Pakistan's atomic weapons are secure, Muhammad Khurshid Khan, deputy director of Islamabad's Strategic Plans Division, told a meeting of nuclear counter-terrorism specialists in Edinburgh Nov. 20. "There's nothing to worry about the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons," Khan told the meeting sponsored by the IAEA, emphasizing that the people guarding the weapons "are not the fundamentalists." (Bloomberg, Nov. 20)

Army helicopter gunships continue to pound neo-Taliban positions in the Swat and Shangla districts of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, in an operation which has taken some 100 lives this week. Officials said a Taliban commander known as Matiullah was killed in the air-strikes on Nov. 15. Maulana Fazlullah, the militant movement's fugitive frontman, is said to have led the dead commander's funeral prayers. But the militants succeeded in capturing the police headquarters in Matta and Alpuri, seats of Swat and Shangla, respectively. The New York Times showed a masked gunman, identified as a follower of Fazlullah's Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, standing guard outside the Matta police station with an armed personnel carrier under his watchful eye. This represents a significant expansion of the militant movement deeper into Pakistan from the Tribal Areas along the Afghan border, its traditional base. With the local constabulary and paramilitary Frontier Corps overwhelmed, Islamabad has sent some 2,000 army troops into the region since July, but they have failed to stop the militants from spreading their area of control. (Daily Times, Pakistan, Nov. 17; NYT, Asian News International, Nov. 16)

Um, didn't we just hear identical news about Iraq? If Cambodia was Nixon's "sideshow" to Vietnam, Afghanistan is Bush's to Iraq—largely eclipsed from the headlines, even as it goes from really bad to considerably worse... From AP, Nov. 10:

KABUL — Six U.S. troops were killed when insurgents ambushed their foot patrol in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan, officials said Saturday. The attack, the most lethal against American forces this year, made 2007 the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

While we certainly don't put it past the Taliban to blow up a bunch of schoolchildren to take out a couple of politicians, we note that this attack comes in the normally (relatively) peaceful north of the country, where the Taliban were never popular and still have little following. News accounts frequently forget that the real power in Afghanistan's hinterlands remain the warlords who terrorized the country in a decade and more of internecine ethnic and sectarian bloodshed after the Soviets pulled out, and still have their deep personal grudges—despite the best efforts of Karzai and the US to broker peace (and maintain the fiction of a centralized Afghan state). Baghlan, the scene of today's horrific attack, lies within the domain of regional warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who (as we have noted) has long been in an oft-bloody power struggle with local rivals. We'd like to know where the apparent targets of this blast stood vis-à-vis this conflict. Note that the Taliban explicitly deny responsibility this time, and raise the possibility of Mujahedeen accounts-settling. From Reuters Nov. 6, emphasis added:

Within days of the 9-11 attacks, media speculation started that al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear weapons. Now it is starting to look like US actions could make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Washington imposed sanctions on both Pakistan and India after their 1998 nuclear tests. Those sanctions were both lifted immediately after 9-11 as the US prepared for war in the region. US military aid to Pakistan continues—despite the regime's complicity in nuclear proliferation to rogue states, and despite the fact that Musharraf threatened to use nuclear weapons in both the 2002 crisis with India and the Kargil crisis of 1999 (when he was just armed forces chief—his coup came in the immediate aftermath of Kargil). Using Pakistan as a proxy state in the GWOT has only inflamed jihadist sentiment there, providing a convenient justification for Musharraf to seize still greater power—which will further inflame the jihadis in a vicious cycle. And it's all rendered even more ironic by the incestuous relationship between Musharraf's own security forces and the jihadis. It isn't difficult to see where all this is leading. On Oct. 29—before Musharraf's auto-golpe—Newsweek found, with good reason, that Pakistan is the "most dangerous" country on earth:

Five people were killed and six others wounded when a missile—allegedly fired from a US drone—hit a suspected militant compound in the restive North Waziristan region of Pakistan, near the Afghan border Nov. 2. Residents said a pilotless US drone fired two missiles into the compound in Dandi Darpakhel in the outskirts of Miran Shah, the regional capital. At least two of the wounded were said to be of Uzbek origin. The casualties were given first aid and taken away by men associated with a militant commander from South Waziristan. Militants sealed off the entire area and did not allow anyone to get to the compound. Some residents put the death toll at 10 and the number of wounded at 12. The compound was located near the madrassa of Waziristan Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is said to have close ties to Osama bin Laden. The Pentagon denied the US military was responsible for the missile strike. A spokesman for the CIA, which operates drones as well, declined to comment. (NYT; Dawn, Pakistan, Nov. 3)

Japan has ordered the withdrawal of its two ships supporting US-led operations in Afghanistan following the government's failure to agree a deal with the opposition to extend the mission beyond the end of its mandate on Nov. 1. The administration of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has said it would try to pass new legislation to allow a more limited mission. "The government will make its utmost effort... to resume an important mission in the Indian Ocean," chief Cabinet spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said. Japan has refuelled coalition warships in the Indian Ocean since 2001.

Pakistani security forces backed up by helicopter gunships engaged militants at the madrassa of extremist cleric Maulana Fazlullah at Kabal in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province Oct. 26. The gun-battle apparently began when a patrol was fired on, and ended when security forces seized what was described as a militant training camp near the seminary. The cleric, known as "Maulana Radio" for his illegal broadcasts urging Taliban-style rule, is thought to have 4,500 armed followers. The fighting was in the Swat district, where a bomb attack on a truck carrying members of the paramilitary Frontier Constabulary near Mingora one day earlier killed 17 militiamen and three civilians, damaging several shops.