NATO took a step away from Pakistan was taken when it reached an independent deal with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan to open a transport route to ship military equipment out of Afghanistan. Circumventing Pakistan may very well become the norm in the region as the US, hopefully, begins a bona fide search for a new regional partner.
A Conversation Between Ahmed Rashid and Steve Coll
In allying with the tribal militants that dominate poorly governed Pakistani border regions, the Pakistani government gives itself a greater measure of control over these areas and creates an effective buffer against two of its biggest fears: a hostile India and an unraveling Afghanistan.
Washington needs to slowly and gently distance itself from Islamabad. Here’s a start.
In July 2010, the monsoon rains began in Pakistan. Most people within Pakistan took the rains as a matter of course, ducking inside and waiting it out. But this time the rains did not stop. The waters crept over the banks of the Indus River, submerging farms and homes, destroying the livelihood of thousands. 1.2 million homes have either been damaged or destroyed; today 4 million Pakistanis are homeless; and 8 million remain dependent on aid, but as the effects of the flood gradually unfold, those numbers will almost inevitably rise.
After 65 years, human rights activists still delight in skewering the Truman administration for its deployment of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Books, fiction and otherwise, have been written about the bombings; the destruction has been featured to varying degrees of abstraction in vast numbers of paintings, and pieces of music attempt to capture the sudden violence of an [...]
Technological discussions often disappoint me. Rather than engage substantively with human nature and the structure of society, they usually single out one decontextualized novelty to misinterpret as a sea change. Internet social networking, for example, only accelerates a process that began with paved roads and horses, or perhaps with the postal service. Yet we approach Facebook as if this is [...]
So far in our discussion of drone policy, started here by Urja Mittal, we have assumed that this technology is the most efficient for fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. By Urja’s account, the debate over drones is currently an issue of educating the public and finagling legal details. I cannot accept this as an initial premise. Before diving into this [...]
Throughout the past decade’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the CIA has consistently used unmanned aircraft and missiles as a warfare tactic. For the most part, the strategy has involved targeting Al-Qaeda or Taliban-affiliated persons with Predator aircraft and their Hellfire missiles. These aircraft provide constant video feeds before and after [...]
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