As President Obama unveiled plans to continue the escalation of US troops in Afghanistan to roughly 60,000, a suicide bomber in the caustic Khyber Agency in the Fata region of Pakistan leveled a two story mosque, killing at least 70. While no group has taken responsibility for the attack, the mosque was known to be routinely visited by local officials and security force members, suggesting that they were most likely the target. The Khyber pass, through which a crucial road links Pakistan and Afghanistan, is one of the few remaining NATO supply routes and was one of the most crucial passages through which supplies and mujahideen entered Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the late 70’s and 80’s.
The Obama Administration’s decision to increase US military efforts in Afghanistan is, as one might expect, leading to the galvanization of various militant groups on both sides of the border who are putting aside their differences to form a consolidated front. The danger, of course, is that such cooperation will further transform the insurgency as a whole into a nationalist struggle rather than one solely based on the safeguarding of a fundamentalist religious ideology. Historically, that reality is not one that bodes well for foreign efforts in Afghanistan, nor public sentiment regarding foreign occupation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
