Daily brief: Obama to announce Afghanistan drawdown Wednesday

The Rack: Excerpt from Joby Warrick’s forthcoming book, The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA (Newsweek).

A long goodbye?

President Barack Obama is set to announce Wednesday night his plans to withdraw 30,000 "surge" troops from Afghanistan, though a spokesman said Monday that Obama was "finalizing" his plans and had not-yet decided (NYT, Post, LAT, Tel, BBC, Reuters, AP, CNN, WSJ, ABC). While Obama is choosing amongst a range of options, he reportedly favors withdrawing all 30,000 troops by the end of 2012 — a decision top U.S. and NATO commander David Petraeus is said to support — with up to 10,000 departing this year (NYT, Post, Reuters, LAT). The announcement comes before secretary of state Hillary Clinton is scheduled to testify Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Two suspected Taliban insurgents, a Pakistani and an Afghan, were hanged in a Kabul prison Monday after being sentenced to death for the killing of over 40 people at a bank in Jalalabad in February (Post, McClatchy). And in Parwan, a suicide bombing targeting the province’s governor killed a 14-year old girl and another bystander instead, while the Taliban killed a teacher working for the government in the city of Kandahar (AP, Pajhwok, Pajhwok).

Also in the news, an Afghan police general in Kunar province has asked permission to respond to Pakistani cross-border attacks with force, after Pakistan reportedly shelled Afghan villages where militants are believed to have fled (Pajhwok, DT, AFP, AP). Afghanistan’s finance minister harshly criticized the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for withholding nearly $70 million in development money as a result of the country’s ongoing banking crisis (BBC, Reuters, AFP, AP). And CNN reports on the concern that poppy growth may surge as Western forces withdraw from Afghanistan (CNN).

Naming names

Pakistan’s Supreme Court chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on Monday formally named justice Javed Iqbal and justice Saqib Nisar to head the probes into the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and the death or journalist Saleem Shahzad, respectively (ET, ET, Dawn, DT). And acting on Supreme Court orders, the government in Sindh removed a number of officials from their posts as a result of an investigation into failed efforts to prevent and cope with last year’s devastating floods (Dawn).

A senior Pakistani foreign ministry official asked for "greater transparency" into U.S. negotiations with the Taliban Monday, while Pakistan’s army denied a Times report in which an unnamed source said army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvaz Kayani had told a group of military officers that Pakistan had been "mortgaged" to the United States (ET, Dawn, Dawn).

Pakistan’s army confirmed this morning that they had detained a senior officer serving at the army’s General Headquarters, Brig. Ali Khan, for allegedly having ties with a banned militant group (AFP/ET, Dawn, AP). Khan’s family said he had been missing since May 6. The army has also denied leaking information about upcoming raids to militant groups (CNN). And Pakistan’s government has formally protested to the United States after a group of U.S. army personnel reportedly tried to force their way into a Frontier Corps base where they had recently lived to retrieve some belongings (ET).

The trials of six paramilitary Rangers and one civilian in the killing of an unarmed teen in Karachi are expected to wrap up by sometime next week (ET, DT, ET). A car bomb on the outskirts of Peshawar killed three people, including an anti-Taliban leader and a child (CNN, ET, AFP). In Quetta a car bomb near a woman’s college killed two people, while a member of Pakistan’s security forces has been killed by a bomb in South Waziristan (AP, DT, Dawn, AFP, Dawn). More information emerged today about a nine-year-old girl who escaped from militants who tried to force her into becoming a suicide bomber (CNN, ET, Reuters, BBC). And finally today, the Tribune details the history of militant violence in the tribal agency of Kurram, while Dawn reports that up to 80 percent of people in South and North Waziristan have been mentally impacted by drone strikes and militant violence (ET, Dawn).

Green gold

The Times of London last week looked at the Panjshir valley’s nascent emerald industry (Times). The trade is worth nearly $200 million a year, though most of the stones are smuggled out of the country after being mined.

Correction: Yesterday’s Daily Brief incorrectly stated that a drone strike in Kurram agency was the first to have taken place there. The strike was the fourth in the agency.

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