Baitullah Mehsud is dead. Really dead. Blubber boy was taken out by a kid in Nevada with a joystick. Good stuff. The Mehsud network has been weakened by a combination of Pakistani military operations, an aggressive propaganda campaign, and U.S. drone attacks. Its strategic space has been remarkably narrowed, despite newly restored alliances with neighboring [...]

Departing Quetta today, on my flight was none other than Ali Ahmed Kurd, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and firebrand lawyers’ movement leader. He was sitting two seats ahead of me, but was later escorted to the cockpit, where he stayed till the end of the flight.  It was the pilot and flight [...]

Terrorists struck an office of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and a police station in central Lahore this morning, killing at least 22 persons and injuring over 200.  At least thirteen of the dead are police officers, reports GEO News. Reports of the attacks’ details are conflicting.  Several officials have described the attack as a [...]

Book Review: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda By Gretchen Peters Thomas Dunne Books, 2009 (320 pages) Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari asked where is the Taliban getting its funding from. For a partial answer, he need not look further than in the bloodshot eyes of one [...]

Why do old white men have a fetish for drawing and redrawing the maps of countries in which they do not live? Perhaps — and I’m being facetious and ironic — it stems from their radicalization as youths when they play boardgames, such as Risk, and are indoctrinated with a sense of God-like mastery and [...]

Recent reporting, including the current concern in the Western press for the nearly million internally displaced persons in Pakistan, has made me return occasionally to my November 2008 post, “Toward the Iraqization of Pakistan?” Six months ago, I warned of: Pakistan’s IDPs tripling in number, rising ethnic tensions in Karachi, the consolidation of anti-Pakistan militant [...]