Word: pakistan
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...propaganda machinery extends beyond the borders of Afghanistan. In Pakistan's Swat Valley, Mullah Qazi Fazlullah, a firebrand Taliban cleric known as "Mullah Radio," has used unlicensed FM stations to effectively paralyze the former resort area, now under militant control. Last week, an editorial from the The News International, a leading English daily, called the Pakistani government's failure to "evolve a counter-narrative to the Taliban propaganda" that fills airwaves and newspaper columns a "dereliction of the highest order...
...counter the Taliban advances in the propaganda war, the Pentagon has reportedly launched a broad "psychological operations" campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan to take down insurgent-run web sites and the jam radio stations. The Afghan government, for its part, has opened a new $1.2 million media center with international support. Staffed by a team of Western-trained spin doctors, the facility includes a high-tech media monitoring wing and an outreach department tasked with building better working relations with journalists...
...course, the conflict in Pakistan is intimately linked to our own battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. As the Bush administration’s misguided and horrendously expensive war in Iraq winds down, we are happy to see that President Obama is redirecting our military and reconstruction efforts to bring peace and stability to that war-torn country and hope that, if the situation stabilizes in that country, the same will happen in Pakistan’s frontier areas...
...Current American policy suits neither our national interest nor our democratic values. Continued unrestricted high-value exports of sensitive military materiel will not help Pakistan to fight the Taliban insurgency on its northwest frontier. Similarly, our policy of no-strings-attached support for Pakistan’s government—which has resulted in a shameful lack of progress on the important issues of human rights and democracy—should instead be restructured in such a way that prioritizes concrete improvements in that government’s human-rights record while maintaining a strategic relationship of mutual benefit...
...Regardless of developments in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should seriously reevaluate our current security posture in South Asia and devise a comprehensive diplomatic agenda for the region that calls for the stabilization of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the eradication of the Taliban and the drug trade, and a positive role for India, a fellow democracy that has proven to be a reliable partner since the bilateral nuclear treaty of 2006. Only a comprehensive South Asian agenda that takes all of these complex variables into account has any chance of permanently resolving the core issues at stake...