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| India-Pakistan |
| FATA operation: 'US cautiously optimistic' |
| 2008-10-17 |
| There is some recent reason to be cautiously optimistic of Pakistani action starting in the Tribal Areas, US General David McKiernan told Reuters on Thursday. He said the outcome in Afghanistan would also be tied to FATA. "Ultimately the outcome in Afghanistan will not be a military outcome, it will be a political outcome." He said foreign militants had imported sophisticated tactics to invigorate the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan but Western pessimism over the conflict was unwarranted. The increase in violence over the last year was due to the resurgent Taliban being forced to shift tactics to "small scale, asymmetric, more complex attacks", on soft targets like civilians, aid workers and government officials, he said, adding while there was "uneven progress" around Afghanistan, "to say we are losing or the Taliban are winning is simply not true". |
| Posted by:Fred |