Pakistani security forces dynamited the homes of Maulana Fazlullah and his spokesman Maulana Sirajuddin Dec. 6 in the Swat Valley village of Imam Dehri, North-West Frontier Province. The Maulana's madrassa was left intact. "The fate of the controversial seminary of Maulana Fazlullah will be decided by local people," an official said. Military authorities said soldiers seized machine-guns, pistols, hand-grenades, rocket-launchers, computers and—surprisingly—some liquor bottles. Clean-up operations are said to be underway. "The forces will chase militants out of the area," Maj-Gen Naseer Janjua told journalists in the village. (Dawn, Pakistan, Dec. 6)

An unpublished UN map leaked to the London Times in Kabul illustrates risk levels across the country for staff and aid workers with color shadings, revealing a sharp deterioration in security over the last two years. A similar map from March 2005 indicated only a strip along the Pakistan border and areas of mountainous Zabul and Uruzgan provinces in the south as too dangerous for aid workers. Now nearly all the ethnic Pashtun south and east is a no-go zone deemed "high" or "extreme" risk, and such pockets are also emerging in the north. (London Times, Dec. 5)

Pervez Musharraf, who resigned Nov. 28 as Pakistan's army chief, will be sworn in today as civilian president, resisting calls from opposition leaders to step down as head of state. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, former ISI chief, now takes over as army chief, a post Musharraf held since Oct. 1998. (Bloomberg, Nov. 29; Dawn, Pakistan, Nov. 28) On the morning of Nov. 29, a roadside bomb killed five Pakistani soldiers and wounded four more outside Miranshah, North Waziristan. (Reuters, Nov. 29)

A suicide car bomber Nov. 27 detonated his payload near two armored vehicles used by US-led coalition troops in Kabul, killing at least two civilians and destroying the wall of a nearby house. The Hezb-i-Islami claimed responsibility for the attack. (AP, Nov. 27) (Hezb-i-Islami is led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the primary beneficiaries of US aid in the 1980s.) That same day, US air-strikes killed 12 civilian road workers, the governor of Nuristan province charged. "So far we know that 12 people have been killed by US bombardment," Gov. Tameem Nuristani told Reuters. "They were only poor and innocent road construction workers." The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) confirmed there had been fighting in the area, but said no air-strikes had been launched. BBC reported the workers were building a road for the US military under a local contractor. (Reuters, BBC World Service, Nov. 28)

Pakistan's atomic weapons are secure, Muhammad Khurshid Khan, deputy director of Islamabad's Strategic Plans Division, told a meeting of nuclear counter-terrorism specialists in Edinburgh Nov. 20. "There's nothing to worry about the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons," Khan told the meeting sponsored by the IAEA, emphasizing that the people guarding the weapons "are not the fundamentalists." (Bloomberg, Nov. 20)

Army helicopter gunships continue to pound neo-Taliban positions in the Swat and Shangla districts of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, in an operation which has taken some 100 lives this week. Officials said a Taliban commander known as Matiullah was killed in the air-strikes on Nov. 15. Maulana Fazlullah, the militant movement's fugitive frontman, is said to have led the dead commander's funeral prayers. But the militants succeeded in capturing the police headquarters in Matta and Alpuri, seats of Swat and Shangla, respectively. The New York Times showed a masked gunman, identified as a follower of Fazlullah's Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, standing guard outside the Matta police station with an armed personnel carrier under his watchful eye. This represents a significant expansion of the militant movement deeper into Pakistan from the Tribal Areas along the Afghan border, its traditional base. With the local constabulary and paramilitary Frontier Corps overwhelmed, Islamabad has sent some 2,000 army troops into the region since July, but they have failed to stop the militants from spreading their area of control. (Daily Times, Pakistan, Nov. 17; NYT, Asian News International, Nov. 16)

Um, didn't we just hear identical news about Iraq? If Cambodia was Nixon's "sideshow" to Vietnam, Afghanistan is Bush's to Iraq—largely eclipsed from the headlines, even as it goes from really bad to considerably worse... From AP, Nov. 10:

KABUL — Six U.S. troops were killed when insurgents ambushed their foot patrol in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan, officials said Saturday. The attack, the most lethal against American forces this year, made 2007 the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

While we certainly don't put it past the Taliban to blow up a bunch of schoolchildren to take out a couple of politicians, we note that this attack comes in the normally (relatively) peaceful north of the country, where the Taliban were never popular and still have little following. News accounts frequently forget that the real power in Afghanistan's hinterlands remain the warlords who terrorized the country in a decade and more of internecine ethnic and sectarian bloodshed after the Soviets pulled out, and still have their deep personal grudges—despite the best efforts of Karzai and the US to broker peace (and maintain the fiction of a centralized Afghan state). Baghlan, the scene of today's horrific attack, lies within the domain of regional warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who (as we have noted) has long been in an oft-bloody power struggle with local rivals. We'd like to know where the apparent targets of this blast stood vis-à-vis this conflict. Note that the Taliban explicitly deny responsibility this time, and raise the possibility of Mujahedeen accounts-settling. From Reuters Nov. 6, emphasis added: