Sara Sidner
CNN

Sabar Mina is cloaked in a light green shawl tinged with dirt. She is holding an empty flour sack that she plans on filling with firewood.

Her eyes are soft and kind, but they bear the signs of exhaustion. There's a reason for that. Instead of going to school, the eight-year-old walks an hour to work.

All day long Sabar takes items back and forth between two of the most dangerous countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Normally she smuggles flour from the Pakistan side where she is from. Pakistan has a ban on exporting food items to Afghanistan because of a spike in food prices, so flour is a hot commodity right now.

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Pakistani policemen secure the site after a suicide bomb blast in Rawalpindi on Monday.

CNN

A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people Monday by detonating explosives outside a bank where people had lined up to pick up their monthly checks, police said.

The blast, in the Cannt area of the city, also wounded more than 65 others, said Imdad Ullah Bosal, a district coordination officer. Two women were among the dead, he said.

Meanwhile, another suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a police checkpoint in Lahore hours after the Rawalpindi attack, a police official told CNN.

The bombers, believed to be wearing suicide vests, blew themselves up as police inspected their vehicle at the Babu Sabu checkpoint, according to Lahore police chief Pervez Rethore. The blast injured at least 17 police and civilians, a local rescue services spokesman said. At least three people sustained serious injuries, Rethore said.

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CNN's Ivan Watson in Rawalpindi, Samson Desta in Islamabad and journalist Nasir Habib contributed to this report.

Clinton said Friday she did not come to Pakistan for happy talk.

CNN

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday she did not come to Pakistan for "happy talk."

Her three-day trip is aimed at getting frank, open discussions going about the fight against terrorism - and that includes presenting U.S. concerns, she said.

In an interview with CNN, Clinton said it's time to "clear the air" with a key U.S. ally. She added, "I don't think the way you deal with negative feelings is to pretend they're not there."

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Pakistani soldier patrols military logistics route out of South Waziristan on October 24.

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann
Special to CNN

The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American drone warfare program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office, U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders along with hundreds of other people, a quarter of whom were civilians.

As a result of the unprecedented 42 strikes by drone aircraft into Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have been killed.

The dead include two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians, according to our analysis.

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With U.S. attention focused on Pakistan's security issues, will Hillary Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

E. Benjamin Skinner
Time

As Hillary Clinton pays her first visit to Pakistan as Secretary of State, an unfolding hostage crisis will test the Obama Administration's rhetoric on human rights in the region. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad say at least three landlords have held as many as 170 bonded farmworkers at gunpoint on their estates in the country's southeast Sindh province since late September. With U.S. attention focused on getting Pakistan to deal with huge security issues to Washington's satisfaction, will Clinton be able to press Islamabad's rulers to address a controversy involving rural poverty and modern-day slavery?

The crisis began after the workers' advocates successfully petitioned three district courts to declare as illegal the debts that the landlords were using to compel the workers into indentured servitude. Those debts average around 1,000 Pakistani rupees — roughly $12. The hostages, a third of whom are children, some as young as 4 months old, are landless peasants, known as haari in Urdu. According to Ghulam Hyder, a spokesman for Pakistan's Green Rural Development Organization, the landlords have killed one hostage already and are threatening to kill the others unless they drop the cases and return to work. The landlords also abducted Amarchand Bheel, an advocate for the laborers, as he traveled to court to plead their cause.

A 2004 study by the International Labour Office (ILO) estimated that there are up to a million haari families in Sindh alone, the majority living in conditions of debt bondage, which the U.N. defines as modern-day slavery. Last fall, Pakistan's Daily Times newspaper quoted the labor minister of neighboring Punjab province as saying that landlords hold millions of forced laborers in "private prisons" across the country.

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Reza Sayah
CNN

Jill Dougherty
CNN

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived Wednesday in nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country hit hard by terrorism, economic crisis and rising sentiment that it is paying too high a price for its partnership with the United States in fighting extremists.

Clinton is expected to meet with top Pakistani officials, including president Asif Ali Zardari, but a major challenge during this visit is to convince Pakistanis that the U.S. wants a partnership that goes beyond fighting al Qaeda and other extremist groups.

Talking with reporters en route to Pakistan, Clinton said she wants to "turn the page" on what has been, in the past few years, "primarily a security-anti-terrorist agenda."

"We hold that to be extremely important, and it remains a very high priority," she said. "But we also recognize that it is imperative that we broaden our engagement with Pakistan."

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A Pakistani soldier pictured during operations against militants in June.

Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.

The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after Israel’s Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide Hassan Tuhami. Both countries decided that they wanted a separate peace — outside of the Geneva comprehensive framework pushed by Mr. Carter.

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Anderson Cooper | BIO
AC360° Anchor

Pakistani authorities remove bodies from the scene of Thursday's deadly attacks in Lahore.

Omar Waraich
Time

"They were dressed in black, all black," says Inam Mansoor, 33, an ambulance driver who entered a military compound in the Pakistani city of Lahore to recover people wounded in a new wave of militant attacks that killed 37 people on Thursday. "They were carrying guns and backpacks. They had commando-style scarves wrapped around their heads." But if such attacks have lately become an almost daily occurrence as Pakistan's army prepares a new offensive against the Taliban in Waziristan, what was remarkable in Lahore was that three of the attackers apparently were women. Police commandos who spoke to TIME at the scene made the claim, which was later confirmed by Interior Minister Rehman Malik.

The extremist organizations behind the violence are hardly champions of women's equality, but there have been reports in recent months of groups of young women — some of them survivors of 2007's showdown between the army and militant supporters at Islamabad's Red Mosque — traveling to Dera Ghazi Khan in southern Punjab to cement ties with jihadist groups there. The involvement of women fighters may be peculiar to Punjab-based militant groups. The Taliban forces in the northwest don't tolerate women walking out their homes unaccompanied by male relatives or being educated, much less trained as fighters. But the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad saw women publicly assert their support for the militants.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for more from Peter Bergen . AC360° at 11 p.m. ET.

Remote-controlled drones, such as the Predator, are proving increasingly popular with the U.S. military.

Peter Bergen | BIO
CNN National Security Analyst

The Al Qaeda videotape shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage. A milky gas slowly filters in. An Arab man with an Egyptian accent says: "Start counting the time." Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving.

This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Derunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by an Egyptian with the nom de jihad of "Abu Khabab." In the late 1990s, under the direction of Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group's WMD research program, which was given the innocuous codename "Yogurt." Abu Khabab taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas. The Egyptian WMD expert also explored the possible uses of radioactive materials, writing in a 2001 memo to his superiors, "As you instructed us you will find attached a summary of the discharges from a traditional nuclear reactor, among which are radioactive elements that could be used for military operations." In the memo, Abu Khabab asked if it were possible to get more information about the matter "from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere." This was likely a reference to the retired Pakistani senior nuclear scientists who were meeting then with Osama bin Laden.

In the pandemonium following the fall of the Taliban in the winter of 2001, Abu Khabab disappeared into the badlands on the Afghan-Pakistani border. The United States put a $5 million bounty on his head and, in January 2006, attempted to kill him and Zawahiri while they were believed to be in the Pakistani hamlet of Damadola, targeting them with a missile launched by a drone aircraft.

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Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, pictured in November 2008.

Aryn Baker
Time

After nearly three months of planning, and very public anticipation, Pakistan's military moved on the South Waziristan stronghold of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group of militants that Pakistani officials say have been behind some 80% of terrorist attacks in the country over the past few years, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto and a recent spate of violence that has taken 150 lives in the past two weeks.

The ground operation, code-named Rah-i-Nijat (Urdu for "Path to Deliverance"), was launched early Saturday morning after weeks of heavy aerial bombardments that were designed to weaken militant fortifications. By Sunday, some 28,000 soldiers had moved into a remote corner of the mountainous region, in a three-pronged attack intended to trap the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 militants in South Waziristan, including some 1,000 Uzbek and foreign fighters who may be affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Heavy fighting has already claimed the lives of at least three soldiers (two of whom were killed by a land mine) and dozens of militants, according to military officials. Across the country, Pakistanis were glued to their television sets, watching an offensive that seemed far away against the militants who were believed to be responsible for the widespread terrorist attacks that have left few corners of the country unscathed. Sunday morning's Dawn newspaper led with the headline "Army Embarks on Rah-i-Nijat, Finally."

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CNN

The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East and Central Asia visited Pakistan on Monday as the Pakistani army battled Taliban militants in the country's northwest, U.S. Embassy officials said.

Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, held meetings as U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also arrived on a separate visit.

Details about their visits were not immediately available.

Petraeus' and Kerry's arrivals came on the heels of Pakistani troops launching a massive ground offensive backed by air power over the weekend in South Waziristan, a refuge and power base for insurgents operating in Pakistan and along the Pakistani-Afghan border.

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Displaced Pakistanis wait in line Monday after fleeing military operations against militants in South Waziristan.

Shuja Nawaz
Foreign Policy

The battle for Pakistan has finally started in earnest along the northwest frontier. After months of warning of an impending attack, the Pakistani military moved into South Waziristan this weekend to stamp out the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which is allied with al Qaeda and allows the terrorist group to operate from the region. The Army bulked up the division entrusted with the task, supplementing it with troops and helicopters from North Waziristan, and local regiments from the Frontier Corps. The aim was to encircle and destroy the TTP in the southeastern third of Waziristan, where some 10,000 well-armed and battle-hardened militants are hiding.

But despite the reinforcements, the force trying to root out the entrenched militants is still not fully equipped or ready for mobile warfare. After more than eight years of involvement in the U.S.-led war against militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan still does not have all the weapons or assistance that it needs to do the job right.

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CNN

At least 41 people were killed and dozens wounded in a blast Monday at a security forces checkpoint in northwest Pakistan, authorities said.

About 45 people were injured in the explosion in the Shangla district in the volatile Swat Valley, said Syed Altaf Hussein, a senior government official in the area.

The explosion targeted a military vehicle, officials said.

Elise Labott

CNN State Department Producer

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi made the rounds in Washington just as President Obama's national security team shifted its attention to Pakistan.

This week Secretary of Defense Williams Gates called the Afghan border with Pakistan the "epicenter of jihad." And the renewed focus on Pakistan suggests that Obama has a new role for Pakistan in the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

After all, in developing a strategy for "Afpak," Obama acknowledged the United States cannot win in Afghanistan without cooperation from Pakistan, the suspected hideout of Obama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders.

Which is why the buzzword of both Qureshi and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week was "partnership," as in the United States and Pakistan are united in a "strategic partnership" against a common enemy.

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Militant attacks, such as this one in Islamabad on Monday, are turning the Pakistani population against jihadists.

Peter Bergen
CNN

It hasn't been too often in the past couple of years that you could write about good news from Pakistan. But if there is a silver lining to the atrocities that have plagued the country in the past several years, it is the fact that the Pakistani public, government and military are increasingly seeing the jihadist militants on their territory in a hostile light.

The Taliban's assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the country's most popular politician; al Qaeda's bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; the attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl; and multiple large-scale attacks on Pakistani police and army installations by the Taliban have provoked real revulsion among the Pakistani public.

In fact, historians will likely record the Taliban's decision to move earlier this year from Pakistan's Swat Valley into Buner District, only 60 miles from Islamabad, as the tipping point that finally galvanized Pakistan to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator.

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