Afghanistan Archive

The results of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections provide a genuine opportunity for Pakistan and the United States to rebalance their relationship. For Pakistan, they are a chance to re-establish representative government. For the United States, they are a chance to demonstrate support for Pakistan’s democratic institutions. And for both countries, they are an opportunity to initiate a much healthier long-term relationship. Despite his recent appeals to European and American audiences for support, the Musharraf era is over. President Pervez Musharraf once could claim to rule Pakistan with the support of the public, the Army and the Americans, but not anymore. His […]

For months, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has had only limited success in generating greater contributions for NATO’s military operations in Afghanistan by appealing directly to European governments. As a result, Gates has now decided to pursue the risky strategy of appealing directly to their skeptical publics for support. The Afghan war dominated the two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania. The government of Canada had provoked a mini crisis by warning beforehand that that it would withdraw its forces from the insurgent-prone province of Kandahar next January unless other NATO countries agreed to send at least […]

What looked like another bad day Feb. 7 for NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan ended with a hopeful development. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates addressed his fellow defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania, with a request he had made many times over the past six months. He again asked allies to increase the number of troops in the country’s south in preparation for the expected spring Taliban offensive and to shore up beleaguered forces from Canada, Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Once again, it appeared NATO allies would demur. Some even had the […]

WASHINGTON – Despite little evidence that a massive program of aerial coca crop fumigation has worked in Colombia, and despite serious reservations by the Pentagon and by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the U.S. State Department, backed by the White House, is quietly pushing the expansion of aerial poppy eradication into Afghanistan as a way to fight the Taliban. Soon Afghanistan, which produces 92 percent of the world’s opium and 80 percent of the world’s heroin, may be the target of a program of Plan Colombia-style aerial crop eradication. With the Afghan war entering a tenuous new phase, the stakes are […]