Pakistan

Dozens of people were killed in two explosions that targeted military vehicles in Lahore this morning.

Rescue workers say the death toll was between 25 and 30; most news reports put it closer to 40. Nearly 100 other people were injured.

Two suicide bombers walked up to the vehicles in Lahore's busy R.A. Bazaar area and blew themselves up shortly before Friday prayers were scheduled to begin. The bazaar area houses many army officials, as well as military-run hospitals and schools.

Nobody has claimed responsibility yet for the bombings. But the Tehrik-i-Taliban seems the likely culprit: The group claimed responsibility for a bombing in Lahore earlier this week, which targeted an interrogation building used by the provincial government's Special Investigation Agency. 14 people were killed in that explosion.

As many as 21 people were killed today by two U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan's Madakhel tehsil.

David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.

On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.

When the U.S. Transportation Security Administration in January instituted mandatory airport pat-downs and bag searches for citizens of 14 countries -- all but two of them in the Middle East and all but one majority Muslim -- you knew it was just a matter of time before the institutionalized racial profiling caused an outcry.

On Sunday, a group of Pakistani lawmakers who had been invited to visit the United States and meet with Obama administration bigwigs refused to go through the additional screening in Ronald Reagan National Airport on their way to a flight to New Orleans, according to the New York Times. Pakistan is on the of the 14 countries whose citizens have been selected for more scrutiny. The legislators returned to Pakistan, where they've been hailed for their actions.

One theme that's clear in a lot of recent writing on the war in Afghanistan -- particularly writing from the policy community in Washington -- is the delineation between what's good for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, and what's good for Afghanistan itself.

There's scant information on the wires this morning, but NBC News and the AP are both reporting that a U.S. drone fired at least two missiles at a house in Miram Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan province on Monday.

The AP reported three dead and one wounded, while NBC said five were killed and four wounded in the attack. Neither outlet reported their identities, though the Washington Post said that three foreigners were among the dead.

Also in Pakistan today, a car bomb struck a police building in Lahore where security forces interrogate "high-value suspects," killing 13 people and wounding 61, including civilians. The Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility and said that the attack "was to avenge drone attacks and military operations in the tribal areas.

Update, 9:51 p.m.: Well, maybe not. ABC News and several other outlets are now reporting that the man arrested wasn't Gadahn, but rather "Abu Yahya Mujahideen al-Adam," described as an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen from Pennsylvania, described as a "close associate" of Osama bin Laden.

Except... I've never heard of the guy. Nor have several counterterrorism analysts I asked tonight. A search for that name, in both Arabic and English, yields nothing (except for today's news reports).

Pakistani officials say they've arrested another senior Taliban leader in Karachi. Agha Jan Motasim, an aide to Mullah Omar, has been missing for two weeks; military sources said today that he was detained.

The Pakistani government won't give the U.S. access to most of its detainees, so nobody's sure exactly how many members of the Quetta Shura they've arrested -- maybe half, maybe more, maybe less -- but it is clearly a significant number. So I tend to think we've settled the question of whether these arrests are a deliberate effort or just dumb luck.

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

A drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan on Wednesday killed Mohammed Qari Zafar, a Taliban commander wanted for planning a 2006 bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, which left diplomat David Foy and three Pakistanis dead, according to Pakistani officials.

Zafar was the operational commander of the Fedayeen-e-Islam, "an alliance between the Pakistani Taliban, the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Jaish-e-Mohammed," according to Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal.

Wednesday's strike was the 18th of the year and the 19th since a Dec. 30 suicide bomber struck a CIA team in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven officers who were involved in planning operations against the Taliban in Pakistan's border regions. The Obama Administration is on pace for around 115 strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan this year.

The Iranian government, which has long accused the U.S. of backing the Jundallah terror group, has a new piece of "evidence" -- more on the scare quotes later -- to support that claim.

Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi was arrested earlier this week and transported to Iran, where he's now being interrogated (and, we can assume, tortured). Iranian officials won't say where Rigi was arrested, but Mohammad Abbasi, Pakistan's ambassador to Iran, said Islamabad was involved.

Last week was a busy one for the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, with four strikes in the span of five days, one of which killed the brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the high-ranking Taliban commander.

Meanwhile, Israel unveiled the Heron TP, a massive drone the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner that can fly as far as Iran.

The New York Times and the Washington Post both have stories this morning about the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. But they come to strikingly different conclusions about why Baradar was captured. Here are Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung in the WaPo, casting the capture as a sign of increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation:

The capture of senior Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan represents the culmination of months of pressure by the Obama administration on Pakistan's powerful security forces to side with the United States as its troops wage war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

This is pretty much the standard narrative that has emerged since Baradar's capture was announced on Monday night: The Pakistani intelligence and security services have finally accepted that the Taliban poses a threat, and Baradar's arrest signals a new level of cooperation.

Over the weekend, Pakistan's Supreme Court blocked two judicial nominees proposed by President Asif Ali Zardari after Zardari passed over the man who had been favored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. At issue in the dispute is whether the president must confer with the chief justice before making judicial nominations, an area in which there is some legal disagreement, according to the Washington Post.

And yet here's Pakistani political analyst Hasan Askari, talking to the AFP (via Dawn): "If the Supreme Court goes ahead and tries to pull [Zardari] down, then perhaps the system will collapse ... and perhaps there will not be constitutional government in Pakistan."

Is it me, or does every seemingly technical bureaucratic maneuver in Pakistan now come loaded with tons of questionable baggage?

Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, says the military has achieved all of its goals in South Waziristan, and that most of the "high-profile militants" have been killed.

Addressing troops and officers during his visit to forward positions in South Waziristan, Kayani said that massive development work would commence in the area soon so that IDPs could live comfortably when they return.

The Pakistani army has been a bit triumphal of late: Kayani said last week that the army has "achieved its strategic objectives" in Bajaur Agency, which has seen some heavy fighting this year. And the military continues to tout last year's operations in the Swat Valley as a success story.

The New York Times devotes 800 words this morning to the startling conclusion that international borders are porous.

The Chaman crossing -- marked on the Pakistani side by the three-story Friendship Gate -- should presumably be among the most secure in the country: it is the sole crossing between Kandahar, the birthplace of the Afghan Taliban, and Baluchistan, which is, according to American officials, home to Taliban commanders who control many Afghan fighters. But Taliban fighters -- anyone, really -- can cross and smuggle weapons and drugs...

You could write this about literally any two countries. The Egypt-Israel border should be "among the most secure" in the world, but hundreds of impoverished African migrants find a way to sneak across every year. The border between North and South Korea should be locked tight, but defectors find a way out.

Suicide bombers are targeting Shi'ite worshippers today in Iraq and Pakistan -- much like they did 40 days ago, on Ashura.

More than 25 people were killed by two car bombs in Karbala -- one of the most important cities in Shi'ism, where millions of people are gathered this week (عربي) for Arbaeen. The bombs targeted a group of worshippers as they were leaving the city.

Apologies for taking a day to cover the roadside bombing of a U.S. convoy in Pakistan, but sometimes good things come to those who wait: in this case, a Jeremy Scahill article in the Nation that provides some nice context to the first-ever U.S. military deaths in the country.

One other item jumped out at me from the latest U.S. intelligence community threat assessment, released yesterday. Remember last month, when U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates urged Islamabad to launch a new offensive against the Taliban in North Waziristan? I called that irrational and suggested Pakistan needs to focus on consolidating its existing gains.

The threat assessment seems to agree!

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.