Pakistan

Thank you for this opportunity to testify about the effects of U.S. policy in Afghanistan on the stability and political evolution of Pakistan.

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The talks got little notice in the US media until a detailed article by South Asia expert Steve Coll in the New Yorker in March 2009. ...

Executive Summary

The White House's list of about 50 metrics to evaluate progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which it assembled to calm rising fears in Congress and the public about the Obama administration's increasingly embattled war strategy, is up on ForeignPolicy.com (with a more legible version here). The draft list, dated Sept. 16, 2009 and delivered to a closed congressional

Eight years after September 11, the "war on terror" has gone the way of the dodo. And President Obama talks instead about a war against al Qaeda and its allies.

What, then, of al Qaeda's enigmatic leader, Osama bin Laden, who has vanished like a wisp of smoke? And does he even matter now?

If the southern Afghan province of Helmand were a country it would be the world's leading producer of opium and its derivative, heroin. More than half the world's heroin originates here--much of it destined for the veins of junkies living in Europe.

In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials and Afghan police raided the office of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand, and found nine tons of opium in his office. He is no longer the governor.

In the case of freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, it was not Islamic extremists who came for him on a cold, rainy night. It was the Pakistani police who threw ... and more »

A young American (Nicholas Schmidle) goes to Pakistan to launch his journalism career. Twenty-two months later he's expelled from the country. A first-person account of the power and appeal of the Taliban, the ideological cross-currents in Pakistan, and life in one of the world's most dangerous places. ... Original Audio