Not only do Pakistani leaders often make statements on the security situation that contradict the reality on the ground, they make them at the most ill-advised times. Take Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani's statements about Swat, the district the government recently turned over to the Taliban after allowing them to enforce their radical brand of sharia.

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Monday that the situation in Swat was returning to normal and no one including the US should be worried about that.

Gilani made his statement just one day after Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the pro-Taliban front group that has demanded the enforcement of sharia in the Swat Valley, put his finger in the eye of the government for caving. Sufi is telling the Pakistani government it must halt all activities by the secular courts in Swat and that decisions made by his Islamic courts cannot be challenged by Pakistan's government. And if his demands aren't met within four days, "The government will be responsible for all the consequences if our demands are not implemented," Sufi threatened. He also described democracy, which is the political system employed in Pakistan, as "system of infidels."

As if on cue, today the Swat Taliban kidnapped four members of the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary police force. If 'returning to normal' means that Swat continues to fall further under the grip of the Taliban, then Gilani is 100 percent accurate.

Remember how the video of the flogging of a young woman who had the temerity to leave her home with a man who wasn't her husband or relative was supposed to change the psyche of the Pakistani people and give them the fortitude to fight the Taliban? Here's what Husain Haqqani, the Ambassador to the United States told a gathering in Washington a week ago:

Recently there was a video shown on Pakistani television and it really galvanized the nation into recognizing that the Pakistani nation does not want to tolerate people that do not respect basic human rights.

Things didn't quite work out that way. According to Pakistan's interior ministry, the flogging never happened. "The report said that the video footage was ‘false and fake’ and that no such incident had taken place," the Pakistani daily Dawn reported. The woman and her family said the attack didn't happen, and villagers in Swat said they didn't witness the event.

Forget the fact that the Taliban admitted to carrying out the whipping and video of the event is available for all to see. Investigators go into a region dominated by the Taliban and asked questions, that the Taliban won't like, and there you have it, the flogging never happened.

Just days after news of the flogging was made public, I noted that the incident would spark much handwringing and little action inside Pakistan. Sadly, this has come to pass.

But don't worry, perhaps another outrage will rally the Pakistanis to fight the Taliban. Like last week, when a man and woman who were said to be having an affair were brutally murdered in broad daylight by the Taliban in Hangu. Dawn tells us what happened:

The woman is heard appealing to the Taliban, ‘Have mercy on me, please have mercy; the charges against me are false and no man has ever touched her’.

The Taliban first shoot the woman by firing two bullets in her chest and later open a burst of Kalashnikov fire at both the woman and the man. But the woman is still seen breathing, and the Taliban start yelling that she is alive and issuing orders to ‘kill her, kill her’.

Here's guessing that if an investigation is held, the conclusion that this double murder as "false and fake" as well. And the murders will also fail to spark outrage among the Pakistanis, who seem to be fatalistically waiting for the Taliban takeover.

From the department of "now, who could have really guessed this?": The Pakistani government's peace accord with the Taliban in the Swat Valley (or to be more precise the Malakand Division) has led to an influx of terrorists, expanded recruitment, and the establishment of new terror camp. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Yet a visit to the Taliban-controlled valley here found mounting evidence that the deal already is strengthening the militants as a base for war. U.S. officials contend the pact has given the Taliban and its allies in al Qaeda and other Islamist groups an advantage in their long-running battle against Pakistan's military.

The number of militants in the valley swelled in the months before the deal with the Taliban was struck, and they continue to move in, say Pakistani and U.S. officials. They now estimate there are between 6,000 and 8,000 fighters in Swat, nearly double the number at the end of last year.

Taliban leaders here make no secret of their ultimate aim. "Our objective is to drive out Americans and their lackeys" from Pakistan and Afghanistan, said Muslim Khan, a spokesman for the group, in an interview here. "They are not Muslims and we have to throw them out."

Militant training camps are springing up across the valley's thickly forested mountainsides. "Young men with no prospect of employment and lack of education facilities are joining the militants," said Abdur Rehman, a schoolteacher in Swat.

Back in February, Tom Ricks said the Swat peace agreement was "a smart move". Here is what he said:

I know it looks like a setback but I suspect this might be a smart move. Give the people of Swat sharia law, and see how they like it. Meanwhile, bolster your security forces in the area so they can pick up the ball when the Taliban has sufficiently alienated the populace. Risky? Sure. But better than losing Swat altogether.

When Ricks wrote this, it should have been clear to anyone who has tracked these peace agreements over time and understands the situation in Swat and the Northwest Frontier Province that the agreements had failed in the past and would continue to fail in the future.

Monday's Washington Post noted that the war between Israel and Hezbollah during the summer of 2006 has sparked concern in the U.S. military:

U.S. military experts were stunned by the destruction that Hezbollah forces, using sophisticated antitank guided missiles, were able to wreak on Israeli armor columns. Unlike the guerrilla forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, who employed mostly hit-and-run tactics, the Hezbollah fighters held their ground against Israeli forces in battles that stretched as long as 12 hours. They were able to eavesdrop on Israeli communications and even struck an Israeli ship with a cruise missile.

While the article focused on the internal dispute inside the military over the need to gear the force to fight counterinsurgencies or traditional combat, there is another reason the military is interested in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War that isn't mentioned: the rise of the al-Qaeda-Taliban-jihadi alliance in Pakistan.

While U.S. and NATO forces have yet to fight battles in Afghanistan against the Taliban on the scale that Israel has, the Pakistani Army has engaged in large scale operations against similar forces inside Pakistan. The Taliban have defeated the Pakistani military in open engagements on numerous occasions in North and South Waziristan forcing the military to sign an agreement not to operate there. During these battles, the Taliban reportedly used anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, sophisticated communications equipment, and fought at the company and battalion level. The Taliban were able to overrun forts and take an entire regular Army unit captive.

Like their allies in the south, the well-armed and trained Taliban in Swat and Bajaur withstood offensives for months on end, and fought the Pakistani military to a standstill. There's a truce in Bajaur at the moment, while the Swat Taliban have forced the government to cede much of the Northwest Frontier Province to the extremists. And in cities such as Lahore and Mumbai, India, the Taliban have staged small-scale military assaults that have shocked both nations.

The Taliban, emboldened from their successes in Pakistan and at the urging of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, are setting their sights on Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban has fought in Afghanistan, but the best forces have been held in reserve to secure the local fronts. That may change this year, and the U.S. military is preparing for just that.

The video of a young woman being beaten in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested district of Swat has sparked considerable controversy inside Pakistan. The Pakistani president and prime minister ordered an investigation of the incident, and even Pakistan's Supreme Court got involved. The newly restored chief justice ordered government officials to testify in front of the court and ordered its own investigation.

But not all parties in Pakistan have expressed outrage over the incident. To many Pakistanis, everyone but their countrymen are responsible for the country's ills. Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition party whose stance on the Taliban has been nebulous at best, has been silent over the incident. Imran Khan, the leader of a small political party that has taken pro-Taliban positions, deplored the whipping but said it was a plot by "international conspirators" to defame Islam and foil the Swat "peace deal." The Chairman of the Pakistan International Human Rights commission said the video "is fictitious and termed it a conspiracy to malign Islam."

Regardless of the political firestorm the flogging incident created inside Pakistan, it will fail to move the country closer to fighting the Islamist extremists in its midst. Oddly enough, the country sits by idly as suicide bombers and assault teams target government officials, the security forces, and even worshippers in mosques in Pakistan's largest cities. The Taliban carried out three suicide bombings just this weekend; sixteen police and paramilitary troops were killed in suicide attacks in Islamabad and North Waziristan, while 24 Shia worshippers were murdered in a suicide attack outside of a mosque in central Punjab province. Very rarely are any of the terrorists behind the attacks captured. Pakistani political leaders seem to express more outrage at the occasional American airstrikes that target al Qaeda and Taliban leaders than at the near-daily suicide attacks throughout the country.

Just over six weeks ago, the Pakistani government cut a deal with the Taliban to impose sharia, or Islamic law, in a region that encompasses more than one-third of the Northwest Frontier Province, one of Pakistan’s four provinces. The government claimed the agreement was negotiated from a position of strength, and the imposition of sharia would improve the situation for those living in the Swat valley. So how are things going for the Pakistanis living in Swat? Predictably, the Taliban have taken little time to dispense brutal punishments for minor infractions. Days ago, the Taliban publicly whipped a young woman for having the temerity of leaving her home with a man who was not her husband. The Nation, a Pakistani newspaper, describes the punishment:

“Please stop it,” she begs, alternately whimpering or screaming in pain with each blow to the backside. “Either kill me or stop it now.” A crowd of men stands by, watching silently. Off camera a voice issues instructions. “Hold her legs tightly,” he says as she squirms and yelps. After 34 lashes the punishment stops and the wailing woman is led into a stone building, trailed by a Kalashnikov-carrying militant.

The Taliban proudly took credit for the punishment:

Reached by phone, Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan claimed responsibility for the flogging. “She came out of her house with another guy who was not her husband, so we must punish her. There are boundaries you cannot cross,” he said. He defended the Taliban’s right to thrash women shoppers who were inappropriately dressed, saying it was permitted under Islamic law.

In carrying out this punishment, the Taliban have violated the agreement with the government several times. Cases such as this are supposed to be put forth to a local Islamic court for judgment. This wasn't done. And the Taliban are forbidden from carrying arms in Swat. But these violations are minor compared to the kidnappings and murders of security forces in Swat since mid-February.

Fareed Zakaria tells us we should learn to live with radical Islamist groups like the Taliban in Swat. They're no threat to Western security, Zakaria would have you believe. Those suicide attacks the Swat Taliban carried out scores of times? Merely local expressions of disenfranchisement. And the stonings and whippings are carried out by barbarians who have no interest in global politics:

The groups that advocate these policies are ugly, reactionary forces that will stunt their countries and bring dishonor to their religion. But not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world—in fact, most do not. Consider, for example, the most difficult example, the Taliban. The Taliban have done all kinds of terrible things in Afghanistan. But so far, no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack over the past 10 years—including 9/11.

Oddly enough, "the most difficult example" -- the Taliban -- are really easiest example of how allowing these groups to thrive threatens our national security. Perhaps Zakaria forgets that al Qaeda plotted 9-11 from Afghan soil, under the protection of Mullah Omar's Taliban. Or that Mullah Omar defiantly refused to hand over al Qaeda leaders under his care. Or that the plots and attacks against the West since 9-11 were hatched in Pakistan's tribal areas, which are under Taliban control. Or that groups like al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa and Shabaab in Somalia have openly threatened to attack the West. Oh, and by the way, many of their operatives have trained in camps run by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. How easily we forget.

The not-so-covert U.S. air campaign has expanded yet again beyond the traditional hunting grounds of the Taliban-controlled tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan and Bajaur. Earlier today, at least one unmanned Predator strike aircraft struck in the Arakzai tribal agency. Twelve Taliban fighters loyal to Hakeemullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader behind the attacks on NATO convoys moving through Pakistan, were reported killed.

Prior to December of 2008, all of the U.S. airstrikes were carried out in North Waziristan, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. But that changed on December 22, when U.S. Predators struck in Bannu, a region outside of the tribal areas. Since that attack, the United States hit once more in Bannu and two other times in the Kurram tribal agency. The expansion of the attacks shows the Taliban and al Qaeda are no longer confined to small regions along the Afghan border. The rot has spread.

Recently the Obama administration hinted that it was investigating expanding the strike zone to Baluchistan, a Pakistani province that borders southern and eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban shura, led by Mullah Omar, is based in Quetta, while the Taliban run numerous camps and recruiting facilities there.

Today's strike as well as the recent strikes outside of the three main tribal agencies suggests the Obama administration may be serious about targeting the Taliban in Baluchistan.

Once again, Pakistan is the origin of another military-styled assault on civilian or government installations in South Asia. Today's terror assault on a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan, is the latest in a string of such attacks, which include the strike on the city of Mumbai, the storming of government offices in Kabul, and the ambush of the Sri Lankan Cricket team.

All of these attacks have been traced back to Pakistan-based and backed terrorist groups. Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s minister of the interior, admitted today's attack was likely carried out by Pakistani groups, but implied the terrorists are being armed by outside countries:

Interior ministry chief Rehman Malik suggested homegrown terror movements were responsible.

"The nation knows these terrorist organizations," he told Geo news, adding: "The question is -- from where they are getting grenades, guns and rocket launchers in such a large number?"

Pakistan has buried its head in the sand after each such attack and has attempted to blame other countries, mainly arch-rival India, for the terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil.

Malik is correct; these groups are well known to the Pakistani nation. To this day, many are still being supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency and elements within the military. The problem has gotten so bad that over the past several days that President Obama, Secretary of Defense Gate, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen have all gone on the record stating this.

And to answer Malik's question: Lashkar-e-Taiba, the likely culprit in this attack, operates in both Pakistan and in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The group is still supported, armed, and funded by the Pakistanis, despite claims otherwise. Just the other day, Lashkar's spokesman said the group is preparing for a fresh offensive in India after major clashes with Indian forces. And the Taliban and a host of allied terror groups freely operate in northwestern Pakistan and carry out attacks against the government and security forces. They have all the weapons needed to pull off such attack.

You have to hand it to the Pakistanis for their capacity for denial. In the wake of last year's terror assault on Mumbai--which was planned, launched, and directed from Pakistani soil--elements of the military and the government have gone out of their way to deflect blame and put the spotlight on India. Their latest attempt is nothing short of comical, or it would be if the situation inside Pakistan were not so dire.

According to the Paksitani newspaper Dawn, a report on last month's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore indicates the Indians were behind the plot. The reason given, according to Dawn? "[N]o militant organizations Pakistan had the capacity to carry out the attack without the help of a state intelligence agency." The report cites the weapons and communications network used in the attack point to state sponsorship.

Keep in mind that this is a country that suffers from daily attacks from the Taliban, al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and a host of terror groups based on its soil, and where a vibrant and deadly insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province has defeated the Paksitani military multiple times on the battlefield since 2004. Many of these groups use sophisticated weapons and communications network, ironically much of which is provided by elements with Pakistan's military and intelligence service.

The Obama administration is clearly turning up the heat on the Pakistani government in an effort to get them to tackle the Taliban leaders operating in the Quetta region. Last week, administration officials leaked that they are mulling airstrikes against the Taliban leadership in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, and particularly against the executive council in Quetta. This would be a significant expansion of the not-so-covert Predator campaign currently taking place in the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province.

Since then, the International Security Assistance Force has begun to name Taliban leaders directing "insurgent activity from outside Afghanistan." In press releases that reported on the death of three Taliban commanders in Helmand province since March 16, ISAF has identified four Taliban commanders operating from outside of Afghanistan. Pakistan isn't directly named, but U.S. and NATO officers have been saying for years that the insurgency in southern Afghanistan is being directed by the Taliban shura in Quetta. And while the identification of Taliban commanders operating from outside of Afghanistan may seem insignificant, I've been following ISAF press releases for years and have yet to see this mentioned. The message to Pakistan is clear: We know who these Taliban leaders are and where they are operating from.

It will be interesting to see if the Obama administration will follow up on the not-so-veiled threats to strike in Baluchistan if the Pakistan military does not act against the Taliban leadership. The administration is pushing a policy of engagement and additional support for the Pakistani government, while some in Congress seek to lavish the country with a $20 billion, 15-year aid package. At some point it will be difficult to sell engagement and aid for Pakistan to the American people while we conduct strikes throughout half the country because the Pakistanis are unwilling to tackle the Taliban and al Qaeda problem.

The news that the Mamond tribe in Bajaur has signed a "peace agreement" with the Pakistani government is sure to cause some in the "let's negotiate" crowd to jump with joy. On the face of it, it looks like a great deal: the fighting ends, al Qaeda won't be sheltered, the Taliban will lay down their weapons and recognize the writ of the state:

Leaders of the Mamond, the largest tribe in the district that borders Afghanistan, signed a 28-point peace accord Monday, agreeing to surrender local Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, his spokesman Muslim Khan and three other key figures, the Dawn newspaper reported.

However, the Taliban leaders will be pardoned and allowed to live peacefully if they promised not to fight government forces.

Under the agreement, all militants would lay down arms and get themselves registered with their respective tribes to facilitate monitoring and stop propaganda against the state and its institutions.

The Mamoond tribe also agreed not to shelter any al-Qaeda-linked foreign militants, rent or sell them property and to register all Islamic seminaries in the area.

The problem is the Mamond tribe signed a very similar agreement back in 2006:

1) We, the tribes of Mamond in Bajaur agency, undertake in writing that we would neither give refuge to any Pakistani or foreign terrorist or criminal nor establish contacts with them. We undertake to cooperate with the government of Pakistan and the political administration of Bajaur in taking action against local or foreign militants in case information becomes available about presence of suspects in the area.

2) We undertake to accept and follow all decisions and agreements already made or likely to be made at the national and local levels between us and Pakistan government and political administration of Bajaur for maintaining law and order and pursuing development activities.

3) We agree to cooperate with government and non-government organisations and protect the life and property of their members for the sake of Bajaur’s progress and prosperity and for ensuring law and order.

4) We also undertake not to take part in any militant activity or acts of sabotage in or outside Pakistan that would bring a bad name to the country.

5) As patriotic Pakistanis, we would not hesitate to offer sacrifices for the country, whenever called upon to do so by the government of Pakistan and the political administration of Bajaur.

Expect this "peace agrement" to yield the same results as the failed 2006 agreement.

On February 20, the New York Times published an article claiming that U.S. airstrikes against Taliban supremo Baitullah Mehsud inside Pakistan's tribal areas were a "broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan." Here is what the Times wrote:

The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft. Under President Bush, the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.

This report was picked up by the Washington Times on March 3:

Unmanned aircraft have begun targeting Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, a shift in strategy by the Obama administration that may reflect efforts to pre-empt a Taliban spring offensive against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military avoided hitting Mr. Mehsud's forces in 2007 and 2008, during the Bush administration, when the Taliban leader waged a campaign of suicide bombings inside Pakistan and humiliated the Pakistani army in his tribal stronghold near the Afghan border.

The problem is these articles are wrong. Since 2005, I've tracked the airstrikes inside Pakistan closely. There were three strikes against Baitullah's network prior to President Obama taking office.

A June 15, 2008 strike took place in Makeen, Baitullah's home town. An October 16, 2008 strike took place in the village of Sam in the Ladha region. And a January 2, 2009 strike also targeted Baitullah's forces in the Ladha region.

I contacted the New York Times on February 21 and the Washington Times on March 4 about these inaccuracies. Neither newspaper has responded.

We're constantly told that the U.S. Predator attacks against the Taliban and al Qaeda are turning the vast majority of the Pakistani people against America. A while back I noted that not all Pakistani want to see the strikes end. A survey that was taken in Pakistan's Pashtun tribal belt backs this up.

Between November 2008 and January 2009, the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy conducted surveys in the regions the U.S. strikes have focused on: North and South Waziristan and the Kurram tribal agency. Here are some of the results:

Do you see drone attacks bringing about fear and terror in the common people?
Yes 45%, No 55%

Do you think the drones are accurate in their strikes?
Yes 52%, No 48%

Do you think anti-American feelings in the area increased due to drone attacks recently?
Yes 42%, No 58%

Should Pakistan military carry out targeted strikes at the militant organisations?
Yes 70%, No 30%

Do the militant organisations get damaged due to drone attacks?
Yes 60%, No 40%

The author of the article includes some interesting observations of his interactions with more than 2,000 Pakistanis living in the tribal agencies, such as this:

I asked almost all those people if they see the US drone attacks on FATA as violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. More than two-third said they did not. Pakistan’s sovereignty, they argued, was insulted and annihilated by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, whose territory FATA is after Pakistan lost it to them. The US is violating the sovereignty of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, not of Pakistan. Almost half the people said that the US drones attacking Islamabad or Lahore will be [in] violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan, because these areas are not taken over by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Many people laughed when I mentioned the word sovereignty with respect to Pakistan.

Over two-thirds of the people viewed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as enemy number one, and wanted the Pakistani army to clear the area of the militants. A little under two-thirds want the Americans to continue the drone attack because the Pakistani army is unable or unwilling to retake the territory from the Taliban.

Perhaps a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak situation.

In the Wall Street Journal, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari attempts to convince the West that his nation's "fight against terrorism is relentless" and negotiations with the Swat Taliban are not actually occurring, but instead are taking place with "traditional local clerics."

In the highly volatile Swat Valley, our strategy has been to enter into talks with traditional local clerics to help restore peace to the area, and return the writ of the state.

We have not and will not negotiate with extremist Taliban and terrorists. The clerics with whom we have engaged are not Taliban. Indeed, in our dialogue we'd made it clear that it is their responsibility to rein in and neutralize Taliban and other insurgents. If they do so and lay down their arms, this initiative will have succeeded for the people of Swat Valley. If not, our security forces will act accordingly. Unfortunately, this process of weaning reconcilable elements of an insurgency away from the irreconcilables has been mischaracterized in the West.

Actually,President Zardari is mischaracterizing what he calls "traditional local clerics." The cleric he is referring to, Sufi Mohammed, is a radical Taliban supporter. Here is a brief backgrounder on Sufi:

Sufi Mohammed is the spiritual leader of the outlawed Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad's Sharia Law. He claimed to have eschewed violence after being released from prison in November 2007 as a condition of a similar failed peace agreement in Swat. Sufi led more than 10,000 Pakistanis into Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. Mullah Fazlullah, the radical anti-government cleric behind the insurgency and terror attacks in Swat, is his son-in-law.

Sufi and the Swat Taliban maintained very close links to the radical administration of the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, the pro-Taliban mosque in the heart of Islamabad whose followers enforced sharia and kidnapped policemen just one mile from the seat of government. The Pakistani military stormed the Lal Masjid in July 2007 after a several-month standoff. More than a hundred followers and more than a dozen soldiers were killed in the battle.

In recent interviews, Sufi has declared his hatred for democracy and the West, and described Mullah Omar's regime in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 as "ideal."

“From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by the infidels. Islam does not allow democracy or elections,” Sufi told Deutsche Presse-Agentur just days before the Malakand Accord was signed. “I believe the Taliban government formed a complete Islamic state, which was an ideal example for other Muslim countries."

Just yesterday, the Taliban murdered two soldiers in Swat, and Sufi's reaction was the government was in violation of the ceasefire. The Daily Times reports:

[Sufi] said he was satisfied with the way Mullah Fazlullah, Sufi’s son-in-law, was leading the Swat Taliban. “The Taliban are doing nothing wrong ... the government is responsible for violations.”

President Zardari's entire premise for negotiations falls apart when you look at who the government is actually negotiating with. And the United States is supposed to be comforted in knowing Pakistan has ceded territory to a man who praises the Taliban and sent thousands of fighters to kill our troops in Afghanistan.

After years of watching the slow deterioration of the Pakistani state at the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and allied jihadi groups, I've come to one conclusion: just when you think things in Pakistan can't get any worse, they probably will. Just two weeks after the government essentially ceded one-third of the Northwest Frontier Province to the Taliban, terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team as they visited in the eastern city of Lahore.

Seven members of the team were wounded in the attack, two seriously. Five Pakistani police were killed and 11 were wounded fending off the assault by all accounts was conducted by 12 well-armed, well-trained attackers. The International Cricket Council has suspended international games in Pakistan until the security situation "changes dramatically."

With political instability and unrest in the legal system, large swaths of territory under Taliban control, and the Taliban insurgency and accompanying lawlessness creeping closer to Islamabad, one has to ask if we are witnessing the final act in the unraveling of the Pakistani state.

As Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar push a 10 year, $15 billion non-military aid package for Pakistan as well as a one-time aid package estimated between $4 and $5 billion, Senator Carl Levin has questioned the wisdom of such a move. The Press Trust of India reports:

An influential US Senator has questioned the commitment and willingness of Islamabad to take head on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and charged the official machinery in Pakistan of providing crucial assistance to its leaders.

"For many reasons, I question whether Pakistan has the political will or the capability to take on the Taliban and other militants. Evidence of their unwillingness or inability to do so has been clear and longstanding," said Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

Levin, who convened a hearing on "Strategic Options for the Way Ahead in Afghanistan and Pakistan," said there have been reports for some that the Afghan Taliban council meets in Quetta and from there plans attacks in southern Afghanistan.

"The militant Baitullah Mehsud, suspected of orchestrating the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, holds an open press conference in South Waziristan," he pointed out. "To make matters worse, the Pakistan government inflames opposition to the United States with their strong public criticism of our air strikes," Levin charged.

At the Times of India, Chidanand Rajghatta notes that billions have gone missing, but the tap may soon be turned back on.

US government reports in recent times have detailed how Pakistan has misused billions in aid for a military build-up against India instead of using it for the intended war on terror. Audits have also detailed million of dollars in fraudulent claims by the Pakistani military. Reimbursement to Pakistan have been halted for several months because of this but are set to resume soon after the Obama administration has given a green signal pending further audits.

He also notes that "the proposed aid is not contingent on Islamabad living up to any benchmarks." Considering that Congress was insistent on having benchmarks to judge Iraq's political and security progress, this omission is curious, to say the least.

Pakistan continues to complain about the U.S. Predator campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and operatives in Pakistan's tribal areas, even after it has been disclosed that bases inside Pakistan are being used to conduct the strikes. Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency told the New York Times that these strikes, as well as U.S. plans to send an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, "are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country."

American missile strikes have reduced Al Qaeda’s global reach but heightened the threat to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells here and fights to maintain its sanctuaries, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The officials acknowledge that the strikes and raids by the Pakistani military are proving effective, having killed as many as 80 Qaeda fighters in the past year. But they express growing alarm that the drone strikes in particular are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country.

They also voiced fears that the expected arrival of 17,000 American troops in Afghanistan this spring and summer would add to the stresses by pushing more Taliban fighters into Pakistan.

In essence, the ISI is saying that U.S. efforts to target Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and secure Afghanistan are responsible for the rise of "militancy" in the region. This of course ignores the fact that for decades the Taliban has been sponsored by elements within Pakistan's military and intelligence service, even to this day.

While the Predator strikes no doubt put the government in an awkward situation and are angering Pakistanis, the real cause of instability and the spread of radical Islam is Pakistan’s inability to control its own territory. Pakistan could end the Predator strikes if it showed it was serious about dislodging the Taliban and al Qaeda from the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province. Instead, the Pakistanis have cut a series of peace deals, starting in North and South Waziristan in 2004, with the latest ceasefires coming to effect in Swat and Bajaur. The Pakistanis have ceded ground to the Taliban, thus giving al Qaeda the sanctuaries needed to reestablish its network after its near-defeat in Afghanistan in 2001-2002.

The U.S. strikes are happening because the Pakistani government is either unable or unwilling to restore its writ in large swaths of territory, and is in fact quite willing to cede control of these regions to the extremists. Make no mistake: These strikes are signs of just how bad the situation is inside of Pakistan. The United States would rather police its own territory but is forced to step in and keep al Qaeda off balance lest it conduct another attack on the scale of 9-11 or worse.

As one of the conditions to ending the fighting in Swat, Taliban chieftain Mullah Fazlullah has demanded the government pay reparations to the Taliban. And the guy who is footing the bill? The U.S. taxpayer, according to Pakistani reporter and Taliban expert Syed Saleem Shahzad. At least $6 million has been paid to the Taliban and more is on the way.

"The amount has been paid through a backchannel, " a senior security official told AKI on condition of anonymity.

"It is compensation for those who were killed during military operations and compensation for the properties destroyed by the security forces. In fact, negotiations for this package were finalised well before Maulana Sufi Mohammad signed a peace deal."

The security official said the amount was delivered from a special fund of president Asif Ari Zardari. All the tribal areas come under the president's jurisdiction and a special aid package, including a donation from the US, was designated for the tribal area by the president's office and distributed through the governor's office in the North West Frontier Province.

"Some other smaller amounts are also under negotiation which shall also be delivered soon," the official confirmed.

Not only is the United States paying the Pakistani government to abdicate territory to the Taliban, we get to fund the Taliban as well.

Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar are pushing yet another aid package for Pakistan. The Kerry-Lugar bill is expected to triple military aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion. It's time for the U.S. government to ask if it is getting a good return on its investment. Considering that more than $3.8 billion of $5 billion of U.S. aide to Pakistan has gone unaccounted for and the Taliban is being funded by the United States, perhaps the answer is no.

I've written quite a bit in the past about the Pakistani government's misguided negotiations with the Taliban. Agreements from 2006-2008 only allowed the Taliban and al Qaeda to regroup, rearm, and consolidate their power in the tribal areas and the greater northwest, while serving to demoralize the Pakistani military and the people living under the Taliban's boot. (See here or here).

Despite ample evidence of the failure of this policy, the Pakistani government is cutting a new peace agreement with the Taliban. The government will allow the Taliban to implement sharia in a region called the Malakand Division, which encompasses the districts of Malakand, Swat, Shangla, Buner, Dir, and Chitral. This region makes up about 1/3 of the Northwest Frontier Province (see map here). In exchange, the government will end its operation in Swat.

Recently, President Zardari said force must be used to defeat the Taliban, while Prime Minister Gilani said other measures are required. Clearly the "other measures" option will be tried, and the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters sheltering among them will only grow stronger.

From one of my favorite blogs, Information Dissemination, comes the news that Senator Dianne Feinstein has divulged that the United States is conducting strikes in against al Qaeda's network in Pakistan's tribal areas from a secret base inside Pakistan:

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan's northwest border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said of the planes.

Sen. Feinstein's spokesman later claimed she was referring to a February 2008 report in the Washington Post. Here is the article and the excerpt:

With all signs pointing to a unique target, CIA officials ordered the launch of a pilotless MQ-1B Predator aircraft, one of three kept at a secret base that the Pakistani government has allowed to be stationed inside the country. Launches from that base do not require government permission, officials said.

Regardless of how Sen. Feinstein came about the information, her making the statement gives weight to the notion that the CIA is launching attacks on targets in the tribal areas from a base located on Pakistani territory. And that genie cannot be put back into the bottle, Pakistanis will believe this.

Aside from the obvious operational security and diplomatic concerns, Sen. Feinstein has just confirmed what we have all known for some time: the strikes on al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan have taken place with the approval of the Pakistani government, and the government's protests of these attacks are designed to placate Pakistani citizens. But all this has done is harm the image of the United States, as we're portrayed as the big, bad bully that violates Pakistan's sovereignty without a care for the people. This mess also shows that the situation in Pakistan is so bad that the government has to lie to its people about a campaign designed to kill al Qaeda leaders, the very same ones that have been behind numerous suicide attacks on Pakistani soil that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians.

The Paksitani government has asked Richard Holbrooke, the envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan to "talk to Taliban moderates," Reuters reports.

Pakistan advised President Barack Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday to reach out to reconcilable elements of the Taliban movement as part of a strategy for peace in the region.

Envoy Richard Holbrooke met with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and army chief General Ashfaq Kayani during a visit that will last until Thursday.

The United States, NATO, and Afghanistan should by all means reach out to "Taliban moderates." In fact this has been going on for years via a program to bring in low and mid-level commanders over to the side of the government. The effort has had some minor successes but the rising violence has driven many Taliban moderates away from the program in the South.

Perhaps it would be nice if someone - say the Pakistanis who keep pushing this line - identified precisely these moderates that can end the insurgency. If anyone finds an influential Taliban moderate inside of Afghanistan that is willing to end the insurgency, by all means please let us know. Advice to Ambassador Holbrooke: if the answer is Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, and Mullah Mohamed Tayeb Agha, you know you've been had.

CNN has a story on the situation in Swat, the Taliban-controlled region in Pakistan's northwest outside of the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Hina Khan, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl, talks about how the Taliban are in control of the region and are expanding thier influence:

"Right now, [Swat Valley] is under the control of the Taliban," she said. "They are knocking on the doors of Peshawar, and I have no doubt they will be knocking on the doors of Islamabad [if] the government continues the complacency they are showing right now."

But Major General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for Pakistan's military, disagrees:

"There is success," Abbas said of operations against anti-government forces in the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan. "The success rate of the army's operation is pretty good in these areas."

I've been closely following the situation in Pakistan's northwest for five years now. And sadly, I have to take the word of a 14-year-old Pakistani girl over the word of a senior Pakistani military officer. Here's why: Pakistan's military leadership has been outright untruthful to the media multiple times in the past on events in the northwest. In two of the more blatant instances, Major General Abbas had to backtrack on his falsehoods.

In August 2007, Baitullah Mehsud's Taliban forces in South Waziristan captured an entire company of about 300 Pakistani regular Army troops as they were patrolling through the tribal agency. Abbas denied this and initially claimed the troops were merely sheltering in a valley due to bad weather after losing communications, but it was later confirmed that a company-sized unit driving in 17 vehicles was captured by Mehsud's forces. After backtracking, the military claimed about 110 troops were captured. But after the Taliban displayed the soldiers to a BBC television crew, it was confirmed 300 troops were captured.

In another incident in January 2008, the Taliban overran the Saklatoi Fort in South Waziristan, but the military emphatically denied the reports. "Absolutely baseless and I reject this report," Abbas said at the time. "I want to clarify that the Pakistan Army and the Frontier Corps personnel are still present in the fort." Two days later, Abbas briefed the media on the military's successful operation to retake the Saklatoi Fort.

Hopefully, senior U.S. and NATO military commanders in Afghanistan and Western diplomats will begin taking what the Pakistanis are saying with a bag of salt.

Here we go again. CIA officials are gloating over the effectiveness of the U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. NPR reports:

CIA-directed airstrikes against al-Qaida leaders and facilities in Pakistan over the past six to nine months have been so successful, according to senior U.S. officials, that it is now possible to foresee a "complete al-Qaida defeat" in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan. The officials say the terrorist network's leadership cadre has been "decimated," with up to a dozen senior and midlevel operatives killed as a result of the strikes and the remaining leaders reeling from the repeated attacks.

Not so fast, a senior U.S. military intelligence official who is an expert on al Qaeda's organization wrote in an email to me earlier today, a portion of which is excerpted below:

I'm not even going to get into the karmic quality of these types of cavalier declarations being offered on the day that our supply lines got cut into Afghanistan. With Swat now recognized by the press as being under TNSM control after more than a year's worth of fighting there and Peshawar essentially in a state of siege, these types of triumphalist declarations from Langley are dubious at best.

The official points to the de-classified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which states that al Qaeda has regenerated its network in northwestern Pakistan and maintains a safe haven there.

Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.

Despite the ramped up U.S. attacks, which admittedly have had an impact on al Qaeda's operational capabilities, the group still maintains a safe have in Pakistan and is still capable of regenerating its leadership. Of the seven al Qaeda leaders killed (and not eight as many are reporting as Rashid Rauf has not been confirmed killed; you can see the list here), three were members of al Qaeda Shura Majlis,or executive council. "Losing 'only' three Shura Majlis members in the span of 12 months is probably considered acceptable losses to AQSL [al Qaeda senior leadership] given the far more horrific tallies that were inflicted against them in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 that led a lot of observers in and outside of government to declare the group more or less dead by 2005," the official stated.

We need to recognize successes in the war, but need to be extremely careful about making such over-optimistic statements. Taliban and al Qaeda control in Pakistan and Afghanistan has expanded since the 2007 NIE. Despite Pakistani claims to the contrary, the Pakistani Army is losing ground in the northwest while NATO is still searching for the right strategy in Afghanistan, where the Taliban legitimately claim much of the rural regions are under their control. The U.S. attacks have had an impact on al Qaeda's ability to strike at the United States, but by no means does this mean the group has been "decimated." Making such overly optimistic claims only damages our ability to properly assess the nature of the threat.

The Pakistani military is yet again on the offensive against the Taliban in the district of Swat, which is well outside of the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. This is the third time the military has tried to eject the Taliban in the past two years. The two previous efforts ultimately failed, despite more than a division of Pakistani forces deployed in the small region.

There are three reasons for past Pakistani Army failures. One, the Taliban are organized to fight in military formations and are fighting fiercely. Two, the Pakistani Army has no aptitude to fight a counterinsurgency and over relies on airstrikes and artillery to dislodge the Taliban. This causes inordinate amount of civilian casualties and keeps the military from exploiting human intelligence. And three, the Pakistani military just flat out lacks the will to fight, which, by the way, is another reason they over rely on air and artillery strikes.

This report from an Al Jazerra journalist embedded with Pakistan troops demonstrates the poor fighting spirit of the Pakistani military as well as the Taliban's skill in counterattacking. The Taliban drives off what appears to be a company or battalion-sized assault of Pakistani troops. Pakistani tanks race away from the fighting, and the Pakistani infantry moving in behind them does the same shortly afterward. The reporter describes the Pakistani troops as "clearly shaken" and the commander calls in for airstrikes, placing the civilians in the line of fire.

Keep this in mind when reading reports of successful Taliban operations in Swat. The military may be able to make short term gains, but the Taliban in Swat have repeatedly shown the ability to strike back and regain control of the region that is about 100 miles from the capital of Islamabad.

The Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan executed six more "US spies," continuing their campaign to remove any opposition to their rule in the Taliban-controlled tribal areas. One of the "spies" was publicly hanged in Mir Ali, which is one of the two large towns in North Waziristan. The locals won't take his body down out of fear of retribution by the Taliban. At least 15 such "spies" have been killed in North Waziristan since the New Year.

The murders in North Waziristan make clear that the Taliban are running the show in the tribal area. Hundreds of such executions have been carried out by the Taliban, but there has yet to be a single prosecution for these murders. The government doesn't have the capability to conduct an investigation in the area, and if they did, it has no power to detain the suspects. The Taliban, and not the Pakistani government, is calling the shots in this region. Here are some other indicators the Taliban is in control of territory. These warning signs show up routinely in the Pakistani press:

• The government seeks to negotiate with the Taliban to restore peace in a region, or the locals themselves turn to the Taliban to end the fighting. Most recently this happened in the settled districts of Hangu and Swat (outside of the tribal areas). Peace deals have been signed in many of the tribal agencies and the settled districts in the northwest.

• The Taliban is bold enough to grant amnesty to government officials. This just happened in Swat, where Mullah Fazlullah announced a "conditional amnesty for social and political workers and public representatives from target killings.” Fazlullah is confident enough to admit his forces are conducting targeted killings of government officials, knowing nothing can be done to stop him.

While much of the reporting on the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan focuses on Pakistan's tribal areas and the spread of the Taliban into the northwest, the problems within Pakistan run far deeper than that. Over the years, the spread of radicalism has extended far beyond the tribal areas, into the more 'civilized' provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

Mohammed Hanif, a Pakistani ex-patriot and author, returned to Pakistan and described how the seeds of extremism have been planted in Pakistani society. Hard-line and radical clerics, along with naked opportunists, have taken to the airwaves to evangelize, Hanif says:

Not only do they crop up on every discussion on every topic on earth but now they have their own TV channels as well, where they can preach 24/7, interrupted only by adverts for other mullahs.

The mosque imam, who served an essential social function, has given way to another kind of mullah: the power mullah, who drives in a four-wheeler flanked by armed guards; the entertainer mullah, who hogs the airwaves; and the entrepreneur mullah, who builds networks of mosques and madrassas and spends his summer touring Europe. And then there is the much maligned mullah with his dreams of an eternal war and world domination.

Since “mullah,” when pronounced in a certain way, can be read as a derogatory term, and since we don’t want to offend them (because we all know that they do get very easily offended) we should call them evangelists or preachers.

Mullahs, maulvis, imamas, or ulema-i-karam as many of them prefer to call themselves, have never had the kind of influence or social standing that they enjoy now. A large part of Pakistan is enthralled by this new generation of evangelists. They are there on prime time TV, they thunder on FM radios between adverts for Pepsi and hair removing cream. In the past few years, they have established fancy websites with embedded videos; mobile phone companies offer their sermons for download right to your telephone. They come suited, they come dressed like characters out of the Thousand and One Nights, they are men and they are women. Some of them even dress like bankers and talk like property agents offering bargain deals in heaven.

Hanif notes that Pakistan's "aspiring middle classes" and the upper classes have been seduced by the mullah's siren song, which has "has changed our social landscape beyond recognition."

Hanif also notes that the opportunist and charlatan preachers pave the way for a more radical breed to fill in behind, and that Pakistani society has ignored this threat.

"In Karachi, there are frequent warnings that the Taliban are headed this way. There are posters warning us about Talibanisation. Altaf Hussain thunders about them at every single opportunity. But nobody seems to warn us about the preachers who are already here: the ones wagging their fingers on TV always tend to precede the ones waving their guns, smashing those TVs and bombing poor barbers."

Pakistan is the greatest problem we face moving forward, with the possible exception of a nuclear Iran. In Pakistan, the Taliban and allied extremist are growing stronger militarily. The civilian government is fractured and exercises little control over the military and the intelligence service, many of who sympathize or support the terror groups. And as Hanif notes, the Pakistani people have become more pliant to the message of extremists.

The Pakistani Taliban have stepped up their murder campaign against what they term "U.S. spies" in the tribal agency of North Waziristan. Over the week, the bodies of eight men accused of spying for the United States have turned up in the Taliban-controlled tribal agency. The men are often mutilated or even beheaded. They always have a note pinned to their chest warning others against "spying" for the United States.

One reason for this Taliban murder campaign is a fear that local tribesmen are aiding the United States by designating safe houses and training compounds:

Current and former Pakistani intelligence agents say residents of the area who are helping the United States have access to what locals call "pathris," literally "small things" -- referred to by one agent as a "gadget" -- that can be thrown into homes and used as targeting signals. Military officials declined to comment further on whether the devices map Global Positioning System coordinates, provide an RF signal or use some combination of these or other targeting technologies.

"The attacks have become so precise. In a village, if they want to hit a house in the middle of the village and it's surrounded by other houses, the missile would come and hit that one house only," a resident of North Waziristan, who says he has witnessed numerous missile strikes, told ABC News.

The Taliban lost five senior operational leaders and several mid-level commanders to U.S. airstrikes last year.

The Pakistani government is powerless to stop these murders, and has yet to detain or prosecute a single person for these crimes. The Pakistani military stationed in North Waziristan remain in their garrisons while the Taliban run their Islamic Emirate.

One month after the Mumbai terror assault, Pakistan and India appear to be moving closer to war. Tensions have been high the past two weeks as both nations' militaries have been placed on high alert. Pakistan has refused to hand over terror suspects and has taken minimal and token action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front group, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

South Asia is on edge today as reports indicate a Pakistani division is being redeployed from the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier Province to the border region near Lahore. The unit that is being moved is assigned to blunt an Indian armored strike into Pakistan. The division was previously assigned to fighting against the Taliban in the Bajaur region, where a halting offensive has been underway since the summer.

Aside from the risk of an all-out war between Pakistan and India, two regional nuclear powers, the move may further destabilize the lawless Pakistani northwest. NATO convoys destined for Afghanistan have been under attack over the past month. More than 70 percent of NATO supplies move through the northwest. The United States plans to surge an additional four combat brigades and an aviation brigade into Afghanistan by next summer. Even more supplies must move through this region, which no doubt will further fall under Taliban control.

Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban who is accused of being behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, said he’d back the government if war breaks out with India. Baitullah promised the Taliban would to send "thousands of our well-armed militants" and hundreds of suicide bombers to Pakistan's eastern border with India "to fight alongside the army if any war is imposed on Pakistan." He also said the suicide bombers are being equipped with their suicide vests.

Baitullah’s call to support the military validates the long-standing Pakistani strategy of establishing strategic depth--supporting the Taliban and jihadi groups--to oppose India. Despite Pakistan siding with the United States after the 9/11 attack, many in the military and intelligence service continued to back this policy covertly. Little has been done to crack down on the multitude of jihadi groups inside Pakistan. And powerful elements within the Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped revive the Afghan Taliban after it was ousted from power in early 2002.

A war with India would be welcome for the Taliban. Pakistani Army operations, as ineffective as they have been in the Northwest Frontier Province, would end, allowing the Taliban to finally consolidate its Islamic Emirate in the region and free up forces to fight in Afghanistan. This would allow the Taliban to cut off NATO’s supply line to Afghanistan, making the upcoming U.S. “surge” difficult to support.

Pakistan is complaining that it needs more weapons from the United States in order to fight the Taliban insurgency in the northwest regions bordering Afghanistan, Newsweek's Ron Moreau and John Barry report uncritically. "We are on a war footing," Pakistan's national-security chief, retired Army Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani told the magazine. "But [the U.S.] supply chain is working on a peacetime basis. You have to support us at much greater speed." Pakistan wants more Cobra attack helicopters, designators for laser-guided bombs, night vision equipment, IED jammers, and sophisticated communications monitoring equipment.

The reality is the United States has already invested more than $5 billion in the Pakistani military. In December 2007, the New York Times reported the U.S. taxpayers are being taken for a ride by Pakistan, as much of the funds were diverted to conventional Pakistani forces on the border with India.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

In February 2008, one US official told The Guardian that more than 70 percent, over $3.8 billion, cannot be accounted for.

So what has this investment bought the United States? The Taliban have taken control of all seven of the tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan and is in control or has a strong presence in much of northwestern Pakistan. The Taliban, al Qaeda, and a host of jihadi groups maintain training camps throughout the region. Last summer, U.S. military and intelligence officials told me there are more than 150 camps and more than 400 support locations (safe houses, weapons storage locations, etc.) in the northwest. In late August, the U.S. stepped up airstrkes dramatically in the tribal efforts in an effort to prevent al Qaeda from htting the West again. NATO supply columns are being hit almost daily while traveling through Peshawar and Khyber. Jihadi groups launched a multitude of attacks on the neighboring countries of Afghanistan and India, with the help of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency and elements within the military.

The U.S. better think long and hard before investing more money in Pakistan's military.

I've been particularly hard on Pakistan the past several weeks. Watching the developments in Pakistan closely the past four years, I've learned that all is not what it seems, and there is significant institutional support for the Taliban, al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the alphabet soup of jihadi groups that infest the country. Actions taken against these groups are never decisive, and often smack of double-dealing attempts to placate the West.

But there are good people in Pakistan who fight the jihadis, knowing that they pose a very danger not only to the West, but to the Pakistani state itself. Major General Faisal Alavi was one of them. As the former commander of Pakistan's Special Service Group, he was charged with hunting down al Qaeda and other terror groups.

Alavi was relieved of his command three years ago after expressing displeasure with then-President Pervez Musharraf. He also said he was fired because he knew two senior Army generals who were cutting deals with the Taliban. Alavi was murdered three weeks ago after sending a letter to Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kiyani requesting to have his honor restored and threatening to expose the generals. The London Times' Carey Schofield met Alavi just before he was killed, and tells the story:

Alavi, who had dual British and Pakistani nationality, named the generals he accused. He told Kiyani that the men had cooked up a “mischievous and deceitful plot” to have him sacked because they knew he would expose them.

“The entire purpose of this plot by these general officers was to hide their own involvement in a matter they knew I was privy to,” he wrote. He wanted an inquiry, at which “I will furnish all relevant proof/ information, which is readily available with me”.

I folded up the letter and handed it back to him. “Don’t send it,” I said. He replied that he had known I would talk him out of it so he had sent it already. “But”, he added, “I want you to keep this and publish it if anything happens to me.”

I told him he was a fool to have sent the letter: it would force his enemies into a corner. He said he had to act and could not leave it any longer: “I want justice. And I want my honour restored. And you know what? I [don’t] give a damn what they do to me now. They did their worst three years ago.”

The hit on Alavi was professional, Schofield reported. And Pakistanis are convinced this was carried out by elements within the Army.

Friends and family members were taken aback to be told by serving and retired officers alike that “this was not the militants; this was the army”. A great many people believed the general had been murdered to shut him up.

General Kiyani and other senior generals did not attend Alavi's funeral, but "wreaths were laid on behalf of Kiyani and most of the country’s military leadership."

Senior military and intelligence officials tell me they hope there are enough Pakistanis like Alavi to prevail over the multitude of Pakistani jihadis. But if General Kiyani, who most of this hope is placed upon, will not attend the funeral of a patriot such as Alavi, the situation clearly is quite grim.

Pakistan is making a big show of its "crackdown" on Jamaat-ud Dawa, the charity that serves as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba. The government claims to have rounded up scores of members and closed multiple offices since the United Nations declared the group behind the Mumbai attacks a terrorist entity and named four senior leaders terrorists.

But if Pakistan's detention of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Jamaat-ud Dawa and Lashkar-e-Taiba, is any indication, the crackdown is far from serious. The New York Times reports on the details of Saeed's so-called "house arrest." It turns out that Saeed is neither confined to his home, nor under arrest.

A few miles away, in Mr. Saeed’s leafy neighborhood, it was a decidedly more relaxed scene. Several dozen policemen ringed the area around his home, standing casually with rifles and enforcing a house arrest that seemed more of a forced vacation.

Two heavily bearded workers from Jamaat-ud-Dawa arrived with food, and the police raised the barricades and allowed them through, choosing not to inspect their Suzuki truck. Mr. Saeed’s relatives have been allowed to come and go freely from the home, policemen said. A young boy and a girl standing on the second-floor balcony of Mr. Saeed’s home looked down at the police and smiled.

One local police commander, seeing journalists arrive, rushed over and proclaimed that Mr. Saeed was confined inside his home, banned from going outside now or at any other time.

Almost on cue, Mr. Saeed emerged moments later from the mosque across the street, clad in a green jacket and a cream-colored shalwar kameez, the long tunic and baggy pants that Pakistani men commonly wear, and ambled back to his house. “No, no, it’s not Hafiz Saeed,” the embarrassed commander said, though it clearly was. “I’m just following instructions,” he added.

Pakistan's defense minister freely admitted the crackdown on Saeed's terror group occurred not because Pakistan has tired of the group's activities, but because the government was concerned it would be labeled a terrorist state and suffer from UN sanctions. "We are part of the international community and cannot afford confrontation with the whole world,” Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar told the Pakistani press.

Meanwhile, Saeed's son openly threatened the Pakistani government with violence at a sermon in one of Jamaat-ud Dawa's mosques.

Inside the mosque, Mr. Saeed’s 38-year-old son, Mohammed Talha Saeed, took his father’s place at the podium and inveighed against the government’s crackdown as the result of “dictation from the United States” and pressure from “Jews and the Hindu lobby.”

“If the government continues this type of activity, then one day the army of God will come,” he lectured, urging the worshipers to remain patient.

For much of this week and last, I've noted that the Pakistani government's action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front group, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, would tell us much about their seriousness in rooting out the multitude of terror groups operating withing its borders. The New York Times report on how the Pakistan goverment went about shutting down the Laskhar/Jamaat officies and "detaining" its leader, Hafiz Saeed, is less than inspiring.

Despite the appearance of Pakistani resolve, the detention of Mr. Saeed was orchestrated by the government in a way to minimize what many here expect to be an angry reaction from the public, and from a broad spectrum of Islamic militant groups sympathetic to Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Just before the police surrounded his mosque and other buildings in central Lahore, Mr. Saeed, who claims he no longer has connections to Lashkar, was allowed to hold a news conference, unfettered by the authorities, in which he denounced a decision on Wednesday by the United Nations sanctions committee to place Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar on a terrorist blacklist of groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

“We will not accept any decision taken under Indian pressure,” a defiant Mr. Saeed told several dozen journalists.

In another sign of the apprehension within the government about the domestic reaction to getting tough on Mr. Saeed and his groups, the foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, announced the United Nations decision on television at midnight when most viewers had gone to bed.

The foreign minister said Pakistan would comply with the United Nations decision, but did not say the group had been proscribed, nor did he announce the house arrest of Mr. Saeed. The Pakistani police said Mr. Saeed would be detained for three months. The State Bank of Pakistan said it had frozen the accounts of Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

Suffice to say that these are not the actions of a government that is confident in its abilities to rein in the multitude of terror groups operating on its soil.

The United Nations Security Council has stepped up to the plate and declared the Pakistan-based Jamaat-ud-Dawa a front group for the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group. The UNSC has placed Hafiz Saeed and three other senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaat-ud-Dawa on the list of terrorists associated with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The Pakistani government has said it would act if the UNSC placed the group on its list of terrorists. Today, Saeed has been placed under "house arrest" for three months and offices of the terror group have been shut down in Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Azad Kashmir. Prior to the designation, two senior Lashkar operatives thought to be behind the Mumbai attacks have been detained.

The big questions are: is the Pakistani government serious about taking on the host of terror groups openly operating in Pakistan and will the military and intelligence establishment accept this? Saeed has been detained in the past, only to be released, and when Lashkar-e-Taiba was banned in the past, it merely renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and continued operations. The intelligence and military establishment have used Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaat-ud-Dawa and other jihadi groups as part of Pakistan’s policy to oppose India and liberate Kashmir decades ago. The Pakistani institutions have invested plenty into these terror groups, and significant elements are sympathetic or openly support their activities. What happens if the government goes to far?

Just three days after the Mumbai attacks, a senior U.S. military intelligence officer described the Lashkar-e-Taiba to me as “al Qaeda junior.” Lashkar-e-Taiba has vast resources, an extensive network, and is able to carry out complex attacks throughout its area of operations, the official explained. "If by some stroke of luck al Qaeda collapsed, LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) could step in and essentially take its place."

The relationship between al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba is complex, the official noted. "While Lashkar-e-Taiba is definitely subordinate to al Qaeda in many ways, it runs its own network and has its own command structure. The groups often train in each others' camps, and fight side by side in Afghanistan."

The Los Angeles Times' Sebastian Rotella explained on Decemebr 8 how Lashkar-e-Taiba “has actively recruited Westerners, especially Britons and Americans, serving as a kind of farm team for Islamic militants who have gone on to execute attacks for Al Qaeda, a close ally. The Pakistani network makes its training camps accessible to English speakers, providing crucial skills to an increasingly young and Western-born generation of extremists.”

Lashkar-e-Taiba notables include Australian David Hicks, the former Guantanamo detainee; Aabid Khan, a Briton who was arrested with “a trove of terrorist propaganda and manuals on his laptop ”and “maps and videos of potential targets in New York City and Washington”; and the leader of the suicide cell that attacked the London subway in 2005.

The article is well worth the read. Rotella shows that the war extends far beyond Afghanistan and the enemy consists of more than just al Qaeda.

Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader who is wanted by the Indian government for his involvement in last week's Mumbai terror assault, has given an interview. Saeed, the founder of Lashkar, denied involvement with the group, claiming he relinquished his leadership after the Pakistani government banned the group. The interview demonstrates how Saeed lies about his connections to terrorist groups:

Q- The Indian authorities allege that you are still being backed by the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency] and your group is linked to al-Qaeda?

A- They can say anything. I am not bothered about what they say. I will keep spreading the message of Allah Almighty despite all pressures, knowing fully well that the Indians will continue to mislead the world community by linking us with Lashkar-e-Taiba, with the ISI and even with al Qaeda.

Here is what Saeed said in 2001 after the September 11 attack on the United States:

The LET will not allow the Pakistan Government to hand over Osama bin Laden to the USA. Osama bin Laden is a Muslim and thus we will not allow the Pakistan Government in any condition to hand him over to the USA. Protection of Osama is the duty of every Pakistani Muslim. No one can stop the jihad in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It will continue.

Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba and an alphabet soup of terror groups continue to operate from within Pakistan despite their clear connections to international terror groups. When Prime Minister Gilani and President Zardari deny the Pakistani government was not behind the Mumbai attacks, they are technically correct--the civilian government vey likely did not order this attack. But Pakistan's unwillingness to root out these terror groups and the ISI's sponsorship of these groups ultimately makes the nation of Pakistan responsible for the terror attacks consistently emanating from its soil.

This morning I mentioned the difficulty Pakistan would have in turning over senior leaders from the Lashkar-e-Taiba, as the group has essentially become a state within the Pakistani state. Today, India expert Shlok Vaidya said Pakistan has the same problem dealing Dawood Ibrahim, the South Asian mafia don whose network is intertwined with terror groups throughout the region.

Unfortunately, the Pakistani state can’t take him out without incurring the wrath of Dawood’s network, which is extensively linked to every major terror outfit in the region and has played a prominent role in major attacks. In short, Dawood is to black globalization what AQ Khan was to nuclear proliferation (also a Pakistani resident).

This is the same challenge Pakistan faces across the board, especially with regards to LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba]- the functioning state has been essentially slaved to its various nonstate elements. This is why Zardari has been forced to act as the mouthpiece for both his functioning state and the nonfunctioning areas that killed his wife - any other action results in his immediate failure. Musharraf faced the same dynamic.

"Black globalization" is defined as "the direct use of the black market for anti-state and competing state action."

There is one more problem that Pakistan has with turning over the likes of Ibrahim and other terror leaders. If the Pakistani government is seen to be caving to the demands of India, this would be political suicide for President Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani, and the Pakistan Peoples Party.

Robert Kagan offers an interesting potential solution to Pakistan’s problem of Islamist extremist groups threatening the viability of the state: "Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas."

The problem with this approach is the roots of extremism run deeper than just at the fringes of the tribal areas and in Kashmir. Taliban, al Qaeda, and other extremist activists and sympathizers are entrenched in the intelligence and security services. Terror groups aren't just based in Waziristan and Kashmir. Much of the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan are under siege. Last year, the Musharraf government had to launch a military assault on the Red Mosque, in the heart of Islamabad just one mile from the parliament building, to clear out rampaging Islamists enforcing sharia on the streets. Rawalpindi, a supposedly secure military garrison and sister city to Islamabad, has been rocked by terror attacks. Lashkar-e-Taiba's headquarters in Muridke is located just outside of Lahore in eastern Punjab province. The port city of Karachi is infested with extremists groups. These problems are merely the tip of the iceberg.

So where do you start? If you pick the tribal areas, how do we know the army won't fracture and civil war breaks out throughout Pakistan? If international forces move into Kashmir, will the Pakistani security establishment, which has invested much into the Kashmiri cause, cooperate? If there is one cause most Pakistanis can unite on, it is the liberation of India-occupied Kashmir (and by extension hatred of the Indians).

After NATO’s debacle in Afghanistan, what international force is going to be willing to take on Pakistan’s Islamists, who make Afghanistan’s extremists look like armed boy scouts in comparison? NATO countries are balking at the historically low casualty rates in Afghanistan and are looking to cut and run. And after trumpeting U.S. casualties in Iraq, will the American public and our political elites stand for similar if not higher casualty rates in Pakistan as were encountered in Iraq?

Finally, as Kagan notes, how exactly do you get the United Nation’s to go along with any plan that appears to infringe on a country's national sovereignty? States such as North Korea, perhaps one of the most horrific regimes since Pol Pot’s Cambodia, are coddled by Turtle Bay.

Pakistan remains the greatest national security challenge for President-elect Obama’s administration. There are no easy, off-the-shelf solutions that do not require enormous sacrifice from those who walk into that snake pit.

The Pakistani military's reaction to the unmanned U.S. Predator airstrikes in its northwest would be funny were it not that al Qaeda is plotting their next attack on the West from there. Supposedly outraged over the U.S. violations of its sovereignty, the Army has conducted exercises to shoot down the Predators.

"The elements of Army Air Defense demonstrated their shooting skills by targeting the drones flying at different altitudes," the military said in a statement.

Air defense commander Lieutenant-General Ashraf Saleem praised the "precision and agility" of the gunners.

The exercises "at a desert range near the city of Muzaffargarh in the central Pubjab province," far from the border areas where the U.S. Predators are ranging.

Here's a suggestion: Deploy the anti-aircraft batteries in Wana in South Waziristan and Miramshah in North Waziristan. The vast majority of the U.S. strikes take place in these towns. This happens for good reason: the Haqqani family and Taliban forces under Baitullah Mehsud, Mullah Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadar, and a host of other minor Taliban leaders and their al Qaeda allies openly operate in these areas.

While the Pakistani Army is at it, try deploying ground forces along with the air defense units and take down these networks. If they really want the airstrikes to stop, that is the best solution.

U.S. Special Operations Forces / the CIA struck yet again in Pakistan’s northwest. A senior al Qaeda leader named Abdullah Azzam al Saudi is thought to have been killed in the unmanned Predator/Reaper airstrike, but this has not been confirmed by U.S. intelligence. Azzam serves as a liaison between al Qaeda and the Taliban, and also is involved with al Qaeda’s “external operations” – meaning they network that plots attacks on the West.

Today’s attack isn’t extraordinary because it killed an al Qaeda or occurred inside Pakistani territory: Five senior al Qaeda leaders have been confirmed killed during 30 strikes and incursions into Pakistan’s tribal areas this year. The strike is unusual because it took place in the Bannu Frontier Region, outside of Pakistan’s seven Taliban-controlled tribal areas. The rest of the 29 U.S. strikes inside Pakistan this year took place in the tribal areas of Bajaur and North and South Waziristan.

So is this meaningful? Yes. Most of the reports from Pakistan focus on al Qaeda and the Taliban’s presence in the tribal areas. But for years the groups have been expanding into what are called the “settled districts” of the Northwest Frontier Province. Al Qaeda and Taliban safe houses and camps, and their area of influence extend far outside of the tribal areas. Is the United States planning to strike deep inside Pakistan?

The Pakistani government has weakly protested the U.S. strikes. Earlier this week the Washington Post claimed the attacks were occurring with the approval of the Pakistani government. Will the Pakistani government accept U.S. strikes beyond the tribal areas?

Is Pakistan's shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency supporting and even fighting alongside the Taliban and allied groups against NATO and Afghan forces? Defense Tech's Christian Lowe posted a snippet of an interview with Eric Edelman, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, which suggests the ISI is still active against allied forces in Afghanistan. Here is the exchange:

Defense Tech: In Afghanistan, have you seen any evidence of Pakistani agencies' involvement in assisting the Taliban and other parties within Afghanistan against US troops and also within the [federally administered tribal areas]?

Edelman: I think that, you know, there's a long history here. The Pakistan government for a very long time has regarded Afghanistan as its 'strategic depth' and clearly there have been relationships that go back to the Mujahaddin era that have persisted. We've had some concerns about it, we've expressed those concerns. We had a meeting with the head of ISI, general Pasha ... my view is we ought to give him a chance to see how he can handle his new responsibilities and go from there.

Defense Tech: So is that a 'yes?'

Edelman: You'll have to make a judgment on whether that was a yes or not.

Reports of the ISI's aiding the Taliban are nothing new. In December 2006, Afghan intelligence captured a Pakistani intelligence officer who was "in charge of relations between the ISI and al Qaeda leaders" in Kunar province.

But the most controversial claim was made by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Nash, a U.S. Marine Corps leader of an Embedded Training Team operating on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier from June 2007 until March of this year. Nash claimed the ISI provided helicopter resupply support to "a 'base camp' in Nangarhar Province occupied by fighters from the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Hezb-i-Islami faction led by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar." Nash told this to the Army Times after a copy of his PowerPoint briefing was leaked. Several military officers have denied seeing evidence of ISI involvement in Afghanistan.

Nash states in his presentation that the information is classified (I have a copy of the presentation). "ISI involved in direct support to many enemy operations…classification prevents further discussion of this point," Nash states in the notes. "Area specific."

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and multiple "purges" of the ISI, elements of Pakistani intelligence are still supporting Taliban and al Qaeda attacks inside Afghanistan. Edelman and the rest of the U.S. government dances around the issue of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban and even al Qaeda inside of Afghanistan because the United States is dependent on Pakistan to keep NATO's vital supply line open.

The U.S. military has struck yet again inside Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. U.S. Predators hit an al Qaeda safe house in the Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan. Twelve people, including five “foreigners” were killed in the attack.

The strike occurred just one day after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari protested the attacks. “It’s undermining my sovereignty and it’s not helping win the war on the hearts and minds of people,” Zardari said in an interview. On the same day, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry described the attacks as a “violation of international law.”

But the United States is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this issue. On one hand, the attacks risk destabilizing Pakistan’s government and turn Pakistanis toward the extremists. On the other, U.S. intelligence strongly believes al Qaeda has regrouped in the tribal areas and is actively plotting strikes against the West, using men with Western passports.

The attacks have netted some major al Qaeda leaders this year. Abu Laith al Libi, a senior military commander in Afghanistan, was killed in a strike in North Waziristan in January. Abu Sulayman Jazairi, al Qaeda’s external operations chief, was killed in a strike in Bajaur in March. Abu Khabab al Masri, al Qaeda's WMD chief, and several senior members of his staff were killed in a strike in South Waziristan in July. Khalid Habib, the leader of al Qaeda's paramilitary forces in the tribal areas, was killed in North Waziristan in October. Abu Jihad al Masri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Group and member of al Qaeda's top council, was also killed in North Waziristan this October.

Pakistan is complaining about its sovereignty, but refuses to accept large swaths of its northwestern province are out of its control. Until Pakistan gets a handle on the problem, the United States has no choice but to continue the attacks.

Pakistani politicians continue to blame U.S. airstrikes against Taliban and al Qaeda camps in the lawless tribal areas for alienating the public, but refuse to address their own problems in conducting counterinsurgency operations. The latest objection to U.S. military airstrikes comes from President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi during a meeting with Secretary of State Rice. Qureshi's comments are particularly interesting.

"These drone attacks are unproductive, and they are contributing to alienation as opposed to winning people over," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in an interview Wednesday night.

Qureshi spoke after briefing Pakistani journalists on what he described as Zardari's 20-minute meeting with Rice and another private gathering between Zardari, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia...

"And there is a collateral damage which we must avoid," Qureshi recounted, referring to U.S. strikes that have inadvertently killed civilians. "In fact, what is required is more sharing of intelligence information. What is required is building Pakistan's capacity to deal with insurgency."

The United States has been conducting strikes in North and South Waziristan because intelligence strongly believes al Qaeda's next attack on the west will originate from there. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have scores of camps in the region, which crank out suicide bombers as well as fighters for Afghanistan. The Pakistani military said it has no intention of going into the Waziristans. The Army has taken a serious beating each time it tried.

But most interestingly are Qureshi’s comments about the U.S. strikes alienating the Pakistani population. Perhaps he should look into how his own military is fighting in the Taliban stronghold of Bajaur. As the Washington Post reported this week, the Army is coercing the tribes to fight the Taliban, and bombs their villages if they won't. The military is over relying on artillery and airstrikes to attack the Taliban inside towns. Entire towns have been reduced to rubble. These actions alienate the Pakistanis living in the tribal areas far more than any U.S. airstrike.

The Pakistani military has been fighting in the tribal areas on and off for seven years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet they refuse to learn the hard lessons of counterinsurgency. The U.S. would not be forced to hit al Qaeda havens if Pakistan would get its act together and take the Taliban insurgency seriously.

The Pentagon is planning to expand the number of air bases in the remote regions of Afghanistan’s south and east, USA Today reports. The bases will allow the U.S. military to sortie more of the deadly unmanned Predator and Reaper aircraft that provide surveillance and striking power for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The bases are needed “particularly in the rugged mountain area near the border with Pakistan” as the region “has seen some of the toughest fighting for U.S. troops.”

The article focuses on using the Predators and Reapers to support U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, but the USA Today misses the elephant in the room. The U.S. military and CIA have been conducting covert airstrikes into Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas that border eastern Afghanistan, primarily with unmanned Predators and Reapers. The strikes have skyrocketed over the past year after President Bush loosened the restrictions on striking inside Pakistan. U.S. intelligence is deeply concerned the next attack on the West will be hatched in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The United States has conducted at least 28 airstrikes and cross-border attacks in Pakistan in during 2008 (you can see the current list here). Twenty-one of these attacks have occurred between Aug. 31 and Nov. 7. At least four senior al Qaeda leaders have been killed in these attacks. In comparison, there were only 10 recorded strikes during 2006 and 2007 combined.

The big question is whether or not President-elect Barack Obama will continue the current policy of hitting al Qaeda and their Taliban allies inside Pakistan. The Pakistani government has already implored Obama to halt the attacks. Obama has run on a platform that emphasizes a kinder, gentler foreign policy that stresses diplomacy. He also promised to be aggressive inside Pakistan. He will soon learn that being “liked” and “respected” by the international community often conflicts with vital U.S. national security interests.

While Pakistan's president thinks the war against the Taliban in the tribal areas is going well, several reports from the frontlines tell a different story. The London Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all share grim accounts of the fighting in Pakistan's tribal agency of Bajaur.

The London Times also reported that detailed plans drawn up by the Taliban were recovered in Bajaur. The Taliban established weapons and ammunition caches and set up fixed bunkers and networks of trenches. The fight on one stretch of road about eight miles long was so bad it took nearly two months of heavy fighting to clear the area.

The most disturbing aspect of the reports is the Pakistani government’s plan to get the local tribes on their side to fight the Taliban. This effort is often touted as Pakistan’s version of standing up an Awakening as happened in Iraq's Anbar province. I’ve detailed some of the problems associated with the government’s efforts to win over the tribes: There is no organization between the tribal groups; the tribes that join are largely on the margins; they often refuse to work with the military; and they are vastly outnumbered by the Taliban.

But the Washington Post provides another disturbing detail in the efforts to get the tribes to fight the Taliban. Instead of working with the tribes, the government is threatening them to join the effort or face the wrath of the military.

But, so far at least, the tribal militias have been no panacea. Instead, the use of the militias, known as lashkars, has set off a debate over whether such a strategy will contribute to a civil war in the northwest that could engulf all of Pakistan. Yet some tribal leaders say they have little choice but to fight their brothers, cousins and neighbors: The Pakistani military, they say, has threatened to bomb their villages if they do not battle the Taliban.

"They are between the devil and the deep sea," said Akhunzada Chitran, a tribal representative from the Bajaur area. "On the one side, there is the Taliban, but on the other side, they are being forced by the government to fight the Taliban or flee or the government will bomb them. It's a very difficult choice to make, but we have made up our minds to take on the Taliban."

In Charmang, a town about 30 miles east of the border with Afghanistan, two tribal leaders were kidnapped and beheaded three weeks ago after organizing 300 to 400 tribesmen into a lashkar to fight the Taliban in Bajaur. Their bodies were tossed into the road for all to see the next day, witnesses said.

"We're in a constant state of panic and fear. We're sandwiched between the government and the Taliban," said Rahimullah, a resident of Charmang who, like many ethnic Pashtuns in the area, uses only one name. "If we support the government openly, then we have to face the wrath of the Taliban."

Coercing the tribes to fight the Taliban is a deeply flawed tactic that is sure to backfire on the Pakistani state. This is no way to win an insurgency.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari believes the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in the troubled Northwest Frontier Province is going well. "I think from where it was when we took over, we are in a much better place," Zardari told the Associated Press. "We used the force of the government and they (the militants) realized that there is a force here, that the people of Pakistan are to be reckoned to it." Zardari then goes on to say he hopes the new Obama administration will end the attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas.

The Pakistani military launched operations against the Taliban in the lawless border agency of Bajaur in early August. This is a region where al Qaeda directs operations into northeastern Afghanistan. Senior al Qaeda leaders, including Ayman al Zawahiri, have sought shelter in the region.

While U.S. intelligence officials say that the operation in Bajaur has reduced attacks across the border in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, the fighting has not gone well. The Pakistani military claims to have killed 1,500 Taliban fighters with minimal losses. The Taliban disputes these claims and contends that their forces have killed hundreds of Pakistani troops. In the past, the Taliban has been far more credible concerning casualties that the Pakistani military.

The military has claimed to have captured ground in Bajaur, only to lose it several times. There is no counterinsurgency plan; instead, the military is conducting a scorched earth campaign and relying on artillery and airstrikes to defeat the Taliban. At the beginning of the operation, the military claimed they would clear Bajaur in three months. That deadline has passed, and a senior general said the fighting would last up to a year.

The military is in the same situation in the settled district of Swat, an area that was once described as the Switzerland of Pakistan. The Taliban have held off the military for more than a year, and have killed hundreds of police, paramilitary troops, and soldiers.

In North and South Waziristan, the Taliban openly rule and the government has taken the military operation off the table. The government has conducted more negotiations with the Taliban in Waziristan and assured them an operation would not take place.

To counter Pakistan's lack of action in the Waziristan, the United States has focused on hitting Taliban and al Qaeda camps and safe houses in Waziristan in an attempt to blunt their ability to conduct attacks in the West and Afghanistan. Zardari claims these strikes hamper Pakistan's efforts to fight the Taliban.

If Pakistan’s effort to run the Taliban and al Qaeda out of the northwest is going well, I'd hate to see what it looks like when things are going poorly.

This is the perfect opening for a Joe Biden-esque line of attack tonight so tone-deaf, silly, and sexist as to overshadow the rest of the debate. "You see, this Sarah Palin is nothing but trouble. Her good looks and flagrant skirt-wearing are already the cause of international incidents. How can she possibly be expected to lead in a world filled with backward religious fanatics whose every custom we must respect (as long as they're not backward, Christian fanatics, which I hasten to remind you is exactly what Sarah Palin is!)."

Asif Ali Zardari is in trouble with a radical Islamic leader:

Islamic religious leaders in Pakistan have issued a fatwa against President Asif Ali Zardari for allegedly flirting with Sarah Palin when the two met at the United Nations last week during her meet-and-greet with foreign leaders, India's Daily News reported.

Cleric Maulana Abdul Ghafar, a prayer leader at radical mosque Lal Masjid, condemned Zardari's "indecent gestures" toward Palin as a disgrace to all of Pakistan.

Zardari's "filthy remarks and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt" was unbecoming of a head of state of a Muslim country, Ghafar said during a sermon, according to the Daily News.

Zardari has also drawn criticism from the Pakistani press and the nation's feminists, who blasted the president for calling Palin "gorgeous."

Lal Masjid is the "Red Mosque" besieged by Pakistani forces in 2007, and Ghafar a close relative of cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was killed in the fighting.

As the government of Pakistan continues to negotiate with the Taliban, it has ramped up its public relations effort to sell the talks to the West. In Sunday's Boston Globe, Nadeem H. Kiani, the Press Attaché for the Pakistani Embassy, assures us that there are no negotiations with terrorists or Taliban.

The new strategy does not envisage negotiations with the terrorists or withdrawal of troops from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The government has made it clear that there would be no negotiations with terrorists, and that any negotiations with those who would lay down their arms and give up militancy would be held from a position of strength and would be conditional on ending attacks on both sides of the border.

But the reality of the situation is that the Pakistani government has indeed negotiated with the Taliban. When you look at who the Pakistani government is negotiating with, the claims that only reconcilables are at the table are false.

The Pakistani government cut a deal with Faqir Mohammed in Bajaur and the Malakand region. This freed Sufi Mohammed, one of the most dangerous Taliban leaders in Pakistan. The Pakistani government cut a deal with Mullah Fazlullah in Swat. The Pakistani government cut a deal with Omar Khalid in Mohmand.

Hafiz Gul Bahadar, a Taliban commander in North Waziristan, was present at the signing of the February peace deal. Negotiations are underway with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, Tariq, the Taliban commander in Darra Adam Khel, and Maulvi Abdullah, a Taliban spokesman in Mardan.

If that isn't enough to disprove the claims of the Press Attaché for the Pakistani Embassy, then look no further than the deal cut with the Taliban in North Waziristan. The peace agreement has allowed al Qaeda fighters to remain in the tribal agency "as long as they pledge to remain peaceful."

The Pakistani government spun the peace negotiations in 2006 and early 2007 the exact same way -- by claiming to negotiate with tribal leaders, and not the Taliban. They were dishonest then, and are being dishonest now.

The U.S. military appears to have conducted yet another “over-the-horizon” strike into Pakistan’s Taliban and al Qaeda-controlled tribal areas. At least 14 Pakistanis and “foreigners” – which means al Qaeda – were killed in a missile attack on the home of a Taliban commander in the tribal agency of Bajaur.

Ed at Hot Air said Mullah Obaidullah Ahkund, the Taliban’s defense minister prior to 2001 and a senior member of Taliban’s Shura Majlis, or executive council, was killed in the attack. But this may be a case of mistaken identity, which happens so often in these types of incidents. Obaidullah was reported to have been arrested in Quetta in February while raising money for the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the Pakistani newspaper Dawn said the home was that of Maulavi Obaidullah, “a local militant commander.”

Regardless of who was killed in the attack, this is the fourth such attack inside Pakistani territory since the end of January. The most successful strike took out Abu Laith al Libi, a senior al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military is clearly concerned about the Taliban and al Qaeda’s growing strength in the tribal regions. With the new Pakistani government’s obsession with negotiating with the Taliban and ceding control of the tribal regions and the Northwest Frontier Province to the Taliban, and by default al Qaeda, the U.S. may need to rely on such strikes to take out senior terrorist leaders.

While the removal of terrorist leaders and the destructions of safe houses and camps proves useful in disrupting operations, it does little to change the overall situation, which is characterized by Taliban and al Qaeda control of the territories.

Infamous Taliban leader assumes room temperature:

A senior Taliban commander who became a hero to Islamic militants for his role in shooting down a U.S. helicopter in 2005, killing all 16 special forces troops aboard, has been killed by Pakistani security forces, officials and Taliban militants tell CBS News.

Mullah Ismail, a notorious Taliban commander from the Afghan province of Kunar, was killed in a shootout with Pakistani police as he traveled with a kidnapped trader, a local police officer said Wednesday. He was apparently on his way into the lawless Northwest Frontier Province along the Afghan border.

If you read Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor or are familiar with Operation Red Wing, you'd recognize Ismail as the incompetent Taliban commander who lost roughly half his force of 150 men to four US Navy SEALs (three of whom died fighting off their attackers). He was later lionized by his fellow bugs for a lucky RPG shot that took down a helicopter full of special forces troops on their way to assist Luttrell's squad. True to form, the press always plays up the Chinook shoot-down and the tragic loss of 16 operators instead of the remarkable heroism and admirable killing power of the SEALs.

Lone Survivor was a New York Times bestseller, and will be made into a feature film next year.

HT: Blackfive

After Monday's elections, it looks like the writing's on the wall for the Pakistani strongman:

Two politicians close to Mr. Musharraf have said in the past week that the president was well aware of the drift in the country against him and they suggested that he would not remain in office if the new government was in direct opposition to him. 'He does not have the fire in the belly for another fight,' said one member of his party. He added that Mr. Musharraf was building a house for himself in Islamabad and would be ready soon to move.

On a conference call this morning, Council on Foreign Relations scholar Daniel Markey said that this week's elections "could be the end" of Musharraf's party, the Muslim League-Q. Most of the U.S. coverage of the Pakistani elections has interpreted the results as a "blow" or "setback" to the Bush administration, but Markey noted that "A lot of Pakistanis voted for reasons that had nothing to do with Musharraf's relationship with the United States." Moreover, the major Islamist party, the MMA, lost seats in the Northwest Frontier province. It is hard to argue that elections which promote civilian rule and deal a blow to Islamic extremists are a "setback" for the United States and liberalism.

During the conference call, Markey predicted a period of tumult in Islamabad as the election winners jostle to form a coalition government. That may mean, Markey went on, that in the "near term ... all of the Pakistani political leaders will be very distracted from issues that the United States cares about." It's worth asking, though: compared to whom? Because it is not as if the generals, the ISI, and Musharraf have paid much attention recently to the "issues that the United States cares about" either.