Taliban, unhinged and isolated.

Taliban, unhinged and isolated.




The United States has stepped up its use of pilotless planes to strike at Qaeda targets along Pakistan's rugged border area, a measure that in the past drew protests from President Pervez Musharraf but now has his government's tacit approval. Since January, missiles reportedly fired from CIA operated Predator drones have hit at least three suspected hideouts of Islamic militants, including a strike last Sunday on a house in a South Waziristan village called Toog.

The surge began after visits to Pakistan at the beginning of the year by senior U.S. officials, including intelligence czar Mike McConnell, CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden and Adm. William Fallon, who recently resigned as commander of the U.S. forces in the region. Some news reports said at the time that Musharraf had "rebuffed" U.S. proposals to step up combat operations inside Pakistan. But U.S. officials and Pakistani sources, who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive information, said the recent wave of Predator attacks are at least partly the result of understandings the high-level visitors reached with Musharraf and other top Pakistanis, giving the United States virtually unrestricted authority to hit targets in the border areas.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/128617

http://snipurl.com/22hk2

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The Taliban leadership in southern Afghanistan is passing into the hands of younger, more extreme insurgents as the relentless targeting of traditional commanders by British forces takes its toll.

'Hamid Karzai's diplomat expulsion move halted efforts to split Taliban' In a week spent in Helmand province, The Daily Telegraph has found widespread evidence that special forces operations are degrading the Taliban's leadership and its ability to co-ordinate operations. Police guard a Taliban fighter captured in Zabol province. Officials say 200 Taliban commanders were killed last year But there are also indications of increasing radicalisation within the Taliban as more extreme fighters, many of them al-Qa'eda-linked foreign militants, fill the gaps left when experienced Taliban leaders are killed. Western military officials say privately that approximately 200 medium and high-level Taliban commanders were killed countrywide in targeted bombings or assassinations by American and British special forces last year, and a further 100 captured. Using local intermediaries, the Telegraph was able to meet two mid-level Taliban commanders in the provincial capital Lashkargar. Both claimed that the Taliban was increasingly recruited from outside Helmand and that its hierarchies were becoming far less clear cut.

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Binys begging:

New vector in GWOT

Biny has trachea

GWOT on the right track degration of terrorists C2, and cadre leaving an inexperienced shell

G

Even local Afghans come up short in Taliban dealings

Zabul elders attempt to negotiate a separate peace, finds orders from terrorist leadership in Pakistan are 'to burn reconstruction projects'

QALAT, Afghanistan -- Faced with Taliban militants burning down their schools and killing their people, the elders of this impoverished province took a drastic step. They went behind the backs of the American military and their own government to negotiate with the Taliban.

But Haji Hashem, chairman of Zabul provincial council, learned an important lesson when he and other leaders sat down with Taliban commanders, one he was reminded of Monday after weekend carnage left more that three dozen Taliban dead: negotiating with the insurgents simply is not a viable option.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=396613

http://snipurl.com/22iwy
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