Pakistan

Washington DC -- New America Foundation Schwartz Fellow and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs today on, "Afghanistan and Pakistan: Understanding a Complex Threat Environment."

Two years ago, Pervez Musharraf, who was then Pakistan’s President and Army chief, summoned his most senior generals and two Foreign Ministry officials to a series of meetings at his military office in Rawalpindi. There, they reviewed the progress of a secret, sensitive negotiation with India, known to its participants as “the back channel.” For several years, special envoys from Pakistan and India had been holding talks in hotel rooms in Bangkok, Dubai, and London. Musharraf and Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, had encouraged the negotiators to seek what

After eight years of a White House that often seemed blinkered by the threats posed by Pakistan, the Obama administration seems to grasp the severity of the myriad crises affecting the South Asian state. The media has followed suit and increased its presence and reporting, a trend confirmed by CNN’s decision to set up a bureau in Islamabad last year.

Journalist Steve Coll says that India and Pakistan held secret talks over the disputed region of Kashmir in 2006, but that tentative plans for peace have since been abandoned due in part to the political decline ...

The move “represents a big step backward” for the government which had “pledged to roll back” such regulations in Pakistan, said Parag Khanna, ...

It is certain that as one of its first actions, President Barack Obama's administration will approve a military "surge" in Afghanistan come the spring. The question that needs to be decided is: a surge for what? On the answer will depend in large part the success or failure of the administration in the "war on terror" as a whole.

Parag Khanna, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining global Competition ...

I hope with all my heart that most of what I am going to write in this article will prove mistaken. President Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and of Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (and de facto American broker for the Kashmir issue), are both in themselves very positive moves. The Bush administration’s neglect of these two conflicts was among its more disgraceful foreign-policy omissions. The appointment of such senior, respected and impressive

For Barack Obama, Iraq is the bad war and Afghanistan the good war. The president-elect has promised to cut back our involvement in the former and wage the latter with vigor, committing more troops and money. Paradoxically, Obama's solution for Afghanistan could worsen its problems.