Center for a New American Security

Ghaith Abdul Ahad breathes a breath of minty fresh air into the fetid Wikileaks debate. It was kind of obviously really; everyone was arguing about Pakistan's links to the Taliban, the Pakistanis denied it, the Pakistani media complained, the British PM slapped Pakistan around publicly in India, the Americans said it was OK, the Pakistanis were behaving much better now. The only people who didn't get a say in it all were the Taliban. Until Ghaith went and asked them.

Just as we (by this I mean myself mainly) were wondering why the hell Pakistani militants had killed Khalid Khawaja, a man with serious militant sympathies and connections of his own, Nicholas Schmidle steps in to explain in the New Republic.

Patrick Cockburn has great report from Bajaur in today's Independent. The access comes about as a result of a PR trip organised by the Pakistani military but Cockburn takes that into account in his analysis.

We have touched in this blog on developments that seem to suggest the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups have started working ever-more closely together.

A just-published news report has prodded Londonstani out of a work-enduced coma:

The Christian Science Monitor reports today (24th) that the Pakistani authorities have moved against the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Pakistan (dubbed the Quetta Shura)

Since ISAF and the Pakistani forces are not doing so well at countering the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Tehreek-e-Taliban in Pakistan, it seems the two organisations have decided to compete with each other instead.

Londonstani is still processing the news that the suicide bomber who killed the CIA officers in Khost was a Jordanian double agent working for the Pakistani Taliban.

Apart from reading like the backcover of a Fredrick Forsyth novel, this illustrates the point of the CNAS report AM posted in the previous entry.

On December 4, four militants stormed a mosque used extensively by Pakistan Army personnel and killed 35 people who had gathered for Friday prayers. Among the victims were 17 children. Security forces battled the militants for an hour before three blew themselves up. The attack marked a return to the sort of well-executed, multi-pronged tactics that militants have used against the army on previous occasions. But the choice of target - Muslims at prayer - forced a response from the country's religious establishment.

Is there really a difference between the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan? The question divides the Pakistani and American governments as well as analysts and observers, including those that post comments on this blog.

Events in and concerning Pakistan over the past couple of days have brought this question into sharper focus.

There's little news coming out from independent sources about the Pakistani army's campaign in Waziristan. The suspicion amongst the international journalists and analysts is that the Pakistani army doesn't have the capacity to take out militants without causing serious collateral damage to civilians, and so the result of the present action will be further militancy in the future.