Over 69 percent of Americans believe that the Afghanistan war is important to their national security, with 36 percent of those saying it is very important.
"We want to make certain that no terrorist organisation can find a haven anywhere, and, with a border adjoining Afghanistan, that makes Pakistan a priority," Mattis said.
There is no doubt that all terrorist organisations like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Tayiba are operating with impunity in Pakistan. They may be loosely confederated, but their agendas are being synchronised and India after Afghanistan is their prime target.
Pakistan-based Haqqani network is a deadly terrorist outfit, which is responsible for more than 90 percent of the civilian casualties in eastern part of Afghanistan, a top US military official based in this part of the war-torn country believes.
US President Barack Obama is unlikely to rake up the issue of Kashmir during his visit to India, a senior American official in New Delhi indicated. The US has reiterated that Kashmir is a bilateral issue to be resolved between New Delhi and Islamabad.
'But one of the important things to remember is that what we are seeing today in India -- the destruction of the forests, the opening up of the forests to mining companies.' 'It's a horrifying thing that's going on.' 'Yet, if you look at who owns the mining companies, you will see that almost always they are vegetarians!' 'They are people, who in their own lives would probably not even hurt an insect, but yet have no qualms about destroying an entire ecosystem.'
The top US commander in Afghanistan appeared to be on his way out after the White House and Pentagon took strong objection to his controversial comments against key aids of Obama administration in an interview.
Following the recent killing of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in an American military raid, the Obama administration has adopted a new strategy towards the chief of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar, which is aimed at persuading the fugitive extremist leader to agree to a negotiated settlement of the decade-long conflict in Afghanistan, writes eminent Pakistani journalist Amir Mir.
A new video, released by Maulana Asim Umar -- a senior leader of Al Qaeda's Pakistan cell -- urging Kashmiris to follow the footsteps of their "brothers" in Iraq and Syria and launch a jihad against India, has rung alarm bells in New Delhi.
Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar leaked the whereabouts of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden to American investigators, the Sunday Mirror reported.
A US Congress-constituted quasi-judicial body on Wednesday asked the Joe Biden Administration to designate four nations, including India, as "countries of particular concern", alleging that religious freedom conditions there in 2020 continued their negative trajectory.
'No amount of digression can hide deflect the fact that the PM's visit was badly conceived, planned and executed,' argues Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Pak seeks US help to ease tensions with India.
He will call for 'an end to the politics of resistance and retribution', a senior aide said.
The US were ready to mount an operation inside Pakistan, similar to the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
A former director-general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence has said that United States President Barack Obama will pull out American troops from Afghanistan for economic reasons rather than for strategic ones because his administration would find the ongoing surge unsustainable.
Richard Holbrooke, who passed away on Monday, was probably inching toward his complete lifetime achievement -- as the architect of peace in Afghanistan and in South Asia, says M K Bhadrakumar.
The conditions are related to Pakistan's support to terrorists and terror outfits.
US Congressman Joe Crowley, who spearheaded the campaign for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create a new separate hate crimes category in the agency's uniform crime reporting programme to track bigoted attacks against Sikh Americans, has now set his sights on fully integrating Sikh Americans in the US Armed Forces
'New Delhi and Washington are now on the same page, on dealing with growing Chinese assertiveness, across the entire Indo-Pacific region,' notes Ambassador G Parthasarathy, Chancellor, Central University of Jammu.
In the wake of mounting reports about Pakistan's commitment to fighting terrorism despite American military and economic largesse and credible intelligence of Islamabad's perfidy in maintaining links with militant groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan's ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani argued that the number of Pakistani soldiers killed in fighting militants should silence these critics.
Pak can only access the money if it does more to crack down on internal terror networks launching attacks on neighbouring Afghanistan.
Facing a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, the Barack Obama administration seems to believe in a 'buyout' formula, which involves paying the militants to leave the outfit and reintegrate into mainstream society. President Barack Obama signed a $680 billion defence appropriations bill, which will pay for military operations in the 2010 fiscal year. The bill includes a Taliban reintegration provision under the Commander's Emergency Response Programme.
The issues that figured prominently in these discussions included terrorism, Afghanistan and the situation in the Asia Pacific region.
'Afghanistan cannot be at peace until the Pashtuns regain their pre-eminent role in the country's governance,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
United States along with other European countries are ignoring India's role in Afghanistan in their effort to appease Pakistan, a prominent American foreign policy magazine has said.
Al Qaeda has started feeling the heat as a result of the intensification of American efforts against it in the Af-Pak region, a top Obama Administration official has said.
United States President Barack Obama's Special Envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, who is currently on a three-day visit to Pakistan, is expected to make a short visit to New Delhi on Friday.
A commando who deserted from the Pakistan Army has emerged as a suspect in the abduction of an American aid expert in Punjab's provincial capital, police officials said on Sunday.
India previously rejected the US religious freedom report, saying it sees no locus standi for a foreign government to pronounce on the state of its citizens' constitutionally protected rights.
The US gained one-day international status at the beginning of 2019 and beat Scotland in December. Higgins is eyeing Test status within the next decade.
'We are very grateful that the US takes the trouble to keep us informed and to consult with us as this situation is being managed by them,' Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor tells rediff.com's Aziz Haniffa.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official asserted that US President Donald Trump, during his presidency, has really strengthened all aspects of the US-India security and defence cooperation to build a comprehensive, enduring and mutually beneficial defence partnership.
Pakistani Taliban elements can be broadly divided into two groups, the 'good Taliban' and the 'bad Taliban'.'Good Taliban' are those who never target Pakistani armies and their focus remains on Afghanistan, while the 'bad Taliban' mainly attack Pakistani government installations and often seek refuge across the border.
In understanding Obama's strategy, we must begin with an obvious but unstated point: The extra forces that will be deployed to Afghanistan are not expected to defeat the Taliban. Instead, their mission is to reverse the momentum of previous years and to create the circumstances under which an Afghan force can take over the mission.
Dissatisfied with the inadequate efforts from Pakistan to root out militants from inside its territory, the United States is pushing for an expanded campaign of ground raids across the border inside the country.
Pakistan's security forces and its intelligence agency have facilitated the rise of the Taliban, with whom they have an "ambiguous" relationship, a former top American army official, now headed to become the country's representative to Afghanistan has said.
'If the US intention was to use the FATF platform to isolate Pakistan and impose sanctions against it, that is not going to work when influential countries such as Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia will not lend support to the US campaign,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
B'desh minister termed as "untrue" the allegations of minority repression in the country.
While Wikileaks did not say in its message what the third instalment of their release would cover. However, a Reuters despatch from Washington DC said that classified US diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against foreign governments and leaders are expected to feature in the official documents that Wikileaks plans to release.
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