By Ahmed Rashid New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 15 · October 8, 2009
To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan by Nicholas Schmidle Henry Holt, 254 pp., $25.00
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda by Gretchen Peters Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 300 pp., $25.95
Follow the Frog to the full article with Chuck Spinney's highlights, nine pages in an easily downloaded document.
Highlights as we read them:
1) Massiviely fraudulent election in Afghanistan;
2) Military situation going from bad to worse for US and the (virtually non-existent) Afghan Army and Police;
3) Pakistan keeping 80% of its troops on the border with India;
4) Pakistan refusing to rein in its one really disciplined jihadist group that keeps attacking India (Mumbia plus).