Daily brief: new U.S. Afghanistan/Pakistan envoy to be announced

The Rack: An occasional new AfPak Channel Daily Brief mini-feature with highlights from the magazine rack. Today: Tara McKelvey, "Inside the killing machine," on how drone strikes are authorized, Newsweek. Send suggestions!

New faces

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reportedly set to announce that Marc Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey with almost three decades of experience at the State Department, will be the new special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, after the death of Amb. Richard Holbrooke in December (Post, NYT, Pajhwok). Others on the short list reportedly included Strobe Talbott, John Podesta, Frank Wisner, and Nicholas Burns; the White House and State Department are said to have disagreed over the parameters of the job, and the Post has more details (Post).

Senator John Kerry reportedly left for Pakistan late last night to try and defuse tensions with Pakistani leaders over the case of Raymond Davis, the detained American diplomat who shot and killed two Pakistanis late last month who he said were trying to rob him, as a spokeswoman for the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, Fauzia Wahab, said Davis has diplomatic immunity (AP, ET, Dawn, ABC, Reuters, Daily Times, The News). However, a spokesman for Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari said Wahab’s statement was her "personal opinion," "neither the policy of the party nor the government."

Pakistani officials tell the AP that most experts in Pakistan’s legal and foreign offices believe Davis is immune from prosecution and will present documents to that effect to the Lahore High Court on Thursday, leaving it to a judge to decide, "a sign that Islamabad is trying to give the U.S. an opening to free the man while avoiding domestic backlash" (AP). Pakistan’s law minister, Babar Awan, seemed to link the Davis case with that of Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist convicted of the attempted murder of her American interrogators in Afghanistan and sentenced to 86 years in prison, commenting that the U.S. has "a repatriation call and we have a call" (Tel). Declan Walsh reports on an audiotape reportedly recorded secretly last year that seems to explain Siddiqui’s 2003 disappearance: a man identified as Imran Shaukat, a senior Pakistani counterterrorism official said, "I caught her," and turned her over to Pakistan’s intelligence services the ISI (Guardian).

During a two-day military operation in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, 30 suspected militants have been killed in clashes with Pakistani security forces (Daily Times). And data from a European weather center reportedly predicted the floods that devastated Pakistan last summer more than a week ahead of the rainfall, but the weather center "does not have the resources to provide specific weather forecasts to individual nations," and a scientific and technical assistant to the center’s director said, "Even if someone had noticed this, it is simply not our role to take the phone and call someone" (Post). Pakistan’s meteorology department also "missed" predicting the extreme rains, according to its director general. 

Sting operations

A group of seven men, including two naturalized American citizens, reportedly agreed to conspire to help the Taliban by shipping drugs, including heroin and cocaine, through West Africa to the U.S. in order to use the proceeds to buy weapons, including surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers, to fight American troops in Afghanistan, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan (NYT, WSJ, CNN, AJE, Bloomberg). Five of the men pleaded not guilty to the charges, which stem from a DEA sting operation, and the other two are awaiting extradition from Romania, where they were arrested on Saturday.

Yesterday, Afghan police in Kabul stormed the International Election Commission offices and seized control of ballot boxes from last September’s parliamentary election, presumably to help the Karzai-appointed special court investigate fraud (Post, Pajhwok, Post). The IEC’s chief electoral officer said the IEC would cooperate with the special court, but not participate in any recounts, stating, "For us, the case of the 2010 election ended with the inauguration of the national assembly." And human rights groups are concerned that an Afghan government plan to take control of women’s shelters across the country is "a sop to Islamic hardliners to grease fragile peace talks with insurgents" (Times, AFP).

Three stories about money and Afghanistan finish out the day’s news: McClatchy reports that although the U.S. government criticized the performance of Black & Veatch in Afghanistan, the contracting company continued to receive work (McClatchy); wages aren’t keeping up with costs in Afghanistan (WSJ); and Pentagon budget requests forecast U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan "will drop to an average of 98,250 in fiscal year 2012, compared with an estimated average of 102,000 soldiers and support personnel in fiscal 2011," though defense secretary Robert Gates said the estimate was "conservative…since we don’t know how many troops will be reduced during the course of FY ’12," which begins in October (Reuters).

Practicing penmanship

Pakistan’s National Council of the Arts has organized a calligraphy workshop tomorrow in Islamabad in honor of the holy month of Rabiul Awal (The News). Students will learn both technique and some history of the script.

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