Obama’s Afghan plan left Afghans and Pakistanis with more questions than answers. Ahmed Rashid spoke with Richard Holbrooke about the region’s biggest worries.
Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore, who has covered Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia for a variety of publications since 1979. He is the author of the best selling Taliban and most recently, Descent Into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. He writes for the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books and BBC Online. This year Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of the world’s most important 100 Global Thinkers.
As Obama announces an aggressive counterterror campaign in Afghanistan, the region’s most dangerous nation—Pakistan—gets more grim by the day. Ahmed Rashid on President Zardari’s loss of control.
The U.S. is on the verge of providing substantial aid to Pakistan’s struggling government—if only long-running civilian-military tensions don’t mess things up.