Tag: Pakistan

Five years after most senior al-Qaeda leaders are thought to have fled this port city, officials in Karachi worry that the organization is regrouping and finding new support here and in neighboring Afghanistan. They are especially concerned about the recruitment of potential foot soldiers for the next major terrorist attack. The resurgence has been managed […]

What is the Council of Islamic Ideology? It is a 20-member constitutional body that advises the government on religious aspects of the law and society – but its recommendations are not binding. The council was created by a military government in 1961. The constitution states that CII members should be well-qualified. It specifies that the […]

The European Union (EU) and Western governments have sought details from Pakistan of its links with the late Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who was killed by a drone strike in Balochistan on May 21 this year. Highly placed EU sources revealed that Pakistan has been asked to explain the veracity of the reports appearing […]

Mansour was killed due to surveillance as he traveled to Pakistan from Iran. With Akhundzada’s reclusive nature, traditional methods of locating him will be extremely difficult but not impossible.

For the Air Assault the engineers had a similar mission, but a different ride to it.

It’s become a somewhat familiar story in the war on terror: The United States was presented with strong evidence that one of its highest-valued terrorist targets was inside Pakistan and exposed, so they assassinated him. In response, Pakistan rails against what it says is a breach of its sovereignty. Although there have been several instances […]

A passport found at the site of a U.S. drone attack targeting Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour bears the name of a Pakistani man named Wali Muhammad and carries a valid Iranian visa, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said on Sunday. The ministry did not directly comment on the possibility that Mansour might have been […]

The policeman was there when I woke at dawn. He had slept outside my room, not in a chair or on the faux-leather sofa, but slumped against the door. The reason was simple. This was Dera Ismail Khan, a Pakistani town on the road to the tribal areas and their assortment of al-Qaeda terrorists and thuggish Taliban […]

A “pink flamingo” is a term recently coined by Frank Hoffman to describe predictable but ignored events that can yield disastrous results. Hoffman argues that these situations are fully visible, but almost entirely ignored by policymakers. Pink flamingos stand in stark contrast to “black swans“—the unpredictable, even unforeseeable shocks whose outcomes may be entirely unknown. […]

She was just 15. Her alleged crime: Helping a neighbor and her boyfriend elope. For that, she was dragged from her home, injected with sedatives, strangled, tied up in a van and then burned, Pakistani officials said. More than a dozen people have been arrested in the brutal and barbaric killing, including the mother of […]

This Sunday marked five years since a team of US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden during a CIA-led raid on the al-Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The agency celebrated by tweeting details about the raid as though it were happening live. One person whose name didn’t make it into the CIA’s tweet storm: Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who reportedly helped the […]

The Weight of One Mission: Recounting the Death of Usama bin Laden, Five Years Later By: Nick Rasmussen, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center   It’s a scene you never forget. The intensity. The focus. The stillness of a room. The weight of one mission. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with […]