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No blogging yesterday while I worked on a couple of reported projects -- so I'll spare you any day-after thoughts on President Obama's choice to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus. You've read enough of those already, I'm sure.

Instead, let's pivot back to what's actually happening in Afghanistan. As I said in my Al-Jazeera piece about McChrystal's departure, the change of command isn't likely to mean a major change in strategy: McChrystal was hardly the only counterinsurgency believer in the military, and many elements of his "new strategy" actually began under his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan.

The latest United Nations quarterly report on Afghanistan (pdf), released today, is a mix of bleak pronouncements about security and neutral-or-slightly improved news about governance.

The "overall security situation has not improved" since the UN's previous report in March 2010.

I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera earlier this week that said most of what I wanted to say about the New York Times' much-maligned Afghan minerals story. (If you haven't seen it, here's James Risen's remarkably testy response to his critics.)

Michael Ross is correct that we shouldn't just assume Afghanistan will fall prey to the "resource curse." Evidence certainly suggests that it will: I can't think of a resource-rich country, outside of Norway, that doesn't suffer from at least some of the classic rentier-state problems. But that's a conjecture, and we shouldn't dwell on it.

Philip Alston's report on targeted killings, delivered to the United Nations' Human Rights Council this week, has received a lot of attention for being the first big takedown of the United States' clandestine drone program.

Alston makes a measured and reasoned legal attack on the general use of targeted killings by governments against non-state actors, but he specifically criticizes the American drone campaign in the Middle East, expressing doubt that the U.S. can claim to be in an armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and concluding that, "[o]utside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal." 

But Howard Koh, the top Obama administration official to attempt a public legal defense of the use of drones, has invoked America's "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces" as a justification for taking out individual fighters and leaders. So who's right when everybody's wrong?

A United Nations report released yesterday concluded that Pakistan has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world in 2009. Three million people fled their homes last year, according to the study.

"The military operations of governments and armed non-state actors caused most displacement, and many people were displaced more than once."

Most of the displacements were temporary: Two million people returned to their homes, and Pakistan's IDP population at the end of 2009 was "only" 1.2 million.

Still, the numbers are staggering, particularly when you realize that nearly all of Pakistan's IDPs are coming from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (nee NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Those two regions have a combined population of roughly 25 million -- so one out of every eight residents became an IDP, at least temporarily, in 2009.

On the wires this afternoon, the kind of news from Afghanistan that has become all too familiar: A prominent cleric who had called for "peace and stability" was shot to death along with two members of his family on Sunday.

Evan did a comprehensive roundup of the news from Afghan president Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington this week. Just one thing to add from me.

I have a post over on Al-Jazeera's Web site looking at Afghanistan's ongoing governance problems, none of which received much (public) attention during Karzai's visit. One thing I couldn't really address, for space reasons, is how these problems influence perceptions of the upcoming Kandahar campaign/operation/process/whatever we're calling it these days.

During Afghan President Hamid Karzai's first 48 hours in Washington, D.C. -- the first half of a four-day visit that comes at a momentous time in his country's history -- the recently re-elected leader chose a distinctly non-Afghan issue to emphasize: a visit he paid on Tuesday morning to injured American troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

During brief remarks after the trip, before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai spoke only of the visit, calling it "an extremely painful moment." Later that day, at a reception in his honor, Karzai brought it up again. "That was a moment of immense thinking for me as a person," he said. On Wednesday, during a joint press conference after meeting with President Obama, the Walter Reed visit -- "a very difficult moment" -- was on the tip of Karzai's tongue, to the exclusion of more controversial issues, such as Karzai's April diatribe against alleged Western interference in the October presidential election that he won.

That Karzai was reportedly "visibly moved" by the sight of devastated American soldiers is understandable and even laudable, but Karzai's repeated public mentions of the visit seemed to deliver a political message as well: I understand your sacrifice, I am your friend, but I still need you to be there for me.

A suspected U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan, the second in 48 hours, killed between six and ten people in the villgge of Datta Khel, about 35km west of Miranshah.

The drones fired an unusually large number of missiles -- 11, according to Dawn; 18, according to The News -- at a group of tents near the village. Local security officials told AFP that as many as five drones were involved in the attack.

The identities of the victims are unknown, and it's unclear whether the attack targeted any high-level Taliban figures.

A drone strike in Datta Khel on Sunday killed 10 people; there were no reports of high-level Taliban commanders killed in that attack, either.

I have a lot of questions about yesterday's New York Times report that the Obama administration is debating an expanded "boots on the ground" presence in Pakistan, but the fundamental question is this: What does Washington hope to accomplish by sending more troops to Pakistan?

Policymakers have been debating this issue for a while, but it's likely to receive renewed attention in the wake of Faisal Shehzad's failed Times Square bombing. So it's worth pondering the strategic implications of sending more U.S. troops -- trainers, most likely -- to Pakistan.

The White House held a conference call yesterday afternoon -- well, afternoon DC time; it was close to midnight here -- to discuss Afghan president Hamid Karzai's upcoming visit to Washington.

Karzai arrives in Washington on Monday; he will meet with military and diplomatic officials before a three-hour (!) Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Wednesday. He's also bringing a large delegation of ministers to meet with other U.S. officials.

A U.S. drone strike in northwest Pakistan killed at least five people this morning, the second deadly strike in North Waziristan in three days.

Today's mid-morning attack blew up an alleged Taliban compound in the Khushali Toorkhel area, about 25km east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. Between five and eight people were killed, according to conflicting reports from local authorities.

At least six people were killed by two suspected U.S. drone strikes in northwest Pakistan today -- the second and third drone attacks this week.

Today's attacks targeted Tolkhel, a village just north of Miranshah, the most populated town in North Waziristan. AFP reports that the first attack struck a car full of alleged Taliban militants; the second targeted a group of people who rushed to help the victims.

Earlier this week, a drone strike killed three people near the village of Boya in North Waziristan, about 20km west of Miranshah.

Pakistani airstrikes killed nearly 100 "suspected militants" in two northwest districts on the border with Afghanistan on Saturday in an effort to continue to battle insurgents after hard-fought campaigns to the south.

One of the strikes occurred near the town of Bezoti, in the Orakzai district, where militants had tried to capture a military stronghold during a midnight attack on Friday.

Armed men attacked a Pakistani government checkpoint near the U.S. consulate in Peshawar yesterday, leaving three local guards and four attackers dead. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), associated with the Mehsud clan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, claimed responsibility.

After the jump, new video from Britain's Channel 4 (via the New York Times' Lede Blog):

As the United States plays a lethal game of drone chess in the skies above Pakistan's semi-lawless northwestern tribal areas, and the government of the country attempts to plot out an end game where it retains influence in Afghanistan, a restive, decades-old independence movement is growing bolder and angrier in Pakistan's large, energy-rich Balochistan province, Madiha Tahir reports in the National's Review.

I was never a huge fan of Kai Eide, the recently-departed United Nations envoy in Afghanistan -- his rush to declare the obviously-stolen election a success, in particular, rubbed me the wrong way -- but I can't argue with the man's assessment of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar's arrest.

The intent is unclear to me, because I don't know the circumstances. Then comes the question of the impact. Now his arrest was followed by the arrest of at least ten, twelve, fourteen other rather prominent Taliban members, and what I can say is that the effect of that in total, certainly, was negative on our possibility of continuing the political process that we saw as so necessary at that particular juncture.

Eide goes on to criticize Pakistan's role in Baradar's arrest, saying "I don't believe that these people were arrested by coincidence."

A U.S. drone fired three to five missiles at a "militant compound" near the village of Datta Khel in Pakistan's North Waziristan province today, killing at least eight suspected pro-Taliban fighters.

I was off the grid all day, so I'm just now getting a chance to respond to the reports that the Afghan government was negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar when he was arrested by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

If this report is true, it basically confirms one of the two rumors about Pakistan's motives for arresting Baradar: The ISI wants to control Taliban reconciliation talks in Afghanistan, so it's going to round up "moderate" Afghan Taliban figures who are talking directly with Karzai and replace them with "extremists" loyal to the ISI (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, come on down).

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.