From what I have been reading about Afpak, the current line of thinking seems to be that the U.S plans to turn operations against Kandahar into a full offensive. Then the U.S will begin "reconciliation" talks with the hard-core Taliban so as to effect a political solution strong enough for an American pull out.
Initially the Kandahar operation was supposed to be over by August but now the thinking is major operations will still be going on in November. Kandahar is Afghanistan's spiritual center and currently run mafia-style by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-Brother of the Afghani President. Supposedly he is also a CIA Agent.
Hilary Clinton has made clear that efforts will be made to avoid another Fallujah, a reference to the bloody Iraqi street battle which was a major propaganda blow to U.S efforts. What are the alternatives? Here is a really good article on some of the things we have been doing to win the war over there.
Apparently the Taliban are also getting creative too. According to the below link the Taliban published a recent communique from Mullah Omar in " Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Finnish, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Somali and Malay/Indonesian"..." Granted the Finns have 100 troops in Afghanistan but, they are not even in the top ten contributors. Even Estonia has more troops in Afghanistan than Findland. Who in the Taliban has the the time to learn a difficult language like Finnish? Also when the New York Times say "Farsi" I assume the authors really mean "Dari". The name "Dari" has been used for Eastern Persian since 1964 in Afghanistan for nationalist reasons.
Source:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/muhammad_omar/index.html?inline=nyt-per
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