Winning the Afghanistan War in Pakistan

Not too long after some 15,000 U.S., British, and Afghan national forces launched the largest attack on Taliban forces since President Obama signed orders to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, news broke of the arrest of the second most senior Afghan Taliban commander since 2001, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.



According to officials, he was seized in a secret raid in Pakistan several days ago by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence forces. His capture reflects a markedly changed attitude by Pakistani intelligence toward an insurgent force that the country had allowed to operate with relative impunity for the past eight years.

Stunned by the success of this operation, however, a Taliban spokesman denied reports of Mullah Baradar's capture, saying he was still in Afghanistan, actively organizing the group's military and political activities.

"Mullah Baradar has not been arrested, he is in Afghanistan, I don’t know who spread the rumor, but it’s absolutely false,” Qari Mohammed Yousef, a spokesman for the Taliban, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani media's response to the arrest of Mullah Baradar has been surprisingly muted.

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9/11: Good War, Bad War, No War

Eight years have passed since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. government is still waiting to pay the $25 million reward it has offered to anyone who provides information leading to Osama bin Laden's capture.

Meanwhile, almost eight years have passed since the U.S. has launched Operation Enduring Freedom, less than a month after the attacks of 9/11, in order to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that harbored the group. It was supposed to be a swift and decisive victory until the U.S. botched an effort to nab bin Laden in late 2001 in Afghanistan's Tora Bora region. His trail has since gone cold, and everything has gone wrong.



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Yemen: A Powder Keg Ready To Explode

With the recent obsession about the Iranian "Velvet Revolution," the ongoing coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, news from a country like Yemen seldom makes headlines in Western media, especially in the U.S. In fact, even for reporters savvy in Yemeni politics and fluent in Arabic, accurate and unfiltered news about what's really going on inside Yemen is hard to unearth. This is due to the security apparatus of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which to a large extent has made it difficult for independent media outlets to access troubled areas like Abyan, east Aden and Sa'ada, in northern Yemen.

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Pakistan: Who's To Blame?

Speaking at the National Assembly, Pakistan's Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani said that the military could stop the Taliban and that the country's nuclear weapons were safe.
"Does this parliament not have moral courage to stop them?" he asked.
Pakistan is on a precipice. The Swat Valley, once called the Switzerland of Pakistan for its great natural beauty, is now the Taliban's battle ground for Islamic fundamentalism where harsh Islamic (shari'a) law is imposed on the population and fully sanctioned by the Pakistani government. In recent days, armed Taliban fighters have set up checkpoints and occupied mosques in the Buner region just 60 miles from Islamabad, declaring Islamic law before retreating after striking a deal with the government.
Will Pakistan eventually fall to the Taliban?

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