ATTACKS CONTINUE IN PAKISTAN – Foreign Policy blog’s Daily Brief has a rundown of the latest violence in Pakistan.
Oct 152009
Oct 092009
Can U.S. forces succeed in a land long known as the “graveyard of empires”? FRONTLINE‘s season premiere, Obama’s War, airing October 13, 2009 on PBS, takes a look at the administration’s new counterinsurgency plan for Afghanistan and its neighbor, Pakistan, where US troops are not allowed. To see the new strategy at work, FRONTLINE embedded with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment in Afghanistan’s violent Helmand province. Since the Marines’ arrival in July, Helmand has become the most lethal battlefield in Afghanistan. But FRONTLINE found the Marines trying to act as armed diplomats, attempting to build the necessary trust for badly needed economic development. Continue reading »
A professor from the University of California, Los Angeles thinks he has a pretty good idea. UCLA geography Professor Thomas Gillespie uses a technique that tracks endangered species to narrow down the spot where the terrorist is most likely hiding. Here’s the abstract from the MIT International Review PDF:
One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama bin Laden? We use biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction (distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics) and remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird) over three spatial scales (global, regional, local) to identify where bin Laden is most probably currently located. We believe that our work involves the first scientific approach to establishing his current location. The methods are repeatable and can be updated with new information obtained from the US intelligence community.
This region of Afghanistan is south of Tora Bora, the mountain fortress where bin Laden’s well-trained fighters made a stand against American forces in 2001. On December 16, 2001, despite a U.S. and Afghan assualt, Osama bin Laden escaped from the hideout across the border into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Gillespie’s location is close to the border with Kurram Agency, which is part of the FATA, and not far from a number of U.S. missile strikes on suspected terrorists in North Waziristan. (A good, interactive map the the region is here.)
For anyone interested in trying to collect the reward for bin Laden, Gillespie goes as far as identifying three buildings in Parachinar where bin Laden and his support structure could be hiding. Good luck!
- Scott
The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement asking the government of Pakistan to better protect journalists covering the growing war against militancy in the South Asian nation.
“There is growing concern for the safety of journalists in Pakistan amid a surge in attacks apparently by militant groups who cannot abide critical reporting. President Asif Ali Zardari must act swiftly to assert the government’s authority and reverse this trend,” said Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator.
The statement from CPJ comes a day after Imtiaz Alam, the secretary general of the South Asia Free Media Association (SAMFA), a regional press freedom group, was attacked by four men wielding hockey sticks late last night near his home in the eastern city of Lahore.
Earlier in the week, Musa Khan Khel, a journalist with Geo TV, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Khan Khel was in the valley covering celebrations by supporters of a local Taliban leader and cleric two days after Islamabad allowed the Taliban to impose Shariat (Islamic law) in the area.
The CPJ reports that in 2008, journalist killings went largely uninvestigated. The watchdog group says at least 10 slayings since 1998 have gone unsolved, which put Pakistan 12th on CPJ’s Impunity Index. Compiled for the first time in 2008, the index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. The higher a nation’s ranking, the more dangerous it is for the press.
A high-level government investigation into the 2006 slaying of reporter Hayatullah Khan still remains secret. Khan was abducted in December 2005 after reporting evidence that the U.S. was responsible for an attack on a house along the Afghan border that killed an al-Qaeda leader and several villagers.
Khan was a contributer to the documentary program FRONTLINE on PBS. A story about his work and the circumstances surrounding his death can be found HERE on the FRONTLINE website.
- Scott