Word: islamabad
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...General Mohammed Fahim - even if that means turning a blind eye to their transgressions. He is also keen to take charge of negotiating a political settlement with the Taliban on his own timetable, and with less of a role for Pakistan than Washington might be ready to concede to Islamabad. Just as U.S. influence in Iraq declined precipitously once its intention to withdraw became clear, so is Karzai's game plan premised on getting along without the U.S., even though he'll do his best to keep it there as long as possible. That means going through the motions...
Like Pakistan over the past eight years, Karzai has been biding his time, positioning himself for the battles and power shifts that will come when the Americans leave, his goal - like Islamabad's - being to protect his power. And the arrival in Washington of the Obama Administration signaled the onset of the endgame. Driven by a desire to conclude America's fiscally burdensome wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and alarmed by the downward security spiral in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration put Karzai on notice that failure to tackle the corruption that was deemed to be fueling the insurgency would jeopardize...
Although the militants failed to breach the compound's security, the multipronged assault was the most serious strike against an American diplomatic mission in the country since 1979, when the U.S. embassy in the capital of Islamabad was overrun and torched by university students in response to the siege of Mecca by Saudi religious insurgents. Other attacks have followed. In Peshawar in 2008, a U.S. diplomat narrowly escaped a Taliban ambush as she drove to work. Two years earlier, an American diplomat's car was rammed by an explosives-laden vehicle in Karachi, killing him and several other people...
...Waziristan and Orakzai. But the militants have proved resilient, and their ability to stage massive attacks appears intact. The combined offensives against them meant the Taliban "simply spread out wherever they could to other areas," says Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "I was under no illusion that this phenomenon is gone, that they would not be able to bounce back...
...Kabul, officials are suspicious of Islamabad's long-delayed help in catching the Taliban. A senior official confided to TIME that Karzai, whose relations with the U.S. ambassador and military commanders have been frosty of late, is worried that the U.S. and other NATO countries may be in such haste to end the war that they will agree to a pact with Pakistan that will put Afghanistan firmly back in Pakistan's orbit...