I used to think that with the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and with the change of heart on the part of General Musharraf, the situation in Afghanistan was getting dramatically better. But in the last two months, the picture seems to have worsened. It may be the case that significant bets have been placed on the scenario that NATO forces will fail, that Hamid Karzai will be gone and that the Taliban will be back in Afghanistan:
- Elizabeth Rubin has a great two-part article in The New York Times: Part 1 (pdf), Part 2 (pdf).
- The Taliban, regrouped and rearmed by Peter Bergen, from The Washington Post.
Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation has a good `backgrounder' on 26 October, titled Denying terrorists safe haven in Pakistan, which puts these issues together and tries to think about how this can play out in coming years.
And while I'm on this gloomy subject, I must point you to Noah Feldman, who has a marvellous article in The New York Times Magazine titled Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age, which tries to think through nuclear proliferation in a world of suicide bombing.
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