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LAHORE, Pakistan -- The most dangerous place on Earth -- the Pashtun tribal belt straddling Pakistan's border with Afghanistan -- is about to get more dangerous. As the summer offensive by al-Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and NATO troops gets underway in Afghanistan and the militant groups threaten to resume their attacks on Pakistan's army, the newly elected government in Islamabad needs the support and patience of the Bush administration rather than Washington's single-minded desire for military solutions. Much has been made in the United States about the possibility that Pakistan's coalition government is about to cut a deal...

WASHINGTON — The Arabs who vanquished Al Qaeda in Iraq's Anbar province are counseling America to allow Afghans to form irregular militias and be mindful of their devout adherence to Islam, according to a memo from the Anbar Awakening to the American Embassy in Kabul. A rough English translation of the memo, which outlines an "awakening" strategy for Afghanistan and was originally prepared in Arabic at the request of the American deputy chief of mission there, Christopher Dell, was obtained by The New York Sun and confirmed as accurate by the military. The Afghanistan front has been a worry for...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar and their top commanders are hiding in Pakistan, posing a "huge challenge" to the security of the country and neighboring Afghanistan, a senior US administration official said Friday. "There is no question that the iconic leaders of Al-Qaeda -- (Ayman al-) Zawahiri, bin Laden ... are in the tribal areas of Pakistan," the official said at a media briefing. "We believe that the Taliban's shura (consultation) council leaders led by Mullah Omar reside in Quetta in Pakistan," he said, referring to the capital of rugged Baluchistan...

MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan - Pro-Taliban militants seized control of a shrine in northwestern Pakistan and renamed it after Islamabad's Red Mosque, while 10 people died in the latest violence near the Afghan border, officials said Monday. About 70 pro-Taliban militants occupied the shrine of renowned Pashtun freedom fighter Sahib Turangzai and its accompanying mosque in the town of Lakarai in Mohmand tribal region on Sunday, a spokesman for the militants and a local government official said. The militants declared their support for the radical leaders of the Red Mosque that was stormed by Pakistan's army this month after its clerics...

June was the bloodiest month in a long time, with about a thousand dead (700 Taliban, a hundred government and foreign troops and 200 civilians). For the first six months of the year, about 3,200 were killed, compared to about 4,000 for all of last year. About 70 percent of the dead are Taliban. The high Taliban casualty rate is the result of high losses among Taliban leaders, and recruiting many younger, inexperienced Pushtun tribesmen. The more experienced Pushtun gunmen noted the losses from last year, and took a pass on a Taliban paycheck this time around. Their misgivings were...

Pakistani villagers shot dead a woman and three men in a public execution after a tribal council found them guilty of adultery, a witness and government officials said. About 600 people watched the four, including an Afghan refugee, shot to death on Monday in the Khyber agency, a semi-autonomous ethnic Pashtun tribal region on the Afghan border. "We found a man and a woman in a compromising position along with another man who was drunk and had already committed adultery, and the owner of the house" said Haji Jan Gul, a resident of Alamgudar village, where the four were killed....

Rumors of Osama bin Laden's death are greatly exaggerated and the al-Qaida leader is preparing his next video broadcast to be aired on al-Jazeera, reports an acclaimed Pakistani journalist who has interviewed him. In an exclusive interview with Paul L. Williams, author of the new book, “The Dunces of Doomsday,” and David Dastych in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, Hamid Mir says bin Laden is not only alive and well but in the process of preparing a video-taped appearance for al-Jazeera, the Qatari Arabian news network.

CIA's Haq cover-up is part of a pattern November 1, 2001BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Unnamed CIA officials flat out lied when they told reporters that the first they had heard from Abdul Haq was his futile plea to be saved from the Taliban fighters who surrounded him and then murdered him last Friday. That fits the pattern of deceit, arrogance and ignorance that describes the U.S. role in the murder of the legendary Afghan commander. Actually, the Central Intelligence Agency had been in contact with Haq's representatives since last February. It was not a congenial liaison. The CIA's reaction ...

WASHINGTON, Nov 01, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Already divided between north and south, war-ravaged Afghanistan appears to be moving toward a more permanent partition.The process of partition began long before the extremist Taliban militia was formed in 1994. According to some analysts it started with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.Created as a buffer zone between British India and the former Russian empire, Afghanistan survived the departure of the British from the subcontinent in 1947 because the fear of Soviet communism kept its various factions together.The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and its disgraceful ...

...[W]ar-weary Afghans will go to the polls tomorrow to participate in their country's first direct presidential elections.... Coming just three years after the nation was freed from the shackles of al Qaeda and the Taliban, tomorrow's voting is arguably one of the most significant events of the post-9/11 world. Thought it won't be picture perfect, the election is a vital step in establishing democracy in Afghanistan. And it's happening right in the heart of the Islamic world. Afghanistan has made tremendous progress toward democracy in very short order. Three years ago, the fundamentalist Taliban ruled the country with an iron...

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Oct. 5 - "Don't be harsh to the people!" President Hamid Karzai beseeched his security detail, which was bearing down on an overly eager crowd with sticks and automatic weapons. "They will calm themselves!" Below the stage, white pigeons meant to symbolize peace were tentatively stepping out of their coop. Soon Afghanistan's president tried to do the same. "If you sit in your place, I will come say hello to each one of you," Mr. Karzai told the surging crowd, and then he marched off the stage toward the throng. He did not get far before his guards...

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afsheen was just nine years old when she was married to a man four times her age to pay for a crime she did not commit. Her father had killed someone and she had to marry a member of the victim's family as compensation under a centuries-old custom of Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribes. Known as swara, the custom calls for a girl to be given away in marriage to an aggrieved family as part of settlement for murder perpetrated by one of her relatives. "This marriage has ruined my life," said Afsheen, who is now a...

<p>Mirali, Pakistan -- Since the U.S. military and its Northern Alliance allies routed Afghanistan's Taliban regime and drove Osama bin Laden from his Tora Bora redoubt at the end of 2001, the hunt for fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban fighters has centered largely on an unusual area - theautonomous tribal zones of Pakistan that line the Afghan border. The region is inhabited by fiercely independent peoples who are devoutly religious, ready to fight and hostile to foreigners. Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Juliette Terzieff recently visited this wild and remote region and filed these two of four reports..</p>