'Saving Face' Wins Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject

Well, I hadn't heard of this one (and I'm moved by this), so I checked online for some information. There's a page at Wikipedia, and the Los Angeles Times reports, "Oscars 2012: 'Saving Face' wins for documentary short."

Two U.S. Military Officers Shot and Killed in Kabul

At Los Angeles Times, "2 Americans killed in Afghanistan in new Koran-burning violence," and Blazing Cat Fur, "Two U.S. advisers killed by Westerner at Afghan Interior Ministry: officials (VIDEO)."

And at Telegraph UK, "Two senior American soldiers shot dead in Kabul":

Two Americans, believed to be senior US army officers, were shot dead by a gunman on Saturday in a secure area deep inside one of the most high-security buildings in Afghanistan.

The shootings came after five days of protests against the burning of copies of the Muslim holy book at an American base in Afghanistan.

A Taliban spokesman immediately claimed responsibility for the shootings. A Nato source said an "aggressive search" was underway for the gunman, who was believed to be Afghan.

The two officers, a colonel and a major, were killed inside the interior ministry in Kabul, where they had been advisers working with Afghan counterparts.

Continue reading.

And at USA Today, "U.S. condemns deadly attack on Americans in Afghanistan."

Drone Strike Video

Not a lot of details, but pretty wicked.

Via Weasel Zippers:

Hellfire Missile Takes Out Taliban Jihadist

Via Weasel Zippers:

And from yesterday, "The Taliban Go Mainstream: Afghanistan Terror-Sponsors Seek 'Softer Side' to Medieval Political Regime."

The Taliban Go Mainstream: Afghanistan Terror-Sponsors Seek 'Softer Side' to Medieval Political Regime

Well, you gotta give it to the Obama administration.

They got Bin Laden so now it's time to go easy on the Taliban, the medieval Islamist terror-sponsor who executes teenage girls for escaping arranged marriages and who is now looking to build deeper alliances with Pakistani militants to fight U.S. forces. But hey, it's a new day. Barack Obama's on the way!

At Wall Street Journal, "Emboldened Taliban Try to Sell Softer Image":

KABUL — When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, Maulvi Qalamuddin headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice, the religious police that shut down girls' schools, beat up men with insufficiently long beards and arrested those in possession of music or video tapes.

Nowadays, the 60-year-old Taliban cleric is on a different mission: He is overseeing a network of schools that teach reading, writing and math to thousands of girls in his home province of Logar, an insurgent hotbed just south of Kabul.

"Education for women is just as necessary as education for men," Mr. Qalamuddin thunders. "In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning."

The Taliban's restrictions on women and schooling, combined with support for al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, turned the group into an international pariah even before the September 2001 attacks on America. Now, as the U.S. pulls out its troops and tries to negotiate a peace settlement with the insurgents, the international community grapples with a crucial question: If returned to power, will the Taliban behave any more responsibly this time around?

In recent public statements, the Taliban have made an effort to appear a more moderate force, promising peaceful relations with neighboring countries and respect for human rights. The big unknown is whether this new rhetoric represents a meaningful transformation—or is merely designed to sugarcoat the Taliban's real aims.

"One might believe that they would change over time," says U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the day-to-day commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. "You see some messages that they might open their thinking a bit about women, a woman's place in society. But I don't know that I would bet on it."

U.S. and Taliban representatives have met over the past several months, trying to establish a dialogue that could end America's longest foreign war. In a tangible sign of progress in early January, the Taliban dropped their insistence that all foreign troops must leave Afghanistan before any peace talks begin and agreed to set up a representative office in Qatar to facilitate future negotiations. To create trust in these talks, the U.S. is considering transferring to Qatari custody five senior Taliban officials incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Despite a new willingness to negotiate with the U.S., however, the Taliban's leadership still believes it can reach its war aim of seizing Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan after most foreign forces withdraw in 2014, American military commanders agree.

Continue reading.

For some reason optimism eludes me here.

But the drumbeat for precipitous withdrawal continues on the left, and even some on the mainstream right think we should pull out --- because the Obama administration's prosecution of the war has endangered American lives.

Another reason to vote Republican in the fall, no matter who wins the nomination. We need to repair American foreign policy and commit to completing the gains in international security that the Bush administration had secured before the Corrupt-o-crats took office. Sheesh.

Militants Attack Police Station in Northwest Pakistan Town of Dera Ismail Khan

At Telegraph UK, "Militants storm police station in northwest Pakistan."

Also from Agence France-Presse, "Pakistan quells militant attack, eight killed: Official":

 Pakistani security forces on Saturday quelled a militant attack on a police station in which eight people were killed including four suicide bombers, one police and three civilians, police said.

The attackers targeted the main police station in Dera Ismail Khan city near the lawless tribal region, provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told AFP.

Three suicide bombers detonated themselves and one was shot dead by the army, police chief of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Akbar Hoti told AFP.

"Army and police units have entered the police station and a search operation is over," he said after an operation lasting over two hours.

"We have recovered bodies of four militants, they were all wearing suicide vests," he said.

One police official and three civilians were also killed in the operation, he said adding that eight others including a policeman were wounded.

"We are checking the identity of the civilian casualties to ascertain if they included any militants," he said.

Interior minister Rehman Malik blamed Taliban militants for the attack. "Terrorists attacked security forces," he told reporters.

Police spokesman Mohammad Hanif said earlier police shot dead two militants and at least one other blew himself up.

He said he believed about half a dozen militants stormed the station located in a sensitive area housing government offices, district courts and lawyers chambers.

They hurled hand grenades and opened fire on the office of the district police chief, he said. The police chief was unhurt, he added.

Authorities summoned troops and commandos ringed the area, police said.

Pakistani Death Squads Hunt Down Suspected Drone Informants in North Waziristan

At Los Angeles Times, "Pakistani death squads go after informants to U.S. drone program."

The reprisals are dreadful. But the news is working to fuel the radical left's antiwar agitation on Afghanistan, and the press reporting hasn't been particularly objective on these topics. See Telegraph UK, "Pakistani girl brought to US for treatment 'disfigured by her own nation's military'." And at Long War Journal, "CNN makes questionable claim that drone strike wounded Pakistani child."

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

Veena Malik Claims She Was Wearing Hotpants in Controversial FHM Nude Cover

Okay, bringing you the important news in comparative politics and international relations!

I saw this story previously at Foreign Policy, "Nude Veena Malik cover stuns Pakistani Twitterverse," and "The India subtext in the Veena Malik nude cover controversy."

Hey, even foreign policy specialists need some Rule 5 diversions.

But see London's Daily Mail, "'The stress added ten years to my age': FHM India's 'naked' covergirl claims she was threatened after claiming shoot was doctored."

Afghanistan Suicide Bombings Kill Dozens in Kabul

This reminds me of Iraq in 2006.

At Telegraph UK, "Fears Afghanistan is on verge of new sectarian war as 59 people killed in twin bomb attacks."

And at Wall Street Journal, "Attacks Point to New Afghan Conflict: Bombings of Shiite Worshippers in Two Cities Kill More Than 60 and Introduce Sectarian Strife Absent for a Decade."

Tuesday's massacre of Shiites brought to Afghanistan the sort of attack that has been perpetrated at Shiite mosques and religious processions in Iraq by al Qaeda and in Pakistan by the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

The Kabul bombing was especially shocking, even in a country experiencing an ever-growing number of gruesome attacks.

In Fog of War, Rift Widens Between U.S. and Pakistan

At New York Times":

WASHINGTON — The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers over the weekend reflected a fundamental truth about American-Pakistani relations when it comes to securing the unruly border with Afghanistan: the tactics of war can easily undercut the broader strategy that leaders of both countries say they share.

The murky details complicated matters even more, with Pakistani officials saying the attack on two Pakistani border posts was unprovoked and Afghan officials asserting that Afghan and American commandos called in airstrikes after coming under fire from Pakistani territory. NATO has promised an investigation.

The reaction inside Pakistan nonetheless followed a now-familiar pattern of anger and tit-for-tat retaliation. So did the American response of regret laced with frustration and suspicion. Each side’s actions reflected a deepening distrust that gets harder to repair with each clash.

The question now, as one senior American official put it on Sunday, is “what kind of resilience is left” in a relationship that has sunk to new lows time after time this year — with the arrest in January of a C.I.A. officer, Raymond Davis, the killing of Osama bin Laden in May and the deaths of so many Pakistani soldiers.

Airstrike Over Pakistan Inflames Regional Tensions

At Washington Post, "Dozens of Pakistani troops die in NATO attack," and New York Times, "NATO Strikes Kill Pakistani Forces, Raising Tensions."

And at Fox News, "Pakistan Tells U.S. to 'Vacate' Air Base as Border Strike Inflames Tensions."

Pakistan: The Ally From Hell

From the press office at The Atlantic:

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 4, 2011 -- An exclusive report on Pakistan, featured in the upcoming issues of The Atlantic and National Journal, paints a chilling picture of a U.S. ally even more treacherous than previously known. While it's no secret Pakistan is home to radical jihadists and a large nuclear arsenal, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and National Journal's Marc Ambinder reveal troubling new information about the extreme lengths the country is taking to hide its nuclear weapons from the U.S.—and about the secret plans the U.S. military has made to seize those weapons in the event of a crisis. Goldberg and Ambinder also provide fresh insight into the deeply strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship, one in which the two countries are more adversaries than allies.

This combined Atlantic/National Journal reporting effort, the product of dozens of interviews over the course of six months, marks the first time the two publications have collaborated on joint cover stories.

The Atlantic's report is available free online: "The Ally From Hell":

Much of the world, of course, is anxious about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and for good reason: Pakistan is an unstable and violent country located at the epicenter of global jihadism, and it has been the foremost supplier of nuclear technology to such rogue states as Iran and North Korea. It is perfectly sensible to believe that Pakistan might not be the safest place on Earth to warehouse 100 or more nuclear weapons. These weapons are stored on bases and in facilities spread across the country (possibly including one within several miles of Abbottabad, a city that, in addition to having hosted Osama bin Laden, is home to many partisans of the jihadist group Harakat-ul-Mujahideen). Western leaders have stated that a paramount goal of their counterterrorism efforts is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of jihadists.

“The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term, and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” President Obama said last year at an international nuclear-security meeting in Washington. Al-Qaeda, Obama said, is “trying to secure a nuclear weapon—a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using.”

Pakistan would be an obvious place for a jihadist organization to seek a nuclear weapon or fissile material: it is the only Muslim-majority state, out of the 50 or so in the world, to have successfully developed nuclear weapons; its central government is of limited competence and has serious trouble projecting its authority into many corners of its territory (on occasion it has difficulty maintaining order even in the country’s largest city, Karachi); Pakistan’s military and security services are infiltrated by an unknown number of jihadist sympathizers; and many jihadist organizations are headquartered there already.

Continue reading.

National Journal's report is by subscription only.

Taliban Shoot Down U.S. Copter in Afghanistan

At Los Angeles Times, "31 U.S. troops, 7 Afghans killed in Taliban attack on NATO helicopter."

In a rare event, Taliban insurgents shoot down a Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade near Kabul. It's the largest single-incident loss of military lives since the war's start.

And at New York Times, "31 Americans Killed as Taliban Shoot Down a Copter." (Via Memeorandum.)

Keep America Safe: 'More Risk'

Via Theo Spark:

Stratfor's Reva Bhalla on Yesterday's Mumbai Bombings

Reva Bhalla is interviewed at the Dylan Ratigan show. She's Director of Analysis at Stratfor. It's good:

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "Relief and worry after slaying of Hamid Karzai's half brother."

The Implosion of Counterinsurgency

At the video is the fascinating exchange where General Petraeus endorses torture in the case of the ticking time bomb. Keith Olbermann, whose "Countdown" program has been resurrected, smeared Petraeus on this in a recent segment, with quotes from other top officials who essentially impugn the general's reputation.

More video from the testimony at Gateway Pundit, "American Hero General David Petraeus: “I Disagree With Barack Obama… I’m No Quitter”."

Yeah. A hero. Not to Keith Olbermann.

Anyway, on the implosion of counterinsurgency, see National Journal, "Washington Losing Patience with Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan."

John Nagl is the kind of guy who brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wicked line in The Great Gatsby about people who succeed at such an early age that “everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” A star at West Point and a Rhodes scholar, the native Nebraskan was only 37 when he landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in January 2004. In that article, Nagl offered an inside-the-Sunni-Triangle tutorial on what he came to call “graduate-level war.” Nagl’s mantra: “We have to outthink the enemy, not just outfight him.” In an era when small but wily bands of nonuniformed insurgents could stymie America’s mighty military machine with stealthy guerrilla attacks and roadside bombs planted in the night, the U.S. had to figure out how to hunt down the bad guys and cut off their support from the local population. Nagl, after studying the British and French colonial experience, as well as America’s handling of the Vietnam War, helped to develop what has since become famous as U.S. “counterinsurgency doctrine,” or COIN. As his celebrity grew, Nagl proselytized about it everywhere, even on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

By the late 2000s, the precocious Army major had become part of a brain trust around America’s uber-general, David Petraeus, the commander who implemented the Iraq troop surge. Commissioned by Petraeus, Nagl helped to author the official counterinsurgency manual that has since reoriented American military doctrine, shifting the center of gravity from rough-and-ready conventional war fighters to cerebral specialists in irregular warfare and targeted response. After retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in early 2008—even though he seemed to be on the fast track to four-star fame—Nagl took over a little-known think tank, the Center for a New American Security, and turned it into what journalist Tara McKelvey called “counterinsurgency central in Washington.”

Brilliant and brash as ever at the advanced age of 45, Nagl delivers a sober endorsement of the military’s current COIN strategy in Afghanistan, which, because it was adapted from Iraq, is partly his brainchild. It is a strategy that many experts believe is not working—and the skeptics may now include President Obama himself. “I think any sane person would be disillusioned,” Nagl says over a lunch of mussels and mozzarella salad at Finemondo, a lushly decorated restaurant around the corner from his office. Even some of those around Petraeus (who is retiring from the military to run the CIA) are losing heart. But Nagl says that the Janus-faced core of COIN strategy—winning over the Afghan population with kindness, aid, and a multibillion-dollar policy to “clear, hold, and build” towns and villages while ruthlessly killing off insurgents—is just starting to succeed. He laments that the debate in Washington is dominated by critics who complain that the war is almost 10 years long and already more hopeless than Vietnam.

RTWT.

Yet another reason I'm unhappy with the president. Cut-and-run is one thing, but running when the tide is turning is another. George W. Bush refused to abandon Iraq, and that's when the consensus from all quarters was that the war was a "fiasco." We persevered in Iraq, and it's a stable emerging democracy today. In Afghanistan, I'm not confident we'll be able to say the same thing a fews years from now.

'The Crush at the Afghan Exits'

An editorial at the Wall Street Journal.

The NATO allies will follow Obama's move and cut-and-run from the deployment: "France to gradually pull troops from Afghanistan."

I noted previously that it's not the Afghans who're forcing us out. Domestic political calculations are driving policy, and I pray the region doesn't deteriorate into a million Mumbais, but that's asking a lot from the Man Upstairs.

Candidates Show G.O.P. Less United on Goals of War

At New York Times:

DERRY, N.H. — The hawkish consensus on national security that has dominated Republican foreign policy for the last decade is giving way to a more nuanced view, with some presidential candidates expressing a desire to withdraw from Afghanistan as quickly as possible and suggesting that the United States has overreached in Libya.

The shift, while incremental so far, appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world. A new debate over the costs and benefits of deploying the military reflects the length of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the difficulty of building functional governments and the financial burden at home in a time of extreme fiscal pressure.

I noticed this, and I wondered a bit about Michele Bachmann on foreign policy. She hardly sounds like a neocon, but I think that's good. We've been in Afghanistan for almost 10 years, and that's hard to sustain politically. Look for a lot of folks to declare victory and advocate a rapid drawdown.

Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants Who Assisted Bin Laden Operation

Via Astute Bloggers, "UNREAL BREAKING NEWS: PAKISTAN ARRESTS CIA'S INFORMANTS WHO AIDED ASSASSINATION OF BINLADEN."

And the link to the New York Times, "Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid."

Over the past several weeks the Pakistani military has been distancing itself from American intelligence and counterterrorism operations against militant groups in Pakistan. This has angered many in Washington who believe that Bin Laden’s death has shaken Al Qaeda and that there is now an opportunity to further weaken the terrorist organization with more raids and armed drone strikes.

But in recent months, dating approximately to when a C.I.A. contractor killed two Pakistanis on a street in the eastern city of Lahore in January, American officials said that Pakistani spies from the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI, have been generally unwilling to carry out surveillance operations for the C.I.A. The Pakistanis have also resisted granting visas allowing American intelligence officers to operate in Pakistan, and have threatened to put greater restrictions on the drone flights.

And follow the links for the whole thing.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Key Al Qaeda Operative in 1988 Embassy Bombings, Killed in Somalia

At Atlanta Journal Constitution:

NAIROBI, Kenya — The al-Qaida mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania was killed this week at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu by Somali forces who didn't immediately realize he was the most wanted man in East Africa, officials said Saturday.

The death of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed — a man who topped the FBI's most wanted list for nearly 13 years — is the third major strike in six weeks against the worldwide terror group that was headed by Osama bin Laden until his death last month.

Mohammed had a $5 million bounty on his head for allegedly planning the Aug. 7, 1998, embassy bombings. The blasts killed 224 people in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Most of the dead were Kenyans. Twelve Americans also died.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — who was on a visit to Tanzania on Saturday as Somali officials confirmed Mohammed's death — called the killing a "significant blow to al-Qaida, its extremist allies, and its operations in East Africa.

"It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere — Tanzanians, Kenyans, Somalis, and our own embassy personnel," Clinton said.

More at that link above, although I think the same lessons apply now that applied after the Abbottabad raid: Targeted killings don't kill the Al Qaeda organization. Depending on whom you talk to, global jihad constitutes an amorphous, multi-faceted terror network, with many alliances of convenience and substantial ties to state actors, such as Pakistan. There's lots of work to do in that sense. See, for example, Jayshree Bajoria, "Pakistan's New Generation of Terrorists."