Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The plan President Obama unveiled last week for Years 9 and 10 of the war in Afghanistan left a basic question begging for an answer: If Al Qaeda is the threat, and Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, why send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan? In his address Tuesday night, the president mentioned Pakistan and the Pakistanis some 25 times... --snip-- That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent...

Pakistan's efforts to establish control of the tribal regions along the Afghan border, has led to promotion opportunities for the many tribal men who have joined the Pakistani armed forces. Men from the tribal territories have long been overrepresented in the Pakistani military. Thus the new governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, the region that abuts the Afghan frontier, and which includes the "Federally Administered Tribal Areas," that have been a haven for Taliban and Al-Qaeda for many years, is himself a native of the region. Ali Mohammed Jan Orakzai, a retired lieutenant general in the Pakistani Army, was appointed...