David Rohde has begun to unwind his harrowing tale of being inside the Pakistani Taliban’s grip. We’ll have to wait to see how it unfolds, but so far he’s making McChrystal’s counterinsurgency point pretty well, but also the points of progressives who are after Obama to work faster and harder on Gitmo and other related issues. One small portion of Rohde’s terrifying journey:
… FOR the next seven months and 10 days, Atiqullah and his men kept the three of us hostage. We were held in Afghanistan for a week, then spirited to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding.
Atiqullah worked with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of one of the most hard-line factions of the Taliban. The Haqqanis and their allies would hold us in territory they control in North and South Waziristan.
[...] My captors harbored many delusions about Westerners. But I also saw how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged. America, Europe and Israel preached democracy, human rights and impartial justice to the Muslim world, they said, but failed to follow those principles themselves.
By all reports, the northwest tribal area of Pakistan is not the place you want to find yourself. Hardcore Taliban in this area, where bin Laden could be, are not people with which you can negotiate, very different from Afghan Taliban. It’s Taliban like Haqqani that have infiltrated the ISI and even though the Pakistan government is stepping up, now in the process of what could be a two-month operation in the region to take them on, which will take them into bitter winter, it remains to be seen if this is too little too late.
Of course, Rohde never expected to find himself in this situation, which also illustrates the joined nature of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also their differences.
On Afghanistan, Sen. John Kerry just let fly a warning shot over Pres. Obama’s bow:
“Look, it would be entirely irresponsible for the president of the United States to commit more troops to this country, when we don’t even have an election finished and know who the president is and what kind of government we’re working in,” Kerry said from the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Obama’s fending off a lot of incoming from allies, from “Bush III” and George W. Bush being invoked to simple dissent from teachers’ unions, AFSCME’s Gerry McEntee, to op-ed columnists and everywhere in beyond and in between. Warning signs abound and they’re coming from friendlies.
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