Cinco de la tarde. Los responsables de Jamat e Islami (JI), principal partido islamista de Pakistán, envían mensajes de texto a los periodistas para avisar de que la gran manifestación contra la intervención americana y rezar por el alma del «mártir» Bin Laden se retrasa media hora por la lluvia. El lugar de inicio de la marcha es el Club de Prensa de Rawalpindi, donde un gran número de profesionales espera a los extremistas para cubrir su reacción tras la muerte del líder de Al Qaida el pasado lunes. Pese al llamamiento a echarse a las calles, apenas 1.500 personas se congregaron en Quetta. L...

Elizabeth Rubin

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence. Bin Laden’s Pakistani hosts, two rich businessmen called Arshad and Tariq Khan who owned the house and were killed with him, hail from Charsadda, 15 miles north of Peshawar. Their uncle was a retired Brigadier. (Arshad was apparently the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who led intelligence officials to the compound.) This is not a lawless land. This is highly controlled territory.

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents. Why, asks a US army major, did all his friends die in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the real problem is on the other side of the border? Why, asks a twelve-year-old Afghan girl in Kandahar whose family has been wiped out by US air strikes, are you bombing us? How has this come to pass?

In 2006, I traveled through Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, meeting with many Taliban fighters. I described it at the time as a kind of Taliban spa that offered them rest and rehab between battles in Afghanistan to which they would be returning. But it was more than that. I met Afghan Taliban who’d tried to make a deal with the Afghan government to get back to a life without fighting. One told me he was then arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, and blackmailed—they would release him if he would resume fighting and dispense with notions of reconciliation. He rose up the ranks of the Taliban command, traveling freely between Quetta in Pakistan and Zabul, a province in Afghanistan, where he was an intelligence commander for Afghan Taliban fighting coalition forces.

Another young Afghan Taliban I met in Peshawar was involved in the production and distribution of propaganda and recruiting DVDs—beheadings, inspirational music videos, and killings of American soldiers, all set to Pashtun war songs. But after spending hours and hours with him, I noticed his anti-infidel rhetoric beginning to subside, and when the subject of the ISI’s operatives came up, his whole demeanor changed. “Snakes,” he called them. Their first offense, he said, was trying to oust Mullah Omar and create a more obedient Taliban leader—like Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old jihadi we once financed to fight the Soviets but who has now set up shop in Waziristan under ISI protection. (Along with his son Sirajuddin, Haqqani stages the big-media-grabbing attacks in Afghanistan but seems to abide by the rules of his hosts—no attacks against Pakistan. He also runs a virtual kidnapping factory in Waziristan and the Pakistanis have done nothing to stop it.)

Then he said:

I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually, most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying of roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under ISI orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.

He told me about ISI orders to behead an Indian engineer who was captured (and these orders were later corroborated). “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone,” he told me. “And if the ISI knew I told you, I’d be fucked.”

That was 2006. Since then, just about everyone has learned the rules of the game: The ISI will continue to support the various jihadi groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in order to attack and intimidate India, and get what it wants in Afghanistan—more or less a semi-independent extension of Pakistan. In 2008, American intelligence even proved definitively what Afghans and Indians on the ground already knew: that the deadly attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was planned with the help of the ISI.

And it isn’t just the ISI that is supporting the Taliban. During my travels through Pakistan, I had a long discussion about the Pakistan Army’s conflicted loyalties with Najam Sethi, the longtime editor of Lahore’s Friday Times. What does it want? Where does it stand? The Pakistani military retains a secular strain, but religion is central to its ideology. Since its inception in 1947, its raison d’etre has been to defend the Muslim world. This mission, however, is constantly undermined by the fact that, while Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims live in India, and most of the attacks by the militant groups it supports have ended up killing fellow Muslims. There is a contradiction at the heart of the Pakistani Army and it’s expressed in what everyone has come to call Pakistan’s “double game.”

The military officers I met—many of them retired, living better than bin Laden, in lavish Latin-American style mansions with pure-bred dogs, English-style cooks, and manicured lawns—spoke to me as if they envied the jihadists’ clarity of purpose, their moral vision. In Sethi’s view, the military also harbors “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans. They are still angry with the US for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad, and for sanctioning them over the nuclear program. The standard army phrase about their treatment by the Americans was, Sethi said, “They used us like a condom.”

Despite these widely held sentiments and the evidence against a strong alliance, US diplomats and generals have tried to sustain the image of close cooperation.

In 2010, I had the chance to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the US relationship with Pakistan. He’d just been to the country to urge its generals to go after the jihadists, the Taliban, and the Haqqani network. I asked Gates how he could possibly consider Afshaq Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani army, an ally. “It’s frustrating,” Gates told me. I waited for more, but nothing came. Your silence says a lot, I said. “Well, I was very specific in a couple of my meetings in looking at them point-blank and saying, ‘Haqqani and his people are killing my troops. I’ve got a problem with that,’” Gates responded. And what did they say, I asked. Gates is all control, but he cracked a small smile as he said: “They listened.”

Admiral Mike Mullen has spent the better part of the first two years of the Obama administration—hours and hours of flight time, face time, and phone time—cultivating a strong relationship with Kayani. Up until recently, Kayani’s Wikipedia entry said that he counted Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a close friend and ally. That line has now been removed. US officials maintain they don’t think that Kayani or ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had direct knowledge themselves about bin Laden. But even before Sunday’s assassination of bin Laden, a friend of mine told me that when he recently saw Mullen the admiral seemed puzzled by the breakdown of the relationship. “What relationship?” my friend asked. “[Kayani] was never on your side.”

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Will the revelation that bin Laden and family were dwelling in a newly built Pakistani Army mansion not far from the capital finally change the nature of the strange dance between the US and Pakistan? One wonders how good and smart men and women are taken in by diplomatic friendships, how they allow themselves to believe lies they know to be lies, or worse, settle for the lie because it seems there’s no way out, no creative solution to change the trusted old forms of diplomacy or the definitions of enemy and ally.

Of course at the heart of the problem lies Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. We’d rather our Pakistani army enemy controls it than our Pakistani Taliban enemy. But will we ever know who is who, and can we tell them apart? And so our policy in Pakistan has collided with the Lot equation: How many righteous men must there be for God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, asks Abraham. And when God says fifty, Abraham keeps lowering the number. What if there is just one? How many American, Afghan, Pakistani, European casualties are worth keeping this Catch-22 policy alive?

Al-Qaida confirmed the killing of Osama bin Laden Friday and vowed revenge, saying Americans' "happiness will turn to sadness" in the first statement by the terror network since its leader was slain in a U.S. commando raid against his Pakistani hideout.

FILE - In this Dec. 24, 1998 file photo, Muslim militant and al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden speaks to a selected group of reporters in mountains of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. The Americans who raided bin Laden's lair met far less resistance than the Obama administration described in the aftermath, according to its latest account. The commandos encountered gunshots from only one man, whom they quickly killed, before sweeping the house and shooting others, who were unarmed, a senior defense official said.

FILE - In this May 2, 2011 file photo, a Pakistan army soldier stands on top of the house where it is believed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The Americans who raided Osama bin Laden's lair met far less resistance than the Obama administration described in the aftermath, according to its latest account. The commandos encountered gunshots from only one man, whom they quickly killed, before sweeping the house and shooting others, who were unarmed, a senior defense official said.

Masked Indonesian Muslims take part in a protest condemning the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia, Friday, May 6, 2011.

Supporters Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam hold al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's picture during a rally, in Kuchlak, 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of Quetta, Pakistan on Friday, May 6, 2011. One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden has told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for six years without leaving its upper floors, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets across Pakistan on Friday, denouncing the US raid which killed the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. In Kuchlak near Quetta, close to the Afghan border, protesters chanted "Osama is alive", holding aloft placards with pictures of bin Laden.

Al-Qaida confirmed the killing of Osama bin Laden Friday and vowed revenge, saying Americans' "happiness will turn to sadness" in the first statement by the terror network since its leader was slain in a U.S. commando raid against his Pakistani hideout.

FILE - In this Dec. 24, 1998 file photo, Muslim militant and al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden speaks to a selected group of reporters in mountains of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. The Americans who raided bin Laden's lair met far less resistance than the Obama administration described in the aftermath, according to its latest account. The commandos encountered gunshots from only one man, whom they quickly killed, before sweeping the house and shooting others, who were unarmed, a senior defense official said.

FILE - In this May 2, 2011 file photo, a Pakistan army soldier stands on top of the house where it is believed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The Americans who raided Osama bin Laden's lair met far less resistance than the Obama administration described in the aftermath, according to its latest account. The commandos encountered gunshots from only one man, whom they quickly killed, before sweeping the house and shooting others, who were unarmed, a senior defense official said.

Masked Indonesian Muslims take part in a protest condemning the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia, Friday, May 6, 2011.

Supporters Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam hold al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's picture during a rally, in Kuchlak, 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of Quetta, Pakistan on Friday, May 6, 2011. One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden has told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for six years without leaving its upper floors, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.

Click: all of the AfPak Channel's coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden (FP).

Targeting trains

American intelligence analysts have reportedly discovered, based on documents and information recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that the slain al-Qaeda leader remained involved with planning attacks against the United States, rather than acting only as an inspirational figurehead in recent years (NYT, Post, Guardian, WSJ, BBC, CNN, Tel, Times, AFP). Handwritten notes from February of 2010 indicated that al-Qaeda was considering an attack timed to the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 strikes on New York and Washington that involved targeting railroads in the U.S., though officials said there was no evidence that the plot was more than "aspirational." [[BREAK]]

The C.I.A. reportedly maintained a safe house in Abbottabad, a military garrison town a few hours' drive from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, for months before the May 2 raid, and developed an extensive network of local informants and other sources (Post, NYT, Reuters). The New York Times reports that the last time U.S. forces thought they had bin Laden in their sights was in 2007 near Tora Bora, Afghanistan (NYT).

Today, U.S. president Barack Obama is planning to meet with some members of the Navy SEAL team that carried out the raid, which involved secret, radar-evading helicopters (CBS, CNN, NYT). Since 2009, the U.S. has been secretly increasing the ranks of "hunter-killer commandos" in Afghanistan, and used this increase to "try to pressure the Pakistanis themselves to move against militants" (WSJ). For more on the legal aspects of the bin Laden raid, read our sister newsletter, the Legal War on Terror (FP).

Al-Qaeda has just released its first confirmation of bin Laden's death in a statement posted on militant websites dated May 3, saying that his blood "will not be wasted" (Reuters, AP). Pakistani officials tell the Wall Street Journal that bin Laden split from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, around six years ago, because bin Laden reportedly had money troubles and was losing popularity in the network, though U.S. officials say they had not heard of a split (WSJ). U.S. officials did say they had strong evidence that the funding for the al-Qaeda leader had been an issue.

Five years in the same room

One of the three wives of bin Laden has reportedly told Pakistani intelligence, which is carefully managing a "a steady drip of testimony" from the women and children in their custody, that she had lived in the same room in the Abbottabad compound with bin Laden for five or six years (Guardian, McClatchy, WSJ, Guardian, AP, CNN, BBC, ABC). Pakistani authorities say they will not allow the U.S. automatic access to the survivors, who are believed to be held in at a medical facility in Rawalpindi (ET, ET). Pakistan's foreign ministry has said the women and children would be returned to their countries of origin, though since Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden's citizenship in 1994, his relatives in the country would have to adopt the children. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the head of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad, has reportedly offered to adopt bin Laden's children (Toronto Star).

The Pakistani Army speaks

In the first public reaction from the Pakistani Army to the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden, Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani warned that a repeat of the operation would not be tolerated and would lead to a review of Pakistan's "level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States" (NYT, Post, Dawn, Geo, ET/Reuters, AP, WSJ, AJE, FT, FT, Guardian, Dawn). A press release from the Pakistani Army, available here, also strongly warned neighboring India against conducting similar operations, and stated that Pakistan's "strategic assets" -- nuclear weapons -- are well-defended. Gen. Kayani also reportedly decided that U.S. personnel in Pakistan -- around 275 at any given time -- should be reduced to the "absolute minimum" (NYT, DT).

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, who reportedly told Gen. Kayani about the Abbottabad raid around 3am local time on Monday morning, said via a spokesman that he had not been informed of any decisions by Pakistan about the presence of U.S. military trainers there (DT, AFP). Top Pentagon official Michele Flournoy said the Obama administration does not have "any definitive evidence" that Pakistan knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, which a new poll shows 72 percent of Americans disagree with (NYT, CSM).

Members of the U.S. Congress are calling for a complete review of the U.S.'s some $3 billion in annual aid to Pakistan, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 18 certified that Pakistan was making a "sustained commitment" to ending support for Islamist militants, a key condition for the provision of aid (CNN, McClatchy). Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has "ordered a full court press" from Pakistan's lobby in Washington to counter allegations that Pakistan knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad or helped shelter him (Reuters). Some 1,000 people near Abbottabad protested against the U.S. raid, and in Quetta, the Islamist political party the JUI-F organized a rally to "pay homage" to bin Laden (AFP, AFP). Protests also occurred in Multan and Peshawar.

Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, a top U.S. commander who recently finished a tour in southern Afghanistan, said that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, "should be worried" following the raid on bin Laden's compound because "it shows the Americans are focused" (AFP, Reuters). The Post assesses that legislators seeking to use bin Laden's death to renew calls to speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are unlikely to succeed because they "still lack the support of either party's leadership" and "still do not have an urgent piece of legislation -- a bill central to the war effort -- to force a distracted Congress to focus on Afghanistan" (Post).
 
Non-bin Laden news

In the first suspected U.S. drone strike reported since April 22, missiles killed as many as 15 people, including foreign militants and one civilian, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan (AFP, AP, ET/Reuters, AP, Geo, Post, CNN, The News). Clashes between militants and Pakistani security forces continue in Mohmand, and in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistani police killed two would-be suicide bombers after their car refused to stop a checkpoint (DT, ET). In Quetta, unknown gunmen opened fire on around 50 people exercising on a soccer field, killing six (AP).

The NYT reports that yesterday's rally in Kabul against the Karzai government's reconciliation efforts toward the Taliban attracted more than 10,000 people, mostly from northern Afghanistan (NYT).

New uniforms

Although the Badminton World Federation has ruled that skirts are part of badminton's official attire, women of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northwest Pakistan are taking to the courts wearing hijabs and with covered legs (ET). The FATA Sports Board has organized a tournament for May 16.

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Supporters of Pakistani religious party Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Islam, some holding images of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, burn the U.S. flag during an anti-U.S. rally on the outskirts of Quetta May 6, 2011.

At least six people have been killed and 15 others injured in firing and rocket attack in Hazara town of provincial capital here on Friday morning.

Hundreds of people took to the streets near the Pakistani city of Quetta to pay "homage" to al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden.

QUETTA - Honderden mensen zijn vrijdag in de Pakistaanse stad Quetta de straat op gegaan om eer te bewijzen aan al-Qaedaleider Osama bin Laden, die in de nacht van zondag op maandag in Pakistan werd doodgeschoten tijdens een operatie van Amerikaanse commando's.

CBC.ca

8 Killed In Pak Cricket Stadium Shooting RTT News (RTTNews) - Up to eight people were killed when unidentified gunmen went berserk firing at spectators and players at a cricket ground in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, reports said. The incident took place in a suburb of Balochistan capital Quetta ... Gunmen kill eight people at Pakistan cricket matchMonsters and Critics.com Terrorists kill players and spectators at local cricket club in Pakistanbettor.com (blog) all 317 news articles »

Suspected militants on Friday opened fire on members of a community in Quetta, killing at six eight and wounding 15, police said. According to eyewitnesses, a dozen of miscreants came to Hazara Town locality of Quetta and resorted to indiscriminate firing. Police official Hamid Shakil said the people were in a neighbourhood park in Quetta [...]

Hundrevis av pakistanere samlet seg for å hylle Osama bin Laden ved byen Quetta fredag. Også i Manila på Filippinene demonstreres det.

Quetta (NTB-AFP): Hundrevis av pakistanere samlet seg for å hylle Osama bin Laden ved byen Quetta fredag.

Suspected Islamist militants open fire on a group of Pakistani Shia in the town of Quetta, killing at least eight and wounding 15, police said, the first major violent incident since the death of Osama bin Laden

QUETTA, Pakistan: Hundreds of people took to the streets near the Pakistani city of Quetta on Friday to pay "homage" to Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and call for holy war against America, witnesses said.

Minstens acht shi’itische moslims zijn afgelopen nacht doodgeschoten in de zuidwestelijke Pakistaanse stad Quetta. Nog eens vijftien andere shi’ieten raakten gewond bij de schietpartij.

Islamabad.- Ocho personas murieron hoy y otras quince resultaron heridas en un ataque con proyectiles y disparos contra un grupo de chiies reunidos en un cementerio de la ciudad suroccidental paquistaní de Quetta, informó una fuente policial.

El suceso ocurrió esta mañana en la zona de Birori, donde varios chíies habían acudido a un parque con un camposanto para honrar a sus seres queridos cuando un grupo de atacantes comenzó disparar desde una colina, indicó la fuente al canal paquistaní Express Tv.

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Assailants open fire in park in Quetta amid fears of backlash from al-Qaeda-linked groups after bin Laden's killing.

QUETTA, Pakistan — Assailants using rockets and guns attacked a group of people exercising at an open soccer field in southwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing four of them and wounding 15, police said.

At least eight people belonging to Pakistan's minority Shia community die in an explosion in the south-western city of Quetta.

Gunmen kill eight people at Pakistan cricket match Monsters and Critics.com Islamabad - At least eight people were killed Friday and 15 more injured when unidentified gunmen attacked a local cricket ground in south-western Pakistan, police said. The attack took place in a suburb of Quetta city, the capital of Baluchistan ... and more »

Islamabad (NTB-Reuters): Minst åtte mennesker ble drept og ti såret da væpnede menn åpnet ild mot en gruppe sjiamuslimer i Quetta i Pakistan fredag.

By Peter H. Brooks
Best Defense South Asian natural resources bureau chief

"Water security for us is a matter of economic security, human security, and national security, because we see potential for increasing unrest, conflicts, and instability over water."
--Statement by U.S. Secretary of State Hilary, March 22 2011, World Water Day.

"The national security implications of this looming water shortage...will be felt all over the world."
--US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Feb. 22, 2011.

"...fresh water scarcity at local levels will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security."
-- Testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Feb. 10, 2011.

With a bombing campaign in Libya, counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an ongoing recovery in Japan why are the leaders of the U.S. foreign policy establishment talking about water? Well, when you consider that by 2030 global demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by forty percent you can begin to understand their concern.

But does more scarcity mean more conflict? Are we really in for a future full of water wars? The answer is not quite so clear.

The Fallacy of Water Wars
Mark Twain once said, "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fightin over." The history of water conflict is extensive and well-documented (pardon the pun). But by and large water conflicts are local, intra-state affairs.

In the last fifty years, of the 1800 or so interstate, water-related disputes the vast majority ended in peaceful agreements on water usage. But many of these agreements were low-hanging, diplomatic fruit, unlikely to be so easily negotiated or resolved again, particularly as demand for fresh water continues to rise. The peaceful relations in three river basins in particular are beginning to show signs of strain. [[BREAK]]

Indus River Basin
In South Asia tensions are mounting between India and Pakistan over the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), an agreement governing the flow of the vital Indus River.

When the Senate report quoted above was released in late February, the Pakistani media jumped on it as proof of India's violations of the IWT. Some opinion-makers have even said that a water war is already underway or at least a "water war of words". Op/Eds in Pakistan argued that India exercises "water hegemony" by continuing to violate the IWT or at the very least by benefiting from its flaws. Some outspoken, fringe voices even suggested the use of nuclear weapons to solve the problem. And all of this in the last month!

Given India's overwhelming military strength, Pakistan's counterinsurgency campaigns in its North West Frontier, and America's vested interests on both sides, the dispute seems likely to remain a water war of the words, but there is certainly no guarantee of peace between the countries.

Tigris/Euphrates River Basin
In 1990 Turkey deliberately cut off water supplies to its southern neighbors, Syria and Iraq, over concerns of their support for Kurdish separatists in Turkey. In February 1992, then Prime Minister of Turkey, Suleyman Demiral said, "We do not say we share their oil resources. They cannot say they share our water resources. This is a matter of sovereignty. We have the right to do anything we like."

In 2009, responding to severe water shortages, Iraqi parliament demanded an increase in the share of Turkish river waters. Despite this and continued droughts, Turkey has continued building dams. As broader regional instability permeates into Syria and Iraq, expect water to play an increasingly important role in future local and international disputes between these three countries.

The Nile Basin
Three prominent Egyptian leaders in the last half century predicted water wars in Egypt. In 1979, Anwar el-Sadat said that water was "the only matter that could take Egypt to war again." In 1995 Egyptian World Bank official, Ismail Serageldin said "Many of the wars this century were about oil, but those of the next century will be over water." In 1988 Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, "The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics."

Fearful that upstream neighbors Sudan, Ethiopia (where 85 percent of the river originates), Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo would turn off the tap, Egypt has fought any attempt by neighbors to divert the Nile. The wars these men predicted have been avoided because of diplomatic agreements like the Nile Basin Initiative. But, as post-revolution Egypt evolves, these statements are important to remember, particularly in light of Ethiopian plans to build a hydropower dam and the growing uncertainty of who will rule the new Egypt.

The Future of Water Conflict
The future of water conflict -- like most other kinds of conflict -- will remain, for the most part, local in its scope. But as diplomatic options dwindle and the scarcity increases, expect water conflict to take on a more international flavor than ever seen before particularly in these three volatile river basins.

In any event, it's safe to say water deserves the attention that it is getting in our political, diplomatic, and intelligence establishments.

So before you dismiss water as some sort of fringe consideration to the future of international security consider Secretary Clinton's words from last year's World Water Day, "It's not every day you find an issue where effective diplomacy and development will allow you to save millions of lives [and] advance our national security interests. Water is that issue."

A former Marine infantry officer, Peter H. Brooks is now a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Rajasthan, India, studying drinking water and public governance. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Fulbright Program or the US State Department.

Dried up river outside of Quetta, Pakistan. (Lynsey Addario/Corbis)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's death could advance the effort to reach a political resolution to the war in Afghanistan, because it might convince the Taliban and al Qaeda to come to the negotiating table.

"In Afghanistan, we have to continue to take the fight to al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. Perhaps now they will take seriously the work that we are doing on trying to have some reconciliation process that resolves the insurgency," Clinton said on Wednesday to a conference of editorial writers at the State Department. "So our message to the Taliban hasn't changed; it just has even greater resonance today. They can't wait us out, they can't defeat us; they need to come into the political process and denounce al Qaeda and renounce violence and agree to abide by the laws and constitution of Afghanistan."

Clinton said that bin Laden's death would make al Qaeda and the Taliban more likely to strike a deal in Afghanistan because they will have no grand leader to rally around.

"Well, a lot of people say, well, [bin Laden's deputy Ayman] al-Zawahiri will step into it. But that's not so clear. He doesn't have the same sense of loyalty or inspiration or track record," she said. "I mean, bin Laden was viewed as a military warrior. He had fought in Afghanistan. He wasn't an intellectual. He wasn't just a talker. He had been a fighter, so he carried with him a quite significant mystique."

"The Taliban did not give up al Qaeda when President Bush asked them to after 9/11, because of Mullah Omar's personal relationship with bin Laden. That's gone, so I think it opens up possibilities for dealing with the Taliban that did not exist before."

At least one Pakistani Taliban group, Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), has already said that it is planning to increase attacks in the wake of bin Laden's death -- and will not come to the negotiating table. "Now Pakistani rulers, President Asif Ali Zardari and the army will be our first targets. America will be our second target," TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said on Tuesday.

And Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan's Tehrik-e-Insaaf party said on Tuesday that the United States has transformed bin Laden into a martyr.

"For all these people who think the U.S. is not fighting terrorism but fighting Islam, [bin Laden] will become a holy warrior and an inspiration for legions of jihadis. All it will do is increase extremism," he said.

But Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Afghan Taliban, namely the Quetta al Shura, might be more amenable to negotiations than the Pakistani Taliban, because they are the ones getting hammered by U.S. forces and are suspected to be internally divided over whether or not to maintain their alliance with al Qaeda.

Quetta al Shura's only statement on bin Laden's death so far was to express doubt that he was really killed.

"Negotiating with the Quetta al Shura Taliban is easier without the personal commitment of Mullah Omar to Osama bin Laden as a constraint. The only question is how much easier. I'm inclined to think there are a lot more barriers than just this," Biddle said.

"There has been plenty of speculation that the field command in Afghanistan and the high command in Pakistan have been experiencing deepening schsms."

Clinton also said that the administration would try to use the bin Laden death to make the case that now is not the time to cut funding for diplomacy and development at the State Department and USAID.

"We're going to be working to bolster our partnerships even now, particularly as people are digesting this news. We're going to look for ways to put this into the context of the larger debate we're having here at home about what it takes to stay engaged in the world," she said.

Clinton argued that the Obama administration's increased funding for State and USAID helped in the mission to find and kill bin Laden, although she didn't give any details on how State was involved in the overall mission to find and kill bin Laden.

"Our tools were so much better [than in the previous administration] and our relationships had evolved in a way that enabled us to obtain information that was actionable. So it takes funding and it takes resources, and it takes having those person-to-person connections that really make a difference," she said.

Asked about how the killing of bin Laden would impact the wave of democratic revolutions sweeping the Arab world, Clinton said the final impact was unpredictable but that the United States could influence how the region digests the news.

"Up until now, the Middle East and North Africa have been very focused internally, what were they going to do in Egypt to navigate their revolution, what was finally going to happen in the other places," she said. "This is an event that breaks through that, but which way it breaks is not clear yet.  If we can keep the emphasis on his extremist ideology, his use of violence is not what brought about the Arab spring, I think we can begin to shape how people think about it."

The extraordinary and dramatic killing of America's Most Wanted Man has brought confusion, embarrassment, triumph, regret and a resounding cold shoulder to the Pakistani people from the international community. A senior Pakistani diplomat told me, "Maybe it's time to accept that, in great power games, we don't matter." This comment could be a public relations exercise to wash Pakistan's hands of any responsibility for Osama bin Laden's death and the ensuing militant backlash. But it's clear that a solo operation on Pakistani soil by U.S. Navy SEALs is a reality check for unassuming citizens who have let the Pakistani Army's budget fuel theirs and the army's delusions of grandeur.

It's hard to blame Pakistanis for the utter bewilderment they are experiencing after the death of bin Laden. Pakistan's leaders seem dumbfounded by the whole operation, and a lack of a coherent public message from the government, the military, and the intelligence service the ISI has only hindered the average Pakistani's desire to find a defensible position on the issue. Pakistanis are left with many questions and few answers. [[BREAK]]

How could the world's most wanted man be hiding around the corner from a Pakistani military academy? If Osama bin Laden had been living in Abbottabad, a mere two hours' drive from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, without the ISI's knowledge, it was a criminal stroke of genius on his part. Hide where the drones don't fall and where they'll never think to look. The bigger the house the fewer questions asked. Wealth in Pakistan serves as its own boundary wall between the privileged and the law.

How could the Army not have known and/or engaged foreign forces conducting combat operations within Pakistan's borders? The same senior Pakistani diplomat told me, "Pakistanis are just unaware of the U.S. military's capabilities." If this is the case, then the American military machine has immeasurable might, or the Pakistan Army has short arms and deep pockets.

Why wouldn't America share the information about the upcoming raid with the Pakistani Army so that the U.S.'s own fairly high-risk operation was not compromised by Pakistani forces? Would the Pakistan Army refuse an operation against bin Laden? Probably not, but Pakistan could conceivably request to mount their own operation to take him out. One reason the Americans did not take Pakistan into confidence was concern that the Pakistani Army could not be trusted with this information. The Pakistani Army would have had too much to answer for to the U.S. if members of it were irresponsible with details about the raid, and bin Laden escaped.

How could bin Laden have been located without Pakistani intelligence? Common sense tells us that he couldn't have been. Even if Pakistan's government pleads ignorance on all counts, it is inconceivable that the United States could have located this target without some prior form of help from the ISI. And if this is indeed the case, then one has to concede that the ISI would not share intelligence on a terrorist they are secretly trying to harbor.

Every retired Pakistani military man I have spoken with thinks that ISI/Army members must have been clued in to the operation or bin Laden's location, but likely at the most five to ten people were in the know. If the Army knew anything, it was likely only at the highest levels -- Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, ISI chief Major General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and their closest lieutenants -- and in that case the suggestion that Pakistan's government as a whole was somehow "sheltering" bin Laden does not make much sense because Pakistan would have sold bin Laden if they had him to begin with, in exchange for some national respect from the U.S. A possible Pakistani pitch to the U.S. could have been: we have bin Laden in our sights; you take him out, absolve us of responsibility, you get the victory, and we don't have to deal with the militant blowback at home. The continued campaign of drone strikes in the tribal areas compromises Pakistani sovereignty, but a one-time raid may be easier to sell and forget. The issue here is the concern that Pakistan's double game will leave it with nothing but a backlash from both the international community and the militants. But if you find Osama bin Laden in your own front yard, you don't really have much room for negotiation.

In the off chance that the ISI did not play a part in locating bin Laden in Abbottabad, but had some intelligence on him, what would the Pakistani military establishment gain from harboring a man like Osama bin Laden? Is he a "strategic asset" the way the Haqqani network or the Quetta Shura is believed to be? No.

A main difference between Osama bin Laden and the Quetta Shura or the Haqqani network was that bin Laden did not possess a network of fighters, was not indigenous to the land despite ties cultivated possibly through marriages, and above everything else was more of a symbol of jihad than an operational influence. Pakistani military officials have told me before that the reason why the Haqqanis and the Quetta Shura may serve as assets is because they possess vast networks and will still be around long after the Americans leave Afghanistan. If Pakistan wants to exercise ‘strategic depth' in what they may assume will be a protracted battle for power in Afghanistan after the U.S. leaves, then they want to back the men whose main interest is power in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden's goals were megalomaniacal, stretched over continents, and completely incompatible with the idea of negotiations. The Haqqani network and the Quetta Shura are insurgent groups, or bands of terrorists by most accounts, but potentially both could get their feet in the door for negotiations in Afghanistan. Taking all this into consideration, it is hard to see how Pakistan could have considered Osama bin Laden a strategic asset the way the Haqqani network or Quetta Shura are presumed to be for the Pakistani military establishment.

What if Pakistan really didn't know anything? If that's the case, then that is a bitter pill for Pakistanis to swallow and heads should roll in the establishment. The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani has already stated that an inquiry is to take place. If the Army and ISI are found to be completely ignorant they can and should be held accountable. Worldwide attention on such an inquiry bears the possibility that a government usually impotent in front of the military could actually hold the military accountable for once.

At the moment, nobody in the Pakistani security establishment is willing to provide answers to Pakistanis. Pakistanis want to know if the ISI tipped the Americans off; they want to know if the ISI harbored a terrorist; they want to say that Pakistanis helped in the operation, either operationally or with prior intelligence, or that some kind of deal was struck with the United States. What they don't want to hear is that their country knew nothing. That leaves them without a position to defend, although if there are any people that can defend the indefensible, it's the Pakistanis. Many Pakistanis just want to be able to have a national stance on the issue and say, "These are the facts and these are our opinions on the matter." But, alas, it is likely we won't get any of the inside facts soon, if we ever do.

Shaheryar Mirza has a masters in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington D.C. and works as a reporter for Express 24/7 in Karachi, Pakistan. Follow him on twitter @mirza9.

The death of Osama bin Laden will raise the inevitable question: What are we still doing in Afghanistan? The answer, of course, is that the mission in Afghanistan is about something bigger and more ambitious than eliminating Al Qaeda’s leaders—most of whom, in any event, are probably living in Pakistan, as bin Laden was when the United States finally tracked him down. No, the mission in Afghanistan isn’t about killing Al Qaeda members. It’s about stabilizing the country so that it can never again serve as the hotbed of extremism that it was until 2001, with all of the attendant national security and human rights problems that resulted.

But that in turn raises other questions: Is it worth prolonging a war that has stretched on for nearly ten years for that broader goal? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: Even if that goal is worth fighting for, is it actually achievable? 

Over the past few years, a consensus has formed in Washington that the answer to that last question is a resounding no. For years, war in Afghanistan has been portrayed as a hopeless failure. The government in Kabul, we have been told, is corrupt and predatory. The Afghan army is a mess. Tribal loyalties trump national loyalties. The Taliban is gaining in strength.

All of this rendered a decision made by President Obama last autumn rather odd—at least on the surface. Obama had long promised that American troops would begin leaving Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. As Vice President Joe Biden had explained: “In July 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.” But then, over the course of a week in November, the White House announced a major reversal of course: A large-scale troop presence would remain in Afghanistan for an additional three years, until 2014.

Only a handful of journalists seemed to realize the magnitude of the news. For its part, The New York Times characterized the new approach as “a change in tone,” a curious label for several more years of war.

But while Americans barely seemed to notice, people in Kabul certainly did. In December, a few weeks after Obama’s announcement, I met with Hedayat Amin Arsala, a courtly senior minister in the Afghan government and a confidant of President Hamid Karzai. We were seated in a basketball-court-sized office adorned with a massive chandelier in a nineteenth-century building in central Kabul. Arsala had been dismayed by Obama’s initial plan to begin withdrawing in 2011. “I was not very happy with it,” Arsala recalled, choosing his words carefully. “It gave the impression to the opposition that if they stick to their guns a little longer, they might be able to succeed after that.” Arsala, reflecting the views of many Afghans both inside and outside the government, expressed relief that Obama was now reversing himself. In fact, he hoped the American president would go even further, and hammer out a long-term agreement with Afghanistan so that American troops could remain in the country into 2015 and beyond. “Between now and 2014, we will be working on this together with the United States,” he told me. A range of other American and Afghan officials confirmed that such an agreement is currently being worked on.

Then came this month’s killing of Osama bin Laden—and while Americans rejoiced, many Afghans were, according to the Times, worried that the successful operation would hasten the departure of American troops. “This should not be used as a justification for premature withdrawal,” warned one former Afghan official.

What is going on here? First, Obama had concluded that a war which was widely believed to be failing was in fact still worth prosecuting. Then, Afghans had made it known that they were relieved the United States would be sticking around. Now, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, they were reminding the United States that they expected it not to renege on this promise. Is this a case of a stubborn American president—unwilling to admit defeat, egged on by Afghan allies—doubling down on a completely failed enterprise? Or is it possible that the Afghanistan war is actually succeeding?

 

Major Jim Gant of the Army Special Forces is a rangy, intense Pashto speaker with tattoos of Chinese characters on his right arm. Like many of his fellow Special Forces officers in the field, Gant sports a shaggy beard and wears an Afghan scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. He has been at the forefront of an unlikely transformation in counterinsurgency tactics, so much so that he’s been nicknamed “Lawrence of Afghanistan.” Gant’s rise to prominence started in late 2009, when he published a paper on the website of Steven Pressfield, a novelist and military veteran. The article was called “One Tribe at a Time,” and it drew on Gant’s experiences as a Special Forces team leader working with a Pashtun tribe—the Taliban’s historical base is among the Pashtuns—in eastern Afghanistan in 2003. Based on his experiences, Gant advocated that small units of autonomous Special Forces embed with Pashtun tribes and train them to fight the Taliban.

While most policy papers languish on desks or hard drives unread, Gant’s paper ricocheted around the upper echelons of the military. It even reached General David Petraeus, who called the paper “very impressive, so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely.” After that, the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, stepped back from “door-kicking” missions and instead began to advise and build up local forces. In what the U.S. military has termed “Village Stability Operations,” members of the Special Forces now live among the Pashtun tribesmen in remote areas where insurgents once had unfettered freedom of movement. The goal is to help train community militias, known to the U.S. military as Afghan Local Police (ALP). At present, the government of Afghanistan has authorized 10,000 ALP militiamen; American officers believe that the number will eventually rise to something more like 24,000.

Getting the ALP approved by Kabul required a significant concession from Hamid Karzai, who had feared that arming tribal militias might rejuvenate the warlordism that has plagued Afghanistan since the early 1990s. To address Karzai’s concerns, the ALP is administered by the Afghan Ministry of Interior, and everyone admitted to the program has to submit to biometric scans. On the ground, militia candidates are vetted by local village councils.

This December, at a base near Kabul, I bumped into Gant at a meeting with some senior Special Forces officers. Gant said he was pleased with the progress and noted that in the Pashtun language the community forces are known by the word Arbakai, a traditional term for forces that secure their own area. “The Taliban are very threatened by this,” Gant said. “It’s taking their safe haven away.” Other experts I spoke with affirmed that the community policemen have created “security bubbles” that didn’t exist before.

If Gant’s approach sounds familiar, it should. That’s because it draws on the same principles as the counterinsurgency tactics that worked for Petraeus in Iraq. Ultimately, the effort in Afghanistan will either succeed or fail based on the counterinsurgency practices, like Gant’s, that Petraeus has put in place. I recently got to see Petraeus—who took over the Afghanistan mission last year, and has just been nominated by Obama to head the CIA—in action during a briefing at the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul. When he walked into the briefing room, it was precisely 7:30 a.m., and a bevy of generals and a couple dozen staff officers immediately stood up. He hurriedly motioned for them to sit down and images began to be projected onto screens around the room. Some screens showed the weather in various parts of Afghanistan, others the numbers of American soldiers recently killed, and others maps of insurgent activity. Over secure videoconference lines, commanders from around Afghanistan gave status updates about their sector of the war, with Petraeus alternately quizzing, cajoling, and complimenting them. The only interruption came toward the end of the briefing, when a scuffle broke out over a recalcitrant goat. A group of officers had dragged the hapless animal, a Navy mascot, into the room in honor of the upcoming Army-Navy football game. “Thanks fellows,” said Petraeus, sounding slightly impatient. “That was really cute.”

Counterinsurgency is often misunderstood as being mostly about winning “hearts and minds”; and, as Gant’s program shows, there’s certainly an element of that. But, at the most basic level, it’s really a set of common-sense precepts about how to avoid being hated while simultaneously applying well-calibrated doses of violence—that is, killing people. The importance of killing to counterinsurgency is an unpalatable truth that often gets disguised with Orwellian neologisms such as “kinetic operations,” but Petraeus clearly understands that reaching “hearts and minds” goes only so far on its own.

As a result of stepped-up operations, many of the Taliban’s longtime safe havens in Helmand and Kandahar have been eliminated, according to the U.S. military. Of course, the Pentagon has reason to give optimistic reports; but I was struck to see that the International Council on Security and Development, an organization long critical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, is also echoing this assessment, based on its own on-the-ground research.

Meanwhile, operations by Delta Force and Navy Seals have decimated the ranks of mid-level Taliban commanders. This March, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in a typical three-month period, 360 insurgent leaders were killed or captured. (According to a number of observers, the average age of Taliban commanders has dropped from 35 to 25 in the past year.)

On the administrative front, Petraeus has managed to put a stop to particularly senseless policies. At its worst, the Afghanistan conflict has been sustained partly by a contracting system under which U.S. funds take a perverse path from Afghan contractors to Taliban leaders. That is, a fair portion of the money paid out by Washington for a given project, such as the construction of a road, has made it into the pockets of insurgents in exchange for not attacking that road. Petraeus has put in place new contracting guidelines to try to tame this problem.

Petraeus also appears to be making progress in standing up an effective Afghan National Army. Currently, the army is the most well-regarded institution in the country, with approval ratings over 80 percent. While Tajiks are overrepresented in the officer corps, and Pashtuns from the south of the country are grossly underrepresented among the rank and file, overall, the army is ethnically balanced, retention rates (while hardly stellar) are rising, pay rates went up two years ago to $140 per month for a raw recruit (the average yearly income in Afghanistan is less than $400), and the army is on track to reach its November 2011 end-strength goal of 171,000.

 

But will all these changes in military strategy actually lead to long-term victory in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, anyone observing the country learns to live with alternating feelings of hope and despair. As heartened as I often felt when seeing the military progress, I found the corruption of key Afghan politicians to be deeply depressing. More significantly, the war is exacting a steep cost in American lives. Since Obama took office, some 890 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan. That’s around 60 percent of the total who have died there since the war began in the fall of 2001.

Most of the eastern provinces remain infested with insurgents, as do provinces near Kabul such as Ghazni. The so-called “reintegration” process, in which Taliban foot soldiers lay down their arms and reenter their communities, is largely moribund. Data from Indicium Consulting shows that incidents involving insurgent IEDs, small arms fire, rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks have more than doubled in recent years, from around 8,000 in 2008 to more than 17,000 in 2010. Efforts at striking deals with the Taliban have led nowhere. The most promising discussions occurred last year between the Karzai government and senior Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour—except that “Mullah Mansour” turned out to be a crafty Quetta shopkeeper who had spun a good yarn about his Taliban credentials in order to make some quick money. Meanwhile, official meetings held between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in places like the Maldives to discuss “reconciliation” have produced nothing. One sardonic Afghan official offered me a simple reason for why the parties had agreed to meet for negotiations. “Everybody wanted to go to the Maldives,” he said.

When I was in Kabul, I asked a small group of leading American counterinsurgency experts if they could think of a case in which an insurgency was defeated under circumstances like the ones we see today in Afghanistan—where insurgents enjoy a safe haven, the government is corrupt, and a third-party military force is intervening on the side of the corrupt government. The experts could not think of a single example. I found just as little solace in How Insurgencies End, a rigorous RAND study, published last year, of 89 insurgencies fought around the world since World War II. Insurgents who have enjoyed a sanctuary have won almost half the conflicts where there was a clear victor. In countries with less than 40 percent urbanization, insurgents have won about three-quarters of the time. And pseudo-democracies, such as Afghanistan, have a particularly poor record of defeating insurgencies, because they neither have the stomach for total repression nor the capacity to offer accountable government. They lose about 85 percent of the time.

Then there is Pakistan, which has, to put it mildly, not always been a helpful player in Afghanistan. The Pakistani army has long sought a pliant Afghan state on its western border to balance its Indian neighbor to the east—a doctrine known as “strategic depth”—and it believes the Taliban served this purpose fairly well. Today, Pakistan’s economy is in bad shape: Its inflation rate hovers around 15 percent, and annual growth has fallen from 7 percent to 2 percent, which cannot remotely sustain what will be in 2015 the world’s fifth-largest population. Simultaneously, Pakistan is spending an astonishing 17 percent of its budget on defense and only 3 percent on education. All of these indicators are bad news for Pakistanis, but they’re also bad news for Afghans: In the long run, an unstable Pakistan means an unstable Afghanistan, since the border between the countries is basically ungovernable, and extremists can so easily drift back and forth. 

And yet, against this parade of depressing facts, one must balance some other realities. It helps to begin with some historical context. For all of Afghanistan’s problems, the country has come a long way since I first began visiting it almost two decades ago. I first came to Kabul in 1993, when it was a patchwork of vicious ethnic militias fighting block-to-block, Mogadishu-style. Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was routinely unleashing barrages of hundreds of rockets that had an unfortunate habit of landing on the heads of innocent Kabul civilians rather than on his enemies. I saw boys as young as ten fighting alongside the militiamen. Travel at night anywhere at all was out of the question, and brigands of all kinds roamed the countryside kidnapping and thieving at will. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died, and even more fled the country.

I next visited the country in 1997, a year after the Taliban had seized power. The streets were now quiet, and all women were covered from head to foot. Fierce, black-turbaned Taliban “vice and virtue” enforcers roamed around the cities, enforcing their ordinances in fast-moving pickup trucks, stopping to harass, beat, or arrest men whose beards were of improper length or women whose feet were visible. One day, I saw a man crumpled on the street as a Taliban enforcer beat him with a stick. The man had failed to pray at the appointed hour. Days in Taliban Afghanistan passed unbearably slowly. There was nothing to do, no place to go. There were no sounds of music, no films, no entertainment. The economy was in free fall. Kabul was a ghost town, with only 500,000 inhabitants left. The rest had fled. Streets were nearly devoid of cars. My only glimpses of women were when they flitted through the empty streets like wraiths dressed in blue burkas. When I stayed in Kabul in the winter of 1999, I was the only guest in the only functioning hotel in town, an Intercontinental that had long ceased to have anything to do with the brand. There was no heat or hot water, nor were there any telephones. I was lucky to have one of the few rooms with windows that remained intact from the war. When I visited Taliban cabinet officials, we would sit shivering in unheated rooms in their ministries while they told me what a misunderstood man Osama bin Laden was.

Today, Kabul has three million inhabitants. There are restaurants and bars and social venues—and people are friendly. (Among journalists, the guilty secret is that working in Kabul today is sort of, well, fun.) A decade ago, 9 percent of Afghans had access to basic medical care. Today, 85 percent do. Under the Taliban, about one million kids (almost none of them girls) were in school, whereas now about seven million children are being educated (more than one-third of them girls, with the proportion rising). Before the U.S. occupation, a telephone system barely existed in Afghanistan. Today, one in three Afghans has a cell phone. Afghans once had access to no media outlets apart from the Taliban’s Voice of Sharia radio network. Now there are, in the words of the BBC, “scores of radio stations, dozens of TV stations and some 100 active press titles.” More than five million Afghan refugees have returned home. Kabul has becom so crowded with cars and people that the city’s pollution is statistically more lethal than the war.

Afghanistan’s economy is also booming. Thanks to the improvements in security provided by the United States and NATO, GDP growth between 2009 and 2010 was a strong 22 percent. That’s just the start. According to a thorough study released earlier this year by the Pentagon, an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits is waiting to be unearthed in Afghanistan, including enough lithium to make the country a world leader in raw materials for batteries. The Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the rights to a copper mine near Kabul, and last year JP Morgan put together a $50 million deal for a gold mine in northern Afghanistan. No wonder, then, that 70 percent of Afghans told pollsters for the BBC late last year that their country is now going in the right direction. (By comparison, in a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April, 70 percent of Americans said the United States is going in the wrong direction.) It’s also why Afghans give surprisingly high marks to the U.S. military, even after nearly a decade of often bungled occupation: 68 percent favorable, according to a BBC/ABC poll released in January 2010. (By contrast, a 2007 BBC/ABC poll in Iraq found that only 22 percent of Iraqis supported the U.S. military presence in their country.)

It’s true that overall security has deteriorated recently in Afghanistan, but much of that is due to stepped-up military operations. This is what happened at the start of the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan also remains a safer place than countries such as Russia or Mexico, where political conflict and criminal violence kill proportionately more people. Residents of New Orleans are five times more likely to be murdered today than Afghan civilians are likely to be killed in war.

Even the unhappy RAND study on the success of insurgencies contained some encouraging findings. One of the most important is that when a government has a significant force superiority ratio (9:1 or greater), it “correlated strongly with success” in defeating insurgents. The projected end strength of the Afghan army and police is 375,000, and the Taliban is around one-tenth of this size. That’s not including all of the outside military forces that are also involved on the side of the Afghan government. What’s more, according to the RAND study, “[c]ontrary to conventional wisdom, insurgents do not win by trying to simply outlast the government. In fact, over the long run, governments tend to win more often than not.” While the long run can be all too long—it took more than four decades for the Colombian government to effectively defeat the FARC—the fact remains that time is working against the insurgents, especially with the new lengthening of the U.S. commitment.

 

Although the White House’s pledge to remain in Afghanistan appears to be firm, calls to pull out have been increasing. One striking example of the new emerging consensus came out earlier this year, when George W. Bush’s ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, wrote in Foreign Affairs that “Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of the Pashtun south and east”; he advocated de facto partition of Afghanistan as “the best available alternative to strategic defeat.” The plan was merely the most extreme expression of a now-common sentiment amongst the U.S. foreign policy establishment: Let’s just get it over with.

Partition or withdrawal sound simple and alluring; but Blackwill and others don’t seem to fully grasp the problems with such proposals. For one thing, with whom would we negotiate a partition? The so-called “moderates” in the Taliban reconciled with the Afghan government long ago. The remaining Taliban fighters have splintered into several groups, each more extreme than the next. And why would the Taliban honor their side of the bargain? Deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Waziristan and in Swat were merely preludes to the Taliban establishing brutal “emirates,” regrouping, and then moving into adjoining areas to seize more territory.

The human costs of partition or withdrawal would be horrific. When the Taliban took control of the Pakistani tourist destination of Swat between 2008 and 2009, they imposed a reign of terror, beheading policemen and leaving their bodies to rot in public, burning down schools for girls, and administering public lashings to women accused of adultery.

And, finally, there are the strategic costs. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, but Al Qaeda still exists, and there is no reason to believe that a reconstituted Taliban government would be any less hospitable to Al Qaeda than the Taliban rulers of the 1990s. After September 11, Mullah Omar lost everything to protect bin Laden, and since then he has said nothing to distance himself from that fateful decision.

Of course, just because it would be preferable to succeed in Afghanistan does not mean we actually can. But, when I look at the hopeful signs that are starting to emerge from the country, and when I consider these indicators in tandem with the likely consequences of a hasty exit, I do think the wise choice now is for the United States to stay. In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.

Staying in Afghanistan isn’t the politically obvious decision: The war is going to remain controversial, and it’s going to be criticized from both the left and the right. Arguably, it could even imperil Obama’s reelection. Still, the president has made his choice and he appears to be sticking with it. This, I am convinced, is good for Afghanistan. One day, I hope, we’ll also realize that it was good for the United States.

 

Peter Bergen is a contributing editor for The New Republic and the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda. This article originally ran in the May 26, 2011, issue of the magazine.

 

Around 800 Pakistanis rallied in Quetta on

Tuesday over the death of Osama bin Laden. Were they celebrating the American action against this man who had twisted and hijacked their peaceful religion? Were they dancing in the streets and passing out candy because this man who had besmirched the image of Islam by connecting it with terrorism had at last passed from the scene?

No; they were chanting "Death to America," burning an American flag, and mourning the death of a man they revered ...

Uncomfortable scrutiny for Pakistan

After the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden early Monday morning in Abbottabad, the small military garrison city some 40 miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, speculation is rife about how the al-Qaeda leader could have been hiding in plain sight virtually under the noses of the Pakistani military, and Obama administration officials say they are investigating whether bin Laden had help from Pakistani authorities over the years (NYT, Post, Reuters, WSJ, McClatchy, FT, Guardian, Independent, Reuters, Dawn, AP). U.S. officials said Pakistani officials were not told about the raid, which involved four American helicopters entering Pakistani airspace undetected from Afghanistan, until after it occurred (AP, NYT, WSJ, Post, AP). [[BREAK]]

Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, have maintained they didn't know bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound, while top Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan called it "inconceivable" that the terrorist leader did not have "some kind of support system" within Pakistan (AP, Post, WSJ). Some Pentagon and C.I.A. officials were skeptical that Pakistan knew, while others were more suspicious (NYT). The Pakistani military has not officially commented on bin Laden's death, though an official with the intelligence service the ISI said the agency was embarrassed and a military official conceded, "It is an intelligence failure" (BBC, Dawn).

Residents of Abbottabad say the massive compound stood out in its middle-class neighborhood, though many were shocked to learn bin Laden had been living there (LAT, NYT, Times, Guardian, WSJ). The town had been better known as a hub for tourists and the Pakistani military (Post).

Inside the raid

More details are emerging about the Abbottabad raid, in which bin Laden was code named 'Geronimo:' the armed al-Qaeda leader was shot in the left eye after reportedly using a woman who may have been one of his wives as a human shield, one of the helicopters malfunctioned inside the compound and had to be destroyed, and members of the Obama administration national security team watched in real-time (National Journal, Politico, AJE, Times, Tel, CNN, ABC, Guardian, LAT, WSJ, NYT, Post, Dawn, Politico). Earlier options to kill bin Laden included a bombing raid on the three-story compound, but the Obama administration opted to use the specially trained Navy SEAL Team Six to carry out the attack. The other men who died in the assault were reportedly two brothers believed to be bin Laden's couriers and one of his sons (AFP, Post).

The trail to bin Laden reportedly ran through one of these trusted couriers, Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait, whose importance to al-Qaeda reportedly became known to U.S. intelligence based on information from detainees in Guantanamo including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Farraj al-Libi, who was captured in 2005 (AP, ABC, NYT, WSJ, Post, Guardian, Post, McClatchy). Ahmed reportedly had a phone call with someone being monitored by U.S. intelligence last summer, and authorities started watching him. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. reportedly identified the license plate number of Ahmed's white Suzuki near Peshawar, which ultimately led the U.S. to the Abbottabad compound (NYT, AP). Ahmed was reportedly killed in the raid (AP, Guardian). The U.S. is currently investigating the computers and other material retrieved from Abbottabad (AP). For more on the hunt for bin Laden, read our sister newsletter, the Legal War on Terror (FP).

Then what happened?

After bin Laden's death, his body was reportedly taken out of Pakistan by helicopter, and he was identified using genetic kinship analysis, a type of DNA testing, which U.S. officials said showed a "virtually 100 percent match of the body" with DNA collected from as-yet-unidentified bin Laden family members (Post, NYT, LAT). The U.S. also identified bin Laden via facial recognition and testimony from one of his wives, who survived the raid (Post, Post).

After being ritually prepared for a Muslim burial, bin Laden's body was dumped off the U.S. aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson into the Arabian Sea (Post, NYT, ABC, CBS). Islamic scholars have been split on whether the sea burial, designed to avoid the establishment of a shrine for bin Laden's supporters and which reportedly occurred after Saudi Arabia refused to take the body, was insulting or appropriate. The U.S. has not yet released visual or forensic proof of bin Laden's death, and officials are said to be weighing whether to release post-mortem photos and videos (ABC, Post, Politico).

What's the reaction been?

Jihadis around the world reacted with expressions of grief and disbelief at bin Laden's death, along with promises of revenge and resilience (NYT, AFP, ABC, AP). Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed reportedly led special prayers for bin Laden in Lahore earlier today (Reuters). The Taliban in Afghanistan said they had not received confirmation from the group's leaders about bin Laden's death, and in any case, "The activity of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was unimportant. All activities were and continue to be conducted by the Taliban" (Time). The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan threatened revenge against both Pakistan and the United States, stating that, "Pakistan will be the prime target" (AFP, ET, Geo). Twenty five foreign fighters were killed crossing the border from Pakistan into the eastern Afghan province of Nuristan in what may be the first sign of preparation for retaliatory attacks (Reuters). Speculation now turns to the leadership succession question in al-Qaeda (Post, NYT).

Across the Middle East, reactions were mixed, "from anger in the most conservative locales of Lebanon to jubilation among Shiite Muslims in Iraq" (NYT, FT, Reuters, Politico). In Quetta, Pakistan, hundreds took to the streets in honor of bin Laden, burning American flags (AFP). In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai reiterated his position that the main terrorist threat in the region comes from Pakistan, and the debate is turning toward the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan (WSJ, NYT). Iranian officials said that following bin Laden's death, the U.S. has "no more excuse" to be in the region (AFP). And former Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf said the raid violated Pakistani sovereignty (CNN-IBN). Read more about world reactions in yesterday's daily brief (FP).

A long time coming

Gary Weddle, a middle school science teacher in Washington, vowed after al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11, 2001, not to shave his beard until bin Laden was captured or killed (Time, AP). Yesterday, he shaved it off.

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Reuters

Swift sea burial angers Islamic conservatives The Australian Supporters of the pro-Taliban party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Nazaryati shout anti-US slogans in Quetta, Pakistan. Picture: AFP Source: AFP THE dispatch of Osama bin Laden's corpse - tipped into the sea from the deck of a US aircraft carrier - is stoking ... Muslims in Iowa glad Islam is no longer held hostageDesMoinesRegister.com Md. Islamic Leader Thrilled, Concerned Over bin Laden's DeathWBAL Baltimore Can Osama bin Laden become an Islamic martyr?IBNLive.com CBS News -Chicago Tribune (blog) -The Augusta Chronicle all 54,364 news articles »

Supporters of hardline pro-Taliban party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Nazaryati (JUI-N) shout anti-US slogans during a protest in Quetta on May 2. The US has warned it will probe how Osama bin Laden managed to live in undetected luxury in Pakistan, as gripping … Continue reading →

Usama Bin Laden, a mass killer, passed virtually unmourned from the scene. There were no demonstrations against his killing in the Arab world. A few Taliban protested in Quetta and Afghanistan, as one might expect. Mostly Muslims denounced him and expressed relief he was gone. Bin Laden carried out 9/11 to begin a big political [...]

It is time to bury the war on terror

Gesturing at the dazed and bloodied survivors sitting crumpled in the road, a bystander asked: "How can someone think of doing this kind of thing?" In the two decades that followed the car bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the answer to that question was to become terrifyingly clear. To the relatives of the thousands of lives he destroyed, the answer was intimate. To those elected to govern them it was a test of credibility. Osama bin Laden was the author of the most catastrophic attack on US soil since the second world war, and for those who gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at Ground Zero, laughing, chanting and singing The Star-Spangled Banner, news of his death brought relief. Barack Obama, the third US president to have vowed to hunt their nemesis down, talked repeatedly of justice being done. Anyone who has passed a fire station in New York and seen the memorial plaques to the firefighters who died on 11 September 2001 cannot fail to appreciate the deep scar America still bears. Vengeance was theirs.

But not theirs alone. Buried in this final reckoning is that fact that, in Osama bin Laden's war against the US, countless more Muslims paid with their lives than Americans, Britons, Australians or Spaniards did. Thousands of Iraqi Shias, Pakistanis, Yemenis and Jordanians also lost their lives as a result of an ideology that cast any Muslim who did not embrace the true path as a traitor – worse still, an apostate. The result of this fratricidal carnage is that al-Qaida has now lost what fatal attraction it once held for anti-imperialists. There is no more potent sign of the loss of al-Qaida's brand leadership of revolt than the Arab spring, in which one dictatorship after another has tottered and fallen, out of a yearning to end tyranny. The fight for democracy, not a caliphate, has begun to redeem decades of lost honour and dignity. No shockwave swept through the Arab world as news of Bin Laden's death spread, and that is perhaps the most fitting epitaph.

Lessons learned?

But what a litany of miscalculation and disaster the post-9/11 decade became. If Bin Laden and his fighters drew tight the tripwire for American military might, he was blessed with a president in George W Bush and a neoconservative group of advisers who marched straight into it. America was traumatised, but the eagerness of that administration to see al-Qaida as a foe that was more potent, widespread and numerically larger than it actually was turned what should always have been a series of planned counterterrorist operations into invasions, occupations and war seemingly without credible end. Easy to say in hindsight, less easy to enact at a moment where America was traumatised and searching for a means to hit back. Anti-terrorism gave way to its much more potent cousin, anti-insurgency. The fight against al-Qaida became a global game of hopscotch, jumping from one continent to another, creating such concepts as a crescent of crisis – a not too distinct echo of the domino theory. The war on terror will one day provide an object lesson in how not to react to an ideology whose whole purpose is to create a Manichean divide between Muslims and the western world. Any war which succeeded in lumping together as a common enemy populations as disparate as Sunnis in Iraq, southern Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Punjabi militants in Pakistan, Moroccans of the Maghreb and the Shabab of Somalia could only have ended in failure, and it surely is time to bury the war on terror. It posited whole areas of the globe whose governments were too weak to cope with the militants they harboured. It, too, was responsible for ending thousands of innocent lives.

Pakistan is the litmus test

The failed concept of the failed state is still being used to hunt militants in Yemen, widely assumed to have bought into the al-Qaida franchise. Here is a country where 7 million people, about one-third of the population, are deemed to be food insecure, and 10% malnourished. With a president who refuses to go, a 50% fall in export revenues, rising food prices (90% of all food has to be imported) and, if that were not enough, a water crisis, Yemen is at the centre of a perfect storm. And yet the dominant lens through which Washington views this particular failing state is counter-terrorism. USAid has spent millions of dollars in a stabilisation strategy for the central crescent of Yemen, deemed an al-Qaida hotbed, which is money down the drain. It is time we finally learned the lessons of this lost decade.

The biggest test of a new approach will be Pakistan. As the jubilation subsided in the US, fingers already started to be pointed towards Islamabad. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said that the Pakistani army and intelligence services had many questions to answer. There are indeed many. Bin Laden was not only located in one of the most unlikely places for an international terrorist – the home of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country's version of Sandhurst. It's as if he'd been living in Camberley. He was in a purpose-built bunker and had been there for some time. The fact that a senior member of al-Qaida has been caught in a city far away from the drone strikes of North Waziristan is not new: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, others in Karachi and Faisalabad. But the suspicion that someone, somewhere in the ISI must have been sheltering Bin Laden was only amplified by a senior administration official who said yesterday that they shared their intelligence on their suspicions that Bin Laden was in this compound with no other country "including Pakistan".

There is, as yet, no evidence that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was playing a double game. And even if there were, what benefit to ending the war in Afghanistan would that intelligence produce? After 30,000 civilians and 5,000 soldiers and policemen have lost their lives in Pakistan's campaign against al-Qaida, there can be no doubt in any analyst's mind where the strategic interests of the Pakistani army lie. They lie in ending a war against militants which has become as much a threat to Pakistan as it has become to the territorial integrity of its neighbour Afghanistan. Pakistan's military may be a frustrating ally. It must also be appreciated in Washington that having America as your ally in Pakistan's part of the world is equally onerous. But the fact that the two share a common goal is indisputable, and even more so after Bin Laden's death. If America seriously wants to start high-level talks with the Taliban, it will be the ISI that will enable those to happen – not just for the Haqqani network but for Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura as well.

Obama's war

In the end, it all now comes down to one man, Barack Obama. On 11 September 2001 he was an obscure senator who reacted to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre by talking of the need to raise the hopes of embittered children across the globe. Almost a decade further on, the softest touch, in Dick Cheney's insulting view, has become the man who succeeded in hunting his quarry down. The irony will not be lost on Republicans who claim that America is now less safe under a Democrat president. There will undoubtedly be an al-Qaida response to their leader's death, and there is no shortage of evidence that plots are in the pipeline. A terrible life that brought misery to thousands is now over. Ending the legacy of that conflict will require all of Mr Obama's earliest and truest instincts. He now has the authority to carry them out.

When President Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. forces in Abbottabad on Sunday, American crowds greeted the news with rapture. The response in Pakistan was a bit more complicated. Former President Pervez Musharraf called Bin Laden's death a "positive step" but also a violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty. Pakistanis on the ground are ambivalent. Hundreds gathered in Quetta to protest Bin Laden's killing.

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Hundreds took to the streets of Quetta today to pay homage to Osama bin Laden, chanting 'death to America' and setting fire to a US flag. Angry participants belonging to a religious party in Quetta, the capital of southwestern province Baluchistan, were led by federal lawmaker Maulawi Asmatullah.

Hundreds took to the streets of Quetta on Monday to pay homage to Osama bin Laden, chanting death to America and setting fire to a US flag, witnesses and organisers said. Angry participants belonging to a religious party in Quetta, the capital of southwestern province Baluchistan, were led by federal lawmaker Maulawi Asmatullah. They also torched More >

With great passion last year, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, "I categorically deny the presence of Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and even Mullah Omar in any part of Pakistan."

Now, with the capture of bin Laden in Pakistan -- only 40 miles from Malik's office - it's more difficult than ever to consider his statements, and those of his civil and military counterparts, credible.  Since 9/11, Pakistan's leaders have been lying to the United States, neighboring countries, their own people, and even to one another about fundamental elements of the war on terror.[[BREAK]]

On 9/11, Washington told Islamabad it was faced with a choice: you're either with us or with the terrorists.  Islamabad hedged its bets and basically chose both. Pakistan's military and intelligence services remain allied with Afghanistan's three major insurgent groups: Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami, and the network of longtime militant Jalaluddin Haqqani. Yet the same military and intelligence services have played an essential role in preventing major attacks on Western targets since 9/11, saving the lives of countless non-Pakistanis.

Pakistani troops have fought valiantly in their own war on terror -- a civil war that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Pakistanis, security personnel, innocent civilians, as well as militants and terrorists. 

Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani commemorated his military servicemen's sacrifices at the third annual martyrs' day this weekend.  As he supplicated for the thousands of fallen Pakistani servicemen, the usually emotionless Kayani fought back his tears.  Kayani told the audience that Pakistan would not sell its national integrity -- by inference, to the United States -- for prosperity. But the real focus of his address was this: Pakistan faces a long-term fight against terrorists from within. 

Since the launch of major counterinsurgency operations in Swat in 2009, the Pakistan Army has launched a persistent information operations campaign to pit its populace against the set of militants it fights.  But it is dependent on stoking anti-American, not anti-al-Qaeda, sentiments.  The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and allies -- in the language of the army and its allies in the Pakistani media -- were not waging jihad, but fasad (mischief). They were fighting the Pakistan army not for its support of the United States in the war on terror, but because of an outside campaign to destabilize Pakistan, legitimize the seizure of its nuclear weapons, and potentially even break up the country.  And the terrorists were not simply sons of the soil motivated by revenge and poisoned by a bastardization of their religion - no, they were witting or unwitting agents of a CIA-Mossad-RAW [Indian intelligence] nexus aimed at destroying Pakistan. Al-Qaeda, an organization whose leaders have openly declared war on the Pakistani state, was rarely mentioned.

And so today it remains unclear what exactly happened during the fatal raid yesterday.  Were some elements of Pakistan's military-intelligence apparatus aware of the operation? Did they give their consent? Did they even cooperate? Reports that the U.S. helicopters took off from the Ghazi airbase in Tarbela, where American Special Operations Forces have been training their Pakistani counterparts, suggests that there was some Pakistani involvement in the operation that captured and killed bin Laden.

However, U.S. officials state that no other country was aware of the operations (a position now backed up by Pakistan's military), in which bin Laden was caught hiding less than a mile away from Pakistan's West Point and a short flight away from the capital.  And so it's possible that Pakistan was  caught with its pants down, having failed to stop or even spot the American incursion.

Publicly, U.S. officials are not aggressively putting pressure on Pakistan, though it will face tough questions from Congress and the media about how the world's most wanted terrorist could live for years in the shadow of major Pakistani army institutions, in what is essentially an army garrison town. Privately, one can expect greater pressure from Washington on Islamabad and Rawalpindi to "do more."  Will Pakistan be able to continue its dual policy of supporting some militants and also partnering with the United States?

Inside the Pakistan Army's ranks, one can expect greater pressure on Kayani, Inter-Services Intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and possibly even Air Force Chief Marshall Rao Qamar Suleman.  Kayani has already been lambasted since the mid-March release of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore in January.  Given the record of attacks by radical serving and retired officers against the military leadership and other officers since 9/11, it's highly likely that threats against the military from within will rise.  And al-Qaeda and its affiliates -- including the TTP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi -- are certain to lash out in anger against the Pakistani state and civilians.

Irrespective of whether it helped capture bin Laden, having both aided and worked against the United States and Islamic militants, and with the killing of bin Laden in mainland Pakistan, the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus is now caught in its own web of lies.  Getting out of it won't be pretty.

Arif Rafiq is president of Vizier Consulting, LLC, which provides strategic guidance on Middle East and South Asian political and security issues.  He writes at the Pakistan Policy Blog (www.pakistanpolicy.com).

Not everyone is celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden. Between 800 - 1,200 protestors marched in Quetta, Pakistan on Monday, to pay homage to the al-Qaeda leader, according to Dawn.

Protestors were said to belong to Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a religious party in Quetta, and were led by federal lawmaker Maulawi Asmatullah. They are also reported to have burned a US flag.

The Pakistani Taliban have now warned government leaders of retaliation. Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) told Reuters:

"Now Pakistani rulers, President Zardari and the army will be our first targets. America will be our second target."

A poll by the Pew Research Center found that bin Laden's popularity had dipped from 46% among Pakistani Muslims in 2003, to 18% in 2010. It found that Muslims around the world displayed a declining confidence in bin Laden, but Palestinians had maintained the highest support for bin Laden since 2003.

Now, Palestinian Islamist group Hamas has condemned the killing of bin Laden by U.S. forces, according to Ynetnews. The group's leader Ismail Haniyeh said at a press conference that he viewed the killing:

"...as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood."

and added:

We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs...

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry told Ynetnews that the U.S. no longer has a reason to be in the Middle East.

"This incident proves that there is no need for a huge war in order to deal with one person... (He added Iran) condemns all acts of terrorism in the world, including the organized terror of the Zionist regime".

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Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• VIDEO: This Is The Inside Of Osama Bin Laden's Mansion
• PHOTOS: See The Giant Mansion Where Bin Laden Was Living
• Bin Laden Blowback Begins -- Hamas Furious, Taliban Vows Revenge, Bombs In Pakistan

Stunned and angry Pakistanis today rallied for dead Osama Bin Laden. Angry supporters of Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam burn representation of the United States during a rally to condemn the killing of Osama bin Laden in Quetta, Pakistan on … Continue reading →

New York Times

Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News New York Times Musa Farman/European Pressphoto Agency Supporters of the Islamic party Jamiat Ulma-e-Islam Nazaryati protesting in Quetta, Pakistan, on Monday against the US-led killing of Osama bin Laden. The killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan caused jubilation ... Foreign Policy: Bin Laden Is Dead, Al-Qaida Isn'tNPR Texas Lawmakers Marking Osama bin Laden's DeathKUT News Texas Tech Expert: bin Laden's death could be trouble for Americans abroadKCBD-TV VentureBeat -WPTV -Dallas Voice all 9 news articles »

Quetta (NTB-AFP): Flere hundre mennesker hyllet den drepte al-Qaida-lederen Osama bin Laden i en demonstrasjon Quetta i Pakistan mandag.

A computer programmer, startled by a helicopter clattering above his quiet Pakistani town in the early hours of the morning Monday, did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

People watch a news bulletin announcing the killing of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden at a local electronic shop in Quetta, Pakistan Monday, May 2, 2011. Osama bin Laden, the glowering mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed thousands of Americans, was slain in his luxury hideout in Pakistan early Monday in a firefight with U.S. forces, ending a manhunt that spanned a frustrating decade.

An image made from Geo TV video shows flames at what is thought to be the compound where terror mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday, May 1, 2011, in Abbatabad, Pakistan. (AP Photo/GEO TV) TV OUT, NO SALES

A Pakistani police officer talks to a motor cyclist at a security check post in Abbottabad, Pakistani on Monday, May 2, 2011. Osama bin Laden was holed up in a two-story house 100 yards from a Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad when four helicopters carrying U.S. anti-terror forces swooped in the early morning hours of Monday and killed him.

Map locates Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S.-led raid

Globe and Mail correspondent Graeme Smith tells CTV that there is a lockdown in Quetta, Pakistan and people are being searched due to the concern that there will be a backlash due to what happened. He also says some people in Pakistan sympathize with Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban have announced that they will launch their 'spring offensive' against the Afghan government and Coalition and Afghan forces starting on May 1. The announcement comes just one day after top US officers warned of a major Taliban offensive that will start this week.

In a statement released on their propaganda website, Voice of Jihad, the Taliban announced they will launch operation "Badar" starting on May 1. The statement is attributed to the "Leadership Council" of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," which is better known as the Quetta Shura. Badar (or Badr) was a battle fought and won by the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca, Saudi Arabia; the victory is attributed to the divine intervention of Allah.

The Taliban said Badar's primary targets would be "foreign invading forces, members of their spy networks and (other) spies, high-ranking officials of the Kabul Puppet Administration, both military and civilian, members of the cabinet, members of the parliament, Heads of foreign and local companies working for the enemy and contractors."

The Taliban specifically signaled out members of the Afghan High Peace Council as a primary target of attacks as the council seeks to promote reconciliation and blunt the terror group's ability to fight against the Afghan government and Coalition forces.

"Since members of the American espionage agencies, government officials of the Puppet Administration and enemies of the Afghan people and Jihad have ensconced themselves in the so-called Peace Council and are trying to pave the way for the prolongation of the American occupation by cashing in on the name of Jihad, religion and tribal chieftainship; wants to prevent Mujahideen from waging Jihad against the invaders and are urging the Afghan Mujahid people to accept American slavery and surrender, therefore, members of the Council can be target of the Mujahideen attacks during the operations as, in view of their role, they are considered official members of the ranks of the enemy," the Taliban statement read.

The Taliban offensive would focus on "military centers, places of gatherings, airbases, ammunition and logistical military convoys of the foreign invaders in all parts of the country." The Taliban said that their tactics would include "group and martyrdom seeking attacks," or suicide attacks and assaults; "group offensives," or massed assaults; "city attacks," ambushes, and IED attacks.

The Taliban also said that "strict attention must be paid to the protection and safety of civilians during the spring operations by working out a meticulous military plan."

However, during past and present operations, the Taliban have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. According to statistics compiled by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan last summer, the Taliban are responsible for 76 percent of the civilian deaths, while Coalition and Afghan forces are responsible for just 12 percent of the civilian deaths.

While publicly the Taliban have claimed they seek to limit civilian casualties, a secretive directive issued by Mullah Omar last year shows the Taliban have no qualms about attacking civilians, including women, who cooperate with the Afghan government or Coalition forces.

The announcement of the beginning of operation Badar takes place just one day after senior, unnamed NATO military officials briefed reporters that the Taliban will launch a major offensive at the end of this month.

"We're tracking credible intelligence that senior Taliban leaders, backed by the Haqqani network, plan to conduct attacks throughout Afghanistan from the end of April," one official said, according to Reuters. "They're attempting to regain momentum after the progress by the coalition over the last year."

Also yesterday, the US Department of Defense released its biannual report on the status of the war in Afghanistan. In the report, the military said the Taliban's momentum has been blunted by intensive conventional and special operations offensives. But the Taliban will seek to reverse their losses, particularly in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan, where the Taliban have lost their traditional base of power.

Wonk Watch: Andrew Kuchins, "A truly regional economic strategy for Afghanistan," The Washington Quarterly. 

 

Hot water 

 

A Pentagon inquiry into last summer's Rolling Stone profile "The Runaway General" that led to the sacking of then-top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal has found "no proof of wrongdoing" by the general or his military and civilian advisers, and disputed several incidents and comments reported in the article (NYT, AFP, Tel, Guardian). Read the inspector general's report here (pdf) and Rolling Stone's response here.   [[BREAK]]

 

Following a 60 Minutes investigation into the best-selling Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools that called into question key parts of the books, the publisher is reviewing the contents with author Greg Mortenson, who may be sued for defamation by Mansur Khan Mahsud, the head of a Pakistani think tank whom Mortenson called Taliban and claimed kidnapped him in Waziristan in 1996 (CBS, CNN, NYT, Tel, Guardian). Mortenson gave an extended interview to Outside Online, admitting to "discrepancies" in the timing of events in the books while describing his co-author's 'literary compression,' and commenting about his alleged kidnappers, "They didn't call themselves 'Taliban,' and maybe they were and maybe they weren't" (Outside Online). Mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer has published an account of Mortenson's story that claims he made up large chunks of the books, called "Three Cups of Deceit," available here (pdf). 

 

Last month, formal talks on a long-term agreement for a U.S. presence in Afghanistan after 2014 reportedly began under Obama administration envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, alarming leaders from Iran and Russia (NYT). Diplomats say U.S. negotiators are hoping to reach an agreement on the 'Strategic Partnership Declaration' by July, when the first U.S. troops are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan.  

 

Yesterday in the capital of Parwan province north of Kabul, one person was killed and ten injured when shooting broke out during a protest against the continued detention of an alleged insurgent by NATO and Afghan forces (AFP). Also yesterday, 12 Iranian and five Afghan engineers were kidnapped by gunmen in Farah province, which borders Iran (AFP).  

 

Comings and goings

 

U.S. Speaker John Boehner made his first trip to Pakistan since the Republican party took over the House last year and met with top Pakistani officials, including prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (The News, AFP). After the meetings in Islamabad, Gilani told Pakistan's parliament that he had told Boehner the U.S. should give Pakistan drone technology and refrain from carrying out drone strikes in the country's northwest. Pakistani foreign secretary Salman Bashir is headed to Washington tomorrow, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen is reportedly visiting Islamabad this week (ET). 

 

Pakistan's military announced that it has test fired the Hatf-9, a short range nuclear capable missile (AP). The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan claimed to be running three training camps for suicide bombers in Waziristan (ET). A car bombing in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, injured two women outside the offices of a local charity, and targeted killings continue in Karachi, as six people were killed today and three yesterday (AFP, ET, DT, Dawn, The News). The Express Tribune assesses that emerging trends in these targeted killings suggest an "increasing overlap in political and sectarian violence" (ET).

 

Fierce competition

 

Afghanistan finished third in the recently concluded International Invitational Handball Tournament in Punjab, Pakistan (Pajhwok). Two teams from Pakistan took the top slots. 

 

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Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has stated that military is subordinate to civilian government and that constitution does not allow armed forces to indulge in politics. Addressing the participants of a ceremony at the Staff College Quetta in Islamabad, the CJP said that the armed forces should safeguard the country against internal and [...]

A Taliban suicide bomber assassinated Kandahar's chief of police in an attack at a headquarters in the provincial capital earlier today .

A suicide bomber dressed as a policeman penetrated security at a heavily guarded headquarters and entered the office of Brigadier General Khan Mohammad Mujahid. The suicide bomber then detonated his vest, killing Mujahid and critically wounding two other police officers, according to Pajhwok Afghan News.

Khan is the latest senior Afghan official in Kandahar to have been assassinated by the Taliban since the spring of 2010. The list of those killed in the Taliban's assassination campaign also includes the deputy governor of Kandahar, the district chief for Arghandab, and the deputy mayor of Kandahar City.

Today's suicide attack in Kandahar is the seventh in Afghanistan in three days. Yesterday, the Taliban carried out three attacks in Paktia, Kabul, and Kandahar. A suicide assault team killed three policemen in an attack at a training facility in Paktia. Three people were wounded in an attack outside a government building in Kabul, and another was wounded in an attack that targeted police in Kandahar.

The Taliban carried out three suicide attacks on April 13. The largest attack occurred in Kunar province, when a suicide bomber killed an influential pro-government tribal leader and warlord, along with nine other Afghans. In addition, 13 Afghans were wounded yesterday in suicide attacks in Kandahar and Kapisa.

Radical Taliban wing linked to recent suicide assaults

Today's attack, like previous complex suicide operations carried out by the Taliban in Kandahar this year, was likely carried out by the Mullah Dadullah Mahaz, or the Mullah Dadullah Front, a radical Taliban subgroup closely linked to al Qaeda. US military intelligence officials told The Long War Journal that this subgroup is suspected of having carried out the recent attacks in Kandahar.

The Mullah Dadullah Front is a wing of the Taliban in the south that has adopted al Qaeda's tactics and ideology, a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal in December 2010. The Mullah Dadullah Front is led by Mullah Adbul Qayoum Zakir, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee who has since been promoted as the Taliban's top military commander and co-leader of the Taliban's Quetta Shura.

The radical Taliban wing is thought to be behind the April 7 suicide assault on a police headquarters in Kandahar that killed six policemen; the Feb. 12 suicide assault on the provincial police headquarters that killed 19 people; and the Jan. 8. suicide attack in Kandahar's border city of Spin Boldak that killed 17 people, including a senior police commander allied with General Abdul Raziq, an anti-Taliban warlord in Kandahar.

Background on the situation in Kandahar

The Taliban, under a directive issued by Mullah Omar, have responded to the Coalition and Afghan offensive in the south with a campaign of violence and intimidation. Taliban fighters have been directed to "capture and kill any Afghan who is supporting and/or working for coalition forces" and the Afghan government, as well as "any Afghan women who are helping or providing information to coalition forces."

As part of the Taliban's counteroffensive in Kandahar, the terror group has targeted tribal leaders, politicians, and other elites for assassination. Dozens of Afghan officials, Afghans, including the deputy governor of Kandahar, the district chief for Arghandab and the deputy mayor of Kandahar City, have been killed since the spring of 2010. The Taliban's counteroffensive is led by Mullah Muhammad Isa Akhund, the military commander for the province.

Top leaders at the International Security Assistance Force and US politicians have described Kandahar as the strategic center of the country, and said the province is key to defeating the Taliban.

Coalition and Afghan special forces have heavily targeted the Taliban's top leadership in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province. Scores of mid- and senior-level leaders in Kandahar have been killed or captured over the past several months, including a "key" financier for the Mullah Dadullah Front; an unnamed senior commander who operated in Panjwai and was based out of the Pakistani city of Chaman; and another senior commander who is linked to Iraq's Qods Force.

Numerous Taliban leaders operate from Chaman, which is across the border from Spin Boldak in Kandahar. Pakistan's military and intelligence services have allowed the Taliban to operate from Chaman and other locations, and they support Taliban operations in Afghanistan.

In an effort to curb Taliban influence, special operations raids have been carried out in support of ISAF and Afghan counterinsurgency efforts in Kandahar. Since the summer of 2010, ISAF and Afghan conventional forces have moved into the districts of Arghandab, Dand, Zhari, and Panjwai in an effort to deny the Taliban safe havens and relieve pressure on the city of Kandahar. Scores of new combat outposts now dot the region in an attempt to secure regions that have been under Taliban control for years.

Violent spring ahead 

 

A day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of a violent spring ahead in Afghanistan and cautioned NATO allies against bringing home their forces too soon, a suicide bomber killed the police chief of Kandahar province along with two other policemen (Post, AP, AFP, Reuters, Pajhwok). The suicide bomber was reportedly wearing a police uniform, and the Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack. [[BREAK]]

 

Afghan president Hamid Karzai invited Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to visit him this weekend in Kabul, and the two will discuss "bilateral relations and regional matters," according to a Pakistani foreign ministry spokeswoman (AFP). A Pakistani official said yesterday that Pakistan would support a plan that would allow the Taliban to open an office in Turkey as part of efforts at dialogue between the insurgent movement and the Afghan government (AFP, Reuters). And the Pakistani Army has begun a construction project to build a road from the northwest Pakistani town of Bannu through Pakistan's tribal areas, ending at the Afghan border town of Ghulam Khan in North Waziristan (AFP, DT). The road, which will cost an estimated $48 million and take 18 months to complete, is designed to serve as a central trade route between Pakistan and Afghanistan.  

 

Frenchmen captured

 

In late January in Lahore, two French citizens of Pakistani origin were arrested for alleged links to the Pakistani Taliban and for meeting with a man with suspected ties to al-Qaeda (AP, Reuters). Intelligence officials said the men had planned to go to Waziristan to seek militant training, and that the man with suspected ties to al-Qaeda provided information that led to the arrest of Umar Patek, an Indonesian militant linked to the 2002 Bali bombings. The AP has today's must-read reporting on the details of how Patek was captured earlier this year in Pakistan, one of the biggest terror arrests under the Obama administration (AP).  

 

A U.S. official reiterated yesterday that the U.S. has no plans to halt C.I.A. operations in Pakistan, despite Pakistani objections (AFP). In Quetta, a religious leader and one of his students were killed when gunmen on motorbikes opened fire near a shrine last night (Dawn). The cleric's son and another student were injured in the attack. And residents of Pakistan's Swat Valley, site of a major military offensive in 2009, are worried that slow economic development could roll back security gains (Reuters).  

 

As a confidence building measure, Pakistan released 89 Indian fisherman authorities had arrested in the last 13 to 19 months for fishing in Pakistani waters (AFP, PTI, DT). Earlier this week, India released 39 Pakistani prisoners.  

 

Coming to a theater near you

 

Yesterday, Lahore opened the city's first 3-D movie theater with a red carpet showing of "Avatar," and the organizers noted that a 3-D cinema costs 10 times as much as a standard theater (ET). Reusable 3-D glasses will be for sale for eager moviegoers.

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As the spring fighting season begins in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force will employ a two-pronged approach in seeking to blunt the Taliban's expected offensive. While maintaining pressure on the Taliban in its southern strongholds in the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, ISAF will intensify special operations raids against the Taliban's top military and political commanders throughout the country.

Over the past year, ISAF has killed several thousand low-level fighters and hundreds of low and mid-level commanders during special operations raids and combat operations, but most of the Taliban's top military commanders have eluded death or capture.

The Taliban commanders listed below are among those who have been most targeted by ISAF and Afghan special operations teams. These commanders are crucial in organizing attacks, recruiting fighters, and providing the ideological underpinning to inspire Taliban fighters to continue despite intense ISAF and Afghan operations. As long as these commanders elude targeting by ISAF and special ops teams, they will continue to reorganize in Pakistan and maintain their fight against ISAF and Afghan forces.

South and southwest:

Abdul Qayyum Zakir

Zakir is the Taliban's top military commander and is closely linked to al Qaeda. Zakir also commands the Mullah Dadullah Mahaz, or Mullah Dadullah Front, a wing of the Taliban in the south that has adopted al Qaeda's tactics and ideology. The Mullah Dadullah Mahaz has been behind the recent spate of suicide assaults and attacks against Afghan and ISAF forces, the Afghan government, and civilians. Zakir and other top Taliban leaders are known to operate from the Pakistani city of Quetta as well from as the border city of Chaman in Baluchistan.

Hafiz Abdul Majeed

Majeed is the current leader of the Quetta Regional Military Shura, one of the Taliban's four regional military councils. Maeed is tasked with reorganizing the Taliban in the south in the wake of major ISAF and Afghan offensives in Helmand and Kandahar. He previously served as the Taliban's intelligence chief.

Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim

Khadim is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was released by the Afghan government in 2007. Prior to his capture in 2001, Khadim led the Taliban's mobile shock troops which were deployed in hotspots throughout the country. He is currently the Taliban's shadow governor in Uruzgan province.

Mullah Hayatullah Khan

Khan is the Taliban's military commander in Farah province. He is closely linked with al Qaeda, runs suicide training camps, and also serves as a spokesman for the Taliban.

Southeast:

Sirajuddin Haqqani

Siraj is the leader of the Miramshah Regional Military Shura, one of the Taliban's four regional military councils, and he commands the Haqqani Network. He is also the Taliban's regional governor for the provinces of Paktika, Paktia, and Khost. Siraj is close to top al Qaeda leaders and is a member of al Qaeda's Shura Majlis, or executive council. In March 2008, the US added Siraj to the list of specially designated global terrorists, and in March 2009 put out a bounty of $5 million for information leading to his capture.

Mullah Sangeen Zadran

Sangeen is Siraj Haqqani's top lieutenant. He is the Taliban's shadow governor for Paktika province and also commands forces outside of Paktika. He is considered one of the most dangerous operational commanders in eastern Afghanistan, and has organized multiple assaults on US and Afghan combat outposts in the region. In the summer of 2009, Sangeen took credit for the kidnapping of a US soldier who apparently stepped away from his post at a combat outpost in Paktika on June 30, 2009. The soldier is still in Sangeen's custody, and is thought to be held in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan.

Jan Baz Zadran

Jan Baz Zadran is a top aide to Siraj Haqqani. He serves as the Haqqani Network's logistical and financial coordinator, and also acquires weapons and ammunition for the network.

Khalil al Rahman Haqqani

Khalil is a brother of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the patriarch of the Haqqani Network, and an uncle of Siraj Haqqani. Khalil has served as a key fundraiser, financier, and operational commander for the Haqqani Network. The US added Khalil to the list of specially designated global terrorists in February 2011.

Badruddin Haqqani

Badruddin is one of Siraj Haqqani''s brothers. He serves as a senior military commander in the Haqqani Network.

East:

Mullah Abdul Kabir

Kabir is the leader of the the Peshawar Regional Military Council, which runs operations in the Afghan east, northeast, and north. He was captured by Pakistani intelligence in February 2010 but released shortly afterward. He served as the Taliban's former shadow governor for the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar; during the Taliban's reign, he was the governor of Nangarhar.

Anwar ul Haq Mujahid

Mujadid is the commander of the Tora Bora Military Front, a Taliban subgroup based in Nangarhar province. His father, Maulvi Mohammed Yunis Khalis, was instrumental in welcoming Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan after al Qaeda was ejected from Sudan in 1996. Pakistani intelligence officials are said to have detained Mujahid in Peshawar in June 2009, but it was rumored that he was released sometime in 2010.

North and northeast:

Qari Zia Rahman

ISAF has described Qari Zia Rahman as a "dual-hatted Taliban and al Qaeda commander" who leads operations in the northeastern provinces of Kunar and Nuristan. He also heads forces in the Pakistani tribal agencies of Bajaur and Mohmand. Special operations forces have been actively hunting "QZR" for the past year.

Dost Mohammed

Dost is the Taliban's commander in Nuristan province and a close ally with al Qaeda. He organized and led the assault on a US combat outpost in which the base was nearly overrun. Dost is featured prominently on his Tora Bora website, where he is seen carrying out operations and inspecting US military bases that were abandoned in 2009.

Mullah Munibullah

Munibullah is the Taliban's military commander for Nuristan province. He has been instrumental in conducting attacks in the province, as well as in taking control of districts from Afghan forces.

Qabir Bashir Haqqani

The Taliban's military commander in Kunduz province; he has been responsible for organizing the takeover of multiple districts in the northern province. He is closely linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

Center:

Dawood

Dawood, or Daud, is a senior leader in the Haqqani Network who serves as the Taliban's shadow governor for Kabul. He is the co-leader of the so-called Kabul Attack Network, which seeks to strike at Afghan and ISAF forces in and around the Afghan capital. The Kabul Attack Network is made up of fighters from the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, and cooperates with terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and al Qaeda. Top Afghan intelligence officials have linked the Kabul Attack Network to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate as well. The network's tentacles extend outward from Kabul into the surrounding provinces of Logar, Wardak, Nangarhar, Kapisa, Ghazni, and Zabul, and also far north into Kunduz.

Taj Mir Jawad

Jawad, along with Daud, leads the Kabul Attack Network. He is also a senior Taliban propaganda and is believed to be one of the personalities behind Zabibullah Mujahid, the "spokesman" for the Taliban who publishes at Voice of Jihad. ISAF targeted Taj Mir Jawad's personal network in Logar province in early April 2011.

Anwar Dangar

Dangar is a senior Taliban commander who directs operations in Kabul, Kapisa, Parwan, and Wardak provinces. He is a top commander in the Kabul Attack Network.

Qari Baryal

Baryal is a senior Taliban commander in Kapisa province, just north of Kabul. Baryal has been instrumental in carving out Taliban safe havens in Kapisa. In 2008, he directed an ambush that killed 10 French soldiers.

Propaganda:

Amir Khan Muqtaddi

Muqtaddi is the director of of the Taliban's media operations. He is believed to manage the Voice of Jihad, the Taliban's online propaganda machine that cranks out dozens of press releases daily. Voice of Jihad is published in English, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Pashtu.

For more information on the leadership of the Taliban in Afghanistan, see LWJ report, The Afghan Taliban's top leaders.