Pakistan, Afghanistan | featured news

Air travelers from Nigeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and nine other countries will face full-body pat downs before boarding airliners under new security screening procedures targeting foreign passengers announced by the United States on Sunday.

The Pakistani Taliban claims they used a turncoat CIA operative for the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan as revenge for a militant leader's death.

Pakistani forces are zeroing in on two major Taliban bases in South Waziristan region as their offensive pushes deeper into militant bastion on the Afghan border, the military said on Sunday.

Pakistani jets pounded militant hide-outs along the Afghan border overnight as hundreds of thousands of civilians fled South Waziristan ahead of an expected government offensive, officials said Wednesday.

The suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on Thursday lays bare the reality that this conflict is a single war with multiple fronts that extend from Afghan battlefields to Pakistan's fractured political scene and include the vital interests of India and the United States.

The Pakistani army says it has launched a new offensive against militants in a northwest district that neighbors the beleaguered Swat Valley and Afghanistan.

Pakistan must do more to "erase" Taliban bases inside its territory which are destabilizing the entire region, the U.S. commander of Western troops in neighboring Afghanistan said on Sunday.

The Obama administration is starting a broad effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from using radio stations and Web sites to intimidate civilians and plan attacks, officials say.

President Obama this morning announced a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy that will require significantly higher levels of U.S. funding for both countries, with U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan alone increasing about 60 percent from the current toll of about $2 billion a month.

President Obama plans to send another 4,000 troops to Afghanistan along with hundreds of civilian specialists in an effort to confront what he considers "the central challenge facing [that] country," senior administration officials said Thursday.