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There was good news from other fronts too. In Pakistan, a joint operation in Karachi by the CIA and Pakistan's own spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had netted a very big fish: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban's military chief. In quick succession, the ISI had also rolled up two of the Taliban's "shadow" governors of Afghanistan's provinces and another senior figure. And in North Waziristan, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, a missile launched from a CIA drone had struck at the heart of the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group responsible...
...feared legions have been consigned to the margins of the fighting in Afghanistan. Their numbers have dwindled from 500 to 100, says National Security Adviser Jones. In Pakistan they continue to enjoy the protection of the TTP and the Haqqani network but have effectively been pinned down by the CIA's drones. "Neither in Afghanistan nor in Pakistan is al-Qaeda at the tactical front edge," says a senior Administration official. Al-Qaeda remains the strategic reason for the current fighting; one of Obama's grounds for staying the course in Afghanistan is to prevent bin Laden from re-establishing...
...some effect. There have been 17 strikes by unmanned aircraft in Pakistani territory thus far this year, according to the Long War Journal, a nonprofit online publication that tracks such attacks. The spike was triggered in part by a Dec. 30 suicide attack that killed seven CIA officials at an Afghan outpost. The Haqqani network and Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud apparently aided the suicide bomber; some reports say Mehsud was wounded, possibly killed, in a Jan. 14 strike. Meanwhile, the remote-control pilots operating Predators and Reapers continue to peer at their video screens, hoping to catch sight...
...Iranian state television broadcast footage of a supposed confession made by Rigi, saying he was flying to Central Asia to meet with American handlers at the U.S.-run Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan. Intelligence Minister Moslehi had already pointed his finger at Washington and the hand of the CIA, claiming to have evidence that Rigi was earlier housed at a U.S. base in Afghanistan and set up with fake documentation by the Americans. Accusations blaming the West for fomenting trouble within Iran's borders are nothing new, though. U.S. officials as well as British diplomats in Tehran have denied...
Counter-arguments abound, of course. There are two interpretations regarding Baradar, who was leaving a seminary in a dingy slum outside Karachi when Pakistani operatives, acting on a tip from the CIA, picked him up. The first theory is that Pakistan owed the U.S. big time for knocking out one of their troublesome insurgents and could not dither when the CIA demanded that Baradar be grabbed. But the second theory, put out by local Pakistani journalists with reliable Taliban contacts, suggests that Baradar was dispensable for the Pakistani intelligence since he broke last December with Omar. According to Peshawar journalist...