Pakistan

The Taliban’s siege in the Swat Valley presents a major opportunity for Pakistani President Asif Zardari, one he’s taken an important first step toward grasping, but one that can also slip away quite easily.

The Swat has been pounded since last week by 15,000 Pakistani troops beating back Taliban fighters. Heavily armed helicopters, mortars and jets have bombarded the lush terrain, inflicting 700 Taliban casualties, according to the state’s interior minister, and displacing 400,000 people.

Join us as journalist Nick Schmidle, who was deported from Pakistan in January 2008 after writing a controversial New York Times Magazine article entitled

On the late afternoon of Wednesday April 29, I went to interview a local leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in Karachi, and spent a couple of hours at their headquarters. From there, I went on to Zeinab market to look for presents for my family, and spent another couple of hours haggling over textiles and looking for a new suitcase. Then back to my hotel, where I had a shower and a bite to eat, called my wife, and contemplated… more

Steve Coll of the New Yorker and NBC's Andrea Mitchell join NBC's David Gregory to discuss the steps Pakistan and Afghanistan are taking to fight the Taliban and bring peace to the troubled area. Link to Transcript

 

Gen. David Petraeus, head of the United States Central Command, has stated that the next two weeks are crucial to Pakistan’s survival, while David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency expert, has said that the country could collapse within six months. General Kiyani, Pakistan’s Army chief, could declare martial law imminently if his counter-offensives in the Swat region prove ineffective in stemming Taliban infiltration into the Punjab.

In To Live or to Perish Forever Nicholas Schmidle takes readers to Pakistan's rioting streets, to Taliban camps in the North-West Frontier Province, and on many surprising adventures as he provides a contemporary history of this country long riven by internal conflict. With the intimacy and good humor available only to the most fearless and open-eyed reporters, Schmidle narrates this turbulent period of Pakistan's recent history, a time when Americans began to realize that Pakistan's fate is inextricably linked with… more

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari relishes politics behind closed doors. But as his army continues to battle Taliban militants in northwest Pakistan with fighter jets, air-dropped commandos, and helicopter gunships, Zardari has been keeping an exceptionally low profile.

In the past few weeks as the Pakistani Taliban have marched ever closer to the capital, Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sounded the alarm about the threat posed by the militants, who she said in congressional testimony pose "a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world."

Some media commentators have even warned that the populous, nuclear-armed state might fall into the hands of the religious zealots.