Word: pakistans
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McChrystal repeated the chieftain's words Feb. 18 in a secure video teleconference with President Barack Obama and his top advisers on Afghanistan and Pakistan. By then, the operation, by all accounts, was going well. NATO troops had encountered only sporadic resistance; much of the town was under the control of the U.S. Marines. British-led forces, meanwhile, had taken the nearby community of Showal. Some government in a box was already being unpacked. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
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...
After a year of mostly grim tidings from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama could have been allowed a moment of satisfaction. But McChrystal's recounting of the Helmand chieftain's warning ensured that the mood in the White House's Situation Room during the conference call was somber. According to National Security Adviser Jim Jones, who was there, Obama added an exhortation of his own, using the idioms of counterinsurgency warfare. "Do not clear and hold what you are not willing to build and transfer," he told McChrystal, a maxim he had repeated often over the previous months. "You've heard...
Washington's newfound friendship with Islamabad could still fray over one particularly vicious Afghan clan. The NATO forces' most dangerous adversaries are the Haqqanis, who have sworn loyalty to Omar while operating semi-independently in the eastern Afghan provinces and also across the border in Pakistan. Since the days of the jihad against the Soviets, Pakistani spy service the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has kept close ties with the Haqqanis. Now the Pakistanis are resisting demands by Washington to clear the Haqqanis out of their lair in the Pakistani territory of North Waziristan. Pakistani officials insist they will...
...while U.S.-Pakistan relations are better now, they are still fraught. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, a veteran of the Balkans and other bruising diplomatic acts, remarked wearily on Feb. 18, during his seventh swing through Islamabad, "This is the most complicated relation with an ally that I've ever experienced. I don't want to mislead you; it's still fragile...