Suspected US drone attack in Pakistan kills at least seven Taliban

Al Jazeera noted that the attacks came a day after the Taliban killed two Afghan brothers they suspected of being spies for the US.

Pakistani police found the bodies strewn with bullets in an abandoned village in North Waziristan, Khan Zada, a local police official said.

A note signed by the Taliban was left with the bodies. It said that the brothers were from the Afghan city of Khost, near the Pakistan border, and had been abducted and killed.

The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, said at a news conference in Kabul on Saturday that the US would potentially double its deployment to Afghanistan by mid-2009, according to AFP.

A total of 70,000 foreign troops are currently deployed in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban insurgency, AFP said, but violence is on the rise.

This year has been the bloodiest for international forces here since the Taliban fell, with nearly 290 soldiers killed. About 1,000 Afghan troops and police, as well as more than 2,000 civilians, have also been killed in 2008.

In a recent Christian Science Monitor dispatch from Kabul, experts warned that the US is increasingly facing a similar problem in Afghanistan as the Soviets did in the 1980s: attacks on vulnerable supply roads, lack of control of the countryside, and an enemy with hideouts across the border in Pakistan.

From the perspective of Zamir Kabulov, the former Soviet official, President-elect Barack Obama's proposed troops surge for Afghanistan is not enough....

The Soviets had nearly 400,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers at their disposal – more than twice what the US and NATO have here – and yet they still failed, he notes.

The coalition's stretched resources have created an unwanted echo of the worst of Soviet times, Professor Goodson [of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.] says.

In a commentary in Dawn, a Pakistani English-language daily, Muhammad Khakwani said the problems in the north Pakistan tribal areas were aggravated by ill-defined borders.

Whether it is wheat being smuggled, water rights, or militants crossing unchecked, addressing the root causes of the problems always gets complicated by the absence of agreed upon borders....

How can we fence a border when the neighbor does not agree on where to draw the line? We have unofficial agreements with tribal elders regarding the role of our troops from the lawless zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This guarantees that the tribal, lawless zone will remain tribal and lawless.

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