Center for a New American Security

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.

Any hopes Londonstani had that Pakistan would be trouble-free while Ms Henley-on-Thames made a slightly nervous visit didn’t last long… about 7 hours to be exact.

The day Ms HT arrived at Islamabad International Airport, two grenade attacks on schools in Quetta wounded 17 people. Considering that the attack took a relatively minor toll, it seemed a military officer’s statement (as reported by the local press) that Taliban resistance was dying down reflected a bottoming out of Taliban violent capabilities in general.

They know ours. Now we have theirs.

It's probably not even worth counting how many times one side of a conflict has portrayed the increasing violence of its foes as a "last gasp". The Taliban in Afghanistan has been gasping since about 2005, and the surge in attacks about a year after the invasion of Iraq was a last gasp right to the point militants butchered themselves to the very edge of a civil war. Londonstani's no expert on military history, but if semi-remembered school lessons serve him right, Goebbels was going on about the allies gasping their last as they marched in his direction.