The agency helped to bring down the Taliban in one of the best-organised military campaigns in recent history (CIA operatives on horseback directed airpower to choice targets).
It's an especially disturbing question considering that since the start of the year, the Pakistani Army has clashed with the Taliban in four tribal regions.
9. (S/REL NATO) Although Pakistan now identifies both al-Qaida and the Taliban as existential threats, Lavoy said, Pakistani government institutions still support the Taliban in two key ways.
One result has been to put the United States in the contradictory position of striking the Taliban in four other Afghan cities -- Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif -- while in effect sparing them from defeat in Kabul.
"North Korea would not go down as fast as Saddam's regime (in less than a month of the U.S. invasion) or the Taliban (in two months), but the aftermath would be similar and probably of greater intensity," Fitzpatrick said.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Remotely piloted United States aircraft killed at least 43 militants loyal to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban in two different attacks on Wednesday, according to regional news reports that could not be independently confirmed.
Appointed by the government, paid for by international agencies and given free passage by the Taliban in one of the last three countries in the world where polio is endemic, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative's 65,000 volunteers and workers had seemed to have nearly wiped out the disease — until recently.
In another region crucial to Taliban power, along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan, Taliban commanders in three key provinces that control the southern approaches to Kabul -- Paktika, Paktia and Logar -- were reported today to have been in contact with opposition groups that have come together in a loose alliance against the Taliban.
Today alone, he said, American jets hit Taliban positions in three separate waves.
Afghan government soldiers killed 40 Taliban fighters in three southern border villages, in one of the deadliest instances of increased rebel activity this year, officials said today.
