Pakistan

During the 1980s covert campaign against the Soviets, Pakistan's General Zia ul-Haq told CIA Director William Casey that being an ally of the United States was like living on the banks of a major river—"The soil is wonderfully fertile, but every four or eight years the river changes course and you may find yourself alone in the desert." Since then, Pakistan has remained cognizant of Zia's warning and insulated itself from fully allying with the United States.

Back in May, Michael Kinsley, holding the newly redesigned issue of Newsweek in hand, weighed the future of the newsmagazine. Guess what? He wasn't particularly impressed. "Whenever they have an existential crisis—and this is not the first—they always make the wrong choice," he wrote in The New Republic. But putting aside Newsweek's innovative streak (or lack thereof), their coverage of Pakistan is pretty darn good.

Starting today, Foreign Policy magazine and the New America Foundation are launching The AfPak Channel, a special project taking readers inside the war for South Asia. The site features daily news reports, original features, blogging, and analysis from prominent journalists and experts from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the world. It's available on

... According to Katherine Tiedemann, a policy analyst on counter-terrorism strategy at the New American Foundation think-tank in Washington, part of the reason for this was that al-Qaeda had retreated to urban compounds to make it more difficult for armed drones to attack them. ... Original Article

Analyst Parag Khanna cautions, though, that "this could prove to be a premature celebration," adding that other leaders may emerge in Mehsud's place, raising a new problem for Pakistani and U.S. intelligence. "When you kill one important leader, you scatter [the militants], and your intelligence game has to start all over again," says Khanna, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Earlier this summer, the Taliban released a DVD that suggested Baitullah Mehsud was losing his mojo. Unlike other propaganda videos, which show Taliban cadres conducting real ambushes in Afghanistan or firing rockets in the heavily forested hills along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, this one made me think that the Bad News Bears had landed in South Waziristan. A couple dozen guys jogged in circles, ran through some military drills, and fired their Kalashnikovs into the dirt, before forming a circle and dancing a traditional Pashtun jig.

A Pakistani official with knowledge of intelligence matters told CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen that the strike in Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area was based on "solid intel." And following the attack, "the Mehsud network has gone quiet as if in shock," the official said.

U.S. terrorism experts agree that al Qaeda has suffered setbacks, at least in some parts of the world. Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, said the "net effect of the drone attacks" along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, "has been devastating to their planning and training." Polling data also show a loss of public support for al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, Bergen said.

On July 23 Seth Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, joined the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen, senior fellow and co-director of the New America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, to discuss Afghanistan and Jones' recently published book, In The Graveyard of Empires.  

There's something very poignant about the photographs of a beaming Hillary Clinton in India. Having fractured her elbow last month, the secretary of State has been undergoing a grueling regime of physical therapy, and until recently she was wearing a stylish sling. One has to assume that Clinton is still in pain, yet she's managed to put on a valiant show for the Indian throngs who've greeted her. When Clinton first visited India in 1995, she was festooned with garlands at every stop. As a country… more