Word: pakistani
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Baitullah Mehsud is a natural leader: cagey, dogged and charismatic, with an apparent knack for uniting disparate factions around a common cause. But instead of channeling those talents toward building an empire, Mehsud is trying to bring one to its knees. The shadowy Pakistani Taliban commander, whose vertiginous rise to infamy landed him on 2008's TIME 100 List, has transformed the badlands of South Waziristan into al-Qaeda's most important redoubt. Among the atrocities attributed to Mehsud is the brazen assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Dec. 2007. Mehsud has denied involvement, but even...
...Pakistan has cooperated extensively with U.S. efforts to target al-Qaeda militants on its own soil, facilitating the capture of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and scores of other operatives. Its army has lost several hundred men in clashes with various Pakistani Taliban groups in the tribal areas and the Swat Valley. Still, it's no secret that the Afghan Taliban's leadership continues to operate from the Pakistani city of Quetta, and reports of ongoing Pakistani backing for Taliban efforts in Afghanistan have surfaced regularly in recent years...
...Pakistan expects that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan sooner or later, and it's not likely to trust Washington to secure Pakistani interests there. As long as Pakistan remains locked in strategic competition with India, it will seek influence in Afghanistan - an objective that arguably aligns it more closely with the Taliban than with the Karzai government...
...None of this necessarily puts the U.S. and Pakistan on a collision course. The Obama Administration has begun to talk of reconciliation with moderate Taliban elements, and some in the Pakistani leadership may be hoping to move Washington closer to the approach urged by Musharraf at the very beginning of the war: separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda...
...though, there's a lot more fighting to be done. The U.S. won't engage the Taliban from the U.S.'s current position of weakness in the face of the insurgents' momentum. First, it will try to reverse that momentum on the battlefield. And the Pakistani brass faces the reality that after more than seven years of war, the Taliban has morphed and grown in ways that make turning it into a Pakistan proxy increasingly improbable. Still, despite the less forgiving posture of the Obama Administration and absent a resolution of six decades of conflict with India, Pakistan...