Fareed Zakaria says that the United States may in fact be scaling down the goals of the military operation

Fareed Zakaria | BIO
CNN Anchor

When President Obama announced plans Tuesday to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, it appeared to be a major escalation of the war in that country. But, foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria says that the United States may in fact be "scaling down" the goals of the military operation.

In an interview with CNN, Zakaria gave the new plan a good chance of succeeding in achieving its more limited objectives. But he said Obama's idea of setting a target date for starting to draw down U.S. troops was a strategic mistake - though he suggested the president may have needed to do so for political reasons.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria: GPS," spoke to CNN Wednesday.

CNN: The president outlined an intensive but short-term boost of the military resources in Afghanistan. He didn't call it a surge but is this effectively the same as the Iraq surge?

Fareed Zakaria: Actually I think this is a different surge than the Iraq surge. And not enough people have noticed that - because the president did increase the number of troops and in fact, in many ways the number of troops that he has increased in percentage terms is much larger than the Iraq surge.

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Wright and Martin believe that the Karzai administration must be pressured to punish corruption

Ann Wright and Paul Kawika Martin
Special to CNN

President Obama just announced he plans to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, where hatred of the U.S. grows every day. Next door, nuclear-armed Pakistan tilts toward disaster. It's time for Americans to insist on a nonmilitary way out of this mess.

We recently returned from a CodePink study trip to Afghanistan, and our expertise and experience points to a strategy of transitioning from military to political and economic solutions that will help Afghans while making Americans safer.

The first step in providing Afghans security and weakening the Taliban and violent extremists is to remove recruiting incentives. It's time to stop air and Predator drone strikes that tend to kill, injure and terrorize civilians. It's time to stop arbitrary detentions and harsh treatment of prisoners that would be unacceptable here.

While those in major cities live in relative security, rural Afghans fear violence from insurgents or U.S. and NATO forces. Many fear civil war or the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan requires more trusted Afghan police and security forces. These forces are paid only $110 dollars a month - not a living wage - and payments are regularly late. Little wonder these forces are corrupt, poorly motivated and have a high rate of desertion. The Taliban pays its foot soldiers far better.

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Tim Hetherington
Getty Images for CNN

October was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war in 2001. Roadside bombs are now the biggest threat to U.S. forces in the region. In September, Anderson reported from the front lines of the war against the Taliban and went out on patrol with Marines in Helmand Province.

Take a look at this photo gallery.

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.

Taliban fighters lay down their weapons as they surrender to the Afghan government in western Afghanistan.

Christiane Amanpour
CNN Chief International Correspondent

October has been the deadliest month for the US and NATO militaries fighting in Afghanistan as well as UN workers trying to organize an election runoff. Surely the surge in deaths serves to underscore why Afghanistan matters.

For all the debate happening away from the battlefield, here are a couple of important bottom-line questions:

Is the world prepared to see the Taliban and their opportunistic allies al Qaeda return to power in Afghanistan? Are people prepared for the terrorists' dream- photo-op of Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden sitting smiling together in Kabul?

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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
CNN

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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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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Gen. Stanley McChrystal reportedly wants as many as 40,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Ed Henry and Brian Todd
CNN

As tensions mount over the best way forward in Afghanistan, top aides say President Obama is adamant about coming up with a new plan before deciding on troop levels.

Rising violence and the resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan have put the Obama administration on defense as the war enters its ninth year.

"Until the president's review of this early in the administration, there hadn't been a strategy, a coordinated strategy to deal with both Afghanistan and this very dangerous region of the world for many, many years. And that's what the president's intent on getting right," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The president has received a document from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, officially asking for up to 40,000 more U.S. troops, aides said.

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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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CNN obtained this photo of a U.S. helicopter above Forward Operating Base Keating in the Nuristan province

Ed Hornick
CNN

Mountainous terrain and harsh weather in remote parts of Afghanistan have proven a deadly combination for the U.S. military in its push to reduce mounting violence in the country.

On Saturday, Taliban militants attacked American and Afghan troops in the Nuristan province in eastern Afghanistan. Eight American troops and two members of the Afghan national security forces were killed, according to the Pentagon.

It was the largest number of Americans killed by hostile action in a single day since July 13, 2008, when nine troops died, according to CNN records.

The fighting was so fierce that at one point U.S. forces "had to collapse in on themselves," a U.S. military official with knowledge of the latest intelligence reports on the incident told CNN. These revelations about the battle that engulfed Forward Operating Base Keating are a further indication of how pinned down and outmanned the troops were. Watch more on the attack in rural Afghanistan »

The base was scheduled to be closed in the next few days, CNN has learned. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, wanted to cede remote outposts and consolidate troops in more populated areas to better protect Afghan civilians.

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The United States has about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Peter Bergen and Leslie H. Gelb
Time

In August, President Obama laid out the rationale for stepping up the fight in Afghanistan: If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people. Obamas Af-Pak plan is, in essence, a countersanctuary strategy that denies safe havens to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with the overriding goal of making America and its allies safer. Under Obama, the Pentagon has already sent a surge of 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, and the Administration is even weighing the possibility of deploying as many as 40,000 more.

This is a sound policy. If U.S. forces were not in Afghanistan, the Taliban, with its al-Qaeda allies in tow, would seize control of the country's south and east and might even take it over entirely. A senior Afghan politician told me that the Taliban would be in Kabul within 24 hours without the presence of international forces. This is not because the Taliban is so strong; generous estimates suggest it numbers no more than 20,000 fighters. It is because the Afghan government and the 90,000-man Afghan army are still so weak.

The objections to an increased U.S. military commitment in South Asia rest on a number of flawed assumptions. The first is that Afghans always treat foreign forces as antibodies. In fact, poll after poll since the fall of the Taliban has found that a majority of Afghans have a favorable view of the international forces in their country. A BBC/ABC News poll conducted this year, for instance, showed that 63% of Afghans have a favorable view of the U.S. military. To those who say you cant trust polls taken in Afghanistan, its worth noting that the same type of poll consistently finds neighboring Pakistan to be one of the most anti-American countries in the world.

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New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell was abducted Saturday while covering a NATO airstrike in Afghanistan.

Stephen Farrell
The New York Times

Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed, as was a British soldier who has not been identified. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of the four-day ordeal.

Mid-to-late morning on Friday, Sept. 4, we in the Kabul bureau began hearing reports of an explosion in a Taliban-controlled area near the northern city of Kunduz.

It was clear that this was going to be a major controversy, involving allegations of civilian deaths against NATO claims that the dead were Taliban. Furthermore, it was in an area that was becoming increasingly newsworthy because it was becoming more troubled by insurgents.

My colleague Rich Oppel and I began discussing the story, and I forewarned the Afghan staff that they should at least begin thinking about logistics for a possible drive north, for a decision to be taken later.

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Villagers gather at the rubble of houses belonging to supporters of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud..

Ed Henry
CNN Senior White House Correspondent

After several days of uncertainty, the Obama administration now believes that a CIA missile strike did kill Pakistan's Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, according to a senior U.S. official.

"He's dead," the senior U.S. official said flatly, adding that intelligence officials have told President Obama they are convinced Mehsud perished in last Wednesday night's attack.

The death comes after a dramatic escalation of the number of unmanned drones the CIA is using for missile strikes in the rugged South Waziristan tribal region where Mehsud was killed. The CIA recently requested an increase in drones from five to nine that were tracking Mehsud and it was approved by the White House shortly before his death, according to the senior U.S. official.

The senior U.S. official said the government is convinced they got Mehsud based on various indicators on the scene of last week's strike. It was an extremely warm night and a short, stocky man meeting Mehsud's physical description sought refuge from the heat on the roof of the home of Mehsud's father-in-law, according to the official.

Then the man in question began having his legs massaged on the roof of the home, which was an indicator to intelligence officials that it was Mehsud because his legs ached from diabetes and he frequently sought relief. At that point, according to the senior U.S. official, the CIA moved forward on the strike acting on a pre-approved order from the President to strike when U.S. intelligence officials believed they had Mehsud in their sights.

The Taliban leadership have published a guide-book for their forces.

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

A manifesto of terror was released this week. It was disguised as a 65-page code of conduct for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan under the guise of Islamic Law.

What was the Taliban leadership thinking when it released this pocket-sized booklet? It’s hard to answer this question without looking at the general situation in Afghanistan and what information the booklet contains.

Fierce battles have erupted along the Pakistan-Afghan border region over the past few months because U.S. Marines and British troops have stepped up the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in that area. Those battles have resulted in hundreds of deaths in the ranks of both groups – as well as among civilians and NATO troops. And the situation has led to a refugee crisis where more than a million people fled the border region.

Despite the losses and setbacks Taliban and al Qaeda have suffered, their attacks continue. And their propaganda machine repeatedly produces hate messages to incite Afghans against their own government and against the West. According to Afghan authorities, at least seven Taliban insurgents wearing suicide vests and wielding machine guns struck at government and commercial targets on Saturday in the eastern city of Khost. The suicide bombers died when they detonated their vests, and at least 14 civilians - three military service members and a police officer - were wounded.

Now comes the booklet. The group decided to deliver it to the Qatar-based Arabic network Al-Jazeera instead of posting it on the Internet, which has become a common strategy adopted by many terror groups and insurgencies recently.

According to Al-Jazeera, the pocket-sized book with the blue cover contains 13 chapters and 67 articles dealing with topics ranging from recruiting and training, to rules of conduct and engagement.

The first section is titled “Issues of Existence.” It explains, among other things, that if an Afghan government official “agrees to leave his position and join the Taliban, he should be protected.” The section also warns that, “Any Taliban member who mistreats the converted Afghan will be brought to judgment.”

One section deals with the subject of taking hostages. It gives instructions on not harming the hostages or killing them in order to use them in prisoner swap operations. In another chapter, the fate of high-ranking captured officers from what is described as the “slave government,” is left to the discretion of the local leader.

Perhaps the most significant detail in this manifesto of terror is that it stresses that no new groups are to be formed without the approval of high ranking commanders. On radical Islamist websites, commentators deduced that this could be a sign of a rift between al Qaeda and Taliban. The two groups have been operating closely and almost in the same bunker since 2001. As a matter of fact, al Qaeda’s leadership is believed to be hiding in Taliban-controlled territory in Swat Valley and in Northern and Southern Waziristan - a rugged border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The booklet does not mention al Qaeda at all, according to Al-Jazeera.

In the section on “Agents” the booklet describes what should happen if a person is confirmed to be “spying for the enemy.” In this case, the booklet says that person “is considered spoiled and only the Mullah can forgive or deport him or order him dead.”

The booklet also offers directives on suicide operations, asking that the fighters spare civilians, ignoring the fact that no suicide attack could be carried out in accordance with that rule.

For the Taliban, the publication is called, “List of the Mujahideen in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” The group’s intention is to give a copy to every one of its members as a guideline on conduct as they fight the “infidels” and all who aid, them including the legitimate Afghan government and forces who they refer to as members of the “slave government.”

To the naked eye however, this booklet is a manifesto justifying terror while hiding behind the cover of Taliban’s own interpretation of Islamic Law. It is a simple attempt to give an outlawed organization some semblance of control, at a time when facts on the ground show the opposite.

Find more from Octavia Nasr here.

Program Note: To watch more on what’s going on in Afghanistan and how the U.S. might respond, tune in to AC360° tonight 10p ET