Word: afghan
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Afghanistan's fraudulent elections complicate President Obama's job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan's elections now seem unlikely to produce. (See pictures from election day in Afghanistan...
...undertaken to defeat al-Qaeda is increasingly seen through the lens of these elections. In my home state of Vermont - where the National Guard is about to deploy to Afghanistan - people seek me out to ask why our soldiers should be fighting for a corrupt Afghan government clinging to power by fraud. I am quite sure the same question is being asked of political leaders in both the U.S. and Europe...
Because the elections were so critical to political stability in Afghanistan - and, therefore, prospects for the U.S.-led military mission - the U.S. and its allies needed them to go smoothly. The U.N. Security Council tasked the U.N. mission in Afghanistan to support the IEC and other Afghan institutions in the conduct of "free, fair and transparent" elections. On two occasions, I started to take action that could have reduced the risk of fraud. In July, I learned that there were 1,500 polling centers (out of a total of 7,000) sited in places either controlled by the Taliban...
...remote and largely ungoverned nature of South Waziristan made it the ideal hiding place for foreign militants, al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Over the years, unmolested by government intervention, various groups of militants fortified their bases and recruited local residents to their cause. From those groups, the Pakistani Taliban emerged in 2003, partly in response to then President General Pervez Musharraf's about-face on support for the Afghan Taliban after the Sept. 11 terror attacks...
...northwest-Punjab militant nexus became brutally illumined on Thursday as the violence swung from near the Afghan border, to the edges of the Indian one, and back again. Before the attacks in Lahore, a suicide car bomb exploded near a police station in the northwest's Kohat city, killing three police officers and eight civilians. And when the Lahore violence was over, another car bomb exploded in Peshawar, killing a six-year-old boy and wounded nine others, mainly women and children. Security is also being beefed up in Karachi, Pakistan's financial capital and biggest city - and the only...