Daily brief: drone reportedly strikes Pakistani tribal region
On the offensive in Pakistan
A
U.S. drone attack has reportedly killed at least eight people, four of
them militants, in South Waziristan, near the village where erstwhile
Pakistani Taliban chieftain Baitullah Mehsud was killed in early August
(Geo TV and BBC).
Two
intelligence officials told the AP that the strike targeted a suspected
militant hideout in the stronghold of Taliban commander Wali ur-Rehman,
but it's unclear if it targeted any specific leader (AP). It is the 33rd drone strike this year, compared to 34 in all of 2008.
The
drone attack comes a day after the Pakistani army began pounding South
Waziristan with jets and helicopter gunships in an assault on the
insurgent stronghold that may be designed to exploit internal Pakistani
Taliban rifts in the wake of Baitullah's death (AFP and Reuters). The group, now under the leadership of commander Hakimullah Mehsud, has vowed revenge for its leader's death (AFP/Dawn).
Show me the money
Pakistan's
finance minister, Shaukat Tarin, told the Financial Times that half of
the U.S.'s planned assistance to Pakistan is likely to be spent
wastefully on administrative costs, and urged the U.S. to channel the
funding through Pakistani agencies in lieu of their U.S. counterparts (FT).
Tarin emphasized that Pakistan would resist any attempts to condition
aid on anything related to its nuclear program or relationship with
India (BBC).
Afghanistan aflame
A day after one of Afghanistan's deadliest bombings in years, a rocket attack
hit the city center of Kandahar close to a branch of the Kabul Bank at
around 10:30pm last night (Al Jazeera).
Tuesday night's car bombings may have thrown Kandaharis into deeper
despair about the prospects for peace in their notoriously agitated
province (New York Times).
And
early this morning, NATO and Afghan forces attacked a hospital in the
restive eastern province of Paktika where a suspected Taliban commander
was being treated for injuries sustained in election day fighting (BBC and AFP).
The gun battle between militants and coalition forces lasted about six
hours, and and an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
statement said no civilians were killed.
These incidents are
part of a broader pattern: Taliban militants have begun exacting
revenge against voters in last Thursday's presidential
election, launching nearly a dozen attacks since then,
stealing ballot boxes, executing government officials, and as promised,
chopping off the inkstained fingers of voters (Wall Street Journal).
As the results come trickling in
As
results of last week's Afghan presidential election continue to trickle
in, incumbent president Hamid Karzai's lead has grown (Pajhwok).
With 17 percent of the vote counted, Karzai has 42 percent, while his
main competition Abdullah Abdullah has 33 percent. The two longshot
candidates, Ramazan Bashardost and Ashraf Ghani, are holding steady at
11 percent and three percent, respectively. The sample is too small and
unrepresentative to make projections, however, and election officials
have announced they will not release any more figures until at least
Saturday (Reuters).
Karzai
is still short of the 50 percent he needs to avoid a second round
against Abdullah, though final certified results won't be available
until at least mid-September (AP).
Few votes from Helmand and Kandahar, two southern provinces where the
Pashtun Karzai is likely to perform well, have been counted, and
complaints of corruption and fraud are adding to the uncertainty around
election results.
Along similar lines, Karzai has enveloped
himself in a cadre of warlords like his former defense minister Marshal
Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who is suspected of ties to Afghanistan's
lucrative poppy trade (New York Times).
Karzai has apparently calculated that the warlord's support in his
election campaign outweighs the U.S.'s warnings that selecting Qasim
Fahim as a running mate would hurt his standing with the west.
Traffic jams: universally annoying
Drivers
in Rawalpindi, Pakistan are complaining that the traffic in the
evenings before Muslims break their fasts during the month of Ramadan
is chaotic and poorly managed by the more than one thousand traffic
cops patrolling the roads (Daily Times).
One resident observed that the few traffic wardens who don't
"disappear" from their posts seem to focus more on writing up motorists
for minor infractions than actually keeping cars moving along the road.
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