Zakaria: Learning to Live With Radical Islam

"We don't have to accept the stoning of criminals. But it's time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists."

By Fareed Zakaria NEWSWEEK

Pakistan's Swat valley is quiet once again. Often compared to Switzerland for its stunning landscape of mountains and meadows, Swat became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against Army troops. No longer, but only because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants' key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means women's schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence.

The militants are bad people and this is bad news. But the more difficult question is, what should we—the outside world—do about it? That we are utterly opposed to such people, and their ideas and practices, is obvious. But how exactly should we oppose them? In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have done so in large measure by attacking them—directly with Western troops and Predator strikes, and indirectly in alliance with Pakistani and Afghan forces. Is the answer to pour in more of our troops, train more Afghan soldiers, ask that the Pakistani military deploy more battalions, and expand the Predator program to hit more of the bad guys? Perhaps—in some cases, emphatically yes—but I think it's also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism.

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AP/NPR:Taliban Vows Violent Response to US Troop Increase.

720 Afghan police were killed in 6 months.President Karzai is still trying to establish a dialogue with some of the Taliban. Meanwhile, President-elect Obama is still talking about the need of an additional 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. It is likely that this strategy will not work and might even backfire.The Taliban will deliver on their threats.

KABUL, Afghanistan December 8, 2008, 08:31 am ET · The Taliban's fugitive leader said the planned increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan will give his fighters incentive to kill and maim more Americans than ever.
Mullah Omar, who is believed to be sheltered by fiercely conservative tribesman on the Afghan-Pakistan border, said battles would "flare up" everywhere.
"The current armed clashes, which now number into tens, will spiral up to hundred of armed clashes. Your current casualties of hundreds will jack up to thousand casualties of dead and injured," said the statement, which was written in broken English and posted on a Web site Sunday that has previously carried militant messages.
Violence in Afghanistan has spiked in the last two years, and 2008 has been the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban for hosting al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
There are more than 60,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including 32,000 U.S. forces. Though U.S. troop levels are already at their highest since the start of the conflict in 2001, American commanders have requested 20,000 more troops to stem the increase in violence that has engulfed parts of the country.
Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain warned on Sunday during a visit to Afghanistan that the situation "is going to get harder before it gets easier."The rising violence in Afghanistan appears to be coordinated closely with the spike in militant attacks in neighboring Pakistan, and officials increasingly view both countries as part of the same battlefront.

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AP/NPR: Taliban could clear $500M from 2008 drug trade

The UN reports that the Taliban could clear $500M in 2008 from the opium drug trade.
The Taliban and other warlords could clear almost half a billion dollars from Afghanistan's opium trade this year — money that will help finance insurgent attacks, the U.N.'s drug czar said.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, said the Taliban also appears to be stockpiling the drug to manipulate its price, after several years in which production surpassed world demand.
Afghanistan produces over 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw ingredient for making heroin."By year end, warlords, drug lords and insurgents will have extracted almost half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production and trafficking," Costa said in a summary of the U.N.'s annual Afghanistan opium survey, published Thursday.

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Taliban urges Obama to end Bush's foreign policies

How should President-elect Obama deal with the Taliban? As the military options are getting trickier, it could be time to start some conversation...
Taliban insurgents battling the U.S.-backed Afghan government urged President-elect Barack Obama to change course in U.S. foreign policy and withdraw American troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq, an Internet monitoring service said Tuesday.

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