Worldfocus interviews the Middle East Institute’s Marvin Weinbaum onwhat the Taliban’s Monday attack on a World Food Program office inIslamabad means for U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and for U.S. andPakistani strategy against the Taliban.
Not long after the so-called “civilian surge” was announced as part of the troop buildup in Afghanistan, a veteran State Department foreign service officer I spoke with posed a simple question: “Where are they going to come from?” He had recently returned from a year serving on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan and was grappling with the lack of civilian expertise that he said was so desperately needed for the state-building tasks there. “Is the new Secretary of Agriculture going to volunteer staff? The Secretary of the Treasury?” He suspected not. The diplomat’s insights get at a central challenge [...]
On the morning of June 9, 2008, U.S. drug enforcement agents alongside NATO military personnel and Afghan commandos raided a suspected drug weigh-station in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province near the border with Pakistan. Code-named Operation Albatross, the counternarcotics mission was the result of a tip from a government official in Kandahar and led to a seizure of mind-blowing proportions: 262 metric tons of dried hashish, equivalent in size to 30 London-style double-decker buses. The raid was the world’s largest drug seizure ever conducted by law enforcement authorities. But there is little reason to celebrate. Afghanistan’s narcotics industry has become a [...]
