Registan.net

Daniel Simons, of the the main Pakistan guys at the Council on Foreign Relations, has an op-ed in the New Statesman about Pakistan:
As evidence mounts that Islamabad is unable or unwilling to tackle Islamist militancy in its tribal belt, the drumbeat for a more aggressive American policy against militant sanctuaries in Pakistan – including incursions […]

The Afghan Foreign Ministry is shocked—shocked!—that Pakistani militant leaders are vowing jihad in their country.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry Thursday summoned the charge-de-affairs of the Pakistani Embassy to Afghanistan and lodged a protest over the remarks of Pakistani militants’ leaders, a statement of the ministry said.
“The foreign ministry described the remarks of […]

I recall receiving no small amount of hate mail over my insistence to let Pakistan’s new civilian government handle the tribal areas in the way it sees fit, and not at the behest of any short term Western concerns. Behold:
Pakistani forces have launched a military operation against Taliban militants near the northwestern city of […]

On June 21, “Artillery shells fired from Pakistan landed in an Afghan army compound and close to an international military base in Afghanistan on Saturday and NATO forces returned fire, the alliance said.” This comes amid several other incidents of cross-border attack, though most were direct-fire, Taliban-style incidents. It is unknown whether the artillery was […]

In all of the hemming and hawing over the Pakistani government’s negotiations with the tribal areas—which have been appropriate, in that it is not by any stretch capitulation, but rather a normal process of accommodation and bluster on both sides—very little attention has been paid to the traditional ways of getting things done: bribes.
KHYBER AGENCY: […]

It is no surprise Afghanistan is desperately poor. But what often gets glossed over in the reporting on poverty—whether concerning drugs or wheat—is the enormous problem of debt.
Much like elsewhere in South Asia, this debt is usually very small—Mohammed Yunnus, for example, found in Bangladesh that family debt was commonly under $30, yet still crippling. […]

Nightwatch argues that May was the most violent month in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion:
NightWatch almost has completed its monthly assessments of combat for both April and May. In the data sample drawn from unclassified reporting sources that NightWatch uses, April featured 199 violent incidents in 86 districts, making it the most lethal April […]