Team Petraeus: Taliban 'Comfortable And Safe In Pakistan'

[Casino67]

NYDailyNews.com:

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK

Where are the Taliban and their one-eyed leader Mullah Omar hiding out? Where’s the Afghan Haqqani network now based? The answer, of course, is Pakistan. It used to be a dirty little secret no one spoke about publicly. That changed in the past few years, but an apparent U.S. blunder involving an airstrike inside Pakistan that killed two of its border scouts could knock such overt criticism of our paradoxical ally off the table again.

The U.S. military once helped prop up Pakistan’s shaky regimes by refusing to publicly acknowledge its ally’s army and intelligence service’s collaboration with the enemy. After Army Gen. David Petraeus took over NATO forces in Afghanistan on July 4th, however, the diplomatic niceties eased after years of “See no evil,” and pressure mounted on Pakistan’s army to hit the Taliban like they meant it.

The Obama administration has leaned hard on Pakistan’s current government about Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries — or as hard as anyone can with a stubborn republic fretting over India’s expanding influence.

Petraeus’ staff has applied its own pressure on Pakistan in almost daily blunt public statements spotlighting the embarrassing fact that the Taliban’s base of operations and command and control are not even in their own country. The trend of calling out Pakistan has continued despite Petraeus’ near-apology on Wednesday for the Pakistani border guards’ accidental killings by a NATO chopper last month, which he said “we deeply regret.”



The author, Gordon Meek Tweets under the handle of Meekwire. His tweets are interesting.