Quetta becomes a target

Washington Post:

As American troops move deeper into southern Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents, U.S. officials are expressing new concerns about the role of fugitive Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and his council of lieutenants, who reportedly plan and launch cross-border strikes from safe havens around the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.

But U.S. officials acknowledge they know relatively little about the remote and arid Pakistani border region, have no capacity to strike there, and have few windows into the turbulent mix of Pashtun tribal and religious politics that has turned the area into a sanctuary for the Taliban leaders, who are known collectively as the Quetta Shura.

Pakistani officials, in turn, have been accused of allowing the Taliban movement to regroup in the Quetta area, viewing it as a strategic asset rather than a domestic threat, while the army has been heavily focused on curbing violent Islamist extremists in the northwest border region hundreds of miles away.

As a result, Pakistani and foreign analysts here said, Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, has suddenly emerged as an urgent but elusive new target as Washington grapples with the Taliban's rapidly spreading arc of influence and terror across Afghanistan.

"In the past, we focused on al-Qaeda because they were a threat to us. The Quetta Shura mattered less to us because we had no troops in the region," said Anne W. Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. "Now our troops are there on the other side of the border, and the Quetta Shura is high on Washington's list."

Patterson also acknowledged that the United States is far less familiar with the vast desert region than with the northwestern tribal areas, where it has been cooperating closely with Pakistan for several years in the hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders and where it periodically kills insurgents with missiles fired from remotely piloted aircraft. The United States does not carry out such drone strikes in the Quetta region.

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We have known for along time that Taliban leadership were hiding in Quetta. Reading this makes me think that Richard Holbrook just discovered that. If he is going to get the Pakistanis to pay attention to the problem then good for him. The CIA and the ISI should be looking to take these guys out.